[T]he report’s executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.
“The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs,” says the report. “But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb.”
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Nuclear technologies missed their window. The use cases where they are the best technical solution now are extremely limited, and that means you can get the investment going to improve them.
It’s a curiosity now.
There’s an alternative timeline where Chernobyl doesn’t happen and we decarbonize by leaning on nuclear in the nineties, then transition to renewables about now. But that’s not our timeline. And if it were, it would be in the past now.
From where I stand you couldn’t be further from the reality of the situation.
Nuclear has a number of advantages from low carbon output per kilowatt over lifetime as well as being extremely cheap per kilowatt.
But the real advantage being overlooked is the small foot print and land use compared to other forms power generation. A nuclear reactor is ideal for high density population areas, adding no pollution like fossil fuels and using a fraction of the land that renewables require. And there is room for overlap between renewables and nuclear as well, meaning days where wind or solar would produce more power than usual, its easy to scale back solar production to take advantage of cheaper power, and vice versa for times when renewables aren’t going to generate enough to meet demand nuclear can increase their output relatively quickly and effectively.
The future of nuclear is however one of the most important. We are eventually going to be spending humans to other planets, and having mature, efficient and compact forms of power generation with long lifetimes and minimal start up power from idle states is going to be important, solar gets less effective the further from the sun we get, you can’t stick a wind turbine on a space craft and expect good results, and you’re out of your mind if you want to burn fossil fuels in an oxygen limited environment.
Treating nuclear as more than a curiosity but rather as the genuine lifeline and corner stone of our futures and future generations is significantly more important than fossil fuel profits today and all their propaganda.
as well as being extremely cheap per kilowatt.
What? How? Far as i know it’s the most expensive, with a lot of hidden costs.
When costs are level per kilowatt over lifetime Nuclear is cheaper thanks to economies of scale, it’s only more expensive when plants are restricted by local authorities in how much they can produce in a given cycle so that other power generators in the energy sector can fill their contracts. When these artificial caps are removed and the plant is allowed to operate as intended and no kneecapped to allow coal and oil plants to operate at their peak effeciency rates, nuclear drops below .10USD. And thats using outdated equipment and maintaining the absurdly high safety standards saddled upon them despite being the safest form of power production bar none.
When these artificial caps are removed and the plant is allowed to operate as intended and no kneecapped to allow coal and oil plants to operate at their peak effeciency rates, nuclear drops below .10USD.
Wholesale or retail cost? Either way, that’s not especially cheap compared to renewables.
Nuclear may be cost competitive with putting solar panels in space at this point. Granted, that’s back of the envelope costs for a hypothetical space based solar system compared to nuclear plants that already exist. But the fact that they’re close is not a good sign for nuclear.
Plants will take 10 years to build, at least. If every permit was signed today, there wouldn’t be a single GW of this new nuclear going on the grid until 2034. We’re aiming for major reduction in CO2 by 2030. Oh, and the huge amount of concrete needed would create a massive spike in CO2 by itself. Timeline issues alone kill nuclear before it starts.
Edit: fixing autocorrect’s corrections
Extremely cheap per kilowatt? Every statistic out there that I’ve seen and that includes government funding, as well as construction and deconstruction costs, paints a different picture. Nuclear is only competitive with coal or the relatively underdeveloped solar thermal.
In 2017 the US EIA published figures for the average levelized costs per unit of output (LCOE) for generating technologies to be brought online in 2022, as modelled for its Annual Energy Outlook. These show: advanced nuclear, 9.9 ¢/kWh; natural gas, 5.7-10.9 ¢/kWh (depending on technology); and coal with 90% carbon sequestration, 12.3 ¢/kWh (rising to 14 ¢/kWh at 30%). Among the non-dispatchable technologies, LCOE estimates vary widely: wind onshore, 5.2 ¢/kWh; solar PV, 6.7 ¢/kWh; offshore wind, 14.6 ¢/kWh; and solar thermal, 18.4 ¢/kWh.
Emphasis mine, source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power
If you scroll down literally like. A paragraph past that you will see a very nice table showing the spread of nuclear costs. Some (including in the US, which is used for the EIA figures) are quite expensive, but others (notably South Korea) are very much cost-competitive or better than renewables. Also worth noting, the renewable estimates have spread themselves, and do not include overinstallation/storage required to behave as firm power.
Which is to say:
A - there certainly are quite a few places that nuclear doesn’t make sense, at least currently. Including the US
B - equally, there are a lot of places around the world where nuclear is competitive
C - we should perhaps look at why the US is so expensive relative to other countries; it’s not some law of nature, we can change it. And it’s probably not just because other countries under-regulate them (I’d buy that for some of the countries listed)
I specifically picked the statistic that claimed to have included the full cost of installing something new. Most other statistics only include prolonging the life of existing plants, thus ignoring the installation costs completely. You can just quote the paragraphs that prove your point the same way I have and then we can discuss further. Maybe I made a mistake, who knows.
The real advantage of nuclear is it’s constant output of power compared to the variable output of solar and wind
The space based nukes paragraph is irrelevant. While I agree with the point thtat it may not only be useful for long term space habitation, it may be required, I don’t see what that has to do with earth based commercial power generation. They’re very different beasts with little overlap. That’s like saying you support corn based subsidies, because we’ll have to grow crops off world: true but not relevant.
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I disagree, a bit.
