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> This is why many, including myself, are against nuclear power. And this stance would be perfectly fine if the alternatives were better. If we are firing up

> This is why many, including myself, are against nuclear power. And this stance would be perfectly fine if the alternatives were better. If we are firing up coal plants to make up for not building nuclear plants, we are much worse than even a _leaking_ nuclear power plant. Coal plants, depending on where their coal comes from, can't even be built near nuclear as they would set off radiation alarms. Coal emissions are particularly harmful and cause lots of deaths worldwide. Natural gas are much less so, but still not great. We need to remove the older nuclear power plants and replace them, for baseline power, with newer designs. They are far safer and will not meltdown no matter what fails. Newer reactor designs are usually not self-sustaining and require active management to keep them going (as opposed to intervening to stop them). The answer seems to be renewables everywhere, and newer reactors to keep up with baseline demand. > The proposal comes as most of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed and built in the 1960s or 1970s, are reaching the end of their original 40- to 50-year operating licenses. That is indeed the main problem. We have solved a lot of issues in half a century.

Kon5ole 3y ago
>And this stance would be perfectly fine if the alternatives were better. I believe we passed the point where solar with storage is better. It's certainly faster and easier to deploy, but now it's apparently also cheaper per produced Wh than nuclear even accounting for a mere 30% efficiency from the storage "detour". Solar has kept falling in price this year as well, while nuclear is always revealed to be more expensive every time a new study is made.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > It's certainly faster and easier to deploy, but now it's apparently also cheaper per produced Wh than nuclear even accounting for a mere 30% efficiency from the storage "detour". The cost of storage isn't just the conversion losses. You also need the storage hardware, and for it to have enough capacity for an extended period of low generation. Once you convert heating systems to electric to stop burning fossil fuels, what do you do during winter when it's cold, the days are short and it's cloudy and calm for a week? No one seems to be able to answer this, and the closest I've seen is something like "keep all of the existing natural gas plants operational and use them to burn hydrogen instead, but only when renewable generation is low." Which is just preposterously expensive -- you'd have to maintain an entire redundant set of generating plants that you hardly ever use and that themselves cost almost as much as nuclear power plants do. But that is still less expensive than trying to build a week's worth of storage capacity using something like lithium batteries. And both of them have the problem that you have to choose in advance how much storage capacity to build, but if you build too much you've doubled your costs and if you build too little then people freeze to death.
  - Kon5ole 3y ago
    >The cost of storage isn't just the conversion losses. You also need the storage hardware That is also included in the estimates of course and solar+storage is still cheaper. Solar is so cheap that individuals are themselves paying to get it on the roofs of their homes and get returns from the investments inside a quarter of the life expectancy of the panels despite being taxed on everything involved, sometimes even the production of electricity. Small communities have made off-grid hydrogen fuel stations, including electrolyzers and storage. It's so cheap that basically anyone can do it. Certainly any corporation that is making money can do it, and will do it, as soon as they realize it's cheaper than grid-electricity. >"keep all of the existing natural gas plants operational and use them to burn hydrogen instead, but only when renewable generation is low." Which is just preposterously expensive Any gas plant still being operational would be running all the time and be part of the base supply just like it is today. You would mix hydrogen in with the natural gas gradually as production capacity is increased, so for the first 100s of TWh you wouldn't even need to invest in anything but hydrogen production. Compared to replacing the same amount of energy with nuclear it will be very cheap, maybe orders of magnitude cheaper. Ironically that's also the main problem I see with it - there are many large power plant investments already made that will become unprofitable if solar+storage starts dictating the price of electricity, not just nuclear. There are many laws in many countries that only exist to make it hard for private actors to produce their own electricity.