Yes, blackouts are cheaper than electricity.
>The second point is that renewables today have become so cheap that in many cases they are below the basic operating costs of nuclear power plants.
Prohibiting new plants by law has a way of doing that, with aging mechanisms that fail catastrophically instead of being gracefully shut down in favor of new ones.
And his explanation isn't to justify these claims, but to blame political opponents. Sad!
Texas has demonstrated that you can have blackouts and expensive at the same time if only you cut enough regulations.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/how-and-why...
Multiple examples of problems were given for France, yet the French government likes nuclear power.
Notice how they're right on the river right upstream from St. Louis.
But we also had much worse things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weldon_Spring_Ordnance_Works (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5670478/), Sauget Superfund (https://old.post-gazette.com/pg/06276/727066-28.stm), Monsanto Headquarters, https://www.builtstlouis.net/ammo.html
Now I live in Seattle. I'd much rather that Callaway plant was where the Handford site is than have the Hanford Site there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/longstaff1/
>Uranium mining facilities produce tailings that generally are disposed of in near surface impoundments close to the mine. These tailings pose serious environmental and health risks in the form of Randon emission, windblown dust dispersal and leaching of contaminants including heavy metals and arsenic into the water.
https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201052/
Nuclear energy still requires fuel. The impacts and costs from mining operations and refining should be taken into account when comparing to other energy sources. They are part of it. Nuclear energy can't exist without it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_mine_drainage
[2]: https://copperalliance.org.uk/knowledge-base/education/educa...
https://www.copper.org/publications/newsletters/innovations/...
And nuclear plants in general would also need to be factored in.
As well as the nickel used in corrosion proof alloys needed in nuclear facilities.
https://nickelinstitute.org/about-nickel/nickel-alloys-in-oi...
If you are going to make that argument, then you need to make the same about the materials and fuels involved in other electricity generation methods as well, and things get complicated rather quickly e.g. offshore turbines use a fair amount of neodymium and dysprosium, thin-film solar panels need tellurium, cadmium, and indium, … and many of these rare earths or elements are either often contaminated with radioactive elements (which end up in tailings) or are produced as part of (and ecologically indistinguishable from) other mining operations e.g. tellurium from copper and cadmium from zinc.
I clearly made up the numbers, just curious.
Pollution isn't always a thing you can measure on a scale from bad to less bad. There's long term systemic effects from the countless contaminants released by industries around the world we barely have any idea about.
I realize economic models, and fairly frighteningly, increasingly ecological models require easy to work with numbers that can be compared and contrasted to analyse cost vs benefit, but the real world does not work that way.
Furthermore, unlike copper, steel and other metals, uranium can't currently be recycled.
See my previous post
Coming from a cold, dark country with long and cloudy winters and no oceanic coast, it drives me mad when people point at the Med or California and say “look how cheap solar and wind is”.
I’m not, like many Polish people are, pro coal and climate change denier, just saying we can’t solve global warming on the assumption of Californian weather.
Two sorts of grid storage batteries: Elon Must has made Lithium batteries work on grid scale. Flow batteries or fuel cells, are probably more economic. And then there is pumped hydro
EVs have a big capacity. Not industrial sized and with clear limitations (at 08:00 it needs to be charged in order to bring you to work), but all together, having every car in future being a storage, makes for a huge buffer.
Edit: removed first sentence.
There is absolutely no comparison to long term storage of nuclear waste and discarded solar panels.
Well, crush 100 acre of solar panels, put them in a landfill near a river, and tell me if cadmium, lead and mercury taste good and have a good effect on the fauna around. I'm not talking about batteries here.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041201...
https://goodelectronics.org/chinese-workers-demand-compensat...
The meme is that nuclear waste produced so far amounts to 'a football field worth' or some similar framing. But you could fit the entire earth into a football field if you're prepared to go quite deep. It's a deliberate trick to make it seem like a non-issue, and deflects from the serious challenge that is long-term handling of nuclear waste. Plus, this is the size of the problem if we stop tomorrow, just the amount produced in the 50 years nuclear power has been up and running. So you must multiply not only by the length of time to be stored but also future projections for continued operation. If you try and project that out to a rolling total, assumming you keep the level of waste production at it's current level and no greater, it's an enourmous quantity.
