10 ms·

Fossil fuels could have been left in the dust 25 years ago

146 points by helsinkiandrew 2y ago

lifty 2y ago
If the point is generalizable, we should build more nuclear power plants. They will become cheaper.
- jrnvs 2y ago
  They can’t be made in a factory and thus the learning effect is very small (if it even exists - nuclear reactors have increased in price).
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    > They can’t be made in a factory They can now, see Small Modular Reactors (SMR).
    - fifilura 2y ago
      Where can I see one?
      - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
        Just need to: 1. Build prototype 2. Iterate on prototype. 3. In conjunction start standardizing and automating processes. 4. Achieve large enough scale to amortize the factory and process optimization costs over enough units to actually gain anything. The “SMR hype industry” seems to be perpetually stuck at 1, not even being able to deliver a single prototype. All the while talking like the factory already exists and SMRs are solved. Somehow it doesn’t add up.
      - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
        https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_booklet_2022.pdf https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_booklet_2022.pdf linked from https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-reactors-smrs#:~:text=More%20than%2080,they%20are%20deployed https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-.... I don't know, I'm not a specialist. But this came up by doing a rudimentary search.
        fifilura 2y ago
        Thank you! Seems like I have 4 choices (although i probably don't want to go to Russia, since they are at war). KLT-40S Russia HTR-PM China HTR-10 China HTTR Japan
        fifilura 2y ago
        Yay! There is a company called Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation. It has a nice ring to it! "Super safe bank" "Really clean hamburger restaurant" "Most trustworth car salesman" "Very accurate surgeon"
        rad_gruchalski 2y ago
        This is pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg.
        fch42 2y ago
        If they really work in this factory like shown in that video, handling radioactive material in the production process with little personal protection (especially against airborne dust), then at least I for one would not like to work for them, ever. The safety of "final" product notwithstanding (that's fine), the shaping, size sorting and sintering processes create dust and really, you don't want to get that into yourself.
  - Moldoteck 2y ago
    Did these increase in price in China too?
  - nomel 2y ago
    Please see the cost breakdown: https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ Very very little is made/manufactured on site. You do not make turbines, computers, pipes, or much at all, on a construction site. You form, weld, pour, and assemble. The goal would be a standard design, to cut those giant engineering and custom fabrication costs to a small fraction. You don't need to deliver a completed factory on a pallet to save costs (although that's possible with distributed small module reactors, as Asia is ramping up for).
    - treyd 2y ago
      Which is why France has such strong nuclear supply, they decided going into it to hage standard designs.
      - Retric 2y ago
        France’s nuclear is fully owned by the government. The subsidies are so huge there’s basically zero market forces in play on the supply side.
        mpweiher 2y ago
        It's not subsidized. In fact, cheap nuclear electricity is used to subsidize other industries. The entire nuclear industry (construction, operation, support) cost France € 228 billion and produce 11000 TWh (by 2012). That's 2,07 cents/kWh. Not too shabby.
        Retric 2y ago
        Your numbers are wildly off and not just from ignoring inflation when using poorly sourced numbers from 2012. Quick, how much did they spend on fuel over that timeframe? Well according to that estimate it was 0, so it’s hardly including the operating costs. To give some perspective: “In March 2023 France's Parliament formally approved the government's nuclear investment plan – by 402 votes in favor and 130 against – which considers the €52 billion construction of six new EPR-2 PWRs at three sites.” That’s not operations that’s just for construction of 6 reactors when they have 56 in operation and that’s interest free unlike US reactor where interest is included with construction costs. One year later that’s already been increased to 67.4 billion euros: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-lifts-cost-estimate-new-reactors-67-bln-euros-les-echos-2024-03-04/#:~:text=PARIS%2C%20March%204%20(Reuters),on%20Monday%2C%20citing%20unidentified%20sources https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-l.... France operated as a pay as you go system so they didn’t set money aside for the full cost of decommissioning their reactors etc. Last I checked there was some talk in 2017 of them setting aside 27 billion based on some ridiculously optimistic estimates but mostly the plan is just foist the costs onto future taxpayers.
  - qball 2y ago
    >They can’t be made in a factory All nuclear power plants made since around 1980s or so have been made in factories. The US (and other nations) use them all the time for their submarines- defense concerns correctly override environmentalists (and the oil companies backing them financially). The problem is a solved one. We're rich enough to afford to tilt at windmills instead- for now, anyway.
- chpatrick 2y ago
  Doesn't make sense if there are alternatives that are at least as cheap without the hassle.
- Arnt 2y ago
  It's not infinitely generalizable, only to tech production issues and maybe not to all of those. Nuclear isn't expensive because of production. https://progress.institute/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ https://progress.institute/nuclear-power-plant-construction-...
- PaulKeeble 2y ago
  Even if it wasn't the case that PV's could have replaced fossil fuels back then because they weren't advanced enough nuclear was more than capable of doing so and readily available. Indeed investing in various different types of reactors might very well have produced a similar curve of progress and finding ways to make them less dangerous and requiring less regulation all of which would have sped up deployment and reduced the cost. We will never know, we just know now that its cheaper to do solar and power storage than nuclear.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  It is. They do. And did. Both France and Germany figured out how to do this. And then stopped building. <facepalm> You build a standardized design, and you build a bunch of them, and you overlap the construction. Germany's Konvoi reactors were built for DM 4 billion a piece in the late 80s. At the same time, non-Konvoi reactors cost more than twice as much, DM 9.5 billion. Apply the 88% cumulative inflation between then and now and you'd be at DM 7,52 billion, or € 3.9 billion. Fortunately we are starting to build more again, so prices should begin to fall.