4 ms·

I'm just going to re-post this amazing statistic I saw the other day: In the first nine months of 2023, China built 215 TWh (adjusted for capacity factor!) of

I'm just going to re-post this amazing statistic I saw the other day: In the first nine months of 2023, China built 215 TWh (adjusted for capacity factor!) of solar and wind energy. This exceeds the 206TWh from the entire fleet of 26 nuclear power plants that China has under construction today, and those have completion dates years in the future. It is likely that China will exceed these amounts again in the near future. It goes without saying that there are still major issues to be solved here around baseload and storage. Maybe nuclear will end up having some role. But the idea that nuclear is going to be more than a small fraction of future global energy generation just seems completely obsolete in the face of this manufacturing wave. And articles that argue for building nuclear because "renewables are manufactured overseas" just highlight how desperately we need to get realistic here -- it's like arguing we should keep using sail-power and whale oil rather than industrializing, because we made the decision not to build steam engines domestically.

nickpp 3y ago
> still major issues to be solved here around baseload and storage So maybe this is why China is still building those nuke plants?! We can have both, you know. But we keep burning gas, oil and coal while arguing how dangerous nuclear is. Meanwhile Climate Change is here and it's real. We could've been 100% nuclear by now. It was fear mongering from greens and environmentalists (heavily financed and brainwashed by oil producers like Russia) that f-d up our climate like it did.
- 8ytecoder 3y ago
  The number of premature deaths caused by coal/oil/gas - both directly due to the pollution and indirectly due to climate change, far exceeds the total deaths by nuclear power. The funny thing is it’s usually the most progressive and green leaning people that oppose nuclear so much.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  >We can have both, you know. TFA is not about "having both." It is clearly about positioning nuclear as an alternative to renewable buildouts. This is in the title and also the text. And that's fine, because it reads like a nuclear industry promotional piece. But leave that aside. Both my anecdote and this article agree on one critical fact. It shows up in this line: the age of the brutalist concrete cooling towers and highly centralized state control as the only features of nuclear power may already be over. In other words, even these authors agree that the traditional (1970s-era) nuclear plant is already obsolete, and won't compete with renewables. The only tech that can possibly compete at this point is some kind of modular factory-built nuclear that can scale exponentially. Anything else is likely to be a very costly footnote, both here and probably in China. The rest of the article pins its hope on the success of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to be the scalable tech that can somehow compete with renewables. I've seen a number of articles on HN in recent days giving some pretty bad news about the state of SMRs. But at least an accelerated-development-of-SMRs story hangs together consistently, whereas a lot of wishful "legacy nuclear would be a viable contender but for those meddling environmentalists" Internet commentary just makes no sense in the face of the kind of massive scale that renewable buildouts are seeing.
  - Projectiboga 3y ago
    A US government backed SMR just quit their pilot project as they can't compete on cost in the current market. Nuclear is basically obsolete. We need to subsidize it to safely use all the current waste and while extracting energy turn that into safer leftovers.
    - p1mrx 3y ago
      The problem is that nuclear can't compete on cost with fossil fuels, and we've failed to make those obsolete.
      - nickpp 3y ago
        The reason nuclear is so expensive and slow to build is overregulation. It also slowed R&D so much that we haven't created and tested the reactor designs that were safer, smaller and easier to run. It's like when inventing the airplane we would've stopped because the high number of crashes and never reached today's safety and convenience.
- danielbln 3y ago
  Exxon Valdez, Deep Water Horizon, Three Mile Island, and so on. How much do you trust giant Energy megacorp to do the right thing, play by the book, not cut corners? Especially with the smell of deregulation in the air?
  - nickpp 3y ago
    > How much do you trust giant Energy megacorp to do the right thing Just as much as I trust any giant megacorp to do the right thing?! Which is to say slightly more than my government and slightly less than my neighbors. Everything around me that I use and enjoy (my phone, my car, my laptop, my clothes, my food, movies, music, internet etc) is created&delivered by a megacorp or other. I hope someday we will each produce our own energy but so far solar mostly works on sunny days and home nuclear is probably illegal - regulated to death.
    - danielbln 3y ago
      That's why I wrote "Energy" megacorp. Apple dropping the ball on the iPhone has slightly different externalities than BP's corner cutting causing a blowout on Deep Water Horizon and creating havoc an entire ecosystems, or Met Ed causing a partial meltdown in Pennsylvania with all the fun stuff that came with that. The reason why you don't die of lead poisoning while enjoying your megacorp food is regulation by the way.
      - nickpp 3y ago
        So what exactly are you proposing?! Who is supposed to generate all that energy we are using instead of "megacorps" and how?
        danielbln 3y ago
        We made our bed and need to sleep in it, but we should be careful what sort of technology we allow them to handle, especially if/when we push for more deregulation. Corps have a singular goal, making money, everything else is secondary unless imposed externally. Exxon can't mess up wind or solar power in a way that it pollutes entire landscapes, but they can do (and have done) so with fossil fuel production, and heavy heavy regulation is presumably one of the few reasons why we haven't seen more issues with nuclear fission on that front. If not for that, some Exxon exec will one day get the bright idea on how to cut a lot of corners to boost quarterly profits, and a windmill toppling over has different externalities than a meltdown, or even just inadvertent radioactive gas/particle release. I'm not saying the likes of Shell, BP and Exxon can't handle it (they certainly can) but it needs to happen in an environment that prioritizes safety above all else, because in the case of fission the fallout is quite severe if they/we mess up (compared to other energy sources).
