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I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts th

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Can’t speak to other localities, but in the US, every additional project multiplies headaches with red tape, bureaucracy, cronyism, ideologically opposed politicians, sham environmental groups puppeted by incumbents, nearby residents taking issue with the project for whatever reason, etc. getting one project off the ground and landed safely is a monumental effort, let alone multiple.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  Someone pointed out in another comment that Iowa, USA has installed an incredible amount of wind turbines in the last 25 years. There is a whole Wiki page on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Iowa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Iowa Also, Texas has done very similar.
tomComb 1y ago
I don’t think it would cost more. The real problem with nuclear energy is, and always has been the cost. It always seems to turn into a boondoggle.
9dev 1y ago
If you factor in all the cost usually externalised in nuclear power, it’s often a lot more expensive than people realise. Decommissioning nuclear waste and old reactors is a huge, time-consuming, and thus extremely expensive operation.
- mpweiher 1y ago
  This turns out not to be the case, and all these supposedly "externalized" costs are actually included in the price of electricity produced by nuclear reactors. For example in Switzerland, all of that still allows full production costs of 4,34 Rappen (with a profit).
  - tcfhgj 1y ago
    In France they aren't, Germany neither
    - mpweiher 1y ago
      Wrong on both counts. The only wrinkle is that when the German government made electricity production from nuclear power illegal, it had to take over some of those responsibilities, for obvious reasons. It also took over the money that had been saved up thus far, which is almost certainly more than needed to cover the costs. Well unless those costs are driven up to infinity with ever more creative mechanisms by politicians. But that's a political problem. Finland just built a site for around €1 billion.
      - throwaway2037 1y ago
        > Finland just built a site for around €1 billion. I am confused. Are you talking about reactor #3 from Olkiluoto? Even the initial estimate from 2005 was 3B EUR.
        mpweiher 1y ago
        No, about the Onkalo nuclear storage facility. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230613-onkalo-has-finland-found-the-answer-to-spent-nuclear-fuel-waste-by-burying-it https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230613-onkalo-has-finla...
      - tcfhgj 1y ago
        it is not wrong, both countries subsidized nuclear power
alexey-salmin 1y ago
If Germany invested all their renewable money into nuclear, they would be carbon-neutral today. Not by 2050 but today. Instead the CO2 per capita in Germany is 2x the one in France. And France had built their reactors in the 70s for a modest price. The "whole load more renewable energy" idea is peak wishful thinking and it's incredible people still buy it today.
- mpweiher 1y ago
  And the CO₂ difference for electricity production, so the only part of the energy system where nuclear vs. intermittent renewable is currently applicable, is not 2:1. It is 10:1.
- notTooFarGone 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - alexey-salmin 1y ago
    Perhaps. Will see how the German economy looks like in 2035.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - beeflet 1y ago
    >Holy shit - you can't build a nuclear power plant in Germany. Not with you in the way
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  No they couldn't have. Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power. Not even China could have built 250GW of nuclear power for $700B although they could come close. Germany likely would have needed to spend $5T. Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.
Eric_WVGG 1y ago
(just based on a little googling, don't shoot me if I'm wrong) 1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year 1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag. Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant. Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.
- bluGill 1y ago
  Meanwhile Iowa has more than 6000 wind turbines and is building 2-3 more every single day. You can find places in Iowa where there are wind turbines evenly spaced in all direction much farther than the eye can see. You wouldn't see 1300 turbines around Springfield because they don't put them close enough together to see that many. Most of those turbines are built by "German" companies, though the factory is local. Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.
notatoad 1y ago
ignoring the fact that we live in the real world where money isn't infinite: nuclear provides stable base power generation, and it does it without taking up a lot of space. Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.
- fundatus 1y ago
  Nuclear also requires non-infinite resources like uranium.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - chickenbig 1y ago
    Wind and solar require non-infinite resources too.
  - peterfirefly 1y ago
    There's plenty for a few thousand years. We might have solved fusion power by then.
    - LinXitoW 1y ago
      How plenty is the supply that's not in some other countries control, that might make us dependent on them, yet again, like with Germany, gas and Russia.
- tcfhgj 1y ago
  > Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land Neither, see gas caverns underground
- deleted 1y ago
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter. It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable. It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.
- hvb2 1y ago
  > You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter. Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little. Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    > The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. We already do that. France notably has a lot of hydropower and they pump water up when they don’t want to shutdown a nuclear unit. The issue is that there is very little places where you could build new dams in Europe and water shortage is becoming a regular occurrence.
    - hvb2 1y ago
      Not every dam has to be of the size of the Hoover dam. A single huge battery is also not practical. Yes water shortage might be a problem if the river you're on runs dry. That's not often a problem though, plenty of major rivers. And a dam doesn't change the total amount that flows, it just changes when. As a result it might even help in lowering some flood risks.
yongjik 1y ago
As a supporter of nuclear, I think most nuclear supporters will be happy if we achieve carbon neutrality by any means. But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14. It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"
- kieranmaine 1y ago
  > It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?" Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1] The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything"[2] is an interesting demonstration of how solar + batteries is pushing other generation sources to the periphery in most of the world. Edit: Here is some more data for Brazil and the UK showing a large increase in solar over the last 5 years [3][4] 1. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-power-continues-to-surge-in-2024/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-power-continu... 2. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-every-hour-of-every-day-is-here-and-it-changes-everything/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... 3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/wind-and-solar-generate-over-a-third-of-brazils-electricity-for-the-first-month-on-record/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/wind-and-solar-gene... 4.https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/a-record-year-for-british-solar/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/a-record-year-for-b...
  - strawhatguy 1y ago
    just looked at 2, using their own numbers, and it says 97% to 24/365, in a sunny area (Las Vegas), which is like an outage 43 minutes out of every day (24 * 0.03 * 60). That's not what many would consider as 24/365, and certainly not "every hour of every day".
