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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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This is something that has been occasionally happening in Europe (at least in Germany, don't know about France) for well over 10 years now. Probably more like 15.
What's sorely needed at this point is much more storage to make this energy available when it is needed instead of when it isn't. Before that happens, you cannot really decommission any gas or coal power plants, because you still need them during times of much less renewable production.
this is why we still need nuclear, to replace the fossil fuel baseline.
The concept of baseline power is no longer needed. Scientists wrote about that for years now. Battery storage and smart grids are growing faster and cheaper than nuclear ever could.
Can storage technology reach 100% coverage by 2050? Because that's the target for net-0 afaik.
If not, we should invest in something else to help us reach that goal, and Nuclear seems the most promising medium-term solution.
If there was enough funding or political backing anything could get done by 2050. That's a huge amount of time. Any time someone mentions a climate goalpost like that they are pulling the cloth over your eyes
We needed to get this shit done 10 years ago. Any delay in removing all fossil fuel emissions now is just a matter of how bad we want climate change to get, rather than preventing it. Net zero by 2050 is a fucking eternity away and is a shit goal, and all the projections that get us on track to 1.5 °C of warming have us extensively using carbon capture which is entirely unrealistic.
Existing nuclear plants in France work, they can load follow to some degree, and renewables can make up the difference with minimal energy storage. But at a certain point you have to stop investing in renewables if you have minimal energy storage and your electricity solution is working.
I am going to emphasize that last part: IF you can't get enough energy storage, and IF your energy mix is fine, you must stop investment in renewable installations. Without enough storage, the baseload+peak paradigm works, you just have to regulate it.
Greenfield nuclear is (probably) not economically relevant.
Refurbishing existing NPPs has a LCOE on-par with renewables and gives breathing room for variability issues that will otherwise be absorbed by fossil fuels until that eventual transition to storage/smart grid.
Any discussion of nuclear's costs/profitability that does not distinguish between greenfield and existing/refurbished is agendaposting since most of the costs of a NPP are upfront.
France’s baseline is nuclear and has been for decades.
France has plenty of nuclear power.
It doesn't help with renewable peaks in the slightest.
What is needed are storage solutions and flexible usage that can utilize cheap power at peak times.
Amazing how you get downvoted with no reply even though your comment is the truth. People who claim to be environmentalists who are also against nuclear energy are seriously dumb.
Answering from a German perspective:
Fuel isn't easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That's not desirable.
Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don't have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.
Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it's insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
The reason people don't answer to that bs anymore is because it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side.
And alas, we continue to put more CO2 into the air and the planet keeps warming.
And the solution to that will not be nuclear power. Not in the near future because it takes too long to build and we need to cut CO2 now. And I'm also not convinced it's a good long-term strategy based on the other points I've mentioned.
If we could magically build reactors in time with the needed capacity to replace coal and gas (which it doesn't really btw starting and stopping nuclear plants takes way longer than necessary to react to demand changes) this would be a different discussion. But as it stands now it's just a distraction from what we need to do: build renewable energy sources.
watch us be repeating the same excuse in another 50 years. yes, nuclear takes a long time to build but that doesn’t mean we should just not do it.
also at the bare minimum we should not be shutting down functional reactors which is happening in europe.
As I already said I do have a lot of concerns around nuclear power as a long term strategy that I do not see or at least see as less of a problem with renewable energy sources.
I don't know about Europe as a whole but in Germany we did not shut down functional reactors. We shut down reactors of which no one knows how functional they are because no one checked that because they were scheduled to be shut down anyways.
And I'll repeat again: discussing if this was a mistake is such a moot point it literally doesn't matter now. It's done. Discussing this again and again just takes up everyone's time and energy without any productive outcome.
That's functionally the same thing. And it does matter to discuss. Even if you believe the ship has sailed in Germany, it hasn't elsewhere, and Germany's experience can be useful to learn from.
