Renewables don't provide base load capacity, though. What do you do when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing? You either burn some carbon or split some atoms. Those are currently the options available.
Hydropower storage is geographically limited. Chemical storage is not available at the scale required. Plus most batteries produced are going to EVs. Remember, the world uses ~60 TWh of energy per day. And it's not not the day and night cycle that needs to be smoothed out, it's also seasonal fluctuations that can last for weeks.
All the other options haven't been built at scale. Hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air have all been suggested, but aren't deployed widely enough to prove viability.
It is. But the issue is that storage systems are quite expensive and not nearly as green as what feeds them.
Interestingly when you include these nuclear is much more competitive. But this depends on the studies and you should pay very close to the assumptions those studies make. Regardless, these are always in aggregate. So even with biases the case always is made that when considering the heterogenous nature of environment that some places will favor nuclear and others will favor renewables (which is again nonhomogeneous as wind and solar aren't always strongly coupled and certainly hydro isn't available everywhere). This is true for the studies that show the best results for nuclear and the studies that show the worst. A major problem with these discussions is people are operating on aggregate assumptions and acting as if it's one or the other.
One interesting part that people might not be aware of is hydrogen production. Nuclear is often argued as a base load so the question is what to do when the sun is shining and wind is strong? You can throttle nuclear but this is not cost effective. But you can in turn produce hydrogen, which can even be used to cheapen and make renewable storage more green. One of the biggest concerns here though is that hydrogen production might be so valuable that nuclear producers might favor that over providing base load.
So as everything, the reality is much more complicated than our general conversations reveal. It's even far more complicated than what can be included in a HN reply. But I hope I gave a sufficient response than can also point to more information.
Obtaining electricity thanks to industrial renewable (see Lazard's LCOE) is way (and more and more) cheaper than with nuclear.
There are many ways to alleviate unwanted impacts of 'intermittency' (PEM membranes, central plant enabling many sites exposed to different wind regimes to feed it, batteries...)
Hydrogen overproduction (from the grid perspective) isn't a challenge because various industries need huge amounts (~94 millions metric tons/an) of it.
Therefore the 'hydrogen' approach favors renewable sources.
Most of what you are talking about is theoretical and the real costs will become apparent only once someone tries actually doing it. Meanwhile, nuclear power is proven technology for decades, worldwide.
Established by make sure you know the assumptions it makes too. Don't just take data at face value, make sure you know what the data actually is telling you and importantly what it doesn't tell you.
I'm talking about nuclear power plants in general, which have been in use since the '50s. Not a specific type of reactor. If 'it was proven' then I guess France's electricity shouldn't be cheaper than Germany's? Oh wait...
The point is about total cost, and considering all public money invested the French nuclearization isn't a cheaper way. Just compare tax pressure in France and Germany, and their public fundings for the grid.
Moreover in case of any mishap (major accident, hot waste wandering around...) all bets are off.
What tax pressure are you talking about? Germany has higher income tax than France. Also, even if nuclear power is a bit more expensive–why should we race to the bottom price tag when we're trying to fight a climate crisis? Isn't preserving vast natural areas and ecologies (instead of covering them up with solar and wind farms) worth a bit more money? Isn't it worth it to reduce pressure on strip-mining huge amounts of earth to eke out some meagre amounts of minerals for batteries?
> Moreover in case of any mishap
Reactors are designed to shut down (full containment) and have been for many years now, so no 'all bets' are not off. That's just FUD.
All taxes considered (not only income tax)
"the highest shares of taxes and social contributions as a percentage of GDP being recorded in France (48.0 %), Belgium (45.6 %) and Austria (43.6 %)."
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
> Isn't preserving vast natural areas and ecologies (instead of covering them up with solar and wind farms) worth a bit more money?
Indeed, however the burden related to renewable sources is often way less than presented as off-shore wind turbines (globally the biggest reserve) don't use any land and offer sanctuaries to exhausted seas, while solar panels on roofs and agrivoltaics... aren't really a burden, either.
> Isn't it worth it to reduce pressure on strip-mining huge amounts of earth to eke out some meagre amounts of minerals for batteries?
These raw materials have substitutes and they are recycled.
Uranium is a fuel (disappearing gradually), has no substitute, is hardly recycled in practice and as ore grades are diminishing greenhouse-gas emission associated to its obtention will augment.