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > That is also included in the estimates of course and solar+storage is still cheaper. I don't believe that it is. > Solar is so cheap that individuals are themselves paying to get it on the roofs of their homes and get returns from the investments inside a quarter of the life expectancy of the panels despite being taxed on everything involved, sometimes even the production of electricity. Because they have free land (existing empty roof) and are using grid power from nuclear and fossil fuels whenever the sun isn't shining. Everybody knows solar is cheaper during the day, the question is how do you heat your house at night. > Small communities have made off-grid hydrogen fuel stations, including electrolyzers and storage. It's so cheap that basically anyone can do it. It's cheap in the sense that you can build one at small scale. How much is it to build 500GW worth of capacity and then store enough hydrogen to run it for ten days straight? > Any gas plant still being operational would be running all the time and be part of the base supply just like it is today. Not if its purpose is to supply power during periods of low generation. Suppose you have a bunch of wind turbines that on average generate 500 GW of power. Sometimes it's 950 GW, sometimes it's 50 GW. Then you have 500 GW of average demand. When they generate in excess of demand you want to use the excess to produce hydrogen. Okay, fine, but that's about half the time, so already your combustion-based power plants are operating at most at half duty cycle. But the renewable output is more of a bell curve. The midpoint is 500GW but 450GW or 550GW are way more common than 950GW or 50GW. The problem is you still need enough generating capacity for when it's 50GW. You have to maintain 450GW of alternate capacity even though you don't need the majority of it except for on rare occasions. > You would mix hydrogen in with the natural gas gradually as production capacity is increased, so for the first 100s of TWh you wouldn't even need to invest in anything but hydrogen production. Constructing the existing plants is a sunk cost but that doesn't mean it wasn't a cost. You still have to maintain them and build new ones as they age out, you can't recover the cost of the land by selling it. And you could get a similar efficiency by converting the existing sites to nuclear, reusing the land and steam-to-power generating equipment and grid connection. But then you get power ~100% of the time because the fuel cost is negligible. > Ironically that's also the main problem I see with it - there are many large power plant investments already made that will become unprofitable if solar+storage starts dictating the price of electricity, not just nuclear. There are many laws in many countries that only exist to make it hard for private actors to produce their own electricity. The real problem here is that if you did a straight free market design, the result would be that power is very cheap 95% of the time and then costs multiple dollars per kWh during extended periods of low generation. That would allow long-term storage technologies and reliable generation methods to recover their costs from the times they're most needed, and use pricing to suppress demand when supply is low. But then instead of having a $100/month electric bill, people would pay $20/month eleven months out of the year and then the month when there isn't enough capacity it would be $1000, unless they can severely limit their use during that time, which generally means something like turning down their thermostat in the winter. Which, of course, people hate. The alternative is to have the power company smooth it out, so you always pay $100/month and they take the extra $80 most months to build nuclear reactors that can supply reliable power. In the end it comes out about the same but then people don't get a huge surprise bill once in a while.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
It's much cheaper, faster, and less risky (financially) to replace them with renewables. It's a bit of an academic exercise anyway at this point because it just takes a decade plus to plan any new nuclear. That's based on a sample of next to nothing because there just isn't a whole lot of nuclear coming online at all. Nor is there a whole lot of capacity stuck in the planning or construction pipeline. And what little does come online does so late, over budget, etc. So those handful of pitiful plants are not a great reference from the point of view of convincing people to do some more. Renewables on the other hand are coming online by the tens of gw every year. There are still learning effects, and prices are still coming down further. As for baseload (which I assume is what you are referring to here), that seems to be an elusive concept that is just never expressed in twh. Because as soon as you do that, you can start imagining all sorts of alternative and much cheaper, practical, less hand wavy, and faster ways of getting that capacity in place than building actual nuclear plants at scale. I mean, how many nuclear plants do we actually need? 2, 5, 200? At least put a number on it. Do we need any plants at all? Nobody seems to know this or want to talk about this in any level of detail that you could use to actually start planning some budgets for this. It's just presumed lazily that we need unspecified (typically to the extent of committing nontrivial percentages of the world's GDP to this) amounts of it to ensure our anxiety levels stay within acceptable range. It's completely irrational at this point. Meanwhile, the amount of wind and solar coming online keeps beating expectations and battery production is ramping up from gwh scale to twh scale per year. It's the only practical alternative that exists to nuclear right now. And it's being done at a ridiculous scale because it's an order of magnitude or two cheaper (and dropping further). To make a dent into that, you need a lot of nuclear plants at this point for it to even matter and at a much lower cost than most nuclear proponents seem willing to entertain. I don't see that happening really. Doubling or quadrupling the amount of renewables + battery seems much easier, doable, and cheaper at this point. Especially if it needs to be done in a timely fashion.
