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No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shin

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and the uranium fuel is very cheap, perhaps 10% of the cost of running the plant. This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if you care about greenhouse emissions. Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514). In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were announced a few weeks ago. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW). Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. But you don't hear about it in the mainstream news yet. And many people (Germany, Spain, I'm looking at you) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this. Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.

jakewins 2y ago
> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.
- closewith 2y ago
  > You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather. Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.
    - closewith 2y ago
      Well, that's a false dichotomy, because no-one's (at least no-one reasonable and in good faith) is suggesting shifting the grid entirely to nuclear. Instead, a diverse set of generation sources is ideal, including solar, wind, nuclear and hydro.
      - pjc50 2y ago
        Dunno, all the nuclear advocates seem to contrast it with wind/solar, which are also much cheaper and quicker capital investments.
        closewith 2y ago
        Well, the point of this thread is that's only true until a sufficient level of availability is required, and then nuclear (and fossil thermal plants) all of a sudden become a viable option again.
        mpweiher 2y ago
        Nope, virtually all nuclear advocates call for combined renewable/nuclear grids. Nuclear and reliable renewables for base load, intermittent renewables for intermittent load where and when it matches. Wind/solar are not cheaper. Per kWh they are more expensive. Thanks to China, they are a lower and smaller-grained capital investment.
epoxia 2y ago
The issue of dunkelflaute is measurable and you can approach it the same way that storms are rated as being 100,1000-year storms. Not that I wouldn't appreciate more nuclear.
akamaka 2y ago
What you didn’t mention is the effect that renewables have on the cost of nuclear power. When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop. Because nuclear power has high up front costs, its economics are increasingly eroded as more renewables and batteries are added to the grid. You’re totally correct that renewables and batteries aren’t yet able to bridge the gap in times of bad weather, but what they are excellent at is spoiling the economics of any other type of cheap electricity generation that comes with high capital costs.
- kaliqt 2y ago
  That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output. The only time it won't scale to meet output is if the price stays high, but if the nuclear energy is already on the grid and has elastic pricing, the rest will take care of itself.
  - akamaka 2y ago
    But the price of energy can be negative, so a new nuclear plant might never pay off its cost, even if it provides the public benefit of cheap electricity.
    - quickthrowman 2y ago
      Did you read the post you’re responding to? > That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output. If the price of electricity is negative, people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox > In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.
Panzer04 2y ago
But not cheap. Gas peakers are cheap compared to nuclear, and arguably much more appropriate for the foreseeable future when it comes to making up for renewable energy's inconsistency problems. I mostly disagree with your initial assertion as well. A sufficiently large and diversified grid will largely cover itself, and when it doesn't, that's what peakers and so on will handle.
greenthrow 2y ago
This is nonsense. If you're going to cite arbitrary "N+1 days of bad weather" then I can cite "N+1 severe natural disasters" where the nuclear reactor is engineered to withstand N. And unlike the theoretical "disaster" due to extended bad weather taking renewables down, this has actually happened in recent memory with Fukushima. And this was a true disaster, not just a power outage. Nuclear is not safe. Every time proponents say "new designs are safe" eventually a new disaster proves this lie. Then the nuclear proponents say "oh well that was an old design, new designs are safe!" Nuclear is too expensive. Renewables even with storage are way cheaper! We can way over build renewables. We can distribute them, because "bad weather" is regional. All for much cheaper than nuclear. Stop pushing this out-dated, unsafe and expensive technology. Its time has passed.
- edmundsauto 2y ago
  To be fair, the unsafe designs are all 50 years old because of FUD from incidents that are also generally pretty old. I’m not sure it’s comparable to modern designs - this isn’t a “new iPhone every year” deal.
  - greenthrow 2y ago
    Get out of here with this lie. Before the disaster, nuclear proponents cited Fukushima as an example of how safe modern nuclear was.
    - edmundsauto 2y ago
      I think everyone knew the Mark I boiling water reactors designed in the 1960s was not a “safe by default” design. Open to receipts if folks with some understanding of nuclear designs were on record before that touting its safety.
      - greenthrow 2y ago
