3 ms·

The problem isn't that nobody wants nuclear in their backyards, lots of people do (the people that already have nuclear in their backyard). The problem with nu

The problem isn't that nobody wants nuclear in their backyards, lots of people do (the people that already have nuclear in their backyard). The problem with nuclear is the same one that it's always been: it's too expensive. Nobody wants to go bankrupt. Meanwhile we have cheap batteries and super super cheap solar and wind to charge them.

nradov 3y ago
Where are the cheap batteries? List prices are gradually coming down but availability remains limited for any large projects. And if you actually want to store a useful amount of energy, that takes a lot more than just a big box full of battery cells.
- epistasis 3y ago
  Where are the cheap batteries? Getting installed right now. Grid assets are usually measured in MW or GW, but multiply by 3-4 to get the GWh. EIA said developers expect to add 30GW in 2024 here: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202 Note the 7GW of batteries already in California, 3GW in Texas. Texas will move much more quickly than California now because it's a profit based market with few barriers to entry. There were other estimates in 2024 were for 14.1 GW for this year, but IMHO 30 GW is much more likely: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 We are at the start of an exponential growth curve. As prices fall, more demand appears. There are plans for massive amounts of battery production capacity. BNEF has tracked 7.9TWh/year of planned factory capacity by the end of 2025 (probably only 50%-70% of that will get developed): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-already-makes-as-many-batteries-as-the-entire-world-wants https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... However, this is exactly on track with the estimates I heard, 3 years ago now, of 10x growth in production capacity every 5 years. By 2031 we should see 20-30TWH/year of production.
  - hermitdev 3y ago
    So...what's the story with grid-scale battery disposal? Are we heading for another series of super-fund cleanups? That's a lot of toxic material that's going to have to be disposed at end of life.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      It will be recycled, there's tons of recycling facilities that are just waiting for recyclable material to show up. So far it's just defective new batteries that go into them. Plus, they're really not that toxic. Not as bad as fly ash from burning coal, or fracking fluid from natural gas, for example.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      https://electrek.co/2024/04/11/north-america-just-got-its-first-recycled-li-ion-battery-materials-plant/ https://electrek.co/2024/04/11/north-america-just-got-its-fi... https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2023/11/02/redwood-materials-gears-up-to-recycle-first-big-wave-of-used-ev-batteries/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2023/11/02/redwood-... https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ (Redwood Materials was founded by Tesla's CTO co-founder JB Straubel)
- zizee 3y ago
  I'm a nuclear proponent, but similar arguments can be made for why we cannot solve our woes with nuclear. I'd also suggest scaling battery production is going to be less challenging than scaling nuclear production.
WalterBright 3y ago
It's too expensive because of the cost of endless lawsuits and review process. This is fixable.
- hedora 3y ago
  I’m pro-nuclear, but the cost isn’t fixable. It is improvable, and we need to have power sources that ramp up and down on demand, and to fill seasonal gaps. Nuclear is the best long-term bet for that. However, as it is, coal plants already cost more than solar or wind. Almost all of that cost is in the turbines. Unfortunately, nuclear plants use similar turbines, and the coal industry has already cost-optimized the death out of them. It is unlikely there are significant improvements coming. So, even if the rest of the nuclear plant was free, it would still be uncompetitive on a raw $/kwh basis.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > Almost all of that cost is in the turbines. Cost of mining and transporting the coal?
    - hedora 3y ago
      Coal loses on cost before you even build the furnace, let alone put something in it to burn. (“Turbine” also includes stuff like the boiler, generator, etc, etc. I should have written “cost of the plant, minus the coal furnace and the fuel”)
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        What about the 10 years being mired in the courts? "The licensing process – something that can take more than a decade to complete – consists of a series of approvals by the NRC, including issuance of design certification, early site permits, limited work authorizations, construction permits, operating licenses and combined licenses for new nuclear power facilities."
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
r14c 3y ago
I think this is one of the major limitations of framing everything in terms of profit. Sometimes a society needs to build services and run them at-cost for it to make sense.
- epistasis 3y ago
  If nuclear was our only choice for zero-carbon energy, I would say that we should change the subsidies and prices to make it profitable, or at least at-cost. The problem with nuclear isn't that it's at-cost, the problem is that construction projects balloon into financial disasters that are too risky. Check out what happened to France's Areva due to constructing the Olkiluoto. It is literally owned by the French government to bail it out from their financial disaster. Or what happened to Westinghouse and parent company Toshiba due to trying to construct AP1000s. We have better alternatives that are cheaper and are not such massive single points of failure. Right now the US government is throwing money hand over fist at nuclear, and if the industry can make a go of it and manage to construct some more, great, I have no problem with that. But nuclear is fundamentally inefficient, expensive, and bad source of power compared to the alternatives. It's always always overpromised and underdelivered. Seemingly nobody in the industry has every made an honest construction estimate. I mean, of course there were a few successful construction projects, but on average it's been a disaster. Throw another $100B at it, see if somebody finally figures it out after 70 years, but it seems pretty doubtful. Nobody left in the industry seems to be capable or smart enough to deliver.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Yeah, transit advocates say that too, but it's the same thing: once you advertise that you don't want to make a profit, you'll find that people can make sure you make a loss. At-cost is the same as cost-plus and has the same problem: the only way for the guy building something for you to extract value from the thing is to raise the cost high enough. It's a weird thing. American transit advocates will cry themselves hoarse that public transit should be free or run at a loss but almost every system in the world that's good (TfL, HK Metro, JR East) makes money. But every American system loses money hand over fist and sucks. This makes it quite clear to me. It's very easy to be shitty losing money. It's very hard to be shitty and make money.

