Some context: The Green Party had long been diametrically opposed to nuclear, to the extent that they have twice exited a coalition government in protest of granting additional reactor permits. Over the past ten years their position has gradually shifted though, thanks to STEM-oriented Greens in particular, as it has become obvious that AGW is a bigger threat than nuclear. This in spite of several setbacks:
– Obviously, the Fukushima disaster of 2011.
– The fact that the Olkiluoto 3 reactor project [1], a 1600MW PWR unit, was plagued by chronic delays and cost overruns – it is only now being connected to the grid, over ten years behind schedule. OL3's fundamental problem was that the European nuclear industry simply was not up to the task of delivering a first-of-its-kind, ambitious third-gen reactor after a fifteen-year hiatus during which no new nuclear power plants were built in Europe.
– Another planned nuclear plant, Hanhikivi [2], had problems finding a Western reactor supplier; after some arguably rather shady dealings, a contract was made with Rosatom, the state nuclear corporation of Russia. This received some well-earned criticism, but Finnish decisionmakers (perhaps naively) wanted to think there was no political dimension to such an agreement. After February 24, the project is now almost certainly dead in the water, never having left the planning and design phase.
Honestly, me neither. There is likely some selection bias going on however. It's difficult to say how many expensive buildings are missing from that list.
Now all the people who insisted the Greens had been co-opted by Big Oil will be completely silent about their having now been co-opted by Big Nuke. But Big Oil/Gas/Coal loves new nuke projects; each represents a decade or more of still buying fossil fuels, instead of incrementallly displacing fossil with renewables.
What this really means is probably that their position is moot, because no new nukes are planned or likely.
Delays and cost overruns on a nuke construction project are, for many stakeholders, the whole point of the project. Actually beginning to deliver power to the grid is the end of their income stream, thus to be fought tooth and nail. The larger a project is, the more stakeholders it usually needs, and thus the more active participants who do not want it delivered. The prevalence of this dynamic varies from place to place; it has long been dominant in the US, not just for nuke projects, but for urban tunnels and other big public works projects.
I would not invest in fossil fuel in a country that is heavily investing into nuclear power. Most of the costs associated with nuclear is in the constructions, so once they are built those costs are already sunk and they will deliver maximum energy at what ever price point that the market sits at. Fossil fuel can not compete against nuclear power on price after construction is completed, especially if paid by a budget a few governments ago.
I would however consider fossil fuels as a great investment if a country is heavily invested in renewables. Someone has to operate as reserve energy for when the weather changes and the season change to winter. Politicians in northern countries has already demonstrated a great unity in spending a lot of subsidies on "reserve energy" plans. You do not even need to spend fuel to get paid. And then we the market price do rise above that of fossil fuel costs, you get paid again by producing energy at the point where the market is at its highest. It is hard to optimize more for profit than those operating a fossil fuel power plant in those reserve energy plans.
The Swedish environmental minister last winter, who was also the spoke person for the green party, said something like: Oil power plants are and will continue be a natural part of the Swedish reserve energy plan. It is nothing abnormal to use oil when demand exceeds supply. It is hard to get a better political endorsement than that.
While these comments probably do apply to a great many government sponsored/financed projects like bridges and such, probably not as much in the case of for-profit nuclear power.
The company in charge of the plant project will be eager to get the power revenue flowing.
Eh, many of the stakeholders of the Hanhikivi project were individual municipalities which very much would have liked to get their carbon-free source of electricity. In the case of OL3, the only winners were probably lawyers due to the years of court battles between Finnish stakeholders and the French reactor supplier Areva. Everybody else lost.
The Greens' new position is mostly relevant in the context of small, modular reactor (SMR) units. Whether or not commercial SMRs ever prove feasible, I'd wager that right now their future looks brighter than that of huge gigawatt-scale reactor projects.
The individual municipalities are not the ones driving up cost and delaying completion. They do not benefit from delays and cost overruns. It is not hard to find who does benefit from those.
It is yet to be seen whether those empowered to gatekeep nuke projects will be able to identify enough places where they can extract graft from projects using from SMRs. If not, they will surely steer clear, even at the expense of having no nuke to milk at all.
Nuclear power plants are not “carbon free.” They do not emit carbon or other greenhouse gases as they split atoms during the fission process, but their carbon footprint must be assessed on the basis of their complete nuclear fuel life cycle. Significant amounts of fossil fuel are used indirectly in mining, milling, uranium fuel enrichment, plant, and waste storage construction, decommissioning, and ultimately transportation and millennia-long storage of waste. There is plenty of carbon in that footprint that is rarely acknowledged, computed, or mediated. You can read that
Additionally, the industry’s rhetoric masks the astronomical costs for thousands of years of storage that could be better invested in rapidly developing renewable fuels with a lower carbon footprint such as solar, wind, geothermal, and Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, without any potential side effects.
The prospects for SMRs are poor. Here’s why.
*Economics and scale*
Nuclear reactors are large because of economies of scale. A reactor that produces three times as much power as an #SMR does not need three times as much steel or three times as many workers. This economic penalty for small size was one reason for the early shutdown of many small reactors built in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s.
*Mass manufacturing aspects*
If an error in a mass-manufactured reactor were to result in safety problems, the whole lot might have to be recalled, as was the case with the Boeing 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner jetliners. But how does one recall a radioactive reactor? What will happen to an electricity system that relies on factory-made identical reactors that need to be recalled?
*SMRs and the climate crisis*
The climate problem is urgent. The IPCC and other international bodies have warned that to stop irreversible damage from climate change, we need to reduce emissions drastically within the next decade. The SMR contribution in the next decade will be essentially zero. The prospects for SMRs beyond that are also bleak, given that entire supply chains would need to be established after the first ones have been built, tested and proven in the field.
*Other concerns*
Water use is another concern that is expected to intensify in the future. Nuclear plants have very high water withdrawal requirements. A single 300 MW reactor operating at 90 percent capacity factor would withdraw 160 million to 390 million gallons of water every day, heating it up before discharge. Reducing the demand for water by using air cooling will require the addition of a tower and large electric fans – further raising the construction cost and reducing output of electricity by up to 7 percent of the capacity of the reactor.
Finally, SMRs will also produce many kinds of radioactive nuclear waste, because the reactors are smaller in physical size and because of refueling practices adopted for economic reasons. SMRs based on light water designs, such as NuScale, will also produce a larger mass of nuclear waste per MWh of electricity generated. The federal government is already paying billions of dollars in fines for not fulfilling its contractual obligations to take possession of spent fuel from existing reactors. The legislative plan in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act was for a deep geologic disposal repository to open in 1998. After nearly four decades, that plan has come to naught.
This is great, and hopefully it will stop the premature shutdown of existing nuclear reactors.
But it's pretty tiny climate news overall. Nuclear reactors are aging out and nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore.
Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor, which won't come on line for a bare minimum of 10 years, best case. We don't have that long to wait to start replacing nearly all of our fossil fuel infrastructure, and replace the nuclear reactors that are reaching end of life.
If nuclear was going to be a climate solution, then all the nuclear reactors started in the 2000s needed to complete on time and on schedule to encourage the building of more. Instead it's 2022 and we are still waiting to see how bad the financial disaster will be for them. That's not the route towards building more nuclear.
People quote low prices for renewables today that we might be scoffing at in 50 years just like we scoff at the early claim that "nuclear power is too cheap to meter"
Specifically, you can't compare a nuclear reactor that delivers predictable power to solar and wind systems that deliver power when they want to deliver power. Germany has already had episodes where the spot price for electricity went under zero -- yet to make the electric grid work they have to burn natural gas when renewables aren't available.
The story for storage looks better than it ever has but it is still orders of magnitude more expensive more expensive than it needs to be to be practical.
People fantasize about feeding excess renewable energy into systems that run intermittently that capture carbon directly from air, synthesize hydrogen and e-fuels, etc. Trouble is that most of the systems have a high capital cost: e-fuel production has a crazy high capital cost as it is, if the factory is running only 20% of the time then bam... capital costs are 5x greater per unit.
The LWR struggles to compete with other energy sources for several reasons, not least of which is the high capital cost of the steam turbine and associated heat exchangers. There is hope:
> The story for storage looks better than it ever has but it is still orders of magnitude more expensive more expensive than it needs to be to be practical.
Storage is already cheaper than peaker plants and that's all it needs to be for now.
Meanwhile HVDC lines appear to also be a viable solution:
For facilities with more than 1GW capacity Wikipedia has a list [1] (though note that that's merely the turbine's capacity, the total amount stored is the GWh figure that's missing for half of the entries).
There's also a list specifically with installations that aren't pumped hydro, but none of those would make the list above because of their limited capacity [2]. Pumped hydro dominates the storage game so far, both in number of installations and maximum size.
Pumped hydro is extremely dependent on geography. Yes, the extant plants have favorable cost-per-capacity, but that number will only get worse as less favorable sites are used for it.
Pumped hydro potential turns out to be surprisingly independent of geography. What is espectially dependent on geography is placement of already-built dams.
But pumped hydro is not the only kind of bulk energy storage.
Last time I checked there doesn't exist a commercial operated pumped hydro that buy renewables when supply is high and sell when the weather/season has changed.
I found one plant on the wikipedia list that is at least operated commercially by an private energy company, but they use it to balance their network of fossil fuel power plants when they shut down or start up. During starting/stopping the grid need to stabilize, and doing it themself is cheaper than paying third parties. They stated that in the future when the time is right then they might start to fill the pumped hydro by using renewables, but for now it is power by fossil fuels. Looking at who paid for that storage, it seems to be mostly through subsidies so it was likely a pretty nice deal for them and on paper it look green.
Storage is trivial freshman physics (lift a weight, pump air to displace water under pressure, pump water uphill) except for batteries, which are also perfectly known physics, with numerous chemistries in mass production, a century of universal use, and working prototypes for more exotic chemistries
Thus, literally as different from fusion as is possible to express.
Fusion is trivial freshman physics. It is just plasma heated up. Kids play with plasma lamps as toys. Getting energy from it is just as simple as hooking it up to a steam engine.
Not much storage has been built out because there is not enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. Until there is enough, it would be stupid to divert money from building renewables to building storage. After there is enough, it will be time to build out storage. At that time storage will be radically cheaper than today.
This has been explained to you several times already. Repeating your assertion about lack of storage tells us about something other than the energy landscape.
The Wikipedia article on pumped hydro mentions some perhaps surprising variations that do not depend on mountain geography.
CAES -- compressed air -- is quite mature. Until recently it was considered to have insufficient round-trip efficiency, but that doesn't matter so much anymore. Again, there are numerous interesting variations, including pumping air into a vessel anchored to the sea floor via a pipe from an onshore compressor, and others where heat of compression is banked and added back when extracting power, for better efficiency.
In Chile, a big air liquification system is under construction. In principle this is similar to compressed air storage, but without need for pressure vessels. LN2 can be shipped, and is industrially useful directly.
