>However, many of the measures needed for energy efficiency are now cheaper than the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants.
Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity.
>The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants.
Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastrophically instead of being gracefully shut down in favor of new ones.
And his explanation isn't to justify these claims, but to blame political opponents. Sad!
Funny, everyone was happy about how Texas scrapped so many coal plants and built so many windmills until it reached a cascade failure point and then the narrative shifted to "OMG, look at all the deregulation!"
Texas had no power because they forgot everything they learnt the hard way from their "once-in-a-decade snow storm" they had 2011.
Coal piles freezing solid because there is no roof, gas valves impossible to operate because nobody would put a box around them, no water too cool reactor cores because the pipes froze: these are not failures somehow cascading from the fact they build some windmills.
When I learnt that turbines on Texas nuclear plants stay under the open sky I was REALLY surprised. It was the reason behind the single failure, otherwise nuclear plants have weathered this crisis perfectly.
I guess the lesson is that not even Texans think nuclear is so safe it doesn't need weather protection, or maybe it's some pesky federal regulation that says that at least the reactor needs to be protected...
The failure point was a repeat of previous cold events -- it wasn't really a cascade event, of course, given wind turbines provide only 20% of power on the ECOT mini-grid.
Given there are similar capacity wind turbines running happily in Antarctica, and the heads-up from the 2011 & 2019 events to winterise the Texas fleet, it's difficult to see how this is a 'windmill problem'.
I wouldn't frame the blackouts as a "windmill problem" as they're primarily a "winterization problem", but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored. ERCOT is a world leader in wind production, and that was pretty punishing when its 25GW of wind capacity was producing 0. We invested billions into a generation source that at one point produced 0 and eventually "exceeded projections" by producing slightly more than 0. We could have invested those billions in basically any other source and had significantly more electricity available. Winterization would have helped somewhat with less turbines freezing, but it doesn't help at all when the wind stops blowing.
I see you've made many sweeping comments in this thread, some of which I can't confirm the veracity of.
> ... but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored.
Has that grid suffered lots of blackouts at times other than big freezes?
If it hasn't, then that would suggest that the designers / operators of the grid factored in the unreliability of wind, and have the baseload well covered by gas, nuclear, etc.
> ERCOT is a world leader in wind production, and that was pretty punishing when its 25GW of wind capacity was producing 0.
And yet:
"About half of the state’s wind capacity was offline Sunday because of turbines that had frozen in west Texas, according to the Austin American-Statesman, but high winds from the winter storm were spinning coastal turbines faster and generating more power to offset those losses." [1]
> Winterization would have helped somewhat with less turbines freezing, but it doesn't help at all when the wind stops blowing.
'fewer'
I'm not sure where you're getting information that the wind stopped blowing, or why that's a reason to not use wind turbines as part of an overall power generation strategy, or indeed why you seem to be surprised that if ECOT prepared wind turbines, as well as gas & nuclear (which both lost a fair chunk of capacity) then the outcome wouldn't have been so appalling.
You're reading a lot into my comments. You seem to think that I'm against using wind power, which is absolutely not true, as I've commented in the past. I'm against the current narrative's misinformation which cherry-picks stats to push a political agenda. I would like ERCOT to continue to "use wind turbines as part of an overall power generation strategy", but in order to do this intelligently it is necessary to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different generation sources. The fashionable anti-nuclear, pro-wind propaganda is not helping anyone to understand reality.
All of my information about the output of different sources comes from personally digging through ERCOT's minutely detailed reports[0]. I haven't seen a nice, neat fact-checking propaganda piece that deals with the relevant data, but I haven't really searched that hard because all the data is right there, straight from the source.
The "Fuel Mix Report" lists the output of each generation type in 15 minute intervals[1]. There are over 25000 GW of wind capacity, so we would expect to see a maximum of a bit less than 6250 GWh of wind output in the best 15 minute periods ("a bit less" is taking into account that we don't expect 100% output even in the best circumstances). The data matches this, as we see peaks reaching about 5600 GWh. The values are conveniently totaled for each day, and with a theoretical ceiling of 600,000 GWh capacity per day we see that the most actually produced on any day in Jan or Feb 2021 was 458,000 GWh on January 6th, 76% of capacity.
If we look at February 15, 16, and 17, wind output was 225,000 GWh for all three days combined, or a whopping 12.5% of capacity. This matches the pitiful performance that I was seeing in real time in ERCOT's feed.
None of the 15 minute periods report 0 GWh, the lowest being 149 GWh on Feb 15th. So either the granularity is not fine enough or I was just wrong to say that wind dropped to zero, and I would like to revise my position to say that wind output dropped to 2% of capacity.
Hopefully you can understand how I can both support intelligent use of wind power while being dismayed by fact-checking pieces that turn "only 25%" of our capacity being 87.5% offline into vague terms like "exceeded projections" and "wind wasn't a problem", as if 15,000-20,000 GW of capacity being offline was not a significant factor. (87.5% of 25,000 GW is 21,875 GW, but again I am not expecting wind to be able to produce at 100%).
> indeed why you seem to be surprised that if ECOT prepared wind turbines, as well as gas & nuclear (which both lost a fair chunk of capacity) then the outcome wouldn't have been so appalling.
This comes off like you're just making things up to troll me. I've specifically mentioned winterization many times. It's also very telling that, like the fact-checkers, you have to stick to vague terms like "lost a fair chunk of capacity" without getting into the actual numbers which would show how massive that disparity really is.
Well, you conceded that it's primarily a winterisation problem, but then immediately say:
> ... but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored.
The word 'unreliable' is ambiguous here -- clearly world+dog understands that power generated by wind is highly variable, and ERCOT (as for any ISO, and similar orgs in other countries) maintains and improves their forecasts around this variability.
This is factored into the overall grid provisioning and maintenance of power to consumers. It's why I asked about the effect of this variability outside of major cold events. Evidently not so much?
So, using the word 'unreliable' in a way that sounds like wind turbines can't be trusted seems disingenuous, since there's no surprises with the way they operate, and the variability in the power they can generate.
Your comment that billions should have been invested in anything except wind, and this would have guaranteed significantly more electricity available - isn't supported by the facts. Nuclear, gas, and coal all failed in various but predictable ways.
So you're kind of conceding that winterisation would have helped, but only in the context of fewer wind turbines being taken out. The fact coal, gas, and nuclear failed, because they hadn't been properly protected against cold weather, you seem to be discounting.
I haven't stared at the ERCOT numbers, and am disinclined to do so -- the fact that much of the state was without power for several days, and early reports suggested the grid was some minutes away from catastrophic cascading failure, suggests to me that concise numbers aren't the important thing here.
What's clear is that despite the 2011 heads-up, and the audit two years ago that highlighted the continued lack of preparedness, it was way more than the predictable freezing of some wind turbines. The history and political motivation for this highly isolated ISO further highlights the problems of poor planning and poor regulation. Were they not so intentionally disconnected, power could have easily been sourced from elsewhere in the country.
I did find an interesting 'actual number' that their lack of maintenance for their wind turbines was a major contributory factor:
"Though frozen wind turbines were a contributing factor, wind shutdowns accounted for less than 13% of the outages, Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations for ERCOT, told Bloomberg." [0]
Further in that article:
"According to a report from ERCOT, solar accounts for only 3.8% of the state's power capacity throughout the year. Wind energy accounts for 10% of Texas's winter energy capacity and throughout the entire year it is able to provide 24.8%, the second-largest source of energy in the state under natural gas, which accounts for 51%."
Which suggests your 25% figure is misleading, as that's a yearly average - it's 10% (about the same as nuclear) during that time of year.
> I haven't stared at the ERCOT numbers, and am disinclined to do so -- the fact that much of the state was without power for several days, and early reports suggested the grid was some minutes away from catastrophic cascading failure, suggests to me that concise numbers aren't the important thing here.
I gave references to the exact locations which would take at most a minute or two to find. If we're just going off journalists' opinion pieces, then we're not ever going to get any further than the cherry-picked stats that they choose to provide. If you don't think my numbers are worth taking into account because they come from the source data and not someone's propaganda, then I don't know what to tell you. You're happy enough to cite numbers when they fit into your argument.
> This is factored into the overall grid provisioning and maintenance of power to consumers. It's why I asked about the effect of this variability outside of major cold events. Evidently not so much?
The recent events indicate precisely that this planning had some serious flaws. We cannot make that assumption. Although you have pointed out that wind power normally varies between 10% and 25% of the supply, so the normal variability is apparently very large.
> Were they not so intentionally disconnected, power could have easily been sourced from elsewhere in the country.
The adjacent regions also suffered rolling blackouts. There was a little power to source, but not much. This argument is not supported by the "concise numbers".
Re my personal opinion on wind use: My original position was that wind can be very good despite some issues, but as I've gotten into these discussions and dug through the data, I see significant reasons that wind might be a bad fit for Texas without some major improvements beyond just winterization. I'm open to those improvements but I don't know what they could be, so my opinions here are not really made up yet.
I'm not really interested in advancing any particular policy prescription. I'm mostly pushing back against the widespread misinformation (especially avoidance of actual numbers in favor of vague terms) around this topic, in order to give some space for a real discussion. I'm not trying to show that so much wind generation is a problem, I'm trying to show that it could be a problem and that possibility needs to be accounted for. Wind shouldn't be assumed to have "exceeded projections" because some partisan "fact-checker" said so without specifying how absurdly low those 24-hour projections were. That's why I've repeatedly said that winterization could improve the situation, but I also point out the flaws in thinking that winterization will magically solve all the issues, since wind is so variable even without any freezing.
You've thrown lots of numbers around, while claiming other people are wrong and/or incautious:
> I'm against the current narrative's misinformation which cherry-picks stats to push a political agenda.
and
> If we're just going off journalists' opinion pieces, then we're not ever going to get any further than the cherry-picked stats that they choose to provide. If you don't think my numbers are worth taking into account because they come from the source data and not someone's propaganda, then I don't know what to tell you. You're happy enough to cite numbers when they fit into your argument.
