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Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

nytimes.com

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Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#221

Post by chelical »

ben_w wrote: post #46
philwelch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible. Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear te…

> the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage What are these problems, exactly? I see videos and news stories about grid batteries being successfully deployed for short term management and how pumped hydro is basically a big cheap gravity battery, but I'm not a civil/electrical engineer, so I accept there could easily be elephants in the room here.

I don't understand why people don't talk about the water usage involved in pumped hydro when the vast majority of the Western United States is dealing with record low water levels + sinking due to groundwater usage.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#222

Post by pfdietz »

DennisP wrote: post #175
colinmhayes wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Korea has been constantly building nuclear for decades. The price has come down marginally, renewables are still far cheaper. Yes, the problem is largely political, I don't see a solution to that though.

Renewables are far cheaper on the margins but not necessarily if you want them to provide all your power needs. Nuclear cost in South Korea, Japan, and India is generally under $3000/kW, according to this peer-reviewed study. See Figure 12: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... Now let's model overall grid costs, here: https://model.energy/ Pick a country and "fetch wind and solar." By defau…

That's overnight cost, not included in model.energy. You also have to add in the financing cost during construction.

If we are talking about Korean export NPPs, the Barakh NPP has four reactors for a total of 24.4B$, producing 5.6GW(e). THis is about $4B/GW. If I plug in 4000 per MW (its euros, not $, but they're not too different right now) for the capital cost of nuclear in model.energy, increase the NPP lifetime to 40 years, and use US 2011 weather data, nuclear optimizes to zero.

I'll add that model.energy is looking at the best case for nuclear: providing baseload. Handling variability will incentivize storage, which means renewables will be at an increased advantage. Dispatchable demand of any kind, even slightly dispatchable (allowed to be off 10% of the time, say) also tilts the game toward renewables.

The 25 year lifespan for nuclear there may reflect economic obsolescence rather than technical lifespan. Energy technology is evolving quickly now, so investors may simply refuse to credit the promise of such long lifespans. Even in the US, there have been existing NPPs that shut down because they could not recoup their operating costs (granted, much of that was due to gas and also renewable subsidies, but with solar having dropped in cost by nearly an order of magnitude in the last decade it's a bold move to assume it won't keep falling.)

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#224

Post by logifail »

anonporridge wrote: post #81
adrianN wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps the reasons are economical. Recently nuclear construction projects became a lot more expensive and took a lot longer than initially planned.

Some of those economical problems are burdened on the nuclear industry because of political problems. For example, because everyone is terrified of nuclear, regulations may require an absurd level of safety expenses that no other energy producer is burdened with. If the political climate lead to burdening fossil fuel burners with costs to reduce their pollution and GHG emissions that directly and indirectly lead to o…

> because everyone is terrified of nuclear, regulations may require an absurd level of safety expenses that no other energy producer is burdened with

"The researchers start out with a historic analysis of plant construction in the US. The basic numbers are grim. The typical plant built after 1970 had a cost overrun of 241 percent—and that's not considering the financing costs of the construction delays [..] while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor [...] In the end, the conclusion is that there are no easy answers to how to make nuclear plant construction more efficient. And, until there are, it will continue to be badly undercut by both renewables and fossil fuel."[0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#225

Post by Manuel_D »

thehappypm wrote: post #208
rswskg wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*in the right conditions, ignoring nighttime, winter, northern hemisphere, etc etc...

Okay, put in batteries, still an order of magnitude cheaper than a nuclear plant without any risk of doomsday

Not even remotely true. Global battery production is around 300 GWh per year. The US alone uses 12.5 TWh of electricity per day. The world uses ~60TWh. That's 8 years of global battery output to fulfill just one hour of electricity storage.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#226

Post by [deleted] »

schroeding wrote: post #144
photochemsyn wrote: post #12

Funny article in that it doesn't discuss lifecycle costs. A side-by-side comparison of the cost of grids powered by nuclear power plant relative to those powered by wind/solar/storage is what I'd expect to see from a 'paper of record' like the NYTimes. Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of w…

> A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party. Yes, that's technologically possible, but would require massive economic investment. I agree, but: It's 100% impossible to replace the need for gas in the short timespan of five months until the next winter, no matter how much money or resources we throw at the problem. The absolute majority of h…

[deleted]

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#227

Post by woeirua »

mperham wrote: post #214
rswskg wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*in the right conditions, ignoring nighttime, winter, northern hemisphere, etc etc...

That's why you mix in wind too.

And there are still days (like during Texas' winter power fiasco) where neither the sun, nor the wind are strong enough to generate sufficient power from renewables alone. How people still believe that you can get by without any baseload power generation capacity is beyond me.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#228

Post by tcfhgj »

lelag wrote: post #186
legulere wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big percentage of mushrooms and game is still not fit for consumption today in Germany because of Chernobyl. So it's not just local. And even if, Germany is more densely populated than the Ukraine. The Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine is the same size as the state of Saarland.

The externality of emitting 1kg of CO2 has been evaluated between 10000 usd to 100000 usd. Assuming the lower range, the 300 millions tons of CO2 produced by the german electricity production accounts for 3x10^15 USD per years. That's 789 times the german GDP per year taken away from future generations. Now compare it to the GDP of Saarland.

Please name a source of that. The environmental department of the german government estimates about 640 euro per ton for the next 100 years.

https://www.presseportal.de/pm/62786/4789535

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#229

Post by layer8 »

losvedir wrote: post #166

One thing I don't understand is the uninhabitable zone around Chernobyl is not that big, and the U.S. has plenty of space. And electricity can be transmitted decently far, right? So... is it unreasonable to have lots of fairly low-regulated nuclear power plants in, say, 50 mile uninhabited areas (maybe even make it a nature preserve or something for animals)? And if one or two meltdown, oh well?

Mushrooms in Germany are still contaminated today from the Chernobyl fallout: https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#230

Post by user_7832 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #63
impostervt wrote: post #3

I just finished Bill Gates' "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster". Very good book, and it makes two points (among many others): - To reduce carbon in the air, getting clean electricity is key. If we can do that, we can more easily reduce emissions from other areas. - There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear power.

> There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear power. This is either stupidly wrong or stupidly right. Stupidly right, there's fairly new nuclear plants in operation that there's no real reason to shut down, so will probably be running in 2050. Stupidly wrong, it seems to be placing some entirely unwarranted implication that without nuclear we'd be lost, when most serious analysis agree that renewables…

>Stupidly wrong, it seems to be placing some entirely unwarranted implication that without nuclear we'd be lost, when most serious analysis agree that renewables will be about 80% of energy production, which doesn't really leave much room for nuclear to take all the credit.

>IEA's net zero roadmap...

I'd like to make a slightly vague rebuttal to your slightly vague rebuttal (ofc not your fault if the IEA doesn't explicitly say anything about nuclear, not blaming you). The IPCC has said that nuclear is necessary if we want to hit our climate goals.

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