Base load is still hard to get with renewables, unless you can get a somewhat consistent level of power from them. That’s basically just hydro/tidal and geothermal at this point, and all of those have very limited areas where they can be used.
Nuclear, on the other hand, can be built anywhere except my backyard.
We have four choices:
- Discover/build another form of consistent renewable energy (what’s left? Dyson sphere?)
- Up our storage game, big time (hydrostatic batteries, flywheel farms, lithium, hydrogen, whatever, just somewhere to put all this extra green energy)
- Embrace nuclear
- Clutch on to fossil fuels until we all boil/choke.
We can do all of them concurrently, provided there’s money for it, but we only give money to the last one.
Exactly. I live in Utah, which is perfect for nuclear:
- desert close by with a mountain between the desert and dense population
- lots of coal power, and unique air quality concerns due to inversion
- perfectly set up for mass transit - about half (more than half?) of the population lives in a narrow corridor, so cars could be replaced with electric trains and buses
- no access to the ocean, geothermal is probably expensive due to hard rock, no tides, hydro couldn’t be done at scale, cold winters make battery storage hard, etc
So why don’t we do it? FUD. We should have a nuclear base with solar and wind helping out, but instead we have a coal base and are transitioning to natural gas. That’s dumb. And it’s hilarious because we sell electricity to California when their backbone isn’t sufficient.
It’s probably not the best option everywhere, but it’s a really good option in many areas.
So why don’t we do it? FUD.
A consortium of Utah’s utilities (UAMPS) literally just pulled out of its commitment to backing NuScale’s modular reactor in November 2023. It was a problem of cost, when the construction looked like it was going to become too expensive, at a time when new wind construction is dropping the price of wind power. It basically just couldn’t compete on cost, in the specific environment of servicing Utah.
geothermal is probably expensive due to hard rock
I wouldn’t sleep on geothermal as a future broad scale solution for dispatchable (that is, generation that can be dialed up and down on demand) electrical power. The oil and gas fracking industry has greatly improved their technology at imaging geological formations and finding places where water can flow and be pumped, in just the past decade. I expect to see over the next decade geothermal reach viability beyond just the places where geothermal heat is close to the surface.
Yeah, I just saw that news, which apparently happened end of last year. The public wants nuclear (or at least a non-coal base power), but projects keep getting delayed or scrapped due to local lawsuits or local governments pulling financial support.
Geothermal is cool, and apparently there’s an active project. It should produce 400MW, which is pretty significant, but still a pretty small fraction of total capacity (~9.5GW).
If the Blue Castle project ever finishes, it’ll supply ~1.5GW power. That, with geothermal, could take up ~1/4 of the total energy generation, which would be a really good start. I’d also like to see hydrogen production as a “battery” source (produce from solar, burn at night). Looks like that’s under development as well.
Lots of interesting things are happening now, I just wish they started 10+ years ago…
Scrapping the NuScale project had nothing to do with lawsuits. Governments pulled their financial support because projected costs were exceeding what was contractually promised, mostly due to pandemic-related supply chain and inflation issues.
This is typical of nuclear. The industry wants to believe its problem is regulation. It’s not, at least not if you want to have better safety guarantees than the Soviet Union did. Its problem is that to be safe, nuclear is expensive, and there doesn’t appear to be a way out of that.
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Yes, NuScale wasn’t scrapped due to lawsuits, I was more referring to the delays to Blue Castle, which was delayed for 3-ish years due to lawsuits.
NuScale is a pretty small operation promising something like 300-400MW. Blue Castle is a lot larger promising ~1500MW.
nuclear is expensive
Initially, yes, but amortized over the life of the plant, it’s pretty cheap. It has a high upfront cost and relatively low operating costs. And one of the big operating costs (waste disposal) won’t be an issue here, the larger issue is water access for cooling, and that’s political (farmers don’t want to give up water rights).
My main concern is seismic activity, since if we get an earthquake, it’ll likely be very violent. That increases initial costs, but doesn’t really impact ongoing costs. Utah just doesn’t like throwing large sums of money around, hence the political pushback.
We’re still >50% fossil fuels, so I’ll support anything that replaces that. I like hydrogen (in development), geothermal (in development), solar (expanding), and wind (seems to be slowing), but that’s not going to be enough. Even if all of those were operating today, we’d still be using significant amounts of fossil fuels. I think we will still need nuclear, we have the space and demand for it.
Who’s working to change the perception there?
Perception seems fine, every poll I’ve seen going back 10 years has been positive for nuclear power. Everyone seems to want it, they just don’t want it in their backyard.
The Blue Castle project was (is?) a proposal for a nuclear plant in eastern central Utah, which is pretty far from any urban center and buffered by a mountain range. They won a lawsuit regarding water rights more than 5 years ago, but there have been no updates on it for 5-ish years.
There’s a SMR project in S. Idaho that was active recently, Unfortunately, it seems to have missed subscription targets, so it’s unlikely to move forward. I don’t know where those subscriptions are supposed to come from (I’m interested), but I’m guessing it’s cities buying in and many dropped out due to financing not being certain.
A lot of the pushback is from politicians, not residents. The popular support is there, but our legislatures and local governments are pretty conservative and unwilling to take risks.
“Base load” is not that much. Off shore wind is almost always blowing, and all the other renewables can be stored via batteries or hydrogen (or tanks, in case of biogas). Yes, that’s a whole lot of stuff, but the technology exists, can be produced on large scale and (most importantly) doesn’t cause any path dependencies.
