Because there are nights there are winters there are cloudy and rainy days, and there are no batteries capable of balancing all of these issues. Also when you account for those batteries the cost is going to shift a bit. So we need to invest in nuclear and renewables and batteries. So we can start getting rid of coal and gas plants.
Comment on Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe
wewbull@feddit.uk 22 hours ago
$60k per MW or $210M for a nuclear reactors worth (3.5GW). Sure… the reactor will go 24/7 (between maintenance and refuelling down times, and will use less land (1.75km² Vs ~40km²) but at 1% of the cost, why are we still talking about nuclear.
(I’m using the UKs Hinckley Point C power station as reference)
Benaaasaaas@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 17 hours ago
Also when you account for those batteries the cost is going to shift a bit.
You better be bringing units if you’re going to be claiming this.
Still almost a third of the LCOE of nuclear when storage is added: statista.com/…/global-levelized-cost-of-energy-co…
Given that both solar and storage costs are trending downwards while nuclear is not, this basically kills any argument for nuclear in the future. It’s not viable on its face - renewables + storage is the definitive future.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
And cheaper solar and batteries permits cheaper Hydrogen which provides unlimited and 100% resilient renewable power, and still cheaper than nuclear.
suzune@ani.social 20 hours ago
But Germany has no space for nuclear waste. They haven’t been able to bury the last batch for over 30 years. And the one that they buried most recently began to leak radioactivity into ground water.
And… why give Russia more military target opportunities?
elucubra@sopuli.xyz 19 hours ago
I’m not a rabid anti-nuclear, but there are somethings that are often left out of the pricing. One is the exorbitant price of storage of spent fuel although I seem to remember that there is some nuclear tech that can use nuclear waste as at least part of it’s fuel (Molten salt? Pebble? maybe an expert can chime in). There is also the human greed factor. Fukushima happened because they built the walls to the highest recorded tsunami in the area, to save on concrete. A lot of civil engineering projects have a 150% overprovision over the worst case calculations. Fukushima? just for the worst case recorded, moronic corporate greed. The human factor tends to be the biggest danger here.
suigenerix@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
… there are somethings that are often left out of the pricing
Another example that gets skimmed over our ignored is the massive cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant. It typically ranges from $280 million to $2 billion, depending on the technology used. More complex plants can be up to $4 billion. And the process can take 15 to 30 years to complete.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
there is some nuclear tech that can use nuclear waste as at least part of it’s fuel
Those are less competitive, and salt reactor attempts have historically caused terminating corrosion problems. The SMR “promise” relies on switching extremely expensive/rare/dangerous plutonium level enriched fuel, that rely on traditional reactors for enrichment, for slightly lower capital costs.
Flatfire@lemmy.ca 19 hours ago
Not an expert, but molten salt reactors are correct. MSRs are especially useful as breeder reactors, since they can actually reinvigorate older, spent fuel using more common isotopes. Thorium in particular is useful here. Waste has also been largely reduced with the better efficiency of modern reactors.
Currently, Canada’s investing in a number of small modular reactors to improve power generation capacity without the need to establish entire new nuclear zones and helps take some of the stress off the aging CANDU reactors. These in particular take advantage of the spent fuel and thorium rather than the very expensive and hard to find Uranium more typically used. There’s been interest in these elsewhere too, but considering how little waste is produced by modern reactors, and the capacity for re-use, it feels pike a very good way to supplement additional wind and solar energy sources.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
If France can find space, surely Germany can.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
If Finland could find space, Germany definitely can.
frezik@midwest.social 5 hours ago
The batteries needed are a lot less than you might think. Solar doesn’t work at night and the wind doesn’t always blow, but we have tons of regional weather data about how they overlap. From that, it’s possible to calculate the maximum historical lull where neither are providing enough. You then add enough storage to handle double that time period, and you’re good.
Getting 95% coverage with this is a very achievable goal. That last 5% takes a lot more effort, but getting to 95% would be a massive reduction in CO2 output.
wewbull@feddit.uk 18 hours ago
You’re using factors of less than 10 to argue against a factor of 100.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
Also the budget and timeline is always understated, because otherwise government could withdraw funding if they don’t sink a little more cost into the budget every year.
frezik@midwest.social 21 hours ago
I think there’s a contingent of people who think nuclear is really, really cool. And it is cool. Splitting atoms to make power is undeniably awesome. That doesn’t make it sensible, though, and they don’t separate those two thoughts in their mind. Their solution is to double down on talking points designed for use against Greenpeace in the 90s rather than absorbing new information that changes the landscape.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
What isn’t sensible about nuclear? For context, I’m coming from the US in an area with lots of empty space (i.e. tons of place to store radioactive waste) and without much in the way of hydro (I’m in Utah, a mountainous, desert climate). We get plenty of sun as well as plenty of snow. Nuclear should provide power at night and throughout the winter, and since ~89% of homes are heated with natural gas, we only need higher electricity production in the summer when it’s hot, which is precisely what solar is great for.
