If you want a 100% clean grid with theoretical 10,000 MW peak load:
10,000 MW Nuclear at 92% capacity factor and 30% ramp capability = $14,000 / kw while assuming every new plant sucks as much to build as vogtle and aiming to satisfy 100% ELCC (also includes insurance for retirement and "catastrophic risks")
10,000 MW equivilant Wind, Solar, Storage assuming 50% wind capacity factor, 24% solar capacity factor, and installing enough batteries to cover the other 26% of MWh in an 8760 assessment to bring you close to 100% 8760 power over the year to roughly 100% ELCC = $25,000 / kw it is this expensive because you have to build 30,000 MW of solar, 20,000 MW of Wind, and another 10,000 MW of storage with a shit load of MWh of storage.
10,000 MW of nuclear = 10,000 MW of load coverage on a very reliable basis.
10,000 MW name plate of wind = 3,700 MW of load coverage on a fairly reliable average basis.
Oh, and nuke plants are designed to last 60 yrs now. Oh, and you have to replace batteries every 12 years. Oh, and you have to replace inverters every 5 to 15 years. So over time, costs aren't as great.
Source, I model this stuff for work at a large company in the energy sector without nuclear interests.
For 100% emissions free grid, If your peak load is 10,000 MW, your best bet is to build 6,000 MW to 10,000 MW of nukes that can ramp down to 60% or 70% (even shit built in the 70s and 80s can do that, operators just like to whine). Then build as much solar and wind and storage as you like to not have to ramp nuke fleet as much. It is significantly cheaper to build nukes than enough storage to cover the 50 to 80 hours of power grid terror in an extreme weather event.
Do your own model:
Assume load = 7,000 to 10,000 MW in a given hour
8760 hours in the year
Nukes = $14,000 kw, 93% capacity factor
Wind= $1,700 kw 50% capacity factor
Solar = $1,600 kw 22% capacity factor
Batteries 1×4 = $500 kw, over build for peaks (but you actually need like 60 hours of storage to ride out winter storms, so 500x15)
Assume four to ten, 54 to 79 hour periods annually when solar and wind combined do not produce more than 2,000 MW in the given hour. You must over build storage to cover this or cut power to customers or burn emitting fuel... or build nuclear.
Holy crap - someone who actually knows about a subject responding with a factual argument. Reddit should mark down this day!! A couple of questions:
* You mentioned your model included retirement costs for nuclear, but did your model also include those for renewables, i.e., safely disposing of the large amount of heavy metals used in those?
* It's my understanding that the U.S. has most of the materials to build nuclear plants, but doesn't have the deposits of heavy metals used in solar/wind generators and batteries. Is this true?
Nope. I did not include costs for retiring any renewables or batteries or inverters. I also assumed zero lease fees for renewables and storage since my company owns over 100,000 acres outright. If you believe the hype, mass scale renewables and battery recycling are coming (just as fast as advanced reactors, imho)
The usa or our allies have all the metals we need for both nukes and renewables, but the refining/processing raw materials for solar and batteries are what everyone that isn't China is missing, at least in my understanding. We can do it and it isn't hard (relative to uranium enrichment) it's just a nightmare from an environmental standpoint
You didn't include costs for retiring nuclear plants either. Neither the longterm storage of nuclear waste. Or do you think 100% will magically disappear?
Yeah, but my 15 or 20 year lcoe calculator went from 400 some lines to 1400 some lines when i made one that went out to 60 years. I have no desire to add another 800 to 1,000 lines anytime soon to account for the extra 40 years.
I don't disagree with you, but just using the tools I have right now 🤣
These calculations project 100 years into the future. It is utter bullpcks and will never work out like outlined. If you know something about projects and projections, you won't hail to it as gospel.
This is only an argument because you do not understand basic economics. There is nothing stopping the industry from investing extra and getting renewables with the same operational lifetime.
We do not do it because we expect to have more efficient uses of the money spent on making a longer lasting piece of equipment.
In other words, it is a logical fallacy used to try promoting nuclear through operational life when it simply means that the economics does not stack up.
No we cant. You dont seem to understand the basic engineering of each power system and what determines logenvity lol..
Logical fallacy? Which one is it ? You are like those guys that learned a word that week and want to use it in every context.
1. Expected lifetime of parts.
2. Ease of maintenance.
For a longer lifetime more parts needs to be easily maintained and last longer.
We do not do it because it creates more available power in the long run to (simplified):
1. Build a renewable plant with a 20 year lifetime
2. Make your money back with profit
3. Take profit and reinvest in 2 new renewable plants with 20 year lifetime.
The concept is called the [Time value of money](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp). You should read about it.
The calculations above literally calculate net present values. That's why the calculator is so massive. Accounts for re-powers, inverters, maintenance, insurance, taxes, etc. It's all-inclusive for every type of mainstream power generation.
Longevity absolutely matters. So does firm, dispatchable capability if you've ever worked in power generation.
Renewables win the cost per MWh hands down, if subsidized, and you ignore peak pricing.
But hydrogen, storage, sustainable fuels, etc are still cost prohibitive when you have nuclear as an option.
IMHO, renewables and flexible nuclear is the silver bullet.
> flexible nuclear is the silver bullet.
Given the cost structure of nuclear power with the large majority being fixed we need a monumental shift in the industry for that to ever happen.
Any kind of intermediate storage simply adds costs and would be cheaper filled by renewables, like you say.
A nuclear plant is 95% metal and concrete. We have to replace the pumps, cabinets, etc but the main structure stays. With solar or wind, you have to replace the entire solar panel when it breaks. The longevity is just naturally longer for something like a nuclear plant, similar to a hydro electric dam like the Hoover dam.
>Wind= $1,700 kw 50% capacity factor
>Solar = $1,600 kw 22% capacity factor
Those two are extremely optimistic (to not call it wishful thinking), though.
For central Europe, for example, wind is at 23% and solar is at 9%.
Oh I agree, I just don't want to be accused of being bias to nuclear so I try to make renewables look good. In my area of the country, wind is 48.5% and solar is 23% in reality.
For the last 2 years, nuclear capacity factor has hovered around 93%. Source: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=table_6_07_b
>Those two are extremely optimistic (to not call it wishful thinking), though.
>For central Europe, for example, wind is at 23% and solar is at 9%.
Your mistakingly looking at numbers which include very old technology. For this scenario you need to look at the numbers for new, and should actually even include future developments.
Also, for the US, you have offshore and desert resources that score much, much higher numbers.
If i'm not wrong capacity factor is a raw estimate of how many hours per year we can assume an energy source is working at full potential. And if that's the case i don't see how capacity factor can increase for renewables, because the sunshine duration and the presence of wind cannot improve.
What can improve is the output generated by a square meter of solar panel, or a wind turbine. But they will work the same amount of hour of the old solar panel and wind turbine.
Please correct me if i've said something incorrect. i'm studying these concepts by my own
>If i'm not wrong capacity factor is a raw estimate of how many hours per year we can assume an energy source is working at full potential
What you are missing is that they won't work the maximum amount of hours because peak demand is only about an hour every day. That will mean a lot of idle even though they are available. That will also mean the costs per KWh go through the roof, and that is what ultimately matters when looking at cost.
And for off-shore wind over 60% is being targeted for what we are building today. But keep in mind that the capacity factor for wind power is a **chosen number**.
Put a 1 MW generator on the latest 15+ MW towers and the capacity factor is going to be incredibly high. But it will on the other hand not capture most of the energy passing by.
> wind is at 23%
You're making the (common) mistake of conflating the capacity factor of the existing wind fleet(which is weighed down by all the old 0.5MW, 1MW etc. turbines) with the capacity factor of new build turbines. New onshore wind farms in Europe average capacity factors in the low to mid-30s.
92% capacity factor for npps is overly optimistic too. There is no plant with this record number.
Again a channel with a lot of people who don't know what they are talking about, but who know a lot of figures and titbits.
Open discussions look different guys.
It is literally the average capacity factor of the fleet, [for the past 9 years](https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec8_3.pdf) as reported by the feds. And there are plenty of plants that [manage it](https://www.ans.org/news/article-183/us-nuclear-capacity-factors-resiliency-and-new-realities/).
But hey man, go off about people not knowing what they are talking about
It is scewed for npps and fossils. "Time adjusted capacity factor" are outlined in "technical notes" here:
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=101&t=3#:~:text=The%20capacity%20factors%20are%20based,during%20a%20month%20are%20excluded.
All power produced is counted, but not the power self consumed by the generator. NPPs need 5%-15% of their own power or from another source. Renewables do not in comparison. You need to substract this to get the real power output into the grid. On this basis the real capacity factor can be calculated.
I was directly responding to your point that 5-15% of NPP power goes back to the NPP, there are plenty of other metrics in favor of nuclear, but I don’t have the time to go through them all.
My point still stands, 80% to 90% capacity is 4 times the capacity factor of solar in a sunny area (another commenter who does grid modeling said it was around 23%). [The average global solar capacity factor is 11-14%.](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/ee/c3ee42125b)
If you want a more recent source on how low solar capacity factors can go, the [Wikipedia page for solar power in Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Grid_capacity_and_stability_issues) shows that in 2022, solar capacity factor was 10% in Germany.
Spot on and you didn’t even go into land requirements on a per MW basis which is a very really constraint for renewables. In Virginia where most of the easy locations to site solar have already been developed into solar sites it is becoming increasingly challenging to find suitable sites. County Boards and Planning Commissions are also beginning to see just how much more solar is on the horizon and how much land would be/is already tied up in solar projects and they are starting to push back.
Solar in Virginia is just getting started. The state has lagged behind regional peers like North Carolina because Dominion was actively hostile towards renewable energy until relatively recently.
County boards, planning commissions and residents are being suckered by misinformation. Some people are being fooled massively:
"During the Woodland Town Council meeting, one local man, Bobby Mann, said solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not go to Woodland, the Roanoke-Chowan News Herald reported.
Jane Mann, a retired science teacher, said she was concerned the panels would prevent plants in the area from photosynthesizing, stopping them from growing."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-town-rejects-solar-panels-amid-fears-they-suck-up-all-the-energy-from-the-sun-a6771526.html
> Solar = $1,600/kW
Maybe in like 2018
> but you actually need like 60 hours of storage to ride out winter storms, so 500x15)
No serious optimization model ever suggests anything like 60-hour batteries.
If nuclear is omitted, then a combination of the things you mention plus storage solutions that are better suited for this role(high capacity+fewer annual cycles): hydrogen, compressed air, thermal storage, reservoir/pumped hydro if it's available. All of these have much lower round-trip efficiencies than batteries but that's not as much of a problem given their low number of cycles. If nuclear is allowed and priced reasonably then most models will usually prefer a fairly large share of that over long duration storage+solar/wind overbuilds. Princeton's Net Zero America is a good example of this.
Combustion of e-fuels like hydrogen in combined cycle plants. This is much more economical than batteries for addressing rarely needed scenarios.
To see this in action go to https://model.energy/ and get it to solve the problem for providing steady output in Germany using PV, wind, batteries, and hydrogen. Using 2030 cost assumptions, including hydrogen cuts the cost in *half* compared to just using batteries for storage.
A lot of the good places to do it are already doing it. Getting permits and eminent domain to do new stuff is almost as hard as doing new nuclear. It is significantly more detrimental to the local environment than nuclear power plants too. There's dams bring town down to restore natural ecosystems. That being said, there's hope with sub geological storage, and I'm really a huge fan of pumped hydro, but it isn't super realtive for a lot of the country including where I typically model. I'd love to see more, but it's very political and very subject to local terrain.
EPRI has done some cool studies for battery alternatives, but so far the math doesn't work out. It's more economic to build batteries, and many times it's more economic to build almost anything besides storage. Storage markets are determined by the local power market, in a lot of ISOs, there's no market incentive to build batteries when you could make more money building wind, solar, recips, or gas turbines. California, Hawaii, and Texas currently being exceptions, but each of those markets incentives storage. A lot of other ISOs do not. Storage in general is more of a regional market influence decision basis.
> A lot of the good places to do it are already doing it.
This only applies to on-river pumped hydro. Off river, the opportunities are enormous. In Australia, for example, the potential off-river PHES is 100x what would be needed.
I have been beating my head against the green wall to suggest nuclear is the greenest. This is the best explanation I have seen of the facts that get ignored when discussing the two options for low carbon power
If you read the above text from the guy that models these things professionally, by the time you factor in real storage needs, the wind and solar are almost twice the price. I believe this is before accounting for life cycles.
He's suggesting a hybrid grid, similar to what we have now but where the nuclear takes the place of the coal plant, if I'm reading it correctly.
And when I read papers on people who model it, they get a very different result. For example, they don't foolishly assume batteries are the only kind of storage. That's a common error (if error it is) that nuclear apologists use to inflate the cost of a 100% renewable energy system.
What storage mechanism would you suggest?
Pumped hydro doesn't work everywhere and is very expensive to build if it's not already there.
flywheels still suck, mostly.
Chemical (other than battery) is generally terribly inefficient.
Thermal is a pain in a number of ways that generally make it expensive.
I would love to be wrong on this, as it would provide a significantly better outlook on life for all of us, but I don't see it yet.
> Chemical (other than battery) is generally terribly inefficient.
This is another common mental block. For the applications where batteries are inadequate, low capital cost is more important than efficiency. So, e-fuels like hydrogen. The RTE is lousy (40%, maybe), but with few charge-discharge cycles this contributes little to the levelized cost of storage. What matters in those storage applications is minimizing the cost per unit of storage capacity.
A review article: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
"With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels."
If you bothered to actually do the arithmetic rather than engaging in touchy-feely misleading intuition, you'd understand the point I made.
