8 ms·

The overarching criticism is that nukes cost way more than any other power source currently under consideration. Solar and wind cost way, way less. Geothermal c

by ncmncm 5y ago

The overarching criticism is that nukes cost way more than any other power source currently under consideration. Solar and wind cost way, way less. Geothermal costs somewhat less. If you want to repurpose your steam turbines, geothermal is a better choice. Now that we know how to bore very deep holes electrically, geothermal is practical in many more places than before.

iso8859-1 5y ago
What is the price of fossil fuels contributing to climate change? Has that been factored into the calculation?
- hetspookjee 5y ago
  As if that has ever been the case. Cruise ships would be prohibitively expensive, and flying would be too. Almost all products would be twice or thrice the price, if not more, except for a lot of manually laboured locally crafted stuff. Sometimes I wouldn’t be surprised if wooden ships would be coming back again, especially now with all the modern technology.
  - shlurpy 5y ago
    Why not make the sailboats out of modern materials?
- pydry 5y ago
  Why would it make a difference if you're comparing solar/wind/battery/pumped storage to nuclear?
  - dTal 5y ago
    You can't directly compare them, because taken individually none of those can replace "base load" fossil fuels by themselves. How much does a solar installation that can reliably output a gigawatt of power, night and day, rain or shine cost? Can't do pumped storage everywhere either - how many batteries do you need? Nuclear starts to look cheap.
    - pydry 5y ago
      There are plenty of pumped storage locations, low wind tends to correspond to sunny days and vice versa. Battery costs have also plunged to a level where Hawaii pairs them with solar farms to provide baseload. The extreme low cost of all of these technologies is largely why nuclear power is dying out. It struggles to compete. The consistency just isnt that much of an advantage. Take away the insurance subsidy so that the taxpayer funded $800 billion cleanup costs for Fukushima are privatized and nuclear moves from struggles to compete to eye wateringly expensive. It can share some of the costs with nuclear arsenal maintenance though, so some governments will continue to push it on their populace.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        I'd argue that, given the downside of not moving quickly, cost is a secondary consideration. If a basket of mixed sources, including nuclear, get us there sooner than renewables alone then cost should not be the main driver of the discussion.
        pydry 5y ago
        A fine attitude to take. However, you should probably account for solar farms and battery installations taking 6 months to plan, execute and deploy. Offshore wind farms are a couple of years. Large pumped storage projects can take up to 4. Meanwhile Hinkley point C will be completed in 2026 after being kicked off all the way back in 2010 and will provide power that is "only" 3x the price. I'd argue that nuclear has really expensive and slick PR.
        ineedasername 5y ago
        It seems like we need a bunch of crash projects working at once. Heck, the COVID pandemic showed we're still capable of such projects, given the will to do so. I know, entrenched interest & their lobbying of politicians gets in the way. Well, pay them off! A few quick searches show that the top oil companies had a combined profit of roughly $200 Billion last year. Move off fossil fuels but give them the $200B to stay out of the way! In exchange, they take that to invest in retooling & retraining their workforce for the new methods. Heck, their drilling knowledge base alone makes them great candidates to take the lead on that aspect of geothermal. I think I'm only half serious about this. Payoffs (well, "subsidies" in political language) might be an awful idea. It's a realpolitik viewpoint, maybe not a good one. But maybe it could get us around the roadblocks.
elevaet 5y ago
> Now that we know how to bore very deep holes electrically, geothermal is practical in many more places than before. I'd love to know more about this. Links?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=mit+geothermal+microwave+drilling&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=mit+geothermal+microwave+dr...
parkingrift 5y ago
Does nuclear power actually cost way more? This is routinely mentioned and practically never accurately cited.
- akamaka 5y ago
  https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
  - belorn 5y ago
    Looking at the full reports on hydrogen and other storage solutions, the conclusion seems to be the same as it has been for a while. Nuclear is cheaper than any combination of renewables + storage except for a few hours of capacity storage when used in combination with PV. What makes storage with PV profitable is the discharge cycle of 24hrs and low capacity, but the energy grid in many countries require long duration capacity and this has yet to make commercial sense. Thus the most economical way to construct a grid right now is renewables when weather is optimal and fossil fuels when its not. Optimize for cost and that is what you get, and that type of grid is exactly what many countries energy politic has been subsidizing towards. Nuclear don't need storage, but it also cost more than both renewables and fossil fuels.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      I think you must be misreading the tables. It is only sunk-cost nukes, ignoring construction and leaning on military subsidies, that match the current cost of renewables + solar. And, of course, the cost of the latter at the time any new nuke construction could (ever) be completed will be much lower.
      - belorn 5y ago
        You are not reading the full report. All the storage solutions that are cheaper than nuclear power has a capacity of 1-6 hours, not days or weeks. Anything longer has yet to achieve economical viability. The few ones that has a prognosis in the near future to start being economical viable has a key assumption of a full discharge cycle of 24hrs for 365 days per year, which I repeat, has yet to exist. A full discharge cycle mean it must charge and then sell all the energy it captured, and in their prognosis, it need to do so every single day. A battery that does that, and only carries 1-6 hours of capacity, can match the cost of nuclear power. Otherwise nuclear power is cheaper, and in comparison to green hydrogen, nuclear power is cheaper by a very large margin.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Saying nuclear is expensive is circular logic because we intentionally made it expensive. The greenpeace dolts who got it regulated into oblivion (in no small part thanks to the help of a bunch of useful idiots who equated nuclear power with nuclear weapons) with the specific aim of making it not cost competitive. A generation later, the clipboard warrior dolts point to the results of the prior generation of dolts and say it's not cost competitive. It's only not cost competitive because we make it that way. You could bring down the cost of nuclear substantially without actually changing the physical requirements of the plants themselves simply by setting the bureaucratic processes up to default to speedy approval rather than default to delay and deny.

by ncmncm 5y ago

iso8859-1 5y ago

What is the price of fossil fuels contributing to climate change? Has that been factored into the calculation?

hetspookjee 5y ago
As if that has ever been the case. Cruise ships would be prohibitively expensive, and flying would be too. Almost all products would be twice or thrice the price, if not more, except for a lot of manually laboured locally crafted stuff. Sometimes I wouldn’t be surprised if wooden ships would be coming back again, especially now with all the modern technology.
- shlurpy 5y ago
  Why not make the sailboats out of modern materials?
pydry 5y ago
Why would it make a difference if you're comparing solar/wind/battery/pumped storage to nuclear?
- dTal 5y ago
  You can't directly compare them, because taken individually none of those can replace "base load" fossil fuels by themselves. How much does a solar installation that can reliably output a gigawatt of power, night and day, rain or shine cost? Can't do pumped storage everywhere either - how many batteries do you need? Nuclear starts to look cheap.
  - pydry 5y ago
    There are plenty of pumped storage locations, low wind tends to correspond to sunny days and vice versa. Battery costs have also plunged to a level where Hawaii pairs them with solar farms to provide baseload. The extreme low cost of all of these technologies is largely why nuclear power is dying out. It struggles to compete. The consistency just isnt that much of an advantage. Take away the insurance subsidy so that the taxpayer funded $800 billion cleanup costs for Fukushima are privatized and nuclear moves from struggles to compete to eye wateringly expensive. It can share some of the costs with nuclear arsenal maintenance though, so some governments will continue to push it on their populace.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      I'd argue that, given the downside of not moving quickly, cost is a secondary consideration. If a basket of mixed sources, including nuclear, get us there sooner than renewables alone then cost should not be the main driver of the discussion.
      - pydry 5y ago
        A fine attitude to take. However, you should probably account for solar farms and battery installations taking 6 months to plan, execute and deploy. Offshore wind farms are a couple of years. Large pumped storage projects can take up to 4. Meanwhile Hinkley point C will be completed in 2026 after being kicked off all the way back in 2010 and will provide power that is "only" 3x the price. I'd argue that nuclear has really expensive and slick PR.
        ineedasername 5y ago
        It seems like we need a bunch of crash projects working at once. Heck, the COVID pandemic showed we're still capable of such projects, given the will to do so. I know, entrenched interest & their lobbying of politicians gets in the way. Well, pay them off! A few quick searches show that the top oil companies had a combined profit of roughly $200 Billion last year. Move off fossil fuels but give them the $200B to stay out of the way! In exchange, they take that to invest in retooling & retraining their workforce for the new methods. Heck, their drilling knowledge base alone makes them great candidates to take the lead on that aspect of geothermal. I think I'm only half serious about this. Payoffs (well, "subsidies" in political language) might be an awful idea. It's a realpolitik viewpoint, maybe not a good one. But maybe it could get us around the roadblocks.

elevaet 5y ago

> Now that we know how to bore very deep holes electrically, geothermal is practical in many more places than before. I'd love to know more about this. Links?

ncmncm 5y ago
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=mit+geothermal+microwave+drilling&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=mit+geothermal+microwave+dr...

parkingrift 5y ago

Does nuclear power actually cost way more? This is routinely mentioned and practically never accurately cited.

akamaka 5y ago
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
- belorn 5y ago
  Looking at the full reports on hydrogen and other storage solutions, the conclusion seems to be the same as it has been for a while. Nuclear is cheaper than any combination of renewables + storage except for a few hours of capacity storage when used in combination with PV. What makes storage with PV profitable is the discharge cycle of 24hrs and low capacity, but the energy grid in many countries require long duration capacity and this has yet to make commercial sense. Thus the most economical way to construct a grid right now is renewables when weather is optimal and fossil fuels when its not. Optimize for cost and that is what you get, and that type of grid is exactly what many countries energy politic has been subsidizing towards. Nuclear don't need storage, but it also cost more than both renewables and fossil fuels.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    I think you must be misreading the tables. It is only sunk-cost nukes, ignoring construction and leaning on military subsidies, that match the current cost of renewables + solar. And, of course, the cost of the latter at the time any new nuke construction could (ever) be completed will be much lower.
    - belorn 5y ago
      You are not reading the full report. All the storage solutions that are cheaper than nuclear power has a capacity of 1-6 hours, not days or weeks. Anything longer has yet to achieve economical viability. The few ones that has a prognosis in the near future to start being economical viable has a key assumption of a full discharge cycle of 24hrs for 365 days per year, which I repeat, has yet to exist. A full discharge cycle mean it must charge and then sell all the energy it captured, and in their prognosis, it need to do so every single day. A battery that does that, and only carries 1-6 hours of capacity, can match the cost of nuclear power. Otherwise nuclear power is cheaper, and in comparison to green hydrogen, nuclear power is cheaper by a very large margin.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Saying nuclear is expensive is circular logic because we intentionally made it expensive. The greenpeace dolts who got it regulated into oblivion (in no small part thanks to the help of a bunch of useful idiots who equated nuclear power with nuclear weapons) with the specific aim of making it not cost competitive. A generation later, the clipboard warrior dolts point to the results of the prior generation of dolts and say it's not cost competitive. It's only not cost competitive because we make it that way. You could bring down the cost of nuclear substantially without actually changing the physical requirements of the plants themselves simply by setting the bureaucratic processes up to default to speedy approval rather than default to delay and deny.