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Nuclear is one notch above dead, though I'm sure it won't officially die for another few decades. As a former proponent it's hard to argue against the significa

Nuclear is one notch above dead, though I'm sure it won't officially die for another few decades. As a former proponent it's hard to argue against the significant advances made by renewables over the past few years. Sure, nuclear makes for a better baseline load, but the regulatory and safety requires of nuclear make the economics difficult, almost easier to just build overcapacity into the renewable generation.

cpach 6y ago
I don’t really understand how wind and sun could totally replace nuclear. How do we get electricity during the night? How do we get electricity when it’s cloudy but the wind is light at the same time?
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
  Store the power. Batteries, pump water up into lakes, melt salt, etc.
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    From the numbers we saw during the Texas power outage, the amount of batteries required would be mind-boggling. Lots of places do not have the geography required for pumped storage, or it is already fully exploited (building a new dam is also an environmental disaster) Molten salt also still seems to be in it's infancy. The most practical solution I could see today to live without baseline power would be to build a massive inter-continental HVDC grid. Large grids have a tendency to be fragile and have catastrophic failures though.
    - godelski 6y ago
      To be honest the best probably would be to get small modular reactors (SMRs) into mass production. That would give economies of scale along with other benefits. But we aren't quite there yet. I'd imagine if SMRs became popular larger reactors would as well too.
      - manicdee 6y ago
        Can you imagine how a Texan operator of a SMR would have cut corners and what the damage to their plant would have been in this cold snap? Remembering that the damage to Texan energy production was due to failure to winterise their equipment after the last two cold snaps. It has happened before, they were told it was going to happen again, but the legislature decided that it was best to let the market decide the outcome. An SMR operator refusing to winterise their plant would end up in a similar situation: part of the equipment freezes or ices over (because antifreeze costs money), leading to an inability to scale up production until ambient temperatures rise far enough to defrost the frozen plant.
        pbourke 6y ago
        Isn’t nuclear federally regulated today?
        godelski 6y ago
        Yes, and nuclear facilities have significantly different standards from other facilities. The parent's comment is bad because the SMR wouldn't explode or leak if it wasn't properly winterized. It would shut down. But there is a lower chance of that happening simply because the significantly higher standards surrounding nuclear.
        manicdee 6y ago
        Where did I suggest a SMR would explode or leak?
    - bildung 6y ago
      Texas' (additional) problem was lack of connectivity to the rest of the country. With a proper grid the outages wouldn't have occured.
  - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
    Also, there will be hundreds of millions of EVs in about 10 years. With not-so-small batteries, charged by distributed rooftop solar. Many / most of the EVs will have batteries that are overprovisioned for daily driving in order to enable distance driving.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Making Methane is important too. We already have infrastructure for storing vast amounts of natural gas. We can just use it to store Methane made from Water, CO2 and electricity.
- neolog 6y ago
  Store it, or get it from somewhere else?
- nl 6y ago
  Transmission lines and storage. There are multiple 2500km transmission lines in use today. They are relatively cheap to build and solve almost all the intermitency issues. China has a few over 3000km long already, eg: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid/chinas-state-grid-corp-crushes-power-transmission-records https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid... and there is a 4500km long line planned for Australia to Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_...
- MrApathy 6y ago
  You build a big grid. Wind won't be light everywhere. Load is lower at night, so lack of sunlight is less of an issue. Maybe people start placing battery packs in their homes. Battery technology has seen large investments over the past decade and performance is better than ever. When demand is high, inexpensive natural gas can be turned on quickly. There are a lot of options, almost all of them less expensive than nuclear. That's my point, traditionally nuclear was good for baseline and renewable doesn't have a comparable equivalent apart from hydro. But other renewables like wind are getting to be so efficient and inexpensive, that I don't see how building an excess of it can't compete with nuclear.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Load is lower at night Only in warm climates.
    - whoooooo123 6y ago
      Yes, and also load is higher in the winter, when there's less wind and sunshine.
      - hyper_dynamics 6y ago
