11 ms·

"these renewables can generate electricity at much lower costs than fossil fuels and, especially, nuclear power. In the United States, unsubsidized wind power c

"these renewables can generate electricity at much lower costs than fossil fuels and, especially, nuclear power. In the United States, unsubsidized wind power costs fell by 71 percent between 2009 and 2020, whereas unsubsidized utility scale solar energy costs declined by 90 percent during the same period." This was a weird take from the author since NPP aren't interchangeable with Wind/solar-parks. Seems more like a nuclear hit piece than an actual attack on lobbyism.

DeathArrow 4y ago
- Mrdarknezz 4y ago
  ... What?
raphaelj 4y ago
It's now actually cheaper to build wind/solar + some sort of storage than designing/building/operating/decommissioning a nuclear plant.
- Mrdarknezz 4y ago
  You still need some sort of baseload to support wind/solar. That can come in the form of Hydro/nuclear if you want to decarbonize or do like germany and build massive amounts of gas.
  - ggm 4y ago
    No, you don't "need" this. You can overbuild renewable, or build batteries or PH but it's not "baseload" when you do this, for filling supply shortfall. There is no need for a continuous, constant output source of electricity if you have diverse sources, including storage and fast response. There are economic and timeline rationalisations why a baseload supply model will happen. It's about a different use of the word "need" -it benefits some actors in the problem space.
    - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
      So far there is no real life example of what you are suggesting. The only countries that has gone green include either nuclear or hydro in their mix. Storage + Intermittent is not enough to power a modern grid. Also yes you do need to always meet demand to ensure the frequency is stable, otherwise you'll have massive problems.
      - audunw 4y ago
        > Storage + Intermittent is not enough to power a modern grid. As a previous comment pointed out, one solution is to just over-construct renewables. You can look through a graph of output of wind+solar for a large area and find the minimum output compared to its rated capacity. The output from wind+solar is never zero, and the minimums are usually short. Last time I looked at the numbers for UK, if I remember correctly, it looked like they had to have 2-3 times the rated capacity to produce enough for the vast majority of days with minimum production. It's more accurate to say that nobody has demonstrated that storage + intermittent can power a large scale modern grid (there are plenty of examples for micro grids and islands). Whether it actually can or not is unknown. And part of the reason is that nobody has really needed to demonstrate it yet. There have so far been other workarounds that have been acceptable. UK and Germany doesn't have their own hydro-power, but has built grid connections to tap into Norway's for instance. > Also yes you do need to always meet demand to ensure the frequency is stable, otherwise you'll have massive problems. The other side of this, that is increasingly being taken more seriously, is to have more adaptive loads. There are for instance large parking garages built for EV car ride sharing or rental services that are V2G capable. The cars have quite a lot of flexibility in when they do their charging, and they can even feed energy back into the grid. There have been studies of anything from varying the temperature of freezers and hot water tanks across the country, to varying production rate or temperatures is metal production. To me, if we're serious about solving climate change, this is essentially a problem that solves itself: we absolutely need to make a MASSIVE amount of green hydrogen.. for trucks, ships, planes, e-fuels, fertilizers, steel, etc. That's a HUGE amount of load that can easily be load-balanced to follow the production from renewables. You can even feed some of the stored hydrogen back into the grid in rare cases with extremely low production, probably using existing gas peaker plants. I'm not against nuclear btw, but feels like the most enthusiastic nuclear proponents often have a very myopic view of the problem. That is, they assume in 20-30 years, everything will look exactly the same as before, except all electricity is nuclear+some renewable. Assuming we don't solve the energy storage and load balancing problem is equivalent to assuming we don't solve the climate crisis, because CO2 emissions are about so much more than just electricity production.