The Chinese have committed to building over 150 new nuclear reactors. The British government will subsidize Rolls Royce. Japan will reactivate over 30 nuclear reactors.
It seems this is the biggest energy story of the year. The comeback of nuclear energy.
It's not a comeback until you push the first kwh to the grid for the price you said you'd build the new generator for. Japan turning back on mothballed reactors is a Big Deal (and a quick win for avoiding CO2 emissions), but getting new reactors built in less than a decade or for less than billons of dollars is where the proof lies. Talk and promises are cheap, action has a cost and can't be faked.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... (Lazard’s latest annual Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis (LCOE 15.0) shows the continued cost-competitiveness of certain renewable energy technologies on a subsidized basis and the marginal cost of coal, nuclear and combined cycle gas generation.)
Comparing the cost of a non-intermittent energy source with an intermittent energy source excluding the cost of storage is comparing apples to oranges. Solar and wind are cheap, until you saturate the energy market during peak production hours. Then it gets exorbitantly expensive. The only viable storage solution at the moment is hydroelectric, which is geographically limited. Global lithium ion battery output for a whole year doesn't even add up to 1 hour's worth of the USA's electricity consumption.
When probed on how to address intermittency, many wind and solar advocates propose things like hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air, or other solutions that are currently in the prototyping stage and have yet to actually be deployed to a grid and demonstrate viability.
This is the chief advantage of nuclear power: it works and we have over half a century of production experience with it. Betting on one of those storage solutions panning out is betting on a big unknown.
The simplest energy storage solution is your hot water heater. Turning on everyone's hot water heater when there is surplus electricity, and turning them off when there's a deficit, is a very low cost solution.
The next level is using residential HVAC systems the same way. Comfortable temperatures are a range, so heating/cooling can push the temps to one end of the range, and when there is less electricity available, they can drift to the other end.
The charger for your electric car is another very practical sink for cheap electricity.
This is accomplished by having a spot price for electricity, and then people buying thermostats that query the spot price and turn HVAC, hot water heater, car battery chargers, etc., on and off.
This can be extended EVEN FURTHER by heating/cooling a pile of rocks to later use to heat/cool the house.
A battery consisting of a pile of rocks can't be expensive.
The idea is to not only adjust supply to the demand, but to shape the demand to the supply.
I am utterly astonished that this is never, ever discussed when talking about solutions to fluctuating supply. Having fixed electricity rates 24/7 is simply madness in today's electricity generation situation.
The problem with your great ideas, and "great ideas"generally is the lack of proven numbers.
As the poster above you pointed out the capacity of LI batteries is tiny. Yet you tout car batteries as though that were a new idea and a meaningful solution. And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.
You also ignore the losses from your solutions. What is the round trip loss from heating up rocks and getting the energy back? It is huge. And you artfully forgot to mention all the equipment needed to get the energy back out in usable form such as electricity.
All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea". The problems with load shaping are many. If you shut a factory down to spare the grid, then it is not producing. So all else being equal, you need more factories for the same production. Building and maintaining those extra factories takes labor, management, and energy.
Getting people to turn off air conditioning means that they are less comfortable, or perhaps unable to sleep, or unable to work. The South of the US more or less became viable economically due to air conditioning.
This is not unique to you, but I am really fed up with people spouting half-assed ideas and thinking that they constitute a solution.
As they said in the dot.com era - ideas are cheap.
> What is the round trip loss from heating up rocks and getting the energy back? It is huge. And you artfully forgot to mention all the equipment needed to get the energy back out in usable form such as electricity.
If you store the energy by heating the rocks, you can recover it to heat your house by simply blowing air over the rocks. No need to convert it to electricity, which would indeed be silly.
The same goes for air conditioning. Excess electricity could be used to cool the rocks, which then can be used to cool your house when electricity is expensive.
The detour through the rocks (or anything with thermal mass) costs next to nothing.
I am not talking about using the EV battery to run the house. I am talking about using the EV battery to run the EV. Simply charge it when electricity rates are cheaper. It's shifting the demand.
> thinking that they constitute a solution
They are perfectly and cheaply implementable, and are part of the solution.
> half-assed
I actually have a degree in mechanical engineering. You shouldn't be so hasty in your inferences.
I don't understand the animus in replies to your post. It's as if people want to deny that people like myself heat our homes in the winter by blowing air over hot water in a heat-exchanger. We can and many do heat that water during the day with the magic of the sun's rays or by burning wood (the only true renewable we have). Humans have been using thermal property of rock (not concrete, concrete doesn't match rock's efficiency) and water to heat ourselves and our homes for hundreds of years, and will likely continue to do so for hundreds more.
> The South of the US more or less became viable economically due to air conditioning.
I don't think that's the right way to phrase it. The South was clearly economically viable before A/C. It's kinda like saying that New York City wasn't economically viable until the invention of the safety elevator.
Overall I agree with your views on "half-assed ideas". I want to elaborate on this one topic a bit more, because it presses a button of mine.
On thing A/C did was make it possible to build cheap homes following northern tastes and styles, on the assumption power would remain cheap. Northerners could move in without having to adapt their customs and practices much.
Southern vernacular architecture includes high ceilings (so the heat rises above the people), lots of windows (to let the air go through and heat escape), and with the house raised off the ground (so cooling air flows underneath). This describes the A/C-less Florida house I grew up in. An even more traditional design would have a wraparound porch, to provide extra shade and let the windows stay open even when it rains.
OTOH, A/C encouraged house designs which require A/C to be comfortable - a sort of co-dependency. These vernacular features make the A/C bill higher, so they weren't included in newer homes. I tried living in a Florida home designed for A/C, but without using the A/C. Not only was it much less comfortable, as you write, but we started getting mold because of the humidity. A house made for A/C doesn't have much air flow.
So I don't think the argument is simply 'getting people to turn off air conditioning', but 'getting people to design houses which are a better fit for the local climate and have better long-term sustainability.'
That's of course hard, and expensive.
It's also hard to change lifestyles to fit the climate. Eg, the dominant US culture doesn't appreciate or tolerate siestas, even if it's locally more appropriate.
Oh, and this isn't unique to the South. It's cheaper to build a frame house in Arizona, which requires A/C to be livable, than to build an house (like an adobe house) with thick walls that moderate the temperature fluctuations.
Nor is it just A/C. Earthship designs, for example, show what is possible ... for people who are willing to put more work into daily maintenance. Which is part of the lifestyle change that's hard to do.
One thing to note about the A/C issue is that, as global warming progresses, passive cooling will become strictly necessary for survival - most parts of the South will start reaching higher and higher wet bulb temperatures.
No he didn't, the rocks are for asynchronous heating/air conditioning, all you need to get the energy back is a water pump or air blower and tubes.
Your reply is unnecessarily dismissive and snarky. All of those ideas are easy to do projects for individuals.
The only thing you need to implement on a global/national/regional scales is a spot market for electricity accessible for everyone. Then you can lean back and watch people implement all those simple ideas and many more.
All in all, your reply is unnecessarily dismissive and snarky. Those ideas are not "brilliant ideas" (btw you should learn about correct quoting). Of course those won't solve the problem all at once, but they will have a huge impact.
Try not to get suckered into the notion that all ideas are cheap. Bad ideas are cheap and come from a place of either arrogance or ignorance. Great ideas are not cheap, as they typically come from folks who expended the required effort to become a subject matter expert, which gives them foundational knowledge and a better view of the whole picture -- both at a high and granular level.
That said, the parent comment's ideas are bad and ignorant, for the reasons you mentioned and more.
> That said, the parent comment's ideas are bad and ignorant, for the reasons you mentioned and more.
The parents comments are neither bad nor ignorant. They can be summarized as demand management.
Utilities hate demand management. If they run an efficient market with incentives to shift demand, profits drop. Their profits are based on cost, increasing costs is how they improve their margins. Same as healthcare, band-aids cost $1400 at a hospital. When profits are capped by regulation, this is the workaround.
Don't get suckered into fossil fuel narrative. All the narrative against any kind of progress comes from industry that benefits from status quo and regurgitated by media.
I never purported that fossil fuels are a good thing. In fact, I never mentioned them at all and was only discussing the concept of "ideas being cheap." Honestly, it's rather troll-ish and shameful that you've concocted this arrogant rant against an imaginary argument that nobody was making.
You also just bolstered my point about the OC's ideas being bad, because you admitted that the utility providers aren't motivated to do such a thing, which was the entire foundation of his argument -- that some imaginarily ethical regulatory organization is going to force utilities to be equally ethical, efficient and technologically progressive.
And just to be perfectly clear, using a pile of heated rocks as primary energy storage is beyond ridiculous and entirely ignorant of thermodynamics and physics in general.
You're being unnecessarily confrontational. You're also incorrect: there are already utility providers that have started pricing based on load (my provider bases rates on season, day of the week, and time of day, updated annually, so a sort of aggregate estimate that I suspect will become finer grained in the coming years), and thermal energy storage via mass is a very common technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage
How exactly am I being unnecessarily confrontational? The OC constructed an entire argument based around something I never said. That is called gaslighting and is the very definition of confrontational, and I have every right to defend myself from it. For you to suggest that I should just accept being gaslit, is both absurd and its own form of gaslighting.
Also, you just made the exact opposite point of the OC in regards to rates, and then provided a link about thermal energy storage that proves the only point I made, which is its inefficiency[1] at small scale -- and at large scale it is not a pile of rocks inside every home.
Again, just because people use the technique, doesn't make it the best or even most appropriate method. It is incredibly inefficient and no technology can make it more efficient, because it is limited by the laws of physics -- which you keep insisting don't matter for some reason.
And again, you're making a sweeping generalization about regulatory organizations that isn't even remotely true, and you have nothing to base it on. In the US alone, the majority of states have systems that combine both regulated and unregulated rates, and even in the states where the regulators decide on the rate, a utility can request rate increases at any time.
Your entire premise is based around some mystical altruism that doesn't actually exist in government or business.
Please elaborate how heating a rock, putting it in an insulated box, and taking it out of that box later to release it's heat to the air is "incredibly inefficient" compared to heating the air directly.
Because it takes 3-5x as much energy to heat rock than water, and at least twice as much as many other common materials. Sorry to say, even air is more efficient depending on the scale of time you're trying to solve for, though its ability to retain that heat is directly limited by the properties of the insulated box -- like a house, for example.
You're going to be tempted to reference the last link as evidence in your favor, but it's very much the opposite. It's saying the advantage concrete has is its ability to be heated to higher temperatures than water. Except it doesn't get to break the laws of physics and still requires 3-5x as much energy input, which is why it's really only practical for large scale operations that can safely heat the concrete to extreme temperatures, using massive amounts of electricity that would otherwise be wasted due to low grid demand. They are still losing at least 75% efficiency in that process, but it's slightly better than losing 100%, as long as you pretend there aren't any environmental impacts of producing all that extra concrete.
You'll notice the first installation referenced in this section actually uses 1,000 cubic feet of additional reinforced concrete and an entire home's worth of additional electricity to supply a single home with 50% of its heating and hot water. That's a second foundation's worth of concrete, for perspective.
And moreover, as we've already established, this concept isn't new at all. If it were legitimately more efficient and more practical than alternatives, every home would already be using its foundation as heat storage. But they don't, because it's not.
To quote, your comment's ideas are bad and ignorant. Not because they are incorrect, but because you blindly insist on them. The reasoning is valid merely for a rock/concrete oven or a vacation house.
I suggest you read up on laws of conservation. If you want to be less than 100% efficient, you have to lose energy somehow, somewhere.
I don't know where you're getting efficiency numbers from, but quoting from your reference, storage in Sorø will double as electricity storage while beating your numbers on electricity alone.
"A similar system is scheduled for Sorø, Denmark, with 41–58% of the stored 18 MWh heat returned for the town's district heating, and 30–41% returned as electricity."
BTW, when you switch rocks for concrete, of course it's expensive and makes no sense - people don't add tons of concrete for thermal storage. Though they do use it, if it's there, and add rocks, brick walls, water tanks, phase change materials etc, if they want more.
You are conflating physically and politically hard problems. It's hard to beat physics, but we absolutely should be talking about, considering and demanding practical yet politically hard solutions. All we have to do is ask, and the alternative is to quietly sink into an abyss.
> And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.
well, actually car are parked and not used most of the time, even more during nights when there is no solar energy. And TBH this is my mid-term plan: solar panels to charge it by day and use its battery by night for lights and electric appliances (moving to an electric cold/heat pump for heating it's out of my budget currently, I'm on natural gas)
Disclaimer: Founder of Electric Foundation (accelerate EV adoption), Conduit Foundation (require all new construction to be EV ready)
> And you ignore the fact that if you use car batteries as storage for the grid, that detracts from their use to, you know, run cars.
Most people drive about 20 - 40 minutes per day. In large cities, it is 2+ hours. The remaining 22 hours, EV is an energy sponge. Take the current peak load, produce more renewables than the peak, turn renewables to 11, absorb all the excess free energy. EV is primarily an energy storage device, some people take trips on them once in a while. None of this energy is wasted. There is no need to think of a round trip for this scenario. All energy for transportation can be free and clean, we are capturing excess production. Utilities are curtailing renewable production, this is a shame, we have built solar/wind farms, but not using free energy! This is a huge barrier for new renewables, producers have to consider growing curtailment.
> All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea". The problems with load shaping are many.
Utilities are a monopoly, guaranteed a cost + profit formula. Utilities increase their costs to increase the profit. We see the same formula play out in health care, hospitals charge $1,400 for a band-aid. Energy can be a lot cheaper, and zero. It is entirely possible for Utilities to pay us for using our electric cars storage, they provide the best grid stabilization and smooth out demand and supply curve, flattening the peak rates. Instead of paying 10 - 20x for peaker gas plants, why can’t Americans be paid? There is a nexus of Utilities (generators, producers, distributors) and jacking up capital costs.
> All the books and studies talk about load shaping, contrary to your "astonishment" that no-one is considering this "brilliant idea".
Because these are produced by the utilities. Economists and scientists are funded by the industry to write their view. This happened and continues to happen. [1]
Lead is a gift of God. [2], this view was supported by scientists, surgeon general, AMA, public health and nearly all Govt bodies. Industry sets the rules for all of us so they can continue to extract profits for as long as possible. With this rule, we are all poisoned by lead for ~100 years. Lead poisoning is permanent! "lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears. modern man’s lead exposure is 300 to 500 times" [4]. We not only have polluted ourselves, but made a permanent toxic change for all of humanity. For what? To make the richest people a little bit richer?
Koheo's rule (put in place by the industry) was used and continues to be used for thousands of other toxins.
"Using the Kehoe Rule, Ethyl Corporation was a winner in either situation: if its product was actually safe, Ethyl would be seen as a responsible party. If, however, its product was unsafe, it would take decades to demonstrate that with certainty. The process of getting to certainty could be prolonged by challenging the methods and results and calling for more data, and while it was going on the product would continue to generate profits. Kitman indicates that the strategy taken by the lead industry, referring to use of the Kehoe Rule, similarly "provided a model for the asbestos, tobacco, pesticide and nuclear power industries, and other(s)... for evading clear evidence that their products are harmful by hiding behind the mantle of scientific uncertainty."[4] Kettering Laboratories under Kehoe's leadership also certified the safety of the fluorinated refrigerant, Freon, "another environmentally insensitive GM patent that would earn hundreds of millions before it was outlawed."" [3]
Innocent until proven guilty is for people. Should we use the same rule for stuff that harms us? How can we prove this harm when all the studies on harm are done only by the insiders?
The internet that we see today, all the things that are happening in the tech space directly result from the breaking up of AT&T monopoly. We went from circuit switched to packet switched networks, built the underlying networks to throw packets at each other."AT&T, a powerful gatekeeper, controlled innovation by controlling access to the resources needed to innovate – the wires – the physical layer of the telephone network. AT&T's view of Paul Baran's packet-switching design was: ‘It can't possibly work, and if it did, damned if we are going to allow the creation of a competitor to ourselves.’ [5]
The current configuration of the grid is a creation of this utility nexus. We must break this monopoly. If we can figure out how to sling IP packets at each other, surely we can imagine a reconfiguration of the grid that will let us throw electrons at each other. This will result in upto a thousand dollars/month saved for all of us (residential use), as well as making all the energy clean and renewable. Forever.
[4] https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2000/03/02/...
"Lead is poison, a potent neurotoxin whose sickening and deadly effects have been known for nearly 3,000 years and written about by historical figures from the Greek poet and physician Nikander and the Roman architect Vitruvius to Benjamin Franklin. Odorless, colorless and tasteless, lead can be detected only through chemical analysis. Unlike such carcinogens and killers as pesticides, most chemicals, waste oils and even radioactive materials, lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize, and it never disappears.
For this reason, most of the estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the United States in the twentieth century remains–in the soil, air and water and in the bodies of living organisms. Worldwide, it is estimated that modern man’s lead exposure is 300 to 500 times greater than background or natural levels. Indeed, a 1983 report by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution concluded that lead was dispersed so widely by man in the twentieth century that “it is doubtful whether any part of the earth’s surface or any form of life remains uncontaminated by anthropogenic [man-made] lead.”
This doesn't really work in a lot of places in the world, because the base things are already too expensive. Most of the world does not have HVAC at home. They don't generate heat with electricity either. Car battery chargers only matter if you own an electric car, own a house and have a charger at home. None of this is relevant to most people in the world. It might be in a couple of decades, but not yet. And this includes France.
Smart appliances are a good idea in principle but rolling them out will take a long time. Water heaters last 10+ years. I don't think there are even any widely available on the market today which will automatically increase the temperature at mid day in anticipation of an electricity shortage later. And it's a safety hazard in homes with small children; hot water temperature should never be hot enough to cause burns when someone turns on the faucet.
Most homes don't have enough free space for a big pile of rocks to increase thermal mass. My home has pretty good insulation but on hot days we're going to be miserable without AC in the evening regardless of how much we chilled the house down earlier.
In France, every electric meter have been (or is going to be) replaced with a new one named Linky.
Linky is an electric meter connected to the grid through PLC but it embeds the required hardware to eventually drive appliances consumption.
It provides a dry contact which can be open or closed remotely via the grid’s PLC. So it can be open or closed even without internet.
You can imagine to use this contact to drive a power line dedicated to your water boiler, electric car …
IIRC, atm, the only provided possibility is to open/close the contact via a web API / a smartphone app. But in the future, it may become controllable by the electricity provider to be automatically opened / closed based on the grid’s state (and the electricity price)
That's great! While probably hard to watch anywhere outside of Germany, there is a mini TV series about what will happen when we all got our smart electric meters:
And before anyone replies that it won't come that far, please consider three things:
- We are using an AC power network, not a DC one.
- The power grid is the backbone of modern society.
- Try to find one big technology deployment which was deemed "safe" and actually kept that promise. Because I can easily find countless counter examples reaching from the Titanic to your latest game console.
The dry contact I'm talking about is totally opt-in. It's a physical contact that is not used by default. You can, if you want, wire it to a power line on which you can plug a subset of your appliances.
So the surface attack of this feature is that an hacker could stop you water boiler to heat or your car to charge, but you'd just have to plug them to the rest of your (still working) network.
And yes, the electricity provider could probably switch off your provisioning remotely. But that's not a novelty. That was always possible. Now it can be done safely.
And I'd like to add that the Linky is NOT connected to the internet. It's connected to the electricity provider network so you need to control the electricity provider in order to hack the meter. But at this point, if you gain control of the network, there is no interest in hacking the meters.
> So it can be open or closed even without internet.
A binary solution is far less efficient than one where the consumer decides if he's willing to pay the spot price or not. Especially if that is controlled from afar.
Shaping demand with prices is how free markets work. Shaping demand via some remote bureaucrat's decision to randomly cut people off is socialism.
> Any it's a safety hazard in homes with small children; hot water temperature should never be hot enough to cause burns when someone turns on the faucet.
That’s a matter of forced mixing. The temp coming out of the hot water heater itself should have very little to do with the faucet temp in 2021. (Yes I realize it still does)
The device is called a tempering valve. It's already necessary if you want a child-safe temperature in the bathroom, because such a temperature is below the leigonella-inhibiting temperature of the storage.
> I don't think there are even any widely available on the market today which will automatically increase the temperature at mid day in anticipation of an electricity shortage later.
Why should there be? Electric rates are fixed 24/7. All the power company has to do is provide an API to get the spot price, and start varying the electric rates according to supply. The market will adapt.
> Most homes don't have enough free space for a big pile of rocks to increase thermal mass.
Criminy. Do I have to design it, too? Most homes have a basement or a crawl space.
Walter, the things you're saying are patently untrue. Many, many countries and municipalities do not have fixed pricing, so you're looking at this from inside a personal bubble, which does not reflect reality for the rest of the world. So with that in mind, what you're actually proposing is a solution that works for some homes, in some municipalities, under very specific circumstances.
I can't imagine anyone wanting to start a business strictly based around a last-mile solution, when other solutions already exist and are substantially more efficient and scalable.
You're also assuming that the regulatory bodies for each municipality inherently want things to be efficient and customer-friendly, but that's just not how it works. In the US alone, all you need is to look at the disaster in Texas this past winter, where prices jumped to 180x their usual rates -- and for brazenly nefarious reasons.
> Walter, the things you're saying are patently untrue.
Want me to show you my electric bill? Fixed rate, 24/7, in every place I've lived, for my entire long life. California, land of the rolling blackouts because they can't match demand with supply, also has fixed electric rates.
> is a solution that works for some homes, in some municipalities, under very specific circumstances.
Oh come on.
> I can't imagine anyone wanting to start a business strictly based around a last-mile solution, when other solutions already exist and are substantially more efficient and scalable.
Look at the endless variety of thermostat innovation for your HVAC system. Even internet connected ones. Why would you suggest that simply automatically adjusting the thermostat based on spot prices for electricity is inefficient and unscalable?
> You're also assuming that the regulatory bodies for each municipality inherently want things to be efficient and customer-friendly
I infer no such thing. I suggested making changes.
> where prices jumped to 180x their usual rates
And I bet none of those customers had thermostats connected to the spot price of the electricity.
Do you know that the pump price of gas varies every day? That's demand shaping. And it works.
Give me a break, Walter. I explain that you're viewing this from within a bubble, and your response is to insist that you're not in a bubble because you, personally, haven't lived somewhere without fixed rates? That's the definition of a bubble argument and self-centeredness.
If you really think your ideas are unique and revolutionary and "correct," then I recommend going down to your local utility and pitching them heated rocks, instead of trying to convince the internet that you're right about everything -- see how long it takes for them to stop laughing.
As an aside, my father invented, developed and sold a heated rocks system over 40 years ago. It definitely worked, but the concept itself proved to be too inefficient, impractical and non-scalable, and because of that it never got adopted beyond a few off-the-grid folks. So, when I say that your ideas would only work in very specific circumstances, that's based on actual historical information, not some imagined universe where the entire world is exactly the same as you, personally, have experienced.
> you, personally, haven't lived somewhere without fixed rates? That's the definition of a bubble argument and self-centeredness.
So, the 5 states and 2 foreign countries I've lived in are a self-centered bubble? I'll turn that around. Where in the US are variable, minute by minute electricity pricing which can be remotely queried?
> see how long it takes for them to stop laughing
First they ignore you, then they laugh, then they race to implement it. What I see in this thread is "electricity rates are fixed 24/7, that's the way they've always been, anything else is inconceivable".
Frankly, why should the utility care? They'd probably profit quite a bit from massive government money to develop grid storage batteries.
It is typical for solar heated homes to use rocks/concrete for heat storage. Traditional adobe homes with thick earthen walls also are very, very good at being a heat sink and source, making the home comfortable. As mentioned elsewhere, I have a Swedish masonry fireplace which uses masonry to store the heat and slowly release it. It's a simple heated rock system. The Swedes have used that design for centuries.
As for your father's invention, I have no idea what went wrong with it. Perhaps a couple manufacturing engineers having a look could improve it quite a bit. After all, rarely does the first iteration of a concept be very practical.
You're proposing nothing but hypotheticals based on what a utility SHOULD care about as opposed to what they ACTUALLY do. And it's an exhausting amount of mental gymnastics.
As for my father's invention, the reason it didn't catch on was for the same reason that piles of rocks don't actually scale -- it's incredibly inefficient, as is every other rock-based thermal storage. Just because it's a functional method of accomplishing a task, doesn't mean it's the best method, and what you've repeatedly asserted is that YOUR idea should be the best method simply because you say so.
Same as Macron's: spending time and effort on reliable generation (i.e. nuclear) instead of wasting it on feel-good drop-in-a-bucket non-solutions. Every single one of those houses can be cooled or heated up if you have energy available on request, no need for massive piles of rocks here and there
It also means more thermal losses and huge thermal masses required to make any difference.
Walter, you are making up science in your head that does not actually exist. I would highly encourage you to do some actual research before you continue to make these incredibly uninformed comments.
> Because it takes 3-5x as much energy to heat rock than water
And 100% of that energy gets recovered as it slowly returns to ambient temperature.
You're confusing heat with temperature.
> you are making up science in your head that does not actually exist
You should be careful about making such statements. You're quite wrong. The heat going into the rock will be 100% returned. All of it. Where do you imagine it will go?
