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Why use nuclear energy when renewables do it without any radiation or 3rd party hazard for 1/5th the cost? That sounds awfully close to a solution looking for a

Why use nuclear energy when renewables do it without any radiation or 3rd party hazard for 1/5th the cost? That sounds awfully close to a solution looking for a problem. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

scrlk 4y ago
Is it still a 1/5th of the cost if you have to factor in storage?
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  No need to factor in storage when creating synthetic fuels like the GP suggests.
  - loeg 4y ago
    You would instead need to factor in the inefficiencies of creating and burning those fuels.
- pydry 4y ago
  If you synthesize windgas and burn that for electricity (which is probably the most expensive, inefficient way to store and use that energy) it's still about 4/5ths the cost of nuclear power. If you combined pumped storage and batteries with solar and wind it's roughly between 2/5ths and 3/5ths. This ignores taxpayer shouldered insurance for nuclear power. If you price that accurately the cost of nuclear power balloons still further. It's never been particularly cost effective but compared to dirt cheap renewables it's a veritable financial black hole. This is why EDF is currently imploding. It's why only countries that have nukes or really want the option to have nukes build civilian nuclear power plants.
  - akvadrako 4y ago
    windgas? That's not a word I've ever heard or sound like a well established source of energy.
    - pydry 4y ago
      coz it doesnt make economic sense to do it until A) wind and solar energy is routinely producing a lot more energy than can be currently used and stored cheaply B) pumping natural gas becomes prohibited or prohibitively expensive.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Yes. Battery backed solar and wind is still cheaper than nuclear, and mostly cheaper than coal and natural gas in many markets. For seasonality, you can use buried HVDC transmission (which is fairly efficient at moving large amounts of energy vast distances). China moves more power further with HVDC than the US would have to. Burying it gets around NIMBYs and other land issues that slow this infra down. Commercial nuclear is just ridiculously expensive for the capacity factor and energy produced. It’s not entirely without use, but best suited for where there are no other options (the Arctic, Antarctica, etc). It’s likely cheaper to burn natural gas for the last ~5% of generation needed when the grid is mostly zero carbon in a decade (based on renewables and battery storage ramp rates) and then suck that CO2 into the ground with excess renewables (that otherwise would’ve been curtailed) versus continuing to try to build nuclear (although I haven’t done the math). https://reneweconomy.com.au/nuclear-inquiry-told-firmed-renewables-cheapest-and-best-option-for-future-58109/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/nuclear-inquiry-told-firmed-rene... https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-150-vf.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-o... https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinas-state-grid-corp-crushes-power-transmission-records https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinas-state-grid-corp-crushes-pow... https://www.power-technology.com/features/chinas-mega-transmission-lines/ https://www.power-technology.com/features/chinas-mega-transm...
- ianburrell 4y ago
  We are approaching the prices where storage is almost as cheap as nuclear power. More importantly, we don't need to worry about storage now. Gas peaker plants will work until we get rid of all the other fossil fuel power plants. Then, storage should be cheaper since will know how to scale it. There is difference between short-term and long-term storage. Finally, one solution to storage problem is build more supply. Three times will cover nearly every situation, and we will need extra power for doing hydrogen, carbon removal, and fuel generation. It is possible we won't need long-term storage and can use hydrogen or fuel.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Okay but what’s the amortized cost of building triple the supply? The chart you linked to only talks about marginal cost.
    - ianburrell 4y ago
      I don’t think amortized cost matters. The research and development has been done or is included in the unit cost. Renewables have better unit economics than nuclear since fixed costs are spread over many, many more units. It sounds like better reactors need lots of research. More important is time, it takes ten years to build reactor while can order solar panels now. Probably can build a new solar panel plant and multiple solar installations in decade. There does need to be economic incentive to over build. Someone, probably the government, will need to pay for carbon capture. May need to encourage hard-to-electrify industries to switch. But we have a while until that happens.
brutusborn 4y ago
Because nuclear doesn’t require the development of extra storage on the grid, so ends up being cheaper in majority of locations.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  Please cite a study which confirms that. I have not seen it in all my research.
