What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this one power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country's electricity needs. 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7.
It is more than 14%. It looks like this plant, all three reactors together, might eventually cover a third of Finland's needs. But those are 2020 numbers. Increased electrification, especially EVs and moves away from gas, will probably reduce that percentage. In that context, the third reactor is only incrementally more powerful than those already running at the facility.
"The Olkiluoto plant consists of two boiling water reactors (BWRs), each producing 890 MW of electricity, together comprising 22% of the country's electricity generation for 2020.[1] A third reactor, Unit 3, is expected to be online in January 2022, and at 1,600 MW, will by itself satisfy 14% of the country's electricity demand."
If those EVs are mainly charging at night, where does the extra peak load come from? Or is this just a case of not being able to shut off as much NG/Hydro generation at night (since nuclear can’t really be turned on and off at will)?
We (Finland) are probably not going to move towards electric heating to any significant degree. Currently direct (resistive) electric is already the most common means of heating in single-family homes and other low-density residential buildings. Heat pumps are fortunately becoming popular especially in new development, and with them a significant reduction of electricity use compared to direct electric.
For condos and apartment buildings by far the most common method of heating is district heating (teleheating) [1], and historically this has been very carbon intensive, even though cogeneration of both heat and electricity in one plant is quite efficient (efficiency > 80%; most Finnish thermal power plants are cogen). Fossil fuels and peat are being replaced with more sustainable (mostly wood-based) fuels, but attaining the emission goals requires burning less fuel, period, which means technologies like geothermal boreholes and large-scale heatpump facilities.
SMR nuclear reactors, if they ever become mainstream, would be an excellent source of clean heat and electricity for cities. Current nuclear power plants are located (by design) too far from cities for it to be economical to pipe their waste heat to where it's needed.
District heating and heat pumps can be combined in some clever hybrid ways.
You can have tiny heat pumps in every home that share a district-wide pipe as a heat source, you can use giant/deep heat pumps to supply the district-wide pipe and you can do both at the same time. And heat pumps can also be used to cool things, returning heat into the system and allowing for big solar gains in windows, since the heat generated can be re-used when it's more than needed rather than wasted.
Yep, and cooling is rapidly becoming a problem comparable to heating; summers are getting hotter but Finnish construction norms are still all about keeping homes warm in the winter as opposed to cool in the summer. Few Finnish homes have AC, except for those that have two-way heat pumps. Portable AC units have been in very high demand in the past few summers due to heat waves that used to be exceptional but are quickly becoming the norm.
>SMR nuclear reactors, if they ever become mainstream, would be an excellent source of clean heat and electricity for cities. Current nuclear power plants are located (by design) too far from cities for it to be economical to pipe their waste heat to where it's needed.
I don't believe that waste heat is plenty. Here, in Romania, we use the waste heat from the nuclear power plant as district heating but that is enough for a small town near it.
What kind of coefficients of performance are there in Finland, for heat pumps? And what kind of heat pumps are there? Are air-sourced pumps any use in the Finnish climate?
Our heat pump (older model, not sure how old it is since it was in the house when we bought it) works pretty well down to -15. After that it's better to shut it down, save the electricity, and use the good old wood heaters that have been installed since the house was built in the 50's.
Not an expert, but apparently the latest ASHPs still have a CoP of around 2 at –20°C and unity at –30°C, which is pretty much the extreme low for the less-sparsely populated parts of the country. Ground source HPs are of course better in that respect but the initial investment is larger. Apparently GSHP is the most popular mode of heating in newly built single-family homes.
Thank you! In that case, they are very much worth it. In Romania, with the current absurd gas prices, even resistive heating is cheaper when powered by the national hydroelectric supplier.
The price of gas has had an enormous effect on the waiting times for solar panel and heatpump installations here in Western Europe, how is this in Finland right now?
It might end up cheaper to ship in ammonia synthesized from solar in the tropics. Most likely it will be a combination of several: normally, delivery by transmission line because cheapest, but with geothermal held ready for strategic backup, and stockpiled ammonia for load peaks.
Shipping will get cheaper as fuel does, but is already astonishingly cheap.
To remain competitive, shipping will need to re-tank to burn tropically synthesized (most likely) anhydrous ammonia, which will soon be cheaper even than bunker oil. Ships still burning oil will find increasingly fewer ports open to them.
The west-African coastal Sahara, coastal Peru/Bolivia, Baja California, Arabia/Sudan/Eritrea, Yemen/Oman/Pakistan, Socotra, and north-western Australia all look like good places to site solar-driven ammonia synthesis. I don't doubt that less geographically-favored sites will dominate instead.
probably a stupid question, but is it a possibility that geothermal energy (if adopted to a great extent) could take away from the earths core energy and reduce the magnetic field?
Some 42 million megawatts of energy reach the surface continually and are radiated into space as the earth cools from its initial molten state more than 4 billion years ago. No feasible amount of geothermal development could make even a small dent in this process. Furthermore, the earth’s heat budget is continually replenished by the radioactive decay of naturally occurring elements, and almost all of the energy associated with each decay event is converted to heat. Plus, the heat content of the geothermal reservoir rocks is continually replenished by conduction of heat from the earth’s deeper interior.
I see. 42 million megawatts is 42,000 gigawatts. A quick google search tells me that typical power output of a nuclear power plant is around 1 gigawatt.
So a single nuclear power plant would be roughly equivalent to 0.002% of earths geothermal energy radiation. It doesn't sound like much, but for something as crucial as the earth's magnetic field, I wouldn't want to reduce it one bit.
I guess if the heat is radiated into space anyways and we simply capture that it doesn't speed up the core's energy loss, but if we start digging into the core and allowing energy to escape faster, we would effectively speed it up, right?
My concern is fundamentally whether or not we are siphoning energy out of the core faster than it would otherwise escape.
Since the layers are directly connected, it doesn't sound like to me that you'd have to dig into the very core for that to happen.
Of course at the current state of affairs the effects are miniscule, but it doesn't sound like a very good investment as something to potentially scale up in the future to where it will actually matter.
If it turns out to be a problem, how hard would it be to insert fuel back into the earth's core to sustain the magnetic field?
Literally impossible to do. And, also, absolutely pointless to worry about.
In another century, if we don't blast ourselves back to the stone age first (increasingly likely), energy from hydrogen-boron fusion will dominate wherever solar is impractical, and the geothermal wells will become too expensive to continue operating. So, either way, the whole process is an imperceptible blip.
OK, good. But yeah the high likelihood of returning to the stone age repeatedly makes it even more important for the magnetic field to sustain for as long as possible.
We will never have any way to interfere with the planetary magnetic field, in any circumstance.
Blasting our way back to the stone age will succeed in chopping off CO2 output suddenly, though. The climate could then return to normal in only a century or three, if the sudden change did not instead trigger an ice age or something.
If only all problems were as trivially ignorable as this one.
The radius of the Earth is 4000 miles. A 10-mile hole is thus 1/400 of the way to the center. You may as well worry that scratching the skin of an apple might damage the seeds.
Actually scratching the skin of an apple does negatively affect the apple - the part of the "mantle" under the scratch begins to rot right away.
Look at a graph of the temperature of the Earth as a function of depth. The temperature jumps tremendously below the crust, and is much more stable per depth below. The crust is the insulation of the Earth - and damaging that crust might affect the mantle is ways we cannot yet imagine.
It could also leak out, loose heat, and drilling down to it could trigger earthquakes and eruptions.
The argument "it's big, we can't affect it" has been proven wrong in the case of the atmosphere, and again in the case of the ocean. It is no longer a sound argument.
"It's big, we can't drill more than a negligible fraction of the way to it" remains as true as ever. So, no, we cannot make it leak out, lose heat, or trigger earthquakes or eruptions. It will still be almost as hot in a half-billion years when the sun engulfs and vaporizes it, whatever we do.
Eruptions in Siberia, and later in India, not long ago geologically, released more heat in a (geologically) short time than we could use up in a million years, with no effect on the Earth's magnetic field.
The answer that I've always heard is "no". But that would have also been the answer to "do tailpipe emissions affect the atmosphere" in March 1922, so I'd say that we just don't yet know.
Global climate disruption by CO2 emissions was first predicted in the 1890s.
You should worry instead about the effects of excreted pharmaceuticals and neo-nicotinoid pesticides on wildlife, excess fertilizer runoff on coastal ecosystems, and ocean acidification from CO2 dissolving to produce carbonic acid, making sea life unable to fix calcium for shells, destroying the underpinnings of the food chain and the whole ocean ecosystem. Oh, and global climate disruption.
We have no need to borrow imaginary trouble, we are making plenty of actually real trouble already.
Nuclear reactors could modulate their output, but they would take a grievous economic hit if they do so, because most of their costs are fixed, independent of the power setting.
Shipping from thevoutside of the European Union isn't really relevant after our eastern neighbor decided to invade Ukraine.
We were originally planning to ditch domestic peat as fuel, in favor of Russian biofuel, but that's off the table now, and peat will probably be used extensively for a few years until alternatives are in place.
Energy independence is what we aim for at the moment. Carbon neutral is still something we aim for in the long run, but not being relianton Russian energy is the primary goal for the next few years.
Since solar panels can go to zero output onto the grid instantly, this is just a matter of improper design (of the equipment, or of the regulatory regime.)
In any case, the cost/kWh from nuclear is computed assuming it's running flat out (except for refueling outages). Reduce that generation and the levelized cost increases. It's already very much higher than renewables; curtailing nuclear output would make that discrepancy worse.
Except if I have batteries, why should I charge them with expensive nuclear energy when I can charge them with cheap renewables? The nuclear plant will be forced to compete with those renewables for this market, which will limit what it can earn with the otherwise curtailed output. This is not as bad as losing it entirely, or even paying for someone to take it, but it's still going to be a net negative for the plant's economics vs. running all out selling at the calculated cost.
Nuclear has very high capital costs but fuel and operating costs (sans financing and insurance) are relatively cheap. Nuclear energy isn’t expensive if the plant is already built, so if you had to choose and the costs were already sunk, it wouldn’t matter. I guess your point is whether to build the plants in the first place rather than going with other renewables. Since hydro is pretty much tapped out, I guess that would be wind or biofuels?
My point was that when you calculate the cost/kWh from a nuclear plant, if you then are going to operate than plant only 50% (say) of the time you could otherwise do so, the cost/kWh from that plant goes way up, because those high fixed costs are now amortized over only half the output.
Note that even some of the OPERATING costs of a nuclear plant are fixed. You still need about as many staff to run the plant even if you cycle it up and down.
The renewables will be wind and PV. Biomass uses too much land area, and would likely be reserved for specialty markets like chemical feedstocks and perhaps aviation fuel.
Operating cost of nukes is low only compared to coal and oil, and not even to gas. Compared to renewable + storage, nuke operating cost is very, very high.
Do you have sufficient battery capacity to power your grid through a 90th percentile worst case scenario solar outage? 95th? 99th? How long can it go without running coal and gas?
Nuclear works when you want it to. Solar and wind work when they want to. That's a very big difference when you're producing the electricity people rely on to live their daily lives.
It's a very common mistake to think that batteries are to be used to get to a 100% renewable grid.
Hydrogen can be much cheaper for (say) the last 10%, because (1) hydrogen has very low capital cost per unit of storage capacity, and (2) the efficiency hit of going through hydrogen vs. batteries is less important when it's just 10% of the total.
Think of batteries and hydrogen as analogous to cache memory and main memory in a computer. They have different performance and economic characteristics and compensate for each others weak points.
To see this in operation, go to https://model.energy/ and try turning hydrogen off and on in the settings. If you simulate for Germany, for example, turning off hydrogen can double the cost of achieving a certain level of constant grid power. Hydrogen can be particularly valuable for places with large seasonal variation or lots of wind (which has a long timescale component in how it varies.)
I will add that China is already selling electrolysers for < $300/kW, less than half that simulation's 2030 cost assumption.
> Hydrogen can be much cheaper for (say) the last 10%, because (1) hydrogen has very low capital cost per unit of storage capacity, and (2) the efficiency hit of going through hydrogen vs. batteries is less important when it's just 10% of the total.
Basically all hydrogen comes from fossil fuels. It's just natural gas with extra steps.
That's true right now, but that doesn't mean that hydrogen has to come from fossil fuels in the future (any more than most electrical power coming from fossil fuels right now means that that must also be the case in the future.)
When describing hydrogen for energy storage in a 100% renewable grid, the hydrogen would be produced by electrolysis using renewable energy.
Isn’t that what the EVs could be? There is also pumped storage, but it requires lots of land, water, and elevation differences (the latter I assume being the issue in Finland).
Pumped storage needs a lot of water to start but can then just cycle the water between reservoirs. Some will be lost by evaporation, but that loss isn't that high.
I once compared a proposed pumped hydro system in Arizona near Phoenix vs. the water evaporated by the Palos Verde nuclear generating station. Per unit of levelized power output, the pumped hydro system used at least an order of magnitude less water than the nuclear plant.
That analysis ignores the prospect of siting a solar array floating on the reservoir, with benefits of reduced evaporation and cooler, more efficient conversion, an opportunity unlikely to be long neglected.
It will mostly only go down, anyway, when the sun is not out.
If the panels don't mind settling on the banks, or if they are far enough offshore not to, that will not be a problem. It is already common to float panels on regular hydroelectric generation reservoirs, so the event is anyway familiar to operators.
If the floats are bottom-heavy and attached to cables spanning the reservoir, the water dropping out from under just leaves them suspended. You need cable attachments, anyway, to extract power and maintain spacing.
Granted, the cost for solar and wind fail to account for the cost of storage to accommodate their intermittency. If your country has hydroelectric dams, then that works. But for the rest that don't have the right geography for hydro, they burn fossil fuels.
Nuclear provides a path for decarbonization. Solar and wind do not, until a massive breakthrough in energy storage is invented. And nobody knows when that will happen, or if it will happen.
We don't need massive breakthroughs in energy storage. And the goal is overall carbon-neutral, not carbon-zero. And other than wind and solar, we also have hydro and geo-thermal. The latter might become a very important part of the mix, as it would be relatively easy to securely and relatively cheaply deploy a lot of small scale heat pump power plants, requiring fewer massive power line installations, with the added benefit that geo-thermal basically works independent from the time of the day and weather conditions.
As for storage, one way to "store" energy is hydrogen, which we can then burn as needed. We can probably get the efficiency of that to 70% (for hydrogen-burning larger-scale power plants).
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is another existing option, with an efficiency of about 70-80%.
It's also OK to have some carbon emissions if you can manage to have other measures neutralizing that. We can e.g. use renewable biofuels (e.g. wood, biomass from algae or crops) which "use" a lot of carbon while growing to remove a lot of the emissions the power plants produce, and can with filter technology remove the rest to a degree where we'd still be neutral overall.
As I see it, we already got all the basic building blocks, and now it's a matter of optimizing them further and further, and more importantly figuring out the development and deployment (including financing, investment incentives, etc) and logistics (building the additional power lines required is a massive, politically-charged, often NIMBY-kind challenge here in Germany, and from what I hear in a lot of other places including the US too).
The deployment and logistics is a general problem of electrification, even with nuclear. People want to plug in their EVs near where they live, and want heat in their homes, so you either need additional power lines or (smaller scale) power plants close to people and industry, either way.
> And other than wind and solar, we also have hydro and geo-thermal.
These are geographically dependent. You can't build the where you need them.
> As for storage, one way to "store" energy is hydrogen, which we can then burn as needed. We can probably get the efficiency of that to 70% (for hydrogen-burning larger-scale power plants).
Large scale electrolysis remains unproven. This goes in the "scientific breakthrough required" bucket.
> Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is another existing option, with an efficiency of about 70-80%
Also geographically dependent. You basically need an alpine lake handy to build pumped storage.
Carbon sequestration at anything close to relevant scales also has never been done.
> The deployment and logistics is a general problem of electrification, even with nuclear. People want to plug in their EVs near where they live, and want heat in their homes, so you either need additional power lines or (smaller scale) power plants close to people and industry, either way.
No, this isn't a problem with nuclear. Most energy demand is in cities. And since nuclear plants are not geographically dependent, you can build them near places with lots of energy demand. As opposed to renewables which might need to be built very far away in places with large solar or wind potential.
Geo-thermal is a little bit geographically dependent, but by far not as much as you make it sound. Hydro is indeed very geo-dependent, no contest there.
Large-scale electrolysis is not unproven. E.g. Air Liquide operates a 20MW plant producing 3000t/annum near Quebec already[0]. Other projects in development aim for 200MW facilities. Granted, that isn't yet massive scale, just about 99,000 MWh/annum of usable energy (about 33kWh/kg for hydrogen), and the smallest US nuclear plant is theoretically capable of 5,098,320 Mwh/annum or around 50 times more. But large scale enough to act as a proof of concept in my opinion.
Pumped storage is a bit geo-dependent, but you do not need an alpine lake, you need an empty space somewhat higher up where you can pump some water, preferably without loosing too much water due to evaporation and other factors, and some water, preferably fresh water to avoid corrosion as much as possible, maybe desalinated. But if need be salt water and an artificial hill will do.