i5heu 1y ago
There is just no good reason to build nuclear in a world with renewables. Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves. And if you calculate in the risk like “get me a insurance that covers leaks and melt downs” and finance somehow the disassembly of a nuclear plant, nuclear is one of the most costly ways you can get energy. Plus it is a huge nice target in war times. There are so so many benefits to decentralized renewables that you intuition is absolutely correct.
- xvfLJfx9 1y ago
  This statement is very uninformed. Other sources are intermittent, nuclear energy is not. The problem about many countries not being able to produce fuel rods themselves is true, but the exact same applies to other energy sources. Most nations depend on very few other nations for imports of oil gas etc. Nuclear power plants only have a high upfront cost, which is compensated by their long lifetime of 60-100 years. Other energy sources also have high upfront production costs + you need to spend additional money on infrastructure for batteries/storage. I also don't understand your argument on military targets. A NPP is a target the sane way a solar park, wind-park, geothermal facility or whatever would be a target. And to add to that, wile they are of course not indestrctible they are extremely robustly built. You can literally fly an airplane into them and it wouldnt result in a meltdown.. I do agree on your point on decentralization, yes.
pil0u 1y ago
Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Even with that, renewables are cheaper. One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.
  - johanyc 1y ago
    The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it
    - nilslindemann 1y ago
      No one cares, you buy it temporarily from the one who has it. And next time you may be the one who has it, and he may buy from you. Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
      - chickenbig 1y ago
        > Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee? Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?
mikepavone 1y ago
You totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload oriented combined cycle plants). Personally, while I'm not opposed to nuclear, I'm pretty bearish on it. Most places are seeing nuclear get more expensive and not less. Meanwhile solar and batteries are getting cheaper. There's also the issue that nuclear reactors are generally most economical when operating with very high load factors (i.e. baseload generation) because they have high capital costs, but low fuel costs. Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload. Now a lot of what makes nuclear expensive (especially in the US) is some combination of regulatory posture and lack of experience (we build these very infrequently). We will also eventually hit a limit on how cheap solar and batteries can get. So it's definitely possible current trends will not hold, but current trends are not favorable. Currently the cheapest way to add incremental zero-carbon energy is solar + batteries. By the time you deploy enough that nuclear starts getting competitive on an LCOE basis, solar and batteries will probably have gotten cheaper and nuclear might have gotten more expensive. [0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-scale-solar-pv https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-s...
- gpm 1y ago
  > Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload. Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation. Batteries are poised to change this - but at that point you've got to be cheaper than the intermittent power sources.
  - phire 1y ago
    If the goal is 100% carbon-free energy, then we simply can't let economics get in the way. Otherwise we will always be stuck building some natural gas peaker plants. And one option is to mass produce nuclear power plants, get prices down even further via economics of scale and then run them uneconomically. Uneconomically doesn't mean "at a loss", just that you aren't making as much profit as you could optimally. With enough economics of scale, we can probably still run these nuclear plants at a profit, maybe even cheaper than natural gas peakers. But it doesn't matter, the goal is saving the planet, not profit. It's not the only option, you can also build massive amounts of wind/solar/tidal and pair them with massive amounts of battery storage. The third option is to build way more hydro power plants. Hydro tends to get overlooked as a form of green energy, because while it might be 100% renewable, you do have to "modify" a local ecosystem to construct a new dam. But hydro has the massive advantage that it can work as both baseload and demand load, so they can pair nicely with wind/solar/tidal. I'm not even talking about pumped hydro (though, that's a fourth option to consider). Regular hydro can work as energy storage by simply turning the turbines off at letting the lakes fill up whenever there is sufficient power from your other sources.
rnhmjoj 1y ago
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no? You're exactly right, in theory, in practice it's impossible without some significant amount of energy storage, which we don't really have. I once did this calculation for fun: in Italy, starting from the current energy mix and replacing fossils with more solar while meeting the demand in winter would require covering with panels an area equal to the region of Abruzzo (that's like 5% of Italy's total surface).
- tcfhgj 1y ago
  Germany sits on storage capacity more than 247 TWh
  - opo 1y ago
    What is the 247 TWh number referring too? Germany uses a little over 500 TWh of electricity per year. Germany has a little more than 20 GWh of grid storage.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      It's referring to the possible storage capacity, probably the potential to store hydrogen in underground solution mined salt caverns. I've heard much higher figures, in the PWh for Europe as a whole. Storage of energy as heat at 600 C has much larger potential storage capacity; see standardthermal.com
boringg 1y ago
Different energy product. And it doesn't preclude renewable energy from being deployed alongside. This pitting of renewables vs nuclear is not helpful for renewables or nuclear. They both work well together.
- dalyons 1y ago
  They don’t actually. Renewables on the grid make nukes uneconomical.
  - boringg 1y ago
    No actually they don't. Not sure which market your talking about but I can assure you that re-investing in nuclear power is the right choice for long term energy capability for humans.
lucideer 1y ago
> Sure, it might cost more I think this is more than good enough to be the "straight answer" you're looking for all on its own (& it's definitely not a case of "it might" - it definitely will). However, on top of the cost, there's three additional reasons: 2. It will take longer 3. It will need to be geographically distributed to an extent that will incur a significantly broader variety of local logistical red tape & hurdles 4. One of the largest components that will cost more is grid balancing energy storage, which is not only a cost & logistical difficulty, but also an ongoing research area needing significant r&d investment as well. Given all those comparators, it's a testament to the taboo that's been built up around nuclear that we have in fact been pursuing your "all renewable" suggestion anyway.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  > It will take longer Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from? Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.
  - lucideer 1y ago
    > economically When we're talking about societal public investment - even investment in the private sector - capital cost is a much more constrained consideration than anything related to abstract market "competitiveness". The latter does not influence the former in real terms (only in argumentative policy terms, which are unfortunately more impactful than they should be). > Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from? Longer than nuclear to do what? I was replying to the above commenter who said the following: > in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables TTL for individual nuclear is obviously always much longer than for renewables but time to any arbitrary large generation goal is almost certainly shorter for nuclear (barring taboo).
