5 ms·

But the fact is that we did go years without building any, leading to nuclear power plants being more expensive. It is the path we chose (rightly or wrongly) an

But the fact is that we did go years without building any, leading to nuclear power plants being more expensive. It is the path we chose (rightly or wrongly) and today solar and wind is cheaper in the western world. Even if continuing to invest in nuclear in the 1970s was the right choice, it may no longer be the case today that we have those. (see Path Dependence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence) In my opinion, rather than spending the many years and billions of dollars on regaining the edge in nuclear, we should expand the capacity of the cheap and clean energy sources we have access to today.

jjk166 4y ago
That's a perfectly sensible argument, my point was just that for most of its history, the anti-nuclear movement was not making that argument.
- oliwary 4y ago
  That is fair! I do wonder where we would be had we never stopped investing in nuclear. Probably much better from a global warming perspective - alas, here we are.
xupybd 4y ago
Nuclear runs constantly. Solar and wind don't. This is a significant problem. Storage is hard and inefficient. We don't currently have a viable complete renewable solution. Nuclear is much better for the planet than fossil fuels and is the only option to bridge the gap required to operate the current renewables.
- donmaq 4y ago
  > Nuclear is much better for the planet than fossil fuels and is the only option to bridge the gap required to operate the current renewables. That's a strong declaration without any solution in sight for nuclear power-generated waste: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-waste https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-waste
  - xupybd 4y ago
    There are pragmatic solutions for the limited but long lasting deadly waste created. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-wastes-myths-and-realities.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      Well the best strategy would be LFTR/MSRs that can breed and/or burn the waste to usable isotopes or as fuel. But it's always interesting how much pro-nuclear people are anti-MSR or anti-anything-but-huge-concrete-domes-and-solid-rods Because the lobbies underlying nuclear power in solid fuel rod processing is a lucrative government boondoggle. All the nuke proponents say "we are losing all the old guard!". I actually think this is a feature, nuclear needs to be reformulated and reassessed from the ground up without all the political and military biases, and once they have stable cost profiles in wind/solar to actually target. If they can actually make a competitive reactor once wind/solar stabilizes, likely at 1/2 to 1/3 the current real dollar cost.
      - RealityVoid 4y ago
        This is ridiculous. Never in my life have I read someone say "Build nuclear, but not MSR!!" My problem with MSR is that I do not have a productive one I can point to and say "There! It works!". But by all means, let's build some! And then, you nicely suggest that all pro-nuclear people somehow _must be shills_ (as if, uhh, nuclear people just love destroying the world, I guess?) that really is ridiculous and not a too charitable reading of the opponents.
        AtlasBarfed 4y ago
        Have you read any of the history behind the ORNL MSR and the budgetary ax it got? Do you know that Weinberg and the ORNL people advocated for increased safety in the nuclear industry (which their reactor design had fundamental advantages over all other designs)? The organizational religion of nuclear power was that it was safe and had no chance of failure. You can choose to disagree on my characterization of the nuclear industry, but the political wars with "The Greens" has counter-radicalized nuclear proponents. ORNL and Weinberg saying their nuclear reactor was superior on safety leads to the inevitable follow-up implication for anyone listening that other nuclear reactors... WERE NOT. Thus the ORNL director for MSR was sent to forced retirement/fired (fired from a government job!), ORNL funding was totally axed. Kirk Sorensen claims that MSR research was forbidden in public universities at a policy level, so no one would touch it. Sorensen is a pretty rabid LFTR advocate, but the fact that only in 2022 after 60 years, finally SOMEONE is doing a research reactor that fits in a closet? The fact there has been ZERO research programs in MSR tells me that Sorensen is probably right about the prohibition. I believe that the Military was also involved in this, because they needed their isotopes for weapons, or to maintain popular support for nuclear weapons. You can't have these people undermining public confidence in civilian nuclear power, what follows after that is the hated peacenik "Greens" then getting nuclear weapons banned. Anyway, yes it does seem conspiratorial, but with nuclear tech which required so much governmental push/funding in the beginning, and now has SO MUCH regulatory apparatus above it that was an organizational outgrowth of the original nuclear research government agencies, YES, there is a historical and effective bias against the ORNL design. Some of that is practical: the ORNL and LFTR designs are totally different that the entirety of the world's solid fuel designs. It would require AEC regulatory fasttracking, and a ton of budget. And if something doesn't have government funding in the nuclear world, it is