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There are nuclear reactors closing in the US not because of regulation, but because they cannot compete with much cheaper wind and fracked gas sources. There is
by beat 7y ago
There are nuclear reactors closing in the US not because of regulation, but because they cannot compete with much cheaper wind and fracked gas sources. There is little difference in operational cost between running a nuclear plant at 50% and running it at 100%. So when they start losing key customers to cheaper power, pretty soon they're operating the plant in the red.
The real interesting part of this is that modern power is so much cheaper that it's less expensive to eat the capital losses and shut down nuclear plants early than it is to continue to operate them.
- manfredo 7y ago> There are nuclear reactors closing in the US not because of regulation, but because they cannot compete with much cheaper wind and fracked gas sources The former is intermittent, and the latter emits carbon. > There is little difference in operational cost between running a nuclear plant at 50% and running it at 100%. So when they start losing key customers to cheaper power, pretty soon they're operating the plant in the red. Yes, and we're replacing nuclear plants with fossil fuel plants because of it. When California shut down its second to last nuclear plant, it's carbon emissions from electricity generation rose by 35%. And now we're poised to shut down the Diablo canyon plant with solar during the day and natural gas during the evening. If we cared about reducing carbon, we'd keep the nuclear plant operating and shut down a fossil fuel plant with the surplus energy.
- Retric 7y agoIMO, the most interesting power source mid term is tracking solar power. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72399.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/72399.pdf At grid scale 1 access tracking is ~7% higher per watt which works out to about 2.14c/kWh in an ideal location. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/06/28/los-angeles-seeks-record-setting-solar-power-price-under-2¢-kwh/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/06/28/los-angeles-seeks-rec... However, these systems produces ~30% more power outside of the normal range for solar systems. This effectively squashes much of the duck curve and with the right mix and wide geographic distribution work well with nuclear power and modest energy storage systems.
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoTechnically, this makes the duck curve worse, because the actual "problem" the duck curve presents is solar ramplong down in the evening faster than gas can ramp up. But trackers (or west facing panels) make that more like a square wave so it lasts longer but then falls faster than a static south facing panel. But, the duck curve isn't a real problem anyway. Worst case scenario, some solar gets curtailed , creating an opportunity for storage solutions.
- Retric 7y agoYou’re thinking solar is all in the same location. Across a few locations in even a single time zone the ramp up and down is going to be fairly steady. Also, with nuclear in the mix you can be charging grid storage twice a day assuming a daytime and night time surplus. This possibly cuts the cost per kWh of some energy storage in half.
- labawi 7y agoRamp up/down is not much of an issue, as long as you can predict it. Yes tracking solar looks more like a square wave, but only in an extent a duck looks more like a horse, than a worm.
- beat 7y agoMarket forces do not care if the power source emits carbon or not. We have to deal with that, and I don't like it either. Despite my surface appearance of being anti-nuclear because I point out the irrational, emotional nature of pro-nuclear arguments, I would greatly prefer to keep existing nuclear plants running until end-of-life, rather than replacing them with gas. But market forces disagree with me. So what's the alternative? Crushing carbon taxes? That would eliminate the "intermittent" wind and solar solutions that are clean, safe, and cheap, because at the moment they need gas to balance the load. And it would effectively be doubling the cost of energy production in order to subsidize nuclear. And it still doesn't give us an exit ramp, so we'd have to build more nuclear and continue to de facto prohibit solar indefinitely. That's absurd. What appears most practical to me is taking advantage of gas in the short run to load-balance wind/solar, and eventually moving to energy storage for the balancing, encouraged via increasing carbon tax.
- manfredo 7y agoYes, if we want to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions we should tax or even ban carbon. Why is building nuclear instead of wind and solar "absurd"? France generates over 70% of its electricity from nuclear and it costs them half as much as Germany. Your wind and solar + gas solution is not a solution. We're still going to be emitting carbon of we are burning gas during the evenings. Energy storage at the necessary scale has not been demonstrated. Nuclear power is known technology. By comparison, solving the energy storage at this scale amounts to saying, "well... we'll figure it out eventually but until then we'll keep emitting carbon."
- beat 7y agoFrance is no longer building nuclear reactors. Nobody is, really, certainly not at "do something about greenhouse gasses" scale. The problem is economic. The vast bulk of the cost of a reactor is up-front construction, amortized over 30-50 year lifespans. That requires predictable energy prices, in a market where solar prices dropped over 80% in a decade. There are three different major energy sources all running half the cost of nuclear right now. This rather impacts the risk of the up-front capital investment. Which affects the cost of the capital upwards. Which in turn makes building new reactors that much more expensive. We should be building renewables because they're cheaper, safer (please, don't waste breath with nonsense arguments), and far more politically palatable. "Energy storage at the necessary scale has not been demonstrated". Of course it's been demonstrated. It's a problem with a thousand solutions. It's just a matter of getting costs down and production up (which in turn drives down cost). Batteries, thermal, compression, gravity storage... there are so many ways to store and release energy. I see the "can't store at scale" argument everywhere, and it's utter nonsense, and it never comes with supporting math or facts.
- Iv 7y agoThat's interesting. It may then matter that French plants are state-owned. It probably makes them cheaper on the long term