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China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

johnmenadue.com

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Re: China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

#31

Post by hackerlight »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #10

It’s very difficult to estimate the true cost of nuclear power because so many resources are spent on safety features rather than the basic stuff essential to power generation. New construction cost per energy out can vary by 5x, even against the grain of expected purchasing power parity advantages: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-britain-is-building-...

That is the true cost of nuclear, though. Costs associated with social licensing are just costs, no different from labor or materials. The safety requirements may be excessive and irrational, but they're not going away while the general public remains fearful. Any cost that can't go away in a realistic universe is ... just another cost.

Another social licensing risk is early plant closure. The levelized cost of nuclear energy is the best case scenario. This number assumes that your country won't become like Germany. What will happen to the ROI of nuclear if there's a moral panic in 15 years forcing early plant closures? Nobody can predict the irrationality of the crowd. Renewables don't face such risks to ROI.

Re: China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

#32

Post by hackerlight »

goatlover wrote: post #28
pfdietz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analysis I've seen doesn't support the position we should also be deploying nuclear. We come out ahead rolling out renewables and storage as fast as possible, driving these technologies down their experience curves. Any new nuclear added will likely close early when it can't even make an operating profit.

Nuclear energy is a lot more dense, therefore requiring less land, and doesn't depend on the sun or wind. It also doesn't depend on future breakthroughs in storage and transmission.

Cost declines have made storage viable already:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-...

Global storage production is 1TW/h per annum now and will increase to 4TW/h by 2030, while also being cheaper.

Re: China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

#33

Post by janalsncm »

henry2023 wrote: post #19

To this day I think that nuclear is the best way to produce clean and abundant energy. There only one problem. Only governments build nuclear reactors and if you want to innovate in this space you need to deal with these institutions which adds a lot of complexity. Solar on the other hand appeals to the public and can be deployed in large scale facilities. Large scale economics apply directly and we can see that by l…

Aside from the complexity, part of the issue when comparing nuclear and solar is this: In the US we like to externalize our environmental damage as much as possible, which was one of the “benefits” of moving manufacturing to China. This has been one of the main effects of the environmental movement in the US, simply making a lot of things infeasible. As long as the US environment is clean, damage elsewhere is tolerated. (Maybe that wasn’t the intention, but it is the result.)

With solar we can externalize the environmental damage almost 100% if the panels are manufactured somewhere else. We would install them somewhere else if we could, too. With nuclear there is always some underlying amortized risk of problems, and this perceived risk is impossible to externalize. Again, what is important is the perception of damage rather than actual damage.

Of course I’m also not quantifying the actual damage from either one. I’m not sure which one is worse in terms of raw material extraction or CO2 emissions per lifetime KWh produced. I checked and it seems solar might be higher for CO2. But that difference isn’t going to matter if nuclear doesn’t get built.

Re: China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

#34

Post by loeg »

WalterBright wrote: post #12

In the Pacific Northwest, I see rooftop solar panels half-covered with mildew. I wonder how that affects the power generation, and how often one would have to climb up on the roof to scrape them clean.

Yes, rooftop home solar doesn't make a ton of sense at this latitude and especially not adjacent to this much hydro power.

Re: China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

#35

Post by dyauspitr »

hangonhn wrote: post #29
janalsncm wrote: post #9

It is telling that a country with basically none of the American barriers to nuclear (NiMBYism, slow construction) is also shifting focus to solar and wind. It’s just simpler. You can put up a solar panel tomorrow and start generating power. A solar panel is a self-contained prefab power generating unit. Even with all of the advancements in nuclear, we still don’t have anything like that.

I was going to say... if a country like China, with its massive engineering/building capacity and authoritarian "efficiency" cannot hit their nuclear construction targets, it is quite telling how difficult it must be in reality to build nuclear reactors in general. I am still very pro-nuclear but it seems PV + wind + battery storage are coming down in price much faster than people expected and it just makes sense to…

Renewables plus nuclear should be the way of the future. Nuclear power when renewables are not available and some sort of storage (pumped hydro, heat in salt etc) when renewables are active.

Re: China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

#36

Post by pfdietz »

goatlover wrote: post #28
pfdietz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analysis I've seen doesn't support the position we should also be deploying nuclear. We come out ahead rolling out renewables and storage as fast as possible, driving these technologies down their experience curves. Any new nuclear added will likely close early when it can't even make an operating profit.

Nuclear energy is a lot more dense, therefore requiring less land, and doesn't depend on the sun or wind. It also doesn't depend on future breakthroughs in storage and transmission.