- pests 3y ago
  Renewables + battery storage also gets less us dependant on centralization. If every person, company, town, city, state, and country can install their own solar and some batteries that's one step towards independence and reduces impact zones of distasters or other emergencies.

Kon5ole 3y ago

>And this stance would be perfectly fine if the alternatives were better. I believe we passed the point where solar with storage is better. It's certainly faster and easier to deploy, but now it's apparently also cheaper per produced Wh than nuclear even accounting for a mere 30% efficiency from the storage "detour". Solar has kept falling in price this year as well, while nuclear is always revealed to be more expensive every time a new study is made.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> It's certainly faster and easier to deploy, but now it's apparently also cheaper per produced Wh than nuclear even accounting for a mere 30% efficiency from the storage "detour". The cost of storage isn't just the conversion losses. You also need the storage hardware, and for it to have enough capacity for an extended period of low generation. Once you convert heating systems to electric to stop burning fossil fuels, what do you do during winter when it's cold, the days are short and it's cloudy and calm for a week? No one seems to be able to answer this, and the closest I've seen is something like "keep all of the existing natural gas plants operational and use them to burn hydrogen instead, but only when renewable generation is low." Which is just preposterously expensive -- you'd have to maintain an entire redundant set of generating plants that you hardly ever use and that themselves cost almost as much as nuclear power plants do. But that is still less expensive than trying to build a week's worth of storage capacity using something like lithium batteries. And both of them have the problem that you have to choose in advance how much storage capacity to build, but if you build too much you've doubled your costs and if you build too little then people freeze to death.
- Kon5ole 3y ago
  >The cost of storage isn't just the conversion losses. You also need the storage hardware That is also included in the estimates of course and solar+storage is still cheaper. Solar is so cheap that individuals are themselves paying to get it on the roofs of their homes and get returns from the investments inside a quarter of the life expectancy of the panels despite being taxed on everything involved, sometimes even the production of electricity. Small communities have made off-grid hydrogen fuel stations, including electrolyzers and storage. It's so cheap that basically anyone can do it. Certainly any corporation that is making money can do it, and will do it, as soon as they realize it's cheaper than grid-electricity. >"keep all of the existing natural gas plants operational and use them to burn hydrogen instead, but only when renewable generation is low." Which is just preposterously expensive Any gas plant still being operational would be running all the time and be part of the base supply just like it is today. You would mix hydrogen in with the natural gas gradually as production capacity is increased, so for the first 100s of TWh you wouldn't even need to invest in anything but hydrogen production. Compared to replacing the same amount of energy with nuclear it will be very cheap, maybe orders of magnitude cheaper. Ironically that's also the main problem I see with it - there are many large power plant investments already made that will become unprofitable if solar+storage starts dictating the price of electricity, not just nuclear. There are many laws in many countries that only exist to make it hard for private actors to produce their own electricity.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > That is also included in the estimates of course and solar+storage is still cheaper. I don't believe that it is. > Solar is so cheap that individuals are themselves paying to get it on the roofs of their homes and get returns from the investments inside a quarter of the life expectancy of the panels despite being taxed on everything involved, sometimes even the production of electricity. Because they have free land (existing empty roof) and are using grid power from nuclear and fossil fuels whenever the sun isn't shining. Everybody knows solar is cheaper during the day, the question is how do you heat your house at night. > Small communities have made off-grid hydrogen fuel stations, including electrolyzers and storage. It's so cheap that basically anyone can do it. It's cheap in the sense that you can build one at small scale. How much is it to build 500GW worth of capacity and then store enough hydrogen to run it for ten days straight? > Any gas plant still being operational would be running all the time and be part of the base supply just like it is today. Not if its purpose is to supply power during periods of low generation. Suppose you have a bunch of wind turbines that on average generate 500 GW of power. Sometimes it's 950 GW, sometimes it's 50 GW. Then you have 500 GW of average demand. When they generate in excess of demand you want to