    - _aavaa_ 1y ago
palata 1y ago
There are a few things: 1. The electrical system was built for big power plants distributing the electricity to households. If you want to generate electricity a bit everywhere, you need to adapt the infrastructure. That's costly and it hasn't really been done at scale (whereas with nuclear plants it has). 2. With nuclear, you have great control over how much you produce. With renewables, you generally don't: you have electricity when there is wind or when there is sun. Batteries are not a solved problem at scale. 3. Renewable is cheap, but it depends on globalisation, which in turn depends on the abundance of fuel fossils. With nuclear, it's easier to have fewer dependencies. Which proportion of solar panels come from China? 4. Nuclear energy is very dense. Estimate how many solar panels you need to produce as much as a big nuclear plant, even without factoring in the batteries and the weather.
strawhatguy 1y ago
Yes? Any sort of system that generates power... can generate lots of power if there's more of that system. What I find odd is that it has to be an all-or-nothing approach. Maybe sunny areas can do more with solar, great! But that won't work everywhere, and probably isn't a complete replacement anywhere. Other places that are cloudy, it might be better to go nuclear. Or even gas. The regulations and the subsidies ought to be removed though, let the market decide. Solar or Nuclear will win if it's better, and that might be a per-area contest.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Renewables and storage have gotten so cheap that the areas where nuclear might still be competitive have greatly shrunk. Right now, the best remaining places for nuclear are in eastern Europe away from coasts. Even there, nuclear is at best competitive with optimistic assumptions. This also means that, globally, renewables are much cheaper than nuclear in most places. In a global economy, energy intensive industries will migrate to these renewable-rich regions as fossil fuels are phased out. The relative energy ghetto regions will not save their heavy industries by going nuclear.
  - strawhatguy 1y ago
    Luckily EV mandates have been rolled back nationally (although not in my state yet). That’s a sure way to drive up the cost of storage anyway, when maybe battery storage is better served for this power station purpose instead. Obviously using used car batteries might be a way to recycle these more effectively than what is currently available.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      It's going to have no effect on the global cost trajectory of battery storage. The US is not in the storage driver's seat, China is.
credit_guy 1y ago
I'm a nuclear supporter. I think we might be able to satisfy our energy needs with renewables. I am not entirely sure, because I'm not in the field. But, if it's true that renewables are so much cheaper, then self-interested individuals will invest in them. There is no need to be anti-nuclear. People like me, who are pro-nuclear, do it because they believe that nuclear technology, like all technologies, could become much cheaper. Elon Musk was saying about rockets that in the end, with enough learning, the cost of building a rocket is only limited from below by the cost of the raw materials, so he though there is room to make rockets cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. I think nuclear technology is the same; we can make it cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. After all, we did that with solar and wind, didn't we?
- dalyons 1y ago
  Solar and wind are extremely simple machines and are thus much more amenable to manufacturing economies of scale than fundamentally complicated nuke plants. I very much doubt we’d get to 10x , 100x seems impossible.
  - credit_guy 1y ago
    A 10x reduction is very doable. Consider this: the Vogtle units 3-4 cost about $37 BN [1]. The similar size Karachi units 2-3 cost about $10 BN [2]. The difference is that the Karachi units were built by China. The design used at Karachi is called Hualong One [3], and since China built the 2 Karachi units, it has built 5 more, and has 15 more under construction and 9 more approved for construction. The cost of the reactors that China builds for itself is not known, but it's very likely lower than the ones that China built for Pakistan. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi_Nuclear_Power_Complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi_Nuclear_Power_Complex [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
fy20 1y ago
One thing to bear in mind about Europe is that to go carbon neutral you need to be able to deal with winters. First of all they are darker than the US due to latitude, so solar during winter is basically a no go in half of the places where people actually live. I have rooftop solar and November - February it might as well not exist. One January it generated 20kWh for the whole month vs a peak of 70kWh per day in the summer. Wind is an option, but NIMBYism makes that hard as Europe doesn't have as much empty space as the US. The other thing is heating: in Europe around 64% of residential energy use goes to space heating Vs 42% in the US. And the majority of that comes from gas. So to go carbon neutral, you actually need to greatly increase electricity demand. This is why Europe is pushing for new homes to be really well insulated.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  I don't think you should dismiss opposition to wind as mere NIMBYism Windmills can be super loud and disruptive if they are built near you Take a look around online and you can find people posting videos along the lines of "A windmill was built near my house, now every evening it's like a strobe light in here as the sun sets behind the windmill" I wouldn't want to live anywhere near one myself
  - procaryote 1y ago
    Isn't that exactly what NIMBY means? People want the power to stay on but they don't want the power generation built near them.
    - bluefirebrand 1y ago
      I think if something is built near you that materially lowers the quality of your life, being angry about it is not NIMBYism I personally think NIMBYism is more along the lines of "this doesn't negatively impact my day to day life, but I'm worried it will lower my property value"
      - procaryote 1y ago
epistasis 1y ago
It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear. For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal. There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personally, I think 100% renewables will win because projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear. Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers. So I think that trend will continue...) You won't hear much about this in the popular media though, because they are too afraid of offending conservatives with politically incorrect facts. Sites like Ars Technica cover it though: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092022/inside-clean-energy-last-10-percent/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092022/inside-clean-ene...
- realusername 1y ago
  > Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers Well no, storage would need another 100x improvement for being usable in a 100% renewable scenario in any country you have any sort of winter. Say what you want on nuclear but we have example of countries which managed it successfully, for renewables, we still haven't.
  - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    Which is entering emergency reserve territory. Nuclear power CAPEX to build an emergency reserve would seem to be utterly insane. The easy solution is gas turbines. We already have them and as aviation and maritime shipping decarbonize utilize the same fuel. Whether that is syngas, ammonia or biofuels. Or earmark the biofuels for grid usage. Today the US produces enough ethanol used as a blend in for gasoline to run the grid without help for 14 days. As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.
    - realusername 1y ago
aubanel 1y ago
The answer to this is just "intermittent" : the higher the share of renewables, the higher the share that you have to make up for when you're at night without wind. This can be done through batteries, water storage, or interconnection, but that's the real cost of renewables.
