Nuclear energy. I’m a dilettante (software engineer by background) but I find the topic absolutely fascinating and have educated myself on a diet of papers and books about the topic.
I find this topic particularly infuriating as the media feeds on and sells irrational fear on the topic, actively preventing a real solution we have to climate change TODAY, yet refuse to take.
I don’t have a problem with nuclear energy other than that it is expensive relative to other technologies such as solar or wind. Maybe some of the reason it is so expensive is precisely because of the FUD the media spreads on the topic. I think new technologies that gain widespread use are often the ones that are most profitable so in that sense solar beats out nuclear.
media feeds on and sells irrational fear on the topic
It is expensive relative to solar and wind. I agree!
You’ll notice, I hope, that in another comment in this thread I concluded that we need lots and lots of solar and wind. I’m ALL in on renewables; they’re great!!
But the (dirty) secret of renewables is that it’s got external cost associated with it. I can build a gas plant, or a nuclear plant, and I broadly get the advertised generation capacity out of it. I can steer this up or down (also with nuclear; one of many misunderstandings people hold on nuclear is that it’s not steerable)
When I build a wind turbine park, I can also in aggregate get an advertised rating out of it - in a windy area I multiply the capacity all the turbines by 45%-ish and that’s what I’ll get out of these turbines in a year. It’s remarkably precise.
The challenge is that a heat-based plant is steerable up and down (between 0 and its capacity), in the moment, on demand. Renewables are only steerable down (between 0 and whatever the wind wants to do right now).
And then many say “well we just need to build a LOT of turbines (and/or solar) and then we will always have enough”. Or they say “well, we will need some adjustable, backup capacity”.
And that’s valid - but…
We have a lot of wind today - enough that we can feel confident about estimating what “a lot of wind capacity would do”. And we would still have complete wind/sun-less days with zero output, even if we build massive over-capacity.
Ok, some say, then let’s invest in distribution - so I can source masses of renewable power from even further away. Yup, although all simulations show even with insane investments in distribution interconnectors, you end up with days of no power from anywhere AND you’ve now to spend on inter-connectors.
Let’s store it then! Well, sure, but now you’ve got to build an absolutely insane amount of batteries (heavy metal strip mining and very expensive, and probably more than we can actually conceive to make) or you’ve got to make very expensive pumped storage (we don’t have enough areas where pumped storage can be located).
If you want 50Hz (or whatever your local equivalent is) ALL THE TIME, there are external costs to renewables: Massive investment in distribution, massive investment in energy storage, massive over-building capacity etc.
So when you build renewable capacity, you are adding these external costs elsewhere. That’s why many grid-planners advocate for a different model: Guaranteed capacity.
Ie.: “I guarantee between 0 and 1000 GW, on demand; if I can’t meet the requested requirement, I pay a fine based on the size of the miss”. If you forced renewable capacity towards “guaranteed capacity”, these investments would have to be made in association with the build of the renewable capacity, either by leaker gas plants, storage, distribution networks etc.
So what’s happening right now is these externalised costs to renewable capacity are being absorbed elsewhere. When you add the cost of guaranteeing the capacity, nuclear no longer looks expensive.
Or you accept that hospitals will be burning diesel fuel and the rest of our world shuts down at random times. Travel to Johannesburg if you want a sense of what the world feels like when the power goes out in an entire neighbourhood to load-shed.
So I’m not arguing against renewables - if they could get us all the way there, at the sticker price, I’d not make an argument for nuclear.
But I do not believe you can - and as originally discussed, this is based on reading an unseasonable amount of papers and literature about grid planning, renewables and nuclear energy.
So for me, it comes down to: What do you want to do to guarantee that frequency is maintained 24/7? Gas peaker plants? Nuclear? Storage?
None of the options to go from “we have power 90% of the time” to “we have power 100% of the time” are that enticing. Nuclear power is the least bad. If 20-25% of our capacity came from nuclear, the price of guaranteeing 100% frequency-hold drops dramatically. Any other alternative seems worse.
Yeah, I am vaguely aware of the energy storage costs(externalities) that can be associated with solar and would agree that grids need some sort of way to have a baseline supply that should include nuclear. Do you have an idea or numbers of how much more expensive nuclear is vs solar and whether the solar figure includes it’s externalities?