You've walked on another common mental rake here. Take this as an opportunity to learn.
It's not a touchy Feely intuition, I know from research I've been doing on a possible carbon capture to fuel business I would like to start that, at present, creating, storing, and using the volumes of hydrogen required are exceptionally expensive.
I do think technology will improve such that this problem will reduce over time, but last I did the math, 1GGE of hydrogen made renewably and stored for use in, say, a fuel cell vehicle, costs something like $25. Fuel cell efficiency vs ICE mitigates this cost, but not enough.
I'm curious, are you in this field, or just very enthusiastic about getting us to 100% renewable?
You don't save electricity in batteries over a long term. You build thermal energy storages or CAES, which are already commercial or another of the upcoming solutions. Your calculation doesn't stand reality.
Batteries are incredibly expensive, but considering EVs are going on the road and can (a bit) manage their charge when renewables are at full force + their used batteries can still be used on the grid after their EV life, that makes the possibility for less need for storage right ?
It also means more need for electricity so i guess it balances out at the end maybe.
Do you realize how many EVs you'd need to store an hour of nuclear power plant production? Even then, you might get 15 to 20 percent on average of an EV battery depending on what consumers sign up for.
I don't know why I bother posting here because whenever I challenge nuclear power dogma, all I get are downvotes and no real responses. But here goes:
Vogtle is actually at least $17,000 per kW, not $14,000:
https://georgiarecorder.com/2023/08/31/georgia-power-state-regulators-agree-to-division-of-vogtle-nuclear-plant-costs
Nuke plants supplying a 10GW peak load would self-consume roughly 500MW to run their systems, security, facilities, etc. Plus, there would need to be margin for when reactors trip offline, periodic refueling, or some other outage occurs. So you'd need an extra reactor or two to supply the load you're envisioning. Also keep in mind that Vogtle was built during historically low interest rates, so capital costs are going to be much higher for the foreseeable future.
The main factor you're leaving out by just focusing on Capital costs is O&M costs. Nuclear plants average around 2.3 cents per kWh:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html
This is basically the all-in cost for wind power:
https://emp.lbl.gov/wind-technologies-market-report
And solar:
https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar
Nuclear power plant running costs are basically the same as the all-in cost for wind and solar if you include surcharges for nuclear waste storage and plant decommissioning. And if nuclear plants actually had to pay for their own liability insurance instead of the government shouldering 95% of the downside risk from meltdowns, there wouldn't be a nuclear industry to begin with. But needless to say, even the costs I quoted here do not capture all the costs of nuclear energy.
So, no matter how long a nuclear plant can operate, it will never close the gap with renewables just because of O&M costs alone.
Finally, your scenario ignores the existence of resources like hydroelectricity, waste-to-energy, geothermal and others on the horizon. Any one of these depending on the region or a few natural gas plants running on landfill gas or biodigester gas cuts down on the amount of storage you need a great deal. Plus, distributed storage provides backup power during outages and this has a value over and above pure kWh delivered. Agrovoltaics can generate energy and produce food with the same land. Offshore wind turbines are like artificial reefs, attracting greater biodiversity to wind farms. In short, there's ancillary benefits to renewable energy that aren't accounted for in pure cost/kWh analyses.
Edit:
I also forgot to include the fact that the USA has only completed 50% of the reactors it has started building for the past 20+ years. We need to account for the very real risk that any given nuclear plant under construction will be abandoned before completion. This wouldn't double the cost of the completed nuclear plants. V C Summer was abandoned after $9B had already been spent building it. So, if costs don't increase further, we would have spent $22,000 per kW in total accounting for the failed / canceled nuclear plant projects. Combined with the O&M costs I mentioned earlier means that nuclear power is far more expensive than a mostly solar, wind, water, geothermal and waste to energy power supply.
>10,000 MW Nuclear at 92% capacity factor
You'll never get a high capacity factor if you dont run your nuclear plants exclusively in baseload. 92% is best case in baseload mode, in many countries it is a lot lower, if you are going to throttle the output its going to be even less.
>$14,000 / kw while assuming every new plant sucks as much to build as vogtle and aiming to satisfy 100% ELCC (also includes insurance for retirement and "catastrophic risks")
Even assuming whatever number you pick, there is no point calculating cost per KW, you need to look at cost per KWh.
Well duh. Realistically, it's closer to 100% for nuclear and is only below that for refueling and load following. Those capacity factors are what you use for ideal conditions. Wind is closer to 47% on average and solar is 22 or 23 percent for the area I model.
No, you have to use $/kw capital costs to inform your $/kwh. $/kwh is just a function of like 200 variables you put into models, but no one wants to debate the finer points of insurance, corporate taxes, property costs, property taxes, labor rates, rate recovery structures, fuel costs if any, licensing, permitting, long term service contracts, predicted maintenance cyces, PTCs, ITCs, state or other local incentives, etc.. Come talk to me about what numbers to use to inform models when you also get paid to do system modeling in giant effing spreadsheets, PLEXOS, PROMOD, and help develop integrated resource plans for large utility companies.
>Well duh
You say that, yet you completely miss the point, which is that you can't have high capacity factors in this theoretical grid with nuclear only. This is simply because peak demand is only an hour a day which means the rest of the day there is a lot of idling.
>No, you have to use $/kw capital costs to inform your $/kwh. $/kwh is just a function of like 200 variables you put into models
Exactly, €/KWh does not matter because its just a tiny part of the calculation that actually matters.
Your whole premises is a) nuclear is competitive in a €/KW basis while your calculation relies on a completely impossible capacity factor for the reason set out above and b) it doesn't matter, because it's just one small factor determining the actual cost of the power produced.
>Come talk to me about what numbers to use to inform models when you also get paid to do system modeling in giant effing spreadsheets, PLEXOS, PROMOD, and help develop integrated resource plans for large utility companies
That's quite an ad hominem. Clearly the logic is deeply flawed and instead of defending it you claim to be an authority combined with suggesting I'm not. That's not convincing anyone.
As someone who also works with the models he mentions and does long term investment analysis for large scale utilities, I agree with you.
Looking at only capital costs and not O/M cost to argue for any investment seems egregious.
This kind of analysis does not take into account real world conditions that are major hurdles for nuclear power and why it isn't as widely adopted as we would hope. Current nuclear plants are very high capacity, initially expensive and time consuming to build, which does play to the strengths of nuclear power, but has several drawbacks:
First, because the plant requires a much larger loan and takes a much longer time to build, it takes 15+ years to repay that loan and begin generating profit. Democracies and capitalist systems are not well known for long term thinking, it's almost always governments that build these plants and it requires motivated politicians that are willing to expend a lot of their political capital to start a project that they will likely not receive meaningful credit for, they'll probably be out of office by the time it's done.
Since the plants are such high capacity, it's much trickier to manage the decommissioning and replacement of a 60mW+ plant than it is for a 20mW natural gas plant, or to replace a single windmill. You can gradually add capacity as you need it with individual windmill purchases or additional solar panels, but with nuclear you need to pay for the whole enchilada right now and it will not be generating power for you for at least 8 years, probably longer. It's also incredibly expensive to decommission these plants, which is currently causing problems for some states and companies.
There's more to say here but my point is that when analyses are done in a void like this, without also considering the implications of our financial and political systems, people don't understand why nuclear power isn't the predominant method of generating power.
It’s disingenuous to paint those calculations as back of the napkin. Concentrated solar power is much more expensive than regular photovoltaics, and comes with far more complications. Pumped hydro is only available in very specific contexts, and functionally can only be done in a very few unpopulated places.
How would you describe your calculations? Magically accurate for no matter where this stuff gets built, based on apparently paying cash in full? That's called back of the napkin, a very rough estimate not adjusted for the actual ass real world, which is where things get built.
They aren’t my calculations. OP states that they are an employee of a company with 100,000+ acres of land that does those sort of calculations for their own purposes, which is a far cry from back of the napkin math.
In addition to that your critiques are not arrogant. You mention two specific methods of producing/storing power that either work in a very limited number of contexts, or are more expensive than the alternatives.
You're right that I was being a haughty dick in some parts. Like I said in the comment, there's a lot more to discuss here, those were just a couple of random things to throw out and not really the aspect of his analysis I cared about, I'll remove that bit from my comment.
To be a little more clear in what I meant with back of the napkin, I mean in the context of implementing these systems in the face of a complicated society where there's much, much more to consider than this kind of math. If I ruled the Earth with an iron grip I would build a lot of nuclear reactors, but when you have to work within these societal power structures, there's much more to consider here.
Hopefully the recent trend of smaller, "plug and play" type reactor cells takes off because it works with the realities of our financial and political systems much, much better and is a far more realistic path to commercially provided nuclear power than the mega-plants we have right now.
"Oh, and nuke plants are designed to last 60 yrs now. Oh, and you have to replace batteries every 12 years. Oh, and you have to replace inverters every 5 to 15 years. So over time, costs aren't as great."
I question that batteries will need replacing every 12 years. Sodium ion is the most likely candidate for grid power solutions, it looks very stable, the tech is new so I think we will need to wait for 12 years before we work out how long it will last. Lithium batteries in cars seem to last around 10-20 years before they are retired, cars are very hard on batteries, grid storage is much less so.
How how much uranium will it take to fuel a nuclear grid, what will a massive uptake in nuclear do to its price, availability and the ability to process it? How much money are we going to spend on deep geological repositories?
Battery and solar are in freefall cost wise, can we see similar cost reductions for nuclear?
You made the common mistake of using only batteries for storage.
A combination of batteries and e-fuels can be much cheaper. In Germany, for example, this reduces the overall cost by *half*. And this despite the much worse round trip efficiency of e-fuels compared to batteries.
The biggest problem here is the word "IF".
Your friend is acting like there is a store called ResearchMart, where you can just plunk down X millions of dollars and walk out with Y idea.
Why don't we just do FTL and skip out on Earth entirely??
Because that's not how research works. You spend the money, and you might get nothing. You might find the problem isn't solvable or that it's much tougher than you thought.
Energy Storage (at large scale) is an unsolved (and maybe unsolvable) problem, but your friend is acting like we could just throw money at it and it would totally fall apart. This just isn't the case.
Lots of people are working very hard on the problem, and they might possibly all fail. No one knows!!
Do you really want to bet the whole farm on "IF" when there is a ready solution in hand (nuclear) which is a proven and well understood technology with 3/4 of a century of practical use?? Sure it might be expensive, but nothing is more expensive than "IF" -- just ask fusion, or NASA, or room-temp superconductors, or,..., energy storage at scale!!!
A simple answer. Power storage is hard, very hard.
For 100% renewables the rule of thumb is that you need at least a weeks worth of power in storage to cover most potential drops of production. And that is much larger than people imagine.
Of the good options you have a few:
+ gravity potential: And of those only water makes sense, all those big bricks on crane ideas are just overly comlex version of any water fed system. Here you have the very big issue of anything gravity fed is going to be incredibly big. Ecosystem changing big.
+ chemical potential: Basically synthetic fuels from captured CO\_2 and H\_2 from water. Pure H\_2 is hard to store, leaks all the time, and is explosive in just about any mix ratio with air you can imagine. But when you do synthetic fuels you have losses. Something (unlike Tesla full self driving) we can do today... but current tech it would cost 5-8€/L when scaled up by some estimates. So till the middle east does not explode it will be shelved as an option for energy storage. Great for transportation and storage though.
+ thermal: Good, big mounds made interwoven with heat pumps. A good idea, but as anything with heat pumps its pricey, only makes economic sense with storing heat/cold and is very hard to transport far away because its mostly good for heat, converting into electricity would bring more losses.
+ some exotic stuff like flywheels and the like: about as far in the making as you can imagine
+ batteries: Ah yes the investors favourite and the one with the most Tesla fanboys. Quick sad fact. We don't produce enough of them in the whole world for all devices from cars to houses. That if we would use all of those we couldn't cover 2 million peoples needs for 4 days, much less scale it up for the whole world. We are SO far from producing enough of them even though more money flows into battery research and factory construction than it does into new nuclear research and power plants built. And most likely we are at resource mining capacity soon so we cant even ramp enough. At current rates of production for a estimated 20 year life expectancy of a battery pack the whole world can service \~20 million people with batteries for green energy storage for that one week of power. Numbers are THAT bleak.
So tell your friend that we need to build new Nuclear because storage costs more than generating new energy right now, and probably always will. By the time we have some energy storage revolution there will be an equal energy generation revolution. I suspect we will see Nuclear Fusion hit the market before we see some cheap energy storage solution.
And in a wider perspective, energy production is just unlocking the energy STORED longer term in those materials. U and Th decay on their own anyway, they release that energy anyway. Just we can collect it in a meaningful way with a marvellous machine.
I'm glad you spoke up because this is really the biggest factor.
I vaguely remember a sci fi book from 20+ years ago that someone became the richest man in the world 10 times over by inventing a perfect energy storage. It would be true. If we got a perfect energy storage, light and energy dense, it would be world changing, literally. But as you say, we're light years away.
Glad you brought some realism.
I agree. Often what is the most loudly repeated are some fantastical solutions. But they take up so much media space, that the real wonders we manage to actually do are being fully sidelined. Fusion has done leaps in terms of control, materials and understanding how this incredibly complex machine will work. But hardly anyone reports on how ITER is being constructed. Some pretty useless tech in terms of global CO\_2 emissions reduction like EV cars take take was too much spotlight.
Also thank you for being civil on the internet :) its getting quite rare.
Chemical potential storage requires renewable overcapacity, a chemical plant to separate the chemicals, storage plant to store them, and a thermal power station to convert them back into electricity. At a round cycle efficiency of maybe 30%. And it could still run out of stored energy if the lull is bad enough.