- tcfhgj 1y ago
  Or gas (produced using renewable energy) storage
BrtByte 1y ago
In theory, you can replace nuclear with a massive buildout of renewables and storage and grid upgrades and overcapacity to handle intermittency. The challenge is that doing all of that fast enough
- jama211 1y ago
  Is it faster or slower than building nuclear plants?
procaryote 1y ago
> Sure, it might cost more That. There are reasons why the cost rises if you lack other base and reactive generation to balance out the grid as you then need over production and storage. But in the end that's about cost Spiking electricity prices will lose you an election
zvrba 1y ago
Nuclear has the highest energy density (kWh produced per km2). "Renewables" need much larger areas to produce equivalent power. This means that habitats for many species are negatively affected or destroyed. This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is. EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpeace activist on the street who was collecting money. While I would gladly donate to WWF, I said sharp "NO" to him and explained that it was because Greenpeace opposes nuclear.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Energy density is unimportant. What matters is cost. A source that has higher energy density but also higher cost is a loser. The whole energy density meme was propagated by Vaclav Smil. He observed in the past that energy sources had become more energy dense, and then took the irrational leap to proclaim this was some sort of iron law of energy development.
- yread 1y ago
  While that's strictly true, there are a lot of people who wouldnt mind living across the fence from a solar farm. Not so many want to live next to a nuclear power plant. Irrationaly perhaps but still.
- LinXitoW 1y ago
  I obviously don't know about Norway, but in most developed countries, the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure. While I can't prove it, it seems too convenient that people suddenly care about "nature" right after they've fucked it up for so many other reasons.
  - LunaSea 1y ago
    > the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure The surface of both of these things hasn't changed much in the last 30 years.
pembrook 1y ago
No. It’s as simple as: A) battery tech isn’t good enough or clean enough …and… B) renewables aren’t reliable enough (peak generation times don’t line up with peak demand times) You could learn this within 1 minute of asking chatgpt, so I’m not sure what the motivation is here if you actually aren’t anti-nuclear. Also, for human society to move up the kardashev scale (or even just utilize current AI) we cannot do it with renewables. Renewables only scale by using up a crap ton of fossil fuels to mine the materials and factory produce the equipment and ship it around the globe. Nuclear runs steady and practically forever off material that fits in a small box. Ultimately, we need both. As China has already realized.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  But you're wrong. Batteries are now fine for diurnal storage, which is their intended use. Batteries are not fine for seasonal storage, but there are alternatives for that when it is needed. China is installing vastly more renewables than nuclear. Their nuclear builds appear to be just a holding action to preserve their capability to build NPPs; that can't last forever.
  - pembrook 1y ago
    Yes the alternatives for the seasonal storage problem are...fossil fuels. So obviously if we can't solve the seasonal problem yet with batteries, current battery tech isn't capable enough to make clean energy a reality without Nuclear. Also, China's energy mix is irrelevant for Europe, the two regions have vastly different climates, population distributions, and government. Europe has much bigger seasonal gaps in the winter for things like solar; Hydro is huge in China due to massive river systems like the Yangtze, but basically tapped out in Europe; Wind is a huge opportunity in China but only works Offshore in Europe; Europe can't run cross-continent UHV grid systems like China due to beaurocratic impossibility; etc. etc.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      That's an alternative for the seasonal storage problem, and currently the cheapest one. That doesn't mean other alternatives don't exist, just that those alternatives are not currently competitive with fossil fuels. One should not use this situation that those alternatives can't exist or be reasonably expected to exist, or that a system using them would be more expensive than a system using nuclear. If that were a valid argument, one could equally argue that because new nuclear cannot compete with natural gas combined cycle for baseload, new nuclear is not an option.
m101 1y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment That, as well as intermittency being difficult to manage. Nuclear+gas is the cleanest solution.
Erwyn 1y ago
> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no? Yes in theory, the problem is when you try to apply theory to practice: I don’t want to make a disservice to this discussion and as I don’t have the figures at hand anymore but there have been thought experiments around this and one was to hypothetically have two dams that would pump 2 meters of water out of the sea between France and UK and then release it. If my memory serves well this would only cover 1 week of France’s energy consumption. Okay, appart from the fact that you would require far more space in term of infrastructure for renewables, the most interesting issue with renewable energies for me is that they are not controllable (I don’t know if this is the correct term in English): basically you cannot command WHEN you produce energy, you are dependent on weather (sun/wind) or water current (tidal power). What that means is that you cannot aling production with supply and you end up in some cases with acute mismatch: for instance in France, the peak of energy consumption is during winter, a time where there is very few sun, while Japans peak is in summer which could be more convenient. The Rule when dealing with energy production is that you can’t produce less than demand nor more than demand otherwise you end up with a blackout and potential damages. To mitigate both the rule of energy production and the non controllable aspects of renewable there are strategies. The two most common ones are buying/selling your energy and storing/unloading it. Those work but they do have their own pitfalls. Buying/selling for instance does work for adjustments but not for peaks because usually during peaks your neighbours are also peaking and thus also looking for selling. Storing/unloading is its whole set of problems making it hard. You will find a lot of documentation on the subject but here is the gist of it: fist of all it is inefficient meaning you need to produce far more energy than you store and are able to unload in the end. Storing in batteries takes a lot (like really a lot) of place and we are talking nation wide production. Storing using a dam (pumped storage power plants) which is quite a nice way of doing it requires to have places to build them, meaning the correct geographical circumstances. In France for instance we already have quite a large dam network and couldn’t really build more (added to the fact that you usually need to flood a valley which gerenally is not well taken by the inhabitants of the place). So here you are with your whole lot of space used up to produce renewable energy but you are still confronted to the issue of its non controllable nature. Sure you can store/unload a bit, you can buy/sell another bit, but in the end you still have to face the fact that it is not controllable. So how do you solve the issue ? Here comes your friend, the controllable energy. A solution to your issue, and the one which is basically always applied is to have a mix of energies, meaning adding a controllable one along your non controllable ones to make up for the highs and lows of the latest. And the king of eco-friendly controllable energies is a nuclear power plant, not only because of the ecological factor but also because of the ratio space/energy produced.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