So here’s my thought process:
- nuclear for base load demand to cover nighttime power needs, as well as the small percentage of homes using electricity for heat
- solar for summer spikes in energy usage for cooling
- batteries for any excess solar/nuclear generation
If we had a nuclear plant in my area, we could replace our coal plants, as well as some of our natural gas plants. If we go with solar, I don’t think we have great options for electricity storage throughout the winter.
itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 hours ago
Because it makes no sense, environmentally or economically speaking. Nuclear is, as you said, base load. It can’t adjust for spikes in demand. So if there’s more energy in the grid than needed, it’s gonna be solar and wind that gets turned off to balance the grid. Investments in nuclear thus slow down the adoption of renewables.
Solar is orders of magnitude cheaper to build, while nuclear is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity, even discounting the waste storage, which gets delegated the the public.
Battery technology has been making massive gains in scalability and cost in recent years. What we need is battery arrays to cover nighttime demand and spikes in production or demand, combined with a more adaptive industry that performs energy intensive tasks when it’s abundant. With countries that have large amounts of solar, it is already happening that during peak production, energy cost goes to zero (or even negative, as traded between utilities companies).
About the heating: gas can not stay the main way to heat homes, it’s yet another fossil fuel. What we need is heat pumps, which can have an efficiency of >300% (1kWh electricity gets turned into 3kWh of heat, by taking ambient heat from outside). Combined with large, well-insulated warm-water reservoirs, you can heat up more water than you need to higher temperature during times of electricity oversupply, and have more than enough to last you the night, without even involving batteries. Warm water is an amazing energy storage medium. Batteries cover electricity demand as well as a backup in case you need uncharacteristically much water. This is a system that’s slowly getting adopted in Europe, and it’s great. Much cheaper, and 100% clean.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
What we need is battery arrays
I absolutely agree. My support for nuclear is not instead of renewables, but in addition to it. Nuclear is a proven technology, and at least in the US, we have a lot of space where we can store waste relatively inexpensively (nobody’s going to care about a massive landfill in Nevada).
The problem with going for 100% renewables is that I don’t think we can really keep up with battery production, and if we push for dramatically increasing our energy storage capacity (whether that’s chemical batteries, pumped hydro, etc), it’s going to cost a ton to transition. Solar is cheaper than nuclear, but solar + battery backup currently is not, especially if it needs to run over the winter when solar generation is much lower.
I’m not saying we should stop installing battery-backed solar projects, but that we should add nuclear to the list. Our electricity demand will only continue to increase, so we need multiple solutions to replace coal and eventually natural gas. One of the major cost and time limitations for nuclear is construction, and that’s because we don’t build many of them. If we line up multiple plant projects at the same time, we can make better use of our engineering resources (it’s a lot easier to build 10 of something back to back than 10 of something months or years apart), which will make nuclear more attractive compared to other options.
gas can not stay the main way to heat homes
Agreed, and I’ve actually been looking into heat pumps for my own home. I already have an external AC unit, so theoretically the transition shouldn’t be that hard (air ducts already exist).
The problem is that, in my area, winters get pretty cold, and heat pumps are a lot less efficient at heating when it’s cold. The solution is to dig a deep hole to bury the heat exchangers so they get a more consistent temperature to maintain efficiency, and that’s a really expensive project for existing structures (not bad for new construction). The transition to heat pumps is going to be very slow because of that large upfront cost/poor efficiency in winter.
Even if this wasn’t an issue, there’s still the massive problem of existing electricity production (in my area) being fueled by coal and natural gas. If I switch to a heat pump, I may be polluting more than if I stuck with gas (it’s pretty close last I checked). My state (ignoring transportation) gets something like 1/3 of its energy from coal, about half from natural gas, and most of the rest comes from solar (and a little from wind). We need something to handle that base load supply, and installing batteries is going to be expensive (esp. since hydro isn’t really an option in our desert) and probably take many years regardless. Nuclear can be built today, and in my area, it can be built on the other side of a mountain range from the bulk of the population.
