I've been saying for years that we'll know the world is serious about energy when we see big pushes into nuclear power. We're here now. This is the point at which all the dumb "but what about a gorillion turbines and solar panels" start to die off (except for where they're legitimately a great solution) and talk about the only viable power source moving forward will start to grow. This is super exciting to me.
> "but what about a gorillion turbines and solar panels"
It's a good thing to have a diverse portfolio of energy solutions to help avoid single points of failure in the network. Especially as something like solar continues to become more and more efficient.
I don't really understand this argument. How are dozens of nuclear power plants a single point of failure? Because of the uranium mining and processing? Then we can invest in fast reactors, which consume 100x less and require less R&D than renewables have benefited from in the last decades. Or seawater uranium, another 100x in reserves, distributed all around the world.
"Amidst a slow-burning heat wave that has killed hundreds and sparked intense wildfires across Western Europe, and combined with already low water levels due to drought, the Rhône’s water has gotten too hot for the job. It’s no longer possible to cool reactors without expelling water downstream that’s so hot as to extinguish aquatic life. So a few weeks ago, Électricité de France (EDF) began powering down some reactors along the Rhône and a second major river in the south, the Garonne. That’s by now a familiar story: Similar shutdowns due to drought and heat occurred in 2018 and 2019. This summer’s cuts, combined with malfunctions and maintenance on other reactors, have helped reduce France’s nuclear power output by nearly 50 percent."
France is about the best existing case for nuclear, incidentally.
The issue outlined above is a problem for all thermal plants. Coal and gas plants would suffer from the same issue.
Furthermore, nuclear plants don't need to be cooled with potable water. They can be cooled with ocean water, or with waste water. In fact, seawater cooling is the most popular form of cooling. Only 15% of nuclear plants are cooled with river water.
Off topic question. Can a large nuclear reactor be completely air-cooled? I think a full-scale reactor cluster expelling hot jet upwards and providing air conditioning in form of negative static pressure to its surrounding megalopolis would be very cyberpunk.
Air doesn't have much thermal mass, so you'd have to move a lot of air through the heat exchangers to make it work. It's probably possible, but there's much more viable alternatives. In particular, you can use wastewater to cool plants where water is scarce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
This can be addressed by expanding heat exchangers. Unlike the river water cooling which is constrained by how much the plants are allowed to heat the river.
Primary coolant loop runs at arbitrary temperature, there's never going to be a point that a nuke can't be cooled. It's only matter of designed capacity.
To be fair, and as a non-fan of wind (kills birds, annoys animals and humans) and solar (lowers the albedo of the planet, denies sunlight to parts of the local ecosystem), wind and solar do not have this cooling requirement. So that's nice. But anyways, you can always use sea water if you have access to the sea, or rely on a geographically-very-large grid for the diversity of sources that GP says we need.
A geographically large grid will require extensive transmission network upgrades. That has to be factored into the cost competitiveness of these sources.
Renewable generation itself is cheap. But what's expensive (or straight up unfeasible) is everything required to mitigate the intermittent production. Storage at the scale of tens of terawatt hours can't even be feasibly built with current technologies. Moving electricity over thousands of miles, across mountain ranges, would require HVDC lines to be constructed in very rugged terrain.
Correct, but most generation is still produced close to demand. If you look at a map of where power plants are located (https://synapse.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/201fc98c0d74...) you'll see they're concentrated near cities. The grid spans a large area, but most energy is transmitted over a short distance.
Renewables, due to their low energy density and specific weather requirements, need to be built in remote areas. This has led to situations where the grid cannot accommodate transmitting the amount of energy that proposed renewable plants will produce: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
People often cite the decentralized nature of renewables as an advantage. It's not. It's a significant disadvantage as it has a much bigger burden on the transmission infrastructure.
solar on roofs doesn't take anything from local ecosystem. Solar above car parks neither.
Solar on a home is such a simple, affordable and save solution, why are you 'non-fan'? which indicates you hate it? How much are you against it? So much that you prefer burning coal over it?
It's possible to use "dry cooling" for a nuclear reactor. [1][2] The thermodynamic efficiency would be much lower, but it is possible to use alternative thermodynamic cycles/methods, for example reactors sent into space have used radiative cooling since there is no realistic way to use fluids to finally reject the heat.
So basically radiators. They would have to be huge, and they would have to move huge amounts of air through them. As a backup that might work, probably using a hybrid where a water body is used for cooling and air is the fallback.
Air-cooling is possible. This only effect certain type of reactor. As soon as you go to higher temp reactor air-cooling is very efficient.
And even in France this was only a problem because of their terrible delayed maintenance.
> France is about the best existing case for nuclear, incidentally.
No it isn't. France has done essentially nothing for 30+ years. Has done little maintained, their reactors aren't up to date.
The generation after the generation that built the reactor has always resented the system and wanted to rip it out. They literally decided to retire it by 2035 despite having no plan to replace it.
Certain lakes aren’t going to dry up within human timescales. And disaster risk is present in a lot of places. Just something you take into account when you build it.
The problem is more our lack of ability to build them quickly and in a cost effective way. An investment in solar will much more reliably and quickly turn into a certain amount of power generation.
Hopefully this changes once every nuclear project isn't some complex bespoke thing that is likely to be late and over budget.
The true costs are unknown. All we have is the announced figure and then two parties with an interest in showing low costs despite a 4 year delay saying
"Yes sir, all went according to plan!!"
Even though it obviously did not all go according to plan.
This has indeed been a big blocker, but the article is proof that the market now wants it. And there are plenty of new nuclear startups, as well as interested researchers. What was lacking so far was a real need energy-wise (in the absence of a high carbon tax) and regulatory stability/transparency.
Edit: also, sodium fast reactors have existed for 20 years. The R&D has mostly already been done for that tech. But the lack of projects make it stuck to TRL 8.
Isn’t solar energy a SPOF? It goes to zero MW roughly every 12 hours at any given location on Earth where most people live due to the availability of the Sun’s light.
Maybe, but at what cost? There is no such thing as "solar fallout". Doesn't the SPOF come with the trade-off of incredibly low risk of causing long term high-mortality rates of all life in the surrounding area?
Solars go first in any disasters and there's cleanup cost of destroyed panels, so there is such thing as solar fallout. They also don't decay unlike radioactive fallout.
that... is not even close to comparable. A hurricane smashes a bunch of your local panels, you go and pick them up, and if they're too damaged throw them in landfill. Fukushima is going to cost between $470 billion and $660 billion to clean up. A solar "cleanup" would not even be a 10000th of that cost. Why even mention this?
It is. They just don't take a lot of weather, so they're not more than disposable subsidy capture device if you live in places that storms and flying debris are normal. Solar panels are glasses painted with heavy metal stained glasses, so you can't leave the panels around, they have to be recovered.
All moot points if they last indefinitely where you are, serious points if they don't.
There are no big pushes into nuclear power. These are all tiny deployments that may never even happen.
And those dumb turbines and solar panels produce power at a fraction of the cost of nuclear. And every year they get cheaper and more efficient. Which is why the market has continually decided over and over again to go in this direction.
The most important metrics are cost and speed of co2 reduction. An 80% renewable grid may achieve that more effectively than nuclear. It may be optimal to burn gas for a couple of weeks per year. Or to build massive pumped storage and nuclear stations.
But trying to hit some purity target of 100% is irrelevant. There are lower hanging fruit for decarbonisation than the last few percent of power generation.
We need a battery that is safe and mandate every home to have one. Or provide incentive for it to be installed. We shouldn't wait for super battery to be install in a central place, instead every home could afford one an provide high quality electrical power.
Surely instead of a giant Water boiler in a lot of homes we could have a giant battery instead.
We probably cannot shop our way out of climate change. The intense climate damage you'd do installing hundreds of millions of batteries (of any kind) would likely offset dozens of years of use.
why would you want to share your EV battery capacity with the grid? I don't understand this. Range is entirely dictated by your EV capacity and you're going to "rent" back the capacity (and battery cycles) for night time hours? I don't understand how this would work at scale.
> why would you want to share your EV battery capacity with the grid?
Because you'd get paid for it, and you like free money.
And it should be pretty trivial to set an option to ensure you always have the necessary range for your daily commute by a little bit before you leave your home.
if services like Uber have shown anything, its that you can sell your vehicle's intrinsic value, depreciating it's value in the process. But will you be net positive after depreciated value?
Obviously almost nobody would do it if it weren't net positive.
And why wouldn't it be? The whole point here is for power companies to avoid buying as many batteries themselves, and their own batteries depreciate too.
This isn't hard -- the power company adjusts the price it pays minute per minute, and you set the threshold at which it is profitable for you, taking battery cycles into account. And it becomes a classic supply and demand curve -- it's Econ 101.
Uber drivers earn roughly $0.70/mile[1]. Gas at $3/gal and MPGs at 25mpg mean it costs $0.12/mi in fuel. a $30k vehicle driven to 150k miles costs roughly $0.20/mi in depreciation. Without additional maintenance costs, its roughly $0.32/mi to drive a car. Approximating tires, oil changes, brakes, and other maintenance of roughly $0.15/mi, you're looking at total cost to drive at $0.45-0.50/mi.
Do you think most Uber drivers drive for the $0.7-$0.12 = $0.58/mile or the actual cost of $0.70-$0.50=$0.20/mile? Sustainable Supply/Demand doesn't work until all costs are measured.
A Rivian battery is roughly $17k. Estimating 1500 charge cycles [2], that's roughly $11/charge. If you "give back" half a cycle, there's only $1.50 worth of electricity sold back, but its $5.50 worth of battery. Are you expecting to get paid $1.50+profit or $7+profit?
Because a battery will become a lot cheaper and replacing it sooner will still have huge benefits for you financially.
I have a 100kWh battery and can drive with this 3 weeks around without charging at all.
Why would i not want to leverage this?
And results from storage systems show that you can charge and discarge car batteries a lot more often without real degeneration when you do this a lot more stable than when driving.
Also it reduces the overall straine to the power grid. If you fill your cars battery with local solar, you are transporting less energy across the whole grid. If you discharge it locally, again less overall energy which needs to be transfered across the whole grid.
How this would work at scale? easy: in my city for example there is one local power company and they offer a charging solution for my EV. They have a few powerplants locally here too. They have everything they need.
Also overall solar energy prediction for the next day is very good. You can easily save a lot of money by leveraging this up front.
So does nuclear, and in much larger absolute extent: production of steel and concrete, used copiously in NPP construction, inevitably releases a lot of CO2. Melting silicon or smelting aluminum, not nearly as much. (IDK about epoxy resin production.)
I suppose that instead of eliminating the processes that produce large amounts of CO2, we should embrace them, learn to capture the CO2 where it's produced in high concentrations (like steel plants or cement furnaces), and either bind the carbon in non-volatile ways, like in plastics, or produce fuel from it again and close the loop.
Wind and especially solar are also serious. But their applications are different; they can offset the load when the sun shines, or the wind blows, but can't provide a stable source.
If you need baseload, and need it carbon-free, your only option currently is nuclear. It's terribly encumbered, but apparently it's still less of an impasse that large-scale electricity storage currently is.
- Hydrothermal: great if you're in Iceland, or near Yellowstone, or other such place blessed by heated rock being close to the surface. Not as great if you need to drill 7 km to reach it.
- Hydro: great if you have a lot of mountains and rivers, like Switzerland or Norway. Harder if you don't, like in much of Texas, to say nothing of Florida.
- Tidal: great if you have a sea shore, preferably with narrow bays / fjords. But if you're in a place like Turkmenistan (one of the two doubly-landlocked countries), you resort to drilling for and burning methane %)
* most of the "good sites" have already been taken
* hydro will regularly silt up, requiring constant dredging
* hydro does not work as well or at all in drought conditions, which are increasingly common
* hydro dams require reservoirs, which in addition to the obvious disruption of the displacement of thousands or even a million plus people in the case of Three Gorges, can end up emitting large amounts of carbon as flooded vegetation decomposes.
* hydro is extremely disruptive to migratory fish. the success rate of interventions like fish ladders is in the low single digit percents. so you can get a bunch of carbon free power but also destroy an ecosystem in the process, not to mention any downstream fishing. and you see similar effects with other things that downstream users might want from the river like fresh silt.
> they can offset the load when the sun shines, or the wind blows, but can't provide a stable source.
That they don't work when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow is such a tired and trite remake.
Yes, they don't provide consistent output on their own, but storage exists. If you need electricity store it in batteries or pumped hydro. If you need it for heating store it in thermal batteries.
>Yes, they don't provide consistent output on their own, but storage exists
I think this varies depending on where you live. In California, Cal-iso has a really cool dashboard that seems to show that they have enough battery storage to hold about 90 minutes of daytime solar generation.
Definitely not something that can handle a fully cloudy day yet (presumably it's cheaper to keep some natty gas plants ready to spin up or import than to store more excess solar?)
Storage exists, but it's insufficient and expensive.
We need 30x, or maybe 100x more storage. After that, we could live on renewables only, and keep gas-fired plants only as a disaster-recovery tool, like diesels in datacenters.
Until then, we need stable generation which does not spew CO2, which is, well, nuclear. It's hard to tell if ubiquitous cheap utility-scale batteries emerge in 5 years or 50 years.
> Storage exists, but it's insufficient and expensive
It’s just insufficient. Solar + storage is cost competitive with nuclear. The problem is we have a bajillion needs for batteries, a Balkanised global market and wholly insufficient production forecasts over the next decade without gas or nuclear support. Voters seem to like gas. Private participants are choosing nuclear where they can.
Good to be a gas exporter for the next half century or so.
It is expensive, almost $100 per kWh stored, plus construction costs that involve fireproofing and spacing things because lithium batteries are flammable. And a lithium battery loses capacity with every recharge, so it needs replacement every few years.
We need batteries that cost, say, $10 / kWh, are not (as) flammable, not toxic (not Pb, not NiCd), and don't degrade too fast.
With that, they can be large, heavy, have low specific charge, require high or low temperatures (within reason), etc. For a large utility-grade installation all these qualities are not hugely important. There is plenty of space under solar panels and around wind turbines anyway.
Before that, selling methane remains a very good business indeed.
There are pumped storage hydro-electric plants with abundant and cheap capacities. They also work and are in use, mostly in China and Japan.
China is building a lot more, too. It will probably have 80% of the world’s energy storage capacity in a decade.
We just don’t talk about them in the West for some reason. I guess battery tech is more appealing somehow but it’s not cheaper nor more environmentally friendly, all in all.
I hope that now once there are some serious users of power, they might build some of these plants, and then governments in the West will wake up to how good the plants are.
> are pumped storage hydro-electric plants with abundant and cheap capacities
Cool. Yes. Now scale that by two orders of magnitude.
Here’s the kicker: getting approval to put an SMR in Wyoming is easier than flooding another valley or buying massive contiguous plots. Nuclear, if these guys can execute, which is a big if, promises to be as agile as gas generators. Our current default when we have energy shortfalls.
Well, I cannot currently foresee a situation where we’d need to apply this technology to store several orders of magnitude more energy. Even storing 50% more energy this way in the West would have significant self-reinforcing positive effects on the renewable energy industry.
You might be thinking in an all-or-nothing way. Some solutions don’t need to scale well on cubic scales, etc. Moreover, there is hardly a reason pumped storage power plants can’t be done along side nuclear investment. There isn’t a dichotomy of choice, expanding use of both — or either — would benefit us all.
In fact, there are synergies between pumped storage and nuclear power — pumped storage allows nuclear to more closely meet the peaks and valleys of electricity demand throughout the day.
I think the biggest problem is that the energy sector isn’t making big plant investments due to capitalistic incentives. Why invest into plants if less supply of electricity means a higher unit price, and any state investment into private power companies can go straight into retained earnings/dividend? It would be improving things for technological advancement sake, against investor interests. Things work differently when the power companies are state-owned, of course. But that doesn’t completely flip the script either — technological advancement for advancement sake is still not often pursued. And it’s often even seen as wasteful by the electorate.
If we wanted technological advancement, we have several clear ways to achieve it, even without scaling the current technology exponentially. The problem is that we didn’t want it enough. But now some companies do.
It might be easy to build pumped storage in Boulder City, NV, situated among mountains near the Hoover dam. It would be much harder to build something similar near Houston, TX, where the land is flat as a table.
They are grid-wide plants, which don’t need to be near large population centres. Sierra Madres/Rockies offer great elevation gradients in West TX, if one would want to keep it in the state.
This is a consideration but I don’t think it’s the real reason we don’t consider these plants.
I think this is more likely it. NIMBY is a plausible explanation for both the delays in building these plants and NPPs. Not to mention the guaranteed opposition to whoever suggests them as a politician.
Hydroelectric dams have a storied history of pissing people off, through death and displacement, at the very least.
My ancestors (along with natives) were run off from their valley home in PA when a dam was built. Out here in the Sonoran Desert, we've got a lake where the river should be, and the indigeneous (among others) are still pissed about the dam that was pretty much politically forced on all of us.
Conversely, there are groups who absolutely rejoice when a dam is decommissioned and demolished. It's party time when that land is reclaimed, and the water flows again naturally.
Well, this is about pumped storage hydroelectric plants, which are not dams. These plants aren’t generally built on rivers because they require much larger water reservoirs.
As with any land development, they require land, of course. But all power grid elements do.
They don't turn Alpinesque ecologies into tidal pools if you don't build them in Alpinesque ecologies.
The truth is that we are developing a lot of land every year for different purposes, from industrial to residential. The question is whether we will develop it for everyone's benefit, or for some yet another tax exempt monopoly's warehouse.
We could even build these plants in place of abandoned industrially exploited land, such as quarries, which conveniently already form quite large water reservoirs. We could reclaim a completely dead parcel of land and once we stop using the reservoir, it could blossom into a set of new natural ecologies.
Don't take the worst case scenario and present it as the only one when there is a world of possibilities.
Is that a thing where they build wind farms? Like are there any wind farms where it is likely to occur with any regularity?
In my region wind generation dipped down to only 1pc of capacity for a day or two last winter which seems to be the floor as far as I can tell.
That tells me that we only need to increase capacity by 100x to get the coverage we want, and as a bonus we get all that surplus capacity most of the time to use on non-essential industry.
First of no one is saying its just wind and solar. You say wind, solar and energy storage (batteries).
And second, if more people would buy EVs, we would already have A LOT MORE storage available. My EV has 100kWh and could heat a whole modern build house for 2 full days in winter.
I agree with all of this. I get annoyed with the conversations surrounding wind and solar, but I don't dislike the techs themselves. They have a place and are great, and solar is mind-bogglingly affordable right now. I've seen utility companies offering them """for free""" (you lease, your electricity covers the cost of lease, no money for extra generated) because it's so cheap now.
But we need, as you said, a baseload. Nobody is really discussing how to create this, they're just saying we should magically invent an incredibly dense battery (more energy-dense than hydrocarbons, ideally, or let's say within 50% as useful) using technologies nobody can even fathom. Meanwhile, we're seeing breakthroughs in fusion tech, miles ahead of the usefulness of fission, which is miles ahead of anything else we have right now.
I just don't understand the aversion to a clean, renewable power source.
More logically, if you're serious about climate change you're not serious about nuclear.
This Amazon investment aims to only have 5GW of nuclear on the grid 15 years from now. That's not a solution to climate change, it's not even a rounding error. It rises to a rounding error on the suddenly discovered need for new energy for AI, but it's a decade late for that. In 15 years, the grid will be completely decarbonized by solar and batteries and wind, existing nuclear/hydro, and probably some new tech like enhanced geothermal. This is 2039 energy environment that nuclear will enter into, and it will have to compete with 15 more years of prices falling on batteries and renewables. SMRs can't compete on price with today's price for new large nuclear, todays new large nuclear can't compete on price with today's solar/wind/batteries, and today's solar/wind/batteries sure as hell won't compete with 15 years of prices falling. SMRs like this have no hope to be a competitive product.
Nuclear has overpromised and underdelivered for 60 years. We should have kept existing plants running. If our anscestors had lit money on fire to produce a bunch of reactors 40 years ago, we'd be in a much better position.
But we'd also be in a much better position had they not pooh-poohed solar and made bigger investments sooner, driving forward solar revolution by 15-30 years from where it is now.
We'd have been in a much better position if there had been a massive investment in battery technology 15-30 years earlier, making EVs feasible sooner, and revolutionizing the grid with storage sooner.
Solar and batteries will be the foundation of the future, because they are technology that gets cheaper the more we invest in them. Nuclear might be around in 50 years, maybe not, but it won't be any cheaper or more affordable. It's a technology that barely moves the more we spend on it, and can sometimes be economically efficient in the best of cases. But the average case for building nuclear is big price overruns, and it's not uncommon for utilities to be brought to the point of bankruptcy.
We have better technology available, today, to be deployed. Let's do it. Nuclear is a pipe dream from people that haven't run the numbers, or have run the numbers they have gotten them drastically wrong. The entire history of nuclear energy in this country is of people not running the numbers or running the numbers and getting them drastically wrong.
Germany's energy is 80% fossil fuels. France's is 50%. I'm not sure how you reached the conclusion that Germany's energy mix is less "dirty" than Frances.
Again, Germany emits 6 times as much C02 for every MWh of electricity generated as France.
It's not an issue of production vs. consumption. You're counting nuclear power, which is heavily utilized by France, as a "dirty" energy source despite the fact that it's cleaner than most renewables.
If you're not serious about energy consumption, you're also not serious about climate change. Unfortunately consumer and business technology wants to go the other way.
Climate change fact #1: CO2 (and to some extent other GHG) is the cause of climate change.
Climate change fact #2: energy consumption is not a cause of climate change, except for when it causes CO2 emission.
Climate change fact #3: reduced CO2 emission will not stop climate change.
Reducing energy usage is a losing climate strategy in three ways 1) it doesn't solve the problem, cutting emissions 50% does jack shit, we need to get to 0% emissions and then negative emissions. 2) It's politically ineffective because only some people and countries will actually reduce emissions. 3) It's political suicide because it validates false anti-climate change propaganda. 4) It's highly socially regressive because these dictates demand that the burden be placed mostly on developing countries.
Reason #1 is enough to disqualify the "reduce energy usage" as a climate strategy, but really there's zero way to look at it and think that there's any validity. Please find better sources and stop spreading this counterproductive idea.
I just wish this brings more research into Thorium based reactors, as they seem to be the future of sustainable nuclear power. Maybe a SMR powered by Thorium in the future? Who knows.
>During its operational lifetime, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was shut down 225 times. Of these 225 interruptions, only 58 were planned. The remaining interruptions were due to various technical problems, including: “chronic plugging” of the pipes...
>...These problems remain relevant. Even today, no material can perform satisfactorily in the high-radiation, high-temperature, and corrosive environment inside a molten salt reactor.
I'm not sure anyone has made one that powered anything or produced electricity. The MSRE just intermittently heated the air when it was working.
Apparently although it only ran from 1965 to 1969 and produced a peak of 8MW, it's still costing about $10m per year to manage the waste produced. In the 1990s they found uranium in the waste had migrated leading to the possibility of an accidental criticality.
Still the Chinese supposed to be running an experimental one similar to the MSRE in the Gobi desert next year. I'm not holding my breath for commercial operation though.
Doesn't even neccessarily need to be Thorium-232, we also have a lot uf Uranium-238 that isn't really used efficiently.
Thermal/Fast Breeders are needed to use those fuel sources. Only Russia commercialiced them, because western nations stopped funding r&d (EBR2 in the US and Superphênix in France)
The basic economics of power generation do not agree with your contention.
The reality is that this is all nuclear can rest its hopes on. Industry specific applications, because for general electricity generation it is hopelessly non-competitive.
I’ve been saying for years that new nuclear plant development will be evidence of an AGI fufilling its physiological hierarchy of needs. I see Starship as another requirement.
I just wanted to take the opportunity to say something positive about these companies, since it's so rare that I find anything positive to say.
I applaud these efforts. The amount of energy that's going to be burned by these things is crazy. Whether or not that energy use is wasted is an open question.
I think it's a positive thing if the companies making these bets don't offload the costs of those bets onto public utilities, and also that they're looking at energy sources that have less of an adverse environmental impact than things like coal.
> since it's so rare that I find anything positive to say
Wonder why that is?
> I think it's a positive thing if the companies making these bets don't offload the costs of those bets onto public utilities
This is written as if with concern for public utilities which makes me wonder: Do you think they’ll stop using public utilities? Do public utilities want that? How long until these companies try to outright replace public utilities?
You seem to think that I'm praising these companies. I'm certainly not. I think they're a net negative on society.
That said, it's as important to acknowledge when they do something positive, even a little bit, as it is to call them out when they do bad things. More important, even, since if all a person can do is condemn then that person becomes less effective in terms of encouraging change. You want both carrot and stick.