However, all your figures push the narrative that wind is / should be 25% of the total state capacity all the time:
> There are over 25000 GW of wind capacity, so we would expect to see a maximum of a bit less than 6250 GWh of wind output in the best 15 minute periods ...
and
> ... being dismayed by fact-checking pieces that turn "only 25%" of our capacity being 87.5%
Despite, as I quoted earlier:
"Wind energy accounts for 10% of Texas's winter energy capacity and throughout the entire year it is able to provide 24.8%"
So your 25% ratio, and all the GwH figures you keep extrapolating from that, are not what ERCOT projects or expects to obtain in winter. (EDIT: Indeed, this implies the average for the whole of winter is 10%, with an understanding it will dip well below that figure through those months.)
Are you cherry-picking yearly average figures and inappropriately applying them here to push a narrative?
> Are you cherry-picking yearly average figures and inappropriately applying them here to push a narrative?
I am neither cherry-picking nor using yearly average figures. The one yearly figure of "over 25000 GW" is for ERCOT's installed wind capacity, which is consistent year-round apart from a small growth as new capacity comes online. My other figures are for specific dates or months, the dates being when black outs were happening.
As for why wind's low output compared to capacity matters so much, I am dealing with the inescapable facts of the Texas climate and how it relates to the energy market. The capacity in Texas is driven by summer-time demand. Yet, very rarely, there are winters in which the demand can briefly exceed summer-time capacity. It's obvious that the current market is unable to consistently meet the demand in these rare winter events.
The root problem is having capacity which can perform in summer but not in winter, whether due to not being winterized, being down for maintenance, or any other reason. Focusing solely on winterization is being used as a diversion from the problem that Texans actually care about, which is simply having power in their homes during extreme winters.
By refusing to look at the data, you are missing the fact that wind actually does produce quite a lot of power on many winter days. In fact, ERCOT's all-time record for wind production was set in February 2018. But on some winter days, wind produces very little. It should be obvious that wind significantly reduces the average profits for other generation sources in winter, and thus has a negative effect on the market for more reliable generation capacity. Wind's high variability does contribute to a lack of output during extreme weather.
The "wind performed excellently" side is just ignoring all of this, but it's all highly relevant and should be part of the discussion. I am not saying that it should lead to a "wind is bad" conclusion in the final analysis. I am saying that there are significant problems with wind generation that should be part of the analysis, not swept under the rug. Saying "just winterize" is extremely hand-wavey, as it does not account for how the high costs of winterization can result in less installed capacity, and it completely fails to consider other issues like certain generation sources being highly inconsistent even when there is no freezing. Saying "all sources had problems" is a way to avoid recognizing that nuclear dramatically outperformed every other generation source even without winterizing. Performing at 75% of capacity is completely different from performing at 12.5%.
There are some more detailed analyses in the articles at [0] and [1]. [0] deals with the claim that deregulation was the culprit, showing that the relevant Texan regulations are actually more strict and better-enforced than the national regulations (due to previous freezing issues), while other national regulations do apply to Texas (like some dealing with gas). [1] goes into detail on how capacity planning fell short, by someone who was actually responsible for capacity planning in a region of ERCOT. The main point is that Texas has no capacity market, and this is what has allowed it to become a world leader in wind generation but has led to failures in having enough capacity available. "When capacity value is rewarded, this makes the economics of renewables much less competitive. Texas has stacked the deck to make wind and solar more competitive than they could be in a system that better recognizes the value of dependable resources which can supply capacity benefits. An energy only market helps accomplish the goal of making wind and solar more competitive. Except capacity value is a real value. Ignoring that, as Texas did, comes with real perils." "Incentives and responsibility need to be paired. Doing a post-mortem on the Texas situation ignoring incentives and responsibility is inappropriate and incomplete."
With all this taken into account, I think that I favor a system of primarily nuclear power providing baseload needs (with some basic winterization please), and a mixture of other sources that can economically and consistently meet variable demand. This leaves wind a solid place where it is economically efficient, as in some windy regions of Texas. I haven't completely made up my mind though.
> The one yearly figure of "over 25000 GW" is for ERCOT's installed wind capacity ...
That figure informs an earlier calculation, which got you to here:
> [nuclear fission] Performing at 75% of capacity is completely different from [wind] performing at 12.5%.
Which is why I'm alerting you to your seemingly intentional misuse of the numbers coming out of ECOT.
AIUI their own reports indicate wind in winter accounts for 10% of the state's power.
Because the yearly average is 24.8% indicates that through the other times of the year ERCOT budgets / forecasts something > 24.8%. (Which in turn indicates that your 25000GW figure can not equate to 25% - there's clearly fluctuations on the constituent power sources through the year.)
So if everyone expects wind to provide ~10% that time of year -- with a good deal of hour/day variability -- then your earlier mathematical wrangling:
> ... 25000 GW of wind capacity .. we would expect to see ... 6250 GWh of wind output in the best 15 minute periods.
> The data matches this, as we see peaks reaching about 5600 GWh.
> ... a theoretical ceiling of 600,000 GWh capacity per day ... the most actually produced on any day in Jan or Feb 2021 was 458,000 GWh on January 6th, 76% of capacity.
> ... February 15, 16, and 17, output was 225,000 GWh for all three days combined, or a whopping 12.5% of capacity.
-- where you've taken the yearly average of state supply (24.8%), incorrectly applied it to winter (whereas ERCOT anticipates an average of 10% during those months), and are complaining you're seeing 12.5% of a total that's out by a factor of 2.5 (ie. it'd be 31% expected capacity for that time of year).
And that's all ignoring the fact that ERCOT failed in their duty of care so ~half the fleet was inoperable.
This is why I think you're being disingenuous with your calculations.
As to your other points:
> Focusing solely on winterization is being used as a diversion from the problem that Texans actually care about, which is simply having power in their homes during extreme winters.
I don't live there, but my understanding is there was a strong movement to decomm coal power plants to reduce pollution & improve air quality, so 'power in homes in extreme winters' is doubtless on the list, but isn't the list.
It's reasonable that the good people of Texas assumed all would be fine, anyway.
The people running this system said, in January:
"We studied a range of potential risks under both normal and extreme conditions," Pete Warnken, ERCOT's manager of resource adequacy, said in its Seasonal Assessment for Resource Adequacy prepared in November, "and believe there is sufficient generation to adequately serve our customers."
and in February:
"Bill Magness, president and chief executive officer of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, spoke briefly about the winter weather during his report to the board at the Feb. 9 meeting, the only mention of the incoming storm during the public portion of the virtual meeting, which spanned two hours, 28 minutes.
"Magness spoke about the approaching cold front for about 40 seconds:
" “It is actually going to be winter here pretty soon. As those of you in Texas know, we do have a cold front coming this way. We’ll probably see our winter peak later this week or in the very early part of next week. And Operations has issued an operating condition notice just to make sure everyone is up to speed with their winterization and we’re ready for the several days of pretty frigid temperatures to come our way."
Given the claims immediately fired off when things went titsup, blaming legislation that hadn't been enacted yet, wind turbines, solar, everything other than poor management and poor preparation - it's unsurprising that much of the FUD stuck.
> By refusing to look at the data, you are missing the fact that wind actually does produce quite a lot of power on many winter days.
I'm very much not missing that.
I understand wind is highly variable.
Hence you support it (today) with gas plants that can spin up in under 10 minutes, and insert a buffer (batteries, say) in between.
> It should be obvious that wind significantly reduces the average profits for other generation sources in winter, and thus has a negative effect on the market for more reliable generation capacity.
I really don't get how that might work. Whoever's selling the power sets the price (as we've seen to some ludicrous extent this year). If wind power generation wasn't profitable, it presumably wouldn't be so popular. Especially the case in a exuberantly commercial landscape such as Texas / ERCOT.
> Wind's high variability does contribute to a lack of output during extreme weather.
I'm not sure if that's false, a truism, or a blend.
If you're saying that variable sources of power will contribute to variable power generation - yeah, sure.
OTOH if you're asserting that small-term (hours, days) variability -- that can be forecast reasonably accurately over short-term periods (weeks, months) -- means less power than you were expecting, then that makes no sense at all, unless your forecasting is consistently appalling, in which case .. you know .. the problem's not with your plant.
> With all this taken into account, I think that I favor a system of primarily nuclear power providing baseload needs ...
If you mean nuclear fission, then I suspect you're going to be disappointed.
I've asked twice already - has there previously been comparable blackouts there where the root cause wasn't a lack of winterisation?
Looking to the rest of the world could be informative, as I don't think we see this kind of event in countries with comparable power generation breakdown and similar climates. But I haven't done any deep research there.
> Installed capacity is installed capacity. It does not "fluctuate" throughout the year.
7 days ago I had a new array of 12kW of solar panels plugged into the grid.
So far I've had one properly sunny day - that generated about 53kwH.
Because we're in autumn, two weeks away from the equinox, I know that this is going to be 'about average', but through the year there'll be seasonal variations.
In 3 months from now, f.e., at the winter solstice, I may hit 30kwH on a clear day, but averaging probably 20kwH per day. Some days, if it's raining, or very overcast, of course, it'll be less.
Thinking that my 'installed capacity' is the maximum available in the middle of summer, on a cloudless day, would be an unhelpful way to think of it. Rather, I'd consider 'over the year, I'll get x amount of power generated', and then divide that by 365 for an average daily amount.
Similar to how the ERCOT team has said 'over the year, our wind turbines will generate x amount of power' - but they've also gone into seasonal sub-divisions.
So, if you want to make a point about wind turbines not fulfilling the theoretical maximum output in the wrong half of the year while half the fleet is frozen, I can see why you'd want to assume it's mid-summer all year around.
Every power source had some failures, but the only power sources that dropped all the way to 0 were solar and wind. Nuclear operated at 75% of capacity, while fossil generation seems to have been around 60%. Wind recovered slightly and "exceeded projections" by producing in the 15-30% range, but closer to 15% at night when it's coldest.
All sources were notoriously un-winterized, but wind generation had the additional problem of not working when there wasn't enough wind, which is why it dropped to 0 at one point. Suggesting that wind would perform adequately if it were only winterized is simply inaccurate. It's common knowledge among non-zealots that wind and solar are far too unreliable to supply baseload generation needs, and that unreliability led to a missing 15-20 GW of generation when we needed it. Base load must be supplied by something else, like perhaps nuclear which performed pretty well despite not being winterized.
> Wind ran at about 50% of capacity and that was because it wasn't winterized.