nradov 3y ago

Where are the cheap batteries? List prices are gradually coming down but availability remains limited for any large projects. And if you actually want to store a useful amount of energy, that takes a lot more than just a big box full of battery cells.

epistasis 3y ago
Where are the cheap batteries? Getting installed right now. Grid assets are usually measured in MW or GW, but multiply by 3-4 to get the GWh. EIA said developers expect to add 30GW in 2024 here: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61202 Note the 7GW of batteries already in California, 3GW in Texas. Texas will move much more quickly than California now because it's a profit based market with few barriers to entry. There were other estimates in 2024 were for 14.1 GW for this year, but IMHO 30 GW is much more likely: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424 We are at the start of an exponential growth curve. As prices fall, more demand appears. There are plans for massive amounts of battery production capacity. BNEF has tracked 7.9TWh/year of planned factory capacity by the end of 2025 (probably only 50%-70% of that will get developed): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-already-makes-as-many-batteries-as-the-entire-world-wants https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... However, this is exactly on track with the estimates I heard, 3 years ago now, of 10x growth in production capacity every 5 years. By 2031 we should see 20-30TWH/year of production.
- hermitdev 3y ago
  So...what's the story with grid-scale battery disposal? Are we heading for another series of super-fund cleanups? That's a lot of toxic material that's going to have to be disposed at end of life.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    It will be recycled, there's tons of recycling facilities that are just waiting for recyclable material to show up. So far it's just defective new batteries that go into them. Plus, they're really not that toxic. Not as bad as fly ash from burning coal, or fracking fluid from natural gas, for example.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    https://electrek.co/2024/04/11/north-america-just-got-its-first-recycled-li-ion-battery-materials-plant/ https://electrek.co/2024/04/11/north-america-just-got-its-fi... https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2023/11/02/redwood-materials-gears-up-to-recycle-first-big-wave-of-used-ev-batteries/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2023/11/02/redwood-... https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ (Redwood Materials was founded by Tesla's CTO co-founder JB Straubel)
zizee 3y ago
I'm a nuclear proponent, but similar arguments can be made for why we cannot solve our woes with nuclear. I'd also suggest scaling battery production is going to be less challenging than scaling nuclear production.

WalterBright 3y ago

It's too expensive because of the cost of endless lawsuits and review process. This is fixable.

hedora 3y ago
I’m pro-nuclear, but the cost isn’t fixable. It is improvable, and we need to have power sources that ramp up and down on demand, and to fill seasonal gaps. Nuclear is the best long-term bet for that. However, as it is, coal plants already cost more than solar or wind. Almost all of that cost is in the turbines. Unfortunately, nuclear plants use similar turbines, and the coal industry has already cost-optimized the death out of them. It is unlikely there are significant improvements coming. So, even if the rest of the nuclear plant was free, it would still be uncompetitive on a raw $/kwh basis.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > Almost all of that cost is in the turbines. Cost of mining and transporting the coal?
  - hedora 3y ago
    Coal loses on cost before you even build the furnace, let alone put something in it to burn. (“Turbine” also includes stuff like the boiler, generator, etc, etc. I should have written “cost of the plant, minus the coal furnace and the fuel”)
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      What about the 10 years being mired in the courts? "The licensing process – something that can take more than a decade to complete – consists of a series of approvals by the NRC, including issuance of design certification, early site permits, limited work authorizations, construction permits, operating licenses and combined licenses for new nuclear power facilities."
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

r14c 3y ago

I think this is one of the major limitations of framing everything in terms of profit. Sometimes a society needs to build services and run them at-cost for it to make sense.

epistasis 3y ago
If nuclear was our only choice for zero-carbon energy, I would say that we should change the subsidies and prices to make it profitable, or at least at-cost. The problem with nuclear isn't that it's at-cost, the problem is that construction projects balloon into financial disasters that are too risky. Check out what happened to France's Areva due to constructing the Olkiluoto. It is literally owned by the French government to bail it out from their financial disaster. Or what happened to Westinghouse and parent company Toshiba due to trying to construct AP1000s. We have better alternatives that are cheaper and are not such massive single points of failure. Right now the US government is throwing money hand over fist at nuclear, and if the industry can make a go of it and manage to construct some more, great, I have no problem with that. But nuclear is fundamentally inefficient, expensive, and bad source of power compared to the alternatives. It's always always overpromised and underdelivered. Seemingly nobody in the industry has every made an honest construction estimate. I mean, of course there were a few successful construction projects, but on average it's been a disaster. Throw another $100B at it, see if somebody finally figures it out after 70 years, but it seems pretty doubtful. Nobody left in the industry seems to be capable or smart enough to deliver.
renewiltord 3y ago
Yeah, transit advocates say that too, but it's the same thing: once you advertise that you don't want to make a profit, you'll find that people can make sure you make a loss. At-cost is the same as cost-plus and has the same problem: the only way for the guy building something for you to extract value from the thing is to raise the cost high enough. It's a weird thing. American transit advocates will cry themselves hoarse that public transit should be free or run at a loss but almost every system in the world that's good (TfL, HK Metro, JR East) makes money. But every American system loses money hand over fist and sucks. This makes it quite clear to me. It's very easy to be shitty losing money. It's very hard to be shitty and make money.