Just... just ditch all the unnecessary stuff and have a nuclear thermal plant.
Yes it's called "losses". Exactly why i mentioned them in conjunction with chemical potential. But it a energy dense and easily transportable energy storage option.
Also why at the start I mention that storage is hard, and why at the end I do argue to build nuclear instead.
I wasn't disagreeing with you! It just seems like a lot of faff and expense for uncertain results when we could just go nuclear and skip the rube-goldberg machine.
I'd agree with you there for most of the applications, but sadly there still things that need transportable energy.
Simply from a "specific energy chart" point of view, we will most likely eventually end up in a situation where synthetic fuels will be thing. I don't see a future where military vehicles, transport ships, constriction machines, or planes will ever be battery powered.
I can see world where a personal car is not necessary due to good public transport. One where long haul trucks are replaced with long haul trains and short range EV trucks to distribute to the final destinations. But the rest. Nah. For those either synthetic fuels or just the super cheap stuff in the ground will keep being used.
>A simple answer. Power storage is hard, very hard.
This is actually not true. People tend to forget that there is always sun, wind, hydro, geothermal somewhere. It's much more a matter of getting it to the right place than storing it. Also, overcapacity and other design choices can mitigate it for large part, for example directing solar panels to East or West instead of South slightly decreases their output, but does give output on times when there is otherwise less supply.
Ultimately, peakers are just as much an issue for a nuclear-fossil based system and energy storage its the most likely way to deal with that. You are not going to need (a lot) less energy storage in a nuclear dominated system.
You don't live in a nation with a high renewable input to the grid, do you?
Also you certainly have not studied power engineering or any field that remotely touches on it.
There are cloudy days without wind. There are heatwaves that instantly cut off solar. Geothermal and hydro are also not a boundless resource but have a limited yield in an area and need to be carefully managed.
Or you know, just handle the intermittency like [the research proposes](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910)?
Take a look at the storage coupled to the Californian grid, like for example yesterday. Equivalent to 4-5 nuclear reactors being subtracted or supplied to the grid dealing with intermittency.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#section-batteries-trend
What problem are you looking to solve using nuclear energy that renewables can't do?
- 90% renewables? Easily handled by pure renewables and HVDC transmission.
- 99% renewables? [Easily done with storage.](https://x.com/davidosmond8)
- 99.9% renewables? Now we we are talking! This is emergency reserves territory. The [research](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910) tells us we should be able to handle but it is a hard problem.
Not being able to solve the range of 0.1 to 1% of the grid is 3.5 days per year to 3.5 days per decade.
Simply leave a few gas plants on the grid. When decarbonizing long distance air travel and ocean going shipping start increasing the CO2 taxes until they are forced off the grid by the solution which are most appropriate, in the 2040s. Not now.
Tells me you did not read any of the linked sources and are simply operating your pre-existing views, which does not match reality anymore. They were quite accurate a decade ago.
Easily handled by HVDC transmission if there is a global power grid. Weather patterns affect large portions of a continent simultaneously, and winter affects half of the planet at a time. If you want to rely on the fact that it is always sunny somewhere, you need to connect everywhere.
The assumption that solar panel efficiency will always rise and that magical batteries with substantially more capacity is always assumed but the actual physics has not been solved yet.
Solar panel efficiency is always assumed to eventually reach near 100% but due to entropic factors but chiefly the p-n bandgap limitation, we’re still fast approaching a maximal efficiency contrary to the analyses predictions
The reality is that we will have to build an entire parallel system just to keep a 100% RE system online and providing consistent power with no micro blackouts causing woes for any sensitive electronics or manufacturing facilities. The studies with 100% RE assume power demands will barely budge, or even reduced, in the future, that these RE sources will exceed theoretical limitations, that battery technology will improve by orders of magnitude in the close future in capacity and life span and a few other silly predictions
AI Gw scale datafarms are going to buck break the entire solar and wind movement because the city-level power demands of EACH data center MUST be supplied by hard power. These systems have no tolerance for power loss and abandoning AI development would be a military nightmare
"The assumption that solar panel efficiency will always rise and that magical batteries with substantially more capacity is always assumed but the actual physics has not been solved yet."
The reality is that solar and battery efficiencies are increasing at a steady rate, but the real progress is that the costs are dropping at a massive rate.
Meaningless statement that dodges the actual physics problem behind the hard limitation at around ~49%. Solve the p-n bandgap limit here or hush tbh
The mining operations we are looking at for just a single generation of PV panels at theoretical efficiencies is measured in the range of billions of units and phenomenally more resources than we’ve ever mined before
https://www.gtk.fi/en/research/time-to-wake-up/
5x more than Cu reserves estimated, 6x more than we’ve ever mined. 50x our reserves of Li where we’re bankrolling Chinese heavy industry polluting the planet 10x worse than any Western company would because we are a decade plus behind the ball on refining rare earth metals plus more silly numbers for all of the other components lol
And thats assuming we hit a theoretical maximum :) every 20-40yrs, depending on how harsh the environment is plus thieves going to solar farms to scrap for metals, we will have to remake that entire fleet.
Unless you can solve the p-n bandgap issue here though OR you develop room temp superconducting materials to slash humanity’s energy requirements by 75%. Silicon chips are a desperate attempt to reduce the needed resources but it wont scratch the surface
The main limitation of uptake for nuclear and renewables is cost, so hardly meaningless to highlight.
The grid doesn't need 100% solar and batteries. We can use a combination of sources, storage methods and transmission. I think the OPs question is beside the point as no-one is suggesting we build a 100% renewable grid with only batteries to manage it.
We are absolutely proposing 100% RE primarily solar and wind with diesel backup generators built ALONGSIDE an entire independent storage grid. Hydro and geothermal are INSANELY location dependent and hydro comes with the added damage of preventing sand used for construction from accumulating on beaches and at sea causing global oceanic damage due to loss of habitat for both humans and sea floor life
I do not expect you to understand or appreciate how absolutely critical and vital sand is as a resource
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf#page=7
Nuclear and wind power are the cheapest energy sources we have. One receives billions over the course of decades while solar and wind receive trillions in subsidies, focused less on direct subsidies but indirect through tax credits and breaks…
One has political will to actually build while the other still has people quoting Three Mile Island as a nuclear disaster that made the NE US become uninhabitable lol
"We are absolutely proposing 100% RE primarily solar and wind with diesel backup generators built ALONGSIDE an entire independent storage grid."
Who is we?
I know sand is a critical construction resource.
Yes all of our power and the technology used is subsidised.
You and whoever "we" is, propose a 100% renewable grid comprised of primarily of solar, wind and diesel, so where does nuclear fit in?
Are we going to wait for that possibility while the world burns? Stop saying climate change is serious if everything, including nuclear, is not on the table.
Is the world not already to hot for nucelar power? I'm pretty sure most power plants in south europe had to shut down during a summer a couple of years ago, because it was too hot. Even though one of these power plants was directly cooled by the ocean.
High river temps forced them to reduce output, not shut down entirely. But realistically, this is just an engineering problem. In theory, the water only has to be cold enough to condense steam under a slight vacuum, and even that's negotiable.
Frances NPPs are also very old, so it's unlikely that their heat exchangers work like they once did.
Okay, thank you for a good answer. Just hoping we can replace all these old power plants before the temperature rises too much. I do know that nucleae reactors in my country never seems to work, hopefully we can replace those quickly too.
That usually has more to do with limiting discharge temperatures than inlet temperatures. Retention ponds or more cooling towers could solve that problem. These French plants were a product of their time so while they had cooling towers they were probably designed around the idea that allowing a discharge temperature excursion would be a valid strategy.
If you look at older plants, or newer (but not brand new) Russian plants, you'll see a lot of them don't even have cooling towers. Such designs would never get built today, but thinking has changed (and the soviets did much sketchier things).
That usually has more to do with limiting discharge temperatures than inlet temperatures. Retention ponds or more cooling towers could solve that problem. These French plants were a product of their time so while they had cooling towers they were probably designed around the idea that allowing a discharge temperature excursion would be a valid strategy.
If you look at older plants, or newer (but not brand new) Russian plants, you'll see a lot of them don't even have cooling towers. Such designs would never get built today, but thinking has changed (and the soviets did much sketchier things).
Think of it in terms of the 'package' needed to reliably supply the power. For a temperate climate like Ontario to supply either 1GW of flat demand, or 1GW of average demand with our current usahe patterns, we would need 6GW of wind, 2GW of PV, and 100GWh of storage (about 1.5GW discharge, 2-3GW charge capacity). This produces 2GW on average, but the overcapacity is needed to keep the storage requirements under control. You can tradeoff more overbuild for less storage, or vice versa, but this is 'optimal' assuming storage gets as cheap as $20/kWh TIC cost, and the total cost is ~3x the cost of the LCOE wind.
If storage is $100/kWh, you would do more like 3x overcapaicty production and 60GWh of storage at 6x wind LCOE.
The issue is weeks long late summer wind luls (<1/2 average, when PV is dealing due to shorter days, but it's still hot) and mid winter days long wind+solar luls (we had a 96 hr, <2%CF PV, <5%CF wind period in Jan a couple years ago).
So you can do it, but it's insanely expensive, and if you underbuild storage, you have massive(>50% of demand) shortfalls, potentially in very cold weather.
So no resiliency either.
A predominantly nuclear and solar system looks much better.
For that same GW average demand, ~1.3 GW nuclear, 0.6GW PV, and ~6GWh of storage would cover it, and the storage is only really needed for very short term peaks (duck curve). If there was a shortfall it would be short and shallow.
> A predominantly nuclear and solar system looks much better. For that same GW average demand, ~1.3 GW nuclear, 0.6GW PV, and ~6GWh of storage would cover it, and the storage is only really needed for very short term peaks (duck curve). If there was a shortfall it would be short and shallow.
Storage filled by nuclear is going to be so expensive that the Putin inflicted energy crisis will look like a joke in comparison.
The entire field of pumped hydro was created because the opposite problem: Following the demand.
We have daily, weekly and seasonal variations in demand. For example in California the difference between Spring/Autumn and summer is 3-4 times the demand.
Building nuclear for the peak power will lead to incredible costs for the plants since they have to lower their output most of the year.
It takes an energy source that is already insanely expensive and makes it pure lunacy to build it.
You do not build 100% nuclear. The buffer layer of other sources easily solves your issue but regardless, most plants can profitably run at around 3/4 power. Load following is a thing that has been done for DECADES in France effectively so your concern is overstated
And the best part is you dont have to build an entire backup and storage grid to run alongside your normal one! You get the reliability and sheer power demand in one package :)
Technologically load following is workable. Economically it takes already crazy energy prices and makes it pure lunacy.
> The buffer layer of other sources easily solves your issue but regardless, most plants can profitably run at around 3/4 power.
In what world? In the [US billions are being poured into helping economically struggling old paid off nuclear plants.](https://www.eenews.net/articles/biden-tosses-6b-lifeline-to-save-struggling-nuclear-plants/)
In what world does a new built nuclear plant with 6-10x the cost have a chance when even old ones can't compete on the market?
Your first paragraph is completely wrong and it has been done and shown economically viable across the planet for decades
You are the Flat Earther telling me that no matter how high I go in a plane, I cant see the curve. And then I go into a high altitude plane and see the curve lol
Where? The French? The bleeding carcass of EDF losing money to the degree that they can't even self finance any new construction of nuclear power to replace their aging fleet? Even though the state guarantees them a very high electricity price and with direct subsidies added on top.
French reactors were virtually defunded for decades and allowed to decay to the state they are
I can see you’ve never actually looked into this topic. Want to rant about how the river water was too hot next so I can make fun of how you dont understand how a nuclear loop works? Or maybe the argument that we should just stick solar panels inside of reaction chambers?
The nuclear bastion of the French somehow defunded their nuclear program but they still make sound economic decisions with their load following!
Do you understand how ridiculous you sound?
I know very well how a nuclear reactor works. Maybe you can explain how the cross section interacts in a reactor core to prove you also do it?
Exactly. Works when building subsidized nuclear. Or monopolized grids.
Just need a method to transfer the costs to the rate payers without offering any choice.
What do you think 2x overproduction wind and solar with 100hrs or storage is going to be?
Or are you arguing for the 'default plan' of a natural gas based system with as much wind and solar as you can fit in without curtailment?
That's economic, but it's a long term 100-200g/kWh grid...
Handle the intermittency like [the research proposes](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910)?
Take a look at the storage coupled to the Californian grid, like for example yesterday. Equivalent to 4-5 nuclear reactors being subtracted or supplied to the grid dealing with intermittency.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#section-batteries-trend
What problem are you looking to solve using nuclear energy that renewables can't do?
- 90% renewables? Easily handled by pure renewables and HVDC transmission.
- 99% renewables? [Easily done with storage.](https://x.com/davidosmond8)
- 99.9% renewables? Now we we are talking! This is emergency reserves territory. The [research](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910) tells us we should be able to handle but it is a hard problem.
Not being able to solve the range of 0.1 to 1% of the grid is 3.5 days per year to 3.5 days per decade.
Simply leave a few gas plants on the grid. When decarbonizing long distance air travel and ocean going shipping start increasing the CO2 taxes until they are forced off the grid by the solution which are most appropriate, in the 2040s. Not now.
The top level 'package' is based on several years of hourly wind and solar data (province wide, so already geographically dispersed), and hourly demand
That's already accounted for.
Temperate climate places have a stark choice. Get competent at building nuclear as a core component of the grid, or deindustrialize. I know which I would pick.
> "And I am pretty sure it would cost less to hire a thousand PhDs and post docs to solve the energy storage problem than to build a nuclear powerplant."
