[T]he report’s executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.
“The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs,” says the report. “But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb.”
Nuclear technologies missed their window. The use cases where they are the best technical solution now are extremely limited, and that means you can get the investment going to improve them.
It’s a curiosity now.
There’s an alternative timeline where Chernobyl doesn’t happen and we decarbonize by leaning on nuclear in the nineties, then transition to renewables about now. But that’s not our timeline. And if it were, it would be in the past now.
I disagree, a bit.
Base load is still hard to get with renewables, unless you can get a somewhat consistent level of power from them. That’s basically just hydro/tidal and geothermal at this point, and all of those have very limited areas where they can be used.
Nuclear, on the other hand, can be built anywhere except my backyard.
We have four choices:
- Discover/build another form of consistent renewable energy (what’s left? Dyson sphere?)
- Up our storage game, big time (hydrostatic batteries, flywheel farms, lithium, hydrogen, whatever, just somewhere to put all this extra green energy)
- Embrace nuclear
- Clutch on to fossil fuels until we all boil/choke.
We can do all of them concurrently, provided there’s money for it, but we only give money to the last one.
Exactly. I live in Utah, which is perfect for nuclear:
- desert close by with a mountain between the desert and dense population
- lots of coal power, and unique air quality concerns due to inversion
- perfectly set up for mass transit - about half (more than half?) of the population lives in a narrow corridor, so cars could be replaced with electric trains and buses
- no access to the ocean, geothermal is probably expensive due to hard rock, no tides, hydro couldn’t be done at scale, cold winters make battery storage hard, etc
So why don’t we do it? FUD. We should have a nuclear base with solar and wind helping out, but instead we have a coal base and are transitioning to natural gas. That’s dumb. And it’s hilarious because we sell electricity to California when their backbone isn’t sufficient.
It’s probably not the best option everywhere, but it’s a really good option in many areas.
So why don’t we do it? FUD.
A consortium of Utah’s utilities (UAMPS) literally just pulled out of its commitment to backing NuScale’s modular reactor in November 2023. It was a problem of cost, when the construction looked like it was going to become too expensive, at a time when new wind construction is dropping the price of wind power. It basically just couldn’t compete on cost, in the specific environment of servicing Utah.
geothermal is probably expensive due to hard rock
I wouldn’t sleep on geothermal as a future broad scale solution for dispatchable (that is, generation that can be dialed up and down on demand) electrical power. The oil and gas fracking industry has greatly improved their technology at imaging geological formations and finding places where water can flow and be pumped, in just the past decade. I expect to see over the next decade geothermal reach viability beyond just the places where geothermal heat is close to the surface.
“Base load” is not that much. Off shore wind is almost always blowing, and all the other renewables can be stored via batteries or hydrogen (or tanks, in case of biogas). Yes, that’s a whole lot of stuff, but the technology exists, can be produced on large scale and (most importantly) doesn’t cause any path dependencies.
Nuclear is extremely expensive, as the article highlighted. And to be cost effective, power has to be produced more or less constantly. Having a nuclear power plant just for the few hours at night when wind and sun don’t work is insane - and insanely expensive.
Not to mention slow to build. Takes about a decade to get a nuclear plant going. If that is replacing coal, you are burning that coal during construction. The CO2 cost of that should be taken into account when comparing to much quicker renewables (approx 2 years). Also pouring all that concrete. Once it’s build, sure it’s green, but that is expensive, takes ages and comes with a big CO2 cost to get going.
Or you go renewable now, turn the filthy coal off about 8 years sooner and save a ton of money and CO2 right now.
Nuclear is mostly expensive because of regulations and red tape that are mostly built upon FUD.
That needs to be re-addressed from the ground up. There needs to be a big PSA push on the safety of nuclear and on the true costs and hidden dangers of coal and oil plants to build massive public support, and then we got to fix the outdated regulations.
Also, coal plants aren’t cheap. And coal has costs that are heavily subsidized by society. If you could calculate all of the external costs and level out subsidies, nuclear is cheaper and, more importantly, far far safer, than any GHG plant.
Up our storage game, big time
I think this can be expanded out a bit, to the more generalizable case of matching generation to demand. Yes, storage can be a big part of that.
But another solution along the same lines may be demand shifting, which in many ways, relies on storage (charging car batteries, reheating water tanks or even molten salt only when supply is plentiful. And some of that might not be storage, per se, but creating the useful output of something that actually requires a lot of power: timing out industrial processes or data center computational tasks based on the availability of excess electrical power.
