5 ms·

One project in 30 years doesn't benefit from economies of scale. Nuclear is the only hope we have to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Sola

One project in 30 years doesn't benefit from economies of scale. Nuclear is the only hope we have to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Solar and Wind should be used whenever possible, but they are not 100% of our solution mix, even if they are the majority. If we want to mitigate the impact of climate change, we need to invest in decreasing Nuclear costs and building many more plants in the US.

jakewins 3y ago
Nuclear is dope and we should build tons of it, but it ain’t our only hope; plenty of other alternatives to build at the same time. Eg hydro, overprovisioning solar or wind, transmission to remove local weather variations, coupling wind and solar, demand flexibility. Fervo just started its first full-scale new-gen geothermal plant, for instance; 24/7 firm power. You might like David Roberts interview with Tim Latimer about it: https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally...
- forrestthewoods 3y ago
  Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.
  - switchbak 3y ago
    Canada's energy mix is roughly 60% hydro, and some provinces are well past 90%. You ought to check your numbers.
    - forrestthewoods 3y ago
      No offense, but Canada isn’t relevant on the global scale. Hydro use is growing, especially in developing countries. However it’s a shrinking percentage of total energy generation. There is an absolute cap on theoretical hydro energy production, and it isn’t enough. Hydro is low carbon and renewable. But it isn’t green, and it’s not enough.
    - KptMarchewa 3y ago
      Canada is second-largest country by area, occupying around 6.5% of Earth's land surface. It's only 37th by population, with 0.5% of world's population. It's very non-representative example.
  - jakewins 3y ago
    True but PV+wind make our existing dams go much further - recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season. Adding PV means hydro can save much more of its water, just dispensing to “fill in the gaps”. This is already how the hydro in Norway and Sweden operates, you can see it daily if you look at the hourly power breakdowns by generation type. But I agree, I hope we will get to a point where we can decommission the big dams..
    - xyzzyz 3y ago
      > recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season That’s not quite how it works. Consider the biggest hydro project in US, the Columbia river, with its 14 dams. The system does fill up in the rainy season, but the crucial thing is that it’s not the dams that do fill up, but rather the whole watershed, meaning things like snowfall and ground water. This means that we have very limited amount of control over when we let the water through. We can’t just dam the river for an extended period: if we don’t use it for generating power, we must spill (waste) it. This means in practice that the dams are not batteries: to a large degree, it‘s use-it-or-lose-it. To make these into batteries, we’d need to somehow refurbish the dams to tremendously increase the power generating capacity on each dam, so that instead of assumption of continuous flow (either through turbines or spillways), we make the flow more intermittent, so that we can make up for closed times by pushing more water through during open times. This is tremendously difficult in practice: dams are simply not designed to allow for refurbishing with many more turbines or much more flow through them than they were originally designed for, the upstream reservoirs are not designed for quickly varying water levels, etc. Point is, we can’t just “save the water”.
      - Arrath 3y ago
        > That’s not quite how it works. Yeah in reality there are two forms of hydropower: the classic reservoir dam, and 'run of the river' powerplants. You're absolutely right, even reservoir dams don't really fulfill the 'annual battery' idea, since they must maintain some minimum outflow for downstream consumers and can't shut it off entirely if it better suits the power generation goal.
  - mywittyname 3y ago
    > But hydro sucks more than most people realize. There's a reason Russia blew up the Kakhovka hydro dam. The down-stream impacts of the flooding were more devastating than what they could reasonably accomplish with conventional weapons.
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      No. It killed <75 people. They blew up the dam because it was also a bridge and removing it allowed them to redeploy troops to the east.
      - KptMarchewa 3y ago
        I'm as far from russia apologist as can be - but they blew the bridge part few months earlier, in November. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHLImMbnAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHLImMbnAw
        ethbr0 3y ago
        They dented and rendered the road inoperable months earlier. But the thing about dams is that they're over-engineered and massive. Even with high explosives it's difficult to demolish one. Hence why dam busting bombs were large (>4000 kg) and still required underwater detonation to boost their power [0]. It wasn't unreasonable for the Russians to expect Ukraine might be able to seize a bridgehead on the far side, rebuild an operable road over the dam, and then rush armor (and logistics) across it. Much harder and more time consuming when there are no longer any load bearing remnants available. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise#The_attacks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise#The_attac...
        KptMarchewa 3y ago
        >It wasn't unreasonable for the Russians to expect Ukraine might be able to seize a bridgehead on the far side, rebuild an operable road over the dam, and then rush armor (and logistics) across it. It was, as much as it was unreasonable for russians - that's why they ran over to that side of river.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    Looking this up. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html > Hoover Dam generates, on average, about 4 billion kilowatt-hours. And the lake covers an area of 1,495,806 acres Rough estimate, 2GW worth of solar produces that much in a year. And requires I think 12000 acres of land. (Open to have phat fingered the calcs) My take away is it's not even economic anymore and requires flooding 100 times more land then a solar plant.