Can’t speak to other localities, but in the US, every additional project multiplies headaches with red tape, bureaucracy, cronyism, ideologically opposed politicians, sham environmental groups puppeted by incumbents, nearby residents taking issue with the project for whatever reason, etc. getting one project off the ground and landed safely is a monumental effort, let alone multiple.

throwaway2037 1y ago
Someone pointed out in another comment that Iowa, USA has installed an incredible amount of wind turbines in the last 25 years. There is a whole Wiki page on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Iowa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Iowa Also, Texas has done very similar.

tomComb 1y ago

I don’t think it would cost more. The real problem with nuclear energy is, and always has been the cost. It always seems to turn into a boondoggle.

9dev 1y ago

If you factor in all the cost usually externalised in nuclear power, it’s often a lot more expensive than people realise. Decommissioning nuclear waste and old reactors is a huge, time-consuming, and thus extremely expensive operation.

mpweiher 1y ago
This turns out not to be the case, and all these supposedly "externalized" costs are actually included in the price of electricity produced by nuclear reactors. For example in Switzerland, all of that still allows full production costs of 4,34 Rappen (with a profit).
- tcfhgj 1y ago
  In France they aren't, Germany neither
  - mpweiher 1y ago
    Wrong on both counts. The only wrinkle is that when the German government made electricity production from nuclear power illegal, it had to take over some of those responsibilities, for obvious reasons. It also took over the money that had been saved up thus far, which is almost certainly more than needed to cover the costs. Well unless those costs are driven up to infinity with ever more creative mechanisms by politicians. But that's a political problem. Finland just built a site for around €1 billion.
    - throwaway2037 1y ago
      > Finland just built a site for around €1 billion. I am confused. Are you talking about reactor #3 from Olkiluoto? Even the initial estimate from 2005 was 3B EUR.
      - mpweiher 1y ago
        No, about the Onkalo nuclear storage facility. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230613-onkalo-has-finland-found-the-answer-to-spent-nuclear-fuel-waste-by-burying-it https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230613-onkalo-has-finla...
    - tcfhgj 1y ago
      it is not wrong, both countries subsidized nuclear power

alexey-salmin 1y ago

If Germany invested all their renewable money into nuclear, they would be carbon-neutral today. Not by 2050 but today. Instead the CO2 per capita in Germany is 2x the one in France. And France had built their reactors in the 70s for a modest price. The "whole load more renewable energy" idea is peak wishful thinking and it's incredible people still buy it today.

mpweiher 1y ago
And the CO₂ difference for electricity production, so the only part of the energy system where nuclear vs. intermittent renewable is currently applicable, is not 2:1. It is 10:1.
notTooFarGone 1y ago
[flagged]
- alexey-salmin 1y ago
  Perhaps. Will see how the German economy looks like in 2035.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- beeflet 1y ago
  >Holy shit - you can't build a nuclear power plant in Germany. Not with you in the way
bryanlarsen 1y ago
No they couldn't have. Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power. Not even China could have built 250GW of nuclear power for $700B although they could come close. Germany likely would have needed to spend $5T. Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.

Eric_WVGG 1y ago

(just based on a little googling, don't shoot me if I'm wrong) 1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year 1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag. Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant. Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.

bluGill 1y ago
Meanwhile Iowa has more than 6000 wind turbines and is building 2-3 more every single day. You can find places in Iowa where there are wind turbines evenly spaced in all direction much farther than the eye can see. You wouldn't see 1300 turbines around Springfield because they don't put them close enough together to see that many. Most of those turbines are built by "German" companies, though the factory is local. Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.

notatoad 1y ago

ignoring the fact that we live in the real world where money isn't infinite: nuclear provides stable base power generation, and it does it without taking up a lot of space. Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.

fundatus 1y ago
Nuclear also requires non-infinite resources like uranium.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- chickenbig 1y ago
  Wind and solar require non-infinite resources too.
- peterfirefly 1y ago
  There's plenty for a few thousand years. We might have solved fusion power by then.
  - LinXitoW 1y ago
    How plenty is the supply that's not in some other countries control, that might make us dependent on them, yet again, like with Germany, gas and Russia.
tcfhgj 1y ago
> Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land Neither, see gas caverns underground
deleted 1y ago

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter. It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable. It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.

hvb2 1y ago
> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter. Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little. Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  > The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. We already do that. France notably has a lot of hydropower and they pump water up when they don’t want to shutdown a nuclear unit. The issue is that there is very little places where you could build new dams in Europe and water shortage is becoming a regular occurrence.
  - hvb2 1y ago
    Not every dam has to be of the size of the Hoover dam. A single huge battery is also not practical. Yes water shortage might be a problem if the river you're on runs dry. That's not often a problem though, plenty of major rivers. And a dam doesn't change the total amount that flows, it just changes when. As a result it might even help in lowering some flood risks.

yongjik 1y ago

As a supporter of nuclear, I think most nuclear supporters will be happy if we achieve carbon neutrality by any means. But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14. It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"

kieranmaine 1y ago
> It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?" Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1] The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything"[2] is an interesting demonstration of how solar + batteries is pushing other generation sources to the periphery in most of the world. Edit: Here is some more data for Brazil and the UK showing a large increase in solar over the last 5 years [3][4] 1. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-power-continues-to-surge-in-2024/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-power-continu... 2. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-every-hour-of-every-day-is-here-and-it-changes-everything/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... 3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/wind-and-solar-generate-over-a-third-of-brazils-electricity-for-the-first-month-on-record/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/wind-and-solar-gene... 4.https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/a-record-year-for-british-solar/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/a-record-year-for-b...
- strawhatguy 1y ago
  just looked at 2, using their own numbers, and it says 97% to 24/365, in a sunny area (Las Vegas), which is like an outage 43 minutes out of every day (24 * 0.03 * 60). That's not what many would consider as 24/365, and certainly not "every hour of every day".

i5heu 1y ago

There is just no good reason to build nuclear in a world with renewables. Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves. And if you calculate in the risk like “get me a insurance that covers leaks and melt downs” and finance somehow the disassembly of a nuclear plant, nuclear is one of the most costly ways you can get energy. Plus it is a huge nice target in war times. There are so so many benefits to decentralized renewables that you intuition is absolutely correct.

