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It's a start! But there should be 100 others under construction right now under a wartime like economy. This is an emergency in both sovereignty and maintaini

It's a start! But there should be 100 others under construction right now under a wartime like economy. This is an emergency in both sovereignty and maintaining an industrialized, modern economy.

Gwypaas 4y ago
Or get 3-4x as much bang for the buck building renewables. Source: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
- Msw242 4y ago
  How are you going to deal with base load? We can save money on nuclear but reducing the amount of bureaucracy and increasing the volume for economies of scale.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    In Finland, Hydro combined with wind should take care of baseload. They've also been importing cheap electricity to avoid burning expensive fossil fuels for about a decade, so they probably want to continue with that.
    - gojomo 4y ago
      Where will they "import cheap electricity" from if none is being exported?
      - oldgradstudent 4y ago
        Supposedly from northern Sweden, according to a Swedish friend. Take this with a grain of salt. They have a lot of power generation in the north, but not enough transmission capacity to transfer it to the population centers in the south, so they have to sell it cheaply to their neighbors, and buy expensive electricity from their neighbors in the south. This all worked fine when they could buy cheap electricity from their southern neighbors. But now they have a problem. A few weeks ago there was 10X or more electricity price difference between north and south Sweden. Take a look at: https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/ https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/ Pick, for example, August 26, 2022, at 11:04. Prices up north are 14 euro per MWh, and 750 euro per MWh in the south.
        gojomo 4y ago
        Very interesting! Do you know if Sweden's northern generation surplus via something robust against gas-shortages, like say local hydropower?
        Gwypaas 4y ago
        Loads of hydro [1], the energy mix in Sweden is usually 45-50% hydro depending on the year. Sweden currently has extremely chaotic electricity prices. Whenever the export capacity is maxed out the prices drops to €10-30/MWh and then instantly recovers to the gas based prices of Europe when it's not. With the recent chaos at the French nuclear plants Sweden became the largest exporter of electricity in the EU. [2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_stations_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st... [2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-europes-largest-net-power-exporter-2022-08-10/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...
    - doikor 4y ago
      > In Finland, Hydro combined with wind should take care of baseload. Nuclear and hydro are the baseload generation in Finland at the moment and will be far into the future. Hydro is also used to handle peaks. Imports are mostly hydro too.
  - rcxdude 4y ago
    you deal with baseload with renewables. It just doesn't make sense to seperate 'baseload' from 'peak' with renewables (in fact this is one reason why nuclear and renewables don't complement each other, in fact renewables will tend to destroy nuclear economically without a bunch of subsidies in place), you just step back and think about how you're going to match supply and demand when both fluctuate over time. (And the answer is a combination of over-building renewable capacity and storage. Funnily enough if you ask how you'd supply a grid with nuclear power you get the same answer, just with longer lead times and a higher price tag).
    - ftth_finland 4y ago
      Unless you mean hydro when you say renewables, you aren’t going to deal with baseload in the winter with renewables. Not that hydro is enough for baseload in itself.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    Well, if it's a wartime economy measure why care? As long as the average is good enough and you keep the most important consumers running. If we're talking peace time, then there's loads of strategies. For Finland, Sweden and Norway there's immense possibility of hydro power to simply switch it to be used in a more dispatchable manner than baselod. For less hydro equipped countries see this research. > *B. Dealing With Variability and Stability* > Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. > However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place. > With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
  - jakewins 4y ago
    "Base load" is word invented by coal power operators to argue for their extended existence, it is not a real thing. See Table 1 in this review paper from June for a summary of grid simulations from 10 separate models running 100% renewables at various time step resolutions: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=983...
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      More precisely, it was the coal and nuclear equivalent of the "duck curve". It was costly/inefficient for these techs to be flexible, so they seperated the flexible load out into gas and hydro to work around the limitations of the inflexible tech. Now its a rallying cry for some reason.
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