No, Walter, you're confusing energy with temperature. If it takes 1 kWh of electricity to increase the temperature of water by 1 unit (thereby releasing 1 unit of heat to the atmosphere), it takes 3-5 kWh of electricity to increase the temperature of a rock by 1 unit. That's called inefficiency.
I'm done trying to explain 6th grade Earth science to you. You're either trolling or extremely unwilling to accept reality, so unless you have actual evidence for any of your claims, please stop pretending that you're some super genius who knows better than every scientist and engineer on the planet.
The energy comes back out of the rocks in the form of heat. 100% of it. No losses. Energy in equals energy out. If you heat the rock by 1 degree, in cooling off 1 degree it will release 100% of the heat absorbed.
> you're some super genius who knows better than every scientist and engineer on the planet
I suggest you ask an actual thermodynamicist, not a 6th grader. I don't need to present evidence that conservation of energy applies. After all, it's the law.
This is getting beyond ridiculous, Walter, and you're making things up again. At no point did I or anyone else on the planet ever suggest that heating a rock by 1 degree will release less than 1 degree of heat.
As I've explained multiple times now, it's a matter of where the heat originally came from, and it requires 3-5x MORE ENERGY to impart the THE SAME AMOUNT OF HEAT to a rock as it does water. That's the entire point, and is the portion of thermodynamics that you keep pretending doesn't exist. I'm not sure how many more times or ways I can explain this to you, because you clearly don't want to accept that the original heat input doesn't magically manifest itself.
I've provided you with evidence for all of this, but you're still making the same baseless argument. Your ignorance of the subject is exhausting to engage with, so if that was your intent, I guess you win today's Troll Award. But you're still completely wrong about the science, you're unwilling to provide any evidence to back up your claims (because the evidence doesn't exist), you have no basis for your argument at all, and you should be ashamed of yourself for insisting otherwise in such an aggressively arrogant manner.
> At no point did I or anyone else on the planet ever suggest that heating a rock by 1 degree will release less than 1 degree of heat.
Yet you said it was only 20% efficient. Where did the 80% of the energy go?
> it requires 3-5x MORE ENERGY to impart the THE SAME AMOUNT OF HEAT to a rock as it does water
No, it doesn't. It's the same. Unless you've confused heat with temperature. Or you didn't try to heat the rock in an enclosed, insulated box, and the rocks were radiating the heat away almost as fast as it was applied.
"Heat is a form of energy that can be transferred from one object to another or even created at the expense of the loss of other forms of energy."
You finally provided some "evidence" and it literally says the opposite of what you're suggesting. I would highly encourage you to keep reading the subsequent pages on that site, because it goes on to explain the reasons why you're wrong.
> No, it doesn't. It's the same.
This statement is the entire premise of your argument, but is directly refuted by the source you provided, and is so ridiculously absurd that I can't take you seriously anymore. You have to be trolling.
Walter, I've already provided you with a mountain of evidence. You pasted a single sentence stating that heat can be transferred between objects, which nobody has ever refuted, and does not factor in any of the actual physics involved with that transfer -- and then you asked me to paste an entire article as a counterpoint.
Your gaslighting continues, and I'm beyond tired of it.
> Criminy. Do I have to design it, too? Most homes have a basement or a crawl space.
In Europe at least, the vast majority of people live in high-rise blocks, which barely have adequate parking space, never mind any room for electricity storage. None of your solutions are even close to practical from this point of view alone.
Not to mention, relying on the market to be rational really can't be the solution to keeping the grid functional. Blackouts are massively disruptive and potentially life threatening.
I don't, and most don't either: there is no room. We have hot pipes through which hot water is pumped. At best, the high-rise itself has a hot water heater, but even that probably only holds a few hours worth of water. Serious storage is only there at the neighborhood level.
In Arizona, everything was slab-on-grade because the ground was very, very dry. That's not so in most other areas.
The crawl space keeps the wood off the ground where it wicks up moisture and quickly rots. Cement wicks up moisture, too. Try a slab in Seattle, for instance, and your house will soon be uninhabitable from mildew.
> 30 percent of new single-family homes started in 2013 have a full or partial basement, 54 percent are built on slabs, and 15 percent have a crawl space.
> I don't think there are even any widely available on the market today which will automatically increase the temperature at mid day in anticipation of an electricity shortage later.
Our house built 7 years ago has an Enefarm fuel cell/hot water heater. Every house in our neighborhood and every house I’ve seen by the same builder has one. It approaches things a little bit differently but to the same effect. It learns your energy use patterns and turns on the fuel cell (using LP gas) when you usually use electricity, generating hot water as a side effect. The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
> it's a safety hazard in homes with small children; hot water temperature should never be hot enough to cause burns when someone turns on the faucet.
Internally it stores water at 65 degrees C but mixes it with cold water to to supply all water to the house at a certain temp. We have ours set to 40C but you can change it on a control panel. Of course, there are mixing taps at the sinks/showers. It’s very common for shower temp controls here to have a extra stop at 40C that requires pressing a button to exceed.
> Most homes don't have enough free space for a big pile of rocks to increase thermal mass
I don’t know about cooling but the ones that take advantage of cheap electricity at night to store up heat and release slowly over the day are not massive.
> I am utterly astonished that this is never, ever discussed when talking about solutions to fluctuating supply. Having fixed electricity rates 24/7 is simply madness in today's electricity generation situation.
In many areas wholesale markets work on a spot price basis (although players in the market can of course hedge against low/high prices), but consumers have been very reluctant to go with spot price contracts.
This will probably not be helped by the experience of those consumers in Texas who got $10000 electricity bills during last winter's storm, as the prices skyrocketed.
Sure, I agree with that. I guess people don't want to be in a position of having to choose between freezing to death and going bankrupt. So they won't go with the spot-price following contract, even though in some sense it would be better for the grid as a whole.
I suppose this could be handled with some kind of roof price (with the lost money being inserted as some kind of fixed surcharge on the bill or something like that). That would allow reaping most of the benefits of spot pricing without risking bankruptcy during a crisis.
The alternative to demand shaping is the electricity just gets turned off. Which is also what happened in Texas.
There's a name for it: "rolling blackouts". Texas had them, they're also popular in California.
Another name for it is "shortages". Shortages happen when prices are fixed. Having fixed prices does not at all mean there's enough for everyone. Someone's gonna do without.
Shorages also happen when you don't have enough production capability or transportation capibility. See most of what is happening durring the pandemic. I can assure you the price of containers and wood have not been fixed.
Of the two states you mentioned, California is also faceing a housing shortage. I would hazard that the same factors that are causing that shortage are in play for their power problems as well.
Some car batteries may be available but I know for a fact that stock of some ran out. We could not get them from the manufacturer.
Same as ECM for cars. You think that Ford, GM or Toyota would not pay a bit extra to be able to sell cars?
Wood saw a huge price increase but also ran out.
Right now try to source tires. Distributors don't have them, you might be able to find 1 or 2 if you are lucky but you could offer double or triple and you still couldn't buy in volume. Material is not available.
You could buy them from someone who has them. There's a price at which anyone will sell. The problem then becomes the price you'd have to charge for the cars is too much, but someone who is willing to pay that price could still buy them.
Which is why new car prices are up substantially.
If prices were set by law, this couldn't happen (legally). So then the shortages are real.
I manufacture equipment, I can't use used batteries, I need new. If something is not available in the quantities I need, it is not available. Food is a good example of this, in a famine there is not enough food. Money can not buy you extra because it does not exist.
Or another example:
So if I am willing to pay anything, I can get the Mona Lisa? and if you are willing to pay anything, you can get the Mona Lisa as well? There is only one.
But to bring this back to the original topic of the thread, since we have determined that money is no object, why not spend that money to build nuclear power plants.
My water heater is not a storage device for electricy. It lacks the means to recover energy from it, and I want hot water in the morning, every morning, not at random times during the year when there is a surplus of power.
Also, in any cold climate, 'surplus of energy' is generally associated with the presence of sunlight, i.e. at times when heating the house is typically not a great priority. You want that heating on when it is coldest, which typically coincides with the lowest renewable energy production as well.
Charging and decharging your car sounds great, but it means your battery is deteriorating while you aren't even driving.
> My water heater is not a storage device for electricy.
Criminy. Of course it isn't. It's a storage device for HOT WATER.
I have an experiment you can try. Unplug your hot water heater. See how long the hot water lasts. (For me, it remains hot enough to shower for TWO DAYS.) That suggests, to ignorant me, that one does not need to heat the water in it at a moment's notice, but it can be deferred to the cheaper times of the day.
Furthermore, water doesn't have to be heated to a precise temperature. The temp of your shower is controlled by mixing it with cold water. Hence, one can heat the water to a much higher temp when electricity is cheap, further extending the "battery" effect of storing hot water.
If you know ahead of time that you are going to use it like this, you can use a purpose built Thermal Store. It's a huge insulated water tank that you heat up, and then you extract heat from it by running mains water through a heat exchanger with the tank water.
Typically used by people with wind, solar, or burned fuel energy supplies to smooth out energy consumption and soak up extra energy when there is too much. Also by people with variable electricity pricing to soak up free excess energy from the grid at night and heat their home for free all day.
Your water heater quite probably is an electrical storage device, it's been a fairly standard tech for decades in many countries, often using cheap coal or nuclear power at night since they aren't economic to ramp down.
I'd be very surprised if France didn't do things like this. edit: googled it:
I'm quite sure my water heater does not store electricity. It stores hot water, and it completely lacks the ability to turn hot water back into electricity. At best I can use electricity at surplus times to heat water more cheaply, but that doesn't make it 'an electrical storage device'. I cannot attach a light bulb to it, for example, so you cannot use it during dark, quiet days to compensate for the lack of renewable power.
Probably your first line is what caused the confusion.
>The simplest energy storage solution is your hot water heater. Turning on everyone's hot water heater when there is surplus electricity, and turning them off when there's a deficit, is a very low cost solution.
People want a storage solution, not a surplus use solution. Using peak sunlight or wind to heat water isn't going to be useful for a factory or server farm. The only thing that sort of load shifting helps is to diminish peak load.
Yeah, it is probably a great idea to charge your electric car during the day at work as opposed to at night. Maybe a good idea for hot water too, until you have company or teenagers who manage to use up your water in the afternoon.
The pile of rocks to store heat sounds like a nonstarter to me, unless you plan to retrofit a bunch of houses and hope that the heat stored isn't depleted faster for any reason. Otherwise broken pipes at best and deaths at the worst. Not sure how much space you would need for something like that but seems like a problem for small apartments, either the heat leakage would overheat the place or you wouldn't store enough to keep warm.
I said it was a next step. Besides, the government building code constantly adds new requirements for energy efficiency. That's why we have double pane windows today. It was mandated for new construction.
> Otherwise broken pipes at best and deaths at the worst
Good points.
Denmark has a lot HVAC district heating with storage for load balancing planned in it's energy strategy 2050 (as I remember when I read it few years back).
The only way most people can time-shift charging their electric cars to the daytime is if their parking spot at their job has a charging station. Practically, that means a very large fraction of office building parking spots will need charging stations. That sounds prohibitively expensive. Incentives can only nudge so far before you run into genuine problems of logistics.
Charging stations can be installed and can make money by charging the commuters to charge their cars while they work. If the price differential between day & night is enough, it will be worthwhile for both the parking lot owner and the car owner.
Yes but "you can charge it while you sleep" is a pretty popular selling point of electric cars. You're arguing that we should purposely make electric cars less attractive.
People talk about "demand management" as if it's free. Not much power available, just shut down some factories. But if you're running your factories only half the time, you need to build twice as many factories to make the same stuff. You're making renewables look artificially cheap by externalizing costs to their customers.
> Yes but "you can charge it while you sleep" is a pretty popular selling point of electric cars. You're arguing that we should purposely make electric cars less attractive.
Instead, "you can charge it while you work". Not many people drive more than an hour a day - that's 23 hours where it sits. I see lots of cars parked in residential streets during the day. Paid parking lots catering to commuters can also offer charging services.
Any factory wants to run full-speed 24/7. How are you going to manage their demand without reducing their production?
Same principle applies to most things. If electricity stops being readily available all the time, then you're introducing a new constraint that people have to optimize for. If that means they change their behavior, then they're doing something more expensive than whatever they were doing before, when they optimized without that constraint.
That extra cost generally isn't figured into the optimistic estimates of how cheap renewables are, but it's still a cost that society pays.
Building lots of charging stations at employer parking lots is also a new cost, that doesn't get counted against renewables.
Many factories don't run 24/7. And yet more factories don't run their most energy intensive processes continuously even when they factory is "running".
A few commuters to the little town I live in can charge their electric cars during the day while they are at work.
If every parking space had a 7 kW connection (230 V, 30 A single phase) almost all cars could be fully charged while their owners were at work. In fact even an ordinary 3 kW connection would be enough for most people; even my 2015 Tesla Model S adds more than 12 km per hour at 3 kW.
Charging a car takes way more power than running a parking meter.
All I'm saying is, the costs of these sorts of demand management measures for renewables should not be overlooked in comparisons with the cost of nuclear, which doesn't need them.
> Charging a car takes way more power than running a parking meter.
True, you'll need a heavier wire. And the cost of installing wire far exceeds the cost of the wire. When my house was wired up, the cost of the installation was 40 times the cost of the reels of wire.
Also night is a pretty good time for grid load since wind does decently at night, and power use is very low. (since most offices/factories don't use power at night)
Also if your home has a "NightSaver" meter (just what they're called here in Ireland, but basically a day and night meter), the night rate is often nearly half the day rate, so it makes sense to charge at night.
> The simplest energy storage solution is your hot water heater. Turning on everyone's hot water heater when there is surplus electricity, and turning them off when there's a deficit, is a very low cost solution.
This is available in the UK, using a thing called the Economy 7 tariff on electricity [1]. You have two sets of circuits on this plan. One set is the normal set that provides electricity 24/7, so you get expensive electricity when the rate is high and cheap electricity when the rate is low. The other only provides electricity when the rate is lower, such as at night (the 7 in "Economy 7" refers to 7 hours of cheap electricity at night).
There are water heaters designed specifically to work with this [2]. They have a main heating element that does most of the work, which you connect to a circuit that only provides power when the rate is low. These tanks also have a boost heating element that is on a 24/7 circuit meant to just provide any extra heating you need for hot water use during the day.
They also have tariffs that provide a fixed rate 24/7, which should be cheaper than Economy 7 during the day but more expensive at night, so whether Economy 7 saves you money depends on how much of your electricity use is at night.
>I am utterly astonished that this is never, ever discussed when talking about solutions to fluctuating supply.
I'm not surprised to be honest. On a forum like this, you'll get a bunch of very smart people talking about something they don't know a lot about, but authoritatively. (Just look at the incredibly snarky and dismissive responses you've received)
It's certainly talked about in industry and work is going into implementing it.
I work in the electricity-tech industry but I've given up on trying to talk about things like demand response as I'm always shouted down
HN has also snarkily informed me many times that demand for gasoline is completely inelastic.
Never mind that the pump price of gas changes every day, especially when there's an oil refinery explosion, or glut, or whatever. It's a classic example of demand shaping via price. And it works because demand for gas is elastic.
The only time this did not work was when the government regulated oil prices and which stations got a gas allocation. Older folks like me might remember this - long gas lines in the 1970s. Gas lines that disappeared literally overnight when Reagan repealed the price and allocation controls.
How is a refinery explosion, pipeline shutdown or glut proof that demand is elastic?
All that shows is that supply is elastic and that market price varies. For the most part, demand is inelastic. You require the same amount of fuel to go to work/school and return. Now you could vary your shopping habits, go to a shopping center with several stores as opposed to the stores you like. You could put off a road trip or vacation but it isn't like either of those things are the bulk of gasoline usage.
Refinery and pipeline problems are relatively short-term events. Something like an embargo which caused the oil crisis would definitely change behavior and demand.
When you talk about allowing prices to determine who gets and doesn't get a good that is fine when it is a luxury item like graphics cards. But when you talk about the same thing for a necessity like food, water and electricity then getting priced out of the market means death.
Sorry, but that is obviously untrue. If it was true, gas prices would just go up and stay up.
> But when you talk about the same thing for a necessity like food, water and electricity then getting priced out of the market means death.
Then you'll have to accept that the inevitable shortages also mean death. Anti-gouging laws not only produce shortages, they make for less supply overall being available. (This is because high prices motivate increased supply.)
P.S. For just one example, when gas prices are low, people will drive to the store to pick up a loaf of bread. When they're high, people will combine errands and buy more items on fewer trips to the store.
>Sorry, but that is obviously untrue. If it was true, gas prices would just go up and stay up.
Only if there was a monopoly or collusion, otherwise the competition would cause prices to fall to a point just above break even. Well, more complicated than that, prices would fall to a point where it is profitable enough for the companies involved to keep producing the goods and not switch to making something else.
>Then you'll have to accept that the inevitable shortages also mean death. Anti-gouging laws not only produce shortages, they make for less supply overall being available. (This is because high prices motivate increased supply.)
No, you can also over produce something and pay for the over production. We do that with food. That is why you hear a lot about paying farmers to not farm or dumping excess grain in the ocean as opposed to selling it.
>P.S. For just one example, when gas prices are low, people will drive to the store to pick up a loaf of bread. When they're high, people will combine errands and buy more items on fewer trips to the store.
I literally used that as one of my examples: "Now you could vary your shopping habits, go to a shopping center with several stores as opposed to the stores you like. You could put off a road trip or vacation but it isn't like either of those things are the bulk of gasoline usage."
But again, that is not the bulk of gasoline use. Most people are not going to the store for a loaf of bread, going back the next day for hamburger meat and going a third day for salad. Or even making 2 or three trips in a day. Most people don't like to spend their time in cars driving places.
You highlight the biggest problem: humans simply must change/adjust/whatever you want to call it, if humanity is to survive. The only technological out is fusion power. Without that, humans must learn to do with less (of everything). Everything else is empty rhetoric and time wasted.
Or we could use fission instead of fusion? We already have examples of countries using it successfully: France, Sweden, South Korea, and increasingly China. And the US during the 60s and 70s.
Geographically independent power, no carbon emissions, and no intermittency. It fulfills anything we'd get from fusion, except we have 70 years of experience using it in our power grids.
We don't need fusion. Fusion would be nice but we have more than enough fissile material to use well-understood fission plants for the foreseeable future.
The problem is humanity needs to get it's act together and stop allowing politics, NIMBY and a severe lack of understanding of science from getting in the way of saving itself.
Nuclear proliferation is the least of our problems if we can't grow our food outside anymore and half our cities are underwater.
No that's wrong. There are plenty of ways of achieving carbon neutral energy production. Fusion is one of them, but it's unlikely that fusion will be a particularly cheap source of power.
> A battery consisting of a pile of rocks can't be expensive.
> The idea is to not only adjust supply to the demand, but to shape the demand to the supply.
> I am utterly astonished that this is never, ever discussed when talking about solutions to fluctuating supply. Having fixed electricity rates 24/7 is simply madness in today's electricity generation situation.
It might not be the same everywhere but in France and Belgium at least, it is very common to have two rates: peak and off-peak. A signal is sent by the provider to your electrical meter (basically 220V when off-peak, 0V when peak) that can pilot a switch that turns the hot water heater on only during off-peak hours.
Some electric heaters also work on that principle, they are filled with bricks and heat up during off-peak hours then release the stored heat later, when it is needed. That's your "battery consisting of a pile of rock". However, I have lived with those things and it doesn't work at all because storing heat in anything else than water just doesn't work well. Basically at the end of the day, when you come back from work and need the heat that was stored during the night, it's already gone (and totally wasted as the house was empty). The most modern designs don't work much better. I think these only still exist because the idea seems good enough to convince people to buy them, but it's not actually technically feasible.
Anyway, everything you say is already possible in western Europe, and already done (except for HVAC, but that's mostly because HVAC in private homes isn't very common in the first place). What could be improved is to have more dynamic off-peak hours, but that's not a technical problem, everything would already work as is.
I think the problem with storing energy in western Europe, is that you need most energy for heating in winter, when there is hardly any solar power. So any convenient daily pattern doesn't work. For wind, you can probably heat up during the night assuming there is less other demand for electricity.
However, that doesn't help during period when there is hardly any wind. It is not as if you can stop heating your house for a couple of weeks.
I'm curious have this will play out. On a bright summer day, there is plenty of solar power. So it make sense to do everything during the day. During winter, it is better to distribute the load and move load to the night. That requires quite a bit of signaling to get right.
Whilst the UK did indeed have 5 days with less than 2GW wind (not weeks with 0 like you claim), the situation is not as simple as news outlets and agenda-pushers would have you believe. A bunch of other plants (including nuclear) going offline was a major contributing factor.
So you propose to power all of Germany from the North Sea area? In theory it's possible, the North Sea is big enough. But transport costs maybe become an issue.
Well, if the bricks in your heater aren't insulated, of course they'll release their heat prematurely.
I have a Swedish fireplace. The firebox is very small, and the masonry is rather massive. The idea is for the masonry to soak up the heat, then slowly release it long after the fire dies down. Apparently the Swedes have used this design for centuries. I don't imagine the Swedes are such fools that they wouldn't notice for centuries that it doesn't work (it does!).
People also used to put rocks in the fireplace, then pull them out to put in their beds to warm them at night. This is just a primitive method of doing the same thing.
Where I live the vast majority of heat is produced by natural gas or propane. This includes water boilers, water heaters, clothes dryers, cooking ranges and ovens.
This is a good point, but would that ever actually happen? Or would it just be "free" electricity at first and later the electric boiler owners find out that a gas one would've been cheaper after all.
I would consider purchasing an electric boiler if the average operating cost was significantly lower.
Eventually this will make sense, but it’s not something that will happen in my neck of the woods in the next 20 years.
Here in Flanders (60% of Belgium in terms of population) that is not an option. No more pure natural gas heating allowed in new construction from 2023. Gas/heat pump hybrids can still be installed until 2025, but that's it.
It's more strict for oil based heating. Even replacing an existing system is not allowed anymore from 2022.
> The idea is to not only adjust supply to the demand, but to shape the demand to the supply.
This is completely backwards. Demand is highly price inelastic and inversely correlated with the supply of renewables. People usually eat at night. They heat their homes overnight. None of these things will change based on energy prices.
What you're proposing is a tax on the poor, and no practical benefit to boot.
> The charger for your electric car is another very practical sink for cheap electricity.
I don't have an electric car. I do not know anybody with an electric car. And wouldn't the surplus show up specifically when those cars aren't at the home?
> A battery consisting of a pile of rocks can't be expensive.
No, but the labor cost of hooking up your pile of rocks battery will be impractical for almost everyone.
> The next level is using residential HVAC systems the same way.
Again, I don't know anybody with an HVAC system. Everything here in the UK is based on natural gas and would cost an unbelievable amount of money to replace with electric.
> BTW, everybody in Arizona has A/C. Amazingly, A/C demand peaks when the sun is high in the sky.
Here in California, peak AC demand is late afternoon.
Environmental thermal mass means peak outdoor temperature happens a fair bit after peak insolation. Structures take even more time to heat up and add additional delay. Finally, people arriving home from work means increased AC use, too.
Demand stays fairly high after it gets dark.
(And it's my understanding most other places keep daytime heat later than here).
Sure, there all kinds of ways to move demand around from when it would naturally peak based on peoples' preferences.
This particular one is only mildly effective; precooling can lower later demand somewhat.
My house is very well insulated, but I still cannot coast from 5:30pm to 9:30pm (when windows are sufficient for comfort and demand really starts to slope off) without an excessive amount of prechilling. My structure, insulation, and attic are all preheated by the day's heat and so there is a big warm thermal mass next to my living space.
Also, opening windows overnight increases indoor humidity, which in turn requires more air conditioning the next day.
If it'll save you 10% on your electric bill, would you do it? I would. And reducing peak demand by 10% can really reduce the cost and need for grid battery storage.
Best of all, doing this sort of management of your HVAC system costs you essentially nothing. It's picking money off the ground.
We have had "off peak hot water" for many decades. Multiple different rates for peak and off-peak.
It is not useless but it does have its price in terms of complexity and usability. With off peak at night you tend to run out of hot water during the day at times e.g. if you have visitors.
I've never seen it mentioned in any articles about baseline and peak power needs, and all that talk about grid batteries.
> and it is no panacea.
Nobody said it was. If it would, say, reduce the need for grid batteries by 10%, that would be an enormous savings. All by changing a new thermostat.
I remember in the 70s energy crisis the appearance of programmable thermostats what would automatically lower the temp at night. My proposal just extends that.
My house has a 25 year old gas furnace and it is still in solid condition. Had to get the blower motor replaced but that is about it. Our AC unit did not fare as well so we may be upgrading both next year. But yeah, they can last a lot longer than 10 years.
> Demand is highly price inelastic and inversely correlated with the supply of renewables.
The first is dubious, the second is... highly location dependent.
Peak demand in California matches peak solar output pretty well; before solar was big, supply concerns focused on peak demand hours, in the afternoon; now they are in the evening because solar has made the highest gross demand time the time where there is the least concern for supply.
> No, but the labor cost of hooking up your pile of rocks battery will be impractical for almost everyone.