        Less wind in the winter is surely not true for countries in Europe.
  - godelski 6y ago
    > Battery technology has seen large investments over the past decade and performance is better than ever. Battery technology still has a bit to go before it can perform this task though. Even if we don't account for freak weather events (which are becoming more common). > When demand is high, inexpensive natural gas can be turned on quickly. Is this a good option though? I think the only good argument against nuclear is cost, so I agree with that. But if we consider the cost of emissions, storage (these aren't counted in solar and wind and don't make for fair comparisons to base loads like coal, gas, or nuclear), or other factors that fall under "tragedy of the commons" (i.e. putting sources on even playing fields) the prices become more comparable (depending how you weigh factors). But it really does come down to how much you value the cost of climate and human lives (since nuclear is about 50x safer than natural gas). Cost is a good argument, but we have to define our priors because "cost" means different things to different people. I for one would rather pay more for electricity and save human lives and reduce emissions. Just at $50/ton tax (low) would make it competitive[0], assuming that we couldn't regain economies of scale. [0] https://www.axios.com/nuclear-energy-could-be-competitive-but-it-requires-pricing-carbon-78fd8c75-a534-4baa-a12b-452e8ce17c9c.html https://www.axios.com/nuclear-energy-could-be-competitive-bu...
- pydry 6y ago
  Overproduction, storage and demand side shifting. The market can choose which mix of these works best in which market - which might vary a lot from market to market. It's rather ironic that the carbon industry spent the last 30 years telling us through Koch institutes etc. that the market knew best (when fossil fuels were most viable financially) and now that the green energy competition is undercutting them to death, suddenly markets don't solve anything.
ehnto 6y ago
I was also a big fan, but there are many alternatives now. I think they will remain useful for some edge cases. I am now more looking forward to seeing battery and energy storage solutions mature, as well as seeing how solar powered hydrogen gas can replace or dilute fossil fuel in gas turbine generators for greener load balancing.
- Aachen 6y ago
  > I am now more looking forward to seeing battery and energy storage solutions mature I'm reading Bill Gates' latest book, he says he spent and lost a lot of money on battery tech and while we are able to get incremental improvements, it appears that an order of magnitude improvement is unlikely at this point. Other areas are still possible - heck, batteries are still possible, but I'm not sure we should hope for that rather than draft an optimistic case of incremental improvements and start planning with that instead.
  - ehnto 6y ago
    I think energy storage outside of chemical batteries is where infrastructure scale storage should be happening. Things like pumped dams or gravity batteries. Instead of thinking of them as longer term storage of excess energy, we can think of them as capacitors for the grid overnight. In this way while we still rely on a fossil fuel turbine as a last resort, the vast majority of the year can be covered by renewables. Lets say the split looks like: 8am - 8pm : 100% renewables 8pm - 8am : Split between remaining renewables then gravity storage begins discharging If you are going to run out of gravity storage, you will have ample warning, and you will have a comfortable amount of time to bring a backup gas turbine plant online. One of the big challenges with all grids is continuity and keeping everything in sync, most of the time the issue is not having the ability to rapidly respond to fluctuations in the grid. Gravity storage helps solve that issue by being very predictable, and (with a smart grid integration) instantaneously available.
    - Aachen 6y ago
      Don't have time for a proper response, just a short note: Yep people are looking into that, but it ain't trivial. Apparently one needs a fairly specific slope for it to be econom at the moment (competitive with chemical batteries). If you look on YouTube for the (clickbaity, unfortunately) title "the truth about pumped storage" (iirc), you should find a video from some engineering channel where some of this is mentioned. Another keyword might be Ireland. There's gotta be more information-dense / less time-consuming sources than that video though, it's just the one I got this from. My point being, if it were this simple, yeah. Looks like we'll (recurring theme) need a bit of everything to get there on the timescale we're looking at to avoid worse issues.
andbberger 6y ago
Hard to argue that something that powers like 70% of France is one notch above dead. If all of big oil had conducted an incredibly successful campaign against you since you were born, you probably wouldn't be feeling too hot either. And they conducted that campaign because of how incredibly good the technology is. This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, and anti-science policy. Now is the time to rally for change and science-driven policy, not to give up. The water is lapping at our feet!
- neaanopri 6y ago