>> Moreover in case of any mishap
> Reactors are designed to shut down (full containment)
Clearly write: "a major nuclear accident in France is simply absolutely not possible" and everyone knowing about all this will immediately grasp that you don't know what you are writing about. An hydrogen / vapor explosion is possible, and it may let dangerous stuff escape in the wild, and this is true in France. The subject of debate is not this danger but the associated risk (probability and effects of such an events).
Talking about overall tax levels is a red herring. We have to look specifically at the costs of power generation (both internalized and externalized).
> the burden related to renewable sources is often way less than presented
Surely you're joking. Wind turbines are the size of football fields and they basically can't be recycled after their useful lifespan of 20 years. They have to be buried, using up huge amounts of space.
> Uranium is a fuel (disappearing gradually)
Again, I hope you're joking, because leaving aside all the existing uranium mines operating today, even leaving aide the fact that spent fuel can be recycled (and a lot of if is even today!), we know how to extract it from seawater. If you think seawater is a scarce resource, I don't know what to tell you.
> write: "a major nuclear accident in France is simply absolutely not possible" and everyone knowing about all this will immediately grasp that you don't know what you are writing about.
As opposed to writing 'as ore grades are diminishing greenhouse-gas emission associated to its obtention will augment' which is perfectly legible to everyone? Sure dude.
Also, you realize that the burden of proof lies with the person claiming something is possible, because you can't prove a negative, right? You know that's not how the scientific process works, right?
Source? The real TCO isn't. Fact: EDF gobbled during decades public money and various advantages, and is now crushing under a >50 billions € debt
> the carbon intensity of generation is 10 times lower than Germany's
In the 1960's France coal reserves were vanishing (France switched to nuclear) while Germany's were massive (in RDA it was huge). This is the root cause.
Nope. This is now illegal in most nations. Even recyclable blades now exist, and old ones are more and more burnt in cement killns.
> uranium
> spent fuel can be recycled (and a lot of if is even today!)
Nope. Source? Even France doesn't recycle (MOX) more than a few percent, and it only is recyclable once. Industrial real 'eternal' recycling (possible with renewables, as most components such as copper or aluminium are 'infinitely' recyclable at human timescale) of uranium isn't achieved anywhere. If it is, please state where and how.
> we know how to extract it from seawater
This is nothing more than an old dream. Please state (source) where it is, at industrial stage. It simply isn't, anywhere, and all attempts (since the 1970's) failed, and this is a well-know fact. Quote: "pumping the seawater to extract this uranium would need more energy than what could be produced with the recuperated uranium". Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-j2/docs/e...
The remainder being almost entirely fossil fuels including 25.6% from burning coal, largely necessary because Germany chose to phase out nuclear energy.
Electricity is not the whole story either. Renewables accounted for less than 20% of Germany's primary energy consumption in 2023.
The point is, removing the remaining 1/3rd of fossil fuel production becomes a lot harder. The issue is that renewables other than hydro and geothermal are all intermittent. Build as many solar panels as you want, you're not going to satisfy nighttime demand without massive storage facilities.
10 GWh of storage is peanuts. That's what one nuclear plant produces in about 5 hours. The USA uses 500 GWh of electricity per hour.
The first step is just to build enough renewables and enough battery to last one average day. That gets you to 95% of reducing CO2. Then you can think about if it even makes sense to replace those cloudy yet/windless days.
We just need to spend on the most economic places to save CO2.
World electricity consumption is 60,000 GWh per day. "Last one average day" is much greater than existing battery production can satisfy - it's around 40x annual battery production to achieve just 12 hours of storage. And that's ignoring the fact that electric vehicles are consuming the vast majority of battery production. Making any serious efforts towards grid-storage would set back EV adoption.
Using EV as grid storage is not feasible. One, many vehicles are used for business, utilities, and public transit. So they'll be driven during the day, and charged at night. This is going to increase load during hours of non-production, the opposite of storage. Two, no san grid operator is going to accept a situation where much of their storage capacity will just drive away for vacation, or in anticipation of a disaster. The predicted exponential rise is still an order of magnitude less than the scale required, and the vast majority of it is not going to grid storage.
Wind is subject to intermittency, too. It's not a magic bullet that eliminates storage. Unless you're overprovisioning wind by a factor of 10 (in which case it's not cheap anymore), you'll still have weeks-long stretches where there is insufficient energy.