      Watch out, ideology is blinding you. Base load is very much a real concept: how much you need to have available at all times for your society to function. Your industry to run, your critical services, etc. You can make multiple layers (just running the government, industries, having heating available at all times, etc), and they vary over the year, but base load is absolutely a real thing. Additionally, I would recommend you read the remarks of Table 1, where half of them either make a gigantic portion of electricity needs disappear (not counting livestock needs lol), or assume that 10000TWh (or much more) will be covered by fossil fuels or nuclear. Hm, that sounds like a lot like a base load. It does not either cover how much you need to build (current best case scenarios are that you need to build 2.5x worth your needed consumption for it to be available at all times. Hope you're ready to cover Texas in solar panels you need to replace every ten years), or assume that you can just... transfer electricity through ? Yeah, sure, if we had a worldwide grid that just delivers energy where it needs to be without loss, but we don't.
      - Gwypaas 4y ago
        Base load exists on the demand side, it does not exist on the producer side. Base load on the producer side is simply a made up term because the most inflexible power plants of the 1970's were also the cheapest, and thus matched it.
  - markvdb 4y ago
    The general strategy that will get you quite far: - improve interconnects - overdimension production - CHP [0] with biomass fuel - hydro storage - increase demand flexibility - generate carbohydrates for seasonal storage - lower consumption Technological improvements and breakthroughs are nice extras. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
  - AdamN 4y ago
    If the problem with nuclear was just bureaucracy, China would be building 100 of them right now. These are complicated machines and even the second most powerful country in the world is only building 17 currently.
    - Msw242 4y ago
      >China is planning at least 150 new reactors in the next 15 years, more than the rest of the world has built in the past 35. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
- nicolaslem 4y ago
  Why not both?
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Nuclear and renewables are like oil and water: they don't mix well. When renewables are built out they push the price of electricity down too often for nuclear to earn the good average price it needs. When prices spike, dispatchable sources (or dispatchable demand) move in and snipe the peaks, so nuclear can't make up for it then. These days, it's looking like renewables + storage could supply "synthetic baseload" more cheaply than nuclear in most places (maybe not Finland, yet; that part of the world is one of the worst for renewables), so there's not much place left for nuclear. If your energy system has variable demand it will need storage even with nuclear, which tilts the game toward renewables even further (their need for storage is partially covered by the storage one needs anyway to level the load; said storage can level supply and demand at the same time, to some extent.) Nuclear also has the problem that it's not going to survive very well as a niche technology, as that would likely not cause enough construction of new power plants to keep the industry from seeing negative learning effects.
    - adev_ 4y ago
      > When prices spike, dispatchable sources (or dispatchable demand) move in and snipe the peaks, so nuclear can't make up for it then. That is not true. Nuclear power has been used as a dispatchable / regulative source of power to compensate solar and wind power intermittency for decades in France.[1] > These days, it's looking like renewables + storage could supply "synthetic baseload" more cheaply than nuclear in most places And that's gross bullshit. - Never storage of electricity has been deployed successfully at scale needed for a mid size country. Pretend that it is, today, a solution is highly hypocritical or plain gross bullshit. - Even on the most optimistic (and untested) scenario, the cost plan of RE+Storage is (at best) on part with Nuclear energy (Pumped-storage) and or way more expensive (battery, power2gas). [2] > maybe not Finland, yet; that part of the world is one of the worst for renewables That is even more bullshit. Finland has pretty large hydro reserves. Renewable does not stop to solar. [3] [1]: https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document [2]: https://www.powermag.com/how-much-will-hydrogen-based-power-cost/ https://www.powermag.com/how-much-will-hydrogen-based-power-... [3]: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FI?solar=false&remote=true&wind=false https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FI?solar=false&remote=t...
- probablypower 4y ago
  How do you define "bang for buck"? Would love to see a source stating that renewables are 3-4x more effective in the context of energy security and grid stability.
  - cromka 4y ago
    > Would love to see a source stating that renewables are 3-4x more effective in the context of energy security and grid stability. Why are you asking for a source over a statement which op didn't make?
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    You seemed to have just made this up as a ridiculous straw man, but it's probably actually true. They paused their other nuclear plant build because of worries that the nation they were building it with would be able to mess with their electricity supply. And grid forming inverter based tech is the new best option. Distributed inverters can provide all sorts of grid services cheaper than old centralised tech.
- Mrdarknezz 4y ago