  I'm skeptical 'big oil' campaigned against nuclear. Oil doesn't compete for power generation, fossil fuel power is mostly from coal and natural gas. I would totally believe coal companies did that
  - aksss 6y ago
    Hydrocarbons have nothing to worry about, even with nuclear. We are running into fossil fuels (our global usage is still climbing at a rapid pace), we have not flatlined, much less started to bend the curve downwards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&t=760s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&t=760s
  - Turing_Machine 6y ago
    Err... natural gas (the largest component of current U.S. power generation) is produced by the exact same big oil companies, for the most part. The three largest natural gas producers in the United States are ExxonMobil, BP, and ConocoPhillips. Also, before the Arab Oil Embargo hit in 1973 (causing oil prices to skyrocket) a significant amount (though not a majority by any means) of the U.S. electric grid was oil-fired.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    What will it take to convince you of the facts? https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-gas-lobby-opposes-state-subsidies-for-nuclear-power-producers-1493145109 https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-gas-lobby-opposes-state-sub... That should also give you some terms to search for other sources too if you feel compelled.
rayiner 6y ago
I’m incredibly depressed about renewables. They’re a dead end technology for a civilization in decline—one cutting energy usage rather than exponentially increasing it to make wonderful things possible. You’ll never power a starship with windmills. Why can’t we bring down the price on nuclear instead of giving up?
- pfdietz 6y ago
  > I’m incredibly depressed about renewables. They’re a dead end technology for a civilization in decline Solar could supply civilization with more energy than fission or fusion (in manmade reactors) ever could. The Sun will produce orders of magnitude more energy than totally fusing all the deuterium or fissioning all the uranium and thorium in the solar system could provide. Far from being a sign of a civilization in decline, the triumph of renewables would be a signpost on the way to becoming a Kardashev 2 civilization that can fully exploit the energy resources of the solar system.
- echelon 6y ago
  Ask your question to the average person and imagine their response. It's because nobody is thinking about the starships, for better or worse. People are bad enough at dealing with today's problems.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  You'll never power a starship with coal either. That dead end technology is one of the few hopes for countering global warming and carbon emissions. And rooftop solar and EV batteries dual-purposing for distributed grid storage are complementary technologies. "Why can't we bring down the price of nuclear" is a problem with the nuclear industry, and has nothing to do with the REVOLUTIONARY sea change that renewables represent. And I'm a LFTR fan. Brayton cycle? 100x more available fuel that's breeded? Vastly reduced proliferation risk? "Burn" spent fuel rods? 99% fuel use? Zero meltdown risk with plug and liquid fuel? Scales down to the size of a closet? Very rapid startup/shutdown time? Container degradation was a problem, but whatever. Amazing stuff. But LFTR and other technologies have zero chance in the open market right now with renewables plummeting in cost to the point that there exist no fossil fuels that are competitive in the marketplace. Solar/wind is one of the few developments that are counter to our civilization sliding into a polluted, totalitarian, oppressive dystopia. Solar/Wind can enable decentralized power production in the third world, and combined with Starlink and other satellite internet webs will enable so much potential for the third world without the pseudo-oppressive nature of grid and wired communications infrastructure.
lumost 6y ago
I've had a tough time understanding the regulations against nuclear. A typical coal plant produces more nuclear waste than a nuclear plant... with the exception that its burned into the atmosphere. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
- adrianN 6y ago
  Diluting nuclear waste is a good way to deal with it. The problem with nuclear plants is that you have all this radiation sitting in one spot.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pretendscholar 6y ago
    Isn't it good to have all your waste in one small location? Especially radiation which can be attenuated by engineering. That's probably one of the biggest selling points for nuclear for me. Solar and wind involves a lot of land being used that can't be left for nature or other purposes. A 1 km^2 site can power a whole region with nuclear energy.
  - MertsA 6y ago
    I'd much rather have nuclear waste safely contained in one spot than distributed into everyone's lungs. The worst case scenario with nuclear waste is that it's distributed around the environment. That's the status quo with fossil fuels. You absolutely do not want to "dilute" nuclear waste into the environment.
- jhayward 6y ago