Manuel_D 3y ago
The problem is that peak load is when solar (and typically, wind too depending on the geography) is producing its lowest output. So if you fulfill this demand with nuclear, then you've just made your wind and solar irrelevant because nuclear is just as cheap to run around the clock. This is why proponents of a primarily wind and solar grid are assuming that hydrogen, compressed air, or something else will make storage nearly-free.
- triceratops 3y ago
  > The problem is that peak load is when solar (and typically, wind too depending on the geography) is producing its lowest output How do you figure that? Residential time of use prices are highest at mid-day. Power use is lower at night, even with higher demand for heating in the winter.[1] > So if you fulfill this demand with nuclear, then you've just made your wind and solar irrelevant because nuclear is just as cheap to run around the clock. Given the above, if your nuclear fleet only supplies enough power for nighttime then by definition it lacks the capacity to support peak demand. 1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    Peak electricity demand tends to be in the afternoon, right around sunset. Since this is right as solar is tapering off, this creates the duck curve problem [1]. It does vary by region and season. In hotter climates, during the summer, peak electricity demand does tend to happen around mid-day [2]. The same page you linked, actually. In case you didn't notice, the demand curves for spring, summer, fall, and winter are all overlaid on the same graph. Mid-day electricity use is highest during the summer, but in other seasons it peaks in the evening right around sunset. Furthermore, about half of homes in the US are heated by gas [3], so decarbonization of heating is going to increase night-time energy use. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve 2. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 3. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30672#:~:text=Broad%20ranges%20in%20winter%20temperatures,36%25%20who%20rely%20on%20electricity https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30672#:~:tex....
belorn 3y ago
China are also building more fossil fuel power plants than any other country. Using fossil fuel power plants as reserve energy and renewables as peak/bulk energy has been the most cost effective way to produce energy in the last 50 year and the key strategy for many countries. It is why Germany focused on subsidizing massive amount of wind, solar, and natural gas power plants. It worked great until Russia invaded Ukraine and the pipelines got blown up. The only difference between the German strategy and the Chinese strategy is that China is also building a few token nuclear plants. China is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) customer of Russian natural gas. As long we don't want to pay significant more for energy then this strategy will continue to be the dominant strategy. Any other strategy is obsolete. People will try to argue nuclear, green hydrogen, rust batteries, Tesla batteries and so on but for the long foreseeable future all those will just be a footnotes compared to what get built. More renewables, more natural gas, more coal, more oil power plants. Anything else is seen as too costly because any single other technology is just dwarfed by the capacity and cost savings of combining renewables with fossil fuels.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  China is building a lot of coal as well. But the interesting thing is that they're setting up a scheme in which the government pays the plants not to generate. Capacity is at 50% and falling quickly. This thread indicates that most plants will be getting the majority of their revenue from these payments by the second half of this decade. Related: latest estimates indicate a structural decline in Chinese CO2 emissions starting next year, almost entirely because of renewable buildouts. [1] https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/1722886066942743017?s=12&t=sPOl9bVNdjREujwiUeFx1g https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/17228860669427430... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
  - belorn 3y ago
    Available capacity is not falling, production output is. This is the purpose of reserve energy. Cheap renewable energy is produced when the weather allows it, and fossil fuels produce energy when demand exceed supply. In order to keep fossil fueled power plants ready to supply energy, the state steps in and provide a paycheck in order to keep them available (this is the program that the twitter post talks about). This is the strategy that Germany has. It is also why getting rid of fossil fuel subsidies is close to impossible. The more fossil fuel power plants a country need to have standing by, the more subsidies are needed to keep them staffed and fueled up. In general it did reduce emissions compared to running exclusively on fossil fuels, while reducing costs at the same time since at peak weather the efficiency of renewables are very high.
Dig1t 3y ago
We can, and must, do both. Solar and wind are awesome, but they are not dispatchable like nuclear is. They are not available when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We have enough nuclear fuel to power all of human civilization for a very long time and it is completely carbon free. There are vast swaths of land to safely store the small amount of generated waste. If you really care about climate change you should be 100% onboard the nuclear bandwagon.
- eqvinox 3y ago
  > We have enough nuclear fuel to power all of human civilization for a very long time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium > Optimistic predictions > The OECD estimates that with the world nuclear electricity generating rates of 2002, with LWR, once-through fuel cycle, there are enough conventional resources to last 85 years using known resources and 270 years using known and as yet undiscovered resources. With breeders, this is extended to 8,500 years.[

