7 ms·

Nuclear waste is a problem, but it is nothing compared to the waste from gas and coal, which we release to the atmosphere daily. It kills thousands every year a

by epups 3y ago

Nuclear waste is a problem, but it is nothing compared to the waste from gas and coal, which we release to the atmosphere daily. It kills thousands every year and will kill millions in the future. And you may think: well there you go, let's get rid of all of that and just use renewables then. But we can't, as the parent comment demonstrates. Some days you just need a stable energy source, and your only realistic choice for the next 20 years is hydro (already maxed out at most places), nuclear, gas or coal. Pick your poison.

hef19898 3y ago
Agree, CO2 emissions are big problem, a life threatening one for some people. Nuclear is a problem too, just not a global obe. You know, both things can be true at the same time. Again, what would be your alternative way forward? Coal and oil burning has to go, that much is sure. We still need electricity so, hence we need clean sources. And we need them fast, because as a species we were asleep at the wheel for way too long. Also, we need a lot of those clean sources. So what is your proposal? A realistic one, please, not a scenarion of "we should have done X decades ago", but one that can be worked on right now, on the basis we have.
- katbyte 3y ago
  There is none except hydro and nuclear for base load. Unless you want to burn gas (co2) or coal (co2 and radioactive emissions that cause more cancers in the us then nuclear has world wide) Renewables outside hydro cannot, and will never, be able to provide a a stable base load for the grid, battery storage isn’t there and has all sorts of issues, pumped storage requires even more rare conditions then hydro, as does geothermal, so we are left with nuclear as the only real clean and reasonable path forward that we would have done decades ago if not for oil and gas doing everything to prevent it. So what is YOUR proposal to provide a stable base load?
  - andyjohnson0 3y ago
    > There is none except hydro and nuclear for base load. I'm not the person you're replying to, and I mostly agree with your points, but I think its necessary to point out that nuclear and hydro have long lead times to build the infrastructure. And we basically don't have enough time left to build it. I don't have good answers. Solar + interconnectors, maybe? So that areas in daylight can power areas that aren't? But this obvs requires cooperative behaviour.
    - mplewis 3y ago
      The second best time to build nuclear is today.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Not if you get the equivalent of multiple NPPs in renewables installed every month it isn't. The best time to build nuclear was before Chernobyl, and since Fukushima new nuclear plants are dead basically.
      - labster 3y ago
        The third best time to build nuclear is in about 20 years, when we develop fusion.
        adrianN 3y ago
        There is no reason to believe that fusion will be cost competitive.
        KingOfCoders 3y ago
        If fusion is nuclear than solar is too ;-)
        belter 3y ago
        Add a zero digit to your estimate.
    - amatix 3y ago
      There's a company working to build a 3600km long cable between solar + wind farms in Morocco, and the UK. 3.6GW cable, 10GW of generation, 20GW of battery storage, and the cable should run at full load for 20h a day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Power_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...
  - kawhah 3y ago
    My proposal would be to use combined cycle gas turbines to peak renewables until over-installation and storage make that no longer necessary. Gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. Modern gas turbines are by far the most efficient way of generating electricity from fossil fuels. Replacing fossil fuels burnt in ICEs and for heating with electricity generated using gas will drastically reduce emissions quickly. There is plenty of gas. Much of it is cheap to extract. The strategic reasons for doing this are that gas turbines will be able to handle the extreme 'duck curves' and other demand volatility we will see when both renewables and electric vehicles are ramped up hard. Those are the two levers which are currently easiest to push on - because individuals can replace vehicles and heating systems, and will do so given smallish financial incentives. And because solar, wind and storage, can be scaled easily without excessive top-down planning or insane capital needs. If nuclear is to be the solution, we have to quickly commit to it hard as a society. Compared to gas, nuclear will both make electricity more expensive and make swings and volatility in demand or in renewable supply more costly to deal with. It will on the margin discourage EV and electric heating, and discourage other renewables. Nuclear is good at 'base load', but not much else. This is fine(-ish) if we rapidly switch to almost all nuclear. It works well in a 'Star Trek economy' where governments can act quickly and cheaply and impose choices