10 ms·

China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

39 points by flgb 2y ago

aurareturn 2y ago
On HN, there are a lot of nuclear proponents. Any comments from them on this article? Just curiosity from me because I don't know much about this topic.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  Nuclear is slower and more expensive to deploy than solar or wind. Nobody should dispute that. We should deploy the latter as quickly as possible. In addition, we should build nuclear plants, certainly until we’ve phased out coal and oil for primary generation. The article describes China scaling back new plants at a slower pace—about 5 a year instead of ten–but that’s still a multiple of anything we’re doing.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    The analysis I've seen doesn't support the position we should also be deploying nuclear. We come out ahead rolling out renewables and storage as fast as possible, driving these technologies down their experience curves. Any new nuclear added will likely close early when it can't even make an operating profit.
    - goatlover 2y ago
      Nuclear energy is a lot more dense, therefore requiring less land, and doesn't depend on the sun or wind. It also doesn't depend on future breakthroughs in storage and transmission.
      - hackerlight 2y ago
        Cost declines have made storage viable already: https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-they-shift-solar-to-evening-peak-in-one-of-worlds-biggest-grids/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-... Global storage production is 1TW/h per annum now and will increase to 4TW/h by 2030, while also being cheaper.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        Compute please how much the land for a PV field will cost, vs. how much the PV equipment to go on it will cost. Do this for prime farmland, which might be $20K/acre, then do it for west Texas rangeland, which might be $1K/acre. There is plenty of land. If the cost of land ever became a serious constraint on renewables, renewables will be so cheap they will have already relegated all other energy sources to museums. As for future breakthroughs: solar and wind could be rolled out with existing storage, but of course improvements are welcome. But turn this around: investment in nuclear requires believing that such improvements won't occur. If they do, your nuclear investment is totally screwed. It won't even make back operating costs. Do you think betting the improvements won't occur is a reasonable bet? Do you think nuclear is going to get financing from hard nosed business types with that hanging over it? Maybe you're just suggesting continued investment in nuclear R&D, in case all the renewable and storage technologies suddenly hit a brick wall. R&D has a low bar to justify it, so that's not a hard case to make.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > We come out ahead rolling out renewables and storage as fast as possible, driving these technologies down their experience curves We don’t have storage technology to absorb a 2% year-long grid-wide output decrease [1]. That means overbuilding or, more practically, sticking with natural gas. If we aren’t building nuclear, then continuing to build gas plants is the right move. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61943 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61943
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        Sure we do. It's e-fuels like hydrogen. Yes, the round trip efficiency sucks, but for year-long storage the cost of inefficiency is very low (compared to system capital cost), because there are so few charge-discharge cycles. A simple cycle gas turbine might be $0.6/W, vs. $10/W for a new nuclear power plant. So we can back up the grid with these turbines for a very small fraction of the cost of building nuclear power plants to power the grid.
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > It's e-fuels like hydrogen. Yes, the round trip efficiency sucks, but for year-long storage the cost of inefficiency is very low This is still pie in the sky technology. Particularly given the frequencies, magnitudes and durations we’re considering. At that point SMRs become topical. > we can back up the grid with these turbines for a very small fraction of the cost of building nuclear power plants to power the grid Absolutely. If we’re okay with gas being a core energy source for the foreseeable future, we shouldn’t build nuclear. (And for countries without safe access to gas, coal.)
        pfdietz 2y ago
        > This is still pie in the sky technology. 4% of the hydrogen production in China is by electrolysis now. Electrolysers there are below $300/kW. You object to this because it's not available, then you point to SMRs, which don't exist now except on slides. And given NuScale's recent disappointments one should not expect the rosy promises of their (or other) SMRs to come true or find much of a market. > Absolutely. If we’re okay with gas being a core energy source for the foreseeable future, we shouldn’t build nuclear. (And for countries without safe access to gas, coal.) The gas would be hydrogen. Hydrogen + batteries are nicely complementary and enable renewables to undercut new construction nuclear even for supplying baseload power.
