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The massive solar overcapacity that is required to deal with seasonal variation and the massive energy storage make this endeavor much more costly than nuclear.

The massive solar overcapacity that is required to deal with seasonal variation and the massive energy storage make this endeavor much more costly than nuclear. For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... Fig. 3

magicalist 4mo ago
> For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh. That's not what it says. It says that would be the cost assuming the current grid and power came from only solar or only nuclear. The majority of the cost then is for overprovisioning and storage, especially to handle the lack of sun in the winter. The actual low cost power comes from mixes of renewables, that they note nuclear can't compete with (especially in their hypothetical future energy system with things like scheduled EV charging). They give an example of offshore wind (66%), solar (8%), CCGT (26%) (primarily natural gas) for 66 EUR/MWh, or, restricting to biomass for the gas plant: offshore wind (84%), solar (13%), CCGT (3%) at 99 EUR/MWh. (it's also worth noting that this is for Denmark. Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude).
- looofooo0 4mo ago
  There is not enough wind capacity in most countries
- red75prime 4mo ago
  I chose those numbers to emphasize the system cost. Too many people go "Solar panels are cheap! Why don't we have them everywhere?" That's why.
  - brainwad 4mo ago
    Even then, the costs came down 10x in a decade, so it seems foolish to commit to nuclear which has no prospects of getting cheaper.
    - somenameforme 4mo ago
      It will likely become significantly more expensive at scale. At current nuclear usage we use about 60,000 tons of uranium year powering nuclear reactors. [1] Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that. [2] So that's enough for about 2 centuries of usage at current levels. Bump up nuclear by 10x and we're at 20 years until we're out, assuming all those potential reserves can be found. The claims of endless nuclear energy rely on salt-water extraction which is like 3 parts per billion and not at all economical, or the development of breeder reactors which as of yet also remain prohibitively expensive, significantly more dangerous/finnicky owing to using liquid sodium as a coolant, and offer much easier weaponization. Back in the 70s Exxon predicted the impacts of widespread CO2 output, but hand-waved it away. I feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight. [1] - http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2026/ph241/flanagan2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2026/ph241/flanagan2/ [2] - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-global-uranium-reserves-by-country/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-global-uranium-rese...
      - peterfirefly 4mo ago
        Remember when the world ran completely out of copper?
        leonidasrup 4mo ago
        The world will not run completely out of copper, be we can expect much higher prices. "Copper and lithium are major exceptions where expected mined supply from announced projects falls short of projected demand in 2035, with implied deficits of 30% for copper and 40% for lithium" https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook-2025/overview-of-outlook-for-key-minerals https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook...
- leonidasrup 4mo ago
  Biomass in Demark is in large part not green technology. Could be even worse then fossil gas. "The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips." https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark
  - lukan 4mo ago
    Even if the wood is imported, it still counts as green, as it regrowing and does not add CO2 that was in the ground before. (So it depends how much CO2 the ships used to transport it there)
    - leonidasrup 4mo ago
      1. We can comfortable say that the CO2 from burned wood stays in the atmosphere for at-least 100 years (time necessary for the next tree to grow), with all the associated effects. 2. I could not imagine scaling biomass to country like India or China to cover the same share in electricity production mix as in Dermark (Denmark currently produces 20% of electricity from Bioenergy). https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/denmark https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/denmark
      - lukan 4mo ago
