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To provide more context, wind and solar were both in the low $30's/MWh of LCOE (levelized cost of energy) 3 years ago[0], with that number predicted to continue

To provide more context, wind and solar were both in the low $30's/MWh of LCOE (levelized cost of energy) 3 years ago[0], with that number predicted to continue falling rapidly. Combined cycle (natural gas) is a bit higher[1] than solar and wind, with that number expected to rise over time, and I'm fairly sure the current numbers don't really reflect the substantial cost of the carbon emissions, which we will all have to pay for sooner or later. Either way, the number utilities see is currently much lower than SMRs. I'm pretty sure every prediction I've ever seen for how quickly the cost of wind and solar will fall has underestimated the speed in retrospect. That's the kind of thing these reactors have to compete with. Grids have also repeatedly been shown to handle more renewables than every previous prediction would make, and we haven't hit the limit. At this point, fossil fuel sources more frequently a source of blackouts than than renewables from everything I've seen, despite certain people blaming renewables at every turn. What we need is more energy storage, whether that's in the form of traditional batteries or more novel forms of energy storage. I think nuclear is a fine source of energy if you have it, but evidence over the last several decades shows that it is virtually impossible to build for myriad reasons. The Vogtle nuclear reactors have been one giant boondoggle. New nuclear is not cost competitive, unfortunately. This was also an interesting article yesterday: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/19/michael-bloomberg-backs-renewable-energy-in-new-op-ed/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/19/michael-bloomberg-backs... [0]: https://www.eenews.net/articles/doe-heres-where-renewable-costs-are-heading/ https://www.eenews.net/articles/doe-heres-where-renewable-co... [1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46856 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46856

