And yet, after many decades of solar, wind construction. It is the energy source in that pie chart that is sizeable (just as much as all wind and solar) and extremely stable (probably for the last 50 years), without any major construction in the past 30 years minimum.
Comment on 40% of US electricity is now emissions-free
GooseFinger@lemmy.world 1 year agoWhy? Nuclear power is the most complex and expensive option of any clean energy source from what I know.
Eximius@lemmy.world 1 year ago
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
Wind/solar only ramped up in the last 10 years, not decades. That’s when they got cheap. Really cheap. It’s nuclear that had a huge head start.
IamtheMorgz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
To be fair, Plant Vogtle just turned on Unit 3 earlier this year and Unit 4 should be coming soon.
CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.work 1 year ago
That’s a good thing. It means lots of hours of well paying engineering and construction work.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nearly all of nuclear in the USA was built decades ago. Instead of being “paid off” and being cheaper, its still more expensive to generate electricity with nuclear than nearly all other electricity sources in the USA.
CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.work 1 year ago
I’m not sure what you are referencing, but there are good reasons why nuclear power is expensive: lots of engineering and construction hours, strick safety and quality standards for design and materials, and no externalities, since decommissioning and waste handling have to be accounted and baked into the final utility cost to consumers. In other words, even if it’s difficult to pay off a nuclear power plant (in a liberalized energy market of course) it’s still money well spent. The same requirements and expectations should have to apply to other industries as well.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Are you arguing its a “good thing” for existing built plants or for propose plants yet to be built? I wasn’t sure, but the result is the same for both. Nuclear is too expensive for what it provides in the face of better alternatives. I’m happy to back my statements with sources. Which position were you arguing?
ironeagl@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Nuclear is the most regulated one. Start requiring full recycling / disposal of solar or wind and how expensive do they get?
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nuclear is the most regulated: True. Accidents in nuclear have the most consequence, by far, of any generation source.
I would imagine that if we’re just going for disposal, solar and wind are still pretty cheap. With zero recycling wind turbine blades can just be buried after their 25 year life cycle. source.
Same landfill disposal option is available for solar panels at $1 to $5 per panel. source
This would be the level of disposal nuclear has, except low and high level nuclear waste is much more costly and potentially destructive even after disposal.
JamesFire@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s not significantly more expensive though. en.wikipedia.org/…/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
And even if it was, it has other benefits.
Like using significantly less land, and being safer.
It can also work as a source of heat for district heating or various industrial processes, and since the plants themselves have no emissions, they can be reasonably placed in cities for this purpose without harming people. Using heat directly is more efficient than converting it to and from electricity.
Nuclear has it’s place.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s not significantly more expensive though. en.wikipedia.org/…/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
I’m looking at that source it shows:
-nuclear $6,695-7,547 /kw -solar pv $1,327 /kw
At the most generous calculation that puts nuclear power at 5 x more expensive that solar PV. So if you have a theoretical pure electricity bill on solar PV of $100/month, your theoretical pure electricity bill on nuclear of $500/month.
I’m not sure how you reach the conclusion that nuclear is not significantly more expensive.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
modern gen 4 plants are MUCH simpler, foregoing PWR loop entirely in favor of liquid metal/salt type reactors, with various different design choices that are all much simpler, and cheaper to build/maintain.
If we see actual development in that field it’s not hard to imagine them playing with the fossil fuels, possibly renewables as well given the base load productivity, and relative lack of waste.
FireTower@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nuclear power is good for its consistent output that’s independent of outside factors like wind, clouds, or drought. Plus much of the cost of nuclear is tied with the construction of the plant not the operating costs, so a paid off plant isn’t particularly expensive.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I wish that were true. Nuclear plants built in the 60s and 70s (but still operating today) was losing money in Ohio. So the power companies bribed the Republican Ohio Speaker of the House $60 million dollars to pass a law that citizens have to pay extra fees totally over $1 billion dollars to power plants so that power companies can make a profit on nuclear. The bill was passed, and signed into law by the governor of Ohio, and years passed before the investigation found the bribery scandal.
That former Ohio Speaker of the House was sentenced to 20 years in prison finally.
