Agree, CO2 emissions are big problem, a life threatening one for some people. Nuclear is a problem too, just not a global obe. You know, both things can be true at the same time.
Again, what would be your alternative way forward? Coal and oil burning has to go, that much is sure. We still need electricity so, hence we need clean sources. And we need them fast, because as a species we were asleep at the wheel for way too long. Also, we need a lot of those clean sources.
So what is your proposal? A realistic one, please, not a scenarion of "we should have done X decades ago", but one that can be worked on right now, on the basis we have.
> So what is your proposal? A realistic one, please, not a scenarion of "we should have done X decades ago", but one that can be worked on right now, on the basis we have.
Sometimes the only realistic answer is "We should have done X, many years ago" - I think society and humans in general need to get better at admitting this. Sometimes we back ourselves into a corner and we just need to accept that as a fact.
But due to the situation we are in, the actual realistic answer I have is continue to burn coal and gas as a bridge while we do a crash program to train up the next generation of nuclear engineers and construction workforce.
Start 100 reactor sites right now and understand they are mostly going to be used as on-the-job training for construction crews for the next decade while we burn co2 and learn how to build things again.
Of course continue to install as many gigawatts of solar and wind during that time period as you can while expanding the grid. As you spin up your "nuclear batteries" you can then start spinning down coal and gas and let your renewables take up the peak loads. Load prediction and larger grids have become reliable enough now that you can spin up nuclear in a predictable fashion for load-following, with a small amount of grid battery hanging around for those few hours of surprises per year.
Hydro is interesting but effectively 100% utilized worldwide at this point. Once you get your nuclear workforce geared up and the initial surge of demand completed, perhaps start looking at modifying as much hydro capacity in the world to act in both directions as pumped storage. Imagine pumping water back into Lake Mead from downstream when there is excess power generation. Exceedingly inefficient - but starts to become interesting when you have grid-tied batteries that actually work at scale.
Edit: Nuclear is only dead in the developed world because we chose it to be so. Society can decide tomorrow to change that decision if properly motivated. We have many times in the past for much harder things than building a few hundred industrial plants we already have built before.
There were two new nuclear reactor projects launched in Europe in the 2000s / 2010s: two new reactors in Finland and Hinkley C in the UK. Finland canceled one and got one 1600 MW reactor online this year. Hinkley C is already 3 years late and will take at least 5 more years. In the same time Hinkley C was planned until now, the UK installed 10x the capacity of Hinkley C in wind alone.
You see the maths here, right? Not to mention wind and solar are cheaper than Hinkley C, already were in 2015 or so (based on 20 year bid prices per kWh for both alternatives).
Nuclear in the developed world is dead because it is too expensive. Nuclear isn't dead in the developing world because governments there want it, and it is better than coal (which makes nuclear a better choice for me, no idea if that really factors into those decisions or not). Developing countries could as easily go for renewables straight away as well so.
It is not society that needs to change to make nuclear viable again, it is the economics behind it. And with renewables, especially solar, following Moore's law to a T so far, that wont happen ever.
I mean, the same exact argument can be made for public transportation (e.g. subway/rail) construction in the US. It's too expensive to be realistic!
Well, sure. But why is it that expensive? It's expensive because we decided it to be so.
If it became an existential problem for society you would see the cost per mile of rail plummet 10x or more.
The same goes for nuclear. The expensive bits are almost all societal constructs. Much like all large projects in the developed world. Once the shit hits the fan so to speak, those costs tend to mysteriously evaporate and society magically gets stuff done in record time. See: historical shifts to wartime production.
If your only argument against nuclear is cost, I'm afraid it's not a very compelling one to me.
Now, renewables may surprise me and somehow we crack the storage problem. But I will continue to posit nuclear power plants are the best grid-scale battery tech we've yet to invent. I say this due to the costs. Not the monetary costs, but the return on energy invested cost which is really the only thing that will end up mattering in the end.