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      Dams still get built for non-power reasons, to manage water supplies, so adding turbines (and floating solar PV) to them might make sense, but yes I think we're now at the point where new hydro purely for energy production is going to struggle to make a case for itself against just deploying renewables and batteries and interconnects. edit: to add some context re the Hoover dam: > Upon becoming Secretary of Commerce in 1921, Hoover proposed the construction of a dam on the Colorado River. In addition to flood control and irrigation, it would provide a dependable supply of water for Los Angeles and Southern California.
    - KptMarchewa 3y ago
      It's not exactly relevant how much solar produces per year - it's very important _when_ the energy can be produced and how much you can control that.
  - newZWhoDis 3y ago
    Absolute nonsense. Your attitude is actively harmful to decarbonization. Ecosystem change =/= ecosystem destruction. The lake produced by a dam is a far more beneficial ecosystem to a much broader range of life than the river that preceded it
    - nicpottier 3y ago
      Source? I like hydro but this is not at all what people I know working in this field believe to be true.
  - thatswrong0 3y ago
    My assumption is that rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere pose a much greater existential threat to humanity than localized ecosystem damage resulting from river blockages. But maybe I'm wrong. Speaking of hydro, I do think pumped hydro-storage ought to be looked at a lot more for energy storage (esp. versus giant lithium-ion battery banks), especially as we transition to inconsistent renewable sources like solar and wind. I'd assume that creating new, isolated bodies of water wouldn't incur as much ecological damage as blocking off existing rivers or greatly increasing our mining of rare earth minerals)
    - sidewndr46 3y ago
      But it isn't "localized ecosystem damage". Building dams absolutely fucking destroys the ecosystems upstream and downstream. It's the civil engineering of burning the crops when you retreat. The "new" ecosystem has nothing in common with the prior ecosystems.
      - DiscourseFan 3y ago
        I'd rather some species of fish die out than the ocean boils, personally
        thatswrong0 3y ago
        Yeah. And dams can be removed (and as far as I can tell, nature is relatively adaptable and can recover).
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    Hydro is only source of renewable power that generates >50% of any country's electricity grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable... Wind caps out at 42% with Denmark, solar at 15% in Australia. Many countries have nearly 100% of their electricity coming from hydroelectricity. Besides nuclear power, hydroelectricity is one of the few non-intermittent sources of renewable energy - sure, rainfall does technically make hydro intermittent in a sense, but it's not going to change output on a dime when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing. Well, you also have geothermal power, but that's even more geographically constrained than hydro.
    - forrestthewoods 3y ago
      That’s a non sequitur. I never said hydro wasn’t renewable. I said it wasn’t clean. Most people think of hydro as renewable and low carbon and clean. Two are true, one is false. Hydro is dirty and, imho, we should phase it out the same way we should phase coal out. Nuclear isn’t renewable by most definitions. But it is low carbon and clean. Nuclear was good 40 years ago. Solar is getting good. Wind I don’t know much about. Hydro is an ok bootstrap but is much dirtier and more problematic than most people realize.
      - Manuel_D 3y ago
        Hydro is indeed clean in that it does not emit greenhouse gases. Sure, it disrupts life around the dammed waterway. But that's way less of an impact than climate change.
        therealdrag0 3y ago
        Hydro emits huge amounts of GHG when flooded organic matter decomposes btw.
        Manuel_D 3y ago
        This is a one-time overhead emission, and I doubt it's "huge" compared to even a small amount of fossil fuel use.
- azinman2 3y ago
  Every serious analysis in green energy has never been able to make it work without nuclear.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    This is a baldfaced lie (unless you are engaging a No True Scotsman dismissal of the large number of studies that say otherwise.)
    - azinman2 3y ago
      https://youtu.be/bkIK4Xo1GRM https://youtu.be/bkIK4Xo1GRM
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Not wasting 100 minutes of my life on that. I'd read a paper defending such a claim. In the meantime, here are a large number of abstracts of peer reviewed papers showing 100% RE is feasible: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/100PercentPaperAbstracts.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Comb... Here's a review article on 100% RE studies: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 "The main conclusion of most of these studies is that 100% renewables is feasible worldwide at low cost."
chris222 3y ago
I’m not so sure with overprovisioning, batteries and controllable load. Also pumped hydro and other gravity batteries. We barely have any storage on the grid right now.
- weaksauce 3y ago
  > Also pumped hydro and other gravity batteries pumped hydro is not a winner. the locations that could be used are few and far between and require massive amounts of water and wreak ecological nightmare on a wide area.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    The locations where pumped hydro could be used are extremely abundant. Remember, it doesn't have to be on a river. It can be out in a desert! Here's an example of a project being built in Nevada. Basin and Range geography, more vertical relief than you can shake a stick at. Look how small this thing is for the capacity! https://www.cityofelynv.gov/pdf/CityCouncil2021/cc1-28-21/WhitePinePumpedStorage_January282021PresentationtoElyCityCouncil.pdf https://www.cityofelynv.gov/pdf/CityCouncil2021/cc1-28-21/Wh... https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/ https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/ (the whole thing could be sped up; that's a general problem in the US)
