Is this the inflection point when we go back to the 1970s? Richard Nixon had planned for 1000 nuclear reactors in the US for Project Independence by the year 2000:
Germany was actively trying to block labelling nuclear as green to make sure nuclear isn't eligible for subsidies [1]. France was pushing for nuclear energy to be added to the list. Nobody knows if it was just general erratic behaviour by the green party or just general hatred and jealousy towards the french.
But let's also remember that France sold their turbine business due to pressure of the DoJ[2], has been talking about repatriating it[3] (which has not happened yet), but as of now has 29 out of 56 reactors out of commission and as a result, the energy powerhouse France is buying energy from Bavaria[4].
France is also spending a large fortune to replace most but not all of its current generation capacity. Largely due to cost overruns and delays and aging plants. This will blow the costs of German solar + wind installations out of the water.
Its reactors are getting old enough that their capacity factors have declined - in 2020 down to 62%. This isnt much ahead of the capacity factor of the best wind turbines (57%).
Theyll be in just as much shit as Germany this winter as nuclear output is projected to fall still further. Why people are giving shit to Germany for not following their model mystifies me. Theyll be lighting up the coal too.
> Its reactors are getting old enough that their capacity factors have declined - in 2020 down to 62%. This isnt much ahead of the capacity factor of the best wind turbines (57%).
The situation is a bit more nuanced than that. Yes the capacity factor has reduced but not only because they are getting old:
1. Wind and solar have priority access to the grid in France. If they are producing a lot, the NPPs have no choice but to cut their power output, reducing artificially their capacity factor.
2. The NPP reached their end of planned life, meaning they had to do an extensive refit to get a life extension. This is a bit more than just regular maintenance, these are upgrades to more current security standards.
3. As you said, the older the NPP become, the more maintenance is required
Nobody knows if it was just general erratic behaviour by the green party or just general hatred and jealousy towards the french.
It was neither. The German plan was to leverage "green" Russian gas for control over the EU. As usual, the grand German plan has ended with the continent on fire.
This reads like part of the comment section on a British tabloid. The german government took a stance against both nuclear and gas being labelled as "green", transitional sources of energy. Within the government, the SPD was in favor of Gas but not nuclear, the FDP was in favor of both, and the Greens were in favor of neither.Overall it doesn't fucking matter, because it was a vote in the European Parliament, an independent institution.
If anything, I would speculate that it was the effectiveness of Russian gas lobbyists after Fukushima, convincing Germany to decommission all their nuclear power plants.
"In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San."
"With regard to Southeastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia (Moldova & Ukraine). The German side declares its complete political disinterestedness in these areas."
Is is also due to the German 'green' party - Die Grünen - having grown out of and on the base of their resistance against nuclear power. Atomkraft? Nein danke ('Nuclear power? No thanks') together with the 'smiling sun logo' [1] have become so engrained in this organisation that it is comparable to sacrilege for 'greens' to acknowledge that they were wrong on this issue.
It is one of the best options available given the limitations of the area. Germany does not have the geography for large-scale hydropower like e.g. Norway does, it does not have large-scale access to geothermal energy sources like Iceland does, it does not have access to reliable wind like actually not that many places have - where 'reliable' stands for 'does not stop when you need it'. It does not have access to large deposits of natural gas like the Netherlands once did and Russia still does. What Germany does have is coal of varying qualities, much of it on the lower end of the quality scale.
More importantly, what Germany does have is a tradition of engineering excellence which is just the thing needed to design and build effective nuclear power infrastructure. France succeeded here so I see no reason why Germany could not if they only managed to convince - or push aside - the remaining recalcitrant 'green' politicos.
Germany also doesn't have Uranium either. Nuclear power plants are simply not competitive. Part of that is due to legal security requirements. But they need fuel and cooling to work. They need to be rebuild regularly and the storage question is not solved. There is a lack infrastructure and energy storage, this is why Germany exports power to other countries who have them, but solving these issues are a better strategy than new nuclear plants.
Nuclear power will not help fighting climate change and it is simply too expensive compared to other renewable sources. That is the opinion of leading engineers too and exceptionally widely spread.
Sweden has plenty of Uranium and is on friendly foot with Germany. The demand for Uranium is also much easier to meet than that for combustibles like coal, oil and gas. Germany was on the verge of firing up a fast breeder reactor in Kalkar [1] which would have solved both the nuclear waste problem as well as made it far less dependent on incoming fission-grade Uranium. The reactor was ready for its first load of spent nuclear fuel - which it would have turned into new fuel for traditional fission reactors plus a small amount of highly radioactive [2] waste - but it was never started due to the protests of the predecessors of the 'greens'.
Imagine a Germany which would have gone the route the French - who did build fast breeder reactors - went. Imagine the reduction in dependency on imported fuels and the reduction in emissions. Also imagine a German industry which would have been less dependent on combustible fuels due to the availability of lower-priced electricity. That industry would have been far better prepared for the rise of cheaper renewable electricity sources like solar an wind. Compare this to the current situation where those same 'greens' responsible for making this evolution impossible now voted for an increased use of coal-fired power plants to be able to close the last nuclear power plants.
[2] highly radioactive which implies a short half-life, this type of waste needs to be stored for a period of 100-300 years instead of the thousands required for spent fuel pellets. It also is of much smaller volume and as such solved the nuclear waste problem as well as (supposed) fuel problem.
Delayed inspections, rivers drying out affecting cooling, cracks in reactors, unusual corrosion, billions in debt after a Rosatom deal, etc.
It's a very nuanced issue, I don't think it's very informed to say it's just due to delayed inspections... The inspections were what found cracks due to corrosion, repairs are taking really long.
They changed laws to allow rivers getting heated more to keep plants running. Germany won't need nuclear and we have completely different problems with our infrastructure that leads to energy going to waste. We pay Austria and Switzerland regularly to take our energy because we have too much, we stop wind turbines and disconnect solar panels because the net is overflowing. This has created an industry because these countries have pump storage plants. Granted, these are required for wind and solar power to be effective. Germany has storages too but they are not attached to the net because of old laws that would make it costly. Basically you have to pay for the energy you save AND the energy you put back into the net.
And France currently shows that nuclear isn't really a good choice for base load since they had to restrict power output due to heat. The plants are getting older and require a lot of maintenance.
Energy production of the future should not concentrate on nuclear. It cannot compete on price and environmental factors in Europe. There are other places were it would fit better.
Is it just me or does ESG feel like a giant virtue signal from companies and investors?
Taking this specific issue of nuclear. Nuclear Energy is objectively cleaner than other forms of energy generation and is objectively safe if you operate it properly. With that said, it seems like Nuclear Energy would be embraced by the ESG crowd, but that simply wasn't the case.
Now that the rubber met the road, the sentiment has changed. So was nuclear actually bad? Or was it just "bad". Almost seems that everyone was so obsessed with going green and getting rid of "big bad nuclear" that they forgot that they depend on it. Much like a kid quitting his job to pursue the arts and then realizing, he can't make rent without the job they just quit...
ESG is a tool that certain political parties can use to "give to their friends" and "take from their enemies". Anyone who doesn't toe the line will find their ESG rating dropping (see Tesla: https://theconversation.com/how-a-sustainability-index-can-k...)
Been criticizing Tesla for years. But once Elon openly confronted cancel culture's twitterized grip on democracy all of a sudden those criticisms became newsworthy and a concern for regulators.
Same with crypto: The scammy-ness and un-pleasentness (ie of funding terrorists and organized crime) was always there, but news-worthy it got only once Canadian Truckers made use of it.
I'm not opposed to identifying situations where companies are getting away with something for free that they should be paying for, and then correcting that. For example, dumping chemicals into a river, or emitting toxic fumes into the air.
Somehow this turned into: "only solar, wind, and thermal are good, so everything other than those are bad. We need to shut down nuclear."
It would have been better if it was: "wow, these decades old designs did really well. We've learned a lot over the years, let's build newer, better, cleaner, safer nuclear plants and then shut down the old ones."
It is just the most expensive power, discounting externalities like CO2, disaster liability, decommissioning, and waste management. Include the latter, and it gets worse. Include CO2, and coal is worse.
The cheapest power, with or without externalities, is solar followed by wind. A dollar spent on those produces several times as many kWh as anything else.
They are of course intermittent, but that doesn't matter much because their share of total generation is low. As their contribution comes to dominate, we will need to add storage. Until then, money is overwhelmingly more usefully spent adding generating capacity, as is being done. But a hell of a lot more should have been and needs to be spent on that.
California is very well placed to take advantage of cheap solar energy.
I watched the video and I'm not sure I even caught what the problem was supposed to be? There was a vague implication that solar and batteries were expensive, but I didn't see any actual comparison to how much gas and nuclear would cost as an alternative.
Solar PV is the cheapest available energy, and California will probably generate about 3/4 of its energy with it. Currently about 50% of their electricity is gas, so whenever the sun is shining they can stop burning gas and save money and carbon.
Solar PV plus lithium batteries are already cheaper than peaking gas and so being rolled out for purely financial reasons and the price gap is only widening.
After renewables become a large enough fraction of the generating capacity, then it becomes necessary to start adding storage.
It is legitimate to ask whether there will ever be enough lithium battery production capacity to to provide for both cars and utilities, but it is a made-up problem because almost all utility storage will not be lithium batteries, but something cheaper.
California already has quite a lot of pumped hydro capacity in place, and could add more cheaply by adding pumps to existing reservoir penstocks.
Due to forward looking regulations, California (like China) is just about to have a dramatic storage boom over the next few years. They have 40GWh of EV batteries and are likely to quadruple that in a few years, but I'm not even counting that in the boom, basically every planned grid solar deployment includes a big chunk of batteries.
I feel like we're back at the point in the cycle were the detractors say "solar is a net negative" or "wind can never supply more than 17%". It's not based on science or economics just pessimism.
Fundamentally, solar and lithium batteries are cheap, abundant alternative that cost less than the next best thing. They're going to be a lot bigger than most people currently expect, especially in sunny regions like California with good regulations in the short term, and long term they will utterly dominate in Equatorial regions on market price alone.
Daily cycle storage has been a known solved issue for a while, we're just waiting for the pricing and deployment to catch up. And seasonal storage now looks likely to be green hydrogen, again solved before we really need it.
Just the queue of planned projects today in California, Chile and China is enough to show this is true.
Growth pains of a rapidly growing battery manufacturing sector should provide the opposite impression that people seem to take. Always with the "at current rates" stats to make change seem impossible.
Yes, new things that don't exist don't exist, that's why we invented them and built big factories to make them, because we wanted them to exist in large numbers.
Any analysis that uses lithium batteries as the reference storage technology gives at best an upper bound on cost. More often it signals incompetence or bad faith.
Real utilities will rely on whatever storage is cheapest at the time they need to build it. Batteries will remain among the most expensive storage, but are good for load-smoothing.
Synthetic fuels cost more, but have desirable externalities: utilities can sell excess production. Those costs are falling fast, too.
We're going to see more interconnected grids, the sun is usually shining somewhere and the wind is blowing somewhere. And when it isn't, we're going to see higher prices.
Private companies will absorb some part of the societal cost of intermittent electricity, by letting factories and workplaces stay idle when power costs are high - this will filter down to lower wages for the employees of those companies.
I feel like the "wind and solar only!" crowd love to point out externalities of other forms of power generation but not wind and solar. It's not magic; we don't just conjure up windmills and solar panels from thin air and magically suck electricity from them. There are real costs, risks, and suboptimal function of all these systems.
Smaller real costs. It costs less to build and operate a solar or wind farm than just to operate an already-paid-for coal plant. It costs, just now, about the same to build and operate a solar or wind farm as to just operate an already-paid-for nuke. But renewable costs are still falling fast.
Cost of storage is falling faster than wind or solar ever did. By the time Cali needs to build storage -- after there is renewable generation capacity to charge it from -- it will be very cheap.
It costs less... in California or adjacent states with both massive insolation and good infrastructure. It doesn't cost less in Germany or Poland which is north of the 50th latitude and has about a third of the insolation per year.
And storage has some very hard physical limits on scaling up that will prevent costs from falling a lot - mostly the actual amount of the elements on earth that are needed for the batteries.
In fact storage has no physical limits on scaling up. Costs are low and falling faster than solar and wind ever did, and there is no reason to doubt it will continue. The overwhelming majority of storage is not batteries, and will not be batteries.
If you have to lie to make your case, what does that tell your readers?
It would certainly help if the water reservoirs weren't so empty because they could serve as giant batteries. But maybe a water source or desalination could help.
The "engineering calculations" are so extremely simplified that I would call them wrong. You need a lot of water for nuclear plants btw. to conduct away the heat.
And especially in that dry regions with insane amounts of space solar energy would outcompete nuclear on every possible metric and it isn't close.
This is the problem: with current technology, if you include storage, solar / wind has both the worst prices and externalities.
Replacing storage with load-following (hydro, Geothermal, modern nuclear) is necessary unless we find ways of storage that beat current theoretical limitations
> include storage, solar / wind has both the worst prices and externalities.
Absolutely false. Most storage used today (95%+) is pumped hydro, which is very cheap. Costs for all kinds of storage are falling even faster than solar or wind ever did.
There are no theoretical limitations on storage. Most storage is just E = Fx, understood and applied for centuries.
If you have to lie to make your case, what does that tell readers about your case?
My bad if it was unclear, "theoretical limitations" obviously concerned chemical means of storage.
Hydro is ideal, but the problem is it needs mountains and huge amounts of water, which aren't accessible everywhere
You also didn't address the main point: storage drives up costs and externalities which most people advocating for intermittent sources seem to completely sweep under the rug
ESG is one of the best examples of good intention paving the way to hell. It is fundamentally undemocratic to the greatest extends aside from creating large factious industries with a parasitic behavior and randomly sanction investments positively or negatively. It enables corruption and companies that can invest into legal departments specialized in compliance towards ESG requirements will win here. It is one of the worst mechanism our financial "experts" came up with. The last present of boomers to finally destroy the world for everyone if I want to exaggerate, but I think it isn't much less.
You are commenting this on a thread in which people are praising France's 60 year old reactors and suggesting Germany keeps their 40 year old reactors running, which were built to last 40 years. "Running them properly" is easier said than done, and frankly, the naive and misinformed opinions spewed constantly about the topic by proponents are a strong argument against nuclear energy. Not that it matters anyway, no one in a position of responsibility is going to build them, regardless of how much Isaac Asimov fans on the internet are crying foul about it.
> no one in a position of responsibility is going to build them
a bit of an exaggeration? today: "Sizewell C: New nuclear power station granted development consent by the government ... French energy company EDF, which will partly fund the project, has said the plant will generate electricity for at least 60 years and will employ 900 people."
This person is the most responsible person for the situation we're in right now. She conspired with others to derail (literally in some cases) Nuclear power.
This is what happens when you follow uninformed advocates from Hollywood. People should learn to despise "influencers." They know little but aim to move people to action based on poor or very poor understanding of the things they propose and base their positions on emotion, mostly.
You let the oil industry off the hook pretty easily.
Renewables research have been hobbled for ages because of powerful lobby. It's only in the last decade that it was pushed to the front stage.
Nuclear power is not some magic safe thing. It can and will cause horrible disaster and consequences if run the same way we run our energy economy for most of the last 100 years, by pure greed.
I'd also consider the possibility that the generations-old and well-connected fossil fuel lobby also had a hand in it. In fact, I'd wager a much larger effect than Ms Fonda and co.
They could not have done it and would not have gone over with the public without her critical (no pun) marshalling of the movement. She was key and deserves blame.
It's like expecting C&H would come around and denounce anyone who said, "ice-cream is great, I love sweets, let's all celebrate with sweets". Sure, if they were ethical, they'd mention how sugar is bad for human health and undermine their company.
I don’t know, Windscale for example did not seem to have much of an effect, and it was much worse. The way it’s spun in the media has much more weight than the actual risks in most people’s mind.
I am not writing from an American perspective, this is true in European media as well. In any case, you’d think that an accident releasing radionuclides all over Europe would be a better example of the dangers of nuclear than a security system shutting down a reactor as expected in case of emergency. It’s all academic anyway, these discussions are not exactly rational.
The incredible irony being that nobody died and no evidence has been found of health problems in the affects population. Nuclear energy is about 1000 times safer than getting energy from coal.
The level of ignorance in the general population is astounding.
Ok, but Fonda and the environmental groups that supported her and the media could have looked at facts and spoken to the experts before disseminating false information, fear, and in general FUD to scuttle the technology.
Those same actors and their heirs/replacements could agitate for Nuclear and explain how wrong they were in retarding the technology.
Use the same cloud they used to scuttle the tech to revive and invigorate the technology.
They should also stress people to seek facts by themselves and to not rely on mouthpieces and emotive arguments when making decisions and choices. To be critical and seek your own information.
Whatever harm the anti-nuke lobby did towards contemporary fission power, the biggest loss imo was the federal government keeping research funding for future fusion power at perpetual sub-"fusion never" levels. And this was before The China Syndrome!
Each dollar spent on fusion is a dollar not spent where it can have any useful effect before 2050.