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  I doubt it. Even if the ORNL MSR reactor got maximum funding, we averted the safety panic from three mile island, and were effectively making no nuclear waste the economics still probably can't compete with current wind/solar. The scary prospect for all forms of energy is that wind and solar likely have a lot of runway, as does grid storage. Combined wind/solar + grid storage will fall under combined cycle natural gas this year. Just to emphasize, combined cycle natural gas exceeds the carnot efficiency of a single stage combustion with additional heat cycles. That means it basically has maximized the physics of extracting energy from using natural gas. In the US natural gas is also basically as low as can practically be priced because it is a waste byproduct of the bakken shale in the Dakotas. Natural gas beats all other fossil fuels and nuclear by quite a lot. And it CANNOT compete with wind/solar. Solar still has numerous opportunities to drop between perovskites and some theoretical cheap multijunction manufacutring. Grid storage will see sodium-sulfur or some other cheap/dense battery tech in the next 10 years in addition to the steady improvement of sodium-ion and LFP chemistries already in mass production. I would really really like to see a scalable cheap nuke plant that is only twice as expensive as solar/wind. But that massive 10s of billions in research and investment would have needed to start in the 1990s. And IMO would have been shunted to the same failed solid fuel rod designs rather than MSR or some other "radical" reactor design. Nuclear will simply never be economically viable in the foreseeable 30 years. And neither will fusion.
datadrivenangel 2y ago
Article misses the fact that a lot of governments in the 70s and 80s (shoutout to Germany especially) put a lot of investment into solar panel adoption, which is part of why the cost dropped so much in the 80s and 90s and 2000s.
- ant6n 2y ago
  I thought German investment started with the first green partnered government in 1998.
- nomel 2y ago
  Are these dates correct? Germany had only 2MW in 1990 and 91 [1]. It looks like solar interest didn't really start until the 80's [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Generat... [2] https://wiki.energytransition.org/wiki/history-of-the-energiewende/ https://wiki.energytransition.org/wiki/history-of-the-energi...
  - logtempo 2y ago
    Germany did investing, but China ate the market. It's basically what happened in the 21th. It's also interesting that we're talking about 1980/90. 25 years ago is 1999.
    - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
      25 years ago is discussed in the context of shifting the current state of the art solar to 25 years ago. So starting maybe in the 1970s would produce the current performance and economies of scale, but much earlier, not "starting" in 1999.
imoverclocked 2y ago
Lots of big jumps in the article and the devil is in the details. Solar panels have seen a lot of innovation in the last few decades. Simply pumping out tons of 30 year old technology may have stunted that progress or even created so much waste that solar could have been deemed as non-viable. Some panel technologies are really hard to recycle but have held a performance edge at different times in solar tech development. Sometimes going all-in on mass production of something is not worth the short-term savings.
- drcross 2y ago
  You may be putting the cart before the horse. Wouldnt pumping out tons of anything create forcing functions for efficiency, as in, exactly what happened but on a longer timeframe?
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    I don't think that's the case. Pumping them out might well mean free money, which means there's no incentive to do better.
    - seadan83 2y ago
      Industries which receive subsidies today and still have incentives "to do better" are counter-examples to your statement. " Pumping them out might well mean free money" The article talks about this, Wrights law. The "pumping them out" leads to economies of scale and production efficiency in of itself.
      - jokethrowaway 2y ago
        You never know what unintended consequences you have with subsidies Central Planning is never free.
        digging 2y ago
        > You never know what unintended consequences you have with subsidies We already have subsidies and catastrophic climate change.
littlestymaar 2y ago
For electricity generation alone (which is also what TFA talks about) we could even have done it 30 years ago. In fact France did, so this is not pure speculation, it's just a terrible missed opportunity.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > In fact France did, so this is not pure speculation... France did what!? France's electricity mainly comes from nuclear, oil and gaz. Solar is nowhere sizeable compared to these three yet. Oil is fossil.
  - sl-1 2y ago
    It decarbonized its electricity production by building a lot of nuclear (eg. left fossil fuels in the dust). Of course only partly, as the nuclear fleet still depends on fossil fuels, but still a great achievement.
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    > France's electricity mainly comes from nuclear, oil and gaz. No, nuclear, hydro and then a fraction of fossil (which is still among the lowest in the world as of today).
- robocat 2y ago
  France's nuclear industry is a key economic sector, which represents 6.7% of the job market (220 000 people) for 2 600 companies and a turnover of €50 billion per year A summary of how France paid for the building of its nuclear energy sector: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/2023/03/31/pricing-power-how-france-built-its-nuclear-industry/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/2023/03/31/pricing-p... although decommissioning costs also matter. Quote from: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/CNPP-2021/countryprofiles/France/France.htm https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/CNPP-2021/cou...
  - fch42 2y ago
    What is interesting is that the article says other countries should use "France as blueprint". - to have a state-owned electricity generation monopolist ? - to use demand-based price increases to push down demand ? - to provide half the funding for generating plants from taxpayers' coffers? France's example in nuclear is, if you like to phrase it like that, one of "socialistic infrastructure policies that have proven to work well". Quoth Lenin, "Communism is the Soviet state plus electrification of the country", https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO - I would like to see a comparative essay on France's nuclear push of 60s/70s/80s and the USSR's 20s/30s/40s. And/or, in fact, later; the number two nuclear power generating country in Europe behind France is, after all, Ukraine.
refulgentis 2y ago
Smart people's disease: "I read about Wright's Law, which says the more $X you make the cheaper it gets. Therefore for all manufactured products $X, the more we make, the cheaper they'll get." STEM helped me a ton in college, when I move from physics to economics, everything was "just a curve" instead of something that needed to be approached and memorized individually Here, instead of feeling put out that ex. government won't just throw more money at carbon capture, I can say "well, we're just describing a power curve, which is not a law"
- iknowstuff 2y ago
  I’m not sure if it’s me or if your point is difficult to understand
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by my point, I'll assume you're referring to the STEM reference. I need more from an argument than "Here is a synonym for a power law function. If a power function has different parameters, it has a different output". I would be more easily blinded if I was encountering Wright's Law - spending more on things make things insanely cheap insanely quick - without knowing what a power law is and knowing it was just arguing from that.
    - krisoft 2y ago