    - XorNot 3y ago
      The problem with pumped-hydro is - and all storage based solutions is - how low can you let the storage get before it's an emergency? Electricity is a vital service: completely vital. Without it, modern civilization halts. It might be annoying being unable to make a cup of coffee, but municipal water and sewage need electricity to work. You go without power for a week, and the entire wastewater infrastructure will start shutting down. Refrigeration and food storage fails. Even backup fuel storage becomes a liability because you need electricity to pump it around. So the question is, how low can you let the reservoir get? Because it's not about how long you could run going from 100% to 0% - it's how much of it can you use. And we have a model for this, in the form of another service: city townwater supplies. In Australia, water restrictions go into effect when we hit <50% water capacity in the dams. That's the level at which usage cuts are applied to try and ensure we don't run out. At <40% we increase the severity. But this sort of resource exhaustion is also slow - we lose storage capacity over the course of months, not days. And this is a resource which is dependent on electricity to supply (we also have a desalination plant, so we have some guaranteed capacity). So within that context then - i.e. imagine you're planning a nation-state electricity supply, what are your risks? - how good does pumped hydro - or any storage-based solution - look, when your requirement is "the power cannot go off - ever". Put on your systems engineering hat, treat it like a software deployment - what level of redundancy and overbuild would you want when you're told "this is a mission critical, safety-critical system consuming an intermittently available resource". How much capacity and overbuild would you believe is necessary to have confidence, or even decision-making capability, when pressured?
KerrAvon 3y ago
Counterpoint just because someone has to go against the pro-nuclear orthodoxy here: economy of scale won't fix nuclear power. You will never get the cost (or risk) down far enough with existing technology, and none of the advanced technologies have panned out so far. And large scale renewables + battery storage are good enough.
- coldpie 3y ago
  > And large scale renewables + battery storage are good enough. I wish this were true, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that it is. Up here in Minnesota, we heat our homes with natural gas. Once that's converted to electric, that's a _lot_ of energy to generate and store, and it has to be absolutely reliable for six straight months or you're talking mass death. Nuclear seems like a perfect fit for this scenario. I think it's a poor choice to take it off the table.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Generating green hydrogen with renewables and then burning it in combined cycle plants would be cheaper than Vogtle-level nuclear.
    - _hypx 3y ago
      Maybe. The thing about nuclear reactors is that the fuel cost is nearly zero on account of how little of it you need. Even with reprocessing, it is still <$0.01/kWh. So nearly all cost with nuclear is upfront. Mass production of nuclear power plants will drive that down dramatically. Nuclear, if done at scale, is can be very cheap. So having a stable source of cheap electricity that can be built in nearly any location is still a good idea. Even in a world with super cheap green hydrogen.
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        With nuclear you're burning your powerplant, essentially. That the fuel is comparatively cheap is irrelevant, since that's not what's dominating the cost of power.
pfdietz 3y ago
> Nuclear is the only hope we have to do to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Nuclear would be entirely unsuited for this task. Nuclear provides baseload, it doesn't fill in gaps. If you try to run the reactor intermittently to counterbalance an intermittent source the cost of its output increases massively.
- belorn 3y ago
  That is true when the market price is fairly static and doesn't change much. This is how it used to be when fossil fueled power dominated the grid, since the biggest cost is the fuel and that could scale based on demand. For EU this is no longer the case. The difference in market price between low and high can be above 100x. In theory a power plant could earn as much in 4 days as an other plant earn in a year worth of power generation. This is why all those nations started to bailout the power bills of businesses and citizens last winter. A single month for some people costed more than a years worth of power. For companies with contract obligations, paying what ever the market demanded was the lesser evil. The US is not in the same situation, but the energy grid there is still a market based one. There is also other technologies that could in theory compete in such volatile market.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Those high points are better addressed by such things as hydrogen-burning turbines. Hydrogen produced from excess renewables during the price troughs, stored underground, then burned at the peaks. Because the capacity factor of these turbines would be low the cost of fuel would be acceptable, and their capital cost would be an order of magnitude below what a nuclear plant would cost, per unit of power output. Europe has enough salt formations to store many petawatt hours of hydrogen, far far more than would be needed.
    - belorn 3y ago
