The nuclear plant consists of two units each with 1200MW production capacity. Let's be pessimistic and assume that we need 24 hours of storage or roughly 57600MWh. A modern redox flow or lithium ion battery can cost as little as $100 per kWh but Tesla's grid battery with 129MWh cost 66 million which is around $500 per kWh so we will use that.
Well it turns out 57600MWh * 500$/kWH is exactly 28.8 billion USD. No power grid on earth needs a 24 hour battery but even with this crazy assumption grid storage isn't significantly more expensive than nuclear power.
Solar and wind, unsubsidized, with storage, are already cheaper than nuclear. Those costs will continue to plummet, especially as EV battery demand ramps (rapidly expanding battery manufacturing capacity).
Nuclear lost because it’s too expensive, and has its own externalities to ignore (decommissioning, waste disposal, liability insurance).
To refill the battery you need to generate 57600MWh each day. Assuming that we get 12 hours of sunlight per day at 50% efficiency, you that comes down to 2 (efficiency factor) * 57600MWh / (12 hours / day) = 9600 MWh solar installation.
At $1 / Watt, 9600 MWh solar installation comes down to $9.6 billion.
Assuming my math is correct, this seems pretty competitive. In particular, I am assuming that $1 / Watt means $1 per Watt of electricity at max luminosity. If $1 / Watt means $1 per 1 Watt of absorbed solar energy, the efficiency should be 10% - 15%.
Large scale installation cost per watt: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/doe-officially-...
I think the flow battery can get even cheaper than this for 24hr storage. Recent price claims[1] were $150/kWh at 4hr, and $100/kWh at 8hr - this puts the cost of charge/discharge rate at $400/kW and the cost of the energy storage at $50/kWh.
1kW @ 4hrs = (400+ 50* 4) /4 = 150$ (50+400/4)
1kW @ 8hrs = (400+ 50* 8) /8 = 100$ (50+400/8)
1kW @24hrs = (400+ 50* 24) /24 = 66$ (50+400/24)
So it really was a bit crazy to estimate 500$/kWh for that storage, 200$kWh would be absolute maximum present price for flow battery, and under $75kWh seems likely.
There's ~12 hour batteries on the grid (pumped storage), but they mostly recharge from coal and nuclear at night.
And think of all the CA plants sitting idle on a day like today, where peak load was 28,000 MW.
* If nuclear is that safe, why don't we eliminate or at least, significantly raise the nuclear liability cap? The nuclear industry keeps trying to sell us (this article included) on the idea that disasters are now close to impossible. It'd be an easier sell if they voluntarily increased their liability, to, say $150-400 billion and found private insurers willing to take a risk on their safety, no?
* Did you personally consider Japan's nuclear plants unsafe before Fukushima? (as far as I can tell it took most of us by surprise)
* If the strike price for Hinkley point electricity is 1.5x-2x renewable strike price today (never mind in 10 years when renewable prices have plunged again), what exactly was so great about building a "next gen" nuclear plant?
B) Transparency is not great when it come to power plants. It is impossible for citizens to make a informed decisions about which countries has safe power plants and which are unsafe.
C) The environmentalist argument is not that renewable electricity is worse than nuclear, but that we still burn material and put co2 into the air for power and heat. Even in a place like Sweden, we still sometimes burn coal. If we could ban all such usage without building more nuclear than great, but we don't look like we are any nearer a ban on burning gas, oil and coal today than when renewable prices was prohibitive expensive. Nuclear power plants directly replace other power plants, while wind and solar seems mostly just supplement the market with cheaper electricity during good conditions while coal keep burning when the wind is calm and the sun is set.
Fukushima was before I was into the topic. I really can't say anything either way, except to parrot what others say: it was tech from the 60s and they built it on a major fault line.
I haven't read up on insurance for nuclear reactors, so I can't say much about that either. Again, though, even if it's dangerous, I don't see a way out that does not include dependency by all countries on solar power from the Saharah and similar places, or nuclear power. Assuming it's somewhere in the middle between the current safety levels and the claimed ones for newer designs, we should not exclude nuclear. It's also not as if we would build 1000 reactors worldwide simultaneously. Some will be built earlier than others and we'll learn more about their safety, allowing us to steer whether we want to appropriate more land for renewables or continue building more reactors.
Fukushima has been a lesson here. Strategically, Japan has to import it's energy, except for solar energy. With a float of trains electricity is already at the core of their transportation system.
Here, at least, nuclear doesn't look like it's the future.
After Fukushima Daiichi disaster Japan shut down all it's reactors and switched to fossil fuels, not renewables, and this is the most tragic outcome of the disaster.
