To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

I thought hydroelectric was our storage miracle? You invest solar into pumping up the reservoir and drain it at night to spin turbines.

The problem is that the costs to build such power stores demands broad adoption of solar to justify the investment to build these hydroelectric systems. Their efficiencies are awful on the small scale. But people cannot adopt solar until stable power can be had. It will require state intervention and forward thinking to subsidize some of these projects to get broad solar buildup off the ground.

> The downside of solar is approximately 0

1. No sunlight at night, making it twice as expensive and, depending on the recyclability of batteries, not a "renewable" energy source.

2. Batteries can combust ("the note 7 is da bomb"). Doesn't happen often, but neither does a nuclear facility blow up every day.

3. Solar needs a lot more surface area than nuclear. If you fill all the rooftops on the planet, you still won't have enough solar.

I'm not saying nuclear is better, but please be objective.

Gravitational "batteries", aka moving large quantities of water uphill / downhill, can be pretty efficient, landscape permitting. A dam can also be dangerous if breached suddenly, though.

A really safe, auto-shutdown, no-meltdown, nuclear-waste-burning nuclear facility, e.g. based on molten Th salts, would beat solar in many areas. Needs significant R&D yet, like solar needed it 15 years ago.

> Every design will be old after a few decades.

Time passes. A truly stunning insight.

You've somehow managed to miss the entire point you were responding to. A power plant that is designed today is designed with 50 more years' knowledge of possible failure modes than a plant that was designed 50 years ago.

Does that mean that it cannot fail? No, but as adults we are constantly exposed to risks of all kinds and life is simply a matter of weighing risks and benefits. The car you drive to work is not perfectly safe, and in fact all Americans have an extraordinarily high risk of dying in an auto accident compared to most other causes of death. But you decide that having a job is worth the risk of driving to work, and the cars today are certainly far safer than cars engineered in the 50s or even the 70s.

The risk of a modern nuclear plant is far lower than one engineered during the 50s (as most current reactors are). And truthfully, even those present a much lower health/safety risk than coal plants do.

The biggest problem at this point is that NIMBYs who don't want any upgrades or modernization to take place have stifled replacement of older reactors with safer and more modern ones, and prevented proper reprocessing and disposal of the waste in safe repositories. Instead we just run the older reactors far past their design lifespans and allow the waste to pile up on-site. If you want to bring up Fukushima - most of the contamination was caused by discharging water from the spent fuel pools that are needed to hold all that waste that piles up due to lack of proper disposal.

In other words - NIMBYs literally caused the vast majority of the contamination from the Fukushima accident.

The fully-baked lifetime costs of nuclear power are quite vigorously debated; it's hard to get accurate numbers, since in general there are unpriced government insurance policies backing the plants (i.e. the government will step in to pay the $10B cleanup costs in the unlikely event that something goes wrong).

One way of attempting to answer this question is to look at France, where 75% of their power is nuclear; their price per KWh for consumers up to 2015 was lower than the average for Europe (12th-cheapest in Europe according to Wikipedia, and 2nd-lowest for commercial), but that almost certainly doesn't price the government insurance mentioned above [2].

Note that due to a lot of electric heating in residential stock, France is very susceptible to increased demand in cold winters; in such situations they have to import from the rest of Europe, sometimes at peak hours. And as of 2016, a bunch of French reactors were shut down over safety concerns, so the prices there are spiking dramatically [3].

Another approach; let's look at cost per installed MW of power for current projects. For solar, that's now beating wind (and half the price of coal) for the newest installs, at $1.65M/MW [4]. According to the World Nuclear Association (who I'm going to assume will give the best possible numbers that can be said with a straight face), nuclear installs are ranging from ~$2.5M/MW to $7M/MW of capacity, with most cases closer to the high end of that range [5].

Now, load factor appears to be around 20% for US desert installs [6], so you need 4.5x more installed capacity to meet nuclear's load factor of 90%. Load-factor-adjusted costs: solar $8.25M/MW, nuclear $2.8M/MW - $7.8M/MW. That makes it look a lot closer than your numbers suggest. A deeper analysis would include pricing energy storage (which increases the cost of solar more than nuclear, but does need to be considered for an all-nuclear mix) and subsidies (which predominantly increases the cost of nuclear).

I haven't done more than skim your link, which seems interesting reading, and I'll dig into that later. But the from-first-principles analysis doesn't seem to be using the right costs for solar; it has `Cost: $12.3 Billion` for a 500MW CSP installation, or $24.6M/MW. That's a factor of 15 above the observed cost of installing a modern solar plant. It might be accurate for a CSP plant, but that's not the cheapest solar available.

In summary, I'm somewhat agnostic on this issue, but the energy storage issues with solar/wind seem like they could push the cost up substantially as we start to get towards majority-renewable on our grid, so I tentatively support building some new nuclear as a short-to-medium-term hedge. But we should be sure to do so with as little subsidies as possible, so that the installation price reflects the true cost, rather than kicking the can down the road on billions of dollars of decommissioning costs. And entirely new reactor designs (e.g. fast breeders) could change the calculus entirely.

Caveat emptor; I'm not in the energy business, so there's probably some missing steps here. Please let me know if you spot one.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-ene... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Manage... [3]: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-27/french-shocked-powe... [4]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-ene... [5]: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-as... [6]: http://euanmearns.com/estimating-global-solar-pv-load-factor...