arcticbull 4y ago
> What we need is more energy storage, whether that's in the form of traditional batteries or more novel forms of energy storage. Batteries are a nightmare at grid scale from an environmental perspective. Other forms of storage are needed (pumped hydro for example), or nuclear plus renewable on top of a smart-grid capable of adjusting demand instead. It's fundamentally far more difficult and costly to adjust supply (or to buffer with storage) than it is to reduce demand during periods of low renewable generation. As more EVs and their chargers come online, instantaneous load reductions become cheap and easy - and possible.
- jfengel 4y ago
  Plain old combined cycle can handle a lot of the demand peaks. We already have that in place. If they operate 1% or even 5% of the time, we've still cut vast amounts of carbon. There would be much lower hanging fruit than trying to replace that last fraction with nuclear. We have a solution already in place. That doesn't mean all research on modular reactors should stop. It would have a niche if it worked. It's just not the thing holding back decarbonization, and not an excuse to hold back as much renewables as possible as fast as possible.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    And if they have to operate 1% of the time, they can do that with hydrogen, and the fuel cost will be inconsequential.
- coder543 4y ago
  > Batteries are a nightmare at grid scale from an environmental perspective. Which part[0], exactly? I think most people dramatically overestimate the level of "nightmare", and battery contents are highly recyclable. We don't have a ton of battery recycling right now because there aren't enough failing batteries yet to support the necessary facilities, but several companies are starting to ramp up. Also worth considering that even after a battery is "too old" to use in an EV, it is perfectly fine to use in stationary storage applications for quite awhile longer ("reuse") even before it is time to recycle and rebuild those components into a new battery. > It's fundamentally far more difficult and costly to adjust supply (or to buffer with storage) than it is to reduce demand during periods of low renewable generation. As more EVs and their chargers come online, instantaneous load reductions become cheap and easy - and possible. I completely agree with this, and most people either can't or won't see this point in discussions about renewables. The more predictable load that comes online, the easier it is to justify more production. Even if that production is using so-called "intermittent" renewables, when the need arises, asking people to voluntarily avoid charging for a day would be equivalent to adding a huge amount of production suddenly, just by removing load. (And EVs have enough range for a week of normal commuting for most people, easily. The few people who need to charge desperately would be able to charge without problems.) If you pay people for volunteering to participate in Demand Response, you will get plenty of volunteers. "Demand response" is a critical part of the grid of the future. [0]: https://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/97/28/WEB/09728-cover-schematic.jpg https://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/97/28/WEB/09728-cover-sc...
evancox100 4y ago
Sorry but it is very misleading to say that fossil fuels sources are a bigger cause of blackouts than renewables. Without dispatchable generation, like nat gas plants but also hydroelectric, the grid would black out every single night. Yes dispatchable generation may fail to materialize at times, but renewables “fail” to provide consistent power every single day, when the sun stops shining at night or wind stops blowing. Future battery deployments may be able to smooth these out over long enough timescales, but we are nowhere near that point right now.
- coder543 4y ago
  >> Grids have also repeatedly been shown to handle more renewables than every previous prediction would make, and we haven't hit the limit. > Yes dispatchable generation may fail to materialize at times, but renewables “fail” to provide consistent power every single day, when the sun stops shining at night or wind stops blowing. As I said. You're just repeating the old arguments. People thought that small percentages of renewables would destabilize the grid, then that didn't happen, so then they said a slightly larger percentages would do it, and it didn't. This tired theme has been repeated ad nauseam for the last decade or two. I agree that you need some amount of Base Load, but renewables haven't been the problem yet, and energy storage is the solution, long term, along with Demand Response. Small amounts of grid energy storage have been shown[0] to have disproportionately high effects on improving grid stability. We might need less than you predict. As it is, since we are still successfully adding more and more renewables to the grid, and renewables aren't being the source of blackouts, SMRs have to compete with renewables on cost, and they simply don't. SMRs also don't compete with Combined Cycle plants in terms of cost either, so which one are utilities going to choose? Peak demand for the grid is in the late afternoon / early evening, so the amount of battery storage needed to "shift" solar production by a few hours is not as much as you would think. Wind power produces more power at night than during the day, and it produces more in winter than summer, which is quite convenient given how solar produces more in the summer and during the day.[1] They make quite a complementary pair of power sources. There are seasonal concerns, which is where some combined cycle plants come into play, even if they don't operate for most of the year, but that's also not SMRs. Combined Cycle is way cheaper than these nuclear SMRs. If you over-build on wind and solar, you can go a long way even in times of year with "less" wind and less sunshine, and with the low cost of wind and solar... lots of people are looking to overbuild as a partial solution that doesn't require batteries. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve#Benefits_for_the_consumers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve#Benefi... [1]: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1368867 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1368867
infoseek12 4y ago