- causality0 2y ago
  The article makes it pretty clear the shift was prompted by their ongoing failure to meet their nuclear goals as well as a dropping cost of renewables, not by a philosophical choice to embrace only renewables.
- MostlyStable 2y ago
  its short and mostly just a description of whats happening. Not much to comment on. Except for the last sentence that says that nuclear "can't" compete with renewables. Firstly, it's actually competing with coal, which is what is going in instead, and secondly, any regulatory regime that slows nuclear deployment so much that you instead install coal is deeply, deeply flawed. Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years. They need to figure out which roadblocks are slowing it down and remove them. Regulation is a choice. Sometimes it's a very good choice. But if your options are "highly regulated nuclear" and "coal", then you have made some poor regulatory choices.
  - afiori 2y ago
    I agree with your point but as feedback on phrasing saying > Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years might cause some skepticism as Chernobyl was in 1986. I am not saying that it is false, but I am saying that it will sound false
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      The average coal power plant kills a few dozen people a year in normal operation with first world safety standards. It's just that these people are spread over a wide geographic area and can be blamed on things like smoking and car exhaust.
    - MostlyStable 2y ago
      Pollution from burning coal (and other fossil fuels, but mostly coal) kills, depending on which estimate you believe, 10s of thousands, to millions of people per year, and that is completely ignoring impacts of climate change. Yes, even when you take into account accidents like Chernobyl, and even if you decide to accept the very highest of the total death estimates, it's still dramatically safer than coal. Over-reacting to early nuclear disasters and failing to accelerate our build out and continuing with coal for the past nearly 80 years post Chernobyl is, in my opinion, one of the greatest civilizational mistakes humanity has made.
    - yongjik 2y ago
TeeMassive 2y ago
I've always found these articles about China adopting green policies and shifting its industries towards green energy sources to be suspicious. If they were true then why are China's emission ever increasing year after year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china If their share of renewables / nuclear energy were increasing then there would be a decrease in C02 emissions per capita, but that has never been the case even with the increase in announcements in "green" mega projects over the years.
- janice1999 2y ago
  is this so hard to explain? - CO2 comes from sources other than energy (electricity) production. - Overall energy usage is increasing, outpacing % growth of renewables.
  - TeeMassive 2y ago
    > Overall energy usage is increasing, outpacing % growth of renewables. This is why I pointed out per capita emissions. If renewables had a bigger proportion, then it would decrease. It didn't. In fact it accelerated.
    - fspeech 2y ago
      It takes time for capacity to turn into usage. As the installation in 2023 is so large relative to the total solar capacity the time lag would have more pronounced effect. The number one issue is geographic distribution. The largest installations are in the western provinces, where land is sparsely populated with plentiful of sun and wind. But the consumers of electricity are primarily in the central and eastern provinces. It's not easy to move so much electricity over the large distance, so energy intensive industries need to move west. That will take time. Meanwhile the demands in the east keep growing. Chinese electricity usage is growing significantly faster than GDP, unlike the US.
- MegaDeKay 2y ago
  From the article: "Previously China expected that its energy emissions would peak in 2030, but revised forecasts are now indicating that this could happen as early as 2024, 5-6 years ahead of target."
tomohawk 2y ago
China is building a lot of coal power plants. https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/chinas-new-coal-power-spree-continues-as-more-provinces-jump-on-the-bandwagon/ https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/chinas-new-coal-po... And industrializaing vast swaths of land by covering it with solar panels. https://www.facebook.com/XinhuaSciTech/videos/solar-panels-on-taihang-mountain/1938260629552608/ https://www.facebook.com/XinhuaSciTech/videos/solar-panels-o...