Warm water is an amazing energy storage medium
I doubt we have enough water here in the desert to handle that. We already have problems with our existing inconsistent water supply for regular users, locking up even more water is going to be a really tough sell.
frezik@midwest.social 5 hours ago
We also should consider HVDC lines. The longest one right now is in Brazil, and it’s 1300 miles long. With that kind of range, wind in Nebraska can power New York, solar in Arizona can power Chicago, and hydro all around the Mississippi river basin can store it all. We may have enough pumped hydro already that we might not even need batteries, provided we can hook it all up.
xthexder@l.sw0.com 16 hours ago
You bring up heated water as a method of storage, and it reminds me of a neighborhood in Alberta, Canada that uses geothermal + solar heated water storage for 52 homes. They’ve been able to successfully heat the entire neighborhood with only solar over the winter since 2015.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community
There’s a huge number of new storage technologies being developed, and the fact that some even work on a seasonal basis for long term storage is amazing.
Devorlon@lemmy.zip 21 hours ago
I’m very much in the first camp and need to remind myself whenever I think about arriving due nuclear
pastermil@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
but at 1% of the cost, why are we still talking about nuclear
Sure… the reactor will go 24/7 (between maintenance and refuelling down times, and will use less land
wewbull@feddit.uk 5 hours ago
The land thing isn’t anywhere near enough of a concern for me, especially when dual uses of land are quite feasible.
24/7 is just about over commissioning and having storage. Build 10x as much and store what you generate. At those sorts of levels even an overcast day generates.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Using the remaining 99% of the cost to bury batteries underground would seem reasonable.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
Batteries can be containerized in modules, with a turnkey connection that remains mobile. Solar can use those containers as support structure. Hydrogen electrolyzer/fuel cells can also be built in same containers.
frezik@midwest.social 2 hours ago
Underground construction generally isn’t cost effective. It costs way more to get dirt and rock out of the way than just building a frame upwards. There might be other reasons to do it, but you want to avoid it if possible.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
The underground suggestion was only to counter the argument of space usage.
DogWater@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Because grid level power delivery is about FAR more than just raw wattage numbers. Momentum of spinning turbines is extremely important to the grid. The grid relies on generation equipment maintaing an AC frequency of 60 hz or 50hz or whatever a country decides on. Changing loads throughout the day literally and a resistance to the entire grid and it can drag the frequency down.
reliable consistent power delivery is absolutely critical when it comes to running the grid effectively and that is something that solar and wind are bad at
Ideally we will be able to use those technologies to fill grid level storage to supply 100% of our energy needs in the not to distant future but until then we desperately need large, consistent, clean power generation.
mindlesscrollyparrot@discuss.tchncs.de 4 hours ago
You aren’t wrong, but you are assuming that the grid is required. Solar panels can be installed at the point of use, and then the grid doesn’t come into it at all.
frezik@midwest.social 2 hours ago
That’s the worst way to do solar, though. It doesn’t get to take advantage of economies of scale in installation and inverters. Some levelized cost of energy studies put it just as expensive as nuclear.
Solar gets its cheapness when it’s in fields or on top of large, flat commercial/industrial buildings.
mindlesscrollyparrot@discuss.tchncs.de 2 hours ago
Do commercial/industrial buildings not require power then?
echodot@feddit.uk 13 hours ago
You have to have some base load it can’t be all renewable because renewables just aren’t reliable enough. The only way to get 100% reliability from solar for example would be to build a ring of panels around the equator (type 1 civilization stuff).
I would have order the options for base load nuclear is the least worst, at least until we can get Fusion online, but you know that’s always 20 years away.
wewbull@feddit.uk 5 hours ago
Storage. It’s all about storage. In exactly the same way that our water is handled. We have reservoirs to handle the times when natural water supply is low.
jagged_circle@feddit.nl 13 hours ago
That’s why we have hydro. Its a giant battery. We can also make synthetic methane.
We absolutely can do 100% renewable.
echodot@feddit.uk 10 hours ago
Hydro is great but it’s not clean it requires you to flood vast areas of land, it’s quite damaging to wildlife.
It is also highly situation dependent, you be quiet exactly the right kind of geography in order to be able to build hydro and then you require that there is no one living in the affected area otherwise it gets very expensive very quickly assuming you’re allowed to do it at all.
jagged_circle@feddit.nl 5 hours ago
I didn’t say hydro is perfect. It is renewable. And its a giant battery.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 21 hours ago
A MW of solar averages out to about .2 MW/h per hour. A MW of nuclear averages about .9 MW/h per hour.
But even so as the UK does it, nuclear power isn’t worth it. France and China are better examples since they both picked a few designs and mass produced them.
oyo@lemm.ee 2 hours ago
In many regions solar capacity factor is much higher than 20%; for example, the entire US. atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_pv
xthexder@l.sw0.com 16 hours ago
Maybe just use percentages instead of these weird units. 0.2 MHh per hour is just 0.2 MW, or 20%.