That was as true 30 years ago.
A Tokamak fusion plant would cost at least 10x fission, and fission is already far from competitive. So, absent aneutronic, fusion has no prospect ever.
Most people who have looked at it say x-ray emission losses would prevent achieving breakeven. I am not equipped to evaluate the assertion, but private investors have favored other designs.
There is a split between thermal-equilibrium designs, like Tokamak, and those relying on non-linear plasma fluid effects to achieve much greater compression in selected places and/or times where fusion should happen. Plasma fluid dynamics is tricky. Plasma fluid radiology is harder.
There's no reason why 2050 has to be the target year other than the numerical roundness lends itself to sci-fi futurism. This isn't Sim City 2000.
It could have been earlier had there been more effort put into it in the past. Just look at that chart- even if the projections were wildly optimistic, it still seems like there was no political will to even try.
Because there was no point. It was already known it would be radically more costly than fission.
So, money spent on fusion is welfare for the military contractors who build the test articles, and for hot-neutron physicists who might be needed for weapons work.
It is good that a few plasma fluid dynamics physicists and their grad students get the odd bone or two, because it is a too-neglected field. It would be better to give them the whole budget.
It was and is a speculative technology, but what is the harm in reallocating funding from say, fossil fuel subsidies, into fusion R&D? Even as a purely scientific endeavor, who knows what kinds of useful knowledge and applicable by-products might be found along the way. If fusion is such a dead end, why have there actually been new discoveries made over the past several years, even if they might be hyped? Do you believe MIT/CFS, TAE, JET, or ASIPP are just burning money or something? Who are you to claim that a technology is impossible? Skepticism in fission does not have to convert to the dismissal of fusion.
What happened at TMI was wildly exaggerated by anti-nuke activists. Obviously they took full advantage of the public's ignorance to instill fear into the public such that Nuclear was DOA in the years and decades after their agitative activism. And, so here we are.
TMI has been consistently lowballed by nuke advocates.
In particular, its very large "venting" of radioactive krypton gas that ran down to the river and spread out in neighborhoods on the riverbanks is never counted among its impacts.
Why Jane Fonda? I know she protested arctic drilling during the Obama years, but other than starring in The China Syndrome, a work of fiction she neither wrote nor directed and was not the only actor to star in, what did she ever have to do with nuclear protesting?
After starring in The China Syndrome she became a huge anti-nuclear zealot and would hold protests and drew lots of attention and bent many ears her way with her stardom and her Hollywood “expertise.”
> This person is the most responsible person for the situation we're in right now
You can't possible mean this. She is more responsible than Putin? It's her fault that German politicians ignored all the warnings and choose to depend on Russian fossil fuel? It's her fault that we did not start the massive move away from fossil fuel we needed to do 10-15 years ago, and which would have stripped Putin of his fossil power?
I can see how OP means just that. Nuclear construction went from skyrocketing to free fall after Ronda’s starring in The China Syndrome led her to become an anti-nuclear hyperevangelist. People listened to her and the Three Mile Island incident shortly thereafter could plausibly be said to have been blown way out of proportion with her amplifying voice.
It’s not unreasonable to think that if that movie and Fonda’s anti-nuclear bent never happened, nuclear would have become so profligate that nothing Putin did would have given him a hold over the Western energy sector.
At most I thought it was gossip for the bored (e.g. “did you hear Kim K is voting for BLAH BLAH BLAH?? She’s right, yellow-tailed Californian sea urchins are people too this is like so important you guys BLAH BLAH BLAH”).
People really vote based on what celebrities think? Why?
That they might align at times with a better decision does not imply they made a logical decision. In many instances they were making emotional appeals, if I recall correctly.
Also, it's to hard to imagine that any of the other Democrat candidates for president could have fared worse than Biden. Bloomberg or Bernie, I think could have done a better job so far. The others were a bit green and likely unprepared for global events, but even so, could one imagine them dong any worse? There is a fair chance they could have done better.
"Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart..."
Trump spoke like Eudora Welty on amphetamines. It was all over the place, garden-path on uppers; Biden can't seem to properly read off a teleprompter. Any of the other Democrat candidates would represent the presidency better, I think.
HN loves to assume that if someone bashes a Democrat then they’re big Trump fans. I don’t know GP and I don’t know which way he/she leans politically, but I wouldn’t think that their post should be read as “compared to Trump, Biden is….”
Funny how people seem to bring it up as if it matters. He was President for four years, so he's got an actual record to be judged on. The fact that he had his own reality TV show before that is irrelevant.
You're right. We've gone from "This guy's only claim to fame is being born rich and starring in a reality TV show, he's probably not going to be a very good president" to "We had 4 years of this guy as president and he sucked big time".
> Since the Ukraine crisis the EU is relabeling everything ESG
I remember reading about the "relabeling" long before UK crisis. It started as Germany wanting to label gas as green to defend their high interest in Russian gas and going all surprised when France pulled the "Nuclear is cleaner than gas so it's green too, right ?" card. Current crisis probably helped Nuclear to make the cut because it originally wasn't a done deal at all.
Knowing its 42°C currently in France and 40°C in UK, that we blasted previous temp records two times in two months, well I think we should make it mandatory to build reactors.
All political decisions in western democracies have a hard limit of a four year time horizon. Sure, there are times when collective decisions can be made with decades of planning - but only if they can fall through the increasingly narrow gaps between left/right politics.
Don't get me wrong, it's still better than any alternative I've seen anywhere, but it has its weaknesses.
Yeah, but that limits decision making to about 4 years if you have 5 year election cycles.
The last year you don’t want to piss off the voters so you have to be very sparse in getting anything done, so the last year in the election run up is spent pandering to as many people as possible rather than actually doing any of the real work.
Even if in the end you get multiple terms in office, you were never guaranteed re-election, so you were forced to make short term plans regardless (to stop the other lot getting in instead).
Nobody cared about climate change 20 years ago, at least not enough to build nuclear power. People laughed at Al Gore and called it a hoax or denies it.
People only really started abandoning nuclear power with the advent of fukushima.
"Nobody" cared, yet the Vice President on the US was picked partly because of his strong credentials on the issue. Gore published "Earth in Balance" exactly 20 years ago, and even then it contained nothing new or controversial outside the Fox News bubble.
Nobody cares enough about climate change even now to actually do anything serious about it.
Even in countries where both sides of politics pay lip service to agreeing for the need for radical changes they haven't been happening. And in others we still have entire political parties arguing against even minimal adjustments to our economies.
We're basically hanging all our hopes on some sort of technological miracle.
Does it? I feel like if we overbuild wind by like a factor of x5 in whole of Europe (on top of the median load factor, not assuming 100% of course), we would pretty much not need coal or gas. x5 ratio is still lower than nuclear reactor budget and time ratios overrun in the last 2 decades.
That being said I'm all for not putting all our eggs in the same basket, and having both nuclear, wind, solar AND coal and gas plants is fine by me (but the plan must say that the coal and gas plants will never be in use, but they are ready "just in case")
5x overbuild won't be enough, as I mentioned elsewhere at least in TX its not unusual for the wind to be producing at less than 15% of rated capacity. Particularly in the winter/summer when the energy load is at its highest.
So, like the 8% production two weeks ago, you need a 10x overbuild _just_ to reach rated capacity consistently. And you probably need some kind of long term storage as well for when it really goes bad.
There is a huge difference between slow to dispatch (coal/nuke/etc) plants which take hours to come up to full pressure, and simply not having anything that can come online (solar/wind) for a predicted weather event.
> 5x overbuild won't be enough, as I mentioned elsewhere at least in TX its not unusual for the wind to be producing at less than 15% of rated capacity. Particularly in the winter/summer when the energy load is at its highest.
Unless TX has a median load factor of 100% (in which case, wow), 5x overbuilding on top of median load factor definitely works in the case you describe.
As far as I know, the typical wind average load factor is 33%. So over-scaling by 5x of that would mean that 7% is still enough to provide. Granted, that's not a very large margin to the 8% you mention, but Europe is bigger than Texas, so it's less likely to have such a low-wind event.
Your just restating (or not understanding) what I said, the average is misleading because its seasonal, which isn't even clear unless you look for it in the graphs (because they swing). edit: (and I should be clear, its still swinging when the daily average is 5%, it might say produce 8% during the evening but only 2% during the day).
You will have to tweak the graph because I didn't spend the time to figure out how to create a link to a graph which isolates just wind, and then expands the time-frame out to an entire year.
If you do that, what you see is during the summer the lulls are much lower and last for much longer. AKA it might go for a week or two basically not producing anything. It happens at other times of the year too, but during the spring/fall the weather is changing faster (aka its less stable) and the running average goes up.
This is what the wind/solar people seem to refuse to understand, its not a simple averaged calculation over a year because the worse case is much much worse for storage and capacity. The wind blows at 5% nameplate for two weeks, and the amount of storage and overbuild required to bridge that makes it an order of magnitude more expensive than pretty much every other source. Made massively worse because in say TX, that is also when energy consumption peaks.
You'll notice that I mentioned over-scaling wind, not solar. I'm not a fan of solar overall, except maybe some clever big projects like using deserts, and for personal self-sufficiency (where people would over-scale a lot).
I don't mind keeping building solar panels, but subsidizing requires proper analysis of the benefits and externalities (notably on the grid) rather than blindly giving money to anyone saying !SOLAR! like we currently do.
Thanks for the article, I didn't know climate models estimated EU will have less wind, I expected we would get more wind.
That being said, the article is pretty low on numbers. The only actual number shown is -32% in UK. Which can totally be overcome by having 5x overproduction in whole of Europe.
We of course need to overbuild. You can do x4 for off shore wind and still come out ahead of nuclear. That map also corresponds to the time of year solar works 16 hours per day in Europe. It also shows that France Italy and the eastern part of the Baltics had more wind than usual.
Again... what do you do, when there's no wind along the baltic coast? Even a single windless night? Do you turn peoples power off, until it starts blowing again?
was presumably the answer to that. Now of course one does need a proper analysis of weather patterns (wind+sun) over the whole of Europe over the long term to know how well it would actually work. But it is a fairly large area.
In a world of increasingly broken supply chains, insane inflation, and gross materials shortages, I would never be hypothesizing about over-building anything.
or batteries / battery analogs. It is possible to solve this problem with tools we currently have. If we're thinking long term, we do not require coal or gas for power generation given sufficient hydro, wind, solar and storage. Cryogenic air, pumped hydro, and other storage designs are possible.
Chemical batteries are completely useless and expensive gimmick in state-wide storage of electric energy. Cost is main reason why it is cheaper to build coal/gas plant instead.
From what I've read batteries are the preferred option for short-term zero-emissions levelling but once you get into longer term stuff you start looking at storing compressed air or hydrogen in salt caverns. But hydrogen cracking/storage as a grid-level utility is still at the experimental stage.
Power-to-gas (Hydrogen or Methane) as battery is from my perspective only viable solution. Everything else appears to be more or less elaborate attempt to suck subsidies, but provide inadequate system.
Right when you hear about power problem in TX, its _always_ when the wind isn't blowing. All that wind power has slowed investment in anything that isn't a gas plant, yet its all those gas plants running at 100% capacity and the wind basically producing at <10% which are a problem. Because apparently ERCOT is just adding the wind power (well based on some statistical weather analysis) to the total state capacity instead of assuming its 0% in their worse case calculations.
During the shortages two weeks ago the wind farms were producing at 8% of rated capacity, and that isn't an unusual amount for this time of year. The wind farms do fantastic in the spring/fall when we don't need much energy, but then in the winter and summer they are frequently less than 15% of rated capacity.
Yep... you need 100% of use covered even if it's a windless night (no solar, no wind), and then turn off (eg hydro, gas) when you have both wind and sun.
Puting just wind and sun infrastructure means constant blackouts.
Never mind that nuclear isnt dispatchable either (ramping down production can be done but it basically just wastes energy) and also needs to be paired with storage or gas to work.
Depending on who you talk to and your definitions, nuclear is generally considered dispatchable. The only definitively non-dispatchable sources are e.g. wind and solar where they cannot guarantee power levels and availability during the dispatching window. It is a bit of a spectrum - some sources (i.e. nat gas plants) are considered highly dispatchable because they can be spun up and down and adjust power levels very quickly (i.e. load following).
There is not enough geographical locations. Sorry to bust your dream, but not every country in Europe is Switzerland or Austria with useful valleys and rivers in them
If you only have one reactor, sure... if you only have one solar cell, even a bird can stop electricity production. But, if you have multiple/many nuclear powerplants (such as france does), you can turn off one reactore and the others will take the load, fix the first, turn it back on, turn the second one off, do whatever, bring it back on,.... With solar, when it's night, it's night for all the solar cells in your country, and when there is very little or no wind, this can be true for whole regios or even your whole country again.
First, as others have pointed out, Nukes can be throttled, they don't tend to be because its not economically efficient (basically the entire cost is front loaded in the construction).
But there is a _HUGE_ difference between simply not having the capacity because the wind isn't blowing, and having to predict 12-24 hours in advance what the energy load is going to be. In the latter case its entirely possible to spin a nuke or coal plant up in anticipation of the need.
Plus, if you overbuilt nukes, and could guarantee a consistent energy overproduction then you could build all kinds of energy soaking plants, to say desalinate sea water, produce various liquid fuels, etc as well as drive the acceptance of electric cars with free night/weekend charging schedules.
This is actually one of my issues with the Biden administrations "we need more charging" stations drive recently. Charging stations are a problem that will fix themselves when people can look at electric cars and actually say "i'm not driving a coal burner around" and its a no brainier to charge this thing vs buying gas. Until recently that calculation isn't clear, your playing around the edges with the numbers, and the best cases aren't even 2x. Continent wide off peak free and clean electricity for charging makes it obvious which is better. When that happens gas stations will scramble to install charging.
> But there is a _HUGE_ difference between simply not having the capacity because the wind isn't blowing, and having to predict 12-24 hours in advance what the energy load is going to be. In the latter case its entirely possible to spin a nuke or coal plant up in anticipation of the need.
It seems like you think that no wind or wind comes as a complete surprise and that they don't use models to estimate the wind for the next day? How do you think the day-ahead prices are calculated? 1GW missing is 1GW missing, it doesn't matter if that's wind or nuclear. That mismatch needs to be accounted for.
The point isn't that they aren't modeling it, the point is when there is a shortfall, they can't just tell the wind to produce more, they have to find more traditional sources, and when those run out... well... calls for conservation and rolling blackouts when those fail.
And they can and do, tell traditional plants they can't go down for maintenance, or that they have to come back online.
I don't get how this relates to my original point. Do you agree or disagree that both wind and nuclear need fossil fuel backups if there is no hydro that can fill in for the missing capacity?
Are you suggesting to run the current ones at lower than optimal output and only run at optimal output when necessary? That doesn't sound like a good use of capital.
Vs having 100% of your worse case capacity in gas plants sitting around idle?
The solar/wind numbers aren't even remotely comparable at this point because no one factors those in until the power bill shows up, then somehow the price goes up as we add more "cheap" renewables.
Ok sure, ignore the CO2 costs... Because without nukes your going to get carbon production, and with energy usage growing year over year, CO2 usage will continue to increase. If your lucky it might go down for a couple years before resuming the upward trend, but that doesn't even look probable at this point since countries are killing their carbon free sources (nukes) faster than they are growing the percentage of CO2 free energy production.
And those nukes are going to look downright inexpensive if/when we ever get the point of consuming more than say 2/3'rds of the yearly power from wind/solar.
So, keep wishing for that magic renewable bullet and keep watching the gobal CO2 increase and getting pushback from people who aren't happy about rolling blackouts, or their energy prices going up and up and up.
If the greenheads got out of the way and stopped trying to kill every nuke plant the engineering and construction prices would fall significantly. Its not like they are actually that hard to build, we did it in the past, and places that aren't Europe and the US somehow manage to do it for significantly less too. AKA, the price is a political problem not a technical one.
Each nuke project greenlighted means burning coal for ten or more years while building it. The money spent just on that coal over those ten years would have paid for enough solar to displace it all, immediately, and then more after.
The money handed over to the contractor for the nuke, meanwhile, could have instead built out several more matching solar and wind farms, that would also come online in just a year or two, displacing that many times more CO2 emission.
So, each nuke plant started, diverting money from building out renewables, brings climate catastrophe nearer. Coal interests are lobbying now for nuke projects, because it means a continuing market for coal while they are built, vs. wind and solar that displace coal market share immediately.
? This sounds like fiction, have any actual numbers?
Even nuke prices outside of the US and Europe are barely more expensive these days than the cost of wind and a gas plant, making them actually less expensive when the gas plant fuel costs are factored in over its lifespan.
which has such wonderful nuggets as:
"A breakthrough came in 1963 with GE's contract to build a low-cost light-water reactor at Oyster Creek, New Jersey. By the late 1960s, overnight construction costs for new reactors had dropped to $600 to $900/kW in today's dollars — cheaper than modern gas plants. Atomic energy was on a roll."
