5 ms·

The problem isn't cost of power generated, its the ability to respond to rapid volatility - when clouds obscure solar panels, and when the wind stops blowing.

The problem isn't cost of power generated, its the ability to respond to rapid volatility - when clouds obscure solar panels, and when the wind stops blowing. Nuclear cannot do this so it is useless. Batteries and gas power plants can which is why they are being rolled out. Wind, Solar, Gas, Batteries and Electric Vehicles are existing solutions to the climate problem. The market will implement them slowly, since they are cheaper and superior to legacy solutions, but we need political effort to do it more quickly.

plasticchris 8y ago
A certain baseline power requirement must be met. It's also interesting to see the volatility of solar and wind be used as an argument against baseline generation, as this has traditionally been an argument against renewables.
- pfdietz 8y ago
  It's an argument against renewables only when the renewables are expensive. When renewables are cheap, then nuclear is placed in an impossible situation, as nuclear either displaces the renewables when they ARE available (incurring a large marginal cost), or only runs when they aren't (forcing nuclear's large fixed costs to be amortized over much less output). It's likely that a cost optimized grid will have little or no nuclear in it.
  - DennisP 8y ago
    Unless you do solar and mostly skip wind, in which case you can build enough nuclear to run the nighttime load and solar for just the extra daytime load, then you can run the nukes 24/7. That minimizes both nuclear downtime and storage requirements. But if we're going to build a lot of wind, that still doesn't necessarily doom nuclear, if we can lower the capital cost of nuclear. The article describes some fairly simple ways to go about that; a recent study at MIT had the same recommendations. Down the road a decade or so, molten salt reactors will start to be available, and those look to have much lower capital costs and good load-balancing.
    - pfdietz 8y ago
      Running nuclear plants just at night would double the cost of that power. This would be insane. Using nuclear instead of solar when solar was available would increase the cost of that power by a factor of 3 or more. That would also be insane. Nuclear just doesn't have a place on a grid with a large renewable supply. EDIT: You wrote: "I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build enough solar for the extra demand during the day." This is case #2, using nuclear power during the day when you could have used cheap solar. It makes no sense economically at current nuclear costs.
      - DennisP 8y ago
        I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build enough solar for the extra demand during the day. Wind/solar is only that much cheaper if you ignore storage. Stop ignoring the possibilities of much cheaper nuclear and things look different anyway. South Korea is already 6X cheaper according to the article, and some GenIV designs are likely to do even better.
        pfdietz 8y ago
        South Korea's numbers lack transparency, and I believe they assume very low interest rates (that is, they socialize the financial risk.) Is there a POSSIBILITY of much cheaper nuclear? Sure, anything is POSSIBLE. Is it LIKELY? Experience says "no". And surely it's not possible in the US right now. Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy? The SMR companies are not in a position to deliver now; the one that is closest, NuScale, is not promising the kind of cost reductions that would be needed.
        sanxiyn 8y ago
        > Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy? There actually is a simple solution: follow UAE and let Koreans build standardized APR-1400.
pfdietz 8y ago
No, it's the cost of power. And even if nuclear were technically able to respond instantly, it's economically pointless, since if you don't run a nuclear plant most of the time the cost of power goes all to hell.
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  You can do a few things to solve this problem: * Couple the nuke to a large thermal storage system and load follow with that * Use steam bypass to switch energy from the turbogenerator to desalination, direct decarbonization, liquid fuel synthesis, district heating, industrial processes, and so on.
loeg 8y ago
Batteries and things like batteries serve shifting demand relative to slower-moving supply for nuclear even better than they fit unpredictable/irregular supply renewables. Unlike sunny or windy days, nuclear power is consistent 24/7 and output can be modulated (albeit, with delay) by raising and lowering control rods. Batteries (electrical or mechanical) can store extra nuclear-produced energy and use it to power the grid while output increases to match demand, and vice versa.
- pfdietz 8y ago
  No. If renewables are cheap, then batteries and other storage will just serve to reduce the fraction of time renewables are not covering demand (why charge the batteries with nuclear if cheaper renewable power is available?) The smaller this fraction is, the worse nuclear does economically.
  - radicalbyte 8y ago
    What if you need twice as much electricity in the winter as in the summer? You're either going to need double the renewable capacity (4 x if you're solar-based) or some kind of super battery. Which doesn't exist yet. The point for nuclear isn't just to cover demand curves; it's that to decarbonize the entire economy you need to both switch current electricity production to low-carbon sources and increase the capacity by 3-6x to cover all other energy requirements (including sucking carbon from the air to counter chemical processes we can't decarbonize). Nuclear has to be part of the solution.
    - pfdietz 8y ago
      Solar is headed toward as little as $0.01/kWh, an order of magnitude cheaper than high capacity factor nuclear. At that price, you cover seasonal shifts by some combination of overbuilding and curtailment in the summer, plus production of hydrogen. You burn the hydrogen in the winter in relatively cheap gas turbines (simply cycle turbines + generators are around $400/kW). This would be much cheaper than seasonal low capacity factor nuclear. The other thing that will happen is that energy-intensive industry migrates to lower latitudes where there's less seasonality. Sorry, Europe. I don't think nuclear advocates have gotten through their heads just how dire the situation is for nuclear energy. It is just not anywhere close to viable now, or even needed, and you do yourselves a disservice by concocting flawed arguments that let you think otherwise. Nuclear is going to survive only by large reductions in cost (and those costs are not due to some conspiracy of your political adversaries; they are due to the complexity and difficulty of the technology). Otherwise, it's going the way of vacuum tubes and magnetic bubble memory.
roylez 8y ago
Interesting this gets quickly downvoted. I totally agree with what he/she says. Screwing up once, then the site is fucked for total human eternity, and you have a no-go zone on the map forever. Afterall, "Anything That Can Possibly Go Wrong, Does".
- acidburnNSA 8y ago
  "Forever" may be a bit of an overstatement as we get better understandings of the health effects of low-dose radiation. Wolves are loving it in there (people were worse than radiation for them) [1]. [1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a22011471/chernobyl-turning-into-wildlife-preserve-wolves/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a22011471/c...

plasticchris 8y ago

A certain baseline power requirement must be met. It's also interesting to see the volatility of solar and wind be used as an argument against baseline generation, as this has traditionally been an argument against renewables.

pfdietz 8y ago
It's an argument against renewables only when the renewables are expensive. When renewables are cheap, then nuclear is placed in an impossible situation, as nuclear either displaces the renewables when they ARE available (incurring a large marginal cost), or only runs when they aren't (forcing nuclear's large fixed costs to be amortized over much less output). It's likely that a cost optimized grid will have little or no nuclear in it.
- DennisP 8y ago
  Unless you do solar and mostly skip wind, in which case you can build enough nuclear to run the nighttime load and solar for just the extra daytime load, then you can run the nukes 24/7. That minimizes both nuclear downtime and storage requirements. But if we're going to build a lot of wind, that still doesn't necessarily doom nuclear, if we can lower the capital cost of nuclear. The article describes some fairly simple ways to go about that; a recent study at MIT had the same recommendations. Down the road a decade or so, molten salt reactors will start to be available, and those look to have much lower capital costs and good load-balancing.
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    Running nuclear plants just at night would double the cost of that power. This would be insane. Using nuclear instead of solar when solar was available would increase the cost of that power by a factor of 3 or more. That would also be insane. Nuclear just doesn't have a place on a grid with a large renewable supply. EDIT: You wrote: "I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build enough solar for the extra demand during the day." This is case #2, using nuclear power during the day when you could have used cheap solar. It makes no sense economically at current nuclear costs.
    - DennisP 8y ago
      I agree that would be insane, which is why I said to run the nuclear 24/7 and build enough solar for the extra demand during the day. Wind/solar is only that much cheaper if you ignore storage. Stop ignoring the possibilities of much cheaper nuclear and things look different anyway. South Korea is already 6X cheaper according to the article, and some GenIV designs are likely to do even better.
      - pfdietz 8y ago
        South Korea's numbers lack transparency, and I believe they assume very low interest rates (that is, they socialize the financial risk.) Is there a POSSIBILITY of much cheaper nuclear? Sure, anything is POSSIBLE. Is it LIKELY? Experience says "no". And surely it's not possible in the US right now. Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy? The SMR companies are not in a position to deliver now; the one that is closest, NuScale, is not promising the kind of cost reductions that would be needed.
        sanxiyn 8y ago
        > Who is going to suddenly build these much cheaper nukes here, the Nuclear Power Plant Fairy? There actually is a simple solution: follow UAE and let Koreans build standardized APR-1400.

pfdietz 8y ago

No, it's the cost of power. And even if nuclear were technically able to respond instantly, it's economically pointless, since if you don't run a nuclear plant most of the time the cost of power goes all to hell.

acidburnNSA 8y ago
You can do a few things to solve this problem: * Couple the nuke to a large thermal storage system and load follow with that * Use steam bypass to switch energy from the turbogenerator to desalination, direct decarbonization, liquid fuel synthesis, district heating, industrial processes, and so on.

loeg 8y ago

Batteries and things like batteries serve shifting demand relative to slower-moving supply for nuclear even better than they fit unpredictable/irregular supply renewables. Unlike sunny or windy days, nuclear power is consistent 24/7 and output can be modulated (albeit, with delay) by raising and lowering control rods. Batteries (electrical or mechanical) can store extra nuclear-produced energy and use it to power the grid while output increases to match demand, and vice versa.

pfdietz 8y ago
No. If renewables are cheap, then batteries and other storage will just serve to reduce the fraction of time renewables are not covering demand (why charge the batteries with nuclear if cheaper renewable power is available?) The smaller this fraction is, the worse nuclear does economically.
- radicalbyte 8y ago
  What if you need twice as much electricity in the winter as in the summer? You're either going to need double the renewable capacity (4 x if you're solar-based) or some kind of super battery. Which doesn't exist yet. The point for nuclear isn't just to cover demand curves; it's that to decarbonize the entire economy you need to both switch current electricity production to low-carbon sources and increase the capacity by 3-6x to cover all other energy requirements (including sucking carbon from the air to counter chemical processes we can't decarbonize). Nuclear has to be part of the solution.
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    Solar is headed toward as little as $0.01/kWh, an order of magnitude cheaper than high capacity factor nuclear. At that price, you cover seasonal shifts by some combination of overbuilding and curtailment in the summer, plus production of hydrogen. You burn the hydrogen in the winter in relatively cheap gas turbines (simply cycle turbines + generators are around $400/kW). This would be much cheaper than seasonal low capacity factor nuclear. The other thing that will happen is that energy-intensive industry migrates to lower latitudes where there's less seasonality. Sorry, Europe. I don't think nuclear advocates have gotten through their heads just how dire the situation is for nuclear energy. It is just not anywhere close to viable now, or even needed, and you do yourselves a disservice by concocting flawed arguments that let you think otherwise. Nuclear is going to survive only by large reductions in cost (and those costs are not due to some conspiracy of your political adversaries; they are due to the complexity and difficulty of the technology). Otherwise, it's going the way of vacuum tubes and magnetic bubble memory.

roylez 8y ago

Interesting this gets quickly downvoted. I totally agree with what he/she says. Screwing up once, then the site is fucked for total human eternity, and you have a no-go zone on the map forever. Afterall, "Anything That Can Possibly Go Wrong, Does".

acidburnNSA 8y ago
"Forever" may be a bit of an overstatement as we get better understandings of the health effects of low-dose radiation. Wolves are loving it in there (people were worse than radiation for them) [1]. [1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a22011471/chernobyl-turning-into-wildlife-preserve-wolves/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a22011471/c...