151–160 of 332 posts
I think it's time to give up on nuclear. Solar+Wind+Batteries continue to get cheaper. Nuclear doesn't seem to have a detectible learning curve at all
No one has done more to harm the environment than environmentalists that advocate against nuclear power.
Does it make economic sense to just start working on this as a country, or is this still too cost prohibitive?
Seems like a system that you could upgrade over time as the tech gets better.
What are the downsides of such a concept?
It looks like the biggest problem with nuclear is not the safety or whatnot, it's just that as a civilization, we just can't build them without cost overruns and massive delays. And this is a loss, because we need non-variable energy sources to augment wind/solar/tidal. Perhaps the other way to solve the energy transition is to lean heavily into mass storage of variable energy sources. If you have enough energy stora…
[1]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/us-nuclear-indus...
It looks like the biggest problem with nuclear is not the safety or whatnot, it's just that as a civilization, we just can't build them without cost overruns and massive delays. And this is a loss, because we need non-variable energy sources to augment wind/solar/tidal. Perhaps the other way to solve the energy transition is to lean heavily into mass storage of variable energy sources. If you have enough energy stora…
> The decision to cancel the project followed an update from NuScale this year regarding the cost of building the reactors, which had soared to $9.3 billion from $5.3 billion because of rising interest rates and inflation. Even $5.3B seems very expensive. For reference, (the new Finnish) Olkiluoto-3 was €11 billion, for 1600 MW. The article says 6 * 77 MW = 539 MW! How is it that we've become so bad at building?
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/poland-ap-polish-mateusz-...
It looks like the biggest problem with nuclear is not the safety or whatnot, it's just that as a civilization, we just can't build them without cost overruns and massive delays. And this is a loss, because we need non-variable energy sources to augment wind/solar/tidal. Perhaps the other way to solve the energy transition is to lean heavily into mass storage of variable energy sources. If you have enough energy stora…
Just a point of clarity, we need demand resources, which means variable at our command vs not variable or variable based on wind/solar input out of our control. The economically viable mass storage options (i.e pumped storage) are basically all deployed. Batteries are getting there but they still need some shenanigans in the ancillary market where they get paid for not running for complex reasons to make the economic…
Current numbers are lower, but in 2022 you could use LFP for ~5,000 discharge cycles and pay ~480$/kWh of capacity or ~9.6 c/kWh. Inverters etc last longer than the batteries themselves so you can amortize those costs across multiple generations of batteries, therefore it’s not quite upfront costs / number of discharge cycles, but it’s also not that far off of it. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/85332.pdf
Still roughly 2c/kWh * 105% + 9.6 c/kWh * 50% ~= 6.9c/kWh averaged over a day.
Currently batteries are discharged at peak demand, but the underlying economics scales just fine even if you double the number of solar panels for redundancy and aren’t being paid a premium. Further at scale demand that shifted to cheaper nighttime rates will instead shift to cheaper daytime rates.
It looks like the biggest problem with nuclear is not the safety or whatnot, it's just that as a civilization, we just can't build them without cost overruns and massive delays. And this is a loss, because we need non-variable energy sources to augment wind/solar/tidal. Perhaps the other way to solve the energy transition is to lean heavily into mass storage of variable energy sources. If you have enough energy stora…
We need dispatchable energy to complement renewables. Nuclear is on the complete opposite side of the dispatchability equation with high CAPEX and low OPEX.
Like the cancellation exemplifies, even running at 100% nuclear is wholly uncompetitive. Being dispatchable means vastly lowering the utilization rate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am still very confused how power will be generated cleanly on cloudy, no-wind days with solar and wind. You are making it harder by adding that "cleanly" requirement, because the simple answer is going to be "natural gas". Unlike coal or nuclear, natural gas power plants are fast to start and stop (hydroelectric is even faster, but depends on favorable geography), so they can be left powered down (using no fuel)…
The problem with this 90% solution is that the more renewables are added, the more natural gas capacity is required to cover the capacity. Good problem for the natural gas industry. Going clean with nuclear isn’t cheap right now, and it shouldn’t be. It wasn’t at the start of renewables when solar was expensive. Cheap, reliable, clean; pick two.
I think it's time to give up on nuclear. Solar+Wind+Batteries continue to get cheaper. Nuclear doesn't seem to have a detectible learning curve at all
It looks like the biggest problem with nuclear is not the safety or whatnot, it's just that as a civilization, we just can't build them without cost overruns and massive delays. And this is a loss, because we need non-variable energy sources to augment wind/solar/tidal. Perhaps the other way to solve the energy transition is to lean heavily into mass storage of variable energy sources. If you have enough energy stora…
Wonder if it's worth digging into why that's the case. It seems like it's a lot more than just the cost of materials + labour that's the problem.
There's some hope that making designs smaller and more modular might enable less chance of big overspend at a slightly higher expected cost but that's speculation until we actually do it.
0. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...