Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Nuclear" and "faster" don't belong in the same sentence. Renewables can be brought online, and start displacing CO2 emissions, far faster than nuclear can. Any expenditure on new nuclear is a move away from the optimal path to reducing CO2 emission.
Renewable sources, yes. But not storage, and it’s that base load where nuclear can help.
Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
271–277 of 277 posts
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ontario is also twice the size of France and 1/4 the population; they're at least in the same order of magnitude. I'd call it a reasonable comparison.
> Ontario is also twice the size of France You certainly mean Metropolitan France*. France is at least 10 times the size of Ontario.
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't about nuclear vs coal. It is about nuclear vs renewables. And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build. For every nuclear plant you build, we can build the exact same generation capabilities for about half the cost and it can be built in a quarter of the time[1]. That means that the renewable solution will have already mostly paid for itself before th…
From the article you quoted: > In order to replace the two nuclear plants while the sun is down, the batteries would need to replicate two 1.117 GW power sources for 16 hours. The total energy storage capacity would be 39.3 GWh, after we add an extra 10% for safe measure. Sorry, but no. This is a brittle system proposed. A 16 hour battery backup doesn't account for bad weather events like hurricanes, let alone more s…
Nuclear is crazy expensive. Our current renewable technologies, at current prices are capable of providing solutions that in aggregate largely deliver the generation profile of what nuclear can provide at a cheaper cost. This is true for most regions of the world with the exception of the extreme latitudes. And renewables for the most part are continuing to get cheaper, whereas nuclear for the most part has only gotten more expensive. Also, the renewable solution, by incorporating multiple technologies will have greater reliability than the single point of failure that is the nuclear solution. And the renewable solutions can be built out in a few years, very likely paying for themselves before the nuclear solution is even producing its first electron. This is an issue that the pro-nuclear likes to ignore entirely because it is so damning. If you were a free market energy investor, would you rather invest in a capital project that pays for itself in 7-8 years, or a project that doesn't even start making revenue until 10+ years down the road, and has enormous amounts of uncertainty around ongoing maintenance costs to the point where it is not even certain the project would produce enough revenue to offset those? There is a reason renewable projects are getting built left and right, and nuclear projects are few and far between. It is because investors and project developers are running the numbers, and they know which technologies will make them money and which ones won't.
These are all essentially facts. They should be your starting point when attempting to make a pro-nuclear argument. If you fail to address these facts in your counter argument, you will not be taken seriously.
The main problem right now, is that when an energy developer goes to build a project, they are not seeking to build a robust renewable solution that mimics the generation profile of a nuclear plant, they are incentivized to build for the thinnest slice of the generation market as possible to keep costs down. There is some movement in the direction of these more robust renewable projects, we are starting to see more and more solar and wind projects with on-site storage for example. But what we really need is utilities and their regulators to step up and start shaping the energy market to incentivize these more robust renewable packages. Until then we will continue to see incidents like the Texas outage. And FWIW, nuclear will need a fairly large helping hand from those same regulators as well if it is to every be viable, so the need for regulatory changes isn't unique to renewables.
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
No because no one defines sustainability on the infinite terms you do. If people did then your batteries, wind, and solar would not qualify either. You then proceed to ignore the facts on CO2 emissions because you don’t like them. Adding batteries and storage isn’t going to lower your embedded emissions or minerals use is it. And you go on to invent more claims about uranium mining while ignoring the mining for mater…
You said infinitely! I never used sustainability that way. Nuclear is not sustainable because there isn't enough uranium available to extract, certainly not in an environmentally friendly way, in order to meet an expanded demand for more than a few decades https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=365 There is, however, more than enough minerals available to make machines that, once built, will continue to produce and store emi…
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very important point. The externalities of nuclear are actually containable because they are so small. Hundreds of kilos of waste product compared to billions in spent fuel products. The heavy industry footprints of logistics to create the plant and equipment also are more efficient. How many solar panels or wind turbines would you need to produce to generate a nuclear reactor’s worth of power? How expensiv…
> How many solar panels or wind turbines would you need to produce to generate a nuclear reactor’s worth of power? How expensive would that process be comparatively? These factors weigh heavily in nuclear power’s favor because it is so energy dense. And yet literally every single for-profit energy production company in the world is heavily investing in renewables and avoiding nuclear despite government incentives and…
Responding to people highlighting this by pointing out that nuclear is uneconomic under the current policies is either making their point for them or saying nothing at all. :)
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
To put it in numbers (actual production per year, not capacity) [1] [2]: China nuclear 2010: 75 TW/h China nuclear 2021: 408 TW/h (+333 TW/h) Worldwide nuclear: 2768 => 2800 (+32 TW/h) China solar 2010: 0.7 TW/h China solar 2021: 327 TW/h (+326 TW/h) Worldwide solar: 34 => 1033 (+999 TW/h) Luckily, nuclear doesn't really care about solar, since they complement each other perfectly (wind is a different story and it is…
The annual increase in renewable generation in China is now many times that of the annual increase in nuclear generation. Starting at 2010 leads to an underestimate of the renewables' current velocity advantage over nuclear there.
The article suggested that the west should "compete with the two leaders in global nuclear construction: Russia and China" to "not only decarbonize, but bring greater prosperity to the world".
So I wanted to show that even if the west emulated China by slashing regulation, outlawing the greens, and dramatically increased our skill at huge construction projects, we still would focus far more on renewables than on nuclear.
(I ignored Russia, because they produce most of their electricity with fossil fuels, and only 18% with nuclear, which is probably not something the west wants to emulate [1]).
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/electricity/russia-electricity...).
Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
You said infinitely! I never used sustainability that way. Nuclear is not sustainable because there isn't enough uranium available to extract, certainly not in an environmentally friendly way, in order to meet an expanded demand for more than a few decades https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=365 There is, however, more than enough minerals available to make machines that, once built, will continue to produce and store emi…
No you’re not being consistent. Your argument is no reprocessing, breeder, or seawater farming technology is allowable in calculations about the sustainability of fission. But all kids of similar recycling, or new chemistries, or not yet proven technologies are allowable for calculating the sustainability of wind/solar/batteries.
Breeders have been around since the 50s. Again expensive and concerns around sodium coolant were never mitigated. After 70 years 3 are in operation, not due to environmentalists but because they didn't live up to their promise.
Seawater extraction has been around since the 60s and has still hasn't significantly expanded uranium supply (and seriously, filtering the sea? I thought we were talking about minimising environmental damage).
I'm saying nuclear has had its chance. It's too expensive, too expensive to allow fast development reitteration, too slow to address climate change, carries too many risks and hidden costs and just isn't competitive with the promise of renewables which, while needing improvement, are developing much quicker.
Again, I used to be in the pro-nuclear camp but its history has shown its problems are just too complex to solve. It doesn't have a bright future.