It's not. Not knowing if something works is far removed from knowing something does in fact still work. Discussing this again and again with the same arguments on both sides is not fruitful. And it doesn't help making any of the current decisions around our enery supply for the forseeable future.
You said:
If they weren't scheduled to be shut down in the first place people would have known they worked.
Or they would have known that they don't work. Thats the thing. It is very much possible that further operation of these reactores would have been economically insensible. Maybe the repairs would have been so expensive and timeintensive that it would be easier to build new ones. The point is noone knows.
We can argue all day if what the CDU decided together with the owners of the plants was a good decision or a bad one. Nothing productive for the discussion around renewable energy will come out of that discussion. The plants are closed and they wont be able to get up and running in the forseeable future.
The german solution was to build more coal power and shutter nuclear power and then pretend that by using accounting sleight of hand you had a "net-zero" carbon solution. But that's bullshit.
No, that wasn't the solution and it's not what happened, coal is in decline in Germany since the 90s with a rather steep decline since 2018.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=-1&legendItems=ly5y7&source=public
That is true but that isn't a constructive way of arguing about what we should be doing now to benefit the future. You can have the right of saying "told you so" if you need it so badly. I don't really care. We need to solve this problem though and arguing about the chances nuclear could have had in the past is just distracting.
Sure, but it's very little fuel when compared to coal, gas or oil. Raw Uranium is just 14% of the total energy price for nuclear energy, which means that doubling the price of uranium would add about 10% to the cost of electricity produced in existing nuclear plants, and about half that much to the cost of electricity in future power plants. For Coal/Gas plants, the fuel cost is the main cost by far.
Btw, Russia is not the main producer of Uranium. First is Kazakhstan, then Namibia, Canada, Australia and Uzbekistan
For sure, and likely they won't help or help marginally to reach 2035 goals, but they can definitely help to reach "net-0 by 2050". Modern nuclear power plants are planned for construction in five years or less (42 months for Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) ACR-1000, 60 months from order to operation for an AP1000, 48 months from first concrete to operation for a European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) and 45 months for an ESBWR)[47] as opposed to over a decade for some previous plants.
The cost of building new power plants is mostly impacted by delays and overruns, which are often caused by policy changes. For instance, Canada has cost overruns for the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, largely due to delays and policy changes, that are often cited by opponents of new reactors. Construction started in 1981 at an estimated cost of $7.4 Billion 1993-adjusted CAD, and finished in 1993 at a cost of $14.5 billion. 70% of the price increase was due to interest charges incurred due to delays imposed to postpone units 3 and 4, 46% inflation over a 4-year period and other changes in financial policy.
The costs of decommission are included by law in the price of the energy, and the Nuclear Power Plant owners are required to set aside that money in order to smoothly decommission the plant with no extra costs.
There are secure enough strategies to contain the, honestly small, amount of spent fuel we produce today. It's just that it's scary and no one wants a nuclear deposit in their backyard, but in reality it's still orders of magnitude safer than dumping millions of tons of pollutants in the air with coal power plants.
Based on their model, the researchers estimated that 1.37 million cases of lung cancer around the world will be linked with coal-fired power plants in 2025.
How many people do you think will die in 2025 due to Nuclear Energy? How many per MW/h? And I remind you that Germany closed all Nuclear Plants before closing all Coal Powered Plants.
I'm not sure why you are spending so much time comparing nuclear to coal based plants. If you wanted to make a compelling argument there you'd need to compare it to renewable energy sources. I totally agree that we need to phase our coal based plants as fast as possible.
The price for the fuel isn't so much the issue but availability or rather dependency on outside powers. I didn't say that we would depend on Russia directly. But the way the world is changing right now you never know which nation goes haywire next. I'd much prefer the option with less reliance on other states for our power sources.
The delay and cost is definitely subject to policy and policy changes. But today no-one can guarantee that we wont do those and in effect have a delayed and very expensive project on our hands. I'll remind you of Stuttgart 21 or the BER or any other bigger projects Germany has been dealing with as long as I can remember. I have no faith that a reactor would magically be built without any of the issues those projects have.