        "Citation needed" is the lamest response. I am not your personal Google assistant. Nuclear proponents just like you cited Fukushima as a hallmark of reliability to "disprove" its dangers to me. There were articles highlighting it. These are obviously hard to find now with the digital rot of the last decade. Sorry I didn't print out copies to hand out to you many years later.
otherme123 2y ago
Spaniard here: we have zero gas and zero uranium nationally sourced, yet thanks to solar, wind and hydro, our energy grid is among the best in the world. We are at 20% nuclear, above global average, and above USA or UK, no need to install more. Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA. In terms of energy we are good, thank you, and need no lessons from the USA.
- sheepybloke 2y ago
  Spain also has a hugely different energy market than the United States. Spain is around 5% of the size of the US, being closer to a state in our context. Different states have different climates, making them more aligned with different energy sources. It doesn't make sense to compare the US and Spain in this context. > We are at 20% nuclear, Doesn't this prove the parent comment's point, that the best mix of energy is renewables supplemented by a base of nuclear power? > Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA This feels unnecessary. Spain has done an amazing job building an energy base, let's talk about how we can export to different countries and climates instead of putting people down.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
Fission is a bad complement for solar power. A good complement for solar provides dispatchable fill-in-the-gaps type of power. However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement. You can get to 100% carbon free by using a combination of overprovisioning, source diversity, geographic diversity, storage and statistics. You can't get to 100% but you can get to an arbitrary number of nines and say "good enough". The grid is only 99.99% reliable so having generation be better than that has little value. If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid you choose something the opposite of nuclear: something cheap to build but expensive to fuel. For example, synthetic natural gas. The cost of the fuel has little relevance when it only has a duty cycle of 0.1%. And they're cheap to build and likely don't even need building because we already have lots of them. China built a lot of nuclear reactors in the 2010's, but is slowing their build rate. 10GW/year of nuclear power is not very impressive in a country that built 100GW of solar in the first half of 2024. That being said, I still support restarting TMI. The main costs of nuclear are in building and decomissioning them. We've already incurred the cost of building TMI and we're already on the hook for decomissioning it, so running it is likely cost-effective once you remove the sunk costs.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  > However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement. I think this is why they call it baseload. Yes it costs the same, used or unused... but it's always there, ready to be used. This is its strength, not a defect. > If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid But no reasonable person wants that. They want "100% reliability, and who cares where it comes from". If you're environmentally minded, you can tack on a "with no carbon"... but even that isn't the same thing as a "primarily solar grid".
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    baseload is base load, not base generation. Base generation is not a thing. Way back when, they realized that grids had a base load below which it never dropped. They realized that if they designed some of their plants without the expensive features which allowed them to be turned on and off quickly, they could build plants cheaper. You don't design grids for base load, you design grids for peak load in all scenarios. If you can handle peak, you can also handle base. Baseload is for cost optimization. And nuclear is a horrible way to optimize cost.
CuriousCosmic 2y ago
You don't need battery farms to make renewables viable in the US. What you need is to replace the AC grid interconnect system in the US with a HVDC super grid system. The key difference here is that HVDC is exceedingly efficient in energy transfer and has effectively negligible losses compared to AC over distance. The US is big enough that any impact from weather should basically average out over that distance.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  There are huge downsides though because moving power generation further and further from where it’s used opens you up to more disruption from terrorist attacks on the grid (and cyber attacks) unless you also do less centralized production which is going to be more expensive.
  - Ancapistani 2y ago
    > moving power generation further and further from where it’s used opens you up to more disruption from terrorist attacks on the grid Not arguing, just asking - how is this different from how the Internet works?
  - CuriousCosmic 2y ago
    That's the thing. HVDC works better in a decentralised manner. You don't have clocking to deal with so instead it's mainly a matter of just hooking power production and power draw up to what is basically a big cross-country busbar. And you can connect as many bridging connections as you want without having to worry about phase or desync. Instead more connections generally just means power goes from production to consumption along more efficient paths.
- nradov 2y ago
  That doesn't help after sunset on the west coast when residential demand peaks and there is little renewable power being generated anywhere in North America. In theory batteries or other storage could close that gap but realistically it's going to take decades to scale that up.