DEAD. Anyway, China has a prototype MSR reactor coming online. Oh look! MSR projects are coming out of the woodwork everywhere! What a coincidence. Los Alamos is doing materials research! Some Texas university got clearance to boot the first US research reactor in fifty years! Huh, funny how that works. So yeah, sure it might be conspiratorial or uncharitable, but this was probably a trillion dollars in budgeting (inflation adjusted) over 20-30 years that was at stake. I know it seems like I'm anti-nuclear. I think fission power is so effing cool. I think LFTR is the coolest design I've ever seen. I also see that nuclear is fundamentally not competitive with the current approaches, and I don't think that is NIMBYism or excessive regulatory at the core: I think the designs don't scale and issues with nuclear waste and safety are offloaded, avoided, corner-cut, etc. And if nuclear has to compete with solar/wind, those "hidden costs" would be handled even more poorly. So a reactor design that uses 99% of fuel, is meltdown proof, scalable, and can even reprocess old spent rod waste, well, to me that or something that also lives up to that is the real path forward. Scalable (i.e. closet sized) seems to also be a fundamental requirement to competitive economics, although I read a good post on how big honking reactors are what are needed to make the economies of scale work, not small reactors, but I personally suspect that view is polluted with existing huge-effing-solid-fuel-dome reactor design bias. I'm just a dumb fuck programmer that reads this stuff in his spare time. I would love a cogent response from a nuclear scientist that knows the ORNL design in depth to give me really good reasons why it isn't commercially viable. But again I think the entire nuclear industry and university feeder system is all solid fuel rod, because it's the only practical/career/feasible thing to study. But ORNL had a working reactor. Was it commercializable? Would it stand up to industrial/production use? Are molten salts truly impossible to contain long term? Is neutron degradation of the liquid fuel's holding tank too problematic? Are the chemical separation processes too hard to do economically? Anyway, MSRs would be an industrial paradigm shift. It's a total rebuild of the entire nuclear power industry. It's every incumbent nuclear power interest being shown the door, or having a time clock. It's overcoming whatever instiutional echo the Nixon Administration left when it assassinated the ORNL MSR in a massive budgetary knife fight. What could possibly cause a sea change? Oh right, the Chinese are ahead of us in it. It's so funny, the Chinese really are the new evil empire, but they are the fundamental economic and investment driver that produced competitive solar and the batteries that will power the mainstream EV revolution. And they are the ones that have a functional MSR coming online. Well, whatever works.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Storage is not, in fact, hard. Its efficiency is not important beyond a few hours' worth, because it is rarely needed. For those few hours, battery efficiency is very good.
  - xupybd 4y ago
    If it was rarely needed and only needed for a few hours we wouldn't need all the fossil fuel based generation to fill the gaps. I'm not aware of any significant battery based storage system deployed at scale that solves this problem. There are some large battery banks but none even close to the scale required. It's a hard problem as it would require a huge increase in global manufacturing. I'd like to be wrong here. I'd love it if it was possible to build an affordable grid based on 100% renewable generation. It will be possible one day. I look forward to that day.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      It would be stupid to spend money building out storage before there is renewable generating capacity to charge it from. So, they spend on that, first. Most of the storage, in the end, will not be batteries. Most existing storage is pumped hydro, because the dams were already there. There are lots of alternatives: underground or underwater compressed air, liquified air, underground hydrogen, tanked ammonia, buoyancy, mineshaft gravity. Most places will keep a few days' ammonia that they can burn where they do NG today, and order more if it looks like they may need it, and can't book transmission line power. Other times, they will synthesize ammonia for sale. Regional storage of underground hydrogen is already under construction. Hydrogen synthesis efficiency is now well over 90%, up from 60% very recently. Until ammonia synthesis ramps up in the '30s, they will burn NG at need, without apology.
      - xupybd 4y ago
        I hope you're right
      - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
        "Hydrogen synthesis efficiency is now well over 90%" From what source? Hydrocarbons?
