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Really interested and quite easy to read article. In fact, the french energy policy is to invest in new “little” nuclear plants. I’m not sure our politics will consider these scientifical comments…
They still seem to handwave away the issue of baseload, which is entirely frustrating. As I seem to understand it, it’s just a 1:1 comparison of costs.
They use nebulous phrases like “Flexibility is more important” and point to batteries or energy saving methods getting cheaper, without actually including it in the comparison.
Although if it’s true EU plants were randomly closed from production 50% of the time baseload doesn’t really make a difference I guess.
“Baseload generator” isn’t a useful concept. And grid reliability (which is a useful concept) is thought about. It just doesn’t fit into a soundbite like winddon’tblowsundon’tshine.
Here’s an example of a full plan https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/major-publications/integrated-system-plan-isp/2022-integrated-system-plan-isp
Or a simpler analysis on the same grid: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for-australia-is-feasible-and-affordable-with-just-a-few-hours-of-storage/
For reference, 5kWh home batteries currently retail for about $1300 so this would add <10% to the capital cost compared to recent nuclear projects. Pumped hydro is about half the price per capacity, but a bit more per watt. The former is dropping at 10-30% per year, so by the time a nuclear plant is finished, storage cost would be negligible.
Here’s a broad overview of a slightly simplified model https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z demonstrating similar is possible everywhere.
Even in the counterfactual case where the ~5% of “other” generation is only possible with fossil fuel, focusing on it is incredibly myopic because the resources spent on that 1% of global emissions could instead be used for the other 70% which isn’t from electricity and has different reliability constraints.
Doesn’t the Australian model ask for a 4-6% fossil or other fuel input? I don’t see how base load, nuclear or other fuels aren’t relevant to discuss, as nucleur is like 4% of global output right now.
Four points:
The profile of other is short spikes 5-100 hours a few times a year.
1 year of delay is equivalent to 20 years of exclusively using fossil fuels for “other”.
It’s not even obvious that adding nuclear reactors would reduce this because they’re so geographically and temporally inflexible. France has 63GW of nuclear capacity, <45GW of average load and 61GW of winter peak load with vast amounts of storage available via interconnect to hydro countries. They still use 5% gas on top of the rest of the “other” (which is about 10-25GW).
5% of other from gas adds about 20g CO2e/kg per kWh to the total. Less than the margin between different uranium sources.
Running 40% of the capacity 10% of the time puts your nuclear energy in the realm of $1-3/kWh. The list of ways of generating or storing 6% of your energy for <$1/kWh is basically endless.
That’s about 4-8TW of capacity worldwide. 1kg of uranium is good for fuelling about 750W of reactor on a 6 year fuel cycle. Loading those reactors would require digging up all of the known and assumed-to-exist uranium immediately.
Nuclear is an irrelevant distraction being pushed by those who know it will not work. You only have to glance at the policy history or donor base of the politicians pushing for it in Sweden, Canada, Australia, UK, Poland, etc etc or the media channels pushing it to see how obvious it is that it’s fossil fuel propaganda.
It is obviously obviously true that it’s a non-solution. It fails on every single metric. All of the talking points about alleged advantages are the opposite of the truth without exception.
I don’t know enough about the topic to have an argument against, just trying to educate myself. I am curious how you would respond to this person in another thread:
https://jlai.lu/comment/1510040
I assume your response would be essentially similar to your previous comment. That we can develop the battery tech and it would be easier just to use fossil fuels as a bridge anyway?
Gotta love anti nuclear activists getting more and more desperate. You’re being decarbonised. Please do not resist.
Decarbonised by a stagnant and expensive industry that’s friends with coal? Unlikely.
https://i.imgur.com/4z837gc.png
nuclear energy is stagnant and decaying.
nuclear energy is stagnant and decaying.
Do you think you may be confusing the cause with the effect?
Alright, tell me how many more nuclear reactors are needed globally. Let’s just start with decarbonizing electricity production.
And, next, tell me how long do you think that will take, judging based on the average reactor construction time since, say, 1990.
Or look it up, maybe someone wrote an article with such a response.
The best time to build them was decades ago, so clearly the second best time is to… Never? Your argument is taken straight from the oil and coal industries – it would take too long to build up renewables infrastructure, so let’s just not do it? We shouldn’t build windmills, because you can’t tell me how many we need globally?
