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The problem with nuclear is that while we need base-load, base-load doesn't pay. Let's say I have a $billion to invest. My goal is return on investment. Why wo

The problem with nuclear is that while we need base-load, base-load doesn't pay. Let's say I have a $billion to invest. My goal is return on investment. Why would I pick nuclear over solar? Solar is cheap, quick to build, low maintainence, requires a small amount of "cheap" labor, and "worst case" stops working. Nuclear takes 15 years of planning, costs a fortune just to get started, will guarantee endless fights with pretty much everyone, has long-term clean up questions, requires lots of very expensive engineers to keep running. (And worst case is pretty much as bad as you can imagine). Oh right, nuclear makes electricity at night. When it's cheapest. I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward.

viraptor 3y ago
> with no reward For a few countries, the reward is many people not freezing to death mid-winter. If your goal is pure ROI, you may not be interested, but since we can't not have electricity at night, the cost of providing it will raise until the ROI makes sense to someone.
gumballindie 3y ago
Solar is by far my favourite _personal_ power source, but nuclear is a bit more resilient. Suppose a volcano erupts and ash block the sun for a year - which happened before - then solar is pretty much bust. Also there are climates where you dont get sun throughout the year, so it’s not just nights that are the issue. But i do agree that solar, and wind, need to play an important role.
- otherme123 3y ago
  So we should plan our daily lives for events that happen maybe once per thousand years. And at the same time ignore events like Chernobyl or Funushima that will never happen again... until they do.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Not our daily lives, but our critical infrastructure such as that which provides energy. I am not saying _every_ source should be nuclear. All I am saying is we should plan contingency. And yes, chernobyl and fukushima are at the back of my mind. The risk is very real and even if the probability is low the likelihood increases as we increase the quantity of nuclear reactors.
int0x2e 3y ago
This is more of an argument for how pure economic thinking and the current constraints/processes have poor correlation to actual impact and desired outcomes. It's similar to how Enron would make the most money when California had rolling blackouts - by operating right at the edge of the network crashing, they would make the most money because reserves were low, so they intentionally shut power stations down and caused small grid crashes. If you really believe in renewables, if anything, we need to go all in on nuclear for the base load, but no one seems to be headed in that direction other than China and India, because the don't have the same market failures we do.
lm28469 3y ago
When you're so far down the rabbit hole that cheap virtually unlimited clean electricity is bad because it cannot make you rich... If killing children was profitable and somehow legal we'd find people like you investing billions in it I assume I doubt you understand how many solar panels you'd need to replace nuclear, I also doubt you understand how some countries cannot live on solar power for size and geographical reasons alone
- chpatrick 3y ago
  Moral outrage won't make the economics work out.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    Why are countries who invested in nuclear enjoying the cheapest and cleanest electricity then ? The "economics" seem to work very well for them. Why do I pay 47ct/kwh in Germany while my parents pay 13ct/kwh in France ?
    - chpatrick 3y ago
      Because France already has a ton of installed nuclear capacity and Germany stupidly got rid of it. But as alternatives get better and better it makes less sense to start a 20 year process to install new nuclear.
      - lm28469 3y ago
        Call me when Germany's electricity is clean and cheap then, I bet we'll be in the same place in 25 years, in the meantime it's reality VS sci-fi, and so far reality is harsh
        natmaka 3y ago
        In France fossil fuels produce ~65% of final energy, and the project aiming at building the first instance of a series of reactors (EPR) planned in 2004 is a failure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanville_3_%28France%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi... Germany generates more and more clean electricity while not loosing too much of its industrial sector, with a higher GDP and while getting rid of its nuclear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-electricity?tab=chart&time=2000..latest&country=DEU~FRA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-electricity?ta... France emits less partly thanks to the dramatic reduction of its industrial sector: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-trade?tab=chart&region=Europe&country=FRA~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra... The net difference between France and Germany isn't as high as sometimes claimed: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=1990..latest&country=FRA~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
pavlov 3y ago
Countries should build nuclear power as public infrastructure. National freeways were not built as private projects because it was deemed important for the economy to provide access to base traffic infrastructure, even if it wouldn't be profitable for a commercial operator. Why shouldn't the same apply to base-load power?
- berkes 3y ago
