Why is it supposed to be easier to get people onboard with nuclear (which is decreasing) than wind and solar (which are increasing at triple the rate of the nuclear construction peak in the 80s and growing at 20% p.a.)?
People are on board with VRE. Some of the are on board with nuclear too, but it’s not working.
Four points:
The profile of other is short spikes 5-100 hours a few times a year.
1 year of delay is equivalent to 20 years of exclusively using fossil fuels for “other”.
It’s not even obvious that adding nuclear reactors would reduce this because they’re so geographically and temporally inflexible. France has 63GW of nuclear capacity, <45GW of average load and 61GW of winter peak load with vast amounts of storage available via interconnect to hydro countries. They still use 5% gas on top of the rest of the “other” (which is about 10-25GW).
5% of other from gas adds about 20g CO2e/kg per kWh to the total. Less than the margin between different uranium sources.
Running 40% of the capacity 10% of the time puts your nuclear energy in the realm of $1-3/kWh. The list of ways of generating or storing 6% of your energy for <$1/kWh is basically endless.
That’s about 4-8TW of capacity worldwide. 1kg of uranium is good for fuelling about 750W of reactor on a 6 year fuel cycle. Loading those reactors would require digging up all of the known and assumed-to-exist uranium immediately.
Nuclear is an irrelevant distraction being pushed by those who know it will not work. You only have to glance at the policy history or donor base of the politicians pushing for it in Sweden, Canada, Australia, UK, Poland, etc etc or the media channels pushing it to see how obvious it is that it’s fossil fuel propaganda.
It is obviously obviously true that it’s a non-solution. It fails on every single metric. All of the talking points about alleged advantages are the opposite of the truth without exception.
When you demand free insurance from someone they get to set the risk profile.
Tell you what. You put up collateral equal to the value of any nearby city and everything in it, and you can stop ALARA.
Also even with that it’s still bullshit. Nuclear had a higher negative learning rate before ALARA and is still horrifically expensive outside the US.
Also the suggestion that wind and solar aren’t subject to more extreme regulation on potential harms is even more ridiculous.
Except overprovisioning your total load by 30% with nuclear capacity doesn’t allow turning the transient gas off
Cobalt isn’t even in most EV batteries anymore, and LMFP is replacing NMC next year.
Sodium ion will then replace LFP the year after.
It’s also real weird how people only ever care about french colonial exploitation of africa when it comes to materials they pretend are in renewables and not when they’re flooding villages drinking water with uranium tailings.
If you include the full costs of the nuclear programs including the various subsidies, wind has been cheaper for decades, possibly since before nuclear was a thing.
“Baseload generator” isn’t a useful concept. And grid reliability (which is a useful concept) is thought about. It just doesn’t fit into a soundbite like winddon’tblowsundon’tshine.
Here’s an example of a full plan https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/major-publications/integrated-system-plan-isp/2022-integrated-system-plan-isp
Or a simpler analysis on the same grid: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for-australia-is-feasible-and-affordable-with-just-a-few-hours-of-storage/
For reference, 5kWh home batteries currently retail for about $1300 so this would add <10% to the capital cost compared to recent nuclear projects. Pumped hydro is about half the price per capacity, but a bit more per watt. The former is dropping at 10-30% per year, so by the time a nuclear plant is finished, storage cost would be negligible.
Here’s a broad overview of a slightly simplified model https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z demonstrating similar is possible everywhere.
Even in the counterfactual case where the ~5% of “other” generation is only possible with fossil fuel, focusing on it is incredibly myopic because the resources spent on that 1% of global emissions could instead be used for the other 70% which isn’t from electricity and has different reliability constraints.
1kg of lithium produces about 10kWh of storage for 15-20 years. 3-12 hours of storage is plenty for a >95% VRE grid.
1kg of uranium produces about 750W for 6 years.
There are about 20 million tonnes of conventional lithium economically accessible reserves (and it has only been of economic interest for a short time).
There are about 10 million tonnes of reasonably assured accessible uranium (not reserves, stuff assumed to exist). It has had many boom/bust cycles of prospecting.
Lithium batteries are not even being proposed as the main grid storage method.
Here’s an example of what can be done with 5 hours of storage. 5 hours is a 25% participation rate of V2G where the participants offer a third of their battery capacity.
If going with the (false) assumption that nuclear can hit 100% grid penetration, it would take decades to offset the carbon released by causing a single year of delay.
The lowest carbon “let’s pretend storage is impossible and go with 100% nuclear” would still start with exclusively funding VRE.
Plug in car. Press the “I would like to only pay $100/yr to fuel this please” button.
Later when you leave for work press the “I would like the house to be cool when I get home and also want to pay half as much for AC” button.
Buy the 1.5m wide water heater that stores 10kWh of hot water and lasts a week between heatings rather than the 70cm one that lasts a day.
Such an unconscionable burden.
Typical energy density of ore in a new uranium mine burned in an LWR is about the same of coal.
All of the economic/not too damaging stuff together would power the world for about 3 years.
Yup. Definite concern troll behavior.
Pretending the worst prices in the most expensive place in the world for solar are normal. Then pulling the hostage shield politics card in a thread about public spending. Now crying victim.
Completely standard conservative reactionary behavior.
It’s always correct to dismiss concern trolls.
You’re just spreading propaganda.
If you don’t personally want a thing then just shut up rather than polluting a discussion about a completely different use case.
Wild concept: It’s possible to offer a fair price to someone who can. You don’t need to pay $20k for one day’s labour (although you probably do need to pay about $1k for an hour for a licensed electrician to inspect and do the final hookup if you want to AC feed for winter and cloudy days). You do not need to pay $1/W or wait years for grid tie if you have a battery and size for self consumption.
Given how thoroughly ripped off you are and how dismissive you are of the price people in civilised countries consider normal, I’ll assume you’re in the US. Signature solar sell panels for 31c/W hybrid off-grid inverters for $2k and batteries for $280/kWh. You can probably do better if you look around and don’t just listen to the door to door MLM scammers.
Pv is now around $30/m^2 wholesale and $60/m^2 retail.
Not much more expensive than a sheet metal roof (far cheaper than a mature tree after all the water and tending), but a sheet metal roof doesn’t produce $100/yr worth of electricity.
Tree good. If can’t afford tree, then pv obvious choice.
You can buy the panels, inverter, racking and a battery which produces more than enough for anything smaller than a mansion for <$10k. Batteries are also not really necessary and can be added later.
Why are you paying > $20k for someone to put in 60 screws and a piece of conduit?
But car drivers crash into them and hurt themselves sometimes or birds perch and poop on cars. Not worth having trees /s
Yeah because it’s not as if TEPCO would lie to the public about danger they were in. or try to release water that wasn’t safe by not planning to have anywhere to store it or fail to filter the way they claimed
They’re definitely trustworthy this time. Anyone who doesn’t believe everything they say is just crazy, there is absolutely no reason to not take everything they say at face value. Why are you even checking?
Realistically this is China playing political games, but it is also Japan playing political games to try and paint all the times they were lying and there was danger (andnall the times they intend to lie) as innocuous.
The U235 is good for about 3 years, and pinning everything on something that has never had more than a half proof of concept is a bad choice.