A float can be attached to a cable looped through a pulley at the sea floor, and winched down from on shore. This, like several other undersea systems, would work scaled down to local utility size.
There are numerous projects preparing to push hydrogen into underground cavities, in some cases cavities natural gas was recently extracted from.
A UK company has a system with a thousands-of-tons weight winched up and down in a disused mineshaft. There are a great many disused mineshafts worldwide. They can often be used to keep compressed air or hydrogen in at the same time.
Ammonia may be synthesized electrically, and stored or shipped in liquid form under light pressure. Ammonia is massively useful industrially, so synthesis equipment would be idle only when stocks are being drawn down.
Form is building out factories to make iron-air batteries.
Ultimately, we will end up using a few that turn out to be cheapest, or otherwise (e.g. ammonia, LN2) valuable. We just don't know which those will be. We do know that Energy Vault, a publicly traded pump-and-dump scheme, will not be among them.
Calling green hydrogen cheap is a bit of a stretch. The Swedish government produced a government report on the viability of it a couple/few years ago and the price was around 10x compared to nuclear, and that just for producing it. Storage and transportation would be additional costs on top. There is a reason why there aren't any current investments Sweden/Finland/Germany in order to create green hydrogen for energy production. (There are project to create green hydrogen in industries that explicitly need the hydrogen itself, in which case the cost calculations is much better).
In practice we should simply apply the open market and allow energy companies to bid for direct decommission of existing capacity in fossil fuel energy plants. If a commercial company can produce a combined renewables + storage solution that is cheaper than nuclear then that is a major win-win for everyone involved. If it is a bit more expensive than nuclear than it might still be worth it, but then the question is how much more. The combination that should not be allowed to bid is the combination of renewables + fossil fuels, and if needed, laws should be added to that effect.
It pleases you to believe so, but as was the case for solar PV, wind turbines, and batteries before it, literally all hydrogen electrolysis needs now is manufacturing volume.
If your crystal ball has made you so convinced then put your money where your mouth is. Go out and start producing green hydrogen for power and try compete on the open energy market. 10x more expensive than nuclear is sure to be a winner.
> The story for storage looks better than it ever has but it is still orders of magnitude more expensive more expensive than it needs to be to be practical.
> People quote low prices for renewables today that we might be scoffing at in 50 years just like we scoff at the early claim that "nuclear power is too cheap to meter"
There's a huge difference between nuclear and renewables that firmly comes down on the side of renewables: they can be deployed incrementally with variable levels of capital investment, and can be iterated on rapidly.
Solar can be deployed at a scale from a backpack camp charger all the way up to gigawatt-scale solar farms. It's the same technology.
This matters because it's exponentially easier to raise and deploy small amounts of capital continuously than to raise huge lump sums. Nuclear power requires huge lump sums. There are no reactors that, say, cost as much as a car or a laptop or even an aircraft. Reactors start at hundreds of millions for the smallest possible scale and go up rapidly from there.
Incremental cost leads directly to the ability to rapidly iterate. You can't rapidly iterate on things that cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Every nuclear power plant is a monument.
There's been talk of small modular reactors for years, but "small" here is perhaps tens to hundreds of millions. That is still gigantic, too large for the kind of rapid iteration you get with electronics like solar panels and batteries.
Moreso, when only seed money is needed to start a project, and money added translates very directly and visibly to increased capacity, the need to pay graft to those who could veto the project falls away. Probably a strict majority of money spent on huge lump-sum public-works projects such as nukes and tunnels goes to pay such graft.
"Small modular reactors" installed presumably incrementally threaten the graft infrastructure for nuke procurement, so will be unattractive to those involved in nuke finance, even where the alternative is no new nuke projects at all. If you can't block a nuke project, you can't profit from unblocking it, and then why be involved at all? For renewables, the prospect of graft is not what attracted most people to the field. That may come in time.
There should be some limit on how far the price varies, but it is an illusion, that electricity costs the same independent of time. For normal household appliances, there isn't too much flexibility - you need light, when it is dark, cook for the meals etc. But with heating and especially with electric cars, flexible costs make a lot of sense.
Even more in the industry, which is the larger consumer of electricity and needs incentives, to shape there consumption on availability, as far as it makes sense. It could make sense, for a company to invest into battery storage, if it saves costs. Or alternatively pay the utility companies for providing this service.
> Even more in the industry, which is the larger consumer of electricity and needs incentives, to shape there consumption on availability, as far as it makes sense
The shape of consumption is going to be - industry flees the country, and goes somewhere cheaper (and dirtier)
That is unlikely, if the energy is overall cheaper than at a fixed rate. Also, all countries are facing the same challenges with the transition to renewables.
You'd obviously have to limit the price fluctuations for consumer contracts. But currently I'm just starting the dishwasher or washing machine when I fill them, but I don't care when they're done as long as it's within ~12 hours. In many places I can get cheaper electricity at night and save a bit by running them then. But with renewables surplus might happen at any time of day, not just at night. A smart meter combined with marginally smart devices would allow us to run time-insensitive things when it's cheap, instead of when it's convenient.
It just seems to me like as we move all the very heavy energy consumption like transportation and heating from oil and gas to electricity, small gains like your washing machine are going to be negligible.
I'm from a country where in the north the sun goes down for good for a few weeks in the winter. We've managed until now with nuclear but those are all nearing end-of-life and are being shut down and we have no alternatives ready.
But heating and (battery powered) transportation are perfect examples of time-insensitive demand. I don't care when my car is charged, as long as it's reasonably full in the morning. And if your house has enough thermal mass (like an office building) and you give your heating system some wiggle room (let's say 2 degrees up and down) you can heat a bit above the target when energy is cheap so you don't have to heat as much when it's expensive.
If you purpose build the system for it you can do even better, like having an oversized boiler as thermal storage, or ice as cold storage. Those systems exist, they just aren't common because there's little incentive with the way electricity is currently metered.
Pumped storage combined with solar and wind isnt orders of magnitude more than nuclear power. It's still cheaper. Fengning is less than half the cost of a nuclear plant and delivers twice as much power. It's a very effective battery.
Pumped (or indeed, any kind of) storage just isnt very economic when youve got oodles of cheap, dispatchable gas.
Nuclear power almost always exists to help prop up military nuclear requirements. This is as true in Finland (whose plants were built by Russia) as it is anywhere else.
Where do you get the water for pumped storage and where do you put it?
I have a hill that goes up about 300 feet on my farm. I've done the math on the volume of a reservoir for a pumped storage system and it is pretty shocking.
The US has domestic production of natural gas, the EU has some domestic production and imports from Russia. Japan imports a lot of LNG.
There are many countries that don't use natural gas but they don't use pumped storage, instead they use some combination of: oil, very high prices, rolling blackouts.
The military connection is bogus. The size of the domestic nuclear industry is much much larger than plutonium production or uranium enrichment for weapons. Fuel is irradiated for such a long time in commercial reactors that the resulting product contains like amounts of Pu240 which contaminates the desired Pu239 and makes it undesirable for weapons.
> Fengning is less than half the cost of a nuclear plant and delivers twice as much power.
But the issue is not power but storage capacity. Fengning has 40 GWh of storage capacity, that is less than day of production of basic 2 GW nuclear power plant.
For countries in central Europe (or even northern Europe, like Finland), solar production during winter is generally negligible so from renewables you are left with wind energy. There are multiple-day periods of no wind, so just to keep 3 days of wind energy to replace one continuous 2 GW nuclear power, you would need ~3.6 Fengnings.
Periods of high wind tend to coincide with periods of low solar and vice versa. That negligible solar tends to coincide with the very highest wind production. Offshore also tends to anticorrelate with onshore wind. Diversity of wind and solar production already takes a huge chunk out of variability.
Variable/surge/nearly free pricing would take another huge chunk of storage requirements as easily time shifted demand is matched to production (car charging, aluminum smelters, heat pumps, etc).
With 2.5 days of pumped storage you're probably covered for about 4 years out of 5. Those 10 day wind lulls happen 1 year out of 10 in summer and 1 in 25 in winter.
We do have historical weather data, so there should be no reason to guess if a certain amount of storage is sufficient.
I would be far more positive on renewables plus storage if people could point to studies that given this grid, storage, energy production and weather data that would have happened during that time period in that area.
Only 2 out of 5 reactors are Russian built, so only 1 out of 2 plants. There were plans for another Russian reactor but those plans are likely shelved now.
The geology needed for pumped storage is incredibly expensive and difficult, the vast majority of the world can't do it and would be even more expensive than nuclear.
The fantasy is storage: I have a small p.v. with lithium storage just as a protection against blackouts (AC coupled solar inverter to keep it on in case of no national grid frequency presence), in around a year battery capacity is already dropped to 99% and I do not allow more than 10% discharge since it's small, just enough for VMC + fridges/freezer + lights and computers, no main heating/cooling, cooking, washing machine etc from battery, except during sunny days eventually.
Synthetic fuels are not new, we have used them in WWII and probably earlier, they work but we simply can't produce enough of them in any sauce to power a generic usage. So no, so far the sole storage we have is classic mountain hydro witch is VERY good, only it demand waters and mounting, not that rare but definitively not everywhere.
Nuclear produce constant power witch is the perfect match for industry, that's the real main point, similarly low-enriched uranium (like French subs) is very usable on ships, we still miss the more important logistic mean: airplanes, but we can cover theoretically industry and rails and ships from nuclear witch is enough to add renewables locally just for resilience (not much sure if they are worth the investments, due to real energy price with a public nuclear but...). The anti-nuclear movement have a reason: it's not good for private profit and they (neoliberals) know that very well so they hate it.
Why is it a fantasy? Millions of people in the us already have tesla power walls, there are hundreds at least of other solutions, and these things are sold out for a year or more. It works great, and people are using it. Your concern is that it won't last somehow? Your claims look like fear uncertainty and doubt. As others have posted, battery storage is already cheaper than gas peaker plants.
- we do not need energy for private homes ONLY, we also need for industry, hospitals, schools, ... "buildings" that demand MUCH more energy than a home, similarly we do not need only private cars but also trucks, tractors, ... that demand MUCH more power not only in kW terms but also in load capacity and weight: a truck on lithium can be done in vehicle terms, but it's load capacity is less than a half and it's range is even worse;
- it degrade too quickly, without the blackout risk I would never ever put money on such expensive and little lasting batteries. P.v. can repay itself, battery can't and now due to high demand instead of lower they price they became also far more expensive.
Beside that even for my own small personal home and it's microgrid... Without the state/national grid I can't really run fully on battery/p.v. because when a significant load goes down, like my dishwasher have finished heating water (~2kW) and a small load goes down at the same time (let's say just a fridge compressor) my inverter cut the power due to high DC ripple or simply too high AC frequency. To avoid that I need a far bigger system (like 4 time the needed capacity in kWp) able to absorb the "overproduction" quickly enough or special tools (I do not know if they are even on the market) that climb and lower their loads softly to let inverters rump up or down as needed.
