No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble.
Nuclear fission is the answer.
Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.
Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and the uranium fuel is very cheap, perhaps 10% of the cost of running the plant.
This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if you care about greenhouse emissions.
Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514).
In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were announced a few weeks ago. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).
Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. But you don't hear about it in the mainstream news yet. And many people (Germany, Spain, I'm looking at you) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this.
Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather.
I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?”
We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data.
You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.
Plus if it's not sunny/windy in one part of the country, it may well be very sunny or windy in other parts of the country. We have a whole freaking energy grid!
This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.
If you think you don’t have that grid, your country has to build it (instead of billions and more than 10 years for nuclear). Like the Synchronous grid of Continental Europe [1] and [2] which I far from finished but a good start.
This is what happened to Germany. They tried going 100% renewables and then had Russia take up the slack for the rest of what they needed. Then they realized they had a massive shortfall and then was leaning far too much on Russia to take up the slack.
As someone else pointed out, geopolitics always weighs heavy in energy production. Just like in Germany's case where they relied too heavy on Russia for the shortfall of renewables, then Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia used their energy production as leverage to essentially blackmail Germany into not going along with UN sanctions against them.
However we need to get to total energy independence, I'm all for, and this whole idea it has to be one or the other only lengthens the process of getting there. In the mean time, it puts us in a precarious position to be involved with countries and regime's that don't like us and will never have our best interests in mind.
I assume you mean sanctions in general, not UN sanctions specifically. Russia as a permanent member of the UN security council can veto any resolution, so there is little point in even trying to push something through UN.
There was definitely a period where the "renewables are too expensive" propaganda was winning and right wing German parties were successful in slowing renewables, particularly offshore wind rollout in Germany.
This will have cost them Billions, similar to the British right wing effectively banning onshore wind in Emgland at roughly the same time.
Both nations have done well with renewables, but could have done better and saved money and supported local business at the same time.
The cost of the renewables rollout in Germany is on the order of 2 trillion euros. They produce so much renewable energy that the prices regularly go negative, but then import at much higher prices when they don’t. They pay among the highest prices in Europe, and still their CO2 emissions are among the worst. If wind/solar as a whole were both as cheap as touted and as environmentally friendly, that should not be the case.
The whole world owes Germany a massive debt for their overpayment for renewables. Investing in renewables on a massive scale in the 90's is what really kicked off the virtuous cycle that led to the low costs of renewables today.
Germany would have been much better off building nuclear in the 90's. But because they invested in renewables instead, everybody (including Germany) has a much better option of building renewables in the 2020s.
Your source suggests that providing 95% of Texas energy with wind and solar and batteries will cost the same as providing it with nuclear and batteries.
I'm dubious about many of their assumptions but even your source shows that renewables are the obvious choice to power the world.
It's also interesting that the cost drops 50% if you don't need to cover the last 5%. A shame he didn't go further and calculate at 80% and so on like the recent Australian working paper.
I guess that would show that starting the rollout now would provide lots of savings that could be used to deploy the later percentiles.
The most successful ones have a combination of favorable geographic/geological conditions (geothermal vents, suitable rivers, good offshore to land ratio) and small size. It would be hard for Germany to copy solutions from let's say Iceland or Norway.
Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.
Geopolitics and nuclear power are not always such a great combination - consider the Russian occupation of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine. I'm not against nuclear power in general, but saying it's a great hedge against political risks involved with wind and solar is quite a stretch.
Two units cooling for every unit of electricity, at least with PWR/BWR. At a 10 degree C rise it requires about 50ml of water (per second) per kW of electrical power.
Palo Verde NPP in Arizona happens to be in a rather dry area. It uses treated sewage for cooling and is trying to use rather poor quality groundwater too.
If you ever done a tour on a nuclear facility you'd hear about how careful they need to be managing water temperatures in their discharge pools, you don't want a nuke frying off all wildlife on the rivers and/or lakes nearby. You don't want to create massive ponds of still water for cooling, and you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).
Nuclear power plants only really have an effect on the water temperature if they do not have a cooling tower. This makes the plant considerably cheaper, but, as you mentioned, damages the ecosystem.
Only in rare cases, such as during revisions or emergencies, they might be unable to cool the condenser using the tower-coolant-loop. Then they might have to warm up the water temporarily.
> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).
There is no such failure case that a "discharge needs to happen" for the irradiated water. There is a comparatively tiny amount of deionized and supercleaned water in the reactor that is always cycled around. Even if such a case were to occur (how??), the amount of water would be easy to handle/store.
I mean, classical plants and those based around the regulations that the US currently has on the books thanks to some questionable lobbying in the 60s require large amounts of water, sure.
These are hardly the only viable plant designs that exist. Molten Salt, Pebble Bed, and other designs exist.
China is currently underway building a molten salt cooled Thorium reactor.
Russia has had sodium-cooled reactors [0] for some time. America experimented with them at least back to the 1950s, with the USS Seawolf (SSN 575, not SSN 21) having a sodium-cooled reactor (S2G) for her first few years.
Russia also had lead-bismuth reactors, at least militarily, with the Alfa-class.
Let's stay realistic. You can build as many solar panels as you want in Iceland and you won't get any power from them mid winter. They're not just less effective, they would not be functional for over a month. That's not "everywhere".
That doesn't work very well for the Western North America. After sunset there is nowhere to obtain much solar or wind power. We're not going to build a transmission cable to Hawaii.
The wind slows down a lot after sunset in most of North America. Grid scale batteries aren't really a thing yet. Someday maybe, but it's going to take many years to provision enough to handle the nighttime base load on the west coast.
> You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.
Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.
> Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again.
Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.
Not the same scenario. First, France came through this just fine.
Second, the could have kept those plants operating and taken a more piecemeal approach to fixing the cracks. They shouldn't have, and didn't, because you really want that triple or quadruple redundancy in your cooling systems, but they could have if push had come to shove, the plants were still operational.