Public mass transport is freaking expensive, everywhere. Just look at all the cost overruns for similar projects in Germany (which I know of off top of my head). The alternative to public transports is a car. The alternative to nuclear power are, among other things, renewables which are readily available, faster to deploy at scale and cheaper (that is happening right now for almoat a decade). So the comparison is somewhat wrong.
Edit: Cost is the compelling argument for everyone with the money, everything else is either political or ideological. And the money truely has spoken.
There is none except hydro and nuclear for base load. Unless you want to burn gas (co2) or coal (co2 and radioactive emissions that cause more cancers in the us then nuclear has world wide)
Renewables outside hydro cannot, and will never, be able to provide a a stable base load for the grid, battery storage isn’t there and has all sorts of issues, pumped storage requires even more rare conditions then hydro, as does geothermal, so we are left with nuclear as the only real clean and reasonable path forward that we would have done decades ago if not for oil and gas doing everything to prevent it.
So what is YOUR proposal to provide a stable base load?
Fission is too expensive. The good real reasons from a cost perspective for reactors are weapons, medical and industrial applications as well as research.
Why would you want to use battery storage instead of pressure or gravity, for example? You can do gravity by moving stuff around underground, not just classical pumped storage. Digging big and deep holes is something people know how to do quite well, same goes for moving weights/mass up and down.
Could also do some chemical storage as another avenue.
For heat you can have certain thermal storage, too.
Reducing emissions related to transportation leads to electrical vehicles, and therefore to a vast amount of batteries, most not used at any given moment and therefore ready to store overproduction or release needed electricity.
This very average frequency/amplitude/speed of discharge, for any given battery, depends upon many parameters (during most of such 'call to batteries': slope of the call and quantity of electricity needed, duration, proportion of vehicles connected to the grid...).
This is part of the solution, as we have ways to reduce effects of intermittency on production (mainly a mix spread over the continent), other ways to store electricity (hydro, green hydrogen-burning turbo-alternators...), and curtailment...
> There is none except hydro and nuclear for base load.
I'm not the person you're replying to, and I mostly agree with your points, but I think its necessary to point out that nuclear and hydro have long lead times to build the infrastructure. And we basically don't have enough time left to build it.
I don't have good answers. Solar + interconnectors, maybe? So that areas in daylight can power areas that aren't? But this obvs requires cooperative behaviour.
There's a company working to build a 3600km long cable between solar + wind farms in Morocco, and the UK. 3.6GW cable, 10GW of generation, 20GW of battery storage, and the cable should run at full load for 20h a day.
Not if you get the equivalent of multiple NPPs in renewables installed every month it isn't. The best time to build nuclear was before Chernobyl, and since Fukushima new nuclear plants are dead basically.
My proposal would be to use combined cycle gas turbines to peak renewables until over-installation and storage make that no longer necessary.
Gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. Modern gas turbines are by far the most efficient way of generating electricity from fossil fuels. Replacing fossil fuels burnt in ICEs and for heating with electricity generated using gas will drastically reduce emissions quickly. There is plenty of gas. Much of it is cheap to extract.
The strategic reasons for doing this are that gas turbines will be able to handle the extreme 'duck curves' and other demand volatility we will see when both renewables and electric vehicles are ramped up hard. Those are the two levers which are currently easiest to push on - because individuals can replace vehicles and heating systems, and will do so given smallish financial incentives. And because solar, wind and storage, can be scaled easily without excessive top-down planning or insane capital needs.
If nuclear is to be the solution, we have to quickly commit to it hard as a society. Compared to gas, nuclear will both make electricity more expensive and make swings and volatility in demand or in renewable supply more costly to deal with. It will on the margin discourage EV and electric heating, and discourage other renewables.
