One thing to follow in terms of nuclear power in the UK is the work being done in small modular reactors (SMR). These are much smaller PWR reactors that are intended to be considerably cheaper and faster to build than the massive reactors at places like Hinkley Point, Sizewell etc, as well as being far less onerous to decommission. The designs will be such that components can be mass produced in an assembly-line like fashion and transported to the sites.
Development is going forward under the UK SMR Consortium (Rolls Royce, NAMRC, NNL and a few others) and there is quite a lot of buzz in the UK's civil nuclear industry at the moment.
SMR is interesting and have advantages... but it is not ready yet, and there are uncertainty about the cost. Wind and solar are getting so cheap that I have doubt SMR can compete on price... Possibly it could compete at the margin when the cost of storage (electrical and thermal) and demand-response are too expensive.
About the current cost of the different type of energy: https://www.lazard.com/media/451086/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
(please note that capacity factor would be different according to the country, for example renewable energy would be more expensive in France than is this document)
Economies of scale. Most of the cost for a traditional nuclear plant is regulatory&decomissioning. If new nuclear can get over that, and it's allowed to go through a couple of iterations (which happens much faster nowadays), there is really no way to estimate how low the price can go. A 10x reduction is not out of question, if you look at SpaceX for example, another industry where innovation has been frozen for decades.
But the fact is we have now cheap existing clean technologies, with a fast decreasing cost (decreasing cost of energy, and decreasing cost of managing intermittence)...
It does not seems wise to bet that SMR will be cheaper than renewable in 10 to 20 years and wait and pray...
SMR is not a viable option right now. That is an interesting possibility we should study and work on, that could be a good surprise later on, but right now 1) it is not ready 2) we don't know if it will be cost competitive... Putting aside nuclear risks and radioactive waste problem (that are minimized by SMR)
> But the fact is we have now cheap existing clean technologies, with a fast decreasing cost (decreasing cost of energy, and decreasing cost of managing intermittence)
The cost of solar and wind energy when the sun shines or the wind blows has certainly decreased a lot in recent years, you're right about that.
But decreasing cost of managing intermittence? I haven't heard of any big recent advances in that (aside from the successful use in Australia of batteries to damp fluctuations on a timescale of minutes, which is great but doesn't address timescales of hours to months). What am I missing?
Firstly, better capacity factor for onshore wind, offshore wind becoming cost competitive and the emergence of floating offshore wind reduce a bit the intermittence, then the cost of managing it
Secondly renewable is becoming so cheap that installing more than peak demand and setting up curtailment is cost competitive and reduces the intermittence and the cost of managing it. There are also solar project not optimizing for maximum production, but for producing when needed.
Solar-plus-storage is becoming more and more common for new project, with cost falling. Generally all the batteries cost are in free fall while we are just at the beginning of the market expansion: massive economy of scale are on the way, with proven technologies
More electrical storage are coming... Flow batteries, pumped hydro on isolated reservoir (eg Gordon Butte), liquid air, underground compressed air, stacked blocs, hydrogen... And there are many other tech in the lab at the same level development of SMR. Of course all the promising tech wont be a success or be cost competitive, but with SMR you bet on one tech, here you bet on more than a dozen tech.
Virtual Power plant and Demand-response project and market are blooming (and that is a start)...
This last point open a wider market for thermal storage, with existing cheap and mature technologies, and many developing project (relatively low tech) like inter seasonal heat or cold storage
Considering the fact that battery storage would need to undergo several orders of magnitude in price reduction to provide true grid-scale storage, does this really matter? Battery storage is, at best, going to provide municipal load for minutes or maybe hours, but it is unlikely to cover a 24-48 hour power ebb anytime in the next few decades.
If battery storage keeps getting cheaper at the same rate, then yes - two orders of magnitude would be seen in twenty years. Absolutely an important consideration if you're considering a big upfront investment in a nuclear plant whose returns will be realized twenty to seventy years from now (or whatever reasonable build time and operating lifetime you come up with).
Needing "several orders of magnitude" improvement is also pessimistic. There are installations that are borderline economically profitable right now (Tesla battery farm in South Australia): another factor of 5 or 10 makes those attractive in many more places.
Those installations are borderline profitable because either they are a small drop in the bucket of the required storage capacity (c.f. Tesla battery farm) or are heavily subsidized to make renewables appear viable. You are also making some large assumptions regarding battery improvements that may turn out to never be realized -- there may be interesting new chemistries and techniques that work for smaller scale but are infeasible for one reason or another at large scale. It is also possible that the opposite is true (e.g. like for fuel cells) where bigger is better in terms of efficiency and production costs, but so far I have no seen any indication of this.
Battery prices (for different battery technologies) are currently in free fall, and the market is booming, so we are 100% sure to see important economy of scale there. This in currently not the case at all of SMR...
When it comes to technology at pilot scale, price and capacity improvement may turn out to never be realized... But there are dozens of promising tech, so it seems unlikely that all tech will "fail"... and SMR exhibit higer level of risk cause it is even not at the pilot scale project, and it is mostly one technology (with 2 or 3 varieties)
And there are many more tech at the lab stage
And there is also thermal storage, with many proven and cheap technology, and many different innovation at different stage in the pipe
And there are all the innovation to reduce the intermittence and help manage it
And there are all the innovation and intervention to allow to make energy demand more flexible
SMR is based upon well-known technology that we have spent decades working on and improving. Other than pumped hydro and batteries there is no potential grid-scale energy storage mechanism that exists beyond desktop models and toy pilots.
Battery prices are dropping but the easy low-hanging fruit has been plucked so now the rate of price decline is dropping -- 83% last decade but only 33% predicted over next five years. Production is also a long way off from where it would need to be. There are a couple of GWh plants coming online, but that is still only a fraction of what is needed if battery is going to scale up to handle grid storage.
Lots of hand-waving examples you have there, very little in production. A more likely long-term outcome will be to push the storage burden on to the renewable production plants -- only accept power from a producer at a rate they can provide over the next 24 hours with the grid only needing a small surge capacity built into it to smooth out demand spikes.
SMR are not even at the toy pilots stage. We know the tech and we know it can work, but we don't when, what investment is required and if it will be competitive. A lot of uncertainty, but one tech only (with few different variations). There are dozens of storage tech with the same or lower uncertainty level... So dozens more chances a tech will work...
About storage tech working now, you forgot possibly the most used right know and the cheapest one: thermal storage (giving up to 9,000MW to the French grid for example!). With a huge and cheap potential and mature cheap tech.
Why do you frame it as a decision between the two? The market is beyond huge, there are bound to be use cases where one or the other is clearly better.
Also a 10x cost improvement on nuclear would blow everything else away (in a good way). I don't think renewables have the same potential - for one thing, they're a more mature technology (weird, I know, but they've been the focus of global development for quite some time now).
And also there's only so much energy you can get out of solar and wind - you just can't get more than 1.3 kw from a square meter of solar, you have to cover more square meters. On the other hand there's no theoretical reason why you wouldn't have a clean, safe reactor in each car. It's just a technological challenge.
SMRs are being touted not because they are particularly promising, but because they are the last option nuclear supporters have. Traditional reactors have run out of chances, so now it's either the Hail Mary Reactors or give up.
Are there any known problems or difficulties with them? I guess the materials science aspect is extremely difficult as it is already a huge problem in conventional designs...
The big problem is diseconomies of scale in construction and operation. They require more material per MW of power, and more staff too. The story is that economies of scale of manufacture, and changes to regulations about operation, can counter this, but that remains to be demonstrated.
So far, it is obviously not sustainable to finance nuclear power plants from the electricity they produce. In other words, they are not even viable as a business.
Regardless how expensive it get, it won't burn tons of fossil fuels.
Government should just set the conditions for new power and heating infrastructure. No fossil fuels. Zero carbon. A minimum and peak capacity based on current and projected demands. Private companies can bid, but they can't change the conditions.
If a private company can more cheaply and faster build massive amount of battery and use exclusively wind farm to charge them, and have enough capacity to carry through any weather, then cheaper is better. If someone can more cheaply drill into the earth core and use thermal heat (an other promising technology) then great!
If the whole UK energy grid could become fossil free, and the only cost would be a 2x increase in costs, then that would be to me a fair price to pay. It is costly, and by the look from the private companies involved a bit financially risky, but continuing burning fossil fuels is bad enough that all alternatives should be used until the last fossil fueled power plant get demolished.
Cost matters. If you can build renewable power at a fraction of the price, why go nuclear? We can keep gas as backup until storage solutions are better developed.
If money was no issue you could just build a ton of pumped hydro in Scotland and or batter storage.
And if you absolutely want to spend on nuclear power, spend it in SMRs and molten salt reactors. ThorCon is probably not that far from a working solution if given enough funding.
> If money was no issue you could just build a ton of pumped hydro in Scotland and or batter storage.
Wikipedia says "The potential for further practical and viable hydroelectricity power stations in the UK is estimated to be in the region of 146 to 248 MW for England and Wales,[4] and up to 2,593 MW for Scotland.[5] However, by the nature of the remote and rugged geographic locations of some of these potential sites, in national parks or other areas of outstanding natural beauty, it is likely that environmental concerns would mean that many of them would be deemed unsuitable, or could not be developed to their full theoretical potential." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_United...
Pumped-hydro storage doesn't need existing water, but the national grid averages 30GW and peaks at 40GW ( http://grid.iamkate.com/ ) are there enough places to build "a ton of pumped hydro" for that kind of size which are suitable for the above criteria as well?
There are many other solutions than traditional pumped hydro when it comes to electrical storage : new pump hydro on isolated reservoirs (eg gordon butte), battries (eg flow batteries), compressed air, liquid air, stacked bloks, heat to energy come in mind
And you can store energy as heat or cold, which is easier and cheaper, with a bigger potential
And you can have an impact on the demand side, with energy efficiency and demand-response
> If you can build renewable power at a fraction of the price
We keep thinking of "building renewable power" as "we can produce this amount of watts at peak". What we should demand of these projects instead is "we can provide this amount of renewable power 24/7". There is a big difference. We're ending up in a situation where we can "build renewable power at a fraction of the price" for half of the time. For the other half we rely on fossil fuels but we don't see the issue because we're focused on the amount of clean watts we get at peak.
> What we should demand of these projects instead is "we can provide this amount of renewable power 24/7".
