Based on the headline I thought that this was an enormous capital commitment for an enormous generating capacity, but the deal is with a company called Kairos that is developing small modular reactors with 75 megawatts of electrical output each [1]. 7 reactors of this type, collectively, would supply 525 megawatts (less than half of a typical new commercial power reactor like the AP1000, HPR1000, EPR, or APR1400).
Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027:
EDIT: Statement from the official Google announcement linked by xnx below [2]:
Today, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.
This is all about the revival of pebble-bed reactors, which were attemped several decades ago but had problems with the graphite pebbles breaking down and releasing graphite fragments that clogged the pipes, basically. China is way ahead on this with helium-cooled versions. The big deal is that in the event of complete power loss (see Fukushima) they go into shutdown without melting down, although if the coolant lost and replaced with air you would get a nasty Chernobyl-style graphite fire. Still an improvement in safety. See:
> "Several high-temperature thermal neutron–spectrum pebble bed reactors are being commercialized. China has started up two helium-cooled pebble bed high-temperature reactors. In the United States, the X-Energy helium-cooled and the Kairos Power salt-cooled pebble bed high-temperature reactors will produce spent nuclear fuel (SNF) with burnups exceeding 150 000 MWd per tonne. The reactor fuel in each case consists of small spherical graphite pebbles (4 to 6 cm in diameter) containing thousands of small TRISO (microspheric tri-structural isotropic) fuel particles embedded in the fuel of zone these pebbles."
(2024) "Safeguards and Security for High-Burnup TRISO Pebble Bed Spent Fuel and Reactors"
> although if the coolant lost and replaced with air you would get a nasty Chernobyl-style graphite fire
Or alternatively, radioactive dust could be released into the atmosphere such as THTR-300 did.
INL did a gap analysis in 2011 between what was known and what needed research. The german AVR reactor had technical issues that weren't expected -- dust being one of them.
Would be extremely interesting to the the $/MWh for the deal to understand the viability.
Otherwise similar to the NuScale deal which fell through last autumn.
A PPA like agreement which then only kept rising until all potential utilities had quit the deal.
All honor to Kairos if they can deliver, but history is against them. Let’s hope they succeed.
> NuScale has a more credible contract with the Carbon Free Power Project (“CFPP”) for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (“UAMPS”). CFPP participants have been supportive of the project despite contracted energy prices that never seem to stop rising, from $55/MWh in 2016, to $89/MWh at the start of this year. What many have missed is that NuScale has been given till around January 2024 to raise project commitments to 80% or 370 MWe, from the existing 26% or 120 MWe, or risk termination. Crucially, when the participants agreed to this timeline, they were assured refunds for project costs if it were terminated, which creates an incentive for them to drop out. We are three months to the deadline and subscriptions have not moved an inch.
> All honor to Kairos if they can deliver, but history is against them.
History is not really against them. Our current reactors (mainly pressurized water reactors) are the way they are because Admiral Rickover determined that PWRs are the best option for submarines. He was not wrong, but civilian power reactors are not the same as the reactors powering submarines.
PWRs are expensive mainly because of the huge pressure inside the reactor core, about 150 times higher than the atmospheric pressure. For comparison, a pressure cooker has an internal pressure about 5 times higher than the atmospheric pressure, and such a cooker can explode with a pretty loud bang.
The Kairos Hermes reactor design is based on a design that was tested in the '60s, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment [1]. While such a reactor can be used to burn thorium, Kairos decided to go with the far more conventional approach of burning U-235. The reactor operates at approximately regular atmospheric pressure. This should reduce considerably the construction costs.
Of course, there are unknowns. While the world has built thousands of pressurized water reactors, it has built maybe 10 molten salt reactors. For example one quite unexpected effect in the MSRE was the enbrittlement of the reactor vessel caused by tellurium, which shows up as a fission product when U-235 burns.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a very conservative organization, and they don't have much experience with molten salt reactors because nobody has. It took them 6 years to give NuScale an approval for a pressurized water reactor, design that they knew in and out. My guess is that they will not give Kairos an approval without at least 15 years of testing. But Google's agreement with Kairos is quite crucial to keep this testing going.
> The Kairos Hermes reactor design is based on a design that was tested in the '60s, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment
MSRs are a costly distraction. They are not viable without literally hundreds of billions in research and development money. That's why all the MSRs startups are failing long before they even start the licensing process.
> For example one quite unexpected effect in the MSRE was the enbrittlement of the reactor vessel caused by tellurium, which shows up as a fission product when U-235 burns.
It was not unexpected. The _main_ issue with MSRs is that they have to contain fluoride salts that release elemental fluorine radicals as a result of radiolysis. So the reactor vessel walls will be eaten up by them, rather rapidly. Especially when reactors are scaled up to a level that makes them practical. And then you have all the fission byproducts that literally include almost all the Periodic Table.
Sure. But why? MSRs don't have any real features that are worth spending that much money.
Modern PWRs are just as passively safe, if they lose cooling and melt down, the molten fuel will be safely contained by the core catcher.
Uranium is also not scarce, and if we want to get into breeding reactors, existing fuel reprocessing is an established industry, on which we _already_ have spent several hundred billion dollars.
The thing about R&D spending is that it is speculative. Even if that question does have satisfying answers; it is unreasonable to expect people to prove that R&D will have a commercially successful outcomes with foresight.
Or maybe thorium reactors ON A ZEPPELIN! With microwave power transmission. After all, if the objective to spend money on research, then what can be cooler than a nuclear reactor on a blimp?
If you actually think that is a good idea you can try to give it a go. There are worse things to dedicate a life to and it might have big applications in disaster recovery scenarios or something.
When solar and wind and sodium ion batteries are basically there and probably don't need as much investment and R&D (or it's happening anyway from 1000 existing funding sources), it's probably bad. Or at least unlikely to happen.
Sodium batteries theoretically should be cheaper than li-ion, but they are not yet there in practice. And they still won't solve problems with polar vortexes in the US or a month-long Dunkelflaute in Germany.
Very true. The other factors multiply, though, like reliability and degradation, because there are so many packs involved and because they're expected to work for, well, as long as physically possible.
Dunkelflaute simply doesn't exist. It's clearly visible in the charts of the last years that wind and solar almost ideally complement each other in Germany. Why else do you think Germany managed to stay above 50% renewables for every single month this year so far? In which season is the mythical Dunkelflaute supposed to appear?
But hey, it's all fake news. When the next Dunkelflaute happens, the citizens are supposed to just sit in their cold homes and think how great renewable generation is during the other times.
You postulated that there are periods existing where there would be no/very low combined and solar for over a month, yet you only posted links to periods of very low wind generation for less than a day.
Even better, if you look at energy flow in the EU grid for e.g. the period from 2023-02-12 to 2023-02-15, you'll see that we actually exported energy to nuclear-powered France, and imported from renewables-powered Denmark.
That's actually a proof that renewables saved the day there, because lack of wind is always only a regional phenomenon.
The problem is, this is average. You _have_ to plan the grid for the worst case scenario. For Germany, the worst case is 1 month of straight Dunkelflaute. It's estimated to happen once in 100 years.
> Like today we will need peaking capacity in the future, likely either based on hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels.
It's not peaking capacity. It has to be more than 100% of the current capacity (once Germany switches to electricity instead of gas for heating). And it'll be mostly sitting idle.
> What we don't need is nuclear power plants which sit idle at all times unless there is a winter dunkeflaute across half of Europe.
Build nukes, remove wind generators. Problem solved.
In reality we work with statistics. In for example Sweden the “reliability guarantee” is at most one hour of demand exceeding production per year.
That’s a reliability of 99.8%.
Building nuclear power plants would mean locking in enormously more expensive energy costs for everyone, stalling the green revolution in terms of electrification of industry.
This is the problem with nukebros, there’s no logic to the suggestions. Only a complete fixation on nuclear power as the solution to everything.
Which means widespread continued fossil use and energy crisis power cost for the general public.
But that’s a price you’re willing to pay as long as we spend trillions of dollars on subsidies of nuclear power.
> Then we need to make the same calculation for when half the French nuclear fleet was offline.
French shutdowns were _planned_. Nobody died as a result, and it only cost more money than planned as a result of unlucky confluence of events.
> In reality we work with statistics. In for example Sweden the “reliability guarantee” is at most one hour of demand exceeding production per year.
You have it backwards. Sweden is ready to accept one hour of outage per year. Not more than that.
The failure scenario for Germany is not an hour of outage, but a month without energy. Leading to millions of people dead and a total economic collapse.
> This is the problem with nukebros, there’s no logic to the suggestions. Only a complete fixation on nuclear power as the solution to everything.
There's no fucking shame and zero self-reflection with you greenies.
Germany _wasted_ close to $500B on useless Energiewende and is still directly _subsidizing_ _new_ _gas_ _powerplants_. And it'll need to spend even more than that to have even a _hope_ of carbon neutrality, contingent on multiple speculative bets coming true.
Instead they could have used the same amount of money to build a completely carbon-neutral nuclear-powered grid. That would have been available by now. Using technology that was tried and tested in 2000-s.
They’re not. When considering the resilience of the Swedish grid a 10-year winter is used.
So maybe stop with the hyperboles?
Then a ton of post-fact reasoning for why it was actually fine that half the French nuclear supply was offline during the largest energy crisis in a generation.
Please get back to reality.
Wasted? For the first time since the Industrial Revolution we have found a new cheapest near infinitely scalable energy source: renewables.
Nuclear power was the last attempt, it never delivered on the promises.
I love how you say that it would be “available now” when Flamaville 3 started at the same time currently is 6x over budget and 12 year late on a 5 year planned construction timeline.
Germany would have had massive cumulative emissions when still waiting for nuclear power to come online.
But that’s the problem with you guys. You don’t care about emissions. It’s completely fine locking in fossil fuels for 20 years as we wait for nuclear power to come online.
And then in the next sentence you turn around denigrating even a single percentage of fossil fuels as we transition into a renewable grid, before said nuclear would come online.
It’s simply completely senseless. You’re making ridicule of yourself.
> Wasted? For the first time since the Industrial Revolution we have found a new cheapest near infinitely scalable energy source: renewables.
For the _second_ time. The first time was with the nuclear power. Keep forgetting that, yes?
> Nuclear power was the last attempt, it never delivered on the promises.
France has an 8 _times_ less carbon-intensive grid than Germany. RIGHT NOW. Keep forgetting that, yes? They can go to carbon-neutral with fairly minimal changes.
> I love how you say that it would be “available now” when Flamaville 3 started at the same time currently is 6x over budget and 12 year late on a 5 year planned construction timeline.
Russia is finishing the Bangladesh nuclear power plant. On time and within budget. 2 reactors completely built within 10 years. If Russia can do that, other countries can certainly replicate that.
> Germany would have had massive cumulative emissions when still waiting for nuclear power to come online.
> And then in the next sentence you turn around denigrating even a single percentage of fossil fuels as we transition into a renewable grid, before said nuclear would come online.
Again, zero reflection from your side. Zero contrition, zero knowledge, and endless excuses.
France is literally the next door. Their carbon intensity for energy production is just 12% of Germany's. Right now. Germany in the best possible case won't be able to match that until 2040-s. In reality, it won't happen unless something magical occurs.
Nuclear power never became cheaper. As evidenced by it's continued languishing only supported by subsidies.
Hydro power did, and is famously called "geographically limited" because we in short order exploited near every single river globally.
France made the right choice in the 70s in the name of energy independence and nuclear weapons. They did not care the slightest about emissions.
The equivalent choice in 2024 to nuclear power in the 1970s is renewables.
"Hurr durr my cherry picked reactor!!!"
While completely ignoring all western projects. The facts are: Flamanville 3 still haven't entered commercial operation and the projected was started at about the same time as energiewende.
Flamanville, HPC, Olkiluoto 3 and Vogtle are the successful western projects. The unsuccessful get stuck in financing limbo like Sizewell C because the needed subsidies are truly stupid.
You are proposing that Germany in 2024 should have emissions closer to Poland because you value building nuclear power above curbing emissions.
Lets do a thought experiment in which renewables somehow end up being wholly incapable of solving the last 20% of carbon emissions.
Scenario one: We push renewables hard, start phasing down fossil fuels linearly 4 years from now, a high estimate on project length, and reach 80% by 2045.
The remaining 20%, we can't economically phase out (remnant peaker plants).
Scenario two: We push nuclear power hard, start phasing down fossil fuels linearly in 10 years time, a low estimate on project length and reach 100% fossil free in 2060.
Do you know what this entails in terms of cumulative emissions?
The nuclear option will overtake the renewable one in 2094. It means we have 60 years to solve the last 20 percent of renewables while having emitted less.
Do you still care about our cumulative emissions when any dollar spent on nuclear power increases them?
They don't need to solve month-long dunkelflaute. You burn a little natural gas for that. The priority for climate change mitigation is to get to 97% carbon free soon, rather than 100% carbon free in 30 years. The AUC of emissions is all that matters.
Also, both li-on and sodium are cheap and getting cheaper, so the latter being more expensive currently is kind of moot.
For that you need to have 100% of idle capacity just sitting there.
> The priority for climate change mitigation is to get to 97% carbon free soon
No, it's not. The priority is to shake down consumers to get as much money to Greenie cronies as possible. That's why Germany is straightforwardly _subsidizig_ new natural gas power plants. With a pinkie-promise to be "hydrogen ready", maybe sometime in 2030-s.
We already have rain and hydro power plants. Batteries are similar: they store a finite amount of energy. So battery PV and wind have their place as peaker plants to replace gas fired power plants and hydro. Otherwise one could just smelt aluminium with the excess electricity like the Germans do.
Intermittency is a tough thing to handle. The US uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. The word used 60,000 GWh per day. Evening out daily fluctuations, let alone seasonal fluctuations, demands an enormous amount of storage.
>Graham says that the CSIRO modelling showed that at very high levels of wind and solar, a maximum of half a day’s average demand was needed for storage. In some areas of the grid, only around three hours might be needed.
Sadly, there's far, far, far too much FUD floating around about storage (understandably, coz wind+solar threatens the nuclear+carbon lobbies), and not enough thorough and realistic studies like this one.
I've heard people say "oh you cant pay attention to this study because it's in Australia which must be discounted because [reasons], what about [ other country ]?", and I'd welcome seeing an alternative study making appropriate assumptions, but none of these comments so far come attached to anything other than FUD.
I've also seen far, far too many people build or cite a "naive" models that make inappropriate assumptions (e.g. that zero power is generated at night by wind).
> However, the share of solar generation increases less, or even decreases, in higher-latitude countries like Russia, Canada, and Germany (Fig. 2b). These trends continue as more storage is added, so that with 12 h of energy storage and no excess annual generation, 83–94% (average 90%) of electricity demand is met with mixes of 10–70% solar power (49% on average; Fig. 2c).
Even with 12 hours of storage, Germany would be seeing blackouts weekly.
To put this in perspective:
> reliability standards in industrialized countries are typically very high (e.g., targeting <2–3 h of unplanned outages per year, or ~99.97%). Resource adequacy planning standards for “1-in-10” are also high: in North America (BAL-502-RF-03), generating resources must be adequate to provide no more than 1 day of unmet electricity demand—or in some cases 1 loss of load event—in 10 years (i.e., 99.97% or 99.99%, respectively)
So no, even with 12 hours of storage and 50% overcapacity, we'd have an unacceptably unreliable grid.
Also, your linked article is not modelling a carbon-free grid:
> Graham says that the CSIRO modelling showed that at very high levels of wind and solar, a maximum of half a day’s average demand was needed for storage. In some areas of the grid, only around three hours might be needed.
What are these "very high levels of wind and solar"? How much of the remaining demand is satisfied by fossil fuels? The article doesn't say.
50% overcapacity of renewables is still spending way, way less than the equivalent for nuclear. How do the numbers look with 100% or 200% overcapacity, where you're still spending about half of what you would spend on nuclear?
Adding more overcapacity just wastes energy. Storage is the main bottleneck to widespread renewable adoption without frequent blackouts. Having more energy when you don't need it is only really useful if you can store that energy.
No, it also makes the probability of supply not meeting demand lower. Overcapacity tends to feature in most analysis of a fully renewable grid because of that and because it's currently cheaper than storage for all but very short timescales.
Norway is already 100% renewable because it has lots of hydropower. Germany on the other hand, would suffer from an extremely unreliable grid even with 50% overproduction and 12 hours of storage. The further a region is from the equator, the more variability in the production of wind and solar. This study models how reliable grids would be with wind, solar, and storage: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
The issue is that electrical grids have very high reliability requirements (upwards of 99.95%). Plenty of models claiming that small amounts of storage required neglect to mention how frequently they will encounter insufficient generation. Remember, even fulfilling demand 99% of the time is a 20x increase in blackouts.
Also, even just 12 hours of storage globally would be 30,000 GWh of storage. That's still about 50 times the amount of batteries produced annually. The reality is that hydropower is the only feasible form of grid storage.
How is overbuilding going to help when the source of the power itself is intermittent? The sun regularly sets and the wind has this unfortunate habit of not blowing. Or, oddly enough, blowing too much.
If we hope to go 100% renewable, storage is a key piece of that puzzle.
Technically yes if you have an entire fleet to both spread the load following across and their manage their fuel cycles since they get less flexible the further into a fuel cycle a reactor is.
Economically? Load following with nuclear power means an even worse business case than running at 100% 24/7. And nuclear power is already a laughably bad business case when running at 100%.
You don't need to change fuel cycles to reduce the output of a nuclear plant. You can accomplish it by more aggressively cooling the water in the steam turbines, effectively wasting heat (and thus generating less power).
Nuclear is a bad business case compared to a fossil fuel grid. Solar and wind backed by fossil fuels are a better business choice, too. But when it comes to a fossil-fuel free grid, it's the only viable option if you don't have a big source of hydropower nearby. Batteries can't deliver the required storage capacity. Remember, the world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. And as transportation and industrial uses of fossil fuels are electrified, that'll increase.
What are the other storage options? Besides batteries and hydroelectric, there's only prototype technologies that haven't seen any significant deployment at scale. Compressed air, hydrogen, and power to gas have been tried but no at anywhere near grid scales.
Five years ago batteries weren’t anywhere near grid scale either. Arguably they still aren’t. That doesn’t mean we should not consider them when talking snot the grid in 2040.
Sure. But we also shouldn't assume they will be successful at grid-scale either. Planning a grid assuming that some future storage technology will be a silver bullet that solves grid storage is a massive gamble.
Hydroelectric storage is the only grid-scale energy storage system available to us, and it's geographically dependent. And the places that are suitable for hydroelectric storage usually don't need it because they can just generate electricity via hydropower anyway. Until your hypothetical breakthrough in power-to-gas or giant flywheels actually happens, this is the state of grid storage.
It's not such a massive gamble if you can just keep relying on natural gas peaker plants in case storage is somehow unsolvable, which seems quite unlikely given that we have a dozen completely different technologies for storage in the pipeline.
“Oh no we have too much power, what are we going to do with it” is a much better problem to have than “the sun and wind are going down at the same time and we don’t have enough power, what are we going to do about it”.
Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Most of the costs and all of the shutdowns in nuclear power are primarily motivated by anti-nuclear activism. What you’re describing is a policy choice, not an essential reality.
If it costs you money to generate power at a time you cannot sell it, that is losing money. Wind and solar are unique in that they have low marginal costs, whereas a nuclear plant requires more staffing and fuel burn.
I don't understand why you're coming about this problem from a "100% nuclear" situation. That's not the case for the world, and likely never will be the case. But heck, let's assume all you've got to work with is nuclear.
You have a baseload. That's basically the minimum load that always exists. You don't have to worry about selling the power, it's already sold. And then you have peak. Both of these are time / weather dependent but we're still quite able to plan days, if not weeks and months, in advance for what those two values will be. As an example, let's get back to the original topic of the article.
If you're Google and you have a particular datacenter at a location, you know what that baseload is. You know what the peak is. It's a pretty simple calculation to figure out what is most cost-effective here. It's probably even easier for you than the local power company, as base and peak loads likely don't fluctuate much for you outside of HVAC keeping up with weather. It might be to use nuclear for just base load and use the local grid for the rest. It might be to over-produce occasionally because that's still cheaper than buying from the local system operator. Hell, you can probably sell any access, but that's more of a problem than most people think.
But the point is nuclear is king when it comes to baseload power supply. And a datacenter, which consumes a lot of power consistently, is almost entirely baseload.
Also, if you're serious about the problem of "our nuclear power plants are producing more power than we need and we can't turn them off because then we'll have a power shortage", there are applications to dump "bonus" energy into. You'd run into the same problem with renewables too; the difference is that with nuclear, you can avoid the "not enough energy" problem.
We have a version of that in Texas, too. There are some commercial cryptocurrency mining operations that pay for a certain level of power capacity, and if the grid is running low on power, the grid just buys the capacity back from them and they stop mining for awhile.
If you find cryptocurrency mining objectionable for some reason, you could apply the same basic principle to things like aluminum refining or desalination.
Nuclear's electrical output can indeed be turned down, by over-cooling the steam in the turbines. The reactor is putting out the same power, but less electricity is generated since you're deliberately increasing waste heat. This is not efficient so it's rarely done.
Furthermore, too much energy is a far easier problem to solve than too little energy. People can desalinate water, or do any other energy intensive things.
Technically yes if you have an entire fleet to both spread the load following across and their manage their fuel cycles since they get less flexible the further into a fuel cycle a reactor is.
Economically? Load following with nuclear power means an even worse business case than running at 100% 24/7. And nuclear power is already a laughably bad business case when running at 100%.
The fuel is burned at the same rate using this method of modulating output. Thermal output from the reactor is the same. Electrical output is reduced because heat is deliberately wasted.
OK, that's interesting. And it's far better than MSRs, but it still exposes fluoride salts to radiation. It also is a pebble bed reactor, so it'll have all the problems of pebble beds: cracking pellets, difficulty in fuel reprocessing, more nuclear waste, etc.
But yes, this design might be actually feasible for small reactors. But I bet that it won't be cheaper and it'll be impossible to scale to levels approaching PWRs.
Fluoride salts by themselves are very radiation resistant, chemically more so than water. The biggest concern would be liberation of elemental fluorine, but if the salt is kept slightly reducing (which one can do in a sterile salt without dissolved uranium) the fluorine instantly reacts back to fluoride. The slightly reduced salt is also preferred to limit corrosion, allowing the vessel and pipes to be made of stainless steel (FLiBe with dissolved uranium needs special more expensive alloys because chromium would dissolve.)
Activation is also low. The two concerns would be traces of tritium from the two-step activation of beryllium (formation of 6He by (n,alpha) reaction, decay of 6He to 6Li, then (n,t) on 6Li), and also formation of 10Be (half life, 1.4 million years, but the thermal neutron capture cross section of 9Be is only 8.5 mb). The chemical toxicity of beryllium would considerably exceed its radiotoxicity, I imagine.
> The biggest concern would be liberation of elemental fluorine
Yep.
But I'm personally more worried about the pelletized fuel. Pellets are not a great form-factor, and they don't have cladding. Fluoride salts are also far more aggressive than water (mechanically and chemically), so this will limit the maximum specific power of the reactor. So I don't think that something like 1GW molten salt reactor is even possible.
It might be OK if they want to continue using SMRs, though.
> The slightly reduced salt is also preferred to limit corrosion
Sidenote: that's actually not always a great idea. Steel is stainless because it's covered in a film of oxides, and without oxygen it might not be able to form.
This is a problem for the Russian BREST-300 reactor that is cooled by molten lead, they had to do almost 10 years of research to perfect a system that controls the amount of dissolved oxygen in the molten lead. And it's still not clear if they succeeded until the full-scale reactor is built.
In this case, though, I think that they can tune the reducers to react with fluorine preferentially, while still leaving enough oxygen.
Lead is a rather different case, because liquid lead itself corrodes steel. The oxide layer is needed to protect the steel from the lead. FLiBe by itself does not corrode steel.
The theory, at least, is that making SMRs in a factory allows for a steeper and more sustainable learning curve
> Both Hermes and ETU 3.0 will be built using modular construction techniques, with reactor modules fabricated in Kairos Power's facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which will be shipped to Oak Ridge for assembly.
> The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a very conservative organization
I'm glad they are, actually! Personally, I'm not really convinced by the "small modular reactor" concept. Ok, so building a big nuclear power plant is expensive. But is it really cheaper to build 10 smaller nuclear power plants (which all need to conform to the same safety regulations, need maintenance, personnel etc.) instead?
I firmly believe that iteration is the key to good engineering. SpaceX has got where they are (partly) due to running flight after flight with incremental improvements each time. The problem with the massive reactors is that you get to build only a couple of them, so you never get to take advantage of learnings to make the next one better/cheaper/quicker.
So basically it's one economy of scale (making something bigger means the costs for safety, maintenance, personnel etc. are proportionally lower) vs. another economy of scale (making more of one thing decreases the costs per "unit"). Place your bets...
About your comparison to SpaceX: the approach of building a rocket, launching it, letting it explode and then using the gathered data to make the next one explode later (or not at all) is fine for rockets, but I wouldn't want to see it applied to nuclear reactors.
I do agree on not letting nuclear reactors explode, but I did use the SpaceX example on purpose. Before SpaceX started to do it, the concept of iterating to that degree on rockets was unthinkable. There was a self reinforcing loop of "rocket launches are expensive, so we must plan for every contingency, so the launch cycle is long and expensive". SpaceX proved that wrong.
I think small modular reactors are the way out of the similar cycle we've got for nuclear reactors. And I think that building a small number of large ones is going to be a lot better if we're also building a large number of small ones and learning.
It's like not building a y houses for 30 years and then building a massive skyscraper. If that's all we do then we'll only ever have one way of building a skyscraper because there's no room to experiment on other construction materials and techniques.
>Before SpaceX started to do it, the concept of iterating to that degree on rockets was unthinkable.
I'm pretty sure that was what NASA was going to do all the way back in the 70s before their funding got slashed. It was a novel idea but not a novel idea that SpaceX was particularly responsible for, just one they threw capital at because the government stopped caring after the space race.
Nuclear power research, by contrast, never really suffered from a lack of available funds. They were throwing money at mini reactors back in the 90s, saying all the same stuff about how mass production would bring down the price.
NASA funding far exceeds SpaceX’s and always has. It shouldn’t take 4% of the US federal budget (NASA funding during Apollo) to run a hardware-rich design process!
Apollo was wound down because the government wanted NASA to focus on the space shuttle and all sorts of other things as well as slashing the total budget by a huge amount.
So, while in theory it may have had the money, in practice it did not.
The Shuttle cost $48 billion to develop in inflation-adjusted dollars — contrast this with the ~$5B spent on Starship development thus far. It’s hard to defend the claim that NASA is or ever has been under-funded.
NASAs "do stuff" budget is super small because their "keep all the experts on staff" budget is insatiable.
It's not entirely bad though, I'm sure lots of those folks are doing good and important stuff. But I don't think the balance between employment and building things is quite right. At least to my tastes.
if you don't care about any externalities (like spacex), sure. but I doubt hospitals or just normal people who need electricity would be super happy about power sources failing because the people building them subscribed to the "move fast/break things" mentality instead of actually building reliable/safe infrastructure at the cost of it taking longer
Worth mentioning here that the SpaceX Falcon is the world's most reliable rocket, with a full success rate of 99.24% out of 394 total launches, 325 successful launches of the current version, and 98.5% successful booster landings of the current version, something no other orbital launch system even attempts.
At the moment, of course, two astronauts are stuck on ISS after Boeing's new spacecraft, developed along more traditional lines, experienced problems in its first crewed flight. They're awaiting rescue by SpaceX's Dragon, which has flown 16 times with crew and delivered astronauts to the ISS 10 times, all without a glitch. Both companies were awarded their crew contracts in 2014.
Our energy infrastructure isn't particularly reliable right now. Power outages, while not at the level of a third world country, are quite frequent. Nuclear is the highest energy density power generation you can get. Investing in reactors that are less susceptible to explosions (Like a molten salt reactor) is an important step and it's really only viable if you can iterate which means building modular reactor. If you read the article you'll see that most of their iteration and experimentation is without the nuclear material. Something that is possible because the reactor itself is small and can be run through a bunch of safety checks without the dangerous parts.
The route that Nuscale and Kairos are taking is both cheaper and safer than large scale reactors. And we are going to need something to fill the gaps when there is no wind or solar generation available if we want to get off fossil fuels.
> Power outages, while not at the level of a third world country, are quite frequent. Nuclear is the highest energy density power generation you can get.
Well that is more because the American grid is suffering from a mountain load of neglect-debt to a tune that paints the infamous German railways as saints - the Camp Fire for example was most likely caused by a C-hook breaking after many, many decades of neglect [1].
Here in Europe, we get by just fine with outages measured in maybe a dozen minutes (!) a year [2] - Germany got rid of all nuclear reactors, many old ones in other countries were retired as well (Fessenheim, the most infamous one, in 2020), and while there are new builds, they are often decades late and many billions over budget.
How do we do this? We have strict regulations across the board (mandating stuff such as resilience against bad weather, unlike Texas which IIRC refuses to tie in to the other US grids to avoid such regulation), a cross-continental spanning grid [3], and most especially... we just love to bury our cables belowground, so even in the case lightning or storms hit, the actual impact on the consumers is all but negligible. And as the infamous summer of 2023 shows, the power grid still didn't fail even as dozens of NPPs in France and Switzerland had to completely shut down or significantly reduce output because there was not enough cooling water [4]. Hell we even manage to supply an entire country at war with decent power, despite Russia continuously attacking the power grid.
We have plenty of small but commercially successful natural gas plants, so it doesn't seem to be a general principle. The only scaling law mentioned in your article is this:
> a 400-MW reactor requires less than twice the quantity of concrete and steel to construct as a 200-MW reactor, and it can be operated with fewer than twice as many people. Writing in Science in 1961, a senior member of the AEC worried that “competition [from fossil fuel plants] is indeed formidable” and suggested that “with current pressurized-water reactor technology, lower nuclear power costs can be achieved most readily with large plants.”
Almost all the SMRs we've built have been water cooled reactors, which require a large amount of concrete and steel. Newer designs, such as molten salt reactors, can use a lot less, because they operate near atmospheric pressure, don't have to leave room for a high-pressure pipe break introducing a large volume of steam, and have nothing that can cause a chemical explosion. They're also inherently stable and adaptive to load, with little need for active control. A small modular MSR could well work out.
The US has been successfully producing small modular reactors since the 1950’s. We just happen to install virtually all of them inside of submarines and aircraft carriers.
I’ve actually been aboard a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, where I observed flight operations from the flight deck. I can assure you that it’s a working product. And the Navy is under a lot more pressure to cut costs and economize than many government projects.
I believe the thought is that the cost of regulatory and safety measures do not scale favorably with reactor size. You don't have separate facilities so much as 10 reactors on the same site, so you don't need to increase personnel 10x.
Actually proving this with a deployed design seems to be the challenge, though with strong headwinds against nuclear across the board, favoring proven designs over newer ones is at least a little faster. That's not a flaw of the design, but intrinsic to the social and political environment.
One part of the problem with traditional plants is that they are massive mega projects which the US does not specialize in. I am assuming by building smaller you are able to iterate on designs quicker.
I also wonder how much of the cost is tied up in the upfront construction and engineering compared to operations.
I am not so sure you can build an economy of scale with projects that take a decade to construct and even longer when accounting for approvals and paperwork. The projects are too massive and too long. The contractor that poured the foundation for the last project may no longer be around. It has worked in some areas of the world like China because they have been building from zero and are able to scale mega projects.
The US has more hope to learn by iterating on smaller projects.
According to their web site at https://kairospower.com/technology/ it uses a molten fluoride salt based coolant but unlike the MSR/LFTR designs the fissionable fuel is not dissolved into the coolant; instead, the Kairos reactor design puts the fissionables in pellets that are intended to remain solid while in operation; it looks more like a pebble-bed reactor than a MSR/LFTR.
Yes, you are right, I was wrong. The Hermes design is even more conservative than the MSRE design. It is basically the same design as the helium-cooled reactor HTR-PM that China started operating two years ago, only that the helium cooling is replaced with FLiBe cooling; this achieves a higher power density plus a higher rate of passive cooling in case anything goes wrong.
This IAEA report [1] has more details about this design, and the dozens if not hundreds of other types of molten salt reactor designs. The relevant section for the Kairos Hermes design is 4.5 (pages 41-44).
> pressure cooker has an internal pressure about 5 times higher than the atmospheric pressure
This isn't really accurate. The majority of pressure cookers you can buy operates at an absolute pressure of only about twice the atmospheric pressure.
Once, if you're just talking about nuclear reactors. The reactor vessel didn't explode at Fukushima, just the outer building due to accumulated hydrogen. TMI didn't explode at all, the fuel melted but didn't breach containment.
Pressure is very often stated as gauge pressure, i.e. zero-referenced against ambient air pressure. 1 bar gauge pressure is roughly equal to 2 bar absolute pressure.
That entire report is an exercise in selectively choosing data to misrepresent renewables and present nuclear power in the best possible light and wishful thinking.
To the degree that the prominent "renewables vs. nuclear" graph they keep repeating on the webpage and figure 6 in the report is straight up misleading.
This is the source:
What is different about different net-zero carbon electricity systems?
Utilizing storage costs from 2018 and then of course making the comparison against the model not incorporating any hydrogen derived zero carbon fuel to solve seasonal problems.
Which is todays suggestion for solving the final 1-2% requiring seasonal storage in the late 2030s.
Something akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity because they run too little to be economical on their own, but zero carbon. Can be hydrogen or biofuel derived. We will know in 10 years time.
Would they have chosen the ReBF model the difference between made up optimal nuclear power and 2018 renewables would be: $80-94/MWh and $82-102/MWh.
It is essentially: Nukebros writes reports for nukebros, they confirm their own bias. Simply an attempt to justify another massive round of government subsidies on nuclear power.
Ok, we've changed the title to language from the article itself (edited to fit HN's 80 char limit) which seems both representative and neutral. If there's a better title, we can change it again.
(Submitted tile was "Google funding construction of seven U.S. nuclear reactors")
> Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027
Sounds great in theory, but it took NuScale Power 6 years to get their design approved? I hope the AI hype lasts that long then maybe the world would have two certified 75 MWe SMR designs.