The cost is basically bullcrap, even now, if you look at the prices for American and French companies to build plants in China sure its more than a wind farm, but actually about the same per KW when you factor in the gas plant needed to backup that wind farm, nevermind solar...
And those are basically one off, if you think the Chinese are going to be paying those premiums for their own home grown designs I think your probably missing the past 25 years or so of Chinese economic theory, which is summarized as learn how to build it utilizing foreign companies, frequently at great cost, build a few experimental copies/etc and then start stamping out home grown designs for a fraction of the cost. That is after all why your solar panels are so inexpensive. At least where I'm at though, the price of solar hasn't really declined much over the past 15 years or so, because the labor costs now account for probably 2/3th+ of the installed system costs. Going from a $1.50 a W panels to $.60 panels while the install cost climbs at a faster rate hasn't been a winning combination.
Let us know when you have installed a nuke in your house. Comparing cost of rooftop solar here to utility-scale nukes in countries with lax safety regulations and enforcement says more about you than about utility costs.
We already have gas plants, and would anyway need them regardless, so including them in the cost of the renewables is special pleading.
There's a story making the rounds here about a family who is out $11k because they bought a used ford fusion. Within 6 months of buying it, the battery died. If they could buy a replacement battery, it would run them another $14k, but they can't even do that, because the batteries for the fusion aren't being made anymore. The dealer offered them $500 to take the car off their hands.
I think the current median price for a new electric car is something like $67k. Buying used is a bit like taking the gamble of not having health insurance- maybe you'll be fine, maybe you'll get a life-wrecking bill.
That is ugly, at least in the US the car manufactures are under no obligation to provide parts beyond the warantee period, but they generally do, because its very profitable. That said, I tend to drive the wheels off my cars, but since my first, I've tended to buy very popular models, meaning that there is a nearly unlimited supply of junkyard parts. I would expect that is a partial solution to their problem. A wrecked car probably has a fine battery if it wasn't damaged in the wreck. That is the usual answer even with ICE cars because sh*t happens to them too, blown engine/transmission/whatever can easily exceed the purchase price/value of the car.
OTOH, there are probably various borderline amoral ways to deal with the problem by shifting it somewhere else.
Except that engines and transmissions almost never cost as much to repair or even replace as batteries (which are getting more and more expensive over time as supply chain and materials shortages increase). They are also repairable by more people, including the actual vehicle owner.
That is largely though because people aren't buying new engines/transmissions from the manufacture when they fail. Instead there is a robust remanufacturing industry which takes the old broken ones, and basically repairs them and sells them back through the auto parts supply chains.
So, while its true a new battery pack costs a small fortune, most of them probably aren't completely useless when they fail. If car packs are anything like power tool packs, old laptop packs, and the like then they generally go "bad" when a cell or two get far enough out of spec that its not safe to charge/discharge them as a pack because the charge controllers aren't fine grained enough to manage each cell individually beyond monitoring. The internet are full of DYI projects where people collected packs with 18650 batteries, tore them out, quantified them, and then rebuilt them into packs with matching cells.
I'm betting this holds true even for car packs not using a battery standard like the 18650s. Given a pile of back packs, they could be torn apart, the cells rematched, and then rebuilt into remanufactured packs. Sure they won't be 120% or whatever over their original capacity like the new ones, but a battery pack with 85% of its capacity sold for 1/8th of the price of a new one will likely have a market.
BTW: Couple years ago when I was in yellowstone, Toyota had a big plaque on one of the visitor centers about how they were reusing prius batteries for solar backup.
I think it is a pretty bad sign when the cost of replacing a part is higher than the cost of the whole thing.
I suspect this will continue to be true for any used EV whose MSRP (i.e. brand new price) is under $30k. If true, then EVs are the vehicle equivalent of single-use plastics.
btw... there is _HUGE_ difference between it is possible to do something in theory than in praxis, there is NO nuclear reactor that could scale in short periods of time.
france which is _HUGE_ on nuclear still has at least ~7-12% of gas (depending if they can use solar and wind or not)
and they still import power. so it's basically bullshit that it's just economically efficient, it's simple not possible, else it would've been done, but there are only load following plants and not more and there are still no small plants or fusion plants or some other stuff.
Its not theory, the US navy doesn't run gas backup plants on the subs/carriers. Their reactors follow the load, and its not an insignificant variation, since propulsion is on demand and in the case of a sub, likely the largest consumer.
1. they use diesel generators as backup (they need to and it's a safety net)
2. they follow the load but they also pump out unnecessary energy (heat) into the ocean (you can't do that with normal reactors, BECAUSE you don't have infinite cooling water)
3. it's way smaller and the load is way smaller < 100 MW which of course makes load following way way more easier
The fact that sometimes energy needs to be dumped != system cannot be throttled. And a huge number of nuke plants are already on the coast so, they have just as much water as a sub (not that this really matters).
And I suspect size isn't really a factor here, its more about time variance, which I suspect is higher on a ship than its is on the grid. The grid wouldn't be swinging its power usage as drastically or completely as one would expect from propulsion onboard a ship.
This is more about whether its possible to run the reactor at say 50% rated capacity for long periods of time, which AFAIK naval reactors can do, and to a certain extent so can some civilian plants, rod placement controls not just criticality but in the end heat generation, which translates to power output.
Perhaps the best time to build one is 20 years from now with the hope that by then someone else has sorted out how to do it without exceeding an already enormous budget by a factor of four as with Olkiluoto (so far, it's still in trials that it failed on the first attempt). Plus, to get out of gas you'd need tons of storage anyway as current nuclear reactors aren't very reactive, that's what gas plants do. But if you do invest in storage and make that work well, might just overbuild renewables and limit nuclear reactors to specific niches.
I find it amusing how the phrase "overbuild renewables" is thrown about several times in this thread as if it's a good thing. It's not. You must acknowledge that the materials and supply chain required for the wind/solar hypothetical simply don't exist.
> Financial concerns may also deter investors from putting money into nuclear. Plants have vast up-front costs, and there is a long wait for profits due to lengthy development and construction times, particularly in comparison to renewables. Recent new-builds, including the Finland's Olkiluoto nuclear plant, France's Flamanville 3 and the U.K.'s Hinkley Point C, all suffered from huge delays and cost overruns.
> Such issues further complicate both efforts to raise investment for nuclear and policy makers' reliance on the technology to meet environmental goals.
If we'd done what Nixon suggested climate change would probably not be a problem, as not only would we emit less than half current carbon emissions but the rest of the world would have followed and we'd have a huge nuclear power supply chain to make it easier for them to do that. We'd now be replacing gasoline and diesel with EVs and our carbon emissions would be falling rapidly.
While solar and wind have advanced quite a bit to the point that they're a viable option in many regions, whether or not nuclear is at least on the table is the litmus test for whether someone actually takes climate change seriously. Anyone who dogmatically rules out nuclear either doesn't actually believe in climate change or is hopelessly ignorant.
At the very least Germany and other countries should be leaving the perfectly good nuclear plants they already have online until the end of their operable life as they build out renewables and shut down coal and gas. The priority should always be shutting down fossil fuels first.
Energy and politics are intertwined. Nixon’s alcoholism and mental illness took him out of the picture, and really killed the more traditional “establishment” GOP; a new generation of “conservatives” was empowered and eventually took over the GOP.
Who funded these newcomers? Oil, gas and friends was a big part of it. We converted to coal instead as a result.
One of the outcomes of “Project Independence” was that oil fired plants were converted to coal.
Heavy oil is mostly imported, that initiative was focused on using domestic sources of energy. Coal always has outsized influence due to the US Senate.
Calling it a "Ukraine crisis" omits mentioning Russia and the full-scale invasion of annihilation and genocide it's conducting. Please, consider calling it "Russian invasion of Ukraine" or similar. Thank you.
So many things can happen when the boomers retire, including not just this but building more housing stock in insanely overpriced NIMBY cities and building public transit.
Why do people think that selfishness is quality only found in boomers? Reality check even when the boomers are all dead there's still going to be shortsighted selfish people running the show
This is yet another instance of a phenomenon: When you have good outcomes and bad outcomes, and you take some preventative measures to reduce the likelihood of bad outcomes, as time goes by people start believing that the bad outcomes don't really exist and get rid of the preventative measures. Example, energy independence from Russia and shutting down nuclear reactors. Another example, people think there's no point in taking vaccines.
Most of the resistance I’ve seen against vaccines have been against ones that are highly beneficial relative to their risks. Have you seen pushback against ones that weren’t?
I’ve literally seen folks push back against Tetanus, Polio, MMR, etc.
Tetanus and polio do horrifying things to the body; measles and mumps are sort of mid-level, right? And something like chicken pox has a vaccine now, but is relatively harmless if you catch it as a child.
Chicken pox may be harmless as a child. That virus also causes shingles and that is NOT harmless as an adult.
edit to add: things like HPV seem harmless, but HPV infection is linked to the vast majority of cervical cancer. Things like epstein-barr are implicated in certain cancers as well.
There are no "good viruses" and just because they have mild initial symptoms does not make them harmless.
Measles is fatal in about .1% of infections (less than Covid), with hospitalization rates of about 25% and causes hearing loss and long term immune system damage in a decent number of infections.
Mumps can occasionally cause fertility issues in males, among other issues, and is quite painful but rarely fatal (approx. .03-.05%).
Shingles is terrible for adults, and you can’t avoid the risk of you got the live virus. If you’re vaccinated before being exposed, I believe the risk is much much lower but I don’t have the numbers handy.
One should never trivialize disease, but the numbers cited here is almost a magnitude too large, both for measles and covid.
The most trustworthy data sources I could find points at about .02% for measles and .03% for covid. Then of course, infection fatality rate is notoriously hard to quantify.
Different numbers of course, but not that far off -
Measles case fatality rate of 1.2% in unvaccinated population (and they tested everyone nearby, so CFR should be very near IFR here) [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8483622/]. The .02% is way too low except in perhaps already vaccinated population.
US deaths by COVID-19 are now just over 1 million. I’ve heard plenty of anecdotal stories of over and under counting, but given current US population of 329 million, and widespread vaccination, the early stage 1%ish fatality rate is about right. It couldn’t be .03% except perhaps in already vaccinated folks, otherwise we’d literally not have had a pandemic. Total fatalities with a 100% infection rate and no vaccination would be less than 100k. More than that die from normal flus and colds every year, and the excess fatality numbers make it clear that isn’t what happened.
> chicken pox has a vaccine now, but is relatively harmless if you catch it as a child.
I think if adults were catching a disease that took them out of action for a week in a fairly miserable way and gave them blisters that frequently ended up leaving permanent scars, we'd be taking it way more seriously. Kids don't make the decisions, and everyone remembers that they suffered through it, so kids these days should too...
Very true. Also, if the kids go to school or daycare (aka 95%+), they’ll get exposed to a cornocopia of disease, both known and yet to be discovered. I don’t know if you have kids, but both of mine were sick with a constant stream of different bugs from 2-3 yrs old.
I didn’t even know what foot and mouth disease even was until I saw the big ‘known exposure’ warning, and based on my youngest (for reasons out of my control) getting COVID 4 different independent times since May 2021, only one of which was a known exposure, I know there have been a lot more.
Vaccinating against the known badness just helps reduce the pain and risks of serious problems. It should be a nobrainer.
Near as I can tell however, a lot of moms and some dads can’t stand the idea of giving their kid a jab (as in, the experience of it), and use the excuse of vaccines bad to justify not doing it. Short sighted and surprising common now.
I took grandparent comment's reference to be the resistance to COVID-19 vaccines, which could have prevented endemic establishment in the US of COVID-19 had the GOP base adopted them quicker (along with non-pharmaceutical interventions). The mRNA vaccines are an absolute gamechanger in this space. I am glad we have the technology available.
EDIT: Whoa, people surprisingly hate this comment. It's true though -- rural red counties have been hit much harder, due to demographic factors, lower vaccine uptake as well as boosting, lower access, and lower testing generally (leading to higher serology rate differentials to reported counts). The entire state of GA, for example, looks like each county has low case counts compared to the rest of the US until you realize testing there only captures 1 in 4 cases. This selective intransigence to public health measures was a problem when there was one case, and has persisted to be a problem until today.
This is false. There was no chance of ever stopping covid-19 from reaching endemic status with vaccines. Covid simply is too tranmisable and rapidly changing and spread quickly too wild animal populations such as deer. It was right to be cautious and attempt continment/eradication initially when there was still so much unknown but it's clear now we never stood a chance.
> There was no chance of ever stopping covid-19 from reaching endemic status with vaccines
>> COVID-19 vaccines, which could have prevented endemic establishment in the US of COVID-19 had the GOP base adopted them quicker _(along with non-pharmaceutical interventions)_.
Feel free to research what each state/county chose to implement, most of which were never actually solidly set up (meaning the policies had large loopholes that made the NPi fairly ineffective). Note that the US Federal Govt could not implement a global set of policies, instead relying on antiquated design where individual states and counties implemented what they felt like without regard to geographical integration.
It's more likely to be vaccines for measles and DPT (diptheria, pertussis [whooping cough], and tetanus).
No one gets those diseases [because of vaccines, unstated and ignored] and so there's no point inflicting the unspeakable horror of an innoculation on your precious precious baby... is the reasoning.
They weren't ignored, they were given the same advice and a subset did not think it applied. That's different, in my view. Reinfections can and do occur -- lower than vaccine breakthrough for Delta, but not necessarily true for other strains like Omnicron and subvariants.
> Did the GOP's reach extend to the island nation of New Zealand on the other side of the globe?
Well, yeah. New Zealand had great policies and good compliance.
Then the same shitty murdoch and facebook led conspiracy theories, selfishness, and lies spread. Now they're dealing with the same issues as everyone else. Plus without the insane propaganda machine, lack of aid, and hoarding of unused vaccines we may not have even developed some of the mutations or had it become endemic in animal populations.
At least people in new zealand had a chance to get fully vaccinated there and avoid the short term death toll though.
No, since all currently available nuclear reactor models are way more expensive to build than renewables. And a lot of tangentials remain open. Like where to get and reprocess fuel rods? What about operational safety? And most of all, where to dump the radiactive waste?
But in the end, just the price will kill them on any larger scale.
>And a lot of tangentials remain open. Like where to get and reprocess fuel rods? What about operational safety? And most of all, where to dump the radiactive waste?
All solved issues - nuclear energy is a matter of political will at this point.
I recently saw a documentary where someone was researching what the best way would be to label nuclear waste facilities such that future (far, far furture) generations would understand what's in there. You can't just slam an English text on there and hope in tens of thousands of years it will be understood by whatever creature visits it. Even only in light of just that, calling everything solved is a bit far fetched, no?
I can understand it's a stimulating problem for the brain.
In terms of priorities it doesn't make any sense at all to me though. It's hard to get the global population to care and act about what the GLOBAL state of the planet will be by the end of the century.
So I really could not care less if by accident a few people dug a hole in tens of thousand of years at the wrong place and it created an issue. It's not like the whole human population would meet at this same spot and quickly dig a hole deep enough together so that they all get radiated...
In my mind, continued storage of nuclear waste will always have to remain an active process. Dispose and forget like in a landfill isn’t an option if you care about the long-term risks.
That seems super unlikely to be a problem. For long term storage, I'd expect that we'll dig a deep shaft, or use an existing abandoned mine, and then seal it back up. Any group of humans who are willing and able to make a hole through several meters of concrete in order to get at the stuff will almost certainly also have the technological sophistication to know what radiation is, and that radioactive isotopes are dangerous.
Also, if you do decide to leave a message anyway, you'll just have to make it interpretable to a human, not to any possible "creature". 10 000 years is nothing on evolutionary time scales, so it will still just be us humans around, (or nobody at all, if we happen to go extinct first).
But in ten of thousands of years, all radioactive waste will be low activity, no? I mean, we do have prototype reactors that now use actanids as fuel, so the medium lasting high activity waste issue is now dealt with. Don't we only have to worry about the next 300 years for to radioactivity to go down to granitic cave levels?
If operational safety were a completely solved problem nuclear plants would be able to buy insurance without a liability cap of <0.5% of the cost of dealing with 1 fukushima.
As it is, even with that subsidy financing plants is basically impossible without more subsidies. Bill Gates' new reactor startup required taxpayers to fund 50% of it to even exist.
The reason why I believe operational safety is a solved problem: the US Navy has run reactors on board ships and submarines since the 50s, with 0 reactor accidents.
Nuclear can provide base load. Battery tech or other storage options are nowhere near developed/scalable enough to do that. Solar and wind always needs natural gas or similar as a backup.
The whole concept of "base load" is wrong. Electric networks need to provide exactly as much power as demmanded at any point in time to remain stable. "Base load" was just a statistical construct to determine which fraction of the total load is constant and can consequently served by slow power plants. Like nuclear and coal. To maintain a stable grid, you always needed quick power plants like gas and water.
Yes, solar and wind will need to be accompanied by lets call them "on-demand" power sources, like gas, water, in the future large-scale storage and of course power2gas for entirely renewal gas production.