Nuclear is good at 'base load', but not much else. This is fine(-ish) if we rapidly switch to almost all nuclear. It works well in a 'Star Trek economy' where governments can act quickly and cheaply and impose choices by offering abundance. If this was the case, it would make sense to call a 50 year decision that nuclear with a modest amount of over-provision will replace almost all generation. (This has succeeded historically only in France, a very centralized economy for a Western democracy, with a high degree of regulation, and where the government has abundant access to capital.)
The real climate/energy economy is not like this. If you want to see an example of rapid change in action, look at the fracking revolution in the United States. Small players who saw opportunities created a whole new set of technologies, techniques and practices. They did this because they could react to incremental incentives. They didn't have to win everywhere at once. They could win field by field, installation by installation. We need the situation for new renewable generation and power storage to work like this. We need it to be the case that someone who provides storage in the right place at the right time can make money from it. We need it to be the case that someone who makes batteries (or gas storage or gravity storage or turbines or EVs) slightly cheaper or more efficient can make money from that.
There is no reason why this type of progress can work for environmentally damaging tech like fracking and not for environmentally beneficial tech.
Gas isn't a 50 year decision, more like a 20 year decision. It reduces emissions a lot in the short term but leaves the playing field wide open for further rapid and drastic reductions in the longer term.
(A subsidiary concern but still a real one: if you could press a button and replace all fossil fuels with reliable and safe nuclear, you would instantly have catastrophic political breakdown in places where societal cohesion depends on money from fossil fuels. Moving from oil to gas and then ramping down gas progressively allows these places to gradually develop other incomes, and allows the rest of the world time to deal with them and political problems which they are likely to export.)_
> Gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. Modern gas turbines are by far the most efficient way of generating electricity from fossil fuels.
The "Cleanest" is around 400g/kwh which is still very far from clean. It is around 20x more emissive that what Nuclear would give you.
But congratulations, you just described what was the German strategy for the previous 20 years. With a lot of pipelines connected directly to Russia (Because Germany does not have Gas) and with a very happy Vladimir.
And then the Ukrain-Russia war came. And the rest is history.
Oh dear... Germany, and Europe, got gas from the USSR since the 70s (go on wikipedia and read about the state of affaires between NATO and the Warsaw Pact back then). Besides having a reliable, save, and cheap source for gas, this agreement kept incentives aligned and communications open. That startegy worked, until Putin decided to say "fuck it, I want Ukraine".
Since the war in Ukraine happened a year ago, and isn't over yet, the rest cannot be history. The problems with green houses gas emissions and enegry are souch older so, with the first measures being taken 20 odd years ago (too little, but better than nothing).
As always, people cry over spilled milk, what happened happened. Now we have a ton of options to deploy, nuclear power is not a feasible one (cost, time...). Organizations active in nuclear power agree, new projects aren't launched anymore. And the last one to be launched are delayed, and come in above cost, when planned cost already wasn't competitive.
Funny so, it took quite a while to reach the point of "Germany bad because gas financed Putin, nuclear power would have prevented that".
I explicity said elswhere that the devloping world is different, didn't I?
In the developed world, read western industrial nations, nuclear is launched anymore. Those legacy projects, Hinkley C or in Finland, run late and cost more than planned. And they a certainly more expensive than solar and wind. Nuclear is good for base load, the old inflexible kind, only. It is didficult to ramp up and down on short notice, making a grid less flexible the more nuclear is deployed. Hence all serious new capacity being either wind or solar. No idea why facta can be so ignored.
By the way, my opinion about the solar industry, makers and sellers of panels, is rather low, so I deffinitely don't cheer those guys up.
> In the developed world, read western industrial nations, nuclear is launched anymore
There is Korea, USA, France, UK, Slovakia and the UAE in the list.
In longer term, you can add Japan, Czeck Republic, Poland (under investigation) and even Italy is considering it right now.
You should certainly said to them that they are not part of your definition of the developed world.
> Nuclear is good for base load, the old inflexible kind, only. It is didficult to ramp up and down on short notice, making a grid less flexible the more nuclear is deployed
Good. The grid worked on good old inflexible based load for a century now and it prooved it works. Lets continue on that and make it low Carbon at the same time.