xvfLJfx9 1y ago
This statement is very uninformed. Other sources are intermittent, nuclear energy is not. The problem about many countries not being able to produce fuel rods themselves is true, but the exact same applies to other energy sources. Most nations depend on very few other nations for imports of oil gas etc. Nuclear power plants only have a high upfront cost, which is compensated by their long lifetime of 60-100 years. Other energy sources also have high upfront production costs + you need to spend additional money on infrastructure for batteries/storage. I also don't understand your argument on military targets. A NPP is a target the sane way a solar park, wind-park, geothermal facility or whatever would be a target. And to add to that, wile they are of course not indestrctible they are extremely robustly built. You can literally fly an airplane into them and it wouldnt result in a meltdown.. I do agree on your point on decentralization, yes.

pil0u 1y ago

Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.

pfdietz 1y ago
Even with that, renewables are cheaper. One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.
- johanyc 1y ago
  The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it
  - nilslindemann 1y ago
    No one cares, you buy it temporarily from the one who has it. And next time you may be the one who has it, and he may buy from you. Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
    - chickenbig 1y ago
      > Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee? Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?

mikepavone 1y ago

You totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload oriented combined cycle plants). Personally, while I'm not opposed to nuclear, I'm pretty bearish on it. Most places are seeing nuclear get more expensive and not less. Meanwhile solar and batteries are getting cheaper. There's also the issue that nuclear reactors are generally most economical when operating with very high load factors (i.e. baseload generation) because they have high capital costs, but low fuel costs. Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload. Now a lot of what makes nuclear expensive (especially in the US) is some combination of regulatory posture and lack of experience (we build these very infrequently). We will also eventually hit a limit on how cheap solar and batteries can get. So it's definitely possible current trends will not hold, but current trends are not favorable. Currently the cheapest way to add incremental zero-carbon energy is solar + batteries. By the time you deploy enough that nuclear starts getting competitive on an LCOE basis, solar and batteries will probably have gotten cheaper and nuclear might have gotten more expensive. [0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-scale-solar-pv https://www.construction-physics.com/p/can-we-afford-large-s...

gpm 1y ago
> Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload. Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation. Batteries are poised to change this - but at that point you've got to be cheaper than the intermittent power sources.
- phire 1y ago
  If the goal is 100% carbon-free energy, then we simply can't let economics get in the way. Otherwise we will always be stuck building some natural gas peaker plants. And one option is to mass produce nuclear power plants, get prices down even further via economics of scale and then run them uneconomically. Uneconomically doesn't mean "at a loss", just that you aren't making as much profit as you could optimally. With enough economics of scale, we can probably still run these nuclear plants at a profit, maybe even cheaper than natural gas peakers. But it doesn't matter, the goal is saving the planet, not profit. It's not the only option, you can also build massive amounts of wind/solar/tidal and pair them with massive amounts of battery storage. The third option is to build way more hydro power plants. Hydro tends to get overlooked as a form of green energy, because while it might be 100% renewable, you do have to "modify" a local ecosystem to construct a new dam. But hydro has the massive advantage that it can work as both baseload and demand load, so they can pair nicely with wind/solar/tidal. I'm not even talking about pumped hydro (though, that's a fourth option to consider). Regular hydro can work as energy storage by simply turning the turbines off at letting the lakes fill up whenever there is sufficient power from your other sources.

rnhmjoj 1y ago

> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no? You're exactly right, in theory, in practice it's impossible without some significant amount of energy storage, which we don't really have. I once did this calculation for fun: in Italy, starting from the current energy mix and replacing fossils with more solar while meeting the demand in winter would require covering with panels an area equal to the region of Abruzzo (that's like 5% of Italy's total surface).

tcfhgj 1y ago
Germany sits on storage capacity more than 247 TWh
- opo 1y ago
  What is the 247 TWh number referring too? Germany uses a little over 500 TWh of electricity per year. Germany has a little more than 20 GWh of grid storage.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    It's referring to the possible storage capacity, probably the potential to store hydrogen in underground solution mined salt caverns. I've heard much higher figures, in the PWh for Europe as a whole. Storage of energy as heat at 600 C has much larger potential storage capacity; see standardthermal.com

boringg 1y ago

Different energy product. And it doesn't preclude renewable energy from being deployed alongside. This pitting of renewables vs nuclear is not helpful for renewables or nuclear. They both work well together.

dalyons 1y ago
They don’t actually. Renewables on the grid make nukes uneconomical.
- boringg 1y ago
  No actually they don't. Not sure which market your talking about but I can assure you that re-investing in nuclear power is the right choice for long term energy capability for humans.

lucideer 1y ago

> Sure, it might cost more I think this is more than good enough to be the "straight answer" you're looking for all on its own (& it's definitely not a case of "it might" - it definitely will). However, on top of the cost, there's three additional reasons: 2. It will take longer 3. It will need to be geographically distributed to an extent that will incur a significantly broader variety of local logistical red tape & hurdles 4. One of the largest components that will cost more is grid balancing energy storage, which is not only a cost & logistical difficulty, but also an ongoing research area needing significant r&d investment as well. Given all those comparators, it's a testament to the taboo that's been built up around nuclear that we have in fact been pursuing your "all renewable" suggestion anyway.

marcosdumay 1y ago
> It will take longer Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from? Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.
- lucideer 1y ago
  > economically When we're talking about societal public investment - even investment in the private sector - capital cost is a much more constrained consideration than anything related to abstract market "competitiveness". The latter does not influence the former in real terms (only in argumentative policy terms, which are unfortunately more impactful than they should be). > Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from? Longer than nuclear to do what? I was replying to the above commenter who said the following: > in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables TTL for individual nuclear is obviously always much longer than for renewables but time to any arbitrary large generation goal is almost certainly shorter for nuclear (barring taboo).
  - _aavaa_ 1y ago

palata 1y ago

There are a few things: 1. The electrical system was built for big power plants distributing the electricity to households. If you want to generate electricity a bit everywhere, you need to adapt the infrastructure. That's costly and it hasn't really been done at scale (whereas with nuclear plants it has). 2. With nuclear, you have great control over how much you produce. With renewables, you generally don't: you have electricity when there is wind or when there is sun. Batteries are not a solved problem at scale. 3. Renewable is cheap, but it depends on globalisation, which in turn depends on the abundance of fuel fossils. With nuclear, it's easier to have fewer dependencies. Which proportion of solar panels come from China? 4. Nuclear energy is very dense. Estimate how many solar panels you need to produce as much as a big nuclear plant, even without factoring in the batteries and the weather.