That's bullshit. I was watching the ERCOT feed [0] during the blackouts, and I never saw it exceed 30%. I posted about it here extensively during the event, and no one reported seeing higher numbers. Right now wind is 5727 MW (23% of installed wind capacity), which is actually a little higher than the average generation I was seeing during the blackouts. PolitiFact very suspiciously doesn't want to say which sources are supposed to support which claims, but I can't find any support for their figures in their ERCOT links, which are the only actual sources provided.
Edit: I did a little more digging, and found that it's your claim that "wind ran at about 50% of capacity" that is completely false. The truth is that only half of the capacity was frozen, but that does not mean that the other half was producing. About half of the unfrozen capacity was not producing for other reasons. The truth is that wind output was 15-30% of capacity due to a combination of factors, including turbines freezing, batteries losing capacity and plain lack of wind. PolitiFact is not outright lying, they're just being as misleading as they possibly can be by cherry-picking stats like "50% was unfrozen" but omitting highly relevant data like "70-85% was offline". That's propaganda, not fact-checking.
I think you have your terms mixed up. Capacity refers to the maximum output. "Normal capacity" isn't a thing. You could say "normal output" or "expected output".
Yes. The big secret is they're hybrid windmills ;) The grain mills are separated from the wind turbines by electrical lines, unlike their mechanically-linked Dutch grain mill predecessors. Any excess electricity goes into BitFlour, a cryptocurrency that's "milled" instead of "mined".
(For those who missed it, the parent is asserting that "windmill" should be reserved for wind-powered mills.)
It was also... amusing watching capacity payments suddenly cease to be an evil subsidy to big coal and become an essential part of competent grid operations that Texas stupidly didn't have because they're right-wing libertarian nutjobs that think the free market solves everything. And by amusing I mean we're all fucked.
This is wrong in two ways. First off, electricity in France isn't particular cheap by European standards (which already is not cheap)[1]
Secondly, the EDF is debt-laden and heavily subsidized by the French state, this is why other providers cannot compete. Nuclear energy itself is on the expensive end when it comes to energy sources. As the article points out, France has not even allocated a third of the money it needs to decommission existing plants.
Nuclear do get most money for research and development compared to other energy sources, but I have a hard time see how that translate to energy prices. R&D usually goes to universities.
"In France, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Ireland and Finland, the highest shares were spent on fossil fuels (although in absolute terms, the fossil fuel subsidies in France were slightly lower than in Germany).
Both Germany and France is at the same time dwarfed by the amount of subsidies given to fossil fuel in the US. Nuclear subsidized is a tiny dot on map compared to the billions being spent on coal, oil and gas.
They're good until 2030 and then they're all going to start aging out at more or less the same time.
Nuclear power is extraordinarily capital intensive but fairly
reasonably priced to run once it's built.
This also creates a strong incentive to run plants beyond their operating lifetime, which France may do. That takes us into exciting new territory safety-wise.
This tail end expense is maybe the largest problem with nuclear power. Economic systems and corporate structures are not set up for this. The whole economy is used to things costing nothing at the end of their life, or nearly so.
Done with a car? Scrap it, strip it, recycle the recyclables, and toss the rest. Done with a building? Implode it and cart it away. Same goes for almost all other pieces of machinery and capital.
Done with a nuke? Now you have another cost almost as high as building it to begin with! It's like having to buy your car and then spend almost the same amount to un-buy it at the end of its life span.
Yes such things can be priced in, but it requires a tremendous amount of foresight and discipline. There is a constant temptation to cut corners on any cost that won't be incurred for a long time, especially if that time is beyond the term of a politician or the career of a corporate bureaucrat.
Done with a solar panel? Send it to a bulk electronics recycler. Done with a wind turbine? Scrap it like any other piece of heavy machinery.
There are other industries with non-trivial decommissioning costs, like chemicals, oil and gas, etc., but at least the time frame is reasonably short. Nuclear decommissioning costs drag on and on, theoretically many times longer than the plant's useful life span.
In the short term nuclear is undoubtedly expensive, but when the debt from construction is payed off, it becomes an incredibly cheap and reliable source of energy.
As far as I'm aware, dealing with the waste has cost taxpayers in Germany quite a lot over the last couple of decades, and all of the really hot stuff is sitting in glorified warehouses with no end in sight. I have a feeling this may still become a very significant part of the overall costs. Has any other country actually solved that problem?
This is what the interviewee points to in the interview itself, but also adds that they mah not be the answer because there is evidence that original estimates for copper’s corrosion were far too optimistic.
That is simply wrong. Underground storage is not a panacea. Few mines are suitable and even those require expensive preparation and maintenance for coming decades or even centuries, with many hard to predict risks (think earthquake, flood).
Few mines is all we need. The entirety of the USA would need just one such site.
There's plenty of nasty natural stuff underground and a well-designed mine storage site would be a lesser risk than continuously radioactive coal power plants of today.
The only truly reliable and inexhaustible output of the nuke industry is falsehood.
They were lying before the first commercial plant was built ("too cheap to meter") and have continued well past the industry's deserved end ("incredibly cheap", above). The article demonstrates that even operating them, neglecting all of construction and decommissioning, costs more than alternatives.
"Incredibly" is a perhaps unintentionally revealing admission.
It does not look to me like Russia is struggling with exporting its reactors and building them domestically. Areva's issues look to me as purely organizational and political, not technical.
I don't think you're calculating climate change into the cost. We've got maybe 100 years left before things go nuts with the arctic completely melting.
Much less than 100 years. But continuing to operate nukes--instead of building out renewables with that money, and investing the savings in even more renewables--brings it closer.
To everyone being a proponent of this modern new nuclear plants you dream about I ask: would you want to live in a village where they would build a new nuclear plant next to it?
I would have no problem with building one outside our city. And frankly compared the land clearing one would need for solar/thermal or the blight of enormous windmills, I’d prefer it. What you may be really asking is whether people are comfortable with the risk of turning into the next Chernobyl. I feel that risk is quite low, especially for new builds.
Aesthetically, I'd offer a counterpoint that incredibly high aspect ratio white carbon wings are quite beautiful, relative to monolithic concrete blocks. They are also approachable in the landscape (I love mountain biking beneath them).
I agree with your point that nimbyism shouldn't be a relevant factor in new build decisions though. The real issue is not whether you would want to live next to a new nuclear reactor, but whether you would want to live next to one in the process of being decommissioned at minimum cost contracts (or pay for the same, which is not being factored in to operating expenses). Or, live next to one of the wholly inadequate storage facilities for the hottest waste which we still have little idea what to do with.
I cannot understand how anyone would prefer an enormous grey concrete building with a large exclusion zone and large cooling towers blocking the skyline, to otherwise untouched natural or agricultural landscape dotted with wind turbines.
Wind turbines allow you to enjoy more of the countryside because they take up very little space (you can walk around them). Furthermore, they seem to be quieter: https://youtu.be/zKgN2G9d0dchttps://youtu.be/hEMImNj_c44
When you compare the energy densities & land required there is nothing at all enormous about a nuclear plant. It is by far the most space efficient energy source we have (especially once you factor in the upstream footprint of mining & shipping ops)
That depends on how you measure land use; are you counting the amount of space that becomes otherwise unusable, i.e. the relatively small area occupied by the towers, or the entire area of the fields in which the wind turbines are placed? (which can still be used for other things like agriculture).
Personally I think wind turbines look quite majestic, and I like to see them when I go for a drive in the countryside.
This isn't directly related to the original question of living next to a nuclear power plant vs a wind farm, but as you mentioned, nuclear power stations require large mining operations to supply them with uranium (you have to mine a lot of land for a small amount of uranium), whereas wind turbines do not.
And finally, wind turbines can be erected in the sea where they don't displace any land at all.
You don’t need to mine much land to get very large amounts of uranium - they tend to be underground mines, and produce a truly staggering amount of energy by mass mined. Tailings can be problematic - but even the largest uranium mines have had tiny tailings piles compared to even small wind farm footprints.
That link doesn't mention anything about the amount of land required to mine the copper needed for wind turbines.
It must be far less than is needed for mining the uranium needed to generate the same power. Think about it; the copper required for the wind turbines is a fixed one-off cost that lasts the lifetime of the turbine, and can be recycled. Nuclear reactors need a continual supply of uranium (about 27 tonnes per year for a 1GWe reactor: http://bit.ly/3voR0II).
Furthermore copper concentrations are typically around 100 times higher than uranium concentrations, which means you need far more uranium ore than copper ore to produce the same weight of metal. Copper has been extracted with relative ease for thousands of years.
And then of course, there's all the metals and concrete that are needed to build the nuclear power station.
> It must be far less than is needed for mining the uranium needed to generate the same power. Think about it; the copper required for the wind turbines is a fixed one-off cost that lasts the lifetime of the turbine, and can be recycled. Nuclear reactors need a continual supply of uranium (about 27 tonnes per year for a 1GWe reactor: http://bit.ly/3voR0II).
A single wind turbine can contain 3.6 tons of copper[1], so using your source for uranium used by a nuclear power plant in one year. Just seven and a half wind turbines use as much copper as a nuclear power plant uses uranium in one year.
If you replaced the ~100GW of nuclear power capacity in the United States you would need about 360,000 tons of copper. It would take the current US nuclear fleet ~133 years to use the equivalent amount of uranium. The above also assumes that wind turbines runs at 100% capacity which we all know they won't. So your going to need an additional 2 - 4 times more turbines and copper to replace the current US nuclear fleet.
> Furthermore copper concentrations are typically around 100 times higher than uranium concentrations, which means you need far more uranium ore than copper ore to produce the same weight of metal. Copper has been extracted with relative ease for thousands of years.
Also copper concentrations in typical copper ore is not 100 time greater than uranium concentrations. Copper concentrations are about 0.6%[2] and uranium is 0.1% - 0.2%[3].
> Also copper concentrations in typical copper ore is not 100 time greater than uranium concentrations. Copper concentrations are about 0.6%[2] and uranium is 0.1% - 0.2%
Sorry, your right, 100x is too high, that was a rough guess. It should be more like 30-60 times higher when compared with enriched uranium (which is what a nuclear power plant uses); it takes 10 tonnes of natural uranium to produce 1 tonne of enriched uranium [1].
So 100GWe of nuclear power capacity uses around 100x25 = 2500 tonnes of enriched uranium per year. The same amount of digging would likely produce between 2500x30-2500x60 = 75,000-150,000 tonnes of copper, lets take the middle value: 112,500
So in 3.2 (360,000/112,500) years the 100GWe of nuclear power capacity has produced the same amount of digging required to produce 360,000 tonnes of copper. Multiply that by 3 to take account of wind turbine inefficiencies and that takes it to 9.6 years.