Nuclear is extremely expensive, as the article highlighted. And to be cost effective, power has to be produced more or less constantly. Having a nuclear power plant just for the few hours at night when wind and sun don’t work is insane - and insanely expensive.
Not to mention slow to build. Takes about a decade to get a nuclear plant going. If that is replacing coal, you are burning that coal during construction. The CO2 cost of that should be taken into account when comparing to much quicker renewables (approx 2 years). Also pouring all that concrete. Once it’s build, sure it’s green, but that is expensive, takes ages and comes with a big CO2 cost to get going.
Or you go renewable now, turn the filthy coal off about 8 years sooner and save a ton of money and CO2 right now.
Nuclear is mostly expensive because of regulations and red tape that are mostly built upon FUD.
That needs to be re-addressed from the ground up. There needs to be a big PSA push on the safety of nuclear and on the true costs and hidden dangers of coal and oil plants to build massive public support, and then we got to fix the outdated regulations.
Also, coal plants aren’t cheap. And coal has costs that are heavily subsidized by society. If you could calculate all of the external costs and level out subsidies, nuclear is cheaper and, more importantly, far far safer, than any GHG plant.
The alternative to nuclear isn’t coal…
And if you seriously think regulations are the problem, you’re denser than the lead shielding you want to get rid of.
That’s what the industry wants to believe. Except that US regulators have shown a willingness to sign off on new nuclear power plants as long as you do all the paperwork right and show that you’re not some moron who will dump a pile of plutonium in the desert and run water over it to make steam.
Nuclear takes 5 years to build according to initial plans. That’s a joke, and everyone knows it. It’s going to take 10 years, and the budget will double over initial estimate, as well. That means it will take 10 years before you see a dime back on your investment, and it could all be for nothing if the funding shortfall can’t be made up. Some of this is regulations–you know, the kind that keeps another Chernobyl from happening–but a lot of it has been the fact that every plant takes boutique engineering and specialized labor.
The Westinghouse AP1000 design (what they used in Vogtle) was supposed to fix that boutique engineering. It did not. SMRs are also supposed to fix that boutique engineering, but their projects are also failing.
Meanwhile, you could invest your money into a solar or wind farm. It’ll start generating power in 6-12 months and start putting money back in your pocket. Nothing about the construction is particularly boutique; it’s almost all mass produced stuff. You don’t need specialists to put them together, either. There is a track record of solar and wind farms meeting construction deadlines and budget forecasts. Given all that, who the hell would invest money into nuclear?
Sorry, but we’ve seen what happens when you build nuclear reactors in a low regulation environment under cost pressure.
It’s not pretty.
Up our storage game, big time
I think this can be expanded out a bit, to the more generalizable case of matching generation to demand. Yes, storage can be a big part of that.
But another solution along the same lines may be demand shifting, which in many ways, relies on storage (charging car batteries, reheating water tanks or even molten salt only when supply is plentiful. And some of that might not be storage, per se, but creating the useful output of something that actually requires a lot of power: timing out industrial processes or data center computational tasks based on the availability of excess electrical power.
Similarly, improvements in transmission across wide geographical areas can better match supply to demand. The energy can still be used in real time, but a robust enough transmission network can get the power from the place that happens to have good generation conditions at that time to the place that actually wants to use that power.
There’s a lot of improvement to be made in simply better matching supply and demand. And improvements there might justify intentional overbuilding, where generators know that they’ll need to curtail generation during periods where there’s more supply than demand.
And with better transmission, then existing nuclear plants might be able to act as dispatchable backup power rather than the primary, and therefore serve a larger market.
It’s interesting watching how the 30minute electricy price has shifted patterns in the UK. 3-4 years ago there was no doubt that the cheapest time was 1am - 4am. These days the overnight dip isn’t anywhere near as significant as it was, and it’s now equally likely for 1pm-4pm to be the cheapest time of day.
All I can assume is that so many have moved usage to overnight due to “time of use” tariffs that now the demand curve has evened out a bit, and now the extra supply from solar during the day pushes the afternoon price down.
Base load is not necessary. It was made because you could build certain types of plants really cheap if they’re run all the time at the same level. They aren’t a requirement, but rather an economic convenience in an old way of doing things.
Renewables with storage are able to match demand more closely than traditional plants ever could. This results in less wasted power. That means we don’t have to replace every GWh of traditional generation with a GWh of renewable.
Hydro and geothermal have both had some interesting breakthroughs the last few years. Small scale hydro can get useful amounts of power from smaller rivers than was feasible in the past. There are places to put them we didn’t have before.
There’s also high voltage DC lines. The longest deployed one is currently in Brazil, and is about 1500 miles. An equivalent run in the US would mean wind farms in Kansas could power New York, or solar in Arizona could power Chicago. When you can transmit that far, then the wind is always blowing somewhere, and it’s sunny somewhere for the entire day, as well.
Nuclear lost its window of opportunity. It may already be cost competitive with putting solar panels in space.
Edit: fixing autocorrect’s bad corrections
I agree with all of this as an electrical engineer in the field. Base load is only base load because of the load profile of devices connected to the grid having either an on or off switch. Most of the time this means motors/HVACs, but the world of electronics is coming to that equipment just like how inverters have changed how we export solar PV and wind to the grid. VFDs, soft starters, and the like will make our industrial processes that much more efficient. We just need to spread awareness and ramp up implementation, just as much as for renewables themselves.
