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This would have been great 20 or 30 years ago but back then “nuclear bad!”. It would have been a great bridge between burning fossil fuels and wind/solar/etc. It probably would have prevented climate change from getting as bad as it is now. Oh well, here we are.
It probably would have prevented climate change from getting as bad as it is now.
I just read the news yesterday that big coal, oil and gas want to step up their game, despite renewables being ridiculously cheap now. So i don’t think so.
Yep, fossil fuel production is thought to rise up to 2050…
Great! Let’s stock up for our madmax future.
Greed will be the death of us all
There’s a lag between human activity and climate change. Rolling out nuclear might have helped a bit, but whether we’d have seen the results today I’m not sure… the benefits would be in the future.
I doubt cars could have evolved any faster though (well they could, but capitalism, so realistically things went as fast as they could)… so it might not have had much impact at all.
Well, who would have thunk? Expensive nuclear energy is not viable, if holding a blue sheet of sand towards the sky produces power for like half the price.
If it was a matter of half the price then nuclear would be the clear winner. Paying double to get stable power rather than variable power is currently a clear win.
Nuclear has a lot of baggage on top of being more costly (eg public fears, taking a lot longer to get running, building up big debts before producing anything, and having a higher cost risk due to such limited recent production), if it was just a simple “pay twice the price and you never need to worry about the grid scale storage” then nuclear would be everywhere.
It’s been a while since I looked it up, but back then the projected price of SMR energy was about double the cost of current solar.
I’m not sure, if that changed much over the last month.
Anyway, wind, solar and hydro combined can produce energy pretty inexpensively. The power grid isn’t exactly simple with nuclear reactors either, so it’s not like you’re winning that much from this perceived reduction of complexity.
I’m certainly not arguing nuclear is a panacea that everyone in all the governments have somehow missed (even ignoring the risks mentioned its only a potential fit for a small subset of the grid these days, there’s no way building a 100% nuclear grid would make sense today).
The point I’m making is that currently there are energy production needs we effectively can’t fulfil with renewables because the costs would be impractical (eg the last 10% of usage on dark windless nights at the wrong time of year). Some cases do fit nuclear better currently (not all, nuclear usually wants constant usage, can’t help with surges).
Nobody really cares about that though for 2 reasons: 1. There’s plenty of opportunities that renewables still can fill and 2. The cost of storage is projected to drop a lot over time, which should fill in the gaps and squeeze out many of the last opportunities for nuclear.
Quite possibly by the end the remaining slice where nuclear could fit will be so thin it can’t actually sustain an industry (and given the industry has been half dead for decades, it’d take a big win to justify reviving it), so yeah, at the moment it looks like lots of risks and questionable rewards. Nonetheless the current prices aren’t really the problem, it’s just that things are risky, and projected to get worse over time, so why invest?
Ironically it’s not that different to the fossil fuel industry, just with a lot less existing infrastructure.
One massive point that most people are completely blind to is that with energy considerations we are aggressively pursuing two very different goals that in many regards are directly at odds with one another.
The first goal is electrification, which can largely be accomplished by increasing renewables, investing in battery technology, etc. But in the US, we have also been accommodating the desire for electrification by massively increasing natural gas capacity.
The second goal is decarbonization. This requires us to also nix natural gas from the equation at some point. In addition to the problems others have already mentioned (like the fact that renewables aside from hydro are not viable base load power options right now), there is a significant chunk of our energy infrastructure that simply cannot be satisfied in any regard purely with renewables. Like the huge number of industrial processes that need process heat to achieve their end product.
So the best solution is energy portfolio diversity. We can steadily continue to phase out heavy polluters for electrification, but if we want to truly decarbonize, industry demands a solution that can still produce high heat without emissions. Nuclear is a woefully under-exploited technology in that regard, but it is potentially a great solution.
Yup, it’s hard to predict what the mix will look like, but 100% solar would be a very costly solution for sure.
I used to be very pro nuclear, and I still think it could have been a big piece of the puzzle, but I do worry we’ve missed the boat, it could’ve been the first wave of decarbonisation 20 (or more) years ago, I’m not sure how well it can compete growing from almost nothing now with the renewables eating all the easy money. nuclear plants need to run 100% to be successful, and renewables have dropped a bomb on the concept of baseline demand. Maybe as we kill gas we’ll have to start giving massive bonuses to on demand power that isn’t pumping co2, but the absolute lid on that market is the price of storage, which is high enough now, but will drop, it’s unclear how long the gap for nuclear will exist there.
Certainly willing to be wrong though, there’s lots of unknowns with nuclear, quite possibly it could be multiple times cheaper if only we’d invest into it properly.
there is a significant chunk of our energy infrastructure that simply cannot be satisfied in any regard purely with renewables.
