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One can hold any opinion you want, but I don't think it would be a very grounded opinion. Renewables like solar and wind should be the priority, but right now w

One can hold any opinion you want, but I don't think it would be a very grounded opinion. Renewables like solar and wind should be the priority, but right now we're missing key pieces like 1) an effective power grid connecting the places that have solar and wind to the places that need power, and 2) a cost effective mechanism for smoothing over wind and solar's inconsistency. Coal and natural gas are incredibly effective in these respects. The plants can be built near the places the power is needed and / or in places where the required grid already exists, and they inherently produce steady power on demand. Nuclear power is a drop in replacement for these attributes that can supplement renewables in a low emission way today. Without it, or a series of technological breakthroughs in renewables, we'll just end up with an overall mix of renewables supplemented by coal and natural gas -- which isn't going to be enough. And it's not good to bet the world on the hope that we have some technological breakthrough. Given enough time, we might instead focus purely on solar and wind, but we don't have enough time. We need to get to zero net emissions as soon as possible, and we need to use all options available to us if we want to take climate change seriously.

Bromeo 4y ago
> 2) a cost effective mechanism for smoothing over wind and solar's inconsistency. > Coal and natural gas are incredibly effective in these respects. [...] Nuclear power is a drop in replacement for these attributes that can supplement renewables in a low emission way today. If I understand you right, you're saying that nuclear would be a feasible "drop-in" solution for coal/gas to solve the inconsistency problem of renewables. This is precisely /not/ the case, as nuclear power plants are extremely slow to adapt to sudden changes in the power grid (to get a feeling, a short research suggests that the shutdown time for a Pressurized Water Reactor, common e.g. in France, is about 90h [1]). Since crucially nuclear power cannot address the shortcomings of renewables, you still need a way to deal with high-frequency supply/demand changes (gas/coal/hydrogen/batteries/connected grid). Then you can decide whether you prefer covering the baseline with nuclear or renewables. You can choose to use both, but you could also argue that why bother with nuclear in the first place if you can "usually" cover all your needs with renewables + some dynamic technology and then cover the gaps (no wind no sun) by maxing out your dynamic technologies. This might have high CO2 emissions in the moment, but is still amortized small. Finally, electricitymap.org[2] gives a great overview of how the energy is composed in different countries. [1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6944254B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6944254B2/en [2]: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
- chrisfosterelli 4y ago
  > This is precisely /not/ the case, as nuclear power plants are extremely slow to adapt to sudden changes in the power grid Yes it is the case. Nuclear power plans are typically operated at baseload mode, where they run at their max capacity whenever online, but this is not a necessity of the technology. Shutdown times are long, yes, but you don't shut down a plant to vary its output. Shutdown and start up times are long for many plants, independent of fuel. For example, most steam turbine natural gas and coal plants take more than 12 hours to start up. Since you referred to France as an example, I'll use them too. France's EDF believes they vary their nuclear output by as much as 80 percent twice per day once renewables make up a significant contribution to overall power. They're currently equipped to handle swings as big as 21 gigawatts in under 30 minutes. > you can "usually" cover all your needs with renewables + some dynamic technology and then cover the gaps (no wind no sun) by maxing out your dynamic technologies. This might have high CO2 emissions in the moment, but is still amortized small. The math doesn't work out this way. We'll need to 3x our worldwide energy production by 2050. Developing countries are reaching for coal to do this because they aren't willing to pay the premiums required to make renewable energy work consistently. Energy storage needs to get an order of magnitude cheaper, or we need low carbon ways like nuclear to smooth that output. On the map you shared, the majority of gray areas look like India does, and they're going to use a lot more energy in the next 30 years.
2rsf 4y ago
There are some ideas about storing energy in lower consumption periods like Pumped-storage hydroelectricity [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

Bromeo 4y ago

> 2) a cost effective mechanism for smoothing over wind and solar's inconsistency. > Coal and natural gas are incredibly effective in these respects. [...] Nuclear power is a drop in replacement for these attributes that can supplement renewables in a low emission way today. If I understand you right, you're saying that nuclear would be a feasible "drop-in" solution for coal/gas to solve the inconsistency problem of renewables. This is precisely /not/ the case, as nuclear power plants are extremely slow to adapt to sudden changes in the power grid (to get a feeling, a short research suggests that the shutdown time for a Pressurized Water Reactor, common e.g. in France, is about 90h [1]). Since crucially nuclear power cannot address the shortcomings of renewables, you still need a way to deal with high-frequency supply/demand changes (gas/coal/hydrogen/batteries/connected grid). Then you can decide whether you prefer covering the baseline with nuclear or renewables. You can choose to use both, but you could also argue that why bother with nuclear in the first place if you can "usually" cover all your needs with renewables + some dynamic technology and then cover the gaps (no wind no sun) by maxing out your dynamic technologies. This might have high CO2 emissions in the moment, but is still amortized small. Finally, electricitymap.org[2] gives a great overview of how the energy is composed in different countries. [1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6944254B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6944254B2/en [2]: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

chrisfosterelli 4y ago
> This is precisely /not/ the case, as nuclear power plants are extremely slow to adapt to sudden changes in the power grid Yes it is the case. Nuclear power plans are typically operated at baseload mode, where they run at their max capacity whenever online, but this is not a necessity of the technology. Shutdown times are long, yes, but you don't shut down a plant to vary its output. Shutdown and start up times are long for many plants, independent of fuel. For example, most steam turbine natural gas and coal plants take more than 12 hours to start up. Since you referred to France as an example, I'll use them too. France's EDF believes they vary their nuclear output by as much as 80 percent twice per day once renewables make up a significant contribution to overall power. They're currently equipped to handle swings as big as 21 gigawatts in under 30 minutes. > you can "usually" cover all your needs with renewables + some dynamic technology and then cover the gaps (no wind no sun) by maxing out your dynamic technologies. This might have high CO2 emissions in the moment, but is still amortized small. The math doesn't work out this way. We'll need to 3x our worldwide energy production by 2050. Developing countries are reaching for coal to do this because they aren't willing to pay the premiums required to make renewable energy work consistently. Energy storage needs to get an order of magnitude cheaper, or we need low carbon ways like nuclear to smooth that output. On the map you shared, the majority of gray areas look like India does, and they're going to use a lot more energy in the next 30 years.

2rsf 4y ago

There are some ideas about storing energy in lower consumption periods like Pumped-storage hydroelectricity [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...