  This is what boggles my mind in the discussion. The political right, typically for free markets, small governments and against state owned companies, is rooting for an energy supply that is the most regulated, government ran and government depending, of all alternatives. Yet the political left, is against this system, which is the most socialist of all. And is rooting for an energy system that is the most decentralized and least government depending of all (every person with a solar panel an individual producer). I find this remarkable at the least.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    The only Western countries that seems to have got this “right” (in the logical sense you describe, not necessarily as an absolute value judgement) are France and Finland where mostly left-leaning governments built a lot of nuclear over the decades.
unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." --US Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss, in a 1954 address to science writers[1] [1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-101/too-cheap-to-meter.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-10...
lawn 3y ago
> I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward. Which is exactly why we need countries to take responsibility on the state level. Because they can, and should, invest in the long-term well-being of its people despite it not generating the highest returns.
pravus 3y ago
> I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward. That's why we aren't getting nuclear right now. Once the regulatory hurdles come down and all of these questions get answers it'll be clear how to make a return on nuclear investment and that will attract investors. Also, solar (and all other "renewables") are only quick to build assuming you have raw materials. We are probably going to be hitting a raw materials crunch soon because virtually all new technology is pulling from the same resource pool (copper, molybdenum, nickel) and cheap extraction is effectively gone. Also, from an investment point of view, I'm not sure why you'd prefer a more volatile commodity. All commodity markets were set up to reduce volatility and base-load power is a huge reduction of electric grid volatility. You are telling me you'd prefer a world where you have intermittent failures because you could set it up more quickly than have reliable, constant, always-on base power for cooling/heating, food, hospitals, etc. Most people think that's a bad trade-off, hence the desire to have nuclear become the base-load provider fuel of choice.
- pydry 3y ago
  The regulatory hurdles are already low enough and nuclear is usually lavished with subsidies and good PR as well. This is because it shares a lot of the costs of running a nuclear-military industrial complex. Baseload with 5x the LCOE of intermittent sources that takes 10-15x as long to build just isnt valuable to civvies when there are plenty of cheap enough storage options. It's valuable to the military though.
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    It's not 5x, it's more like double AFAICT. Which isn't great, but compares reasonably to fossil fuels once you factor in greenhouse emissions. It shouldn't be the default, but it has plenty of niches where it's clearly the best choice - for instance, in Japan/Korea/etc where the bulk of their energy is imported liquefied natural gas. There's very little space to build solar/wind and so nuclear makes a lot of sense there.
- tremon 3y ago
  Also, the more the personal transportation fleet electrifies, the more electricity we will need during the night/evening: everyone will want their car/bike/scooter/autogyro ready for commuting in the morning.
KptMarchewa 3y ago
No, energy is cheapest in mid day - when solar works. Energy is most expensive in the evenings when there's no sun, yet the demand is high.
natmaka 3y ago
Moreover decommissioning a nuclear plant often is a nightmare (check U.-K.'s current program), and storing electricity needed during the night (for example in the car's battery) is easy and costs less and less. https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
hef19898 3y ago
On the European electricity markets base load pays rather well so.
teed 3y ago
Utilities don't invest on ROI the way someone does investing in equities. Usually a utility gets a fixed return based on capex. The incentive, outside of the return on capex, is to provide clean base load power to stabilize the grid.
- bruce511 3y ago
  I get that in different places utilities would have different mandates. And would potentially have different mechanisms to calculate costs and prices. A govt funded utility could of course then focus on things that are not good (financial) investments. In which case sure, I can see that in play. (Not sure the US is leaning in that direction though.) >> Usually a utility gets a fixed return based on capex This would imply that funding is from sources other than consumers right? Because as a consumer I'm billed on usage, not on utility-capex.
  - chii 3y ago
    > funding is from sources other than consumers right? funding is never going to be from the end consumers. It will be from long term financiers such as large pension funds, PE or some other long term funding sources. The consumer is the other end - they are the 'returns', rather than the funding.
treyd 3y ago
> Oh right, nuclear makes electricity at night. When it's cheapest. Applying naive market logic to this, as solar becomes a larger share of the energy supply mix, the price of energy at night will increase, making baseload supply more attractive. There's probably other effects that could complicate this, but it seems like a problem that could solve itself over time.
- thedrbrian 3y ago
  >the price of energy at night will increase Thought green energy was supposed to save us all money ?