BASF can do it, have been able to for ages, they’re switching their feed stocks around depending on price point and push come to shove they could run on nothing but literal potatoes. The Ukraine war was a bit of an extreme situation for them because their piping wasn’t set up for a massive drop in gas availability but they were able to cut consumption by IIRC 60% without affecting production rates.
Steel smelters will have to be rebuilt completely to run on hydrogen and side note it’s more efficient to turn electricity into hydrogen and then smelt than to try and reduce with electricity directly. All of that costs money but by this point it ain’t exactly rocket science.
…and it’s certainly going to be cheaper than mitigating ever more extreme weather events.
The SMNR format suffers from being small and therefore difficult to be cost effective and that renewables are 4 times as cheap. Not easy to make money in this environment. https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/06/nuclear-energy-free-market-capitalism-arent-compatible/
Yeah, one justification I’d heard was that it was a cheap and low risk way to revive the industry enough for bigger projects, but I’m not sure that’s particularly compelling.
Sounds like a very expensive argument to invest billions on the hope that something might happen 😬. Hope it’s not my money.
Yes, but also literally every industry starts that way. Start small and scale up. Nuclear’s special because we did it once and then almost completely stopped building them globally for so long that the capability faded away.
The tech shifted in the meantime, so even the knowledge that was preserved is for designs we wouldn’t want to build today.
It’s a weird situation.
The last US nuclear plant built went seven years behind schedule and seventeen billion over budget.
That sets a large amount of weariness in everyone to commit to making another, unfortunately.
Yeah the poster above you is wrong. Solar is WAY less than half the price.
Yes, especially right now. To be fair that’s mostly because solar is doing great as far as scale goes right now. Nuclear has near zero scale and lost all experience, so it’s more expensive than ever.
Unfortunately we still need tunable baseline power in order to keep current, voltage, and frequency within the grid’s margin of error. Our options for that are: situationally available (and often environmentally problematic) hydro, fossil fuels, nuclear, and/or giant toxic/fire-prone battery banks.
You forgot hydrogen, saltwater batteries, proper grids, biogas, etc.
If you’d use nuclear power like that, you’d drive up the costs even more, because it’s just not very viable to compete with solar and wind during the day. Better to just invest in proper storage solutions.
Would geothermal work? I can’t think of any particular reason that the heat of the earth should vary much with time (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong in this assumption), and energy production should be more controllable because to my understanding it generally just makes steam for a turbine like more traditional power sources.
Geothermal is really expensive in most parts of the world. It costs a lot of money to drill deep enough and to have enough capacity.
Plasma deep drilling is starting to hit the market which should make geothermal available pretty much everywhere. The sad thing about current geothermal is that it’s not even used in areas where you do have heat near the surface, the reason is that geology is quite unpredictable and every borehole is a crap-shoot between hitting the jackpot and having to pay damages out of your arse because people’s houses collapse. Deep drilling has none of those issues.
Out of those you listed, nuclear is the least flexible in terms of output regulation. PV with batteries is the most flexible.
Hydro is definitely the least flexible. Those gate move slow.
Hydro is often turned on and off as pumped storage. Nuclear never is
Running frequency regulation off batteries is a silly idea, that’s more capacitor range. Also, flywheels, which is how fossil fuels do it anyway.
Not surprising. I would imagine the cost per kWh is more for smaller installations. I never understood the push for these aside from a giveaway to nuclear companies.
There are good guys at INL (although all the guys with MP5s walking around makes for a creepy atmosphere) but there clearly was not much of a future here.
Maybe. I would imagine that having all the portions built at one location and shipped/installed at the site would be quicker and have less variation in final cost.
The last US nuclear power plant built wound up being 7 years late and a face shattering $17,000,000,000 over budget. Who wants something to take an extra unexpected 7 years to have something built and pay seventeen billion dollars more than you planned on to get it?
Less land required as well which is also cheaper.
But ya, being and to produce them in a factory was going to be a big savings. They’d get cheaper as things improved.
a giveaway to nuclear companies
That’s how we roll in Canada. The best part is, the guys who own the nuke plants also own the oil pipelines! Even when they lose they win!
Can we let them lose at the oil and win at the nuclear, please?
I recall seeing a show on Bill Gates a few years back and his drive to get modem nuclear going. It seems many of the current plants around the world are based on old designs from the 50s and 60s.
Newer and modern designs are much safer but it was going to take a tremendous amount of effort to get past the nuclear is bad mindset.
There’s no way to easily educate the masses on a complicated scientific subject and elected officials aren’t going to stay around for long pushing that kind of tech, they might as well push solar, wind, and tidal power as they would have better chances at staying in office.
Are there even enough people who knows how to run these?