      People are naturally allowed to invest in what ever technology they think will fit the role best, such as green hydrogen. No one is investing in that, there exist no hydrogen-burning turbines that burn green hydrogen, but someone could become the first and do that. Producers of green hydrogen are currently more interested in delivering green steel, which pays much better than hydrogen-burning turbines. The general idea is that this will in the future reduce prices down to energy grid levels, and a researcher here in Sweden working on such project estimated prices to drop to those levels around ~2060-2080. This could happen much earlier if prices continue to increase as they do, but who knows. It would make for a good A/B testing to produce both and see which one was the cheaper option, and if the green hydrogen power plant fail they can always just produce more hydrogen for steel production.
rhaway84773 3y ago
Until we’re willing to let Iran, Pakistan, the Talibani Afghanistan build nuclear power plants, nuclear is no hope of anything other than an energy apartheid. And that’s the optimistic scenario where it actually works well, scales, can be built out rapidly, and is not extremely expensive.
dyno12345 3y ago
The US Navy seems to be able to do it
- kibwen 3y ago
  The navy uses nuclear reactors for tactical reasons, not economic reasons. Nuclear-powered ships are significantly more expensive.
  - discodave 3y ago
    The US Navy builds many reactors for the price of this power plant. A Virginia class submarine in 2023 costs $4.3 billion (that's for the whole submarine), it has a 210MW S9G reactor. The Vogtle Unit 3 was $17 billion over budget, for a $30 billion total budget, for 1,100 MW. $204MM / MW for the US Navy vs $273MM / MW for Georgia Power et. al. This project makes nuclear submarines look like a bargain! Sources: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine * https://apnews.com/article/georgia-power-co-southern-climate-and-environment-business-3b1d6c65353c6a65b1ccfddede753ab7 https://apnews.com/article/georgia-power-co-southern-climate...
    - philipkglass 3y ago
      Following the references from the Wikipedia article, I found that the S9G reactor is rated for 210 megawatts of thermal output. The AP1000 reactor that this article is about has a 3415 megawatt thermal output: https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/ap1000-pwr/overview https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/ap1000-pw... The naval reactor is more expensive per unit of output.
photochemsyn 3y ago
How can costs be reduced? You can't skimp on over-engineering nuclear reactors because they have to be designed and built to deal with rare 'black swan' events, such as jetliners crashing into the reactor core. E.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/us/18nuke.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/us/18nuke.html > "The rule, approved by the commission in a 4-to-0 vote, requires that new reactors be designed so their containment structure would remain intact after a plane crash, cooling systems would continue to operate and spent fuel pools would be protected." You can't risk a failure in the primary cooling system, and since reactors need active cooling in the event of a regional grid power failure just to avoid core meltdown, you need onsight power generation capable of running the cooling loop 24-7 (failure in this system led to the Fukushima explosions). These systems (from cooling loops to steam generators) are under constant stress and have relatively high maintenance costs (a major factor in the closure of California's San Onofre reactor). Then you have to add in the cost of the uranium fuel rods, which is a complex supply chain issue in many countries (the recent coup in Niger has shut down 1/3 of France's uranium ore supply chain for their reactors, say news reports). Uranium supplies are limited and historically uranium prices get volatile when it seems a reactor boom is coming (look at right before Fukushima). Then you have the long-term costs of spent fuel treatment and secure storage, and eventual reactor decommissioning. I really don't see anyway to reduce these costs such that nuclear will be anywhere near cost-competitive with today's solar/wind/storage complexes, that are entirely capable of producing reliable 24/7 grid power at costs well below that of a comparable nuclear power plant in most locations.
- zamalek 3y ago
  We've effectively forgotten how to build (specifically engineer) nuclear reactors. This is very similar to problems faced by the space program somewhat recently. During the 3 decade pause people retired and memories faded, there were no apprentices to carry the wisdom forward. > How can costs be reduced? Build more reactors, and re-learn how to build them. Note that this doesn't touch on economies of scale, which will likely never really apply to nuclear power. Nuclear is likely to always have immense up-front costs, but it shouldn't cost this much.
  - 3y ago
cycomanic 3y ago
Large infrastructure projects (and nuclear is certainly one) don't benefit from economies of scale. Half of a nuclear power plant is essentially the same as a coal plant and they have not gone down in price either. The reality is even assuming that we can not overcome shortages in solar and wind by overprovisioning and storage (and studies say otherwise), it does not make any sense to build nuclear instead of solar/wind as long as we are still running coal. We get much bigger CO2 reduction bang for our buck with solar and wind. Building nuclear would therefore effectively increase our CO2 over alternatives. This is especially true as nuclear plants have a relatively long ROI (in terms of CO2.
- jemmyw 3y ago
  If half is the same as a coal plant could existing coal plants be converted to nuclear? They would be in the right places for power generation and it would be a win by reducing coal and not having to build a whole new plant.
  - preisschild 3y ago
    Thats already the plan for some coal sites. TerraPower (Bill Gates is the Chairman) wants to convert the first one in Wyoming. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/doe-report-finds-hundreds-retiring-coal-plant-sites-could-convert-nuclear https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/doe-report-finds-hundreds...
- preisschild 3y ago
  Large infrastructure projects (and nuclear is certainly one) don't benefit from economies of scale. If you do them regularly, then sure they do. You already have trained workers, an intact supply chain and contact with the regulators.