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Germany electricity is about 15% gas. Ohio electricity is about 50% gas.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    The continued existence of the "baseload myth" is a good example how well nuclear lobbying works. To clarify, lets look at what baseload means. Lets take wikipedia's definition: > The baseload (also base load) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time for example, one week... Electricity demand varies over time (on various time scales). Electricity providers need to make sure that they can supply both the continuous demand (i.e. the lowest point of the noisy curve that is supply) and the fluctuations (using some sort of adjustable supplies). Traditionally it was cheaper to have some power plants run 24/7 at constant output power (e.g. your nuclear power plants), to supply the baseload and use more expensive adjustable sources, e.g. gas peakers to supply varying demand. That is an economic decision, if gas peakers are cheaper than those plants running 24/7 you would never use them, because the variable sources give you much more flexibility. With renewables we are in exactly this situations. Renewables give you varying supply, so essentially a noisy supply curve with some average and a minimum supply, given a sufficiently large grid that supply will not be zero and with enough build out, you will always have enough supply to cover baseload. Because renewables are so much cheaper than nuclear, economically you would always build more renewables to lift up your ability to supply baseload, moreover because (most) renewables are varying, you actually also create capability to supply the varying demand (something you can't do with a nuclear power plant). So in short, intermittent renewables can supply baseload (in fact they are better at that then working as "peakers"). If they are much cheaper than nuclear (which has been the case for many countries) it makes more economic sense to build more renewables than large nuclear plants. incidentally the wikipedia article talks about the fact that you can use intermittent sources for baseload just in the next sentence > This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of low cost, availability and high reliability in any particular market. So in short it is a myth that you require nuclear (or any large 24/7 power plant) for baseload. If renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear, then it makes sense to invest in renewables to supply that baseload.
    - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
      Yet this "myth" is what has lead to countries with heavy amounts of green baseloads being able to decarbonize and those without are still struggling. The failure of the Germany energiewende is a great example, Californias struggle is another.
- fenk85 4y ago
  "It's now actually cheaper to build wind/solar + some sort of storage" [citation required] looking at last EIA report renewables + storage is still multiples of nuclear
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- MagnumOpus 4y ago
  Maybe in California it is. A lot more people live at latitudes where there is about a third as much insolation per year as in California.
revertmean 4y ago
Do you have a better explanation? What were the "economic reasons" that caused three nuclear stations to shut down, if it wasn't the availability of cheap renewable electricity?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > What were the "economic reasons" that caused three nuclear stations to shut down, if it wasn't the availability of cheap renewable electricity Not saying the following is the case, but the sample space is broad. For example, overregulation.
  - revertmean 4y ago
    The fuller quote from the PSEG page is: "Since the first ZECs eligibility period began, power markets have deteriorated significantly, thus the financial needs of New Jersey's nuclear plants have continued to grow. Nationwide, nuclear plants continue to struggle economically to survive. Since 2018, three nuclear plants have closed in the eastern U.S., all for economic reasons, and the impact has had a ripple effect." So, they aren't blaming regulations, they're blaming the fact that the power markets have "deteriorated" ie. there is less money to be made. Nuclear clearly hasn't become cheaper, and neither have fossil fuels, so what exactly has led to this cheaper electricity if it isn't the plummeting price of renewables?