I know a big issue in Europe is that you don’t actually have enough people educated on nuclear power to actually build and manage such a plant
Great question, initially I doubt it. There are the same issues are being seen in the US as they try to move microchip processing back stateside versus Asia. There’s a shortage of skilled labour being reported as a stumbling block to making this move happen quickly. Some might argue “cheap” skilled labour but a shortage there still is at present. I don’t think the US government is going to stop this move for security reasons.
It’s amazing in some ways the Chinese were even able to surpass the US in producing these products as they were pretty far behind the western world production technologies in the late 70s when US manufacturers went in to help setup modern at the time factories. Despite the US being the leader at the time, in some ways they abandoned these skills for economic reasons.
The processing chain of microchips will take years to move over, much like a reinvestment into nuclear.
Places like Alberta are already seeing US oil companies withdrawing from long term projects due to federal government regulations that won’t take effect until the middle of the next decade. Think of the shift of those dedicated to these industries and the shortage of those in renewables. Not to worry the latest Alberta government has put the brakes on their current renewables and are tripling down on traditional oil fields even with 1000s of abandoned oil rigs throughout the province the government needs to clean up. They are even threatening to leave Canada yet again. Existing skilled jobs will be saved no matter the cost!
If there ever is an appetite for Nuclear, I’m hoping we are better equipped in the future to assist with training and providing the schooling to those that are needed than we are in the present and in the past. If it is deemed needed for security reasons I’m sure they will figure out the skills issue.
People obviously learn by doing real things, so competitive skilled labor won’t be more available than it is now. EDIT: … if they wait for it to be
They just have to get projects through one by one, then with time there’ll be more competent people.
But yes, some effort in schooling won’t hurt.
You didn’t mention the most important thing here though, economics.
I’m only left wondering how far of a window should we consider this economic window? A quarter, a year, a decade, a lifetime? How does one factor in all the costs of using a particular style of energy?
Often I see people say look at the cost of making a car battery while ignoring the elimination of many parts of ICE vehicles like the tranny, cooling systems, over the various chemicals like oils and fluids that require constant change for ICE servicing. But hey other types of energy are required to make make car batteries including ICE vehicles in the mines . I say fair, tell me what are the WHOLE costs of using other energy sources, on society, on the environment, and the length of time frame.
Most of our forefathers thought faster horses were the only way to go despite the piles of horse shit and dead horse carcasses they were waiting to dry out so they could be removed, filled many city streets. Some city houses had entrances high up to separate the entrance from these things that filed their streets much like a generations earlier had building designs that sheltered the inhabitants of the city below from those emptying their chamber pots into the streets each morning.
Now I love my ICE vehicles and don’t see myself owning a electric vehicle anytime soon so I do understand the want of keeping my horses around, and my overhangs on buildings to protect me from piss and shit being thrown into the street below, but I also can acknowledge in the long term the world I have figured out for myself is not something that is going to last as the world continues to evolve/devolve around us.
Despite these foreign things to us today, they cried think of the economics and the job losses as Ford was providing new technology and freedom to the masses. Think of the economics of whole horse related industries that were mothballed and in many ways replaced as road infrastructure was required for these new fangled ICE vehicles.
How does one measure the economics of this change? By the quarter its terrible, especially to the individual that needs to shell out for a car, and all the new things it requires over the established upkeep of horses. Think of people unemployed by the lack of horses. Hey we really don’t need to leave our farms that often do we?
By the year it’s not looking great initially either unless you are Ford or a oil outfit. Then by the decades things look a lot different on the whole. Perhaps these cars were a good thing for everyone overall?
At this stage the environment is paying a cost we don’t even understand yet. Even if we do, who cares as it is plentiful in the new world and it seemed like it would never end much like the wood supplies to build the great wooden ships that previous empires use to run the world with. So who cares if yet another Valley or field is ruined? There’s plenty more where that came from! And for many years that was the case.
What are the economic costs to deal with clearcut valleys, tailing ponds, manufacturing waste, abandoned mines, and various other wastes? Often the problem of governments and the taxpayers to deal with long after the initial profits have been taken in those quarters, years and decades. After a lifetime overall is not wonderful but fuck them, I got mine!
So which the economic scale are we thinking?
So which the economic scale are we thinking?
I guess the one where investors pull their money out of new nuclear?
I’m having difficultly following your analogy. I’m not sure the horses to ICE comparison is illuminating in relation to SMRs.
The US Navy has probably around 100 nuclear powered vessels, both submarines and Nimitz class carriers. Each of those have miniature nuclear plants on them.
I know their use cases are different but small and portable is small and portable. Virginia class subs typically stayed within cost budgets, but newer V blocks saw cost overruns, as well as the Gerald Ford carrier, which was about 3 billion over budget if I remember.