      > I'm not sure what you mean by my point I will put it as simple as I can: I have read your comment. Multiple times. I have no idea what you are saying. > I need more from an argument than "Here is a synonym for a power law function. If a power function has different parameters, it has a different output". That's your re-phrasing, and I don't find it accurate. What the article questions is what is the parameter of the power function. If it is merely time, you can sit on your hands and solar panels get magically cheaper. You can't make the clock tick faster, therefore it would be foolish to want to speed the process up. But if the input to the function is "cumulative production" rather than time (as the article argues it is) then by sitting on your hands you slooow the function down.
foobarian 2y ago
I wonder how much of the momentum is due to panel manufacturing, and how much is due to advances in inverter and battery tech.
- wmf 2y ago
  Those should also benefit from scale.
Pxtl 2y ago
Imho the real problem that will be harder to reverse on is the city planning. Car-oriented cities will be intrinsically far more difficult to green than urban density. Late 20th and early 21st century city planners will be remembered as an entire profession of Thomas Midgley Juniors.
- tsudounym 2y ago
  Agreed, cities oriented around the car can't be saved. The cost of maintaining 12, 16 lane highways is so exorbitant that they'll have to maintain the sprawl ponzi scheme or go bankrupt.
skeeter2020 2y ago
The author makes some big leaps, both in logic and execution, including the fact that you need some level of concensus to go "all in" on anything new - or to be an autocratic dictator who "knows best".
more_corn 2y ago
And the one big thing that prevented this from happening was that fossil fuel companies gas lit is for years pretending that climate change wasn’t real.
hoosier_daddy 2y ago
much of recent production cost reductions are due to Chinese manufacturing which trade significant environmental damage for increased productivity.
- seadan83 2y ago
  Do you have citations for how Chinese solar panel production causes undo environmental damage? My impression is that China subsidized their solar panel industry and gave that industry grants. Basically they did "Solyndra" a couple dozen times over and then found some winners. The US instead took the Solyndra example and divested. I don't think lax environmental laws was the difference, but instead government investment.
geph2021 2y ago
governments should have been falling over themselves to buy or otherwise subsidise expensive solar PV, because the more we bought, the faster the price would fall That's quite a stretch, especially considering that there are plenty of examples where government subsidies and intervention distorts markets and makes them less efficient and more dysfunctional. I don't disagree with the general premise of the article: more could have been done to transition to renewable energy sooner. But it's really simplistic to say there was a clear, easy answer to this, and it simply involved more government spending on solar energy.
elwebmaster 2y ago
Just another spin on communism and central planning. Why don’t we let the market decide? Why don’t we let people decide what is best for them instead of forcing one technology or another? Inflation is ultra high yet we are ignoring the root cause: increasing cost of inputs due to new taxes and tariffs, and instead hoping that by also increasing the cost of capital all will be good again.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  I can't tell if you're serious or not. We can't let "the market" decide on things like this because the market is a small number of very large companies that have natural monopolies and also doesn't care whether or not it completely consumes the planet for profit.
  - sintaxi 2y ago
    The market is you and me. We decide with our purchasing habits.
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      I have zero ability to choose where my energy comes from. No choice whatsoever.
    - yazzku 2y ago
      That works for alternative products of detergent, not for powering a nation.
- nathan_compton 2y ago
  Even libertarians understand that the atmosphere and its heat trapping properties are a public good. I'd be fine with letting the market decide if we simply banned carbon emissions entirely.
- fch42 2y ago
  After the market "prices in" the real costs of fossil fuel usage, it will decide. And the real costs of tobacco smoking are totally dwarfed by that. All governments need to do is to finally get that part right. Fossil fuel usage literally burns our future. would you use fuel made from rendered baby fat if you could get it for free? That's not a market.
CMay 2y ago
Saying that some law or principle works in one context, so it can probably work here or that some country did X so we can do it too doesn't really account for many of the nuances. Solar panels aren't equally effective everywhere on Earth and some countries or parts of countries are just in different places on Earth. They're also not equally effective in all kinds of weather and some places just have worse weather. You would need a huge oversupply to be able to reliably redirect energy to areas that are underproducing through long distance high voltage transfer lines, which are not perfectly efficient and lose energy along the way. What if night time comes, as it tends to? What if a huge weather event blankets a lot of the country for a day or a few days? What if a volcano erupts somewhere and darkens the sky for a while? Batteries, you say! Batteries have their limits too, and they were even worse 25 years ago. Solar panels and batteries weren't simply about reducing costs and increasing supply, they were also about performance, how much land you need, where the land would be, managing adverse events, handling dips, efficiencies, creating jobs, projected innovations (where are we relative to where we can be), etc. In another context, if you send food to poor countries that can't produce as much of their own food and the population starts increasing far beyond the resources of the land, you have a country that's even more dependent than it was before and risk terrible famine if a supply chain breaks down. If the government had artificially pushed for the production of massive amounts of solar panels and batteries, it could make too many people dependent on something less reliable. When the government funding dries up for it, much of the demand and jobs can dry up too if the demand isn't naturally coming from the market. You could also make the argument that if we had pushed so hard for crappy solar panels back then, it could have failed and soured interest in it even a few decades later. This could apply in the political sphere or even among the population who have memories of being stuck with crappy panels and all the problems they experienced. So if you really believe in and want solar panels to succeed, being too extreme about it too early can potentially be worse rather than better regardless of these cost principles. The question has to be asked if something is truly effective altruism when assessed across the full cycle and span of the problem. I don't even know the full cycle or span of the problem, these are just outside observations. It's probably even more complicated than this.
drtgh 2y ago
> Gordon Moore’s famous prediction about computing power must count as one of the most astonishingly accurate forecasts in history IMHO, because it's been used as a road map, not due anything else. Like a drop-by-drop commercial service. On free will, by how the techniques advance, the computer power would experience abruptly high computing increases, with undetermined development periods occurring in between.
mpweiher 2y ago
