4 ms·

> Nuclear can be useful too. I wouldn’t call it just useful. As far as I understand it’s the best realistic shot we’ve got.

ta1243 3y ago
Why not solar, wind and storage? To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much. It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports can't cover the use, better to simply increase storage and production a bit more.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  Last time I worked the numbers on nuclear vs storage, I came up with… for the same amount of money and for the same amount of generation capacity, battery storage could provide about 4 hours of electricity before needing to recharge while nuclear could provide about 24 months without needing to shut down for a few days for a fuel change. Pumped hydro storage was better, if you have the water resources and elevation change nearby. Lots of places don’t.
  - fifilura 3y ago
    Water magazines and elevation change is required for pumped storage. But why not build that together will already existing hydro plants? The magazines will be full at times, but when they are not, it should be possible to just pump the water back up again and thereby store excess wind and solar power. I live in Sweden, and yeah, flooding large amounts of new land will be impossible by now. The indigenous (Sami) people will say no and file lawsuits. And rightly so, they just didn't had that option 100 years ago. But there is an abundance of existing magazines that can be used this way. They are full around November but after that they start to drain.
    - ralphhughes 3y ago
      Your comment makes a lot more sense if I swap magazines => reservoirs, is that the word you meant?
      - fifilura 3y ago
        Sorry, yes. Swenglish.
  - guepe 3y ago
    I’m interested in details. Nuclear is very expensive and not going down, while batteries are. So with your analysis, it could be possible to estimate how low batteries have to go before meeting nuclear… It could be irrealistic but let’s see !
    - tonyarkles 3y ago
      On the nuclear side I was looking at a GE BWRX-300 (SMR) because my province is currently looking at building a few of them. Specs: 300MWe, nominally $1B first-of-a-kind build cost and $675M next-of-a-kind build cost. Runtime between fuel changes is 18-24 months. -- On the battery side I was looking at the Tesla Megapack 2 XL, since our neighbouring province has a bit of capacity installed. Specs: 979kW output per pack, 3.9MWh capacity. For 300MW output capacity we need 306 units => $425M. The total capacity from fully-charged to fully-discharged is 1193MWh. Total time from full-charge to full-discharge: 3.9h. In the middle of winter we have 8h of daylight and 16h of night/twilight. To provide 300MW overnight on a calm day we need 4.02x the storage capacity (16h runtime/3.9h discharge). That gives us 1231 units for a total cost of $1.7B. -- Yes, the nuclear plant will be more expensive to run (trained staff, security, disposal, etc). On the other hand, the $1.7B cost doesn't include any of the devices that would actually be charging the battery packs either. We do often get cloudy days and calm days here as well. Saturday, for example, we actually had pretty good wind performance but negligible solar performance: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1762085119576125812/photo/1 https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1762085119576125812.... A week ago we had both dark and calm: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1760635567136452664/photo/1 https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1760635567136452664.... These plots are summed across the entire grid in our province, so the commonly stated "well it's never calm everywhere" isn't really valid.
      - guepe 3y ago
        That’s interesting. The quotes for the nuclear power plant are really low though. France, which has a lot of knowledge and trained workforce for nuclear, is slowly building a reactor of 1.2gwe for like 20B euros. If you use those numbers… it looks very different. And that’s at least not idealistic price since it’s they are completing the construction.