Also the NuScale Idaho plant was cancelled last year when cost estimates balooned 3x. 9.3bn for a 460 MWe plant?
seeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia, why would Google waste $120B when they can get the same output for at most half the price (and realistically more like 1/10th) using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades.
edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B. Build 3GW for overcapacity and you’re still at just 17% of the cost of 1GW of nuclear, and you technically have 3x more capacity. Now figure out how many megapacks you can buy for the $14B/GW you saved https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design (answer: 16GW/68GWh)
> using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades
We have nothing close to the battery fabrication pipeline to make that timeline true, certainly not at scale. If this move works, Google will have cemented its power needs and economics for decades to come.
Global battery manufacturing capacity was 2,600GWh in 2023 [1], and has probably already exceeded that this year. The IEA projects closer to 4TWh by 2025, and nearly 7TWh by 2030 [2].
You need to pay attention because this is happening fast.
That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today. (You obviously don't need 1:1 coverage. But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge.)
Now consider EVs. Then add the tens of TWh of annual power demand AI is expected to add to power demand [2]. (And I'm assuming a free market for battery cells, which obviously isn't where we're heading. So add local production bottlenecks to the mix.)
Battery numbers are going up. But they aren't going up fast enough and never could have, not unless we ditch electrifying transportation. Nukes or gas. Anyone pretending there is a third way is defaulting to one or the other.
I had to check the numbers because it grabbed my attention.
No issue with your quoted figure of 30,000 TWh (annual) global electricity consumption.
But we only need to do 7TWh of battery supply in year 1 (or say only 1-2 of that makes it to grid storage).
30,000/365 is 82 TWh daily. So that’s the number to crack, surely? Because a significant percentage of storage will be to make up for wind and solar, which generally approximately follows some sort of diurnal cycle?
If we will be closing in on a couple TWh annual storage capacity in 6 years (leaving aside any real synchronised attempt to get vehicles to be part of large scale distributed grids) then only a few years on from 2030 we’re going to be able to store a significant percentage of our daily energy demands
Investing in nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed.
In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.
This will only worsen the nuclear business case as renewable expansion continues, today being a bonanza fueled by finally finding an energy source cheaper than fossil fuel.
Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns.
> In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.
This is happening because of subsidies given to renewables (renewable energy certificates, net metering, guaranteed feed in prices, CFD) plus policies at the national and EU level (EU Renewable Energy Directive). Take away these policies and you are left with a low quality (intermittent) energy source that requires far more expensive storage to produce power when it is needed.
A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.
Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.
Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
Which is confirmed by Sweden continuing its renewable buildout with both the cheapest electricity prices in Europe and no subsidies on the books for new renewable production.
> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved
Cost assumptions in table 2
Offshore wind 1.9M EUR/MW, 1.67% O&M, 30 year life at 0.51 capacity factor
Onshore wind 1.03M EUR/MW, 2.51% O&M, 30 year life at 0.37 capacity factor
Solar PV 0.6M EUR/MW, 1.50% O&M, 40 year life at 0.14 capacity factor
So they are claiming nuclear (which has a > 0.9 capacity factor in Finland, and 60 year life) needs to have an investment cost between onshore and offshore wind to make sense.
Due to energy system constraints, there might be reasons for down regulating the nuclear power stations, thus as an output the capacity factor might be lower than 90%, but never higher. The study allows for nuclear power to be down regulated to 25% of the maximum load in for instance hours with high wind and solar production.
So the authors decided that the non-dispatchable wind/solar has market priority over nuclear. Hence it is important to pack out the high nuclear scenario with renewables. Also note how the all renewables scenario adds biogas (presumably from all the pig slurry) to firm up demand along with 6GW of inter-connectors to friendly neighbours.
Edit :- Closer analysis of the high nuclear with district heating scenario (figure 4, in the supplementary material) reveals a total electrical demand of just under 10,000MW (unflexible + heating + transport). Note that the authors have chosen to represent nuclear as a continuous 6,686MW of power (rather than the nameplate capacity of 7,400MW).
Even without subsidies solar and battery are cheaper than nuclear and are getting cheaper by 15-20% a year. So no nuclear is unlikely to be cost competitive any time soon unless they get some new tech for nuclear
> nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed
We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift. Again, excluding EVs and AI. That’s why we’re reänimating coal plants and building new gas turbines.
I’d also love to see the numbers on that simulation going from 98.6% coverage to what we expect from a modern grid. (And if the balance is provided by gas or something else.) It should surprise nobody that going from 1 sigma to 2 can cost as much as 2 to 3, even if the percentage gap is much smaller.
> Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy
Europe has invested €1.5tn into new gas infrastructure. That doesn’t go poor without a fight and collateral damage.
> We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift.
A decade to have significant amounts of battery storage is actually a pretty optimistic timeline compared to nuclear. Nuclear plant construction times are on the order of a decade or (realistically) two decades in the West, if you include planning. In China they're managing 7 years, but their nuclear buildouts, while impressive, aren't trending an upward path when compared to renewables (see chart here [1].) SMRs might change this, but they're years from leaving "research" status and entering the mass-production/learning curves that could make them cost competitive.
This doesn't make me happy. If I thought nuclear was viable on the timelines we have to dampen climate change, I'd be 100% in favor of it. If we could assemble the political will to raise taxes and build nuclear at "wartime" speeds, I'd say go for it. I'm also very much in favor of SMR development, just not willing to bet the house on it.
As it stands, there isn't anywhere near enough nuclear power in the planning pipeline for nuclear to matter much on a 20 year timeline.
In any case, we are not going to a 100% renewable/battery grid in 10 years. The first goal is to get renewables to 90-95% or more of power generation, massively overbuilt with short-term battery storage backed by intermittent fossil fuels for the remaining 5-10%. This will represent a massive reduction in emissions. The last 5-10% will have to be completed over the next couple of decades, and the increasing battery production trend gives hope that it can be.
The worst problem with existing nuclear is that with a 15-20 year planning/construction timeline and the current molasses build rate, new nuclear plants will arrive right at the moment when cheap storage is eating the economic use-cases that make them financially viable.
> * Nuclear plant construction times are on the order of a decade or (realistically) two decades in the West, if you include planning*
Sure. Forecasting twenty years out is tough. But our forecasts out 10 years show the power crunch easing to almost no degree--we'll still likely be making the same tradeoff then as now. (And, I suspect, still filling the gap with gas in teh west.)
You're broadly correct: we need to build faster. There is no reason we can't build a large plant in under a decade and an SMR in a few years. The latter is what Google is experimenting with here. It's a long shot. But so is hoping battery production scales the orders of magnitude necessary for it to become a utlity backbone over the next decades.
> first goal is to get renewables to 90-95% or more of power generation, massively overbuilt with short-term battery storage
We don't have the battery pipeline. What we're repeatedly getting is renewables plus gas generators. There is no world in which you put down trillions of dollars of gas infrastructure and then poof it in a few years because it's no longer needed.
A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.
Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.
Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.
The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
> a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost
Yes, nuclear is more expensive. SMRs should help with that, but their expense has never been contested.
But marginal economics aren't everything. Renewable and battery production isn't ramping up fast enough to make that margin available at scale. This doesn't seem capital contrained, either--every major economy is throwing gobs of cash at the problem.
> Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables
False economy. A dollar not invested into nukes doesn't go into renewables--partly because of the aforementioned scaling problem, it tends to wind up in gas.
We’re spending trillions of dollars of new money on gas infrastructure with decades of life and financial liabilities attached to them because we need the power, have maxed out renewables and are left with a choice: gas or nukes. Opposing nukes isn’t playing for renewables, it’s playing for gas.
SMRs can potentially do something that renewables can’t: they could be placed near the loads in places with no space for renewables and without relying on the grid. Think industrial areas or even cities or towns that are surrounded by other developed land. The grid moves slowly, and electricity prices via existing transmission lines are, in many areas, hilariously inflated for a number of reasons. A hypothetical portable, easy-to-acquire SMR producing power at $100/MWh would not be an amazing deal if a large electric utility bought it, but a $100/MWh would be an amazing price in quite a few markets if a small utility could actually buy at that price and deliver via a small last-mile distribution system.
Yes, that shit study which models supplying the entire grid with one energy source and lithium storage through all weather conditions.
I would suggest reading the study I linked so you can see the difference in methodology when credible researches in the field tackle similar questions.
The credible studies are focused on simulating the energy system and market with real world constraints. Which apparently works out way cheaper when not involving nuclear in the picture.
That entire report is an exercise in selectively choosing data to misrepresent renewables and present nuclear power in the best possible light and wishful thinking.
To the degree that the prominent "renewables vs. nuclear" graph they keep repeating on the webpage and figure 6 in the report is straight up misleading.
This is the source:
What is different about different net-zero carbon electricity systems?
Utilizing storage costs from 2018 and then of course making the comparison against the model not incorporating any hydrogen derived zero carbon fuel to solve seasonal problems.
Which is todays suggestion for solving the final 1-2% requiring seasonal storage in the late 2030s.
Something akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity because they run too little to be economical on their own, but zero carbon.
Would they have chosen the ReBF model the difference between made up optimal nuclear power and 2018 renewables would be: $80-94/MWh and $82-102/MWh.
It is essentially: Nukebros writes reports for nukebros, they confirm their own bias. Simply an attempt to justify another massive round of government subsidies on nuclear power.
lmao, you say shit study but you suggest using green h2 as backup which not only isn't economically feasible (for now at least) but current generators are either using a mix with gas or use pure h2 with huge nox releases due to high temp burning. Not just that, most lcoe costs magically assume that 4h storage is enough. Look at yesterday's Germany generation and tell me how 4h storage will be enough there. Or maybe I should link to amount of subsidies Germany is pouring each year in renewables like https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-29/germany-s... or like https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-looks-specia...
It's funny that when I ask ren-bros how much subsidies edf in France is getting they are either silent or are linking to price shielding that's totally unrelated and is present in most eu countries after russia's invasion.
Renewable bros as usual are dunking on nuclear and promoting their clean supply like a mecca without facing hard reality - most renewables now are subsidized by fossils and will be in any close future
>you suggest using green h2 as backup which not only isn't economically feasible (for now at least)
That's poor logic, h2 as a last-2%er doesn't need to be feasible until we've gotten to the 98% mark. And honestly, h2 feasibility is a function of cheap energy anyway, which probably means midday solar while solar farms are chasing dusk prices.
not, h2 feasibility in the context of power generation depends on many more factors, including how frequent the plant is used when day hours will be mostly tapped by solar generation and how you'll do price compensation. And in the context of h2 for renewables as a peaker, it'll need to be much more than 2%. And again, the emission problem for h2 generation isn't solved yet beyond fuel cells
Sorry, was writing on a mobile. Here's a more detailed explanation why it's pure BS.
Because it's simply magic thinking. They postulate a "future fully sector-coupled system" and then say that if this somehow magics into existance, then everything's peachy.
Basically, "a sector-coupled system" allows transforming excess power into something useful (district heating, hydrogen, steel, etc.), and shedding the load and/or providing some power back when there's not enough generated power available.
In other words, if you solve the problem of providing 1 month of energy storage for Germany and Denmark, then renewable energy is basically free. Duh.
The problem is that "sector-coupled systems" don't exist, and their creation will result in far, far, far, far more expenses than building fucking PWRs.
Yes, the study incorporates no lithium storage. Including storage we will easily reach far above 90% renewable penetration.
When we get to the final percent in the 2030s we can utilize akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity markets [1] but zero carbon.
Peaker plants today already run too little to be economical on their own, essentially what in our current grids constitute seasonal storage and emergency reserves.
Simply update the terms for the capacity markets to require the fuel to be zero-carbon. It can be synfuels, biofuels or hydrogen. Whatever comes out the cheapest.
As we electrify transportation we can shift over the massive ethanol blending in gasoline in the US to be our seasonal buffer. [2]
> When we get to the final percent in the 2030s we can utilize akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity markets [1] but zero carbon.
Capacity markets effectively don't exist in Europe right now. There are plans to create a plan for them by 2027, this is how urgent it is for Europe. But no worries, natural gas is now green, and it's fine to send money to Azerbaijan for it.
There is no pathway for most of Europe to switch to renewables any time soon.
In eu France is the biggest net exporter in the EU while Germany with huge renewable capacity net imported 20+TWh this year. Look how Germany's generation was yesterday to get a sneak peek
This is only because it is profitable for Germany to do so, not because of lack of capacity. Germany imports energy when there is low demand (and price) and exports when there is high demand (and price). Look at this chart: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_trading/chart.htm?l=...
Again, look at yesterday generation. They were not able to satisfy local demand with renewables and bumped up coal+gas by a lot.
Also, if you look at the numbers - the price difference isn't that huge but trade difference is huge. This year export price is less than 1$ more than import. Problem is Germany net imported 25TWh so they are still in a big trade deficit and it continues to grow considering dunkelflaute is ahead
Yes, Germany is targeting a 80% renewable electricity mix by 2030 and 100% by 2035. They have no illusions about being perfect today. Their current status is 65% renewable for 2024.
Maybe stop looking at instants and start looking at the larger picture: keeping our cumulative emissions as low as possible.
Starting a nuclear construction project which won't deliver any decarbonization for 15-20 years is accepting large cumulative emissions.
they don't target 100% by 2035. They want to close last coal plant by 2038 which is a bit optimistic looking at yesterday's generation. For gas it's even worse - the plan is totally unrealistic and their planned h2 ready plants that'll use gas initially, will probably still use a mix with gas when/if green h2 becomes reality or they'll replace the generators with pure h2(unlikely) which has huge nox emissions due to high burn temperature
"But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge."
How much battery storage do you think we need? Surely not a year's worth.
For solar, we'd likely need 10-16 hours of storage to power stuff overnight. Maybe a little more to cover a few cloudy days. Sounds like we are about 5% of that now?
Generally the worst case is two weeks. In the middle of winter you often get cloudy low wind days for that long. Of course how you handle those worse cases are days need not be how you handle typical. If you can handle 16 hours of no input this will over the typical cases this will be enough to max a massive dent in carbon emissions and we can fall back to existing gas (or even coal) plants for the rest. Plus a lot of power use can turn off when needed - give my company a discount and we can turn the factory off.
10-16 hours is not enough at all. On a cloudy day, solar output will only be 15-20%. On top of that, your panels really only generate for 8 hours on a very good day - the sun is a lot dimmer in the early morning and late evening. Really, you need 2x storage for a good day, if you want to deal with two cloudy days you'd want 50-60 hours of storage.
Could you possibly read the article you're replying to again?
Even skimming through it discusses the coverage of wind and a not 50/50 system particularly to cover winter & night time. There is also discussion of a ~2% from "other" and how much storage capacity is required.
The article even goes into using wind & solar data for the simulation and reducing further the output to be conservative.
I obviously understand it's not a 100% solar system. If it was you would need to be able to deal with at least 2 weeks of bad weather, not two days, and you would have to take into account winter (dropping to about 5 hours instead of 8).
Additionally, mixing solar and wind is not as easy as it seems, because the two are correlated. If you have a major storm that makes wind energy impossible due to wind speeds above ~100km/h, you will also have clouds making solar energy unworkable. I'm not aware of any simulations modelling a 95+% solar/wind grid for storage needs, taking into account extreme weather patterns, grid topology, and equipment damage, but if you do then please link it.
I don't see any article linked in the comment I replied to. Perhaps you're mixing up two comment chains.
> That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today.
I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting powering a portion of the grid with batteries that are cycled once per year. One can optimistically cycle one or even twice a day (if wind peaks when the sun is down). Or you can try to ride through a week of bad weather, but natural gas is not actually a terrible solution for that. And those batteries last for a lot longer than a year.
So I think your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years.
Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.
> your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years
The former is calculated from projected 2030 battery production to present energy levels. An essential component of strategy is knowing on whose side time is. Battery production won't reach 1/10 for at least a few decades. That's the point. We need an intermediate solution, and if that's going to be gas, we have to live with the fact that (a) emissions will continue and (b) we perpetuate trillions of dollars of capital infrastructure that will be as difficult to take down in the future as coal has been today.
> Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.
If you come up with some combination of carbon-free energy sources and storage that covers 90% of grid energy needs, and you need to fill in the gap, and that gap is a whole lot of power but only for a handful of days a year, then I don’t think nuclear is a good option at all to fill in the gap. The capital expense would be absurd.
Decarbonization is great, but in the real world, decarbonization per dollar spent is what matters. Instead of spending a zillion dollars on nuclear peaker plants, spend a lot fewer dollars on gas peaker plants and the the rest for more effective environmental improvements.
> Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.
There's a crossover point. If you use natural gas to provide <1% of yearly electricity needs, and you save a zillion dollars while doing so, you can find cheaper ways to decarbonize by the same amount.
We'll figure it out. There is too much at stake and there are already a gazillion engineers out there going to bed every night thinking about how to solve this problem.
Innovation is the grim reaper of analyst reports. No one at my company notifies an investment bank when we have a breakthrough internally (lol).
Why are you comparing the rate of change of battery storage capacity, the vast majority of which if grid connected will be used for at most diurnal storage, to yearly energy consumption?
Holy mother of all type errors there.
Multiply it by 365, and it implies that in 2030 alone, we will create enough battery storage to time shift almost 10% of our total electricity use today.
I could just as easily assert the same of nuclear or gas. It doesn't make it true, although there seems to be evidence that nuclear cannot scale as fast as batteries/solar/wind.
Nobody claims renewables + battery doesn't work long term. (And not only work, but do so at rock-bottom costs.)
The problem is the timeline. Time out building that additional infrastructure, including expected demand growth, and you always need more power in the interim. Particularly if you're planning on taking coal offline.
If there is an arugment that we can ramp up battery production even faster than we are, the math changes. But we're already in a Herculean effort to mass produce more batteries faster.
Battery manufacturing capacity is greatly underutilized in China. That was battery cell prices there fell by nearly 1/2 in the last year. There is tremendous room for expansion of production.
The problem with nuclear in Georgia, and in the US, was that no one remembers/ed how to do it, and so all the lessons of yore had to be relearned, and the supply chain had to be stood up.
If you put in an order for several reactors, the very first one (especially of a new model, like Vogtle 3 was) will be expensive AF. The second will be expensive. All models after that will be at a more 'reasonable' cost.
Nuclear reactors are just like any other widget: the cost goes down with economies of scale. If you order 4 or 8 reactors at one sites they'll get progressively get cheaper (there is a floor of course). If you then put in an order at a second site, and move the workforce (or a portion) there, the lower costs will still be present.
If you start and stop construction, or order a whole bunch of different models/types, then there economies of scale goes out the window.
Sort of - nuke plants are fundamentally phenomenally complicated compared to true economies of scale technologies like solar. You won’t reap 100x cost savings in nukes, no matter how many you build
You can't just invent a number because you like it more. Solar and Wind are cheaper than nuclear even if you go beyond LCOE and include system costs. Even the nuclear lobby acknowledges this nowadays and has switched to other arguments.
Not even close. Wind and solar are cheap _only_ if you don't depend on them. In particular, for the wind the adequacy rating is about 10% in most places. It means that you can expect 10% of the nameplate capacity to be available at all times system-wide. So multiply the wind energy costs by 10x, and suddenly they are quite more expensive than nuclear.
It's not even a question for the solar, it simply can't provide power during a day without storage.
> Even the nuclear lobby acknowledges this nowadays and has switched to other arguments.
First, capacity factor is a silly metric to use for this. The industry uses LCOE or system LCOE, because this is about dollars per actual TWh produced, not capacity. In other words: A capacity factor of 10% doesn't matter if building 10x the amount is still cheaper.
With that said, the wind capacity factor in Germany is 20% for onshore and 40% for offshore, so even that was wrong by a factor of 2-4.
Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.
And new AP1000s in the US would cost significantly less, because there are already experienced workers & supply chains from Vogtle and getting a license requires less work too, because you can copy much of Vogtle.
The median build time for nuclear reactors is 7 years. This is archivable if you continue building and not just build 1 or 2 every few decades.
The scale just isn't there. A single nuclear power plant near me, McGuire Nuclear Power Plant, produced 17,514 GW·h in 2005. The entire potential output of the Tesla (cough Panasonic) Gigafactories in California and China have a combined output of ~50 GWh per year. [0] Nuclear power is amazing at producing a reliable base load of power that massively outstrips our ability to produce and store solar power. Say our load is well aligned with the cycle of solar power and we're ignoring weather so we can derate the amount we want to store to 30% that's 105 years of production out of what I think is the two largest batter plants in existence to store the power produced continuously by a single large nuclear power plant.
Global stationary storage deployed for 2024 will be ~150GWh, and this is accelerating. Batteries are easy, nuclear appears to be impossible (economically speaking).
So 35 years then to store the power generated 24/7 by McGuire at that rate of production which ignores that the huge spike of AI loads will want 24/7 power, if we're looking at that kind of load I'd rate it at 50% for starters (low to be honest because it doesn't account for how solar ramps up during the day) which is around 60 years. Plus that's giving full capacity to those batteries when ideally we'd only use the middle 60% to avoid deep cycling the batteries daily unless they've completely solved that problem.
The nuclear ain't getting built, these are facts. Even if one breaks ground today, you won't push your first kwh to the grid for a decade, at which point another ~10TW of clean energy will have come online globally.
If AI is using too much power in the short term, destroy demand with policy and economics. We are not beholden to the robot trainers, we just don't provide utility access to the load. Unlimited demand of industrial scales of electrical power isn't a right of some sort.
Everyone is a libertarian until it’s their commons experiencing the tragedy. Strange to think that having regulations around large scale electrical loads is a dictatorship. It’s okay for us to collectively say no, depending on the circumstances.
> Everyone is a libertarian until it’s their commons experiencing the tragedy.
Yeah sure and everyone is a socialist utopian until its their own money/liberty on the line.
If we cannot “collectively” reach a consensus what happens?
Im just pointing out that the original suggestion of “ban ML for environmental reasons” is extreme/ham-fisted. This is what dictatorships do in real life all over the globe “for the greater good”.
Should crypto be a government-approved use of energy? What about manufacturing semiconductors? Building data centers? Producing EVs, solar farms or batteries? Are flights for vacation allowed?
You aren’t thinking about the second order impact of having a government that has the ability to gatekeep energy production for specific use cases…
And can be recharged as soon as the wind or the sun comes back.
The sizing of batteries and power sources is highly region specific, and the places where it makes sense today with current manufacturing capacity, don't have to be "everywhere" for it to be fine where it's actually done; and given the roll out rate of renewables, we also don't need to wait until battery output per year can totally displace the existing and currently running gas plants, just back up the newly installed renewables themselves - 4h in this case is how fast the PV farm would recharge those batteries in the best case, the average output of a PV plant is about 10% of the peak, so this is really a 40 hour battery pack not a 4 hour pack.
I mean, look at Germany's grid yesterday& today and tell me, with such overcapacity, how much more overcapacity it would need and how much storage it would need to cover such events with low wind and solar?
I use the approximation of annual capacity factors for PV being 10%, which means 10x. Wind has a higher capacity factor IIRC between 35% and 85% and that heavily depends on location.
A realistic answer would need me to spend at least a month dealing with finding historical satellite cloud cover data, wind records, correlations leading to nationwide dunkelflaute, the planning options for where new stuff can be built, etc.
And even then, that varies depending on international grid connections, and how much storage is on the grid.
cf yearly are good for some purposes but bad for others. Again, look at Germany's coal/gas use yesterday vs today as well as wind/solar generation and imports. If you don't want fossils, how would you cover such events? France was outputting towards Germany equivalent of 3-4 npp and 2 additional from Switzerland, max being about 12+GW from neighbors. How would it be financially viable considering there are many other days when demand will be met for day hours? New solar/wind will not be able to sell energy at negative prices unless they get subsidies. Germany already spends 20bn/yr for price subsidies and their grid is far from overcapacity and that doesn't account for other subsidy types like for transmission for renewables
Today's values, from what I've seen, this country could run on just wind if it had 10x more than now, but it doesn't really need that in isolation, it's just that PV was harder to judge because the graph wasn't even close to a flat line.
> New solar/wind will not be able to sell energy at negative prices unless they get subsidies.
They already do, in good weather.
> 20bn/yr for price subsidies and their grid is far from overcapacity
And how much of that was for a guaranteed price made way back when the stuff was still expensive?
New PV is, by itself, the single cheapest source of electricity; even adding on batteries only takes it up to somewhere between gas and nuclear depending on the specifics.
> and that doesn't account for other subsidy types like for transmission for renewables
How's that a subsidy? I've not seen the breakdown of bill costs here, but back in the UK there was a split between connection cost and use cost.
We haven't reached yet such renewable market penetration to get this problem. It'll happen when a lot of days, 10 day hours will be covered by renewable output.
> And how much of that was for a guaranteed price made way back when the stuff was still expensive?
I have no idea how are these are distributed. Do you have a link for recent vs old projects?
So using your numbers, it is solidly a little less than half the cost, not one tenth (26GWh seems around the necessarily amount for riding out ~14 hours of darkness. I'm assuming your factor of 3 makes up for seasonal variation and cloudy days). The panels take up 9 acres of land area, and need to be kept clean of snow and dust. The battery lifetime is small compared to expected life of a nuclear reactor, but the battery lifecycle is more straightforward. This seems like the territory of having a reasonable tradeoff between the two, not some unequivocal win for an Internet smackdown about how we should avoid one approach.
That is seemingly such an absurdly high number to get a nuclear planet up and running.
Is the majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?
> Is that majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?
One part this, two parts the economics of a novel technology platform being deployed in a large size, three parts American labor costs and inexperience with megaprojects.
Similar to why we can't build ships [1]: high input costs, notably materials and labour, and a coddled industry that is internationally uncompetitive. With ships, it's the Jones Act and shipyard protectionism; with civilian nukes, it's misguided greenies. (Would note that we're perfectly capable of nuclear production if it happens under the military.)
Nuclear is still much more expensive than renewables in China, where there aren't too many "misguided greenies" setting policy. Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable, not the other way around.
The faster people can internalize this lesson, the sooner we'll get to economically-viable nuclear power.
> Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable
As far as Europe is concerned, there seems to have been various political move and lobbying to affect energy independence (e.g. France): economy is transformed energy, so by nuking (…) energy independence, you're suffocating countries. The military role of nuclear is furthermore crucial; civil & nuclear must be correlated.
That's to say, giving up nuclear is not something a sane, well-driven country should do lightly, regardless of ideologies.
It's a tricky topic; what I regularly hear from economists is that wind & solar are still far from being able to compete with nuclear. And because of the previous two points, people can't but frown upon "green" arguments, even if the underlying intentions are honest and well-intended.
(China may not have misguided greenies, but it has a strong incentive to sell whatever it's offering).
If China had a super cheap nuclear design they would be very happy to export that the same way they export their other technologies like EVs, high speed trains, solar panels, batteries, etc. But it simply does not exist.
The first article refers to 2018 in the future tense, and the second article is three years old without a single announcement of a Belt and Road nuclear plant since then.
china has a super cheap design called hualong and they plan to export it the way russia is exporting their designs. Another plan is finishing local adaptations of ap1000 that can be reselled without licensing problems
> > why China installed 217 GW of solar last year, but only 1.2 GW of nuclear
> > And 114 GW of coal [1]. Don't do nuclear, and that becomes 115 GW of coal. Nuclear and renewables aren't competing for market share.
That is true for China, since their overall energy demand is growing massively. But is that also true for other parts of the world like the US or EU? Because looking at the electricity production [1] this doesn't seem to be the case. So in those markets they would compete for replacing existing fossil power plants. I think we can expect some growth, but not on a level even close to China.
We should see some increase in electricity consumption due to displacement of direct uses of fossil fuels. For example, use of heat pumps in place of natural gas furnaces, electric cars in place of IC engine vehicles. Add to that the ever popular AI and general data center consumption motivating this announcement (but I wonder how much of that is going to move to places with cheaper electricity.)
Yes, these and other innovations will defivinitely increase our overall electricity consumption, but i imagine that it will be a gradual shift as it is aleady happening, since vehicles and heating has long life cycles. It also helps that energy wise these technologies are more efficient, so that offsets some of the increase.
Probably hard to judge right now where AI is heading and if the pace of increased energy consumption remains this high. But i agree that they'll probably end up moving closer to sources of cheap electricity.
The efficiency would decrease primary energy use, if the electricity were being produced from thermal sources, but the amount of electrical energy used would increase.
I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that the rest of the world is a footnote to China's emissions. Europe's emissions are already dropping fast, though. Presumably if China can decarbonize its economy at the rate it's going, then we presumably the rest of the world (even poorer nations) will be able to fast-follow them due to the learning curve (or else just because China will have so much excess manufacturing capacity that they'll flood the world with cheap renewables.)
The current analysis is that China's emissions peak this year [1,2] and will enter a structural decline. This is because new renewables are being deployed faster than growth in energy demand. The new coal construction is mostly "dispatchable" production that will be used to backstop the fast-growing renewable grid, with payments going to coal plants in exchange for not generating (and built-in expectations that these payments will rise over the next few years as renewables and storage serve more of the demand.)
is it? New plants cost 3-3.5bn for a stable 1gw output. For renewables - much more needs to be built to provide same reliability or compensate with fossils
IMO they only continue to exist because of the Jones Act not the way I think you're implying where Jones Act protectionism prevents them from flourishing. High material and labor alone are enough to explain why people wouldn't build ships in the US. What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea? Gone are the days when the US dominates on skill or capacity, and that's not because the US has lost something the rest of the world just caught up with us.
Whenever we're looking at the 1900s and wondering why the US used to be so dominant as an industrial power I think it's incredibly important to remember our industry got all the upside (an absolute torrent of money and demand) and none of the downside (bombing) of two world wars. IMO the US industrial base was riding high on that easily into the 80s and people mistake that dominance for skill and prowess rather than the waning boon of WW2's mobilization and destruction of every other extant industrial power.
The point is there are downstream costs to our moribund shipping industry. We have a internally-navigable waterways we barely use, offshore wind power gets stalled due to lack of ships, et cetera.
Post-WWII effects are one component. But another is that we want a protected shipbuilding industry for its own purposes, which is fine, but that curtails a lot of other production.
> What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea?
Energy. Our energy costs are much lower than theirs.
There is a huge difference between the US accounting for 20% of Global GDP and merely being "in first place" at the end of WWI and the USA having half of global GDP (and 80% of the world's hard currency reserves) at the end of WW2. While also say, having a Navy easily more powerful than the rest of the world combined, and being able to to focus on an upcoming surge in consumer consumption as opposed to desperately struggling to stabilize food production and rebuild cities and industries that had been ravaged by war.
Britain, a victor that had never been occupied, wasn't able to lift many significant food rationing schemes until the 1950s. Bread, which wasn't rationed during the war, had to be rationed from '46 to '48.
There is a meaningful distinction between being the leading industrial power and being the overwhelmingly dominant economic power.
When the German soldiers first encountered the US doughboys, they were struck by their height, their excellent food, and their supplies. That was when Germany knew they had lost WW1.
And this was despite having to ship all that stuff across an ocean.
France, with all their nuclear base, just raised their estimate for new reactors (I'm so shocked!):
> State-owned Electricite de France SA has raised its estimate for the future construction costs of six new atomic reactors in France by 30% to €67.4 billion ($73 billion)
6 reactors, 1650MW each, $7B per 1GW vs Vogtle's $17B. Planned. In 2 decades, after it's finally built, it will have doubled of course lmao.
That right, blame the hippies. Nothing at all to do with nuclear power plants being the one thing that you really do want to be engineered well. But no, regulations are of course to blame!
The anti-nuclear hippy movements of the 60s and 70s are pretty directly responsible for a lot of the slow down in expansion of nuclear power.
>Between 1975 and 1980, a total of 63 nuclear units were canceled in the United States. Anti-nuclear activities were among the reasons, but the primary motivations were the overestimation of future demand for electricity and steadily increasing capital costs, which made the economics of new plants unfavorable.
because 1 - 1gw of solar capacity isn't the same as nuclear, even 3gw of solar isn't the same as 1gw of nuclear (to get a proper perspective, look at germany's grid yesterday& how much overcapacity of solar/wind they have and how much was actually generated/imported). 2 - vogtle unit 4 was 30% cheaper than unit 3, proving positive learning curve, meaning (in theory, according to https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/ ) new builds should be significantly cheaper
I'm fairly pro-nuclear but the EIA (Energy Information Administration) publishes a "Levelized Costs of New Generation" report every year that compiles the total cost of installing new generation, taking into account the fuel, build up, maintenance, interest, and inflationary costs, and nuclear ends up costing more $$$ than other renewable alternatives.
It's no conspiracy why nuclear never gets traction these days -- maybe it was cost-effective 10-30 years ago but renewable technology has gotten relatively cheap. (Shutting down active nuclear reactors earlier than needed is a whole different issue though.)
Nuclear is a terrible investment in 2024. Price per delivered megawatt-hour is guaranteed to be much lower for a combination of solar+battery+wind.
-- Edit --
To clarify, "Nuclear is a terrible investment for private industry in 2024." However, I understand why nation states (and their equivalents) would want a diversity of power sources. There many be non-economic reasons why nations want to build nuclear over solar+battery+wind.
There's something to be said for space. A nuclear reactor takes up far less land than an equivalent amount of wind and solar generation. That's quickly going to become a limiting factor in wind/solar rollout and already is in some smaller countries (unless they're willing to bulldoze their entire land to cover it in solar panels)
Ok we can all agree that the US has not a land problem.
This argument is relevant in Europe but the US has more than enough space power transmission is a problem but it's solvable.
Just because the US has a lot of area doesn't mean it should all be paved over and turned into solar farms. "Who needs nature and green spaces? It could be cheap electricity instead" is a mindset the next generation will hate us for, just like our generation resents previous generations for thinking "Why not burn coal? It's cheap electricity and there's lots of air left."
The US has a massive green space problem. It's a country of roads, parking lots, and corn fields and it's a problem that's visible from space.
Don't take this as opposing solar energy. I support it versus fossil fuels. But if nuclear is viable, I'm for it.
I see this argument a lot. Yes, the density is very high for nuclear power plants, but you need to build them in the middle of nowhere, for political and safety reasons. So, are we really saving space compared to solar? Plus, there is much less political resistance to solar farms, and almost zero safety issues (for PV).