Humans have always adapted to power being available in different quantities and forms over time. This is why we have corn stores, mills, corned beef, and cold houses. No farmer expects that the sun makes his corn grow in January. In the end, we adapt to our environment, and we have done that though all the ages. Today, we can make it technically much smarter, for example by adding a price signal to electricity, and generating hot water for doing laundry during strong-wind night hours. If this is cheaper and more efficient than battery storage, then why not do it?
This is a solved problem, particularly in the UK. Battery prices are constantly dropping and pumped storage is a proven solution. It requires investment, but far less than fission plants.
It is far from a solved problem, in fact it is a problem that shows the simple solutions to be infeasible. Battery prices are several orders of magnitude above where they would need to be to provide true grid-scale storage and production capacity is a fraction of what would be required for same. Pumped storage is a dead-end solution because we have simply run out of places for effective hydro and are quire soon going to run out of places where we can turn existing hydro resources into pumped storage.
There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables, which is why they continue to become a bigger and bigger problem as more and more production shifts in that direction.
> Battery prices are several orders of magnitude above where they would need to be to provide true grid-scale storage and production capacity is a fraction of what would be required for same.
Thankfully prices are falling, efficiency improving, and massive battery factories are planned. The growth of EV means that will continue. Peaker plants are already being replaced with batteries.
> Pumped storage is a dead-end solution because we have simply run out of places for effective hydro
Nope. There is large pumped storage being built in Scotland right now and there are hundreds more glens where it would be feasible.
>There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables
Just as one example that may well magic away these problems, grid attached storage in the form of electric cars and home storage is growing massively right now. It may be we rethink entirely our centralised approach to production and storage.
Fission is expensive, centralised and carries heavy decommissioning costs and extreme tail risks. Fusion may someday give renewables a worthy rival but till then the falling prices mean nuclear has had its day.
Scotland can provide, at most, less than 5% of required capacity if you turned every available loch into pumped storage. Claiming that pumped storage is in any way a viable grid-storage system that can handle baseload in the UK is inaccurate.
Even if every battery production facility on the planet was dedicated entirely to producing storage batteries for the UK it would take almost half a decade to meet the requirements. You can claim that more will be built, but there are resource pipelines involved that are not as elastic and just throwing a pile of money at someone to build a factory. Battery production is growing, but nowhere near fast enough to meet the requirements for grid scale storage.
Right now fission has no competition from renewables+storage because the storage part of that equation remains a fantasy.
This is where a market solution should be used. Set up the conditions for minimum delivery of carbon-free power for a given period and let private companies bet on it. If people can deliver a battery solution that exclusively use renewable to charge them, and do this cheaper than nuclear, then they win the bid.
They don't get to use natural gas as a backup. They also need to be held liable to maintain the minimum capacity just as effective as more expensive solutions, but if they are willing and able to do that cheaper then they should win the bid and we should let them deliver carbon-free energy.
In the EU there is actually already a market of different contingents of electrical energy with different availability guarantees. Sources with high availability are more expensive and this helps to finance the required technology. And all this works rather in an evolutionary way. For example, we can, today, predict how much wind power will roughly be generated within the next days, and we can adjust reserve capacities with different costs to even that out. It is not only feasibly but also the economical thing to do.
Yes, we do have that system and people do bid to deliver energy. We do however allow fossil fuels to be used when wind power is not producing, and such, the carbon-free reserve capacities are competing against fossil fuels on production cost without the external cost of climate change being added. The economical outcome of that is an constant increase in fossil fueled capacity in practically every country in EU, with new fossil fueled power plant being built today even when we know that the climate can't take it.
The costs and risks involved in large scale power generation facilities isn't really fit for private companies and market competition. And when you add a market element to it, companies might cut corners to increase profits ( or minimise losses), and you certainly don't want that.
> We can keep gas as backup until storage solutions are better developed.
No thanks. Continuing burning fossil fuels until a better solution exist is not going to work. Climate change is already causing long term damage on a global scale, causing species to go extinct, raises water levels, expands deserts, displaces people, and is a problem that need to be taken serious. No waiting for a future technology yet undiscovered.
If we stop building new fossil fuel plants and only build nuclear and renewable, then maybe in 20-30 years we will reach a zero carbon energy grid. Given some of the most optimistic research, that might give us a small chance in prevent global crisis. A small chance. Continuing to burn gas until we have something better developed will rob us of that small chance. A 2x cost in energy, while somewhat costly, is still small cost compared to the consequences long term if we continue to burn fossil fuels.
Renewables are intermittent, pumped hydro could work at the expense of destroying Scottish national parks.
Freewheel storage could also work. But SMRs are not ready yet, as outlined in the article. MSR thorium reactors are far in the future, probably past 2030. The closest to being done is NuScale's design which is a natural circulation PWR. But it was just approved this year. Also Russia has a barge with two naval reactors, but theycre small and I don't see the UK licensing Russian designs anytime soon.
The UK grid is on track to eventually becoming fossil free, although there will likely be a long 'tail' period where natural gas backup plants still operate during periods of unusually high demand and/or restricted supply.
2020 will very likely be the first year that renewables overtake fossil fuels in total electricity generated.
> Regardless how expensive it get, it won't burn tons of fossil fuels.
Maybe it won’t be a lot once built, but fuel extraction and processing are energy intensive. Also, 10 years of construction and the vast quantity of steel and concrete are going to burn one hell of a lot of fossil fuel.
It would be interesting to compare the lifetime fossil fuel usage of all power generators, including construction and disposal (and waste storage).
Getting cheaper doesn't mean requiring less CO2 emissions. GP's proposal would let the market decide what makes financial sense, given the constraints.
What is the cost of an offshore generation plant that can produce power with the same reliability of a nuclear one? This needs to get into the equation.
Probably the 100% renewable system will end up cheaper than one that includes nuclear. This requires prediction of where costs will be going, but the worldwide the market seems to be betting on that outcome, not nuclear, which only gets built when governments heavily tilt the scales.
The cost of wind turbines has little to do with the cost of ensuring that the power plant will provide a set amount of 100% renewable energy all the time. Because when the wind is not blowing the plant has either to provide energy from a storage system or source it somewhere else, again with 100% reliability.
You didn't look at that link, did you? It has models using predicted costs for wind, solar, nuclear, batteries, and hydrogen storage, and computes the minimum cost system to produce reliable baseload power using real historical weather data (at 5 minute intervals). You can alter the assumptions and see what the costs optimize to. Nuclear is "Dispatchable 2" in the advanced settings.
No, I didn't look at the link- you could have at least described what it contained.
I gave it a quick look, but frankly it would take me a lot of time to check if the model and assumptions make sense (it also seems to reply "job failed" whenever it doesn't have a cached answer). But I think real costs can be estimated only from working plants. Do we have, now, renewable energy plants that are capable of delivering a constant amount of energy by storing the excess production? How many have been built around the world? Why aren't we building more if they're so cheap?
> Do we have, now, renewable energy plants that are capable of delivering a constant amount of energy by storing the excess production?
As long as we are burning fossil fuels (and in particular natural gas) it doesn't make much sense to build such things, even if we could. The natural gas provides pre-stored energy.
Fair comparison here is overall energy invested for energy obtained. For nuclear, as it is much denser energy-wise then anything else, you need to do the least amount of digging per MW capacity / let alone overall produced MWh. Nuclear is orders of magnitude better than other low-co2 options. For example for solar it is about 6, versus 75 for nuclear. [1]
Also instructive to keep in mind just how energy dense nuclear fuel is. [2]
> ”Fair comparison here is overall energy invested for energy obtained.”
We think of “energy invested” as having an environmental cost, and of course that’s true when it comes from polluting fossil sources.
But as grids get cleaner, and transport vehicles and construction equipment are electrified, this is no longer such a concern. Eventually we’re just using clean energy to build more clean energy - a virtuous cycle!
New low-carbon concrete formulas and steel production technology are also needed, of course, since these are a major source of emissions whether for a nuclear plant or wind farm.
> Nuclear is orders of magnitude better than other low-co2 options.
Then, why is it not economically viable when fairly competing with solar and wind energy? Because it requires much more subsidies and nuclear developers cannot even bear the financial risks of their projects, as one would expect from a economically viable technology.
I was specifically referring to energy spent to build and operate / energy actually generated over lifetime, so called EROI. My post refers to the sources of the info
If the whole UK energy grid could become fossil free, and the only cost would be a 2x increase in costs, then that would be to me a fair price to pay.
A large number of people would die as a result of such a policy. Fuel poverty is already a significant problem, the UK government gives out 'winter fuel payment' benefits to some, but doubling the price of energy would push a lot of elderly, infirm, and poor people to stop heating their homes.
This idea would need to come with nationalised energy costs for it to work.
Now, of course this is more complex because some of that price rise is due to "levies" being placed to support both "green" initiatives and support for the vulnerable.
Its a fucking stupid project that was signed to make a political point. Instead of thinking about the needs of the next 100 years, it was signed to fulfill a short term political goal.
The government were over a barrel, the people making the contract knew it, and the government signed anyway.
doubling the price of energy would push a lot of elderly, infirm, and poor people to stop heating their homes
2x increase in cost doens't necessarily directly translate to doubling the price for everyone. For example it could be coupled with a scheme where consuming way above average makes the part which is above much more expensive, depending on income, to yield the ones consuming less and/or low income not having to pay double. Plus taxing overconsumption could be an incentive to getting rid of some needless energy usage.
It could be, but coming from happy Energiewende Germany, as a household you pay more than twice as much for your power as any industrial or commercial user, 30ct/kWh vs. 12ct/kWh. The difference comes from the usual rebates, but the largest part is that commercial users don't pay the renewable tax that is mandatory for non-commercial users. For the really big users, such as smeltings, there are additional subsidies on top to keep the price of power even lower.
So the situation might be different elsewhere, but in Germany, poor consumers pay for Energiewende plus subsidies.
Yes unfortunately it's not uncommon at all that certain industries effectively get subsidized for their energy use and/or pay less taxes on it. In an ideal world that could be adjusted as well though but realistically that's not going to happen. Example from neighbouring country how crippled things can be: solar would be subsidized, leading to the ones with enough money putting complete factory roofs full with solar, to the point the time in which they'd gain back the initial cost would be a couple of years only. Don't get me wrong, great that they have solar energy, but there's way, way more concumer roofs out there but with an average income the initial cost for them is just too much.