Then there's looking at how well we're progressing with permanent, safe sequestration of existing nuclear waste. Not very well - There have only ever been three sites in the world for permanent waste disposal and only one of them is operating today (WIPP in the USA). The other two in Germany closed many years ago, and are costing billions in ongoing remediation costs as it turns out 'permanent' didn't pan out as well as hoped. Of course, no nations are accepting waste produced by other nations as that would be a political nightmare, and so each country is left to work out a plan on it's own.
The USA has shut down something like 30 plants so far, but of those only about 10 have so far been decommissioned. Of those, about half were truly decommed and most of the rest were put in to the SAFSTOR programme, where they are left to decay for up to 60 years. Theory is they'll be a bit cheaper to decommission after that time, and the funds to decomm them up-front are not available. A handful opted for a third option of entombing the reactor in situ.
Personally, I think this article raises great points. If we could rewrite history and have built a thriving nuclear power industry 20 years ago, we'd probably be in much better shape now, at least with respect to climate change
But that's not what happened. Given the current state of the industry we can't afford to spend decades trying to right the technical and regulatory wrongs of the past now that renewables are becoming truly viable.
France did that. It is not perfect but I would call it a success. France CO2 emissions are low [1], electricity is affordable, and suffered no major accident. France is even able to recycle nuclear fuel, and is generally among the world leaders of everything nuclear.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?s...
When you ignore the glaring problems with renewables? Sure... but why pay attention to rare earth minerals needed, massive problems creating massive amounts of PV panels, recycling issues, etc
We can't afford to let the burgeoning "savior" of our world continue on it's destructive path because the Religion of Renewables won't admit to the fact that it's Priests are doing bad things with children...
To many aspects and conversations turn into religious debates. PC? SJWs? Climate Change? Anti-Nuclear/Pro-Renewable? (or vice versa on all of them) all turn into religious debates with people who refuse to look at both sides of very complex issues.
However, it's extremely difficult to determine how much of this expense is necessary vs. due to over-regulation or lack of innovation. It's easy to say that some regulations on nuclear power are probably unnecessary (cf. widespread nuclear paranoia); it's much harder to say which. It's easy to say that new kinds of reactors might be cheaper; it's harder to say what kind or how much cheaper.
ReBCO-stabilized fusion on the horizon throws another wrench in the prediction machine, as well. Who knows what that's worth? It was invented yesterday!
What's basically needed to bring the cost of nuclear down is scale, investing more in production. This is why new approaches to mass producing small scale reactors is so interesting. It should allow nuclear to get competitive with renewables, and having a diverse energy base is definitely a good thing.
Also, fusion holds the most hope for massively decreasing the cost of energy. It's a game changer, and it's close. It's possible that fusion allows things like mass carbon capture, powering reforestation efforts, and more.
The sheer capital intensity of nuclear is what hampers innovation, not safety regulations.
> every euro invested in new nuclear power plants makes the climate crisis worse because now this money cannot be used to invest in efficient climate protection options.
This is a weak argument.
The article makes a good point, which is that renewable costs in some countries are lower than nuclear operating costs. But this alone does not justify the claim that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse.
Then the article delves into politicking. I get the feeling that that was the original intended goal of the piece.
It is very clear that the sum is strongly positive, even with increasing uncertainty in the later points. The case is solid even if one or two sub-arguments turned out to have holes.
Huge decommissioning costs are always neglected in any argument promoting nukes.
As thoroughly bad as the argument is for building nukes, and even for continuing to operate existing nukes, the value proposition for Tokamak fusion is thousands of times worse. The only plausible explanation for continued work on them is as a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population available to draw upon for weapons projects. Nothing else could make a lick of sense. Spending on Tokamak is thus deeply irresponsible.
Spending money on fusion research will unlock humanities next energy supply for when/where solar isn't viable.