Last I checked, Moore's Law simply does not apply to photovoltaics. The exponential increase in computing comes from being able to make smaller transistors, and the fact that a smaller transistor is able to perform the same computation as a bigger transistor. A smaller solar cell is not capable of converting the same amount of power as a larger cell, because its power output depends on the area. (Also on the efficiency, but that's a separate issue, and not subject to exponentials). It was also always something that was driven by demand, as you need ever more expensive fabs to create the smaller feature sizes. It is most definitely not something that happened just due to time passing.
jmward01 2y ago
The elephant in the room to answer the 'why' is that fossil fuels were already working and it took vision to see beyond them and the massive subsidies they get. When vision was available (Jimmy Carter and solar panels on the White House comes to mind) the people without vision, or people that understood how to make a buck today at the expense of tomorrow, put up roadblocks (Regan tearing them down...). The technology, because it is massively better, eventually caught up and passed fossil fuels (yes I am talking in the past tense) which has finally made it easy to see even without vision and finally made it able for people to make a buck today. Nothing has structurally changed that would have allowed us to make different choices in the 70s. We are only, finally, now seeing the solar wave because the same forces are at play now as then. This means we haven't learned anything and will do (are doing?) this again with other technologies and issues. The real question we should be asking ourselves is how to prevent this disastrous pattern from happening again and again. There is no point moaning that solar took so long to happen and there isn't a point to blaming 'big oil' since they will soon be replaced with ? (Big Tech? Big Solar? Big Ag? Big Space?). What are -actual- concrete changes can be made to avoid this type of mess in the future?
- jfengel 2y ago
  Avoid? A few years ago there were memes about how the problem with zombie movies is that they never showed people running out to get zombified. Whatever kind of big mess we create in the future I guarantee we will find ways to make it worse rather than better. The US is preparing to elect a climate denialist to its highest office. This can't be fixed. It's not just some big corporate culprit. It's us. It's not all of us, but it's enough.
  - leashless 2y ago
    well said. "A few years ago there were memes about how the problem with zombie movies is that they never showed people running out to get zombified." I laughed far too hard at this, in the context of the upcoming bird flu pandemic.
- jonathankoren 2y ago
  Not to be a complete pessimist, but there was an active disinformation campaign, not dissimilar to the tobacco companies lying about cancer rates going on. Mix in useful idiots and as Upton Sinclair pointed out, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," and you've got decades of outright denial and obstruction. The only choice is out organize and take direct action, because elections simply aren't enough. https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fossil_fuel_report1.pdf https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fossil_fuel_repo...
briandw 2y ago
Think about what we could do with nuclear power if we had spent decades designing and building cheaper reactors. Small Modular Reactors out of a factory could solve the biggest problem of nuclear, that it's expensive and takes a long time to build.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  We already have small modular energy producing units called photovoltaic cells. They can be installed anywhere with sun by anyone who knows how to use a screwdriver, don’t explode, and don’t contain a highly regulated material. In other words, even if we grant that nuclear is a good idea in the U.S. is it also a good idea in Mexico? What about Guatemala?
  - littlestymaar 2y ago
    You missed the part where your “small modular energy producing unit” only works during the day and when it doesn't rain though. That's true you cannot spread nuclear everywhere in the world due to political instability constraints. But at the same time, the majority of CO2 emissions come from countries which have access to nuclear technology already…
- kagakuninja 2y ago
  The US government has already spent massive amounts of money subsidizing nuclear science programs, because much of the technology is dual-use for weapons. The same is true of every nuclear armed nation in the world. We subsidized the nuclear power industry for many decades. We also perversely spent $trillions subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. What the author and others point out is solar lacked those massive subsidies. Had we spent the same amount on subsidies for solar power, as we spent on nuclear or fossil fuels, solar power technology would have advanced much faster. Yeah, maybe if we dumped even more cash in to nuclear, we might have those cost efficient reactors people keep dreaming about. Or maybe not, because there are compelling arguments that nuclear power will never be able to compete against solar on price. Yes, I am aware that the sun isn't always shining...
martinclayton 2y ago
An aside: Tim Harford presents one of the very best programmes on BBC Radio 4: More or Less [1]. Each programme investigates the reality behind statistics used in the media and by politicians. It's quite UK-centric, of course, but simply one of the most informative shows there is. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd
cladopa 2y ago
In Spain in 2007, the Government asked people to invest in solar panels guaranteeing a price that was outrageously high for a long time. Of course then it changed the price and 60.000 families were bankrrupted. Solar panel were ultra expensive and could not compete with other types of energy. Of course lots of the people in Government became rich as a result of the operation. Today we are having problems with solar panels network instability. Yesterday there was a 3 hour blackout in big parts of Spain because solar unbalance. So it is not that easy.
logtempo 2y ago
We're not able to left it in the dust today, how could we have done so 25 years ago? "we" should have, but "we" could not.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  We cannot because of big oil's buying of politicians and its merchants of doubt. They must be destroyed politically and economically, but XR ain't helping this cause. PV and onshore wind are so cheap (LACE or LCOE), they make nuclear and SMRs essentially moot. Economics will somewhat displace big oil, but it will take leadership to destroy this industry that is killing us and causing insurance losses.
globular-toast 2y ago
You give someone X. Then later you say, you don't need X any more because you can have Y. They say, thanks, now I have X and Y.
testhest 2y ago
Nuclear could have done it, but then the Soviets and Greenpeace came along and ruined it.
smitty1e 2y ago
The market has not agreed, and one favors that over the various vocal minorities whose claims have simply not borne out.
jnmandal 2y ago
This is obviously true but so could many of humanity's worst practices and behaviors. The problem is no one wants to make the various sacrifices that come with changing status quo. Debating what could have been done is silly. The only interesting question really is whether this inherent reticence will cause a civilizational collapse, human extinction, planetary obsolescence or perhaps only something of a temporary dark ages for humans and life on earth.