> You think these companies made this decision with altruistic concern for the environment?!
Of course not. Nothing any of these companies do is altruistic. It's all about the Benjamins, baby.
> Do you think they’ll stop using public utilities?
They likely will stop using electric utilities. It's just simpler this way, more predictable.
> Do public utilities want that?
Maybe they do; a huge consumer usually negotiates special rates, and may require more costly infrastructure work because the capacity is not sufficient for them.
> made this decision with altruistic concern for the environment?!
No, more likely with an egotistic concern for the environment. Billionaires don't have a spare copy of Earth (Mars is even worse), and if you've got billions and can actually move the needle of the climate change to keep Earth in a better shape for you and your children, won't you?
* a ton of private investment in nuclear power [1]
* AI models performing at PhD-level on some tasks [2]
I know it can feel low-status to admire these accomplishments -- it feels like we're aligning with/submitting to the people behind them -- but I perceive technological growth to be accelerating across a bunch of fields that matter to me.
I admit, this is very impressive: "AI models performing at PhD-level on some tasks" but it remains to be seen as to whether all this intelligence actually leads to greater productivity and whether that "productivity" even translates into higher earnings in a meaningful way.
the way I see it, virtual goods (games, digital goods, etc) will continue to be ever more free and lower cost, while nothing much changes in the real world.
Did you notice how closed captions generated from videos became really good? Did you notice that machine translation became usable for everyday tasks? Did you notice that you can direct your phone at an inscription in a language unknown to you, and get a translation put at the same spot on the picture, and an explanation of it read aloud to you? Does it make your very real life easier?
All this stuff used to be high-end research with unstable and hardly usable results like 10 years ago.
> Did you notice how closed captions generated from videos became really good?
I've noticed the exact opposite over the last year or so. They've become riddled with errors of the sort that actively mislead people about what was actually said.
> Does it make your very real life easier?
So far, generative AI has not made my very real life any easier. It has made it more uncertain, though, and has made it harder to trust anything I am not seeing/hearing in person.
Are we just going to ignore the negative externalities of AI? From my perspective, the main product of AI is bots spamming social media with misinformation - largely with a goal of swaying elections.
I'm not saying that AI is inherently evil and has no potential, but just ignoring the cost is misleading. It's like saying oil is wonderful and pretending global warming isn't a thing.
The tech may be "hard" but that doesn't mean it's a net positive for society, which to me is what really matters. Of course this is all subjective and nobody can predict the future, but I just find this blind optimism to be self-destructive.
What is the actual significance of the booster catch is ? Re-usability is obviously part of it, but do we really think that thing will just be refueled and sent straight back off in the near future?
It seems to be an incredible feat of engineering, no doubts there, but how significant are the practical implications?
I found this from Musk, which is his usual over the top optimistic self:
In an interview to YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut, Musk said that his vision is that Mechazilla will one day be able to turn around and set a rocket back on the launchpad, perhaps as little as 30 minutes after touchdown.
Heavy Booster is 232 feet tall, and 29.5 feet across, and weighs something like 275 tons
and that's precision engineering - multiple pressurised chambers, flared and clean flowing pipes for fluid routing, nozzles, etc.
These things are no easy build, they take time, high skill levels, resources, etc.
30 minutes turn around on reuse is BS for now, they'll take weeks of fine toothed retesting and examination to clear them for reuse - but that'll still be a considerable saving of time, money, and resources compared to a complete new build from scratch.
Yeah I see, but also all of that shifting of weight, heat, acceleration and deceleration must be pretty stressful on that structure and on the materials, I feel like it would be best to wait and see what these things look like after one or two uses before claiming the wins.
I dare say that's why they'll take weeks of fine toothed retesting and examination to clear them for reuse and they'll bed a few in before setting long term procedures in stone.
What's your Engineering background? Civil, Mechanical? Ever worked on any of those 380+ metre tall North Sea Oil and Gas platforms?
I have never worked on a 380+ tall North Sea Oil platform :)
I work in Software but I'm a massive tinkerer and have done a lot of work wit my hands. I'm not a structural or mechanical engineer. Most of my knowledge is just things I've picked up doing renovations, fixing my car etc.
>do we really think that thing will just be refueled and sent straight back off in the near future?
The Falcon 9s have been landed, checked out, refueled and flown again for a while now. The record is currently 23 flights from a single booster. I don't see how this is fundamentally different - reusing the booster that is. The upper stage is a different matter.
Even if you don't enjoy the science/exploration angle, asteroid mining should be incredibly good for human needs.
Any metal you can think of exists in phenomenal abundance there, and should be able to be exploited at minimal cost in the long run. Having huge supplies of cheap platinum, gold, nickel, cobalt etc would be extremely good for humanity. It also means we don't need to have dirty and ugly mines on earth.
There is also the military angle. If the west lets China control orbit, we're in big trouble.
Asteroid mining is wildly uneconomical. There is no material to be found in large quantities on any asteroid in the solar system whose value justifies the development and installation costs of the infrastructure needed to get that material back to Earth.
If you're building a megastructure in space, that's a different story. But please understand that mining gold or platinum from asteroids, at (literally) astronomical cost, will not do anything to advance the state of life on Earth except, at best, reduce the price of gold and platinum, which are not societal bottlenecks.
It is 100% guaranteed that, at some point in the (geologically) near future, humanity will need to leave Earth permanently, or move the planet or something to that effect if we really want to.
We should be beyond ready by the time that comes. It's not an immediate or daily human need, but it IS a human need.
The sun is heating up, and Earth is going to become too hot. I’m not sure on the timeline; might be a few hundred million years. Might be more. It depends on how the atmosphere reacts.
On that timescale we could use a gravitational tractor to fix it, if we insist keeping the planet around.
ok, so we have a loooottt of time to do that. for now, i think humanity already has waaaayyyy tooo many problems to deal with before we need to worry about that.
250 million years is an estimate for when the formation of a new supercontinent results in sufficient volcanic activity to drastically increase CO2 in the atmosphere and probably kill off all large mammals. 500 million is when C3 photosynthesis stops being possible and virtually all plants are gone, which would collapse all terrestrial ecosystems and leave behind very little animal life, probably none. There seems to be a very high likelihood of extinction level asteroid strikes happening well before either of these.
But we're talking here about a span of time that is a thousand times longer than anatomically modern humans have existed up to this point. Given how far we've come since then, I don't know how you can possibly speculate what kinds of capabilities we might have by then to synthesize breathable air and food from raw disintegrated atoms of anything. If you look billions of years into the future, then it's going to get hot enough to sterilize the planet of any life whatsoever, which we probably can't overcome. If we can terraform other planets, we can terraform Earth itself, which would seemingly overcome any other challenge short of triple the heat that is eventually coming.
It seems maybe a bit premature to think this is something currently living humans should worry about figuring out how to escape from.
We might also note that, given the compartively short time it took humans to come about after the K-Pg event, it's probably reasonable to expect there is more than enough time before these "possibly all life killer" type far future things happen for some other kind of intelligent life that develops civilization and technology to replace humans if we go extinct by some means other than the planet being totally destroyed.
OP never said they liked spaceflight. They also didn't say anything about addressing human needs. They just said "hard tech golden age". So I think you are looking for a fight that isn't there.
But anyway; let's take it at the best case curiosity. I do like spaceflight. Is it a problem to you what people like? Does everything you like specifically address human needs? I find this confusing.
Regardless, all life on Earth is going to die. I see it as a "major human need" to avoid death of our civilization and all other life we know of in the whole universe, if it becomes possible. And it does seem more possible now - because of the advances SpaceX has made with hard rocket tech in the last few years, specifically.
I would say that space flight is cool as a potential experience -- I hope that it's safe and cheap enough one day that I can go -- and I also think that life is good [0], so if we can spread life to more planets, that's good.
That's what dinosaurs thought and then the asteroid hit the Earth.
And, personally, I want a space telescope a thousand times bigger than James Webb. That's my biggest need after food, shelter, health and human connection.
a) It's not a major advance in spaceflight. It's a notable step but the last major advance was when Nasa enabled the private/public partnership and started to allow companies like SpaceX to exist in the first place.
b) There is not a ton of private investment in nuclear power. It is a handful of LOI that history has shown usually doesn't translate to much.
c) AI models do not perform at PhD level. They can solve some PhD level tasks but as Apple showed in their research the minute you swap out variables or add irrelevant information they fall apart. So clearly not evidence of intelligence.
Not to be negative on anything because I do think we are in an incredible era but these aren't what I would consider the best examples.
This is a much more significant announcement. The above two deals are not significant commitments from Google & Amazon because there is no downside. If the plan is successful Google & Amazon get cheap green power. If it falls through they're not out anything but still benefit from the publicity for trying.
This announcement has downside. If it fails, Amazon's investment goes to zero. Which means they likely did significant due diligence. This is a real commitment.
There's a nice synergy between data center operations and nuclear power. Similar requirements for high reliability, complex systems, redundancy, even things like electrical grids and cooling, and industrial HVAC are crossover points
In other words, a lot of engineers could work quite happily in both fields.
AI training demand should in theory be extremely elastic. Scale up when and where power is cheap, scale down when and where it is expensive. Training larger models takes a long time, and storing or moving the current training checkpoint is not that expensive.
Inference is somewhat elastic - people want relatively low latency - they might be able to tolerate an extra round-trip around the world, but probably not waiting until a time when there is more total capacity.
However, the big impediment to using cheap and green power is the capital cost of the training hardware; that can't be moved around in a hurry, so its capacity goes unused when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Much of the cost of the high-end data centre oriented GPU hardware is likely not incremental cost for nvidia - it is recovering fixed costs, or profit. In addition, people buying the hardware fear it will depreciate, so they have a limited time frame to use it.
So it is fair to say that it is nvidia's pricing strategy that is a significant driver of Google, Microsoft and Amazon investing in nuclear.
The cost of the GPUs massively dwarfs the cost of the electricity. GPUs have a short lifetime of a few years before the next generation makes them mostly obsolete.
Therefore it makes sense to use even very expensive electricity to run GPUs. Thus Musk insanely running generators to keep his new DC running. A little money can solve really really bad planning. And these SMRs, if ever built, will be very expensive electricity, a long long time from today.
Investing in nuclear has nothing to do with satisfying current AI power needs. This announcement aims to have 5GW running in 15 years. A small amount of energy too far away.
When has any tech company planned for energy 15 years away? Or any other specific R&D need 15 years away? Never.
These announcements are about vibes and politics. I hope it means that the nuclear industry, for once in its history, actually delivers on its promises and doesn't fail. But the history of nuclear is to fail fail fail at every opportunity, so I'm not optimistic.
Also, note the investment size, $500M. Basically nothing. That would buy a DC a bunch of power right now, in the form of solar and the batteries to convert the solar to constant output. Building the 5GW of SMR nuclear is going to cost a minimum of $50B, probably $100B or $150B. It's not going to be competitive with today's prices on solar and batteries. The nuclear purchase is all virtue signalling, not based in actual needs or solutions.
This is great news. The Xe-100 reactor design is not that different from the Kairos Hermes reactor that was yesterday in the news [1]. They both use TRISO pebbles, they are both slow (or thermal) reactors, and they are both SMR's that produce very nearly the same output (80 MW for Xe-100, 75 MW for Hermes). The only difference is the coolant: it is helium for this reactor, and FLiBe molten salt (a mix of lithium and beryllium fluorides). Helium is a gas, so it's much less dense than a molten salt, which is a liquid. Surprisingly, helium has a very high specific heat (5.2 J/gK), higher even than the specific heat of water (4.2 J/gK). FLiBe has about 2.4 J/gK specific heat. Helium can travel through the core at a much higher speed, so overall, the disadvantage of being a gas is not that great. The Hermes reactor is projected to have about twice the power density of the Xe-100 reactor.
There are some great things about Helium though. One is that Helium-4 (which represents 99.9998%) is the only isotope in the universe that has exactly zero neutron absorption cross-section. All other coolants absorb some of the neutrons in a reactor, but helium doesn't. It is also an inert gas, so it does not pose the various corrosion problems posed by other coolants and moderators (like water for NuScale, FLiBe for Kairos, sodium for Natrium, lead for Westinghouse).
China did already put in production two reactors of the same type as Xe-100, the HTR-PMs. They appear to be working just fine.
We now have the three tech giants moving in on nuclear. I think we will have a race to see which SMR provider comes online first even though Nuscale canceled its pilot plant, sending shockwaves through the industry last year, there's a clear demand now. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft signs with an SMR provider in the coming weeks because the other players have. I would have said it would be Nuscale, but Sam Altman might move them to Oklo.
Wait... But everyone says wind+solar+batteries are so much cheaper than nuclear. Why aren't big corpos pouring money in these instead to get even more output?
> everyone says wind+solar+batteries are so much cheaper than nuclear. Why aren't big corpos pouring money in these instead to get even more output?
Same reason it makes sense to build as much wind and solar with batteries plus nukes as possible: scale. (And false dichotomy: they’re also investing massively in wind, solar and batteries.)
We didn’t produce enough batteries (or solar panels or wind turbines, for that matter) fast enough before . For solar and wind, moreover, approval difficult scales with land area. You’d think nukes would be harder, but it’s apparently easier to get a state to let you YOLO on land rights when it’s on a small footprint.
Solar and wind (with batteries) is still cheaper. Gas is politically problematic for Big Tech, so they go with nuclear. The voting public in America and Europe, on the other hand, chose gas.
but considering acceleration of scaling solar/wind/battery production & it's fast deployment, they may as well wait 5-8 years and build the stuff then. Unless they need firm power that solar+wind+battery can't provide enough unless you have huge overcapacity of all of them
> considering acceleration of scaling solar/wind/battery production & it's fast deployment, they may as well wait 5-8 years and build the stuff then
Do you have sources for your time scale?
The acceleration is massive and from a massively tiny baseline. AI is predicted to add 0.8% energy growth a year to American power use [1]; lots of that is going into gas.
> unless you have huge overcapacity of all of them
There is the political reality that what’s been built has voting employees and tangibility in a way what is to be built does not. That’s the danger in our deployment of gas turbines. If we hit an energy surplus, the first to get cut will be things not yet built, even if those are renewables. (Think: phase out of subsidies, maybe even grid charges.) Some enlightened jurisdictions will continue shutting down gas turbines to replace them with solar, maybe even nukes, but most won’t.
actually vogtle showed that unit 4 was completed faster and cheaper than unit 3. Add to that no experienced ppl for building it, foak build, unfinished design, covid. Imo new projects of ap1000 could be done significantly cheaper and faster
There are. There's about one announcement a month for those deals. For instance Google inked deals with at least Energix, New Green Power and Black Rock in the last quarter.
So the question then is: why do the nuclear deals make Hacker News and the solar deals don't?
"Everybody" doesn't say solar, wind, or batteries is cheaper than nuclear. The question of what is "cheaper" at any given time isn't really relevant at this scale -- its cheap.
Price and availability of electricity and power is more or less global, however datacenter customers are in the situation where they need to power a city with electricity in a location where there is neither an existing city nor its generation capactiy.
I was under the impression that whatever drop in consumer usage exists overnight is made up for with ML training, video transcoding, etc. That there's never any shortage of tasks to run.
Absolutely. However, an often made detraction of nuclear is that the baseload is superfluous during off hours, so hydrogen generation is worth mentioning.
Do you have a source for that, how wide is the variation for different reactor types and operators, does it apply to individual reactors or whole sites when there are several reactors on one site?
Not if you are a high-demand single point consumer like a data center. Google doesn't want to buy thousands of acres for solar panels, nor the hassles of installing massive batteries next to a new data center. A small nuclear reactor would be a much easier fit. A steady user also wants a steady power supply. Nuclear is very steady.
Interesting to call building a "small nuclear reactor" an easier fit than simply putting up a bunch of containers with batteries, hooking them up and calling it day.
So if you build a decent sized data center to consume 160 MWh you can get 2 SMRs and call it a day.
Or you can buy 480 Tesla MegaPacks (about 6 acres) and 1600 acres (it's roughly 1 MW per 5 acres) of solar panels to run the DC and charge the batteries during the day. Sure some can go on the building, but you'd still need way more acreage than that can provide.
They at least partly figured out fluoride for brushing teeth and in drinking water was a net positive based on teeth health and natural fluoride levels in wells around the world. CDC estimates it reduces cavities by 25%.
> Is Uranium relatively easy to find to power these reactors […]
Yes. Uranium is (currently?) cheap and plentiful, to the point that nuclear 'waste' fuel reprocessing isn't generally economically worth it: it's cheaper to store in and buy new fuel.
If the price of uranium does ever spike or becomes harder to get to, then reprocessing can become an option.
We have about 90 years of 'cheap' uranium, much more at increased price(which isn't that important for npp scale). If you factor in that at certain point reprocessing like Orano will be more economically profitable - we'll get in fact much more time to transition to fast/thorium reactors
Currently its (uranium-235) quite easy to find because the demand isn't really that high, but when the demand for nuclear power gets higher I'm sure we will see more seawater extraction / & breeders that use the much more plentiful uranium-238 or thorium-232
Thorium has been on the horizon forever. A bit like we'll have fusion in 30 years. No government wants to solely invest in it, because it can't really be weaponised.
China has an MSR online. Yes, it probably isn't using thorium yet, but a molten salt reactor is what's necessary in order to get to the thorium fuel cycle economically
I'd rather wait for fusion. Fission is dirty and creates more radioactive waste than we know how to deal with. A tsunami hitting a fusion plant would not do much except knock it out of commission. Fission on the other hand ....well, we've seen that already. We've seen many times how messy fission is.
The comment about nuclear waste could not be further from the truth. All of the radioactive waste from nuclear electricity generation in the US fits in a volume equivalent to a football field stacked 10 meters high: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
The meltdown at Fukushima amounted to a very small proportion of the total damage incurred by the tsunami. No deaths due to radiation besides a couple plant workers are expected. The exclusion zone was cleaned up and reopened after about a decade. The learnings from this event should be that nuclear isn't actually all that risky, relative to how much carbon-free energy it generates.
Fusion will not be economical in our lifetimes. Compared to fission, you've replaced an expensive and dangerous fuel with a cheap and safe fuel, and replaced an expensive containment vessel with the most complex machine ever engineered by mankind, that also needs to be disposable because of the absurd energies contained within.
We already have a perfectly good fusion reactor. It's about 1 AU away, and it's beaming more power to us than any Kardashev Type I civilization could ever use (and small-scale fusion will be useless to any Type II civilization anyway).
As far as I understand it, no matter what kind of magic fusion device you come up with, it's going to be throwing off lots of fast neutrons which will be absorbed by the equipment generating the fusion reaction
So a fusion reaction will gradually irradiate the generator that is creating the reaction.
A molten salt reactor which consumes virtually all of its nuclear fuel as the closest approximation to your desire to have nuclear reactors without nuclear waste.
Edit: I recall that helium 3 fusion may actually be pretty neutron free. But you got to get your hands on a lot of helium 3
Fusion won’t happen in our lifetimes, we just don’t have the science and materials to do it, unless by some miracle AI actually proves its worth and figures out the containment problem, that also seems like a stretch.
And... there it is, 11 paragraphs in: "The first Xe-100 SMR is being developed at a Dow manufacturing site on the Texas Gulf Coast, with financial support from the US government." (Emphasis mine.)
From Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' memo (1953)[1]:
"An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:
1. It is simple. 2. It is small. 3. It is cheap. 4. It is light. 5. It can be built very quickly. 6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now." (Emphasis mine, again.)
I've seen so many of these come (and go), I think they actually use Rickover's paper as a blueprint for their marketing pitch. Xe's site on the Xe-100[2], "A simple design & modularized components" where, "Our elegant and simple design maximizes the use of off-the-shelf components manufactured and shipped to site using existing road & rail." <shakes head>
I think safe and affordable nuclear power could do a great deal of good. But I've seen "small modular reactor real soon" (including pebble-beds) for thirty years, so I'm reflexively skeptical. I checked to see if I could find any evidence this one is beyond the paper reactor stage, but my search-fu was insufficient to find it, presuming it exists.
I feel like this is only happening because financial projections were discovered to be impossible to meet with the current power generation and the trends for building new power were insufficient.
At today's live event (to accompany the news) Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced plans for 5 gigawatts of small modular nuclear reactors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hFBKIt_YfI
Let's begin with a quote from Yann LeCun (Vice-President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta):
AI datacenters will be built next to energy production sites that can produce
gigawatt-scale, low-cost, low-emission electricity continuously.
Basically, next to nuclear power plants.
The advantage is that there is no need for expensive and wasteful
long-distance distribution infrastructure.
Note: Yes, solar and wind are nice and all, but they require lots of land
and massive-scale energy storage systems for when there is too little sun
and/or wind. Neither simple nor cheap.
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.
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.
Vogtle capacity factor is at 91%. That won't do for a datacenter.
This is exactly why highly energy intensive consumers are still connected to the grid, and NOT to individual power plants.
In a grid with increasing proportion of renewable energy (wind/solar), it becomes less and less appealing to build nuclear plants because the amount of time that those plants are not competitive increases (=> whenever wind/sun is available).
Even in China, basically the only country where nuclear power is being added at a non-negligible rate right now, nuclear output is being eclipsed by wind/solar already, and those are growing much faster, too: More wind power was added in China since 2019 than the total nuclear power right now (~400TWh/year), and absolutely no trend reversal is in sight.
nuclear increased approvals for npp - 10+/yr with 30+ in construction. Not comparable to renewable scaling, but China certainly sees potential in nuclear
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 fuels.
Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns. It needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to a reliable renewable system.
> 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.
> Investing in nuclear power today is an insane prospect
The Real World™ disagrees with your model. Time to update your model.
> In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.
No, nuclear power is being forced off markets by insane subsidy schemes that lead to grids being flooded with electricity at negative (or just zero) prices, due to those producers being isolated from price signals by both (a) subsidised/guaranteed producer prices and (b) priority.
We are paying "renewable" produces to produce electricity that nobody wants, then have to pay consumers to take it off our hands AND wreak havoc with our reliable producers. And then we congratulate ourselves on a job well done.
> Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns
Nuclear power plants are licensee to print money. Unless you forbid them to operate or flood the market with subsidizes competitors and give those competitors priority.
> Even China has figured out that nuclear power is not economically viable.
LOL. That's why they are accelerating their nuclear program.
I have the same feeling but opposite. Nuclear energy has never been profitable anywhere in the world to date, has entirely disproportionate downsides that have manifested repeatedly despite the most rigorous safety procedures found anywhere.
The evidence for this is overwhelming and undeniable, yet some people here still seem to believe that nuclear is ‘cheap and safe’.
I truly don’t understand how it’s possible for rational humans to believe that.
The problem is that this is just a feeling. The bigger problem is that this feeling is still extremely widespread, completely contrary to the facts. For example...
> Nuclear energy has never been profitable anywhere in the world to date
This is completely false. Nuclear energy is profitable pretty much everywhere it is used. Almost obscenely profitable, if you are allowed to run the plants.
I ran the numbers for Hinkley Point C. At the rate they negotiated (14,8 Cents/kWh...or was it pence?) the profits are almost obscene.
A modern EPR will generate 1040 TWh of electricity over its lifetime, assuming 80 years operation and 90% capacity factor. Assuming the EDF-negotiated price is 14,8 cents, that's a cool € 150 billion worth of electricity. But that's just one reactor, whereas HPC is two. So € 300 billion. Puts even the completely ridiculous cost overruns for those two reactors into perspective, doesn't it?
China built their two EPRs for a total of $7.5 billion, and with the EPR2, EDF is pretty certain to get construction times and costs.
The annual reports for one of the Swiss plants are online. They produce electricity for 3-5 cents. Profitably. In Switzerland. And they have expenses like...oh...a new administrative building in one year. Switzerland is not cheap.
> has entirely disproportionate downsides
What are those "entirely disproportionate downsides", in your opinion? If you subtract the effects of radiophobia?
>This is completely false. Nuclear energy is profitable pretty much everywhere it is used.
Not if you consider the full costs. Every official source you find only shows the costs that the operators have to pay, but the operators never pay the full cost. No nuclear power plant that I have found documentation for anywhere is operated without immense national subsidies.
You mention Hinkley point and say that they will generate 150 billion euros in income over 80 years. Let's assume that's about right and look further.
It is currently estimated to cost over 40 billion to build. Now we're at 110 billion.
The storage facility will likely be Sellafield, which has a yearly budget of around 2.5 billion per year, times 80 years is 200 billion. Now we're at negative 90 billion.
Negative 90 billion already while the plants are actually operational. But the waste has to be managed for longer than that. For centuries after the plants have been closed, in fact. So we're at negative what, 300, 400 billion over the lifetime of costs.
This is also without considering any cost of operations. We assume here that 1000 people operating the plant work for free, never need any equipment, the plant never need maintenance, and the calculation still has a debt of several hundred billion.
