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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

by 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.
      - pydry 5y ago
        I'd argue more or less the same. Level the playing field amongst green energy (i.e. eliminate free nuclear insurance) hand offer the same level of subsidy to all of them. It would either mean no new nuclear plants or somebody comes up with a genuinely cheap, safe version that theyd be willing to put their money behind. That isnt what the propaganda is demanding though. It wants the perpetuation of free insurance for nuclear and to be given massive subsidies on top of that that solar, wind and pumped storage will never be granted. to produce less electricity for more money. It wants the market contorted out of all recognition to allow this and the only reason I can think of why is because the military needs it.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    No, because capital is fungible. Each dollar dumped into building a nuke is a dollar taken out of circulation and unavailable for wind/solar/storage. It would (a) in the end displace much less coal, (b) produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. During each of those years, more dollars would go to coal making it also unavailable for wind/solar/storage. So, starting a nuke plant brings global climate catastrophe nearer, even if it might be made produce some power someday, and not be canceled because of massive cost overruns and delays. Every dollar that can be pulled together for energy should go to building out solar, wind, and storage. And maybe geothermal.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Your argument only makes sense if 1) you take it as a given that nuclear can't help get us reach our goals sooner. And 2) that storage is a solved problem at the highest possible scales needed for this. #2 is highly debatable, and #1 relies on #2. There are certainly promising options emerging in the area of storage, but I don't think it's a solved problem, especially at the scale necessary here. If I had your confidence about storage then I would agree with you completely, but I don't, and it doesn't seem like there's any consensus that storage is a solved problem. Quite the opposite: the consensus seems to be that we're not ready yet. As such, investments in that area are also potentially places where capital expended might produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. CAES is often cited as a storage mechanism but nothing has been built at utility scale and multiple projects that have tried have fallen apart before getting there. This is an extreme crisis situation where no single option has a guaranteed outcome. Pursue multiple in parallel. Heck, if we'd done that two decades ago-- massively build out nuclear while massively investing in renewables-- the issue wouldn't be nearly as critical.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        Storage in principle is simple because you only need one method that is universally applicable. Storage in practice is complicated just because you always want to use the cheapest and most useful alternative in each place and time, which will be no more expensive than the universal method, and often cheaper. But for planning, the universal method is good enough. We already know we can make, tank, and transport any amount of, e.g., anhydrous ammonia, anywhere and at any scale, and can burn any amount of anhydrous ammonia (in existing gas plants) for power, anywhere and at any scale. It has a round-trip efficiency of X, requiring top-line generation with capacity factor Y of 1/XY, which we know we can afford. And that suffices. We have not built out much storage yet, specifically because the costs of storage alternatives are in free fall, just as costs for wind and solar generation plummeted in the past, but faster. So, building out storage next year gets you a lot more storage than building out this year. Storage method X is likely to be undercut by method Y next year. Projects X "fall apart" because methods Y are turning out cheaper, just as concentrated-solar projects fell apart when photovoltaics undercut that. Falling apart is bad for whoever put money into those, but very, very good for the rest of us. In the meantime, money is much better spent on top-line generating capacity, because you will need that to charge up the storage from, anyway. And, your dollar gets by far the most top-line generating capacity building photovoltaic solar and wind. Tying that dollar up in a nuke project that won't deliver anything at all for years, if ever, and more dollars buying coal in the meantime, is the opposite of good strategy.

by dTal 5y ago

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.
    - pydry 5y ago
      I'd argue more or less the same. Level the playing field amongst green energy (i.e. eliminate free nuclear insurance) hand offer the same level of subsidy to all of them. It would either mean no new nuclear plants or somebody comes up with a genuinely cheap, safe version that theyd be willing to put their money behind. That isnt what the propaganda is demanding though. It wants the perpetuation of free insurance for nuclear and to be given massive subsidies on top of that that solar, wind and pumped storage will never be granted. to produce less electricity for more money. It wants the market contorted out of all recognition to allow this and the only reason I can think of why is because the military needs it.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  No, because capital is fungible. Each dollar dumped into building a nuke is a dollar taken out of circulation and unavailable for wind/solar/storage. It would (a) in the end displace much less coal, (b) produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. During each of those years, more dollars would go to coal making it also unavailable for wind/solar/storage. So, starting a nuke plant brings global climate catastrophe nearer, even if it might be made produce some power someday, and not be canceled because of massive cost overruns and delays. Every dollar that can be pulled together for energy should go to building out solar, wind, and storage. And maybe geothermal.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Your argument only makes sense if 1) you take it as a given that nuclear can't help get us reach our goals sooner. And 2) that storage is a solved problem at the highest possible scales needed for this. #2 is highly debatable, and #1 relies on #2. There are certainly promising options emerging in the area of storage, but I don't think it's a solved problem, especially at the scale necessary here. If I had your confidence about storage then I would agree with you completely, but I don't, and it doesn't seem like there's any consensus that storage is a solved problem. Quite the opposite: the consensus seems to be that we're not ready yet. As such, investments in that area are also potentially places where capital expended might produce nothing for an unknown number of years, maybe forever. CAES is often cited as a storage mechanism but nothing has been built at utility scale and multiple projects that have tried have fallen apart before getting there. This is an extreme crisis situation where no single option has a guaranteed outcome. Pursue multiple in parallel. Heck, if we'd done that two decades ago-- massively build out nuclear while massively investing in renewables-- the issue wouldn't be nearly as critical.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Storage in principle is simple because you only need one method that is universally applicable. Storage in practice is complicated just because you always want to use the cheapest and most useful alternative in each place and time, which will be no more expensive than the universal method, and often cheaper. But for planning, the universal method is good enough. We already know we can make, tank, and transport any amount of, e.g., anhydrous ammonia, anywhere and at any scale, and can burn any amount of anhydrous ammonia (in existing gas plants) for power, anywhere and at any scale. It has a round-trip efficiency of X, requiring top-line generation with capacity factor Y of 1/XY, which we know we can afford. And that suffices. We have not built out much storage yet, specifically because the costs of storage alternatives are in free fall, just as costs for wind and solar generation plummeted in the past, but faster. So, building out storage next year gets you a lot more storage than building out this year. Storage method X is likely to be undercut by method Y next year. Projects X "fall apart" because methods Y are turning out cheaper, just as concentrated-solar projects fell apart when photovoltaics undercut that. Falling apart is bad for whoever put money into those, but very, very good for the rest of us. In the meantime, money is much better spent on top-line generating capacity, because you will need that to charge up the storage from, anyway. And, your dollar gets by far the most top-line generating capacity building photovoltaic solar and wind. Tying that dollar up in a nuke project that won't deliver anything at all for years, if ever, and more dollars buying coal in the meantime, is the opposite of good strategy.