As for the deployment and logistics of nuclear, it is certainly a problem. Our current grids, independent from the form of electricity generation, are usually not designed to handle the growing demand that electrification probably will create. You can see what happens when the demand somewhat suddenly rises (and the EV introduction is still somewhat "sudden" in the time scales grid operators and infrastructure planners usually consider) e.g. in Kazakhstan when the Chinese bitcoin miners moved there[1]. Furthermore, planning, building and testing new nuclear plants is a massive capital expenditure even without technology research, as well as a political hot topic in a lot of places (and even in nuclear-friendly regions I'd bet that NIMBYs would form real quick once a location for a new plant gets discussed).
Last thing I read by the way is that the EU gets about 20% of the Uranium it uses to fuel existing nuclear plants from Russia (at least until now), with another ~20% coming from Kazakhstan[2], which is somewhat closely allied to (and for sure scared of) Russia. Another ~20% come from Niger, a country not exactly renowned for being a politically stable and human-rights respecting nation. Maybe the EU can source elsewhere, even if the demand increases as potentially more nuclear within the EU goes online, but it surely has a rather problematic political dimension attached aside from general nuclear politics such a nuclear proliferation. And it's not just the EU which needs to switch to electrification, either. Where will Africa or Latin America or Asia get their nuclear tech and nuclear fuel?
Nuclear, like oil, creates international political dependencies in a lot of places, while most renewables would not necessarily do the same.
Geothermal is indeed geographically dependent. You need to be on a fault line, or otherwise have heated rocks near the surface. Most places do not have these conditions.
The hydrolysis example you provided is tiny relative to the requirements of grid scale storage. To put this in perspective, the US alone uses 500 GWh of electricity every hour. And this will increase as electrification progresses, electricity only accounts for about a third of total energy production. Producing grid scale hydrolysis remains unproven.
The same reliance on a globalized economy still exist with intermittent sources. The copper used in wind turbine generators probably comes from Chile, for instance.
With laser drilling, geothermal is no longer geographically dependent.
That will, of course, still need to be developed to production. But it is a (large) incremental process improvement, not a whole different technology.
First you said hydrolysis was not practical at all. Today you say 200 MW facilities are not big enough. What will you say tomorrow? Why not admit it now?
You could point to flywheels as a form of energy storage. But unless you actually have the ability to operate them at sufficient scale, that's irrelevant. People have been investigating laser drilling for a decade at least [1], yet it hasn't resulted in widespread geothermal adoption.
Throughout this whole thread you've been pointing to proposals and plans as though simply having plans is a demonstration of viability. Unless people are actively implementing the solutions you're proposing, then those solutions aren't proven to work. There's a massive difference between pointing to an entrepreneur that promises this special drill will be able to build geothermal plants anywhere, and actually building geothermal plants in the middle of Germany. There's a massive difference between plans that promise to store X amount of hydrogen, and actually building and running said storage plants. Electrolysis has been known for at
As far as I'm concerned, both hydrolysis and this geothermal-anywhere approach fall into the bucket of "scientific breakthroughs". Could they be viable if they pan out? Sure. But it's highly unwise to bet the future of civilization on something that might work out, as opposed to something that's been operating at scale for most of a century.
Thus, it is good that nobody is talking about betting the future of civilization on any such thing. We have well-proven storage methods, and a large variety of promising alternatives, almost all of which depend on no new physics, just old-fashioned civil engineering. Any of those few that would need a "breakthrough" they don't get will be easily forgotten. Most of the failures will be for alternatives that turn out to be slightly less cheap than others.
60 years, by the way, pushes the boundary of "most of a century".
We have well proven storage methods that don't scale. We have unproven storage mechanisms that we hope will scale.
Let's actually put this in perspective: Global electricity consumption is about 60 TWh daily, which works out to about 2.5 TWh per hour or 40 GWh per minute. Plans to run a wind and solar grid predict a 12 hour storage requirement to generate 80% of our energy from wind and solar [1], and weeks of storage for a 100% wind and solar grid. And remember, this is on top of the cost of actually generating all that energy in the first place. If people want to prove that these storage mechanisms are viable, then how about they build one minute's worth of storage. If we don't even have one minute's worth of storage provisioned, then I see zero reason to be confident in the ability to build hours, days, or weeks of storage.
By comparison, we'd need to build 9 nuclear plants for each one that presently exist to generate all of our electricity from nuclear. Any only 8 if we eliminate everything but nuclear and hydro. Also, It's 68 years since the first nuclear electrical plant and 80 years since the first fission reactor.
If nuclear is to power the world it also needs technologies that have not been proven.
Today's thermal reactors, if they provided the entire 18 TW of primary energy demand, would consume in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year. This would consume known uranium resources in less than a decade.
So, either seawater uranium would be needed (which would have to be scaled up by something like 11 orders of magnitude from what has been demonstrated) or breeder reactors would be needed (also not a proven technology, and likely more expensive than thermal burner reactors.)
The real figure [1] is 60,000 years worth of uranium with our current nuclear energy production, which is about 10% of our electrical demand. So 6,000 years for a 100% nuclear grid. Electricity production is about 25% of total energy demand, so call it 1,500 years for all energy converted to nuclear.
Furthermore, moving nuclear seawater extraction - even at it's present costs, without economies of scale - would not significantly impact nuclear's costs [2]:
> Fortunately, the cost of uranium is a small percentage of the cost of nuclear fuel, which is itself a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power. Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.
> So as the cost of extracting U from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
Electrolysis was well understood for a century before we knew fission existed.
Pumped hydro has always worked at scale.
You keep repeating that storage is not built out. We know. Before it can have been built out, it will need building out. But nukes are also not built out. Which can get done faster?
You just really wish storage tech was harder than it is because you need that for nukes not to look like the obviously bad investment they have proven, by "most of a century" of experience, to be.
Nuclear is much more built out as compared to storage. We need only one order of magnitude increase to decarbonize through nuclear. Actually, slightly under one order of magnitude, only about a factor of 8 increase depending on how much hydroelectric plants we keep.
By comparison, we need 6 to 7 orders of magnitude increase in our existing hydro and battery storage capacity to decarbonize through renewables. And an infinity order of magnitude increase in electrolysis storage, because we don't have any such storage at all. It's not that they haven't been built out. They haven't been built, full stop.
I don't need to make storage tech look any worse than it is. How much electrolysis storage capacity do we have, worldwide? Zero. I think you're the one engaging in wishful thinking, treating these totally unproven systems as certain when nobody has ever operated a grid storage electrolysis facility.
If someone told you they have plans for a supersonic passenger jet that will be even cheaper than normal airliners, would you believe them? If they actually had working planes, and they were actually able to build and operate a batch of a few dozen planes more cheaply than typical airlines then yes. But if they only had one plane, and little operational experience I wouldn't. And if all they had were plans on paper, I certainly would not - this is the stage that storage mechanisms other than hydro and batteries are in.
You wish that costs for renewables were not still plummeting, and for storage were not falling more than twice as fast as for renewables, and that costs for building and operating nukes were not, instead, rising. But they are, they are, and they are.
Pretending that "breakthroughs" will be needed to field storage must be your last hope, but building out storage is just construction. You will continue to be disappointed.
You insist storage costs are cheaper, but the reality is that we can't know the cost until storage plants are actually built. You're comparing the actual costs of nuclear, with the promised costs of storage. We have actual costs for hydro and battery storage, but they are too high. We only have promised costs of electrolysis, ammonia, or what have you because none of the approaches have actually been built.
Come back to me when electrolysis storage systems are actually built, and we can examine the actual costs of storage the same way we examine the costs of nuclear: by looking at the bill after the plant has been built. If you really are so confident in their efficacy, then this should be no problem.
There will be no artificial hills for pumped hydro. (Usually those are called "water towers" when used for municipal water storage under pressure.)
But deep subterranean cave and sub-ocean tanks for pumped hydro will be a thing. These make pumped hydro storage practical in radically more places than usually imagined. Combined with hill reservoirs, they multiply the storage capacity per unit mass of water.
A hilltop reservoir is, incidentally, an excellent place to site a solar array, which is cooled and more efficient by the water under it, and in turn radically reduces evaporative loss and biofouling in the reservoir.
I am not saying we're almost there, just that we do not necessarily need break-though new tech.
You're absolutely right that we will need to spend a lot of money and time if you seriously want to achieve to become globally carbon-neutral. However, going nuclear wouldn't be necessarily cheaper or quicker, either.
Agreed. Though be aware, that puts the decarbonizing countries at a massive disadvantage to those who aren’t decarbonizing, as every action they take (from heating to transport) becomes more directly expensive.
Which makes a war of conquest or destruction by countries not doing so much easier to win.
Edit: Also, with interest rates likely to go up due to inflation/central bank action, that CapEx may soon be impossible to bear without some equivalent to a wartime economy anyway. A lot of the renewables have been helped by essentially free money.
It doesn't mean it is necessarily more directly expensive. The decarbonizing nations, notably the "West" and even China to a degree, have a lot of influence and control over the markets of good and services, both politically as well as a matter of who owns companies manufacturing things, and currently also in regards of who creates demand and margins for producers.
You can see that in a lot of consumer products already, when the EU e.g. started to mandate to put energy consumption ratings on electric appliances, and the market then swiftly went to improve the power consumption in most cases. I grew up with regular light bulbs, but now I and everybody I know largely uses LED light bulbs, again driven by consumer demand and heavily nudged by political policy in the EU. And I either save money now or at least break even thanks to my electric bill being less, and LED lights usually lasting so long they are over time cheaper than the old regular bulbs.
I wouldn't dare try to predict how these things would actually shake out eventually.
True! Though be aware, what you are referring to is not energy production, which is what I was referring to. It is efficiency gains in energy consumption.
Most of the easy improvements have already been done. with the possible exception of insulating more (far harder than changing out electric bulbs or when new appliances get bought or computers age out replacing them with higher efficiency versions). Normal ICE cars and trucks have also hit diminishing returns efficiency wise.
Usually not so easy though as it may seem, especially in concrete, stone, or other masonry buildings which are very common in Europe.
What I’m referring to is far coarser grained, and on the production side.
Fossil fuels are very, very energy dense, and that energy is released/used through completely different mechanisms than electrical energy. So for heat, even if switching to heat pumps which are over unity devices (1 Input unit of energy can move almost 3x units of heat), the amount of energy required to do so for countries which need a lot of heat is astronomical. I did some back of the envelope math for Germany in another thread, and even being very conservative we’re talking 7x the total energy requirements of their current entire grid to replace natural gas for them.
So it’s more than just buying a heat pump and installing it, it’s a massive undertaking involving the equivalent of $120-$600k+ of capex to accomplish. That is for every many woman and child when you add it all up. One would hope they could be more efficient, but those prices already involve a huge economy of scale.
If the EU forms an army and has mandated no fossil fuels, they would need to spend a massive amount more capex to build that army than if they did not right now, let alone keep it energized. That takes time, resources from other things, and exposes them to unique supply chain challenges too.
If they want to just switch their economy off fossil fuels, right now that will likely take a 5-10 years even on a wartime footing. It takes time to build factories, source materials, R&D complex things. Many of these will depend on countries they may not want to depend on (such as chips from China or raw materials currently sourced from Russia). And that is a massive amount of money, on top of likely weapons manufacturing, etc.
If they wanted to do it in 2 years, I’m not sure it’s possible right now.
Geographic distribution only works so much. It lower the probability of insufficient generation, but doesn't completely eliminate it. It also comes with other costs. Namely, the need for overproduction as well as expanding electrical infrastructure to move lots of energy over long distances. We're already hitting transmission bottlenecks for renewable projects: https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/3/22560691/power-grid-clim...
We have electricity run to almost everywhere there is a road, and every building that we spend any significant amount of time in. We can charge at work or on the street during the day. Basically anywhere a car is stationary.
With the right incentives and infrastructure we can shift electric vehicle charging to daytime, or whenever there is excess generating ability coming from the grid.
Most people don't drive all day long either. They drive half an hour at a time several times a day, going to work or school or the mall and back. The remaining ~22 hours a day are available for charging.
If a country has abundant solar power (probably not Finland!) it would make more sense to wire up workplace parking lots so that EVs could absorb the excess midday electricity.
Sure, but at night the car will probably be in place for, say, 10 hours, every night. Not faffing jumping between places and trying to find a public charging point. Even just driving to work and charging there is say 6 hours of continuous charging. The main block of time will still be at night.
6 hours charging is more than enough for work/school/shopping. On the rare occasion that you want to drive all day, you can add a night charge to that (before or after the drive as appropriate). Overall, the large majority of charging will (or can) be during the day.
True, though it depends on energy mix and location, and all day on weekends are also often similar. If any of your local electricity providers have a variable time of use tariff, that's a pretty good guide to when the cheapest (and often, but not always, the greenest) electricity is available.
Some EVs can automatically charge at these times, and sometimes you get discounts for charging at these times, but you can also usually just set a timer on your charger.
For example the above suggests it's usually nighttime, but weekends and statutory holidays are also good.
As an aside, I wonder how much money an economy could save by having a new "cheap electricity holiday' which chooses one or two days a year that they announce a month in advance as national holidays when an extreme weather event is predicted.
I live in a province where 90%+ of electrical power comes from hydro sources. Essentially we can arbitrarily scale for time of day demand to a pretty large degree.
It's the incentivized/induced demand problem. Build out a new freeway, suddenly it's full of traffic. Same thing for power. If you make power cheap people find more ways to use it.
This is still probably a good thing, but something to consider.
Much of "induced demand" will be for synthesizing hydrogen and hydrocarbons, which then compete with mined sources, absorb otherwise unused peak capacity, and provide back-up storage.
Finland has 5 million people. I am pretty sure there are existing plants in the world that could satisfy the entire country if moved to Finland. There are 10ish dams that produce over 10k MW
This is if you count the Greater Toronto Area and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex respectively, to be clear (Finland has five and a half million inhabitants).
D-H3 and H-B fusion release their energy in a form that can be extracted electromagnetically, with no detour through heat and turbines, so at least in principle could be cheaper to use than fission, unlike the D-T fusion that ITER etc. target.
There are projects working on these. They have much higher activation energy, so are harder to make happen -- for hydrogen-boron fusion, much, much harder. Helium-3 is scarce, effectively available only from decay of tritium, all of which has to be synthesized, then it needs to decay, with a half-life of 12 years.
Yeah, we're pretty close to the point where as much time has passed since pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors were invented as there was between their invention and the invention of the steam turbine.
By population that's one reactor of this scale per million people. To replace all other sources of electricity, 8 thousand such reactors would feed the current world's population. We'd need just shy of 500 more to keep up with population growth by 2030 - or at least 500 new reactors globally per decade.
(edit - assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shouldn't they be able to - and - obviously they don't)
> assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shouldn't they be able to
Finland's climate is an outlier:
One-third of energy consumption in housing was electricity in 2018. [...] 47% of electricity was used to heat indoor areas and 36% to household appliances. The remainder of electricity was used to heat domestic water and saunas.
Here in Perth a good third or more of my electricity is keeping the house cool so some of that is going to average out. We don't have saunas but we do have hot water.
There's going to be an obvious error of margin either side of my napkin calculations but I think the order of magnitude is in the ballpark.
It’s a question of temperature difference. Cooling a house from 40° to 20° uses approximately the same energy as heating it from 0° to 20°. But it gets much colder than 0° C in Finland, while it is very rare to have temperatures above 45° C anywhere in the world.
It's not just that. To make something colder using a heat pump, you must heat up something else by the equivalent amount. Actually more, because of losses.
Whereas making something warmer can be done without a heat pump, by releasing stored chemical energy, at nearly no losses.
Heating something with chemical energy by combustion (for example) has a large second law loss -- there's a large increase in entropy in combustion, and in transmitting the high grade heat to the low temperature of the building being heated. Because of these avoidable entropy sources, it's possible to be smarter, for example to use a gas-fired heat pump to achieve a COP of > 1.
Yeah, a simple absorbtion refrigerator (gas fired) is already way better than a gas oven.
The plumbing is just more expensive than works often be worth it, and the nice low-temperature systems run on what's essentially an ammonia destiller.
Nope, it’s all about the temperature differential. Using a heat pump like an air conditioner is the same efficiency either direction. Usually when you’re talking about heat it’s going from (say) 20F to 70F, with AC it’s more like 90F to 70F. With heat you might even need to do like 0F to 65. AC max might be 115 to 75 which is still substantially less.
How about building design? I know in colder climates buildings are designed to retain heat. Are buildings in warmer climates designed with similar heat insulation in mind? I think traditional architectures are designed for convective cooling but that doesn't play well with air-conditioning. Not too mention the modern designs obsessed with glass which I think traps heat. Good and efficient for cold climates, not so much for the hot ones.
Right. But remember, not all forms of green energy generation are equal. Wind and solar need some dispatchable source as a backup. Hydro works, if you have it. But it's geographically limited. Gas is the typical backup source, but that emits carbon.
