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Are wind and solar and batteries the future for US electricity?
- bifrost 7y agoI think we're designing for the wrong thing. We should have nuclear going at 120% of demand and use the exess power to support electricity based carbon capture devices.
- java-man 7y agoIf one does not mind maintaining a fund to compensate for the losses incurred should a nuclear reactor melt down or a spent fuel storage should explode in an accident or a terrorist attack.
- bifrost 7y agoMore people die from air pollution than Nuclear, its much safer than all technologies.
- java-man 7y agoThat might be true even considering a large scale nuclear accident (think Chernobyl). Still, if we ignore the deaths for a moment and focus on the monetary damages - I don't think the nuclear industry is ready to compensate New York inhabitants in case of Indian Point, for example. What is the combined value of all the real estate in Manhattan?
- maximente 7y agothis may sound controversial but does it matter? status quo is that potable water, etc. are going to become issues of certainty by 2050. that's likely to affect hundreds of millions-billions of people (10x-100x NYC metro area) that there may be a nuclear accident has to be weighed alongside the fact that there is certain catastrophe ahead, not on its own.
- java-man 7y agoI agree, this has to be weighed alongside with other factors. One big difference is that other factors are gradual, and will come with characteristic times of decades, so we will have (some) time to adjust. A nuclear accident will be immediate, on the time scale of hours. I think we should keep in mind that nuclear power came about from the military need, so the desire to keep these plants operating might also come from the same source. On top of that, I personally think there is absolutely no excuse not to develop solar+battery solutions. Should we decide to put as much money as we did in nuclear into solar, and cover let's say Arizona in solar panels, we could shut down all the nuclear power plants and export excess electricity to Canada. This should be a national priority.
- elproxy 7y agoThere's a lot of irrational talk on nuclear (which one could even be tempted to suspect was the result of astro-turfing campaigns by oil companies), I find this is a pretty decent starting point to question mainstream opinions and beliefs: https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/nuclear/discussing-a-couple-common-statements-on-nuclear-energy/ https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/nuclear/discussin... Also, regarding accidents, it is not solely a property of nuclear power, see for instance the Banqiao dam catastrophe.
- sp332 7y agoNow think of the alternative - what happens to Manhattan when the sea level rises?
- java-man 7y agoA very valid point, but a change of topic. Let's cover Arizona in solar panels and we won't need nuclear.
- leftyted 7y agoIs that what "safer" means? Fewer people died? Nuclear reactors have the (demonstrated) potential to make a large swath of earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. "Air pollution" doesn't. I hope we do build more nuclear. But I think you're understating the risks. And no, I'm not convinced by the "modern designs can't fail" argument. No system is immune to human stupidity (or human maliciousness).
- bifrost 7y agoI think you might need to read what people are writing about climate science then... They're talking about the end of days from air pollution.
- elproxy 7y agoThe CO2 we’re putting in the atmosphere from the combustion of fossil fuels will be there for 10000 years. Current nuclear waste is essentially harmless in a few centuries.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoThis. It's not that nuclear has zero consequences—far from it, in fact—it's that other methods of power generation have even larger consequences! Nuclear is the least-worst option by far. I'd love if solar could power 100% of our society. It can't, at least not right now.
- nanny 7y agoIt's too late. Solar and wind have the popularity and the momentum. They won. The base cost to solar is also much, much cheaper than nuclear, making it easier to practically implement. And solar/wind is a better long term solution anyway in that we don't have to worry about waste management, safety, maintenance, etc. It can also be extremely decentralized.
- bifrost 7y agoGermany has already been raked over the coals for going un-nuclear. I think we'll see the opinion of solar/etc change as we realize its actually much more expensive.
- Aperocky 7y agoThat's one of the stupidiest thing that has ever been done. Just because people can't design safe (enough) nuclear reactor in the 70s, it means that it's politically expedient to shut off all nuclear power station inside a country.
- AlphaGeekZulu 7y agoI would be super happy, if they'd only shut down the nuclear reactors of the 70s, for starters!
- teabee89 7y agoHow is solar/wind + batteries cheaper than nuclear? Any numbers I saw omits batteries which would be an unfair comparison. EDIT: I had asked the opposite question of what I intended.
- bifrost 7y agoYou don't need batteries with nuclear, at all. There's also less habitat destruction, less issue with bird strikes, less people falling off towers, less issues with "view obstruction".
- padobson 7y agoCan we mine enough uranium to produce this much electricity?
- bifrost 7y agoYes. Reactor technologies have advanced, we just haven't built enough. We can actually reprocess the tons of old fuel we have for trillions of MWh.