Now you might say wait, that makes no sense, then EDF (the operator) would be unprofitable and go bankrupt!
Yes, and they did, a few years ago.
France covered the bill of over 50 billion euros in debt and also the upcoming 20 or so more billions in repair and maintenance. EDF was unprofitable even when they neglected required repairs and maintenance.
Again, nuclear is not profitable. Now, since the costs are mostly covered by governments and future generations, short-sighted investors and quarterly earnings-focused companies will of course go along with the pretense that it is.
Amazon is buying the subsidized unrealistic purchase price because that's what's going to be relevant to them. When the operator goes bankrupt because the costs turn out to be way more than they calculated with, it's not Amazon's problem. It's the US taxpayer's problem.
>> Nuclear energy is profitable pretty much everywhere it is used
> Not if you consider the full costs.
Yes, in fact it is one of the few (maybe only?) electricity source that accounts for full costs. Fossil fuels deposit their waste in the atmosphere, renewables are heavily subsidized and their environmental damage generally isn't included either.
> No nuclear power plant that I have found documentation for anywhere is operated without immense national subsidies.
Citation needed.
> You mention Hinkley point and say that they will generate 150 billion euros in income over 80 years.
Incorrect. That is one reactor of HPC. Both together would be € 300 billion if they continue to get the agreed price, which I don't think they will.
> The storage facility will likely be Sellafield, which has a yearly budget of around 2.5 billion per year, times 80 years is 200 billion
Not only do you only take the output of just one reactor when there are two, you require that one reactor to finance all of Sellafield, a facility that serves the entire country.
> Yes, and [EDF] did [go bankrupt], a few years ago.
No they did not. The French state, which never owned less than 84% of EDF, bough the remaining 16% stake to simplify the planned nuclear expansion.
> EDF was unprofitable even when they neglected required repairs and maintenance.
The opposite was true. EDF was and continues to be immensely profitable over the last few decades, despite being milked dry by the state, for example having to suffer such idiocies as having to sell 25% of their electricity at 4 cents/kWh to competitors and then often having to buy it back at market rates (ARENH). In 2022 those market rates were up to € 1/kWh, so they had to buy back their own electricity at 25x the price that they were required to sell it for. And the French government increased the ARENH quotas in that year.
These kinds of insane accounting shenanigans, all on the back of reliable and highly profitable nuclear plants, were the primary reason that EDF had a € 10 billion loss in 2022, their first in over a decade, IIRC.
>> Yes, and [EDF] did [go bankrupt], a few years ago.
>No they did not.
Yes they did. That the government bailed them out instead of actually letting the bankruptcy take place makes no difference.
However you slice it, the bottom line is that the price of nuclear electricity in France has not included the 10 billion that France paid to take ownership, does not include the 50 billion of debt that they took over, and not the 20 billion of neglected maintenance.
This is a well documented 80 billion euros that should have been paid by EDF and should have been visible on the electricity bills of nuclear power customers in France. But it wasn't.
There are other examples too, like the german Asse II mine, rancho seco in the US, the government nuclear fund in sweden, all either entirely paid for by taxpayers or underfunded meaning they will eventually have to be paid for by taxpayers.
>LOL. Not only do you only take the output of just one reactor when there are two,
Yes I did, because none of the other 9 reactors pay for Sellafield either. If the rules change today so that new nuclear plants have to pay for their own waste, then HPC would have to pay for all of Sellafield.
Also, HPC will probably be the last remaining plant for at least 40 years (if it is operational for 80), so it will have to finance Sellafield alone then.
And what about the remaining centuries after that? Who pays then?
You may think that's unfair, but it is of course even more unfair that they don't pay for it and instead kick the costs to future taxpayers.
Right?
Who pays for Rancho Seco, who pays for Yucca Mountain, who pays for Asse II, who pays for AVR? Not the nuclear operators.
How can you even remotely believe that nuclear pays for it's full costs when there are so many examples like this?
Wrong. Until 2004 France owned 100% of EDF. They sold just 16%. And then took it back. It was always a state-owned enterprise.
> 50 billion of debt that they took over
The state did not "take over" €50 billion in debt. That is still held by EDF (and if you count the debt of state-owned companies as government debt, then it was always government debt, because, see above, the French state always owned vastly more than 50% of EDF. 100% until 2004, to be precise).
And that debt is not operational debt. As I stated before, EDF has been extremely profitable, and paying both taxes as well as dividends to its owner(s), mostly the French state.
Taking on the loans is how they financed construction of the nuclear power plants, which were not financed by the tax payer, but on the capital markets. With the loans EDF took on, they built infrastructure, in this case nuclear power plants. And with the (quite significant) profits from operating those plants, they pay back the loans.
This is what is known as "investment". Most companies do it.
> If the rules change today so that new nuclear plants have to pay for their own waste, then HPC would have to pay for all of Sellafield.
if (false) → conclude anything you like.
And of course you still only counted the income of a single reactor at HPC. [Picard voice:] There. are. two. reactors.
> Also, HPC will probably be the last remaining plant
False. UK is planning a 4x expansion of nuclear capacity.
"Lacking an operating repository, the federal government initially paid utility companies somewhere between $300 and $500 million per year in compensation for failing to comply with the contract it signed to take the spent nuclear fuel by 1998"
It looks like the utilities paid the federal government for the repository, but are not getting the services they paid for.
Ahh yes, they did:
"The companies held up their end, feeding about $750 million into the Nuclear Waste Fund each year. But the department did not manage to set up any facility to receive the waste, forcing energy companies to store it themselves on-site."
The reasons given for the renationalization were "EDF's problems are above all under-capitalisation and under-remuneration."
Which means "they are not profitable".
>Until 2004 France owned 100% of EDF. They sold just 16%. And then took it back.
That changes nothing of what I said - they "Took it back" by paying 10 billion euros of taxpayer money.
>The state did not "take over" €50 billion in debt.
You might argue that the taxpayers were always on the hook for this debt. It was only documented and formalized when France bought the whole thing. Ltting EDF go bellyup and not paying was never on the table, that's the hook of nuclear power.
But that's semantics. 50 billion of debt will be paid by the taxpayers sooner or later.
You have failed to refute my claim of 80 billion in hidden costs and are instead arguing sidepoints and semantics. The unemotional thing to do would be to say "Ah yes, of course we need to account for at least those 80 billion, that's true".
I thought you said you were the rational one with evidence and the opponents were all emotional. 80 billion is not emotions, it's evidence, and you're trying hard to pretend it doesn't exist.
Why is that?
>It looks like the utilities paid the federal government for the repository, but are not getting the services they paid for.
But they didn't pay for it. They may have paid 750 million per year but that's not anywhere close to enough. Remember Sellafield?
This is another example of how the operators pretend to be profitable - they pay nowhere near enough to cover the costs, but they have negotiated a deal that makes that a taxpayer problem. In their books they just write "waste management, paid in full" and the rest of the payment is covered by taxpayers. A hidden expense.
This is again a fact that you seem unwilling to accept. Why?
You should read your sources. It confirms what I wrote and contradicts what you wrote.
> they "Took it back"
No. Not if "it" was "EDF". Because "it" was a minority 16 percent stake.
> 50 billion of debt will be paid by the taxpayers sooner or later.
No it won't. Which part of "profitable" and "investment" do you not understand?
> You have failed to refute my claim of 80 billion in hidden costs
There was nothing there to refute. You are free to make up random stuff, I will continue to ignore your made up stuff, as even the claims for which you provide sources turn out to be untrue, contradicted by the very sources you bring.
> But they didn't pay for it.
But they did. So much, in fact, that the federal government now has to pay them for breach of contract. Sellafield is not Yucca mountain, and is much more than just a storage facility.
"Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to ... "
So in 2022, France gave EDF directly over 12 billion euros. Saying they had 9 billion in profits when they were given 12 buillion by the state is a bit odd.
Surely a cool free 12 billion on top of the "insane profits" they generate on their own can't be less than the money they were given?
A grandfather who spends money using his grandchildren's credit cards is not profitable. And that is basically what EDF is doing.
The sad fact is that France has dug itself into a hole. They have a huge industry around nuclear, which is at the end of any pretense of profitability with an enormous mountain of unpaid costs coming up in the centuries ahead. This will be a burden on France's economy - the credit cards have run out, now the grandchildren have to pay.
>> 50 billion of debt will be paid by the taxpayers sooner or later.
>No it won't. Which part of "profitable" and "investment" do you not understand?
A company that drowns in debt and needs government bailouts is not profitable by any definition of the word.
Investments generate profits after you have paid for them, so nuclear is clearly not an investment - it costs more money every year. EDF could pretend to be profitable in the beginning but now the facts have caught up. The true cost of nuclear is undeniable in the long run.
Turns out EDF was selling nuclear power below production cost all these years, they just pretended that the production costs were low by neglecting maintenance and borrowing money.
> A company that drowns in debt and needs government bailouts is not profitable by any definition of the word.
They're not "drowning" in debt, they're not being bailed out and they are most definitely profitable.
> [nuclear] costs more money every year
You might want to actually look at the EDF financial reports...
> That's why France now has increased the price of nuclear power by over 60%
Also not true. France has increased the "price" of the ARENH program, which allows companies access to 25% of EDFs cheap nuclear capacity at low prices.
> Turns out EDF was selling nuclear power below production cost all these year
Turns out the ARENH program legally required EDF to sell 25% of its production at a very low fixed price. Even if it needed that electricity itself, which meant it often had to buy that same electricity it had produced back from those same competitors at a higher price. At the height of the energy crisis at a 25x higher price.
> As I said - not profitable.
Yes, you keep saying it, and it keeps being wrong.
> What are those "entirely disproportionate downsides", in your opinion? If you subtract the effects of radiophobia?
A handful of people operating Chernobyl have caused costs that passed 600 billion euros already in 2016, and will keep costing more money for the foreseeable future.
Nations have international agreements to cover liabilities from nuclear power stations, since no company and very few individual nations can cover the costs of severe accidents.
The majority of health effects from Chernobyl were from the evacuation, not the accident. Check the WHO reports.
In Fukushima it was all of them.
The 1975 Banqiao dam failure caused (best estimate) around 200000 deaths, evacuation of tens of millions and a several million houses destroyed. Was that a reason for the entire world to get out of hydro-power, because the "disproportionate downsides" are just too great?
Or did we check that our dams are built to better standards? And possibly update those standards? The RBMK-1000 was a reactor that even at the time would never have been permitted to be built in the west. Not even close. It was inherently unstable, with the positive void coefficient, and had no containment.
And the kinds of shenanigans that were ordered at Chernobyl also are not permitted.
TMI was a meltdown. There was no effect outside the plant. And nuclear safety was improved significantly after TMI.
Fukushima will have no health effects in the Japanese population. All the adverse health effects and the vast majority of the financial damages are due to the unnecessary evacuation and the shutdown.
"Relocation was unjustified for 75% of the 335,000 people relocated after Chernobyl."
"Relocation was unjustified for the 160,000 people relocated after Fukushima."
“By now, more Japanese have died from the closing of Japan's nuclear power plants following the 2011 Tohoku quake than from the tsunami and the earthquake combined, which was about 20,000 people.”
In terms of money, just 5 years of the reactor shutdown cost the Japanese more than $200 billion. That is the vast majority of the financial damage. Take that to 10 years and you are at $400 billion and that's assuming constant prices.
The "Atomausstieg" has cost Germany more than €500 billion. So what is disproportionate?
>The majority of health effects from Chernobyl were from the evacuation, not the accident. Check the WHO reports.
No, 6000 cases of thyroid cancer from Chernobyl were not caused by the evacuation, it was caused by the fallout. And the topic you are trying to dodge is that nations all over europe had to spend money to screen for these cancers for decades after Chernobyl, they had to feed wildlife special food, sanitize large areas of land and so on. The EU even had to pay for a new sarcophagus, despite never haven gotten a single kwh from Chernobyl. And it hasn't stopped costing money yet.
Nothing else (at least in peacetime) that humans do can have such consequences from mistakes made by a few individuals.
We see the same hidden costs in Sellafield, where Norway - who exports power to the UK, they don't get any - are volunteering to pay for Sellafield since an accident at sellafield could have severe effects on food production near Oslo, the capital of Norway. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/05/sellafield-...
Notice how the 2.5 billion pounds of yearly hidden costs I told you about earlier here is described as a "shoestring budget". The hidden subsidies given to nuclear power is found everywhere if you just scratch the surface a little bit.
In summary; precisely because it's not clean, it's also neither cheap nor safe.
The reality of this is evidenced by Sizewell C. Even with complete political unity for nearly 20 years they haven't managed to come up with a working business case outside of essentially a cost plus contract.
Building nuclear power as a cost plus contract, there you have true insanity.
But that is the reality of nuclear power today. It is vastly undercut by renewables and expensive to the point that even with near political unity the cost can't be defended when public scrutiny is applied down the line.
> Yeah, nuclear power can be profitable when it is enormously subsidized.
No, it is pretty much always profitable. When you negotiate rates that are similar to what renewables get, the profits get obscene. One person I showed these numbers to, who had previously also made the claims about nuclear never being profitable, changed his tune quite quickly. The profits at those rates are so obscene that he claimed it must be corruption.
> The CFD for Hinkley Point C proves that nuclear power does not have a business case in 2024.
No it doesn't. HPC's primary purpose is to rebuild the UK's nuclear industry. In addition to providing incredible amounts of reliably electricity.
> ... for more subsidies ...
Don't have access to the article, but the headline speaks of a loan guarantee. Which is less than what renewables get.
> The reality of this is evidenced by Sizewell C.
Which they are building. Evidence that there is no business case?
In fact UK plans to quadruple nuclear power. Because there is no business case. Riiiight.
> Building nuclear power as a cost plus contract, there you have true insanity.
Evidence of the "cost plus" contract?
> It is vastly undercut by renewables
Only when the renewables are massively subsidized.
And they don't deliver the same product: reliable, dispatchable electricity.
> When you negotiate rates that are similar to what renewables get, the profits get obscene.
I don't understand what you are smoking. The entire investment cost for renewables are similar in price for the electricity from a paid off nuclear plant. Excluding decommissioning, insurance and waste storage costs for the nuclear plant.
Take Sweden, the lowest electricity costs in Europe and no subsidies for new built renewables on the books. Keeps building the equivalent to an EPR in wind power every 2 years.
You truly must be a cult member to think nuclear power makes financial sense when the UK government is adding a ~ £7B subsidy to Sizewell C before the final investment decision to get the project started, because they can't find investors!
> Evidence of the "cost plus" contract?
Just Google the Regulated Asset Base. EDF is too weak to take any risk from Sizewell C on their books, thus it becomes a cost plus contract as the government takes the entire risk, because it has been wholly incapable of finding any investors.
> In fact UK plans to quadruple nuclear power. Because there is no business case. Riiiight.
You mean like they've been doing since the mid 2000s.
I would suggest you dare click any of these links:
You just keep producing lots of verbiage and simply no evidence for your claims.
Intermittent renewables are subsidized everywhere. Nuclear power is not.
Electricity prices in countries with nuclear power are generally lower than electricity prices where intermittent renewables are used.
Hydro is a different matter, that is reliable. Sweden has both hydro and renewables and is planning on adding 10 nuclear plants. Norway has hydro, doesn't need nuclear, though they are looking at SMRs for some remote communities. Iceland has plenty of hydro and geothermal they don't need nuclear.
Alas, hydro is something you have or don't have. You can't build it out if you don't have the geography for it. The countries with the lucky geography use it to their advantage, though both Sweden and Finnland happily add nuclear to their hydro.
The just-published report from the US DOE shows that nuclear + renewables solutions are cheaper than renewables alone. which is why the US wants to add around 200 GW of nuclear capacity to their grid, tripling capacity.
> Intermittent renewables are subsidized everywhere. Nuclear power is not.
And then you go and point to Hinkley Point C with a ridiculously subsidized CFD as a "good example".
Really, what are you smoking?
> Electricity prices in countries with nuclear power are generally lower than electricity prices where intermittent renewables are used.
You mean like the insane €70/MWh ARENH agreement for old paid off nuclear plants which is higher than German wholesale prices. Reality's bias against nuclear power keeps moving faster than even your talking points.
> Sweden has both hydro and renewables and is planning on adding 10 nuclear plants.
Yes with massive massive subsidies. The opposition has promised to block it on cost grounds when they get into power next time.
> The just-published report from the US DOE shows that nuclear + renewables solutions are cheaper than renewables alone. which is why the US wants to add around 200 GW of nuclear capacity to their grid, tripling capacity.
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 compared to $82-102/MWh.
It is essentially: Nukebros writes reports for nukebros based on selectively chosen outdated data, they confirm their own bias. Simply an attempt to justify another massive round of government subsidies on nuclear power.
Lets end the discussion here. You clearly don't have any capability of critical thinking and keeps sprouting talking points without understanding what they mean in contrary to all real world evidence.
> And then you go and point to Hinkley Point C with a ridiculously subsidized CFD as a "good example".
Where did I point to HPC as a "good example"? Nowhere, that's where.
It is the worst example, currently, of a nuclear construction project gone awry, and last I checked will be the most expensive pair of nuclear reactors in history, by a good margin.
And even that will be ridiculously profitable given the negotiated price, which is the same price that various UK off-shore wind projects are getting. Except that HPC power will be reliable. And there will be lots of it. And the plants will last for a very long time.
Just like Georgia Power had to increase their electricity prices to pay for the disastrous Vogtle-3/4 projects. To less than half the price of electricity in California, the US's intermittent renewables poster-boy.
Fun fact: the worst of nuclear power is better than the best of intermittent renewables.
> 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.
Aka: Reality™
But you are right, discussing actual reality with you is pointless.
> Thank you for confirming that investing in modern nuclear power leads to vastly higher power bills for the ratepayers.
I didn't and it does not. French power bills are much lower than German ones. As are Swedish and Finnish ones. Georgia power bills (Vogtle-3/4) are half of California's (PV/wind-meister).
Before 2002 (the German Atomausstieg), electricity rates were steadily falling compared to purchasing power. After 2002, they have been steadily rising.
In Europe, electricity prices correlate in pretty much a straight line with the penetration of intermittent renewables in the country's electrical grid. The higher the percentage, the higher the prices.
> Nuclear power needs to come down in price by 85% to be competitive with renewable systems. That is the fact today.
That is about as counterfactual as you can be. Nuclear is cheaper than intermittent renewables on any metric you can find. And that's even before you notice that intermittent renewables don't actually provide power when you need it.
The world has left the renewbro dreams behind and is turning to nuclear:
- COP28: worldwide tripling of nuclear
- UK: quadrupling of nuclear
- US: tripling nuclear
- Japan + South Korea: were going to abandon nuclear, now expanding instead
- Poland: getting into nuclear, in a big way.
- Holland: 4 new reactors instead of the originally planned 2
- Sweden: were also going to reduce / discontinue, now want at least 10 new reactors
- France: had a law on the books that disallowed the expansion of nuclear capacity in absolute terms and mandated reduction to below 50%. This law was scrapped in March 2023 (>70% majority), now on track to build 14 EPR2 reactors
- China: were on track to triple capacity, now accelerating.
- India: on track to triple capacity by 2031
- Ukraine: building 4 new AP-1000
- Italy: got out of nuclear late 80s early 90s, now getting back into nuclear
- Microsoft, Google, Amazon: all investing heavily in nuclear
- Major banks just announced support for nuclear
- IPCC calls nuclear essential for tackling climate change
- So does the EU, the US government, etc.
- Czech repubic: just ordered a South Korean APR-1400
Lovely. All you do is keep claiming stuff and sidestep all questions you don’t want to face without any reputable sources to back it up.
Then attempting to justify it by subsidy programs being launched. In one sentence it’s the cheapest in the next sentence truly enormous subsidy programs are needed to even get projects started. And that’s a win?!?
Like, please provide a source for this statement which is completely contrary to all reputable modern research on the subject:
> That is about as counterfactual as you can be. Nuclear is cheaper than intermittent renewables on any metric you can find. And that's even before you notice that intermittent renewables don't actually provide power when you need it.
You sound like a deranged cult member who has been caught out.
Nobody claims 100% availability. Doesn't change that nuclear is by far the most reliable electricity generator. The US nuclear fleet has had capacity factors in the 95% range for ages now. And the 5% tend to be planned maintenance/fueling.
Not only are the times of unavailablilty very rare and usually plannable, they are also uncorrelated. Seasons, day/night cycles and even large scale weather patterns are highly correlated.
Nuclear is among the least dependable generation sources from a long term capacity standpoint, with multiple incidents taking generation off for long periods. 3 mile island wasn’t a big deal from a health and safety standpoint, but at 4 AM TMI-2 went offline with zero warning and never came back. Similarly you can’t trust timelines for when exactly new generation will come online.
Less severe incidents don’t necessarily make the news, but losing 1.3 GW at some random period for weeks or months isn’t particularly uncommon. Sure major incidents are “rare,” but there’s not actually that many nuclear power plants ever constructed.
Nuclear has the highest reliability of all generation sources, with for example the largest fleet of reactors, the US fleet, consistently coming in at around 95% capacity factor.
Most of the remaining 5% is scheduled outages for maintenance and refueling. And both the rare scheduled as well as the even rarer unscheduled outages tend to be uncorrelated. Well, unless radiophobia grips a country and they decide to shut everything down.
Trust renewbros to always use a single example to bolster their claims.
Examples are plentiful, read up on why Foreign material exclusion (FME) is such a major concern. Months of completely unplanned outage, 10’s millions in damage and even more in lost production all from a minor mistake.
Short term capacity factor is not the same as reliability, the grid needs power every day not some average over a year. Add some turbines and a given dams capacity factor drops but it becomes more valuable due to the added flexibility and redundancies.
Lifetime capacity factors of US reactors are a long way from 95% often in the low 80% or below that’s not because the grid doesn’t want their power but because nuclear is unreliable over the long term.
> Short term capacity factor is not the same as reliability,
Er, capacity factor and reliability are not the same thing, that is true. But not in the way you seem to think. Capacity factor is more stringent than simple reliability, as it also takes into account planned outages and even power reductions due to external circumstances, for example when nuclear output in Finnland was throttled to compensate for the over-production problems they had with their hydro last year.
And you do need to make up your mind whether you think long term or short term is important, because you are contradicting yourself on that.
Capacity factors are usually given for a year, and in recent years, the capacity factors for nuclear in the US have been in the 95% range for a while, though recently dropped to "just" 93%. What the capacity factor was 30 years ago isn't really relevant.
The idea that 93%-96% capacity factors somehow make nuclear power "unreliable" is ... "interesting".
If you find a more reliable electricity source, do present it here.
That inherently misrepresents nuclear when the fueling cycle lasts longer than a year and maintenance cycles extend across decades. But again reliability is the ability to provide a service. A full multi week outage can’t be patched over via batteries, you need redundancy.
Suppose your an island nation considering looking to get 3GW of nuclear. You’d like the most efficient option of really huge 1.5 GW reactors but if any of them is offline you’re already at 50% output. It’s going to happen, and the grid needs to be able to deal with it, in practice it would need to be able to deal with both being offline for weeks..
> The idea that 93%-96% capacity factors somehow make nuclear power "unreliable" is ... "interesting".
Even a 95% capacity factor over a year can represent near perfect uptime OR include a random 2 week outage with zero notice during absolutely peak seasonal demand.
But again lifetime averages are often in the 80% range and that’s not from fueling cycles alone. Many multi month outages are guaranteed to happen during a plants lifespan requiring further redundancy based around the assumption that nuclear is unavoidable.
Simply repeating this stuff doesn't make it any more salient.
Ocne again: bring actual evidence for a grid-level electricity generator that is more reliable than nuclear. And with "source" I mean actual evidence, not your say-so.
Evidence like the 18 different US nuclear power plants at 0 output on this list Right Now. Plenty of them are at 100% and a few are at lower output based on grid demand, but 18 are simply offline due to the unreliable nature of nuclear.
The wonderful thing about being correct is the evidence is plentiful. I didn’t pick some random day that happens to be bad. It’s the middle of the day so many natural gas peaking power plants are online to meet surging demand, but all this nuclear simply isn’t available. And it’s not available due to the inherent unreliable nature of the technology.
Extremely expensive natural gas being used Today specifically because nuclear energy doesn’t work the way you think it does.
PS: You’re not going to see this kind of nationwide tracking for say coal because the availability so just so much better. Total outages are less frequent and don’t lass nearly as long.
Reading is not the problem. What you don't seem to understand is that you repeatedly writing something does not actually make it true.
In fact, given your record here, you repeatedly writing something is a pretty good indicator of it being false.
And this claim of yours remains absurdly false, no matter how often you repeat it.
