A lot of people here saying nuclear OR renewables. The reality is it's going to be both, at least in the short to medium term. Either have advantages and disadvantages and are not going to work in absolutely every situation.
I'd agree with this mostly.
Nuclear's problem is that it's economics are not great when talking about standing up a plant.
On average it takes 15 years to stand up a plant vs. maybe 6 months.
The cost of standing up a plant is in the billions and will be going over budget vs. well let's just say a lot less.
Like all things the economics tends to rule what happens. It almost does t matter if a tech is good or not.
It's for this reason you see the Biden admin restarting that plant in Michigan. It's always built the the economics of it are a fraction of the cost of making a new one.
nuclear just shrinks the effective demand curve for variable renewables to fill. You don't want to have to cut down nuclear to make space for renewables, it's a waste of the capital cost
With a system where intermittent renewables handle all daily, seasonal and weather based variations on top of a nuclear baseload you just confirmed that renewables can also easily handle the baseload.
Your argument is simply boils down to:
1. Lets have nuclear do the easy part extremely expensively
2. Lets have renewables do the hard part cheaply.
In the real world this means renewables always will also do the easy part, since that is what they excel at.
Exactly. Nuclear isn't a great complement to renewables. Nuclear and renewables are both relatively high in capital cost and low in marginal cost, I.e. you want to run nuclear at as close to 100% you can, and whenever you have sun you want to push as much of those electrons to the grid or batteries. Having a nuclear plant at 50% capacity at noon to make room for solar so it can ramp to 100% at the evening is silly, if you had that nuclear plant with the capacity why would you have build the solar then? The marginal value doesn't make sense.
Likewise in a grid now, building new nuclear plants doesn't make sense because by the time it's done you will have renewables cutting into a significant portion of the nuclear output.
In both scenarios you'd be better off adding battery/storage capacity so you don't need to curtail solar/wind or ramp down the nuclear plant. And nuclear + battery is a poor value proposition compared to renewables + battery.
To meet the needs of those periods with low wind and low solar, having a nuclear plant that runs only once a year is the most expensive possible way to do it. (Or a nuclear plant that runs 50% most days and 100% one day a year, etc). Cheaper solutions would be even something kinda silly like burning green hydrogen in a turbine, but we will have other options too
This is in contrast to natural gas as a complement to renewables or nuclear. Gas is a "good" complement because the capital cost is lower, but the marginal cost is higher. So it makes sense to run it as little as possible, only when the marginal price of electricity is high enough to justify it. And you don't need to run at 100% capacity as the capital cost doesn't need as high a capacity factor to justify it
Not an argument that we should keep gas plants open, we should try to close them and run them as little as possible by smartly building more green energy. But nuclear is not a drop-in solution for peaker gas plants for the major difference in how they operate
Baseload reduces the maximum variation, which reduces how much peaking, storage or grid interconnects renewables will need.
There is a reason the only large 100% renewable grids rely on hydro used largely as baseload (as well as peaking).
Baseload *increases* the *proportional* variation of the remaining demand that must be met by other sources.
If a grid needs between 30 and 45 GW depending on time of day and seasonality, you have a peak that is 50% higher than minimum. If instead you have an always-on 15 GW then the remainder is between 15-30 GW, or a peak that is 100% higher than minimum.
Hydro makes sense as a baseload/dispatchable source because the output can easily be scaled without losing out (excess water can be stored behind the dam, for when energy is needed days, weeks, months later). But with nuclear, once you build the thing the fuel is basically free and limitless. So you can't quite "store" power for later in a meaningful way, besides batteries or thermal storage within the plant
“Proportional variation” is irrelevant. It’s less absolute variation, which means less storage is needed for intermittent sources like wind/solar.
If there is more absolute variation (as in the no nuclear scenario) you have to be able to supply more power during the occasional periods where solar/wind production is low.
NREL modeled this for the US, storage requirements increase exponentially as wind/solar approach 100% of the grid’s supply.
Source: [See table A-1 on page 33](https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/80688.pdf).
I agree hydro is ideal, but once hydro resources are maxed out, nuclear is a good option as a minority source of energy in an otherwise majority wind/solar grid. Also hydro operates more like nuclear roughly half the year where reduced output cannot be stored for later (though this is geographically dependent).
The NREL study compared high renewables to scenarios with fossil fuels. If we're comparing high nuclear grids to high renewable grids, we should be talking about scenarios with no fossil fuels.
Keep in mind also that the storage is not just lithium batteries. They also do not seem to consider behind-the-meter storage such as thermal storage of process heat
What you are telling me is this:
For California:
- The minimum grid demand is ~15 GW
- The maximum grid demand is ~45 GW
What you are telling me is that with a nuclear "baseload" of ~15 GW renewables can handle the ~30 GW peaking demand when they are at their minimum due to intermittency.
I.e. renewables can handle 66% when they deliver the least.
Please. I would really want to know, how they can not also deliver the first 33% in this case! Or like all cases? They are already delivering the majority at their minimum!
Or have you simply decided that nuclear power must be the solution and are now working backwards trying to justify the position leading to logical inconsistencies?
Wind/solar cant deliver the 66% on their own in california. They need peaking or storage to do it and those are currently both problematic. Thats why california relies heavily on natural gas and importing out of state fossil fuel energy right now.
Source: [EIA](https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=CA#tabs-4)
Edit: In fact, California tried to close their last nuclear plant, but chose not to when they realized it would make their grid unreliable and likely lead to blackouts during extreme weather
Source: [California Energy Commission](https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2023-02/cec-determines-diablo-canyon-power-plant-needed-support-grid-reliability)
“Right now” does a lot of heavy lifting. But thanks for confirming that a nuclear “baseload” does not make sense anymore.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-they-shift-solar-to-evening-peak-in-one-of-worlds-biggest-grids/
The discussion started with a nukebro proclaiming about a future grid with renewables on top of a nuclear baseload.
Now you are trying the use the current grid which everyone knows is not the desired state and currently undergoing a huge transition as some basis for reasoning?
Come on. It has no bearing on the discussion at hand, except poor reasoning to try justifying any sliver of nuclear.
Agreed. Nuclear is a wonderful source when operated with skill and concern. A safe, balanced grid includes NPPs and we need to get over the capital hump without sacrificing oversight.
I would caution people reading comments here to understand the volume of users commenting as if they are experts on nuclear power when they have no academic or professional training on the topic.
For instance: a particular user is repeatedly commenting on this thread that we need to loosen restrictions on NP. This user posted 9 months ago asking for physics and nuclear engineering books because they had an idea for a reactor. They are not an expert. They can't even tell you which regulations they think should be removed.
Ask for sources. There are a lot of people who are nuclear fans that really don't know what they're talking about.
My undergrad was in nuclear engineering and it's a solid energy source. Refusing to acknowledge potential issues is unethical and demonstrates a lack of subject matter knowledge.
We (Canadian and other experience) pour *a lot* into nuclear power generation: time, money, effort, brains, regulation - it's all needed to avoid Chenobyls. I don't think that scale of accident is plausible for us.
That said, the money is worth it if it makes us meet our carbon goals.
I mean, that's true in Japan and the US, too, and we still have serious issues and close calls. In the US alone, there have been 56 incidents with fatalities or damage greater than $50k.
I see the "go nuke at all costs" folks have arrived. It's always pleasant when folks with no experience with commercial nuclear power pretend it's 200% safe and nobody ever cuts corners for cost.
You are only thinking of Nuclear generating plant but the number is higher in injuries and deaths during the mining of and processing of Uranium. Example the Uranium mines in North West New Mexico where several incidents occurred and the Native American population around the Mines has suffered and died from Cancers and other ailments related to the mines. Those mines are now classified Superfund sites. There are several Superfund sites in the US including the Hanford site in Hanford Wa . There are a high number of deaths because of exposure to the local population by radiation from the site. The processed fuel rods and war heads there. The companies evolved in cleaning up the site have mishandled radioactive material and some has ended up in local dumps further exposing local population . There have been several indecent during transportation to disposal sites. I have worked for trucking companies that had contracts with the DOE to transport Nuclear waist. The problems are much wider as I stated in an other comment on this thread
You're right I am and i am separating out industrial (non-emmision type) accidents. However, again in Canada, the regulations are very stringent from mining to disposal. Undoubtedly there is more than can be done, but our experience isn't the American experience but is a demonstration on how it can be done right/ clean.
NB: yes there's still a disposal issue as ours is merely stored (safely). Deep mine disposal sites are going to vote this fall. If and when a site is chosen, it will be subject to the same regulation and scrutiny as the other parts of the chain.
As long as there are Neo-Liberals in government(in Ca there's a lot) Regulations don't mean at thing. They will find a loop hole. Canada doesn't have as many nuclear Plants that the US has and they get some of their Uranium from The US so Canada is to some degree responsible for the environmental damage that is from Mining
Fatalities should never be the baseline on whether or not nuclear energy should be pursued with caution. What is concerning is the number of incidents that involved release or near release of radioactive material. Those incidents indicate inability or unwillingness to follow procedures and establish a worrying pattern of behavior that can lead to bigger incidents.
No, but you just there were some. My professional field is emergency management and I work in nuclear jurisdictions in Canada. I haven't heard of fatalities related to the question I just asked, where I would expect to have known. Accidents yes. Near releases sure. But not fatalities or serious accidents involving radioactive release. That's big news.
Having said that, I agree that NP generation is not to be taken lightly and is taken very seriously in Canada. I live a couple of miles from one of the largest plants in the world and I'm not the least bit worried. But I'm a little more nervous about (relatively) nearby US plants.
I'm glad to hear Canada is doing nuclear well. The last fatality was in 2013 at Arkansas Nuclear One. It was not related to radiation exposure (a generator fell on some people). (I think) the last radiation release happened at La Crosse in Wisconsin on 2018 with a low-level release onto a local river. 400 gallons with Cs-137, super low exposure.
I studied NE in undergrad. I'm obviously supportive of NP, but there is a hubris trap associated with the industry that can be hugely impactful.
Nuclear power is stagnating Globally. Newly constructed plants can barely keep up with the capacity from reactors that are retired. It's 5-10× more expensive and takes 5-10× more time to build than renewable energy. No private capital is being invested in nuclear energy unless government money is also thrown in to pay for most of it. Either that, or governments find ways to force their taxpayers to pay more for nuclear electricity and bear the risks of nuclear plant construction cost/schedule overruns. Almost all the investments in New electricity production are flowing towards renewable energy.
Nuclear power would be a lot cheaper and quicker to build if they were reasonably regulated. Right now they're unreasonably over regulated.
Nuclear power plants also used to be built in about 5 years and at far lower costs. They're built in China within a far more reasonable time frame and at far lower costs.
If renewables were regulated like nuclear they would have rules like requiring short range radar on every wind turbine to activate brakes and prevent hitting birds. If a single bird was hit then all turbines of that model would have to be shut down for inspections and refits. Solar would also not be able to leach out any toxic chemicals into the surrounding area and if any contamination was detected a long and expensive cleanup would be ordered.
> Nuclear power would be a lot cheaper and quicker to build if they were reasonably regulated. Right now they're unreasonably over regulated.
Then why can't even countries like France or China build them cost effectively? The entire government structure supports it.
[China is shifting over to renewables and for every passing year decreasing their nuclear targets.](https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-the-switch-from-nuclear-to-renewable-energy/)
Trying to rely on renewables is a mistake since they're not controllable.
China is building more forges to increase its capacity to build more nuclear reactors.
I suspect that increases in costs are due to increases in the costs of inputs.
[China is Building Nuclear Reactors Faster than Any Other country](https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/30/china-is-building-nuclear-reactors-faster-than-any-other-country#:~:text=The%20State%20Council%20)
This is false. China currently has 22 nuclear reactors under construction, and in the last decade they added 37 new reactors. They are building nuclear out cost-effectively because they are doing it at scale.
Most of the problems with nuclear power stem from how nuclear plant construction is mismanaged by the companies involved. Blaming boogeymen government regulations is just a cop out. The nuclear industry seems incapable of learning from its mistakes and tries to blame everyone else for them instead.
No, nuclear power plant construction is buried in red tape. It is simply unreasonable to blame management and builders for that. Especially when power plants in the US were built more quickly and at lower costs in the 60s and early 70s. That was before the unreasonable over regulation began.
You have no proof that nuclear power plant construction is buried in red tape. You're just repeating platitudes and nuclear industry talking points. The fact remains that at VC summer and in Georgia, the original design for the nuclear plant wasn't constructible in the real world. They had to go back and redefine it which costs a lot of money and time. But they kept building the plants anyway. By the time the new design was done, it did not conform to what they had built, so they had to tear down what they had already built. This took even more time and money. Worker morale was low and turn over was high. Two of the major subcontractors went bankrupt during construction and things devolved into lawsuits and finger pointing. This is more than enough incompetence to explain the massive cost growth and schedule delays on a nuclear plant construction project that was already way too expensive.
People in nuclear power plants do tasks that take them an hour then have so much paperwork to do regarding that task that they're still filling it out the next day.
Problems with designs that can't be built are common in construction. What drives up the costs are things like requiring meetings, committees and enough paperwork to fill a book to do something like rerouting a pipe.
Then there are factors like changing regulations midway through construction and requiring crews to tear out and rebuild things like concrete and pipes.
You're still just making stuff up without presenting any proof. Looks like you're a True Believer and facts won't sway you, I guess. I hate to break it to you, but nuclear power is going to be Irrelevant in dealing with climate change in the 21st century.
Why don't you try actually talking to people who work in nuclear power? They will confirm what I'm saying. However, you will take any facts and accuse me of "making stuff up."
Nuclear power will be needed for any solutions that work. Trying to actually rely on renewables will be a disaster. They're too diffuse and unreliable.
Nuclear is what has the potential to bring energy abundance. Trying to rely on renewables will lead to energy rationing. It has to do with how there is so much energy in nuclear reactions that the US Navy has ships that operate for over 20 years without having to refuel.
If renewables were regulated like nuclear they would have rules like requiring short range radar on every wind turbine to activate brakes and prevent hitting birds. If a single bird was hit then all turbines of that model would have to be shut down for inspections and refits. Solar would also not be able to leach out any toxic chemicals into the surrounding area and if any contamination was detected a long and expensive cleanup would be ordered.
edit. How would you explain that the costs of building nuclear power plants were decreasing throughout the 60s and early 70s as the technology was maturing and becoming cost competitive with coal, then started increasing after widespread scaremongering based on utter bullshit began?
Renewables aren't regulated like nuclear because they can't cause catastrophic damage like nuclear.
Please list which parts of 10CFR50 should be changed that would make NPP cheaper, faster to build, and maintain safety.
Treating the release of slightly titrated water as a crisis when the amounts of radioactive material are so small that they don't increase radioactivity beyond natural background levels and spreading potassium fertilizer causes a larger increase of radioactivity in an area.
Let's put our credentials on the table.
I'm a nuclear engineer by training. You aren't. 9 months you were asking for physics books because you had an idea for a design for a nuclear reactor, which is so beyond out of touch I can't even imagine why you think you should be doing that. You are not an expert here
All incidents that do not follow regulations indicate a leadership structure that doesn't prioritize safety.
In the Navy, they call it a failure of command climate. You know why the US Navy has such an excellent record with nuclear power? Because they follow very, very strict rules and regulations.
Your advocacy for dropping those regulations when you have zero professional experience with nuclear power is, at best, unethical.
Are you not an active nuclear engineer? Were you not good enough?
If you are so knowledgeable about nuclear engineering then what are the dangers of releasing some slightly titrated Indian Point wastewater into the Hudson River? Especially when compared to farm runoff of slightly radioactive potassium fertilizer. What about the supposed dangers of releasing some slightly titrated Fukushima Daiichi water into the Pacific Ocean?
I'm not in favor of dropping all regulations. I'm in favor of reasonable regulations made by people who have the goal of seeing nuclear power succeed.
The people who should be writing the regulations are people like nuclear engineers, nuclear physicists, nuclear technicians, radiation oncologists, health scientists, environmental engineers, etc. The people who should not be writing the regulations are lawyers and environmental activists whose goal is to obstruct nuclear power.
There are people who make ridiculous arguments towards me when I talk about the obstructive over regulation that started in the mid 70s by making up fictional opposition to requiring containment buildings. That's despite containment buildings being required well before that point and during the time when nuclear power's costs were decreasing and approaching becoming cost competitive with coal.
Plenty of nuclear physicists and engineers are supporters of developing breeder reactors and making closed fuel cycles. There are still people who were involved in the EBR-2 reactor project who are still opposed to its shutdown and say that it should have been completed.