The labor cost of hooking it up isn't that bad, geothermal heat pumps aren't that costly.
Insulating the pile of rocks battery is probably the hard part.
Can't afford a smart water heater? We're just talking about the thermostat for it. I doubt a mass produced thermostat that could get a price from the internet would cost more than $10. I don't know what your electric bill is, but I'd be cash positive in the first month.
This only applies in areas that already use electric heaters.
Anywhere else poor people cannot afford to replace their gas heater with an electric one. And if they rent they have no choice, it’s up to the landlord. In some locales it is common for the renter to pay for the heat bill. So the landlord has little incentive to install a different heating system. In other locales the average cost of heat is factored in to the price of rent and the incentives are basically the same.
> I doubt a mass produced thermostat that could get a price from the internet would cost more than $10
Total costs will be low if you can also find a perfectly spherical plumber (& electrician (& WiFi/4G-technician)) that charges less than $1 per hour for installation.
In New Zealand the law and insurance requires that only registered electricians can work on household wiring, with paperwork per house to confirm. Surprisingly enough most people are unwilling to do something illegal, that will also void their house insurance.
Perhaps the laws and insurance rules are less strict where you are?
I also think that very few people feel comfortable working on household wiring, and very few people are comfortable with fixing plumbed in appliances.
I will add that the law is good, because houses get sold, and wiring is invisible, and no future owner wants to find out their wiring is bodged up by some clueless software engineer.
There is some truely terrifyingly dangerous wiring done by amateurs.
If we're dealing with rural areas reliable internet isn't always a given. The UK had an interesting solution for this for older electricity meters which encodes data in the BBC Radio 4 LW (198 kHz AM) radio station. Most of the country is covered by a single transmitter because of how efficiently LF waves propagate and it doesn't require an internet connection to work. Sadly I think the rise of smart meters will probably be the death knell for Radio 4 LW too.
I think it's easy to forget how flakey the internet can be outside of major cities in some places. Having lived in places that are fairly off the beaten track I wouldn't want my electricity bill to depend on always having a reliable WiFi connection for example.
I work at a company that does DERMS projects in this space (peak shaving, load balancing, power factor optimization, voltage support, etc, etc).
It's not that no one talks about this stuff, it's just that it's as with all things in the utility space projects take time and a lot of the work being done is still exploratory.
No one I work with seems to think this stuff is a magic bullet either, just part of the solution (of which nuclear is another important part).
I should also note that these DERMS projects are very software reliant and I think all of us here on HN know quite well that reliability can be an issue in the software space...
Trouble is, it's nowhere near enough. Cases you mentioned (charging personal cars, heating/cooling down houses) are relatively small. Let's be generous and say it's 20% of overall energy consumption. For comparison, last summer average energy production of UK's offshore wind stayed under 10% of its capacity for a month. How do you even make a dent in this massive sea of missing energy with those small and temporary reductions?
That has a significant risk, what if you hit the end of your range whilst the deficit is still getting worse? Deficits are not following nice predictable normal curves.
I've lived somewhere with storage heaters. They are horrible, practically indistinguishable from no heating at all. A large enough thermal mass would require a complete rebuild.
> what if you hit the end of your range whilst the deficit is still getting worse?
You, the consumer, can override it. You get to decide between donning a sweater or paying more. Isn't that objectively better than some bureaucrat simply turning off the power to your neighborhood (rolling blackouts)?
I live in an area where hot water heating is common. Hot water heaters have secondary loops through the main oil-fired boiler and these could easily be made electric.
A missing link is indeed a cinder block energy storage pile that could be set to preheat water going into the hot water boiler, or to cycle through water going into heating.
>>"The simplest energy storage solution is your hot water heater. Turning on everyone's hot water heater when there is surplus electricity,"
I already do this manually. I unplug it before taking a shower and plug it again at night. Of course, doing it automatically is the only way is going to be done at scale.
I wonder how recharging the net from a plugged in e-car would affect the lifetime/resale-value of that car, if that concept would be in general use. And how the grid then would develop, regarding overall capacity.
Those sound like cost savers, not the mass storage solution that is needed. I haven't done the math but I bet you're missing about an order of magnitude of storage needed to make intermittent power sources sufficient to power the grid by themselves.
A mix of sources (e.g. a few solar and wind plants in different locations) overcomes much of the intermittency and storage issues. It usually requires upgrades to the grid and beyond that just some careful management of the (less regular) intermittency issues (whether storage or alternative sources on demand).
One plant should not be judged on its intermittency alone. Its just not how the system works at a connected-grid scale.
Unfortunately wind and solar isn't homogeneously distributed around America nor the globe. The highest capacity, for both, in the US is more central US and not the coasts. This creates a lot of added complexity as those places also tend to be the lowest population density AND a large distance from said population centers.
So we can store our storage centers closer to population centers, but we can't generate it close by. We now have lots of transmission losses and opportunities for failures.
The problem with all this is that it is exceedingly complicated and most people are trying to simplify the problem. But here even including second order factors doesn't give you good approximations of the solution.
Renewables are indeed vital. At the same time, it feels counterproductive that every discussion on nuclear or renewables ends up casting things as an either or proposition. Nuclear as baseload remains very useful. What's more, we don't just seek to replace current capacity but also to quickly increase generation.
While costs of transmission infrastructure required for country scale (larger distances for lower correlation) energy dispatch are recognized, its more abstract challenges are less well acknowledged. Dispatch at this level is not just about developments in grid integration or hardware like solid state "transformers", it also has a complex routing coordination aspect requiring research in control and even game theory [1].
A lack in wind and solar can sometimes occur simultaneously. Analysis of German wind turbines data observed that experiencing a stretch of almost a week with generation as low as 10% installed capacity was likely within a given year [2]. Surprising/extreme weather events like Europe's recent "wind drought" are rare but there remains a large amount of uncertainty in how changes in climate will affect the tail of this distribution. Tools such as coordinating distributed generation and improvements in storage tech will surely help smooth generation, nuclear is another powerful tool in that toolbox.
> Nuclear as baseload remains very useful. What's more, we don't just seek to replace current capacity but also to quickly increase generation.
The problem is that Nuclear may not be economical if it is only used when both solar and wind run out. Nuclear has large fixed costs. And almost zero marginal costs. So the average costs -- what needs to be charged in order to avoid bankruptcy, increase as you use it less.
That means every solar panel you add makes the nuclear power a bit more expensive. And that incentivizes adding more solar. Up until you drive the nuclear out of business, and then suddenly you don't have reliable power anymore.
Then you are faced with a situation of
a) only having nuclear power which can provide for all of your needs, in which case adding solar is an unnecessary expense
b) only having solar+wind and an unreliable grid, which means you need to add batteries to cover solar+wind. And the price of those batteries may be more than the price of the nuclear plant.
c) having nuclear and solar both, with enough subsidies given to the nuclear plant to keep it in business so that the total solution is more costly than just going with nuclear.
So yeah, there really is a tension between nuclear and solar.
This is not the situation, however, with solar and coal. Because coal plants are damn cheap, and they have higher marginal costs. Thus solar can coexist with coal or with gas much better than with nuclear.
Therefore the economics is such that as people promote solar the result is a decrease in nuclear and an increase in coal and gas.
Your model is overly simplified. Nuclear runs into the exact same issues in the other direction as you try to scale it to take over more of the grid. Frances nuclear reactors where at 70% capacity factors vs 90% in the US even with France exporting and importing vast amounts of electricity with the rest of Europe. It’s really not Nuclear vs Solar it’s simply Nuclear’s high cost and thus inflexibility that’s at issue.
Current electricity demand is heavily biased to daytime use even with cheap nighttime prices causing people to shift demand to use that. Start to ramp up solar to the point where daytime demand is higher and a great deal of nighttime demand drops off.
Grid storage isn’t cheap enough to store energy at current nighttime rates, but it’s cheap enough to have a balanced grid backed by hydro, wind, and solar even with zero fossil fuels. The tipping point to cheap daytime rates and expensive nighttime rates isn’t inherently better or worse, it just reflecting the future economic reality.
You are correct that my model is simplified. I ignore the issue that demand isn't really stable, and you need some peaker plants.
The problem is that Solar isn't really a good solution for peaker plants, because those need to be reliable. So I don't think this simplification undermines the tradeoffs I was describing, although I agree that in the space of peaker plants, there can be some combination of solar and gas to handle peaks when it is sunny and also when it is not sunny. Just be prepared that you need enough gas and coal to cover all the generating capacity you are getting from solar and wind, which is again very expensive.
> grid backed by hydro, wind, and solar even with zero fossil fuels
This requires a lot of hydro, more than most nations have together with really punitive electric rates when there is an absence of wind or solar. I mean, massively punitive rates, because demand for electricity is highly price inelastic. So be prepared for rates to go up 10x or 20x or even 100x when there is a stretch of windless days with weak sun. I think there is a reason why no nation has gone this route except oddballs like Iceland with their reliable geothermal.
Solar is the economic equivalent of base load power in that it’s cheap, and doesn’t follow the demand curve. Batteries then fill the role of peaking power plants as long as they can be filled cheaply. How you get from there to a balanced grid isn’t to have exactly as much generation on average as you need. Instead you install about twice as much as you need on average because it’s just that cheap vs any other source that even half of all generated solar is wasted it’s still cheaper than any other alternative.
At that point you are still going to get multiple day stretches where wind and solar only cover ~1/2 of daily demand but hydro can make up the difference on such occasions even if it’s only supplying 6.6% of annual US demand. Basically you get 1-2% hydro on most days and on 5% of days you a lot of energy stored.
As to high costs, because of the excess solar you’re generally filling batteries with nearly free electricity. Average nighttime wholesale prices therefore end up at ~10c/kWh or whatever the battery storage costs settle on, but daytime rates when most demand actually takes place are going to tank. That’s a net reduction in average prices. Trying to make a grid from Nuclear + batteries on the other hand means your paying Nuclear prices at night, but nuclear + battery prices in the daytime which is the opposite of what you want. Nuclear + fossil fuels on the other hand simply doesn’t go far enough.
Now in a mostly solar world a very low percentage of electricity may end up generated by fossil fuels, but a 99.X% solution is success by any reasonable metric.
PS: As a sanity check you can look at what people are paying when their off grid and then realize that’s very much a worst case.
Lack of wind and solar can happen but at scale there is plenty of hydro energy stored to cover significant edge cases. Rivers can handle significantly more flow than current hydro releases without causing flooding, we just need to retro fit existing dams and then reduce their generation most of the time to reserve that capacity for when it’s needed. Aka averaging 6.6% over 365 days a year ~= 80% for 30 days.
Also, be careful when looking at wind and solar minimal percentages. It’s the difference between median output and minimum output that matters not maximum output. Long term it’s likely something like 30 to 50% of all solar generation is going to be wasted simply because it’s just that cheap.
Dams don’t release CO2, they can produce trivial amounts of methane but that breaks down fairly rapidly in the atmosphere. It’s only when vast amounts of methane are released at the same time or the source is continuous that methane is an issue.
In terms of fish, large dams are needed for flood control and water. But rivers and streams often have huge numbers of small dams that are equally problematic and far less useful.
Extreme weather events can result in both extreme energy demand and edge cases for intermittent energy production. We can’t just rely on the low probability of our energy sources dropping out at the same time. That’s just begging for a catastrophic black swan event. Heat and cold can kill during a power outage. At least we need massive peaker capacity (with pipes that don’t freeze), and that’s part of the price tag.
Extreme weather events tend to cause issues for all kinds of power generation, including the so called non-intermittent ones. For example the extreme (for the location) cold in texas last winter took out nuclear, gas, coal, and wind power. There's nothing special about the "intermittent" ones here.
Look at the red line it dips at on the second Monday just like coal and natural gas. The drop wasn’t as severe, but it was significant and lasted several days.
Right, the "for the location" is important here. It's that they weren't prepared for the cold, not that they couldn't be.
Likewise we could make power stations that could withstand hurricanes, or earthquakes, or tsunamis, and so on. We don't usually though, it's too expensive (not to defend the decision not to weather proof more in this case, it wasn't really that far outside of the expected operating conditions as I understand the situation).
I was going to say, the answer is obviously a mix of different things, but the discussion sounds similar to when some this is hard to implement at work.
I’m not an energy grid expert but I guess it’s hard to have nuclear, gas wind and solar playing together because if it weren’t, people would just get on with it?
One partial solution to the renewables problem is to massively over-build. If they continue to drop in price, that will be feasible. Solar can be built up to the point where it will reliably produce sufficient daytime power even on very cloudy days for instance. Obviously it doesn't produce at night, but usage is also lower at night (in the future variable pricing to keep that the case as more electric cars come online). Likewise wind turbines can reliably produce power day and night if they're a bit geographically distributed and in sufficient numbers. This also means that often there will be more power available than needed. Some turbines can simply be stopped (braked) during those periods, but we may indeed find many loads can be time-shifted, reducing the baseline amount that needs to be reliably produced.
Long way of saying I agree with you; to make a reasonable comparison, you need to include an over-building factor to account for the variable nature of renewables. I'm not sure what that factor is (obviously it depends on a lot of variables), but I know it's been studied.
The problem with over-build is that if you count the energy necessary for building the renewable systems (mining, transport, building..) and the losses in distribution, the return of energy could be not so great.
What's the uptime for fission plants? I recall that our "local" nuclear power plant (Trojan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant ) being down more often than it was up. Maybe it's because it was an old design or something, but it went online in 1975 which doesn't seem that old. It operated from 1975 to 1992.
The uptime (or capacity factor) for fission plants is the highest of any energy source, at over 90% [1] [2]. By comparison, wind and solar at at 35% and 25% respectively.
For anyone curious, usually down time is a month every 12-18 months. They refuel, do maintenance, and inspections during this time as well. Usually plants have more than one reactor, so these will be out of phase with one another.
Normally there are multiple reactors and scheduled shutdowns. This is true for any power source. I'm sure there are differences in maintenance efficiency vs coal or hydro, but it's a different question than short term fluctuation that are a characteristic of wind and solar.
>When probed on how to address intermittency, many wind and solar advocates propose things like hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air, or other solutions that are currently in the prototyping stage and have yet to actually be deployed to a grid and demonstrate viability.
Cryogenic energy storage ("liquid air") plants have been deployed - a 15 MWh (5 MW peak) grid-scale demonstration plant has been operating in Greater Manchester near where I live since 2018, and there's a permanent 250 MWh (50 MW peak) plant under construction on the opposite side of the city region.
Granted that peak energy usage in the UK today was around 42 GW, so it's a small fraction (OTOO a tenth of a percent at peak) of what's needed, but... it's coming.
I fully agree with you, though, that nuclear is needed. Renewables + storage can't be the complete answer. I'm a wind, solar and nuclear advocate.
Comparing the cost of an energy source that has consistently failed to meet budget and construction timeline targets to those that have is what is actually comparing apples to oranges
I think one interesting solution is to store energy in "gravity", just pull something really heavy up and then when you need energy, let it fall and go through generator. https://gravitricity.com/
LCOE for CPVCSP + molten salt storage systems are already cheaper than nuclear according to lazards (and increasingly more so with every new plant online), but probably not acceptable for anywhere above the latitude of northern Germany.
The EU would need about 10k Cerro Dominador's (which would cover about 1% of the surface area of the EU) to supply its energy needs at worst case (using ~1kwh/m2/day seen during dec/jan).
Would you also consider the costs of next 10,000 years of safe storage of nuclear waste?
If we don't have a viable and economically well understood solution for nuclear waste handling , any cost calculations for nuclear is a waste of time .
"What about nuclear waste" is a fossil fuel industry talking point because the government doesn't want to talk about what long-lived nuclear waste actually is.
It's plutonium.
There are treaties that say you can't use spent fuel from civilian power reactors to make nuclear weapons, so nobody admits to doing this, but they probably are. That's where it goes. But since nobody can admit to it, the representative from coal country gets to say 'what about nuclear waste' whenever somebody wants to replace coal with nuclear and nobody can tell them the answer because they're not allowed to admit it. But it's not a bug, it's a feature.
There are also newer reactor designs that can run on plutonium (permanently eliminating it) and also intentionally produce Plutonium-240 in amounts that make it impossible to use for weapons. If that's what we actually wanted to do with it.
Plutonium-239 (and neptunium-237 not used in weapons AFAIK ) are the most long lived isotopes of HLW ( High Level Wastes) yes. There are also other isotopes and other types of waste. We don't have yet data for any civilian waste disposal ( Yuccta mountain project is effectively dead now.
We currently do not have a viable economically well understood solution, not hypothetical plans which may work to use plutonium effectively [1] at costs we have no idea about or disposal facility for which costs are not really known yet for all types (HLW/ILW and LLW) waste products we cannot talk costs of ownership.[2]
That doesn't mean we shouldn't do nuclear or not build new plants, but without knowing these costs any estimate of cost of ownership is useless numbers in the air as nobody knows what it is going to actually cost yet.
[1] Again engineering and economics, engineering maybe well understood, costs are not, we don't know the costs until we build a few, nuclear is notorious for widely over running cost estimates compared to any other power generation method.
[2] We don't need to measure thousand years of disposal to know the costs, we just need to run an actual disposal site for few years to really estimate the costs .
There's plenty of chemical waste from fossil fuel use and petrochemicals that may be very long lived and cause actual health impacts if inadequately stored, too... with basically no efforts made to apply the same sorts of criteria of quality and longevity of disposal of waste.
So effectively, we compare the (not fully known) costs of really mitigating the long term impacts of nuclear with outstanding storage ... to doing nothing about greater impacts from fossil fuels (both short term impacts and long-lived waste).
The difference is storing nuclear waste is accepted practice today expected from every country having a plant, storing chemical emissions(CO2) is not.
A enforced storage/cleanup would be ideal yes, U.S. has never agreed to any standards, even know while Kerry talking about shutting down Coal by 2030 from nowhere, the U.S. government explicitly did not join the pledge to shutdown coal in 2030s like some countries did last week in COP26, and has always refused to get into any international binding agreement.
From a economic perspective what you are mandated to pay for [1] today is how you model costs of the project. Running a nuclear plant today means you have to keep spent in fuel on premise with no horizon for that status quo to change. Economic model for actual money going to be spent now ( not environmental or social costs models of indirect costs) has to factor that in the cost of ownership of a plant.
Is that unfair because fossil fuels has indirect costs ? yes it is, but that does not matter from an economic decision making point of view when financing a new power plant today. Carbon tax is not a solution either as currently being envisioned [1]
---
[1] The carbon tax that is being discussed in the U.S. would be a disaster .
a) The tax rate is quite low which will supposedly increase over the years. The political pendulum in the U.S. almost guarantees that when republicans come to power in 2024 or later they are going repeal/relax a carbon tax like with Paris Agreement. U.S. is not currently in position to make serious long term commitments on any policy.
b) The polluters want limits *relaxed* as part of the tax deal. That means they want to be able to pollute as much as they want and just pay a small tax to do so ,which is why it is actually supported by some republicans I suppose.
c) Finally there is no plans on how to use the money to *remove* CO2 from the atmosphere, reducing emissions with that money with green investments is not good enough as polluters are in theory paying the government to take care of the problem and will pollute as they wish so government needs to clean the CO2 up. CCS is not viable economically today certainly not at the tax rate being proposed.
My comment isn't talking about CO2. I'm talking about e.g. benzene.
Nuclear waste disposal is concerned/stymied by the possibility that the water table in remote areas where no one lives currently may be moderately contaminated in thousands of years if it fails, and this contamination may last thousands of years.
Whereas we have contaminated the water table in populated areas with benzene and aromatics -- where they will remain contaminated for thousands of tens of thousands of years.
That is, we're trying to prevent theoretical harms in the distant future, and in so doing, we're accepting much larger present harms.
The point remains the same for benzene or other containments as well, there is not much regulatory requirements in most countries for what you should do with these effluents, so today dumping it is acceptable, if safe handling/disposal is mandatory then it would factor in the actual financial costs analysis/model.
We're talking about real costs of each alternative, though-- not just the viability of enterprises. After all, we're really talking about policymaking, and externalities like contaminating your groundwater like chemicals still "count" in overall outcomes.
There is a clear intrinsic value ( and critical need) to avoid fossil fuels, nobody is disputing that. However to imply nuclear is actually cheaper today fiscally is not accurate as original commenter was saying, given variances[1] in plant construction between estimates and actual cost incurred, also uncertainty over long term disposal method and poor understanding of those end of life costs makes it very poor choice for policy making on selecting between clean options.
If there are no other(clean) options having equivalent characteristics (consistent base load, scalability, location etc) to augment solar/wind etc ( whose costs are very well understood now including end of life costs) , then we are not choosing because it is cheaper, we are doing it because there is no choice.
[1] All plants will have some cost deviations, but nuclear has much higher both time and cost deviation from plan estimates.
If we're arguing that axis, I'd say we're arguing about the costs of storage, including end of life costs. And I do not feel like they are well understood: especially the costs and problems of recycling lots of lithium batteries at scale.
It's not only plutonium, it's an unholy mess of everything from completely inert materials to extremely hazardous. Nuclear fission is not at all equivalent to a nice chemical reaction where A + B = C.
See this graph for the spread based on Z number (Protons + Neutrons).
With the advent of cheap transport to LEO with SpaceX with thousand/millions of tons of yearly capacity - can't we just fling the nasty stuff into the sun?
It is extremely hard to reach the sun or orbits much lower than the earth, lot harder than reaching say Mars.
Parker Solar probe launched in 2018 will take 7 years and multiple gravity assits to slow down enough to get close orbit to the sun.
It is also why BepiColombo will take 6-7 years to reach mercury orbit with similar steep delta-v costs.
Here is a delta V map [1] for the solar system. It would be easier to launch our trash to escape the solar system rather than land it in the sun.
Either way we generate nuclear waste in the millions of pounds per year , launch costs with everything spaceX is doing is nowhere cheap enough to even get the waste in significant quantities to even LEO.
Thank you for a great answer to what I only can assume was a idiotic question. So if I get the gist of your answer the closer to the sun, the faster you go - all else equal. So one needs to loose alot of energy to end up actually into the sun... (or whatever is needed to vaporise the contents)
Here's another stupid question if you don't mind :) - If you launch the nuclear waste attached to a solar sail aimed such that it decreases velocity around the sun and thus make spacecraft fall towards the sun - wouldn't that work?
It is harder(less efficient) than moving away from the sun using a solar sail, somewhat similar to sailing into the wind.[1]
I don't have the exact numbers but roughly 9.08 μN/m2 is the radiation pressure @ 1 AU and depending on sail configuration (Square/Lattice etc) we can expect a λ ~ 0.25 , with a 800m2 and 5g/m2 density sail we can get effective acceleration around 1 mm/sec2, so you can reach near the sun in few(<10) years ignoring efficiency losses due to quartering and any payload weight etc.
In a real system you could speed this up a bit by using powerful lasers to improve acceleration and orbital methods like a cycler, but meaningful payload size would make it slower too.
The basic metric is that escape velocity of solar system is 30km/s earth starts you at 18km/s : it is easier to add 12 than drop by 18. You can do the same things at 2/3 delta-v budget and push your payload out of the solar system than into the sun.
[1] All orbits decay and eventually(10^150+ years) even the Earth will fall into sun ( or equivalent mass white drawf) so yes it is always possible
> Since breeder reactors on a closed fuel cycle would use nearly all of the actinides fed into them as fuel, [the] volume of waste they generate would be reduced by a factor of about 100
> In addition, the waste from a breeder reactor has a different decay behavior, because it is made up of
different materials. [Its] fission products have a peculiar 'gap' in their aggregate half-lives, such that no fission products have a half-life between 91 years and two hundred thousand years. As a result of this physical oddity, after several hundred years in storage, the activity of the radioactive waste from a Fast Breeder Reactor would quickly drop to the low level of the long-lived fission products.
> ". In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries"."
I have been following FBR progress especially thorium based ones, as it was considered to be India's path to energy independence since the 1950's. The progress has been slow and expensive and still a lot of research is left to do, so to say meaningfully that waste will reduce is not a viable plan today or next 20 years.
Recycling costs should already be well understood and can be built with reasonable accuracy into a ownership model.
Between dying in next 100-200 years because of climate change or risking nuclear contamination problems 100's of years in the future in concentrated locations the later is always preferable yes.
I am not saying there is no good reason to move to nuclear, but cost is not one of them, as literally we don't know what it will cost yet.
~~And which storage system is that?~~ (parent post was edited with links after my response)
Lithium ion battery production is at only ~400 GWh per year. By comparison, the US uses 12,500 TWh of electricity daily, or just over 500 GWh per hour. And this is only electricity, not total energy usage. Attempting to provision widespread lithium ion storage would lead to demand shock and skyrocketing prices. Not to mention it would involve delaying transition from ICE vehicles to EVs.
You're right in some scenarios: if a country has extensive dam networks, then yes renewables + storage could be cheaper. Dams provide immense energy storage capacity. Close the turbines when solar and wind are producing, open them when they're not. If a country is blessed with extensive hydroelectric potential then great.
But hydroelectricity is a matter of geography, and plenty of regions do not have the right geography to construct dams. Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage. Other proposals like hydrogen storage, flywheels, etc. have not actually been deployed to the grid so we have no real-world cost history for these systems. Somebody writing a white paper claiming $X/KWh of storage and actually building a system are two very different things.
