Forgive me for being cynical at this point, but I'll believe it when it comes online. I sure hope they're successful, though. Nuclear is still the only thing we have going for relatively near-term non fossil-fuel baseload. Anything not near term is too late.
You might be one of those who embrace electric vehicles today, yet it's worth remembering that electric cars were once considered obsolete. They were revived through persistent belief and innovation, despite the dominance of internal combustion engines. This same principle of perseverance and innovation applies to nuclear energy and solar panels.
We cannot predict with certainty which technologies will dominate the future, but it's clear that innovation and research should always be our priorities. Dismissing nuclear power as a relic of the past is illogical. Instead, we should focus on improving it and continuing to explore all potential solutions for sustainable energy. Nobody can predict.
It's a race between nuclear, batteries, and using direct air capture to make up for remaining fossil fuels, concrete and other corner case greenhouse gas emissions.
I think direct air capture is going to be the technology that gets us over the finish line, simply because it's the only one that has a path to net-zero.
Nuclear, renewables and batteries all make carbon capture more affordable, so the ultimate answer is probably "all of the above".
Direct air capture is really about the least realistic of popular geoengineering proposals. The atmosphere is huge. We didn't get into this situation overnight - it took almost two centuries and oodles of factories, vehicles, concrete plants, etc. It's vastly cheaper just not to output more CO2 in the first place. Thermodynamic constraints mean that tremendous amounts of energy are required to do DAC in the first place, not to mention the knock-on biosphere effects of the production required to build that hitherto-unseen scale of capability.
We can't magic-tech our way out of this situation. It will take huge effort, and more importantly, sacrifice of the unthinking low-value abundance we have. Nuclear power is hard, but it is still much more realistic than unproven wundertech like DAC.
Yep. We basically doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. If we had a machine that could take some volume of air and scrub all the C02 out, we’d need to pass half of the atmosphere through it to cut the CO2 in half.
I think the point is that even if we can scale up DAC to work, we need some carbon-free source of energy to power it. Fixing the atmosphere essentially means we need enough non-emitting energy to run civilization since 1850 in reverse, and preferably much faster than 1x.
No argument from me. Trees work. Stopping forest loss is an absolutely low-hanging fruit, but one that we still cannot achieve. Rewilding of massive areas must be a primary goal. If we can't do that, we certainly can't do DAC. In general, the Earth's homeostasis (and thus, thus homeostasis of human civilization) depends on continued, robust functioning of the biosphere. The biosphere is resilient and adaptable. However, it has never faced intelligence before. Humans - more and more unfettered by their own physical limitations - will seek (as always) to bend their environment to their own particular wills - even when it conflicts with the interests of humanity as a whole. Even in a decaying and impoverished environment, people may still seek out ever more marginal benefits at greater and greater social costs. I hope I'm wrong, but we may be at the great filter.
Right now most of our cities are directly dealing with the problems of the "Heat Island effect". It's dangerous and causing very real, very scary death statistics.
We know the easy fixes: add more trees to parking lots. Replace more parking lots with trees.
We know exactly why that is an unpopular solution: most parking lots are privately owned and trees don't pay parking fees. Also, our cities are so car-centric parking is "important" and removing any parking spaces is seen as hurting surrounding businesses because fewer people will commute there from the suburbs/exurbs.
"Ban cars and reforest parking lots" is a joke of an extremist take, but also both one of the easiest solutions and one of the hardest solutions, to the Heat Island effect specifically, but also as a microcosm of the things we need to do to solve climate change issues in general.
Between now and 2030 there will be a lot of energy generation coming online. Hundreds of GW basically. The vast majority of that is going to be renewables. Nuclear is not going to contribute much at all. It might actually shrink proportionally as several reactors are scheduled to be decommissioned and there just isn't a whole lot being approved for construction.
This project is only adding some 340 MW. Not nothing of course but probably expensive and just not a lot in comparison. And of course that 2030 target date will likely slip. And in good tradition the article doesn't actually talk about budgets or money. Because obviously, this being a nuclear plant, it will blow through whatever budget was defined. By about 2x at least.
> Today couldn’t have happened without the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which is supporting the project with the largest single contribution the federal government has ever committed to a private project.
Which in short, is why Bill Gates is still involved at all: tax payer money is covering the budget and most of the risk. Which is substantial. And he gets to look all visionary if/when this thing comes online at great cost at some point in the 2030s.
