4 ms·

$10 billion for a gigawatt of the cleanest, safest, most energy-dense, most thermally efficient, and most reliable power you can find vs $4 billion for a gigaw

$10 billion for a gigawatt of the cleanest, safest, most energy-dense, most thermally efficient, and most reliable power you can find vs $4 billion for a gigawatt wind farm that takes up 100-1000x the land, always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance, and doesn't provide predictable output unless you mine about half a million pounds of lithium

epistasis 4y ago
These points are either inaccurate or irrelevant We can not build nuclear at $10/GW, that's a fantasy. The use of the land is quite different too. When a wind farm "uses" 100x-1000x the land (and I am not accepting those numbers, just quoting you), that land is still available for other uses. The fraction of "used" land is so neglible as to not matter at all. So to discuss it in the same terms as a reactor doesn't make sense at all.
- replygirl 4y ago
  my point is that the advantages of nuclear both outweigh its cost by a mile, and address most of the issues we're dealing with in transitioning to renewables and conservation. i'd throw hydro, desal, and terraforming projects like nawapa in that category too. even with mixed use i'd still say renewables have a footprint problem, but the bigger problem i see is that the output is unstable and too low relative to input, and we're already seeing blackouts in part because of just that. we can't move down the energy ladder if we want to keep improving everyone's standard of living, and we have a moral imperative to do that
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Another thing about the land assessment is that nuclear requires extremely specific land: either access to a massive body of water, or a huge resource of wastewater (e.g. Arizona's reactor) This severely limits the amount of nuclear we can use in the biosphere, as every TWh of useful energy results in roughly a TWh of heating that needs to be dumped somewhere without negatively impacting the environment. Meanwhile, solar and wind do not have that scaling problem, and there is way more spare land available to generate more energy that we can currently imagine what to do with. As for intermittency, we will simply design the future electrical grid exactly the same we design it now: we build our minimum capacity to the the maximum usage. We haven't done that yet with renewables because we are still building. Anti-renewables nuclear advocates never seem to realize that about our current grid, that we have huge huge huge capacity that is almost never used. It will be the same in the future, with renewables, to an even greater degree. The difference is that renewables don't have fuel, so unlike all those peaker gas plants, the cost of using that additional energy capacity is near zero, as long as there is transmission capacity. A grid powered by renewable energy is one where we will have incredibly energy abundance, huge amounts of curtailed energy that are not used because the energy is not in the right time or place. The amount of excess energy will be determined by the relative cost of generation capacity versus arbitrage capacity for place (transmission capacity) or time (storage). A renewables powered grid is a huge step up on the energy ladder, and will enable far far cheaper and more abundant energy than a nuclear grid ever could. Which isn't to say I'm against nuclear; if the industry ever gains some basic competence and can keep their promises, and the promises are competitive or complementary to storage plus renewables, let's build more. But it is the responsibility of the industry to improve, and prove to others that it has finally improved. And as long as people are running around blaming nuclear's decades of failure on everything except the true root cause, poor construction, nuclear will never have a chance to improve.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > land is still available for other uses How many uses are there that exclude prolonged presence of living things?
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Wind turbines are often sited on operating farms. The point that was being made is that while a field of wind turbines may be spread over a large area, most of that area can still be farmed.
    - natmaka 4y ago
      Moreover in many nations the main potential for wind power is off-shore: more power, better load-factor...
  - biorach 4y ago
    On fertile land there is still limited grass growth beneath and between solar arrays - more than enough for e.g. sheep to graze.
jhgb 4y ago
> that takes up 100-1000x the land Practically irrelevant unless you're Singapore or the like. > always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance That's true for a nuclear power plant fleet as well. There's always some downtime for maintenance and/or refueling (although usually you prefer to do both at the same time, sometimes unplanned outages are still a thing). > and doesn't provide predictable output unless you mine about half a million pounds of lithium Nonsense. Why would wind power plants require any lithium? BTW in my country, $10B are close to providing 1 GW in average solar PV power output -- that is, capacity-factor-adjusted -- and it would have been more than 1 GW of average output if it weren't for our terrible PV capacity factor, so other countries fare much better. But even that would be on par with your 1 GW reactor (since that is slightly below 1 GW on average due to its own capacity factor). Yet PV costs keep decreasing year by year while reactor costs are increasing. The future will be very interesting...
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > Practically irrelevant unless you're Singapore or the like No. Very many Countries have very dense territories, and not much land naturally destinable to that kind of degradation.
  - jhgb 4y ago
    And many do not. So? Considering that you want to build very large grids to smooth over your generation (my country is a part of a synchronous grid supplying almost half a billion people with electricity), it's very hard to argue with "but where will we put these things?", because in almost all cases you will find a place.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      You have stated that land use is «practically irrelevant» with the exception of «Singapore or the like». It is not.
      - jhgb 4y ago
cycomanic 4y ago
Dfunny how the article directly mentions that because the economics don't work out, nuclear proponents try to shift the discussion to misleading metric such as space occupied. At least consider the size of the nofly zone and the safety zone around your nuclear power plant.

epistasis 4y ago

These points are either inaccurate or irrelevant We can not build nuclear at $10/GW, that's a fantasy. The use of the land is quite different too. When a wind farm "uses" 100x-1000x the land (and I am not accepting those numbers, just quoting you), that land is still available for other uses. The fraction of "used" land is so neglible as to not matter at all. So to discuss it in the same terms as a reactor doesn't make sense at all.

replygirl 4y ago
my point is that the advantages of nuclear both outweigh its cost by a mile, and address most of the issues we're dealing with in transitioning to renewables and conservation. i'd throw hydro, desal, and terraforming projects like nawapa in that category too. even with mixed use i'd still say renewables have a footprint problem, but the bigger problem i see is that the output is unstable and too low relative to input, and we're already seeing blackouts in part because of just that. we can't move down the energy ladder if we want to keep improving everyone's standard of living, and we have a moral imperative to do that
- epistasis 4y ago
  Another thing about the land assessment is that nuclear requires extremely specific land: either access to a massive body of water, or a huge resource of wastewater (e.g. Arizona's reactor) This severely limits the amount of nuclear we can use in the biosphere, as every TWh of useful energy results in roughly a TWh of heating that needs to be dumped somewhere without negatively impacting the environment. Meanwhile, solar and wind do not have that scaling problem, and there is way more spare land available to generate more energy that we can currently imagine what to do with. As for intermittency, we will simply design the future electrical grid exactly the same we design it now: we build our minimum capacity to the the maximum usage. We haven't done that yet with renewables because we are still building. Anti-renewables nuclear advocates never seem to realize that about our current grid, that we have huge huge huge capacity that is almost never used. It will be the same in the future, with renewables, to an even greater degree. The difference is that renewables don't have fuel, so unlike all those peaker gas plants, the cost of using that additional energy capacity is near zero, as long as there is transmission capacity. A grid powered by renewable energy is one where we will have incredibly energy abundance, huge amounts of curtailed energy that are not used because the energy is not in the right time or place. The amount of excess energy will be determined by the relative cost of generation capacity versus arbitrage capacity for place (transmission capacity) or time (storage). A renewables powered grid is a huge step up on the energy ladder, and will enable far far cheaper and more abundant energy than a nuclear grid ever could. Which isn't to say I'm against nuclear; if the industry ever gains some basic competence and can keep their promises, and the promises are competitive or complementary to storage plus renewables, let's build more. But it is the responsibility of the industry to improve, and prove to others that it has finally improved. And as long as people are running around blaming nuclear's decades of failure on everything except the true root cause, poor construction, nuclear will never have a chance to improve.
mdp2021 4y ago
> land is still available for other uses How many uses are there that exclude prolonged presence of living things?
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Wind turbines are often sited on operating farms. The point that was being made is that while a field of wind turbines may be spread over a large area, most of that area can still be farmed.
  - natmaka 4y ago
    Moreover in many nations the main potential for wind power is off-shore: more power, better load-factor...
- biorach 4y ago
  On fertile land there is still limited grass growth beneath and between solar arrays - more than enough for e.g. sheep to graze.

jhgb 4y ago

> that takes up 100-1000x the land Practically irrelevant unless you're Singapore or the like. > always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance That's true for a nuclear power plant fleet as well. There's always some downtime for maintenance and/or refueling (although usually you prefer to do both at the same time, sometimes unplanned outages are still a thing). > and doesn't provide predictable output unless you mine about half a million pounds of lithium Nonsense. Why would wind power plants require any lithium? BTW in my country, $10B are close to providing 1 GW in average solar PV power output -- that is, capacity-factor-adjusted -- and it would have been more than 1 GW of average output if it weren't for our terrible PV capacity factor, so other countries fare much better. But even that would be on par with your 1 GW reactor (since that is slightly below 1 GW on average due to its own capacity factor). Yet PV costs keep decreasing year by year while reactor costs are increasing. The future will be very interesting...

mdp2021 4y ago
> Practically irrelevant unless you're Singapore or the like No. Very many Countries have very dense territories, and not much land naturally destinable to that kind of degradation.
- jhgb 4y ago
  And many do not. So? Considering that you want to build very large grids to smooth over your generation (my country is a part of a synchronous grid supplying almost half a billion people with electricity), it's very hard to argue with "but where will we put these things?", because in almost all cases you will find a place.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    You have stated that land use is «practically irrelevant» with the exception of «Singapore or the like». It is not.
    - jhgb 4y ago

cycomanic 4y ago

Dfunny how the article directly mentions that because the economics don't work out, nuclear proponents try to shift the discussion to misleading metric such as space occupied. At least consider the size of the nofly zone and the safety zone around your nuclear power plant.