strawhatguy 1y ago

Yes? Any sort of system that generates power... can generate lots of power if there's more of that system. What I find odd is that it has to be an all-or-nothing approach. Maybe sunny areas can do more with solar, great! But that won't work everywhere, and probably isn't a complete replacement anywhere. Other places that are cloudy, it might be better to go nuclear. Or even gas. The regulations and the subsidies ought to be removed though, let the market decide. Solar or Nuclear will win if it's better, and that might be a per-area contest.

pfdietz 1y ago
Renewables and storage have gotten so cheap that the areas where nuclear might still be competitive have greatly shrunk. Right now, the best remaining places for nuclear are in eastern Europe away from coasts. Even there, nuclear is at best competitive with optimistic assumptions. This also means that, globally, renewables are much cheaper than nuclear in most places. In a global economy, energy intensive industries will migrate to these renewable-rich regions as fossil fuels are phased out. The relative energy ghetto regions will not save their heavy industries by going nuclear.
- strawhatguy 1y ago
  Luckily EV mandates have been rolled back nationally (although not in my state yet). That’s a sure way to drive up the cost of storage anyway, when maybe battery storage is better served for this power station purpose instead. Obviously using used car batteries might be a way to recycle these more effectively than what is currently available.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    It's going to have no effect on the global cost trajectory of battery storage. The US is not in the storage driver's seat, China is.

credit_guy 1y ago

I'm a nuclear supporter. I think we might be able to satisfy our energy needs with renewables. I am not entirely sure, because I'm not in the field. But, if it's true that renewables are so much cheaper, then self-interested individuals will invest in them. There is no need to be anti-nuclear. People like me, who are pro-nuclear, do it because they believe that nuclear technology, like all technologies, could become much cheaper. Elon Musk was saying about rockets that in the end, with enough learning, the cost of building a rocket is only limited from below by the cost of the raw materials, so he though there is room to make rockets cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. I think nuclear technology is the same; we can make it cheaper by a factor of 10 or 100. After all, we did that with solar and wind, didn't we?

dalyons 1y ago
Solar and wind are extremely simple machines and are thus much more amenable to manufacturing economies of scale than fundamentally complicated nuke plants. I very much doubt we’d get to 10x , 100x seems impossible.
- credit_guy 1y ago
  A 10x reduction is very doable. Consider this: the Vogtle units 3-4 cost about $37 BN [1]. The similar size Karachi units 2-3 cost about $10 BN [2]. The difference is that the Karachi units were built by China. The design used at Karachi is called Hualong One [3], and since China built the 2 Karachi units, it has built 5 more, and has 15 more under construction and 9 more approved for construction. The cost of the reactors that China builds for itself is not known, but it's very likely lower than the ones that China built for Pakistan. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi_Nuclear_Power_Complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi_Nuclear_Power_Complex [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One

fy20 1y ago

One thing to bear in mind about Europe is that to go carbon neutral you need to be able to deal with winters. First of all they are darker than the US due to latitude, so solar during winter is basically a no go in half of the places where people actually live. I have rooftop solar and November - February it might as well not exist. One January it generated 20kWh for the whole month vs a peak of 70kWh per day in the summer. Wind is an option, but NIMBYism makes that hard as Europe doesn't have as much empty space as the US. The other thing is heating: in Europe around 64% of residential energy use goes to space heating Vs 42% in the US. And the majority of that comes from gas. So to go carbon neutral, you actually need to greatly increase electricity demand. This is why Europe is pushing for new homes to be really well insulated.

bluefirebrand 1y ago
I don't think you should dismiss opposition to wind as mere NIMBYism Windmills can be super loud and disruptive if they are built near you Take a look around online and you can find people posting videos along the lines of "A windmill was built near my house, now every evening it's like a strobe light in here as the sun sets behind the windmill" I wouldn't want to live anywhere near one myself
- procaryote 1y ago
  Isn't that exactly what NIMBY means? People want the power to stay on but they don't want the power generation built near them.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    I think if something is built near you that materially lowers the quality of your life, being angry about it is not NIMBYism I personally think NIMBYism is more along the lines of "this doesn't negatively impact my day to day life, but I'm worried it will lower my property value"
    - procaryote 1y ago

epistasis 1y ago

It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear. For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal. There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personally, I think 100% renewables will win because projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear. Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers. So I think that trend will continue...) You won't hear much about this in the popular media though, because they are too afraid of offending conservatives with politically incorrect facts. Sites like Ars Technica cover it though: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092022/inside-clean-energy-last-10-percent/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092022/inside-clean-ene...

realusername 1y ago
> Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers Well no, storage would need another 100x improvement for being usable in a 100% renewable scenario in any country you have any sort of winter. Say what you want on nuclear but we have example of countries which managed it successfully, for renewables, we still haven't.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  Which is entering emergency reserve territory. Nuclear power CAPEX to build an emergency reserve would seem to be utterly insane. The easy solution is gas turbines. We already have them and as aviation and maritime shipping decarbonize utilize the same fuel. Whether that is syngas, ammonia or biofuels. Or earmark the biofuels for grid usage. Today the US produces enough ethanol used as a blend in for gasoline to run the grid without help for 14 days. As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.
  - realusername 1y ago

aubanel 1y ago

The answer to this is just "intermittent" : the higher the share of renewables, the higher the share that you have to make up for when you're at night without wind. This can be done through batteries, water storage, or interconnection, but that's the real cost of renewables.