Fusion power has been hampered by the way it's been approached )massive slow moving projects) but is inevitably going to come to fruition given enough time and money and when it does it will likely displace most other energy sources.
Could be if it delays or prevents addressing the real roots of the problem such as overpopulation and extreme lack of energy conservation.
Fukushima is nature's way of reminding us to conserve or live to regret it eventually.
No one has yet been able to even locate the still-molten fuel, I know its only been 10 short years and it's not supposed to be easy or even possible with today's limited nuclear technology. Good thing it has such a long half-life so there's plenty of time remaining to figure this out over the next 24,000 years. As all engineers know, when deadlines are too short it can lead to unaddressed consequences.
Regardless since the nuclear option exists there will always be a significant faction of enthusiasts who will die eventually without regretting it at all.
Most regrets will occur in a future these enthusiasts (or anybody else) can not accurately visualize, but it doesn't matter to them anyway.
The article starts with proper framing. You must think in terms of lifetime capital costs and opportunity cost. Then it chooses numbers selectively to make the argument stronger than it is. Nuclear and renewable energy production can't be compared directly with price per kWh.
Nuclear energy is 24/7 from the start. Currently Nuclear/coal/gas provides base load that enables cheap renewables (base load is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time. Day, week, months)
Supplying same base load with renewables means energy production + large scale energy storage + grid investments. You need overcapacity in production and the grid to even out time and geographical variability of renewables.
I have not seen any honest cost comparison that counts in everything.
> It would often even be affordordable to pay 1 – 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity storage in addition to the generation costs for wind and solar power and still be below the operating costs of nuclear power plants. And here we have to ask the same question: How many emissions can I avoid with one euro, one dollar or one yuan?
I read that as meaning there is probably enough margin in the renewable cost to actually make money while storing electricity in batteries from wind and solar and selling it as a price below what nuclear costs to keep running. Unfortunately I am having trouble translating 1-1.5 cents/Kwhr to the current price of battery storage tech, and this doesn’t factor in the costs of creating these batteries at scale either, but the argument does say that’s likely to be cheaper.
Arguments for all other forms of renewables at scale right now seem to depend on having/maintaining fossil fuel power generation just to satisfy daily demand reliably, so you end up with two sets of power generation infrastructure designed to meet peak capacity (so effectively double capacity of what’s needed), which is extraordinarily expensive.
Advocacy for non-hydro renewables requires heaping doses of “hope” that new technologies will be developed one day to deprecate the side-by-side ff power-generation.
That hope and risk has to be priced in to the comparisons with nuclear for supplying electric grids, or the debate isn’t “nuclear vs renewables” it’s “nuclear vs. (renewables + fossil fuel generation)”. At that point it even makes sense to think of “nuclear vs. (renewables + nuclear)”.
If you want the cost of CO2 and its global impact priced into using fossil fuels, perhaps that’s what the cost of nuclear should be compared to.
$3T would buy 200 GW of nuclear power plants, about 3% of what's needed.
0: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-pow...
There are quite some solar-thermal installations of >100MW, which store solar energy in a thermal buffer to later convert this to electrical power, creating an effective 24/7 stable supply of power, weather permitting.
> Arguments for all other forms of renewables at scale right now seem to depend on having/maintaining fossil fuel power generation just to satisfy daily demand reliably, so you end up with two sets of power generation infrastructure designed to meet peak capacity (so effectively double capacity of what’s needed), which is extraordinarily expensive.
I'm by no means an expert on this but I've been trying to learn more about it recently. From what I gather the end-state can be 100% renewables in different ways:
1) Have enough hydro that can be turned into pumped storage that a complete grid mix can be done with just hydro+solar+wind with very little overbuild. Portugal has very good conditions for this and back of the envelope calculations tell me it's possible with just 15% overbuild. All of the extra is solar which is very cheap[1]. With a better interconnected European grid it may be possible to do that across the whole continent.
2) Overbuild solar and wind by a large amount since they're so cheap, supplement that with some expensive batteries, and allow energy prices to go to zero and even negative at times to see if anyone has a use for the excess energy. We're talking something like 3-5x overbuild and then having so much excess energy that you start disrupting other fossil fuel usage[2].