And yet it's often the people on smallest income who consume the most for heating because their houses as unlikely to be insulated well. The government is giving out grants to improve insulation/boiler efficiency, but if you live in council housing you're screwed again.
Besides, very soon all new construction in the UK will be required to be heated exclusively by electricity, so for new housing heating costs will be absolutely huge compared to gas.
for new housing heating costs will be absolutely huge compared to gas
Isn't it more nuanced than that? Don't know UK rules, but since you mention new housing: aren't these required to adhere to some minimum of insulation, likewise for renovations, thereby drastically reducing the energy required in the first place (I mean if I just compare our renovated house with my parent's, energy requirement is 4 to 5 times less per square m)? Moreover depending on climate, cost to produce a given amount of energy is lower for heta pumps than for gas?
I mean, yes, there are standards, but the standards are sometimes shit. As an example - my friend just bought a very expensive brand new house, fancy insulation, but.....all radiators are like 2 feet wide? Even for the living room where intuitively, that cannot be the correct size of a radiator for that. But apparently(having complained) nope, these are regulation size etc. Now he spends 2x as much on heating for a house the same size as his old one built 20 years ago, because predictably, the rooms never get hot enough in winter with those crappy undersized radiators.
Again, that's just anecdote, feel free to ignore it.
Wrt insulation I really meant law, not standard. I hope there are no laws limiting the size of radiators? That would not make a lot of sense i.e. story sounds more like whoever was in charge of calculating the size completely messed up.
My rough calculations me that switching my 1970s UK detached home from gas to electric for hot water and central heating would triple my usage costs (and that doesn't include the cost of switching in the first place).
I'm still interested in doing it though because it would massively simplify the heating system. Removing gas from the system would mean I could do all the regular maintenance by myself whereas at present I'm obliged to use a registered, gas-trained plumber on the boiler itself because the law requires it.
It's an interesting point. The law actually allows a competent person to work on their own gas systems themselves but doesn't define exactly what that means. I've seen people claim that it only narrowly applies to previously qualified Gas Safe engineers who have allowed their registration to lapse but I think that is a stretch.
Also, I think the idea would be to install an air source heat pump rather than resistive electrical heating.
The combination of a carbon tax and universal basic income is the solution here.
It would also push adoption of non-fossil energy sources, since poor people have more than enough incentives to chose the economically best solution for them.
If only countries could work together to institute a global carbon tax. Pollute too much - pay the tax. Don't pollute - great and, if you are poor/developing, here is help (funded by polluters) to stay that way while still being able to develop.
We don't need anywhere near global consensus, a small group of nations can start. The idea is called a "climate club", and it won William Nordhaus a Nobel Prize.
I don’t think the Europe Union really wants a trade war with the US. Basically, Germany is the weak spot in this. They are an export driven economy and a US embargo on Germany would be devastating.
China's per capita CO2 emissions are still 1/2 that of the U.S. More importantly, neither the Chinese government nor powerful Chinese politicians deny anthropogenic climate change. And they've recently recommitted to nuclear energy expansion despite growing public fear after Fukushima and a subsequent rise in costs as Chinese regulatory policies became more strict.
Part of the reason for the gap in nuclear construction in recent years, separate from Fukushima, seems to have been growing trade tensions with the U.S. Now that construction and approvals have resumed, it seems like China has decided to ditch almost all foreign designs and only build their "homegrown" AP1000 derivative. Unlike American politicians, Chinese politicians haven't forgotten the art of turning lemons into lemonade. Nuclear, solar, electric cars--they're using the transition to bolster and develop their industrial sectors. As countries should be making many of these investments anyhow to hedge and supplement the often myopic and short-sighted pursuits of the free market, the net costs to abandoning the fossil fuel economy can be significantly reduced. (In retrospect the contracts for American nuclear plants were probably handouts, anyhow, intended to mitigate balance of trade tensions. But with all goodwill having been burned to ash by the current administration, not to mention the collapse of the American nuclear construction industry, it became a pointless gesture.)
Not entirely unrelated, China is also building a system of high-speed long-distance trains like few countries have. There will be a time after the individual gas-powered car. I guess it will be propelled electrically, but it's quite likely that the power will come from an overhead line.
> China's emissions are approximately double the US's and growing.
China's population is 1.4 billion compared to 330 million for the US though. Surely you should be comparing this relative to population size (China is four times bigger) and countries with smaller emissions per person should be recognised as doing well?
Are you seriously proposing that CO2 be capped per country, as opposed to per capita?
That's a fascinating proposal.
I don't think that will be particularly favorable to the US, though. There are 195 countries in the world, yet the US accounts for 14% of all of the world's emissions.
You have to look at who is polluting the most. If country A represents 2x the emissions of country B, then it's twice as important to curb their pollution.
Country borders mean nothing to the planet in ecological terms. How about looking at emissions per square kilometer as a target, but focusing treaty efforts on the largest CO2 emitting countries (or coalitions of countries that can be dealt with as a block)?
> If country A represents 2x the emissions of country B, then it's twice as important to curb their pollution.
Capping emissions per capita accomplishes just that. Why are you so opposed to it?
> How about looking at emissions per square kilometer as a target
So, Canada (Population 38 million) should get to pollute three times more, in absolute values than India (Population 1.35 billion), because it has three times the land area?
> Country borders mean nothing to the planet in ecological terms.
Country borders don't mean anything to the planet, but they mean everything to how we must solve this problem.
People need energy to live.
The world has a limited carbon budget.
Distributing it equally, per capita is the least you can do to be fair about it. (In order to actually be fair about it, you must also count historic emissions, which means that the western world has long blown its share of that budget.)
It's not that Canada "should get to" pollute more than India. Canada can pollute more than India and still have the effects absorbed by its environment. Canada has vast forests absorbing CO2 on a scale sufficient to mostly counteract the harmful effects caused by its relatively sparse population. India doesn't have those vast forests, and its population is enormous.
I'm making no claim that it should be this way. It is this way.
Despite emitting more CO2 per capita, Canada is putting a negligible strain on the planet compared to India, the US, or especially China.
Put taxes on imports from big polluters. That will make them tow the line. Frankly it should have been the approach from the start to avoid need for cooperation.
If we want to speed up the end of fossil fuels, while not increasing poverty, and not artificially distorting markets and technological developments by politically meddling with costs, we have to do these 3 things:
1. Introduce a substantial carbon tax on extraction and import of any fossil energy source. This should include embodied energy, like aluminum.
2. Pay back part of the tax gains to the poorer population in form of a universal basic income (it could be some other scheme but I think this is the best one).
3. Subsidize any form of non-fossil energy generation, INCLUDING STORAGE, from the carbon tax. This subsidy MUST be non-discriminatory, it must not depend on promised future efficiencies in a technology but what it actually delivers, today. And it must give incentive to make any technology, and also energy distribution, consumption and storage, more efficient. It could be, for example, night time storage heaters (which were heavily promoted in the 1950s / 1960s to make nuclear more economical).
What we should NOT do is to subsidize some technology which has been making fancy promises since five decades, without really delivering them. Among other things, this would be market distortion, and precisely because it would reduce our effectiveness in fighting climate change, it would be very harmful. At worst, it would result in that we do effectively nothing, while pretending we do.
If its like the other projects, it may never generate a single kWh when it gets cancelled.
Also, it will be much too late to avoid massive climate change so its a bit mute. And that's assuming we also cut all our other emissions and every other country on earth cuts theirs...
Plus "no matter what the cost" is a pretty weird attitude if you don't mind me saying. If we can save more carbon by spending the same money elsewhere, shouldn't we do that instead?
Areva, responsible for the construction of Olkiluoto-3 in Finland on a fixed price contract. Restructured and sold all of it's reactor business except Olkiluoto-3, which it still is liable for, to EDF.
Western industry has progressively lost their ability to efficiently manage many types of heavy industry and large construction projects. This is particularly true for nuclear, which requires the application of disparate and highly specialized techniques and skillsets that are quickly lost. Though not to the same extent as the U.S., Japan, France, and South Korea have lost many of the same skills even though only a couple of decades ago they could churn out new nuclear plants with breakneck speed. (The only thing more astonishing than the efficiency of the French and Korean nuclear industries was how quickly they died.)
Reviving the nuclear industry will be painful and costly, but the same is true for reviving and rehabilitating other heavy industries that have withered away, if and when these countries ever choose to do so. The justifications for resolving ourselves to their death are hypocritical. Both solar and wind power manufacturing industries, not to mention the automobile industry, would be non-existent in the U.S. without heavy subsidies. For example, special trade zones that incentive partial manufacturing of certain wind generator components in the U.S., or in the case of automobiles flat-out quotas. But even then the future of these industries in the U.S. remain tenuous. Fortunately for consumers (but less so for semi-skilled and skilled factory labor), solar panels, wind generators, and cars are easily imported; nuclear plants not so much, not unless the modular reactor designs take off.[1]
[1] Interestingly, the skillsets, including project management techniques, for these industries can't be imported, either. Toshiba bought Westinghouse because they thought they could use their superior heavy industry skills to rehabilitate Westinghouse and the American nuclear industry. But heavy industry skillsets are especially tuned to local industrial supply chains and labor pools, as well as domestic regulatory frameworks. Toshiba couldn't do squat with Westinghouse; it was deadweight from day 1.
To some extent, it turns out that the problem is France never actually had those specialized nuclear techniques and skillsets. For example, they had huge problems with defective welding and large forgings that weren't up to spec and had faked QA testing documentation which caused big delays. Then the regulators went back and looked at the old plants from the original wave of nuclear building, and they had the same problems. It's just that French nuclear wasn't so well scrutinized back then, possibly for political reasons.
Westinghouse was all rotten from the beginning, they sold reactors like cigarettes packs and disregarded scientists' safety concerns. Just look at the guy at 15:21.
So how do you turn a whole unsafe industry into a safe one? That's a lot of organizational DNA to change. Might as well convert a dinosaur into a gazelle.
Dunno, probably act responsibly like the AECL (Canadian company responsible for CANDU reactors) has. Usually it's a management problem. Start by changing the CEO? The nuclear industry, just like aerospace, should be very risk adverse. It's no place for SV or tobacco company mentalities.
I am hopeful about the new crop of companies currently designing SMRs. This was probably the way it should have been done from the onset, rather than pushing single unit power to hundreds of gigawatts.