Hydro is really the only non-intermittent carbon-free energy source besides geothermal and nuclear power. The reality is that wind and solar are only cheap in the context of a non-intermittent source that can fill in for the intermittency of renewable production. Running a minority of your grid on solar and wind, supplementing gas plants is one thing. Running a grid mostly wind and solar is totally different beast.
But you can't deny the reality that the electricity supply is rapidly changing and that the issues of non-intermittency are turn out as not so relevant than anticipated. We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to. Batteries are helping us rely less on them and since cost of batteries and PV/wind is trending so strongly down, it is already happening that many markets prefer batteries over using gas/coal plants.
This will push down CO2 emittance. That all that matters really (at reasonable cost).
> We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to.
Not if you want to solve climate change. Reducing emissions to 50% of present levels and then just keeping them there isn't going to prevent climate change. Overproduction during peak hours doesn't help unless you have a way to release that energy in non-peak hours.
Again, growing battery production isn't actually resulting in grid storage. Even dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage isn't going to make significant changes in grid storage, but it will stop EV adoption.
> Sorry this just false. Battery deployment for electricity grid storage is progressing with unprecedented and accelerating speed.
And what, exactly, is that speed? The US plans to deploy "15GW" (presumably the authors mean GWh of storage, GW is not a unit of storage) of grid storage in 2024. That's less than 2 minutes of storage!
Again, global battery production is only about 6-700 GWh (be careful with figures that cite capacity, which is distinct from actual production). And very little of that is dedicated to grid storage.
Those figures are about maximum dispatchable power usually for a time of more than 1 hour (2 to 4 seems typical).
So 16 GW battery allow you to power the US similarly to 3x times the power of the largest US nuclear reactor for probably 3 hours.
If such projects are economically feasible now, the economics are just getting better and better and this means we will see exponential growth. California is seeing improved grid stability and reduction in CO2 emissions due to batteries today.
Somewhere between 4 and 8 minutes worth of storage deployed over the span of a whole year is not even remotely close to feasible. Even diurnal storage to even out solar production will require 8-12 hours worth of storage. Seasonal intermittency will require days or even weeks.
Since 2020, battery prices have gone flat. Moore's law works because computers get faster as transistors get smaller. That's not the case for batteries, or most other goods. A new car cost a million dollars in 1900, $100k in 1910, and $10K in 1920. Would it have been reasonable to assume that a new car would cost $10 by 1950? Of course not, the steel and rubber in the car is worth much more than $10. A car cannot cost less than the input materials used to build it.
I guess, fair amount of NIMBY there (if you don't like wind power next to you, you also don't like storage next to you in a lot of cases), some subsidies might also have had some effects on storage vs production built. Not everything is capital efficient in all places, too, of course.
1) Pump water uphill and let it run downhill. There is a massive amount of viable geography for this all over the world.
2) Batteries
3) Charge more money for electricity so people shift their demand.
4) Make hydrogen, store it and burn it to make the electricity.
Surprisingly, if you only did 4 (which is the most expensive) all of the time for every watt of power generated from solar and wind it would be very expensive, but would still be a bit cheaper than nuclear power. Nuclear power is just that expensive.
And the price only gets more horrendous if you try to use it as a peaker.
It can be solved at continental-level. Germany already sells part of its overproduction (wind, solar...) to Austria and Switzerland, to have it stored by their dams.
Whatever happened to the notion of local/decentralised energy?
Plus it relies on countries at both ends wanting the interconnection. Sweden and Norway are not so happy about other countries taking their hydro energy when it suits the market.
> relies on countries at both ends wanting the interconnection
Exactly as, right now, each and every country in the continental grid sometimes starts a production unit in order to help a neighbor in need. Everyone gains by playing according to this rule.
> taking their hydro energy
Because, right now, the system is far from being complete: not enough production units deployed on the continent, interconnections, lines, storage... This transition, a huge ordeal, is in progress.
> help a neighbor in need. Everyone gains by playing according to this rule.
Not so for Norway, where electrical prices have gone up as a result of all of these inter-connectors and a drought. Norwegian people and businesses have lost out. Politicians have taken note.
> The larger the interconnection the bigger the failure domain
True, however we have to consider the chances of a given proportion of the grid to fail: a more spread-out and heterogeneous (wind, solar...) fleet of production units is way more robust.