So how much would it cost to do geothermal to power a city? It must be wildly infeasible if I’ve never even heard it mentioned. Can significant electric generation be had from that?
It’s limited in the geography where it could be useful, such as near techtonic plate boundaries. Iceland gets about a quarter of its electricity that way. Some advancements in drilling techniques have made it more viable in more locations.
https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2023/05/is-geothermal-energy-making-a-comeback
You are on a nuke loving platform and people are going to downvote anything that isn’t hard pro nuke. But you are correct. I have had this exact same discussion before. The numbers you are looking for are called the LCOE, or the ‘levelized cost of electricity’ where the lifetime of the technology cost if factored in. Offshore wind is currently the lowest followed by solar. Nuke is clost to 10x the cost. There is even an international nuke consortium that has several reports agreeing with exactly what you are saying and basically sum it up as: if you invested in nuke early, then it is cost efficient to just keep upgrading. If you didn’t invest in it early, then the cost to implement it so high that you are better off going wind/solar. Even if you add in the cost of battery systems, it is still cheaper than building a new nuke plant. And more than that, with these new nuke plants you have to upgrade all your infrastructure because your old wires can’t handle the output loads. If you look at the 30+ billion Georgia spent on this plant, they could have simply given out a micro generation grant to everyone to add solar to their roofs, not needed to upgrade the lines, and been far better off. But hey, just like reddit, if you are commenting on lemmy you better be pro nuke only and ignore the other numbers.
So, essentially, nuclear power is like airships, except with worse disasters?
More people died in airship incidents than in civil nuclear power.
E: typo
Yeah, read it. Also the article with the discussion on the death toll. 31 immediate deaths 60 attributable in the following two decades
The official WHO estimate with 4000 more cancer deaths until 2050 is based on the disputed LNT model. Even UNSCEAR itself says:
The Scientific Committee does not recommend multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world
Dr. Thomas shares that contrary to popular belief there is a scientific consensus that the Chernobyl accident has resulted in the deaths of less than 55 people as a result of radiation.
The two airship accidents with the most casualties count together 120 dead (USS Akron and Dixmude).
Mmmm. Looking at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship
Roughly I’d say it’s at most 200-300 people. Airships just didn’t carry many at once.
If you look at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_fatalities_by_country
You easily go past the airships estimate. One that surprised me was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
“Estimated 100 to 240 cancer fatalities in the long term”
You can beat airships deaths will just one of big accidents.
https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima
I explicitly wrote “civil nuclear power”. I know there were big incidents, especially in early military nuclear sites. Windscale and Kyshtym are two of those.
Kind of academic as your still go past the small number killed in airships.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airship_accidents
For the total number of airships, the loss of life (and airships) is quite high…
So we agree, airships and nukes are both outmoded, old tech.
also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties
I never agreed that its outmoded or old tech.
At Fukushima Daichii died one worker of radiation poisoning and one in a crane incident. The evacuation killed 51 more. Scientific consense is, that the loss of life and cumulative lifetime would have been lower if there was no evacuation.
Are you German? That’s standard German rethoric and the reason, they shut off their reactors prematurely. It’s not how the world sees it though.
No. I’m not German. We run our reactors as long as possible because free money is free money ;)
Does anyone know about the technology that nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers use? Why are they able to operate but we can’t use the same technology on land?
Because if the military wants something, budgets are big. And they do not need to make money.
Military expenses, the only socialism acceptable to Americans.
Gotta love how the post office is legally required to show they can turn a profit, but the military has a history of building literal burn pits that essentially burn US tax dollars by lighting equipment on fire and giving soldiers cancer.
I don’t think the military should show a profit. That would just bring back colonialism. Although, they do make a hefty profit for defense contractors.
The fact that this was your take away is concerning.
No government service should have to show a profit. If it’s an essential service, then it needs to be done. The only time money should come into it is in regular audits to ensure the budget is being used efficiently.
Because military engineers overengineer these things from the most expensive materials available, and they also perform frequent maintenance on them, which is also expensive.
To add to this: A certain type of Soviet submarine used a lead-bismuth alloy as coolant for their reactor. The coolant solidifies at ambient temperature so it had to be heated indefinitely by some way or another or else it solidified and trashed the reactor. I don’t think any of them exist anymore since Russia wasn’t able to afford sustaining the giant navy after the Soviet collapse.
Just goes to show how insane nuclear submarine engineering is, or was at some point.
Why are they able to operate but we can’t use the same technology on land?
Military budgets. You can use the tech, but no civilian can afford it.
They used pressurised water reactors with enriched uranium. Dunno how the costs run but there is no strategic alternative anyway. They also wouldn’t want such highly enriched uranium to be commonplace.
I’m pretty sure they essentially are “one time use” only.
Extremely simplified:
They run for 20-30 years without refueling, which means the reactors/system could be built more compact, a higher level of safety and require less maintenance / monitoring / fine-tuning.
All those parameters are connected in an equation which means if you want higher safety you have to make another parameter “worse”. By making the system “one time use” you set the “refuelability” and “repairability” parameters to the lowest and can therefore up the other parameters.
Also, military requirements are very different from civilian.