by offering abundance. If this was the case, it would make sense to call a 50 year decision that nuclear with a modest amount of over-provision will replace almost all generation. (This has succeeded historically only in France, a very centralized economy for a Western democracy, with a high degree of regulation, and where the government has abundant access to capital.) The real climate/energy economy is not like this. If you want to see an example of rapid change in action, look at the fracking revolution in the United States. Small players who saw opportunities created a whole new set of technologies, techniques and practices. They did this because they could react to incremental incentives. They didn't have to win everywhere at once. They could win field by field, installation by installation. We need the situation for new renewable generation and power storage to work like this. We need it to be the case that someone who provides storage in the right place at the right time can make money from it. We need it to be the case that someone who makes batteries (or gas storage or gravity storage or turbines or EVs) slightly cheaper or more efficient can make money from that. There is no reason why this type of progress can work for environmentally damaging tech like fracking and not for environmentally beneficial tech. Gas isn't a 50 year decision, more like a 20 year decision. It reduces emissions a lot in the short term but leaves the playing field wide open for further rapid and drastic reductions in the longer term. (A subsidiary concern but still a real one: if you could press a button and replace all fossil fuels with reliable and safe nuclear, you would instantly have catastrophic political breakdown in places where societal cohesion depends on money from fossil fuels. Moving from oil to gas and then ramping down gas progressively allows these places to gradually develop other incomes, and allows the rest of the world time to deal with them and political problems which they are likely to export.)_
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Base load, for starters, is an overblown problem, multiple days with close to 100% renewables showed us that. Now that this is out of the way: Massive build out of renewables, mainly solar and wind. Build the grid for that as well. Use gas peaker plants, if needed. Keep nuclear plants running as long as safely possible. Invest in a green hydrogen network for storage. Make industrial demand more flexible. Reinterate, rinse and repeat. I work from memory here, based on what I learned during my masters and a couple of stints in energy hungry industries a couple of yeaes ago. Besides gas peaker plants and green hydrogen, all of that is already happening in Europe. Especially solar and wind build out is progressing massively across the world, even without a concentrated effort behind it. Regarding industrial demand flexibility, that is also happening for a decade now (I personally know it does in the chemical industry, paper industry and graphite industry, surprising how much flexibility companies can squeeze out of production tech that was historically seen as being not flexible at all when there is loads of money to be made). Domestic demand is different, convenience beats saving most of the time, also households don't have professional energy management (hint: there isba massive, hard, start-up idea here: provide automated consumption control of electricity for households beyond smart thermostats ansball the other "smart" home crap). Nuclear is a dead end in the developed world: too expensive (Hinkley C was already more expensive than wind like 7 years ago), takes too long install (just google year per kWh for the last NPPs installed) and has additional, unsolved, long term issues (waste storage only being one of those). Heck, even investors are quiting NPPs across the Western world. Nuclear has a future so: existing plants need be run as long as safely possible (the main reason German plants were shit down, they reached the end of their service live), for countries with nuclear arsenals, for the production of medical radionucleoids, for research... New ones are a waste of time, energy and money right now so. And yet again, you said why something doesn't work, because just building dozens of plants and go fully nuclear is not feasible or realistic for the developed world. For developing countries it is different, and they should build nuclear plants instead of coal ones, but then those have a lot of catching up to do. They could also go fully renewable right away so, they should have an "easier" (nothing is easy about any of this) life doing so without a century of legacy structures and systems to worry about (grids, industry, domestic use...).
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Fission is too expensive. The good real reasons from a cost perspective for reactors are weapons, medical and industrial applications as well as research. Why would you want to use battery storage instead of pressure or gravity, for example? You can do gravity by moving stuff around underground, not just classical pumped storage. Digging big and deep holes is something people know how to do quite well, same goes for moving weights/mass up and down. Could also do some chemical storage as another avenue. For heat you can have certain thermal storage, too.