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  Coal has excellent politics, especially in India & China. It’s mineable almost everywhere people live, is burdened by little international regulation (at least compared to nuclear), and is labour intensive enough to create powerful local advocates.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  The undeniable fact is that humans are very electricity hungry. Cheap electricity opens up tons of downstream benefits. I am envisioning something like an international market for clean electricity. Something like an internet for power. This would enable developing countries to leapfrog dirty methods like coal, similar to how many countries leapfrogged over credit cards and cheques we still have in the US. Of course the UHVDC technology may not be ready for it yet.
  - maxerickson 2y ago
    Solar panels approximate an international market for clean electricity (there's just quite some lag).
- cash-MeOutside 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - shrimp_emoji 2y ago
    CHINA NUMBA ONE USA NUMBA TW--RUSSIA NUMBA TWO USA NUMBA.. NUMBA EIGHT, OK?
janalsncm 2y ago
It is telling that a country with basically none of the American barriers to nuclear (NiMBYism, slow construction) is also shifting focus to solar and wind. It’s just simpler. You can put up a solar panel tomorrow and start generating power. A solar panel is a self-contained prefab power generating unit. Even with all of the advancements in nuclear, we still don’t have anything like that.
- hangonhn 2y ago
  I was going to say... if a country like China, with its massive engineering/building capacity and authoritarian "efficiency" cannot hit their nuclear construction targets, it is quite telling how difficult it must be in reality to build nuclear reactors in general. I am still very pro-nuclear but it seems PV + wind + battery storage are coming down in price much faster than people expected and it just makes sense to build more since the incremental cost is so low, especially compared to something like nuclear. That said, there's no reason to not pursue both options, which apparently China is doing but at a slower pace for nuclear.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    Renewables plus nuclear should be the way of the future. Nuclear power when renewables are not available and some sort of storage (pumped hydro, heat in salt etc) when renewables are active.
    - h0l0cube 2y ago
      Nuclear is great as a baseload, but as wind and solar reach overcapacity, peakers will be more useful to react to changes in weather. But by then, energy storage will be economical and scalable enough to obviate gas and coal for this purpose. Renewable takeover is a foregone conclusion at this point. That said, from a conservation point of view, nuclear is something I’m in favor of
      - dyauspitr 2y ago
        It’s what I was trying to get across. Use nuclear where you would use a peaked plant and then direct the nuclear entry into storage when renewables are active.
spacebanana7 2y ago
It’s very difficult to estimate the true cost of nuclear power because so many resources are spent on safety features rather than the basic stuff essential to power generation. New construction cost per energy out can vary by 5x, even against the grain of expected purchasing power parity advantages: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-britain-is-building-the-worlds-most-expensive-nuclear-plant/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-britain-is-building-...
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Safety features aren't essential to power generation?
  - spacebanana7 2y ago
    Yes, but after a certain point it becomes a matter of risk tolerance. Apparently some radiation standards in nuclear power plants work out at millions/billions of dollars per year per life saved https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-safe#footnote-2-110641050 https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-saf...
    - pydry 2y ago
      Ok then let's repeal the Price-Anderson Nuclear indemninty act and make nuclear power plants liable for ALL clean up costs if something goes wrong. For Fukushima that number is circa $800 billion. If it is as safe as you think it is with a minimum of safety standards then the market will still provide. Sophisticated insurers will be capable of calculating the risk and shouldering all of it for a reasonable fee. Right? The act exists, of course, because it definitely isnt safe enough to do that and sophisticated private insurers who are capable of calculating risk better than you or I know this all too well. They won't touch nuclear power without a ludicrously low liability cap. The ironic thing is that even with this gargantuan implicit subsidy (yes, taxpayer funded insurance that pays out $800 billion in an emergency is a big subsidy), nuclear power still isnt cost competitive with solar and wind. But, I'm all in favor of letting nuclear plants determine their own safety levels. IF they can get the insurance to cover ALL the costs of dealing with a disaster. Free market, baby.