You’re grasping at straws. If you care about climate change, and you trust in science, there’s only one valid viewpoint on nuclear energy. I welcome dissenting opinions however and would be more than happy to hear why you disagree. Just know that I took courses in college on nuclear reactors and their design as part of my degree, as well as environment engineering, and I currently work in the green energy field – by no means am I automatically correct, but I want to see an argument that’s based in science and recent scientific studies and analysis, let’s say anything past 2015.
I could not disagree more. Renewables are cheaper safer easier to deploy and secure the grid. Nuclear is dead.
Nuclear is the safest energy. It has the fewest deaths per kWh produced. Some modern reactors are able to consume nuclear waste to generate fuel as well. If you want to minimize nuclear waste, we need to build at least some reactors to shove existing waste into.
Nuclear keeps our already unsafe grid more unsafe. It’s too expensive and accidents, while rare, are disastrous. Nuclear is dead.
The best time to build them was decades ago, so clearly the second best time is to… Never? Your argument is taken straight from the oil and coal industries – it would take too long to build up renewables infrastructure, so let’s just not do it? We shouldn’t build windmills, because you can’t tell me how many we need globally?
You seem to be unaware of the plans and needs to reduce GHGs. We do not have decades to waste.
You’re right, and that’s why it would be foolish to build exclusively nuclear. It’s also foolish however to not build any nuclear. The long lead time means we need to start ASAP so it’s ready ASAP. With proper government action targeting bottlenecks in the process (I believe there’s only one manufacturer in the world for a certain type of reactor shielding) we can speed that up.
Diversification is the way to go. At the very least, we should build enough reactors and breeder reactors to consume existing nuclear waste and drive that to effectively 0.
On top of all that, the bottleneck for deploying solar and wind en masse isn’t actually solar and wind facilities (although we certainly need those) but our electric grid. It needs an upgrade in order to integrate alternative energies, and I believe estimates on doing that are ~10 years. We might end up in a situation where a nuclear reactor is actually faster to build, depending on the type.
I would love to be decarbonised, but unfortunately i dont have the patience to wait 2 decades for it to happen.
How long do you think it takes to build renewables? It’s been about 20 years since most countries have started implementation and no country is 100% reliant on renewable energy or could store even a night’s energy needs without generation.
You can build a 50MW wind farm in 6 months
It’s been about 20 years since most countries have started implementation and no country is 100% reliant on renewable energy or could store even a night’s energy needs without generation.
Lot to unpack here.
There are actually a few countries that have 100% renewable capacity such as Iceland or Scotland and a lot more that are very close.
Yes we could be 100% renewable by now but the ff industry has done a lot of lobbying and conservative politicians have dragged their feet.
It has been a lot longer than 20 years since countries started building nuclear, yet were not 100% nuclear, is that a fault of the technology? or the politicians and NIMBYs?
Wind works at night, so you dont really need to store a nights worth of energy, especially as energy consumption is much lower at night.
Who fucking cares about profit, our planet is dying.
The planet is fine, and will be fine after we’ve gone, much like it was fine after the other mass extinctions. What’s dying is the environment that supports human life. Less snappy, granted, but I feel like emphasising that this is our problem and not something we should do for others might be worthwhile.
Do you never get tired of being pointlessly pedantic? Yes, the planet, as in the big rock floating in space, will continue to exist. Thanks.
There’s a point to my pedantry here. Did you read my whole post or just the first few words?
I care. I care that we don’t make a rash decision for a potential short term solution. Why not ramp up solar / wind and other alternatives?
Storage, we have less Lithium than you seem to think, and pumped hydro is not a solution – not that it’s not a universal solution, it’s simply not a solution. Implementation costs more than a nuclear reactor and maintenance and security costs are way, way higher than a nuclear reactor. We, unless you want to adopt a powerless overnight lifestyle, need on-demand power generation. Nuclear is the best, safest, cleanest, most feasible option for that until we remove all precious metals from energy storage technology.
I disagree. Nuclear is too slow costly and a huge security risk for an already unsafe grid. We need energy decentralization in addition to decarbonization. Renewables like solar and wind are 100% the best step.
anyone with a basic understanding of economics?
Like either we spend fuck tons of money subsidising nuclear to make it profitable or we can focus on wind and companies will build it themselves because its profitable.
What do you think is more likely: that I don’t understand the basics of how capitalism works? Or maybe that the comment was a criticism of the worship of the “free market,” and considering profit-motive to be the be-all, end-all?
Well considering you’re conflating a market economy with capitalism…
The question has always been what does one do when the renewables aren’t providing enough power (ex: nights, etc). The current solution is natural gas. It would be a big improvement if we would use a carbon-free source like nuclear instead.
