4 ms·

For the cost of 5kW nameplate of new western nuclear (>$10/W) you can get, right now, at retail, as an individual: 50kW nameplate of solar, and 8kW nameplate of

For the cost of 5kW nameplate of new western nuclear (>$10/W) you can get, right now, at retail, as an individual: 50kW nameplate of solar, and 8kW nameplate of wind, and 75kWh of storage and a 5kW generator (which will almost never need turning on) and a biogas digester. And it will produce enough excess power to replace itself (with a cheaper version) or just triple the batteries if you can get 2-3c/kWh for the surplus well before the reactor is built Mentioning nuclear as an option is about as sensible as a generator bicycle.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I wouldn't advocate for new nuclear (for the same reason the creator of this model gives, it just isn't cost effective) but existing nuclear in stable, northern regions that also have hydro is definately a positive if you're aiming to get to carbon-free power faster. If you don't have the much hydro then it can fight with solar/wind for usage of that dispatchable resource, and if you don't have the nuclear you can build solar/wind for less so there's no reason to start.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Agreed. Keep the current nuclear on as long as it's safe and doesn't cost more than eg. a new green ammonia build.
evancox100 4y ago
So you can buffer the wind/solar output for just 78 minutes? Doesn’t sound like a complete solution. Edit: I guess per the paper it really depends on the specific details of generation/load timing. Could be workable for a certain region but not for another.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  The demonstration is 5kW year round with insignificant consumption of fossil fuels everywhere with a climate about as good as Toronto or better, not having somewhere to put all the sunlight. Mid-winter in high latitude you get as little as 2hrs of sunlight/day (or 0 in the arctic, but hardly anyone lives there). If you live in the tropics, 10kW is probably fine. Also if you feel the need to use it up, electrolyzers are cheap and hydrogen is worth money. You can also store a great deal of energy in a few tonnes of NaOH and avoid using precious winter electricity for heating. You can also reshuffle the wind, solar and battery for your local climate, or wait a year or three for sodium batteries to halve the price.
- qqqwerty 4y ago
  The parent is pointing out, that if you are trying to find a solution to generate 5kw of constant power using nuclear, for the same cost you can get an absurd amount of renewable generation and storage plus a backup generator. The batteries can store 15 hours worth of energy at peak demand, you get a 10x overbuild of peak capacity in solar, plus wind, biogas and a backup generator to boot. It is highly unlikely that the system would ever fail. I would guess you could probably cut the system size in half and still have uptime in the high 9's. And the added bonus is you would have a fair bit of redundancy should any part of the system need maintenance, whereas the nuclear solution doesn't even come with a backup generator.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
nuclear definitely needs to be in the mix to reach 100% fossil-fuel-free energy generation; not gonna happen on wind/solar/hydro alone
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  You're literally commenting on a thread about how 100% renewable is possible on a comment demonstrating that an individual can beat the cost effectiveness of new nuclear with 100% renewables. The utility scale version of the digester is a gas peaker running on green ammonia possibly with a mix of long distance transmission. Everything else scales at least linearly. Nuclear is dead. The last nail went into the coffin when green hydrogen first hit parity with delivered grey hydrogen in some regions. The case just gets worse from here. Stop shilling.
- epistasis 4y ago
  This has been an article of religious faith, but I'm not sure it has ever been a technologically defensible opinion. Before the recent order of magnitude drops in battery prices, it may have been an economical argument, but to make that economic argument one would have to ignore the technological tech curve of solar and renewables. And now that nuclear won't be able to compete on the economics, whereas 10 years ago we though we could still build nuclear for historical prices, people have not updated their reasoning. Most of the models that included nuclear alongside renewables used far far lower prices for nuclear than we can actually build it for. And even then, nuclear was only selected at ~10% of generation for cost reasons, not tech reasons.
  - scarby2 4y ago
    The data doesn't include SMRs and MSRs which could be extremely compelling both from a cost and time to build perspective (or they could be a dead end). Current gen LWRs are problematic for all sorts of reasons but i wouldn't rule nuclear out of the fight just yet. Especially when you take into account china's track record of delivering nuclear plants at a competitive price.
    - 4y ago
s1artibartfast 4y ago
