10 ms·

California needs clean firm power, and so does the rest of the world [pdf]

40 points by p1mrx 5y ago

ricw 5y ago
Yada yada yada. Renewables are intermittent and cannot be trusted. We need nuclear. Sure, just that it's not even remotely price competitive despite decades of R&D and subsidies and nobody wants Nuclear in their back yard. What they miss entirely is building an international electrical grid that can deal with intermittency of any energy source (even nuclear reactors go down for half years at a time). Why does Chile want to provide power to Asia, rather than the US (or in fact any of the countries along the pacific coastline)? Just as transportation infrastructure (containers, highways, trains etc) liberalised and reduced the cost of international trade, a grid would do the same to energy. Great international electrical grids is what we really need. Then let the market solve for who, where and what supplies the power (with the right incentives of course)...
- droidist2 5y ago
  Can the electricity be efficiently transmitted that far though? If so, this idea is incredible, the sun is always shining somewhere on Earth.
  - csee 5y ago
    Yes it can. It's a good idea but the main downside is it ignores self-defense risk.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gbasin 5y ago
    No, there is massive loss from transmission as a function of distance
  - _Microft 5y ago
    High-voltage direct current connections have a loss in the order of 3.5%/1000km (that's approximately 10% loss per 3000km). China is operating several power lines at even higher voltages because that makes it more efficient. The loss for direct current depends on the square of the current, so you really want to reduce the current (which transmitting the same power at a higher voltage does). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advancements_in_UHVDC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity_transmission_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
- thanatosmin 5y ago
  As a matter of fact, the article repeatedly mentions the benefits of nuclear power.
- p1mrx 5y ago
  The message here is not "we need nuclear", but rather "we need clean reliable energy sources to complement wind/solar." If we can at least agree on what problem we're trying to solve, then we can rationally weigh the tradeoffs of nuclear against other expensive energy sources (like geothermal and carbon storage) that satisfy the requirement. Building new transmission lines is quite difficult, especially in the USA.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Hydro is a cheap and clean energy source that complements wind and solar just fine. There is high variability in solar if your expecting 100% of solar power to be consumed, if you accept most solar power is going to be wasted because it’s still cheap at twice the price then things start to very very different. 2X = 4c/kWh solar + batteries + wind + hydro solves the grid just about everywhere. US might only get 6.6% of annual electricity from hydro, but it’s already a huge grid scale battery storing up extremely intermittent rain into dependable power. 6.6% 100% of the time is already an 80+% solution 5% of the time.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      >Hydro is a clean energy source that complements wind and solar just fine Hydro has some serious downsides for the ecosystem of whatever watershed it bottles up. Maybe newer implementations solve that?
      - Retric 5y ago
        We want some dams for water storage and flood control, having hydro power in those locations doesn’t add new environmental concerns. Small dams don’t produce significant power and can be removed. It is worth considering larger dams, but I doubt people are going to be willing to remove any major US dams any time soon.
    - _-david-_ 5y ago
      The problem with hydro is that there are draughts. Is global warming going to make that better? Nuclear can run fine in rain or shine. Hydro should be put in the same category as wind and solar.
- hcurtiss 5y ago
  As a former linear corridor permitting attorney who is married to a current linear corridor permitting attorney, I can tell you with confidence that there is no universe where we build any meaningful amount of new energy transmission in the PNW USA. We can't get a single powerline across the Cascades, much less the dozens we would need for this kind of grid resiliency. The current suite of environmental laws are an effective veto on significant new development through federal lands.
  - baggy_trough 5y ago
    Climate change politics in a nutshell. At some point, some large group of people is going to have to do something they very much don't want to do, and guess what? They resist doing it.
  - ricw 5y ago
    Could just avoid all of that by going underwater along the coast. But yes, good point in that power grid lines are as controversial and politically fraught as nuclear power...
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      >Could just avoid all of that by going underwater along the coast. Not at a tractable price. Adding saltwater never makes things cheaper.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Kind of ironic, as running power lines seems as environmentally insignificant as they come.
    - LeoPanthera 5y ago
      The town of Paradise, CA would disagree with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_California
    - hadlock 5y ago
- SonicScrub 5y ago
  Related video to this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gacGuWjqKco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gacGuWjqKco The video profiles the EU's efforts to do exactly this. One example used is how Spain (geographically blessed with solar power), and Denmark (geographically blessed with wind), can both use France's nuclear power as a buffer between them to smooth out the peaks/throughs in their output, and therefore are able to invest in more renewable power. Interconnected grids that straddle national borders are absolutely essential to increasing the amount of renewable energy we can build. The technical limitations are easy to overcome (especially for neighboring countries). The barriers are purely political, as this system requires a common electricity market on the grid, and co-operation between national governments. Hopefully North America can get it's crap together on this. As it stands right now, the USA can't even get a common grid within it's own nation. Maine voters just rejected an interconnection from Hydro-Quebec. Which is disappointing since Quebec is blessed with near perfect geography for hydro-electric, and can no longer expand this energy production since it's capacity outstrips the demand.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > Maine voters just rejected an interconnection from Hydro-Quebec. Which is disappointing since Quebec is blessed with near perfect geography for hydro-electric, and can no longer expand this energy production since it's capacity outstrips the demand. That's completely crazy. HQ's offer was something like 5 cents per KW/h. That's 3 times less than what New England is paying for right now with natural gas. The lobbyists really did a great job here.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - SllX 5y ago
