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>Am I missing something or this is total madness? You're not missing anything. This is madness. Renewables will never be competitive in a market that they dom

>Am I missing something or this is total madness? You're not missing anything. This is madness. Renewables will never be competitive in a market that they dominate because they are intermittent and you can't just turn a city off because it's cloudy and calm. Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s.

diegocg 7y ago
It is not delusion, but simple economics what makes it impossible to build new nuclear plants. The Obama administration granted permissions to build new plants, but few people were interested because fracking made gas cheaper - but even the ones that were built required loan guarantees from the government. The private sector wasn't able to find a solution by itself. A nuclear power plant requires billions in up front costs, which take a long period of time to recover, a time which can not be calculated reliably because nobody can predict the future and nobody knows how technology may evolve during that time and how will it affect power prices, how future wars will affect supply, how much demand developing nations will bring to the markets, etc. Even if nuclear power is cheap, the margins are not static and betting billions without knowing when you will get them back is not something everyone wants to do. Nuclear is going to need a lot of government subsidies if it wants to have a renaissance.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hurricanetc 7y ago
  It wouldn’t cost so much or take so long if there hadn’t been decades of misguided propaganda and whining about nuclear. The fact that nuclear is expensive is not an engineering or construction problem. China is building nuclear fast and cheap, right now.
  - number6 7y ago
    And there will never be a nuclear disaster in china. Ah the wonders of progress and dictatorships
    - anticodon 7y ago
      So, Fukushima disaster could be blamed on Japanese dictatorship?
      - usrusr 7y ago
        GP is being part sarcastic, part claiming that China would just keep it under wraps. It worked for the Soviets, for three whole days.
    - hurricanetc 7y ago
      We’re living in a coal energy disaster right now. People fear the wrong things.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    If that's true then why isn't every country replacing their old nuclear plants with new designs? Why keep around legacy plants like Fukushima that had obvious design mistakes (emergency generator was flooded)?
    - hurricanetc 7y ago
      Because there is virtually infinite red tape and paper pushing to do it. There are new, smaller, safer, and easy to build plants that have been waiting approval for years and years. The US has never had a nuclear disaster but we’ve had countless coal disasters. Oh and we’re living in a climate disaster caused by coal.
codemac 7y ago
> Nuclear power is the only solution. How much energy storage do we need to not need nuclear? That seems to be an assumption you're making that I'm not actually familiar with.
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  That's the wrong question. The right question is how much time do you think the grid should be offline each year? It's a simple question no renewable proponent wants to talk about because it makes their whole case indefensible.
  - nl 7y ago
    Renewables plus transmission plus storage plus gas generation is easily as reliable as the generation mix we have now.
    - buzzkillington 7y ago
      Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently. So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2 to make a mass extinction inevitable by 2100. Am I the only one that sees a problem with this?
      - nl 7y ago
        mass extinction inevitable by 2100 This is very emotive language, which is fine, but there is no currently projected scenario where mass extinction is inevitable or even likely. Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently. We are well on the way. In many parts of the world this is the majority energy mix already. So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2 This is untrue. It's roughly the same cost as replacing coal stations with new coal stations, which is roughly ten times cheaper than replacing them with nuclear. And it cuts energy production C02 production by about 70% which is easily enough to meet most targets to stabilise the climate.
nl 7y ago
Renewables will never be competitive in a market that they dominate because they are intermittent and you can't just turn a city off because it's cloudy and calm. Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. This is simply wrong. Firstly, renewables plus transmission reduce the intermittentcy problem enormously. China has multiple 2000km+ transmission lines already working, and preliminary work has started on a 3800km transmission line from Australia to Singapore[1]. Combine that with comparatively small amounts of short term storage (eg, batteries), as much long term storage (eg pump hydro) as possible and fill the rest with gas generation (around 30% of the CO2 output of coal or oil) and you have a generation mix that is very quick to build, competitive with coal on price and dramatically cheaper than nuclear. [1] https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/singapore-power-retailer-backs-cannon-brookes-20-billion-sun-cable-20190925-p52usz https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/singapore-power-retaile...
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  No one knows what the Chinese power grid does because it is a national secret. You can have a look at the power grids of the first world, like the European, North America and Australian ones. Europe is the only one with a true large scale interconnected grid[0] and even there the interconnects are expensive, small and marginal. With the majority of EU population being able to import or export only ~20% of the power generated locally. The US and Australian grids are even less connected, with the project you're quoting being simply a pipe dream to steal money from idiots. I've worked in data analysis for an energy company and renewables are amazing because they make the energy markets volatile and unpredictable. They allow rent-seeking in power generation. Something that hadn't been possible for decades. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
  - nl 7y ago
    The Chinese power grid isn't especially secret. Data is available here[1] or a good write-up on Wikipedia[2]. I live in Australia so I know it pretty well. My state (South Australia) has multiple ~1000km interconnects with more being planned. Australia remains badly underconnected compared to other markets. Wikipedia has good data[3], and your idea about "looking at the first world" is dramatically outdated. Most new power generation is being done in Asia (and to some degree Africa) which is where these long distance power transmission lines are mostly being built. If you don't trust the Chinese ones (not sure why - you can go visit a lot of these installations because the hydro dams are tourist attractions, and you can see them on Google Maps) you can just look at the multiple 1000km+ installations in India[4]. [1] https://chinaenergyportal.org/en/category/stats/ https://chinaenergyportal.org/en/category/stats/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#Asia
econcon 7y ago
>Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s. I wonder why they don't find a location on planet which is most stable, away from human settlement. Then create a nuclear reactor large enough to meet all the world requirement for electricity and supply it to all the world.
- akvadrako 7y ago
  Because the cost of transmission will be even higher. Moving large amounts of electricity over large distances is hard; it’s much cheaper to move gas or oil.
  - Animats 7y ago
    Not any more. China's longest power transmission link is 3324 km. 1.1 megavolts DC. 12 gigawatts. Running for over a year. Equivalent to moving 30 million tons of coal per year. China's cheap power sources (coal and hydro) are in the northwestern part of the country, and the big loads are in the southeastern part. So many HVDC links are going in. The US's biggest HVDC link is Oregon to California, opened in 1970.
    - akvadrako 7y ago
      Interesting, though I would like to see more cost comparisons. Some negatives I've found are UHV lines used for renewable transmission will see low utilization and the switching equipment is quite unreliable so overcapacity is needed. I did find a book with some details in case anyone wants to dig deeper: Ultra-high Voltage AC/DC Power Transmission (2018) (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=7AF7982201735A290D81BD2AC789B860 http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=7AF7982201735A290D8...)
pergadad 7y ago
Nuclear is subsidised by billions of dollars, starting from the ongoing research to buying land to construction to security to the massive grid investments needed for any new power plant, to security and contingency measures to finally the eventually externalised costs of (unlikely but possible) incidents and most importantly long-term storage and decommissioning. Huge huge tax payer subsidies are put into all stages of nuclear, which never show up on the energy company's balance sheets or the 'operating costs'. I'm not against nuclear but saying renewables are not competitive with this is incredibly naive and blatantly wrong - the subsidies and funds directly or indirectly provided for nuclear are on an entirely different scale than for renewables, which have mainly some research funding, grid extension and development subsidies behind them.