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Actually, nuclear plants need maintenance once in a while too and they do have outages as well. Take France for example, a lot of their reactors are offline for maintenance right now. Right in the middle of the biggest energy crisis on the continent since the oil crisis in the seventies. A lot of countries are already pretty far down the path of going carbon neutral. Mostly without building or planning to build nuclear plants. They are a lot less necessary than some nuclear proponents would have people believe. Energy storage is actually a fairly simple problem. There are at this point dozens of different ways that are being used commercially to store energy. Including of course a wide variety of battery types, pumped hydro and other gravity based systems, thermal storage, synthesizing hydrogen and other gases/liquids that can be burned later, etc. The main challenge is not storage but cheap storage. Or cheaper storage as combined generation and storage bids are fairly common these days and already way cheaper than nuclear already. Scaling the deployment of these solutions over the next few decades will drop cost further. And of course energy can also be moved around via cables over long distances. The main challenge is not just generating enough power but getting it to where it is needed. Long distance cables even out local fluctuations in solar and wind performance.
Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
How is wind and solar in any way close to achieve what nuclear has already has? Solar and wind is not a mature technology at all, you would know if you lived in a country that has invested heavily in it. Where i live people has to use an app to see when they can afford to wash their clothes, run the dishwasher, charge the car at any given time of the week and and hour. The government is praying to the weather gods for a warm and windy winter so that we might avoid rolling blackouts and insane energy prices. We as humans can simply not afford to rely on the current state of mother Nature. Who knows what might happen? Wind patterns could change over time or because of climate change, heck a super vulcano an asteroid or nuclear fallout could block out the sun for years. As long as we can't control the weather, plate tectonics or deflect asteroids let's invest in a technology that is very well understood and has stood the test of time, works in space, the most energy dense, the most efficient and there's enough of it on earth to keep us going for thousands of years.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  If solar and wind are not mature, that just means there's even more room for them to improve. And they're already beating the pants off nuclear globally for new generating capacity. If you extend the demonstrated empirical experience curve for solar assuming PV dominates world energy production, cost might decline to just $0.01/kWh.
  - Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
    Solar and wind is not being anything as long as we haven't got a solution for storage. As it is now wind and solar are backed up by dirty sources like gas, coal and biomass and that isn't about to change any time soon.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      The difficulty of solving the storage problem is greatly overstated. The big issue with storage will be which of the many possible approaches comes out on top. It's an embarrassment of possibilities, not an unsolvable problem. BTW, nuclear isn't going to power the world with current thermal reactors (there's not enough uranium), so hand wringing over storage should be matched by that for the more difficult problem of making breeder reactors safe and affordable. So far, they've been more expensive than current commercial reactors, and they suffer from safety issues due to Pu and 233U producing fewer delayed neutrons, so they operate closer to prompt criticality. (Unlike breeders, storage is actually getting installed on grids around the world these days, and costs are coming down.)
anton96 4y ago
>> today solar and wind is cheaper in the western world. I’m afraid this is only true for the US, let’s not forget almost all of Europe is as north as Canada or north US. In order to compare the cost we cannot just compare the price to install a certain capacity. You must also factor in how much extra capacity you need to build. When we look at the Germany[1], on the best month, their solar produce half of the installed capacity and solar never goes higher than a third. And that’s for the best month. Germany has already invested 600 billions, does it need to go 5 five folds ? Maybe less as the costs are decreasing. It seems like that money invested in nuclear would produced much more and prevent spending what’s starting to look like an entire gdp invested into renewables. 1: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
- pfdietz 4y ago
  The extra capacity is taken into account with "levelized cost". Levelized cost of wind and solar are just a fraction of the levelized cost of energy from new nuclear power plants. We can estimate the cost of storage to deal with intermittency and seasonality, and renewables will likely come in cheaper than nuclear by the time any nuclear plant whose construction was started today would come on line. https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ As modeling gets better, renewables look better, as there are more and more ways found to work around the seasonality and intermittency problems. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=983... > 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.
- MaKn 4y ago
  From where do you geht the 600 billion figure? I only know the 500 billion figure from an INSM study from 2016 but that was an estimste for 2025 (doubtful that it still holds up) and also include things like transport infrastrukture etc. Nuclear is by far the most expensive technology and keeps only getting more expensive. They are also not insurable and the waste problem is not solved. Appart from that they are also basically a big target.

jjk166 4y ago

That's a perfectly sensible argument, my point was just that for most of its history, the anti-nuclear movement was not making that argument.

oliwary 4y ago
That is fair! I do wonder where we would be had we never stopped investing in nuclear. Probably much better from a global warming perspective - alas, here we are.

xupybd 4y ago

Nuclear runs constantly. Solar and wind don't. This is a significant problem. Storage is hard and inefficient. We don't currently have a viable complete renewable solution. Nuclear is much better for the planet than fossil fuels and is the only option to bridge the gap required to operate the current renewables.

donmaq 4y ago
> Nuclear is much better for the planet than fossil fuels and is the only option to bridge the gap required to operate the current renewables. That's a strong declaration without any solution in sight for nuclear power-generated waste: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-waste https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-waste
- xupybd 4y ago
  There are pragmatic solutions for the limited but long lasting deadly waste created. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-wastes/radioactive-wastes-myths-and-realities.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Well the best strategy would be LFTR/MSRs that can breed and/or burn the waste to usable isotopes or as fuel. But it's always interesting how much pro-nuclear people are anti-MSR or anti-anything-but-huge-concrete-domes-and-solid-rods Because the lobbies underlying nuclear power in solid fuel rod processing is a lucrative government boondoggle. All the nuke proponents say "we are losing all the old guard!". I actually think this is a feature, nuclear needs to be reformulated and reassessed from the ground up without all the political and military biases, and once they have stable cost profiles in wind/solar to actually target. If they can actually make a competitive reactor once wind/solar stabilizes, likely at 1/2 to 1/3 the current real dollar cost.
    - RealityVoid 4y ago
      This is ridiculous. Never in my life have I read someone say "Build nuclear, but not MSR!!" My problem with MSR is that I do not have a productive one I can point to and say "There! It works!". But by all means, let's build some! And then, you nicely suggest that all pro-nuclear people somehow _must be shills_ (as if, uhh, nuclear people just love destroying the world, I guess?) that really is ridiculous and not a too charitable reading of the opponents.
      - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
        Have you read any of the history behind the ORNL MSR and the budgetary ax it got? Do you know that Weinberg and the ORNL people advocated for increased safety in the nuclear industry (which their reactor design had fundamental advantages over all other designs)? The organizational religion of nuclear power was that it was safe and had no chance of failure. You can choose to disagree on my characterization of the nuclear industry, but the political wars with "The Greens" has counter-radicalized nuclear proponents. ORNL and Weinberg saying their nuclear reactor was superior on safety leads to the inevitable follow-up implication for anyone listening that other nuclear reactors... WERE NOT. Thus the ORNL director for MSR was sent to forced retirement/fired (fired from a government job!), ORNL funding was totally axed. Kirk Sorensen claims that MSR research was forbidden in public universities at a policy level, so no one would touch it. Sorensen is a pretty rabid LFTR advocate, but the fact that only in 2022 after 60 years, finally SOMEONE is doing a research reactor that fits in a closet? The fact there has been ZERO research programs in MSR tells me that Sorensen is probably right about the prohibition. I believe that the Military was also involved in this, because they needed their isotopes for weapons, or to maintain popular support for nuclear weapons. You can't have these people undermining public confidence in civilian nuclear power, what follows after that is the hated peacenik "Greens" then getting nuclear weapons banned. Anyway, yes it does seem conspiratorial, but with nuclear tech which required so much governmental push/funding in the beginning, and now has SO MUCH regulatory apparatus above it that was an organizational outgrowth of the original nuclear research government agencies, YES, there is a historical and effective bias against the ORNL design. Some of that is practical: the ORNL and LFTR designs are totally different that the entirety of the world's solid fuel designs. It would require AEC regulatory fasttracking, and a ton of budget. And if something doesn't have government funding in the nuclear world, it is DEAD. Anyway, China has a prototype MSR reactor coming online. Oh look! MSR projects are coming out of the woodwork everywhere! What a coincidence. Los Alamos is doing materials research! Some Texas university got clearance to boot the first US research reactor in fifty years! Huh, funny how that works. So yeah, sure it might be conspiratorial or uncharitable, but this was probably a trillion dollars in budgeting (inflation adjusted) over 20-30 years that was at stake. I know it seems like I'm anti-nuclear. I think fission power is so effing cool. I think LFTR is the coolest design I've ever seen. I also see that nuclear is fundamentally not competitive with the current approaches, and I don't think that is NIMBYism or excessive regulatory at the core: I think the designs don't scale and issues with nuclear waste and safety are offloaded, avoided, corner-cut, etc. And if nuclear has to compete with solar/wind, those "hidden costs" would be handled even more poorly. So a reactor design that uses 99% of fuel, is meltdown proof, scalable, and can even reprocess old spent rod waste, well, to me that or something that also lives up to that is the real path forward. Scalable (i.e. closet sized) seems to also be a fundamental requirement to competitive economics, although I read a good post on how big honking reactors are what are needed to make the economies of scale work, not small reactors, but I personally suspect that view is polluted with existing huge-effing-solid-fuel-dome reactor design bias. I'm just a dumb fuck programmer that reads this stuff in his spare time. I would love a cogent response from a nuclear scientist that knows the ORNL design in depth to give me really good reasons why it isn't commercially viable. But again I think the entire nuclear industry and university feeder system is all solid fuel rod, because it's the only practical/career/feasible thing to study. But ORNL had a working reactor. Was it commercializable? Would it stand up to industrial/production use? Are molten salts truly impossible to contain long term? Is neutron degradation of the liquid fuel's holding tank too problematic? Are the chemical separation processes too hard to do economically? Anyway, MSRs would be an industrial paradigm shift. It's a total rebuild of the entire nuclear power industry. It's every incumbent nuclear power interest being shown the door, or having a time clock. It's overcoming whatever instiutional echo the Nixon Administration left when it assassinated the ORNL MSR in a massive budgetary knife fight. What could possibly cause a sea change? Oh right, the Chinese are ahead of us in it. It's so funny, the Chinese really are the new evil empire, but they are the fundamental economic and investment driver that produced competitive solar and the batteries that will power the mainstream EV revolution. And they are the ones that have a functional MSR coming online. Well, whatever works.
ncmncm 4y ago
Storage is not, in fact, hard. Its efficiency is not important beyond a few hours' worth, because it is rarely needed. For those few hours, battery efficiency is very good.
- xupybd 4y ago
  If it was rarely needed and only needed for a few hours we wouldn't need all the fossil fuel based generation to fill the gaps. I'm not aware of any significant battery based storage system deployed at scale that solves this problem. There are some large battery banks but none even close to the scale required. It's a hard problem as it would require a huge increase in global manufacturing. I'd like to be wrong here. I'd love it if it was possible to build an affordable grid based on 100% renewable generation. It will be possible one day. I look forward to that day.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    It would be stupid to spend money building out storage before there is renewable generating capacity to charge it from. So, they spend on that, first. Most of the storage, in the end, will not be batteries. Most existing storage is pumped hydro, because the dams were already there. There are lots of alternatives: underground or underwater compressed air, liquified air, underground hydrogen, tanked ammonia, buoyancy, mineshaft gravity. Most places will keep a few days' ammonia that they can burn where they do NG today, and order more if it looks like they may need it, and can't book transmission line power. Other times, they will synthesize ammonia for sale. Regional storage of underground hydrogen is already under construction. Hydrogen synthesis efficiency is now well over 90%, up from 60% very recently. Until ammonia synthesis ramps up in the '30s, they will burn NG at need, without apology.
    - xupybd 4y ago
      I hope you're right
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      "Hydrogen synthesis efficiency is now well over 90%" From what source? Hydrocarbons?
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Actually, nuclear plants need maintenance once in a while too and they do have outages as well. Take France for example, a lot of their reactors are offline for maintenance right now. Right in the middle of the biggest energy crisis on the continent since the oil crisis in the seventies. A lot of countries are already pretty far down the path of going carbon neutral. Mostly without building or planning to build nuclear plants. They are a lot less necessary than some nuclear proponents would have people believe. Energy storage is actually a fairly simple problem. There are at this point dozens of different ways that are being used commercially to store energy. Including of course a wide variety of battery types, pumped hydro and other gravity based systems, thermal storage, synthesizing hydrogen and other gases/liquids that can be burned later, etc. The main challenge is not storage but cheap storage. Or cheaper storage as combined generation and storage bids are fairly common these days and already way cheaper than nuclear already. Scaling the deployment of these solutions over the next few decades will drop cost further. And of course energy can also be moved around via cables over long distances. The main challenge is not just generating enough power but getting it to where it is needed. Long distance cables even out local fluctuations in solar and wind performance.

Galaxeblaffer 4y ago

How is wind and solar in any way close to achieve what nuclear has already has? Solar and wind is not a mature technology at all, you would know if you lived in a country that has invested heavily in it. Where i live people has to use an app to see when they can afford to wash their clothes, run the dishwasher, charge the car at any given time of the week and and hour. The government is praying to the weather gods for a warm and windy winter so that we might avoid rolling blackouts and insane energy prices. We as humans can simply not afford to rely on the current state of mother Nature. Who knows what might happen? Wind patterns could change over time or because of climate change, heck a super vulcano an asteroid or nuclear fallout could block out the sun for years. As long as we can't control the weather, plate tectonics or deflect asteroids let's invest in a technology that is very well understood and has stood the test of time, works in space, the most energy dense, the most efficient and there's enough of it on earth to keep us going for thousands of years.

pfdietz 4y ago
If solar and wind are not mature, that just means there's even more room for them to improve. And they're already beating the pants off nuclear globally for new generating capacity. If you extend the demonstrated empirical experience curve for solar assuming PV dominates world energy production, cost might decline to just $0.01/kWh.
- Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
  Solar and wind is not being anything as long as we haven't got a solution for storage. As it is now wind and solar are backed up by dirty sources like gas, coal and biomass and that isn't about to change any time soon.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    The difficulty of solving the storage problem is greatly overstated. The big issue with storage will be which of the many possible approaches comes out on top. It's an embarrassment of possibilities, not an unsolvable problem. BTW, nuclear isn't going to power the world with current thermal reactors (there's not enough uranium), so hand wringing over storage should be matched by that for the more difficult problem of making breeder reactors safe and affordable. So far, they've been more expensive than current commercial reactors, and they suffer from safety issues due to Pu and 233U producing fewer delayed neutrons, so they operate closer to prompt criticality. (Unlike breeders, storage is actually getting installed on grids around the world these days, and costs are coming down.)

anton96 4y ago

>> today solar and wind is cheaper in the western world. I’m afraid this is only true for the US, let’s not forget almost all of Europe is as north as Canada or north US. In order to compare the cost we cannot just compare the price to install a certain capacity. You must also factor in how much extra capacity you need to build. When we look at the Germany[1], on the best month, their solar produce half of the installed capacity and solar never goes higher than a third. And that’s for the best month. Germany has already invested 600 billions, does it need to go 5 five folds ? Maybe less as the costs are decreasing. It seems like that money invested in nuclear would produced much more and prevent spending what’s starting to look like an entire gdp invested into renewables. 1: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

pfdietz 4y ago
The extra capacity is taken into account with "levelized cost". Levelized cost of wind and solar are just a fraction of the levelized cost of energy from new nuclear power plants. We can estimate the cost of storage to deal with intermittency and seasonality, and renewables will likely come in cheaper than nuclear by the time any nuclear plant whose construction was started today would come on line. https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ As modeling gets better, renewables look better, as there are more and more ways found to work around the seasonality and intermittency problems. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=983... > 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.
MaKn 4y ago
From where do you geht the 600 billion figure? I only know the 500 billion figure from an INSM study from 2016 but that was an estimste for 2025 (doubtful that it still holds up) and also include things like transport infrastrukture etc. Nuclear is by far the most expensive technology and keeps only getting more expensive. They are also not insurable and the waste problem is not solved. Appart from that they are also basically a big target.