The bad bribed-passed law is still on the books in Ohio and citizens are still paying extra to artificially make nuclear profitable for the power company. Here’s just a small source for the whole sorted story..
So no, even old built nuclear power plants are still more expensive that nearly all other electricity sources in the USA.
ironeagl@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
They’ve had to keep upgrading them - the percentage of nuclear is the same, but no new plants have been built, so that extra power has come from research on how close to the red line they can actually run.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
New reactors just came online in Georgia this year. A $15 billion dollar planned project that cost $30 billion with overruns.
So new or old, nuclear is really expensive electricity.
DanglingFury@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Besides maybe coal
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
That consistent output isn’t as useful as you think. Solar and wind are ridiculously cheap, so we would want to use them when they’re available. That means winding down nuclear plants when those two spin up. I’m turn, that means those initial construction costs you mentioned aren’t being efficiently ammortized over the entire life of the plant.
What we can do instead is take historical sun and wind data for a given region, calculate where the biggest trough will be, and then build enough storage capacity to cover it. Even better, aim for 95% coverage in the next few years, with the rest taken up by existing natural gas. There’s some non-linear factors involved where getting to 100% is a lot harder than 95%.
CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.work 1 year ago
This is the trap. The fossil fuel industry has co-opted wind and PV solar by way of filling in the gaps and transitioning to net zero emissions. Of course, the gaps will always be there and the transition will never complete and “net zero” seems to just leave the door open on fossil fuels forever.
Nuclear power, on the other hand, has the reliability that @FireTower@lemmy.world mentioned and it closes any of the gaps from wind and solar right up. You don’t have to quickly cut the power on a reactor if it’s sunny or windy, just divert it to hydrogen and ammonia production. Even if the efficient high temperature electrolysis tech isn’t ready yet, it doesn’t really matter since it’s emissions free. Furthermore, nuclear power produces good heat/steam to support cogeneration and various industrial processes.
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
Nonsense. Conservatives have brought up nuclear for decades as a way to play “gotcha” with anti-nuclear progressives. Maggie Thatcher, for example, embraced the science of climate change early on as a way to push nuclear. It was never serious, though. Always a political game that resulted in no new nuclear being built while coal and oil continued to ramp up.
GabberPiet@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The problem is that there are currently no good (cheap, scalable) technologies to store these large amounts of electrical energy.
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
There are several lines of storage research that only need to be ramped up to mass production at this point. Since stationary storage doesn’t have the weight restrictions that electric car batteries do, there are many different viable options. Flow batteries, sodium batteries, pumping water uphill, big tower of concrete blocks on pullies, hydrogen electrolysis, big ceramic block that gets hot. Some will work wherever, others are only viable in certain situations, but there are many options and we only need one of them to work at scale.
When nuclear tries to make improvements, it tends to do one thing per decade. If it fails, wait another decade to try the next thing. Last decade, it was the AP1000 reactor. It was hoped it would make a single, repeatable design that would avoid the boutique engineering that caused budget and schedule overruns in the past. Didn’t work out that way. This decade, it’s Small Modular Reactors. The recent collapse of the Utah project doesn’t give much hope for it.
Even if it does, it won’t be proven out before 2030. We’ll want to be on 90% clean electrical technology by then if we have even a hope of keeping climate change at bay. There is no longer a path with nuclear that could do so. Given project construction times, the clock ran out already.
iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com 1 year ago
Pumped hydro works well for storage, although it basically has the same problem as hydro power - it’s only available in places with water and elevation changes.
Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
If every home was a battery instead of an armory that would be a really cool redundant storage infrastructure. Likely not financially viable compared to centralized storage but it would be kind of cool if their was no immediate central reliance on power so any interruption in power generation could withstand say 1 week of storage reserves nation wide before outages started trickling off to support say hospitals, heating above 40 degrees, etc. Entirely too complicated I’m sure but just a neat thought I had after reading your comment.
oyo@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Even current lithium-based battery storage is already cheaper than nuclear.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 year ago
Don’t forget power companies can also work with smart thermostat manufacturers and car manufacturers to implement demand side tweaks to reduce power consumption. If they need to drop demand by some number of megawatts, they can adjust everyone’s thermostate by 1 degree temporarily and easily meet that need, or slow electric car charging by half a kilowatt. As long as there’s a manual override for users who need to charge right then or need to change the thermostat right then, this can easily make a significant dent in the variability of the grid with renewables
iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com 1 year ago
I totally agree with this. A lot of places have cheap electricity in off-peak hours, as a workaround to this limitation (steady output).