I have yet to see a convincing strategy to explain humans in a few thousand years what we buried in these tombs. It just doesn't seem plausible. And even if we find a few suitable places are we sure we will find more when those have filled up?
Because Germany decommissioned their Nuclear plants before they did so with coal plants (or gas plants, which they keep building)
Sure, but price is a function of availability and demand. The price is low because it's pretty available and the demand is nothing like that of oil, LNG or coal. Plus Canada and Australia have some of the biggest reserves in the world (3rd, 4th) and they are western democracies we can rely on. Also, Uranium isn't bought JIT, but it's bought years in advanced so that it can be enriched and stockpiled, this means that it doesn't feel the price fluctuations that much.
As for renewables, I don't know if you've noticed, but most solar cells right now come from China, if they were to stop selling tomorrow (for one reason or another) we'd be kind of screwed anyway. Maybe a good mix and diversification is the best answer here. And yes, I know that you don't need China to keep operating your solar cells, but they are kind of needed right now to make the transition, new cells will be needed to replace old ones, and we also need batteries, which they are now leading production of. Unless we move manufacturing back (which we should do, but that's a decades long process we can't possibly rely upon) we are still reliant on an external state to undergo the ecological transition.
Maybe it won't really be necessary, some 4th gen nuclear reactors promise to be able to use spent fuel for their reaction (also Thorium, which is extremely more abundant than Uranium). These are now like fusion reactors, which are permanently 20 years away, but we are building them right now. Some of these plants will go online this decade afaik, and if they deliver, many more will surely follow next decade.
Using spent fuel should shorten the estimated containment time from tens of thousands of years to 300 years, which should be enough to just say, bury them and leave.
This is an issue we might be able to fix without hoping for magical technology. Also because it doesn't touch only this argument, but pretty much everything happening in the country. We can't just say "Germany can't make any big project" and leave.
Yeah but that is done. There is no way to reverse that. The thing we need to talk about now are options to coal based plants which are nuclear and renewables. So if anything we need to discuss the pros and cons of those two. Noone here is saying that the coal plants are a good thing.
Germany had one of the biggest sectors for photovoltaic cells. They are closing and I agree we should be moving production back to europe. Right now there might be enough knowhow left so it does not take decades to do so.
If we can actually use spent fuel. That's a big if I don't want to gamble on. Also 300 years is still a very long time. 300 years eralier society was so much different than now, we can't possibly predict what's going to happen in the next ~10 Generations of humans.
My point isn't "do nothing instead of nuclear power" though. My point is that many smaller projects seem way more likely to succeed in the bigger picture even if some of them fail or are delayed, which is what reneweable energies are suited to. The success of the transition is also about people being able to trust into the success of the project. And I don't think many people have a lot of trust into germanies ability to bring big projects to a successful end. I'd like that to be different, I do, but that's just not what I have experienced in my lifetime.
Kazakhstan isn't exactly any better than Russia. They're Russia's little puppet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Sure but if we succeed at mitigating cimate change effects to a reasonable degree, civilization will survive for centuries, during which a reactor that uses itmight become available. It's a minor problem blown out of proportion, as opposed to CO₂ emissions, which are the opposite.
Even if this were true this doesn't help with the very real issue that we can't build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn't have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it's solution.
Why do you not include city-scale energy storage as wishful thinking? Unlike nuclear reactors, that amount of storage doesn't exist.
Because batteries aren't as dangerous as reactors, are still making massive improvements on energy density and seem feasible to me. Doing anything useful with nuclear waste has been discussed for decades and no-one has come forward with any really promising results. The waste has been around for long enough if anyone could have done something productive with it it likely would have happened already.
How big would a battery need to be to power a single city of 1000000 for 1day?
Why would you want to do that? Do you fear that there might be absolutely pitch black days with absolutely zero wind?