But since there was plenty of capacity available, they could afford to take those plants offline and do the checks and repairs all at once.
Intermittent renewables afford you no such optionality.
This event happened in 2022. this is the only year since 1995 where nuclear production fell below 300TWh (278TWh in 2022 vs 360 in 2021 and 320 in 2023).
These cracks are not the only factor for the poor performance on nuclear in 2022 : several reactors had to do their 10-year maintenance (grand carénage), which had been delayed because of the pandemic.
It's hard to extrapolate reliability issues from an event that happened once in 30 years.
Well, that's a false dichotomy, because no-one's (at least no-one reasonable and in good faith) is suggesting shifting the grid entirely to nuclear. Instead, a diverse set of generation sources is ideal, including solar, wind, nuclear and hydro.
Well, the point of this thread is that's only true until a sufficient level of availability is required, and then nuclear (and fossil thermal plants) all of a sudden become a viable option again.
Yep. That was a one-time occurrence, due to (a) inspections being deferred during COVID and (b) France's long time catastrophic underinvestment in their nuclear fleet.
Until March 2023, there was a law in France that made it illegal to increase nuclear capacity in absolute terms and mandated reduction to under 50% in relative terms.
But again, a one-time event, and it doesn't change the high capacity factors world-wide (over 80%) and the extremely high capacity factors in reasonably well run fleets ( > 90% in the US, and also inGermany when they still had nuclear ).
One time or not, need to be able to deal with it, as need to be able deal with the possibility of underinvestment etc. - especially if fleets get much bigger.
1) It caused/aggrevated serious issues on the European energy market at the time
2) Then you might have no electricity for some months every few decades from "one offs"
3) Appeals to humans needing to be different are rarely successful
Electricity supply to consumers was affected how? And please separate this out from the general energy crisis of 2021-2023.
Since we didn't have "no electricity for some months" in this one-off, and, as I explained elsewhere, had optionality, not quite sure how you extrapolate from an event not happening to an event happening every few decades.
Gosh, so we're not ever going to invest sufficiently in battery tech for that to ever work. Glad you cleared that up for us.
But to be clear, it wasn't some random "human nature" that caused the underinvestment. It was official government policy, and that government policy has now been changed.
The renewables mafia that is still in control in Germany was also in control in France. That has been taken care of, mostly by being exposed to the harsh light of Reality™.
The law that mandated reduction and forbade expansion of nuclear was repealed March 2023. They are now expanding capacity, build first 6 and then an additional 8 simplified EPR2 reactors.
And there was one more reason for the lull in investment: France did the initial expansion under the Messmer Plan far too quickly. They nuclearized their grid in just 15 years.
Which sounds great, and of course completely puts the lie to those who claim that nuclear is "too slow". But there is a problem: these nuclear plants are not just quick to build, they also last pretty much forever, at least 60 years, many if not most are being extended to 80 years and the experts say there's no reason not to go to 100.
If you have built all the nuclear power plants you need in 15 years and they last 100 years, you have nothing to build for 85 years (or 65 / 45 years if you assume 80/60 year lifespans).
That's a problem, because your nuclear industry will wither and die in that time.
The supply was there because there was supply from elsewhere (and it happened in an energy crisis - it happened when it happened). France isn't isolated.
Poor policy can happen again - such is human nature. So things need to work under poor policies, too.
> The supply was there because there was supply from elsewhere
Exactly, as I wrote. Which is why they were able pursue the option "shut everything down at once and fix immediately" without any negative repercussions apart from EDFs bottom line for that one year.
(Though that apparently was not the biggest negative impact on their bottom line that year. The bigger one was being compelled by law to sell electricity to their competitors at 4 cents/kWh and having to buy it back at market rates that were spiking due to the energy crisis).
There was also the option "stagger the shutdowns and take a slightly elevated risk of one of the triple-redundant cooling systems failing". Which they might have preferred to reducing electricity supply for the country or accelerating repairs. But they didn't have to do that.
> So things need to work under poor policies, too.
Nothing works under arbitrarily bad policy, and such a standard is not applied to anything in the real world.
Dayjob is in energy market algo trading and DER ancillary services in EU, and I can tell you with confidence this is far from true.
And when the nukes trip for safety reasons - which happens multiple times per year - that’s a GW that just dropped off the grid from one second to the next.
For me, I much prefer the reliability of wind and solar; never seen a correlated failure, and we know their production pattern days in advance.
It’s literally just that having a solar+wind grid that can survive 3 days of bad weather costs 6x as much as a grid that can survive normal day to day.
The number I heard was 8x. Solar is about 50 cents / kW, a "24 hour" solar grid is about $4/kW. But that's still about half the price of a natural gas grid and 1/5th the cost of nuclear.
What about negative externalities? If we were to force all actors to pay for their emissions and toxic by-products, factoring the entire lifecycle into the cost, what would it look like then? If, even with that in mind, solar looses to nuclear, that would be a fairly interesting result.
> I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?”
Something close to that happens almost every year in Europe. Last year there was nearly 3 weeks in winter where there was very little wind across the continent (<20% capacity production on all wind farms), and obviously little to no solar (high latitudes).
Nuclear plants often operate at 90%+ capacity factors, while solar can range from 10-25% depending on location. So you might need 4-9 times more solar capacity to match total energy output.
So depending on the region, you might need 4-9 gigawatts of solar capacity with a higher amount of battery storage to match 1 GW nuclear output. This is because you need to account for winter vs summer, for bad weather etc. Maybe it will take a lot more space and cost more to build than restarting a nuclear plant for 1.6 billion.
Because it’s reasonably cheap to buy two decades of fuel in advance, and it won’t take up much space. If such a thing were a concern, then people would do precisely that.
If it were still a problem towards the end of that period, then you can in fact extract uranium from seawater.
It's also plentiful in many countries, it's just not mined because it's too cheap. But since fuel is under 1% of the cost of Nuclear, if it was a problem we could easy mine more difficult places.
