Yes, because profit is what’s so important and not part of creating the problem, right?
Why not use both?
Because we only have limited resources and they have to be used wisely. So if it is cheaper to build solar, rather then nuclear, we should use our workers to build solar. The other problem is that nuclear reactors do not last forever, so over time, they will be phased out, just due to economics.
The problem is it’s not that simple from a climate perspective. Solar and wind are great but are incredibly variable which is not good when you need a guaranteed baseline electricity production. There is no situation under which a large nation could reliably just use wind/solar to power the country. Currently nuclear is the only renewable, clean energy source that can produce a stable output.
Nuclear is not renewable. It uses uranium as fuel. It is low carbon and emission free, but not renewable.
There are two solutions to intermittency. First one is a large grid with a lot of differen renewable power sources. It is always sunny somewhere, so when you can move the electrcitiy around, you have much less of a problem. Even better ifyou have wind power as well. With a continent sized grid, you basicly avoid the problem of cloudy days.
Next part is storage. Due to the large grid size you have the ability to use hydro power plants with reservoir as long term storage for particullarily cloudy days or winter and battery and pumped hydro for nights. Biomass is also an option if need be. Maybe we later hydrogen as long term storage as well, for really bad weeks and using it mainly for say chemical plants. Again the better large and interconnected the grid the less storage is needed. In some regions namely large sunny deserts having a nights worth of storage and some emergency backup biomass power plants would be enough. Basicly it runs down to less then a day worth of storage
There are also actually renewable baseloads like hydro power for flow power plants and geothermal, which are also good options. Also variable demand is a thing, which allows for even more renewables.
Seriously intermittency is much less of a problem, then it is made out to be. You just have to add a bit of interconnection and storage to it, but even that is not that expensive and seriousyl usefull.
This is the lie that is told, but nuclear has trouble getting grid penetration over 70% even with massive overprovision and storage via foreign interconnect.
Stable output which is totally interrupted for weeks at a time isn’t useful for meeting a combination of stable, variable, and dispatchable loads. Nor does it contribute meaningfully alongside variable output.
You and many people overestimate the effect of clouds on solar power generation. Even on cloudy days solar panels still produce mostly the same amount of power. On the absolutely darkest cloud days, solar panels still put out about 50% the same amount of energy they generate on perfectly clear sunny days. And that’s only for the absolutely darkest cloud days, whereas if it’s just a typical overcast kind of day the output will be a lot higher. So even if society went to being completely solar powered, you’d only need 50% more solar power generation to be completely meeting your needs even on the cloudiest days.
People just say “storage” as if it’s some simple solution. It’s not. Pumped hydro can work in some places but it can also cause pretty impactful disturbances for the local ecosystem so it needs to be planned with care. Hydrogen storage is not a mature technology yet, it’s still in the trial stage and has pretty poor performance (something like 35% round-trip efficiency), not to mention the issues with hydrogen gas leaking due to its small molecular size. Shouldn’t even start discussing lithium ion, but the danger of thermal runaway should alone be enough of a reason to plan it very carefully.
Don’t get me wrong, renewables + storage is the future, aside from eventual fusion power it’s the cheapest and most environmentally friendly alternative. But a lot of people talk as if there aren’t enormous technical challenges in stabilizing a power grid with renewables at the moment. Remember that precisely all of the power that is put into the grid has to be pulled out of the grid, every minute of every hour of every day of the year, as soon as that equilibrium is broken in either direction we experience significant issues.
There’s so much years old anti storage propaganda in your text, it’s painful.
Hydrogen storage is not a mature technology yet
What makes a tech mature to you? We have all the components of a hydrogen storage path up and running everywhere around the world. They’re not profitable, at least not without government incentives, but solarpunk is anti-capitalist, so profitability shouldn’t be among our primary concerns.
something like 35% round-trip efficiency
That’s a worst case figure for purely electrical round trip efficiency. We could use waste heat of the fuel cell process (to a lesser extent also the electrolysis process) in order to bump that number up considerably.
not to mention the issues with hydrogen gas leaking due to its small molecular size
That has not been an issue for quite some time thanks to advances in materials science. Also, we could use methanation, of course sacrificing some more efficiency, but then we could even use old natural gas infrastructure without an issue.