I'm glad more renewables are coming online, but that's not the 24/7 base capacity that is really needed to fully replace fossil fuels. Solar and wind are cheap now, but they only generate power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. Thus, energy storage on a huge scale is needed if they are to replace fossil fuels. Power grid unreliability is politically untenable. People will march headfirst into the destruction of industrial civilization, ignoring the warnings of climate scientists, before they will accept an electrical grid that is offline for 5% of the time. For as difficult as nuclear is, storage is much harder yet. Nuclear is proven tech. It works at scale. The main obstacles political, but they are much more easily overcome than objections people would have with an unreliable grid.
Baseload power producers ceased to be relevant decades ago. The nuclear industry has coopted the term because they know they can’t compete on cost.
With storage now coming online in large enough quantities to meaningfully affect the grid the window of opportunity for nuclear energy has passed. It had a chance if the reactors started in the 2000s had delivered on time and on budget. They did not deliver.
Baseload power is still very much relevant. People will not tolerate power outages when it's cloudy. Yes, storage has advanced, but it's nowhere near the capacity that's needed. If it were, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. It's far from the capacity of existing nuclear power supplies, right now - much less what is needed.
Given your answer it does not seem like you opened the linked article. Storage in California is supplying the equivalent to 4-6 nuclear reactors during the evening peaks. They are supplying nuclear scale level energy. We are having this discussion because a nuclear energy startup sees their window of opportunity vanish.
Baseload on the demand side still exists. Baseload powerplants not so much.
Look at the rate California is installing storage. Given the current rate, in 20 years time when what we install today reaches EOL, California will have 10 hours of storage during the summer peak.
When simulating the Australian grid with 5 hours of storage at mean power levels that leads to 99% reliability. [1]
A nuclear plant to solve the last 1% is a non-starter.
Of course we also do not only rely on storage, there is also:
- Large grid to decouple weather patterns
- Demand response
People already get on hourly contracts and schedule car charging for when it is cheap. The next step is automating it and making it more streamlined.
Some companies already support chargers which integrate with the pricing, they can even give you money back through demand response.
It's worth noting that California is one of the wealthiest regions in the world, yet it faces extremely high electricity bills to achieve its goals.
On the other hand, nuclear power is criticized while France, which relies heavily on nuclear energy, enjoys some of the lowest electricity rates in Europe.
How can you apply California's model to poorer countries when even California hasn't fully decarbonized? France, on the other hand, achieved significant decarbonization decades ago.
It's ironic that people like you see the fight against climate change as an opportunity to attack nuclear power. Be honest about your intentions.
Mostly based on the huge payouts for forest fires and bankruptcy of PG&E.
Until they had the highest rates in Europe when their nuclear energy did not deliver. [1] Currently they are completely unable to construct any new nuclear power given the outcome of Flamanville 3 [2] and cost escalations of their upcoming reactors [3], before they have even started building. The future for the French nuclear industry is looking incredibly bleak.
Relying on data from the 50-80s to "show" that nuclear is viable today, and also only looking at the reactor and not the entire plant, is essentially lying with statistics.
Have a look at all projects in the west in the past 20 years. They've either been cancelled or taken 20+ years from announcement to commercial operation.
Given the extreme costs of and lengthy construction timelines of modern nuclear power investing in it today prolongs climate change.
> Until they had the highest rates in Europe when their nuclear energy did not deliver. [1] Currently they are completely unable to construct any new nuclear power given the outcome of Flamanville 3 [2] and cost escalations of their upcoming reactors [3], before they have even started building, the future for the French nuclear industry is looking incredibly bleak.
You are cherry-picking examples to support your argument, which is intellectually dishonest. For instance, if I took the construction time of the slowest wind farm and presented it as the norm, it would be equally misleading. I provide average and mean construction times, which are more representative of the overall picture.
> Have a look at all projects in the west in the past 20 years. They've either been cancelled or taken 20+ years from announcement until commercial operation.
This is another example of cherry-picking. Western countries have not invested in nuclear power on a large scale in recent decades. However, countries like South Korea and China, which have heavily invested in nuclear energy, have achieved much shorter construction times.
You mention statistics but fail to explain how building one nuclear plant per decade in the West represents any meaningful statistical evidence. It is misleading to generalize from such a small sample size.
> Given the extreme costs and lengthy construction timelines of modern nuclear power, investing in it today prolongs climate change.
Germany's Energiewende, which has cost 600 billion euros over 20 years, has not achieved significant decarbonization. Renewables remain the most heavily subsidized energy source in Europe.
To understand your position better, do you prioritize excluding nuclear power or achieving decarbonization?
