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But that ceases to make any sense the second you have renewables cheaper than nuclear. Then renewables start cutting into that base load as well, whenever they

But that ceases to make any sense the second you have renewables cheaper than nuclear. Then renewables start cutting into that base load as well, whenever they can.

DennisP 5y ago
That depends on how you set up your electricity market. Since these markets are necessarily designed from the top down, we can set the rules however we like.
- dale_glass 5y ago
  You can, but why would you set up the market backwards? The whole idea of base load was that nuclear is very cheap, but inflexible. So you optimize, generating as much as possible with nuclear, then filling in the variable bits with more expensive to run, but more flexible generation. Cheap renewables have completely wrecked that model though.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    You set up the market to get the lowest possible total energy cost. If the lowest system design is to have nuclear as part of the mix instead of massive amounts of storage, then there's nothing backwards about setting up the market to support that. Right now we have a market where wind/solar don't have to pay for the externalities imposed by their intermittency. That is backwards.
    - dale_glass 5y ago
      Well, if you're going to account for all externalities, that sounds like a good idea, but I don't think nuclear would fare well under such a model. Fukushima cost around $200 billion to clean up. I don't think that got factored into the cost of the power it sold. Now I guess the answer here is insurance, but any insurance company that signs up for a potential payout of $200 billion is going to charge quite the premium, which won't make the already expensive nuclear power any more attractive. And how do you even calculate the premium here? It's not a house or a vehicle with an easy to determine cost. We're talking about evacuating an area of unknown size for however long might be necessary.
      - DennisP 5y ago
        The reactor in the article would have been completely unaffected by the events at Fukushima. In any case, my point is a different one: energy that's available on demand is more valuable than energy that is not, and we should price it as such. If we don't, we end up doing things like backing up our wind/solar with fossil...which also doesn't have its externalities priced in.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  You can also determine, by optimization, what the most cost effective energy system would look like. If you do this you will discover that nuclear may not have a place in it. Of course you can set up a market system where nuclear is favored, but that would be a market system that would likely not be delivering the lowest overall cost solution to the optimization problem.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    "May." I haven't seen anyone actually do that, have you? All I see are researchers ignoring nuclear and proving that an all-renewables grid is possible, not that it's cheaper than a grid including nuclear. At one point MIT had a US grid simulator online and I played around with it for a while. The cheapest fossil-free combination I found was solar and nuclear. Basically enough nuclear for nighttime demand, and enough solar for extra daytime demand. Wind+solar+storage was a good bit costlier. And that was with conventional nuclear cost. We should probably find out whether, in practice, it's cheaper to mass-produce passively-safe small modular reactors in factories.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Look at this website https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ It models minimum cost combinations of renewables, batteries, and hydrogen to supply synthetic baseload given historical weather data (insolation, wind) in various places. It can also include nuclear (enable option "Dispatchable 2", which is based on EPR.) Twiddle the cost assumptions as you like to see what dominates. Passively safe small reactors are the latest in nuclear magical thinking. Yes, this time, the it-will-be-cheaper promise will be real, unlike all the other times it was a lie. At some point Charlie Brown the Nuclear Stan needs to realize Lucy is going to pull away the football again.
      - DennisP 5y ago
        I'll spend some time with that, thanks! Edit: From some initial attempts, using their EPR costs does leave nuclear out entirely, in both the US and China. However, cutting the nuclear capital cost in half results in a grid that is completely nuclear. And it's not all or nothing. Reducing nuclear capital cost to 2/3 of the EPR value, the US gets a mix of sources with 63% nuclear. Whether such cost reductions are feasible, we'll see. You may be right, but I'll note that we have never actually tried mass-producing lots of small passively-safe reactors, or done more than early experiments with MSRs. I'm glad there are companies and countries giving it a shot. Edit2: Actually, even current production nuclear technology can get us there, if we follow the lead of the most effective countries. See figure 12 in this study of global nuclear cost curves: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
arcticbull 5y ago
Depends on your goals. Cost isn't the be-all, i'd rather have three nuclear plants than a thousand square miles blotted out by panels, for instance.
- dale_glass 5y ago
  Cost is extremely important, though. Energy costs propagate everywhere. Want to make some aluminium? That costs a lot of electricity. Want to serve some data? Got to power the servers with something. If your electricity cost is too much, industry will move elsewhere. If you try to subsidize it, that money will have to come out of somewhere.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Nuclear electricity is really cheap, building the plants is the expensive part. And yeah, I'm fine with reallocating the $5T in fossil fuel subsidies from 2010-2021 towards constructing said plants. [1] Then hopefully we'll also recognize some economies of scale. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-5-trillion-in-fossil-fuel-subsidies https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-5-trillion-in-fossi...
    - dale_glass 5y ago
      Nuclear will never win the economy of scale war with renewables. Solar is extremely amenable to mass manufacturing. You can pump out solar panels by the millions. Then it all goes together with various metal brackets, wiring, and electronics, all of which have long been mass manufactured. They're made in many places and have uses in multiple industries, and there's plenty competition. Wind is very amenable to mass manufacturing. Generators, gears, various nuts and bolts can all be mass made. The actual towers and windmills are definitely more specialized though. And trailing way behind that is nuclear. You need to deal with radiation, use exotic alloys, and have a bunch of very specific tooling and instrumentation with lots of regulations and certifications. Plus lots of redundancy to make sure nothing bad happens. And they have exactly the same "cheap electricity". A solar panel just sits there and makes power, only it comes for cheap from a factory in China and you don't need various backup systems. You can just build more solar instead, which produces more money.

But that ceases to make any sense the second you have renewables cheaper than nuclear. Then renewables start cutting into that base load as well, whenever they can.

DennisP 5y ago

That depends on how you set up your electricity market. Since these markets are necessarily designed from the top down, we can set the rules however we like.

dale_glass 5y ago
You can, but why would you set up the market backwards? The whole idea of base load was that nuclear is very cheap, but inflexible. So you optimize, generating as much as possible with nuclear, then filling in the variable bits with more expensive to run, but more flexible generation. Cheap renewables have completely wrecked that model though.
- DennisP 5y ago
  You set up the market to get the lowest possible total energy cost. If the lowest system design is to have nuclear as part of the mix instead of massive amounts of storage, then there's nothing backwards about setting up the market to support that. Right now we have a market where wind/solar don't have to pay for the externalities imposed by their intermittency. That is backwards.
  - dale_glass 5y ago
    Well, if you're going to account for all externalities, that sounds like a good idea, but I don't think nuclear would fare well under such a model. Fukushima cost around $200 billion to clean up. I don't think that got factored into the cost of the power it sold. Now I guess the answer here is insurance, but any insurance company that signs up for a potential payout of $200 billion is going to charge quite the premium, which won't make the already expensive nuclear power any more attractive. And how do you even calculate the premium here? It's not a house or a vehicle with an easy to determine cost. We're talking about evacuating an area of unknown size for however long might be necessary.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      The reactor in the article would have been completely unaffected by the events at Fukushima. In any case, my point is a different one: energy that's available on demand is more valuable than energy that is not, and we should price it as such. If we don't, we end up doing things like backing up our wind/solar with fossil...which also doesn't have its externalities priced in.
pfdietz 5y ago
You can also determine, by optimization, what the most cost effective energy system would look like. If you do this you will discover that nuclear may not have a place in it. Of course you can set up a market system where nuclear is favored, but that would be a market system that would likely not be delivering the lowest overall cost solution to the optimization problem.
- DennisP 5y ago
  "May." I haven't seen anyone actually do that, have you? All I see are researchers ignoring nuclear and proving that an all-renewables grid is possible, not that it's cheaper than a grid including nuclear. At one point MIT had a US grid simulator online and I played around with it for a while. The cheapest fossil-free combination I found was solar and nuclear. Basically enough nuclear for nighttime demand, and enough solar for extra daytime demand. Wind+solar+storage was a good bit costlier. And that was with conventional nuclear cost. We should probably find out whether, in practice, it's cheaper to mass-produce passively-safe small modular reactors in factories.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Look at this website https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ It models minimum cost combinations of renewables, batteries, and hydrogen to supply synthetic baseload given historical weather data (insolation, wind) in various places. It can also include nuclear (enable option "Dispatchable 2", which is based on EPR.) Twiddle the cost assumptions as you like to see what dominates. Passively safe small reactors are the latest in nuclear magical thinking. Yes, this time, the it-will-be-cheaper promise will be real, unlike all the other times it was a lie. At some point Charlie Brown the Nuclear Stan needs to realize Lucy is going to pull away the football again.
    - DennisP 5y ago
      I'll spend some time with that, thanks! Edit: From some initial attempts, using their EPR costs does leave nuclear out entirely, in both the US and China. However, cutting the nuclear capital cost in half results in a grid that is completely nuclear. And it's not all or nothing. Reducing nuclear capital cost to 2/3 of the EPR value, the US gets a mix of sources with 63% nuclear. Whether such cost reductions are feasible, we'll see. You may be right, but I'll note that we have never actually tried mass-producing lots of small passively-safe reactors, or done more than early experiments with MSRs. I'm glad there are companies and countries giving it a shot. Edit2: Actually, even current production nuclear technology can get us there, if we follow the lead of the most effective countries. See figure 12 in this study of global nuclear cost curves: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

arcticbull 5y ago

Depends on your goals. Cost isn't the be-all, i'd rather have three nuclear plants than a thousand square miles blotted out by panels, for instance.

dale_glass 5y ago
Cost is extremely important, though. Energy costs propagate everywhere. Want to make some aluminium? That costs a lot of electricity. Want to serve some data? Got to power the servers with something. If your electricity cost is too much, industry will move elsewhere. If you try to subsidize it, that money will have to come out of somewhere.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Nuclear electricity is really cheap, building the plants is the expensive part. And yeah, I'm fine with reallocating the $5T in fossil fuel subsidies from 2010-2021 towards constructing said plants. [1] Then hopefully we'll also recognize some economies of scale. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-5-trillion-in-fossil-fuel-subsidies https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-5-trillion-in-fossi...
  - dale_glass 5y ago
    Nuclear will never win the economy of scale war with renewables. Solar is extremely amenable to mass manufacturing. You can pump out solar panels by the millions. Then it all goes together with various metal brackets, wiring, and electronics, all of which have long been mass manufactured. They're made in many places and have uses in multiple industries, and there's plenty competition. Wind is very amenable to mass manufacturing. Generators, gears, various nuts and bolts can all be mass made. The actual towers and windmills are definitely more specialized though. And trailing way behind that is nuclear. You need to deal with radiation, use exotic alloys, and have a bunch of very specific tooling and instrumentation with lots of regulations and certifications. Plus lots of redundancy to make sure nothing bad happens. And they have exactly the same "cheap electricity". A solar panel just sits there and makes power, only it comes for cheap from a factory in China and you don't need various backup systems. You can just build more solar instead, which produces more money.