It's just an example number. No matter what if you are building a grid that has 0 baseload power generation, you need some amount of storage capacity for each KWh of consumption. We can argue how much you actually need, but the fact remains that when you start storing large amounts of power, which you would need in-order to keep a city running during times of reduced generation, it takes a large amount of space.
In order to demonstrate that, I chose a pretty straight-forward scenario of a city of 1million for just one day. Let's assume that this amount of stored energy would be sufficient for a 100% renewable grid for say New York City.
So how much energy storage would be needed and how much space would such a storage facility take up?
For the fun of it I did do the calculation. Berlin uses about 12TWh per year. That's about 33GWh per day.
Assuming an energy density of 450Wh/l (a number car batteries apparently were able to reach 2020) that's about 80.000 m³.
A soccer field is about 4000 m². So a space of 10 soccer fields with 20m high battery stacks would do that.
Now assume that energy density will have improved in the last 4,5 years and that maybe storage batteries can be different from batteries in cars and that can go down by a lot. Seems reasonable enough for the biggest city in Germany.
Unfortunately your rough math misses a lot of the picture. This is where the gotcha comes in.
https://electrek.co/2022/10/19/the-worlds-largest-single-phase-battery-is-now-up-and-running/
That is a currently realized grid storage facility, the largest and really only one of it's kind. Today's renewables do not do storage at all, they rely on fossil fuels to make up the baseload.
Some numbers. This facility stores 1400MWh, on 2,000 acres or (~8,000,000 sq meters) Much greater then your 40,000sq meter estimate. Plus you said about 33GWh for a day. Well you'd need ~24 of these facilities to cover just Berlin.
So now the big question, how much energy storage will be needed in a >90% renewable grid? It's obviously a difficult question based on a lot of factors, but one such estimate I found here: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/24/us-zero-carbon-future-would-require-6twh-of-energy-storage/ ~6TWhrs for the US or about 4300 of those facilities.
Yes it wouldn't have to be monolithic like that facility is, but regardless of how you distribute it, it's a non-trivial amount of space taken up. Totally ignoring the costs, and sourcing the materials for the batteries of such facilities.
But just for fun that facility was ~$550M So you'd need to spend about $2.3T for the initial building of that storage.
Okay so your comparison has a few flaws there. The square meters I calculated were just a reference. The important thing is the volume taken up. If you stack your batteries only 1m high that's gonna cover a lot of ground. You also completely failed to take into account that energy density has apparently 4x since 2020 which shrinks the required volume significantly.
I'm gonna argue that 4000 of these facilities distributed around the whole USA isn't that much. Spacewise the USA is in a very comfortable position compared to European countries.
As for the price: taking the price for a pilot project and assuming that every facility is going to cost that is very wrong. If you're going to build 4000 of them, cost is going to go way down.
But if we are talking numbers here I too have a question. How much land would nuclear plants (and the intermediary storage and final storage for the waste) use to fulfill those 12TWh per year? And how much would those cost to build and maintain? I imagine that a battery facility is way cheaper to operate than a nuclear plant.
You'd be wrong then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station This is a Nuclear power plant in the middle of a desert so no large bodies of water near by, though obviously the design could be adapted to places where water was more plentiful.
It takes up 4000 acres (16,000,000 sq meters) Produces (not stores) 4GW (~32,000 GWHrs annually) For comparison, the US Produces 42400000 GWhrs annually. And it cost $14Billion in 2023 dollars
If I were to replace all of the US's generating capacity with nuclear, fully shunning renewables. it would cost ~$19Trillion and take up 5.3million acres (which is the minimum amount of land that could be taken up by any currently existing power generation system https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source ). But no one wants to do that (although it would be amazing for the atmosphere). Instead we merely need to supplement renewables with base-load power, and we don't actually need power storage at all.
