Comment by V__

Comment by V__ 11 hours ago

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I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away.

The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.

StopDisinfo910 11 hours ago

If you consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut.

For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.

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  • V__ 11 hours ago

    I am totally in agreement, that nuclear plants shouldn't be shut down before fossil ones.

    A decentralized grid sound way more resilient, then one with a few nuclear plants, which often have long unexpected downtimes (see France). I agree with you on the potential logistical dependencies, however that sadly applies to nearly everything right now.

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    • StopDisinfo910 11 hours ago

      The French grid has been extremely resilient with only a minor setback a couple years ago when multiple plants were in maintenance at the same time and that’s despite not significantly investing in it for decades.

      Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.

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      • V__ 11 hours ago

        This year again multiple nuclear plants in France had to reduce their output due to heatwaves and water levels, and ongoing cooling concerns. This is becoming a yearly occurrence. Though, I am not saying you can't have a nuclear grid, or you shouldn't use it at all, it's just that renewables seem to be a much better solution for most cases.

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    • mulmen 11 hours ago

      By definition the grid is decentralized. That’s what makes it a grid. Resiliency of the grid is a function of excess capacity but not the number of nodes.

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      • V__ 10 hours ago

        I am no expert but remembering the grid outage in Spain this year, which was caused by a substation or node failure and not by a capacity problem. Wouldn't it be fair to describe resiliency as a combination of both capacity and nodes?

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oceanplexian 11 hours ago

How is the hype for a limitless clean energy source, something that could benefit every aspect of humanity more than any other invention in human history considered “weird”?

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  • V__ 11 hours ago

    Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive, even though it had 60+ years time. I hope the day fusion energy finally has its big breakthrough isn't too far away, but conventional nuclear won't solve our problems.

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    • xienze 10 hours ago

      > Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive

      I’m laughing in $0.11/kWh nuclear energy while Germany’s “cheaper” green energy is uh... quite a bit more expensive.

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      • V__ 9 hours ago

        Retail or production price, where are you based?

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        • xienze 9 hours ago

          In the US, the price I’m metered at.

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    • mulmen 11 hours ago

      Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps.

      Running our own fusion reactors would be great but waste is not limited to fission designs. All nuclear generation has radioactive waste, it’s unavoidable.

      Grid scale storage with renewables can absolutely meet our needs.

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      • mpweiher 10 hours ago

        > extra steps.

        Those extra steps are crucial, as they massively dilute the output and make it weather/daylight and seasonally dependent.

        Intermittent renewables produce at least an order of magnitude more waste than nuclear reactors, be they fusion or fission.

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      • pfdietz 10 hours ago

        > Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps.

        This observation seems entirely useless and pointless. What implication are you saying we should draw from this?

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  • stonemetal12 11 hours ago

    For something that is supposed to be clean it sure keeps making places unhabitable.

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  • delusional 11 hours ago

    > limitless clean energy source

    Like the guy you're responding to, I'm not a nuclear hater. We also have other "limitless clean energy sources" however, wind and solar.

    How is nuclear going to benefit humanity in ways electrical energy hasn't already? We haven't been energy constrained in the past 10-20 years. It really doesn't seem like additional energy production is going to make that much of a difference.

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    • otikik 11 hours ago

      “Limitless” in that context means “it still happens in a cloudy week with no wind”

      Reply View 3 replies
      • mulmen 11 hours ago

        That is what storage and long distance transmission are for. It’s very hard to take these tired arguments seriously.

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        • mpweiher 10 hours ago

          Both of these are not feasible solutions for industrial economies.

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      • delusional 11 hours ago

        I'd like to see a prior for that use of that word, otherwise you're just making stuff up. Please use words to say things.

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mpweiher 10 hours ago

> It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky.

None of this happens to be true.

A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.

Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electricity, transmission (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.

Making the more expensive part of a system several times more expensive to at best save a little bit on the cheaper part seems...foolish. It's like the old Murphy's law "a $300 picture tube will blow to protect a 3¢ fuse" translated into energy policy.

And whether LCOE is actually cheaper with intermittent renewables is at best debatable. Factor in system costs and it is no contest. Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration.

What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain. Since the #Spainout, the grid operator put the grid in "safe mode", which means no more than 60% intermittent renewables. Quick quiz: if that is "safe mode", what does that make >60% intermittent renewables?

Here the Finnish environment minister:

""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.

He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."

https://yle.fi/a/74-20136905

Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.

While no energy source is completely safe, nuclear happens to be safest one we have.

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  • V__ 8 hours ago

    > A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.

    It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow.

    > Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less.

    True, but land use just isn't that important of a factor. Especially if roofs and other unused lands come into play. It just doesn't make much of a difference.

    > (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.

    With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.

    > Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment

    Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself. At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize and this will apply to most in the near future. Especially when batteries become more widespread.

