A solar panel is a self-contained prefab power generating unit. Even with all of the advancements in nuclear, we still don’t have anything like that.
I am still very pro-nuclear but it seems PV + wind + battery storage are coming down in price much faster than people expected and it just makes sense to build more since the incremental cost is so low, especially compared to something like nuclear. That said, there's no reason to not pursue both options, which apparently China is doing but at a slower pace for nuclear.
And if the only factor is cost, coal is the way to go. So so cheap if the pollution is somebody else’s problem.
Currently, PRC now largely hitting nuclear construction targets fine after switching to domestic nuclear. What PRC couldn't seem to do, like the west, is build _western_ nuclear tech economically, because industry seems to be a mess. 2010s nuclear ambition under 13th 5-year plan was delayed largely due Fukushima reassessement and drama over original pursuit of western nuclear tech (French EPR / US AP1000 technical and political issues like US sanctions / Westinghouse bankruptcy), adding delays, forcing PRC planners to switch to domestic tech, which is now coming online at expected pace. Current 14th 5-year plan still aiming for ~180-200 GWe by 2035 with ~150 total reactors, which is in line with mid 2010s assessments. IMO as more nuclear comes online, and associated nuclear expertise, there's likely going to be faster improvement on nuclear side. Not unlikely next gen nuclear will beat economics of renewables + storage.
Hopefully we avoid trying to fix the dogmatic mistakes of the past and in so doing, make a new dogmatic mistake in the present. Anti-nuclear policies were wrong back then, but I think the time for nuclear has probably passed.
But I don't necessarily disagree with you.
And you don't spend 10,000 years hoping & working to make sure nothing goes wrong with the 95% of fuel (unburned) & decommissioned reactors debris you wind up with in the end.
There are good tech answers to try to decrease these problems, but they'd involve building more advanced nuclear fuel lifecycle reactors. Which no one is going to fund. Especially since waste seems to be externalized from generation.
Solar on the other hand appeals to the public and can be deployed in large scale facilities. Large scale economics apply directly and we can see that by looking at the historic price per kW[1].
Finally, me as a nuclear advocate own 14x550w panels + a 20 kWh battery. I’m off grid > 95% of the year. Solar is unstoppable now.
I know people in Seattle who run their entire house off solar for 6-8 months on the year (important now that AC is increasingly needed around here...) and who don't fully deplete the credit they've saved up with the power company until January.
Also only Seattle gets the majority of their energy Hydro Power, anyone in King County but outside of Seattle is getting a mix[1] including around 46% from coal + natural gas.
You'll need to dig through all the wind turbines and dams to find them though. The PNW has better choices than solar anyway.
New construction cost per energy out can vary by 5x, even against the grain of expected purchasing power parity advantages:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-britain-is-building-...
The article describes China scaling back new plants at a slower pace—about 5 a year instead of ten–but that’s still a multiple of anything we’re doing.
Firstly, it's actually competing with coal, which is what is going in instead, and secondly, any regulatory regime that slows nuclear deployment so much that you instead install coal is deeply, deeply flawed. Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years. They need to figure out which roadblocks are slowing it down and remove them.
Regulation is a choice. Sometimes it's a very good choice. But if your options are "highly regulated nuclear" and "coal", then you have made some poor regulatory choices.
> Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years
might cause some skepticism as Chernobyl was in 1986. I am not saying that it is false, but I am saying that it will sound false
If their share of renewables / nuclear energy were increasing then there would be a decrease in C02 emissions per capita, but that has never been the case even with the increase in announcements in "green" mega projects over the years.
This seems a bit obvious to say, but that wouldn't be the case if the standard of living were also being raised. Also, there's a huge amount of CO2 generated by non-energy means; e.g. building with concrete.
https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/chinas-new-coal-po...
And industrializaing vast swaths of land by covering it with solar panels.
https://www.facebook.com/XinhuaSciTech/videos/solar-panels-o...
I am envisioning something like an international market for clean electricity. Something like an internet for power. This would enable developing countries to leapfrog dirty methods like coal, similar to how many countries leapfrogged over credit cards and cheques we still have in the US. Of course the UHVDC technology may not be ready for it yet.
It’s mineable almost everywhere people live, is burdened by little international regulation (at least compared to nuclear), and is labour intensive enough to create powerful local advocates.
