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Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe
(www.pv-magazine.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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$60k per MW or $210M for a nuclear reactors worth (3.5GW). Sure... the reactor will go 24/7 (between maintenance and refuelling down times, and will use less land (1.75km² Vs ~40km²) but at 1% of the cost, why are we still talking about nuclear.
(I'm using the UKs Hinckley Point C power station as reference)
The land thing isn't anywhere near enough of a concern for me, especially when dual uses of land are quite feasible.
24/7 is just about over commissioning and having storage. Build 10x as much and store what you generate. At those sorts of levels even an overcast day generates.
Using the remaining 99% of the cost to bury batteries underground would seem reasonable.
Batteries can be containerized in modules, with a turnkey connection that remains mobile. Solar can use those containers as support structure. Hydrogen electrolyzer/fuel cells can also be built in same containers.
Because there are nights there are winters there are cloudy and rainy days, and there are no batteries capable of balancing all of these issues. Also when you account for those batteries the cost is going to shift a bit. So we need to invest in nuclear and renewables and batteries. So we can start getting rid of coal and gas plants.
You better be bringing units if you're going to be claiming this.
Still less than half of the LCOE of nuclear when storage is added: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1475611/global-levelized-cost-of-energy-components-by-technology/
Given that both solar and storage costs are trending downwards while nuclear is not, this basically kills any argument for nuclear in the future. It's not viable on its face - renewables + storage is the definitive future.
And cheaper solar and batteries permits cheaper Hydrogen which provides unlimited and 100% resilient renewable power, and still cheaper than nuclear.
But Germany has no space for nuclear waste. They haven't been able to bury the last batch for over 30 years. And the one that they buried most recently began to leak radioactivity into ground water.
And.. why give Russia more military target opportunities?
I'm not a rabid anti-nuclear, but there are somethings that are often left out of the pricing. One is the exorbitant price of storage of spent fuel although I seem to remember that there is some nuclear tech that can use nuclear waste as at least part of it's fuel (Molten salt? Pebble? maybe an expert can chime in). There is also the human greed factor. Fukushima happened because they built the walls to the highest recorded tsunami in the area, to save on concrete. A lot of civil engineering projects have a 150% overprovision over the worst case calculations. Fukushima? just for the worst case recorded, moronic corporate greed. The human factor tends to be the biggest danger here.
Not an expert, but molten salt reactors are correct. MSRs are especially useful as breeder reactors, since they can actually reinvigorate older, spent fuel using more common isotopes. Thorium in particular is useful here. Waste has also been largely reduced with the better efficiency of modern reactors.
Currently, Canada's investing in a number of small modular reactors to improve power generation capacity without the need to establish entire new nuclear zones and helps take some of the stress off the aging CANDU reactors. These in particular take advantage of the spent fuel and thorium rather than the very expensive and hard to find Uranium more typically used. There's been interest in these elsewhere too, but considering how little waste is produced by modern reactors, and the capacity for re-use, it feels pike a very good way to supplement additional wind and solar energy sources.
If France can find space, surely Germany can.
You're using factors of less than 10 to argue against a factor of 100.
I think there's a contingent of people who think nuclear is really, really cool. And it is cool. Splitting atoms to make power is undeniably awesome. That doesn't make it sensible, though, and they don't separate those two thoughts in their mind. Their solution is to double down on talking points designed for use against Greenpeace in the 90s rather than absorbing new information that changes the landscape.
And then there's a second group that isn't even trying to argue in good faith. They "support" nuclear knowing it won't go anywhere because it keeps fossil fuels in place.
What isn't sensible about nuclear? For context, I'm coming from the US in an area with lots of empty space (i.e. tons of place to store radioactive waste) and without much in the way of hydro (I'm in Utah, a mountainous, desert climate). We get plenty of sun as well as plenty of snow. Nuclear should provide power at night and throughout the winter, and since ~89% of homes are heated with natural gas, we only need higher electricity production in the summer when it's hot, which is precisely what solar is great for.
So here's my thought process:
If we had a nuclear plant in my area, we could replace our coal plants, as well as some of our natural gas plants. If we go with solar, I don't think we have great options for electricity storage throughout the winter.
This is obviously different in the EU, but surely the nordic countries have similar problems as we do here, so why isn't nuclear more prevalent there?
Because it makes no sense, environmentally or economically speaking. Nuclear is, as you said, base load. It can't adjust for spikes in demand. So if there's more energy in the grid than needed, it's gonna be solar and wind that gets turned off to balance the grid. Investments in nuclear thus slow down the adoption of renewables.
Solar is orders of magnitude cheaper to build, while nuclear is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity, even discounting the waste storage, which gets delegated the the public.
Battery technology has been making massive gains in scalability and cost in recent years. What we need is battery arrays to cover nighttime demand and spikes in production or demand, combined with a more adaptive industry that performs energy intensive tasks when it's abundant. With countries that have large amounts of solar, it is already happening that during peak production, energy cost goes to zero (or even negative, as traded between utilities companies).