exe34 2y ago
and remember, it's only fair to include the cost of carbon capture to return the carbon into the soil, since the cost of nuclear in these discussions will include both the cost of disposal and cleanup of disasters that only happen several continents away.
berkes 2y ago
No. An energy mix is the answer. One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build. Nuclear plants that already run, often take days, some even weeks to adjust significant: so if on monday the wind stops blowing, on tuesday it gets cloudy, and on tuesday afternoon everyone needs to charge their EV or fire up the AC, it'll often take until next week friday before a nuclear plant can deliver this. Modern plants are faster, and theres many "hacks" where energy is blown out (wasted) for short peaks down, or where there's always 10% wasted for short peaks up. So nuclear needs innovation. But most of all, needs to be "just a piece of the puzzle" and never the only piece. Nuclear fission, and other of this "innovation" isn't there. That's the other slow part of nuclear. Even if its production ready today, that plant won't run for another decade, often 20+ years (except china, which tells you the reason why it's so rediculous slow: NIMBY, regulations, democracy) So, sorry, aside from all the other (fictive) problems with nuclear (waste, risk etc), nuclear has a serious problem of being just too damn slow to solve *todays* energy crisis on its own. Edit: Source, I've interned in power plants. A comparable coal plant, took one and a half month to power up from zero to producing electricity: which happened every 5 years for revision and three months to power down. It could adjust 10% in a few hours, but everything over 30% needed week(s) of planning ahead. I made those plannings.
- jgtrosh 2y ago
  > > Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. > No. > An energy mix is the answer. Maybe that “No.” was unnecessary.
  - berkes 2y ago
    Maybe. Probably, if "future" means 50+ years, so two generations in future. But not if it means "future" in even overlapping the current nuclear plants that are EOL, 10, 20 even 30 years. Because to replace those nuclear EOL with other nuclear, we'd need to start building plants in 2014, 2015 (which we didn't). The next best time may be now, but "We", at least in Europe aren't doing that either, and AFAIK neither in the US. TBC: I'm not saying "it won't work, so stop chasing it" on contrary. But shoehorning "fission" into a discussion of a current energy crisis, what this article is about, isn't relevant. Such tech isn't for today, tomorrow. Not even for when your kids grow, up, but at most for your grandkids when they are working - horizons.
janice1999 2y ago
You know nuclear power plants have issues in extreme weather too, right? [1] [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-the-leading-cause-of-nuclear-power-outages/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-t...
Suppafly 2y ago
>No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. I'm in favor of nuclear too, but this is a ridiculous point. Your first sentence mentions solar and wind and your second only addresses solar. If the sun doesn't shine for n+1 days, the wind is still going to be available most or all of those days.
- rgmerk 2y ago
  The discussion of incorporating variability into the power grid is incredibly unsophisticated on HN. The US (and Europe) are big places with diverse energy demand and weather patterns, and smart renewable energy developers will seek out resources that are decorrelated with existing supplies because the power can be sold at higher prices. Batteries are also getting cheap enough to profitably arbitrage intraday price variability. Another thing that gets ignored in these discussions is that in any net zero scenario there is going to be a fair bit of green hydrogen/biofuels/synfuel produced for transport and industrial use. A fraction of that could be diverted to gas peaker plants when monster dunkelflautes manifest themselves.
croes 2y ago
A nuclear power plant needs supervision, if it can run N days without but there is no supervision for N+1 days, we are in big trouble.
bb88 2y ago
I realize this isn't the HN popular opinion, but nuclear power will be great once: 1. People are educated about true risk AND forget about Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Or the need to have iodine pills if you live near one. ("If it's so safe, why do I need the iodine pills?") 2. Bad actors face actual prison time, not just corporate fines. Meanwhile, today, the bad actors still get bonuses. (You can kinda blame this one on the simpsons, but I do want for Christmas this year a Simpsons Springfield Isotopes Hockey Jersey with the 3-eyed fish. https://jerseyninja.com/springfield-iceotopes-simpson-hockey-jersey/ https://jerseyninja.com/springfield-iceotopes-simpson-hockey...) 3. We grow a lot of crops in the desert in the US. We need a lot of water to do that. There's gigawatts of solar potential there. And the cost of one reactor is $35B US for 1GW. For solar/wind you could have 10GW for around $10B US and then there's $25B US for batteries.
deleted 2y ago
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mhx1138 2y ago
I personally could tolerate it if Microsoft’s “Ai” is down for a few hours or days per year. Give clippy a break.
giantg2 2y ago