WalterBright 2y ago
In the Pacific Northwest, I see rooftop solar panels half-covered with mildew. I wonder how that affects the power generation, and how often one would have to climb up on the roof to scrape them clean.
- ajross 2y ago
  The article is about industrial generation, not home solar which is largely a vanity thing still. Go look for mildew on a big solar farm on the other side of the Cascades. You'll need to dig through all the wind turbines and dams to find them though. The PNW has better choices than solar anyway.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Isn't there a dust problem east of the Cascades?
    - ajross 2y ago
      Not such that you can't clean off a solar panel with a hose, no. The point is that maintenance in industrial environments is a given and part of the cost structure. Seeing mildew on grandma's panels isn't really an indictment of the technology.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        I've never successfully cleaned the dust off my car windows with a hose. It always requires a brush or sponge.
        ajross 2y ago
        You lost me. Are you seriously staking a position on "Solar Energy Will Never Work Because Electric Companies Don't Do Windows"? Or are you just trolling. This is silly. Yes. You can clean a solar panel. Do you genuinely not believe that?
- 2y ago
henry2023 2y ago
To this day I think that nuclear is the best way to produce clean and abundant energy. There only one problem. Only governments build nuclear reactors and if you want to innovate in this space you need to deal with these institutions which adds a lot of complexity. Solar on the other hand appeals to the public and can be deployed in large scale facilities. Large scale economics apply directly and we can see that by looking at the historic price per kW[1]. Finally, me as a nuclear advocate own 14x550w panels + a 20 kWh battery. I’m off grid > 95% of the year. Solar is unstoppable now. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
- opmac 2y ago
  There's a lot of inconvenient truths one needs to accept if they want to advocate for widespread nuclear energy. Specifically, there are very real nuclear proliferation concerns which cannot be ignored. Alternative clean energy sources, which are safe on the global scale, can made widely available with proper investment. That should be the future.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > Specifically, there are very real nuclear proliferation concerns which cannot be ignored. The countries with the #1 and #2 sized nuclear arsenals are currently at war. A war that, as far as I can tell, is continuing to escalate. The countries ranked #2 and #3 (China has been busy building them) are preparing for war with each other. We're seeing ongoing evidence around the world that nuclear weapons are the only thing that can deter a big player from launching an invasion of a country. We could plausibly be looking at the opening stages of WWIII and while there is a lot of concern it isn't enough to jolt people out of their normal routines and the political impacts have been relatively muted. The situation is so bad right now I'm not sure what the proliferation concerns are supposed to be. It is already just a matter of time until something goes terribly wrong. How much is prosperity energy generation supposed to make the situation? If anything it might stabilise the military situation.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Aside from the complexity, part of the issue when comparing nuclear and solar is this: In the US we like to externalize our environmental damage as much as possible, which was one of the “benefits” of moving manufacturing to China. This has been one of the main effects of the environmental movement in the US, simply making a lot of things infeasible. As long as the US environment is clean, damage elsewhere is tolerated. (Maybe that wasn’t the intention, but it is the result.) With solar we can externalize the environmental damage almost 100% if the panels are manufactured somewhere else. We would install them somewhere else if we could, too. With nuclear there is always some underlying amortized risk of problems, and this perceived risk is impossible to externalize. Again, what is important is the perception of damage rather than actual damage. Of course I’m also not quantifying the actual damage from either one. I’m not sure which one is worse in terms of raw material extraction or CO2 emissions per lifetime KWh produced. I checked and it seems solar might be higher for CO2. But that difference isn’t going to matter if nuclear doesn’t get built.
peter-m80 2y ago
Quiet? No. But maybe US people who believe they are the center of the world are unaware of that

