this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Is there another plausible scenario? Wind and solar are getting so cheap, that displacing either with nuclear is like flushing money down the toilet.
Wind and Solar aren't reliable, so you either need storage or a backup source to compensate when demand peaks above production from renewables.
Absolutely! The way I see it, grid energy storage is something we really need to improve dramatically.
Yeah, but there really aren't that many good options for it. Pumped Hydro is by far the best but limited by geography.
That’s what I thought until I watched this video.
I assume you mean the "limited by geograpghy" bit? It's a pretty good video overall, but the US and Australia aren't the best examples here. You guys have tons of space and a rather low population density. But large parts of Northern Europe we have some insanley densly populated areas and no site for pumped storage nearby.
Yeah, that’s exactly it. Initially I thought it was pretty much impossible to find suitable locations any more, but apparently there are lots of sites left. Highly populated areas are obviously a lot more challenging. The point is that as opposed to having exactly zero locations, it seems that we do have some options here and there.
Update: here’s an interesting map for potential locations. If you’re in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Stockholm or other flat regions, you’re not going to see any pumped hydro any time soon. However mountains of Norway, Spain, France, Italy and Germany look a lot better in that regard.
Actually, Poland, Hungary, and England are probably the worst locations, but fortunately there are still many opportunities elsewhere in Europe.
Currently that backup/storage is mostly fossil fuels, so building nuclear would displace fossil fuels. As long as nuclear remains expensive, we will only build it because not emitting CO2 is socially valuable.
Nuclear would have to get a lot cheaper to eat wind/solar's lunch. Maybe that could happen someday, but it's not worth worrying about now.
the other scenario is coal stays online to meet a growing demand...
Unfortunately, there is. Let’s think about the situation in China or India.
They already have plenty of coal power, and the need for energy keeps on growing. If they replace coal with nuclear, their energy production can grow that way, but it’s goin to re quire lots of investments. However, in a situation like that there’s little incentive to do so when you can just keep your coal power running and build more nuclear to meet the energy needs of the country.
Maybe if China had access to more oil they could switch to natural gas like the West did...
Wind and solar are so cheap because they have had investment and research done for years. Nuclear hasn't had that type of investment because people have reservations about it.
Give nuclear all the money "renewables" have been getting and you will see prices drop.
This sounds like hyperbole. Nuclear has been powering the world for decades. It may not have enjoyed sexy headlines, but it's hard to believe billions of dollars has been invested in new plants without any research.
1960s nuclear has been powering the world for decades. Even most new plants are using reactor designs from over half a century ago.
New reactor designs exist and some have even been tested on the small scale, but nuclear power is an extremely conservative industry. That molten salt reactor built in China not that long ago that made all the news as a "new" reactor type? The US first tested that design in the 1960s, and the no further research was funded by anyone despite the fact that the prototype worked very well.
The current hope is that Small Modular Reactors catch on and drag the rest of the nuclear industry with them. They tend to use newer and potentially much safer designs.
That's just not true. The Westinghouse AP1000 was given type approval in 2011. It's what is referred to as a GEN3+ reactor. A lot of R&D was put into simplifying the design, reducing the number of pipe runs, valves, pumps etc compared to GEN2 reactors. It also used large sub assemblies that were factory built off-site then moved for final assembly.
In theory they should have been cheaper to build, but they weren't. Large assemblies that don't fit together properly need a lot of very expensive site time for rework. There were other issues on top of that, which just compounded the assembly problems. It's how Vogtle ended up going from $12B to $30B+, and V.C Summer went from $9B to an estimated $23B when the project was cancelled while under construction.
The EPR units from Areva were similar GEN3+and received type approval in the early 2000s. They had similar cost overruns, for similar reasons.
I have strong reservations about SMRs. So far the cost/MW is about on par with traditional reactors while the amount of waste increases by 2 to 30x traditional reactors depending on technology used.
There are reasons why reactors moved from 300-600MW units to 1000MW+ in the first place. The increased output would cover what was thought to be marginal increase in costs. That turned out to be at least somewhat true.
They can call it whatever they want but PWR is an old design. They polished the design a bit, so what? It's still an overblown pressure cooker.
Industrial scale reactor designs take a ton of time and money and experience to research. Research reactors are only a step in the middle of the process, and nobody's been willing to take any new designs past that.
SMEs have potential not because they're particularly efficient or cost effective, but because stand a chance of pushing the state of the art. They offer a way around the whole "I'm not paying $40bn for an unproven design" problem.
Recent research on nuclear has been litteraly sabotaged by ecologists and politics.
Yep, it's more pro-nuclear bollocks.