> power is political
True, however such incidents are rare (this one dates back from 2018) and their extent more and more reduced as grid-control devices and backup plants are continually enhanced.
As already shown there is no way for nearly all nations to ever hope to obtain an autonomous grid, and even those able to plan on this will obtain a less-robust and more expensive grid. Team play is becomes more and more mandatory and efficient, on all accounts, and bad players may lose the support of the biggest group.
> electrical prices have gone up
Yes, because there now are not enough ways to store, causing some over-pressure on existing ones. Storing in order to sustain the grid when production isn't sufficient only makes sense if we store overproduction, and overproduction remains rare (esp. at continental-level) because way too few renewable are producing. We reached the very first step: more and more overproduced renewable electricity, which triggers investments towards the next step: massive storage. V2G is a major contender.
You need more than that. My memory is that solar needs something like 16 hours of storage assuming perfect weather. And it gets much worse if you don't have perfect weather.
No you don't need more than that because electricity grids do not consist entirely of a single form of generation. Have you considered learning something about this topic before commenting?
Judging from their other comment I think they seem to be some kind of nuclear/anti-environmentalist zealot. In this comment they assumed wind power didn't exist. In the other comment they said that my current electricity tariff (3) would get people lynched and crater the economy rather than getting me to put my laundry, dishwasher and car charger on at a different time of day.
This kind of abject extremism is sadly par for the course on topics like this due to the kind of propaganda that the nuclear industry spews out. It generates zealots.
Yes, obviously I did because you responded to it below.
I find it amusing that when I cited a study that modeled exactly this scenario you poured scorn on it because it was modeled around a specific country. You didn't respond with actual figures demonstrating that this altered the results significantly, you just said "AUSTRALIA EASY MODE".
Seriously?
Yet the guy that presumed that the wind doesnt blow... ever? You didnt respond to that.
It's an interesting insight into the mind of a nuclear activist.
I'm certainly not anti-environment. It's just I recognize that the only path forward that is both possible and not horribly destructive is nuclear. The technology to make renewables practical simply does not exist even on the horizon. The storage problem is always handwaved away with "batteries" or "hydrogen"--the greens never do the numbers because that will expose the fact it doesn't work.
Renewables reduce oil and gas use. Period. You still need just as much generating capacity and you still release a lot of CO2.
And in that other comment what I said is that going pure renewable would get people lynched for how badly they wrecked the economy. The "green" approach is basically "pay no attention to the fact that the storage tech does not exist." In the real world we see it *increasing* emissions. (Shut down nuke, the load falls onto gas because it actually exists.) What would happen to our economy if power was dollars per kWh?? Because that's what it would take to ensure the lights always stay on in a pure renewable environment.
>With that in mind, exactly one year ago I started running a simple simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with approximately five hours of storage
Worst case scenarios can be provisioned for by storing and burning hydrogen.
The roundtrip cost of electricity generated this way is expensive (it's ~50% efficient) but even then it is still cheaper than the cost of baseload nuclear power electricity.
1) Pump what water up what hill? You need vast quantities of water and terrain capable of being dammed at reasonable cost. Few sources of water can be pumped at that rate without causing considerable trouble. And places with lots of water tend to be rather sparse in suitable hills. (If the terrain isn't pretty flat the water runs fast and doesn't stick around to be vast quantities of water.)
2) Not even in the ballpark of economic.
3) You'll really crater our economy, you'll get lynched and people will go back to the old way.
4) You realize the low efficiency of the loop you are proposing and big storage headaches it causes?
And nuclear power isn't "just that expensive". Rather, US nuclear power is by regulation defined as too expensive. There is a horrible provision in the nuclear world: "as low as reasonably achievable." Sounds good, and probably is good in the medical side. But on the power side it inherently defines nuclear as too expensive because if it wasn't too expensive then additional "safety" (which I find questionable, there comes a point where additional "safety" means more to break and thus doesn't really work) would be reasonably achievable.
The Republicans keep crusading about "too much regulation" but because they're not actually interested in the best possible outcome they miss the biggie: We should define that which is say 2x as safe as the status quo is deemed safe enough. And the flip side of this, that which is 2x as dangerous as the status quo is deemed unsafe. (I'd be open to different ratios, I just need to put something down.)
Let's look at the reality.
