521–530 of 1001 posts
Nuclear was a great option 20 years ago. Today though it's too late. The cost and time to generation (especially in the west) is too high, you'll get far better returns far more quickly from renewables and storage
We need to do what we can right now to avoid people saying this exact same thing 20 years from now.
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> It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. None of this happens to be true. A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one. Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electr…
> A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one. It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow. > Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. True, but land use just isn't that important of…
This, again, is not true. The average is currently at 6.5 years and dropping slightly, the time has been fairly consistent over the last decades.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
The main factor determining build times appears to be "how much do you want to?". France built 50+ reactors in a total of 15 years, the fastest build times are Japan, South Korea, China and Germany.
Secondary factors are "is this a FOAK build or NOAK", and "how much experience is there building nuclear plants". When Japan was good it built in under 4 years, and had plans to go below 3. And no, that's not detrimental to safety.
> and use just isn't that important of a factor.
It is when land is expensive.
> With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.
Typical dodge into the qualitative: the additional grad capacity required to ship power across the country from where it is produced to where it is needed is a multiple of that required to strengthen it for additional consumers. Never mind the whole "smart grid" madness.
> Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself.
That's also false. These costs are almost always included and have little impact on the total cost of power. For example, the Gösgen plant in Switzerland produces for 4,34 Rappen / kWh, including all costs and including a profit.
> At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize
That's also not true. When subsidies for off-shore wind were reduced, Germany, Denmark and the UK had zero bids for wind-parks, and immediately the discussion was "new subsidy models". Intermittent renewables in Germany currently get €20 billion in direct subsidies, never mind the advantage of having feed-in priority and being able to burden other producers with cost of intermittency.
> The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables
That's also not true. There was a trigger (in PV production) that led to a substation having problems. But that was just the trigger, not the cause. Grids have to be able to deal with faults like that from time to time. The grid in Spain wasn't, because there were too many intermittent renewables in the grid, and too few rotating masses that stabilize the grid.
> Grid scale batteries solve this problem.
Are these grid scale batteries sufficient to power an entire industrialized nation for a week or more in the room with us now? How much are they?
Nuclear power is clean but VERY EXPENSIVE. Dispatble solar and wind are about 1/5 the price of new nuclear.
Your comment is just disinformation at this point. If nuclear was very expensive China wouldn't have built 30 in the last 10 years despite massive opposition. In reality when you take all the costs into account there is no cheaper form of energy generation and there likely never will be, outside of cost decreases in Fission based nuclear itself.
Anticipating such a rapid decline is hard and a lot of people still are stuck on outdated data.
Sure China commissioned these plants in the past and will plan more, but it won't be due to cost.
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The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter. It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large…
> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter. Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little. Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with…
It's also the oldest storage tech and I doubt there's a single place in Europe available to build more.
> Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
The whole EU is in winter weather together.
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The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it
You should check out these things called batteries.
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear. For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal. There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personall…
Well no, storage would need another 100x improvement for being usable in a 100% renewable scenario in any country you have any sort of winter.
Say what you want on nuclear but we have example of countries which managed it successfully, for renewables, we still haven't.
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If anyone is interested, here's a picture of decades worth of it[0]. I used to have a video of Russia's, but it seems to have gone down. If somehow you can way back it, here's the link[1]. For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll…
> For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, ... per capita. Sure, all other waste is bigger than that, but it is still a whole lot and still, usually, power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does. I wonder why.
> power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does.
Honestly, I'll pay a higher premium to get a power source with lower amounts of waste. Even if it costs more to store that waste. Just the scale of the waste is so massive. The environmental damage. Leaking into water supplies. All those same problems with nuclear fuel are the same with any other fuel. The difference is that in nuclear there is a greater concentration of damage by volume while having dramatically less volume.
To determine what's the cheapest option here you have to assign that damage per volume and then compare the volumes. How much more dangerous do you think nuclear is? 100x? 100000x? How much do you think any given section of the environment is worth? The CO2? The animals and other life impacted? The health costs of people living nearby?
All these things are part of the equation for every single power source out there.
> per capita
Seriously, do you understand the scale we're talking here? I mean there's more literal mass in a 1MW solar power plant. You get a few years of all of the nuclear power in France for the weight of a 1MW solar farm. France's nuclear generates 63GWs. That's 63000 times! Nuclear isn't 10000x as expensive, it's not even 10x. So I'm not exaggerating when I'm asking if you think it's 1000x more dangerous or 1000x more costly to the environment. Because that's still giving us a conservative estimate
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The EU is fining France because they don’t have enough clean energy in their mix despite France having the cleanest energy in Europe because nuclear used to not count. They are also forcing the French national energy company to resell their electricity at a loss to competitor moving money which should be used to invest into the pocket of private investors. And let’s not talk about the utter stupidity of the current d…
You do know that a large portion of the energy crisis was caused by half the French nuclear fleet being online when it was for once truly absolutely needed? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr... I also note that you didn’t have anything to say about the EPR2 program and the absolutely insanely bonkers large subsidies needed to get it off the ground.
That event was actually the final nail in the coffin for the all renewable policies of France, seeing that when the nuclear plants had a problem, the renewables failed even harder than the nuclear plants made it hard to make a case for all renewable policies
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?