You point to the past, which is completely irrelevant, and you point to single plants, which is also completely irrelevant, as the fleet is pretty large. The total and current capacity factor for nuclear power in the US is in the 90s.
Doesn't get much simpler than that.
And you've yet to produce an electricity source with a higher capacity factor.
Because you can't.
Because your claim is simply not true.
And will remain untrue no matter how often you repeat it or how many other irrelevant stats you pull.
I'm as skeptical of nuclear as a person can get, but I think availability is significantly mitigated by the SMR concept IIUC. Yes, uptime is worse than people might think (nuclear plants are offline a LOT https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/outages/), but if you've got literally dozens of SMRs chained up, then hypothetically you can expect/handle some % being down at any one time.
but usually availability for npp can be planned (maintenance/refueling) unlike say wind/solar output (not referring to day/night but hourly variations)
for weather - that's not a problem for newer designs that account for that. Even in France just a few nr of plants are affected and their output reduced
Once it’s built and operational? It can run near 100% for literally decades at 99.9% plus uptime, no solar source is going to do that because of physics where you can easily vary from 0% to 99% over a single day and have to smooth that out for the grid. Obviously you will need an extra reactor or 3 for when you have to take one of the others offline for maintenance.
> 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.
It's the grid which protects it and if the grid is broken nuclear is even worse since you're suddenly faced with far too much power on a small portion of the whole grid. Meanwhile with renewables, even if the grid is broken on several points, you are much better off due to the distribution of power generation.
> Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was "hobbyists." BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another.
After all, the microwave oven came from developing nuclear weapons. Those warm air blankets used during post-op in hospitals came from NASA Apollo/Gemini/Mercury development.
Who knows where what useful things could come from properly tracking a person's face so silly filters could be applied...er, wait, we have this one backwards. The silly filters are just the useful numbing down of people accepting their faces always being tracked. nevermind
In the modern era, waste is basically the 8th sin. Inefficiency is a moral failure for these people. You're only allowed to have just enough hospital beds to accommodate the current demand with a little leeway. You're only allowed to have as much stock of anything as it takes for the next shipping container to arrive and be unloaded. It's all razor-thin efficiency all the way down, with no slack available for black swan events. And then we wonder why inflation is up 100% when the logistics chains break down, then try to scapegoat whatever politician is in power at the wrong time.
who are you to say how people should use energy? This is a pure nihilistic coal post and I think you should think about being less judgmental, it will make you happier.
The real reason is to keep this stock market bull run going and they are terrified of it coming down to earth again where it is supposed to be. They definitely will burn whatever they need to so that their stock price doesn’t come down. But it is inevitable and also disgusting that we are throwing our climate change goals out the window for this.
Total construction of wind, solar, energy storage, and nuclear globally over the past decade is what the market is saying and it’s saying it very clearly.
Individual participants making different bets is how the market decides what’s effective and what’s wasteful. But you can’t assume any subgroup is speaking for the total market, because they could be about to lose big. Nuclear could make a huge comeback in the coming decades, but until that happens we can only talk about the market in terms of what the market is actually doing.
Regulations aren’t what’s driving nuclear to unprofitably. China which still builds nuclear and doesn’t give a fuck about US nuclear regulations is still brining solar and wind to market vastly faster.
It's because nuclear power plants are so durable, they last almost forever, but at least 80-100 years for modern plants.
If you build out too quickly, you end up in the same situation the French found themselves in after the Messmer-plan predictions turned out to vastly overestimate demand: they were done after 15 years.
With effectively no nuclear power plants to build for 45-85 years, their industry withered and they have had to re-learn building them. Not helped by the fact that there was a legal cap on the total amount of nuclear production.
Fucashma happened in 2011, their up over 4x since then with the total share of electricity from nuclear in China roughly doubled. It’s just nowhere close to the changes seen in renewable generation.
China is already trying to use coal as a peaking generation something it’s terrible at. That’s something nuclear is even worse at and what’s ultimately limiting their nuclear ambitions. They slowed down the pass of nuclear construction despite nuclear only making up ~5% of their electricity supply it’s simply an issue with nuclear not regulations.
They reduced nr of builds after fk and ramped up only recently with 10+ reactors approved/yr. But agree it's still harder to scale than renewables, but they are gradually getting close to 4-5 years of build time for their designs so things may improve greatly in near time
I suspect the timing is simply coincidence. Solar became vastly more viable in that timeline and it can be rolled out from planning to electricity in months not years.
China could build nuclear faster if they wanted to. They were building it faster in the 2010s and have slowed down, so they obviously have the capacity.
yes they slowed down and ramping up again now. 10+ reactors/yr approved, 30+ under construction, hualong build time of about 5 years, will probably drop to 4
Not necessarily. The grid of the future needs a plurality of solutions, one of which is clean baseload (e.g. hydropower, nuclear fission, or fusion).
However, don't discount renewables. Paired with energy storage -- which isn't only chemical batteries! --, intermittent generation can be extremely useful across vasts parts of North America.
Baseload is a term used to describe a downside not some inherent requirement of the grid. Up to 30% of electricity can be supplied by “baseload” sources without issue, but scaling past that runs into increasing problems.
Hydro is described as peaking power because it can be ramped up and down 100%-0%-100% multiple times in a single day. Very useful for tracking changing demand and intermittent energy from solar/wind.
Coal/Nuclear has issues doing the same due to thermal stress and heat loss when not in use. The energy used to get things back to working temperatures requires fuel which isn’t generating power, you also have ware issues from thermal cycling. Alternatively, you could keep things at operating temperatures but that’s again spending fuel without generating electricity.
On top of this Nuclear runs into if you try and ramp down very low very quickly, wait a few hours a then try and ramp back up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison To be clear 100%-30%-100% can be fine 100% to 0% to 100% isn’t.
Baseload is a a requirement of real electricity demand, it tends to be about 50-60% of total demand.
Since intermittent renewables cannot do baseload, and get asymptotically more expensive trying, fans of intermittent renewables are trying to paint baseload as an obsolete concept by making intermittency primary.
That is silly. Baseload is real and a major component of demand. Intermittent renewables can be a good addition, as their supply curves can actually match the variable part of the demand fairly closely (thought obviously not perfectly).
It is not true that Hydro can be ramped arbitrarily. For example, just last year Finland had a huge problem with their plentiful hydro plants overloading the grid. Fortunately they also have significant nuclear that they were able to ramp down to compensate.
With ~60% baseload, there is no need to ramp nuclear plants down to 0 rapidly. That's only necessary if you screw up your grid by having too much intermittent renewables and giving them priority. Don't do that.
Alas, overloading their grid with renewables is exactly what some countries are doing, Germany for example. This is a really bad idea for a number of reasons. One is that due to even the average capacity factors being so low, you have to dramatically over provision in order to even achieve fully supply on average. However, that massive overprovisioning means that when weather is favorable, those massively over provisioned massively cannibalize each other (and other producers, if those still exist).
The more you overprovision, the worse this gets.
Reasonably ramping nuclear up or down is no problem. France for example has been using nuclear reactors almost exclusively for some time. Lower capacity factors for the nuclear plants than you'd really want, but otherwise not a problem. Their investment in renewables (aim seems to be around 30-40%) will likely increase the capacity factors of their nuclear plants. Good for them!
It’s not the renewable cloud trying to redefine a term go back to 2005 on Wikipedia and you’ll see: “A base load power plant is one that provides a steady flow of power reguardless of total power demand by the grid. Typically, nuclear power plants and most coal fired power plants are considered base load because it is more efficient or safer to run at a set output instead of trying to precisely match power consumption demands.” https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Base_load&oldid=1...
You can find that definition used regularly in older books dating well before renewables where a thing.
01 April 1967: “This paper states some of the basic principles concerning daily and annual load factor on power systems, and the use of load duration curves in coordinating the type and operating pattern of generating plant. Operating procedure is explained, and the types of plant in use or under construction in New Zealand are described. Overseas plant is divided into the categories of base load, medium load factor, and peaking, with an outline of the desirable characteristics in each case.”
Also, time of day pricing shifts users to periods of low demand so it doesn’t represent the minimum need, just the observed demand under specific pricing schemes. If daytime rates fall well below nighttime rates continually the actual usage at 3AM would fall dramatically.
The space isn’t relevant as per current Wikipedia “The base load[2] (also baseload)”
There’s an even older saying: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and prove it.”
The article even goes on to use both, while making clear which definition the author is trying to promote: “Power plants that do not change their power output quickly, such as some large coal or nuclear plants, are generally called baseload power plants.[3][5][6]”
In the wider context grid operators don’t actually care about the specific absolute lowest demand number. They need to operate 24/7 for years so whatever the minimum number happens to be for a single second just doesn’t matter much compared to blackouts and other extreme situations. Bottom 5th percentile matters from an economic standpoint, but very temporary extremes only matter in terms of resiliency.
You’re incorrect in several ways here. Utilities care about the supply they need to generate not total customer demand because of inefficiency in the transmission network. People like yourself got confused when reading about existing terms and have been using them incorrectly ever since.
Anyway you’ve been spouting so much nonsense I’m only going to respond to a fraction of it.
The minimum power demand is the easiest to reach with intermittent sources via even minimal storage being by definition the lowest relevant number. It’s also the least valuable electricity to supply which is why nobody actually does this. You use energy from batteries when the price of that energy is highest. That’s a function of energy markets not inherent limitations on the technology. It’s easy to move most use at 3AM to other times of the day because most of the consumption is due to cheap prices. Charging EV’s late at night happens specifically because there’s anything particular going on at 3AM and otherwise generation would be idle.
Terms of art don’t necessarily mean what you think they mean. Nobody can take into account transmission losses in real time because they don’t actually know want they are. They also can’t directly track use in real time, as such baseload etc is calculated from the supply side.
They can know how much energy they are generating and they can look at the grid frequency/stability. Which is why they speak in terms of supply. Demand is always a lower and only indirectly relevant number.
> have firm generation capacity
Batteries charged from redundant but still cheap solar are more dependable than individual nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power plants have historically have been offline roughly 10% of a given power plants total lifespan making it surprisingly difficult to consistently supply baseload with nuclear alone. Total availability of French nuclear power in 2022 for example was abysmal. Batteries can easily make up for short term instability, but nobody is paying for enough batteries to supply 1+GW 24/7 for 2 months because some nuclear power plant will eventually need maintenance.
“Firm power” is more about the type of relationship between energy generation and consumers than the actual technology being used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firm_service
but big corpos are pouring money in it instead of pouring them in own renewable combo. So maybe they know something?
And nuclear doesn't take much to run. EDF in France got 11bn profit last year and will beat it this year. And that's WITH govt limitation called arenh that forces them to sell 1/4 energy at lower price. EDF basically got f'd with foak builds in france,finland and uk, especially uk due to their overregulation and need for custom components but actually running nuclear is great business
Maybe if you have high levels of renewables penetration. And for a couple of days per month the wholesale electricity price gets very high. And you can sell your nuclear power at very high rates to the market. Or at cheap market beating rates to your private customers.
And electricity in Georgia is, after prices being raised to pay for this particular disaster, around half as expensive as electricity in California.
Important point: even the most disastrous nuclear projects are better than "succesful" intermittent renewables.
Nuclear power plants are big and take a while to build. They also reliably deliver truly stupendous amounts of electricity over an amazing amount of time.
Totally worth it.
Nuclear: an expensive way to generate cheap electricity.
Intermittent renewables: a cheap way to generate expensive electricity.
Afaik china now builds 30+ reactors with additional 10+ approved.
And completion time for many projects tends to be closer to 5 years
Also vogtle was foak build, it's natural to be over time and budget. Still unit 4 was 30% cheaper than unit 3. The more you build the cheaper it gets
Not just FOAK, they also had to rebuild the industry. And of course there was politicking of the industrial players.
And they had some major f-ups. For example, they used a new licensing process, which is all-up-front. This is great, because it means you can get a single design approved and then just built that design over and over, instead of all these one-offs that then are all FOAK.
Except.
Their design wasn't actually done (correctly) when it was approved. So what got approved was safe (that's what the NRC checks). But it wasn't actually buildable, which is not the NRC's problem. So they had to go back to the NRC again and again to make changes, but within a process that wasn't meant to work that way. So sometimes it was cheaper just to tear down what they had built.
COVID also didn't help.
But now the Vogtles are built, and as you said the second AP-1000 was already 30% cheaper than the first. The next ones should be significantly better, not only for the usual FOAK stuff, but they have now built two of these, so they have plans that are actually buildable.
I suspect we’ll get a split where the elites will get the dependable, expensive nuclear energy for their playthings like AI data centers (powered from nearby nuke reactors) and that we plebeians will get the solar/wind/best effort grid supplies as they are more economical right now.
Are you or the rest of America OK with a nuclear power plant being "in your backyard"? Maybe not literally, but any of the effects of it having problems.
> Are you or the rest of America OK with a nuclear power plant being "in your backyard"?
Economists have the term market failure for configurations in which groups of individuals making decisions predictably produces bad outcomes [1].
The last decades seem to imply that there is a broader social failure when high-frequency, echo chambered, outrage-based discussion results in suboptimal debate. This is true from our political media to social media to the quality of private policy debate in America.
Nuclear power seems to exemplify that problem. If a public utility discusses nuclear power, every neighbour in the zip code will come out complaining about radiation. Even if their town is built on radioactive coal ash. Even if they live next to a missile silo, or near a port where our nuclear-powered fleet makes call. Private parties, on the other hand, can cut through the bullshit, which we usually see as bad, but plays a spoiler effect that maybe keeps the system from getting gridlocked.
Instead of this, it might be interesting to see Amazon (or similar provider) offer some kind of compute tier whose performance (not memory or storage, just cpu/gpu) is dependent the amount of power from sun/wind being generated. For many internal applications, I could see that being an acceptable compromise for some amount of cost savings.
I've been saying for years that we'll know the world is serious about energy when we see big pushes into nuclear power. We're here now. This is the point at which all the dumb "but what about a gorillion turbines and solar panels" start to die off (except for where they're legitimately a great solution) and talk about the only viable power source moving forward will start to grow. This is super exciting to me.
> "but what about a gorillion turbines and solar panels"
It's a good thing to have a diverse portfolio of energy solutions to help avoid single points of failure in the network. Especially as something like solar continues to become more and more efficient.
I don't really understand this argument. How are dozens of nuclear power plants a single point of failure? Because of the uranium mining and processing? Then we can invest in fast reactors, which consume 100x less and require less R&D than renewables have benefited from in the last decades. Or seawater uranium, another 100x in reserves, distributed all around the world.
> How are dozens of nuclear power plants a single point of failure?
https://www.wired.com/story/nuclear-power-plants-struggling-...
"Amidst a slow-burning heat wave that has killed hundreds and sparked intense wildfires across Western Europe, and combined with already low water levels due to drought, the Rhône’s water has gotten too hot for the job. It’s no longer possible to cool reactors without expelling water downstream that’s so hot as to extinguish aquatic life. So a few weeks ago, Électricité de France (EDF) began powering down some reactors along the Rhône and a second major river in the south, the Garonne. That’s by now a familiar story: Similar shutdowns due to drought and heat occurred in 2018 and 2019. This summer’s cuts, combined with malfunctions and maintenance on other reactors, have helped reduce France’s nuclear power output by nearly 50 percent."
France is about the best existing case for nuclear, incidentally.
The issue outlined above is a problem for all thermal plants. Coal and gas plants would suffer from the same issue.
Furthermore, nuclear plants don't need to be cooled with potable water. They can be cooled with ocean water, or with waste water. In fact, seawater cooling is the most popular form of cooling. Only 15% of nuclear plants are cooled with river water.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu....
Off topic question. Can a large nuclear reactor be completely air-cooled? I think a full-scale reactor cluster expelling hot jet upwards and providing air conditioning in form of negative static pressure to its surrounding megalopolis would be very cyberpunk.
Air doesn't have much thermal mass, so you'd have to move a lot of air through the heat exchangers to make it work. It's probably possible, but there's much more viable alternatives. In particular, you can use wastewater to cool plants where water is scarce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/632988813/hot-weather-spells-...
> Nuclear power plants in Europe have been forced to cut back electricity production because of warmer-than-usual seawater.
This can be addressed by expanding heat exchangers. Unlike the river water cooling which is constrained by how much the plants are allowed to heat the river.
Primary coolant loop runs at arbitrary temperature, there's never going to be a point that a nuke can't be cooled. It's only matter of designed capacity.
So a coolant loop can run at 100.000 degree? How?
Yes but not solar or wind.
And YES It is a problem which needs to be fixed, increases risk and costs. Don't say its not a problem.
Could part of that waste heat be transfered underground so that a city could use it as a differential source for heatpumps?
To be fair, and as a non-fan of wind (kills birds, annoys animals and humans) and solar (lowers the albedo of the planet, denies sunlight to parts of the local ecosystem), wind and solar do not have this cooling requirement. So that's nice. But anyways, you can always use sea water if you have access to the sea, or rely on a geographically-very-large grid for the diversity of sources that GP says we need.
A geographically large grid will require extensive transmission network upgrades. That has to be factored into the cost competitiveness of these sources.
Renewable generation itself is cheap. But what's expensive (or straight up unfeasible) is everything required to mitigate the intermittent production. Storage at the scale of tens of terawatt hours can't even be feasibly built with current technologies. Moving electricity over thousands of miles, across mountain ranges, would require HVDC lines to be constructed in very rugged terrain.
Europe's and the U.S.'s grids are geographically large.
Correct, but most generation is still produced close to demand. If you look at a map of where power plants are located (https://synapse.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/201fc98c0d74...) you'll see they're concentrated near cities. The grid spans a large area, but most energy is transmitted over a short distance.
Renewables, due to their low energy density and specific weather requirements, need to be built in remote areas. This has led to situations where the grid cannot accommodate transmitting the amount of energy that proposed renewable plants will produce: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...
People often cite the decentralized nature of renewables as an advantage. It's not. It's a significant disadvantage as it has a much bigger burden on the transmission infrastructure.
Good studies showed that wind doesn't kill birds.
solar on roofs doesn't take anything from local ecosystem. Solar above car parks neither.
Solar on a home is such a simple, affordable and save solution, why are you 'non-fan'? which indicates you hate it? How much are you against it? So much that you prefer burning coal over it?
It's possible to use "dry cooling" for a nuclear reactor. [1][2] The thermodynamic efficiency would be much lower, but it is possible to use alternative thermodynamic cycles/methods, for example reactors sent into space have used radiative cooling since there is no realistic way to use fluids to finally reject the heat.
1. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/duboc2/
2. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
So basically radiators. They would have to be huge, and they would have to move huge amounts of air through them. As a backup that might work, probably using a hybrid where a water body is used for cooling and air is the fallback.
Air-cooling is possible. This only effect certain type of reactor. As soon as you go to higher temp reactor air-cooling is very efficient.
And even in France this was only a problem because of their terrible delayed maintenance.
> France is about the best existing case for nuclear, incidentally.
No it isn't. France has done essentially nothing for 30+ years. Has done little maintained, their reactors aren't up to date.
The generation after the generation that built the reactor has always resented the system and wanted to rip it out. They literally decided to retire it by 2035 despite having no plan to replace it.
> No it isn't. France has done essentially nothing for 30+ years. Has done little maintained, their reactors aren't up to date.
I mean, we aren’t disagreeing.
They’re the best case, and that’s not great. It a bit like true communism - real success is just over that next hill.
Thats one of the shortcomings of using a river with variable flow over an ocean or large lake
Ocean yes, but then that opens you up to hurricanes and/or tsunamis.
Lakes can dry up. So that's no better than a river I would think.
Either way, there are no fully safe and permanent sources of cooling water, is what I'm taking away from this.
Certain lakes aren’t going to dry up within human timescales. And disaster risk is present in a lot of places. Just something you take into account when you build it.
> Certain lakes aren’t going to dry up within human timescales.
Which ones? The North American Great Lakes, maybe? Anything else?
The Aral Sea was the third largest lake in the world. Within the human time scale of the last six decades, it's lost 90% of its area.
Aral sea was milked for agriculture. Not all lakes are like that.
The problem is more our lack of ability to build them quickly and in a cost effective way. An investment in solar will much more reliably and quickly turn into a certain amount of power generation.
Hopefully this changes once every nuclear project isn't some complex bespoke thing that is likely to be late and over budget.
And yet UAE a country without any technical knowlage built them in a cost effective way and quickly.
In fact, any country that has built them in mass figured out how to do it cost effective and quickly.
The reality is, its only not cost effective and quick when a country only builds a single reactor as a vanity project to keep the industry alive.
No country that seriously tried to quickly increase production with nuclear has failed.
The UAE spent $30B and a decade building one nuclear plant. The technical knowledge (and the design, and the construction) came from South Korea.
The true costs are unknown. All we have is the announced figure and then two parties with an interest in showing low costs despite a 4 year delay saying
"Yes sir, all went according to plan!!"
Even though it obviously did not all go according to plan.
And who is going to pay for all of this R&D and investment.
The market doesn't want it, banks don't want to finance it, researchers aren't interested and startups can't afford to.
You can't fight against market dynamics when you're talking about capital expenditure this high.
This has indeed been a big blocker, but the article is proof that the market now wants it. And there are plenty of new nuclear startups, as well as interested researchers. What was lacking so far was a real need energy-wise (in the absence of a high carbon tax) and regulatory stability/transparency.
Edit: also, sodium fast reactors have existed for 20 years. The R&D has mostly already been done for that tech. But the lack of projects make it stuck to TRL 8.
Isn’t solar energy a SPOF? It goes to zero MW roughly every 12 hours at any given location on Earth where most people live due to the availability of the Sun’s light.
IF solar would be the only thing people do, yes.
Thats just not the case.
Solar is used together with wind and storage.
And there are very little energy systems which rwould relia only on solar. More north you go, there is often water.
Maybe, but at what cost? There is no such thing as "solar fallout". Doesn't the SPOF come with the trade-off of incredibly low risk of causing long term high-mortality rates of all life in the surrounding area?
Solars go first in any disasters and there's cleanup cost of destroyed panels, so there is such thing as solar fallout. They also don't decay unlike radioactive fallout.
that... is not even close to comparable. A hurricane smashes a bunch of your local panels, you go and pick them up, and if they're too damaged throw them in landfill. Fukushima is going to cost between $470 billion and $660 billion to clean up. A solar "cleanup" would not even be a 10000th of that cost. Why even mention this?
It is. They just don't take a lot of weather, so they're not more than disposable subsidy capture device if you live in places that storms and flying debris are normal. Solar panels are glasses painted with heavy metal stained glasses, so you can't leave the panels around, they have to be recovered.
All moot points if they last indefinitely where you are, serious points if they don't.
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There are no big pushes into nuclear power. These are all tiny deployments that may never even happen.
And those dumb turbines and solar panels produce power at a fraction of the cost of nuclear. And every year they get cheaper and more efficient. Which is why the market has continually decided over and over again to go in this direction.
> produce power at a fraction of the cost
Sadly, also for a fraction of the time.
Until storage is solved in a satisfactory way, solar and wind will remain auxiliary. And the capacity should be in gigawatt-days.
The most important metrics are cost and speed of co2 reduction. An 80% renewable grid may achieve that more effectively than nuclear. It may be optimal to burn gas for a couple of weeks per year. Or to build massive pumped storage and nuclear stations.
But trying to hit some purity target of 100% is irrelevant. There are lower hanging fruit for decarbonisation than the last few percent of power generation.
Nuclear power needs an 85% cost reduction to be competitive with renewables when modeling system costs.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
>Until storage is solved in a satisfactory way
We need a battery that is safe and mandate every home to have one. Or provide incentive for it to be installed. We shouldn't wait for super battery to be install in a central place, instead every home could afford one an provide high quality electrical power.
Surely instead of a giant Water boiler in a lot of homes we could have a giant battery instead.
We probably cannot shop our way out of climate change. The intense climate damage you'd do installing hundreds of millions of batteries (of any kind) would likely offset dozens of years of use.
Well that fraction coincides with when demand is the highest.
And storage is being solved as we have more batteries being deployed and grid supply capable EVs becoming more popular.
The market is deciding where money should be allocated and it's simply not going towards nuclear.
why would you want to share your EV battery capacity with the grid? I don't understand this. Range is entirely dictated by your EV capacity and you're going to "rent" back the capacity (and battery cycles) for night time hours? I don't understand how this would work at scale.
> why would you want to share your EV battery capacity with the grid?
Because you'd get paid for it, and you like free money.
And it should be pretty trivial to set an option to ensure you always have the necessary range for your daily commute by a little bit before you leave your home.
if services like Uber have shown anything, its that you can sell your vehicle's intrinsic value, depreciating it's value in the process. But will you be net positive after depreciated value?
Obviously almost nobody would do it if it weren't net positive.
