Do we really have to put these plants on critical natural resources? I realize the plant is already on Lake Michigan.
For some reason it seems like there is very little middle ground between “Nuclear power is dangerous. We shouldn’t have any.” And “Nuclear power isn’t dangerous. It poses no threat.” Let’s hedge our bets here.
This states governor is the one against Enbridge keeping a pipeline in Lake Michigan, citing environmental concerns despite no prior issues and a deal to sure-up the existing pipeline. In the case of the pipeline, there is no alternative to crossing Lake Michigan. Not so for a nuclear plant.
Edit: point is being proven in the replies. Why so much hostility to safeguarding our environment against the worst case? Why not place it somewhere where an accident wouldn’t have such devastating consequences?
I'm pro nuclear, but it's also the only power generation system we have where the risk remains long after the power is generated. Calling nuclear safe seems unfair, given many millenias of time it's byproducts will have to be dealt with across.
I don't think that's really accurate. We can reprocess most nuclear waste into forms that are far less long-term radioactive, and a few hundred years is nothing considering the lasting effects of pollution from coal and gas, or how long it would take for all those decommissioned solar panels or wind turbines.
We can potentially reprocess used nuclear fuel, but that has so many problems.
The reactors are much more advanced designs, and the US and much of the world has been focused the opposite direction: on very simple, very safe, lower cost designs. Making a fast neutron reactor is just a different class of beast, and it's unclear where the appetite is for it. (Which is a shame.) Japan, China, India, and Russia are the only countries to have started new breeder reactors projects since Franc'es last reactor Superhenix in 1985.
Most breeder reactors use a reprocessing mechanism that is somewhat akin to the enrichment used for weapons. It's goal is to extract the good & enriched stuff & leave the rest of the fission product out (which still have hundreds of years to be dealt with). There's still justifiable hesitancy about developing such technology further. Even if we feel like we can use it safely in X Y and Z countries, once the technology becomes more proven (particularly if it can be shown to be cost effective) it's hard to imagine it won't become more available, and that has a real & scary risk.
Ask yourself how many of the above countries that started breeder reactors do we want making new nuclear weapons? And note how many have kicked out nuclear weapons inspectors (Russia, China).
One of my favorite candidate designs was the Integral Fast Reactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor), began in 1984 as a faster fast reactor which was considerably safer by default, and which was capable of a lower-refinement (lower proliferation concern) burning of already spent fuel (including a wide range of medium-lived/longer-lived transuranic wastes). But almost all indicators are that we try for simpler & dumber designs, not to improve & refine what we could do.
I also think it's a huge disservice only identify short half-life products as dangerous. Yes they have the most immediate threat, but we generate plenty of other wastes that are severely scary, particularly among the transuranics, and plenty of even the "low" nuclear wastes will quickly ruin an area & spread if mistakes happen. The variety of different nuclearly active chemical wastes we have to deal with is vast (those pesky transuranics). I'd love to be talked down here some, I think this is one place I'm best able to be convinced with good science, but my reading of information like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Waste_reductio... is that there is just so much to be dealt with, such a pesky variety. And yes fast reactors help a lot here, if we can deploy them at scale effectively, but again I just question whether on a cost basis that will happen.
I agree with you in principle that nuclear has amazing potential to be handled well. But in fact, most of the world takes the shortest route they can & thinks nothing of how much or what kind of waste is generated. It's a network externality, foisted off onto the government to deal with. Even in France, the one beacon of breeder reactors, there's been scant investment in improving iterating or refining what mechanisms they have; continuing to use one centralized PUREX refining center to do most of the work. Meanwhile we have few positive indicators elsewhere about good nuclear. IFR derived designs like PRISM, S-PRISM and Versatile Test Reactor have repeatedly stalled.