  You can't replace Nuclear with intermittent energy, they serve different function. So far the cheapest and the largest deployment of green energy has come from Nuclear and Hydro.
  - paganel 4y ago
    With the mention that Hydro is not at all environmental-friendly, quite the contrary. It helps with decreasing the quantity of CO2 we generate, but in many other aspects is pretty bad (and in many cases an existential threat) when it comes to the local environment.
    - cpursley 4y ago
      Yeah, Hydro is terrible for river ecosystems and one of the reasons they started removing them in the Pacific NW (USA) - trout migration.
    - timellis-smith 4y ago
      They are pretty major producers of methane https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/06/hydropower-hydroelectricity-methane-clean-climate-change-study https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/06...
    - dghughes 4y ago
      Hydro is bad for the environment especially those who live near it. A buildup of methylmercury in sediment is caused by hydro dams. There are lawsuits here in Canada by First Nations who live near dams.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Hydro has been superceded by battery storage and Green Hydrogen production, for economic reasons. Existing ones, particulalry those built for multiple functions (water supply, recreation) still have some use but mostly you just want to be rolling out solar and wind until you run out of fossil fuel generation to displace. Only then do you really need to start comparing whether building storage would cost less than more renewables and interconnects and hydro is unlikely to be the lowest cost option unless you're going to build the dam anyway for other reasons.
- samatman 4y ago
  Renewables make grid reliability worse, especially wind, because the grid has to maintain a frequency, which is ultimately done with the inertia of huge rotating chunks of iron. That's fine, as long as there are huge rotating chunks of iron. Nuclear can rotate the chunks, as can hydro and geothermal. Everything else emits carbon. Europe is pretty tapped on hydro and geothermal, that leaves nuclear, or some very handwavey ideas of building a bunch of flywheels using resources which could be contributing to primary generation.
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    Synchronous condensers do just that, but they're essentially the same as a turbogenerator of the same VA rating, except with no input shaft.
    - samatman 4y ago
      Those are the flywheels I was referring to, yes. Metals are energy intensive and we can't afford to build generator-equivalent machinery that doesn't generate. A lot of other replies are deluded about the scale at which inverters can operate, but what else is new.
      - formerly_proven 4y ago
        Synchronous condensers and grid flywheels are two different things, the former is synchronous, hence rpm locked to instantaneous grid frequency. These provide very short term stability, and are not energy storage (due to the small acceptable variance in grid frequency), and are normally used for dynamic grid-scale PFC. Flywheels are asynchronous and inverter-driven.
  - jakewins 4y ago
    > which is ultimately done with the inertia of huge rotating chunks of iron. Not "ultimately", "incidentally". How do you think microgrids work without giant spinning masses? There's no technical reason wind or PV can't provide inertia, just need to program the inverters to help maintain frequency rather than just follow it.
mrtksn 4y ago
> But there should be 100 others under construction right now under a wartime like economy. Average time to build a NPP is 5 to 7 years[0]. This also assumes that anyone can build and run an NPP, it's like saying that everyone should stop doing whatever they are doing and start building Fabs during the chip crisis. "Designing a car? Building a pharmaceuticals factory? Coding JavaScript? Stop that, we have more important things to do. Just drop whatever you do and start making 5nm Fabs and Nuclear Power plants" Also, what do you do with the NIMBYs? [0] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/park-k2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/park-k2/
- jafo 4y ago
  I like the "wartime like economy" analogy. It took 6 years to defeat the bad guys during the second world war. Most of the guys that defeated them had little to no military training at the onset of the conflict. The NIMBYs in that scenario were marketed to with either assured oppression, or war with a "better" future. Same can be done today.
  - PietdeVries 4y ago
    While we're on the "wartime economy" topic - is your country currently at war? Is any EU country currently formally at war? Is the US? How would that justify a "war time economy decision"?!? You can't just throw all democracy laws and regulations overboard just because Russia is messing in their backyard (okay - that is an understatement, but you get the point)...
    - loudmax 4y ago
      No we don't need to throw democracy and regulations overboard, but we do need policies that reflect the urgency of the situation. Europe needs be entirely off of Russian gas for the foreseeable future. And unfortunately in the short run this means bringing some coal plants that were slated for decommission back online just to get through the winter. In the slightly longer term, the rest of the world really needs to get off of fossil fuels and be cutting carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. This is critical and urgent, but not at the cost of the rule of law or democracy.
ibejoeb 4y ago