Compute please how much the land for a PV field will cost, vs. how much the PV equipment to go on it will cost. Do this for prime farmland, which might be $20K/acre, then do it for west Texas rangeland, which might be $1K/acre.

There is plenty of land. If the cost of land ever became a serious constraint on renewables, renewables will be so cheap they will have already relegated all other energy sources to museums.

As for future breakthroughs: solar and wind could be rolled out with existing storage, but of course improvements are welcome. But turn this around: investment in nuclear requires believing that such improvements won't occur. If they do, your nuclear investment is totally screwed. It won't even make back operating costs. Do you think betting the improvements won't occur is a reasonable bet? Do you think nuclear is going to get financing from hard nosed business types with that hanging over it?

Maybe you're just suggesting continued investment in nuclear R&D, in case all the renewable and storage technologies suddenly hit a brick wall. R&D has a low bar to justify it, so that's not a hard case to make.

Re: China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

#37

Post by MostlyStable »

afiori wrote: post #22
MostlyStable wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its short and mostly just a description of whats happening. Not much to comment on. Except for the last sentence that says that nuclear "can't" compete with renewables. Firstly, it's actually competing with coal, which is what is going in instead, and secondly, any regulatory regime that slows nuclear deployment so much that you instead install coal is deeply, deeply flawed. Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer…

I agree with your point but as feedback on phrasing saying > Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years might cause some skepticism as Chernobyl was in 1986. I am not saying that it is false, but I am saying that it will sound false

Pollution from burning coal (and other fossil fuels, but mostly coal) kills, depending on which estimate you believe, 10s of thousands, to millions of people per year, and that is completely ignoring impacts of climate change. Yes, even when you take into account accidents like Chernobyl, and even if you decide to accept the very highest of the total death estimates, it's still dramatically safer than coal.

Over-reacting to early nuclear disasters and failing to accelerate our build out and continuing with coal for the past nearly 80 years post Chernobyl is, in my opinion, one of the greatest civilizational mistakes humanity has made.

Re: China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

#38

Post by yongjik »

afiori wrote: post #22
MostlyStable wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its short and mostly just a description of whats happening. Not much to comment on. Except for the last sentence that says that nuclear "can't" compete with renewables. Firstly, it's actually competing with coal, which is what is going in instead, and secondly, any regulatory regime that slows nuclear deployment so much that you instead install coal is deeply, deeply flawed. Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer…

I agree with your point but as feedback on phrasing saying > Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years might cause some skepticism as Chernobyl was in 1986. I am not saying that it is false, but I am saying that it will sound false

Searching for "coal pollution death europe" would give:

https://www.wwf.mg/?272333/Dark%2DCloud

> It reveals that in 2013 their emissions were responsible for over 22,900 premature deaths, ...

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/air-pollut...

> Pollution from Europe’s coal plants responsible for ‘up to 34,000 deaths each year’

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abecff

> The health burden of European [coal power] emission-induced PM2.5, ..., amounts to at least 16 800 (CI95 14 800–18 700) excess deaths per year over the European domain.

Chernobyl's total death toll is estimated somewhere between thousands and tens of thousands: in other words, even assuming the worst number for Chernobyl, in every year or two, coal kills the same number of Europeans as Chernobyl ever did. The number may be as low as a few months.

Re: China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

#39

Post by dyauspitr »

WalterBright wrote: post #12

In the Pacific Northwest, I see rooftop solar panels half-covered with mildew. I wonder how that affects the power generation, and how often one would have to climb up on the roof to scrape them clean.

It’s like getting your gutters cleaned. You’re just going to have contractors that come by once or twice a year to clean out your panels.

Re: China's quiet energy revolution: the switch from nuclear to renewable energy

#40

Post by pfdietz »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #30
pydry wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok then let's repeal the Price-Anderson Nuclear indemninty act and make nuclear power plants liable for ALL clean up costs if something goes wrong. For Fukushima that number is circa $800 billion. If it is as safe as you think it is with a minimum of safety standards then the market will still provide. Sophisticated insurers will be capable of calculating the risk and shouldering all of it for a reasonable fee. Right…

The natural objection is that the Fukushima response was a significant overreaction. Counting that cost is like including Iraq war costs for oil usage (perhaps fair for the first gulf war, but the expense of the second was an independent policy mistake) [1] (least bad Forbes article I’ve read in years) https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...

Destruction of property value by an accident is a real cause for legal action even if you consider it irrational.

Shellenberger is not a credible source. He's the person who assured us PV is bad because it uses rare earth elements (it does not.)

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