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It's a false dichotomy. Worldwide there are about 100 GW of nuclear reactors planned of them about 40 GW actually being constructed and about 10 GW are actually

It's a false dichotomy. Worldwide there are about 100 GW of nuclear reactors planned of them about 40 GW actually being constructed and about 10 GW are actually commissioned annually. This is barely sufficient to replacement of reactors that are being decommissioned and there is no growth of nuclear capacity worldwide - we have exactly as much as 15 years ago. Comparatively, renewables are set to add 800GW this year. Yes that will translate to "only" about 130GW of average power which is an energy equivalent of about 150GW of nuclear capacity, but that still means replacing all of the world nuclear (372GW) in 2.5 years. Wind already produces as much overall energy as nuclear (around 2550 TWh/y) and solar, 2/3 as much and will equal nuclear in probably 1 year. And almost all of this capacity has been built in the last 5 years for solar and last year 10 years for nuclear, with deployment speeds fast accelerating. There's simply no comparison. Nuclear has already lost.

krasin 2y ago
> Nuclear has already lost. Classic nuclear did lose. Microreactors have a chance unless irrational fear prevents it from entering the game. And yes, it gives me a great pleasure to see the rapid deployment of wind & solar installations.
- anovikov 2y ago
  Microreactors have no chance at all in the world because nuclear scales very well with size, and as a result, is bound to be very expensive when small. In Russia, they have a bunch of microreactors, they work fine, but very expensive to run and are kept only in remote places with no other way to power them. Niche thing at best. How many microreactors do we need to replace all the world's final energy consumption (ok around 20% will be replaced by heat pumps net energy gain)? That's 11,000 GW of continuous power. A million 10 MW ones? How many people does that take to build and maintain across the entire value chain? Sounds like hundreds of millions people, easily 10 or maybe 20% of entire world's workforce. Not going to happen.
  - krasin 2y ago
    > Microreactors have no chance at all in the world because nuclear scales very well with size, and as a result, is bound to be very expensive when small. Solar is cheap because it has hit the economy of scale. Hell, fences made of solar (sometimes, not even connected!) are now more cheaper than those made of wood (at least, in some countries). While I would not bet my money on the economic feasibility of nuclear microreactors, I would like them to have a fair market trial. If they do succeed, we all win.
    - fsh 2y ago
      Small reactors have lost against GW-class facilities around 60 years ago. This is why they were no longer built. I find it strange to believe that the economy of scale somehow doesn't apply to nuclear power plants, even though history clearly shows it does.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    You have economies of scale (size) squaring off against economies of scale (production). For one-offs, the economies of size win, because then the economies of production don't actually get a chance to do their thing. So kick-starting is a problem. However, the problems with the EPR and the AP-1000 hint (do not prove) that we may be hitting size limitations. The strategy that Rolls-Royce is pursuing seems promising: factory-built microreactors (so economies of production) that you can plop into existing coal-powered plants to upgrade them to nuclear. That way you reduce the issues with the non-factory-built parts.
    - johndunne 2y ago
      And decommissioning promises to be more manageable and less expensive with microreactors. Individual microreactors can be swapped as they age out and decommissioned/refurbished elsewhere.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        Really? I expect microreactors would create much more irradiated material than larger reactors, due to the higher surface area/volume ratio of tiny reactors. This also negatively affects their neutron economy.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  I don't see it as 'irrational fear' to fear having these small poison containers run by the lowest bidder about everywhere with about as good oversight as the increased number allows.
banish-m4 2y ago
Exactly. Renewables are resoundly economically advantageous over micronuclear and don't have the Chernobyl, forever waste problems, physical security issues, or potential proliferation risks. It doesn't save the planet or save money, so don't spread risk throughout populated areas unnecessarily.
- anovikov 2y ago
  I'd remove the proliferation risks - face it, proliferation is a done deal and everyone who can afford a nuke will have one in the next 30 years, including many private entities (Elon Musk for sure but quite probably, many much smaller ones, plus churches as well). Otherwise, right.
  - CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
    What makes you think that?
    - roenxi 2y ago
      I'm not him, but the Manhatten project cost ~$25 billion dollars and didn't have access to today's physics knowledge or computer-aided design capabilities. There are a lot of countries that can match $25 billion in expenditure - Musk spent almost twice that on Twitter - and the real cost is probably lower. We've also got a lower-bound on the difficulty of producing missiles based on what North Korea can do.
  - banish-m4 2y ago
    No. You're wrong. The proliferation risk exists where significant enrichment fuel is used or the design is feasibly adaptable to breeding. These conditions are entirely avoidable by design, or by simply eliminating the entire category of risk by doing something else more profitable.
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    proliferation is a real concern but this part is completely ill-founded > including many private entities (Elon Musk for sure but quite probably, many much smaller ones, plus churches as well) Modern (that is since the end of the middle ages) State exists because they enforce the “monopoly of violence”, there's no way any private individual could be allowed to have nukes. Even in Russia, the realm of Oligarchs' PMCs (well before Prigojin assassination) the State always maintained full control on its nukes (and when Russia was a failed state at the beginning of the 90s, the US worked hard to make sure it was the case). Private entities with nukes could only happen in the event of a complete collapse of the US as a State, in which case nuclear proliferation would be the least of your problems (and even then, I don't see China not intervening to stop that from happening anyway, like the US did in Russia)
zahma 2y ago