diegocg 7y ago

It is not delusion, but simple economics what makes it impossible to build new nuclear plants. The Obama administration granted permissions to build new plants, but few people were interested because fracking made gas cheaper - but even the ones that were built required loan guarantees from the government. The private sector wasn't able to find a solution by itself. A nuclear power plant requires billions in up front costs, which take a long period of time to recover, a time which can not be calculated reliably because nobody can predict the future and nobody knows how technology may evolve during that time and how will it affect power prices, how future wars will affect supply, how much demand developing nations will bring to the markets, etc. Even if nuclear power is cheap, the margins are not static and betting billions without knowing when you will get them back is not something everyone wants to do. Nuclear is going to need a lot of government subsidies if it wants to have a renaissance.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hurricanetc 7y ago
It wouldn’t cost so much or take so long if there hadn’t been decades of misguided propaganda and whining about nuclear. The fact that nuclear is expensive is not an engineering or construction problem. China is building nuclear fast and cheap, right now.
- number6 7y ago
  And there will never be a nuclear disaster in china. Ah the wonders of progress and dictatorships
  - anticodon 7y ago
    So, Fukushima disaster could be blamed on Japanese dictatorship?
    - usrusr 7y ago
      GP is being part sarcastic, part claiming that China would just keep it under wraps. It worked for the Soviets, for three whole days.
  - hurricanetc 7y ago
    We’re living in a coal energy disaster right now. People fear the wrong things.
- imtringued 7y ago
  If that's true then why isn't every country replacing their old nuclear plants with new designs? Why keep around legacy plants like Fukushima that had obvious design mistakes (emergency generator was flooded)?
  - hurricanetc 7y ago
    Because there is virtually infinite red tape and paper pushing to do it. There are new, smaller, safer, and easy to build plants that have been waiting approval for years and years. The US has never had a nuclear disaster but we’ve had countless coal disasters. Oh and we’re living in a climate disaster caused by coal.

codemac 7y ago

> Nuclear power is the only solution. How much energy storage do we need to not need nuclear? That seems to be an assumption you're making that I'm not actually familiar with.