That being said, the majority are in Asia. The UAE have one under construction, they did install more solar capacity already.
Two Japanese ones are suspended. Which leaves China as the leader.
Just as a reminder: these are the capacities
Under Construction (grid connection, as of Nov. 2023, between 2023 and 2030): 68 GW
Planned: 109 GW
Proposed: 353 GW
Total: 630 GW
Solar capacity installed between 2018 and 2021: 500 GW
Solar capacity estimated to be installed until 2025: 1.3 TW
I hope that puts it into perspective with regards to where the money goes. Nuclear proponents are at risk of becoming a serious road block when it comes to a fast energy transition, even more so if they continue to ignore raw market numbers.
In the UK, planning started on Hinkley Point in 2010. It was supposed to run at 3 TW by 2020, costing £24 per MWh. It's now 13 years into a process that is projected to complete in another 5 years, eventually producing energy for £90 per MWh.
In roughly the same period of time 30 TW of wind capacity have been installed. Even if you discount windfarm capacity at an aggressive 4:1, wind has already succeeded in producing 2.5 times what nuclear said it would be able to and failed at.
Onshore wind is being delivered at a per MWh cost below that of the new nuke, if it ever runs. The offshore cost is much lower still.
Moreover modern gas turbo-alternators can burn hydrogen instead of methane, and electricity generated thanks to renewable units' (wind turbines, solar panels...) overproduction can be used to obtain hydrogen (dubbed 'green hydrogen', thanks to water electrolysis).
Base load, for starters, is an overblown problem, multiple days with close to 100% renewables showed us that. Now that this is out of the way:
Massive build out of renewables, mainly solar and wind. Build the grid for that as well. Use gas peaker plants, if needed. Keep nuclear plants running as long as safely possible. Invest in a green hydrogen network for storage. Make industrial demand more flexible. Reinterate, rinse and repeat.
I work from memory here, based on what I learned during my masters and a couple of stints in energy hungry industries a couple of yeaes ago. Besides gas peaker plants and green hydrogen, all of that is already happening in Europe.
Especially solar and wind build out is progressing massively across the world, even without a concentrated effort behind it.
Regarding industrial demand flexibility, that is also happening for a decade now (I personally know it does in the chemical industry, paper industry and graphite industry, surprising how much flexibility companies can squeeze out of production tech that was historically seen as being not flexible at all when there is loads of money to be made). Domestic demand is different, convenience beats saving most of the time, also households don't have professional energy management (hint: there isba massive, hard, start-up idea here: provide automated consumption control of electricity for households beyond smart thermostats ansball the other "smart" home crap).
Nuclear is a dead end in the developed world: too expensive (Hinkley C was already more expensive than wind like 7 years ago), takes too long install (just google year per kWh for the last NPPs installed) and has additional, unsolved, long term issues (waste storage only being one of those). Heck, even investors are quiting NPPs across the Western world. Nuclear has a future so: existing plants need be run as long as safely possible (the main reason German plants were shit down, they reached the end of their service live), for countries with nuclear arsenals, for the production of medical radionucleoids, for research... New ones are a waste of time, energy and money right now so.
And yet again, you said why something doesn't work, because just building dozens of plants and go fully nuclear is not feasible or realistic for the developed world.
For developing countries it is different, and they should build nuclear plants instead of coal ones, but then those have a lot of catching up to do. They could also go fully renewable right away so, they should have an "easier" (nothing is easy about any of this) life doing so without a century of legacy structures and systems to worry about (grids, industry, domestic use...).
Again, what would be your alternative way forward? Coal and oil burning has to go, that much is sure. We still need electricity so, hence we need clean sources. And we need them fast, because as a species we were asleep at the wheel for way too long. Also, we need a lot of those clean sources.
So what is your proposal? A realistic one, please, not a scenarion of "we should have done X decades ago", but one that can be worked on right now, on the basis we have.