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Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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The problem with Nuclear's "good enough" is that Nuclear is currently worse than other technology we have in almost every way.
It is absolutely true that solar and wind are better because more money has gone into their research. But because of that, they are better options in almost all real world power situations.
The problem with focusing on nuclear is... why waste all that political capital just to spend 100x the money or more that you could spend to be 100% renewbles in the short term? The front-loaded TCO is the real issue with that one. If you wanna hit 0 emissions tomorrow with Solar/Wind, you're just paying the up-front costs, knowing there are per-year costs (still cheaper than fossil fuels) to keep it going. If you want to do the same with nuclear, you're paying for almost all of it out of the gate for 50 years worth. Suffice to say, that's a budgeting nightmare.
And what's left is space. Nuclear creates a lot of power in a small area. But wind and solar are both far more easily/efficiently integrated into the space we are already using.
No way. Batteries are expensive as hell. Solar+Battery is at best equal to nuclear in the current numbers. And probably worse overall... forget the actual damages as far as mining all the lithium and other rare metals.
You're in the green after about 10-15 years with nuclear. So I'm not sure why you bring this point up repeatedly. https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY?t=600
TCO shouldn't matter to stop climate change.
There's plenty of decommissioned coal/gas/oil plants that are perfect sites for nuclear. Ironically it costs more to clean up the radioactivity left behind by these plants than the nuclear plant will release in it's whole lifetime.
Batteries+solar runs $77/MWH with current technology. Nuclear runs $175/MWH with current technology (both of these numbers are TCO, not just running costs) 1 and 2. Months back I did a fairly exhaustive analysis on reddit. Wish I'd kept a link of that, but I cut and ran. More importantly, a nuclear plant is usually "locked in" to current efficiency for 50 years or more, where solar farms and battery farms can be traded up. By end-of-life, that nuclear plant will still be a $175/MWH-TCO plant, but could be competing against solar+battery in the order of $50/MWH TCO as large scale battery tech is skyrocketing of late.
I ended up anti-nuclear from a position of knowledge and research, not a position of "omg it's nuclear". I started pro-nuclear until I did the math a LOT.
Per Nuclear Power Economics and Project Structuring, the capital cost accounts as 60% of the total cost of ownership. Yes it's in the green (capital-wise), by year 10-15. But 60% of Every penny that needs to be spent on a nuclear plant is spent before you hit the "on" button. Solar plants go green in 5 years, but more importantly, you amortize the cost (and continue to do so) over the life of the plant. The latter is always more feasible for a large scale project.
Compare that to solar roofs, solar parking shades, windmills that can often be installed in "spare lots", etc.
EDIT: And to be clear, I'm not even saying there may never be an appropriate use for a nuclear plant in going green. There's just very few of them. Going solar in a big city is a custom gig, but dropping a nuclear plant in its outskirts, not so much. Luckily for me in the US, there's a whole hell of a lot of unused or unusable land just begging for solar plants.
According to the EIA.gov, nuclear is between 36 and $88 per megawatt hour for LCOE for advanced nuclear. Your numbers are way off.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf
Strange. I must be mis-reading your numbers, because the chart I'm reading on your link shows an LCOS/LCOE between $88 and $98... The numbers I was quoting was probably conventional nuclear, and that's a fair correction. I would really appreciate if you are able to address why my references disagreed with your reference, as I didn't come out with my numbers off-the-cuff. Is it conventional vs advanced nuclear, or is it a different measurement entirely?
Note also, however, that Advanced Nuclear still loses to Solar handily in every single chart presented in that document. In addition, none of that addresses the front-loaded cost of nuclear vs solar, which amounts to an entire order of magnitude.
And yet you made simple mistakes like assuming that nuclear reactors only last 40 years?
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-reactor-much-longer-you-might-think
When your assumption is flawed by literally a possible 50% (or more) of the nuclear reactors lifetime your evaluation is useless. Your numbers are useless without evidence or citation especially when you make easily disprovable assumptions from the get go.
What magic technology have we invented? You realize that lithium ion batteries are 1980's technology right? We haven't made any significant advancements in battery technologies in decades. All we do is repackage it so we can charge/discharge them faster. That's not capacity.
Yes, that's what I said. Remember we're in it for long term solutions. Not bullshit hand-wavy nonsense.
Yes 100,000 little projects vs 1...
And I'm not even Anti-solar... after all it's literally just second-hand nuclear production... But it's just that. Second-hand, and why settle for "Second" when we can harness first hand? I'm just not dumb enough to assume it's the answer to all our problems.