Oh, I'm talking about "state of art" Victron and Fronius inverters not some unknown brand from Alibaba... So far I've read claims that new (not available here, so far) Enphase microinvertes can be quick enough to reducing much such issues, while also cut the peak production, witch means that for x kWp you need x+1/4 panels kWp power since microinverters can sustain panel DC current but can't offer much more than a fraction of if on AC side.
It's not FUD, it's practically experimented state of things: with grid connected I lower around 50% my overall power consumption (more than 60% now and in summer, than less than 30% in winter, due to heat pumps to heat the home, especially at night and in early morning) from grid, without I can just survive blackout: some classic small UPSes for home rack and personal desktops, due to the aforementioned power cut due to microgrid stability issue, the rest on the battery inverter; when the Sun shine enough almost anything can run (at least, one/two high power appliances at a time eventually) and for the rest the battery and a small emergency generator to recharge do the rest, tested. It's environmental friendly? NO. It's cheap? Also no. I've done that just as a protection against skyrocketing prices and blackouts when I start thinking they'll came soon, and so far I was right, for prices at least, I've even need a slightly bigger plant for economical reasons, but that's all.
Did you imaging just a small restaurant with ~8-10kW mean power when open, with 15-20kW peaks? How much battery and p.v. it need? And for what? Can we even produce enough batteries for such small usages on scale? I can't answer myself but I've already seen comments from far more informed subjects like some CEOs of automotive sector who say absolutely no...
If you have other data I'm curious.
About EVs since you've cited Tesla: for my personal use-case an EV is still more expensive than an ICE ones, but might became on par or even cheaper when diesel will be, because I'm pretty sure it will, around 4€/liter (so far here is around 2€/l) BUT that's just because I do not need the car every day WFH, so I can charge it when the Sun shine, at least most of the time. Potentially with future (so far there are only some experiments) vehicle-to-loads I can use the EV as a secondary battery for the house, perhaps not fully charging it every day so to use it as energy dump to stabilize the microgrid lowering the TCO another small bit: how many people are in a similar situation or at least potentially they can? 10% of total population? What they can do those who happen to live a bit northern than here where p.v. is used but a bit of a joke combining average meteo + naturally low Sun exposure? How many have flowing water or constant enough wind to run on local domestic renewables? 5%?
I do not know if the TCO of a turbo-gas PP is higher than a p.v.+lithium ones, but I know a GPP can run 24/7 if there is gas for decades, a p.v.+lithium can't, at maximum it last 8 years or so for the storage part. And so far I do not know if we can even produce enough mega-batteries for such plants on scale. I do not even know if without turbogas we can keep a grid on, due to frequency perturbations and time needed to compensate. Windmills are relatively quick to adjust, hydro almost the same, p.v. definitively not. And only hydro is constant enough, p.v. can be just in few spot, wind in almost no place.
It is always claimed that the conversion to 80-100% renewable energies fails because of "non-existent" & "too expensive" storage options. At the same time, most arguments against #VisionZero are reduced to lithium-ion batteries, their costs and their environmental balance. Here is an overview of chemical and mechanical storage options that are affordable & feasible with current technology.
ETH Zurich Energy Storage Handbook: "From today's perspective, the Energy Strategy 2050 is technically feasible. The necessary storage technologies are available - today on the market, marketable or demonstrably realisable."
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000445597
Keeping the grid reliable as solar photovoltaics and wind power (both with accurately forecastable but large variations in output) come to dominate electric generation requires changes in markets, institutions, operations, habits, and mental models. This has proven feasible in both theory and practice, as illustrated by national statistics’ reports of 75 percent renewable coverage of annual electricity consumption in Scotland (2018), 72 percent in Denmark (2017, domestic production only), 67 percent in Portugal (2018), 40 percent in peninsular Spain (2018), and 38 percent in Germany (2018). Most such grids sometimes achieve over 100 percent renewable supply, just as Japan’s southern island of Kyushu reported 76 percent peak solar coverage on 23 April 2017 1008, and Shikoku 102 percent on 3 May 2018 1009, despite Japanese utilities’ insistence that far smaller renewable fractions will crash the grid. No “storage miracle” is needed, though some seem to be emerging. Whether solar, fossil-fueled, or nuclear, no generator needs 100 percent backup, because one generator does not serve one load; rather, all generators serve the grid, which in turn serves all loads. The grid is designed to back up failed plants with working plants, so varying solar and wind power output are backed up by a diversified portfolio of other variable renewables, dispatchable renewables, or other resources. Solar and wind power don’t need massive batteries so they can produce power steadily like big thermal plants; rather, at least eight classes of grid flexibility resources (A) besides bulk electrical storage and fossil-fueled backup are proven, available, cost-effective, and sufficient.(B) We don’t and needn’t yet know all details of their ultimate mix as renewables rise toward 100 percent of generation; for now, we need only know that ample and affordable integration options exist.(C) As climatologist Prof. Ken Caldeira says, “Controversies about how to handle the [electricity] endgame should not overly influence our opening moves.”
(A) Efficient use; 2. unobtrusively flexible demand; 3. modern forecasting of variable renewables’ output (often more accurately than demand); 4. diversifying those variable renewables—wind and solar PV—by type and location; 5. dispatchability—integrating wind and solar PV portfolios with the other renewables (not counting big hydropower, which could also be integrated more effectively than now and with cogeneration that must run anyhow to satisfy its thermal loads; 6. distributed thermal storage worth buying anyway, or managed thermal storage in buildings’ existing thermal mass; 7. distributed electrical storage worth buying anyway (e.g. smart charging and discharging of electric vehicles bought to provide mobility); 8. hydrogen, now most likely from renewable electricity.
Sorry but that's just theory next to propaganda in the sense that we can play math games like "hey but you produce 120-130% of the total energy you need", yes, only I need energy on 24h so while theoretically I produce more than I consume in practice evening-night-early-morning-noSunnyDays I use the grid or I need a stable source of energy, that's to say how certain analyses are just optimistic math often commissioned to back some PR target with something that appear science.
"Thermal Energy Storage" is just an experiment no one know if can work in production and on scale, "Pumped storage power plants" is classic mountain hydro, VERY effective, but need mountains and water, for instance just Swiss and Norway who NORMALLY have plenty of both this summer have had significant issues due to water shortages, they import more energy to backup, energy coming mostly from nuclear (Sweden and France) and a bit from oil&gas, "kinetic rotational mass storage" are classic flywheel UPS, something we have almost abandoned because of costs and very small effectiveness, they do not "store" for long, like ultra-condensers they can be just quick stabilizer who can cover 1-3' short spikes letting other systems have time to ramp up or down, hydrogen is a recurrent myth some try to sell, nothing we will ever seen on scale etc.
Long story short: you collected some scientific evidence, that's scientific, positive, but in practice is just a theoretical game. I've experience the same in my small setup: in theory microgrid stability is assured, Victron even say their MultiPlus is a pure-sine-wave UPS quick enough for the entire house and under certain condition most of the time is true, unfortunately there are also some other conditions, not so rare, and that's why in practice I have to keep small UPS for home rack and desktop FORMALLY uselessly redundant.
At grid scale is even worse: we predict enough to speculate how much energy we will produce with a very good precision but we can't predict instantaneous variations, or to simplify given an hour timeframe we can predict what's up in the means in such hour, but we can't predict many peaks during that time. Keeping the grid practically stable so far means rolling blackouts: when too many loads appear we cut some to lower the total load keeping the frequency up enough, when too many goes down we cut-out some generators to keep the frequency low enough, statistically it's very well, we guarantee stability in 99% of the case, blackouts tend to be just few minutes per localized area etc. In practice is just like 1.x℃ global warming is a mean value that means for some areas +10/+15℃ in summer, witch have a VERY DIFFERENT face at such zoom level.
Your operator can say "hey we just have had a ∑ of 99.99999% of reliable works on scale, unfortunately the nearby hospital have had to put many UPSes to avoid the "just a minute" blackouts that happen weekly and heavily impact their IT tools. Some again optimistically respond "but hey, you just need a PowerWall, a vehicle-to-load application!" yes, on scale. Try to compute how much backups we need for a manufacturing plant with CNCs operating 24/7/365 or just for apartments where there is no room to install such systems physically. Doing so it's very USA: being optimistic, project yourself and fix on the go or fail and restart. For a company who can fail that's work, for a society is a recipe for disasters so ample that's CRIMINAL trying at such speed and manner.
Being "smart" like having a parallel data network quick enough, with enough bandwidth, with enough IT safety and reliability, with all electricity producer and consumers just tell "I need xkW in y time" and get "we ramp up production for you" theoretically can be a game changer, I do not even imaging how such monster can be built and maintained. Not only: we need such system on scale, witch means substituting 100% off all equipment. Did you have experienced some large-scale changes like shifting from analog terrestrial television or radio to digital? Now try to imaging how much we need electricity 24/7/365 respects of TV/radio.
Interesting. I thought "clean energy" generally didn't include nuclear. Also, is hydro really "clean energy"? In the US at least, biomass is the largest source of "clean energy". I'm betting it's even more for germany as they don't have the rivers we do to generate hydro power.
Depends a bit on the nature of the bio mass. If we are talking about the non-edible parts of groceries or the manure produced by raising animals for meat, that is quite renewable. However, I don't think explicit farming for energy production is a good idea.
Sure, CO2 removal is much less efficient than point-capture, but if we're talking about using excess power generated at wind and solar installations, we may as well, right?
...Of course, this isn't what you meant. But there will always be better ways to use 'excess' energy than bitcoin's proof-of-access-to-energy-arbitrage scheme.
Also doesn't the Bitcoin network run all the time? Maybe it can average spatially but it can't decide to simplify the problem because less power is available globally.
Plenty of crypto mining places using old hydroelectric dams around the world. It also means the maintenance of said hydroelectric dams are paid for. Even oil companies are looking at ways to harness the energy from burning gases on oil rigs for crypto mining. In a way, crypto is turning the world greener by not wasting energy.
Fine, except that that is completely false. Crypto mining mainly runs on carbon-emitting generation, much of it stolen where that is easiest, and actively speeds arrival of climate catastrophe.
> It is a bold thing to claim that crypto mining is run on stolen power. Stolen from whom, may I ask?
It's a bit surprising to me that you that you hadn't heard about this yet. I've come across dozens and dozens of news reports on this phenomenon. There are at least three different versions how this is typically done:
A) By illegal hookups directly to the power grid, so the victim is a power company (and thereby effectively all its customers).
B) By someone who secretly runs mining rigs at, for instance, their place of work, so the company or organization is stuck with the power bill while the criminal gets to mine using "free" electricity.
C) Via Cryptojacking, i.e. by remotely installing mining malware on people's computers/devices. In this case, the power is "stolen" from whoever has to pay for the electricity bill for that particular device.
If you are interested in news reports on specific instances of this happening (and typically someone getting caught), just do a web search for "mining stolen power".