- ericd 3y ago
  Solar generation is much, much lower in the winter than in the summer, so we need to massively overbuild solar to have reasonable generation in the winter. And there are many times when there’s very little generation for a week or more because of weather, so you need to massively overbuild storage, too. Combined, it’s not cheap to reliably replace base load power. Edit: I should note that one proposal I’ve seen to mitigate some of this is to improve long distance transmission, since it’s never cloudy everywhere, and taken to an extreme, you could, for example, put lots of solar in the Sahara to power the UK, or even send power from the hemisphere in summer to the hemisphere in winter. But then, besides the huge capital costs for building out transmission infra, you run into energy independence issues/trust issues between governments. But maybe within large political blocs like the EU, Italy/Southern Spain could sell solar power to the more northern European countries, with less risk.
  - lumost 3y ago
    This is true, however at the end of the day - this would work out to a per kwh cost of overbuilt infrastructure. Is there a reliable study of what this kwh cost is? In New England we pay upwards of 14 cents per kwh or higher. My understanding is that this would buy a substantial overbuilt, it's likely that energy prices upwards of 30 cents per kwh would be politically viable provided there were guardrails to keep heat/hot water cheap.
    - ericd 3y ago
      Right, you can just wrap it into the cost. I'm not sure, I'm not an expert in this, but my impression is that permitting and labor are a really big portion of the cost in the US, rather than eg panels being the driving cost. There are also a lot of blockages in getting projects approved because there's not enough transmission capacity in many places, and many places require that the new producer fund the new transmission infrastructure, rather than that cost being shared, which is insane.
      - ta1243 3y ago
        Transmission capacity does seem to be the main problem with expanding the grid in several countries - a problem that applies equally to new nuclear (which can't be where older coal/gas/oil plants are as they tend to need things like large amounts of water)
- beretguy 3y ago
  > Why not solar, wind and storage? Because it’s nowhere near effective enough. ———- I suggest watching a few videos by particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder to educate themselves on this topic https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=sabine+nuclear+ https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=sabine+nuclear+
  - ta1243 3y ago
    Why would a particle physisist know anything about the economics of running power generation
    - beretguy 3y ago
      What’s your point? Economy has to be stable/grow at the expanse of humankind going extinct? I posted videos in reply to this comment: > Why not solar, wind and storage? So that people who ask such questions can do their own research and study things about nuclear power. Nobody said anything about economy.
- a_gnostic 3y ago
  So make it easier for individuals to convert cars, build and sell them, by removing barriers to the market. Move away from corporate monopoly thinking in infrastructure. Enable many individual solutions, and allow them to stand or fail on their own merits; Grass roots vs. Top down. Implement tax-breaks instead of subsidies.
- konschubert 3y ago
  For thre few days a year, we’re also fine burning a bit of natural gas.
cesarb 3y ago
I don't think it's that realistic; nuclear simply takes way too long to build. For instance, the most recent nuclear reactor under construction near where I live has been under construction for 40 years and it's still not complete. In the meantime, the amount of added solar, wind, and hydro has been several times the power that single reactor will have once it's finally done.
konschubert 3y ago
I’m all for trying, but solar is the one that’s taking off at the moment.