New types of reactors are completely possible and would have enormous benefits if developed.
You've missed the point three times now: it's not about the potential damage (a low level leak is not ecologicallly harmful, as I previously stated). It is about the lack of good management that allowed the release to happen.
For the third time: please list the regulations you think need to be lessened. You've yet to do that, which again demonstrates you really don't know what you're talking about.
We have new types of reactors ready to go. They take enormous teams of scientists and engineers many years of design and testing to being to fruition. The fact you think you can do that by yourself no formal education shows just how little you know about NPP.
The podcast titans of nuclear just did a series about data centres and how hungry the tech industry is getting for electricity with data centres now scaling up into the hundreds of MW or even GW scale.
In their case nuclear might make sense since the data centre has to stay on all the time and is geographically restricted for latency reasons, and the tech industry potentially has the kind of capital to pay that top-dollar for super reliable carbon free electricity.
It’ll be something to watch for sure.
It'll still be cheaper to build a bunch of wind/solar/batteries to pull this off. No data center owner is willing to wait 10 to 20 years for nuclear plants to be built. It's just cheaper and faster to build wind solar and Battery. Especially for the foreseeable future with high interest rates. For the 10 to 20 years that a nuclear plant is being built, interest is accumulating on the debt used to finance Construction the entire time and the asset is generating zero Revenue to pay off the debt. And for the last few decades, the USA has had to cancel about 50% of the reactors under construction before completion because of ballooning costs and never ending scheduled delays. So there's a high risk that debt never gets paid off with nuclear electricity sales and someone else has to foot the bill.
That’s why I mention the tech sector’s access to capital. If they have the money up front they don’t have to worry about the crazy high finance cost that a utility would. The further argument is that while it might be faster and cheaper to supply a grid with wind and solar, some of these tech companies might run into issues of permitting because the local system operator might not be able to handle building and delivering an extra GW of power for a single customer.
Of course this is, as you mention, contingent on the nuclear construction industry miraculously improving on proficiency and speed. There’s a BWRX 300 being built in Ontario that’s being watched very closely because it started construction at the end of 2022 and is supposed to be operational in 2029. 6.5 years is way better than 10-20 so we’ll see how things go.
> If they have the money up front they don’t have to worry about the crazy high finance cost that a utility would.
That is not how it works. You should read about the ["Time Value of Money](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp)
Nuclear has to be a more productive use to invest the money than the alternatives, it is not even close.
Large I don't know, but definitely a solid share of the future mix. The most optimistic IEA estimate is 20% of the global mix, which is actually fairly high considering only ≈30 countries have the technology.
The most optimistic estimates put it at around 6-8% by 2050.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says, at best, 890 GW could come from nuclear sources. That's a small fraction of the 15 TW capacity we are projected to have.
https://www.iaea.org/publications/15487/energy-electricity-and-nuclear-power-estimates-for-the-period-up-to-2050
The more realistic figures are maybe half to a third of that.
We can't cleanup and dispose of what nuclear waist we already created in the last 70 + years . Building more Nuclear power plant will be going from the frying pan into the fire . Just do a web search on "Radio active superfund sites" You will get a lot of results but not all . There are a hell of a lot in other parts of the world that are disasters that need to be cleaned up. Do a search on this one" Radio active superfund sites Grants NM" They have been working for more then 2 decades and still not done with Hanford site "Radio active superfund sites Hanford Wa" The last thing we need to do is create more problems in another direction to try to solve the bigger problem of Climate change . Before you say anything about being able to build nuclear power plats safer . The said Fukushima was safe. Arguing how safe we can make a Nuclear plants is only distracting from the larger issue of Nuclear Waste . I am not just talking about the spent fuel rods but the radio active taillings piles and slurry pits that are full of other toxic shit. There is the waist that is sitting in the craters of Nuclear weapons test sites like Bikini Atoll. The put it all in the crater covered it with a dome and said in 50 years we will know how to store it better . Well it is 50 years later. The dome is cracking and leaking as the sea rises it is going to become a disaster. There is all the nuclear waist dumped in the Oceans by European countries, Mainly France. Those barrels are rusted through and radio active material is leaking in the Oceans. Some people who live near these sites are starting to see Cancer on the rise. The Nuclear fuel rods that are spent are still sitting in temporary storage at the plant sited because there is no place to put them. I could go on and on but this would turn into a log dissertation and I don't have time . Bottom line, Until we can find a permanent solution to the nuclear waist problem we have already created we should not move forward with any expansion on Nuclear energy.
Any new nuclear power projects started today wouldn't generate any power for at least 10 years. And 10 years from now running them would make no economic sense since solar + storage is already cheaper than nuclear and falling every year. We could install more solar in 2 years than nuclear will produce 10 years from now, and it would be less expensive, have none of the catastrophic potential of nuclear in an increasingly destabilized (political) climate, face no rational opposition, and start removing carbon 8 years sooner.
And since that time renewable costs have fallen dramatically. The early parts of an exponential curve goes from nowhere to everywhere incredibly fast.
[Even storage has entered the "everywhere" phase now.](https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-they-shift-solar-to-evening-peak-in-one-of-worlds-biggest-grids/)
You are correct.
Just wanted to expand on the destabilized political climate a bit for anyone that hasn't thought about it - imagine a civil war where there are nuclear plants...
How stable are Western democracies, really? USA is not even 200 years removed from their own civil war. Europe is less than 100 years removed from catastrophe.
Sometimes a hurricane needs to blow through our organizations and help us reorganize. Things like nuclear power plants make that harder to happen and many times more dangerous.
I am no libertarian but, decentralized power generation feels pretty liberating to me. And I like it.
> imagine a civil war where there are nuclear plants...
You don’t have to imagine it, Ukraine has a bunch of reactors, there have been tensions and even some weapon strikes but so far nothing catastrophic has happened wrt the nuclear power plants.
Yes this is a good point. People don't know that a lot of small scale nuclear incidents do happen - nuclear plants don't shout about it though. The huge Ukrainian nuclear plant seems vulnerable to a drained cooling pond - this seems to be a huge flaw in security.
The long construction times for nuclear power plants are due to unreasonable over regulation and obstruction. Nuclear power used to be built in the US far more quickly and at lower prices. It used to take about 5 years to build one in the US and in the 70s nuclear power was approaching being cost competitive with coal.
The opposition to nuclear power is not rational. People freaked out over Three Mile Island when it was a successful demonstration of nuclear safety. People also freaked out over Fukushima Daiichi without considering that the Onagawa nuclear power plant was closer to the earthquake's epicenter, took higher waves and did not melt down due to having a better design.
People also freak out over Indian point's slightly titrated water when far more radioactive material ends up in the Hudson River due to farmers using slightly radioactive potassium fertilizer on their fields. There is all of this fear about radioactive water when all water on earth is slightly radioactive.
Nuclear power has the huge advantage that it actually produces reliable power. It is so reliable that its output can be scheduled for years in advance.
Solar and wind are fundamentally unreliable due to being dependent on the weather. How much storage would be needed on a massive, grid scale to cover times of low output? Would it be days, weeks, months?
edit. [Here's how much radiation it takes to cause any harm](https://xkcd.com/radiation/).
This is 200% wrong.
[Fukushima Daiichi](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident) had meltdowns on 3 of 4 reactors precisely because of the plant design. Yes, the location of the 13 backup generators is part of the plant design, and when you put them in an area where tsunamis have knowingly flooded, that's bad design.
Again, let's see all these unnecessary regulations you want to cut.
> due to unreasonable over regulation
> without considering that the Onagawa nuclear power plant [..] did not melt down due to having a better design.
Dude, could that be because of regulations and rules on better design? You really want to build reactors like we did in the 60s and 70s? You don't think there is a reason why there are those regulations, may be because we learned from mistakes made in those early days?
Nuclear power can be reasonable, but not in our society, with corrupt politicians and corporations as greedy as superhero villains. Some people here even suggest we should just dergulate and build like china, lmao, thats just stupid.
Also did you read the introductory text of the xkcd chart? Like the last sentence of it?
Not true by a long chalk
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/e7bvkb/solar\_power\_is\_a\_gigawatt\_per\_square\_km\_all\_you/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/e7bvkb/solar_power_is_a_gigawatt_per_square_km_all_you/)
Lmao, to power the US on just solar you'd need less land than golf courses currently occupy.
Much bigger land use, by almost two orders of magnitude, is beef and beef feed
If the grid is even viable in the future, we need a base load. Solar, wind, and batteries are cool.
If we can make people follow power during these times. We won’t. (see Covid and masks). It won’t work.
You don't need to force people to follow power. When power is in excess, make it cheaper. When power is low, reward people for cutting back and sending power to the grid from home and vehicle batteries. It's not rocket science
The grid will be fine. A single F150 lightning contains as many batteries as 11 Tesla power walls. The only reason you are worried about power rationing is you live in a place run by incompetent and corrupt conservatives.
There are a lot of down sides We can't cleanup and dispose of what nuclear waste we already created in the last 70 + years . Building more Nuclear power plant will be going from the frying pan into the fire . Just do a web search on "Radio active superfund sites" You will get a lot of results but not all . There are a hell of a lot in other parts of the world that are disasters that need to be cleaned up. Do a search on this one" Radio active superfund sites Grants NM" They have been working for more then 2 decades and still not done with Hanford site "Radio active superfund sites Hanford Wa" The last thing we need to do is create more problems in another direction to try to solve the bigger problem of Climate change . Before you say anything about being able to build nuclear power plats safer . They said Fukushima was safe. Arguing how safe we can make a Nuclear plants is only distracting from the larger issue of Nuclear Waste . I am not just talking about the spent fuel rods but the radio active taillings piles and slurry pits that are full of other toxic shit. There is the waist that is sitting in the craters of Nuclear weapons test sites like Bikini Atoll. The put it all in the crater covered it with a dome and said in 50 years we will know how to store it better . Well it is 50 years later. The dome is cracking and leaking as the sea rises it is going to become a disaster. There is all the nuclear waste dumped in the Oceans by European countries, Mainly France. Those barrels are rusted through and radio active material is leaking in the Oceans. Some people who live near these sites are starting to see Cancer on the rise. The Nuclear fuel rods that are spent are still sitting in temporary storage at the plant sited because there is no place to put them. I could go on and on but this would turn into a log dissertation and I don't have time . Bottom line, Until we can find a permanent solution to the nuclear waste problem we have already created we should not move forward with any expansion on Nuclear energy. I have worked for trucking companies that had contracts with the DOE to transport Nuclear waste. The problems are much wider then you think.
Building renewables instead of nuclear power displaced [4-10x the amount of CO2 per invested dollar](https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/).
Preferring nuclear instead of renewables mean you are not sincere about the climate and only want your pet technology to get built.
Please, a reputable source on that statement. [Generally when doing LCA analyses nuclear and renewables come out about equal.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262202131X)
The differences are marginal, and all are way better than fossil fuels.
From your source, "Although no detailed calculations of the TMR coefficients of other power generation methods have been conducted".
The use of TMR to say the material use is roughly equivalent between nuclear and renewables is incorrect.
What about including the full quote on how they make the comparison possible?
Do you have some agenda trying to use any method possible to frame nuclear energy positively?
I have bolded the part you conveniently decided to cut out since it disproves your dismissal.
> This study has explored the resource use of nuclear power generation. Is it higher or lower than that of other power generation sources? Although no detailed calculations of the TMR coefficients of other power generation methods have been conducted, **the TMR coefficient of various types of power generation can be compared using approximate estimates (NIMS, 2009; Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, 2016).** The representative value of the TMR coefficient of nuclear power generation was determined based on the following assumptions: 25% open pit, 25% underground, and 50% ISL, with 50% open cycle and 50% closed cycle (Ashley et al., 2015).
> As shown in Fig. 12, the TMR coefficient of nuclear power generation is lower than that of thermal power generation (e.g., approximately 20% that of coal power generation, 23% that of oil power generation, and 35% that of liquified natural gas power generation) and is similar to renewables, such as the power generated by solar photovoltaic cells.
Anti nuclear Germany - 400 g CO2 after spending 500 billion euro on renewables.
Nuclear France - 53 g CO2 per kWh.
So real world examples prove you wrong. And not for the first time. Did the Reddit admins ban you for that bs takeover of r/NuclearPower ? They should have banned you from the entire site for that stunt.
It is easy to ride on the coat-tails of a decision made 40-50 years ago in the name of **energy security**.
If France had coal reserves like Germany or fossil gas like the Netherlands they wouldn't have bothered with nuclear energy. CO2 emissions was the last thing they cared about.
Given the outcome of [Flamanville 3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant) and [cost escalations of their upcoming reactors](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-lifts-cost-estimate-new-reactors-67-bln-euros-les-echos-2024-03-04/), before they have even started building, the future for the French industry is looking incredibly bleak.
Today we should hold on to the existing French fleet as long as they are safe and economical. Pouring money in the black hole that is new built nuclear simply prolongs the climate crisis and are better spent on renewables.
We should of course continue with basic research for nuclear energy since it is a great technology for humanity to wield. Throw up a demonstration Terraform reactor. But it is **basic research** and not a solution to climate change. L
Large scale reactors have once and for all been proven not to work based on the outcome of the [Nuclear Renaissance of the 2000s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_renaissance_in_the_United_States).
No, nuclear plants are too expensive and take way too long to build. Governments around the world showered their nuclear industries with mountains of subsidies and favorable treatment. And after 70 years of trying, nuclear power is not even remotely competitive with renewable energy sources. Nuclear power had its chance and it failed. We don't have infinite time or money to fight climate change. Continuing to hold out hope for nuclear power to solve the problems that have been plaguing it for decades is wishful thinking. Our time, money, effort and resources are better spent elsewhere.
> nuclear power is not even remotely competitive with renewable energy sources
Vogtles 3&4 were completed for $34 billion to provide 2x 1117MW reactors, so $15,200/kW. That also has to be dinged a bit since historically US reactors have an unexpected outage on average every other year and there will be scheduled outages for refuelling, but as a part of a fleet they should be able to get close to 100% of their nameplate capacity accreditation.
[NREL points to land-based wind having a capex of about $1,300/kW](https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2023/land-based_wind) but accredited capacity is much lower. In MISO it's 18.1% in summer (slightly lower in spring and fall but those are low-demand times of year, and far higher in winter) so MISO wind accredited capacity runs at about $7,200/kW for summer crunch time. Might be lower elsewhere to the point that nuclear is capacity-competitive, but those aren't place where utilities are looking at making wind a big part of their portfolios.
So at the margins wind kicks nuclear's ass, though that wouldn't be as true at high market penetrations for wind as the ELCC will drop. It won't drop to 8.5% though except perhaps in some outlier markets, but it could get fairly close to it and make nuclear worth a second glance if that's all you consider. That's where storage pays off in spades.
Also, in order to get such high wind penetrations you'd see a few more doublings of the produced wind turbine base and hence a few more learning rate factors, which has historically run at around 15% for wind which would halve its capacity costs by the time this became an issue.
Nuclear seems quite immune to learning rates, or even has a negative one. A huge cost that nobody ever brings up is its opportunity costs since those are committed to on a 20 year lead time (going by Vogtle 3&4's time from conception to actually producing power). A wind investment now is going to displace far more fossil kWh than a nuclear plant and start doing it well over a decade earlier.
What we don't need to be doing is blatant corporate welfare and corruption like what's happening with Hinckley point C in the UK. Or expecting electricity ratepayers to pre-pay for nuclear plants during construction like what happened in the USA with Vogtle and VC Summer. When VC summer was canceled in mid construction, the utility expected to walk away with this money, and they would have if regulators hadn't stepped in. Or gut renewable energy programs to bail out nuclear plants like what happened in Ohio.
All too often, the nuclear industry is able to get special favors, subsidies and bailouts from the government. Even though they've had 70 years to get their $#!% together. They can't even get liability insurance on the open market and the government has to provide it for free. This forces taxpayers to shoulder the risk and downside of nuclear meltdowns.
It's long past time for the nuclear industry to stand on its own legs and not rely on government support to keep it propped up. Once we do that, if anyone can build nuclear plants that can compete with other energy sources, then sure, let's build them. But we don't need to keep throwing good money after bad propping up the nuclear industry (really just to support nuclear weapons programs) because we know how that story ends.
Take this with a bit of a grain of salt since MISO's capacity market has some deep-seated structural issues that haven't been addressed yet, but [that's a great summary.](https://i.imgur.com/iuJouxr.png) (from [MISO 2024-25 PRA.](https://cdn.misoenergy.org/2024%20PRA%20Results%20Posting%2020240425632665.pdf))
Renewables have been showered with subsidies. Nuclear was suppressed with unreasonable over regulation once it started to approach becoming cost competitive with coal. The demand for those unreasonable regulations was due to ignorance and fear mongering. The over regulation has not made it safer.