> what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months
Forget about two months, the cost to battery store just for two or three days is enormous. At the same time, it does not happen often enough to justify the cost over just using natural gas as a backup, so that is how it is done.
Many documented cases of non zero marginal cost energy systems failing. And in response we have learnt to eliminate, minimise, and manage risk better in those systems.
But apparently, in zero marginal cost energy it’s impossible. The only energy systems where you can have reliability have rent seeking minerals companies selling you fuel.
The problem is that you need to plan for the absolute worst case, once in a century, scenario and size your batteries accordingly.
Same reason why almost no one goes 100% solar at home deep in the south/north because you'd need 20x your needed capacity in batteries to account for that once in a decade bleak winter week
I don't mean to be cynical, but manifestly this isn't necessary. It's why widespread power outages remain a thing even in rich, highly industrialized countries. American Gulf Coast utilities don't spend astronomical sums on distribution infrastructure to ensure 100% uptime through hurricanes; entire regions end up going hours if not days without power on a regular basis. Likewise, Texas doesn't maintain enough generation and robust infrastructure to make it through every cold snap unscathed.
People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages."
I'm all for nuclear, but let's be honest about how real-world infrastructure truly works. And, yes, I believe this means safety claims of Gen 4+ nuclear are off, just as they were for prior gen plants. Through motivated accounting people arrive at the numbers that are demanded, but knowingly or not the actual risk of an incident will be greater, as it manifestly always has been. At the same time our real risk tolerance is much greater than we claim, and this will eventually be born out in the power markets, whether through greater nuclear, less reliable power, or some other state of affairs.
> Likewise, Texas doesn't maintain enough generation and robust infrastructure to make it through every cold snap unscathed.
Correction: Texas, the state, doesn't require producers to maintain adequate reserve generation or robust infrastructure, and since they are not (except for a couple of small exceptions) connected to other regional grids, they can't be made to do so by the federal government. This is by design. It's a bad design, but one that greatly pleases corporations.
> People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages."
This was not my experience when I lived in Texas. There was a brief moment in time for me (~2017 – 2019) where it was actually substantially cheaper, but only if you had the time and knowledge to scour all of the available plans and run some kind of modeling on them, since some had a lot of weird rules. Around COVID, that changed, and the cost savings evaporated. I check periodically, and it still hasn't recovered. Cheapest I could find for where I lived was 10.1¢/kWh, but that's just the base price. In contrast, my base price in North Carolina, on an REMC, is an annual average of 7.48¢/kWh.
All that to say, Texans were/are paying more than many others for sub-standard service. I bought a generator while there, and had to use it many, many times. I have used it precisely once here in NC, and that wasn't even a real need – sunny, pleasant afternoon, and someone hit a transformer with their car. Lost power for about 2 hours. Could've easily just done without and been fine.
> you need to plan for the absolute worst case, once in a century, scenario and size your batteries accordingly.
For a once-in-a-century situation, you can have alternatives other than batteries. For instance, backup diesel generators; any extra CO2 emitted by them in that situation would be insignificant when spread over a hundred years. And once you're planning for once-in-a-century events, you need backup generators anyway, since you can have failures other than just cloudy windless weather.
What you didn’t mention is the effect that renewables have on the cost of nuclear power. When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop. Because nuclear power has high up front costs, its economics are increasingly eroded as more renewables and batteries are added to the grid.
You’re totally correct that renewables and batteries aren’t yet able to bridge the gap in times of bad weather, but what they are excellent at is spoiling the economics of any other type of cheap electricity generation that comes with high capital costs.
> When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop
In the short run, sure. In the long run, cheap power builds its own demand. A country that commits to a certain amount of nuclear baseload, even if run at a loss in the short term, is injecting a very real industrial subsidy into its system. (The way to ensure you don’t get a dog is to subsidise long-term loans for private borrowers. They still need to make a profit someday. But you reduce the time value of money for them.)
The investment doesn’t make sense for a non-nuclear power. But if you’re already producing nuclear waste at scale for your military, it’s a little silly to pretend you’re safer without a civilian reactor in the middle of a desert while all manner of subs and ships patrol your coast.
You are right which means that the cheap excess solar energy during summer and during the day will drive a boom in those industries which can leverage such intermittent availability of very cheap energy.
The problem you describe seems to be one targeted by the TerraPower project in Wyoming. It plans to operate at 100% capacity at all times (345 MWe), but makes itself more akin to other renewables by incorporating energy storage into its design.
It is supposed to be able to increase capacity to 150% (500 MWe), allowing it to respond to energy scarcity. But it can also respond to energy abundance by storing excess production in molten salt storage tanks.
Residential users make up ~38% of the electricity market in the US.
Where do you suggest the rest of the users should get power from? And how would that work exactly in reality?
Even of the government had to ensure that everyone has access to affordable electricity they'd still have to buy it from someone which fundamentally doesn't change anything.
Profit is… not fake, but fiat. Energy and clean water are real.
With collapsing demographics the current economic system will fall over anyway, either due to inflation or defaults, so maybe it’s a good time to start thinking about how to separate utilities from money.
If I had answers, I wouldn't be saying that it's a good time to think about that.
But you shouldn't assume that things will just continue on as they were in the past hundred years. Boomers are retiring now, when the busters start going into retirement it's going to be a huge mess. Inflation is how democracies die.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
-- John Maynard Keynes.
I think he's onto something as I see the lengths Boing, Intel, FAANG, et. al going to benefit us all everyday...
There are so few corporations which build things to better the world and make money in the process.
99% of the corporations build things to earn money. Their wares sometimes do no harm, but it's the exception.
In many cases, the desire for money, not the need, is the driving force behind the technology. See n startups which are discussed here and categorized as "this is better as X. they're just trying to earn money with no real benefit to anyone".