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    It's more like drastic drop in energy price mid day.
- bruce511 3y ago
  It will solve itself. But I don't think the solution is nuclear. The solution will be storage. Again, the issue is cost, and externalities. On the one hand the cost of nuclear electricity is low, but the externalities are extremely high. Time, public opinion, and long-term liability are all against it (and that's assuming it goes as planned.) Sure, optimal storage has yet to be figured out. Batteries and pumped-water-schemes are working in some cases, but are not necessarily grid-scalable [1]. But work in this area has potential, and we've not reached any maxima here yet. Technologies like compressed air, hydrogen and so on are sll in their infancy. I should note that I am pro-nuclear. It's a lot cleaner than coal or gas. I'm just not sure it'll ever be economically attractive. [1] on a household level, batteries that can store over-night amounts of power exist, send are easily available. This provides a cap on how expensive night electricity can be.
  - int0x2e 3y ago
    Storage will never work. Quote me on this. Nuclear or a mix of nuclear and renewables will be the only way to seriously get away from fossil fuels. Also, even if storage works some day, hoping we manage to discover how, scale and implement it across human civilization in time is a crazy bet to make. Even if we seriously go all in on nuclear and renewables tomorrow - it might already be too late, so betting on some miracle tech to be found, scaled and implemented in time is not only unwise, it would require several miracles to have any hope.
realusername 3y ago
And that's exactly why private markets do not work for electricity and will never work. The grid needs to work 100% of the time and the policies should reflect that.
- bruce511 3y ago
  On the one hand I agree on the other hand I think this is an issue with nuclear, not markets. For example, the market may complement cheap solar with cheap storage. Certainly cracking grid-level storage coupled with cheap solar, will change the game. (And be very profitable) If you start a new nuclear plan today you're betting the storage problem won't be solved for 15 years (until nuclear operational) or 40 odd years after that (payback period.) That's a bold bet. All it takes us for compressed-air-in-old-mines (or whatever) to work well, and you're out of luck. The private market will exhaust storage ideas before investing in new nuclear. Which is your point. Which means a govt betting on storage failure. That's a bet I'm not sure govt wants to make.
  - Mawr 3y ago
    The bold, bold bet of building time proven solutions instead of hoping we'll come up with better tech just in the nick of time. Don't build nuclear, don't build rail, just cross your fingers and pray we'll solve mass energy storage and self driving in time.
  - realusername 3y ago
    There's no cheap storage being able to sustain grid loads, that doesn't exist regardless of what the futuristic articles will tell you on the internet. That might happen for sure but if we go that route of non existing tech, there's even better than the magical storage, there's fusion and unlike the magical storage tech, we know for sure that it exists. > If you start a new nuclear plan today you're betting the storage problem won't be solved for 15 years (until nuclear operational) or 40 odd years after that (payback period.) That's a bold bet. If you bet on a full renewable grid, you're betting that some unknown tech will appear in the next decade to solve all your problems, yeah no thanks, that's not how you plan infrastructure on the long term. R&D and deployment are two very different things. And while you are waiting, any cost to sustain the load (like gas plant) is unrecoverable. > The private market will exhaust storage ideas before investing in new nuclear. Which is your point. Hence why I'm saying we don't need the private market which is creating more problems than solutions here. The private market solution was to use more gas which is bad for climate change and bad for the diplomatic relationships as seen in the EU during the Russian war.
jszymborski 3y ago
But nuclear doesn't just provide energy at night, it provides when there is heavy cloud cover and/or the wind isn't blowing. Also, depending where you are in the world, days get awfully short in winter.
- otherme123 3y ago
  Yes, the mythical cloudy days with no wind over large extensions that basically never happen. Right now where I live, we are "enduring" our third week without seeing the sun. Cloudy day after cloudy day, non stop rain (i.e. more hydro). But to nobody surprise, we are also enjoying our third week with continuous wind, and the electricity is often at 0.03 the kWh: virtually free. I'm not saying that an occasional day cloudy but without wind cannot happen. But in real world, cloudy almost always means windy where the turbines are.
  - himinlomax 3y ago
    It happens regularly in winter in Europe, there were several instances just last winter where wind power was under 10% capacity for over a week. Good luck building that much storage for that long.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    If it's so cheap and so good why does literally nobody in the entire world does it ?
    - berkes 3y ago
      Are you implying that nobody has solar panels or wind turbines?
      - lm28469 3y ago
        They're stacking them on top of existing energy sources,virtually no one replaced fossil or nuclear by solar Germany is the perfect example, they use as much dirty energy as twenty years ago: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig1-installed-net-power-generation-capacity-germany-2002-2022.png?itok=5BA4OuEZ https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