To provide some counter to my own general thread, Japan has shown again and again a willingness to try & try hard that I respect. They recently started working with TerraPower on a PRISM/IFR based design that could potentially go somewhere. But this is a faint ray of hope in a gloomy low-tech unglorious nuclear landscape. https://neutronbytes.com/2022/02/03/terrapower-teams-up-with...https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35430993
> Ask yourself how many of the above countries that started breeder reactors do we want making new nuclear weapons? And note how many have kicked out nuclear weapons inspectors (Russia, China).
This to me is the single biggest reason to pursue the tech. The genie is out of the bottle.
Who do you think should pursue it? Governments? Public/private enterprise? How should it happen? Who is going to pursue very very expensive speculative possibly interesting technology? Should we pursue the China/Russia/India pro-proliferation version, or should we follow a profileration-safe and risk-safe'er IFR version?
Right now there's not success. To say the genie is out of the bottle ignores how new these experimental Russian, Chinese, & Indian reactor projects are. Most are not online. How well they operate now or will operate as they really go online unknown. How refined their refinement is is unknown. How much would these authoritarian entities share with the rest of the world? If heavy-industrialists like GE Hitachi & others start cranking out ultra-successful PUREX breeder reactors, find how to make them cost efffective, and then really many many nations start having these capabilities, doesn't that worry you, just a bit?
> ignores how new these experimental Russian, Chinese, & Indian reactor projects are.
The Russian projects I know of are 60+ years old now. They've been plenty successful.
> How much would these authoritarian entities share with the rest of the world? If heavy-industrialists like GE Hitachi & others start cranking out ultra-successful PUREX breeder reactors, find how to make them cost efffective, and then really many many nations start having these capabilities, doesn't that worry you, just a bit?
Not any more than it concerns me that the nations that already have these capabilities do. The non-authoritarian entities of today are the authoritarians of tomorrow and vice-versa. Eventually, this technology will make it out there in a cost-efficient and easily-reproduced manner, it's mostly just a matter of time.
And even if some less-than-friendly nations get access to this, and use it to make nuclear weapons, and then deploy them, unless we're talking about the deployment of a world-ending number of nuclear weapons (an arsenal that would need to really rival the current major nuclear powers) should not lead to a global nuclear exchange. Or more correctly, if it does lead to a global nuclear exchange, we deserve it for being so stupid as to escalate like that.
You're overestimating the risks of nuclear waste. Properly processed, it's in the form of a tough ceramic that can't leak and is stable for millions of years. Unless you start grinding it and inhaling it, it's not going to kill anyone.
> Properly processed, it's in the form of a tough ceramic that can't leak and is stable for millions of years.
Is proper processing free or profitable? Nuclear is already unprofitable, in fact, in the history of nuclear energy, it has never been profitable. This is why it requires nations to build nuclear power plants, and investors are only interested in taking the money from selling electricity and not in building the plants, storing the waste, security for storing the waste, being responsible for decommissioning old power plants, and thus it is highly unlikely they'd be interested in paying for properly processing nuclear waste into tough ceramics.
Pro-nukes love to waste their time arguing about this and that. But they only need to do one thing to have all the nuclear power they can use: make it profitable. Nothing else matters, not NIMBYS, not the safety, not the waste, only economic viability.
It's included in the price of operation. Is the processing of CO₂ emissions included in coal or gas generation? Of course not, because it's dumped in the atmosphere.
> Nuclear is already unprofitable
French electricity is cheaper than Germany's. Also the government has been taking EDF's money for decades to cover budget shortfalls, so it's not even subsidised, quite the opposite in fact.
It's really hard to take that site seriously when it considers the impact of "a small number of people dying in accidents in supply chains – ranging from helicopter collisions with turbines; fires during the installation of turbines or panels; and drownings on offshore wind sites"
...but thinks that Chernobyl was only responsible for 433 deaths, and they fell asleep at their computers before considering the carbon footprint of uranium mining and enrichment (and unlike materials used in permanent magnets and batteries, which everyone loves to get excited about - uranium is not recycled, nor can it be at least in the US without enormous infrastructure and policy changes.)