The percentage of electricity stolen for mining is dwarfed by the amount of electricity stolen for other means. Energy company executives in my country are almost always sell it on the side, so thank you very much for your concern that some very small part of it is stolen to power bitcoin mining.
And it is known that all major mining pools which consume maybe 80% of all power run on energy bought at commercial rates.
I'm not a miner, nor I want to be one, but I can hardly stand this baseless smearing of bitcoin on the pretense that it hurts environment. Energy producers produce energy, and sell it at some price. Whoever buys that energy can use it however they like it. If you want to help the environment, well, advocate for building nuclear power plants instead of coal and oil ones.
This power plant is run by a very sloppy operator who wastes ~99.99% of energy. The management team should be fired and sued for such gross negligence.
> Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor,
Source? The largest grid scale batteries to date don't come close to the numbers you are talking about. The largest operational deployment gives a paltry 0.4 GW and can only sustain that for a few hours[1].
People love to hand wave away storage, but it is a monumental and unsolved problem.
Battery storage projects have tended to be smaller and in the UK average around 20MW. They have followed the pattern of distributed energy rather than big projects connecting at 400kV. In the UK there is over 20GW in the pipeline.
We already know that only a very small fraction of storage will ever be batteries, initially enough for load-leveling and eventually for evening peaking.
We also know that money put into storage before enough renewables have been built out to displace fossil generation and charge the storage is money wasted that could have been spent building out generation capacity. When storage becomes a good use of money, it will be much, much cheaper to build. Pointing to not much storage built out yet is a shuck.
> nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore
Given the huge subsidies for nuclear reactors, did they ever know? Regardless of the environmental merits, it’s not a cheap technology, and due to the limited number of reactors built it’s not exactly a competitive market either. At least at this point in time, building new reactors is necessarily slow and expensive.
And, by the time one can be completed, it will be unable to compete with other generation built and deployed since the project started. Bidding only at night, it is even less competitive, because costs are 24/7, so prices would need to be 3x higher.
> Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor
Besides the intermittency of renewables everyone else has already mentioned, a nuclear reactor has a life of 50 years, which is extendable with maintenance. There are literally reactors built in the 1950s still operating today. Solar and wind installations have to be fully rebuilt every 15-20 years (and the decommissioned materials recycled).
So you get stable power, for at least twice as long.
This is abuse disadvantage for nuclear, not an advantage. Current high costs are locked in for a very long time.
Whereas with solar and storage, after 15 years (for the storage) or 30 years (solar) you can take advantage of technology advancement. And of technology has not advanced much, you can simply maintain or repair the existing infrastructure, just like nuclear or other large capital expenditures.
There are problems of baseload power that neither solar nor wind reliably solve though. Barring the introduction of a complex system of storage to the electrical grid you don’t just need a certain amount of total power generation you need the distribution of production to match the distribution of consumption. We can generate much of this with solar and wind if we are comfortable with having far less power at night from solar and irregular power generation based on weather conditions from wind. This can work well when these technologies are small portions of the grid but it causes problems when we rely on them for substantial portions of power generation.
... which will be built when it makes sense to build it.
Right now, building out storage makes no sense. Money that could be spent on storage is now rightly spent on generating capacity that can still displace carbon polluters. When there is too little carbon pollution left to displace, then will be time to build storage. By that time the storage will be radically cheaper to buy, because its cost is falling even faster than renewables cost ever did.
Okay I'm afraid that's it for me. Being on a discussion board that has to debate "is deploying solar in Finland a good idea?" is not worth it.
Incidentally, yes, it took Finland 10 years to build their last reactor. They commissioned it a week or so ago, mere days before Russia disconnected them. Literally nothing we can effectively do to mitigate climate change takes <5 any more, including a fair few GW-scale wind farms I know of. Refusal to face that is why we are facing the calamity we are. Cheers.
Producing electricity during the summer nights is basically useless. There's a huge diurnal effect, and an even larger seasonal one. The consumption at the winter peak is roughly double that of the summer trough.
Solar is fundamentally a bad fit for Finland. (Wind is a little bit tricky too, since abnormally low winter temperatures correlate with low wind speeds. But that is a problem on the time scale of a week, rather than half the year.)
So, during summer, you don't need to pay to have ammonia shipped in. During winter, on occasions when wind threatens to die down for longer than your stock of ammonia will last you, you order a shipment.
I have no idea of what you mean by "a shipment of ammonia". 24 hour sunlight does not work to make solar power viable in Finland, because that extra production happens exactly when there is least need for electricity, and there is no economical way to store that energy for consumption 7 months later.
Basically nobody builds solar power in Finland. It's about 0.3% of the electricity production (while renewables as a whole are more than 50%). That's the reality. Your idea that the summer nights would somehow make it economical is an uninformed fairy tale.
Where does Finland get fuel for its turbines today? Fuel is imported.
Do you really imagine that importation will become impossible just because additional means of power generation, such as wind, have been added?
In near future decades, synthetic ammonia will become cheaper, per kWh, than NG, and reliably available from, e.g., solar farms in the tropics. So, that will be imported, instead of more expensive alternatives, during times when local renewables, local storage, and transmission lines do not supply enough of cheaper power.
At other times, not.
Cost of solar generation equipment is still in exponential free fall. If it is not yet a good buy for the times it could produce, it will be after the cost falls enough. That is how economics works. Planning based on current cost when cost is in sharp decline is bad planning.
The ability to import fuels, even if synthetically generated ones, for most of the year doesn't seem like much of a benefit.
Currently 14% of the Finnish electricity generation is done using fossil fuels + peat. That should go down as Olkiluoto 3 starts production. The infra you're assuming is not there. So your plan would in practice require building up not only massive amounts of solar power but also similarly massive amounts of new fuel-powered power plants that you'd run with foreign fuel for half the year. That is a really shit plan.
Look, it is obvious you're fanatical about solar power. And I'm sure it is a great fit for the areas where most of humans currently live. But it is an awful fit for a country at the Arctic circle. By making up these fairy tales about how it'd work, you just lose your credibility when talking about the areas of the world you actually know something about.
Refusal to admit that most of the world does not live in Finland seems to be a bit disconnected from reality.
It's good news, but as I said:
> But it's pretty tiny climate news overall.
Japan may also have a pretty good argument for pushing nuclear, as well as a few other places, but they are mostly just doomed to have higher energy prices than other parts of the word because of it. Not high enough perhaps to seriously disadvantage them on the global economy, but higher than places that have better natural energy sources.
Deploying solar or wind is nice and stuff, but it doesn’t remove fossil plants, because when there is no sun / wind (which happens a lot in Europe), you need to burn fossil fuels. Storage is not viable today, both because it emits a lot of co2/kWh (especially if you wanted to eliminate fossil plants, you’d need to overprovision) and because of supply constraints.
Wind electricity production in x-axis (MWh/h), y-axis is consumption of electricity (MWh/h). Each do is one hour, dot color is a month. There is no correlation.
Instead of nitpicking terminology, let's talk about the issue directly:
What do you do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing?
There isn't enough batteries on earth to even make a dent in the storage you would need. We don't want to burn any more hydrocarbons. What are our other options? Massive pumped hydro might get us there, but that construction is on a similar time horizon to a new nuclear plant anyway.
Let's talk about this directly: what do you do when the nuclear reactor goes down because it's time to refuel, or because it's heating up the river too much in a heat wave (eg in France), or because some sensor valve froze shut in an decade-frequent cold snap (Texas)?
You get the power from some other generator on the grid at a different geographic location.
We can easily get to 80%-90% renewables that way, with current lithium ion storage, and no price decreases. With price decreases, and the huge panopoly of other storage chemistries that are close to shipping, and maybe even competing economically (iron, maybe vanadium flow, maybe zinc air), then we have clear paths to 100%.
But even in France, nuclear never beat this 80%-90% mark, and it would absolutely bonkers insane and unrealistic to consider keeping the US's nuclear percentage at its current 20% of generation, because we can't build and we need to replace ~100 reactors very very very soon. We will be lucky if the nuclear industry could even deliver 10% of electricity needs in the future, because they simply can not build and deliver on their promises. Especially with electrification expanding energy consumed as electricity versus fossil fuels in the coming decades.
Pumped hydro is also very expensive compared to lots of lithium batteries. We will soon be producing many TWh/year of lithium ion, getting to tens of TWh/year by the early 2030s. We can accelerate that curve, or decelerate it based on investments and regulatory structures.
Nuclear is too far behind on tech to catch up. We simply can not grow the workforce or the supply chains of reactors quickly enough to sustain past construction levels at this pace. It would be foolish capital allocation.
> what do you do when the nuclear reactor goes down because it's time to refuel, or because it's heating up the river too much in a heat wave (eg in France), or because some sensor valve froze shut in an decade-frequent cold snap (Texas)?
> You get the power from some other generator on the grid at a different geographic location.
Nuclear has a much better uptime then current renewable tech. In the winter, there is zero sunshine in North America for 10+ hours a day. And it just so happens that we hit peak energy usage while the sun is down.
For nuclear, you only need storage "peaker plants" to smooth out demand. To go all in on renewalable and solar, you actually need to be able to service 100% of demand, for many hours, from storage. It won't be feasible for decades.
I think your estimate for tens of TWh/year by mid 2030s is reasonable. But most of that is for EVs. Tesla has the largest currently running and the largest in-the-pipeline lithium ion battery factories, but all those batteries are going straight into an EV.
Even if we dedicated 100% of batteries we can produce to be grid storage, we wouldn't have enough until ~2040. And, by the way, they all need to be replaced by 2050 because the cells all degrade and become dangerous.
In reality, the spare production capacity we can dedicate to grid storage will always be small. I'm not convinced it can even catch up with our growing energy usage in our lifetime.
> Nuclear has a much better uptime then current renewable tech. In the winter, there is zero sunshine in North America for 10+ hours a day. And it just so happens that we hit peak energy usage while the sun is down.
A renewable energy grid would be anti-fragile. We would know we could handle an outage because we'd encounter them regularly. Unlike nuclear, which goes down so infrequently that outages cause real problems.
We don't hit peak energy usage when the sun goes down. We hit peak energy usage when solar power is about 30% off peak and wind energy is at peak.
> For nuclear, you only need storage "peaker plants" to smooth out demand. To go all in on renewalable and solar, you actually need to be able to service 100% of demand, for many hours, from storage. It won't be feasible for decades.
> I think your estimate for tens of TWh/year by mid 2030s is reasonable. But most of that is for EVs. Tesla has the largest currently running and the largest in-the-pipeline lithium ion battery factories, but all those batteries are going straight into an EV.
Tesla barely makes the top ten even if you count the Nevada factory as theirs. You shouldn't, because Panasonic makes the batteries in the Nevada gigafactory. CATL is by far the biggest battery manufacturer.
> Even if we dedicated 100% of batteries we can produce to be grid storage, we wouldn't have enough until ~2040. And, by the way, they all need to be replaced by 2050 because the cells all degrade and become dangerous.