If the point is generalizable, we should build more nuclear power plants. They will become cheaper.

jrnvs 2y ago
They can’t be made in a factory and thus the learning effect is very small (if it even exists - nuclear reactors have increased in price).
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  > They can’t be made in a factory They can now, see Small Modular Reactors (SMR).
  - fifilura 2y ago
    Where can I see one?
    - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
      Just need to: 1. Build prototype 2. Iterate on prototype. 3. In conjunction start standardizing and automating processes. 4. Achieve large enough scale to amortize the factory and process optimization costs over enough units to actually gain anything. The “SMR hype industry” seems to be perpetually stuck at 1, not even being able to deliver a single prototype. All the while talking like the factory already exists and SMRs are solved. Somehow it doesn’t add up.
    - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
      https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_booklet_2022.pdf https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_booklet_2022.pdf linked from https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-reactors-smrs#:~:text=More%20than%2080,they%20are%20deployed https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-are-small-modular-.... I don't know, I'm not a specialist. But this came up by doing a rudimentary search.
      - fifilura 2y ago
        Thank you! Seems like I have 4 choices (although i probably don't want to go to Russia, since they are at war). KLT-40S Russia HTR-PM China HTR-10 China HTTR Japan
      - fifilura 2y ago
        Yay! There is a company called Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation. It has a nice ring to it! "Super safe bank" "Really clean hamburger restaurant" "Most trustworth car salesman" "Very accurate surgeon"
        rad_gruchalski 2y ago
        This is pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg.
        fch42 2y ago
        If they really work in this factory like shown in that video, handling radioactive material in the production process with little personal protection (especially against airborne dust), then at least I for one would not like to work for them, ever. The safety of "final" product notwithstanding (that's fine), the shaping, size sorting and sintering processes create dust and really, you don't want to get that into yourself.
- Moldoteck 2y ago
  Did these increase in price in China too?
- nomel 2y ago
  Please see the cost breakdown: https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ Very very little is made/manufactured on site. You do not make turbines, computers, pipes, or much at all, on a construction site. You form, weld, pour, and assemble. The goal would be a standard design, to cut those giant engineering and custom fabrication costs to a small fraction. You don't need to deliver a completed factory on a pallet to save costs (although that's possible with distributed small module reactors, as Asia is ramping up for).
  - treyd 2y ago
    Which is why France has such strong nuclear supply, they decided going into it to hage standard designs.
    - Retric 2y ago
      France’s nuclear is fully owned by the government. The subsidies are so huge there’s basically zero market forces in play on the supply side.
      - mpweiher 2y ago
        It's not subsidized. In fact, cheap nuclear electricity is used to subsidize other industries. The entire nuclear industry (construction, operation, support) cost France € 228 billion and produce 11000 TWh (by 2012). That's 2,07 cents/kWh. Not too shabby.
        Retric 2y ago
        Your numbers are wildly off and not just from ignoring inflation when using poorly sourced numbers from 2012. Quick, how much did they spend on fuel over that timeframe? Well according to that estimate it was 0, so it’s hardly including the operating costs. To give some perspective: “In March 2023 France's Parliament formally approved the government's nuclear investment plan – by 402 votes in favor and 130 against – which considers the €52 billion construction of six new EPR-2 PWRs at three sites.” That’s not operations that’s just for construction of 6 reactors when they have 56 in operation and that’s interest free unlike US reactor where interest is included with construction costs. One year later that’s already been increased to 67.4 billion euros: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-lifts-cost-estimate-new-reactors-67-bln-euros-les-echos-2024-03-04/#:~:text=PARIS%2C%20March%204%20(Reuters),on%20Monday%2C%20citing%20unidentified%20sources https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-l.... France operated as a pay as you go system so they didn’t set money aside for the full cost of decommissioning their reactors etc. Last I checked there was some talk in 2017 of them setting aside 27 billion based on some ridiculously optimistic estimates but mostly the plan is just foist the costs onto future taxpayers.
- qball 2y ago
  >They can’t be made in a factory All nuclear power plants made since around 1980s or so have been made in factories. The US (and other nations) use them all the time for their submarines- defense concerns correctly override environmentalists (and the oil companies backing them financially). The problem is a solved one. We're rich enough to afford to tilt at windmills instead- for now, anyway.
chpatrick 2y ago
Doesn't make sense if there are alternatives that are at least as cheap without the hassle.
Arnt 2y ago
It's not infinitely generalizable, only to tech production issues and maybe not to all of those. Nuclear isn't expensive because of production. https://progress.institute/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/ https://progress.institute/nuclear-power-plant-construction-...
PaulKeeble 2y ago
Even if it wasn't the case that PV's could have replaced fossil fuels back then because they weren't advanced enough nuclear was more than capable of doing so and readily available. Indeed investing in various different types of reactors might very well have produced a similar curve of progress and finding ways to make them less dangerous and requiring less regulation all of which would have sped up deployment and reduced the cost. We will never know, we just know now that its cheaper to do solar and power storage than nuclear.
mpweiher 2y ago
It is. They do. And did. Both France and Germany figured out how to do this. And then stopped building. <facepalm> You build a standardized design, and you build a bunch of them, and you overlap the construction. Germany's Konvoi reactors were built for DM 4 billion a piece in the late 80s. At the same time, non-Konvoi reactors cost more than twice as much, DM 9.5 billion. Apply the 88% cumulative inflation between then and now and you'd be at DM 7,52 billion, or € 3.9 billion. Fortunately we are starting to build more again, so prices should begin to fall.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
I doubt it. Even if the ORNL MSR reactor got maximum funding, we averted the safety panic from three mile island, and were effectively making no nuclear waste the economics still probably can't compete with current wind/solar. The scary prospect for all forms of energy is that wind and solar likely have a lot of runway, as does grid storage. Combined wind/solar + grid storage will fall under combined cycle natural gas this year. Just to emphasize, combined cycle natural gas exceeds the carnot efficiency of a single stage combustion with additional heat cycles. That means it basically has maximized the physics of extracting energy from using natural gas. In the US natural gas is also basically as low as can practically be priced because it is a waste byproduct of the bakken shale in the Dakotas. Natural gas beats all other fossil fuels and nuclear by quite a lot. And it CANNOT compete with wind/solar. Solar still has numerous opportunities to drop between perovskites and some theoretical cheap multijunction manufacutring. Grid storage will see sodium-sulfur or some other cheap/dense battery tech in the next 10 years in addition to the steady improvement of sodium-ion and LFP chemistries already in mass production. I would really really like to see a scalable cheap nuke plant that is only twice as expensive as solar/wind. But that massive 10s of billions in research and investment would have needed to start in the 1990s. And IMO would have been shunted to the same failed solid fuel rod designs rather than MSR or some other "radical" reactor design. Nuclear will simply never be economically viable in the foreseeable 30 years. And neither will fusion.

Article misses the fact that a lot of governments in the 70s and 80s (shoutout to Germany especially) put a lot of investment into solar panel adoption, which is part of why the cost dropped so much in the 80s and 90s and 2000s.

ant6n 2y ago
I thought German investment started with the first green partnered government in 1998.
nomel 2y ago
Are these dates correct? Germany had only 2MW in 1990 and 91 [1]. It looks like solar interest didn't really start until the 80's [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Generat... [2] https://wiki.energytransition.org/wiki/history-of-the-energiewende/ https://wiki.energytransition.org/wiki/history-of-the-energi...
- logtempo 2y ago
  Germany did investing, but China ate the market. It's basically what happened in the 21th. It's also interesting that we're talking about 1980/90. 25 years ago is 1999.
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    25 years ago is discussed in the context of shifting the current state of the art solar to 25 years ago. So starting maybe in the 1970s would produce the current performance and economies of scale, but much earlier, not "starting" in 1999.

imoverclocked 2y ago

Lots of big jumps in the article and the devil is in the details. Solar panels have seen a lot of innovation in the last few decades. Simply pumping out tons of 30 year old technology may have stunted that progress or even created so much waste that solar could have been deemed as non-viable. Some panel technologies are really hard to recycle but have held a performance edge at different times in solar tech development. Sometimes going all-in on mass production of something is not worth the short-term savings.

drcross 2y ago
You may be putting the cart before the horse. Wouldnt pumping out tons of anything create forcing functions for efficiency, as in, exactly what happened but on a longer timeframe?
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  I don't think that's the case. Pumping them out might well mean free money, which means there's no incentive to do better.
  - seadan83 2y ago
    Industries which receive subsidies today and still have incentives "to do better" are counter-examples to your statement. " Pumping them out might well mean free money" The article talks about this, Wrights law. The "pumping them out" leads to economies of scale and production efficiency in of itself.
    - jokethrowaway 2y ago
      You never know what unintended consequences you have with subsidies Central Planning is never free.
      - digging 2y ago
        > You never know what unintended consequences you have with subsidies We already have subsidies and catastrophic climate change.

littlestymaar 2y ago

For electricity generation alone (which is also what TFA talks about) we could even have done it 30 years ago. In fact France did, so this is not pure speculation, it's just a terrible missed opportunity.

TacticalCoder 2y ago
> In fact France did, so this is not pure speculation... France did what!? France's electricity mainly comes from nuclear, oil and gaz. Solar is nowhere sizeable compared to these three yet. Oil is fossil.
- sl-1 2y ago
  It decarbonized its electricity production by building a lot of nuclear (eg. left fossil fuels in the dust). Of course only partly, as the nuclear fleet still depends on fossil fuels, but still a great achievement.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  > France's electricity mainly comes from nuclear, oil and gaz. No, nuclear, hydro and then a fraction of fossil (which is still among the lowest in the world as of today).
robocat 2y ago
France's nuclear industry is a key economic sector, which represents 6.7% of the job market (220 000 people) for 2 600 companies and a turnover of €50 billion per year A summary of how France paid for the building of its nuclear energy sector: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/2023/03/31/pricing-power-how-france-built-its-nuclear-industry/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/2023/03/31/pricing-p... although decommissioning costs also matter. Quote from: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/CNPP-2021/countryprofiles/France/France.htm https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/CNPP-2021/cou...
- fch42 2y ago
  What is interesting is that the article says other countries should use "France as blueprint". - to have a state-owned electricity generation monopolist ? - to use demand-based price increases to push down demand ? - to provide half the funding for generating plants from taxpayers' coffers? France's example in nuclear is, if you like to phrase it like that, one of "socialistic infrastructure policies that have proven to work well". Quoth Lenin, "Communism is the Soviet state plus electrification of the country", https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO - I would like to see a comparative essay on France's nuclear push of 60s/70s/80s and the USSR's 20s/30s/40s. And/or, in fact, later; the number two nuclear power generating country in Europe behind France is, after all, Ukraine.

refulgentis 2y ago

Smart people's disease: "I read about Wright's Law, which says the more $X you make the cheaper it gets. Therefore for all manufactured products $X, the more we make, the cheaper they'll get." STEM helped me a ton in college, when I move from physics to economics, everything was "just a curve" instead of something that needed to be approached and memorized individually Here, instead of feeling put out that ex. government won't just throw more money at carbon capture, I can say "well, we're just describing a power curve, which is not a law"

iknowstuff 2y ago
I’m not sure if it’s me or if your point is difficult to understand
- refulgentis 2y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by my point, I'll assume you're referring to the STEM reference. I need more from an argument than "Here is a synonym for a power law function. If a power function has different parameters, it has a different output". I would be more easily blinded if I was encountering Wright's Law - spending more on things make things insanely cheap insanely quick - without knowing what a power law is and knowing it was just arguing from that.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > I'm not sure what you mean by my point I will put it as simple as I can: I have read your comment. Multiple times. I have no idea what you are saying. > I need more from an argument than "Here is a synonym for a power law function. If a power function has different parameters, it has a different output". That's your re-phrasing, and I don't find it accurate. What the article questions is what is the parameter of the power function. If it is merely time, you can sit on your hands and solar panels get magically cheaper. You can't make the clock tick faster, therefore it would be foolish to want to speed the process up. But if the input to the function is "cumulative production" rather than time (as the article argues it is) then by sitting on your hands you slooow the function down.

foobarian 2y ago

I wonder how much of the momentum is due to panel manufacturing, and how much is due to advances in inverter and battery tech.

wmf 2y ago
Those should also benefit from scale.

Pxtl 2y ago

Imho the real problem that will be harder to reverse on is the city planning. Car-oriented cities will be intrinsically far more difficult to green than urban density. Late 20th and early 21st century city planners will be remembered as an entire profession of Thomas Midgley Juniors.

tsudounym 2y ago
Agreed, cities oriented around the car can't be saved. The cost of maintaining 12, 16 lane highways is so exorbitant that they'll have to maintain the sprawl ponzi scheme or go bankrupt.

skeeter2020 2y ago

The author makes some big leaps, both in logic and execution, including the fact that you need some level of concensus to go "all in" on anything new - or to be an autocratic dictator who "knows best".

more_corn 2y ago

And the one big thing that prevented this from happening was that fossil fuel companies gas lit is for years pretending that climate change wasn’t real.

hoosier_daddy 2y ago

much of recent production cost reductions are due to Chinese manufacturing which trade significant environmental damage for increased productivity.

seadan83 2y ago
Do you have citations for how Chinese solar panel production causes undo environmental damage? My impression is that China subsidized their solar panel industry and gave that industry grants. Basically they did "Solyndra" a couple dozen times over and then found some winners. The US instead took the Solyndra example and divested. I don't think lax environmental laws was the difference, but instead government investment.

geph2021 2y ago

governments should have been falling over themselves to buy or otherwise subsidise expensive solar PV, because the more we bought, the faster the price would fall That's quite a stretch, especially considering that there are plenty of examples where government subsidies and intervention distorts markets and makes them less efficient and more dysfunctional. I don't disagree with the general premise of the article: more could have been done to transition to renewable energy sooner. But it's really simplistic to say there was a clear, easy answer to this, and it simply involved more government spending on solar energy.

elwebmaster 2y ago

Just another spin on communism and central planning. Why don’t we let the market decide? Why don’t we let people decide what is best for them instead of forcing one technology or another? Inflation is ultra high yet we are ignoring the root cause: increasing cost of inputs due to new taxes and tariffs, and instead hoping that by also increasing the cost of capital all will be good again.

bongodongobob 2y ago
I can't tell if you're serious or not. We can't let "the market" decide on things like this because the market is a small number of very large companies that have natural monopolies and also doesn't care whether or not it completely consumes the planet for profit.
- sintaxi 2y ago
  The market is you and me. We decide with our purchasing habits.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    I have zero ability to choose where my energy comes from. No choice whatsoever.
  - yazzku 2y ago
    That works for alternative products of detergent, not for powering a nation.
nathan_compton 2y ago
Even libertarians understand that the atmosphere and its heat trapping properties are a public good. I'd be fine with letting the market decide if we simply banned carbon emissions entirely.
fch42 2y ago
After the market "prices in" the real costs of fossil fuel usage, it will decide. And the real costs of tobacco smoking are totally dwarfed by that. All governments need to do is to finally get that part right. Fossil fuel usage literally burns our future. would you use fuel made from rendered baby fat if you could get it for free? That's not a market.

CMay 2y ago

Saying that some law or principle works in one context, so it can probably work here or that some country did X so we can do it too doesn't really account for many of the nuances. Solar panels aren't equally effective everywhere on Earth and some countries or parts of countries are just in different places on Earth. They're also not equally effective in all kinds of weather and some places just have worse weather. You would need a huge oversupply to be able to reliably redirect energy to areas that are underproducing through long distance high voltage transfer lines, which are not perfectly efficient and lose energy along the way. What if night time comes, as it tends to? What if a huge weather event blankets a lot of the country for a day or a few days? What if a volcano erupts somewhere and darkens the sky for a while? Batteries, you say! Batteries have their limits too, and they were even worse 25 years ago. Solar panels and batteries weren't simply about reducing costs and increasing supply, they were also about performance, how much land you need, where the land would be, managing adverse events, handling dips, efficiencies, creating jobs, projected innovations (where are we relative to where we can be), etc. In another context, if you send food to poor countries that can't produce as much of their own food and the population starts increasing far beyond the resources of the land, you have a country that's even more dependent than it was before and risk terrible famine if a supply chain breaks down. If the government had artificially pushed for the production of massive amounts of solar panels and batteries, it could make too many people dependent on something less reliable. When the government funding dries up for it, much of the demand and jobs can dry up too if the demand isn't naturally coming from the market. You could also make the argument that if we had pushed so hard for crappy solar panels back then, it could have failed and soured interest in it even a few decades later. This could apply in the political sphere or even among the population who have memories of being stuck with crappy panels and all the problems they experienced. So if you really believe in and want solar panels to succeed, being too extreme about it too early can potentially be worse rather than better regardless of these cost principles. The question has to be asked if something is truly effective altruism when assessed across the full cycle and span of the problem. I don't even know the full cycle or span of the problem, these are just outside observations. It's probably even more complicated than this.

drtgh 2y ago

> Gordon Moore’s famous prediction about computing power must count as one of the most astonishingly accurate forecasts in history IMHO, because it's been used as a road map, not due anything else. Like a drop-by-drop commercial service. On free will, by how the techniques advance, the computer power would experience abruptly high computing increases, with undetermined development periods occurring in between.