That's how hard they had to reach for "deaths caused by wind and solar" - helicopters crashing into wind turbines.
You can point to "research" like this all you like. Power companies in the US are shutting down nuclear power plants because they're not economical and installed wind/solar capacity is outpacing the shutdowns capacity-wise 6:1, and growing.
Why? Because solar and wind cost a fraction of what nuclear does, and are getting cheaper every year. Meanwhile, nuclear is getting more expensive, and that's with the enormous subsidization of the entire nuclear energy program because of its importance to "defense" for weapons and propulsion.
> There's far worse than slighly warm clean water going into Lake Michigan.
And if a "once in a thousand years" storm (which is happening every few years) happens, and the plant does a Fukashima, and pollutes the largest fresh-water lake with radioactive waste, rendering a water supply for tens of millions of people undrinkable, then what?
> ...but thinks that Chernobyl was only responsible for 433 deaths ...
I can't say I've ever seen 433? About 50-ish people died from the acute effects of the disaster and over time, the number came in around 4000 according to UNSCEAR.
Note for comparison that coal kills 24,000 in the US each year, and no other nuclear power accident in history has killed anyone. Maybe 1 person in Fukushima, depending on how you do the attribution. Zero at Three Mile Island.
The Bangqiao dam killed 240,000 people in one fell swoop but nobody holds that against hydro. We assume we've learned from that and engineered a better dam. We seem to have different standards for the spicy rocks for some reason.
> ... and they fell asleep at their computers before considering the carbon footprint of uranium mining and enrichment (and unlike materials used in permanent magnets and batteries, which everyone loves to get excited about - uranium is not recycled, nor can it be at least in the US without enormous infrastructure and policy changes.)
Err, no, that's factored into the numbers. It still has a lower carbon footprint than wind and solar, let alone storage. Because uranium is so incredibly energy dense.
> Why? Because solar and wind cost a fraction of what nuclear does, and are getting cheaper every year.
Not for the same profile of generation, no. A pure wind and solar grid plus storage would cost dramatically more than nuclear does today. In fact even a 90% renewable grid plus storage is dramatically more expensive that nuclear today. So yeah, an incomplete solution is cheaper than a complete solution, I guess.
> And if a "once in a thousand years" storm (which is happening every few years) happens, and the plant does a Fukashima, and pollutes the largest fresh-water lake with radioactive waste, rendering a water supply for tens of millions of people undrinkable, then what?
The bet is there won’t be an accident. Assuming there won’t be an accident is not hedging. In the event of an accident, the cost is massive. Why risk the largest fresh water system in the world?
> The data is clear, nuclear is the safest, cleanest, lowest-carbon and most reliable form of energy we have.
By your own citation, solar is safer. I realize graphs can be tricky to read, but come on. The fact that nuclear requires so much concrete also means solar and wind use less carbon. And you're missing a data point: nuclear is also the most expensive form of energy ever conceived.
> By your own citation, solar is safer. I realize graphs can be tricky to read, but come on.
I would consider them equally safe, and both the safest form of energy. If you really want to get technical this graph excludes rooftop solar which has about 20X the fatality rate of industrial solar in terms of deaths per TWh. [2] But I don't really care, they're equally the safest form of energy.
> The fact that nuclear requires so much concrete also means solar and wind use less carbon.
This is factored into the calculations I linked and no, they don't.
> And you're missing a data point: nuclear is also the most expensive form of energy ever conceived.
Again, not accurate. Solar and wind are bursty and sometimes just drop to zero. Solar at night or when it's cloudy, and wind when it's not windy.
If you actually want a 100% renewable grid you need storage. And adding this storage makes wind + solar + storage combo significantly more expensive than nuclear. In fact even a 90-something% renewable grid with storage is more expensive than nuclear. [1]
Also there's nothing intrinsically expensive about nuclear, you put the spicy rocks in the water and it gets hot. The cost is all up-front in plant construction and as the DOE's head of the loans program Jigar Shah says, there's an easy path to reducing that cost: stop building one-off plants in each location, design cookie cutter plants and drop them down where it makes sense. The actual cost of uranium input into a nuclear plant is $0.005/kWh.
