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Nuclear makes little sense for climate targets. The construction is too expensive and too slow - allocating capital to nuclear ends up slower than allocating th
by dv_dt 6y ago
Nuclear makes little sense for climate targets. The construction is too expensive and too slow - allocating capital to nuclear ends up slower than allocating the same capital to renewables for hitting climate targets. If you look at reports of lifetime costs for utility scale energy, Nuclear is the most expensive and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Solar and wind is already 3-4x cheaper than nuclear, and by the time the decade is out it will likely be 10x cheaper even with attendant storage.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
- vlovich123 6y agoThat’s only because nuclear hasn’t seen serious investment in generations. That’s why solar and wind has come down.
- dv_dt 6y agoChina seriously invested in it heavily, met a modicum of success in building a wave of nuclear plants, but near the middle of the full plan decided to halt any new construction. I think even with low regulation, and a focused investment it was turning out more expensive than the alternatives. Personally, I think looking at the data so far, we should just stop investing in fission plants, continue research of fusion plants, but put a practical focus on building renewables to meet climate targets to get the most reduction for the buck.
- thinkcontext 6y agoLoan subsidies passed under GWB were supposed to result in a nuclear renaissance in the form of Westinghouse's AP1000 GEN III+ reactor. The 2 projects started under Obama have been unmitigated financial disasters. One was cancelled after spending $9B on a hole in the ground, the other is about to come online after going 2x+ over money and time budget. All other AP1000 projects in the US have been cancelled. No one in the US is going to order an AP1000 unless the government takes on construction risk.
- oconnor663 6y agoCasey Handmer has a related take: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-power-a-solution-to-climate-change/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-pow... > The reason solar is winning is because the manufacturing technology can be iterated every six months, so the learning curve is much faster. Nuclear power plant technology is iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational, while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage. Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5% improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor. Obviously not. There's definitely an argument that some part of that slow iteration speed for nuclear is political and unnecessary. Clearly if we built more plants they would iterate faster. But realistically at this point...is it going to happen?
- ralala 6y agoI guess you also don't need insurances for nuclear plants. Nobody will be able to pay in the worst case.
- betterunix2 6y agoActually, nuclear power plant operators have special liability protections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Act
- class4behavior 6y agoNuclear power plants aren't just an all-or-nothing kind of risk. There is plenty that could go wrong and either halt its operations or affect its environment. For instance, a lot of plants increase the average temperature of the rivers they dump their cooling water in. That issue has become more threatening over time since climate change is doing the same.
- pydry 6y agoUS plants have to insure for disaster up to $200 million. The taxpayer is on the hook for the rest. In Fukushima total cleanup costs could go up to a trillion dollars : https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-will-approach-one-trillion-dollars-just-for-nuclear-disaster/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
- strictnein 6y agoYou need baseload power. On a dark windless night, when everyone is charging their electric cars, you can't just have brownouts and blackouts. And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to handle all of that, but implementation of something like that isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.
- adrianN 6y agoMost countries are pretty far away from the amount of renewables where you start requiring lots of storage. You can easily do 50% renewables for electricity with hardly any storage at all.
- Maximus9000 6y agoI agree, but not with the "50%" number. “Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity.” Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy - 2010. https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven-chu-posts-nuclear-rationale-on-facebook/ https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-steven...
- legulere 6y agoThe how does Denmark manage 60%, and Germany 50%? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...
- Maximus9000 6y agoTechnically, from your own numbers... Denmarks intermittent renewables (wind + solar) is 43%. Germany is 34%. Biofuel & Hydro are not intermittent. I don't know, that's pretty impressive. Maybe they have international connectors with other countries? I think Germany buys Nuclear power from France? or maybe they have a super stable kind of wind.
- bongobingo 6y agoI’ve yet to see any renewable plan that could cover big northern cities. Where are we going to build a solar farm to cover NYC, DC, and Philadelphia? There is 9 hours of daylight in the dead of winter, and it’s not exactly known for being sunny in January. NYC alone needs 11,000 megawatt hours per day. My back of the envelope fermi estimate is a solar farm covering approximately 16,000 acres. Forget the metro area, that’s just for NYC. Probably double if you include the entire metro area. You aren’t going to find that kind of land within 300 miles of NYC.
- dv_dt 6y agooffshore wind...
- notJim 6y agoWhy is there a requirement that power be generated within 300 miles? NYC already gets plenty of power from further away than that. With HVDC transmission, we can transmit power thousands of miles efficiently. PNW hydro power is used in LA, for example.
- burkaman 6y agoFirst of all, did you look at a map? 300 miles from NYC gets you to upstate New York, or western Pennsylvania, or rural West Virginia. Second, NYISO, which covers New York State, already imports lots of power from Quebec, Ontario, New England, and PJM (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, and more). We do need more transmission (another thing the White House is working on: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/04/27/fact-sheet-biden-administration-advances-expansion-modernization-of-the-electric-grid/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...), but power import/export over long distances is already commonplace. Edit: And if you really want to look to the future, you could read the proposal for a North American Supergrid: http://northamericansupergrid.org/ http://northamericansupergrid.org/
- Wohlf 6y agoYou say 'did you look at a map' but have you looked at a topographical map? I don't see much room that isn't either protected forests or the Appalachian mountains, in some cases it's both.
- Robotbeat 6y agoThere is no renewable energy source that is faster than simply maintaining existing nuclear capacity. Lots of nuclear power plants are at risk of closing. A small subsidy to keep them open until we build out sufficient renewables to shut down all fossil fuels is a freaking steal considering the effects of climate change.
- WhompingWindows 6y agoYou're not responding to the premise of the article: subsidize existing nuclear, not new nuclear. You're taking on an easier argument, but instead you need to clarify: how is allowing carbon-free existing nuclear fall due to price a good thing for the climate?
- dv_dt 6y agoI am perhaps missing it, but my takeaway from the article was that doesn't seem to actually specify existing nuclear, preferring to talk about nuclear subsidy. If it were only existing nuclear I would mostly agree on keeping it save for certain certain end of life reactors (e.g diablo canyon built near an earthquake fault).
- LaMarseillaise 6y ago> Nuclear makes little sense for climate targets. I do not care only about the climate - I care about the environment. The entire planet should not be covered with solar panels and wind turbines. Whether or not it is more expensive, I support nuclear because it is the right thing to do.
- legulere 6y agoRooftop photovoltaics alone could produce 40% of US electricity: https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/eyes-on-environment/the_power_of_rooftop_solar/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/eyes-on-environment/the... You don’t need to cover the whole planet.
- LaMarseillaise 6y agoCurrent US electricity. To decarbonize transportation and industry, we will need 200-300% more. That drops rooftops to 10%, and that does not account for night and winter (overbuilding and storage).
- mkoubaa 6y agoButter and guns my friend
- hinkley 6y agoSolar and wind are nuclear power. We keep the reactor 93 million miles away, in a huge gravitational containment system, and even so tens of thousands of people die from cancer caused by the radiation every year in the United States alone, despite two layers of shielding and multiple kinds of voluntary prevention protocols.