    Based on everything I’ve read from actual Maine voters on that topic, they did so for good reasons. An interconnect with Hydro-Quebec can happen, if you find a way to bring Maine voters on board and that is a solvable problem. But if you treat their concerns as unimportant and you throw around words like “grand scheme of things”, then yeah, they will continue to reject Hydro-Quebec. Part of politics is coalition building. If you can’t do it then you get what you get.
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  There was a North Africa project to power Europe using this approach called Desertec. Here's a fairly negative review of what happened. https://www.ecomena.org/desertec/ https://www.ecomena.org/desertec/ One issue is that they tried to set up an export system for solar electricity before they ensured that the local economies would have priority access to reliable power, that may have been a central problem.
  - woah 5y ago
    Unfortunately many leftists are more interested in manipulating green energy to meet their unrelated political goals than solving global warming. If a green power project does not also bring about an international dictatorship of the proletariat to free the world from corporate oppression, they are happy to block it. They never mention that their obstructionism is an affirmative vote in favor of our current unsustainable practices. In this case, the article's author is worried that Desertec, while much cleaner, and a clear environmental win, could replicate some of the political dynamics of oil extraction in the middle east. He pretends that he would like to see "decentralized small-scale projects that can be democratically managed and controlled by local communities that promote energy autonomy". But has this been created? No. By opposing actual real projects, he is voting to keep extracting and burning oil. With this article, he is actively promoting oil and the dictatorships propped up by it, while pretending to fight against injustice.
    - omegaworks 5y ago
      So we just have to be ok creating new systems that reproduce the extractive, abusive relationships between Europe and Africa that existed in the past (and continue to exist today)? Build a conveyor belt that literally transmits the solar resources of African countries to Europe that does not guarantee that Africans actually benefit from the transaction? The climate crisis should not be used as an excuse for rich countries to plunder underdeveloped ones.
      - woah 5y ago
        Sunlight is renewable, and will not run out
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- roenxi 5y ago
  > Sure, just that it's not even remotely price competitive despite decades of R&D and subsidies There are rather clear signs [0] of political interference in the price of nuclear. It might be the only technology I've ever seen where the learning curve suddenly inverted. The demand isn't even that we have to go nuclear at all costs, it is just ... if the global warming people are serious then a Fukushima every 40 years is nothing and we should be letting cheap nuclear (the safest, cleanest, most reliable form of energy we know of) take over. Instead it is being held to impossible safety standards and we're using coal (basically the least safe, most polluting form of energy we know about). This is madness. Renewables are acceptable to me personally now the price has come down, but it is hard to overlook that places that go renewable all end up in the headlines for an energy crisis a few years later. Wind power is cheap but it isn't reliable. [0] https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publication/cama_crawford_anu_edu_au/2017-11/4_2017_lang_0.pdf https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publica...
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    That's a weird paper.. no mention of Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island or any of the other major meltdowns or near catastrophes in the 1970s/1980s. Perhaps the cheaper generation of nuclear plants were inherently unsafe, hence the more expensive costs going forward, necessitating a new learning curve as we "overbuilt" the plants to avoid thousand-square mile exclusion zones?
    - roenxi 5y ago
      Even taking that on as a given (which, I mean, yeah pretty reasonable to tighten standards) ... that should be a step change as new standards are bought in, not a linear uptrend. Then the downwards sloping learning curve should resume.
paxys 5y ago
- Clean (carbon-free) - Not dependent on weather - Economically viable Pick 2
- nix23 5y ago
  - Clean (carbon-free) Nuclear and a mix of available sources (wind, water, ground etc) - Not dependent on weather Nuclear, ground and dam's (aka water batteries) - Economically viable Nuclear and a mix of available sources (wind, water, ground etc) BTW: Nothing is carbon free AtM
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Nuclear is not even close to being economically viable atm. Making it economically viable probably isn't politically viable.
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      This seems to largely be because we build new designs for almost every reactor, and change the regulation faster than projects get finished, so they have to get refitted part way through. The regulatory framework also makes it infeasible to finance small reactors. If we could build the same design over and over in a bunch of locations, with a common regulatory regime it would be much cheaper and much faster. That nuclear is slow and expensive to build is an artifact of infrequency and bad regulation.
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        > If we could build the same design over and over in a bunch of locations, with a common regulatory regime it would be much cheaper and much faster. This not being possible is why I said making nuclear economically viable is not politically viable.
        ch4s3 5y ago
        I'm not so sure that's the case. I think the big push now in France and China could open the path to more nuclear elsewhere. I also think that if places start to have issues with grid stability or intermittency of power, they'll be inclined to give it a second look. That said, there could be some heretofore unexpected leap forward in battery tech, but that's not necessarily going to happen. The political situation in all of the West is moving rapidly and in unexpected ways lately, so the realm of what's possible could easily change.
Glench 5y ago
One thing I've heard Saul Griffith[1] talk about is instead of thinking traditionally about supply-side electricity as this paper does, think instead about an "internet of electricity" where all the distributed producers and consumers of electricity work together to balance a "smart grid". Household or community solar, utilities, even your car's (gigantic) battery would all work together to provide stability and resilience. This would require "grid neutrality" where no one's electron's are favored above others the same way no one's packets are valued above others in the internet. Seems like a smart idea given how distributed the grid is becoming. [1] https://www.otherlab.com/ https://www.otherlab.com/
mogadsheu 5y ago
I wonder what portion of the reading population recognizes that all roads for ‘clean firm’ power lead to nuclear. Hydrogen production is largely a hydrocarbon byproduct (made from gas or biomass, which is burning organic matter). Geothermal resources are not particularly plentiful, although there is certainly greater potential than our existing use. After 15+ years of study, I’m convinced that nuclear is the only option for carbon emissions reduction at the scale that leadership hopes to achieve.
- p1mrx 5y ago
  > I wonder what portion of the reading population recognizes that all roads for ‘clean firm’ power lead to nuclear. The paper highlights at least 2 other possible roads. The point that we need to understand the need, compare the options, and invest in at least one of them.
joecool1029 5y ago
>California has committed to achieve a net-zero carbon economy by 2045. While turning off their only nuclear reactors. >California will need to rely primarily on forms of energy that do not emit greenhouse gases. Generated by equipment produced by burning lots of coal in China. I scrolled down a bit more and saw nuclear as a growing share on their graphs. Remind me again how many plants are even as far as the planning stage in California?
- 5faulker 5y ago
  California is walking on the path Bill Gates envisioned....
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    This doesn't sound likely. Bill Gates is pro nuclear so it doesn't make much sense why he would be against the plants in California?
newaccount2021 5y ago
Democrats will do what they always do - virtue signal on climate change and go back to their Range Rovers, mansions, and private jets. For Gavin Newsom, there is no need to take action, he need only announce that California will be at zero-emissions at some point in the future after he has left office. In the near future you will see Biden release capacity from the strategic oil reserve and/or call for gas taxes to be reduced...the increases in the price of gas will otherwise result in a Republican sweep in midterms next year. So, the reality is Democrats making more CO2 soon, and doing nothing later.
skybrian 5y ago
I didn’t see hydroelectric power mentioned in a quick skim. Perhaps I missed it? There’s not enough hydroelectric power, but wind and solar can be thought of as a way of conserving it for when it’s most needed. It might be interesting to see how the numbers work out if the Pacific Northwest is included.
- Arrath 5y ago
  Pervasive drought conditions can make the reliability of hydroelectric somewhat problematic, as it can't be completely cut off and saved for peak demand, thanks to downstream (over)subscription of the water supply and minimum flow requirements.
photochemsyn 5y ago
The severe problems with nuclear are well known: 1) Extrememly high construction costs and cost overruns. 2) Requires more cooling water than any other power source. 3) Highly radioactive 'spent fuel' must be stored indefinitely. 4) Uranium ore mining and processing consumes significant energy, of the fossil fuel form typically. 5) Catastrophic failure scenarios (Fukushima, Chernobyl). 6) Major security issues with high costs. 7) Poor compatibility with intermittent and varying energy sources (i.e. solar, wind), as does coal. Note the 'modular' concept is just as bad, as you still have all the security costs, waste storage costs, cooling issues, etc. just distributed in more locations. All in all the nuclear experiment looks like a complete failure, and yes you can use solar/wind/storage at scale to generate all the electrical power required for human civilization - and yes, shutting down all the nuclear power plants in earthquake zones makes perfect sense. As far as the 'you're exaggerating risks' comments, well, then, let's see the repeal of Price Anderson accident indemnity, which would require the owners and operators of nuclear power plants to pay full costs for disasters. Investors would flee en masse if that happened, of course.
- bullen 5y ago
  I agree but Uranium has 1.000.000x the energy density of oil and 1.000.000.000x that of batteries. If we are to stand any chance of avoiding the tail end of a net hubbert curve we need nuclear. Fusion, thorium and 4th gen fission (France has cancelled both the super-phenix project and the modern revival of that initiative) are nowhere near realistic and/or deterministic dates, so we have to go with the 100 years of Uranium we have left. This is the only descision where I'm against, but for, at the same time. There is no alternative except permanent crisis until civilization returns to the stone age. Coming down from the massive bubble created by stored sunlight (coal, oil and gas) is not going to be a smooth ride any way we turn it.
  - erentz 5y ago
    > 100 years of Uranium we have left FWIW it's really not clear that there's such a limit on the uranium supply. Could be 4 billion years with seawater harvesting and reprocessing, etc. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
ConanRus 5y ago
[dead]

40 points by p1mrx 5y ago

ricw 5y ago

Yada yada yada. Renewables are intermittent and cannot be trusted. We need nuclear. Sure, just that it's not even remotely price competitive despite decades of R&D and subsidies and nobody wants Nuclear in their back yard. What they miss entirely is building an international electrical grid that can deal with intermittency of any energy source (even nuclear reactors go down for half years at a time). Why does Chile want to provide power to Asia, rather than the US (or in fact any of the countries along the pacific coastline)? Just as transportation infrastructure (containers, highways, trains etc) liberalised and reduced the cost of international trade, a grid would do the same to energy. Great international electrical grids is what we really need. Then let the market solve for who, where and what supplies the power (with the right incentives of course)...

droidist2 5y ago
Can the electricity be efficiently transmitted that far though? If so, this idea is incredible, the sun is always shining somewhere on Earth.
- csee 5y ago
  Yes it can. It's a good idea but the main downside is it ignores self-defense risk.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gbasin 5y ago
  No, there is massive loss from transmission as a function of distance
- _Microft 5y ago
  High-voltage direct current connections have a loss in the order of 3.5%/1000km (that's approximately 10% loss per 3000km). China is operating several power lines at even higher voltages because that makes it more efficient. The loss for direct current depends on the square of the current, so you really want to reduce the current (which transmitting the same power at a higher voltage does). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advancements_in_UHVDC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity_transmission_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity...
thanatosmin 5y ago
As a matter of fact, the article repeatedly mentions the benefits of nuclear power.
p1mrx 5y ago
The message here is not "we need nuclear", but rather "we need clean reliable energy sources to complement wind/solar." If we can at least agree on what problem we're trying to solve, then we can rationally weigh the tradeoffs of nuclear against other expensive energy sources (like geothermal and carbon storage) that satisfy the requirement. Building new transmission lines is quite difficult, especially in the USA.
- Retric 5y ago
  Hydro is a cheap and clean energy source that complements wind and solar just fine. There is high variability in solar if your expecting 100% of solar power to be consumed, if you accept most solar power is going to be wasted because it’s still cheap at twice the price then things start to very very different. 2X = 4c/kWh solar + batteries + wind + hydro solves the grid just about everywhere. US might only get 6.6% of annual electricity from hydro, but it’s already a huge grid scale battery storing up extremely intermittent rain into dependable power. 6.6% 100% of the time is already an 80+% solution 5% of the time.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >Hydro is a clean energy source that complements wind and solar just fine Hydro has some serious downsides for the ecosystem of whatever watershed it bottles up. Maybe newer implementations solve that?
    - Retric 5y ago
      We want some dams for water storage and flood control, having hydro power in those locations doesn’t add new environmental concerns. Small dams don’t produce significant power and can be removed. It is worth considering larger dams, but I doubt people are going to be willing to remove any major US dams any time soon.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    The problem with hydro is that there are draughts. Is global warming going to make that better? Nuclear can run fine in rain or shine. Hydro should be put in the same category as wind and solar.
hcurtiss 5y ago
As a former linear corridor permitting attorney who is married to a current linear corridor permitting attorney, I can tell you with confidence that there is no universe where we build any meaningful amount of new energy transmission in the PNW USA. We can't get a single powerline across the Cascades, much less the dozens we would need for this kind of grid resiliency. The current suite of environmental laws are an effective veto on significant new development through federal lands.
- baggy_trough 5y ago
  Climate change politics in a nutshell. At some point, some large group of people is going to have to do something they very much don't want to do, and guess what? They resist doing it.
- ricw 5y ago
  Could just avoid all of that by going underwater along the coast. But yes, good point in that power grid lines are as controversial and politically fraught as nuclear power...
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >Could just avoid all of that by going underwater along the coast. Not at a tractable price. Adding saltwater never makes things cheaper.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Kind of ironic, as running power lines seems as environmentally insignificant as they come.
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    The town of Paradise, CA would disagree with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_California
  - hadlock 5y ago
SonicScrub 5y ago
Related video to this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gacGuWjqKco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gacGuWjqKco The video profiles the EU's efforts to do exactly this. One example used is how Spain (geographically blessed with solar power), and Denmark (geographically blessed with wind), can both use France's nuclear power as a buffer between them to smooth out the peaks/throughs in their output, and therefore are able to invest in more renewable power. Interconnected grids that straddle national borders are absolutely essential to increasing the amount of renewable energy we can build. The technical limitations are easy to overcome (especially for neighboring countries). The barriers are purely political, as this system requires a common electricity market on the grid, and co-operation between national governments. Hopefully North America can get it's crap together on this. As it stands right now, the USA can't even get a common grid within it's own nation. Maine voters just rejected an interconnection from Hydro-Quebec. Which is disappointing since Quebec is blessed with near perfect geography for hydro-electric, and can no longer expand this energy production since it's capacity outstrips the demand.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Maine voters just rejected an interconnection from Hydro-Quebec. Which is disappointing since Quebec is blessed with near perfect geography for hydro-electric, and can no longer expand this energy production since it's capacity outstrips the demand. That's completely crazy. HQ's offer was something like 5 cents per KW/h. That's 3 times less than what New England is paying for right now with natural gas. The lobbyists really did a great job here.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- SllX 5y ago
  Based on everything I’ve read from actual Maine voters on that topic, they did so for good reasons. An interconnect with Hydro-Quebec can happen, if you find a way to bring Maine voters on board and that is a solvable problem. But if you treat their concerns as unimportant and you throw around words like “grand scheme of things”, then yeah, they will continue to reject Hydro-Quebec. Part of politics is coalition building. If you can’t do it then you get what you get.
photochemsyn 5y ago
There was a North Africa project to power Europe using this approach called Desertec. Here's a fairly negative review of what happened. https://www.ecomena.org/desertec/ https://www.ecomena.org/desertec/ One issue is that they tried to set up an export system for solar electricity before they ensured that the local economies would have priority access to reliable power, that may have been a central problem.
- woah 5y ago
  Unfortunately many leftists are more interested in manipulating green energy to meet their unrelated political goals than solving global warming. If a green power project does not also bring about an international dictatorship of the proletariat to free the world from corporate oppression, they are happy to block it. They never mention that their obstructionism is an affirmative vote in favor of our current unsustainable practices. In this case, the article's author is worried that Desertec, while much cleaner, and a clear environmental win, could replicate some of the political dynamics of oil extraction in the middle east. He pretends that he would like to see "decentralized small-scale projects that can be democratically managed and controlled by local communities that promote energy autonomy". But has this been created? No. By opposing actual real projects, he is voting to keep extracting and burning oil. With this article, he is actively promoting oil and the dictatorships propped up by it, while pretending to fight against injustice.
  - omegaworks 5y ago
    So we just have to be ok creating new systems that reproduce the extractive, abusive relationships between Europe and Africa that existed in the past (and continue to exist today)? Build a conveyor belt that literally transmits the solar resources of African countries to Europe that does not guarantee that Africans actually benefit from the transaction? The climate crisis should not be used as an excuse for rich countries to plunder underdeveloped ones.
    - woah 5y ago
      Sunlight is renewable, and will not run out
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
roenxi 5y ago
> Sure, just that it's not even remotely price competitive despite decades of R&D and subsidies There are rather clear signs [0] of political interference in the price of nuclear. It might be the only technology I've ever seen where the learning curve suddenly inverted. The demand isn't even that we have to go nuclear at all costs, it is just ... if the global warming people are serious then a Fukushima every 40 years is nothing and we should be letting cheap nuclear (the safest, cleanest, most reliable form of energy we know of) take over. Instead it is being held to impossible safety standards and we're using coal (basically the least safe, most polluting form of energy we know about). This is madness. Renewables are acceptable to me personally now the price has come down, but it is hard to overlook that places that go renewable all end up in the headlines for an energy crisis a few years later. Wind power is cheap but it isn't reliable. [0] https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publication/cama_crawford_anu_edu_au/2017-11/4_2017_lang_0.pdf https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publica...
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  That's a weird paper.. no mention of Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island or any of the other major meltdowns or near catastrophes in the 1970s/1980s. Perhaps the cheaper generation of nuclear plants were inherently unsafe, hence the more expensive costs going forward, necessitating a new learning curve as we "overbuilt" the plants to avoid thousand-square mile exclusion zones?
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Even taking that on as a given (which, I mean, yeah pretty reasonable to tighten standards) ... that should be a step change as new standards are bought in, not a linear uptrend. Then the downwards sloping learning curve should resume.

paxys 5y ago

- Clean (carbon-free) - Not dependent on weather - Economically viable Pick 2

nix23 5y ago
- Clean (carbon-free) Nuclear and a mix of available sources (wind, water, ground etc) - Not dependent on weather Nuclear, ground and dam's (aka water batteries) - Economically viable Nuclear and a mix of available sources (wind, water, ground etc) BTW: Nothing is carbon free AtM
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Nuclear is not even close to being economically viable atm. Making it economically viable probably isn't politically viable.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    This seems to largely be because we build new designs for almost every reactor, and change the regulation faster than projects get finished, so they have to get refitted part way through. The regulatory framework also makes it infeasible to finance small reactors. If we could build the same design over and over in a bunch of locations, with a common regulatory regime it would be much cheaper and much faster. That nuclear is slow and expensive to build is an artifact of infrequency and bad regulation.
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      > If we could build the same design over and over in a bunch of locations, with a common regulatory regime it would be much cheaper and much faster. This not being possible is why I said making nuclear economically viable is not politically viable.
      - ch4s3 5y ago
        I'm not so sure that's the case. I think the big push now in France and China could open the path to more nuclear elsewhere. I also think that if places start to have issues with grid stability or intermittency of power, they'll be inclined to give it a second look. That said, there could be some heretofore unexpected leap forward in battery tech, but that's not necessarily going to happen. The political situation in all of the West is moving rapidly and in unexpected ways lately, so the realm of what's possible could easily change.

Glench 5y ago

One thing I've heard Saul Griffith[1] talk about is instead of thinking traditionally about supply-side electricity as this paper does, think instead about an "internet of electricity" where all the distributed producers and consumers of electricity work together to balance a "smart grid". Household or community solar, utilities, even your car's (gigantic) battery would all work together to provide stability and resilience. This would require "grid neutrality" where no one's electron's are favored above others the same way no one's packets are valued above others in the internet. Seems like a smart idea given how distributed the grid is becoming. [1] https://www.otherlab.com/ https://www.otherlab.com/

mogadsheu 5y ago

I wonder what portion of the reading population recognizes that all roads for ‘clean firm’ power lead to nuclear. Hydrogen production is largely a hydrocarbon byproduct (made from gas or biomass, which is burning organic matter). Geothermal resources are not particularly plentiful, although there is certainly greater potential than our existing use. After 15+ years of study, I’m convinced that nuclear is the only option for carbon emissions reduction at the scale that leadership hopes to achieve.

p1mrx 5y ago
> I wonder what portion of the reading population recognizes that all roads for ‘clean firm’ power lead to nuclear. The paper highlights at least 2 other possible roads. The point that we need to understand the need, compare the options, and invest in at least one of them.

joecool1029 5y ago

>California has committed to achieve a net-zero carbon economy by 2045. While turning off their only nuclear reactors. >California will need to rely primarily on forms of energy that do not emit greenhouse gases. Generated by equipment produced by burning lots of coal in China. I scrolled down a bit more and saw nuclear as a growing share on their graphs. Remind me again how many plants are even as far as the planning stage in California?

5faulker 5y ago
California is walking on the path Bill Gates envisioned....
- cinntaile 5y ago
  This doesn't sound likely. Bill Gates is pro nuclear so it doesn't make much sense why he would be against the plants in California?

newaccount2021 5y ago

Democrats will do what they always do - virtue signal on climate change and go back to their Range Rovers, mansions, and private jets. For Gavin Newsom, there is no need to take action, he need only announce that California will be at zero-emissions at some point in the future after he has left office. In the near future you will see Biden release capacity from the strategic oil reserve and/or call for gas taxes to be reduced...the increases in the price of gas will otherwise result in a Republican sweep in midterms next year. So, the reality is Democrats making more CO2 soon, and doing nothing later.

skybrian 5y ago

I didn’t see hydroelectric power mentioned in a quick skim. Perhaps I missed it? There’s not enough hydroelectric power, but wind and solar can be thought of as a way of conserving it for when it’s most needed. It might be interesting to see how the numbers work out if the Pacific Northwest is included.

Arrath 5y ago
Pervasive drought conditions can make the reliability of hydroelectric somewhat problematic, as it can't be completely cut off and saved for peak demand, thanks to downstream (over)subscription of the water supply and minimum flow requirements.

photochemsyn 5y ago

The severe problems with nuclear are well known: 1) Extrememly high construction costs and cost overruns. 2) Requires more cooling water than any other power source. 3) Highly radioactive 'spent fuel' must be stored indefinitely. 4) Uranium ore mining and processing consumes significant energy, of the fossil fuel form typically. 5) Catastrophic failure scenarios (Fukushima, Chernobyl). 6) Major security issues with high costs. 7) Poor compatibility with intermittent and varying energy sources (i.e. solar, wind), as does coal. Note the 'modular' concept is just as bad, as you still have all the security costs, waste storage costs, cooling issues, etc. just distributed in more locations. All in all the nuclear experiment looks like a complete failure, and yes you can use solar/wind/storage at scale to generate all the electrical power required for human civilization - and yes, shutting down all the nuclear power plants in earthquake zones makes perfect sense. As far as the 'you're exaggerating risks' comments, well, then, let's see the repeal of Price Anderson accident indemnity, which would require the owners and operators of nuclear power plants to pay full costs for disasters. Investors would flee en masse if that happened, of course.

bullen 5y ago
I agree but Uranium has 1.000.000x the energy density of oil and 1.000.000.000x that of batteries. If we are to stand any chance of avoiding the tail end of a net hubbert curve we need nuclear. Fusion, thorium and 4th gen fission (France has cancelled both the super-phenix project and the modern revival of that initiative) are nowhere near realistic and/or deterministic dates, so we have to go with the 100 years of Uranium we have left. This is the only descision where I'm against, but for, at the same time. There is no alternative except permanent crisis until civilization returns to the stone age. Coming down from the massive bubble created by stored sunlight (coal, oil and gas) is not going to be a smooth ride any way we turn it.
- erentz 5y ago
  > 100 years of Uranium we have left FWIW it's really not clear that there's such a limit on the uranium supply. Could be 4 billion years with seawater harvesting and reprocessing, etc. https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-longterm-sustainable.html https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...

ConanRus 5y ago

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