12 ms·

The competition is for cost. I don't mind more competition, I think it's great that there are alternatives. However, I don't see nuclear as particularly competi

The competition is for cost. I don't mind more competition, I think it's great that there are alternatives. However, I don't see nuclear as particularly competitive on that front as it is currently, by far, the most expensive option. The only thing that comes close is natural gas. Which has seen pretty high price hikes of course. Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that. Nuclear, not so much. A few deployments here and there. Usually at prices that are way over budget and years late as well. Maybe smaller nuclear plants will change that. They have a lot to prove. I wouldn't bet the future on that. It's a wild card at best. Meanwhile, the future is now. Lots of countries are going carbon neutral in the next decade or so and mostly without the help of nuclear power. No need to wait for small reactors to work or not. If they do somehow work at a price point that isn't prohibitively expensive, great! But not a problem if this is just the next chapter in nuclear power's long history of being too costly and complicated to be practical.

inglor_cz 4y ago
Predicting future cost is really, really hard. Future cannot really be extrapolated from the current state of things. Until 2022, a lot of Europeans counted on cheap Russian gas. If any kind of cold war breaks out with China, will solar panels be as available as they are today? Ceteris paribus, I would always keep at least some energy generating capability "at home", without the need to rely on potentially hostile powers or unstable regions. Even if it looked uneconomical at the very moment.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  What do you think about the reliability of the global supply chain for uranium ore and fuel rod production? Canada has some high-grade ore but the United States and Europe don't seem to have much at all.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    Canada is fine with me. Finer than China. You can also stockpile rods easier than, say, gas. They don't take up as much space, given how energy dense they are. Having a three year strategic reserve is thinkable, not so much with other means of electricity production.
    - photochemsyn 4y ago
      The strategic reserve of sunlight and wind isn't susceptible to disruption due to war or economic collapse. It does take some work to collect that energy, i.e. a domestic PV and turbine and battery manufacturing capacity, but these are not consumables like oil, gas, coal or uranium - they're durable goods that should last for years to decades, and which can be recycled.
      - inglor_cz 4y ago
        Manufacturing of PVs and batteries on a large enough scale (and that means much larger, at least volume- and weight-wise, than a fleet of SMRs) needs enormous amounts of minerals that are produced in either unstable or potentially hostile regions. The sheer energy density of uranium cannot really be downplayed here.
        Retric 4y ago
        PV’s require minimal rare materials because the part that makes power is only ~1/5000th of a meter thick. It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power. The casing on the other hand can be made from an extremely wide range of materials. And of course long term you can recycle PV panels because they arn’t consuming the material.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        > It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power. Well, one cubic meter of uranium is ~19000 kg, so not sure what your point was.
- Retric 4y ago
  “Will solar panels be as available as they are today” Already installed solar obviously has zero dependency on China. In the steady state you need to replace around 3% per year to keep up with panel degradation, but a dependable solar grid has significant excess production so you have wiggle room to build up domestic manufacturing. And you can ramp up alternatives like wind. Nuclear has more significant systemic risks, which are less obvious. Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance. If they where nearly as dependent on Nuclear as often reported they would be having real trouble right now.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > Already installed solar obviously has zero dependency on China > Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance There is more. Nuclear power requires continual availability of skilled technicians and engineers, replacement parts that need advanced manufacturing, water and other material, access to road and infrastructure. And a stable socioeconomical and political and legal system. And military defense. For some developed countries it can already difficult to provide all these things with 100% reliability. Today, before the bigger impact of climate change. And what about the remaining 50% of human population? Do you see South American, African and middle-eastern countries being able to run nuclear plants? And they do, what about plutonium and nuclear proliferation?
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      If Bulgaria and Ukraine can run their nuclear plants, why not Brazil or Argentina?
      - Retric 4y ago
        Ukraine has a poor history of running nuclear power plants. They recently had one suffer a large scale military attack and are of course managing the aftermath of Chernobyl.
        4y ago
shukantpal 4y ago
Are you including the cost of battery storage in solar & wind power generation for 24 / 7 power output? Otherwise Nuclear power is of higher quality since it can be sustained virtually at any time unlike solar & wind
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  French nuclear power is unavailable more often due to maintenance or lack of cooling water than British wind is. British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.
  - chelical 4y ago
    Capacity factor is generally better for nuclear than any other energy source. > British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero. Sorry, I didn't realize French nuclear reactors weren't generating any energy at the moment.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Over half of French reactors are down. https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/07/28/frances-nuclear-plants-are-going-down-for-repairs https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/07/28/frances-nuclear-...
      - phtrivier 4y ago