Nuclear, as it stands, is the only solution to decarbonizing the energy grid for much of the world. Until some breakthrough in energy storage transpires, or fusion becomes feasible, fission plants remain necessary for decarbonization.
Storage is a solved problem, and only needs to be built out. No such "breakthrough" is needed.
Storage cost is falling much faster, even, than solar and wind generation. The only question today is whether to put a euro into solar or wind now, or into storage that will be much cheaper next year. Thus far, in most places, the former is still favored. More carbon tax can help move the choice the other way.
As solar and wind costs continue down, synthesizing methane and kerosene from captured CO2 and synthetic hydrogen will shortly be cheaper than mining, refining, and transporting them, even without the carbon taxes. Synthesis of those, and of ammonia and hydrogen itself will absorb unlimited "overbuilt" peak generating capacity, and stocks of all of those serve also as storage. That their round-trip efficiency is less than, say, hydro or batteries matters little where they rarely need to be used for that.
And which solution is that? Lithium ion batteries? To put this in perspective, global lithium ion battery output [1] annually doesn't amount to 1 hour's worth of US electricity usage (500 GWh). Hydroelectric storage? You essentially need to repurpose an alpine lake as a dam. That's geographically dependent, and it's dubious it'd scale well as viable hydro sites become more and more remote. The remaining things like electricity-to-gas, or thermal storage only exist in prototypes, and might not even be feasible let alone viable.
In response to your edit:
> As solar and wind costs continue down, synthesizing methane and kerosene from captured CO2 and synthetic hydrogen will shortly be cheaper than mining, refining, and transporting them, even without the carbon taxes. Synthesis of those, and of ammonia and hydrogen itself will absorb unlimited "overbuilt" peak generating capacity, and stocks of all of those serve as storage.
Nobody has successfully built a grid-scale energy-to-gas plant, ever. It remains the stuff of prototypes. This approach is very much in the "hypothetical" phase. There are serious unsolved problems in energy-to-gas:
* It needs a source of carbon to convert H2 to methane. This could come from biofuels, but those aren't available in sufficient supply.
* Producing large quantities of hydrogen without CO2 emissions remains difficult. Almost all methane comes from steam reformation (CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2), which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis can't be done effectively.
Currently, power to gas storage is way more expensive than either lithium ion or hydroelectric storage and it's unclear whether it'll ever be cheaper than existing options.
Obviously not lithium batteries. Even suggesting it demonstrates you are not serious.
And, obviously hydrogen will not continue to be made from hydrocarbons. It will instead be feedstock for synthesizing hydrocarbons. Carbon would need to be extracted from air, or at least from exhaust, to get carbon credits.
What you're describing is a combination of electrolysis and the Sabatier process [1]. And as I explain before there are major obstacles to actually converting electricity to methane at scale. It needs a source of carbon, and extraction of carbon from the air or exhaust is not feasible. Furthermore, massive electrolysis of hydrogen is also not something we have been able to do. Almost all hydrogen is produced through carbon-emitting steam reformation [2].
In short, converting electricity to methane and then back to electricity again is not a presently available option and it's unclear whether it'll ever be viable at stale. Grid-scale energy storage remains an unsolved problem
It is fortunate that you are not making decisions, then, for the people who are directing the use of billions of dollars invested in exactly the activities you insist do not work.
The Swedish government made a viability study on green hydrogen a years ago, which is public as all other government papers are. The cost estimate was around 100 times that of burning natural gas, or about 10 times higher than nuclear. It has potential if it can fall in prices, but so far it has not. The study also referenced German studies with similar findings.
It is so economical nonviable that there isn't even small scale experiments to get the ball running as a storage medium. There is however some bright spots for green hydrogen when hydrogen itself can be used. Green hydrogen is only a few times more expensive than using fossil fuel in order to create hydrogen, and in that situation green hydrogen has found a place. It also reduces those industries CO2 emissions which can then be turned into profits in terms of trading existing emissions rights. As fossil fuels prices goes up, the economical viability of green hydrogen in hydrogen using industries goes up, but the price compared to nuclear remain the same.
The Brits are switching to store wind-generated hydrogen in undersea cavities where they now stockpile natural gas. A similar project is going on in Utah, and another in Texas. All three are utility-scale production systems, not pilot projects.
Other storage media being built out for full-scale production use include iron-air batteries, where (IIRC) $1.5B is going into factories, a liquified-air storage system in Chile ($0.5B), and synthetic ammonia in Norway. Nobody can track even a fraction of the utility-scale pumped-hydro projects under construction world-wide.
We will need hundreds times as much of these, and of others, in the end, which will all take decades to build out.
Coverage I'm reading about this project says it's not only a prototype, it's also a planned prototype. The prototype hasn't even been built yet: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55763356
You said it'd be stored in caves, so perhaps it's a different project. It'd be good to link to this project.
Right, these alternative energy storage systems are untested technology. Contrary to your prior claims, they're not being built at grid scale currently.
You mean, they are not being operated at grid scale, currently.
Things still being built need to finish being built before they go into service.
Just yesterday, you said some unspecified "breakthroughs" would be needed. Now you point to construction not finished. You are clutching at straws. The more honest course would be to admit you were just wrong.
The construction hasn't even begun on these projects, and it's unclear whether they will actually be built. The Utah project is still trying to secure funding, We do need a scientific breakthrough to make storage possible. Grid scale hydrogen electrolysis could be that breakthrough, but we don't know if it will live up to expectations.
Energy storage is far from a solved problem. You insist that it's been solved, but none of your proposed solutions have actually been implemented.
Well-understood energy storage methods need to be built out. Building out takes time. We already knew that. We also know we don't need any breakthroughs before we can build out. We have methods that work now.
That is not to say there won't be breakthroughs, too, that make storage even cheaper to build out. But any storage already built will continue working as well as ever. Any hoped-for breakthroughs that don't pan out will not stall build-out. The worst that can happen is costs plummeting not quite as precipitously as had been expected.
We already see utility-scale hydro storage in use, and utility-scale iron-air battery factories under construction, and utility-scale liquified-air and ammonia-synthesis plants under construction, and utility-scale investment in hydrogen synthesis and storage. Each additional storage technology that begins to come online only improves the picture.
Repeating, again and again, that things that still need to be built out have not been built out yet sheds no light.
Because it's not much (if even that) cheaper than batteries in practice, it's very limited by geography (best sites for this are often already used for it), and there are significant environmental concerns (mountains are often protected areas, because humans have not managed to destroy them as much as other places).
Each dollar put into building out nuclear instead of renewables + storage brings climate disaster closer. Money is fungible. You cannot spend the same dollar on both. A dollar spent on nukes yields enormously less than the same dollar spent on renewables, and the difference is only growing.
Nuclear plants can modulate power by more aggressively cooling the reactor. They don't do this because it's effectively wasting nuclear energy, but it can be done.
There are safety-related limits (power modulation proportion, duration of a pause needed after each modulation, modulations frequency...), and the very combustible status is a major parameter.
« un réacteur peut varier de 100 % à 20 % de puissance en une demi-heure, et remonter aussi vite après un palier d’au moins deux heures, et ce deux fois par jour »
Proposed translation: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
It can be done, but amounts to decreased utilization, and even greater relative incremental cost, because actual operating cost is the same either way. With nukes already the highest-cost choice, intermittent demand makes them even more impractical.
1.6GW is a pretty standard install in nuclear. For scale the largest nuclear install Kori is the current largest in operation at 7.4GWe installed capacity[2]. It achieved 74+% capacity last year which is an important point missed when looking at energy _delivered_ to the grid. By contrast US plants achieve much higher capacity factors, with Diablo Canyon in California producing 2.2 GWe at a _lifetime_ operation capacity factor of 90+%[1]. Scaling up nuclear, at high reliability is not such a stretch as some other energy scaling problems.
1.6 GWe is huge for a single nuclear reactor. EPRs are on the high end. Most nuclear reactors are closer to 1 GWe. Nuclear plants with multiple reactors on a site certainly do often go well above 1.6.
From I understand, China's foray in EPR was simply a move to leech the technology from France to improve their own ability to build nuclear plants.
A few people were vocal about this before it happened, and things did not go well for them.
The Maureen Kearney case is simply unbelievable, this woman was working for Areva and blowing the whistle hard on this transfer of technology, after receiving threat she was found tied up in her bedroom, a letter A engraved in her abdomen, with a kitchen knife handle inserted in her genitals.
The police decided she probably did that to herself and jailed her, while the state attorney prosecuted her. And she was sentenced to prison time and a hefty fine. it took a while before the sentence was overturned and for the truth to come out that she had not faked anything.
In the end, what she was warning actually happened, France is no better and even worse in its ability to build nuclear plants with no actual plant put in service (ITER is a mess, Flamanville EPR is plagued), while China started both Taishan EPR reactors and is now able to sell its ability to build plants to other countries.
That's a good point, people in Finland use more per capita than 80% of the global population, so if everyone were to have the same energy standards as Finland we'd probably need more like 10k reactors and 600 per year give or take.
Or we stick with the status quo, force everyone into their lane, and probably need like 3000 to 4000 reactors to serve current needs, and 150 to 200 per year. Give or take.
I think that's still in the same ballpark orders of magnitude-wise.
Everything has downsides, and it has to be compared to the alternatives.
In Finland's case, the realistic alternatives are burning coal or burning Russian gas. (If the Finns dedicated a substantial chunk of their forests to this one generator, they could maybe use biomass.)
Coal kills two orders of magnitude more people per GWh than nuclear--and it does that when operating nominally, not when malfunctioning--and it produces three or four orders of magnitude more waste and more environmental harm from mining.
Russian gas has geopolitical/national security problems.
Biomass is a roundabout way of burning diesel fuel and gas, while degrading and eroding forest soils and polluting watersheds.
The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to five significant figures.
> The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to five significant figures.
That's a weird metric (one meltdown is quite a catastrophe) and the calculation seems suspicious too. Between Chernobile and Fukushima I don't see how this could be correct.
I do find your other points more convincing, though with some "citation needed" wrt. coal.
I can't speak to the meltdown statistic, but for coal: just the burning alone is responsible for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths annually[1].
And that's before we consider the environmental and health risks of ash ponds[2], which can (and have caused) heavy metal pollution in nearby groundwater supply. The largest industrial spill in US history happened barely a decade ago, and was an ash pond[3].
Edit: I can personally recommend "The Buffalo Creek Disaster" (ISBN 9780394723433) as a writeup by a lawyer involved in a similar coal ash accident (one that directly killed over 100 people).
WHO has particulate air pollution from fossil and biofuel killing just about 8 million people per year (a Chernobyl of people (short + long term) every 7 hours). Add in that they also cause climate change and non-combustion sources like nuclear, wind, solar, hydro all look pretty darn awesome.
I love this reply. We can go even further. If we would approach air safety in such way as Nuclear, then de Havilland DH.106 Comet would be first and last commercial jet.
Nuclear fision reactors safety technology have moved further. There are challenges, but we havent even tried to solve them fully (as we were busy improving gas burning efficiency)
TMI and Fukushima were both "modern" when built. All reactors that melted down did because operators ignored construction, maintenance, or operating safety standards. Other plants not yet melted down show evidence of more construction standard failings: pumps installed despite failing to meet specifications, bolts of substituted, inadequate steel. Diablo Canyon is built directly on a fault line. Now we learn that new EPR plants are inherently flawed, by design.
Ignoring standards is, by the evidence, itself standard procedure for building and operating civil nuke plants. Our global society, as it is conducted, is by the evidence unable to produce and operate a safe civil nuke.
The improvements were already mainstream before Chernobyl was built. It's all about making reactors tolerant to operator error, and if something does go wrong, make sure it goes wrong slowly, so operators have lots of time to react.
The RBMK reactor is quite an elegant design. Simple plug-and-play architecture for adding and removing fuel and other assemblies while the reactor was running, perfect for things like doping silicon for semiconductors and producing plutonium for weapons. But to get this capability you have to either give up affordability or safety, and they chose to give up safety.
The most obvious is that rods naturally fall into water now, which dampens the neutron exchange to a stop, which works automatically in case of power cut (The rest of improvements are about preventing water from overheating and forming H2, and preventing H2 from overpressuring the chambers or exploding, which happened in both Chernobyl and Fukushima).
Less radioactive waste than coal power plants, and significant less devastation compared to continuing funding wars by buying gas, oil and coal.
Energy generation is always a trade off. Right now the world is reacting to the fossil fuel funded wars created by one such trade off. We are also in the middle of causing irreversible climate change, which would cause more damage than any amount of meltdowns or nuclear waste could ever get near.
Naturally there are alternatives. If money were no objection then green hydrogen looks pretty nice, and one could always extract heat from the core of the earth as long the technology was safe enough to do so. As soon we have a technology that get proven to be cheaper, safer and more scalable than nuclear we should all switch to that. Buying natural gas from Russia is for multiple obvious reason not that.
Less radioactive EMISSION during NORMAL OPERATION than coal plants (and I think that ignores radioactivity released in uranium mining). The amount of radioactivity in the spent fuel rods of a nuclear plant is vastly higher than that liberated by a coal plant.
It is estimated that around 1/5 of people living around a coal ash lake has gotten cancer. Thankfully there are no such number for people living near nuclear plants, or around sites of nuclear waste disposal. The amount of people who has died to radiation thanks to coal vastly outnumber the amount of people who has died to nuclear waste. If we including mining, coal mining is a symbol of one of the most dangerous job a person could do, and it has harvested many more souls than uranium mining.
I don't think they were saying that the radioactivity is causing the cancer in those 1/5 people. I read it as two separate points: coal plants simultaneously emit more radiation than nuclear plants, and coal plants cause more cancer via the other chemicals and rare earth elements they emit.
Yes. one of those other chemicals is arsenic which has a tendency to end up in peoples drinking water.
There is a place in the US that has a rather peculiar name of Cancer Alley. It is not a nuclear testing area, nuclear waste deposit area or area for nuclear plants. It is an area know for its petrochemical plants. It illustrate quite well the difference of nuclear waste that people are scared of, and fossil fuel waste that people accept as just normal part of life.
Moreover the more we obtain uranium (prospecting, mining, milling...), the more we add to the associated carbon footprint. Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions.
Scientific studies are clear: M. Lenzen ("between 10 and 130 g CO2-e/kWhel, with an average of 65 g") and E. Warner et G. Heath ("9 to 110 g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050")...
Nuclear power's "biggest problem" has been solved for decades. You can put everything in giant metal canisters and sink it into bedrock. It's vastly more expensive than doing nothing, but now that politicians are going to be held accountable for their fuckups they'll allocate the money.
And even after all that it's still far less expensive than remediating coal output.
Each and every time someone claims that we can perfectly predict bedrock future for hundreds of thousands years to come I have to remind us that plate tectonics only was admitted by geophysicists during the 1960's.
Hoping to know enough and for sure about all this is... a hope.
Stating that we know what our descendants will need/do in a so distant future is even more funny.
Such a major parameter wasn't considered 60 years ago... others ignored pertinent facts probably exists.
My point was about what we (for the time being) ignore, albeit it is pertinent.
They "considered" such facts using a somewhat light approach:
'Bob Loux, the executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, expressed amazement that the US Department of Energy had only just carried out the "11th hour" drilling tests.
"It certainly looks like DoE has encountered a surprise out there, and it certainly speaks to the fact they haven't done the technical work they should have done years ago," he told the paper.
"It's going to have to cause some change of the design in the final analysis. It's going to impact the safety case."'
They also "considered" those metal containers as adequate during the 1990's, then... (what, you think "they" are omniscient?)... problems related to brines and high temperature arose...
If the biggest externality is heated water in a subarctic climate, or nuclear waste that gets stored on-site indefinitely in casks and produces no notable leaks or accidents (like has been done in the US for a long time now), the externalities are way less than literally any other form of energy production. That includes Dams, solar power, geothermal, wind, you name it.
What prevents heated waste water from being used for…heat? Surely Finland uses central heating plants that pump hot water throughout the city (or maybe that’s just a Chinese/Russian thing?). What makes waste heat water less suited to heating, higher entropy?
Combined Heat and Power in Finland is very common, much more so than in rest of Europe. 80% of the fossil fuel power plants output both electricity and heated water. Compared to (quick googling) 8% in the US and 11% in EU.
I think it just not hot enough after electricity production. So temperature is not high enough after it passes through turbines. Specially due to distances involved.
What I find incredible is that this reactor is going online at all.
Okiluoto started in 2003 and was supposed to cost 3 Bns and be ready in 2009.
it took 18 years instead of 6 and total cost is difficult to know exactly but is over 12 Bns instead of 3.
Building this plant (and the Flamanville one) put into light so many issues at so many levels that I am surprised it was completed and actually works.
Though the previously completed EPRs in Taishan was stopped since last june after gas leaks have been found in the primary circuit and framatome asked the US for help. Current talks point to a design flaw and the possibility of not restarting this EPRs is on the table.
If this is confirmed, this flaw could also affect Okiluoto and flamanville EPRs.