> "By comparison, the US uses 12,500 TWh of electricity daily"
I was suspicious of your numbers so I did a bunch of math and then realized you're using the European comma rather than a decimal. So 12,500 means 12.5, not 12500.
(EIA.gov says the U.S. used about 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours in 2020 [1]. 3.8 trillion kilowatt hours equals 3.8 billion megawatt hours, equals 3.8 million gigawatt hours, equals 3.8 thousand terawatt hours per year or 10.4 twh per day. If we figure the U.S. has about a hundred million households and divide 3,800 twh by that, we get 38 megawatt hours per household per year. This is a very rough estimate, as it doesn't include industrial/commercial/government users. If we divide by 365*24 to cancel out the time units, we get an average consumption of .004338 MW or 4.338 kilowatts per household. That sounds about right.)
Current battery production is only just barely getting started. China dominates production of LFP cells (which are ideal for grid storage) because of patents which are expiring, so hopefully we'll see more production outside of china in the near future.
LFP cells aren't bottlenecked by nickel or cobalt, and so the main resource constraints I believe are lithium, aluminum, and copper which are all quite a bit cheaper and available in bigger quantities. I think prices are expected to eventually settle somewhere around $80 per kwh of capacity for the cells, and I don't think we're that far off that now. (LFP may eventually be displaced by something else, like lithium sulfur or solid state batteries or something, but I think LFP is probably good enough.)
Maybe lithium or copper will become bottlenecks and prices will rise. Let's say prices do hold at about $80 per kwh. Maybe we'll round up to $120 per kwh to account for pack construction, a building to store the batteries, inverters, chargers, and so on. If the average U.S. adult-aged person uses about 2kw on average, then they need 48kwh of storage for 24 hours. That would be about $5760. If we amortize that over ten years, it's about $48 a month. That's kind of expensive, but it's within the realm of what can be done without assuming any major technological breakthroughs. We probably don't need 24 hours of storage, though, if we have enough renewable energy over-production and backup fossil fuel plants to use in extreme situations.
Just because CATL can manufacture LFP cells at $80/kWh doesn't mean the end-to-end system is available at that price. Home battery storage is nowhere near $80 or even $100 per kWh. It's at $500-$1000/kWh. Tesla Powerwall 2 has the best price per kWh available on the market, at $560/kWh. Inverters able to handle the currents necessary for turning on an electric oven are in the thousands. Installation costs are in the thousands. And then, these batteries do not last forever - they're rated at 3000-5000 cycles
If we imagine a near-future scenario - a battery powered house heated with heat pumps, driving an electric car, during central European foggy winter, which tends to last for about a week at a time. Let's say they use 60kWh/day. We're looking at $100k just for the batteries and installation, even assuming electricity comes free. In ~15-20 years, the batteries reach their recommended cycle life, requiring a choice of another $100k or accepting that what used to be a 3-day storage becomes 2-day
This is not some "extreme situation". It's a completely predictable scenario that recurs with near 100% probability every single year. Then there are places like Ganges river, Bangladesh or Indonesia, home to hundreds of millions of people, where neither solar, nor wind is viable (and land is scarce)
Those prices for home storage units are the price we pay for not having significant domestic LFP production. Maybe making a cheap battery unit is harder that I think but to me it sure looks like there isn't a lot of serious competition in that space, otherwise the units would correspond better to battery costs. (And why would you try to build a company around a product that some Chinese company can make the product at a cheaper cost because they have access to the necessary patents on more favorable terms? Maybe everyone knows that and is staying away, at least until LFP cells become a thing anyone in the world can buy at roughly-equal prices.)
I think it's useful to think in terms of cars. I'm actually doing an EV conversion right now, and I have a motor controller that puts out about 100 kilowatts of 3-phase AC. It came with the motor so I don't have an exact price, but fair market value is probably around $1500. (That's retail cost in quantities of one. Wholesale cost is presumably somewhat less.) It weighs maybe ten pounds or so. That's adequate to power probably about a dozen houses. I don't know if it puts out a sine wave or a square wave. Even if it's the latter, you could imagine a hundred of these things putting out square waves with, say, randomly-varying pulse width and having it average out to a sine wave. There's probably better ways to do that, but anyways the point is that we do have the capacity to switch enormous amounts of power in a very small package for pretty low cost. It's actually kind of amazing.
Maybe if the batteries feed into an HVDC line or they're co-located with a solar plant, then you don't even need to deploy more inverters.
A battery management system for my conversion is a little over a thousand dollars for a setup with about 48 cells. In a big installation you could amortize BMS costs by using bigger cells, or placing them in parallel groups -- the downside being that it might take longer to notice if a cell is going bad. My BMS is made by a company that caters to EV conversions; they're doing low-volume sales. A major utility ordering the equivalent for hundreds of thousands of cells probably can get a nice volume discount.
As far as foggy winters go: renewable energy needs to be traded over a wide geographical area. Purely local generation doesn't really make sense, unless you have some useful purpose for unpredictable amounts of surplus energy. Wind power would need to be a part of it. Even fossil fuels are a reasonable option as long as they're not used very often. Running natural gas plants for a week or two in the dead of winter or in case of grid disruptions seems like a reasonable use of fossil fuels. Indonesia has a lot of land outside of Java. Even Java is pretty sparsely populated outside of cities. Most of it is jungle which we'd like them to keep and farms, but solar doesn't need to take up a huge percentage of available land. Even solar panels on roofs can go a long way.
LFP is also actually the perfect battery for urban transportation in tropical countries. Their low cost and economics would ensure a big transformation in coming years because few people understand the tremendous impact they have on lifecycle cost (due to high no of cycles).
I personally feel that in 10 years in India it will be cheaper to rent an electric car running on LFP for trips < 300 km along with a driver (cheaper here) than buy your own car.
> Lithium ion battery storage is not cheaper than nuclear, and is not produced at sufficient scale to be viable for grid storage.
It may not be so now, but in 7 years, or in other words, by the time a nuclear power plant commissioned today starts producing power, it definitely will.
Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024:
Without a sudden, disruptive change in the cost and rate of deployment of nuclear there doesn't exist a path for it become a significantly larger part of the energy mix.
So 3 years from now, global lithium ion battery production will add up to ~3 hours of USA's electricity consumption? If we stop building EVs, electronics, etc. and dedicate all lithium ion battery production worldwide to grid storage in the US for 8 years we'll have enough for 1 day of electricity storage. Just for the USA. And how much storage we actually need? For 0% fossil fuel usage, some estimates place storage demands as high as 3 weeks [1]. This is still far from viable, even if the predictions hold true.
It's also ignoring that electricity usage is predicted to increase substantially worldwide as countries develop, and that these predictions of lithium ion battery production might not pan out. It'd also severely delay adoption of electric vehicles, as battery capacity is being diverted to grid storage away from EVs.
You usually oversize your production in renewable and get extra energy in your peak production.
Here in Quebec we have a new tarification and smart water heater, house heating that do peak shaving.
Some industries will have access to almost free energy in peak production period and will have incentives to do something valuable with it
Charging of EV will certainly play a role too.
Still nuclear can be useful if some country are able to build them fast enough and cheap enough.
3 hours of storage is massive, and enable super high penetration of renewables, above 80% of electricity generation.
Even the much vaunted France doesn't have 80% nuclear on their grid.
Plus, energy storage production capacity is growing at an exponential rate. It's doubtful that we could grow our nuclear construction crews at that pace.
It's going to be very hard to nuclear to scale as fast as renewables and storage are, if there's even an economic case to be made for nuclear construction, and somebody finally solves the logistic problems of large construction projects in the modern Western world.
We know we can build storage and renewables, but we don't know how to build nuclear anymore, and none, absolutely none, of the nuclear proponents have any proposals to fix it. The best is an entirely new type of small reactor that has been rejects in the past because of its high per unit cost. Perhaps it will work, but who knows? It's a big risk, whereas storage and renewables are a sure bet.
It really isn't. For reference, across Europe we're currently having a meteorological phenomenon with bad weather, clouds, little wind, and low temperatures. It has been ongoing since ~october and is projected to continue into the winter. When Texas was hit with terrible weather last year, it lasted a few days. Multi-day storms, which take out solar and wind, aren't unheard of. 3 hours of storage is OK to even out things, but isn't nowhere near close enough to guarantee reliable electricity.
The numbers I've seen say you need ~12 hours of storage to support 80% solar/wind generation composition and 2 weeks to hit 100%. And we're just talking about the US right now. What about the rest of the world?
Personally I think small mass manufacturable fission reactors are the best bet but why are we hung up on either/or? We should aggressively pursue both nuclear and solar/wind generation.
I agree that we should invest in both. But it is not as easy as waving a magic wand. Energy project development is a complicated dance between local power market regulators, local and federal incentives, private investors, and shovel ready/cost-effective technology. And in the rare occasions when congress opens up the wallet, it is a small pie that everyone is fighting over, so the lobbyists start slinging arrows.
The fact is, nuclear can and will be a really great addition to the energy mix. But there are models out there that show that we can build a carbon free grid without it. The big question mark is on the future cost of storage. The consensus is that those costs are going to come down considerably. If so, then going all in on renewables likely gets us to a carbon free grid faster. But this is also a very US centric take. For example China likely has much easier road to rolling out nuclear (less regulatory hurdles, less local interference/input). Where as in the US, I am sure we can build a big national pro-nuclear movement, but the second someone proposes a real life project, the NIMBY's will come out of the woodwork.
> (less regulatory hurdles, less local interference/input)
This is not the current hurdle when it comes to more nuclear in the US or Europe. Nuclear is very welcome where it is currently under construction, and there's no regulatory reason that these sites have all become construction disasters, it's just bad execution of the reactors.
Even China's attempts to build the French EPR design took twice as long to build as they had estimated initially, and we don't really know how much more in cost.
Nuclear's path to new reactors begins with being able to build on a reliable schedule without exorbitant cost. There are many sites that would welcome more nuclear that would not have NIMBY problems, there's just no one willing to bear all the risk of finding that unicorn contractor that can actually build.
This same problem was also evident during the late 1970s and early 1980s nuclear projects. There was NIMBYism back then affecting projects, but there was also lots of construction malpractice that resulted in big cost overruns. US utilities can not bear the construction risk of a $10B project. Few entities can.
> Global li-ion manufacturing capacity is poised to triple by 2024
But we need all of that to electrify transportation, so where do you get the ones for the power grid?
Also, what happens to the price of batteries if you get rid of baseload and cause demand for batteries to spike much higher than even the increased amount of battery production capacity?
Because we simply are unable to do so fast enough. China recently started a massive, largest in the world project to add 150 plants over the next 15 years. That's 10 reactors annually, or an estimated 10GW using the current 49.6GW from 50 units they have already.
Adjusted for capacity factor this is maybe going to keep up with solar deployment, but definitely not with wind capacity growth in the same country. And China has been the world leader in nuclear deployment for a while now.
Renewables win on a "worse is better" basis - yes, they're intermittent, but they're cheap and deploy in a matter of months without too many specialists involved.
You didn't explain why we shouldn't do both. Just because it takes a long time doesn't matter. If we want to ensure we have consistent energy production then nuclear should be built. Even if we can build a massive amount of storage it may not be enough. Global warming is supposed to cause extreme weather. Why not create nuclear which can work regardless of weather?
Excellent point. Peak electricity consumption occurs during the evenings when solar is producing little, if any, electricity. Daily fluctuations of electricity usage put an even greater demand on electricity storage.
Due to AC usage, electricity demand tends to be much higher in the summers than in the winters. And the demand profile in the summers peaks in mid-late afternoon. i.e You are not looking at the highest overall peak of the year, just the hourly peaks from the last few days.
They match up demand with load by using a buttload of hydro and and even larger amount of natural gas. We can't use natural gas if we're trying to get rid of fossil fuels and we can't use hydro in places without appropriate geography, so then what?
To say nothing of what happens when solar and wind are "it's cloudy and there's no wind right now" intermittent rather than time-of-day intermittent.
Overbuilding renewables (and accepting seasonal curtailment), utility scale battery and hydro storage, and HVDC transmission and robust interconnections between grids/systems. Whatever is left will be a pragmatic amount of natural gas/green hydrogen/ammonia mix for combustion.
> To start, we’ll consider Sanders’ claim that “scientists tell us” that it’s possible to get to a zero-carbon electrical grid without nuclear power.
> “The shortest answer is yes, that’s true. Scientists do tell us that we can,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.
> Ryan Jones, an expert in electricity systems and a co-founder of Evolved Energy Research, a consulting company that models low-carbon transitions, agreed. “Anyone who says that nuclear is 100% necessary on a technical basis, I would claim, just hasn’t looked at the alternatives in enough detail,” he said in an email.
> Most experts FactCheck.org contacted, including those who think nuclear power should remain an option, said that from a technical perspective, nuclear is not needed to decarbonize the grid.
Woopty doo, you don’t “technically” need nuclear power to go carbon neutral.
If it shaves a decade or two off the process isn’t it worth it? Eventually you can start retiring nuclear plants, but in the mean time isn’t it better to focus on the carbon issue?
> Most experts agree that Sanders is correct that it’s technologically possible to decarbonize the grid without using nuclear power. But many researchers also say keeping nuclear on the table makes decarbonization easier and more likely.
> But technically possible is not the same as practically feasible, or the most cost-effective. In that regard, many, although not all, researchers say nuclear — or something like it — is likely to be necessary to some degree. And even if nuclear is ultimately not needed, they say, the safer strategy is not to exclude it.
But what does "technically" mean?
> “All the evidence says it is possible to decarbonize the energy system in the U.S. without using nuclear power,” said Jones. But, he added, there are cases, such as places that don’t have good wind resources, in which building new nuclear plants can reduce the cost of decarbonizing. Depending on the region, he said, “getting to 100% renewable energy is either very expensive or necessitates significant new transmission to import resources from elsewhere.”
> That’s where nuclear can be helpful. It doesn’t have to be nuclear — Jones said carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, for example, would also work. Sanders’ plan, notably, specifically excludes CCS.
> A large number of scenarios expanded nuclear power, Shindell said, to around double today’s level. He estimated that 90% of the scenarios included nuclear capacity above today’s level, and just one or two scenarios phased out nuclear entirely by 2100.
And the article, that YOU LINKED, goes on like this. I feel like you are being very disingenuous. I don't think anyone (or at least anyone that is informed, but then again that's probably too much to expect here given comments), is saying that nuclear is _absolutely_ necessary. I do think people are saying that it is much easier and cheaper if it is included within the solution. I do think people mischaracterize the arguments though and frame it as "all nuclear" vs "all renewables" but the truth is that both those solutions are absurd. We want a mixture and what that mixture is is going to depend on the region and country that is producing power. It is rather complicated and nuanced and the conversations typically don't acknowledge this.
Maybe part of the problem here is scientific lingo. We say "technically" and "possible" a lot of times, even if our confidence intervals are pretty small. This is something we can work on, but it is often to avoid infighting because someone else will argue "but 'technically' it is possible, just really unlikely/difficult" and you'll have to concede. You'll see this in any "nerd debate".
Either way, I'm going to call you out for misrepresenting your source.
To demonstrate that I’m arguing in good faith, I will bet you a $1000 donation to a charity of your choice if any developed country successfully commissions a new commercial nuclear generator (with energy actively supplied to a grid connection), that has not yet broken ground as of today, within ten years of this comment’s timestamp.
I’m not splitting hairs, I’m arguing very clearly that nuclear won’t get built, it won’t be needed, alternatives will meet demand, and that energy consumption and generation modeling by a variety of energy analysts (across commercial and academic institutions) supports my thesis.
You’re not betting directly on either of the issues being discussed though. The person you’re arguing with made no claim that anti-nuclear advocates won’t be successful, only that intermittent renewables plus storage won’t allow hitting near term decarbonization targets. It’s kind of weird for you to win the bet if you’re wrong about the actual issue in the most dire way…
I'm not going to take that bet because I don't have faith in the political will to follow science. That is a more general trend than just climate, mind you. Practically, I do agree with you, that we likely aren't going to see reactors built. But I do want to say that this is contrary to the advice from the scientific community. I do think it is important to push back on claims like yours though, because part of the political will is because a lot of people believe that this is in line with the scientific consensus (again, a common problem and why I call out armchair experts a lot).
That's his thing. He makes broad to the point of indefensible claims, backs them up with a laundry list of tangentially related links, almost always from the news (and we all know how much the news loves to report "the whole truth"), and then when he gets called out he moves goalposts around muddies the waters and does all sorts of tricks that are SOP when arguing in bad faith. If he were not constantly arguing for viewpoints that more or less correlate with the net average HN user his posts would have been defaulted to dead long ago. I think he believes his own BS so it's debatable whether he is technically arguing in bad faith but it sure fails the duck test.
Would you mind pointing out my indefensible claims or where I moved the goalposts? The Lazard LCOE v15 analysis link I posted at top level of this thread specifically shows that solar paired with storage is cheaper than nuclear on a per kwh basis. My other links demonstrate that base load is unnecessary, and also substantiate that renewables and storage are cheaper than nuclear. Finally, if factcheck.org's conversation with various experts demonstrating that nuclear isn't necessary to decarbonize (and my willingness to put $1000 at stake, to demonstrate I'm arguing in good faith, that no new nuclear will be built successfully in the developed world), what evidence would be valid? I'm always happy to provide citations and references, but you can't discuss a topic in good faith with someone if every citation or reference is rejected as "fake news." Some objective observations and truth must be present and agreed upon.
To be frank, it sounds more like you are disgruntled and are unhappy when the facts presented (as well as the general consensus of the forum, as you mention in the comment I'm replying to) don't align with your belief system. I don't mean to be rude by any means, but I'm unable to come to any other conclusion based on my (imho, polite) interactions with you. I do believe my conclusions based on the data I present. Why would I comment and participate if I didn't? I don't take issue if you choose to not engage, but I'd appreciate if you'd tone down the libel and attacks on my character in a public forum if you choose to not bring facts and argue ideas.
Germany should pick this up and pledge to be free of fossil fueled power plants by 2025, banning energy generated from fossil fuels from being bought and consumed.
If they can beat France on cost then here is a political win to be made. Be it using lithium batteries to store up 3-4 weeks worth of the nations energy consumption, or the more likely green hydrogen which is commonly suggested as being more likely choice for wind energy.
The current commercial viable lithium battery solution, that which solar farms has written articles about, is around 4 hours of 80% capacity. Not bad. Every day the batteries get charged when the sun is at its peak and powers prices is at its lowest point, and every day when the sun goes down they can utilize the highest price point as demand exceed supply of cheap energy.
For wind it is a bit more complicated. You can have a few weeks of good weather, followed by a long period of low wind conditions and high demand. A few hours won't cut it, and the more capacity you add the slower the discharge cycle will be. Green hydrogen would be a more economical storage medium, but right now the technology is having a hard time to be economical viable. That said it would benefit the world if Germany made a run for it so we can compare the cost to nuclear.
> pledge to be free of fossil fueled power plants by 2025
Unlike pledges, which can be produced instantly, actually bringing reliable power online takes more than 3 years.
It's these types of pledges that make the public view these replacement efforts as fundamentally unserious.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of nuclear and think the industrialized west should follow in France's footsteps. But we will not get there by 2025. We may never get there as long as we approach this problem in such an unserious manner.
The parent post is claiming that the storage solutions are right now cheaper than the alternatives. If they are already here in terms of costs then bringing them online should be fairly quick ordeal.
I agree with you however that it will take much longer than 3 years. Lithium batteries can be done today for the kind of storage solution which they are suitable, but not for wind. The green hydrogen might work, but we have yet to see large scale production and we are nowhere near to have it operate as an alternative to natural gas on a nation scale. Germany should really make an attempt if they wish to take a different path from France, but it will likely take a few decades if its successful.
Solar and wind often overproduce (leading to negative prices). This (otherwise useless energy) will be used to produce dihydrogen (water electrolysis), which will be stored, then used to produce electricity (fuel cell).
Although I love the concept, it seems hydrolisis isn't very efficient transforming electrical energy to chemical energy. Until it is ready, it is not ready.
Canadian politicians are pledging to develop blue hydrogen in Alberta. That means transforming hydrocarbons into hydrogen.
Yep, it is as stupid as it sounds. Consume fossil fuels to produce hydrogen and label it blue energy.
Electrolysis is decently efficient (>70%), but turning the Hydrogen back to electricity loses quite a bit. Nevertheless, the real question is cost, not efficiency. As you noted during peak production the electricity is essentially free. If it's cheaper to use existing NG infrastructure to store Hydrogen and run gas turbines with it than building an equivalent amount of batteries, then we should go for it. Given that world lithium battery production is insufficient right now, and different battery chemistries are still experimental, proven technology like electrolysis+gas turbines seems like a good idea.
We are not embarked in a race on efficiency. A system able which is:
- able to store otherwise is wasted energy
- affordable (the total price of this storing-then-reconversion into electricity is OK) is adequate
- storing in adequate volumes
is adequate, even if its total efficiency is below .01
Blue hydrogen isn't good (emission-wise), but may be used as a way to evaluate and enhance what will ultimately be a green (electric energy only produced by renewable used to obtain dihydrogen) system.
Moreover there are quick and decisive progress towards better efficiency.
If you take $1 of electricity and water, you can convert it to $.50 of hydrogen bond energy, and then you can take the hydrogen run it through a fuel cell and get $.25 of electricity. It’s never going to be an alternative to battery chemistry which yields $.95 back.
Please read my other reply published nearby: we are not embarked into an efficiency race. Efficiency (of any renewable-source based system) is a mean, not an end.
The pricing is quite difficult to measure consistently. For instance, the cost of coal generation is usually priced around $0.10/kWh, but it kills 25-33 people per TWh. At the rate the NRC uses, the statistical value of $9M per life, that would add $0.27/kWh, totaling almost $0.37/kWh.
At that price nuclear is already dramatically cheaper than coal - about half as expensive based on the analysis you linked.
The thing is, it's not clear which externalities are priced into renewables. For instance, is the cost of cleaning up this disaster where rare earth metals are mined/refined priced into wind power? [1] Burying the turbine blades forever? [2] How about the cost of the global scale e-waste problem yielded by covering the earth in solar panels which last 30 years? [3] How about power storage - all that lithium?
I'm fine with nuclear, I'm fine with wind, I'm fine with solar. There's no such thing as "green" just shades of black.
Whatever gets us off carbon fuels - yesterday. I strongly doubt the pricing is what's reflected in those charts - they tend to underprice the externalities of everything non-Nuclear. Even if they don't though, I don't really care, at this point decarbonizing is worth paying double for power. I'm not sure how good a deal we're getting is going to matter when we live on Waterworld.
> It pointed to an Electric Power Research Institute study that estimates all blade waste through 2050 would equal roughly .015% of all the municipal solid waste going to landfills in 2015 alone.
While it'd be better to do something useful with them it's not a problem to put them in a landfill.
Wind turbine blades and solar panels are almost entirely recyclable, current state. I don’t have a source as to current and target responsible rare earth mining practices. Lithium can be evaporated from brine ponds responsibly, and energy density insensitive chemistries can produce cells without cobalt (conflict minerals).
I’m not against nuclear for geographies that need district heat or don’t get enough sun or wind for reasonable renewable generation, but I do take issue that it gets put forth as a silver bullet that we’re going to scale up in a reasonable amount of time when all signs point to that being objectively false. I’m violently allergic to platitudes and snake oil.
> Wind turbine blades and solar panels are almost entirely recyclable, current state.
The article I linked (titled "Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills", haha) indicates that turbine blades are not recyclable. They are fiberglass, which is a mix of glass and plastic - it's long been known as one of the hardest things to recycle. They are currently buried - or burned. The latest scuttlebutt on that is Semens Gamesa has a recyclable prototype. [1] I suspect it will come, but is it priced in?
> "At the end of their working life, most blades are buried underground or burned." [1]
As for solar panels, I agree they could be recycled - up to some 90% based on some digging - but it's super expensive to do so, and I suspect it's also not priced in. 91% of the plastic you throw into the recycle bin makes its way to the landfill anyways. [2]
I don't think there is a silver bullet per se, which is why I want them all deployed ASAP.
My comment was more that I don't think the prices as reflected in your link represent the true cost of the electricity due to the varying degree to which externalities are priced in. Even if accurate, price (probably to your point) isn't really the be all and end all here. The switchover needs to happen, and in time, whatever that looks like. All this hand-wringing around nuclear taking forever to deploy a few decades ago is part of why we're here, now, without nuclear.
the first link is basically your second link [2]. the rest are mostly links about that the problem from non recyclable is mostly a problem that only exists, because these fiberglass blades are dirt cheap compared to alternatives and it's cheaper to dump them in landfills.
in fact in 4 european countries it's forbidden to put them into landfills. in fact a spain company _can_ recycle fiber to fiber glass to 100% (reciclalia) and they do it even for differnt uses cases (formula 1 and aerospace).
of course if landfills are accepted in a country it's cheaper than to recycle. dumping is always cheaper than recycling thats why we dump so much (not just wind turbines...) in fact in germany a lot of our "recycling process" is asically thermal recycling which is not "real" recycling. we basically cheat the stats.
a shit ton of stuff can be recycled if somebody wants to, which is often not the case, not even on a governement level and sometimes it's just stupid to even create non recycable waste for no reason (which happens often in the food industry because the non recycable case is often cheaper)
That’s wonderful (seems we’re closer than I thought too!) and I’m sure it will keep getting better - but again my point was that I don’t think it’s priced into the top line numbers when comparing cost of energy sources. I think priced in is throwing away fiberglass blades.