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > they aren't blaming regulations Yet no evidence for this is raised. I don’t believe an abandonment of nuclear R&D is solely to blame. But I haven’t seen sufficient evidence to discard the hypothesis.
      - revertmean 4y ago
        No evidence for what? I'm genuinely baffled here. They're the nuclear power company; surely they would know the reasons they need a subsidy?!
neonsunset 4y ago
As usual. That's why we can't have nice things. "...fossil fuels, and, especially, nuclear power". There is no alternative. Yes, nuclear power plants are expensive and one of the reason for that is the economy of scale doing its work. By building more of them and overhauling regulatory body their price should decrease substantially.
- uwuemu 4y ago
  [dead]
- neonsunset 4y ago
  Keep downvoting. Your anti-nuclear agenda today will be the source of suffering due to global warming and pollution tomorrow.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
They pretty much are interchangeable if, like Ohio, your electricity is 50% gas generated.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
It's probably both. That doesn't mean it isn't true. And a little to counter the mostly pro nuclear articles on HN doesn't hurt. Basically, there's no such thing as a profitable nuclear plant. Every nuclear plant in existence exists only because of vast amounts of public funding. People make lots of money with them but that's always courtesy of local tax payers and clever businesses making sure they are not on the spot when things get expensive. When the price per mwh for renewables is an order of magnitude lower (or multiple orders long term), it becomes feasible to do really inefficient things with renewables and still be more cost effective. Things like simply installing 10x more than you need. Or using that excess capacity to generate e.g. hydrogen. Or just spending a lot of money on energy storage. Or building cables so power can be imported/exported between areas with surpluses and shortages. That's why Europe doesn't have rolling blackouts. It has a lot of wind and solar. Some countries have months where they use nothing else. And then winter comes and the lights stay on and no blackouts happen. There are challenges, sure. But they are addressable. What's going on in the market is that legacy power generation is being dismantled more or less prioritized by cost. That's why many formerly coal dependent countries at this point are pretty far done getting rid of coal. Even some parts of the US with traditionally very strong coal lobbies. It just stopped being economical years ago. And that stopped being in doubts soon after. Gas is going to follow the same path now that gas is no longer cheap. Even just the wild price fluctuations of gas are problematic. You can't plan a business to stay financially healthy if the prices of your main resource fluctuate all over the place. Nuclear has been in decline for decades. Old nuclear plants are exploited until the investments for keeping them going fall out of favor with local legislators. New nuclear plants are deeply unpopular and a relatively rare event at this point. Closing existing plants is likewise unpopular because of a sunk cost fallacy that makes it tempting to spend some more. But even that runs out at some point. New plants occasionally get build of course; but rarely on budget or time and usually with vast amounts of public funding. Decommissioning nuclear actually requires investments as well. It's expensive and typically not actually factored into electricity pricing. Just like storing the waste for millennia isn't accounted for either. Or providing perpetual security to prevent terrorists doing things like building dirty bombs with stolen radioactive waste or simply sabotaging a plant. All that depends on public funding. Nuclear plants are stupendously expensive if you consider all of that. The corruption pointed at in the article is basically about how public money has been used for decades to keep expensive nuclear plants going. Big spending infrastructure attracts all sorts of behavior. And where there is big government spending and not a whole lot of scrutiny, corruption is going to happen.
pjc50 4y ago
If your reaction to actual criminal charges against members of the nuclear industry for illegal bribery is to dismiss it as a "hit piece", I think you need to recalibrate yourself.

