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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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14 years and 35 billion (combined with #4 which has not been finished) and didn't generate a single kWh in anger until now. Put the same investment into renewables and it would generate similar or greater energy and would start doing so within a year.
The argument against nuclear now is not about safety. It is about money. Nuclear simply cannot compete without massive subsidies.
Renewables and nuclear are in the same team. It's true that nuclear requires a greater investment of money and time but the returns are greater than renewables. I recommend checking this video about the economics of nuclear energy.
That video completely ignores decommissioning costs for nuclear power plants and long-term nuclear waste storage costs in its calculation. Only in the levelized cost of electricity comparison does it show that nuclear is by far the most expensive way of generating electricity, and that it simply can't compete with renewables on cost.
People love to look at nuclear power plants that are up and running and calculate electricity generation costs based just on operating costs - while ignoring construction costs, decommissioning costs, and waste disposal costs.
The cost of storing nuclear waste for a running plant is only a few hundred thousand a year; basically just just salary for a few people to transport it to a big hole in the ground.
Decommissioning costs a few hundred million, which sounds like a lot, but for a project that lasts for decades it's basically nothing.
You could probably fit all of the nuclear waste America produces in few trucks. It's not as much as people think.
Or even less if we -- gasp, shock, horror! -- reprocessed it.
(We don't do that because of overblown fears about nuclear weapons proliferation.)
Those must be some big fucking trucks. And as far as I know, only Finland has actually developed any long-term storage which could be considered safe.
Nuclear is fine, but nuclear fanboi takes are similar to weed fanbois, it's not a perfect solution.
Estimated total cost of decommissioning in the UK is £120bn. But it's going to take 100 years to do it.. so yay lots of rotting radioactive buildings for the next century.
The nuclear waste storage facility cost 53bn to build, let alone run.. so way off your 'few hundred thousand a year'.
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Renewables and nuclear play different sports.
Renewables are better for most of our needs but there is a backbone need of base power. Nuclear is an expensive but clean way to provide that.
By my very very very rough calculations, you could build a large scale solar farm with 3x power output and have enough money left over to build a 33GWh battery. That would more than cover a continuous supply of 1GW.
Absolutely, and we should. We should have both. Nuclear has a very long lifespan and very consistent power. Ideal battery setups do to buy long term lithium battery storage is less of a thing, but it's growing. There are some other battery techs that use other chemistries which are also attractive.
Multiple eggs in multiple baskets.
Not the guy you responded to but I totally agree. Plus I think countries like Canada, with lots of snow and less direct sunlight, would appreciate an energy source they can rely on in the winter
Unless there are a few cloudy days in a row... My panels produce a lot less than normal during cloudy days.
Remember that blanketing the world with solar panels isn't exactly great for the environment. Rooftops makes a lot of sense, but the cost goes way up, an maintenance becomes a nightmare. The footprint of nuclear is much smaller
The footprint of solar is significant, but still nothing compared to agriculture. E.g. The area used to grow corn to make ethanol in the US is ~ 3x what you'd need to fully power the US on solar.
~96000000 acres used for corn, ~40% of that is used for ethanol. That makes 38.3e6 acres. First estimate I found for area of solar panels to fully power the US on solar alone was 14.08e6. That makes corn for ethanol 2.7 times the area of solar panels if all that was used was solar.
Yeah agriculture isn't great for the environment either, but that doesn't actually make solar any better
What price per kw generation are you using?
France was able to output 2 reactors per year at 1,5 billion of euros per 1000MW for more than 2 decades during the 70's to 90's. The whole French nuclear industry has cost around 130-150 billions between 1960 and 2010, including researches, build and maintenance of France's whole nuclear fleet.
A 1000MW reactor, at current French electricity price and for a 80% capacity factor, generates 1,4 billion of euros worth of electricity per year, for a minimum of 60 years.
Nuclear is not costly, and can absolutely compete by itself, if you don't sabotage it and plan it right.
Except those reactors are off 30-50% of the time due to shoddy construction, €1.5/W in 2023 money is pure fiction, and overnight costs with free capital aren't real costs once you adjust for inflation and stop cherry picking the first reactors before negative learning rates kicked in.