China is building a whole lot of new reactors, and the ones that came online most recently took about 5-6 years from start of construction to finish, which is substantially less than a decade. Japan, prior to the shutdown, was able to build new nuclear plants in 4-5 years. It's certainly possible to construct new, modern nuclear plants smoothly and quickly, and countries capable of this are the ones that are doing most of the nuclear plant construction. You hear disproportionately about debacles like Flamanville Unit 3 in France (under construction since 2007, with heavy cost overruns), and they're indicative of some serious problems with France's ability to get reactors built, but worldwide they're the exception.
The USA hasn't done much better at delivering nuclear reactors on time or on budget in the last 3 decades: Vogtle, VC Summer, Bellefonte, for example. The only reactors to come online in that time is Watts Barr 1 and 2 and Comanche Peak 2 all of which started construction in the 1970s.
4 to 6 years is possible, but more of a best-case scenario.
If you look for example, the nuclear reactor built in France in the 70ies and 80ies took generally between 5 and 9 years to build, with the newer and greater capacity reactors taking significantly more time.
Keep in mind that it was at the pick of Nuclear reactor construction. These are really large projects with tons of suppliers and contractors to coordinate. There is a lot of experience and institutional knowledge needed, but which has been unfortunately partially lost with the significant slowing down of new constructions in the late 80ies/90ies.
Also, this slowing down also had a significant effect on the supply chains, often leaving very few companies key components/sub-systems.
Flamanville 3 is definitely a poorly lead project and a big outlier, but, a country re-starting its nuclear construction, the first units would probably take ~10 years to come online.
One of the things to watch out for when looking at renewable energy prices is that it can often reflect the value of that energy, rather than production cost.
The price being very low often reflects the fact that, at that time, this energy is basically worthless/useless. And in fact, prices have even gone negative, meaning "please stop feeding this useless energy into the grid".
So low renewable prices are not necessarily a good sign, and can in fact just be the economic indicator for the limited usefulness of renewable energy.
I don't think anyone expects a 100% build rate on these commitments, but like all funnels, a certain percentage of these projects that are having awareness raised now will eventually be built. Any progress here is better than nothing.
The cost consists of a number of factors: materials and labor, design issues, and legal challenges. A global effort to build up proper nuclear infrastructure means the design issues will be far less of an issue: just design one really good reactor, and build a few hundred. And governments can (and in the case of China, will) move to limit the possibility of legal challenges. That just leaves materials and labor, which are comparable to similarly-sized industrial structures: considerable, but certainly not insurmountable.
I suspect the Chinese are less susceptible to the problem in western nations where every random person/group can basically DoS the engineering program through the legal system.
That announcement of 150 reactors in China is no real change to the long term plans either. Still simply keeping the option barely open which is very sensible to do when you're such a huge economy, even if it comes from subsidies.
In 2019, China had a new target of 200 GWe of nuclear generating capacity by 2035, which is 7.7% out of predicted total electricity generating capacity of 2600 GWe.
So with about 50 GWe from 50 reactors today adding another 150 gives you the same goal of about 200 GWe. Unless we're talking SMRs because then the goal just got reduced to a fraction of the original.
Japan invested on nuclear then nowadays don't want it anymore but now needs energy. One has to see them canceling their planned phase-out, as "in March 2021, only 11 percent of Japanese said they wanted that nuclear energy generation be discontinued immediately. Another 49 percent was asking for a gradual exit from nuclear energy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#Post-Fu... )
> UK. Rolls-Royce gets funding
"£195m cash injection from private firms and a £210m grant" are ridiculous sums. In France Macron announced 1 billion €: given that nuclear research already burnt ~900 millions € per year (public research), a fair part of the 2.2 billions allocated to the CEA's civilian programs, this isn't decisive.
> Japan invested on nuclear then nowadays don't want it anymore but now needs energy. One has to see them canceling their planned phase-out, as "in March 2021, only 11 percent of Japanese said they wanted that nuclear energy generation be discontinued immediately. Another 49 percent was asking for a gradual exit from nuclear energy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#Post-Fu... )
Wow. To have even ~40% of the population not opposing nuclear after a national trauma like Fukushima, shows their sophistication as a people.
It also should be considered that stopped nuclear plants (its pool filled by nuclear fuels) aren't safe like no plants but similar to running plants (but I doubt majority of people know that).
60% want "the nuclear power to be discontinued" either right now or gradually, and ~27% "don't know". IMHO there is a large majority of citizens wanting a phase-out.
> The Chinese have committed to building over 150 new nuclear reactors.
Hang on, China also announced a couple of months ago to build 43 new coal-fired power plants.
It's not that long ago - perhaps a decade - that China was building a new coal-fired power plant every 10 days or so. Not small ones, but on the same scale as the largest coal-fired power plant we had in Australia at the time.
I mention this as a counterpoint to any 'If China's doing it, it must make sense' fallacy.
China pledged to peak Carbon emissions as a share of GDP by 2030. Not the same thing, given that GDP is increasing by 6-8% each year. Most Western nations already have had emissions per GDP declining for a long time.
> 2030 will increase China's peak carbon allowance afterward
China has rejected abiding by any Carbon "allowance", nor will it adopt any cap and trade system for carbon.
Can someone explain why 1.5°C is considered a realistic goal? It seems rather obvious to me that the world is going to warm a bit beyond that. Staying under 2°C is going to be quite the challenge. 1.5°C doesn't seem remotely likely. I realize the climate science says it's the ideal temperature to aim for giving the 1.2°C warming we've already done, but it doesn't seem politically or economically feasible at this point.
I think the problem is the gap between outrage and effective action.
Outrage is what identifies a problem, but to solve the problem requires state capacity to deploy infrastructure cost effectively and at scale.
Now we have no shortage of outrage. We've got activists blocking traffic and having "die-ins" in which they lie down on the grass and sob. We have endless moaning about 'climate collapse'.
But none of that increases nuclear generating capacity. None of that deploys any reliable battery storage at scale.
So then you have the neoliberal free-marketeers thinking that if they impose taxes on oil then magically these nuclear plants will be built, just out of the free market. This is faith-based infrastructure.
But that doesn't happen, so you have the public being burdened by high taxes, then they kick the politicians out of office to lower their taxes, and nothing gets done.
Is that because the public has an emotional attachment to fossil fuels? That they love coal? No, people don't care where they get their energy. Making them care -- e.g. promoting outrage -- does nothing to deploy nuclear power at scale. Lecturing end users about how they are "destroying the plant" also does nothing. That's also just more outrage.
This lack of effective action and the substitution of outrage for engineering competency is why we still need fossil fuels for baseload and will continue to need them.
In fact we are so paralyzed by emotion and irreality that I predict that we will never recover the state capacity we had in the postwar period and instead will just end up buying nuclear plants from China and battery storage infrastructure from China, because we don't have the competency to deploy this infrastructure at scale by ourselves.
But China has state capacity. They do not have the outrage, which is why people who only value outrage think that China is doing nothing. But China will leapfrog the West in things like Nuclear power and even in the area of battery storage at scale.
It may not be according some 2030 timeline, which is again a political deadline rather than a deadline arising from a sober assessment of engineering roadmaps, but China will eventually do it because it has state capacity to act in this area and we do not. When it comes to solving big infrastructure challenges, we have only outrage.
Because we'are slackers and we have the easy job of stopping emissions and we are bitching about it.
The world wont stop warming at 2 degrees, thats just projection for 2100, it will keep warming after that.
The next generation will have to pay for pulling carbon out od the air to actually stop warming, and that's going to cost $2 for every $1 the oil industry has ever made.
Still building coal plant doesn't mean the plant operated continuously in the future. Perhaps they may use those coal plant only when solar power generation isn't good (I don't know).
It makes sense to build both. Coal fired plants are much less expensive to produce and get to a positive ROI much faster. If you don't like it, you can always try launching a land war in Asia to stop them.
Don't have to launch a war. Climate change will fuck them up without the need to involve military. Downside is that we have to deal with that shitstorm too.
It's only good news if they aren't PWR/LWR meltdown-possible 70 year old designs.
I do like there is a large market to this startup. Hopefully that will result in a somewhat price-competitive reactor design. But I doubt that will happen for another 10 years.
I think solar/wind/battery will eat the lunch of any new nuclear plant in cost once it goes online.
"The comeback of nuclear energy" At last, I would say. We have magic energy source in our hands but, no, better spend milliards on wind turbines and solar panels, although we know they sometimes work and sometimes don't, so they can't provide predictable input for a grid without batteries that we don't have and will not have in foreseeable future.
I am wondering what Germany is going to do. They have bet heavily on wind & solar (apparently they haven't check how many sunny days Germany has...) with the backup from Russian gas from Nord Stream 1/2 (for some reason this gas is "clean" although burning it produces CO2). If everyone around will switch to nuclear, what I hope will happen, they can end up with the very expensive setup that is still producing a lot of CO2.
I am afraid that Germany will try to enforce ban on nuclear by European Union (what they can do, since Brexit Germany is in fact ruling UE), as the wrong investment might hurt their economy. I hope France will oppose.
Exactly. Unfortunately the problem is the people are opposing nuclear and to make people happy Germany leaders will do what they can, to push the whole EU to their home politics drama. One of the biggest drawback of any union when the big guys are incentivized for something not aligning with rest of members. No wonder so many neighbors are unhappy
This is super good. Again, the point is not Europe in and of itself, but also India and China.
The demand for power in India and China is outstripping everyone else. And it is still stuck using coal power. India and China do NOT have land (for renewables) commensurate with the population or energy demand.
Also one of the biggest sources of renewable hydro power is a geopolitical flashpoint for India vs China (https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/china-proposed...). Almost a hundred soldiers died in an India vs China battle recently around this area.
Both India and China have unilaterally rejected COP26 restrictive measures from developed nations... simply because it is not possible to reduce the power demand coming from populations (the size of Europe) being lifted up from poverty.
The only answer for the next 50 years is nuclear tech. And France is literally the only game in town right now. So let us pray, this happens sooner than later. You do NOT want coal from 2 BILLION people in the atmosphere.
Actually, it is not so clear nuclear is the solution in Europe (e.g. France) at this point. You still have to mine lots of uranium ore, because compared to coal, you actually only seek a small fraction of it, where with coal you can burn almost all of what you mine. The enrichment facilities have dual use for war and the uranium mostly comes from Russia which is geopolitically problematic (for Europe, somewhat similar to coal/ oil/ gas mostly). With nuclear fission, we basically don't recycle much if at all. You have to take care of the waste. With coal of course, you have ash and all the CO_2 you have to do something about (again in Europe at least) if you don't want to pay too much on emission allowances.
The last point, we just don't know how to build nuclear economically anymore. The process is so bureaucratic and slow it becomes infeasible to finance without major interventions. Letting Chinese or Russian companies build it from the standpoint of Europe is a geopolitical challenge and a security risk.
All this time and money would be perhaps spent better elsewhere. In Europe, we are not able to build a nuclear powerplant in 15 years, so that is lots of time for research and development and even building something useable. It is very likely, most of the renewable sources will become more economical and nuclear less even less. We might devise a scheme to store energy by e.g. splitting salt (NaOH) into sodium metal, hydrogen and oxygen and later combining sodium with water to NaOH again, while getting hydrogen as a byproduct and lots of electrical current. It is a simple process, we "just" have to scale it and develop it further. The first half of it is well known for 100 years and was used at industrial scale. Currently, we just split NaCl directly to obtain sodium... The second half is described in patents by Lockheed-Martin that are long expired. You can read more in this diagram: https://www.orgpad.com/s/iV3vbi
Btw. Slowakia has a lot of nuclear too and here in Czechia, we have a conversation about building new reactors in Dukovany too. For Czechia, the approach seems to be misguided as you can read here (Google Translated from Czech): https://denikreferendum-cz.translate.goog/clanek/32812-cesky...
My biggest argument against nuclear is that there are no incentives for decommissioning unsafe plants in the far future.
The usual pro-nuclear argument says that nuclear plants are only unsafe if managed incorrectly. However, the West doesn't have the political or economic framework to ensure they will get managed correctly: if you are the leader of the executive of some country, are you going to decomission a plant built 30 years ago that gives the country a lot gW of energy and raise energy prices for everyone, or are you going to risk the very low chance of a serious accident to keep prices down and pass the ball to whomever governs next?
If nuclear is the future, we need an effective process of automatic decommissioning that can bypass governments. That process doesn't exist yet.
Um, what ? There is not really any meaningful voices against building a new reactor block in Dukovany. Rather, there was a debate about making sure non-friendly foreign blocks are excluded from the tender to avoid the power plant being used as bargaining chip in future diplomatic games involving the Czech Republic.
As outlined in the linked article quite in depth, it is economically infeasible and Czechia and the consumer have nothing to gain by it even compared to alternatives that also have their fair share of problems. If it was such a great idea/ investment, ČEZ wouldn't need any guarantees but it really isn't. I don't know how you evaluate, what voices are meaningful or not. Have you spent at least months researching the topic from multiple angles?
There are already massive solar array farms in the Gobi desert.
You are misunderstanding the growth in power needed. If India and China move towards electric vehicles..... just New Delhi has 12 million cars. Just to compare, London has 2.6 million cars. New York has about 4 million cars.
I don't think people grasp what 2 billion people really means.
I’m no fan of the Chinese regime, but maybe they just concluded that the preening do-nothingness that goes on at these summits isn’t worth getting mixed up with. From last week:
“China has reported overnight to be planning 150 new nuclear reactors over the next 15 years — more than have been built around the world since 1980 — a signal that uranium production needs to be stepped up, fast and soon.”
Macron said "We are going, for the first time in decades, to relaunch the construction of nuclear reactors in our country".
This is a blatant lie, as France launched a project and never ceased trying to build. However it failed flat.
Then in 2002 the project Flamanville-3 was launched (a generation III reactor, the "EPR", first one of its kind), and the building phase started in 2007. It is a major failure, not delivered, at least 11 years behind schedule, and will cost at least 19.1 billion euros (initial budget: 3.4 billions €).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
I believe the Flamanville EPR is considered as some sort of prototype. It was planned to be years in the making and difficulties were expected.
However, they were not expecting this much. The reasons that they are pushing are:
1. Lack of proper trained personnel
2. More constraints imposed during the projects due to Fukushima
3. First design of that kind
And as you said, the last nuclear reactor to be finished in France was 20 years ago[0]. The people who worked on that last plant were probably the one who worked on plants during the 70s, 80s and 90s and retired right after. It fits with reason 1.
The last reactors to enter commercial operation in France, the 2 units at Civaux Nuclear Power Plant, took 13 and 11 years from construction start in 1988/1991 to commercial operation in 2002:
I wonder if EDF succumbed to hubris in thinking that they could build a new reactor design twice as fast as the last-completed reactors, or if they published optimistic numbers because they thought that there was more institutional tolerance for constant slippage than for estimating unhappily large numbers right at the start.
Some say that Flamanville-3 is a failure because it should be built along with many other reactors. This seems ridiculous to me, as if the problems (lack of adequate applied skill, bad project management... there is a complete official report about the causes, written by M. Folz) would be alleviated by parallelizing projects (it would instead worsen their effects and add delays).
> if they published optimistic numbers because they thought that there was more institutional tolerance
In France institutional tolerance for the nuclear industry is at its max. Start in 2007, to be delivered in 2012, nothing delivered in 2021 and 5.6 times over-budget... and no-one even talks about calling it off. Even better: M. Macron wants to start new projects!
I would bet on hubris here. In parallel with the Flamanville unit, they've been building EPR in Olkiluoto, Finland. There's a number of issues that have been shared by both of the projects, of course with some issues specific to each one. They agreed to deliver the Finnish plant on turnkey basis and are facing billions in losses because the quoted price is something like 1/3 of the final cost.
> Flamanville EPR is considered as some sort of prototype
No, it officially is a "tête de série" (meaning among the firsts of a series). It cannot be a prototype because this very model, the EPR, was sold to Finland and the corresponding project (Olkiluoto-3) started 2 years before Flamanville's.
> the one who worked on plants during the 70s, 80s and 90s and retired right after
In such huge heavy industry projects occupying tens of thoosands persons there is a constant stream of newcomers. Moreover this industry must maintain existing (exploited) reactors, and a non-neglectable portion of skills needed when building are also needed during maintenance. Also: many critical specialties, especially outside the nuclear isle, are qualifications built upon a non nuclear-specific trade (concrete, welding...): a "standard" professional can be trained in nuclear-specific skills in months. In any case the industry (which isn't exactly a low-cost lo-margin one...) has to manage human resources, and to find ways to maintain critical and very specific skills.
As happy as I am that nuclear is back, I really don't trust Macron on this. For the record, here is what he did in his current term regarding nuclear:
- shut down the Fessenheim plant, one of the most reliable one. Yes it was the oldest, but not by far, and reports from the nuclear authority are pretty clear that this plant was in a much better shape than others built just a few years afterwards (Bugey, one year later which is now older than Fessenheim was when shut down, and Blayais started 4 years later).
- promised to reduce the share of nuclear in the electricty mix to 50% by 2025.
- shut down Astrid, the French research project for 4th generation nuclear (which is the only long term viable path for nuclear, since there will never be a shortage of fertile material (U238 or Thorium) whereas fissile one is pretty limited. Breeding reactors also solve the very-long lived nuclear waste issue).
He did all of this when he was trying to seduce electors from the green party. Now he don't seem to care about them, but who knows for how long…
Maybe the green party elector finally realised that the battle against CO2 doesn't need to be 100% renewable?
Regarding the closing of Fessenheim, it seems like a sensible decision. The central was designed to last 40 years and long exceeded its expiration date. In the last 10 years it had roughly one incident per year with graver and graver consequences. And in any case, France would have started lose a lot of money because, due to the geographical position and the risk it pose, its neighbours, Switzerland and Germany were not really happy with it and had started to repetedly attack the decision to maintain it open in courts.
The fact that a politician had to take this decision (and not engineers) is in my opinion the most shocking part. It shows that the ANS probably became complacent with the state of security of centrals. Probably similar to finanicial markets or aviation regulators. And generally when that happens it's the begining of catastrophes.
> Maybe the green party elector finally realised that the battle against CO2 doesn't need to be 100% renewable?
I wish it was it, but it's not what's happening. Macron is currently campaigning for his reelection and has decided to adopt a really conservative tone for his campaign: it's all about “fighting islamism”, reducing welfare, etc., etc., the strong nuclear narrative fits clearly in this tone.
> Regarding the closing of Fessenheim, it seems like a sensible decision. The central was designed to last 40 years and long exceeded its expiration date. In the last 10 years it had roughly one incident per year with graver and graver consequences.
It was designed for 40 years, but so did every other plants that were given a extended lifetime approval. Actually, it's not uncommon at all to design a power plant with a specific lifetime in mind, and extending it afterwards when you realize it hasn't wore out too much (fun facts, some systems were dead long before reaching the 40 years span they had been designed for, and have been replaced even though it wasn't part of the original plan). And as I said, Fessenheim was one of the best plant of that generation when it comes to incidents, it had a much better rating than several plants built a bit later and which will still be in service for the next decade.
> And in any case, France would have started lose a lot of money because, due to the geographical position and the risk it pose, its neighbours, Switzerland and Germany were not really happy with it
I don't know where you take that from but in reality, France have to pay a huge sum of money to Germany as compensation for the shut-down because part of Fessenheim's plant (17.5%) was owned by the land of Bade-Wurtemberg. The overall price that will be paid until the end of the compensation period (supposed to last until 2041) is still unknown because it will depend on the market price of electricity on that period, but it's expected to be between a faction of billion to a few billion euros.[1]
> The fact that a politician had to take this decision (and not engineers) is in my opinion the most shocking part. It shows that the ANS probably became complacent with the state of security of centrals. Probably similar to finanicial markets or aviation regulators. And generally when that happens it's the begining of catastrophes.
This is indeed a serious risk with regulation authorities, but in the case of the ASN it's proven pretty reliable in recent days: rthe 50 years lifetime extension was granted in exchange of a huge overhaul of the existing plants (“le grand carénage)” costing several billions, to add a lot of new safety equipment, most of them designed with the Fukushima accident in mind.
To promise to reduce the share of nuclear in itself means nothing. If you increase the production with renewable, automatically, nuclear will have a smaller share. It does not mean that you do not plan ahead.
Fessenheim had been a thorn in the back of previous governments for years. Sometimes political move are not logical from a technical standpoint but can be seen as intermediate step in a larger plan. I don't blame him for that.
Astrid though seems to be the real mistake. The new CEA boss at the time said that[0] we don't need that kind of reactor because uranium is cheap as nobody wants nuclear anymore since Fukushima. This is such a stupid reason that I cannot believe to be the real one.
I'm not sure what's been debunked. The US does not have the construction capabilities of 1970s France. And for that matter, neither does France, as is being proven in Flamanville and in Olkiluoto, Finland.
Perhaps we can invite Slovakia or Russia to build in other countries, but there's no knowing if they could train local workforces accomplish what they have.
I suspect the real reason is "maybe turning profit-skimming by intermediate layers of management into an art-form, makes any large-scale project-costs trend to infinity".
HS2 spent ungodly sums on "consulting" and management fees to do stuff that, back in the day, would have probably been carried out by a couple of commandeered civil servants. But I'm sure all their Word reports have nice headings and lots of "holistic" something.
If this is combined with a move away from fossiel fuel for heating and logistics - and a significant investment in renewable - then it is an excellent move for France.
I would sign up today for nuclear power in 2025 if it replaced all natural gas and diesel/petrol vehicles on the roads.
At least one of the reasons why solar and wind really got off the ground is because the marginal cost of one more installation is not very high. Panels on the roof may not be the most efficient, but they are actually feasible for a homeowner to purchase and install.
7-10 years is a death sentence if we need to transition in the next 15 years, by 2035. Especially since we don't know which design to build, and our current nuclear fleet is rapidly aging out.
The nuclear industry will be lucky if its able to pull off enough construction to replace reactors that age out. There's no chance of nuclear becoming a backbone of our new grid, when we would need to produce 400GW of new nuclear. The napkin math does not work out.
However, renewables and storage are scaling their production at just barely a high enough rate, if we continue on the same exponential growth curves we have been on for the next decade.
Hopefully production will scale even faster, now that solar is the cheapest form of new energy.
> 7-10 years is a death sentence if we need to transition in the next 15 years, by 2035
France has no need to transition when it comes to electricity. We're already almost as low emission as possible so there is no urgency. What we need is a medium term plan, because the plants may start being decommissioned in around 10 years (unless ASN give them the right to run for ten more years, which isn't completely impossible: in the US, some plants from the same technology (PWR) is allowed to run until 70 years!).
And btw, solar in France makes zero sense except in the Mediterranean region, the weather is just not good enough…
France should take advantage of their extremely low CO2 electricity grid and start to electrify other sectors. Like EV's, and heat pumps for domestic heating. And yes, all this would mean an increase in electricity consumption so the electricity production capacity would need to increase as well. So in that sense, restarting nuclear construction makes sense, both to replace existing capacity and to increase the total capacity. And yes, probably makes sense to add a modest amount of wind and solar as well, as long as that can be done without adding fossil fuel backup plants.
From your perspective, when the sun isn't shinning, you just don't get paid. But from the grid perspective, when you don't produce electricity somebody else has to do it! And since the sun isn't shining that much, the grid owner has to have another power supplier most of the time (or batteries).
I guess I would call the decommissioning of 75% of generation facilities a transition. If you can build more nuclear, more power to you. But until I hear more details, the current attempts are not looking good, nobody has been talking about serious EDF plans other than the EPR (would like to hear about something if it missed it!), and if nothing is being talked about, it seems that any construction would not start for a minimum of 5-10 years, with who knows how long of a build phase.
I thought the whole issue with wind and solar is that the storage issue isn't yet solved. Nuclear on the other hand is 70 year old technology that is proven to be capable of being the majority energy source of a nation.
France is at 75% nuclear; we can get to 75% renewables without storage.
And storage is quickly getting solved. California has gone from almost nothing to more than a GW of storage in a year, and is adding more GW at the moment. Even the "free market" in Texas is choosing to add many GW of storage, even more GW of solar and wind, and almost no new natural gas. And in the US, the majority of new solar projects include storage now, because for a long time there has been more DC production power than ability to convert it to AC, and a few hours of storage makes financial sense because storage has gotten so cheap. As it gets cheaper, there will be bigger an bigger amounts of storage added to every renewables project, on site.
Meanwhile we can't build nuclear in Western countries anymore. France can't, the US can't, the UK is likely going to fail.
The problem in the nuclear industry is that they are stuck on getting even first of a kind plants out. The idea of scaling up to hundreds of GW in the next few years is a pipe dream for the us and Europe. Maybe China will be able to build their 150 planned reactors, but even if they do they will be building far far more renewables than that.