Nuclear safety? It's about 10x as good as natural gas. (5x if you count Fukushima--but all of those deaths are from the evacuation. Staying put had an expected death toll of zero.)
Natural gas is about 10x as safe as oil.
Oil is about 10x as safe as coal.
Yes--coal is 1000x as dangerous as nuclear.
(And note that these numbers do not include any harms from climate effects and thus are actually an understatement.)
Waste? There are two basic types:
Low-level: stuff that might have been contaminated. Compare it to ambient (things which aren't hotter than ambient shouldn't be treated as nuclear waste) to see if you need to care, usually you don't.
High-level: Yeah, it's hot. Very hot. But we are handling it wrong. The problem is that in the name of preventing proliferation we made reprocessing a dirty word. Plutonium is plutonium, isn't it? No. Bombs need Pu-239 with low amounts of Pu-240. It's extremely hard to make a bomb from reactor plutonium because it's got gobs of Pu-240. Yes, they can be separated--but anybody who can separate them can also separate U-235 from U-238. Pretty much the same thing, it's just the plutonium is 3x harder to separate.
Reprocess the spent fuel. 90% of it goes back into the reactor, even more if you're using a breeder design. Of what's left there are some commercially useful isotopes. Cobalt-60 would be pretty nasty spread over the environment but it's pretty darn good at killing things you really want dead. Say, to make shelf stable meat and dairy products. Once you get done with that you have some actual waste. Which will decay to ambient in 10,000 years and note that most of that decay is in the early part. You simply don't need elaborate precautions.
Which means nuclear and renewables are the worst possible companions imaginable.
Nuclear and renewables compete for the same slice of the grid. The cheapest most inflexible where all other power generation has to adapt to their demands. They are fundamentally incompatible.
For every passing year more existing reactors will spend more time turned off because the power they produce is too expensive.
The production cost of 'renewable' electricity (RE) is increasingly lower than that of nuclear. So when they produce, they are and will be preferred.
This will reduce the effective load factor of nuclear power and therefore increase its production cost (it is only profitable with a high load factor), with a strong feedback.
It gets worse because, on the technical level and despite some progress, nuclear power cannot (due to technical limitation and for safety-related reasons) adjust its production ("load following") to always exactly match demand.
This will promote the deployment of an RE system based on a continental a mix (wind, solar, etc.), smart grid, clean backup (green hydrogen), storage, etc. which will reduce the variability of its production (intermittency effect) so nuclear power will be less and less useful and more and more expensive.
I’m not sure why you seem to think nuclear and renewables are competing, but you’re just objectively wrong. Non-consistent and on-demand power generation literally go hand-in-hand. There are coal power plants that rarely turn on because they are only turned on when the grid needs to offset peaks, something that cannot be done with current renewables, even with your incredibly expensive batteries (which are mostly going into EVs anyway, and thus are a moot point.
Additionally, California is ideal for solar panels, but I assume you haven’t put even an ounce of thought into how New York or Chicago will handle it, have you?
Because every industry has capital costs that you want to repay by using it as much as you can.
There is a very small amount of people working on low-capital industries (normally with higher operational costs), and they seem to be close to some gain here or there. But almost all of our knowledge is biased against turning things off.
> Because every industry has capital costs that you want to repay by using it as much as you can.
that's the bit I don't quite understand - yes, in a simple economic model where you want the numbers to go brrr, it makes sense, but is there a physical limit? could a country decide to own the big facility and use the excess electricity and sell the results to commercial ventures? the government can afford to have a piece of land taken that doesn't return a profit 100% of the time?
I am uniformed on this, but those industries likely take time to scale up. A large scale desalination plant requires a significant amount of infrastructure.
No one will want anything from your desalination plant in Norway, and shipping water is not a thing because it becomes too expensive.
The next problem is energy cost vs. duty cycle. The less you run due to only utilizing cheap prices the higher the impact of fixed costs on your business.
Smelting cant base their production on when excess energy might be available. They need that energy now. Desalination might be a good sink but again, if water is needed now and there's no excess then what? That's why we have base load.
The difference is who gets harmed.
For solar and wind the general public generally can’t be affected by any accidents because the deaths are general work place hazards coming from working aloft with heavy equipment.
For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated.
It is not even comparable. If I chose to not work in the solar and wind industry my chance of harm is as near zero as it gets. Meanwhile about all consequences from nuclear power afflicts the general public. Both in terms of costs, injuries and life changing evacuations.