jakewins 3y ago

Nuclear is dope and we should build tons of it, but it ain’t our only hope; plenty of other alternatives to build at the same time. Eg hydro, overprovisioning solar or wind, transmission to remove local weather variations, coupling wind and solar, demand flexibility. Fervo just started its first full-scale new-gen geothermal plant, for instance; 24/7 firm power. You might like David Roberts interview with Tim Latimer about it: https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally#details https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally...

forrestthewoods 3y ago
Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.
- switchbak 3y ago
  Canada's energy mix is roughly 60% hydro, and some provinces are well past 90%. You ought to check your numbers.
  - forrestthewoods 3y ago
    No offense, but Canada isn’t relevant on the global scale. Hydro use is growing, especially in developing countries. However it’s a shrinking percentage of total energy generation. There is an absolute cap on theoretical hydro energy production, and it isn’t enough. Hydro is low carbon and renewable. But it isn’t green, and it’s not enough.
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    Canada is second-largest country by area, occupying around 6.5% of Earth's land surface. It's only 37th by population, with 0.5% of world's population. It's very non-representative example.
- jakewins 3y ago
  True but PV+wind make our existing dams go much further - recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season. Adding PV means hydro can save much more of its water, just dispensing to “fill in the gaps”. This is already how the hydro in Norway and Sweden operates, you can see it daily if you look at the hourly power breakdowns by generation type. But I agree, I hope we will get to a point where we can decommission the big dams..
  - xyzzyz 3y ago
    > recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season That’s not quite how it works. Consider the biggest hydro project in US, the Columbia river, with its 14 dams. The system does fill up in the rainy season, but the crucial thing is that it’s not the dams that do fill up, but rather the whole watershed, meaning things like snowfall and ground water. This means that we have very limited amount of control over when we let the water through. We can’t just dam the river for an extended period: if we don’t use it for generating power, we must spill (waste) it. This means in practice that the dams are not batteries: to a large degree, it‘s use-it-or-lose-it. To make these into batteries, we’d need to somehow refurbish the dams to tremendously increase the power generating capacity on each dam, so that instead of assumption of continuous flow (either through turbines or spillways), we make the flow more intermittent, so that we can make up for closed times by pushing more water through during open times. This is tremendously difficult in practice: dams are simply not designed to allow for refurbishing with many more turbines or much more flow through them than they were originally designed for, the upstream reservoirs are not designed for quickly varying water levels, etc. Point is, we can’t just “save the water”.
    - Arrath 3y ago
      > That’s not quite how it works. Yeah in reality there are two forms of hydropower: the classic reservoir dam, and 'run of the river' powerplants. You're absolutely right, even reservoir dams don't really fulfill the 'annual battery' idea, since they must maintain some minimum outflow for downstream consumers and can't shut it off entirely if it better suits the power generation goal.
- mywittyname 3y ago
  > But hydro sucks more than most people realize. There's a reason Russia blew up the Kakhovka hydro dam. The down-stream impacts of the flooding were more devastating than what they could reasonably accomplish with conventional weapons.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    No. It killed <75 people. They blew up the dam because it was also a bridge and removing it allowed them to redeploy troops to the east.
    - KptMarchewa 3y ago
      I'm as far from russia apologist as can be - but they blew the bridge part few months earlier, in November. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHLImMbnAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHLImMbnAw
      - ethbr0 3y ago
        They dented and rendered the road inoperable months earlier. But the thing about dams is that they're over-engineered and massive. Even with high explosives it's difficult to demolish one. Hence why dam busting bombs were large (>4000 kg) and still required underwater detonation to boost their power [0]. It wasn't unreasonable for the Russians to expect Ukraine might be able to seize a bridgehead on the far side, rebuild an operable road over the dam, and then rush armor (and logistics) across it. Much harder and more time consuming when there are no longer any load bearing remnants available. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise#The_attacks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise#The_attac...
        KptMarchewa 3y ago
        >It wasn't unreasonable for the Russians to expect Ukraine might be able to seize a bridgehead on the far side, rebuild an operable road over the dam, and then rush armor (and logistics) across it. It was, as much as it was unreasonable for russians - that's why they ran over to that side of river.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  Looking this up. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html > Hoover Dam generates, on average, about 4 billion kilowatt-hours. And the lake covers an area of 1,495,806 acres Rough estimate, 2GW worth of solar produces that much in a year. And requires I think 12000 acres of land. (Open to have phat fingered the calcs) My take away is it's not even economic anymore and requires flooding 100 times more land then a solar plant.
