11 ms·

> ... I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grid

> ... I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible. Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty years. > Another factor that this article should have mentioned is the reliability of the global uranium ore -> fuel rods supply chain. Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern, as is using breeder reactors to reprocess spent fuel. And the exact same issues apply to storage.

adrianN 4y ago
How is energy storage at scale unsolved when we can synthesize Methane quite easily? Grid scale storage is just a matter of cost. It's unclear which technology will be the most cost effective, but if we wanted to we could just store energy as Methane and pay the 50% efficiency cost.
- pdabbadabba 4y ago
  If this is so simple, why don't we do it? Or is that the question you're asking? Of course, that 50% efficiency cost seems like a bit of a bear in itself. If you lose half of the stored power, that would seem to significantly drive up the total lifecycle cost of a Watt of wind power. (Recognizing, of course, that not all of it must be stored.) The cost and inefficiency (==cost) of storage seems like an unfortunate thing to handwave away in a conversation about relative costs.
  - adrianN 4y ago
    No, it's obvious why we don't do it: it's fairly expensive and we currently don't have enough renewable supply to fill tanks with Methane. Grids can easily be 70+% renewable without any storage at all. Money is currently better spent increasing supply than building storage.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    We do it already on a grand scale. It's just that since we live in a world where we burn lots of gas, we don't need to do the "generate synthetic methane" step, we can just burn less of it. Sure, we could spend billions on generating synthetic methane from renewables while at the same time burning natural methane, but that would be stupid.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    That is all capex. Renewable capex is still in free fall. Storage too. The more you use it, the less it costs, per kWh.
ben_w 4y ago
> the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage What are these problems, exactly? I see videos and news stories about grid batteries being successfully deployed for short term management and how pumped hydro is basically a big cheap gravity battery, but I'm not a civil/electrical engineer, so I accept there could easily be elephants in the room here.
- creato 4y ago
  It’s just scale. Those batteries and pumped hydro stories seem big. Relative to your house, they are. Relative to the grid as a whole, they are small.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    That doesn't answer the question. What exactly is the problem that needs to be solved?
    - paulmd 4y ago
      Scaling up capacity of the storage. There aren't that many sites that are geologically feasible for pumped storage (and it destroys a local ecosystem by flooding and draining it repeatedly) and batteries need rare earth metals (not actually that rare but environmentally toxic to produce). We need O(100x) current production to fully switch away from hydrocarbons. That's a lot of reservoirs or a lot of cobalt that have to be mined.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        Globally the potential pumped storage resource is far larger than would be needed. You might be confused by assuming the pumped hydro has to be on existing rivers. http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
      - ben_w 4y ago
        Cobalt already eliminated from half of new Tesla batteries: https://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-using-cobalt-free-lfp-batteries-in-half-new-cars-produced/ https://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-using-cobalt-free-lfp-b...
photochemsyn 4y ago
'handwave the unsolved-at-scale' ? All you have to do is look at Australia: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-forming-battery-to-begin-construction-in-australia/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-f... > Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South Wale’s Liddell coal plant and Victoria’s Loy Yang facility. In January, AGL Energy revealed that it had secured both Wärtsilä and Fluence under non-exclusive framework agreements to supply up to 1 GW of large-scale battery storage." So, would it make more economic sense for this 1GW battery-storage system to be replaced by a nuclear power plant? Australia after all is one of the places with the most high-grade uranium ore, being among the top three exporters. Here's an example of more reliable analysis: > "To illustrate this point, the 2,430 MW Vogtle nuclear plant could be expected to generate 21 million MWh per year. That is enough to power about 1.75 million residential households. Meanwhile, a hypothetical 3,500 MW solar power plant would be able to produce just under 6 million MWh of electricity per year. This number is enough to power only 500,000 homes, which is considerably less than nuclear power. For solar to produce as much electricity as is generated by a nuclear power plant, it would require about 13,000 MW of utility-scale solar capacity, which about four times as much as built in the existing plants. However, the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant." https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-power/#Comparing_and_Contrasting https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-power/...
- Johnny555 4y ago
  850MW doesn't tell you how much energy it can store -- if you need 850MW to power your grid and your battery can supply 850MWh, where do you get power for the other 11 hours until the sun comes out?
  - jimmydorry 4y ago
    For some reason, these journalists tend to drop the "h" portion of the rated capacity of energy projects. The battery capacity (I believe this will actually be a group of stand-alone installations) will be 850MWh, which is about 2.6% of that Australian state's daily consumption.
pfdietz 4y ago
Complains about renewables handwaving at scale, then suggests seawater uranium extraction and breeder reactors. They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan. Don't worry, they're lobbying to lower those standards in order to be more cost-competitive with renewables.