I was a nuclear operator in the Navy. Here are the actual reasons:
- The designs are classified US military assets
- They are not refuleable
- They only come in 2 “sizes”: aircraft carrier and submarine
- They are not scaleable. You can just make a reactor 2x as big
- They require as much down time as up time
- They are outdated
- The military won’t let you interrupt their supply chain to make civilian reactors
- New designs over promise and underdeliver
- They are optimized for erratic operations (combat) not steady state (normal power loads)
- They are engineered assuming they have infinite sea water available for everything
There’s more but that’s just off the top of my head
It’s expensive in subs too
I’m pretty sure most military reactors use weapons grade uranium that’s enriched to mid 90%. Countries get sensitive when you start enriching uranium to the mid 90s.
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This was pretty much obvious for everyone from the beginning, except if you’re a fanboy of this tech.
Or a someone getting a bribe from them.
Why can’t we switch to thorium and molten salt instead? Much cleaner, much safer, same idea.
Because it is actually not that simple, especially on the “cleaner” and “safer” parts.
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Theoretically the main advantage of the thorium is precisely because its safer and cleaner. When removed from its neutron source thorium quickly ceases fission and decay.
“Theoretically” is worth very little. It is pretty much the same for every concept NPP, that once construction starts on an actual practical plant, ugly problems start coming up all over the place that were not considered or thought of in the concept stage. Corrosion is one of the biggest ones.
See also the Rickover memo.
The technology doesn’t exist in a commercially viable form. That’s why.
And even more expensive, no?
So an interesting thing I’ve noticed people doing is basically claiming that whatever other side is being astroturfed by the “real evil”, right. “Fossil fuel is funding renewable FUD of nuclear reactors!” or “Fossil fuels is funding nuclear FUD of renewables!”. You can also see this with liberals claiming that anyone who disagrees with the DNC is a Russian bot, and with people who disagree with libs claiming that libs fund radical right-wing candidates as an election strategy and that this is one of the reasons why they are basically just as bad as those right-wingers.
The core thing you need to understand about this, as a claim, is that they can both be true. They can both be backed opposition, controlled opposition, astroturfing. Because it’s not so much that they’re funding one racehorse that they want to be their opposition, so much as they are going to fund both sides, plant bad faith actors among both sides, bad faith discourse and division, thought terminating cliches, logical fallacies, whatever, and then by fueling the division, they’ve successfully destroyed their opposition. The biggest help to the fossil fuels lobby isn’t the fact that conversations about nuclear or renewables are happening when “we should be pushing, we should be in emergency mode, everyone should agree with me or get busted” right, as part of this “emergency mode” is us having these conversations. No, the biggest help to fossil fuels lobbies is the nature of the discourse, rather than the subjects of the discourse.
Also I find it stupid that people are arguing for all in on one of the other. That’s dumb. Really, very incredibly dumb. Mostly as I see this discourse happening in a disconnected top-down vacuum separate from any real world concerns because everyone just wants to be “correct” in the largest sense of the word and then have that be it. Realistically, renewables and nuclear are contextually dependant. Renewables can be better supplemented by energy storage solutions to solve their not matching precisely the power usage curves and trends, but a lot of those proposed storage solutions require large amounts of concrete, careful consideration of environmental effects, and large amounts engineering, i.e. the same shit as nuclear. It can both be true that baseload doesn’t matter so much as things like solar can more closely match the power usage curves naturally for desert climates where large amounts of sunlight and heat will create larger needs for A/C, and it can also be true that baseload is a reality in other cases where you can’t as easily transition power needs or try to offset them without larger amounts of infrastructural investment or power losses. Can’t exactly preheat homes in the day so they stay warm at night, in a cold climate, if the r-values for your homes are ass because everyone has a disconnected suburban shithovel that they’re not recouping maintenance costs of when they pay taxes.
These calculations of cost offsets and efficiencies have to be made in context, they have to be based in reality, otherwise we’re just arguing about fucking nothing at all. Maybe I will also hold water in the debates for money not being a great indicator of what’s possible, probable, or what’s the best long term solution for humanity, too, just to put that out there. But God damn this debate infuriates me to no end because people want to have their like, universal one size fits all top down kingly decree take of, well is this good or bad, instead of just understanding a greater, more nuanced take on the subject.
If you wanna have a top-down take on what’s the best, you probably want global, big solar satellites, that beam energy down with microwave lasers.
Nuclear fanboys are strange! The won’t let it go.
Because it’s really cool tech and unlike burning coal, oil and gas it’s CO2 neutral. And alternatives like fusion reactors are still decades away, at least, and we can’t build renewables fast enough either.
In my opinion shutting down all nuclear powerplants was the stupidest thing the government here in Germany has ever done, especially since coal is still being subsidized and our planet isn’t getting any cooler.
None of what you say is false.
None of what you say is enough to make it the right path for the future.
It‘s a better path than fossil fuels and a worse one than renewables.
Exactly, so you invest the money in renewables.
I wouldn’t call it worse than renewables. It’s a sidegrade from coal burning. Where I’m from, solar is non-viable 6 months of the year. Wind is theoretically viable year-round but in reality it’s less than that due to cold snaps and the intermittent nature of wind. And there’s no way that wind power alone could provide enough power even when running at 100%. There are no viable rivers here for hydro either. Geothermal is nigh impossible here as well. So without a reliable back-up power source, everyone here would be experiencing brown outs on a fully renewable system. Many wouldn’t receive power at all due to a significant rural population and the challenges inherent to it (and forcing people into cities is not a viable option). So the only options are fossil fuels and nuclear. Given that we’re killing everything with the former, I would much prefer we give the latter a go.