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    Dams still get built for non-power reasons, to manage water supplies, so adding turbines (and floating solar PV) to them might make sense, but yes I think we're now at the point where new hydro purely for energy production is going to struggle to make a case for itself against just deploying renewables and batteries and interconnects. edit: to add some context re the Hoover dam: > Upon becoming Secretary of Commerce in 1921, Hoover proposed the construction of a dam on the Colorado River. In addition to flood control and irrigation, it would provide a dependable supply of water for Los Angeles and Southern California.
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    It's not exactly relevant how much solar produces per year - it's very important _when_ the energy can be produced and how much you can control that.
- newZWhoDis 3y ago
  Absolute nonsense. Your attitude is actively harmful to decarbonization. Ecosystem change =/= ecosystem destruction. The lake produced by a dam is a far more beneficial ecosystem to a much broader range of life than the river that preceded it
  - nicpottier 3y ago
    Source? I like hydro but this is not at all what people I know working in this field believe to be true.
- thatswrong0 3y ago
  My assumption is that rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere pose a much greater existential threat to humanity than localized ecosystem damage resulting from river blockages. But maybe I'm wrong. Speaking of hydro, I do think pumped hydro-storage ought to be looked at a lot more for energy storage (esp. versus giant lithium-ion battery banks), especially as we transition to inconsistent renewable sources like solar and wind. I'd assume that creating new, isolated bodies of water wouldn't incur as much ecological damage as blocking off existing rivers or greatly increasing our mining of rare earth minerals)
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    But it isn't "localized ecosystem damage". Building dams absolutely fucking destroys the ecosystems upstream and downstream. It's the civil engineering of burning the crops when you retreat. The "new" ecosystem has nothing in common with the prior ecosystems.
    - DiscourseFan 3y ago
      I'd rather some species of fish die out than the ocean boils, personally
      - thatswrong0 3y ago
        Yeah. And dams can be removed (and as far as I can tell, nature is relatively adaptable and can recover).
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  Hydro is only source of renewable power that generates >50% of any country's electricity grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable... Wind caps out at 42% with Denmark, solar at 15% in Australia. Many countries have nearly 100% of their electricity coming from hydroelectricity. Besides nuclear power, hydroelectricity is one of the few non-intermittent sources of renewable energy - sure, rainfall does technically make hydro intermittent in a sense, but it's not going to change output on a dime when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing. Well, you also have geothermal power, but that's even more geographically constrained than hydro.
  - forrestthewoods 3y ago
    That’s a non sequitur. I never said hydro wasn’t renewable. I said it wasn’t clean. Most people think of hydro as renewable and low carbon and clean. Two are true, one is false. Hydro is dirty and, imho, we should phase it out the same way we should phase coal out. Nuclear isn’t renewable by most definitions. But it is low carbon and clean. Nuclear was good 40 years ago. Solar is getting good. Wind I don’t know much about. Hydro is an ok bootstrap but is much dirtier and more problematic than most people realize.
    - Manuel_D 3y ago
      Hydro is indeed clean in that it does not emit greenhouse gases. Sure, it disrupts life around the dammed waterway. But that's way less of an impact than climate change.
      - therealdrag0 3y ago
        Hydro emits huge amounts of GHG when flooded organic matter decomposes btw.
        Manuel_D 3y ago
        This is a one-time overhead emission, and I doubt it's "huge" compared to even a small amount of fossil fuel use.
azinman2 3y ago
Every serious analysis in green energy has never been able to make it work without nuclear.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  This is a baldfaced lie (unless you are engaging a No True Scotsman dismissal of the large number of studies that say otherwise.)
  - azinman2 3y ago
    https://youtu.be/bkIK4Xo1GRM https://youtu.be/bkIK4Xo1GRM
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Not wasting 100 minutes of my life on that. I'd read a paper defending such a claim. In the meantime, here are a large number of abstracts of peer reviewed papers showing 100% RE is feasible: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CombiningRenew/100PercentPaperAbstracts.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Comb... Here's a review article on 100% RE studies: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 "The main conclusion of most of these studies is that 100% renewables is feasible worldwide at low cost."