- philwelch 4y ago
  We've had breeder reactors for decades, what are you talking about?
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    We've had demo reactors with various issues, none of which demonstrated they could compete even with burner reactors. I remind you the double standard involved criticizing renewables "at scale", so a few problematic breeder reactors won't dispel the hypocrisy.
    - philwelch 4y ago
      For what it's worth, I'm not suggesting using breeder reactors as a primary source of electrical power, but as an option for reprocessing transuranic waste and spent fuel. So totally different levels of scale. Also, the main reason we haven't invested in breeder reactors is that it turns out uranium isn't actually scarce enough to justify it.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        Oh but you have to use breeders (or perhaps sea water uranium extraction) for a global nuclear-powered economy. Burner reactors run out of sufficiently cheap uranium in less than a decade at that scale. That pesky "scale" thing again.
nine_k 4y ago
Also, reprocessing "nuclear waste" from nuclear power stations yields a lot of pretty good fuel for "fast breeder" reactors [1]. This also mostly solves the problem of storing the highly active nuclear waste: you may need like 5% of the current storage capacity if you burn the current "nuclear waste" stockpiles. Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns. But for the US, or France, or UK, or India, or China (and a bunch of others) this should not be a concern, since they officially have nuclear weapons. It's mostly the political will, and the public opinion (which are interlinked) that limit a nuclear renaissance. If you talk about subsidies, please remember how huge were the subsidies that kickstarted the current solar and wind booms; early panels and wind towers were completely uneconomical by today's standards, and R&D costs were colossal. But now, with the technology streamlined and the economies of scale kicking in, solar is competitive even without subsidies. The same could happen to a new crop of nuclear technology, much cleaner and more efficient than the kind we've inherited from 1970s. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
- smaddox 4y ago
  > Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns. Not if you use Thorium breeder reactors.
  - danielrpa 4y ago
    I'm interested in nuclear energy but it appears that I don't know enough. Thorium breeder, processes generating pu-239... Is there a relatively accessible book I can read to understand all of this better?
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      The LFTR presentations (lots of youtubes) showed how their isotope chains were proliferation resistant.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
makeitdouble 4y ago
> Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty years. Nuclear's position at this point is "we had a meh run, but next generation will be better, pinky promise". On a global scale for the past fifty years we had 2 meltdowns, a country attacking another's nuclear facilities as a threat, and no clear replacement plan for the aging reactors in most countries even as they are way past the set date for decommission ing, and se still don't see how to cheaply deal with the waste. People tend to brush the "political problems" under the rug, but they are real issues either way, so not taking them into account when doing comparisons wouldn't be fair.
- SgtBastard 4y ago
  In the same 50 years we’ve had the largest period of economic expansion in history, with virtually the entire economy directly dependent on cheap and plentiful energy. There is an argument to say that on balance the pros outweigh the cons.
worik 4y ago
> Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems.... > Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern Hmmm.... Hand waving unsolved at scale technical problems
mayama 4y ago
> Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology Grid storage technology is already there with pumped hydro storage(PHS). As 90% of built and newly building grid storage is already PHS. It is political problems and inertia that's holding it back. To be clear, I'm referring to off the river closed-loop PHS, which doesn't need a huge river check dam, flood zone, huge population relocation or ecological issues. All it needs is two places with area of 1sqkm each some hundred meter elevation apart. There is ANU study that claims we have enough of such sites for needed storage. Look at how fast China is building PHS recently. I think PHS approvals, even for closed-loop, in US are as hard to get as nuclear, which is holding it back. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/05/sustainable-pumped-hydro-across-616818-sites/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/05/sustainable-pumped-hy... https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/10/05/aussie-scientists-champion-closed-loop-pumped-hydro/ https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/10/05/aussie-scie...
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
.... and by the time any reactor design I'd be interested in seeing built (aka not old solid fuel rod plants susceptible to meltdowns), it would be ... 10 years? 20 years? wind/solar/storage are on actively improving cost curves that even gas turbine is losing to. No one knows the price target of wind/solar/battery in 10-20 years, but I'd guess it is at least half the cost in real dollars of today. Nuclear proponents are pushing all the media outlets because they are in the same boat as coal: LCOE is so much lower for wind/solar that electric companies lose money on them relative to alt energy. Only base load is a viable role onthe grid, and gas turbines beat them at that handily (although with a carbon tax who knows). I'm not opposed to keeping existing nuclear plants online with some subsidies, but new nuclear plants? Come on. And I am a huge fan of those LFTR presentations and strongly believe next gen nuclear will be viable once a stable price point can be targeted.

adrianN 4y ago

How is energy storage at scale unsolved when we can synthesize Methane quite easily? Grid scale storage is just a matter of cost. It's unclear which technology will be the most cost effective, but if we wanted to we could just store energy as Methane and pay the 50% efficiency cost.

pdabbadabba 4y ago
If this is so simple, why don't we do it? Or is that the question you're asking? Of course, that 50% efficiency cost seems like a bit of a bear in itself. If you lose half of the stored power, that would seem to significantly drive up the total lifecycle cost of a Watt of wind power. (Recognizing, of course, that not all of it must be stored.) The cost and inefficiency (==cost) of storage seems like an unfortunate thing to handwave away in a conversation about relative costs.
- adrianN 4y ago
  No, it's obvious why we don't do it: it's fairly expensive and we currently don't have enough renewable supply to fill tanks with Methane. Grids can easily be 70+% renewable without any storage at all. Money is currently better spent increasing supply than building storage.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  We do it already on a grand scale. It's just that since we live in a world where we burn lots of gas, we don't need to do the "generate synthetic methane" step, we can just burn less of it. Sure, we could spend billions on generating synthetic methane from renewables while at the same time burning natural methane, but that would be stupid.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  That is all capex. Renewable capex is still in free fall. Storage too. The more you use it, the less it costs, per kWh.

ben_w 4y ago

> the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage What are these problems, exactly? I see videos and news stories about grid batteries being successfully deployed for short term management and how pumped hydro is basically a big cheap gravity battery, but I'm not a civil/electrical engineer, so I accept there could easily be elephants in the room here.

creato 4y ago
It’s just scale. Those batteries and pumped hydro stories seem big. Relative to your house, they are. Relative to the grid as a whole, they are small.
- ben_w 4y ago
  That doesn't answer the question. What exactly is the problem that needs to be solved?
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Scaling up capacity of the storage. There aren't that many sites that are geologically feasible for pumped storage (and it destroys a local ecosystem by flooding and draining it repeatedly) and batteries need rare earth metals (not actually that rare but environmentally toxic to produce). We need O(100x) current production to fully switch away from hydrocarbons. That's a lot of reservoirs or a lot of cobalt that have to be mined.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Globally the potential pumped storage resource is far larger than would be needed. You might be confused by assuming the pumped hydro has to be on existing rivers. http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Cobalt already eliminated from half of new Tesla batteries: https://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-using-cobalt-free-lfp-batteries-in-half-new-cars-produced/ https://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-using-cobalt-free-lfp-b...

photochemsyn 4y ago

'handwave the unsolved-at-scale' ? All you have to do is look at Australia: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-forming-battery-to-begin-construction-in-australia/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-f... > Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South Wale’s Liddell coal plant and Victoria’s Loy Yang facility. In January, AGL Energy revealed that it had secured both Wärtsilä and Fluence under non-exclusive framework agreements to supply up to 1 GW of large-scale battery storage." So, would it make more economic sense for this 1GW battery-storage system to be replaced by a nuclear power plant? Australia after all is one of the places with the most high-grade uranium ore, being among the top three exporters. Here's an example of more reliable analysis: > "To illustrate this point, the 2,430 MW Vogtle nuclear plant could be expected to generate 21 million MWh per year. That is enough to power about 1.75 million residential households. Meanwhile, a hypothetical 3,500 MW solar power plant would be able to produce just under 6 million MWh of electricity per year. This number is enough to power only 500,000 homes, which is considerably less than nuclear power. For solar to produce as much electricity as is generated by a nuclear power plant, it would require about 13,000 MW of utility-scale solar capacity, which about four times as much as built in the existing plants. However, the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant." https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-power/#Comparing_and_Contrasting https://www.solarfeeds.com/mag/solar-power-vs-nuclear-power/...

Johnny555 4y ago
850MW doesn't tell you how much energy it can store -- if you need 850MW to power your grid and your battery can supply 850MWh, where do you get power for the other 11 hours until the sun comes out?
- jimmydorry 4y ago
  For some reason, these journalists tend to drop the "h" portion of the rated capacity of energy projects. The battery capacity (I believe this will actually be a group of stand-alone installations) will be 850MWh, which is about 2.6% of that Australian state's daily consumption.

pfdietz 4y ago

Complains about renewables handwaving at scale, then suggests seawater uranium extraction and breeder reactors. They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan.

dane-pgp 4y ago
> They have very high double standards in Nuclearstan. Don't worry, they're lobbying to lower those standards in order to be more cost-competitive with renewables.
philwelch 4y ago
We've had breeder reactors for decades, what are you talking about?
- pfdietz 4y ago
  We've had demo reactors with various issues, none of which demonstrated they could compete even with burner reactors. I remind you the double standard involved criticizing renewables "at scale", so a few problematic breeder reactors won't dispel the hypocrisy.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    For what it's worth, I'm not suggesting using breeder reactors as a primary source of electrical power, but as an option for reprocessing transuranic waste and spent fuel. So totally different levels of scale. Also, the main reason we haven't invested in breeder reactors is that it turns out uranium isn't actually scarce enough to justify it.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Oh but you have to use breeders (or perhaps sea water uranium extraction) for a global nuclear-powered economy. Burner reactors run out of sufficiently cheap uranium in less than a decade at that scale. That pesky "scale" thing again.

nine_k 4y ago

Also, reprocessing "nuclear waste" from nuclear power stations yields a lot of pretty good fuel for "fast breeder" reactors [1]. This also mostly solves the problem of storing the highly active nuclear waste: you may need like 5% of the current storage capacity if you burn the current "nuclear waste" stockpiles. Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns. But for the US, or France, or UK, or India, or China (and a bunch of others) this should not be a concern, since they officially have nuclear weapons. It's mostly the political will, and the public opinion (which are interlinked) that limit a nuclear renaissance. If you talk about subsidies, please remember how huge were the subsidies that kickstarted the current solar and wind booms; early panels and wind towers were completely uneconomical by today's standards, and R&D costs were colossal. But now, with the technology streamlined and the economies of scale kicking in, solar is competitive even without subsidies. The same could happen to a new crop of nuclear technology, much cleaner and more efficient than the kind we've inherited from 1970s. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

smaddox 4y ago
> Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns. Not if you use Thorium breeder reactors.
- danielrpa 4y ago
  I'm interested in nuclear energy but it appears that I don't know enough. Thorium breeder, processes generating pu-239... Is there a relatively accessible book I can read to understand all of this better?
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    The LFTR presentations (lots of youtubes) showed how their isotope chains were proliferation resistant.
- pfdietz 4y ago

makeitdouble 4y ago

> Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty years. Nuclear's position at this point is "we had a meh run, but next generation will be better, pinky promise". On a global scale for the past fifty years we had 2 meltdowns, a country attacking another's nuclear facilities as a threat, and no clear replacement plan for the aging reactors in most countries even as they are way past the set date for decommission ing, and se still don't see how to cheaply deal with the waste. People tend to brush the "political problems" under the rug, but they are real issues either way, so not taking them into account when doing comparisons wouldn't be fair.

SgtBastard 4y ago
In the same 50 years we’ve had the largest period of economic expansion in history, with virtually the entire economy directly dependent on cheap and plentiful energy. There is an argument to say that on balance the pros outweigh the cons.

worik 4y ago

> Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems.... > Seawater extraction is an option if that's ever a real concern Hmmm.... Hand waving unsolved at scale technical problems

mayama 4y ago

> Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology Grid storage technology is already there with pumped hydro storage(PHS). As 90% of built and newly building grid storage is already PHS. It is political problems and inertia that's holding it back. To be clear, I'm referring to off the river closed-loop PHS, which doesn't need a huge river check dam, flood zone, huge population relocation or ecological issues. All it needs is two places with area of 1sqkm each some hundred meter elevation apart. There is ANU study that claims we have enough of such sites for needed storage. Look at how fast China is building PHS recently. I think PHS approvals, even for closed-loop, in US are as hard to get as nuclear, which is holding it back. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/05/sustainable-pumped-hydro-across-616818-sites/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/01/05/sustainable-pumped-hy... https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/10/05/aussie-scientists-champion-closed-loop-pumped-hydro/ https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/10/05/aussie-scie...

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

.... and by the time any reactor design I'd be interested in seeing built (aka not old solid fuel rod plants susceptible to meltdowns), it would be ... 10 years? 20 years? wind/solar/storage are on actively improving cost curves that even gas turbine is losing to. No one knows the price target of wind/solar/battery in 10-20 years, but I'd guess it is at least half the cost in real dollars of today. Nuclear proponents are pushing all the media outlets because they are in the same boat as coal: LCOE is so much lower for wind/solar that electric companies lose money on them relative to alt energy. Only base load is a viable role onthe grid, and gas turbines beat them at that handily (although with a carbon tax who knows). I'm not opposed to keeping existing nuclear plants online with some subsidies, but new nuclear plants? Come on. And I am a huge fan of those LFTR presentations and strongly believe next gen nuclear will be viable once a stable price point can be targeted.