Activists who embrace nuclear power

It is also a mistake to inflate, which is what I'm concerned with. I'm under the impression that the political aspect is being inflated because this is an aspect that the average person can more easily understand.

> Listening to experts is also not a good advice on it own, there is a lot of domain specific knowledge out there.

This is why I specifically mention consensus and the vast complexity of the problem. You can easily replace the instances of nuclear in this paragraph with any power source and the basis would still hold true (honestly even the concerns of lobbying from the above paragraph). But there are experts in nuclear power, experts in solar, experts in wind, etc then there are people who have worked in these industries for decades that lead these groups (usually the leaders of these groups hold multi-domain knowledge and there are several members). This hierarchical structure provides the communication network for these people. The mistake you're making here is assuming that these people are working in isolation. Go to any DOE lab and you will find reactor researchers eating lunch with solar researchers. These people talk. They talk a lot. It is their job to talk to one another. Half the models that the climate scientists do wouldn't work if these people weren't talking to one another. You're over simplifying the reality of the situation by creating nice and neat boxes for researchers to sit in. I'm not saying "listen to a nuclear expert" I'm saying "listen to the consensus of several disciplines." Having been in those lab settings I don't see the nuclear researchers being anti-solar or anti-wind, but I do see them being anti-fossil fuels. Similarly I don't see the solar or wind researchers being anti-nuclear (actually the opposite) but I do see them being anti-fossil fuels. Even the researchers studying fossil fuels there are anti-fossil fuels and pro nuclear and renewables. There's a very clear consensus here. They disagree about the proportions of the energy portfolio, but not the components. And honestly their disagreement on proportions isn't large and all sides are making different assumptions about technologies that do not yet exist, and they will gladly admit this.

> Off course I am non of these things, my expertise is in front end web development. I am less then a layman in nuclear or power policy. However I am worried about the climate emergency, and I do worry that experts giving advice in favor of nuclear power are misguided—or worse—have their own agenda.

Do you question that of fossil fuels? Solar? Wind? Hydro? If not, why? What's the difference here? Why do you have faith in one set but not the other? They all have their own agendas, and for the most part they are the same (though applied to their own technology). But a researcher also has a very different agenda than the company providing the energy product. Clearly the latter has a more biased position than the former and I'm saying to listen to the former.

> I don’t think this puts me on a high horse or—more accurately—under a tin foil hat.

These are the same. The tin foil hat is often associated with believing that the scientists have missed something that is clear to you. The tin foil hat is the know it all manager who micromanages but doesn't have the first clue about the technical aspects of your work. We've all had that manager. We all know that manager's ego and how frustrating they are. How they make it more difficult to get work done.

> Experts failed to stop the climate catastrophe before it was an emergency.

I'm not sure where this diverges from my main point. It is exactly the problem I'm concerned with. The experts say one thing. That thing gets politicized. The politicization takes over and manipulates the perception of what the experts say to fit the political narrative. Population becomes confused and argues. Policy fails as we fight and experts are scrambling to clarify what they actually mean and how that's different than what people are saying that they mean.

> Again I am not an expert on what I am talking about.

Then don't take a hard position, but rather a soft one. That is all I'm arguing for here. I'm not sure how many times I need to say this, but I'm not advocating for nuclear so much as "let the experts." If that's a controversial position then I'm highly concerned. We can only do the best we can do. I'm quite certain that the best efforts of experts is vastly superior to the best efforts of laymen. Sure, the laymen will have a few wins now and then, but the likelihood of success is magnitudes higher by going with experts. (Again, I'm not saying don't be critical, I'm just saying that if you're a layman don't bring a baseball bat to the debate. Doing so represents extreme arrogance and leads to a regression in progress)

> When reading commentary on HN I usually try to filter out the people that seem to know what they are talking about.

This is great and should be done, but HN is not highly populated by climate nor energy experts, although there are some here. It's easy to say things that sound intelligent without them actually being.

Edit: I want to add, in my original post I also did shit on the typical pro-nuclear commenter, complaining about how they are talking about things they don't know about (thorium, SMRs, liquid, breeders, etc). It should be explicitly clear that my comment is more "hey guys, maybe this is a complex subject and we should stop arguing so strongly and see what the experts say" and not "fuck yeah nuclear power screw those renewables." I'm tired of anything remotely suggesting nuclear is anything but evil is equated to the latter.

