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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

#281

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Manuel_D wrote: post #269
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Annual battery production for EVs is estimated to grow from 160 gigawatt-hours (GWh) today to 6 600 GWh in 2030 – the equivalent of adding almost 20 gigafactories each year for the next ten years. So we're building those batteries anyway, because EVs are cheaper and better than ICE. It's just a bonus that they'll help roll out renewables too.

Estimates are not the same thing as real production figures. People estimated we'd have 10Ghz single threaded cpu performance by now back in the 90s. Batteries are already approaching supply shortages for input materials: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev... And as you correctly point out, most of these batteries are going to go to EVs rather than grid storage.

Yes, no-one can predict the future, maybe we'll all be riding horses.

But if, as basically everyone acklowledges, we'll all be driving EVs, then we will charge them from the grid. So they'll be better than grid storage, they'll be responsive demand (with grid storage you need to send the electricity back to the grid, which incurs another efficiency loss).

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

#282

Post by ncmncm »

anonporridge wrote: post #93
Retric wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasons are economic. France has been heavily subsidizing nuclear for years and can swap to cheaper alternatives for less money. It’s not that nuclear is any worse, it’s just that the alternatives got better.

Wind and solar got better, but it seems fundamentally problematic to me to suggest that those are the alternatives to nuclear. They're not. Fossil fuel is the alternative to nuclear (and possibly battery supported wind/solar) as the base load. Fossil fuels are fundamentally cheaper because they can more easily avoid paying the cost of their negative externalities than nuclear can. If we could actually internalize the…

Renewables + storage is the alternative to nukes. And, there is simply no contest. Nukes have been left far behind.

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

#283

Post by xienze »

cycomanic wrote: post #195
eldaisfish wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your final comparison there is an excellent example of hand-waving away the problem of intermittency. This is something that advocates of renewables regularly want to dismiss because the discussion is a difficult one. Wind and solar are cheap now because their fuel cost is zero and the cost of grid reliability is borne by us - consumers. In a better world, the cost of balancing the grid at night should be borne by a…

Nuclear has the same issue of intermittency. You have to either overprovisioning if you use nuclear or use battery storage. Nuclear is much more expensive than wind/solar so if you follow an overprovisioning strategy the best is to build wind/solar capacity, because it buys you more. Moreover, the larger and more integrated grids become (this is happening already for economic reasons in Europe) the less this is an is…

> The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night.

Is it enough wind to meet all the demand at night? And what happens when it stops blowing as much as expected for a long period of time[0]? You still need baseline power generation for quite some time to come until those questions that, well, keep getting hand waved away are solved.

0: https://fortune.com/2021/09/16/the-u-k-went-all-in-on-wind-p...

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

#284

Post by pfdietz »

chelical wrote: post #221
ben_w wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Pumped hydro doesn't use up the water. It goes back and forth between the lower and the upper reservoirs. Some evaporates, for sure, but that's a tiny fraction of the water that would be evaporated cooling a NPP of the same power output.

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

#285

Post by cinntaile »

philwelch wrote: post #193
cycomanic wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need 100% storage supply. Also note if France would go 100% nuclear they would need either significant overprovisioning or storage as well. Nuclear is not an load following source. Even less so if you want to operate economically.

> Why would you need 100% storage supply. So you don't have power outages on windless nights.

You generally use peaker plants or backup fossil fuel or hydro for that use case, at this point in time batteries are used to supply power for a couple of hours at best. You need that backup power anyway for when the nuclear plant is out of commission for some reason.

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

#286

Post by aidenn0 »

mlyle wrote: post #187
ben_w wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2021, we added this many new gigawatts: 183 PV[0], 100 wind[1], 7.88 nuclear (but 8.6 nuclear was also shut down)[2] 28 times that, ignoring the shutdowns (I don't actually know how long wind lasts, IIRC nuclear is "about 50-70 years" and PV is "about 30 years"), gives a total of: 5124 GW PV, 2800 GW wind, 218 GW nuclear. But that's a lower bound for PV, as that's growing with what looks like an approximately expo…

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…

For the USA, utility scale PV runs at a capacity factor of over 25% in the sunbelt and mid teens elsewhere. I suppose that may qualify as "often near 10%" but I think you are overstating it a bit, as really household PV is the only one that really is around 10%.

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

#287

Post by ncmncm »

boringg wrote: post #97
unchocked wrote: post #32

I will hazard that the problems with nuclear are not technological but political, and the economic problems with nuclear are there because of political reasons. France gets ~75% of its power from nuclear, safely and economically. France inhabits the same physical world as the rest of us, but is different politically. If there were a will, there would be a way. If the environmental movement had paid more attention to…

The problems with Nuclear are simple and straight forward: (1) Economic not viable if you include the total life cycle cost of the system (i.e. nuclear waste storage and dismantling the asset. Theres a large difference between building new reactors vs running the old ones until the end of life (in terms of economics). Also the modular reactors that are getting a lot of hype right now also still have a nuclear waste d…

Yet, waste disposal is the smallest of problems nukes pose.

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

#288

Post by acidburnNSA »

boringg wrote: post #184
acidburnNSA wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not viable if you include the total life cycle cost of the system (i.e. nuclear waste storage and dismantling the asset. On the contrary! Nuclear plants pay a fraction of their revenue through their life into special decommissioning funds that have so far been more than enough to perform full greenfield decommissioning. For waste, there's a separate fund called the Nuclear Waste Fund in the US (and other nuclear-op…

Sorry should have been more clear. True cost of permanent waste disposal. They cant find anywhere to put it so while 50B sounds nice it doesn't have a home and the lifetime cost of operating a facility is probably significant higher (if they can find one). Read: problem not resolved.

It's being done in Finland and Sweden [1] just fine, and for reasonable cost. NIMBY is a big problem but once we figure out how to solve that in the USA like Finland did, then it is basically a solved problem.

[1] https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html

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

#289

Post by Manuel_D »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #281
Manuel_D wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Estimates are not the same thing as real production figures. People estimated we'd have 10Ghz single threaded cpu performance by now back in the 90s. Batteries are already approaching supply shortages for input materials: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev... And as you correctly point out, most of these batteries are going to go to EVs rather than grid storage.

Yes, no-one can predict the future, maybe we'll all be riding horses. But if, as basically everyone acklowledges, we'll all be driving EVs, then we will charge them from the grid. So they'll be better than grid storage, they'll be responsive demand (with grid storage you need to send the electricity back to the grid, which incurs another efficiency loss).

Sure, if we have all our electricity produced through non intermittent sources we don't need grid storage. EVs charge from the grid and drive around just fine. Nobody doubts that.

But if we are going to predominantly use intermittent energy sources we'd need massive amounts of grid storage. Delivering this through batteries is not feasible. We need to conserve battery supply for things that cannot be directly powered from the grid, like vehicles. It's too precious to be squandered on grid storage

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

#290

Post by mlyle »

aidenn0 wrote: post #286
mlyle wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For the USA, utility scale PV runs at a capacity factor of over 25% in the sunbelt and mid teens elsewhere. I suppose that may qualify as "often near 10%" but I think you are overstating it a bit, as really household PV is the only one that really is around 10%.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31755603

Note non-utility scale solar is 75% of the installed watts, too-- so you have a huge share of it pulling towards that 10-12% number.

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