Did Exxon hide their global warming research to benefit humanity? Of course not. Did Tetra Ethyl Lead added to gasoline instead of Ethanol, just because it was better? No because it was patentable and ethanol was not. Did WV created "better" diesel engines to benefit the humanity? No the engines were only "better" for their bottom line and problematic for every one. Did DuPont hid the effects of forever chemicals because it was beneficial/harmless to the nature? On the contrary.
Companies do whatever they can without breaking laws (or bending them with money) to earn more money. The products we get are side effects of it.
I like this take about current (Generative) AI hype:
The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth.
-- jeffowski (at Twitter/X)
> Their wares sometimes do no harm, but it's the exception.
I disagree with that to a very extreme degree (also it's a very silly thing to say unless you don't see any value in computers, smartphones, planes, automobiles, washing machines, fridges and other appliances).
The things you listed are generally the exceptions. Also the question is whether society/people benefited from VW, Exxon, DuPont etc. to such an extent that it outweighed all of those things?
Of course it's relative, if we value access to cheap and effective transportation, synthetic clothing, various plastic products etc. more than we care about all the negative externalities that's what we get... It's all down to incentives, corporations are inherently neither good nor evil.
> to earn more money. The products we get are side effects of it.
I agree that's true on the whole. But that's why humans do anything at all (replace money with other tangible or intangible benefits). Absolute altruism doesn't scale and isn't in any way sustainable.
They did when they were led by people passionate about the technology. As soon as MBAs got ahold of them, it was all about enriching shareholders in the short-term.
Who pays for it?
If everybody gets all of the above for free, then why would they ever work and contribute to covering the cost of these free for everyone services?
Once a large number of people stop working, who actually works to grow the food? Who builds the houses?
It's interesting that you bring up a large number of people no longer growing food as if that's not the current reality. What do all those people do now that they don't have to work for food?
Someone works grueling hours in the sun to grow it and then the rest of us work and pay those people that grew it money. Is this really a question?
If the people doing the growing are getting all of their needs met why would they grind to produce food to sell for money when they get money for free?
Why would the vast majority of people in the bottom 50% of the economic ladder work at all if they were getting all of their needs met at no cost to them?
Why stop there? EVERYBODY deserves healthcare and education too!
I would say in a perfect world everyone should have all of these things.
The problem is that the marginal cost to giving each of these things to everyone increases to infinity as we approach 100% of a sufficiently large and diverse population. For example, creating a city water system should efficiently deliver clean water to a large proportion of an urban population. However, not everyone lives in an urban setting and delivering clean water to remote populations can get astronomically expensive.
As rational citizens we must acknowledge this unfortunate reality and figure out how to deal with it fairly and equitably. Profit seeking enterprise has been astoundingly effective at driving down these marginal costs for a whole host of goods for centuries. Many of these things you mention only exist because profit seekers developed and distributed them!
That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output.
The only time it won't scale to meet output is if the price stays high, but if the nuclear energy is already on the grid and has elastic pricing, the rest will take care of itself.
But the price of energy can be negative, so a new nuclear plant might never pay off its cost, even if it provides the public benefit of cheap electricity.
Is it case that the metric we're using does not show the actual price? https://www.squeaky.energy/blog/the-unintended-consequences-... shows a way to get "free" electricity on a regular basis, while it still costs consumers a very non-zero amount. In the case of solar, revenue could be achieved through out-of-market payments (CfD, power purchase agreements, renewable energy certificates).
Or is it the sign that the nightmare battery dominated grid is starting to happen? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-unstoppabl...
Battery operators can choose between strategies designed to maximize revenue, profit, competitive advantage, or competitor losses, over any given timescale and with almost perfect deniability.
> That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output.
If the price of electricity is negative, people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again.
> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.
> people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again.
But will electricity cost enough to justify the huge upfront cost of nuclear plants?
If we have the wealth to build capital-intensive projects that are marginally cost effective, it might be easier to build smelters and desalination plants that only run at 40% capacity, when the sun is out.
Easily solved via sane energy policy. Of course politics will likely make this impossible in the US.
In a rational environment you run your nuclear at 100% 24x7. The cost of the fuel is not material running at 10% vs. 100%. Letting parasitic intermittent power sources screw this up is simply financial engineering by largely bad actors. At least currently.
Then you use intermittent power sources to provide your peak loads during the day, and any excess you ideally start putting into storage - whatever that may be. If you have effectively free marginal power during certain peak times, I'm positive industry will find a way to turn that into money.
I still have hope sanity returns to the energy discussion, but it likely won't happen in the US during my lifetime. The cost of solar and wind is entirely politics - the storage cost is literally never considered when reading articles on the subject. The hidden costs are likely 10x or so what the marginal cost per kwh everyone loves to spew. Lots of folks getting massively rich off this disinformation so there is huge inertia behind ignoring it - even from very smart people that should absolutely know better after a few hours of reading on the subject. Just look at many of the posts here at HN.
The environmental costs of methane (natural gas) are simply not being considered. The methane leaks into the environment are underestimated by at least 10x if not much, much, more. Pivoting from nuclear and to natural gas has been an utter environmental disaster.
It's worth remembering that the anti-nuclear crowd was always backed by big oil, and even in the age where solar and wind are being pushed, big oil benefits as the unmet demand for base load power, in the absence of nuclear, means that they get the business as there is no alternative.
They pulled the green crowd along for the ride hook, line, and sinker.
If we have designed our markets to price cheap, reliable electricity out of the market and instead prefer expensive unreliable electricity, we've really f*ed up.
Spaniard here: we have zero gas and zero uranium nationally sourced, yet thanks to solar, wind and hydro, our energy grid is among the best in the world. We are at 20% nuclear, above global average, and above USA or UK, no need to install more.
Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA. In terms of energy we are good, thank you, and need no lessons from the USA.
Spain also has a hugely different energy market than the United States. Spain is around 5% of the size of the US, being closer to a state in our context. Different states have different climates, making them more aligned with different energy sources. It doesn't make sense to compare the US and Spain in this context.