I have nothing against renewables, why would I? They'll be part of the solution. But let's at least have an honest conversation about the facts.
> > And you're missing a data point: nuclear is also the most expensive form of energy ever conceived.
> Again, not accurate.
But it is.
The generation of electricity through nuclear power plants in the United States cost 29.13 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour in 2021.[1]
> Also there's nothing intrinsically expensive about nuclear,
Oh, but there certainly is. The historically high cost of nuclear power electricity is largely due to capital costs (that you would be paying for whether the plants produced electricity or not), and because plants in the US have often not been designed to ramp up and down easily, they tend to be operated continuously. It takes $10B before the first watt of electricity is generated. Uranium costs a fortune. Waste storage is astoundingly expensive due to amount of time it must be stored, not to mention the cost of security for that storage.
Meanwhile,
a typical solar system in the U.S. can produce electricity at the cost of $0.06 to $0.08 per kilowatt-hour.[2]
Cool. So when the nuclear industry offers a 40 year contract for all the energy a 1GW nuclear plant produces with no liability cap, fully funded decomissioning insured against bankruptcy, and fully funded cleanup of mines payable in full after it has been operating for 1 year at >92% CF for $3 billion we'll know you're telling the truth about it costing <$30/MWh.
Until then it's just lies and whining to demand handouts.
Nuclear power plants have to be next to a large body of water because they tend to overheat if something goes wrong. If they do overheat, they have to suck in large volumes of water very quickly to cool themselves down in order to avoid a runaway reaction.
This of course adds another danger to nuclear plants -- flooding. Because the plant is next to a large body of water, there is always danger of the water going up and flooding the pumps, which usually break down and fail to pump water. Then ironically the plant will overheat for lack of cooling while being flooded. This is what happened to Fukushima.
This is what would have happened in Missouri just several months after Fukushima, but we got lucky then -- the plant flooded and the pumps failed but by pure luck the plant was shut off for refueling when the flood happened. [1] Most people do not realize how close the USA was to having its own Fukushima.
Anyways the point of this rant is that there really isn't much room for compromise. Nuclear power is just not safe, and it is really stupid in the presence of ever more affordable renewables.
> Nuclear power plants have to be next to a large body of water
With the one exception of Arizona’s Palo Verde generating station. It’s the US’s largest power plant (by actual production, not nameplate capacity) and it is the world’s only nuclear power station not located near a body of water. It’s right in the middle of the desert. It’s cooled by evaporating waste water from Phoenix.
What critical natural resource is the plant currently on? Are you suggesting that "the shoreline of Lake Michigan" is a bad place for a nuclear plant - an industrial facility that uses water, and where continuous supply of water is a mitigation to the most common failure modes?
Let's hedge our bets here - by placing nuclear power plants near abundant sources of water, as the original builders of the Palisades nuclear plant did.
> Do we really have to put these plants on critical natural resources? I realize the plant is already on Lake Michigan.
You mean by the water? I’m hardly an expert on the subject, but pretty sure you need a large water source for a nuclear plant both for the turbines and excess cooling.
It’s easiest to put it near the largest fresh water system in the world. It’s also easiest to use coal and oil. But are these the best options overall?
The pipeline could have gone around Lake Michigan through Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, before crossing back into Michigan and continuing into Canada (it crosses the Great Lakes again in Sarnia too).
I think it makes sense to build the tunnel and continue operating the pipeline, but "no alternative" goes too far, you need to condition it somehow (like no profitable alternative or whatever).
They needed a water supply for cooling, and there aren’t many natural lakes in the midwest.
Also, how bad would it actually be if the plant melted down into the lake? There would be a lot of dilution.