There’s a huge part of the equation you’re forgetting in all of this. Storage. Renewables are great and have proliferated spectacularly and I’m excited to see that they continue, but our societies are stuck on fossil fuels to plug the holes in intermittent sources. Either we have some pretty rapid and miraculous advances in large-scale battery storage and deployment infrastructure, or we stay on fossil fuels. But when those run out, are you hedging your bets on battery storage and energy management infrastructure handling ever-growing demand? Or would you rather small-scale nuclear offset some of that. There’s room for both solutions here, and frankly we need all of them because it’s not just about intermittency. We urgently need to quit fossil fuels entirely, implying nuclear energy sources are rolled out even if they cease to become necessary. That’s a lot better than ignoring the option and continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and polluting our air.
- krasin 2y ago
  > There’s a huge part of the equation you’re forgetting in all of this. Storage. Let me come and defend the California strategy for the energy production. As can be seen on the California grid status page ([1]) (click on the Supply tab, find batteries and play with dates), the battery capacity grew from negligible to something that eclipses imports in the peak consumption hours. I fully expect that in 2-3 years, California will have enough of solar + storage to stop firing its gas generators and importing coal electricity from Utah. 1. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
- anovikov 2y ago
  There is surprisingly little storage (or in some better cases, no storage at all) required to balance renewables and studies from 10-15 years ago confirm it, that's a favourite theme of conservatives but no longer brought up in serious circles. We already have all the production capacity (online and in committed, funded projects) for the required amount of batteries and will have many times more in only a few years - batteries will be there even before solar panels themselves will, mainly because installing them is simpler and they immediately make quick money, payback periods are shorter (and getting shorter as more solar is installed).
roenxi 2y ago
> There's simply no comparison. Nuclear has already lost. In the 1980s wind & solar had already lost; and by a substantially bigger margin. Yet here we are. The potential for nuclear energy is still substantially greater than that of renewable power and eventually one of these companies will find a way to exploit that potential if we let them look.
- ggm 2y ago
  Both of you are arguing about fluid numbers which reflect political expediency and local economics, not actual power-cost-scale-efficiency numbers. Nuclear works fine. So does Wind and Solar. All three have proponents and opponents and which has more pace, or likelihood of deployment is not subject to their actual ability to supply power, but to external forces which do not relate to that power at all.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    Intermittent renewables such as wind and solar do not work fine alone, as they are non-dispatchable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation They are OK as an addition to dispatchable sources, which is why the vast majority of industrialized nations are now planning for a mix of nuclear and intermittent renewables.
    - hkwerf 2y ago
      Nuclear is almost as non-dispatchable? As soon as you've ramped up a nuclear reactor to full power, the weather has changed. Thus they essentially occupy almost the same niche. Those who plan to use both nuclear and wind/solar don't do it for the dispatchability.
      - mpweiher 2y ago
        > Nuclear is almost as non-dispatchable? That turns out not to be completely not the case. As in not even close. First, modern nuclear power plants can do load-following just fine, you often just don't want to because their variable costs are so low that it just makes more sense to keep them running. Second, the problem with intermittent renewables is that they can't provide power when you need it. Even when you don't load-follow as much, that is not the problem of nuclear. > As soon as you've ramped up a nuclear reactor to full power, the weather has changed That's a problem of the intermittent renewables, not of nuclear. You don't make the clown-energy the primary and force everything else to adapt to that. > Those who plan to use both nuclear and wind/solar don't do it for the dispatchability. Yeah they do. Dispatchability in terms of grid demand, not in terms of compensating for intermittency.
littlestymaar 2y ago
> It's a false dichotomy. It's not. Without nuclear scare the developed world electricity mix could have look like France's as early as the 90s, saving countless tons of CO2 emissions, and millions of lifes. Renewable are eventually coming but the tech took 40 more years to come, and that's how much we're late.
- fsh 2y ago
  The french energy mix is around 50% fossil fuels [1]. The reduction in CO2 emissions over the last two decades were only due to better efficiency (lower energy usage) and renewables. [1] https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    “Energy mix” is not the same as “electricity mix”, a lot if this is gas used to power cars and trucks, which are another problem entirely and isn't solved by renewable alone but by another technology (electric cars) which synergies even better with nuclear than with renewables. Of course reductions over “the last two decades” aren't due to nuclear, since France was already all nuclear two decades ago, duh. Most of emissions reductions over that period where due to: improved efficiency (car engine, notably), but also massive disindustrialization unfortunately (which ultimately raised the emissions, since we now import goods produced with a more emissive electricity mix than us), renewables are only marginal in that regard (it mostly substituted nuclear production…)
    - fsh 2y ago
      The climate doesn't care which sector emits the CO2. For a societal analysis, focusing on only electricity makes very little sense.
      - littlestymaar 2y ago
        The thing is: no alternative to nuclear can help on non-electricity emissions either, so when it comes to the topic of nuclear vs the rest, it doesn't make sense to talk about the whole and it makes sense to focus on electricity. That doesn't mean we don't care about the others, it's just completely irrelevant to the discussion. I do care about biodiversity or women's right as well, that doesn't mean it's relevant to bring in unrelated topics.
kevinak 2y ago
Using the average electricity produced is not the way to plan power production. I’m sure you’re aware that there are peak usage patterns as well as “wind droughts” resulting in situations where the power generated isn’t enough. You have to look at the worst case scenario and ideally plan for that.