This comment:
> unless they're willing to bulldoze their entire land to cover it in solar panels
Your sentiment is interesting. No one says that when we talk about building new farms. Really, that is what people have done for the past 2000 years to alter our landscape. Can you imagine what Brazil looked like in 1800 vs today? Dramatic landscape changes due to farming. Same for US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. California has plenty of desert or very unproductive land that can be covered with solar panels.
Nuclear may not be competitive for electricity, but it could be a viable option for district heating. If you ignore electricity generation completely, you could make small simple low-pressure reactors and hide them underground. There is a spin-off company from a national research institute in Finland that believes it can make 50 MW (thermal) reactors for €100 million, with some municipal utilities semi-committed to buying ~15 of them.
Google's entire thing only consumed on average 2.6x worth of AP1000 energy last year. Why does anyone think that the IT industry needs to pull all of the weight of electrifying the American economy by building 7 AP1000 power stations?
People say trillion dollar corporations need to start taking steps to limit climate change, then when they do, "Why should trillion dollar corporations need to pull their weight?"
This top-down corporate order will make more change than Americans can individually.
They have the capital, and are the ones who need the extra generation capacity now. They will share the cost along with the average consumer as EVs take up a larger proportion of total vehicles on the road.
And you are applying this equally across all American industry? The production of chlorine by electrolysis consumes twice as much electricity in America than Google consumes worldwide. But I don't see you up here calling for Olin Chlor Alkali to build nuclear power stations, for some reason. Are you suggesting that the American chemical industry lacks capital?
It’s not real funding, it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built! No different from Microsoft’s previous fusion power purchase agreement. The Goog may as well announce they’ve reserved office space in a building to be built on Proxima Centauri B.
Just tech virtue signalling: Google/Microsoft trade the impression that they’re relevant leaders for some legitimacy for a blue sky startup.
> it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built! No different from Microsoft’s previous fusion power purchase agreement
A frequent complaint from utilities has been AI companies refusing to sign PPAs. They want the option of picking up and leaving if someone else offers a better deal down the road, leaving the utility stuck with overbuilt infrastructure costs.
> virtue signalling
This term has lost whatever meaning it ever had if we're using it to refer to binding contracts.
> This term has lost whatever meaning it ever had if we're using it to refer to binding contracts.
If a technological solution is optimistic and remains vaporware possibly forever, then it maybe "virtue signaling" is if there more nonfunctional desire for it that outstrips practical or economic utility. A better term would be "vaporware" when there is less social puritanism involved, and I don't think coal or nuclear signal anything of redeemable greenwashing value compared to cheaper renewables combined with PES and distributed grid storage.
Money talks. Signing the PPA is a legally binding contract to buy the power, so the power companies will them be willing to build the plant, knowing that there's guaranteed demand. Without the PPA, there's no guaranteed demand, and the powerplant won't get built.
Legally binding is a nebulous concept when you're some of the world's richest companies with legal departments multiple times larger than the entire staff of the companies you're 'legally bound' with.
> Legally binding is a nebulous concept when you're some of the world's richest companies
The flip side of being rich enough to hire good counsel is being rich enough to be worth going after. Were Google to renege on an agreement such as this, there would be a line of litigation financiers standing to buy the claim.
Unless it's not actually Google but some shell company Google is technically a customer of. But either way, I don't imagine the intent is to bail on the agreement.
An agreement to buy enough power for a lightbulb from a plant generating from unicorn farts is meaningless.
If they happen to pull through, it’s a drop in the bucket of Google’s overall consumption. If they don’t, then there is no downside for Google. This is not an investment.
It's a first customer, and guaranteed revenue if the generation is able to be built and operated. It's huge for the nuclear startup company, and can be used to get the financing lined up.
Agreed that Google is taking on very little risk here, but it's still a good action and moves the space forward.
Originally it was a worthwhile term to examine distinctions between virtue communications that might be more matters of social negotiation and virtue communications that might be reflections of personal value investment.
Then in certain political usage it became a nihilistic drive-by dismissal for nullifying any kind of virtue accountability, whether sincerely invested or not, a challenge to the idea that there was any such thing as sincere virtue discourse.
This isn’t a binding contract like Elon Musk agreeing to buy Twitter. Google may be bound in some way to buy power from a future unbuilt powerplant that doesn’t yet exist in prototype form. If Kairos fizzles, more likely than not, can Google seek damages? Will Microsoft seek damages from their binding contract when Helios isn’t grinding out fusion gigawatts in 2028 as promised?
This is de-risking the other way. It allows the energy companies to build their infrastructure without worries that they will get undercut by a competitor and be stuck with overbuilt infrastructure and no one to sell to.
Without that commitment, the investment doesn't get made into the new power generation. Margins in that industry are much lower than in tech.
Yes, it gives them some firm future revenue numbers to work with. They can take this agreement and get financing to pay for the actual construction needed.
Look to NuScales near collapse last autumn for a recent nuclear power example:
NuScale has a more credible contract with the Carbon Free Power Project (“CFPP”) for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (“UAMPS”). CFPP participants have been supportive of the project despite contracted energy prices that never seem to stop rising, from $55/MWh in 2016, to $89/MWh at the start of this year. What many have missed is that NuScale has been given till around January 2024 to raise project commitments to 80% or 370 MWe, from the existing 26% or 120 MWe, or risk termination. Crucially, when the participants agreed to this timeline, they were assured refunds for project costs if it were terminated, which creates an incentive for them to drop out. We are three months to the deadline and subscriptions have not moved an inch.
A power purchase agreement is critical to getting investment. The US aviation industry is wouldn’t exist if not for the UK and French governments making a purchase agreement for planes at the start of WW2
It's funny how many people think getting investments is as easy as just asking a bank or VC for money. If you want anything substantial besides scraps of angel/friends and family rounds, you need to prove your product first.
Getting Google in line as a customer is absolutely huge for Kairos.
And the belief that you will actually be able to deliver it. Try it. Go try to pitch Google a $/MWh figure that undercuts what they’re offered here and see how far you get.
IIRC Nuscale was supposed to be doing a demo SMR project in Idaho until the costs blew out and nobody wanted to pay for the new costs. So we’ll see what comes of this.
What are you talking about? If you have Google an offer to sell them $1 for $0.50 they will absolutely take it even if they 99% think you will flop. There is no downside.
Insurance and regulatory hurdles are far higher than contracts selling future electricity customer purchase agreements and likely to doom almost all new nuclear projects in the US as they have for the past 50 years. I don't see why an amoral customer would care about the specific source power as long as it's cheapest, but even a socially-conscious customer would probably be okay with renewables if and when they are generally the cheapest option. Perhaps there are a handful of specific datacenter locations and requirements in particular areas that would be better suited to geothermal or nuclear.
Which claim? Regarding investments, from the world bank, "The pricing mechanism [a component of a PPA] is the primary mechanism for allocating revenue and market risk in respect of the project between the public and private sectors and is central to the private project proponent’s and its lenders’ assessment of the commercial viability and bankability of the project."
I believe Jigar Shah, the director of the Loan Programs Office at DoE, also talked about the importance of PPAs in attracting outside investment in his book Creating Climate Wealth: Unlocking the Impact Economy
Again we’re not talking about an agreement to built a wind farm or solar or a big LNG turbine. A bank sees a PPA for any of those and knows if it cuts a check, it’ll happen with high probability. These tech PPAs are not much more than mutual handwaving by comparison.
It would be circular if a single person was saying both of those.
Are the people you're talking to in support of the first quote?
I would expect them to say a lack of PPAs shows lack of confidence, or for them to barely care about the number of PPAs. Not to use it as evidence that there's no interest.
Oh, I think I misunderstood what you meant by "there isn't interest".
I thought the disputed claim was that companies don't make nuclear PPAs because of lack of interest. In that case those claims would combine into a very flawed argument, but pinewurst isn't saying that.
But if the actual meaning was that companies don't invest in the power plants needed to fulfill the nuclear PPAs because of lack of interest, then yes pinewurst was saying that, but that's not a circular argument anymore. "Nuclear PPAs don't represent real interest in power plants." and "There's negligible demand for nuclear PPAs for actual power because there isn't real interest in power plants." are compatible statements and not circular at all. The implication is simple: PPAs are a useless signal, and if you want to check for meaningful interest you need to check other signals. I don't know if I agree, but I think it's a reasonable position. And there's no 'conspiracy' needed.
The claim that there would be no US aviation industry without British/French orders in WWII, which given US production for our OWN Armed Forces is a flat-out absurd thing to claim. France was overrun in 1940 and the RAF only used a few American designs compared with their own.
This is a very far cry from the claim, which is that the American aviation industry would not exist were it not for some orders by Britain and France.
That one is hard to support, given that the American aviation industry was the first such industry, anywhere, and was doing quite well for itself prior to the outbreak of the war.
Did the orders help? Um. Yes? I mean they stopped paying for the planes after Lend-Lease so, mixed bag there, there was a war on and all. But I don't see how the gulf between "Without Britain and France paying for a few planes before the war started" and "$50 Billion in materiel provided free of charge with most of the debt written off and most of the production destroyed in combat" gets bridged. I'm calling shenanigans.
It's worth noting that only several years earlier, the US aircraft industry was almost completely killed by the Wright's patents and licensing practices.
The UK, France (especially), Italy, and others were way ahead of the US until the Feds made the Wrights share their patents to support production of arms for WW I. This led to the rise of far more innovative competitors in aircraft design and production: Curtiss, Martin, Lockheed, Boeing, etc., which rapidly eclipsed the Wright company's fossilized and already obsolete technology. (Note that Wright was soon more or less forced to merge with Curtiss...)
All true. But that's the Great War, not the World War.
Also worth noting that it had been eleven years between the Wright brothers' first flight, and the outbreak of the Great War. By the time WWII was on the horizon, US aviation was a force to be reckoned with. By the end of WWII, it was about the size of all European aviation industry combined, but certainly not before.
To address the sibling comment as well, yes that's accurate as I understand history. The big benefit of the prewar orders was that it gave the US a head start on ramping up for war production, which was nonetheless a basket case for the first year or so after the US entered the war, just before 1942. Without that head start the entire timeline for winning the war would have been pushed back, I don't think it could have changed the outcome but the additional suffering would have been immense.
Yeah, its not much I agree. But it is an agreement the company can wave that they at least have future buyers for their non-existing power generators if they were to build them!
Kairos is using FLiBe coolant with TRISO solid fuel.
While this has some advantages (low pressure, no fission products in the FLiBe), it also some issues.
First, the fuel cycle costs are higher than a LWR. The fuel is dispersed as small encapsulated grains in graphite spheres. Manufacturing the fuel is more expensive, I believe the enrichment needed is higher, and the volume of the spent fuel is considerably larger. All that graphite needs to be disposed of along with the spent fuel.
Second, FLiBe require isotopically separated lithium. Li-6 has a ruinously high thermal neutron absorption cross section so it must be rigorously excluded. It also produces tritium when it absorbs neutrons, which would permeate through the reactor and beyond. But there are no large scale lithium isotope separation plants in operation, and the technology that was used for this in the Cold War (to make Li-6 for H-bombs) has been shut down and cannot be restarted because of mercury pollution (liquid mercury is an inherent part of the process and much escaped down drains at Oak Ridge.)
Kairos has announced operation of a FLiBe purification plant, which sounds promisingly like an isotope separation plant, but it appears it's only a plant for removing other impurities (oxygen, sulfur, iron, etc.) from FLiBe. Isotopically pure Li-7 fluoride would be an input to this plant.
Third, FLiBe is about 11% beryllium. Annual world production of beryllium is just a few hundred tons. There's a limit to how much FLiBe could be made for these reactors (or for fusion reactors, for that matter.)
I'm inferring from this that their current plan is to import lithium-7, from either Russia or China?
- "The Kairos Power fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor requires highly enriched lithium-7 to support operations. The high enrichment requirements complicate quality and process control due to lack of qualified standards and instrumentation capable of meeting the required precision and accuracy. Currently, enrichment [sic] of 99.95% 7Li is imported to the U.S. in limited quantities."
- "Due to environmental concerns and relatively low demand for enriched lithium, further use of the COLEX process is officially banned in the USA since 1963, which strengthens China’s near unanimous [sic] hold over the market of enriched lithium, followed by Russia.[7]. [...]Although US nuclear industry relies heavily on Chinese and Russian enriched lithium, ecological concerns over the process may impede its future domestic use at industrial scale."
Right–that's the topic of the GAO report I found. Total US demand of about 300 kg/year of lithium-7, for [⁷Li]OH. They specifically call out the FLiBe molten-salt reactors because they need orders of magnitude more lithium-7; they worried (as of 2013) the Chinese MSR could cause a supply crunch that would affect US PWR's.
On the one hand, I'm glad we're finally slowly letting go of the BigOil(tm) propaganda against nuclear. The fact that we're still burning dead dinosaurs to power our society and relying on windmills is insane to me.
On the other, a nuclear startup, presumably some VC-backed monstrosity who will only care about making the most money (aka cutting every conceivable corner there is to cut) possible, sounds like a recipe for fucking disaster just waiting to happen sooner rather than later.
> cutting every conceivable corner there is to cut
Do you think SpaceX cut every conceivable corner to make money? Nuclear (and space), are heavily government regulated. It isn't perfect a safety net but it works.
If SpaceX cuts corners, some rockets fall over a field in Texas/the ocean somewhere. Not a great thing to have happen, but the damage is pretty minimal all things considered.
If a nuclear power plant-owning VC-backed startup cuts corners because their shareholders expect 3 cents more of profit YoY on their earnings report, we get a nuclear meltdown that shuts off an area the size of a small city for a century.
These startups can barely keep passwords secure, I don't trust them and their VC psycho buddies for a second with something as potentially powerful as nuclear energy.
> ... we get a nuclear meltdown that shuts off an area the size of a small city for a century.
Not necessarily. Instead we could just have disposal containers that leak sooner rather than expected.
The storage and disposal side of the nuclear waste is still an unsolved problem, other than "just bury it and hope there's no contamination problems later on".
Sticking it at the bottom of a 5000ft mine shaft in a geologically stable region, with pictograms, is a solution.
If we lose the ability to decipher pictograms on the containers, we're probably back to being apes and have also lost the ability to mechanically dig 5000ft straight down, or 1000ft straight forward through rock, so we'd never encounter it ever again.
There are meltdown-free designs as engineers have learnt from previous problems.
That's exactly the point of government regulation, want to build a privately developed and operated commercial nuclear reactor? Requirement #1: it cannot be physically possible to have a meltdown.
Pretty much the same way jet liners have black boxes, round windows, no smoking, seat belts, etc. The FAA regulates and legislates that.
The irrational fear of nuclear power is just that.
You misunderstand my fears. I'm not fearful of Nuclear power, I'm fearful of VCs and by extension the kind of behavior they encourage.
Aviation is, as you pointed out, heavily regulated, yet that didn't stop the profit-seeking vultures from causing the Boeing-MAX fiasco. There are countless instances of private equity ruining everything they touch while covering things up to avoid repercussions for getting caught (if they ever even come), what makes you so sure this time it's going to be different?
Nuclear is held to an entirely different and higher standard, even to aviation. There isn't any other field that is so critically examined under a microscope by governments.
VC companies have to meet the regulatory criteria. There aren't any safety corners that they can realistically cut without falling foul of regulation and inspection.
I love the 'ideally' in the dry cask storage article...
"Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel."
Also guessing that article is woefully out of date since it mentions:
"The NRC estimated that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, most likely requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind"
The best thing about nuclear, IMHO, is that all of the highly radioactive waste ever produced by nuclear power plants in the US could fit into a single football stadium. Compare that to coal, oil, natural gas, etc.
It's not too hard of a problem to solve, it just requires political will to bury it in a dry geologically stable desert somewhere in the US, which we have plenty of.
> all of the highly radioactive waste ever produced by nuclear power plants in the US could fit into a single football stadium.
I have heard this before, but is this just the physical waste's volume? Isn't that a useless metric? What would happen if you included the volume of the containers required to safely house it?
> What would happen if you included the volume of the containers required to safely house it?
Immensely more manageable than e.g. toxic, radioactive coal ash [1]. TL; DR Spent fuel isn't a real problem. We dispose of tonnes of similarly-nasty stuff every day without mention. (And unlike with radiation, it's difficult to indpendently check chemical toxicity.)
> And unlike with radiation, it's difficult to independently check chemical toxicity.
This was always kind of interesting to me, and I'm surprised it's not mentioned more. Not for any practical purpose, but just because you'll often hear people talk about how radiation is super scary because it's "invisible". Which is the case, sure, but it seems like it's hardly unique? As you implied, there's countless chemical contaminants that are just as dangerous, and just as undetectable by human senses. At least with radioactive contaminants you can (at least in most situations) use Geiger counters and dosimeters and whatnot - with some of the chemical threats humanity has cooked up, it seems like you need an entire study just to determine if they're present or not.
Sure, but I just mean that if you put all the nuclear waste into a pool-sized container, is there not a chance that it would go critical without safe housing and separation?
`not too hard a problem`
- just hard enough that it hasn't been progressed for decades.
but the great thing about next gen reactors is that the waste solution does not need to be addresed; any waste from next gen reactors will simply go wherever the final solution for existing waste engines lands.
Safety claims of novel, unproven fission designs always come with a crazy footnote. Pebble bed reactors are completely safe, if they are never exposed to water or oxygen, which is a pretty hilarious caveat for planet Earth.
If you can contain the highly corrosive, very hot, molten salts, then they are fairly safe, but you do need to guarantee that the path to the dump-tanks is undisturbed by whatever disaster is necessitating their use.
A big non-safety disclaimer is that the proposed advantage of online refueling is still largely theoretical.
No one has built a large scale viable one yet because of the extremely caustic coolant. In theory they sound great, but no one has come up with a material that can survive the molten saltfor decades
Considering that there are no commercial-scale operating MSRs, I am guessing there are some pretty significant difficulties. Like graphite pebble reactors, molten salts must be perfectly desiccated, which is impossible to guarantee under Earth operating conditions, and nobody knows what kinds of materials to use for the salt containment, or how it might be changed by a few decades of operation.
I believe it depends on the salt used and why a lot of research is looking at fluorine - floride salts don't dissolve in water and thus don't have the same risks. Another MSR design seeing a lot of attention is SSR which similarly doesn't use any chemically reactive materials. SSR is also interesting from a cost perspective as it's projected to cost half of a modern coal power station and almost a third that of a modern large scale nuclear construction putting it in line with solar plants that don't have batteries (i.e. much more cost effective).
there aren't any records in history with problems with casks storing solid waste.
Related to spent fuel: the solution should be storage facility like in sweden + purex like in France (or even better - fast reactors and pyroprocessing)
Epochal "century" boundaries don't always line up with year % 100. One could argue that the 20th century didn't properly begin until some idiot shot an archduke. It likewise seems like the 20th century likewise overshot Y2K by a decade or two. Now things are accelerating in a different, new, and exciting direction.
It's the same thing with decades. People often say the "sixties" didn't really start till 1963. And when you think of the start of 1980's culture, a lot of people are really only talking about 1983-1984.
Like, 1960 itself clearly belonged to the 1950's, the same way 1980 still belonged to the 1970's -- culturally, that is.
Obviously, the question of what year a decade "really" started in, allows for endless argument. :)
I did. There was no talking to friends after turning off the computer and then it was also too late to make phone calls. I remember pretend-playing (if that's the English word for it) having conversations in them while already in bed. Nowadays that's not uncommon to do at all
Not that I had a grand vision as, what was I, perhaps 7 years old? But communication and the transfer of information are two of the main things to live for. Neither seems boring or small beans to me at all
Absolutely nothing boring about communicating, but the communicator itself is near/low tech. That’s why we have billions of them already in people’s hands.
It’s still possible to mitigate without upending society (provided the Hansen paper is wrong), but just barely and not for long. It is absolutely dire and urgent but we’re not beyond hope for the future generations yet.
Sort of feels like we wasted a long time having our best and brightest figuring out how to optimize advertising algorithms. I think we're finally starting to recover from that phase.
Sort of, they are being built to power AI models which do all kinds of things, but yes definitely advertising is part of it. Ads are mature now though, these mega corps have fine-tuned their products and squeezed every last advertising penny out of their audiences that they can, there isn't as much new stuff to build in that area now.
I'm still curious what all these companies exactly want genAI for, but I doubt it's about ads. And the other kinds of AI aren't driving the new power usage.
Citation needed for the claim that any particular non-trivial fraction of engineering talent has been wasted on ad algorithms, or that those are the "best and brightest", or that those people would have been doing other useful work if the ads didn't exist.
Without evidence this is just a repetition of an old, unproven meme for internet points.
The talent follows the money. Consider what was hottest during the 2000s-2010s tech boom, startups offering free services with the value proposition of eventual data collection for ads.
Maybe also look at value instead of revenue, in terms of public market caps or private acquisitions. At least Facebook's $1.48T market cap is derived from ads.
That doesn't answer the question. I asked for, and I quote, "any particular non-trivial fraction of engineering talent has been wasted on ad algorithms, or that those are the "best and brightest", or that those people would have been doing other useful work if the ads didn't exist".
Your inability to provide evidence is suggestive that the evidence does not exist.
I'm not sure what else you want beyond my answer, maybe proof that these big tech companies have indeed been hiring bright engineers, but maybe you or someone else can find it on the Internet. I'm gonna go ahead and agree with Dig1t on this.
Nah, those are the giant overly complex fission reactors. Now we're talking about sleek, much safer, miniature designs that are mass produced. Well, technically they're actually mass fueled. ;)
No, not really? Fukushima first became operational in 1971. That's 40 years before that incident or 50 years ago.
Development of generation III+ "fail-safe" reactors began to be developed around 1990's. To my knowledge none of them have had accidents like Fukushima.
Also Fukushima didn't result in any, or nearly no, deaths. However, I do hear of major oil catastrophes every decade or less. Deep Horizon accident in 2010 in comparison had 11 fatalities, 17 injuries, and spilled 134 million gallons of oil polluting almost the entire Gulf of Mexico.
According to Google the history of "fail safe" reactors is:
> Development of Generation III+ reactors began in the 1990s. The Westinghouse AP1000 was the first Generation III+ reactor to receive final design certification from the NRC in 2005.
It'll be a "wow I didn't see that coming" moment if it's AI (training) that inadvertently saves us from catastrophic climate change by all the big tech funding a resurgence of nuclear power.
Caveat. I did pencil in data centres using nuclear as highly probable some years ago (I worked in geophysical energy+mineral exploration for decades then moved to resource intelligence presentation).
Won't I don't see is the "inadvertently saves us from catastrophic climate change" part .. sure, that might happen but it doesn't follow that it will - the more probable outcome is that overall we humans just consume even more energy with some of that addditional energy coming from nuclear.
The assumption is that AI builds momentum in nuclear power to the point where it can be used elsewhere. I've kept hearing that nuclear is very expensive mainly due to lack of scale.
The reality is that human energy consumption is expanding faster than nuclear is likely to be built out.
It's a tall ask for nuclear to cover projected additional demand (see: global energy consumption data over time), it's even more of an ask to expect it to make inroads on existing demand also.
Nuclear is also expensive in comparison to alternatives (depending upon local expertise): Australia's costings (cold start on nuclear power tech) are that the better ROI over next four decades on energy investment now is not nuclear (2024 CSIRO energy report).
The selling point of modular reactors is that they are built on a production line and that the next one is identical to the one before. But why not apply this principle to large reactors? After all there are plenty of reactors that operate reliably so why not just dust off the drawings and build another one just like the one before?
In this podcast (1) Jigar Shah (head of DOE’s Loan Programs Office) said:
"...the first one will be more expensive, the second will be cheaper, the third one is cheaper, the fourth one's cheaper. So it is objectively the case that if you went to a 1200 MW coal site, which by definition only has 1200 infrastructure around it, and you built one AP1000, that would be more expensive than building four 300 MW reactors, because the second, third and fourth one will be cheaper than the first one."
Are you implying that building a copy of an existing PWR would be more costly (in real terms) than building the first one? After all the world has quite a variety of first ones already built.
Also claiming certain knowledge of the financial outcome of a large engineering project before one has even a prototype is pretty much the definition of hubris.
The podcast also says that there are 92 reactors operating in the US now and that one of the reasons why the US is so far behind other countries in the nuclear industry is that 'no four are the same'. So why not pick the most successful one and build a copy?
The word cheaper is doing a lot of work here. How much cheaper?
I'm not arguing that modularity is bad just that there doesn't seem to be any hard evidence yet that they will be truly modular, certainly not in the same sense as washing machines coming off a production line are. Look at how many rockets SpaceX built before they got it right.
Even production lines for much simpler things generally take some time to settle down. The idea that the second one will be noticeably cheaper than the first seems rather unlikely because it will have to incorporate fixes for the things that didn't quite work right on the first one.
Also a 300 MWe reactor is still very large machine and has to dump huge amounts of heat somewhere so the site is still important so making the individual reactors cheaper does not make the whole project correspondingly cheaper.
I have no in-depth knowledge in this area and can't offer any answers. However, I listened to the podcast a few months back and it seemed relevant to your original question. I hope you find it useful.
We should have learned by now that as soon as things go south, be it a radioactive leak or worse, it won't be any company which will cover the costs related to solving the caused problem. It will be the taxpayer.
I believe that the Price Anderson act sets aside $10 billion from the nuclear operators as a kind of insurance fund. After that the government would foot the bill. Fukushima's cleanup costs are over $100 billion.
There are some big differences with the atom bomb though :
A lot of people have been talking about AGI / the Singularity for decades, and that essay is yet another example.
Not sure if it's the hindsight talking, but the situation with (un)controlling fission was much clearer ? We knew it was at least theoretically possible. And the first test was very precisely engineered (in fact switching at the last minute to a more complex design because the calculations showed that the material wasn't pure enough to work). And the very first test worked.
Meanwhile, despite for AGI it (almost) all being out in the open, nobody can define what AGI exactly is, and it's all extremely empirical : throw compute at the wall, try another algorithm, see if the black box seems smarter, or not. Nobody knows even in theory when (or even if) AGI will be reached, and for how long scaling up compute will keep providing the very impressive results we have seen so far.
It's encouraging that people are starting to think critically about energy usage in the US and worrying about LLMs is as good introduction as any.
The main problem is that US needs to ramp down fossil fuel extraction and usage, and bring down per capita general electricity usage to levels resembling the rest of the western world. See eg this map: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use
Because in-spite of all the FUD on here, it’s magical, I use it everyday and I don’t believe we’re anywhere close to the limit of what they can deliver yet.
No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, you're in trouble.
Even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar/wind. Battery backup postpones the "range anxiety deadline" but cannot remove it. Fundamentally, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable.
Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source that can be widely adopted (cf. hydro). After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity). Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100%.
Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.
Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (probably 80 years, maybe more). The unenriched uranium fuel is very cheap (https://www.cameco.com/invest/markets/uranium-price), perhaps 5% of the cost of running the plant.
This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if greenhouse emissions matter.
Google is funding construction of 7 nuclear reactors. Microsoft is paying $100/MWh for 20 years to restart an 819 MW reactor at Three Mile Island. Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates owns a stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors. As for Meta, see Yann LeCun's unambiguous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097
In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were recently announced. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).
Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy, along with solar and wind. Many people (e.g., Germany) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this.
Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
I want to add to this that I routinely see solar plants compared on a cost basis with other forms of energy by using the nameplate capacity.
Which is, hmm. Rather than impute motive, since I'm sure motives vary, I'm going to talk about why this doesn't work. Classic heat plants (coal, diesel, nuke, doesn't matter) get around 90% of the nameplate. Specifically they're running 90% of the time, and producing at the full capacity while running. That percentage is called the capacity factor.
Because for classic generators the capacity factor is high (hydro can vary a lot based on water available in the reservoir), nameplate capacity, which is what the plant yields under ideal conditions, is usually what we talk about. The problem is that the nameplate capacity of solar is what you get on a perfectly sunny day, with the sun shining directly on the panel.
What you want in order to assess cost is the nameplate capacity multiplied by the capacity factor, which is the averaged amount of power you can get out of the plant given real-world conditions. For solar, this can push 30% in an ideal location like Arizona, and be as low as 13% in a not-ideal location like Minnesota. Wind can push 50% capacity when well installed, but it is intermittent in an even less predictable way than solar. If the wind stops in the middle of the night, all wind and solar generation put together is bupkis.
We need nuclear. We could do without all of the other carbon-free electrical generation by use of nuclear energy. I don't think we should, mind you, solar in particular has a big advantage in that it's just about the only generating source which comes in small modules, so we can chip away at generation by adding whatever's affordable and build up over time.
But next time you hear that solar is cheaper, see if you can check the numbers and determine if the claim is being made on the basis of nameplate capacity. If it is, multiply that cost by four.
Your link specifically states that no long term storage option exists, but it does so in a rather weaselly (“until {a future date}, there was not {safe long term storage}”) way that seems specifically crafted to confuse the reader.
In the US long term storage absolutely exists, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [1]. It only stores nuclear waste of military origin (i.e. from the making of the nuclear bombs). But there is no technical reason this storage can't also accommodate civilian waste. By the way, the amount of military waste exceeds the civilian waste by a factor of 3 or so.
In one sense it does exist (i.e. it's buried in salt beds 2,000 feet below surface), but is it safe?
In 2014 there was an explosion of a waste container and radioactive particles were spread throughout the facility and up to the surface by the air processing equipment in the mine.
It seems like it's not just a binary choice, but more of a continuum of how safe is the particular solution compared to others.
Nope. No nuclear energy supporter will state that nuclear energy is perfectly safe, clean, secure or reliable. Nothing is perfect, why would the bar for nuclear energy be perfection?
Nuclear energy is not perfectly safe for the obvious reason that we've had Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. It is not perfectly clean, since it produces nuclear waste. It is not perfectly secure, just look at the Zaporizhzhia power plant. It is not perfectly realiable: there are times when a lot of French reactors went offline because the water in rivers was too warm.
> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
Which energy source has stricter safety and security regulations than nuclear? Surely the strictest security regulations are applied to the least safe and secure operations?
Which other source has cleanup operations going for decades, 1000s of miles from where a single plant operated? What other power source has the military guarding its waste?
The reliability seems great until unexpected failures drops a large percentage of the national power supply in a matter of minutes (as seen in France, Sweden and Finland for example). Such events are more disruptive than cloudy days are with Solar.
> Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years
But they keep costing money for longer than the US has existed after they close.
Surely investing in hydrogen or similar is way better for the future than nuclear.
> The reliability seems great until unexpected failures drops a large percentage of the national power supply in a matter of minutes (as seen in France, Sweden and Finland for example). Such events are more disruptive than cloudy days are with Solar.
That's a failure mode common to all large centralized power plants, not exclusive to nuclear. For instance, an unexpected failure (a triple fault on one of the transmission lines coming from the power plant) of a single hydroelectric power plant caused a country-wide power outage in two countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Brazil_and_Paraguay_black...).
And even then, it took a string of extreme circumstances for Fukushima to happen, and compared to Chernobyl/TMI wasn't nearly as disastrous. A strong earthquake AND a tsunami AND people once again ignoring the safety instructions to shut it down early.
It is possible to build reactors that are physically incapable of melting down.
So to throw out the entire nuclear industry just because seems like a weird argument IMO.
Three Mile Island was a relatively safe reactor with a (partial) meltdown, which didn't cost that much, and is going to go back into production decades later. Fukushima, too, was a relatively safe reactor that caused a (partial) meltdown, but a massive financial burden.
It's debatable how much of that cost is truly necessary.
If this would've happened in the fossil fuel world, the cleanup would've been in the low billions instead of >$100B.
I would argue deep horizon was ecological a disaster several orders of magnitude worse than Fukushima, yet it cost several orders of magnitude less in cleanup.
It's almost as if we apply different scales to different energy sectors.
But there were a number of limiting factors that led to people building reactors that could meltdown, but were incredibly unlikely - see Fukushima - it didn't technically meltdown - even in a VERY bad scenario with a good bit of human error.
Pebble bed reactors are not safe, they fail for different reasons than other reactor designs but they can still fail.
They don't need fanatical attention to active cooling, but they do instead need fanatical control of the atmosphere near the reactor to prevent fires, for example.
The first prototype was built in Germany in the 60s. It was closed in 1988, had to be bailed out by the German government in 2003 and has of course been a continuous money drain on German taxpayers ever since.
From basic principles one might consider that anything that generates enormous amounts of power in a concentrated area can never be truly safe. All that energy is always a potential disaster.
Power plants that generate less power but are cheaper to make and can be distributed over a large area to ensure redundancy is a better strategy for both safety and reliability.
That's very recent and not tested enough outside of China, so personally I'm going to wait and see what X-Energy does, but it'd be great if it works out.
Meltdowns are also not the only risk. That Wikipedia article says the PBR concept was used in the AVR reactor and still resulted in a non-meltdown accident that contaminated the groundwater with radioactive substances. Again they couldn't attribute deaths to it, but the main article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor makes it look like an expensive mess with many accidents and protocol breaches. 1966 though; hopefully they've learned.
Nuclear is absolutely necessary to complete the clean energy transition, but is it really an either-or with solar and wind? We need massive amounts of clean electricity to displace fossil energy sources, not just to power the grid but also to synthesize all the chemical feedstocks that currently come from oil. The skills and resources needed to build out nuclear capacity and solar/wind capacity are quite different and needn't compete with each other.
> is it really an either-or with solar and wind? We need massive amounts of clean electricity
No. This is a false dichtomy pushed, from what I can tell, by the gas lobby. It's solar and wind + nukes or gas.
Batteries work in theory but not in practice: production doesn't scale fast enough, and that was before LLMs brought a new and growing source of power demand to the table. (I'm ignoring that grid batteries compete with transport electrification. A combination of economies of scale and common bottlenecks in construction of battery plants, irrespective of chemistry, links the pursuits.)
Batteries are radically transforming California's power grid.
In the last few years, they have displaced a huge chunk of the natural gas power used in early evenings after sunset when solar drops off but demand is still high.
Why doesn't battery production scale fast enough? Be specific on what limits it.
I firmly believe battery production can scale up very fast. Indeed, that's exactly what's been happening.