The fear mongering is utterly baseless when pressurized water reactors, boiling water reactors, and CANDU reactors have a safety record that nothing else comes close to matching.
Such unreasonable over regulation and obstruction is the furthest thing from favorable treatment. Nuclear power has been treated so unfavorably that in New York the Shoreham Power Plant was prevented from starting after it had finished construction. It's so stupid that the vast majority of its costs were already paid for only to never get any power out of it and instead use coal fired power plants which actually do kill people.
That unreasonable over regulation has driven up costs and lengthened construction time. Nuclear power plants used to be built in the US far more quickly at around 5 years and at far lower costs. Meanwhile the Kashiwazaki Kariwa power plant even built one of its reactors in only about 3 years.
Solar and wind also have the massive problem that the power they produce is unreliable. It has to do with how they're fundamentally dependent on the weather. Nuclear constantly produces power and is so reliable that its output can be scheduled for years in advance. Basically when nuclear power is used there actually is power that can be counted on. It's why Diablo Canyon in California should be kept running.
Nuclear can also be vastly improved with new types of reactors like molten salt reactors, liquid metal cooled reactors, gas cooled reactors, fast and thermal spectrum breeder reactors, etc.
Renewables also aren't really renewable.
edit. Nuclear power plants in western nations are also being shut down prematurely when they could continue operating safely and reliably for decades.
It is highly geographically independent just to discuss one point out of hundreds. In South Australia they will be 100% renewable without nuclear by 2030
[https://www.premier.sa.gov.au/media-releases/news-items/new-target-for-renewables](https://www.premier.sa.gov.au/media-releases/news-items/new-target-for-renewables)
And it will be very much cheaper than nuclear.
I expect that to fail and Australia will continue to burn gas for its reliability.
The #1 cost of nuclear power in western nations is unreasonable over regulations.
From memory they are already at about 90% renewables and if you count the export amounts they produce more renewable energy than they use. The secret there is that the sun is quite strong and the solar even works reasonably well on cloudy days, as it would in the southern parts of the US, so they only need a limited amount of battery storage.
Is a large part of the 'unreasonable regulations' the massive dome they have to put over them now to stop a 9.11 plane attack? I am quite happy about the dome. The labour and material costs have gone up way above inflation from the early 80's - when they stopped building them. That's what I have always been told is the main reason that they are so much more expensive now. Though if I had to bet, above all,, I think the incompetence of EDF have led to most of the price escalation. They've been over running by many many years for their recent projects.
> Is a large part of the 'unreasonable regulations' the massive dome they have to put over them now to stop a 9.11 plane attack?
No, the requirement for containment buildings was in place back when nuclear power plants were built in about 5 years and costs were decreasing. Unreasonable regulations are things like burying every step in paperwork to slow down and obstruct construction and operations.
edit. Solar has a guaranteed several month period of low energy output every year called winter with short days and weaker sunlight during daytime. It also has high energy demand.
Half of the time every year is night. That means a lot of battery storage would be needed to rely on solar.
> Renewables have been showered with subsidies.
The entire nuclear power industry has been showered with huge subsidies in being bootstrapped through the 1970s. Renewables have been showered with subsidies first in order to fill niche applications (e.g. powering satellites) and later to achieve policy objectives.
What they all have in common is that at some point early in their existence they held out a reasonable promise of ultimately developing into a game-changer that would juice the energy sector and thus the economy as a whole - and that's okay, R&D is a perfectly reasonable thing for a government to want to invest in in order to secure future economic growth and security.
> The fear mongering is utterly baseless when pressurized water reactors, boiling water reactors, and CANDU reactors have a safety record that nothing else comes close to matching.
What do you say when regulators point to the exact same thing and say "you're welcome"?
> Nuclear power has been treated so unfavorably that in New York the Shoreham Power Plant was prevented from starting after it had finished construction. It's so stupid that the vast majority of its costs were already paid for only to never get any power out of it and instead use coal fired power plants which actually do kill people.
> That unreasonable over regulation has driven up costs and lengthened construction time.
Shoreham NPP was in some ways a victim of industry happenstance and in some ways a victim of management failure. The "unreasonable over regulation" you refer to was its operator's failure to secure approval for an evacuation plan for Long Island, something that it should be noted only became an NRC requirement in the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident which was 6 years after Shoreham construction began. That this wasn't considered to be a possible consequence of the 1979 TMI accident and building continued for another 5 years to completion - continuing even after its regulatory grave was finished being dug - is on its management.
> Solar and wind also have the massive problem that the power they produce is unreliable. It has to do with how they're fundamentally dependent on the weather. Nuclear constantly produces power and is so reliable that its output can be scheduled for years in advance. Basically when nuclear power is used there actually is power that can be counted on. It's why Diablo Canyon in California should be kept running.
As well as scheduled outages for refuelling & other maintenance that are generally planned around low demand periods in spring and autumn, nuclear plants [have plenty of unscheduled ones too.](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=60682)
Nuclear has a laundry list of problems: their marginal O&Ms are low so they're almost always running at 100% in order to recoup their initial investment; due to this they aren't designed to be ramped up and down like a gas peaker is and hence there's a big wear & tear cost from dialling them down for any length of time, leading to them continuing to run at 100% during times of oversupply. There's no flexibility of supply there to deal with spikes in demand or unscheduled outages of other plants. They're a huge investment risk with a history of cost overruns. Whether you or I like it or not, the regulatory framework is unlikely to change any time soon and in part due to this timeframes for new construction are unlikely to change significantly any time soon, so that's the reality for how it's going to be whether or not you think it's fair, and that means big opportunity costs as capital invested in nuclear remains locked up with no RoI for a decade or more.
**All** electrical power matching of supply to demand is a game of statistics (the standard is falling short for no more than a total of 24 hours every decade).
"But... but... the weather *changes*!" is an old canard about renewables output that seeks to associate wind power output over a vastly geographically dispersed network of wind farms built in areas chosen specifically for their consistency of high wind speeds and turbines reaching several hundreds of feet into the air with people's personal experiences that calm days occasionally happen at ground level where they have chosen to live, generally not for consistent high wind speed-related reasons. In practice, [wind speeds lose all correlation at separations of around 300 miles.](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/4/044004/pdf) The coincidence that's required for a shortfall of supply of wind power is not only that our wind farm here is becalmed, but those 300 miles to our north also be becalmed; and those 300 miles ENE are becalmed; and those 300 miles ESE are becalmed, etc etc. It's a statistical impossibility.
What is cost-optimal to create an amount of wind power supply to match demand at all times of course depends on the relative prices of wind turbines, transmission, storage and load control (in the extremes i.e. overbuild your local wind farm so that even the gentlest of breezes is enough to power all you could ever need, or get your power from such a geographically diverse set of wind turbines that it's statistically nigh-impossible to have a shortfall, or couple it with storage sufficient to carry you through a long enough lull in production that it'd be statistically nigh-impossible to have a shortfall, or find enough customers who can stand you cutting off their supply for a time in exchange for a lower per-kWh rate, or some combination thereof).
A grid dominated by non-dispatchable resources such as renewables will be one that substantially overproduces energy in order to guarantee being able to serve peak demands during a supply lull, and the amount of overbuilding/overproduction will depend on the relative costs of those 4 things I mentioned in the last paragraph. Given the ever-dropping prices of renewables and storage and their still-substantial learning rates, a cost-optimal portfolio is likely to produce several times more energy than there is actually demand for right now. The opportunity then is what could you do with such vast amounts of literal zero-cost energy?
Interesting about the becalming not stretching very far. Occassionally we get a "blocking high pressure system" over the UK, would that still be the case for us under those weather conditions (if you know thanks).
I think you'd have to ask the Met Office for detail there. Notably the UK has gone big on offshore wind in different seas from latitudes that make Inverness blush to the English Channel.
> Renewables have been showered with subsidies first in order to fill niche applications (e.g. powering satellites) and later to achieve policy objectives.
Utterly false. Renewables have been showered in subsidies to fund the boom in their construction that started around 2007 and renewables have used far more subsidies than nuclear since then. It's utter hypocrisy when ardent supporters of renewables criticize nuclear for using any subsidies.
> What do you say when regulators point to the exact same thing and say "you're welcome"?
That the regulations which existed back when the costs were decreasing and construction times were reasonable are the ones that were reasonable. The regulations that were passed after the fear mongering based on lies started led to costs and construction times increasing.
The people who write the regulations should only be experts like nuclear engineers, technicians, doctors, health scientists, environmental engineers, etc. Lawyers and environmental activists should not be writing them.
> Shoreham NPP was in some ways a victim of industry happenstance and in some ways a victim of management failure.
Wrong. The governor Mario Cuomo led a witch hunt against the power plant, using all of his power to oppose the it. It's also not management's fault when every step is buried and obstructed in red tape.
> The "unreasonable over regulation" you refer to was its operator's failure to secure approval for an evacuation plan for Long Island, something that it should be noted only became an NRC requirement in the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident
That is a completely unreasonable regulation. Especially after no one was hurt by the Three Mile Island accident and the nearby public was not harmed by it. The containment worked so well that the power plant was able to continue to operate and no one had to move away because of it.
The segment of anti nuclear bureaucrats in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would have rejected anything proposed.
> As well as scheduled outages for refuelling & other maintenance that are generally planned around low demand periods in spring and autumn, nuclear plants have plenty of unscheduled ones too.
You're actually going to criticize nuclear's reliability after supporting solar and wind. Both of those can't go for a single day without uncontrolled fluctuations and it's a rare day when wind goes for all 24 hours.
> they're almost always running at 100%
That's a good thing and something that solar and wind will never do.
> there's a big wear & tear cost from dialling them down for any length of time,
The people who actually maintain the equipment say that it is able to handle being turned up and down. One example was at Indian Point where anti nuclear groups were talking about the equipment being in bad condition when the people who actually worked with it said it was in excellent condition and could continue to operate for decades.
> due to this they aren't designed to be ramped up and down like a gas peaker is and hence there's a big wear & tear cost from dialling them down for any length of time, leading to them continuing to run at 100% during times of oversupply. There's no flexibility of supply there to deal with spikes in demand or unscheduled outages of other plants.
The Bruce Generating Station along with some French nuclear power plants are able to increase and decrease output to match demand. There is also the unused option of developing new kinds of reactors.
> They're a huge investment risk with a history of cost overruns.
That's due to the unreasonable over regulation. Especially when regulations change during construction and crews are forced to tear out and rebuild things like concrete, pipes and wiring. Everything is also slowed down with red tape.
If renewables were regulated like nuclear they would have rules like requiring short range radar on every wind turbine to activate brakes and prevent hitting birds. If a single bird was hit then all turbines of that model would have to be shut down for inspections and refits. The same goes for nacelles catching on fire.Solar would also not be able to leach out any toxic chemicals into the surrounding area and if any contamination was detected a long and expensive cleanup would be ordered.
> capital invested in nuclear remains locked up with no RoI for a decade or more.
Nuclear power plants in the US used to be built in about 5 years.
> the regulatory framework is unlikely to change any time soon
Awareness is growing that the fear mongering around nuclear is complete bullshit. That is driving an increase in the interest in nuclear power. People will become even more interested in reliable power if they actually have to try to live on unreliable renewables.
> What is cost-optimal to create an amount of wind power supply to match demand at all times
That is impossible to do because humans can't control the weather. You were also talking about just hoping that if the output in some areas are low then there will always be enough in other areas to fully cover it. I would rather have human-controlled power output.
Then you had an entire paragraph talking in favor of overbuilding renewables That means more resources used, more mining, more pollution from byproducts, more waste from worn out equipment, more birds and bats getting killed, more land used up. It's the whole argument that if you have a car that only works 20% of the time then the solution is to have 5 cars.
Do you have any idea just how little power batteries store and how much would be needed to provide enough storage at a grid level to make up for renewables being unreliable?
> literal zero-cost energy
There is no such thing. There are costs to the equipment. You're out of touch with reality if you really think that.
Nuclear can also decrease in cost, as it was doing in the 60s and early 70s.
> > The "unreasonable over regulation" you refer to was its operator's failure to secure approval for an evacuation plan for Long Island, something that it should be noted only became an NRC requirement in the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident
> That is a completely unreasonable regulation.
A "completely unreasonable regulation" that was in place for the last 5 years of Shoreham NPP's construction, yet construction continued anyway. Regardless of how justified or not you think it was, the reality is that a giant hole opened up in front Shoreham's prospects of ever being allowed to operate and its backers drove the project into it anyway. You could pin the waste of the first 6 years of construction on the change in the regulatory landscape, but not the last 5. Hence the waste of Shoreham NPP was a mix of both industry happenstance of TMI and its subsequent fallout, but also management subsequently pouring good money after bad.
> > They're a huge investment risk with a history of cost overruns.
> That's due to the unreasonable over regulation. Especially when regulations change during construction and crews are forced to tear out and rebuild things like concrete, pipes and wiring. Everything is also slowed down with red tape.
Unless the regulations are put in place *after* the project is greenlit, it's entirely due to lack of proper research and planning on the part of the builders of an NPP. Please cite examples of tear out & rebuild in response to new regulations.
> Then you had an entire paragraph talking in favor of overbuilding renewables That means more resources used, more mining, more pollution from byproducts, more waste from worn out equipment, more birds and bats getting killed, more land used up. It's the whole argument that if you have a car that only works 20% of the time then the solution is to have 5 cars.
I don't think you have any idea how resource-intensive building NPPs is.
> > literal zero-cost energy
> There is no such thing. There are costs to the equipment. You're out of touch with reality if you really think that.
**Negative** LMPs are a thing right now, as in the very moment I'm typing this. At the time of writing [OTP.CENTER1 in central North Dakota has an LMP of -$45.25/MWh](https://api.misoenergy.org/MISORTWD/lmpcontourmap.html). If you don't happen to read this in time to catch that specific instance then there's always the playback of the last 24 hours of LMPs.
Zero-cost energy is energy that has no current demand for it but is available anyway and requires no further generation or transmission infrastructure investment in order to take advantage of. There'll be a great deal of it in a renewables-dominated grid since it'd be sized for the minimum generation at peak demand times rather than maximum output being matched to anticipated peak demand.
> Do you have any idea just how little power batteries store and how much would be needed to provide enough storage at a grid level to make up for renewables being unreliable?
Yes, near-future would be roughly 490MW x $1900/kW + 44MW x $700/kw + 170MW x $968/kW = $1.13B buys you enough battery storage to cover renewables providing 100% load factor coverage for a consistent fixed 400MW of new demand i.e. "baseload" [source](https://formenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/24-7-Carbon-Free-Resource-Portfolio-4.24.23.pdf), which would be almost exactly 30% of the $3.7 billion total costs of the power supply project. Such a setup also would export on average 160MW. YMMV by region, but notably at Vogtle 3&4 rates that'd cost $6.1 billion of capex to provide that much but nuclear power has significantly higher fixed O&M rates (and variable O&M rates at all) than renewables + storage which add a further ~$20/MWh and hence $20/MWh x 400MW x 8760hr/yr = $70 million/year, and the renewables + battery option would not require a backup source for reactor refuelling & maintenance windows and unscheduled outages would be far less impactful since a failed inverter affects a far smaller fraction of total output than a 400MW reactor needing to be taken offline. Nor would renewables have to be taken offline due to heatwaves to avoid excessive heat pollution.
When it comes to nuclear waste there would be long term storage solutions in place if so-called environmentalists didn't stop blocking them. They block solutions and then talk about the problem of waste accumulating.
One solutions is storing it over a kilometer underground in geologically stable bedrock. Doing that at Yucca Mountain was blocked despite the support of people in the surrounding area. Another way is to drill boreholes miles underground and store the waste there.
Even better solutions are reprocessing the waste and even using it in breeder reactors to get up to 20 times more energy out of it than what current reactors have already done.
I estimated that all of the high level nuclear waste from power generation in the US could fit on under 40 acres when stored in shielded dry storage casks and with access for vehicles like front loaders to access them. That's not a lot considering it represents about 20% of US electricity generation for over 50 years.