DeathArrow 4y ago

Mrdarknezz 4y ago
... What?

raphaelj 4y ago

It's now actually cheaper to build wind/solar + some sort of storage than designing/building/operating/decommissioning a nuclear plant.

Mrdarknezz 4y ago
You still need some sort of baseload to support wind/solar. That can come in the form of Hydro/nuclear if you want to decarbonize or do like germany and build massive amounts of gas.
- ggm 4y ago
  No, you don't "need" this. You can overbuild renewable, or build batteries or PH but it's not "baseload" when you do this, for filling supply shortfall. There is no need for a continuous, constant output source of electricity if you have diverse sources, including storage and fast response. There are economic and timeline rationalisations why a baseload supply model will happen. It's about a different use of the word "need" -it benefits some actors in the problem space.
  - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
    So far there is no real life example of what you are suggesting. The only countries that has gone green include either nuclear or hydro in their mix. Storage + Intermittent is not enough to power a modern grid. Also yes you do need to always meet demand to ensure the frequency is stable, otherwise you'll have massive problems.
    - audunw 4y ago
      > Storage + Intermittent is not enough to power a modern grid. As a previous comment pointed out, one solution is to just over-construct renewables. You can look through a graph of output of wind+solar for a large area and find the minimum output compared to its rated capacity. The output from wind+solar is never zero, and the minimums are usually short. Last time I looked at the numbers for UK, if I remember correctly, it looked like they had to have 2-3 times the rated capacity to produce enough for the vast majority of days with minimum production. It's more accurate to say that nobody has demonstrated that storage + intermittent can power a large scale modern grid (there are plenty of examples for micro grids and islands). Whether it actually can or not is unknown. And part of the reason is that nobody has really needed to demonstrate it yet. There have so far been other workarounds that have been acceptable. UK and Germany doesn't have their own hydro-power, but has built grid connections to tap into Norway's for instance. > Also yes you do need to always meet demand to ensure the frequency is stable, otherwise you'll have massive problems. The other side of this, that is increasingly being taken more seriously, is to have more adaptive loads. There are for instance large parking garages built for EV car ride sharing or rental services that are V2G capable. The cars have quite a lot of flexibility in when they do their charging, and they can even feed energy back into the grid. There have been studies of anything from varying the temperature of freezers and hot water tanks across the country, to varying production rate or temperatures is metal production. To me, if we're serious about solving climate change, this is essentially a problem that solves itself: we absolutely need to make a MASSIVE amount of green hydrogen.. for trucks, ships, planes, e-fuels, fertilizers, steel, etc. That's a HUGE amount of load that can easily be load-balanced to follow the production from renewables. You can even feed some of the stored hydrogen back into the grid in rare cases with extremely low production, probably using existing gas peaker plants. I'm not against nuclear btw, but feels like the most enthusiastic nuclear proponents often have a very myopic view of the problem. That is, they assume in 20-30 years, everything will look exactly the same as before, except all electricity is nuclear+some renewable. Assuming we don't solve the energy storage and load balancing problem is equivalent to assuming we don't solve the climate crisis, because CO2 emissions are about so much more than just electricity production.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Germany electricity is about 15% gas. Ohio electricity is about 50% gas.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  The continued existence of the "baseload myth" is a good example how well nuclear lobbying works. To clarify, lets look at what baseload means. Lets take wikipedia's definition: > The baseload (also base load) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time for example, one week... Electricity demand varies over time (on various time scales). Electricity providers need to make sure that they can supply both the continuous demand (i.e. the lowest point of the noisy curve that is supply) and the fluctuations (using some sort of adjustable supplies). Traditionally it was cheaper to have some power plants run 24/7 at constant output power (e.g. your nuclear power plants), to supply the baseload and use more expensive adjustable sources, e.g. gas peakers to supply varying demand. That is an economic decision, if gas peakers are cheaper than those plants running 24/7 you would never use them, because the variable sources give you much more flexibility. With renewables we are in exactly this situations. Renewables give you varying supply, so essentially a noisy supply curve with some average and a minimum supply, given a sufficiently large grid that supply will not be zero and with enough build out, you will always have enough supply to cover baseload. Because renewables are so much cheaper than nuclear, economically you would always build more renewables to lift up your ability to supply baseload, moreover because (most) renewables are varying, you actually also create capability to supply the varying demand (something you can't do with a nuclear power plant). So in short, intermittent renewables can supply baseload (in fact they are better at that then working as "peakers"). If they are much cheaper than nuclear (which has been the case for many countries) it makes more economic sense to build more renewables than large nuclear plants. incidentally the wikipedia article talks about the fact that you can use intermittent sources for baseload just in the next sentence > This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of low cost, availability and high reliability in any particular market. So in short it is a myth that you require nuclear (or any large 24/7 power plant) for baseload. If renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear, then it makes sense to invest in renewables to supply that baseload.
  - Mrdarknezz 4y ago
    Yet this "myth" is what has lead to countries with heavy amounts of green baseloads being able to decarbonize and those without are still struggling. The failure of the Germany energiewende is a great example, Californias struggle is another.
fenk85 4y ago
"It's now actually cheaper to build wind/solar + some sort of storage" [citation required] looking at last EIA report renewables + storage is still multiples of nuclear
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
MagnumOpus 4y ago
Maybe in California it is. A lot more people live at latitudes where there is about a third as much insolation per year as in California.

revertmean 4y ago

Do you have a better explanation? What were the "economic reasons" that caused three nuclear stations to shut down, if it wasn't the availability of cheap renewable electricity?

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> What were the "economic reasons" that caused three nuclear stations to shut down, if it wasn't the availability of cheap renewable electricity Not saying the following is the case, but the sample space is broad. For example, overregulation.
- revertmean 4y ago
  The fuller quote from the PSEG page is: "Since the first ZECs eligibility period began, power markets have deteriorated significantly, thus the financial needs of New Jersey's nuclear plants have continued to grow. Nationwide, nuclear plants continue to struggle economically to survive. Since 2018, three nuclear plants have closed in the eastern U.S., all for economic reasons, and the impact has had a ripple effect." So, they aren't blaming regulations, they're blaming the fact that the power markets have "deteriorated" ie. there is less money to be made. Nuclear clearly hasn't become cheaper, and neither have fossil fuels, so what exactly has led to this cheaper electricity if it isn't the plummeting price of renewables?
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > they aren't blaming regulations Yet no evidence for this is raised. I don’t believe an abandonment of nuclear R&D is solely to blame. But I haven’t seen sufficient evidence to discard the hypothesis.
    - revertmean 4y ago
      No evidence for what? I'm genuinely baffled here. They're the nuclear power company; surely they would know the reasons they need a subsidy?!

neonsunset 4y ago

As usual. That's why we can't have nice things. "...fossil fuels, and, especially, nuclear power". There is no alternative. Yes, nuclear power plants are expensive and one of the reason for that is the economy of scale doing its work. By building more of them and overhauling regulatory body their price should decrease substantially.

uwuemu 4y ago
[dead]
neonsunset 4y ago
Keep downvoting. Your anti-nuclear agenda today will be the source of suffering due to global warming and pollution tomorrow.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

They pretty much are interchangeable if, like Ohio, your electricity is 50% gas generated.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

It's probably both. That doesn't mean it isn't true. And a little to counter the mostly pro nuclear articles on HN doesn't hurt. Basically, there's no such thing as a profitable nuclear plant. Every nuclear plant in existence exists only because of vast amounts of public funding. People make lots of money with them but that's always courtesy of local tax payers and clever businesses making sure they are not on the spot when things get expensive. When the price per mwh for renewables is an order of magnitude lower (or multiple orders long term), it becomes feasible to do really inefficient things with renewables and still be more cost effective. Things like simply installing 10x more than you need. Or using that excess capacity to generate e.g. hydrogen. Or just spending a lot of money on energy storage. Or building cables so power can be imported/exported between areas with surpluses and shortages. That's why Europe doesn't have rolling blackouts. It has a lot of wind and solar. Some countries have months where they use nothing else. And then winter comes and the lights stay on and no blackouts happen. There are challenges, sure. But they are addressable. What's going on in the market is that legacy power generation is being dismantled more or less prioritized by cost. That's why many formerly coal dependent countries at this point are pretty far done getting rid of coal. Even some parts of the US with traditionally very strong coal lobbies. It just stopped being economical years ago. And that stopped being in doubts soon after. Gas is going to follow the same path now that gas is no longer cheap. Even just the wild price fluctuations of gas are problematic. You can't plan a business to stay financially healthy if the prices of your main resource fluctuate all over the place. Nuclear has been in decline for decades. Old nuclear plants are exploited until the investments for keeping them going fall out of favor with local legislators. New nuclear plants are deeply unpopular and a relatively rare event at this point. Closing existing plants is likewise unpopular because of a sunk cost fallacy that makes it tempting to spend some more. But even that runs out at some point. New plants occasionally get build of course; but rarely on budget or time and usually with vast amounts of public funding. Decommissioning nuclear actually requires investments as well. It's expensive and typically not actually factored into electricity pricing. Just like storing the waste for millennia isn't accounted for either. Or providing perpetual security to prevent terrorists doing things like building dirty bombs with stolen radioactive waste or simply sabotaging a plant. All that depends on public funding. Nuclear plants are stupendously expensive if you consider all of that. The corruption pointed at in the article is basically about how public money has been used for decades to keep expensive nuclear plants going. Big spending infrastructure attracts all sorts of behavior. And where there is big government spending and not a whole lot of scrutiny, corruption is going to happen.

pjc50 4y ago

If your reaction to actual criminal charges against members of the nuclear industry for illegal bribery is to dismiss it as a "hit piece", I think you need to recalibrate yourself.