5 ms·

Nuclear power is clean at the plant but the fuel has a very dirty production pipeline. Further, plants are estimated to have a carbon impact around the same or

Nuclear power is clean at the plant but the fuel has a very dirty production pipeline. Further, plants are estimated to have a carbon impact around the same or worse than natural gas because their supply chain is so expensive. Instead of the carbon coming from burning the fuel, it comes from the enormous amount of work that goes into keeping a nuclear power plant running. HNers love to shout about the environmental impact of semiconductor production for solar panels and mining for batteries and even permanent magnets used in electric motors. But apparently reactor fuel comes out of the ground and is refined based on ...wishful thinking? It's all moot. Nuclear power is not being deployed by utilities because it is one of the most expensive forms of energy generation. With almost a century of enormous subsidization and research, it has only increased in cost. Wind and solar have plummeted in cost. Wind is currently the cheapest, with solar hot on its tail. Solar continues to fall at around 10% a year. Last year in the US alone, and only accounting for grid-scale projects, wind and solar have replaced nuclear at a 6:1 ratio. When you account for commercial and residential solar and wind, it's an even higher ratio. Solar cells cost $76 per watt in the seventies and now it costs thirty cents per watt. That's a 250 fold reduction. Wind has gone from 55 cents per kwhr in the eighties, to 5 cents today. Nuclear? More expensive than it was in the eighties. With HVDC transmission technology seeing wider and wider use, and well as battery technology plunging in cost: everyone in the industry and government sector considers "what energy source do we go forward with" as solved. It's not just cheaper: it doesn't have any of the numerous concerns nuclear does. Solar panels can be recycled (or simply resold for applications where the 10-20% reduced capacity doesn't matter, ie where there's plenty of roof/land available relative to energy needs), and the biggest problem with wind turbines has been figuring out how to recycle the turbine blades when they're EOL, something that is now solved. GE is turning blades into concrete, and Vestas has figured out how to recycle blades into like-new fiberglass. Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward except the nuclear industry.

hedora 5y ago
It's unclear that battery scaling will happen in time to reach sharply negative carbon emissions, or that solar and wind will meet future energy demands. Our kids need to put all the carbon back in the ground, which means we need to put the first 10-20% back ourselves. That would double global energy consumption for decades, assuming we started today. Your supply chain carbon arguments have a fundamental flaw: Transportation and the grid need to decarbonize regardless of which technology the power plant uses. Solar panel production is being bootstrapped with coal based power plants. That doesn't imply coal plants will be needed moving forward, or that industrial (bursty, scheduled consumption) electicity will be scarce. The fact that US nuclear plants are riduculously economically inefficient doesn't imply plants in the rest of the world are similarly bad, or that the technology is infeasible. The US environmental movement intentionally sabotaged the industry through the second half of the 20th century. Also, efficient, safe nuclear plants have been operated for decades in other countries. Anyway, we're clearly headed to a situation where we have effectively infinite clean electricity during the day, thanks to solar. The real questions are whether energy storage devices are cheaper than nuclear, and how economical it is to time shift energy-intensive industrial processes (basically building 2-3x more factory, but idling it at night). I'm hoping there is some bursty carbon capture technology on the horizon, where buying more equipment for a higher burst capture rate is cheap, so the electricity produced for the quarter of the day where there's a massive surplus isn't wasted. We need to do that anyway, and it would greatly reduce nuclear, hydro and energy storage demand.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Cost for storage is falling even faster than solar or wind ever did. All that is unclear is what will end up cheapest, in any particular area. In many places, the poorer round-trip efficiency of chemical synthesis (hydrogen, ammonia, hydrocarbons) is offset by the massive usefulness of synthesizer output after the tanks are full. That is, when the tanks have been topped off, the excess output generates revenue. Solar generating capacity has become so cheap that needing 2x, 3x, 4x more, for whatever reason, is no blocker.
  - HyperRational 5y ago
  - hedora 5y ago
    Even if batteries and solar get another 10x cheaper, that's not enough to make it through winter in some populated areas. A whole home backup battery is $10K's, and likely stores under 24 hours of normal usage. Buying 90 of those per house (for three months of power backup) would cost millions per house today. A bright overcast day in California can easily drop solar output by 50-75%. Up north, it's much worse, and those days can come in multi-month bursts. Much of the US south will be uninhabitable according to current climate projections, which increases demand up north, creating distribution problems that haven't been solved. Also 40+ state megastorms are becoming common in the US. What happens if the whole continent is cold and cloudy at the same time? I guess you're propsing synthetic natural gas, or similar?
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Batteries are the most expensive storage medium. No utility will use those to keep more than a few minutes or hours of backup. Pumped hydro is cheap and reliable, but each site has a strict upper limit on how much it can store. Synthetic anhydrous ammonia, and hydrogen, are the favored utility-scale media. They can be stored, but more importantly they can also be shipped in from the tropics, and most importantly can be sold when the tanks are full.
ch4s3 5y ago
> but the fuel has a very dirty production pipeline Not really. You need very little uranium to operate a plant, and a lot of it comes from decommissioned bombs. When we were mining it in the US, it caused far fewer problems than coal or natural gas.
dev_tty01 5y ago
>Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward except the nuclear industry. This is provably false on many fronts. There is a growing recognition that nuclear is the only low carbon source that can produce substantial carbon-free power in all weather conditions and all latitudes. "There were over 50 additional nuclear reactors under construction in 2020, and hundreds more are planned primarily in Asia." https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/energy-nuclear-power-production-electricity-sustainable/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/energy-nuclear-power-... https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/nuclear-power-energy-transition https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/nuclear-power-energy-... https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/23/tech-billionaires-rally-around-nuclear-as-energy-crisis-looms/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/23/tech-billionaires-ral... Nuclear may or may not become the dominant energy source, but to say "Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward" is simply incorrect.

hedora 5y ago

It's unclear that battery scaling will happen in time to reach sharply negative carbon emissions, or that solar and wind will meet future energy demands. Our kids need to put all the carbon back in the ground, which means we need to put the first 10-20% back ourselves. That would double global energy consumption for decades, assuming we started today. Your supply chain carbon arguments have a fundamental flaw: Transportation and the grid need to decarbonize regardless of which technology the power plant uses. Solar panel production is being bootstrapped with coal based power plants. That doesn't imply coal plants will be needed moving forward, or that industrial (bursty, scheduled consumption) electicity will be scarce. The fact that US nuclear plants are riduculously economically inefficient doesn't imply plants in the rest of the world are similarly bad, or that the technology is infeasible. The US environmental movement intentionally sabotaged the industry through the second half of the 20th century. Also, efficient, safe nuclear plants have been operated for decades in other countries. Anyway, we're clearly headed to a situation where we have effectively infinite clean electricity during the day, thanks to solar. The real questions are whether energy storage devices are cheaper than nuclear, and how economical it is to time shift energy-intensive industrial processes (basically building 2-3x more factory, but idling it at night). I'm hoping there is some bursty carbon capture technology on the horizon, where buying more equipment for a higher burst capture rate is cheap, so the electricity produced for the quarter of the day where there's a massive surplus isn't wasted. We need to do that anyway, and it would greatly reduce nuclear, hydro and energy storage demand.

ncmncm 5y ago
Cost for storage is falling even faster than solar or wind ever did. All that is unclear is what will end up cheapest, in any particular area. In many places, the poorer round-trip efficiency of chemical synthesis (hydrogen, ammonia, hydrocarbons) is offset by the massive usefulness of synthesizer output after the tanks are full. That is, when the tanks have been topped off, the excess output generates revenue. Solar generating capacity has become so cheap that needing 2x, 3x, 4x more, for whatever reason, is no blocker.
- HyperRational 5y ago
- hedora 5y ago
  Even if batteries and solar get another 10x cheaper, that's not enough to make it through winter in some populated areas. A whole home backup battery is $10K's, and likely stores under 24 hours of normal usage. Buying 90 of those per house (for three months of power backup) would cost millions per house today. A bright overcast day in California can easily drop solar output by 50-75%. Up north, it's much worse, and those days can come in multi-month bursts. Much of the US south will be uninhabitable according to current climate projections, which increases demand up north, creating distribution problems that haven't been solved. Also 40+ state megastorms are becoming common in the US. What happens if the whole continent is cold and cloudy at the same time? I guess you're propsing synthetic natural gas, or similar?
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Batteries are the most expensive storage medium. No utility will use those to keep more than a few minutes or hours of backup. Pumped hydro is cheap and reliable, but each site has a strict upper limit on how much it can store. Synthetic anhydrous ammonia, and hydrogen, are the favored utility-scale media. They can be stored, but more importantly they can also be shipped in from the tropics, and most importantly can be sold when the tanks are full.

ch4s3 5y ago

> but the fuel has a very dirty production pipeline Not really. You need very little uranium to operate a plant, and a lot of it comes from decommissioned bombs. When we were mining it in the US, it caused far fewer problems than coal or natural gas.

dev_tty01 5y ago

>Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward except the nuclear industry. This is provably false on many fronts. There is a growing recognition that nuclear is the only low carbon source that can produce substantial carbon-free power in all weather conditions and all latitudes. "There were over 50 additional nuclear reactors under construction in 2020, and hundreds more are planned primarily in Asia." https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/energy-nuclear-power-production-electricity-sustainable/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/energy-nuclear-power-... https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/nuclear-power-energy-transition https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/nuclear-power-energy-... https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/23/tech-billionaires-rally-around-nuclear-as-energy-crisis-looms/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/03/23/tech-billionaires-ral... Nuclear may or may not become the dominant energy source, but to say "Nobody sees nuclear as a viable path forward" is simply incorrect.