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.