You don't put 10 year batteries into storage facilities. LiFePo4 batteries are cheaper, last a lot longer and degrade a lot more safely. They're heavier so aren't commonly used in cars outside of China, but storage uses don't care about weight.
> We'd need about 50 TWh of batteries. We can build that faster than we can build a single nuclear plant.
That's a huge [citation needed]. Global battery production is currently around 0.5 TWh per year[1]. Even if we continue to scale battery production, 50TWh is decades worth of our manufacturing capacity.
Also, don't forget that the latest and greatest battery packs last ~10 years. Just the upkeep on your grid scale battery is 5 TWh/year. We don't have anything close to enough manufacturing.
Only a negligible fraction of the storage that will be built will be batteries, so talking about batteries is just blowing smoke.
Storage cost is falling even faster than renewables cost ever did. There are many different storage options. Each place will adopt the mix of them that makes sense for that place. Until new renewable generating capacity no longer displaces carbon emission, spending on storage would be stupid.
I disagree, we are in the hundreds of GWh/year of lithium ion production now, and it grows 10x roughly every five years.
It's unlikely that any other storage tech can build supply chains quickly enough to compete with that growth. I certainly don't see pumped hydro doing this, unless we can stop relying on geography and construction projects. To make pumped hydro economical we would need something like spheres bolted to the ocean/lake floors, that pump water out and in for storage. And the materials costs for that are not falling in the same way as chemical storage.
Yet, the material cost for such a sphere, today, would be much less than for the equivalent amount of batteries, even at projected prices. It would only ever experience compressive force, which unreinforced concrete is very good at.
Lithium is a poor choice for stationary storage, and competing with growth of electric car usage would be bad policy. Probably molten-metal batteries will turn out better for utility use, where you must have batteries. But there are a lot of other choices besides batteries and pumped hydro.
But that was five years ago, and as a manufactured product perhaps they can achieve better pricing over time.
Lithium ion has no disadvantages for stationary storage, and it has one absolutely massive advantage: there are lots of higher-margin uses driving production scales up, and manufacturing costs down.
If the dropping price of lithium ion batteries suddenly opens up new markets that are so huge, that demand can not be met, prices plateau for a long time, then I hope that other technologies can catch up. But as it is I see little chance for other chemistries or technologies to scale to match lithium ion in the near term future. I'm perhaps hopeful for iron-air batteries from Form Energy, but that's only because their management team has lots of hot shots, and not as much because they have an innate technical advantage. At this point in time, execution is everything, and there's precious few people with the executive capacity and the names that would allow them to attract sufficient capital to compete with the lithium ion juggernauts.
(I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong. And I have been proven wrong on my skeptical tech takes in the past, so I know I'm not invincible here.)
A storage medium that does not tend to burst into flame emitting vaporized Drano would be a much better choice to pack together by the hundreds of tons. Iron-air is one such chemistry. Liquid metal is another.
I love to dig out this old article on why "baseload" is a bullshit argument against reneawbles and surprisingly, "baseload" comes up only when it's nuclear astroturf time again. Weird eh?
Solving the climate crisis with Future Tech is nice and all, but the word "future" does have a meaning.
More practically, we should we be building the last generation of nuclear reactors to cover us for the next 50 years until the Future Tech actually exists.
At this point, the untested "future tech" is nuclear. Storage is far more reliably produced than nuclear, and its silly to pretend otherwise when we have extremely robust supply chains for storage that produce absolutely massive amounts, whereas nuclear just creeps along with failures and schedule delays and excuse after excuse after excuse.
Nuclear is not a serious tech, it's barely a tech at all because it gets more expensive rather than cheaper the more we discover about it. Almost an anti-technology in fact, mostly a boondoggle to fund decrepit contractors that have killed subways and transit and all sorts of other construction in the Western world.
Current lithium ion storage production is at 200-300 GWh/year, which, with daily discharge is 8-12 nuclear reactors' worth of energy. Per year. And this capacity is growing 10x every 5 years, and massively dropping costs. Every. Single. Year. Nuclear is an absolute joke compared to that.
In winter, at times when wind falls off and demand exceeds transmission line delivery capacity, synthetic fuel will be shipped in from the tropics. The amount of synthetic fuel to stockpile is a cost optimization exercise.
> "The Alliance for Science is a global communications initiative based at the Boyce Thompson Institute, an independent nonprofit research institute affiliated with Cornell University. Our primary source of support is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."
The article does gloss over where Finland would source its uranium from. A GW-scale nuclear power plant burns through ~200 tons of fuel rods per year, and Finland's supplier seems to have been the Russian state-owned uranium outfit Rosatom:
Finland does have plans to start mining and refining uranium ore, but it looks like they'll produce only enough for one reactor:
> "Last year, 35% of Finnish electricity production came from the country’s four nuclear reactors, whose owners Fortum and TVO buy their nuclear fuel from other countries including Russia, France and Canada."
Anyone holding ownership in Canada's high-grade uranium ores is likely going to do well by this move. About that...
Regardless, countries like Finland which are solar-limited for much of the year are the obvious place for nuclear. Whether they can make their domestic uranium mining operations 'clean and fossil-fuel free', and secure reasonably priced contracts for importing the rest of their required reactor fuel, remains to be seen.
> Finland's supplier seems to have been the Russian state-owned uranium outfit Rosatom
"TVO has bought uranium from Canada, Australia and Africa, had it converted to UF6 in Canada and France, and enriched in Russia. Fuel fabrication has been in Germany, Sweden and Spain.
Fortum predecessor company IVOl contracted for a complete fuel supply service from Russia for the Loviisa plant."
For a bit more numbers, wikipedia has this:
"In 2009, Finland imported nuclear fuel from Sweden (40%), Russia (18%), Germany (2%) and other countries (40%)."
Fortum is those 18%. The Swedish plant is to my knowledge American owned, and from the numbers I have seen, the biggest source of uranium that it processes comes from Niger. Canada, Australia and Kazakstan isn't that far however, each sitting around 20%.
If the Greens in England and Wales dropped their opposition to nuclear and also binned off a few of their more anti-egalitarian positions (I cannot in good faith support criminal sentencing where a man goes to jail but a woman doesn't for the same crime for example) and I'd probably vote for them at this point. They've only recently been seen as a 'serious' party with mainstream appeal but climate change doesn't really care for our political sensibilities.
Given that no party accurately matches 100% of your policies and that they’re unlikely to achieve a majority and force through the less-palatable-to-you policies (regardless of what they are) it’s probably best to vote based on the critically important issues, which currently is pretty much the climate crisis.
> a few of their more anti-egalitarian positions (I cannot in good faith support criminal sentencing where a man goes to jail but a woman doesn't for the same crime for example)
That's nuts, haven't heard that before (not that I'm a supporter or anything), any more info on that - what crime for example?
Searching not turning up much, since it's being sued for the opposite sexism at the moment; grepping https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/cj.html, are you referring to these?
> CJ381 Recognising the nature of the female prison population, with high levels of mental illness, experience of being a victim of crimes such as sexual assault and domestic violence, and caring responsibilities for children, the only women who should be in custody are those very few that commit serious and violent crimes and who present a threat to the public.
> CJ382 For the vast majority of women in the criminal justice system, solutions in the community are more appropriate. Community sentences must be designed to take account of women’s particular vulnerabilities and domestic and childcare commitments. The restrictions placed on sentencers around breaches of community orders must be made more flexible.
Yeah that's what I'm on about. I don't like how it sets up gendered sentencing guidelines at all let alone doing so in a way that doesn't create any practical benefit by being gendered. The argument could just as easily be made in a non-sexist way by applying it to all non-violent offenders and to be honest I'd probably agree with it. Do they think that children can shrug off a father in prison like it's nothing?
The idea that under the Greens I'd be sent to prison for the configuration of my genitals rather than the severity of my crime is just abhorrent, in the same way I think the way women are often ignored and mistreated by the justice system is abhorrent. It's a real shame because I'd really like to vote for them, but it would mean compromising my core value that everybody should be equal under the law. We did not become a secular society only to immediately burden part of it with original sin again.
I think I understand where they are coming from but let's not pretend that dads in prison doesn't also have a massive effect on the development of their children (or not!).
In some ways the only people who should be in prison are the most violent and who are a danger to the public but we don't have a great range of alternatives for someone who e.g. steals a large amount of money but is not dangerous to the public per-se.
It also seems like 'scope creep', that they'd be better off as more of a single-issue party. My impression is that's how it's viewed by voters (those they have) anyway - I don't think Green party support is a good reflection of 'women out of prison' support.
The German green party demanded a ban on sending weapons to conflict zones just at the end of last year, now they would love to send all our army's equipment to Ukraine immediately.
They fought tooth and nail for the ban of genertical modified food, but now are in favor of a mandatory mRNA vaccination even for young people.
So why shouldn't they make another 180 on their fight against nuclear power, for which they could finally claim victory after the last three nuclear power plants will be switched off by the end of this year.
> They fought tooth and nail for the ban of genertical modified food, but now are in favor of a mandatory mRNA vaccination even for young people.
This is a consistent position. mRNA vaccination is not genetic modification. On the other hand, adenoviral-vector vaccines are genetically modified organisms.
I don't think any credible person or German party ever claimed that. It's the food you're eating that's modified, not that you get genetically modified from eating it
(Of course gmo is a thousand times better than previous practices with random mutation)
You are correct, nobody claimed that. But environmentalists often warned of "unknown risks" [1] when consuming genetically modified food. Why at the same time there should be no unkown risks when injecting mRNA vaccines into children is beyond me.
They won't and why should they? Nuclear is done in Germany. They won.
Instead Germany has been the biggest motor for renewable development in the world and now needs to jump back on their own ship after 16 years of conservative stagnation.
Germany is a lot bigger, and for Germany nuclear power certainly isn't sustainable. The population isn't on board for one thing. For another, the supply chain and the complicated life cycle has a tendency to bind huge amounts of resources and manpower that can't be easily used elsewhere in the economy, if you can find it in the first place (France has a shortage of nuclear engineers for example). Add to that the impossible and horrendously complicated nature of the risk management calculations.
If we started now, we might replace Russian gas in 20 years. We can do that in a year or two with renewable energy and other means while avoiding a lot of the other problems.
Germany is right in the middle of the biggest and most stable grid on this planet. They don't have to build storage within a year because they don't have to store all that stuff. They can take their time and continue to expand their national grid. Something they've been doing even during the last 16 years where the conservative government has been crippling the expansion of renewable energy.
Germany derives 25% of its energy consumption from natural gas. In order to remove this, they'll need to replace it with something. If they want to replace it with renewable energy, then they'll need storage. In no universe can they simply swap 25% of their energy consumption within a year without additional infrastructure.
> If they want to replace it with renewable energy, then they'll need storage.
They obviously don't because it took them one year to get rid of 10% of it already. Without any significant expansion of storage capacity or expansion of renewables btw because the previous Goverment was not in for that. This one is.
