3 ms·

Varying load by +/- 25% is neat but that doesn’t solve the “I need energy at night” problem for solar. You either need batteries or wind (but even wind is risky

Varying load by +/- 25% is neat but that doesn’t solve the “I need energy at night” problem for solar. You either need batteries or wind (but even wind is risky because you’re screwed during windless nights). All these other ideas are worth exploring and I’m 100% in favor of them, but the only path to decarbonizing the grid is nuclear & I’m so frustrated by all the solar absolutists that think renewables can power 100% of the grid by 2050 just because solar panel costs are dropping. We’d get much closer to net 0 if we were building fission plants aggressively (cue all the solar proponents claiming it’s too expensive or unsafe even when it really isn’t and solar costs are intentionally calculated in a misleading fashion to ignore the buildout needed for energy storage or altering unrelated industries to make solar more attractive).

matthewdgreen 3y ago
When the grid transition began in the 2000s the hope was that solar prices, storage and nuclear would all see massive cost declines that made a fast transition possible. This has occurred for solar PV. It’s reasonably plausible that it will also occur for storage, given the huge incentives and rapid increase in manufacturing efficiencies. It has not happened at all for nuclear and there’s currently nothing on the horizon that gives much hope this will change by the 2050/60 time frame. Even China, which is blasting away at nuclear, predicts it will only be 18% of their generation by 2060 (and that’s likely optimistic.)
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Yeah, nuclear is hard because it was strangled in the crib for 50 years and it’s hard to make up that ground on time scales for net 0. It still remains the better bet for decarbonizing the grid and all the other neat ideas seem mostly like party tricks and nothing more. I think China in particular is interesting because there’s a good chance that they’re building enough capacity that their costs start to decrease & they become the world leader in fission plants. Specifically interested in what they’re doing with MSR designs because they should be much much cheaper than traditional HWR designs. But yes, it’s going to take us a minute to rebuild and restart our fission know-how as a species. It’s also telling that China is building a heck of a lot of fossil plants (natural gas & coal) in addition to lots of solar. That’s because they have a lot of electrification to do (they have a massive rural population & they also have much more transportation that needs to electrify to use grid power). Solar is a fine companion to handle daytime peak growth (which is why they’re reaching TW scale with solar) but that baseload growth remains a problem which is why they’re building so many fossil fuel and nuclear plants.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    I don’t want to re-litigate the “fission didn’t fail economically, it was killed” perspective (which I find unconvincing: people have proven they’ll put up with much more dangerous things if they’re profitable.) But we need to replace the entire global fossil fuel industry in 20-30 years, and the only possible way to do that is with energy sources that can be mass-produced in a factory with all the scale and efficiency improvements and virtuous cost and production flywheel that entails. Solar and wind are on this trajectory. Storage is plausibly on an earlier stage of this trajectory. Nuclear might get onto this trajectory through modular reactors, but those don’t exist and are at the “maybe” research stage with huge questions still unanswered. By contrast, commercial battery deployment and production is economical and projected to hit 6.5TWh by 2030. As a related datapoint on “party tricks”, China built more solar and wind in the first nine months of 2023 than all 26 nuclear reactors it has under construction. They’re likely to build even more next year. The need for baseload is a valid point, but the trajectories of renewables vs. non-modular nuclear are so different that it’s hard to see nuclear catching up enough to make a difference.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      Given that China is building out more coal plants than all other countries combined, I think that’s telling about the efficacy of renewables to achieve net 0. They’re targeting 2030 for peak CO2 emissions because they’re trying to cheaply electrify as much of their population as possible as quickly as possible because the CO2 reduction efforts that will dominate 2050-2100 will impose significant economic growth challenges & China wants to make sure they’re in a more stable position to compete with the West. Yes, China is building a huge amount of solar capacity, but AFAICT it’s all about absorbing peak growth as they add more consumers of electricity. Baseline growth remains a huge problem and China is solving that with a mix of nuclear and fossil fuels. I fully expect China will continue to ramp up nuclear as they get better at it. And EVs are a huge iceberg problem for the electric grid as they currently don’t run off the grid and represents a massive amount of energy consumption that will be added to the grid. On top of that they consume a huge amount of battery production which means there’s not that much left over for grid scale batteries. We also have no existence proof of economical grid scale batteries at any meaningful scale. You also have to overbuild your solar by quite a bit so that you can charge the battery up when the sun is shining to time-shift that excess capacity into the night. Solar is fine and it’s not a knock against it, but there’s simply no trajectory to reach net 0 CO2 emissions and you will end up with a hybrid grid. 18% nuclear would represent a huge CO2 reduction because all that capacity would otherwise be fossil fuels (because the alternative is not building batteries because that tech doesn’t exist yet). MSRs are a neat party trick but honestly I think China’s approach of SMRs is a far safer bet in terms of being a massive cost reduction, safer, and use waaay less water & are far less of a research project. My hunch is that they’re also standardizing their nuclear plant designs to keep costs in check. Keep in mind that France is 90% fossil fuel free in their grid even though nuclear only represents ~60% of energy produced. I haven’t read anywhere that fission failed due to economics - it has always been price competitive with fossil fuels. It’s the regulatory burdens & concerns about safety (some valid, most not) that strangled its growth. Do you have any links suggesting nuclear construction is uneconomical?
dragontamer 3y ago
> Varying load by +/- 25% is neat but that doesn’t solve the “I need energy at night” problem for solar. *48 hours* is the part of that statement that solves the "need energy at night" problem. By allowing this industry to shift power-consumption forward, or backward, by 48-hours, you effectively build a battery. A very strange battery yes, but it means the plant can collect during peak solar (+25% power usage), and then cut power at night by -25%.