By the way, the "base load" was artificially increased in the past to accommodate the mainly slow power plants. This is no longer a requirement, future loads will be more dynamic and more adjusted to the market offers.
This is a confusing statement. Are you saying that there is no reasonable minimum amount of electricity that needs to be available all of the time? That would make no sense given that we never have situations where there is zero usage of electricity.
In your scenario where we use renewables + gas, water, and storage which of these would be ensuring that we at least have enough to satisfy the loads on the grid that never turn off or vary? Everything on that list except gas is subject to forces we cannot directly control so I assume you would need a certain number of gas power plants to always be in production or idling to satisfy that demand.
Well, as statistics clearly show, there is a minimum demand 24/7. But that is just one characteristic number. That is the demand you always have to provide through the year. But at any time, more power is required, you have to provide that too. You cannot treat power demand over the "base load" any differently than the base load. Which type of energy production you might be using, you need to plan the ability to ramp up the production.
So it isn't that you require special sources for the "base load", that can be provided by solar+wind, if they are available in the necessary amount. It is just that "base load" can also be provided by slow power plants.
The big problem with nuclear from the grid side is, that they are the slowest power plants available. Consequently, (and because of cost efficiency) they are run at high power output levels 24/7, the rest of the grid has to adjust by being throttled or fast plants which can be ramped up and down.
Gas is the fastest type of classical power plants (together with water, but that usually has limited amounts). And as the fuel always was on the expensive side, there is quite an incentive of not running gas power plants too much. They would be a good company to renewables, as they can switch between 0 and 100% and back very quickly. And in a grid dominated by renewables, you would only rarely run them at high loads for longer times. And while they emit more CO2 than nuclear plants, they do distinctively less than coal powered plans.
In the long run, you can run gas plants on e.g. hydrogen produced from solar - the recent plans for extending gas power plants in Germany all included the requirement to be usable with hydrogen too.
> The baseload[1] (also base load) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week. This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of low cost, availability and high reliability in any particular market.
> [...]
> According to National Grid plc chief executive officer Steve Holliday and others, baseload is "outdated".[7][6]
Burning gas emits a lot of CO2. Nuclear power emits zero CO2. Solar and wind power do not work at night (and in overcast conditions). Weather prediction horizon is 2 week tops. Grid-scale energy storage is way too expensive.
Conclusion: we need nuclear (and most certainly we don’t need gas).
Solar doesn't work at night of course, but wind power does. Actually, on average, it is stronger at night. Yes, we have to supply power in the times of low renewable production. Though there are renewables which are good for it like biomass and water.
Nuclear is the worst to accompany renewables, because it is the slowest power source from a load switching perspective. Gas is the one which is fast switching, that is why the typical peaker plants run on gas. They could run on oil of course, but that would be much worse.
In the future, the gas is to be produced renewable, and of course energy storate has to be extended.
Right, but the renewables are the one power source which is well suited going into the future. They don't use up any non-renewable source (hence the name), and they are the one energy production which is really available in most countries. All the others more or less depend on imports.
It can follow the fluctuations during the day. That's what is done in France. It is not efficient at all since a NPP cost mostly the same regardless of its power generation, and is technically a bit more complex, but perfectly doable.
>Electric networks need to provide exactly as much power as demmanded at any point in time to remain stable.
Great, so what do we do when the sun isn't shining, the wind isn't blowing and the dams are empty? Just have a second grid worth of gas plants which we turn on once every two weeks for shits and giggles?
> a second grid worth of gas plants which we turn on once every two weeks
What if it just requires keeping the existing plants around, and turning them on for 6 hours every 8 weeks, for example?
Yes, that's not 100% renewable, but it gets electricity production to 99% renewable, and that other 1% you can mitigate by doing power-to-gas / direct-air-capture.
The same what I am doing when all the nuclear power plants are down.
In fact this isn't going to happen and there needs to be enough fungible capacity both internally and in the European grid. Right now, France is highly dependent on the grid, as 50% of the nuclear plants are down.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Time is just a statistical construct, but it's also a useful one. Similarly, base load is a concept to determine how power generation should be distributed between high reliability/consistent sources, vs less consistent sources.
The thing is, if the demand of the grid raises, you have to raise power production. Period. Of course, if e.g. it is dark, you cannot raise the power production of solar cells. That is bad. But if your nuclear plant is running at 100% already, you cannot rise the power production either. So it doesn't help you. "Base load" is only the statistical number of load you can expect 24/7 for your planning.
So you always have to have some means of power generation available for demand raises at any point and you have to be able to throttle down power generation in case of a demand drop, because otherwise the grid goes down equally as if you had not enough power capacity.
The good news is: renewables can be throttled down quickly, better than most other sources, the bad news is, you can only know about 3 days in advance what the maximum output of your renewables will be and there are days with very low total production. A future grid concept would have to come up with a solution for that. Gas would have been the easy way and probably will be the future when based on gas created via power2gas.
yes. they don't do a good job of dealing with seasonal variability, but batteries are great at dealing with milliseconds to hours, and pumped hydro is great on scales from minutes to weeks
This is an incredible misunderstanding! Honestly, it's like saying that planet Earth is flat.
Did you meant something like "time zones are a social construct"? This true but quite a different claim that the one you made (which is not surprising since what you said is just nonsense).
So you propose turning every mountain valley into an environmentally destructive storage battery? If we are willing to do that, why not just invest more in hydro power, since one of the big limits is the public's low tolerance for the environmental damage it causes? If we are just ignoring that damage or ignoring the public, why not build out basic hydro and not 'pumped storage'?
Hinkley Point C is being funded privately, based on a mechanism whereby the government guarantees EDF receive £92.50/MWh. This was thought of as expensive when the deal was being negotiated but the current wholesale price has been above that level for most of the past 12 months and is currently about £243/MWh. While EDF get the difference made up when the price is below the strike price, they pay back the difference if the wholesale price is higher.
And also a subject to state security and political leverage. I definitely would not like to be dependent on anti-nuke Austria fanatics who would be limiting storage capacity to me, just because I am using nuclear power plant.
I have a very hard time reading online forums. How come people do not see what I see? How can someone not see the constant stream of the same automatic thoughts again and again?
Each major topic, including nuclear has comments from people like you and those comments are always the same old introductory talking points depite the author having seen them refuted countless time. How can someone not bore himself and be that mentally immutable? How many times again in their life will people say the same answer and stay imprisoned in the topic introductionnary level?
It is remarkable.
Anyway let's address the comment:
> all currently available nuclear reactor models are way more expensive to build than renewables
Okay you use all, a universal quantifier which is epistemologically very weak.
For starters the economical costs are accidental bureaucratic contingencies. The interest rate is a self-fullifling prophethy and most of nuclear reactors have been created pre-bureaucratic era, are still in use and are actually much less deadly than C02 air pollution so let's admit the talking point is ad-hoc mediocrity.
Secondly even if you take into account the economics of nuclear reactors from countries that have abandoned nuclear.. you have to realize how absurd the comparison is:
1) renewable is increasing the cost of nuclear operation (underusage of maximal throughput) for nor reason
2) solar panel have a short lifespan (20-30 years) with diminishing returns of efficiency, compare that with the lifepsan of 80-90 years that nuclear often attain and you see that the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled.
3) Essentially it's time to try to avoid making absurd statements. Solar and wind economics are absurd, inexistant once you necessitate a storage grid (e.g. no light at night or with mild weather) and this which is barely doable (still no single real world deployment of a smart grid fully renewable (without cheats like hydro) exists) and has absurd economics (not even talking about the immense stress that would have on lithium resources which are seriously needed for the future of mankind). 3) just show how strong the level of virtue signaling/hypocrisy going on.
4) actually if your country hasn't become crazy you can have nuclear that are more economical even without considering 3), which is likely the case of China but most evidently is the case of Russia, which like it or not is the world leader by far, the new VVER-TOI are disruptive, both in economics and time to build (3.5 years), while simultaneously improving upon safety.
> where to get and reprocess fuel rods
this is not an issue
> What about operational safety
well if you're not retarded enough to build a plant in a major seismic/tsunami region the operational safety is much superior to all other classses of energies. Renewable induce more deaths than nuclear.
> where to dump the radiactive waste
You are talking about a fiction, in france nuclear generate a few kilos of waste per habitant, per year. The majority of nuclear wastes do not come from the nuclear industry and are a non issue since we have many depositories in place and the vast majority become negligibly radioactive after a few years. About the long term part while its very easy to isolate like many kinds of equally or more toxic industrial wastes, it can be reprocessed as MOX fuel however it is slighly less economical but only of a few percents.
In the end, once renewable reach a major percentage of energy and heat production, the use of gaz and fuel as pilotable energies will skyrocket making the point moot. If nuclear become the needed pilotable energy it makes renewable economics moot. Hence obviously renewable use will be very limited.
Also I foresee that the russian nuclear export monopoly will massively grow although china might take a slice and so could Korea and France iff France new EPR pragmatic design is not a shitshow.
#3 is the big one for me. Solar and wind can't be simultaneously "the cheapest form of energy available" and yet also require grid-scale battery technology that doesn't exist--and even if it did exist, would not be economical--and require massive government subsidies (read: taxes stolen from people to fund boondoggles). Why is it the externalities are always ignored by proponents of wind/solar but then discussing other forms of power are nitpicked to death about said externalities? It's almost like wind/solar fanatics hold religious opinions.
> compare that with the lifepsan of 80-90 years that nuclear often attain and you see that the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled.
One thing I am wary about is what the lifespan of any newly build plant would be that uses modern technology.
If you take a random 8bit home computer from 1983, all the non-mechanical parts on it likely still work today.
If you take a random computer from 1993, well most bits probably work.
If you take a random computer from 2003, if you are lucky some things work.
2013? Odds are it won't work.
The differences in manufacturing between everyday consumer electronics and high reliability electronics has grown larger and larger, for two reasons.
One is progress of Moore's law, smaller feature sizes have made electronics more susceptible to many different types of failure[1][2].
The second is RoHS[3], removing lead from solder has basically given all consumer electronics a 10 year life span.
Now of course you can get non-RoHS components, but they are not the norm, and to make things reliable you need to ensure everything is not RoHS.
Want a reliable storage medium? That is going to cost an insane multiple. Want a reliable computer? Another insane multiple, you are going to need to have something built on an ancient manufacturing process, and because you aren't getting the benefits of economies of scale you are paying more, and you are basically getting a bespoke machine so you now need to test it to heck and back to ensure reliability.
One problem with how we have chosen to advance our electronics industry is that the types of goods that are made en-masse have steadily separated from what types of goods need to be made for long term engineering projects.
An example of this in action: when Tesla first came out they realized existing automotive infotainment systems basically sucked and that they couldn't provide a good UX with anything available off the shelf at the time, so they instead plopped new consumer non-automotive gear. A touch screen that didn't suck! But it also melted. Everyone yelled at them "should have known better!" but their choices were "unreliable consumer" or "crappy behind the scenes".
Another example, RoHS doesn't have exclusions for home appliances. RoHS is also why the control board on washing machines gives out after ~10 years, necessitating purchasing a new washing machine even though the mechanics may have another decade left in them! (RoHS needs a crap ton more exclusions for long lived appliances...)
That's a lot of FUD about RoHS - especially for the consumer space.
Don't you think that maybe everything built to be as cheap as possible to barely survive the warranty period is maybe a slightly larger effect than tin whiskers?
Also old appliances typically contained less things that can break in the first place: What doesn't exist cannot break.
It's just a function of cost, do you want to engineer your device/machine to last or not, and are more features more important to you than reliability.
> Don't you think that maybe everything built to be as cheap as possible to barely survive the warranty period is maybe a slightly larger effect than tin whiskers?
YouTube recently recommended me some tear down videos of washing machines, for whatever reason. The video compared 1990s to modern machines.
The insides are remarkably similar, the main failure point is the electronics, flat out.
And in my experience (n=1), what fails on modern appliances is the electronics! Not the pumps or motors, sure sometimes those go out, but most often it is the control board.
Look at every car built since 2010. Sure you have some models with known manufacturing defects on a given part, but replace that one part and mechanically most cars are reliable. But how many cars have you come across that run just fine, but the check engine light is stuck on and the mechanic is like "well I could fix it but it will cost a lot"?
We have hundreds of years of knowledge about making reliable machines in massive quantities, and then cost reducing them (ok maybe 200 years tops), as a species we haven't even bothered trying to cost reduce reliable electronics! We just accept that they will fail.
I also had my fair share of repairing home appliances (trying to anyway) and in my N~5 sample size I was not only limited to failed control boards.
But having seen those control boards I am honestly surprised that they even survive the warranty period. They are that cheaply and badly made. From the circuit board itself to the components used. And of course not designed to be repairable at all. They have more in common with a cheap calculator than something that controls kWs of power. But allowing the manufacturer to use leaded solder would have made zero difference in their reliability.
People absolutely can build reliable electronics these days, but it will be slightly more expensive than not quite so reliable electronics.
Higher profit margin has a higher priority than making sure the product survives long after the warranty period has ended.
Especially if the consumer only looks at the initial price without taking into consideration how long it will last. Which is also hard to do without reviewers tearing the machine to bits. Being expensive does not mean it is actually any good and will last a long time.
The changes that drive the reduction in lifespan of modern electronics is a very good topic, however it is an obvious issue that is taken into account in nuclear designs. The latest VVER-TOI has a life expectancy of 60 years, upgradeable to 100 years. It is possible that they have to change the CPUs every 10 years as routine maintenance though. I don't think they are full analog nowadays.
I guess that's because you are missing part of the picture.
> For starters the economical costs are accidental bureaucratic contingencies.
Yes, everything says that it's possible to create safer nuclear reactors. But our current ones aren't. Safe reactors are on the same level of "nobody does this because of market and bureaucratic constraints" as cheap open-storage fuel cells. Except that the constraints are harder to change for the reactors.
We should be trying very hard to change both. But until we do, the reality will be that both nuclear reactors and batteries are expensive. And our current reactors are only safe because of the safeguards put on them, remove the safeguards, and they won't be safe anymore.
> renewable is increasing the cost of nuclear operation (underusage of maximal throughput) for nor reason
That's a pretty bad way to frame it. The problem here is that all non-dipatchable (on the economical sense, not the technical one) sources compete to get full utilization. That's not a problem when most of the power is dispatchable, but none of the options you are considering (renewables - except for buifuels - or nuclear) are. Adding nuclear capacity will increase the nuclear operational cost even more than renewables (because they have the same generation profile).
The only solution here is storage.
> solar panel have a short lifespan (20-30 years) with diminishing returns of efficiency ... the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled.
You noticed that you took the manufacturer guarantee and cited it as expected lifetime, right? AFAIK, we don't have a good number for how long our current tech of solar panels will last, because after just a few decades on the field, nobody catalogued enough failures to measure it. But we know it's way longer than that.
Anyway, doubling the cost of solar panels is both the wrong way to go (interest rates exist), and changes about nothing when comparing with the current costs of nuclear. (It would make them lose to coal, but then, both solar and coal are normally built by private business with proper accounting in practice to compare their costs.)
> Solar and wind economics are absurd
Well, you clearly didn't dig into those. Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries). But it will of course always lose to natural gas generation.
Anyway, natural gas generation at night is a pretty good stop-gap.
> not even talking about the immense stress that would have on lithium resources which are seriously needed for the future of mankind
I don't expect grid storage to use lithium at all, but the fact that you have gone over lithium¹ reserves and are ignoring uranium reserves shows a very biased research. TLDR, none will be a problem soon (or probably ever for lithium).
> In the end, once renewable reach a major percentage of energy and heat production, the use of gaz and fuel as pilotable energies will skyrocket making the point moot.
Well, eventually we will need storage. That's true for nuclear too.
But anyway, renewables don't increase the consumption of fossil fuel based sources in any way, so the only way they can push the prices higher is by reducing economies of scale, what is actually the goal.
1 - Of any element you could choose, you decided to go with lithium, one of the most available ones on the Earth's surface? But well, once in a while somebody pops up talking about iron or silicon shortages, so you could have done worse.
> Yes, everything says that it's possible to create safer nuclear reactors. But our current ones aren't.
1) extraordinary claim
2) completely miss the point that the 10000 bureaucratic safety rules could be trimed by half while actually improving security and reducing costs.
3) completely miss the point that current models from Russia and China are cost effective and comply with aforementioned unoptimized rules.
> remove the safeguards, and they won't be safe anymore
most of the reactors from the 70s and 80s are still in use. they have much less safeguards and are still safe enough as in you'd better invest the saved money in saving lifes/medecine research than in those hypothethical safety gains that only drive marketing and hypocrisy.
> Adding nuclear capacity will increase the nuclear operational cost even more than renewables (because they have the same generation profile).
completely miss the point that not developing renewable and going for 100% nuclear increase overall economics.
completely miss the point that nuclear plants can contrary to renewable decrease their output in a very fine grained way. Why is that interesting? The plant cost almost the same, but does not add a significant cost by overproducing electricity. When renewable overproduce electricity (which happens all the time given enough share) the excess electricity will break the electric grid and cause a nationwide shutdown. To prevent that, the Grid operator has to sell electricity at a loss (AKA pay people to consume the electricity). Given some level this startegy won't even work and will need a special costly infrastructure optimized for burning (throwing away) excess electricity.