And why wouldn't it be? The whole point here is for power companies to avoid buying as many batteries themselves, and their own batteries depreciate too.
This isn't hard -- the power company adjusts the price it pays minute per minute, and you set the threshold at which it is profitable for you, taking battery cycles into account. And it becomes a classic supply and demand curve -- it's Econ 101.
Uber drivers earn roughly $0.70/mile[1]. Gas at $3/gal and MPGs at 25mpg mean it costs $0.12/mi in fuel. a $30k vehicle driven to 150k miles costs roughly $0.20/mi in depreciation. Without additional maintenance costs, its roughly $0.32/mi to drive a car. Approximating tires, oil changes, brakes, and other maintenance of roughly $0.15/mi, you're looking at total cost to drive at $0.45-0.50/mi.
Do you think most Uber drivers drive for the $0.7-$0.12 = $0.58/mile or the actual cost of $0.70-$0.50=$0.20/mile? Sustainable Supply/Demand doesn't work until all costs are measured.
A Rivian battery is roughly $17k. Estimating 1500 charge cycles [2], that's roughly $11/charge. If you "give back" half a cycle, there's only $1.50 worth of electricity sold back, but its $5.50 worth of battery. Are you expecting to get paid $1.50+profit or $7+profit?
[1] https://www.stilt.com/careers/how-much-does-uber-pay/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Rivian/comments/10onhud/ev_battery_...
Because a battery will become a lot cheaper and replacing it sooner will still have huge benefits for you financially.
I have a 100kWh battery and can drive with this 3 weeks around without charging at all.
Why would i not want to leverage this?
And results from storage systems show that you can charge and discarge car batteries a lot more often without real degeneration when you do this a lot more stable than when driving.
Also it reduces the overall straine to the power grid. If you fill your cars battery with local solar, you are transporting less energy across the whole grid. If you discharge it locally, again less overall energy which needs to be transfered across the whole grid.
How this would work at scale? easy: in my city for example there is one local power company and they offer a charging solution for my EV. They have a few powerplants locally here too. They have everything they need.
Also overall solar energy prediction for the next day is very good. You can easily save a lot of money by leveraging this up front.
Not really we just need cables across different time zones
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Solar and wind emit a lot of CO2 upfront relative to the energy they produce down the line.
"A lot" is really subjective, so I'll link this chart instead:
https://assets.solar.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Carbon-f...
I'd say 1-5% of coal is pretty good.
Also as we make the power grid cleaner and switch to electric vehicles, the CO2 used in manufacturing goes down.
So does nuclear, and in much larger absolute extent: production of steel and concrete, used copiously in NPP construction, inevitably releases a lot of CO2. Melting silicon or smelting aluminum, not nearly as much. (IDK about epoxy resin production.)
I suppose that instead of eliminating the processes that produce large amounts of CO2, we should embrace them, learn to capture the CO2 where it's produced in high concentrations (like steel plants or cement furnaces), and either bind the carbon in non-volatile ways, like in plastics, or produce fuel from it again and close the loop.
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Now run that in comparison to building and decommissioning a nuclear power station
Its not a lot. Pls don't repeat this. Wind and solar turnaround is very fast...
Wind and especially solar are also serious. But their applications are different; they can offset the load when the sun shines, or the wind blows, but can't provide a stable source.
If you need baseload, and need it carbon-free, your only option currently is nuclear. It's terribly encumbered, but apparently it's still less of an impasse that large-scale electricity storage currently is.
> If you need baseload, and need it carbon-free, your only option currently is nuclear
What about geothermal, tidal, hydro, etc?
Good, given the right geography.
- Hydrothermal: great if you're in Iceland, or near Yellowstone, or other such place blessed by heated rock being close to the surface. Not as great if you need to drill 7 km to reach it.
- Hydro: great if you have a lot of mountains and rivers, like Switzerland or Norway. Harder if you don't, like in much of Texas, to say nothing of Florida.
- Tidal: great if you have a sea shore, preferably with narrow bays / fjords. But if you're in a place like Turkmenistan (one of the two doubly-landlocked countries), you resort to drilling for and burning methane %)
Hydro has a bunch of problems.
* most of the "good sites" have already been taken
* hydro will regularly silt up, requiring constant dredging
* hydro does not work as well or at all in drought conditions, which are increasingly common
* hydro dams require reservoirs, which in addition to the obvious disruption of the displacement of thousands or even a million plus people in the case of Three Gorges, can end up emitting large amounts of carbon as flooded vegetation decomposes.
* hydro is extremely disruptive to migratory fish. the success rate of interventions like fish ladders is in the low single digit percents. so you can get a bunch of carbon free power but also destroy an ecosystem in the process, not to mention any downstream fishing. and you see similar effects with other things that downstream users might want from the river like fresh silt.
Pumped storage hydro solves many of these issues.
It’s not really baseload without something else, though. And pumped hydro capacity is generally meant for hours or days.
> they can offset the load when the sun shines, or the wind blows, but can't provide a stable source.
That they don't work when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow is such a tired and trite remake.
Yes, they don't provide consistent output on their own, but storage exists. If you need electricity store it in batteries or pumped hydro. If you need it for heating store it in thermal batteries.
>Yes, they don't provide consistent output on their own, but storage exists
I think this varies depending on where you live. In California, Cal-iso has a really cool dashboard that seems to show that they have enough battery storage to hold about 90 minutes of daytime solar generation.
Definitely not something that can handle a fully cloudy day yet (presumably it's cheaper to keep some natty gas plants ready to spin up or import than to store more excess solar?)
They do. The good news is that the limit factor on that growth appears to be getting through the grid interconnect queue rather than a lack of people willing to pay to build them: https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-20...
Storage exists, but it's insufficient and expensive.
We need 30x, or maybe 100x more storage. After that, we could live on renewables only, and keep gas-fired plants only as a disaster-recovery tool, like diesels in datacenters.
Until then, we need stable generation which does not spew CO2, which is, well, nuclear. It's hard to tell if ubiquitous cheap utility-scale batteries emerge in 5 years or 50 years.
> Storage exists, but it's insufficient and expensive
It’s just insufficient. Solar + storage is cost competitive with nuclear. The problem is we have a bajillion needs for batteries, a Balkanised global market and wholly insufficient production forecasts over the next decade without gas or nuclear support. Voters seem to like gas. Private participants are choosing nuclear where they can.
Good to be a gas exporter for the next half century or so.
It is expensive, almost $100 per kWh stored, plus construction costs that involve fireproofing and spacing things because lithium batteries are flammable. And a lithium battery loses capacity with every recharge, so it needs replacement every few years.
We need batteries that cost, say, $10 / kWh, are not (as) flammable, not toxic (not Pb, not NiCd), and don't degrade too fast.
With that, they can be large, heavy, have low specific charge, require high or low temperatures (within reason), etc. For a large utility-grade installation all these qualities are not hugely important. There is plenty of space under solar panels and around wind turbines anyway.
Before that, selling methane remains a very good business indeed.
Batteries in controlled env do not need to be replaced every few years.
There are pumped storage hydro-electric plants with abundant and cheap capacities. They also work and are in use, mostly in China and Japan.
China is building a lot more, too. It will probably have 80% of the world’s energy storage capacity in a decade.
We just don’t talk about them in the West for some reason. I guess battery tech is more appealing somehow but it’s not cheaper nor more environmentally friendly, all in all.
I hope that now once there are some serious users of power, they might build some of these plants, and then governments in the West will wake up to how good the plants are.
> are pumped storage hydro-electric plants with abundant and cheap capacities
Cool. Yes. Now scale that by two orders of magnitude.
Here’s the kicker: getting approval to put an SMR in Wyoming is easier than flooding another valley or buying massive contiguous plots. Nuclear, if these guys can execute, which is a big if, promises to be as agile as gas generators. Our current default when we have energy shortfalls.
Well, I cannot currently foresee a situation where we’d need to apply this technology to store several orders of magnitude more energy. Even storing 50% more energy this way in the West would have significant self-reinforcing positive effects on the renewable energy industry.
You might be thinking in an all-or-nothing way. Some solutions don’t need to scale well on cubic scales, etc. Moreover, there is hardly a reason pumped storage power plants can’t be done along side nuclear investment. There isn’t a dichotomy of choice, expanding use of both — or either — would benefit us all.
In fact, there are synergies between pumped storage and nuclear power — pumped storage allows nuclear to more closely meet the peaks and valleys of electricity demand throughout the day.
I think the biggest problem is that the energy sector isn’t making big plant investments due to capitalistic incentives. Why invest into plants if less supply of electricity means a higher unit price, and any state investment into private power companies can go straight into retained earnings/dividend? It would be improving things for technological advancement sake, against investor interests. Things work differently when the power companies are state-owned, of course. But that doesn’t completely flip the script either — technological advancement for advancement sake is still not often pursued. And it’s often even seen as wasteful by the electorate.
If we wanted technological advancement, we have several clear ways to achieve it, even without scaling the current technology exponentially. The problem is that we didn’t want it enough. But now some companies do.
> I cannot currently foresee a situation where we’d need to apply this technology to store several orders of magnitude more energy
The current baseline power demand forecasts from the DoE and IEA.
> Even storing 50% more energy this way
Is in the broad scheme meaningless. It would still require massively increasing our investment in gas generators.
It might be easy to build pumped storage in Boulder City, NV, situated among mountains near the Hoover dam. It would be much harder to build something similar near Houston, TX, where the land is flat as a table.
They are grid-wide plants, which don’t need to be near large population centres. Sierra Madres/Rockies offer great elevation gradients in West TX, if one would want to keep it in the state.
This is a consideration but I don’t think it’s the real reason we don’t consider these plants.
> are pumped storage hydro-electric plants with abundant and cheap capacities
You’re flooding gorgeous landscape near high property values.
I think this is more likely it. NIMBY is a plausible explanation for both the delays in building these plants and NPPs. Not to mention the guaranteed opposition to whoever suggests them as a politician.
Hydroelectric dams have a storied history of pissing people off, through death and displacement, at the very least.
My ancestors (along with natives) were run off from their valley home in PA when a dam was built. Out here in the Sonoran Desert, we've got a lake where the river should be, and the indigeneous (among others) are still pissed about the dam that was pretty much politically forced on all of us.
Conversely, there are groups who absolutely rejoice when a dam is decommissioned and demolished. It's party time when that land is reclaimed, and the water flows again naturally.
Well, this is about pumped storage hydroelectric plants, which are not dams. These plants aren’t generally built on rivers because they require much larger water reservoirs.
As with any land development, they require land, of course. But all power grid elements do.
> this is about pumped storage hydroelectric plants, which are not dams
Damn or not, pumped hydro requires flooding and then unflooding, turning the Alpinesque ecologies into tidal pools. That's disruptive.
They don't turn Alpinesque ecologies into tidal pools if you don't build them in Alpinesque ecologies.
The truth is that we are developing a lot of land every year for different purposes, from industrial to residential. The question is whether we will develop it for everyone's benefit, or for some yet another tax exempt monopoly's warehouse.
We could even build these plants in place of abandoned industrially exploited land, such as quarries, which conveniently already form quite large water reservoirs. We could reclaim a completely dead parcel of land and once we stop using the reservoir, it could blossom into a set of new natural ecologies.
Don't take the worst case scenario and present it as the only one when there is a world of possibilities.
> don't turn Alpinesque ecologies into tidal pools
Where do you think large, regular flows of water in natural valleys that can be economically dammed with large gravitational potential energy sit?
> Until then, we need stable generation which does not spew CO2, which is, well, nuclear.
A nuclear plant in the USA takes oh about 18 years to build. That's 18 years of solar, wind, and storage growth and cheapening.
Grid connected batteries are only viable for a short duration, they aren’t going to help when you don’t have any wind for two weeks.
When's the last time the North Sea had no wind for two weeks?
https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2021/09/14/energy-prices-in-...
If you dig a little deeper than an industry front quoting the WSJ, "stop" there means "10-20% less than usual" https://climate.copernicus.eu/esotc/2021/low-winds
Not everyone can use energy from the North Sea.
Thankfully, it’s not the only reliably windy spot on the planet.
Especially on continent-sized electrical grid scales. We put the farms in windy spots, and we pick a variety of spots.
Can the North Sea wind provide enough for 100 million people?
Almost certainly yes. The Dogger Bank farm alone powers six million, and we’ve hardly filled the entire sea with turbines.
Is that a thing where they build wind farms? Like are there any wind farms where it is likely to occur with any regularity?
In my region wind generation dipped down to only 1pc of capacity for a day or two last winter which seems to be the floor as far as I can tell.
That tells me that we only need to increase capacity by 100x to get the coverage we want, and as a bonus we get all that surplus capacity most of the time to use on non-essential industry.
Its not that simple.
First of no one is saying its just wind and solar. You say wind, solar and energy storage (batteries).
And second, if more people would buy EVs, we would already have A LOT MORE storage available. My EV has 100kWh and could heat a whole modern build house for 2 full days in winter.
I agree with all of this. I get annoyed with the conversations surrounding wind and solar, but I don't dislike the techs themselves. They have a place and are great, and solar is mind-bogglingly affordable right now. I've seen utility companies offering them """for free""" (you lease, your electricity covers the cost of lease, no money for extra generated) because it's so cheap now.
But we need, as you said, a baseload. Nobody is really discussing how to create this, they're just saying we should magically invent an incredibly dense battery (more energy-dense than hydrocarbons, ideally, or let's say within 50% as useful) using technologies nobody can even fathom. Meanwhile, we're seeing breakthroughs in fusion tech, miles ahead of the usefulness of fission, which is miles ahead of anything else we have right now.
I just don't understand the aversion to a clean, renewable power source.
Some stats. Solar install 2024 593GW, nuclear install per year about 8GW.
Solar growing about 30% a year, nukes about 0%.
Storage is coming along too.
(some source stuff https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601621)
If you're not serious about nuclear, you're not serious about climate change.
More logically, if you're serious about climate change you're not serious about nuclear.
This Amazon investment aims to only have 5GW of nuclear on the grid 15 years from now. That's not a solution to climate change, it's not even a rounding error. It rises to a rounding error on the suddenly discovered need for new energy for AI, but it's a decade late for that. In 15 years, the grid will be completely decarbonized by solar and batteries and wind, existing nuclear/hydro, and probably some new tech like enhanced geothermal. This is 2039 energy environment that nuclear will enter into, and it will have to compete with 15 more years of prices falling on batteries and renewables. SMRs can't compete on price with today's price for new large nuclear, todays new large nuclear can't compete on price with today's solar/wind/batteries, and today's solar/wind/batteries sure as hell won't compete with 15 years of prices falling. SMRs like this have no hope to be a competitive product.
Nuclear has overpromised and underdelivered for 60 years. We should have kept existing plants running. If our anscestors had lit money on fire to produce a bunch of reactors 40 years ago, we'd be in a much better position.
But we'd also be in a much better position had they not pooh-poohed solar and made bigger investments sooner, driving forward solar revolution by 15-30 years from where it is now.
We'd have been in a much better position if there had been a massive investment in battery technology 15-30 years earlier, making EVs feasible sooner, and revolutionizing the grid with storage sooner.
Solar and batteries will be the foundation of the future, because they are technology that gets cheaper the more we invest in them. Nuclear might be around in 50 years, maybe not, but it won't be any cheaper or more affordable. It's a technology that barely moves the more we spend on it, and can sometimes be economically efficient in the best of cases. But the average case for building nuclear is big price overruns, and it's not uncommon for utilities to be brought to the point of bankruptcy.
We have better technology available, today, to be deployed. Let's do it. Nuclear is a pipe dream from people that haven't run the numbers, or have run the numbers they have gotten them drastically wrong. The entire history of nuclear energy in this country is of people not running the numbers or running the numbers and getting them drastically wrong.
Source?
Germany is a tragic real-world example.
Take a look at what Germany did to itself. Compare France.
The anti-nuclear wind/solar proponents are dangerously wrong.
Germany has been reducing its carbon emissions by increasing the ratio of renewable energy, year after year despite the exit from nuclear power.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Isn't that the goal? If they can do that without nuclear power - great.
Despite France's >50% nuclear power they have a much higher ratio of "dirty" power compared to Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France
Germany's energy industry emits 6 times as much greenhouse gases per MWh of electricity generated than France: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2024/09/08/france-....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
Germany's energy is 80% fossil fuels. France's is 50%. I'm not sure how you reached the conclusion that Germany's energy mix is less "dirty" than Frances.
> Germany's energy is 80% fossil fuels.
Where did you get that number from?
https://www.iea.org/countries/germany
> Renewables 39.4% share of power generation, 2022
vs. France's 26.1%.
Edit: I guess you might be talking about consumption whereas I'm talking about production.
Nuclear power is less "dirty" than most forms of renewables: https://world-nuclear.org/images/articles/0a2091ce-35b3-4ada...
Again, Germany emits 6 times as much C02 for every MWh of electricity generated as France.
It's not an issue of production vs. consumption. You're counting nuclear power, which is heavily utilized by France, as a "dirty" energy source despite the fact that it's cleaner than most renewables.
I read that it turned from being large exporter of energy to be large importer.
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That Germany's early retirement of its fleet was a bad idea does not mean that building more is a good idea.
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If you're not serious about energy consumption, you're also not serious about climate change. Unfortunately consumer and business technology wants to go the other way.
Climate change fact #1: CO2 (and to some extent other GHG) is the cause of climate change.
Climate change fact #2: energy consumption is not a cause of climate change, except for when it causes CO2 emission.
Climate change fact #3: reduced CO2 emission will not stop climate change.
Reducing energy usage is a losing climate strategy in three ways 1) it doesn't solve the problem, cutting emissions 50% does jack shit, we need to get to 0% emissions and then negative emissions. 2) It's politically ineffective because only some people and countries will actually reduce emissions. 3) It's political suicide because it validates false anti-climate change propaganda. 4) It's highly socially regressive because these dictates demand that the burden be placed mostly on developing countries.
Reason #1 is enough to disqualify the "reduce energy usage" as a climate strategy, but really there's zero way to look at it and think that there's any validity. Please find better sources and stop spreading this counterproductive idea.
Getting rid of CO2 from the atmosphere will take a lot of power. Energy conservation is not the way to go.
I just wish this brings more research into Thorium based reactors, as they seem to be the future of sustainable nuclear power. Maybe a SMR powered by Thorium in the future? Who knows.
Thorium based seems to be a conventional nuclear reactor with added complications. Getting conventional made is hard enough.
There's a good article on the technical problems here https://thebulletin.org/2022/06/molten-salt-reactors-were-tr... One quote from that:
>During its operational lifetime, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was shut down 225 times. Of these 225 interruptions, only 58 were planned. The remaining interruptions were due to various technical problems, including: “chronic plugging” of the pipes...
>...These problems remain relevant. Even today, no material can perform satisfactorily in the high-radiation, high-temperature, and corrosive environment inside a molten salt reactor.
I'm not sure anyone has made one that powered anything or produced electricity. The MSRE just intermittently heated the air when it was working.
Apparently although it only ran from 1965 to 1969 and produced a peak of 8MW, it's still costing about $10m per year to manage the waste produced. In the 1990s they found uranium in the waste had migrated leading to the possibility of an accidental criticality.
Still the Chinese supposed to be running an experimental one similar to the MSRE in the Gobi desert next year. I'm not holding my breath for commercial operation though.
Doesn't even neccessarily need to be Thorium-232, we also have a lot uf Uranium-238 that isn't really used efficiently.
Thermal/Fast Breeders are needed to use those fuel sources. Only Russia commercialiced them, because western nations stopped funding r&d (EBR2 in the US and Superphênix in France)
The basic economics of power generation do not agree with your contention.
The reality is that this is all nuclear can rest its hopes on. Industry specific applications, because for general electricity generation it is hopelessly non-competitive.
Unfortunately, this isnt to sustain exiwting enetgy, its to add powER TO AI GIGO.
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I’ve been saying for years that new nuclear plant development will be evidence of an AGI fufilling its physiological hierarchy of needs. I see Starship as another requirement.
How are any of these things connected?
I just wanted to take the opportunity to say something positive about these companies, since it's so rare that I find anything positive to say.
I applaud these efforts. The amount of energy that's going to be burned by these things is crazy. Whether or not that energy use is wasted is an open question.
I think it's a positive thing if the companies making these bets don't offload the costs of those bets onto public utilities, and also that they're looking at energy sources that have less of an adverse environmental impact than things like coal.
Kudos, guys.
> since it's so rare that I find anything positive to say
Wonder why that is?
> I think it's a positive thing if the companies making these bets don't offload the costs of those bets onto public utilities
This is written as if with concern for public utilities which makes me wonder: Do you think they’ll stop using public utilities? Do public utilities want that? How long until these companies try to outright replace public utilities?
Still want that public money.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/03/nuclear-m...
> Whether or not that energy use is wasted is an open question.
Slop is a waste for us, but a boon in: data harvesting, surveillance, labor and union costs; for them.
> also that they're looking at energy sources that have less of an adverse environmental impact than things like coal.
You think these companies made this decision with altruistic concern for the environment?!
M$FT makes recall a required dependency in explorer.exe -> “I'm so glad I can finally compliment these guys for caring about the environment.”
Make it make sense.
You seem to think that I'm praising these companies. I'm certainly not. I think they're a net negative on society.
That said, it's as important to acknowledge when they do something positive, even a little bit, as it is to call them out when they do bad things. More important, even, since if all a person can do is condemn then that person becomes less effective in terms of encouraging change. You want both carrot and stick.
> You think these companies made this decision with altruistic concern for the environment?!
Of course not. Nothing any of these companies do is altruistic. It's all about the Benjamins, baby.
> Do you think they’ll stop using public utilities?
They likely will stop using electric utilities. It's just simpler this way, more predictable.
> Do public utilities want that?
Maybe they do; a huge consumer usually negotiates special rates, and may require more costly infrastructure work because the capacity is not sufficient for them.
> made this decision with altruistic concern for the environment?!
No, more likely with an egotistic concern for the environment. Billionaires don't have a spare copy of Earth (Mars is even worse), and if you've got billions and can actually move the needle of the climate change to keep Earth in a better shape for you and your children, won't you?
It feels like we're in a golden age of hard tech:
* A major advance in spaceflight [0]
* a ton of private investment in nuclear power [1]
* AI models performing at PhD-level on some tasks [2]
I know it can feel low-status to admire these accomplishments -- it feels like we're aligning with/submitting to the people behind them -- but I perceive technological growth to be accelerating across a bunch of fields that matter to me.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41827362
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858961
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03169-9
I admit, this is very impressive: "AI models performing at PhD-level on some tasks" but it remains to be seen as to whether all this intelligence actually leads to greater productivity and whether that "productivity" even translates into higher earnings in a meaningful way.
the way I see it, virtual goods (games, digital goods, etc) will continue to be ever more free and lower cost, while nothing much changes in the real world.
Did you notice how closed captions generated from videos became really good? Did you notice that machine translation became usable for everyday tasks? Did you notice that you can direct your phone at an inscription in a language unknown to you, and get a translation put at the same spot on the picture, and an explanation of it read aloud to you? Does it make your very real life easier?
All this stuff used to be high-end research with unstable and hardly usable results like 10 years ago.
> Did you notice how closed captions generated from videos became really good?
I've noticed the exact opposite over the last year or so. They've become riddled with errors of the sort that actively mislead people about what was actually said.
> Does it make your very real life easier?
So far, generative AI has not made my very real life any easier. It has made it more uncertain, though, and has made it harder to trust anything I am not seeing/hearing in person.
It's good but for some languages, like Japanese, it can be pretty freaking wacky.
I agree with 1 and 2, but 0 is questionable. Cheaper space flight is a great incremental improvement though.
Are we just going to ignore the negative externalities of AI? From my perspective, the main product of AI is bots spamming social media with misinformation - largely with a goal of swaying elections.
I'm not saying that AI is inherently evil and has no potential, but just ignoring the cost is misleading. It's like saying oil is wonderful and pretending global warming isn't a thing.
The tech may be "hard" but that doesn't mean it's a net positive for society, which to me is what really matters. Of course this is all subjective and nobody can predict the future, but I just find this blind optimism to be self-destructive.
What is the actual significance of the booster catch is ? Re-usability is obviously part of it, but do we really think that thing will just be refueled and sent straight back off in the near future?
It seems to be an incredible feat of engineering, no doubts there, but how significant are the practical implications?
I found this from Musk, which is his usual over the top optimistic self:
In an interview to YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut, Musk said that his vision is that Mechazilla will one day be able to turn around and set a rocket back on the launchpad, perhaps as little as 30 minutes after touchdown.
The dimensions quote is:
and that's precision engineering - multiple pressurised chambers, flared and clean flowing pipes for fluid routing, nozzles, etc.These things are no easy build, they take time, high skill levels, resources, etc.
