271–280 of 818 posts
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Building pipelines for oil and gas isn't trivial either but we managed to do it.
Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak. Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant factor in power distribution.
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The thing is, 183GW from PV is like 20-30GW of nuclear, because nuclear's capacity factor is near 100% and PV's is often near 10%. Storage seems hard and expensive. We're going to need a whole lot of approaches: - Wind taking a bigger share of renewables - Whatever storage we can reasonably build, including some exotic stuff like power-to-gas-to-power. - Nuclear filling in a little bit - PV comically overbuilt and ro…
Renewables' capacity factor is much greater than 10%, in practice. If you need falsehoods to make your case, you have no case.
> Renewables' capacity factor is much greater than 10%, in practice. If you need falsehoods to make your case, you have no case.
Residential/commercial PV -- e.g. rooftop solar-- very often is 10% or less.
If you want to only look at utility-scale fixed tilt, instead, recent deployments average near (not quite) 20%.
https://emp.lbl.gov/pv-capacity-factors
Nuclear's capacity factor is 93%. In which case, 183GW from utility-scale, fixed-tilt PV is like 183/.93 * .20 = 39GW. Which, admittedly, is outside of my range of 20-30, but also relies on generous assumptions (utility scale projects only-- which are only ~25% of US solar wattage).
If you consider only tracking, you can get all the way to 49GW, which still doesn't eliminate the point.
Perhaps the bigger point is looking at the eastern seaboard. Shipping power 2000 miles is not super practical for various reasons, and the capacity factors for a whole region of the US are pretty poor.
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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…
If governments provide guarantees for the loans, a discount rate of 3% is not unreasonable.
Set it like that, and it spits out a price of €32.6/MWh.
Now, to make it even more reasonable to emerging economies, assume that through mass production and a relaxation of security requirements to less paranoid levels, the overnight cost can be reduced to €1500, you get $21.3/MWh.
This is what the price of electricity SHOULD be, if we want the world to stop depending on hydrocarbons. (Not just a few rich countries.)
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> gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems... Gross mismanagement and flagrant disregard of safety systems are inevitable, inherent features of power utilities. If your technology is disastrous without perfect handling, your technology is disastrous.
> your technology is disastrous without perfect handling, your technology is disastrous Did we watch the same miniseries? Chernobyl went beyond gross negligence. To say nothing of perfection. In the reactor design, in its operation and in post-crisis management.
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The thing is, 183GW from PV is like 20-30GW of nuclear, because nuclear's capacity factor is near 100% and PV's is often near 10%. Storage seems hard and expensive. We're going to need a whole lot of approaches: - Wind taking a bigger share of renewables - Whatever storage we can reasonably build, including some exotic stuff like power-to-gas-to-power. - Nuclear filling in a little bit - PV comically overbuilt and ro…
Even at 10% capacity factor, and with a sudden cessation of the long term exponential trend in PV, and assuming the 2021 numbers for new nuclear power while ignoring that more was shut down, that still leaves more than twice as much new PV as new nuclear.
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?
Such disasters should only be a small - if bright red - footnote to a good policy: "NEVER build anything resembling this historic disaster. And if anything ever shows operational characteristics remotely resembling it, then shut it down IMMEDIATELY."
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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…
model.energy assumes a flat, constant energy demand. Which isn't a ridiculous assumption, given their caveats and default options, unless you're trying to argue for 100% nuclear, in which case it renders any conclusion totally nonsensical.
(But if we start charging a lot of electric vehicles at night, the demand curves will flatten out anyway.)
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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 saf…
Really, actual cost is much more than reported cost, because disaster insurance and decommissioning are always omitted from cost accounting.
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That doesn't answer the question. What exactly is the problem that needs to be solved?
Scaling up capacity of the storage. There aren't that many sites that are geologically feasible for pumped storage (and it destroys a local ecosystem by flooding and draining it repeatedly) and batteries need rare earth metals (not actually that rare but environmentally toxic to produce). We need O(100x) current production to fully switch away from hydrocarbons. That's a lot of reservoirs or a lot of cobalt that have…
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That doesn't answer the question. What exactly is the problem that needs to be solved?
Scaling up capacity of the storage. There aren't that many sites that are geologically feasible for pumped storage (and it destroys a local ecosystem by flooding and draining it repeatedly) and batteries need rare earth metals (not actually that rare but environmentally toxic to produce). We need O(100x) current production to fully switch away from hydrocarbons. That's a lot of reservoirs or a lot of cobalt that have…