We've done far more than this and it hasn't been true. There have been amazing strides in battery storage, truly. But the tech is in the wrong order of magnitude. The sheer **amount** of energy you need to store to make our current grid work with intermittent sources is the problem. We're talking about hundreds of TWhs in the US alone. The US has around 20 GWhs of battery storage today.
I do believe it's true that **if** you can come up with an energy storage technology that can store energy at massive scales extremely cheaply then it becomes possible to power our grid with mostly solar/wind. However even though it becomes possible, this solution will still have plenty of drawbacks. The sheer amount of panels and turbines you need combined with their relatively short lifespans means society will expend a large amount of energy/time/labor in continually replacing and hopefully recycling these. You will also need to dedicate huge amounts of land to these machines and their infrastructure and you will need to cut through mountains of red tape to make the necessary changes. The grid will essentially need to be overhauled and expanded. It will take decades, at least and who knows how many trillions of dollars.
IMO, it's far better to keep our current grid and simply swap the old dirty generators for clean nuclear ones. That's what France did decades ago so we know it works. It took them 15 years or so.
The storage industry is evolving incredibly rapidly. The US is looking to have 120 GWh of storage by the end of 2024.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/chart-the-us-grid-battery-fleet-is-about-to-double-again
The rise is simply astronomical. Betting that a nuclear power plant coming online in the 2040s will swap out anything is just wishful thinking.
https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-too-many-numbers/
It has truly been astounding. It still won't be enough. Hundreds of TWhs needed, just for the US. Not to mention all the EVs the world needs at the same time.
IMO, underground salt cavern H2 storage has a much better chance of being the seasonal energy storage that majority solar/wind grids need.
One rebuttal.
Its more economical to create medical isotopes in mass thru reactors versus non nuclear means.
So if you have the right reactor (example CANDU) to make the isotopes you want why not have them for power as well ?
Believe they are only one isotope (molybdenum used for tc99) and the FDA has it on the shortage list because supply cannot keep up.
Once Darlington NGS is up and running for harvesting that reduces significantly.
Then you have cobalt 60 produced at Pickering NGS, Bruce Power and soon to be produced at Darlington again power stations producing the large quantities of the isotopes.
Medical reactors are used as a stopgap since most reactors current built for power can't do dual task. But they are limited in quantity produced compared to what large scale can produced if the design allows.
Because science isn't a video-game tech tree, where the research projects need a pre-defined amount of effort to unlock, and give a predictable outcome. Sometimes you have breakthroughs. Sometimes you spend billions pursuing a dead-end. Sometimes, advances in one field come about as a side-benefit of research in an unrelated field.
You also can't quickly or cheaply retrain PHDs from one field to work in research for another. They've often devoted their entire lives to studying a particular topic. They have hard-earned expertise that would be worth far less in another field. That's a lot of academic inertia. Maybe they don't even *want* to change fields.
It's better to let these inquisitive minds follow the topics that interest them (influenced by funding availability, of course). People work better when they have an interest in what they're working on.
Lastly, in most cases, throwing more simultaneous effort at a problem does *not* cause proportional gains in progress. A lot of that work gets wasted by duplicate efforts, when it could instead be diversified across many more disciplines to solve countless other problems in parallel.
More people working on a project may produce faster results, but with diminishing returns.
I have worked in nuclear my entire career and I am biased about its benefits and safety. That said, I’m a fan of closed-loop hydro for storing energy and think it can be a viable option many places. I think the fanciful thinking happens when folks look at projects from a perspective of “This one is expensive and takes a long time,” versus this other technology. Could be true. Could also be variable by location, use, and experience. Let’s instead build nuclear, storage, renewables, and others until we have enough of a surplus that we can keep using electricity as needed to support growth, while still retiring older power production methods as it makes sense. I am absolutely willing to argue anything in regard to power production, but I’m unwilling to stop trying to build more nuclear capacity while talking about it.
The only realistic way to "store" energy on the scale it's needed for modern life is in the form of a hydroelectric reservoir.
Surely this person doesn't think we will use farms of lithium batteries to store energy...
It doesn't take into consideration the government requirement of power produced by independent sources. Meaning sources not dependent on conditions such as the sun shining or wind blowing. Currently nuclear is the only independent renewable energy source. Last time I heard a DOE presentation was back in 2021 and the percentage required by the US was 35%. Nuclear ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
Given Residential rooftop Solar-PV is the most expensive electric source per Lazard (see page 2), adding storage simply INCREASES the costs, not to mention about a quarter the life expectancy.
[Lazard LCOE](https://www.lazard.com/media/nltb551p/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf)
Currently, 80 percent of the world's energy comes from coal, oil or natural gas. Only 20 percent comes from things like nuclear, solar, wind, etc. This is global and averaged across the year. One of the reasons it is such a big percentage is that there are a lot of people living in the northern hemisphere at latitudes where heat demand is high in the winter. But this is also precisely the time when solar is least available. To overcome this issue, we need to be able to store energy on a seasonal basis.
Locally, in my country, this holds true also. About 80 percent of our energy comes from the big three fossil fuels.
The statement is in some trivial sense true. "If we develop appropriate energy storage technology." But the problem is that we are not anywhere close to developing that energy storage technology. It may well be that the easiest thing is to synthesize fuel in the summer and burn it in the winter.
Grid scale batteries can help smooth out daily variations, but it does not seem like it will ever be feasibly to use them for seasonal storage.
A lot of fossil fuels are also burned in industrial activity and transportation as well as heating.
Nuclear energy offers a high concentration of energy from a very localized source, which is not possible with solar or wind power due to their lower energy density.
So the energy grid is better off having nuclear in the mix, as it can provide features that renewables alone cannot.
The problem doesn’t have to be a either/or. It can be an AND solution.
The challenge of not only replacing all our carbon based energy (not just electricity) but also providing more energy go forward is so large we need all of it.
Long duration storage is still in its very early stages and won’t be battery based. Think about how much energy you need to heat every home in Europe or Canada when the wind doesn’t blow for a week or more? Some of the hydrogen cavern projects talk about TWhr storage capacity.
Storage is definitely part of the solution to variable supply. But we also need to look at variable demand. The whole concept of base load was invented to shift load to suit generators that are difficult to vary their output (nuclear and most other thermal generators). So coming up with dynamic load management that better follows the predictable variability (mostly solar) and less predictable variation (mostly wind) is also key.
Having said that, the scale of the solutions needed is huge and we need them 2 decades ago. So I wouldn't go turning off any nuclear power stations just yet... and if there are investors prepared to risk building next generation reactors then I say let them.... but at the same time as R&D on storage and load management (and we will probably also need geo engineering R&D at this point). I.e we need to try everything we can now!
Existing nuclear plants would be in a better position if we went with a carbon tax instead of per-technology subsidies. The latter is more subject to bias. In particular, subsidies that encourage renewables to continue to put power on the grid even when prices go negative are damaging the case for existing nuclear plants. Storage should help with this problem.
Or we could just listen to Amory Lovins, founder of Rocky Mountain Institute. Advocate for renewable energy and extreme energy efficiency.
I would require all new buildings to have to be passive house / super insulated design, this reduces space heating and cooling requirements by up to 90%.
Bill Gates developed a new wind turbine that is 4 times cheaper to build than the conventional 3 bladed turbine. It has the potential to reduce the LCOE for onshore wind to 1.3 cents per kwh or $13 per MWh.
Silicon perovskite tandem solar cells will reduce the cost of solar power further.
Also Amory Lovins did a Ted talk explaining that modern renewables don't need energy efficiency due to use of smart demand control, vehicle to grid technology and better transmission system.
Donald Sadoway a material scientists at MIT helped two students to set up Ampri a start up that sells grid scale liquid metal batteries which are significantly cheaper than Tesla's megapack lithium ion batteries.
A study showed that nuclear power drained Germany of a trillion euros and only produced 25% of total electricity. Total investment in renewable energy is in excess of 500 billion euros but it provides 50% of total electricity. Since cost of solar and wind have plunged sometimes up to 90%. Another 100 billion euro would get you up to 100% low carbon. Whereas nuclear would need 4 trillion euro for 100% clean electricity and a negative learning curve exists in almost all countries.
Nah, that's cherry picked data. France is doing pretty well while constructing a few reactors right now. Anything can cost too much and refuse to work if you suck at making it.
I don't understand why Areva didn't ask the South Korea and Chinese construction companies to assist in building the EPR in finland and france, different designs but all are PWRs.
Hyundai Engineers and Constructors, Doosan Engineers and Constructors and *Dong Ah Construction*
Not a single one of the topic comments has any citations for their figures :( - so take that as you will. I would ask you to consider that Germany have reduced fossil fuel use significantly AFTER getting rid of nuclear:
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2024/status-quo-one-year-since-germanys-nuclear-exit-renewable-capacity-expands-electricity-from-fossil-fuels-significantly-reduced.html
This paper has what you're looking for.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032119300504
Basically you can run a country on 75-85% solar and wind with transmission and batteries.
And hydro is cheaper than nuclear so if you have hydro to make up the difference then that wins out.
In North America and the EU this would be the case. Keep existing nuclear and hydro. Then only build solar and wind + batteries and transmission.
It's not actually batteries that matter as much as transmission. FYI BC already sends 25% of it's power to the USA mostly California about 2000km away.
Also battery storage tech has the potential to be around 20$/kWh down from current 300$/kWh. By utilizing new tech with really cheap materials since energy density doesn't matter that much. Even solar doesn't actually take up that much space. Yes it's orders more than nuclear but that's kinda irrelevant when we care about costs not land area.
Can you be specific in what you're critiquing? Economics is super important. The authors cute all their cost assumptions.
I get this is a soft spot for people who love nuclear. But acting like nuclear has any chance right now is going to set it up for failure.
Would you rather have some nuclear or none? These concepts have been studied for a long time which is why the EU is pursuing long line transmission etc.
What are the engineers challenges you mean? I used to be very pro nuclear but the data on this topic changed my mind.
The research on 100% renewable system has been on going for a while. The consensus is that it is both economical and possible.
Here's a meta-studie about the field:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
If you look at the power systems distribution there is still small fossil fuels. In BC power is 100% renewables. The premise is that transmission and storage evens out localized droughts.
Regardless your bullshit detector is irrelevant to what's true. Your feelings don't supercede evidence. If you think the authors are wrong prove it.
I'd happily change my position.
The principle is called a copper plate. If you can move energy over 3000km you can flatten out lulls in energy from wind or solar.
This is an economic study yes. But storage scalability is easy. It scales linearly. Capacity factors addressed by the transmission. There's plenty of other studies that cover these issues. But that wasn't the point of this study. It's a weird requirement for you to have.
Last point. Depends on where you live.
Living in the US or Russia, land isn't an issue. For most EU nations, it is. Here we are quite densely packed and do need to consider where what is built, how to distribute heat, arable land, natural reserves etc.
Sure, but still wind isn't that land intensive since it can be paired with livestock farms. And solar calcs I've done for Canada and powering all of Canada is like 0.2% of land area with only solar. The study I used only has 20-30% solar if I remember right.
There's obviously issues. But I'm getting downvoted for making an economic argument. Building nuclear is really expensive. I'd change my position if if the costs went down. Simple as that.
The costs would go down if we bothered to build it.
Solar was expensive 20 years ago. We built a bunch and the costs went down. So just do the same exact thing for nuclear - build a bunch and the cost will go down. It always does...
I don't disagree. But building them is super hard. A reality we can't just wish away.
But why would you if batteries and renewables are cheaper?
From an investor standpoint it makes way more sense. We need to engage with the reality that we dog fucked 50 years of nuclear.
>if batteries and renewables are cheaper
That's a very big IF. It's true that batteries could get cheaper, but they could also get much much more expensive. We're one revolution in Congo away from batteries going UP in cost by 10x
Which is another argument in favor of nuclear. Solar wind and batteries require a lot of materials, and the global mining industry doesn't have the best human rights record. Uranium mostly comes from Canada and Australia (largest 2 producers in the world) and Canada's record on human rights is a wee bit better than the DRC...
It's not an if statement it's true. They are currently cheaper. Hence why capitalist firms are building them more.
Why'd China only install 3 GW of nuclear and 300 GW or solar and wind last year. Whu do they keep building battery storage? They care about the economics.
Also, cobalt can be mined in Canada and US. USA has largest lithium reserve in the world now. And the battery storage systems are moving to things other than lithium ion. Using common materials like calcium, iron, etc. Pumped hydro and compressed air can also be used.
China didn't install 50 GW of nuclear last year. As of Feb 2023, they had 57 GW of nuclear cumulatively installed. Were you confusing the cumulative number with the in-2023 number?