viraptor 3y ago

> with no reward For a few countries, the reward is many people not freezing to death mid-winter. If your goal is pure ROI, you may not be interested, but since we can't not have electricity at night, the cost of providing it will raise until the ROI makes sense to someone.

gumballindie 3y ago

Solar is by far my favourite _personal_ power source, but nuclear is a bit more resilient. Suppose a volcano erupts and ash block the sun for a year - which happened before - then solar is pretty much bust. Also there are climates where you dont get sun throughout the year, so it’s not just nights that are the issue. But i do agree that solar, and wind, need to play an important role.

otherme123 3y ago
So we should plan our daily lives for events that happen maybe once per thousand years. And at the same time ignore events like Chernobyl or Funushima that will never happen again... until they do.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Not our daily lives, but our critical infrastructure such as that which provides energy. I am not saying _every_ source should be nuclear. All I am saying is we should plan contingency. And yes, chernobyl and fukushima are at the back of my mind. The risk is very real and even if the probability is low the likelihood increases as we increase the quantity of nuclear reactors.

int0x2e 3y ago

This is more of an argument for how pure economic thinking and the current constraints/processes have poor correlation to actual impact and desired outcomes. It's similar to how Enron would make the most money when California had rolling blackouts - by operating right at the edge of the network crashing, they would make the most money because reserves were low, so they intentionally shut power stations down and caused small grid crashes. If you really believe in renewables, if anything, we need to go all in on nuclear for the base load, but no one seems to be headed in that direction other than China and India, because the don't have the same market failures we do.

lm28469 3y ago

When you're so far down the rabbit hole that cheap virtually unlimited clean electricity is bad because it cannot make you rich... If killing children was profitable and somehow legal we'd find people like you investing billions in it I assume I doubt you understand how many solar panels you'd need to replace nuclear, I also doubt you understand how some countries cannot live on solar power for size and geographical reasons alone

chpatrick 3y ago
Moral outrage won't make the economics work out.
- lm28469 3y ago
  Why are countries who invested in nuclear enjoying the cheapest and cleanest electricity then ? The "economics" seem to work very well for them. Why do I pay 47ct/kwh in Germany while my parents pay 13ct/kwh in France ?
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    Because France already has a ton of installed nuclear capacity and Germany stupidly got rid of it. But as alternatives get better and better it makes less sense to start a 20 year process to install new nuclear.
    - lm28469 3y ago
      Call me when Germany's electricity is clean and cheap then, I bet we'll be in the same place in 25 years, in the meantime it's reality VS sci-fi, and so far reality is harsh
      - natmaka 3y ago
        In France fossil fuels produce ~65% of final energy, and the project aiming at building the first instance of a series of reactors (EPR) planned in 2004 is a failure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanville_3_%28France%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi... Germany generates more and more clean electricity while not loosing too much of its industrial sector, with a higher GDP and while getting rid of its nuclear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-electricity?tab=chart&time=2000..latest&country=DEU~FRA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/low-carbon-electricity?ta... France emits less partly thanks to the dramatic reduction of its industrial sector: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-trade?tab=chart&region=Europe&country=FRA~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra... The net difference between France and Germany isn't as high as sometimes claimed: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=1990..latest&country=FRA~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

pavlov 3y ago

Countries should build nuclear power as public infrastructure. National freeways were not built as private projects because it was deemed important for the economy to provide access to base traffic infrastructure, even if it wouldn't be profitable for a commercial operator. Why shouldn't the same apply to base-load power?

berkes 3y ago
This is what boggles my mind in the discussion. The political right, typically for free markets, small governments and against state owned companies, is rooting for an energy supply that is the most regulated, government ran and government depending, of all alternatives. Yet the political left, is against this system, which is the most socialist of all. And is rooting for an energy system that is the most decentralized and least government depending of all (every person with a solar panel an individual producer). I find this remarkable at the least.
- pavlov 3y ago
  The only Western countries that seems to have got this “right” (in the logical sense you describe, not necessarily as an absolute value judgement) are France and Finland where mostly left-leaning governments built a lot of nuclear over the decades.