Here’s an example of what can be done with 5 hours of storage. 5 hours is a 25% participation rate of V2G where the participants offer a third of their battery capacity.
If going with the (false) assumption that nuclear can hit 100% grid penetration, it would take decades to offset the carbon released by causing a single year of delay.
The lowest carbon “let’s pretend storage is impossible and go with 100% nuclear” would still start with exclusively funding VRE.
Lol at trying to pass that link off as a valid, unbiased source.
lol at a rando discrediting an article that gives supporting data. Did you even read it? Write your own well supported opinion and submit it here. We’ll wait.
Oh is that a new rule? You can’t point out garbage, bias sources unless you’ve written a dissertation on it? Fucking rube.
Good point. You are a garbage biased source.
Great comeback. Very cute.
But why don’t you go ahead and go get a juice box and let the adults speak.
TIL an “adult” is someone who denigrates a link without even reading it or having any substantive data points to support their points. Sounds like you have plenty of juice boxes to give out.
Nuclear is not, and cannot be, a gap coverage solution. Due to xenon/iodine poisoning and decay heat management you need to keep a reactor critical as long as possible to be economical. That’s independent of the problem of keeping the water hot that fossil fuel generators share. You can’t just turn a reactor on and off.
Keep the reactors running to avoid that issue. As long as they are providing enough power when the renewables aren’t, we successfully cut out natural gas from the power grid.
It can provide a baseload though where solar can provide extra power during the heat for places where the summer and days are the power intensive part, rather than winter and nights. You still need a short-term stop gap as the sun sets but it’s still hot out, but even if that was just powered by NG it would be a huge step forward. Adding greener energy storage options to store extra power nuclear or wind could generate overnight would be better.
Btw, could a small percent of nuclear reactors be turned on/off seasonally, potentially transporting fuel between the north in the winter and the south in the summer?
Yes, but if you spend the money making a reactor, you really should just use it. Uranium is pretty cheap, it’s the reactor that’s expensive.
Fair. If a grid was just powered by batteries, solar, wind, and existing nuclear plants, which would be the most effective to turn off when demand is too low?
Columbia station load follows within a certain range set by nearby hydro. It can be done. The economics aren’t even that bad, as fuel is one of the cheaper inputs to the reactor.
consumers may also help reduce system costs by adapting their electricity consumption to the availability of renewable energy
From the linked paper. They mention some other options for storage like batteries (plenty of environmental issues there though) but based on the quoted text I have a hard time taking this seriously if they actually expect people to change their behavior.
I think innovation at the consumption end is going to help a lot. On Technology Connections I saw an electric induction stove that could be powered from a regular socket. It had a battery that would trickle charge throughout the day and then use the batteries to power the induction cooktops, as well as a couple of plugs. If widely deployed and in other appliances, with a little smarts that could provide power leveling at the home level.
Another solution would be adding some intelligence to water heaters. Have a temperature control valve on the output where you set the temperature, and program the water heater get to 160-180°F when electricity is cheap. This would be a thermal battery that would easily level out demand for electricity for heating water.
Or you could do thermal storage by heating a house very warm/cold prior to a large cold snap/heat wave, and letting it coast down/up to a temperature instead of heating/cooling a lot during the cold/hot weather. He’s got a video on this technique here
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Another solution would be adding some intelligence to water heaters. Have a temperature control valve on the output where you set the temperature, and program the water heater get to 160-180°F when electricity is cheap. This would be a thermal battery that would easily level out demand for electricity for heating water.
This has been done for close to a century in wind or run of river hydro heavy countries (as well as some coal ones).
The water heater has a buffer tank and is attached to a meter that only runs when a signal is sent across the power line. This stores about 20kWh for a 300L tank.
Modern insulation would allow going up to a few m^3 for a couple weeks’ worth.
Combine that with some radiant floor heating on a nice thick concrete slab and you could use the battery for home heating. (Though it would need a lot of water.)
“Not enough power from renewables? Just turn off your fridge for a few days and you’ll be fine!”
Honestly that sentiment has strong “blame the consumer” vibes that seems to pervade climate arguments.
Sure, people can reduce consumption, but at best its a stopgap, not a solution.
There’s stuff like heaters and to a degree things like washing machines that can shape the time they’re active to whenever there’s a lull.
Consider Britain: Each time the BBC runs a popular show you get an energy usage spike once it’s over because people are getting up and make themselves a cuppa. Doesn’t really make sense to run the heater in the tank for your shower at the same time, or charge your car, that can wait a bit.