Sometimes I think all of this strife and posturing is just to force people to get behind nuclear. It's truly absurd that, as just one example, California is simultaneously mandating electric-only vehicles and telling people that they're not allowed to charge them because there's not enough electricity.
- pydry 4y ago
  It absolutely is. 100% not for environmental reasons, but because civilian nuclear power supports a nuclear military (by e.g. sharing costs, skills, industrial ecosystem). In Finland's case the French state (Areva) provided the indirect €5 billion subsidy to get this plant built. Finland wasnt going to shoulder the full costs itself. It has no military nuclear interests. France does. The Soviets built their other one. The military is the underlying driver for nuclear power everywhere. Recent environmentalism is just moral cover for the real goal. It's always < 3/4 the cost of a combined solar, wind and pumped storage run grid. The German green/anti nuclear coalition was a particular threat because it was (until the war) demonstrating a model that threatened to economically undermine civilian nuclear power globally.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    In 2017 this angle was up in the news in the UK. Take the responses as you like. > The government is using the “extremely expensive” Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to cross-subsidise Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal, according to senior scientists. > In evidence submitted to the influential public accounts committee (PAC), which is currently investigating the nuclear plant deal, scientists from Sussex University state that the costs of the Trident programme [1] could be “unsupportable” without “an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure”. > [...] > This week, the Green MP Caroline Lucas asked the government about the Ministry of Defence and the business department discussing the “relevance of UK civil nuclear industry skills and supply chains to the maintaining of UK nuclear submarine and wider nuclear weapons capabilities”. > Harriett Baldwin, the defence procurement minister, answered that “it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom”. > [...] > At the PAC hearing, the Labour MP Meg Hillier asked whether “Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base”. > Lovegrove answered: “We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills. I don’t think that’s going to happen by accident. It is going to require concerted government action to make that happen.” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-consumers-to-fund-nuclear-weapons-through-hinkley-point-c https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-... > Andrew Stirling believes that there was a crucial, largely unspoken, reason for the government’s rediscovered passion for nuclear: without a civil nuclear industry, a nation cannot sustain military nuclear capabilities. In other words, no new nuclear power plants would spell the end of Trident. “The only countries in the world that are currently looking at large-scale civil power newbuild programmes are countries that have nuclear submarines, or have an expressed aim of acquiring them,” Stirling told me. > Building nuclear submarines is a ferociously complicated business. It requires the kind of institutional memory and technical expertise that can easily disappear without practice. This, in theory, is where the civil nuclear industry comes in. If new nuclear power plants are being built, then the skills and capacity required by the military will be maintained. “It looks to be the case that the government is knowingly engineering an environment in which electricity consumers cross-subsidise this branch of military security,” Stirling told me. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme)
me_me_me 4y ago
the war in ukraine will be well over by the time those plants get finished, you can plop down a nuclear plant like a house, for obvious reasons.
- belorn 4y ago
  The Ukraine war will end in a few weeks, a couple of months at top. - HN comment in February.
  - me_me_me 4y ago
    avg build time of nuclear reactor is 7years according to google. I am willing to bet a $100 russia will be long gone either from ukraine and/or be collapsed state.
    - belorn 4y ago
      7 years sound as a much better bet than 2 months, but who knows. The US has stayed in the middle east for longer than that. I fully expect that the energy crisis in EU will last much longer than 7 years. The hydroelectric dams in northern Europe need to be replaced and reduced, while the industry and transport sector need to switch to using more electricity. Reducing energy capacity from the corner stone of energy production while at the same time increase consumption is going to take a while to fix. 20-30 years is a more likely time table for when those issues will start to be solved.
unity1001 4y ago
> But there should be 100 others under construction right now under a wartime like economy. Leave aside wartime-like economy. Actual war, even the actual apocalypse are excellent opportunities to profit from, in capitalism. So such concepts like 'sovereignty', 'industrialization', less, 'the people' are irrelevant in its context.
spixy 4y ago
greetings from Slovakia which just finished one reactor (launches in december) and will finish another one in 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochovce_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Units_3&4_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochovce_Nuclear_Power_Plant#U...