With last winter trend of France finding design flaws in its reactors and being forced to stop them for emergency repairs and maintenance[1] (affecting the most recent and most powerful ones too), nuclear plant do not seems like a sound sustainable choice at least when France is involved.
> it took 18 years instead of 6 and total cost is difficult to know exactly but is over 12 Bns instead of 3.
The cynic in me would like to point out that it's not really running yet:
> Olkiluoto 3 started test production at just over 0.1 gigawatt, a small fraction of its capacity, with a ramp-up to full, regular electricity output planned by the end of July.
What's depressing is that you'd need ten of these giant power plants to power Bitcoin mining.
And by the time you finally got those ten $10B plants online, Bitcoin's energy use would have ballooned to some even more absurd number, assuming we do nothing to stop the current trajectory.
You'll need three times more to power all the standby devices in the US, and nobody is doing something as simple as to powering down their tv/console when they stop using it. People don't even unplug their chargers after their phone is charged.
Interestingly gold mining also uses more electricity than Bitcoin mining and that doesn't even include the associated costs of pollution, cleanups etc. Gold also isn't a network that can transfer value. On the other hand some of it is used in industrial applications.
I think the point is that the only way to reduce crypto profitability is to impose a soft limit on electricity by massively increase the cost of electricity if you exceed a certain allotment. Otherwise, there's no real way to tell if someone is mining crypto or if they just using a lot of electricity unless it's a massive mining operation.
and who's to judge it was useless? If you're the one paying, then you can make this judgement. Otherwise, you're merely putting your own moral values above someone else's.
Bitcoin's energy use can't balloon arbitrarily large. It's tightly constrained by the miner reward, which is getting cut in half every four years (the non fee part, which is currently less than 2% of the total reward).
Energy wasted by natural gas flaring is 5.5x more energy than bitcoin consumes. Renewable energy curtailment in China alone (turning generation off because we can't consume it fast enough) is almost enough energy on its own to power all bitcoin miners. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons
It's perfectly fine to have a negative opinion of bitcoin and proof of work, but you're wasting political capital in the fight against climate change when there are much bigger fish to fry against wasteful uses of energy that don't have an army of people, businesses, and even nation states (El Salvador) gearing up to fight you to defend their money.
reward in a currency for which you buy the energy. This takes into account the current btc/eur price in finland, if that's where you buy the energy, and that's not guaranteed to halve either.
You're right. The real constraint is the miner reward priced in the various currencies electricity producers want, which has gone up tremendously even with inflation rate halvings.
But bitcoin is currently about a $1 trillion asset class, and growth of it's price has been slowly logarithmically for years. Most bullish cases suggest an eventual value of $10 trillion (in line with gold) to $100 trillion (in line with global bond market). But it's likely going to take decades (with several halving cycles) to get there.
Unless you're suggesting that it's likely to balloon in value even more and/or fast than that, I don't see mining ever becoming the biggest problem we have to deal with. Especially since bitcoin holders don't see PoW mining as a liability, but as a mission critical feature of the system.
...if you continue to heat with gas, drive on petrol, fly on petroleum...
I don't want to be the party pooper but that renewable energy has to cover more than current electricity consumption does get overlooked continuously. Less by governments than by the media and general public, thankfully, but still.
It's IMO an often overlooked reason to combine nuclear with renewables, and instead of looking at scaling down energy usage to match renewables' intermittent nature, design for overproduction and push it into easy to switch on electrolysers to provide green hydrogen feedstock for steel production, fuels for systems that can't depend on batteries, even CO2-neutral syntin for aviation and space where batteries don't have the density or just don't work.
And have no redunancy whatseoever, and if this is like most nuclear plants have no need to quickly spin up or down in response to load changes, and probably the math is done by averaging power usage, so only if you can somehow shift a ton of power usage away from prime time.
If only we could have both types of energy source. Cover the gaps in solar/wind with nuclear, cover the gaps in nuclear with solar/wind. Sprinkle a small amount of pumped hydro and battery storage on top and what a world it could be.
Nuclear can't be shut down / turned on on a short term basis, there is a lot of inertia. It might be a solution for seasonal issues only, but in Germany, there's usually wind during the no-sun season, and sun during the no-wind season.
Sun can be predicted. Not sure what the reaction time is and how far ahead we can reliably forecast wind, but even if there is zero response possible to wind fluctuations that still seems like a win. Afaik fuel is also not the biggest cost in nuclear so estimating on the high side might not be an issue (but this is admittedly where I veer into speculation).
Uranium (as a nuclear fuel) cost may never become prohibitive, however ore grade may prove a major challenge as its decline leads to more emissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30660554
With such a (realistic) approach nuclear is condemned because its production costs (LCOE: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 ) are higher than renewables' (and the gap is enlarging). Therefore renewables will be preferably used. Nuclear gets more expensive as it is more sparsely used: this feedback loop will widen the gap.
With time renewables production will get less an less intermittent thanks to a more and more adequate spreading, to a mix (wind, solar...), to storage (hydrogen...) and an overly-expensive nuclear will become useless.
It’s not that extraordinary. For example, one power plant in Poland provides 20% of all electricity consumed in Poland. Sadly, it’s a coal plant, one of the biggest in the world. It also burns lignite, which makes it even worse.
Ideally, you overbuild and have some flexible consumer of electricity that can arbitrarily ramp consumption up or down to suck off any excess supply whenever inflexible basal civilization demand doesn't match supply, e.g. ramp up when everyone is asleep and ramp down if a reactor needs to go offline.
Right. A useful sink for surplus energy could be something like surplus heat or electricity to synthesize carbon-neutral fuels. We're not likely to get large electric aircraft anytime soon.
Electric aircraft doesn't really strike me as this kind of customer. Aircraft has relatively inflexible fueling demands based on customer demand that is reserved weeks ahead of time.
Bitcoin mining is commonly promoted as this kind of ideal electricity consumer. Hydrogen production could be another.
However, I think more interesting for this community would be to build some kind of demand response general computing datacenter. Basically, sell computing resources with poor availability guarantees, but at a cheaper rate than standard datacenters.
i.e. we'll run your batch jobs very cheaply, but we can't give you strong guarantees about how long it will take because we have to wait for excess grid electricity to have the energy to run them. Best case that's every night. Worst case we won't be able to run anything for weeks because Texas is going through another freak winter storm.
> Electric aircraft doesn't really strike me as this kind of customer. Aircraft has relatively inflexible fueling demands based on customer demand that is reserved weeks ahead of time.
I think you misunderstood. The parent comment implied that excess electricity could be use to produce synthetic fuels (via carbon capture) to power conventional airplanes, ships or other machinery.
If you have datacenters on multiple grids (and applications that are favorable to being moved around), you could direct traffic to where energy was abundant. This is not uncommon for large commercial sites; you can usually get a better rate from the utility if you commit to demand response, and it's not too hard to shift load if you're already doing multi-site for reliability/continuity)
Make it 8 stations instead of 7 to have an excess of energy and then use the extra energy, when there's not enough demand, to produce fertilizers or other energy-intensive goods.
I suspect in today's world of maximizing capital efficiency, and being able to contract in large numbers of people, the very expensive power plant won't be offline for long for maintenance.
They'll probably shut the plant down, and have 500 workers come in to replace everything that needs to be replaced, and then power it up again within a few days, and let it run for another 6 months or so.
Everything will be planned on workplans, and most won't require specialist knowledge... Eg. "Replace pump 205 in building C with this pump. Required skills people: 2x plumber, 2x electrician".
That is exactly how nuclear outages work. Everything is planned in a resource-loaded schedule and many of those resources are just there for the outage.
Finland is actually somewhat known for running short (1 year) cycles with very very short (<10 days for refuelling is not unheard of) refuelling outages every other cycle alternating with slightly longer maintenance outages. A more typical scenario in the US would be 18 month cycles with a 30ish day outage. Some plants are moving to 24 month cycles with slightly longer outages.
Capacity factor for nuclear plants in the US is consistently around 93% (similar figures in many other countries as well), which is significantly higher than other generation sources.
Most reactor downtime is due to refueling, since that requires cooling down the core through several stages. AFAIK it's not practical to do it safely and economically in under a few weeks.
Most reactor maintenance is already done during refueling so there isn't much more room to optimize that downtime. (though that may change the older a reactor gets)
Most reactor downtime is actually for maintenance during refueling windows. As I mentioned in another comment, there is experience doing refuelling-only outages in <10 days. If everything goes well, you can startup a PWR from cold shutdown to hot full power in 3 12 hour shifts
To be clear: Finland has a slightly smaller population than Minnesota. This is a big plant to be sure, but it's fraction of the market says more about the size of the market than the size of the plant.
420 isn't an insurmountably large a number - it's 8.4 per state (lets' round it up to 10 for redundency).
at an average cost of $10 billion per plant, that's 4.2 trillion dollars. I think the US has spent more than that on the iraq war and the afganistan war - 8 trillion according to https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar - which could've paid for these 420 plants twice over.
Or, could build out solar, wind, and storage, leaving plenty over for universal health care, university education, clean drinking water and breathing air, mass transit projects, and even fixing bridges.
But US decided to invade Iraq and Afghanistan instead of any of those.
Nuclear is really the only solution at the moment. It is a shame it took a war for people to start realising this. At least we can all learn with Germany's mistakes now.
What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time.
By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But, consider that in the same time period, 10 of this wind projects could be completed.
On top of that, solar projects are also much faster. Look at the Solar Star solar installation which provides .5 gigawatts of power, started in 2013 and completed in 2015. So 10 of these could have been completed in the same time as the Finnish system. No, I'm not suggesting that Solar is a good option in Finland. And yes, it would be important to work on massive battery storage systems, to make these work.
This just points out just how uneconomical nuclear power is. On top of that, with nuclear facilities coming under fire in Ukraine and Russia making (probably bluffing) threats against Finland, it really makes nuclear an unappealing option. Can someone point out why these projects are so attractive to so many people when it would appear that a combination of renewables appear to both be faster to bring on line and overall safer?
Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is.
The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of the opex is in maintenance, staffing, safety and reliability, and that cost is low per MWH.
Grid solar is statistically significantly safer than Nuclear. Climbing on rooftops can be dangerous, but solar is much better in a dessert than on top of a roof.
Nuclear takes longer, is more expensive, has lower ROI, and higher risks. Solar has a lower capacity factor, but having 1/3 the availability at 1/15th the cost is a net win. Especially as we need vastly more power in the daytime and idling Nuclear is really expensive.
Currently 3% of global electricity comes from Solar and 16% from hydro with Nuclear only proving 10%. Scaling Nuclear to a significantly on a global scale take not just massive construction and new regulations, but also training etc, we simply don’t have the time.
Nuclear is over 4x safer than solar [1]. As far as "not having the time", we'd still be using natural gas to accommodate wind and solar's intermittency unless some breakthrough in storage technology happens. Batteries are mostly going to go to vehicles, not grid scale plants. Other storage solutions like thermal batteries, compressed air, or giant flywheels remain in the prototyping phase and aren't even proven to be viable at scale.
Not for the people who would have liked to drink the water used to clean the panels (cf the projects in deserts). Everything has some drawbacks and it s useful to diversify.
Your off by orders of magnitude. Nuclear uses vastly more water than solar power per kWh.
“Nuclear Energy consuming roughly 400 gallons of water per megawatt-hour, 320 billion gallons of water were consumed by United States nuclear power plant electricity generation in 2015.” And that’s direct consumption in cooling towers, nuclear indirectly uses power in other ways.
By comparison the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project in Riverside County estimated 2/3 cup of water per megawatt hour.
Most of the water used by nuclear is used to run the heat exchangers, and gets dumped straight back into the river it's drawn from. This looks like it's the source you're quoting [1]. It's pretty clear that nuclear power is a tiny fraction of water usage [2]. Furthermore, in water-constrained areas nuclear plants can be cooled with wastewater [3]. And lastly, plenty of nuclear plants are cooled with ocean water, which obviously has zero shortage.
The notion that nuclear power is going to significant affect water supplies is without merit.
I agree it’s a trivial amount of water and both can go without using water, the point was solar is on average vastly less.
However, wastewater is just water. Look at a long river and towns upstream dump their wastewater into rivers that towns and cities downstream collect as municipal water.
There are a couple of things to consider. The solar and wind need to be overprovisioned, to feed the grid scale batteries to provide baseload. Those batteries are currently not cost effective, which is why there are very few such batteries in use. If you add in the price of battery, wind and solar look rather pricey. Without the batteries, they are helping us reduce the use of fossil fuel plants, but not helping shut them down.
The other thing is the land. Solar and wind each need a substantial % of landmass to have 100% of our power come from those sources.
The ongoing costs of running nuclear are also way higher than solar or wind, which matters.
No one uses batteries for large scale (eg overnight) storage. They are used for grid stability (eg, 1/2 hour supply).
Reliability comes from solar and wind power redundancy and geographic distribution. If your collection area is over a few thousand square kilometres it is very rare for there to be no wind and no sun. Make it a few tens of thousand square kms (which modern high voltage transmission achieves) and your reliability is higher than coal.
Except when the North Sea wind was weaker than usual in 2021, triggering an energy crisis that has persisted to this day. This impacted almost the entirety of Europe and led to a spike in gas prices, since, surprise, all the backup plants rely on gas and coal.
Evidently you failed to read "redundancy and geographic distribution".
That there is North Sea wind power, howsoever intermittent, is a pure good. Tying it into a larger network makes it better. The solution to local deficits is more localities.
There is not infinite transmission capacity in all directions. It is difficult to get permission to build new transmission lines, which are also expensive.
Transmission lines are not expensive at all compared to nuclear power. This nuclear plant cost $12B and it is a cheap one!
Compare that to the SunCable is budgetted at $14B, (AU $20B in the article = US$20B) which is an undersea(!) HVAC cable all the way from Australia to Singapore (3,800km!) AND a 3GW(!) solar farm[1].
By comparison, the distance from Spain to Scotland is 2400km. And when the wind stopped in the North Sea, Spain was setting records in terms of the amount of power generated from wind farms[2]
Look at Latvia. >45% hydro, plenty of space for wind, both on shore and off shore, and hardly any of that potential realised with only 2.2% active wind energy production.
Significant public investment in wind energy announced to start construction in... 2026. That is a glacial pace in the face of an ecological and geopolitical crisis situation.
4 years planning, That is normal before for starting construction. There are environmental studies to be done first to ensure any damage to the environment the work would cause can be mitigated. There are permits to be issued which must include the mitigation measures. Some design work must be done to get the permits so they know what they are permitting. Land must be purchased, transmission right of ways granted. Enough design work must be done to place the order for long lead time equipment, such as wind turbines. How many, how big, where do they go for best ROI? Some of these permitting steps face opposition and negotiations must take place. This is the process real world infrastructure projects face.
You cannot depend on nuclear 24x7x365 as we’ve been able to see in France and Germany the last few years. Hot temperatures in summer cause the temperature of the rivers to increase so much that the water cannot be used for cooling and so these plants have to be shut down. That’s only going to become worse.
That seems like a problem that can be accounted for in the initial design. I’m sure you can design a plant to be cooled down by even 99C water, and if the river is that hot we have other problems.
I.e., by increasing cost. But nukes are already not competitive. Increasing cost makes them less so. Their competitiveness is already in sharp decline as alternatives get ever cheaper.
> so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is.
It does insofar as it matters for capital. Who wants to invest in a plant that will take at least ten years (but probably more with cost overruns in the billions) before they see a ROI? Especially when the cost per MWH from a renewable project that will be online in 2 years with less risk is already comparable if not more competitive.
Who wants to invest in a plant that will take at least ten years
This points out one of the sad flaws of the human race and ultimately, it's probably the one that will lead to our downfall.
We're absolute crap at thinking long-term.
Look at you, talking about ten years as if it's eons. You're not wrong, of course! Capital doesn't like to invest in projects ten+ years before ROI.
But ten years is not a long time. We should be thinking about many, many things at least ten years in the future. Hell, forget ten years. We should be plotting our energy strategy with an eye to the next hundreds of years.
Of course, we won't, because we're humans and we really struggle to think past next week. And those of us in democracies have designed a system that literally punishes politicians for thinking beyond the next election cycle.
Shit, we didn't even understand the implications of improvements in fracking and other improvements in extraction efficiencies from 'dirty' hydrocarbon sources would have, in the mid-oughts peak oil was on the horizon with nothing feasible that could fill the coming gap.
but is a renewable project that matches the capabilities of a nuclear project (to the same degree of reliability and availability) really the same cost?
you gotta compare like-for-like. If the solar project that takes 2 years only provide power half the time, then you need double the size to provide the same amortized level of power at night. You also need some form of storage. And that's if you don't have a spate of bad weather preventing it from working - so to amortize that problem you'd need to build yet larger...
The South Australian grid is a great example of how well this approach works.
It's mostly (>60%) a mix of solar and wind power, with some gas that fills in the gaps - as well as batteries for grid stability. Still importing some coal power from interstate, but that is decreasing too.
The investment has been incremental - so much smaller amounts, with much less risk and therefor more attractive to investors.
A large part of this (since 2018) has been done by a conservative state government, who have been highly supportive of the renewable transition.