I think that this obsession about intermittent power comes partially from the idea that any new sources of power must be drop-in replacements for the systems that we’ve had for so many decades. However those systems run the way they do as an accident of technology, not because of a careful analysis and design to match optimal usage patterns.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I appreciate seeing a serious, well thought out comment posted from a lemmynsfw account!
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
im assuming by “winding down” you mean production of power? Not shutting down the plants, nuclear plants operate the most efficiently at high capacity factor, when they aren’t producing power the fuel is still decaying, thus you should be producing power for AS LONG as possible. This is why if you ever look at capacity factor >80% is really common, i’ve even seen >100% a couple of times, as well as the term “baseload plant” being used almost always in reference to nuclear.
That wouldn’t make sense for an existing nuclear plant, the nuclear plant should stay running in place of solar/wind. As you would be burning money actively otherwise, or you could just shut it down permanently, thats the other option.
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
Yes, running them at a lower level, and yes, that would be my point. You can run them down when renewable sources pick up, but that’s inefficient. Solar/wind don’t mix well with nuclear; you’re leaving something on the table if you try.
IamtheMorgz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The storage capacity is the hard part. Batteries aren’t really a viable option (we don’t really have good enough batteries, limits on how many can be made with current resources, etc).
Dams would be good (pump water uphill when electricity is cheap and release when you need the energy back), but dams are not a viable option everywhere and also have a high environmental impact and are arguably not the safest thing for a community.
I read somewhere recently about the idea of putting smaller batteries in individual homes, basically distributing the power ahead of time to a certain number of places so they are not taking from the grid in peak times, but it would be hugely expensive still, and I also question if we have the ability to make so many batteries, much less get enough people to install them.
frezik@midwest.social 1 year ago
We have plenty of options. Grid storage doesn’t have the same size and weight limitations that electric cars do, which opens up many more possibilities. Flow batteries are getting cranked up for mass production, and that’s probably all we need. Even if that doesn’t work out, there are other directions to go.
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Consistent output is certainly useful when you break down demand into a constant demand + variable demand. For instance, if demand is typically 200-350 kWh, you could build a nuclear plant to generate 200 kWh and constantly run while you meet the varying 0-150 kWh demand with wind and solar.
I will agree though that we need to run numbers on this to determine the best approach. I don’t have a feel for what wins out if we make larger solar and wind farms – increased cost for the additional capacity, or increased efficiency from economies of scale.
Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Don’t leave out the deconstruction of old nuclear plants after their operational time and the storage of radioactive waste. It’s very laborious and expensive.
leds@feddit.dk 1 year ago
Nuclear power is bad for its consistent output because demand is not constant. You could of course run some energy hungry chemical reaction when there is more power than demand, make hydrogen to use for synthetic fuels for example or build a battery to store the excess power for when the demand is high. But is is of course much cheaper with renewables.
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Total demand is not constant, but you can represent total demand as a sum of a given constant demand plus variable demand. Say for instance the average demand varies from 200-350 kWh a year. You could run nuclear power plants to generate 200 kWh worth of electricity, and use solar/wind for the remaining 0-150 kWh demand. It would be fairly efficient to have nuclear provide a base load of some kind while solar and wind vary to meet the full demand.
ironeagl@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Hydro is best as a giant battery bank, and pairs quite well with nuclear.
Poutinetown@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Hydro is also quite independent but it’s heavily dependent on geography. That’s how Canada is able to be much ahead in renewable energy.
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
Also, having nuclear in a 100% low carbon grid is great to stabilize the grid.
A French study showed that having around 13% of nuclear in the grid reduce the solar and battery capacity needed by a factor of two compared to no nuclear.