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Nuclear Power, until those who care about the environment accept that the only clean at scale power solution for base load is nuclear power we will get no where

Nuclear Power, until those who care about the environment accept that the only clean at scale power solution for base load is nuclear power we will get no where. "Renewables" are great and should be in the mix but they are not an at scale solution. http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/images/ghgemissions/sources-overview.png http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/images/ghgemissions/source... By going mostly electric for our transportation and nuclear for power generation we could really make a dent in 58% of this pie. There are people who simultaneous worry a tremendous amount about global warming who will actively protest against nuclear power. All while an extremely large amount of pollution is being burned all around us. Be reasonable we need a now solution or there wont be a when.

vectorjohn 11y ago
Lots of people keep saying this, but I really don't think it's true. Solar and wind work fine at scale. There is nothing un-scalable about them. What they don't do is work at night, and in that case nuclear is a fine option. Although batteries that can run a house overnight aren't that expensive.
- scottkduncan 11y ago
  Wind works at night. :)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- epistasis 11y ago
  Given nuclear's huge expense, huge lead times, and intense local political opposition, and comparing it to how battery&renewable is getting much cheaper with time, I don't doubt that battery&renewable will be cheaper at scale than nuclear power will be by the time that either could be built out.
  - brc 11y ago
    The expense and lead times and nimby-ism which cripples nuclear are mostly regulatory. If you apply the same constraints to wind generation (which is increasingly happening) it looks even worse than nuclear.
    - epistasis 11y ago
      I've never seen convincing numbers that the expense is regulatory. And the nimby-ism is not regulatory in the least. There are always grand claims of how cheap nuclear can be, but it has never been seen in practice. Sometimes people even claim that nuclear is cheap by only looking at the operating & maintenance costs, ignoring the true costs of nuclear, which are all upfront. What type of nuclear constraints could be applied to wind generation? Validation of designs? There's very few turbine designs out there. I can't see how wind could be ever be made more expensive than nuclear, but am open to new data.
      - brc 11y ago
        Where you can put wind power, how many approvals you must have, how long the lead times are. If you can't see how regulatory process increase costs, use this thought experiment. You want to build a house. You buy some land for it, and submit the plans for approval. Now spend the next ten years paying an architect to complete forms and submitting them for review. You have to pay the carrying cost of the land and the architects salary. The cost of the building materials for house remains the same. Can you now afford the house?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ps4fanboy 11y ago
  If we went fully "renewable" how much industrial waste would these batteries that everyone needs create? Solar and Wind really doesnt work for everyone, where it is cost effective, available and reliable it makes sense to mix them in, but you cant tell me you fully expect every country to go 100% Solar and Wind?
  - moultano 11y ago
    Global population is concentrated near the equator and near the coast, both great conditions for solar and wind.
    - ekianjo 11y ago
      Paris is a good example of that.
      - nl 11y ago
        Denmark is a net power exporter, from renewables.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    The industrial waste caused by solar/wind would pale in comparison to the existing waste being generated by electric cars and mobile phones. And of course you can't expect every country to go fully solar/wind. What you need are integrated, continent wide power grids and alternative energy storage mechanisms like molten sands etc.
  - epistasis 11y ago
    Batteries are really not that bad for industrial waste. Lead-acid are terrible, but there are better options when it comes to daily storage of lots of energy. Compared to coal, give me batteries any day! And we don't really yet know the full effects of all this cheap natural we're getting through fracking. Though I'm sure fracking is probably better than coal mining, we'll have to wait to see.
  - vectorjohn 11y ago
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  Any idea what proportion of Western Europe would need to be covered in solar panels and wind farms to reliably give 90% of the required kWh per day? The other 10% could come from tidal. But you'd need much of the potential hydro capacity to act as energy storage. (Assuming battery/hydro back up on a daily basis).
  - epistasis 11y ago
