Unfortunately we still need tunable baseline power in order to keep current, voltage, and frequency within the grid’s margin or error. Our options for that are: situationally available (and often environmentally problematic) hydro, fossil fuels, nuclear, and/or giant toxic/fire-prone battery banks.
Comment on First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled
agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 1 year ago
Well, who would have thunk? Expensive nuclear energy is not viable, if holding a blue sheet of sand towards the sky produces power for like half the price.
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 1 year ago
You forgot hydrogen, saltwater batteries, proper grids, biogas, etc.
If you’d use nuclear power like that, you’d drive up the costs even more, because it’s just not very viable to compete with solar and wind during the day. Better to just invest in proper storage solutions.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 1 year ago
Would geothermal work? I can’t think of any particular reason that the heat of the earth should vary much with time (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong in this assumption), and energy production should be more controllable because to my understanding it generally just makes steam for a turbine like more traditional power sources.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Geothermal is really expensive in most parts of the world. It costs a lot of money to drill deep enough and to have enough capacity.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Plasma deep drilling is starting to hit the market which should make geothermal available pretty much everywhere. The sad thing about geothermal is that it’s not even used in areas where you do have heat near the surface, the reason is that geology is quite unpredictable and every borehole is a crap-shoot between hitting the jackpot and having to pay damages out of your arse because people’s houses collapse. Deep drilling has none of those issues.
oyo@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Out of those you listed, nuclear is the least flexible in terms of output regulation. PV with batteries is the most flexible.
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Hydro is definitely the least flexible. Those gate move slow.
oyo@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Hydro is often turned on and off as pumped storage. Nuclear never is
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Running frequency regulation of batteries is a silly idea, that’s more capacitor range. Also, flywheels, which is how fossil fuels do it anyway.
scratchee@feddit.uk 1 year ago
If it was a matter of half the price then nuclear would be the clear winner. Paying double to get stable power rather than variable power is currently a clear win.
Nuclear has a lot of baggage on top of being more costly (eg public fears, taking a lot longer to get running, building up big debts before producing anything, and having a higher cost risk due to such limited recent production), if it was just a simple “pay twice the price and you never need to worry about the grid scale storage” then nuclear would be everywhere.
agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 1 year ago
It’s been a while since I looked it up, but back then the projected price of SMR energy was about double the cost of current solar.
I’m not sure, if that changed much over the last month.
Anyway, wind, solar and hydro combined can produce energy pretty inexpensively. The power grid isn’t exactly simple with nuclear reactors either, so it’s not like you’re winning that much from this perceived reduction of complexity.
scratchee@feddit.uk 1 year ago
I’m certainly not arguing nuclear is a panacea that everyone in all the governments have somehow missed (even ignoring the risks mentioned its only a potential fit for a relatively thin slice of the grid these days).
The point I’m making is that currently there are energy production needs we effectively can’t fulfil with renewables because the costs would be impractical. Some of those do fit nuclear better currently. Nobody really cares about that though for 2 reasons: 1. There’s plenty of opportunities that renewables still can fill and 2. The cost of storage is projected to drop a lot over time, which should fill in the gaps and squeeze out many of the last opportunities for nuclear.
Quite possibly by the end the remaining slice where nuclear could fit will be so thin it can’t actually sustain an industry (and given the industry has been half dead for decades, it’d take a big win to justify reviving it), so yeah, at the moment it looks like lots of risks and questionable rewards. Nonetheless the current prices aren’t really the problem, it’s just that things are risky, and projected to get worse over time, so why invest?
Ironically it’s not that different to the fossil fuel industry, just with a lot less existing infrastructure.
sh00g@kbin.social 1 year ago
One massive point that most people are completely blind to is that with energy considerations we are aggressively pursuing two very different goals that in many regards are directly at odds with one another.
The first goal is electrification, which can largely be accomplished by increasing renewables, investing in battery technology, etc. But in the US, we have also been accommodating the desire for electrification by massively increasing natural gas capacity.
The second goal is decarbonization. This requires us to also nix natural gas from the equation at some point. In addition to the problems others have already mentioned (like the fact that renewables aside from hydro are not viable base load power options right now), there is a significant chunk of our energy infrastructure that simply cannot be satisfied in any regard purely with renewables. Like the huge number of industrial processes that need process heat to achieve their end product.
So the best solution is energy portfolio diversity. We can steadily continue to phase out heavy polluters for electrification, but if we want to truly decarbonize, industry demands a solution that can still produce high heat without emissions. Nuclear is a woefully under-exploited technology in that regard, but it is potentially a great solution.
Greyghoster@aussie.zone 1 year ago
The SMNR format suffers from being small and therefore difficult to be cost effective and that renewables are 4 times as cheap. Not easy to make money in this environment. cleantechnica.com/…/nuclear-energy-free-market-ca…
scratchee@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Yeah, one justification I’d heard was that it was a cheap and low risk way to revive the industry enough for bigger projects, but I’m not sure that’s particularly compelling.
Greyghoster@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Sounds like a very expensive argument to invest billions on the hope that something might happen 😬. Hope it’s not my money.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
The last US nuclear plant built went seven years behind schedule and seventeen billion over budget.
That sets a large amount of weariness in everyone to commit to making another, unfortunately.
oyo@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Yeah the poster above you is wrong. Solar is WAY less than half the price.
scratchee@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Yes, especially right now. To be fair that’s mostly because solar is doing great as far as scale goes right now. Nuclear has near zero scale and lost all experience, so it’s more expensive than ever.