No. No I didn't. I was using the lowest life expectancy for nuclear because it steelmanned nuclear for my other critiques. You want to use longer ages, that means you're prepaying 60% of that longer age at cost. I find it interesting that you called me out on trying to give nuclear more benefit. That said, IAEA holds with 30-40 year life expectancy on a nuclear plant so I think the steel-man I chose is acceptable.
Lithium Ion batteries are being used at large scale now, sure. It's dishonest to say the ones being built today for utility-scale power are 1980's technology, just as it's dishonest to pretend that nuclear power is what it was in the 1950's. But there are also advancements in molten sand batteries, and even utility scale water energy storage is going down in price (though I believe it's still slightly more expensive than nuclear).
So how is $140/MWH total cost of energy over the life of a nuclear plant "the long haul" over $77/MWH total cost of energy over the life of a nuclear farm? Do we need to discuss how that kind of math works? Building solar+battery plants, running them till EOL, rebuilding them from scratch and repeating several times is still **half ** as expensive as producing the same amount of energy with a nuclear plant until it reaches EOL.
And considering that cost is effectively more like $1,000/MWH or more for the first few years, how exactly are we going to get carbon neutral any time soon by literally adding an order of magnitude to our costs?
Sure. Being able to plop it down at a massively high price does have its uses. Note I said there CAN be appropriate uses for nuclear. Just not many of them. The price is just unreasonable. And very often, space isn't really an issue. Those 100,000 little projects are still cheaper than that 1 project nuclear for the amount of energy created.
For several reasons. First, the sun is in a state of nuclear fusion which is at least 4x more efficient than can be achieved with fission. Second, the sun is gonna burn whether we harvest that energy or not. Third, the most expensive part of a any nuclear power prospect is causing and containing it. We get to skip that step with solar.
I guess I am "dumb enough". Between the power created from the sunlight itself, and wind and hydroelectric power created indirectly by it. The numbers all work out.
How much of that $140 is labour?
Seems an odd question. Since I'm not sure what you're getting at, my answer might or might not be of value.
The only thing I know offhand about the breakdown is 60% of the total lifetime cost of electricity is in construction costs, a number that is disgustingly through the roof and why using nuclear power for the whole world is unfeasible. It's that bad.
The rest is "day to day costs" which are far lower with nuclear than other forms of energy. Which would be great if it didn't cost so much to build a nuclear plant.
Countries with a lower PPP would get the lifetime cost closer to parity, if a handful of project experts etc are brought in at Western rates and local labour is used for the build and operation. If the federal system of government for that country streamlines the registration process while mandating key critical compliance steps (for instance, full test and verification on the containment system but not the light switch in the control room toilets, which I have read is an issue with the US regs) it would seem that non-us countries would be able to do nuclear cheaper per MWh.
Cheaper than $140, or cheaper than Solar? Someone just got back to me with claims of lower Nuclear numbers... and even in those claims, Nuclear simply could not get anywhere close to Solar.
Probably a third of that cost is tied up in NRA certification with 32 different federal and state licensing bodies, planning, EIS statements which average 6 years to write, and the political approval process.
While you're waiting those six to 10 years to get your project started, you're going to see a construction cost inflation rate of what, 25 to 30%?
Care to substantiate that the red tape amounts to more than 100 years worth of the same MWH of solar? Or is that just your gut feeling?
Also note, even if the construction cost were 30% inflated, nuclear is still losing handily to solar by the figures I cited.
I was half joking, although cost escalation would actually account for a major portion of the cost increase.
We did a new building project. Started during 2021, and by the time we received the final bids costs had increased 50%. All within 6 months. We're at 10% cost escalation this year alone.
Imagine 6 years of that.
However, it also sounded like these companies had no clue what they were doing. Similar to California High Speed Rail.
Of course. That happens. Luckily, we have countries like China with less red tape to use to measure. They've been building a lot of nuclear and solar. Their end-to-end solar looks like around $750M per GW (possibly including storage? Not sure. About $2.2B for a 3.3GW plant). Looks like they're spending about $5B per GW of nuclear.
Sorry I don't have the solar reference anymore. I was building a math equation for another comment and realized they weren't talking price, so scrapped it without thinking.
Since those numbers seem to match US figures, I think people in the Western World forget that a lot of bid cost increases or "escalations" are due to the fact that companies try to low-bid to win the contract, knowing every little inconvenience will require a cost increase. It evens out more than people want to admit.
Yeah I hate dealing with that. Then they send back every design decision to be reopened, resulting in literally years the meetings to decide which source for which equipment, all the while the Costco up to the point where if we just built a damn thing 5 years ago then it would have been cheaper than trying to go with a low bid now. Not to mention years of delays.
Agreed. It doesn't end up saving a penny, but it definitely leads to greased wheels along the way and richer politicians.