  > A typical coal plant produces more nuclear waste than a nuclear plant. No. This is absurdly incorrect. That article has been debunked many times because its basic claim is that coal ash ponds emit to the environment (not contain) more radiation than spent nuclear fuel storage in perfect working order. The spent fuel from a nuclear power plant contains many orders of magnitude more radioactive matter than any coal plant, anywhere. The design of fuel assemblies, as well as the associated exterior containment of e.g. cooling ponds, or dry casks, keeps the massive amount of radioactivity confined and separate from the environment.
malwarebytess 6y ago
> it's hard to argue against the significant advances made by renewables over the past few years. I don't think it's that hard to argue that we should have been building nuclear plants en-masse 30 years ago, and that resistance to this has lead to immeasurable damage to our biosphere. And that continued resistance will result in even more damage. No projections for renewables is fast enough to meet the gap. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/15/renewable-energy-is-growing-fast-in-the-u-s-but-fossil-fuels-still-dominate/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/15/renewable-e... Nuclear is increasingly the only option for meeting climate targets quickly enough to save our biosphere.
- adrianN 6y ago
  We can't build nuclear plants quickly. In the ten years it takes to build a nuclear plant you can build a lot of wind and solar. It's cheaper too.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    The UK commissioned Calder Hall in 1953 and connected it to the grid in 1956 (although energy production was its secondary purpose). We could do it faster if we really wanted to.
    - kristopolous 6y ago
      And if all goes as planned it'll only cost £121bn and take a total of 139 years to decommission. Really. Started in 1981, scheduled to finish in 2120, and nothing really went wrong Oh except for the year after 1956, where that site saw the worst nuclear accident in the UK's history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
      - AdmiralGinge 6y ago
        >Sir John Cockcroft, leading the project team, was sufficiently alarmed to order the filters. They could not be installed at the base as construction of the chimneys had already begun, and were constructed on the ground then winched into position at the top once the chimney's concrete had set.[42] They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident". You've got to love the British understatement! Having said that, this was really at the start of the nuclear age and came about through the UK being excluded from US nuclear projects despite having contributed to the Manhattan Project under the incorrect assumption technology would be shared after the war. Windscale was built because Britain needed the atomic bomb to prevent its post-war decline making it geopolitically irrelevant and needed it before the US and Soviet Union banned further testing. There's no way anything like that would be built today by any sane government knowing what we do now.
ekianjo 6y ago
Renewables have such a poor energy density that I am not sure anyone can take your last sentence seriously.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  The "energy density" argument against renewables is not even wrong. It's just one big non sequitur.
credit_guy 6y ago
But what if the cost of nuclear energy were to come down by a factor of 3? Nuscale's SMR cost is about $3BN/GW, while the cost of Vogtle 3-4 is about $10BN/GW. The cost of solar has a lower bound: even if panels become free, you still need to buy the rights to the land where you mount them. The cost of solar has come down a lot lately, but there's not much scope to come down further, if you look at the total cost.
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  > you still need to buy the rights to the land where you mount them. And you need to store the power somewhere for nights and cloudy days. Energy storage ain't cheap, or even feasible enough for an all-solar-and-wind power system. I don't know why solar advocates continuously ignore this point.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Batteries for short term storage, hydrogen (stored underground and burned in turbines) for long term storage. Combined cycle is 10% of the cost of a nuclear plant of the same capacity; simple cycle just 5%, so one can back up the entire grid with hydrogen and still pay lower capital cost than for a nuclear grid. https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/
    - credit_guy 6y ago
      Not according to the EIA ([1] page 8 Table 1b). The cost for 1 MWh of nuclear energy is $63 and for solar $30. The solar cost includes 4 hours of storage (no long term storage). [1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
      - pfdietz 6y ago
        That nuclear number has no credibility. AP1000 and the EPR were also promised to be cheaper, but were 2-3x times that.
Accujack 6y ago
Study up on modern nuclear technology (which solves a lot of the economic issues as well as a lot of safety/regulatory issues). Also, learn about how power grids work. Simply building in over capacity of renewables won't solve the problem at all.
omgwtfbbq 6y ago
>almost easier to just build overcapacity into the renewable generation. That won't be sufficient to stabilize a grid. You need big baseline output and/or lots of storage.