chris222 3y ago

I’m not so sure with overprovisioning, batteries and controllable load. Also pumped hydro and other gravity batteries. We barely have any storage on the grid right now.

weaksauce 3y ago
> Also pumped hydro and other gravity batteries pumped hydro is not a winner. the locations that could be used are few and far between and require massive amounts of water and wreak ecological nightmare on a wide area.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The locations where pumped hydro could be used are extremely abundant. Remember, it doesn't have to be on a river. It can be out in a desert! Here's an example of a project being built in Nevada. Basin and Range geography, more vertical relief than you can shake a stick at. Look how small this thing is for the capacity! https://www.cityofelynv.gov/pdf/CityCouncil2021/cc1-28-21/WhitePinePumpedStorage_January282021PresentationtoElyCityCouncil.pdf https://www.cityofelynv.gov/pdf/CityCouncil2021/cc1-28-21/Wh... https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/ https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/ (the whole thing could be sped up; that's a general problem in the US)
  - XorNot 3y ago
    The problem with pumped-hydro is - and all storage based solutions is - how low can you let the storage get before it's an emergency? Electricity is a vital service: completely vital. Without it, modern civilization halts. It might be annoying being unable to make a cup of coffee, but municipal water and sewage need electricity to work. You go without power for a week, and the entire wastewater infrastructure will start shutting down. Refrigeration and food storage fails. Even backup fuel storage becomes a liability because you need electricity to pump it around. So the question is, how low can you let the reservoir get? Because it's not about how long you could run going from 100% to 0% - it's how much of it can you use. And we have a model for this, in the form of another service: city townwater supplies. In Australia, water restrictions go into effect when we hit <50% water capacity in the dams. That's the level at which usage cuts are applied to try and ensure we don't run out. At <40% we increase the severity. But this sort of resource exhaustion is also slow - we lose storage capacity over the course of months, not days. And this is a resource which is dependent on electricity to supply (we also have a desalination plant, so we have some guaranteed capacity). So within that context then - i.e. imagine you're planning a nation-state electricity supply, what are your risks? - how good does pumped hydro - or any storage-based solution - look, when your requirement is "the power cannot go off - ever". Put on your systems engineering hat, treat it like a software deployment - what level of redundancy and overbuild would you want when you're told "this is a mission critical, safety-critical system consuming an intermittently available resource". How much capacity and overbuild would you believe is necessary to have confidence, or even decision-making capability, when pressured?

KerrAvon 3y ago

Counterpoint just because someone has to go against the pro-nuclear orthodoxy here: economy of scale won't fix nuclear power. You will never get the cost (or risk) down far enough with existing technology, and none of the advanced technologies have panned out so far. And large scale renewables + battery storage are good enough.

coldpie 3y ago
> And large scale renewables + battery storage are good enough. I wish this were true, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that it is. Up here in Minnesota, we heat our homes with natural gas. Once that's converted to electric, that's a _lot_ of energy to generate and store, and it has to be absolutely reliable for six straight months or you're talking mass death. Nuclear seems like a perfect fit for this scenario. I think it's a poor choice to take it off the table.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Generating green hydrogen with renewables and then burning it in combined cycle plants would be cheaper than Vogtle-level nuclear.
  - _hypx 3y ago
    Maybe. The thing about nuclear reactors is that the fuel cost is nearly zero on account of how little of it you need. Even with reprocessing, it is still <$0.01/kWh. So nearly all cost with nuclear is upfront. Mass production of nuclear power plants will drive that down dramatically. Nuclear, if done at scale, is can be very cheap. So having a stable source of cheap electricity that can be built in nearly any location is still a good idea. Even in a world with super cheap green hydrogen.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      With nuclear you're burning your powerplant, essentially. That the fuel is comparatively cheap is irrelevant, since that's not what's dominating the cost of power.

pfdietz 3y ago

> Nuclear is the only hope we have to do to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Nuclear would be entirely unsuited for this task. Nuclear provides baseload, it doesn't fill in gaps. If you try to run the reactor intermittently to counterbalance an intermittent source the cost of its output increases massively.

belorn 3y ago
That is true when the market price is fairly static and doesn't change much. This is how it used to be when fossil fueled power dominated the grid, since the biggest cost is the fuel and that could scale based on demand. For EU this is no longer the case. The difference in market price between low and high can be above 100x. In theory a power plant could earn as much in 4 days as an other plant earn in a year worth of power generation. This is why all those nations started to bailout the power bills of businesses and citizens last winter. A single month for some people costed more than a years worth of power. For companies with contract obligations, paying what ever the market demanded was the lesser evil. The US is not in the same situation, but the energy grid there is still a market based one. There is also other technologies that could in theory compete in such volatile market.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Those high points are better addressed by such things as hydrogen-burning turbines. Hydrogen produced from excess renewables during the price troughs, stored underground, then burned at the peaks. Because the capacity factor of these turbines would be low the cost of fuel would be acceptable, and their capital cost would be an order of magnitude below what a nuclear plant would cost, per unit of power output. Europe has enough salt formations to store many petawatt hours of hydrogen, far far more than would be needed.
  - belorn 3y ago
    People are naturally allowed to invest in what ever technology they think will fit the role best, such as green hydrogen. No one is investing in that, there exist no hydrogen-burning turbines that burn green hydrogen, but someone could become the first and do that. Producers of green hydrogen are currently more interested in delivering green steel, which pays much better than hydrogen-burning turbines. The general idea is that this will in the future reduce prices down to energy grid levels, and a researcher here in Sweden working on such project estimated prices to drop to those levels around ~2060-2080. This could happen much earlier if prices continue to increase as they do, but who knows. It would make for a good A/B testing to produce both and see which one was the cheaper option, and if the green hydrogen power plant fail they can always just produce more hydrogen for steel production.