No point comparing like for like. The end game is a stabile balanced grid. If that is fulfilled by 100% intermittent or 100% deterministically dispatchable does not affect anything in regards to the end user. All they want is reliably the cheapest power at the time of consumption.
That follows if you are playing Sim-City, or I suppose if you think giving the government absolute control over energy production and you want to leave the market completely out of it. I'm just talking the world we live in.
To answer more directly though, yeah the power is the same cost. Perhaps when renewable penetration into the energy market is saturated, there will be a greater demand for base load at all those times renewables aren't producing at peak, and that will be reflected in those nuclear MWHs becoming very profitable even at a higher unit cost.
You have a great point. Who is funding the building new nuclear plants these days? I imagine it is mostly governments or government backed utilities.
I would absolutely never invest in a nuclear project but I sure am glad they are there to keep the lights on when the weather doesn’t cooperate for wind and solar.
A mix of different sources is the key to a robust grid, and nuclear is a great part of that mix.
As a side note on British Columbia site C 1000 MW a hydro dam is currently looking like it will cost 16 billion and take about 10 years to build, those numbers could easily be for a nuclear plant.
I reckon that's a reasonable way to think about it. I often see people blaming irrational nuclear fear or environmentalists for the lack of nuclear development, but really if they want to see it be optimized as part of the solution in the future, they should be advocating for expanded government subsidies or direct funding because right now that's the obstacle, the fact that nuclear isn't part of a purely market solution.
If you look at the electricity market in Ontario, zero development of new plants is part of a market based solution. They had to form a new government agency the Ontario power authority to sign long term contracts so that companies can secure loans to build infrastructure. The market price was politically influenced with many charges being hidden outside of the hourly price in an “uplift” charge and nobody had confidence that prices would be high enough for long enough to get their ROI.
Markets are interesting for economic dispatch based on marginal cost, but then real world constraints such as rivers that must flow and a lack of infinite transmission capacity in all directions kick in and it starts to look a lot like what it replaced. I guess it works where it works
The worst case of nuclear, it is worse than the worst case of solar/wind. So even if it were rational for humanity, it might not be rational for a country.
I'm having trouble picturing how it is safer than solar though.
The statistics wrap rooftop solar into the “solar” mix so all those DIY/fly-by-night installers who don’t use safety equipment while working at heights and end up killings themselves make solar by far the deadliest energy source in terms of deaths per MW capacity installed.
In a word, reliability. Nuclear is /by far/ the most reliable energy source.
Nuclear power plants produce maximum power 92.5% of the time. Compare that to other energy sources:
- Geothermal: 74.3%
- Nat gas: 56.6%
- Hydropower: 41.5%
- Coal: 40.2%
- Wind: 35.4%
- Solar: 24.9%
Batteries are a joke. Consider the 409MW / 900MWh battery at Florida Power & Light: this is only enough to power 329,000 homes just over two hours. What happens after the juice runs out? In a day the RE Ginna Nuclear Plant in New York operates at 582 MW--in 24 hours thats 13,968MWh guaranteed! [3] That's powering over 329,000 or more homes without fear of outages. Battery systems in conjunction with renewables brings the capital cost per kwh of nuclear vs renewable to closer to 2:1 (6k $/kW vs 3k $/kW) too. So you're essentially getting 3x the reliability for 2x the cost when using nuclear and outages that exceed a few hours are a non issue. [4]
Coal and gas sure, but renewables are obviously dependent on weather. Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can". When there is significant oversupply of energy from solar, it gets sold for pennies on the dollar to neighbouring regions, and when the sun doesn't shine, you're sol.
That's not what this is about. Negative electricity prices are rare, and do not account for the massive difference in utilization between renewables and nuclear. By the way nuclear power output can be ramped up and down by a lot, and in a matter of minutes in case of unplanned problems, even if it can't (really shouldn't) go to dead zero.
The person I responded to claimed that nuclear plants run at close to 100% because they bid low because the marginal cost of their electricity production is low, but the same is true for renewables like wind and solar. Yet these renewables run at much lower utilization rates - because of weather and daylight cycle, not "because they can", except in rare cases of negative prices as you mentioned.
It's a lack of imagination. People look at established systems that took generations to implement and take for granted all of the developments and revelations that emerged from that generations-long effort to make that system work the way it does today. Then they look at an emerging system, like renewable energy, and see only the flaws and shortcomings, completely forgetting that a historically-massive investment of time and money is the only way to make any new system feasible on that scale.
Olkiluoto 3 suffered significant delays and cost overruns. My impressions, based on recollection I got reading the newspapers during these two decades, are:
1. Bad management of construction project, almost near corruption level stupidity. Many constructions tasks outsourced to contractors who outsourced them to contractors who outsourced them to contractors, making it easy to take "cost-saving" shortcuts and difficult to supervise.
2. Failure of corruption to speed things up: Finnish nuclear safety authorities are not easily bribed, so when issues with bad quality of welds, concrete, boiler valves and safety electronics were identified (all this from memory, these were separate incidents), the issues could not be smoothed over and ignored with well-placed thick envelopes. The authorities would demand the construction crew to tear stuff apart and do again, properly. And if it didn't pass, then again. And again.
Most of the issues I have read about do not sound like "nuclear technology" failures, more about failures in building a big pressurized boiler power plant. The nuclear part comes in by authorities requiring high quality. They couldn't make good enough concrete bed on a first try, that isn't some super novel space technology.
It mostly reminds me of similar kind of mismanagement that plagues many big construction projects run by big corps managed by suits. During same time frame city of Helsinki wasted amazing amount of money in a "automated metro car" subway upgrade project they bought from Siemens, which ultimately didn't work and had to be scrapped.
(edit. City of Helsinki decided to "automate" city subway metro system in 2006, contract signed with Siemens in 2008, originally planned to be completed in 2011. Project was postponed several times and effectively scrapped in 2016. Tried googling most recent news, the lower district court had given judgement in 2021, parties likely to appeal.)
Olkiluoto 3 was the first-ever EPR to start construction back in 2005. It was supposed to go live in 2009, but basically everything that could have gone wrong did, which is why it was so massively delayed.
Funnily enough, the 2nd and 3rd EPRs in China both opened before this one, taking "only" 9 years from start to production. They're also the world's largest reactors now.
I've read that the startup process of building new or subsequent nuclear plants will be considerably shorter due to the groundwork for the Finnish reactor paving the way.
Which seems to topple most of your argument.
As for wind turbines on land, they require a lot more space for the same yield, space which is stolen or irreversibly destroyed for the local fauna. Here in Norway, wind turbines near settlements are also forced to run on diminished capacity at night because of the health problems people associate with the 24/7 humming and whoosh noises (not kidding).
To produce 1 gigawatt of power you need 1000 square kilometers of wind turbines or 300 sq km of solar elements or 3 sq km of nuclear power plants. How much land do you have in your country that you are ready to deforestate in order to build renewables?
Predictability.
Renewables depend on weather. They only work when the wind blows or the sun shines. Are you ready to be able to heat your house only when the weather forecast is good?
The wind farm linked above is installed in a forested area. The turbines are above the tree line, and didn't require a significant amount of deforestation. In addition to that, in CA at least, and I'm sure elsewhere, wind farms can still have farm land underneath, definitely grazing land.
While 23 years to build the thing are already bad, it now needs to operate continuously for at least some 30 years selling electricity at a price that is even today not competitive with renewables to make financial sense.
Essentially, building a nuclear power plant in 2022 means you are betting we won't have workable storage for renewables by 2052.
If you add in batteries with todays technology the nuclear plants are competituve with solar or wind.
So the alternative is coal or natural gas plants.
Which then have their own drawbacks.
Solutions that are built today need to use technology available today.
Nuclear is fine, especially when you are not buying the first reactor of its kind from a vendor who has never fully built a plant on its own.
Areva got a tad too greedy and cut out the middleman in the form of doing 100% of the work themselves instead of the usual 30% and contracting out the rest.
They ware not helped by the fameously strict Finnish regulatory authority (STUK).
Agreed, though solar tech has gotten a lot better and cheaper in the last 20 years, so it's not completely fair to compare. Power storage is still an issue, but this is getting better and better each year with the prices of lithium iron phosphate batteries coming way down.
Renewables are fair-weather energy sources, both literally and geopolitically. Hopefully it never comes to that, but off-shore wind is a trivially easy target in a war. Solar too is not very defendable. Power plants are a bit better (in a sub-apocalypse war at least).
Without significantly more information, it doesn't really point out nuclear being uneconomical. It points out artificial roadblocks, regulatory and otherwise, imposed on nuclear generation that aren't imposed on other forms of generation.
Other forms of generation that require GHG-emitting backup generation.
Good job Finland. I respect the opinions of the environmentalists and agree with most of what they say, but until we have something more reliable that can put out power 24/7 year round, we need more new, modern nuclear plants.
Wind turbines work on average at 18-30% efficiency in Finland. The nadir efficiency is roughly at 6%. You'd need to build 1300+ 3MW wind turbines to match the average production of Olkiluoto 3, or 7000+ turbines to guarantee the same level of constant output that this plant puts out reliably.
We had this "too slow to build" -argument 15 years ago, but no other renewables have delivered. We built 67 new windmills in 2020. That number would have to be double for your argument to start being plausible in our environment.
France has 56 nuclear plants that provide roughly 73% of the energy needs of the country. ~73% of this capacity was finished between 1980 and 1990.
Modern regulation and the scarcity of new builds has made building slower, but it should be expected that Areva, the builder of Olkiluoto 3, should be able to pump out new facilities and significantly faster rate compared to the last decade.
> Modern regulation and the scarcity of new builds has made building slower, but it should be expected that Areva, the builder of Olkiluoto 3, should be able to pump out new facilities and significantly faster rate compared to the last decade.
Went so swimmingly that Areva went into bankruptcy a couple of years ago. The company only exists to shield EDF and the French state from any remaining risk they still can from Olkilouto 3.
THe current report on Areva ability to build plants has been the object of a public statement by Bernard Doroszczuk, head of ASN (nuclear safety atuhtority) in newspaper Le Monde[1]
He basically says that France is currently or close to be facing a industrial failure for the whole existing nuclear plants which means the nuclear safety cannot be guaranteed. The ability to build anything nuclear is out of reach for France who lacks engineers and technical know how which is the consequences of decades old political decisions to outsource to China, there is a lack of anticipation and no plans which is leading France in a probable dead-end.
The current French EPR in flamanville has confirmed what happened with Okiluoto, hundreds of failures, lack of planning, huge delays, low quality with forged document, going over budget by several times.
You may be interested in reading Marc Endeweld most recent book "L'Emprise. La France sous influence" it covers the current state of nuclear in France and it depicts an even bleaker picture than what the head of ASN publicly acknowledges.
I was talking specifically about Finland. Our situation is such that our energy consumption peaks during the winter months when onshore wind farms perform poorly.
These numbers are all insignificant, tho. Finland needs to build roughly 22-35GW of renewable/nuclear power to get rid of carbon based energy, and we're nowhere near.
The clear answer is that we need both wind and nuclear – a LOT of both, but I doubt we'll do neither in sufficient quantity.
At the very least we should stop shutting down current nuclear power plants.
Any newly built renewable generation should be used to retire fossil fuel plants first, and once those are gone then we can consider retiring (current) nuclear.
If you changed every part of a boat, does the original EOL of the boat still make sense ?
Yes there are unremplacable parts in a nuclear reactor, but if it's measured to be safe to continue, then there is no reason to respect the initial EOL.
Corners get cut on refurbishment, for political reasons, and the facility continues to degrade while their life is too far extended. Fukushima had this issue.
The problem at Fukushima Daiichi was not refurbishment problems: it was the fact that the emergency batteries and generators were in the basement and accessible from the sea-facing side of the structure.
Fukushima Daini did not have those problems, and thus not much drama happened at it:
Fukushima's main issue is related to attempts to 'save face'. International aid for cooling water and power (for cooling/etc) was offered, and rejected, despite the basement diesel generators being flooded by the tsunami that resulted from the earthquake. Realistically the plant was built somewhere they shouldn't have placed it, and the safety systems should have been retrofitted with additional raised systems once the risk was properly understood.
One of the oldest nuclear power plant in operation worldwide is Beznau in Switzerland, which has been running since 1969. It is currently scheduled to start shutting down in 2030 which will then take 10-15 years. The other plants are scheduled to start that processes in 2040-45. So unlike Germany they are not at a point of no return yet and according to Wikipedia that type of plant could potentially extend their lifespan to 80 years instead of 60.
Nothing will solve the climate crisis in the time frame it takes to build a nuclear reactor. If you start building now, you get part of the solution in the future.
Finland is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2035. Do you suggest that if we start planning now, we can rely on having new nuclear plants operational in 13 years? Also note that we wouldn't be buying them from Russia because of the current war, and China would be risky in the same way. There's a current project where the only offer was from Russia and that one is being suspended indefinitely right now.
Easier when you cheat on the documentation. Sitting on two chairs at the same time is hard.
> In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[23] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[24] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[23][25]
> In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[26] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[27] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[28]
I'm curious how many scandals are involved with similar projects taking twice as long to complete in Europe. Or projects taking 4 times as long to complete in the USA? Fewer scandals? More scandals? Worse scandals? I have no idea.
We've seen similar scandals for EPRs in Flamanville and Okiluoto, forged document to fake certification of vital components of the plants, unqualified workers, lack of planning, lot of outsourcing,…
it should be documented on the relevant wikipedia pages.
So...cheating is just normal around the world when building nuclear power plants regardless of how long the project takes to complete? And Korea doesn't get 5-year build times because of cheating?
You don't want to "fast track" nuclear security and this is not something you can iterate by building unsafe plants first. Even as it is, people don't want a nuclear plant in their backyard and it's a long process to find and secure a suitable location.
You'd need huge amounts of capital with big risks and little profits foreseen. The track record from the latest western projects is horrible so I don't see how it would be possible to get the backing now.
"fast track approval" -- spare no expense in manpower to review with as little delay as possible. Many workers in parallel, all required regulations observed.
Your implication is "cut corners" which is a misunderstanding.
Going carbon-neutral might have been the right answer 20 years ago. To avoid 1.5 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels, we need to go carbon-negative today.
Even if we reach 0 in 13 years, the road to flipping the magnitude will be long, and I estimate longer than the time to build a reactor.
In 7.5 years (mean time for construction of a nuclear power plant), there will still be oil, gas, and even coal plants in operation in many countries. Nuclear capacity is clearly not useless.
No one thing will solve it, it will take a constellation of lots of things. If you do nothing while you wait for the one single solution, it won't get solved at all.
The process takes much longer due to political issues not technical ones. The ongoing price crunch and energy sanctions have allowed Finland to speed up the process. The same thing happened with vaccine production and COVID. Normally, vaccines take much longer to develop, test, and approve. If we followed your logic, we wouldn't bother with lockdowns since a vaccine could take a decade to develop.
What does a conflict that started two weeks ago have to do with the construction time of a reactor that has taken 17 years to build.
You also don't seem to realize the other reason, and the primary reason, to lockdown is to lighten the peak load on hospitals, in response to waves of infection.
Renewables with “magic” storage. Wind can be low for a month for a whole country (cf UK last year). There is no storage technology that can store that much power at scale. What you need is an alternative on demand source of energy, which cost is always omitted when looking at renewable energy cost.
The only climate compatible way is not an alternative on demande source of energy, but the other way around: adapt our energy consumption to its availability and significantly lower our energy use. (see this 2009 piece by low tech magazine[1])
This is the real issue with dealing with climate change: we have to drastically change our way of living, in ways that most of us have not properly grasped and are not ok with.
But it is not a matter of choice, this will happen. It is a matter of choosing to do it in a somewhat controlled manner over the few time left, of to be subjected to this change in a brutal way.
Not possible to build a civilization with hunter gatherer ways of harvesting power. "The sun didn't shine and wind speed was too low, so the ventilators stopped and people died".
We need energy equivalent of grains: renewable and storable.
The argument you are trying to make there completely fails to defend the claim that storage need to be 15x cheaper for renewables to compete with nuclear.
And where do you build that hydro? I hear some people suggesting Europe using the valleys in Sweden and Norway. Imagine the EU electricity grid at the mercy of one of Putin’s submarines. The rest of Europe doesn’t have many valleys left to flood.
24/7 isn't true at all. People keep repeating this like it's 2020. There's an ongoing energy crisis that started in 2021. Low wind speeds across all of Europe were a massive trigger.
also France stopped 13+ nuclear reactors mid-winter which really did not help.
But defects were found that would jeopardize the current evaluation to renew the certification for using them for 10 more years, so the decision was made to stop several reactors for forced maintenance and repairs.
It's not! The strangely named "Dispatchable 2" can be turned on as an option; it's based on the economics of the EPR (although you can change all the assumptions as needed.) If you do that, you'll find the solutions tend to be either "no nuclear" or "all nuclear", depending on the cost assumptions. This is a counter to the people who suggest "renewables, but use nuclear to cover the last 20%", which is a dumb idea.