39 points by flgb 2y ago

On HN, there are a lot of nuclear proponents. Any comments from them on this article? Just curiosity from me because I don't know much about this topic.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Nuclear is slower and more expensive to deploy than solar or wind. Nobody should dispute that. We should deploy the latter as quickly as possible. In addition, we should build nuclear plants, certainly until we’ve phased out coal and oil for primary generation. The article describes China scaling back new plants at a slower pace—about 5 a year instead of ten–but that’s still a multiple of anything we’re doing.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  The analysis I've seen doesn't support the position we should also be deploying nuclear. We come out ahead rolling out renewables and storage as fast as possible, driving these technologies down their experience curves. Any new nuclear added will likely close early when it can't even make an operating profit.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    Nuclear energy is a lot more dense, therefore requiring less land, and doesn't depend on the sun or wind. It also doesn't depend on future breakthroughs in storage and transmission.
    - hackerlight 2y ago
      Cost declines have made storage viable already: https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-they-shift-solar-to-evening-peak-in-one-of-worlds-biggest-grids/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-... Global storage production is 1TW/h per annum now and will increase to 4TW/h by 2030, while also being cheaper.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      Compute please how much the land for a PV field will cost, vs. how much the PV equipment to go on it will cost. Do this for prime farmland, which might be $20K/acre, then do it for west Texas rangeland, which might be $1K/acre. There is plenty of land. If the cost of land ever became a serious constraint on renewables, renewables will be so cheap they will have already relegated all other energy sources to museums. As for future breakthroughs: solar and wind could be rolled out with existing storage, but of course improvements are welcome. But turn this around: investment in nuclear requires believing that such improvements won't occur. If they do, your nuclear investment is totally screwed. It won't even make back operating costs. Do you think betting the improvements won't occur is a reasonable bet? Do you think nuclear is going to get financing from hard nosed business types with that hanging over it? Maybe you're just suggesting continued investment in nuclear R&D, in case all the renewable and storage technologies suddenly hit a brick wall. R&D has a low bar to justify it, so that's not a hard case to make.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > We come out ahead rolling out renewables and storage as fast as possible, driving these technologies down their experience curves We don’t have storage technology to absorb a 2% year-long grid-wide output decrease [1]. That means overbuilding or, more practically, sticking with natural gas. If we aren’t building nuclear, then continuing to build gas plants is the right move. [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61943 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61943
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      Sure we do. It's e-fuels like hydrogen. Yes, the round trip efficiency sucks, but for year-long storage the cost of inefficiency is very low (compared to system capital cost), because there are so few charge-discharge cycles. A simple cycle gas turbine might be $0.6/W, vs. $10/W for a new nuclear power plant. So we can back up the grid with these turbines for a very small fraction of the cost of building nuclear power plants to power the grid.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > It's e-fuels like hydrogen. Yes, the round trip efficiency sucks, but for year-long storage the cost of inefficiency is very low This is still pie in the sky technology. Particularly given the frequencies, magnitudes and durations we’re considering. At that point SMRs become topical. > we can back up the grid with these turbines for a very small fraction of the cost of building nuclear power plants to power the grid Absolutely. If we’re okay with gas being a core energy source for the foreseeable future, we shouldn’t build nuclear. (And for countries without safe access to gas, coal.)
        pfdietz 2y ago
        > This is still pie in the sky technology. 4% of the hydrogen production in China is by electrolysis now. Electrolysers there are below $300/kW. You object to this because it's not available, then you point to SMRs, which don't exist now except on slides. And given NuScale's recent disappointments one should not expect the rosy promises of their (or other) SMRs to come true or find much of a market. > Absolutely. If we’re okay with gas being a core energy source for the foreseeable future, we shouldn’t build nuclear. (And for countries without safe access to gas, coal.) The gas would be hydrogen. Hydrogen + batteries are nicely complementary and enable renewables to undercut new construction nuclear even for supplying baseload power.
causality0 2y ago
The article makes it pretty clear the shift was prompted by their ongoing failure to meet their nuclear goals as well as a dropping cost of renewables, not by a philosophical choice to embrace only renewables.
MostlyStable 2y ago
its short and mostly just a description of whats happening. Not much to comment on. Except for the last sentence that says that nuclear "can't" compete with renewables. Firstly, it's actually competing with coal, which is what is going in instead, and secondly, any regulatory regime that slows nuclear deployment so much that you instead install coal is deeply, deeply flawed. Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years. They need to figure out which roadblocks are slowing it down and remove them. Regulation is a choice. Sometimes it's a very good choice. But if your options are "highly regulated nuclear" and "coal", then you have made some poor regulatory choices.
- afiori 2y ago
  I agree with your point but as feedback on phrasing saying > Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years might cause some skepticism as Chernobyl was in 1986. I am not saying that it is false, but I am saying that it will sound false
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    The average coal power plant kills a few dozen people a year in normal operation with first world safety standards. It's just that these people are spread over a wide geographic area and can be blamed on things like smoking and car exhaust.
  - MostlyStable 2y ago
    Pollution from burning coal (and other fossil fuels, but mostly coal) kills, depending on which estimate you believe, 10s of thousands, to millions of people per year, and that is completely ignoring impacts of climate change. Yes, even when you take into account accidents like Chernobyl, and even if you decide to accept the very highest of the total death estimates, it's still dramatically safer than coal. Over-reacting to early nuclear disasters and failing to accelerate our build out and continuing with coal for the past nearly 80 years post Chernobyl is, in my opinion, one of the greatest civilizational mistakes humanity has made.
  - yongjik 2y ago

TeeMassive 2y ago

I've always found these articles about China adopting green policies and shifting its industries towards green energy sources to be suspicious. If they were true then why are China's emission ever increasing year after year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china If their share of renewables / nuclear energy were increasing then there would be a decrease in C02 emissions per capita, but that has never been the case even with the increase in announcements in "green" mega projects over the years.