krasin 2y ago

> Nuclear has already lost. Classic nuclear did lose. Microreactors have a chance unless irrational fear prevents it from entering the game. And yes, it gives me a great pleasure to see the rapid deployment of wind & solar installations.

anovikov 2y ago
Microreactors have no chance at all in the world because nuclear scales very well with size, and as a result, is bound to be very expensive when small. In Russia, they have a bunch of microreactors, they work fine, but very expensive to run and are kept only in remote places with no other way to power them. Niche thing at best. How many microreactors do we need to replace all the world's final energy consumption (ok around 20% will be replaced by heat pumps net energy gain)? That's 11,000 GW of continuous power. A million 10 MW ones? How many people does that take to build and maintain across the entire value chain? Sounds like hundreds of millions people, easily 10 or maybe 20% of entire world's workforce. Not going to happen.
- krasin 2y ago
  > Microreactors have no chance at all in the world because nuclear scales very well with size, and as a result, is bound to be very expensive when small. Solar is cheap because it has hit the economy of scale. Hell, fences made of solar (sometimes, not even connected!) are now more cheaper than those made of wood (at least, in some countries). While I would not bet my money on the economic feasibility of nuclear microreactors, I would like them to have a fair market trial. If they do succeed, we all win.
  - fsh 2y ago
    Small reactors have lost against GW-class facilities around 60 years ago. This is why they were no longer built. I find it strange to believe that the economy of scale somehow doesn't apply to nuclear power plants, even though history clearly shows it does.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  You have economies of scale (size) squaring off against economies of scale (production). For one-offs, the economies of size win, because then the economies of production don't actually get a chance to do their thing. So kick-starting is a problem. However, the problems with the EPR and the AP-1000 hint (do not prove) that we may be hitting size limitations. The strategy that Rolls-Royce is pursuing seems promising: factory-built microreactors (so economies of production) that you can plop into existing coal-powered plants to upgrade them to nuclear. That way you reduce the issues with the non-factory-built parts.
  - johndunne 2y ago
    And decommissioning promises to be more manageable and less expensive with microreactors. Individual microreactors can be swapped as they age out and decommissioned/refurbished elsewhere.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      Really? I expect microreactors would create much more irradiated material than larger reactors, due to the higher surface area/volume ratio of tiny reactors. This also negatively affects their neutron economy.
rightbyte 2y ago
I don't see it as 'irrational fear' to fear having these small poison containers run by the lowest bidder about everywhere with about as good oversight as the increased number allows.