    There's a proposed roadmap for much of the world here: http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CountriesWWS.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Count...
  - js8 11y ago
    Not that much, actually: http://www.techinsider.io/map-shows-solar-panels-to-power-the-earth-2015-9 http://www.techinsider.io/map-shows-solar-panels-to-power-th... It certainly seems more feasible than some feeble attempt to cover the Earth with a reflective surface as a geoengineering measure to counteract global warming.
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      Promising. However naive extrapolation from that source would would be a significant underestimate of required capacity. Western Europe has significant seasonal deviations in sun. Our governments would not accept direct electrical imports from Africa. We also consume much more energy per capita that other regions.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  What is expensive is replacing all the current energy infrastructure. Even if you went out and just re-built coal power stations and oil refineries it would cost trillions. We sometimes forget in first world countries that a lot of the reason we are so wealthy is because we have an enormous stock of physical capital paid for over the centuries.
- js8 11y ago
  I agree. And the fact that you need to store the energy during night and winter is not a big deal for technology either. We have been dealing with a similar problem with food supply since agriculture. I think it looks so unfeasible, because today people don't even recognize when we have a winter - that's how well we have solved the problem.
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Making those shiny new batteries is an extremely dirty and polluting process. Again peopld ignore what they dont see.
- dang 11y ago
  > Just keep repeating it, but it isn't true. Please edit uncivil language like this out of your comments when posting here. Without that (well, that and the uppercase yelling), this comment would be a fine one. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - vectorjohn 11y ago
    Fixed. Didn't know a single word in caps was considered yelling.
    - dang 11y ago
      Well, there were two ;) Thanks! That reads much much better.
nostromo 11y ago
Earth has a set amount of uranium that is destroyed when creating energy. Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction. But if we tried to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear, we would be out within a few decades. Then we'd need to move to other non-renewable materials (thorium?) or start mining astroids. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glob... And the mining of uranium looks awfully similar to the mining of coal. (Of course you need far fewer uranium mines for the same amount of energy.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Arandis_Mine_quer.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Ara...
- ps4fanboy 11y ago
  Pick a problem, you cant solve them all at once. - mining is pretty much a necessity of life at this point. - 200 years to come up with solutions to energy production while not turning the planet into an oven sounds pretty good.
  - nostromo 11y ago
    You've misunderstood my comment. We have 200 years of uranium left at current rates of consumption. But if we replaced all fossil fuels with nuclear, we'd consume 10 times more per year and we'd only have about 20 years of energy available before needing to move on to a new energy source.
    - ps4fanboy 11y ago
      Uranium exploration is pretty much non existent these days, I would'nt be comfortable saying how much there actually is. Peak oil has been coming for decades but they keep finding it.
    - flubert 11y ago
      Okay, it is wikipedia, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor "Adherents claim that with seawater uranium extraction, there would be enough fuel for breeder reactors to satisfy our energy needs for 5 billion years at 1983's total energy consumption rate, thus making nuclear energy effectively a renewable energy."
staticint 11y ago
> the only clean at scale power solution for peak load is nuclear power Nuclear is fantastic for base load, but peak load? Steam bypassing costs as much as generating electricity does, but with nobody wanting to pay for power they didn't use. Technically a good solution, but falls apart economically.
- ps4fanboy 11y ago
  Sorry I meant base load.
akamaka 11y ago
If we can go mostly electric for our transportation, as you suggest, that means we have cheap and plentiful battery storage. If we can easily store power, there's not much advantage for using nuclear power over wind and solar.
- brc 11y ago
  Not necessarily true. Liquid fuels are used for transportation but only for niche generation, because they have higher costs, both in capital equipment and in fuel cost. Likewise, battery cost for transport can make it attractive, but that doesn't necessarily make it better for stationary generation. Scale beats everything when it comes to generation.
  - epistasis 11y ago