Realize that to replace all the motor vehicles in the US with BEVs would need enough batteries to store at least 40 hours of the average US grid output. This is almost certainly much more than would be needed for the grid itself.
I'm not sure that grid batteries should compete with transport electrification. One reason I haven't moved yet on batteries for the home is that I'm still interested to see what alternatives to lithium emerge. It seems to me that transport prioritises size and weight, whereas home and grid might take a hit on those measurements to maximise efficiency, durability, etc
> not sure that grid batteries should compete with transport electrification
The bottlenecks are in processing materials, forming anodes and cathodes and packaging them into cells. Processes preserved across most chemistries. There is a reason the guys who built Li-on plants are pretty good at building LFP plants, and why the guys building LFPs are making announcements about sodium.
Why can't processing be ramped up arbitrarily? There's no compelling limit on how many factories can be built.
This is the glory of industry: if the process is profitable, you can stamp out factories and generate ever larger profits, up to the point the market is saturated.
> One reason I haven't moved yet on batteries for the home is that I'm still interested to see what alternatives to lithium emerge
You could also buy a medium-sized lithium package now and already help with the transition, if you have the means, and then buy a full pack once the new hype tech becomes production-ready in 30 years (perhaps sooner but, with current warming, that's not something I'd wait on)
Nuclear is absolutely not necessary to complete the clean energy transition. It's dubious that new construction nuclear power plants are even useful for it, compared to alternatives.
No one has said it’s either-or. In fact the thread you responded specifically mentions how nuclear needs to be there as a “bad weather backup” of other clean energy sources.
Lots of people say either or. When nuclear comes up, someone will claim we should just go all in on solar, wind and batteries. That's unworkable, so we wind up burning gas.
I rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas. It's always "wind and solar is unreliable" (not intermitent).
Even in this thread someone is saying that the problem with solar is that "if a megavolcano darkens the atmosphere... thus we should go all in to nuclear", as if it was a guaranteed event in the next 100 years.
>I rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas.
It is almost always implied. It seems so obvious that nuclear should be replacing fossil fuels it doesn't seem worth mentioning. Unless someone says they're aiming for an energy policy of nuclear plus fossil fuels, it's probably safe to say their goal is nuclear and solar/wind/etc.
Even the volcano comment you mention ends with "For energy we obviously need all the options available."
I can't deduce "implied" when the comments are very, very explicit against solar and wind, not a single word about gas. But somehow I have to read between the lines that they actually meant to criticise fossils.
> rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas. It's always "wind and solar is unreliable"
People picked tribes and decided it's all or nothing. I agree--that's stupid. There is a historical alignment between renewables backers and anti-nuke activists (see: Germany) that caused nuclear to polarise away from renewables. That doesn't really exist anymore. But you see its artefacts in the debate.
It sounds like they're talking about the difference between baseload power and intermittent power. Replacing fossil fuel baseload power plants can be done now. Replacing them with variable renewable energy sources would require some sort of breakthrough in energy storage technology.
> Replacing them with variable renewable energy sources would require some sort of breakthrough in energy storage technology
No, it wouldn't. Batteries + renewables is proven and it works. The problem isn't a technological barrier. The problem is we need batteries for a lot of things and production can't ramp up fast enough.
It’s not ideal to have solar/wind and nuclear though. Nuclear doesn’t throttle well (or at least, economically). And Even building gas peak plants to cover still cloudy days is an order of magnitude lower in capital cost and risk than nuclear. The problem is we don’t have a coordinated enough system to properly reward mostly- turned off gas peak plant owners.
I meant “no one is saying that on this thread” of course. A lot of people talk about the conflict between Palestine and Israel too but we don’t bring it here because we are talking about something else.
Whatever your plan for a nuclear grid without burning fossil gas is (massive overprovision, syngas production, batteries, demand response, just ignoring the issue) it'll work better and cheaper with renewables.
> Nuclear is absolutely necessary to complete the clean energy transition, but is it really an either-or with solar and wind?
For energy we obviously need all the options available.
If a major volcano goes off up and darkens the sky with clouds and high winds make wind farms unsafe to operate, then nuclear is probably our only reliable power source left. It's not like there weren't multiple ice ages and warming events in the history of our planet.
There is a reason sailboats were obsoleted by the steam engine: it could tug forward in windless waters and stll make it fast enough to deliver the mail. The base load power station is the steam engine. The sailboat is the wind turbine or the PV array. Most of them need a gas fired power plant to compensate for windless or cloudy days, like newer sailboats need an engine. We could use a load following SMR in place of the gas fired plant.
They're mostly used for recreational sailing or racing and are also equipped with an engine (diesel or electric sail drive) for maneuvers and in case there's no wind. Sailing has also advanced a lot since the nineternth century, but commercial shipping is now done with bunker oil and diesel engines and was previously done with steamers.
> Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company.
And the deadlines keep getting pushed because the fuel supplier is Russia. Nuclear is not immune to geopolitics or the weather as this comment suggests. It's one of the many issues comments like this ignore - like the spiraling construction costs (even in China), risk trade off when it comes to the catastrophic nature of accidents, viability and enormous costs of clean up and waste storage etc.
Russia does only the enrichment of the Uranium. The western world already had their own large-scale enrichment facilities and can (and is currently) rebuilding those capacities.
It won't because people disagreeing with your view are not all uneducated morons. Their opinions are based on politics and ideology. And you can't deny that it's factually true that radioactive waste is generated. I personally don't think that this is problem compared to the alternatives, but others do and they're not just uneducated.
> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
Wasn't Fukushima a nuclear fission reactor? How is nuclear fission secure?
Yep. Personally I'd be happy with a nuclear power plant in my town, but it's not because I read some book proving to me that it's safe.
And I don't want to hear the Fukushima partial-meltdown was operator error and we just need people to not make mistakes. I'd rather be told that accidents will happen, radioactive substances will leak, and we have ways to deal with that.
Intermittent and unreliable are two different things.
Renewables are intermittent and reliable; if a wind producer has bid into the day-ahead auction, you can expect with very high reliability they will deliver as bid.
Nuclear is great, so is zero-marginal-cost energy producers :)
And recently found the be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.
It needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.
Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
Yes, that shit study which models supplying the entire grid with one energy source and lithium storage through all weather conditions.
I would suggest reading the study I linked so you can see the difference in methodology when credible researches in the field tackle similar question.
The credible studies are focused on simulating the energy system and market with real world constraints. Which unsurprisingly works out to be way cheaper when not involving nuclear in the picture.
it models solar+wind+storage + even brings the 95% supply into discussion and it's still better for nuclear.
I suggest you to understand that 4h storage is a totally unrealistic requirement and h2 production is a pipedream for foreseeable future
> I suggest you to understand that 4h storage is a totally unrealistic requirement
If California simply continues their current storage rollout they will have 10 hours of storage at peak demand and 20 hours of storage at average demand when the warranties for what they build today run out in 20 years.
This would coincide with any new nuclear power plant project starting today beginning commercial operations.
If Vogtle, Flamanville 3 and friends had delivered on their promises in the 2000s nuclear power might have been part of the solution. They did not do it, and thus nuclear power never became part of the solution.
> h2 production is a pipedream for foreseeable future
When we get to the final percent in the 2030s we can utilize akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity markets [1] but zero carbon.
Peaker plants today already run too little to be economical on their own, essentially what in our current grids constitute seasonal storage and emergency reserves.
Simply update the terms for the capacity markets to require the fuel to be zero-carbon. It can be synfuels, biofuels or hydrogen. Whatever comes out the cheapest.
As we electrify transportation we can shift over the massive ethanol blending in gasoline in the US to be our seasonal buffer. [2]
Not so sure about California https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO especially considering at some point peaker/overcapacity/storage would need huge subsidies to be built, especially considering California wants to shut down it's nuclear.
Vogtle unit 4 was cheaper and faster than unit 3, meaning there is positive learning curve.
> Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels.
How does that follow?
How does using nuclear for some of our energy needs bias the rest of our energy sources towards fossil fuels? As opposed to renewables or even more nuclear?
We get vastly more bang for the buck when investing in renewables.
Fixing climate change is both having enough energy to displace all fossil fuel we consume and being quick enough with the transition lessen the end state carbon content in the atmosphere.
I still don't see how nuclear prolonging fossil fuels follows from any of that.
Building nuclear doesn't prevent or slow the rest from transitioning to renewable. If anything, it can get us off of fossil fuels faster because it handles the base load.
Totally agree. The move away from research in nuclear technology towards unreliable "green tech" is a colossal mistake. I'm not sure why Germany did it. Reliable power is the life blood of an economy. With electric cars (and possibly trucks) more will depend on power capacity a country is able to reliably produce.
Research safety and disposal. Add funds to that research so that we can get over our fear. We did it for airlines its time to do it for nuclear power.
A lot of people knock h2 as a fuel, but 1/2 the time these complaints seem to not be of a technical merit, but some blather about how it will all come from Ng.
Nonsense.
Such things can be regulated, but my point is that solar and wind are perfect for h2 generation. The sun shines? Produce. The wind blows? Produce.
The variability is irrelevant, and the result is the creation of a fuel source that can be stored.
Even better, we already have an immense network of Ng pipes, and there have been many tests and studies on injecting h2 into Ng lines, and pulling it out at the other end with molecular filters. There is no molecular reaction either.
The means low cost, massively deployed infra already exists.
And this massive network of Ng lines, with h2 injected, can in effect be an immense storage tank of h2.
We don't need some unified "batteries only" group think, but instead having multiple clean sources of energy is a boon. Just the cost of adding 3x the power transmission capacity, distribution is daunting, h2 can let a faster rollout of clean transport occur.
We should embrace all paths which the market can endure amd which can be green.
Using the existing natural gas lines for hydrogen would be pretty disruptive. I don't think most things that burn natural gas will work properly on H2. So, you're looking at a big-bang switchover, in which every appliance connected to the natural gas "grid" in the area will need replacing at the same time. In the Northeast at least, it's common for houses to use natural gas for heating, water-heating, and/or cooking.
> doesn't cooperate for time T+1, you're in trouble.
Unscheduled maintenance intervals exist everywhere. This is not a unique problem.
> They are intermittent and unreliable.
On a 24 hour ahead basis. On a year to year basis, they're always available, and are absurdly reliable.
> And natural gas is a poor choice if greenhouse emissions matter.
There is nothing that can save you from being required to hold a broad mix of power generation technologies. Building a monoculture here is completely counterproductive and probably hastens the destruction.
> despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained
That container is mechanical. It has a failure rate. Failures never occur when you _want_ them to. Again, a _depth_ of strategies is appropriate here.
"Send it by train then bury it under a mountain and just forget about it" is not an actual strategy. It seems to work, because we probably just don't know any better yet, but the people who are uncomfortable are right to be so. Pretending that they simply lack "education" is a pretty rude point of view.
Burying radioactive waste in places unchanged for hundreds of millions of years is probably safe enough.
(Sadly, we have to consider that long because the current climate change is also unprecedented on these timescales.)
I am appalled though that anyone is seriously considering the idea of container-sized reactors, for which we can be nearly certain, if this seriously takes off, and we make million(s) of them, that hundreds if not thousands will end up abandoned in random places, and weathering will pierce them before they become radilogically inert.
> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, you're in trouble.
Yes, any finite quantity is less than infinity. The same is true for fuel deliveries.
Does nuclear fission avoid the issue of meltdowns? Genuinely curious. The only downside I see to nuclear power is geopolitics/war (like we're seeing in Ukraine) so we don't cause even bigger catastrophes due to instability.
There are designs which avoid meltdowns, yes. Because the fuel is already molten. Like FliBe. It has a safety plug which if melts, the fuel flows in a contained reservoir and solidifies.
ap1000 would have withstanded fukushima. And plants are designed to withstand an impact with an airplane. So all in all, yes, pretty safe. Gen4 will be even better especially with fuel dilation designs
Nuclear fission is the reaction that has had meltdowns. There are fission technologies/strategies that are supposed to be meltdown-proof, but I do not know the science well enough to say whether that is true.
that's kinda true but not yet commercially deployed. The main idea is on overheat fuel expands and fission reaction is stopped/reduced due to higher distance
Assuming only batteries are used for storage is one of the common bullshit arguments against renewables. It's bad strawman engineering.
What works much better is a combination of batteries and an e-fuel like hydrogen. Batteries handle most of the stored energy flow; hydrogen handles the rarer long term storage needs. They complement each other, in a way like cache memory and RAM complement each other.
CAES stores much less energy than hydrogen per unit of storage volume. So, for sufficiently long storage times, hydrogen is far better than CAES. For those long storage times, there are proportionally fewer charge/discharge cycles, so the cost of the hydrogen itself becomes proportionally less important.
CAES is likely going to be squeezed out by batteries, but hydrogen addresses the extreme storage use case (just a few cycles/year) where both batteries and CAES are unsuitable.
The pacing technology for green hydrogen is low capex electrolysers. China, as usual, is leading the charge on this. I understand 4% of hydrogen production in China is now from electrolysis.
hydrogen generators either use a mix with gas or pure h2 that has huge nox emissions. And the problem is that green h2 isn't economical now and even if it'll be someday - the plant will still need subsidies always due to low usage
Green H2 isn't competitive with cheap NG unburdened by CO2 taxes.
Realize that global H2 production is enormous -- 75 million tons/year for pure H2, another 24 MT for hydrogen in mixed gas streams -- and much of this needs to be produced even when we're entirely off fossil fuels. Green hydrogen is not an optional thing. So all the problems of making and storing it are going to have to be solved. Once that's done, adding some turbines (very much like existing ones; it's likely possible to just retrofit existing NG turbines with new combustors) is not a large additional step. These turbines already have an after stage that reduces NOx back to N2.
I'd think that just pooling the money from multiple consumers into large AP1000 power plants buildouts would be cheaper.
So far economies of vertical scaling mostly led to cheaper energy than more smaller units.
Ideally youd have one company with a lot of skilled labor building NPPs all the time instead of only every few decades, because that means experienced workers change jobs/retire, supply chains cease to exist and this leads to cost and time overruns.
Still great to see finally more money being invested into this limitless technology (nuclear fission)
SMRs ain't it [1]. The LCOE of nuclear is the worst of any power geneartion method. The failure modes are catastrophic. Chernobyl has an absolute exclusion deal ~40 years later of 1000 square miles (literally). Fukushima's clean up costs will approach $1 trillion [2] and take likely over a century. These get hand-waved away as irrelevant outliers.
The idea that SMRs are safer is yet to be proven. SMRs have a scaling issue in that a larger reactor is simply more efficient.
Solar currently can produce about 1000 Watts per square meter (likely 200-400 in practice) so 500MW of power is going to be 1-1.5 square kilometers of solar panels. You can say it's varies in effectiveness geographically. That's true. But you can build your data centers pretty much anywhere. The Sun Belt, California or Colorado spring to mind [3].
Data centers just don't need a base load. You can simply not run them when there isn't sufficient power. Google already does. Its data center in Finland basically shuts down when it gets too hot. It's otherwise cooled by the sea. This was deemed to be more efficient than having active cooling infrastructure.
So 500MW of power is what? 4B kWh/year? In California, one benchmark I found was about 10kWh/year per square foot. That's ~4 square kilometers as a very conservative estimate.
Fukushima is really the only outlier, and the lesson learned should be it's probably a bad idea to build nuclear reactors near active fault lines.
Most of the extremely pessimistic total cost estimates are around $750B for Fukushima, and that's not the present value. That's money spent so far in the future the discount rate is substantial. Japan's official estimate is $187B, with probably a $100B NPV.
Chernobyl was an inherently (and well known) unsafe design. When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
The cost of burning fossil fuels is estimated to be well, well over $1T.
> Most of the extremely pessimistic total cost estimates are around $750B for Fukushima
This isn't the defense or retort that you think it is. This is from ONE incident. The industry recognizes the long tail of catastrophic failures is so large that laws have been passed to limit nuclear power liability in the US. I'm talking specifically about the Price-Anderson Act [1].
This severely limits nuclear power liability to ~$500 million per incident. That's a lot less than $1T or $750B or whatever figure you prefer. So who picks up the tab in a catastrophic event? Taxpayers. It's another example of how nuclear power can only exist with government subsidies. Yet we apparently want to trust private corporations to manage nuclear power plants and take the profits while shifting the risk to the public.
Additionally there's a self-insurance fund, but it would be completely inadequate to cover an incident like Fukushima. This is recognized [2].
> The cost of burning fossil fuels is estimated to be well, well over $1T.
So this is a strawman on two fronts. First, you're comparing the cost of a single massive failure by one plant to the entire fossil fuel industry. Second, I never even said fossil fuel power. I said solar.
The typical reaction is I think supported by an efficient markets pov - in other words this is dumb, we know it’s dumb, but market failures make it look to the owners of capital that it’s a good investment
1. There is too much money in the world for the investments (Massive QE post 2008 and post covid). Hence people with money want returns on tokens that say 10 dollars in the front instead of say 5 dollars
2. The externalities of nuclear power are not properly priced in (see Chernobyl)
3. The price of tax compared to services received for wealthy is again out of whack and so any investment looks good because the whole chain is not paying enough tax
All in all, I believe in efficient markets and price mechanisms - I just also believe people with power and influence bend the markets to their own needs and guess what they stop being efficient - hence the need for strong governments (not strongman governments)
What about the positive externalities of nuclear power? It’s unfair to only complain about negative externalities - any action whatsoever always has a negative side-effect which can be used as a cynical excuse to block it.
Downthread I go on (much) longer, but honestly I see the maths as simple
1. We want to generate electricity with minimal carbon output.
2. Nuclear is part of this equation (along with solar, wind and tidal. Maybe one day fusion)
3. Nuclear has large capital upfront, a maintenance cost that requires us to always be on the A game, and the cost of catastrophic failure is fucking huge.
4. The other options have downsides of course, but their ongoing maintenance is basically lower because the catastrophe cost is much much much lower.
5. It’s really hard to quantify things like “major urban area made uninhabitable”, because it has almost never happened. But it can and it will if we keep chucking risk around like this.
6. The way to stop this, no the way to align investment, is to correct price externalities - positive and negative.
If we want to re- start places like Indian Point (a relative well
Managed successful nuclear plant whose history reads like a series of disasters) then we ask what if Indian point failed like Fukushima.
That’s Westchester, and most of Manhattan that suddenly looks like a disaster movie. No Fukushima was not actually as deadly as feared (1 person kinda), but the evacuation and knock on effects. Try that on the Hudson and see what the cost of evacuating New York is - I mean, shipping, finance everything.
Honestly I struggle to see what’s crazy anymore.
How about every bond raised to fund a nuclear plant has a 100 year lien attached that no payments can be made till a century of safe operation and closure has occurred.
If the financials make sense after that I will take another look.
Nuclear power has almost unlimited downsides
and fairly limited upsides.
It’s at least as expensive (and mostly more) to maintain a nuclear power station
As any other form of (non-carbon) power generation - and the costs of catastrophic failure and orders of magnitude higher.
This is just back of the envelope maths. Cost to maintain a power station of X GW for 100 years is X, cost to maintain solar panels of X GW for 100 years is Y. Cost of total catastrophic failure in fifty years of solar panels because the country fell apart is small y. Cost of total catastrophic failure of fission reactor is huge great X.
The simplest analysis just comes up with huge downsides.
Look I take the train past Battersea powerstation most days. It was built 100 years ago at the height (?) of the British Empire. It became disused as Britain fell into bankruptcy in the 70s and was left to fester for decades before people realised a vast shopping centre in the middle of London was quite nice.
If it was nuclear it would still be sealed off, any slacking of maintenance, any cost saving too far, would fuck up the world’s greatest city .
And if you think the worlds most powerful and richest country could always afford the very best maintenance - let me introduce you to political decision making in the 1960s, industrial policy in the 1970s and human beings who tend to hope as a strategy.
It’s not hard to pretend the obvious won’t happen, and if you take the risk sometimes you will be right. And the cautious man will look silly.
But in the end Warren Buffet looks more sensible than Dick Fuld.
And even Warren is aware he pays far less tax relative to his maid.
But it’s upto us to fix that just as it’s upto us to not make bad investment choices as a society that we will pay costly annual fees for centuries to come.
The designers of new reactors (the one in this article specifically, and others too) claim that the design is inherently safe and has no possibility of catastrophic meltdown.
If this is true, then you are greatly overestimating the downside costs.
The result of a failed system won't be as inert and benign as a failed solar panel, but it is also unlikely to be "fuck up the entire city", especially when considering the smaller modular deployment.
The cheque is in the post, I will still respect you in the morning,
Come on. I’m not saying new designs are Rube Goldberg machines flinging radioactive waste around, but “perfectly safe for the next hundred or five hundred years” is complete rubbish. There is no such thing.
This is not about engineering - this is about humans, how humans react in the face of profitable deals, and the history of engineering safe systems (one death or catastrophe at a time)
Genuine question: How will the US put the cat back in the bag?
AI even if stuck to GPT 4~ levels has the potential to be usable in industries and outcompeted non AI users, as such, how can the US tell people that they shouldn't get nuclear power plants?
We'll sell you products and services that utilize AI and you are not allowed to get it yourself, is that the new model? It's no secret (I think?) that the US was behind many of the nuclear scare movements such as the green party in Germany as to avoid nuclear proliferation, for its own interests.
But if nuclear becomes required, and we are decades away from nuclear fusion...? what is the solution here? I'm genuinely curious.
The US was exporting reactors all around the world. Most of those reactors are light water reactors using low enriched uranium fuel, its not that big of a nuclear weapons proliferation concern.
https://archive.is/fdSXf
Based on the headline I thought that this was an enormous capital commitment for an enormous generating capacity, but the deal is with a company called Kairos that is developing small modular reactors with 75 megawatts of electrical output each [1]. 7 reactors of this type, collectively, would supply 525 megawatts (less than half of a typical new commercial power reactor like the AP1000, HPR1000, EPR, or APR1400).
Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027:
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/kairos-power-starts-const...
EDIT: Statement from the official Google announcement linked by xnx below [2]:
Today, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.
[1] https://kairospower.com/technology/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841108
This is all about the revival of pebble-bed reactors, which were attemped several decades ago but had problems with the graphite pebbles breaking down and releasing graphite fragments that clogged the pipes, basically. China is way ahead on this with helium-cooled versions. The big deal is that in the event of complete power loss (see Fukushima) they go into shutdown without melting down, although if the coolant lost and replaced with air you would get a nasty Chernobyl-style graphite fire. Still an improvement in safety. See:
> "Several high-temperature thermal neutron–spectrum pebble bed reactors are being commercialized. China has started up two helium-cooled pebble bed high-temperature reactors. In the United States, the X-Energy helium-cooled and the Kairos Power salt-cooled pebble bed high-temperature reactors will produce spent nuclear fuel (SNF) with burnups exceeding 150 000 MWd per tonne. The reactor fuel in each case consists of small spherical graphite pebbles (4 to 6 cm in diameter) containing thousands of small TRISO (microspheric tri-structural isotropic) fuel particles embedded in the fuel of zone these pebbles."
(2024) "Safeguards and Security for High-Burnup TRISO Pebble Bed Spent Fuel and Reactors"
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2023.2...
and
https://www.powermag.com/nuclear-milestone-chinas-htr-pm-dem...
> although if the coolant lost and replaced with air you would get a nasty Chernobyl-style graphite fire
Or alternatively, radioactive dust could be released into the atmosphere such as THTR-300 did.
INL did a gap analysis in 2011 between what was known and what needed research. The german AVR reactor had technical issues that weren't expected -- dust being one of them.
https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/5026004.pdf
From what I can tell the dust issue is still a point of contention.
Would be extremely interesting to the the $/MWh for the deal to understand the viability.
Otherwise similar to the NuScale deal which fell through last autumn.
A PPA like agreement which then only kept rising until all potential utilities had quit the deal.
All honor to Kairos if they can deliver, but history is against them. Let’s hope they succeed.
> NuScale has a more credible contract with the Carbon Free Power Project (“CFPP”) for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (“UAMPS”). CFPP participants have been supportive of the project despite contracted energy prices that never seem to stop rising, from $55/MWh in 2016, to $89/MWh at the start of this year. What many have missed is that NuScale has been given till around January 2024 to raise project commitments to 80% or 370 MWe, from the existing 26% or 120 MWe, or risk termination. Crucially, when the participants agreed to this timeline, they were assured refunds for project costs if it were terminated, which creates an incentive for them to drop out. We are three months to the deadline and subscriptions have not moved an inch.
https://iceberg-research.com/2023/10/19/nuscale-power-smr-a-...
> All honor to Kairos if they can deliver, but history is against them.
History is not really against them. Our current reactors (mainly pressurized water reactors) are the way they are because Admiral Rickover determined that PWRs are the best option for submarines. He was not wrong, but civilian power reactors are not the same as the reactors powering submarines.
PWRs are expensive mainly because of the huge pressure inside the reactor core, about 150 times higher than the atmospheric pressure. For comparison, a pressure cooker has an internal pressure about 5 times higher than the atmospheric pressure, and such a cooker can explode with a pretty loud bang.
The Kairos Hermes reactor design is based on a design that was tested in the '60s, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment [1]. While such a reactor can be used to burn thorium, Kairos decided to go with the far more conventional approach of burning U-235. The reactor operates at approximately regular atmospheric pressure. This should reduce considerably the construction costs.
Of course, there are unknowns. While the world has built thousands of pressurized water reactors, it has built maybe 10 molten salt reactors. For example one quite unexpected effect in the MSRE was the enbrittlement of the reactor vessel caused by tellurium, which shows up as a fission product when U-235 burns.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a very conservative organization, and they don't have much experience with molten salt reactors because nobody has. It took them 6 years to give NuScale an approval for a pressurized water reactor, design that they knew in and out. My guess is that they will not give Kairos an approval without at least 15 years of testing. But Google's agreement with Kairos is quite crucial to keep this testing going.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
> The Kairos Hermes reactor design is based on a design that was tested in the '60s, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment
MSRs are a costly distraction. They are not viable without literally hundreds of billions in research and development money. That's why all the MSRs startups are failing long before they even start the licensing process.
> For example one quite unexpected effect in the MSRE was the enbrittlement of the reactor vessel caused by tellurium, which shows up as a fission product when U-235 burns.
It was not unexpected. The _main_ issue with MSRs is that they have to contain fluoride salts that release elemental fluorine radicals as a result of radiolysis. So the reactor vessel walls will be eaten up by them, rather rapidly. Especially when reactors are scaled up to a level that makes them practical. And then you have all the fission byproducts that literally include almost all the Periodic Table.
> They are not viable without literally hundreds of billions in research and development money.
The US produces 40000 billion kWh every decade, so that doesn't really seem that bad to me.
Sure. But why? MSRs don't have any real features that are worth spending that much money.
Modern PWRs are just as passively safe, if they lose cooling and melt down, the molten fuel will be safely contained by the core catcher.
Uranium is also not scarce, and if we want to get into breeding reactors, existing fuel reprocessing is an established industry, on which we _already_ have spent several hundred billion dollars.
The thing about R&D spending is that it is speculative. Even if that question does have satisfying answers; it is unreasonable to expect people to prove that R&D will have a commercially successful outcomes with foresight.
Then why not fund fusion reactors?
Or maybe thorium reactors ON A ZEPPELIN! With microwave power transmission. After all, if the objective to spend money on research, then what can be cooler than a nuclear reactor on a blimp?
You know? That sounds actually interesting because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-moderated_self-regula...
Hydrogen can be so hawt!1!!
If you actually think that is a good idea you can try to give it a go. There are worse things to dedicate a life to and it might have big applications in disaster recovery scenarios or something.
When solar and wind and sodium ion batteries are basically there and probably don't need as much investment and R&D (or it's happening anyway from 1000 existing funding sources), it's probably bad. Or at least unlikely to happen.
Sodium batteries theoretically should be cheaper than li-ion, but they are not yet there in practice. And they still won't solve problems with polar vortexes in the US or a month-long Dunkelflaute in Germany.
CATL’s first generation sodium batteries, shipped in Chery cars are $77/kWh
CATL’s lithium phosphate batteries are more expensive for now at >$100kWh.
Sodium batteries are definitely cheaper in practice, but much lower energy density.
The question is how far CATL can push energy density, and the second generation is claimed to be >200Wh/kh.
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/catl-and-byd-to-start-pro...
https://www.westchestercleanenergy.com/post/record-low-lithi...
Energy density is a bit less relevant for grid storage, though. Not like you run out of space to put them.
Very true. The other factors multiply, though, like reliability and degradation, because there are so many packs involved and because they're expected to work for, well, as long as physically possible.
Dunkelflaute simply doesn't exist. It's clearly visible in the charts of the last years that wind and solar almost ideally complement each other in Germany. Why else do you think Germany managed to stay above 50% renewables for every single month this year so far? In which season is the mythical Dunkelflaute supposed to appear?
> Dunkelflaute simply doesn't exist.
Here's one: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&... - look at the dates between 2019-01-16 to 2019-01-25.
> It's clearly visible in the charts of the last years
I have just provided you an example. Want more? Here's another: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&... - the period between 2023-02-04 and 2024-02-08, then followed by 2023-02-12 to 2023-02-15.
But hey, it's all fake news. When the next Dunkelflaute happens, the citizens are supposed to just sit in their cold homes and think how great renewable generation is during the other times.
You postulated that there are periods existing where there would be no/very low combined and solar for over a month, yet you only posted links to periods of very low wind generation for less than a day.
Even better, if you look at energy flow in the EU grid for e.g. the period from 2023-02-12 to 2023-02-15, you'll see that we actually exported energy to nuclear-powered France, and imported from renewables-powered Denmark.
That's actually a proof that renewables saved the day there, because lack of wind is always only a regional phenomenon.
And here's the correlation coefficient between countries:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-coefficients...
Like today we will need peaking capacity in the future, likely either based on hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels.
What we don't need is nuclear power plants which sit idle at all times unless there is a winter dunkeflaute across half of Europe.
> https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-coefficients...
The problem is, this is average. You _have_ to plan the grid for the worst case scenario. For Germany, the worst case is 1 month of straight Dunkelflaute. It's estimated to happen once in 100 years.
> Like today we will need peaking capacity in the future, likely either based on hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels.
It's not peaking capacity. It has to be more than 100% of the current capacity (once Germany switches to electricity instead of gas for heating). And it'll be mostly sitting idle.
> What we don't need is nuclear power plants which sit idle at all times unless there is a winter dunkeflaute across half of Europe.
Build nukes, remove wind generators. Problem solved.
No grid is sized for the 100 year catastrophe. Then we need to make the same calculation for when half the French nuclear fleet was offline.
Consider an even worse issue and expect 80% to be offline for the 100 year catastrophe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
In reality we work with statistics. In for example Sweden the “reliability guarantee” is at most one hour of demand exceeding production per year.
That’s a reliability of 99.8%.
Building nuclear power plants would mean locking in enormously more expensive energy costs for everyone, stalling the green revolution in terms of electrification of industry.
This is the problem with nukebros, there’s no logic to the suggestions. Only a complete fixation on nuclear power as the solution to everything.
Which means widespread continued fossil use and energy crisis power cost for the general public.
But that’s a price you’re willing to pay as long as we spend trillions of dollars on subsidies of nuclear power.
> No grid is sized for the 100 year catastrophe.
Utterly wrong. Grids _are_ sized for that.
> Then we need to make the same calculation for when half the French nuclear fleet was offline.
French shutdowns were _planned_. Nobody died as a result, and it only cost more money than planned as a result of unlucky confluence of events.
> In reality we work with statistics. In for example Sweden the “reliability guarantee” is at most one hour of demand exceeding production per year.
You have it backwards. Sweden is ready to accept one hour of outage per year. Not more than that.
The failure scenario for Germany is not an hour of outage, but a month without energy. Leading to millions of people dead and a total economic collapse.
> This is the problem with nukebros, there’s no logic to the suggestions. Only a complete fixation on nuclear power as the solution to everything.
There's no fucking shame and zero self-reflection with you greenies.
Germany _wasted_ close to $500B on useless Energiewende and is still directly _subsidizing_ _new_ _gas_ _powerplants_. And it'll need to spend even more than that to have even a _hope_ of carbon neutrality, contingent on multiple speculative bets coming true.
Instead they could have used the same amount of money to build a completely carbon-neutral nuclear-powered grid. That would have been available by now. Using technology that was tried and tested in 2000-s.
They’re not. When considering the resilience of the Swedish grid a 10-year winter is used.
So maybe stop with the hyperboles?
Then a ton of post-fact reasoning for why it was actually fine that half the French nuclear supply was offline during the largest energy crisis in a generation.
Please get back to reality.
Wasted? For the first time since the Industrial Revolution we have found a new cheapest near infinitely scalable energy source: renewables.
Nuclear power was the last attempt, it never delivered on the promises.
I love how you say that it would be “available now” when Flamaville 3 started at the same time currently is 6x over budget and 12 year late on a 5 year planned construction timeline.
Germany would have had massive cumulative emissions when still waiting for nuclear power to come online.
But that’s the problem with you guys. You don’t care about emissions. It’s completely fine locking in fossil fuels for 20 years as we wait for nuclear power to come online.
And then in the next sentence you turn around denigrating even a single percentage of fossil fuels as we transition into a renewable grid, before said nuclear would come online.
It’s simply completely senseless. You’re making ridicule of yourself.
> Wasted? For the first time since the Industrial Revolution we have found a new cheapest near infinitely scalable energy source: renewables.
For the _second_ time. The first time was with the nuclear power. Keep forgetting that, yes?
> Nuclear power was the last attempt, it never delivered on the promises.
France has an 8 _times_ less carbon-intensive grid than Germany. RIGHT NOW. Keep forgetting that, yes? They can go to carbon-neutral with fairly minimal changes.
> I love how you say that it would be “available now” when Flamaville 3 started at the same time currently is 6x over budget and 12 year late on a 5 year planned construction timeline.
Russia is finishing the Bangladesh nuclear power plant. On time and within budget. 2 reactors completely built within 10 years. If Russia can do that, other countries can certainly replicate that.
> Germany would have had massive cumulative emissions when still waiting for nuclear power to come online.
Germany is right now already _locked_ into future emissions for more than 20 years. Even freaking _coal_ (!) is not being phased out until 2038: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-government-says-...