> But we know it's way longer than that
who is we? Where is the evidence?
Also newer reactors have a lifespan extendable to 100 years hence you need to triple or quadruple the price.
And wind, which is generally much more prevalent than solar last in most cases 20 years. In 2016 they have started (in germany) installing twice as big turbines which are likely to have shorter lifespans.
> The only solution here is storage.
> Well, eventually we will need storage. That's true for nuclear too.
nuclear doesn't need energy storage.
> Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries)
please source, enligthen me, I am unable to find reliable information supporting this.
> Anyway, natural gas generation at night is a pretty good stop-gap
Please let's not be a joke, the discussion is about a long term fossil-free future. Not a thesis that only works until it doesn't.
> grid storage to use lithium at all
wtf, energy storage without batteries is niche. What are you refering to? Water, hydrogen? The majority should be with electric batteries AKA lithium. This should be obvious.
> renewables don't increase the consumption of fossil fuel based sources in any way
Renewable needs pilotable energies. Solar in january and december is almost non existent. How much is an empirical and country dependent question but bewteen 20-30% average share of fossil energy needed seems probable. Meanwhile 100% nuclear is perfectly doable. 70% renewable 30% nuclear is also doable but would be economically inefficient.
> both solar and coal are normally built by private business with proper accounting in practice to compare their costs
Wrong assumption, solar and wind in germany are extensively subsidized.
Anyway the most salient point about this discussion is the storage energy cost and feasability, of which you provide zero data.
regarding lithium availability:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/q78xv...
Enough to build 8 billions cars and then zero cars for the next generation LOL.
Now add that in addition of one car per habitant we need a similar or even bigger battery for his regular electricity uses, including house heating.
Doing policies that last for just the current generation and not the next centuries is madness.
Yes we've all heard there are HUGE reserves in the oceans. Which pointless to say. There are a looot of gold in the oceans too. The density and extractability of it is the key question. The fact this is not currently used means it cost more than current methods. How much more? x10 ? x100? x10000? Who knows? Sharing technical evidence about this issues would improve the depth of the discussion but until then we are manipulating a huge existential risk.
about uranium reserves:
right, the current estimate of reserves is of a 230 year supply at current consumption. The needed consumption for 100% would be at least a x10 so let's say we ran out of uranium in 23 years if massively adopted.
1) A major point is that contrary to lithium, the mining industry of uranium is much smaller and therefore if it received mass funding, the reserves might significantly increase.
2) like lithium there are huge oceanic reserves and like lithium, this is not a solution until proven otherwise.
3) reactors that reuse MOX fuel (like e.g. France does) can significantly (how much ?) reduce uranium consumption. Note that lithium can be recycled too but setting a global systematic recycling industry is yet to be done.
4) Indeed thorium reactors (not uranium) are the ideal solution since we have thorium for the next millenium. Thoriums reactors are not just a theoretical concepts, some have been made so it is feasable. It has not been developed because the energy efficiency/economics are inferior (how much ?) although since most of the cost is on the time to build the plant anyway, this should still be a viable solution although not necessarily as cost effective as renewable here (but with an expensive energy storage grid and pragmatic designs (like russian/chinese ones) and taking into account lifespan, and renewable need for fossil fuels/gaz, it very well could be)
As for the ocean argument it seems easier to solve for uranium though which is needed in much less quantity (because of its ernergy density) and hence needs less regional density.
Note however that water filtration methods for lithium are often similar to existing desalinisation plants. Which ironically are a great specialization for nuclear power plants.
So... The claim safeguards created after major accidents happened are necessary for safety is extraordinary?
They can probably be improved, but then, you keep comparing with Russia and China as if those two countries cared about the safety of their population.
(Anyway, there was a recent paper here on HN that looked into the issue and discovered the costs are more of a consequence of the small size of the industry than the safety constraints. That kind of problem is hard to fix, but if you want to try, it's a worthy cause.)
> completely miss the point that not developing renewable and going for 100% nuclear increase overall economics.
You seem willfully ignorant of how power generation economics work. Or are you talking about the opportunity costs of choosing the cheapest option?
>> But we know it's way longer than that
>who is we? Where is the evidence?
Hum... The first Google result I get seems to be using this data:
TLDR, the worst kind of panel they measured lost less than 2% of it's capacity per year, so about half of its capacity in 50 years. Some slightly more expensive ones lost less than 1% per year.
> > Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries)
> please source
Oh, there's a comment on this thread about how hydro-storage can hold about 10 times the requirements for the world. There was one recently about how hydrogen is perfectly sufficiently, as flawed as it is. And of curse, there is always some weird design appearing once in a while, that nobody invests in, of course, because nobody has ever invested on energy storage.
> The majority should be with electric batteries AKA lithium.
What a lack of principled thinking, this equating batteries with lithium. Lithium isn't that great for stationary storage in any way other than the batteries factories already existing.
> Renewable needs pilotable energies.
Not more of them than we are using now. Anyway, no, 100% nuclear doesn't work well either, it would be incredibly expensive. None work without storage. (By the way, you seem to have an incorrect model of why renewables don't decrease their production when they overproduce. Most of them can do it perfectly well if the overproduction becomes too severe, it just brings costs.)
> regarding lithium availability
And then we go into the "what is the meaning of that "reserves" word" treadmill... You may want to look into it in detail, as both lithium and uranium have a problem with that word. None has a problem of availability.
Anyway, about sea extraction, people have done it economically for lithium, but for uranium it's many orders of magnitude harder.
Also, about this:
> reactors that reuse MOX fuel (like e.g. France does) can significantly (how much ?) reduce uranium consumption.
In theory, recycling can reduce consumption around 1000 times (varies with every detail on the lifecycle). Breeding can do much more (that's why thorium is interesting).
Yep, thorium brings several engineering problems. Uranium breeding brings a lot of them too.
Overall, breeding reactors are currently way too expensive. They are interesting on the long term, once those solvable problems get solved. I do agree they have no place at all in a discussion about current energy crisis or global warming.
Cost is not static. Building more will create economies of scale. Most importantly, overhauling the excessive safety guidelines will give you an immediate savings
Wikipedia succinctly puts what happened last time "scale" was tried.
> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[46] [...] Eventually, more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled,[50] and the construction of new reactors ground to a halt.
> The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible.[53]
The Forbes article cited there is criticizing the American model of building nuclear but praising the French model. The difference being standardization. One could also point to South Korea as a good model. By building new plants and tinkering with both the designs and regulation the US has maximized cost, albeit while pushing the tech forward. Basically the US built almost every reactor as an R&D project over that period. We could have and still could stamp out standard designs, and then the difficulty would be in construction management. That's by no means simple stuff but it's a reasonable path forward.
So you need to cheat on the safety side of things to be a good model? Their once grandiose plan of being a nuclear power house exporting reactors stopped at exactly the 4 reactors to UAE which was signed before the scandal. Of course to an authoritarian country.
> In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[24] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[25] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[24][26]
> In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[27] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[28] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[29]
No-- but there is a middle ground between institutional paralysis requiring safety-at-any-cost... and laissez-faire, safety-be-damned!
Ever since local NY authorities prevented a distant completed reactor from ever being operated by refusing to write a regulation-mandated evacuation plan, it's been mostly impossible to build nuclear in the US. Why put lots of capital at risk when rules might change and it can be decided "ehhhh, nevermind, you can't operate!" at the end of the process years later.
You’re arguing against a straw man. I’m not advocating sacrificing safety. Nuclear in the US is regulated to a level of safety far more stringent than any other industry and out of line with the actual danger. Moreover the regulations change frequently and safety reviews of new designs get rejected without comment or feedback. Many of these regulations were written and devised by people specifically trying to tank the industry. We could take an approach that is more neutral to nuclear and base regulations on probabilistic models of risk and it would be much cheaper and just as safe.
indeed, everyone misses the fact that, for any solution to be cost-effective you need an experienced team that have built thay before, that means:
1 - all powerplants should be identical, so you can work out problems on reactor 1 and have no probpems by the time you are building reactor 55. The US model of private companies building random shit doesnt fit well. Thats how wind and solar work - they build thousands of identical solar panels and wind turbines
2 - you cant start and stop construction - if you stopped building for 10 years, your engineers have left, retired or died. Now you build a new reactor, and you are goong to have inexperienced people making the same mistakes. you have to have an institution that is building non-stop for 20 years, like china does.
thats also why wind and solar works - the same teams of people were installing and servicing turbined for decades
3 - factory made - manufacturing of wind and solar is automated to a large degree. Automation in construction is ~0%. Whether you are building a house or a reactor, they are expensive manual labour. Some of this might be solved with prefab buildings, some might be solved with Small Moduper reactors, but approached require large investment and long-term commitment
I’m not sure they all have to be the same, but settling on a few standard designs would help a lot. SMRs might be good in some cases whereas in other situations a larger plant would make sense. I think privately constructed and run plants would be fine if the regulations were clear and didn’t change so frequently.
I beg your pardon? Excessive safety guidelines? Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe? How close Japan brush with disaster as the Fukushima fallout could have hit the Tokyo region?
> Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe?
Yes. My idea is that it would be much less harm (to human health and the environment) than is caused by burning brown coal in properly functioning coal-burning power plants.
And much less harm than results from using diesel as a transport fuel. That produces very high levels of carcinogens and other harmful products.
Yet, Europe does both.
Edit: note that these harms are caused every day by equipment working as designed. They are not due to extreme unforeseen circumstances but are accepted as normal.
Have you seen the amount of pointless paperwork that has nothing to do with actual safety/better outcomes that the nuclear industry generates? It’s mind boggling.
Fukushima is a good example of this, because the massive amount of paperwork made it hard to see that they could just spend 1/10th the amount of time, energy, and money and better protect their cooling generators and/or ask for help in time from the navy that was sitting just offshore and willing to help
> Do you have any idea what a large scale nuclear disaster could cause in a densely populated Europe?
Depends, what type of plant?
Plenty of nuclear plant designs that just drop the rods into a water bath and halt all activity.
Do you realize what types of health impacts gas leaks are having on densely populated regions right now?
Or how about fracking destroying drinking water? Higher cancer and birth defect rates for surrounding communities.
> How close Japan brush with disaster as the Fukushima fallout could have hit the Tokyo region?
The amount of fallout from Fukushima was obscenely minuscule. The worst case estimates, by the most pessimistic naysayers, 130 extra deaths will result from the accident. The most commonly agreed upon estimates, 0 additional deaths.
Meanwhile, 13k people dead minimum from coal in America each year. No one even tracks the impact from the literal thousands of natural gas leaks that are ongoing. [1] is a nice visualization of natural gas incidents from 2010 to 2017.
Fukushima was a worst case scenario with massive mismanagement on multiple levels, and the sum environmental impact was less than any of the multiple of oil tanker spills that happen, quite literally, multiple times a year. [2]
I always love the nuclear arguments of "It's SAFE!" immediately followed by, "We just need to remove those pesky safety regulations to make it economical."
I can’t speak for European regulatory bodies, but in the USA the relevant authority is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which was founded in 1974 and approved zero new reactor designs between 1974 and 2020. Conservative doesn’t even begin to describe the stance of regulatory agencies, despite newer designs being much safer from decades of design improvements, nobody wants to be the person responsible for signing off and issuing a safety certification.
The required storage time for nuclear waste in Germany is 1 million years. Storing anything safely for one million years in one of the most densly populated continents is a huge challenge and certainly not as easy as "just dump it somewhere in the desert".
Also: uranium is a finite resource. After it will have run out, it humanity will have to maintain and check these storage sites for that amount of time. Who is expected to pay this? People who don't profit from the power anymore? In my eyes the only solution is either transmutation into less harmful wastes (very costly) or paying the future storage cost for that timeframe upfront (very, very costly).
Which points out the absurd safety requirements and paperwork. That regulation (if true, I haven’t seen it) is just trying to make it impossible to do anything, not actually protecting anyone in any real way.
1) In far less than a million years, the contents of the cask will be well below background radiation levels. Literally less dangerous from radiation than sitting at home.
2) It’s been less than 100 years since Germany had a raving lunatic trying to conquer the world at the helm, and less than 50 since they were split in half between two world superpowers. It’s ridiculous hubris to think anyone could predict or plan more than 100 years in advance with any certainty, let alone a million. And by setting a million year milestone, they’re saying ‘don’t even try to make something that could work now’
3) more people will die from the economic fallout of what the gov’t is doing (and the burning of Coal, wars, etc) than would die from any halfway likely outcome of a nuclear disaster here. They could have multiple Fukushima’s and still be better off.
4) as a species, anything recognizably human has been around AT MOST a single digit multiple of that number. Recorded history and civilization is a tiny fraction of that number. It’s a fun mental game, not a pragmatic limit or has any real meaning in this context.
Also, while Uranium is finite (as is everything else), we’ve got plenty to last the foreseeable future even without any fancy technology advancements. And there is plenty of avenues for that.
It’s the picture of ‘the now is unacceptable, the future is impossible.’
1) In far less than a million years, the contents of the cask will be well below background radiation levels. Literally less dangerous from radiation than sitting at home.
heck even a time scale of 10.000 is beyoned the current civilized world, do you even realize that?
how stupid to talk even about millions, if the modern world didn't even exists for a few HUNDRED of years.
and it's stupid to dump shit into the earth without knowing what will happen at point x.
If we never did anything until we fully understood all the ramifications forever, we’d literally have never existed. I’m not saying ‘don’t figure out what will happen next’. That’s dumb.
I’m saying ‘don’t set some impossible to achieve goal and fall into analysis paralysis while doing things with far worse known outcomes right now’. Because that is also dumb.
We know putting it in giant steel casks is pretty much foolproof, and will ensure no leaks for at least 40+ years. They’re literally bulletproof. It’s what every major reactor has been doing for 40+ years. Works surprisingly well.
> "It’s been less than 100 years since Germany had a raving lunatic trying to conquer the world at the helm, and less than 50 since they were split in half between two world superpowers."
It is an absolute mystery why this does not inspire utmost confidence in the future of safe nuke waste storage...
Chernobyl went from glowing pile of smoldering glass to ‘just don’t dig it all up and play in it, idiots’. In half the time.
And yeah, Putin did send folks who did dig parts of it up - and play in it. They are idiots. They might die from it. However, conservatively, at least 10,000-100,000x the number of people already have, or will shortly be dead from more classical methods - artillery, gunfire, incendiaries, etc. Horrible ways to go, all. Near as I can tell, the idiots doing the digging are also likely to be the only ones seriously impacted by it, unlike the others.
Nuclear waste isn’t super healthy or anything, but it’s not even on the radar of ‘nasty shit a maniacal dictator will use to kill people’. Except maybe a bond-type spy ironically.
You know the last Hitler literally had his folks invent ICBMs and setup mass death camps, right?
Even if all the nuclear waste in the world right now went back in time and got spilled in the worst places possible, the mess and ensuing death would be way less than they made.
Which matters…. Mostly if not having it will kill people, no?
If it’s entombed in glass or in giant steel casks requiring no further work to keep safe, then the only real danger would be them pulling it out and using it for evil. Which, they’ll already have plenty of evil things at their disposal, and things far easier to use and more scalable for evil too. So not likely to be all that interesting.
You generally need monitoring at a minimum, and maintenance to shore up degradation of any unstable containment materials (i.e. those used to prevent water leeching, etc).
Plus security. You need to keep people out- there's always going to be some idiot who wants to get too close or use it for Evil.
That said, I imagine the costs are far less than the alternatives. Rebuilding the grid to satisfy continental-wide wind will produce a lot of CO2.
Holy shit, 1000 reactors? Did anyone tell them the more reactors you have, the more likely one will melt down? (basic probability)
IMO they should be used strategically, i.e. concentrated large power requirements and to lower overall emissions. You want a mix of power-generating solutions, otherwise you have a monoculture which can lead to system collapse. Right now they're short on gas, but what happens when they're short on uranium, or places to put spent fuel? You can't just spin up a new power plant over a weekend (which is their problem right now). Or if we had a supervolcano and solar went out, or if winds died down, or had a shortage of parts due to a pandemic or recession, etc.
We need many solutions to cover all our bases. You spin up and down capacity in each market depending on the circumstances. This allows the lowest cost, least harmful solutions at any given time, hedges against changing market conditions, and enables emergency power relief.
edit: LOL @ all the downvotes because I said a nuclear meltdown might be bad
I never said nuclear power plants were bad. But Chernobyl depopulated a 1,000 square mile region that will remain uninhabitable for hundreds to thousands of years. Do that a couple more times over a century in a densely populated area like Europe and see how easy it is to travel without a car made of lead, much less find a place to live.
It's not uninhabitable, it's simply uninhabited. It's perfectly safe to visit Chernobyl, or even live there, and has been for years. It's been open for tourism since 2011. Dilapidated buildings pose a bigger risk to Chernobyl tourists than radiation. Animals certainly don't seem worse off and they returned to the city long before people did.
