Ironically many countries are considering underground storage of CO2 to combat climate change.
Is carbon sequestration even remotely realistic though (beyond PoC, and at scale)?
Hard to say, its a big mega project, but then so is what we do today to keep getting more oil and gas. Same story goes for energy storage to make solar/wind workable at large scales. Very hard problem! So is sucking the last dregs of oil out of the ocean, or creating earthquakes to suck it out of the ground.
To everyone being a proponent of this modern new nuclear plants you dream about I ask: would you want to live in a village where they would build a new nuclear plant next to it?
I would have no problem with building one outside our city. And frankly compared the land clearing one would need for solar/thermal or the blight of enormous windmills, I’d prefer it. What you may be really asking is whether people are comfortable with the risk of turning into the next Chernobyl. I feel that risk is quite low, especially for new builds.
:) fair play to you. At least the real estate prices will be good.
I won't go for low risk when it comes to nuclear and not let my family grow up next to it. Only no risk would be acceptable to me when it comes to nuclear, quite some tail risk in this case.
why is nuclear waste such a big problem? in terms of m^3 the amount is rather small, and I feel like we're not discussing what's gonna happen with old solar panels. Is there a way to recycle them / how good is it? The article doesn't mention it. As for the nuclear storage problem, from my point of view it seems more like the biggest problem is that people don't want it near them even though it's stored hundreds of me…
When one plant’s worth of solar panel waste is improperly discarded, does it ruin potable water supplies, airable land and the health of entire regions? Does that area become a no-man’s land for decades /centuries, even after spending many billions to try and rectify the damage? There is absolutely no comparison to long term storage of nuclear waste and discarded solar panels.
If we’re trying to be honest here, that’s not an appropriate comparison. Properly disposed-of nuclear waste doesn’t necessarily cause these problems either. When you look at the physical footprint disparities (land-clearing) needed for commensurate solar power generation, rendering such land unusable and ecologically disrupted/destroyed, solar doesn’t come out smelling like roses these days either. If you’re lucky it can be reclaimed more easily but in the daily operation for its lifetime and beyond in the best case, the land occupation needed to power a small town exclusively with solar is pretty massive. Now do a country. Now do a continent.
Right, I think hydro is about as close to at-scale 24/7 always-on generation as you can get with renewables right now. Even with that, everywhere I’ve lived with hydro power had backup fossil fuel generation, which was periodically used, though rarely. Arguments for all other forms of renewables at scale right now seem to depend on having/maintaining fossil fuel power generation just to satisfy daily demand reliably,…
If the world was completely solar, we'd need 30TWh of batteries, which would cost about $3T. [0] $3T would buy 200 GW of nuclear power plants, about 3% of what's needed. 0: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-pow...
Previous generation of nuclear reactors in France were built for less than 2 billion euros (constant euro) per GW (sorry it's in french, you can see the numbers here http://i-tese.cea.fr/_files/LettreItese18/ECLAIRAGES/REP.pdf on page 10). There were 50 reactors of three types (900, 1300 then 1450 GW). If we had kept this technology instead of losing the know-how and developing a new program, we could certainly build 1500 GW for those 3T. Don't know if any other country ever achieved such economy scale on its civil nuclear program, maybe South-Korea as like France they have only one nuclear company, and even more reactors per sites of few different models.
>However, many of the measures needed for energy efficiency are now cheaper than the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity. >The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastr…
To everyone being a proponent of this modern new nuclear plants you dream about I ask: would you want to live in a village where they would build a new nuclear plant next to it?
Nuclear friendly countries are struggling with the costs. Multiple examples of problems were given for France, yet the French government likes nuclear power.
Electricity in France is so cheap that EDF has had to raise domestic electricity prices in order to make it possible for other providers to compete
In the short term nuclear is undoubtedly expensive, but when the debt from construction is payed off, it becomes an incredibly cheap and reliable source of energy.
Renewables fail at heating in the winter because they generate electricity directly. SMR nuclear district heating might be the only way to cover the shortfall. Thermal power plants have an inherent advantage when it comes to producing heat.
Lack of storage in the US is a purely political issue, not a technical one. Other countries are either successfully building such storage (Finland) or invest into fuel recycling and breeder technologies (France and Russia), which significantly reduce amount of waste which has to be stored and its long-term danger.
Yes, hence the “mostly”. For a variety of blocking reasons though, this is an unresolved (if not unresolvable) problem.
I don’t think we even need to store it. Nuclear waste has been sitting in regular storage for over 50 years now, seems to be perfectly safe. We should just keep doing what we’re doing.
Why do we even need to bother putting it underground except for some unlikely what if scenarios 1000 years in the future.
For anyone interested in more depth, the full report linked in the article is worth looking at. In general, it's not been a good year for the industry. Uneconomical plants in operation, stalled and cancelled projects, criminal fraud and theft of public money, and the unsolved problem of how to decommission anything plague the business. If the real costs were addressed, it seems many more plants would have shut down b…
Thanks.
Saul Griffith has been making the same points.
TLDR: Based on opportunity costs and urgency, renewable generation capacity is both much quicker and cheaper.
However, we must also invest (R&D) in next generation nuclear. eg micro reactors and liquid sodium. And hope like hell that any of the 50 long shot bets wins biggly. Because we're still going to need it.
>However, many of the measures needed for energy efficiency are now cheaper than the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity. >The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants. Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastr…
To everyone being a proponent of this modern new nuclear plants you dream about I ask: would you want to live in a village where they would build a new nuclear plant next to it?
If it is replacing the asthmatic toxins from fossil fuel (almost everywhere in the world), then absolutely yes.