If you have a seasonal storage breakthrough you're back at 1) with just another technology in place of hydro. Financing hydrogen generation seems to me like picking winners within 2). Both scenarios can be supplemented if shaping demand can be made at scale. Things like heating buildings and charging EVs can be shifted a few hours during the day without much inconvenience and possibly allow shaving off some important peaks.
Most of this discussion would be avoided if we just put a steadily increasing price on carbon, remove all other subsidies, and let the market shake things out.
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UTUjhrBF04MP38b4WlQx...
[2] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/585c3439be65942f022bb...
If we forgo nuclear power the only other currently viable carbon free, stable, energy source is hydro power, which has huge environmental costs and immense public resentment/push back. For example look at the James bay hydro project[1]. 11,500 km2 of land flooded, intense protest from the Cree and other first nations as well as conservation groups, increases in mercury levels in fish populations, etc. Expanding hydro power enough to handle base load energy use is unlikely, due to the above costs and push back.
So if we can't expand hydro or nuclear then we have to go all in on wind and solar plus grid storage. We could use pumped hydro but that brings about many of the same costs/problems as hydro power. That leaves us with over building wind and solar, and adding huge amounts of transmission lines and batteries to account for the variability. Add in the switch from ICE cars to electric and the amount of new metals needed is going to be immense.
I've also noticed that every time a new transmission line or mine is purposed in the United States their is immense push back from environmental and conservation groups, and from the public as a whole. For examples of this look at the fight over adding new transmissions lines in southern Wisconsin[2] or the intense opposition to mining the Duluth complex[3] in northern Minnesota[4]. The Duluth complex is the largest untapped copper and nickel resource in the world and Polymet has been trying to get permits for well over a decade to mine. Copper and nickel are greatly needed for renewable energy and batteries, and it could still be another 4 or 5 years if it ever happens.
Not using nuclear energy is just going to massively exacerbate the transmission line and mining problems as well as increase the prices of renewable energy. Wind and solar is "cheap" because we don't factor in the added transmission lines, and natural gas peaker planets needed to currently make it happen. Also many of the groups pushing for wind and solar + batteries also happen to be against adding additional mines and transmission lines required to make it happen, and honestly you cant really blame them, mines can pollute local water supplies and transmission lines are ugly.
All and all a balanced approach is probably the cheapest and most viable path forward, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, grid storage all working together on the grid.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project
[2]: https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/cardina...
[3]: http://www.miningminnesota.com/duluth-complex/
[4]: https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2020/06/polymet-copper-nickel-...
Nuclear being too expensive is the main point of this article. That seems upsetting to a lot of nuclear proponents. But I don't see a lot of arguments to counter that core point.
Nuclear the most expensive option in the German market. This is a completely uncontroversial fact. You can verify it in countless publications. You can argue whether it is 3x more expensive (according to the article) or a maybe a bit more when you consider all the hidden cost. IMHO 3X actually a very friendly assessment considering bids for solar and wind are trending very much below the cited cost in the article by about 2-5x. The point is that it is expensive by a quite significant factor.
I don't get your argument about mining. Yes policy making in the US is a problem (hence the Texas situation a few weeks ago). Nuclear does not solve that political mess; it just adds to it. I don't think the US is actually capable at this point of building nuclear cheaply. There are just too many stakeholders drooling over the multi billion $ budgets for that ever to make sense economically. And in any case the glacial decision making ensures it will be too little too late even if they by some miracle stick to budgets, which I would argue is pure fantasy. Too little, too late, for way too much is not what the world needs.
As for Germany, nuclear is their only CO2-free base load power option, so comparing costs to solar that only works when sun shines isn't apt. A good winter storm and tidal, wind and solar are out for hours - what do you do then? Coal? Gas? Or just have nuclear for base to start with? And yes, one day there could be massive grid-scale storage, maybe.
Nothing wrong with pointing out issues/costs with nuclear, in fact it's good to point out the issues with nuclear so it can be properly weighed. I'm just trying to point out issues/costs of only using renewables, so we can weigh those as well.