    - natmaka 3y ago
      A major piece here (electricity storage) is V2G ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ). Reducing emissions related to transportation leads to electrical vehicles, and therefore to a vast amount of batteries, most not used at any given moment and therefore ready to store overproduction or release needed electricity. Batteries' performance are quickly progressing, and their prices history is clear: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
      - apex_sloth 3y ago
        car batteries aren't great for storing and retrieving energy for grid usage. to expensive for too few cycles.
        natmaka 3y ago
        This very average frequency/amplitude/speed of discharge, for any given battery, depends upon many parameters (during most of such 'call to batteries': slope of the call and quantity of electricity needed, duration, proportion of vehicles connected to the grid...). This is part of the solution, as we have ways to reduce effects of intermittency on production (mainly a mix spread over the continent), other ways to store electricity (hydro, green hydrogen-burning turbo-alternators...), and curtailment...
  - adrianN 3y ago
    Hydrogen and gas turbines are proven ways to store large amounts of energy and turn it back into electricity.
- phil21 3y ago
  > So what is your proposal? A realistic one, please, not a scenarion of "we should have done X decades ago", but one that can be worked on right now, on the basis we have. Sometimes the only realistic answer is "We should have done X, many years ago" - I think society and humans in general need to get better at admitting this. Sometimes we back ourselves into a corner and we just need to accept that as a fact. But due to the situation we are in, the actual realistic answer I have is continue to burn coal and gas as a bridge while we do a crash program to train up the next generation of nuclear engineers and construction workforce. Start 100 reactor sites right now and understand they are mostly going to be used as on-the-job training for construction crews for the next decade while we burn co2 and learn how to build things again. Of course continue to install as many gigawatts of solar and wind during that time period as you can while expanding the grid. As you spin up your "nuclear batteries" you can then start spinning down coal and gas and let your renewables take up the peak loads. Load prediction and larger grids have become reliable enough now that you can spin up nuclear in a predictable fashion for load-following, with a small amount of grid battery hanging around for those few hours of surprises per year. Hydro is interesting but effectively 100% utilized worldwide at this point. Once you get your nuclear workforce geared up and the initial surge of demand completed, perhaps start looking at modifying as much hydro capacity in the world to act in both directions as pumped storage. Imagine pumping water back into Lake Mead from downstream when there is excess power generation. Exceedingly inefficient - but starts to become interesting when you have grid-tied batteries that actually work at scale. Edit: Nuclear is only dead in the developed world because we chose it to be so. Society can decide tomorrow to change that decision if properly motivated. We have many times in the past for much harder things than building a few hundred industrial plants we already have built before.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    There were two new nuclear reactor projects launched in Europe in the 2000s / 2010s: two new reactors in Finland and Hinkley C in the UK. Finland canceled one and got one 1600 MW reactor online this year. Hinkley C is already 3 years late and will take at least 5 more years. In the same time Hinkley C was planned until now, the UK installed 10x the capacity of Hinkley C in wind alone. You see the maths here, right? Not to mention wind and solar are cheaper than Hinkley C, already were in 2015 or so (based on 20 year bid prices per kWh for both alternatives). Nuclear in the developed world is dead because it is too expensive. Nuclear isn't dead in the developing world because governments there want it, and it is better than coal (which makes nuclear a better choice for me, no idea if that really factors into those decisions or not). Developing countries could as easily go for renewables straight away as well so. It is not society that needs to change to make nuclear viable again, it is the economics behind it. And with renewables, especially solar, following Moore's law to a T so far, that wont happen ever.
svantana 3y ago
There is also geothermal, where some very interesting innovations are being made by Quaise Energy among others. Also, energy storage is emerging as an electricity grid stabilizer. The cost trend of solar+wind+storage is looking very promising when compared to nuclear.