Plug in car. Press the “I would like to only pay $100/yr to fuel this please” button.
Later when you leave for work press the “I would like the house to be cool when I get home and also want to pay half as much for AC” button.
Buy the 1.5m wide water heater that stores 10kWh of hot water and lasts a week between heatings rather than the 70cm one that lasts a day.
Such an unconscionable burden.
The best solution is having EVs plugged into the grid at night. VTG is the easy solution to peaker needs.
Then you are getting into the issue of the power company eating up your charge cycles on your EV battery. Who pays for the fact that my battery now has half the design lifetime due to constant cycling because it’s feeding the grid?
These are easily solved details. For example, by providing power on the grid you are in essence a power company. Perhaps you get reimbursed based upon what you provide. You know net metering is already a thing, right?
I’m just saying that we might need to get away from the idea that a car battery is solely an owner expense. They’d have to be subsidized or there would be huge equity issues. And yes “I do know about net metering,right.”
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Typical energy density of ore in a new uranium mine burned in an LWR is about the same of coal.
All of the economic/not too damaging stuff together would power the world for about 3 years.
According to the article, the researchers concluded that nuclear reactors are not a good fit for that role.
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is an old and proven method for load balancing intermittent power sources. Would like to see more of that as geography permits.
The “as geography permits” part is a big obstacle, unfortunately.
Not in China.
Actually it isn’t if you stop only looking at places that are also suitable as power plant, that is, have a big river flowing through them.
You can do pumped hydro in an old mineshaft.
Can you? To store the energy you need to pump up; to use it you need to flow back down. Where is the ‘down’ or ‘up’ from a mine shaft?
I’d also question if the volume would be worth it.
Edit: maybe you are thinking compressed air?
…the up is at the surface and the down is at the bottom of the mine shaft? I’m not talking about horizontal ones, of course. You let water in, generating power, and then, to regenerate empty space and with that the capacity to again generate power, you spend energy to pump it up.
As to volume, there’s some gigantic mineshafts, but even small ones might warrant small installations it’s not like some pipes and a pump and generator are much of an investment. Of course, don’t try that in a salt mine geology will play an important part.
And lastly: Mineshafts aren’t the only option. There’s a lot of mountains, and they have many sides, and also plateaus and valleys. Build two concrete basins, connect them via pipe, ship in water from somewhere, voila, pumped hydro storage.
I guess I wasn’t clear where on the surface the storage is. Do they still make a dam type area to store the ‘high’ water, or is it just a different part of the mine which is closer to the surface?
I was able to find some mine numbers… yeah; insane. Especially something like an open cut mine which is functionally already lake shaped.
It’s an obstacle for anything, including nuclear. Just ask Japan.
That will not remotely cover baseline loads and is not without significant efficiency loss due to the pumping phase.
All commonly used forms of energy storage have some efficiency loss. Pumped storage is not perfect but my understanding is that it usually comes at a 10-25% loss, which isn’t all that shabby all things considered.
Nuclear is a terrible fit for peaker plants, that’s not how it works. If it isn’t selling energy at as close to 100% of the time as is feasible it’s losing money.
While I agree completely, it is troublesome that you, BombOmOm, are saying this… :/ username checks no fly list out.
Sometimes, a kinetic response is the only reasonable reaction. ;p Asking nicely doesn’t stop a Russian war of conquest.
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This is actually kind of a bad solution.
The reality is that any form of power generation needs more than just the panels or turbine. You need sufficient cabling/conduit and, often, cooling/heating to keep it viable. And you need a large battery* to store excess energy. Let alone anything required to feed it back into the grid.
All of which is expensive in terms of resources and cost and maintenance.
That ALSO ignores the other elephant in the room. Technology Connections did a GREAT video on this but, as a high level summary: Even ignoring the wealth inequality between those who can and can’t afford their own energy collection system, this pretty much breaks the power grid model. Because maybe you live in an area where every house can be power neutral (or even positive) during the spring and fall. Come summer you need to turn the ACs on which means you need something to help pick up the slack at peak hours. Which is a power plant of some form.
If everyone is not paying their power bill six months out of the year? The cost of that power goes up drastically because now there are fewer people paying for maintenance or even just baseline operation.
No. Personal renewable energy is nice. And I would argue all office buildings should mandate them as part of construction/retrofitting. But we still need to put the onus on the power grid as a whole to account for cloudy days or people running the AC AND the dryer at the same time.