use the excess to produce hydrogen. Okay, fine, but that's about half the time, so already your combustion-based power plants are operating at most at half duty cycle. But the renewable output is more of a bell curve. The midpoint is 500GW but 450GW or 550GW are way more common than 950GW or 50GW. The problem is you still need enough generating capacity for when it's 50GW. You have to maintain 450GW of alternate capacity even though you don't need the majority of it except for on rare occasions. > You would mix hydrogen in with the natural gas gradually as production capacity is increased, so for the first 100s of TWh you wouldn't even need to invest in anything but hydrogen production. Constructing the existing plants is a sunk cost but that doesn't mean it wasn't a cost. You still have to maintain them and build new ones as they age out, you can't recover the cost of the land by selling it. And you could get a similar efficiency by converting the existing sites to nuclear, reusing the land and steam-to-power generating equipment and grid connection. But then you get power ~100% of the time because the fuel cost is negligible. > Ironically that's also the main problem I see with it - there are many large power plant investments already made that will become unprofitable if solar+storage starts dictating the price of electricity, not just nuclear. There are many laws in many countries that only exist to make it hard for private actors to produce their own electricity. The real problem here is that if you did a straight free market design, the result would be that power is very cheap 95% of the time and then costs multiple dollars per kWh during extended periods of low generation. That would allow long-term storage technologies and reliable generation methods to recover their costs from the times they're most needed, and use pricing to suppress demand when supply is low. But then instead of having a $100/month electric bill, people would pay $20/month eleven months out of the year and then the month when there isn't enough capacity it would be $1000, unless they can severely limit their use during that time, which generally means something like turning down their thermostat in the winter. Which, of course, people hate. The alternative is to have the power company smooth it out, so you always pay $100/month and they take the extra $80 most months to build nuclear reactors that can supply reliable power. In the end it comes out about the same but then people don't get a huge surprise bill once in a while.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

It's much cheaper, faster, and less risky (financially) to replace them with renewables. It's a bit of an academic exercise anyway at this point because it just takes a decade plus to plan any new nuclear. That's based on a sample of next to nothing because there just isn't a whole lot of nuclear coming online at all. Nor is there a whole lot of capacity stuck in the planning or construction pipeline. And what little does come online does so late, over budget, etc. So those handful of pitiful plants are not a great reference from the point of view of convincing people to do some more. Renewables on the other hand are coming online by the tens of gw every year. There are still learning effects, and prices are still coming down further. As for baseload (which I assume is what you are referring to here), that seems to be an elusive concept that is just never expressed in twh. Because as soon as you do that, you can start imagining all sorts of alternative and much cheaper, practical, less hand wavy, and faster ways of getting that capacity in place than building actual nuclear plants at scale. I mean, how many nuclear plants do we actually need? 2, 5, 200? At least put a number on it. Do we need any plants at all? Nobody seems to know this or want to talk about this in any level of detail that you could use to actually start planning some budgets for this. It's just presumed lazily that we need unspecified (typically to the extent of committing nontrivial percentages of the world's GDP to this) amounts of it to ensure our anxiety levels stay within acceptable range. It's completely irrational at this point. Meanwhile, the amount of wind and solar coming online keeps beating expectations and battery production is ramping up from gwh scale to twh scale per year. It's the only practical alternative that exists to nuclear right now. And it's being done at a ridiculous scale because it's an order of magnitude or two cheaper (and dropping further). To make a dent into that, you need a lot of nuclear plants at this point for it to even matter and at a much lower cost than most nuclear proponents seem willing to entertain. I don't see that happening really. Doubling or quadrupling the amount of renewables + battery seems much easier, doable, and cheaper at this point. Especially if it needs to be done in a timely fashion.

pests 3y ago
Renewables + battery storage also gets less us dependant on centralization. If every person, company, town, city, state, and country can install their own solar and some batteries that's one step towards independence and reduces impact zones of distasters or other emergencies.