486@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
MW/h
There is MW which is a unit of power and then there is MWh which is a unit of energy, but what is MW/h supposed to mean?
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
Thanks for catching the typo.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 21 hours ago
Nuclear actually around 0.5 or 0.6, because 1/3 is always off for repair and control.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 21 hours ago
Maybe in the UK when each plants is basically unique instead of having improvements from all the previous iterations. In the US it’s around 92%. I don’t know how to search China or France’s numbers, but I suspect they’re similar or better.
noerdman@discuss.tchncs.de 21 hours ago
One percent.
One fucking percent.
One!!
dgmib@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
We can’t manufacture and install enough solar farms and storage to get us off of fossil fuel within 20 years and more importantly available investment capital isn’t the limiting factor.
Investments in nuclear power are not taking money away from investments in solar.
We can do both, and it gets us off fossil fuels sooner.
wewbull@feddit.uk 2 hours ago
This is interesting. Why do you think that?
I would disagree, because is see investment capital as finite. There are only so many investors able to operate at infrastructure scales. And therefore I see nuclear’s true cost as opportunity cost.
dgmib@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
From an investor perspective, solar farm projects are a slam dunk once they reach the point of being ready to purchase panels.
There are a lot of things to line up to build a grid-scale solar farm before you get to that point. You need to acquire (the rights to) the land, get permits to connect to the grid, which usually includes construction of the new transmission line to the grid. You need to line up panels from a manufacturer (who in turn has supply chains to manage), and labor to install it. And 100 other things. It typically takes a few years of planning, but get all that in order, but it’s a small percentage of the total expense of the project.
At the point you need to do the larger capital raise needed to buy the panels and hire the labour it’s a slam dunk. The project can be completed typically within 12-24 so there’s a quick process to get to generating revenue for investors, and because solar has gotten so cheap it doesn’t take long to see positive ROI. It’s not like electricity demand is going away either. It’s a very safe bet, once all the pieces are lined up, and not difficult to raise funds once you get to the point of needing the big money.
People on Lemmy/Reddit have this mental model that there’s a fixed budget for investment in the energy transition. If that was the case, then yes it would make sense to go all in on the cheapest technology option.
But that’s how it works. Energy projects are competing with the global market for investment capital and there’s no shortage of wealth wanting to throw money at a solar project because they’re low risk/high ROI.
Nuclear projects are a different story, long timelines from construction to revenue generation and high upfront capital costs make them unfavourable investments, they generally need government support to derisk the investment before investors jump on board. Which the governments are reluctant to do because they lack a mandate to do so from the populace. In part because of this mindset that nuclear investment impedes solar or wind investments.
frezik@midwest.social 2 hours ago
Total solar manufacturing capability has been increasing exponentially. So has wind, and so have various storage methods.
Yes, we can install enough.
dgmib@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Solar has been growing exponentially for the past decade or so, wind has not. Wind has run into supply chain limitations on rare earth metals such as neodymium and isn’t growing exponentially anymore.
It’s doubtful that solar will continue growing exponentially for the next 20 years but even if it does, that only gets us to the point of enough capacity to displace the ~17.9 PWh of electricity generated by fossil fuels in 2023.
To get off of fossil fuels we need to change everything else that’s burning fossil fuels too. That means every vehicle replaced with an EV, every gas furnace replaced with a heat pump. As we do that it’s going to 2-3x electricity demand.
The world burned 140 PWh worth of fossil fuels in 2023, and we only generated 1.6 PWh from solar power. That 1.6 is up from 1.3 PWh in 2022. A lot of that 140 PWh was wasted heat energy so we don’t need to get that high, but we still need to generate something in the area of 60-90 PWh of electricity annually to eliminate fossil fuels.
~4/5th of our energy still comes from fossil fuel, we have a long f’ing way to go. Even with the current exponential growth of solar we don’t get off of fossil fuels within 20 years, and that’s assuming global energy demand doesn’t increase.
Don’t take my word for it. Extrapolate the data yourself. Your rose coloured glasses aren’t helping.
bzah@discuss.tchncs.de [bot] 1 hour ago
That’s why we also need to reduce our use of pretty much everything. We can never reach zero fossil fuel used, unless we start by reducing the amount of stuff we buy/use, starting with things that currently use fossil fuels: cars, shipping, flights, plastics and so on.
Then we could use renewable energies only or nuclear only or a mix of both to power what is truly necessary for our lives.
frezik@midwest.social 1 hour ago
Except that this has actually been studied, and a future with Wind/Water/Solar (WWS) is completely viable without a single new megawatt of nuclear.
www.amazon.com/…/1009249541