5 ms·

Market 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

by beat 7y ago

Market 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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
  France 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.
  - manfredo 7y ago
    Why would France need to keep building reactors? They're not building more of them because reactors last close to a century. > 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 And how many of those sources emit no carbon, and deliver power all around the clock? Geothermal and Hydroelectric can, but those are geographically limited.
    - beat 7y ago
      Solar thermal is zero carbon and 100% uptime, but it's still expensive. Costs are dropping rapidly, though. And as stated earlier, solar + storage or wind + storage also meet your requirements, and are technically viable. It's just a question of cost. Cost of PV solar has dropped so much in the past decade that it could become the winner, even factoring in storage costs. Wind has far less storage costs, because the "What if the wind stops blowing?" theory that sounds so clever isn't really held up by decades of actual data.
      - manfredo 7y ago
        Solar thermal is 2-2.5 times the cost of nuclear: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf We could wait for solar thermal to get cheaper than nuclear (and assume that the cost of nuclear also remains static). Or we could just build nuclear power. The latter has the advantage of having consistent generation regardless of weather and time of year, and consuming a fraction of the amount of land. Wind power has consistent output over long periods of time. But we still need to make the power grid resilient to fluctuations, which would require immense amounts of energy storage. To put it in perspective how infeasible energy storage is, take a look at California's latest energy projects. The current largest storage plant has 183MWh of capacity, and a planned one has a predicted 300Mwh of capacity[1]. By comparison, the Diablo Canyon plant generats 2,2000MWh of energy every hour [2]. These two energy storage plants can only store 5 minutes and 9 minutes worth of power generated by the Diablo Canyon plant respectively. 1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/california-will-replace-gas-power-plants-with-the-worlds-largest-battery-system https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/california-will-repla... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
mikemotherwell 7y ago
It can't be true that keeping a nuclear power plant running is more costly than replacing it with a massive capital expenditure. Can it? The only possible way is if the alternative is massively funded by debt, and the "cost" is based on historically low interest rates and a repayment timeframe in the decades. Even then, given the ongoing cost of nuclear is relatively small, how is it possible that the capital expenditure of solar + natural gas is cheaper than the running cots of nuclear? Can someone show me that maths?
- beat 7y ago
  When something is true, saying "it can't be true" doesn't make it not true. This is happening to existing nuclear plants in the US. Not plans for plants, not plants in construction. This caught my eye when a nuclear plant in Iowa (near friends, including one who retired from working there) got slated for shutdown, over a decade before end-of-life. They'd lost a key industrial customer that consumed 30% of the plant's output to much cheaper wind/gas. At that point, operating costs went into the red. The plant was no longer generating the revenue to pay off its own debt. It was a purely economic decision. And yes, the wind and gas that ate its lunch are also capital expenditures, amortized over time. But they're still much cheaper.
- keanzu 7y ago
  The market is easily distorted by government. Want nuclear to win? Interest free loans. Want wind/solar to win? Subsidies. Put a thumb on the scale and make it say whatever you want.
redwall_hp 7y ago
>So what's the alternative? Nationalization of all energy generation?

by beat 7y ago

manfredo 7y ago

Yes, 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 ago
France 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.
- manfredo 7y ago
  Why would France need to keep building reactors? They're not building more of them because reactors last close to a century. > 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 And how many of those sources emit no carbon, and deliver power all around the clock? Geothermal and Hydroelectric can, but those are geographically limited.
  - beat 7y ago
    Solar thermal is zero carbon and 100% uptime, but it's still expensive. Costs are dropping rapidly, though. And as stated earlier, solar + storage or wind + storage also meet your requirements, and are technically viable. It's just a question of cost. Cost of PV solar has dropped so much in the past decade that it could become the winner, even factoring in storage costs. Wind has far less storage costs, because the "What if the wind stops blowing?" theory that sounds so clever isn't really held up by decades of actual data.
    - manfredo 7y ago
      Solar thermal is 2-2.5 times the cost of nuclear: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf We could wait for solar thermal to get cheaper than nuclear (and assume that the cost of nuclear also remains static). Or we could just build nuclear power. The latter has the advantage of having consistent generation regardless of weather and time of year, and consuming a fraction of the amount of land. Wind power has consistent output over long periods of time. But we still need to make the power grid resilient to fluctuations, which would require immense amounts of energy storage. To put it in perspective how infeasible energy storage is, take a look at California's latest energy projects. The current largest storage plant has 183MWh of capacity, and a planned one has a predicted 300Mwh of capacity[1]. By comparison, the Diablo Canyon plant generats 2,2000MWh of energy every hour [2]. These two energy storage plants can only store 5 minutes and 9 minutes worth of power generated by the Diablo Canyon plant respectively. 1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/california-will-replace-gas-power-plants-with-the-worlds-largest-battery-system https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/california-will-repla... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant

mikemotherwell 7y ago

It can't be true that keeping a nuclear power plant running is more costly than replacing it with a massive capital expenditure. Can it? The only possible way is if the alternative is massively funded by debt, and the "cost" is based on historically low interest rates and a repayment timeframe in the decades. Even then, given the ongoing cost of nuclear is relatively small, how is it possible that the capital expenditure of solar + natural gas is cheaper than the running cots of nuclear? Can someone show me that maths?

beat 7y ago
When something is true, saying "it can't be true" doesn't make it not true. This is happening to existing nuclear plants in the US. Not plans for plants, not plants in construction. This caught my eye when a nuclear plant in Iowa (near friends, including one who retired from working there) got slated for shutdown, over a decade before end-of-life. They'd lost a key industrial customer that consumed 30% of the plant's output to much cheaper wind/gas. At that point, operating costs went into the red. The plant was no longer generating the revenue to pay off its own debt. It was a purely economic decision. And yes, the wind and gas that ate its lunch are also capital expenditures, amortized over time. But they're still much cheaper.
keanzu 7y ago
The market is easily distorted by government. Want nuclear to win? Interest free loans. Want wind/solar to win? Subsidies. Put a thumb on the scale and make it say whatever you want.

redwall_hp 7y ago

>So what's the alternative? Nationalization of all energy generation?