I only began recording in 2018 particularly noteworthy reporting and research pieces (regarding any topic) I stumble upon. I just added the above to my personal bibliography for good measure.
It's always astonishing how hydro and nuclear are so much better handled by SoEs like EDF or HydroQuebec that manage to turn a profit too, while private companies can never do it well.
EDF is the "private company" which is building Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C.
For Hinkley, EDF have assumed the construction risk in return for an exceptionally high, guaranteed "strike price" for the electricity it produces.
But for Sizewell, it sounds like a different finance arrangement will be in place, likely where the UK government/public assumes more of the risk in return for a cheaper per-MWh price.
The main advantage that EDF has that allows it to work well isn't that effective out of France. They still do good work, but they act much more like a private company than an SoE, which is why it's so much more successful in France.
Well, EDF have not been so successful with their most recent project in France, Flamanville 3.
Construction started in 2007, with estimated completion in 2012 at a cost of €3.3 billion.
As of 2020, the plant is still not complete and the cost has spiralled to €19.1 billion. It is now tentatively planned to go online at the end of 2022.
We saw what happened to Areva building reactors on a fixed cost contract. Today's economic realities do not quite let one plan a 10 year project on a fixed cost. 3.3bn do not equate to 2007 3.3bn in 2020. The Chinese are able to do it because they not a free market economy, they can force people to work at gunpoint.
They are viable but I'm quite skeptical about accurately estimating the costs for a 10 year project. Concrete, steel, fuel, workforce costs fluctuate from a year to another, let alone 10 years. We'll just have to accept that there are going to be cost overruns.
Comparatively to other nuclear companies and in aggregate, EDF has the best safety record, the cheapest energy when subsidies are taken out, and is solidly profitable. That one or two constructions went overbudget does not matter if the result is still head and shoulders ahead of the fray.
> One of the reasons that the electricity that Hinkley will one day produce is so expensive (£92.50 per megawatt hour, compared with gas and wind at about £40) is that the constructors were required to shoulder the risk of any cost overruns themselves. EDF estimates that the cost of electricity produced at Sizewell will be somewhere between £40 and £60.
So even the company with a financial incentive to under-estimate the cost is saying that the electricity it produces will be at best as expensive as wind energy already is.
Of course nuclear power plants can still generate electricity on a windless day, but if they're only used on such days, then the cost per Joule is even worse.
Perhaps the (estimated) £20 billion could be spent on energy storage projects like Vehicle-to-Grid distribution or hydrogen generation, which should be even more competitive 10 years from now when this power plant is supposed to start operating.
> So even the company with a financial incentive to under-estimate the cost is saying that the electricity it produces will be at best as expensive as wind energy already is.
... And be low-carbon (~10gCO2/kWh). Whereas the £40/MWh estimate for wind included gas power generation, which is at 400gCO2/kWh. Given how wind has a typical load factor of 20-30% max in Western Europe, you’d be using gas at best 70% of the time, meaning an average carbon intensity perhaps around 300gCO2/kWh.
So for the same price (or even double that as a first step - nuclear costs decrease radically with lower risks perceived by investors), nuclear gets you > 30x less carbon in the atmosphere than wind+gas. That is not insignificant.
> they're only used on such days, then the cost per Joule is even worse.
Nuclear isn’t like gas: it is fixed-costs infrastructure, meaning that the more you use it, cheaper it gets. So you want to use it as much as possible. (French nuclear plants oscillate between 75% and 90% load depending on maintenance schedules.) So on a windy day, nuclear load won’t typically change too much, but rather gas and coal usage will go down to let wind electricity match up with demand. This means nuclear gets you less emissions even in that case.
> £40/MWh estimate for wind included gas power generation
No, they're totally separate things. It's not "wind and gas" as a single entity, it's "wind farms supply power to the grid at £40/MWh and gas plants also provide power to the grid at £40/MWh". In other words, it just means they cost about the same which is half the cost of nuclear. There is no 30/70 split as you imagined.
Which makes sense. Scotland gets around 90% of it's electricity from renewables, of which around 70% is wind power. It couldn't possibly do that if your figures were correct.
Right! My “40 includes wind + gas” was confusing, and if that’s “40 on average”, my bad.
My point was to address the idea that nuclear is too costly as a long term solution, which I think (?) OP was using that cost/MWh comparison to intent.
FTR though, I do appreciate that gas + renewables can be a nice transition strategy (like the UK seems to have done to eradicate coal).
> There is no 30/70 split as you imagined.
It seems you understood I was talking about a 30/70 split in cost. That is not what I said: I was talking about a 30/70 split in usage.
But FTR, even in the sense I intended, you’re right, the number 30/70 is wrong, or at least it can only be valid under specific conditions that I’m not really able to quantify (electricity mix, coverage of demand, etc), and I hadn’t thought it through a lot.
Using gas backup is a transition technology which is the most effective and available thing we have right now, and it won't stay that way. Demanding zero emissions right now is like to maliciously demand perfection in order to kill of something good.
I do recognize the value of renewables + gas as a transition strategy. :) And do appreciate what the UK has been doing there (using gas + renewables to eradicate coal).
My comment was addressing the pre-conceived idea that nuclear is too costly to be a long term solution. (Which I’m actually not sure the original comment meant, heh...)
> The others are already over budget and behind schedule
The reason why is important though. Is it because of:
1) Political issues, where the government has set up incentives for the builder to lie?
2) Social issues, where environmentalists attack the project to drive up costs?
It seems unbelievable to me that nuclear plant planners are unable to plan because ... dunno, maybe they hear nuclear and lose the ability to add numbers. There has to be something else going on. Planning is relatively easy once there are 1-2 historical projects to look at.
My experience with energy markets is governments proactively screw them up for reasons I cannot discern. For some reason guaranteed profits is a common standard in Australia which for the life of me I do not understand. Which idiot thinks that is clever? The UK might be doing something similarly stupid.
There may well be other contributing factors than the quite narrow two you offer.
Reading some of Jeremy Leggett's analysis of nuclear in the region, notably Flamanville and Hinkley, is highly enlightening.
From inability to plan or produce sufficiently high quality components, and then challenges getting them into place without damaging them, low quality work being undertaken in the construction process [1], government hiding details of contractual arrangements, a consistent (and predicted) drop in the price of power before and through the lives of these projects, industry players being painted into a corner where they must [try to] grow their business despite the above [2], combined with a surfeit of hubris all round.
It's astonishing how decades into nuclear energy, there are still people who attempt to shift the blame for this over budget and behind schedule technology on somebody else.
You have literally nothing in your hands but it still won't stop you from blaming the government (which blindly throws money on it) and "environmentalists" (which obviously failed or those projects would not have started).
Construction projects are inherently unpredictable, because it's building something large, bespoke, and in constantly varying conditions. Nuclear plants are very complex, so that obviously raises the level of unpredictability.
Every manufactured object has an insanely long and convoluted dependency chain, where each link is subject to disappearance due to factors completely out of your control. Especially objects that require special or unusual parts.
Then there's actually building the thing, which can go wrong for a million reasons before you've even reached the grand and rolling lands of human error.
"However, the BBC understands that the fact Sizewell C is a carbon copy of Hinkley - which has seen work on a second reactor there completed 30% more quickly than the first - is thought to have substantially mitigated that risk."
It sounds like it should be pretty easy to budget for this plant. Plans are allowed to include a 20% "we don't know what this is going to be spent on but something will come up" for surprises.
If each solar farm consisted of one giant solar panel I'm sure we would see exactly the same problem. In reality building a solar farm involves redoing one simple step over and over again. It's much easier to scale up.
Much better than a 300% overspend. Any renewable project that is going in that direction would be cancelled. Not only are renewables easier to build in small modules, but the staged build-out allows any problems (like, bad cost estimates) to be identified and fixed (or aborted).
The modular nature of renewables also allows them to be much more resilient in the face of component failure, or in face of construction errors (with the exception of common mode design failures). This means they can be installed with less skilled labor that makes more mistakes.
Renewable fields are akin to server farms w. large numbers of replaceable blades. Nuclear plants are like mainframes.
Planning is not easy. There is an Omega Tau Podcast called "why mega projects fail" [1] which is a good explanation. Bias is a serious problem in decision making.
It's a job stimulus package, creating 10000 jobs and advertising this(whether or not it eventuates) is the reason for giving this project the green light.
It's a 10 year project. 2 mil becomes 200k per year. Still a lot, but then it's not really a purely job project. If you send 10000 people 200k per year you will end up with the same hole in your pockets of 20 billion after 10 years, but with a nuclear power plant less. And 10000 people with zero work experience.
Chances are that 10 years from now you're still going to be money in the hole with no nuclear power plant. Both scenarios have no plant after 10 years.
That's assuming no returns on investment. With £2 million you could spend £75,000 a year and reasonably expect to preserve your $2 million (and grow it by inflation) forever.
(Going with 3.75% rule instead of usual 4% rule so you have a safety margin.)
True but equally they might end up with a nuclear power plant at the end of it which means while they paid £200k peer year for each job they get an asset at the end albeit unknown how useful it will be or whether it gets finished
It's quite sad to see the lack of innovation in western countries around the build and development of nuclear power plants. Red tape, regulation and lack of political will (due to unfavourable views on nuclear technology) will continue to see most countries fall behind on this.
It's really quite sad. Nuclear has a negative connotation to most but it's the future. Interstellar space travel will rely on the nuclear technology that should be worked on today.
I reason that we should be building and developing these technologies now rather than continuing to rely on burning carbon based fuels to power our homes. The technology is there. The will is not.
Sadly, too many dummies keep on pandering on about how it's dangerous which in turn, drives up cost - then other dummies come along and say "Oh it is too expensive", without understanding the first group of people that drove the cost up to begin with.
> lack of innovation in western countries [...], Red tape, regulation
Red tape is invariably written in innocent victims' blood. And "regulation" is not a bogeyman.
But for a complex problem like this, I assure you there are no simple explanations - but people always seem to want simple explanations. That disappoints me.
The US has built many nuclear plants in modern times and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, they are all in naval warships. I wish the same political will could be applied to civilian nuclear research at least.
Why? This article even explains why? It isn't an either or situation. You need a well diversified portfolio of zero (operating) emission technologies. Nuclear is one of those, along with wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal.