> We are at 20% nuclear,
Doesn't this prove the parent comment's point, that the best mix of energy is renewables supplemented by a base of nuclear power?
> Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA
This feels unnecessary. Spain has done an amazing job building an energy base, let's talk about how we can export to different countries and climates instead of putting people down.
Fission is a bad complement for solar power. A good complement for solar provides dispatchable fill-in-the-gaps type of power. However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement.
You can get to 100% carbon free by using a combination of overprovisioning, source diversity, geographic diversity, storage and statistics. You can't get to 100% but you can get to an arbitrary number of nines and say "good enough". The grid is only 99.99% reliable so having generation be better than that has little value.
If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid you choose something the opposite of nuclear: something cheap to build but expensive to fuel. For example, synthetic natural gas. The cost of the fuel has little relevance when it only has a duty cycle of 0.1%. And they're cheap to build and likely don't even need building because we already have lots of them.
China built a lot of nuclear reactors in the 2010's, but is slowing their build rate. 10GW/year of nuclear power is not very impressive in a country that built 100GW of solar in the first half of 2024.
That being said, I still support restarting TMI. The main costs of nuclear are in building and decomissioning them. We've already incurred the cost of building TMI and we're already on the hook for decomissioning it, so running it is likely cost-effective once you remove the sunk costs.
What you say makes sense. But what if we need to generate 50 times more electricity than we do now? At some point solar and wind energy will start being very expensive because we'll run out of cheap land. You might think 50 is absurd, but consider this: right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition most of our energy use to electricity. The big culprits are transportation, steel, concrete and fertilizers. That's a factor of 3. Then we want to increase everyone's standards of living to match the current standard of living of the average American or European person. That's another factor of 3. Then we want to increase our (clean) energy use. Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions in the atmosphere. If, as Elon wants, we end up having hundreds or thousands of launches per day, and we want these launches to be net zero, then we need to find a way to manufacture hundreds of millions of tons of synthetic fuel each year. AI will also consume a lot of electricity. We will also need to build cities, if we are to lift billions of people out of their current rural life (in Africa, South America, India, etc). Everybody talks about solar as if the goal is to replace the current generation capacity. But the goal is to do that, and then more, much, much more. I think you need nuclear for that.
> At some point solar and wind energy will start being very expensive because we'll run out of cheap land.
Yes that might happen. But it'll happen at a number much greater than 50X. And it's a problem that'll only happen if we solve the global warming problem first.
> right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition most of our energy use to electricity. The big culprits are transportation, steel, concrete and fertilizers. That's a factor of 3.
But we mostly use fuels that are 30% - 60% efficient plus wastage for production, refining and transporting. Over 2/3rds of the energy we use gets wasted as heat. So we've got a factor of 1/3 to cancel out your 3 here. It's not completely efficient so it's actually about 1.2X, not 3X.
> Then we want to increase everyone's standards of living to match the current standard of living of the average American or European person.
Yep, that's a good 3X, if not more there. But unfortunately it's going to take decades to accomplish this.
> Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions in the atmosphere. If, as Elon wants, we end up having hundreds or thousands of launches per day, and we want these launches to be net zero, then we need to find a way to manufacture hundreds of millions of tons of synthetic fuel each year.
> Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions
Each launch would then be a 0.00001X, and is approximately equivalent to a trans-pacific plane flight. Thousands of flights per year would not be a significant fraction of the Earth's emissions. Hundreds of thousands of flights would be.
- solar is fine up to around 500X
- which won't happen this century
- when it happens power will be abundant enough that the cost calculations will be radically different
- technology will also be radically different. Maybe we'll use anti-matter reactors or something.
> Yes that might happen. But it'll happen at a number much greater than 50X.
It's difficult to say. We are not running out of land, that's for sure. But we are running out of cheap land. Or rather land where it is economical to build solar. Sahara has plenty of empty land, and it is plenty sunny all year long, but there are civil wars more often than not, various militias, corrupt governments, etc. The US has lots of deserts, but also lots of groups with various agendas that find ways to delay projects, and delays can transform good projects into bad projects.
As a concrete example, take California. California is very proud to be a leader in environmental issues. You can find on the state website the installed capacity per year. For the last 5 years it has been [1], in GW: 1.2 (in 2020), 1.5, 2.0, 2.3, 0.9 (in 2024, so far). The year over year growth rates were 26%, 35%, 10% and for this year -60%. This year is not over, and it's possible the numbers are not up to date, but it's quite unlikely we'll get to match last year's numbers, let alone see a double digit growth.
Or take Texas. Wikipedia has their annual numbers between 2007 and 2023 [2]. I did the math, and between 2007 and 2017 they experienced a 90% annual growth. Nice Moore's law at work there. For the next 4 years the average annual growth was 60%. And for the last 2 years, it was 28%. Nothing to sneeze at, but the trend is clear. Why, if the cost of the panels went down?
> Thousands of flights per year
Elon is not talking about thousands of flights per year. Thousands of flights per day. Millions per year. A million launches of 5 kT CO2e each equal 5 GT CO2 each. That's about 10% of the current worldwide emissions. Or about 30% of the current emissions that come from power generation. If we are to use synthetic fuel instead of fossil fuel, and you have a 30% efficiency of making synfuel (which is what a quick google search indicates), then you have a 2x increase in electricity needs.
> However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement.
I think this is why they call it baseload. Yes it costs the same, used or unused... but it's always there, ready to be used. This is its strength, not a defect.
> If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid
But no reasonable person wants that. They want "100% reliability, and who cares where it comes from". If you're environmentally minded, you can tack on a "with no carbon"... but even that isn't the same thing as a "primarily solar grid".
baseload is base load, not base generation. Base generation is not a thing.
Way back when, they realized that grids had a base load below which it never dropped. They realized that if they designed some of their plants without the expensive features which allowed them to be turned on and off quickly, they could build plants cheaper.
