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Why Nuclear Power, Not Renewables, Is the Path to Low-Carbon Energy (2020)
- adamvalve 5y agoWhy does it always have to be one or the other? It’s silly.
- pfdietz 5y agoNuclear and renewables do not work well together. When you model cost optimized synthetic baseload sources (with renewables, nuclear, and storage), the solutions swap (as assumptions change) from "all renewable" to "all nuclear" with no in-between.
- _Microft 5y agoDoes anyone know if this is true? https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Research_on_Equal_Opportunity https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Researc... That would make the source a lot less credible tbh.
- pjc50 5y agoMore on the author: https://trueties.org/trueties.org/about-robert-bryce.html https://trueties.org/trueties.org/about-robert-bryce.html Someone really has it in for him: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/anti-renewable-energy-fabricator-robert-bryce-continues-david-ward https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/anti-renewable-energy-fabrica...
- antr 5y agoAttacking the author instead of attacking the argument?
- kiliantics 5y agoNuclear gets a lot of support from the fossil fuel industry and also the defence industry, unsurprisingly enough. There are some interesting points against embracing more nuclear energy which go beyond the usual fears of its danger and waste disposal. /r/uninsurable is a space that discusses these a lot. They aren't necessarily more correct but it does seem there is a lot of misinformation out there about nuclear energy and we should definitely be skeptical when it is being pushed hard and evaluate who is doing so and why.
- Faaak 5y agoFollowing the article, the US per-capita energy spending is of 144$/annum, compared to 81$ for Europe. However, the consumer price per kWh is higher in Europe (~20cts/kWh) than in the US (~12). So the big difference here is that the US consumes more. Perhaps due to worse efficiency houses/appliances (dryer, ...)
- beaconstudios 5y agoI suspect the pervasiveness of HVAC in the US is also an aspect. They're pretty power-intensive and run all the time - you just don't really see them outside large offices in the UK, I'm not sure about elsewhere.
- lwhi 5y agoHouses are bigger. I think this is the main contributing factor.
- 988747 5y agoUS is located more to the south than Europe, so more spending on air conditioning in southern states can make quite a difference...
- iSnow 5y agoThat's not the reason, if it were, then within the EU, southern members would use more energy. It's a lot more nuanced, with bigger houses in the USA, a lot cheaper construction, higher industrial output than poorer European countries and so on: https://www.statista.com/statistics/332520/primary-energy-consumption-in-selected-countries-in-europe/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/332520/primary-energy-co...
- rejectedandsad 5y agoDryers in Europe are famously ineffective, and from what I gather even having them is rarer - many people still air dry on clotheslines etc. Plus, air conditioning is more common even in cooler areas of the US - I’m in the north but have and use central AC. We should innovate ourselves out of this with solar, wind, nuclear rather than advocating for inferior living standards.
- chanux 5y agoJust leaving this here: Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change? - Kurzgesagt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ
- awestroke 5y agoNuclear power is more expensive per KWh than renewables. Even more if you factor in nuclear waste storage. Why would you ever consider nuclear instead of renewables with this in mind?
- PaulHoule 5y agoNuclear works when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Renewables provide cheap energy at the margin (e.g. negative energy prices in Germany at peak hours) but cannot be counted on all the time.
- bushbaba 5y agoI’d bet storing excess energy for a rainy day is cheaper than storing nuclear waste for many lifetimes.
- TameAntelope 5y agoNot if you store it in space.
- falcolas 5y agoSpace launches still fail. The fallout from a failed launch of radioactive fuel would be pretty devastating. Not to mention that launch prices are still, pardon the pun, astronomical.
- PaulHoule 5y agoI think there is almost a theorem that storage capacity will cost at least as much as generation capacity.
- Gwypaas 5y agoIt's all about the geographical decoupling with local storage and smart consumers to smooth the loads. For example tying the charging of your electric car while it's parked to the current price. For example using Norwegian hydro together with German, British and Danish wind. Germany <-> Norway (2021): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink UK <-> Norway (2021) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Link Denmark <-> Norway (1977) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skagerrak_(power_transmission_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skagerrak_(power_transmission_...
- PaulHoule 5y ago... there will be no new light water reactors built outside of China because a LWR can't possibly be competitive with renewables or fossil fuel with carbon capture. The problem is that LWR works at low temperatures to drive a steam turbine. Modern fossil fuel plants use gas turbine generators (like airplane engines) that have a power density more than 10 times greater -- if airplanes were driven by steam turbines the whole fuselage would be a steam turbine and there would be no room for the passengers. Even if they solved the problem that the $5 billion LWR that is supposed to be built in 3 years is really a $20 billion LWR built in 10 years, an LWR still not economic. People quit building nuclear plants at the same time they quit building coal burners for the same reason -- steam turbines can't compete economically. Even if the heat was free, the balance of plant is too much. If we switched to (say) a sodium cooled fast reactor or HTGR or a molten salt reactor it's possible nuclear could be competitive but any new reactor faces challenges in terms of materials, fuel fabrication, control...
- TameAntelope 5y agoCost would more than likely go down if innovation in nuclear weren't stifled to all hell by FUD.
- bryanlarsen 5y agoCoal plants use steam turbines too, and the cost of the steam turbine is the main reason why coal plants are no longer economically viable.
- jabl 5y agoLack of energy density in the turbines is not really what drives nuclear costs up. For a power plant it's not really an issue. That being said, you're correct though. Compared to steam, power conversion machinery based on supercritical CO2 is amazingly compact. Fairly proven technology is higher temperature steam (about 540C rather than 300C) which is widely used in fossil fuel power plants, and would allow slightly better efficiency and smaller size.
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- andi999 5y agoI thought there is not so much uranium: https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html#:~:text=Uranium%20abundance%3A%20At%20the%20current,for%20less%20than%205%20years https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm.... 5 years if all nuclear power.
- himinlomax 5y agoWe keep finding petroleum because there is a huge demand for it. Known reserves of uranium are low because we're not looking for more as the demand is low. If there was a demand, there is little doubt prospection would pick up and reserves would be found.
- jbverschoor 5y agoThere are other nuclear fuels as well.
- 5555624 5y agoThe link doesn't define "the world supply of viable uranium." Find other sources. (The article even discusses extracting uranium from seawater.) What about finding new deposits or new mines? According to the Virginia Geologic Survey, "The largest unmined uranium deposit in the United States is Coles Hill, in Pittsylvania County." (https://www.dmme.virginia.gov/dgmr/uranium.shtml https://www.dmme.virginia.gov/dgmr/uranium.shtml) Virginia currently has a moratorium on uranium mining.
- arcticbull 5y agoThere's more than enough thorium to go around, though, something like 40,000 years worth.
- rootVIII 5y agoThe only reason reactors are dangerous is because everyone was still using the disaster plan from the 1960s. Cooling a melting reactor can be done very safely now if people put the effort in. This is a much cleaner solution than solar; wtf are we supposed to do with all of the solar cells every 10 years or so... landfill? I completely agree with you
- Angostura 5y agoI assume you are being ironic suggesting that putting solar cells into landfill is more problematic than disposing of spent nuclear fuel - and decommissioning old, radioactive installations.
- jchook 5y agoSolar panels have a relatively short lifespan, require and enormous amount of material compared to the energy they generate, and contain toxic elements that never break down. In contrast, all the nuclear waste generated by the world since the invention of nuclear energy can fit into a single Highschool auditorium. For perspective, a giant freight ship that burns two tons of crude fuel per hour could run on 5g of plutonium per year.
- lwhi 5y agoI'm sorry, but comparing the nuclear waste to the waste provided by solar panels is absolute lunacy.
- PaulHoule 5y agoNuclear waste isn't really waste. That's part of the reason why projects like Yucca Mountain haven't been completed. Natural uranium is a mixture of U235 and U238, an LWR consumes U235 and a small amount of the U238. It gets maybe 2% of the energy out of the uranium and most of the long-lived radioactivity is Pu239 and related actinides that have value as fuel. (In a reprocessing cycle almost all of the waste decays in 500 years.) Reprocessing nuclear fuel to produce uranium and plutonium powder is a straightforward technology. What's not straightforward is fabricating fuel out of that powder. The most practical way to alloy oxides of U and Pu is to put them through a high-energy ball mill that fuses together nanoparticles of U and Pu. The HEBM can make something like Silica into a deadly poison, so just think what it can do with Plutonium! It seems impossible to run a Pu fuel fab that is a safe place to work without using a respirator full time. The French seem cool with it, but it violates the labor laws in every other country. To make it worse, fuel fabrication is a labor intensive process which involves somebody putting pellets into a fuel rod with gloved hands. There are alternatives (co-precipitation, liquid fuel reactors, robotics) but they have to be developed to close the fuel cycle.
- Angostura 5y agoI disliked the headline, because it seemed to me that at the very least Renewables have a substantial role to play, even if nuclear is required for guaranteeing baseload. This prompted me to have a look at the source and this may provide useful context https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Research_on_Equal_Opportunity https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Researc...
- lwhi 5y agoIt sounds like a headline an organisation formed to lobby for the nuclear industry might use.
- pydry 5y agohttps://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Research_on_Equal_Opportunity https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Researc... it's a Koch outlet.
- tlocke 5y agoBaseload isn't really relevant when talking about meeting demand. What's important is that for any point in time all the energy sources added up are equal to the demand. System operators will use the cheapest source first, which is always renewables, then (at least in the UK) it'll typically use gas generation to meet the shortfall. Gas is particularly good for this because it can easily be turned up and down. In all this, baseload isn't really a relevant concept. In the UK, where there's a semblance of a free market in electricity generation, it's been possible for decades for nuclear power stations to be build by private industry. None have because they just can't compete economically. The cases where they have been built have all been when the government intervened in the market and heavily subsidized them. Nobody really knows why!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gruez 5y ago>What's important is that for any point in time all the energy sources added up are equal to the demand. [...] then (at least in the UK) it'll typically use gas generation to meet the shortfall But does that work out to be better overall (ie. in terms of cost, or in terms of the environment) than having nuclear providing the baseload?
- postingawayonhn 5y ago> Malcolm Turnbull, a member of [Australia's] center-left Labor party. They may want to re-check the source for that one. Turnbull is a member of the center-right Liberal Party.
- wazoox 5y agoNuclear is vastly more efficient than wind and solar, requiring much less copper, concrete, and ground space for the same amount of available energy. Plus this is entirely controllable production, requiring only minimal hydro power for production smoothing (French nukes can ramp up from 0 to 100% or the reverse in 10 minutes), while wind and solar produce whenever they want, and therefore require either storage (no technology exists at scale, particularly nothing that could be massively available and producing in the next couple of decades) or backup production (usually gas, which is really bad from a CO2 point of view). That's why Germany's Energiewende is going into the wall: it's already much more expensive than planned, and will require humongous additional investment, so far for very limited impact on absolute emissions. Remember that what counts for the climate are absolute emissions, not relative proportions of low-carbon and high-carbon production!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- CapsAdmin 5y agoDamming a river has a negative environmental impact on its wildlife too.
- justanotherguy0 5y agoAnd wind turbines kill birds. And solar fields disrupt habitats. What about it?
- devoutsalsa 5y agoWind turbines kill maybe 500,000 birds a year. [1]. Birds flying into windows kills up to 1,000,000,000 birds per year. [2] [1] https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/collisions/wind-turbines.php#:~:text=The%20most%20comprehensive%20and%20statistically,and%20500%2C000%20birds%20per%20year https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/.... [2] https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/being-a-good-wildlife-neighbor/birds-and-windows/#:~:text=Up%20to%20one%20billion%20birds,of%20window%20collisions%20are%20fatal https://audubonportland.org/our-work/rehabilitate-wildlife/b....
- ferdowsi 5y agoWhy ARE types like the Koch Brothers so interested in nuclear? It's a massive upfront capital expenditure, and profitability is always questionable so they need to be subsidized by governments. Is it simply ideological aversion to solar and wind?
- mnw21cam 5y ago"14.5 terawatts per day". Units, people, units!
- tristor 5y agoWhy not both? I feel like at this point anyone who has done any research at all on climate change and its intersection with power generation fully acknowledges as accepted wisdom that nuclear is best for baseload and scaling and renewables are best for peak-load and have the lowest cost of production (ecologically and economically) at their highest output points. What is unspoken in many discussions is how energy intensive a lot of technologies are that are going to be more necessary as global warming continues /and/ technologies which could help to counteract and perhaps reverse the damage we've already done (atmospheric carbon scrubbers). Having carbon neutral or carbon negative baseload generation in mass quantity is absolutely critical to any realistic plan to deal with climate change, which currently means nuclear as our only option. Given that nuclear (with the correct reactor designs) has better power generation density than competing technologies and superior scaling, if we had 1:1 replacement of existing fossil fuel power plants with nuclear in the US, for instance, we would have enough excess baseload generation to start running atmospheric carbon scrubbers full-time in major cities to counter-act pollution from ICE vehicles and excess energy for various other pollution mitigation strategies (such as water purification / ground pollution abatement).
- kragen 5y agoNuclear energy is the Amiga of energy sources. Ahead of its time, it was unjustly rejected and persecuted by the ignorant masses. Its advocates are bonded by the quiet pride that at least they weren’t unthinkingly siding with those masses. (And they’re right!) Meanwhile, as the Amiga stagnated for terribly unfair reasons, other, scrappier technologies like the i386 and UMG-Si grew from being worthless boondoggles (except in special circumstances, like spaceflight) to being actually far better and cheaper. But the Amiga advocates keep the faith, sharing their suffering and resentment. They inevitably try the alternatives a little and perhaps even start to like them. Gradually their denial recedes, decade by decade. But they know that however much fab costs go down and leave their beloved Amiga behind in the dust, you’ll never be able to run nuclear submarines and Antarctic research stations on solar panels. — ⁂ — Not all nuclear-energy advocates are so unversed in the basics of energy as to say incoherent things like “replacing daily energy consumption from crude oil will require 14.5 terawatts per day” or pants-on-head things like “renewable mandates push up electricity prices” (https://freopp.org/why-nuclear-power-not-renewables-is-the-path-to-low-carbon-energy-part-1-c0b66d4b9570 https://freopp.org/why-nuclear-power-not-renewables-is-the-p...) but today they are all suffering from serious truth deficiencies. — ⁂ — Wind, where available, undercut the cost of steam power (including nuclear and coal) a decade ago, and PV undercut it in equatorial parts of the world about four years ago, or in even more of the world if you don’t include storage. As a result, last year, China, whose electrical consumption has doubled in the last decade, built 48.2 gigawatts† of new photovoltaic capacity last year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-climatechange-idUSKBN29Q0JT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-energy-climatechang... but only has, I think, something like 10 GW of nuclear plants under construction, scheduled to come online over the next several years. PV installed capacity in China is growing by 23% per year, the same rate it has been growing worldwide for the last few years; with some luck that will return to the 39%-yearly-worldwide-growth trend that has been the fairly consistent average over the last 28 years.‡ (Previous versions of this comment were posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26218673 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26674832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26674832.) ______ † China’s PV capacity factor seems to be only about 13%, so those 48 GWp probably work out to only about 6 GW average. It would be nice if China managed to site its new PV plants in places that could provide a capacity factor like California’s 28%. ‡ Why 28? Because I haven’t found figures yet on what worldwide installed capacity was in 01992 or earlier.
- rho4 5y agoI am not against nuclear per se, but Chernobyl and Fukushima taught me that accidents will happen, so in order to get my support, build them as far away from where I live as possible. I prefer wind and especially solar over nuclear because: - no megacorp and state monopolies (more price competition) - faster innovation cycles - faster scaling / much shorter project timeframes - decentralization (on national and individual levels) - romantic hopes of independence / self-reliance (on national and individual levels) Not so much because of monetary or efficiency considerations. The nuclear lobby should address these points to get me to listen. Also, article TLDR.
- froggertoaster 5y agoLots of the push against nuclear is non-scientific. Worth pointing out that all humans reject science, not just conservatives - liberals do exactly the same thing. This is salient to the nuclear discussion because, regardless of the science, liberals STILL push against nuclear science - even though it's the best hope for getting away from using fossil fuels that we have today. https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1322308774351138816 https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1322308774351138816
- tlamponi 5y agoNuclear energy, in the current actual available and usable forms, means that you have a system which never ever can fail, or it will create issues for a big part of the world for the next thousands or even ten thousand years. That means neither in the plants itself nor in the waste storage systems. Under ideal circumstances and change in society so that all live together peaceful happy, and we're incredible lucky with natural disasters of any form in the vicinity of plants and storage systems, then yes, we may even get away with it. But history tells us this is very unlikely to be the case once politics, real world behaviour of climate, tectonic plate movement, ... is involved. IMO it's really egoistic to risk screwing over that many future generations. E.g., during the Cold War both, West and East Germany choose an unfit place (some leaky old salt mine) for their long term storage of nuclear waste, overriding geological expert opinions, just as it was deemed to screw over the other side more in case of leakage, really nice result when then merging again into one country, basically screwed them self double time. It may be that modern systems are much safer than those decades ago, but 1. those built decades ago are still running and 2. the risk factor cannot just be the probability of an incident, it needs to factor in possible impact and duration of said impact, and when doing so (current) nuclear just stinks. Don't get me wrong, fusion reactors would be great to have and nuclear power itself can avoid high-carbon emitting power plants (albeit the mining of fissile material isn't exactly done in a green-way either), but the real risk+impact is just brushed over by the lobbyist. Note, that there's actual astroturfing and greenwashing effort going on with nuclear[0][1], the amount of such posts on HN or reddit + the commenters jumping in to defend this stuff is always astounding. [0]: https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=http://ro.uow.edu.au/&httpsredir=1&article=2978&context=lhapapers https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=http://ro.... [1]: https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/ielapa.900854928758689 https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/ielapa.900854928...
- iSnow 5y agoMade it halfway through, but it keeps on rambling how this senator said this and that member of the Sierra club that. Is there a TL;DR?
- nico_h 5y agoSolar plant size vs production in Germany is not really a good indicator of the optimal areal efficiency of solar panels. Maybe looking at closer to the equator locations would be more fair to the technology. And putting wind turbines in the sea would likely be less problematic for NIMBY people (plus dual use: fish nursery!)
- imsesaok 5y agoi see this popping up around the internet every now and then and it's always the same few dudes who advocate "for nuclear". not "use nuclear and renewables" mind you, it's "nuclear good renewables bad". i genuinely wonder why. nuclear power is inherently lethal. not nuclear plants, nuclear energy. to keep it safe, you need a. tons of money, and b. stable government. miss one and you won't build plants. if you have both, might as well build more cheaper and faster alternatives like renewable energy.
- orwin 5y agoYou can dive in my history, i'm really not anti-nuclear. But these kind of storytelling is damageable. It put in concurrence both type of energy. Can we agree than anything is better than coal and oil for electricity production, and go down from here?
- krylon 5y agoRegarding the argument that nuclear power plants "always work", I would like to point out that in France, a lot of them are built next to rivers and use river water for cooling. Except in summer, when the water in the rivers becomes too warm to be effective in cooling. As far as I recall, a while back, during a really hot summer in Europe, the power output of French nuclear plants went down a lot. As global warming progresses, this kind of problem is probably going to become more common.
- mgarfias 5y agoI want our dams here in the PNW shit canned. Our salmon and steelhead populations are dying due to the dams, which is going to take its toll on the rest of the ecosystem when they’re gone.