    Scale matters for massive thermodynamic processes for effieiceny, but 21st century technology has become much more decentralized. You don't need massive installations of solar or wind at one location, the can be distributed throughout the grid. Massive scale is possible, but it's not required once you get away from heat differentials as the core of your energy process.
    - brc 11y ago
      It still matters for transmission, construction and maintenance costs, as well as resources like land and labor. You may not need scaled installations, but they will still beat out the alternatives in any industry shakeout over the long term. We build large scale factories, farms, ports, airports, roads and retail outlets. These happen because they work. Even if the energy production at scale gave no advantage, all the other advantages of scale means that it wins out in the end.
lucisferre 11y ago
This plan seems to ignore the growth curves of renewables. By the time any nuclear power expansion plan gets into place exponential growth in photovoltaics and other renewable technologies will have taken over. Nuclear power would have been a great idea, if we had started at least 10 or 20 years ago. It is unfortunate "environmentalists" did such a disservice to the environment, but we're long past the point of Nuclear being a viable solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
- illegalsmile 11y ago
  Doubtful that will be anytime soon and we'll most likely always need some sort of baseline power system that's not a from a renewable source.
  - epistasis 11y ago
    That ignores the price curve of batteries. Right now, wholesale prices for lithium ion batteries are $150/kWh of capacity, which translates roughly to $0.15/kWh of stored energy. This is less than the price swing in spot prices for energy currently, so we'll start seeing this market expand drastically. And as electric car batteries lose capacity and need to be replaced, those batteries will still have plenty of storage left for use at home or on the grid. When batteries get down to $75-$100/kWh capacity, storage will be able to take over much more of the grid. And there are lots of promising flow batteries that can beat lithium ion on price, when it comes to grid-level storage.
    - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      Not to mention other energy storage options - of which there are many. If renewables had had a small percentage of the money thrown at nukes in subsidies and sponsorship, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
    - brandmeyer 11y ago
      1) I think you're off by about 2x for wholesale lithium battery prices; they are closer to 300 USD/kW-hr. 2) a) The economics of battery energy storage are effectively a type of arbitrage in time, where you get some fraction of depth-of-discharge over the time in question. 2) b) In the most limiting case, lets assume that battery energy storage is only being used for daily cycling, that the maximum cycle depth is 75%, and that the investor expects to break even in 5 years. In order to be viable at that breakeven time, the price of energy needs to swing by over 0.22 USD/kW-hr over the day (RMS !). Considering that bulk energy is only 0.05 USD/kW-hr now (average!), that's a huge amount of volatility that needs to be exposed to the market. I suspect that if customers are exposed to that volatility instead, that we will see enough voluntary adjustment on the demand side of the market to prevent 5x swings in price. With that much volatility available, consumers will demand the savings that aggressive time-of-use pricing offers in such a market. On the other hand, the economics become much more favorable for energy storage in the frequency support market. For example, the market for primary frequency reserve (PFR) operates on 15 minute time scales and faster. Therefore, the time between battery cycles is two orders of magnitude smaller than the bulk storage market. Right now, there is enough PFR on the US grid (via coal-fired steam and gas-turbine power) that the price for PFR is very low. But as renewables continue to displace fossil fuels as a fraction of total power, the price for PFR will start to creep up.
addicted 11y ago
We've had this discussion before, but nuclear is already more expensive than renewables, and getting more expensive. Renewables are getting cheaper. In addition, nuclear takes longer to setup, and the most feasible solutions being considered that are supposed to solve nuclear's current problems are all in the prototype stage at best.
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  This neglects how the great expense of nuclear and the long amount of time it takes to build is at least in part due to decades of anti-nuclear propaganda. There are certain activist groups who have created this problem and are now disingenuously pointing to the problem as if they had nothing to do with it.
  - lamontcg 11y ago
