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It's a trope that Nuclear is failing because of fearmongering. Nuclear is uneconomical, especially with renewable energy dropping in cost consistently. Is Franc

• aloer 8y ago
  39 billion of 1.28 trillion is 3%. Does that mean they only save 3% when betting on falling prices for renewables? For four decades? Doesn't sound much like a financial advantage compared to the (presumably) more predictable and stable prices for nuclear
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • philipkglass 8y ago
    Doesn't sound much like a financial advantage compared to the (presumably) more predictable and stable prices for nuclear. Reactors that are already built and in good operating order provide very predictable electricity at low-moderate costs. Building new reactors is much less predictable. France's latest reactor design, the EPR, is many years behind schedule and many billions over budget at both French and Finnish projects to build the new reactor. It was even years late when built in China, where presumably no lawsuits/activists/excessive safety regulations were ever allowed to get in the way.
    • pfdietz 8y ago
      Also, we're now in an environment where power technology is changing rapidly, due to the rapid decline in cost of renewables. In that environment, any long term investment is suspect. This is one reason combustion turbines held on: they have lower capital cost, so if they're made obsolete in a couple of decades it's not as big a hit.
  • dv_dt 8y ago
    The only thing predictable about nuclear construction prices and schedules is that they tend to go over by 2x-4x or higher (but they tend to get canceled at that point). The 3% difference is a reasonable criticism, meaning that they're basically at parity cost wise in this comparison. But then you really have to add the 1000+ year waste storage costs - which even if not ignored, are ridiculous to estimate costs for.
    • tomatotomato37 8y ago
      Is that because its a nuclear project, or because its a large civic project? With everything from the California High-Speed Rail project to New York's public transit system to the F35 fighter jet I don't really think the US is going to be getting any major projects done again without absolutely demolishing anything resembling a budget, at least in the near future.
      • dv_dt 8y ago
        I don't think you can separate nuclear projects from being large civic projects, but I agree with you on something going massively wrong with US large project capability. IMHO, it's the rise of a specialist-in-managment-only class of executive in the US more than other nations.
    • fmajid 8y ago
      Only in the US. France has well-managed public works and they use standardized reactor designs for economies of scale. That doesn’t prevent snafus on new designs like the Superphenix fast breeder reactor, but nothing like the US’ absurd cost disease.
      • Octoth0rpe 8y ago
        Superphenix isn't exactly the only example of a complete cost fuckup in france: http://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-revises-schedule,-costs-of-Flamanville-EPR http://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/EDF-revises-schedule,... Short version: was originally expected to cost 3.3 bil euro, is now at 10.9 bil euro and climbing.
  • mikemotherwell 8y ago
    Does that account for the space available in India? How much land would it take to provide power for 1.3 billion people? I think the idea that renewables will be feasible in a country India's size with India's population, while preserving much if any natural space seems, at best, optimistic. By all means Australia - the 6th largest country by area in the world with a population of 25ish million has the space. But India? Sure it is the 7th largest country by area, but it is less than half Australia's size, with 50-70 times the population (India's population estimates are tricky). The scariest part of these debates is that the solution is likely energy dependence, as in countries with space - and day more sunshine - sell electricity to those without it. I don't think ANYONE likes that idea, but I can't see any way that it is feasible worldwide while maintaining each country's energy independence.
• merpnderp 8y ago
  People say this, but they never explain where the power will come from when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. I hear people throw out "batteries" as if that word is some sort of solution.
  • toomuchtodo 8y ago
    There are several islands already running on solar, wind, and batteries alone. If every six months the rate at which a million EVs are sold, how much battery storage is that over the next decade? My math says tens of GWs.
    • jabl 8y ago
      > There are several islands already running on solar, wind, and batteries alone. EDIT Which is awesome, and surely beats running diesel generators! Which presumably don't have large, dense cities nor heavy industry? > If every six months the rate at which a million EVs are sold, how much battery storage is that over the next decade? My math says tens of GWs. Battery costs are orders of magnitude too high to make sense for anything but very short term storage. Yes, they are fantastic for some ancillary services like frequency control. And with lots of solar and air conditioning, might allow you to get past the duck curve hump in the evenings. Providing energy for a couple weeks when a high pressure system has parked on your country and wind produces 0? Forget it.
      • dv_dt 8y ago
        Iceland has a lot of industrial aluminum smelting operations there because they have very low cost renewable hydro power... Flow batteries will come online to carry the storage past where high volume production lithium cost savings can't reach. I think if we put nearly the same or as consistent capital into renewable as we put into even the last decade of fossil fuel discovery, we'll find that costs drop very very rapidly. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/03/13/worlds-first-flow-battery-gets-10-years-of-performance-insurance/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/03/13/worlds-first-flow-bat...
  • zanny 8y ago
• roenxi 8y ago
  I have issues using French costings because I can't read the primary sources, and there are a lot of stupid environmentalists out there who misrepresent the costs. I'm going to commit the same sin and point out that people are willing to claim 'renewables in Germany are pulling down wholesale prices!' and ignore the fact that their retail prices are amongst the highest in Europe because they are charging a massive renewable-support tariff. The experience in Australia is nobody has considered nuclear because one political party (labour) has historically had a policy of banning the technology. The economics of the costs have never been tested because of the hysterical response to radiation risk. I suspect if it was regulated to the same safety standards as solar it would be very cost-competitive indeed.
  • talaketu 8y ago
    That's a ridiculous analysis of anti-nuclear sentiment in Australia. Australia is a democracy and many minor political parties have responded to genuine community concerns that developed since the cold war around non-proliferation, disarmament, testing, nuclear waste management, aboriginal land rights, mining degradation. The current focus of energy policy is on reducing GHG emissions, reliability and affordability of supply. The installed cost of nuclear power does not make it an attractive option compared to fast installation of solar and wind generation.
    • roenxi 8y ago
      Labor dropped their policy back in '07 because it was a stupid policy, you know. > non-proliferation, disarmament, testing You don't need to do any of that jazz to have nuclear power. The existence of cheap and clean nuclear power would in fact be a powerful stabilising force and likely to promote world peace. > nuclear waste management Are there worries here that cannot be fairly summed up as concerns about radiation risk? The volumes are tiny and trivially manageable apart from that. > aboriginal land rights, mining degradation Those are simply anti-mining concerns. There is nowhere in Australia that mining doesn't interact with somebody's land rights. There is also no organised political force in Australia that wants to ban mining - even the Greens are not opposed to mining in principle. > The installed cost of nuclear power does not make it an attractive option ... Maybe. I'm not up to date with the current costs for wind and solar but I've been consistently told they were the cheapest option and it has been consistently proven they are not. Happily the evidence is a lot more compelling this round but I'm waiting to see the whole-of-grid picture. That doesn't change the fact that there was a long stretch of Australia's history where the most economic cheap & clean source of energy was basically blanket banned due to a major parties policy. You'd have to be stupid to try and run the gauntlet with nuclear power in the current political environment, so I doubt it is going to get a fair go.
• endorphone 8y ago
  "It's a trope that Nuclear is failing because of fearmongering." I think it's a large scale astroturfing effort by the nuclear industry (which is huge, with a very small number of players) and the useful rubes who play along. Nuclear may be a necessary part of the grid mix, but the panacea presented has never remotely been close to reality -- every build takes much longer than promised, and always, with 100% certainty, costs billions more than planned. Every build has maintenance that costs multiples of the claims, operation that is far more expensive, and with waste products that there is still no viable solution for, with an eternity of costs dragging them down. And nuclear only exists because the public subsidizes it by eschewing the need for real insurance (which would be prohibitively expensive otherwise). In every economic sense nuclear has been an enormous boondoggle, and they stopped making them because every energy provider got wise. This has nothing to do with fearmongering or some sort of ignorant public -- quite the contrary, the overwhelming public sentiment had no problem with nuclear -- though that claim frequently appears. It's bizarre.
  • Veelox 8y ago
    >I think it's a large scale astroturfing effort by the nuclear industry Just to be clear, you think that the nuclear industry is paying people to go on line and say positive things about nuclear power? Can I get some kind of source for this claim?
    • endorphone 8y ago
      While I led off with "I think", the notion that this is outlandish is a curious response. Every large industry has social media massaging efforts (and nuclear has layers and layers of lobbying and PR groups), and I see no reason why nuclear would be free of this. The recurring "Nuclear is the only hope" posts on various social media sites come with regular frequency. But they also have a number of former well-known figures who are quite literally on their payroll. People like Patrick Moore who they pay to write editorials -- always with the byline that he was a Greenpeace activist (yet never noting that he's paid to do this) -- heralding the wonders of nuclear energy. It's a massive industry, and every plant is tens of billions of dollars, so of course they engage in these efforts.
• tropo 8y ago
  Nuclear can be cheap. We have decided to make it expensive. We throw away 95% of the fuel. This is because Carter gave an order to not reprocess old fuel rods. Well, we would throw away 95%, but actually we just keep it sitting around for political reasons. Most of our fissionable material is sitting in containment ponds. The NRC refuses to give guidance. They will only approve a reactor or disapprove it, given a finalized design. You have to do all the design work up front, completely in the dark, and then you get a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Every stupid insignificant part involves absurd paperwork, right down to changing the lightbulbs.
  • xyzzyz 8y ago
    Nuclear fuel is very cheap per kWh generated. It's so cheap that people don't bother with breeder reactors, because the potential savings in fuel costs are trivial. It's not why nuclear is expensive. It's the construction costs.
    • acidburnNSA 8y ago
      And operation costs. Construction and operation costs are both hampered by regulatory burden that is not currently commensurate with the statistical risk.
      • endorphone 8y ago
        It understates the statistical risk! Nuclear power plants have international treatise to severely curtail their liability in the event of an accident because nuclear events are extraordinarily costly. Fukushima thus far has yielded some $700B USD of costs, and it has no end in site. Chernobyl has been estimated at having cost $235B USD. No insurance company would touch this sort of liability, so governments put a hard cap on the potential liability. Here in Ontario, nuclear plants were only responsible for $75M of damage for the longest time, though over the next few years it will increase to $1B. The actual damage it could reasonably cost -- what any other industry would have to insure for -- would be more in the $1000B ($1T) range.
• nickik 8y ago
  All this renewable stuff and the saving are total theory. There is no industrial country that is even close to being fully renewable. France would do much better to replace their nuclear reactors with more modern once over a long time. These reactors work for almost 100 years while you have to replace solar panels and wind multiple times. Not to mention intermittency is not even close to being solved. Every actual attempted of using renewable has skyrocketed costs however much people want to ignore that.
  • pfdietz 8y ago
    Nothing ever happens for the first time, right?
• nickik 8y ago
  > It's a trope that Nuclear is failing because of fearmongering. Nuclear is uneconomical, especially with renewable energy dropping in cost consistently. You are ignoring that the fearmongering has over a long time influenced laws and regulation to make it uneconomical. To pretend there is no correlation is simply disingenuous. It was a hope of many senators that wanted to get the 'green' vote to systematically defund and over-regulate nuclear. Nuclear innovation was significantly hindered by political interest on ever level, federal to local and I can go into lots of examples. It is actually well known and confirmed that anti-nuclear organization such as green peace had a deliberate political strategy to focus on one thing only, more regulation for nuclear TO make it more expensive. The 'nuclear is unsafe' hammer has turned out to be very effective because most people and even most politicians don't know the facts. The coal and oil interest of course have a nice alliance with the greenpeace types and together nuclear was systematically hindered. Just look at the current regulatory agency and the almost complete standstill in improvements since they took over. If you look the production of nuclear reactors in the US you will see that they were on pace to replace coal power when building them was not much more expensive then a coal plant. Since then we had almost zero innovation and cost have exploded. If you just look at the resources required for nuclear, there is no reason it should be so expensive. The problem is that we are using 60 year old designs because innovation has been made totally impossible thanks to the regulatory framework.
• tracker1 8y ago
  What damage does it actually make to the environment when creating solar panels? I mean, what materials are gathered, distributed and collected from where? What is the break even point just on cost, not even counting environmental impact.