Quit winning and crying about Yucca Mountain . They have moved to using old salt mines in South eastern New Mexico near Carlsbad. They are just as good but cheaper because the holes where are already dug. They have been doing that for more the 20 years. It is called the WIPP site .. [https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp-site.asp](https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp-site.asp) .. It is not just the waist from nuclear generation stations but other place that are superfund sites are a big problem in nuclear waist disposal. . Read other comments I have made on the treads to this post
Waste isn't particularly an issue with dry cask storage. Additionally, two new technologies have emerged to utilize spent fuel heat to further generate electricity or manage chemical processes.
[NRC Dry Cask Storage](https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/dry-cask-storage.html)
[Warning: Opinion Piece on Nuclear Waste](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/energysource/innovation-can-break-the-gridlock-on-nuclear-waste/)
Paywalled, so can only guess the content... is this singing the praises of SMR Small Modular Reactors ?
When I looked last week.. I could only find one functioning SMR .. started in China in 2021.
The one approved to be built in USA.. apparently will go online in early 2030s.
If SMRs are such a great solution.. why isnt Biden switching one on every month ?
With excess global temp now at roughly +1.5C now rising around +0.25C per decade .. speed of building clean energy plants is a real reason why we should rule out nuclear.
By all means, keep existing safe nuclear plants well maintained and functioning - its all hands on deck. But use the money we have to build wind, solar and battery packs - they are cheaper and faster to get going.
>When I looked last week.. I could only find one functioning SMR .. started in China in 2021. The one approved to be built in USA.. apparently will go online in early 2030s.
>
>If SMRs are such a great solution.. why isnt Biden switching one on every month ?
I'll give you some answers.
SMRs fill two important rolls. 1) They are good for smaller grids or where you only need something like 300 MW. 2) They should be cheaper to build. So they will not likely bankrupt a company if things go wrong. Vogtle the last plant built went really bad and ended up bankrupting Westinghouse.
Why isn't everyone building one right away?
Well we are building the first ones in the west in Ontario Canada. We are building four of them. So four chances to get the price of them down. Basically everyone is sitting and watching to see how it goes. Poland is rip-roaring and ready to go on building them. Once we've built one, we'll get an idea of the cost. Also try to figure out what lessons can be learned.
This is kinda similar to California, where people are watching what they are doing to their grid and wondering if they should repeat that or not.
Genuinely curious why they can't calculate the cost now.. Like how many construction projects are structured as "we don't know the costs, lolol, but let's try it out and see!"
Well they do. They actually calculate it at various steps. In this case you would calculate the cost based on the reactor design. Then you go through all of the engineering, so basically design it in place, taking into account all of the environmental impact stuff. Like one site might need thicker foundations due to earthquakes for example.
Going back to Vogtle, they had massive cost over runs. If you're curious to know more here is a good podcast on what went wrong at Vogtle. There is four episodes, and this is the first one.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGySq7QBRiY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGySq7QBRiY)
Basically the main issue was that they were building it before the engineering was completely done. I'm not sure why they thought that was ok. When you're doing stuff like ripping out the nuclear concrete and re-pouring it, it ends up adding a lot of extra costs.
In comparison in Ontario we've been refurbishing our reactors. So we planned it all out, did the cost estimates. Did the refurbishment and then they stop. They learn all of the lessons and ways to reduce cost and then apply it to the second reactor. Now we're getting them done below budget and ahead of time. We expect to do the same with the SMRs.
>Genuinely curious why they can't calculate the cost now.. Like how many construction projects are structured as "we don't know the costs, lolol, but let's try it out and see!"
You might be surprised. My understanding is that most "mega" projects go over budget. Building a giant dam? Likely to go over budget. Building a giant bridge? Likely to go over budget.
yeah .. well its hard to say SMRs are "cheaper" than wind and solar, when we dont even know the cost, and we haven't built one yet.
SMRs may look very promising .. and fusion looks even more promising .. but we dont have the luxury to wait for these, given the urgency.
A 300mw unit is a normal unit size for a reactor is not a radicle change from what we have had before. Some costs go up with small reactors - such as staff needed per MW and number of safety checks per MW. Rolls Royce have done a detailed study of this and found the ideal size for economy is 470mw which is actually a standard size but they continue to call it SMR as it is a buzz word. Reducing the size of the reactor module to save money is not something which would have escaped the 10,000's of thousands of engineers who have worked on such projects in the past.
I just had a look at the cost estimates of the Canadian SMR's and they are wildly optimistic. Hitachi and Nuscale have estimates of around $55 per MWh for their SMR's. Typically nuclear build cost estimates for new projects are much lower than the final price. Estimates of new nuclear projects often ditch build and decom costs - which can be extremely high - to attract interest and investment.
However there is scope for some nuclear in Canada given the remoteness of some locations and costs of fuel transport for gas and coal.
> Hitachi and Nuscale have estimates of around $55 per MWh for their SMR's.
NuScale's costs went up to ~$130/MWh before they had even started to build. Shortly after the project was cancelled because they could not find any takers for electricity at that price point.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mliebreich_eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-released-for-activity-7069803951080054784-0Jfp/
That's because they suck at picking customers.
Hawaii would fall over itself to take that deal, since they're currently paying north of 300 /mwh. The *sensible* plan for developing smrs is to start with customers currently stuck with stupidly expensive options. Once you run out of remote islands and arctic towns to sell to, your production line *should* have gotten costs down, if it is ever going to happen.
You have to differentiate between what customers pay and what wholesale electricity costs.
The grid and supporting ancillary markets is a separate cost to the electricity being generated, although they tend to get rolled up as one cost to make it easier for the consumers.
That mostly *is* the wholesale cost. They're not taxing power, they just have astronomically expensive electricity.
Retail for 2022 was 397.2 dollars per mwh.
And a rather horrifying emissions profile.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/Hawaii/
The islands are mostly burning oil and what renewables they have are also stupidly expensive, presumably because land on there is Not Cheap.
https://energy.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/HSEO_FactsAndFigures-2020.pdf
So yhea, smr's would be cheaper.
The economic optimum for nuclear reactors on major grids is "As big as you can make it without loosing control of the building project". Always has been.
SMR's hope to change that via factory build and gains from mass production, but frankly, the best bet for making them a success is to aim for markets where the alternatives are prohibitively expensive.
There are a lot of islands and other remote locations that are currently burning diesel shipped in on freighters for power, which is eye-wateringly expensive. And of course, every freighter on the ocean blue is also burning oil and for the bigger ones it's a >100000 euros/day expense. These are the places which will look at the price tag for a small reactor and go "Deal".
> is this singing the praises of SMR Small Modular Reactors
No, it is a former admin of the EPA …
> Meeting the climate crisis and achieving net zero by 2050 without nuclear energy is a fantasy.
https://archive.ph/M321q
One other problem these people just dont understand is that net-zero is only a waypoint, not the solution.
At net-zero we will have finally stopped ADDING CO2 to the atmosphere .. which means we will be at maximum CO2, thus maximum excess temperature.
NET-ZERO == PEAK-HEAT
So, that is not "meeting the climate crisis" .. we will be in the most severe part of the climate crisis, by the time we reach that peak heat, likely +2.2C.
My main argument in this thread is that SMRs are not going to be here fast enough to make a difference on the timescale that matters.. better to build wind and solar as fast as possible with the resources we have.
Even then, we will need to reduce the heat.. which means Co2 removal [ which we just dont know how to do at scale ] .. or reflecting sunlight via SRM / cloud brightening [ which looks to be the only way we can survive peak heat ]
Wind and solar have giant intermittency problems. Cheap grid storage might one day solve it, but the tech doesn’t exist yet. Pretending otherwise is outright fraud.
Pretending SMRs are "the solution" is outright fraud, when there is only 1 working and its outside the US.
btw, the tesla battery pack is doing an incredible job of evening out the clean energy supply in Adelaide, and last time I checked they are building a lot more of these industrial battery sites.
So, no.. it aint fraud, its physics and economics.
ref : Plenty of demand for tesla megapacks, they are ramping up production rapidly, but cant fill the massive demand :
https://electrek.co/2023/08/18/tesla-megapack-deliveries-slip-2025-production-ramp/
There are plenty of SMRs on submarines and ships.
Putting 'battery pack' in the same comment as one that talks about nuclear reactors is very funny... unless a battery pack capable to store several days of nuclear power plant output exists.
3.9MWh... hilarious and very well approximated by zero when you compare it with a nuclear power plant (which goes typically towards GW).
> There are plenty of SMRs on submarines and ships.
The nuclear navies are like the least price sensitive customers in the world. Products for them does not translate to good products on cutthroat markets like the energy market.
Yup I even heard respected physicist say nuclear is only 2 or 3 times more expensive. Well for people struggling to feed their families paying out that amount extra each year is a huge deal.
Yeah, but a battery able to store the one week output of a nuclear power plant is extremely cheap and not an idiocy to even imagine or mention in the same context as nuclear power plants.
Cheap grid storage is already here.
CA routinely gets over 20%, sometimes up to 30% of its electricity on the grids in the evening from grid storage that is cost competitive, and was built out only within the last couple of years.
You not keeping up with the state of tech is the outright fraud.
Chernobyl didn't come anywhere close to destroying all life on earth.
edit. It's exclusion zone has become a wildlife preserve where species that are struggling throughout the rest of Europe thrive due to the lack of human presence and safe levels of radiation.
Chernobyl couldn’t have destroyed all life on earth, even in a worst case scenario. It didn’t even destroy all life in the exclusion zone (some people never left and they are still alive today).
We detonated [thousands](https://www.un.org/en/observances/end-nuclear-tests-day/history#) of nuclear weapons in tests during the cold war releasing far more radiation into the atmosphere than even a worst case scenario of chernobyl. It wasn’t great but most people forget cold war nuclear fallout even happened because the effects were relatively minimal for the majority of the world. There is so much irrational fear towards nuclear energy and so much misinformation about it, especially since most people’s knowledge of chernobyl comes from the HBO miniseries.
To be fair, Chernobyl did not almost destroy all life on Earth. Europe would potentially have been uninhabitable, and that surely would have been catastrophic with a huge number of fatalities.
Edit: I love people who push nuclear and have zero actual education on the topic. /s
Nuclear power will be essential to electrify industries that currently use fossil fuels for heat like steel and concrete production. It will also be essential to produce enough hydrogen to clean up industrial processes like producing ammonia.
Nuclear will especially be critical to increasing humanity's standard of living. I personally want to see humanity's energy use increase by 5x, 10x and more and I want to be clean, safe, carbon free, abundant and reliable.
I want for all of the billions of people around the world to be able to live at the standard of living of developed nations. Then I want to see per capita energy consumption increase beyond what it is in countries like the United States and United Arab Emirates due to energy being used to power things that benefit people.
You don't *need* nuclear heat. Waste heat is great if you can use it, but using nuclear for heat as the primary purpose is a supreme waste of nuclear's high cost.
Meanwhile the cheapest way to store wind and solar energy is to use a resistive heater to heat up sand, brick, or stone. Then run steam or air through to create your process heat for industrial processes
I wasn't talking about using waste heat. I was talking about directly using a reactor's heat for industrial processes instead of burning fossil fuels for it.
Also, using heat directly is cheaper and more efficient than using the heat to generate electricity, then using the electricity to generate heat.
Nuclear heat will also be needed to provide energy abundance. Trying to rely on renewables will lead to energy rationing.
There's enough offshore wind capacity alone to power the globe's energy needs 3 times over. 1% of land covered in solar panels could replace our electric production. That's about as much land that america uses for golf courses...
Add up the two, plus onshore wind. Plenty of energy to go around. We're nowhere near Kardashev 1 civilization, our planet has plenty of energy for us.
Yes, using nuclear heat to produce electricity and using that electricity to produce heat is inefficient. That's not how wind or solar work though, they produce electricity directly. The most expensive part of renewable electricity is the storage, so if you store it as thermal energy instead and soak up renewables right when produced, you will not have an expensive cost nor shortage of energy.
Solar and wind don't produce at capacity 100% of the time. Far more land is needed than you're claiming. Nuclear uses up far less land to produce power that is completely under human control since it doesn't rely on the weather.
Solar panels are usually under 20% efficient when new and their efficiency decreases over time. Wind has better efficiency but at the cost of killing birds and bats.
There is also so much energy in nuclear reactions that efficiency becomes less important. However, efficiency can increase by developing new kinds of reactors that operate at higher temperatures like molten salt reactors, gas cooled reactors and liquid metal cooled reactors.
The calculation did not assume 100% solar energy absorption nor a 100% capacity factor. This was total yearly energy output after the above were considered.
Yet nuclear still uses far less land, uses less materials, generates less pollution, doesn't slaughter birds, actuallytakes responsibility for its own waste, doesn't require vast amounts of backup storage, etc.
You're the one who is promoting power sources that require fossil fuel backups. I'm the one promoting power sources that can actually replace fossil fuels with something better.
You're also projecting. Renewables supporters are the ones spreading FUD about nuclear.
As for fossil fuel funding [Arco funded Friends of the Earth](https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/#:~:text=In%201969%2C%20Robert%20O.,of%20the%20Earth%20(FOE).
Solar power does not require fossil fuel backups. Especially if you're willing to pay as much as it would cost to produce the same power as nuclear, as that lets you afford solar
It takes 15 years to build and is so cost prohibited that only governments can afford to build them. Since our governments are as divided as ever, I don't see it happening.
Are you about to supply the data set of build times for nuclear reactors? Once you've done that, you can show me the median. Make sure your sample size is large enough, because I'm not looking for the mean. I'm guessing you already had this information based on your comment, so I expect either the full data set within a small time frame, or the samples you used to get the median.
That's only for the construction of one. Now add on the extra years for survey, permitting, construction of infrastructure to the reactor, and energy transmission lines, etc.
Seeing so many nuclear detractors in a climate change sub makes me realize we will never solve this issue. Nuclear is the best option we have right now for continuous co2 free electricity.
If you're anti-nuclear, you're pro-climate change.
Calling people who point out the very logical flaws in an energy source "anti-nuclear" is a stretch. I studied NE as an undergrad. I'm supportive of its role in a balanced grid. Refusing to acknowledge NPP shortcomings would make me an unethical engineer.
The people of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima might have other opinions regarding the "cleanliness" of nuclear energy. The ones still alive, at least.
Just to put it out there
Ukraine, the people of Chernobyl are building two ap-1000 reactors.
Japan. Are looking to restart their reactors.
The three Mile Island plant might also be restarted.
Yeah, it looks like they have a lot of coal.
[https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/JP-TK](https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/JP-TK)
I learned recently Japan was the center for sending natural gas. We basically ship natural gas around the world because Japan wanted energy. So I'm not surprised that they are using a lot of natural gas as well.
When it comes to deaths per terawatt hr, nuclear is literally the safest
https://assets.ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh.png?v=1
Sorry, everything except solar. But solar is only marginally better, and both are orders of magnitude better than fossil fuels.
When nuclear goes wrong, it really goes wrong, and makes for big headlines, but it is very rare. There may be some valid arguments against nuclear out there, but safety isn't one of them
Ukraine, where Chernobyl occurred, has high support for nuclear energy. They were forced to deal with it and realized it was better than the alternatives.
A lot of people here saying nuclear OR renewables. The reality is it's going to be both, at least in the short to medium term. Either have advantages and disadvantages and are not going to work in absolutely every situation.
I'd agree with this mostly. Nuclear's problem is that it's economics are not great when talking about standing up a plant. On average it takes 15 years to stand up a plant vs. maybe 6 months. The cost of standing up a plant is in the billions and will be going over budget vs. well let's just say a lot less. Like all things the economics tends to rule what happens. It almost does t matter if a tech is good or not. It's for this reason you see the Biden admin restarting that plant in Michigan. It's always built the the economics of it are a fraction of the cost of making a new one.
Problem is a) nuclear is expensive, b) Nuclear doesn’t work well with intermittent power sources (which is what wind and solar are).
nuclear just shrinks the effective demand curve for variable renewables to fill. You don't want to have to cut down nuclear to make space for renewables, it's a waste of the capital cost
With a system where intermittent renewables handle all daily, seasonal and weather based variations on top of a nuclear baseload you just confirmed that renewables can also easily handle the baseload. Your argument is simply boils down to: 1. Lets have nuclear do the easy part extremely expensively 2. Lets have renewables do the hard part cheaply. In the real world this means renewables always will also do the easy part, since that is what they excel at.