"No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather." Generally agree. However, I want to point out that it could defined be possible if designed the right way. You can use "batteries" like pumped hydro, which could protect against longer duration outages. Bonus is that when there's no sun, there's usually rain, which one would hope would also offset some of the draining of the water.
riedel 2y ago
Three mile island already hit jackpot once in the statistics game and it didn't only go offline for a few days. And it is true that fuel cost are not the driving factor for fision. I am all in, if power companies really have to pay for all security and lifecycle costs upfront.
hintymad 2y ago
> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable. I never understood the hysteria of the anti-nuclear people. I mean, the stats are out there for everyone to verify. Even the worst nuclear disaster killed no more than 100 people[1]. Plus, the new generation of the nuclear reactor can auto shut down when the temperature keeps rising. As for the nuclear waste, we need just one football field to store all the waste even before the recycling, which can recoup 90% of the material. I'm also aware of the argument that even one death is too many. But if we follow this argument, wouldn't we need to account for the deaths caused by the alternative energy source, like coal? And the death would be in the thousands, right? And why won't we protest that? [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
- km144 2y ago
  For the explanation of hysteria: 1) Nuclear disasters are acute, traumatic events that can have drastic effects on health of people and ecosystems for generations 2) Nuclear power sounds like nuclear bombs and nuclear radiation, both of which are scary and resonate with long-held cultural fears of nuclear technology that have existed since the Cold War. Basically, yes most fears of nuclear power are irrational. But that's part of the problem—even if nuclear power polluted in a manner similar to coal power and there wasn't the risk of acute disaster, I still think Americans would be quite wary of the technology purely due to cultural priors.
quantified 2y ago
How clean, fast, cheap and reliable is the decommissioning of a plant once its short life is over? Anything that lasts only 50 years is pretty short-term.
danielbln 2y ago
This user account is spamming the same message into various threads. Correct or not, it leaves a taste.
geysersam 2y ago
Nuclear energy is not free from disruptions caused by natural events or other unexpected causes. See for example the nuclear power plants in France that have to shut down in summer because if low water in the nearby rivers used for cooling. It's always a question of probability and risk. If we get extreme weather conditions that our storage cannot keep up then we have to temporarily reduce usage and in the longer term increase storage capacity. That said, I'm not against nuclear. But I'm against simplisticly dismissing renewables.
dyauspitr 2y ago
India has nine nuclear plants actively under construction to be completed between 2024-27 as well.
lenkite 2y ago
Very few people talk about the land requirements for solar and consequence of de-greening. To generate 1 MW of solar power, approximately 5 acres are needed. This means a 1 MW solar farm fits on a 10-acre space. This overlaps with croplands and grasslands used for livestock grazing. This affects animal movement patterns. Removing native vegetation to make room for solar farms threatens endangered animals and insects which rely on the vegetation for food and habitat.
credit_guy 2y ago
I am pro-nuclear, but I don't think that's exactly the correct argument for nuclear power. I think we can cover the current level of energy consumption with solar and wind. The problem is that we want to live in a future where the world consumes at least 10 times more energy than now. This might seem like an outrageous number, but it's not. The average energy use per capita in the world is 3.5 times lower than in the US. At the least we want the rest of the world to reach the living standards of the current average American person. But we also know that AI will consume exponentially increasing amounts of electricity. The exponential function is funny, you don't notice it until it explodes in your face. Right now AI uses a non-negligible but still small amount of energy, but the growth is clearly exponential. In a world where the energy is not a constraint, in a few decades AI will consume more energy than the rest of the economy combined, although it will be difficult to say what "the rest of the economy" will mean with a world where everything will be powered by AI. Nuclear has the potential to fulfill all this future growth in energy requirements. The fundamental problem of nuclear is not safety, or waste, or proliferation. It is cost. And this is a solvable problem. The total cost of the 4 Barakah reactors you mentioned was $32 billion, or $5.7 billion/GW. The cost of utility solar is about $1 billion/GW, but the capacity factor is only about 30%, while the capacity factor of nuclear is about 90%. So $5.7 at 90% is still a bit more expensive than $1 at 30%, but if the cost of nuclear goes down by a factor of 2, it's at the same level as solar. And there is no reason to think such a reduction is not possible.
xinayder 2y ago
The worst part of this is, Thorium-based reactors seem to be the future of nuclear, but because of FUD and politics, no one is funding research to find out whether the theoretical thorium reactors are the way to go forward.
imtringued 2y ago
You'd be in trouble even if you had nuclear power. If the sun stops shining, our agricultural yields will approach zero and everyone would have to stay close to district heated buildings, due to the extreme cold.