    No, even the French nuclear build showed negative learning effects that had nothing to do with anti-nuclear propaganda. A global nuclear build is going to do much, much worse than France did: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421510003526 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421510... Abstract The paper reviews the history and the economics of the French PWR program, which is arguably the most successful nuclear-scale up experience in an industrialized country. Key to this success was a unique institutional framework that allowed for centralized decision making, a high degree of standardization, and regulatory stability, epitomized by comparatively short reactor construction times. Drawing on largely unknown public records, the paper reveals for the first time both absolute as well as yearly and specific reactor costs and their evolution over time. Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characterized by a substantial escalation of real-term construction costs. Conversely, operating costs have remained remarkably flat, despite lowered load factors resulting from the need for load modulation in a system where base-load nuclear power plants supply three quarters of electricity. The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.
einrealist 11y ago
Only if you agree, that you move into a unpopulated area, that the nuclear power plants are built in your garden, that everything is paid by you and you also take care of the waste. Thank you.
- mikeash 11y ago
  I'd be happy to live near a nuclear plant and waste disposal. Why not? It sure would beat living downwind of a coal power plant like many of us do now.
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  It is a well-known and fully solved problem of how to deal with nuclear waste. The reason it is not dealt with is purely political, at least in the United States: an anti-science Senator who was pandering to anti-science constituents in his state by killing the waste disposal site.
codecamper 11y ago
And so we build nuclear power plants in Nigeria (population 175 million)?
nickbauman 11y ago
The former head of the IAEC has come out on record against this notion. She said that the paltry few nuclear power plants in development are no where near far along enough to make a difference for over 20 years from now, while renewables are delivering, albeit still too slowly, right now.
MichaelMoser123 11y ago
> nuclear power bla bla global warming bla bla Chernobyl? Fukushima? The technology has the potential of destroying huge areas for good. Do we want that? A complex system that is attacked on multiple threat vectors is likely to fail - no matter how many redundandancies are put into safety. I can tell you that from looking at CS/network security. A complete failure/breach of a big reactor is very costly.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > destroying huge areas for good Even Chernobyl isn't destroyed for good, though it's still an expensive mess to clean up. Fortunately, nobody builds reactors with such an idiotic design (a positive void coefficient[1]). The actual site at Fukushima Daiichi is going to to be a long, expensive cleanup, but that's about the extent of the damage. Concerns about the surrounding area is just radiophobia and an extreme overreaction by the Japanese government. With how incredibly destructive the tsunami was, Fukushima Daini (which was also badly damage by the tsunami) showed us how incredibly safe nuclear power can be. > can tell you that from looking at CS More CS people need to study the lesson of incidents like therac-25[2]. It's very important to learn what fail safe means, which is very possible to implement, usually by avoiding as much of that "complex system". I trust the inherent and engineered safety systems of a nuclear reactor much more than I would trust any software project - including my own. > A complete failure/breach of a big reactor is very costly. So are fly ash slurry spills. You're holding coal to the same standards, right? [1] http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/chernobyl.html http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/chernobyl.html [2] http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf
  - MichaelMoser123 11y ago
    Caesium 137 has a fucking halflife of 30.7 years. There is still a lot of that material in Ukraine and Belorussia. The economy and agriculture of both countries sustained severe damage as a result http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/5-social-economic-impacts.htm http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/5-social-economic... now were just very lucky that there was no full meltdown of the reactor core. Can you claim without flinching that this will never ever happen? I doubt it. Just look up 'heroes of Chernobyl' - we were very close http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/04/13/when-three-divers-swam-into-the-jaws-of-chernobyl/ http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/04/13/when-three-divers-swam-i... The fact that an accident of similar magnitude happened after Chernobyl sort of invalidates the point that it was all exclusively due to faulty reactor design. In Germany this assessment led to a full shutdown of all nuclear power plants.