Electricity prices are through the roof in Finland right now. This was even the case before the war started. We import an incredible amount of LNG from Russia, a lot of which is used for electricity production if I have it correct, which we would of course like to be independent of. But for the time being we have spikes of 60-70 cents/kWh electricity prices. Hopefully OL3 will help this somewhat.
Finland has another nuclear power plant under construction as well... or at least we did, until the war started, now I don't know what will happen. Rusatom was supposed to supply the reactor for Hanhikivi nuclear power plant, which was also severely delayed.
Russia is also an important supplier of nuclear fuel to Finland.
We don't import a lot of LNG from Russia. Gas coming from Russia comes through the pipes, not LNG. However, we don't even use gas a lot in Finland (it accounts 3% of the total energy production).
The electricity prices are through the roof for other reasons (and have been for almost a year now) and are not related to Russia at all.
Those trading energy knew of the energy related tensions between Russia and the west and hence were bidding high prices for these commidities in the futures markets.
Finnish market is tied to other Nordics that are tied to central Europe. So it is cascading effect. Main culprit for Nordics really is poor levels of hydro reservoirs. And high prices in Central Europe leading to prices also increasing here.
This is surprising to me, I found this number for Finland: 22.5% comes from hydropower.
I suppose I'm stuck associating Tampere, Finland (Nokia) with hydropower as well as the Venmork plant in Norway that was sabotaged during WW2. I realize that doesn't mean much however.
I have to do some reading, but my understanding was that the Finnish plant is using an alternate funding structure from many of the existing nuclear installations. Less direct subsidies or more risk directly on the commercial entities?
> Finland: 22.5% comes from hydropower. I suppose I'm stuck associating Tampere, Finland (Nokia) with hydropower
Simply put, Sweden and Norway share the Scandinavian mountain ridge which gives a lot of rain at altitude and dammable valleys; Finland is on the whole much flatter, so has less favourable conditions for hydro power.
> I have to do some reading, but my understanding was that the Finnish plant is using an alternate funding structure from many of the existing nuclear installations. Less direct subsidies or more risk directly on the commercial entities?
Haven't checked recently, but at a guess / from vague memory: Probably shoving off as much as possible of the financing onto the builder / owner, Rosatom (mainly via its Finnish "partners" / subsidiaries), but in the end backed up by State guarantees because who else would voluntarily/ is big enough. All of course dressed up in more or less convoluted arrangements as suitable to make it look a little better / less bad.
>Finland is on the whole much flatter, so has less favourable conditions for hydro power.
Yeah, I had Quebec in mind as a similar geography without the large mountains of the Rockies and Cascades. I didn't account for just how flat Finland is, and how high a big chunk of Quebec is. Interestingly at first they appeared similar, the high points are quite close. But looking at elevation profiles it was clear how misleading that can be.
It looks like I was a bit mixed up, the structure I was thinking of is called the Finnish Mankala system.
Energy producers are owned by parties that bear the costs of operating the company. Owners receive shares of electricity at cost, any unwanted portion is sold by them into the Nordic market. This means that output is effectively contracted to each owner over the life of the plant. The private owners are mostly heavy industry with a high demand for base-load power, and hence low costs are critical for them.
FWIW the plant construction appears to be a fixed price contract with a consortium of plant suppliers: AREVA GmbH, AREVA NP SAS and Siemens AG, which are jointly liable for the obligations under the plant supply contract until the end of the plant unit's warranty period.
For a while, Russian nuclear fuel was cheaper. There are alternative sources if the political interest to not fund Russian exceed the economical interests.
What I find shockingly absent in this article is any commentary on budget and cost overruns. I'm definitely not anti-nuclear but it stands to reason that a comparison vs other forms of energy would've been wise to consider.
Something like this. The project started in 2000, construction began in 2005 and should have been completed in 2010. Original cost was 3 billion euro but landed on over 10 billion euro.
It is the first nuclear reactor in Europe for 15 years so not much working experience or available sub contractors.
Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that.
If nuclear energy should be considered, much more must be built more continuously.
I think this is vastly misunderstood in the (artificial) renewables vs nuclear conversation. We keep building effectively one-off complex machines, and then flushing all that knowledge down the drain by saying it cost too much and took too long. Like yes, the first one always takes longer and costs more...
There's no reason to assume that building the same nuclear reactor design multiple time will maintain the same cost or decrease. Even with the supposedly successful French nuclear program, costs increased over time, there was negative learning:
There's huge huge risk in choosing a particular design and building even one of it, because we don't know if it will be constructible the first time, and we don't know if future builds of the first design will be more or less expensive.
When each build is a $10B roll of the dice with variance of 2-3x of initial estimates, it's a bit difficult to find rational financial backers. Especially when there's not that much profit to be had from even a successful build. The risk reward is completely out of whack compared to the other options for carbon neutral energy.
Of course there is, it's happened exactly the way I said in South Korea, Japan, and American naval reactors. These projects take a long time to complete and there have been relatively few of them. It therefore stands to reason that the cycle of learning from them and making their construction more predictable would take longer than for e.g. cars.
Far too many people are generalizing from the French and American nuclear programs, both of which built lots of reactors in a comparatively short time and then were fear-mongered into a standstill by the fossil fuel lobby.
"""In the third era of nuclear power construction in Japan, from 1980 to 2007, costs remain between ¥250,000/kW and ¥400,000/kW, representing an annual change of −1% to 1%. This period experienced relatively stable costs over 27 years."""
The negative learning rate is a strong signal of interference by the regulators. More than anything else it shows how excessive safety regulations are strangled the industry.
1970s nuclear safety standards, despite it all, were still better than the energy strategy the world adopted from 1970-2020. Killing off nuclear in search of a perfect power system was a stupid strategy, and failed. The only unfortunate point of karmic justice is that Europe ended up reliant on Russian gas and in an energy crisis as a reward for their stubbornness against making the technically obvious choice.
Well done Finland for even managing to get a reactor built in the face of all that.
What did France change about their regulations that increases cost?
Maybe you have some actual knowledge, but I have never found somebody who says that regulations are the problem but has any concrete suggestions for changing regulations. It's just a vague gut feeling. And in the case of France I doubt it applies at all.
Construction is not like manufacturing, it does not see continual productivity improvements like manufacturing does:
As an energy source whose costs are primarily construction related, we would not expect to see it falling in cost over time. We would expect that energy sources whose costs are dominated by manufacturing to outcompete nuclear as time passes.
Ironically, the evidence to date is that'd probably get more people killed due to energy security issues. The last group who tried to apply that logic in defiance of market forces - the Germans - are currently staring at each other wondering what to do about their reliance on Russian gas.
If they'd acted rationally, acknowledged Fukushima and moved on with trying to make their nuclear power cheaper instead letting ideology determine that part of their energy policy then they wouldn't be in the mess they are in. Instead they pushed ahead with renewables, ignored technical problems like reliability and have ended up looking like fools while literally paying a high price for the privilege. France continues to quietly plod away as a reliable European energy success story.
In France the 'nuclear success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the "loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") stating that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025, from 72% then, and that renewable sources must replace it.
In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 7.5% of the gridpower in 2020).
The sole reactor currently planned (Flamanville-3) is a complete disaster, more than 12 years behind schedule, it will cost at least 19.4 billion € (initial budget: 3.7 billion €).
The other options for carbon neutral energy that does not rely on using fossil fuel as part of the energy strategy are few and far between. The few suggested solutions tend to rely on battery solutions for wind power (at least for countries this far up north).
It would be great to see an attempt to such battery solution that would cover the same amount of capacity as this plant, that can operate for at least several months without recharging, in Finish winter, and cost less than this plant and be built faster. That would check all the boxes, and if such technology already exist, people here should really put their investment money into it.
It's not only the first one. It's at least the first ones plural. The same one, being built in France in Flamanville by the same company was scheduled to be finished in 2012, and is currently planned for 2023 (11 years delay), and with crazy over cost like the Finish one.
I don't think there is any reason to think it will be different for future ones if any. We'll see what happens for the British one (Hinkley Point C), but they already know there will be large delays and cost overrun.
It’s not too big, just too politicized. Bill Gates wanted to do it for a long time, but he can’t get the political buy in.
For me even seeing the Tesla Berlin factory delays makes me sad: in China already the second factory is being built while Germany is coming up with new arguments without looking at the cost/benefit ratio for EU of those delays.
Using someone who's been comfortably in the top 5 wealthiest people for the past two decades, with a 12-digit estimated net worth is perhaps not a good way to illustrate "not too big."
The main reason I was writing it is that there _is_ willingness from the top tech billionaires to invest in modern nuclear plants. They don’t do it because the politicians don’t let them do it, and it’s not only about regulations, they want to keep full control.
So far every attempt at small modular reactors built assembly line style has failed. Currently there's two projects with some momentum: NuScale's pilot plant in Idaho, and the recently announced Rolls Royce project.
Sadly NuScale seems to be struggling to meet timeline and cost targets, and there were some headlines last year about the sponsoring utility pulling out of the project. I'm rooting for them but it doesn't look good.
The RR project is still just on paper really, and is closer to a medium sized reactor than SMR. Maybe they've cracked the code? Maybe not, we'll see.
Every nuclear thread here people chime in with a reflexive "just build nuclear smarter" answer without actually addressing why every prior attempt at this has failed. A lot of people don't want to develop an understanding of the challenges more sophisticated than smugly blaming environmental activists, over regulation, etc.
Look at these projects from the prospective of potential private investment. Anyone doing basic due diligence is going to realize that the odds are stacked against a project hitting it's time and cost goals. Then you look at the trend lines for levelized cost of renewables + storage, and you realize that even in the best case scenario, within 2 decades you may be squeezed out of the market even if the efficiencies of scale and learning kick in.
> ...and then flushing all that knowledge down the drain by saying it cost too much and took too long. Like yes, the first one always takes longer and costs more...
Yup, exactly: And then there is a huge stink about this and no more are built for a good while, so the next one is a first one again. Over and over and over. Lather, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat...
> Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that.
When did Japan last build a nuclear reactor? I don't think any time recently.
South Korea used to be touted as a success at construction without massive overruns, but it turns out that it was largely a result or corruption and skimping on safety inspections:
As for China and Russia, we don't really have much insight to what they are doing as far as safety. China is seems to be successful at large scale construction projects in a way that we can not replicate in the west, so perhaps their numbers are reasonable for construction costs.
> If nuclear energy should be considered, much more must be built more continuously.
We would need entirely new designs unlike what has been built in the past. Both France and the US have negative learning rates when building the same reactor design multiple times, and that was 50 years ago when construction was a much more effective part of our economies.
I do not believe that nuclear is a smart energy source to pursue given our modern production capabilities. There's a bevy of nuclear startups trying smaller reactors that might be able to constrain construction costs. But in the past these designs have been rejected because of the loss of economy of scale, as being too expensive per watt.
Of the potential carbon neutral energy sources of the future, nuclear is one of the e least practical. It may supply a tiny fraction of our future power, maybe 10%, but without a major revolution soon on construction, our aging reactors will be shut down at end of life without any way to build more of them.
Last one was connected in 2009 which isn't that recent but there are also not that many projects of this size. China and Russia might not be the most thrustworthy and I would rather see more more western examples but then we have to go back a couple of decades, most of which were excellent.
I agree that a gigantic shift is required and put my hopes into mass produced SMRs. It's gonna take time and money, yes, just like the shift to EVs and renewables.
Fossil fuels is still above 80% of global primary energy, nuclear 5% and renewables excluding hydro 2%.
I really don't think putting all eggs in the solar/wind basket is good. They should of course also get heavy investments but that doesn't have to exclude nuclear. We're gonna need everything we have to end the fossil era.
Even in the first nuclear build out in the US, large cost overruns were very common. Forbes magazine was famously critical of this in a 1985 cover article.
There's a reason the US stopped building NPPs back then and it wasn't green mind control.
> China is seems to be successful at large scale construction projects in a way that we can not replicate in the west
Are they? Considering that their population is higher than the whole of North America + EU + Russia combined, wouldn't it be fair to compare it that way? Sure, it's one country as opposed to several, but still, the population plays a huge role in this "amazing construction at scale".
can you flesh this out, why exactly does a larger population mean more efficient construction projects? i don't follow
seems to me other factors like economics and government structure are more important, don't think a 4x larger US would be building faster and more cheaply
I guess what I'm saying is you can't compare what "China" is doing to most western countries, which have a fraction of the population, so of course there will be fewer reactors, fewer roads, less housing, less production.
I'd say it's more fair to compare it to a region of equal population. People actually do stuff, and the more of them (especially educated ones) there are, the more stuff will get done.
People are the biggest resource these days, which western countries realized a long time ago (or maybe it's the other way around, western countries created this system?). Hence, immigration heavily in favour of the best from other parts of the world.
And higher concentrations of people are more productive and effective. Think cities vs rural areas.
After accounting for that and comparing, if your region (clump of people) is still losing, then you might have a real problem and should take notes from the other group.
EDF (France) keeps building nuclear reactors around the world. Not sure whether they are the only EU company active in that market, but I doubt it. Either way, some expertise definitely exists in Europe.
Germany had spectacular delays and overruns for a new airport for Berlin
That too doesn't mean Europe forgot how to build airports.
This reactor was designed/partially built by Framatome/Areva/EDF/whatever the ownership structure is now after the various Areva scandals. Siemens erected the building. Same design as the Flamanville plant that's still not finished. Two reactors vessels shipped to China also from the same design. Time delays (took over 7 years to construct; original plan was 4), structural issues in the reactor containment vessel during manufacturing due to shoddy work by Areva and substandard alloy quality delivered by the Areva subsidiary.
This is also the nuclear plant (Taishan) that was in the news last year regarding damaged fuel rods.
That's the output from the experts in France so far.
Areva was basically shuttered and written off as a loss during all this. A part of the company only still exists as part of this Finland deal.
They didn't lose their nuclear capability because they kept maintaining and building reactors instead of decommissioning them. US and to a degree most of Europe did not.
China in particular plans to build ~250 new reactors over the next few years, most like new HTG reactors based on the pebble bed technology Germany sold to them when they abandoned their next-gen nuclear plans.
Russia has reactor building capabilities that are still current but their domestic needs are stagnating so said capability could decay as they don't actually need to build modern reactors at this time.
Japan has a similar problem to Russia in that post-Fukishima there isn't domestic demand for nuclear reactors. However they are building reactors for other countries, in particular I think they are planning to build ~20 good sized reactors in India.
This "250" number for China keeps being trotted out, but nobody knows how many of those will actually ever be built or operated. There is
anyway not fuel for that many, at present.
It would be more honest to cite the much smaller number that have actually broken ground. Nobody knows how many of those will be completed, or how many of those completed will be fueled or operated continuously, or where operated actually mainly generate power, as opposed to generating plutonium and tritium for weapons.
The pebble bed reactors are pretty much useless for making weapons grade material.
The design was built with non-proliferation in mind.
If they wanted to do that they would have just built more of their LWR design.
What do you mean there isn't enough fuel? Not enough pellets/pebbles? Well ofcourse.. there is only 2 operational reactors right now... not enough uranium? Yeah no. There is way more than enough uranium to fuel their projected fleet and it's not like they are building it tomorrow, it's probably going to take until around 2050 to complete.
China has a track record of saying they will do something and then actually doing it, I'm inclined to believe they will make good on that number.
I get that people don't like China but lets be serious, no-one else is actually as serious about nuclear power as them right now.
Xi is old. Will the next dictator share Xi's enthusiasm for high-cost power when the rest of the world is on low-cost power?
Any organization as big as the Chinese gov't makes lots of plans, and changes them as conditions change. It is one thing to be prepared to build a lot of nukes, entirely another to start building them, and entirely a third to finish them. The last will depend on conditions in the world, and of political alliances at the time.
> when the rest of the world is on low-cost power?
And regret about it?
The French are in much better position compared to the German with that low-cost power enthusiasm yet still heavily dependent on burning fossil.
I think you overestimate how expensive these reactors will be. Also they are part of a mix naturally. China has such vast energy needs they are still building coal, LNG, solar and nuclear all alongside each other.
My current feeling is that if they stick to their plan and build these smaller 600MW reactors that can mostly be built in factories and assembled on-site it's going to be a vastly different economic proposition than existing "big nuclear" that has been attempted in the West.
Of course there is no way to know exactly how it plays out but the inputs look good.
> This "250" number for China keeps being trotted out
The source is a Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... ) which states that the boss of Chine General Power corp. announced his plans 200GW for 2035, nothing more. Admitting that it is an official governmental announcement (it doesn't seem so(?)) and given that China already has 50GW, that's maybe 100GW new (way less than 150 standard reactors).
Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), and 1200GW planned for 2030. In 2020 China added 71,6GW windturbine power. Even considering the load factors the picture is pretty clear.
Probably large fixed costs (engineers, builders learning how to do the thing) amortized over building a large number of plants.
China has been constructing a lot of new nuclear power plants over the last 15 years -- estimated at ~12 GW in 2013, but now closer to 50 GW as of 2021. Wikipedia says 50 plants as of 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China.