Yeah, so dangerous that the wildlife has found itself a great new sanctuary, and the babushkas that refused to evacuate and lives in the "zone" at 90 years old all died decades ago.. oh...
> In the first stress test in spring, the German government pointed out that nuclear units would hardly help to save gas as gas demand in Germany was mainly driven by heat production and industrial use.
That's what I already thought was the case and the article adds it as the last paragraph. I get a lot of people want to focus on the nuclear angle but it's only one part of a frustrating string of poor energy choices by Germany's politicians.
Of current gas demand. The thing is that Germany was planning on significantly increasing their gas demand by building many gas reactors [1] to work in tandem with renewables.
Since building new gas plants isn't really an option anymore, and renewable can't produce reliable electricity by themselves regardless of cost, we are back to nuclear.
> The thing is that Germany was planning on significantly increasing their gas demand by building many gas reactors [1] to work in tandem with renewables.
I wanted to explain what's wrong with this statement, because that's simply not true. But I don't have to: You just need to read the text that you linked to:
"As Germany ramps up renewables and exits coal and nuclear power, it may need more gas power capacity, which would mostly be put to use at times of high electricity needs and little wind or sunshine – and not necessarily lead to more overall gas consumption."
Nuclear isn't directly an alternative to gas power. You've got the problem stated right in your comment: the constant output of nuclear is only part of generation needs.
Gas is different from nuclear in that it's easy to regulate the power generated, which is necessary to deal with demand spikes and generation dips (the latter due to wind/solar which may not always be available). Presumably Germany would only ever want to rely on gas for this purpose.
There are ways to adjust nuclear power output but they are quite expensive (on top of the fact that any nuclear power plant is already expensive).
To get rid of fossil fuel power plants you need to match their exceptional ability to regulate power generation levels. You could do this by using nuclear for base generation and supplementing renewables with storage techniques (e.g. pumped hydro storage), but nuclear is unfortunately not a "drop in" replacement on its own.
The situation you’re describing arrives from a status quo of lots of renewables and no nuclear. The actual starting point was nuclear and no renewables. If they had both renewables and nuclear they could have done a number of other things with their energy design.
Nuclear energy is bad at providing flexible output and that's what is needed.
And with rising temperatures the exiting power plants aren't reliable at all because the the need cool water supply
Sounds like something they would 'have' to use all the time. It's not like wind and sunshine was about to start powering the German industrial machine all on it's own any time soon.
Probably biased but reminds me of a recent talk by a Polish nuclear scientist explaining how this gas infrastructure is much more expensive than most people imagine. And it has to be regularly updated. So, if we are to factor in that cost, then brand new nuclear infrastructure and nuclear conversion isn't that much more.
One could be wondering why there was a big pushback against nuclear energy in the first place. Especially that it hasn't happened in the neighboring France.
Was it perhaps because of some hidden actors who pushed for the gas pipelines deals?
I can imagine, that the Russian influences in Germany hasn't magically disappeared after the fall of Berlin wall.
(Opposition to) nuclear energy is an emotional topic in Germany, one that mobilizes people. In a democratic society that leads to effects like the phase out of nuclear.
It’s mind-numbingly simple and I do not understand at all why conspiracies are mentioned left, right and center in this thread.
Lobbyists are not a conspiracy theory.
No matter if they act on behalf of businesses or state actors, one has to admit that they do exist and have influence over public policies.
Also, the fact that in most countries there are multiple hidden agents acting on behalf of other countries hardly seems to be a conspiracy theory as well.
The lobbying is real but it usually can only amplify real, existing fears. In central Europe those fears were largely sparked by Chernobyl.
There's a substantial age cohort in Germany who can remember when their parents wouldn't let them play outside, or remember the runs on iodine tablets - people who's earliest understanding of the word "nuclear" was either in reference to Chernobyl or to fears of nuclear armageddon.
We know now that Chernobyl was a big deal in the immediate vicinity and not that huge of a deal continent-wide. But the climate in those early days was one of fear - in the midst of the Cold War a massive nuclear accident of unknown real severity in an untrusted neighbouring country was blanketing the continent in an unknown amount of radioactive material.
You can make truthful and rational arguments until you're blue in the face but the issue is emotive - a lot of people's minds have been made up by frightening experiences early in life.
Anybody only "wondering" about that didn't try to look into the history of Germany and nuclear. It's home to one of the first long term nuclear storage sites in history, supposed to store the stuff for centuries, yet after only decades its become a generational mess.
Add Chernobyl, Fukushima and the nuclear industry refusing to pay for the disposal of their waste, and Germany is a prime example of how and why nuclear fission is neither economical, nor sustainable.
> Especially that it hasn't happened in the neighboring France.
It's also happening in neighboring France [0], half their fleet has been offline for most of the summer [1]. A fleet that's already underfunded by billions [2], that's why the French reinvestment into new reactors was a very conservative and modest one with basically no reference to how even that will be financed.
> Fukushima incident had a big impact on German public opinion.
Merkel already went against public opinion when she put in place running time extensions in late 2010 to delay the phase-out, that was massively controversial decision.
Then only a few months later Fukushima blew up, so her already unpopular and controversial position became ultimately untannable. Particularly as many faults with German reactors were found during the [atom-moratorium](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom-Moratorium) that was declared after Fukushima.
Prior to that safety inspections were not even mandatory for the operators.
Industry and residential heat may be larger users than electricity but its still significant. In 2021 gas produced slightly more of Germany's electricity than nuclear, coal produced over twice as much as nuclear. If more nuclear went offline those numbers worse would be worse. As it is Germany is having to restart old coal and oil generators.
There are roughly 40 million households in Germany based on some random numbers I found googling. If every one of them had a 1500 Watt space heater (woefully undersized for some, fine for others I imagine), and used them during the expected coldest day, you’d be throwing an extra 60 billion watt hours (aka gigawatts) of extra load on the grid right when renewables are least capable (typically).
That would also almost exactly double current German peak electrical energy consumption.
In my experience, all statements like "if everybody did {thing that I could do, and claim to be a social virtue}..." about energy / economic / environmental problems are 99% performative virtue. Even if they don't require Weihnachtsmann to take care a major "would not scale well" issue or ten, they almost universally assume that the great majority of "everybody" enjoys economic, housing, employment, etc. circumstances quite similar to the person making the statement.
I agree. I also lately seem to be in a mood to enjoy doing math and pointing out why such performative statements, if taken at face value, would either 1) do more harm than good, 2) would be impossible.
As you might guess, in my current mood I’m not great at parties.
Well, don't do that exactly, they're inefficient (but at least they're cheap). Ideal would be every house having a heat pump installed. Then you can heat a home much more efficiently using electricity than just going resistive.
The problem with heat pumps is scale. 30M out of Germany's 40M homes use gas or oil for heat. Last year 150K heat pumps were installed in the country. The government has set a goal of 500K installed per year by 2024 with 6M total reached by 2030.
Every one possible should be installed, it just won't make a dent.
Together with significantly reduced electricity cost at night like in the past, this is probably the way to go if we wanted to go back to nuclear power.
If every German apartment dweller bought and ran an extra 1500W electric heater, then that would have a very noticeable effect on the German electricity grid and overall electricity consumption.
This is already an issue in the UK with electric tea kettles during certain times [0], but those are only in use for a very short time, those German electric heaters would need to run a lot to get trough winter.
So... Where do we get 45 million plug-in heaters? And to replace a 20kW gas heater you'll need _slightly_ more than 1 1.5kW plug-in heater.
Yes.. it's a component. Yes I'm sure it will be employed. Yes it will stress the electric grid (but there is much more flexibility available). But it's not the solution to the majority of gas heating, because there simply isn't the capacity to get the required amount of hardware in the available time.
Those gas heaters are usually overdimensioned by a few factors. Nobody needs to fill instantly fill a bathtubs with 60 degrees. My house came with an 14kW gas unit, but a 5kW heatpump is enough for cold winters. Naturally the unit will be running for longer, but that's an efficiency in itself (lower delta T). Assuming a conservative COP of 4, that comes down to 1.25kW primary electricity consumption. It's a no brainer.
Germany is not an island. The EU burns plenty of gas for electricity. Germany could simply sell nuclear electricity to other EU members so they will burn less gas. And isn't this kind of cooperation the whole point of the EU?
> Germany could simply sell nuclear electricity to other EU members so they will burn less gas.
Germany is already the largest electricity exporter on the planet [0]. Germany is also the only economy of its size class that has an actual renewable share close to 50% [1], while comparable economies, like Japan or the US, hover at around 20% renewables.
In that context it's extremely questionable how Germany gets constantly blamed for all kinds of things related to energy, when it was literally were the renewable energy change was pioneered not just technologically [2] but particularly regulation wise [3].
>Germany is already the largest electricity exporter on the planet
This is not relevant, again, unless it would be impractical to install more transmission lines.
>renewable share
Using the wrong statistic is not a good comparison, what matters is the fraction of fossil fuels. The classification of "renewables" here is crafted to specifically exclude nuclear while for some absurd reason permitting hydropower (which is terrible for river ecosystems).
If you invent a metric specifically to support your ideology, it supports your ideology. However, it doesn't convince anyone who is paying attention to the facts.
>it's extremely questionable how Germany gets constantly blamed
It's not Germany that is truly to blame. It's the anti-nuclear movement which is to blame, and Germany is just one of its many victims. However, this movement led Germany to make bad decisions recently, and those decisions can be criticized specifically, regardless of what else was done.
> This is not relevant, again, unless it would be impractical to install more transmission lines.
It is very relevant, why should all the burden to fix all the worlds problems fall exclusively on Germany when Germany already has done so much and was literally the first to recognize the problem?
> The classification of "renewables" here is crafted to specifically exclude nuclear
Yes, because uranium is not a renewable resource, it's actually a very finite resource.
And if you want to see "wrong statistics" playing around with stuff like that, then you need to look at the UK who gets absurdly inflated "electricity from CO2 free sources" shares so it can act like its energy sector is renewable and sustainable, when it's really not.
> It's not Germany that is truly to blame. It's the anti-nuclear movement which is to blame
Just two paragraphs ago you were arguing for Germany to fix it, and now it's some "anti-nuclear movement to blame", all under a submission that comes from a rather questionable source, with its very own lobby, to begin with [0]
Well, currently a lot of electricity goes from Germany to France, as 50% of the French nuclear plants are not operational at the moment. (A lot need maintenance, others are down because of the heat)
- Everything needs maintenance; nuclear plants are by no means unique in this regard. France may have planned badly, so that many plants are down at once, but this is not a systemic problem with nuclear power.
- Europe overall was unprepared for the heat wave, but we are not really concerned with energy demand during heat waves (which are short, and when sunshine is plentiful) but rather during the winter (which is long, and dark in EU).
So again, more nuclear capacity in Germany could offset gas-fired power plants throughout EU.
I would not be so arrogant to assume the German power industry would solve the problems so much better than the French. The French mostly suffers from the fact that it has become prohibitively expensive to build new reactors.
And of course: Germany currently has 3 operational reactors, new ones could be available in 10-15 years earliest.
There had been plenty of warnings, because in the last 10 years it was quite common for the French grid to be borderline in the summer, cooling always was a tight spot.
And nuclear is a bad offset for gas-fired power plants, as they are rather used as quick power plants, that is something nuclear is the worst at.
>The French mostly suffers from the fact that it has become prohibitively expensive to build new reactors.
This is another red herring. You complained that French reactors are down for maintenance, I responded to that. Construction costs do not cause reactors to go down for maintenance.
To your second paragraph, again, the energy supply in the summer is not the central problem. Existing solar does well in the summer.
>And nuclear is a bad offset for gas-fired power plants, as they are rather used as quick power plants, that is something nuclear is the worst at.
Alone, this is true. However, batteries take up very little space and large installations can be put up quickly. Solar is nice in the long term but takes a long time to install at reasonable scale.
I’m not sure why Germany thought that it would be a good idea to decommission nuclear energy in the first place. It’s the greenest energy source at scale!
Some people live in their imaginary perfect world, for them compromises don't exist, they only see the positive impacts of their ideas/actions without any of the negatives.
Just like people (ie armchairs ecologists) protested in France against the preemptive cutting and burning of small parts of forests to prevent fires, they won, two days ago the entire forest burned. To save a few hundred trees they sacrificed the whole forest.
Germans don't like nuclear because "what if Fukishima happens in Germany", so instead they gas themselves with coal/gas fumes which are thousands of time worse in every single aspects, there is no "big boom" possible with gas/coal, it's a slow suffocating death, which apparently is not as scary
> Germans don't like nuclear because "what if Fukishima happens in Germany", so instead they gas themselves with coal/gas fumes which are thousands of time worse in every single aspects, there is no "big boom" possible with gas/coal, it's a slow suffocating death, which apparently is not as scary
Great then that the alternative is renewables without the negative side effects of either fossil fuels or nuclear!
Bonhoeffer argues stupidity is a moral failing, not an intellectual one [1].
So if you believe Bonhoeffer, then it can be argued armchair intellectuals have an obligation to not be stupid. And perhaps Germany and France should fine the stupid, or possibly put them in prison.
BTW your argument is based on the same perfect world where things like Fukushima don't happen.
Germany already has a problem with it's existing nuclear waste and is far from solving it.
When Germany is hit by a Tsunami hit me up I'l pay you a beer
For every nuclear related death you have hundred thousands of coal related deaths, it's that simple. The potential, yet highly low probability, big boom scares you more than the inevitable slow death that's all, it's purely irrational
I meant an nuclear accident not a tsunami.
Just like Fukushima was hit by a catastrophe bigger than expected the same could happen in Germany.
Maybe a plane crash, none of the existing power plants is germany is build to withstand one.
And who said about coal instead of nuclear?
Coal is used because german politicians intentionally blocked wind and solar power.
> Just like people (ie armchairs ecologists) protested in France against the preemptive cutting and burning of small parts of forests to prevent fires, they won, two days ago the entire forest burned. To save a few hundred trees they sacrificed the whole forest.
I‘ve not been able to find a source to back up this claim.
Because renewables are handily greener with a fraction of the negative side effects nuclear brings. Both from taking care of spent fuel and safety measures.
You can't even insure a nuclear power plant. That should tell you how safe the private market think they are.
This is a tired argument. The amount of land wind and solar needs to power the world is extremely small comparatively speaking [1], and nuclear just can't get built in under a decade. So we use a bunch of land, but at least it gets built (you can build the equivalent power generation of a nuclear plant, even taking into account capacity factor, with solar and batteries in ~2-3 years).
Perhaps density matters if you're attempting to escape a gravity well, but Earth is big and space is not a concern.
Y'all know enough sunlight hits the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year, right? [2] It's fusion at a distance. Someone else handles the waste, the safety risk, there is no neutron embrittlement issues.
Ain't nobody using cobalt long term. The price of nickel, copper, polysilicon, and lithium might rise based on demand, but there are ample reserves in conflict free areas, not to mention recycling supply chains to source as "premium ore." The logistical work must be done, but there are no show stoppers. Draw your attention specifically to my last two links.
(i personally prefer lfp due to lower thermal runaway risk for stationary storage applications; the lack of expensive conflict minerals and lower costs are a cherry on top)
That book was a helpful contribution to the debate when it was published in 2008, but by 2017 people were already pointing out[0] its obsolete assumptions about renewables, and there is now an open source collaborative effort to produce a more accurate and up-to-date version.[1]
I don't want to speak ill of the late great David MacKay, but it does seem that reality has exposed his pro-nuclear bias, which was already apparent[2] just from the choice of language he used when describing the different technologies.
btw. china will double their wind power since 2019 at the end of the year. they build the biggest hydro plant on the planet and will add a ton of new pv panels in 2022 (even more than the previous years).
china is just not stupid and will focus on a single technology. what they do with nuclear is probably less than 25% than what they will build with solar and wind, besides that they plan to build over 30 plants, which would probably end in a desaster in the eu or us.
Much less than 25%. The nuclear industry in China is about the minimal investment while still keeping the door open, if some incredible breakthrough magically appears.
> and nuclear just can't get built in under a decade
This is a tired argument. Ten years ago, the green movement was saying the same thing and in ten years, they'll be saying the same. It's always a good time to invest in green power, although it would have been even better to do it ten years ago.
You can, but we don’t, because people have preferences with their views and overcoming them takes time. We have a choice: nuclear or climate crisis. Putting ideological purity ahead of practical reality is dogmatic.
> people have preferences with their views and overcoming them takes time.
Isn't that equally true of nuclear energy? In fact more so, as renewables account for a growing share of global electricity production, while the share from nuclear has been decreasing for decades.[0]
Or do you literally mean "views" as in "sight lines" / "landscapes"? That's true, but people also have preferences about whether they're within a potential nuclear exclusion zone or not.
> We have a choice: nuclear or climate crisis.
That seems like a false dichotomy, or you're begging the question and not really explaining why renewables aren't an option. It's like saying, "We have a choice: clean, fuelless renewables or toxic nuclear catastrophes". Thinking that nothing can go wrong with nuclear is itself an ideology, and it's one that insurance companies don't share.