        Let's note that part of them are down now for planned maintenance that had to be delayed because of the pandemic. Hopefully, this is not going to be a recurring event. Water temperature is also a problem, but, again, is something that is going to resolve itself "at some point". Finally, others are closed for potentially recurring corrosion issues, and _that_ is the really problematic stuff since most of our reactors were built around the same time. I don't exactly understand why everyone is tiptoing around the fact that we're going to have electricity shutdowns this winter in Europe, when the gas that's supposed to full peaked plants is going to be missing. Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it, at the moment, and at least a good old blackout and a few shortages at gas stations might make some people take energy issues seriously.
anton96 4y ago
For your renewable vs nuclear cost, is the cost advantage that obvious? When price is comparison is done, does it account for lifespan difference, a nuclear reactor last 60 year vs 20 for wind and solar. That can already triple price of the renewable. Does it account, that you should build extra capacity of many time what you need because not all the same regions have the same wind and sun exposition at the same time? You can look how oversize is the installed capacity of Germany [1] compared to France. Also, I'm not sure for the US but the EU got its solar panel production wiped out by the heavily subsided Chinese industry. So the rather lower apparent cost of solar by might be partially driven by the Chinese attempt to pump money in to gain market share. [1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Solar panels can last 50 years. The main reason they don't is that they improve so much every decade that the opportunity cost of doubling power output per square meter makes it worth replacing them. So you're left with 2 theses: 1: solar panels will stop improving, so you should amortize over 50 years. 2: solar panels will keep improving, so cost / kWh will be less than a 50 year amortization.
Dig1t 4y ago
Nuclear absolutely has to be part of that carbon neutral equation. Solar and wind are awesome, but they are not “dispatchable”. i.e. they turn off sometimes when the wind stops blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Without tons of batteries, natural gas and coal etc are always going to be used to fill the gaps. Nuclear is the perfect choice to replace those dispatchable sources. Also, additional nuclear capacity can be used to do things like desalinate ocean water and help alleviate droughts in the future.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Traditionally, nuclear is not dispatchable either, it's baseload, and in particular these SMRs are not dispatchable. There are a few variable output reactors in France, but they are very expensive. Molten salt reactors could perhaps have a thermal storage component, but... Nuclear is "firm" in that its always running. This is a good characteristic. I'm more optimistic about advanced geothermal that has been developed in recent years, using the advances in drilling developed for fracking. If we can use the waste heat from nuclear for something productive, like desalination, then I think it has a much better chance. But coastal communities will also have access to offshore wind, which has really high capacity factors and will be far far cheaper than nuclear could be.
  - politician 4y ago
    An array of SMRs is dispatchable even though a single SMR is not. It’s a scheduling problem.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Oh really, what's the ramp rate of this design? I haven't heard anybody claim that ability for SMRs. What makes an array more dispatchable than a single SMR? I don't follow how that could be possible.
      - njarboe 4y ago
        Elsewhere in the thread, credit_guy quotes 20% to 100% in 96 minutes[1]. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32370392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32370392
Gareth321 4y ago
> Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that. A lot of these calculations are based on straight line production cost against average power output. They often omit one of the most valuable aspects of nuclear: grid stability. Redundancy is expensive but EXTREMELY important. I see few papers accurately imputing this cost when they conclude that we should all switch to renewables immediately. Here in Europe we can have swings in wind power production in excess of 50% in the span of a day. This is ENORMOUS volatility, and requires some kind of stable power production to offset the slow wind days. Grids need to be diversified. Solar, wind, tide, geothermal, hydro, and definitely nuclear. If not nuclear, we are stuck with coal and LNG for the foreseeable future.
- oezi 4y ago
  This will just mean that even more renewables will be built up the point where it is economically feasible to store such energy in batteries, heat, hydrogen, synfuels etc. Yes, many of these processes are inefficient, but if you consider wind already being the cheapest mode of electricity generation then after another 50% price decline due to progress in technology we might have electricity for lots of inefficient storage mechanisms.
  - Gareth321 4y ago
    Storage is of course the way to overcome grid volatility but so far there are few economical options. As I mentioned, few studies have been conducted on this volatility component and cost, but my understanding is that current storage options are uneconomical relative to nuclear, and especially relative to coal and LNG. Hydro storage is ~70% efficient but it's obviously only feasible in mountainous regions. It's actually cheaper to significantly overshoot renewable capacity to compensate for slow days, but if we're now building 2-3x peak capacity then the cost equation shifts considerably.
yrgulation 4y ago
> The competition is for cost Ideally there would be competition for end user low costs as well as investment costs. Electricity should be cheaper than tap water.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
>At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that. If the costs are so settled, why are countries like China still installing more thermal plants than solar or wind? You think they would favor the cheaper proven options?
- oezi 4y ago
  Is China installing more thermal than renewables? I thought it was roughly balanced between fossils and hydro+wind+solar.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I think you are right if you add it all up.
Ycombigatorz 4y ago

inglor_cz 4y ago

Predicting future cost is really, really hard. Future cannot really be extrapolated from the current state of things. Until 2022, a lot of Europeans counted on cheap Russian gas. If any kind of cold war breaks out with China, will solar panels be as available as they are today? Ceteris paribus, I would always keep at least some energy generating capability "at home", without the need to rely on potentially hostile powers or unstable regions. Even if it looked uneconomical at the very moment.

photochemsyn 4y ago
What do you think about the reliability of the global supply chain for uranium ore and fuel rod production? Canada has some high-grade ore but the United States and Europe don't seem to have much at all.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Canada is fine with me. Finer than China. You can also stockpile rods easier than, say, gas. They don't take up as much space, given how energy dense they are. Having a three year strategic reserve is thinkable, not so much with other means of electricity production.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    The strategic reserve of sunlight and wind isn't susceptible to disruption due to war or economic collapse. It does take some work to collect that energy, i.e. a domestic PV and turbine and battery manufacturing capacity, but these are not consumables like oil, gas, coal or uranium - they're durable goods that should last for years to decades, and which can be recycled.
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      Manufacturing of PVs and batteries on a large enough scale (and that means much larger, at least volume- and weight-wise, than a fleet of SMRs) needs enormous amounts of minerals that are produced in either unstable or potentially hostile regions. The sheer energy density of uranium cannot really be downplayed here.
      - Retric 4y ago
        PV’s require minimal rare materials because the part that makes power is only ~1/5000th of a meter thick. It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power. The casing on the other hand can be made from an extremely wide range of materials. And of course long term you can recycle PV panels because they arn’t consuming the material.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        > It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power. Well, one cubic meter of uranium is ~19000 kg, so not sure what your point was.
Retric 4y ago
“Will solar panels be as available as they are today” Already installed solar obviously has zero dependency on China. In the steady state you need to replace around 3% per year to keep up with panel degradation, but a dependable solar grid has significant excess production so you have wiggle room to build up domestic manufacturing. And you can ramp up alternatives like wind. Nuclear has more significant systemic risks, which are less obvious. Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance. If they where nearly as dependent on Nuclear as often reported they would be having real trouble right now.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > Already installed solar obviously has zero dependency on China > Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance There is more. Nuclear power requires continual availability of skilled technicians and engineers, replacement parts that need advanced manufacturing, water and other material, access to road and infrastructure. And a stable socioeconomical and political and legal system. And military defense. For some developed countries it can already difficult to provide all these things with 100% reliability. Today, before the bigger impact of climate change. And what about the remaining 50% of human population? Do you see South American, African and middle-eastern countries being able to run nuclear plants? And they do, what about plutonium and nuclear proliferation?
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    If Bulgaria and Ukraine can run their nuclear plants, why not Brazil or Argentina?
    - Retric 4y ago
      Ukraine has a poor history of running nuclear power plants. They recently had one suffer a large scale military attack and are of course managing the aftermath of Chernobyl.
      - 4y ago

shukantpal 4y ago

Are you including the cost of battery storage in solar & wind power generation for 24 / 7 power output? Otherwise Nuclear power is of higher quality since it can be sustained virtually at any time unlike solar & wind

bryanlarsen 4y ago
French nuclear power is unavailable more often due to maintenance or lack of cooling water than British wind is. British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.
- chelical 4y ago
  Capacity factor is generally better for nuclear than any other energy source. > British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero. Sorry, I didn't realize French nuclear reactors weren't generating any energy at the moment.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Over half of French reactors are down. https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/07/28/frances-nuclear-plants-are-going-down-for-repairs https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/07/28/frances-nuclear-...
    - phtrivier 4y ago
      Let's note that part of them are down now for planned maintenance that had to be delayed because of the pandemic. Hopefully, this is not going to be a recurring event. Water temperature is also a problem, but, again, is something that is going to resolve itself "at some point". Finally, others are closed for potentially recurring corrosion issues, and _that_ is the really problematic stuff since most of our reactors were built around the same time. I don't exactly understand why everyone is tiptoing around the fact that we're going to have electricity shutdowns this winter in Europe, when the gas that's supposed to full peaked plants is going to be missing. Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it, at the moment, and at least a good old blackout and a few shortages at gas stations might make some people take energy issues seriously.

anton96 4y ago

For your renewable vs nuclear cost, is the cost advantage that obvious? When price is comparison is done, does it account for lifespan difference, a nuclear reactor last 60 year vs 20 for wind and solar. That can already triple price of the renewable. Does it account, that you should build extra capacity of many time what you need because not all the same regions have the same wind and sun exposition at the same time? You can look how oversize is the installed capacity of Germany [1] compared to France. Also, I'm not sure for the US but the EU got its solar panel production wiped out by the heavily subsided Chinese industry. So the rather lower apparent cost of solar by might be partially driven by the Chinese attempt to pump money in to gain market share. [1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Solar panels can last 50 years. The main reason they don't is that they improve so much every decade that the opportunity cost of doubling power output per square meter makes it worth replacing them. So you're left with 2 theses: 1: solar panels will stop improving, so you should amortize over 50 years. 2: solar panels will keep improving, so cost / kWh will be less than a 50 year amortization.

Dig1t 4y ago

Nuclear absolutely has to be part of that carbon neutral equation. Solar and wind are awesome, but they are not “dispatchable”. i.e. they turn off sometimes when the wind stops blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Without tons of batteries, natural gas and coal etc are always going to be used to fill the gaps. Nuclear is the perfect choice to replace those dispatchable sources. Also, additional nuclear capacity can be used to do things like desalinate ocean water and help alleviate droughts in the future.

epistasis 4y ago
Traditionally, nuclear is not dispatchable either, it's baseload, and in particular these SMRs are not dispatchable. There are a few variable output reactors in France, but they are very expensive. Molten salt reactors could perhaps have a thermal storage component, but... Nuclear is "firm" in that its always running. This is a good characteristic. I'm more optimistic about advanced geothermal that has been developed in recent years, using the advances in drilling developed for fracking. If we can use the waste heat from nuclear for something productive, like desalination, then I think it has a much better chance. But coastal communities will also have access to offshore wind, which has really high capacity factors and will be far far cheaper than nuclear could be.
- politician 4y ago
  An array of SMRs is dispatchable even though a single SMR is not. It’s a scheduling problem.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Oh really, what's the ramp rate of this design? I haven't heard anybody claim that ability for SMRs. What makes an array more dispatchable than a single SMR? I don't follow how that could be possible.
    - njarboe 4y ago
      Elsewhere in the thread, credit_guy quotes 20% to 100% in 96 minutes[1]. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32370392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32370392

Gareth321 4y ago

> Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that. A lot of these calculations are based on straight line production cost against average power output. They often omit one of the most valuable aspects of nuclear: grid stability. Redundancy is expensive but EXTREMELY important. I see few papers accurately imputing this cost when they conclude that we should all switch to renewables immediately. Here in Europe we can have swings in wind power production in excess of 50% in the span of a day. This is ENORMOUS volatility, and requires some kind of stable power production to offset the slow wind days. Grids need to be diversified. Solar, wind, tide, geothermal, hydro, and definitely nuclear. If not nuclear, we are stuck with coal and LNG for the foreseeable future.

oezi 4y ago
This will just mean that even more renewables will be built up the point where it is economically feasible to store such energy in batteries, heat, hydrogen, synfuels etc. Yes, many of these processes are inefficient, but if you consider wind already being the cheapest mode of electricity generation then after another 50% price decline due to progress in technology we might have electricity for lots of inefficient storage mechanisms.
- Gareth321 4y ago
  Storage is of course the way to overcome grid volatility but so far there are few economical options. As I mentioned, few studies have been conducted on this volatility component and cost, but my understanding is that current storage options are uneconomical relative to nuclear, and especially relative to coal and LNG. Hydro storage is ~70% efficient but it's obviously only feasible in mountainous regions. It's actually cheaper to significantly overshoot renewable capacity to compensate for slow days, but if we're now building 2-3x peak capacity then the cost equation shifts considerably.

yrgulation 4y ago

> The competition is for cost Ideally there would be competition for end user low costs as well as investment costs. Electricity should be cheaper than tap water.

s1artibartfast 4y ago

>At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that. If the costs are so settled, why are countries like China still installing more thermal plants than solar or wind? You think they would favor the cheaper proven options?

oezi 4y ago
Is China installing more thermal than renewables? I thought it was roughly balanced between fossils and hydro+wind+solar.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I think you are right if you add it all up.

Ycombigatorz 4y ago