The alternatives in that area included unfiltered trash burning plants back when the nuclear plant was installed. It’s not obvious whether the trash burning plant running for 30-50 years would be worse than a meltdown.
> They needed a water supply for cooling, and there aren’t many natural lakes in the midwest.
Not contesting your actual point about situating the plant, but the midwest has more lakes than any other (similarly sized) region in the US, and particularly with the Great Lakes has access to the largest surface freshwater resource in the world.
Oh man. This brings back memories. I spent a few weeks every summer for 20 years about a mile south of the plant. Before 9/11 you could go down by the warm water discharge, plop down a beach chair and hang out in the 100 degree water. The guards would give you dirty looks but they never bothered anybody.
I don’t know that this plant should be restarted though. They were trying to bury the spent fuel in the sand dunes next door at one point because they were out of space.
Even more recently (10 years ago?) I could see outdoor cement casks for storing the spent fuel.
Nuclear could be great, bit the spent fuel issue, NIMBY problems and insane costs will probably close the door on nuclear energy unfortunately.
We did do that. The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository was constructed but no nuclear waste was actually transported there because of once again, NIMBYs.
None of the European countries "did it" w.r.t. spent fuel, none of those sites are in operation yet. Though Finland is planning to start operation soon, after 7 years of construction and 3.5 billion EUR in construction costs. Searching for what they now consider a suitable site took decades.
Bure is a research project, a model for a real, large-scale, long-term storage site. Which France intends to build there. I'm not sure if they have started? They plan to be finished around 2035-2040, and apparently expect construction to cost between 25 and 30 billion EUR. Initial operation (pilot phase) is expected to occur 2040-2050, if that goes well, regular operation can start.[1] Plans and expectations of huge public projects being what they are.
Spent fuel is currently sent to La Hague, where afaik they store almost all of it in warehouses surrounded by barbed wire, just like everybody else. It'll take decades to move all of it to Bure, or wherever else they decide to put it.
> Which France intends to build there. I'm not sure if they have started?
To my understanding, the tag "research project" has been mainly used to avoid a crowd of NIMBYs from day one. There is already nuclear waste in the tunnels and not in small quantities. It does work and is used for what it has been designed.
Budget is hardly surprising when we talk about a facility supposed to store the garbage of a country that has been running full nuclear for 40 years.
> Spent fuel is currently sent to La Hague, where afaik they store almost all of it in warehouses
Part of it is there are to be recycle in Mox. An other part is to be re-enriched. The rest will very likely be buried underground since the Fast Neutron reactor plans are unlikely to happen any time soon due to short term politics.
This is incredibly dumb. These plants were only designed to run for 40 years. This particular one was extended to 51 years. Restarting it will be very dangerous. Nuclear energy is expensive, dangerous and will only work with massive taxpayer subsidies. But running old plants many years after their designed for lifespans is especially stupid.
Radiation corrodes metals much faster than usual and in ways that are not predictable. It is dangerous to run these things longer than their designed for lifetimes.
Build the crap out of wind and solar where it works and mix in other non carbon generation where you can; preferably distributed resources. Put up long distance DC lines to places that need extra, such as the north in winter. Install storage everywhere. Install smart controls everywhere. Make up for any emergency needs with natural gas plants that are kept operational for that purpose; we can afford a bit of carbon emissions if we eliminate the worst offenders, IMO. Reduce energy use via more efficient devices and laws around efficiency. Help with tax write offs for energy use for low income and tax heavy energy users to pay for it. Take over all utilities nationally and coordinate everything. Reduce shipping by onshoring manufacturing. Pass laws requiring allowing employees to be remote if they choose, for knowledge work. Spend a lot more on transportation infrastructure other than cars. Tax carbon at the source and let the costs trickle down into the worst offenders.
Nuclear is great tech, but isn’t financially viable today in most situations. I would love to see it in the mix above somehow if new designs were cheaper and safer. Also, energy can’t just increase forever. We have to force reductions in use where practical via the means above.