Not sure if overruns were due to being nuclear or because of other reasons. They are high tech military items that aren’t exactly mass produced, so lots of ways to overrun. However they are more mass produced than nuclear power stations in the civilian sector. Maybe some lessons can be learned.
Edit: Also forgot an important point that modularization was a key design point of the Virginia sub.
Any botanist can explain how they managed to grow a nuclear reactor plant?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nuclear power provides energy that is largely free of carbon emissions and can play a significant role in helping deal with climate change.
But in most industrialized countries, the construction of nuclear plants tends to grossly exceed their budgeted cost and run years over schedule.
One hope for changing that has been the use of small, modular nuclear reactors, which can be built in a centralized production facility and then shipped to the site of their installation.
Their smaller size makes it easier for passive cooling systems to take over in the case of power losses (some designs simply keep their reactors in a pond).
The government’s Idaho National Lab was working to help construct the first NuScale installation, the Carbon Free Power Project.
NuScale CEO John Hopkins tried to put a positive spin on the event, saying, “Our work with Carbon Free Power Project over the past ten years has advanced NuScale technology to the stage of commercial deployment; reaching that milestone is a tremendous success which we will continue to build on with future customers.”
The original article contains 472 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Nuclear power provides energy that is largely free of carbon emissions and can play a significant role in helping deal with climate change.
This is a giant hoax of an argument anyway.
Nuclear plants consist mainly of a shitton of concrete (and only the best sort is good enough). The production of that concrete causes a terrible amount of carbon emissions upfront.
But in most industrialized countries, the construction of nuclear plants tends to grossly exceed their budgeted cost and run years over schedule.
LMAO I didn’t know that. So they tried to solve the problem of human stupidity? ;-)
modular nuclear reactors, which can be built in a centralized production facility and then shipped to the site of their installation.
Yea, sure… make it even better by adding an extra lot of carbon emissions for the transportation.
I have to take back my statement from above: they did NOT try to solve stupidity, but rather exploit it.
Nuclear plants consist mainly of a shitton of concrete (and only the best sort is good enough). The production of that concrete causes a terrible amount of carbon emissions upfront.
Actually, if you compare them to solar or wind at equivalent service, it’s not that straightforward:
Renewables installed capacity is nowhere close to their actual production, nuclear can produce its nominal capacity in a very steady way.
Wind turbines also need a lot of concrete, and much more metal for equivalent output. Solar panels need a lot of metals.
Renewables need a backup source to manage their intermittency. It’s most often batteries and fossil plants these days. I don’t think I need to comment on fossil plants, but batteries production also has a very significant carbon emission budget, and is most often not included in comparisons. Besides, you need to charge the batteries, that’s even more capacity required to get on par with the nuclear plant.
With all of these in consideration, IPCC includes nuclear power along with solar and wind as a way to reduce energy emissions.
If you use lithium batteries, sure, but grid-scale solutions are definitely moving away from that, the only reason Lithium ever really showed up in the grid is because car manufacturers built up lithium capacity, it wouldn’t have happened without that. Lithium itself I think won’t be an issue for long, plenty of abundant repositories have been found and we haven’t even really started recycling, cobalt now that’s a completely different topic.
Main difference is that you really don’t need energy density if you don’t lob the batteries around all the time so flow batteries, sodium-ion, molten salt, whatnot, are very enticing options. For spikes and frequency regulation there’s good ole flywheels (which came for free with all those glorified steam engines burning fossil fuels and uranium). Also around here we’re using Scandinavian hydrodams as storage for our wind, granted not everyone has them as neighbours.
A bit further down the line power-to-X will also be an important factor in backup and seasonal storage: We’ll need various hydrogen/hydrocarbon compounds anyway as feed stock, for steel smelting etc. so production capacity to soak up renewable overproduction will be available. Which side note is also the reason people should stop with the “hydrogen is dirty” argument: What the fuck else are you going to smelt steel with. Right now hydrogen smelters are going to use fossil hydrogen, yes, but that’s pretty much the only way to build up enough demand so that green hydrogen production gets investment.
Solar plus batteries are already cheaper than nuclear, and only going down. Nuclear has always gotten more expensive over time. For the cost of the most recently completed nuclear plant in the US they could have built 12 times the nameplate capacity worth of solar with 24 hours of battery backup. (A totally unnecessary amount of dispatchability.)
Solar and batteries easily “pay” for their manufacturing carbon emissions within 1-2 years max (as does nuclear). This payback period only goes down as the grid gets greener.
‘Interesting’ analysis. Now do the same for an equivalent-power thermal power plant, over its lifetime.
thermal power plant
But why? Nobody has tried to promote these, or even claimed that they would save emissions…
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What does the abbreviation mean? ;-)