The issue is that peak power consumption occurs after sundown in most countries. Nuclear power also costs the same to generate power 24/7 as it does to generate power intermittently. So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. This is why people invested in renewables are often very adverse to nuclear power.
> So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables.
If you build enough nuclear power to fill the gap in the duck curve without storage, and remove fossil fuels, you're basically running entirely nuclear and hydro, and mostly nuclear. You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use, because you need e.g. 100GW for the peak load in the evening but only 50GW for twelve hours overnight.
That doesn't seem likely to be cheaper than using storage for only the differential load in the evening. But once you have storage there isn't any good reason not to use cheap solar for the daytime load differential, and to provide the energy to charge the storage for later in the day.
The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. The redundancy isn't an issue with nuclear, it's an issue of the notion that we need nuclear and renewables. Just cut out the renewables, and only use nuclear. Using nuclear to fill in the duck curve makes renewables redundant, thus the aversion to nuclear of many proponents of renewables.
If storage does become cheap and available, then renewables could be cheaper depending on the price of land and capacity factor of the energy sources. But that's a question of if. We have nowhere near the amount of storage required and no solid plan for reaching the required scale. So it's a matter of burning fossil fuels until we're able to build out orders of magnitude more energy storage.
Middle Ages called, they want their concepts back.
Why is "geographical independency" desirable here?
We ditched the concept of self-sufficiency long ago for almost every other product. Your iPhone was not built here. Your banana was not grown here. The corn might have been grown half a country away. The drugs you might have been prescribed were maybe not produced in your country at all. Why would energy be so different in that regard? (#)
Intermittency is much easier solved geographically than temporally. Move energy instead of trying to store it for local use later. Self-sufficiency was necessary in medieval times because it was impossible to move large amounts of things fast and easy. We solved this problem and famines went away as well. Any famine you hear about today is not caused by logistics or unavailability of food in general but by political or societal problems.
High-voltage direct current (HVDC) power transmission also exists. China has power lines that can transfer gigawatts over distances of thousands of kilometers. Today.
Losses of HVDC are roughly 3% per 1000km by the way, so it is not even that half of the energy is lost in the process.
(#) It actually is different in the regard that effects of lost or cut power (the latter in case of talking about a conflict) are more immediate than they are for most physical products. The latter are usually to some degree in transit or storage so production issues are not immediately felt. It feels like this problem can be solved by even more interconnectedness of power grids. (In Europe, more than a TW (Terawatt)of power sources and consumers are connected to the same grid already, even though a relatively low fraction of this power can be moved over larger distances at the moment.)
> Your iPhone was not built here. Your banana was not grown here. The corn might have been grown half a country away. The drugs you might have been prescribed were maybe not produced in your country at all. Why would energy be so different in that regard?
The examples you provided here really don't illustrate your point well because most of them are easily shipped across the ocean which is not at all true for energy.
We do ship energy across oceans though, in oil tankers and as coal.
A better counterargument would the suspicious number of wars, invasions and military bases involved in cross-country energy exchanges (ie, there is a lot of fighting over oil in the middle east). It seems remarkably foolish to source energy from territory controlled by a foreign military.
The SARS-NCoV-2 epidemic showed how brittle the worldwide supply chains really are. China is a production powerhouse, producing all kinds of everything, and everyone and their neighbour wants to produce in China, but unfortunately this had created a single point of failure. Once the virus stopped things in China, the disruption cascaded along the supply chain networks; demand existed but production was stopped.
Resiliency in supply chains won't happen through adding massive inventories to handle a months long disruption, instead it will happen by moving some of the production away from Asia back to USA, Europe, Great Britain, and so on.
Naturally bananas and corn won't get this treatment, but technological goods will.
Do you really want to depend on another country for your power? Like maybe a little (we do this), but a significant portion? Honestly this seems like a disastrous idea. This is a huge security risk and pretty much puts your entire economy and social well being in the hands of another country. Idk about you, but I'll pay more money for this security.
I wonder which is easier? Large scale battery deployment or scaling nuclear.
I think there are good reasons to be bullish about battery storage. It is already an area of massive research. It is something we need to scale anyway due to electric cars. And it is very easy to deploy to the existing grid. You just need a concrete pad, some power gear, and a substation.
Being optimistic about nuclear does not mean we cannot be optimistic about batter storage.
> I think there are good reasons to be bullish about battery storage.
That's not my issue. My issue is that we currently have working nuclear technology. That we can build and deploy now. Bullish means we're relying on future inventions. With the potential catastrophe we have ahead of us I don't think it is a good idea to put all our eggs in one basket. It may not pan out. It may not pan out in the timeframe we need it to. Nuclear is a relatively cheap risk reduction strategy. Be bullish on battery, but have a backup because in the mean time we're still using coal/oil/gas.
The UK already has around 1GW deployed and has 10GW+ in the pipeline. All of Which should be built before Sizewell C starts to generate.
I dont doubt that we can build nuclear plants. But right now the number of nations that can actually pull it off is small. Changing that would require new tech, modularisation, mass production etc. That is great and we should do that. But will it happen quickly?
We're concerned about storage in this part of the conversation. Since we're talking about being bullish on batteries. But sure, we can move the target.
The US currently has less than 10 seconds of battery storage relative to it's 11.5 TWh average daily electricity consumption. The scale required relative to the scale we're capable of providing presents a staggering difference. We're talking about a 1,000x to 10,000x difference between current battery storage and required battery storage.
Well nuclear needs water, not a very strong constraint I agree but one nevertheless.
In France when it gets too hot they have to stop the nuclear plants since by environnement regulations they cannot pump out too hot water in the river.
By now offshore wind is still behind in capacity factor compared to nuclear but it's closer and closer.
For the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1)
For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2)
Nuclear has problems with the load being intermittent because it's too inflexible (you can't realistically run a nuclear plant for 12 hours and then turn it off, you really want it to be running the whole time). If you have nuclear capacity for peak load, then what do you do with that extra energy at off peak times? The solutions for this end up looking a lot like the solutions for dealing with the intermitency of solar/wind.
For the third time, the solution is to just save money by ditching the intermittent sources and only using nuclear. Nuclear makes renewables redundant, not the other way around. Nuclear generates power round the clock. Nuclear doesn't suffer from the duck curve, so it doesn't need storage or gas backup plants.
No it does not. The Duck curve refers to the sinusoidal production of solar power (and wind power, to a lesser extent) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve. The duck curve refers to the problem of the fact that energy consumption is mostly flat, but solar solar produces a big curve from dawn to dusk. This is why renewables need so much storage, to take overproduction during peak hours and use that excess energy during the off-hours. Matching a flat source of energy generation to a mostly flat demand curve is much easier than adapting a sinusoidal source of energy generation to a flat demand.
The disparity between peak energy load and minimal energy load is only ~25%. Excess energy is an easy problem to solve. Nuclear power plants' thermal output is largely fixed, but their electrical output can be modulated by more aggressive cooling. Basically, deliberately produce more waste heat. If this nuclear plant is on the coast it can use this waste heat for desalination - the waste heat gives you freshwater as a bonus.
Another option is to not waste the heat, and use thermal storage. A well-insulated vat of salt is cheap, can be made arbitrarily large, and will hold heat over a 24 hour period with reasonable efficiency. So you store the heat during below-average demand and use it to generate extra electricity during above-average demand.
But the same solution also makes solar interesting again when it's used in combination, because you can store heat from nuclear during the times when solar is generating and then use it during the times when it isn't.
Sure, but thermal storage remains in the prototyping stage. Besides solar thermal generation I'm not aware of any grid scale thermal storage facilities. It's a potential future option, but it's not a presently extant option.
Thermal storage is based on basic physical principles. There is no question that it can be done. It hasn't been commercialized because the market for energy storage has heretofore been served by fossil fuels.
If you remove fossil fuels, you have to replace them with something. You're building new power plants. New nuclear power plants could straightforwardly be built with thermal storage.
Fusion is also based on basic physical principles. Do you think a plant to cut all funding for renewables or fission and putting it into fusion research amounts to a sound energy policy? Sound approaches to decarbonization are based on technologies that are currently available, not ones that might become available depending on the outcomes of research and development.
Nuclear plants definitely could use thermal storage, but the main advantage is of nuclear over renewables is that they have consistent energy production and thus don't need storage in the first place. It doesn't suffer from the duck curve like solar, or weather-dependent intermittency like wind. Nuclear doesn't need storage to become viable, as France has demonstrated for decades.
Nuclear is not really geographically independent though. The plant has to be constructed to withstand earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters.
It also has to be near a reliable water source so that it can be cooled. The bigger the power plant the more geographically constrained it is. France faces low river flow rates in the summer because of climate chance and this forces them to take some of the nuclear plants offline. Otherwise the waste heat would make it impossible for aquatic life to live near those power plants. Ever wondered why someone make an "obvious" mistake such as building Fukushima directly near the tsunami prone coast? Because the ocean is a reliable heat sink.
Reliable cooling is also a big problem for the nuclear plants in the US East coast. They are away from the shore but well in reach of different types of disasters, like hurricanes, winter storms and flooding. They need reliable cooling and for that they depend on a working electrical grid. There are many ways in which the Fukushima disaster could repeat itself there - in a region which is rather densely populated.
"An offshore earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or above could cause submarine avalanches and create dangerous tsunamis with waves higher than 26 feet (8 meters), [...] Underwater canyons and bays could focus these waves and make them even bigger."
A submarine avalanche causes waves by a sudden displacement of earth under water. These occur regardless of earthquakes, and rarely result in significant waves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbidity_current
"A 7.2-magnitude earthquake off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1929 caused a large underwater landslide, creating a large wave that rushed ashore and killed 28 people on the island, ten Brink said. The waves were up to 26 feet high until some reached narrow inlets, where they grew to 43 feet (13 m), he said."
Yes, caused by an earthquake 500 times more powerful than the magnitude 4.5 you had previously stated:
> An offshore earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or above could cause submarine avalanches and create dangerous tsunamis with waves higher than 26 feet
Turbidity currents occur on the regular without earthquakes and rarely result in substantial waves. They have been observed to happen due to earthquakes, but this is a rare event. The Grand Banks quake is the only known earthquake to have done this, and as you pointed out it was an earthquake with a much larger magnitude.