cpach 6y ago

I don’t really understand how wind and sun could totally replace nuclear. How do we get electricity during the night? How do we get electricity when it’s cloudy but the wind is light at the same time?

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
Store the power. Batteries, pump water up into lakes, melt salt, etc.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  From the numbers we saw during the Texas power outage, the amount of batteries required would be mind-boggling. Lots of places do not have the geography required for pumped storage, or it is already fully exploited (building a new dam is also an environmental disaster) Molten salt also still seems to be in it's infancy. The most practical solution I could see today to live without baseline power would be to build a massive inter-continental HVDC grid. Large grids have a tendency to be fragile and have catastrophic failures though.
  - godelski 6y ago
    To be honest the best probably would be to get small modular reactors (SMRs) into mass production. That would give economies of scale along with other benefits. But we aren't quite there yet. I'd imagine if SMRs became popular larger reactors would as well too.
    - manicdee 6y ago
      Can you imagine how a Texan operator of a SMR would have cut corners and what the damage to their plant would have been in this cold snap? Remembering that the damage to Texan energy production was due to failure to winterise their equipment after the last two cold snaps. It has happened before, they were told it was going to happen again, but the legislature decided that it was best to let the market decide the outcome. An SMR operator refusing to winterise their plant would end up in a similar situation: part of the equipment freezes or ices over (because antifreeze costs money), leading to an inability to scale up production until ambient temperatures rise far enough to defrost the frozen plant.
      - pbourke 6y ago
        Isn’t nuclear federally regulated today?
        godelski 6y ago
        Yes, and nuclear facilities have significantly different standards from other facilities. The parent's comment is bad because the SMR wouldn't explode or leak if it wasn't properly winterized. It would shut down. But there is a lower chance of that happening simply because the significantly higher standards surrounding nuclear.
        manicdee 6y ago
        Where did I suggest a SMR would explode or leak?
  - bildung 6y ago
    Texas' (additional) problem was lack of connectivity to the rest of the country. With a proper grid the outages wouldn't have occured.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Also, there will be hundreds of millions of EVs in about 10 years. With not-so-small batteries, charged by distributed rooftop solar. Many / most of the EVs will have batteries that are overprovisioned for daily driving in order to enable distance driving.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Making Methane is important too. We already have infrastructure for storing vast amounts of natural gas. We can just use it to store Methane made from Water, CO2 and electricity.
neolog 6y ago
Store it, or get it from somewhere else?
nl 6y ago
Transmission lines and storage. There are multiple 2500km transmission lines in use today. They are relatively cheap to build and solve almost all the intermitency issues. China has a few over 3000km long already, eg: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid/chinas-state-grid-corp-crushes-power-transmission-records https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid... and there is a 4500km long line planned for Australia to Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93ASEAN_Power_...
MrApathy 6y ago
You build a big grid. Wind won't be light everywhere. Load is lower at night, so lack of sunlight is less of an issue. Maybe people start placing battery packs in their homes. Battery technology has seen large investments over the past decade and performance is better than ever. When demand is high, inexpensive natural gas can be turned on quickly. There are a lot of options, almost all of them less expensive than nuclear. That's my point, traditionally nuclear was good for baseline and renewable doesn't have a comparable equivalent apart from hydro. But other renewables like wind are getting to be so efficient and inexpensive, that I don't see how building an excess of it can't compete with nuclear.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Load is lower at night Only in warm climates.
  - whoooooo123 6y ago
    Yes, and also load is higher in the winter, when there's less wind and sunshine.
    - hyper_dynamics 6y ago
      Less wind in the winter is surely not true for countries in Europe.
- godelski 6y ago
  > Battery technology has seen large investments over the past decade and performance is better than ever. Battery technology still has a bit to go before it can perform this task though. Even if we don't account for freak weather events (which are becoming more common). > When demand is high, inexpensive natural gas can be turned on quickly. Is this a good option though? I think the only good argument against nuclear is cost, so I agree with that. But if we consider the cost of emissions, storage (these aren't counted in solar and wind and don't make for fair comparisons to base loads like coal, gas, or nuclear), or other factors that fall under "tragedy of the commons" (i.e. putting sources on even playing fields) the prices become more comparable (depending how you weigh factors). But it really does come down to how much you value the cost of climate and human lives (since nuclear is about 50x safer than natural gas). Cost is a good argument, but we have to define our priors because "cost" means different things to different people. I for one would rather pay more for electricity and save human lives and reduce emissions. Just at $50/ton tax (low) would make it competitive[0], assuming that we couldn't regain economies of scale. [0] https://www.axios.com/nuclear-energy-could-be-competitive-but-it-requires-pricing-carbon-78fd8c75-a534-4baa-a12b-452e8ce17c9c.html https://www.axios.com/nuclear-energy-could-be-competitive-bu...
pydry 6y ago
Overproduction, storage and demand side shifting. The market can choose which mix of these works best in which market - which might vary a lot from market to market. It's rather ironic that the carbon industry spent the last 30 years telling us through Koch institutes etc. that the market knew best (when fossil fuels were most viable financially) and now that the green energy competition is undercutting them to death, suddenly markets don't solve anything.