About the heating: gas can not stay the main way to heat homes, it's yet another fossil fuel. What we need is heat pumps, which can have an efficiency of >300% (1kWh electricity gets turned into 3kWh of heat, by taking ambient heat from outside). Combined with large, well-insulated warm-water reservoirs, you can heat up more water than you need to higher temperature during times of electricity oversupply, and have more than enough to last you the night, without even involving batteries. Warm water is an amazing energy storage medium. Batteries cover electricity demand as well as a backup in case you need uncharacteristically much water. This is a system that's slowly getting adopted in Europe, and it's great. Much cheaper, and 100% clean.
You bring up heated water as a method of storage, and it reminds me of a neighborhood in Alberta, Canada that uses geothermal + solar heated water storage for 52 homes. They've been able to successfully heat the entire neighborhood with only solar over the winter in 2015-2016 and have gotten > 90% solar heating in other years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community
There's a huge number of new storage technologies being developed, and the fact that some even work on a seasonal basis for long term storage is amazing.
That's pretty cool! Still seems to have some issues, but as the technology matures, that seems like a promising technology. I didn't know seasonal warm water storage was a thing
We also should consider HVDC lines. The longest one right now is in Brazil, and it's 1300 miles long. With that kind of range, wind in Nebraska can power New York, solar in Arizona can power Chicago, and hydro all around the Mississippi river basin can store it all. We may have enough pumped hydro already that we might not even need batteries, provided we can hook it all up.
HVDC is much more expensive than Hydrogen pipelines, which doubles as storage and transmission, and can provide continent wide resilience, even when local renewables provide much cheaper power when it is available than either long distance electric or H2 power.
A MW of solar averages out to about .2 MWh per hour. A MW of nuclear averages about .9 MWh per hour.
But even so as the UK does it, nuclear power isn't worth it. France and China are better examples since they both picked a few designs and mass produced them.
China's experience indicates you can mass produce nuclear relatively cheaply and quickly, having built 35 out of 57GW in the last decade, and another 88GW on the way, however it's not nearly as quick to expand as solar, wind, and fossil fuels.
There is MW which is a unit of power and then there is MWh which is a unit of energy, but what is MW/h supposed to mean?
Thanks for catching the typo.
Maybe just use percentages instead of these weird units. 0.2 MHh per hour is just 0.2 MW, or 20%.
It seems easier to say solar produces an average of 20% of it's peak capacity.
In many regions solar capacity factor is much higher than 20%; for example, the entire US. https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/utility-scale_pv
Because grid level power delivery is about FAR more than just raw wattage numbers. Momentum of spinning turbines is extremely important to the grid. The grid relies on generation equipment maintaing an AC frequency of 60 hz or 50hz or whatever a country decides on. Changing loads throughout the day literally add an amount of drag to the entire grid and it can drag the frequency down. The inverse can also happen. If you have fluctuating wind or cloud cover you can bring the whole grid down if you can't instantly spin up other methods to pick up the slack.
reliable consistent power delivery is absolutely critical when it comes to running the grid effectively and that is something that solar and wind are bad at
Ideally we will be able to use those technologies to fill grid level storage (batteries, pumped hydro) to supply 100% of our energy needs in the not too distant future but until then we desperately need large, consistent, clean power generation.
You aren't wrong, but you are assuming that the grid is required. Solar panels can be installed at the point of use, and then the grid doesn't come into it at all.
We can’t manufacture and install enough solar farms and storage to get us off of fossil fuel within 20 years and more importantly available investment capital isn’t the limiting factor.
Investments in nuclear power are not taking money away from investments in solar.
We can do both, and it gets us off fossil fuels sooner.
This is interesting. Why do you think that?
I would disagree, because is see investment capital as finite. There are only so many investors able to operate at infrastructure scales. And therefore I see nuclear's true cost as opportunity cost.
From an investor perspective, solar farm projects are a slam dunk once they reach the point of being ready to purchase panels.
There are a lot of things to line up to build a grid-scale solar farm before you get to that point. You need to acquire (the rights to) the land, get permits to connect to the grid, which usually includes construction of the new transmission line to the grid. You need to line up panels from a manufacturer (who in turn has supply chains to manage), and labor to install it. And 100 other things. It typically takes a few years of planning, but get all that in order and it’s a small percentage of the total expense of the project.
At the point you need to do the larger capital raise needed to buy the panels and hire the labour it’s a slam dunk. The project can be completed typically within 12-24 months so there’s a quick process to get to generating revenue for investors, and because solar has gotten so cheap it doesn’t take long to see positive ROI. It’s not like electricity demand is going away either. It’s a very safe bet, once all the pieces are lined up, and not difficult to raise funds once you get to the point of needing the big money.
People on Lemmy/Reddit have this mental model that there’s a fixed budget for investment in the energy transition. If that was the case, then yes it would make sense to go all in on the cheapest technology option.
But that’s how it works. Energy projects are competing with the global market for investment capital with non-energy related investments and there’s no shortage of wealth wanting to throw money at a solar project because they’re low risk/high ROI.
Nuclear projects are a different story, long timelines from construction to revenue generation and high upfront capital costs make them unfavourable investments, they generally need government support to derisk the investment before investors jump on board. Which the governments are reluctant to do because they lack a mandate to do so from the populace. In part because of this mindset that nuclear investment impedes solar or wind investments.