- acqq 7y ago> Reactor technologies have advanced Can you give any link to anything that is actually implemented? Edit: regarding the answer below "French do it" it's a plant that existed as a military plant in sixties and is in a civil use since 1976, so it is more than 50 years old. It spends 1.4 GW of electricity per day to operate. Only a few years ago, after all these years, France achieved the possibility to have just 10% of its nuclear power production fueled by the products of the plant (as they fulfill cca 75% of all electricity needs from nuclear plants, that means that they can reach "whole" 7% of the France's electricity needs -- it was less before!). So I still ask, what it that has been "advanced" since long ago and is really implemented? https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_de_retraitement_de_la_Hague https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_de_retraitement_de_la_Ha...
- sadris 7y agohttps://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nuclear-fuel-the-french-do-it-why-cant-oui https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...
- AlphaGeekZulu 7y agoWell, the french reactors are not processing old fuel. Spent fuel is taken out, brought to some other place (La Hague), replenished and then transferred back to the nuclear plant. This stretches the effectiveness of the nuclear fuel by a few percent but does not at all solve the problem of final storage of nuclear waste. If this is, what the original poster meant with - "Reactor technologies have advanced, we just haven't built enough. We can actually reprocess the tons of old fuel we have for trillions of MWh." - I am a little disappointed. By the way: La Hague had nuclear accidents, including exposure of Iodium-131 and Caesium-137, explosions, tritium contaminations of the ocean, leaks, a catastrophic fire in the storage facilities of graphite elements and uranium parts, continuous contamination with Strontium-90 and others from 1968 until 2013. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_de_retraitement_de_la_Hague#Incidents https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_de_retraitement_de_la_Ha... I just mentioned this because of: "Anti-nuclear fear mongering has proved baseless. The French have recycled fuel like this for 30 years without incident: no terrorist attack, no bad guys stealing uranium, no contribution toward nuclear weapons proliferaton, and o accidental explosions." in the linked article of the parent post.
- anonuser123456 7y agoI would think solar and wind for opportunistic CCS would be a lot cheaper.
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoHaving a way to use excess energy for carbon capture would make it easier to expand solar and wind and further undermine the economic case for nuclear.
- elproxy 7y agoI think orders of magnitude are in different leagues, a quick indication being the relative shares of fossil fuels and wind/solar in global final energy. Our best bet for carbon capture is probably to be found in the plant kingdom.
- selimthegrim 7y agoNice to see a Birmingham based startup - let’s hope they’re hiring soon!
- selimthegrim 7y ago95% of it according to John Deutch https://youtu.be/PA8OzmiP9_4 https://youtu.be/PA8OzmiP9_4
- effnorwood 7y agoNo. It’s Nuclear.
- aksss 7y agoIn April on phys.org: "The growing demand for minerals and metals to build the electric vehicles, solar arrays, wind turbines and other renewable energy infrastructure necessary to meet the ambitious goals of the Paris Climate Agreement could outstrip current production rates for key metals by as early as 2022, according to new research by the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures. The study, commissioned and funded by U.S. non-profit organisation EarthWorks, shows that as demand for minerals such as lithium and rare earths skyrockets, the already significant environmental and human impacts of hardrock mining are likely to rise steeply as well." https://phys.org/news/2019-04-exposes-extent-mineral-demand-renewable.html https://phys.org/news/2019-04-exposes-extent-mineral-demand-... More renewable infrastructure = more mining. I don't know if this is an example of the laws of thermodynamics, but nothing comes for free. I think it's relevant when comparing turbine, solar array and tide capture equipment to nuclear. Also relevant to policy decisions about domestic mining - preventing mining doesn't mean demand drops, it means we source minerals from other nations that may or may not respect clean and responsible mining techniques. Just because we do less fossil fuel extraction doesn't mean we get away from natural resource development. It's a question of which is preferable, why, and how to do it in the most responsible fashion; but acknowledging the link between messy, ground-dwelling resource extraction and our electronics is not one that captures much public attention today. And so I think more and more about nuclear power.
- phil248 7y agoYes, but one can make the same argument about nearly anything since nothing comes in to existence without some set of inputs. It's not some unique attribute of renewable energy infrastructure that it requires resources to build. That's just an attribute of anything, be it houses or cars or medical equipment or toilet paper. There is, however, a unique characteristic of renewable energy infrastructure that separates it from all the other crap we build on an global scale, and that is that if we don't built it we are essentially doomed.
- aksss 7y agoRight, that's why I'm suggesting it's an element of comparison between nuclear and "renewables". I really don't know which has a greater burden of resource extraction. You need a lot of electronics to build a nuclear plant, but you need a lot of discrete electronic devices to build wind farms, solar arrays and the like. That's an interesting question of environmental cost to me, but either tech there is still resource extraction going on and I just think it's frequently a missing element of the discussion in the context of environmental policy. For instance, people protesting the approval of new mining projects in the US - okay, but where are you going to get the minerals that are in demand? A place where the regulatory oversight is lessened? Is that really the most responsible approach to resource development or just a NIMBY attitude?