30 minutes turn around on reuse is BS for now, they'll take weeks of fine toothed retesting and examination to clear them for reuse - but that'll still be a considerable saving of time, money, and resources compared to a complete new build from scratch.
Yeah I see, but also all of that shifting of weight, heat, acceleration and deceleration must be pretty stressful on that structure and on the materials, I feel like it would be best to wait and see what these things look like after one or two uses before claiming the wins.
I dare say that's why they'll take weeks of fine toothed retesting and examination to clear them for reuse and they'll bed a few in before setting long term procedures in stone.
What's your Engineering background? Civil, Mechanical? Ever worked on any of those 380+ metre tall North Sea Oil and Gas platforms?
I have never worked on a 380+ tall North Sea Oil platform :)
I work in Software but I'm a massive tinkerer and have done a lot of work wit my hands. I'm not a structural or mechanical engineer. Most of my knowledge is just things I've picked up doing renovations, fixing my car etc.
>do we really think that thing will just be refueled and sent straight back off in the near future?
The Falcon 9s have been landed, checked out, refueled and flown again for a while now. The record is currently 23 flights from a single booster. I don't see how this is fundamentally different - reusing the booster that is. The upper stage is a different matter.
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why do you like spaceflight? i don't see that as addressing any major human needs
Even if you don't enjoy the science/exploration angle, asteroid mining should be incredibly good for human needs.
Any metal you can think of exists in phenomenal abundance there, and should be able to be exploited at minimal cost in the long run. Having huge supplies of cheap platinum, gold, nickel, cobalt etc would be extremely good for humanity. It also means we don't need to have dirty and ugly mines on earth.
There is also the military angle. If the west lets China control orbit, we're in big trouble.
Asteroid mining is wildly uneconomical. There is no material to be found in large quantities on any asteroid in the solar system whose value justifies the development and installation costs of the infrastructure needed to get that material back to Earth.
If you're building a megastructure in space, that's a different story. But please understand that mining gold or platinum from asteroids, at (literally) astronomical cost, will not do anything to advance the state of life on Earth except, at best, reduce the price of gold and platinum, which are not societal bottlenecks.
Perhaps. But I'd be more convinced if you gave some arguments.
This article tells a very different story: https://www.cnet.com/science/rare-asteroids-near-earth-may-b...
Platinum has a lot of industrial uses today at $1000/oz: https://market-news-insights-jpx.com/ose/commodities/article...
At $10/oz it could be used for vastly more purposes.
And if China let's west control the orbit, China is in big trouble.
It is 100% guaranteed that, at some point in the (geologically) near future, humanity will need to leave Earth permanently, or move the planet or something to that effect if we really want to.
We should be beyond ready by the time that comes. It's not an immediate or daily human need, but it IS a human need.
Bold claim. Why?
The sun is heating up, and Earth is going to become too hot. I’m not sure on the timeline; might be a few hundred million years. Might be more. It depends on how the atmosphere reacts.
On that timescale we could use a gravitational tractor to fix it, if we insist keeping the planet around.
ok, so we have a loooottt of time to do that. for now, i think humanity already has waaaayyyy tooo many problems to deal with before we need to worry about that.
Correct, hence the "(geological) time" bit ;)
A lot of time, but it is irrefutably a requirement, and as we research it, we'll learn lots of things to use here on Earth, too.
There's some stuff here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
250 million years is an estimate for when the formation of a new supercontinent results in sufficient volcanic activity to drastically increase CO2 in the atmosphere and probably kill off all large mammals. 500 million is when C3 photosynthesis stops being possible and virtually all plants are gone, which would collapse all terrestrial ecosystems and leave behind very little animal life, probably none. There seems to be a very high likelihood of extinction level asteroid strikes happening well before either of these.
But we're talking here about a span of time that is a thousand times longer than anatomically modern humans have existed up to this point. Given how far we've come since then, I don't know how you can possibly speculate what kinds of capabilities we might have by then to synthesize breathable air and food from raw disintegrated atoms of anything. If you look billions of years into the future, then it's going to get hot enough to sterilize the planet of any life whatsoever, which we probably can't overcome. If we can terraform other planets, we can terraform Earth itself, which would seemingly overcome any other challenge short of triple the heat that is eventually coming.
It seems maybe a bit premature to think this is something currently living humans should worry about figuring out how to escape from.
We might also note that, given the compartively short time it took humans to come about after the K-Pg event, it's probably reasonable to expect there is more than enough time before these "possibly all life killer" type far future things happen for some other kind of intelligent life that develops civilization and technology to replace humans if we go extinct by some means other than the planet being totally destroyed.
Exploring is a major human need, as history has shown repeatedly.
OP never said they liked spaceflight. They also didn't say anything about addressing human needs. They just said "hard tech golden age". So I think you are looking for a fight that isn't there.
But anyway; let's take it at the best case curiosity. I do like spaceflight. Is it a problem to you what people like? Does everything you like specifically address human needs? I find this confusing.
Regardless, all life on Earth is going to die. I see it as a "major human need" to avoid death of our civilization and all other life we know of in the whole universe, if it becomes possible. And it does seem more possible now - because of the advances SpaceX has made with hard rocket tech in the last few years, specifically.
Well I did say that the field 'mattered' to me :)
I would say that space flight is cool as a potential experience -- I hope that it's safe and cheap enough one day that I can go -- and I also think that life is good [0], so if we can spread life to more planets, that's good.
[0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/this-is-the-dream-timehtml
That's what dinosaurs thought and then the asteroid hit the Earth.
And, personally, I want a space telescope a thousand times bigger than James Webb. That's my biggest need after food, shelter, health and human connection.
> That's what dinosaurs thought and then the asteroid hit the Earth.
An asteroid-ravaged Earth is still more habitable than any planet in the solar system.
I'd prefer we avoid the whole asteroid-ravaging thing.
a) It's not a major advance in spaceflight. It's a notable step but the last major advance was when Nasa enabled the private/public partnership and started to allow companies like SpaceX to exist in the first place.
b) There is not a ton of private investment in nuclear power. It is a handful of LOI that history has shown usually doesn't translate to much.
c) AI models do not perform at PhD level. They can solve some PhD level tasks but as Apple showed in their research the minute you swap out variables or add irrelevant information they fall apart. So clearly not evidence of intelligence.
Not to be negative on anything because I do think we are in an incredible era but these aren't what I would consider the best examples.
Where did Apple prove that? Apologies for living under a rock seemingly...
HN links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41842194
I'm not sure they proved it but they put out a paper arguing that.
Related:
Google commits to buying power generated by nuclear-energy startup Kairos Power
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41840769
Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443
This is a much more significant announcement. The above two deals are not significant commitments from Google & Amazon because there is no downside. If the plan is successful Google & Amazon get cheap green power. If it falls through they're not out anything but still benefit from the publicity for trying.
This announcement has downside. If it fails, Amazon's investment goes to zero. Which means they likely did significant due diligence. This is a real commitment.
you probably wanted to write Google&MSoft
Also, Oracle claims to have a location, "building permits" and is working on a design for a nuclear powered data center.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514
That makes four big tech companies on board with nuclear in 30 days.
There's a nice synergy between data center operations and nuclear power. Similar requirements for high reliability, complex systems, redundancy, even things like electrical grids and cooling, and industrial HVAC are crossover points
In other words, a lot of engineers could work quite happily in both fields.
Also consistent demand. Nuclear doesn’t ramp up or down well and neither do datacenters.
AI training demand should in theory be extremely elastic. Scale up when and where power is cheap, scale down when and where it is expensive. Training larger models takes a long time, and storing or moving the current training checkpoint is not that expensive.
Inference is somewhat elastic - people want relatively low latency - they might be able to tolerate an extra round-trip around the world, but probably not waiting until a time when there is more total capacity.
However, the big impediment to using cheap and green power is the capital cost of the training hardware; that can't be moved around in a hurry, so its capacity goes unused when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Much of the cost of the high-end data centre oriented GPU hardware is likely not incremental cost for nvidia - it is recovering fixed costs, or profit. In addition, people buying the hardware fear it will depreciate, so they have a limited time frame to use it.
So it is fair to say that it is nvidia's pricing strategy that is a significant driver of Google, Microsoft and Amazon investing in nuclear.
The cost of the GPUs massively dwarfs the cost of the electricity. GPUs have a short lifetime of a few years before the next generation makes them mostly obsolete.
Therefore it makes sense to use even very expensive electricity to run GPUs. Thus Musk insanely running generators to keep his new DC running. A little money can solve really really bad planning. And these SMRs, if ever built, will be very expensive electricity, a long long time from today.
Investing in nuclear has nothing to do with satisfying current AI power needs. This announcement aims to have 5GW running in 15 years. A small amount of energy too far away.
When has any tech company planned for energy 15 years away? Or any other specific R&D need 15 years away? Never.
These announcements are about vibes and politics. I hope it means that the nuclear industry, for once in its history, actually delivers on its promises and doesn't fail. But the history of nuclear is to fail fail fail at every opportunity, so I'm not optimistic.
Also, note the investment size, $500M. Basically nothing. That would buy a DC a bunch of power right now, in the form of solar and the batteries to convert the solar to constant output. Building the 5GW of SMR nuclear is going to cost a minimum of $50B, probably $100B or $150B. It's not going to be competitive with today's prices on solar and batteries. The nuclear purchase is all virtue signalling, not based in actual needs or solutions.
I would have thought that X-Energys HTR would be better suited for high-temperature process heat applications than electricity production for DCs
This is great news. The Xe-100 reactor design is not that different from the Kairos Hermes reactor that was yesterday in the news [1]. They both use TRISO pebbles, they are both slow (or thermal) reactors, and they are both SMR's that produce very nearly the same output (80 MW for Xe-100, 75 MW for Hermes). The only difference is the coolant: it is helium for this reactor, and FLiBe molten salt (a mix of lithium and beryllium fluorides). Helium is a gas, so it's much less dense than a molten salt, which is a liquid. Surprisingly, helium has a very high specific heat (5.2 J/gK), higher even than the specific heat of water (4.2 J/gK). FLiBe has about 2.4 J/gK specific heat. Helium can travel through the core at a much higher speed, so overall, the disadvantage of being a gas is not that great. The Hermes reactor is projected to have about twice the power density of the Xe-100 reactor.
There are some great things about Helium though. One is that Helium-4 (which represents 99.9998%) is the only isotope in the universe that has exactly zero neutron absorption cross-section. All other coolants absorb some of the neutrons in a reactor, but helium doesn't. It is also an inert gas, so it does not pose the various corrosion problems posed by other coolants and moderators (like water for NuScale, FLiBe for Kairos, sodium for Natrium, lead for Westinghouse).
China did already put in production two reactors of the same type as Xe-100, the HTR-PMs. They appear to be working just fine.
Good luck to X-Energy.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41840769
We now have the three tech giants moving in on nuclear. I think we will have a race to see which SMR provider comes online first even though Nuscale canceled its pilot plant, sending shockwaves through the industry last year, there's a clear demand now. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft signs with an SMR provider in the coming weeks because the other players have. I would have said it would be Nuscale, but Sam Altman might move them to Oklo.
Wait... But everyone says wind+solar+batteries are so much cheaper than nuclear. Why aren't big corpos pouring money in these instead to get even more output?
> everyone says wind+solar+batteries are so much cheaper than nuclear. Why aren't big corpos pouring money in these instead to get even more output?
Same reason it makes sense to build as much wind and solar with batteries plus nukes as possible: scale. (And false dichotomy: they’re also investing massively in wind, solar and batteries.)
We didn’t produce enough batteries (or solar panels or wind turbines, for that matter) fast enough before . For solar and wind, moreover, approval difficult scales with land area. You’d think nukes would be harder, but it’s apparently easier to get a state to let you YOLO on land rights when it’s on a small footprint.
Solar and wind (with batteries) is still cheaper. Gas is politically problematic for Big Tech, so they go with nuclear. The voting public in America and Europe, on the other hand, chose gas.
but considering acceleration of scaling solar/wind/battery production & it's fast deployment, they may as well wait 5-8 years and build the stuff then. Unless they need firm power that solar+wind+battery can't provide enough unless you have huge overcapacity of all of them
> considering acceleration of scaling solar/wind/battery production & it's fast deployment, they may as well wait 5-8 years and build the stuff then
Do you have sources for your time scale?
The acceleration is massive and from a massively tiny baseline. AI is predicted to add 0.8% energy growth a year to American power use [1]; lots of that is going into gas.
> unless you have huge overcapacity of all of them
There is the political reality that what’s been built has voting employees and tangibility in a way what is to be built does not. That’s the danger in our deployment of gas turbines. If we hit an energy surplus, the first to get cut will be things not yet built, even if those are renewables. (Think: phase out of subsidies, maybe even grid charges.) Some enlightened jurisdictions will continue shutting down gas turbines to replace them with solar, maybe even nukes, but most won’t.
[1] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...
> AI is predicted to add 0.8% energy growth a year to American power use [1]; lots of that is going into gas.
And given past performance, the nuclear projects being proposed here are projected to add 0% energy capacity to the grid within the next 20 years.
actually vogtle showed that unit 4 was completed faster and cheaper than unit 3. Add to that no experienced ppl for building it, foak build, unfinished design, covid. Imo new projects of ap1000 could be done significantly cheaper and faster
There are. There's about one announcement a month for those deals. For instance Google inked deals with at least Energix, New Green Power and Black Rock in the last quarter.
So the question then is: why do the nuclear deals make Hacker News and the solar deals don't?
yes, but why not pour even more $ in those then since if it's cheaper = you get more kw for the same $?
"Everybody" doesn't say solar, wind, or batteries is cheaper than nuclear. The question of what is "cheaper" at any given time isn't really relevant at this scale -- its cheap.
Price and availability of electricity and power is more or less global, however datacenter customers are in the situation where they need to power a city with electricity in a location where there is neither an existing city nor its generation capactiy.
> why not pour even more $ in those then since if it's cheaper = you get more kw for the same $?
Law of diminishing marginal returns: you don’t. You either need to pay a premium for expedited delivery or eat the time value of delays.
Spreading your bets is considered sensible.
Baseload. Nuclear runs forever and you can put a datacenter right beside it to avoid grid complexities.
An added value is that in off-hours nuclear can be used to produce hydrogen for carbon free fuel.
Do data centers really have off-hours?
I was under the impression that whatever drop in consumer usage exists overnight is made up for with ML training, video transcoding, etc. That there's never any shortage of tasks to run.
these do have downtimes for maintenance when load is shifted to others
Not arguing against you, but - as can wind and solar at times of excess generation.
Absolutely. However, an often made detraction of nuclear is that the baseload is superfluous during off hours, so hydrogen generation is worth mentioning.
Nuclear only runs about 95% of the time. You still need to deal with grid complexities.
1.3 nines of reliability? Awesome.
Do you have a source for that, how wide is the variation for different reactor types and operators, does it apply to individual reactors or whole sites when there are several reactors on one site?
The PRIS database has country averaged data for energy availability factor, capacity factor etc.
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/ThreeYrsEnergyAva...
I have to say: That looks as if they all value safety over uptime.
Thanks.
Not if you are a high-demand single point consumer like a data center. Google doesn't want to buy thousands of acres for solar panels, nor the hassles of installing massive batteries next to a new data center. A small nuclear reactor would be a much easier fit. A steady user also wants a steady power supply. Nuclear is very steady.
Interesting to call building a "small nuclear reactor" an easier fit than simply putting up a bunch of containers with batteries, hooking them up and calling it day.
I know what I would bet on.
So if you build a decent sized data center to consume 160 MWh you can get 2 SMRs and call it a day.
Or you can buy 480 Tesla MegaPacks (about 6 acres) and 1600 acres (it's roughly 1 MW per 5 acres) of solar panels to run the DC and charge the batteries during the day. Sure some can go on the building, but you'd still need way more acreage than that can provide.
I know what I would bet on too.
Revealed preference
Footprint? Maybe.
imo - need for firm power
For the same reason people support fluoridation of drinking water: they "trust the science" without even looking at it.
fluoride is good stuff in limited quantity, like many other things.
drinking fluoride in small quantities doesn't have a ton of evidence of benefit. Brushing your teeth with fluoride does.
They at least partly figured out fluoride for brushing teeth and in drinking water was a net positive based on teeth health and natural fluoride levels in wells around the world. CDC estimates it reduces cavities by 25%.
Is Uranium relatively easy to find to power these reactors, or is the next wave of startups going to be space/deep ocean mining operations to find it?
> Is Uranium relatively easy to find to power these reactors […]
Yes. Uranium is (currently?) cheap and plentiful, to the point that nuclear 'waste' fuel reprocessing isn't generally economically worth it: it's cheaper to store in and buy new fuel.
If the price of uranium does ever spike or becomes harder to get to, then reprocessing can become an option.
We have about 90 years of 'cheap' uranium, much more at increased price(which isn't that important for npp scale). If you factor in that at certain point reprocessing like Orano will be more economically profitable - we'll get in fact much more time to transition to fast/thorium reactors
See discussion of the uranium mining situation here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41661768
which includes a risky method of profiting from the adoption of nuclear power.
More detail here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41746562
Currently its (uranium-235) quite easy to find because the demand isn't really that high, but when the demand for nuclear power gets higher I'm sure we will see more seawater extraction / & breeders that use the much more plentiful uranium-238 or thorium-232
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
Thorium has been on the horizon forever. A bit like we'll have fusion in 30 years. No government wants to solely invest in it, because it can't really be weaponised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
No problem weaponizing Thorium. The US even tested bombs with material from the thorium fuel chain.
Quite easily chemically separated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233
Nobody invests "solely" in it, because Uranium is plenty cheap and plenty plentiful, and the Uranium infrastructure is in place.
but you don't need reactors for weapons, you may as well build those without them, you just need an enrichment facility
Proven by all the uranium 235 I've produced in Factorio before ever building a nuclear reactor.
China has an MSR online. Yes, it probably isn't using thorium yet, but a molten salt reactor is what's necessary in order to get to the thorium fuel cycle economically
That was a great deal to dismentel AREVA in France to kick them from the edge of the Nuclear business and bring power back to America \o/
I'd rather wait for fusion. Fission is dirty and creates more radioactive waste than we know how to deal with. A tsunami hitting a fusion plant would not do much except knock it out of commission. Fission on the other hand ....well, we've seen that already. We've seen many times how messy fission is.
The comment about nuclear waste could not be further from the truth. All of the radioactive waste from nuclear electricity generation in the US fits in a volume equivalent to a football field stacked 10 meters high: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
The meltdown at Fukushima amounted to a very small proportion of the total damage incurred by the tsunami. No deaths due to radiation besides a couple plant workers are expected. The exclusion zone was cleaned up and reopened after about a decade. The learnings from this event should be that nuclear isn't actually all that risky, relative to how much carbon-free energy it generates.
Fusion will not be economical in our lifetimes. Compared to fission, you've replaced an expensive and dangerous fuel with a cheap and safe fuel, and replaced an expensive containment vessel with the most complex machine ever engineered by mankind, that also needs to be disposable because of the absurd energies contained within.
We already have a perfectly good fusion reactor. It's about 1 AU away, and it's beaming more power to us than any Kardashev Type I civilization could ever use (and small-scale fusion will be useless to any Type II civilization anyway).
As far as I understand it, no matter what kind of magic fusion device you come up with, it's going to be throwing off lots of fast neutrons which will be absorbed by the equipment generating the fusion reaction
So a fusion reaction will gradually irradiate the generator that is creating the reaction.
A molten salt reactor which consumes virtually all of its nuclear fuel as the closest approximation to your desire to have nuclear reactors without nuclear waste.
Edit: I recall that helium 3 fusion may actually be pretty neutron free. But you got to get your hands on a lot of helium 3
Fusion won’t happen in our lifetimes, we just don’t have the science and materials to do it, unless by some miracle AI actually proves its worth and figures out the containment problem, that also seems like a stretch.
Plenty of room in old coal mines to stash all the waste we could ever want.
And... there it is, 11 paragraphs in: "The first Xe-100 SMR is being developed at a Dow manufacturing site on the Texas Gulf Coast, with financial support from the US government." (Emphasis mine.)
From Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' memo (1953)[1]: "An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:
1. It is simple. 2. It is small. 3. It is cheap. 4. It is light. 5. It can be built very quickly. 6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”) 7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components. 8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now." (Emphasis mine, again.)
I've seen so many of these come (and go), I think they actually use Rickover's paper as a blueprint for their marketing pitch. Xe's site on the Xe-100[2], "A simple design & modularized components" where, "Our elegant and simple design maximizes the use of off-the-shelf components manufactured and shipped to site using existing road & rail." <shakes head>
I think safe and affordable nuclear power could do a great deal of good. But I've seen "small modular reactor real soon" (including pebble-beds) for thirty years, so I'm reflexively skeptical. I checked to see if I could find any evidence this one is beyond the paper reactor stage, but my search-fu was insufficient to find it, presuming it exists.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html (The whole paper is well worth reading, IMHO) [2] https://x-energy.com/reactors/xe-100
Make them pre-pay into a clear up fund. And carry massive insurance funds.
No privatizing the profits but then socializing the cost of the waste disposal (and leaks).
If the public has to pay for it as a EPA superfund site for cleanup, well then Amazon should then be sued out of existence for this.
I feel like this is only happening because financial projections were discovered to be impossible to meet with the current power generation and the trends for building new power were insufficient.
At today's live event (to accompany the news) Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced plans for 5 gigawatts of small modular nuclear reactors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hFBKIt_YfI
Let's begin with a quote from Yann LeCun (Vice-President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta):
https://x.com/ylecun/status/1837875035270263014No 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.
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.
Vogtle capacity factor is at 91%. That won't do for a datacenter.
This is exactly why highly energy intensive consumers are still connected to the grid, and NOT to individual power plants.
In a grid with increasing proportion of renewable energy (wind/solar), it becomes less and less appealing to build nuclear plants because the amount of time that those plants are not competitive increases (=> whenever wind/sun is available).
Even in China, basically the only country where nuclear power is being added at a non-negligible rate right now, nuclear output is being eclipsed by wind/solar already, and those are growing much faster, too: More wind power was added in China since 2019 than the total nuclear power right now (~400TWh/year), and absolutely no trend reversal is in sight.
nuclear increased approvals for npp - 10+/yr with 30+ in construction. Not comparable to renewable scaling, but China certainly sees potential in nuclear
Not sure how much it factors in, but solar is at a political disadvantage since Chinese solar panels are artificially expensive.
OK, let me know whenever you can build it.
Anyways you could double the power of the country with solar on just roofs and parking lots, so consider that before you go in on your land argument.
Solar and batteries will win
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 fuels.
Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns. It needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to a reliable renewable system.
> 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...
China finished 1 reactor in 2023 and are in track for a massive 3 finished reactors in 2024.
On the other hand they are building enough renewables to cover their entire electricity growth.
Even China has figured out that nuclear power is not economically viable.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...
Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.
> Investing in nuclear power today is an insane prospect
The Real World™ disagrees with your model. Time to update your model.
> In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.
No, nuclear power is being forced off markets by insane subsidy schemes that lead to grids being flooded with electricity at negative (or just zero) prices, due to those producers being isolated from price signals by both (a) subsidised/guaranteed producer prices and (b) priority.
We are paying "renewable" produces to produce electricity that nobody wants, then have to pay consumers to take it off our hands AND wreak havoc with our reliable producers. And then we congratulate ourselves on a job well done.
> Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns
Nuclear power plants are licensee to print money. Unless you forbid them to operate or flood the market with subsidizes competitors and give those competitors priority.
> Even China has figured out that nuclear power is not economically viable.
LOL. That's why they are accelerating their nuclear program.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-03-15/china-...
China’s Nuclear Energy Expansion Is Getting Even Faster
Beijing’s rapid deployment of atomic power rivals its growth in solar and wind, and the round-the-clock electricity is more beneficial for the grid.
A lot of ideologically-driven people here who are staunchly anti-nuclear no matter what. It's tiring.
> lot of ideologically-driven people here who are staunchly anti-nuclear no matter what. It's tiring.
As someone who is pro-nuclear, there are also a lot of pro-nuclear folks who are needlessly pessimistic on wind, solar and batteries.
Look at what Germany did to itself. How long will that damage take to repair?
The anti-nuclear wind/solar proponents are dangerously wrong.
We need to clearly explain why wind and solar are not enough, and why nuclear is complementary. We need to explain it so everyone can understand it.
We must not allow what happened in Germany to happen elsewhere.
I have the same feeling but opposite. Nuclear energy has never been profitable anywhere in the world to date, has entirely disproportionate downsides that have manifested repeatedly despite the most rigorous safety procedures found anywhere.
The evidence for this is overwhelming and undeniable, yet some people here still seem to believe that nuclear is ‘cheap and safe’.
I truly don’t understand how it’s possible for rational humans to believe that.
