7 ms·
Nuclear does not seem to be on the mass production curve that solar and batteries are. Even if you could design a reactor that itself can be mass produced at t
by stetrain 3y ago
Nuclear does not seem to be on the mass production curve that solar and batteries are.
Even if you could design a reactor that itself can be mass produced at that scale, you still need to do the same with selecting and getting environmental and public safety approval for installation sites and production, transportation, and disposal of the fuel and waste.
I'm not against nuclear from a technological perspective, but I just don't see it being economically competitive with effectively printable devices like solar and batteries given the current direction of the cost curves on each.
- the8472 3y agohttps://www.statista.com/statistics/1129876/china-nuclear-power-generation-volume/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1129876/china-nuclear-po...
- stetrain 3y agoHow do costs compare? What's the site approval process like in China vs the US?
- _aavaa_ 3y agoCompare this graph with more than nuclear, and notice how lagging nuclear is compared to any other renewable. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y agoNuclear might not be able to compete in the U.S. and Europe, but that’s largely because of a ridiculous regulatory regime and has very little to do with the actual tech.
- wolverine876 3y agoPeople love to say it, but is there evidence? I've never seen it - which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but that this claim needs it.
- Manuel_D 3y agoNuclear was much cheaper in the 1970s and early 80s: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-Cost-of-US-Nuclear-Power-Reactors-by-Construction-Start-Date_fig8_292964046 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-Construction-C... This wasn't just due to regulatory influence, it was also due to economies of scale. But the two are related, more regulation results in fewer builds. Fewer builds reduces economies of scale and thus increases costs. Which results in even fewer nuclear builds, and so on.
- angiosperm 3y agoIn other words, nuke cost has only ever increased, however much was built.
- Manuel_D 3y agoOn a per-MW basis nuclear power dropped in cost during the 1950s. See the small blue dots round the late 1950s and early 60s? Compare that with the cluster of red dots.
- wolverine876 3y agoEarly, low-hanging fruit?
- Manuel_D 3y agoThat, and larger plants. Things like concrete containment vessels have costs relative to the surface area of a hemisphere, while power output scales with the volume. But the big driver was economies of scale. Building multiple copies of the same or similar design means you can have longer production runs of steam generators, pressure vessels, turbines, etc.
- angiosperm 3y agoI.e., cost has risen monotonically since the 1950s.
- edm0nd 3y agoWe can thank the hippies of the 60s and 70s for all their anti-nuclear silliness for making the nuclear industry heavily over regulated.
- Toutouxc 3y agoThere was also the Soviet nuclear fireworks project in the 80s that didn’t help much.
- hef19898 3y agoAnd then it took until the 90s to have an actual imopact on policy. It always puzzles how people get even the most basic timelines wrong.
- _ph_ 3y agoYou have to to be honest. They were able to push for stronger regulations not because politics mainly listens to hippies. Stronger regulations were prudent considering the safety levels of the earlier reactor design. Without those regulations, many more cheap, but less safe reactors might have been built. Of which more had gone bad over years. So yes, if you will, thank the hippies for preventing several nuclear incidents.
- VBprogrammer 3y agoChina has installed more renewable energy than the rest of the world put together last year. I'm pretty sure we can rule out any "ridiculous regulatory regime" issues there.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y agoThey’re also building a lot of nuclear: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1129876/china-nuclear-power-generation-volume/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1129876/china-nuclear-po...
- ViewTrick1002 3y agoChina is barely building nuclear anymore. China added more wind and solar the past nine months than all of its nuclear reactors under construction will provide. Yes, that includes capacity factor. https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718 https://twitter.com/yo_ean/status/1718633487454904718
- pydry 3y agoA moderate civilian nuclear supply chain and skills base helps keep a lid on the maintenance and construction of nuclear submarines, carriers and nuclear bombs.
- willy_k 3y agoIf you’re going to try to determine how China is approaching nuclear power, it’s probably more useful to look at data related to that [0], instead of drawing conclusions from tangential data. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
- VBprogrammer 3y agoThe point I was making is that China isn't inclined to do things just to appease some regulatory requirement. They are also building an incredible amount of Coal power.
- throwjnkjk 3y agoSlave labor is always cheap. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ILAB/images/storyboards/solar/Solar.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ILAB/images/storyboar...
- XorNot 3y agoBatteries are nowhere near able to meet any energy storage demands of the grid. The simple question to ask yourself is why do battery installations always get quoted in units of power - GW - and not units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually use? (The answer is: because they're terrible for it. Batteries hold about 3x they're rated power value as energy - which means the 10 GW or whatever someone quotes is good for about 3 hours at that output. Great for grid stability, expensive and useless for long term storage).
- cesarb 3y ago> The simple question to ask yourself is why do battery installations always get quoted in units of power - GW - and not units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually use? For the same reason gas power plants and hydroelectric power plants are quoted in MW units, and not on the size of their fuel tanks or reservoir volume (converted to MWh as appropriate): it's the most important number for balancing the grid. If you have 90 GW of power demand on the grid at a given moment, you need 90 GW of power generation on the grid at that same moment (simplifying a bit, since transmission constraints mean you also need some of that power generation to be at specific places).
- XorNot 3y agoThus answering the challenge: they're not storage. They're grid stabilization utilities. Because no one expects to run them for more then 30 minutes to an hour while they bring dispatchable generation online. Which means they're irrelevant to the idea of grid scale energy storage, because they don't meaningfully store anything.
- ViewTrick1002 3y agoLast year you said they couldn't even meet enough demand for the grid. Now it is 30 minutes to an hour. Next year it will be hours. How does it feel when the Overton windows moves while nuclear is stuck in the past? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
- mpweiher 3y agoThe insane thing is that it is so efficient that it doesn't need to be on that mass production curve to be competitive. It is competitive even in the somewhat insane way we build it now. However, we have a number of companies working on building reactors in factories. Rolls-Royce for example is talking to Ukraine to upgrade some of their old (not sure if already decommissioned) coal plants to nuclear with small, factory-built nuclear reactors.