The production capacity of modern Western economies is very well suited to wind, solar, and storage. It is absolutely awful at massive construction projects, like nuclear. Construction productivity has barely changed at all since the 1970s, while other fields' productivity has soared. We should take advantage of that.
And this ain't even talking about the new types of super cheap long duration storage that have high energy/power ratios. There's iron batteries in both traditional solid forms and in flow forms. Noe that the market need is becoming apparent, there are new chemistries being developed all the time that are suitable for stationary storage but not as well suited for cars and other mobile applications. Which is fantastic, as we can then reserve all that quickly growing production capacity for transport.
We need a law that for megaprojects, local governments and/or federal agencies must respond to requests within X days, or be fined an escalating per-day rate. And if their responses are incomplete, same.
The timeline ballooning as all external parties take their time weighing in and covering their asses, and costs associated with idling construction waiting for same, are getting ridiculous.
Either it's a priority (in which case everyone should treat it as such), or it's not (in which case we should accept we just can't build non-priority projects over a certain scale).
IIRC one of the big problems is that the construction standards a nuclear plant has to meet are the ones in effect when it comes online, not the ones in effect when construction begins, and then costs balloon because the requirements change multiple times in the middle of construction.
If the construction requirements of 1980 are sufficient for a plant operating ten years from now that came online in 1980 then the construction requirements of this year should be sufficient for a plant operating ten years from now even if it hasn't come online yet. So the obvious fix for this is to use the requirements as of the day construction begins rather than the day it ends.
The Maas river at the Tihange plant in Belgium beat its projected 1000-year maximum by a sizable percentage this year, using up about half of the plant's safety margin. Climate change makes such events harder to predict and if such a thing were to happen during construction, you'd absolutely have to reconsider flooding defenses while you still can, anything else would be irresponsible. This sort of cutting corners to essentially make these plants more profitable is (in part) what gives nuclear such a bad rep. Given that several of our supposedly invulnerable plants had serious incidents, I'd say we're still pretty bad at designing and running these things, and in no position to skimp on safety.
Also, re: Tihange: the reactors at Tihange were designed for 40 years of operation, so Tihange 1 should have been shut down in 2015 (and Tihange 2 should be a year from now). If the operator and the Belgian government had adequate planning skills, a replacement reactor (or other power generator) should have been completed by then, and the new reactor could have been built using updated safety margins.
Tihange is a good example of the same political inaction that gave us this climate crisis. It has nothing to do with cutting corners, nor about "designing and running these things". It is (political) complacency, not mismanagement of the plant that's the main problem.
>"Given that several of our supposedly invulnerable plants had serious incidents, I'd say we're still pretty bad at designing and running these things, and in no position to skimp on safety."
The plants that have had issues were known to be the oldest and most vulnerable ones.
> We need a law that for megaprojects, local governments and/or federal agencies must respond to requests within X days, or be fined an escalating per-day rate.
Other than the fact that the federal government fining the federal government has no actual effect, all that making a high-legal stakes response timeline with impossible to concretely define completeness requirements would do is increase litigation and litigation costs around such projects.
Sometimes a five year delay could be a community that sues over a new reactor, then appeals, appeals, etc. Then if that lawsuit was posted here the title might be "US government tries to rush reactor, threatens small town life".
You'd never get megaprojects built then, because no-one would reasonably commit to them given the risk that they undergo scope creep and the steepness of that punishment.
Yeah, that would simply put more obstacles in place. We need less ass covering and bureaucracy and more action. You don't solve that by creating more risk and the need for more ass covering.
It would be easier to just make a law against continued consumption of energy produced from fossil fuels, with the fines focused on when the government eventually breaks the law in order to prevent blackouts.
If you forbid fossil fuels at a point in time (say 2030), the energy market will know ahead when demand will exceed supply. There aren't better incentives avilable if you want the mega projects built on time
EDF has been quietly acquiring land around existing nuclear power plants for many years (like Cattenom, near Luxembourg), with the unstated but likely goal of expanding them rather than going for brand new sites.
In some cases EDF even planned building more reactors from the very beginning, for example at the nuclear power plant of Belleville-sur-Loire: everything was planned for 4 reactors, but only 2 were built. So they can build two extra right there, no need to find a new site.
The current not so small problem is that EDF needs to learn how to build nuclear reactors again. That's what they are currently doing, at great cost and great delays... But if the political will is there, they can start to break ground quite literally tomorrow.
The French have a streamlined regulatory framework including standardized reactor designs and limited public comment that helps to reduces their costs and timelines.
Source: chapter 6 of “Nuclear Power: A Brief Introduction.”
I think what this points out is that the problem isn't government regulation, it's incompetent design, engineering, procurement, and construction.
The stories in the US about VC Summer and Vogtle construction failures do not point to government regulation being the problem, they point to basic flaws throughout the construction process. Design of the AP1000 that is "unconstructable" according to the EPC contractor, who then goes on to build their own unproven design, which then requires an external check. The problem wasn't that the design had to be certified by the government, the problem was that design wasn't in touch with construction.
It is really all the lawsuits, environmental impact reports, and bureaucracy that slows infrastructure down.
We used to be able to build things quite quickly. E.g. The Bay Bridge was built in 5 years for $77 million (~$1.5 Billion today) in 1931-1936. This is not ground breaking, but law passed to bridge opening.
Just replacing the Eastern span cost $6.5 Billion and took ~18 years to build (1995-2013) from law passed to section opening.
If you create hydrocarbon fuels with sequestered CO_2, driven by nuclear electricity, you have a clean, energy-dense battery. Plus, you don’t have to retrofit the entire automobile fleet.
Just make sure to do something about NOx emissions, the cause of the downfall of Diesel in many countries. As long as you burn just about any fuel - hydrocarbon or otherwise - using air you'll end up with NOx as a combustion by-product. Filtering out nitrogen from air is possible - zeolites are used for this purpose in oxygen concentrators - but hard to do at a high enough capacity to satisfy the needs of even modest-sized ICEs so a post-combustion NOx capture/conversion step will be needed regardless of the provenance of the fuel [1].
Sort of - but it doesn't solve the issue with air quality. Electrification of transport isn't just about CO2. We'll see more instant benefits from having air we can breathe.
A lot of the air pollution from cars is from brake dust and tire micro particles. EVs do result in less brake dust, but the tires are still a problem.
And if you live on the West coast, it was recently discovered that an essential chemical used for tire durability and safety causes mass deaths in salmon. (Or rather, the chemical breaks down into another chemical, which causes mass salmon death, and probably other fish death too).
I will appreciate never having to hear a damn diesel truck again, however. Those things should be taxed heavily for noise pollution in addition tk their massive particulate emissions.
Since you couldn't realistically replace all ICE vehicles right away, it'd help ease the transition and especially in rural areas, air quality might not be a big concern anyway. If you end up with a surplus of clean gas, you could just burn it in dedicated plants and take care of the NOx there, or use it for aviation and in agriculture.
Air quality is a problem that basically all of the first world has solved to varying extents that depend mostly on whether the local areas are affected are rich enough that it tops their lists of problems.
When the developing world gets rich they'll care too.
But liquid fuels are incredibly convenient, so maybe they will be worth the high price in certain applications. For example in jet engines for airplanes.
People already cycle through cars quite frequently. Big Auto doesn't need to convince anybody to buy a new car. This would be a purposeless conspiracy.
I don't think it's about making everyone buy new cars as much as about realizing that there's a new category of ultra-palatable government subsidies for them to cash in on.
France already has 80-90% of electricity supply being supplied by nuclear. It also exports an enormous amount of power to other European countries.
I don't know exactly how true this is but I believe gas usage for heating is much rarer in France than other countries. They have a lot of electrical storage heating due to the cheap off peak baseload that nuclear gives.
uranium may not be a fossil fuel but it shares all the problems of them
- pollution and waste
- it's limited
At the current consumption, uranium would only last 80 years, if all the countries start to build new power plants, won't last more than 2 decades before it's depleted, and we will have the same problem again.
nuclear power is not a solution, is just a small patch.
> As of 2011 the world's known resources of uranium, economically recoverable at the arbitrary price ceiling of US$130/kg, were enough to last for between 70 and 100 years.[60][61][62] In 2007, the OECD estimated 670 years of economically recoverable uranium in total conventional resources and phosphate ores assuming the then-current use rate.[63]
> Light water reactors make relatively inefficient use of nuclear fuel, mostly using only the very rare uranium-235 isotope.[64] Nuclear reprocessing can make this waste reusable, and newer reactors also achieve a more efficient use of the available resources than older ones.[64] With a pure fast reactor fuel cycle with a burn up of all the uranium and actinides (which presently make up the most hazardous substances in nuclear waste), there is an estimated 160,000 years worth of Uranium in total conventional resources and phosphate ore at the price of 60–100 US$/kg.[65]
Uranium can be used to create weapons, so we don't want to allow Uranium mining everywhere except a few safe spots. If demand for Uranium will increase, then price for Uranium will skyrocket (buyer marker will switch to seller market) and will match prices for other kinds of energy.
Maybe they and China will create a little power envy in the USA, and we can get back on track for some real change and improvements in CO2 pollution containment.
The major drawback of nuclear seems to be their large power output and long durability. Once you built the few plants you need (France and Sweden for example) you don't have to build any more for 50 or so years and then the manufacturing capability dies.
Hoping for companies like NuScale, maybe they can get a continuous operation going and churn out cheaper and cheaper plants.
The manufacturing/construction capability for nuclear needs to be global, rather than national. There is plenty of need for new nuclear to sustain and grow the expertise around the world. This goes for the governments as well, but unfortunately governments seem to be abysmal about learning from other countries.
I'm hoping China will leverage this and actually make some real modular mini nuke plants and make the US jealous enough to do the same. The USA has been stuck in the 60s as far as nuclear tech goes. Unpragmatic "environmental" groups have all but killed it here out of Luddite fears of teh nuclear radiation.
What has been learned is that the new third generation pressurised water reactor design was more complicated design than initial thought, as recognized by the Électricité de France. The first operational EPR unit started commercial operation in December 2018.
The gen 3 design is, depending on how you view it, 3 years old. It was found to be too expensive and too complex.
There exist new version of gen 3 reactors and there are design for gen 4 reactors, both claiming to solve many of the issues of the old gen 3 reactors.
And yet as I understand it, France is looking at starting 6 more of the EPR design. Though we don't know specifics, that's the only thing that seems possible to build at the moment, unless you are saying EDF has designs for newer versions, which j have not heard about.
According to wikipedia (and I assume the linked source), the 6 new EPR will be done under the newer version called EPR 2. Great naming schemes and all.
Those 6 new one was the news from 2020. The one we see in the article is unspecified and could be a reference to the 6 EPR 2 or something else. Same is true for the 150 Chinese plants being planned.
The biggest fault in the old EPR design process seem to be the mid-construct patch that occurred in 2012 as a result of the Fukushima accident. Other issues seems to be related to goals like "world’s highest-output nuclear plant". They decided to use rather exotic form of steel, within the upper limit of what can be created. Given the decision of making the highest-output nuclear plants, and there are only a few places in the world that can create and work the kind of steel that the design require, the budget did not work. In addition, the exotic nature of the material makes it difficult to weld correctly.
The open questions I see is if EPR 2 also require similar exotic materials, if the exotic materials has improved in availability and price, and if the experience in welding it has improved to the point where fewer mistakes are done. It is also possible that by not trying to achieve new world records in plant size and output, the budget might be more reasonable. The world largest and highest wind turbine might be a nice research goal, but building one at the limit of current material would not be my first choice if costs were a priority.
At the start of construction, Hinkley Point C is estimating €8.1/W. This is still four times the initial estimates cost for Flamanville 3, €2/W. But it's a bit less than the current estimated cost of Flamanville 3, €11.5/W.
However this is all assuming that Hinkley Point C stays in budget and on schedule, which would be a strange assumption to make given recent history.
So I'm not sure anything is being learned, or construction capability is increasing. Which is a shame, because that area of the world is the area with the strongest need for nuclear. The rest of the world will get by fine without it. And for that matter, it's likely that Northern Europe can build enough wind and storage to get around their need for nuclear. But it all would have been a lot easier if the nuclear industry was anywhere close to delivering on its lofty promises.
Jean Marc Jancovici is one of the most vocal of we can call "Nuclear ecologist" around in France, the content is amazing and he definitely have a point if you want to follow [0].
He is a realist, but in this field we need to go beyond and to open big money for the research into small and decentralized nuclear power.
Every citizen have to know the pros and the cons, and be educated to the risks. Energy provide good living standards, but we have to know the drawbacks and we have to account for externalities in every business model.
This will be the only way to keep our standards of living and keep an habitable home.
France already has gaz (cost is hight), or hydrolic (water daws are all in use at its max in France), but it seems France doesnt want to go the german way and switch on the coal power plants.
The press article mention green peace, while most of people think gren peace are communicant people who doesnt get aware about science news and will applause germany for leaving nuclear (but going COAL) and blame france for keeping nuclear (but having low CO2 energy ratio) like if wastes are worst than CO2 while CO2 is nowday issue.
Government tryed to open the energy market in France, but since it has done that, the consumer prices are only getting highter and highter while the historic company EDF is making profit, and not the new comers who are often at the edge to termination plan. Also, Having a company not being EDF (governement has 80% part of it) to own a reactor is a risk, because profit always come first for a company.
Having new reactor will give more low-CO2 emission energy and give more time to have more decent work (r&d) on renewable energy and stockage (not daws since we already use them all here) probably.
There are risk to have reactor, and also wastes, but the CO2 costs look the best until there is something else.
PS: I'm not a macron side voter; I think many french people think like this; I'm not backing anything with source, because it's just what it is on people minds i guess and i agree a bit to that; so I'm just sharing this here for the discussion
If you don't believe that as part of the tragedy, and the misinfluenced public's opinion over nuclear industry, then you probably did not get what the parent really means...
You are moving the goal post. This is what OP said:
> Mr Burns was the most environmentally responsible Simpson's character and likely a real scientific expert.
And it's clearly wrong.
Now:
> * Portrait nuclear energy tycoon as the only villain is sad. Because it reflects a unconscious strong mental imprint of nuclear being fearful.
From the top of my head the show had a corrupt and inept chief of police, a corrupt mayor, a crazy homicidal clown, a fat tony hanging around freely and an unstable clown. Burns was not the only villain.
He was not a villain because of being a nuclear energy tycoon. He was a villain because of his actions (greed and arrogance and grandeur disillusions).
Now of course by association you could defend the idea that's it's a full blown attack on nuclear. And yes there is a strong mental imprint of nuclear being fearful in the US but I'd argue it has more to do with real life events and... I don't know.. cold war era craze for home bunkers to survive an nuclear winter than a cartoon that started at the end of the 80's and uses a badly managed nuclear plant as a laughing device (humor device ?) not even present in every episode.
> * The show can portrait coal miner. Instead of hiding nuclear waste in the tree. Coal miner can pollute the sky as some form of "sky painting".
Are you trying to build the argument that being against nuclear means being for coal ?
Anyway, apart from that three eye fish I don't recall the springfield nuclear plant had incidents that had lasting consequences like Chernobyl or Fukushima had. So apart from being comical...
I don't see where in the show it transpires that the depiction of the springfield nuclear plant reflects a " strong mental imprint of nuclear being fearful".
Indeed. But let's be clear that those practices are on the bad actors themselves. Let's not paint these tragedies as some form of inherent flaws of nuclear energy.
One thing I cannot fully communicate with posts like this, is that it's not clear what the intention is. By these posts, I refer to posts which uses emotional summary, backed by human loss that has the subject involved. Then leave no trace of the actual rational conclusion from the facts.
It looks just like an intentional emotional manipulation, which plagued most US news reports. This type of approach, makes rational discussion very difficult to progress.
Edit:
Look at the child reply. See what emotion brings to a discussion. From nuclear energy to illegal disposal of nuclear waste, then to holocaust. The emotion is increasing, but the subject of the discussion is dissolved in the process without any trace of respect to the other parties in the discussion.
Emotion sucks the rationality from the discussion, and literally deprive the common grounds between people. In the end, achieve nothing.
It is a common argumentation method of self-called "rationalists" that the opponent is not rational. It is extremely disingenuous for two reasons:
You go away from arguing about the topic on hand and instead proclaim that all your opponents arguments are not valid. It is basically a "You are stupid and I do not have to listen to your points".
Further true rationality does not define any goals, because it is just about using reason to come to conclusions or for deducting how to best get to a goal. People that claim to be ideology-free are very dangerous, as they are not ideology free, but cannot accept people seeing different goals.
You can see this romantic view of science in a lot of nuclear power advocates. Nuclear power has, standing for progress and a representative of science, become the goal in itself that is needed to be protected.
To come back to the dumping of nuclear waste: For a while that practice was not even illegal, contrary to what you claim. Nuclear power leads to nuclear waste, which has to be handled properly. Because that is expensive, there exists a high probability for improper handling to happen. Given how often improper handling of nuclear waste has happened, it seems like a systematic problem that is also very likely to happen again, as nuclear waste is an issue that stays for a very long time, which probably also means different political systems.
Your argument that improper handling is only the fault of the bad actors that in the end acted out the dumping is invalid. It ignores on one hand, that the responsibility for toxic waste lies with the producers. If they did not take care for a proper disposal it is their fault. On the other hand it ignores the reasoning of the people that do the toxic waste dumping. Usually that happens in poorer regions and people do it simply because they have no alternative way of earning money.
I was saying the post has little context, and based on relatively mainstream mental response, it's reasonable to assume that the OP intends to arouse emotional response through association, instead of lay out it's argument.
> You are stupid and I do not have to listen to your points
...
I was saying that the OP did not provide context and concrete meaning. How is that not listening?
If someone refuses to talk, then it must be the others is "not listening"?!...
> Further true rationality does not define any goals, because it is just about using reason to come to conclusions or for deducting how to best get to a goal. People that claim to be ideology-free are very dangerous, as they are not ideology free, but cannot accept people seeing different goals.
I guess this applies to the grand parent post more than mine?
> You can see this romantic view of science in a lot of nuclear power advocates. Nuclear power has, standing for progress and a representative of science, become the goal in itself that is needed to be protected.
Hah?!
Me and every post I saw uses climate change as the main driving force.
I have never seen anyone claim that nuclear is just plainly noble or something.
Everyone is claiming that tech advanced and nuclear is safer and should be acceptable, if it were to be assessed relatively evenly with alternatives...
> Your argument that improper handling is only the fault of the bad actors that in the end acted out the dumping is invalid
I never argued this
Or I never intended to argue this. But human language is complicated, I blame myself equally as anyone who misunderstood.
Back to bad actor.
No, bad actor in large scale is just interests misaligned. I never doubt there is fundamental issues with nuclear that caused dumping. But let's discuss in current context: emotional public are under skewed image of nuclear.
In this part of your post I believe. It leads people to that conclusion:
>> Edit: Look at the child reply. See what emotion brings to a discussion. From nuclear energy to illegal disposal of nuclear waste, then to holocaust. The emotion is increasing, but the subject of the discussion is dissolved in the process without any trace of respect to the other parties in the discussion.
>> Emotion sucks the rationality from the discussion, and literally deprive the common grounds between people. In the end, achieve nothing.
Frankly, I don't know what to make of it. Sometimes people build arguments with enough cruft to fog their main points and intentionally mislead people and sometimes it's not intentional and they don't realize it. HN also loves to play the definition game sometimes.
I'd just say this:
> But let's discuss in current context: emotional public are under skewed image of nuclear.
Do we have a poll or something to assess where people stand regarding nuclear ?
> Intentions don't mean much when someone somewhere has cut one corner too many and you and your family is in the fallout zone and can't leave the house, open the windows, trust your food or water safety, and that's AFTER the weeks go by before the "general population" finds out about it at all, while the people at the top of the power pyramid know within minutes or hours...
> Then, years later, you read HN comments downplaying the effects and the affected with the same types of arguments as Holocaust deniers.
> It's emotional, but it's not manipulation. It is the reality how it happened.
Of course the writing style is not the same as the one used in a study abstract and probably the poster has some emotions about it but he's not writing irrational or emotional things. I do agree making a comparison with holocaust deniers approaches the Godwin threshold though. I'd have used climate change deniers instead.
Also, one can write rational things while still being driven by emotions.
It is not purely emotional though. There currently are no permanent storages worldwide. The first might soon come online in Sweden, most waste us still in wet storage. Part of it in the ocean too...
Well, but surely the posts are fully emotional, right? The point is not that the facts behind the emotion are meaningless, it's the orientation of the discussion.
Of course one can reach a destination by heading in the opposite direction, because earth is round; but it would be awfully wasteful.
One can also influence people and make things happen by being super emotional/ideological, in other words, being with super little rationality (not that they are incapable, they just orient in that direction naturally). But that would be awfully ineffective.
Intentions don't mean much when someone somewhere has cut one corner too many and you and your family is in the fallout zone and can't leave the house, open the windows, trust your food or water safety, and that's AFTER the weeks go by before the "general population" finds out about it at all, while the people at the top of the power pyramid know within minutes or hours...
Then, years later, you read HN comments downplaying the effects and the affected with the same types of arguments as Holocaust deniers.
It's emotional, but it's not manipulation. It is the reality how it happened.
Dig a hole and dump it in the hole. Then worry about real problems.
I promise you no mutant monster will arise from the earth to destroy civilization.
The hysteria over where we store this waste is really silly. Even if spray it into the air all over the planet, we'd still release 1/100 the amount of thorium and uranium than is currently being released into the air by the world's coal plants. Therefore even if we spray the waste into the air, it's still safer than coal. Burying it in the ground is much, much safer.
A lot has been written on it, and we've been told by many reputable people that it's not a big problem. If climate change really is a dire threat, nuclear waste is just a non-issue relatively speaking. Anyone promoting that we should block nuclear because of waste is some kind of bad faith actor.
I think not a bad faith actor, but an emotionally dominated actor. Most of the anti-nuclear opposition is about gut level emotion. This is why the bar is raised so much higher for nuclear than anything else. The reason boils down to "but this is nuclear!!
Indeed, I have thought about this "deeply". But not hysterically, which is why you seem to be so troubled about a calm assessment of risk that takes into account other risks we already accept and things like opportunity costs.
FWIW, there's nothing super-unique about the Finnish solution. Most countries have suitable geology. AFAICS, the main reason for the success of the project is that various hysterical anti-nuclear activists weren't allowed to dominate the discussion.
Reddit has a few subreddits dedicated to uranium investing. I caught wind of this a few months ago, and my investments are doing well.
Some in the community seem to think that the market will 10-20x due to the world waking up to the immediate, pressing need for nuclear. (Insufficient wind/solar capacity, storage, transmission, etc.)
There are also some interesting behaviors going on in the uranium market, where certain players are buying up all of the supply. It's short-squeezeish in nature.
China announcement, French announcement. US uranium exploration. Lots going on.
France already has one 3rd gen nuclear plant under construction, Flamanville 3, and it's 10 years behind schedule. That's discouraging. France did so well at nuclear plant construction in the 1980s.
France nuclear innovation was very linked to military force and bombs. Over the decades, skills where lost and biggest players in the field are failing companies deep in dept. The enregetical status quo looks good but there is absolutely no research in the field except fusion which is very far away. France lost his nuclear leadership times ago and there is absolutely no reason to wait for innovation here. The risk of a nuclear disaster in the center of e
Europe is not to dismiss, with 55 aging reactors across the territory. Wasted genius ressources by politics 101.
>France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security. Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035. [1]
according to the target set in the "Energy transition for green growth" bill.
I get the fascination with base load and the incredible amount of energy compared to chemical based alternatives. But:
1. What will the net online time be? (Lots of these plants go in maintenance for long stretches of time)
2. Spent fuel?
3. Proliferation risk?
4. Accident mitigation?
I can try to answer your questions. (Disclaimer, I'm a masters student studying systems with a focus on energy systems. Obviously not an expert, and am somewhat biased pro-nuclear.)
1. Net online time for nuclear isn't particularly bad, especially when you consider that other alternatives too go down. [1] Of course you'll need some extra capacity/more plants, but that was anyway the case.
2. I feel this is probably the strongest point that can be held against nuclear. Short-term fuel management is not an issue/already figured out, and climate change is a much quicker risk in the next 50 years, so I'd argue it's still better to go 0-carbon instead of finding a perfect solution right now.
3. I'm not sure if you're referring to proliferation of the fuel or technologies, but both are reasonably well-developed fields that France should not have major problems.
4. Similar to point one - nuclear accidents vs risks/deaths from coal is like comparing flight safety with cars. Sure, airplanes feel unsafe but are statistically MUCH safer than cars. Chernobyl and Fukushima were both avoidable (though that can admitably be said for a lot of accidents). Deaths from pollution itself are in the millions instead. [2]
> both avoidable (though that can admitably be said for a lot of accidents)
I'm pro-nuclear, but the need to be circumspect about safety is real.
I always think of a Bruce Cockburn song, "Radium Rain", written in 1986 when visiting Germany right after Chernobyl:
Every day in the paper
You can watch the numbers rise
No such event can overtake us here
We're much too wise
In the meantime, don't eat anything that grows
And don't breathe when the cars go by
Decades with hundred of nuclear power plants in the world have not seen them be a significant source of fissionable material for terrorists or new nations developing nuclear weapons. See Iran, a nation that has devoted significant resources to such an endeavor, as a case in point.
