> The mid-2020s will be a critical time for the nation’s fleet of reactors.
> Many of them have 60-year operating licenses that will expire in the 2030s. Getting these new fuels to market before then would increase the performance of these reactors and ultimately improve their chances of applying for extended operation with the NRC.
Going beyond 60 years is quite breath taking. There are so many components in these massively complex beasts that would need to be inspected and replaced, since this is far far beyond their design life times.
For example, at Davis-Bessie there was an acidic leak dripping onto a reactor head for years, resulting in more than 6 inches of corrosion into the reactor head, leaving only 3/8 of an inch to hole back all that pressure. Despite warning signs of lots of rust in the air filters, they didn't find it until that late stage. This was 20 years ago:
What sort of other unexpected issues can crop up? We need these nuclear reactors to run as long as possible. And those in the reactor construction industry tell me that there will never be replacements like them. If we do figure out how to build nuclear again, it's going to be small. And that won't scale until at a bare minimum of the late 2030s.
So this seems like a good effort, but without some heroic efforts, there will be a period where we go from ~100GW of nuclear in the US to just a handful of GW.
I hope we get off our asses and replace them with either more nuclear sources or renewables (if practical).
I am really disheartened by the trend of politicians and environmental orgs shutting down nuclear plants with the public justification being to replace them with renewables and then just building natural gas turbines instead (looking at you California).
Any migration into (non-hydro) renewables will bring more water or gas turbines at the short term.
At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel). But right now they are the other side of the renewables coin.
"At the long term those will be gone, probably replaced by batteries (or just fed with synfuel)"
AFAIK, that is a huge leap of faith, nevermind the overbuild requirements to supply it.
Do you have any actual data/estimates to back up that theory?
Bonus points for including the energy required to supply transportation needs, and energy growth estimates over say the next couple decades.
Because, I've read a crapton of literature on this stuff (and I have a family connection to the TX energy system) and I simply can't see how any of this is going to actually work if 1: The costs don't balloon over carbon sources, 2: The grid maintains a reasonable level of reliability, 3: we can maintain the rare earth mines/production/etc needed to get us even to 100% over the next couple decades without accounting for demand growth.
AFAIK: The only workable solution for providing a couple TW's of power realistically in the next decade is Nukes, everything else depends on some "breakthrough" that hasn't happened yet.
Edit: If you take hydro out of the picture, the current status of wind/solar is really poor, and its only going to get worse when you have to build 6-8x as many wind turbines or 3-4x as many solar farms just to provide enough average energy to meet todays demands, and with that will come cost multiplication as well. Its easy to build 30% renewable, but every overbuild multiplier is just going to multiply the cost. Then you have to figure out how to store it.
That is a projection of where the US will be in 30 years, and nothing really suggests to me that they are wrong. The only thing I think that will change that is a 1970's French like pivot which clears the red tape, and has an explicit goal of building the ~150 reactors in the US needs to remove most of that carbon. And then start handing it out like candy to other countries because we have standardized the design enough, and built enough of them to return it to 1960's levels of cost (aka cheaper than natural gas).
My actual bet at this point is the Chinese do it, and replace the US as a worldwide leader in energy production.
Nice graph that of renewables production on your link. It's always interesting when you get one of those predictions of "yep, it's have grown exponentially since the beginning, but an inflection will start right now and we will only have the low-growth half of the logistic function at the future".
I suggest your source has a bad model.
Anyway, you are talking about costs of renewables production compared with gas. There's nothing to discuss on that anymore, renewables are cheaper when they can produce, their costs are falling, and fossil fuel costs are predicted to slowly raise forever. The only costs with any space to compare and discuss nowadays are about storage, not production.
All of electricity production requires surplus, we run our systems at a fraction of full capacity because that's the only sane way to design a system that has zero storage.
As storage gets deployed more and more, we will be able to increase the capacity factor of all the more expensive parts, like transmission and distribution.
Already, T&D is a huge cost of our electricity, something like 6-8 cents of the average 13 cents/kWh in the US, with the rest being generation costs. As solar and wind plunge below our current costs, to 1-2 cents/kWh, T&D becomes a much larger cost center, and only storage has the potential to undercut that.
T&D is sized to peak draw, which is many many many multiples of average draw. Storage close to the meter solves all that, and drastically reduces the cost of T&D. If we are at 5-15 cents/kWh right now for lithium ion storage, it's going to be 2-6 cents in 10-15 years, faster than we could get the first new nuclear reactor online if we started building today.
While I agree that underused storage does have higher cost, we will likely have a plethora of cheaper storage options in the future that only work at lower usage rates than daily discharge, and those can fill in the other parts of the cost/discharge frequency need.
Any guesses what those storage technologies capable of scaling to TWh levels will be?
Also, before wind/solar the grid was built to a small factor over the expected peak. Aka maybe 120% of yearly peak which also compensated for downtime and repairs.
