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Interesting. In your professional nuclear engineer opinion, what is the future of nuclear in the energy mix? Not in the political sense, but I keep hearing the

Interesting. In your professional nuclear engineer opinion, what is the future of nuclear in the energy mix? Not in the political sense, but I keep hearing these claims that solar/wind will just destroy nuclear due to lower costs. Does that make sense to you, or do you think nuclear has something to offer?

acidburnNSA 4y ago
The solar/wind cost argument you refer to relies entirely on an accountant's metric called Levelized Cost of Electricity, which explains what the cheapest power sources are on the margin, given today's fossil-backed grid. Wind and solar and fracked gas do great in this metric. But when you start looking at costs of the entire future decarbonized electricity system, including all the stuff needed to level out the weather-dependence of wind and solar, and you start comparing e.g. a 100% wind + solar + batteries grid vs. a wind + solar + hydro + nuclear grid, you start seeing dramatic differences. There's a metric being developed called Levelized Full system Cost of Electricity to handle this. Anyway it turns out that having a 24/7 zero-carbon miniscule-footprint energy source like nuclear fission in the mix is a huge help to the overall system. Also, nuclear can use its 'waste' heat as district heat and pump warm water up to 100 km to fully decarbonize local building heat without going through an electrical conversion. Also nuclear works great in deep space. So yeah, I see a great future for nuclear in the near, medium, and extremely distance future.
- amalgamated_inc 4y ago
  Thanks, very interesting. I have heard that exact reasoning ("It's all about LCoE!") from various Very Smart People Good At Math. Physics PhDs, VCs (Chamath talks about how this means we "already have practically free, abundant energy from solar"). Seems to me like a case of wishful myopia, where they hone in on that one metric that gives them the illusion that This Is Working.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    That's my perspective. LCOE says what people want it to say, and so it's self-reinforcing. Meanwhile, electricity costs are skyrocketing, and the grid is getting more fragile. I really liked this book covering a lot of this: https://www.amazon.com/Shorting-Grid-Hidden-Fragility-Electric/dp/1735358002 https://www.amazon.com/Shorting-Grid-Hidden-Fragility-Electr...

acidburnNSA 4y ago

The solar/wind cost argument you refer to relies entirely on an accountant's metric called Levelized Cost of Electricity, which explains what the cheapest power sources are on the margin, given today's fossil-backed grid. Wind and solar and fracked gas do great in this metric. But when you start looking at costs of the entire future decarbonized electricity system, including all the stuff needed to level out the weather-dependence of wind and solar, and you start comparing e.g. a 100% wind + solar + batteries grid vs. a wind + solar + hydro + nuclear grid, you start seeing dramatic differences. There's a metric being developed called Levelized Full system Cost of Electricity to handle this. Anyway it turns out that having a 24/7 zero-carbon miniscule-footprint energy source like nuclear fission in the mix is a huge help to the overall system. Also, nuclear can use its 'waste' heat as district heat and pump warm water up to 100 km to fully decarbonize local building heat without going through an electrical conversion. Also nuclear works great in deep space. So yeah, I see a great future for nuclear in the near, medium, and extremely distance future.

amalgamated_inc 4y ago
Thanks, very interesting. I have heard that exact reasoning ("It's all about LCoE!") from various Very Smart People Good At Math. Physics PhDs, VCs (Chamath talks about how this means we "already have practically free, abundant energy from solar"). Seems to me like a case of wishful myopia, where they hone in on that one metric that gives them the illusion that This Is Working.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  That's my perspective. LCOE says what people want it to say, and so it's self-reinforcing. Meanwhile, electricity costs are skyrocketing, and the grid is getting more fragile. I really liked this book covering a lot of this: https://www.amazon.com/Shorting-Grid-Hidden-Fragility-Electric/dp/1735358002 https://www.amazon.com/Shorting-Grid-Hidden-Fragility-Electr...