Spent fuel from nuclear power plants-- probably the more vulnerable point in the supply chain-- is nonetheless difficult to the point of extreme expense & impractical to refine to weapons grade. You would need such large quantities that it would be extremely difficult to steal enough without notice: Someone is going to notice the 200,000 lb cask leaving a storage facility. Then the refinement process is difficult, requiring immense sums of money to built the significant infrastructure required for refinement. North Korea, the newest nuclear power, got there with significant help from the Soviets extending back in the 60's and it still took them decades to get there.
This is all on top of the fact that any modern plant designs use feedstock fuel that is even harder to refine into anything weapons grade, and is much more efficient to the point that spend fuel refinement difficulties dwarfs the above roadblocks for fuel from older designs.
Dirty bombs are more problematic, but also significantly less destructive, and suffer from many of the same logistical hurdles, notably that the material most useful for a dirty bomb is also material that requires massively robust precautions to ensure the thieves don't kill themselves with radiation exposure long before any chance of making use of it. Less useful material that requires fewer precautions is not practical for dirty bombs without significant refinement capacity.
All of this at a time when real measurable deaths from fossil fuel powerplants, their pollution, and their industrial accidents, are themselves more dangerous, right now, than theoretical & difficult to achieve usages of fuel from new nuclear power plants.
Generally speaking, any operator of any reactor can make nuclear weapons if they want to.
Some reactors don't generate weapons-grade isotopes when operated as intended, but if you control the reactor, my understanding is that it is easy to modify it so that it does.
There is no technical safeguard against nuclear proliferation - all of them are political.
France has been running on 75%+ nuclear power mix for the past 50 years and is doing better energy/emissions-wise than almost every other country in the world. Your questions have already been answered, it seems. They seem to have bet on the right horse, and went full steam ahead with it (no pun intended). And now they are supplying all their neighbours with surplus clean energy.
I always point at this when my American "environmental" friends yell at me as a proponent of a Manhattan style project in nuclear tech here in the USA as the solution to climate change.
1 - During my study, I visited a nuclear plant. They explained to us the plant is designed around 4 quadrants, each one capable of turning on and off independently of each other. So when one needs maintenance, you just put this one offline, and the others keep running. This way the reactor is never totally shut off, as I understand that starting it from scratch is an expensive operation.
2 - For the spent fuel, France has plenty of strategically maintained relationships in what used to be West African colonies with uranium mines. Why do you think we sent the army during the Mali war ? We cultivate those alliances because they bring a lot on the table, from resources to routes and bases. Nuclear is doubly interesting for us, because we can source it even if Russia or China decide to tell us to go to hell. In case of a conflict, this is priceless.
3 - I don't know anything about proliferation, so can't answer this one.
4 - Accident mitigation is the big problem, IMO. I've seen how they operate inside, and let's just say I'm glad the people that designed the thing were very, very, _very_ good at their job. Because the ones maintaining it have a very relaxed attitude. And the plants are pushed to produce way past their initial expected life span. But I insist, I'm amazed at how good engineers of the 70' were. Those plants are old tech, but they are incredible. However, even if the probability of an accident is low (there are triple safety mechanisms everywhere), the severity of a potential accident is such that I consider nuclear disasters a huge risk that we don't take seriously enough. What's more, it nourishes the growing anti-nuclear sentiment, so we should really get our act together.
The risks of nuclear energy is far more favourable than global warming.
Global warming effects are global, non-linear and there are still many unknowns, which makes it more risky. Nuclear risks are local and the harm is well known. Also nuclear energy is anti-fragile (more disasters means saver plants).
I believe we are far too cautious with building new nuclear plants. Not because I think that nuclear energy is not dangerous, but I believe global warming is a far greater risk.
Nuclear energy should not be our only source of energy for other reasons like resiliance (diversity in sources make a society more robust), power balance (you don't want one type of industry to have it all) and long term cost opportunity (some energy may prove cheaper later if we also develop them).
And since we are using nuclear energy, we engage in this risk, which we should mitigate given the magnitude of it. Ignoring it is not rational.
Opposing the risk of a nuclear accident to globalm warming is a false dichotomie. Like stating we don't spend money on fighting covid because cancer is more deadly, more likely, and need all the money we have.
I am not necessarily pro nuclear. But due to catastrophic risk, nuclear should be considered in a diversified energy portfolio. This can be different from region to region. I am anti-anti-nuclear.
Of course we should not ignore the risks of nuclear. But my point is that there is no 100% guarantee that no accidents will ever happen. But considering the problems we are facing, the risk characteristics of nuclear are favourable to the problem we are solving.
Yes. In fact, if one if being cold hearted, you can say that it could be worth it if we limit the consequences to only "x" accidents with "y" victims.
After all, climate change kills a lot of people, we only have to kill less.
But the problem here is that climate change is not shocking to people. But a nuclear accident would be. In fact, 2 of the 3 nuclear disasters we had are burnt in the collective memory for ever.
So strong action to prevent such accidents are also needed as a communication measure, to reasure the population. Given you are "anti-anti-nuclear", I think it's a good step to reduce the "anti-nuclear" sentiment.
There is already an incredible amount of effort done to prevent accidents. The problem nuclear faces is similar to the problem COVID vaccines face: No scientist or engineer with integrity can guarantee 100% safety.
Should we tell the public simple messages like: "Trust me dude, it is super super super safe!", or should we tell the public a nuanced story of calculated risks? I don't know whether the last strategy will work, but the first strategy has failed both nuclear and COVID vaccination. In my country we are in a lock down again, because too few people are vaccinated.
None of those questions are new, nor show stoppers for existing plants. Why do you think the existing procedures may not be satisfactory? (I'm assuming you think so based on the way you ask the question)
EDIT: to be clear, I'm not asking this as a backhanded question. I'm genuinely curious why this is not seen as a "solved problem", at least in a country with relatively strong government institutions
Well, the way previous generations fizzled suggests these problems aren’t that solved after all.
Just 1 long term waste storage has ever been built in the world, plant productivity has always been relatively low (initial manufacturing delays, refueling, minor accidents, refurbishments), many anti-proliferation techniques just over-produce rad-waste.
Oh, and if we were to buildout nuclear globally how long would the ore reserves last?
It fizzled due to FUD. Existing plants work and are defensible. The waste can be stored safely.
In emerging economies new designs can be used, but they'll probably have to be trialed in a developed economy. You could also pursue economic policy that has developing economies fund the research instead of letting them expect handouts.
You're saying there were no actual, serious problems with nuclear plants?
> Existing plants work and are defensible.
That's survivorship bias to a degree: Te plants that work and are defensible are the plants you see. It's also a bias of sunk costs: The surviving plants could have been way over-budget and late, but it's still worth operating them.
> You're saying there were no actual, serious problems with nuclear plants?
Compared to other forms of energy generation, measured in illnesses, injuries, maimings, and deaths, past and plausibly attributed to the future, per KWH? Not really, no.
I tire of the 'say something bold and prove me wrong' rhetoric, when people know exactly what's wrong with what they are saying. It doesn't contribute to anyone's understanding, and wastes my time. Hope the rest of your day goes well.
The realization that industrial processes are dangerous, that power generation is an industrial process, and therefore dangerous, and that the only meaningful way to measure the danger of an industrial process is by comparing it to that of another industrial process should contribute to the understanding of some.
Is nuclear power generation dangerous? Yes. Is all power generation dangerous? Yes. How dangerous is nuclear power generation compared to alternatives? Not very.
It's pretty accurate to say that nuclear fizzled due to FUD. The conversation ended after the answer to the first question was 'yes'.
I’d appreciate if you could clarify what’s wrong. Even if both you and your interlocutor understand it, the point has unfortunately gone over my head (and possibly the same for others reading).
Not OP, but one problem that they mentioned which is "wrong" from an economic point of view is that afaik, there is no way to calculate the total cost of ownership of a nuclear plant.
This is due to that fact that there are no viable plans for long term nuclear storage to calculate the cost of.
You're partaking in the "say something bold and prove me wrong" rhetoric, you just like the assumption that nuclear is unsafe more. When acting with imperfect information you should not go to such methods.
Ah that’s breeders, it’s a different game. They’re technically more challenging (the French spent billions on their plants which didn't quite deliver) and have a significant nuclear weapons proliferation risk.
Somewhere I read (sorry for the lack of sources) that with single-pass fuel use, known reserves would only last a couple decades, a century at best.
A global buildout of breeders is the issue. The rich countries telling the poor countries they can’t have nice things because of “our” security concerns. Big talking point in the 1960s. Tom Lehrer even wrote a cute song about nuclear proliferation in 1964, “Who’s Next?”.
If you get any expansive policy and process wrong, the negative global consequences are dramatic and long-lasting. So, first, do no harm.
True, but breeder technology has a lot more potential for weaponry proliferation (part of the reason France is so much invested in nuclear is precisely because of that.)
And it’s not as easy as recycling empty glass bottles… the French struggled to keep their breeders online and keep them economical (but then the military we’re still happy so…)
2. Solved problem. Spent fuel is not really an issue, we have solutions and areas to put it in both Europe and the USA. Only green Luddites hold it back. Storage really does not take up a lot of space.
3. Next to none if the right type of fuel stock and reactor is chosen. Obviously security comes in, but that is also a solved issue
4. Lots of modern designs literally cannot go critical, I suggest we use those, instead of old designs just because they're "a known known".
5. don't build reactors that can go critical near known tsunami shorlines.
6. At worst we'll surely have fusion by the end of the century and can then retire the nuclear plants. Solar and wind without a 100x improvement in battery storage tech do not make sense right now as the sole producer of energy like a lot of unrealistic "environmental" groups claim.
This was going well until point 6. Fusion isn't anywhere near practical in 2021, it requires lots of investment and research to do even a first prototype. And it is a high tech marvel that won't be cheap to operate. So the funding for it may eventually dry out in favour of boring tech fission plants.
Hard to say tbh. But these reactors probably aren't offline as much as you think. They shut down for 1 month every 18-24 months for refueling.
> 2. Spent fuel?
France is the world leader in this regard. Remember that 17% of France's entire power comes from _recycled_ nuclear. But if you want to see what their entire nuclear waste. This is _decades_ worth, and I'm betting much smaller than you expected.[0] (coal is doing this on a a daily or weekly basis). Just for fun, let's look at Russia's too.[1] We're literally just talking a warehouse. People vastly overestimate the waste and what to do with it. It is fine where it is for hundreds of years. The only "problem" that we have with "long term storage" is how to store it somewhere where if somehow all knowledge was lost that future humans with no radiation detecting equipment could accidentally release waste (quite a high bar, and not one we're concerned with other long lasting waste like lead or heavy metals). We have a few hundred years to figure that out.
> 3. Proliferation risk?
None? It is France. They already have nuclear weapons. But while we're talking about it, Megatons to Megawatts[2] has been the best deproliferation project in history, reducing the number of nuclear warheads by over 20,000.
> 4. Accident mitigation?
Very low. This is also over estimated. We have a very early reactor which no other country besides Russia built because it had the ability to explode. And we have another event where we didn't know earthquakes could happen of that size until basically right before said earthquake happened. These are major disasters, but the two should not be conflated. Even including these, they are far less environmentally damaging than the fossil fuels we've been using. The major problem with nuclear is that disasters are both temporally and spatially localized. There's advantages and disadvantages to this in terms of dealing with the consequences. On one hand, it is a lot to clean up. On the other hand the country that created the disaster is the one that suffers the most (as opposed to what we're seeing with oil spills and the entire climate crisis, which is not temporally localized and thus the danger is not weighted properly).
> None? It is France. They already have nuclear weapons. But while we're talking about it, Megatons to Megawatts[2] has been the best deproliferation project in history, reducing the number of nuclear warheads by over 20,000.
More nuclear trained personnel, designs, materials, and plants mean more opportunities for someone to acquire technology or materials.
More opportunities - yes, more risk - not necessarily. Interested people already know how to build a nuclear bomb, there is very little mystery there, not much need to steal designs. The greatest risk here is someone stealing enriched fuel, because getting it is the hard part of building the nuclear bomb.
If a big country like France can handle guarding hundreds of small nuclear weapons, they can certainly handle guarding nuclear fuel in small number of additional NPPs. We are not talking about building NPPs in every small town guarded by incompetent local volunteers. Trained armed personnel and accountability of processes and personnel in few facilities can prevent this risk.
By who? Someone not... French? I think you misunderstand both how difficult that would be to pull off and how much enriched uranium you would need for a bomb. Bombs and reactors don't use the same materials. Bombs use a shit ton more enriched materials. If you look back at that M2M page you'll notice how much highly enriched material was turned into unenriched (500 tonns -> 15000 tons, in case you didn't click). That's a pretty big differential.
I'm sorry, but you're just spreading FUD. There's a reason the Iran Deal is a fine deal. But I don't expect anyone to understand this without 1) reading the fucking thing and 2) actually understanding nuclear physics and reactor design (this should be rather unsurprising, but for some reason everyone thinks they are qualified on this matter). I suspect you don't meet either qualification, given your comment.
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? We penalize and eventually ban accounts that post like this. I don't want to penalize or ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd be grateful.
Of course there are. But we have to pay attention to what the community is saying in general. Consensus. To be fair, this is often hard to decipher when you aren't in said community and we are talking about a rather complicated topic ("Here be Dragons"). I mean we have "climate experts" showing up on certain news channels claiming that the IPCC reports are hogwash but we have a huge consensus in the community in general.
So with the Iran deal, what do we have? Well they would have needed around 3-6mo to enrich their stockpile for enough material for a single weapon. Something they haven't done before and do not have the technology to do. Also something they did not appear to be attempting to do.
But I talked about consensus. I'd say Nature is a good source for that[0]. You'll note here that Nature is talking about getting enough enriched material in months but several other news sources I looked at used the phrase "build a weapon" instead. I'd call this fear mongering and misunderstanding the science.
I'm not trying to tell you that you're dumb, but rather that this is a complicated matter and that amateur levels of understanding aren't quite enough to even get the basics. I have a degree in the field, have worked in the industry and in energy departments. My level of understanding is barely enough to get the basics. I'm calling you out because we're talking about something extremely complicated that people vastly overestimate their expertise to handle. Atomic physics is not a simple thing where you can get a basic understanding through even months of googling.
1. What will the net online time be? (Lots of these plants go in maintenance for long stretches of time)
The term you're referring to is capacity factor. Nuclear power typically has the highest capacity factor of any energy source. [1] [2] For reference, nuclear is 92%, while wind is 35% and photovoltaic solar at 25%.
> 2. Spent fuel?
It can be reprocessed, reclaiming over 90% of fuel. Even without reprocessing, nuclear fuel's energy density is such that a tiny amount of waste is produced per unit of energy. For comparison, the sum total of all of the USA's nuclear electricity production occupies a volume the footprint of a football field, and 10 yards high. [3]
> 3. Proliferation risk?
Nuclear fuel is refined to about ~20% fissile material. Nuclear weapons typically need over 80% or 90%. Countries would need to build their own enrichment facilities to bring nuclear fuel to weapons grade uranium, and then further refine that to plutonium. If they had such facilities they'd be able to refine natural uranium to weapons grade anyway.
> 4. Accident mitigation?
First of all, even if you include Chernobyl nuclear power (which didn't even have secondary storage) has the lowest fatalities per unit of energy produced [4]. People often neglect the fact that fossil fuels kill millions each year due to air pollution. Renewables like hydroelectricity have had accidents far more devastating that nuclear power [5]. Nuclear plants are expensive because a lot of effort is made to make them safe, and to contain a potential failure. People often forget that the USA had a reactor meltdown analogous to Chernobyl during the Three Mile Island incident. Except nobody died and there was no widespread contamination because the reactor had a big concrete condom over it, unlike Chernobyl.
Moreover all this came after a civil war and violent Japanese invasion, during which dams were bombed, causing "massive flooding in Henan" (same source).
In such a context and chain of events a nuclear reactor and its nearby spent fuel may cause some headaches.
Banqiao: predicting and adverting this catastrophe was possible, but given such a context nobody was able to do so.
> Nuclear fuel is refined to about ~20% fissile material. Nuclear weapons typically need over 80% or 90%. Countries would need to build their own enrichment facilities to bring nuclear fuel to weapons grade uranium, and then further refine that to plutonium. If they had such facilities they'd be able to refine natural uranium to weapons grade anyway.
I've wondered about that. On one hand, the reasoning above makes sense. On the other, people who know far more than I do say there is proliferation risk. I suspect there is something I don't understand.
The proliferation risk is that countries build enrichment facilities claiming it's for nuclear electricity production, but instead used for weapons production. This can be addressed by prohibiting the construction of enrichment facilities and having countries that already possess nuclear weapons enrich fuel for other countries pro-bono.
That arrangement sounds great for the countries with enrichment facilities and a raw deal for everyone else. What country would want to have that dependancy for
basic energy needs?
They get fuel processing without having to develop and deploy very expensive technology, and possibly get free processing. Also, they get less nuclear proliferation, which could be existential for humanity.
I believe it is in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or was proposed as another agreement.
I think it is also worth mentioning that enrichment plants don't scale linearly. So it starts to become fairly obvious when a country is producing more enriched material than what is necessary for their energy production.
I'm not sure who you're talking about. If we're talking about nuclear scientists who are pro nonproliferation, well they're the ones who invented it. If we're talking about green peace, well, they are neither green nor peaceful.
I'm learned about it from random Internet commenters who make posts that know it all, dismiss everyone else, and support it by being aggressive and obnoxious.
We're on HN. There are people with expertise in the field. You can also vet everything I've stated. I've linked sources and pulled from my own experience. You would not be arguing with me if this was on database processing or something computer related. But we're talking a hot topic and one that is known to be extremely complicated. Sorry that you think my education and experience in the field is dismissive of the views of someone who claims to have neither.
> On the other, people who know far more than I do say there is proliferation risk.
Who? I mean I hear people on the news state it, but never any concerns at a certain 3 letter agencies that is not the department of education. I haven't heard a serious nuclear physicist be concerned with the Iran Deal. And when Iran broke the deal (not long ago) those same people knew it was a bluff, because Iran didn't even have the ability to produce enough enriched material to create bombs. Even running their enrichment centers at full capacity. Which btw, these enrichment centers don't scale linearly, which is why it is easy to vet through satellite photography. Weapon enrichment centers are typically kinda obvious. This may be a key part in what you aren't understanding. I also linked in another comment the Megatons to Megawatts program. You'll notice there the conversion rate of weapons material to fuel was about 30x (remember, reversing that process is not linear).
Edit: After reading your other comment to me, I can see this isn't proceeding in good faith.
For other people reading: I'm very well read (for an amateur) about the Iran deal, and it appeared to be accepted by experts that they could enough produce weapons-grade materials for a nuclear bomb within around a year. I don't recall anyone questioning it. The goal of the deal was to push the timeline to multiple years (if Iran violated the deal).
Are there any existing reactor types, blueprints or built, that are engineered toward utilizing spent fuel first and foremost?
If not, I hope France seriously considers using breeder reactors to reduce leftover radioactive material.
Otherwise, I think this is fantastic news. In fact even if they build light water reactors I think it is the ideal base load solution to bridge the gap from oil and coal.
Aren't reactors like that typically a proliferation risk? That might not be an issue as long as France doesn't decide to start selling its nuclear power plants to questionable countries again.
France is a nuclear capable country, so the proliferation risk is fairly low from what I understand. They could even sell the plants abroad and bring the waste back to France to be recycled.
Germany is not a nuclear capable country, and I am not sure how they feel about France being their primary source of energy (or enriched uranium, if they have their own plants). Hopefully they prefer French nuclear energy to Russian oil and gas.
> Germany is not a nuclear capable country, and I am not sure how they feel about France being their primary source of energy (or enriched uranium, if they have their own plants). Hopefully they prefer French nuclear energy to Russian oil and gas.
Considering europe has a harmonized energy market[0][1], does that really matter?
France, germany and the benelux are so tightly economically integrated anyways, that doing harm to one would result in massive chaos in the others.
France recycle spent fuel for whole Europe. In order to reuse a part of plutonium, most of the plant consume a mix of uranium and plutonium: mox. AFAIK, France has huge piles of useless plutonium.
These 'fast breeder reactors' are difficult to tame.
In France: ASTRID burnt ~700 millions euros and didn't get past plans. Before it the 'Superphenix' project burnt ~8 billions euros, was built, had a long chain of incidents, then was canceled. Before it the 'Phenix' project ran then had serious problems ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix#Earlier_work_... ). Before it the 'Rapsodie' project also ended with problems.
Notwithstanding numerous projects in other nations. Nowadays Russia (and India, to an extent) is the only nation pursuing this path.
In the US the EBR I melted down as did the Enrico Fermi reactor in Detroit. Both of them were put back together and operated after the fuel damage.
EBR II and FFTF operated with no major problems in the US, but the Clinch River project was canceled. However the US has failed to construct a mixed-oxide fuel facility which is the most developed fuel for a fast reactor (e.g. pure metal and nitrides are both options but oxide fuels seem to require a high energy ball mill that can turn harmless silica into deadly nanoparticles that can wreck your lungs, just imagine what it does with Pu)
MONJU burned up in Japan.
The Russians have documented hundreds of sodium fires in the BN-350 and BN-400 but they would say fires happen in industrial facilities all the time and people just put them out. They turned on the BN-800 in 2016 and it is now consuming nuclear weapons plutonium.
Old literature suggests that the capital cost of the LMFBR is inevitably worse than the LWR. I'm not sure that's right. Both the LWR and coal burning power plants have been uncompetitive since 1980 against gas turbines for power generation. A closed-cycle gas turbine would fit in the employee break room of the turbine house of a nuclear reactor, but it is an undeveloped technology. A high temperature reactor with a gas turbine powerset could potentially be an order of magnitude smaller than an LWR, not have high pressures, have no risk of a steam explosion -- I think next generation nuclear is not worth pursuing unless the capital cost can be brought radically down with those factors.
There is a precedent for commercial licensing of the LMFBR in the US. Terrestrial Energy (Bill Gates's company) is making noises about building one but they are holding their cards so close to their chest that it's hard to believe they have a realistic plan to do it.
> However the US has failed to construct a mixed-oxide fuel facility which is the most developed fuel for a fast reactor (e.g. pure metal and nitrides are both options but oxide fuels seem to require a high energy ball mill that can turn harmless silica into deadly nanoparticles that can wreck your lungs, just imagine what it does with Pu)
Oxide fuel technology is of course pretty mature, as that's what current generation LWR's all use. However, it has severe disadvantages in a LMFBR. US thinking was apparently that they would jump straight to metal fuel (EBR-II and the canceled IFR), other who have used it see it as a stopgap until nitride fuels become available (e.g. Russia is experimenting with nitrides in their fast reactors).
As for economics, technically breeding is extremely cool (catnip for physicists!), but with current uranium prices there's no particular economic driver to develop and commercialize the technology. I think it's very hard to compare prices for mature LWR technology and various one-off fast breeder prototypes, let alone paper reactors. It's useful as a backstop for rising uranium prices, however.
> There is a precedent for commercial licensing of the LMFBR in the US. Terrestrial Energy (Bill Gates's company) is making noises about building one but they are holding their cards so close to their chest that it's hard to believe they have a realistic plan to do it.
The Bill Gates backed company is Terrapower. They have some agreement with GE Hitachi to develop and commercialize the technology, called "Natrium". AFAIU the Natrium reactor is heavily inspired by the canceled IFR, using metal fuel. We'll see what happens, interesting tech though.
(Terrestrial Energy is the company behind the "IMSR" molten salt reactor. It's a thermal spectrum uranium burning, non-breeding reactor design, though)
But uranium oxide vs mixed (plutonium) oxide fuel (used in LMFBR) is a big difference. The later is made by making plutonium nano particles that are potentially deadly for workers in the factory.
France doesn’t get excited about it but the US doesn’t seem to think it can be done safely.
Nuclear energy is THE power source of NIMBY-ism, relatively clean, ecological, always available but just so long as it's next door to somebody else. The Germany plans to do away with this power source with come back to bite them badly in the next thirty years.
Nuclear is the most expensive form of energy on the market. If you fast forward two decades, countries will be producing power at vastly different cost levels that will dictate their economic success. Those relying on nuclear will be piling on debt for getting power way above market prices.
Germany never had a substantial nuclear deployment. It peaked around 20GW. About 8 remains. The disappearance of 16GW from the grid was a complete non event. No blackouts. No instability. It just happened gradually and now its gone. The remaining 8 are tiny compared to daily fluctuations in wind and solar that are also not an issue. In terms of base load it is completely irrelevant whether it stays or goes. It's certainly not worth paying a lot for. If you replace 20GW with a few hundred GW of wind and solar, you end up with plenty of capacity and baseload. That's more or less what happened in the last few decades. The French already import excess power from Germany and elsewhere below the price they are selling their own nuclear power quite often.