*: EVs with “vehicle to load” capability are arguably a way to subsidize this cost. Smaller battery but it is something that, theoretically, every household would have. There are ALSO concerns over the increased number of cycles but… But the main issue is that… people tend to be out of the house during the day. So your battery won’t be part of the system during peak sun hours.
This is a misrepresentation of what he said, which was a discussion on net metering and high feed in tarriffs.
The people with surplus can pay for the grid infrastructure with energy they produce consumed elsewhere at whatever its value is. When they have no surplus they can pay with money.
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What makes you think personal renewable are going to be more efficient than large scale renewables? The sun doesn’t magically shine in the middle of the night on personal homes, the wind doesn’t magically blow only in residential areas…
Those potentially have the same issue. The solution to filling the gaps in production from renewable sources is not necessarily more panels or more windmills, it’s having energy storage somewhere to keep surplus energy when it’s being produced (e.g. during the day, or when the wind is blowing) available to be used when it’s not.
So in your example, each home could also have its own battery bank. Or, a larger battery bank could be placed somewhere on the electricity grid.
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If your appliances are efficient and your usage is moderate, you don’t need much to generate enough power to run your home. And, provided you don’t also need to charge an EV in the garage…
The 8 Bit Guy just did a video detailing his setup, which is all solar panel driven, and he rode out a day in the recent Texas heat running his air conditioners and so forth just on his solar panels and stored backup power. He has a comparatively rinky-dink number of panels, just a few over his little side porch and a couple more hung on his fence.
I imagine someone with one side of their roof paneled plus or minus a small windmill could easily power their own home as well as provide a surplus to charge a battery bank.
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at night perhaps they could sleep
The growing idea is to just have a shit load of renewables, everywhere. The wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun shines through the clouds. If you have a ridiculous excess total capacity then even when you’re running at limited capacity you could still cover the demand. Basically, most of our renewable infrastructure would actually be curtailed or offline a lot of the time.
And that opens up opportunities for energy intensive industries like aluminium or hydrogen production to run whilst there’s an excess of energy
I’m all for green hydrogen production, it’s using hydrogen in place of fossil fuels that bothers me. We already have a shit load of demand for hydrogen from industrial uses, and it would take 3x the world’s total renewable capacity in 2019, dedicated solely to hydrogen production, to meet this with green hydrogen. If we start adding transportation into that demand we’ll never make it, and it will be far less efficient than other energy sources (eg batteries).
So yeah, we should have green hydrogen production, but we shouldn’t listen to those same people when they say they think it should also be used for transportation. That’s just trying to increase the size of the market to increase profits.
Hydrogen works well with a renewable grids because you can take advantage of the times there is excess energy production so that power doesn’t just go to waste.
We do need to be careful because hydrogen is often sold as a pipe dream by gas companies to convince us to use gas (e.g. “this new gas turbine power plant can be converted to hydrogen”, even though that’d be a workload less efficient than fuel cells).
As for its use in transport, it looks like battery electric vehicles have won that battle for personal vehicles. Both have their advantages but in practice there are few enough fuel stations for hydrogen and enough chargers that that’s not going to flip.
However, batteries are entirely unsuitable to long distance, high load transport like trucks. Ideally they’d be replaced by rail, but that’s not happening anytime soon in many places so hydrogen likely will be the solution there.
Chasing profit is how we got here. This shouldn’t be the basis of the decision. If it’s the only thing we can use to drag conservatives along though, I guess it’ll have to do.
It’s not about chasing profit though, it’s about getting to net zero as quickly as possible using finite resources. Any money that goes to nuclear could be going to renewables, which would get us there more quickly.
Any money that goes to nuclear could be going to renewables, which would get us there more quickly.
That’s a false dilemma. Nuclear and renewables provide different things, so they shouldn’t be compared directly in an “either or” comparison, and certainly not on cost. Nuclear power provides a stable baseline, so you don’t have to rely on coal/gas/diesel powered generators. Renewables cheaply but opportunistically provide power from natural sources that may not always be available but that can augment the baseline. The share of renewable energy in the mix is something engineers should figure out, not “the market”.
Also, monetary cost shouldn’t be the only concern. Some renewables have a societal cost too, for example in the amount of land that they occupy per kWh generated, or visual polution. I wouldn’t want to live within the shadow flicker of a windmill for example.
They don’t provide different things, they both provide electricity. Nuclear is only really suited to base load, whereas renewables can be spun up and down to match varying demand - however renewables are also more than capable of covering base load, because it’s all just electricity.