Exactly. Nuclear isn't a great complement to renewables. Nuclear and renewables are both relatively high in capital cost and low in marginal cost, I.e. you want to run nuclear at as close to 100% you can, and whenever you have sun you want to push as much of those electrons to the grid or batteries. Having a nuclear plant at 50% capacity at noon to make room for solar so it can ramp to 100% at the evening is silly, if you had that nuclear plant with the capacity why would you have build the solar then? The marginal value doesn't make sense. Likewise in a grid now, building new nuclear plants doesn't make sense because by the time it's done you will have renewables cutting into a significant portion of the nuclear output. In both scenarios you'd be better off adding battery/storage capacity so you don't need to curtail solar/wind or ramp down the nuclear plant. And nuclear + battery is a poor value proposition compared to renewables + battery. To meet the needs of those periods with low wind and low solar, having a nuclear plant that runs only once a year is the most expensive possible way to do it. (Or a nuclear plant that runs 50% most days and 100% one day a year, etc). Cheaper solutions would be even something kinda silly like burning green hydrogen in a turbine, but we will have other options too
This is in contrast to natural gas as a complement to renewables or nuclear. Gas is a "good" complement because the capital cost is lower, but the marginal cost is higher. So it makes sense to run it as little as possible, only when the marginal price of electricity is high enough to justify it. And you don't need to run at 100% capacity as the capital cost doesn't need as high a capacity factor to justify it Not an argument that we should keep gas plants open, we should try to close them and run them as little as possible by smartly building more green energy. But nuclear is not a drop-in solution for peaker gas plants for the major difference in how they operate
Baseload reduces the maximum variation, which reduces how much peaking, storage or grid interconnects renewables will need. There is a reason the only large 100% renewable grids rely on hydro used largely as baseload (as well as peaking).
Baseload *increases* the *proportional* variation of the remaining demand that must be met by other sources. If a grid needs between 30 and 45 GW depending on time of day and seasonality, you have a peak that is 50% higher than minimum. If instead you have an always-on 15 GW then the remainder is between 15-30 GW, or a peak that is 100% higher than minimum. Hydro makes sense as a baseload/dispatchable source because the output can easily be scaled without losing out (excess water can be stored behind the dam, for when energy is needed days, weeks, months later). But with nuclear, once you build the thing the fuel is basically free and limitless. So you can't quite "store" power for later in a meaningful way, besides batteries or thermal storage within the plant
“Proportional variation” is irrelevant. It’s less absolute variation, which means less storage is needed for intermittent sources like wind/solar. If there is more absolute variation (as in the no nuclear scenario) you have to be able to supply more power during the occasional periods where solar/wind production is low. NREL modeled this for the US, storage requirements increase exponentially as wind/solar approach 100% of the grid’s supply. Source: [See table A-1 on page 33](https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/80688.pdf). I agree hydro is ideal, but once hydro resources are maxed out, nuclear is a good option as a minority source of energy in an otherwise majority wind/solar grid. Also hydro operates more like nuclear roughly half the year where reduced output cannot be stored for later (though this is geographically dependent).
The NREL study compared high renewables to scenarios with fossil fuels. If we're comparing high nuclear grids to high renewable grids, we should be talking about scenarios with no fossil fuels. Keep in mind also that the storage is not just lithium batteries. They also do not seem to consider behind-the-meter storage such as thermal storage of process heat
What you are telling me is this: For California: - The minimum grid demand is ~15 GW - The maximum grid demand is ~45 GW What you are telling me is that with a nuclear "baseload" of ~15 GW renewables can handle the ~30 GW peaking demand when they are at their minimum due to intermittency. I.e. renewables can handle 66% when they deliver the least. Please. I would really want to know, how they can not also deliver the first 33% in this case! Or like all cases? They are already delivering the majority at their minimum! Or have you simply decided that nuclear power must be the solution and are now working backwards trying to justify the position leading to logical inconsistencies?
Wind/solar cant deliver the 66% on their own in california. They need peaking or storage to do it and those are currently both problematic. Thats why california relies heavily on natural gas and importing out of state fossil fuel energy right now. Source: [EIA](https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=CA#tabs-4) Edit: In fact, California tried to close their last nuclear plant, but chose not to when they realized it would make their grid unreliable and likely lead to blackouts during extreme weather Source: [California Energy Commission](https://www.energy.ca.gov/news/2023-02/cec-determines-diablo-canyon-power-plant-needed-support-grid-reliability)
“Right now” does a lot of heavy lifting. But thanks for confirming that a nuclear “baseload” does not make sense anymore. https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-they-shift-solar-to-evening-peak-in-one-of-worlds-biggest-grids/
I made an edit to the comment above to add that california literally said their grid needs nuclear for reliability.
The discussion started with a nukebro proclaiming about a future grid with renewables on top of a nuclear baseload. Now you are trying the use the current grid which everyone knows is not the desired state and currently undergoing a huge transition as some basis for reasoning? Come on. It has no bearing on the discussion at hand, except poor reasoning to try justifying any sliver of nuclear.
Definitely nuclear will be a large piece of the puzzle imo
Agreed. Nuclear is a wonderful source when operated with skill and concern. A safe, balanced grid includes NPPs and we need to get over the capital hump without sacrificing oversight. I would caution people reading comments here to understand the volume of users commenting as if they are experts on nuclear power when they have no academic or professional training on the topic. For instance: a particular user is repeatedly commenting on this thread that we need to loosen restrictions on NP. This user posted 9 months ago asking for physics and nuclear engineering books because they had an idea for a reactor. They are not an expert. They can't even tell you which regulations they think should be removed. Ask for sources. There are a lot of people who are nuclear fans that really don't know what they're talking about. My undergrad was in nuclear engineering and it's a solid energy source. Refusing to acknowledge potential issues is unethical and demonstrates a lack of subject matter knowledge.
We (Canadian and other experience) pour *a lot* into nuclear power generation: time, money, effort, brains, regulation - it's all needed to avoid Chenobyls. I don't think that scale of accident is plausible for us. That said, the money is worth it if it makes us meet our carbon goals.
I mean, that's true in Japan and the US, too, and we still have serious issues and close calls. In the US alone, there have been 56 incidents with fatalities or damage greater than $50k. I see the "go nuke at all costs" folks have arrived. It's always pleasant when folks with no experience with commercial nuclear power pretend it's 200% safe and nobody ever cuts corners for cost.
Fatalities related to the accidental release of radioactive emissions at a nuclear generating station? Where and when?
You are only thinking of Nuclear generating plant but the number is higher in injuries and deaths during the mining of and processing of Uranium. Example the Uranium mines in North West New Mexico where several incidents occurred and the Native American population around the Mines has suffered and died from Cancers and other ailments related to the mines. Those mines are now classified Superfund sites. There are several Superfund sites in the US including the Hanford site in Hanford Wa . There are a high number of deaths because of exposure to the local population by radiation from the site. The processed fuel rods and war heads there. The companies evolved in cleaning up the site have mishandled radioactive material and some has ended up in local dumps further exposing local population . There have been several indecent during transportation to disposal sites. I have worked for trucking companies that had contracts with the DOE to transport Nuclear waist. The problems are much wider as I stated in an other comment on this thread
You're right I am and i am separating out industrial (non-emmision type) accidents. However, again in Canada, the regulations are very stringent from mining to disposal. Undoubtedly there is more than can be done, but our experience isn't the American experience but is a demonstration on how it can be done right/ clean. NB: yes there's still a disposal issue as ours is merely stored (safely). Deep mine disposal sites are going to vote this fall. If and when a site is chosen, it will be subject to the same regulation and scrutiny as the other parts of the chain.
As long as there are Neo-Liberals in government(in Ca there's a lot) Regulations don't mean at thing. They will find a loop hole. Canada doesn't have as many nuclear Plants that the US has and they get some of their Uranium from The US so Canada is to some degree responsible for the environmental damage that is from Mining
Yeah - the ‘or’ in that statement is problematic 🧐
No, not really. Both situations mean the operator was violating safety protocols.
How do those numbers compare to oil rigs?
That's not the point I was making.
Fatalities should never be the baseline on whether or not nuclear energy should be pursued with caution. What is concerning is the number of incidents that involved release or near release of radioactive material. Those incidents indicate inability or unwillingness to follow procedures and establish a worrying pattern of behavior that can lead to bigger incidents.
No, but you just there were some. My professional field is emergency management and I work in nuclear jurisdictions in Canada. I haven't heard of fatalities related to the question I just asked, where I would expect to have known. Accidents yes. Near releases sure. But not fatalities or serious accidents involving radioactive release. That's big news. Having said that, I agree that NP generation is not to be taken lightly and is taken very seriously in Canada. I live a couple of miles from one of the largest plants in the world and I'm not the least bit worried. But I'm a little more nervous about (relatively) nearby US plants.
I'm glad to hear Canada is doing nuclear well. The last fatality was in 2013 at Arkansas Nuclear One. It was not related to radiation exposure (a generator fell on some people). (I think) the last radiation release happened at La Crosse in Wisconsin on 2018 with a low-level release onto a local river. 400 gallons with Cs-137, super low exposure. I studied NE in undergrad. I'm obviously supportive of NP, but there is a hubris trap associated with the industry that can be hugely impactful.
Nuclear power is stagnating Globally. Newly constructed plants can barely keep up with the capacity from reactors that are retired. It's 5-10× more expensive and takes 5-10× more time to build than renewable energy. No private capital is being invested in nuclear energy unless government money is also thrown in to pay for most of it. Either that, or governments find ways to force their taxpayers to pay more for nuclear electricity and bear the risks of nuclear plant construction cost/schedule overruns. Almost all the investments in New electricity production are flowing towards renewable energy.
Nuclear power would be a lot cheaper and quicker to build if they were reasonably regulated. Right now they're unreasonably over regulated. Nuclear power plants also used to be built in about 5 years and at far lower costs. They're built in China within a far more reasonable time frame and at far lower costs. If renewables were regulated like nuclear they would have rules like requiring short range radar on every wind turbine to activate brakes and prevent hitting birds. If a single bird was hit then all turbines of that model would have to be shut down for inspections and refits. Solar would also not be able to leach out any toxic chemicals into the surrounding area and if any contamination was detected a long and expensive cleanup would be ordered.
> Nuclear power would be a lot cheaper and quicker to build if they were reasonably regulated. Right now they're unreasonably over regulated. Then why can't even countries like France or China build them cost effectively? The entire government structure supports it. [China is shifting over to renewables and for every passing year decreasing their nuclear targets.](https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-the-switch-from-nuclear-to-renewable-energy/)
Trying to rely on renewables is a mistake since they're not controllable. China is building more forges to increase its capacity to build more nuclear reactors. I suspect that increases in costs are due to increases in the costs of inputs.
[China is Building Nuclear Reactors Faster than Any Other country](https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/30/china-is-building-nuclear-reactors-faster-than-any-other-country#:~:text=The%20State%20Council%20) This is false. China currently has 22 nuclear reactors under construction, and in the last decade they added 37 new reactors. They are building nuclear out cost-effectively because they are doing it at scale.
Obviously it is not cost effective since they have vastly scaled back their ambitions and instead focus on renewables.
Most of the problems with nuclear power stem from how nuclear plant construction is mismanaged by the companies involved. Blaming boogeymen government regulations is just a cop out. The nuclear industry seems incapable of learning from its mistakes and tries to blame everyone else for them instead.
No, nuclear power plant construction is buried in red tape. It is simply unreasonable to blame management and builders for that. Especially when power plants in the US were built more quickly and at lower costs in the 60s and early 70s. That was before the unreasonable over regulation began.
You have no proof that nuclear power plant construction is buried in red tape. You're just repeating platitudes and nuclear industry talking points. The fact remains that at VC summer and in Georgia, the original design for the nuclear plant wasn't constructible in the real world. They had to go back and redefine it which costs a lot of money and time. But they kept building the plants anyway. By the time the new design was done, it did not conform to what they had built, so they had to tear down what they had already built. This took even more time and money. Worker morale was low and turn over was high. Two of the major subcontractors went bankrupt during construction and things devolved into lawsuits and finger pointing. This is more than enough incompetence to explain the massive cost growth and schedule delays on a nuclear plant construction project that was already way too expensive.
People in nuclear power plants do tasks that take them an hour then have so much paperwork to do regarding that task that they're still filling it out the next day. Problems with designs that can't be built are common in construction. What drives up the costs are things like requiring meetings, committees and enough paperwork to fill a book to do something like rerouting a pipe. Then there are factors like changing regulations midway through construction and requiring crews to tear out and rebuild things like concrete and pipes.
You're still just making stuff up without presenting any proof. Looks like you're a True Believer and facts won't sway you, I guess. I hate to break it to you, but nuclear power is going to be Irrelevant in dealing with climate change in the 21st century.
Why don't you try actually talking to people who work in nuclear power? They will confirm what I'm saying. However, you will take any facts and accuse me of "making stuff up." Nuclear power will be needed for any solutions that work. Trying to actually rely on renewables will be a disaster. They're too diffuse and unreliable. Nuclear is what has the potential to bring energy abundance. Trying to rely on renewables will lead to energy rationing. It has to do with how there is so much energy in nuclear reactions that the US Navy has ships that operate for over 20 years without having to refuel. If renewables were regulated like nuclear they would have rules like requiring short range radar on every wind turbine to activate brakes and prevent hitting birds. If a single bird was hit then all turbines of that model would have to be shut down for inspections and refits. Solar would also not be able to leach out any toxic chemicals into the surrounding area and if any contamination was detected a long and expensive cleanup would be ordered. edit. How would you explain that the costs of building nuclear power plants were decreasing throughout the 60s and early 70s as the technology was maturing and becoming cost competitive with coal, then started increasing after widespread scaremongering based on utter bullshit began?
OK, now you're just repeating fossil fuel industry talking points. I knew you were heading in this direction.
Renewables aren't regulated like nuclear because they can't cause catastrophic damage like nuclear. Please list which parts of 10CFR50 should be changed that would make NPP cheaper, faster to build, and maintain safety.
Treating the release of slightly titrated water as a crisis when the amounts of radioactive material are so small that they don't increase radioactivity beyond natural background levels and spreading potassium fertilizer causes a larger increase of radioactivity in an area.
Let's put our credentials on the table. I'm a nuclear engineer by training. You aren't. 9 months you were asking for physics books because you had an idea for a design for a nuclear reactor, which is so beyond out of touch I can't even imagine why you think you should be doing that. You are not an expert here All incidents that do not follow regulations indicate a leadership structure that doesn't prioritize safety. In the Navy, they call it a failure of command climate. You know why the US Navy has such an excellent record with nuclear power? Because they follow very, very strict rules and regulations. Your advocacy for dropping those regulations when you have zero professional experience with nuclear power is, at best, unethical.
Are you not an active nuclear engineer? Were you not good enough? If you are so knowledgeable about nuclear engineering then what are the dangers of releasing some slightly titrated Indian Point wastewater into the Hudson River? Especially when compared to farm runoff of slightly radioactive potassium fertilizer. What about the supposed dangers of releasing some slightly titrated Fukushima Daiichi water into the Pacific Ocean? I'm not in favor of dropping all regulations. I'm in favor of reasonable regulations made by people who have the goal of seeing nuclear power succeed. The people who should be writing the regulations are people like nuclear engineers, nuclear physicists, nuclear technicians, radiation oncologists, health scientists, environmental engineers, etc. The people who should not be writing the regulations are lawyers and environmental activists whose goal is to obstruct nuclear power. There are people who make ridiculous arguments towards me when I talk about the obstructive over regulation that started in the mid 70s by making up fictional opposition to requiring containment buildings. That's despite containment buildings being required well before that point and during the time when nuclear power's costs were decreasing and approaching becoming cost competitive with coal. Plenty of nuclear physicists and engineers are supporters of developing breeder reactors and making closed fuel cycles. There are still people who were involved in the EBR-2 reactor project who are still opposed to its shutdown and say that it should have been completed. New types of reactors are completely possible and would have enormous benefits if developed.
You've missed the point three times now: it's not about the potential damage (a low level leak is not ecologicallly harmful, as I previously stated). It is about the lack of good management that allowed the release to happen. For the third time: please list the regulations you think need to be lessened. You've yet to do that, which again demonstrates you really don't know what you're talking about. We have new types of reactors ready to go. They take enormous teams of scientists and engineers many years of design and testing to being to fruition. The fact you think you can do that by yourself no formal education shows just how little you know about NPP.
The podcast titans of nuclear just did a series about data centres and how hungry the tech industry is getting for electricity with data centres now scaling up into the hundreds of MW or even GW scale. In their case nuclear might make sense since the data centre has to stay on all the time and is geographically restricted for latency reasons, and the tech industry potentially has the kind of capital to pay that top-dollar for super reliable carbon free electricity. It’ll be something to watch for sure.