> And then in the next sentence you turn around denigrating even a single percentage of fossil fuels as we transition into a renewable grid, before said nuclear would come online.
Again, zero reflection from your side. Zero contrition, zero knowledge, and endless excuses.
France is literally the next door. Their carbon intensity for energy production is just 12% of Germany's. Right now. Germany in the best possible case won't be able to match that until 2040-s. In reality, it won't happen unless something magical occurs.
Nuclear power never became cheaper. As evidenced by it's continued languishing only supported by subsidies.
Hydro power did, and is famously called "geographically limited" because we in short order exploited near every single river globally.
France made the right choice in the 70s in the name of energy independence and nuclear weapons. They did not care the slightest about emissions.
The equivalent choice in 2024 to nuclear power in the 1970s is renewables.
"Hurr durr my cherry picked reactor!!!"
While completely ignoring all western projects. The facts are: Flamanville 3 still haven't entered commercial operation and the projected was started at about the same time as energiewende.
Flamanville, HPC, Olkiluoto 3 and Vogtle are the successful western projects. The unsuccessful get stuck in financing limbo like Sizewell C because the needed subsidies are truly stupid.
https://www.ft.com/content/2a5d9462-b921-4577-82c1-4eb508775...
You are proposing that Germany in 2024 should have emissions closer to Poland because you value building nuclear power above curbing emissions.
Lets do a thought experiment in which renewables somehow end up being wholly incapable of solving the last 20% of carbon emissions.
Scenario one: We push renewables hard, start phasing down fossil fuels linearly 4 years from now, a high estimate on project length, and reach 80% by 2045.
The remaining 20%, we can't economically phase out (remnant peaker plants).
Scenario two: We push nuclear power hard, start phasing down fossil fuels linearly in 10 years time, a low estimate on project length and reach 100% fossil free in 2060.
Do you know what this entails in terms of cumulative emissions?
Here's the graph: https://imgur.com/wKQnVGt
The nuclear option will overtake the renewable one in 2094. It means we have 60 years to solve the last 20 percent of renewables while having emitted less.
Do you still care about our cumulative emissions when any dollar spent on nuclear power increases them?
They don't need to solve month-long dunkelflaute. You burn a little natural gas for that. The priority for climate change mitigation is to get to 97% carbon free soon, rather than 100% carbon free in 30 years. The AUC of emissions is all that matters.
Also, both li-on and sodium are cheap and getting cheaper, so the latter being more expensive currently is kind of moot.
> You burn a little natural gas for that.
For that you need to have 100% of idle capacity just sitting there.
> The priority for climate change mitigation is to get to 97% carbon free soon
No, it's not. The priority is to shake down consumers to get as much money to Greenie cronies as possible. That's why Germany is straightforwardly _subsidizig_ new natural gas power plants. With a pinkie-promise to be "hydrogen ready", maybe sometime in 2030-s.
We already have rain and hydro power plants. Batteries are similar: they store a finite amount of energy. So battery PV and wind have their place as peaker plants to replace gas fired power plants and hydro. Otherwise one could just smelt aluminium with the excess electricity like the Germans do.
Intermittency is a tough thing to handle. The US uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. The word used 60,000 GWh per day. Evening out daily fluctuations, let alone seasonal fluctuations, demands an enormous amount of storage.
>Graham says that the CSIRO modelling showed that at very high levels of wind and solar, a maximum of half a day’s average demand was needed for storage. In some areas of the grid, only around three hours might be needed.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/much-storage-needed-solar-wind-p...
Sadly, there's far, far, far too much FUD floating around about storage (understandably, coz wind+solar threatens the nuclear+carbon lobbies), and not enough thorough and realistic studies like this one.
I've heard people say "oh you cant pay attention to this study because it's in Australia which must be discounted because [reasons], what about [ other country ]?", and I'd welcome seeing an alternative study making appropriate assumptions, but none of these comments so far come attached to anything other than FUD.
I've also seen far, far too many people build or cite a "naive" models that make inappropriate assumptions (e.g. that zero power is generated at night by wind).
The further a region is to the poles, the worse intermittency becomes. Both for solar and for wind: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
> However, the share of solar generation increases less, or even decreases, in higher-latitude countries like Russia, Canada, and Germany (Fig. 2b). These trends continue as more storage is added, so that with 12 h of energy storage and no excess annual generation, 83–94% (average 90%) of electricity demand is met with mixes of 10–70% solar power (49% on average; Fig. 2c).
Even with 12 hours of storage, Germany would be seeing blackouts weekly.
To put this in perspective:
> reliability standards in industrialized countries are typically very high (e.g., targeting <2–3 h of unplanned outages per year, or ~99.97%). Resource adequacy planning standards for “1-in-10” are also high: in North America (BAL-502-RF-03), generating resources must be adequate to provide no more than 1 day of unmet electricity demand—or in some cases 1 loss of load event—in 10 years (i.e., 99.97% or 99.99%, respectively)
So no, even with 12 hours of storage and 50% overcapacity, we'd have an unacceptably unreliable grid.
Also, your linked article is not modelling a carbon-free grid:
> Graham says that the CSIRO modelling showed that at very high levels of wind and solar, a maximum of half a day’s average demand was needed for storage. In some areas of the grid, only around three hours might be needed.
What are these "very high levels of wind and solar"? How much of the remaining demand is satisfied by fossil fuels? The article doesn't say.
50% overcapacity of renewables is still spending way, way less than the equivalent for nuclear. How do the numbers look with 100% or 200% overcapacity, where you're still spending about half of what you would spend on nuclear?
Adding more overcapacity just wastes energy. Storage is the main bottleneck to widespread renewable adoption without frequent blackouts. Having more energy when you don't need it is only really useful if you can store that energy.
No, it also makes the probability of supply not meeting demand lower. Overcapacity tends to feature in most analysis of a fully renewable grid because of that and because it's currently cheaper than storage for all but very short timescales.
> I've heard people say "oh you cant pay attention to this study because it's in Australia
So a study for Australia should be applicable everywhere else? Like in Germany or Norway?
Norway is already 100% renewable because it has lots of hydropower. Germany on the other hand, would suffer from an extremely unreliable grid even with 50% overproduction and 12 hours of storage. The further a region is from the equator, the more variability in the production of wind and solar. This study models how reliable grids would be with wind, solar, and storage: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
The issue is that electrical grids have very high reliability requirements (upwards of 99.95%). Plenty of models claiming that small amounts of storage required neglect to mention how frequently they will encounter insufficient generation. Remember, even fulfilling demand 99% of the time is a 20x increase in blackouts.
Also, even just 12 hours of storage globally would be 30,000 GWh of storage. That's still about 50 times the amount of batteries produced annually. The reality is that hydropower is the only feasible form of grid storage.
More applicable than FUD.
I am, as I said, still waiting for models which demonstrate that it is wildly different...
I actually worked on such a model professionally (as in "being paid for it") in 2006, for Germany.
Here's a good overview article: https://energytransition.org/2017/07/germanys-worse-case-sce...
> Germany will always need dispatchability roughly at the level of its annual peak demand
The solution they're proposing is power-to-gas. Which so far has been way too expensive to matter.
P2G isn't actually horrendously expensive compared to nuclear power, it's just horrendously expensive to regular old natural gas.
Power to gas for the "worst case scenarios" would also be the last thing you'd do to transition a grid from 97% carbon free to 100% carbon free.
Or just overbuild your generation sources?
How is overbuilding going to help when the source of the power itself is intermittent? The sun regularly sets and the wind has this unfortunate habit of not blowing. Or, oddly enough, blowing too much.
If we hope to go 100% renewable, storage is a key piece of that puzzle.
Nuclear also has this problem because it cannot be easily tuned down during low demand periods.
Much of the pumped hydro that exists today was built to handle excess nuclear.
Nuclear can handle variable loads just fine, if reactors are designed with load-following in mind. France does that, for example.
Technically yes if you have an entire fleet to both spread the load following across and their manage their fuel cycles since they get less flexible the further into a fuel cycle a reactor is.
Economically? Load following with nuclear power means an even worse business case than running at 100% 24/7. And nuclear power is already a laughably bad business case when running at 100%.
You don't need to change fuel cycles to reduce the output of a nuclear plant. You can accomplish it by more aggressively cooling the water in the steam turbines, effectively wasting heat (and thus generating less power).
Nuclear is a bad business case compared to a fossil fuel grid. Solar and wind backed by fossil fuels are a better business choice, too. But when it comes to a fossil-fuel free grid, it's the only viable option if you don't have a big source of hydropower nearby. Batteries can't deliver the required storage capacity. Remember, the world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. And as transportation and industrial uses of fossil fuels are electrified, that'll increase.
Batteries and hydro are not the only storage options.
What are the other storage options? Besides batteries and hydroelectric, there's only prototype technologies that haven't seen any significant deployment at scale. Compressed air, hydrogen, and power to gas have been tried but no at anywhere near grid scales.
Five years ago batteries weren’t anywhere near grid scale either. Arguably they still aren’t. That doesn’t mean we should not consider them when talking snot the grid in 2040.
Sure. But we also shouldn't assume they will be successful at grid-scale either. Planning a grid assuming that some future storage technology will be a silver bullet that solves grid storage is a massive gamble.
Hydroelectric storage is the only grid-scale energy storage system available to us, and it's geographically dependent. And the places that are suitable for hydroelectric storage usually don't need it because they can just generate electricity via hydropower anyway. Until your hypothetical breakthrough in power-to-gas or giant flywheels actually happens, this is the state of grid storage.
It's not such a massive gamble if you can just keep relying on natural gas peaker plants in case storage is somehow unsolvable, which seems quite unlikely given that we have a dozen completely different technologies for storage in the pipeline.
Notably it also runs the reactors much harder, which has led to situations like France needing to shut all nuclear plants at once for maintenance.
“Oh no we have too much power, what are we going to do with it” is a much better problem to have than “the sun and wind are going down at the same time and we don’t have enough power, what are we going to do about it”.
It means the nuclear power plants shut down and then start losing money hand over fist, eventually closing.
Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Most of the costs and all of the shutdowns in nuclear power are primarily motivated by anti-nuclear activism. What you’re describing is a policy choice, not an essential reality.
If it costs you money to generate power at a time you cannot sell it, that is losing money. Wind and solar are unique in that they have low marginal costs, whereas a nuclear plant requires more staffing and fuel burn.
I don't understand why you're coming about this problem from a "100% nuclear" situation. That's not the case for the world, and likely never will be the case. But heck, let's assume all you've got to work with is nuclear.
You have a baseload. That's basically the minimum load that always exists. You don't have to worry about selling the power, it's already sold. And then you have peak. Both of these are time / weather dependent but we're still quite able to plan days, if not weeks and months, in advance for what those two values will be. As an example, let's get back to the original topic of the article.
If you're Google and you have a particular datacenter at a location, you know what that baseload is. You know what the peak is. It's a pretty simple calculation to figure out what is most cost-effective here. It's probably even easier for you than the local power company, as base and peak loads likely don't fluctuate much for you outside of HVAC keeping up with weather. It might be to use nuclear for just base load and use the local grid for the rest. It might be to over-produce occasionally because that's still cheaper than buying from the local system operator. Hell, you can probably sell any access, but that's more of a problem than most people think.
But the point is nuclear is king when it comes to baseload power supply. And a datacenter, which consumes a lot of power consistently, is almost entirely baseload.
Also, if you're serious about the problem of "our nuclear power plants are producing more power than we need and we can't turn them off because then we'll have a power shortage", there are applications to dump "bonus" energy into. You'd run into the same problem with renewables too; the difference is that with nuclear, you can avoid the "not enough energy" problem.
If you're not in Texas, there's such a thing as paying to keep capacity available, and then you don't lose money.
And power plants having individual finances in the first place is a policy choice, not a law of nature.
We have a version of that in Texas, too. There are some commercial cryptocurrency mining operations that pay for a certain level of power capacity, and if the grid is running low on power, the grid just buys the capacity back from them and they stop mining for awhile.
If you find cryptocurrency mining objectionable for some reason, you could apply the same basic principle to things like aluminum refining or desalination.
That's still only paying when the capacity is needed. It doesn't do a good job of incentivizing power sources/releases that are needed very rarely.
Nuclear's electrical output can indeed be turned down, by over-cooling the steam in the turbines. The reactor is putting out the same power, but less electricity is generated since you're deliberately increasing waste heat. This is not efficient so it's rarely done.
Furthermore, too much energy is a far easier problem to solve than too little energy. People can desalinate water, or do any other energy intensive things.
Technically yes if you have an entire fleet to both spread the load following across and their manage their fuel cycles since they get less flexible the further into a fuel cycle a reactor is.
Economically? Load following with nuclear power means an even worse business case than running at 100% 24/7. And nuclear power is already a laughably bad business case when running at 100%.
The fuel is burned at the same rate using this method of modulating output. Thermal output from the reactor is the same. Electrical output is reduced because heat is deliberately wasted.
Simulation studies have covered this. It addresses it by providing more power when there is less sunlight and less wind.
It wont help much but it was the actul solution when the main source of electricity was fossil fuels because you could stockpile the fossil fuel
Overbuilding doesn't make solar generate power at night. Days with minimal wind can see 10% average wind speeds or less.
The Kairos design does not dissolve the fuel in the salt.
OK, that's interesting. And it's far better than MSRs, but it still exposes fluoride salts to radiation. It also is a pebble bed reactor, so it'll have all the problems of pebble beds: cracking pellets, difficulty in fuel reprocessing, more nuclear waste, etc.
But yes, this design might be actually feasible for small reactors. But I bet that it won't be cheaper and it'll be impossible to scale to levels approaching PWRs.
Fluoride salts by themselves are very radiation resistant, chemically more so than water. The biggest concern would be liberation of elemental fluorine, but if the salt is kept slightly reducing (which one can do in a sterile salt without dissolved uranium) the fluorine instantly reacts back to fluoride. The slightly reduced salt is also preferred to limit corrosion, allowing the vessel and pipes to be made of stainless steel (FLiBe with dissolved uranium needs special more expensive alloys because chromium would dissolve.)
Activation is also low. The two concerns would be traces of tritium from the two-step activation of beryllium (formation of 6He by (n,alpha) reaction, decay of 6He to 6Li, then (n,t) on 6Li), and also formation of 10Be (half life, 1.4 million years, but the thermal neutron capture cross section of 9Be is only 8.5 mb). The chemical toxicity of beryllium would considerably exceed its radiotoxicity, I imagine.
> The biggest concern would be liberation of elemental fluorine
Yep.
But I'm personally more worried about the pelletized fuel. Pellets are not a great form-factor, and they don't have cladding. Fluoride salts are also far more aggressive than water (mechanically and chemically), so this will limit the maximum specific power of the reactor. So I don't think that something like 1GW molten salt reactor is even possible.
It might be OK if they want to continue using SMRs, though.
> The slightly reduced salt is also preferred to limit corrosion
Sidenote: that's actually not always a great idea. Steel is stainless because it's covered in a film of oxides, and without oxygen it might not be able to form.
This is a problem for the Russian BREST-300 reactor that is cooled by molten lead, they had to do almost 10 years of research to perfect a system that controls the amount of dissolved oxygen in the molten lead. And it's still not clear if they succeeded until the full-scale reactor is built.
In this case, though, I think that they can tune the reducers to react with fluorine preferentially, while still leaving enough oxygen.
Lead is a rather different case, because liquid lead itself corrodes steel. The oxide layer is needed to protect the steel from the lead. FLiBe by itself does not corrode steel.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00109...
> traces of tritium from the two-step activation of beryllium
Also from the 6Li absorption of 1 neutron. The Lithium used is almost pure 7Li, at 99.995%. But there is still 50 ppm 6Li in it.
Yes. The inescapable tritium production from Be sets the lower bound on how pure the 7Li has to be.
The theory, at least, is that making SMRs in a factory allows for a steeper and more sustainable learning curve
> Both Hermes and ETU 3.0 will be built using modular construction techniques, with reactor modules fabricated in Kairos Power's facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which will be shipped to Oak Ridge for assembly.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/work-begins-on-f...
> The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a very conservative organization
I'm glad they are, actually! Personally, I'm not really convinced by the "small modular reactor" concept. Ok, so building a big nuclear power plant is expensive. But is it really cheaper to build 10 smaller nuclear power plants (which all need to conform to the same safety regulations, need maintenance, personnel etc.) instead?
I firmly believe that iteration is the key to good engineering. SpaceX has got where they are (partly) due to running flight after flight with incremental improvements each time. The problem with the massive reactors is that you get to build only a couple of them, so you never get to take advantage of learnings to make the next one better/cheaper/quicker.
So basically it's one economy of scale (making something bigger means the costs for safety, maintenance, personnel etc. are proportionally lower) vs. another economy of scale (making more of one thing decreases the costs per "unit"). Place your bets...
About your comparison to SpaceX: the approach of building a rocket, launching it, letting it explode and then using the gathered data to make the next one explode later (or not at all) is fine for rockets, but I wouldn't want to see it applied to nuclear reactors.
I do agree on not letting nuclear reactors explode, but I did use the SpaceX example on purpose. Before SpaceX started to do it, the concept of iterating to that degree on rockets was unthinkable. There was a self reinforcing loop of "rocket launches are expensive, so we must plan for every contingency, so the launch cycle is long and expensive". SpaceX proved that wrong.
I think small modular reactors are the way out of the similar cycle we've got for nuclear reactors. And I think that building a small number of large ones is going to be a lot better if we're also building a large number of small ones and learning.
It's like not building a y houses for 30 years and then building a massive skyscraper. If that's all we do then we'll only ever have one way of building a skyscraper because there's no room to experiment on other construction materials and techniques.
>Before SpaceX started to do it, the concept of iterating to that degree on rockets was unthinkable.
I'm pretty sure that was what NASA was going to do all the way back in the 70s before their funding got slashed. It was a novel idea but not a novel idea that SpaceX was particularly responsible for, just one they threw capital at because the government stopped caring after the space race.
Nuclear power research, by contrast, never really suffered from a lack of available funds. They were throwing money at mini reactors back in the 90s, saying all the same stuff about how mass production would bring down the price.
NASA funding far exceeds SpaceX’s and always has. It shouldn’t take 4% of the US federal budget (NASA funding during Apollo) to run a hardware-rich design process!
Apollo was wound down because the government wanted NASA to focus on the space shuttle and all sorts of other things as well as slashing the total budget by a huge amount.
So, while in theory it may have had the money, in practice it did not.
The Shuttle cost $48 billion to develop in inflation-adjusted dollars — contrast this with the ~$5B spent on Starship development thus far. It’s hard to defend the claim that NASA is or ever has been under-funded.
NASAs "do stuff" budget is super small because their "keep all the experts on staff" budget is insatiable.
It's not entirely bad though, I'm sure lots of those folks are doing good and important stuff. But I don't think the balance between employment and building things is quite right. At least to my tastes.
if you don't care about any externalities (like spacex), sure. but I doubt hospitals or just normal people who need electricity would be super happy about power sources failing because the people building them subscribed to the "move fast/break things" mentality instead of actually building reliable/safe infrastructure at the cost of it taking longer
Worth mentioning here that the SpaceX Falcon is the world's most reliable rocket, with a full success rate of 99.24% out of 394 total launches, 325 successful launches of the current version, and 98.5% successful booster landings of the current version, something no other orbital launch system even attempts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
Comparisons to other rockets here:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/spacexs-falcon-9-roc...
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-succ...
At the moment, of course, two astronauts are stuck on ISS after Boeing's new spacecraft, developed along more traditional lines, experienced problems in its first crewed flight. They're awaiting rescue by SpaceX's Dragon, which has flown 16 times with crew and delivered astronauts to the ISS 10 times, all without a glitch. Both companies were awarded their crew contracts in 2014.
and nuclear reactors are incredibly reliable as well. do the ends always justify the means?
Since I don't see moral deficit in the means involved in either example, I don't understand the point of your question.
Our energy infrastructure isn't particularly reliable right now. Power outages, while not at the level of a third world country, are quite frequent. Nuclear is the highest energy density power generation you can get. Investing in reactors that are less susceptible to explosions (Like a molten salt reactor) is an important step and it's really only viable if you can iterate which means building modular reactor. If you read the article you'll see that most of their iteration and experimentation is without the nuclear material. Something that is possible because the reactor itself is small and can be run through a bunch of safety checks without the dangerous parts.
The route that Nuscale and Kairos are taking is both cheaper and safer than large scale reactors. And we are going to need something to fill the gaps when there is no wind or solar generation available if we want to get off fossil fuels.
> Power outages, while not at the level of a third world country, are quite frequent. Nuclear is the highest energy density power generation you can get.
Well that is more because the American grid is suffering from a mountain load of neglect-debt to a tune that paints the infamous German railways as saints - the Camp Fire for example was most likely caused by a C-hook breaking after many, many decades of neglect [1].
Here in Europe, we get by just fine with outages measured in maybe a dozen minutes (!) a year [2] - Germany got rid of all nuclear reactors, many old ones in other countries were retired as well (Fessenheim, the most infamous one, in 2020), and while there are new builds, they are often decades late and many billions over budget.
How do we do this? We have strict regulations across the board (mandating stuff such as resilience against bad weather, unlike Texas which IIRC refuses to tie in to the other US grids to avoid such regulation), a cross-continental spanning grid [3], and most especially... we just love to bury our cables belowground, so even in the case lightning or storms hit, the actual impact on the consumers is all but negligible. And as the infamous summer of 2023 shows, the power grid still didn't fail even as dozens of NPPs in France and Switzerland had to completely shut down or significantly reduce output because there was not enough cooling water [4]. Hell we even manage to supply an entire country at war with decent power, despite Russia continuously attacking the power grid.
[1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/long-term-wear-found-o...
[2] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37960/umfrage...
[3] https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/
[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/high-river-temperatu...
We have been attempting "small modular reactors" since the 1950s. They've never worked out. In the same sense that tiny coal plants never worked out.
Large physical scale is everything with old school power generation technologies due to various scaling laws.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
We have plenty of small but commercially successful natural gas plants, so it doesn't seem to be a general principle. The only scaling law mentioned in your article is this:
> a 400-MW reactor requires less than twice the quantity of concrete and steel to construct as a 200-MW reactor, and it can be operated with fewer than twice as many people. Writing in Science in 1961, a senior member of the AEC worried that “competition [from fossil fuel plants] is indeed formidable” and suggested that “with current pressurized-water reactor technology, lower nuclear power costs can be achieved most readily with large plants.”
Almost all the SMRs we've built have been water cooled reactors, which require a large amount of concrete and steel. Newer designs, such as molten salt reactors, can use a lot less, because they operate near atmospheric pressure, don't have to leave room for a high-pressure pipe break introducing a large volume of steam, and have nothing that can cause a chemical explosion. They're also inherently stable and adaptive to load, with little need for active control. A small modular MSR could well work out.
The US has been successfully producing small modular reactors since the 1950’s. We just happen to install virtually all of them inside of submarines and aircraft carriers.
For the least price sensitive customer in the world: The US navy. That doesn't tend to translate into working products on cutthroat markets.
I’ve actually been aboard a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, where I observed flight operations from the flight deck. I can assure you that it’s a working product. And the Navy is under a lot more pressure to cut costs and economize than many government projects.
I believe the thought is that the cost of regulatory and safety measures do not scale favorably with reactor size. You don't have separate facilities so much as 10 reactors on the same site, so you don't need to increase personnel 10x.
Actually proving this with a deployed design seems to be the challenge, though with strong headwinds against nuclear across the board, favoring proven designs over newer ones is at least a little faster. That's not a flaw of the design, but intrinsic to the social and political environment.
One part of the problem with traditional plants is that they are massive mega projects which the US does not specialize in. I am assuming by building smaller you are able to iterate on designs quicker.
I also wonder how much of the cost is tied up in the upfront construction and engineering compared to operations.
>I am assuming by building smaller you are able to iterate on designs quicker.
Everyone in this thread is assuming this, but you get economy of scale by building lots of the same thing, not by constantly changing things.
Iterate on designs quickly in development. Build lots of the same thing in production. Smaller hardware helps for both phases.
I am not so sure you can build an economy of scale with projects that take a decade to construct and even longer when accounting for approvals and paperwork. The projects are too massive and too long. The contractor that poured the foundation for the last project may no longer be around. It has worked in some areas of the world like China because they have been building from zero and are able to scale mega projects.
The US has more hope to learn by iterating on smaller projects.
According to their web site at https://kairospower.com/technology/ it uses a molten fluoride salt based coolant but unlike the MSR/LFTR designs the fissionable fuel is not dissolved into the coolant; instead, the Kairos reactor design puts the fissionables in pellets that are intended to remain solid while in operation; it looks more like a pebble-bed reactor than a MSR/LFTR.
Yes, you are right, I was wrong. The Hermes design is even more conservative than the MSRE design. It is basically the same design as the helium-cooled reactor HTR-PM that China started operating two years ago, only that the helium cooling is replaced with FLiBe cooling; this achieves a higher power density plus a higher rate of passive cooling in case anything goes wrong.
This IAEA report [1] has more details about this design, and the dozens if not hundreds of other types of molten salt reactor designs. The relevant section for the Kairos Hermes design is 4.5 (pages 41-44).
[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/STI-DOC-010-4...
> pressure cooker has an internal pressure about 5 times higher than the atmospheric pressure
This isn't really accurate. The majority of pressure cookers you can buy operates at an absolute pressure of only about twice the atmospheric pressure.
Ok. And they are still dangerous if they explode. Imagine what happens if something at 150 atm explodes.
You don't have to imagine, it happened several times.
Once, if you're just talking about nuclear reactors. The reactor vessel didn't explode at Fukushima, just the outer building due to accumulated hydrogen. TMI didn't explode at all, the fuel melted but didn't breach containment.
Not super relevant but pressure cookers only go up to about 1 bar. They definitely would blow before 5.
1 bar is atmospheric pressure. I.e., as far as you in your kitchen are concerned, no pressure at all.
Pressure is very often stated as gauge pressure, i.e. zero-referenced against ambient air pressure. 1 bar gauge pressure is roughly equal to 2 bar absolute pressure.
Using solid fuel in a msr is certainly a choice.
Hopefully it is just a stepping stone.
https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/ high chances it'll be more expensive than ap1000 overall /kwh
That entire report is an exercise in selectively choosing data to misrepresent renewables and present nuclear power in the best possible light and wishful thinking.
To the degree that the prominent "renewables vs. nuclear" graph they keep repeating on the webpage and figure 6 in the report is straight up misleading.
This is the source:
What is different about different net-zero carbon electricity systems?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266627872...
Utilizing storage costs from 2018 and then of course making the comparison against the model not incorporating any hydrogen derived zero carbon fuel to solve seasonal problems.
Which is todays suggestion for solving the final 1-2% requiring seasonal storage in the late 2030s.
Something akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity because they run too little to be economical on their own, but zero carbon. Can be hydrogen or biofuel derived. We will know in 10 years time.
Would they have chosen the ReBF model the difference between made up optimal nuclear power and 2018 renewables would be: $80-94/MWh and $82-102/MWh.
It is essentially: Nukebros writes reports for nukebros, they confirm their own bias. Simply an attempt to justify another massive round of government subsidies on nuclear power.
copypaste I see))
Ok, we've changed the title to language from the article itself (edited to fit HN's 80 char limit) which seems both representative and neutral. If there's a better title, we can change it again.
(Submitted tile was "Google funding construction of seven U.S. nuclear reactors")
> Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027
Sounds great in theory, but it took NuScale Power 6 years to get their design approved? I hope the AI hype lasts that long then maybe the world would have two certified 75 MWe SMR designs.
Also the NuScale Idaho plant was cancelled last year when cost estimates balooned 3x. 9.3bn for a 460 MWe plant?
Yeah I’m not going to lie, that’s quite disappointing. Google funding several AP1000’s would be huge.
seeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia, why would Google waste $120B when they can get the same output for at most half the price (and realistically more like 1/10th) using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades.
edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B. Build 3GW for overcapacity and you’re still at just 17% of the cost of 1GW of nuclear, and you technically have 3x more capacity. Now figure out how many megapacks you can buy for the $14B/GW you saved https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design (answer: 16GW/68GWh)
> using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades
We have nothing close to the battery fabrication pipeline to make that timeline true, certainly not at scale. If this move works, Google will have cemented its power needs and economics for decades to come.
Global battery manufacturing capacity was 2,600GWh in 2023 [1], and has probably already exceeded that this year. The IEA projects closer to 4TWh by 2025, and nearly 7TWh by 2030 [2].
You need to pay attention because this is happening fast.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... [2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b...
> nearly 7TWh by 2030
That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today. (You obviously don't need 1:1 coverage. But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge.)
Now consider EVs. Then add the tens of TWh of annual power demand AI is expected to add to power demand [2]. (And I'm assuming a free market for battery cells, which obviously isn't where we're heading. So add local production bottlenecks to the mix.)
Battery numbers are going up. But they aren't going up fast enough and never could have, not unless we ditch electrifying transportation. Nukes or gas. Anyone pretending there is a third way is defaulting to one or the other.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...
[2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...
I had to check the numbers because it grabbed my attention.
No issue with your quoted figure of 30,000 TWh (annual) global electricity consumption.
But we only need to do 7TWh of battery supply in year 1 (or say only 1-2 of that makes it to grid storage).
30,000/365 is 82 TWh daily. So that’s the number to crack, surely? Because a significant percentage of storage will be to make up for wind and solar, which generally approximately follows some sort of diurnal cycle?
If we will be closing in on a couple TWh annual storage capacity in 6 years (leaving aside any real synchronised attempt to get vehicles to be part of large scale distributed grids) then only a few years on from 2030 we’re going to be able to store a significant percentage of our daily energy demands
5 hours of storage and a 98.6% renewables system.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr...
Investing in nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed.
In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.
This will only worsen the nuclear business case as renewable expansion continues, today being a bonanza fueled by finally finding an energy source cheaper than fossil fuel.
Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns.
> In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.
This is happening because of subsidies given to renewables (renewable energy certificates, net metering, guaranteed feed in prices, CFD) plus policies at the national and EU level (EU Renewable Energy Directive). Take away these policies and you are left with a low quality (intermittent) energy source that requires far more expensive storage to produce power when it is needed.
A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.
Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.
Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Which is confirmed by Sweden continuing its renewable buildout with both the cheapest electricity prices in Europe and no subsidies on the books for new renewable production.
> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved
Cost assumptions in table 2
Offshore wind 1.9M EUR/MW, 1.67% O&M, 30 year life at 0.51 capacity factor
Onshore wind 1.03M EUR/MW, 2.51% O&M, 30 year life at 0.37 capacity factor
Solar PV 0.6M EUR/MW, 1.50% O&M, 40 year life at 0.14 capacity factor
So they are claiming nuclear (which has a > 0.9 capacity factor in Finland, and 60 year life) needs to have an investment cost between onshore and offshore wind to make sense.
So the authors decided that the non-dispatchable wind/solar has market priority over nuclear. Hence it is important to pack out the high nuclear scenario with renewables. Also note how the all renewables scenario adds biogas (presumably from all the pig slurry) to firm up demand along with 6GW of inter-connectors to friendly neighbours.By way of contrast, https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Nuclea... Page 5 forecasts a 37% reduction in costs when nuclear is part of the energy mix in California.
Edit :- Closer analysis of the high nuclear with district heating scenario (figure 4, in the supplementary material) reveals a total electrical demand of just under 10,000MW (unflexible + heating + transport). Note that the authors have chosen to represent nuclear as a continuous 6,686MW of power (rather than the nameplate capacity of 7,400MW).
Even without subsidies solar and battery are cheaper than nuclear and are getting cheaper by 15-20% a year. So no nuclear is unlikely to be cost competitive any time soon unless they get some new tech for nuclear
> nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed
We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift. Again, excluding EVs and AI. That’s why we’re reänimating coal plants and building new gas turbines.
I’d also love to see the numbers on that simulation going from 98.6% coverage to what we expect from a modern grid. (And if the balance is provided by gas or something else.) It should surprise nobody that going from 1 sigma to 2 can cost as much as 2 to 3, even if the percentage gap is much smaller.
> Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy
Europe has invested €1.5tn into new gas infrastructure. That doesn’t go poor without a fight and collateral damage.
> We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift.
A decade to have significant amounts of battery storage is actually a pretty optimistic timeline compared to nuclear. Nuclear plant construction times are on the order of a decade or (realistically) two decades in the West, if you include planning. In China they're managing 7 years, but their nuclear buildouts, while impressive, aren't trending an upward path when compared to renewables (see chart here [1].) SMRs might change this, but they're years from leaving "research" status and entering the mass-production/learning curves that could make them cost competitive.
This doesn't make me happy. If I thought nuclear was viable on the timelines we have to dampen climate change, I'd be 100% in favor of it. If we could assemble the political will to raise taxes and build nuclear at "wartime" speeds, I'd say go for it. I'm also very much in favor of SMR development, just not willing to bet the house on it.
As it stands, there isn't anywhere near enough nuclear power in the planning pipeline for nuclear to matter much on a 20 year timeline.
In any case, we are not going to a 100% renewable/battery grid in 10 years. The first goal is to get renewables to 90-95% or more of power generation, massively overbuilt with short-term battery storage backed by intermittent fossil fuels for the remaining 5-10%. This will represent a massive reduction in emissions. The last 5-10% will have to be completed over the next couple of decades, and the increasing battery production trend gives hope that it can be.
The worst problem with existing nuclear is that with a 15-20 year planning/construction timeline and the current molasses build rate, new nuclear plants will arrive right at the moment when cheap storage is eating the economic use-cases that make them financially viable.
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/China-r...
> * Nuclear plant construction times are on the order of a decade or (realistically) two decades in the West, if you include planning*
Sure. Forecasting twenty years out is tough. But our forecasts out 10 years show the power crunch easing to almost no degree--we'll still likely be making the same tradeoff then as now. (And, I suspect, still filling the gap with gas in teh west.)
You're broadly correct: we need to build faster. There is no reason we can't build a large plant in under a decade and an SMR in a few years. The latter is what Google is experimenting with here. It's a long shot. But so is hoping battery production scales the orders of magnitude necessary for it to become a utlity backbone over the next decades.