The only thing nuclear provides that renewables don’t is grid stability. Nuclear turbines have large rotating masses, when loads are switched on and off they keep spinning the same speed, helping to maintain voltage and frequency. Meanwhile renewables are almost all run via inverters, which use feedback loops to chase an ideal voltage and frequency, but that gives them an inherent latency when dealing with changes on the network. However, there are other ways of providing grid stability.
It’s not a windmill. It doesn’t mill anything. The technical term is Wind Turbine Generator (WTG), but usually they’re called wind turbines or just turbines. A group of turbines make up a wind farm.
Land occupied is not much of a concern when most renewables (and nuclear, for that matter) tend to be installed away from population centres. It feels like you’re grasping for reasons now.
Suffice it to say, I work in the electrical industry, and this isn’t the first report that’s come out saying renewables are cheaper, better value and quicker to build and get us to net zero when compared to nuclear. That isn’t to say nuclear isn’t important and shouldn’t be built, just that nuclear shouldn’t be a priority in pursuit of phasing out fossil fuels. At the end of the day, demand will only go up, so building a lot of renewables before building nuclear won’t exactly be going to waste. We’ll need all of it.
Renewables cannot be spun up. You have to massively over build to do that. And even then, you’re still depending on availability of sun and wind.
If you need more power than is available, it’s done with natural gas peaker plants at 10x the normal cost of electricity.
On the flip side, a stable base load of nuclear, can be spun up and down over the day to meet expected load.
Renewables can effectively be spun up or down as long as they have batteries. That way, they can usually be generating as much energy as possible regardless of demand.
is our battery tech even up to this?
Yes. There’s numerous live examples which have been in place for years (Horndale South Australia for example)
Yes. It costs less and requires less mining to use the most expensive and wasteful storage option. The only reason there aren’t more is a lack of sufficient investment in VRE required to make them useful.
In that case it’s the batteries being loaded and unloaded, not the renewables.
Storage can be connected to the grid anywhere and charged whenever power is cheap - from whatever sources are generating at that time. It is effectively an independent investment - assuming your on-grid / grid scale.
As far as i know the only major renewable electricity generation that is intrinsically linked to storage is reservoir based hydro with reverse pumping capability though even that increases costs and is a quite situation dependent if you want a lot of peaking power…
Nuclear fanboys could equally argue to add batteries so as to convert baseload into shape, or peaking.
That’s exactly the suggestion, over-build renewables right now to get to net zero, then fill out the generation portfolio with nuclear. The demand will only go up, so that excess renewables will eventually be used to capacity anyway. The study is laying out what the priority should be right now, when climate change has already got its foot well in the door.
Adding 1GW that runs 80% of the time with months long outages to a grid that has 10GW of power available 95% of the time and 3GW 5% of the time doesn’t fix the issue and requires charging $4000/MWh rather than merely $200/MWh to pay back your boondoggle.
All the people chanting “baseload” understand this but pretend not to.
baseline
Base load. Here’s an argument that we don’t need it: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/28/we-dont-need-base-load-power/
Reading that… It basically seems to say that we can live with intermittent blackouts when wind and solar fail.
There’s an interesting point buried at the end of that article: electricity quality. With batteries in the loop, supply can scale with demand almost instantly, versus the time it takes for various types of power plant to adjust output.
There’s an equally buried link to a death by powerpoint that made me pray for a blackout before i could get anywhere close to understanding how that bar graph was constructed.
I can’t vouch for the following being a necessarily better source, but this one seem a lot more upfront about some of their assumptions and sensitivities. In this adding storage to wind is seems to be +tens of dollars per MWh; a fair amount more than the +1-3 dollars per MWh shown in the cleantech article.
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/So i’d like to know where these cheap battery cost assumption comes from - is it proven tech, available at scale , at that price?
just seems a bit too good to be true.I wonder if this has any impact on another piece of the puzzle, high voltage direct current (HVDC) which we need to transport electricity over large distances with minimal loss.
Two’s a crowd: Nuclear and renewables don’t mix
Only the latter can deliver truly low carbon energy, says new study
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201005112141.htm
If countries want to lower emissions as substantially, rapidly and cost-effectively as possible, they should prioritize support for renewables, rather than nuclear power.
This article is about profitability, not cost to net zero. They are very different things. It also ignores the cost of scale, go all in on say solar today and that doesn’t make more panels available, the increased demand would raise prices and suddenly its not so profitable.
Nothing is as simple and easy as people want it to be.
Solar price still decreasing and the demand never been so high. That’s the faster energy deployment.
Demand has never been so high. If we wanted to go all in on solar and get to net zero on it, that demand would be 100x higher.
