this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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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.
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.
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. https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/06/nuclear-energy-free-market-capitalism-arent-compatible/
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.
Sounds like a very expensive argument to invest billions on the hope that something might happen 😬. Hope it’s not my money.
Yes, but also literally every industry starts that way. Start small and scale up. Nuclear’s special because we did it once and then almost completely stopped building them globally for so long that the capability faded away.
The tech shifted in the meantime, so even the knowledge that was preserved is for designs we wouldn’t want to build today.
It’s a weird situation.
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.
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 small subset of the grid these days, there’s no way building a 100% nuclear grid would make sense today).
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 (eg the last 10% of usage on dark windless nights at the wrong time of year). Some cases do fit nuclear better currently (not all, nuclear usually wants constant usage, can’t help with surges).
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.
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.
Yup, it’s hard to predict what the mix will look like, but 100% solar would be a very costly solution for sure.
I used to be very pro nuclear, and I still think it could have been a big piece of the puzzle, but I do worry we’ve missed the boat, it could’ve been the first wave of decarbonisation 20 (or more) years ago, I’m not sure how well it can compete growing from almost nothing now with the renewables eating all the easy money. nuclear plants need to run 100% to be successful, and renewables have dropped a bomb on the concept of baseline demand. Maybe as we kill gas we’ll have to start giving massive bonuses to on demand power that isn’t pumping co2, but the absolute lid on that market is the price of storage, which is high enough now, but will drop, it’s unclear how long the gap for nuclear will exist there.
Certainly willing to be wrong though, there’s lots of unknowns with nuclear, quite possibly it could be multiple times cheaper if only we’d invest into it properly.
BASF can do it, have been able to for ages, they're switching their feed stocks around depending on price point and push come to shove they could run on nothing but literal potatoes. The Ukraine war was a bit of an extreme situation for them because their piping wasn't set up for a massive drop in gas availability but they were able to cut consumption by IIRC 60% without affecting production rates.
Steel smelters will have to be rebuilt completely to run on hydrogen and side note it's more efficient to turn electricity into hydrogen and then smelt than to try and reduce with electricity directly. All of that costs money but by this point it ain't exactly rocket science.
...and it's certainly going to be cheaper than mitigating ever more extreme weather events.
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.
Yeah the poster above you is wrong. Solar is WAY less than half the price.
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.
Unfortunately we still need tunable baseline power in order to keep current, voltage, and frequency within the grid's margin of error. Our options for that are: situationally available (and often environmentally problematic) hydro, fossil fuels, nuclear, and/or giant toxic/fire-prone battery banks.
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.
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.
Plasma deep drilling is starting to hit the market which should make geothermal available pretty much everywhere. The sad thing about current 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.
Out of those you listed, nuclear is the least flexible in terms of output regulation. PV with batteries is the most flexible.
Hydro is definitely the least flexible. Those gate move slow.
Hydro is often turned on and off as pumped storage. Nuclear never is
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.
Running frequency regulation off batteries is a silly idea, that's more capacitor range. Also, flywheels, which is how fossil fuels do it anyway.