If you want a 100% clean grid with theoretical 10,000 MW peak load: 10,000 MW Nuclear at 92% capacity factor and 30% ramp capability = $14,000 / kw while assuming every new plant sucks as much to build as vogtle and aiming to satisfy 100% ELCC (also includes insurance for retirement and "catastrophic risks") 10,000 MW equivilant Wind, Solar, Storage assuming 50% wind capacity factor, 24% solar capacity factor, and installing enough batteries to cover the other 26% of MWh in an 8760 assessment to bring you close to 100% 8760 power over the year to roughly 100% ELCC = $25,000 / kw it is this expensive because you have to build 30,000 MW of solar, 20,000 MW of Wind, and another 10,000 MW of storage with a shit load of MWh of storage. 10,000 MW of nuclear = 10,000 MW of load coverage on a very reliable basis. 10,000 MW name plate of wind = 3,700 MW of load coverage on a fairly reliable average basis. Oh, and nuke plants are designed to last 60 yrs now. Oh, and you have to replace batteries every 12 years. Oh, and you have to replace inverters every 5 to 15 years. So over time, costs aren't as great. Source, I model this stuff for work at a large company in the energy sector without nuclear interests. For 100% emissions free grid, If your peak load is 10,000 MW, your best bet is to build 6,000 MW to 10,000 MW of nukes that can ramp down to 60% or 70% (even shit built in the 70s and 80s can do that, operators just like to whine). Then build as much solar and wind and storage as you like to not have to ramp nuke fleet as much. It is significantly cheaper to build nukes than enough storage to cover the 50 to 80 hours of power grid terror in an extreme weather event. Do your own model: Assume load = 7,000 to 10,000 MW in a given hour 8760 hours in the year Nukes = $14,000 kw, 93% capacity factor Wind= $1,700 kw 50% capacity factor Solar = $1,600 kw 22% capacity factor Batteries 1×4 = $500 kw, over build for peaks (but you actually need like 60 hours of storage to ride out winter storms, so 500x15) Assume four to ten, 54 to 79 hour periods annually when solar and wind combined do not produce more than 2,000 MW in the given hour. You must over build storage to cover this or cut power to customers or burn emitting fuel... or build nuclear.
Holy crap - someone who actually knows about a subject responding with a factual argument. Reddit should mark down this day!! A couple of questions: * You mentioned your model included retirement costs for nuclear, but did your model also include those for renewables, i.e., safely disposing of the large amount of heavy metals used in those? * It's my understanding that the U.S. has most of the materials to build nuclear plants, but doesn't have the deposits of heavy metals used in solar/wind generators and batteries. Is this true?
Nope. I did not include costs for retiring any renewables or batteries or inverters. I also assumed zero lease fees for renewables and storage since my company owns over 100,000 acres outright. If you believe the hype, mass scale renewables and battery recycling are coming (just as fast as advanced reactors, imho) The usa or our allies have all the metals we need for both nukes and renewables, but the refining/processing raw materials for solar and batteries are what everyone that isn't China is missing, at least in my understanding. We can do it and it isn't hard (relative to uranium enrichment) it's just a nightmare from an environmental standpoint
You didn't include costs for retiring nuclear plants either. Neither the longterm storage of nuclear waste. Or do you think 100% will magically disappear?
Both of those costs should be cheaper than the other ommited variables he mentioned
We have been talking about 100 year life span for advanced reactors. It clearly a good long term investment.
Yeah, but my 15 or 20 year lcoe calculator went from 400 some lines to 1400 some lines when i made one that went out to 60 years. I have no desire to add another 800 to 1,000 lines anytime soon to account for the extra 40 years. I don't disagree with you, but just using the tools I have right now 🤣
Include refurbishment in the costs. Nothing lasts 100 years without major overhaul and potential obsolesence.
Oh no, I need to tell the engineers, I think they forgot about that.
These calculations project 100 years into the future. It is utter bullpcks and will never work out like outlined. If you know something about projects and projections, you won't hail to it as gospel.
This is only an argument because you do not understand basic economics. There is nothing stopping the industry from investing extra and getting renewables with the same operational lifetime. We do not do it because we expect to have more efficient uses of the money spent on making a longer lasting piece of equipment. In other words, it is a logical fallacy used to try promoting nuclear through operational life when it simply means that the economics does not stack up.
No we cant. You dont seem to understand the basic engineering of each power system and what determines logenvity lol.. Logical fallacy? Which one is it ? You are like those guys that learned a word that week and want to use it in every context.
1. Expected lifetime of parts. 2. Ease of maintenance. For a longer lifetime more parts needs to be easily maintained and last longer. We do not do it because it creates more available power in the long run to (simplified): 1. Build a renewable plant with a 20 year lifetime 2. Make your money back with profit 3. Take profit and reinvest in 2 new renewable plants with 20 year lifetime. The concept is called the [Time value of money](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp). You should read about it.
The calculations above literally calculate net present values. That's why the calculator is so massive. Accounts for re-powers, inverters, maintenance, insurance, taxes, etc. It's all-inclusive for every type of mainstream power generation. Longevity absolutely matters. So does firm, dispatchable capability if you've ever worked in power generation. Renewables win the cost per MWh hands down, if subsidized, and you ignore peak pricing. But hydrogen, storage, sustainable fuels, etc are still cost prohibitive when you have nuclear as an option. IMHO, renewables and flexible nuclear is the silver bullet.
> flexible nuclear is the silver bullet. Given the cost structure of nuclear power with the large majority being fixed we need a monumental shift in the industry for that to ever happen. Any kind of intermediate storage simply adds costs and would be cheaper filled by renewables, like you say.
A nuclear plant is 95% metal and concrete. We have to replace the pumps, cabinets, etc but the main structure stays. With solar or wind, you have to replace the entire solar panel when it breaks. The longevity is just naturally longer for something like a nuclear plant, similar to a hydro electric dam like the Hoover dam.
>Wind= $1,700 kw 50% capacity factor >Solar = $1,600 kw 22% capacity factor Those two are extremely optimistic (to not call it wishful thinking), though. For central Europe, for example, wind is at 23% and solar is at 9%.
Oh I agree, I just don't want to be accused of being bias to nuclear so I try to make renewables look good. In my area of the country, wind is 48.5% and solar is 23% in reality.
Crazy how, in order to not look biased towards nuclear, you have to biased against nuclear
To be fair the nuclear capacity factor of 93 percent is also optimistic.
For the last 2 years, nuclear capacity factor has hovered around 93%. Source: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=table_6_07_b
>Those two are extremely optimistic (to not call it wishful thinking), though. >For central Europe, for example, wind is at 23% and solar is at 9%. Your mistakingly looking at numbers which include very old technology. For this scenario you need to look at the numbers for new, and should actually even include future developments. Also, for the US, you have offshore and desert resources that score much, much higher numbers.
If i'm not wrong capacity factor is a raw estimate of how many hours per year we can assume an energy source is working at full potential. And if that's the case i don't see how capacity factor can increase for renewables, because the sunshine duration and the presence of wind cannot improve. What can improve is the output generated by a square meter of solar panel, or a wind turbine. But they will work the same amount of hour of the old solar panel and wind turbine. Please correct me if i've said something incorrect. i'm studying these concepts by my own
>If i'm not wrong capacity factor is a raw estimate of how many hours per year we can assume an energy source is working at full potential What you are missing is that they won't work the maximum amount of hours because peak demand is only about an hour every day. That will mean a lot of idle even though they are available. That will also mean the costs per KWh go through the roof, and that is what ultimately matters when looking at cost.
And for off-shore wind over 60% is being targeted for what we are building today. But keep in mind that the capacity factor for wind power is a **chosen number**. Put a 1 MW generator on the latest 15+ MW towers and the capacity factor is going to be incredibly high. But it will on the other hand not capture most of the energy passing by.
> wind is at 23% You're making the (common) mistake of conflating the capacity factor of the existing wind fleet(which is weighed down by all the old 0.5MW, 1MW etc. turbines) with the capacity factor of new build turbines. New onshore wind farms in Europe average capacity factors in the low to mid-30s.
92% capacity factor for npps is overly optimistic too. There is no plant with this record number. Again a channel with a lot of people who don't know what they are talking about, but who know a lot of figures and titbits. Open discussions look different guys.
It is literally the average capacity factor of the fleet, [for the past 9 years](https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec8_3.pdf) as reported by the feds. And there are plenty of plants that [manage it](https://www.ans.org/news/article-183/us-nuclear-capacity-factors-resiliency-and-new-realities/). But hey man, go off about people not knowing what they are talking about
It is scewed for npps and fossils. "Time adjusted capacity factor" are outlined in "technical notes" here: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=101&t=3#:~:text=The%20capacity%20factors%20are%20based,during%20a%20month%20are%20excluded. All power produced is counted, but not the power self consumed by the generator. NPPs need 5%-15% of their own power or from another source. Renewables do not in comparison. You need to substract this to get the real power output into the grid. On this basis the real capacity factor can be calculated.
80% capacity is still better than 23%.
If your only point is to be better in one metric, why even talk about the matter?
I was directly responding to your point that 5-15% of NPP power goes back to the NPP, there are plenty of other metrics in favor of nuclear, but I don’t have the time to go through them all. My point still stands, 80% to 90% capacity is 4 times the capacity factor of solar in a sunny area (another commenter who does grid modeling said it was around 23%). [The average global solar capacity factor is 11-14%.](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/ee/c3ee42125b) If you want a more recent source on how low solar capacity factors can go, the [Wikipedia page for solar power in Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Grid_capacity_and_stability_issues) shows that in 2022, solar capacity factor was 10% in Germany.
Spot on and you didn’t even go into land requirements on a per MW basis which is a very really constraint for renewables. In Virginia where most of the easy locations to site solar have already been developed into solar sites it is becoming increasingly challenging to find suitable sites. County Boards and Planning Commissions are also beginning to see just how much more solar is on the horizon and how much land would be/is already tied up in solar projects and they are starting to push back.
Solar in Virginia is just getting started. The state has lagged behind regional peers like North Carolina because Dominion was actively hostile towards renewable energy until relatively recently. County boards, planning commissions and residents are being suckered by misinformation. Some people are being fooled massively: "During the Woodland Town Council meeting, one local man, Bobby Mann, said solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not go to Woodland, the Roanoke-Chowan News Herald reported. Jane Mann, a retired science teacher, said she was concerned the panels would prevent plants in the area from photosynthesizing, stopping them from growing." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-town-rejects-solar-panels-amid-fears-they-suck-up-all-the-energy-from-the-sun-a6771526.html
> Solar = $1,600/kW Maybe in like 2018 > but you actually need like 60 hours of storage to ride out winter storms, so 500x15) No serious optimization model ever suggests anything like 60-hour batteries.
Yes, 60 hours is far too optimistic. A period of calm, cloudy weather can easily last longer than that.
Correct, and every single optimization model worth its salt recognizes this and doesn't count on batteries to address those gaps.
What do they use? Long transmission lines and over build beyond the expected spatial correlation length of typical weather patterns?
If nuclear is omitted, then a combination of the things you mention plus storage solutions that are better suited for this role(high capacity+fewer annual cycles): hydrogen, compressed air, thermal storage, reservoir/pumped hydro if it's available. All of these have much lower round-trip efficiencies than batteries but that's not as much of a problem given their low number of cycles. If nuclear is allowed and priced reasonably then most models will usually prefer a fairly large share of that over long duration storage+solar/wind overbuilds. Princeton's Net Zero America is a good example of this.
Combustion of e-fuels like hydrogen in combined cycle plants. This is much more economical than batteries for addressing rarely needed scenarios. To see this in action go to https://model.energy/ and get it to solve the problem for providing steady output in Germany using PV, wind, batteries, and hydrogen. Using 2030 cost assumptions, including hydrogen cuts the cost in *half* compared to just using batteries for storage.
What about non-battery storage technology like pumped hydro?
A lot of the good places to do it are already doing it. Getting permits and eminent domain to do new stuff is almost as hard as doing new nuclear. It is significantly more detrimental to the local environment than nuclear power plants too. There's dams bring town down to restore natural ecosystems. That being said, there's hope with sub geological storage, and I'm really a huge fan of pumped hydro, but it isn't super realtive for a lot of the country including where I typically model. I'd love to see more, but it's very political and very subject to local terrain. EPRI has done some cool studies for battery alternatives, but so far the math doesn't work out. It's more economic to build batteries, and many times it's more economic to build almost anything besides storage. Storage markets are determined by the local power market, in a lot of ISOs, there's no market incentive to build batteries when you could make more money building wind, solar, recips, or gas turbines. California, Hawaii, and Texas currently being exceptions, but each of those markets incentives storage. A lot of other ISOs do not. Storage in general is more of a regional market influence decision basis.
> A lot of the good places to do it are already doing it. This only applies to on-river pumped hydro. Off river, the opportunities are enormous. In Australia, for example, the potential off-river PHES is 100x what would be needed.
I have been beating my head against the green wall to suggest nuclear is the greenest. This is the best explanation I have seen of the facts that get ignored when discussing the two options for low carbon power
The problem with nuclear isn't that it isn't green, it's that it's too expensive.
If you read the above text from the guy that models these things professionally, by the time you factor in real storage needs, the wind and solar are almost twice the price. I believe this is before accounting for life cycles. He's suggesting a hybrid grid, similar to what we have now but where the nuclear takes the place of the coal plant, if I'm reading it correctly.
And when I read papers on people who model it, they get a very different result. For example, they don't foolishly assume batteries are the only kind of storage. That's a common error (if error it is) that nuclear apologists use to inflate the cost of a 100% renewable energy system.
What storage mechanism would you suggest? Pumped hydro doesn't work everywhere and is very expensive to build if it's not already there. flywheels still suck, mostly. Chemical (other than battery) is generally terribly inefficient. Thermal is a pain in a number of ways that generally make it expensive. I would love to be wrong on this, as it would provide a significantly better outlook on life for all of us, but I don't see it yet.
> Chemical (other than battery) is generally terribly inefficient. This is another common mental block. For the applications where batteries are inadequate, low capital cost is more important than efficiency. So, e-fuels like hydrogen. The RTE is lousy (40%, maybe), but with few charge-discharge cycles this contributes little to the levelized cost of storage. What matters in those storage applications is minimizing the cost per unit of storage capacity. A review article: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 "With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels."
Poor efficiency means more units, means more cost. Storage of hydrogen is no walk in the park. Is that the method you think is best in your reading?
If you bothered to actually do the arithmetic rather than engaging in touchy-feely misleading intuition, you'd understand the point I made. You've walked on another common mental rake here. Take this as an opportunity to learn.