Shouldn’t even start discussing lithium ion, but the danger of thermal runaway should alone be enough of a reason to plan it very carefully.
Lithium-ion batteries are environmentally bad for sure, but talking about thermal runaway? Really? You need very high temperatures for that to happen. Most stationary storage applications will never see such high powers that they come even close to thermal runaway by themselves. If in a high power application, you’ll have better battery management systems supervising the temperature and reducing the allowed power. It’s really a non-issue if you have engineers who know what they’re doing working on it.
Coming bad to environmentally bad: see sodium-ion batteries.
Not everywhere, not all the time. Were that the case we’d be much farther ahead in getting rid of fossil fuels.
Our government is busy to make people pay for owning solar panels. So yeah profit is always more important and literally no government or company gives a shit about the environment.
I’m pretty sure people will start removing their solar panels here soon since no one wants to pay more for doing good.
Profit is the only real problem with nuclear. The US navy has 7000+ years of operating nuclear reactors without a major incident, and with minimal enviromental impact.
That’s a good point. Having the large scale would afford more room for safety monitoring and control equipment, access for maintenance and operations, and better economies of scale on equipment cost.
Not to mention one plant stays in place on land with unlimited access to support equipment and personal while the other flys though the depths of the ocean, exposed to all its dangers and unpredictability with only the people and equipment that fit onboard.
Renewables are incredibly cheaper to build, come online orders of magnitude faster, are completely non-centralized, require massively less infrastructure, have no millennium length waste storage dangers, etc etc etc. The only component still to be built out is energy storage to meet the baseload, and that’s well on its way with batteries, water pumping, and other energy storage technologies.
It’s just not even a question, renewables are the better choice for new construction.
Renewables are incredibly cheaper to build, come online orders of magnitude faster, are completely non-centralized
All true.
require massively less infrastructure
Not true. In fact, very much the opposite is true, nuclear plants are vastly more compact.
have no millennium length waste storage dangers
Neither does nuclear, really. Waste storage is a non-issue, that has had effectively zero observable impact over the decades we’ve been doing it.
But the bottom line is that this is a distraction. The longer we continue focusing on short term profit, repeating the previous generations’ mistakes, the harder it will be to get to zero emissions. Nuclear and renewables are not mutually exclusive. The more diverse our energy sources, the more robust our fossil-fuel free grid will be.
Not true. In fact, very much the opposite is true, nuclear plants are vastly more compact
Distributed solar and agrivoltaics have 0 or negative land use and require less material than a nuclear reactor. Whereas low-yield uranium resource (like Inkai) has a lower area specific power than a dedicated utility solar install.
Distributed solar + battery also has the effect of massively reducing strain on transmission. A household that previously had a summer peak consumption of 20kW, a summer average of 2kW and a winter max daily average of 1kW can now be fed with 800W of transmission instead of 20kW. Results are less extreme in high latitude but it can still halve.
And if I might add: access to large amounts of water is also an infrastructure and France is already running out of it.
Great news if you want the free market to solve all the world’s problems.
I’m more into ensuring we have a diverse carbon free energy generation future, though, and nuclear is just able to solve the storage problem today, which makes it incredibly valuable to society.
Are there any nuclear plants today that implement energy storage? I know molten salt reactors would be capable but none actually exist as far as I can find.
We need to do both. The amount of renewable energy that we need to decarbonize or economy is enormous.
Right now we don’t have the industrial capacity to manufacture the amount of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries needed for the transition. We need to ramp up the production, it means new factories, new trained engineers and technicians, new mines for the ore… All of that takes years or even decades to setup. The estimates I saw for the amount of lithium needed implied that we need to multiply the production by a factor of 20 !! Renewables energy also requires a lot of copper. New mines can take decades to open.
We already have some industrial capacity for building nuclear reactors do we should use it. Same for renewables and ramp up as much as we can.
I’m 2020 this is the world primary energy mix :
- Coal: 27.6%
- Oil: 31.6%
- Gas: 25%
- Nuclear: 4.4%
- Hydropower: 7%
- Wind: 2.6%
- Solar: 1.4%
- Other renewables: 0.5%
Right now fossil fuel are still above 80%, it needs to be close to 0% in 25 years. We need to use all the tools we have available: nuclear, solar and wind.