Similarly, improvements in transmission across wide geographical areas can better match supply to demand. The energy can still be used in real time, but a robust enough transmission network can get the power from the place that happens to have good generation conditions at that time to the place that actually wants to use that power.
There’s a lot of improvement to be made in simply better matching supply and demand. And improvements there might justify intentional overbuilding, where generators know that they’ll need to curtail generation during periods where there’s more supply than demand.
And with better transmission, then existing nuclear plants might be able to act as dispatchable backup power rather than the primary, and therefore serve a larger market.
It’s interesting watching how the 30minute electricy price has shifted patterns in the UK. 3-4 years ago there was no doubt that the cheapest time was 1am - 4am. These days the overnight dip isn’t anywhere near as significant as it was, and it’s now equally likely for 1pm-4pm to be the cheapest time of day.
All I can assume is that so many have moved usage to overnight due to “time of use” tariffs that now the demand curve has evened out a bit, and now the extra supply from solar during the day pushes the afternoon price down.
The timing of all those things has been carefully selected by billions of people. Timing is already super important to humanity for other reasons.
There is value in the schedule arrangement we have, which is why there is already sufficient demand to have different electric prices at different times and people still pay it.
The schedule we have arranged contains value. Demand shifting means getting people to do things at times other than they naturally would choose to.
We can’t talk about things like this like they’re free. There’s a big, real, not easily measurable cost to changing the times of day we use energy.
Our solution is to serve us, not the other way around.
Base load is not necessary. It was made because you could build certain types of plants really cheap if they’re run all the time at the same level. They aren’t a requirement, but rather an economic convenience in an old way of doing things.
Renewables with storage are able to match demand more closely than traditional plants ever could. This results in less wasted power. That means we don’t have to replace every GWh of traditional generation with a GWh of renewable.
Hydro and geothermal have both had some interesting breakthroughs the last few years. Small scale hydro can get useful amounts of power from smaller rivers than was feasible in the past. There are places to put them we didn’t have before.
There’s also high voltage DC lines. The longest deployed one is currently in Brazil, and is about 1500 miles. An equivalent run in the US would mean wind farms in Kansas could power New York, or solar in Arizona could power Chicago. When you can transmit that far, then the wind is always blowing somewhere, and it’s sunny somewhere for the entire day, as well.
Nuclear lost its window of opportunity. It may already be cost competitive with putting solar panels in space.
Edit: fixing autocorrect’s bad corrections
I agree with all of this as an electrical engineer in the field. Base load is only base load because of the load profile of devices connected to the grid having either an on or off switch. Most of the time this means motors/HVACs, but the world of electronics is coming to that equipment just like how inverters have changed how we export solar PV and wind to the grid. VFDs, soft starters, and the like will make our industrial processes that much more efficient. We just need to spread awareness and ramp up implementation, just as much as for renewables themselves.
So how much would it cost to do geothermal to power a city? It must be wildly infeasible if I’ve never even heard it mentioned. Can significant electric generation be had from that?
It’s limited in the geography where it could be useful, such as near techtonic plate boundaries. Iceland gets about a quarter of its electricity that way. Some advancements in drilling techniques have made it more viable in more locations.
https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2023/05/is-geothermal-energy-making-a-comeback
From where I stand you couldn’t be further from the reality of the situation.
Nuclear has a number of advantages from low carbon output per kilowatt over lifetime as well as being extremely cheap per kilowatt.
But the real advantage being overlooked is the small foot print and land use compared to other forms power generation. A nuclear reactor is ideal for high density population areas, adding no pollution like fossil fuels and using a fraction of the land that renewables require. And there is room for overlap between renewables and nuclear as well, meaning days where wind or solar would produce more power than usual, its easy to scale back solar production to take advantage of cheaper power, and vice versa for times when renewables aren’t going to generate enough to meet demand nuclear can increase their output relatively quickly and effectively.
The future of nuclear is however one of the most important. We are eventually going to be spending humans to other planets, and having mature, efficient and compact forms of power generation with long lifetimes and minimal start up power from idle states is going to be important, solar gets less effective the further from the sun we get, you can’t stick a wind turbine on a space craft and expect good results, and you’re out of your mind if you want to burn fossil fuels in an oxygen limited environment.
