5 ms·

The fact is that nuclear is extremely expensive, and only gets built where there's huge government subsidy. The subsidy that renewables get pales in comparison

by tlocke 5y ago

The fact is that nuclear is extremely expensive, and only gets built where there's huge government subsidy. The subsidy that renewables get pales in comparison to nuclear subsidy. Take the UK for example. Here we have a relatively free market in electricity generation. It's been possible for decades for a private company to build a nuclear power station, but nobody has. The only ones planned or built have enormous subsidies where the government has run roughshod over the free market. Nuclear just doesn't make economic sense.

bettysdiagnose 5y ago
Nuclear energy is only relatively expensive because we don't price the cost of global warming, environmental degradation and air pollution into fossil fuels at all. It's a market failure, but not of nuclear energy.
- tlocke 5y ago
  Nuclear may or may not beat coal, but the competition is with renewables. Nuclear is far, far more expensive than renewables.
  - enaaem 5y ago
    Renewables are very cheap if you want to improve your clean energy portion from let us say 11.2% to 12.9%. You don’t have to think about storage and it’s good enough for the next election. But what if we want go full carbon neutral by 2050?
    - api 5y ago
      Looking around the world it seems like it’s easy and cheap today to get to 30% or so solar and wind (averaged over 24-48h). Going beyond that gets a lot harder. You need storage, long range grid connects (e.g. HVDC), etc. The actual practical max varies by location. Some places have a ton of solar or wind and some have poor conditions. There are regions with poor renewables and high population density. That would require long range grid connects but that in turn raises the bar for the regions from which they are drawing. Batteries need to drop in price by at least another order of magnitude. They’ve already experienced almost Moore’s Law price drops for the past two decades so this is probably possible. The major cost now is manufacturing not materials and batteries are amenable to a lot of manufacturing automation.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Unless you consider that with renewables you need grid scale storage that is extremely expensive and impractical.
    - chefkoch 5y ago
      Not really https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
      - sofixa 5y ago
        I don't see any data on the costs of grid scale storage capable of handling multiple days of no sun or wind.
        chefkoch 5y ago
        With the difference in cost you can overbuild the renewable capacity as well as paying for even uneconomical storage like "green H²".
    - mrep 5y ago
      We already have electrical grid scale storage with methane which is one of the possible power to gas implementations [0]. It's just nobody does it because it is cheaper to get it out of the ground. Sure, the efficiency isn't as good as batteries, but wikipedia shows nuclear being over 3x as expensive as wind/solar [1]. Power to gas using wind/solar can definitely be done cheaper than that. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File:20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE,_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
      - MagnumOpus 5y ago
        Wikipedia shows nuclear in France at EUR 70/MWh, and solar without storage at around EUR 50/MWh. Storage will make it easily more expensive than nuclear plants. Remember, Europe is farther north and less insolated than California, Hawaii or Morocco, where solar PV might achieve $30-40/MWh.
  - bettysdiagnose 5y ago
    No, that is exactly the opposite of true. Competition is specifically with fossil fuels because it's not always windy and it's not always sunny. We need renewables, obviously, but we need nuclear as well to provide baseload.
  - alexis-d 5y ago
    Renewables can't provide a consistent baseload which is a big (unfortunate) drawback.
    - tlocke 5y ago
      To address the baseload question. Baseload for a period is the level below which demand doesn't drop. Baseload isn't a relevant figure if you're running a power network. The job of a grid operator is to make sure supply matches demand from second to second. What happens is that the grid operator uses the cheapest marginal electricity first, which is always renewables, then if there's still a gap it's filled with power from a gas power station. That gap is continuously varying, and gas power is needed because it can continuously vary in response. The point is that baseload isn't a relevant concept in balancing the grid, it's all about matching supply with demand.
      - DennisP 5y ago
        Ok but we need a grid without natural gas if we're going to fix climate change. Baseload is a relevant figure if we're designing that new grid. Grid-scale multi-day battery storage is expensive, and possibly even infeasible, so we might be best off using nuclear for baseload, with renewables and battery balancing on top of that.
        tlocke 5y ago
        To take the USA for example, it'll play out like this. As more and more renewables are built there will be periods where the amount of renewable electricity will exceed demand. During these periods, electricity will be very cheap and will be used to create hydrogen. The existing natural gas storage and pipework will be used for hydrogen instead, and hydrogen turbines / fuel cells will be built. So the natural gas infrastructure will be taken over by hydrogen, generated from renewable electricity. This gradual takeover will extend to heating. Natural gas boilers in homes / buildings will be converted to hydrogen, and so in the end the USA will end up with zero carbon emissions for electricity and heating.
  - tlocke 5y ago
    So to address the point of renewables and storage. Storage of the electricity produced by renewables is only needed when it exceeds demand. The UK is part of a European grid, and so a wind farm in Scotland only needs to store electricity if the whole of Europe is already running on 100% renewable. We've not reached that level so far, and won't for quite a while.