I don't know where you get those arguments from but you should seriously reconsider those sources.
It covers electricity because this is the only sector where nuclear could be relevant. The other sectors like heating and industry use of gas can't be covered by nuclear since electrical heating is negligible in Germany. Didn't you look that up?
You can use nuclear or stored renewables to power a heat pump, which could heat homes for most of the German winter. You’re saying heating is “negligible”, but the fact remains that 25% of all energy consumed in Germany comes from natural gas. There is nothing negligible about that. Also, it seems like you might not be aware, but natural gas has other uses besides heating and electricity. Natural gas is necessary to make hydrogen, which is a key component in making ammonia used for fertilizer. It has other industrial uses as well.
> You can use nuclear or stored renewables to power a heat pump, which could heat homes for most of the German winter.
To even supply something close to a significant amount of homes with heat pumps would take decades. In decades, Germany will be run on renewables completely. Gas or Russia have nothing to do on this level of discussion.
> but the fact remains that 25% of all energy consumed in Germany comes from natural gas
If you just stupidly ignore what I write and repeat the same invalid argument over and over again, it won't become valid.
It is still that 10% which is relevant for the topic here and it can be done next year without having to run a single nuclear reactor a single day longer. This is what will actually happen.
Building out renewables is the correct action right now. In the readily foreseeable future, building storage will be correct. In the meantime, building factories to build storage is beginning.
All these things take time. Repeating that things still yet to be done have not already been done sheds no light.
"The other countries" do that and they're happy to do it. We just recently got a significant boost from Nordlink. But you don't care about all that don't you? You just want to forcefully project your own attitude and hope that the other side is just as bad informed as you are because this is how that nuclear astro turf works...
Random dudes on Hackernews are pointing out the flaws im Germany's energy policy because with a few minutes of research they can see what experts through years of study and research cannot see...
Nota bene "and other means". This may include other fossil fuels, even other sources of natural gas in the meantime. Which are still easier to get rid of mid-term than nuclear power.
Nuclear power in Germany is not going to happen. We don't like the risk profile, both financially and otherwise. Other nations may see it differently.
I will buy solar panel for my home now and disconnect from the grid if you are capable provide me with a storage product that makes sense. AFAIK there are no batteries that are safe and make economical sense today and I have no clue what you storage thing you allude too that can be built in 1 year (very convenient of you not to mention what exactly it is you think that storage is that will appear this year if there is a demand)
For home use, the Tesla Powerwall is popular. https://www.tesla.com/powerwall. It gets expensive if you want to ride out several cloudy days in a row.
It's inefficient to have off-grid battery systems for every home. If you can average supply and demand across an entire grid, you need much less storage per person. And you can use storage systems with higher fixed cost but lower cost per kWh, like pumped hydroelectric.
A grid would need to be huge, because I will have a ton of sun at the same time as my neighbors and we all have darkness at the same time. Wind can compensate partially but you still need a 100% solution and don't want to give up your country energy security and depend hard on others because if bad weather happens then they will not send you energy and keep it for thir own population.
For your house, batteries is currently your best alternative. New battery tech is coming online which may turn out to scale down to single home use. Or may not. But even lithium storage gets cheaper every year.
The right mix of storage technologies will very widely according to where it serves.
You mean Germany has enough storage now that is unused and would also be enough to cover the case where gas is replaced with solar? Any numbers that show this , including say 1 winter week for residential and industry consumption?
OK, we can see in winter this storage put to good use then and in spring you can be happy proving me wrong with statistics that show that in fact Germany managed to replae all gas and nuclear production with solar and batteries.
Nobody is asking for stopping building solar or wind, why do you think this is what we are discussing? (it is about some complementary energy source that will help when there is no sun and wind for a few days)
It's called the energy market. Some energy consumers and producers are flexible in when they can produce or consume. So there is some elasticity which buffers the transient nature of wind and solar even without any storage even though there is some.
Uranium, being so energy dense, is quite practical to ship from anywhere in the world, and there are stable and democratic countries with ample reserves - so please don't use such a lazy argument here.
Russia can't get their act together to keep their trucks running. Due to chronic economic malaise and instability, they're not going to be a reliable producer of that fuel for a while.
If one's goal is influence, fighting wars is counter-productive.
The top five countries investing the most into the economy of Kazakhstan remained unchanged in 2019. Being the largest investor, the Netherlands invested $7.3 billion in Kazakhstan (30.2%), followed by the USA — $5.5 billion (23.0%) and Switzerland — $ 2.2 billion. China outran the Russian Federation in terms of investments and took 4th place with $1.7 billion (7.0%), while the Russian Federation closed the top five with $1.4 billion (5.8%) invested in Kazakhstan.
If they did, Putin would cheer. It takes 20 years to build a nuclear plant, so the likely result world be that Germany would be "temporarily" dependent on Russian gas for another 20 years.
The big problem for nuclear in Sweden at least is that no new staff has been trained for a long time. We couldn’t really run our shutdown reactors if we tried.
The same applies for Germany; our plants that have been shut down can, de facto, not be reactivated. The effort would be too big, and the industry lacks the experts as priorities shifted for obvious reasons.
In other news, Germany just started a partnership with Quatar to import Gas, because, you know, we don't want to support abusive regimes :-) Everything just gets more messy and distorted by the day.
There's also coal electricity from Poland and France seems to be nuking up to serve as Europe's reserve battery for when greens aren't producing or a large exporter misbehaves in politics next time.
Often enough, France cannot even power itself, less so export electricity 24/7. And the number of operational reactors is going down, not up. France is only a strong exporter in the times where there is low demand - exporting surplus nuclear energy is of course far better than regulating the reactors down - both from an economic standpoint as well as an ecologic one.
Yes, he did. Is there any chance he will build them, if you look at the unfinished Flammaville reactor, which is like 10 years overdue and equally over the price estimate?
France currently has like 58 reactors, all of them very old. It is doubtful that France can even keep up the current production levels.
Will giving this money to built up solar and extract the needed neodyme/copper increase the worldwide deployment of solar and wind, or are the mines already running at close to max capacity anyway and new developments are stalled by a lack of workforce, administrative decisions, or environmentalists?
I was talking about mines authorization in Peru (environmental blocks) and in China (administrative blocks).
You did not respond to my question. Do you think your argument 'money to nuclear is bad cause it slows down renewables ' is really true? Aren't we close to max production capacity yet? And in this case, why not continue with nuclear instead of building new coal?
Yes, money is in fact fungible. No, we are nowhere near max production capacity, as demonstrated by prices still falling. Nobody is building new coal except China.
Last time I visited Sweden, the mentality there seemed a bit like changing the mind on something like approach to energy is unthinkable. "We said in the 70s that nuclear is bad, so we can't just revisit this mindset now, just like that, 50 years later".
It may be hard for them to get off nuclear though, as most Swedes (that I met) seem not to care about costs of electricity at all. Lightbulbs on, when leaving a house. Not ever getting into an elevator with a stranger - better for it to ride twice. Petroleum cars are expensive and EVs free to use...
This might have something to do with Finland being energy reliant on Russia. Fact is Europe is reliant on Russia for energy, and much of the world for many base products. You can't sanction Russia, without causing pain to yourself. So most of the world didn't try, but with with the current peak levels of Anti Russia sentiments in the West, even the far left is forced into making pragmatic decisions.
I think one of the biggest issues with nuclear power is that they are designed to last decades yet they need to bee maintained properly operate safely over time, which can be a bit expensive and responsibility shifts over time so it gets "forgotten" easily and leaders can blame their predecessors if something bad happens.
Seems like China is gonna be have the best nuclear energy tech in the near future. They currently use French and U.S. designs, but within a generation I bet they'll be making their own, probably better ones.
"""
Lufeng, run by China General Nuclear Power Group, will receive a pair of third-generation Hualong One pressurized water reactors. China General Nuclear and China National Nuclear Corp. say they together independently developed the advanced reactor, which is based on U.S. and French designs.
Haiyang and Sanmen, which are run by State Power Investment Corp. and CNNC, respectively, will receive CAP1000 pressurized water reactors. The technology is based on the AP1000 reactor developed by Westinghouse.
China had 53 nuclear power plants at the end of 2021 with an total generating capacity of about 55 gigawatts. The government plans to expand the scale to 70 GW by 2025. Capacity is expected to grow further until it reaches between 120 GW to 150 GW in 2030, which may be enough to surpass the U.S. and France.
"""
Is this a case of politics, like science, proceeds one funeral at a time? Did the 1970s anti-nuclear people age out of the party leadership and membership so this could get revisited?
There is a healthy dose of pragmatism. Probably, very few people would choose nuclear if there were loads of alternatives, the capital cost and build times are insane and despite improvements, let's not pretend that nuclear fuel is easy to deal with.
But take away gas and coal and you are left with the green alternatives like solar, wind and waves which all have their own challenges the first two have high variability and aren't great for base-load and the third has challenges building equipment that can survive the extremely harsh ocean currents for a period of time that will not leave a trail of rusting relics (afaik).
I think it's more to do with the fact that the rhetoric around climate change has shifted. Now the official Green Party stance is that it is the most urgent issue of our time and must be combated by any means necessary. Of course, this conflicts with their (former) anti-nuclear stance, and they've been repeatedly criticized for this hypocrisy. I've even heard young environmentalists speculate that the Greens were secretly in bed with the oil companies.
Not just aging out, idealism as a political motive is essentially dead, because it's a luxury that can't be afforded anymore.
The new green line - everywhere - isn't "nuclear bad", it's "act on climate change or everybody, including your kids, will pay the price". The entire board changed, figures and strategies notwithstanding.
You still have to haul around huge amounts of radioactive materials with whatever technology. That alone is a big factor in the impossible risk calculations.
So far there has never been a dirty bomb. What if the pro-nuclear fanboys get their wish and we solve the energy problems of the developing world using nuclear power? What if a modestly developed country gets overrun or overturned? I don't like the odds. Most risk calculations don't take into account that people seem to make mistakes or might eventually even blow up a reactor intentionally. It's unthinkable until it happens.
Radioactive material in the United States largely doesn't move. It is stored in concrete casks on site that sit there even after decommissioning. You can see with binoculars or satellite photo.
Also, same impossible calculations apply to any power tech. Number of people injured installing rooftop solar or wind, poisoned by graphite mining, trucking accidents, aluminum production, and the like.
With "moving around" I mean mainly getting it out of the ground, processing, installing and waste storage. That alone has proven to be problematic enough.
And no, other power technologies are not as impossible to estimate. Nuclear power plants are very unique in the kind of mess they can make, see Fukushima and Tschernobyl. Those sites still need looking after and cleaning up, the final cost can't even be estimated yet. It's always been the accidents that supposedly can't happen and never happened. With other technologies not so much. Falling of a rooftop is a very knowable thing. Calculating the likelihood a nation state fails and terrorists get access to nuclear material for a dirty bomb? Never happened. But if nuclear power is your solution to the climate crisis, it needs to be everywhere...