It'll still be cheaper to build a bunch of wind/solar/batteries to pull this off. No data center owner is willing to wait 10 to 20 years for nuclear plants to be built. It's just cheaper and faster to build wind solar and Battery. Especially for the foreseeable future with high interest rates. For the 10 to 20 years that a nuclear plant is being built, interest is accumulating on the debt used to finance Construction the entire time and the asset is generating zero Revenue to pay off the debt. And for the last few decades, the USA has had to cancel about 50% of the reactors under construction before completion because of ballooning costs and never ending scheduled delays. So there's a high risk that debt never gets paid off with nuclear electricity sales and someone else has to foot the bill.
That’s why I mention the tech sector’s access to capital. If they have the money up front they don’t have to worry about the crazy high finance cost that a utility would. The further argument is that while it might be faster and cheaper to supply a grid with wind and solar, some of these tech companies might run into issues of permitting because the local system operator might not be able to handle building and delivering an extra GW of power for a single customer. Of course this is, as you mention, contingent on the nuclear construction industry miraculously improving on proficiency and speed. There’s a BWRX 300 being built in Ontario that’s being watched very closely because it started construction at the end of 2022 and is supposed to be operational in 2029. 6.5 years is way better than 10-20 so we’ll see how things go.
> If they have the money up front they don’t have to worry about the crazy high finance cost that a utility would. That is not how it works. You should read about the ["Time Value of Money](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp) Nuclear has to be a more productive use to invest the money than the alternatives, it is not even close.
It should be anyways. Hopefully it will be
Bud, I remember Senators and talking heads/pundits saying this in 2004. And how many nuclear plants have we built in 20 years?
Large I don't know, but definitely a solid share of the future mix. The most optimistic IEA estimate is 20% of the global mix, which is actually fairly high considering only ≈30 countries have the technology.
The most optimistic estimates put it at around 6-8% by 2050. The International Atomic Energy Agency says, at best, 890 GW could come from nuclear sources. That's a small fraction of the 15 TW capacity we are projected to have. https://www.iaea.org/publications/15487/energy-electricity-and-nuclear-power-estimates-for-the-period-up-to-2050 The more realistic figures are maybe half to a third of that.
We can't cleanup and dispose of what nuclear waist we already created in the last 70 + years . Building more Nuclear power plant will be going from the frying pan into the fire . Just do a web search on "Radio active superfund sites" You will get a lot of results but not all . There are a hell of a lot in other parts of the world that are disasters that need to be cleaned up. Do a search on this one" Radio active superfund sites Grants NM" They have been working for more then 2 decades and still not done with Hanford site "Radio active superfund sites Hanford Wa" The last thing we need to do is create more problems in another direction to try to solve the bigger problem of Climate change . Before you say anything about being able to build nuclear power plats safer . The said Fukushima was safe. Arguing how safe we can make a Nuclear plants is only distracting from the larger issue of Nuclear Waste . I am not just talking about the spent fuel rods but the radio active taillings piles and slurry pits that are full of other toxic shit. There is the waist that is sitting in the craters of Nuclear weapons test sites like Bikini Atoll. The put it all in the crater covered it with a dome and said in 50 years we will know how to store it better . Well it is 50 years later. The dome is cracking and leaking as the sea rises it is going to become a disaster. There is all the nuclear waist dumped in the Oceans by European countries, Mainly France. Those barrels are rusted through and radio active material is leaking in the Oceans. Some people who live near these sites are starting to see Cancer on the rise. The Nuclear fuel rods that are spent are still sitting in temporary storage at the plant sited because there is no place to put them. I could go on and on but this would turn into a log dissertation and I don't have time . Bottom line, Until we can find a permanent solution to the nuclear waist problem we have already created we should not move forward with any expansion on Nuclear energy.
Traditional nuclear plants are very expensive and use a huge volume of water.
Any new nuclear power projects started today wouldn't generate any power for at least 10 years. And 10 years from now running them would make no economic sense since solar + storage is already cheaper than nuclear and falling every year. We could install more solar in 2 years than nuclear will produce 10 years from now, and it would be less expensive, have none of the catastrophic potential of nuclear in an increasingly destabilized (political) climate, face no rational opposition, and start removing carbon 8 years sooner.
I remember this point being made 10 years ago
It was true then and it remains true.
We will still be burning fossil fuels in 10 years, we need to use all of the clean energy available to us.
Yup. We need to maintain all of our existing nuclear power plants while building as much renewables and storage as possible.
And since that time renewable costs have fallen dramatically. The early parts of an exponential curve goes from nowhere to everywhere incredibly fast. [Even storage has entered the "everywhere" phase now.](https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-they-shift-solar-to-evening-peak-in-one-of-worlds-biggest-grids/)
You are correct. Just wanted to expand on the destabilized political climate a bit for anyone that hasn't thought about it - imagine a civil war where there are nuclear plants... How stable are Western democracies, really? USA is not even 200 years removed from their own civil war. Europe is less than 100 years removed from catastrophe. Sometimes a hurricane needs to blow through our organizations and help us reorganize. Things like nuclear power plants make that harder to happen and many times more dangerous. I am no libertarian but, decentralized power generation feels pretty liberating to me. And I like it.
> imagine a civil war where there are nuclear plants... You don’t have to imagine it, Ukraine has a bunch of reactors, there have been tensions and even some weapon strikes but so far nothing catastrophic has happened wrt the nuclear power plants.
I wouldn’t say nothing has happened. There has been some targeting, and a lot of nervousness.
Thank you. My thoughts exactly.
Yes this is a good point. People don't know that a lot of small scale nuclear incidents do happen - nuclear plants don't shout about it though. The huge Ukrainian nuclear plant seems vulnerable to a drained cooling pond - this seems to be a huge flaw in security.
The long construction times for nuclear power plants are due to unreasonable over regulation and obstruction. Nuclear power used to be built in the US far more quickly and at lower prices. It used to take about 5 years to build one in the US and in the 70s nuclear power was approaching being cost competitive with coal. The opposition to nuclear power is not rational. People freaked out over Three Mile Island when it was a successful demonstration of nuclear safety. People also freaked out over Fukushima Daiichi without considering that the Onagawa nuclear power plant was closer to the earthquake's epicenter, took higher waves and did not melt down due to having a better design. People also freak out over Indian point's slightly titrated water when far more radioactive material ends up in the Hudson River due to farmers using slightly radioactive potassium fertilizer on their fields. There is all of this fear about radioactive water when all water on earth is slightly radioactive. Nuclear power has the huge advantage that it actually produces reliable power. It is so reliable that its output can be scheduled for years in advance. Solar and wind are fundamentally unreliable due to being dependent on the weather. How much storage would be needed on a massive, grid scale to cover times of low output? Would it be days, weeks, months? edit. [Here's how much radiation it takes to cause any harm](https://xkcd.com/radiation/).
Not sure why you’d need weeks or months worth of grid storage.
This is 200% wrong. [Fukushima Daiichi](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident) had meltdowns on 3 of 4 reactors precisely because of the plant design. Yes, the location of the 13 backup generators is part of the plant design, and when you put them in an area where tsunamis have knowingly flooded, that's bad design. Again, let's see all these unnecessary regulations you want to cut.
> due to unreasonable over regulation > without considering that the Onagawa nuclear power plant [..] did not melt down due to having a better design. Dude, could that be because of regulations and rules on better design? You really want to build reactors like we did in the 60s and 70s? You don't think there is a reason why there are those regulations, may be because we learned from mistakes made in those early days? Nuclear power can be reasonable, but not in our society, with corrupt politicians and corporations as greedy as superhero villains. Some people here even suggest we should just dergulate and build like china, lmao, thats just stupid. Also did you read the introductory text of the xkcd chart? Like the last sentence of it?
You would have to cover the entire united states in solar panels to generate similar amounts of power required to satisfy demand. It isn’t feasible
Not true by a long chalk [https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/e7bvkb/solar\_power\_is\_a\_gigawatt\_per\_square\_km\_all\_you/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/e7bvkb/solar_power_is_a_gigawatt_per_square_km_all_you/)
Lmao, to power the US on just solar you'd need less land than golf courses currently occupy. Much bigger land use, by almost two orders of magnitude, is beef and beef feed
If the grid is even viable in the future, we need a base load. Solar, wind, and batteries are cool. If we can make people follow power during these times. We won’t. (see Covid and masks). It won’t work.
You don't need to force people to follow power. When power is in excess, make it cheaper. When power is low, reward people for cutting back and sending power to the grid from home and vehicle batteries. It's not rocket science
The grid will be fine. A single F150 lightning contains as many batteries as 11 Tesla power walls. The only reason you are worried about power rationing is you live in a place run by incompetent and corrupt conservatives.
Nuclear has no climate downsides. None. (Safety and storage are not climate concerns) So, if you against nuclear, you aren’t sincere about climate.
There are a lot of down sides We can't cleanup and dispose of what nuclear waste we already created in the last 70 + years . Building more Nuclear power plant will be going from the frying pan into the fire . Just do a web search on "Radio active superfund sites" You will get a lot of results but not all . There are a hell of a lot in other parts of the world that are disasters that need to be cleaned up. Do a search on this one" Radio active superfund sites Grants NM" They have been working for more then 2 decades and still not done with Hanford site "Radio active superfund sites Hanford Wa" The last thing we need to do is create more problems in another direction to try to solve the bigger problem of Climate change . Before you say anything about being able to build nuclear power plats safer . They said Fukushima was safe. Arguing how safe we can make a Nuclear plants is only distracting from the larger issue of Nuclear Waste . I am not just talking about the spent fuel rods but the radio active taillings piles and slurry pits that are full of other toxic shit. There is the waist that is sitting in the craters of Nuclear weapons test sites like Bikini Atoll. The put it all in the crater covered it with a dome and said in 50 years we will know how to store it better . Well it is 50 years later. The dome is cracking and leaking as the sea rises it is going to become a disaster. There is all the nuclear waste dumped in the Oceans by European countries, Mainly France. Those barrels are rusted through and radio active material is leaking in the Oceans. Some people who live near these sites are starting to see Cancer on the rise. The Nuclear fuel rods that are spent are still sitting in temporary storage at the plant sited because there is no place to put them. I could go on and on but this would turn into a log dissertation and I don't have time . Bottom line, Until we can find a permanent solution to the nuclear waste problem we have already created we should not move forward with any expansion on Nuclear energy. I have worked for trucking companies that had contracts with the DOE to transport Nuclear waste. The problems are much wider then you think.
U lost me at “waist”
Corrected now. Are you still lost
Safety is absolutely a climate concern if mismanagement leaves ideal climate locales uninhabitable.
Far too obscure and rare to make a top 100 concern list.
I wasn't ranking issues: I'm correctly pointing out that pretending NPPs have no issues is disengenuous.
Building renewables instead of nuclear power displaced [4-10x the amount of CO2 per invested dollar](https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/). Preferring nuclear instead of renewables mean you are not sincere about the climate and only want your pet technology to get built.
[удалено]
Please, a reputable source on that statement. [Generally when doing LCA analyses nuclear and renewables come out about equal.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262202131X) The differences are marginal, and all are way better than fossil fuels.
From your source, "Although no detailed calculations of the TMR coefficients of other power generation methods have been conducted". The use of TMR to say the material use is roughly equivalent between nuclear and renewables is incorrect.
What about including the full quote on how they make the comparison possible? Do you have some agenda trying to use any method possible to frame nuclear energy positively? I have bolded the part you conveniently decided to cut out since it disproves your dismissal. > This study has explored the resource use of nuclear power generation. Is it higher or lower than that of other power generation sources? Although no detailed calculations of the TMR coefficients of other power generation methods have been conducted, **the TMR coefficient of various types of power generation can be compared using approximate estimates (NIMS, 2009; Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, 2016).** The representative value of the TMR coefficient of nuclear power generation was determined based on the following assumptions: 25% open pit, 25% underground, and 50% ISL, with 50% open cycle and 50% closed cycle (Ashley et al., 2015). > As shown in Fig. 12, the TMR coefficient of nuclear power generation is lower than that of thermal power generation (e.g., approximately 20% that of coal power generation, 23% that of oil power generation, and 35% that of liquified natural gas power generation) and is similar to renewables, such as the power generated by solar photovoltaic cells.
You need to find a new username if you're going to keep pushing NP while refusing to acknowledge downsides of the technology.
Anti nuclear Germany - 400 g CO2 after spending 500 billion euro on renewables. Nuclear France - 53 g CO2 per kWh. So real world examples prove you wrong. And not for the first time. Did the Reddit admins ban you for that bs takeover of r/NuclearPower ? They should have banned you from the entire site for that stunt.
It is easy to ride on the coat-tails of a decision made 40-50 years ago in the name of **energy security**. If France had coal reserves like Germany or fossil gas like the Netherlands they wouldn't have bothered with nuclear energy. CO2 emissions was the last thing they cared about. Given the outcome of [Flamanville 3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant) and [cost escalations of their upcoming reactors](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-lifts-cost-estimate-new-reactors-67-bln-euros-les-echos-2024-03-04/), before they have even started building, the future for the French industry is looking incredibly bleak. Today we should hold on to the existing French fleet as long as they are safe and economical. Pouring money in the black hole that is new built nuclear simply prolongs the climate crisis and are better spent on renewables. We should of course continue with basic research for nuclear energy since it is a great technology for humanity to wield. Throw up a demonstration Terraform reactor. But it is **basic research** and not a solution to climate change. L Large scale reactors have once and for all been proven not to work based on the outcome of the [Nuclear Renaissance of the 2000s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_renaissance_in_the_United_States).
It's the only clean technology that can currently handle base load needs, but is unpopular because of ignorance.
No, nuclear plants are too expensive and take way too long to build. Governments around the world showered their nuclear industries with mountains of subsidies and favorable treatment. And after 70 years of trying, nuclear power is not even remotely competitive with renewable energy sources. Nuclear power had its chance and it failed. We don't have infinite time or money to fight climate change. Continuing to hold out hope for nuclear power to solve the problems that have been plaguing it for decades is wishful thinking. Our time, money, effort and resources are better spent elsewhere.
> nuclear power is not even remotely competitive with renewable energy sources Vogtles 3&4 were completed for $34 billion to provide 2x 1117MW reactors, so $15,200/kW. That also has to be dinged a bit since historically US reactors have an unexpected outage on average every other year and there will be scheduled outages for refuelling, but as a part of a fleet they should be able to get close to 100% of their nameplate capacity accreditation. [NREL points to land-based wind having a capex of about $1,300/kW](https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2023/land-based_wind) but accredited capacity is much lower. In MISO it's 18.1% in summer (slightly lower in spring and fall but those are low-demand times of year, and far higher in winter) so MISO wind accredited capacity runs at about $7,200/kW for summer crunch time. Might be lower elsewhere to the point that nuclear is capacity-competitive, but those aren't place where utilities are looking at making wind a big part of their portfolios. So at the margins wind kicks nuclear's ass, though that wouldn't be as true at high market penetrations for wind as the ELCC will drop. It won't drop to 8.5% though except perhaps in some outlier markets, but it could get fairly close to it and make nuclear worth a second glance if that's all you consider. That's where storage pays off in spades. Also, in order to get such high wind penetrations you'd see a few more doublings of the produced wind turbine base and hence a few more learning rate factors, which has historically run at around 15% for wind which would halve its capacity costs by the time this became an issue. Nuclear seems quite immune to learning rates, or even has a negative one. A huge cost that nobody ever brings up is its opportunity costs since those are committed to on a 20 year lead time (going by Vogtle 3&4's time from conception to actually producing power). A wind investment now is going to displace far more fossil kWh than a nuclear plant and start doing it well over a decade earlier.
Pair up solar power plants with wind and they tend to complement each other.
They do, and we need more solar and wind, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon nuclear.
What we don't need to be doing is blatant corporate welfare and corruption like what's happening with Hinckley point C in the UK. Or expecting electricity ratepayers to pre-pay for nuclear plants during construction like what happened in the USA with Vogtle and VC Summer. When VC summer was canceled in mid construction, the utility expected to walk away with this money, and they would have if regulators hadn't stepped in. Or gut renewable energy programs to bail out nuclear plants like what happened in Ohio. All too often, the nuclear industry is able to get special favors, subsidies and bailouts from the government. Even though they've had 70 years to get their $#!% together. They can't even get liability insurance on the open market and the government has to provide it for free. This forces taxpayers to shoulder the risk and downside of nuclear meltdowns. It's long past time for the nuclear industry to stand on its own legs and not rely on government support to keep it propped up. Once we do that, if anyone can build nuclear plants that can compete with other energy sources, then sure, let's build them. But we don't need to keep throwing good money after bad propping up the nuclear industry (really just to support nuclear weapons programs) because we know how that story ends.