Current wind turbines last around 20 years, so even if we assume they only use newly mined copper (not recycled), and we ignore all the metals and other materials used to build the nuclear power stations, then the nuclear power stations are still going to require about twice as much earth dug up for mining.
Large turbine farms are an eyesore, IMO, that dominate entire landscapes. Visually destroying the countryside is probably better than emitting 30 billion tons of CO2 each year, though. But yeah, I think a nuclear plant (as I have seen them) would be preferable, visually, to the enormous turbine farm needed to produce an equivalent amount of power. How much would that be? Avg nuclear plant generates 1GW in the US. Average turbine generates 1.67 MW. So about 600 turbines at about an acre a piece. So a square mile of turbines.
I have driven passed it many, many times. I can tell you that the visual impact is minimal, and the area around it is "untouched natural or agricultural landscape". Blocking the skyline? How tall do you think the cooling towers are? Wind farms have a much larger visual impact.
:) fair play to you. At least the real estate prices will be good.
I won't go for low risk when it comes to nuclear and not let my family grow up next to it. Only no risk would be acceptable to me when it comes to nuclear, quite some tail risk in this case.
Let’s keep in mind that not doing nuclear is subjecting you and your family (and subsequent generations) to the long term issue of ever-increasing CO2 output. While waiting for workable battery tech at 3% avg y/y improvement - which means a looong wait for truly reliable at-scale FF displacement. The promise of renewables is great, but planning for a battery miracle in the short term is no plan at all. IF we appropriately monetize the cost of going deeper into fossil fuels every day (which is what the globe is doing right now, still), I think the risk of nuclear is put in a better context. So it seems to me we’re talking about the global risks of continuing on current track or localized risk of nuclear plant accident. Out of 440 operable on-grid plants, how many accidents have you heard of that would have impacted you or your family?
I don’t think “no-risk” exists for any power gen tech, fwiw. There are always going to be trade-offs.
Do people even read the ariticles they respond to?
For interviewee points to the fact that new nuclear is significantly more expensive than solar and wind. In fact, even existing nuclear’s base running costs are higher. And here’s the kicker. Solar/wind + existing battery tech is also cheaper than nuclear. And we don’t even need battery until solar/wind generation has increased by an order of magnitude.
So $1 spent on nuclear will do a lot less to reduce CO2 than $1 spent on wind/solar. Further, that $1 spent on nuclear will still take up to a decade to start helping reduce CO2, while the solar/wind options will likely be active within a year or so.
The article may be wrong about all these facts, but in a response to it one needs to at least show why they are wrong instead of pretending the claims were never made.
Plus, what never gets factored into this, is a sane discussion about industrial uses. Switching off industrial users in extreme events (light winds/cloudy for multiple weeks) has a cost, but that could also be factored in to the costs of relative power strategies.
We already have these kind of contracts — perhaps we should be more aggressive in pursuing that?
There is no storage solution for this. How do you store daily power needs of a large metro area x 3 days? Batteries? Thermal? The capacity isn't there today for a viable installation. Maybe in rural areas that can give up a ton of land mass for a relatively low population.
>Uranium mining facilities produce tailings that generally are disposed of in near surface impoundments close to the mine. These tailings pose serious environmental and health risks in the form of Randon emission, windblown dust dispersal and leaching of contaminants including heavy metals and arsenic into the water.
Nuclear energy still requires fuel. The impacts and costs from mining operations and refining should be taken into account when comparing to other energy sources. They are part of it. Nuclear energy can't exist without it.
Uranium mining seems hell of a lot better than Copper/Nickel mining[1]. Not only is the scale of copper and nickel needed for wind and solar vastly greater than the amount of Uranium needed, but Copper/nickel mines have all the same issues with leaching heavy metals and arsenic, just on a larger scale. And wind turbines use a lot of copper[2], so I'm fine with looking into the costs of nuclear energy through uranium mining if we also calculate the costs of mining from Wind, Solar and grid storage.
Who is actually doing this work? I have had an idea for a kind of 'public meta-analysis' site, where we could give simple headline figures for important questions like this based on consensus estimates. A bit like the Cochrane or Mental Elf, but for everything and producing a dataset of actual numbers to be used in arguments like this. It's so frustrating in comment threads like this that nobody actually has reasonable numbers for the fundamental assumptions of the arguments on either side.
> One thing I never really see brought into the nuclear energy equation that's fairly environmentally bad is uranium mining.
If you are going to make that argument, then you need to make the same about the materials and fuels involved in other electricity generation methods as well, and things get complicated rather quickly e.g. offshore turbines use a fair amount of neodymium and dysprosium, thin-film solar panels need tellurium, cadmium, and indium, … and many of these rare earths or elements are either often contaminated with radioactive elements (which end up in tailings) or are produced as part of (and ecologically indistinguishable from) other mining operations e.g. tellurium from copper and cadmium from zinc.
I'm not sure how directly comparable they are. How do you compare radioactive and chemical contamination to the kind of contamination from coal mines?
Pollution isn't always a thing you can measure on a scale from bad to less bad. There's long term systemic effects from the countless contaminants released by industries around the world we barely have any idea about.
I realize economic models, and fairly frighteningly, increasingly ecological models require easy to work with numbers that can be compared and contrasted to analyse cost vs benefit, but the real world does not work that way.
In an exhaustive study of attributable deaths per TWH of power generated, nuclear is safer than wind and solar. Even when you factor in scary words like "radioactive contamination," people falling off roofs installing solar panels is still more dangerous.
Worth mentioning that Chernobyl is included in this data. If someone has a worse long-tail risk in mind, it would be interesting to hear.
The risk from contamination is certainly below coal, which generates far greater quantities of RAM, with constituents being basically consistent with nuclear plant waste.
Chernobyl definitely didn't turn out as bad as it could have, but on the other hand hopefully we're in a bit better of a safety stance now across the industry than Chernobyl was in?
The real long tail risks from nuclear are the long term ones, which aren't factored in because we don't know what nuclear storage sites will be like in 100 or 1000 years. That's what many rational people object to about nuclear power — it involves a massive discounting of future risk, and we know people are really bad at over-discounting future risk in general.
The energy density of uranium is so high that the amount you have to mine compared all the other metals that are mined for even renewables when building a power plant is tiny. Heck you can find rocks in the mountains of Montana and Colorado with so much natural uranium they have that greenish black color from so much natural uranium.
You don't need much enriched uranium, but you need to process a lot of dirt to get it.
Natural uranium concentrations are around 0.1-0.2% (copper is around 0.6%), and you need 10 tonnes of natural uranium to produce 1 tonne of enriched uranium.
Furthermore, unlike copper, steel and other metals, uranium can't currently be recycled.
So... it’s a massive problem that there is no storage for nuclear waste (mostly agree) but not even worth mentioning there is no energy storage for renewables?
Coming from a cold, dark country with long and cloudy winters and no oceanic coast, it drives me mad when people point at the Med or California and say “look how cheap solar and wind is”.
Lack of storage in the US is a purely political issue, not a technical one. Other countries are either successfully building such storage (Finland) or invest into fuel recycling and breeder technologies (France and Russia), which significantly reduce amount of waste which has to be stored and its long-term danger.
I don’t think we even need to store it. Nuclear waste has been sitting in regular storage for over 50 years now, seems to be perfectly safe. We should just keep doing what we’re doing.
Why do we even need to bother putting it underground except for some unlikely what if scenarios 1000 years in the future.
1. Expecting current political and economic structures etc to remain for thousands of years is silly, so we do need a more permanent solution to a long-term problem.
2. Keeping lots of nuclear waste in spent fuel pools just increases the risk picture unnecessarily.
If there's a regional instability for a year or two and spent fuel pools boil off and then waste melts through, possibly poisoning the groundwater for that region, that's a big problem.
Mostly corrosion. The half lives involved, combined with the great expense of safely adjusting these things after they're put to rest, means that you would really like something really dry and remote. Fear of contaminating ground water is incredibly sensible to me, at least. It'd be a hell of a thing to get Yucca Mountain un-cancelled...
Poland has cloudy winters with short days and no reliable offshore winds (nothing comparable to the trade winds on the North Sea for example). It is mostly a lowland country with no potential for pumped hydro, or for the most part, regular hydro.
I’m not, like many Polish people are, pro coal and climate change denier, just saying we can’t solve global warming on the assumption of Californian weather.
Would that not make a great argument for more European integration in energy infrastructure?
Where Spanish solar, Danish and Dutch North Sea Wind, Norwegian Hydro, or Swedish Geothermal, power Poland on the days when its own wind and solar is below whats needed?
I'm from the Netherlands, and many fellow countryman and politicians have similar excuses for not going renewables (there is little Sun, no space for windmills). Both of which are easily debunked. But even if true, easily solved with better integration.
When people worry about land-use of solar, I think about exactly this. There are large chunks of central Spain that would be largely improved by covering them in solar panels (joke, but only just in some places).
Or even better: cross the Gibraltar strait and put solar farms in Morocco, Algeria, Mali. Relative cheap maintainance and building, and vast surplus of sun in places where currently only dry sand grows.
And that requires both large and heavy networks towards Europe, but also, moving lots of electricity-heavy industry south. It makes zero sense to build a new coal-power-station in Eemshaven in the Netherlands for some data-center and Aluminium-enrichment-forge (which then ships the aluminium over Europe) when that aluminium-forge could be built in Algers next to a gigantic solar farm in the desert.
I'd be up for that. I am concerned about how that works in practice.
Leaving aside technical issues (can you really push power from Spain to Latvia? Is it really true that total renewable power in Europe can always power the whole continent?), this is an economic project larger than the Euro or the vaccine roll-out. There will be weekly issues of power redistribution - who gets it when there's a shortage? Whose job is it to maintain trans-border infrastructure? Some countries, through resourcefulness or good fortune, will have more spare power, and thus powering, hmm, less powerful countries, leading to the usual "{country-X} power for people from {country-X}". What about electricity costs? Is there a flat rate in Europe? Etc.
I'm not sure how to actually make that work in practice.
> can you really push power from Spain to Latvia? Is it really true that total renewable power in Europe can always power the whole continent?