In the grand scheme of things, turbidity events don't significantly impact the overall risk of tsunamis. The tsunami risk overwhelmingly comes from the earthquakes themselves, not the turbidity events they may trigger.
> The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency.
For one, it needs a cool river with lots of water available for cooling. Which with climate change is, even in the UK, becoming less ubiquitous than it was so far.
It needs a source of water to run heat exchangers, but it doesn't need to be fresh water. It can run on seawater (which can also be used for desalination with the waste heat), or on wastewater.
Maybe some promising new storage technology will prevail, but solutions that are 5-10 years of development away from being viable have a habit of taking a lot more than 5-10 years to become viable. Until then nuclear presents the only proven way of decarbonizing an energy sector to a great extent that works in any environment.
It's true that nuclear doesn't make economic sense relative to running a gas plant and using solar when you can. You can get a greater immediate carbon reduction by spending the cost if a nuclear plant on supplementing fossil fuels with nuclear. But that'll only go so far. Once you outstrip demand during peak generation hours, you're effectively getting less energy for the same capacity. It doesn't provide a path to decarbonization without storing large amounts if energy - much larger than what we'll be able to store for decades at least.
The Finnish Olkiluoto plant might go on line in 2022 and then it would have had a 22-year development time. Starting such a project today this would mean it finishes around 2040. And this was planned with "conventional" nuclear technology and knowing well all the difficulties such a construction entails. That would perhaps be in time to power a kind of cold house museum to show our children how Earth has been looking before runaway climate change.
Proposing new technology which is sure to run longer smells to me a lot like to suggest doing nothing in order to avoid change that is both absolutely urgent, and totally possible now.
There exist no feasible plan to build out the storage required to make renewables work within 5-10 years. The US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity every day. About 500GWh every hour. We have about one Gigawatt hour worth of battery storage. We need terawatt hours worth of storage. The availability of battery storage remains off by several orders of magnitude.
There are a lot of things which are already employed, like generating hydrogen by electrolysis and feeding it into natural gas storage and gas distribution networks. This is not a full solution but works and is being used in Germany now. Also, we will need many transition technologies to make every step ecomonical, it won be a single technical break-through.
Oddly, this is the exact sort of behavior I sometimes see with the advocates for renewables.
Cost should always be a consideration, but when people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid.
The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates. The cost for renewables + storage is at least the cost of nuclear, but that cost also doesn't matter to some advocates. (If grid storage was cheap, we would have built it decades ago.)
Some advocates recommend massively overbuilding solar or wind to deal with seasonal differences. This is obviously a cost multiplier but that doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.
Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.
Advocates for renewables seem happy with relying on natural gas peaker plants to get around the costs of building grid storage, but methane is a very potent GHG in the short term and there are lots of methane losses in its capture and distribution. No one seriously thinks that natural gas is a long term answer to climate change.
It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. If you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
Exelon has stated that for new nuclear plants in the US to compete with NG CC, CO2 taxes would have to be $300-400/ton. To compete with NG for filling in around renewables, CO2 taxes would have to be much higher than that.
Other projections have the economy basically decarbonizing (without needing nuclear) at a CO2 tax of just $200/ton.
There's a good reason Exelon is tryin to spin off all its NPPs.
“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
I don't think we really know what a fair CO2 tax should be since it is hard to say what are the long term societal costs of an extra ton of CO2 in the atmosphere. (Though we will likely find out in the next 50 years.)
I am not sure the amount of subsidies that are given to wind, but the rationale for the CO2 tax idea seems to come from that:
>...Crane blamed the regulators of wholesale power markets for failing to give credit to nuclear generators for the social benefits of their carbon-free output. He and other executives say that it’s unfair to not provide nuclear generators a subsidy comparable to the tax credit that wind turbine operators receive for every kilowatt-hour of electricity they produce.
Ok, tell me how do you plan on restoring the dying nuclear industry? It's still dying to this very day and it's not because there is a lack of trying or too much regulation. It's because of the inherent complexity of a monolithic power plant. They are so complicated that no single party except the government can take full responsibility for them. Meanwhile no other industry has this problem.
My plan is to watch China do it, they're currently aiming to be the world #1 nuclear energy producer by 2035. They probably have the infrastructure experience to pull it off. It is an interesting experiment and it'll be fascinating to compare it to the German Energiewende to see which is more effective.
>Ok, tell me how do you plan on restoring the dying nuclear industry?
That is a different discussion. France built France built over 50 reactors in about 15 years, so obviously a rapid buildup could be done if that ends up being the best option, but that is worthy of its own discussion.
My point was that there are advocates who only talk about the cost of nuclear power compared to say the low cost of solar electricity from solar cells in Arizona at noon. If we are going to only rely on wind/solar there are a lot of unknowns about how long term grid storage could work or the costs of over building of wind/solar that might have to be done, etc etc. Yea that all might just work out, but if it doesn't is it better to suffer an existential threat from climate change or use nuclear power? If people are opposed to nuclear power no matter the consequences, then they should just say that.
I think Bill Gates has the right approach here - he is investing in grid storage technologies AND investing in advanced nuclear plant designs.
That's because Bill Gates listened to the scientists, and you can see him write about this. He knows to not put all his eggs in one basket. So he invests in small nuclear, because it is a technology we have and can fix deployment issues. He invests in solar because it is a far cheaper option in sunny areas. He invests in carbon capture and sequestration to reverse the effects of climate change to this point and how we'll likely continue to pollute. He invests in battery technology so we can use those renewables without a base load (really would be a phase in). And he's investing in fusion because it could make all these questions obsolete. He's investing from many different angles because you can't really predict what will work.
There's this weird myth of "either or" here. People are treating money, labor, and materials as if they are these static things. This isn't a video game where if you need more pylons you just buy them. In reality we only have so many experts in a field at a time. We can't just solve fusion faster by throwing more money at it. There are diminishing returns after a point. So you use this money elsewhere. This weird myth of "either or" really comes down to thinking that everyone is stupid and "I'm an expert" (the "It's so simple, you just..."). I find this odd on a site full of tech nerds who have to frequently deal with these types of logistical issues and laymen making wildly naive conjectures.
Nuclear really does force us into an "either or" scenario. Nuclear is just as cheap as it is to run at a fraction of its capacity as it does to run it at full capacity. Peak energy load also happens when the sun is not in line of sight. So if you use nuclear to fulfill peak load, then you can just use these plants for the rest of the day and skip building intermittent sources.
This is why most plans for renewables are contingent on orders-of-magnitude improvements in energy storage. Or continued use of fossil fuels. Because if you use nuclear to fill in the duck curve, then there's no reason to build out other sources of energy.
> Oddly, this is the exact sort of behavior I sometimes see with the advocates for renewables.
If so, the renewable advocate should argue based on cost. Nuclear is very likely going to lose that argument, ultimately spurious arguments about energy density or intermittency notwithstanding.
Consumer rooftop solar might be the most highly subsidized form of power in the world, so yes it might be cost-effective for the people getting the subsidies - but that doesn't mean it is not expensive.
Rooftop grid-connected solar is a way to get the reliability benefit of being on the grid without having to pay your fair share of the cost of providing that reliability.
> You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use
This is the worst argument I've ever read for renewables.
With renewable and storage, you need to build at the very least 7 times the capacity. Maybe as much as 40 times the capacity. Because of the low load factor, the fact that it's pretty common to have a full week without wind or without sun, etc.
You can also exchange energy using high-voltage DC lines across the whole continent.
Also, wave energy converters like Pelamis are an exciting technology, precisely because they harvest wind energy decoupled in space and time. It is a great opportunity for Scotland, the coast of France and Spain, Japan, Scandinavia and so on. Not totally technologically mature but shown to be viable using 400kW plants.
Fantastic stuff that doesn't exist and won't exist for a long time at the humougous scale we need. We need to get out of fossil fuels now. Be realistic for chrissake! We need dense, powerful power sources.
Pro-nukes like to point to China for support, but China is building large numbers of UHV DC transmission lines, in large part to transmit renewable power. They have 30,000 km of UHV DC lines now, and will be building more.
Our daily routines are so synchronized that we see these massives peaks everywhere. Not only in energy consumption but also in road use (congestion), commuting services (packed subway cars) or in super markets (low fraction of total available checkouts needed during most times of the day because their number was dimensioned for peak times). I'm sure you can find other examples if you think about it.
Flattening the demand over time by allowing to spread out daily routines (by not requiring or forbidding certain opening hours or office hours for example) so our infrastructure would not need to be dimensioned for these outsized peaks would be addressing the actual underlying issue. Building nuclear plants and more streets might be an easier task as the other would require personal and societal change ... and people are creatures of habit (which is something we should never underestimate).
In fact, in the 1950 and 1960s it was attempted to make more use of nuclear by using electrical night storage heaters with cheaper tariffs over the night.
If you remember the pro-nuclear argument at that time, hold on, it was "electricity from nuclear energy will be so cheap, it will be useless to install a meter in privates homes".
>..."electricity from nuclear energy will be so cheap, it will be useless to install a meter in privates homes".
That was simply a statement from the head of the AEC at a meeting with science writers along with a lot of other bold statements about the future:
>...It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.
>...A later survey found dozens of statements from the period that suggested it was widely believed that nuclear energy would be more expensive than coal, at least in the foreseeable future.[6] James Ramey, who would later become the AEC Commissioner, noted: "Nobody took Strauss' statement very seriously
I don't think it really works that way. Think about battery power, it isn't going to scale linearly. If land costs are a big issue (and limitation) this is true. If wind and sun aren't uniform, this is true. If the premise was true then we would have always only used coal because it is so cheap. You don't have to eliminate the duck curve, but smooth it out. There's also many other reasons to have a well diversified portfolio. It would be ridiculous to say "only wind" or "only solar." I'm not sure why this argument is made with nuclear when we don't do it in with any other source nor have we done it historically. It is just a non sequitur and a weird argument to make.
Land costs are not a big issue, especially when looking at the world as a whole. In much of the US, for example, the cost of putting solar equipment on some land is nearly two orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the land itself. If a country is land constrained, then in an era of cheap solar they'll lose heavy industry to other countries with more land.
If land cost ever did become significant globally for renewables then renewables will have already slaughtered the competition, by being cheaper by a huge factor.
Relying on another country for your energy needs isn't a great idea. We've long sought to be energy dependent. Doing so has led to less wars and less influence from outside governments. Are you really going to base your entire economy and civilian well being (because let's be real, we live in an electric world) on the promise that another country will always sell that energy to you at a fair price? Always? Never decide to change?