  - Natsu 4y ago
    Renewables require storage because they're not always running, the sun isn't always shining, the wind isn't always blowing, but people are always using power. Nuclear only shuts down when someone shuts off the plant, so it provides base load.
    - Gwypaas 4y ago
      Now cite some research showing it is cheaper to build nuclear than manage the variability of renewables. Then try to put that nuclear plant on a marginal price energy market dominated by renewables. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Lol no. Nuclear usually is used to generate baseload and often loses a fortune. The amortized capital costs are so high that many of these plants get shut down because they lose money. The HN pro-nuclear response is of course always “well, if we didn’t have [regulation] or could build some new nuclear tech everything would be awesome”.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    They are shut down, but not because the capital cost is so high. They are shut down because the operating cost is too high.
  - brutusborn 4y ago
devmor 4y ago
Because peak demand exists. Renewables are cheaper and safer than nuclear power, that much is undeniable. The problem they do have is that their generation is sporadic. Until we solve the energy storage problem, there has to be something else on the grid that can be always online always delivering enough power to meet peak demand.
- Krasnol 4y ago
  There are many means of storage out there already. There is also spreading out of the grid and diversifying renewables sources. This is not some mysterious magic which needs to be performed here. The tools are out there.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  Nuclear is awful for peak demand. The cost model of super expensive CAPEX and low OPEX only lends itself to running at 100% 24/7. Let us say you run a peaking nuclear plant. It can run for 30% of the time, optimistically. It now costs ~3x the price, so $390 to $600 per MWh. That's insane energy prices. Worse than Europe in a haphazard energy transition from Russian gas due to the largest war in Europe since WW2 breaking out.
  - 8note 4y ago
    The missing competitor is natural gas, which is good at peak demand, and not very good at carbon emissions
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Ultimately the rare high price peaks can be shaved with green hydrogen instead of natural gas. Hydrogen can be stored underground, with a cost per unit of energy storage capacity of about $1/kWh, some two orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries. Round trip efficiency sucks, but that's not important for rarely used storage.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    If you can yse storage to mamage peak with renewables, you can use smaller amount of storage to manage peak with nuckear and charge at night
rdevsrex 4y ago
Well the raw materials for renewables, like copper and rare earths, are quite dirty to produce, and often done in the global south, and a not insignificant amount was produced in Russia. So there are a lot of costs that don't show up for the end user, and it's not a given that we'll be able to access the volume of material needed to transition to a clean energy future without nuclear energy in the mix.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  All materials for renewables can be recycled. It is not like they are lost. Also, compare the huge exploitation the fossil industry, which we are replacing, is already doing of the earth. From a total material requirement, nuclear is in line with solar and much worse than wind. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262202131X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...
- nl 4y ago
  > rare earths This is a common myth that just won't go away. From 2019: "A new report by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe) shows that rare earth minerals are not widely used in solar energy and battery storage technologies."[0] > like copper and rare earths, are quite dirty to produce, and often done in the global south I'm from Australia. You say "Global South" like it's some kind of substitute for "poor countries". I have very mixed feelings about mining, but it's pretty hard to argue against the idea that mining these exact minerals has made Australia one of the richest counties in the world, and the people working in those mines as some of the best paid "unskilled" labor on Earth[1][2]. [0] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-in-solar-panels/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w... [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
  - pacificmint 4y ago
    > I'm from Australia. You say "Global South" like it's some kind of substitute for "poor countries". “Global South” is the currently used term for what was previously called “Developing Countries” and “Third World Countries” before that. The global south is not equal to the geographical south, otherwise they could’ve just said the southern hemisphere. According to Wikipedia[1], Australia is considered part of the “Global North”. It’s an economic label more than a geographic one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South
mik1998 4y ago
What about everyone killed or exposed to radiation in the process of manufacturing the necessary so-called "renewables", which require an incomparable amount of resources relative to a nuclear power plant of similar output?