I don’t know where you’re from, but I doubt it’s as bleak as you make it sound for renewables. They key to renewables is threefold IMHO:
-
You have to overbuild. You need to be able to sustain things on 50-60% of maximum output.
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You must have multiple grades of storage to cover different time scales. Hours, days, weeks, months. Different capacities of storage that can respond on different timescales.
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You need to exploit the diversity of different geographic areas. Take the US for example. Wind in the northern coastal regions. Solar across the south. Hydro in the mountains. These different areas can’t do it alone. They need to supply each other in times of plenty, and depend on each each other in times of “famine”.
So there’s lots of investment needed; In capacity, storage and transmission, and the choice is always where you spend your money. I would rather spend it on renewables and the infrastructure to support it. It’ll be quicker to bring online, cheaper, and a better long term solution.
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What is so cool about making some water boil?
Because you’re not just making a fire to make water boil, you’re literally splitting atoms in a controlled environment. That’s kinda cool. You can’t do that at home.
Yea but splitting atoms just to boil water. The atom splitting part is the cool part. Using it just to boil water is not so cool.
Aside from flattening a city, what exactly would you do with nuclear technology? How do you think we could capture the energy from fission without boiling water?
Well it seems like a stupid idea to use nuclear technology to boil some water. So just don’t. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean you should do it.
And yet for a plethora of regions it’s the only viable alternative to fossil fuels for reliable electricity.
Lemy has such a hard on against nuclear. I’m seeing reports by antinuclear think tank grifters shoved in my face almost daily…
I’ve seen opinions very strongly in both directions on here. I’m very pro-nuclear, but the largest issues they face is always bureaucracy. It sucks that an artificial thing is what’s stopping then usually, but it is true. We need some protections to keep things safe, but it seems too harsh for nuclear compared to the dangers it presents opposed to the dangers of other power sources.
Absolutely, and it’s by design by candid admission of environmentalist organizations and green parties. Their objective was over regulating the industry beyond any rationality and they succeeded.
For this particular design, they could have powered the earth by connecting turbines to the eyes of every engineer and project manager from us all rolling them in the back of our heads upon hearing “no cost overruns or delays”.
Lemy has such a hard on against nuclear
Maybe you should spend more time outside. Every flavor of nuclear has worse approval ratings than most dirtbag politicians.
I’m seeing reports by antinuclear think tank grifters shoved in my face almost daily…
Why do you think you need to PAY people to oppose nuclear? After seven decades of cockamamie “this time it’s different” schemes most people just moved on.
Woa bro I was saying hard on but this is a full on raging erection maybe you should deal with your frustrations
Edit: Changed introductory wording to be less belligerent. I am sorry if I have caused a significant level of offense.
Just wait for the nuclear shills to flood in and claim that nuclear fission is a sustainable and necessary form of power generation.Some people claim that nuclear fission is a sustainable and necessary form of power generation. It is not. Uranium extraction devastates entire landscapes, the construction of nuclear power plants is too expensive (even for SMRs, as the article explains), ergo electricity prices will climb, it is a hugely wasteful use of so many tonnes of concrete (concrete manufacturing is heavy on the environment too), it creates waste that will still haunt us for hundreds of thousands of years (finding geological structures that are guaranteed to be stable that long is difficult), and relative to the initial construction and set-up effort, they don’t provide that much energy. We already have methods that can provide us plenty enough electricity that are entirely sustainable by leveraging large-scale atmospheric aerodynamics as well as the largest nuclear fusion reactor at our disposal (the sun). There’s simply no need to go nuclear.I hate that the conversation is happening on these terms. I hate that we have a bunch of opinionated online “teams” on this issue.
Hey, you know what we need? All of it. Any sort of energy generation that lowers atmospheric emissions in any way we do need. The concept of “nuclear shills” shouldn’t exist, the concept of “solar shills” or “hydrogen shills” or “fossil fuel shills” shouldn’t exist. The entire conversation is a PR battle by energy corps to get people to buy into marketing so they can get governments to back popular choices so they can get expensive contracts for large infrastructure work.
I hate that we have online keyboard warriors overrepresenting the challenges of one of the contributors to lowering emissions while underrepresenting the challenges of others. Hey, do you think nighttime generation and storage is an issue? Maybe installation costs for domestic solar generation, the state of the grid or the uneven distribution of solar power yields on different territories? Because I do.
And I do think cost and build times for nuclear generators are a problem (which makes it confusing that some countries are dismantling plants that seem to be working safely and are within their expected lifespan, but I digress).
And I do think the impact of hydroelectric power in nearby areas is a problem.
And I do think the open questions for geothermal are a problem.
And I do think the issues with cost, storage and dirty generation of hydrogen are a problem.
And I do think we should be working on all of that. At once. This isn’t kids arguing about which game console is better on the backyard, this is a massive existential issue, and would be even if we weren’t dealing with a climate change ticking bomb. This report? It’s bad news. Any report that tells us any of the ideas we have for weaning off fossil fuels is not working as well as we expected is bad news. Can we all get with that program?
The problem is that “both” isn’t a valid option unless a country has unlimited finances.