100,000 people dying one at a time over the course of a decade seems to have a lower public relations impact then 1000 people dying in a once-in-a-century spectacularly tragic accident. Even though the total casualties are higher.
Fentanyl is a prime example. I believe (from memory) over 100,000 people die of it each year in the in the US. Everyone knows it's a problem. We should "do something". But, we don't. Nobody cares enough (except as a platitude come election time). However if 1000 people died in a bomb attack (or similar) it would be top news for weeks and they would be scrambling the military and make us take our wedding rings off for scanning at airports.
If 10% of people who died in auto accidents each year were to perish in one horrible spectacular event it probably would be "transformative" as far as public policy.
Fentanyl is an issue because they are preventable deaths.
(Never mind that cracking down actually increases the death rate. And the fentanyl problem came about because of cracking down on heroin. Fentanyl is far cheaper to make and far easier to smuggle due to being much smaller. But it has a tendency to clump and thus when handled by street dealers they can't produce a uniform product.)
> For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated.
How much expense is justified for each life (or year of life) saved from radiation exposure by scraping up the soil and bagging it? Can we justify the evacuation of elderly from close to Fukushima on the grounds that in 20 years time they will have an elevated risk of cancer? How is that balanced with deaths caused by the process of relocation? What about the human cost of an energy shortage caused by shutting down the nuclear power stations in Japan?
The same goes for chemical cleanup (heavy metal poisoning, pesticides, dioxins, PFAs, fly-ash, asbestos).
To make the cleanup decisions we need some notion of tradeoff between cost and benefit. Otherwise we'll end up in a situation where an indeterminate amount of money can be spent on something with no benefit (other than achieving something a politician willed to happen).
In California the lowest yearly demand is ~13 GW. The yearly peak is ~48 GW.
Assume that 3 reactors at a time are in revision during the spring and autumn. This means the "base demand" is 16 GW.
I don't see a material difference in handling 32 GW or 48 GW of dispatchable power generation, assuming the lowest possible renewable generation is zero for the renewable side (which is not the case.)
The other option would be having more nuclear plants and turning them off for large parts of the year. That is incredibly expensive.
All this entails forcing the customers to pay for more expensive nuclear energy rather than utilize cheaper energy when it is available.
In reality the more expensive nuclear power plants are turned off.
You're using the instantaneous numbers, which matters for the peak (because if you hit 48 GW for just one hour you still have to meet the demand) but not the trough (because having overcapacity for a negligible number of hours a year is fine). The real base demand number for California is ~24 GW:
That is the average base demand over a year. Meaning for about half the year it will be less and you have to shut down parts of the nuclear fleet.
Either way, solving a 24 GW or 35 GW on top of ~20 GW something base is about as easy. Nuclear simply does not fit modern grids.
> Nobody is going to do this. It doesn't make sense to build entirely nuclear plants. It does make sense to build some more than we have now.
Exactly. Which is why nuclear power does not fit modern grids, because they will be required to shut down. As is seen time and time again in Europe when no one wants their expensive energy.
Then it's not clear where you came up with 13 GW, which is inconsistent with the ~24 GW from the Department of Energy.
> Either way, solving a 24 GW or 35 GW on top of ~20 GW something base is about as easy.
Needing 48GW instead of 24GW would literally double the cost, on top of doubling the cost of renewable generation since you'd need an average of 48GW of that instead of 24 to avoid regular use of a backup system which is presumably fossil fuels. That is not a small difference.
> Which is why nuclear power does not fit modern grids, because they will be required to shut down.
There is no point at which they shut down. They provide baseload. You get 24 GW from nuclear, which is the minimum load on the grid. If you also get something from renewables at this time, that's when you charge your batteries for later. This won't get you a week but allows you to do peak shaving. If the load is 48GW and you get 24GW from nuclear and 24GW from renewables, everything is fine. If the load is 48GW and you get 24GW from nuclear and anything less from renewables, now you discharge the batteries.
And then you only need 24 GW of peaker plants in the event that the batteries are dead and current load exceeds current generation.
For solar and wind the general public generally can’t be affected by any accidents so the deaths are general work place hazards coming from working aloft with heavy equipment.
For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated.