ehnto 6y ago

I was also a big fan, but there are many alternatives now. I think they will remain useful for some edge cases. I am now more looking forward to seeing battery and energy storage solutions mature, as well as seeing how solar powered hydrogen gas can replace or dilute fossil fuel in gas turbine generators for greener load balancing.

Aachen 6y ago
> I am now more looking forward to seeing battery and energy storage solutions mature I'm reading Bill Gates' latest book, he says he spent and lost a lot of money on battery tech and while we are able to get incremental improvements, it appears that an order of magnitude improvement is unlikely at this point. Other areas are still possible - heck, batteries are still possible, but I'm not sure we should hope for that rather than draft an optimistic case of incremental improvements and start planning with that instead.
- ehnto 6y ago
  I think energy storage outside of chemical batteries is where infrastructure scale storage should be happening. Things like pumped dams or gravity batteries. Instead of thinking of them as longer term storage of excess energy, we can think of them as capacitors for the grid overnight. In this way while we still rely on a fossil fuel turbine as a last resort, the vast majority of the year can be covered by renewables. Lets say the split looks like: 8am - 8pm : 100% renewables 8pm - 8am : Split between remaining renewables then gravity storage begins discharging If you are going to run out of gravity storage, you will have ample warning, and you will have a comfortable amount of time to bring a backup gas turbine plant online. One of the big challenges with all grids is continuity and keeping everything in sync, most of the time the issue is not having the ability to rapidly respond to fluctuations in the grid. Gravity storage helps solve that issue by being very predictable, and (with a smart grid integration) instantaneously available.
  - Aachen 6y ago
    Don't have time for a proper response, just a short note: Yep people are looking into that, but it ain't trivial. Apparently one needs a fairly specific slope for it to be econom at the moment (competitive with chemical batteries). If you look on YouTube for the (clickbaity, unfortunately) title "the truth about pumped storage" (iirc), you should find a video from some engineering channel where some of this is mentioned. Another keyword might be Ireland. There's gotta be more information-dense / less time-consuming sources than that video though, it's just the one I got this from. My point being, if it were this simple, yeah. Looks like we'll (recurring theme) need a bit of everything to get there on the timescale we're looking at to avoid worse issues.

andbberger 6y ago

Hard to argue that something that powers like 70% of France is one notch above dead. If all of big oil had conducted an incredibly successful campaign against you since you were born, you probably wouldn't be feeling too hot either. And they conducted that campaign because of how incredibly good the technology is. This isn't a technological problem, it's one of corruption, conflicts of interest, and anti-science policy. Now is the time to rally for change and science-driven policy, not to give up. The water is lapping at our feet!

