An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse
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Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse
#2Note: I do not know if this argument against nuclear energy is valid. I'm submitting it in the hope that HN comments will help evaluate it.
Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse
#3It's infatuating that all arguments pro- and against nuclear energy are so selective. It's very hard to get unbiased view.
The article starts with proper framing. You must think in terms of lifetime capital costs and opportunity cost. Then it chooses numbers selectively to make the argument stronger than it is. Nuclear and renewable energy production can't be compared directly with price per kWh.
Nuclear energy is 24/7 from the start. Currently Nuclear/coal/gas provides base load that enables cheap renewables (base load is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time. Day, week, months)
Supplying same base load with renewables means energy production + large scale energy storage + grid investments. You need overcapacity in production and the grid to even out time and geographical variability of renewables.
I have not seen any honest cost comparison that counts in everything.
Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse
#4It's infatuating that all arguments pro- and against nuclear energy are so selective. It's very hard to get unbiased view. The article starts with proper framing. You must think in terms of lifetime capital costs and opportunity cost. Then it chooses numbers selectively to make the argument stronger than it is. Nuclear and renewable energy production can't be compared directly with price per kWh. Nuclear energy is 24…
Right, I think hydro is about as close to at-scale 24/7 always-on generation as you can get with renewables right now. Even with that, everywhere I’ve lived with hydro power had backup fossil fuel generation, which was periodically used, though rarely.
Arguments for all other forms of renewables at scale right now seem to depend on having/maintaining fossil fuel power generation just to satisfy daily demand reliably, so you end up with two sets of power generation infrastructure designed to meet peak capacity (so effectively double capacity of what’s needed), which is extraordinarily expensive.
Advocacy for non-hydro renewables requires heaping doses of “hope” that new technologies will be developed one day to deprecate the side-by-side ff power-generation.
That hope and risk has to be priced in to the comparisons with nuclear for supplying electric grids, or the debate isn’t “nuclear vs renewables” it’s “nuclear vs. (renewables + fossil fuel generation)”. At that point it even makes sense to think of “nuclear vs. (renewables + nuclear)”.
If you want the cost of CO2 and its global impact priced into using fossil fuels, perhaps that’s what the cost of nuclear should be compared to.
Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse
#5We will end up with nuclear, we can take as many different path as we wish. Any nation which goes full nuclear first will reap the benefits.
Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse
#6>However, many of the measures needed for energy efficiency are now cheaper than the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants.
Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity.
>The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants.
Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastrophically instead of being gracefully shut down in favor of new ones.
And his explanation isn't to justify these claims, but to blame political opponents. Sad!
Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse
#7We will end up with nuclear, we can take as many different path as we wish. Any nation which goes full nuclear first will reap the benefits.
I will not bother reading that article, sorry.
Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse
#8Solar and off loading batteries from like Ambri is probably a good idea. Nuclear is great, but is simply annoying in every right despite being an existing "throw megawatts at it" solution that's also not spewing gas.
Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse
#9It's infatuating that all arguments pro- and against nuclear energy are so selective. It's very hard to get unbiased view. The article starts with proper framing. You must think in terms of lifetime capital costs and opportunity cost. Then it chooses numbers selectively to make the argument stronger than it is. Nuclear and renewable energy production can't be compared directly with price per kWh. Nuclear energy is 24…
There is a mention of the costs needed for storage in renewables that would keep the electricity under the operating cost of nuclear, albeit in a somewhat indirect way-
> It would often even be affordordable to pay 1 – 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity storage in addition to the generation costs for wind and solar power and still be below the operating costs of nuclear power plants. And here we have to ask the same question: How many emissions can I avoid with one euro, one dollar or one yuan?
I read that as meaning there is probably enough margin in the renewable cost to actually make money while storing electricity in batteries from wind and solar and selling it as a price below what nuclear costs to keep running. Unfortunately I am having trouble translating 1-1.5 cents/Kwhr to the current price of battery storage tech, and this doesn’t factor in the costs of creating these batteries at scale either, but the argument does say that’s likely to be cheaper.
Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse
#10Note: I do not know if this argument against nuclear energy is valid. I'm submitting it in the hope that HN comments will help evaluate it.
Unfortunately you're more likely to just find confirmation bias here. The HN community (and the tech community in general) is predominantly pro-nuclear.
Personally, I think this article raises great points. If we could rewrite history and have built a thriving nuclear power industry 20 years ago, we'd probably be in much better shape now, at least with respect to climate change
But that's not what happened. Given the current state of the industry we can't afford to spend decades trying to right the technical and regulatory wrongs of the past now that renewables are becoming truly viable.