4 ms·

> given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity The problem is, the weather dependency makes it harder the more you add, because you will

> given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity The problem is, the weather dependency makes it harder the more you add, because you will have too much when the weather is optimal and next to nothing when it isn't.

bee_rider 1y ago
Skill issue, there’s no such thing as too much energy, we need to get better at steering the stuff.
ViewTrick1002 1y ago
Storage is absolutely exploding. With China adding 74 GW in 2024 [1] alone and for the US it was expected to make up 30% of grid additions [2] before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity. Replacing Vogtle with renewables TWh for TWh and then building $63/kWh [3] storage with the money leftover leads to enough storage to supply the equivalent to Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days. That is how utterly truly insanely expensive new build western nuclear power is. [1]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storage-capacity-surges-to-74-gw-168-gwh-in-2024-up-130-yoy/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag... [2]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 [3]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-announces-winning-bidders-in-10-gwh-bess-tender/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  That's a reasonable way to think about it, but is 10 days enough? It seems 12-24 hours would be needed to smooth out diurnal variations, but there is also the seasonal variation of 2x-3x in many places which either requires a large investment in overgeneration or huge amounts of storage. There is also this problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?" If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1] So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were building back when the French were building large numbers of reactors reliably. [1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably line up with ground transportation around some single entity fuel like methane or DME
  - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    Throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm. Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total energy supply. When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting food waste. If they are still needed. Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on before attempting to solve a future issue today. Yes we already have a solution for all those industries which require stable power: buy an electricity future. But somehow we need to treat the grid differently and handout untold trillions to the nuclear industry. We have research on when we achieve learning effects. > If you look at the data specifically you're going to find learning but for that there's a several requirements: > - It has to be the same site > - It has to be the same constructor > - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one construction to the next > - It has to be constant labor laws > - It has to be a constant regulatory regime > When you add these five you only get like four or five examples in the world. From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k China is not succeeding? They have been averaging 4-5 construction starts per year since 2020 which tracks to a 2-3% nuclear power in their electricity mix. From their 2011 target of building 300 GW nuclear power in the next 10-20 years they have so far managed to complete 46 GW. But surely those final 254 GW will show up before 2031.
ivan_gammel 1y ago
This reminded me of how France had to limit nuclear outputs because of the heatwave. New designs can probably mitigate the risk but it will inevitably add to the operational and construction costs. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-threaten-frances-already-tight-power-supply-2022-07-15/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-threa...
- preisschild 1y ago
  Its not about "new" vs "old" designs. Cooling towers have been a feature for decades, which those french nuclear power plants just didn't have before, because it wasn't necessary yet. Thanks to climate change it now is. Also it isn't as bad as it sounds. They had to throttle some nuclear power plants slightly. This lead to a loss of less than 0.2% of the total 2022 nuclear generation in france.

bee_rider 1y ago

Skill issue, there’s no such thing as too much energy, we need to get better at steering the stuff.

ViewTrick1002 1y ago

Storage is absolutely exploding. With China adding 74 GW in 2024 [1] alone and for the US it was expected to make up 30% of grid additions [2] before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity. Replacing Vogtle with renewables TWh for TWh and then building $63/kWh [3] storage with the money leftover leads to enough storage to supply the equivalent to Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days. That is how utterly truly insanely expensive new build western nuclear power is. [1]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storage-capacity-surges-to-74-gw-168-gwh-in-2024-up-130-yoy/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag... [2]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 [3]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-announces-winning-bidders-in-10-gwh-bess-tender/ https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...

PaulHoule 1y ago
That's a reasonable way to think about it, but is 10 days enough? It seems 12-24 hours would be needed to smooth out diurnal variations, but there is also the seasonal variation of 2x-3x in many places which either requires a large investment in overgeneration or huge amounts of storage. There is also this problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?" If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1] So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were building back when the French were building large numbers of reactors reliably. [1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably line up with ground transportation around some single entity fuel like methane or DME
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  Throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm. Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total energy supply. When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting food waste. If they are still needed. Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on before attempting to solve a future issue today. Yes we already have a solution for all those industries which require stable power: buy an electricity future. But somehow we need to treat the grid differently and handout untold trillions to the nuclear industry. We have research on when we achieve learning effects. > If you look at the data specifically you're going to find learning but for that there's a several requirements: > - It has to be the same site > - It has to be the same constructor > - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one construction to the next > - It has to be constant labor laws > - It has to be a constant regulatory regime > When you add these five you only get like four or five examples in the world. From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k China is not succeeding? They have been averaging 4-5 construction starts per year since 2020 which tracks to a 2-3% nuclear power in their electricity mix. From their 2011 target of building 300 GW nuclear power in the next 10-20 years they have so far managed to complete 46 GW. But surely those final 254 GW will show up before 2031.

ivan_gammel 1y ago

This reminded me of how France had to limit nuclear outputs because of the heatwave. New designs can probably mitigate the risk but it will inevitably add to the operational and construction costs. [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-threaten-frances-already-tight-power-supply-2022-07-15/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-threa...

preisschild 1y ago
Its not about "new" vs "old" designs. Cooling towers have been a feature for decades, which those french nuclear power plants just didn't have before, because it wasn't necessary yet. Thanks to climate change it now is. Also it isn't as bad as it sounds. They had to throttle some nuclear power plants slightly. This lead to a loss of less than 0.2% of the total 2022 nuclear generation in france.