Solar and wind are great! I’m sure they’ll be a huge part of the future. However, there are places that don’t have good conditions for either and applications that they struggle with like providing large amounts of power for things like refining aluminum or casting steel. Not to mention how useful it would be if you fit one in a Super Galaxy and power a military base with it or quickly connect one and get it pumping power into a grid that’s experiencing blackouts. Wind and solar will probably be cheaper but this kind of tech could still be very useful in quite a few places.
- coder543 4y ago
  > Wind and solar will probably be cheaper but this kind of tech could still be very useful in quite a few places. I agree, and I would love to see SMRs succeed. But, the latest developments in the cost of NuScale don't get my hopes up very high. Related, I have no idea if UNSC is going to go anywhere, but I really like their website[0]. Probably the best SMR company website in existence. [0]: https://www.usnc.com https://www.usnc.com
  - infoseek12 4y ago
    Cost estimates for novel nuclear designs have a track record of being all but worthless. I wish I could dismiss your pessimism but the flip side of the economics, that’s a large part of what makes this so difficult, is that if they do succeed and make SMRs a real thing the cost could go down dramatically.
    - coder543 4y ago
      This was also an interesting and relevant analysis if you want to read more on the subject: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why-small-modular-reactors-cant-compete-with-renewable-energy/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why... Like I said, I do hope that SMRs succeed, and I want them to succeed cost effectively, not just by subsidization.
    - garbagecoder 4y ago
Manuel_D 4y ago
Comparing renewables without storage with a non-intermittent source is comparing apples to oranges. Until said storage system is developed, renewables have to be paired with a dispatchable source - usually fossil fuels. Existing batteries are nowhere near the scale required to capture and re-release intermittent energy production. Nuclear power is cheaper when built at scale [1]. When dozens of plants were being built of the same few designs, costs were less than a quarter of what they are now. Most nuclear plant construction is first-of-a-kind in the country it's being built. These have always cost more. 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
- coder543 4y ago
  > Most nuclear plant construction is first-of-a-kind in the country it's being built. These have always cost more. I don't see how this is relevant. The Vogtle reactors are here in the US. The US has plenty of experience building nuclear reactors, no? I would love it if nuclear were cost effective to build, but I would like to see any recent examples of that, anywhere in the world. Even NuScale is predicting that they won't be cost competitive with Combined Cycle gas plants.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    Vogtle 3 and 4 are the first AP1000 reactors built in the US. That means most of the parts and components used in this plant are the first attempt at building and integrating such components. It's a lot cheaper to retain all this knowledge and churn out a run of, say, 2 dozen steam generators [1] instead of building them as a one-off every time. There's many such components where there's no market outside of nuclear power plants, and so there's no economy of scale to be had if we're only building 1 or 2 nuclear plants at a time. > I would love it if nuclear were cost effective to build, but I would like to see any recent examples of that, anywhere in the world South Korea has been consistently building nuclear power comparatively cheaply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#:~:text=Nuclear%20power%20is%20a%20major,Korea's%20total%20electrical%20generation%20capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#:.... France did so as well during the Messmer plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messmer_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme... Of course it's probably not as cost competitive with fossil fuels. The whole point is to get off of fossil fuels. This is where wind and solar really struggle: they're great at reducing fossil fuel use by ~40% by shutting down gas plants when wind and sun are available. But it's ultimately still fossil fuels forming the backbone of the grid. Nuclear provides a path towards actually removing fossil fuel generation entirely, instead of just opportunistically supplementing it with intermittent renewables. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power)#:~:text=Steam%20generators%20are%20heat%20exchangers,primary%20and%20secondary%20coolant%20loops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power....
BuckyBeaver 4y ago
Unless renewables can provide ALL of our energy needs, we MUST built some power-generation facilities, must we not? The last I heard, there's no way we can avoid generating a bunch of our power. So if not nuclear, what?
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Renewables can provide all of our energy needs. The only question is cost. So in the worst case, it's a financial bet, not an existential one.
  - api 4y ago
    That question isn’t without consequence. If the cost is too high there will be a populist revolt and return to “roll coal!” You can’t impoverish people today to prevent a future catastrophe like severe climate change that can only be argued for on the basis of science many people don’t understand… not unless you are in a North Korea level dictatorship and can just shoot people who disagree.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Renewables do, in fact, generate power. We have combined-cycle gas turbines already, that will not be torn down. They will just be fired up only at need. Eventually they will burn synthetic fuel. At need.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> I think nuclear is a fine source of energy if you have it, but evidence over the last several decades shows that it is virtually impossible to build for myriad reasons. > What we need is more energy storage If nuclear is impossible despite existing, storage is Even More Impossible
