9 ms·

Solar & wind are great, but no mention of nuclear? (look into Gen IV if concerned about nuclear's reputation) That's looking like what we need most of all if w

by Reedx 8y ago

Solar & wind are great, but no mention of nuclear? (look into Gen IV if concerned about nuclear's reputation) That's looking like what we need most of all if we want to seriously tackle the problem. If you're wondering why, Bill Gates argues a good case on why solar & wind are not enough: https://youtu.be/d1EB1zsxW0k?t=518 https://youtu.be/d1EB1zsxW0k?t=518

bilbo0s 8y ago
Problem is, there is no private sector money for that. You want that? You gotta figure out how to get government to pay for it. Investment in nuclear requires MUCH more captial than just throwing up some windmills somewhere. Even if you get rid of all regulation and taxes, it'd still be orders of magnitude more expensive. Private money would still rush into wind, solar, and storage.
- kingnothing 8y ago
  Vogtle, the only nuclear power plant currently under construction in the US, is privately funded. The only info I see about government involvement is the guarantee of about $8B of construction loans, with a total cost of around $25B paid for by a few regional power companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
  - beat 8y ago
    If it was economically viable, it would be done. Forget the US and complaining about the darn treehuggers. Look at countries that don't particularly care about the environment. Russia gets about 20% of its power from nuclear, and is currently scaling back expansion plans due to cost. India gets only 3% from nuclear, and new development will get that to maybe 5%. China gets less than 4% of its power from nuclear, and is backing off from new construction plans as well. If nuclear were really cheap, and environmentalist resistance was really the problem, we'd see much more nuclear power in these countries, both existing and under construction.
    - lstodd 8y ago
      > Russia gets about 20% of its power from nuclear, and is currently scaling back expansion plans due to cost. Citation needed on scaling back. Any way you slice it, Russia can't rely on renewables, it's either fossil or nuclear since most of hydroelectric is already harnessed. Edit: I just had a cursory look of Moscow energy needs. It has about 12GWe installed capacity in city limits, all natural gas. Up to twice that is used in distict heating in winter. I did not dig up how much energy is imported, but given how many high-voltage transmission lines come in it can't be trivial. Replacing that with "renewables" is not possible.
      - beat 8y ago
        12Gw == 12,000Mw. Off a quick lookup, 2Mw of wind requires 1.5 acres of land. A little arithmetic, some rounding up, and we need, say, 10,000 acres of wind power, around 15 square miles. But you'll raise an objection, so double that. And then you'll raise another objection, so double it again, and sooner or later, we're up to 100 square miles of windmills. The city of Moscow alone is 970 square miles. For point of comparison, Minnesota produced 3500Mw of wind in 2016, from wind farms mostly in the southwest part of the state. There's lots and lots of land left for more wind farms.
        jessaustin 8y ago
        If Russia has plenty of anything, it's land. USA is in a similar situation. If politics didn't intervene, they both would naturally use more wind power than more densely populated nations.
      - godelski 8y ago
        >> Russia gets about 20% of its power from nuclear, and is currently scaling back expansion plans due to cost. > Citation needed on scaling back. [0] says 11% btw [0] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/russia/energy- https://www.worlddata.info/europe/russia/energy-
      - int_19h 8y ago
        Don't forget that many power plants are thermal combined-heat-and-power that utilize waste heat from power generation. If you replace them all with renewables, you'd have to compensate for that heat output, not just electricity.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Vogtie is the example that proves the rule. Originally, it was supposed to cost right around USD14 Billion. Cost overruns have pushed that, not to USD25 Billion, but USD28 Billion. (And the online date has been pushed back from this year, to 2022.) Keep in mind, the DoE was supposed to back USD8 Billion of the original USD14 Billion price tag. So needless to say, the financials have changed considerably. So much so that the consortium behind Vogtie nearly fell apart due to the latest cost overrun combined with the fact that they could not pass any more cost overruns on to their customers. (The customers under state law are not allowed to switch energy suppliers.) Vogtie is a slow motion train crash. When it comes online, the customers will be forced to pay more than wind power customers BECAUSE the government intervened and prohibited any customers from changing suppliers. And I suspect that's gonna go over about as well as a fart in church.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  But there isn't much private sector money in windmills either and solar isn't going to deliver enough energy. So that leaves us with oil and coal and wood. Whatever the third phase of clean energy will be it won't be disrupting anything fundamental, it can't and it isn't as clean as we like to believe.
- credit_guy 8y ago
  > Even if you get rid of all regulation and taxes, it'd still be orders of magnitude more expensive Are you sure about that? There is a company in upstate New York [1] that quietly builds about one nuclear reactor per year. You don't hear much about it because that reactor goes to power a submarine. The safety record of these reactors is unbelievable; after all some people spend weeks at a time within meters of them. Here's a quote from a US Navy spokesperson: "We have never had an accident or release of radioactivity which has had an adverse effect on human health or the environment" [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knolls_Atomic_Power_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knolls_Atomic_Power_Laboratory [2] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/09/john-mccain/navys-record-unblemished/ https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun...
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Compare the cost of just one of those reactors... to the cost of a fully installed windmill in Iowa. Heck, go ahead and compare the cost of one of those reactors to a fully installed wind FARM in Iowa, or Wisconsin, or wherever. There's just no comparison. Some of these windfarms are producing at, what? $0.02 a kWh? Maybe $0.03? And that's before you even count subsidies or tax breaks. It's no wonder some go to $0.00 a kWh, and some even go negative. You sound like you know something about what it takes to build a reactor. So I'm assuming you understand the costs there. Which likely means that you think a windmill costs far more than a windmill actually costs. Nuclear is MUCH more expensive in terms of capital outlay, and it is prohibitively expensive in terms of operating costs when compared with wind or solar. The only reason the reactors we're discussing are being built is because the government is doing it. This is what would have to happen to make nuclear a reality in our future power mix. The government would have to pay for it. It's too expensive for anyone else to try without government assurances.
    - belorn 8y ago
      When people talk about cost of nuclear vs wind the issue is that you can not go to a wind farm and get a contract that give 24/7 energy at a set level for $0.02 kWh. What you get is a contract that give you $0.02 kWh when the wind farm is producing at peak capacity, and then you have to buy the somewhat more expensive coal and gas produced energy whenever the wind is not at peak capacity. It is like comparing the transportation cost of rail vs trucks. It is obvious that the price per km is cheaper for the rail. If what you want is to transport goods between two railway stations that has excess rail capacity it going to be extremely cheap compared to have a truck driver. $ per kWh is not relevant. $ per contracted supply of continuous power 24/7 is. The video even mention the wind + solar + battery, but is questionably if the average output of all three puts it better than nuclear. A benefit however over nuclear is that such constellation can be created independent of each other with shorter investment spans that nuclear.
gehsty 8y ago
Any reason storage + renewables + well connected ‘super grids’ between countries cannot work out? Why do we have to have nuclear?
- rakoo 8y ago
  Because reliable intermittent (what we should call pv/wind + storage or gas for redundancy) pollutes multiple times more than nuclear. Nuclear is the cleanest form of electricity generation that we can produce in scale, and the cleanest one for the amount of fossil we want to get rid of. Quick reminder: more than 60% of the world's electricity is fossil-based. To replace that only with nuclear would need 1500 new reactors. Do you really think it will be feasible to do that with wind and/or solar?
  - acidburnNSA 8y ago
    Also: the physical footprint of nuclear is tiny compared to energy harvesting + seasonal storage. This really matters at the scales we need. Not that nuclear is free from nimbyism, but its small footprint still counts.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  Electric heating, even with heat pumps, is still a massive inefficient power sink in terms of overall power required when compared to direct heat conversion. As nuclear energy is one of the few renewable heat sources that work independent of weather, it will be required if we want to make district heating carbon free (that being said I believe getting electrics/transportation carbon neutral will be good enough since burning NG purely for heat is efficient enough that we can justify penciling it in under the earth's natural carbon recovery budget)
  - dependsontheq 8y ago
    It’s not really independent of weather a lot of European plants had problems in the drought last year https://www.energy-reporters.com/environment/drought-forces-nuclear-shutdowns/ https://www.energy-reporters.com/environment/drought-forces-...
tim333 8y ago
Nukes cost more https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/new-year-same-story-cost-of-wind-and-solar-fall-below-cost-of-coal-and-gas/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/new-y...
- godelski 8y ago
  Yes, but climate change costs even more. There's a few things to unpack here. But I won't talk about why nuclear costs so much. I'll just point out that if you look at countries like Germany and Japan which are turning off nuclear plants and targeting renewables are also turning up their coal usage. The big issue here is that battery technology just isn't there yet. No pro nuclear person is anti renewable (maybe they exist, but I have yet to find one). They just don't want to see nuclear replaced with coal. They care about the environment. Many believe it is too late for any other option and we need to just aggressively go to net 0 (or less) with current technology. The truth is that we just can't meet these goals with current renewables and batteries. We're all for funding battery and renewable tech. But we also believe that action has to happen NOW.
  - Krasnol 8y ago
    > and targeting renewables are also turning up their coal usage. Germany is actually turning OFF coal. There is a new plant right now which will never produce power. Others are being turned off. Coal is clogging the lines for renewable power. Meanwhile costs for nuclear waste disposal and decommission of nuclear plants cost the taxpayer money because of failed ideas of a safe mine in the past and heavy lobbying today.
    - godelski 8y ago
      Well Germany has some explaining to do [0]. Their carboon footprint is stagnant and renewable production/usage is skyrocketing. [0] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/germany/energy-consumption.php https://www.worlddata.info/europe/germany/energy-consumption...
      - 8y ago
grecy 8y ago
It is so clear that nuclear is dead. The US has abandoned the only two it has tried to construct since the 1970s, after pouring in billions. Like or it not, I don't think we'll ever see another new nuclear plant constructed outside BRIC countries.
- sien 8y ago
  There are 50 reactors under construction in 15 different countries. http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and...
  - grecy 8y ago
    I don't believe that list is accurate, the US abandoned construction of the two it was building [1] Also, very few of the reactors on that list are in OECD countries. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-project-canceled-in-south-carolina.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-pro...
    - catawbasam 8y ago
      So more accurately: nuclear is dying (slowly) in OECD countries.
      - grecy 8y ago
        ...which is exactly what I said originally... "I don't think we'll ever see another new nuclear plant constructed outside BRIC countries. "
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  Vogtle is still underway, as another poster pointed out.

by Reedx 8y ago

bilbo0s 8y ago

Problem is, there is no private sector money for that. You want that? You gotta figure out how to get government to pay for it. Investment in nuclear requires MUCH more captial than just throwing up some windmills somewhere. Even if you get rid of all regulation and taxes, it'd still be orders of magnitude more expensive. Private money would still rush into wind, solar, and storage.

kingnothing 8y ago
Vogtle, the only nuclear power plant currently under construction in the US, is privately funded. The only info I see about government involvement is the guarantee of about $8B of construction loans, with a total cost of around $25B paid for by a few regional power companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
- beat 8y ago
  If it was economically viable, it would be done. Forget the US and complaining about the darn treehuggers. Look at countries that don't particularly care about the environment. Russia gets about 20% of its power from nuclear, and is currently scaling back expansion plans due to cost. India gets only 3% from nuclear, and new development will get that to maybe 5%. China gets less than 4% of its power from nuclear, and is backing off from new construction plans as well. If nuclear were really cheap, and environmentalist resistance was really the problem, we'd see much more nuclear power in these countries, both existing and under construction.
  - lstodd 8y ago
    > Russia gets about 20% of its power from nuclear, and is currently scaling back expansion plans due to cost. Citation needed on scaling back. Any way you slice it, Russia can't rely on renewables, it's either fossil or nuclear since most of hydroelectric is already harnessed. Edit: I just had a cursory look of Moscow energy needs. It has about 12GWe installed capacity in city limits, all natural gas. Up to twice that is used in distict heating in winter. I did not dig up how much energy is imported, but given how many high-voltage transmission lines come in it can't be trivial. Replacing that with "renewables" is not possible.
    - beat 8y ago
      12Gw == 12,000Mw. Off a quick lookup, 2Mw of wind requires 1.5 acres of land. A little arithmetic, some rounding up, and we need, say, 10,000 acres of wind power, around 15 square miles. But you'll raise an objection, so double that. And then you'll raise another objection, so double it again, and sooner or later, we're up to 100 square miles of windmills. The city of Moscow alone is 970 square miles. For point of comparison, Minnesota produced 3500Mw of wind in 2016, from wind farms mostly in the southwest part of the state. There's lots and lots of land left for more wind farms.
      - jessaustin 8y ago
        If Russia has plenty of anything, it's land. USA is in a similar situation. If politics didn't intervene, they both would naturally use more wind power than more densely populated nations.
    - godelski 8y ago
      >> Russia gets about 20% of its power from nuclear, and is currently scaling back expansion plans due to cost. > Citation needed on scaling back. [0] says 11% btw [0] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/russia/energy- https://www.worlddata.info/europe/russia/energy-
    - int_19h 8y ago
      Don't forget that many power plants are thermal combined-heat-and-power that utilize waste heat from power generation. If you replace them all with renewables, you'd have to compensate for that heat output, not just electricity.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Vogtie is the example that proves the rule. Originally, it was supposed to cost right around USD14 Billion. Cost overruns have pushed that, not to USD25 Billion, but USD28 Billion. (And the online date has been pushed back from this year, to 2022.) Keep in mind, the DoE was supposed to back USD8 Billion of the original USD14 Billion price tag. So needless to say, the financials have changed considerably. So much so that the consortium behind Vogtie nearly fell apart due to the latest cost overrun combined with the fact that they could not pass any more cost overruns on to their customers. (The customers under state law are not allowed to switch energy suppliers.) Vogtie is a slow motion train crash. When it comes online, the customers will be forced to pay more than wind power customers BECAUSE the government intervened and prohibited any customers from changing suppliers. And I suspect that's gonna go over about as well as a fart in church.
ThomPete 8y ago
But there isn't much private sector money in windmills either and solar isn't going to deliver enough energy. So that leaves us with oil and coal and wood. Whatever the third phase of clean energy will be it won't be disrupting anything fundamental, it can't and it isn't as clean as we like to believe.
credit_guy 8y ago
> Even if you get rid of all regulation and taxes, it'd still be orders of magnitude more expensive Are you sure about that? There is a company in upstate New York [1] that quietly builds about one nuclear reactor per year. You don't hear much about it because that reactor goes to power a submarine. The safety record of these reactors is unbelievable; after all some people spend weeks at a time within meters of them. Here's a quote from a US Navy spokesperson: "We have never had an accident or release of radioactivity which has had an adverse effect on human health or the environment" [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knolls_Atomic_Power_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knolls_Atomic_Power_Laboratory [2] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/09/john-mccain/navys-record-unblemished/ https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun...
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Compare the cost of just one of those reactors... to the cost of a fully installed windmill in Iowa. Heck, go ahead and compare the cost of one of those reactors to a fully installed wind FARM in Iowa, or Wisconsin, or wherever. There's just no comparison. Some of these windfarms are producing at, what? $0.02 a kWh? Maybe $0.03? And that's before you even count subsidies or tax breaks. It's no wonder some go to $0.00 a kWh, and some even go negative. You sound like you know something about what it takes to build a reactor. So I'm assuming you understand the costs there. Which likely means that you think a windmill costs far more than a windmill actually costs. Nuclear is MUCH more expensive in terms of capital outlay, and it is prohibitively expensive in terms of operating costs when compared with wind or solar. The only reason the reactors we're discussing are being built is because the government is doing it. This is what would have to happen to make nuclear a reality in our future power mix. The government would have to pay for it. It's too expensive for anyone else to try without government assurances.
  - belorn 8y ago
    When people talk about cost of nuclear vs wind the issue is that you can not go to a wind farm and get a contract that give 24/7 energy at a set level for $0.02 kWh. What you get is a contract that give you $0.02 kWh when the wind farm is producing at peak capacity, and then you have to buy the somewhat more expensive coal and gas produced energy whenever the wind is not at peak capacity. It is like comparing the transportation cost of rail vs trucks. It is obvious that the price per km is cheaper for the rail. If what you want is to transport goods between two railway stations that has excess rail capacity it going to be extremely cheap compared to have a truck driver. $ per kWh is not relevant. $ per contracted supply of continuous power 24/7 is. The video even mention the wind + solar + battery, but is questionably if the average output of all three puts it better than nuclear. A benefit however over nuclear is that such constellation can be created independent of each other with shorter investment spans that nuclear.

gehsty 8y ago

Any reason storage + renewables + well connected ‘super grids’ between countries cannot work out? Why do we have to have nuclear?

rakoo 8y ago
Because reliable intermittent (what we should call pv/wind + storage or gas for redundancy) pollutes multiple times more than nuclear. Nuclear is the cleanest form of electricity generation that we can produce in scale, and the cleanest one for the amount of fossil we want to get rid of. Quick reminder: more than 60% of the world's electricity is fossil-based. To replace that only with nuclear would need 1500 new reactors. Do you really think it will be feasible to do that with wind and/or solar?
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  Also: the physical footprint of nuclear is tiny compared to energy harvesting + seasonal storage. This really matters at the scales we need. Not that nuclear is free from nimbyism, but its small footprint still counts.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
Electric heating, even with heat pumps, is still a massive inefficient power sink in terms of overall power required when compared to direct heat conversion. As nuclear energy is one of the few renewable heat sources that work independent of weather, it will be required if we want to make district heating carbon free (that being said I believe getting electrics/transportation carbon neutral will be good enough since burning NG purely for heat is efficient enough that we can justify penciling it in under the earth's natural carbon recovery budget)
- dependsontheq 8y ago
  It’s not really independent of weather a lot of European plants had problems in the drought last year https://www.energy-reporters.com/environment/drought-forces-nuclear-shutdowns/ https://www.energy-reporters.com/environment/drought-forces-...

tim333 8y ago

Nukes cost more https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/new-year-same-story-cost-of-wind-and-solar-fall-below-cost-of-coal-and-gas/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/new-y...

godelski 8y ago
Yes, but climate change costs even more. There's a few things to unpack here. But I won't talk about why nuclear costs so much. I'll just point out that if you look at countries like Germany and Japan which are turning off nuclear plants and targeting renewables are also turning up their coal usage. The big issue here is that battery technology just isn't there yet. No pro nuclear person is anti renewable (maybe they exist, but I have yet to find one). They just don't want to see nuclear replaced with coal. They care about the environment. Many believe it is too late for any other option and we need to just aggressively go to net 0 (or less) with current technology. The truth is that we just can't meet these goals with current renewables and batteries. We're all for funding battery and renewable tech. But we also believe that action has to happen NOW.
- Krasnol 8y ago
  > and targeting renewables are also turning up their coal usage. Germany is actually turning OFF coal. There is a new plant right now which will never produce power. Others are being turned off. Coal is clogging the lines for renewable power. Meanwhile costs for nuclear waste disposal and decommission of nuclear plants cost the taxpayer money because of failed ideas of a safe mine in the past and heavy lobbying today.
  - godelski 8y ago
    Well Germany has some explaining to do [0]. Their carboon footprint is stagnant and renewable production/usage is skyrocketing. [0] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/germany/energy-consumption.php https://www.worlddata.info/europe/germany/energy-consumption...
    - 8y ago

grecy 8y ago

It is so clear that nuclear is dead. The US has abandoned the only two it has tried to construct since the 1970s, after pouring in billions. Like or it not, I don't think we'll ever see another new nuclear plant constructed outside BRIC countries.

sien 8y ago
There are 50 reactors under construction in 15 different countries. http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and...
- grecy 8y ago
  I don't believe that list is accurate, the US abandoned construction of the two it was building [1] Also, very few of the reactors on that list are in OECD countries. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-project-canceled-in-south-carolina.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/climate/nuclear-power-pro...
  - catawbasam 8y ago
    So more accurately: nuclear is dying (slowly) in OECD countries.
    - grecy 8y ago
      ...which is exactly what I said originally... "I don't think we'll ever see another new nuclear plant constructed outside BRIC countries. "
selimthegrim 8y ago
Vogtle is still underway, as another poster pointed out.