It's a start! But there should be 100 others under construction right now under a wartime like economy. This is an emergency in both sovereignty and maintaining an industrialized, modern economy.

Gwypaas 4y ago

Or get 3-4x as much bang for the buck building renewables. Source: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Msw242 4y ago
How are you going to deal with base load? We can save money on nuclear but reducing the amount of bureaucracy and increasing the volume for economies of scale.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  In Finland, Hydro combined with wind should take care of baseload. They've also been importing cheap electricity to avoid burning expensive fossil fuels for about a decade, so they probably want to continue with that.
  - gojomo 4y ago
    Where will they "import cheap electricity" from if none is being exported?
    - oldgradstudent 4y ago
      Supposedly from northern Sweden, according to a Swedish friend. Take this with a grain of salt. They have a lot of power generation in the north, but not enough transmission capacity to transfer it to the population centers in the south, so they have to sell it cheaply to their neighbors, and buy expensive electricity from their neighbors in the south. This all worked fine when they could buy cheap electricity from their southern neighbors. But now they have a problem. A few weeks ago there was 10X or more electricity price difference between north and south Sweden. Take a look at: https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/ https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/ Pick, for example, August 26, 2022, at 11:04. Prices up north are 14 euro per MWh, and 750 euro per MWh in the south.
      - gojomo 4y ago
        Very interesting! Do you know if Sweden's northern generation surplus via something robust against gas-shortages, like say local hydropower?
        Gwypaas 4y ago
        Loads of hydro [1], the energy mix in Sweden is usually 45-50% hydro depending on the year. Sweden currently has extremely chaotic electricity prices. Whenever the export capacity is maxed out the prices drops to €10-30/MWh and then instantly recovers to the gas based prices of Europe when it's not. With the recent chaos at the French nuclear plants Sweden became the largest exporter of electricity in the EU. [2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_stations_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st... [2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-europes-largest-net-power-exporter-2022-08-10/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...
  - doikor 4y ago
    > In Finland, Hydro combined with wind should take care of baseload. Nuclear and hydro are the baseload generation in Finland at the moment and will be far into the future. Hydro is also used to handle peaks. Imports are mostly hydro too.
- rcxdude 4y ago
  you deal with baseload with renewables. It just doesn't make sense to seperate 'baseload' from 'peak' with renewables (in fact this is one reason why nuclear and renewables don't complement each other, in fact renewables will tend to destroy nuclear economically without a bunch of subsidies in place), you just step back and think about how you're going to match supply and demand when both fluctuate over time. (And the answer is a combination of over-building renewable capacity and storage. Funnily enough if you ask how you'd supply a grid with nuclear power you get the same answer, just with longer lead times and a higher price tag).
  - ftth_finland 4y ago
    Unless you mean hydro when you say renewables, you aren’t going to deal with baseload in the winter with renewables. Not that hydro is enough for baseload in itself.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  Well, if it's a wartime economy measure why care? As long as the average is good enough and you keep the most important consumers running. If we're talking peace time, then there's loads of strategies. For Finland, Sweden and Norway there's immense possibility of hydro power to simply switch it to be used in a more dispatchable manner than baselod. For less hydro equipped countries see this research. > *B. Dealing With Variability and Stability* > Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. > However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place. > With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
- jakewins 4y ago
  "Base load" is word invented by coal power operators to argue for their extended existence, it is not a real thing. See Table 1 in this review paper from June for a summary of grid simulations from 10 separate models running 100% renewables at various time step resolutions: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=983...
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    More precisely, it was the coal and nuclear equivalent of the "duck curve". It was costly/inefficient for these techs to be flexible, so they seperated the flexible load out into gas and hydro to work around the limitations of the inflexible tech. Now its a rallying cry for some reason.
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    Watch out, ideology is blinding you. Base load is very much a real concept: how much you need to have available at all times for your society to function. Your industry to run, your critical services, etc. You can make multiple layers (just running the government, industries, having heating available at all times, etc), and they vary over the year, but base load is absolutely a real thing. Additionally, I would recommend you read the remarks of Table 1, where half of them either make a gigantic portion of electricity needs disappear (not counting livestock needs lol), or assume that 10000TWh (or much more) will be covered by fossil fuels or nuclear. Hm, that sounds like a lot like a base load. It does not either cover how much you need to build (current best case scenarios are that you need to build 2.5x worth your needed consumption for it to be available at all times. Hope you're ready to cover Texas in solar panels you need to replace every ten years), or assume that you can just... transfer electricity through ? Yeah, sure, if we had a worldwide grid that just delivers energy where it needs to be without loss, but we don't.
    - Gwypaas 4y ago
      Base load exists on the demand side, it does not exist on the producer side. Base load on the producer side is simply a made up term because the most inflexible power plants of the 1970's were also the cheapest, and thus matched it.
- markvdb 4y ago
  The general strategy that will get you quite far: - improve interconnects - overdimension production - CHP [0] with biomass fuel - hydro storage - increase demand flexibility - generate carbohydrates for seasonal storage - lower consumption Technological improvements and breakthroughs are nice extras. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
- AdamN 4y ago
  If the problem with nuclear was just bureaucracy, China would be building 100 of them right now. These are complicated machines and even the second most powerful country in the world is only building 17 currently.
  - Msw242 4y ago