I'm not all in on nuclear, but nameplate comparison is meaningless. Solar might hit the name plate for a few hours a day with suitable weather while nuclear can run 24/7 or on demand.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Good thing we weren't comparing nameplate then but instead comparing ability to meet baseload on a cost basis (that thing that's supposed to be most strongly in favour of nuclear) and finding the result insanely in favour of renewables 5kW nameplate nuclear is 3-4.5kW net with 10-40% of the time needing total backup and zero ability to meet higher peak demand. The system I described needs 2.4 hours of peak sunlight spread throughout a day or 15 hours of wind in a day or 30kg of biofuel (not doable for very many days) or 30kg of imported fuel or any combination with the battery averaging 1-5(ie. you meet ~85% of load with wind/biofuel and draw ~20% of battery) days to meet the 5kW target. It also has a massive peak capacity which dwarfs the nuclear system during half of the year. You might need to tilt the panels two or three times a year in parts of Canada or similar, and maybe import a few days worth of ethanol (or any other stable hydrocarbon you can run your generator on) each year, but this is still less backup than a fission plant needs. Couple it to an uncorrelated system or trade some solar for an electrolyzer and fuel cells and you can reduce reliance on imported fuel even more. Solar cells and batteries will also better than halve in price well before your plant is finished -- likely making it impossible to even run, let alone recoup your costs. Additionally perovskites work better with partial shade and are quite likely to hit cost parity with solar so the nameplate value can be reduced (or reliability on a still, cloudy, winter, northern morning will increase).
trashtester 4y ago
This report provides costs for nuclear power down to about $30/MWH (LCOE) at 3% discount rate (interest rate - inflation rate): https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12/egc-2020_2020-12-09_18-26-46_781.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12... Most countries should be able to reach such levels if providing guarantees for the credit, removing overly excessive regulation and allowing the most capable and experienced construction companies to lead construction and initial operations, especially if large enough numbers are built that economies of scale kick in. Renewables-only systems (apart from hydro, where available), are not able to provide constant power output at anything near such levels yet, without a significant percentage of the power being generated by natural gas. Massive capital investments in the grid, hydrogen generation, etc, MAY be able to actually provide stable power, but would be very unlikely to match nuclear if nuclear is optimized for price. This could change in a few years, obviously, especially if storage becomes super cheap. But there is no guarantee of that. As for the astronomical costs of some recent nuclear plants in western countries, those are a bit like evaluating the price of electric cars based on the Tesla Model S Plaid. We can get perfectly serviceable plants for a fraction of the price, by removing most of the bells and whistles, while still making sure that they are safer than most of the plants in operation today.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  There are a couple of problems with that analysis. Firstly I am very sceptical of their 60 year claim with an additional 20 years for LTO. Every time I look a supposed 60 year reactor in the west up it is having major problems after less than 40 -- I'd be interested in seeing a survey of reactors broken down by location (china is provably much more cost efficient at doing large projects than anyone else albeit at a high human cost) and whether they're funded by geopolitical incentives (russia subsidizing reactors to induce energy dependence). Additionally half of the reactor lifetime is irrelevant to meeting 2050 targets even if we take design lifetime as true. Even if we take the $30/MWh as an assumption. There are solar projects completing right now on the order of 80c/fixed Watt or $1.2 tilting. These produce 5-6 and 6-8 kWh/day/kW respectively. Ending the day with half of that production in a battery nets you an LCOE around $50 and that is falling by 15%/year with little indication of slowing down. Wind is a similar story (although not dropping as precipitously) and moderately anti-correlated. When 'we promise we can reduce the price by 3x and we'll follow through on that promise for 70 years even though costs have been going up and we've never followed through before' is a pretty hard sell against 'we've been consistently dropping costs for 10 years at a rate that will make even the most optimistic projections of nuclear look expensive before you can build even the first one'. Then with the shorter lived renewables you get your money back after 10-20 years, and cna spend it on a new system that is $3/MWh (or more likely 10 as land and coupling costs will dominate). And then there's all the geopolitical problems going nuclear entails for the large portion of the world who aren't allowed to make their own fuel. We did that with fossil fuels and it was awful -- and they can be refined by more than 5 countries.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I wouldn't advocate for new nuclear (for the same reason the creator of this model gives, it just isn't cost effective) but existing nuclear in stable, northern regions that also have hydro is definately a positive if you're aiming to get to carbon-free power faster. If you don't have the much hydro then it can fight with solar/wind for usage of that dispatchable resource, and if you don't have the nuclear you can build solar/wind for less so there's no reason to start.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Agreed. Keep the current nuclear on as long as it's safe and doesn't cost more than eg. a new green ammonia build.

evancox100 4y ago

So you can buffer the wind/solar output for just 78 minutes? Doesn’t sound like a complete solution. Edit: I guess per the paper it really depends on the specific details of generation/load timing. Could be workable for a certain region but not for another.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
The demonstration is 5kW year round with insignificant consumption of fossil fuels everywhere with a climate about as good as Toronto or better, not having somewhere to put all the sunlight. Mid-winter in high latitude you get as little as 2hrs of sunlight/day (or 0 in the arctic, but hardly anyone lives there). If you live in the tropics, 10kW is probably fine. Also if you feel the need to use it up, electrolyzers are cheap and hydrogen is worth money. You can also store a great deal of energy in a few tonnes of NaOH and avoid using precious winter electricity for heating. You can also reshuffle the wind, solar and battery for your local climate, or wait a year or three for sodium batteries to halve the price.
qqqwerty 4y ago
The parent is pointing out, that if you are trying to find a solution to generate 5kw of constant power using nuclear, for the same cost you can get an absurd amount of renewable generation and storage plus a backup generator. The batteries can store 15 hours worth of energy at peak demand, you get a 10x overbuild of peak capacity in solar, plus wind, biogas and a backup generator to boot. It is highly unlikely that the system would ever fail. I would guess you could probably cut the system size in half and still have uptime in the high 9's. And the added bonus is you would have a fair bit of redundancy should any part of the system need maintenance, whereas the nuclear solution doesn't even come with a backup generator.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

nuclear definitely needs to be in the mix to reach 100% fossil-fuel-free energy generation; not gonna happen on wind/solar/hydro alone

Schroedingersat 4y ago
You're literally commenting on a thread about how 100% renewable is possible on a comment demonstrating that an individual can beat the cost effectiveness of new nuclear with 100% renewables. The utility scale version of the digester is a gas peaker running on green ammonia possibly with a mix of long distance transmission. Everything else scales at least linearly. Nuclear is dead. The last nail went into the coffin when green hydrogen first hit parity with delivered grey hydrogen in some regions. The case just gets worse from here. Stop shilling.
epistasis 4y ago
This has been an article of religious faith, but I'm not sure it has ever been a technologically defensible opinion. Before the recent order of magnitude drops in battery prices, it may have been an economical argument, but to make that economic argument one would have to ignore the technological tech curve of solar and renewables. And now that nuclear won't be able to compete on the economics, whereas 10 years ago we though we could still build nuclear for historical prices, people have not updated their reasoning. Most of the models that included nuclear alongside renewables used far far lower prices for nuclear than we can actually build it for. And even then, nuclear was only selected at ~10% of generation for cost reasons, not tech reasons.
- scarby2 4y ago
  The data doesn't include SMRs and MSRs which could be extremely compelling both from a cost and time to build perspective (or they could be a dead end). Current gen LWRs are problematic for all sorts of reasons but i wouldn't rule nuclear out of the fight just yet. Especially when you take into account china's track record of delivering nuclear plants at a competitive price.
  - 4y ago

s1artibartfast 4y ago

I'm not all in on nuclear, but nameplate comparison is meaningless. Solar might hit the name plate for a few hours a day with suitable weather while nuclear can run 24/7 or on demand.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Good thing we weren't comparing nameplate then but instead comparing ability to meet baseload on a cost basis (that thing that's supposed to be most strongly in favour of nuclear) and finding the result insanely in favour of renewables 5kW nameplate nuclear is 3-4.5kW net with 10-40% of the time needing total backup and zero ability to meet higher peak demand. The system I described needs 2.4 hours of peak sunlight spread throughout a day or 15 hours of wind in a day or 30kg of biofuel (not doable for very many days) or 30kg of imported fuel or any combination with the battery averaging 1-5(ie. you meet ~85% of load with wind/biofuel and draw ~20% of battery) days to meet the 5kW target. It also has a massive peak capacity which dwarfs the nuclear system during half of the year. You might need to tilt the panels two or three times a year in parts of Canada or similar, and maybe import a few days worth of ethanol (or any other stable hydrocarbon you can run your generator on) each year, but this is still less backup than a fission plant needs. Couple it to an uncorrelated system or trade some solar for an electrolyzer and fuel cells and you can reduce reliance on imported fuel even more. Solar cells and batteries will also better than halve in price well before your plant is finished -- likely making it impossible to even run, let alone recoup your costs. Additionally perovskites work better with partial shade and are quite likely to hit cost parity with solar so the nameplate value can be reduced (or reliability on a still, cloudy, winter, northern morning will increase).

trashtester 4y ago

This report provides costs for nuclear power down to about $30/MWH (LCOE) at 3% discount rate (interest rate - inflation rate): https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12/egc-2020_2020-12-09_18-26-46_781.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12... Most countries should be able to reach such levels if providing guarantees for the credit, removing overly excessive regulation and allowing the most capable and experienced construction companies to lead construction and initial operations, especially if large enough numbers are built that economies of scale kick in. Renewables-only systems (apart from hydro, where available), are not able to provide constant power output at anything near such levels yet, without a significant percentage of the power being generated by natural gas. Massive capital investments in the grid, hydrogen generation, etc, MAY be able to actually provide stable power, but would be very unlikely to match nuclear if nuclear is optimized for price. This could change in a few years, obviously, especially if storage becomes super cheap. But there is no guarantee of that. As for the astronomical costs of some recent nuclear plants in western countries, those are a bit like evaluating the price of electric cars based on the Tesla Model S Plaid. We can get perfectly serviceable plants for a fraction of the price, by removing most of the bells and whistles, while still making sure that they are safer than most of the plants in operation today.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
There are a couple of problems with that analysis. Firstly I am very sceptical of their 60 year claim with an additional 20 years for LTO. Every time I look a supposed 60 year reactor in the west up it is having major problems after less than 40 -- I'd be interested in seeing a survey of reactors broken down by location (china is provably much more cost efficient at doing large projects than anyone else albeit at a high human cost) and whether they're funded by geopolitical incentives (russia subsidizing reactors to induce energy dependence). Additionally half of the reactor lifetime is irrelevant to meeting 2050 targets even if we take design lifetime as true. Even if we take the $30/MWh as an assumption. There are solar projects completing right now on the order of 80c/fixed Watt or $1.2 tilting. These produce 5-6 and 6-8 kWh/day/kW respectively. Ending the day with half of that production in a battery nets you an LCOE around $50 and that is falling by 15%/year with little indication of slowing down. Wind is a similar story (although not dropping as precipitously) and moderately anti-correlated. When 'we promise we can reduce the price by 3x and we'll follow through on that promise for 70 years even though costs have been going up and we've never followed through before' is a pretty hard sell against 'we've been consistently dropping costs for 10 years at a rate that will make even the most optimistic projections of nuclear look expensive before you can build even the first one'. Then with the shorter lived renewables you get your money back after 10-20 years, and cna spend it on a new system that is $3/MWh (or more likely 10 as land and coupling costs will dominate). And then there's all the geopolitical problems going nuclear entails for the large portion of the world who aren't allowed to make their own fuel. We did that with fossil fuels and it was awful -- and they can be refined by more than 5 countries.