The ideal ratio between renewable power and base-load power I do not know. But during the day in Texas in July it's about 50% higher then at night. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
So even if we assume renewables don't work at night, base-load only needs to account for ~33% of total electric production at the worst case. Much more manageable then the ~6.5hrs/6TWhrs of energy storage required for a 100% renewable grid to function.
The tl;dr, is that while renewable powered storage is possible, the magnitude of storage required to eliminate base-load generation is VASTLY larger then anti-nuclear advocates realize, and not feasible today (or possibly ever). This belief stems from is fossil fuel propaganda, especially in Germany where the fossil fuel interests understand they have nothing to fear from renewables because a renewable heavye grid is only possible with fossil fuel plants and every year every nation burns more fossil fuels then they did the year before*, Germany included. It will stay that way until mass famine hits and the human population of the earth collapses, unless we stop burning fossil fuels. The only viable non-fossil fuel replacement for our large and growing baseload capacity is nuclear power.
*note that fossil fuels aren't only used for energy production, transportation and shipping are huge areas as well.
Your tldr does not follow from any of the things you wrote above. Considering current energy densities it doesn't seem unfeasible to me to build that storage. And I was honestly surprised how little space this would have taken back in 2020, not to mention that, again, this has been reduced by about 4x today. And it's going to go down further. Your only argument here seems to be space and I don't see that as a big problem. A few soccer fields worth of land distributed in the vicinity of each bigger city doesn't seem like a lot to me.
I do see your point that it is in the interest of fossil fuel to stop nuclear power from replacing them. But I don't agree that we won't be able to build an energy grid without fossile fuels. I believe we can have a grid without both of these technologies.
You seem to be influenced by the "well we won't do anything until we are already burning" mentality which is coincidentally pushed heavily by the fossil industry. It's meant to defer people from believing that change is possible and taking action so we all stay at home and bicker about how cool it would have been if we started change 20 years ago.
It's 1000x "a few soccer fields" for a city like Berlin, and we have zero other working grid level storage facilities in the world at that scale. The handful that do exist are <100MWh, and are meant for specific situations, not for powering 100% renewable cities. No one is building grid-level storage, it's a pipe dream. But it's pushed as a solution because the fossil fuel industry knows it will never happen, but what will happen is more fossil fuel plants will be built.
The premise of powering a complete city just from one singular facility is a false one. It's unnecessary to build such a facility. You can build multiple smaller ones to supply sectors of a city according to the needs of that sector. The answer also depends on how smart the usage of the power is. Are people using power when it's available? Are people trying to use a lot of power when it's not available but must come from storage? There are so many factors your scenario doesn't take into account. The answer has to be: it depends.
This also feels a lot like a gotcha question not posed in good faith. Because again: you won't need to power anything solely from storage. Wind and sun will always supply a base level of energy.
That is objectively false. The sun doesn't shine at night, and wind doesn't blow 100% of the time. So logically there is some amount of time that you do not get a base load provided only by sun and wind. Hence the need for storage at all. And yes it is a gotcha question, because it's something that anti-nuclear people hand-wave away as if the significant storage infrastructure to support a 100% renewable is just a rounding error, and not worth thinking about.
I did the calculation for you in a different answer, it isn't as unreasonable as you seem to think. Aside from that:
It's extremely uncommon for the whole powergrid to experience zero wind. That's not happening.
What pro-nuclear people are just waving away is so much more though. Space for storage is nothing in comparison.
You can absolutely reduce coal and gas without batteries. Hydro is a thing, nuclear also exists. Maybe it's cheaper and more environmentally-friendly to disconnect some solar and some wind from the grid during excess peak production and keep the nuclear running, than having huge storage? Also you're forgetting about the possibility for instant demand response, imagine things like AC units in summer or heaters in winter, where they could be turned on automatically during peak production to keep your house comfier for no cost.
Happens in Norway occasionally. Even hits the headlines sometimes. Then you go into the price graph to see and the price is negative for an hour or so. Rest of the day it's more expensive than it was 2 years ago before we sold our power to central Europe.