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  All materials for renewables can be recycled. It is not like they are lost. Also, compare the huge exploitation the fossil industry, which we are replacing, is already doing of the earth. From a total material requirement, nuclear is in line with solar and much worse than wind. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262202131X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Renewables require lots of land. In the United States we have unlimited land. People nostalgically want that land to consist of pretty family farms, but 50 years of policy put them all out of business.
8note 4y ago
Do we actually know that they do it without 3rd party hazard?
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  There is one industry where the laws limit liability even to enable it to be built. That is nuclear power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
karaterobot 4y ago
Since the person you're responding to is talking about the legacy of nuclear protests, it's worth noting that all the time we spent between Chernobyl and today, when renewables are finally starting to become a viable alternative, we could have had cheap, clean energy from nuclear. That absolutely crucial forty year period, when we basically missed our chance to arrest global warming below 2 degrees, we slowed or halted building more, newer, better plants because of protests (and the second order effects of protests, like increased costs due to regulation, and loss of expertise, and so on). And now we're saying "well heck, gosh, maybe we don't even need nuclear power!" and to me, this sounds like an extension of the same protests, just in another form. But maybe I'm wrong. My view is: why not build both? We can find a use for the extra energy, I'm sure. At the very least, it would be nice for somebody to say "yeah, we were trying to help the earth by fighting every effort to build nuclear, but we just ended up causing more coal power plants to be built, and now we're all in a lot of trouble, and it's at least partly because of that."
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  Nuclear 40 years ago was the right choice. France did it not for the environment but for energy security. The Messmer plan today would be renewables. The problem with nuclear is that it is extremely expensive, 5x the price of renewables, and slow to build. For every dollar spent on nuclear energy today, we are prolonging the climate emergency.
- ianburrell 4y ago
  If you have time machine, go back twenty five years, make Al Gore president, and have him build tons of nuclear power plants. Or go forward decades, grab the plans for fusion power and bring them back. We do need all the energy which is why building something expensive is bad idea. When could build multiple times as much power with renewables. If you want 100§ nuclear, then we can build 500§ wind and solar.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    But you need 5x as much wind and solar because you will have to store it in the form of hydrogen for 50-80% loss in round-trip back to electricity There will never be enough batteries and hydro storage in the world.
rayiner 4y ago
Looking at subsidized marginal cost of energy tells you pretty much nothing. You need a cost function that considers at least reliability and the cost of energy storage.
- epistasis 4y ago
  What is your comment in reference to? You are replying to a link that has unsubsidized, all-in costs, not marginal costs. And it also has costs for storage, in battery form. (And costs for hydrogen, which might some day be a form of storage, but much more likely will just be used for chemical processes and maybe heat)
  - rayiner 4y ago
    From the link: > When U.S. government subsidies are included, the cost of onshore wind and utility-scale solar continues to be competitive with the marginal cost of coal, nuclear and combined cycle gas generation
    - epistasis 4y ago
      That's saying that capital + operating costs of onshore wind and solar are competitive with the operating costs of fuel-driven electricity. Which is a statement that it is financially better to build as much wind/solar as one can to replace fuel usage. IE as long as the output doesn't get curtailed, the economically rational decision is to build solar and wind now. Of course there are some serious caveats as to why utilities do not do this: 1) they are not economically rational, in most markets they do not have greater profits with lower costs, and 2) this report is from 2021 and the cost of capital has risen somewhat due to higher interest rates. Nonetheless, wind, solar, and batteries dominate what is planned to be added to the grid in 2023: https://www.power-eng.com/solar/eia-solar-to-make-up-more-than-half-of-new-u-s-capacity-additions-in-2023/ https://www.power-eng.com/solar/eia-solar-to-make-up-more-th...
jimworm 4y ago
I understood the GP as focussing more on the missed opportunity. Those cheap renewables didn't exist 40 years in the past. There could've been lots of nuclear energy built since then, a lot of emissions not generated, and those hypothetical decades-old plants would now be considered for decommissioning over the coming decades, just in time to be replaced by the renewables that do exist.