rhaway84773 3y ago

Until we’re willing to let Iran, Pakistan, the Talibani Afghanistan build nuclear power plants, nuclear is no hope of anything other than an energy apartheid. And that’s the optimistic scenario where it actually works well, scales, can be built out rapidly, and is not extremely expensive.

dyno12345 3y ago

The US Navy seems to be able to do it

kibwen 3y ago
The navy uses nuclear reactors for tactical reasons, not economic reasons. Nuclear-powered ships are significantly more expensive.
- discodave 3y ago
  The US Navy builds many reactors for the price of this power plant. A Virginia class submarine in 2023 costs $4.3 billion (that's for the whole submarine), it has a 210MW S9G reactor. The Vogtle Unit 3 was $17 billion over budget, for a $30 billion total budget, for 1,100 MW. $204MM / MW for the US Navy vs $273MM / MW for Georgia Power et. al. This project makes nuclear submarines look like a bargain! Sources: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia-class_submarine * https://apnews.com/article/georgia-power-co-southern-climate-and-environment-business-3b1d6c65353c6a65b1ccfddede753ab7 https://apnews.com/article/georgia-power-co-southern-climate...
  - philipkglass 3y ago
    Following the references from the Wikipedia article, I found that the S9G reactor is rated for 210 megawatts of thermal output. The AP1000 reactor that this article is about has a 3415 megawatt thermal output: https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/ap1000-pwr/overview https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/energy-systems/ap1000-pw... The naval reactor is more expensive per unit of output.

photochemsyn 3y ago

How can costs be reduced? You can't skimp on over-engineering nuclear reactors because they have to be designed and built to deal with rare 'black swan' events, such as jetliners crashing into the reactor core. E.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/us/18nuke.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/us/18nuke.html > "The rule, approved by the commission in a 4-to-0 vote, requires that new reactors be designed so their containment structure would remain intact after a plane crash, cooling systems would continue to operate and spent fuel pools would be protected." You can't risk a failure in the primary cooling system, and since reactors need active cooling in the event of a regional grid power failure just to avoid core meltdown, you need onsight power generation capable of running the cooling loop 24-7 (failure in this system led to the Fukushima explosions). These systems (from cooling loops to steam generators) are under constant stress and have relatively high maintenance costs (a major factor in the closure of California's San Onofre reactor). Then you have to add in the cost of the uranium fuel rods, which is a complex supply chain issue in many countries (the recent coup in Niger has shut down 1/3 of France's uranium ore supply chain for their reactors, say news reports). Uranium supplies are limited and historically uranium prices get volatile when it seems a reactor boom is coming (look at right before Fukushima). Then you have the long-term costs of spent fuel treatment and secure storage, and eventual reactor decommissioning. I really don't see anyway to reduce these costs such that nuclear will be anywhere near cost-competitive with today's solar/wind/storage complexes, that are entirely capable of producing reliable 24/7 grid power at costs well below that of a comparable nuclear power plant in most locations.

zamalek 3y ago
We've effectively forgotten how to build (specifically engineer) nuclear reactors. This is very similar to problems faced by the space program somewhat recently. During the 3 decade pause people retired and memories faded, there were no apprentices to carry the wisdom forward. > How can costs be reduced? Build more reactors, and re-learn how to build them. Note that this doesn't touch on economies of scale, which will likely never really apply to nuclear power. Nuclear is likely to always have immense up-front costs, but it shouldn't cost this much.
- 3y ago

cycomanic 3y ago

Large infrastructure projects (and nuclear is certainly one) don't benefit from economies of scale. Half of a nuclear power plant is essentially the same as a coal plant and they have not gone down in price either. The reality is even assuming that we can not overcome shortages in solar and wind by overprovisioning and storage (and studies say otherwise), it does not make any sense to build nuclear instead of solar/wind as long as we are still running coal. We get much bigger CO2 reduction bang for our buck with solar and wind. Building nuclear would therefore effectively increase our CO2 over alternatives. This is especially true as nuclear plants have a relatively long ROI (in terms of CO2.

jemmyw 3y ago
If half is the same as a coal plant could existing coal plants be converted to nuclear? They would be in the right places for power generation and it would be a win by reducing coal and not having to build a whole new plant.
- preisschild 3y ago
  Thats already the plan for some coal sites. TerraPower (Bill Gates is the Chairman) wants to convert the first one in Wyoming. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/doe-report-finds-hundreds-retiring-coal-plant-sites-could-convert-nuclear https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/doe-report-finds-hundreds...
preisschild 3y ago
Large infrastructure projects (and nuclear is certainly one) don't benefit from economies of scale. If you do them regularly, then sure they do. You already have trained workers, an intact supply chain and contact with the regulators.