ta1243 3y ago

Why not solar, wind and storage? To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much. It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports can't cover the use, better to simply increase storage and production a bit more.

tonyarkles 3y ago
Last time I worked the numbers on nuclear vs storage, I came up with… for the same amount of money and for the same amount of generation capacity, battery storage could provide about 4 hours of electricity before needing to recharge while nuclear could provide about 24 months without needing to shut down for a few days for a fuel change. Pumped hydro storage was better, if you have the water resources and elevation change nearby. Lots of places don’t.
- fifilura 3y ago
  Water magazines and elevation change is required for pumped storage. But why not build that together will already existing hydro plants? The magazines will be full at times, but when they are not, it should be possible to just pump the water back up again and thereby store excess wind and solar power. I live in Sweden, and yeah, flooding large amounts of new land will be impossible by now. The indigenous (Sami) people will say no and file lawsuits. And rightly so, they just didn't had that option 100 years ago. But there is an abundance of existing magazines that can be used this way. They are full around November but after that they start to drain.
  - ralphhughes 3y ago
    Your comment makes a lot more sense if I swap magazines => reservoirs, is that the word you meant?
    - fifilura 3y ago
      Sorry, yes. Swenglish.
- guepe 3y ago
  I’m interested in details. Nuclear is very expensive and not going down, while batteries are. So with your analysis, it could be possible to estimate how low batteries have to go before meeting nuclear… It could be irrealistic but let’s see !
  - tonyarkles 3y ago
    On the nuclear side I was looking at a GE BWRX-300 (SMR) because my province is currently looking at building a few of them. Specs: 300MWe, nominally $1B first-of-a-kind build cost and $675M next-of-a-kind build cost. Runtime between fuel changes is 18-24 months. -- On the battery side I was looking at the Tesla Megapack 2 XL, since our neighbouring province has a bit of capacity installed. Specs: 979kW output per pack, 3.9MWh capacity. For 300MW output capacity we need 306 units => $425M. The total capacity from fully-charged to fully-discharged is 1193MWh. Total time from full-charge to full-discharge: 3.9h. In the middle of winter we have 8h of daylight and 16h of night/twilight. To provide 300MW overnight on a calm day we need 4.02x the storage capacity (16h runtime/3.9h discharge). That gives us 1231 units for a total cost of $1.7B. -- Yes, the nuclear plant will be more expensive to run (trained staff, security, disposal, etc). On the other hand, the $1.7B cost doesn't include any of the devices that would actually be charging the battery packs either. We do often get cloudy days and calm days here as well. Saturday, for example, we actually had pretty good wind performance but negligible solar performance: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1762085119576125812/photo/1 https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1762085119576125812.... A week ago we had both dark and calm: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1760635567136452664/photo/1 https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1760635567136452664.... These plots are summed across the entire grid in our province, so the commonly stated "well it's never calm everywhere" isn't really valid.
    - guepe 3y ago
      That’s interesting. The quotes for the nuclear power plant are really low though. France, which has a lot of knowledge and trained workforce for nuclear, is slowly building a reactor of 1.2gwe for like 20B euros. If you use those numbers… it looks very different. And that’s at least not idealistic price since it’s they are completing the construction.
ericd 3y ago
Solar generation is much, much lower in the winter than in the summer, so we need to massively overbuild solar to have reasonable generation in the winter. And there are many times when there’s very little generation for a week or more because of weather, so you need to massively overbuild storage, too. Combined, it’s not cheap to reliably replace base load power. Edit: I should note that one proposal I’ve seen to mitigate some of this is to improve long distance transmission, since it’s never cloudy everywhere, and taken to an extreme, you could, for example, put lots of solar in the Sahara to power the UK, or even send power from the hemisphere in summer to the hemisphere in winter. But then, besides the huge capital costs for building out transmission infra, you run into energy independence issues/trust issues between governments. But maybe within large political blocs like the EU, Italy/Southern Spain could sell solar power to the more northern European countries, with less risk.
- lumost 3y ago
  This is true, however at the end of the day - this would work out to a per kwh cost of overbuilt infrastructure. Is there a reliable study of what this kwh cost is? In New England we pay upwards of 14 cents per kwh or higher. My understanding is that this would buy a substantial overbuilt, it's likely that energy prices upwards of 30 cents per kwh would be politically viable provided there were guardrails to keep heat/hot water cheap.
  - ericd 3y ago
    Right, you can just wrap it into the cost. I'm not sure, I'm not an expert in this, but my impression is that permitting and labor are a really big portion of the cost in the US, rather than eg panels being the driving cost. There are also a lot of blockages in getting projects approved because there's not enough transmission capacity in many places, and many places require that the new producer fund the new transmission infrastructure, rather than that cost being shared, which is insane.
    - ta1243 3y ago
      Transmission capacity does seem to be the main problem with expanding the grid in several countries - a problem that applies equally to new nuclear (which can't be where older coal/gas/oil plants are as they tend to need things like large amounts of water)
beretguy 3y ago
> Why not solar, wind and storage? Because it’s nowhere near effective enough. ———- I suggest watching a few videos by particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder to educate themselves on this topic https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=sabine+nuclear+ https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=sabine+nuclear+
- ta1243 3y ago
  Why would a particle physisist know anything about the economics of running power generation
  - beretguy 3y ago
    What’s your point? Economy has to be stable/grow at the expanse of humankind going extinct? I posted videos in reply to this comment: > Why not solar, wind and storage? So that people who ask such questions can do their own research and study things about nuclear power. Nobody said anything about economy.
a_gnostic 3y ago
So make it easier for individuals to convert cars, build and sell them, by removing barriers to the market. Move away from corporate monopoly thinking in infrastructure. Enable many individual solutions, and allow them to stand or fail on their own merits; Grass roots vs. Top down. Implement tax-breaks instead of subsidies.
konschubert 3y ago
For thre few days a year, we’re also fine burning a bit of natural gas.

cesarb 3y ago

I don't think it's that realistic; nuclear simply takes way too long to build. For instance, the most recent nuclear reactor under construction near where I live has been under construction for 40 years and it's still not complete. In the meantime, the amount of added solar, wind, and hydro has been several times the power that single reactor will have once it's finally done.

konschubert 3y ago

I’m all for trying, but solar is the one that’s taking off at the moment.