Very small loss if you consider only the footprint of the pylon. Probably quite an inconvenience when you consider having to turn the tractor or combine a lot more than you would need to with an open field. Even worse when you realize that you need to be able to access the wind turbine for maintenance two or three times a year. Definitely not good when you need a major replacement or removal after 20 years and you need to bring in heavy equipment.
fair point, hence the conditional "might". The point I was trying to make was that with regards to land usage one energy source is not vastly more efficient with regards to land use than the other.
Enjoy planting wind farms and solar farms costing huge amounts of land.
Note that as far as solar goes there might not be such 'cost' in the future: experiments putting solar panels over farmland, like 30% coverage give or take, show hardly any effect on crop yield. I don't know how/when this is going to be rolled out, but it does sound quite interesting. I mean the land use for farming is huge.
Solar isn't a great idea in Germany anyway, but wind farms don't take much land, because you can use it for other things. It's pretty common here in the UK to have livestock or crops in the same fields as wind turbines.
Solar works great in Germany. Admittedly, there are better places in the world for solar, but it works. At noon today, about 50% of the total electricity in Germany came from solar. We need much more of solar, but until all rooftops have been filled with solar, it basically comes at zero land usage and at that point, the grid could be powered on many day entirely on solar. Add on top widely extended wind power.
Right. I wrote about peak output today, which is admittedly a sunny day. But just doubling the amount of solar installations would mean that Germany could run at times entirely on solar. That definitely means "solar is working". And a tenfold increase in production is absolutely feasible, we have so many rooftops alone.
Add to that a greatly increased wind production capacity, and Germany is pretty close to even replace most usages of fossil fuels outside of electricity generation with renewable energy.
> But just doubling the amount of solar installations would mean that Germany could run at times entirely on solar.
Remember that
Germany has about the same solar potential as Alaska [1]
Capacity factor for solar in Germany went from 5.7% in 1990 to 11.1% in 2019.
Even increasing it at 10%/year to double it would take 7-8 years.
It's not that simple to "just double it", Italy makes 43% of its energy from renewable sources, it's mainly hydro thanks to our geography and it's been like that since at least 20 years, but the numbers aren't going up very rapidly, there's a limit on how many dams you can build.
Also, renewable like solar and wind are increasing and replacing the thermoelectric (gas, coal, fossil in general), the problem is we still have to buy at least 10% of the required energy from other countries, that might or might not use fossil to produce it.
The point is not if we will be able to use 100% of renewable energy in the future, the point is "can we wait long enough for them to reach that point, before it's too late"?
In 2010 or 2011 solar capacity was increased by 10GW in one year. We are currently at about 70GW, so it would take 7 years at the 2010 rate - one would assume that with much more efficient panels available today, the first doubling could be easily done in 5 years and obviously we might try much harder today than we did back then, when it was not critical yet. I wouldn't see why we couldn't do 20 GW/year today and more in the future.
Going to renewables certainly is a 90/10 style problem, but as we are very much pressed for time, we should push for the 90 quickly first and then tackle the rest. And if we hit 20GW/year solar buildup and also have strong wind buildups, we might quickly have enough to just use power2gas and the existing infrastructure to bridge the gaps in the supply. And of course, some amount of importing is acceptable too. If Arabia and northern Africa build up large hydrogen plants, we should buy that too. Helps achieving our goals quicker, gives those regions important income. But of course, we shouldn't make us so much dependant on a single suppler any more as we did with gas.
What other ways would we have to achieve this goal in short notice?
There is no Green future without nuclear energy as a component.
By saying “yes, it’s better than coal but not as good as wind/water/solar/geothermal” you’re missing the forest for the trees.
People are using coal and gas today. Without moving to nuclear we will keep using coal and gas. There is no near-term future where we can live on 100% renewable energy.
Not until we can figure out the storage problem, which is not batteries.
Pumping water with excess power up into a reservoir to later use for hydro power, or something along those lines, is likely the only "battery" big enough to power a country.
Because Germany is also where the one of the worlds first deep geological repository sites for nuclear waste was experimentally started in the 70s, in the former salt mine Asse II.
That thing was supposed to last for many centuries, yet after only a few decades it became such a huge environmental mess that it will take several future generations, and a lot of money, to clean it up.
Which is only one among the many reasons why nuclear fission was declared not sustainable, others include resource dependencies for the fuel and generally extremely high costs for everything, while operators refuse to pay their share for it in terms of waste disposal.
All problems that "pro nuclear" people regularly handwave away, often pointing at France to go "Look, they can do it!", when that's just completely ignorant of the actual state of the French energy sector; It's existing nuclear fleet is already heavily underfunded, it's also very old, as a result of that more than half of French nuclear reactors have spent most of this summer offline.
That is if they ain't throttled/shut down due to heatwaves making them impossible to cool.
I'd rather have nuclear than hydro. Hydro requires a fairly drastic alteration of a large amount of land and probably uses about the same if not more concrete than a nuclear power plant. You can't put hydro just anywhere, it comes with risks to downstream people and infrastructure, the reserve of water is not directly controllable, they're usually quite remote which requires miles of high voltage transmission lines be built across sometimes otherwise pristine land, the dams themselves can seriously impact rivers and the wildlife that live in and around them. That's just what I could rattle off in a few minutes, I'm sure there are more reasons why they're not ideal.
All that happens with a dam, is one ecosystem is replaced with another. Some animals die off, others replace them.
Literally, a dam isn't replacing the tiniest part of an ecosystem in Quebec. Trillions of acres, upon trillions, and only thousands for dams.
Meanwhile, there are far more deadly things with nuclear plants.
I think I'm lucky in Quebec, as such dams can be located away from people, thus reducing danger of a dam breaking.
The biggest mistake environmentalists ever made, was to fight dams. You cannot even remotely compare burning coal, or gas, or oil for power, with a dam.
Yet environmentalists fought dams, and nuclear in the 70s, the 60s, and look where we are now.
Still spewing CO2 like mad.
How about we jump up and down for joy, at a dam, or a nuclear plant instead of naysaying either?
Ok so two points somewhat mollified depending on geography and ecology, if you happen to live somewhere with trillions of acres of land with ample rivers then you're A-OK but if you instead are somewhere with only a few major rivers and higher population density you're up the creek so to speak. What about the rest?
So-called green energy is not harmless for the environment. To clearcut square miles for solar farms then cover them over so plants can't grow, is akin to sterilizing the environment under them. Complete ecological disaster.
Hydro is great for boaters and sport fishing, but no so much for the ecosystem it drowned. And it's always square miles of devastating rapid change.
Dams also cause huge ecological damage - there's no easy solution. Nuclear is good if (and this is a big if) the nuclear wastes are managed properly. Even then, right now sometimes it feels like nuclear waste is currently treated as the "next generations" problems.
We can re-use nuclear waste now. Something like 90% of "waste" can be recycled and reused. It's not like we're just shoving it in yucca mountain anymore.
Not really. That is the dream of the fast reactor. It had been ongoing since the 50s. All attempts have been more costly than uranium reactors and there's only one in Russia which has operated with any kind of longevity.
They also have proliferation concerns and have therefore been limited to nuclear powers.
Not to mention that the amount of nuclear waste is absolutely tiny. If we can solve the political problem of where to store it then we could feasibly keep all of the nuclear waste ever produced in a single location far away from anyone or anything. I'd much rather have a nuclear waste storage site near where I live than live near a gas plant constantly spewing emissions into the air. I can tell where the nuclear waste is, I have no control over where the wind blows and which air I breathe.
they don't scale well unless you're in a country with lots of rivers that haven't been used. Most countries don't have that, like they don't have thermal. You can throw up a lot of power plants gas/coal/nuclear in most places though.
Seeing everything through the "how expensive is it" lens is exactly what is making us burn our own planet though. Price should be the least of our concern when we discuss the future of our planet. Money has no value if you can't breath
This is still a venture capital/investment forum, just handwaving away these economic dynamics, without even trying to explain how to replace them, does not really add much to the debate.
It's the equivalent of somebody pointing out; "This is too expensive, we can't finance building or running it" and somebody replying with "Money is just invented, it's not real!".
As true as that might be philosophically, practically it still doesn't change anything because the practical reality we live in is dominated by economic interests manifested trough money.
So if your solution does need massive amounts of money, then you need to explain where they money is supposed to come from, as you can't just "wish" nuclear reactors into existence.
> then you need to explain where they money is supposed to come from
idk, when I see the US spending 8-10 trillion dollar in 20 years in Afghanistan I think money really isn't the problem here, we could have nuclearised the entire West twice over and still have extra, priorities I guess...
> as you can't just "wish" nuclear reactors into existence.
Yeah but you can wish them out, and wish for solar and wind farms to replace them, too bad these wishes didn't actually work out.
Also, electricity is twice as expensive in Germany than in France, always been, and that's just the beginning of the whole coal/gas shitshow that's about to hit in the winter. Germany has the most expensive electricity of the EU zone too.
I never cherish when basic needs are handled by greedy capitalists no... Move fast and break things is fine when you develop a mobile app nobody gives a shit about, not when you can raise the heating cost of a family by a factor of 2 whenever you feel like your CEO needs a bonus
> idk, when I see the US spending 8-10 trillion dollar in 20 years in Afghanistan I think money really isn't the problem here
That's American fiscal policy, but we are talking about Germany here, which has way less debt per GDP [0] [1], so for the most part Germany knows how to handle its money and where to best put it.
> Yeah but you can wish them out, and wish for solar and wind farms to replace them, too bad these wishes didn't actually work out.
Except Germany didn't just "wish", it acted and created the conditions for a renewable boom, to compensate for the long-term fission phaseout, it did that trough the first green electricity feed-in tariff scheme in the world already back in 1991 [2].
That's why Germany nowadays sits on nearly 50% renewables even after shutting down fission reactors; Those reactors were very much mostly replaced by solar and wind [3].
> Also, electricity is twice as expensive in Germany than in France
See the aforementioned EEG, that's why electricity, and also gasoline, is so expensive in Germany; There is an extra tax on it that has been used to pioneer the research [4] and deployment of PV and wind before these technologies were adopted widespread globally, thus turning them into the efficient profitable industries they are today.
German subsidies paid for that R&D and scaling up part, jut like they were, and still are, a major contributor to where these technologies are today.
Yes. But this is how world works. I suggest you to try doing it yourself: get rid of all fossil-fuel based heating and cooking appliances, replace your car with an EV, and maybe set up your own renewable power generation if your area's electricity isn't green.
I've always wondered why isn't someone trying to do a nuclear power generator in outer space.
Say, we create a nuclear plant in outer space (maybe around the moon orbit?) where there's no risk of nuclear waste "falling down" to earth if shit happens.
Then, said plants are used to generate energy and store it in some high density material (maybe liquid hydrogen?).
Finally, some of that energy is spent to "push" the large hydrogen tanks into Earth's orbit so that they fall down into earth.
This way the nuclear fusion issues would not matter and this could be scaled a lot.
I think that we have all the technical pieces to do this, but it is just a matter of some large company developing the project, even if starting small.
The German green party have been vehemently anti nuclear for decades. It's been that way since before Chernobyl but they started to gain popularity after that.
The worst thing is, that little-germans (austrians) are protesting, when we here in Slovenia want to build a new block for our existing nuclear power plant.
Movies that portray radiation as something you can catch like a virus don't help. Like the Chernobyl movie from HBO that may be historically accurate but exaggerated for Hollywood.
German Greens are against fossil fuels and against Russia. The only thing Russia funded was a smear campaign against the last Green chancellor candidate.
Quality of these comments is why every nuclear energy thread needs to be flagged into oblivion.
The green movement had its origins in the protests of 1968, which opposed the establishment both in the West and the East. Some parts of the movement later received support from the USSR. Particularly the ones that opposed nuclear weapons.
As far as I understand, the support mostly ended with the collapse of the USSR. Green/left activists are often strongly anti-authoritarian, and Russia is not as credible ally to the anti-West elements as the USSR was. The pro-business elements of traditional center-left / center-right parties were more useful to Russian interests, and the right-wing populist / conservative nationalist movement became a better source for useful idiots.
Is there any truth to this, what are your sources? Because if Russia wanted to make Germany dependant on their energy, using a political movement/party within to achieve their aims would be the natural progression.
Still recall the overreaction post-Fukushima and thought it was really peculiar that a non-seismic region would look to an island sitting on top of a tectonic plate for guidance.
It's almost comical how wide the ESG definition has become and how its been expanded to include not-so-eco friendly energy sources.
I fear that all these virtue signaling, tree hugging movement, have an ulterior motive that overrides the genuine good will of the people participating but this asymmetric political cell will not be exposed I'm afraid because it would ruin a lot of what we've taught our schools as "moral".
This is like a rich person that has a change of heart and wants his donation to a prestiguous school back but don't want to look bad so he's trying to find all sorts of faults.
I wouldn't describe, the process of recognizing your mistakes as self hate. As a German, I know my country is not perfect, none is, and I recognize that past mistakes should not happen again. Smart people learn from mistakes and try not to repeat them.
Sure compared to the US most Germans are not patriotic or are blindly loving their country. But compared to the US what over country emotionally so invested in being number 1 that everything that was bad or does not work / could be better is ignored?
The US is like an Ostrich, as soon as it is uncomfortable they put their head in the sand and yell we are the best, we are number. It can also be compared to conservatives labeling liberals as snow flakes and ridiculing save spaces, while at the same time making the US a giant safe space and ignoring reality.
If nuclear was an easy solution the French reactors would be running. Or as the article states.
> In France, nuclear availability is currently at 24.8 GW, less than half the installed capacity of 61.4 GW due to safety checks at several reactors.
The real problem isn't electricity, it is natural gas as a feedstock for industry and for heating. There you don't have the same instant fungibility pure electricity brings, and nuclear can't magically solve either.
You can easily heat houses with electricity, and, with more effort, you can convert most of industrial processes to use electricity instead of gas. The reason it hadn’t been done is that it was significantly more expensive than using gas. However, with gas gone, and with hypothetical abundant nuclear, this would not have been the case.
Arguing against nuclear because “electricity doesn’t help heat houses” is extremely strange, bordering on deceptive.
Yes, all the gas usages can and will be replaced by electricity. Which will come from renewables. The 3 remaining German nuclear reactors won't make much of a difference here, but yes, those which are in any shape for it, should run e bit longer. Though one has to take into account, that the maintenance was set up according to operate them to the end of the year, so a lot of maintenance would be necessary for any longer operation time.
No where there is abundant nuclear visible, new build projects have vastly overrun any time and fiscal budgets.
This is something solar/wind zealots often like to repeat, while hand-waving away the fact that those energy sources work when they want to, not when you want them to.
If you want a reliable, clean power grid, there's one option, and it's not solar and wind.
Not really, no. You either need storage tech that doesn't exist and might or might not be possible, or you need to grossly overbuild intermittent sources everywhere and make megagrids, the likes of which the world has never seen.
Maybe those are possible. Maybe they aren't. We don't know. There is precisely one known working option.
In Germany, electricity from photovoltaic won’t replace gas for winter heating. That’s why nuclear is so crucial in Europe, where, unlike in US, photovoltaics are much less practical, due to weather and land use constraints.
In the short term, you can use resistive space heaters. This is, to be sure, 2-3x times more expensive than heat pumps, but given the cost of gas, might still be worth it. Point is, nuclear helps, and a couple of extra gigawatts day and night makes a difference.
> If nuclear was an easy solution the French reactors would be running.
To me the French nuclear situation is just another example of why privatizing public infrastructure is an exceptionally stupid idea. In the free market, the consequences of failing to perform long-term infrastructure maintenance is a negative externality, and so it doesn't get done.
Good then that the French nuclear reactors are to 84.5% owned by the French government. It is currently being renationalized due to facing bankruptcy.
> On 6 July 2022, French prime minister Elisabeth Borne announced that "the French government is aiming for a full nationalization of" EDF.[31][55] Borne "vowed" to limit the impact of the rise in energy prices through the state having "full control over...electricity production and performance.” Borne told parliament, "we must ensure our sovereignty in the face of...the colossal challenges to come."[56] Earlier in 2022, President Emmanuel Macron had "suggested" a renationalization of EDF as well as a "big expansion of nuclear energy in the coming decades"[57] however, in 2021, he had to scrap an "overhaul" of EDF, codenamed "Project Herculesl," that would have placed EDF's profitable renewables sector in a new company, due to opposition by unions and objections raised by the European Commission.[58]
When your main stakeholder (French State) forces you to sell your production way below market rates to your competitors, leaving you with a 8bn€ loss for 2022, it's no surprise EDF struggles financially [1].
For context, this measure was an effort to help competitors not rise their prices too much for the end consumers. Instead of taking the money from its budget, the State took it from EDF's.
It would be kinder to view the French nuclear industry as a subsidy enabling a skilled workforce for the military side and their nuclear submarines, carriers and weapons.
In that view it all makes sense, especially that the government still does not publish how much it costs to generate the electricity. Only the subsidized rates the public pays.