mpweiher 2y ago

Last I checked, Moore's Law simply does not apply to photovoltaics. The exponential increase in computing comes from being able to make smaller transistors, and the fact that a smaller transistor is able to perform the same computation as a bigger transistor. A smaller solar cell is not capable of converting the same amount of power as a larger cell, because its power output depends on the area. (Also on the efficiency, but that's a separate issue, and not subject to exponentials). It was also always something that was driven by demand, as you need ever more expensive fabs to create the smaller feature sizes. It is most definitely not something that happened just due to time passing.

jmward01 2y ago

The elephant in the room to answer the 'why' is that fossil fuels were already working and it took vision to see beyond them and the massive subsidies they get. When vision was available (Jimmy Carter and solar panels on the White House comes to mind) the people without vision, or people that understood how to make a buck today at the expense of tomorrow, put up roadblocks (Regan tearing them down...). The technology, because it is massively better, eventually caught up and passed fossil fuels (yes I am talking in the past tense) which has finally made it easy to see even without vision and finally made it able for people to make a buck today. Nothing has structurally changed that would have allowed us to make different choices in the 70s. We are only, finally, now seeing the solar wave because the same forces are at play now as then. This means we haven't learned anything and will do (are doing?) this again with other technologies and issues. The real question we should be asking ourselves is how to prevent this disastrous pattern from happening again and again. There is no point moaning that solar took so long to happen and there isn't a point to blaming 'big oil' since they will soon be replaced with ? (Big Tech? Big Solar? Big Ag? Big Space?). What are -actual- concrete changes can be made to avoid this type of mess in the future?

jfengel 2y ago
Avoid? A few years ago there were memes about how the problem with zombie movies is that they never showed people running out to get zombified. Whatever kind of big mess we create in the future I guarantee we will find ways to make it worse rather than better. The US is preparing to elect a climate denialist to its highest office. This can't be fixed. It's not just some big corporate culprit. It's us. It's not all of us, but it's enough.
- leashless 2y ago
  well said. "A few years ago there were memes about how the problem with zombie movies is that they never showed people running out to get zombified." I laughed far too hard at this, in the context of the upcoming bird flu pandemic.
jonathankoren 2y ago
Not to be a complete pessimist, but there was an active disinformation campaign, not dissimilar to the tobacco companies lying about cancer rates going on. Mix in useful idiots and as Upton Sinclair pointed out, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," and you've got decades of outright denial and obstruction. The only choice is out organize and take direct action, because elections simply aren't enough. https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fossil_fuel_report1.pdf https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fossil_fuel_repo...

briandw 2y ago

Think about what we could do with nuclear power if we had spent decades designing and building cheaper reactors. Small Modular Reactors out of a factory could solve the biggest problem of nuclear, that it's expensive and takes a long time to build.

janalsncm 2y ago
We already have small modular energy producing units called photovoltaic cells. They can be installed anywhere with sun by anyone who knows how to use a screwdriver, don’t explode, and don’t contain a highly regulated material. In other words, even if we grant that nuclear is a good idea in the U.S. is it also a good idea in Mexico? What about Guatemala?
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  You missed the part where your “small modular energy producing unit” only works during the day and when it doesn't rain though. That's true you cannot spread nuclear everywhere in the world due to political instability constraints. But at the same time, the majority of CO2 emissions come from countries which have access to nuclear technology already…
kagakuninja 2y ago
The US government has already spent massive amounts of money subsidizing nuclear science programs, because much of the technology is dual-use for weapons. The same is true of every nuclear armed nation in the world. We subsidized the nuclear power industry for many decades. We also perversely spent $trillions subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. What the author and others point out is solar lacked those massive subsidies. Had we spent the same amount on subsidies for solar power, as we spent on nuclear or fossil fuels, solar power technology would have advanced much faster. Yeah, maybe if we dumped even more cash in to nuclear, we might have those cost efficient reactors people keep dreaming about. Or maybe not, because there are compelling arguments that nuclear power will never be able to compete against solar on price. Yes, I am aware that the sun isn't always shining...

martinclayton 2y ago

An aside: Tim Harford presents one of the very best programmes on BBC Radio 4: More or Less [1]. Each programme investigates the reality behind statistics used in the media and by politicians. It's quite UK-centric, of course, but simply one of the most informative shows there is. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd

cladopa 2y ago

In Spain in 2007, the Government asked people to invest in solar panels guaranteeing a price that was outrageously high for a long time. Of course then it changed the price and 60.000 families were bankrrupted. Solar panel were ultra expensive and could not compete with other types of energy. Of course lots of the people in Government became rich as a result of the operation. Today we are having problems with solar panels network instability. Yesterday there was a 3 hour blackout in big parts of Spain because solar unbalance. So it is not that easy.

logtempo 2y ago

We're not able to left it in the dust today, how could we have done so 25 years ago? "we" should have, but "we" could not.

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
We cannot because of big oil's buying of politicians and its merchants of doubt. They must be destroyed politically and economically, but XR ain't helping this cause. PV and onshore wind are so cheap (LACE or LCOE), they make nuclear and SMRs essentially moot. Economics will somewhat displace big oil, but it will take leadership to destroy this industry that is killing us and causing insurance losses.

globular-toast 2y ago

You give someone X. Then later you say, you don't need X any more because you can have Y. They say, thanks, now I have X and Y.

testhest 2y ago

Nuclear could have done it, but then the Soviets and Greenpeace came along and ruined it.

smitty1e 2y ago

The market has not agreed, and one favors that over the various vocal minorities whose claims have simply not borne out.

jnmandal 2y ago

This is obviously true but so could many of humanity's worst practices and behaviors. The problem is no one wants to make the various sacrifices that come with changing status quo. Debating what could have been done is silly. The only interesting question really is whether this inherent reticence will cause a civilizational collapse, human extinction, planetary obsolescence or perhaps only something of a temporary dark ages for humans and life on earth.