buzzkillington 7y ago
That's the wrong question. The right question is how much time do you think the grid should be offline each year? It's a simple question no renewable proponent wants to talk about because it makes their whole case indefensible.
- nl 7y ago
  Renewables plus transmission plus storage plus gas generation is easily as reliable as the generation mix we have now.
  - buzzkillington 7y ago
    Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently. So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2 to make a mass extinction inevitable by 2100. Am I the only one that sees a problem with this?
    - nl 7y ago
      mass extinction inevitable by 2100 This is very emotive language, which is fine, but there is no currently projected scenario where mass extinction is inevitable or even likely. Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently. We are well on the way. In many parts of the world this is the majority energy mix already. So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2 This is untrue. It's roughly the same cost as replacing coal stations with new coal stations, which is roughly ten times cheaper than replacing them with nuclear. And it cuts energy production C02 production by about 70% which is easily enough to meet most targets to stabilise the climate.

nl 7y ago

Renewables will never be competitive in a market that they dominate because they are intermittent and you can't just turn a city off because it's cloudy and calm. Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. This is simply wrong. Firstly, renewables plus transmission reduce the intermittentcy problem enormously. China has multiple 2000km+ transmission lines already working, and preliminary work has started on a 3800km transmission line from Australia to Singapore[1]. Combine that with comparatively small amounts of short term storage (eg, batteries), as much long term storage (eg pump hydro) as possible and fill the rest with gas generation (around 30% of the CO2 output of coal or oil) and you have a generation mix that is very quick to build, competitive with coal on price and dramatically cheaper than nuclear. [1] https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/singapore-power-retailer-backs-cannon-brookes-20-billion-sun-cable-20190925-p52usz https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/singapore-power-retaile...

buzzkillington 7y ago
No one knows what the Chinese power grid does because it is a national secret. You can have a look at the power grids of the first world, like the European, North America and Australian ones. Europe is the only one with a true large scale interconnected grid[0] and even there the interconnects are expensive, small and marginal. With the majority of EU population being able to import or export only ~20% of the power generated locally. The US and Australian grids are even less connected, with the project you're quoting being simply a pipe dream to steal money from idiots. I've worked in data analysis for an energy company and renewables are amazing because they make the energy markets volatile and unpredictable. They allow rent-seeking in power generation. Something that hadn't been possible for decades. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
- nl 7y ago
  The Chinese power grid isn't especially secret. Data is available here[1] or a good write-up on Wikipedia[2]. I live in Australia so I know it pretty well. My state (South Australia) has multiple ~1000km interconnects with more being planned. Australia remains badly underconnected compared to other markets. Wikipedia has good data[3], and your idea about "looking at the first world" is dramatically outdated. Most new power generation is being done in Asia (and to some degree Africa) which is where these long distance power transmission lines are mostly being built. If you don't trust the Chinese ones (not sure why - you can go visit a lot of these installations because the hydro dams are tourist attractions, and you can see them on Google Maps) you can just look at the multiple 1000km+ installations in India[4]. [1] https://chinaenergyportal.org/en/category/stats/ https://chinaenergyportal.org/en/category/stats/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#Asia

econcon 7y ago

>Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s. I wonder why they don't find a location on planet which is most stable, away from human settlement. Then create a nuclear reactor large enough to meet all the world requirement for electricity and supply it to all the world.

akvadrako 7y ago
Because the cost of transmission will be even higher. Moving large amounts of electricity over large distances is hard; it’s much cheaper to move gas or oil.
- Animats 7y ago
  Not any more. China's longest power transmission link is 3324 km. 1.1 megavolts DC. 12 gigawatts. Running for over a year. Equivalent to moving 30 million tons of coal per year. China's cheap power sources (coal and hydro) are in the northwestern part of the country, and the big loads are in the southeastern part. So many HVDC links are going in. The US's biggest HVDC link is Oregon to California, opened in 1970.
  - akvadrako 7y ago
    Interesting, though I would like to see more cost comparisons. Some negatives I've found are UHV lines used for renewable transmission will see low utilization and the switching equipment is quite unreliable so overcapacity is needed. I did find a book with some details in case anyone wants to dig deeper: Ultra-high Voltage AC/DC Power Transmission (2018) (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=7AF7982201735A290D81BD2AC789B860 http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=7AF7982201735A290D8...)

pergadad 7y ago

Nuclear is subsidised by billions of dollars, starting from the ongoing research to buying land to construction to security to the massive grid investments needed for any new power plant, to security and contingency measures to finally the eventually externalised costs of (unlikely but possible) incidents and most importantly long-term storage and decommissioning. Huge huge tax payer subsidies are put into all stages of nuclear, which never show up on the energy company's balance sheets or the 'operating costs'. I'm not against nuclear but saying renewables are not competitive with this is incredibly naive and blatantly wrong - the subsidies and funds directly or indirectly provided for nuclear are on an entirely different scale than for renewables, which have mainly some research funding, grid extension and development subsidies behind them.