Diverting resources from solar and wind which are growing ~25-50% and currently 2EJ/yr per year to nuclear is a net loss given that a 20 year build up of the nuclear industry resulted in <1EJ/yr increase in the 80s. By the time any new reactor is online, the annual production of new PV will exceed the entire nuclear fleet builtnover 70 years.
Just the first fuel load for that much nuclear requires more than doubling uranium mining. Not to mention the iridium, gadolinium etc. or anything outside the core. And this is in uranium resources that are significantly worse than those currently being mined.
The “so much copper” for solar is about 0.4kg/kW for distributed (10% of current mining would cover all electricity in 2 years).
Similarly current lithium production is producing about 1TWh/yr of batteries. 10 years of that is overkill for lithium’s role in grid storage (although about an order of magnitude more is needed if the goal is for everyone to have an EV and we ignore sodium ion, both unrelated to cancelling renewable projects and instead pretendingnto build a nuclear reactor).
You’re also making fossil fuels seem like a bigger contributer than they are. 1J of electricity will provide 5J of space heating or the same travel distance as 5-8J burnt to refine petrol and make an ICE car go. 20% hydro/renewables/nuclear means that only 50% of the actual stuff done is via fossil fuels. Which is not to say heat pumps and electrified transport are trivial transitions, but they are necessary either way.
Is lithium still that important with the new battery technologies emerging?
I’ve been reading that sodium based and even solid state batteries are making leaps and bounds while at the same time we are actively reducing the amount of lithium required to manufacture large capacity batteries, by introducing new formulas based with much cheaper and plentiful elements.
What I would like to see is a ramp up on recycling more and better.
Sodium ion is commercial now and in the scale-up phase. It’s usable for anything a lithium battery was usable for in 2015, but with some advantages (cheaper, longer lasting, shippable fully discharged, less fire-prone). Other grid scale technologies (ZnBr, Fe, NaS, V, Na-flow) are in the demo stage.
In either case the current scale of the lithium battery industry exceeds the scale needed for diurnal grid storage significantly. Mining a kg of lithium is both lower environmental impact and larger in scale of application (in terms of energy per year delivered by the associated system) than mining a kg of Uranium.
You don’t need to remember me the downsides of mining lithium or uranium.
If the numbers are true, my country has the richest reserves of lithium in Europe and one of the richest in the entire world. But the idea of strip minning it does not appeal to anyone and we have a village actively campaigning to not have a mine set up there, regardless the number of jobs ot could bring there.
Regarding uranium, I actually live in an area where it was once mined the land bears the scars. Nobody really remembers how much rock was cut, crushed and hauled away by train in the day.
But this always brings this to mind: why are we not investing in technology to harvest lithium from salt water? I remember hearing it was a viable option growing up.
yes qyron
lithium remains a crucial element in the realm of emerging battery technologies, despite the evolution and diversification of battery chemistries. Lithium-ion batteries, which utilize lithium as a core component, have dominated the energy storage landscape for decades due to their high energy density, reliability, and widespread use in various applications, including consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and renewable energy storage.
I agree, especially with respect to batteries. It’s not about nuclear vs renewables, it’s about nuclear vs batteries. We can probably scale up energy storage to meet the world’s baseload needs - but we haven’t done that before. It might take a long time, we might hit some dead ends, and it might not end up being as cheap as we hope. But we have seen nuclear power on a large scale so we know what it takes. To be certain we can get zero carbon as soon as possible we should pursue every promising avenue.
Also note that the cost of, for example, solar energy has decreased 94% in the last 35 years because we have (rightly) put lots of resources into research and scaling up production. Meanwhile nuclear investment has been way down for decades. Maybe the cost of nuclear would come down with economies of scale, and newer designs.
@pizzaiolo Even with the extreme subsidies given to nuclear, it still doesn’t make money. Insurance payout cap, govt responsibility for cleanup, the fact most of the tech was paid for by public money, massive state and federal subsidies for plant operation… it still can’t turn a profit. lmao. That’s the real reason PGE was going to shut down Diablo. It’s too expensive to operate, and it has unfunded maintenance liabilities that total near the original plant construction cost.