Land costs are indeed an immense issue. The exact figure of how much land needs to be covered in solar panels varies depending on inclination with the sun and weather.Its not too bad for countries like Australia that have reliable sunlight and plenty of land. But much of the energy consumption occurs closer to the poles, and with more frequent obscuration of the sun from weather. And these countries are typically much more population dense. Dedicating several percentages of the landmass of a dense country is indeed a substantial cost. And this isn't even getting into the require immense amounts of energy storage. We have 5 minutes worth of hydroelectric storage relative to our average 11.5 TWh daily electricity consumption. But hydroelectric is geographically dependent and hard to scale. We only have 10 seconds worth of battery storage, about 1 Gigawatt hour.
It's incorrect to say that countries never go all in on one energy source. Norway generates almost all of it's electricity from hydroelectricity. Iceland generates the overwhelming majority from geothermal. And France generates the lion's share of it's electricity from nuclear power. The last of these three is geographically independent.
Sure, Norway and Iceland probably don't have to build a single nuclear plant. Nor would some states like Vermont and Washington that have extensive hydroelectric generation. But other geographies can only make do with fossil fuels. Intermittent sources can mitigate this, but we'll always need a solution to fill in the duck curve until we either make a breakthrough in energy storage or some other carbon free form of energy. But we already have another form of carbon free energy, and one that is already working for other countries.
It IS an either-or situation. Nuclear is terrible for backing up renewables. We don't need a diversified portfolio, we need a sufficiently reliable portfolio at minimum cost. This will likely involve no new nuclear plants; they're too expensive.
Renewables + storage (both short and long term). At the current rate of improvement of these technologies, this will be cheaper. Building expensive baseload now is a recipe for stranded assets not far down the road.
Can you explain a little more about the storage part of this? I see renewables and storage mentioned every time this topic comes up. It seems like we've got the solar panels and wind turbines figured out, but I'm skeptical on the storage part. I tried doing some research myself, but everything I find reads like a press release from a company that is attempting some kind of storage. As far as I can tell, there is no actual large-scale storage operating anywhere, other than pumped hydro, which we've known about for a long time, and can't be scaled unless we start building mountains.
I mentioned I'm skeptical, but I'm genuinely asking, because I've never seen anyone ask about it.
Any NPP started today will not be online until 2030 or later, so one should compare with renewable/storage projections of cost, not current costs. The renewable and storage systems can be brought online much faster than NPPs.
Large scale electricity storage other than hydro power doesn’t exist and is extremely unlikely to materialize anytime in the near future.
Some advocates of renewables argue that “Power2Gas” is an option but they completely underestimate the amount of energy large countries need to store.
In Germany, for example, the daily electricity consumption is 1600 GWh. Converting that into methane would require to produce 3.5 million gas trucks filled with methane - for just a day.
And Germany’s current total hydro capacity is about 40 GWh, so only 1/40 of what we need of storage for a single day.
I don’t see a future for 100% renewables other than for small countries like Norway, Austria or Iceland who have lots of mountains for hydro power but only a fraction of the population of Germany or even the US.
Making plans ignoring where prices are likely to go doesn't seem prudent to me.
Investors are used to operating under uncertainty and placing their bets. The market, which reflects the combined input of all those investors, seems to think NPPs are not a good bet.
The technical issues of storage are unique to particular kinds of storage. There are many different kinds being pushed. Are you saying ALL of them are going to fail? That's a bold position, especially as cheap renewables make the environment more and more lucrative for anyone who can provide better storage technology. We're talking many trillions of dollars here, and the economic incentives will only get stronger as duck curves and CO2 taxes increase.
There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy.
> There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term. Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy. Its not the will of the voting public. This is a defeat for the environment and democracy.
You could put all the nuclear waste the US has ever produced on one football field stacked 3 stories high.
Roughly 83,000 metric tons.
Meanwhile we produce over 50 million tons of electronic waste that is full of nasty heavy metals that can, and do, leech into the environment causing wide spread destruction, because instead of storing them in some sort of containment vessel we just dump them on whatever country will take a pittance payment.
Nuclear waste storage is a NIMBY problem, in terms of environmental pollutants you could probably find hog farms that churn out more waste.
Comparisons of hog fecal matter to nuclear waste are tens of magnitudes of danger and complexity apart. A person can move hog waste. The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste.
> The most complex equipment the human race has ever designed can move nuclear waste.
Concrete and a train is the usual method.
Nuclear waste isn't some magic death substance. It is hazardous, but so are a lot of other substances that are dealt with in large volumes every day, and again, nuclear waste isn't even that large of a volume!
Meanwhile coal plants pump radioactive particles directly into the air, and communities surrounding coal plants have higher rates of cancer, but people complain less because it is in the air and not in barrels labeled with a scary symbol.
With modern nuclear plant designs, the waste would be even less, and there are even designs for plants that would use existing nuclear waste as fuel.
Nuclear is a technology with trade-offs like anything else. There is no need to dismissing it outright.
Are you confusing the products of a meltdown and spent nuclear fuel? Spent nuclear fuel can be handled very safely, and moved relatively easily. The problem is just that everyone says “not in my backyard” when it comes to long term storage. Nuclear is, in terms of waste and logistics, a solved problem. In truth, off-site storage may not even be necessary, as reactors can many times handle storage on site.
> Only technocrats and elites want more nuclear energy.
Only technocrats know how to build an operate an electricity grid, it isn't commonly held knowledge.
The voting public are not equipped to vote on how to create a reliable, performant and affordable energy grid. It isn't an issue that should be decided by the public's will.
The public can overrule anyone on anything, but on technical issues it is usually wiser to defer to the technocrats.
At the risk of being too reductive, it strikes me that it’s most appropriate to let the public determine the strategy: the broad strokes and goals they want (clean, safe, low/no carbon energy sources), but to defer to actual trained experts on the tactics: the generation mix and transmission tech.
This isn’t to say there should be no supervision or accountability; more that the elites are called so for a reason (a better word would be “experts”), and that there’s otherwise a risk of micromanagement and all that it entails.
America and the UK haven't done well at deferring to actual trained experts with COVID-19 tactics. I have no idea what you might say the public's broad-strokes and goals for COVID19 were.
It seems quite reasonable to say that if "the public" want unclean, unsafe, high-carbon energy sources and deny that climate change is a problem, they should be unable to have any input in the same way that someone who wants a tall building that is unsafe can't have one, and someone who wants a car on the road without passing any safety tests can't have one, and someone who wants to provide unsafe medical treatments is not allowed to.
Nuclear waste has not existed in the medium or long term. It hasn't even existed longer than the Catholic church, a mere blip on histories timescale. Of course there is no evidence. But the short term failures do not give me hope.
Except it has. There are natural fission reactors (Oklo mine being the best example).
We aren't doing anything that nature doesn't do on its own.
Worst case, you dilute it back down to ore levels and bury it in the ground. Take care to avoid the water table, and it's exactly as dangerous as a lot of the stuff that's already in the ground.
> There is no evidence nuclear waste can be disposed of safely in the medium or long term.
There's no evidence that it can't be. And given that it's pretty safe, pretty stable, and there's not much of it, the burden of proof is VERY much on the small minority of fear mongers to explain something so obviously easy is, in fact, impossible.
Read about burner mode of breeder reactors, they allow to "burn" spent nuclear fuel and make the resulting waste much safer in the long-term, i.e. not only volume of waste will be 100 times smaller, but also the "burnt" fuel will be relatively safe radiologically speaking after just several hundreds years, instead of tens of thousands of years for waste from existing reactors).
In the UK more people support than oppose nuclear power when polled. The tories were also voted in with nuclear power in their manifesto, albeit only in one small section.
> The tories were also voted in with nuclear power in their manifesto, albeit only in one small section.
I'll bet my life that fewer than 10% of the people who voted Conservative last December had any idea what the manifesto said about nuclear power.
(I don't mean this as a jibe at Tories in particular; my point is just that no-one reads manifestos, and even fewer people bother to learn about the finer details of their party's nuclear policy in an election that's completely dominated by one issue [Brexit])
To the extent that this is true it's because of anti-scientific FUD. The problem of nuclear waste is utterly insignificant compared to fossil fuel emissions.
Yet coal power plants pump radioactive, climate changing, material into the air we breathe by the chimney full, and gas vehicles do it by the cylinder full at the rate of ~1 litre/second outside homes and schools, and nobody gives a shit about "disposing of that safely in the medium or long term".
You can dispose of nuclear waste "safely" by having a (single) Chernobyl style meltdown, continent-wide fallout, and long-term deadzone and still come out ahead of all the coal power plants.
Importance of mass-production can not be underestimated. ERP has only 2 working reactors and 3 in construction. Meanwhile Russia produces VVER reactors in an almost conveyor-like fashion (see list in [0]), iterating on design and streamlining construction process, which results in more than twice smaller CAPEX per GW and less delays. Such mass production allows to lower cost of R&D per built reactor and in general to "spread" cost of supporting country's nuclear expertise, which is then used for development of new technologies such as breeders and non-RTG space reactors (though sadly the latter does not see much development lately).
When energy cost of nuclear vs renewables is compared it's very common not only to forget about cost of storage and of additional generation capacity (including natural gas peak plants) required for renewables, but also to bring cost of nuclear based on the projects like ERP, not on the Russian/Chinese/Korean projects, which arguably have much more sensible and viable in long-term energy policy.
Arguably the reason for the success of renewables in the UK is that the government gave big subsidy opportunities early on, and then made cost reduction a condition of future subsidy. And there is a strong grid operator that can do strategic planning. This worked for wind, solar, and maybe battery storage now. And this regulated/grid based approach is what deals with issues like intermittency. People may forget these things in a discussion on the web, but the grid and regulators do not.
And actually Hinckley and Sizewell do fit within this model. They have been given very high strike prices and hopefully will be able to deliver a more cost effective pipeline of projects later on. But this approach is more difficult with large, monolithic projects.
Great read, thanks do much for the link! It's really refreshing to see the actual math. Main takeaway: nuclear can be cheap if financed properly, but incredibly expensive otherwise. Also, nuclear plants eventually become highly valuable cash cows, once the huge initial investment is recouped.