    >China is planning at least 150 new reactors in the next 15 years, more than the rest of the world has built in the past 35. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-climate-goals-hinge-on-440-billion-nuclear-power-plan-to-rival-u-s https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...
nicolaslem 4y ago
Why not both?
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Nuclear and renewables are like oil and water: they don't mix well. When renewables are built out they push the price of electricity down too often for nuclear to earn the good average price it needs. When prices spike, dispatchable sources (or dispatchable demand) move in and snipe the peaks, so nuclear can't make up for it then. These days, it's looking like renewables + storage could supply "synthetic baseload" more cheaply than nuclear in most places (maybe not Finland, yet; that part of the world is one of the worst for renewables), so there's not much place left for nuclear. If your energy system has variable demand it will need storage even with nuclear, which tilts the game toward renewables even further (their need for storage is partially covered by the storage one needs anyway to level the load; said storage can level supply and demand at the same time, to some extent.) Nuclear also has the problem that it's not going to survive very well as a niche technology, as that would likely not cause enough construction of new power plants to keep the industry from seeing negative learning effects.
  - adev_ 4y ago
    > When prices spike, dispatchable sources (or dispatchable demand) move in and snipe the peaks, so nuclear can't make up for it then. That is not true. Nuclear power has been used as a dispatchable / regulative source of power to compensate solar and wind power intermittency for decades in France.[1] > These days, it's looking like renewables + storage could supply "synthetic baseload" more cheaply than nuclear in most places And that's gross bullshit. - Never storage of electricity has been deployed successfully at scale needed for a mid size country. Pretend that it is, today, a solution is highly hypocritical or plain gross bullshit. - Even on the most optimistic (and untested) scenario, the cost plan of RE+Storage is (at best) on part with Nuclear energy (Pumped-storage) and or way more expensive (battery, power2gas). [2] > maybe not Finland, yet; that part of the world is one of the worst for renewables That is even more bullshit. Finland has pretty large hydro reserves. Renewable does not stop to solar. [3] [1]: https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document [2]: https://www.powermag.com/how-much-will-hydrogen-based-power-cost/ https://www.powermag.com/how-much-will-hydrogen-based-power-... [3]: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FI?solar=false&remote=true&wind=false https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FI?solar=false&remote=t...
probablypower 4y ago
How do you define "bang for buck"? Would love to see a source stating that renewables are 3-4x more effective in the context of energy security and grid stability.
- cromka 4y ago
  > Would love to see a source stating that renewables are 3-4x more effective in the context of energy security and grid stability. Why are you asking for a source over a statement which op didn't make?
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  You seemed to have just made this up as a ridiculous straw man, but it's probably actually true. They paused their other nuclear plant build because of worries that the nation they were building it with would be able to mess with their electricity supply. And grid forming inverter based tech is the new best option. Distributed inverters can provide all sorts of grid services cheaper than old centralised tech.
Mrdarknezz 4y ago
You can't replace Nuclear with intermittent energy, they serve different function. So far the cheapest and the largest deployment of green energy has come from Nuclear and Hydro.
- paganel 4y ago
  With the mention that Hydro is not at all environmental-friendly, quite the contrary. It helps with decreasing the quantity of CO2 we generate, but in many other aspects is pretty bad (and in many cases an existential threat) when it comes to the local environment.
  - cpursley 4y ago
    Yeah, Hydro is terrible for river ecosystems and one of the reasons they started removing them in the Pacific NW (USA) - trout migration.
  - timellis-smith 4y ago
    They are pretty major producers of methane https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/06/hydropower-hydroelectricity-methane-clean-climate-change-study https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/06...
  - dghughes 4y ago
    Hydro is bad for the environment especially those who live near it. A buildup of methylmercury in sediment is caused by hydro dams. There are lawsuits here in Canada by First Nations who live near dams.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Hydro has been superceded by battery storage and Green Hydrogen production, for economic reasons. Existing ones, particulalry those built for multiple functions (water supply, recreation) still have some use but mostly you just want to be rolling out solar and wind until you run out of fossil fuel generation to displace. Only then do you really need to start comparing whether building storage would cost less than more renewables and interconnects and hydro is unlikely to be the lowest cost option unless you're going to build the dam anyway for other reasons.
samatman 4y ago
Renewables make grid reliability worse, especially wind, because the grid has to maintain a frequency, which is ultimately done with the inertia of huge rotating chunks of iron. That's fine, as long as there are huge rotating chunks of iron. Nuclear can rotate the chunks, as can hydro and geothermal. Everything else emits carbon. Europe is pretty tapped on hydro and geothermal, that leaves nuclear, or some very handwavey ideas of building a bunch of flywheels using resources which could be contributing to primary generation.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  Synchronous condensers do just that, but they're essentially the same as a turbogenerator of the same VA rating, except with no input shaft.
  - samatman 4y ago
    Those are the flywheels I was referring to, yes. Metals are energy intensive and we can't afford to build generator-equivalent machinery that doesn't generate. A lot of other replies are deluded about the scale at which inverters can operate, but what else is new.
    - formerly_proven 4y ago
      Synchronous condensers and grid flywheels are two different things, the former is synchronous, hence rpm locked to instantaneous grid frequency. These provide very short term stability, and are not energy storage (due to the small acceptable variance in grid frequency), and are normally used for dynamic grid-scale PFC. Flywheels are asynchronous and inverter-driven.
- jakewins 4y ago
  > which is ultimately done with the inertia of huge rotating chunks of iron. Not "ultimately", "incidentally". How do you think microgrids work without giant spinning masses? There's no technical reason wind or PV can't provide inertia, just need to program the inverters to help maintain frequency rather than just follow it.

mrtksn 4y ago

> But there should be 100 others under construction right now under a wartime like economy. Average time to build a NPP is 5 to 7 years[0]. This also assumes that anyone can build and run an NPP, it's like saying that everyone should stop doing whatever they are doing and start building Fabs during the chip crisis. "Designing a car? Building a pharmaceuticals factory? Coding JavaScript? Stop that, we have more important things to do. Just drop whatever you do and start making 5nm Fabs and Nuclear Power plants" Also, what do you do with the NIMBYs? [0] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/park-k2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/park-k2/

jafo 4y ago
I like the "wartime like economy" analogy. It took 6 years to defeat the bad guys during the second world war. Most of the guys that defeated them had little to no military training at the onset of the conflict. The NIMBYs in that scenario were marketed to with either assured oppression, or war with a "better" future. Same can be done today.
- PietdeVries 4y ago
  While we're on the "wartime economy" topic - is your country currently at war? Is any EU country currently formally at war? Is the US? How would that justify a "war time economy decision"?!? You can't just throw all democracy laws and regulations overboard just because Russia is messing in their backyard (okay - that is an understatement, but you get the point)...
  - loudmax 4y ago
    No we don't need to throw democracy and regulations overboard, but we do need policies that reflect the urgency of the situation. Europe needs be entirely off of Russian gas for the foreseeable future. And unfortunately in the short run this means bringing some coal plants that were slated for decommission back online just to get through the winter. In the slightly longer term, the rest of the world really needs to get off of fossil fuels and be cutting carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. This is critical and urgent, but not at the cost of the rule of law or democracy.

ibejoeb 4y ago

Sometimes I think all of this strife and posturing is just to force people to get behind nuclear. It's truly absurd that, as just one example, California is simultaneously mandating electric-only vehicles and telling people that they're not allowed to charge them because there's not enough electricity.

pydry 4y ago
It absolutely is. 100% not for environmental reasons, but because civilian nuclear power supports a nuclear military (by e.g. sharing costs, skills, industrial ecosystem). In Finland's case the French state (Areva) provided the indirect €5 billion subsidy to get this plant built. Finland wasnt going to shoulder the full costs itself. It has no military nuclear interests. France does. The Soviets built their other one. The military is the underlying driver for nuclear power everywhere. Recent environmentalism is just moral cover for the real goal. It's always < 3/4 the cost of a combined solar, wind and pumped storage run grid. The German green/anti nuclear coalition was a particular threat because it was (until the war) demonstrating a model that threatened to economically undermine civilian nuclear power globally.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  In 2017 this angle was up in the news in the UK. Take the responses as you like. > The government is using the “extremely expensive” Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to cross-subsidise Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal, according to senior scientists. > In evidence submitted to the influential public accounts committee (PAC), which is currently investigating the nuclear plant deal, scientists from Sussex University state that the costs of the Trident programme [1] could be “unsupportable” without “an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure”. > [...] > This week, the Green MP Caroline Lucas asked the government about the Ministry of Defence and the business department discussing the “relevance of UK civil nuclear industry skills and supply chains to the maintaining of UK nuclear submarine and wider nuclear weapons capabilities”. > Harriett Baldwin, the defence procurement minister, answered that “it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom”. > [...] > At the PAC hearing, the Labour MP Meg Hillier asked whether “Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base”. > Lovegrove answered: “We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills. I don’t think that’s going to happen by accident. It is going to require concerted government action to make that happen.” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-consumers-to-fund-nuclear-weapons-through-hinkley-point-c https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-... > Andrew Stirling believes that there was a crucial, largely unspoken, reason for the government’s rediscovered passion for nuclear: without a civil nuclear industry, a nation cannot sustain military nuclear capabilities. In other words, no new nuclear power plants would spell the end of Trident. “The only countries in the world that are currently looking at large-scale civil power newbuild programmes are countries that have nuclear submarines, or have an expressed aim of acquiring them,” Stirling told me. > Building nuclear submarines is a ferociously complicated business. It requires the kind of institutional memory and technical expertise that can easily disappear without practice. This, in theory, is where the civil nuclear industry comes in. If new nuclear power plants are being built, then the skills and capacity required by the military will be maintained. “It looks to be the case that the government is knowingly engineering an environment in which electricity consumers cross-subsidise this branch of military security,” Stirling told me. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme)

me_me_me 4y ago

the war in ukraine will be well over by the time those plants get finished, you can plop down a nuclear plant like a house, for obvious reasons.

belorn 4y ago
The Ukraine war will end in a few weeks, a couple of months at top. - HN comment in February.
- me_me_me 4y ago
  avg build time of nuclear reactor is 7years according to google. I am willing to bet a $100 russia will be long gone either from ukraine and/or be collapsed state.
  - belorn 4y ago
    7 years sound as a much better bet than 2 months, but who knows. The US has stayed in the middle east for longer than that. I fully expect that the energy crisis in EU will last much longer than 7 years. The hydroelectric dams in northern Europe need to be replaced and reduced, while the industry and transport sector need to switch to using more electricity. Reducing energy capacity from the corner stone of energy production while at the same time increase consumption is going to take a while to fix. 20-30 years is a more likely time table for when those issues will start to be solved.

unity1001 4y ago

> But there should be 100 others under construction right now under a wartime like economy. Leave aside wartime-like economy. Actual war, even the actual apocalypse are excellent opportunities to profit from, in capitalism. So such concepts like 'sovereignty', 'industrialization', less, 'the people' are irrelevant in its context.

spixy 4y ago

greetings from Slovakia which just finished one reactor (launches in december) and will finish another one in 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochovce_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Units_3&4_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mochovce_Nuclear_Power_Plant#U...