The infrastructure overhaul needed for a full-on changeover to electric would require an investment on the order of the Apollo program and I don't see that happening. Not just from a financial perspective but the engineering as well. Banning petrol cars and gas cookers and praying the rest of the dominoes fall in place isn't going to work.
> The United States spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo between 1960 and 1973, or approximately $257 billion when adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars.
vs.
> The US is spending $369bn on subsidies for green technologies under the Inflation Reduction Act
Yea, I'm not saying it will work, but nuclear isn't going to work either, at this point. This was my ideas for how to do it, and clearly this problem is more complex and harder than just doing it. I figure we'll just continue to drive off the cliff and eventually there will be wars over water and cold climates.
None of these points seem to address the parent’s point which was that restarting a nuclear plant that is much older than its intended lifespan is not safe.
“No more criticisms without solutions” is not a real argument. Obviously criticisms must be considered. And the magnitude of the risks is obviously important.
It sounds like you are arguing nuclear power is expensive, dangerous, and will only work with massive taxpayer subsidies; but we should ignore all of that because we don’t have a viable alternative. I don’t think we should ignore those statements?
That plus the spent fuel pools need to be be continually filled with cool water at all costs otherwise the spent fuel burns and potentially spreads radioactive ash over an area the size of a small state.
> NRC has long mulled whether to compel the nuclear industry to move most of the cooled spent fuel now held in densely packed pools to concrete containers called dry casks. Such a move would reduce the consequences and likelihood of a spent fuel pool fire. As recently as 2013, NRC concluded that the projected benefits do not justify the roughly $4 billion cost of a wholesale transfer. But the national academies's study concludes that the benefits of expedited transfer to dry casks are fivefold greater than NRC has calculated.
Utter insanity. Regulatory capture is a hell of a thing when it comes to nuclear.
This is why I file nuclear power under "nice things" - and we can't have nice things.
Radiation will send high energy particles that may displace metal atoms from their lattices. This may cause weakening, embitterment etc. Also shooting high energy particles at atoms will cause atoms to get into chemical reactions that they would have never gotten into before. This may cause new and unusual forms of rustlike behavior.
It is not predictable because with radiation you are deep in quantum physics territory, and a lot of things depend on chance. Things may be perfectly fine if only isolated atoms are kicked out of their lattices, but if you are unlucky some atoms along a line get kicked out and you get a crack.
Similarly you are not sure exactly what atom will get energized by some high energy electron and what other atom it will react with. Once you get into high energies, you can get a lot of chemical reactions that seemed impossible otherwise, or that nobody has ever thought of. There again usually you get some isolated strange compound. But if you are unlucky you get something that can act as a catalyst for further reactions and spread around like rust.
It's true that it's unpredictable for a single atom, but when you're dealing with a macroscopic object (say, a metal part), it's quite predictable. The law of large numbers helps out quite a bit here (and the number of atoms is very large).
> Once you get into high energies, you can get a lot of chemical reactions that seemed impossible otherwise, or that nobody has ever thought of. There again usually you get some isolated strange compound. There again usually you get some isolated strange compound. But if you are unlucky you get something that can act as a catalyst for further reactions and spread around like rust.
If that were true, we'd all be immune to neutron radiation. It's just there's a lot of stuff between cosmic neutrons and us, and that's where carbon-14 comes from. It's not perfect but at least we're not walking balls of cancer.
Germany, in the meantime, decides to shut down three remaining nuclear plants. No news about major electric storage capacity yet, so I wonder how solar + wind would fare.
Germany is part of the broader European grid, and solar/wind is backed by interconnections to hydro etc etc.
I was just listening to a podcast on battery storage and apparently continental Europe is behind on grid-scale battery installations because the power market design isn’t there to support it yet (as compared to the UK, the USA and particularly the Texas grid, and Australia).