tcfhgj 1y ago
Or gas (produced using renewable energy) storage

BrtByte 1y ago

In theory, you can replace nuclear with a massive buildout of renewables and storage and grid upgrades and overcapacity to handle intermittency. The challenge is that doing all of that fast enough

jama211 1y ago
Is it faster or slower than building nuclear plants?

procaryote 1y ago

> Sure, it might cost more That. There are reasons why the cost rises if you lack other base and reactive generation to balance out the grid as you then need over production and storage. But in the end that's about cost Spiking electricity prices will lose you an election

zvrba 1y ago

Nuclear has the highest energy density (kWh produced per km2). "Renewables" need much larger areas to produce equivalent power. This means that habitats for many species are negatively affected or destroyed. This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is. EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpeace activist on the street who was collecting money. While I would gladly donate to WWF, I said sharp "NO" to him and explained that it was because Greenpeace opposes nuclear.

pfdietz 1y ago
Energy density is unimportant. What matters is cost. A source that has higher energy density but also higher cost is a loser. The whole energy density meme was propagated by Vaclav Smil. He observed in the past that energy sources had become more energy dense, and then took the irrational leap to proclaim this was some sort of iron law of energy development.
yread 1y ago
While that's strictly true, there are a lot of people who wouldnt mind living across the fence from a solar farm. Not so many want to live next to a nuclear power plant. Irrationaly perhaps but still.
LinXitoW 1y ago
I obviously don't know about Norway, but in most developed countries, the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure. While I can't prove it, it seems too convenient that people suddenly care about "nature" right after they've fucked it up for so many other reasons.
- LunaSea 1y ago
  > the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure The surface of both of these things hasn't changed much in the last 30 years.

pembrook 1y ago

No. It’s as simple as: A) battery tech isn’t good enough or clean enough …and… B) renewables aren’t reliable enough (peak generation times don’t line up with peak demand times) You could learn this within 1 minute of asking chatgpt, so I’m not sure what the motivation is here if you actually aren’t anti-nuclear. Also, for human society to move up the kardashev scale (or even just utilize current AI) we cannot do it with renewables. Renewables only scale by using up a crap ton of fossil fuels to mine the materials and factory produce the equipment and ship it around the globe. Nuclear runs steady and practically forever off material that fits in a small box. Ultimately, we need both. As China has already realized.

pfdietz 1y ago
But you're wrong. Batteries are now fine for diurnal storage, which is their intended use. Batteries are not fine for seasonal storage, but there are alternatives for that when it is needed. China is installing vastly more renewables than nuclear. Their nuclear builds appear to be just a holding action to preserve their capability to build NPPs; that can't last forever.
- pembrook 1y ago
  Yes the alternatives for the seasonal storage problem are...fossil fuels. So obviously if we can't solve the seasonal problem yet with batteries, current battery tech isn't capable enough to make clean energy a reality without Nuclear. Also, China's energy mix is irrelevant for Europe, the two regions have vastly different climates, population distributions, and government. Europe has much bigger seasonal gaps in the winter for things like solar; Hydro is huge in China due to massive river systems like the Yangtze, but basically tapped out in Europe; Wind is a huge opportunity in China but only works Offshore in Europe; Europe can't run cross-continent UHV grid systems like China due to beaurocratic impossibility; etc. etc.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    That's an alternative for the seasonal storage problem, and currently the cheapest one. That doesn't mean other alternatives don't exist, just that those alternatives are not currently competitive with fossil fuels. One should not use this situation that those alternatives can't exist or be reasonably expected to exist, or that a system using them would be more expensive than a system using nuclear. If that were a valid argument, one could equally argue that because new nuclear cannot compete with natural gas combined cycle for baseload, new nuclear is not an option.

m101 1y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment That, as well as intermittency being difficult to manage. Nuclear+gas is the cleanest solution.

Erwyn 1y ago

> in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no? Yes in theory, the problem is when you try to apply theory to practice: I don’t want to make a disservice to this discussion and as I don’t have the figures at hand anymore but there have been thought experiments around this and one was to hypothetically have two dams that would pump 2 meters of water out of the sea between France and UK and then release it. If my memory serves well this would only cover 1 week of France’s energy consumption. Okay, appart from the fact that you would require far more space in term of infrastructure for renewables, the most interesting issue with renewable energies for me is that they are not controllable (I don’t know if this is the correct term in English): basically you cannot command WHEN you produce energy, you are dependent on weather (sun/wind) or water current (tidal power). What that means is that you cannot aling production with supply and you end up in some cases with acute mismatch: for instance in France, the peak of energy consumption is during winter, a time where there is very few sun, while Japans peak is in summer which could be more convenient. The Rule when dealing with energy production is that you can’t produce less than demand nor more than demand otherwise you end up with a blackout and potential damages. To mitigate both the rule of energy production and the non controllable aspects of renewable there are strategies. The two most common ones are buying/selling your energy and storing/unloading it. Those work but they do have their own pitfalls. Buying/selling for instance does work for adjustments but not for peaks because usually during peaks your neighbours are also peaking and thus also looking for selling. Storing/unloading is its whole set of problems making it hard. You will find a lot of documentation on the subject but here is the gist of it: fist of all it is inefficient meaning you need to produce far more energy than you store and are able to unload in the end. Storing in batteries takes a lot (like really a lot) of place and we are talking nation wide production. Storing using a dam (pumped storage power plants) which is quite a nice way of doing it requires to have places to build them, meaning the correct geographical circumstances. In France for instance we already have quite a large dam network and couldn’t really build more (added to the fact that you usually need to flood a valley which gerenally is not well taken by the inhabitants of the place). So here you are with your whole lot of space used up to produce renewable energy but you are still confronted to the issue of its non controllable nature. Sure you can store/unload a bit, you can buy/sell another bit, but in the end you still have to face the fact that it is not controllable. So how do you solve the issue ? Here comes your friend, the controllable energy. A solution to your issue, and the one which is basically always applied is to have a mix of energies, meaning adding a controllable one along your non controllable ones to make up for the highs and lows of the latest. And the king of eco-friendly controllable energies is a nuclear power plant, not only because of the ecological factor but also because of the ratio space/energy produced.