You don't design grids for base load, you design grids for peak load in all scenarios. If you can handle peak, you can also handle base.
Baseload is for cost optimization. And nuclear is a horrible way to optimize cost.
One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build.
Nuclear plants that already run, often take days, some even weeks to adjust significant: so if on monday the wind stops blowing, on tuesday it gets cloudy, and on tuesday afternoon everyone needs to charge their EV or fire up the AC, it'll often take until next week friday before a nuclear plant can deliver this. Modern plants are faster, and theres many "hacks" where energy is blown out (wasted) for short peaks down, or where there's always 10% wasted for short peaks up.
So nuclear needs innovation. But most of all, needs to be "just a piece of the puzzle" and never the only piece.
Nuclear fission, and other of this "innovation" isn't there. That's the other slow part of nuclear. Even if its production ready today, that plant won't run for another decade, often 20+ years (except china, which tells you the reason why it's so rediculous slow: NIMBY, regulations, democracy)
So, sorry, aside from all the other (fictive) problems with nuclear (waste, risk etc), nuclear has a serious problem of being just too damn slow to solve *todays* energy crisis on its own.
Edit: Source, I've interned in power plants. A comparable coal plant, took one and a half month to power up from zero to producing electricity: which happened every 5 years for revision and three months to power down. It could adjust 10% in a few hours, but everything over 30% needed week(s) of planning ahead. I made those plannings.
> One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build.
All of those things, to me, mean that it should be a large part of the mix. Nuclear should be the backbone of our energy production, and should be sufficient to supply our baseline needs.
That said, in places where hydro or geothermal are practical, those should be used in preference to nuclear. They're cheaper, more reliable, and just better in almost every way.
Solar, wind, tidal, wave action, and so on should be what we build on top of that baseline. They should be cheaper to build and operate, but far less consistent.
If you want to train a huge LLM, or smelt metals, or do anything that's energy-intensive but not very time-sensitive, you schedule those loads during times where energy production exceeds existing demand.
... and you know when that happens by pricing energy based on availability. Electricity should be cheapest when we have more than we need, and more expensive when the inconsistent sources listed above aren't producing. In other words, market forces are sufficient to make this happen.
In fact, one of the cool things about solar and wind in particular is that they are so aggressively cyclical that it's possible that energy prices could actually go negative - not often, or regularly, but possible. That opens the door to all kinds of use cases that would otherwise never be profitable, and using those types of technologies often leads to efficiency gains that can eventually make them more efficient than the current alternatives.
This market thing is in place already. At least in Europe it is, I've done a project during my energy engineering study for APEX.
The irony, however, is that it's not all that good for nuclear. When prices go down or even negative, a CHP or windmill is shut down in minutes. The nuclear plant (or ancient coal, or even hydro) will go below cost price, or even havs to pay to deliver electricity, because they can't not deliver. And in Europe we are having a few times of negatively priced electricty per year recently.
And contrary to what many people think, nuclear power is rather expensive. For a small part that's political (subsidies and all), but mostly it's because running
a nuclear plant is expensive; its fuel is expensive as hell (it does burn fuel), and storing its waste "guaranteed" safe for some 5.000 years is expensive (incredible timescales; egyptians building pyramids - to now, timescales). Also expensive is it's cooling facilities: nuclear operates on a steam cycle, so it needs a lot of cooling; many places don't have that (anymore). E.g. in France some plants were shut down because rivers dried up too much and they'd be heating up the remaining "trickle" too much with these plants. That makes it unreliable, the way hydro, tidal, etc can be unreliable too.
There are just so much problems with nuclear power. Again, aside from the political "opinions" on it: these well known percieved risks and such. But that makes it a difficult part of that mix. I do believe it should be a crucial part, but also am convinced that part should be as small as possible, due to those downsides, costs. And, as you say, indeed, in places where there's alternatives, you'll find these alternatives are almost always a better option, cost, timescale and operational wise.
> When prices go down or even negative, a CHP or windmill is shut down in minutes.
Negative prices are a symptom that the (day ahead) market is not the real game being played. CfD, production subsidies and renewable credits are the order of the day.
> The nuclear plant ... will go below cost price
> its fuel is expensive as hell
The Bugey plant is also the main reason France must ask the Swiss to let more water through the Seujet Dam. While most of the water is released back into the river, the reactors need a constant, cool flow — and climate change isn’t only making the Rhône’s water scarcer, but also warmer.
> in France some plants were shut down because rivers dried up too much and they'd be heating up the remaining "trickle" too much with these plants
Looking at https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/07/13/frances-nuclear-po... it appears power was reduced due to river temperatures, not river levels. That makes it more a regulatory issue, and probably one solvable with more hardware (extra cooling towers or greater extraction).
One might also ask whether it is worth EDF investing to get the extra few percent total output across the year; the solar peaks during hot weather will tend to reduce the price of electricity, so why not just schedule maintenance at that time of year. Thus PV creates a problem that it partially solves.
Scheduling loads based on energy spot price tends to wreck the economics of manufacturing. If you have to shut down when energy prices spike then you're still paying fixed expenses for PP&E plus at least some labor. It's tough to finance that.
Depends a bit on the "manufactoring". It's not "black"-"white". While it's certainly true for e.g. a brewery or a bike-factory-line, it's less so for aluminum, or chemicals. And even less so for systems like a freezer.
A friend who makes juices and dried fruits on medium scale, plans his production ahead based on the spot pricing: steaming or deep-freezing can be postponed for days, apparently; I helped him with some dashboards and integrations of the pricing-APIs for this.
What I'm trying to say is: yes, a lot of industry won't be able to profit much from these markets. But many can, if they are just willing to change their current ways a little. Not all: many.
Probably, if "future" means 50+ years, so two generations in future.
But not if it means "future" in even overlapping the current nuclear plants that are EOL, 10, 20 even 30 years. Because to replace those nuclear EOL with other nuclear, we'd need to start building plants in 2014, 2015 (which we didn't). The next best time may be now, but "We", at least in Europe aren't doing that either, and AFAIK neither in the US.