neaanopri 6y ago
I'm skeptical 'big oil' campaigned against nuclear. Oil doesn't compete for power generation, fossil fuel power is mostly from coal and natural gas. I would totally believe coal companies did that
- aksss 6y ago
  Hydrocarbons have nothing to worry about, even with nuclear. We are running into fossil fuels (our global usage is still climbing at a rapid pace), we have not flatlined, much less started to bend the curve downwards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&t=760s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&t=760s
- Turing_Machine 6y ago
  Err... natural gas (the largest component of current U.S. power generation) is produced by the exact same big oil companies, for the most part. The three largest natural gas producers in the United States are ExxonMobil, BP, and ConocoPhillips. Also, before the Arab Oil Embargo hit in 1973 (causing oil prices to skyrocket) a significant amount (though not a majority by any means) of the U.S. electric grid was oil-fired.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  What will it take to convince you of the facts? https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-gas-lobby-opposes-state-subsidies-for-nuclear-power-producers-1493145109 https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-gas-lobby-opposes-state-sub... That should also give you some terms to search for other sources too if you feel compelled.

rayiner 6y ago

I’m incredibly depressed about renewables. They’re a dead end technology for a civilization in decline—one cutting energy usage rather than exponentially increasing it to make wonderful things possible. You’ll never power a starship with windmills. Why can’t we bring down the price on nuclear instead of giving up?

pfdietz 6y ago
> I’m incredibly depressed about renewables. They’re a dead end technology for a civilization in decline Solar could supply civilization with more energy than fission or fusion (in manmade reactors) ever could. The Sun will produce orders of magnitude more energy than totally fusing all the deuterium or fissioning all the uranium and thorium in the solar system could provide. Far from being a sign of a civilization in decline, the triumph of renewables would be a signpost on the way to becoming a Kardashev 2 civilization that can fully exploit the energy resources of the solar system.
echelon 6y ago
Ask your question to the average person and imagine their response. It's because nobody is thinking about the starships, for better or worse. People are bad enough at dealing with today's problems.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
You'll never power a starship with coal either. That dead end technology is one of the few hopes for countering global warming and carbon emissions. And rooftop solar and EV batteries dual-purposing for distributed grid storage are complementary technologies. "Why can't we bring down the price of nuclear" is a problem with the nuclear industry, and has nothing to do with the REVOLUTIONARY sea change that renewables represent. And I'm a LFTR fan. Brayton cycle? 100x more available fuel that's breeded? Vastly reduced proliferation risk? "Burn" spent fuel rods? 99% fuel use? Zero meltdown risk with plug and liquid fuel? Scales down to the size of a closet? Very rapid startup/shutdown time? Container degradation was a problem, but whatever. Amazing stuff. But LFTR and other technologies have zero chance in the open market right now with renewables plummeting in cost to the point that there exist no fossil fuels that are competitive in the marketplace. Solar/wind is one of the few developments that are counter to our civilization sliding into a polluted, totalitarian, oppressive dystopia. Solar/Wind can enable decentralized power production in the third world, and combined with Starlink and other satellite internet webs will enable so much potential for the third world without the pseudo-oppressive nature of grid and wired communications infrastructure.

lumost 6y ago

I've had a tough time understanding the regulations against nuclear. A typical coal plant produces more nuclear waste than a nuclear plant... with the exception that its burned into the atmosphere. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

adrianN 6y ago
Diluting nuclear waste is a good way to deal with it. The problem with nuclear plants is that you have all this radiation sitting in one spot.
- deleted 6y ago
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- pretendscholar 6y ago
  Isn't it good to have all your waste in one small location? Especially radiation which can be attenuated by engineering. That's probably one of the biggest selling points for nuclear for me. Solar and wind involves a lot of land being used that can't be left for nature or other purposes. A 1 km^2 site can power a whole region with nuclear energy.
- MertsA 6y ago
  I'd much rather have nuclear waste safely contained in one spot than distributed into everyone's lungs. The worst case scenario with nuclear waste is that it's distributed around the environment. That's the status quo with fossil fuels. You absolutely do not want to "dilute" nuclear waste into the environment.
jhayward 6y ago
> A typical coal plant produces more nuclear waste than a nuclear plant. No. This is absurdly incorrect. That article has been debunked many times because its basic claim is that coal ash ponds emit to the environment (not contain) more radiation than spent nuclear fuel storage in perfect working order. The spent fuel from a nuclear power plant contains many orders of magnitude more radioactive matter than any coal plant, anywhere. The design of fuel assemblies, as well as the associated exterior containment of e.g. cooling ponds, or dry casks, keeps the massive amount of radioactivity confined and separate from the environment.

malwarebytess 6y ago

> it's hard to argue against the significant advances made by renewables over the past few years. I don't think it's that hard to argue that we should have been building nuclear plants en-masse 30 years ago, and that resistance to this has lead to immeasurable damage to our biosphere. And that continued resistance will result in even more damage. No projections for renewables is fast enough to meet the gap. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/15/renewable-energy-is-growing-fast-in-the-u-s-but-fossil-fuels-still-dominate/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/15/renewable-e... Nuclear is increasingly the only option for meeting climate targets quickly enough to save our biosphere.

adrianN 6y ago
We can't build nuclear plants quickly. In the ten years it takes to build a nuclear plant you can build a lot of wind and solar. It's cheaper too.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  The UK commissioned Calder Hall in 1953 and connected it to the grid in 1956 (although energy production was its secondary purpose). We could do it faster if we really wanted to.
  - kristopolous 6y ago
    And if all goes as planned it'll only cost £121bn and take a total of 139 years to decommission. Really. Started in 1981, scheduled to finish in 2120, and nothing really went wrong Oh except for the year after 1956, where that site saw the worst nuclear accident in the UK's history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
    - AdmiralGinge 6y ago
      >Sir John Cockcroft, leading the project team, was sufficiently alarmed to order the filters. They could not be installed at the base as construction of the chimneys had already begun, and were constructed on the ground then winched into position at the top once the chimney's concrete had set.[42] They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident". You've got to love the British understatement! Having said that, this was really at the start of the nuclear age and came about through the UK being excluded from US nuclear projects despite having contributed to the Manhattan Project under the incorrect assumption technology would be shared after the war. Windscale was built because Britain needed the atomic bomb to prevent its post-war decline making it geopolitically irrelevant and needed it before the US and Soviet Union banned further testing. There's no way anything like that would be built today by any sane government knowing what we do now.

ekianjo 6y ago

Renewables have such a poor energy density that I am not sure anyone can take your last sentence seriously.

pfdietz 6y ago
The "energy density" argument against renewables is not even wrong. It's just one big non sequitur.

credit_guy 6y ago

But what if the cost of nuclear energy were to come down by a factor of 3? Nuscale's SMR cost is about $3BN/GW, while the cost of Vogtle 3-4 is about $10BN/GW. The cost of solar has a lower bound: even if panels become free, you still need to buy the rights to the land where you mount them. The cost of solar has come down a lot lately, but there's not much scope to come down further, if you look at the total cost.

orthecreedence 6y ago
> you still need to buy the rights to the land where you mount them. And you need to store the power somewhere for nights and cloudy days. Energy storage ain't cheap, or even feasible enough for an all-solar-and-wind power system. I don't know why solar advocates continuously ignore this point.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Batteries for short term storage, hydrogen (stored underground and burned in turbines) for long term storage. Combined cycle is 10% of the cost of a nuclear plant of the same capacity; simple cycle just 5%, so one can back up the entire grid with hydrogen and still pay lower capital cost than for a nuclear grid. https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/
  - credit_guy 6y ago
    Not according to the EIA ([1] page 8 Table 1b). The cost for 1 MWh of nuclear energy is $63 and for solar $30. The solar cost includes 4 hours of storage (no long term storage). [1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      That nuclear number has no credibility. AP1000 and the EPR were also promised to be cheaper, but were 2-3x times that.

Accujack 6y ago

Study up on modern nuclear technology (which solves a lot of the economic issues as well as a lot of safety/regulatory issues). Also, learn about how power grids work. Simply building in over capacity of renewables won't solve the problem at all.

omgwtfbbq 6y ago

>almost easier to just build overcapacity into the renewable generation. That won't be sufficient to stabilize a grid. You need big baseline output and/or lots of storage.