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
Renewables cannot scale. If you want a 20th century level of power production in the 23rd century, renewables are your ticket.
- enslavedrobot 4y ago
  Renewables are scaling at 15% a year, storage is scaling at 20% per year. Nuclear has not scaled because scaling requires fast iterative development cycles that allow learnings that decrease cost. Because nuclear plants are enormous you can only build a few at a time and design changes are super risky because billions of dollars are at stake. An R&D line for solar cells is cheap to run and enables rapid cost efficiency. Batteries are even easier to scale at the moment because we are nowhere near the theoretical limits of those technologies and it's easy for material chemists to experiment with new ideas for only a few thousand dollars. Today it may seem like there is a case for nuclear, but in ten years even existing nuclear plants will be uneconomical because electricity will be zero cost while the sun is out. Instead of being able to sell their power 24 hours a day they will only make money for a declining part of the day. This profitable period will continue to shrink as batteries get cheaper allowing for the arbitrage of electricity stored while the sun is out. This financial reality is the real reason no one will ever build another nuclear plant in the US.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Of course renewables can scale. Why do you think they can't? Be quantitative.
fwlr 4y ago
Pithy answer: You can’t pump solar panels into the gas tank of a 1998 Honda Civic and expect it to run. Mathematically: 1.44 billion metric tons of coal were shipped by sea in 2019, representing a need for 4.2x10^13 megajoules, or 11,667 terawatt-hours. Total global power output by solar panels in 2019 was 681 terawatt-hours (pg 24 in this pdf https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/52f66a88-0b63-4ad2-94a5-29d36e864b82/KeyWorldEnergyStatistics2021.pdf https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/52f66a88-0b63-4ad2-...). So you need to 20x global solar energy output and somehow spread most of that to countries that can’t afford or aren’t interested in building and maintaining huge solar plants. But they already have built and know how to maintain their coal plants. Zero-emission synthetic coal and gasoline are zero-friction drop-in upgrades that obviate the need for probably trillions of international investment and enormous political and diplomatic effort. Alternatively, you could run the massive carbon capture plants on solar energy instead of nuclear, and still ship these “completely clean conventionals” worldwide. It would mean building 3x as many plants for the same output since they could only run during bright daylight hours. You could bring this 3x number down by instead building (once again commensurately massive) energy storage plants as an intermediary between the solar plants and the carbon capture plants, calculating the impact of all three in order to optimally balance generation, storage, and production. There’s even a crude political/rhetorical argument: you don’t have to convince redneck hicks to sell their gas guzzling Hummer and buy a Prius. Likewise there’s no need to sanction holdout countries to force them to accept enormous globalist investments in order to build solar power plants in their country. Finally, I would add this emphatically is a solution looking for a problem. I want to see nuclear power used because I believe it is currently being misrepresented by at least one or two orders magnitude due to regulation and subsidy differentials, and its usage at scale will reveal that discrepancy.
- Gwypaas 4y ago
  Now you are conflating primary energy usage and what the consumers need. Any thermal engine is cooling away 40-80% of the energy. For coal it is about 60% to 70% depending on if the plant uses supercritical steam or not.
  - fwlr 4y ago
scythe 4y ago
Nuclear power had the distinct advantage of existing 50 years ago. No renewable can match that! I don't think it's entirely useless to study the mistakes of the past, particularly since the same patterns may repeat themselves in the future — see e.g. the rhetoric comparing battery metal mining to the environmental impact of petrochemical extraction.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  The past is dead, as the US and French attempts at reviving nuclear power plant construction are showing. One thing to note is how incredibly dangerous construction was in the past, including during the first nuclear rollout. The rate of deaths among construction workers was something like a factor of 5 higher in the 1960s as it is now. Did construction become more expensive because these deaths were deemed unacceptable? If so, you're not going to see cheaper nuclear without great relaxation of worker safety rules.
- pasttense01 4y ago
  The renewable hydro existed long before 50 years ago.
opo 4y ago
As your source shows, solar can be very cheap (utility grade solar providing power when it is sunny) to the most expensive form of electrical power in the world (residential solar on rooftops). You can also see that if you also want power when it isn't sunny (or windy if using windmills) you need to add in the cost of utility grade storage which noticeably increases the costs.