Otherwise you have to decide on what’s the most feasible option and then renewables win big time
I sometimes feel as if the current push for atomic is from the fossil-lobby as they are aware that it either works and they get 10-20 more years to sell oil until the reactors are built - and even if it doesn’t work out it still will slow down rollout of renewables
If you have 100 billion to spend on energy producing you have to choose if you want to go all-in with one source or split it up which would move the end of fossil fuels Back further
Not to mention having to buy the radioactive materials from dictatorships and having problems to cool down the reactors with rising temperatures and rivers running dry
I just don’t see how atomic isn’t a huge gamble that can backfire hard (and I’m not even talking about catastrophic events like Fukushima)
Most countries have unlimited finances. They only have limited real resources like labor, concrete, copper, glass, etc. The fact that we still don’t understand this and behave as if the metadata of the economy accurately describes reality puts artificial brakes on the solutions of many problems, climate being one of them.
The problem is that if a country treats money as unlimited and without a cost then inflation will mirror that and people in that country will lose their savings, their job will not pay for their bills anymore and so on
It’s not as simple as “just spend more”…
Inflation is a symptom of the lack of some real resource. There are many parts of the economies of many countries where there’s unused production capacity which simply “turns more natural resources into more stuff” if more money enters that part of the economy, without producing inflation. It’s not “just spend more”, it’s “spend as much as you can on things that you want done, which aren’t limited by real resources.”
I found Randall Wray’s lectures on the topic to be eye-opening.
You keep doing the thing. The thing sucks. Please stop.
For one, no, that’s not how that works. Money is already being spent in energy generation, mostly towards oil and gas. This isn’t your weekly takeout budget.
It’s also not a race towards infinite energy where you dump money to make the infinite energy bar go up. Energy generation will continue to be costly and have problems, regardless of the mix of options chosen. There is simply no single silver bullet. Which is, presumably why we already don’t go “all-in” on one energy source, which is just about the dumbest possible plan. Energy diversification is absolutely part of this, regardless of where the majority of the output is coming from.
So please stop it. Genuinely stop it. This isn’t a zero sum game, it’s about finding the mix of energy sources that gets you less killed in the next century or so. Not finding a single source, not backing a single winning horse, not having your stupid team you support for either dumb Internet reasons or disingenuous trolling reasons win.
having to buy the radioactive materials from dictatorships
Not really, but also kinda. The biggest exporters of ore are Kazakhstan, Namibia, Canada, and Australia.
The only major producers that aren’t American puppets stripping themselves of resources to maintain western hegemony are Russia, Niger, China, and India, who total less than 15%.
I wouldn’t call Russia or India not-dictatorships, but I don’t see them using US weapons and training to put down a restive population and keep the resources and money flowing out like Kazakstan.
All good points, and I’m all for pretty much any technological research, but
And I do think cost and build times for nuclear generators are a problem
Thorium is another form of fission generation that has not been commercialized yet. In the real world, maybe it will be better, or maybe it won’t. But fission generation already takes too long to build out, so why switch lanes to a different form of fission generation that also needs more time and money to be commercialized? Nuclear uranium fission generation had its growing pains over the years, as the technology found challenges to address and areas to improve, but thorium has not yet gotten far enough to run into those so there will be additional challenges requiring time, money, further development
If those were decades ago when the future was bright for fission technology, I’d be all over this. However the future is dark and cloudy for fission generation, nightfall may be approaching. The advantages of thorium are not enough to shine a new light, there’s not enough room for improvement to save fission generation, this is just an expensive detour.
This is nonsense. Like someone else said we will need some kind of nuclear power for future space exploration. There are parts of the world that are dark for six months of the year, and plenty of places that don’t get enough light for solar to be practical.
Most renewable sources are not consistent enough to be used by themselves, and battery storage isn’t practical with current technology. Then there are the concerns with hydro power and biomass and how that affects the environment. I have even been told by leftists that biomass shouldn’t be installed as it destroys too many native forests.
Of course the actual best solution is one we don’t have the technology for yet: things like nuclear fusion or neutrino capture.
For the record, I disagree with you both and this narrative is also part of the problem in my book. Screw the futurism and longermism of “we need nuclear power for space exploration”. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about mitigating runaway climate effects and filling the blanks of an alternate energy mix by using complementary tech.
Absolutely let’s keep working on nuclear power. Absolutely let’s keep working on battery storage, and potential energy storage and thermal storage and wind and geothermal and whatever else we can come up with. And absolutely let’s abandon whatever doesn’t work or is made obsolete, starting with no longer burning hydrocarbons as soon as we can stop.
There’s this air of erudite dilettantism about this chatter that just pisses me off. People sitting by and idly projecting their sci-fi fantasies about colonizing planets or about a fully solar powered planet and feeling smart about it. Given the short-term, impending human cost of this issue, both for climate reasons and for energy scarcity reasons, that just feels gross at this point.
What do you disagree with me? I was trying to back you up up here saying that yes we need nuclear in addition to all the other technologies. I am not saying that you shouldn’t use solar, just that it isn’t applicable everywhere on earth.
Screw the futurism and longermism of “we need nuclear power for space exploration”. We’re not talking about that.
You should be talking about that. After all climate change is also a future problem. Staying on a single planet isn’t safe even if you eradicate climate change, war, disease, and just about everything else. There is pretty much nothing stopping a gamma ray burst or stray blackhole, or any number of other things from killing everyone on this planet. Like yeah climate change is a high priority, but it doesn’t make all other issues go away.
Look, I’m just trying to impress something very specific here and I can tell I’m not getting through.