Right now, the driving reason behind solar prices going down is to encourage more demand. If that demand were to jump suddenly, then that driving reason is gone, and suddenly it makes more sense to charge more as supply can’t keep up.
Maybe you’ll understand the point better now.
You clearly don’t understand macroeconomics
I was speaking about the market, the solar panel price. Many developing countries now invest in solar power to meet their energy needs with the cost of solar energy technologies decreasing and the availabilities of governments subsidies. The Ukrainian conflict may have an impact on the market but nothing is sure.
The path to Net Zero is mainly Solar and Wind. https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050
Right now, the driving reason behind solar prices going down is to encourage more demand. If that demand were to jump suddenly, then that driving reason is gone, and suddenly it makes more sense to charge more as supply can’t keep up.
Doubling down on ignorance is unbecoming.
You seem to be implying that there’s some problem with going to renewables but there isn’t. It’s just quicker and cheaper than nuclear to do so. It’s not like it’s breaking new ground either - plenty of places have already done it.
Nuclear is the hard way of doing this, not renewables.
I’m not implying there is a problem with renewables, I’m actively stating that markets will change if you increase the demand massively and that you can’t just say that a market state today would continue if you change all the driving forces behind it.
What generally is statable is that diversification in markets stays stable. if you buy all the options then you keep the power in the buyer and the costs stay as low as possible.
Wait, do you really expect us to believe that increasing solar will increase its price? Have you looked at the cost of solar over the past decade? Do you understand the economy of scale as it applies to all 3 (solar, wind, and batteries) because I don’t think you do.
my dude, did you really need to make three individual comment replies all to me
Yes
However, the researchers show that in terms of cost and speed, renewable energy sources have already beaten nuclear and that each investment in new nuclear plants delays decarbonization compared to investments in renewable energies. “In a decarbonizing world, delays increase CO2 emissions,” the researchers pointed out.
They talk about profit to get the attention of money people, but the ultimate goal is decarbonization. Hell, the title of the source article is “Why investing in new nuclear plants is bad for the climate”.
Two of the researchers are economists, and the third is an environmental economist. I’d rather get my opinions on decarbonization and nuclear energy from actual scientists and people who run research reactors.
It’s just money people talking to money people. I don’t trust an economist to make a value judgment on science when all they’re looking at is profit. I actually actively distrust them. They’re interested in investments and profit – nuclear has an undeserved stigma and it makes its profit in the long term, not the short term that they all seem to love.
If people internalized that last line of yours we could get shit done. …
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Seriously. By this logic fossil fuels are cheaper, thus better!
This is how we get garbage like carbon credits, trying to capture the cost to the environment in dollar amounts is just more symptoms the fallacy of using economics in lieu of physics.
If we measured the amount of destruction to our environment that fossil fuels cost long-term I bet they’d stop being profitable really quick.
Oil companies knew all about this since at least the 70s, and it was still very very profitable for them.
Turns out humans are selfish.
Profit doesn’t equal good. Renewables take a lot of materials and fabrication to upkeep. Im sure theres more money to be made in renewable than there is in nuclear, that doesn’t imply one is better than the other.
K, but this isn’t about profits. This is about not destroying the environment, which nuclear can help with (you know if nobody bombs the plant)
Ah, yes, love my last vacations in chernobyl
But it’s also about cost. Nuclear is far more expensive upfront, more expensive to maintain, and more expensive to decommission. Cheap, agile renewables will be an easier option for the vast majority of the planet
We would be really stupid to worry about money when trying to save the planet. But, what did I know, I’m just some guy on the internet
We*rich countries would be really stupid to worry about money when trying to save the planet.There’s a lot of world outside the US, Europe, and China.
This is everybody’s problem dude.
Correct. Which is why cheap and agile renewables will remain a good option for less wealthy countries.
Financiers tend to worry about money, yes.
First option: a wind/solar plant with costs that aren’t going to increase substantially, power being sold within a couple of years therefore repayments will begin quickly.
Second option: a nuclear proposal - massive costs upfront, that will inevitably skyrocket while the completion date slips and slips, and power being sold 10-15 year in the future so repayments are a long way off.
It’s not a difficult choice.
If your argument is that we should nationalize the energy sector so government can get involved more directly to mitigate financing issues, sure. We both know that’s not going to happen.
How does one provide power when the renewables don’t provide enough power (nights, etc)? Our current solution is natural gas. Nuclear is a huge step up as a carbon-free provider.