scrlk 4y ago

Is it still a 1/5th of the cost if you have to factor in storage?

Gwypaas 4y ago
No need to factor in storage when creating synthetic fuels like the GP suggests.
- loeg 4y ago
  You would instead need to factor in the inefficiencies of creating and burning those fuels.
pydry 4y ago
If you synthesize windgas and burn that for electricity (which is probably the most expensive, inefficient way to store and use that energy) it's still about 4/5ths the cost of nuclear power. If you combined pumped storage and batteries with solar and wind it's roughly between 2/5ths and 3/5ths. This ignores taxpayer shouldered insurance for nuclear power. If you price that accurately the cost of nuclear power balloons still further. It's never been particularly cost effective but compared to dirt cheap renewables it's a veritable financial black hole. This is why EDF is currently imploding. It's why only countries that have nukes or really want the option to have nukes build civilian nuclear power plants.
- akvadrako 4y ago
  windgas? That's not a word I've ever heard or sound like a well established source of energy.
  - pydry 4y ago
    coz it doesnt make economic sense to do it until A) wind and solar energy is routinely producing a lot more energy than can be currently used and stored cheaply B) pumping natural gas becomes prohibited or prohibitively expensive.
toomuchtodo 4y ago
Yes. Battery backed solar and wind is still cheaper than nuclear, and mostly cheaper than coal and natural gas in many markets. For seasonality, you can use buried HVDC transmission (which is fairly efficient at moving large amounts of energy vast distances). China moves more power further with HVDC than the US would have to. Burying it gets around NIMBYs and other land issues that slow this infra down. Commercial nuclear is just ridiculously expensive for the capacity factor and energy produced. It’s not entirely without use, but best suited for where there are no other options (the Arctic, Antarctica, etc). It’s likely cheaper to burn natural gas for the last ~5% of generation needed when the grid is mostly zero carbon in a decade (based on renewables and battery storage ramp rates) and then suck that CO2 into the ground with excess renewables (that otherwise would’ve been curtailed) versus continuing to try to build nuclear (although I haven’t done the math). https://reneweconomy.com.au/nuclear-inquiry-told-firmed-renewables-cheapest-and-best-option-for-future-58109/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/nuclear-inquiry-told-firmed-rene... https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-150-vf.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-o... https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinas-state-grid-corp-crushes-power-transmission-records https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinas-state-grid-corp-crushes-pow... https://www.power-technology.com/features/chinas-mega-transmission-lines/ https://www.power-technology.com/features/chinas-mega-transm...
ianburrell 4y ago
We are approaching the prices where storage is almost as cheap as nuclear power. More importantly, we don't need to worry about storage now. Gas peaker plants will work until we get rid of all the other fossil fuel power plants. Then, storage should be cheaper since will know how to scale it. There is difference between short-term and long-term storage. Finally, one solution to storage problem is build more supply. Three times will cover nearly every situation, and we will need extra power for doing hydrogen, carbon removal, and fuel generation. It is possible we won't need long-term storage and can use hydrogen or fuel.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Okay but what’s the amortized cost of building triple the supply? The chart you linked to only talks about marginal cost.
  - ianburrell 4y ago
    I don’t think amortized cost matters. The research and development has been done or is included in the unit cost. Renewables have better unit economics than nuclear since fixed costs are spread over many, many more units. It sounds like better reactors need lots of research. More important is time, it takes ten years to build reactor while can order solar panels now. Probably can build a new solar panel plant and multiple solar installations in decade. There does need to be economic incentive to over build. Someone, probably the government, will need to pay for carbon capture. May need to encourage hard-to-electrify industries to switch. But we have a while until that happens.

brutusborn 4y ago

Because nuclear doesn’t require the development of extra storage on the grid, so ends up being cheaper in majority of locations.

Gwypaas 4y ago
Please cite a study which confirms that. I have not seen it in all my research.
- Natsu 4y ago
  Renewables require storage because they're not always running, the sun isn't always shining, the wind isn't always blowing, but people are always using power. Nuclear only shuts down when someone shuts off the plant, so it provides base load.
  - Gwypaas 4y ago
    Now cite some research showing it is cheaper to build nuclear than manage the variability of renewables. Then try to put that nuclear plant on a marginal price energy market dominated by renewables. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
Spooky23 4y ago
Lol no. Nuclear usually is used to generate baseload and often loses a fortune. The amortized capital costs are so high that many of these plants get shut down because they lose money. The HN pro-nuclear response is of course always “well, if we didn’t have [regulation] or could build some new nuclear tech everything would be awesome”.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  They are shut down, but not because the capital cost is so high. They are shut down because the operating cost is too high.
- brutusborn 4y ago

devmor 4y ago

Because peak demand exists. Renewables are cheaper and safer than nuclear power, that much is undeniable. The problem they do have is that their generation is sporadic. Until we solve the energy storage problem, there has to be something else on the grid that can be always online always delivering enough power to meet peak demand.

Krasnol 4y ago
There are many means of storage out there already. There is also spreading out of the grid and diversifying renewables sources. This is not some mysterious magic which needs to be performed here. The tools are out there.
Gwypaas 4y ago
Nuclear is awful for peak demand. The cost model of super expensive CAPEX and low OPEX only lends itself to running at 100% 24/7. Let us say you run a peaking nuclear plant. It can run for 30% of the time, optimistically. It now costs ~3x the price, so $390 to $600 per MWh. That's insane energy prices. Worse than Europe in a haphazard energy transition from Russian gas due to the largest war in Europe since WW2 breaking out.
- 8note 4y ago
  The missing competitor is natural gas, which is good at peak demand, and not very good at carbon emissions
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Ultimately the rare high price peaks can be shaved with green hydrogen instead of natural gas. Hydrogen can be stored underground, with a cost per unit of energy storage capacity of about $1/kWh, some two orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries. Round trip efficiency sucks, but that's not important for rarely used storage.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  If you can yse storage to mamage peak with renewables, you can use smaller amount of storage to manage peak with nuckear and charge at night

rdevsrex 4y ago

Well the raw materials for renewables, like copper and rare earths, are quite dirty to produce, and often done in the global south, and a not insignificant amount was produced in Russia. So there are a lot of costs that don't show up for the end user, and it's not a given that we'll be able to access the volume of material needed to transition to a clean energy future without nuclear energy in the mix.

Gwypaas 4y ago
All materials for renewables can be recycled. It is not like they are lost. Also, compare the huge exploitation the fossil industry, which we are replacing, is already doing of the earth. From a total material requirement, nuclear is in line with solar and much worse than wind. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262202131X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...
nl 4y ago
> rare earths This is a common myth that just won't go away. From 2019: "A new report by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe) shows that rare earth minerals are not widely used in solar energy and battery storage technologies."[0] > like copper and rare earths, are quite dirty to produce, and often done in the global south I'm from Australia. You say "Global South" like it's some kind of substitute for "poor countries". I have very mixed feelings about mining, but it's pretty hard to argue against the idea that mining these exact minerals has made Australia one of the richest counties in the world, and the people working in those mines as some of the best paid "unskilled" labor on Earth[1][2]. [0] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-in-solar-panels/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w... [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
- pacificmint 4y ago
  > I'm from Australia. You say "Global South" like it's some kind of substitute for "poor countries". “Global South” is the currently used term for what was previously called “Developing Countries” and “Third World Countries” before that. The global south is not equal to the geographical south, otherwise they could’ve just said the southern hemisphere. According to Wikipedia[1], Australia is considered part of the “Global North”. It’s an economic label more than a geographic one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South

mik1998 4y ago

What about everyone killed or exposed to radiation in the process of manufacturing the necessary so-called "renewables", which require an incomparable amount of resources relative to a nuclear power plant of similar output?

Gwypaas 4y ago
All materials for renewables can be recycled. It is not like they are lost. Also, compare the huge exploitation the fossil industry, which we are replacing, is already doing of the earth. From a total material requirement, nuclear is in line with solar and much worse than wind. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262202131X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...
Spooky23 4y ago
Renewables require lots of land. In the United States we have unlimited land. People nostalgically want that land to consist of pretty family farms, but 50 years of policy put them all out of business.

8note 4y ago

Do we actually know that they do it without 3rd party hazard?

Gwypaas 4y ago
There is one industry where the laws limit liability even to enable it to be built. That is nuclear power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

karaterobot 4y ago

Since the person you're responding to is talking about the legacy of nuclear protests, it's worth noting that all the time we spent between Chernobyl and today, when renewables are finally starting to become a viable alternative, we could have had cheap, clean energy from nuclear. That absolutely crucial forty year period, when we basically missed our chance to arrest global warming below 2 degrees, we slowed or halted building more, newer, better plants because of protests (and the second order effects of protests, like increased costs due to regulation, and loss of expertise, and so on). And now we're saying "well heck, gosh, maybe we don't even need nuclear power!" and to me, this sounds like an extension of the same protests, just in another form. But maybe I'm wrong. My view is: why not build both? We can find a use for the extra energy, I'm sure. At the very least, it would be nice for somebody to say "yeah, we were trying to help the earth by fighting every effort to build nuclear, but we just ended up causing more coal power plants to be built, and now we're all in a lot of trouble, and it's at least partly because of that."

Gwypaas 4y ago
Nuclear 40 years ago was the right choice. France did it not for the environment but for energy security. The Messmer plan today would be renewables. The problem with nuclear is that it is extremely expensive, 5x the price of renewables, and slow to build. For every dollar spent on nuclear energy today, we are prolonging the climate emergency.
ianburrell 4y ago
If you have time machine, go back twenty five years, make Al Gore president, and have him build tons of nuclear power plants. Or go forward decades, grab the plans for fusion power and bring them back. We do need all the energy which is why building something expensive is bad idea. When could build multiple times as much power with renewables. If you want 100§ nuclear, then we can build 500§ wind and solar.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  But you need 5x as much wind and solar because you will have to store it in the form of hydrogen for 50-80% loss in round-trip back to electricity There will never be enough batteries and hydro storage in the world.

rayiner 4y ago

Looking at subsidized marginal cost of energy tells you pretty much nothing. You need a cost function that considers at least reliability and the cost of energy storage.

epistasis 4y ago
What is your comment in reference to? You are replying to a link that has unsubsidized, all-in costs, not marginal costs. And it also has costs for storage, in battery form. (And costs for hydrogen, which might some day be a form of storage, but much more likely will just be used for chemical processes and maybe heat)
- rayiner 4y ago
  From the link: > When U.S. government subsidies are included, the cost of onshore wind and utility-scale solar continues to be competitive with the marginal cost of coal, nuclear and combined cycle gas generation
  - epistasis 4y ago
    That's saying that capital + operating costs of onshore wind and solar are competitive with the operating costs of fuel-driven electricity. Which is a statement that it is financially better to build as much wind/solar as one can to replace fuel usage. IE as long as the output doesn't get curtailed, the economically rational decision is to build solar and wind now. Of course there are some serious caveats as to why utilities do not do this: 1) they are not economically rational, in most markets they do not have greater profits with lower costs, and 2) this report is from 2021 and the cost of capital has risen somewhat due to higher interest rates. Nonetheless, wind, solar, and batteries dominate what is planned to be added to the grid in 2023: https://www.power-eng.com/solar/eia-solar-to-make-up-more-than-half-of-new-u-s-capacity-additions-in-2023/ https://www.power-eng.com/solar/eia-solar-to-make-up-more-th...

jimworm 4y ago

I understood the GP as focussing more on the missed opportunity. Those cheap renewables didn't exist 40 years in the past. There could've been lots of nuclear energy built since then, a lot of emissions not generated, and those hypothetical decades-old plants would now be considered for decommissioning over the coming decades, just in time to be replaced by the renewables that do exist.

AbrahamParangi 4y ago

Renewables cannot scale. If you want a 20th century level of power production in the 23rd century, renewables are your ticket.

enslavedrobot 4y ago
Renewables are scaling at 15% a year, storage is scaling at 20% per year. Nuclear has not scaled because scaling requires fast iterative development cycles that allow learnings that decrease cost. Because nuclear plants are enormous you can only build a few at a time and design changes are super risky because billions of dollars are at stake. An R&D line for solar cells is cheap to run and enables rapid cost efficiency. Batteries are even easier to scale at the moment because we are nowhere near the theoretical limits of those technologies and it's easy for material chemists to experiment with new ideas for only a few thousand dollars. Today it may seem like there is a case for nuclear, but in ten years even existing nuclear plants will be uneconomical because electricity will be zero cost while the sun is out. Instead of being able to sell their power 24 hours a day they will only make money for a declining part of the day. This profitable period will continue to shrink as batteries get cheaper allowing for the arbitrage of electricity stored while the sun is out. This financial reality is the real reason no one will ever build another nuclear plant in the US.
pfdietz 4y ago
Of course renewables can scale. Why do you think they can't? Be quantitative.

fwlr 4y ago

Pithy answer: You can’t pump solar panels into the gas tank of a 1998 Honda Civic and expect it to run. Mathematically: 1.44 billion metric tons of coal were shipped by sea in 2019, representing a need for 4.2x10^13 megajoules, or 11,667 terawatt-hours. Total global power output by solar panels in 2019 was 681 terawatt-hours (pg 24 in this pdf https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/52f66a88-0b63-4ad2-94a5-29d36e864b82/KeyWorldEnergyStatistics2021.pdf https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/52f66a88-0b63-4ad2-...). So you need to 20x global solar energy output and somehow spread most of that to countries that can’t afford or aren’t interested in building and maintaining huge solar plants. But they already have built and know how to maintain their coal plants. Zero-emission synthetic coal and gasoline are zero-friction drop-in upgrades that obviate the need for probably trillions of international investment and enormous political and diplomatic effort. Alternatively, you could run the massive carbon capture plants on solar energy instead of nuclear, and still ship these “completely clean conventionals” worldwide. It would mean building 3x as many plants for the same output since they could only run during bright daylight hours. You could bring this 3x number down by instead building (once again commensurately massive) energy storage plants as an intermediary between the solar plants and the carbon capture plants, calculating the impact of all three in order to optimally balance generation, storage, and production. There’s even a crude political/rhetorical argument: you don’t have to convince redneck hicks to sell their gas guzzling Hummer and buy a Prius. Likewise there’s no need to sanction holdout countries to force them to accept enormous globalist investments in order to build solar power plants in their country. Finally, I would add this emphatically is a solution looking for a problem. I want to see nuclear power used because I believe it is currently being misrepresented by at least one or two orders magnitude due to regulation and subsidy differentials, and its usage at scale will reveal that discrepancy.

Gwypaas 4y ago
Now you are conflating primary energy usage and what the consumers need. Any thermal engine is cooling away 40-80% of the energy. For coal it is about 60% to 70% depending on if the plant uses supercritical steam or not.
- fwlr 4y ago

scythe 4y ago

Nuclear power had the distinct advantage of existing 50 years ago. No renewable can match that! I don't think it's entirely useless to study the mistakes of the past, particularly since the same patterns may repeat themselves in the future — see e.g. the rhetoric comparing battery metal mining to the environmental impact of petrochemical extraction.

pfdietz 4y ago
The past is dead, as the US and French attempts at reviving nuclear power plant construction are showing. One thing to note is how incredibly dangerous construction was in the past, including during the first nuclear rollout. The rate of deaths among construction workers was something like a factor of 5 higher in the 1960s as it is now. Did construction become more expensive because these deaths were deemed unacceptable? If so, you're not going to see cheaper nuclear without great relaxation of worker safety rules.
pasttense01 4y ago
The renewable hydro existed long before 50 years ago.

opo 4y ago

As your source shows, solar can be very cheap (utility grade solar providing power when it is sunny) to the most expensive form of electrical power in the world (residential solar on rooftops). You can also see that if you also want power when it isn't sunny (or windy if using windmills) you need to add in the cost of utility grade storage which noticeably increases the costs.