> I have the same feeling but opposite.
The problem is that this is just a feeling. The bigger problem is that this feeling is still extremely widespread, completely contrary to the facts. For example...
> Nuclear energy has never been profitable anywhere in the world to date
This is completely false. Nuclear energy is profitable pretty much everywhere it is used. Almost obscenely profitable, if you are allowed to run the plants.
I ran the numbers for Hinkley Point C. At the rate they negotiated (14,8 Cents/kWh...or was it pence?) the profits are almost obscene.
A modern EPR will generate 1040 TWh of electricity over its lifetime, assuming 80 years operation and 90% capacity factor. Assuming the EDF-negotiated price is 14,8 cents, that's a cool € 150 billion worth of electricity. But that's just one reactor, whereas HPC is two. So € 300 billion. Puts even the completely ridiculous cost overruns for those two reactors into perspective, doesn't it?
China built their two EPRs for a total of $7.5 billion, and with the EPR2, EDF is pretty certain to get construction times and costs.
Here's an explainer of the economics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
The annual reports for one of the Swiss plants are online. They produce electricity for 3-5 cents. Profitably. In Switzerland. And they have expenses like...oh...a new administrative building in one year. Switzerland is not cheap.
> has entirely disproportionate downsides
What are those "entirely disproportionate downsides", in your opinion? If you subtract the effects of radiophobia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
> The evidence for this is overwhelming and undeniable,
Yes, the evidence for nuclear is overwhelming und undeniable, yet some people go right ahead and deny it.
> I truly don’t understand how it’s possible for rational humans to believe that.
Agreed. I truly don't understand how it’s possible for rational humans to believe that nuclear is unsafe and uneconomic.
>This is completely false. Nuclear energy is profitable pretty much everywhere it is used.
Not if you consider the full costs. Every official source you find only shows the costs that the operators have to pay, but the operators never pay the full cost. No nuclear power plant that I have found documentation for anywhere is operated without immense national subsidies.
You mention Hinkley point and say that they will generate 150 billion euros in income over 80 years. Let's assume that's about right and look further.
It is currently estimated to cost over 40 billion to build. Now we're at 110 billion. The storage facility will likely be Sellafield, which has a yearly budget of around 2.5 billion per year, times 80 years is 200 billion. Now we're at negative 90 billion.
Negative 90 billion already while the plants are actually operational. But the waste has to be managed for longer than that. For centuries after the plants have been closed, in fact. So we're at negative what, 300, 400 billion over the lifetime of costs.
This is also without considering any cost of operations. We assume here that 1000 people operating the plant work for free, never need any equipment, the plant never need maintenance, and the calculation still has a debt of several hundred billion.
Now you might say wait, that makes no sense, then EDF (the operator) would be unprofitable and go bankrupt!
Yes, and they did, a few years ago.
France covered the bill of over 50 billion euros in debt and also the upcoming 20 or so more billions in repair and maintenance. EDF was unprofitable even when they neglected required repairs and maintenance.
Again, nuclear is not profitable. Now, since the costs are mostly covered by governments and future generations, short-sighted investors and quarterly earnings-focused companies will of course go along with the pretense that it is.
Amazon is buying the subsidized unrealistic purchase price because that's what's going to be relevant to them. When the operator goes bankrupt because the costs turn out to be way more than they calculated with, it's not Amazon's problem. It's the US taxpayer's problem.
>> Nuclear energy is profitable pretty much everywhere it is used
> Not if you consider the full costs.
Yes, in fact it is one of the few (maybe only?) electricity source that accounts for full costs. Fossil fuels deposit their waste in the atmosphere, renewables are heavily subsidized and their environmental damage generally isn't included either.
> No nuclear power plant that I have found documentation for anywhere is operated without immense national subsidies.
Citation needed.
> You mention Hinkley point and say that they will generate 150 billion euros in income over 80 years.
Incorrect. That is one reactor of HPC. Both together would be € 300 billion if they continue to get the agreed price, which I don't think they will.
> The storage facility will likely be Sellafield, which has a yearly budget of around 2.5 billion per year, times 80 years is 200 billion
Not only do you only take the output of just one reactor when there are two, you require that one reactor to finance all of Sellafield, a facility that serves the entire country.
The UK has more than one reactor.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a74eb21e5274...
> Yes, and [EDF] did [go bankrupt], a few years ago.
No they did not. The French state, which never owned less than 84% of EDF, bough the remaining 16% stake to simplify the planned nuclear expansion.
> EDF was unprofitable even when they neglected required repairs and maintenance.
The opposite was true. EDF was and continues to be immensely profitable over the last few decades, despite being milked dry by the state, for example having to suffer such idiocies as having to sell 25% of their electricity at 4 cents/kWh to competitors and then often having to buy it back at market rates (ARENH). In 2022 those market rates were up to € 1/kWh, so they had to buy back their own electricity at 25x the price that they were required to sell it for. And the French government increased the ARENH quotas in that year.
These kinds of insane accounting shenanigans, all on the back of reliable and highly profitable nuclear plants, were the primary reason that EDF had a € 10 billion loss in 2022, their first in over a decade, IIRC.
> Again, nuclear is not profitable.
Only if you can't add up the numbers. See above.
And see, again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY
>> Yes, and [EDF] did [go bankrupt], a few years ago.
>No they did not.
Yes they did. That the government bailed them out instead of actually letting the bankruptcy take place makes no difference.
However you slice it, the bottom line is that the price of nuclear electricity in France has not included the 10 billion that France paid to take ownership, does not include the 50 billion of debt that they took over, and not the 20 billion of neglected maintenance.
This is a well documented 80 billion euros that should have been paid by EDF and should have been visible on the electricity bills of nuclear power customers in France. But it wasn't.
There are other examples too, like the german Asse II mine, rancho seco in the US, the government nuclear fund in sweden, all either entirely paid for by taxpayers or underfunded meaning they will eventually have to be paid for by taxpayers.
>LOL. Not only do you only take the output of just one reactor when there are two,
Yes I did, because none of the other 9 reactors pay for Sellafield either. If the rules change today so that new nuclear plants have to pay for their own waste, then HPC would have to pay for all of Sellafield.
Also, HPC will probably be the last remaining plant for at least 40 years (if it is operational for 80), so it will have to finance Sellafield alone then.
And what about the remaining centuries after that? Who pays then?
You may think that's unfair, but it is of course even more unfair that they don't pay for it and instead kick the costs to future taxpayers.
Right?
Who pays for Rancho Seco, who pays for Yucca Mountain, who pays for Asse II, who pays for AVR? Not the nuclear operators.
How can you even remotely believe that nuclear pays for it's full costs when there are so many examples like this?
> Yes they did [EDF "bankruptcy"]
This is not true.
> 10 billion that France paid to take ownership,
Wrong. Until 2004 France owned 100% of EDF. They sold just 16%. And then took it back. It was always a state-owned enterprise.
> 50 billion of debt that they took over
The state did not "take over" €50 billion in debt. That is still held by EDF (and if you count the debt of state-owned companies as government debt, then it was always government debt, because, see above, the French state always owned vastly more than 50% of EDF. 100% until 2004, to be precise).
And that debt is not operational debt. As I stated before, EDF has been extremely profitable, and paying both taxes as well as dividends to its owner(s), mostly the French state.
Taking on the loans is how they financed construction of the nuclear power plants, which were not financed by the tax payer, but on the capital markets. With the loans EDF took on, they built infrastructure, in this case nuclear power plants. And with the (quite significant) profits from operating those plants, they pay back the loans.
This is what is known as "investment". Most companies do it.
> If the rules change today so that new nuclear plants have to pay for their own waste, then HPC would have to pay for all of Sellafield.
if (false) → conclude anything you like.
And of course you still only counted the income of a single reactor at HPC. [Picard voice:] There. are. two. reactors.
> Also, HPC will probably be the last remaining plant
False. UK is planning a 4x expansion of nuclear capacity.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/biggest-expansion-of-nucl...
They have started digging at Sizewell C.
https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/24593672.sizewell-c-construction...
> who pays for Yucca Mountain
"Lacking an operating repository, the federal government initially paid utility companies somewhere between $300 and $500 million per year in compensation for failing to comply with the contract it signed to take the spent nuclear fuel by 1998"
It looks like the utilities paid the federal government for the repository, but are not getting the services they paid for.
Ahh yes, they did:
"The companies held up their end, feeding about $750 million into the Nuclear Waste Fund each year. But the department did not manage to set up any facility to receive the waste, forcing energy companies to store it themselves on-site."
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/05/how-the-department-of-energy...
Same in Germany: the utilities paid into the fund for the disposal, but the politicians blocked it.
Speaking of politicians blocking and Yucca Mountain:
"The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
> Yes they did [EDF "bankruptcy"] >This is not true.
Yes it is. It was reported in just about every language on earth, look at any newspaper you wish. Here's one. https://www.neimagazine.com/news/france-to-renationalise-edf...
The reasons given for the renationalization were "EDF's problems are above all under-capitalisation and under-remuneration."
Which means "they are not profitable".
>Until 2004 France owned 100% of EDF. They sold just 16%. And then took it back.
That changes nothing of what I said - they "Took it back" by paying 10 billion euros of taxpayer money.
>The state did not "take over" €50 billion in debt.
You might argue that the taxpayers were always on the hook for this debt. It was only documented and formalized when France bought the whole thing. Ltting EDF go bellyup and not paying was never on the table, that's the hook of nuclear power.
But that's semantics. 50 billion of debt will be paid by the taxpayers sooner or later.
You have failed to refute my claim of 80 billion in hidden costs and are instead arguing sidepoints and semantics. The unemotional thing to do would be to say "Ah yes, of course we need to account for at least those 80 billion, that's true".
I thought you said you were the rational one with evidence and the opponents were all emotional. 80 billion is not emotions, it's evidence, and you're trying hard to pretend it doesn't exist.
Why is that?
>It looks like the utilities paid the federal government for the repository, but are not getting the services they paid for.
But they didn't pay for it. They may have paid 750 million per year but that's not anywhere close to enough. Remember Sellafield?
This is another example of how the operators pretend to be profitable - they pay nowhere near enough to cover the costs, but they have negotiated a deal that makes that a taxpayer problem. In their books they just write "waste management, paid in full" and the rest of the payment is covered by taxpayers. A hidden expense.
This is again a fact that you seem unwilling to accept. Why?
> It was reported
You should read your sources. It confirms what I wrote and contradicts what you wrote.
> they "Took it back"
No. Not if "it" was "EDF". Because "it" was a minority 16 percent stake.
> 50 billion of debt will be paid by the taxpayers sooner or later.
No it won't. Which part of "profitable" and "investment" do you not understand?
> You have failed to refute my claim of 80 billion in hidden costs
There was nothing there to refute. You are free to make up random stuff, I will continue to ignore your made up stuff, as even the claims for which you provide sources turn out to be untrue, contradicted by the very sources you bring.
> But they didn't pay for it.
But they did. So much, in fact, that the federal government now has to pay them for breach of contract. Sellafield is not Yucca mountain, and is much more than just a storage facility.
"Sellafield, formerly known as Windscale, is a large multi-function nuclear site close to ... "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield
> they pay nowhere near enough to cover the costs,
They paid more than the costs. Look it up.
>> It was reported >You should read your sources. It confirms what I wrote and contradicts what you wrote.
It most certainly does not. Maybe english is not your first language? Here is a story in spanish about how France gave EDF 2.1 billion euros in 2022.
https://cincodias.elpais.com/cincodias/2022/02/18/companias/...
"We're not going to nationalize it" said the politician. Months later, they paid another 10 billion euros to do just that, here is the story in dutch:
https://www.volkskrant.nl/economie/macron-biedt-10-miljard-v...
So in 2022, France gave EDF directly over 12 billion euros. Saying they had 9 billion in profits when they were given 12 buillion by the state is a bit odd.
Surely a cool free 12 billion on top of the "insane profits" they generate on their own can't be less than the money they were given?
A grandfather who spends money using his grandchildren's credit cards is not profitable. And that is basically what EDF is doing.
The sad fact is that France has dug itself into a hole. They have a huge industry around nuclear, which is at the end of any pretense of profitability with an enormous mountain of unpaid costs coming up in the centuries ahead. This will be a burden on France's economy - the credit cards have run out, now the grandchildren have to pay.
>> 50 billion of debt will be paid by the taxpayers sooner or later.
>No it won't. Which part of "profitable" and "investment" do you not understand?
A company that drowns in debt and needs government bailouts is not profitable by any definition of the word.
Investments generate profits after you have paid for them, so nuclear is clearly not an investment - it costs more money every year. EDF could pretend to be profitable in the beginning but now the facts have caught up. The true cost of nuclear is undeniable in the long run.
That's why France now has increased the price of nuclear power by over 60%: https://www.clearygottlieb.com/news-and-insights/publication...
Turns out EDF was selling nuclear power below production cost all these years, they just pretended that the production costs were low by neglecting maintenance and borrowing money.
As I said - not profitable.
> A company that drowns in debt and needs government bailouts is not profitable by any definition of the word.
They're not "drowning" in debt, they're not being bailed out and they are most definitely profitable.
> [nuclear] costs more money every year
You might want to actually look at the EDF financial reports...
> That's why France now has increased the price of nuclear power by over 60%
Also not true. France has increased the "price" of the ARENH program, which allows companies access to 25% of EDFs cheap nuclear capacity at low prices.
> Turns out EDF was selling nuclear power below production cost all these year
Turns out the ARENH program legally required EDF to sell 25% of its production at a very low fixed price. Even if it needed that electricity itself, which meant it often had to buy that same electricity it had produced back from those same competitors at a higher price. At the height of the energy crisis at a 25x higher price.
> As I said - not profitable.
Yes, you keep saying it, and it keeps being wrong.
2023, € 10 billion in profits.
https://www.edf.fr/sites/groupe/files/2024-02/annual-results...
I would like to be this "not profitable"
> What are those "entirely disproportionate downsides", in your opinion? If you subtract the effects of radiophobia?
A handful of people operating Chernobyl have caused costs that passed 600 billion euros already in 2016, and will keep costing more money for the foreseeable future.
Nations have international agreements to cover liabilities from nuclear power stations, since no company and very few individual nations can cover the costs of severe accidents.
That's disproportionate.
The majority of health effects from Chernobyl were from the evacuation, not the accident. Check the WHO reports.
In Fukushima it was all of them.
The 1975 Banqiao dam failure caused (best estimate) around 200000 deaths, evacuation of tens of millions and a several million houses destroyed. Was that a reason for the entire world to get out of hydro-power, because the "disproportionate downsides" are just too great?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Or did we check that our dams are built to better standards? And possibly update those standards? The RBMK-1000 was a reactor that even at the time would never have been permitted to be built in the west. Not even close. It was inherently unstable, with the positive void coefficient, and had no containment.
And the kinds of shenanigans that were ordered at Chernobyl also are not permitted.
TMI was a meltdown. There was no effect outside the plant. And nuclear safety was improved significantly after TMI.
Fukushima will have no health effects in the Japanese population. All the adverse health effects and the vast majority of the financial damages are due to the unnecessary evacuation and the shutdown.
"Relocation was unjustified for 75% of the 335,000 people relocated after Chernobyl."
"Relocation was unjustified for the 160,000 people relocated after Fukushima."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
“By now, more Japanese have died from the closing of Japan's nuclear power plants following the 2011 Tohoku quake than from the tsunami and the earthquake combined, which was about 20,000 people.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/10/31/shutting-...
In terms of money, just 5 years of the reactor shutdown cost the Japanese more than $200 billion. That is the vast majority of the financial damage. Take that to 10 years and you are at $400 billion and that's assuming constant prices.
The "Atomausstieg" has cost Germany more than €500 billion. So what is disproportionate?
Nuclear energy is cheap, clean and safe.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
>The majority of health effects from Chernobyl were from the evacuation, not the accident. Check the WHO reports.
No, 6000 cases of thyroid cancer from Chernobyl were not caused by the evacuation, it was caused by the fallout. And the topic you are trying to dodge is that nations all over europe had to spend money to screen for these cancers for decades after Chernobyl, they had to feed wildlife special food, sanitize large areas of land and so on. The EU even had to pay for a new sarcophagus, despite never haven gotten a single kwh from Chernobyl. And it hasn't stopped costing money yet.
Nothing else (at least in peacetime) that humans do can have such consequences from mistakes made by a few individuals.
We see the same hidden costs in Sellafield, where Norway - who exports power to the UK, they don't get any - are volunteering to pay for Sellafield since an accident at sellafield could have severe effects on food production near Oslo, the capital of Norway. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/05/sellafield-...
Notice how the 2.5 billion pounds of yearly hidden costs I told you about earlier here is described as a "shoestring budget". The hidden subsidies given to nuclear power is found everywhere if you just scratch the surface a little bit.
In summary; precisely because it's not clean, it's also neither cheap nor safe.
> I ran the numbers for Hinkley Point C. At the rate they negotiated (14,8 Cents/kWh...or was it pence?) the profits are almost obscene.
Yeah, nuclear power can be profitable when it is enormously subsidized.
The CFD for Hinkley Point C proves that nuclear power does not have a business case in 2024.
Then add on top that the French government is asking for more subsidies on Hinkley Point C since it might not be enough!
https://www.ft.com/content/c1e3bd19-763b-4ea1-b188-d2872cc36...
The reality of this is evidenced by Sizewell C. Even with complete political unity for nearly 20 years they haven't managed to come up with a working business case outside of essentially a cost plus contract.
Building nuclear power as a cost plus contract, there you have true insanity.
https://www.ft.com/content/2a5d9462-b921-4577-82c1-4eb508775...
But that is the reality of nuclear power today. It is vastly undercut by renewables and expensive to the point that even with near political unity the cost can't be defended when public scrutiny is applied down the line.
> Yeah, nuclear power can be profitable when it is enormously subsidized.
No, it is pretty much always profitable. When you negotiate rates that are similar to what renewables get, the profits get obscene. One person I showed these numbers to, who had previously also made the claims about nuclear never being profitable, changed his tune quite quickly. The profits at those rates are so obscene that he claimed it must be corruption.
> The CFD for Hinkley Point C proves that nuclear power does not have a business case in 2024.
No it doesn't. HPC's primary purpose is to rebuild the UK's nuclear industry. In addition to providing incredible amounts of reliably electricity.
> ... for more subsidies ...
Don't have access to the article, but the headline speaks of a loan guarantee. Which is less than what renewables get.
> The reality of this is evidenced by Sizewell C.
Which they are building. Evidence that there is no business case?
In fact UK plans to quadruple nuclear power. Because there is no business case. Riiiight.
> Building nuclear power as a cost plus contract, there you have true insanity.
Evidence of the "cost plus" contract?
> It is vastly undercut by renewables
Only when the renewables are massively subsidized.
And they don't deliver the same product: reliable, dispatchable electricity.
> When you negotiate rates that are similar to what renewables get, the profits get obscene.
I don't understand what you are smoking. The entire investment cost for renewables are similar in price for the electricity from a paid off nuclear plant. Excluding decommissioning, insurance and waste storage costs for the nuclear plant.
Take Sweden, the lowest electricity costs in Europe and no subsidies for new built renewables on the books. Keeps building the equivalent to an EPR in wind power every 2 years.
You truly must be a cult member to think nuclear power makes financial sense when the UK government is adding a ~ £7B subsidy to Sizewell C before the final investment decision to get the project started, because they can't find investors!
> Evidence of the "cost plus" contract?
Just Google the Regulated Asset Base. EDF is too weak to take any risk from Sizewell C on their books, thus it becomes a cost plus contract as the government takes the entire risk, because it has been wholly incapable of finding any investors.
> In fact UK plans to quadruple nuclear power. Because there is no business case. Riiiight.
You mean like they've been doing since the mid 2000s.
I would suggest you dare click any of these links:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wylfa_Newydd_nuclear_power_sta...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldbury_nuclear_power_station#...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradwell_B_nuclear_power_stati...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moorside_nuclear_power_station
> Only when the renewables are massively subsidized.
> And they don't deliver the same product: reliable, dispatchable electricity.
The Swedish case points differently. They do deliver reliable electricity, maybe have a read?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
Nuclear power needs to come down in cost by 85% to be competitive with the renewable system. Both systems ensure a reliable grid.
You truly sound like a cult member ignoring all facts contrary to your own made up beliefs.
> I don't understand what you are smoking.
Reality.
You just keep producing lots of verbiage and simply no evidence for your claims.
Intermittent renewables are subsidized everywhere. Nuclear power is not.
Electricity prices in countries with nuclear power are generally lower than electricity prices where intermittent renewables are used.
Hydro is a different matter, that is reliable. Sweden has both hydro and renewables and is planning on adding 10 nuclear plants. Norway has hydro, doesn't need nuclear, though they are looking at SMRs for some remote communities. Iceland has plenty of hydro and geothermal they don't need nuclear.
Alas, hydro is something you have or don't have. You can't build it out if you don't have the geography for it. The countries with the lucky geography use it to their advantage, though both Sweden and Finnland happily add nuclear to their hydro.
The just-published report from the US DOE shows that nuclear + renewables solutions are cheaper than renewables alone. which is why the US wants to add around 200 GW of nuclear capacity to their grid, tripling capacity.
https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/LIFTOF...
> Intermittent renewables are subsidized everywhere. Nuclear power is not.
And then you go and point to Hinkley Point C with a ridiculously subsidized CFD as a "good example".
Really, what are you smoking?
> Electricity prices in countries with nuclear power are generally lower than electricity prices where intermittent renewables are used.
You mean like the insane €70/MWh ARENH agreement for old paid off nuclear plants which is higher than German wholesale prices. Reality's bias against nuclear power keeps moving faster than even your talking points.
> Sweden has both hydro and renewables and is planning on adding 10 nuclear plants.
Yes with massive massive subsidies. The opposition has promised to block it on cost grounds when they get into power next time.
> The just-published report from the US DOE shows that nuclear + renewables solutions are cheaper than renewables alone. which is why the US wants to add around 200 GW of nuclear capacity to their grid, tripling capacity.
> https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/LIFTOF...
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 compared to $82-102/MWh.
It is essentially: Nukebros writes reports for nukebros based on selectively chosen outdated data, they confirm their own bias. Simply an attempt to justify another massive round of government subsidies on nuclear power.
Lets end the discussion here. You clearly don't have any capability of critical thinking and keeps sprouting talking points without understanding what they mean in contrary to all real world evidence.
> And then you go and point to Hinkley Point C with a ridiculously subsidized CFD as a "good example".
Where did I point to HPC as a "good example"? Nowhere, that's where.
It is the worst example, currently, of a nuclear construction project gone awry, and last I checked will be the most expensive pair of nuclear reactors in history, by a good margin.
And even that will be ridiculously profitable given the negotiated price, which is the same price that various UK off-shore wind projects are getting. Except that HPC power will be reliable. And there will be lots of it. And the plants will last for a very long time.
Just like Georgia Power had to increase their electricity prices to pay for the disastrous Vogtle-3/4 projects. To less than half the price of electricity in California, the US's intermittent renewables poster-boy.
Fun fact: the worst of nuclear power is better than the best of intermittent renewables.
> 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.
Aka: Reality™
But you are right, discussing actual reality with you is pointless.
Have a good one.
Thank you for confirming that investing in modern nuclear power leads to vastly higher power bills for the ratepayers.
Nuclear power needs to come down in price by 85% to be competitive with renewable systems. That is the fact today.
Both systems need about equal amounts of dispatchable power to follow the load curve.
For nuclear power this comes from that overbuilding nuclear to solve peaking issues is even more horrifically expensive.
Thus the need for storage. Or pumped hydro which was first invented to manage coal and nuclear inflexibility.
Reality keeps moving faster than your nukebro talking points.
Hopefully you’ll wake up from this madness one day.
> Thank you for confirming that investing in modern nuclear power leads to vastly higher power bills for the ratepayers.
I didn't and it does not. French power bills are much lower than German ones. As are Swedish and Finnish ones. Georgia power bills (Vogtle-3/4) are half of California's (PV/wind-meister).
Before 2002 (the German Atomausstieg), electricity rates were steadily falling compared to purchasing power. After 2002, they have been steadily rising.
In Europe, electricity prices correlate in pretty much a straight line with the penetration of intermittent renewables in the country's electrical grid. The higher the percentage, the higher the prices.
> Nuclear power needs to come down in price by 85% to be competitive with renewable systems. That is the fact today.
That is about as counterfactual as you can be. Nuclear is cheaper than intermittent renewables on any metric you can find. And that's even before you notice that intermittent renewables don't actually provide power when you need it.
The world has left the renewbro dreams behind and is turning to nuclear:
- COP28: worldwide tripling of nuclear
- UK: quadrupling of nuclear
- US: tripling nuclear
- Japan + South Korea: were going to abandon nuclear, now expanding instead
- Poland: getting into nuclear, in a big way.