Germany is apparently doing pretty well on “behind the meter” home battery storage, and to be honest as long as there’s storage in the system it’s OK to do it with either 100,000 10kWh home batteries or a gigawatt-hour in a single grid battery facility.
Batteries don’t make a lot of sense for long-duration storage however; for seasonal storage you want some other technology (hydro, hydrogen, demand management etc).
These are the prices for end customers and contain various taxes, surcharges for transmission and various other things. All of these costs are real and it's good to have them as a part of the actual price. You know what it actually costs and it's a good motivation to be energy efficient.
Compare it to France which has the highest market prices in Europe right now [1] (and also last year) but allegedly the customers pay just 22c. It can't work - the nationalization of the EDF was started last year [2] and it posted a 20 billion loss [3]. The true price will be paid one way or the other, through taxes in this case.
The US indeed has a similar cost level but it just puts that out in tax form or takes on more debt. Result: lots of outdated infrastructure and plants like this and companies that leave their mess for tax payers to clean up rather than investing themselves. Like in this case with a nuclear plant that was bought last year and promptly shut down by its new owner. Why would they buy such an old plant at the end of its life?
Now instead of taking the cost of decommissioning it (which costs lots of money) they are now looking to reopen it using public funding. So, they are happy to profit from this deal but not without public funding. The permit is probably less of an issue than finding the hundreds of millions needed to refurbish this plant. Kind of weird if you look at it like that. Until of course you realize that the prospect of public funding was the whole reason for this company to buy this plant. Basically, tax payers and consumers take all the risk. They take the profit. That's how the nuclear business works. Never mind that this plant still needs to be shut down and decommissioned eventually. Who is going to be paying for that?
Well, maybe not right now. Last summer France had 32 of their 56 reactors shut down for unplanned maintenance due to safety concerns. And also do to a lack of cooling water do to the drought. In 2022 France was a net importer of electricity.
Yeah, one year in nearly 40 years of massive nuclear use there was a problem that required maintenance and suddenly Germany's megatons of coal pollution are not a problem. Note that the maintenance is almost completely over (just a few reactors are off), but still.
Also, do you know how many people died in France over 40 years due to a nuclear power accidents? 0.
How many died due to German coal pollution? It's at least in the tens of thousands.
Nonsense. France became a net importer last year [1] because of faulty pipes in a quarter of their plants, and the problems are continuing this year [2]. Their output has been low this year again [3].
My understanding is that that over the period of 2015-2022 Germany has imported anywhere from 2-8 TWh per year from France, which is up to 1.5% of total annual power draw. [1] I don't know if you consider that significant or not.
While the generation is fairly constant, if there is an excess of power (which there historically has been) then you can import a variable portion based on the European grid and electricity market pricing right?
At the same time Germany was exporting to other countries and was overall one of the largest exporters of electricity in Europe. Even France imported from Germany, but overall France exported more.
What people sometimes like to do is take a snapshot at a certain date and time and try to make a broader point, but overall Germany has been a net exporter of electricity for years and years in a row.
The only way you can pretend nuclear is "better for the environment" is if you ignore most of its supply chain and only point a finger to "what comes out of the stack." The fuel supply chain is incredibly energy-intensive, expensive, and environmentally unfriendly, and unlike the materials used for rare-earth magnets and lithium ion batteries which everyone here loves to bleat about...the material is not recycled (nor can it be without significant changes that will take decades) whereas rare earth magnets, lithium ion batteries, and now windmill blades, are all recyclable.
Nuclear has never been economically viable. It's been subsidized, enormously, for close to a century as the stepchild of the "defense" nuclear weapon and propulsion industries. It continues to get more expensive, whereas wind/solar/energy storage are plunging in cost.
Nuclear would also still require energy storage because it can only fulfill base load; nuclear takes days to change power levels, and running at anything other than full capacity drastically impacts its economic viability.
You can point to research all you like. US power companies are buying wind, solar, and energy storage. Not only are they not buying nuclear, they're shutting down plants because they are not economically viable.