> first goal is to get renewables to 90-95% or more of power generation, massively overbuilt with short-term battery storage
We don't have the battery pipeline. What we're repeatedly getting is renewables plus gas generators. There is no world in which you put down trillions of dollars of gas infrastructure and then poof it in a few years because it's no longer needed.
California would like a word with you. Gas generators are increasingly being forced off the grid with storage.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/
Storage costs are today lower than the most aggressive projection for 2050 according to one widely cited US DoE study from 2023.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-149971818
> If we could assemble the political will to raise taxes and build nuclear at "wartime" speeds, I'd say go for it.
Tepco, Russia, and MetEd all lied to or misled the public about the nature of their respective accidents.
Not enough people who were alive during those incidents have died.
A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.
Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.
Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...> a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost
Yes, nuclear is more expensive. SMRs should help with that, but their expense has never been contested.
But marginal economics aren't everything. Renewable and battery production isn't ramping up fast enough to make that margin available at scale. This doesn't seem capital contrained, either--every major economy is throwing gobs of cash at the problem.
> Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables
False economy. A dollar not invested into nukes doesn't go into renewables--partly because of the aforementioned scaling problem, it tends to wind up in gas.
We’re spending trillions of dollars of new money on gas infrastructure with decades of life and financial liabilities attached to them because we need the power, have maxed out renewables and are left with a choice: gas or nukes. Opposing nukes isn’t playing for renewables, it’s playing for gas.
SMRs can potentially do something that renewables can’t: they could be placed near the loads in places with no space for renewables and without relying on the grid. Think industrial areas or even cities or towns that are surrounded by other developed land. The grid moves slowly, and electricity prices via existing transmission lines are, in many areas, hilariously inflated for a number of reasons. A hypothetical portable, easy-to-acquire SMR producing power at $100/MWh would not be an amazing deal if a large electric utility bought it, but a $100/MWh would be an amazing price in quite a few markets if a small utility could actually buy at that price and deliver via a small last-mile distribution system.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... here's another one or this https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
Yes, that shit study which models supplying the entire grid with one energy source and lithium storage through all weather conditions.
I would suggest reading the study I linked so you can see the difference in methodology when credible researches in the field tackle similar questions.
The credible studies are focused on simulating the energy system and market with real world constraints. Which apparently works out way cheaper when not involving nuclear in the picture.
> https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/
That entire report is an exercise in selectively choosing data to misrepresent renewables and present nuclear power in the best possible light and wishful thinking.
To the degree that the prominent "renewables vs. nuclear" graph they keep repeating on the webpage and figure 6 in the report is straight up misleading.
This is the source:
What is different about different net-zero carbon electricity systems?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266627872...
Utilizing storage costs from 2018 and then of course making the comparison against the model not incorporating any hydrogen derived zero carbon fuel to solve seasonal problems.
Which is todays suggestion for solving the final 1-2% requiring seasonal storage in the late 2030s.
Something akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity because they run too little to be economical on their own, but zero carbon.
Would they have chosen the ReBF model the difference between made up optimal nuclear power and 2018 renewables would be: $80-94/MWh and $82-102/MWh.
It is essentially: Nukebros writes reports for nukebros, they confirm their own bias. Simply an attempt to justify another massive round of government subsidies on nuclear power.
lmao, you say shit study but you suggest using green h2 as backup which not only isn't economically feasible (for now at least) but current generators are either using a mix with gas or use pure h2 with huge nox releases due to high temp burning. Not just that, most lcoe costs magically assume that 4h storage is enough. Look at yesterday's Germany generation and tell me how 4h storage will be enough there. Or maybe I should link to amount of subsidies Germany is pouring each year in renewables like https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-29/germany-s... or like https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-looks-specia... It's funny that when I ask ren-bros how much subsidies edf in France is getting they are either silent or are linking to price shielding that's totally unrelated and is present in most eu countries after russia's invasion. Renewable bros as usual are dunking on nuclear and promoting their clean supply like a mecca without facing hard reality - most renewables now are subsidized by fossils and will be in any close future
>you suggest using green h2 as backup which not only isn't economically feasible (for now at least)
That's poor logic, h2 as a last-2%er doesn't need to be feasible until we've gotten to the 98% mark. And honestly, h2 feasibility is a function of cheap energy anyway, which probably means midday solar while solar farms are chasing dusk prices.
not, h2 feasibility in the context of power generation depends on many more factors, including how frequent the plant is used when day hours will be mostly tapped by solar generation and how you'll do price compensation. And in the context of h2 for renewables as a peaker, it'll need to be much more than 2%. And again, the emission problem for h2 generation isn't solved yet beyond fuel cells
> Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.
Only if you don't care about reliability.
Seems like you didn’t read the quote from the abstract. Here’s the relevant part:
> with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
I call BS on that.
You’re asking us to trust your gut reaction over a peer-reviewed study. Do you have any qualifications or experience in the field?
Sorry, was writing on a mobile. Here's a more detailed explanation why it's pure BS.
Because it's simply magic thinking. They postulate a "future fully sector-coupled system" and then say that if this somehow magics into existance, then everything's peachy.
Basically, "a sector-coupled system" allows transforming excess power into something useful (district heating, hydrogen, steel, etc.), and shedding the load and/or providing some power back when there's not enough generated power available.
In other words, if you solve the problem of providing 1 month of energy storage for Germany and Denmark, then renewable energy is basically free. Duh.
The problem is that "sector-coupled systems" don't exist, and their creation will result in far, far, far, far more expenses than building fucking PWRs.
Yes, the study incorporates no lithium storage. Including storage we will easily reach far above 90% renewable penetration.
When we get to the final percent in the 2030s we can utilize akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity markets [1] but zero carbon.
Peaker plants today already run too little to be economical on their own, essentially what in our current grids constitute seasonal storage and emergency reserves.
Simply update the terms for the capacity markets to require the fuel to be zero-carbon. It can be synfuels, biofuels or hydrogen. Whatever comes out the cheapest.
As we electrify transportation we can shift over the massive ethanol blending in gasoline in the US to be our seasonal buffer. [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_market#Capacity_ma...
[2]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=27&t=10
> When we get to the final percent in the 2030s we can utilize akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity markets [1] but zero carbon.
Capacity markets effectively don't exist in Europe right now. There are plans to create a plan for them by 2027, this is how urgent it is for Europe. But no worries, natural gas is now green, and it's fine to send money to Azerbaijan for it.
There is no pathway for most of Europe to switch to renewables any time soon.
In this context, what is a "modern grid"?
In eu France is the biggest net exporter in the EU while Germany with huge renewable capacity net imported 20+TWh this year. Look how Germany's generation was yesterday to get a sneak peek
This is only because it is profitable for Germany to do so, not because of lack of capacity. Germany imports energy when there is low demand (and price) and exports when there is high demand (and price). Look at this chart: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_trading/chart.htm?l=...
another reason is to fire up coal less.
Again, look at yesterday generation. They were not able to satisfy local demand with renewables and bumped up coal+gas by a lot.
Also, if you look at the numbers - the price difference isn't that huge but trade difference is huge. This year export price is less than 1$ more than import. Problem is Germany net imported 25TWh so they are still in a big trade deficit and it continues to grow considering dunkelflaute is ahead
Yes, Germany is targeting a 80% renewable electricity mix by 2030 and 100% by 2035. They have no illusions about being perfect today. Their current status is 65% renewable for 2024.
Maybe stop looking at instants and start looking at the larger picture: keeping our cumulative emissions as low as possible.
Starting a nuclear construction project which won't deliver any decarbonization for 15-20 years is accepting large cumulative emissions.
they don't target 100% by 2035. They want to close last coal plant by 2038 which is a bit optimistic looking at yesterday's generation. For gas it's even worse - the plan is totally unrealistic and their planned h2 ready plants that'll use gas initially, will probably still use a mix with gas when/if green h2 becomes reality or they'll replace the generators with pure h2(unlikely) which has huge nox emissions due to high burn temperature
Larger image is yesterday's generation + https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-29/germany-s... and https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-looks-specia...
And nuclear construction can be much faster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant or you can look at projects from China
"But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge."
How much battery storage do you think we need? Surely not a year's worth.
For solar, we'd likely need 10-16 hours of storage to power stuff overnight. Maybe a little more to cover a few cloudy days. Sounds like we are about 5% of that now?
Generally the worst case is two weeks. In the middle of winter you often get cloudy low wind days for that long. Of course how you handle those worse cases are days need not be how you handle typical. If you can handle 16 hours of no input this will over the typical cases this will be enough to max a massive dent in carbon emissions and we can fall back to existing gas (or even coal) plants for the rest. Plus a lot of power use can turn off when needed - give my company a discount and we can turn the factory off.
10-16 hours is not enough at all. On a cloudy day, solar output will only be 15-20%. On top of that, your panels really only generate for 8 hours on a very good day - the sun is a lot dimmer in the early morning and late evening. Really, you need 2x storage for a good day, if you want to deal with two cloudy days you'd want 50-60 hours of storage.
Could you possibly read the article you're replying to again?
Even skimming through it discusses the coverage of wind and a not 50/50 system particularly to cover winter & night time. There is also discussion of a ~2% from "other" and how much storage capacity is required.
The article even goes into using wind & solar data for the simulation and reducing further the output to be conservative.
I obviously understand it's not a 100% solar system. If it was you would need to be able to deal with at least 2 weeks of bad weather, not two days, and you would have to take into account winter (dropping to about 5 hours instead of 8).
Additionally, mixing solar and wind is not as easy as it seems, because the two are correlated. If you have a major storm that makes wind energy impossible due to wind speeds above ~100km/h, you will also have clouds making solar energy unworkable. I'm not aware of any simulations modelling a 95+% solar/wind grid for storage needs, taking into account extreme weather patterns, grid topology, and equipment damage, but if you do then please link it.
I don't see any article linked in the comment I replied to. Perhaps you're mixing up two comment chains.
It's likely enough battery capacity if you combine batteries with e-fuels for longer term storage.
Assuming batteries are used for all storage use cases is one of the classic errors of energy system analysis.
> That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today.
I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting powering a portion of the grid with batteries that are cycled once per year. One can optimistically cycle one or even twice a day (if wind peaks when the sun is down). Or you can try to ride through a week of bad weather, but natural gas is not actually a terrible solution for that. And those batteries last for a lot longer than a year.
So I think your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years.
> natural gas is not actually a terrible solution
Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.
> your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years
The former is calculated from projected 2030 battery production to present energy levels. An essential component of strategy is knowing on whose side time is. Battery production won't reach 1/10 for at least a few decades. That's the point. We need an intermediate solution, and if that's going to be gas, we have to live with the fact that (a) emissions will continue and (b) we perpetuate trillions of dollars of capital infrastructure that will be as difficult to take down in the future as coal has been today.
> Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.
If you come up with some combination of carbon-free energy sources and storage that covers 90% of grid energy needs, and you need to fill in the gap, and that gap is a whole lot of power but only for a handful of days a year, then I don’t think nuclear is a good option at all to fill in the gap. The capital expense would be absurd.
Decarbonization is great, but in the real world, decarbonization per dollar spent is what matters. Instead of spending a zillion dollars on nuclear peaker plants, spend a lot fewer dollars on gas peaker plants and the the rest for more effective environmental improvements.
> Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.
There's a crossover point. If you use natural gas to provide <1% of yearly electricity needs, and you save a zillion dollars while doing so, you can find cheaper ways to decarbonize by the same amount.
We'll figure it out. There is too much at stake and there are already a gazillion engineers out there going to bed every night thinking about how to solve this problem.
Innovation is the grim reaper of analyst reports. No one at my company notifies an investment bank when we have a breakthrough internally (lol).
Why are you comparing the rate of change of battery storage capacity, the vast majority of which if grid connected will be used for at most diurnal storage, to yearly energy consumption?
Holy mother of all type errors there.
Multiply it by 365, and it implies that in 2030 alone, we will create enough battery storage to time shift almost 10% of our total electricity use today.
This is not a stat that should inspire pessimism.
> and never could have
I could just as easily assert the same of nuclear or gas. It doesn't make it true, although there seems to be evidence that nuclear cannot scale as fast as batteries/solar/wind.
That's per year right?
frequently asserted but not true.
https://x.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1843840160842350779
Nobody claims renewables + battery doesn't work long term. (And not only work, but do so at rock-bottom costs.)
The problem is the timeline. Time out building that additional infrastructure, including expected demand growth, and you always need more power in the interim. Particularly if you're planning on taking coal offline.
If there is an arugment that we can ramp up battery production even faster than we are, the math changes. But we're already in a Herculean effort to mass produce more batteries faster.
nuclear literally takes 10x the time to build as renewables+batteries. That's like the whole reason why it doesn't get built.
During the Messmer plan the French installed 56 reactors in 15 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...
So you're saying that in 1.5 years the same thing can now be done with renewables and batteries?
In 2027 it will easily have been done in a bunch of places ?
> During the Messmer plan the French installed 56 reactors in 15 years.
Canada (mostly Ontario) built 25 reactors in 35 years:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Canada#Power_...
From the 1980s to the 2000s, it took Japan roughly 4-5 years between start of construction and commercial operation for a number of reactors:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
Start of construction is many years after start of the project though.
And now that's not realistic, given their track record on EPR.
Battery manufacturing capacity is greatly underutilized in China. That was battery cell prices there fell by nearly 1/2 in the last year. There is tremendous room for expansion of production.
Based upon?
Looked through the thread and it looks asserted but I don't see the counter not true point.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.is/DklaA ("Bloomberg: China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")
Maybe you just found a great place for a company like Google to invest in.
> seeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia
Vogtle 4 was (IIRC) 30% cheaper than Vogtle 3.
The problem with nuclear in Georgia, and in the US, was that no one remembers/ed how to do it, and so all the lessons of yore had to be relearned, and the supply chain had to be stood up.
If you put in an order for several reactors, the very first one (especially of a new model, like Vogtle 3 was) will be expensive AF. The second will be expensive. All models after that will be at a more 'reasonable' cost.
Nuclear reactors are just like any other widget: the cost goes down with economies of scale. If you order 4 or 8 reactors at one sites they'll get progressively get cheaper (there is a floor of course). If you then put in an order at a second site, and move the workforce (or a portion) there, the lower costs will still be present.
If you start and stop construction, or order a whole bunch of different models/types, then there economies of scale goes out the window.
Sort of - nuke plants are fundamentally phenomenally complicated compared to true economies of scale technologies like solar. You won’t reap 100x cost savings in nukes, no matter how many you build
Every widget has a price floor since there's parts/materials and labour costs. This is even true for solar.
One simply has to be careful about what something "costs" when you look at the first unit versus the nth unit.
did you see France raising their cost estimate for 5 reactors to $73B? France, the shining beacon of nuclear energy.
by the time they build it, the cost of renewables will halve, and their actual cost of nuclear will have doubled again.
> edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B.
No, it's not. Right now it's probably more than $10B a GW if you want the same level of reliability as nuclear.
You can't just invent a number because you like it more. Solar and Wind are cheaper than nuclear even if you go beyond LCOE and include system costs. Even the nuclear lobby acknowledges this nowadays and has switched to other arguments.
No.
Not even close. Wind and solar are cheap _only_ if you don't depend on them. In particular, for the wind the adequacy rating is about 10% in most places. It means that you can expect 10% of the nameplate capacity to be available at all times system-wide. So multiply the wind energy costs by 10x, and suddenly they are quite more expensive than nuclear.
It's not even a question for the solar, it simply can't provide power during a day without storage.
> Even the nuclear lobby acknowledges this nowadays and has switched to other arguments.
Nope.
First, capacity factor is a silly metric to use for this. The industry uses LCOE or system LCOE, because this is about dollars per actual TWh produced, not capacity. In other words: A capacity factor of 10% doesn't matter if building 10x the amount is still cheaper.
With that said, the wind capacity factor in Germany is 20% for onshore and 40% for offshore, so even that was wrong by a factor of 2-4.
Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.
And new AP1000s in the US would cost significantly less, because there are already experienced workers & supply chains from Vogtle and getting a license requires less work too, because you can copy much of Vogtle.
The median build time for nuclear reactors is 7 years. This is archivable if you continue building and not just build 1 or 2 every few decades.
> Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.
Hence the batteries.
The scale just isn't there. A single nuclear power plant near me, McGuire Nuclear Power Plant, produced 17,514 GW·h in 2005. The entire potential output of the Tesla (cough Panasonic) Gigafactories in California and China have a combined output of ~50 GWh per year. [0] Nuclear power is amazing at producing a reliable base load of power that massively outstrips our ability to produce and store solar power. Say our load is well aligned with the cycle of solar power and we're ignoring weather so we can derate the amount we want to store to 30% that's 105 years of production out of what I think is the two largest batter plants in existence to store the power produced continuously by a single large nuclear power plant.
[0] https://www.fuld.com/tesla-energy-massive-growth-in-megapack...
I don't follow your sums. 50GWh of battery cycled once a day for a year is: 18,250 GWh
So you seem out by around 100x.
...sometimes the brain is smoothed by meetings...
Global stationary storage deployed for 2024 will be ~150GWh, and this is accelerating. Batteries are easy, nuclear appears to be impossible (economically speaking).
So 35 years then to store the power generated 24/7 by McGuire at that rate of production which ignores that the huge spike of AI loads will want 24/7 power, if we're looking at that kind of load I'd rate it at 50% for starters (low to be honest because it doesn't account for how solar ramps up during the day) which is around 60 years. Plus that's giving full capacity to those batteries when ideally we'd only use the middle 60% to avoid deep cycling the batteries daily unless they've completely solved that problem.
The nuclear ain't getting built, these are facts. Even if one breaks ground today, you won't push your first kwh to the grid for a decade, at which point another ~10TW of clean energy will have come online globally.
If AI is using too much power in the short term, destroy demand with policy and economics. We are not beholden to the robot trainers, we just don't provide utility access to the load. Unlimited demand of industrial scales of electrical power isn't a right of some sort.
What other activities are prohibited in your dream dictatorship?
Everyone is a libertarian until it’s their commons experiencing the tragedy. Strange to think that having regulations around large scale electrical loads is a dictatorship. It’s okay for us to collectively say no, depending on the circumstances.
> Everyone is a libertarian until it’s their commons experiencing the tragedy.
Yeah sure and everyone is a socialist utopian until its their own money/liberty on the line.
If we cannot “collectively” reach a consensus what happens?
Im just pointing out that the original suggestion of “ban ML for environmental reasons” is extreme/ham-fisted. This is what dictatorships do in real life all over the globe “for the greater good”.
Should crypto be a government-approved use of energy? What about manufacturing semiconductors? Building data centers? Producing EVs, solar farms or batteries? Are flights for vacation allowed?
You aren’t thinking about the second order impact of having a government that has the ability to gatekeep energy production for specific use cases…
Citation for my sibling comment and that which you replied to:
https://www.energy-storage.news/arizonas-biggest-battery-sto... (“Arizona’s biggest battery storage system goes online to feed Meta data centre demand”)
https://orsted.com/en/media/news/2024/10/orsted-has-complete... (“With a 300 MW solar PV capacity, Ørsted’s Eleven Mile Solar Center will produce enough renewable energy to power 65,000 US homes while the battery can store 1200 MWh of power.”)
(~2 years from planning to commissioning)
1.2gw of storage means in 4hr it's gone if solar and wind are weak
And can be recharged as soon as the wind or the sun comes back.
The sizing of batteries and power sources is highly region specific, and the places where it makes sense today with current manufacturing capacity, don't have to be "everywhere" for it to be fine where it's actually done; and given the roll out rate of renewables, we also don't need to wait until battery output per year can totally displace the existing and currently running gas plants, just back up the newly installed renewables themselves - 4h in this case is how fast the PV farm would recharge those batteries in the best case, the average output of a PV plant is about 10% of the peak, so this is really a 40 hour battery pack not a 4 hour pack.
I mean, look at Germany's grid yesterday& today and tell me, with such overcapacity, how much more overcapacity it would need and how much storage it would need to cover such events with low wind and solar?
I use the approximation of annual capacity factors for PV being 10%, which means 10x. Wind has a higher capacity factor IIRC between 35% and 85% and that heavily depends on location.
A realistic answer would need me to spend at least a month dealing with finding historical satellite cloud cover data, wind records, correlations leading to nationwide dunkelflaute, the planning options for where new stuff can be built, etc.
And even then, that varies depending on international grid connections, and how much storage is on the grid.
cf yearly are good for some purposes but bad for others. Again, look at Germany's coal/gas use yesterday vs today as well as wind/solar generation and imports. If you don't want fossils, how would you cover such events? France was outputting towards Germany equivalent of 3-4 npp and 2 additional from Switzerland, max being about 12+GW from neighbors. How would it be financially viable considering there are many other days when demand will be met for day hours? New solar/wind will not be able to sell energy at negative prices unless they get subsidies. Germany already spends 20bn/yr for price subsidies and their grid is far from overcapacity and that doesn't account for other subsidy types like for transmission for renewables
Today's values, from what I've seen, this country could run on just wind if it had 10x more than now, but it doesn't really need that in isolation, it's just that PV was harder to judge because the graph wasn't even close to a flat line.
https://www.energymonitor.ai/power/live-eu-electricity-gener...
> New solar/wind will not be able to sell energy at negative prices unless they get subsidies.
They already do, in good weather.
> 20bn/yr for price subsidies and their grid is far from overcapacity
And how much of that was for a guaranteed price made way back when the stuff was still expensive?
New PV is, by itself, the single cheapest source of electricity; even adding on batteries only takes it up to somewhere between gas and nuclear depending on the specifics.
> and that doesn't account for other subsidy types like for transmission for renewables
How's that a subsidy? I've not seen the breakdown of bill costs here, but back in the UK there was a split between connection cost and use cost.
transmission upgrades are needed for renewables due to their distributed nature https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-looks-specia...
> They already do, in good weather.
We haven't reached yet such renewable market penetration to get this problem. It'll happen when a lot of days, 10 day hours will be covered by renewable output.
> And how much of that was for a guaranteed price made way back when the stuff was still expensive?
I have no idea how are these are distributed. Do you have a link for recent vs old projects?
look at germany's yesterday output and tell me how much batteries they'd need to cover such a drop in generation
Having enough battery capacity to back up enough energy for a few minutes let alone days would require a lot of resources.
I think scaling nuclear power would be cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
Cheaper? No, not even close. Environmentally friendly? Debatable, but wait for new tech.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/iron-air-battery-renew...
yes it'll be cheaper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/
note the word "could"
We have heard better and better batteries being just around the corner for decades at this point.
Sure, maybe a few percent better, but nothing ground breaking.
So using your numbers, it is solidly a little less than half the cost, not one tenth (26GWh seems around the necessarily amount for riding out ~14 hours of darkness. I'm assuming your factor of 3 makes up for seasonal variation and cloudy days). The panels take up 9 acres of land area, and need to be kept clean of snow and dust. The battery lifetime is small compared to expected life of a nuclear reactor, but the battery lifecycle is more straightforward. This seems like the territory of having a reasonable tradeoff between the two, not some unequivocal win for an Internet smackdown about how we should avoid one approach.
That is seemingly such an absurdly high number to get a nuclear planet up and running.
Is the majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?
> Is that majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?
One part this, two parts the economics of a novel technology platform being deployed in a large size, three parts American labor costs and inexperience with megaprojects.
Similar to why we can't build ships [1]: high input costs, notably materials and labour, and a coddled industry that is internationally uncompetitive. With ships, it's the Jones Act and shipyard protectionism; with civilian nukes, it's misguided greenies. (Would note that we're perfectly capable of nuclear production if it happens under the military.)
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/constructionphysics/p/why-cant...
Nuclear is still much more expensive than renewables in China, where there aren't too many "misguided greenies" setting policy. Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable, not the other way around.
The faster people can internalize this lesson, the sooner we'll get to economically-viable nuclear power.
> Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable
As far as Europe is concerned, there seems to have been various political move and lobbying to affect energy independence (e.g. France): economy is transformed energy, so by nuking (…) energy independence, you're suffocating countries. The military role of nuclear is furthermore crucial; civil & nuclear must be correlated.
That's to say, giving up nuclear is not something a sane, well-driven country should do lightly, regardless of ideologies.
It's a tricky topic; what I regularly hear from economists is that wind & solar are still far from being able to compete with nuclear. And because of the previous two points, people can't but frown upon "green" arguments, even if the underlying intentions are honest and well-intended.
(China may not have misguided greenies, but it has a strong incentive to sell whatever it's offering).
If China had a super cheap nuclear design they would be very happy to export that the same way they export their other technologies like EVs, high speed trains, solar panels, batteries, etc. But it simply does not exist.
> If China had a super cheap nuclear design they would be very happy to export that
China "plans to export nuclear power reactors in the future" [1]. It's early stages, but being done through Belt & Road [2].
[1] https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/how-china-has-become-the-world...
[2] https://www.cipe.org/resources/chinas-nuclear-dragon-goes-ab...
The first article refers to 2018 in the future tense, and the second article is three years old without a single announcement of a Belt and Road nuclear plant since then.
china has a super cheap design called hualong and they plan to export it the way russia is exporting their designs. Another plan is finishing local adaptations of ap1000 that can be reselled without licensing problems
This is why China installed 217 GW of solar last year, but only 1.2 GW of nuclear.
> why China installed 217 GW of solar last year, but only 1.2 GW of nuclear
And 114 GW of coal [1]. Don't do nuclear, and that becomes 115 GW of coal. Nuclear and renewables aren't competing for market share.
Everyone is putting down renewables as quickly as possible. But we need more power, so we fill the gap with one of gas, nuclear or coal.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...
> > why China installed 217 GW of solar last year, but only 1.2 GW of nuclear > > And 114 GW of coal [1]. Don't do nuclear, and that becomes 115 GW of coal. Nuclear and renewables aren't competing for market share.
That is true for China, since their overall energy demand is growing massively. But is that also true for other parts of the world like the US or EU? Because looking at the electricity production [1] this doesn't seem to be the case. So in those markets they would compete for replacing existing fossil power plants. I think we can expect some growth, but not on a level even close to China.
[1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/world-electricity-...
We should see some increase in electricity consumption due to displacement of direct uses of fossil fuels. For example, use of heat pumps in place of natural gas furnaces, electric cars in place of IC engine vehicles. Add to that the ever popular AI and general data center consumption motivating this announcement (but I wonder how much of that is going to move to places with cheaper electricity.)
Yes, these and other innovations will defivinitely increase our overall electricity consumption, but i imagine that it will be a gradual shift as it is aleady happening, since vehicles and heating has long life cycles. It also helps that energy wise these technologies are more efficient, so that offsets some of the increase.
Probably hard to judge right now where AI is heading and if the pace of increased energy consumption remains this high. But i agree that they'll probably end up moving closer to sources of cheap electricity.
The efficiency would decrease primary energy use, if the electricity were being produced from thermal sources, but the amount of electrical energy used would increase.
I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that the rest of the world is a footnote to China's emissions. Europe's emissions are already dropping fast, though. Presumably if China can decarbonize its economy at the rate it's going, then we presumably the rest of the world (even poorer nations) will be able to fast-follow them due to the learning curve (or else just because China will have so much excess manufacturing capacity that they'll flood the world with cheap renewables.)
The current analysis is that China's emissions peak this year [1,2] and will enter a structural decline. This is because new renewables are being deployed faster than growth in energy demand. The new coal construction is mostly "dispatchable" production that will be used to backstop the fast-growing renewable grid, with payments going to coal plants in exchange for not generating (and built-in expectations that these payments will rise over the next few years as renewables and storage serve more of the demand.)
[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02877-6
Also because of widespread adoption of battery electric vehicles.
is it? New plants cost 3-3.5bn for a stable 1gw output. For renewables - much more needs to be built to provide same reliability or compensate with fossils
IMO they only continue to exist because of the Jones Act not the way I think you're implying where Jones Act protectionism prevents them from flourishing. High material and labor alone are enough to explain why people wouldn't build ships in the US. What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea? Gone are the days when the US dominates on skill or capacity, and that's not because the US has lost something the rest of the world just caught up with us.
Whenever we're looking at the 1900s and wondering why the US used to be so dominant as an industrial power I think it's incredibly important to remember our industry got all the upside (an absolute torrent of money and demand) and none of the downside (bombing) of two world wars. IMO the US industrial base was riding high on that easily into the 80s and people mistake that dominance for skill and prowess rather than the waning boon of WW2's mobilization and destruction of every other extant industrial power.
The point is there are downstream costs to our moribund shipping industry. We have a internally-navigable waterways we barely use, offshore wind power gets stalled due to lack of ships, et cetera.
Post-WWII effects are one component. But another is that we want a protected shipbuilding industry for its own purposes, which is fine, but that curtails a lot of other production.
> What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea?
Energy. Our energy costs are much lower than theirs.
China's average energy cost for businesses is 10c and the US is 13c according to a quick search I did so I'm still not following.
The rise of the US as an industrial power started in 1800. The US was already dominant before WW1.
There is a huge difference between the US accounting for 20% of Global GDP and merely being "in first place" at the end of WWI and the USA having half of global GDP (and 80% of the world's hard currency reserves) at the end of WW2. While also say, having a Navy easily more powerful than the rest of the world combined, and being able to to focus on an upcoming surge in consumer consumption as opposed to desperately struggling to stabilize food production and rebuild cities and industries that had been ravaged by war.
Britain, a victor that had never been occupied, wasn't able to lift many significant food rationing schemes until the 1950s. Bread, which wasn't rationed during the war, had to be rationed from '46 to '48.
There is a meaningful distinction between being the leading industrial power and being the overwhelmingly dominant economic power.
When the German soldiers first encountered the US doughboys, they were struck by their height, their excellent food, and their supplies. That was when Germany knew they had lost WW1.
And this was despite having to ship all that stuff across an ocean.
The US was an industrial powerhouse then.
The NRC is many things, but a front for "anti-nuclear hippy groups" is not one of them.
France, with all their nuclear base, just raised their estimate for new reactors (I'm so shocked!):
> State-owned Electricite de France SA has raised its estimate for the future construction costs of six new atomic reactors in France by 30% to €67.4 billion ($73 billion)
6 reactors, 1650MW each, $7B per 1GW vs Vogtle's $17B. Planned. In 2 decades, after it's finally built, it will have doubled of course lmao.
That right, blame the hippies. Nothing at all to do with nuclear power plants being the one thing that you really do want to be engineered well. But no, regulations are of course to blame!
The anti-nuclear hippy movements of the 60s and 70s are pretty directly responsible for a lot of the slow down in expansion of nuclear power.
>Between 1975 and 1980, a total of 63 nuclear units were canceled in the United States. Anti-nuclear activities were among the reasons, but the primary motivations were the overestimation of future demand for electricity and steadily increasing capital costs, which made the economics of new plants unfavorable.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Impact_o...
There was a lot scares and FUD about it at the time. To note, I am pro-nuclear.
That says pretty much the opposite of what you claim.
Can Google get 2GW for $34B anywhere in the world? This is the value proposition of modular small reactors.
The cost of nuclear in Georgia today is essentially subsidized by decades and decades of past investments.
And as much as some people might like that you can’t simply move Georgia and place it next to your data centers.
because 1 - 1gw of solar capacity isn't the same as nuclear, even 3gw of solar isn't the same as 1gw of nuclear (to get a proper perspective, look at germany's grid yesterday& how much overcapacity of solar/wind they have and how much was actually generated/imported). 2 - vogtle unit 4 was 30% cheaper than unit 3, proving positive learning curve, meaning (in theory, according to https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/ ) new builds should be significantly cheaper
That wont work because the tesla webpage has a maximum order quantity of 1,000 units... /s
I'm fairly pro-nuclear but the EIA (Energy Information Administration) publishes a "Levelized Costs of New Generation" report every year that compiles the total cost of installing new generation, taking into account the fuel, build up, maintenance, interest, and inflationary costs, and nuclear ends up costing more $$$ than other renewable alternatives.
It's no conspiracy why nuclear never gets traction these days -- maybe it was cost-effective 10-30 years ago but renewable technology has gotten relatively cheap. (Shutting down active nuclear reactors earlier than needed is a whole different issue though.)
Here's the report for 2023: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/...
There is no report for 2024 because they are building a new model to take into account even newer technologies: https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/releases/press537.php
https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... Lazard report for lcoe is so funny because they assume 4h storage will be enough to cover the demand
Nuclear is a terrible investment in 2024. Price per delivered megawatt-hour is guaranteed to be much lower for a combination of solar+battery+wind.
-- Edit --
To clarify, "Nuclear is a terrible investment for private industry in 2024." However, I understand why nation states (and their equivalents) would want a diversity of power sources. There many be non-economic reasons why nations want to build nuclear over solar+battery+wind.
There's something to be said for space. A nuclear reactor takes up far less land than an equivalent amount of wind and solar generation. That's quickly going to become a limiting factor in wind/solar rollout and already is in some smaller countries (unless they're willing to bulldoze their entire land to cover it in solar panels)
Ok we can all agree that the US has not a land problem. This argument is relevant in Europe but the US has more than enough space power transmission is a problem but it's solvable.
Just because the US has a lot of area doesn't mean it should all be paved over and turned into solar farms. "Who needs nature and green spaces? It could be cheap electricity instead" is a mindset the next generation will hate us for, just like our generation resents previous generations for thinking "Why not burn coal? It's cheap electricity and there's lots of air left."
The US has a massive green space problem. It's a country of roads, parking lots, and corn fields and it's a problem that's visible from space.
Don't take this as opposing solar energy. I support it versus fossil fuels. But if nuclear is viable, I'm for it.
This comment:
Your sentiment is interesting. No one says that when we talk about building new farms. Really, that is what people have done for the past 2000 years to alter our landscape. Can you imagine what Brazil looked like in 1800 vs today? Dramatic landscape changes due to farming. Same for US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. California has plenty of desert or very unproductive land that can be covered with solar panels.Nuclear may not be competitive for electricity, but it could be a viable option for district heating. If you ignore electricity generation completely, you could make small simple low-pressure reactors and hide them underground. There is a spin-off company from a national research institute in Finland that believes it can make 50 MW (thermal) reactors for €100 million, with some municipal utilities semi-committed to buying ~15 of them.
Google's entire thing only consumed on average 2.6x worth of AP1000 energy last year. Why does anyone think that the IT industry needs to pull all of the weight of electrifying the American economy by building 7 AP1000 power stations?
You raise a very good point. I need to do some research to understand your comment.
1) Google uses about 25 terawatt-hours per year. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/788540/energy-consumptio...
2) An AP100 nuclear reactor can produce up to 10 terawatt-hours per year. Source: https://canes.mit.edu/overnight-capital-cost-next-ap1000#:~:....
That is incredible to think just how much power that a single nuclear reactor can produce!
People say trillion dollar corporations need to start taking steps to limit climate change, then when they do, "Why should trillion dollar corporations need to pull their weight?"
This top-down corporate order will make more change than Americans can individually.
They have the capital, and are the ones who need the extra generation capacity now. They will share the cost along with the average consumer as EVs take up a larger proportion of total vehicles on the road.
And you are applying this equally across all American industry? The production of chlorine by electrolysis consumes twice as much electricity in America than Google consumes worldwide. But I don't see you up here calling for Olin Chlor Alkali to build nuclear power stations, for some reason. Are you suggesting that the American chemical industry lacks capital?
> 525 megawatts
:(
That's.. not very much.
So typical of Google. Dip their toes in a new field. Get lots of press. Move on to the next thing.
It’s not real funding, it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built! No different from Microsoft’s previous fusion power purchase agreement. The Goog may as well announce they’ve reserved office space in a building to be built on Proxima Centauri B.
Just tech virtue signalling: Google/Microsoft trade the impression that they’re relevant leaders for some legitimacy for a blue sky startup.
> it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built! No different from Microsoft’s previous fusion power purchase agreement
A frequent complaint from utilities has been AI companies refusing to sign PPAs. They want the option of picking up and leaving if someone else offers a better deal down the road, leaving the utility stuck with overbuilt infrastructure costs.
> virtue signalling
This term has lost whatever meaning it ever had if we're using it to refer to binding contracts.
> This term has lost whatever meaning it ever had if we're using it to refer to binding contracts.
If a technological solution is optimistic and remains vaporware possibly forever, then it maybe "virtue signaling" is if there more nonfunctional desire for it that outstrips practical or economic utility. A better term would be "vaporware" when there is less social puritanism involved, and I don't think coal or nuclear signal anything of redeemable greenwashing value compared to cheaper renewables combined with PES and distributed grid storage.
Money talks. Signing the PPA is a legally binding contract to buy the power, so the power companies will them be willing to build the plant, knowing that there's guaranteed demand. Without the PPA, there's no guaranteed demand, and the powerplant won't get built.
Legally binding is a nebulous concept when you're some of the world's richest companies with legal departments multiple times larger than the entire staff of the companies you're 'legally bound' with.
> Legally binding is a nebulous concept when you're some of the world's richest companies
The flip side of being rich enough to hire good counsel is being rich enough to be worth going after. Were Google to renege on an agreement such as this, there would be a line of litigation financiers standing to buy the claim.
Unless it's not actually Google but some shell company Google is technically a customer of. But either way, I don't imagine the intent is to bail on the agreement.
That extremely large and competent legal departments is going to tell you this:
"Taking this to court will cost you a bajillion dollars. And you'll lose. Cut the antics and pay them off."
An agreement to buy enough power for a lightbulb from a plant generating from unicorn farts is meaningless.
If they happen to pull through, it’s a drop in the bucket of Google’s overall consumption. If they don’t, then there is no downside for Google. This is not an investment.
It's a first customer, and guaranteed revenue if the generation is able to be built and operated. It's huge for the nuclear startup company, and can be used to get the financing lined up.
Agreed that Google is taking on very little risk here, but it's still a good action and moves the space forward.
Important to the customer, yes. Meaningless as an indication of Google’s commitment to clean energy.
It was never a meaningful term. Almost everything anyone ever says is virtue signalling; the only difference is which virtues are being flaunted.
Originally it was a worthwhile term to examine distinctions between virtue communications that might be more matters of social negotiation and virtue communications that might be reflections of personal value investment.
Then in certain political usage it became a nihilistic drive-by dismissal for nullifying any kind of virtue accountability, whether sincerely invested or not, a challenge to the idea that there was any such thing as sincere virtue discourse.
In case it wasn't clear, my nihilism is that that political nihilism is itself a form of virtue signaling.
This isn’t a binding contract like Elon Musk agreeing to buy Twitter. Google may be bound in some way to buy power from a future unbuilt powerplant that doesn’t yet exist in prototype form. If Kairos fizzles, more likely than not, can Google seek damages? Will Microsoft seek damages from their binding contract when Helios isn’t grinding out fusion gigawatts in 2028 as promised?
This is de-risking the other way. It allows the energy companies to build their infrastructure without worries that they will get undercut by a competitor and be stuck with overbuilt infrastructure and no one to sell to.
Without that commitment, the investment doesn't get made into the new power generation. Margins in that industry are much lower than in tech.
Yes, it gives them some firm future revenue numbers to work with. They can take this agreement and get financing to pay for the actual construction needed.
> isn’t a binding contract
It absolutely is. Don’t know the details. But there is usually a minimum purchase guarantee by the buyer.
> If Kairos fizzles, more likely than not, can Google seek damages
Probably. Though collecting might be difficult.
> Will Microsoft seek damages from their binding contract when Helios isn’t grinding out fusion gigawatts in 2028 as promised?
Damages, no. Concessions? Probably.
Why would they fissile? Nuclear is solved.
Look to NuScales near collapse last autumn for a recent nuclear power example:
https://iceberg-research.com/2023/10/19/nuscale-power-smr-a-...CFPP was subsequently terminated.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38198136
A power purchase agreement is critical to getting investment. The US aviation industry is wouldn’t exist if not for the UK and French governments making a purchase agreement for planes at the start of WW2
It's funny how many people think getting investments is as easy as just asking a bank or VC for money. If you want anything substantial besides scraps of angel/friends and family rounds, you need to prove your product first.
Getting Google in line as a customer is absolutely huge for Kairos.
All depends on the $/MWh figure.
And the belief that you will actually be able to deliver it. Try it. Go try to pitch Google a $/MWh figure that undercuts what they’re offered here and see how far you get.
IIRC Nuscale was supposed to be doing a demo SMR project in Idaho until the costs blew out and nobody wanted to pay for the new costs. So we’ll see what comes of this.
What are you talking about? If you have Google an offer to sell them $1 for $0.50 they will absolutely take it even if they 99% think you will flop. There is no downside.
The B-17 was developed in 1936 and initial orders were placed in 1938. The government bought hundreds of Douglas B-18 bombers before 1940.
Also the DC-3 / C-47 had its first flight in 1935. With over 10,000 built it showed the US aircraft industry was strong before WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-3
The B-18 Bolo was already obsolete by 1940. Too heavy. Too slow. Range was too short. They were relegated to ASW work.
The B-17, on the other hand, ably earned her nickname, the "Queen of the Skies."
True. But those orders supported the american aviation industry.
Insurance and regulatory hurdles are far higher than contracts selling future electricity customer purchase agreements and likely to doom almost all new nuclear projects in the US as they have for the past 50 years. I don't see why an amoral customer would care about the specific source power as long as it's cheapest, but even a socially-conscious customer would probably be okay with renewables if and when they are generally the cheapest option. Perhaps there are a handful of specific datacenter locations and requirements in particular areas that would be better suited to geothermal or nuclear.
Corporations too have survival and self-preservation instincts.
It can be a necessary step but also a weak gesture at the same time. It doesn't inspire confidence the way actual non-conditional spending does.
Uhh . . . source on that claim?
Which claim? Regarding investments, from the world bank, "The pricing mechanism [a component of a PPA] is the primary mechanism for allocating revenue and market risk in respect of the project between the public and private sectors and is central to the private project proponent’s and its lenders’ assessment of the commercial viability and bankability of the project."
I believe Jigar Shah, the director of the Loan Programs Office at DoE, also talked about the importance of PPAs in attracting outside investment in his book Creating Climate Wealth: Unlocking the Impact Economy
https://ppp.worldbank.org/public-private-partnership/sector/...
Again we’re not talking about an agreement to built a wind farm or solar or a big LNG turbine. A bank sees a PPA for any of those and knows if it cuts a check, it’ll happen with high probability. These tech PPAs are not much more than mutual handwaving by comparison.
This seems circular.
"No one will invest in PPAs for nuclear because there isn't interest."
"These PPAs in nuclear don't represent real interest because they're made with the understanding that the actual product will never develop."
You're assuming your preferred conclusion and inventing a corporate conspiracy to support it.
It would be circular if a single person was saying both of those.
Are the people you're talking to in support of the first quote?
I would expect them to say a lack of PPAs shows lack of confidence, or for them to barely care about the number of PPAs. Not to use it as evidence that there's no interest.
Yes, the person I replied to was doing both, which is why I replied the way I did.
Oh, I think I misunderstood what you meant by "there isn't interest".
I thought the disputed claim was that companies don't make nuclear PPAs because of lack of interest. In that case those claims would combine into a very flawed argument, but pinewurst isn't saying that.
But if the actual meaning was that companies don't invest in the power plants needed to fulfill the nuclear PPAs because of lack of interest, then yes pinewurst was saying that, but that's not a circular argument anymore. "Nuclear PPAs don't represent real interest in power plants." and "There's negligible demand for nuclear PPAs for actual power because there isn't real interest in power plants." are compatible statements and not circular at all. The implication is simple: PPAs are a useless signal, and if you want to check for meaningful interest you need to check other signals. I don't know if I agree, but I think it's a reasonable position. And there's no 'conspiracy' needed.
The claim that there would be no US aviation industry without British/French orders in WWII, which given US production for our OWN Armed Forces is a flat-out absurd thing to claim. France was overrun in 1940 and the RAF only used a few American designs compared with their own.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Purchasing_Commissio...
This is a very far cry from the claim, which is that the American aviation industry would not exist were it not for some orders by Britain and France.
That one is hard to support, given that the American aviation industry was the first such industry, anywhere, and was doing quite well for itself prior to the outbreak of the war.
Did the orders help? Um. Yes? I mean they stopped paying for the planes after Lend-Lease so, mixed bag there, there was a war on and all. But I don't see how the gulf between "Without Britain and France paying for a few planes before the war started" and "$50 Billion in materiel provided free of charge with most of the debt written off and most of the production destroyed in combat" gets bridged. I'm calling shenanigans.
It's worth noting that only several years earlier, the US aircraft industry was almost completely killed by the Wright's patents and licensing practices.
The UK, France (especially), Italy, and others were way ahead of the US until the Feds made the Wrights share their patents to support production of arms for WW I. This led to the rise of far more innovative competitors in aircraft design and production: Curtiss, Martin, Lockheed, Boeing, etc., which rapidly eclipsed the Wright company's fossilized and already obsolete technology. (Note that Wright was soon more or less forced to merge with Curtiss...)
All true. But that's the Great War, not the World War.
Also worth noting that it had been eleven years between the Wright brothers' first flight, and the outbreak of the Great War. By the time WWII was on the horizon, US aviation was a force to be reckoned with. By the end of WWII, it was about the size of all European aviation industry combined, but certainly not before.
To address the sibling comment as well, yes that's accurate as I understand history. The big benefit of the prewar orders was that it gave the US a head start on ramping up for war production, which was nonetheless a basket case for the first year or so after the US entered the war, just before 1942. Without that head start the entire timeline for winning the war would have been pushed back, I don't think it could have changed the outcome but the additional suffering would have been immense.
Yep. Exactly.
Do you think a weaker but more accurate claim would be :
"The US aircraft industry was considerably helped by French and British orders for World War II."
> It’s not real funding, it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built!
PPAs can be used as evidence of guaranteed revenue when raising funds in capital and debt markets.
That capital and debt is used to develop and deploy the technology.
Yeah, its not much I agree. But it is an agreement the company can wave that they at least have future buyers for their non-existing power generators if they were to build them!
Kairos is using FLiBe coolant with TRISO solid fuel.
While this has some advantages (low pressure, no fission products in the FLiBe), it also some issues.
First, the fuel cycle costs are higher than a LWR. The fuel is dispersed as small encapsulated grains in graphite spheres. Manufacturing the fuel is more expensive, I believe the enrichment needed is higher, and the volume of the spent fuel is considerably larger. All that graphite needs to be disposed of along with the spent fuel.
Second, FLiBe require isotopically separated lithium. Li-6 has a ruinously high thermal neutron absorption cross section so it must be rigorously excluded. It also produces tritium when it absorbs neutrons, which would permeate through the reactor and beyond. But there are no large scale lithium isotope separation plants in operation, and the technology that was used for this in the Cold War (to make Li-6 for H-bombs) has been shut down and cannot be restarted because of mercury pollution (liquid mercury is an inherent part of the process and much escaped down drains at Oak Ridge.)
Kairos has announced operation of a FLiBe purification plant, which sounds promisingly like an isotope separation plant, but it appears it's only a plant for removing other impurities (oxygen, sulfur, iron, etc.) from FLiBe. Isotopically pure Li-7 fluoride would be an input to this plant.
Third, FLiBe is about 11% beryllium. Annual world production of beryllium is just a few hundred tons. There's a limit to how much FLiBe could be made for these reactors (or for fusion reactors, for that matter.)
I'm inferring from this that their current plan is to import lithium-7, from either Russia or China?
- "The Kairos Power fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor requires highly enriched lithium-7 to support operations. The high enrichment requirements complicate quality and process control due to lack of qualified standards and instrumentation capable of meeting the required precision and accuracy. Currently, enrichment [sic] of 99.95% 7Li is imported to the U.S. in limited quantities."
https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2023/10/KairosPower_A...
- "Due to environmental concerns and relatively low demand for enriched lithium, further use of the COLEX process is officially banned in the USA since 1963, which strengthens China’s near unanimous [sic] hold over the market of enriched lithium, followed by Russia.[7]. [...]Although US nuclear industry relies heavily on Chinese and Russian enriched lithium, ecological concerns over the process may impede its future domestic use at industrial scale."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLEX_process#COLEX_separation...
(Tangentially, the Chinese FLiBe reactor also uses enriched lithium-7, so I guess they're self-sufficient in that, as both supplier and consumer).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1
edit: Found an additional reference,
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-716 ("Managing Critical Isotopes: Stewardship of Lithium-7 Is Needed to Ensure a Stable Supply" (2013))
> Currently, enrichment [sic] of 99.95% 7Li is imported to the U.S. in limited quantities."
I believe this is referring to rather small quantities (kilograms) imported for pH control in light water reactors.
Right–that's the topic of the GAO report I found. Total US demand of about 300 kg/year of lithium-7, for [⁷Li]OH. They specifically call out the FLiBe molten-salt reactors because they need orders of magnitude more lithium-7; they worried (as of 2013) the Chinese MSR could cause a supply crunch that would affect US PWR's.
God I'm so conflicted.
On the one hand, I'm glad we're finally slowly letting go of the BigOil(tm) propaganda against nuclear. The fact that we're still burning dead dinosaurs to power our society and relying on windmills is insane to me.
On the other, a nuclear startup, presumably some VC-backed monstrosity who will only care about making the most money (aka cutting every conceivable corner there is to cut) possible, sounds like a recipe for fucking disaster just waiting to happen sooner rather than later.
> cutting every conceivable corner there is to cut
Do you think SpaceX cut every conceivable corner to make money? Nuclear (and space), are heavily government regulated. It isn't perfect a safety net but it works.
If SpaceX cuts corners, some rockets fall over a field in Texas/the ocean somewhere. Not a great thing to have happen, but the damage is pretty minimal all things considered.
If a nuclear power plant-owning VC-backed startup cuts corners because their shareholders expect 3 cents more of profit YoY on their earnings report, we get a nuclear meltdown that shuts off an area the size of a small city for a century.
These startups can barely keep passwords secure, I don't trust them and their VC psycho buddies for a second with something as potentially powerful as nuclear energy.
> ... we get a nuclear meltdown that shuts off an area the size of a small city for a century.
Not necessarily. Instead we could just have disposal containers that leak sooner rather than expected.
The storage and disposal side of the nuclear waste is still an unsolved problem, other than "just bury it and hope there's no contamination problems later on".
It depends what your definition of 'unsolved' is.
Sticking it at the bottom of a 5000ft mine shaft in a geologically stable region, with pictograms, is a solution.
If we lose the ability to decipher pictograms on the containers, we're probably back to being apes and have also lost the ability to mechanically dig 5000ft straight down, or 1000ft straight forward through rock, so we'd never encounter it ever again.
There are meltdown-free designs as engineers have learnt from previous problems.
That's exactly the point of government regulation, want to build a privately developed and operated commercial nuclear reactor? Requirement #1: it cannot be physically possible to have a meltdown.
Pretty much the same way jet liners have black boxes, round windows, no smoking, seat belts, etc. The FAA regulates and legislates that.
The irrational fear of nuclear power is just that.
You misunderstand my fears. I'm not fearful of Nuclear power, I'm fearful of VCs and by extension the kind of behavior they encourage.
Aviation is, as you pointed out, heavily regulated, yet that didn't stop the profit-seeking vultures from causing the Boeing-MAX fiasco. There are countless instances of private equity ruining everything they touch while covering things up to avoid repercussions for getting caught (if they ever even come), what makes you so sure this time it's going to be different?
Nuclear is held to an entirely different and higher standard, even to aviation. There isn't any other field that is so critically examined under a microscope by governments.
VC companies have to meet the regulatory criteria. There aren't any safety corners that they can realistically cut without falling foul of regulation and inspection.
I love the 'ideally' in the dry cask storage article...
"Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel."
Also guessing that article is woefully out of date since it mentions:
"The NRC estimated that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, most likely requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind"
The best thing about nuclear, IMHO, is that all of the highly radioactive waste ever produced by nuclear power plants in the US could fit into a single football stadium. Compare that to coal, oil, natural gas, etc.
It's not too hard of a problem to solve, it just requires political will to bury it in a dry geologically stable desert somewhere in the US, which we have plenty of.
> all of the highly radioactive waste ever produced by nuclear power plants in the US could fit into a single football stadium.
I have heard this before, but is this just the physical waste's volume? Isn't that a useless metric? What would happen if you included the volume of the containers required to safely house it?
> What would happen if you included the volume of the containers required to safely house it?
Immensely more manageable than e.g. toxic, radioactive coal ash [1]. TL; DR Spent fuel isn't a real problem. We dispose of tonnes of similarly-nasty stuff every day without mention. (And unlike with radiation, it's difficult to indpendently check chemical toxicity.)
[1] https://www.wsj.com/us-news/coal-ash-cancer-epa-north-caroli...
> And unlike with radiation, it's difficult to independently check chemical toxicity.
This was always kind of interesting to me, and I'm surprised it's not mentioned more. Not for any practical purpose, but just because you'll often hear people talk about how radiation is super scary because it's "invisible". Which is the case, sure, but it seems like it's hardly unique? As you implied, there's countless chemical contaminants that are just as dangerous, and just as undetectable by human senses. At least with radioactive contaminants you can (at least in most situations) use Geiger counters and dosimeters and whatnot - with some of the chemical threats humanity has cooked up, it seems like you need an entire study just to determine if they're present or not.
Sure, but I just mean that if you put all the nuclear waste into a pool-sized container, is there not a chance that it would go critical without safe housing and separation?
Coal ash doesn't have that feature.
> if you put all the nuclear waste into a pool-sized container, is there not a chance that it would go critical without safe housing and separation?
Not really. Even intentionally turning nuclear waste into a critical mass would take some effort, assuming it's been minimally reprocessed.
if you could, that's no longer waste, it's unused fuel.
`not too hard a problem` - just hard enough that it hasn't been progressed for decades.
but the great thing about next gen reactors is that the waste solution does not need to be addresed; any waste from next gen reactors will simply go wherever the final solution for existing waste engines lands.
> just hard enough that it hasn't been progressed for decades
That's the thing, though: it doesn't need to progress, it's essentially solved. At least, for our current usage
Safety claims of novel, unproven fission designs always come with a crazy footnote. Pebble bed reactors are completely safe, if they are never exposed to water or oxygen, which is a pretty hilarious caveat for planet Earth.
What are the disclaimers for molten salt reactors?
If you can contain the highly corrosive, very hot, molten salts, then they are fairly safe, but you do need to guarantee that the path to the dump-tanks is undisturbed by whatever disaster is necessitating their use.
A big non-safety disclaimer is that the proposed advantage of online refueling is still largely theoretical.
No one has built a large scale viable one yet because of the extremely caustic coolant. In theory they sound great, but no one has come up with a material that can survive the molten saltfor decades
Considering that there are no commercial-scale operating MSRs, I am guessing there are some pretty significant difficulties. Like graphite pebble reactors, molten salts must be perfectly desiccated, which is impossible to guarantee under Earth operating conditions, and nobody knows what kinds of materials to use for the salt containment, or how it might be changed by a few decades of operation.
I believe it depends on the salt used and why a lot of research is looking at fluorine - floride salts don't dissolve in water and thus don't have the same risks. Another MSR design seeing a lot of attention is SSR which similarly doesn't use any chemically reactive materials. SSR is also interesting from a cost perspective as it's projected to cost half of a modern coal power station and almost a third that of a modern large scale nuclear construction putting it in line with solar plants that don't have batteries (i.e. much more cost effective).
The volume of nuclear waste is completely overestimated by the man-on-the-street.
https://ukinventory.nda.gov.uk/the-2022-inventory/2022-uk-da...
A bit like all the world's gold would actually comfortably fit into an olympic sized swimming pool.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21969100
Nuclear waste is a bit larger because it's not pure radioactive elements, but it is still a tiny volume.
there aren't any records in history with problems with casks storing solid waste. Related to spent fuel: the solution should be storage facility like in sweden + purex like in France (or even better - fast reactors and pyroprocessing)
"Ideally, the heavy steel mills near Lake Michigan will produce minimal heavy-metals-laden effluent"
Official post: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/goog...
Finally, 24 years in, it’s really starting to FEEL like a new century.
Epochal "century" boundaries don't always line up with year % 100. One could argue that the 20th century didn't properly begin until some idiot shot an archduke. It likewise seems like the 20th century likewise overshot Y2K by a decade or two. Now things are accelerating in a different, new, and exciting direction.
It's the same thing with decades. People often say the "sixties" didn't really start till 1963. And when you think of the start of 1980's culture, a lot of people are really only talking about 1983-1984.
Like, 1960 itself clearly belonged to the 1950's, the same way 1980 still belonged to the 1970's -- culturally, that is.
Obviously, the question of what year a decade "really" started in, allows for endless argument. :)
The 90s ended on 9/11.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Long_nineteenth_c... (I am linking like this because this version I read myself.)
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed..
you don't think smartphones and total mobile phone adoption were a massive change to life before?
When I was a kid and imagined the future I didn’t spend too much time thinking about the communicator. Kind of boring in the bigger picture.
I did. There was no talking to friends after turning off the computer and then it was also too late to make phone calls. I remember pretend-playing (if that's the English word for it) having conversations in them while already in bed. Nowadays that's not uncommon to do at all
Not that I had a grand vision as, what was I, perhaps 7 years old? But communication and the transfer of information are two of the main things to live for. Neither seems boring or small beans to me at all
Absolutely nothing boring about communicating, but the communicator itself is near/low tech. That’s why we have billions of them already in people’s hands.
Glad you have one!!
Whatever. We’ve done too little, too late in order to tackle the climate threats.
We’ve had the technology to build and deploy nuclear reactors for decades but we’ve been burning coal and fuel like there’s no tomorrow so well…
The famous 4chan quote springs to mind.
"The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best is now."
4chan? Are you serious?
That proverb is ancient - it has been around for centuries (if not longer).
Pick your favorite wise quote source:
[1] Ancient Chinese proverb [2] Abraham Lincoln [3] Albert Einstein [4] 4Chat/Reddit/Twitter
Exactly. I see a lot of people attributing it to a Ancient Chinese Saying, but no verification. At least I know for sure it was said on 4chan.
It was said here too, but that doesn't make HN the source.
4chan gets a lot of credit as the origin for various things which I don't think it deserves most of the time.
It’s still possible to mitigate without upending society (provided the Hansen paper is wrong), but just barely and not for long. It is absolutely dire and urgent but we’re not beyond hope for the future generations yet.
We're getting there.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10102024/inside-clean-ene...
https://coal.sierraclub.org/coal-plant-map
https://www.vox.com/climate/372852/solar-power-energy-growth...
https://www.dnv.com/news/eto-energy-related-emissions-will-p...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41602799 (citations)
daily temperatures consistently above +2 ºC the median average since 1970 in my region
We should probably prioritize getting there faster then, and taking fossil fuel supply chain infrastructure and generation offline.
Sort of feels like we wasted a long time having our best and brightest figuring out how to optimize advertising algorithms. I think we're finally starting to recover from that phase.
These nuclear reactors are literally being built to optimize advertising algorithms.
Sort of, they are being built to power AI models which do all kinds of things, but yes definitely advertising is part of it. Ads are mature now though, these mega corps have fine-tuned their products and squeezed every last advertising penny out of their audiences that they can, there isn't as much new stuff to build in that area now.
I'm still curious what all these companies exactly want genAI for, but I doubt it's about ads. And the other kinds of AI aren't driving the new power usage.
Citation needed for the claim that any particular non-trivial fraction of engineering talent has been wasted on ad algorithms, or that those are the "best and brightest", or that those people would have been doing other useful work if the ads didn't exist.
Without evidence this is just a repetition of an old, unproven meme for internet points.
You can look at what percentage of each big tech company's revenue is ads or how much they've spent on their advertising platforms.
That not related to the claim about engineering talent.
The talent follows the money. Consider what was hottest during the 2000s-2010s tech boom, startups offering free services with the value proposition of eventual data collection for ads.
Maybe also look at value instead of revenue, in terms of public market caps or private acquisitions. At least Facebook's $1.48T market cap is derived from ads.
That doesn't answer the question. I asked for, and I quote, "any particular non-trivial fraction of engineering talent has been wasted on ad algorithms, or that those are the "best and brightest", or that those people would have been doing other useful work if the ads didn't exist".
Your inability to provide evidence is suggestive that the evidence does not exist.
I'm not sure what else you want beyond my answer, maybe proof that these big tech companies have indeed been hiring bright engineers, but maybe you or someone else can find it on the Internet. I'm gonna go ahead and agree with Dig1t on this.
> I'm not sure what else you want beyond my answer
It's not hard to see that your response does literally nothing to answer my question.
> I'm gonna go ahead and agree with Dig1t on this.
It's crystal clear that you don't have any evidence for the claim, so your opinion is meaningless.
I'm also glad to see that the hot startups aren't social media anymore.
Um, fission reactors are very much last century.
Nah, those are the giant overly complex fission reactors. Now we're talking about sleek, much safer, miniature designs that are mass produced. Well, technically they're actually mass fueled. ;)
Isn't this what they say every time there's a new reactor design? Then somehow there's still an accident like in Fukushima.
No, not really? Fukushima first became operational in 1971. That's 40 years before that incident or 50 years ago.
Development of generation III+ "fail-safe" reactors began to be developed around 1990's. To my knowledge none of them have had accidents like Fukushima.
Also Fukushima didn't result in any, or nearly no, deaths. However, I do hear of major oil catastrophes every decade or less. Deep Horizon accident in 2010 in comparison had 11 fatalities, 17 injuries, and spilled 134 million gallons of oil polluting almost the entire Gulf of Mexico.
According to Google the history of "fail safe" reactors is:
> Development of Generation III+ reactors began in the 1990s. The Westinghouse AP1000 was the first Generation III+ reactor to receive final design certification from the NRC in 2005.
ap1000 and new smr designs - not quite
Related:
Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443
It'll be a "wow I didn't see that coming" moment if it's AI (training) that inadvertently saves us from catastrophic climate change by all the big tech funding a resurgence of nuclear power.
Ditto.
Caveat. I did pencil in data centres using nuclear as highly probable some years ago (I worked in geophysical energy+mineral exploration for decades then moved to resource intelligence presentation).
Won't I don't see is the "inadvertently saves us from catastrophic climate change" part .. sure, that might happen but it doesn't follow that it will - the more probable outcome is that overall we humans just consume even more energy with some of that addditional energy coming from nuclear.
The assumption is that AI builds momentum in nuclear power to the point where it can be used elsewhere. I've kept hearing that nuclear is very expensive mainly due to lack of scale.
The reality is that human energy consumption is expanding faster than nuclear is likely to be built out.
It's a tall ask for nuclear to cover projected additional demand (see: global energy consumption data over time), it's even more of an ask to expect it to make inroads on existing demand also.
The closest thing we have for examples of nuclear at scale is Korea in recent past decades and currently China right now: https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c...
Nuclear is also expensive in comparison to alternatives (depending upon local expertise): Australia's costings (cold start on nuclear power tech) are that the better ROI over next four decades on energy investment now is not nuclear (2024 CSIRO energy report).
The selling point of modular reactors is that they are built on a production line and that the next one is identical to the one before. But why not apply this principle to large reactors? After all there are plenty of reactors that operate reliably so why not just dust off the drawings and build another one just like the one before?
In this podcast (1) Jigar Shah (head of DOE’s Loan Programs Office) said:
"...the first one will be more expensive, the second will be cheaper, the third one is cheaper, the fourth one's cheaper. So it is objectively the case that if you went to a 1200 MW coal site, which by definition only has 1200 infrastructure around it, and you built one AP1000, that would be more expensive than building four 300 MW reactors, because the second, third and fourth one will be cheaper than the first one."
1. https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps said that
Are you implying that building a copy of an existing PWR would be more costly (in real terms) than building the first one? After all the world has quite a variety of first ones already built.
Also claiming certain knowledge of the financial outcome of a large engineering project before one has even a prototype is pretty much the definition of hubris.
The podcast also says that there are 92 reactors operating in the US now and that one of the reasons why the US is so far behind other countries in the nuclear industry is that 'no four are the same'. So why not pick the most successful one and build a copy?
The word cheaper is doing a lot of work here. How much cheaper?
I'm not arguing that modularity is bad just that there doesn't seem to be any hard evidence yet that they will be truly modular, certainly not in the same sense as washing machines coming off a production line are. Look at how many rockets SpaceX built before they got it right.
Even production lines for much simpler things generally take some time to settle down. The idea that the second one will be noticeably cheaper than the first seems rather unlikely because it will have to incorporate fixes for the things that didn't quite work right on the first one.
Also a 300 MWe reactor is still very large machine and has to dump huge amounts of heat somewhere so the site is still important so making the individual reactors cheaper does not make the whole project correspondingly cheaper.
I have no in-depth knowledge in this area and can't offer any answers. However, I listened to the podcast a few months back and it seemed relevant to your original question. I hope you find it useful.
We should have learned by now that as soon as things go south, be it a radioactive leak or worse, it won't be any company which will cover the costs related to solving the caused problem. It will be the taxpayer.
that's why we should build new reactor designs so that things don't go south
No, it will most likely be an insurance company.
I believe that the Price Anderson act sets aside $10 billion from the nuclear operators as a kind of insurance fund. After that the government would foot the bill. Fukushima's cleanup costs are over $100 billion.
At current rate of once in 1,000 year accidents (3 in 70 years) we will make all the land on rarth radioactive in 250,000 years ...
That assumes that we don't learn from accidents, which isn't really the case. Nobody builds extremely-unsafe RBMK reactors anymore, for example.
And the TMI accident didnt really make any land radioactive and Fukushima seems cleanup-able.
Never in my life I would have think I would once read 'nuclear energy' and 'startup' in the same sentence.
First line of the article is about how the company is trying to avoid spiraling costs. Yeah, seems like a great idea with nuclear energy.
So where's going to be the next Chernobyl? I read they have clearance to build one in Tennessee.
Can someone more informed than me comment — is it me, or does it seem that Situational Awareness essay rings more and more true?
This one ?
https://situational-awareness.ai/parting-thoughts/
There are some big differences with the atom bomb though :
A lot of people have been talking about AGI / the Singularity for decades, and that essay is yet another example.
Not sure if it's the hindsight talking, but the situation with (un)controlling fission was much clearer ? We knew it was at least theoretically possible. And the first test was very precisely engineered (in fact switching at the last minute to a more complex design because the calculations showed that the material wasn't pure enough to work). And the very first test worked.
Meanwhile, despite for AGI it (almost) all being out in the open, nobody can define what AGI exactly is, and it's all extremely empirical : throw compute at the wall, try another algorithm, see if the black box seems smarter, or not. Nobody knows even in theory when (or even if) AGI will be reached, and for how long scaling up compute will keep providing the very impressive results we have seen so far.
I feel like the article is not accurate and understandable to me, can somebody please explain me the background?
Man, this wide scale deployment of LLMs is gonna wreck the environment. Why do we even need this?
It's encouraging that people are starting to think critically about energy usage in the US and worrying about LLMs is as good introduction as any.
The main problem is that US needs to ramp down fossil fuel extraction and usage, and bring down per capita general electricity usage to levels resembling the rest of the western world. See eg this map: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use
Because AI is awesome, and nuclear power is awesome.
Because Sundar loves AI ...
Shareholders need it
Because in-spite of all the FUD on here, it’s magical, I use it everyday and I don’t believe we’re anywhere close to the limit of what they can deliver yet.
A step towards realignment with their OG motto. Good.
"startup" + "nuclear", what could go wrong
A public company couldn't get away with the creative accounting needed to get these headlines...
Sadly, read the fine print before applauding too hard
Reuters article, no paywall: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/g...
CNBC article, no paywall: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/14/google-inks-deal-with-nuclea...
No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, you're in trouble.
Even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar/wind. Battery backup postpones the "range anxiety deadline" but cannot remove it. Fundamentally, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable.
Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source that can be widely adopted (cf. hydro). After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity). Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100%.
Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.
Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (probably 80 years, maybe more). The unenriched uranium fuel is very cheap (https://www.cameco.com/invest/markets/uranium-price), perhaps 5% of the cost of running the plant.
This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if greenhouse emissions matter.
Google is funding construction of 7 nuclear reactors. Microsoft is paying $100/MWh for 20 years to restart an 819 MW reactor at Three Mile Island. Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates owns a stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors. As for Meta, see Yann LeCun's unambiguous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097
In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were recently announced. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).
Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy, along with solar and wind. Many people (e.g., Germany) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this.
Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
I want to add to this that I routinely see solar plants compared on a cost basis with other forms of energy by using the nameplate capacity.