        1. No, if you take wood out of the forest and let it regrow, it is roughly +-0 CO2 balance (It is not just the new trees binding CO2, taking advantage of the new sunlight, all the other plants and existing trees start to bind CO2 the moment they can) 2. No, it is not and I doubt anyone claimed that this is possible.
        leonidasrup 4mo ago
        "Does wood bioenergy help or harm the climate?" by John Sterman. John Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management "The EU, UK, US, and other nations consider wood to be a carbon neutral fuel, ignoring the carbon dioxide emitted from wood combustion in their greenhouse gas accounting. Many countries subsidize wood energy – often by burning wood pellets in place of coal for electric power – to meet their renewable energy targets. But can wood bioenergy help cut greenhouse emissions in time to limit the worst damage from climate change? The argument in favor seems obvious: wood, a renewable resource, must be better than burning fossil fuels. But wood emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than coal – and far more than other fossil fuels. Therefore, the first impact of wood bioenergy is to increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain and takes time – decades to a century or more, depending on forest composition and climatic zone – time we do not have to cut emissions enough to avoid the worst harms from climate change. More effective ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions are already available and affordable now, allowing forests to continue to serve as carbon sinks and moderate climate change." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2022.2062933 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2022.2...
- rob74 4mo ago
  > Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude ...while also having a colder climate than the Danish. At least while the Gulf Stream is still working.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
  Battery and storage tech is improving and innovating all the time. It also has a fast build cycle. Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically.
  - Moldoteck 4mo ago
    It makes sense for Canada. Unless you love using gas for firming of course
  - xethos 4mo ago
    > Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically. Because we won't need base load in 15 years? Or because you're arguing that we'll have so many batteries, and they'll be so cheap, and they'll be so over-provisioned regarding summer/winter variance, that we won't be able to sell excess nuclear power to the states? Personally, I wouldn't make either bet, no matter what odds you give me
kelseydh 4mo ago
Some storage can be had for cheap from existing capacity. Hydroelectric dams with reservoirs, abundant in Canada already, can function like a battery to cover times when solar/wind is low.
dns_snek 4mo ago
> A least-cost combination of all the technologies has also been identified (shown in Fig. 3 as Least Cost Mix). Under the IEA/WEO 2023 cost assumptions, the least-cost solution comprises a combination of offshore wind power (66%), solar PV (8%) and CCGT (26%). Onshore wind power cannot compete with offshore wind power, and nuclear power cannot compete with any of the other technologies. This is due to the relatively low offshore and high onshore wind power cost assumptions in WEO 2023. As we shall see later, onshore wind power comes into the least-cost mix when using WEO 2024 or any of the two DEA cost assumptions. ... > At the case level, we find that in countries such as Denmark with available wind and solar energy resources, nuclear power does not seem to be part of the least-cost solution, neither in today's energy systems nor in future systems of climate neutral societies. This conclusion is valid for the present cost of nuclear power in Europe as well as for IEA/WEO future expectations. The future overnight cost for nuclear power of 4500 EUR/MW in 2050 represents the so-called “nth-of-a-kind” cost for new reactor designs, with assumed substantial cost reductions from the first-of-a-kind projects, while this violates the historical experience of nuclear power technology.
JensKnipper 4mo ago
You can combine solar with wind. And the good thing: wind is complementary to solar. So no need for solar overcapacity and massive energy storage. https://freeingenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Graph-solar-and-wind-seasonal-complement-v2.png https://freeingenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Graph-s... Edit: this is exactly what your link is showing > Demonstrates that mixed wind–solar portfolios outperform single technologies.
- Moldoteck 4mo ago
  no it's not fully complementary. And that's the main challenge. Countries without nuclear and hydro tackle this with gas/coal

magicalist 4mo ago

> For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh. That's not what it says. It says that would be the cost assuming the current grid and power came from only solar or only nuclear. The majority of the cost then is for overprovisioning and storage, especially to handle the lack of sun in the winter. The actual low cost power comes from mixes of renewables, that they note nuclear can't compete with (especially in their hypothetical future energy system with things like scheduled EV charging). They give an example of offshore wind (66%), solar (8%), CCGT (26%) (primarily natural gas) for 66 EUR/MWh, or, restricting to biomass for the gas plant: offshore wind (84%), solar (13%), CCGT (3%) at 99 EUR/MWh. (it's also worth noting that this is for Denmark. Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude).

looofooo0 4mo ago
There is not enough wind capacity in most countries
red75prime 4mo ago
I chose those numbers to emphasize the system cost. Too many people go "Solar panels are cheap! Why don't we have them everywhere?" That's why.
- brainwad 4mo ago
  Even then, the costs came down 10x in a decade, so it seems foolish to commit to nuclear which has no prospects of getting cheaper.
  - somenameforme 4mo ago
    It will likely become significantly more expensive at scale. At current nuclear usage we use about 60,000 tons of uranium year powering nuclear reactors. [1] Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that. [2] So that's enough for about 2 centuries of usage at current levels. Bump up nuclear by 10x and we're at 20 years until we're out, assuming all those potential reserves can be found. The claims of endless nuclear energy rely on salt-water extraction which is like 3 parts per billion and not at all economical, or the development of breeder reactors which as of yet also remain prohibitively expensive, significantly more dangerous/finnicky owing to using liquid sodium as a coolant, and offer much easier weaponization. Back in the 70s Exxon predicted the impacts of widespread CO2 output, but hand-waved it away. I feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight. [1] - http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2026/ph241/flanagan2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2026/ph241/flanagan2/ [2] - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-global-uranium-reserves-by-country/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-global-uranium-rese...
    - peterfirefly 4mo ago
      Remember when the world ran completely out of copper?
      - leonidasrup 4mo ago
        The world will not run completely out of copper, be we can expect much higher prices. "Copper and lithium are major exceptions where expected mined supply from announced projects falls short of projected demand in 2035, with implied deficits of 30% for copper and 40% for lithium" https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook-2025/overview-of-outlook-for-key-minerals https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook...
leonidasrup 4mo ago
Biomass in Demark is in large part not green technology. Could be even worse then fossil gas. "The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips." https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark
- lukan 4mo ago
  Even if the wood is imported, it still counts as green, as it regrowing and does not add CO2 that was in the ground before. (So it depends how much CO2 the ships used to transport it there)
  - leonidasrup 4mo ago
    1. We can comfortable say that the CO2 from burned wood stays in the atmosphere for at-least 100 years (time necessary for the next tree to grow), with all the associated effects. 2. I could not imagine scaling biomass to country like India or China to cover the same share in electricity production mix as in Dermark (Denmark currently produces 20% of electricity from Bioenergy). https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/denmark https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/denmark
    - lukan 4mo ago
      1. No, if you take wood out of the forest and let it regrow, it is roughly +-0 CO2 balance (It is not just the new trees binding CO2, taking advantage of the new sunlight, all the other plants and existing trees start to bind CO2 the moment they can) 2. No, it is not and I doubt anyone claimed that this is possible.
      - leonidasrup 4mo ago
        "Does wood bioenergy help or harm the climate?" by John Sterman. John Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management "The EU, UK, US, and other nations consider wood to be a carbon neutral fuel, ignoring the carbon dioxide emitted from wood combustion in their greenhouse gas accounting. Many countries subsidize wood energy – often by burning wood pellets in place of coal for electric power – to meet their renewable energy targets. But can wood bioenergy help cut greenhouse emissions in time to limit the worst damage from climate change? The argument in favor seems obvious: wood, a renewable resource, must be better than burning fossil fuels. But wood emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than coal – and far more than other fossil fuels. Therefore, the first impact of wood bioenergy is to increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain and takes time – decades to a century or more, depending on forest composition and climatic zone – time we do not have to cut emissions enough to avoid the worst harms from climate change. More effective ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions are already available and affordable now, allowing forests to continue to serve as carbon sinks and moderate climate change." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2022.2062933 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2022.2...
rob74 4mo ago
> Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude ...while also having a colder climate than the Danish. At least while the Gulf Stream is still working.
TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
Battery and storage tech is improving and innovating all the time. It also has a fast build cycle. Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically.
- Moldoteck 4mo ago
  It makes sense for Canada. Unless you love using gas for firming of course
- xethos 4mo ago
  > Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically. Because we won't need base load in 15 years? Or because you're arguing that we'll have so many batteries, and they'll be so cheap, and they'll be so over-provisioned regarding summer/winter variance, that we won't be able to sell excess nuclear power to the states? Personally, I wouldn't make either bet, no matter what odds you give me

kelseydh 4mo ago

Some storage can be had for cheap from existing capacity. Hydroelectric dams with reservoirs, abundant in Canada already, can function like a battery to cover times when solar/wind is low.

dns_snek 4mo ago

> A least-cost combination of all the technologies has also been identified (shown in Fig. 3 as Least Cost Mix). Under the IEA/WEO 2023 cost assumptions, the least-cost solution comprises a combination of offshore wind power (66%), solar PV (8%) and CCGT (26%). Onshore wind power cannot compete with offshore wind power, and nuclear power cannot compete with any of the other technologies. This is due to the relatively low offshore and high onshore wind power cost assumptions in WEO 2023. As we shall see later, onshore wind power comes into the least-cost mix when using WEO 2024 or any of the two DEA cost assumptions. ... > At the case level, we find that in countries such as Denmark with available wind and solar energy resources, nuclear power does not seem to be part of the least-cost solution, neither in today's energy systems nor in future systems of climate neutral societies. This conclusion is valid for the present cost of nuclear power in Europe as well as for IEA/WEO future expectations. The future overnight cost for nuclear power of 4500 EUR/MW in 2050 represents the so-called “nth-of-a-kind” cost for new reactor designs, with assumed substantial cost reductions from the first-of-a-kind projects, while this violates the historical experience of nuclear power technology.

JensKnipper 4mo ago

You can combine solar with wind. And the good thing: wind is complementary to solar. So no need for solar overcapacity and massive energy storage. https://freeingenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Graph-solar-and-wind-seasonal-complement-v2.png https://freeingenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Graph-s... Edit: this is exactly what your link is showing > Demonstrates that mixed wind–solar portfolios outperform single technologies.

Moldoteck 4mo ago
no it's not fully complementary. And that's the main challenge. Countries without nuclear and hydro tackle this with gas/coal