Neither nuclear nor renewables could entirely replace fossil fuels, we desperately need both. Hopefully Japan is restarting it's nuclear reactors (5 reactors were restarted in 2018) and investing in renewables, but I'm afraid it's still not enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan
I don't think the sentiment on nuclear power, even after Fukushima, is as clear cut as you're presenting.
And your claim that Japan is planning on growing might mislead some readers to think that they are expanding the nuclear capacity in Japan. Which is not the case at all. They signed the Paris agreement and unlike the US they try to keep their promise. But they are not expanding any capacity to do this. They simply restart their reactors (which by the way if they might be able to do so is to be seen).
What actually happened is that they started to decommission the Genkai 1, Mihama 1 and 2, Shimane 1 and Tsuruga 1 reactors while they completely abandoned the plan to build Fukushima Daiichi Unit 7 & 8 for obvious reasons among others.
So if anything than the exact opposite can be said that you implied: Japan is slowly but surely phasing nuclear energy out.
I'm about as pro-nuclear as they get, but the Wikipedia articles seem to support a story of the Japanese government shutting down nuclear and being very tentative restarting the existing reactors [0].
It is difficult to guess what is going on in a country that doesn't report in English, but the info in Wikipedia (mostly a little dated) seems to support a rollback of nuclear. Reduced generation, limited new developments. Either they are using less energy or something else is filling the void left by nuclear plant shutdowns.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#Nuclear...
The reality is that solar is a tiny part of global energy and even in countries like Japan it did not even come close to replacing nuclear.
Japan will have nuclear future because they simply have to much capacity already. However the poplar nature of nuclear politics makes it a problem, they will continue to be import depended and fossil fuel for many years to come.
> A second key to deep decarbonization brings up an inconvenient truth for the traditional Green movement: nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source. Although renewable energy sources, particularly solar and wind, have become drastically cheaper, and their share of the world’s energy has more than tripled in the past five years, that share is still a paltry 1.5 percent, and there are limits on how high it can go. The wind is often becalmed, and the sun sets every night and may be clouded over. But people need energy around the clock, rain or shine. Batteries that could store and release large amounts of energy from renewables will help, but ones that could work on the scale of cities are years away. Also, wind and solar sprawl over vast acreage, defying the densification process that is friendliest to the environment.
My readthrough of the article failed to reveal supporting evidence that there is widespread change in opinion about nuclear in younger generations, much less that a pro-nuclear movement is growing.
Dams used as batteries charged by pumping water.
Fantasy fiction isn't going to solve our dilemma. Advanced, less toxic technology will. Nuclear has had its chance.
Far less people have because of nuclear power in all its time than gets killed by nature in a year.
The environmentalist not rationality kille nuclear.
Hmmm, let's see: how many years before the residents of the San Onofre region finish paying for its recent failed upgrade ? Then how much more will they pay for decommissioning it?
That 'clean, safe, too cheap to meter' line is from the 1950s. Before longer we'll have a decentralized, more secure power source that actually lives up to those lies. And best of all? The fuel supply will never be exhausted ... never need to be decommmissioned ... and lives a nice safe 90M miles away.
That doesn't change the article we have here.
I imagine a future where the technology improves to the point where people who live in cloudy areas can still generate plenty of power. Is that unrealistic?
Otherwise you risk being almost as inactive in the required efforts than an average climat change denier.
The most pragmatic thing to do is to improve solar generation and all kinds of storage. Those can actually solve the problem. Nuclear can't be here on time (nor on budget), and everything else just won't happen.
We could have avoided a lot of problems on the last few decades if the nuclear countries decided to push for safer reactors with no proliferation problems. They didn't. They all kept going for more weapons. Now we have to live with those problems, and the nuclear economical window passed away, it does not make sense anymore.
“We are as gods, and have to get good at it.”
Could be coincidence, but it seems awfully convenient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
[1] https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.21/nuclear-energy-theres-no-ea...
From what I've been reading, seems CO2 tops that list. One can bury nuclear waste in the Nevada desert, keep everyone a few hundred miles away, and it'll be fine. From what I learned in high school chemistry class, a gas wants to expand to fill its container, so the CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants eventually makes its way to me.
The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment
How much compared to, say, coal mining? Mining rare earth metals for solar panels and wind turbines?
Yeah, nuclear power has some downsides. But I'm not hearing the "versus" part in your argument.
I am fond of the phrase "final generation nuclear". We need 30 years of nuclear fission before we can sustain fusion.
I think we're already past the point where some nuclear risk is acceptable. It's not a zero sum game - fossel fuels are already being used with risk.
We need to take some (calculated) risks again.