jakewins 2y ago

> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.

closewith 2y ago
> You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather. Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.
- pjc50 2y ago
  > Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.
  - closewith 2y ago
    Well, that's a false dichotomy, because no-one's (at least no-one reasonable and in good faith) is suggesting shifting the grid entirely to nuclear. Instead, a diverse set of generation sources is ideal, including solar, wind, nuclear and hydro.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      Dunno, all the nuclear advocates seem to contrast it with wind/solar, which are also much cheaper and quicker capital investments.
      - closewith 2y ago
        Well, the point of this thread is that's only true until a sufficient level of availability is required, and then nuclear (and fossil thermal plants) all of a sudden become a viable option again.
      - mpweiher 2y ago
        Nope, virtually all nuclear advocates call for combined renewable/nuclear grids. Nuclear and reliable renewables for base load, intermittent renewables for intermittent load where and when it matches. Wind/solar are not cheaper. Per kWh they are more expensive. Thanks to China, they are a lower and smaller-grained capital investment.

epoxia 2y ago

The issue of dunkelflaute is measurable and you can approach it the same way that storms are rated as being 100,1000-year storms. Not that I wouldn't appreciate more nuclear.

akamaka 2y ago

What you didn’t mention is the effect that renewables have on the cost of nuclear power. When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop. Because nuclear power has high up front costs, its economics are increasingly eroded as more renewables and batteries are added to the grid. You’re totally correct that renewables and batteries aren’t yet able to bridge the gap in times of bad weather, but what they are excellent at is spoiling the economics of any other type of cheap electricity generation that comes with high capital costs.

kaliqt 2y ago
That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output. The only time it won't scale to meet output is if the price stays high, but if the nuclear energy is already on the grid and has elastic pricing, the rest will take care of itself.
- akamaka 2y ago
  But the price of energy can be negative, so a new nuclear plant might never pay off its cost, even if it provides the public benefit of cheap electricity.
  - quickthrowman 2y ago
    Did you read the post you’re responding to? > That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output. If the price of electricity is negative, people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox > In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.

Panzer04 2y ago

But not cheap. Gas peakers are cheap compared to nuclear, and arguably much more appropriate for the foreseeable future when it comes to making up for renewable energy's inconsistency problems. I mostly disagree with your initial assertion as well. A sufficiently large and diversified grid will largely cover itself, and when it doesn't, that's what peakers and so on will handle.

greenthrow 2y ago

This is nonsense. If you're going to cite arbitrary "N+1 days of bad weather" then I can cite "N+1 severe natural disasters" where the nuclear reactor is engineered to withstand N. And unlike the theoretical "disaster" due to extended bad weather taking renewables down, this has actually happened in recent memory with Fukushima. And this was a true disaster, not just a power outage. Nuclear is not safe. Every time proponents say "new designs are safe" eventually a new disaster proves this lie. Then the nuclear proponents say "oh well that was an old design, new designs are safe!" Nuclear is too expensive. Renewables even with storage are way cheaper! We can way over build renewables. We can distribute them, because "bad weather" is regional. All for much cheaper than nuclear. Stop pushing this out-dated, unsafe and expensive technology. Its time has passed.

edmundsauto 2y ago
To be fair, the unsafe designs are all 50 years old because of FUD from incidents that are also generally pretty old. I’m not sure it’s comparable to modern designs - this isn’t a “new iPhone every year” deal.
- greenthrow 2y ago
  Get out of here with this lie. Before the disaster, nuclear proponents cited Fukushima as an example of how safe modern nuclear was.
  - edmundsauto 2y ago
    I think everyone knew the Mark I boiling water reactors designed in the 1960s was not a “safe by default” design. Open to receipts if folks with some understanding of nuclear designs were on record before that touting its safety.
    - greenthrow 2y ago
      "Citation needed" is the lamest response. I am not your personal Google assistant. Nuclear proponents just like you cited Fukushima as a hallmark of reliability to "disprove" its dangers to me. There were articles highlighting it. These are obviously hard to find now with the digital rot of the last decade. Sorry I didn't print out copies to hand out to you many years later.