vectorjohn 11y ago

Lots of people keep saying this, but I really don't think it's true. Solar and wind work fine at scale. There is nothing un-scalable about them. What they don't do is work at night, and in that case nuclear is a fine option. Although batteries that can run a house overnight aren't that expensive.

scottkduncan 11y ago
Wind works at night. :)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
epistasis 11y ago
Given nuclear's huge expense, huge lead times, and intense local political opposition, and comparing it to how battery&renewable is getting much cheaper with time, I don't doubt that battery&renewable will be cheaper at scale than nuclear power will be by the time that either could be built out.
- brc 11y ago
  The expense and lead times and nimby-ism which cripples nuclear are mostly regulatory. If you apply the same constraints to wind generation (which is increasingly happening) it looks even worse than nuclear.
  - epistasis 11y ago
    I've never seen convincing numbers that the expense is regulatory. And the nimby-ism is not regulatory in the least. There are always grand claims of how cheap nuclear can be, but it has never been seen in practice. Sometimes people even claim that nuclear is cheap by only looking at the operating & maintenance costs, ignoring the true costs of nuclear, which are all upfront. What type of nuclear constraints could be applied to wind generation? Validation of designs? There's very few turbine designs out there. I can't see how wind could be ever be made more expensive than nuclear, but am open to new data.
    - brc 11y ago
      Where you can put wind power, how many approvals you must have, how long the lead times are. If you can't see how regulatory process increase costs, use this thought experiment. You want to build a house. You buy some land for it, and submit the plans for approval. Now spend the next ten years paying an architect to complete forms and submitting them for review. You have to pay the carrying cost of the land and the architects salary. The cost of the building materials for house remains the same. Can you now afford the house?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ps4fanboy 11y ago
If we went fully "renewable" how much industrial waste would these batteries that everyone needs create? Solar and Wind really doesnt work for everyone, where it is cost effective, available and reliable it makes sense to mix them in, but you cant tell me you fully expect every country to go 100% Solar and Wind?
- moultano 11y ago
  Global population is concentrated near the equator and near the coast, both great conditions for solar and wind.
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    Paris is a good example of that.
    - nl 11y ago
      Denmark is a net power exporter, from renewables.
- threeseed 11y ago
  The industrial waste caused by solar/wind would pale in comparison to the existing waste being generated by electric cars and mobile phones. And of course you can't expect every country to go fully solar/wind. What you need are integrated, continent wide power grids and alternative energy storage mechanisms like molten sands etc.
- epistasis 11y ago
  Batteries are really not that bad for industrial waste. Lead-acid are terrible, but there are better options when it comes to daily storage of lots of energy. Compared to coal, give me batteries any day! And we don't really yet know the full effects of all this cheap natural we're getting through fracking. Though I'm sure fracking is probably better than coal mining, we'll have to wait to see.
- vectorjohn 11y ago
JupiterMoon 11y ago
Any idea what proportion of Western Europe would need to be covered in solar panels and wind farms to reliably give 90% of the required kWh per day? The other 10% could come from tidal. But you'd need much of the potential hydro capacity to act as energy storage. (Assuming battery/hydro back up on a daily basis).
- epistasis 11y ago
  There's a proposed roadmap for much of the world here: http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CountriesWWS.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Count...
- js8 11y ago
  Not that much, actually: http://www.techinsider.io/map-shows-solar-panels-to-power-the-earth-2015-9 http://www.techinsider.io/map-shows-solar-panels-to-power-th... It certainly seems more feasible than some feeble attempt to cover the Earth with a reflective surface as a geoengineering measure to counteract global warming.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    Promising. However naive extrapolation from that source would would be a significant underestimate of required capacity. Western Europe has significant seasonal deviations in sun. Our governments would not accept direct electrical imports from Africa. We also consume much more energy per capita that other regions.
danieltillett 11y ago
What is expensive is replacing all the current energy infrastructure. Even if you went out and just re-built coal power stations and oil refineries it would cost trillions. We sometimes forget in first world countries that a lot of the reason we are so wealthy is because we have an enormous stock of physical capital paid for over the centuries.
js8 11y ago
I agree. And the fact that you need to store the energy during night and winter is not a big deal for technology either. We have been dealing with a similar problem with food supply since agriculture. I think it looks so unfeasible, because today people don't even recognize when we have a winter - that's how well we have solved the problem.
ekianjo 11y ago
Making those shiny new batteries is an extremely dirty and polluting process. Again peopld ignore what they dont see.
dang 11y ago
> Just keep repeating it, but it isn't true. Please edit uncivil language like this out of your comments when posting here. Without that (well, that and the uppercase yelling), this comment would be a fine one. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- vectorjohn 11y ago
  Fixed. Didn't know a single word in caps was considered yelling.
  - dang 11y ago
    Well, there were two ;) Thanks! That reads much much better.

nostromo 11y ago

Earth has a set amount of uranium that is destroyed when creating energy. Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction. But if we tried to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear, we would be out within a few decades. Then we'd need to move to other non-renewable materials (thorium?) or start mining astroids. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glob... And the mining of uranium looks awfully similar to the mining of coal. (Of course you need far fewer uranium mines for the same amount of energy.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Arandis_Mine_quer.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#/media/File:Ara...

ps4fanboy 11y ago
Pick a problem, you cant solve them all at once. - mining is pretty much a necessity of life at this point. - 200 years to come up with solutions to energy production while not turning the planet into an oven sounds pretty good.
- nostromo 11y ago
  You've misunderstood my comment. We have 200 years of uranium left at current rates of consumption. But if we replaced all fossil fuels with nuclear, we'd consume 10 times more per year and we'd only have about 20 years of energy available before needing to move on to a new energy source.
  - ps4fanboy 11y ago
    Uranium exploration is pretty much non existent these days, I would'nt be comfortable saying how much there actually is. Peak oil has been coming for decades but they keep finding it.
  - flubert 11y ago
    Okay, it is wikipedia, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor "Adherents claim that with seawater uranium extraction, there would be enough fuel for breeder reactors to satisfy our energy needs for 5 billion years at 1983's total energy consumption rate, thus making nuclear energy effectively a renewable energy."

