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"Nuclear is likely to be 9% to 12% of generation in 2035" - this is absurd. We should have much more aggressive targets for nuclear. Because it is the cleanest,

"Nuclear is likely to be 9% to 12% of generation in 2035" - this is absurd. We should have much more aggressive targets for nuclear. Because it is the cleanest, safest and most reliable source of 0-emission power. France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear now.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
From reactors built 40 years ago. https://www.reuters.com/article/france-nuclear-edf-idINKBN2AP102 https://www.reuters.com/article/france-nuclear-edf-idINKBN2A...
- sgu999 4y ago
  It apparently took about a decade or so to go from planning to running most of these power plants...
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    What does the cost of nuclear vs renewables and storage look like in a decade? The cost curve is what will define success. Nuclear never gets cheaper.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
The US can't build a nuclear plant in 13 years.
- newsclues 4y ago
  The US can build a plant in 13 years. It's a matter of dedication and willingness. And pissing off a minority of vocal opponents. It takes longer because of the crazy regulations driven in part by environmentalists who complained about nuclear for decades while fossil fuels were the only other option. But the USA has the resources, skills, technology and money to do so in a short period of time.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    The USA hasn't built a sizable number of reactors for 40 years. We haven't completely lost the skills, but they've sure atrophied. It takes China 10 years to build a reactor, and they've built lots of them in the past 20 years and don't have the regulations you decry. There's no way that the US can do it in anywhere close to the same time frame that China can. It's not just the rules and attitudes about nuclear making things slow. We can't build a subway station in any sort of reasonable timeframe or budget.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      Aren't NuScale, Rolls Royce, etc planning to deploy several Gigawatts per year of mini reactors within 5 years? That could be close to 1% of energy usage per year...
      - toomuchtodo 4y ago
        They should build it then, and be willing to suffer financial penalties if they can’t. Otherwise they’re making empty promises. Watch what someone does, not what they say.
    - tcmart14 4y ago
      I believe there are some. If you want to build new reactor designs, it is almost impossible because of the approval you have to get for the design. If I recall, Terrapower was pretty much told they had to prove the tech somewhere else before building here. They planned to build a reactor in China but that was halted because of the trade war? If you are building a reactor with older designs most people say we shouldn't build with, yea there isn't as much push back.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    None of this is correct, the projects have not been stopped due to environmentalists, or regulations, or even willingness. It's just been construction incompetence that caused billions of dollars to be abandoned on a half-finished project at VC Summer. And it's the same construction incompetence that caused Vogtle to be so far behind schedule and so far over budget. If somebody has regulations to change, it's time to propose them.
sgu999 4y ago
Define now, because there's a now in which we'd really like to be able to make that much...
zukzuk 4y ago
More than half of France's nuclear reactors are out of commission right now, so for the foreseeable future that "70%" is more aspirational than anything. We are obviously not going to meet all of our energy needs — especially for certain high-demand applications — from solar and wind alone, but there are some significant advantages to a decentralized power grid that the pro-nuclear folks don't seem to factor into their arguments. Assuming we can build it out, a decentralized grid ought to be much more resilient to the sort of problems France is facing right now.
- S201 4y ago
  This is fairly liberal use of the term "decentralized." Building many more nuclear plants is still "decentralized" in that some of them can be offline and the system still works. Major solar and wind installations are typically concentrated in similar generating stations as nuclear plants are. Many more people will likely have solar on their homes, but it's not like wind and solar is going to lead to a purely decentralized grid where every small community is generating their own electricity. There will always be large scale generating stations for the bulk of grid electricity.
- Krssst 4y ago
  > More than half of France's nuclear reactors are out of commission right now COVID and corrosion issues being investigated led to that, but the fact is that France has had a reliable clean electricity supply for decades before that.
S201 4y ago
Before the typical "nuclear is too expensive/takes too long to build" comments start: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html. Understand why this is the case and how it's entirely reasonable to fix those problems with sufficient will & funding.
- epistasis 4y ago
  That page doesn't really describe how to fix the problems. Nobody really knows, and there's lots of speculations, but if there was an answer it's easily a trillion dollar reward.
  - S201 4y ago
    > That page doesn't really describe how to fix the problems. Clearly you didn't actually read it because there's a large section describing exactly how to improve the economics of nuclear construction: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nuclear-power-economics https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nu...
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      From the conclusion: - Multiple hypothetical approaches to reduce nuclear costs are ongoing. No one knows for sure if any of them will work, or which one will work best And it didn't address the time scale issue at all. OTOH, solar power has a 5 decade history of 90% cost reductions per decade.
      - 988747 4y ago
        Solar power also has a decades long history of only working during a day.
        bryanlarsen 4y ago
        And lithium batteries have a 3 decade history of 80% price reductions per decade.
carabiner 4y ago
China started building 6 new nuclear plants this year: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/China-greenlights-6-new-nuclear-reactors-in-shift-away-from-coal https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/China-greenlights-6-... I guess just like high speed rail, China will leave the US in the dust.
- rllearneratwork 4y ago
  China is also where most of the solar panels are built
- epistasis 4y ago
  If we were to start that now, it would add only 1% generation capacity, and that's assuming that all projects finish within 13 years (unlikely) and that none of the construction projects are abandoned as unfinishable in any way that makes financial sense (which happened to 50% of the reactors started in the US in the 2000s). There's an assumption that we can simply rebuild what we built in the past, but technology has changed quite a bit, construction costs have risen quite a bit, and the lessons we have learned from prior reactors means that we dont want to build the prior designs. Nuclear is a technology without a solid track record, and which has failed in the US, and in France, and in Finland. In these latter examples, we can't blame regulations or public support. Personally, my hypothesis is that construction productivity has been so stagnant compared to manufacturing productivity growth, that nuclear no longer makes sense for advanced economies. Economies at earlier stages of development with lower labor productivity and therefore lower labor costs, may be able to build nuclear cost-effectively.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    > ... and in France, and in Finland ... We might be about to discover that every power policy in Europe has failed, there are a lot of people hoping for a warm winter. I'd be very nervous if their fossil fuel, nuclear, renewable or gas policies were being adopted where I live. There is a serial problem in the west where people aren't taking energy security seriously. If we were, we'd have been building nuclear reactors 13 years ago and we'd be building them now for 13 years in the future. For this comment, I also looked up the Texas thing [0] from last year to see if there was a solid consensus on what happened yet RE wind energy's contribution. I imagine there must be some Wikipedia edit wars happening over whether to show the 7th on this graph [1] because it makes it look like Wind was pretty useless at stopping people from freezing to death in winter. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Texas_power_crisis.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Texas_power_crisis.png
melling 4y ago
That’s less than the 20% we get now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_... “ for 20% of the nation's total electric energy generation.[3] In 2018, nuclear comprised nearly 50 percent of US emission-free energy generation.” Didn’t the United States build 100 nuclear power plants in about 25 years?
- epistasis 4y ago
  Yes, and the problem was that way too many of them were over budget and delayed. Even before Three Mile Island, orders for new nuclear had slowed massively because utilities realized that ther massive risk for financial boondoggles. Those nuclear reactors are now reaching their end of life, and will need to be phased out. France is realizing what happens when you don't replace your aging fleet fast enough: massive unreliability and extended shutdowns for maintenance and fixing things. France also started to build new nuclear in the 2000s, at Flamanville, but it has been an utter debacle, that's ongoing to this day. It's to the point that even though the president has said he's going to order more reactors, it seems unlikely that many of them will ever complete.
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    What if you just kept building them, learning each time, building tacit knowledge and economics of scale?
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Building the same model of reactor a second, third, and fourth time has resulted in increasing cost in both the US and France. There are a few countries that have shown positive learning rather than negative learning, but there's questions about how much of that is from corruption and cheating rather than actual process improvements. (I'm thinking of South Korea here)
kieranmaine 4y ago
The full paragraph is: "Nuclear is likely to be 9% to 12% of generation in 2035 under three of NREL’s scenarios but could more than double to 27% with siting and permitting constraints on generation and transmission, models found. But that is unlikely because the cost-effectiveness of investments in wind, solar, storage and transmission is “clearly” better than that of new nuclear, NREL’s Denholm said."
kjkjadksj 4y ago
Nixon originally wanted a thousand plants to be operational by the year 2000.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

From reactors built 40 years ago. https://www.reuters.com/article/france-nuclear-edf-idINKBN2AP102 https://www.reuters.com/article/france-nuclear-edf-idINKBN2A...

sgu999 4y ago
It apparently took about a decade or so to go from planning to running most of these power plants...
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  What does the cost of nuclear vs renewables and storage look like in a decade? The cost curve is what will define success. Nuclear never gets cheaper.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

The US can't build a nuclear plant in 13 years.

newsclues 4y ago
The US can build a plant in 13 years. It's a matter of dedication and willingness. And pissing off a minority of vocal opponents. It takes longer because of the crazy regulations driven in part by environmentalists who complained about nuclear for decades while fossil fuels were the only other option. But the USA has the resources, skills, technology and money to do so in a short period of time.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  The USA hasn't built a sizable number of reactors for 40 years. We haven't completely lost the skills, but they've sure atrophied. It takes China 10 years to build a reactor, and they've built lots of them in the past 20 years and don't have the regulations you decry. There's no way that the US can do it in anywhere close to the same time frame that China can. It's not just the rules and attitudes about nuclear making things slow. We can't build a subway station in any sort of reasonable timeframe or budget.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Aren't NuScale, Rolls Royce, etc planning to deploy several Gigawatts per year of mini reactors within 5 years? That could be close to 1% of energy usage per year...
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      They should build it then, and be willing to suffer financial penalties if they can’t. Otherwise they’re making empty promises. Watch what someone does, not what they say.
  - tcmart14 4y ago
    I believe there are some. If you want to build new reactor designs, it is almost impossible because of the approval you have to get for the design. If I recall, Terrapower was pretty much told they had to prove the tech somewhere else before building here. They planned to build a reactor in China but that was halted because of the trade war? If you are building a reactor with older designs most people say we shouldn't build with, yea there isn't as much push back.
- epistasis 4y ago
  None of this is correct, the projects have not been stopped due to environmentalists, or regulations, or even willingness. It's just been construction incompetence that caused billions of dollars to be abandoned on a half-finished project at VC Summer. And it's the same construction incompetence that caused Vogtle to be so far behind schedule and so far over budget. If somebody has regulations to change, it's time to propose them.

sgu999 4y ago

Define now, because there's a now in which we'd really like to be able to make that much...

zukzuk 4y ago

More than half of France's nuclear reactors are out of commission right now, so for the foreseeable future that "70%" is more aspirational than anything. We are obviously not going to meet all of our energy needs — especially for certain high-demand applications — from solar and wind alone, but there are some significant advantages to a decentralized power grid that the pro-nuclear folks don't seem to factor into their arguments. Assuming we can build it out, a decentralized grid ought to be much more resilient to the sort of problems France is facing right now.

S201 4y ago
This is fairly liberal use of the term "decentralized." Building many more nuclear plants is still "decentralized" in that some of them can be offline and the system still works. Major solar and wind installations are typically concentrated in similar generating stations as nuclear plants are. Many more people will likely have solar on their homes, but it's not like wind and solar is going to lead to a purely decentralized grid where every small community is generating their own electricity. There will always be large scale generating stations for the bulk of grid electricity.
Krssst 4y ago
> More than half of France's nuclear reactors are out of commission right now COVID and corrosion issues being investigated led to that, but the fact is that France has had a reliable clean electricity supply for decades before that.

S201 4y ago

Before the typical "nuclear is too expensive/takes too long to build" comments start: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html. Understand why this is the case and how it's entirely reasonable to fix those problems with sufficient will & funding.

epistasis 4y ago
That page doesn't really describe how to fix the problems. Nobody really knows, and there's lots of speculations, but if there was an answer it's easily a trillion dollar reward.
- S201 4y ago
  > That page doesn't really describe how to fix the problems. Clearly you didn't actually read it because there's a large section describing exactly how to improve the economics of nuclear construction: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nuclear-power-economics https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nu...
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    From the conclusion: - Multiple hypothetical approaches to reduce nuclear costs are ongoing. No one knows for sure if any of them will work, or which one will work best And it didn't address the time scale issue at all. OTOH, solar power has a 5 decade history of 90% cost reductions per decade.
    - 988747 4y ago
      Solar power also has a decades long history of only working during a day.
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        And lithium batteries have a 3 decade history of 80% price reductions per decade.

carabiner 4y ago

China started building 6 new nuclear plants this year: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/China-greenlights-6-new-nuclear-reactors-in-shift-away-from-coal https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Energy/China-greenlights-6-... I guess just like high speed rail, China will leave the US in the dust.

rllearneratwork 4y ago
China is also where most of the solar panels are built
epistasis 4y ago
If we were to start that now, it would add only 1% generation capacity, and that's assuming that all projects finish within 13 years (unlikely) and that none of the construction projects are abandoned as unfinishable in any way that makes financial sense (which happened to 50% of the reactors started in the US in the 2000s). There's an assumption that we can simply rebuild what we built in the past, but technology has changed quite a bit, construction costs have risen quite a bit, and the lessons we have learned from prior reactors means that we dont want to build the prior designs. Nuclear is a technology without a solid track record, and which has failed in the US, and in France, and in Finland. In these latter examples, we can't blame regulations or public support. Personally, my hypothesis is that construction productivity has been so stagnant compared to manufacturing productivity growth, that nuclear no longer makes sense for advanced economies. Economies at earlier stages of development with lower labor productivity and therefore lower labor costs, may be able to build nuclear cost-effectively.
- roenxi 4y ago
  > ... and in France, and in Finland ... We might be about to discover that every power policy in Europe has failed, there are a lot of people hoping for a warm winter. I'd be very nervous if their fossil fuel, nuclear, renewable or gas policies were being adopted where I live. There is a serial problem in the west where people aren't taking energy security seriously. If we were, we'd have been building nuclear reactors 13 years ago and we'd be building them now for 13 years in the future. For this comment, I also looked up the Texas thing [0] from last year to see if there was a solid consensus on what happened yet RE wind energy's contribution. I imagine there must be some Wikipedia edit wars happening over whether to show the 7th on this graph [1] because it makes it look like Wind was pretty useless at stopping people from freezing to death in winter. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Texas_power_crisis.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Texas_power_crisis.png

melling 4y ago

That’s less than the 20% we get now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_... “ for 20% of the nation's total electric energy generation.[3] In 2018, nuclear comprised nearly 50 percent of US emission-free energy generation.” Didn’t the United States build 100 nuclear power plants in about 25 years?

epistasis 4y ago
Yes, and the problem was that way too many of them were over budget and delayed. Even before Three Mile Island, orders for new nuclear had slowed massively because utilities realized that ther massive risk for financial boondoggles. Those nuclear reactors are now reaching their end of life, and will need to be phased out. France is realizing what happens when you don't replace your aging fleet fast enough: massive unreliability and extended shutdowns for maintenance and fixing things. France also started to build new nuclear in the 2000s, at Flamanville, but it has been an utter debacle, that's ongoing to this day. It's to the point that even though the president has said he's going to order more reactors, it seems unlikely that many of them will ever complete.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  What if you just kept building them, learning each time, building tacit knowledge and economics of scale?
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Building the same model of reactor a second, third, and fourth time has resulted in increasing cost in both the US and France. There are a few countries that have shown positive learning rather than negative learning, but there's questions about how much of that is from corruption and cheating rather than actual process improvements. (I'm thinking of South Korea here)

kieranmaine 4y ago

The full paragraph is: "Nuclear is likely to be 9% to 12% of generation in 2035 under three of NREL’s scenarios but could more than double to 27% with siting and permitting constraints on generation and transmission, models found. But that is unlikely because the cost-effectiveness of investments in wind, solar, storage and transmission is “clearly” better than that of new nuclear, NREL’s Denholm said."

kjkjadksj 4y ago

Nixon originally wanted a thousand plants to be operational by the year 2000.