otherme123 2y ago

Spaniard here: we have zero gas and zero uranium nationally sourced, yet thanks to solar, wind and hydro, our energy grid is among the best in the world. We are at 20% nuclear, above global average, and above USA or UK, no need to install more. Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA. In terms of energy we are good, thank you, and need no lessons from the USA.

sheepybloke 2y ago
Spain also has a hugely different energy market than the United States. Spain is around 5% of the size of the US, being closer to a state in our context. Different states have different climates, making them more aligned with different energy sources. It doesn't make sense to compare the US and Spain in this context. > We are at 20% nuclear, Doesn't this prove the parent comment's point, that the best mix of energy is renewables supplemented by a base of nuclear power? > Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA This feels unnecessary. Spain has done an amazing job building an energy base, let's talk about how we can export to different countries and climates instead of putting people down.

bryanlarsen 2y ago

Fission is a bad complement for solar power. A good complement for solar provides dispatchable fill-in-the-gaps type of power. However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement. You can get to 100% carbon free by using a combination of overprovisioning, source diversity, geographic diversity, storage and statistics. You can't get to 100% but you can get to an arbitrary number of nines and say "good enough". The grid is only 99.99% reliable so having generation be better than that has little value. If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid you choose something the opposite of nuclear: something cheap to build but expensive to fuel. For example, synthetic natural gas. The cost of the fuel has little relevance when it only has a duty cycle of 0.1%. And they're cheap to build and likely don't even need building because we already have lots of them. China built a lot of nuclear reactors in the 2010's, but is slowing their build rate. 10GW/year of nuclear power is not very impressive in a country that built 100GW of solar in the first half of 2024. That being said, I still support restarting TMI. The main costs of nuclear are in building and decomissioning them. We've already incurred the cost of building TMI and we're already on the hook for decomissioning it, so running it is likely cost-effective once you remove the sunk costs.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
> However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement. I think this is why they call it baseload. Yes it costs the same, used or unused... but it's always there, ready to be used. This is its strength, not a defect. > If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid But no reasonable person wants that. They want "100% reliability, and who cares where it comes from". If you're environmentally minded, you can tack on a "with no carbon"... but even that isn't the same thing as a "primarily solar grid".
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  baseload is base load, not base generation. Base generation is not a thing. Way back when, they realized that grids had a base load below which it never dropped. They realized that if they designed some of their plants without the expensive features which allowed them to be turned on and off quickly, they could build plants cheaper. You don't design grids for base load, you design grids for peak load in all scenarios. If you can handle peak, you can also handle base. Baseload is for cost optimization. And nuclear is a horrible way to optimize cost.

CuriousCosmic 2y ago

You don't need battery farms to make renewables viable in the US. What you need is to replace the AC grid interconnect system in the US with a HVDC super grid system. The key difference here is that HVDC is exceedingly efficient in energy transfer and has effectively negligible losses compared to AC over distance. The US is big enough that any impact from weather should basically average out over that distance.

EasyMark 2y ago
There are huge downsides though because moving power generation further and further from where it’s used opens you up to more disruption from terrorist attacks on the grid (and cyber attacks) unless you also do less centralized production which is going to be more expensive.
- Ancapistani 2y ago
  > moving power generation further and further from where it’s used opens you up to more disruption from terrorist attacks on the grid Not arguing, just asking - how is this different from how the Internet works?
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  That's the thing. HVDC works better in a decentralised manner. You don't have clocking to deal with so instead it's mainly a matter of just hooking power production and power draw up to what is basically a big cross-country busbar. And you can connect as many bridging connections as you want without having to worry about phase or desync. Instead more connections generally just means power goes from production to consumption along more efficient paths.
nradov 2y ago
That doesn't help after sunset on the west coast when residential demand peaks and there is little renewable power being generated anywhere in North America. In theory batteries or other storage could close that gap but realistically it's going to take decades to scale that up.

exe34 2y ago

and remember, it's only fair to include the cost of carbon capture to return the carbon into the soil, since the cost of nuclear in these discussions will include both the cost of disposal and cleanup of disasters that only happen several continents away.