I’m not here to call out people arguing for or against one or another type of energy generation. I’m complaining about the discourse about this being about long term hypotheticals and optimal solutions when we should be in emergency mode.
It’s like we’re in a burning building and people are having arguments about the cost per year of different types of fire extinguishers. But if I make this point about someone criticising nuclear power it comes across as me “siding” or “shilling” for nuclear power, same if I do it when someone argues against solar power.
But I’m neither. I’m arguing for practicality and immediate action. Because we need it now, not because I just finished reading the Dune books and have some really neat ideas about generation ships.
ricdeh 4 points 58 minutes ago* (last edited 56 minutes ago)
Just wait for the nuclear shills to flood in and claim that nuclear fission is a sustainable and necessary form of power generation. No, it is not. Uranium extraction devastates entire landscapes, the construction of nuclear power plants is too expensive (even for SMRs, as the article explains), ergo electricity prices will climb, it is a hugely wasteful use of so many tonnes of concrete (concrete manufacturing is heavy on the environment too), it creates waste that will still haunt us for hundreds of thousands of years (finding geological structures that are guaranteed to be stable that long is difficult), and relative to the initial construction and set-up effort, they don’t provide that much energy. We already have methods that can provide us plenty enough electricity that are entirely sustainable by leveraging large-scale atmospheric aerodynamics as well as the largest nuclear fusion reactor at our disposal (the sun). There’s simply no need to go nuclear.
Brought to you by fossil fuel propaganda filtered through renewable resource advocates who would also lose out to nuclear energy.
And yet, I remain bullish.
They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a “factory”. This still doesn’t scale well.
I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn’t require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can’t help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.
I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.
You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn’t last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.
You want people to have their own private nuclear reactor in their basement?
Nukeheads are insane
That’s some real 1950s futurism.
Ford proposed a car with a nuclear reactor.
I sympathized with your statement immediately, but then after thinking about it for a bit, most people basically have controlled pressure bombs (gas-water boilers) and buildings filled with gas pipes that can (and have) wiped out whole city blocks.
It’s still not a good idea, obviously, but localized fossil fuels are also ridiculous when you think about it.
Nuclear waste and fuel is dangerous for years and is an invisible hazard. Propane and gas at least only explode once
Thoughts on CO from malfunctioning boilers?
The two aren’t even part of the same conversation.
It builds up for days even months and is an invisible hazard?
I’m not engaging on this.
I wouldn’t mind one in my basement… If I had a basement. But I do have a nice shed, where a 30MW reactor would fit nicely.
Nukeheads are insane
That’s your opinion. My opinion is that we need distributed power generation that can handle baseload. And neither solar nor wind can do that. My personal experience is, that our wind turbine usually doesn’t spin for several periods of up to 10 days in December through March. And energy storage with the required capacity still doesn’t exist either. Thus the power plants will be burning LNG, biomass, garbage or oil and coal, for the foreseeable future.
A centrally controlled, well regulated, network of small reactors will solve the problem.
Look, friend: as much as I like nuclear energy and decentralization of the powder grid, per home reactors could never, ever work. For the simple reason that the majority of us filthy apes are complete idiots. Furthermore, nuclear works currently because it has oversight by educated, trained professionals in a setting where oversight can be effective. Even if you had some sort of travelling nuclear engineer that would check up on your garage reactor, if anything ever went wrong with it then the response time would be too long to adequately deal with the situation.
The only way a distributed network of reactors could work is if it either had massive overhead or if literally everyone had training on the maintenance of a nuclear reactor. And this isn’t even mentioning the possibility of adverse weather events potentially damaging the reactor or how the waste would be dealt with.
Nuclear reactors are ill-suited for baseloads, because they can’t scale their output in an economical way.
You always want the cheapest power available to fulfill demand, which is solar and wind. Those regularly provide more than 100% of the demand. At this point, any other power sources would shut off due to economical reasons. Same with nuclear, nobody wants to buy expensive nuclear energy at peak solar/wind hours, so the reactor needs to turn off. And while some designs can fairly quickly power down, powering up is a different matter and doing either in an economically feasible way is a fantasy right now.
If solar and wind don’t provide enough power to satisfy demand, some other power source needs to turn on. Studies have already shown that current-gen battery storage is capable of doing so. Alternatives could be hydrogen or gas power stations. Nuclear isn’t an option economically speaking.
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Actually, none of them do. This other guy is insane and no one gets a reactor in their basement, but we have neither the production capacity nor the time to avoid nuclear being a significant portion of all energy in a fissile free future.
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I think the ones small enough for a truck are called micro reactors and they top out at 30 MW
It’s not because of smr, it’s just that all large projects have this level of corruption and grift.
all large projects have this level of corruption and grift
Skill issue. I can’t even blame capitalism, since the french manage to get almost 90% of their power from nuclear.
China has 53 GW installed, 25 GW under construction, and another 47 GW planned. Generally they’re pretty clear-eyed when it comes to major projects like this, so I think we can infer the availability of cheap hydro and solar doesn’t favor doing more than ~15% nuclear since they’re only planning to increase it by 150% over the next couple decades.
Maybe that will change when they set up long term storage/reprocessing.
IIRC the French reactors are all nearing their end of service life and’ll be decommissioned soon.
Surely you made a typo? 50 MW is a tenth of the electrical yield of the smallest PWR you can profitably operate.
Off by a factor of 1000. That’s why I’m not a nuclear engineer.