    - Beldin 5y ago
      I would argue it's the other way around: storage is needed for when demand exceeds supply. You need to make up the difference somehow. When supply exceeds demand, you could just "bleed it off" or reduce supply by decoupling generators.
      - tlocke 5y ago
        I think we're talking at cross-purposes. I'm saying that it's only when the supply from renewables exceeds total demand, you need storage. Otherwise if the supply from renewables doesn't meet demand then there's nothing left over to store, and you'd need to start burning gas. Note that the end-game is that renewables become so pervasive that there are significant periods when renewable generation does exceed total demand, and then you generate hydrogen with it. That hydrogen then displaces the natural gas that's currently used, the storage / pipework infrastructure for natural gas being equally suitable for hydrogen.
  - mytailorisrich 5y ago
    I'd like to see a comparison of costs for the same result, though. Indeed, it seems to me that comparisons tend to focus on the raw cost of producing 1 kWh, leaving aside the very important issue of reliability of production. Cheaper is better, sure, but supply comes first. I don't think that there currently is an alternative to nuclear to guarantee a large supply of low emission electricity. The best alternative is hydropower but it's very limited by geography. So renewables and nuclear are actually complementary.
    - Gwypaas 5y ago
      Regarding reliability, in perfect conditions solar + 4 hours storage are starting to bid at $40 per MWh [0]. Nuclear is well above $100 per MWh [0]: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-than-24gwh-of-batteries-included-in-its-us-solar-plus-storage-pipeline/ https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
      - mytailorisrich 5y ago
        Reliability means what happens when conditions are not perfect and outright bad.
        pfdietz 5y ago
        Ultimately the 100% renewable grid is backed up by something like hydrogen. The round trip efficiency is lousy, but it's not needed very often so that's not very important. A combined cycle power plant has a cost per watt just 10% of that of a nuclear plant (and simple cycle, just 4-5%), so you can completely back up the grid with them and still come out cheaper than nuclear.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ No, nuclear and renewables are not complementary. They are both inflexible.
- chefkoch 5y ago
  With renewables already cheaper than nuclear wouldn't that only make renewables more cheaper that fossile fuels.
  - bettysdiagnose 5y ago
    Fossil fuels and nuclear power provide base load, which we need for a stable power system. Renewables do not. So if we want to elevate renewables to that of base load power sources, so they are functionally equivalent to nuclear/fossil, then we need to price in the cost of energy storage for days or weeks of no sun/wind to provide functional equivalence.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Base load can be provided by renewables + storage. There is no need for base load generators to supply base load demand. Renewables and storage are also falling rapidly in cost. Any nuclear plant we start planning today will be competing with the cheap renewables and storage of decades hence, not just what's available at this instant.
sofixa 5y ago
Nuclear is expensive yes, not least because all decomissioning and cleanup costs are included in the price, which can't be said of any other power generation method. It also has an incredibly long lifespan ( decades, there are literally nuclear power plants constructed in the 1950s still operating today), and private companies tend to think much more short term than that. So yes, government subsidies are needed
- chefkoch 5y ago
  >Nuclear is expensive yes, not least because all decomissioning and cleanup costs are included in the price, Where do you live that these costs are included in the price?
  - sofixa 5y ago
    France. They're included for all new projects ( Flamanville, Hinkley Point) and some older ones depending on the age.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      Also, US reactors are required to put money in a trust fund for decommissioning. https://www.powermag.com/data-shows-nuclear-plant-decommissioning-costs-falling/ https://www.powermag.com/data-shows-nuclear-plant-decommissi...
      - chefkoch 5y ago
        >So the US fleet cleanup is going to cost the taxpayer probably closer to an additional $40 billion, if it all goes according to the estimates. https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup-underfunded-by-up-to-70-billion/ https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup...
        DennisP 5y ago
        According to your article, we're collecting a little less than half what we need, and "utilities are collecting 0.1 to 0.2 cents/kWh" for decommissioning. If we want to roll out a lot more nuclear, we can fully fund the decommissioning deposit, and it will add a whopping 0.2 cent/kWh to the energy cost. We can be reasonably confident of that because decommissioning costs are falling: https://www.powermag.com/data-shows-nuclear-plant-decommissioning-costs-falling/ https://www.powermag.com/data-shows-nuclear-plant-decommissi...
detritus 5y ago
In the UK, Rolls Royce is leading an industrial consortium to change that dynamic: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-on-track-for-2030-delivery-of-UK-SMR https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-on-t...
yodelshady 5y ago
That the same UK that almost constantly pulls in 2 GW of French nuclear, 16 GW of gas, and - if the cable to France breaks - coal at > £ 200 MWh, in a totally unremarkable September, not counting the gas used for heating which lead to several energy companies going bust because of a wind shortfall? Incidentally, look up the radionuclide emissions of a coal (or even heavy oil) plant, such as the one used when the wind stopped blowing. They're literally only allowed because the radionuclide standards applied to fission aren't applied to coal.

by tlocke 5y ago

bettysdiagnose 5y ago

Nuclear energy is only relatively expensive because we don't price the cost of global warming, environmental degradation and air pollution into fossil fuels at all. It's a market failure, but not of nuclear energy.

tlocke 5y ago
Nuclear may or may not beat coal, but the competition is with renewables. Nuclear is far, far more expensive than renewables.
- enaaem 5y ago
  Renewables are very cheap if you want to improve your clean energy portion from let us say 11.2% to 12.9%. You don’t have to think about storage and it’s good enough for the next election. But what if we want go full carbon neutral by 2050?
  - api 5y ago
    Looking around the world it seems like it’s easy and cheap today to get to 30% or so solar and wind (averaged over 24-48h). Going beyond that gets a lot harder. You need storage, long range grid connects (e.g. HVDC), etc. The actual practical max varies by location. Some places have a ton of solar or wind and some have poor conditions. There are regions with poor renewables and high population density. That would require long range grid connects but that in turn raises the bar for the regions from which they are drawing. Batteries need to drop in price by at least another order of magnitude. They’ve already experienced almost Moore’s Law price drops for the past two decades so this is probably possible. The major cost now is manufacturing not materials and batteries are amenable to a lot of manufacturing automation.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Unless you consider that with renewables you need grid scale storage that is extremely expensive and impractical.
  - chefkoch 5y ago
    Not really https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
    - sofixa 5y ago
      I don't see any data on the costs of grid scale storage capable of handling multiple days of no sun or wind.
      - chefkoch 5y ago
        With the difference in cost you can overbuild the renewable capacity as well as paying for even uneconomical storage like "green H²".
  - mrep 5y ago
    We already have electrical grid scale storage with methane which is one of the possible power to gas implementations [0]. It's just nobody does it because it is cheaper to get it out of the ground. Sure, the efficiency isn't as good as batteries, but wikipedia shows nuclear being over 3x as expensive as wind/solar [1]. Power to gas using wind/solar can definitely be done cheaper than that. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File:20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE,_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
    - MagnumOpus 5y ago
      Wikipedia shows nuclear in France at EUR 70/MWh, and solar without storage at around EUR 50/MWh. Storage will make it easily more expensive than nuclear plants. Remember, Europe is farther north and less insolated than California, Hawaii or Morocco, where solar PV might achieve $30-40/MWh.
- bettysdiagnose 5y ago
  No, that is exactly the opposite of true. Competition is specifically with fossil fuels because it's not always windy and it's not always sunny. We need renewables, obviously, but we need nuclear as well to provide baseload.
- alexis-d 5y ago
  Renewables can't provide a consistent baseload which is a big (unfortunate) drawback.
  - tlocke 5y ago
    To address the baseload question. Baseload for a period is the level below which demand doesn't drop. Baseload isn't a relevant figure if you're running a power network. The job of a grid operator is to make sure supply matches demand from second to second. What happens is that the grid operator uses the cheapest marginal electricity first, which is always renewables, then if there's still a gap it's filled with power from a gas power station. That gap is continuously varying, and gas power is needed because it can continuously vary in response. The point is that baseload isn't a relevant concept in balancing the grid, it's all about matching supply with demand.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      Ok but we need a grid without natural gas if we're going to fix climate change. Baseload is a relevant figure if we're designing that new grid. Grid-scale multi-day battery storage is expensive, and possibly even infeasible, so we might be best off using nuclear for baseload, with renewables and battery balancing on top of that.
      - tlocke 5y ago
        To take the USA for example, it'll play out like this. As more and more renewables are built there will be periods where the amount of renewable electricity will exceed demand. During these periods, electricity will be very cheap and will be used to create hydrogen. The existing natural gas storage and pipework will be used for hydrogen instead, and hydrogen turbines / fuel cells will be built. So the natural gas infrastructure will be taken over by hydrogen, generated from renewable electricity. This gradual takeover will extend to heating. Natural gas boilers in homes / buildings will be converted to hydrogen, and so in the end the USA will end up with zero carbon emissions for electricity and heating.
- tlocke 5y ago
  So to address the point of renewables and storage. Storage of the electricity produced by renewables is only needed when it exceeds demand. The UK is part of a European grid, and so a wind farm in Scotland only needs to store electricity if the whole of Europe is already running on 100% renewable. We've not reached that level so far, and won't for quite a while.
  - Beldin 5y ago
    I would argue it's the other way around: storage is needed for when demand exceeds supply. You need to make up the difference somehow. When supply exceeds demand, you could just "bleed it off" or reduce supply by decoupling generators.
    - tlocke 5y ago
      I think we're talking at cross-purposes. I'm saying that it's only when the supply from renewables exceeds total demand, you need storage. Otherwise if the supply from renewables doesn't meet demand then there's nothing left over to store, and you'd need to start burning gas. Note that the end-game is that renewables become so pervasive that there are significant periods when renewable generation does exceed total demand, and then you generate hydrogen with it. That hydrogen then displaces the natural gas that's currently used, the storage / pipework infrastructure for natural gas being equally suitable for hydrogen.
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  I'd like to see a comparison of costs for the same result, though. Indeed, it seems to me that comparisons tend to focus on the raw cost of producing 1 kWh, leaving aside the very important issue of reliability of production. Cheaper is better, sure, but supply comes first. I don't think that there currently is an alternative to nuclear to guarantee a large supply of low emission electricity. The best alternative is hydropower but it's very limited by geography. So renewables and nuclear are actually complementary.
  - Gwypaas 5y ago
    Regarding reliability, in perfect conditions solar + 4 hours storage are starting to bid at $40 per MWh [0]. Nuclear is well above $100 per MWh [0]: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-than-24gwh-of-batteries-included-in-its-us-solar-plus-storage-pipeline/ https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
    - mytailorisrich 5y ago
      Reliability means what happens when conditions are not perfect and outright bad.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        Ultimately the 100% renewable grid is backed up by something like hydrogen. The round trip efficiency is lousy, but it's not needed very often so that's not very important. A combined cycle power plant has a cost per watt just 10% of that of a nuclear plant (and simple cycle, just 4-5%), so you can completely back up the grid with them and still come out cheaper than nuclear.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ No, nuclear and renewables are not complementary. They are both inflexible.
chefkoch 5y ago
With renewables already cheaper than nuclear wouldn't that only make renewables more cheaper that fossile fuels.
- bettysdiagnose 5y ago
  Fossil fuels and nuclear power provide base load, which we need for a stable power system. Renewables do not. So if we want to elevate renewables to that of base load power sources, so they are functionally equivalent to nuclear/fossil, then we need to price in the cost of energy storage for days or weeks of no sun/wind to provide functional equivalence.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Base load can be provided by renewables + storage. There is no need for base load generators to supply base load demand. Renewables and storage are also falling rapidly in cost. Any nuclear plant we start planning today will be competing with the cheap renewables and storage of decades hence, not just what's available at this instant.

sofixa 5y ago

Nuclear is expensive yes, not least because all decomissioning and cleanup costs are included in the price, which can't be said of any other power generation method. It also has an incredibly long lifespan ( decades, there are literally nuclear power plants constructed in the 1950s still operating today), and private companies tend to think much more short term than that. So yes, government subsidies are needed

chefkoch 5y ago
>Nuclear is expensive yes, not least because all decomissioning and cleanup costs are included in the price, Where do you live that these costs are included in the price?
- sofixa 5y ago
  France. They're included for all new projects ( Flamanville, Hinkley Point) and some older ones depending on the age.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    Also, US reactors are required to put money in a trust fund for decommissioning. https://www.powermag.com/data-shows-nuclear-plant-decommissioning-costs-falling/ https://www.powermag.com/data-shows-nuclear-plant-decommissi...
    - chefkoch 5y ago
      >So the US fleet cleanup is going to cost the taxpayer probably closer to an additional $40 billion, if it all goes according to the estimates. https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup-underfunded-by-up-to-70-billion/ https://cleantechnica.com/2020/12/01/us-nuclear-site-cleanup...
      - DennisP 5y ago
        According to your article, we're collecting a little less than half what we need, and "utilities are collecting 0.1 to 0.2 cents/kWh" for decommissioning. If we want to roll out a lot more nuclear, we can fully fund the decommissioning deposit, and it will add a whopping 0.2 cent/kWh to the energy cost. We can be reasonably confident of that because decommissioning costs are falling: https://www.powermag.com/data-shows-nuclear-plant-decommissioning-costs-falling/ https://www.powermag.com/data-shows-nuclear-plant-decommissi...

detritus 5y ago

In the UK, Rolls Royce is leading an industrial consortium to change that dynamic: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-on-track-for-2030-delivery-of-UK-SMR https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-on-t...

yodelshady 5y ago

That the same UK that almost constantly pulls in 2 GW of French nuclear, 16 GW of gas, and - if the cable to France breaks - coal at > £ 200 MWh, in a totally unremarkable September, not counting the gas used for heating which lead to several energy companies going bust because of a wind shortfall? Incidentally, look up the radionuclide emissions of a coal (or even heavy oil) plant, such as the one used when the wind stopped blowing. They're literally only allowed because the radionuclide standards applied to fission aren't applied to coal.