Both: yes. and no.
If "renewables" is only solar and wind: then certainly not. But the total mix: certainly.
And "distribution" is more than pushing electricity from Malta to Iceland (which is rather inefficient) but also "build the datacenter in malta (edit: next to the sea-cooled solar farm)" or "build that new aluminium-forge in iceland where there's a surplus (edit of free geothermal power), rather than in east-poland where it will be coal-powered".
Edit2: The entire "cost" and trans-border export/import is already in place and handled in EPEX: a free and open market for electricity: https://www.epexspot.com/en/market-data
Sort of. Poland has traditionally relied heavily on coal. Now for a variety of economic, ecological and political reasons, there are no new coal plants being installed, and old ones reaching EOL. There is no nuclear, despite half-hearted attempts to bring that about. Gas has mostly been imported from Russia, with constant concerns about continued supplies being used as a political tool, so no significant gas plants either.
So yes, once you factor out all other options, solar and wind is the only thing that you can make progress on. But that's a far cry from saying you could run the country on them.
You likely could eventually. All current projections point that way.
Poland already has a significant advantage with respect to intermittency being connected to an EU wide grid and being able to import/export power easily across a well oiled market. Hawaii may have sun but it can't do that.
The intransigence of the country itself (it loves its coal) is probably the biggest impediment, not Geography. If Germany can do it (and they can and do) so can Poland.
Renewables are cost-competitive, but not by an order of magnitude. If wind and solar net 1/3rd each of CA, it no longer makes economic sense to build them.
Two sorts of grid storage batteries: Elon Must has made Lithium batteries work on grid scale. Flow batteries or fuel cells, are probably more economic. And then there is pumped hydro
We should also not forget the giant decentralised batterypack on wheels that is being rolled out.
EVs have a big capacity. Not industrial sized and with clear limitations (at 08:00 it needs to be charged in order to bring you to work), but all together, having every car in future being a storage, makes for a huge buffer.
Elon didn't make any grid-scale energy storage. The largest grid battery installation in the world can only supply power for a couple minutes – that's a buffer at most.
It's hours, not minutes. Elon Musk ships MWH solutions conveniently packaged as in container form. The largest battery currently being planned is a 1.2GW setup in Australia. That's a big buffer.
Demand for solutions providing power for days simply does not exist currently. Hours is good enough. This business is about providing lots of power quickly.
You are right that they typically are only used for a few minutes to deal with peaks in demand. That's because they are only needed for that long and because you can turn them on and off pretty much instantly. You don't have that choice with traditional solutions like gas plants.
Which is why despite battery cost, this type of battery is very successful at largely removing the need for having peaker plants. It also seems to be very successful at getting rid of blackouts because there were never enough of those peaker plants to begin with in Australia. Another advantage is that you can put these batteries all over the place. Many small installations make up for a lot of aggregate capacity. You can put them in buildings even; and people do.
Musk is also building factories that are producing batteries by the GWH per year per factory and soon TWH per year. He's not alone of course and basically there are quite many other companies now planning their own little GWH production facilities. There are tens of billions being invested in that stuff in the next few years. There will be hundreds or thousands of these factories in a few decades churning out many TWH of storage annually.
That battery capacity is of course mostly intended for the transport sector and not for grid storage.
But if you are worried about having enough storage capacity on the grid, there will be multiple TWH of batteries driving around on roads in most countries by the end of the decade. Basically 2M cars with 50KWH batteries == 1TWH. That's a lot of distributed and mobile storage. All we need to do is plug it in.
Of course there will be more optimal solutions as well. But it's capacity we'll have none the less.
> The largest battery currently being planned is a 1.2GWh setup in Australia. That's a big buffer.
Apparently "Total electricity generation in Australia was estimated to be 265,117 gigawatt hours (GWh) in calendar year 2019"[1], which works out to about 30 gigawatts continually for a year.
So a 1.2GWh battery could power Australia for about two minutes (...at average use. Longer in the middle of the night).
Maybe a hundred installations like that could buffer the fluctuations in renewables in Australia. Plus thousands or tens of thousands more worldwide, while building enough batteries to replace all the cars with electric.
I guess it's doable in a decade or two, if Musk and other manufacturers can really produce TWh's of capacity each year.
That's a battery capable of supplying 1.2 GW peak demand. Or about 1/30th of the energy capacity in Australia if your numbers are correct. Massive buffer.
Those TWH factories are being built right now. Multiple of them. Production ramp up is going to take a few years before they actually produce that much. But you can sort of do the math based on the number of cars they are selling. About half a million last year so that would be roughly a quarter TWH if you assume 50KWH batteries. Ballpark enough to keep Australia running for about a year if your numbers are correct.
That's last year. It's easy to see how they would grow production to a few million units in the next few years. So, at that point they are using TWH of production capacity that they are building right now in Texas, Berlin, Shanghai, and soon possibly India.
Of course the broader industry is growing quite rapidly to probably a few million unit sales this year and tens of millions by the end of the decade. So, definitely already into TWH/year territory right now. Taking care of Australian energy storage needs is not going to be an issue. About a million EVs would do the trick easily. Sadly, they are a bit behind on jumping on that band wagon but they'll catch up soon enough.
> That's a battery capable of supplying 1.2 GW peak demand.
Is it, and if so, for how long?
I saw several articles talking about battery capacity in GW's, with no mention of how long the batteries can provide that power, so I think some reporters just don't understand the difference between GW's (a measure of instantaneous power) and GWh's (a measure of energy or battery capacity).
Power plant capacity is reported in GW's because they provide that power continually, but batteries should be measured in GWh's.
And Vistra's Moss Landing 1.2 GWh battery storage in Monterey County, California claims to be the world's largest.[1]
> Those TWH factories are being built right now.
I don't doubt the factories will exist soon, but I wonder if they'll be able to find the raw materials to feed so many factories, and customers to buy it all. Probably some/many will go bankrupt.
Looks like Mycle Schneider, the lead author, is a founding member of WISE-Paris, which is the French branch of the anti-nuclear group WISE, which he directed from 1983 to 2003. [wikipedia]
Yes, as it establishes the potential bias of the article author. If this article was written by typically a pro-nuclear author it would be much more noteworthy.
Predictably, it didn't bring up the costs (though of course the first comment on HN did) but it tried to play the "environmentalist who has seen the light" angle pretty hard.
It's actually kind of weird how many articles like this do get submitted to hacker news. Link says "it's safe & making a comeback", comments say "it's just not economic and no" <- this has happened quite a few times.
Noting an author's biases/motives, like agarttha did, is useful. It's not the same as asserting that a conclusion is logically false because of the biases of the person who argued it.
In this case I thought it was rather obvious what the author's bias was and he doesnt't try to hide it.
It might be useful if they tried to conceal it. E.g tried to present themselves as an objective researcher at a think tank that takes money from general dynamics/lockheed or a journalist who clearly hastily rewrote a press release.
Broken clock shows the right time twice a day. Biased people being correct is an exception, not the rule. We should be suspicious of people with know biases.
Is it bias when you have an opinion and share it? The article can contain some of the reasons he's anti-nuclear, instead of the other way around, where his bias causes him to write the article.
>Not disputing, but in the interests of full disclosure, the presenter is (per YT About):
>* Professor David Ruzic
>* Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering
>* Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering
>* University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professors usually don't gain these qualifications because they started out anti-nuclear.
Something must have reversed his opinion somewhere along the line, no doubt he has greater domain expertise than all but a few others sharing similar deep knowledge.
why is nuclear waste such a big problem? in terms of m^3 the amount is rather small, and I feel like we're not discussing what's gonna happen with old solar panels. Is there a way to recycle them / how good is it? The article doesn't mention it. As for the nuclear storage problem, from my point of view it seems more like the biggest problem is that people don't want it near them even though it's stored hundreds of meters below surface, and they rather accept a factory and directly breathe the stuff from it
When one plant’s worth of solar panel waste is improperly discarded, does it ruin potable water supplies, airable land and the health of entire regions? Does that area become a no-man’s land for decades /centuries, even after spending many billions to try and rectify the damage?
There is absolutely no comparison to long term storage of nuclear waste and discarded solar panels.
> When one plant’s worth of solar panel waste is improperly discarded, does it ruin potable water supplies, airable land and the health of entire regions?
Well, crush 100 acre of solar panels, put them in a landfill near a river, and tell me if cadmium, lead and mercury taste good and have a good effect on the fauna around. I'm not talking about batteries here.
If a truck full of solar panels crashes on the highway, that highway doesn’t become a superfund site. It doesn’t cost hundreds of millions to clean up, the local community doesn’t see a massive spike in cancer.
>If a truck full of solar panels crashes on the highway, that highway doesn’t become a superfund site. It doesn’t cost hundreds of millions to clean up, the local community doesn’t see a massive spike in cancer.
If we’re trying to be honest here, that’s not an appropriate comparison. Properly disposed-of nuclear waste doesn’t necessarily cause these problems either. When you look at the physical footprint disparities (land-clearing) needed for commensurate solar power generation, rendering such land unusable and ecologically disrupted/destroyed, solar doesn’t come out smelling like roses these days either. If you’re lucky it can be reclaimed more easily but in the daily operation for its lifetime and beyond in the best case, the land occupation needed to power a small town exclusively with solar is pretty massive. Now do a country. Now do a continent.
Since you’re going to go there, let’s add in the damage from all the iron, that limestone and uranian required to build the nuclear plant? Also quite damaging.
Photovoltaics, not the best. Now what about mirrors pointing at concrete towers moving liquid sodium around, like in Spain, or pointed at steel pipes filled with water.
The pro-nuclear crowd have two things in common:
1. They have more faith in humanity than we have shown is warranted
2. They won’t accept that Nuclear has failed to achieve the promised widescale adoption and economic benefits.
I’m for a full accounting of all of it. Maybe we can agree all power generation for an industrialized world comes with enormous cost and trade-offs.
Where does that leave us? You need to supplement renewables with something. Your options seem like fossil fuels or nuclear right now. That’s what this all comes down to - the load factor of renewables sucks for most of the world, storage tech isn’t suitable for the demand that would be placed on it, nor will it be for the foreseeable future barring a miracle. So one either ends up saying that we’ll hold out using fossil fuels to augment the <20% load factor of solar, or we think about embracing nuclear with an assumption that it can be done safely. Point #2 that you bring up is an outcome skewed by many roadblocks of our own making, so people open to nuclear tend to reject the assumption that this is a quality inherent to the technology.