I think it's cheaper and easier to construct a biological weapon than a dirty bomb. For the nuclear material one would need an existing nuclear infrastructure, while for a biological weapon only a reasonable good biologist and a lab is enough.
That is a fallacy. I'm talking about a dirty nuclear bomb which consists of the worst radioactive material you can find (which doesn't have to be "weapons grade" btw) dispersed by conventional explosives. This can be achieved anywhere there is a nuclear reactor for power generation or research purposes. ISIS contemplated doing this.
Biological weapons are actually much harder. It does not just take "a lab". What are we talking about? Weaponizing anthrax? Unless you have access to the secret "weaponized" strains you'd need a pretty big lab to "breed" it yourself. At the very least animal testing, maybe human testing, definitely some mass production. That takes time. Also the dispersal methods aren't as simple as one might think. In theory bioweapons sound easy, in practice they haven't proven to be very effective.
Even a major nuclear accident is not, in the scheme of things, as terrible as continuing to use fossil fuels, which is the realistic alternative for baseload power. The Great Barrier Reef will not mind a few nuclear accidents.
No, the "realistic alternative" is not continued use of fossil use, certainly not forever. It's just a lie people like you keep telling to somehow make nuclear power appear less dangerous by comparison.
And it's not "a major nuclear accident". Talk about multiple major and minor accidents on top of having a baseline of huge supporting infrastructure dealing with the procurement of radioactive base materials and the spent fuel and other waste. Because to replace fossil fuel and "solve" the climate crisis, you need to scale up nuclear power and its risks. Nuclear plants and their supply chains need to sprout up everywhere, including and especially where there is no trustworthy regulatory environment or where that is likely to disappear. And then we aren't just talking about accident but about potential mal intent which is impossible to calculate. Because once you build a power plant somewhere, you also can't just take it away.
the fossil industry loooooved the green hair folks fighting nuclear.
now slowly everyone finds out that with "only renewables", thus without nuclear in the mix, we simply cannot guarantee interrupt free electrical power at scale in most places.
Is the explicit threat of nuclear war by Russia a possible factor here? Ie. Developing nuclear energy would feed into developing nuclear weapons. From what I understand, the anti-war / anti-extinction angle was a primary motivation for at least early Green activists.
There is a comment against that video by user jem780 that claims to quote an Australian academic to counter the argument that there are inadequate uranium reserves.
When I was watching the video, that argument reminded me of the Peak Oil campaign from about twenty years ago. This claimed that the world had reached a point where the amount of oil available would be in decline going forward, and claiming that this justified major changes. At the time, this Peak Oil claim got a lot of sympathetic coverage in mainstream media. Oil production has been healthy in the years since, and technology changes have opened up new reserves.
Cookiewalled video is on the channel Sabine Hossenfelder (German theoretical phycisist), titled "Is Nuclear Power Green?" The conclusion chapter transcription:
> What speaks in favor of nuclear is that it's climate-friendly, has a small landuse and creates power on demand. What speaks against it is that it's expensive and ultimately not renewable.
The disadvantages could be alleviated with new technologies, but it's unclear whether that will work and even if it works, it almost certainly won't have a significant impact on climate change in the
next twenty years.
> It also speaks against nuclear power that people are afraid of it. Even if these fears are not rational, that doesn't mean they don't exist. If someone isn't comfortable near a nuclear power plant,
that affects the quality of life and that can't just be dismissed.
> There are two points I didn't discuss which you may have expected me to mention: one is nuclear proliferation and the risk posed by nuclear power plants during war times. This is certainly
an important factor, but it's more political than scientific and that would be an entirely different discussion. The other point I didn't mention is nuclear waste. That's because I think it's a red herring which some activist groups are using in the attempt to scare people. For what I'm concerned, burying the stuff in a safe place solves the problem just fine. It's right that there aren't any final disposal sites at the moment, but Finland is expecting to open one next year and several other countries will follow.
> And, no, provided adequate safety standards, I wouldn't have a problem with the nuclear waste deposit in my vicinity.
> So, what did I learn from this? I learned that nuclear power has become economically even unappealing than it already was 20 years ago, and it's not clear this will ever change. Personally, I would say that this development can be left to the market. I'm not in favor of regulation that makes it even more regulation for us to reduce carbon emissions. To me,
this just seems insane. In all fairness, it looks like nuclear won't help much, but then again, every little bit helps. Having said that, I think part of the reason the topic is so controversial is that, what you think is the best strategy depends on local conditions. There is no globally right decision. If your country has abundant solar and wind power, it
might not make much sense in nuclear. Though you might want to keep in mind that climate change can affect wind and precipitation patterns in the long run. If your country is at a high risk of earthquakes, then maybe nuclear power just poses too high a risk. If on the other hand, renewables are unreliable in your region of the world, and you don't have a lot of space, and basically
never see earthquakes, nuclear power might make a lot of sense.
> In the end, I'm afraid my answer to the question "is nuclear power green?" is: it's complicated.
What I'm missing in this conclusion is weighing it against other options. At all.
Sure, it's expensive. It is also expensive as compared to buying farmland for solar panels and getting food from elsewhere? And as compared to finding enough people that are okay with wind turbines nearby? (If you can't just get it all from the sea of course.) From my point of view we ought to work on both fronts, I'm not sure this was addressed elsewhere in the video but at least it's not hinted at in the conclusion.
The suggestion of leaving it to the market sounds good in principle, but forgets that we've been using the "low hanging fruit" space so far, making nuclear seem like a terrible investment for any market party that optimizes short/medium-term gain. It also ignores the political aspect: try building one of these things and getting a license to handle enriched uranium or whatever and see what the German government suddenly thinks about leaving it to the market. No sane investor is going to waste billions on that gamble, so a government needs to publish assurances at minimum. Both of these things ought to be factored in when you want to create a level playing field to let the market figure it out. Kinda weird to opine that creating a level playing field is "insane".
That said, it's a more accurate conclusion than I expected from a link-only comment. Usually such comments link sources rather than speaking for themselves due to extreme opinions, but that's not exactly the case here.
In general, solar is not in the same category of energy generation as nuclear because it can't carry the base load of the energy grid, because it is so inconsistent.
We do not currently have a general-purpose battery for solar and wind that could power the grid when they stop producing. (Some regions can through pumped storage hydro.)
Nuclear compares against base-load power sources: coal, gas, oil, hydro, geothermal.
That's an additional issue I didn't think of when writing my comment. Another omission in the linked video I guess? Though I am kinda expecting we can fix this with batteries, pumped hydro, flywheels, load shifting, interconnects, molten salt future tech idk, it generally seems like we have solutions here that should, however, be factored in (as you correctly comment) when comparing most renewables to nuclear.
I have heard a lot of chatter recently about how nuclear has fallen out of favor among certain circles on the left. Can someone explain what the reasons for that are?
What do you mean? The left has been opposed to nuclear since the 60's and 70's, it's been part of pretty much every green party's platform for decades. Dropping opposition to nuclear by some parts of the left is the new phenomenon. If nuclear is falling out of favor with the left then that's simply a return to the status quo.
It gets even more interesting. The Tasmanian Greens are often thought of as the first green party, and they started out as an anti-hydro party. (Well, against a specific dam.)
It's difficult to have a rational discussion about nuclear power with all the pro-nuclear shilling and the anti-nuclear FUD. However the following concerns are standing:
- Nuclear is becoming more expensive while solar and wind are becoming much cheaper. Nuclear and renewables compete for investments so people disagree on what to invest to.
- Nuclear proliferation is an unsolved problem and the risk is growing due to increasing tension.
- Centralized power production is more vulnerable to war, social unrest and floods compared to distributed power production. Risks of social unrest and climate change is increasing.
- Unlike solar, nuclear technology is difficult to deploy safely in developing countries, increasing inequality in energy access.
- Centralized [power] production is intrinsically less democratic than distributed.
- Safe very-long-term storage of nuclear waste is still being debated. Affordable solutions to reprocess and destroy existing waste have not been adopted yet.
- Deployment of new nuclear power takes decades and might be too slow do address climate change.
- Many argue that society should address overproduction and overconsumption of goods, and therefore energy, rather than increasing energy production.
> Many argue that society should address overproduction and overconsumption of goods, and therefore energy, rather than increasing energy production.
These people should be ignored. They are not serious people.
And, against these concerns, there are only two renewable sources that provide constant power and both are limited by geography: hydro and tidal. I'm not aware of any high output tidal in the first place, and both are extremely limited about where they can be built in the first place.
"the production of more of a product, commodity, or substance than is wanted or needed."
Overproduction makes nobody happy by definition and can actively make people unhappy as a sideffect. It is production which is not wanted or needed by anyone, overproduction only exists because we haven't figured out how to share jobs, so instead we give everyone pointless jobs, where they produce pointless products or provide pointless services, just so that they can tick the employment box and get a salary as the division of labor has become an essential part in satisfying basic needs (food and shelter).
He is correct, though. These people should be ignored and they are not serious people.
“Humanity should change its baseline behavior“ is a sign of someone who is more interested in decrying the status quo than they are in fixing anything.
You cannot fundamentally change humanity. Next proposal, please.
> “Humanity should change its baseline behavior“ is a sign of someone who is more interested in decrying the status quo than they are in fixing anything.
The last 20 years in improving building and vehicle energy efficiency never happened?
> The last 20 years in improving building and vehicle energy efficiency never happened?
What about that demonstrates a fundamental change in humanity, or specifically, a reduction in the overproduction or overconsumption of goods?
> Also the last 10.000 years never happened.
Do you have 10k years to spare?
If anything, I’d argue that most of our contemporary problems are a result of our fundamental nature failing to adapt to the new environment — and new problems — that we’ve created over the past 10,000 years.
>- Centralized power production is more vulnerable to war, social unrest and floods compared to distributed power production. Risks of social unrest and climate change is increasing.
You forgot droughts. Low flow rates mean you cannot cool your giant thermal power plant without killing the entire river. So you must turn off your nuclear power plant. Geniuses then place the powerplant near oceans with predictable tsunami risks.
> Nuclear is becoming more expensive while solar and wind are becoming much cheaper.
I'm all for renewables, but this seems rather distorted in a world where we don't price in the externalities of burning fossil fuel.
> Nuclear proliferation is an unsolved problem
Finland could have nukes if they wanted. If a technological backwater like North Korea can get them, anyone can.
Nuclear proliferation isn't being held back by technical details, but policies, international sanctions from the likes of the US etc.
> Centralized [power] production is intrinsically less democratic than distributed.
Is it? E.g. Norway and Switzerland are diversifying now, but for decades hydro-power dwarfed anything else in their energy mix. Hydro is arguably a lot more centralized than nuclear.
I could just as equally advance my pet theory that if your society doesn't have a collective stake in some sort of centralized infrastructure (health care, energy production etc.) that people are less likely to see any point in the whole project of collective decision making in a democracy.