- Holland: 4 new reactors instead of the originally planned 2
- Sweden: were also going to reduce / discontinue, now want at least 10 new reactors
- France: had a law on the books that disallowed the expansion of nuclear capacity in absolute terms and mandated reduction to below 50%. This law was scrapped in March 2023 (>70% majority), now on track to build 14 EPR2 reactors
- China: were on track to triple capacity, now accelerating.
- India: on track to triple capacity by 2031
- Ukraine: building 4 new AP-1000
- Italy: got out of nuclear late 80s early 90s, now getting back into nuclear
- Microsoft, Google, Amazon: all investing heavily in nuclear
- Major banks just announced support for nuclear
- IPCC calls nuclear essential for tackling climate change
- So does the EU, the US government, etc.
- Czech repubic: just ordered a South Korean APR-1400
etc.
Lovely. All you do is keep claiming stuff and sidestep all questions you don’t want to face without any reputable sources to back it up.
Then attempting to justify it by subsidy programs being launched. In one sentence it’s the cheapest in the next sentence truly enormous subsidy programs are needed to even get projects started. And that’s a win?!?
Like, please provide a source for this statement which is completely contrary to all reputable modern research on the subject:
> That is about as counterfactual as you can be. Nuclear is cheaper than intermittent renewables on any metric you can find. And that's even before you notice that intermittent renewables don't actually provide power when you need it.
You sound like a deranged cult member who has been caught out.
Bravo!
A nuclear power plant doesn't have 100% availability for an arbitrary length of time either.
Nobody claims 100% availability. Doesn't change that nuclear is by far the most reliable electricity generator. The US nuclear fleet has had capacity factors in the 95% range for ages now. And the 5% tend to be planned maintenance/fueling.
Not only are the times of unavailablilty very rare and usually plannable, they are also uncorrelated. Seasons, day/night cycles and even large scale weather patterns are highly correlated.
Depends on the timeframe.
Nuclear is among the least dependable generation sources from a long term capacity standpoint, with multiple incidents taking generation off for long periods. 3 mile island wasn’t a big deal from a health and safety standpoint, but at 4 AM TMI-2 went offline with zero warning and never came back. Similarly you can’t trust timelines for when exactly new generation will come online.
Less severe incidents don’t necessarily make the news, but losing 1.3 GW at some random period for weeks or months isn’t particularly uncommon. Sure major incidents are “rare,” but there’s not actually that many nuclear power plants ever constructed.
Completely incorrect.
Nuclear has the highest reliability of all generation sources, with for example the largest fleet of reactors, the US fleet, consistently coming in at around 95% capacity factor.
Most of the remaining 5% is scheduled outages for maintenance and refueling. And both the rare scheduled as well as the even rarer unscheduled outages tend to be uncorrelated. Well, unless radiophobia grips a country and they decide to shut everything down.
Trust renewbros to always use a single example to bolster their claims.
Examples are plentiful, read up on why Foreign material exclusion (FME) is such a major concern. Months of completely unplanned outage, 10’s millions in damage and even more in lost production all from a minor mistake.
Short term capacity factor is not the same as reliability, the grid needs power every day not some average over a year. Add some turbines and a given dams capacity factor drops but it becomes more valuable due to the added flexibility and redundancies.
Lifetime capacity factors of US reactors are a long way from 95% often in the low 80% or below that’s not because the grid doesn’t want their power but because nuclear is unreliable over the long term.
96.04% in 2017, lifetime 78.07% (unreliable). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browns_Ferry_Nuclear_Plant
95.7% in 2017 vs 80.25% lifetime (unreliable). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Valley_Nuclear_Power_St...
And before you think 2017 just had unusually high demand, nope 79.36% capacity factor in 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_Nuclear_One
That’s just another unpleasant reality when trying to actually use nuclear as a major energy source.
> Short term capacity factor is not the same as reliability,
Er, capacity factor and reliability are not the same thing, that is true. But not in the way you seem to think. Capacity factor is more stringent than simple reliability, as it also takes into account planned outages and even power reductions due to external circumstances, for example when nuclear output in Finnland was throttled to compensate for the over-production problems they had with their hydro last year.
Please do read up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
And you do need to make up your mind whether you think long term or short term is important, because you are contradicting yourself on that.
Capacity factors are usually given for a year, and in recent years, the capacity factors for nuclear in the US have been in the 95% range for a while, though recently dropped to "just" 93%. What the capacity factor was 30 years ago isn't really relevant.
The idea that 93%-96% capacity factors somehow make nuclear power "unreliable" is ... "interesting".
If you find a more reliable electricity source, do present it here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#/media/File:US...
> Capacity factors are usually given for a year
That inherently misrepresents nuclear when the fueling cycle lasts longer than a year and maintenance cycles extend across decades. But again reliability is the ability to provide a service. A full multi week outage can’t be patched over via batteries, you need redundancy.
Suppose your an island nation considering looking to get 3GW of nuclear. You’d like the most efficient option of really huge 1.5 GW reactors but if any of them is offline you’re already at 50% output. It’s going to happen, and the grid needs to be able to deal with it, in practice it would need to be able to deal with both being offline for weeks..
> The idea that 93%-96% capacity factors somehow make nuclear power "unreliable" is ... "interesting".
Even a 95% capacity factor over a year can represent near perfect uptime OR include a random 2 week outage with zero notice during absolutely peak seasonal demand.
But again lifetime averages are often in the 80% range and that’s not from fueling cycles alone. Many multi month outages are guaranteed to happen during a plants lifespan requiring further redundancy based around the assumption that nuclear is unavoidable.
Simply repeating this stuff doesn't make it any more salient.
Ocne again: bring actual evidence for a grid-level electricity generator that is more reliable than nuclear. And with "source" I mean actual evidence, not your say-so.
Maybe start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#/media/File:US...
I won't be holding my breath for you to deliver that evidence.
Evidence like the 18 different US nuclear power plants at 0 output on this list Right Now. Plenty of them are at 100% and a few are at lower output based on grid demand, but 18 are simply offline due to the unreliable nature of nuclear.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/... (Not real time but updated daily.)
The wonderful thing about being correct is the evidence is plentiful. I didn’t pick some random day that happens to be bad. It’s the middle of the day so many natural gas peaking power plants are online to meet surging demand, but all this nuclear simply isn’t available. And it’s not available due to the inherent unreliable nature of the technology.
Extremely expensive natural gas being used Today specifically because nuclear energy doesn’t work the way you think it does.
PS: You’re not going to see this kind of nationwide tracking for say coal because the availability so just so much better. Total outages are less frequent and don’t lass nearly as long.
That is not evidence for your claim.
I don't think you even know what your claim is.
Your reading comprehension issues aren’t my fault.
I’ve been saying nuclear is regularly unavailable to produce power for extended periods making it unreliable over long timescales.
I bring up long term capacity factors being much lower than your claimed ~95% as a sign of this.
I point to many nuclear power plants currently unable to produce power for an extended period.
Things don’t get much simpler than that.
Reading is not the problem. What you don't seem to understand is that you repeatedly writing something does not actually make it true.
In fact, given your record here, you repeatedly writing something is a pretty good indicator of it being false.
And this claim of yours remains absurdly false, no matter how often you repeat it.
You point to the past, which is completely irrelevant, and you point to single plants, which is also completely irrelevant, as the fleet is pretty large. The total and current capacity factor for nuclear power in the US is in the 90s.
Doesn't get much simpler than that.
And you've yet to produce an electricity source with a higher capacity factor.
Because you can't.
Because your claim is simply not true.
And will remain untrue no matter how often you repeat it or how many other irrelevant stats you pull.
Capacity. Factor. 90s.
I'm as skeptical of nuclear as a person can get, but I think availability is significantly mitigated by the SMR concept IIUC. Yes, uptime is worse than people might think (nuclear plants are offline a LOT https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/outages/), but if you've got literally dozens of SMRs chained up, then hypothetically you can expect/handle some % being down at any one time.
Let's see how it works out when/if these things are actually running at scale.
but usually availability for npp can be planned (maintenance/refueling) unlike say wind/solar output (not referring to day/night but hourly variations)
Yes, but still not arbitrary length of time: weather can matter for cooling, there could be strike action, policy action, ...
for weather - that's not a problem for newer designs that account for that. Even in France just a few nr of plants are affected and their output reduced
Doesn't change that arbitrary length of availability isn't a thing.
Wind/solar output is surprisingly predictable 3 days out, and the modern grid can react to changes within seconds.
Once it’s built and operational? It can run near 100% for literally decades at 99.9% plus uptime, no solar source is going to do that because of physics where you can easily vary from 0% to 99% over a single day and have to smooth that out for the grid. Obviously you will need an extra reactor or 3 for when you have to take one of the others offline for maintenance.
> 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.
It's the grid which protects it and if the grid is broken nuclear is even worse since you're suddenly faced with far too much power on a small portion of the whole grid. Meanwhile with renewables, even if the grid is broken on several points, you are much better off due to the distribution of power generation.
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> Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was "hobbyists." BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another.
Source: https://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
After all, the microwave oven came from developing nuclear weapons. Those warm air blankets used during post-op in hospitals came from NASA Apollo/Gemini/Mercury development.
Who knows where what useful things could come from properly tracking a person's face so silly filters could be applied...er, wait, we have this one backwards. The silly filters are just the useful numbing down of people accepting their faces always being tracked. nevermind
In the modern era, waste is basically the 8th sin. Inefficiency is a moral failure for these people. You're only allowed to have just enough hospital beds to accommodate the current demand with a little leeway. You're only allowed to have as much stock of anything as it takes for the next shipping container to arrive and be unloaded. It's all razor-thin efficiency all the way down, with no slack available for black swan events. And then we wonder why inflation is up 100% when the logistics chains break down, then try to scapegoat whatever politician is in power at the wrong time.
To think when the AI bubble bursts we'll have all of that excess power available for better use
who are you to say how people should use energy? This is a pure nihilistic coal post and I think you should think about being less judgmental, it will make you happier.
> who are you to say how people should use energy?
Everyone should have a say. We all live here.
The real reason is to keep this stock market bull run going and they are terrified of it coming down to earth again where it is supposed to be. They definitely will burn whatever they need to so that their stock price doesn’t come down. But it is inevitable and also disgusting that we are throwing our climate change goals out the window for this.
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/12/g-s1-9545/ai-brings-soaring-e...
The market has spoken. We need a shitload of reliable electricity and can't rely on the sun or wind.
Total construction of wind, solar, energy storage, and nuclear globally over the past decade is what the market is saying and it’s saying it very clearly.
Individual participants making different bets is how the market decides what’s effective and what’s wasteful. But you can’t assume any subgroup is speaking for the total market, because they could be about to lose big. Nuclear could make a huge comeback in the coming decades, but until that happens we can only talk about the market in terms of what the market is actually doing.
It isn't. If you basically make it illegal by law through overregulation than thats not what the market is saying.
Regulations aren’t what’s driving nuclear to unprofitably. China which still builds nuclear and doesn’t give a fuck about US nuclear regulations is still brining solar and wind to market vastly faster.
but not bc nuclear is unprofitable. Nuclear there is 3-3.5bn/unit, dirt cheap. They just can't scale it faster due to stalling after fukushima events
Yes, it's not because nuclear is unprofitable.
It's because nuclear power plants are so durable, they last almost forever, but at least 80-100 years for modern plants.
If you build out too quickly, you end up in the same situation the French found themselves in after the Messmer-plan predictions turned out to vastly overestimate demand: they were done after 15 years.
With effectively no nuclear power plants to build for 45-85 years, their industry withered and they have had to re-learn building them. Not helped by the fact that there was a legal cap on the total amount of nuclear production.
Fucashma happened in 2011, their up over 4x since then with the total share of electricity from nuclear in China roughly doubled. It’s just nowhere close to the changes seen in renewable generation.
China is already trying to use coal as a peaking generation something it’s terrible at. That’s something nuclear is even worse at and what’s ultimately limiting their nuclear ambitions. They slowed down the pass of nuclear construction despite nuclear only making up ~5% of their electricity supply it’s simply an issue with nuclear not regulations.
They reduced nr of builds after fk and ramped up only recently with 10+ reactors approved/yr. But agree it's still harder to scale than renewables, but they are gradually getting close to 4-5 years of build time for their designs so things may improve greatly in near time
I suspect the timing is simply coincidence. Solar became vastly more viable in that timeline and it can be rolled out from planning to electricity in months not years.
Which then shifted overall electricity planning.
it's not coincidence, they got panicked after fk, just like the rest of the world
Doubling nuclear generation in the next few years and increasing the number of reactors being planned hardly describes panic.
Japan and Germany panicked. China did something else.
China could build nuclear faster if they wanted to. They were building it faster in the 2010s and have slowed down, so they obviously have the capacity.
You don't want to build out too quickly, because the plants are so long-lasting.
If you are aiming for a fleet of 200 reactors, you should be completing 2 per year.
Growing demand means China could have ramped up much faster without that concern.
~5% of total supply after 2+ decades of nuclear construction is almost perfunctory.
yes they slowed down and ramping up again now. 10+ reactors/yr approved, 30+ under construction, hualong build time of about 5 years, will probably drop to 4
If the product doesn't appeal to the broader market place, i.e., the society it is in, then that's that. Markets are human institutions after all.
Not necessarily. The grid of the future needs a plurality of solutions, one of which is clean baseload (e.g. hydropower, nuclear fission, or fusion).
However, don't discount renewables. Paired with energy storage -- which isn't only chemical batteries! --, intermittent generation can be extremely useful across vasts parts of North America.
Baseload is a term used to describe a downside not some inherent requirement of the grid. Up to 30% of electricity can be supplied by “baseload” sources without issue, but scaling past that runs into increasing problems.
Hydro is described as peaking power because it can be ramped up and down 100%-0%-100% multiple times in a single day. Very useful for tracking changing demand and intermittent energy from solar/wind.
Coal/Nuclear has issues doing the same due to thermal stress and heat loss when not in use. The energy used to get things back to working temperatures requires fuel which isn’t generating power, you also have ware issues from thermal cycling. Alternatively, you could keep things at operating temperatures but that’s again spending fuel without generating electricity.
On top of this Nuclear runs into if you try and ramp down very low very quickly, wait a few hours a then try and ramp back up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_poison To be clear 100%-30%-100% can be fine 100% to 0% to 100% isn’t.
Baseload is a a requirement of real electricity demand, it tends to be about 50-60% of total demand.
Since intermittent renewables cannot do baseload, and get asymptotically more expensive trying, fans of intermittent renewables are trying to paint baseload as an obsolete concept by making intermittency primary.
That is silly. Baseload is real and a major component of demand. Intermittent renewables can be a good addition, as their supply curves can actually match the variable part of the demand fairly closely (thought obviously not perfectly).
It is not true that Hydro can be ramped arbitrarily. For example, just last year Finland had a huge problem with their plentiful hydro plants overloading the grid. Fortunately they also have significant nuclear that they were able to ramp down to compensate.
With ~60% baseload, there is no need to ramp nuclear plants down to 0 rapidly. That's only necessary if you screw up your grid by having too much intermittent renewables and giving them priority. Don't do that.
Alas, overloading their grid with renewables is exactly what some countries are doing, Germany for example. This is a really bad idea for a number of reasons. One is that due to even the average capacity factors being so low, you have to dramatically over provision in order to even achieve fully supply on average. However, that massive overprovisioning means that when weather is favorable, those massively over provisioned massively cannibalize each other (and other producers, if those still exist).
The more you overprovision, the worse this gets.
Reasonably ramping nuclear up or down is no problem. France for example has been using nuclear reactors almost exclusively for some time. Lower capacity factors for the nuclear plants than you'd really want, but otherwise not a problem. Their investment in renewables (aim seems to be around 30-40%) will likely increase the capacity factors of their nuclear plants. Good for them!
It’s not the renewable cloud trying to redefine a term go back to 2005 on Wikipedia and you’ll see: “A base load power plant is one that provides a steady flow of power reguardless of total power demand by the grid. Typically, nuclear power plants and most coal fired power plants are considered base load because it is more efficient or safer to run at a set output instead of trying to precisely match power consumption demands.” https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Base_load&oldid=1...
You can find that definition used regularly in older books dating well before renewables where a thing.
01 April 1967: “This paper states some of the basic principles concerning daily and annual load factor on power systems, and the use of load duration curves in coordinating the type and operating pattern of generating plant. Operating procedure is explained, and the types of plant in use or under construction in New Zealand are described. Overseas plant is divided into the categories of base load, medium load factor, and peaking, with an outline of the desirable characteristics in each case.”
Also, time of day pricing shifts users to periods of low demand so it doesn’t represent the minimum need, just the observed demand under specific pricing schemes. If daytime rates fall well below nighttime rates continually the actual usage at 3AM would fall dramatically.
> Baseload is a term used ...
'nuff said.
The space isn’t relevant as per current Wikipedia “The base load[2] (also baseload)”
There’s an even older saying: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and prove it.”
The article even goes on to use both, while making clear which definition the author is trying to promote: “Power plants that do not change their power output quickly, such as some large coal or nuclear plants, are generally called baseload power plants.[3][5][6]”
In the wider context grid operators don’t actually care about the specific absolute lowest demand number. They need to operate 24/7 for years so whatever the minimum number happens to be for a single second just doesn’t matter much compared to blackouts and other extreme situations. Bottom 5th percentile matters from an economic standpoint, but very temporary extremes only matter in terms of resiliency.
It's not the space.
You've consistently mixed up "baseload" and "baseload generation" (not usually called that), irrespective of spaces.
There is baseload. That's demand.
"The base load[2] (also baseload) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load
There is generation capacity that caters to that demand, for example "baseload generation" or better dispatchable generation. That is supply.
> There’s an even older saying: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and prove it.”
True, true...
You understand the difference between supply and demand?
"This demand can be met by unvarying power plants[3] or dispatchable generation,[4]"
Dispatchable generation can also service variable demand, but it is difficult to impossible for non-dispatchable generation to service baseload.
> There is baseload. That's demand.
You’re incorrect in several ways here. Utilities care about the supply they need to generate not total customer demand because of inefficiency in the transmission network. People like yourself got confused when reading about existing terms and have been using them incorrectly ever since.
Anyway you’ve been spouting so much nonsense I’m only going to respond to a fraction of it.
The minimum power demand is the easiest to reach with intermittent sources via even minimal storage being by definition the lowest relevant number. It’s also the least valuable electricity to supply which is why nobody actually does this. You use energy from batteries when the price of that energy is highest. That’s a function of energy markets not inherent limitations on the technology. It’s easy to move most use at 3AM to other times of the day because most of the consumption is due to cheap prices. Charging EV’s late at night happens specifically because there’s anything particular going on at 3AM and otherwise generation would be idle.
LOL. You confuse supply and demand and claim without any evidence the ridiculous assertion that I am not taking into account transmission losses.
And baseload is only the easiest to supply when you have firm generating capacity. When you don't, you can't.
Bye.
Terms of art don’t necessarily mean what you think they mean. Nobody can take into account transmission losses in real time because they don’t actually know want they are. They also can’t directly track use in real time, as such baseload etc is calculated from the supply side.
They can know how much energy they are generating and they can look at the grid frequency/stability. Which is why they speak in terms of supply. Demand is always a lower and only indirectly relevant number.
> have firm generation capacity
Batteries charged from redundant but still cheap solar are more dependable than individual nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power plants have historically have been offline roughly 10% of a given power plants total lifespan making it surprisingly difficult to consistently supply baseload with nuclear alone. Total availability of French nuclear power in 2022 for example was abysmal. Batteries can easily make up for short term instability, but nobody is paying for enough batteries to supply 1+GW 24/7 for 2 months because some nuclear power plant will eventually need maintenance.
You are right, I should have used the term "firm power" instead of "baseload"
“Dispatchable generation” may be a better fit for what you’re talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation
“Firm power” is more about the type of relationship between energy generation and consumers than the actual technology being used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firm_service
No, you were right, baseload is fine.
Baseload is load, so demand side.
Firm power is generation, so supply side.
Flywheel energy storage is neat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage
Add energy (speed) when available, use it to power things when not.
Sweet, these new reactors will be online in 10-15 years in the absolute best case.
How cheap will wind, solar and batteries be then?
but ppl say wind+solar+batteries are already much cheaper. Why then pour money in nuclear? Unless things are a bit more complicated...
That was my point.
There is no universe where starting in on a new nuke today makes financial sense. They just take too long, cost to much to build and run.
but big corpos are pouring money in it instead of pouring them in own renewable combo. So maybe they know something? And nuclear doesn't take much to run. EDF in France got 11bn profit last year and will beat it this year. And that's WITH govt limitation called arenh that forces them to sell 1/4 energy at lower price. EDF basically got f'd with foak builds in france,finland and uk, especially uk due to their overregulation and need for custom components but actually running nuclear is great business
Maybe if you have high levels of renewables penetration. And for a couple of days per month the wholesale electricity price gets very high. And you can sell your nuclear power at very high rates to the market. Or at cheap market beating rates to your private customers.
In the Real World™, that turns out not to be the case. So your model of the real world needs updating.
2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia, and took decades to come online.
China are currently building 27 reactors [1], and the average time is still 7 years for completion.
[1] https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c...
And electricity in Georgia is, after prices being raised to pay for this particular disaster, around half as expensive as electricity in California.
Important point: even the most disastrous nuclear projects are better than "succesful" intermittent renewables.
Nuclear power plants are big and take a while to build. They also reliably deliver truly stupendous amounts of electricity over an amazing amount of time.
Totally worth it.
Nuclear: an expensive way to generate cheap electricity.
Intermittent renewables: a cheap way to generate expensive electricity.
Afaik china now builds 30+ reactors with additional 10+ approved. And completion time for many projects tends to be closer to 5 years Also vogtle was foak build, it's natural to be over time and budget. Still unit 4 was 30% cheaper than unit 3. The more you build the cheaper it gets
Not just FOAK, they also had to rebuild the industry. And of course there was politicking of the industrial players.
And they had some major f-ups. For example, they used a new licensing process, which is all-up-front. This is great, because it means you can get a single design approved and then just built that design over and over, instead of all these one-offs that then are all FOAK.
Except.
Their design wasn't actually done (correctly) when it was approved. So what got approved was safe (that's what the NRC checks). But it wasn't actually buildable, which is not the NRC's problem. So they had to go back to the NRC again and again to make changes, but within a process that wasn't meant to work that way. So sometimes it was cheaper just to tear down what they had built.
COVID also didn't help.
But now the Vogtles are built, and as you said the second AP-1000 was already 30% cheaper than the first. The next ones should be significantly better, not only for the usual FOAK stuff, but they have now built two of these, so they have plans that are actually buildable.
Poland selected it, so did Ukraine.
i'm extremely interested to see if vogtle experience will help polant/ukraine or if it'll be again some f-up because of building in other countries
I think both: there absolutely will be f-ups. And the Vogtle experience will have tremendous benefits to the AP-1000s that follow.
The UK is planning on having gas peaker plants that will run for a maximum of two weeks a year. The plan is to use CCS to make them carbon neutral.
I suspect we’ll get a split where the elites will get the dependable, expensive nuclear energy for their playthings like AI data centers (powered from nearby nuke reactors) and that we plebeians will get the solar/wind/best effort grid supplies as they are more economical right now.
If the market is saying anything it's that solar and batteries will win out
Some, like me, welcome developments in solar, wind, battery and nuclear. They are all viable in their own way, and constantly improving.
The market has spoken and is saying the exact opposite.
Are you or the rest of America OK with a nuclear power plant being "in your backyard"? Maybe not literally, but any of the effects of it having problems.
> Are you or the rest of America OK with a nuclear power plant being "in your backyard"?
Economists have the term market failure for configurations in which groups of individuals making decisions predictably produces bad outcomes [1].
The last decades seem to imply that there is a broader social failure when high-frequency, echo chambered, outrage-based discussion results in suboptimal debate. This is true from our political media to social media to the quality of private policy debate in America.
Nuclear power seems to exemplify that problem. If a public utility discusses nuclear power, every neighbour in the zip code will come out complaining about radiation. Even if their town is built on radioactive coal ash. Even if they live next to a missile silo, or near a port where our nuclear-powered fleet makes call. Private parties, on the other hand, can cut through the bullshit, which we usually see as bad, but plays a spoiler effect that maybe keeps the system from getting gridlocked.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
I would be fine with it.
If it means cheaper rates and better reliability, yeah, I am.
Instead of this, it might be interesting to see Amazon (or similar provider) offer some kind of compute tier whose performance (not memory or storage, just cpu/gpu) is dependent the amount of power from sun/wind being generated. For many internal applications, I could see that being an acceptable compromise for some amount of cost savings.