I literally just don’t see any options with a lower carbon footprint to meet demand in a highly reliable manner, though I would love a miracle energy generating technology to magically appear that could let us avoid nuclear.
>why is nuclear waste such a big problem? in terms of m^3 the amount is rather small
The meme is that nuclear waste produced so far amounts to 'a football field worth' or some similar framing. But you could fit the entire earth into a football field if you're prepared to go quite deep. It's a deliberate trick to make it seem like a non-issue, and deflects from the serious challenge that is long-term handling of nuclear waste. Plus, this is the size of the problem if we stop tomorrow, just the amount produced in the 50 years nuclear power has been up and running. So you must multiply not only by the length of time to be stored but also future projections for continued operation. If you try and project that out to a rolling total, assumming you keep the level of waste production at it's current level and no greater, it's an enourmous quantity.
Then there's looking at how well we're progressing with permanent, safe sequestration of existing nuclear waste. Not very well - There have only ever been three sites in the world for permanent waste disposal and only one of them is operating today (WIPP in the USA). The other two in Germany closed many years ago, and are costing billions in ongoing remediation costs as it turns out 'permanent' didn't pan out as well as hoped. Of course, no nations are accepting waste produced by other nations as that would be a political nightmare, and so each country is left to work out a plan on it's own.
The USA has shut down something like 30 plants so far, but of those only about 10 have so far been decommissioned. Of those, about half were truly decommed and most of the rest were put in to the SAFSTOR programme, where they are left to decay for up to 60 years. Theory is they'll be a bit cheaper to decommission after that time, and the funds to decomm them up-front are not available. A handful opted for a third option of entombing the reactor in situ.
I mean, it's pretty realistic at incinerator plants, the concentrations and temperatures are such that you use up some reasonably small percentage of the total plant effect on capture and you can capture 90 % of the generated CO2.
The trick will be to make sure economic incentives don't lead to people simply building so many incinerators that you end up emitting more than before anyway...
Hard to say, its a big mega project, but then so is what we do today to keep getting more oil and gas. Same story goes for energy storage to make solar/wind workable at large scales. Very hard problem! So is sucking the last dregs of oil out of the ocean, or creating earthquakes to suck it out of the ground.
Unfortunately you're more likely to just find confirmation bias here. The HN community (and the tech community in general) is predominantly pro-nuclear.
Personally, I think this article raises great points. If we could rewrite history and have built a thriving nuclear power industry 20 years ago, we'd probably be in much better shape now, at least with respect to climate change
But that's not what happened. Given the current state of the industry we can't afford to spend decades trying to right the technical and regulatory wrongs of the past now that renewables are becoming truly viable.
> Personally, I think this article raises great points. If we could rewrite history and have built a thriving nuclear power industry 20 years ago, we'd probably be in much better shape now, at least with respect to climate change
France did that. It is not perfect but I would call it a success. France CO2 emissions are low [1], electricity is affordable, and suffered no major accident. France is even able to recycle nuclear fuel, and is generally among the world leaders of everything nuclear.
People advocating for a reasonable position which they hold isn't confirmation bias. Reading a recitation of arguments you've already encountered shouldn't adjust your priors, that's for new information.
At the 60-comment mark, I count 28 comments that are advocating nuclear or poking holes in assumptions about renewables. I’d say the debate is pretty equally represented in quantity if not quality.
When you ignore the glaring problems with renewables? Sure... but why pay attention to rare earth minerals needed, massive problems creating massive amounts of PV panels, recycling issues, etc
We can't afford to let the burgeoning "savior" of our world continue on it's destructive path because the Religion of Renewables won't admit to the fact that it's Priests are doing bad things with children...
To many aspects and conversations turn into religious debates. PC? SJWs? Climate Change? Anti-Nuclear/Pro-Renewable? (or vice versa on all of them) all turn into religious debates with people who refuse to look at both sides of very complex issues.
You gotta love the whataboutism of the nuclear folks ranting about recycling issues of current renewable energy tech when nuclear leaves behind toxic material that has to be kept in a safe place for a long time surviving changes in government, potential revolutions, terrorist attacks, incompetence, greed, etc.
When the main arguments against nuclear power are around cost, it's entirely reasonable to point out costs and inconveniences around alternative power generation sources, which for renewables are mostly around land use, rare and bad to mine materials used in construction, pollution around them and potential recycling, and the lack of stability. All those bring costs up, and some are outright ignored when arguing nuclear is too expensive.
The difference is, most of these costs _are_ factored in to renewable costs because there are few subsidies (at least at grid level). In contrast, there is a huge implicit subsidy to nuclear by punting the issue of nuclear waste storage to future generations. I just don't understand why we're still talking about this when nuclear storage costs, even when included, are laughably optimistic. None of the long term storage plans made since the 1960s have panned out. Everything is still in temporary swimming pools until the music stops and someone has to pick up the bill.
> The difference is, most of these costs _are_ factored in to renewable costs because there are few subsidies (at least at grid level
It will depend on location, but across the EU there are massive subsidies. Furthermore, recycling costs aren't included and are just starting to come to light with the decomissioning of the first generation of solar and wind generation platforms. Their limited useful life,bserious recycling costs and related pollution, and all of those on the energy storage required to actually make them useful for bade load are rarely a part of the discourse.
> I just don't understand why we're still talking about this when nuclear storage costs, even when included, are laughably optimistic
How so? Most of the problems around long term storage are political. The temporary swimming pools are still good enough for decades or even centuries to come, while projects on underground permanent storage are advancing ( most notably Finland iirc).
You know, you have some valid points. Unfortunately, due to your demeaning and dismissive tone, I don't feel there's any point in engaging with you further.
His argument is highly contingent on a single premise: nuclear power is very expensive to build, making it uneconomical.
However, it's extremely difficult to determine how much of this expense is necessary vs. due to over-regulation or lack of innovation. It's easy to say that some regulations on nuclear power are probably unnecessary (cf. widespread nuclear paranoia); it's much harder to say which. It's easy to say that new kinds of reactors might be cheaper; it's harder to say what kind or how much cheaper.
ReBCO-stabilized fusion on the horizon throws another wrench in the prediction machine, as well. Who knows what that's worth? It was invented yesterday!
Agree that his premise is entirely an economic one. From first principles, nuclear energys's marginal cost is very inexpensive (similar to renewables).
What's basically needed to bring the cost of nuclear down is scale, investing more in production. This is why new approaches to mass producing small scale reactors is so interesting. It should allow nuclear to get competitive with renewables, and having a diverse energy base is definitely a good thing.
Also, fusion holds the most hope for massively decreasing the cost of energy. It's a game changer, and it's close. It's possible that fusion allows things like mass carbon capture, powering reforestation efforts, and more.
Mycle Schneider isn’t a trustworthy source. He’s an anti-nuclear activist with a clear agenda and a history of misrepresenting or obfuscating facts about the industry and its inherent danger.
> every euro invested in new nuclear power plants makes the climate crisis worse because now this money cannot be used to invest in efficient climate protection options.
This is a weak argument.
The article makes a good point, which is that renewable costs in some countries are lower than nuclear operating costs. But this alone does not justify the claim that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse.
Then the article delves into politicking. I get the feeling that that was the original intended goal of the piece.
The arguments do not compete. Each adds to the case, and the strength of the argument is the sum of all, less any valid counters.
It is very clear that the sum is strongly positive, even with increasing uncertainty in the later points. The case is solid even if one or two sub-arguments turned out to have holes.
Huge decommissioning costs are always neglected in any argument promoting nukes.
As thoroughly bad as the argument is for building nukes, and even for continuing to operate existing nukes, the value proposition for Tokamak fusion is thousands of times worse. The only plausible explanation for continued work on them is as a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population available to draw upon for weapons projects. Nothing else could make a lick of sense. Spending on Tokamak is thus deeply irresponsible.
You could have made the same argument for investing in solar a few decades ago.
Spending money on fusion research will unlock humanities next energy supply for when/where solar isn't viable.
Fusion power has been hampered by the way it's been approached )massive slow moving projects) but is inevitably going to come to fruition given enough time and money and when it does it will likely displace most other energy sources.
There will never be so much as one single, solitary erg of competitive commercial energy production from any Tokamak plant, ever. Every cent spent on Tokamak is stolen from more viable energy research--which might reasonably even include some non-Tokamak, aneutronic fusion, after solar, wind, and geo capacity are fully built out. Thus, each person-day of work on Tokamak takes our species a day farther away from any desirable goal.
Could be if it delays or prevents addressing the real roots of the problem such as overpopulation and extreme lack of energy conservation.
Fukushima is nature's way of reminding us to conserve or live to regret it eventually.
No one has yet been able to even locate the still-molten fuel, I know its only been 10 short years and it's not supposed to be easy or even possible with today's limited nuclear technology. Good thing it has such a long half-life so there's plenty of time remaining to figure this out over the next 24,000 years. As all engineers know, when deadlines are too short it can lead to unaddressed consequences.
Regardless since the nuclear option exists there will always be a significant faction of enthusiasts who will die eventually without regretting it at all.
Most regrets will occur in a future these enthusiasts (or anybody else) can not accurately visualize, but it doesn't matter to them anyway.
It's infatuating that all arguments pro- and against nuclear energy are so selective. It's very hard to get unbiased view.
The article starts with proper framing. You must think in terms of lifetime capital costs and opportunity cost. Then it chooses numbers selectively to make the argument stronger than it is. Nuclear and renewable energy production can't be compared directly with price per kWh.
Nuclear energy is 24/7 from the start. Currently Nuclear/coal/gas provides base load that enables cheap renewables (base load is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time. Day, week, months)
Supplying same base load with renewables means energy production + large scale energy storage + grid investments. You need overcapacity in production and the grid to even out time and geographical variability of renewables.
I have not seen any honest cost comparison that counts in everything.
There is a mention of the costs needed for storage in renewables that would keep the electricity under the operating cost of nuclear, albeit in a somewhat indirect way-
> It would often even be affordordable to pay 1 – 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity storage in addition to the generation costs for wind and solar power and still be below the operating costs of nuclear power plants. And here we have to ask the same question: How many emissions can I avoid with one euro, one dollar or one yuan?