unyttigfjelltol 3y ago

"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." --US Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss, in a 1954 address to science writers[1] [1] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-101/too-cheap-to-meter.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/students/history-10...

lawn 3y ago

> I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward. Which is exactly why we need countries to take responsibility on the state level. Because they can, and should, invest in the long-term well-being of its people despite it not generating the highest returns.

pravus 3y ago

> I get that we -need- electricity at night. But frankly, there is zero incentive for me to put my billion there. Its high risk with no reward. That's why we aren't getting nuclear right now. Once the regulatory hurdles come down and all of these questions get answers it'll be clear how to make a return on nuclear investment and that will attract investors. Also, solar (and all other "renewables") are only quick to build assuming you have raw materials. We are probably going to be hitting a raw materials crunch soon because virtually all new technology is pulling from the same resource pool (copper, molybdenum, nickel) and cheap extraction is effectively gone. Also, from an investment point of view, I'm not sure why you'd prefer a more volatile commodity. All commodity markets were set up to reduce volatility and base-load power is a huge reduction of electric grid volatility. You are telling me you'd prefer a world where you have intermittent failures because you could set it up more quickly than have reliable, constant, always-on base power for cooling/heating, food, hospitals, etc. Most people think that's a bad trade-off, hence the desire to have nuclear become the base-load provider fuel of choice.

pydry 3y ago
The regulatory hurdles are already low enough and nuclear is usually lavished with subsidies and good PR as well. This is because it shares a lot of the costs of running a nuclear-military industrial complex. Baseload with 5x the LCOE of intermittent sources that takes 10-15x as long to build just isnt valuable to civvies when there are plenty of cheap enough storage options. It's valuable to the military though.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  It's not 5x, it's more like double AFAICT. Which isn't great, but compares reasonably to fossil fuels once you factor in greenhouse emissions. It shouldn't be the default, but it has plenty of niches where it's clearly the best choice - for instance, in Japan/Korea/etc where the bulk of their energy is imported liquefied natural gas. There's very little space to build solar/wind and so nuclear makes a lot of sense there.
tremon 3y ago
Also, the more the personal transportation fleet electrifies, the more electricity we will need during the night/evening: everyone will want their car/bike/scooter/autogyro ready for commuting in the morning.

KptMarchewa 3y ago

No, energy is cheapest in mid day - when solar works. Energy is most expensive in the evenings when there's no sun, yet the demand is high.

natmaka 3y ago

Moreover decommissioning a nuclear plant often is a nightmare (check U.-K.'s current program), and storing electricity needed during the night (for example in the car's battery) is easy and costs less and less. https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

hef19898 3y ago

On the European electricity markets base load pays rather well so.

teed 3y ago

Utilities don't invest on ROI the way someone does investing in equities. Usually a utility gets a fixed return based on capex. The incentive, outside of the return on capex, is to provide clean base load power to stabilize the grid.

bruce511 3y ago
I get that in different places utilities would have different mandates. And would potentially have different mechanisms to calculate costs and prices. A govt funded utility could of course then focus on things that are not good (financial) investments. In which case sure, I can see that in play. (Not sure the US is leaning in that direction though.) >> Usually a utility gets a fixed return based on capex This would imply that funding is from sources other than consumers right? Because as a consumer I'm billed on usage, not on utility-capex.
- chii 3y ago
  > funding is from sources other than consumers right? funding is never going to be from the end consumers. It will be from long term financiers such as large pension funds, PE or some other long term funding sources. The consumer is the other end - they are the 'returns', rather than the funding.

treyd 3y ago

> Oh right, nuclear makes electricity at night. When it's cheapest. Applying naive market logic to this, as solar becomes a larger share of the energy supply mix, the price of energy at night will increase, making baseload supply more attractive. There's probably other effects that could complicate this, but it seems like a problem that could solve itself over time.