staticint 11y ago

> the only clean at scale power solution for peak load is nuclear power Nuclear is fantastic for base load, but peak load? Steam bypassing costs as much as generating electricity does, but with nobody wanting to pay for power they didn't use. Technically a good solution, but falls apart economically.

ps4fanboy 11y ago
Sorry I meant base load.

akamaka 11y ago

If we can go mostly electric for our transportation, as you suggest, that means we have cheap and plentiful battery storage. If we can easily store power, there's not much advantage for using nuclear power over wind and solar.

brc 11y ago
Not necessarily true. Liquid fuels are used for transportation but only for niche generation, because they have higher costs, both in capital equipment and in fuel cost. Likewise, battery cost for transport can make it attractive, but that doesn't necessarily make it better for stationary generation. Scale beats everything when it comes to generation.
- epistasis 11y ago
  Scale matters for massive thermodynamic processes for effieiceny, but 21st century technology has become much more decentralized. You don't need massive installations of solar or wind at one location, the can be distributed throughout the grid. Massive scale is possible, but it's not required once you get away from heat differentials as the core of your energy process.
  - brc 11y ago
    It still matters for transmission, construction and maintenance costs, as well as resources like land and labor. You may not need scaled installations, but they will still beat out the alternatives in any industry shakeout over the long term. We build large scale factories, farms, ports, airports, roads and retail outlets. These happen because they work. Even if the energy production at scale gave no advantage, all the other advantages of scale means that it wins out in the end.

lucisferre 11y ago

This plan seems to ignore the growth curves of renewables. By the time any nuclear power expansion plan gets into place exponential growth in photovoltaics and other renewable technologies will have taken over. Nuclear power would have been a great idea, if we had started at least 10 or 20 years ago. It is unfortunate "environmentalists" did such a disservice to the environment, but we're long past the point of Nuclear being a viable solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

illegalsmile 11y ago
Doubtful that will be anytime soon and we'll most likely always need some sort of baseline power system that's not a from a renewable source.
- epistasis 11y ago
  That ignores the price curve of batteries. Right now, wholesale prices for lithium ion batteries are $150/kWh of capacity, which translates roughly to $0.15/kWh of stored energy. This is less than the price swing in spot prices for energy currently, so we'll start seeing this market expand drastically. And as electric car batteries lose capacity and need to be replaced, those batteries will still have plenty of storage left for use at home or on the grid. When batteries get down to $75-$100/kWh capacity, storage will be able to take over much more of the grid. And there are lots of promising flow batteries that can beat lithium ion on price, when it comes to grid-level storage.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Not to mention other energy storage options - of which there are many. If renewables had had a small percentage of the money thrown at nukes in subsidies and sponsorship, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
  - brandmeyer 11y ago
    1) I think you're off by about 2x for wholesale lithium battery prices; they are closer to 300 USD/kW-hr. 2) a) The economics of battery energy storage are effectively a type of arbitrage in time, where you get some fraction of depth-of-discharge over the time in question. 2) b) In the most limiting case, lets assume that battery energy storage is only being used for daily cycling, that the maximum cycle depth is 75%, and that the investor expects to break even in 5 years. In order to be viable at that breakeven time, the price of energy needs to swing by over 0.22 USD/kW-hr over the day (RMS !). Considering that bulk energy is only 0.05 USD/kW-hr now (average!), that's a huge amount of volatility that needs to be exposed to the market. I suspect that if customers are exposed to that volatility instead, that we will see enough voluntary adjustment on the demand side of the market to prevent 5x swings in price. With that much volatility available, consumers will demand the savings that aggressive time-of-use pricing offers in such a market. On the other hand, the economics become much more favorable for energy storage in the frequency support market. For example, the market for primary frequency reserve (PFR) operates on 15 minute time scales and faster. Therefore, the time between battery cycles is two orders of magnitude smaller than the bulk storage market. Right now, there is enough PFR on the US grid (via coal-fired steam and gas-turbine power) that the price for PFR is very low. But as renewables continue to displace fossil fuels as a fraction of total power, the price for PFR will start to creep up.

addicted 11y ago

We've had this discussion before, but nuclear is already more expensive than renewables, and getting more expensive. Renewables are getting cheaper. In addition, nuclear takes longer to setup, and the most feasible solutions being considered that are supposed to solve nuclear's current problems are all in the prototype stage at best.