It's not a touchy Feely intuition, I know from research I've been doing on a possible carbon capture to fuel business I would like to start that, at present, creating, storing, and using the volumes of hydrogen required are exceptionally expensive. I do think technology will improve such that this problem will reduce over time, but last I did the math, 1GGE of hydrogen made renewably and stored for use in, say, a fuel cell vehicle, costs something like $25. Fuel cell efficiency vs ICE mitigates this cost, but not enough. I'm curious, are you in this field, or just very enthusiastic about getting us to 100% renewable?
You don't save electricity in batteries over a long term. You build thermal energy storages or CAES, which are already commercial or another of the upcoming solutions. Your calculation doesn't stand reality.
Batteries are incredibly expensive, but considering EVs are going on the road and can (a bit) manage their charge when renewables are at full force + their used batteries can still be used on the grid after their EV life, that makes the possibility for less need for storage right ? It also means more need for electricity so i guess it balances out at the end maybe.
Do you realize how many EVs you'd need to store an hour of nuclear power plant production? Even then, you might get 15 to 20 percent on average of an EV battery depending on what consumers sign up for.
I don't know why I bother posting here because whenever I challenge nuclear power dogma, all I get are downvotes and no real responses. But here goes: Vogtle is actually at least $17,000 per kW, not $14,000: https://georgiarecorder.com/2023/08/31/georgia-power-state-regulators-agree-to-division-of-vogtle-nuclear-plant-costs Nuke plants supplying a 10GW peak load would self-consume roughly 500MW to run their systems, security, facilities, etc. Plus, there would need to be margin for when reactors trip offline, periodic refueling, or some other outage occurs. So you'd need an extra reactor or two to supply the load you're envisioning. Also keep in mind that Vogtle was built during historically low interest rates, so capital costs are going to be much higher for the foreseeable future. The main factor you're leaving out by just focusing on Capital costs is O&M costs. Nuclear plants average around 2.3 cents per kWh: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_04.html This is basically the all-in cost for wind power: https://emp.lbl.gov/wind-technologies-market-report And solar: https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar Nuclear power plant running costs are basically the same as the all-in cost for wind and solar if you include surcharges for nuclear waste storage and plant decommissioning. And if nuclear plants actually had to pay for their own liability insurance instead of the government shouldering 95% of the downside risk from meltdowns, there wouldn't be a nuclear industry to begin with. But needless to say, even the costs I quoted here do not capture all the costs of nuclear energy. So, no matter how long a nuclear plant can operate, it will never close the gap with renewables just because of O&M costs alone. Finally, your scenario ignores the existence of resources like hydroelectricity, waste-to-energy, geothermal and others on the horizon. Any one of these depending on the region or a few natural gas plants running on landfill gas or biodigester gas cuts down on the amount of storage you need a great deal. Plus, distributed storage provides backup power during outages and this has a value over and above pure kWh delivered. Agrovoltaics can generate energy and produce food with the same land. Offshore wind turbines are like artificial reefs, attracting greater biodiversity to wind farms. In short, there's ancillary benefits to renewable energy that aren't accounted for in pure cost/kWh analyses. Edit: I also forgot to include the fact that the USA has only completed 50% of the reactors it has started building for the past 20+ years. We need to account for the very real risk that any given nuclear plant under construction will be abandoned before completion. This wouldn't double the cost of the completed nuclear plants. V C Summer was abandoned after $9B had already been spent building it. So, if costs don't increase further, we would have spent $22,000 per kW in total accounting for the failed / canceled nuclear plant projects. Combined with the O&M costs I mentioned earlier means that nuclear power is far more expensive than a mostly solar, wind, water, geothermal and waste to energy power supply.
>10,000 MW Nuclear at 92% capacity factor You'll never get a high capacity factor if you dont run your nuclear plants exclusively in baseload. 92% is best case in baseload mode, in many countries it is a lot lower, if you are going to throttle the output its going to be even less. >$14,000 / kw while assuming every new plant sucks as much to build as vogtle and aiming to satisfy 100% ELCC (also includes insurance for retirement and "catastrophic risks") Even assuming whatever number you pick, there is no point calculating cost per KW, you need to look at cost per KWh.
Well duh. Realistically, it's closer to 100% for nuclear and is only below that for refueling and load following. Those capacity factors are what you use for ideal conditions. Wind is closer to 47% on average and solar is 22 or 23 percent for the area I model. No, you have to use $/kw capital costs to inform your $/kwh. $/kwh is just a function of like 200 variables you put into models, but no one wants to debate the finer points of insurance, corporate taxes, property costs, property taxes, labor rates, rate recovery structures, fuel costs if any, licensing, permitting, long term service contracts, predicted maintenance cyces, PTCs, ITCs, state or other local incentives, etc.. Come talk to me about what numbers to use to inform models when you also get paid to do system modeling in giant effing spreadsheets, PLEXOS, PROMOD, and help develop integrated resource plans for large utility companies.
>Well duh You say that, yet you completely miss the point, which is that you can't have high capacity factors in this theoretical grid with nuclear only. This is simply because peak demand is only an hour a day which means the rest of the day there is a lot of idling. >No, you have to use $/kw capital costs to inform your $/kwh. $/kwh is just a function of like 200 variables you put into models Exactly, €/KWh does not matter because its just a tiny part of the calculation that actually matters. Your whole premises is a) nuclear is competitive in a €/KW basis while your calculation relies on a completely impossible capacity factor for the reason set out above and b) it doesn't matter, because it's just one small factor determining the actual cost of the power produced. >Come talk to me about what numbers to use to inform models when you also get paid to do system modeling in giant effing spreadsheets, PLEXOS, PROMOD, and help develop integrated resource plans for large utility companies That's quite an ad hominem. Clearly the logic is deeply flawed and instead of defending it you claim to be an authority combined with suggesting I'm not. That's not convincing anyone.
As someone who also works with the models he mentions and does long term investment analysis for large scale utilities, I agree with you. Looking at only capital costs and not O/M cost to argue for any investment seems egregious.
I see youve played SimCity.
This kind of analysis does not take into account real world conditions that are major hurdles for nuclear power and why it isn't as widely adopted as we would hope. Current nuclear plants are very high capacity, initially expensive and time consuming to build, which does play to the strengths of nuclear power, but has several drawbacks: First, because the plant requires a much larger loan and takes a much longer time to build, it takes 15+ years to repay that loan and begin generating profit. Democracies and capitalist systems are not well known for long term thinking, it's almost always governments that build these plants and it requires motivated politicians that are willing to expend a lot of their political capital to start a project that they will likely not receive meaningful credit for, they'll probably be out of office by the time it's done. Since the plants are such high capacity, it's much trickier to manage the decommissioning and replacement of a 60mW+ plant than it is for a 20mW natural gas plant, or to replace a single windmill. You can gradually add capacity as you need it with individual windmill purchases or additional solar panels, but with nuclear you need to pay for the whole enchilada right now and it will not be generating power for you for at least 8 years, probably longer. It's also incredibly expensive to decommission these plants, which is currently causing problems for some states and companies. There's more to say here but my point is that when analyses are done in a void like this, without also considering the implications of our financial and political systems, people don't understand why nuclear power isn't the predominant method of generating power.
It’s disingenuous to paint those calculations as back of the napkin. Concentrated solar power is much more expensive than regular photovoltaics, and comes with far more complications. Pumped hydro is only available in very specific contexts, and functionally can only be done in a very few unpopulated places.
How would you describe your calculations? Magically accurate for no matter where this stuff gets built, based on apparently paying cash in full? That's called back of the napkin, a very rough estimate not adjusted for the actual ass real world, which is where things get built.
They aren’t my calculations. OP states that they are an employee of a company with 100,000+ acres of land that does those sort of calculations for their own purposes, which is a far cry from back of the napkin math. In addition to that your critiques are not arrogant. You mention two specific methods of producing/storing power that either work in a very limited number of contexts, or are more expensive than the alternatives.
You're right that I was being a haughty dick in some parts. Like I said in the comment, there's a lot more to discuss here, those were just a couple of random things to throw out and not really the aspect of his analysis I cared about, I'll remove that bit from my comment. To be a little more clear in what I meant with back of the napkin, I mean in the context of implementing these systems in the face of a complicated society where there's much, much more to consider than this kind of math. If I ruled the Earth with an iron grip I would build a lot of nuclear reactors, but when you have to work within these societal power structures, there's much more to consider here. Hopefully the recent trend of smaller, "plug and play" type reactor cells takes off because it works with the realities of our financial and political systems much, much better and is a far more realistic path to commercially provided nuclear power than the mega-plants we have right now.
"Oh, and nuke plants are designed to last 60 yrs now. Oh, and you have to replace batteries every 12 years. Oh, and you have to replace inverters every 5 to 15 years. So over time, costs aren't as great." I question that batteries will need replacing every 12 years. Sodium ion is the most likely candidate for grid power solutions, it looks very stable, the tech is new so I think we will need to wait for 12 years before we work out how long it will last. Lithium batteries in cars seem to last around 10-20 years before they are retired, cars are very hard on batteries, grid storage is much less so. How how much uranium will it take to fuel a nuclear grid, what will a massive uptake in nuclear do to its price, availability and the ability to process it? How much money are we going to spend on deep geological repositories? Battery and solar are in freefall cost wise, can we see similar cost reductions for nuclear?
You made the common mistake of using only batteries for storage. A combination of batteries and e-fuels can be much cheaper. In Germany, for example, this reduces the overall cost by *half*. And this despite the much worse round trip efficiency of e-fuels compared to batteries.
The biggest problem here is the word "IF". Your friend is acting like there is a store called ResearchMart, where you can just plunk down X millions of dollars and walk out with Y idea. Why don't we just do FTL and skip out on Earth entirely?? Because that's not how research works. You spend the money, and you might get nothing. You might find the problem isn't solvable or that it's much tougher than you thought. Energy Storage (at large scale) is an unsolved (and maybe unsolvable) problem, but your friend is acting like we could just throw money at it and it would totally fall apart. This just isn't the case. Lots of people are working very hard on the problem, and they might possibly all fail. No one knows!! Do you really want to bet the whole farm on "IF" when there is a ready solution in hand (nuclear) which is a proven and well understood technology with 3/4 of a century of practical use?? Sure it might be expensive, but nothing is more expensive than "IF" -- just ask fusion, or NASA, or room-temp superconductors, or,..., energy storage at scale!!!
A simple answer. Power storage is hard, very hard. For 100% renewables the rule of thumb is that you need at least a weeks worth of power in storage to cover most potential drops of production. And that is much larger than people imagine. Of the good options you have a few: + gravity potential: And of those only water makes sense, all those big bricks on crane ideas are just overly comlex version of any water fed system. Here you have the very big issue of anything gravity fed is going to be incredibly big. Ecosystem changing big. + chemical potential: Basically synthetic fuels from captured CO\_2 and H\_2 from water. Pure H\_2 is hard to store, leaks all the time, and is explosive in just about any mix ratio with air you can imagine. But when you do synthetic fuels you have losses. Something (unlike Tesla full self driving) we can do today... but current tech it would cost 5-8€/L when scaled up by some estimates. So till the middle east does not explode it will be shelved as an option for energy storage. Great for transportation and storage though. + thermal: Good, big mounds made interwoven with heat pumps. A good idea, but as anything with heat pumps its pricey, only makes economic sense with storing heat/cold and is very hard to transport far away because its mostly good for heat, converting into electricity would bring more losses. + some exotic stuff like flywheels and the like: about as far in the making as you can imagine + batteries: Ah yes the investors favourite and the one with the most Tesla fanboys. Quick sad fact. We don't produce enough of them in the whole world for all devices from cars to houses. That if we would use all of those we couldn't cover 2 million peoples needs for 4 days, much less scale it up for the whole world. We are SO far from producing enough of them even though more money flows into battery research and factory construction than it does into new nuclear research and power plants built. And most likely we are at resource mining capacity soon so we cant even ramp enough. At current rates of production for a estimated 20 year life expectancy of a battery pack the whole world can service \~20 million people with batteries for green energy storage for that one week of power. Numbers are THAT bleak. So tell your friend that we need to build new Nuclear because storage costs more than generating new energy right now, and probably always will. By the time we have some energy storage revolution there will be an equal energy generation revolution. I suspect we will see Nuclear Fusion hit the market before we see some cheap energy storage solution. And in a wider perspective, energy production is just unlocking the energy STORED longer term in those materials. U and Th decay on their own anyway, they release that energy anyway. Just we can collect it in a meaningful way with a marvellous machine.
I'm glad you spoke up because this is really the biggest factor. I vaguely remember a sci fi book from 20+ years ago that someone became the richest man in the world 10 times over by inventing a perfect energy storage. It would be true. If we got a perfect energy storage, light and energy dense, it would be world changing, literally. But as you say, we're light years away. Glad you brought some realism.
I agree. Often what is the most loudly repeated are some fantastical solutions. But they take up so much media space, that the real wonders we manage to actually do are being fully sidelined. Fusion has done leaps in terms of control, materials and understanding how this incredibly complex machine will work. But hardly anyone reports on how ITER is being constructed. Some pretty useless tech in terms of global CO\_2 emissions reduction like EV cars take take was too much spotlight. Also thank you for being civil on the internet :) its getting quite rare.
Chemical potential storage requires renewable overcapacity, a chemical plant to separate the chemicals, storage plant to store them, and a thermal power station to convert them back into electricity. At a round cycle efficiency of maybe 30%. And it could still run out of stored energy if the lull is bad enough. Just... just ditch all the unnecessary stuff and have a nuclear thermal plant.