I read that as meaning there is probably enough margin in the renewable cost to actually make money while storing electricity in batteries from wind and solar and selling it as a price below what nuclear costs to keep running. Unfortunately I am having trouble translating 1-1.5 cents/Kwhr to the current price of battery storage tech, and this doesn’t factor in the costs of creating these batteries at scale either, but the argument does say that’s likely to be cheaper.
My guess is that the article is thinking of other kinds of storage, such as water pumping. I very much doubt battery storage could be cost effective at this time.
Right, I think hydro is about as close to at-scale 24/7 always-on generation as you can get with renewables right now. Even with that, everywhere I’ve lived with hydro power had backup fossil fuel generation, which was periodically used, though rarely.
Arguments for all other forms of renewables at scale right now seem to depend on having/maintaining fossil fuel power generation just to satisfy daily demand reliably, so you end up with two sets of power generation infrastructure designed to meet peak capacity (so effectively double capacity of what’s needed), which is extraordinarily expensive.
Advocacy for non-hydro renewables requires heaping doses of “hope” that new technologies will be developed one day to deprecate the side-by-side ff power-generation.
That hope and risk has to be priced in to the comparisons with nuclear for supplying electric grids, or the debate isn’t “nuclear vs renewables” it’s “nuclear vs. (renewables + fossil fuel generation)”. At that point it even makes sense to think of “nuclear vs. (renewables + nuclear)”.
If you want the cost of CO2 and its global impact priced into using fossil fuels, perhaps that’s what the cost of nuclear should be compared to.
Current all-in battery costs are about $200/kWh. Daily global energy use is about 400 TWh. That would be an 80 trillion dollar battery for just one day of backup.
That just isn't feasible to build near term and it isn't even enough to prevent blackouts. Plus the current methods probably don't scale that far, so the cost is even higher.
Previous generation of nuclear reactors in France were built for less than 2 billion euros (constant euro) per GW (sorry it's in french, you can see the numbers here http://i-tese.cea.fr/_files/LettreItese18/ECLAIRAGES/REP.pdf on page 10). There were 50 reactors of three types (900, 1300 then 1450 GW). If we had kept this technology instead of losing the know-how and developing a new program, we could certainly build 1500 GW for those 3T. Don't know if any other country ever achieved such economy scale on its civil nuclear program, maybe South-Korea as like France they have only one nuclear company, and even more reactors per sites of few different models.
Finally and (slightly) anti-nuclear piece worth reading. Yes, solar is easy for capitalism, but I'm not sure building all those batteries is. Building smaller pre-fab nukes vs building larger battery arrays seem pretty close in terms of challenges.
You don't have a citation on "$3T would buy 200 GW of nuclear power plants", and I very much doubt that extrapolation, because if any sane planner got the $3T budget, the first thing they would do is invest heavily in pre-fab.
It's all relative. Yes, a $3T order for nuclear would reduce costs. But a $3T order for batteries would also reduce their cost. Which would reduce more? I posit the batteries.
> Right, I think hydro is about as close to at-scale 24/7 always-on generation as you can get with renewables right now.
There are quite some solar-thermal installations of >100MW, which store solar energy in a thermal buffer to later convert this to electrical power, creating an effective 24/7 stable supply of power, weather permitting.
Couple of years ago I tried comparing the cost of a solar thermal plant with PV solar. Claimed advantage of solar thermal is the ability to store energy as molten salt. The cost differential though means it'd be cheaper to use PV Solar to heat phase change materials.
> Even with that, everywhere I’ve lived with hydro power had backup fossil fuel generation, which was periodically used, though rarely.
> Arguments for all other forms of renewables at scale right now seem to depend on having/maintaining fossil fuel power generation just to satisfy daily demand reliably, so you end up with two sets of power generation infrastructure designed to meet peak capacity (so effectively double capacity of what’s needed), which is extraordinarily expensive.
I'm by no means an expert on this but I've been trying to learn more about it recently. From what I gather the end-state can be 100% renewables in different ways:
1) Have enough hydro that can be turned into pumped storage that a complete grid mix can be done with just hydro+solar+wind with very little overbuild. Portugal has very good conditions for this and back of the envelope calculations tell me it's possible with just 15% overbuild. All of the extra is solar which is very cheap[1]. With a better interconnected European grid it may be possible to do that across the whole continent.
2) Overbuild solar and wind by a large amount since they're so cheap, supplement that with some expensive batteries, and allow energy prices to go to zero and even negative at times to see if anyone has a use for the excess energy. We're talking something like 3-5x overbuild and then having so much excess energy that you start disrupting other fossil fuel usage[2].
If you have a seasonal storage breakthrough you're back at 1) with just another technology in place of hydro. Financing hydrogen generation seems to me like picking winners within 2). Both scenarios can be supplemented if shaping demand can be made at scale. Things like heating buildings and charging EVs can be shifted a few hours during the day without much inconvenience and possibly allow shaving off some important peaks.
Most of this discussion would be avoided if we just put a steadily increasing price on carbon, remove all other subsidies, and let the market shake things out.
If the issue is cutting CO2 with a power generating solution that’s highly, highly reliable, renewables like solar+wind have an uphill battle to fight. Their load factor is abysmally low, and storage tech at scale just isn’t here to sustain daily demand for 72 hrs. Supplementing with hydro instead of gas/coal to pick up the slack probably implies some massive “three-gorges” style damming projects. How feasible that is varies by region. What do you think about the feasibility of building that much hydro capacity in a way that can sustain Europe’s daily need for three days running? If you had that, why even bother with solar+wind except maybe as localized off-grid solutions? Somewhere out there is also a question of hardening generating capacity against kinetic attack, but that’s a whole separate thing. I only think of it because dams seem pretty vulnerable, especially massive ones.
Wow, what a simplistic look at nuclear vs renewables. They don't even begin to look into the "hidden" costs of renewable energy. They fail to mention or include the costs of new transmissions lines, bringing new mines onboard, building grid storage, etc.
If we forgo nuclear power the only other currently viable carbon free, stable, energy source is hydro power, which has huge environmental costs and immense public resentment/push back. For example look at the James bay hydro project[1]. 11,500 km2 of land flooded, intense protest from the Cree and other first nations as well as conservation groups, increases in mercury levels in fish populations, etc. Expanding hydro power enough to handle base load energy use is unlikely, due to the above costs and push back.
So if we can't expand hydro or nuclear then we have to go all in on wind and solar plus grid storage. We could use pumped hydro but that brings about many of the same costs/problems as hydro power. That leaves us with over building wind and solar, and adding huge amounts of transmission lines and batteries to account for the variability. Add in the switch from ICE cars to electric and the amount of new metals needed is going to be immense.
I've also noticed that every time a new transmission line or mine is purposed in the United States their is immense push back from environmental and conservation groups, and from the public as a whole. For examples of this look at the fight over adding new transmissions lines in southern Wisconsin[2] or the intense opposition to mining the Duluth complex[3] in northern Minnesota[4]. The Duluth complex is the largest untapped copper and nickel resource in the world and Polymet has been trying to get permits for well over a decade to mine. Copper and nickel are greatly needed for renewable energy and batteries, and it could still be another 4 or 5 years if it ever happens.
Not using nuclear energy is just going to massively exacerbate the transmission line and mining problems as well as increase the prices of renewable energy. Wind and solar is "cheap" because we don't factor in the added transmission lines, and natural gas peaker planets needed to currently make it happen. Also many of the groups pushing for wind and solar + batteries also happen to be against adding additional mines and transmission lines required to make it happen, and honestly you cant really blame them, mines can pollute local water supplies and transmission lines are ugly.
All and all a balanced approach is probably the cheapest and most viable path forward, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, grid storage all working together on the grid.
What about the hidden cost of nuclear? The waste storage. The security measures (can't have terrorists walking off with the nuclear waste). The constant need for inspections, audits, etc. And that's before you consider the corruption and the gravy train that is basically associated with funding existing plants using massive amounts of public funding.
Nuclear being too expensive is the main point of this article. That seems upsetting to a lot of nuclear proponents. But I don't see a lot of arguments to counter that core point.
Nuclear the most expensive option in the German market. This is a completely uncontroversial fact. You can verify it in countless publications. You can argue whether it is 3x more expensive (according to the article) or a maybe a bit more when you consider all the hidden cost. IMHO 3X actually a very friendly assessment considering bids for solar and wind are trending very much below the cited cost in the article by about 2-5x. The point is that it is expensive by a quite significant factor.
I don't get your argument about mining. Yes policy making in the US is a problem (hence the Texas situation a few weeks ago). Nuclear does not solve that political mess; it just adds to it. I don't think the US is actually capable at this point of building nuclear cheaply. There are just too many stakeholders drooling over the multi billion $ budgets for that ever to make sense economically. And in any case the glacial decision making ensures it will be too little too late even if they by some miracle stick to budgets, which I would argue is pure fantasy. Too little, too late, for way too much is not what the world needs.
What do you mean hidden costs of nuclear? All of those you listed are a well defined part in the costs, and considered from the start of a nuclear power plant, with provisions required for decomissioning and storage.
As for Germany, nuclear is their only CO2-free base load power option, so comparing costs to solar that only works when sun shines isn't apt. A good winter storm and tidal, wind and solar are out for hours - what do you do then? Coal? Gas? Or just have nuclear for base to start with? And yes, one day there could be massive grid-scale storage, maybe.
"Decommissioning options for a retired nuclear plant may be chosen based on availability of decommissioning funds, operation of other reactors at the same site, or availability of waste disposal facilities."
Today, about half the EoL reactors in the USA are on the SAFSTOR track instead of the one where they are immediately decommissioned. There is a single waste disposal site available, WIPP, that will close in the next couple of years. Only a handful of reactors on the SAFSTOR track are there because they sit adjacent to operational reactors.
Nuclear power plants in the US have been charged massive fees to establish funds for decommissioning. The cost is baked into the energy, even if the political will to spend the funds and store the waste isn't.
That isn't true in Europe, but even accepting your argument: this is a problem for the nuclear industry. Unless we can see evidence that the system as a whole (i.e. nuclear industry plus government of various levels of corruption) can function to process and store waste safely, this is a black mark against the nuclear industry. It doesn't matter if this is 'unfair' in some sense... at the end of the day the waste will exist and after 40+ years there is no evidence of a combined political-industrial system with the capacity to do the right thing.