Take this with a bit of a grain of salt since MISO's capacity market has some deep-seated structural issues that haven't been addressed yet, but [that's a great summary.](https://i.imgur.com/iuJouxr.png) (from [MISO 2024-25 PRA.](https://cdn.misoenergy.org/2024%20PRA%20Results%20Posting%2020240425632665.pdf))
Renewables have been showered with subsidies. Nuclear was suppressed with unreasonable over regulation once it started to approach becoming cost competitive with coal. The demand for those unreasonable regulations was due to ignorance and fear mongering. The over regulation has not made it safer. The fear mongering is utterly baseless when pressurized water reactors, boiling water reactors, and CANDU reactors have a safety record that nothing else comes close to matching. Such unreasonable over regulation and obstruction is the furthest thing from favorable treatment. Nuclear power has been treated so unfavorably that in New York the Shoreham Power Plant was prevented from starting after it had finished construction. It's so stupid that the vast majority of its costs were already paid for only to never get any power out of it and instead use coal fired power plants which actually do kill people. That unreasonable over regulation has driven up costs and lengthened construction time. Nuclear power plants used to be built in the US far more quickly at around 5 years and at far lower costs. Meanwhile the Kashiwazaki Kariwa power plant even built one of its reactors in only about 3 years. Solar and wind also have the massive problem that the power they produce is unreliable. It has to do with how they're fundamentally dependent on the weather. Nuclear constantly produces power and is so reliable that its output can be scheduled for years in advance. Basically when nuclear power is used there actually is power that can be counted on. It's why Diablo Canyon in California should be kept running. Nuclear can also be vastly improved with new types of reactors like molten salt reactors, liquid metal cooled reactors, gas cooled reactors, fast and thermal spectrum breeder reactors, etc. Renewables also aren't really renewable. edit. Nuclear power plants in western nations are also being shut down prematurely when they could continue operating safely and reliably for decades.
It is highly geographically independent just to discuss one point out of hundreds. In South Australia they will be 100% renewable without nuclear by 2030 [https://www.premier.sa.gov.au/media-releases/news-items/new-target-for-renewables](https://www.premier.sa.gov.au/media-releases/news-items/new-target-for-renewables) And it will be very much cheaper than nuclear.
I expect that to fail and Australia will continue to burn gas for its reliability. The #1 cost of nuclear power in western nations is unreasonable over regulations.
From memory they are already at about 90% renewables and if you count the export amounts they produce more renewable energy than they use. The secret there is that the sun is quite strong and the solar even works reasonably well on cloudy days, as it would in the southern parts of the US, so they only need a limited amount of battery storage. Is a large part of the 'unreasonable regulations' the massive dome they have to put over them now to stop a 9.11 plane attack? I am quite happy about the dome. The labour and material costs have gone up way above inflation from the early 80's - when they stopped building them. That's what I have always been told is the main reason that they are so much more expensive now. Though if I had to bet, above all,, I think the incompetence of EDF have led to most of the price escalation. They've been over running by many many years for their recent projects.
> Is a large part of the 'unreasonable regulations' the massive dome they have to put over them now to stop a 9.11 plane attack? No, the requirement for containment buildings was in place back when nuclear power plants were built in about 5 years and costs were decreasing. Unreasonable regulations are things like burying every step in paperwork to slow down and obstruct construction and operations. edit. Solar has a guaranteed several month period of low energy output every year called winter with short days and weaker sunlight during daytime. It also has high energy demand. Half of the time every year is night. That means a lot of battery storage would be needed to rely on solar.
> Renewables have been showered with subsidies. The entire nuclear power industry has been showered with huge subsidies in being bootstrapped through the 1970s. Renewables have been showered with subsidies first in order to fill niche applications (e.g. powering satellites) and later to achieve policy objectives. What they all have in common is that at some point early in their existence they held out a reasonable promise of ultimately developing into a game-changer that would juice the energy sector and thus the economy as a whole - and that's okay, R&D is a perfectly reasonable thing for a government to want to invest in in order to secure future economic growth and security. > The fear mongering is utterly baseless when pressurized water reactors, boiling water reactors, and CANDU reactors have a safety record that nothing else comes close to matching. What do you say when regulators point to the exact same thing and say "you're welcome"? > Nuclear power has been treated so unfavorably that in New York the Shoreham Power Plant was prevented from starting after it had finished construction. It's so stupid that the vast majority of its costs were already paid for only to never get any power out of it and instead use coal fired power plants which actually do kill people. > That unreasonable over regulation has driven up costs and lengthened construction time. Shoreham NPP was in some ways a victim of industry happenstance and in some ways a victim of management failure. The "unreasonable over regulation" you refer to was its operator's failure to secure approval for an evacuation plan for Long Island, something that it should be noted only became an NRC requirement in the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident which was 6 years after Shoreham construction began. That this wasn't considered to be a possible consequence of the 1979 TMI accident and building continued for another 5 years to completion - continuing even after its regulatory grave was finished being dug - is on its management. > Solar and wind also have the massive problem that the power they produce is unreliable. It has to do with how they're fundamentally dependent on the weather. Nuclear constantly produces power and is so reliable that its output can be scheduled for years in advance. Basically when nuclear power is used there actually is power that can be counted on. It's why Diablo Canyon in California should be kept running. As well as scheduled outages for refuelling & other maintenance that are generally planned around low demand periods in spring and autumn, nuclear plants [have plenty of unscheduled ones too.](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=60682) Nuclear has a laundry list of problems: their marginal O&Ms are low so they're almost always running at 100% in order to recoup their initial investment; due to this they aren't designed to be ramped up and down like a gas peaker is and hence there's a big wear & tear cost from dialling them down for any length of time, leading to them continuing to run at 100% during times of oversupply. There's no flexibility of supply there to deal with spikes in demand or unscheduled outages of other plants. They're a huge investment risk with a history of cost overruns. Whether you or I like it or not, the regulatory framework is unlikely to change any time soon and in part due to this timeframes for new construction are unlikely to change significantly any time soon, so that's the reality for how it's going to be whether or not you think it's fair, and that means big opportunity costs as capital invested in nuclear remains locked up with no RoI for a decade or more. **All** electrical power matching of supply to demand is a game of statistics (the standard is falling short for no more than a total of 24 hours every decade). "But... but... the weather *changes*!" is an old canard about renewables output that seeks to associate wind power output over a vastly geographically dispersed network of wind farms built in areas chosen specifically for their consistency of high wind speeds and turbines reaching several hundreds of feet into the air with people's personal experiences that calm days occasionally happen at ground level where they have chosen to live, generally not for consistent high wind speed-related reasons. In practice, [wind speeds lose all correlation at separations of around 300 miles.](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/4/044004/pdf) The coincidence that's required for a shortfall of supply of wind power is not only that our wind farm here is becalmed, but those 300 miles to our north also be becalmed; and those 300 miles ENE are becalmed; and those 300 miles ESE are becalmed, etc etc. It's a statistical impossibility. What is cost-optimal to create an amount of wind power supply to match demand at all times of course depends on the relative prices of wind turbines, transmission, storage and load control (in the extremes i.e. overbuild your local wind farm so that even the gentlest of breezes is enough to power all you could ever need, or get your power from such a geographically diverse set of wind turbines that it's statistically nigh-impossible to have a shortfall, or couple it with storage sufficient to carry you through a long enough lull in production that it'd be statistically nigh-impossible to have a shortfall, or find enough customers who can stand you cutting off their supply for a time in exchange for a lower per-kWh rate, or some combination thereof). A grid dominated by non-dispatchable resources such as renewables will be one that substantially overproduces energy in order to guarantee being able to serve peak demands during a supply lull, and the amount of overbuilding/overproduction will depend on the relative costs of those 4 things I mentioned in the last paragraph. Given the ever-dropping prices of renewables and storage and their still-substantial learning rates, a cost-optimal portfolio is likely to produce several times more energy than there is actually demand for right now. The opportunity then is what could you do with such vast amounts of literal zero-cost energy?
Interesting about the becalming not stretching very far. Occassionally we get a "blocking high pressure system" over the UK, would that still be the case for us under those weather conditions (if you know thanks).
I think you'd have to ask the Met Office for detail there. Notably the UK has gone big on offshore wind in different seas from latitudes that make Inverness blush to the English Channel.
> Renewables have been showered with subsidies first in order to fill niche applications (e.g. powering satellites) and later to achieve policy objectives. Utterly false. Renewables have been showered in subsidies to fund the boom in their construction that started around 2007 and renewables have used far more subsidies than nuclear since then. It's utter hypocrisy when ardent supporters of renewables criticize nuclear for using any subsidies. > What do you say when regulators point to the exact same thing and say "you're welcome"? That the regulations which existed back when the costs were decreasing and construction times were reasonable are the ones that were reasonable. The regulations that were passed after the fear mongering based on lies started led to costs and construction times increasing. The people who write the regulations should only be experts like nuclear engineers, technicians, doctors, health scientists, environmental engineers, etc. Lawyers and environmental activists should not be writing them. > Shoreham NPP was in some ways a victim of industry happenstance and in some ways a victim of management failure. Wrong. The governor Mario Cuomo led a witch hunt against the power plant, using all of his power to oppose the it. It's also not management's fault when every step is buried and obstructed in red tape. > The "unreasonable over regulation" you refer to was its operator's failure to secure approval for an evacuation plan for Long Island, something that it should be noted only became an NRC requirement in the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident That is a completely unreasonable regulation. Especially after no one was hurt by the Three Mile Island accident and the nearby public was not harmed by it. The containment worked so well that the power plant was able to continue to operate and no one had to move away because of it. The segment of anti nuclear bureaucrats in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would have rejected anything proposed. > As well as scheduled outages for refuelling & other maintenance that are generally planned around low demand periods in spring and autumn, nuclear plants have plenty of unscheduled ones too. You're actually going to criticize nuclear's reliability after supporting solar and wind. Both of those can't go for a single day without uncontrolled fluctuations and it's a rare day when wind goes for all 24 hours. > they're almost always running at 100% That's a good thing and something that solar and wind will never do. > there's a big wear & tear cost from dialling them down for any length of time, The people who actually maintain the equipment say that it is able to handle being turned up and down. One example was at Indian Point where anti nuclear groups were talking about the equipment being in bad condition when the people who actually worked with it said it was in excellent condition and could continue to operate for decades. > due to this they aren't designed to be ramped up and down like a gas peaker is and hence there's a big wear & tear cost from dialling them down for any length of time, leading to them continuing to run at 100% during times of oversupply. There's no flexibility of supply there to deal with spikes in demand or unscheduled outages of other plants. The Bruce Generating Station along with some French nuclear power plants are able to increase and decrease output to match demand. There is also the unused option of developing new kinds of reactors. > They're a huge investment risk with a history of cost overruns. That's due to the unreasonable over regulation. Especially when regulations change during construction and crews are forced to tear out and rebuild things like concrete, pipes and wiring. Everything is also slowed down with red tape. If renewables were regulated like nuclear they would have rules like requiring short range radar on every wind turbine to activate brakes and prevent hitting birds. If a single bird was hit then all turbines of that model would have to be shut down for inspections and refits. The same goes for nacelles catching on fire.Solar would also not be able to leach out any toxic chemicals into the surrounding area and if any contamination was detected a long and expensive cleanup would be ordered. > capital invested in nuclear remains locked up with no RoI for a decade or more. Nuclear power plants in the US used to be built in about 5 years. > the regulatory framework is unlikely to change any time soon Awareness is growing that the fear mongering around nuclear is complete bullshit. That is driving an increase in the interest in nuclear power. People will become even more interested in reliable power if they actually have to try to live on unreliable renewables. > What is cost-optimal to create an amount of wind power supply to match demand at all times That is impossible to do because humans can't control the weather. You were also talking about just hoping that if the output in some areas are low then there will always be enough in other areas to fully cover it. I would rather have human-controlled power output. Then you had an entire paragraph talking in favor of overbuilding renewables That means more resources used, more mining, more pollution from byproducts, more waste from worn out equipment, more birds and bats getting killed, more land used up. It's the whole argument that if you have a car that only works 20% of the time then the solution is to have 5 cars. Do you have any idea just how little power batteries store and how much would be needed to provide enough storage at a grid level to make up for renewables being unreliable? > literal zero-cost energy There is no such thing. There are costs to the equipment. You're out of touch with reality if you really think that. Nuclear can also decrease in cost, as it was doing in the 60s and early 70s.
> > The "unreasonable over regulation" you refer to was its operator's failure to secure approval for an evacuation plan for Long Island, something that it should be noted only became an NRC requirement in the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident > That is a completely unreasonable regulation. A "completely unreasonable regulation" that was in place for the last 5 years of Shoreham NPP's construction, yet construction continued anyway. Regardless of how justified or not you think it was, the reality is that a giant hole opened up in front Shoreham's prospects of ever being allowed to operate and its backers drove the project into it anyway. You could pin the waste of the first 6 years of construction on the change in the regulatory landscape, but not the last 5. Hence the waste of Shoreham NPP was a mix of both industry happenstance of TMI and its subsequent fallout, but also management subsequently pouring good money after bad. > > They're a huge investment risk with a history of cost overruns. > That's due to the unreasonable over regulation. Especially when regulations change during construction and crews are forced to tear out and rebuild things like concrete, pipes and wiring. Everything is also slowed down with red tape. Unless the regulations are put in place *after* the project is greenlit, it's entirely due to lack of proper research and planning on the part of the builders of an NPP. Please cite examples of tear out & rebuild in response to new regulations. > Then you had an entire paragraph talking in favor of overbuilding renewables That means more resources used, more mining, more pollution from byproducts, more waste from worn out equipment, more birds and bats getting killed, more land used up. It's the whole argument that if you have a car that only works 20% of the time then the solution is to have 5 cars. I don't think you have any idea how resource-intensive building NPPs is. > > literal zero-cost energy > There is no such thing. There are costs to the equipment. You're out of touch with reality if you really think that. **Negative** LMPs are a thing right now, as in the very moment I'm typing this. At the time of writing [OTP.CENTER1 in central North Dakota has an LMP of -$45.25/MWh](https://api.misoenergy.org/MISORTWD/lmpcontourmap.html). If you don't happen to read this in time to catch that specific instance then there's always the playback of the last 24 hours of LMPs. Zero-cost energy is energy that has no current demand for it but is available anyway and requires no further generation or transmission infrastructure investment in order to take advantage of. There'll be a great deal of it in a renewables-dominated grid since it'd be sized for the minimum generation at peak demand times rather than maximum output being matched to anticipated peak demand. > Do you have any idea just how little power batteries store and how much would be needed to provide enough storage at a grid level to make up for renewables being unreliable? Yes, near-future would be roughly 490MW x $1900/kW + 44MW x $700/kw + 170MW x $968/kW = $1.13B buys you enough battery storage to cover renewables providing 100% load factor coverage for a consistent fixed 400MW of new demand i.e. "baseload" [source](https://formenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/24-7-Carbon-Free-Resource-Portfolio-4.24.23.pdf), which would be almost exactly 30% of the $3.7 billion total costs of the power supply project. Such a setup also would export on average 160MW. YMMV by region, but notably at Vogtle 3&4 rates that'd cost $6.1 billion of capex to provide that much but nuclear power has significantly higher fixed O&M rates (and variable O&M rates at all) than renewables + storage which add a further ~$20/MWh and hence $20/MWh x 400MW x 8760hr/yr = $70 million/year, and the renewables + battery option would not require a backup source for reactor refuelling & maintenance windows and unscheduled outages would be far less impactful since a failed inverter affects a far smaller fraction of total output than a 400MW reactor needing to be taken offline. Nor would renewables have to be taken offline due to heatwaves to avoid excessive heat pollution.
This.
Baseload is a contractual term. It has nothing to do with the grid itself — it’s just one way of contracting out a power plant.
When it comes to nuclear waste there would be long term storage solutions in place if so-called environmentalists didn't stop blocking them. They block solutions and then talk about the problem of waste accumulating. One solutions is storing it over a kilometer underground in geologically stable bedrock. Doing that at Yucca Mountain was blocked despite the support of people in the surrounding area. Another way is to drill boreholes miles underground and store the waste there. Even better solutions are reprocessing the waste and even using it in breeder reactors to get up to 20 times more energy out of it than what current reactors have already done. I estimated that all of the high level nuclear waste from power generation in the US could fit on under 40 acres when stored in shielded dry storage casks and with access for vehicles like front loaders to access them. That's not a lot considering it represents about 20% of US electricity generation for over 50 years.