Which is, hmm. Rather than impute motive, since I'm sure motives vary, I'm going to talk about why this doesn't work. Classic heat plants (coal, diesel, nuke, doesn't matter) get around 90% of the nameplate. Specifically they're running 90% of the time, and producing at the full capacity while running. That percentage is called the capacity factor.
Because for classic generators the capacity factor is high (hydro can vary a lot based on water available in the reservoir), nameplate capacity, which is what the plant yields under ideal conditions, is usually what we talk about. The problem is that the nameplate capacity of solar is what you get on a perfectly sunny day, with the sun shining directly on the panel.
What you want in order to assess cost is the nameplate capacity multiplied by the capacity factor, which is the averaged amount of power you can get out of the plant given real-world conditions. For solar, this can push 30% in an ideal location like Arizona, and be as low as 13% in a not-ideal location like Minnesota. Wind can push 50% capacity when well installed, but it is intermittent in an even less predictable way than solar. If the wind stops in the middle of the night, all wind and solar generation put together is bupkis.
We need nuclear. We could do without all of the other carbon-free electrical generation by use of nuclear energy. I don't think we should, mind you, solar in particular has a big advantage in that it's just about the only generating source which comes in small modules, so we can chip away at generation by adding whatever's affordable and build up over time.
But next time you hear that solar is cheaper, see if you can check the numbers and determine if the claim is being made on the basis of nameplate capacity. If it is, multiply that cost by four.
While I don’t doubt that’s true in some discussions, HN is not Reddit and I don’t see this confusion so much here.
Are you certain of that?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841072
I see it all over the place.
Your link specifically states that no long term storage option exists, but it does so in a rather weaselly (“until {a future date}, there was not {safe long term storage}”) way that seems specifically crafted to confuse the reader.
In the US long term storage absolutely exists, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [1]. It only stores nuclear waste of military origin (i.e. from the making of the nuclear bombs). But there is no technical reason this storage can't also accommodate civilian waste. By the way, the amount of military waste exceeds the civilian waste by a factor of 3 or so.
[1] https://www.wipp.energy.gov/
> In the US long term storage absolutely exists
In one sense it does exist (i.e. it's buried in salt beds 2,000 feet below surface), but is it safe?
In 2014 there was an explosion of a waste container and radioactive particles were spread throughout the facility and up to the surface by the air processing equipment in the mine.
It seems like it's not just a binary choice, but more of a continuum of how safe is the particular solution compared to others.
I see some moving goal posts here. If long term storage exists, then it's not perfectly good long term storage. It's not a true Scotsman.
> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
> The only extant long term storage isn’t safe, clean, secure, or reliable
> You’re moving the goalposts! You should be happy with imperfect storage!
Nope. No nuclear energy supporter will state that nuclear energy is perfectly safe, clean, secure or reliable. Nothing is perfect, why would the bar for nuclear energy be perfection?
Nuclear energy is not perfectly safe for the obvious reason that we've had Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. It is not perfectly clean, since it produces nuclear waste. It is not perfectly secure, just look at the Zaporizhzhia power plant. It is not perfectly realiable: there are times when a lot of French reactors went offline because the water in rivers was too warm.
What exactly is your argument?
That was a direct quote from the parent.
> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
Which energy source has stricter safety and security regulations than nuclear? Surely the strictest security regulations are applied to the least safe and secure operations?
Which other source has cleanup operations going for decades, 1000s of miles from where a single plant operated? What other power source has the military guarding its waste?
The reliability seems great until unexpected failures drops a large percentage of the national power supply in a matter of minutes (as seen in France, Sweden and Finland for example). Such events are more disruptive than cloudy days are with Solar.
> Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years
But they keep costing money for longer than the US has existed after they close.
Surely investing in hydrogen or similar is way better for the future than nuclear.
> The reliability seems great until unexpected failures drops a large percentage of the national power supply in a matter of minutes (as seen in France, Sweden and Finland for example). Such events are more disruptive than cloudy days are with Solar.
That's a failure mode common to all large centralized power plants, not exclusive to nuclear. For instance, an unexpected failure (a triple fault on one of the transmission lines coming from the power plant) of a single hydroelectric power plant caused a country-wide power outage in two countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Brazil_and_Paraguay_black...).
> Which energy source has stricter safety and security regulations than nuclear?
A better question is why nuclear needs that much regulation, it's all just political difficulties. Nuclear technology itself don't need this much.
"Which other source has cleanup operations going for decades, 1000s of miles from where a single plant operated?"
I thought the answer was going to be a coal plant until I read the rest
> Which other source has cleanup operations going for decades, 1000s of miles from where a single plant operated
Chernobyl is a bad example.
The Soviets knew it was an inherently unsafe design and built it anyway.
When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
Fukushima is a better example.
And even then, it took a string of extreme circumstances for Fukushima to happen, and compared to Chernobyl/TMI wasn't nearly as disastrous. A strong earthquake AND a tsunami AND people once again ignoring the safety instructions to shut it down early.
Chernobyl and Fukushima both demonstrate that humans fail over time, and that when they do, nuclear is certainly not clean.
Claiming it is safe and clean when it requires demonstrably superhuman effort to keep it both safe and clean is a weird argument IMO.
It is possible to build reactors that are physically incapable of melting down.
So to throw out the entire nuclear industry just because seems like a weird argument IMO.
Three Mile Island was a relatively safe reactor with a (partial) meltdown, which didn't cost that much, and is going to go back into production decades later. Fukushima, too, was a relatively safe reactor that caused a (partial) meltdown, but a massive financial burden.
It's debatable how much of that cost is truly necessary.
If this would've happened in the fossil fuel world, the cleanup would've been in the low billions instead of >$100B.
I would argue deep horizon was ecological a disaster several orders of magnitude worse than Fukushima, yet it cost several orders of magnitude less in cleanup.
It's almost as if we apply different scales to different energy sectors.
If it's that easy, why didn't Fukushima's plant get the meltdown-proof reactor?
The technology didn't exist yet.
The first one was built in 2021 and went into commercial operation in 2023: https://www.ans.org/news/article-6241/china-pebblebed-reacto...
It was conceptualized in the 50s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
But there were a number of limiting factors that led to people building reactors that could meltdown, but were incredibly unlikely - see Fukushima - it didn't technically meltdown - even in a VERY bad scenario with a good bit of human error.
Pebble bed reactors are not safe, they fail for different reasons than other reactor designs but they can still fail.
They don't need fanatical attention to active cooling, but they do instead need fanatical control of the atmosphere near the reactor to prevent fires, for example.
The first prototype was built in Germany in the 60s. It was closed in 1988, had to be bailed out by the German government in 2003 and has of course been a continuous money drain on German taxpayers ever since.
Nice summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor
From basic principles one might consider that anything that generates enormous amounts of power in a concentrated area can never be truly safe. All that energy is always a potential disaster.
Power plants that generate less power but are cheaper to make and can be distributed over a large area to ensure redundancy is a better strategy for both safety and reliability.
That's very recent and not tested enough outside of China, so personally I'm going to wait and see what X-Energy does, but it'd be great if it works out.
Meltdowns are also not the only risk. That Wikipedia article says the PBR concept was used in the AVR reactor and still resulted in a non-meltdown accident that contaminated the groundwater with radioactive substances. Again they couldn't attribute deaths to it, but the main article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor makes it look like an expensive mess with many accidents and protocol breaches. 1966 though; hopefully they've learned.
Earthquakes and tsunamis often go together, and operator mistakes always happen.
Nuclear is absolutely necessary to complete the clean energy transition, but is it really an either-or with solar and wind? We need massive amounts of clean electricity to displace fossil energy sources, not just to power the grid but also to synthesize all the chemical feedstocks that currently come from oil. The skills and resources needed to build out nuclear capacity and solar/wind capacity are quite different and needn't compete with each other.
> is it really an either-or with solar and wind? We need massive amounts of clean electricity
No. This is a false dichtomy pushed, from what I can tell, by the gas lobby. It's solar and wind + nukes or gas.
Batteries work in theory but not in practice: production doesn't scale fast enough, and that was before LLMs brought a new and growing source of power demand to the table. (I'm ignoring that grid batteries compete with transport electrification. A combination of economies of scale and common bottlenecks in construction of battery plants, irrespective of chemistry, links the pursuits.)
Batteries are radically transforming California's power grid.
In the last few years, they have displaced a huge chunk of the natural gas power used in early evenings after sunset when solar drops off but demand is still high.
https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2024-08-25/b...
Why doesn't battery production scale fast enough? Be specific on what limits it.
I firmly believe battery production can scale up very fast. Indeed, that's exactly what's been happening.
Realize that to replace all the motor vehicles in the US with BEVs would need enough batteries to store at least 40 hours of the average US grid output. This is almost certainly much more than would be needed for the grid itself.
I'm not sure that grid batteries should compete with transport electrification. One reason I haven't moved yet on batteries for the home is that I'm still interested to see what alternatives to lithium emerge. It seems to me that transport prioritises size and weight, whereas home and grid might take a hit on those measurements to maximise efficiency, durability, etc
> not sure that grid batteries should compete with transport electrification
The bottlenecks are in processing materials, forming anodes and cathodes and packaging them into cells. Processes preserved across most chemistries. There is a reason the guys who built Li-on plants are pretty good at building LFP plants, and why the guys building LFPs are making announcements about sodium.
Why can't processing be ramped up arbitrarily? There's no compelling limit on how many factories can be built.
This is the glory of industry: if the process is profitable, you can stamp out factories and generate ever larger profits, up to the point the market is saturated.
> One reason I haven't moved yet on batteries for the home is that I'm still interested to see what alternatives to lithium emerge
You could also buy a medium-sized lithium package now and already help with the transition, if you have the means, and then buy a full pack once the new hype tech becomes production-ready in 30 years (perhaps sooner but, with current warming, that's not something I'd wait on)
Nuclear is absolutely not necessary to complete the clean energy transition. It's dubious that new construction nuclear power plants are even useful for it, compared to alternatives.
No one has said it’s either-or. In fact the thread you responded specifically mentions how nuclear needs to be there as a “bad weather backup” of other clean energy sources.
> No one has said it’s either-or
Lots of people say either or. When nuclear comes up, someone will claim we should just go all in on solar, wind and batteries. That's unworkable, so we wind up burning gas.
I rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas. It's always "wind and solar is unreliable" (not intermitent).
Even in this thread someone is saying that the problem with solar is that "if a megavolcano darkens the atmosphere... thus we should go all in to nuclear", as if it was a guaranteed event in the next 100 years.
>I rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas.
It is almost always implied. It seems so obvious that nuclear should be replacing fossil fuels it doesn't seem worth mentioning. Unless someone says they're aiming for an energy policy of nuclear plus fossil fuels, it's probably safe to say their goal is nuclear and solar/wind/etc.
Even the volcano comment you mention ends with "For energy we obviously need all the options available."
I can't deduce "implied" when the comments are very, very explicit against solar and wind, not a single word about gas. But somehow I have to read between the lines that they actually meant to criticise fossils.
Do you think everyone pronuclear is a climate change denier? It's so incredibly clear who's the "bad guy" here.
> rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas. It's always "wind and solar is unreliable"
People picked tribes and decided it's all or nothing. I agree--that's stupid. There is a historical alignment between renewables backers and anti-nuke activists (see: Germany) that caused nuclear to polarise away from renewables. That doesn't really exist anymore. But you see its artefacts in the debate.
It sounds like they're talking about the difference between baseload power and intermittent power. Replacing fossil fuel baseload power plants can be done now. Replacing them with variable renewable energy sources would require some sort of breakthrough in energy storage technology.
> Replacing them with variable renewable energy sources would require some sort of breakthrough in energy storage technology
No, it wouldn't. Batteries + renewables is proven and it works. The problem isn't a technological barrier. The problem is we need batteries for a lot of things and production can't ramp up fast enough.
I don't see how this is relevant ?
Technical barriers are always also resource availability barriers, since technics also condition both usage and availability.
It’s not ideal to have solar/wind and nuclear though. Nuclear doesn’t throttle well (or at least, economically). And Even building gas peak plants to cover still cloudy days is an order of magnitude lower in capital cost and risk than nuclear. The problem is we don’t have a coordinated enough system to properly reward mostly- turned off gas peak plant owners.
I meant “no one is saying that on this thread” of course. A lot of people talk about the conflict between Palestine and Israel too but we don’t bring it here because we are talking about something else.
Whatever your plan for a nuclear grid without burning fossil gas is (massive overprovision, syngas production, batteries, demand response, just ignoring the issue) it'll work better and cheaper with renewables.
there are real limits on time on funds: we can't really afford to spend those limited resources on non-solutions.
> Nuclear is absolutely necessary to complete the clean energy transition, but is it really an either-or with solar and wind?
For energy we obviously need all the options available.
If a major volcano goes off up and darkens the sky with clouds and high winds make wind farms unsafe to operate, then nuclear is probably our only reliable power source left. It's not like there weren't multiple ice ages and warming events in the history of our planet.
There is a reason sailboats were obsoleted by the steam engine: it could tug forward in windless waters and stll make it fast enough to deliver the mail. The base load power station is the steam engine. The sailboat is the wind turbine or the PV array. Most of them need a gas fired power plant to compensate for windless or cloudy days, like newer sailboats need an engine. We could use a load following SMR in place of the gas fired plant.
which is why no sailboats exist today....
They're mostly used for recreational sailing or racing and are also equipped with an engine (diesel or electric sail drive) for maneuvers and in case there's no wind. Sailing has also advanced a lot since the nineternth century, but commercial shipping is now done with bunker oil and diesel engines and was previously done with steamers.
just one counter-example proves that statement wrong.
The above comment didn't say that sailboats don't exist.
> Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company.
And the deadlines keep getting pushed because the fuel supplier is Russia. Nuclear is not immune to geopolitics or the weather as this comment suggests. It's one of the many issues comments like this ignore - like the spiraling construction costs (even in China), risk trade off when it comes to the catastrophic nature of accidents, viability and enormous costs of clean up and waste storage etc.
Russia does only the enrichment of the Uranium. The western world already had their own large-scale enrichment facilities and can (and is currently) rebuilding those capacities.
> Education will fix this.
It won't because people disagreeing with your view are not all uneducated morons. Their opinions are based on politics and ideology. And you can't deny that it's factually true that radioactive waste is generated. I personally don't think that this is problem compared to the alternatives, but others do and they're not just uneducated.
> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
Wasn't Fukushima a nuclear fission reactor? How is nuclear fission secure?
Yep. Personally I'd be happy with a nuclear power plant in my town, but it's not because I read some book proving to me that it's safe.
And I don't want to hear the Fukushima partial-meltdown was operator error and we just need people to not make mistakes. I'd rather be told that accidents will happen, radioactive substances will leak, and we have ways to deal with that.
Intermittent and unreliable are two different things.
Renewables are intermittent and reliable; if a wind producer has bid into the day-ahead auction, you can expect with very high reliability they will deliver as bid.
Nuclear is great, so is zero-marginal-cost energy producers :)
And recently found the be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.
It needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.
Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
quite the opposite https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
Yes, that shit study which models supplying the entire grid with one energy source and lithium storage through all weather conditions.
I would suggest reading the study I linked so you can see the difference in methodology when credible researches in the field tackle similar question.
The credible studies are focused on simulating the energy system and market with real world constraints. Which unsurprisingly works out to be way cheaper when not involving nuclear in the picture.
it models solar+wind+storage + even brings the 95% supply into discussion and it's still better for nuclear. I suggest you to understand that 4h storage is a totally unrealistic requirement and h2 production is a pipedream for foreseeable future
> I suggest you to understand that 4h storage is a totally unrealistic requirement
If California simply continues their current storage rollout they will have 10 hours of storage at peak demand and 20 hours of storage at average demand when the warranties for what they build today run out in 20 years.
This would coincide with any new nuclear power plant project starting today beginning commercial operations.
If Vogtle, Flamanville 3 and friends had delivered on their promises in the 2000s nuclear power might have been part of the solution. They did not do it, and thus nuclear power never became part of the solution.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/
> h2 production is a pipedream for foreseeable future
When we get to the final percent in the 2030s we can utilize akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity markets [1] but zero carbon.
Peaker plants today already run too little to be economical on their own, essentially what in our current grids constitute seasonal storage and emergency reserves.
Simply update the terms for the capacity markets to require the fuel to be zero-carbon. It can be synfuels, biofuels or hydrogen. Whatever comes out the cheapest.
As we electrify transportation we can shift over the massive ethanol blending in gasoline in the US to be our seasonal buffer. [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_market#Capacity_ma...
[2]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=27&t=10
Not so sure about California https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO especially considering at some point peaker/overcapacity/storage would need huge subsidies to be built, especially considering California wants to shut down it's nuclear. Vogtle unit 4 was cheaper and faster than unit 3, meaning there is positive learning curve.
> Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels.
How does that follow?
How does using nuclear for some of our energy needs bias the rest of our energy sources towards fossil fuels? As opposed to renewables or even more nuclear?
We get vastly more bang for the buck when investing in renewables.
Fixing climate change is both having enough energy to displace all fossil fuel we consume and being quick enough with the transition lessen the end state carbon content in the atmosphere.
I still don't see how nuclear prolonging fossil fuels follows from any of that.
Building nuclear doesn't prevent or slow the rest from transitioning to renewable. If anything, it can get us off of fossil fuels faster because it handles the base load.
Totally agree. The move away from research in nuclear technology towards unreliable "green tech" is a colossal mistake. I'm not sure why Germany did it. Reliable power is the life blood of an economy. With electric cars (and possibly trucks) more will depend on power capacity a country is able to reliably produce.
Research safety and disposal. Add funds to that research so that we can get over our fear. We did it for airlines its time to do it for nuclear power.
A lot of people knock h2 as a fuel, but 1/2 the time these complaints seem to not be of a technical merit, but some blather about how it will all come from Ng.
Nonsense.
Such things can be regulated, but my point is that solar and wind are perfect for h2 generation. The sun shines? Produce. The wind blows? Produce.
The variability is irrelevant, and the result is the creation of a fuel source that can be stored.
Even better, we already have an immense network of Ng pipes, and there have been many tests and studies on injecting h2 into Ng lines, and pulling it out at the other end with molecular filters. There is no molecular reaction either.
The means low cost, massively deployed infra already exists.
And this massive network of Ng lines, with h2 injected, can in effect be an immense storage tank of h2.
We don't need some unified "batteries only" group think, but instead having multiple clean sources of energy is a boon. Just the cost of adding 3x the power transmission capacity, distribution is daunting, h2 can let a faster rollout of clean transport occur.
We should embrace all paths which the market can endure amd which can be green.
The Germans ended up focused on one only.
My point? H2 is perfect for solar.
Using the existing natural gas lines for hydrogen would be pretty disruptive. I don't think most things that burn natural gas will work properly on H2. So, you're looking at a big-bang switchover, in which every appliance connected to the natural gas "grid" in the area will need replacing at the same time. In the Northeast at least, it's common for houses to use natural gas for heating, water-heating, and/or cooking.
The transition will probably be gradual, following the natural gas production that is expected to peak and then decline in the next decade(s).
As these pipelines become empty, they could then be repurposed for H2 ?
Using the excess power to synthesize hydrocarbons using atmospheric CO2 sure would be nice.
Using the existing natural gas lines for hydrogen would be pretty disruptive
You missed the part about molecular filters. No such issue exists.
Mind linking a writeup of your idea? I'd like to learn more, but you seem busy.
> doesn't cooperate for time T+1, you're in trouble.
Unscheduled maintenance intervals exist everywhere. This is not a unique problem.
> They are intermittent and unreliable.
On a 24 hour ahead basis. On a year to year basis, they're always available, and are absurdly reliable.
> And natural gas is a poor choice if greenhouse emissions matter.
There is nothing that can save you from being required to hold a broad mix of power generation technologies. Building a monoculture here is completely counterproductive and probably hastens the destruction.
> despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained
That container is mechanical. It has a failure rate. Failures never occur when you _want_ them to. Again, a _depth_ of strategies is appropriate here.
"Send it by train then bury it under a mountain and just forget about it" is not an actual strategy. It seems to work, because we probably just don't know any better yet, but the people who are uncomfortable are right to be so. Pretending that they simply lack "education" is a pretty rude point of view.
Burying radioactive waste in places unchanged for hundreds of millions of years is probably safe enough.
(Sadly, we have to consider that long because the current climate change is also unprecedented on these timescales.)
I am appalled though that anyone is seriously considering the idea of container-sized reactors, for which we can be nearly certain, if this seriously takes off, and we make million(s) of them, that hundreds if not thousands will end up abandoned in random places, and weathering will pierce them before they become radilogically inert.
agree best strategy should be purex or fast reactors
> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, you're in trouble.
Yes, any finite quantity is less than infinity. The same is true for fuel deliveries.
Does nuclear fission avoid the issue of meltdowns? Genuinely curious. The only downside I see to nuclear power is geopolitics/war (like we're seeing in Ukraine) so we don't cause even bigger catastrophes due to instability.
There are designs which avoid meltdowns, yes. Because the fuel is already molten. Like FliBe. It has a safety plug which if melts, the fuel flows in a contained reservoir and solidifies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe
> so we don't cause even bigger catastrophes due to instability
That isn't the only worry. If the fuel is smuggled out... https://spectrum.ieee.org/high-assay-low-enriched-uranium
ap1000 would have withstanded fukushima. And plants are designed to withstand an impact with an airplane. So all in all, yes, pretty safe. Gen4 will be even better especially with fuel dilation designs
3rd and 4th gen fission reactor designs have many safeguards against meltdown, yes.
Nuclear fission is the reaction that has had meltdowns. There are fission technologies/strategies that are supposed to be meltdown-proof, but I do not know the science well enough to say whether that is true.
Meltdowns are also not the only risk.
that's kinda true but not yet commercially deployed. The main idea is on overheat fuel expands and fission reaction is stopped/reduced due to higher distance
Did you mean to say fusion? In which case yes.
India currently has 9 nuclear plants slated for completion by 2026.
Assuming only batteries are used for storage is one of the common bullshit arguments against renewables. It's bad strawman engineering.
What works much better is a combination of batteries and an e-fuel like hydrogen. Batteries handle most of the stored energy flow; hydrogen handles the rarer long term storage needs. They complement each other, in a way like cache memory and RAM complement each other.
The cost per KW or hydrogen needs to be below $1000/Kwh for your statement to be true.
It’s not there yet. CAES is cheaper than hydrogen today at grid scale, generally speaking : https://www.ctc-n.org/technologies/compressed-air-energy-sto...
CAES stores much less energy than hydrogen per unit of storage volume. So, for sufficiently long storage times, hydrogen is far better than CAES. For those long storage times, there are proportionally fewer charge/discharge cycles, so the cost of the hydrogen itself becomes proportionally less important.
CAES is likely going to be squeezed out by batteries, but hydrogen addresses the extreme storage use case (just a few cycles/year) where both batteries and CAES are unsuitable.
The pacing technology for green hydrogen is low capex electrolysers. China, as usual, is leading the charge on this. I understand 4% of hydrogen production in China is now from electrolysis.
hydrogen generators either use a mix with gas or pure h2 that has huge nox emissions. And the problem is that green h2 isn't economical now and even if it'll be someday - the plant will still need subsidies always due to low usage
Green H2 isn't competitive with cheap NG unburdened by CO2 taxes.
Realize that global H2 production is enormous -- 75 million tons/year for pure H2, another 24 MT for hydrogen in mixed gas streams -- and much of this needs to be produced even when we're entirely off fossil fuels. Green hydrogen is not an optional thing. So all the problems of making and storing it are going to have to be solved. Once that's done, adding some turbines (very much like existing ones; it's likely possible to just retrofit existing NG turbines with new combustors) is not a large additional step. These turbines already have an after stage that reduces NOx back to N2.
It's not that easy https://power.mhi.com/special/hydrogen as you make it sound
Typical.
Should not even be allowed to finance nuclear reactors before the long term storage facilities and recycling facilities
Why not? Its the governments responsibility by law to create a long term repository.
They made it their problem by law and forced the power plant operators (and thus the end consumers) to pay for it, but never delivered.
Yucca Mountain.
That’s off the table currently
Because of politics and nothing else.
That's the only issue with nuclear, politics.
But politics are real, and thus are it's consequences.
It sure does have consequences.
Easy to split the atom, not so easy to vote (correctly) apparently.
I guess we'll keep shipping it around and storing it onsite, even though a massive facility is already built to house all of it.
Maybe one day people will realize the establishment you keep voting in doesn't want cheap and unlimited energy.
Until then, let's keep talking in circles about it.
Good.
How would google insure this reactor?
Why would they do that?
Looked it up- coal power/ gaspower plants are also uninsureable - if you consider the longterm fallout.
But why would the electricity consumer insure the power plant?
Cause its titan[ICK]technically unthinkable?
Small nuclear plants have been tried and failed multiple times.
Elaborate.
China and Russia use them quite effectively.
You dock them right on the shore and it powers an entire remote village / small city.
As another user pointed out, they've also been used by the US military for many decades to power carriers and subs without incident.
https://www.wired.com/story/first-small-scale-nuclear-plant-...
Military reactors do not have to be economical in any sense. They are not candidates for civilian power.
The US and Russian navies use them very effectively
https://www.wired.com/story/first-small-scale-nuclear-plant-...
2010 - don't be evil
2013 - uhhhhhh never mind!
2024 - be evil!
"Don't be evil," from the very beginning, actually meant "focus on revenue more than profit for the time being."
I'd think that just pooling the money from multiple consumers into large AP1000 power plants buildouts would be cheaper.
So far economies of vertical scaling mostly led to cheaper energy than more smaller units.
Ideally youd have one company with a lot of skilled labor building NPPs all the time instead of only every few decades, because that means experienced workers change jobs/retire, supply chains cease to exist and this leads to cost and time overruns.
Still great to see finally more money being invested into this limitless technology (nuclear fission)
SMRs ain't it [1]. The LCOE of nuclear is the worst of any power geneartion method. The failure modes are catastrophic. Chernobyl has an absolute exclusion deal ~40 years later of 1000 square miles (literally). Fukushima's clean up costs will approach $1 trillion [2] and take likely over a century. These get hand-waved away as irrelevant outliers.
The idea that SMRs are safer is yet to be proven. SMRs have a scaling issue in that a larger reactor is simply more efficient.
Solar currently can produce about 1000 Watts per square meter (likely 200-400 in practice) so 500MW of power is going to be 1-1.5 square kilometers of solar panels. You can say it's varies in effectiveness geographically. That's true. But you can build your data centers pretty much anywhere. The Sun Belt, California or Colorado spring to mind [3].
Data centers just don't need a base load. You can simply not run them when there isn't sufficient power. Google already does. Its data center in Finland basically shuts down when it gets too hot. It's otherwise cooled by the sea. This was deemed to be more efficient than having active cooling infrastructure.
So 500MW of power is what? 4B kWh/year? In California, one benchmark I found was about 10kWh/year per square foot. That's ~4 square kilometers as a very conservative estimate.
[1]: https://blog.ucsusa.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-...
[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
[3]: https://neo.ne.gov/programs/stats/pdf/201_solar_leadership.p...
Fukushima is really the only outlier, and the lesson learned should be it's probably a bad idea to build nuclear reactors near active fault lines.
Most of the extremely pessimistic total cost estimates are around $750B for Fukushima, and that's not the present value. That's money spent so far in the future the discount rate is substantial. Japan's official estimate is $187B, with probably a $100B NPV.
Chernobyl was an inherently (and well known) unsafe design. When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
The cost of burning fossil fuels is estimated to be well, well over $1T.
Nothing comes for free. Pick your poison.
Do you happen to know anything about the structural security requirements for SMRs?
Are they the same as new large LWR, as in, must withstand a 737's impact?
not even fault lines - huge tsunami risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant - it was closer to the origin of the eq.
> Most of the extremely pessimistic total cost estimates are around $750B for Fukushima
This isn't the defense or retort that you think it is. This is from ONE incident. The industry recognizes the long tail of catastrophic failures is so large that laws have been passed to limit nuclear power liability in the US. I'm talking specifically about the Price-Anderson Act [1].
This severely limits nuclear power liability to ~$500 million per incident. That's a lot less than $1T or $750B or whatever figure you prefer. So who picks up the tab in a catastrophic event? Taxpayers. It's another example of how nuclear power can only exist with government subsidies. Yet we apparently want to trust private corporations to manage nuclear power plants and take the profits while shifting the risk to the public.
Additionally there's a self-insurance fund, but it would be completely inadequate to cover an incident like Fukushima. This is recognized [2].
> The cost of burning fossil fuels is estimated to be well, well over $1T.
So this is a strawman on two fronts. First, you're comparing the cost of a single massive failure by one plant to the entire fossil fuel industry. Second, I never even said fossil fuel power. I said solar.
[1]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821
[2]: https://thebulletin.org/2020/02/the-us-government-insurance-...
The typical reaction is I think supported by an efficient markets pov - in other words this is dumb, we know it’s dumb, but market failures make it look to the owners of capital that it’s a good investment
1. There is too much money in the world for the investments (Massive QE post 2008 and post covid). Hence people with money want returns on tokens that say 10 dollars in the front instead of say 5 dollars
2. The externalities of nuclear power are not properly priced in (see Chernobyl)
3. The price of tax compared to services received for wealthy is again out of whack and so any investment looks good because the whole chain is not paying enough tax
All in all, I believe in efficient markets and price mechanisms - I just also believe people with power and influence bend the markets to their own needs and guess what they stop being efficient - hence the need for strong governments (not strongman governments)
What about the positive externalities of nuclear power? It’s unfair to only complain about negative externalities - any action whatsoever always has a negative side-effect which can be used as a cynical excuse to block it.
Downthread I go on (much) longer, but honestly I see the maths as simple
1. We want to generate electricity with minimal carbon output. 2. Nuclear is part of this equation (along with solar, wind and tidal. Maybe one day fusion) 3. Nuclear has large capital upfront, a maintenance cost that requires us to always be on the A game, and the cost of catastrophic failure is fucking huge. 4. The other options have downsides of course, but their ongoing maintenance is basically lower because the catastrophe cost is much much much lower. 5. It’s really hard to quantify things like “major urban area made uninhabitable”, because it has almost never happened. But it can and it will if we keep chucking risk around like this.
6. The way to stop this, no the way to align investment, is to correct price externalities - positive and negative.
If we want to re- start places like Indian Point (a relative well Managed successful nuclear plant whose history reads like a series of disasters) then we ask what if Indian point failed like Fukushima.
That’s Westchester, and most of Manhattan that suddenly looks like a disaster movie. No Fukushima was not actually as deadly as feared (1 person kinda), but the evacuation and knock on effects. Try that on the Hudson and see what the cost of evacuating New York is - I mean, shipping, finance everything.
Honestly I struggle to see what’s crazy anymore.
How about every bond raised to fund a nuclear plant has a 100 year lien attached that no payments can be made till a century of safe operation and closure has occurred.
If the financials make sense after that I will take another look.
Based on other threads here, it doesn't seem like there is universal consensus that this is dumb.
That’s ok. They can be wrong :-)
Nuclear power has almost unlimited downsides and fairly limited upsides.
It’s at least as expensive (and mostly more) to maintain a nuclear power station As any other form of (non-carbon) power generation - and the costs of catastrophic failure and orders of magnitude higher.
This is just back of the envelope maths. Cost to maintain a power station of X GW for 100 years is X, cost to maintain solar panels of X GW for 100 years is Y. Cost of total catastrophic failure in fifty years of solar panels because the country fell apart is small y. Cost of total catastrophic failure of fission reactor is huge great X.
The simplest analysis just comes up with huge downsides.
Look I take the train past Battersea powerstation most days. It was built 100 years ago at the height (?) of the British Empire. It became disused as Britain fell into bankruptcy in the 70s and was left to fester for decades before people realised a vast shopping centre in the middle of London was quite nice.
If it was nuclear it would still be sealed off, any slacking of maintenance, any cost saving too far, would fuck up the world’s greatest city .
And if you think the worlds most powerful and richest country could always afford the very best maintenance - let me introduce you to political decision making in the 1960s, industrial policy in the 1970s and human beings who tend to hope as a strategy.
It’s not hard to pretend the obvious won’t happen, and if you take the risk sometimes you will be right. And the cautious man will look silly.
But in the end Warren Buffet looks more sensible than Dick Fuld.
And even Warren is aware he pays far less tax relative to his maid. But it’s upto us to fix that just as it’s upto us to not make bad investment choices as a society that we will pay costly annual fees for centuries to come.
The designers of new reactors (the one in this article specifically, and others too) claim that the design is inherently safe and has no possibility of catastrophic meltdown.
If this is true, then you are greatly overestimating the downside costs.
The result of a failed system won't be as inert and benign as a failed solar panel, but it is also unlikely to be "fuck up the entire city", especially when considering the smaller modular deployment.
>>> If this is true,
The cheque is in the post, I will still respect you in the morning,
Come on. I’m not saying new designs are Rube Goldberg machines flinging radioactive waste around, but “perfectly safe for the next hundred or five hundred years” is complete rubbish. There is no such thing.
This is not about engineering - this is about humans, how humans react in the face of profitable deals, and the history of engineering safe systems (one death or catastrophe at a time)
Genuine question: How will the US put the cat back in the bag?
AI even if stuck to GPT 4~ levels has the potential to be usable in industries and outcompeted non AI users, as such, how can the US tell people that they shouldn't get nuclear power plants?
We'll sell you products and services that utilize AI and you are not allowed to get it yourself, is that the new model? It's no secret (I think?) that the US was behind many of the nuclear scare movements such as the green party in Germany as to avoid nuclear proliferation, for its own interests.
But if nuclear becomes required, and we are decades away from nuclear fusion...? what is the solution here? I'm genuinely curious.
> how can the US tell people that they shouldn't get nuclear power plants?
Who is doing this? Last I checked, America has been trying to sell its AP1000 reactor.
> sell you products and services that utilize AI and you are not allowed to get it yourself
Every economy that can is developing AI.
> the US was behind many of the nuclear scare movements such as the green party in Germany
Source? German greens have a veritable track record of being idiots all on their own.
Whut? Do you have any source to back this up?
The US was exporting reactors all around the world. Most of those reactors are light water reactors using low enriched uranium fuel, its not that big of a nuclear weapons proliferation concern.