With solar we can externalize the environmental damage almost 100% if the panels are manufactured somewhere else. We would install them somewhere else if we could, too. With nuclear there is always some underlying amortized risk of problems, and this perceived risk is impossible to externalize. Again, what is important is the perception of damage rather than actual damage.
Of course I’m also not quantifying the actual damage from either one. I’m not sure which one is worse in terms of raw material extraction or CO2 emissions per lifetime KWh produced. I checked and it seems solar might be higher for CO2. But that difference isn’t going to matter if nuclear doesn’t get built.
You can vaguely do this DIY today using the long life radioactive glow sticks and some solar panels and get a constant power device but its very inefficient and too expensive for the power it produces and its half life is too short.
There is I think no viable way to make that business reality. The government intervention would be absurdly high and it would never make it to market even if the cost of the device was economically competitive with a Solar or Wind setup. This is one of the ways Solar and Wind became dominate, they scale really well from the small to the large, especially solar which the panels on the roof of a house are the same in a multiple MW power station.
The countries with the #1 and #2 sized nuclear arsenals are currently at war. A war that, as far as I can tell, is continuing to escalate.
The countries ranked #2 and #3 (China has been busy building them) are preparing for war with each other.
We're seeing ongoing evidence around the world that nuclear weapons are the only thing that can deter a big player from launching an invasion of a country.
We could plausibly be looking at the opening stages of WWIII and while there is a lot of concern it isn't enough to jolt people out of their normal routines and the political impacts have been relatively muted. The situation is so bad right now I'm not sure what the proliferation concerns are supposed to be. It is already just a matter of time until something goes terribly wrong. How much is prosperity energy generation supposed to make the situation? If anything it might stabilise the military situation.
Apparently some radiation standards in nuclear power plants work out at millions/billions of dollars per year per life saved
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-saf...
A coal power plant is similar to a nuclear plant -- they heat water to turn a turbine to generate water. There's no way a nuclear plant would ever be cheaper than a coal plant to build, and it would have to be to be competitive with solar in cost.
Another social licensing risk is early plant closure. The levelized cost of nuclear energy is the best case scenario. This number assumes that your country won't become like Germany. What will happen to the ROI of nuclear if there's a moral panic in 15 years forcing early plant closures? Nobody can predict the irrationality of the crowd. Renewables don't face such risks to ROI.
Following historical experience curves, when the world is solar powered energy from PV will be below $10/MWh.
Most/all solar panels that exist currently can not be recycled in a way that makes ecological or economical sense. Their operational lifetime is NOT "sustainable", nor is their economical lifetime.
Then there's death's per kWh, required energy storage (with its own ecological and economical issues), mining, transportation, CO2 per kWh, etc etc.
IMO nuclear is a pretty clear winner (as a continious energy source), but it's a complex analysis where important details are easily missed.
What do you mean when you say that solar panels are not sustainable in their economical lifetime?
Nuclear waste persists and remains dangerous for a long time and it's easy to forget and just burden future generations with it.
Given the value of a statistical life (which is something like $12.5M in the US), the value of putative lives saved from going nuclear (using motivated numbers from nuclear advocates) would provide no justification for building nuclear plants instead of renewables. The value would be utterly dwarfed by the excessive cost of the nuclear plants.
- CO2 comes from sources other than energy (electricity) production.
- Overall energy usage is increasing, outpacing % growth of renewables.
This is why I pointed out per capita emissions. If renewables had a bigger proportion, then it would decrease. It didn't. In fact it accelerated.
"There is also a caveat to China's rapid build-out of renewable capacity because at the same time it is still adding substantial coal-fired generation."
"China already accounts for 53% of the world's 2,095 GW of operating coal-fired generating capacity, a share likely to increase in coming years as more coal plants are retired in the developed world."
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
https://www.wwf.mg/?272333/Dark%2DCloud
> It reveals that in 2013 their emissions were responsible for over 22,900 premature deaths, ...
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/air-pollut...
> Pollution from Europe’s coal plants responsible for ‘up to 34,000 deaths each year’
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abecff
> The health burden of European [coal power] emission-induced PM2.5, ..., amounts to at least 16 800 (CI95 14 800–18 700) excess deaths per year over the European domain.