EDF have already planned spent fuel storage and decomissioning, and it's provided for in the prices.
That's just one example, but it's been the standard practice across nuclear projects for decades now in most of Europe.
> Unless we can see evidence that the system as a whole (i.e. nuclear industry plus government of various levels of corruption) can function to process and store waste safely, this is a black mark against the nuclear industry.
It is being done today, and there are multiple projects that intend to improve upon it ( by recycling or cold underground permanent storage). What kind of evidence do you need? For it to be done over a 100 years? It'd be far too late then.
Germany uses a combination of demand shifting, overproduction, imported power and dispatchable power.
>A good winter storm and tidal, wind and solar are out for hours - what do you do then?
Design for the storm. In Texas everything except solar could in theory have worked fine (wind often overproduces in storms) and yet every power source failed.
> What about the hidden cost of nuclear? The waste storage. The security measures (can't have terrorists walking off with the nuclear waste). The constant need for inspections, audits, etc. And that's before you consider the corruption and the gravy train that is basically associated with funding existing plants using massive amounts of public funding.
Nothing wrong with pointing out issues/costs with nuclear, in fact it's good to point out the issues with nuclear so it can be properly weighed. I'm just trying to point out issues/costs of only using renewables, so we can weigh those as well.
> Nuclear being too expensive is the main point of this article. That seems upsetting to a lot of nuclear proponents. But I don't see a lot of arguments to counter that core point.
I think your missing the point. If you ran your entire grid on just solar and wind, no nuclear, or coal or natural gas peaker plants, you'll find that wind and solar is no longer cheap, and is much less resilient to exceptional circumstances.
> I don't get your argument about mining.
My point about mining is, our current course to fighting climate change relies entirely on mining, were making the switch from the Oil and Gas industry to the Mining industry for our energy and transportation markets. This change is going to have huge impacts on the world, mines are quite capable polluters of the local environment, setting up mines in developed countries can take a decade or more, which is the same problem nuclear plants face. Mining is also quite controversial for many good reasons, so there is significant push back from locals and environmental groups whenever and wherever a mine is proposed. All of this means a huge portion on mining takes places in countries with lax environmental and or human rights standards, which just exacerbates the problems.
> I think your missing the point. If you ran your entire grid on just solar and wind, no nuclear, or coal or natural gas peaker plants, you'll find that wind and solar is no longer cheap, and is much less resilient to exceptional circumstances.
That kind of is my point: countries are doing this and without blackouts and it's actually fine. You seem to be claiming nuclear is needed to provide an unspecified base load at an unspecified cost. Other people are pointing out that it is about 3x more expensive and just not generally worth investing in at that cost difference.
Your points about mining are a bit beside the point. I don't actually disagree that the mining sector needs to be cleaned up. But our economy generates demand for lots of things we dig up out of the ground. If anything, it seems that the likes of Tesla are vaguely being responsible here and are actually making efforts to clean up that part of their business by working to source what they need in a sustainable way.
You seem to imply that a scale change is needed on the mining front to bootstrap renewables. I doubt that that's as big of a deal that you seem to imply. Also, you could make the point that with clean energy, resources locked up in that become available for recycling at the end of their life. So, things like lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, etc. actually can be reused. And there are also some efforts to replace some of these minerals with more readily available alternatives. E.g. cobalt free batteries are a thing. Finally, we can offset that by no longer digging up coal, drilling oil, or fracking gas. The difference is that absolutely zero percent of that gets recycled because we burn it.
And lets not forget that uranium mining is probably one of the dirtiest forms of mining. That's just a really nasty business mostly happening under exactly the kind of circumstances you point out. Nothing clean about it. Lots of pollution, radioactive waste, and health issues. And you need to mine a lot of rock to extract very little uranium.
>If you ran your entire grid on just solar and wind, no nuclear, or coal or natural gas peaker plants, you'll find that wind and solar is no longer cheap, and is much less resilient to exceptional circumstances.
>That kind of is my point: countries are doing this and without blackouts and it's actually fine.
A system that can meet the demand with an increasingly higher percentage of non dispatchable wind and solar needs some plan B for when it is night time and there is no wind. Or it is cloudy and not windy for days. It can be batteries but there is a cost to that too.
Any place with a high share of non dispatchable generation tends to either have good interconnections to their neighbors who have firm power supplies, or they have their own natural gas or diesel generation, but there is a cost to having that sitting around too.
I’m fine with cost for nuclear, for batteries, for over building wind and solar, and for nat gas used as a backup for that weather system that moves in once a year that would otherwise result In a blackout. cost is just a number in a ledger somewhere.
The energy supply should come from diverse sources and nuclear is a good part of that solution.
> Your points about mining are a bit beside the point. I don't actually disagree that the mining sector needs to be cleaned up. But our economy generates demand for lots of things we dig up out of the ground. If anything, it seems that the likes of Tesla are vaguely being responsible here and are actually making efforts to clean up that part of their business by working to source what they need in a sustainable way.
Mining is not besides the point, mining is a potential major bottleneck for renewables and has huge environmental costs that should be discussed. Also Tesla is trying to reduce the ecological and human costs of producing battery metals by bringing production/mining to North America, and switching to battery chemistries that don't use cobalt. However those non cobalt battery chemistries use lots of nickel. Also it is becoming extremely difficult to start a mine in the United States. Polymet has been trying to get their copper/nickel mine permitted for over a decade, if you include exploration, which started in the 80's, this project has been going on for decades. Starting a new mine is a very slow process and as the whole world switches to clean energy, demand will surge and new mines will be needed.
> You seem to imply that a scale change is needed on the mining front to bootstrap renewables. I doubt that that's as big of a deal that you seem to imply.
There is plenty of research, articles and information about the incoming surge in demand for metals due to the switch to clean technologies. For example this report from the world bank says that production of some metals would need to increase by nearly 500%[1]
Re batteries: For grid storage, you don't need "battery metals". Lead-based batteries are perfectly sufficient when you don't care about energy density. And that's ignoring other methods of storing energy.
Renewables fail at heating in the winter because they generate electricity directly. SMR nuclear district heating might be the only way to cover the shortfall. Thermal power plants have an inherent advantage when it comes to producing heat.
Everyone always says nuclear is expensive but what if the world (or significant portion of it) decided to go all in and build enough nuclear to replace fossil fuels in the next 2 decades. What would the price be then?
The premise is fallacious on several levels. Nuclear power and renewables are a dichotomy even if one is better for stable baseload power and the other lower in kWhr cost. France isn't going to give up MAD just because renewables are cheaper - it is still a budget synergy since they will have reactors anyway. No country has or will go 100% CO2 reduction focus. The perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good.
For anyone interested in more depth, the full report linked in the article is worth looking at. In general, it's not been a good year for the industry. Uneconomical plants in operation, stalled and cancelled projects, criminal fraud and theft of public money, and the unsolved problem of how to decommission anything plague the business. If the real costs were addressed, it seems many more plants would have shut down by now. The report does a great job of linking to original sources and it would be hard to find fault with the facts in it. TLDR, nuclear is in decline worldwide and maybe completely over in the US as far as new construction. The proposed new modular reactor designs have safety issues that keep them from being a quick fix.
I guess I don't understand how nuclear power can run a submarine but can't be harnessed to provide power on land. Nuclear power seems to work pretty well in ships. It seems as if we're not framing the problem correctly.
Submarine, aircraft, and icebreaker reactors usually operate on military-grade fission materials. You don't want those to be exported all over the world. And a bigger reason is that they simply can not compete with bigger plants. 1 GW class nuclear reactors generate much cheaper electricity even after factoring in their huge CAPEX. There is one example of using a small nuclear ship-scale reactor for civilian power generation in Russia [0], but I would say it's a very edge scenario, not applicable to the most of the world.
Money is no object when making a military submarine that doesn’t have to surface to resupply batteries with diesel generators. Makes for a hard comparison to at-scale public utility construction.
TLDR: Based on opportunity costs and urgency, renewable generation capacity is both much quicker and cheaper.
However, we must also invest (R&D) in next generation nuclear. eg micro reactors and liquid sodium. And hope like hell that any of the 50 long shot bets wins biggly. Because we're still going to need it.
Solar and off loading batteries from like Ambri is probably a good idea. Nuclear is great, but is simply annoying in every right despite being an existing "throw megawatts at it" solution that's also not spewing gas.
I'm going to hesitate to say this article is very short sighted... it talks about "nuclear is expensive, renewables are cheap and we don't know how to store nuclear waste".
Nabla's comment is a good start on the conversation (good frame but no real apples to apples comparisons).
Personally, with the talk about "what about all that nuclear waste"...
where's the talk about the recyclable waste? Batteries, solar panels, wind mills are all very hard to recycle and add "after the fact" costs like nuclear does that's being unaccounted for - and is happening at a MUCH larger scale currently.
Where's the talk about all the "rare earth minerals" that's going to have to be strip mined around the world to keep up with "clean energy"?
I think this article has some valid points wrapped up in talking points to strengthen its argument while ignoring massive talking points that go unmentioned (True comparisons of costs, storage/recycling of materials and the massive increase in "plundering" Earth goes unmentioned... to name a few).
Edit: Not saying I'm "pro nuclear" or "anti renewable"... I'm more of a balanced approach person - I think the future will include Coal, Gas, Nuclear, Solar, hydro and various mixes there-of and we need to work on making all of them better because none of them are going anywhere any time soon - and they ALL have strengths and weaknesses.
> Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.
> Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. It’s going to get worse: Most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now.
> The problem of solar panel disposal “will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment” because it “is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle.”
> Batteries, solar panels, wind mills are all very hard to recycle
Everything the world creates is unprofitable to recycle except for aluminum soda cans. Compared to the average commercial waste, batteries, solar panels and wind blades are straightforward to recycle.
> Where's the talk about all the "rare earth minerals" that's going to have to be strip mined around the world to keep up with "clean energy"?
There's no talk because the commonly used batteries and solar panels don't contain any.
A lifepo4 battery consists of Lithium, Iron and Phosphate, all of which are abundant.
> about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years.
IOW, about 40,000 tonnes of waste. About the same amount of waste as a small town.
Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity.
>The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants.
Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastrophically instead of being gracefully shut down in favor of new ones.
And his explanation isn't to justify these claims, but to blame political opponents. Sad!