Anecdotally I've heard that temporary pollution control measures during the 2008 olympics gave the populace and decision makers a taste of reduced air pollution, and gave increased political willpower to invest in solar, wind, and nuclear power generation.
To a large extent, because they're building established designs. An EPR plant (that is, the same design as this one) was completed in China in about half the time of the Finnish one, but that would have been informed by the problems in building the Finnish EPR, which was the first in the world. Another EPR, being built by EDF (a French company) in the UK is broadly on-track, and should have a much shorter time to switch-on than the Finnish one.
This isn't new; historically, the first couple of examples of any given nuclear power plant design have typically seen major overruns.
> > Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that.
> Any insight into the why?
At least as for China, one gets the feeling (from recent news about COVID-19 hospitals being built in a week, the world's largest dam in a few years, etc) that with a population of over a billion, they do it Pharaonic Egypt pyramid-building style: Throw a few thousand engineers and a few hundred thousand construction workers at anything, and you will get something built.
Or at either end. Or, nowhere near either number. When you are making up numbers to announce, you pick according to the audience, not any physical constraint.
This is why nuclear does not compete with renewables during optimal weather conditions. Nuclear compete with fossil fuels when demand exceeds that of what renewables can produces, usually during periods of non-optimal weather conditions. Right now the price on the energy market is determined by fossil fuel and Russia is using this fact in order to fund their military invasion. Any period where renewable productions dips below demand is an opportunity to extract money from EU into that invasion.
We have completely screwed up market price discovery for energy with big govt involvement and subsidies. The numbers I see everywhere are cherry picked to present a winner and loser.
e.g. Depending on whose point of view you read, solar/wind prices either includes or not: subsidies, storage, land, weather, green label costs passed on to customers, interest rates, etc. Coal prices either includes or not: labor, imports, duties, mining, environmental costs, health costs, etc.
Lately I've come to a conclusion that we can make any of these methods appear equal, higher or lower by shifting the books.
Atleast I'm happy that this article is focusing only on the benefits and outcome, rather than invent winners and losers.
I’m hoping all these comments on HN I see that follow the pattern "I was wrong about something important, but rather than admit that, I'm going to believe that the truth is unknowable" are just the first step on someone's journey to accept an unpleasant shock to their ego.
It's depressing to think there's a growing army of geeks who have given up on science, rationality and objective reality just because they got sucked in by some propaganda and tied their identity a bit too firmly to it to ever escape.
I think the issue is not the geeks grasp of science and objectivity, but the cultures democratization of the talking space to include vast numbers on un-rational and subjective thinkers on equal status with educated and more objective thinkers.
Politics and the funding of state actions seems to be enacted highly subjectively according to power plays and vested interests, with minimal impact from rational geeks.
This is the defining issue of our times in my opinion, the reason climate change is the barely mitigated disaster it's turning into.
We only get a small fraction of the possible benefits of science as a race, because so much of our potential is wasted or actively worked against.
I don't see why it shouldn't be a reason for being hopeful? Admitting ignorance is generally a step in the right direction. No reason to be depressed about it.
Admitting ignorance is no indication that the number is closer to what you wish it were. Increasing uncertainty increases uncertainty. Increased uncertainty undermines investment, which depends mainly on confidence.
But literally every reactor ever built depended more on government extraction and concentration of capital (i.e., politics) than on market forces, making it all even less predictable.
I'm not sure what identity or propaganda or bias I'm part of, so I humbly accept there may be things I don't know I don't know.
But maybe if remotely applicable, an optimistic view can be: that some of those geeks, some of the times care about seeing progress happen, rather than the means.
You appeared to have given up on being able to answer the question "Is coal/peat/oil a better option than nuclear/solar/wind". Some of those questions are tricky, once you get to the level of which of these should be combined in what locations to absolutely maximize the system and what the trade-offs are, but some are easy. For example, peat is a bad fuel for all sorts of reasons. Yes assuming different interests rates or counting the effects of illness differently will affect different models in different ways, but peat is still a stupid thing to be burning for electricity in 2022. This is something we know.
Throwing your hands up and declaring the whole thing unknowable just because (I assume) the expert consensus is coming up with a different answer than you were confidently told and believed about renewables for decades by talking heads in your media bubble seems a weak cop out.
Either prove to everyone that it's a big conspiracy and you were right all along, or convince yourself that what you were told previously was a big conspiracy. One of these options is true.
I think you should read the thread and context of the reply again.
Just to make the misunderstanding clear: Any *green energy* that takes us out of coal/peat/oil is progress. You don't have to repeat as if there is a conspiracy. I was replying to a comment asking for comparison with other sources, saying that *progress to green energy is way more important* than comparisons against brown energy, no matter even if said comparisons paint coal/peat/oil in favourable or unfavorable terms. It's exactly the same you said, burning peat doesn't make sense today no matter the cost, and that's exactly the same I'm saying.
If we leave energy decisions to an under-regulated "free market", we guarantee that market forces will select for the most short-termist, externality-spewing choices possible.
What do power execs care if they leave behind ruins decades down the road? They will have already made their money and enjoyed it.
It was shipped with 12 years delay, and has caused billion in loss to the builder Areva/Orano. They are building a similar one in France which will have at least 11 years delay, and also billions of costs overrun.
Areva/Orano being a french state owned (mostly) company, this is probably largely paid for by the French tax payer.
When you do the 2-3x (minimum) for wind and solar + keep the coal plant around and ready to go at a moments notice, including stockpile fuel and maintain it, it starts getting really expensive really fast.
Gas plant. Coal is much more expensive than gas, by every measure, and is much less adjustable to immediate requirement. The only reason any coal is still being used is installed base and market and political inertia.
You start to understand the issue of comparing the raw cost of kWh of renewables to stable energy like nuclear, if you have to build N times the capacity, the cost per kWh is just N times more expensive.
Doesn't matter if you can't build a grid with only those and still need gas or nuclear aside. The real cost of renewable in a functioning grid is probably 5 times higher of what's advertised when including externalities.
Sure. And if the Moon were made of green cheese and we had regular transport from a mining operation there we could all eat as much green cheese as we want.
Kazakhstan (under Russia's sphere of influence) is the largest producer at 36% of the global supply (5% from Russia itself.) It can be purchased from countries like Canada (15%) or Australia (12%). The next two are Namibia and Niger, each producing 8% of the global supply.
still cleaning up mess at ranger (which has impacted on a dual-listed world heritage national park) and rum jungle (there's a class action of the few surviving workers + their families whose cohort have suffered cancers)
notably still operating is olympic dam, where the huge volumes of radioactive tailings literally spill out on the surrounding land, representing an entirely unmanaged environmental hazard.
A single shipment from wherever can last a looooong time. It's not like gas or oil where you need continuous supply. And there're deposits in civilised world.
Yep. I think the only chance for embracing more nuclear would be to have smaller modular reactors that can be built on an assembly line. And while we're dreaming, moving to Thorium as the fuel.
Anyway not for longer than hoped. And, if approved, not built anytime soon, as the cost will still be much more than for renewable + storage, at that time. Those latter costs are falling faster than ever.
Very distinct things. China is actively deploying modular reactors while thorium salt reactors have many unsolved problems, mostly with durability that will need substantial advancements in material sciences to become viable.
I'll avoid the tiresome linguistic debate about what qualifies as "irony" and instead point out that sure, while Siemens is a "German" company, giving a multinational corporation a national identity very often does not make sense. Siemens has ~300 000 employees, and while it's one of Germany's biggest employers with ~100 000 employees in the country, that still means two thirds of the company does not work in Germany.
Also, Areva is French and Siemens hasn't held any shares in the company since 2009.
Finland has no other good source of energy. In Sweden and Norway we have hydro capacity that covers more than 50% of need. Then we can cover the rest with nuclear and a small portion of wind power.
In Finland nuclear is the only option. Happy to see it come online.
Define a good source: there is no silver bullet to stop the climate crisis. Traditionally, there's a big share of hydro in Finland too (23% of electricity production in 2020), and the market has been building a lot of wind lately (share 12% in 2020, capacity growth 30%).
In heating, heat pumps (geothermal and others) are growing fast (market share 16% in 2021).
Still, wind and other unstable sources can never be the dominant source in society. We need dependable power and for that you need nuclear unless something drastically changes with energy storage.
Depends how much area you want to repurpose (note that it includes roads, power lines, and regular tree trimming near those power lines in addition to the turbines themselves), but I'd estimate that with current and projected Finnish population density, this would actually be a realistic option, yes.
Now that I think of it, I've never anyone speak of the impact on wildlife, nor seen a wind turbine in a forest (only ever on open farmland). Considering both noise and large shadows moving constantly, I assume it will have some impact. (I did hear that bird strikes are a non-issue in relative terms.) Even Wikipedia has no info on anything but birds/bats for on-shore installations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p...
The 9+5+4=18% water bodies, arable land, and pastures/mosaics (respectively) might also be a good target.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_power_density says 1.84 W/m², so at 18% of 338'662 "hundreds ha" = 61 billion m² you get 112 GW which translates into 983 TWh after a year (8760 hours). Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Finland that's 2.6 times more energy than they used in 2013 (this includes heating, driving, etc. but not things like imported clothes, plastic products, etc.). All this is considering only the land area, not sea.
Future work: calculate how many years of monopolizing the world's steel production it takes to get these things produced, much less built in the middle of nowhere with frozen winters.
Forests are a hassle to work in, and add a lot of extra costs. It’s often cheaper and better in many ways to clear the land first if you’re going to do wind there.
1) wind moves faster/freer the higher you are above the ground. the height of the trees moves the ‘ground’ up, without actually moving it up from a foundation or structure perspective. So you spend the money for a 300 ft tower, but only get 200ft of usable height. Not fun.
2) trees grow into things, fall on things, burn at inconvenient times, and are generally a maintenance headache.
3) many types of trees are very, very strong and require
expensive heavy equipment to clear at large scales, especially if you need to remove a lot of stumps. So it adds extra cost above some already significant costs of land.
If you already have some cleared land somewhere, assuming all other factors are equal, it will definitely be preferred.
That sounds like a world of pain. Between the displaced wildlife and released carbon from all those trees, I'd be quite curious if that's even worth it.
It probably isn’t, which is why you don’t see it happen much I imagine.
If the only land they have is trees, it does restrict the options quite a bit. I also forgot to mention, in most climates trees are a hassle this way, they also grow naturally, so even if you clear the land you need to go back and keep it clear every couple years.
Solar has similar drawbacks but worse - you can’t just clear the trees around where you’d put the windmills and roads, you’d need to clear pretty much everywhere including from where they would shade the panels. Which greatly increases the footprint.
Trees can of course be burned for heat and energy, but it’s a time consuming, dangerous, and inefficient process (time/land/manpower) compared to petroleum extraction. It tends to only happen for individual use, at small scale; or when heavily subsidized from taxes on petroleum products.
> If the only land they have is trees, it does restrict the options quite a bit.
Just to make sure, did you see the edit of my comment above? I checked out the land cover in Finland, it is actually a fairly high percentage trees and I did some math on putting wind in the other places.
Now that I'm writing this I realized a major flaw: not looking at https://globalwindatlas.info earlier. It turns out that Finland looks about average (just eyeballing it, I can't figure out how to use this area energy yield tool, it just gives me a blank image instead of a simple number).
The forests are not a big issue for wind in Finland nowadays, you just build towers that are high enough. The biggest problem is the long Russian border. You cannot build a wind farm where it would hide Russian movements from the Finnish radars.
Now you are just making things up. The bigger and stronger trees are, the more valuable they are as timber. But there is plenty of non-forest land to use, and wind is wholly compatible with mixed use with developed farm and pasture, which is why we see that instead.
Timberland owners (at least in my experience owning a lot of timberland) need to time market conditions quite a bit to make a profit. If someone is lucky, an offer for the land CAN coincide with good market conditions for the specific timber they have at the state they have it, but that is far from guaranteed.
All the species I happen to have a good stock of went crazy high earlier last year, then crashed hard due to burn damage to forests in other parts of the state (from over 100% increase in margin, to negative margin) in less time than it would have taken for me to get the paperwork through the state to harvest them.
Depending on market conditions, it could be very expensive to clear, to wildly profitable to clear, but no one is going to sell it to them for less than the profit they’d make in a case like that.
That looks very much like blaming the commenter you replied to for posting a "pointless" comment.
Which is not a very gracious spelling of "Sorry, my comment you replied to was stupid; I retract it and apologize", which I'm sure was what you were trying to convey.
No, he is making up imaginary impediments to wind power build-out. If trees could be a problem, they would be built in ways that trees would not be a problem, full stop.
> No, he is making up imaginary impediments to wind power build-out.
No, he is pointing out very real impediments to wind power build-out in forsests.
> If trees could be a problem,
As has been convincingly shown elsewhere in the subthread that they can, if one were stupid enough to build one's windmills among them.
> they would be built in ways that trees would not be a problem, full stop.
i.e. not in forests. Which was user @lazide's point all along.
And if you were going to say -- as the remains of your argument seem to be boiling down to -- "So don't build windmills in forests then", YTF did you say that to @lazide and not to @Aachen?
In fact wind turbines are routinely erected in forests with no difficulty. But, we neither need to build them there, nor need to avoid building them there. Talking about trees as if they were a problem for wind turbines is just noise. Complaining about that fact being pointed out is more noise.
You have contributed exactly nothing of any substance to the discussion.
Finland has a vast and long coast that could be used to build on or offshore farms. There are also wave hydro systems and Finland has many rivers etc that could be used.
I don't think there is very viable wave energy in the sea around Finland. It is small, shallow and surrounded by land. Sure sometimes there is build ups, but in general it is not too reliable.
As someone else pointed out, we aren't doing enough of these to iron out the kinks. If it's literally copy it might be going much better just because it's second.
Now we should figure out where to build third! It should go even better.
A decision will be made soon on building Sizewell C. Again, this will be the same as Hinckley C.
It should be noted that Hinckley C is penciled in to start operations in 2026. Hopefully if they give Sizewell the go ahead this year it will be in service 2031.
- Time. This one took over a decade and a half to build, and that's pretty normal
- Cost. Literally billions of dollars, all upfront. This one was budgeted at $3B and ended up costing $10B+.
- Inflexibility. Almost all of the cost is in building one, so if you aren't running it basically 100% of the time at 100% capacity you are losing money.
When it comes to $/MWh, nuclear simply can't compete with fossil or renewable when demand is low. And you can't run it to pick up high demand because it gets even more expensive. The private market is simply not interested in them, unless they get a government guarantee that forces their production to be bought at a fixed price.
And there's of course the whole safety and waste argument, but I consider that to be secondary. All in all, nuclear is a could-have-been and mostly a side-effect of nuclear arms development. Neat technology, but there are way better options.
We have to build lots of bigger, standardised reactors which will then reduce the cost due to experience and economies of scale. But then of course someone has to subsidise the tens/hundreds of billions in upfront investment to get to that point.
Where as with renewables this was all done decades ago. And we are now at the point where it is orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear. And getting cheaper by the day.
Renewable+storage is not an order of magnitude cheaper yet, thus far it is just "a lot" cheaper. But that is a predictable outcome, because nobody is predicting when those costs will bottom out. (They will have to, at some point, as incidental cost becomes an increasing fraction of the total. But we are not close to that point yet, except on residential rooftops.)
See this nuclear positive website that doesn't have an imprint (I can find on mobile). I wouldn't bcall it research either. Summary would probably be fair.
> See this nuclear positive website that doesn't have an imprint
You mean an "Impressum"? That's just some weird thing that AFAIK (almost?) only German Web sites have, because they're required to by German law. The vast majority of sites on the World Wide Web get by just fine without it; it's not like that's some kind of minimum requirement for a reputable site.
Many, probably most, Web sites the world over have "About Us" or "Contact" pages. It's just that they're not universally called "Impressum" ("Imprint"); that's a Germany-only thing.
So saying "a Web site without an imprint" as if that in itself somehow showed the site were somehow bad is, if it's about a non-German site, just stupid. HTH.
Yeah but only where it fits the narrative which in the question of cost for example leads to this:
1) If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better
2) Multiple hypothetical approaches to reduce nuclear costs are ongoing. No one knows for sure if any of them will work, or which one will work best
3) Factory-produced large reactors on floating platforms is a surprisingly intriguing idea to make reactors cheap
or: 1) make everything else more expensive so we look better
2) let me consult the magic orb because I have nothing in my hands
3) I have a nice idea
Meanwhile we have HERE just another example of hilariously expensive reactor. Actual facts. Waved away with theories like "we don't have the people with experience anymore" which leaves you with the thought: should inexperienced people build nuclear reactors at all?
20 years ago I was all for nuclear, then I looked at terrible projects in Europe, like in the Finland and the UK, and realised that it's too little too late. Europe can't build nuclear, so rather than trying to fight a losing battle for another 20 years, Europe should be massively investing in what it can do (offshore wind, tidal, solar, pumped hydro)
I'm thinking proliferation as positive. Just think of countries recently in war had nuclear deterrent. They might not have been invaded in first place. Everyone having nuclear weapons would make world much more peaceful and safer place.