> Nuclear being too expensive is the main point of this article. That seems upsetting to a lot of nuclear proponents. But I don't see a lot of arguments to counter that core point.
I think your missing the point. If you ran your entire grid on just solar and wind, no nuclear, or coal or natural gas peaker plants, you'll find that wind and solar is no longer cheap, and is much less resilient to exceptional circumstances.
> I don't get your argument about mining.
My point about mining is, our current course to fighting climate change relies entirely on mining, were making the switch from the Oil and Gas industry to the Mining industry for our energy and transportation markets. This change is going to have huge impacts on the world, mines are quite capable polluters of the local environment, setting up mines in developed countries can take a decade or more, which is the same problem nuclear plants face. Mining is also quite controversial for many good reasons, so there is significant push back from locals and environmental groups whenever and wherever a mine is proposed. All of this means a huge portion on mining takes places in countries with lax environmental and or human rights standards, which just exacerbates the problems.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power...
That's interesting, I didn't know that. Where can I read more about this?
Saul Griffith has been making the same points.
TLDR: Based on opportunity costs and urgency, renewable generation capacity is both much quicker and cheaper.
However, we must also invest (R&D) in next generation nuclear. eg micro reactors and liquid sodium. And hope like hell that any of the 50 long shot bets wins biggly. Because we're still going to need it.
https://grist.org/energy/the-cost-of-germany-going-off-nucle...
There's nothing independent about this clown
Because nukes have stagnated for close to half a century. Bit of a head slapper.
Nabla's comment is a good start on the conversation (good frame but no real apples to apples comparisons).
Personally, with the talk about "what about all that nuclear waste"...
where's the talk about the recyclable waste? Batteries, solar panels, wind mills are all very hard to recycle and add "after the fact" costs like nuclear does that's being unaccounted for - and is happening at a MUCH larger scale currently.
Where's the talk about all the "rare earth minerals" that's going to have to be strip mined around the world to keep up with "clean energy"?
I think this article has some valid points wrapped up in talking points to strengthen its argument while ignoring massive talking points that go unmentioned (True comparisons of costs, storage/recycling of materials and the massive increase in "plundering" Earth goes unmentioned... to name a few).
Edit: Not saying I'm "pro nuclear" or "anti renewable"... I'm more of a balanced approach person - I think the future will include Coal, Gas, Nuclear, Solar, hydro and various mixes there-of and we need to work on making all of them better because none of them are going anywhere any time soon - and they ALL have strengths and weaknesses.
https://fee.org/articles/the-environmental-costs-of-renewabl...
> Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.
https://www.futurity.org/nuclear-waste-recycling-2355402-2/
New, better ways of recycling Nuclear "waste" is being researched constantly
> A new simple, proliferation-resistant approach offers a way to reduce nuclear waste, researchers say.
https://fortune.com/2020/02/05/wind-turbine-fiberglass-landf...
> Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. It’s going to get worse: Most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23...
> The problem of solar panel disposal “will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment” because it “is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle.”
Everything the world creates is unprofitable to recycle except for aluminum soda cans. Compared to the average commercial waste, batteries, solar panels and wind blades are straightforward to recycle.
> Where's the talk about all the "rare earth minerals" that's going to have to be strip mined around the world to keep up with "clean energy"?
There's no talk because the commonly used batteries and solar panels don't contain any.
A lifepo4 battery consists of Lithium, Iron and Phosphate, all of which are abundant.
> about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years.
IOW, about 40,000 tonnes of waste. About the same amount of waste as a small town.
In the article, the interviewee didn't — he specifically talked about decommissioning costs.
Eventually we can probably figure out how to operate them for 50, then 100 years.
The downsides of this are much less than the potential downsides of excess CO2 in the atmosphere, which are civilization-ending.
What's your alternative? American Nuclear Fusion?
This kind of people aren't european, they worship america, and want us to depend more and more on their companies
I'm tired of hearing the same people saying we should exit nuclear energy, this is beyond crazy
renewables, sure