janice1999 2y ago
is this so hard to explain? - CO2 comes from sources other than energy (electricity) production. - Overall energy usage is increasing, outpacing % growth of renewables.
- TeeMassive 2y ago
  > Overall energy usage is increasing, outpacing % growth of renewables. This is why I pointed out per capita emissions. If renewables had a bigger proportion, then it would decrease. It didn't. In fact it accelerated.
  - fspeech 2y ago
    It takes time for capacity to turn into usage. As the installation in 2023 is so large relative to the total solar capacity the time lag would have more pronounced effect. The number one issue is geographic distribution. The largest installations are in the western provinces, where land is sparsely populated with plentiful of sun and wind. But the consumers of electricity are primarily in the central and eastern provinces. It's not easy to move so much electricity over the large distance, so energy intensive industries need to move west. That will take time. Meanwhile the demands in the east keep growing. Chinese electricity usage is growing significantly faster than GDP, unlike the US.
MegaDeKay 2y ago
From the article: "Previously China expected that its energy emissions would peak in 2030, but revised forecasts are now indicating that this could happen as early as 2024, 5-6 years ahead of target."

tomohawk 2y ago

China is building a lot of coal power plants. https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/chinas-new-coal-power-spree-continues-as-more-provinces-jump-on-the-bandwagon/ https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/chinas-new-coal-po... And industrializaing vast swaths of land by covering it with solar panels. https://www.facebook.com/XinhuaSciTech/videos/solar-panels-on-taihang-mountain/1938260629552608/ https://www.facebook.com/XinhuaSciTech/videos/solar-panels-o...

spacebanana7 2y ago
Coal has excellent politics, especially in India & China. It’s mineable almost everywhere people live, is burdened by little international regulation (at least compared to nuclear), and is labour intensive enough to create powerful local advocates.
janalsncm 2y ago
The undeniable fact is that humans are very electricity hungry. Cheap electricity opens up tons of downstream benefits. I am envisioning something like an international market for clean electricity. Something like an internet for power. This would enable developing countries to leapfrog dirty methods like coal, similar to how many countries leapfrogged over credit cards and cheques we still have in the US. Of course the UHVDC technology may not be ready for it yet.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  Solar panels approximate an international market for clean electricity (there's just quite some lag).
cash-MeOutside 2y ago
[flagged]
- shrimp_emoji 2y ago
  CHINA NUMBA ONE USA NUMBA TW--RUSSIA NUMBA TWO USA NUMBA.. NUMBA EIGHT, OK?

janalsncm 2y ago

It is telling that a country with basically none of the American barriers to nuclear (NiMBYism, slow construction) is also shifting focus to solar and wind. It’s just simpler. You can put up a solar panel tomorrow and start generating power. A solar panel is a self-contained prefab power generating unit. Even with all of the advancements in nuclear, we still don’t have anything like that.

hangonhn 2y ago
I was going to say... if a country like China, with its massive engineering/building capacity and authoritarian "efficiency" cannot hit their nuclear construction targets, it is quite telling how difficult it must be in reality to build nuclear reactors in general. I am still very pro-nuclear but it seems PV + wind + battery storage are coming down in price much faster than people expected and it just makes sense to build more since the incremental cost is so low, especially compared to something like nuclear. That said, there's no reason to not pursue both options, which apparently China is doing but at a slower pace for nuclear.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Renewables plus nuclear should be the way of the future. Nuclear power when renewables are not available and some sort of storage (pumped hydro, heat in salt etc) when renewables are active.
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    Nuclear is great as a baseload, but as wind and solar reach overcapacity, peakers will be more useful to react to changes in weather. But by then, energy storage will be economical and scalable enough to obviate gas and coal for this purpose. Renewable takeover is a foregone conclusion at this point. That said, from a conservation point of view, nuclear is something I’m in favor of
    - dyauspitr 2y ago
      It’s what I was trying to get across. Use nuclear where you would use a peaked plant and then direct the nuclear entry into storage when renewables are active.

spacebanana7 2y ago

It’s very difficult to estimate the true cost of nuclear power because so many resources are spent on safety features rather than the basic stuff essential to power generation. New construction cost per energy out can vary by 5x, even against the grain of expected purchasing power parity advantages: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-britain-is-building-the-worlds-most-expensive-nuclear-plant/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-britain-is-building-...