That is unless we sanction all nations that have nuclear weapons and blockade them from international trade until they get rid of them and subject themselves to being open to inspections for couple centuries.
Then again the so called "rational" actors would be less likely do bad things. Just imagine how much better place world would be if in response to drone strike by Obama or Biden the NYC or Washington DC was hit by nuclear weapon. That would surely put end to those antics.
If you think the near-certainty of getting wiped out entirely at some point is the right price for avoiding wars, then sure. I'm not sure most people share that preference.
AFAIK Finland is the only country in the world that has managed to build a long term (they're planning for something like 100000 years) nuclear waste storage facility.
* Plants are very expensive to build. Due to massive upfront costs, it cannot beat wind/solar today unless you use very unusual financial models. (ie. assume interest rates are zero for 50 years). If nuclear plants were built more frequently, cost would come down a lot - it turns out making everything bespoke is hugely expensive.
* Lots of public opposition due to the public being scared of nuclear waste, nuclear accidents, etc. The public far prefers taking on invisible risk (like the lung cancer risk from coal/oil/gas emissions) than the huge event risk of a nuclear meltdown, even if the overall harm to human lives is higher.
And if you manage to convince someone this is an airplane crash type of problem, they start about the finances.
And they're right about it not being the cheapest option, so what can you say? They win the argument.
Next time you meet the person is at a protest where they don't want a solar farm where there is now a nice forest or pasture, no 24/7 moving shadows from huge wind turbine blades and that's after they pushed for a law to require more space between the edge of town and the nearest turbine, protesting for fish rights when hydro is being proposed (if that's possible in their area in the first place)...
People also love to gloss over that electricity is 10% of the problem. Whenever you see a headline about Germany having run on 90% renewable power last month or whatever, mentally replace that with 9% because energy used in transportation, building heating, etc. don't count towards this. And then we haven't even touched upon the problem of cement/steel/plastic yet, we're going to need breakthrough materials or negative emissions with capturing plants that, you guessed it, also require electricity.
It's apparently very hard to understand that we need to work on all fronts, not pick a partial solution and wait until that's exhaustively implemented (all reasonably available space occupied) 15 years down the road, then wonder why emissions are at record highs (see 2021).
As a rule of thumb, greenhouse gas emissions are roughly equally split between electricity production, transportation, heating, agriculture and industry, about 20% each. Transportation is electrifying rather quickly in Europe, heating at a bit slower pace. So it's a bit better than "10% of the problem" - it's about 20% now, becoming ~40% in 10-15 years, eventually lowering total emissions by ~60% probably some time around 2050
Agriculture and industry are tough nuts to crack. With electricity, transport and heating, it's a problem of scaling out. With agriculture and industry - we don't even have a blueprint yet
Fair enough. My figures are from 2013 and even then it was better than 10% (namely 12.7% in the Netherlands where I'm from; that's the latest info Wikipedia has). I'll use 20% as a rule of thumb going forwards because that's indeed more future-proof.
If mere cost/time predictability were the problem we could double any worst-case projection. Even at that price point it's something I think we should pursue alongside the more renewable sources. That electricity has been dirt(y) cheap in the past decades was great, but that's just not sustainable.
But yeah if we argue for another five years before getting started on at least the legislation/planning stages (after which we could still declare it a sunk cost, based on how the situation looks in 2027), we might as well forget about it.
Firstly, the plant above has costed more than 3x projected time or money, so doubling is not going to solve anything.
Secondly, forget civic planning, could you or I go to our companies and say just double by budget because we don't know how to plan well ? What is the guarantee our plan is at least 50% accurate ? i.e. only 2x is enough ?
Poor planning cannot be solved by increasing budget (time or money), even in non public projects, work has tendency to get expanded to meet the budget, basically if Norway had thought 2x the $3B and actually budgeted $6B, they would likely have spent $20B in the end.
All this is only for operational life of the plant, it does not even include long term costs of waste storage because no one can even model that well enough or budget for it today.
I am not saying we shouldn't do nuclear, we really should, but truly commercial plans are meaningless unless we can handle costs better, We should invest more on that, there is encouraging work in SMRs(Small Modular Reactors) that could potentially address these concerns, until then most plants are experimental high risk projects from a public plan perspective.
You left out proliferation of dual-use technologies. The fewer countries with advanced nuclear capabilities, the more thinly spread the expertise necessary to build nuclear weapons.
If Russia didn't have nukes, its imperialistic ambitious would be curtailed. The ability to shield conventional assaults behind a nuclear threat is destabilizing for the rules-based world order.
Is this also sarcasm? So you're saying that building this plant has increase the chance Finland will try to acquire Nuclear weapons? And Russia has nukes purely due to political and military reasons, they'd still have more than enough of them if they mostly started closing/stopped building new plants after Chernobyl.
I don't think it's sarcasm. Maybe North Korea is a better example. It would probably just be "Korea" if they didn't have nukes, but you can't exactly go in and overthrow the government when they can just wipe out all human life on the peninsula in an instant.
(People get upset at the implication that one country would take over another country, but the people of North Korea would probably not be worse off if that happened. Instead they suffer greatly because nobody can help them.)
> It would probably just be "Korea" if they didn't have nukes
Their first nuclear test was in 2006. Even their production of refined uranium and plutonium only began in the 80s, decades after the war came to a standstill.
> People get upset at the implication that one country would take over another country
If anyone is upset that the people of the German "Democratic" Republic got to join the rest of "We, the people" in a free Federal Republic, they're cordially invited to go fuck themselves.
The same would go ten times over for anyone feeling that way about the much more oppressed North Koreans.
No, it's not sarcasm — I would appreciate it if you would be a little more generous when interpreting my remark. The proliferation problem is exacerbated incrementally by every additional plant in every additional country — including this one. The issue is not Finland in particular developing nuclear weapons, but any country developing nuclear weapons — especially a country governed by an autocracy. Or a country that might be governed by an autocracy in the future — the last few years have raised the urgency of the problem of democratic backsliding, which we need to figure out how to avert.
The countries which are least trustworthy wrt nuclear weapons are the ones that aren't going to ask the public's permission. An autocracy doesn't need to power itself by nuclear plants in order to have nuclear weapons. On the other hand having a sustainable, clean source of power not tied to autocratic regimes lowers the leverage those regimes hold over democratic countries.
In my particular country, a major chunk of the public budget goes towards paying fines to EU for use of coal, all while our government periodically passes bills allowing it to borrow more money from the central bank, increasing inflation. Negotiations with neighbouring autocratic countries can be pretty tough, when they can threaten us and rest of Europe, which is going to put pressure, with stopping energy transmission. Energy shortages in some parts of the country were a regular occurrence for decades, even before the current political problems.
Lack of nuclear plants does nothing to prevent a nuclear war, while it harms us on many very tangible levels.
See https://whatisnuclear.com/non-proliferation.html#how-is-nucl... for one of the mechanisms whereby dual-use technology presents issues: obtaining fissile material is difficult, and while nuclear power plants are not a prerequisite, they make it easier.
I agree that dependence on geopolitically and environmentally problematic fossil fuel sources is a pressing concern.
An interesting example is Japan. Japan has a large reactor grade plutonium stockpile. This was ostensibly for their fast reactor program, but that's dead now. So, the plutonium just sits there. It's not ideal for weapons (being reactor not weapons grade) but it can be made to work, so Japan has the potential capability to make thousands of warheads if they need to.
Russia imperialistic ambitions would be far more modest if Europe and US wouldn't fill Putin's coffers with hundreds of billions of dollars and euros in exchange for oil and gas. You know, the things they use instead of Nuclear energy.
Indeed, we are left with (from my perspective) all bad choices in the short-to-medium term. In the US, we made a least-bad calculation when choosing the environmental cost of fracking over the geopolitical costs of depending on dictator oil. Now Europe gets to make similar calculations.
I'd sure like it if less inherently dangerous technologies were further along. But every year they are gaining.
Look at the situation in Ukraine. A huge problem almost nobody is talking about is the largest nuclear plant in Europe was just captured by an invading military force just over a week ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_P...
As soon as private industry is funding and running nuclear power including the decommissioning costs, plus selling their energy at market rates (in the UK we have guaranteed the new nuclear plants rates that are higher than the next most expensive generators costs) then I'll believe that.
The only way these are remotely economical is when they are funded by the tax payer before the are built, while they run, and after they close down.
Any examples that goes against that? I'd be very interested to learn about them. I think as a way to ensure energy independence and remove fossil fuels they are good, but we cannot pretend they don't come with massive costs, and don't yet pay their own way.
The problem is that markets are supremely bad at building a stable electricity grid. So on one hand wind and solar are getting cheaper per MW, but it doesn't include the effect they have on destabilising both the grid and electricity markets - in fact, solar getting cheaper is probably going to cause a stop on buildout in some places, because the price of solar MW is going to be too low to deal with all the time you're not producing - either due to lack of sun, or due to curtailment.
And we do not really have any storage available - the only systems that are 1) not experimental 2) usable for anything other than frequency stabilisation; are the pumped hydro - and those are geographically limited. At least when it's windy, you can use wind turbines as sinks for stability. Intermittent nature of solar and wind is too intermittent for most industrial sinks.
Meanwhile unpredictable nature of generation from wind and solar push the grid to buildout LNG/petroleum powered gas turbines, due to their very short delay on ramping up/down (IIRC, second only to hydro). So you end up in situation where market approach to electricity is going to prevent decarbonisation, unless you hugely upend what is being bought on the market.
Personally I've been thinking of electricity market paying only for predictable (aka "dispatchable") low-carbon power plants, or at least with huge priority. Solar and Wind could still compete on such market by being paired with storage systems into Virtual Power Plants (something that already exists), and the rest of the generation would be sold on spot market during peaks, or preferably to dedicated sinks like green hydrogen production.
The issue is, that in a traditional electrical system, you need both base load and dispatchable power plants. And while nuclear power plants work as base load, they're really bad for dispatchable power, both economically and in how they work.
So if you want to base an electrical grid solely on nuclear power without additional fossil fuel plants, you need either a lot of often unused (and thus very, very expensive) nuclear capacity or some kind of .. storage. It's similar to renewables in that regard, although much more predictable and reliable (with exceptions, such as france this winter).
That's why I'd rather see a variable sink like electrolysers producing green hydrogen for non-electricity related purposes or disconnected operations. A mix of renewable and nuclear that, instead of curtailment, uses excess renewable production for other purposes.
We do not have storage yet just because it is not built out yet.
Thus far, a renewable euro has been just overwhelmingly better used to build out generating capacity, even where intermittent. The only problems in storage are picking which will be cheapest or otherwise most valuable -- e.g. hydrogen, ammonia, and liquid air are entirely the latter -- and that by waiting, you get more for your euro. Storage cost is plummeting much faster even than solar, and solar is already so cheap that building 2x, 3x, 6x overcapacity is in easy reach.
The cheapest, most efficient present storage is pumped hydro, which can be used in very many places where native hydro generation cannot be, i.e. almost anyplace with hills. But iron-air battery factories are under construction, for very cheap and safe storage, and that will compete with many other alternatives. Each has strengths for certain places, all work, and operating cost is in all cases very small, so building "the wrong one" just means you spent more up front than you maybe had to.
Trotting out the "ooh, storage" argument only demonstrates you don't have one.
"But what if it explodes" is actually a valid question for fast reactors, since they can potentially go prompt fast supercritical in a serious accident. Edward Teller was famously suspicious (in 1967) of fast reactors for this reason.
I wonder why is nuclear power controversed? I believe that is one of the most clean forms of energy and leaving hydro and coal aside, one of the cheapest.
Is it because of political activism and some occult groups of interest which have their own agenda?
Partly because nobody involved wanted it ever finished. And partly because, over and over again, construction efforts failed to meet basic quality standards, and had to be ripped out and redone.
Nothing like an aggressive Russia and a war in your neighborhood to kickstart your move towards energy independence. I like seeing this. We should see more plants announced across Europe as part of a push along side wind and solar to diversify energy production. Advancements in nuclear plant design and such have made them cheaper and safer, too.
Take the exact design and duplicate it 5 more times in the country, and then build the same in Sweden, Norway 5x each. Thanks.
Be Carbon Free in 10 years and sell excess energy to neighbours.
Do it now.
Putin has taught us that politicians can actually do stuff when they are forced into an existential crisis, maybe they should do something here as well.
I don't claim to have the answers but I suggest there are many opportunities that are worth pursuing.
It's a BWR, the worst case failure mode looks something like Fukishima. Certainly a mess, but "set on fire" makes me think you're imagining another Chernobyl. BWRs don't catch fire like that. If something went very wrong, the reactor and containment buildings might pop and make a big mess, but it's not as though there's a thousand tons of graphite there to catch fire. It's not an RBMK.
Edit: Actually it's a PWR, the other two reactors at this plant are BWRs. Still, similar worst-case scenarios.
The possibility seems remote right now and I dislike the inflammatory framing, but I think this touches on one of fundamental drawbacks of nuclear power: it is hard to engineer plants to guard against catastrophe because there's a lot of energy stored in an inherently dangerous form.
Hydroelectric power is often similarly vulnerable: you can engineer the dam to hold, but when something outside of tolerances appears, the downstream consequences are severe. Compare with solar or wind, where the energy source is not concentrated and so plant machinery is comparatively inert.
We are continually reassured by proponents that today's designs are invulnerable, but both history and the fundamentals of energy storage bespeak the limitations of such assurances.
Oh, come on. Give me a break with the lazy "citation needed" comment. I'm not going to go hunt up a reference to a paper which reasons that compared with wind and solar rays constantly around us, nuclear fuel rods are inherently dangerous, nor that a dammed river is inherently dangerous because the dam may burst. I expect people to be able to reason about such things themselves.
It's not as if windmills and solar panels are risk-free: If nothing else, they can fall over and crush people. Sure, they're smaller and lighter, so fewer people at a time; but that are a lot more of them, so many more chances for one to fall over.
When an article starts with chernobyl as example of what mistakes we're likely to make when building a new plant today, it makes me itch to just close the tab and dismiss the opinion of the person who linked it.
Not sure why I even bothered digging into it, but for example one later point is also misleading: "uranium resources will be depleted by the end of this century".
I think I found the source (not that they link it, that would be too easy, but by ducking around for this number):
> the total identified amount of conventional uranium stock, which can be mined for less than USD 130 per kg, [was found] to be about 4.7 million tonnes. Based on the 2004 nuclear electricity generation rate of demand the amount is sufficient for 85 years, the study states. Fast reactor technology would lengthen this period to over 2500 years.
> However, world uranium resources in total are considered to be much higher. Based on geological evidence and knowledge of uranium in phosphates the study considers more than 35 million tonnes is available for exploitation.
I'm not sure how the "city of vienna" can read this and summarize it down to say that we'll plainly run out of uranium by 2100. That's just not what the source says. Maybe that's what makes this "reference" "handy" for people with a certain preexisting opinion?
The same bullet point continues with some other interesting claims, let alone the rest of the page, but let me quickly close that tab before I feel inclined to go down more of these rabbit holes...
I mean, it seems a bit like using the Bhopal disaster as an argument to not build any more chemical plants, or the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster as an argument to stop using passenger ships. Chernobyl was a flawed design incompetently operated.
> And what is your solution for storing nuclear waste safely for hundreds of thousands of years?
While it's a problem, it's actually a fairly tractable one, because the volume of high level waste is small and it doesn't leave the plant as part of normal operations. For coal power, for contrast, we store much of the waste in peoples' lungs.
I should really make template comments. Being asked to explain why Chernobyl is not a realistic scenario in the 2020s, with all the available information and previous discussions, has been getting really old...
Or the fact that it hasn't happened despite hundreds of active nuclear power plants around the world (not all in countries that you would expect to have high safety standards).
Same with the waste issue. Nobody asks what the proposed solution is for CO2 storage (it will remain for billions of years! The horror!) when proposing to keep open coal/gas plants a bit longer until we have solar/wind/hydro+storage all set up, but with nuclear we need to find more reasons for the phase-out.
> If these materials are burnt in fuel through recycling, nuclear waste would only remain radioactive for a few hundred years
And that's ignoring that we're also managing to deal with the waste so far just fine, also without recycling.
(The tally is at 40 minutes time wasted for these two answer so far, also because most of the previous one was 'researched' and written on mobile. How long did it take to ask the question? This is why I contemplate templates.)
Obviously this particular idea is still blue-sky but as technology improves, I'd like to think we'll be able to solve problems like this within a few decades.
(although I'm still waiting for my Mr Fusion, Flying Car etc).
> Nuclear waste from power stations can be used as raw materials for nuclear weapons.
I imagine it's almost impossible to manufacture nuclear weapons 'quietly' with waste and sanctions/agreements stop this happening, while countries that go against these are able to manufacture nuclear weapons anyway (North Korea). So I don't think this is as big a risk as suggested.
The rest seem solvable by focusing on better secure designs and then moving from Uranium to another source. I don't know the difficulty of this but I can't imagine it's insurmountable?