    > What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain.

    The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables but happened due to a faulty substation.

    > [...] Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.

    Grid scale batteries solve this problem.

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    • mpweiher an hour ago

      > It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant

      This, again, is not true. The average is currently at 6.5 years and dropping slightly, the time has been fairly consistent over the last decades.

      https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...

      The main factor determining build times appears to be "how much do you want to?". France built 50+ reactors in a total of 15 years, the fastest build times are Japan, South Korea, China and Germany.

      Secondary factors are "is this a FOAK build or NOAK", and "how much experience is there building nuclear plants". When Japan was good it built in under 4 years, and had plans to go below 3. And no, that's not detrimental to safety.

      > and use just isn't that important of a factor.

      It is when land is expensive.

      > With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.

      Typical dodge into the qualitative: the additional grad capacity required to ship power across the country from where it is produced to where it is needed is a multiple of that required to strengthen it for additional consumers. Never mind the whole "smart grid" madness.

      > Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself.

      That's also false. These costs are almost always included and have little impact on the total cost of power. For example, the Gösgen plant in Switzerland produces for 4,34 Rappen / kWh, including all costs and including a profit.

      > At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize

      That's also not true. When subsidies for off-shore wind were reduced, Germany, Denmark and the UK had zero bids for wind-parks, and immediately the discussion was "new subsidy models". Intermittent renewables in Germany currently get €20 billion in direct subsidies, never mind the advantage of having feed-in priority and being able to burden other producers with cost of intermittency.

      > The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables

      That's also not true. There was a trigger (in PV production) that led to a substation having problems. But that was just the trigger, not the cause. Grids have to be able to deal with faults like that from time to time. The grid in Spain wasn't, because there were too many intermittent renewables in the grid, and too few rotating masses that stabilize the grid.

      > Grid scale batteries solve this problem.

      Are these grid scale batteries sufficient to power an entire industrialized nation for a week or more in the room with us now? How much are they?

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quickthrowman 11 hours ago

There is no grid that can be sustained on solar and batteries or wind and solar and batteries or wind and solar and pumped hydro and batteries. Possibly geothermal for base load could replace nuclear and natural gas plants, combined with renewal energy and battery storage.

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  • V__ 10 hours ago

    Why not? Grid scale batteries will allow using solar/wind throughout the day and not only peak times, eliminating the duck curve problem. This is already only a few years away.

    This only leaves "Dunkelflaute" as a concern, which can be solved with either hydrogen/gas etc. production and storage during peaks in the summer for example.

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ahmeneeroe-v2 11 hours ago

Solar and battery have had immense investment to bring down that LCOE. Where can we get if we invest similarly in nuclear.

lol at wind though. that's not real.

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  • mpweiher 11 hours ago

    And even then it's not competitive. And LCOE is only a small part of the cost with intermittent renewables.

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alexey-salmin 11 hours ago

That's only true because both solar panels and batteries are produced in China off cheap coal power.

LCOE is not a fundamental metric. EROI is and it's pretty bad for photovoltaics.

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  • mpweiher 11 hours ago

    And even then it's not actually true.

    First, solar and wind are massively subsidized pretty much everywhere they are deployed, in addition to the indirect subsidies they get from China subsidizing production (and internal deployments).

    Second, and more importantly, LCOE is not the full cost, as you rightly point out. It leaves out system costs, and these are huge for intermittent renewables, and not constant. They rise disproportionately as the percentage of intern mitten renewables in a particular grid rises towards 100%.

    Third, and related, in most countries where renewables are deployed, intermittent renewables not just do not have to carry the burden of their intermittency, they are actually allowed to pass these burdens and costs onto their reliable competitors. Which is even more insane than not accounting for intermittency.

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    • V__ 11 hours ago

      Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized. Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France) or the fact, that the public has to bear the cost of dismantling them (Germany). Thus, a comparison isn't that easy to make.

      System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend due to the increasing implementation of grid batteries, which also solves the third argument.

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      • mpweiher 10 hours ago

        > Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized.

        That is also not true. For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all. Even Greenpeace and the Green's chief anti-nuclear Lobbyist, Jürgen Trittin, called nuclear power plants "money printing machines".

        > Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France)

        Those are minute compared to subsidies intermittent renewables get in Germany. In particular as there is the ARENH program, which is effectively a negative subsidy (it takes money away from the nuclear company EDF), and of course EDF is profitable and gives money to the government.

        When you add it all up, France has a negative subsidy of € 0.1 - 7 billion yearly, whereas Germany subsidizes intermittent renewables to the tune of around €20 billion a year.

        > System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend

        That is also not true. System costs are actually rising, because yields are dropping, the share of renewables has risen and the (fairly cheap) coal backup is to be eliminated. Total costs are now estimated at several trillion euros. For comparison, France's nuclear program cost a total of €228 billion through 2011.

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