> the CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants eventually makes its way to me
Not. It doesn't work like that. CO2 is not even waste in the strict sense of the term; is basic for our survival. If you wipe all CO2 from the air, humankind will go extinct in a hurry because all plants would die really fast. All what we eat started as a CO2 molecule being captured by a plant somewhere.
The problem to recycle or clean it from the air has been solved for us by plants millions of years ago. Plants love CO2 and clean it for free.
Therefore, in the real life, many CO2 produced by Chinese coal-fired plants will be soon captured by a weed or a tree. The rest will go to the atmosphere where will hang on, maybe for a long time, but far away from you.
If you touch or inhale radiactive waste you could die in literally seconds. If you encounter CO2, as long that there is also enough oxygen around, nothing will happen. You will inhale it, will readily enter in your bloodstream, do a couple of roller coaster trips and will be discarded. All of we do it, many times a day for our entire life, without noticeable damage in our body.
And we could say that CO2 is a signifiant danger for the climate, but again, there are much worse molecules in this sense. Methane for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
> One can bury nuclear waste in the Nevada desert, keep everyone a few hundred miles away, and it'll be fine.
Yeah, for a million years. The ideas people have come up with to prevent future generations just blowing it up without knowing what they're doing, and irradiating the whole planet, are quite interesting. If you have a good idea, people will be all ears, because we don't have a plan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...
> Because some radioactive species have half-lives longer than one million years, even very low container leakage and radionuclide migration rates must be taken into account.[21] Moreover, it may require more than one half-life until some nuclear materials lose enough radioactivity to no longer be lethal to living organisms. A 1983 review of the Swedish radioactive waste disposal program by the National Academy of Sciences found that country’s estimate of several hundred thousand years—perhaps up to one million years—being necessary for waste isolation "fully justified."
Look through all that. It's ideas and proposals and things we're trying. We don't even have one thing you could call "a solution", and haven't found one in decades.
> From what I learned in high school chemistry class, a gas wants to expand to fill its container
Just plant trees, then store the wood. Okay, it's probably more complex than that, or there's much better ways. But this is no anywhere near the "a bunch of proposals, and good luck to future generations" level that nuclear waste is.
You're basically saying "CO2 is a gas so it will move to me, and nuclear waste can be buried and you just have to stay a few hundred miles away". There is more to it than that. (apart than CO2 moving to you probably being a good thing, because then you can trap it)
You can't have this both ways. Either CO2 is the most dangerous waste and must be dealt with severely, or it is not.
>When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense.
Solar and wind are going to require billions of dollars for the same output as well, plus additional lithium mines for batteries since the sun doesn't shine every day (and reprocessing when the cells run out), plus those who are going to get killed in construction/maintenance (roof work is dangerous). We've just externalized the consequences for some of that since we don't bother to tax products based on how badly the source country destroys the environment through the manufacture of the product.
Life creates waste, and it's time to accept that reality; you won't get a perfect solution so maybe it's time to start accepting merely good ones instead. Saving the environment is too important to wait.
Numbers. Show numbers. Without numbers you have said NOTHING.
The idea that uranium mining requires tremendous amounts of anything compared to the alternatives is ludicrous simply by the physical fact that there are 938 MW*days of energy in every kilogram of natural uranium. That's 2 million times more energy per mass than any chemical fuel, and that results in a very small mining requirement compared to anything else to power humanity at world-scale.
Sure we do: reprocess it, like every country except the US that uses nuclear power does. The only reason the US doesn't is stupid politics.
The US decision to not get the government pushing reprocessing was the correct one. You will notice that after Reagan lifted Carter's ban on reprocessing, no commercial firms here jumped into the market. That's because it's not economically justified.
I don't think burying waste anytime soon at Yucca Mountain is economically justified either, by the way.
Another super-reasonable thing to do with nuclear waste is burying it in large salt deposits or deep crystalline bedrock. Both are actually totally reasonable and practical solutions. People just go nuts though when you talk about it.
> No. Nuclear power creates the most dangerous waste known to mankind and we have no way of mitigating or eliminating it.
Nuclear waste is incredibly well controlled, unlike waste from solar, wind or fossil. Most Western countries didn't have contamination from civil nuclear waste at all and specially not in the last 30 years. Civilian Nuclear waste has basically killed nobody.
Calling it the 'most dangerous' is nonsense.
> Nuclear isn't cost effective on an ongoing operating basis (compared with natural gas).
Nothing is as cheap as natural gas in the US. Specially don't just look at creation but also the grid, the end to end price.
Nuclear on mass scale is very competitive and has been proven to be able to replace fossil fuels on large scales. South Korea and China can produce very competitive nuclear reactors and we could do the same in the West. France did it in the 70/80 with 1960s tech.