South Korea was building until their corruptions scandals blew up the industry. They haven't been able to sign a single export agreement since. [1]
China has for every single passing year been reducing their nuclear targets in favor of renewables. They keep a toe in the nuclear business but it is not core to their energy strategy anymore. [2]
We can have a look at all reactors we have tried to construct in the past 20 years in the west. The French examples are the pretty picture.
Finished:
- Olkiluoto 3: Took 20 years.
- Flamanville 3: Incredible cost blow-out and delays.
- Vogtle: Laughably delayed and expensive.
Under construction:
- Hinkley Point C: Laughably delayed and expensive.
Cancelled after investment decision:
- Virgil C. Summer: The ratepayers are going to pay for this chaotic project for decades to come.
- Hanhikivi: Was apparently hard to certify a Russian reactor for western standards.
Cancelled before investment decision:
- NuScale: In the end it cost more than Vogtle in $/kW.
Planning limbo because no one can agree on the costs:
- Wylfa-Newydd
- Sizewell C
- Oldbury B
- Bradwell B
- Moorside
Early stage planning:
- 6 new EPR2s by EDF in France: Continuously getting more expensive.
Given this horrific outcome taking statistics from the 70s and saying and saying it has any relevance to the costs and timelines of nuclear power construction in modern advanced economies is just sticking your head in the sand.
Please compare Germany and South Korea then. South Korea, the modern poster child for nuclear power held up as the paragon to emulate. Stuck at 450 gCO2/kWh which is worse than even Germany.
21st century nuclear power does not deliver decarbonization. Renewables do.
You are citing individual cases that don't reflect the broader picture. The reactors you listed don't represent large-scale construction efforts like those seen decades ago.
Additionally, you mention costs as if they are the final cost to consumers. While Olkiluoto 3 was expensive to build, electricity bills in Finland are now stable and relatively low because of it. Over the long term, once the construction costs are repaid, it will be even more economical.
Regarding China, your point isn't clear. The fact remains that China is demonstrating the effectiveness of building multiple reactors in parallel, which is faster and cheaper. Building reactors sporadically, as France is doing with new technologies, is indeed slow and costly.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61927
As for Korea, your argument seems unrelated. I advocate for a mix of nuclear and renewables. Korea's current strategy lacks sufficient renewable energy, which is not ideal. I mentioned Korea specifically to highlight their nuclear power capabilities, not their overall decarbonization strategy. Both Korea and Germany show that decarbonization requires a mix of nuclear and renewable energy sources.
So, is your priority to exclude nuclear power, or to achieve decarbonization?
Incredible how every single reactor we have attempted to build in the west in the past 20 years are "individual cases" when you have to find a way to rationalize your own stand point.
Both the French and the American large-scale efforts ended in tears. Scale did not solve it.
> The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing
> By the mid-1970s, it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent.
> [...]
> The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible.
> Regarding China, your point isn't clear. The fact remains that China is demonstrating the effectiveness of building multiple reactors in parallel, which is faster and cheaper.
Love how your link says "Continues rapid growth" about the Chinese nuclear program while the curve obviously is stagnating.
> While Olkiluoto 3 was expensive to build, electricity bills in Finland are now stable and relatively low because of it. Over the long term, once the construction costs are repaid, it will be even more economical.
So now we just ignore basic economics. You don't get anything for free in the world. Someone paid. In the case of OL3 the French paid for the majority of the cost.
Do you think anyone will sign a contract like OL3 again where the supplier is certain to make a loss?
Lets have a look at Denmark and South Australia then? 150 gCO2/kWh and rapidly declining. Why accept being stuck at 450 gCO2/kWh like South Korea simply because they build nuclear?
Because you don't really care about nuclear plants but understands that the discussion has shifted and now promote nuclear to prolong our reliance on fossil fuels.
> Because you don't really care about nuclear plants but understands that the discussion has shifted and now promote nuclear to prolong our reliance on fossil fuels.
This shows all your intellectual dishonesty.
I'm for any effective way to break down our dependency on fossil fuels. I support research and investment in any type of technology that can effectively help us achieve net-zero emissions. Unlike you, I don't ideologically exclude one technology over another. Excluding a technology only complicates things.
I am well aware of the limitations of both nuclear and renewable energy sources, but this is not a sensible reason to exclude either from the mix. There has never been a single solution to our energy problems, but rather a need for a balanced mix and compromises.
The last attempt at an SMR failed due to out of control costs and that was a conventional water cooled plant (NuScale Power). I would be shocked if TerraPower built anything before 2030 close to their projected costs.