These renewable overbuilds are probably 3x-10x in capacity because it is not unusual for say a wind farm to be producing at single digit percentages of its nameplate capacity. In order to be in those lower overbuild ratios though you need ever larger amounts of storage. So it is an ugly curve, and one that will be in competition with carbon sources in many places due to politics, or simply economics.
And production capacity is continuing to scale exponentially. Other estimates for 2030 production are much higher than the 4TWh/year in that article, I've heard 20-30 TWh/year from others with serious skin in the game.
Plus, there are plenty of other battery chemistries that are closer to production than, say, SMRs, like the much-hyped Form energy's iron air batteries. And that battery cost and discharge rate were designed around current electricity market economics from the very start.
As you point out, there's a tradeoff between overbuild of renewables and storage; with more renewables overbuild there's less need for storage. And with more storage there's less need for renewables overbuild.
If you overbuild renewables 10x, it's simply 10x the cost, plus you have lots of zero-marginal-cost energy nearly all the time.
And I think that this total system cost is probably the Best way to look at the cost, rather than cost/kWh decreasing as more is added. We as a society pay the total cost, not a marginal $/kWh price.
I only see hydrogen or synthfuel production being any meaningful 'storage'. The rest is crazy expensive and doesn't scale well: pumped hydro, compressed air, flywheels, batteries.
It is obviously technically possible to build a couple terawatts of nuclear. But is there good evidence that the industry and supply chains can scale up quickly? How many new engineers and scientists do you need? And could that work in developing countries?
I don't think your assessment is correct on any of the particulars.
Building lots of renewables and storage is eminently practical. It's happening every day, getting cheaper every day, and is scaling unbelievably fast.
Constructing new nuclear, however, is not practical or economical. And it's not because of politicians or environmentalists. It's because Westinghouse, utilities, and contractors can't do it. And it's exactly the same story in France, with undeniably friendly politics and regulation.
There's an important deeper issue here about advanced economies. Construction productivity, when compared to the massive increase in manufacturing productivity, is pretty much constant. So we can either apply our finite and limited construction capacity to building more factories, and exponentially increasing our productivity, or we can apply it to constructing nuclear plants, and get only linear gains in energy out of our construction efforts.
The one way around that is SMRs, maybe, but they far less proven tech than lithium ion batteries, which are far more proven and practical.
Technologically, we have progressed beyond the big nuclear reactors from half a century ago. They are a monument to the age, like the intricate woodwork on Victorian houses, but never to be created again by advanced economies.
The economies that are able to build nuclear are those that are about at the stage of the US in the 70s and 80s: China and Russia. Maaaaaybe South Korea. But the value of their labor force per hour may soon advance beyond the point where it makes sense for them to continue to build nuclear.
The future of energy is manufactured: wind, solar, and battery storage.
The Russians are building VVERs (their name for the LWR) in many countries, they just signed a deal to build 4 in Egypt. For that matter the Russians have a fast breeder running too, they are not so scared of Sodium fires they just put them out. (Which is what The DoE in the US says they did when they ran SFRs.)
China is also building LWRs at a high rate.
Two AP1000s are in the final stages of commissioning now in Georgia, a similar project was abandoned in South Carolina. Those projects were delayed because they were waiting for the first AP1000 to be completed in Zhejiang, China which was waiting for a Chinese factory to make parts.
There are no forges in the US large enough to make LWR parts but they do have them in China, Japan, Russia and France and these are planned in Czecha, India and the UK.
Some reactor types like the HTGR are lower power density than the LWR but others, particularly fast reactors, are higher density and could be physically smaller for the same power output.
Back when people thought fast reactors were inevitable they believed the capital cost of fast reactors would be inevitably higher than the LWR but now some people think a sodium cooled fast reactor could be cheaper if it was coupled to a gas turbine power set which is a fraction the size of a steam turbine never mind the size and cost of associated heat exchangers. Moltex particularly believes they can build a (salt cooled and salt fueled) reactor for much less than an LWR.
> Many of them have 60-year operating licenses that will expire in the 2030s. Getting these new fuels to market before then would increase the performance of these reactors and ultimately improve their chances of applying for extended operation with the NRC.
Going beyond 60 years is quite breath taking. There are so many components in these massively complex beasts that would need to be inspected and replaced, since this is far far beyond their design life times.
For example, at Davis-Bessie there was an acidic leak dripping onto a reactor head for years, resulting in more than 6 inches of corrosion into the reactor head, leaving only 3/8 of an inch to hole back all that pressure. Despite warning signs of lots of rust in the air filters, they didn't find it until that late stage. This was 20 years ago:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis–Besse_Nuclear_Power_St...
What sort of other unexpected issues can crop up? We need these nuclear reactors to run as long as possible. And those in the reactor construction industry tell me that there will never be replacements like them. If we do figure out how to build nuclear again, it's going to be small. And that won't scale until at a bare minimum of the late 2030s.
So this seems like a good effort, but without some heroic efforts, there will be a period where we go from ~100GW of nuclear in the US to just a handful of GW.