matthewdgreen 3y ago

When the grid transition began in the 2000s the hope was that solar prices, storage and nuclear would all see massive cost declines that made a fast transition possible. This has occurred for solar PV. It’s reasonably plausible that it will also occur for storage, given the huge incentives and rapid increase in manufacturing efficiencies. It has not happened at all for nuclear and there’s currently nothing on the horizon that gives much hope this will change by the 2050/60 time frame. Even China, which is blasting away at nuclear, predicts it will only be 18% of their generation by 2060 (and that’s likely optimistic.)

vlovich123 3y ago
Yeah, nuclear is hard because it was strangled in the crib for 50 years and it’s hard to make up that ground on time scales for net 0. It still remains the better bet for decarbonizing the grid and all the other neat ideas seem mostly like party tricks and nothing more. I think China in particular is interesting because there’s a good chance that they’re building enough capacity that their costs start to decrease & they become the world leader in fission plants. Specifically interested in what they’re doing with MSR designs because they should be much much cheaper than traditional HWR designs. But yes, it’s going to take us a minute to rebuild and restart our fission know-how as a species. It’s also telling that China is building a heck of a lot of fossil plants (natural gas & coal) in addition to lots of solar. That’s because they have a lot of electrification to do (they have a massive rural population & they also have much more transportation that needs to electrify to use grid power). Solar is a fine companion to handle daytime peak growth (which is why they’re reaching TW scale with solar) but that baseload growth remains a problem which is why they’re building so many fossil fuel and nuclear plants.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  I don’t want to re-litigate the “fission didn’t fail economically, it was killed” perspective (which I find unconvincing: people have proven they’ll put up with much more dangerous things if they’re profitable.) But we need to replace the entire global fossil fuel industry in 20-30 years, and the only possible way to do that is with energy sources that can be mass-produced in a factory with all the scale and efficiency improvements and virtuous cost and production flywheel that entails. Solar and wind are on this trajectory. Storage is plausibly on an earlier stage of this trajectory. Nuclear might get onto this trajectory through modular reactors, but those don’t exist and are at the “maybe” research stage with huge questions still unanswered. By contrast, commercial battery deployment and production is economical and projected to hit 6.5TWh by 2030. As a related datapoint on “party tricks”, China built more solar and wind in the first nine months of 2023 than all 26 nuclear reactors it has under construction. They’re likely to build even more next year. The need for baseload is a valid point, but the trajectories of renewables vs. non-modular nuclear are so different that it’s hard to see nuclear catching up enough to make a difference.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Given that China is building out more coal plants than all other countries combined, I think that’s telling about the efficacy of renewables to achieve net 0. They’re targeting 2030 for peak CO2 emissions because they’re trying to cheaply electrify as much of their population as possible as quickly as possible because the CO2 reduction efforts that will dominate 2050-2100 will impose significant economic growth challenges & China wants to make sure they’re in a more stable position to compete with the West. Yes, China is building a huge amount of solar capacity, but AFAICT it’s all about absorbing peak growth as they add more consumers of electricity. Baseline growth remains a huge problem and China is solving that with a mix of nuclear and fossil fuels. I fully expect China will continue to ramp up nuclear as they get better at it. And EVs are a huge iceberg problem for the electric grid as they currently don’t run off the grid and represents a massive amount of energy consumption that will be added to the grid. On top of that they consume a huge amount of battery production which means there’s not that much left over for grid scale batteries. We also have no existence proof of economical grid scale batteries at any meaningful scale. You also have to overbuild your solar by quite a bit so that you can charge the battery up when the sun is shining to time-shift that excess capacity into the night. Solar is fine and it’s not a knock against it, but there’s simply no trajectory to reach net 0 CO2 emissions and you will end up with a hybrid grid. 18% nuclear would represent a huge CO2 reduction because all that capacity would otherwise be fossil fuels (because the alternative is not building batteries because that tech doesn’t exist yet). MSRs are a neat party trick but honestly I think China’s approach of SMRs is a far safer bet in terms of being a massive cost reduction, safer, and use waaay less water & are far less of a research project. My hunch is that they’re also standardizing their nuclear plant designs to keep costs in check. Keep in mind that France is 90% fossil fuel free in their grid even though nuclear only represents ~60% of energy produced. I haven’t read anywhere that fission failed due to economics - it has always been price competitive with fossil fuels. It’s the regulatory burdens & concerns about safety (some valid, most not) that strangled its growth. Do you have any links suggesting nuclear construction is uneconomical?

dragontamer 3y ago

> Varying load by +/- 25% is neat but that doesn’t solve the “I need energy at night” problem for solar. *48 hours* is the part of that statement that solves the "need energy at night" problem. By allowing this industry to shift power-consumption forward, or backward, by 48-hours, you effectively build a battery. A very strange battery yes, but it means the plant can collect during peak solar (+25% power usage), and then cut power at night by -25%.