13thLetter 11y ago
This neglects how the great expense of nuclear and the long amount of time it takes to build is at least in part due to decades of anti-nuclear propaganda. There are certain activist groups who have created this problem and are now disingenuously pointing to the problem as if they had nothing to do with it.
- lamontcg 11y ago
  No, even the French nuclear build showed negative learning effects that had nothing to do with anti-nuclear propaganda. A global nuclear build is going to do much, much worse than France did: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421510003526 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421510... Abstract The paper reviews the history and the economics of the French PWR program, which is arguably the most successful nuclear-scale up experience in an industrialized country. Key to this success was a unique institutional framework that allowed for centralized decision making, a high degree of standardization, and regulatory stability, epitomized by comparatively short reactor construction times. Drawing on largely unknown public records, the paper reveals for the first time both absolute as well as yearly and specific reactor costs and their evolution over time. Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characterized by a substantial escalation of real-term construction costs. Conversely, operating costs have remained remarkably flat, despite lowered load factors resulting from the need for load modulation in a system where base-load nuclear power plants supply three quarters of electricity. The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.

einrealist 11y ago

Only if you agree, that you move into a unpopulated area, that the nuclear power plants are built in your garden, that everything is paid by you and you also take care of the waste. Thank you.

mikeash 11y ago
I'd be happy to live near a nuclear plant and waste disposal. Why not? It sure would beat living downwind of a coal power plant like many of us do now.
13thLetter 11y ago
It is a well-known and fully solved problem of how to deal with nuclear waste. The reason it is not dealt with is purely political, at least in the United States: an anti-science Senator who was pandering to anti-science constituents in his state by killing the waste disposal site.

codecamper 11y ago

And so we build nuclear power plants in Nigeria (population 175 million)?

nickbauman 11y ago

The former head of the IAEC has come out on record against this notion. She said that the paltry few nuclear power plants in development are no where near far along enough to make a difference for over 20 years from now, while renewables are delivering, albeit still too slowly, right now.

MichaelMoser123 11y ago

> nuclear power bla bla global warming bla bla Chernobyl? Fukushima? The technology has the potential of destroying huge areas for good. Do we want that? A complex system that is attacked on multiple threat vectors is likely to fail - no matter how many redundandancies are put into safety. I can tell you that from looking at CS/network security. A complete failure/breach of a big reactor is very costly.

pdkl95 11y ago
> destroying huge areas for good Even Chernobyl isn't destroyed for good, though it's still an expensive mess to clean up. Fortunately, nobody builds reactors with such an idiotic design (a positive void coefficient[1]). The actual site at Fukushima Daiichi is going to to be a long, expensive cleanup, but that's about the extent of the damage. Concerns about the surrounding area is just radiophobia and an extreme overreaction by the Japanese government. With how incredibly destructive the tsunami was, Fukushima Daini (which was also badly damage by the tsunami) showed us how incredibly safe nuclear power can be. > can tell you that from looking at CS More CS people need to study the lesson of incidents like therac-25[2]. It's very important to learn what fail safe means, which is very possible to implement, usually by avoiding as much of that "complex system". I trust the inherent and engineered safety systems of a nuclear reactor much more than I would trust any software project - including my own. > A complete failure/breach of a big reactor is very costly. So are fly ash slurry spills. You're holding coal to the same standards, right? [1] http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/chernobyl.html http://www.hiroshimasyndrome.com/chernobyl.html [2] http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf
- MichaelMoser123 11y ago
  Caesium 137 has a fucking halflife of 30.7 years. There is still a lot of that material in Ukraine and Belorussia. The economy and agriculture of both countries sustained severe damage as a result http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/5-social-economic-impacts.htm http://www.greenfacts.org/en/chernobyl/l-3/5-social-economic... now were just very lucky that there was no full meltdown of the reactor core. Can you claim without flinching that this will never ever happen? I doubt it. Just look up 'heroes of Chernobyl' - we were very close http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/04/13/when-three-divers-swam-into-the-jaws-of-chernobyl/ http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/04/13/when-three-divers-swam-i... The fact that an accident of similar magnitude happened after Chernobyl sort of invalidates the point that it was all exclusively due to faulty reactor design. In Germany this assessment led to a full shutdown of all nuclear power plants.