Treating nuclear as more than a curiosity but rather as the genuine lifeline and corner stone of our futures and future generations is significantly more important than fossil fuel profits today and all their propaganda.
as well as being extremely cheap per kilowatt.
What? How? Far as i know it’s the most expensive, with a lot of hidden costs.
When costs are level per kilowatt over lifetime Nuclear is cheaper thanks to economies of scale, it’s only more expensive when plants are restricted by local authorities in how much they can produce in a given cycle so that other power generators in the energy sector can fill their contracts. When these artificial caps are removed and the plant is allowed to operate as intended and no kneecapped to allow coal and oil plants to operate at their peak effeciency rates, nuclear drops below .10USD. And thats using outdated equipment and maintaining the absurdly high safety standards saddled upon them despite being the safest form of power production bar none.
Extremely cheap per kilowatt? Every statistic out there that I’ve seen and that includes government funding, as well as construction and deconstruction costs, paints a different picture. Nuclear is only competitive with coal or the relatively underdeveloped solar thermal.
In 2017 the US EIA published figures for the average levelized costs per unit of output (LCOE) for generating technologies to be brought online in 2022, as modelled for its Annual Energy Outlook. These show: advanced nuclear, 9.9 ¢/kWh; natural gas, 5.7-10.9 ¢/kWh (depending on technology); and coal with 90% carbon sequestration, 12.3 ¢/kWh (rising to 14 ¢/kWh at 30%). Among the non-dispatchable technologies, LCOE estimates vary widely: wind onshore, 5.2 ¢/kWh; solar PV, 6.7 ¢/kWh; offshore wind, 14.6 ¢/kWh; and solar thermal, 18.4 ¢/kWh.
Emphasis mine, source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power
If you scroll down literally like. A paragraph past that you will see a very nice table showing the spread of nuclear costs. Some (including in the US, which is used for the EIA figures) are quite expensive, but others (notably South Korea) are very much cost-competitive or better than renewables. Also worth noting, the renewable estimates have spread themselves, and do not include overinstallation/storage required to behave as firm power.
Which is to say:
A - there certainly are quite a few places that nuclear doesn’t make sense, at least currently. Including the US
B - equally, there are a lot of places around the world where nuclear is competitive
C - we should perhaps look at why the US is so expensive relative to other countries; it’s not some law of nature, we can change it. And it’s probably not just because other countries under-regulate them (I’d buy that for some of the countries listed)
The space based nukes paragraph is irrelevant. While I agree with the point thtat it may not only be useful for long term space habitation, it may be required, I don’t see what that has to do with earth based commercial power generation. They’re very different beasts with little overlap. That’s like saying you support corn based subsidies, because we’ll have to grow crops off world: true but not relevant.
You are on a nuke loving platform and people are going to downvote anything that isn’t hard pro nuke. But you are correct. I have had this exact same discussion before. The numbers you are looking for are called the LCOE, or the ‘levelized cost of electricity’ where the lifetime of the technology cost if factored in. Offshore wind is currently the lowest followed by solar. Nuke is clost to 10x the cost. There is even an international nuke consortium that has several reports agreeing with exactly what you are saying and basically sum it up as: if you invested in nuke early, then it is cost efficient to just keep upgrading. If you didn’t invest in it early, then the cost to implement it so high that you are better off going wind/solar. Even if you add in the cost of battery systems, it is still cheaper than building a new nuke plant. And more than that, with these new nuke plants you have to upgrade all your infrastructure because your old wires can’t handle the output loads. If you look at the 30+ billion Georgia spent on this plant, they could have simply given out a micro generation grant to everyone to add solar to their roofs, not needed to upgrade the lines, and been far better off. But hey, just like reddit, if you are commenting on lemmy you better be pro nuke only and ignore the other numbers.
So, essentially, nuclear power is like airships, except with worse disasters?
More people died in airship incidents than in civil nuclear power.
E: typo
Mmmm. Looking at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship
Roughly I’d say it’s at most 200-300 people. Airships just didn’t carry many at once.
If you look at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_fatalities_by_country
You easily go past the airships estimate. One that surprised me was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
“Estimated 100 to 240 cancer fatalities in the long term”
You can beat airships deaths will just one of big accidents.
https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima
Are you German? That’s standard German rethoric and the reason, they shut off their reactors prematurely. It’s not how the world sees it though.