Nuclear never mattered in Germany other than for military strategic reasons that stopped being relevant when Russia withdrew their tanks from the DDR 30 years ago. All that remains is cold war era obsolete plants that are expensive to keep going. Shutting them down was going to happen no matter what (because they are obsolete and near end of life) and the decision to not build replacement plants was pretty much a constant. The debate around that was pretty much over before Fukushima already. All that did was fast track some of the decision making. It remains a popular and uncontroversial decision in Germany.
Macron is announcing intentions and plans in the middle of an election season where Macron is under a lot of pressure from right wing populist parties. This nuclear push is very much motivated by nationalist sentiments and Macron is in damage control mode as he's losing voters to several right wing parties; some of which you might classify as far right or even neo fascist.
We'll see what remains of those intentions and plans after the elections. Election time posturing is not to be confused with actually policy to spend many billions on nuclear. Assuming he actually wins, he might find himself once more forming a government with a few other parties that will have strong opinions on this topic and not a lot of budget to allocate to a wide range of topics competing for attention. Until that government is a reality, all you have is a politician trying to stay in power trying to appeal to voters currently entertaining the thought to vote for someone else. Even with these announcements, we're still talking a net decline in nuclear capacity over time. It's just slowing it down slightly.
Personally, I think it is wise for the French to keep the knowledge to build reactors going for another generation. Additionally, exporting that knowledge to e.g. the UK is good for their economy. Hinkley Point C is being built by French EDF. Of course, there are plenty of scandals surrounding that particular setup related to cost overruns, delays, etc. That seems to be a constant with nuclear. One thing is certain, it won't be cheap power. Gas is cheaper, even with the recent price increases. Saving money is not a reason to go nuclear. It never was. Whether the UK ends up buying more is very much up in the air. The drama around Hinkley Point C is probably not helping the nuclear case currently. And having to send the money to France is probably not helping that case.
Friend of a friend is literally an expert on base load provision. What you’ve said about solar and wind providing base load is untrue. You need nuclear (or gas etc) to keep the grid stable. Your base load cannot come from solar or wind, it is literally impossible, this is why we use the term “base load”.
Who's going to invest though, when an accident in an entirely different country caused by issues your reactor might not even be susceptible to can easily get your project shut down by the fleeting winds of public opinion?
Excuse my ignorance but I'm wondering how difficult/feasible would it be to have all CO2 captured from burning coal etc and thus making them zero emission.
For me, what emerges from this story is the lack of anticipation on the part of the French government. For years, nuclear power was discredited because it was not environmentally friendly, so we shut down power plants, and now we have to refabricate them? All this makes no sense. Moreover, the production of a nuclear power plant is very long, how are we going to do it in the meantime?
Wasn't many of the reactors shut down in Europe in need of being decommissioned anyway? You shouldn't run a nuclear reactor forever and ever, and most of the reactors in Europe are quite old.
I know there are cases of decommissioning too early, or even a reactor that was fully built but not even started operation (I think Tom Scott had a video on that?), but I don't think that's the common case.
many nuclear reactors in a lot of countries also have very low yields compared to modern reactors. (for instance, most nuclear reactors in the netherlands have been disbanded because they provided little power)
Nuclear has been in a holding pattern for years in France while they waited to see if the EPR unit being built at Flamanville 3 would work out.
There was also a scandal a few years ago when the state-owned nuclear construction company Areva acquired Le Creusot Forge. It turned out that there had been a decades long coverup of weaknesses in the steel forged there for nuclears plants, and falsification of documents.
I completely fail to understand why some think France didn't try to build new reactors for decades. This is not true! We tried , however it is a running disaster.
At the current consumption, uranium will only last 80 years, with the new surge for nuclear plants, will not even last 25
thorium won't last much more, and it's not even viable at this point, this seems like a desperate attempt to maintain the power consumption per capita for some more years before the inevitable collapse.
That's not true. We can use breeder reactors to produce more fissile material. Also, the "80 years" estimate does not include uranium reserves that are not currently being exploited. There is plenty of uranium in the ocean and it is constantly being replanished from the ground.
I interpret your sarcasm with amusement, but also depression. it's really sad to see how Germany turned away from nuclear evergy. It seems like the 3 main soures are now:
Coal should be deprecated already. Renewables are dependent on environmental effects, in particular solar doesn't work in emergency situations such as volcano eruptions rendering the sky dark. For oil, we depend on third parties, of which we know that they do not have our best interests at heart.
It is depressing to see the political situations on these metrics, especially the idea which gets pushed now, which claims that everything will be alright if we just optimize our energy consumption. It ain't gonna happen. People won't meaningfully reduce their energy-consumption, at least not in a way that would justify the use of fossil fuels.
So what are we left with? Nuclear is the only good bet you could make right now, while waiting out on fusion.
edit: I often think of this meme which goes around, talking about the fact that people are much more willing to donate to a single child in need, rather than a group of children who equally need help. People are prone to take action when they feel like their individual action makes an impact.
I feel like this is similar to the fossil fuels - vs - nuclear debate. We know, that about 20mil ppl die every single year due to air pollution. We also know, that a very small, countable number of people died of nuclear accidents, in the complete history of humanity, ever, in total.
Yet we seem to think that the few nuclear accident's fatalities are worse than the ones caused by air pollution. Why? Because we are in some way biased to give more meaning to individual events, rather than rates of change that are around us. And it'll break our backs if we don't carefully examine the problem at hand.
You forgot imported gas, but has the same problems as Oi, maybe worse because the conflicting party is geographically "around the corner" instead of on the other side of the globe.
Germanys relationship with Nuclear power had been one with Tons of absurdity from the get to go. To name a few examples (in no specific order):
- When West Germany decided where they should (temporary) store nuclear waste they had a list of potential abandon mines. While this list wasn't quite up to modern standards it was well thought out. But in the end they choose a mine which not only wasn't on the list, but was known to not be well suited. Reason: Pettiness, east Germany had just done so too, so they choose a mine at the border to east Germany.
- The Anti-Nuclear Power movement in West Germany was partially sponsored and instigated by East Germany (through so where most non-small movements).
- after Fukushima plans to stop using Nuclear Power where moved up costing the State millions due to existing contracts and being questionable. I mean the danger of Atom power had been well understood at that point in question, Fukushima didn't change this, nor did it unearth any (not already well known) huge flaws. So this asks the question if it is so important why wasn't it started years earlier, if it isn't why move so abrupt?
- Germany loves importing nuclear power, not only from France but also from other countries with lower safety standards of which the reactors aren't that far of Germany (geologically seen).
Each and every nation connected to the European supergrid imports when needed and exports when possible, because it is much more efficient than trying hard to maintain autonomy. The is eases balancing production (which may originate from anywhere) with consumption.
Here Germany often acts as a provider for Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Switzerland (which also may provide it to other needing nations).
Well it may depress you even more that I didn't even expect constructive feedback like yours when I pulled in Germany into this discussion (it is the Elephant in the European Grid-Operators-Room anyways).
> 1. Coal
Yes, from Poland
> 2. Renewables
Yes, definetly
> Solar
Already plans underway to force every new home to have solar panels on its roof, regardless of the direction of the gabel and regardless how non-significant solar energy is in Germany anyways. Existing home-owners love the idea of increasing construction costs for future home-owners...
> Wind
Already plans underway to massively increase density of windmills per km, regardless that the existing mills already are turned off for most of the year (because it would melt the grid to keep them running), regardless that we're chopping down huge amounts of trees to make room for them, regardless of the environmental impact of planting unremovable kilo-tons of concrete footing into the ground
> Ocean Currents
No, for two reasons. One: Maintenance costs make this technology inefficient (rust). Two: Since we're world champions in moral soundness our whole tidal-range-gifted coastline is deemed a national park and as such is forever excluded from any such infrastructure work
> 3. imported oil
Already doing that.
I fear, unless there is some crucial pain of whatever sorts on behalf of the average German, our nomenclatura will continue to proceed with the current polciy of "nearshoring responsibility". Because:
> It ain't gonna happen. People won't meaningfully reduce their energy-consumption
German consumers still don't do that, despite paying the highest electricity bills in the developed world (almost twice of what the French pay). Apparently we can still afford to kick down the can (or rather to kick it across the border).
> German consumers still don't do that, despite paying the highest electricity bills in the developed world (almost twice of what the French pay).
No (France .32, Germany .19), and this comparison isn't sound because the financial models differ: Germany finances its transition by taxes on energy, and France mainly finances it thanks to other taxes (the consolidated tax burden is way higher in France).
Sorry, your price link is contradicting you. Meanwhile you've left out that aside from energy-taxation, Germans already are having the highest income-tax and social-security costs of the developed world as well. France must have some very elaborate scheme hiding this great price-equalizer.
> in particular solar doesn't work in emergency situations such as volcano eruptions rendering the sky dark.
I'm not familiar with this. Is this a common problem in Germany? Are southern states like Baden-Württemberg more afflicted or less compared to more northern ones like Schleswig-Holstein?
No, it is a hypothesis of mine, that a large volcano eruption may disrupt the function of solar within a large area that was affected and which depends on solar energy. A particular example may be
I don't think nuclear is much more resistant against forces of nature than solar/wind are... An INES level 7 accident in France could cause a similar outage in France's nuclear capacity (similar to Japan's nuclear lost decade). Or massive droughts could cause nationwide nuclear outages due to a lack of cooling water. Having a mix of nuclear/solar/wind with hydrogen as a "battery" in an EU super grid seems like a good way to mitigate the risks.
No, but winter is. Inclination of the earth means solar produces considerably less energy in winter and this is even more prevalent in far northern/southern latitudes. Also cloud coverage can drastically reduce solar output.
The problem for doing this large scale if the right of way for the HVDC lines. I'm watching this on a smaller scale in Massachusetts, where Maine voters are blocking a HVDC link to Hydro Quebec. But I think this is a game between established interests.. in this case NextEra funded the ballot question and advertising, I think because they lost out on their SeaLink project (HVDC to Seabrook nuclear power plant).
Thanks for that, I really wish everybody could stop classifying the burning of biomass as "renewable" in these discussions. Yes, I understand that it's part of the carbon cycle, but burning it still results in more CO2 in the air than before. In other words, it's a net negative for carbon sequestration.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously with this comment. We ban accounts that do that. Please review the rules and stick to them from now on.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
In recent years, the collaboration between France and Germany in energy production was very beneficial. There are times, when Germany does import electricity from France, this is increasing the profitability of the nuclear reactors, as they can be run at a higher percentage of their capacity, which generally is larger than the French requirements. To be able to follow the varying requirements of the grid, they usually run at 75% load on average. Selling surplus capacity is very attractive then. On the other side, there are times when surplus renewable energy is very welcome in France, when the reactory are struggling to keep up with demand, e.g. when they are low on cooling capacity due to low waters. Germany is still a net electricity exporter.
Germany "exports" as much as in "dumping excess energy onto it's neighbouring countries grids to keep its own grid from melting" – which is why we run the worst electricity export business in the world, having to pay our neighbours money as they aren't taking it for free.
It’s cool for the neighbours though, especially france which is a historical exporter (owing to its stable and relatively efficient nukes). When germany pays you 5c to take a kWh off their grid and italy 30 to get one there's good money to be made if your grid can cope.
> On the other side, there are times when surplus renewable energy is very welcome in France, when the reactory are struggling to keep up with demand, e.g. when they are low on cooling capacity due to low waters.
That’s usually not true fwiw, germany tends to export when nobody needs the electricity e.g. fair weather with high winds, especially week-ends.
And it’s not so much exporting as dumping, german electricity prices regularly go negative because winds crush the grid and they need to shift it so they don’t melt.
The “collaborative” aspect is that france has a large and resilient grid well connected to less provisioned southern neighbors (wholesale prices in spain and italy tend to be quite high), so they can arbitrate and profit some.
But they also must, because continental europe is a synchronous grid so if germany melts down it fucks up the entire continent.
I have been watching https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE?wind=true&solar=false for past 2 days...
Winds weak, yet even when electricity was expensive yesterday around 6PM, Germany was pushing to France, mostly coal generated electricity...
Someone cares to explain?
Hehe, Russia's just for heating. France for everything else. Poland, Hungary and Greece do our border checks. America does our defense. China is our only customer left and all our "dirty jobs" are done by Eastern Europeans.
If that's what it takes to be morally sound - then bring it on destiny, I say, bring it on!
Edit: This a German's attempt at sarcasm, please indugle me!
> I get German Greens have a very specific agenda for historical reasons, but sheesh.
Germany has been ruled by the CDU for the last 16 years so I'm not sure what exactly the Greens have to do with the current energy policies of Germany?
My knowledge is as a foreigner, but I was under the impression that the Greens and FDP have both been prospective kingmakers in the last several federal elections, given the math and split between the CDU/CSU and SPD?
And I'd assume that as the center, courting interests important to their voters is of outsized importance to the larger parties, in an attempt to peel off votes?
I see how you can get that impression from the outside. But for the first three Merkel administrations the CDU/CSU very firmly ruled out any coalition with the Greens, which were somewhat left-ish at the time. In that timeframe they undid most of the energy policies ("Ausstieg aus dem Atomausstieg") enacted by the SPD-Greens coalition of 1998-2005, and then later reversed parts of that because public support for nuclear energy collapsed even in the center-right part (CDU, CSU, FDP) of the political spectrum in 2011 due to Fukushima. Some call it "Ausstieg aus dem Ausstieg aus dem Atomausstieg". It's far more expensive than the original nuclear exit plan - pretty much a golden parachute for nuclear plant operators, and also caused a significant ramp-up in coal.
You're right though that before the final Merkel administration the Greens, the CDU/CSU and the FDP had talks, which ultimately failed because the FDP passed the CSU (the right-wing regional appendix to the CDU) on the right, which was a bit too much for the Greens, which at the time largely occupied the same center-ish position they hold today, having shifted right considerably in the time between 2005 and 2017.
Overall the impact of the Greens party has been very small on the Merkel administrations, however, some parts of the green movement (which is not closely tied to the Greens party) in Germany are the majority opinion in Germany (especially when it comes to a heavy anti nuclear stance) and that's sufficient to drive Merkel policy making. It's also important to note here that Germany has a very strong NIMBY attitude, so while the majority "wants" green energy, they don't want any of the infrastructure in sight.
I'd also like to point out a fundamental difference between Bundestag culture and US Capitol culture. There are bi-partisan bills in the Capitol, but in the Bundestag it is customary for the ruling parties to unconditionally veto drafts introduced by other parties - exceptions are rare. Almost all votes in the Bundestag are under Fraktionszwang i.e. MPs deviating from the party line won't get on the election list next time around, so don't have a safe seat any more (because parties in Germany can't literally force their MPs to vote their way, they can only "incentivize" it).
> the Greens, which were somewhat left-ish at the time.
You mean they aren't any more?!?
No, not being sarcastic: international news media hasn't reported on that, or if they did, I missed it. So where are they now -- center-left, center-center, center-right...? And by how much? (I doubt they've gone far-right, right?)
Thanks for taking the time to write this out! Politics is so intricate that there's always more nuance than one can get from international news. And yet, despite all the variations, most people seem to accept that their country's version of democracy is the only possible option. To me, it seems natural to be fascinated by its different shapes in different places. E.g. Fraktionszwang, which is an entirely different approach than the US-style whipping (i.e. encouraging allegiance, but at most only threatening to support a primary challenger from the same party, and typically accomplished more through favor-trading).
I'm in the middle of Dark on Netflix, and even as a single perspective it's felt enlightening in how it poses the German everyman in relation to the nuclear energy industry. In a way that feels very different to even US perspectives (my country).
In your opinion, would it be fair to say that Chernobyl and then the Cold War drumbeat of nuclear weapons use were the main historical anti-nuclear motivators? And then Fukushima stirred up that present-but-latent thinking in the modern zeitgeist?
I guess the nuance I'm most interested but confused about is how Fukushima triggered such an apparent breakdown in nuclear support in the center-right, and so quickly? Was there pre-existing anti-nuclear sentiment there too? Or was it more about pro-coal sentiment? Or something else entirely?
Yes, opposition of nuclear energy in Germany is historically tied to the peace movement and opposition to foreign powers deploying their nukes on their bases in Germany. Chernobyl was definitely another catalyst here. Though no new nuclear construction has taken place since the early 80s already. Fukushima likely felt very relevant again, because Japan is seen as a highly advanced country and the Japanese are considered extremely diligent in Germany. Parts of the Fukushima plant were also pretty much the same age as many operational German plants at the time, and their reactors are a Western design so the "Soviets don't know squat how to build a safe reactor" excuse that comes up with Chernobyl doesn't have any traction. Overall the nuclear situation in Japan was seen as generally analogous to the nuclear situation in Germany: "The Japanese just had an accident, and we're like them and don't want an accident, so let's shut the reactors down."
Politically, things have become far more convoluted in recent years with large parts of the green spectrum becoming more and more critical of "radiation" in particular (cellular networks, wifi, microwaves, anything nuclear) and entire branches of science in general (nuclear research, obviously, but also pharmaceutics, medicine, biology and others).
As far as the Green party is concerned, historically it had two wings ("fundis" and "realos", the former being the fundamentalists, the latter being realpolitikers), which in principle would both count as sort of left, but in practice the fundis stayed more or less left-ish, while the realos migrated to the right. The SPD-Greens coalition was enabled by the realos wing. Similarly, the realos are now the de-facto ruling wing inside the party since 2018, which is why a SPD-Greens-FDP coalition is possible in the first place.
Coal is quite a difficult topic. Most coal is strip-mined in Germany, which causes the expropriation of entire villages and small cities. That's not a talking point in politics. A state PM illegally dissolving protests against strip mining isn't even a scandal. However, if for example The Left publicly ponders whether expropriation of apartment houses and conversion to social housing in cities could be one way to solve the housing crisis, that's a major scandal and causes them to not pass the 5 % threshold. That might give you a feel for the standing of coal. Despite only employing around 20-25k people in Germany, maintaining coal jobs has become basically an iron curtain protecting coal.
To circle back to the Green party, it's noteworthy that their party program is not even close to a program in line with the 1.5 °C target.
The comparison between Germany and Japan as precision industrial experts makes sense. I'd never thought about it in terms of "our national identity shares this core aspect with their national identity."
As the quip goes in the US, 'The left is a big tent party (accepts all sorts) and so is constantly debating itself. Whereas the right expects everyone to fall in line with the party platform.' But recent presidencies challenged the truth of that.
Coal serves similarly here, for a single reason: votes in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Were those not necessary states to forge a path the presidency, no one would care about the topic. But since they are, even negative statements about coal are couched in very careful language.
IMHO, it's actually more about the ideal of a "coal miner" than it is about actual coal mining. Most of the people supporting it will never work a day in a mine: and nor will many others, with the amount of automation these days. But why let facts get in the way of a good political story? :)
I was happy to see the UK's push at COP26 for annual subsequent meetings to examine and refine nationally determined contributions [0]. Hopefully that will put some "Words are cheap, but we don't actually intend to follow through" countries under more scrutiny.
Nigel Farage was never in power in the UK either, and yet the very risk of losing enough of their voters to UKIP made the Tories embrace the Brexit referendum.
I imagine adversaries of the West are having the biggest laugh at us voluntarily giving up key commodity production abilities in the name of combatting climate change.
The historical problem of Russia is inability of exporting any produce other than raw materials, on account of having Europe as neighbour which can produce anything easier and often cheaper.
But now, with the carbon tax and gas prices in EU, I wonder if Russian mfg capacity will suddently become competitive.
The funniest thing would be Europe pricing itself out of Russian oil due to carbon tax, and then buying now-cheap goods from Russia made based on affordable oil.
There's been serious talks about carbon border adjustments, that is, levying an extra import tax on products from countries that don't have a sufficiently ambitious domestic climate change policy, so probably not.
This strikes me as pretty optimistic given that exactly this kind of carbon dodge has been going on for years (e.g. Europe and the US importing goods from East Asia and other countries running on dirtier fuels)
What are you referring to? The list of industrial accidents? I don’t think it’s fair to criticize this without comparing to the record of a non nuclear facility of similar scale.
Injuries and death are sadly a part of life at all large industrial plants.
The only way nuclear will come back is serious practical next generation reactors. We could have built these since the 70s and didn't. Rather waste money on fusion and renewables.
Based on first principles, nuclear is the cheapest. Its historical path dependency that it isn't.
Fission breeder reactors have the potential to use the least amount of land, be the safest form of energy, have the lowest cost of fuel (essentially free)and use the least amount of total resources (steel, concrete and so on).
These could be used for all kinds of applications, including creating of medical isotopes, nuclear batteries, industrial heat and power.
Non if this is new, these insights are from the 70s and in 50-100 years people will look back and ask 'why were these people don't doing it? They had all the technology, it makes no sense'.
As Europe's dependence on polluting coal and Russian gas increases, France is making the right move. I hope other major European countries will follow suit.
Alstom hasn’t been purchased by a US company AFAIK.
Are you talking about the sale of its power sector to GE in 2014? It is mostly about turbines, not the nuclear aspect, which is more typically under the expertise of Areva NC / Orano Cycle <https://www.orano.group/en>.
This is great news for the Chinese subcontractors who'll get to do the parts we forgot about.
At least we'll have a debate topic during next year election cycle that is not immigration or Islam - that will be a change.
The job of the nuclear security agency will be tricky next year : they'll have to double their effort ("The President does not want an accident making the news") but also stay quieter than usual ("The President does not want any kind of small incident making the news".)
They're independant in theory, of course, and they want to do their job well, but they have biases and bosses who have bosses, etc... I doubt they'll let anything big slip just for électoral purpose, but the scrutiny on their job (especially from the left wing press) will be interesting to see...
Smart man. I can't believe I'm saying this about _Macron_. We _have to_ figure out a way to build reactors cheaply and safely, and you can't do that without the political will, unfortunately. If you could, electricity would be "too cheap to meter" by now already.
The political will didn't fail. The EPR reactor in Flamanville is a work-in-progress since 2007. Albeit it was scheduled to start in 2012 it isn't yet. It will cost at least 19.1 billions euros (initial budget: 3.4 billions euros). No governments pulled the plug on this disaster. How exactly isn't it "political will"?
Political will would be to commit to building _many_ reactors in the future, cheaply and safely. Cost overruns are a thing because this is still exotic, bespoke engineering, and it doesn't have to be. In fact, if nuclear is to succeed, it _can't_ be.
As usual ramping it up implies to build one (the 'tête de série') or at max a few ones, then to launch series. We always did it this way.
Since 2005 4 projects were launched (France: Flamanville, Finland: Olkiluoto, China: Taishan, UK: Hinkley Point). The two first ones are ongoing disasters. Taishan was late and overbudget. Hinkley Point announced, 2 years into its launch, that it will be overschedule and overbudget.
In such a context launching now a huge amount of projects isn't realistic. When a project is late due to a lack of skills and project-management abilities (there is a report about this, the "rapport Folz"), launching 6 new projects may not be a terrific idea.
As far as I know China didn't announce anything. Where is the official announcement?
The source is a Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... ) which states that the boss of Chine General Power corp. announced his plans 200GW for 2035, nothing more. Admitting that it is an official governmental announcement (it doesn't seem so(?)) and given that China already has 50GW, that's maybe 100GW new (way less than 150 standard reactors).
Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), and 1200GW planned for 2030. In 2020 China added 71,6GW windturbine power. Even considering the load factors the picture is pretty clear.
Is the _underscores_ around words supposed to signify something? Or am I just using the wrong browser to view HN and it's not rendering or something. Sorry if this is an obtuse question I'm new here.
Slack and WhatsApp do it, too. I bet also in most of the other major messengers around right now (Signal, Matrix, Telegram). It's a thing in MarkDown, as well. Now that I think about it, some of the only places I type prose where that's not what surrounding underscores do, are HN and various Apple programs (mail, notes, et c.)
[EDIT] For that matter, we all did the same stuff in ascii for years. Asterisks for emphasis (bold, now, in many places), underscores for underlining (which, in the case of, say, book titles, is better represented as italics if you can print italics instead, so I'd guess that's where the "underscore = italic" thing comes from)
Probably habit on the part of the OP from other markup languages, to show emphasis. HN uses asterisks * for italics/emphasis: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
Why would France, which has specifically built its civilian nuclear fleet for independence from the US, want to rely on the American company Westinghouse?
France already did so. Their current reactor architecture (pressurized-water) was Westinghouse's (France bought a license in the 1970's). They even coined a partnership, see https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/cen-v054n002.p005
Westinghouse is bankrupt many times over, if I was a shareholder I would be busted.
EPR was designed by followers of Amory Lovins that wanted to make a reactor which is unconstructable at any cost and schedule.
They tried building an EPR in Finland and it is a decade behind schedule and nobody cares because the people working on it have the best paying job they ever had.
They did get an EPR running in China but had fuel damage right away.
AP1000 is running in China for real and will be running at Vogtle in Georgia USA next year. There have been so many ownership changes that I would have said AP1000 was a Japanese design 10 years ago, now it is effectively a Chinese design.
It seems this is the biggest energy story of the year. The comeback of nuclear energy.
https://smallcaps.com.au/china-supercharge-uranium-race-150-...
The HN discussion on the China story:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29151741
Japan reactivating nuclear reactors:
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210501/p2a/00m/0op/00...
UK. Rolls-Royce gets funding to develop mini nuclear reactors:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59212983