berkes 2y ago

No. An energy mix is the answer. One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build. Nuclear plants that already run, often take days, some even weeks to adjust significant: so if on monday the wind stops blowing, on tuesday it gets cloudy, and on tuesday afternoon everyone needs to charge their EV or fire up the AC, it'll often take until next week friday before a nuclear plant can deliver this. Modern plants are faster, and theres many "hacks" where energy is blown out (wasted) for short peaks down, or where there's always 10% wasted for short peaks up. So nuclear needs innovation. But most of all, needs to be "just a piece of the puzzle" and never the only piece. Nuclear fission, and other of this "innovation" isn't there. That's the other slow part of nuclear. Even if its production ready today, that plant won't run for another decade, often 20+ years (except china, which tells you the reason why it's so rediculous slow: NIMBY, regulations, democracy) So, sorry, aside from all the other (fictive) problems with nuclear (waste, risk etc), nuclear has a serious problem of being just too damn slow to solve *todays* energy crisis on its own. Edit: Source, I've interned in power plants. A comparable coal plant, took one and a half month to power up from zero to producing electricity: which happened every 5 years for revision and three months to power down. It could adjust 10% in a few hours, but everything over 30% needed week(s) of planning ahead. I made those plannings.

jgtrosh 2y ago
> > Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. > No. > An energy mix is the answer. Maybe that “No.” was unnecessary.
- berkes 2y ago
  Maybe. Probably, if "future" means 50+ years, so two generations in future. But not if it means "future" in even overlapping the current nuclear plants that are EOL, 10, 20 even 30 years. Because to replace those nuclear EOL with other nuclear, we'd need to start building plants in 2014, 2015 (which we didn't). The next best time may be now, but "We", at least in Europe aren't doing that either, and AFAIK neither in the US. TBC: I'm not saying "it won't work, so stop chasing it" on contrary. But shoehorning "fission" into a discussion of a current energy crisis, what this article is about, isn't relevant. Such tech isn't for today, tomorrow. Not even for when your kids grow, up, but at most for your grandkids when they are working - horizons.

janice1999 2y ago

You know nuclear power plants have issues in extreme weather too, right? [1] [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-the-leading-cause-of-nuclear-power-outages/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-t...

Suppafly 2y ago

>No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. I'm in favor of nuclear too, but this is a ridiculous point. Your first sentence mentions solar and wind and your second only addresses solar. If the sun doesn't shine for n+1 days, the wind is still going to be available most or all of those days.

rgmerk 2y ago
The discussion of incorporating variability into the power grid is incredibly unsophisticated on HN. The US (and Europe) are big places with diverse energy demand and weather patterns, and smart renewable energy developers will seek out resources that are decorrelated with existing supplies because the power can be sold at higher prices. Batteries are also getting cheap enough to profitably arbitrage intraday price variability. Another thing that gets ignored in these discussions is that in any net zero scenario there is going to be a fair bit of green hydrogen/biofuels/synfuel produced for transport and industrial use. A fraction of that could be diverted to gas peaker plants when monster dunkelflautes manifest themselves.

croes 2y ago

A nuclear power plant needs supervision, if it can run N days without but there is no supervision for N+1 days, we are in big trouble.

bb88 2y ago

I realize this isn't the HN popular opinion, but nuclear power will be great once: 1. People are educated about true risk AND forget about Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Or the need to have iodine pills if you live near one. ("If it's so safe, why do I need the iodine pills?") 2. Bad actors face actual prison time, not just corporate fines. Meanwhile, today, the bad actors still get bonuses. (You can kinda blame this one on the simpsons, but I do want for Christmas this year a Simpsons Springfield Isotopes Hockey Jersey with the 3-eyed fish. https://jerseyninja.com/springfield-iceotopes-simpson-hockey-jersey/ https://jerseyninja.com/springfield-iceotopes-simpson-hockey...) 3. We grow a lot of crops in the desert in the US. We need a lot of water to do that. There's gigawatts of solar potential there. And the cost of one reactor is $35B US for 1GW. For solar/wind you could have 10GW for around $10B US and then there's $25B US for batteries.