by epups 3y ago

hef19898 3y ago

Agree, CO2 emissions are big problem, a life threatening one for some people. Nuclear is a problem too, just not a global obe. You know, both things can be true at the same time. Again, what would be your alternative way forward? Coal and oil burning has to go, that much is sure. We still need electricity so, hence we need clean sources. And we need them fast, because as a species we were asleep at the wheel for way too long. Also, we need a lot of those clean sources. So what is your proposal? A realistic one, please, not a scenarion of "we should have done X decades ago", but one that can be worked on right now, on the basis we have.

katbyte 3y ago
There is none except hydro and nuclear for base load. Unless you want to burn gas (co2) or coal (co2 and radioactive emissions that cause more cancers in the us then nuclear has world wide) Renewables outside hydro cannot, and will never, be able to provide a a stable base load for the grid, battery storage isn’t there and has all sorts of issues, pumped storage requires even more rare conditions then hydro, as does geothermal, so we are left with nuclear as the only real clean and reasonable path forward that we would have done decades ago if not for oil and gas doing everything to prevent it. So what is YOUR proposal to provide a stable base load?
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  > There is none except hydro and nuclear for base load. I'm not the person you're replying to, and I mostly agree with your points, but I think its necessary to point out that nuclear and hydro have long lead times to build the infrastructure. And we basically don't have enough time left to build it. I don't have good answers. Solar + interconnectors, maybe? So that areas in daylight can power areas that aren't? But this obvs requires cooperative behaviour.
  - mplewis 3y ago
    The second best time to build nuclear is today.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Not if you get the equivalent of multiple NPPs in renewables installed every month it isn't. The best time to build nuclear was before Chernobyl, and since Fukushima new nuclear plants are dead basically.
    - labster 3y ago
      The third best time to build nuclear is in about 20 years, when we develop fusion.
      - adrianN 3y ago
        There is no reason to believe that fusion will be cost competitive.
      - KingOfCoders 3y ago
        If fusion is nuclear than solar is too ;-)
      - belter 3y ago
        Add a zero digit to your estimate.
  - amatix 3y ago
    There's a company working to build a 3600km long cable between solar + wind farms in Morocco, and the UK. 3.6GW cable, 10GW of generation, 20GW of battery storage, and the cable should run at full load for 20h a day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Power_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...
- kawhah 3y ago
  My proposal would be to use combined cycle gas turbines to peak renewables until over-installation and storage make that no longer necessary. Gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. Modern gas turbines are by far the most efficient way of generating electricity from fossil fuels. Replacing fossil fuels burnt in ICEs and for heating with electricity generated using gas will drastically reduce emissions quickly. There is plenty of gas. Much of it is cheap to extract. The strategic reasons for doing this are that gas turbines will be able to handle the extreme 'duck curves' and other demand volatility we will see when both renewables and electric vehicles are ramped up hard. Those are the two levers which are currently easiest to push on - because individuals can replace vehicles and heating systems, and will do so given smallish financial incentives. And because solar, wind and storage, can be scaled easily without excessive top-down planning or insane capital needs. If nuclear is to be the solution, we have to quickly commit to it hard as a society. Compared to gas, nuclear will both make electricity more expensive and make swings and volatility in demand or in renewable supply more costly to deal with. It will on the margin discourage EV and electric heating, and discourage other renewables. Nuclear is good at 'base load', but not much else. This is fine(-ish) if we rapidly switch to almost all nuclear. It works well in a 'Star Trek economy' where governments can act quickly and cheaply and impose choices by offering abundance. If this was the case, it would make sense to call a 50 year decision that nuclear with a modest amount of over-provision will replace almost all generation. (This has succeeded historically only in France, a very centralized economy for a Western democracy, with a high degree of regulation, and where the government has abundant access to capital.) The real climate/energy economy is not like this. If you want to see an example of rapid change in action, look at the fracking revolution in the United States. Small players who saw opportunities created a whole new set of technologies, techniques and practices. They did this because they could react to incremental incentives. They didn't have to win everywhere at once. They could win field by field, installation by installation. We need the situation for new renewable generation and power storage to work like this. We need it to be the case that someone who provides storage in the right place at the right time can make money from it. We need it to be the case that someone who makes batteries (or gas storage or gravity storage or turbines or EVs) slightly cheaper or more efficient can make money from that. There is no reason why this type of progress can work for environmentally damaging tech like fracking and not for environmentally beneficial tech. Gas isn't a 50 year decision, more like a 20 year decision. It reduces emissions a lot in the short term but leaves the playing field wide open for further rapid and drastic reductions in the longer term. (A subsidiary concern but still a real one: if you could press a button and replace all fossil fuels with reliable and safe nuclear, you would instantly have catastrophic political breakdown in places where societal cohesion depends on money from fossil fuels. Moving from oil to gas and then ramping down gas progressively allows these places to gradually develop other incomes, and allows the rest of the world time to deal with them and political problems which they are likely to export.)_
- hef19898 3y ago