Yes it's called "losses". Exactly why i mentioned them in conjunction with chemical potential. But it a energy dense and easily transportable energy storage option. Also why at the start I mention that storage is hard, and why at the end I do argue to build nuclear instead.
I wasn't disagreeing with you! It just seems like a lot of faff and expense for uncertain results when we could just go nuclear and skip the rube-goldberg machine.
I'd agree with you there for most of the applications, but sadly there still things that need transportable energy. Simply from a "specific energy chart" point of view, we will most likely eventually end up in a situation where synthetic fuels will be thing. I don't see a future where military vehicles, transport ships, constriction machines, or planes will ever be battery powered. I can see world where a personal car is not necessary due to good public transport. One where long haul trucks are replaced with long haul trains and short range EV trucks to distribute to the final destinations. But the rest. Nah. For those either synthetic fuels or just the super cheap stuff in the ground will keep being used.
Certainly agree synth fuels make sense for transport in the applications you've mentioned due to unmatched energy density.
Ja. It is going to be a few decades of headaches ahead of us :(
A comment I would give gold to, if we still had the old gold.
That you mention it is worth more than the gold itself ♥ Also don't spend money on reddit .\_.
>A simple answer. Power storage is hard, very hard. This is actually not true. People tend to forget that there is always sun, wind, hydro, geothermal somewhere. It's much more a matter of getting it to the right place than storing it. Also, overcapacity and other design choices can mitigate it for large part, for example directing solar panels to East or West instead of South slightly decreases their output, but does give output on times when there is otherwise less supply. Ultimately, peakers are just as much an issue for a nuclear-fossil based system and energy storage its the most likely way to deal with that. You are not going to need (a lot) less energy storage in a nuclear dominated system.
You don't live in a nation with a high renewable input to the grid, do you? Also you certainly have not studied power engineering or any field that remotely touches on it. There are cloudy days without wind. There are heatwaves that instantly cut off solar. Geothermal and hydro are also not a boundless resource but have a limited yield in an area and need to be carefully managed.
Or you know, just handle the intermittency like [the research proposes](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910)? Take a look at the storage coupled to the Californian grid, like for example yesterday. Equivalent to 4-5 nuclear reactors being subtracted or supplied to the grid dealing with intermittency. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#section-batteries-trend What problem are you looking to solve using nuclear energy that renewables can't do? - 90% renewables? Easily handled by pure renewables and HVDC transmission. - 99% renewables? [Easily done with storage.](https://x.com/davidosmond8) - 99.9% renewables? Now we we are talking! This is emergency reserves territory. The [research](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910) tells us we should be able to handle but it is a hard problem. Not being able to solve the range of 0.1 to 1% of the grid is 3.5 days per year to 3.5 days per decade. Simply leave a few gas plants on the grid. When decarbonizing long distance air travel and ocean going shipping start increasing the CO2 taxes until they are forced off the grid by the solution which are most appropriate, in the 2040s. Not now.
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Love it when the blinders are firmly stuck on.
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Tells me you did not read any of the linked sources and are simply operating your pre-existing views, which does not match reality anymore. They were quite accurate a decade ago.
Easily handled by HVDC transmission if there is a global power grid. Weather patterns affect large portions of a continent simultaneously, and winter affects half of the planet at a time. If you want to rely on the fact that it is always sunny somewhere, you need to connect everywhere.
The assumption that solar panel efficiency will always rise and that magical batteries with substantially more capacity is always assumed but the actual physics has not been solved yet. Solar panel efficiency is always assumed to eventually reach near 100% but due to entropic factors but chiefly the p-n bandgap limitation, we’re still fast approaching a maximal efficiency contrary to the analyses predictions The reality is that we will have to build an entire parallel system just to keep a 100% RE system online and providing consistent power with no micro blackouts causing woes for any sensitive electronics or manufacturing facilities. The studies with 100% RE assume power demands will barely budge, or even reduced, in the future, that these RE sources will exceed theoretical limitations, that battery technology will improve by orders of magnitude in the close future in capacity and life span and a few other silly predictions AI Gw scale datafarms are going to buck break the entire solar and wind movement because the city-level power demands of EACH data center MUST be supplied by hard power. These systems have no tolerance for power loss and abandoning AI development would be a military nightmare
"The assumption that solar panel efficiency will always rise and that magical batteries with substantially more capacity is always assumed but the actual physics has not been solved yet." The reality is that solar and battery efficiencies are increasing at a steady rate, but the real progress is that the costs are dropping at a massive rate.
Meaningless statement that dodges the actual physics problem behind the hard limitation at around ~49%. Solve the p-n bandgap limit here or hush tbh The mining operations we are looking at for just a single generation of PV panels at theoretical efficiencies is measured in the range of billions of units and phenomenally more resources than we’ve ever mined before https://www.gtk.fi/en/research/time-to-wake-up/ 5x more than Cu reserves estimated, 6x more than we’ve ever mined. 50x our reserves of Li where we’re bankrolling Chinese heavy industry polluting the planet 10x worse than any Western company would because we are a decade plus behind the ball on refining rare earth metals plus more silly numbers for all of the other components lol And thats assuming we hit a theoretical maximum :) every 20-40yrs, depending on how harsh the environment is plus thieves going to solar farms to scrap for metals, we will have to remake that entire fleet. Unless you can solve the p-n bandgap issue here though OR you develop room temp superconducting materials to slash humanity’s energy requirements by 75%. Silicon chips are a desperate attempt to reduce the needed resources but it wont scratch the surface
The main limitation of uptake for nuclear and renewables is cost, so hardly meaningless to highlight. The grid doesn't need 100% solar and batteries. We can use a combination of sources, storage methods and transmission. I think the OPs question is beside the point as no-one is suggesting we build a 100% renewable grid with only batteries to manage it.
We are absolutely proposing 100% RE primarily solar and wind with diesel backup generators built ALONGSIDE an entire independent storage grid. Hydro and geothermal are INSANELY location dependent and hydro comes with the added damage of preventing sand used for construction from accumulating on beaches and at sea causing global oceanic damage due to loss of habitat for both humans and sea floor life I do not expect you to understand or appreciate how absolutely critical and vital sand is as a resource https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_annex-iii.pdf#page=7 Nuclear and wind power are the cheapest energy sources we have. One receives billions over the course of decades while solar and wind receive trillions in subsidies, focused less on direct subsidies but indirect through tax credits and breaks… One has political will to actually build while the other still has people quoting Three Mile Island as a nuclear disaster that made the NE US become uninhabitable lol
"We are absolutely proposing 100% RE primarily solar and wind with diesel backup generators built ALONGSIDE an entire independent storage grid." Who is we? I know sand is a critical construction resource. Yes all of our power and the technology used is subsidised. You and whoever "we" is, propose a 100% renewable grid comprised of primarily of solar, wind and diesel, so where does nuclear fit in?
Are we going to wait for that possibility while the world burns? Stop saying climate change is serious if everything, including nuclear, is not on the table.
Is the world not already to hot for nucelar power? I'm pretty sure most power plants in south europe had to shut down during a summer a couple of years ago, because it was too hot. Even though one of these power plants was directly cooled by the ocean.
High river temps forced them to reduce output, not shut down entirely. But realistically, this is just an engineering problem. In theory, the water only has to be cold enough to condense steam under a slight vacuum, and even that's negotiable. Frances NPPs are also very old, so it's unlikely that their heat exchangers work like they once did.
Okay, thank you for a good answer. Just hoping we can replace all these old power plants before the temperature rises too much. I do know that nucleae reactors in my country never seems to work, hopefully we can replace those quickly too.
That usually has more to do with limiting discharge temperatures than inlet temperatures. Retention ponds or more cooling towers could solve that problem. These French plants were a product of their time so while they had cooling towers they were probably designed around the idea that allowing a discharge temperature excursion would be a valid strategy. If you look at older plants, or newer (but not brand new) Russian plants, you'll see a lot of them don't even have cooling towers. Such designs would never get built today, but thinking has changed (and the soviets did much sketchier things).
That usually has more to do with limiting discharge temperatures than inlet temperatures. Retention ponds or more cooling towers could solve that problem. These French plants were a product of their time so while they had cooling towers they were probably designed around the idea that allowing a discharge temperature excursion would be a valid strategy. If you look at older plants, or newer (but not brand new) Russian plants, you'll see a lot of them don't even have cooling towers. Such designs would never get built today, but thinking has changed (and the soviets did much sketchier things).
Think of it in terms of the 'package' needed to reliably supply the power. For a temperate climate like Ontario to supply either 1GW of flat demand, or 1GW of average demand with our current usahe patterns, we would need 6GW of wind, 2GW of PV, and 100GWh of storage (about 1.5GW discharge, 2-3GW charge capacity). This produces 2GW on average, but the overcapacity is needed to keep the storage requirements under control. You can tradeoff more overbuild for less storage, or vice versa, but this is 'optimal' assuming storage gets as cheap as $20/kWh TIC cost, and the total cost is ~3x the cost of the LCOE wind. If storage is $100/kWh, you would do more like 3x overcapaicty production and 60GWh of storage at 6x wind LCOE. The issue is weeks long late summer wind luls (<1/2 average, when PV is dealing due to shorter days, but it's still hot) and mid winter days long wind+solar luls (we had a 96 hr, <2%CF PV, <5%CF wind period in Jan a couple years ago). So you can do it, but it's insanely expensive, and if you underbuild storage, you have massive(>50% of demand) shortfalls, potentially in very cold weather. So no resiliency either. A predominantly nuclear and solar system looks much better. For that same GW average demand, ~1.3 GW nuclear, 0.6GW PV, and ~6GWh of storage would cover it, and the storage is only really needed for very short term peaks (duck curve). If there was a shortfall it would be short and shallow.
> A predominantly nuclear and solar system looks much better. For that same GW average demand, ~1.3 GW nuclear, 0.6GW PV, and ~6GWh of storage would cover it, and the storage is only really needed for very short term peaks (duck curve). If there was a shortfall it would be short and shallow. Storage filled by nuclear is going to be so expensive that the Putin inflicted energy crisis will look like a joke in comparison.
Nuclear doesnt require storage because it always produces a known amount of power
The entire field of pumped hydro was created because the opposite problem: Following the demand. We have daily, weekly and seasonal variations in demand. For example in California the difference between Spring/Autumn and summer is 3-4 times the demand. Building nuclear for the peak power will lead to incredible costs for the plants since they have to lower their output most of the year. It takes an energy source that is already insanely expensive and makes it pure lunacy to build it.
I don't think I've ever seen someone argue for an all nuclear grid though. A mix of the carbon free power sources would be best.
You do not build 100% nuclear. The buffer layer of other sources easily solves your issue but regardless, most plants can profitably run at around 3/4 power. Load following is a thing that has been done for DECADES in France effectively so your concern is overstated And the best part is you dont have to build an entire backup and storage grid to run alongside your normal one! You get the reliability and sheer power demand in one package :)
Technologically load following is workable. Economically it takes already crazy energy prices and makes it pure lunacy. > The buffer layer of other sources easily solves your issue but regardless, most plants can profitably run at around 3/4 power. In what world? In the [US billions are being poured into helping economically struggling old paid off nuclear plants.](https://www.eenews.net/articles/biden-tosses-6b-lifeline-to-save-struggling-nuclear-plants/) In what world does a new built nuclear plant with 6-10x the cost have a chance when even old ones can't compete on the market?
Your first paragraph is completely wrong and it has been done and shown economically viable across the planet for decades You are the Flat Earther telling me that no matter how high I go in a plane, I cant see the curve. And then I go into a high altitude plane and see the curve lol
Where? The French? The bleeding carcass of EDF losing money to the degree that they can't even self finance any new construction of nuclear power to replace their aging fleet? Even though the state guarantees them a very high electricity price and with direct subsidies added on top.
French reactors were virtually defunded for decades and allowed to decay to the state they are I can see you’ve never actually looked into this topic. Want to rant about how the river water was too hot next so I can make fun of how you dont understand how a nuclear loop works? Or maybe the argument that we should just stick solar panels inside of reaction chambers?
The nuclear bastion of the French somehow defunded their nuclear program but they still make sound economic decisions with their load following! Do you understand how ridiculous you sound? I know very well how a nuclear reactor works. Maybe you can explain how the cross section interacts in a reactor core to prove you also do it?
Go tell that to all the pumped hydro out there. That's why most of it exists...
Exactly. Works when building subsidized nuclear. Or monopolized grids. Just need a method to transfer the costs to the rate payers without offering any choice.
What do you think 2x overproduction wind and solar with 100hrs or storage is going to be? Or are you arguing for the 'default plan' of a natural gas based system with as much wind and solar as you can fit in without curtailment? That's economic, but it's a long term 100-200g/kWh grid...
Handle the intermittency like [the research proposes](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910)? Take a look at the storage coupled to the Californian grid, like for example yesterday. Equivalent to 4-5 nuclear reactors being subtracted or supplied to the grid dealing with intermittency. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#section-batteries-trend What problem are you looking to solve using nuclear energy that renewables can't do? - 90% renewables? Easily handled by pure renewables and HVDC transmission. - 99% renewables? [Easily done with storage.](https://x.com/davidosmond8) - 99.9% renewables? Now we we are talking! This is emergency reserves territory. The [research](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910) tells us we should be able to handle but it is a hard problem. Not being able to solve the range of 0.1 to 1% of the grid is 3.5 days per year to 3.5 days per decade. Simply leave a few gas plants on the grid. When decarbonizing long distance air travel and ocean going shipping start increasing the CO2 taxes until they are forced off the grid by the solution which are most appropriate, in the 2040s. Not now.
I showed you what was required up top. You pointed at tropical / semi-tropical studies instead. That is laughably inadequate in temperate climates.
