New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

Post by jnxx » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #72

socialdemocrat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables are already widely deployed and payed for. It is nuts to build nuclear to replace fully functional wind turbines and solar cells. Nuclear fans just have no economic sense. It is all about nuclear no matter the cost.

Maybe some promising new storage technology will prevail, but solutions that are 5-10 years of development away from being viable have a habit of taking a lot more than 5-10 years to become viable. Until then nuclear presents the only proven way of decarbonizing an energy sector to a great extent that works in any environment. It's true that nuclear doesn't make economic sense relative to running a gas plant and usin…

Post by jnxx » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

opo wrote: post #81

socialdemocrat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables are already widely deployed and payed for. It is nuts to build nuclear to replace fully functional wind turbines and solar cells. Nuclear fans just have no economic sense. It is all about nuclear no matter the cost.

>...It is all about nuclear no matter the cost. Oddly, this is the exact sort of behavior I sometimes see with the advocates for renewables. Cost should always be a consideration, but when people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid. The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to m…

Post by lostlogin » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

Udik wrote: post #189

pfdietz wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't look at that link, did you? It has models using predicted costs for wind, solar, nuclear, batteries, and hydrogen storage, and computes the minimum cost system to produce reliable baseload power using real historical weather data (at 5 minute intervals). You can alter the assumptions and see what the costs optimize to. Nuclear is "Dispatchable 2" in the advanced settings.

No, I didn't look at the link- you could have at least described what it contained. I gave it a quick look, but frankly it would take me a lot of time to check if the model and assumptions make sense (it also seems to reply "job failed" whenever it doesn't have a cached answer). But I think real costs can be estimated only from working plants. Do we have, now, renewable energy plants that are capable of delivering a…

Post by jnxx » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #49

godelski wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it really works that way. Think about battery power, it isn't going to scale linearly. If land costs are a big issue (and limitation) this is true. If wind and sun aren't uniform, this is true. If the premise was true then we would have always only used coal because it is so cheap. You don't have to eliminate the duck curve, but smooth it out. There's also many other reasons to have a well diversified p…

Land costs are indeed an immense issue. The exact figure of how much land needs to be covered in solar panels varies depending on inclination with the sun and weather.Its not too bad for countries like Australia that have reliable sunlight and plenty of land. But much of the energy consumption occurs closer to the poles, and with more frequent obscuration of the sun from weather. And these countries are typically muc…

Post by skitout » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

evgen wrote: post #195

dmurray wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If battery storage keeps getting cheaper at the same rate, then yes - two orders of magnitude would be seen in twenty years. Absolutely an important consideration if you're considering a big upfront investment in a nuclear plant whose returns will be realized twenty to seventy years from now (or whatever reasonable build time and operating lifetime you come up with). Needing "several orders of magnitude" improvement…

Those installations are borderline profitable because either they are a small drop in the bucket of the required storage capacity (c.f. Tesla battery farm) or are heavily subsidized to make renewables appear viable. You are also making some large assumptions regarding battery improvements that may turn out to never be realized -- there may be interesting new chemistries and techniques that work for smaller scale but…