Nuclear has the massive advantage of being able to replace coal plants directly without redesigning the countries or even continents grid. These cost (and others) are always ignored when solar advocates claim of low dispatch cost.
> When you add the costs of closing and "cleaning up" a plant site, which run into the billions of dollars for each plant, nuclear just doesn't make sense.
Cleanup for any modern plants in the West are already part of the dispatch price. It takes a while to clean up, but the overall land use of nuclear is still 100/1000x smaller then anything else.
> Nuclear is far from "carbon neutral." The process of extracting uranium from the earth uses tremendous amounts of heavy equipment, but the carbon outputs from mining (and cleanup) are never mentioned anywhere in order to sustain the "clean power" myth.
This is another failure in understanding scale. Uranium mining is not very heavy in terms of equipment compared other mining. Furthermore Uranium has a far higher energy density then anything else we could mine for energy. Solar, Wind and literally everything else involves far more mining and far more 'gray CO2' in the production.
Nothing is zero carbon but nuclear is easily the closest thing we have. No other form of energy has a lower land use, lower resource use and produces less CO2. These are well established facts, however much anti-nuclear advocates want to ignore it.
One hand full of uranium is enough for a whole human live inclusive transportation heating and so on. Now compare this to the literal mountain of solar panels that would have to be produced (and the resource mined).
1.1 billion hectares of land are farmed to feed the 7.5 billion people. That works out to 2000 square meters per person.
World energy consumption (all sources) runs about 18 terawatts, or 2400 watts per person. That is 58kWhr per day. Using an insolation factor of 3.0 (that is a 1W solar panel averages 3Whrs per day) each person will require 20kW of solar panels to replace ALL sources of energy. That is about 100 square meters of panels per person.
That's a lot, but not unthinkable. You could buy 8 pallets of panels today for $13k and cover a person, and it only takes 5% as much land as the land used to feed that person.
But now I know that Chernobyl was a ridiculously poor design that lacked a containment dome. If you want to build another Chernobyl I'll fight you, but if you want to build a modern plant or research MSRs I'm all for it, because climate change is set to do way worse than anything nuclear has ever done, Chernobyl included.
That's assuming we're happy to think we have a power problem, not an an energy problem. Anti-solar types (who similarly conflate PVC with solar thermal) like to mix or muddle those. Fission apologists who think that because Lithium is mined, then mining Uranium should be just fine, also seem keen to blunt some semantic nuances.
Nuclear fission's time has been and gone - it's great for bombs, and was an interesting experiment, but the costs are way higher than anyone should reasonably expect to pass onto future generations.
(Plus they snuck in that nasty 'metric ton' construct. 1000kg is a tonne.)
First, the demand for energy is only a small fraction of numerous ways the planet is being compromised - irrevocably. Satisfying all energy demands worldwide cleanly will not "save the planet".
Second, carbon-free is completely different than being clean energy. The byproducts (generally leaking radioactive waste) are significant, highly toxic, and long-lasting. While the emissions of fossil fuels is considered, other cleaner alternatives are not.
Third, the demand for energy is, for the most part, contrived. We are sold on the ideas of the need for one car for each person, the need for cars to travel in the first place, whole house heating and cooling, electrical solutions to simple manual tasks, etc ad infinitum. We could massively reduce energy needs by using low-power and no-power solutions.
The idea that nuclear waste 'leaks' anything is absurd and defiantly not generally true.
While of course the output is toxic, its also highly controlled and does not come into contact with anything.
Its long lasting but it also contains lots of useful stuff that, if we continue to use nuclear power and other nuclear byproducts will turn very valuable.
> Third, the demand for energy is, for the most part, contrived. We are sold on the ideas of the need for one car for each person, the need for cars to travel in the first place, whole house heating and cooling, electrical solutions to simple manual tasks, etc ad infinitum. We could massively reduce energy needs by using low-power and no-power solutions.
Sure if you forced everybody how you would like to live then we could do a lot. The idea that we should artificially restrict peoples energy needs as a way to save the plant just so we can avoid the very minor issue of nuclear waste is absurd.
While I view nuclear power relatively favorably, this is an extremely rose-tinted view of the situation. Nuclear waste can and does leak.
The vast majority of problems facing the planet can be solved given extremely cheap energy:
- Need clean drinking water? Simply desalinate ocean water if you have enough energy.
- Need clean air? Various catalytic converters can remove most and in many cases all harmful molecules, they just cost energy.
- Need to sequester carbon? Sure we know how to do it, provided you have enough energy.
- Need to feed the world? We already grow enough food, the main problem is transportation of that food. Again, easy with enough energy and electric vehicles.