But I think both of us would just be spitballing at that point.
> Safe very-long-term storage of nuclear waste is still being debated. Affordable solutions to reprocess and destroy existing waste have not been adopted yet.
Nuclear waste is known to be a non-issue to pretty much anyone in the know about nuclear.
If we actually cared about taking care of it we could enrich it and get rid of it that way.
It's not causing any near-term harm sitting in barrels on-site at nuclear power plants.
It's only an "issue" because it's really not, so nobody's had the incentive to really "solve" it politically.
> Deployment of new nuclear power takes decades and ...
DK, NL, and DE recently signed an agreement for off-shore wind that's expected to be fully completed in 2050. Everything takes a long time.
> ....might be too slow do address climate change.
We're pissing in the wind when it comes to climate change at this point.
> Many argue that society should address overproduction and overconsumption of goods, and
therefore energy, rather than increasing energy production.
Those people are already free to try for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the Kalahari or Amazon, meanwhile most sensible commentators will note that there's pretty much a direct line between any metric that measures human prosperity and increased energy usage.
There's no issue with increased energy use per-se, just the production methods that have externalities, such as burning fossil fuel (without subsequent capture).
The historical reasons for the opposition are a lot to do with opposition to nuclear weapons, and to a lesser extent environmental concerns around both waste storage/disposal and the impact of catastrophic failure events.
I'm not aware of a change, politically, except perhaps in the opposite direction (more people on the left supporting nuclear power - but that seems to have been slowly going on for many years at this point). Those who oppose nuclear don't trust the long term effects of how nuclear waste is stored, and they don't think the tradeoff between how horrible it is when something goes wrong and how rarely it happens is at an acceptable balance. Of course, these are the main two obvious points of examination from anybody arguing the cons of nuclear power - not just people on the political left.
One of the main reasons is the nuclear waste which for the purposes of the timescales of human civilization and planning are indefinitely dangerous. In the US in particular there's never been a great plan implemented to actually deal with that waste long term. It mostly just gets shuffled around to current running reactors when one shuts down.
If Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only examples of major catastrophe they can point to, and one wasn't even directly caused by malpractice of the employees, and the last one that was malpractice was nearly 40 years ago... then I don't even know. The best I got is "they're stupid."
Why are you implying that natural disasters don't "count"? That's not a very pragmatic stance. If an earthquake has drastically different effects on two different power sources, than that is one difference you must consider. I'm for nuclear power, but you shouldn't call people stupid for petty reasons.
That's not my point. We've learned from the mistake of building a nuclear facility that's vulnerable to earthquakes. We know how to build earthquake-resistant buildings. We know how to build dams. We know that building things close to coastal areas puts them risk of being hit by tsunami. We've learned the hard way. We're in a better position now to build them than we were before.
Uh, yeah, so should every green-type party. It's ridiculous to not be encouraging nuclear power when there are plenty of fossil-fuel power plants (especially coal) being operated and built. We can talk about switching away from nuclear when that's done. Nuclear power generation is far better for the environment and far safer (having cause many, many fewer deaths in history, per unit of power generated).
I don't see how you could justify that conclusion.
Is it that nuclear power plants aren't built overnight, and until they're done current power generation needs to continue? Because in that case it's just the status quo, but with an end data.
If it's the fact that the building of a power plant costs significant energy, then why is that your problem with it? You need to bootstrap at some point, and some countries have made the ridiculous decision to go backwards, undoing that investment.
Also, "nukes" generally means nuclear weapons, not nuclear reactors. It feels like it's being used here to intentionally denigrate nuclear power generation.
It is because money that would be building renewables that displace coal, oil and gas is instead tied up in construction, and not displacing any. When the project is finally cancelled, over budget and late, that money is spent and still not bringing renewables online.
So, each nuke project eliminates substantial immediate, progressive, and permanent erosion of their market.
Developing effective renewables does not preclude the development of nuclear power. Switching completely to renewables in the very short term is not feasible, and it will take particularly long in areas that aren't well-suited to any of the main renewable power technologies. Also, many governments provide ridiculous fossil fuel subsidies, which should be eliminated, freeing up money.
New nuclear power plants will provide huge amounts of very-low-environmental-impact power for decades to come, it's not like its a wasted investment.
Your second sentence seems to make the assumption that every nuclear power project will be cancelled, over budget and late, which is obviously wrong. The fact that you'd write that shows a bad-faith argument.
Building out nukes to displace fossil fuels is much less feasible, in exact proportion to the radically greater cost per MW, plus the additional >decade-long delay before any power comes out.
Money is fungible. Each dollar tied up in nuke construction, plus each other in fossil fuel while waiting on it, are unavailable to use building out renewables.
(And, yes, I ignore the "nukes" thing. There is no confusion. The facts suffice to denigrate them.)
One of the biggest issues which makes it hard for the public to judge how well nuclear does, is the association of nuclear power with nuclear weapons which are totally shrouded in secrecy.
Nuclear power and nuclear weapons were developed together, often with nuclear power plants providing fuel for the weapons. All of this data, including disposal and environmental issues are completely classified.
The Greens' idiotic anti-nuclear stance has empowered and embolden decades of coal and oil exploration and proliferation. As a Green voter I desperately hope this pattern gets adopted and replicated here in Australia the sooner the better.
It isn't idiotic. While it is partially ideological reasoning behind their rejection, nuclear power is overall a bad deal with current technologies. France might have problems operating theirs because they have a drought and rivers aren't able to cool the plants. Uranium is only available in limited supply additionally to the high costs of nuclear energy this will become a problem in the long term. We only recently have opened the first permanent storage for nuclear waste (would need to look up if it really opened).
Part of the problems are regulation, taxes and missing expertise. I guess Finland wants nuclear energy because prices skyrocketed as Russia capped the lines. But nuclear energy could never be a solution to solve that deficit.
There are good solutions to the problems you pose. Most of the problems with fission energy generation is due to PWRs and using fuel pellets instead of liquid fuel. Current technology burns only 3% of the fuel in pellets before having to replace them. MSRs can burn 97% of their fuel. Solid fuel nuclear reactors have byproducts that are radioactive for millions of years. The byproducts of MSRs are radioactive for hundreds of years. MSRs can actually burn the dirty remains of the nuclear fuel tossed aside during the 20th century.
Nuclear waste is process and reactor specific. These are engineering problems and are several magnitudes of order smaller problems to deal with that dealing with carbon waste.
No, it is not a small problem. There are processing plants that show elevated cancer rates in the population living near them and a significant part of radioactivity is just pushed into rivers or the ocean. That is after we have forbidden the practice to just drop nuclear waste in barrels but this is still a legislative shortcoming.
Sure, there are better reactor designs and processing methods but they aren't available yet. We should never exclude fission power completely, just that it isn't a good option right now. If research is inhibited by not using bad and costly technologies, we need other sources of funding. That is an issue that could very well need solving.
I did not say it was a small problem, I said the current problem of stopping CO2 pollution and removing what we already have pumped into the environment over the last 200 years are orders of magnitude larger.
Sorry, I'm kind of hijacking this comment. Honest question, would Australia actually need nuclear? The whole continent looks like it could become a renewable powerhouse for wind/solar/hydro, there's also quite a lot of lithium there from what I understand.
Australia exports millions of tons of thermal coal annually, we have vast gas fields of WA. These are profitable because a international market exist. The market exist because of a lack of affordable alternatives. So no, with enough baseload tech Australia will be probably be OK without nuclear. Solar to H2/Ammonia for example.
I've been predicting this for a while. Nuclear is the best solution we have in hand right now for scaling back the climate disaster. It's better to hedge than throw all your money into one bet.
Wait… someone in the realm of politics changed their mind in a… sane… rational direction?
I feel like I could count instances of that in my lifetime on one hand. Everywhere on the political spectrum everyone seems to have been utterly losing their minds for a long time.
There are many things to bring out the negativity and sarcasm for about politics, but there seem to be reasonable arguments both for and against nuclear power. That's not to say that you can't consider one argument to be obviously better than the other, but the leap to "any opposition to my side is unreasonable and deserves to be snidely made fun of" is part of what's ruining politics.
Yeah, let's pretend thousands of people dying prematurely because of pollution isn't happening as well. Perfect is the enemy of good and looking for a "perfect" solution (zero carbon, zero risk) is just causing suffering and driving us to early extinction.
You will be right one day, and I'll cheer with you. But that day isn't coming terribly soon - the enormous energy storage needed to have the necessary degree of reliability out of intermittent sources, at the level of countries, is far beyond our current practical means.
Storage cost is falling faster than renewables cost ever did.
So in the meantime, build out renewables so that you have something other than fossil fuels to charge your storage from. Then build storage. By then it will be radically cheaper than it is now.
This, to me, sounds like a pipe dream. We can become carbon neutral with the tech we have _right now_ whereas I fail to imagine how these necessarily exponential improvements in storage capacity will happen.
The _one_ thing that gives me hope for storage is maaaaybe synthetic fuels. But currently it's unproved.
If you mean using nukes, nukes started today will ensure burning fossil fuel for at least ten more years while we wait for them to come online. Money (including cost overruns) spent on them will be unavailable to build out renewables that would displace fossil fuels immediately.
Electric synthetic ammonia is mature tech. It just takes a long time to build the factories to produce the needed amount of synthesis equipment.
> Millions of tons of ammonia are handled every year.
Fertilizers are handled in even larger quantities, generally safe most of the time, yet accidents do happen. This alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion killed comparable count of people to Chernobyl + Fukushima combined.
I consider a nuclear power plant way safer than a facility which handles bulk quantities of toxic or explosive stuff.
We don't have storage because we have not built out storage. After we have built out storage, we will have storage.
Until we have enough renewables to charge storage from, any storage would have to be charged from fossil fuels. So, it would be stupid to spend money building out storage with money that could be spent building out renewables. After we have enough renewables, we will want storage. Storage will be radically cheaper at that time.
The reality is that no country has entirely replaced fossil fuels with renewables. If you're advocating shutting down nuclear plants while any amount of power is coming from coal, you are not being serious.
– Obviously, the Fukushima disaster of 2011.
– The fact that the Olkiluoto 3 reactor project [1], a 1600MW PWR unit, was plagued by chronic delays and cost overruns – it is only now being connected to the grid, over ten years behind schedule. OL3's fundamental problem was that the European nuclear industry simply was not up to the task of delivering a first-of-its-kind, ambitious third-gen reactor after a fifteen-year hiatus during which no new nuclear power plants were built in Europe.
– Another planned nuclear plant, Hanhikivi [2], had problems finding a Western reactor supplier; after some arguably rather shady dealings, a contract was made with Rosatom, the state nuclear corporation of Russia. This received some well-earned criticism, but Finnish decisionmakers (perhaps naively) wanted to think there was no political dimension to such an agreement. After February 24, the project is now almost certainly dead in the water, never having left the planning and design phase.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant