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Tend to agree. The window for nuclear is closing now. We should be doing a fuckton of R+D into energy storage solutions, and overprovisioning offshore wind.
by dabeeeenster 7y ago
Tend to agree. The window for nuclear is closing now. We should be doing a fuckton of R+D into energy storage solutions, and overprovisioning offshore wind.
- lstodd 7y agoTo substitute a single 4GWe nuclear plant, one would need ~96 GWh storage, which there is no technology for, plus ~48GW wind farm, while UK has ~22GW installed total now.. And you talk of overprovisioning. Crazy. If anything, we must invest into making nuclear cheaper.
- Retric 7y agoWind is variable but it never has zero output days. Further in many cases you can select peak output periods based on specific sites local conditions. On top of this you can massively over provision and still be cheaper than nuclear.
- lstodd 7y agoIt has zero output days. If only because storms can blow off the blades if you don't feather them.
- ncmncm 7y agoCertain places have zero days. But not the same day as all the neighbors.
- Retric 7y agoEngland does not get 24 hour wind speeds of 55mph (a common wind turbine cut out speed). Specific locations can get close to that, but as a system some areas are getting lower wind speeds and generating lots of power.
- detritus 7y agoHi, do you have any sources for your calculations - I'm not challenging you, I'm simply interested to know more about the realities of trying to go non-carbon (especially when we're looking to electrify our transport network down the line..). Thanks for any pointers!
- lstodd 7y agoI'm afraid you'd have to research this youself, if you wish to really understand. Current designs of PWR reactors are about 1000-1200 MWe, constant, and not really throttable. This makes them the best baseline supply one can wish for, for a comparably meager investment once the idiotic regulation premium is subtracted. If we had bulk energy storage it would have been so much cheaper to just pump it with electricity from nukes than that from wind or solar. Since we don't have the storage tech, the question is moot. Wind or solar is useless for the grid, period.
- ncmncm 7y ago> Wind or solar is useless for the grid, period. That must come as an awful shock to everyone already driving their grid with increasing fractions of wind and solar.
- pjc50 7y agoThe UK 's largest current nuclear plants are 1.3GW, which makes the 4GW number look unrealistic. I'm not sure where you got the worst case capacity factor numbers from either. > invest into making nuclear cheaper People have been talking about this since the 1950s. How much will it cost and how long will it take?
- lstodd 7y ago4GWe is a stock design for a PWR nuclear power station, 4 reactors of 1GWe each, sharing the infrastructure. UK lagged behind the times, yes. Doesn't mean it shouldn't catch up skipping ye olde misdesigns.
- cygx 7y agoGiven these numbers, how was it possible for Germany to cut nuclear energy production from 156TWh in 2002 to 72TWh in 2018? (source: https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&period=annual&year=all https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p...)
- XorNot 7y agoThey buy their baseload from France, which at this point has one of the most vibrant nuclear industries in the world (and no surprise, fought hard to make sure ITER was on French territory).
- cygx 7y agoIn 2018, Germany imported 10TWh of electricity from France, while it produced 545TWh. That's not even 2% - how are you supposed to cover baseload with that?
- pjc50 7y agoA lot of people seem to be saying "baseload" when they mean "peak". That's the benefit of the international links - countries not having their peak consumption at the same time of day can average it out between each other.
- lstodd 7y agoCan't send power over thousands of kilometers without losing half of it, sorry. Not to mention oceans. It is just not happening.
- macspoofing 7y agoThat's the problem with solar and wind. During peak times you get very good generation capacity and nothing or too little off-peak.
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago" The French government just announced a plan to power 95 percent of the country with solar and wind energy by 2060. And by doing so, the government would spend about $44.5 billion (39 billion euros) less than it would if it maintained its current energy infrastructure. To get there, the government would need to cancel plans to construct 15 new nuclear power plants, and instead replace its aging nuclear reactors with renewable infrastructure over the next several decades, according to a new report published Monday by the French environmental agency."
- imtringued 7y agoI don't understand this "which there is no technology for" argument. There is no shortage of energy storage technologies. We have battery storage, we have hydro storage, we have thermal storage, we have hydrogen storage, we have hydraulic hydro storage. We have enough options from the MWh range to the TWh range. Some technologies have pretty crazy scalability. Hydraulic hdyro storage capacity grows faster than the radius^4 but the costs only go up by r^2. I also don't get where you have youe numbers from. Wind power generally has a 60% capacity factor therefore replacing a 4GW nuclear plant requires 6.6GW of wind power.
- jonatron 7y agoInstead, diesel generator sites have sprung up eg: http://www.plutuspowergen.com/current-operations/gallery/ http://www.plutuspowergen.com/current-operations/gallery/ This proves that if grid scale energy storage was cost effective, it'd be built. There's also the demand side of the equation, maybe storage heaters will make a come back if they're activated on live pricing rather than a night timer.
- pjc50 7y agoThat's an interesting read. http://www.plutuspowergen.com/about/sustainability/ http://www.plutuspowergen.com/about/sustainability/ > "Plutus PowerGen’s facilities are anticipated to run for no more than 150 hours per year in 60 minute blocks of time during peak demand and may not exceed 300 hours as a result of the commitments made in the planning permission process. Despite providing valuable generating capacity, each facility is expected to be switched off for more than 97% of the time, ensuring that their annualised emissions are minimal. The Company’s facilities will conform to all UK and EU air quality standards The generators will be fired with either green fuel from HVO (hydrogenated vegetable oil) or gas." A set of "backup" generators run for 3% of the year on vegetable oil is hardly a big carbon emitter. It's an expensive problem - no matter what the grid setup is, someone's got to be the generator of last resort which gets hardly ever used. This is exactly the kind of market that a Tesla battery got deployed into in Australia. http://www.plutuspowergen.com/current-operations/business-model/ http://www.plutuspowergen.com/current-operations/business-mo... is an interesting read too.
- gnode 7y ago> We should be doing a fuckton of R+D into energy storage solutions I agree that we should research energy storage, but there's no guarantee such research would be very fruitful. I don't think it's sensible to double down on the CCGT stopgap, and put our faith in technological breakthroughs. Nuclear fission is a technology which exists now, and we should invest in before the window closes. That said, I can't see it happening in the UK because our politics are a dumpster fire.
- ncmncm 7y agoStorage is just an engineering problem. It doesn't need breakthroughs, just development. And every system invented can be used at the same time, somewhere. The most cost-effective ones will spread. Underground air pressurization is low tech, and can drive existing gas turbines, with or without added methane. Catalytic production of ammonia from water and air is advancing by leaps and bounds, mostly enabling increasingly smaller synthesis systems. Ammonia is directly useful as industrial feedstock, liquid fuel, and fertilizer, once power storage reserve is met. Again, compatible with gas turbines. (A practical use for the waste oxygen would be helpful.) Ammonia is excellent because it is directly useful at the sites of wind turbines at remote farms, avoiding need for connection to an electric grid. It can be injected directly into the soil for fertilizer, and used to power existing machinery -- trucks, tractors. Intermittent production, there, is no handicap. Excess can be sold to neighbors.
- nickik 7y agoIts insane to say nuclear window is closed. In 100 years people will for sure use nuclear and not wind and solar. It would be insane not to. The efficency fuel and land usage is so much more efficent, its an engeneering and regulatory problem right now, not a fundamental problem.
- gnode 7y agoI don't think it can be sensibly argued that nuclear is more fuel efficient than wind and solar, which have no fuel as such). Although future nuclear technology (breeder reactors, seawater uranium extraction, fusion) makes fuel hugely abundant, and essentially a non-issue, comparable with renewables. Engineering and regulatory costs won't necessarily come down over time. As use of nuclear power wanes, costs will likely go up, the positive feedback reinforcing the trend. In 100 years time, fusion may be developed, but we may have seen peak fission already.
- nickik 7y agoWind and solar don't have fuel, but the conversion is bad and the resources is distributed and hard to capture. > Engineering and regulatory costs won't necessarily come down over time. As use of nuclear power wanes, costs will likely go up, the positive feedback reinforcing the trend. Why would they not come down? In most technology we use it does come down. Nuclear is really the exeption where normal development has not happened. Regulatory costs are comming down right now already. The US has started a wide range of reforms to address this problem. The US is going from essentially impossible to regulate a new reactor to only very expensive. Interestingly nuclear went from both parties being against, to both parties being for and 3-4 nuclear reform bills have gone threw congress with little issue. Its suprising to say the least. Its still baby steps but at least its not continued political deadlock. Canada is doing much better and there is actually now feasable to go threw the regulatory process again. This has lead many US and British companies to move to Canada. This should allow now reactor types comming to market in the next 10 years and those be much smaller in scale then PWRs and thus have very much smaller capital costs, thus building them should be cheaper. None no of that is a certainty but its also not crazy either. > In 100 years time, fusion may be developed, but we may have seen peak fission already. Fission is 10^12 more dense then chemical energy, Fusion is about 10^15. The difference there is not all that relevant specially not as a society already ignore the 10^12 difference. Most Fusion don't really add much, other then maybe being better at nuclear proliferation but that is not really a hugly practical problem with fission specially in the western world. Solar and wind have to replaced fairly often, and once first generation installations must get replaced, and cheap nuclear is available, the situation might reverse itself. That said, in certain places it will be hard to beat these but there many places where they are not optimal and there is still the intermitency question. Many GenIV nuclear plants can be perfectly perfectly load following or can be connected to utility scale heat storages.
- AmericanChopper 7y agoWhat’s wrong with new nuclear power coming into service on 10 years? Is it because we’re 10 years away from climate disaster? Because people have been saying that since the 70s. If that’s the only obstacle to some long term thinking then I can’t see what the problem is.