I would be very interested to know why the trend has moved away from building reactors in time and within a reasonable budget. It seems that most projects after the turn of the millennium haven't been cost effective.
Why did we manage to build reactors well before but not now?
Chernobyl and Fukushima. These two events, which between them account for a few thousand deaths at most (compared with the tens of thousands of deaths caused by coal in Europe alone, for example), triggered a panic fear of nuclear power.
For decades, the nuclear industry has been abandoned and sabotaged, with projects such as Phénix, Superphénix and Astrid in France, and virtually all new reactor projects, cancelled due to anti-nuclear opposition.
Competent nuclear engineers and technicians have retired without being able to pass on their know-how, and cutting-edge nuclear-related industries have disappeared or been converted.
We can also thank the Germans for sabotaging the EPR. We started the project together, they forced us to add a lot of totally unjustified redundancies and safety features that made the prototype very complex and therefore costly to build, and then they slammed the door on us.
This same fear has been enough to fund SLS and Ariane programs. Basically to avoid the loss of a capability in case it's needed later on. For some reason it doesn't seem to apply to nuclear. And now people are complaining that building new reactors is expensive, arguably at least partially due to the supply chains no longer existing in the same scale as before.
Base load my friend. We also need steady, reliable, clean power when it's dark and calm. Until we can accomplish seasonal grid storage of renewables, this is the less expensive option.
There are plenty of firming options (battery, pumped hydro, flywheels etc) which deliver reliability for a fraction of the price of this boondoggle. Not to mention a diverse portfolio of renewable technologies spread over a large geographical area is actually quite stable. When the sun isn't shining in one area, the wind may be blowing or the sun shining in another area.
There’s also a reliability element too. Nuclear can reliably output a given amount of energy, at the cost of being slow to alter. Many renewable sources have sporadic amounts of power throughout each day. Either is better than fossil fuels at least.
Good point but that is not insurmountable. There are many ways to achieve predictability (batteries, hydro, tidal) that also come on stream much quicker than any nuclear plant.
Nuclear isn't entirely reliable though. During the big heatwave last year at least 1 and iirc at leat a few French reactors had to be shut down because the water levels in the rivers they were on were not high enough to get sufficient water to cool them. Which is a problem that's only going to get worse as climate change progresses.
That's a limitation of the secondary power conversion side and is true for any power generation methodology that relies on steam generation. That said, there's alternatives to the traditional Rankine cycle that could be deployed without modifying the nuclear side of the plant.
I don't recall them being shut down (that would be a drastic step). They were forced to reduce output, though (making the energy more expensive).
there are a bunch of new reactor designs that don't use water.
The issue is that right now renewables energy don't reduce CO2 emissions by much. (Except for hydro)
Sure if we look at the energy produced it's very clean. The issue is intermittence. As a society we decided to continue using electrical equipment even when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. So we use fossil fuel to compensate and overall the electricity production still enjoy a lot of CO2. We could use batteries, but utility scale battery are not very developed yet.
Same issue with the price. Sure solar energy is very cheap, when it's sunny. But what if I want to turn on the light at night ? The solar panel are not producing, the wind is not blowing, price is irrelevant if I can't get power when I need it.
Nuclear can produce a reliable amount of energy all the time.
I hope we will see the development of utility scale energy storage because this is what we really need for the development of renewable energy.
We don't necessarily have to use batteries. In mountainous regions we already have stations that use surplus power to pump water up a mountain and then drop it down to generate energy when needed. Its basically a potential energy battery. But this is usually location limited and more expensive to set up.
Yes, Pump Storage Hydroelectricity is a great option for storage. It's not the most efficient but it allows to store massive amount of energy.
I think today it's the main utility scale storage solution in the world.
There's also compressed air and flywheels for energy storage.
And a lot of that can simply be solved with a larger grid.
Yes, in a small geographic area, you might run into a situation where the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. On the other hand, on a global scale, the sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing.
A realistic solution right now are therefore continent-wide grids that combine hydro, solar, wind and pumped hydro storage.