nickpp 3y ago

> still major issues to be solved here around baseload and storage So maybe this is why China is still building those nuke plants?! We can have both, you know. But we keep burning gas, oil and coal while arguing how dangerous nuclear is. Meanwhile Climate Change is here and it's real. We could've been 100% nuclear by now. It was fear mongering from greens and environmentalists (heavily financed and brainwashed by oil producers like Russia) that f-d up our climate like it did.

8ytecoder 3y ago
The number of premature deaths caused by coal/oil/gas - both directly due to the pollution and indirectly due to climate change, far exceeds the total deaths by nuclear power. The funny thing is it’s usually the most progressive and green leaning people that oppose nuclear so much.
matthewdgreen 3y ago
>We can have both, you know. TFA is not about "having both." It is clearly about positioning nuclear as an alternative to renewable buildouts. This is in the title and also the text. And that's fine, because it reads like a nuclear industry promotional piece. But leave that aside. Both my anecdote and this article agree on one critical fact. It shows up in this line: the age of the brutalist concrete cooling towers and highly centralized state control as the only features of nuclear power may already be over. In other words, even these authors agree that the traditional (1970s-era) nuclear plant is already obsolete, and won't compete with renewables. The only tech that can possibly compete at this point is some kind of modular factory-built nuclear that can scale exponentially. Anything else is likely to be a very costly footnote, both here and probably in China. The rest of the article pins its hope on the success of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to be the scalable tech that can somehow compete with renewables. I've seen a number of articles on HN in recent days giving some pretty bad news about the state of SMRs. But at least an accelerated-development-of-SMRs story hangs together consistently, whereas a lot of wishful "legacy nuclear would be a viable contender but for those meddling environmentalists" Internet commentary just makes no sense in the face of the kind of massive scale that renewable buildouts are seeing.
- Projectiboga 3y ago
  A US government backed SMR just quit their pilot project as they can't compete on cost in the current market. Nuclear is basically obsolete. We need to subsidize it to safely use all the current waste and while extracting energy turn that into safer leftovers.
  - p1mrx 3y ago
    The problem is that nuclear can't compete on cost with fossil fuels, and we've failed to make those obsolete.
    - nickpp 3y ago
      The reason nuclear is so expensive and slow to build is overregulation. It also slowed R&D so much that we haven't created and tested the reactor designs that were safer, smaller and easier to run. It's like when inventing the airplane we would've stopped because the high number of crashes and never reached today's safety and convenience.
danielbln 3y ago
Exxon Valdez, Deep Water Horizon, Three Mile Island, and so on. How much do you trust giant Energy megacorp to do the right thing, play by the book, not cut corners? Especially with the smell of deregulation in the air?
- nickpp 3y ago
  > How much do you trust giant Energy megacorp to do the right thing Just as much as I trust any giant megacorp to do the right thing?! Which is to say slightly more than my government and slightly less than my neighbors. Everything around me that I use and enjoy (my phone, my car, my laptop, my clothes, my food, movies, music, internet etc) is created&delivered by a megacorp or other. I hope someday we will each produce our own energy but so far solar mostly works on sunny days and home nuclear is probably illegal - regulated to death.
  - danielbln 3y ago
    That's why I wrote "Energy" megacorp. Apple dropping the ball on the iPhone has slightly different externalities than BP's corner cutting causing a blowout on Deep Water Horizon and creating havoc an entire ecosystems, or Met Ed causing a partial meltdown in Pennsylvania with all the fun stuff that came with that. The reason why you don't die of lead poisoning while enjoying your megacorp food is regulation by the way.
    - nickpp 3y ago
      So what exactly are you proposing?! Who is supposed to generate all that energy we are using instead of "megacorps" and how?
      - danielbln 3y ago
        We made our bed and need to sleep in it, but we should be careful what sort of technology we allow them to handle, especially if/when we push for more deregulation. Corps have a singular goal, making money, everything else is secondary unless imposed externally. Exxon can't mess up wind or solar power in a way that it pollutes entire landscapes, but they can do (and have done) so with fossil fuel production, and heavy heavy regulation is presumably one of the few reasons why we haven't seen more issues with nuclear fission on that front. If not for that, some Exxon exec will one day get the bright idea on how to cut a lot of corners to boost quarterly profits, and a windmill toppling over has different externalities than a meltdown, or even just inadvertent radioactive gas/particle release. I'm not saying the likes of Shell, BP and Exxon can't handle it (they certainly can) but it needs to happen in an environment that prioritizes safety above all else, because in the case of fission the fallout is quite severe if they/we mess up (compared to other energy sources).