thedrbrian 3y ago
>the price of energy at night will increase Thought green energy was supposed to save us all money ?
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  It's more like drastic drop in energy price mid day.
bruce511 3y ago
It will solve itself. But I don't think the solution is nuclear. The solution will be storage. Again, the issue is cost, and externalities. On the one hand the cost of nuclear electricity is low, but the externalities are extremely high. Time, public opinion, and long-term liability are all against it (and that's assuming it goes as planned.) Sure, optimal storage has yet to be figured out. Batteries and pumped-water-schemes are working in some cases, but are not necessarily grid-scalable [1]. But work in this area has potential, and we've not reached any maxima here yet. Technologies like compressed air, hydrogen and so on are sll in their infancy. I should note that I am pro-nuclear. It's a lot cleaner than coal or gas. I'm just not sure it'll ever be economically attractive. [1] on a household level, batteries that can store over-night amounts of power exist, send are easily available. This provides a cap on how expensive night electricity can be.
- int0x2e 3y ago
  Storage will never work. Quote me on this. Nuclear or a mix of nuclear and renewables will be the only way to seriously get away from fossil fuels. Also, even if storage works some day, hoping we manage to discover how, scale and implement it across human civilization in time is a crazy bet to make. Even if we seriously go all in on nuclear and renewables tomorrow - it might already be too late, so betting on some miracle tech to be found, scaled and implemented in time is not only unwise, it would require several miracles to have any hope.

realusername 3y ago

And that's exactly why private markets do not work for electricity and will never work. The grid needs to work 100% of the time and the policies should reflect that.

bruce511 3y ago
On the one hand I agree on the other hand I think this is an issue with nuclear, not markets. For example, the market may complement cheap solar with cheap storage. Certainly cracking grid-level storage coupled with cheap solar, will change the game. (And be very profitable) If you start a new nuclear plan today you're betting the storage problem won't be solved for 15 years (until nuclear operational) or 40 odd years after that (payback period.) That's a bold bet. All it takes us for compressed-air-in-old-mines (or whatever) to work well, and you're out of luck. The private market will exhaust storage ideas before investing in new nuclear. Which is your point. Which means a govt betting on storage failure. That's a bet I'm not sure govt wants to make.
- Mawr 3y ago
  The bold, bold bet of building time proven solutions instead of hoping we'll come up with better tech just in the nick of time. Don't build nuclear, don't build rail, just cross your fingers and pray we'll solve mass energy storage and self driving in time.
- realusername 3y ago
  There's no cheap storage being able to sustain grid loads, that doesn't exist regardless of what the futuristic articles will tell you on the internet. That might happen for sure but if we go that route of non existing tech, there's even better than the magical storage, there's fusion and unlike the magical storage tech, we know for sure that it exists. > If you start a new nuclear plan today you're betting the storage problem won't be solved for 15 years (until nuclear operational) or 40 odd years after that (payback period.) That's a bold bet. If you bet on a full renewable grid, you're betting that some unknown tech will appear in the next decade to solve all your problems, yeah no thanks, that's not how you plan infrastructure on the long term. R&D and deployment are two very different things. And while you are waiting, any cost to sustain the load (like gas plant) is unrecoverable. > The private market will exhaust storage ideas before investing in new nuclear. Which is your point. Hence why I'm saying we don't need the private market which is creating more problems than solutions here. The private market solution was to use more gas which is bad for climate change and bad for the diplomatic relationships as seen in the EU during the Russian war.

jszymborski 3y ago

But nuclear doesn't just provide energy at night, it provides when there is heavy cloud cover and/or the wind isn't blowing. Also, depending where you are in the world, days get awfully short in winter.

otherme123 3y ago
Yes, the mythical cloudy days with no wind over large extensions that basically never happen. Right now where I live, we are "enduring" our third week without seeing the sun. Cloudy day after cloudy day, non stop rain (i.e. more hydro). But to nobody surprise, we are also enjoying our third week with continuous wind, and the electricity is often at 0.03 the kWh: virtually free. I'm not saying that an occasional day cloudy but without wind cannot happen. But in real world, cloudy almost always means windy where the turbines are.
- himinlomax 3y ago
  It happens regularly in winter in Europe, there were several instances just last winter where wind power was under 10% capacity for over a week. Good luck building that much storage for that long.
- lm28469 3y ago
  If it's so cheap and so good why does literally nobody in the entire world does it ?
  - berkes 3y ago
    Are you implying that nobody has solar panels or wind turbines?
    - lm28469 3y ago
      They're stacking them on top of existing energy sources,virtually no one replaced fossil or nuclear by solar Germany is the perfect example, they use as much dirty energy as twenty years ago: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig1-installed-net-power-generation-capacity-germany-2002-2022.png?itok=5BA4OuEZ https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...