TBC: I'm not saying "it won't work, so stop chasing it" on contrary. But shoehorning "fission" into a discussion of a current energy crisis, what this article is about, isn't relevant. Such tech isn't for today, tomorrow. Not even for when your kids grow, up, but at most for your grandkids when they are working - horizons.
Gas peakers are cheap compared to nuclear, and arguably much more appropriate for the foreseeable future when it comes to making up for renewable energy's inconsistency problems.
I mostly disagree with your initial assertion as well. A sufficiently large and diversified grid will largely cover itself, and when it doesn't, that's what peakers and so on will handle.
Nuclear energy is not free from disruptions caused by natural events or other unexpected causes. See for example the nuclear power plants in France that have to shut down in summer because if low water in the nearby rivers used for cooling.
It's always a question of probability and risk. If we get extreme weather conditions that our storage cannot keep up then we have to temporarily reduce usage and in the longer term increase storage capacity.
That said, I'm not against nuclear. But I'm against simplisticly dismissing renewables.
> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
I never understood the hysteria of the anti-nuclear people. I mean, the stats are out there for everyone to verify. Even the worst nuclear disaster killed no more than 100 people[1]. Plus, the new generation of the nuclear reactor can auto shut down when the temperature keeps rising. As for the nuclear waste, we need just one football field to store all the waste even before the recycling, which can recoup 90% of the material.
I'm also aware of the argument that even one death is too many. But if we follow this argument, wouldn't we need to account for the deaths caused by the alternative energy source, like coal? And the death would be in the thousands, right? And why won't we protest that?
For the explanation of hysteria: 1) Nuclear disasters are acute, traumatic events that can have drastic effects on health of people and ecosystems for generations 2) Nuclear power sounds like nuclear bombs and nuclear radiation, both of which are scary and resonate with long-held cultural fears of nuclear technology that have existed since the Cold War.
Basically, yes most fears of nuclear power are irrational. But that's part of the problem—even if nuclear power polluted in a manner similar to coal power and there wasn't the risk of acute disaster, I still think Americans would be quite wary of the technology purely due to cultural priors.
I am pro-nuclear, but I don't think that's exactly the correct argument for nuclear power. I think we can cover the current level of energy consumption with solar and wind. The problem is that we want to live in a future where the world consumes at least 10 times more energy than now. This might seem like an outrageous number, but it's not. The average energy use per capita in the world is 3.5 times lower than in the US. At the least we want the rest of the world to reach the living standards of the current average American person. But we also know that AI will consume exponentially increasing amounts of electricity. The exponential function is funny, you don't notice it until it explodes in your face. Right now AI uses a non-negligible but still small amount of energy, but the growth is clearly exponential. In a world where the energy is not a constraint, in a few decades AI will consume more energy than the rest of the economy combined, although it will be difficult to say what "the rest of the economy" will mean with a world where everything will be powered by AI.
Nuclear has the potential to fulfill all this future growth in energy requirements. The fundamental problem of nuclear is not safety, or waste, or proliferation. It is cost. And this is a solvable problem. The total cost of the 4 Barakah reactors you mentioned was $32 billion, or $5.7 billion/GW. The cost of utility solar is about $1 billion/GW, but the capacity factor is only about 30%, while the capacity factor of nuclear is about 90%. So $5.7 at 90% is still a bit more expensive than $1 at 30%, but if the cost of nuclear goes down by a factor of 2, it's at the same level as solar. And there is no reason to think such a reduction is not possible.
Very few people talk about the land requirements for solar and consequence of de-greening. To generate 1 MW of solar power, approximately 5 acres are needed. This means a 1 MW solar farm fits on a 10-acre space. This overlaps with croplands and grasslands used for livestock grazing. This affects animal movement patterns. Removing native vegetation to make room for solar farms threatens endangered animals and insects which rely on the vegetation for food and habitat.
>No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble.
I'm in favor of nuclear too, but this is a ridiculous point. Your first sentence mentions solar and wind and your second only addresses solar. If the sun doesn't shine for n+1 days, the wind is still going to be available most or all of those days.
The discussion of incorporating variability into the power grid is incredibly unsophisticated on HN.
The US (and Europe) are big places with diverse energy demand and weather patterns, and smart renewable energy developers will seek out resources that are decorrelated with existing supplies because the power can be sold at higher prices.
Batteries are also getting cheap enough to profitably arbitrage intraday price variability.
Another thing that gets ignored in these discussions is that in any net zero scenario there is going to be a fair bit of green hydrogen/biofuels/synfuel produced for transport and industrial use. A fraction of that could be diverted to gas peaker plants when monster dunkelflautes manifest themselves.
You don't need battery farms to make renewables viable in the US. What you need is to replace the AC grid interconnect system in the US with a HVDC super grid system.
The key difference here is that HVDC is exceedingly efficient in energy transfer and has effectively negligible losses compared to AC over distance.
The US is big enough that any impact from weather should basically average out over that distance.
There are huge downsides though because moving power generation further and further from where it’s used opens you up to more disruption from terrorist attacks on the grid (and cyber attacks) unless you also do less centralized production which is going to be more expensive.
That's the thing. HVDC works better in a decentralised manner. You don't have clocking to deal with so instead it's mainly a matter of just hooking power production and power draw up to what is basically a big cross-country busbar.
And you can connect as many bridging connections as you want without having to worry about phase or desync. Instead more connections generally just means power goes from production to consumption along more efficient paths.
That doesn't help after sunset on the west coast when residential demand peaks and there is little renewable power being generated anywhere in North America. In theory batteries or other storage could close that gap but realistically it's going to take decades to scale that up.
That's 16 hours of sunlight but more importantly that allows the US to distribute energy production from hydro, wind, and geothermal production across the country.
During the daylight hours solar is great of course but my point about power averaging out had more to do with the other forms of renewable energy.