And the truth is that I only ever said that there isn't enough grid storage available to make renewables feasible for decarbonization. The notion that I ever said there wasn't enough lithium in the earth's crust isn't the truth. Sure, there's more lithium that's inaccessible. But inaccessible lithium isn't available for use in energy storage.

> Last I checked, Li-ion was about US$111/kWh https://dercuano.github.io/notes/energy-storage-efficiency.h... which is probably around US$300/kW on th current grid, depending on how many hours a day you need battery, and buyers were undervaluing storage. Given that coal and (1970s) nuclear plants cost on the order of US$1000/kW to build, this is already economically feasible. (Current nuclear plants cost close to US$7000/kW, but plausibly that's largely regulatory costs.)

You're comparing figures on generation to storage. Yes, a big nuclear plant that generates 2.5 GW of electricity often costs $15 billion, sometimes more sometimes less (The Taishan plant only costed $7 billion for 2GW). But they generate that power for 50 to 80 years. And crucially they generate power 24/7 and don't need a supplemental form of storage.

By comparison, buying 2 gigawatt hours grants you the ability to store enough energy to output 2 GW for a duration of 1 hour. This means something totally different. You still need to add onto this the cost of building and maintaining solar panels or wind turbines or what have you to actually fill this storage.

But what's crucially omitted here is service lifetime. Good lithium ion batteries will do ~1,500 discharge cycles, exceptional ones 2,000. That's 4-6 years of service life for these batteries, especially if they're being used for diurnal storage like solar. And that's really all they're good for, batteries also lose their charge if they sit unused for long durations. so $100 for 1 KWh that needs to be replaced every 4 years really costs $2,000 over the life of 80 years.

Also actually attempting to use batteries for grid storage will cause the price of batteries to skyrocket. Globally ~300GWh of lithium ion batteries are produced annually [1]. The world uses 60TWh of electricity daily. 1 day of storage would take 200 years to provision at current production rates. Sure, battery production is growing but won't be able to keep up with demand and price will rise. As you pointed out earlier, only 20 minutes of storage are available with existing mining techniques so extraction will rapidly become a bottleneck.

1. https://energycentral.com/c/ec/world-battery-production

> You're comparing figures on generation to storage. Yes, a big nuclear plant that generates 2.5 GW of electricity often costs $15 billion … buying 2 gigawatt hours grants you the ability to store enough energy to output 2 GW for a duration of 1 hour

I'm clear on the distinction between power and storage capacity; that's why I said, "Li-ion was about US$111/kWh which is probably around US$300/kW on th[sic] current grid, depending on how many hours a day you need battery" and linked to my note from 02019 about precisely how the price of batteries interacts with the price of energy, depending on how many charge/discharge cycles you get per day and how long they are.

The thing I probably should have been more explicit about is that, on the current storage grid, batteries are needed about 2–3 hours a day; US$111/kWh times two or three hours gives "around US$300/kW": to bridge those 2–3 hours of shortfall, you need 2–3 kWh/kW of batteries. That's what makes Li-ion batteries profitable to install today.

It is of course true that as the amount of solar energy in the grid increases, this duration also increases, especially if demand response doesn't materialize as we might hope. Figures from the CAISO report I linked elsethread http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Final-Root-Cause-Analysis-Mid... show that California's solar generation in the summer is roughly 12 hours a day and fairly constant during about 10 of those hours, ending just after peak demand, and that peak demand is about twice "valley demand". On the fateful day, the demand ramped down from about 45000 MW to about 25000 MW nearly linearly over the other 12 hours, so if you wanted to feed the entire California demand from expanded solar generation, you'd need to store up 420 gigawatt hours (1.5 PJ). You'd need 12 kWh of batteries per (average) kilowatt, which would bring the price of storage to above US$13000 per kW at the battery prices I found two years ago, which is slightly higher than the price of thermal power generation. Hopefully those battery prices will go lower and/or people will shift to using more power when the sun is up, for example because it's free, but those prices are already low enough to invest the first US$50 billion into ramping up battery production and new extraction technologies.

Your point about service life is well taken, but I think you probably would benefit from doing real NPV calculations, with discount rates. I'll make an effort tomorrow if I have time.

Surely by the time we come up with the technology to harvest uranium from seawater, nuclear fission technology will be rendered obsolete as storing power from solar will be much much cheaper with lithium-ion batteries harvested from the same oceans, but with 100 times more efficiency.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Seawater_recove...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Terrestrial