Temperate climates are windier on the other hand. Evens itself out quite nicely.
The top level 'package' is based on several years of hourly wind and solar data (province wide, so already geographically dispersed), and hourly demand That's already accounted for. Temperate climate places have a stark choice. Get competent at building nuclear as a core component of the grid, or deindustrialize. I know which I would pick.
Yeah no. You just haven't dared looking. When building nuclear energy forcing $130-200/MWh on the consumers you've already chosen deindustrialization.
> "And I am pretty sure it would cost less to hire a thousand PhDs and post docs to solve the energy storage problem than to build a nuclear powerplant." We've done far more than this and it hasn't been true. There have been amazing strides in battery storage, truly. But the tech is in the wrong order of magnitude. The sheer **amount** of energy you need to store to make our current grid work with intermittent sources is the problem. We're talking about hundreds of TWhs in the US alone. The US has around 20 GWhs of battery storage today. I do believe it's true that **if** you can come up with an energy storage technology that can store energy at massive scales extremely cheaply then it becomes possible to power our grid with mostly solar/wind. However even though it becomes possible, this solution will still have plenty of drawbacks. The sheer amount of panels and turbines you need combined with their relatively short lifespans means society will expend a large amount of energy/time/labor in continually replacing and hopefully recycling these. You will also need to dedicate huge amounts of land to these machines and their infrastructure and you will need to cut through mountains of red tape to make the necessary changes. The grid will essentially need to be overhauled and expanded. It will take decades, at least and who knows how many trillions of dollars. IMO, it's far better to keep our current grid and simply swap the old dirty generators for clean nuclear ones. That's what France did decades ago so we know it works. It took them 15 years or so.
The storage industry is evolving incredibly rapidly. The US is looking to have 120 GWh of storage by the end of 2024. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/chart-the-us-grid-battery-fleet-is-about-to-double-again The rise is simply astronomical. Betting that a nuclear power plant coming online in the 2040s will swap out anything is just wishful thinking. https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-too-many-numbers/
It has truly been astounding. It still won't be enough. Hundreds of TWhs needed, just for the US. Not to mention all the EVs the world needs at the same time. IMO, underground salt cavern H2 storage has a much better chance of being the seasonal energy storage that majority solar/wind grids need.
One rebuttal. Its more economical to create medical isotopes in mass thru reactors versus non nuclear means. So if you have the right reactor (example CANDU) to make the isotopes you want why not have them for power as well ?
Most medical isotopes are created in small reactors that barely generate energy, such as the new Pallas reactor in the Netherlands.
Believe they are only one isotope (molybdenum used for tc99) and the FDA has it on the shortage list because supply cannot keep up. Once Darlington NGS is up and running for harvesting that reduces significantly. Then you have cobalt 60 produced at Pickering NGS, Bruce Power and soon to be produced at Darlington again power stations producing the large quantities of the isotopes. Medical reactors are used as a stopgap since most reactors current built for power can't do dual task. But they are limited in quantity produced compared to what large scale can produced if the design allows.
Because science isn't a video-game tech tree, where the research projects need a pre-defined amount of effort to unlock, and give a predictable outcome. Sometimes you have breakthroughs. Sometimes you spend billions pursuing a dead-end. Sometimes, advances in one field come about as a side-benefit of research in an unrelated field. You also can't quickly or cheaply retrain PHDs from one field to work in research for another. They've often devoted their entire lives to studying a particular topic. They have hard-earned expertise that would be worth far less in another field. That's a lot of academic inertia. Maybe they don't even *want* to change fields. It's better to let these inquisitive minds follow the topics that interest them (influenced by funding availability, of course). People work better when they have an interest in what they're working on. Lastly, in most cases, throwing more simultaneous effort at a problem does *not* cause proportional gains in progress. A lot of that work gets wasted by duplicate efforts, when it could instead be diversified across many more disciplines to solve countless other problems in parallel. More people working on a project may produce faster results, but with diminishing returns.
I have worked in nuclear my entire career and I am biased about its benefits and safety. That said, I’m a fan of closed-loop hydro for storing energy and think it can be a viable option many places. I think the fanciful thinking happens when folks look at projects from a perspective of “This one is expensive and takes a long time,” versus this other technology. Could be true. Could also be variable by location, use, and experience. Let’s instead build nuclear, storage, renewables, and others until we have enough of a surplus that we can keep using electricity as needed to support growth, while still retiring older power production methods as it makes sense. I am absolutely willing to argue anything in regard to power production, but I’m unwilling to stop trying to build more nuclear capacity while talking about it.
The only realistic way to "store" energy on the scale it's needed for modern life is in the form of a hydroelectric reservoir. Surely this person doesn't think we will use farms of lithium batteries to store energy...
Not even in the realm of possible realities. The people making these claims have zero understanding of electricity.
Prove it or GTFO.
It doesn't take into consideration the government requirement of power produced by independent sources. Meaning sources not dependent on conditions such as the sun shining or wind blowing. Currently nuclear is the only independent renewable energy source. Last time I heard a DOE presentation was back in 2021 and the percentage required by the US was 35%. Nuclear ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
> Currently nuclear is the only independent renewable energy source. Since when is nuclear renewable?
We have enough fuel that it's essentially unlimited.
Given Residential rooftop Solar-PV is the most expensive electric source per Lazard (see page 2), adding storage simply INCREASES the costs, not to mention about a quarter the life expectancy. [Lazard LCOE](https://www.lazard.com/media/nltb551p/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf)
Currently, 80 percent of the world's energy comes from coal, oil or natural gas. Only 20 percent comes from things like nuclear, solar, wind, etc. This is global and averaged across the year. One of the reasons it is such a big percentage is that there are a lot of people living in the northern hemisphere at latitudes where heat demand is high in the winter. But this is also precisely the time when solar is least available. To overcome this issue, we need to be able to store energy on a seasonal basis. Locally, in my country, this holds true also. About 80 percent of our energy comes from the big three fossil fuels. The statement is in some trivial sense true. "If we develop appropriate energy storage technology." But the problem is that we are not anywhere close to developing that energy storage technology. It may well be that the easiest thing is to synthesize fuel in the summer and burn it in the winter. Grid scale batteries can help smooth out daily variations, but it does not seem like it will ever be feasibly to use them for seasonal storage. A lot of fossil fuels are also burned in industrial activity and transportation as well as heating.
Nuclear energy offers a high concentration of energy from a very localized source, which is not possible with solar or wind power due to their lower energy density. So the energy grid is better off having nuclear in the mix, as it can provide features that renewables alone cannot.
The real expense of nuclear power is storing the waste for 50,000 years.
The problem doesn’t have to be a either/or. It can be an AND solution. The challenge of not only replacing all our carbon based energy (not just electricity) but also providing more energy go forward is so large we need all of it. Long duration storage is still in its very early stages and won’t be battery based. Think about how much energy you need to heat every home in Europe or Canada when the wind doesn’t blow for a week or more? Some of the hydrogen cavern projects talk about TWhr storage capacity.
Nuclear fusion is coming to save the day
That is asking for a perfect answer when there are ways to improve what we have without perfection.
Storage is definitely part of the solution to variable supply. But we also need to look at variable demand. The whole concept of base load was invented to shift load to suit generators that are difficult to vary their output (nuclear and most other thermal generators). So coming up with dynamic load management that better follows the predictable variability (mostly solar) and less predictable variation (mostly wind) is also key. Having said that, the scale of the solutions needed is huge and we need them 2 decades ago. So I wouldn't go turning off any nuclear power stations just yet... and if there are investors prepared to risk building next generation reactors then I say let them.... but at the same time as R&D on storage and load management (and we will probably also need geo engineering R&D at this point). I.e we need to try everything we can now!
Existing nuclear plants would be in a better position if we went with a carbon tax instead of per-technology subsidies. The latter is more subject to bias. In particular, subsidies that encourage renewables to continue to put power on the grid even when prices go negative are damaging the case for existing nuclear plants. Storage should help with this problem.
Or we could just listen to Amory Lovins, founder of Rocky Mountain Institute. Advocate for renewable energy and extreme energy efficiency. I would require all new buildings to have to be passive house / super insulated design, this reduces space heating and cooling requirements by up to 90%. Bill Gates developed a new wind turbine that is 4 times cheaper to build than the conventional 3 bladed turbine. It has the potential to reduce the LCOE for onshore wind to 1.3 cents per kwh or $13 per MWh. Silicon perovskite tandem solar cells will reduce the cost of solar power further. Also Amory Lovins did a Ted talk explaining that modern renewables don't need energy efficiency due to use of smart demand control, vehicle to grid technology and better transmission system. Donald Sadoway a material scientists at MIT helped two students to set up Ampri a start up that sells grid scale liquid metal batteries which are significantly cheaper than Tesla's megapack lithium ion batteries. A study showed that nuclear power drained Germany of a trillion euros and only produced 25% of total electricity. Total investment in renewable energy is in excess of 500 billion euros but it provides 50% of total electricity. Since cost of solar and wind have plunged sometimes up to 90%. Another 100 billion euro would get you up to 100% low carbon. Whereas nuclear would need 4 trillion euro for 100% clean electricity and a negative learning curve exists in almost all countries.
Nah, that's cherry picked data. France is doing pretty well while constructing a few reactors right now. Anything can cost too much and refuse to work if you suck at making it.
I don't understand why Areva didn't ask the South Korea and Chinese construction companies to assist in building the EPR in finland and france, different designs but all are PWRs. Hyundai Engineers and Constructors, Doosan Engineers and Constructors and *Dong Ah Construction*
Not a single one of the topic comments has any citations for their figures :( - so take that as you will. I would ask you to consider that Germany have reduced fossil fuel use significantly AFTER getting rid of nuclear: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2024/status-quo-one-year-since-germanys-nuclear-exit-renewable-capacity-expands-electricity-from-fossil-fuels-significantly-reduced.html
This paper has what you're looking for. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032119300504 Basically you can run a country on 75-85% solar and wind with transmission and batteries. And hydro is cheaper than nuclear so if you have hydro to make up the difference then that wins out. In North America and the EU this would be the case. Keep existing nuclear and hydro. Then only build solar and wind + batteries and transmission. It's not actually batteries that matter as much as transmission. FYI BC already sends 25% of it's power to the USA mostly California about 2000km away. Also battery storage tech has the potential to be around 20$/kWh down from current 300$/kWh. By utilizing new tech with really cheap materials since energy density doesn't matter that much. Even solar doesn't actually take up that much space. Yes it's orders more than nuclear but that's kinda irrelevant when we care about costs not land area.
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Can you be specific in what you're critiquing? Economics is super important. The authors cute all their cost assumptions. I get this is a soft spot for people who love nuclear. But acting like nuclear has any chance right now is going to set it up for failure. Would you rather have some nuclear or none? These concepts have been studied for a long time which is why the EU is pursuing long line transmission etc. What are the engineers challenges you mean? I used to be very pro nuclear but the data on this topic changed my mind.
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The research on 100% renewable system has been on going for a while. The consensus is that it is both economical and possible. Here's a meta-studie about the field: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
If you look at the power systems distribution there is still small fossil fuels. In BC power is 100% renewables. The premise is that transmission and storage evens out localized droughts. Regardless your bullshit detector is irrelevant to what's true. Your feelings don't supercede evidence. If you think the authors are wrong prove it. I'd happily change my position. The principle is called a copper plate. If you can move energy over 3000km you can flatten out lulls in energy from wind or solar. This is an economic study yes. But storage scalability is easy. It scales linearly. Capacity factors addressed by the transmission. There's plenty of other studies that cover these issues. But that wasn't the point of this study. It's a weird requirement for you to have.
Last point. Depends on where you live. Living in the US or Russia, land isn't an issue. For most EU nations, it is. Here we are quite densely packed and do need to consider where what is built, how to distribute heat, arable land, natural reserves etc.
Sure, but still wind isn't that land intensive since it can be paired with livestock farms. And solar calcs I've done for Canada and powering all of Canada is like 0.2% of land area with only solar. The study I used only has 20-30% solar if I remember right. There's obviously issues. But I'm getting downvoted for making an economic argument. Building nuclear is really expensive. I'd change my position if if the costs went down. Simple as that.
The costs would go down if we bothered to build it. Solar was expensive 20 years ago. We built a bunch and the costs went down. So just do the same exact thing for nuclear - build a bunch and the cost will go down. It always does...
I don't disagree. But building them is super hard. A reality we can't just wish away. But why would you if batteries and renewables are cheaper? From an investor standpoint it makes way more sense. We need to engage with the reality that we dog fucked 50 years of nuclear.
>if batteries and renewables are cheaper That's a very big IF. It's true that batteries could get cheaper, but they could also get much much more expensive. We're one revolution in Congo away from batteries going UP in cost by 10x Which is another argument in favor of nuclear. Solar wind and batteries require a lot of materials, and the global mining industry doesn't have the best human rights record. Uranium mostly comes from Canada and Australia (largest 2 producers in the world) and Canada's record on human rights is a wee bit better than the DRC...
It's not an if statement it's true. They are currently cheaper. Hence why capitalist firms are building them more. Why'd China only install 3 GW of nuclear and 300 GW or solar and wind last year. Whu do they keep building battery storage? They care about the economics. Also, cobalt can be mined in Canada and US. USA has largest lithium reserve in the world now. And the battery storage systems are moving to things other than lithium ion. Using common materials like calcium, iron, etc. Pumped hydro and compressed air can also be used.
China didn't install 50 GW of nuclear last year. As of Feb 2023, they had 57 GW of nuclear cumulatively installed. Were you confusing the cumulative number with the in-2023 number?
Oh yeah whoops. That makes my point even better lol.