Manuel_D 3y ago

The problem is that peak load is when solar (and typically, wind too depending on the geography) is producing its lowest output. So if you fulfill this demand with nuclear, then you've just made your wind and solar irrelevant because nuclear is just as cheap to run around the clock. This is why proponents of a primarily wind and solar grid are assuming that hydrogen, compressed air, or something else will make storage nearly-free.

triceratops 3y ago
> The problem is that peak load is when solar (and typically, wind too depending on the geography) is producing its lowest output How do you figure that? Residential time of use prices are highest at mid-day. Power use is lower at night, even with higher demand for heating in the winter.[1] > So if you fulfill this demand with nuclear, then you've just made your wind and solar irrelevant because nuclear is just as cheap to run around the clock. Given the above, if your nuclear fleet only supplies enough power for nighttime then by definition it lacks the capacity to support peak demand. 1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  Peak electricity demand tends to be in the afternoon, right around sunset. Since this is right as solar is tapering off, this creates the duck curve problem [1]. It does vary by region and season. In hotter climates, during the summer, peak electricity demand does tend to happen around mid-day [2]. The same page you linked, actually. In case you didn't notice, the demand curves for spring, summer, fall, and winter are all overlaid on the same graph. Mid-day electricity use is highest during the summer, but in other seasons it peaks in the evening right around sunset. Furthermore, about half of homes in the US are heated by gas [3], so decarbonization of heating is going to increase night-time energy use. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve 2. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915 3. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30672#:~:text=Broad%20ranges%20in%20winter%20temperatures,36%25%20who%20rely%20on%20electricity https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30672#:~:tex....

belorn 3y ago

China are also building more fossil fuel power plants than any other country. Using fossil fuel power plants as reserve energy and renewables as peak/bulk energy has been the most cost effective way to produce energy in the last 50 year and the key strategy for many countries. It is why Germany focused on subsidizing massive amount of wind, solar, and natural gas power plants. It worked great until Russia invaded Ukraine and the pipelines got blown up. The only difference between the German strategy and the Chinese strategy is that China is also building a few token nuclear plants. China is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) customer of Russian natural gas. As long we don't want to pay significant more for energy then this strategy will continue to be the dominant strategy. Any other strategy is obsolete. People will try to argue nuclear, green hydrogen, rust batteries, Tesla batteries and so on but for the long foreseeable future all those will just be a footnotes compared to what get built. More renewables, more natural gas, more coal, more oil power plants. Anything else is seen as too costly because any single other technology is just dwarfed by the capacity and cost savings of combining renewables with fossil fuels.

matthewdgreen 3y ago
China is building a lot of coal as well. But the interesting thing is that they're setting up a scheme in which the government pays the plants not to generate. Capacity is at 50% and falling quickly. This thread indicates that most plants will be getting the majority of their revenue from these payments by the second half of this decade. Related: latest estimates indicate a structural decline in Chinese CO2 emissions starting next year, almost entirely because of renewable buildouts. [1] https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/1722886066942743017?s=12&t=sPOl9bVNdjREujwiUeFx1g https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/17228860669427430... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
- belorn 3y ago
  Available capacity is not falling, production output is. This is the purpose of reserve energy. Cheap renewable energy is produced when the weather allows it, and fossil fuels produce energy when demand exceed supply. In order to keep fossil fueled power plants ready to supply energy, the state steps in and provide a paycheck in order to keep them available (this is the program that the twitter post talks about). This is the strategy that Germany has. It is also why getting rid of fossil fuel subsidies is close to impossible. The more fossil fuel power plants a country need to have standing by, the more subsidies are needed to keep them staffed and fueled up. In general it did reduce emissions compared to running exclusively on fossil fuels, while reducing costs at the same time since at peak weather the efficiency of renewables are very high.

Dig1t 3y ago

We can, and must, do both. Solar and wind are awesome, but they are not dispatchable like nuclear is. They are not available when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We have enough nuclear fuel to power all of human civilization for a very long time and it is completely carbon free. There are vast swaths of land to safely store the small amount of generated waste. If you really care about climate change you should be 100% onboard the nuclear bandwagon.

eqvinox 3y ago
> We have enough nuclear fuel to power all of human civilization for a very long time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium > Optimistic predictions > The OECD estimates that with the world nuclear electricity generating rates of 2002, with LWR, once-through fuel cycle, there are enough conventional resources to last 85 years using known resources and 270 years using known and as yet undiscovered resources. With breeders, this is extended to 8,500 years.[