It's funny how HN is all "free market!" when it comes to things like renewables and decarbonizing transit (ie "why muh tax dollars going to this?!")...but nobody seems to acknowledge that the nuclear industry is massively subsidized and Biden is proposing throwing billions more at the industry because of lobbying.
Also, that paper was published four years ago, which means it was based on even older data, and the cost of renewables and energy storage is plunging while nuclear goes up in cost...
It's not like France would have excessive 'base load' nuclear generation in the first place. The base load power plants are not designed to respond to demands or serve as reserved capacity.
Renewables don't need more "storage" than nuclear grids, though this is a bafflingly common belief.
See France, for example, which tops up its nuclear grid with gas, hydro, import/exports etc.
Storage only becomes an issue when you get to the last 20% or so of decarbonisation and if you're down at 5% you're better to focus on electrification of fossil fuel using industry than worry about that last 5% of gas used for electricity.
They've been publishing stories like this for years. They'll generally not mention that they are still burning fossil fuels.
You'll notice the headline isn't "Czech Republic runs on 100% carbon free energy", which would be a much more interesting headline.
I'm not sure how to check Czech Republic generation mix at that time but I wouldn't be surprised to see fossil fuels still being burnt for "contractual reasons". (edit: I'm estimating that there was at least 1.5GW of coal generation at the same time this solar was curtailed, so about 10x as much coal being burned as solar curtailed)
But, even if it was curtailed for genuine reasons, that still doesn't mean storage would make financial sense. See France, where they 'curtail' nuclear power. Does that mean they "need" batteries?
"E.ON Hikes Energy Prices 45% As Germany Winds Down Its Last Nuclear Plants". Note that the news title may intentionally muddy the water and I don't have enough knowledge to tell if the price hike and the shutdown of Germany's last nuclear plants have any causal relationship. That said, I know E.ON has already hiked its price due to the Ukrainian war. It looks at least the green energy didn't help enough.
According to the article where I guess that headline came from E.ON even says that the reason is that they cushioned prices last year during the height of the energy crisis and that this is higher prices from wholesale markets from last year coming through.
It's muddying the water. The hikes are for the so called "Grundversorgung" where providers are required by law to provide you with electricity (and gas) basically without a contract. For instance my local provider hiked prices to 42-43 cents for regular customers at end of last year and "Grundversorgung" to 80 cents. I noticed various nuclear lobbyists were very active spreading false news in recent days, these people have no morals.
Also the prices in Germany vary between hundreds of providers, you can get electricity from any one of them. They supply it by purchasing electricity on the market, some had long term contracts to weather the storm last year, some didn't and hiked prices early, some went bankrupt etc. The problem right now often is that it's difficult to switch contracts - my local provider is not taking on new customers, my guess because they are losing money and hoping the situation will improve.
Germany is digging up coal and increasing coal power production short term. They have longer term plans to go green, but most of those are highly optimistic.
It should have been built closer to St. Joe or South Haven to provide district heating as wasting the heat is an argument for keeping it shut. But, never would have happened with the Greenpeace scare tactics.
It could be built now at cost, but large district heating systems in older (eastern) U.S. cities, such as New York ..., and Indianapolis, are mostly medium-pressure steam systems (150 psi to 400 psi), and extraction and long-distance transport of steam with those parameters is not economical. See https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-nuclea...
For some reason it seems like there is very little middle ground between “Nuclear power is dangerous. We shouldn’t have any.” And “Nuclear power isn’t dangerous. It poses no threat.” Let’s hedge our bets here.
This states governor is the one against Enbridge keeping a pipeline in Lake Michigan, citing environmental concerns despite no prior issues and a deal to sure-up the existing pipeline. In the case of the pipeline, there is no alternative to crossing Lake Michigan. Not so for a nuclear plant.
Edit: point is being proven in the replies. Why so much hostility to safeguarding our environment against the worst case? Why not place it somewhere where an accident wouldn’t have such devastating consequences?