pfdietz 2y ago
Safety features aren't essential to power generation?
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  Yes, but after a certain point it becomes a matter of risk tolerance. Apparently some radiation standards in nuclear power plants work out at millions/billions of dollars per year per life saved https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-safe#footnote-2-110641050 https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-saf...
  - pydry 2y ago
    Ok then let's repeal the Price-Anderson Nuclear indemninty act and make nuclear power plants liable for ALL clean up costs if something goes wrong. For Fukushima that number is circa $800 billion. If it is as safe as you think it is with a minimum of safety standards then the market will still provide. Sophisticated insurers will be capable of calculating the risk and shouldering all of it for a reasonable fee. Right? The act exists, of course, because it definitely isnt safe enough to do that and sophisticated private insurers who are capable of calculating risk better than you or I know this all too well. They won't touch nuclear power without a ludicrously low liability cap. The ironic thing is that even with this gargantuan implicit subsidy (yes, taxpayer funded insurance that pays out $800 billion in an emergency is a big subsidy), nuclear power still isnt cost competitive with solar and wind. But, I'm all in favor of letting nuclear plants determine their own safety levels. IF they can get the insurance to cover ALL the costs of dealing with a disaster. Free market, baby.

WalterBright 2y ago

In the Pacific Northwest, I see rooftop solar panels half-covered with mildew. I wonder how that affects the power generation, and how often one would have to climb up on the roof to scrape them clean.

ajross 2y ago
The article is about industrial generation, not home solar which is largely a vanity thing still. Go look for mildew on a big solar farm on the other side of the Cascades. You'll need to dig through all the wind turbines and dams to find them though. The PNW has better choices than solar anyway.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Isn't there a dust problem east of the Cascades?
  - ajross 2y ago
    Not such that you can't clean off a solar panel with a hose, no. The point is that maintenance in industrial environments is a given and part of the cost structure. Seeing mildew on grandma's panels isn't really an indictment of the technology.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      I've never successfully cleaned the dust off my car windows with a hose. It always requires a brush or sponge.
      - ajross 2y ago
        You lost me. Are you seriously staking a position on "Solar Energy Will Never Work Because Electric Companies Don't Do Windows"? Or are you just trolling. This is silly. Yes. You can clean a solar panel. Do you genuinely not believe that?
2y ago

henry2023 2y ago

To this day I think that nuclear is the best way to produce clean and abundant energy. There only one problem. Only governments build nuclear reactors and if you want to innovate in this space you need to deal with these institutions which adds a lot of complexity. Solar on the other hand appeals to the public and can be deployed in large scale facilities. Large scale economics apply directly and we can see that by looking at the historic price per kW[1]. Finally, me as a nuclear advocate own 14x550w panels + a 20 kWh battery. I’m off grid > 95% of the year. Solar is unstoppable now. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

opmac 2y ago
There's a lot of inconvenient truths one needs to accept if they want to advocate for widespread nuclear energy. Specifically, there are very real nuclear proliferation concerns which cannot be ignored. Alternative clean energy sources, which are safe on the global scale, can made widely available with proper investment. That should be the future.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > Specifically, there are very real nuclear proliferation concerns which cannot be ignored. The countries with the #1 and #2 sized nuclear arsenals are currently at war. A war that, as far as I can tell, is continuing to escalate. The countries ranked #2 and #3 (China has been busy building them) are preparing for war with each other. We're seeing ongoing evidence around the world that nuclear weapons are the only thing that can deter a big player from launching an invasion of a country. We could plausibly be looking at the opening stages of WWIII and while there is a lot of concern it isn't enough to jolt people out of their normal routines and the political impacts have been relatively muted. The situation is so bad right now I'm not sure what the proliferation concerns are supposed to be. It is already just a matter of time until something goes terribly wrong. How much is prosperity energy generation supposed to make the situation? If anything it might stabilise the military situation.
janalsncm 2y ago
Aside from the complexity, part of the issue when comparing nuclear and solar is this: In the US we like to externalize our environmental damage as much as possible, which was one of the “benefits” of moving manufacturing to China. This has been one of the main effects of the environmental movement in the US, simply making a lot of things infeasible. As long as the US environment is clean, damage elsewhere is tolerated. (Maybe that wasn’t the intention, but it is the result.) With solar we can externalize the environmental damage almost 100% if the panels are manufactured somewhere else. We would install them somewhere else if we could, too. With nuclear there is always some underlying amortized risk of problems, and this perceived risk is impossible to externalize. Again, what is important is the perception of damage rather than actual damage. Of course I’m also not quantifying the actual damage from either one. I’m not sure which one is worse in terms of raw material extraction or CO2 emissions per lifetime KWh produced. I checked and it seems solar might be higher for CO2. But that difference isn’t going to matter if nuclear doesn’t get built.

peter-m80 2y ago

Quiet? No. But maybe US people who believe they are the center of the world are unaware of that