Also since 2010 French energy production have to be sold by EDF at loss to help private reseller make more margins and "open the market". This cause several bn of loss per year which is money not available to construct new reactors or pay for proper maintenance.
EDF was also forced to buy Areva when their reactor branch went under because of abysmal management of money on major projects... which EDF now also have to support.
Long story short French energy production isn't looking good lately, reactors are getting older and only one is currently being made but the project is several years late.
My take is that the French government wants to have a nuclear industry to share the costs with the military side. Thus subsidizing nuclear submarines, carriers and nuclear weapons while keeping a skilled industry to base it on.
To allow this the population get subsidized electricity, and everyone else can read about the amazingly cheap electricity in France even though it's a pure subsidy.
In 2010, as part of the progressive liberalisation of the energy market under EU directives, France agreed the Accès régulé à l'électricité nucléaire historique (ARENH) regulations that allowed third party suppliers access up to about a quarter of France's pre-2011 nuclear generation capacity, at a fixed price of €42/MWh from 1 July 2011 until 31 December 2025.[57][58][59]
> As of 2015, France's household electricity price, excluding taxation, is the 12th cheapest amongst the 28 member European Union and the second-cheapest to industrial consumers.[60] The actual cost of generating electricity by nuclear power is not published by EDF or the French government but is estimated to be between €59/MWh and €83/MWh.[61]
You say that nuclear in France is not profitable and so is subsidized (potentially, don't want to argue that here). To back this you use the fact France agreed to a mechanism (ARENH) to sell its electricity BELOW market rates (this is true).
The logical connection makes no sense. If you want to keep something alive and need subsidies for it, why would you on top of that decide to make even more losses on it? Now, we could agree that maybe France did not have the choice to agree. But don't use ARENH as a proof that nuclear is subsidized
France's problem isn't nuclear, it's piss poor management and decades of political laziness.
We had a better infrastructure 30 years ago, back when politicians had long term plans for the future of their country and planned further than to the next election
Note that the sad state of French nuclear is of course mainly due to internal incompetence (and mismanagement, Anne Lauvergeon should probably be in jail) and poor planning.
However, the Areva-Siemens (and Alstom) quagmire, and the insane electricity market liberalization pushed by the EU have also played a role. German policies not only managed to destroy domestic nuclear, but also cripple the French.
Maybe we are a bit harsh with Germany? By pulling out of nuclear, they poured billions in renewables much earlier that other countries. They had to deal with immature technologies and greatly participated in making them more reliable and cheaper.
> The renewable-energy field employs nearly 340,000 people in Germany, and according to the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), there are now more than 180 universities and 120 research institutes involved in the country’s energy-transition programme, Energiewende.
Pulling out of nuclear might have been a net negative for Germany but a net positive for the rest of world.
> Maybe we are a bit harsh with Germany? By pulling out of nuclear, they poured billions in renewables much earlier that other countries.
According to Wikipedia the initial Energiewende legislation included nuclear as a bridging fuel. Its phaseout was brought forward after Fukushima. Germany could have made the same investments in renewables and kept nuclear, then it would have been further along in phasing out fossil fuels.
Interesting thought - but what about an alternative scenario where they invested the same amount in renewables, but with a 20 year phase out for nuclear? They could have reduced reliance on coal and natural gas instead, thereby reducing the political reliance on Russia as well.
I don't think so, a strong German economy ultimately benefits the region and results in more resources available for distribution elsewhere.
But we've decided we don't want that model anymore. It's ironic that people who have been participating in protests about global warming are the very ones that will pay the brunt of the cost through inflation and scarcity of heat/energy
> By pulling out of nuclear, they poured billions in ENRs much earlier that other countries.
That's a bit dual sided. Germany basically let France be their "battery" with it's nuclear reactors.
Germany also ensured that on the EU energy market energy out of renewables had to be bought first. Meaning that nuclear reactors became less profitable while Germany conveniently relied on them when there was low wind or low sun. That was quite a scummy move.
Not arguing with that. But it might still be a net positive.
But renewables is the real key for energy transition. The reality is that very few countries plan to move most of their energy production to nuclear. Even RTE (the French electricity company) said they will need to crank renewables to 50% of their energy mix to meet carbon neutrality by 2050 with their most pro-nuclear scenario (N03).
Making renewables more competitive globally might have largely compensated the gas/goal emitted by Germany if it contributed to help developing countries to skip the fossil stage.
This was an interesting case of a political decision having relatively obvious negative near term repercussions.
I'd assume that the previously shut down nuclear plants weren't "scuttled" and are still able to be brought back online - does anyone here work in the industry and/or have any idea what that process would entail, and what costs would be incurred?
"GERMAN NUCLEAR OPERATOR: WE CAN KEEP RUNNING, ONLY NEED "OK"
News clip has emerged showing that Chancellor Scholz and Economy Minister Habeck have been falsely claiming that nuclear plants cannot operate because of staffing and lack of fuel.
Technically the PreussenElektra CEO is Guido Knott, they operate and have a substantive ownership of the German nuclear plants. Preusenelektra is a subsidiary of E.ON, where Leonhard Birnbaum is the CEO you mention. His opinion follows the government decision. In a letter to the people working for Preussenelektra he wrote:
"The German government has examined the contribution that the remaining nuclear power plants can make to solving the current energy crisis and, after weighing the options, has come to the decision that nuclear energy should not be part of the solution [..] This decision must be respected [..] I can imagine that one or the other of you had hoped that for a while, as a transitional solution, nuclear energy would still have some way to go."
As quoted in "Rheinische Post" (Wednesday edition, 22 june 2022)
Now Bernd Guhlich, communication of PreussenElektra acknowledges this in the interview. Without the OK of the government and by proxy CEO E.ON Leonhard Birnbaum nothing will happen. The E.ON CEO is not the decision or policy maker here, that's the government (which is by definition open to public debate).
But, and that was the point Bern Guhlich was making (which is not one sided as he acknowledges the decision): Isar can technically run for longer then the end of this year if the government decides to do that.
The Bundesministerium fuer Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz (a department of the government) decided against that for reasons Bern Guhlich argues are false:
* there is no legal basis
* the 3 nuclear plants cannot operate longer without fuel rods
Additionally the tweet from Mark Nelson asserts:
"Chancellor Scholz and Economy Minister Habeck have been falsely claiming that nuclear plants cannot operate because of staffing and lack of fuel."
Perhaps you mean that there are other reasons the CEO mentioned in the article you refer to: extension would be of limited energy benefit.
Wrong. The German government has said that the plants would have to run at reduced capacity now to make it through winter with the current fuel, so they might as well run them at full capacity until their EOL.
And pretending that there wouldn't be staffing issues is ridiculous.
But the capacity would be much more helpful in winter when the rolling blackouts start (which I view as a near certainity unless the Russia situation improves) than now.
Running at the start of next year means not using up the nuclear fuel now.
The owner of the plant is someone a level higher in the hierarchy than the statement giver in the video, and he/they said, that they do not want to run the plant. Technically it is feasible, says the interviewee. But it would cost the owner money, so the company actually has no interest unless they get compensated, by a lot: the nuclear phase-out means they make the profits, payed by the state, without cost and risk of actually running the plant. If they cannot phase it out, they have costs, and would not be eligible for the phase-out deal money.
How were these not long term repercussions as well? Nuclear power is the safest per kilowatt hour, and (at least in the US) we’re throwing away the vast majority of fuel solely for political reasons.
Living in a sunny state, I’d love to see solar on everything; the more the better. But to backstop that, nuclear seems like by far the best option.
The decision absolutely has long term repercussions, my comment was more to emphasize that the timeline to the "Wow, we might have made a really bad decision there..." realization was always going to be a short one.
Sometimes major decisions have outcomes that can only be fully appreciated with decades of hindsight. This one was obvious with minimal foresight.
The title is about "thinking", not something that is actually likely to happen.
Some parties, without consensus, are claiming it would be a good idea. The people in charge say that this won't happen, because of material reasons.
The industry does not even want to run longer. It is technically feasible for some months. Legally, it is not feasible yet.
Cost/gains wise the some-month idea could make sense, but new certifications are needed, so perhaps only in times of rare energy this could be a profitable arrangement.
What is that weird source? All the links in there are self-referential, and a lot of the articles are choke full of straight up wrong info.
In their "About us" page they decry "consensus science" and "global warming alarmists"..
Which is a way too common issue with a lot of the online reporting on German fission; Giving straight up wrong history and info based on very questionable motives.
Case in point; The article, once again, claims it was Merkel who decided the exit, allegedly in 2011, when that's plain and simply wrong. Merkel pushed trough extremely unpopular running time extensions in 2010, then Fukushima exploded in 2011 and the running time extensions were revoked during the course of the atom-moratorium, as during safety inspections the reactors were found not to be safe enough to run that much longer [0].
That's also why some reactors never came back online from the moratorium; They were found too unsafe to be turned back on. But their remaining electricity contingency was added to the remaining ones, which is what will allow them to run for longer.
At least if the German government will pay for that extra run time, as the nuclear operators themselves are unwilling to do so [1].
There is literally decades of more history there, several big government subsidies for the nuclear industry along the lines of "Privatized profits, socialized losses" [2], while at the same time sabotaging the renewable built out [3], all under allegedly "nuclear hating" Merkel.
I predict that we get to have actual, fast, non-partisan progress when it comes to the energy and emission problems in the near future. I'm hopeful.
Progressives have been pushing to phase out harmful energy sources (among many other things) since more than half a century across the developed world. There was always push-back from conservative voices, NIMBYs and just generally ignorant people, but that is starting to weaken and we see more and more convergence.
- First, the concerns, typically based on scientific evidence, was simply ignored.
- When voices got louder, there was a push-back based on economic concerns, still ignoring the threat of pollution.
- Meanwhile a wave of propaganda started to saw doubt about the effects of pollution, climate change and so on.
- At first it was said that climate change will not happen.
- Then it was said that climate change is not man made.
- Denying climate change was becoming unpopular, so they started talking about feasibility, nitpicking, ad-hominem/ridicule and distraction.
All of this time everyone could have invested time, money and brain power into shifting to renewable energy, energy storage, energy efficiency, insulation etc.
And now since more and more weather changes and catastrophes are actually happening, there are suddenly people from the same camp talking about bringing back nuclear. Why? Because of an political issue that nobody predicted and is completely unrelated to the global threat of climate change.
But this is a good thing. It is the first step to realization that everyone should put much more effort into sustainable energy and peripheral issues. It might happen for the 'wrong' reasons, but it will happen.
> Germany’s nuclear phase-out was prompted by Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power disaster in 2011.
What's interesting here is how Germany's public policy is swaying in the winds of current events. First it was Japan's experience that triggered the country to pull the plug on nuclear. Now it's the Ukraine war triggering them to plug that sucker back in.
Sacrificing the long term for the short was in former times described as a characteristically American problem. I remember reading article after article about how far-sighted the European governments were. How they built consensus across public and private sectors, working on a scale of many years rather than just one quarter. How much better equipped they were to weather bad times.
It turns out all democracies face similar problems (The People want benefits without pain), but good times create illusions to the contrary for a while.
Nuclear is dead in Germany. Postponing the shutdown of those outdated rotten reactors built in the 70s is not a strategy shift. If new reactors were being built constantly, those old reactors wouldn’t be in service anymore anyways because they are just too expensive and dangerous.
Even by running on nuclear energy, Germany condemned its own industry which relies heavily on gas, which will not be delivered as required by Russia due to its own political decisions against Russia. They won't be able to get the gas from another country in the quantity required. The majority of factories just can't suppress their usage of gas. This winter will be quite difficult for a lot of industrial companies.
I just can't understand, strategically, how such huge decisions can be made so quickly and totally going against the interest of your own people and economy.
No, it takes at least three years to build LNG terminal. Even if it take less than that it would be quite hard to reach the necessary supply by LNG carrier ships. It also requires the construction of new LNG carrier ships. It also requires new partnerships.
That's interesting to hear. I thought the reason LNG futures for this winter in the UK are so high is because other European countries are expected to have completed lng terminals by then. They only started a couple of months ago.
In this thread on Germany I am surprised to read about Jane Fonda (who?).
The European perspective is most strongly influenced by movements starting post Chernobyl.
This happened not only in Germany but also in Sweden and other countries. In Germany, for some reason (please tell us you German HN users) this movement has had an outsized impact and not even Merkel could stop dismantlement of nuclear.
It shouldn't take a crisis to rethink things, but we are humans and so it does.
Ontario has among the lowest emissions power on the face of the Earth because of nuclear power but will be shutting down Pickering power station next year, which generates 14% of all power in the province, eclipsing all renewable energy built and planned and even cancelled projects.
We're about to follow Germany's mistake and yet none of our politicians are talking about it.
"Crisis" is the wrong word to use when the actions taken by governments and endorsed by the democratic voters logically lead you to the obvious conclusions.
Sure, we have a hilariously rocketing energy prices. But this is not an accident. It was easily predictable result of their actions.
Maybe I chose the wrong word. It is intentional result of the policies, so how can there be a 'crisis'? Everyone knew where the path would lead, so how can there be such a thing as surprise, as if it were an accident?
Safe nuclear power is an engineering problem, whereas Russian gas is a geopolitical one. Germany has more faiths in Russia being nice than German engineering. It is a shame.
That's an odd claim. In Germany the Green party was the only party promising to scrap the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Russia before last year's elections.
I assume Europe's only real "strategy" for 2022 is extreme energy conservation, from lowering temperature settings ("put on a sweater") to heating selected rooms and offices. In fact, the plan is more comprehensive, though I notice that the numbers seem elusive - does conservation really have much impact?
"According to the plan’s findings, turning down the thermostat by just 1 °C would save around 7% of the energy used for heating, while setting an air conditioner 1 °C warmer could reduce the amount of electricity used by up to 10%. With an average one-way car commute in the EU of 15 kilometres, working at home three days a week could reduce household fuel bills by around €35 a month, even after taking increased energy use at home into account. And as the average car in the EU clocks up about 13 000 kilometres a year, reducing cruising speed on motorways by 10 kilometres an hour could cut fuel bills by an average of around €60 a year."
The much bigger problem in Germany is their chemical industry which uses gas as a feedstock. You can't just turn down the thermostat when a large chunk of your economy (and a lot of other countries) depends on it.
The title of the story is potentially misleading. Germany is not thinking about building new power plants. It's just thinking about letting the existing ones run a little longer than originally planned.
what about the centralization aspects of nuclear power?
there's no way nuclear can be decentralized, even with relatively tiny reactors, the waste management requires too much discipline.
If the Japanese couldn't avoid a disaster, and considering discipline would come easy to them, I don't think nuclear can ever be truly safe and distributed.
solar and wind are more resistant to centralization.
Picking a fight with Russia over Ukrainian nationalism is not in the interest of Germany. In democracies voters tend to punish politicians who hurt their interest although it sometimes takes a while for them to figure things out.
Modern nationalism has killed more people than any political ideology.
By supporting intervention in Ukraine Germany lost an export market, and are now facing an even worse energy crisis. They will effectively have an energy tax on everything their industry produces.
If they didn't support intervention, I assume they would have faced even worse consequences from allies.
And the German delegation to the UN laughed in Trump's face when he confronted them on their dependence on Russia.
I know HN has its cadre of pro-nuclear devotees but until we have some large technological breakthroughs, nuclear power isn't going anywhere long term.
Fusion as it exists today (eg ITER) is a massive boondoggle. Hydrogen fusion fundamentally loses energy from neutron escape. To add insult to injury, those neutrons also destroy the reactor.
As for fission, of the almost 700 fission plants humanity has ever built, exactly zero have been built without massive government subsidy. Why? Because they're expesnive to build, maintain and operate, uneconomically so. And that's before you even get into the issues such as:
- What do you do with the fuel processing waste (eg UF6)? Some claim this problem is solved (eg reprocessing UF6 -> UF4) but it's not solved but it's not economic;
- What to do with the fuel waste? Putting it somewhere geologically stable and hoping for the best for thousands of years is... less than ideal.
- Can humans be trusted to run nuclear plants long term? Corporations notoriously cut costs that don't have immediate impact but the failure modes of fission plants are catastrophic. Governments too suffer from corruption;
- Can governments regulate fission plants at scale?
I support Germany delaying nuclear power plant closure because of this crisis but this in no way will be a return to nuclear power.
But let's examine how we got here and this is the part that makes people unreasonably mad for some reason. Yes, Putin is the unjustified aggressor but you cannot ignore what role US foreign policy played in creating the Ukraine crisis through NATO. The US would never accept the equivalent level of expansion of a hostile military alliance the way we somehow expect Russia to. I mean the US almost started World War Three over Cuba after instigating the Cuban Missile Crisis by installing Jupiter MRBMs in Turkey.
This war in Ukraine is a massive boon to the US military industrial complex. The level of military aid we're giving to Ukraine is oddly similar to the income defense contractors "lost" by ending the war in Afghanistan.. Weird, huh?
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
Is this the inflection point when we go back to the 1970s? Richard Nixon had planned for 1000 nuclear reactors in the US for Project Independence by the year 2000:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence