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This is great, and hopefully it will stop the premature shutdown of existing nuclear reactors. But it's pretty tiny climate news overall. Nuclear reactors are

This is great, and hopefully it will stop the premature shutdown of existing nuclear reactors. But it's pretty tiny climate news overall. Nuclear reactors are aging out and nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore. Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor, which won't come on line for a bare minimum of 10 years, best case. We don't have that long to wait to start replacing nearly all of our fossil fuel infrastructure, and replace the nuclear reactors that are reaching end of life. If nuclear was going to be a climate solution, then all the nuclear reactors started in the 2000s needed to complete on time and on schedule to encourage the building of more. Instead it's 2022 and we are still waiting to see how bad the financial disaster will be for them. That's not the route towards building more nuclear.

layer8 4y ago
> nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore Given the huge subsidies for nuclear reactors, did they ever know? Regardless of the environmental merits, it’s not a cheap technology, and due to the limited number of reactors built it’s not exactly a competitive market either. At least at this point in time, building new reactors is necessarily slow and expensive.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  And, by the time one can be completed, it will be unable to compete with other generation built and deployed since the project started. Bidding only at night, it is even less competitive, because costs are 24/7, so prices would need to be 3x higher.
PaulHoule 4y ago
It's not that simple. People quote low prices for renewables today that we might be scoffing at in 50 years just like we scoff at the early claim that "nuclear power is too cheap to meter" Specifically, you can't compare a nuclear reactor that delivers predictable power to solar and wind systems that deliver power when they want to deliver power. Germany has already had episodes where the spot price for electricity went under zero -- yet to make the electric grid work they have to burn natural gas when renewables aren't available. The story for storage looks better than it ever has but it is still orders of magnitude more expensive more expensive than it needs to be to be practical. People fantasize about feeding excess renewable energy into systems that run intermittently that capture carbon directly from air, synthesize hydrogen and e-fuels, etc. Trouble is that most of the systems have a high capital cost: e-fuel production has a crazy high capital cost as it is, if the factory is running only 20% of the time then bam... capital costs are 5x greater per unit. The LWR struggles to compete with other energy sources for several reasons, not least of which is the high capital cost of the steam turbine and associated heat exchangers. There is hope: https://www.moltexenergy.com/ https://www.moltexenergy.com/
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Base power is nice, but I think we need to be more creative in setting up infrastructure that can work with varying price.
  - kalleboo 4y ago
    So in the winter everyone just freezes to death since they can't afford heat? That's a solution?
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      You'd obviously have to limit the price fluctuations for consumer contracts. But currently I'm just starting the dishwasher or washing machine when I fill them, but I don't care when they're done as long as it's within ~12 hours. In many places I can get cheaper electricity at night and save a bit by running them then. But with renewables surplus might happen at any time of day, not just at night. A smart meter combined with marginally smart devices would allow us to run time-insensitive things when it's cheap, instead of when it's convenient.
      - wumpus 4y ago
        There are electric vehicle chargers that know the price of electricity and time recharging your car to the best time of day.
      - kalleboo 4y ago
        It just seems to me like as we move all the very heavy energy consumption like transportation and heating from oil and gas to electricity, small gains like your washing machine are going to be negligible. I'm from a country where in the north the sun goes down for good for a few weeks in the winter. We've managed until now with nuclear but those are all nearing end-of-life and are being shut down and we have no alternatives ready.
        wongarsu 4y ago
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
Deploying solar or wind is nice and stuff, but it doesn’t remove fossil plants, because when there is no sun / wind (which happens a lot in Europe), you need to burn fossil fuels. Storage is not viable today, both because it emits a lot of co2/kWh (especially if you wanted to eliminate fossil plants, you’d need to overprovision) and because of supply constraints. Hydro and nuclear is the only low-carbon future.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  False. Each dollar diverted from renewables to nukes brings climate catastrophe nearer.
nabla9 4y ago
As others have said, nuclear not is comparable to wind and solar. Nuclear provides base load, something that wind or solar can't do. Here is a graph: https://i.imgur.com/SaC1HR4.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/SaC1HR4.jpeg Wind electricity production in x-axis (MWh/h), y-axis is consumption of electricity (MWh/h). Each do is one hour, dot color is a month. There is no correlation. Here is great summary of how Finland can go 100% fossil fuel free electricity with nuclear: http://smartenergytransition.fi/en/clean-electricity-production-must-increase-massively-to-replace-fossil-fuel-combustion/ http://smartenergytransition.fi/en/clean-electricity-product...
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  No generator provides base load, because load is usage, not power. Lots of places in the world satisfy base load with dispatchable power.
  - nabla9 4y ago
    > dispatchable power. Using hydrocarbons. The very thing nuclear power avoids.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      France's grid is still quite dependent on hydrocarbons, despite being mostly nuclear. So it's not clear how nuclear helps here.
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    Instead of nitpicking terminology, let's talk about the issue directly: What do you do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? There isn't enough batteries on earth to even make a dent in the storage you would need. We don't want to burn any more hydrocarbons. What are our other options? Massive pumped hydro might get us there, but that construction is on a similar time horizon to a new nuclear plant anyway.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
sofixa 4y ago
> Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor Besides the intermittency of renewables everyone else has already mentioned, a nuclear reactor has a life of 50 years, which is extendable with maintenance. There are literally reactors built in the 1950s still operating today. Solar and wind installations have to be fully rebuilt every 15-20 years (and the decommissioned materials recycled). So you get stable power, for at least twice as long.
- epistasis 4y ago
  This is abuse disadvantage for nuclear, not an advantage. Current high costs are locked in for a very long time. Whereas with solar and storage, after 15 years (for the storage) or 30 years (solar) you can take advantage of technology advancement. And of technology has not advanced much, you can simply maintain or repair the existing infrastructure, just like nuclear or other large capital expenditures.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    This is *a huge disadvantage... My typing on mobile is getting pretty bad...
dahfizz 4y ago
> Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor, Source? The largest grid scale batteries to date don't come close to the numbers you are talking about. The largest operational deployment gives a paltry 0.4 GW and can only sustain that for a few hours[1]. People love to hand wave away storage, but it is a monumental and unsolved problem. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_storage_power_station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_storage_power_statio...
- ncmncm 4y ago
  We already know that only a very small fraction of storage will ever be batteries, initially enough for load-leveling and eventually for evening peaking. We also know that money put into storage before enough renewables have been built out to displace fossil generation and charge the storage is money wasted that could have been spent building out generation capacity. When storage becomes a good use of money, it will be much, much cheaper to build. Pointing to not much storage built out yet is a shuck.
- 7952 4y ago
  Battery storage projects have tended to be smaller and in the UK average around 20MW. They have followed the pattern of distributed energy rather than big projects connecting at 400kV. In the UK there is over 20GW in the pipeline.
TimPC 4y ago
There are problems of baseload power that neither solar nor wind reliably solve though. Barring the introduction of a complex system of storage to the electrical grid you don’t just need a certain amount of total power generation you need the distribution of production to match the distribution of consumption. We can generate much of this with solar and wind if we are comfortable with having far less power at night from solar and irregular power generation based on weather conditions from wind. This can work well when these technologies are small portions of the grid but it causes problems when we rely on them for substantial portions of power generation.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  > a complex system of storage ... which will be built when it makes sense to build it. Right now, building out storage makes no sense. Money that could be spent on storage is now rightly spent on generating capacity that can still displace carbon polluters. When there is too little carbon pollution left to displace, then will be time to build storage. By that time the storage will be radically cheaper to buy, because its cost is falling even faster than renewables cost ever did.
  - sandos 4y ago
    Also, storage will look wildly different in differen parts of the world.
yodelshady 4y ago
> 5GW of solar [in Finland] Okay I'm afraid that's it for me. Being on a discussion board that has to debate "is deploying solar in Finland a good idea?" is not worth it. Incidentally, yes, it took Finland 10 years to build their last reactor. They commissioned it a week or so ago, mere days before Russia disconnected them. Literally nothing we can effectively do to mitigate climate change takes <5 any more, including a fair few GW-scale wind farms I know of. Refusal to face that is why we are facing the calamity we are. Cheers.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  You understand that parts of Finland get 24-hour sunlight all summer long?
  - jsnell 4y ago
    Producing electricity during the summer nights is basically useless. There's a huge diurnal effect, and an even larger seasonal one. The consumption at the winter peak is roughly double that of the summer trough. Solar is fundamentally a bad fit for Finland. (Wind is a little bit tricky too, since abnormally low winter temperatures correlate with low wind speeds. But that is a problem on the time scale of a week, rather than half the year.)
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      So, during summer, you don't need to pay to have ammonia shipped in. During winter, on occasions when wind threatens to die down for longer than your stock of ammonia will last you, you order a shipment.
      - jsnell 4y ago
        I have no idea of what you mean by "a shipment of ammonia". 24 hour sunlight does not work to make solar power viable in Finland, because that extra production happens exactly when there is least need for electricity, and there is no economical way to store that energy for consumption 7 months later. Basically nobody builds solar power in Finland. It's about 0.3% of the electricity production (while renewables as a whole are more than 50%). That's the reality. Your idea that the summer nights would somehow make it economical is an uninformed fairy tale.

layer8 4y ago

> nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore Given the huge subsidies for nuclear reactors, did they ever know? Regardless of the environmental merits, it’s not a cheap technology, and due to the limited number of reactors built it’s not exactly a competitive market either. At least at this point in time, building new reactors is necessarily slow and expensive.

ncmncm 4y ago
And, by the time one can be completed, it will be unable to compete with other generation built and deployed since the project started. Bidding only at night, it is even less competitive, because costs are 24/7, so prices would need to be 3x higher.

PaulHoule 4y ago

It's not that simple. People quote low prices for renewables today that we might be scoffing at in 50 years just like we scoff at the early claim that "nuclear power is too cheap to meter" Specifically, you can't compare a nuclear reactor that delivers predictable power to solar and wind systems that deliver power when they want to deliver power. Germany has already had episodes where the spot price for electricity went under zero -- yet to make the electric grid work they have to burn natural gas when renewables aren't available. The story for storage looks better than it ever has but it is still orders of magnitude more expensive more expensive than it needs to be to be practical. People fantasize about feeding excess renewable energy into systems that run intermittently that capture carbon directly from air, synthesize hydrogen and e-fuels, etc. Trouble is that most of the systems have a high capital cost: e-fuel production has a crazy high capital cost as it is, if the factory is running only 20% of the time then bam... capital costs are 5x greater per unit. The LWR struggles to compete with other energy sources for several reasons, not least of which is the high capital cost of the steam turbine and associated heat exchangers. There is hope: https://www.moltexenergy.com/ https://www.moltexenergy.com/

actionfromafar 4y ago
Base power is nice, but I think we need to be more creative in setting up infrastructure that can work with varying price.
- kalleboo 4y ago
  So in the winter everyone just freezes to death since they can't afford heat? That's a solution?
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    You'd obviously have to limit the price fluctuations for consumer contracts. But currently I'm just starting the dishwasher or washing machine when I fill them, but I don't care when they're done as long as it's within ~12 hours. In many places I can get cheaper electricity at night and save a bit by running them then. But with renewables surplus might happen at any time of day, not just at night. A smart meter combined with marginally smart devices would allow us to run time-insensitive things when it's cheap, instead of when it's convenient.
    - wumpus 4y ago
      There are electric vehicle chargers that know the price of electricity and time recharging your car to the best time of day.
    - kalleboo 4y ago
      It just seems to me like as we move all the very heavy energy consumption like transportation and heating from oil and gas to electricity, small gains like your washing machine are going to be negligible. I'm from a country where in the north the sun goes down for good for a few weeks in the winter. We've managed until now with nuclear but those are all nearing end-of-life and are being shut down and we have no alternatives ready.
      - wongarsu 4y ago

thatfrenchguy 4y ago

Deploying solar or wind is nice and stuff, but it doesn’t remove fossil plants, because when there is no sun / wind (which happens a lot in Europe), you need to burn fossil fuels. Storage is not viable today, both because it emits a lot of co2/kWh (especially if you wanted to eliminate fossil plants, you’d need to overprovision) and because of supply constraints. Hydro and nuclear is the only low-carbon future.

ncmncm 4y ago
False. Each dollar diverted from renewables to nukes brings climate catastrophe nearer.

nabla9 4y ago

As others have said, nuclear not is comparable to wind and solar. Nuclear provides base load, something that wind or solar can't do. Here is a graph: https://i.imgur.com/SaC1HR4.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/SaC1HR4.jpeg Wind electricity production in x-axis (MWh/h), y-axis is consumption of electricity (MWh/h). Each do is one hour, dot color is a month. There is no correlation. Here is great summary of how Finland can go 100% fossil fuel free electricity with nuclear: http://smartenergytransition.fi/en/clean-electricity-production-must-increase-massively-to-replace-fossil-fuel-combustion/ http://smartenergytransition.fi/en/clean-electricity-product...

bryanlarsen 4y ago
No generator provides base load, because load is usage, not power. Lots of places in the world satisfy base load with dispatchable power.
- nabla9 4y ago
  > dispatchable power. Using hydrocarbons. The very thing nuclear power avoids.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    France's grid is still quite dependent on hydrocarbons, despite being mostly nuclear. So it's not clear how nuclear helps here.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  Instead of nitpicking terminology, let's talk about the issue directly: What do you do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? There isn't enough batteries on earth to even make a dent in the storage you would need. We don't want to burn any more hydrocarbons. What are our other options? Massive pumped hydro might get us there, but that construction is on a similar time horizon to a new nuclear plant anyway.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago

sofixa 4y ago

> Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor Besides the intermittency of renewables everyone else has already mentioned, a nuclear reactor has a life of 50 years, which is extendable with maintenance. There are literally reactors built in the 1950s still operating today. Solar and wind installations have to be fully rebuilt every 15-20 years (and the decommissioned materials recycled). So you get stable power, for at least twice as long.

epistasis 4y ago
This is abuse disadvantage for nuclear, not an advantage. Current high costs are locked in for a very long time. Whereas with solar and storage, after 15 years (for the storage) or 30 years (solar) you can take advantage of technology advancement. And of technology has not advanced much, you can simply maintain or repair the existing infrastructure, just like nuclear or other large capital expenditures.
- epistasis 4y ago
  This is *a huge disadvantage... My typing on mobile is getting pretty bad...

dahfizz 4y ago

> Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor, Source? The largest grid scale batteries to date don't come close to the numbers you are talking about. The largest operational deployment gives a paltry 0.4 GW and can only sustain that for a few hours[1]. People love to hand wave away storage, but it is a monumental and unsolved problem. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_storage_power_station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_storage_power_statio...

ncmncm 4y ago
We already know that only a very small fraction of storage will ever be batteries, initially enough for load-leveling and eventually for evening peaking. We also know that money put into storage before enough renewables have been built out to displace fossil generation and charge the storage is money wasted that could have been spent building out generation capacity. When storage becomes a good use of money, it will be much, much cheaper to build. Pointing to not much storage built out yet is a shuck.
7952 4y ago
Battery storage projects have tended to be smaller and in the UK average around 20MW. They have followed the pattern of distributed energy rather than big projects connecting at 400kV. In the UK there is over 20GW in the pipeline.

TimPC 4y ago

There are problems of baseload power that neither solar nor wind reliably solve though. Barring the introduction of a complex system of storage to the electrical grid you don’t just need a certain amount of total power generation you need the distribution of production to match the distribution of consumption. We can generate much of this with solar and wind if we are comfortable with having far less power at night from solar and irregular power generation based on weather conditions from wind. This can work well when these technologies are small portions of the grid but it causes problems when we rely on them for substantial portions of power generation.

ncmncm 4y ago
> a complex system of storage ... which will be built when it makes sense to build it. Right now, building out storage makes no sense. Money that could be spent on storage is now rightly spent on generating capacity that can still displace carbon polluters. When there is too little carbon pollution left to displace, then will be time to build storage. By that time the storage will be radically cheaper to buy, because its cost is falling even faster than renewables cost ever did.
- sandos 4y ago
  Also, storage will look wildly different in differen parts of the world.

yodelshady 4y ago

> 5GW of solar [in Finland] Okay I'm afraid that's it for me. Being on a discussion board that has to debate "is deploying solar in Finland a good idea?" is not worth it. Incidentally, yes, it took Finland 10 years to build their last reactor. They commissioned it a week or so ago, mere days before Russia disconnected them. Literally nothing we can effectively do to mitigate climate change takes <5 any more, including a fair few GW-scale wind farms I know of. Refusal to face that is why we are facing the calamity we are. Cheers.

ncmncm 4y ago
You understand that parts of Finland get 24-hour sunlight all summer long?
- jsnell 4y ago
  Producing electricity during the summer nights is basically useless. There's a huge diurnal effect, and an even larger seasonal one. The consumption at the winter peak is roughly double that of the summer trough. Solar is fundamentally a bad fit for Finland. (Wind is a little bit tricky too, since abnormally low winter temperatures correlate with low wind speeds. But that is a problem on the time scale of a week, rather than half the year.)
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    So, during summer, you don't need to pay to have ammonia shipped in. During winter, on occasions when wind threatens to die down for longer than your stock of ammonia will last you, you order a shipment.
    - jsnell 4y ago
      I have no idea of what you mean by "a shipment of ammonia". 24 hour sunlight does not work to make solar power viable in Finland, because that extra production happens exactly when there is least need for electricity, and there is no economical way to store that energy for consumption 7 months later. Basically nobody builds solar power in Finland. It's about 0.3% of the electricity production (while renewables as a whole are more than 50%). That's the reality. Your idea that the summer nights would somehow make it economical is an uninformed fairy tale.