It is not even comparable. If I chose to not work in the solar and wind industry my chance of harm is as near zero as it gets. Meanwhile about all consequences from nuclear power afflicts the general public. Both in terms of costs, injuries and life changing evacuations.
Authoritarian state still keeping a toe in for military and pragmatic reasons. With communistic 5 year plan system you can through sheer force build a few reactors to keep the option open.
For every passing year they’ve been pulling back their nuclear ambitions in favor of renewables.
Please enlighten us about where countries which have gone all-in on solar get their base power when the sun is not shining enough and there is no wind.
I don’t understand why people who have an axe to grind pretend to be more stupid than they are in these debates. The question is not average price per kWh and never was.
The question remains the same: where should we get base power when intermittent sources are off? The solutions are gas, coal, nuclear or some form of large scale storage.
Germany seems to be ok with polluting a lot with coal to appease the proportion of die hard antinuclear activists in its population. From my point of view, nuclear is not the worst of all the options - it’s actually unclear to me if it’s not even cleaner than building all the batteries required for large scale storage - but you might disagree.
One interesting element is that, while solar needs storage, nuclear needs storage too: the demand is not flat, and become more and more non-flat when decarbonizing the energy sector. For the nuclear, there are two possibilities: 1) over-building centrals, such that they produce the energy corresponding to the peak, but then "dumping" the excess energy otherwise. But this is extremely costly, because the driver of the nuclear cost are upfront: if a central can generate X energy at 100% of the time and costed Y to be build, the price will be Y/X, but if you generate X energy but at 50%, the price will be 2*Y/X. 2) build storage.
So, the storage problem is not a renewable problem, it's something that the grid needs no matter what. In these condition, if the grid needs storage both in case of solar and in case of nuclear, it's not really an argument against renewable anymore.
France has been doing fine with nuclear and hydro for decades (at least when scheduled maintenance doesn’t all happen at the same time). You can use dams as big batteries by pumping water back up when you have excess and nuclear production is actually fairly scalable up and down which ensures the peaks are never that big.
And yet, in France, RTE, the grid supervisor, itself subcompany of EDF who owns the nuclear plants, keeps publishing reports saying that if France does not up their solar generation there is no way the grid works in the future with increased demand volatility.
You can use dams to store renewable energy too.
That's the point. Some people says that renewable is intrinsically flawed because of intermittence. But at the grid level, we will need flexibility, aka storage, no matter what, which means that the intermittence problem is strongly reduced.
And, yes, nuclear plant can scale up and down, but: 1) they need to be designed to do so efficiently and some existing don't. Building a "flexible" nuclear to provide flat generation is uselessly expensive, building a "flat" nuclear to provide flexible generation is uselessly expensive. 2) nuclear, intrinsically, is good to provide flat generation, and scaling the generation up and down cost more money than building storage.
So, it is more efficient to build storage in case of a nuclear heavy grid. Sure, you have different way to solve the problem of flexible grid with nuclear, but you insist on one solution JUST because the other solution is not convenient for you because it is also positive for a grid containing renewable.
You are moving the goal post a lot. I never pretended anything was impossible.
I said that the argument regarding rational calculation based on average costs of a kWh crumbles when you look at it from a proper angle.
The correct question is: is nuclear interesting when compared to building large scale storage facilities? The answer to that is far from being cut and dry with arguments in favour and against both.
The report you quote is not a definitive answer at all. It starts with a huge disclaimer that the cost of nuclear is to be taken specifically in the case of Australia and uses very adverse parameters based on South Korea.
> Please enlighten us about where countries which have gone all-in on solar get their base power when the sun is not shining enough and there is no wind.
I.e. demanding real world done and dusted examples or it is impossible.
Then trying to find technicalities as to why the report is wrong or does not fit your made up example.
> I.e. demanding real world done and dusted examples or it is impossible.
Huh? No, the point is that today, countries which have gone all-in with solars use coal or gas for their base. Hardly clean.
I’m not finding technicalities. That’s literally the heart of the report: what makes sense for investment in Australia given the Australian context. That’s barely related to the heart of the discussion especially considering the caveat stated which I have exposed.
You seem to have trouble arguing in good faith when the discussion doesn’t go your way.