  Base load, for starters, is an overblown problem, multiple days with close to 100% renewables showed us that. Now that this is out of the way: Massive build out of renewables, mainly solar and wind. Build the grid for that as well. Use gas peaker plants, if needed. Keep nuclear plants running as long as safely possible. Invest in a green hydrogen network for storage. Make industrial demand more flexible. Reinterate, rinse and repeat. I work from memory here, based on what I learned during my masters and a couple of stints in energy hungry industries a couple of yeaes ago. Besides gas peaker plants and green hydrogen, all of that is already happening in Europe. Especially solar and wind build out is progressing massively across the world, even without a concentrated effort behind it. Regarding industrial demand flexibility, that is also happening for a decade now (I personally know it does in the chemical industry, paper industry and graphite industry, surprising how much flexibility companies can squeeze out of production tech that was historically seen as being not flexible at all when there is loads of money to be made). Domestic demand is different, convenience beats saving most of the time, also households don't have professional energy management (hint: there isba massive, hard, start-up idea here: provide automated consumption control of electricity for households beyond smart thermostats ansball the other "smart" home crap). Nuclear is a dead end in the developed world: too expensive (Hinkley C was already more expensive than wind like 7 years ago), takes too long install (just google year per kWh for the last NPPs installed) and has additional, unsolved, long term issues (waste storage only being one of those). Heck, even investors are quiting NPPs across the Western world. Nuclear has a future so: existing plants need be run as long as safely possible (the main reason German plants were shit down, they reached the end of their service live), for countries with nuclear arsenals, for the production of medical radionucleoids, for research... New ones are a waste of time, energy and money right now so. And yet again, you said why something doesn't work, because just building dozens of plants and go fully nuclear is not feasible or realistic for the developed world. For developing countries it is different, and they should build nuclear plants instead of coal ones, but then those have a lot of catching up to do. They could also go fully renewable right away so, they should have an "easier" (nothing is easy about any of this) life doing so without a century of legacy structures and systems to worry about (grids, industry, domestic use...).
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Fission is too expensive. The good real reasons from a cost perspective for reactors are weapons, medical and industrial applications as well as research. Why would you want to use battery storage instead of pressure or gravity, for example? You can do gravity by moving stuff around underground, not just classical pumped storage. Digging big and deep holes is something people know how to do quite well, same goes for moving weights/mass up and down. Could also do some chemical storage as another avenue. For heat you can have certain thermal storage, too.
  - natmaka 3y ago
    A major piece here (electricity storage) is V2G ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ). Reducing emissions related to transportation leads to electrical vehicles, and therefore to a vast amount of batteries, most not used at any given moment and therefore ready to store overproduction or release needed electricity. Batteries' performance are quickly progressing, and their prices history is clear: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
    - apex_sloth 3y ago
      car batteries aren't great for storing and retrieving energy for grid usage. to expensive for too few cycles.
      - natmaka 3y ago
        This very average frequency/amplitude/speed of discharge, for any given battery, depends upon many parameters (during most of such 'call to batteries': slope of the call and quantity of electricity needed, duration, proportion of vehicles connected to the grid...). This is part of the solution, as we have ways to reduce effects of intermittency on production (mainly a mix spread over the continent), other ways to store electricity (hydro, green hydrogen-burning turbo-alternators...), and curtailment...
- adrianN 3y ago
  Hydrogen and gas turbines are proven ways to store large amounts of energy and turn it back into electricity.
phil21 3y ago
> So what is your proposal? A realistic one, please, not a scenarion of "we should have done X decades ago", but one that can be worked on right now, on the basis we have. Sometimes the only realistic answer is "We should have done X, many years ago" - I think society and humans in general need to get better at admitting this. Sometimes we back ourselves into a corner and we just need to accept that as a fact. But due to the situation we are in, the actual realistic answer I have is continue to burn coal and gas as a bridge while we do a crash program to train up the next generation of nuclear engineers and construction workforce. Start 100 reactor sites right now and understand they are mostly going to be used as on-the-job training for construction crews for the next decade while we burn co2 and learn how to build things again. Of course continue to install as many gigawatts of solar and wind during that time period as you can while expanding the grid. As you spin up your "nuclear batteries" you can then start spinning down coal and gas and let your renewables take up the peak loads. Load prediction and larger grids have become reliable enough now that you can spin up nuclear in a predictable fashion for load-following, with a small amount of grid battery hanging around for those few hours of surprises per year. Hydro is interesting but effectively 100% utilized worldwide at this point. Once you get your nuclear workforce geared up and the initial surge of demand completed, perhaps start looking at modifying as much hydro capacity in the world to act in both directions as pumped storage. Imagine pumping water back into Lake Mead from downstream when there is excess power generation. Exceedingly inefficient - but starts to become interesting when you have grid-tied batteries that actually work at scale. Edit: Nuclear is only dead in the developed world because we chose it to be so. Society can decide tomorrow to change that decision if properly motivated. We have many times in the past for much harder things than building a few hundred industrial plants we already have built before.
- hef19898 3y ago
  There were two new nuclear reactor projects launched in Europe in the 2000s / 2010s: two new reactors in Finland and Hinkley C in the UK. Finland canceled one and got one 1600 MW reactor online this year. Hinkley C is already 3 years late and will take at least 5 more years. In the same time Hinkley C was planned until now, the UK installed 10x the capacity of Hinkley C in wind alone. You see the maths here, right? Not to mention wind and solar are cheaper than Hinkley C, already were in 2015 or so (based on 20 year bid prices per kWh for both alternatives). Nuclear in the developed world is dead because it is too expensive. Nuclear isn't dead in the developing world because governments there want it, and it is better than coal (which makes nuclear a better choice for me, no idea if that really factors into those decisions or not). Developing countries could as easily go for renewables straight away as well so. It is not society that needs to change to make nuclear viable again, it is the economics behind it. And with renewables, especially solar, following Moore's law to a T so far, that wont happen ever.

svantana 3y ago

There is also geothermal, where some very interesting innovations are being made by Quaise Energy among others. Also, energy storage is emerging as an electricity grid stabilizer. The cost trend of solar+wind+storage is looking very promising when compared to nuclear.