Storage, there are many options. Pumped hydro is great for places with elevation change, molten salt is great for desert climates. Batteries, green hydrogen, compressed gas, etc.
We’ve been storing energy for thousands of years. It’s not difficult in the way nuclear fusion, SMRs, or thorium are difficult.
We’re also moving towards EVs. I’d like to see investment in using a fleet of connected EVs as a giant battery. Your energy company can pay you for making 10-15% of your EV battery available for grid storage and you can opt out if you need that extra range for a trip.
The largest battery on the planet would power my workplace for less than two hours- if it could meet the instant demand, which it cannot.
I’m all for energy storage, but I realise there’s a lot of work to do.
For processes like that though, nuclear would make the electricity too expensive to be economic, renewables wouldn’t.
1,200MW isn’t enough? Where do you work?
Why do you think batteries can’t meet instant demand? That’s kind of their whole thing.
The article talks about the coming droughts and water shortages. Pumped hydro is nice, if you have water.
You save the water in a hole, then pump it back and forth. You can cover it with PV to stop evaporation
This is also good for the droughts as you have emergency water.
There’s evaporation, which can be mitigated by floating solar panels, but pumped hydro is a closed system, it doesn’t consume water.
Governments operate on budgets. If the same budget can yield more renewable energy than nuclear energy, why would we invest in nuclear?
@N1cknamed @NocturnalMorning be carful about time scale when talking about rentrability. In short term a few reneable is certainly cheaper, but nuclear reactor will outlive the ENR. For governement, long term rentability may be more important than short term one. Also, governement consider other parameters (jobs, resillience, public opinion, ghg emmissions? …)
Everything is about profits. Otherwise we wouldn’t even be in this mess.
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When you demand free insurance from someone they get to set the risk profile.
Tell you what. You put up collateral equal to the value of any nearby city and everything in it, and you can stop ALARA.
Also even with that it’s still bullshit. Nuclear had a higher negative learning rate before ALARA and is still horrifically expensive outside the US.
Also the suggestion that wind and solar aren’t subject to more extreme regulation on potential harms is even more ridiculous.
What about when the grid is almost entirely renewables? Is nuclear cheaper than just storage? What about storage one it’s already been implemented to the point of resource scarcity?
No, nuclear is always more expensive in real world conditions. Places with mostly renewables plus in-fill from batteries and transient gas generation are a lot cheaper than nuclear. eg. South Australia.
But transient gas generation produces much more ghgs than nuclear, and when accounting for the ghg potential of metanen and normal pipeline leakage, it is even more damaging than coal.
Except overprovisioning your total load by 30% with nuclear capacity doesn’t allow turning the transient gas off
It’s required less and less as other forms of generation are added to the mix. eg. Tidal and pumped hydro.
1kg of lithium produces about 10kWh of storage for 15-20 years. 3-12 hours of storage is plenty for a >95% VRE grid.
1kg of uranium produces about 750W for 6 years.
There are about 20 million tonnes of conventional lithium economically accessible reserves (and it has only been of economic interest for a short time).
There are about 10 million tonnes of reasonably assured accessible uranium (not reserves, stuff assumed to exist). It has had many boom/bust cycles of prospecting.
Lithium batteries are not even being proposed as the main grid storage method.
Cobalt is the difficult one, especially with the child workers mining it.
Cobalt isn’t even in most EV batteries anymore, and LMFP is replacing NMC next year.
Sodium ion will then replace LFP the year after.
It’s also real weird how people only ever care about french colonial exploitation of africa when it comes to materials they pretend are in renewables and not when they’re flooding villages drinking water with uranium tailings.
Stop all the hate for nuclear. It’s just a way for the fossil fuel industry to cause infighting among those of us who care about the climate. If we can make energy free or close to it, we should. The closer everything comes to being free the better.
People pushing nuclear is a way for fossil fuels industry to keep us reliant on them for the next 20 years while we build power plants.
More than that as we will need to pay them to maintain storage which they won’t be keen to do without tons of government and tax payer assistance
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Ecofanatics just deny any source that says nuclear is good anyway, especially RTE. You make a good sum up though.
Profit 😵
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And? Who gives a shit? We need whatever is cleanest.
Also renewables.
Also incorrect. We need whatever reduces total cumulative emissions the most.
A solar panel today does a lot more than a nuclear reactor in 2045. And installing 5W of solar (which will average 1W) today only costs you the opportunity to build 0.15W of nuclear (which will average 0.12W).
Nuclear isn’t very clean when we can poison a quarter of the earth with it because we’re too dumb to handle it.
