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Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online. This move by Japan makes no rational sense. It is clearly driven by

Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online. This move by Japan makes no rational sense. It is clearly driven by nuclear industry lobbying and constant spread of the canard that we "need" nuclear. There is no need in 2022 when renewables and storage are here today and cheaper.

ramesh31 4y ago
>Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online It is also far more reliable, consistent, scaleable, and does not require grid scale energy storage. Wind and solar will always be just one piece of the puzzle until these issues are resolved.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  On the very large scale is not as scalable with current technology compared to renewables, since the uranium runs out before access to sunlight runs out. Breeders are needed, and we have exactly two working commercial scale fast reactors in the world. For Japan alone that's not a problem though.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Not really the case. With reprocessing of current waste more fuel could be made easily. And we could find more U-235 if demand really went up.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Reprocessing of thermal burner reactor fuel causes only a marginal extension of the uranium resource. What would be needed are breeder reactors operating with a breeding ratio > 1. Otherwise, the vast majority of the 238U cannot be used.
- cauch 4y ago
  I think it's incorrect to say that nuclear does not require energy storage. The energy demand is not flat, it has peaks. If you don't flatten these peaks with storage, you need to build a production system that should be able to generate enough energy during the peak, but then, some of the generators will have to be turned off the rest of the time. To illustrate the idea, let me invent some numbers: with storage, you have, let's say, 10 power plants to build that are running relatively all the time, producing an integrated total of electricity of, let's say, 100. So, if you paid X$ for building the 10 power plants, you will have X/100 per unit of electricity. Without storage, you may end up with, let's say, 15 power plants, but some are turned off 90% of the time. At the end, you also produce an integrated total of electricity of 100 (the integral is the same, the time of consumption is just shifted to create peaks). The cost of build is now 1.5X, and you will have to 1.5X/100 per unit of electricity. On top of that, turning on and off a nuclear plant is less efficient than producing continuously, so the price of electricity increase even more. So, even with nuclear, storage needs to be built. Once the storage is built, it means that the problem of intermittence of renewable is way less problematic.
  - neilwilson 4y ago
    You export the electricity. Either directly, or by bottling it. Excess power always has a use.
    - cauch 4y ago
      Well, you cannot really export it if no one around needs it because they also are not in a peak. If they rely on importing electricity when in non-peak time, what do they do in peak time? By construction, the non-peak time is the worse time to export. Unless you export to a different part of the world, but then, the same argument works with renewable (said simply: if you can export at midnight to a country where it is 4pm, then you can use solar and import at midnight from a country where it is 4pm). What do you mean by "bottling it"? Do you mean storage? Because that's exactly what I'm saying.
      - ramesh31 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
throwawaylinux 4y ago
I've been hearing this for decades. Yet somehow in 2022, peak coal is now in front of us again, and even at these unprecedented production levels, people are buying it for over $400 per tonne. Despite the fact that solar and wind were alleged to have killed coal 10 years ago when it cost $50/tonne. Coal was completely uneconomical, they said. Coal is a stranded asset, they said. How did so many of the "experts" get it so wrong? At this point it's clear that we can't keep waiting for renewables. You think nuclear takes way longer to get online, non-hydro renewables haven't even matched existing nuclear electricity production yet. They haven't even been able to halt the rise in demand for coal, let alone kill it, 10 years after it was supposed to be dead. The best time to stop listening to anti nuclear / pro fossil fuel propaganda and save the climate was in the 70s. The second best time is now.
- megaman821 4y ago
  Nuclear projects aren't getting financed due to propaganda against them, it is because they are bad investments. When people are putting their own money on the line, they don't believe nuclear will be cheaper than renewables + batteries in 10 years.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    Right, they're not getting financed because of things like government prohibitions (as in the case here) and unequal consideration making them bad or impossible investments. The propaganda is presumably to get the public to go along with it.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    It is more that nuclear hasn't been competitive against natural gas in places that have natural gas since 1980. Betting on renewables + batteries in 2022 is like betting on the fast breeder reactor in 1955. There certainly is going to be development in batteries and other forms of storage in the next decade but we don't know where the minerals will come from, we'll have more grid scale batteries catch on fire, face more challenges siting solar farms because, as a major land use, they could affect endangered species, etc. There will be progress there but remember that decarbonization is not just replacing the current electricity grid but it also involves replacing gas appliances with electric appliances, using electricity for heat in buildings (probably with heat pumps), electric cars (that people will want to charge at night and thus require more grid storage as well as competing for battery materials), replacing industrial uses of energy, synthesizing e-fuels for aviation and other special applications, etc. Nuclear as we know it faces two problems: (1) the steam turbine and heat exchangers of the LWR are enormous such that an LWR would have a hard time competing even if the heat was free, (2) every country other than Russia has built LWRs sporadically and faced terrible project management problems; China is catching up with Russia with their Hualong One (4 completed in the past 2 years, 12 under construction now.) Long term the industry has to get rid of the water to get the temperature up so the powerset can be made more economical and you can use the heat for industrial applications such as thermochemical hydrogen, with the big plus that a reactor without a moderator can get roughly 50x the energy out of a pound of natural uranium than LWR.
dr-detroit 4y ago
[dead]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
babypuncher 4y ago
This take always conveniently leaves out the cost of building energy storage for wind and solar. A solar farm by itself is useless at night.
panick21_ 4y ago
Had Germany spend 2000-2020 building nuclear instead of renewables they would be closing in on 100% clean energy by now. Unless Germany is willing to admit that they wouldn't be able to reproduce what France did in the 70/80s.

ramesh31 4y ago

>Fission power is much more expensive than wind and solar and takes way longer to get online It is also far more reliable, consistent, scaleable, and does not require grid scale energy storage. Wind and solar will always be just one piece of the puzzle until these issues are resolved.

pfdietz 4y ago
On the very large scale is not as scalable with current technology compared to renewables, since the uranium runs out before access to sunlight runs out. Breeders are needed, and we have exactly two working commercial scale fast reactors in the world. For Japan alone that's not a problem though.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Not really the case. With reprocessing of current waste more fuel could be made easily. And we could find more U-235 if demand really went up.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Reprocessing of thermal burner reactor fuel causes only a marginal extension of the uranium resource. What would be needed are breeder reactors operating with a breeding ratio > 1. Otherwise, the vast majority of the 238U cannot be used.
cauch 4y ago
I think it's incorrect to say that nuclear does not require energy storage. The energy demand is not flat, it has peaks. If you don't flatten these peaks with storage, you need to build a production system that should be able to generate enough energy during the peak, but then, some of the generators will have to be turned off the rest of the time. To illustrate the idea, let me invent some numbers: with storage, you have, let's say, 10 power plants to build that are running relatively all the time, producing an integrated total of electricity of, let's say, 100. So, if you paid X$ for building the 10 power plants, you will have X/100 per unit of electricity. Without storage, you may end up with, let's say, 15 power plants, but some are turned off 90% of the time. At the end, you also produce an integrated total of electricity of 100 (the integral is the same, the time of consumption is just shifted to create peaks). The cost of build is now 1.5X, and you will have to 1.5X/100 per unit of electricity. On top of that, turning on and off a nuclear plant is less efficient than producing continuously, so the price of electricity increase even more. So, even with nuclear, storage needs to be built. Once the storage is built, it means that the problem of intermittence of renewable is way less problematic.
- neilwilson 4y ago
  You export the electricity. Either directly, or by bottling it. Excess power always has a use.
  - cauch 4y ago
    Well, you cannot really export it if no one around needs it because they also are not in a peak. If they rely on importing electricity when in non-peak time, what do they do in peak time? By construction, the non-peak time is the worse time to export. Unless you export to a different part of the world, but then, the same argument works with renewable (said simply: if you can export at midnight to a country where it is 4pm, then you can use solar and import at midnight from a country where it is 4pm). What do you mean by "bottling it"? Do you mean storage? Because that's exactly what I'm saying.
    - ramesh31 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

throwawaylinux 4y ago

I've been hearing this for decades. Yet somehow in 2022, peak coal is now in front of us again, and even at these unprecedented production levels, people are buying it for over $400 per tonne. Despite the fact that solar and wind were alleged to have killed coal 10 years ago when it cost $50/tonne. Coal was completely uneconomical, they said. Coal is a stranded asset, they said. How did so many of the "experts" get it so wrong? At this point it's clear that we can't keep waiting for renewables. You think nuclear takes way longer to get online, non-hydro renewables haven't even matched existing nuclear electricity production yet. They haven't even been able to halt the rise in demand for coal, let alone kill it, 10 years after it was supposed to be dead. The best time to stop listening to anti nuclear / pro fossil fuel propaganda and save the climate was in the 70s. The second best time is now.

megaman821 4y ago
Nuclear projects aren't getting financed due to propaganda against them, it is because they are bad investments. When people are putting their own money on the line, they don't believe nuclear will be cheaper than renewables + batteries in 10 years.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Right, they're not getting financed because of things like government prohibitions (as in the case here) and unequal consideration making them bad or impossible investments. The propaganda is presumably to get the public to go along with it.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  It is more that nuclear hasn't been competitive against natural gas in places that have natural gas since 1980. Betting on renewables + batteries in 2022 is like betting on the fast breeder reactor in 1955. There certainly is going to be development in batteries and other forms of storage in the next decade but we don't know where the minerals will come from, we'll have more grid scale batteries catch on fire, face more challenges siting solar farms because, as a major land use, they could affect endangered species, etc. There will be progress there but remember that decarbonization is not just replacing the current electricity grid but it also involves replacing gas appliances with electric appliances, using electricity for heat in buildings (probably with heat pumps), electric cars (that people will want to charge at night and thus require more grid storage as well as competing for battery materials), replacing industrial uses of energy, synthesizing e-fuels for aviation and other special applications, etc. Nuclear as we know it faces two problems: (1) the steam turbine and heat exchangers of the LWR are enormous such that an LWR would have a hard time competing even if the heat was free, (2) every country other than Russia has built LWRs sporadically and faced terrible project management problems; China is catching up with Russia with their Hualong One (4 completed in the past 2 years, 12 under construction now.) Long term the industry has to get rid of the water to get the temperature up so the powerset can be made more economical and you can use the heat for industrial applications such as thermochemical hydrogen, with the big plus that a reactor without a moderator can get roughly 50x the energy out of a pound of natural uranium than LWR.

dr-detroit 4y ago

[dead]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

babypuncher 4y ago

This take always conveniently leaves out the cost of building energy storage for wind and solar. A solar farm by itself is useless at night.

panick21_ 4y ago

Had Germany spend 2000-2020 building nuclear instead of renewables they would be closing in on 100% clean energy by now. Unless Germany is willing to admit that they wouldn't be able to reproduce what France did in the 70/80s.