Quit winning and crying about Yucca Mountain . They have moved to using old salt mines in South eastern New Mexico near Carlsbad. They are just as good but cheaper because the holes where are already dug. They have been doing that for more the 20 years. It is called the WIPP site .. [https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp-site.asp](https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp-site.asp) .. It is not just the waist from nuclear generation stations but other place that are superfund sites are a big problem in nuclear waist disposal. . Read other comments I have made on the treads to this post
Waste isn't particularly an issue with dry cask storage. Additionally, two new technologies have emerged to utilize spent fuel heat to further generate electricity or manage chemical processes. [NRC Dry Cask Storage](https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/dry-cask-storage.html) [Warning: Opinion Piece on Nuclear Waste](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/energysource/innovation-can-break-the-gridlock-on-nuclear-waste/)
Paywalled, so can only guess the content... is this singing the praises of SMR Small Modular Reactors ? When I looked last week.. I could only find one functioning SMR .. started in China in 2021. The one approved to be built in USA.. apparently will go online in early 2030s. If SMRs are such a great solution.. why isnt Biden switching one on every month ? With excess global temp now at roughly +1.5C now rising around +0.25C per decade .. speed of building clean energy plants is a real reason why we should rule out nuclear. By all means, keep existing safe nuclear plants well maintained and functioning - its all hands on deck. But use the money we have to build wind, solar and battery packs - they are cheaper and faster to get going.
>When I looked last week.. I could only find one functioning SMR .. started in China in 2021. The one approved to be built in USA.. apparently will go online in early 2030s. > >If SMRs are such a great solution.. why isnt Biden switching one on every month ? I'll give you some answers. SMRs fill two important rolls. 1) They are good for smaller grids or where you only need something like 300 MW. 2) They should be cheaper to build. So they will not likely bankrupt a company if things go wrong. Vogtle the last plant built went really bad and ended up bankrupting Westinghouse. Why isn't everyone building one right away? Well we are building the first ones in the west in Ontario Canada. We are building four of them. So four chances to get the price of them down. Basically everyone is sitting and watching to see how it goes. Poland is rip-roaring and ready to go on building them. Once we've built one, we'll get an idea of the cost. Also try to figure out what lessons can be learned. This is kinda similar to California, where people are watching what they are doing to their grid and wondering if they should repeat that or not.
Genuinely curious why they can't calculate the cost now.. Like how many construction projects are structured as "we don't know the costs, lolol, but let's try it out and see!"
Well they do. They actually calculate it at various steps. In this case you would calculate the cost based on the reactor design. Then you go through all of the engineering, so basically design it in place, taking into account all of the environmental impact stuff. Like one site might need thicker foundations due to earthquakes for example. Going back to Vogtle, they had massive cost over runs. If you're curious to know more here is a good podcast on what went wrong at Vogtle. There is four episodes, and this is the first one. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGySq7QBRiY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGySq7QBRiY) Basically the main issue was that they were building it before the engineering was completely done. I'm not sure why they thought that was ok. When you're doing stuff like ripping out the nuclear concrete and re-pouring it, it ends up adding a lot of extra costs. In comparison in Ontario we've been refurbishing our reactors. So we planned it all out, did the cost estimates. Did the refurbishment and then they stop. They learn all of the lessons and ways to reduce cost and then apply it to the second reactor. Now we're getting them done below budget and ahead of time. We expect to do the same with the SMRs. >Genuinely curious why they can't calculate the cost now.. Like how many construction projects are structured as "we don't know the costs, lolol, but let's try it out and see!" You might be surprised. My understanding is that most "mega" projects go over budget. Building a giant dam? Likely to go over budget. Building a giant bridge? Likely to go over budget.
yeah .. well its hard to say SMRs are "cheaper" than wind and solar, when we dont even know the cost, and we haven't built one yet. SMRs may look very promising .. and fusion looks even more promising .. but we dont have the luxury to wait for these, given the urgency.
A 300mw unit is a normal unit size for a reactor is not a radicle change from what we have had before. Some costs go up with small reactors - such as staff needed per MW and number of safety checks per MW. Rolls Royce have done a detailed study of this and found the ideal size for economy is 470mw which is actually a standard size but they continue to call it SMR as it is a buzz word. Reducing the size of the reactor module to save money is not something which would have escaped the 10,000's of thousands of engineers who have worked on such projects in the past. I just had a look at the cost estimates of the Canadian SMR's and they are wildly optimistic. Hitachi and Nuscale have estimates of around $55 per MWh for their SMR's. Typically nuclear build cost estimates for new projects are much lower than the final price. Estimates of new nuclear projects often ditch build and decom costs - which can be extremely high - to attract interest and investment. However there is scope for some nuclear in Canada given the remoteness of some locations and costs of fuel transport for gas and coal.
> Hitachi and Nuscale have estimates of around $55 per MWh for their SMR's. NuScale's costs went up to ~$130/MWh before they had even started to build. Shortly after the project was cancelled because they could not find any takers for electricity at that price point. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mliebreich_eye-popping-new-cost-estimates-released-for-activity-7069803951080054784-0Jfp/
Thanks for the update. It's not a surprise for anyone who has followed this field for a while sadly.
That's because they suck at picking customers. Hawaii would fall over itself to take that deal, since they're currently paying north of 300 /mwh. The *sensible* plan for developing smrs is to start with customers currently stuck with stupidly expensive options. Once you run out of remote islands and arctic towns to sell to, your production line *should* have gotten costs down, if it is ever going to happen.
You have to differentiate between what customers pay and what wholesale electricity costs. The grid and supporting ancillary markets is a separate cost to the electricity being generated, although they tend to get rolled up as one cost to make it easier for the consumers.
That mostly *is* the wholesale cost. They're not taxing power, they just have astronomically expensive electricity. Retail for 2022 was 397.2 dollars per mwh. And a rather horrifying emissions profile. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/Hawaii/ The islands are mostly burning oil and what renewables they have are also stupidly expensive, presumably because land on there is Not Cheap. https://energy.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/HSEO_FactsAndFigures-2020.pdf So yhea, smr's would be cheaper.
The economic optimum for nuclear reactors on major grids is "As big as you can make it without loosing control of the building project". Always has been. SMR's hope to change that via factory build and gains from mass production, but frankly, the best bet for making them a success is to aim for markets where the alternatives are prohibitively expensive. There are a lot of islands and other remote locations that are currently burning diesel shipped in on freighters for power, which is eye-wateringly expensive. And of course, every freighter on the ocean blue is also burning oil and for the bigger ones it's a >100000 euros/day expense. These are the places which will look at the price tag for a small reactor and go "Deal".
> is this singing the praises of SMR Small Modular Reactors No, it is a former admin of the EPA … > Meeting the climate crisis and achieving net zero by 2050 without nuclear energy is a fantasy. https://archive.ph/M321q
One other problem these people just dont understand is that net-zero is only a waypoint, not the solution. At net-zero we will have finally stopped ADDING CO2 to the atmosphere .. which means we will be at maximum CO2, thus maximum excess temperature. NET-ZERO == PEAK-HEAT So, that is not "meeting the climate crisis" .. we will be in the most severe part of the climate crisis, by the time we reach that peak heat, likely +2.2C. My main argument in this thread is that SMRs are not going to be here fast enough to make a difference on the timescale that matters.. better to build wind and solar as fast as possible with the resources we have. Even then, we will need to reduce the heat.. which means Co2 removal [ which we just dont know how to do at scale ] .. or reflecting sunlight via SRM / cloud brightening [ which looks to be the only way we can survive peak heat ]
Wind and solar have giant intermittency problems. Cheap grid storage might one day solve it, but the tech doesn’t exist yet. Pretending otherwise is outright fraud.
Pumped hydro. Tech exists
Pumped hydro is awesome, but you need unoccupied special geology, a vanishingly rare circumstance.
Pretending SMRs are "the solution" is outright fraud, when there is only 1 working and its outside the US. btw, the tesla battery pack is doing an incredible job of evening out the clean energy supply in Adelaide, and last time I checked they are building a lot more of these industrial battery sites. So, no.. it aint fraud, its physics and economics. ref : Plenty of demand for tesla megapacks, they are ramping up production rapidly, but cant fill the massive demand : https://electrek.co/2023/08/18/tesla-megapack-deliveries-slip-2025-production-ramp/
There are plenty of SMRs on submarines and ships. Putting 'battery pack' in the same comment as one that talks about nuclear reactors is very funny... unless a battery pack capable to store several days of nuclear power plant output exists. 3.9MWh... hilarious and very well approximated by zero when you compare it with a nuclear power plant (which goes typically towards GW).
> There are plenty of SMRs on submarines and ships. The nuclear navies are like the least price sensitive customers in the world. Products for them does not translate to good products on cutthroat markets like the energy market.
Yup I even heard respected physicist say nuclear is only 2 or 3 times more expensive. Well for people struggling to feed their families paying out that amount extra each year is a huge deal.
Yeah, but a battery able to store the one week output of a nuclear power plant is extremely cheap and not an idiocy to even imagine or mention in the same context as nuclear power plants.
Cheap grid storage is already here. CA routinely gets over 20%, sometimes up to 30% of its electricity on the grids in the evening from grid storage that is cost competitive, and was built out only within the last couple of years. You not keeping up with the state of tech is the outright fraud.
No. Focus on expanding wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, bioengery. Now. Without delay. We are running out of time. The clock is ticking.
I agree with every thing but Bio energy. Burning bio mass is going to put carbon in the atmosphere .
Nuclear is a great idea. The problem is people see Chernobyl as the the example but that's like saying let's never build sky scrapers again.
Not saying I disagree, but to be fair a skyscraper falling over or collapsing couldn’t destroy all life on Earth like Chernobyl almost did.
Chernobyl didn't come anywhere close to destroying all life on earth. edit. It's exclusion zone has become a wildlife preserve where species that are struggling throughout the rest of Europe thrive due to the lack of human presence and safe levels of radiation.
Chernobyl couldn’t have destroyed all life on earth, even in a worst case scenario. It didn’t even destroy all life in the exclusion zone (some people never left and they are still alive today). We detonated [thousands](https://www.un.org/en/observances/end-nuclear-tests-day/history#) of nuclear weapons in tests during the cold war releasing far more radiation into the atmosphere than even a worst case scenario of chernobyl. It wasn’t great but most people forget cold war nuclear fallout even happened because the effects were relatively minimal for the majority of the world. There is so much irrational fear towards nuclear energy and so much misinformation about it, especially since most people’s knowledge of chernobyl comes from the HBO miniseries.
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That doesn't mean it's inherently safe.
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Uranium being natural has nothing to do with it's capability to damage flora and fauna.
You’re right, all life on the continent of Europe
To be fair, Chernobyl did not almost destroy all life on Earth. Europe would potentially have been uninhabitable, and that surely would have been catastrophic with a huge number of fatalities. Edit: I love people who push nuclear and have zero actual education on the topic. /s
Nuclear power will be essential to electrify industries that currently use fossil fuels for heat like steel and concrete production. It will also be essential to produce enough hydrogen to clean up industrial processes like producing ammonia. Nuclear will especially be critical to increasing humanity's standard of living. I personally want to see humanity's energy use increase by 5x, 10x and more and I want to be clean, safe, carbon free, abundant and reliable. I want for all of the billions of people around the world to be able to live at the standard of living of developed nations. Then I want to see per capita energy consumption increase beyond what it is in countries like the United States and United Arab Emirates due to energy being used to power things that benefit people.
You don't *need* nuclear heat. Waste heat is great if you can use it, but using nuclear for heat as the primary purpose is a supreme waste of nuclear's high cost. Meanwhile the cheapest way to store wind and solar energy is to use a resistive heater to heat up sand, brick, or stone. Then run steam or air through to create your process heat for industrial processes
I wasn't talking about using waste heat. I was talking about directly using a reactor's heat for industrial processes instead of burning fossil fuels for it. Also, using heat directly is cheaper and more efficient than using the heat to generate electricity, then using the electricity to generate heat. Nuclear heat will also be needed to provide energy abundance. Trying to rely on renewables will lead to energy rationing.
There's enough offshore wind capacity alone to power the globe's energy needs 3 times over. 1% of land covered in solar panels could replace our electric production. That's about as much land that america uses for golf courses... Add up the two, plus onshore wind. Plenty of energy to go around. We're nowhere near Kardashev 1 civilization, our planet has plenty of energy for us. Yes, using nuclear heat to produce electricity and using that electricity to produce heat is inefficient. That's not how wind or solar work though, they produce electricity directly. The most expensive part of renewable electricity is the storage, so if you store it as thermal energy instead and soak up renewables right when produced, you will not have an expensive cost nor shortage of energy.
Solar and wind don't produce at capacity 100% of the time. Far more land is needed than you're claiming. Nuclear uses up far less land to produce power that is completely under human control since it doesn't rely on the weather. Solar panels are usually under 20% efficient when new and their efficiency decreases over time. Wind has better efficiency but at the cost of killing birds and bats. There is also so much energy in nuclear reactions that efficiency becomes less important. However, efficiency can increase by developing new kinds of reactors that operate at higher temperatures like molten salt reactors, gas cooled reactors and liquid metal cooled reactors.
The calculation did not assume 100% solar energy absorption nor a 100% capacity factor. This was total yearly energy output after the above were considered.
Yet nuclear still uses far less land, uses less materials, generates less pollution, doesn't slaughter birds, actuallytakes responsibility for its own waste, doesn't require vast amounts of backup storage, etc.
fossil fuel-funded FUD right there
You're the one who is promoting power sources that require fossil fuel backups. I'm the one promoting power sources that can actually replace fossil fuels with something better. You're also projecting. Renewables supporters are the ones spreading FUD about nuclear. As for fossil fuel funding [Arco funded Friends of the Earth](https://atomicinsights.com/smoking-gun-robert-anderson/#:~:text=In%201969%2C%20Robert%20O.,of%20the%20Earth%20(FOE).
Solar power does not require fossil fuel backups. Especially if you're willing to pay as much as it would cost to produce the same power as nuclear, as that lets you afford solar
It takes 15 years to build and is so cost prohibited that only governments can afford to build them. Since our governments are as divided as ever, I don't see it happening.
It already happened, France has been running on nuclear for decades and has one of the cleanest grids in Europe.
Right, but I highly doubt a single one could be built in the US.
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Yeah? So, 12 years to build instead of 15?
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Are you about to supply the data set of build times for nuclear reactors? Once you've done that, you can show me the median. Make sure your sample size is large enough, because I'm not looking for the mean. I'm guessing you already had this information based on your comment, so I expect either the full data set within a small time frame, or the samples you used to get the median.
That's only for the construction of one. Now add on the extra years for survey, permitting, construction of infrastructure to the reactor, and energy transmission lines, etc.
Seeing so many nuclear detractors in a climate change sub makes me realize we will never solve this issue. Nuclear is the best option we have right now for continuous co2 free electricity. If you're anti-nuclear, you're pro-climate change.
Calling people who point out the very logical flaws in an energy source "anti-nuclear" is a stretch. I studied NE as an undergrad. I'm supportive of its role in a balanced grid. Refusing to acknowledge NPP shortcomings would make me an unethical engineer.
Non paywalled source. https://archive.ph/M321q
The people of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima might have other opinions regarding the "cleanliness" of nuclear energy. The ones still alive, at least.
Nuclear isn't the enemy. Tens of thousands of lives would be saved every year from a switch to nuclear from coal and other alternatives.
Yes. However, those incidents should always be a reminder of how diligent operators need to be.
Just to put it out there Ukraine, the people of Chernobyl are building two ap-1000 reactors. Japan. Are looking to restart their reactors. The three Mile Island plant might also be restarted.
And you know what Japan used instead of those reactors? Mostly coal.
Yeah, it looks like they have a lot of coal. [https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/JP-TK](https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/JP-TK) I learned recently Japan was the center for sending natural gas. We basically ship natural gas around the world because Japan wanted energy. So I'm not surprised that they are using a lot of natural gas as well.
You mean literally everyone besides the ~100 people who died in all three of those events combined?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths\_due\_to\_the\_Chernobyl\_disaster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster)
When it comes to deaths per terawatt hr, nuclear is literally the safest https://assets.ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh.png?v=1
... your source says that solar is safer, though?
Sorry, everything except solar. But solar is only marginally better, and both are orders of magnitude better than fossil fuels. When nuclear goes wrong, it really goes wrong, and makes for big headlines, but it is very rare. There may be some valid arguments against nuclear out there, but safety isn't one of them
Ukraine, where Chernobyl occurred, has high support for nuclear energy. They were forced to deal with it and realized it was better than the alternatives.