Here’s a couple of good papers and articles on the topic:
A systematic review of the costs and impacts of integrating variable renewables into power grids - a large meta-study from Nature Energy showing that the externalised additional cost of integrating 1 MW of renewable production hits £40/MWh between 75% to 85% renewable penetration. Beyond that no studies have been done, but already at this level, renewable would be more expensive than nuclear (at auctioned build-prices today).
Real-World Challenges with a Rapid Transition to 100% Renewable Power Systems - finds that even if you set the Value of Lost Load to £40,000/MWh in a 100% renewable grid, you’ll still get power outages after 2030. It’s not equivalent to externalised cost of renewable integration, but is a heavy indicator that without forcing massive fines on renewable providers, the reserve capacity won’t be provided (it’ll be cheaper for them to just pay the fine). The study finds that a fine of £4 million (!) per required-but-not-fulfilled MWh is needed to encourage providers build the reserve capacity (through distribution, storage etc.).
Many of these articles refer to many other articles you may find interesting.
Overall, my point is that it does us (collective “us”, not just “you and me”) no good to argue that “it’ll be alright if we just commit to renewables”. One has to argue against these peer reviewed studies, done by experts in the field, many collecting and meta-reviewing many other studies, to argue that “renewables will be enough”.
And these are not “cooky studies” in “cooky journals”. Nature, Cell, Joule are some of the most respected journals, with the highest impact ratings and the authors & their reviewers have studied these topics for years.
I’m all for more renewables! But it won’t be enough!
I agree that idealistically on a broad scale the world should use nuclear as a tool in getting to a net zero energy generation. However, on a local level at least here in the US, I’m not sure that the political reality of building nuclear power is feasible. I also concur that more than nuclear plants are needed but applying that idea on a local level doesn’t make currently sense for the US.
Since the US is, according to the Energy Information Agency, already at about ~20% for both Renewable and Nuclear technologies, I think it makes sense to push for whatever is currently the cheapest to displace the remaining Fossil Fuel power generation. While I am sure nuclear could be made cheaper here, I don’t realistically think it will happen based on our current political reality. It seems slightly more realistic to me that Solar and other renewable energies will continue to expand.
I think they’re perfectly safe, but I don’t think we have a good way of storing the waste. Just leave some highly reactive stuff underground for a few hundred to thousand years? That sounds like a recipe for disaster at some point, that is a freakin long time
Well there’s hardly anything to bury if you reprocess. And we know how to reprocess “spent” fuel (I put quotes around “spent” as it still has 98% of its energy left).
And that’s expensive - too expensive compared against new uranium - so we bury it instead.
But if you now hold it up against the cost of staying with fossil fuels (in the long term), even reprocessed uranium fuel is damn cheap.
Mind you, this is before you consider the next set of nuclear reactors coming online, which hardly produce any waste in the first place. I totally understand if people then argue “but that’s not now” which it isn’t. It’s just that the step towards new reactor tech is one we know how to take, so we literally know how to “solve climate” change: It’s a fuck-tonne of renewables and a fuck-tonne of nuclear.
Suppose you didn’t bury it and just stacked up heaps of those nuclear flask thingies and wrote on them “waste we didn’t know what to do with”.
Suppose this went on for several hundred years until a better solution was found, and by that time there was many thousands of those flasks.
I bet our descendents would be glad that we had left them with those rather than continuing to pump waste we didn’t know what to do with into the atmosphere.
Eh, I don’t think that aspect is a problem per se. We certainly understand now why we started to use coal and fossil fuels back then. We didn’t have the technology or knowledge for something better or the understanding of the consequences back then. It’s the same. They’ll understand.
I’m not sure about the situation in Germany, but the US built a large facility in a mountain to put all the waste in one spot and fear mongering meant it went unused.
Instead, waste is spread across the country in multiple redundant spots, wasting money and making it harder to secure.
Nuclear energy. I’m a dilettante (software engineer by background) but I find the topic absolutely fascinating and have educated myself on a diet of papers and books about the topic.
I find this topic particularly infuriating as the media feeds on and sells irrational fear on the topic, actively preventing a real solution we have to climate change TODAY, yet refuse to take.
I don’t have a problem with nuclear energy other than that it is expensive relative to other technologies such as solar or wind. Maybe some of the reason it is so expensive is precisely because of the FUD the media spreads on the topic. I think new technologies that gain widespread use are often the ones that are most profitable so in that sense solar beats out nuclear.
Fixed it for you. 😀
It is expensive relative to solar and wind. I agree!
You’ll notice, I hope, that in another comment in this thread I concluded that we need lots and lots of solar and wind. I’m ALL in on renewables; they’re great!!
But the (dirty) secret of renewables is that it’s got external cost associated with it. I can build a gas plant, or a nuclear plant, and I broadly get the advertised generation capacity out of it. I can steer this up or down (also with nuclear; one of many misunderstandings people hold on nuclear is that it’s not steerable)
When I build a wind turbine park, I can also in aggregate get an advertised rating out of it - in a windy area I multiply the capacity all the turbines by 45%-ish and that’s what I’ll get out of these turbines in a year. It’s remarkably precise.
The challenge is that a heat-based plant is steerable up and down (between 0 and its capacity), in the moment, on demand. Renewables are only steerable down (between 0 and whatever the wind wants to do right now).
And then many say “well we just need to build a LOT of turbines (and/or solar) and then we will always have enough”. Or they say “well, we will need some adjustable, backup capacity”.
And that’s valid - but… We have a lot of wind today - enough that we can feel confident about estimating what “a lot of wind capacity would do”. And we would still have complete wind/sun-less days with zero output, even if we build massive over-capacity.
Ok, some say, then let’s invest in distribution - so I can source masses of renewable power from even further away. Yup, although all simulations show even with insane investments in distribution interconnectors, you end up with days of no power from anywhere AND you’ve now to spend on inter-connectors.
Let’s store it then! Well, sure, but now you’ve got to build an absolutely insane amount of batteries (heavy metal strip mining and very expensive, and probably more than we can actually conceive to make) or you’ve got to make very expensive pumped storage (we don’t have enough areas where pumped storage can be located).
If you want 50Hz (or whatever your local equivalent is) ALL THE TIME, there are external costs to renewables: Massive investment in distribution, massive investment in energy storage, massive over-building capacity etc.
So when you build renewable capacity, you are adding these external costs elsewhere. That’s why many grid-planners advocate for a different model: Guaranteed capacity.
Ie.: “I guarantee between 0 and 1000 GW, on demand; if I can’t meet the requested requirement, I pay a fine based on the size of the miss”. If you forced renewable capacity towards “guaranteed capacity”, these investments would have to be made in association with the build of the renewable capacity, either by leaker gas plants, storage, distribution networks etc.
So what’s happening right now is these externalised costs to renewable capacity are being absorbed elsewhere. When you add the cost of guaranteeing the capacity, nuclear no longer looks expensive.
Or you accept that hospitals will be burning diesel fuel and the rest of our world shuts down at random times. Travel to Johannesburg if you want a sense of what the world feels like when the power goes out in an entire neighbourhood to load-shed.
So I’m not arguing against renewables - if they could get us all the way there, at the sticker price, I’d not make an argument for nuclear.
But I do not believe you can - and as originally discussed, this is based on reading an unseasonable amount of papers and literature about grid planning, renewables and nuclear energy.
So for me, it comes down to: What do you want to do to guarantee that frequency is maintained 24/7? Gas peaker plants? Nuclear? Storage?
None of the options to go from “we have power 90% of the time” to “we have power 100% of the time” are that enticing. Nuclear power is the least bad. If 20-25% of our capacity came from nuclear, the price of guaranteeing 100% frequency-hold drops dramatically. Any other alternative seems worse.
Yeah, I am vaguely aware of the energy storage costs(externalities) that can be associated with solar and would agree that grids need some sort of way to have a baseline supply that should include nuclear. Do you have an idea or numbers of how much more expensive nuclear is vs solar and whether the solar figure includes it’s externalities?
Here’s a couple of good papers and articles on the topic:
A systematic review of the costs and impacts of integrating variable renewables into power grids - a large meta-study from Nature Energy showing that the externalised additional cost of integrating 1 MW of renewable production hits £40/MWh between 75% to 85% renewable penetration. Beyond that no studies have been done, but already at this level, renewable would be more expensive than nuclear (at auctioned build-prices today).
Real-World Challenges with a Rapid Transition to 100% Renewable Power Systems - finds that even if you set the Value of Lost Load to £40,000/MWh in a 100% renewable grid, you’ll still get power outages after 2030. It’s not equivalent to externalised cost of renewable integration, but is a heavy indicator that without forcing massive fines on renewable providers, the reserve capacity won’t be provided (it’ll be cheaper for them to just pay the fine). The study finds that a fine of £4 million (!) per required-but-not-fulfilled MWh is needed to encourage providers build the reserve capacity (through distribution, storage etc.).
How much can nuclear power reduce climate mitigation cost? - shows that nuclear will lower the cost of getting to zero carbon electricity product by 40%+, compared to refusing to use nuclear energy production.
Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems - shows some of the challenges of the assumptions that people make in thinking renewables will get us all the way there.
Projected Costs of Generating Electricity - shows that, all costs considered, nuclear remains an extremely cheap way to create energy, even up against renewables.
Local Complementarity of Wind and Solar Energy Resources over Europe: An Assessment Study from a Meteorological Perspective - shows that at least in Europe, wind and sun don’t anti-correlate (in other words, we’re not going to get energy from the sun on non-windy days and energy from the wind on cloudy days. Also shows there are many periods (days long) in Europe where we have don’t get neither sun nor wind. So storage will have to last us days across Europe.
Many of these articles refer to many other articles you may find interesting.
Overall, my point is that it does us (collective “us”, not just “you and me”) no good to argue that “it’ll be alright if we just commit to renewables”. One has to argue against these peer reviewed studies, done by experts in the field, many collecting and meta-reviewing many other studies, to argue that “renewables will be enough”.
And these are not “cooky studies” in “cooky journals”. Nature, Cell, Joule are some of the most respected journals, with the highest impact ratings and the authors & their reviewers have studied these topics for years.
I’m all for more renewables! But it won’t be enough!
I agree that idealistically on a broad scale the world should use nuclear as a tool in getting to a net zero energy generation. However, on a local level at least here in the US, I’m not sure that the political reality of building nuclear power is feasible. I also concur that more than nuclear plants are needed but applying that idea on a local level doesn’t make currently sense for the US.
Since the US is, according to the Energy Information Agency, already at about ~20% for both Renewable and Nuclear technologies, I think it makes sense to push for whatever is currently the cheapest to displace the remaining Fossil Fuel power generation. While I am sure nuclear could be made cheaper here, I don’t realistically think it will happen based on our current political reality. It seems slightly more realistic to me that Solar and other renewable energies will continue to expand.
I think they’re perfectly safe, but I don’t think we have a good way of storing the waste. Just leave some highly reactive stuff underground for a few hundred to thousand years? That sounds like a recipe for disaster at some point, that is a freakin long time
Well there’s hardly anything to bury if you reprocess. And we know how to reprocess “spent” fuel (I put quotes around “spent” as it still has 98% of its energy left).
And that’s expensive - too expensive compared against new uranium - so we bury it instead.
But if you now hold it up against the cost of staying with fossil fuels (in the long term), even reprocessed uranium fuel is damn cheap.
Mind you, this is before you consider the next set of nuclear reactors coming online, which hardly produce any waste in the first place. I totally understand if people then argue “but that’s not now” which it isn’t. It’s just that the step towards new reactor tech is one we know how to take, so we literally know how to “solve climate” change: It’s a fuck-tonne of renewables and a fuck-tonne of nuclear.
We know how to solve it. We just don’t want to.
Suppose you didn’t bury it and just stacked up heaps of those nuclear flask thingies and wrote on them “waste we didn’t know what to do with”.
Suppose this went on for several hundred years until a better solution was found, and by that time there was many thousands of those flasks.
I bet our descendents would be glad that we had left them with those rather than continuing to pump waste we didn’t know what to do with into the atmosphere.
Eh, I don’t think that aspect is a problem per se. We certainly understand now why we started to use coal and fossil fuels back then. We didn’t have the technology or knowledge for something better or the understanding of the consequences back then. It’s the same. They’ll understand.
I’m not sure about the situation in Germany, but the US built a large facility in a mountain to put all the waste in one spot and fear mongering meant it went unused.
Instead, waste is spread across the country in multiple redundant spots, wasting money and making it harder to secure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository