5 ms·

> I can't believe that modern nuclear plants wouldn't be dramatically more profitable. I can. First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl happened, h

> I can't believe that modern nuclear plants wouldn't be dramatically more profitable. I can. First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That costs money. Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better backup plans. That costs money. Renewables skip this completely. Second, renewables also benefit from progress, but a lot more. Solar and wind are mass industry production. Each iteration is cheap. Experimentation is cheap and safe and done all over the world. Production is highly amenable towards automation. Nuclear isn't. So we have factories pumping out millions of solar cells, but we don't have factories pumping out millions of nuclear vessels, because nuclear plants are rare, one off projects that don't justify mass production, and are too rare to have a robust industry and lots of competition. > Even if they weren't, it would be worth government incentives to prevent grid destabilization as wind and solar take over as the main sources. Yeah, but there are other options that can be used. Eg, yeah, we can spend decades building nuclear and waiting until it starts to work, or we can do things like improving the grid transmission which works out to simple tasks that are doable much faster and amenable to mass production. Same goes for say, pumped hydro and battery storage. Those things can already be done, and you can start doing it much faster than you'll get nuclear built.

Manuel_D 4y ago
> First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That costs money. Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor. > Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better backup plans. Most places aren't subject to magnitude 9.1 earthquakes, so no such plans are needed. Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale. Building a nuclear power plant involves constructing things like pressure vessels and steam generators that have no market outside of nuclear power construction. The price history of nuclear plants demonstrates this: The plants built during the nuclear boom during the late 60s and early 70s were some of the cheapest forms of decarbonized energy production [1]. Producing a run of 40 steam generators [2] is a lot cheaper than a run of 4 steam generators. Same with pressure vessels, and other costly components. Serialized production of the same design yields cost savings. > Same goes for say, pumped hydro and battery storage. Those things can already be done, and you can start doing it much faster than you'll get nuclear built. No, we can't. This is just hand-waving away the biggest obstacle to widespread deployment of intermittent sources. Hydro storage is geographically dependent: you essentially need to be able to create an artificial alpine lake, and it needs to be close to an existing lake or river in order to fill it. Battery storage remains prohibitively expensive. The actual cost of battery storage is much higher than the raw cost of lithium batteries [3]. Labor, installation, and DC to AC conversion equipment leads to net costs of ~$500/KWh. This is why plans for a grid primarily powered intermittent sources assume that some other battery chemistry or hydrogen storage will make energy storage essentially free. 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power... 3. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-costs-rise-interconnection-queue-12-gw/621954/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor. The point is that nuclear is safe because we've been making it safer over time, and that rarely makes it cheaper. The specific ways in which that's done isn't the point. Mass production in general is made cheaper by simplifying and cutting corners. Nuclear isn't terribly friendly towards this, you can't just go "How about we use 30% less concrete?" > Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale. Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely because of what you said, they have no other market use. You'll need to convince industries that it's worth scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That will be tricky. > No, we can't. You're missing the point. Here's what I envision: 1. Renewables continue to eat nuclear's lunch 2. Nuclear keeps not getting built 3. Eventually grid destabilizes 4. People want solutions, right now At point 4, nobody is going to sit there and wait 5-10 years for nuclear to be built. Yeah, batteries are expensive, but remember Tesla's battery in Australia that got done in 100 days? So that's how I see things going. Once the shit hits the fan, urgent solutions will be needed. And pretty much everything is much faster than nuclear. I'm not envisioning some utopic future, but one where problems will be ignored until something goes quite wrong, that's going to suck for a while, then things get hurriedly rectified in a huge rush and at great expense, but that will still favor non-nuclear solutions.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    > The point is that nuclear is safe because we've been making it safer over time, and that rarely makes it cheaper. The specific ways in which that's done isn't the point. Er, no it is the point. We've always been using the safety mechanisms you specified, so it's not going to affect costs because those safety features have always been there. > Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely because of what you said, they have no other market use. You'll need to convince industries that it's worth scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That will be tricky. Quite the contrary, it makes it benefit vastly more from economies of scale. For example, one of the central components in a wind turbine is an alternator or dynamo. We make alternators for all kinds of products, so doubling the production of wind turbines doesn't remotely double the market for alternators because wind turbines are only a small segment of the market for alternators. By comparison, nuclear pressure vessels are only used for nuclear power plants. Thus doubling the production of nuclear pressure vessels doubles the market for pressure vessels. Serialized production of nuclear power at scale would easily expand the market for nuclear power components by an order of magnitude. The same cannot be said of wind turbines and alternators. You're missing the context that renewables are currently being used to supplement a primarily fossil fuel grid. This means we don't actually have to accommodate the intermittent nature of renewable production. Once renewables saturate the energy market during peak production, things become a lot harder for renewables. You're comparing apples to oranges when you compare an intermittent source to a non-intermittent source. People want solutions right now, and intermittent sources are not a solution until cheap and scalable energy storage is invented. Which it hasn't. We have geographically-limited options like hydro which are good for the regions that have access to it. But for everywhere else, it's either continue to use fossil fuels or nuclear power. > Yeah, batteries are expensive, but remember Tesla's battery in Australia that got done in 100 days? How much does it store? Media reports this as "2,000 megawatt seconds" [1]. In other words, 0.55 megawatt hours. This is less electricity than a small nuclear plant produces every minute. To put this in perspective the US alone consumes about 12 TWh (or 12,000,000 MWh) of electricity every day. We'd need tens of millions of these battery facilities. Again, there's a reason why plans for a primary renewable grid assume hydrogen storage, or some new battery chemistry will be a silver bullet for storage. 1. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-begins-providing-inertia-grid-services-at-scale-in-world-first-in-australia/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-beg...

Manuel_D 4y ago

> First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That costs money. Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor. > Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better backup plans. Most places aren't subject to magnitude 9.1 earthquakes, so no such plans are needed. Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale. Building a nuclear power plant involves constructing things like pressure vessels and steam generators that have no market outside of nuclear power construction. The price history of nuclear plants demonstrates this: The plants built during the nuclear boom during the late 60s and early 70s were some of the cheapest forms of decarbonized energy production [1]. Producing a run of 40 steam generators [2] is a lot cheaper than a run of 4 steam generators. Same with pressure vessels, and other costly components. Serialized production of the same design yields cost savings. > Same goes for say, pumped hydro and battery storage. Those things can already be done, and you can start doing it much faster than you'll get nuclear built. No, we can't. This is just hand-waving away the biggest obstacle to widespread deployment of intermittent sources. Hydro storage is geographically dependent: you essentially need to be able to create an artificial alpine lake, and it needs to be close to an existing lake or river in order to fill it. Battery storage remains prohibitively expensive. The actual cost of battery storage is much higher than the raw cost of lithium batteries [3]. Labor, installation, and DC to AC conversion equipment leads to net costs of ~$500/KWh. This is why plans for a grid primarily powered intermittent sources assume that some other battery chemistry or hydrogen storage will make energy storage essentially free. 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power... 3. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-costs-rise-interconnection-queue-12-gw/621954/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...

dale_glass 4y ago
> Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor. The point is that nuclear is safe because we've been making it safer over time, and that rarely makes it cheaper. The specific ways in which that's done isn't the point. Mass production in general is made cheaper by simplifying and cutting corners. Nuclear isn't terribly friendly towards this, you can't just go "How about we use 30% less concrete?" > Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale. Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely because of what you said, they have no other market use. You'll need to convince industries that it's worth scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That will be tricky. > No, we can't. You're missing the point. Here's what I envision: 1. Renewables continue to eat nuclear's lunch 2. Nuclear keeps not getting built 3. Eventually grid destabilizes 4. People want solutions, right now At point 4, nobody is going to sit there and wait 5-10 years for nuclear to be built. Yeah, batteries are expensive, but remember Tesla's battery in Australia that got done in 100 days? So that's how I see things going. Once the shit hits the fan, urgent solutions will be needed. And pretty much everything is much faster than nuclear. I'm not envisioning some utopic future, but one where problems will be ignored until something goes quite wrong, that's going to suck for a while, then things get hurriedly rectified in a huge rush and at great expense, but that will still favor non-nuclear solutions.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > The point is that nuclear is safe because we've been making it safer over time, and that rarely makes it cheaper. The specific ways in which that's done isn't the point. Er, no it is the point. We've always been using the safety mechanisms you specified, so it's not going to affect costs because those safety features have always been there. > Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely because of what you said, they have no other market use. You'll need to convince industries that it's worth scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That will be tricky. Quite the contrary, it makes it benefit vastly more from economies of scale. For example, one of the central components in a wind turbine is an alternator or dynamo. We make alternators for all kinds of products, so doubling the production of wind turbines doesn't remotely double the market for alternators because wind turbines are only a small segment of the market for alternators. By comparison, nuclear pressure vessels are only used for nuclear power plants. Thus doubling the production of nuclear pressure vessels doubles the market for pressure vessels. Serialized production of nuclear power at scale would easily expand the market for nuclear power components by an order of magnitude. The same cannot be said of wind turbines and alternators. You're missing the context that renewables are currently being used to supplement a primarily fossil fuel grid. This means we don't actually have to accommodate the intermittent nature of renewable production. Once renewables saturate the energy market during peak production, things become a lot harder for renewables. You're comparing apples to oranges when you compare an intermittent source to a non-intermittent source. People want solutions right now, and intermittent sources are not a solution until cheap and scalable energy storage is invented. Which it hasn't. We have geographically-limited options like hydro which are good for the regions that have access to it. But for everywhere else, it's either continue to use fossil fuels or nuclear power. > Yeah, batteries are expensive, but remember Tesla's battery in Australia that got done in 100 days? How much does it store? Media reports this as "2,000 megawatt seconds" [1]. In other words, 0.55 megawatt hours. This is less electricity than a small nuclear plant produces every minute. To put this in perspective the US alone consumes about 12 TWh (or 12,000,000 MWh) of electricity every day. We'd need tens of millions of these battery facilities. Again, there's a reason why plans for a primary renewable grid assume hydrogen storage, or some new battery chemistry will be a silver bullet for storage. 1. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-begins-providing-inertia-grid-services-at-scale-in-world-first-in-australia/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-beg...