1) LCOE notwithstanding is new nuclear good value / likely to be a low regrets investment?
2) Why have previous EPRs been delayed and over budget?
3) Why is HPC so expensive?
4) Is there evidence that HPC, the predecessor is likely to be on-time / on-budget?
5) Therefore is this likely to be a good decision?
The first one depends on whole-system modelling of energy systems cost. LCOE is fine for understanding the cost of a single point asset or of a low penetration technology, it doesn't incorporate balancing costs. The way you model this is you build a model that:
-Includes heat as well since the electrification of heat adds a substantial load of non temporally diversified, difficult to defer load. Basically when its cold, everyone wants to run their heat pumps and they will run them for weeks at a time)
-Includes transport (including V2G)
-Includes demand side response
-Includes storage (not including storage and DSR is not realistic and substantially escalates system costs)
-Operates at the long time resolution where investment decisions are made and at the short time resolution (stochastic unit commitment to dispatch available resources in an optimal way)
-Includes system stability constraints
-Includes transmission and distribution costs
-Generates physically plausible load/generation combinations, in other words if you're in Los Angeles you don't need to simulate what happens if it's blazingly hot on a February evening after a day where the sun hasn't shone because that doesn't happen.
You then impose a carbon constraint on your model and let it come up with an optimum generation mix and associated system cost for that constraint. If you want to know the system value of a particular technology, you manually increase or decrease it from the optimum level and determine the change in system cost (excluding the marginal cost of the manually changed technology). This gives you a set of marginal system values which you can compare with your LCOE to determine a curve for each technology, conditioned on all the other technologies and their costs in the system.
Some highlights from this research: (For reference, on an electricity only basis (IOW heat not included) France is 90g/kWh, UK is 220 down from 400 a few years ago, Germany is 400, Poland is 600, Denmark and Sweden are 50 or so.
-For shallow decarbonisation, down to about 100g/kWh, you don't need nuclear or CCS. Optimum systems are Wind/Solar/Battery/DSR/gas.
-Down to 50g/kWh you just run your gas less frequently and need more battery technology. (Or if you have massive hydro you can down to this level with fewer batteries). The cost of batteries has a big impact on total system costs and there are plausible battery cost forecasts where this system is less expensive than most current power systems even without accounting for the costs to the climate.
-For deep decarbonisation, going down from 50 to 0, the system cost without nuclear or CCS goes up very rapidly. That's because above this point you're keeping your existing gas capacity around, just using it less. That requires a tariff mechanism to pay for capacity as well as energy but that's easily solved and in many places exist already. Below this point, even running your gas for a few weeks during winter peaks blows your budget. You therefore need to either:
--Build a lot more batteries, except now they're not being diurnally cycled but used for longer term storage which makes them way more expensive per kWh
--Overbuild renewables so that even when there is very little power produced from them it gets you through an overcast and windless period. This leaves you dumping excess power the rest of the year. There are groups who argue that if we did this, our economy would adapt to find a use for the excess power, which I'm sympathetic to. You need about 4x current peak in nameplate renewables capacity and a lot of batteries to do it in a heat-not-included scenario. This overbuild scenario is the one the models select and the cost is high because the model assumes excess power is wasted.
--Build nuclear or CCS, not necessarily a lot, but some. This is a little-goes-a-long-way type deal.
The system value of Hinckley Point C comes out as being between £80 and £150 / MWh, depending on when you assume the rest of the UK's AGRs will come offline. Remember that these are curves rather than points so its not a matter of this justifying infinite more nuclear at that point but determining the system difference between having a small amount of nuclear and none.
On that basis, the agreed strike price of £93 / MWh is high and difficult to justify on purely commercial basis but remember that long-term government decision making should be based on keeping pathways open and minimising regret. I think it was just about justifiable but I accept that with different assumptions about technology cost curves it might be suboptimal.
This report is a good read and was generated using my favourite model (my second favourite is the MIT GenX model but last time I checked that one doesn't do system operational constraints like reserve and frequency stability): https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2018/12/value_of_...
Essentially EDF and Areva thought that since they were French and operated lots of nuclear power stations, they knew how to build them. This was wrong. You’re probably familiar with First of a Kind (FoaK) but there is also such a thing as First in a While. They made a number of mistakes early on in the EPR programme. (For reference, there have been six plants EPRs where construction has started. In order: Olkiluoto in Finland, Flamanville in France, Taishan 5 and 6 in China, HPC 1 and 2 in the UK) Sizewell would be numbers 7 and 8.
A brief aside on over-budget and over-time here. These are the same thing on complicated major infrastructure projects. Virtually all the costs are labour costs and these are all specialised skills so when they’re not working, you don’t just tell the contractors to go work on something else, you need to pay them the whole time they’re mobilised. A schedule delay = being over budget.
Most significant was the start of Olkiluoto construction before the detailed design was done. Starting construction before detailed design is very common in construction and it’s really more of a balancing act than a binary decision but in this case it was a very bad idea. There were substantial periods of time where thousands of people were being well paid to do nothing while Areva and other partners were working out design issues that held up the build.
Second was some absolutely unforgivable fuckery going on at the main forging works in France. The biggest single item in a PWR reactor is the forged pressure vessel which is made in enormous pieces, these pieces are then painstakingly welded together – each weld may take 100 passes in between each the weld is examined, cleaned, and the work pieces are heated up. There were documents being forged about quality control, really really bad stuff. As a result, the Flamanville vessel lid needs to be replaced very early in its life since it has defects that mean it will not last the 80 year design lifetime.
Third, there are non-up-to-specification welds in the main cooling lines at Flamanville, they’re in a place that is no longer reachable and so EDF has had to develop custom welding robots to fix them.
The two Chinese plants were somewhat late but not so over-budget. Part of the reason for that is China has a big nuclear construction programme so as soon as they needed to halt while a design issue was worked out, they sent all their nuclear qualified on-site staff to work on other projects.
Third: why is the agreed strike price for HPC so high?
First, the capital cost is high. The estimated capex was based on the cost it actually took to build Flamanville and Oikiluoto at least the latter of which has actually been built properly and is now entering final commissioning. That does mean that the capex estimate is more accurate than the much lower costs estimated before construction started on those plants.
Second, the strike price accounts for the entire construction risk sitting with EDF.
Third, EDF has had to finance the whole cost itself. If you built the same project using government borrowing costs the project would be much cheaper. (However this is an economically problematic view since government borrowing costs being low relies on a risk transfer to citizens, a matter on which I disagree with the National Audit Office).
Fourth: How’s HPC construction going?
So far, very well. The second unit is being built faster and more cheaply (remember – same thing) than the first. The timing is such that if you want to get maximum nth of a kind savings from building Sizewell C, you need to make a decision soon so that you can organise moving staff from one to the other. It is worth noting that econometric studies of nuke construction costs have shown that series building saves a huge amount of money so it would actually make no sense for the UK to build any non-EPR designs unless they have radically different characteristics like SMRs to justify it.
Finally: is it therefore the right decision to build Sizewell C?
Honestly. I do not 100% know and I am deeply suspicious of anyone who does. They either know more about it / have thought about it more than I have, and of course I accept that there are people who do and have. Or… they haven’t but are nonetheless sure of their position. My leaning is that long term government thinking should be aimed at actions that are near-optimal / low-regret in the greatest number of cases. Given the uncertainties around CCS as an alternative and the actual climate impact of methane leakage on the way to the CCS plant, the absolute over-riding-everything need to deal with our emissions and to do so as fast as we can, and the long construction time scales, I think it probably is the right decision to build at least this plant.
A decision on a third two-unit EPR does not need to be made until later and at that point we will know more about future technology developments. It may be that at that point we realise that not only do we not need a third but that we didn’t really need Sizewell and HPC either and therefore we will have spent more by 2050 to decarbonise than was optimal. Totally possible! The objective though is not to optimise in a fragile way but to create as many somewhat-optimal pathways as possible.
(disclosures: I make part of my income from working on wind, solar, battery and lately hydrogen projects. I've never worked on a nuclear project.)
I am not all negative to nuclear power but large nuclear reactors is not the way. They are always over budget and delayed. Put the money in next generation nuclear power like small molten salt reactors, batteries and renewables.
How long and how much will take to build a next generation nuclear power plant like with a small molten salt reactor ? Will it be like, twice cheaper and twice faster to build ? If so, why is it not happening ?
Molten salt reactors is a nightmare for material science. You effectively have half of Mendeleev's table on your hands and it's borderline impossible to design a material which will have enough corrosion resistance (reactors have to serve at least several decades) and don't forget about high levels of radiation as well, which also contributes to material damage. Plus online fuel processing is much more difficult than the fuel processing required for fast breeder reactors, and it's one of the main stumbling blocks for breeders right now (well, judging by Russian's experience).
Inertia of the industry combined with risk aversion. Nuclear regulation is not really setup for small modular reactors and nuclear power still has a bad name.
The nuclear fanboys still push the big reactors. I think renewable fans like me favor next gen rectors because we are okay with not building reactors right away. We can build renewables until they are developed. Nuclear fans OTOH hate renewables and just want to build whatever is possible right now.
So we are in a situation where nuclear fans are not pushing it and most renewable fans think all nuclear power is like the current shitty big reactors.
I see, so we can quickly build cheap & safe small molten salt reactors but we actually don't build because of risk aversion and industry inertia so that's really a shame (I thought the tech just wasn't ready yet).
Another problem is nuclear fanboys: why exactly do they hate renewables so much ?
I'm a nuclear fanboy, and I don't hate renewables. Nor do I know anybody who does. We just want nuclear to be allowed. After that, of course it's a matter of results. But currently the narrative is that "we don't want nuclear, because we have renewables"
Astounds me how so many people can be pro nuclear in opposition to fossil fuels - the instant impact is obviously much better, but the risk if something goes wrong is so catastrophically higher that the increased risk with each plant seems a huge gamble.
Where do people think all that nuclear waste goes?
You sound like somebody who has never seen any statistics on nuclear death rates and waste volume because in both cases it is the best of the current options.
Development is going forward under the UK SMR Consortium (Rolls Royce, NAMRC, NNL and a few others) and there is quite a lot of buzz in the UK's civil nuclear industry at the moment.
Some further reading for the interested:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/advanced-nuclear-...
https://www.rolls-royce.com/products-and-services/nuclear/sm...
https://namrc.co.uk/intelligence/smr/