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mhx1138 2y ago

I personally could tolerate it if Microsoft’s “Ai” is down for a few hours or days per year. Give clippy a break.

giantg2 2y ago

"No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather." Generally agree. However, I want to point out that it could defined be possible if designed the right way. You can use "batteries" like pumped hydro, which could protect against longer duration outages. Bonus is that when there's no sun, there's usually rain, which one would hope would also offset some of the draining of the water.

riedel 2y ago

Three mile island already hit jackpot once in the statistics game and it didn't only go offline for a few days. And it is true that fuel cost are not the driving factor for fision. I am all in, if power companies really have to pay for all security and lifecycle costs upfront.

hintymad 2y ago

> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable. I never understood the hysteria of the anti-nuclear people. I mean, the stats are out there for everyone to verify. Even the worst nuclear disaster killed no more than 100 people[1]. Plus, the new generation of the nuclear reactor can auto shut down when the temperature keeps rising. As for the nuclear waste, we need just one football field to store all the waste even before the recycling, which can recoup 90% of the material. I'm also aware of the argument that even one death is too many. But if we follow this argument, wouldn't we need to account for the deaths caused by the alternative energy source, like coal? And the death would be in the thousands, right? And why won't we protest that? [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

km144 2y ago
For the explanation of hysteria: 1) Nuclear disasters are acute, traumatic events that can have drastic effects on health of people and ecosystems for generations 2) Nuclear power sounds like nuclear bombs and nuclear radiation, both of which are scary and resonate with long-held cultural fears of nuclear technology that have existed since the Cold War. Basically, yes most fears of nuclear power are irrational. But that's part of the problem—even if nuclear power polluted in a manner similar to coal power and there wasn't the risk of acute disaster, I still think Americans would be quite wary of the technology purely due to cultural priors.

quantified 2y ago

How clean, fast, cheap and reliable is the decommissioning of a plant once its short life is over? Anything that lasts only 50 years is pretty short-term.

danielbln 2y ago

This user account is spamming the same message into various threads. Correct or not, it leaves a taste.

geysersam 2y ago

Nuclear energy is not free from disruptions caused by natural events or other unexpected causes. See for example the nuclear power plants in France that have to shut down in summer because if low water in the nearby rivers used for cooling. It's always a question of probability and risk. If we get extreme weather conditions that our storage cannot keep up then we have to temporarily reduce usage and in the longer term increase storage capacity. That said, I'm not against nuclear. But I'm against simplisticly dismissing renewables.

dyauspitr 2y ago

India has nine nuclear plants actively under construction to be completed between 2024-27 as well.

lenkite 2y ago

Very few people talk about the land requirements for solar and consequence of de-greening. To generate 1 MW of solar power, approximately 5 acres are needed. This means a 1 MW solar farm fits on a 10-acre space. This overlaps with croplands and grasslands used for livestock grazing. This affects animal movement patterns. Removing native vegetation to make room for solar farms threatens endangered animals and insects which rely on the vegetation for food and habitat.

credit_guy 2y ago

I am pro-nuclear, but I don't think that's exactly the correct argument for nuclear power. I think we can cover the current level of energy consumption with solar and wind. The problem is that we want to live in a future where the world consumes at least 10 times more energy than now. This might seem like an outrageous number, but it's not. The average energy use per capita in the world is 3.5 times lower than in the US. At the least we want the rest of the world to reach the living standards of the current average American person. But we also know that AI will consume exponentially increasing amounts of electricity. The exponential function is funny, you don't notice it until it explodes in your face. Right now AI uses a non-negligible but still small amount of energy, but the growth is clearly exponential. In a world where the energy is not a constraint, in a few decades AI will consume more energy than the rest of the economy combined, although it will be difficult to say what "the rest of the economy" will mean with a world where everything will be powered by AI. Nuclear has the potential to fulfill all this future growth in energy requirements. The fundamental problem of nuclear is not safety, or waste, or proliferation. It is cost. And this is a solvable problem. The total cost of the 4 Barakah reactors you mentioned was $32 billion, or $5.7 billion/GW. The cost of utility solar is about $1 billion/GW, but the capacity factor is only about 30%, while the capacity factor of nuclear is about 90%. So $5.7 at 90% is still a bit more expensive than $1 at 30%, but if the cost of nuclear goes down by a factor of 2, it's at the same level as solar. And there is no reason to think such a reduction is not possible.

xinayder 2y ago

The worst part of this is, Thorium-based reactors seem to be the future of nuclear, but because of FUD and politics, no one is funding research to find out whether the theoretical thorium reactors are the way to go forward.

imtringued 2y ago

You'd be in trouble even if you had nuclear power. If the sun stops shining, our agricultural yields will approach zero and everyone would have to stay close to district heated buildings, due to the extreme cold.