Chernobyl's total death toll is estimated somewhere between thousands and tens of thousands: in other words, even assuming the worst number for Chernobyl, in every year or two, coal kills the same number of Europeans as Chernobyl ever did. The number may be as low as a few months.
Over-reacting to early nuclear disasters and failing to accelerate our build out and continuing with coal for the past nearly 80 years post Chernobyl is, in my opinion, one of the greatest civilizational mistakes humanity has made.
It's just that these people are spread over a wide geographic area and can be blamed on things like smoking and car exhaust.
That said, from a conservation point of view, nuclear is something I’m in favor of
So what? They've invested a large amount of capital in order to avoid low $0.13/kWh residential electricity rates that come from more or less entirely carbon-free sources (mostly hydro, some nuclear/wind). You can do it, it just doesn't make any sense.
As per PSE (the power company for the Seattle Metro but outside of Seattle itself), only 23% of the energy sent to surrounding areas outside of Seattle city proper is from hydro. FWIW Nuclear is less than 1%. 46% is fossil fuels, natural gas and coal.
As for the payback period on solar installs, it made a lot of sense a few years ago when the state had incentives.
With the ability to bank credit, plenty of people around Seattle who have solar panels are only paying for electricity for 3 or so months of the year.
Is it a slam dunk? There is probably better ROI on an index fund, but it is not a money losing proposition by any means.
We don’t have storage technology to absorb a 2% year-long grid-wide output decrease [1]. That means overbuilding or, more practically, sticking with natural gas. If we aren’t building nuclear, then continuing to build gas plants is the right move.
A simple cycle gas turbine might be $0.6/W, vs. $10/W for a new nuclear power plant. So we can back up the grid with these turbines for a very small fraction of the cost of building nuclear power plants to power the grid.
This is still pie in the sky technology. Particularly given the frequencies, magnitudes and durations we’re considering. At that point SMRs become topical.
> we can back up the grid with these turbines for a very small fraction of the cost of building nuclear power plants to power the grid
Absolutely. If we’re okay with gas being a core energy source for the foreseeable future, we shouldn’t build nuclear. (And for countries without safe access to gas, coal.)
There is plenty of land. If the cost of land ever became a serious constraint on renewables, renewables will be so cheap they will have already relegated all other energy sources to museums.
As for future breakthroughs: solar and wind could be rolled out with existing storage, but of course improvements are welcome. But turn this around: investment in nuclear requires believing that such improvements won't occur. If they do, your nuclear investment is totally screwed. It won't even make back operating costs. Do you think betting the improvements won't occur is a reasonable bet? Do you think nuclear is going to get financing from hard nosed business types with that hanging over it?
Maybe you're just suggesting continued investment in nuclear R&D, in case all the renewable and storage technologies suddenly hit a brick wall. R&D has a low bar to justify it, so that's not a hard case to make.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-...
Global storage production is 1TW/h per annum now and will increase to 4TW/h by 2030, while also being cheaper.
> > Yes, rooftop home solar doesn't make a ton of sense at this latitude and especially not adjacent to this much hydro power.
Latitude is inclusive of the surrounding area, not just the city of Seattle.
Also in general when people refer to a city they are also referring to the metro area around it.
Yes, if you are concerned just about greenhouse gas reduction, and if you live in the Seattle city boundaries, then solar is not a meaningful way to make a reduction.
However many people who live in the Seattle Metro area, but outside the city itself, are shocked to learn how dirty PSE's power is.
For those people, getting solar installed might be meaningful.
And again counter to many people's expectations, Seattle does get enough light to make solar somewhat cost effective, especially with net metering in effect.
For Fukushima that number is circa $800 billion.
If it is as safe as you think it is with a minimum of safety standards then the market will still provide. Sophisticated insurers will be capable of calculating the risk and shouldering all of it for a reasonable fee.
Right?
The act exists, of course, because it definitely isnt safe enough to do that and sophisticated private insurers who are capable of calculating risk better than you or I know this all too well. They won't touch nuclear power without a ludicrously low liability cap.
The ironic thing is that even with this gargantuan implicit subsidy (yes, taxpayer funded insurance that pays out $800 billion in an emergency is a big subsidy), nuclear power still isnt cost competitive with solar and wind.
But, I'm all in favor of letting nuclear plants determine their own safety levels. IF they can get the insurance to cover ALL the costs of dealing with a disaster. Free market, baby.