The issue of dunkelflaute is measurable and you can approach it the same way that storms are rated as being 100,1000-year storms. Not that I wouldn't appreciate more nuclear.
"No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather."
Generally agree. However, I want to point out that it could defined be possible if designed the right way. You can use "batteries" like pumped hydro, which could protect against longer duration outages. Bonus is that when there's no sun, there's usually rain, which one would hope would also offset some of the draining of the water.
You'd be in trouble even if you had nuclear power. If the sun stops shining, our agricultural yields will approach zero and everyone would have to stay close to district heated buildings, due to the extreme cold.
Three mile island already hit jackpot once in the statistics game and it didn't only go offline for a few days. And it is true that fuel cost are not the driving factor for fision. I am all in, if power companies really have to pay for all security and lifecycle costs upfront.
How clean, fast, cheap and reliable is the decommissioning of a plant once its short life is over? Anything that lasts only 50 years is pretty short-term.
and remember, it's only fair to include the cost of carbon capture to return the carbon into the soil, since the cost of nuclear in these discussions will include both the cost of disposal and cleanup of disasters that only happen several continents away.
I realize this isn't the HN popular opinion, but nuclear power will be great once:
1. People are educated about true risk AND forget about Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Or the need to have iodine pills if you live near one. ("If it's so safe, why do I need the iodine pills?")
2. Bad actors face actual prison time, not just corporate fines. Meanwhile, today, the bad actors still get bonuses.
3. We grow a lot of crops in the desert in the US. We need a lot of water to do that. There's gigawatts of solar potential there. And the cost of one reactor is $35B US for 1GW. For solar/wind you could have 10GW for around $10B US and then there's $25B US for batteries.
This is nonsense. If you're going to cite arbitrary "N+1 days of bad weather" then I can cite "N+1 severe natural disasters" where the nuclear reactor is engineered to withstand N. And unlike the theoretical "disaster" due to extended bad weather taking renewables down, this has actually happened in recent memory with Fukushima. And this was a true disaster, not just a power outage.
Nuclear is not safe. Every time proponents say "new designs are safe" eventually a new disaster proves this lie. Then the nuclear proponents say "oh well that was an old design, new designs are safe!"
Nuclear is too expensive. Renewables even with storage are way cheaper! We can way over build renewables. We can distribute them, because "bad weather" is regional. All for much cheaper than nuclear.
Stop pushing this out-dated, unsafe and expensive technology. Its time has passed.
In terms of single-incident, I believe hydro takes the lead due to the Banqiao Dam failure (floods over 12,000 square kilometers killing ~30k directly then ~100k more from water contamination and famine). But even that's still dwarfed by the more gradual impact of climate change on the planet from fossil fuels.
Dam failures absolutely destroy vast areas and can contaminate them with oil and gasoline by flooding settlements. In fact hydroelectric power has killed a surprising amount of people.
Suppose you have a devastating earthquake that wrecks renewable power sources in an area. Bad part is you're out of power for a good while. But the second-order risks are very low - maybe some people are killed by falling wind turbines or solar panels, but there isn't any equivalent of radioactive contamination making the place uninhabitable for years.
Banqiao Dam failure alone flooded over 12,000 square kilometers, killing ~30k directly then ~100k more from water contamination and famine.
Even solar still requires various minerals the extraction and processing of which has environmental impact - like tailing ponds of toxic substances that frequently leak, particularly from earthquakes and extreme weather.
But to be clear, the human and environmental impact of solar, wind, nuclear and hydro pales in comparison to that of fossil fuels.
I specifically made my comment about wind and solar. I am not a big fan of large scale hydro for just this reason, as well as the impact on aquatic ecosystems.
> I specifically made my comment about wind and solar
You said "Suppose you have a devastating earthquake that wrecks renewable power sources in an area" - hydropower is considered renewable. I also did address a similar risk of solar (barely anything compared to fossil fuels, but same applies to nuclear).
Focusing on deaths is a nice trick of the nuclear industry because the largest negative impacts of their disasters and even non-disaster costs of operation are still terrible but do not manifest as immediate deaths.
This isn't just counting immediate deaths - else it'd just be ~30 for Chernobyl and ~0 for Fukushima.
In fact, Fukushima's death count seems to primarily be down to that "people had died indirectly as a result of the physical and mental stress of evacuation" - which I feel should at least partially be put on the tsunami that killed 20000.
To be fair, the unsafe designs are all 50 years old because of FUD from incidents that are also generally pretty old. I’m not sure it’s comparable to modern designs - this isn’t a “new iPhone every year” deal.
I think everyone knew the Mark I boiling water reactors designed in the 1960s was not a “safe by default” design. Open to receipts if folks with some understanding of nuclear designs were on record before that touting its safety.
"Citation needed" is the lamest response. I am not your personal Google assistant. Nuclear proponents just like you cited Fukushima as a hallmark of reliability to "disprove" its dangers to me. There were articles highlighting it. These are obviously hard to find now with the digital rot of the last decade. Sorry I didn't print out copies to hand out to you many years later.
People touted the safety of cars in the 1920s. Compared to today’s standards, they were wildly unsafe. The mere fact people were wrong before doesn’t mean they are wrong today. “What some people once said” is not as strong an argument as “designs are demonstrably better engineered”
That doesn’t mean there is no risk. It’s still ok to be scared of nuclear power for new unknown reasons. But let’s not pretend that designs aren’t wildly better now.
The worst part of this is, Thorium-based reactors seem to be the future of nuclear, but because of FUD and politics, no one is funding research to find out whether the theoretical thorium reactors are the way to go forward.
Nuclear fission is the answer.
Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.
Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and the uranium fuel is very cheap, perhaps 10% of the cost of running the plant.
This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if you care about greenhouse emissions.
Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514).
In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were announced a few weeks ago. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).
Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. But you don't hear about it in the mainstream news yet. And many people (Germany, Spain, I'm looking at you) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this.
Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.