The cost optimal path (as CO2 taxes or the equivalent are imposed) will be to displace more and more fossil fuel generation with renewables, then short term storage, then (finally) some combination of very long term storage, transmission, and demand dispatch. At no point will adding more nuclear make sense. That fossil fuels are being used now is just a stage in the migration to 0% fossil fuel, assuming the world actually decides to do that (as it damn well better).
...Do you think nuclear power plants stop working during the day?
Look at the (many) graph reports I linked: in every major American market, nuclear produces consistent power throughout the day and night. That's why they're useful!
Love how the topic has shifted from “even an hour of storage” a couple of years ago to now demanding a complete seasonal storage solution without even specifying based on which data it is needed.
It is funny when reality outpaces contrived made up arguments by conservative detractors.
Texas has been adding metric craptons of solar because it's cheaper to deploy than nuclear. The market forces are already on the side of renewables in most advanced economies. PES and neighborhood/distributed battery including V2G are ways out, and hopefully NMC battery technology will gradually be replaced with something safer. At this point, ostensible talk about nuclear that's not going to happen is crypto-techno-religious political virtue-signaling.
I never made the "one hour of storage" argument so that's a straw man as far as I'm concerned.
And my comment is made sincerely. Seasonal storage is make-or-break for renewables in many geographies (or has to be propped up by fossil fuels, which is the status quo).
France, where this blogger is from, produces a little under 80% of its power from nuclear. It doesn't just power France, but also exports to the UK and Germany among others.
A 100% nuclear society is of course also theoretical, so don't even start with that. We're talking about the optimal mix of sources given currently (and medium-term foreseeable) technology. By most serious analyses, this will include improved energy storage, renewables, and nuclear in the form of SMRs.
Serious analysis means people 'at the coal face' who have to deal with the reality of actually powering a country, not posturing bloggers. Most countries don't have a desert to pave over with solar panels, and wind (especially offshore wind) has proven surprisingly expensive.
Both the current and previous UK governments, left and right respectively, have committed to increasing nuclear as part of the energy mix.
Germany is deeply regretting shutting down its nuclear power stations and the consequences that has had, not only in terms of emissions (twice the per-capita CO2 emissions of France and the UK), but also its energy independence.
France is sitting pretty, precisely because they dealt with the reality in front of them and didn't fall for Greenpeace-esque utopian fantasies that you're now projecting onto others.
Germany is not regretting shutting down its nuclear plants at all. Scholz called it a dead horse last year and said the decision was made a long time ago, and it's time to move on. They gave the world a blueprint with the Energiewende, and the world is jumping on that train. I think it's a very exciting time.
There is no energy independence with nuclear. Most of the uranium comes in the world comes from Kasachstan. The only two countries with relevant production that are democratic are Canada and Australia. The rest is Usbekistan, Niger, Russia. There was a coup in Niger last year and the first thing the military regime announced was they stop selling uranium to France. At a time when the western world has shut its ties to Russia, France is still heavily dependent on Russia to supply uranium. The sun shines and the wind blows everywhere.
France doesn't actually power itself because it doesn't have enough. Last winter was the first winter since there are data (since 2014) that it didn't depend on Germany for imports because their heating is mostly electric, but there's not enough capacity in the winter. I think overall they are in a world of pain, Macron announced I think 6 new plants, but it took them 20 years to finish the prototype in Flamanville. By the time the new ones are finished they will have dozens of old ones waiting to be decomissioned. And they announced enormous investments in the upcoming years so that the old ones even make it that far. So a lot of money to kick the bucket down the road.
France gets less than half their energy from nuclear. Don't confuse the grid with the society as a whole, with all ways energy is used.
And of course no one energizes all activities in their society with nuclear, not even France.
I will add that providing the world's approximately 20 TW of primary energy use via today's reactors would expend the estimated resource of uranium at current prices in less than 10 years. So anyone proposing a nuclear powered world is also assuming advances in either breeder reactors or uranium extraction. So the hypocrisy of ruling out renewables because they have not been proved in practice is palpable.
Authoritarian state still keeping a toe in for military and pragmatic reasons. With communistic 5 year plan system you can through sheer force build a few reactors to keep the option open.
For every passing year they’ve been pulling back their nuclear ambitions in favor of renewables.
Authoritarian state still keeping a toe in for military and pragmatic reasons. With communistic 5 year plan system you can through sheer force build a few reactors to keep the option open.
For every passing year they’ve been pulling back their nuclear ambitions in favor of renewables.
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