This wouldn't mean that the state would get the money back in such an eventuality, but it would mean director => prison.
What kind of person do you think you're going to get to run your nuclear plant if they know that there's a risk of prison if everything goes wrong? Either a very stupid one, a very, very risk averse one or no director at all.
This chain of thought combined with the state's strong desire to see a nuclear industry with a healthy supply chain in order to support the nuclear military is why the indemnity act exists at all. They know that nuclear power requires lavish subsidies like taxpayer backed insurance to even exist.
Counting that cost is like including Iraq war costs for oil usage (perhaps fair for the first gulf war, but the expense of the second was an independent policy mistake)
[1] (least bad Forbes article I’ve read in years) https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...
Shellenberger is not a credible source. He's the person who assured us PV is bad because it uses rare earth elements (it does not.)
4% of the hydrogen production in China is by electrolysis now. Electrolysers there are below $300/kW.
You object to this because it's not available, then you point to SMRs, which don't exist now except on slides. And given NuScale's recent disappointments one should not expect the rosy promises of their (or other) SMRs to come true or find much of a market.
> Absolutely. If we’re okay with gas being a core energy source for the foreseeable future, we shouldn’t build nuclear. (And for countries without safe access to gas, coal.)
The gas would be hydrogen. Hydrogen + batteries are nicely complementary and enable renewables to undercut new construction nuclear even for supplying baseload power.
Right. Long-term large scale hydrogen manufacturing and storage (presumably as ammonia) is not a thing, not to the tune of several percentage points of primary generation. This is speculative, like SMRs.
> Hydrogen + batteries are nicely complementary and enable renewables to undercut new construction nuclear even for supplying baseload power
The math doesn’t work with current technology. Not at that scale. (The lithium alone would be orders of magnitude more than what is forecast to be needed for EVs.)
If underground storage is not available (lack of proper geology), the scheme could be synthesis of methanol, with oxyfuel combustion (Allam cycle) using oxygen from electrolysis, and with the CO2 stored for recycling to produce methanol. The CO2 and oxygen would be stored as refrigerated liquids.
> (The lithium alone would be orders of magnitude more than what is forecast to be needed for EVs.)
I don't believe this is true, not even close. The US has more than a quarter of a billion motor vehicles. A Tesla has about 70 kWh of storage and about 10 kg of lithium, so that's 17 TWh of storage. An optimal "synthetic baseload" for the US from wind and solar might use 6 hours of battery storage (and e-fuels). US average power production is about 500 GW, so six hours is about 3 TWh of batteries. Even if you multiply that a bit to assume less transmission and need for peaking storage it's still not "orders of magnitude" more than for EVs.) All this is even assuming Li-ion batteries would be used for stationary storage instead of the Na-ion batteries now coming on the market.
Were you assuming many days or weeks of batteries would be needed? That's the beauty of also using e-fuels; the batteries can be reserved for the short term storage they're truly suited for.
The crux of the Fukushima costing is whether damage actually occurred to property.
In much of the exclusion zone radiation levels are relatively low, and always have been.
The decision to impose the exclusion zone was deeply political.
Here’s an NYT source for better credibility.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240306192358/https://www.nytim...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/when-radiation-is...
The legal requirement would be if it caused land values to decline. It doesn't matter if that decline was for a reason you'd call irrational. It wouldn't even require proof of responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt; "preponderance of evidence" would be enough in the US system.
A government could impose irrational exclusion zones for arbitrary events, it’s unfair to impose the cost on the event itself unless the exclusion zone policy was justified.
I suggest trying to change this is not going to go well; "radiation isn't really bad, trust us, some meltdowns are ok" would be a very challenging PR move.
This tempers high-frequency variation. The 2% over a full year lower-frequency variation is the problem.
You’re proposing good ideas. But they’re untested and contain fundamental engineering risk. It’s similar to when pro-nuke folk assume SMRs will happen; hence, the analogy.
Right. And that's where the e-fuels come in. Using batteries for that storage problem is absurd and unnecessary. The argument that renewables can't reach 100% because batteries can't do year-scale leveling is a strawman argument. It's bad engineering to try to use batteries for that use case. And because 2% (say) is such a small fraction of the total demand the low round trip efficiency of using e-fuels for grid storage doesn't hurt much overall.