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Money is fungible. Each dollar spent on a nuke is exactly that dollar not spent on renewables, instead. But it takes with it another dollar spent on coal while
by ncmncm 4y ago
Money is fungible.
Each dollar spent on a nuke is exactly that dollar not spent on renewables, instead. But it takes with it another dollar spent on coal while waiting for construction to complete.
The amount spent just on coal and coal plant operation during those ten long years is enough, by itself, to build enough renewables to displace the nuke. The cost of building the nuke itself is enough to build several times enough to displace the nuke, beyond.
And the renewables would come on immediately, displacing carbon immediately.
Without radically increasing build-out of renewables, we will fail to avert climate catastrophe. The exact mode of civilization collapse in that case is debatable, but global thermonuclear war punctuates many.
- brianwawok 4y ago100% renewable isn’t enough right now. Batteries cost too much. 70% renewable and 30% nuke isn’t a bad mix though.
- ncmncm 4y agoThe overwhelming majority of utility storage will not be in batteries, so battery cost is immaterial. Batteries will be useful for load-smoothing, and short-term storage in smaller grids.
- pfdietz 4y agoIn comparison against renewables and storage, new nuclear isn't competing against batteries and storage right now, it's competing against batteries and renewables that could be installed during the operating lifetime of the power plant (earlier in the life more so than later.) So the question is what will renewables and storage will cost in (say) 2030 or later. Batteries have been falling in price by 27%/year recently, and PV by nearly that much, so it's a bold position to assert this will suddenly stop.
- tsimionescu 4y agoPast advancement is not necessarily an indication of future advancement. Battery tech is still exploring ways to improve Li batteries, but capacities have stopped increasing dramatically as far as I know. Even worse, even at the theoretical maximum capacity for these types of chemical batteries, there just aren't enough resources on Earth to build enough to cover the storage requirements of a huge grid. Now, is it possible that a new type of battery will appear and take over the market by 2030? Yes. Will there be enough of them to compete with the stabilizing power of a nuclear power plant? Maybe. Will there be enough nuclear + storage so that the best use of that storage will be to shut down the nuclear plant? Absolutely not. Basically, we need massive amounts of new electrical power (so we can transition transportation to electrical), and we need to shut down all fossil fuel power generation yesterday. Since we can't have enough storage yet for an exclusively green grid, nuclear shouldn't be competing with green energy in this discussion. Our choices are not "all green by 2030 VS green by 2030 + nuclear", they are "green + coal/gas by 2030 vs green + nuclear + less coal/gas". If we're instead talking about 2100, or 2200, then yeah, well probably be able to shut down nuclear as well.
- ncmncm 4y agoLithium batteries are adapted for cars, where weight matters. Anything happening with lithium has no relevance to utility power. The best use of a nuclear power plant is not to build it at all. Having not built it, the storage built instead at a tiny fraction of the cost will certainly be more than enough to replace it. Building any nukes means, for each, building several times less new renewable generating capacity than could otherwise be.
- tsimionescu 4y agoThen what storage of some good few hundreds of megawatts would you build for a tiny fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant, that also fits where a nuclear power plant could be built?
- pfdietz 4y agoLet's look at simulation/optimization results as to what it would cost to use renewables + storage to produce "synthetic baseload" to compete with nuclear, using real historical weather data. (The "synthetic baseload" comparison is favorable to nuclear, as dealing with variable demand can only help renewables as it already requires storage, and that storage can serve double duty in the variable demand case. Similarly dispatchable demand and transmission between countries also only helps renewables.) https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ It's difficult to get nuclear to compete with wind+solar+batteries+hydrogen in the 2030 cost scenarios. Nuclear does least worse in places like Poland then.