Nuclear reactors could modulate their output, but they would take a grievous economic hit if they do so, because most of their costs are fixed, independent of the power setting.
Shipping from thevoutside of the European Union isn't really relevant after our eastern neighbor decided to invade Ukraine.
We were originally planning to ditch domestic peat as fuel, in favor of Russian biofuel, but that's off the table now, and peat will probably be used extensively for a few years until alternatives are in place.
Energy independence is what we aim for at the moment. Carbon neutral is still something we aim for in the long run, but not being relianton Russian energy is the primary goal for the next few years.
Since solar panels can go to zero output onto the grid instantly, this is just a matter of improper design (of the equipment, or of the regulatory regime.)
In any case, the cost/kWh from nuclear is computed assuming it's running flat out (except for refueling outages). Reduce that generation and the levelized cost increases. It's already very much higher than renewables; curtailing nuclear output would make that discrepancy worse.
Except if I have batteries, why should I charge them with expensive nuclear energy when I can charge them with cheap renewables? The nuclear plant will be forced to compete with those renewables for this market, which will limit what it can earn with the otherwise curtailed output. This is not as bad as losing it entirely, or even paying for someone to take it, but it's still going to be a net negative for the plant's economics vs. running all out selling at the calculated cost.
Nuclear has very high capital costs but fuel and operating costs (sans financing and insurance) are relatively cheap. Nuclear energy isn’t expensive if the plant is already built, so if you had to choose and the costs were already sunk, it wouldn’t matter. I guess your point is whether to build the plants in the first place rather than going with other renewables. Since hydro is pretty much tapped out, I guess that would be wind or biofuels?
My point was that when you calculate the cost/kWh from a nuclear plant, if you then are going to operate than plant only 50% (say) of the time you could otherwise do so, the cost/kWh from that plant goes way up, because those high fixed costs are now amortized over only half the output.
Note that even some of the OPERATING costs of a nuclear plant are fixed. You still need about as many staff to run the plant even if you cycle it up and down.
The renewables will be wind and PV. Biomass uses too much land area, and would likely be reserved for specialty markets like chemical feedstocks and perhaps aviation fuel.
Operating cost of nukes is low only compared to coal and oil, and not even to gas. Compared to renewable + storage, nuke operating cost is very, very high.
Do you have sufficient battery capacity to power your grid through a 90th percentile worst case scenario solar outage? 95th? 99th? How long can it go without running coal and gas?
Nuclear works when you want it to. Solar and wind work when they want to. That's a very big difference when you're producing the electricity people rely on to live their daily lives.
It's a very common mistake to think that batteries are to be used to get to a 100% renewable grid.
Hydrogen can be much cheaper for (say) the last 10%, because (1) hydrogen has very low capital cost per unit of storage capacity, and (2) the efficiency hit of going through hydrogen vs. batteries is less important when it's just 10% of the total.
Think of batteries and hydrogen as analogous to cache memory and main memory in a computer. They have different performance and economic characteristics and compensate for each others weak points.
To see this in operation, go to https://model.energy/ and try turning hydrogen off and on in the settings. If you simulate for Germany, for example, turning off hydrogen can double the cost of achieving a certain level of constant grid power. Hydrogen can be particularly valuable for places with large seasonal variation or lots of wind (which has a long timescale component in how it varies.)
I will add that China is already selling electrolysers for < $300/kW, less than half that simulation's 2030 cost assumption.
> Hydrogen can be much cheaper for (say) the last 10%, because (1) hydrogen has very low capital cost per unit of storage capacity, and (2) the efficiency hit of going through hydrogen vs. batteries is less important when it's just 10% of the total.
Basically all hydrogen comes from fossil fuels. It's just natural gas with extra steps.
That's true right now, but that doesn't mean that hydrogen has to come from fossil fuels in the future (any more than most electrical power coming from fossil fuels right now means that that must also be the case in the future.)
When describing hydrogen for energy storage in a 100% renewable grid, the hydrogen would be produced by electrolysis using renewable energy.
Isn’t that what the EVs could be? There is also pumped storage, but it requires lots of land, water, and elevation differences (the latter I assume being the issue in Finland).
Pumped storage needs a lot of water to start but can then just cycle the water between reservoirs. Some will be lost by evaporation, but that loss isn't that high.
I once compared a proposed pumped hydro system in Arizona near Phoenix vs. the water evaporated by the Palos Verde nuclear generating station. Per unit of levelized power output, the pumped hydro system used at least an order of magnitude less water than the nuclear plant.
That analysis ignores the prospect of siting a solar array floating on the reservoir, with benefits of reduced evaporation and cooler, more efficient conversion, an opportunity unlikely to be long neglected.
It will mostly only go down, anyway, when the sun is not out.
If the panels don't mind settling on the banks, or if they are far enough offshore not to, that will not be a problem. It is already common to float panels on regular hydroelectric generation reservoirs, so the event is anyway familiar to operators.
If the floats are bottom-heavy and attached to cables spanning the reservoir, the water dropping out from under just leaves them suspended. You need cable attachments, anyway, to extract power and maintain spacing.
Granted, the cost for solar and wind fail to account for the cost of storage to accommodate their intermittency. If your country has hydroelectric dams, then that works. But for the rest that don't have the right geography for hydro, they burn fossil fuels.
Nuclear provides a path for decarbonization. Solar and wind do not, until a massive breakthrough in energy storage is invented. And nobody knows when that will happen, or if it will happen.
We don't need massive breakthroughs in energy storage. And the goal is overall carbon-neutral, not carbon-zero. And other than wind and solar, we also have hydro and geo-thermal. The latter might become a very important part of the mix, as it would be relatively easy to securely and relatively cheaply deploy a lot of small scale heat pump power plants, requiring fewer massive power line installations, with the added benefit that geo-thermal basically works independent from the time of the day and weather conditions.
As for storage, one way to "store" energy is hydrogen, which we can then burn as needed. We can probably get the efficiency of that to 70% (for hydrogen-burning larger-scale power plants).
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is another existing option, with an efficiency of about 70-80%.
It's also OK to have some carbon emissions if you can manage to have other measures neutralizing that. We can e.g. use renewable biofuels (e.g. wood, biomass from algae or crops) which "use" a lot of carbon while growing to remove a lot of the emissions the power plants produce, and can with filter technology remove the rest to a degree where we'd still be neutral overall.
As I see it, we already got all the basic building blocks, and now it's a matter of optimizing them further and further, and more importantly figuring out the development and deployment (including financing, investment incentives, etc) and logistics (building the additional power lines required is a massive, politically-charged, often NIMBY-kind challenge here in Germany, and from what I hear in a lot of other places including the US too).
The deployment and logistics is a general problem of electrification, even with nuclear. People want to plug in their EVs near where they live, and want heat in their homes, so you either need additional power lines or (smaller scale) power plants close to people and industry, either way.
> And other than wind and solar, we also have hydro and geo-thermal.
These are geographically dependent. You can't build the where you need them.
> As for storage, one way to "store" energy is hydrogen, which we can then burn as needed. We can probably get the efficiency of that to 70% (for hydrogen-burning larger-scale power plants).
Large scale electrolysis remains unproven. This goes in the "scientific breakthrough required" bucket.
> Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is another existing option, with an efficiency of about 70-80%
Also geographically dependent. You basically need an alpine lake handy to build pumped storage.
Carbon sequestration at anything close to relevant scales also has never been done.
> The deployment and logistics is a general problem of electrification, even with nuclear. People want to plug in their EVs near where they live, and want heat in their homes, so you either need additional power lines or (smaller scale) power plants close to people and industry, either way.
No, this isn't a problem with nuclear. Most energy demand is in cities. And since nuclear plants are not geographically dependent, you can build them near places with lots of energy demand. As opposed to renewables which might need to be built very far away in places with large solar or wind potential.
Geo-thermal is a little bit geographically dependent, but by far not as much as you make it sound. Hydro is indeed very geo-dependent, no contest there.
Large-scale electrolysis is not unproven. E.g. Air Liquide operates a 20MW plant producing 3000t/annum near Quebec already[0]. Other projects in development aim for 200MW facilities. Granted, that isn't yet massive scale, just about 99,000 MWh/annum of usable energy (about 33kWh/kg for hydrogen), and the smallest US nuclear plant is theoretically capable of 5,098,320 Mwh/annum or around 50 times more. But large scale enough to act as a proof of concept in my opinion.
Pumped storage is a bit geo-dependent, but you do not need an alpine lake, you need an empty space somewhat higher up where you can pump some water, preferably without loosing too much water due to evaporation and other factors, and some water, preferably fresh water to avoid corrosion as much as possible, maybe desalinated. But if need be salt water and an artificial hill will do.
As for the deployment and logistics of nuclear, it is certainly a problem. Our current grids, independent from the form of electricity generation, are usually not designed to handle the growing demand that electrification probably will create. You can see what happens when the demand somewhat suddenly rises (and the EV introduction is still somewhat "sudden" in the time scales grid operators and infrastructure planners usually consider) e.g. in Kazakhstan when the Chinese bitcoin miners moved there[1]. Furthermore, planning, building and testing new nuclear plants is a massive capital expenditure even without technology research, as well as a political hot topic in a lot of places (and even in nuclear-friendly regions I'd bet that NIMBYs would form real quick once a location for a new plant gets discussed).
Last thing I read by the way is that the EU gets about 20% of the Uranium it uses to fuel existing nuclear plants from Russia (at least until now), with another ~20% coming from Kazakhstan[2], which is somewhat closely allied to (and for sure scared of) Russia. Another ~20% come from Niger, a country not exactly renowned for being a politically stable and human-rights respecting nation. Maybe the EU can source elsewhere, even if the demand increases as potentially more nuclear within the EU goes online, but it surely has a rather problematic political dimension attached aside from general nuclear politics such a nuclear proliferation. And it's not just the EU which needs to switch to electrification, either. Where will Africa or Latin America or Asia get their nuclear tech and nuclear fuel?
Nuclear, like oil, creates international political dependencies in a lot of places, while most renewables would not necessarily do the same.
Geothermal is indeed geographically dependent. You need to be on a fault line, or otherwise have heated rocks near the surface. Most places do not have these conditions.
The hydrolysis example you provided is tiny relative to the requirements of grid scale storage. To put this in perspective, the US alone uses 500 GWh of electricity every hour. And this will increase as electrification progresses, electricity only accounts for about a third of total energy production. Producing grid scale hydrolysis remains unproven.
The same reliance on a globalized economy still exist with intermittent sources. The copper used in wind turbine generators probably comes from Chile, for instance.
With laser drilling, geothermal is no longer geographically dependent.
That will, of course, still need to be developed to production. But it is a (large) incremental process improvement, not a whole different technology.
First you said hydrolysis was not practical at all. Today you say 200 MW facilities are not big enough. What will you say tomorrow? Why not admit it now?
You could point to flywheels as a form of energy storage. But unless you actually have the ability to operate them at sufficient scale, that's irrelevant. People have been investigating laser drilling for a decade at least [1], yet it hasn't resulted in widespread geothermal adoption.
Throughout this whole thread you've been pointing to proposals and plans as though simply having plans is a demonstration of viability. Unless people are actively implementing the solutions you're proposing, then those solutions aren't proven to work. There's a massive difference between pointing to an entrepreneur that promises this special drill will be able to build geothermal plants anywhere, and actually building geothermal plants in the middle of Germany. There's a massive difference between plans that promise to store X amount of hydrogen, and actually building and running said storage plants. Electrolysis has been known for at
As far as I'm concerned, both hydrolysis and this geothermal-anywhere approach fall into the bucket of "scientific breakthroughs". Could they be viable if they pan out? Sure. But it's highly unwise to bet the future of civilization on something that might work out, as opposed to something that's been operating at scale for most of a century.
Thus, it is good that nobody is talking about betting the future of civilization on any such thing. We have well-proven storage methods, and a large variety of promising alternatives, almost all of which depend on no new physics, just old-fashioned civil engineering. Any of those few that would need a "breakthrough" they don't get will be easily forgotten. Most of the failures will be for alternatives that turn out to be slightly less cheap than others.
60 years, by the way, pushes the boundary of "most of a century".
We have well proven storage methods that don't scale. We have unproven storage mechanisms that we hope will scale.
Let's actually put this in perspective: Global electricity consumption is about 60 TWh daily, which works out to about 2.5 TWh per hour or 40 GWh per minute. Plans to run a wind and solar grid predict a 12 hour storage requirement to generate 80% of our energy from wind and solar [1], and weeks of storage for a 100% wind and solar grid. And remember, this is on top of the cost of actually generating all that energy in the first place. If people want to prove that these storage mechanisms are viable, then how about they build one minute's worth of storage. If we don't even have one minute's worth of storage provisioned, then I see zero reason to be confident in the ability to build hours, days, or weeks of storage.
By comparison, we'd need to build 9 nuclear plants for each one that presently exist to generate all of our electricity from nuclear. Any only 8 if we eliminate everything but nuclear and hydro. Also, It's 68 years since the first nuclear electrical plant and 80 years since the first fission reactor.
If nuclear is to power the world it also needs technologies that have not been proven.
Today's thermal reactors, if they provided the entire 18 TW of primary energy demand, would consume in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year. This would consume known uranium resources in less than a decade.
So, either seawater uranium would be needed (which would have to be scaled up by something like 11 orders of magnitude from what has been demonstrated) or breeder reactors would be needed (also not a proven technology, and likely more expensive than thermal burner reactors.)
The real figure [1] is 60,000 years worth of uranium with our current nuclear energy production, which is about 10% of our electrical demand. So 6,000 years for a 100% nuclear grid. Electricity production is about 25% of total energy demand, so call it 1,500 years for all energy converted to nuclear.
Furthermore, moving nuclear seawater extraction - even at it's present costs, without economies of scale - would not significantly impact nuclear's costs [2]:
> Fortunately, the cost of uranium is a small percentage of the cost of nuclear fuel, which is itself a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power. Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.
> So as the cost of extracting U from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
Electrolysis was well understood for a century before we knew fission existed.
Pumped hydro has always worked at scale.
You keep repeating that storage is not built out. We know. Before it can have been built out, it will need building out. But nukes are also not built out. Which can get done faster?
You just really wish storage tech was harder than it is because you need that for nukes not to look like the obviously bad investment they have proven, by "most of a century" of experience, to be.
Nuclear is much more built out as compared to storage. We need only one order of magnitude increase to decarbonize through nuclear. Actually, slightly under one order of magnitude, only about a factor of 8 increase depending on how much hydroelectric plants we keep.
By comparison, we need 6 to 7 orders of magnitude increase in our existing hydro and battery storage capacity to decarbonize through renewables. And an infinity order of magnitude increase in electrolysis storage, because we don't have any such storage at all. It's not that they haven't been built out. They haven't been built, full stop.
I don't need to make storage tech look any worse than it is. How much electrolysis storage capacity do we have, worldwide? Zero. I think you're the one engaging in wishful thinking, treating these totally unproven systems as certain when nobody has ever operated a grid storage electrolysis facility.
If someone told you they have plans for a supersonic passenger jet that will be even cheaper than normal airliners, would you believe them? If they actually had working planes, and they were actually able to build and operate a batch of a few dozen planes more cheaply than typical airlines then yes. But if they only had one plane, and little operational experience I wouldn't. And if all they had were plans on paper, I certainly would not - this is the stage that storage mechanisms other than hydro and batteries are in.
You wish that costs for renewables were not still plummeting, and for storage were not falling more than twice as fast as for renewables, and that costs for building and operating nukes were not, instead, rising. But they are, they are, and they are.
Pretending that "breakthroughs" will be needed to field storage must be your last hope, but building out storage is just construction. You will continue to be disappointed.
You insist storage costs are cheaper, but the reality is that we can't know the cost until storage plants are actually built. You're comparing the actual costs of nuclear, with the promised costs of storage. We have actual costs for hydro and battery storage, but they are too high. We only have promised costs of electrolysis, ammonia, or what have you because none of the approaches have actually been built.
Come back to me when electrolysis storage systems are actually built, and we can examine the actual costs of storage the same way we examine the costs of nuclear: by looking at the bill after the plant has been built. If you really are so confident in their efficacy, then this should be no problem.
There will be no artificial hills for pumped hydro. (Usually those are called "water towers" when used for municipal water storage under pressure.)
But deep subterranean cave and sub-ocean tanks for pumped hydro will be a thing. These make pumped hydro storage practical in radically more places than usually imagined. Combined with hill reservoirs, they multiply the storage capacity per unit mass of water.
A hilltop reservoir is, incidentally, an excellent place to site a solar array, which is cooled and more efficient by the water under it, and in turn radically reduces evaporative loss and biofouling in the reservoir.
I am not saying we're almost there, just that we do not necessarily need break-though new tech.
You're absolutely right that we will need to spend a lot of money and time if you seriously want to achieve to become globally carbon-neutral. However, going nuclear wouldn't be necessarily cheaper or quicker, either.
Agreed. Though be aware, that puts the decarbonizing countries at a massive disadvantage to those who aren’t decarbonizing, as every action they take (from heating to transport) becomes more directly expensive.
Which makes a war of conquest or destruction by countries not doing so much easier to win.
Edit: Also, with interest rates likely to go up due to inflation/central bank action, that CapEx may soon be impossible to bear without some equivalent to a wartime economy anyway. A lot of the renewables have been helped by essentially free money.
It doesn't mean it is necessarily more directly expensive. The decarbonizing nations, notably the "West" and even China to a degree, have a lot of influence and control over the markets of good and services, both politically as well as a matter of who owns companies manufacturing things, and currently also in regards of who creates demand and margins for producers.
You can see that in a lot of consumer products already, when the EU e.g. started to mandate to put energy consumption ratings on electric appliances, and the market then swiftly went to improve the power consumption in most cases. I grew up with regular light bulbs, but now I and everybody I know largely uses LED light bulbs, again driven by consumer demand and heavily nudged by political policy in the EU. And I either save money now or at least break even thanks to my electric bill being less, and LED lights usually lasting so long they are over time cheaper than the old regular bulbs.
I wouldn't dare try to predict how these things would actually shake out eventually.
True! Though be aware, what you are referring to is not energy production, which is what I was referring to. It is efficiency gains in energy consumption.
Most of the easy improvements have already been done. with the possible exception of insulating more (far harder than changing out electric bulbs or when new appliances get bought or computers age out replacing them with higher efficiency versions). Normal ICE cars and trucks have also hit diminishing returns efficiency wise.
Usually not so easy though as it may seem, especially in concrete, stone, or other masonry buildings which are very common in Europe.
What I’m referring to is far coarser grained, and on the production side.
Fossil fuels are very, very energy dense, and that energy is released/used through completely different mechanisms than electrical energy. So for heat, even if switching to heat pumps which are over unity devices (1 Input unit of energy can move almost 3x units of heat), the amount of energy required to do so for countries which need a lot of heat is astronomical. I did some back of the envelope math for Germany in another thread, and even being very conservative we’re talking 7x the total energy requirements of their current entire grid to replace natural gas for them.
So it’s more than just buying a heat pump and installing it, it’s a massive undertaking involving the equivalent of $120-$600k+ of capex to accomplish. That is for every many woman and child when you add it all up. One would hope they could be more efficient, but those prices already involve a huge economy of scale.
If the EU forms an army and has mandated no fossil fuels, they would need to spend a massive amount more capex to build that army than if they did not right now, let alone keep it energized. That takes time, resources from other things, and exposes them to unique supply chain challenges too.
If they want to just switch their economy off fossil fuels, right now that will likely take a 5-10 years even on a wartime footing. It takes time to build factories, source materials, R&D complex things. Many of these will depend on countries they may not want to depend on (such as chips from China or raw materials currently sourced from Russia). And that is a massive amount of money, on top of likely weapons manufacturing, etc.
If they wanted to do it in 2 years, I’m not sure it’s possible right now.
Geographic distribution only works so much. It lower the probability of insufficient generation, but doesn't completely eliminate it. It also comes with other costs. Namely, the need for overproduction as well as expanding electrical infrastructure to move lots of energy over long distances. We're already hitting transmission bottlenecks for renewable projects: https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/7/3/22560691/power-grid-clim...