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> To provide more context, wind and solar were both in the low $30's/MWh of LCOE (levelized cost of energy) 3 years ago[0], with that number predicted to continue falling rapidly. This is like comparing cost of water during a flood and during a drought. London water authority can purify rainwater/river water for $0.1 per tonne, or can desalinate seawater for $2 per ton. Why would they go with expensive desalination? Obviously when there is a drought there is no rainwater to purify, and it has worked out cheaper to install a more expensive, reliable source of water, than it was to create water storage for all of London to last through the worst possible drought. Water and energy are similar in that, if they really run out, people start dying. They are different because you can easily store a week's worth of water in your house, but try store a week's worth of energy. Some countries, like India, Australia and US, can really rely on Solar. But northern countries really cannot. In UK solar panels give 10x less energy in the Winter than in the Summer. And some countries don't even have good wind sources.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  The biggest differences between electricity and water is that water is that water is really hard to transport (cause heavy) and droughts can last for years and effect giant areas. With solar and wind on the other hand, their supply is fairly predictable and variation is mostly local (i.e. it sometimes is cloudy in Germany, but Germany and Britain have almost completely uncorrelated weather). Also it's easy to send electricity 2-4 thousand miles with only minor (10%) losses using high voltage DC. As such you can build a grid with 60-80% renewables with minimal storage. You just make it large to remove local variation in weather and use a mix of wind and solar for your renewables (which are anti-correlated which gives you better reliability). You then can make up any renewable shortages with peaker plants that burn fossil fuels, but if you have a little extra renewable capacity you can keep them from running most of the time. Edit: Also hydro makes a really good battery for the several week timespan. It can't meet 100% of power needed but (especially if you bank water) can provide a decent percent of total demand for a while.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  If you actually look at those northern cloudy countries case by case they all have solutions. You can vaguely handwave at "not everywhere has hydro resource", "some countries don't have neighbors with uncorrelated wind", "offshore windns prohibitive in deep water", "some countries have cloudy winters" and so on, but where about 98% of the world live each negative in one category is met with enough positives in the other categories that it turns out that VRE is the most cost effective strategy and the gaps can he filled with existing known solutions like W2E and turbine upgrades on hydro. Having 2% of the world needing to source 30% of their electricity from gas isn't a good reason to put the brakes on the 99% of electricity and 80% of other energy that can be decarbonized much more quickly with wind and solar than any other choice. Even if it were impossible to decarbonise fully with a VRE dominant strategy, pipelining it until it hits around 50% curtailed as the emissions it avoids while nuclear is being built will be more than funding the nuclear 20% sooner and it will remain useful for producing hydrogen/ammonia/etc. In this case the optimal strategy would be fund both immediately (which china, india, japan, and france are doing), rather than using hypothetical nuclear to attack and slow real VRE buildout.
ttul 4y ago
Surely if given half a chance, the cost of building SMRs will also fall? Comparing wind and solar pricing to the pricing of SMRs when this is the first one to ever have been approved, never mind built, is pretty unfair.
- coder543 4y ago
  SMRs are the original nuclear reactors, more or less: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why-small-modular-reactors-cant-compete-with-renewable-energy/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why... So, this is not really the first try at SMR. But, I can only speak to the numbers NuScale is providing. As I have said several times around this discussion, it would be awesome if SMRs were cost effective, and I hope NuScale can prove they’re up to the challenge, but the same people who are trying to sell the technology keep announcing that it’s going to cost more than expected, which does not make me confident. Hopefully things turn out better than expected. I agree that scaling up production would be helpful for cost, if they avoid getting tangled in a regulatory quagmire. But will it be enough to reduce the cost by more than half?
theropost 4y ago
When doing calculations on such costs, we need to consider the total cost of operation of the plant, distribution costs, load balancing, etc. In the case of intermittent power sources, many calculations tend to favour them without taking into account the entire operational cycle of the power grid. These intermittent sources tend to require more hands on deck, additional backup sources, or power diversions, stability management, battery storage, and a plethora of other indirect costs that are not considered. I really do appreciate these efforts, since they generate energy, which allows progress and growth. However, we do need to ensure our calculations, and accounting for such infrastructure is able to consider the system as a whole.
calaphos 4y ago
Sadly LCOE is a very bad metric when looking at intermittent and non dispatchable generation sources in a power grid. Especially so as they approach a meaningful fraction of total generation. The market goal of power generation after all is not to produce as much kWh as possible but to satisfy demand at a specific time. System level LCOE which take dispatch into account are a better way of looking at power generation costs. Here is a pretty good paper on the topic, albeit a bit older so some parameters might have changed slightly. https://research.google/pubs/pub46289/ https://research.google/pubs/pub46289/
- pfdietz 4y ago
  System level numbers are dependent on the details of the system. LCOE has the advantage that it's independent of the system. Of course everyone understands that in specific cases one has to look at details local in time and space. Ah, and from that abstract: "DOSCOE shows that to cost-effectively remove the last 10-20% of fossil fuels requires a moderate price on carbon and either low-cost nuclear power or carbon capture and sequestration. Alternatively, a hypothetical zero-carbon source needs to have a net present cost less than $2200/kW to displace existing fossil-fuel plants." A combined cycle power plant burning hydrogen satisfies that last requirement. Studies that purport to show that nuclear is needed for the last 10-20% do so by ignoring hydrogen (and other e-fuels), which slam that door in nuclear's face.
panick21_ 4y ago
LCOE is a terrible measure when considering nation state scale reliable electricity.

arcticbull 4y ago

> What we need is more energy storage, whether that's in the form of traditional batteries or more novel forms of energy storage. Batteries are a nightmare at grid scale from an environmental perspective. Other forms of storage are needed (pumped hydro for example), or nuclear plus renewable on top of a smart-grid capable of adjusting demand instead. It's fundamentally far more difficult and costly to adjust supply (or to buffer with storage) than it is to reduce demand during periods of low renewable generation. As more EVs and their chargers come online, instantaneous load reductions become cheap and easy - and possible.

jfengel 4y ago
Plain old combined cycle can handle a lot of the demand peaks. We already have that in place. If they operate 1% or even 5% of the time, we've still cut vast amounts of carbon. There would be much lower hanging fruit than trying to replace that last fraction with nuclear. We have a solution already in place. That doesn't mean all research on modular reactors should stop. It would have a niche if it worked. It's just not the thing holding back decarbonization, and not an excuse to hold back as much renewables as possible as fast as possible.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  And if they have to operate 1% of the time, they can do that with hydrogen, and the fuel cost will be inconsequential.
coder543 4y ago
> Batteries are a nightmare at grid scale from an environmental perspective. Which part[0], exactly? I think most people dramatically overestimate the level of "nightmare", and battery contents are highly recyclable. We don't have a ton of battery recycling right now because there aren't enough failing batteries yet to support the necessary facilities, but several companies are starting to ramp up. Also worth considering that even after a battery is "too old" to use in an EV, it is perfectly fine to use in stationary storage applications for quite awhile longer ("reuse") even before it is time to recycle and rebuild those components into a new battery. > It's fundamentally far more difficult and costly to adjust supply (or to buffer with storage) than it is to reduce demand during periods of low renewable generation. As more EVs and their chargers come online, instantaneous load reductions become cheap and easy - and possible. I completely agree with this, and most people either can't or won't see this point in discussions about renewables. The more predictable load that comes online, the easier it is to justify more production. Even if that production is using so-called "intermittent" renewables, when the need arises, asking people to voluntarily avoid charging for a day would be equivalent to adding a huge amount of production suddenly, just by removing load. (And EVs have enough range for a week of normal commuting for most people, easily. The few people who need to charge desperately would be able to charge without problems.) If you pay people for volunteering to participate in Demand Response, you will get plenty of volunteers. "Demand response" is a critical part of the grid of the future. [0]: https://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/97/28/WEB/09728-cover-schematic.jpg https://cen.acs.org/content/dam/cen/97/28/WEB/09728-cover-sc...

evancox100 4y ago

Sorry but it is very misleading to say that fossil fuels sources are a bigger cause of blackouts than renewables. Without dispatchable generation, like nat gas plants but also hydroelectric, the grid would black out every single night. Yes dispatchable generation may fail to materialize at times, but renewables “fail” to provide consistent power every single day, when the sun stops shining at night or wind stops blowing. Future battery deployments may be able to smooth these out over long enough timescales, but we are nowhere near that point right now.

coder543 4y ago
>> Grids have also repeatedly been shown to handle more renewables than every previous prediction would make, and we haven't hit the limit. > Yes dispatchable generation may fail to materialize at times, but renewables “fail” to provide consistent power every single day, when the sun stops shining at night or wind stops blowing. As I said. You're just repeating the old arguments. People thought that small percentages of renewables would destabilize the grid, then that didn't happen, so then they said a slightly larger percentages would do it, and it didn't. This tired theme has been repeated ad nauseam for the last decade or two. I agree that you need some amount of Base Load, but renewables haven't been the problem yet, and energy storage is the solution, long term, along with Demand Response. Small amounts of grid energy storage have been shown[0] to have disproportionately high effects on improving grid stability. We might need less than you predict. As it is, since we are still successfully adding more and more renewables to the grid, and renewables aren't being the source of blackouts, SMRs have to compete with renewables on cost, and they simply don't. SMRs also don't compete with Combined Cycle plants in terms of cost either, so which one are utilities going to choose? Peak demand for the grid is in the late afternoon / early evening, so the amount of battery storage needed to "shift" solar production by a few hours is not as much as you would think. Wind power produces more power at night than during the day, and it produces more in winter than summer, which is quite convenient given how solar produces more in the summer and during the day.[1] They make quite a complementary pair of power sources. There are seasonal concerns, which is where some combined cycle plants come into play, even if they don't operate for most of the year, but that's also not SMRs. Combined Cycle is way cheaper than these nuclear SMRs. If you over-build on wind and solar, you can go a long way even in times of year with "less" wind and less sunshine, and with the low cost of wind and solar... lots of people are looking to overbuild as a partial solution that doesn't require batteries. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve#Benefits_for_the_consumers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve#Benefi... [1]: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1368867 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1368867

infoseek12 4y ago

Solar and wind are great! I’m sure they’ll be a huge part of the future. However, there are places that don’t have good conditions for either and applications that they struggle with like providing large amounts of power for things like refining aluminum or casting steel. Not to mention how useful it would be if you fit one in a Super Galaxy and power a military base with it or quickly connect one and get it pumping power into a grid that’s experiencing blackouts. Wind and solar will probably be cheaper but this kind of tech could still be very useful in quite a few places.

coder543 4y ago
> Wind and solar will probably be cheaper but this kind of tech could still be very useful in quite a few places. I agree, and I would love to see SMRs succeed. But, the latest developments in the cost of NuScale don't get my hopes up very high. Related, I have no idea if UNSC is going to go anywhere, but I really like their website[0]. Probably the best SMR company website in existence. [0]: https://www.usnc.com https://www.usnc.com
- infoseek12 4y ago
  Cost estimates for novel nuclear designs have a track record of being all but worthless. I wish I could dismiss your pessimism but the flip side of the economics, that’s a large part of what makes this so difficult, is that if they do succeed and make SMRs a real thing the cost could go down dramatically.
  - coder543 4y ago
    This was also an interesting and relevant analysis if you want to read more on the subject: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why-small-modular-reactors-cant-compete-with-renewable-energy/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why... Like I said, I do hope that SMRs succeed, and I want them to succeed cost effectively, not just by subsidization.
  - garbagecoder 4y ago

Manuel_D 4y ago

Comparing renewables without storage with a non-intermittent source is comparing apples to oranges. Until said storage system is developed, renewables have to be paired with a dispatchable source - usually fossil fuels. Existing batteries are nowhere near the scale required to capture and re-release intermittent energy production. Nuclear power is cheaper when built at scale [1]. When dozens of plants were being built of the same few designs, costs were less than a quarter of what they are now. Most nuclear plant construction is first-of-a-kind in the country it's being built. These have always cost more. 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

coder543 4y ago
> Most nuclear plant construction is first-of-a-kind in the country it's being built. These have always cost more. I don't see how this is relevant. The Vogtle reactors are here in the US. The US has plenty of experience building nuclear reactors, no? I would love it if nuclear were cost effective to build, but I would like to see any recent examples of that, anywhere in the world. Even NuScale is predicting that they won't be cost competitive with Combined Cycle gas plants.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  Vogtle 3 and 4 are the first AP1000 reactors built in the US. That means most of the parts and components used in this plant are the first attempt at building and integrating such components. It's a lot cheaper to retain all this knowledge and churn out a run of, say, 2 dozen steam generators [1] instead of building them as a one-off every time. There's many such components where there's no market outside of nuclear power plants, and so there's no economy of scale to be had if we're only building 1 or 2 nuclear plants at a time. > I would love it if nuclear were cost effective to build, but I would like to see any recent examples of that, anywhere in the world South Korea has been consistently building nuclear power comparatively cheaply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#:~:text=Nuclear%20power%20is%20a%20major,Korea's%20total%20electrical%20generation%20capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_South_Korea#:.... France did so as well during the Messmer plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messmer_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme... Of course it's probably not as cost competitive with fossil fuels. The whole point is to get off of fossil fuels. This is where wind and solar really struggle: they're great at reducing fossil fuel use by ~40% by shutting down gas plants when wind and sun are available. But it's ultimately still fossil fuels forming the backbone of the grid. Nuclear provides a path towards actually removing fossil fuel generation entirely, instead of just opportunistically supplementing it with intermittent renewables. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power)#:~:text=Steam%20generators%20are%20heat%20exchangers,primary%20and%20secondary%20coolant%20loops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power....

BuckyBeaver 4y ago

Unless renewables can provide ALL of our energy needs, we MUST built some power-generation facilities, must we not? The last I heard, there's no way we can avoid generating a bunch of our power. So if not nuclear, what?

pfdietz 4y ago
Renewables can provide all of our energy needs. The only question is cost. So in the worst case, it's a financial bet, not an existential one.
- api 4y ago
  That question isn’t without consequence. If the cost is too high there will be a populist revolt and return to “roll coal!” You can’t impoverish people today to prevent a future catastrophe like severe climate change that can only be argued for on the basis of science many people don’t understand… not unless you are in a North Korea level dictatorship and can just shoot people who disagree.
moloch-hai 4y ago
Renewables do, in fact, generate power. We have combined-cycle gas turbines already, that will not be torn down. They will just be fired up only at need. Eventually they will burn synthetic fuel. At need.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> I think nuclear is a fine source of energy if you have it, but evidence over the last several decades shows that it is virtually impossible to build for myriad reasons. > What we need is more energy storage If nuclear is impossible despite existing, storage is Even More Impossible

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> To provide more context, wind and solar were both in the low $30's/MWh of LCOE (levelized cost of energy) 3 years ago[0], with that number predicted to continue falling rapidly. This is like comparing cost of water during a flood and during a drought. London water authority can purify rainwater/river water for $0.1 per tonne, or can desalinate seawater for $2 per ton. Why would they go with expensive desalination? Obviously when there is a drought there is no rainwater to purify, and it has worked out cheaper to install a more expensive, reliable source of water, than it was to create water storage for all of London to last through the worst possible drought. Water and energy are similar in that, if they really run out, people start dying. They are different because you can easily store a week's worth of water in your house, but try store a week's worth of energy. Some countries, like India, Australia and US, can really rely on Solar. But northern countries really cannot. In UK solar panels give 10x less energy in the Winter than in the Summer. And some countries don't even have good wind sources.

adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
The biggest differences between electricity and water is that water is that water is really hard to transport (cause heavy) and droughts can last for years and effect giant areas. With solar and wind on the other hand, their supply is fairly predictable and variation is mostly local (i.e. it sometimes is cloudy in Germany, but Germany and Britain have almost completely uncorrelated weather). Also it's easy to send electricity 2-4 thousand miles with only minor (10%) losses using high voltage DC. As such you can build a grid with 60-80% renewables with minimal storage. You just make it large to remove local variation in weather and use a mix of wind and solar for your renewables (which are anti-correlated which gives you better reliability). You then can make up any renewable shortages with peaker plants that burn fossil fuels, but if you have a little extra renewable capacity you can keep them from running most of the time. Edit: Also hydro makes a really good battery for the several week timespan. It can't meet 100% of power needed but (especially if you bank water) can provide a decent percent of total demand for a while.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
If you actually look at those northern cloudy countries case by case they all have solutions. You can vaguely handwave at "not everywhere has hydro resource", "some countries don't have neighbors with uncorrelated wind", "offshore windns prohibitive in deep water", "some countries have cloudy winters" and so on, but where about 98% of the world live each negative in one category is met with enough positives in the other categories that it turns out that VRE is the most cost effective strategy and the gaps can he filled with existing known solutions like W2E and turbine upgrades on hydro. Having 2% of the world needing to source 30% of their electricity from gas isn't a good reason to put the brakes on the 99% of electricity and 80% of other energy that can be decarbonized much more quickly with wind and solar than any other choice. Even if it were impossible to decarbonise fully with a VRE dominant strategy, pipelining it until it hits around 50% curtailed as the emissions it avoids while nuclear is being built will be more than funding the nuclear 20% sooner and it will remain useful for producing hydrogen/ammonia/etc. In this case the optimal strategy would be fund both immediately (which china, india, japan, and france are doing), rather than using hypothetical nuclear to attack and slow real VRE buildout.

ttul 4y ago

Surely if given half a chance, the cost of building SMRs will also fall? Comparing wind and solar pricing to the pricing of SMRs when this is the first one to ever have been approved, never mind built, is pretty unfair.

coder543 4y ago
SMRs are the original nuclear reactors, more or less: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why-small-modular-reactors-cant-compete-with-renewable-energy/ https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/18/the-nuclear-fallacy-why... So, this is not really the first try at SMR. But, I can only speak to the numbers NuScale is providing. As I have said several times around this discussion, it would be awesome if SMRs were cost effective, and I hope NuScale can prove they’re up to the challenge, but the same people who are trying to sell the technology keep announcing that it’s going to cost more than expected, which does not make me confident. Hopefully things turn out better than expected. I agree that scaling up production would be helpful for cost, if they avoid getting tangled in a regulatory quagmire. But will it be enough to reduce the cost by more than half?

theropost 4y ago

When doing calculations on such costs, we need to consider the total cost of operation of the plant, distribution costs, load balancing, etc. In the case of intermittent power sources, many calculations tend to favour them without taking into account the entire operational cycle of the power grid. These intermittent sources tend to require more hands on deck, additional backup sources, or power diversions, stability management, battery storage, and a plethora of other indirect costs that are not considered. I really do appreciate these efforts, since they generate energy, which allows progress and growth. However, we do need to ensure our calculations, and accounting for such infrastructure is able to consider the system as a whole.

calaphos 4y ago

Sadly LCOE is a very bad metric when looking at intermittent and non dispatchable generation sources in a power grid. Especially so as they approach a meaningful fraction of total generation. The market goal of power generation after all is not to produce as much kWh as possible but to satisfy demand at a specific time. System level LCOE which take dispatch into account are a better way of looking at power generation costs. Here is a pretty good paper on the topic, albeit a bit older so some parameters might have changed slightly. https://research.google/pubs/pub46289/ https://research.google/pubs/pub46289/

pfdietz 4y ago
System level numbers are dependent on the details of the system. LCOE has the advantage that it's independent of the system. Of course everyone understands that in specific cases one has to look at details local in time and space. Ah, and from that abstract: "DOSCOE shows that to cost-effectively remove the last 10-20% of fossil fuels requires a moderate price on carbon and either low-cost nuclear power or carbon capture and sequestration. Alternatively, a hypothetical zero-carbon source needs to have a net present cost less than $2200/kW to displace existing fossil-fuel plants." A combined cycle power plant burning hydrogen satisfies that last requirement. Studies that purport to show that nuclear is needed for the last 10-20% do so by ignoring hydrogen (and other e-fuels), which slam that door in nuclear's face.

panick21_ 4y ago

LCOE is a terrible measure when considering nation state scale reliable electricity.