banish-m4 2y ago

Exactly. Renewables are resoundly economically advantageous over micronuclear and don't have the Chernobyl, forever waste problems, physical security issues, or potential proliferation risks. It doesn't save the planet or save money, so don't spread risk throughout populated areas unnecessarily.

anovikov 2y ago
I'd remove the proliferation risks - face it, proliferation is a done deal and everyone who can afford a nuke will have one in the next 30 years, including many private entities (Elon Musk for sure but quite probably, many much smaller ones, plus churches as well). Otherwise, right.
- CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
  What makes you think that?
  - roenxi 2y ago
    I'm not him, but the Manhatten project cost ~$25 billion dollars and didn't have access to today's physics knowledge or computer-aided design capabilities. There are a lot of countries that can match $25 billion in expenditure - Musk spent almost twice that on Twitter - and the real cost is probably lower. We've also got a lower-bound on the difficulty of producing missiles based on what North Korea can do.
- banish-m4 2y ago
  No. You're wrong. The proliferation risk exists where significant enrichment fuel is used or the design is feasibly adaptable to breeding. These conditions are entirely avoidable by design, or by simply eliminating the entire category of risk by doing something else more profitable.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  proliferation is a real concern but this part is completely ill-founded > including many private entities (Elon Musk for sure but quite probably, many much smaller ones, plus churches as well) Modern (that is since the end of the middle ages) State exists because they enforce the “monopoly of violence”, there's no way any private individual could be allowed to have nukes. Even in Russia, the realm of Oligarchs' PMCs (well before Prigojin assassination) the State always maintained full control on its nukes (and when Russia was a failed state at the beginning of the 90s, the US worked hard to make sure it was the case). Private entities with nukes could only happen in the event of a complete collapse of the US as a State, in which case nuclear proliferation would be the least of your problems (and even then, I don't see China not intervening to stop that from happening anyway, like the US did in Russia)

zahma 2y ago

There’s a huge part of the equation you’re forgetting in all of this. Storage. Renewables are great and have proliferated spectacularly and I’m excited to see that they continue, but our societies are stuck on fossil fuels to plug the holes in intermittent sources. Either we have some pretty rapid and miraculous advances in large-scale battery storage and deployment infrastructure, or we stay on fossil fuels. But when those run out, are you hedging your bets on battery storage and energy management infrastructure handling ever-growing demand? Or would you rather small-scale nuclear offset some of that. There’s room for both solutions here, and frankly we need all of them because it’s not just about intermittency. We urgently need to quit fossil fuels entirely, implying nuclear energy sources are rolled out even if they cease to become necessary. That’s a lot better than ignoring the option and continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and polluting our air.

krasin 2y ago
> There’s a huge part of the equation you’re forgetting in all of this. Storage. Let me come and defend the California strategy for the energy production. As can be seen on the California grid status page ([1]) (click on the Supply tab, find batteries and play with dates), the battery capacity grew from negligible to something that eclipses imports in the peak consumption hours. I fully expect that in 2-3 years, California will have enough of solar + storage to stop firing its gas generators and importing coal electricity from Utah. 1. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
anovikov 2y ago
There is surprisingly little storage (or in some better cases, no storage at all) required to balance renewables and studies from 10-15 years ago confirm it, that's a favourite theme of conservatives but no longer brought up in serious circles. We already have all the production capacity (online and in committed, funded projects) for the required amount of batteries and will have many times more in only a few years - batteries will be there even before solar panels themselves will, mainly because installing them is simpler and they immediately make quick money, payback periods are shorter (and getting shorter as more solar is installed).

roenxi 2y ago

> There's simply no comparison. Nuclear has already lost. In the 1980s wind & solar had already lost; and by a substantially bigger margin. Yet here we are. The potential for nuclear energy is still substantially greater than that of renewable power and eventually one of these companies will find a way to exploit that potential if we let them look.

ggm 2y ago
Both of you are arguing about fluid numbers which reflect political expediency and local economics, not actual power-cost-scale-efficiency numbers. Nuclear works fine. So does Wind and Solar. All three have proponents and opponents and which has more pace, or likelihood of deployment is not subject to their actual ability to supply power, but to external forces which do not relate to that power at all.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  Intermittent renewables such as wind and solar do not work fine alone, as they are non-dispatchable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation They are OK as an addition to dispatchable sources, which is why the vast majority of industrialized nations are now planning for a mix of nuclear and intermittent renewables.
  - hkwerf 2y ago
    Nuclear is almost as non-dispatchable? As soon as you've ramped up a nuclear reactor to full power, the weather has changed. Thus they essentially occupy almost the same niche. Those who plan to use both nuclear and wind/solar don't do it for the dispatchability.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      > Nuclear is almost as non-dispatchable? That turns out not to be completely not the case. As in not even close. First, modern nuclear power plants can do load-following just fine, you often just don't want to because their variable costs are so low that it just makes more sense to keep them running. Second, the problem with intermittent renewables is that they can't provide power when you need it. Even when you don't load-follow as much, that is not the problem of nuclear. > As soon as you've ramped up a nuclear reactor to full power, the weather has changed That's a problem of the intermittent renewables, not of nuclear. You don't make the clown-energy the primary and force everything else to adapt to that. > Those who plan to use both nuclear and wind/solar don't do it for the dispatchability. Yeah they do. Dispatchability in terms of grid demand, not in terms of compensating for intermittency.

littlestymaar 2y ago

> It's a false dichotomy. It's not. Without nuclear scare the developed world electricity mix could have look like France's as early as the 90s, saving countless tons of CO2 emissions, and millions of lifes. Renewable are eventually coming but the tech took 40 more years to come, and that's how much we're late.

fsh 2y ago
The french energy mix is around 50% fossil fuels [1]. The reduction in CO2 emissions over the last two decades were only due to better efficiency (lower energy usage) and renewables. [1] https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix https://www.iea.org/countries/france/energy-mix
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  “Energy mix” is not the same as “electricity mix”, a lot if this is gas used to power cars and trucks, which are another problem entirely and isn't solved by renewable alone but by another technology (electric cars) which synergies even better with nuclear than with renewables. Of course reductions over “the last two decades” aren't due to nuclear, since France was already all nuclear two decades ago, duh. Most of emissions reductions over that period where due to: improved efficiency (car engine, notably), but also massive disindustrialization unfortunately (which ultimately raised the emissions, since we now import goods produced with a more emissive electricity mix than us), renewables are only marginal in that regard (it mostly substituted nuclear production…)
  - fsh 2y ago
    The climate doesn't care which sector emits the CO2. For a societal analysis, focusing on only electricity makes very little sense.
    - littlestymaar 2y ago
      The thing is: no alternative to nuclear can help on non-electricity emissions either, so when it comes to the topic of nuclear vs the rest, it doesn't make sense to talk about the whole and it makes sense to focus on electricity. That doesn't mean we don't care about the others, it's just completely irrelevant to the discussion. I do care about biodiversity or women's right as well, that doesn't mean it's relevant to bring in unrelated topics.

kevinak 2y ago

Using the average electricity produced is not the way to plan power production. I’m sure you’re aware that there are peak usage patterns as well as “wind droughts” resulting in situations where the power generated isn’t enough. You have to look at the worst case scenario and ideally plan for that.