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You’re correct about renewables being cheaper… but faster is a more nuanced discussion.
In the Canadian province I live in we generate 70% of our electricity with natural gas fired power plants. Roughly 20 TWh annually.
To replace that 20 TWh/yr with solar power, we’d need to build ~150 more solar farms the same size as the largest solar farm in Canada. Plus enough storage to cover the grid at night or when the weather is cloudy.
To replace that with nuclear power, we’d need 2 plants the same size as the smallest nuclear power plant in Ontario.
The nuclear plants are significantly more expensive than the solar, that much is certain.
But there are logistical limitations on how many new sources we can interconnect on the power grid in a given year. We simply can’t connect that much new renewables quickly.
It doesn’t need to be a choice, we can do both renewables and nuclear. But if we want to get off of fossil fuels in the next decade, nuclear will get us there sooner.
This is what I'm talking about.
Some comparables for new nuclear in the West:
"But throughout its decade of construction, the project has also been plagued by cascading delays and climbing costs. The first reactor was scheduled to come online in 2016; it’s hitting that milestone seven years later. The total price tag has more than doubled — to more than $30 billion."
https://grist.org/energy/first-us-nuclear-reactor-40-years-online-georgia/
It took more than 10 years and was massively over budget.
"The plant in Somerset, which has been under construction since 2016, is now expected to be finished by 2031 and cost up to £35bn, France’s EDF said. However, the cost will be far higher once inflation is taken into account, because EDF is using 2015 prices."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/23/hinkley-point-c-could-be-delayed-to-2031-and-cost-up-to-35bn-says-edf#:~:text=1%20month%20old-,Hinkley%20Point%20C%20could%20be%20delayed%20to%202031%20and,to%20£35bn%2C%20says%20EDF&text=The%20owner%20of%20Hinkley%20Point,cost%20£2.3bn%20more.
So current estimates are at least 15 years and also massively over budget.
Please tell me again how new nuclear will get us there sooner if we want to get off fossil fuels in the next decade.
I think you may have misunderstood friend. You’re not wrong and I’m not arguing against any of your points.
A wind or solar farm is indeed much faster and cheaper to build than a nuclear power plant. Wind and solar farms take 8-18 months on average. Recent nuclear power plants have been taking 7-10 years.
The nuance isn’t the time required for a single project, it’s the sheer number of renewable projects required that is the issue.
I live in Canada, a single digit number of nuclear power plants here could replace all of the fossil fuel based electricity generation in our grid. That’s something that could be built within 10 years.
We’d need ~1000 new wind and solar farms (not to mention storage) to do the same. We can’t make that happen within 10 years due to supply chain and grid interconnection bottlenecks limiting the number of concurrent projects we can do.
I would ecstatically overjoyed to be proven wrong about this. But we need to get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, and we can’t do that quickly with renewables alone.
Frankly we’re fucked either way, but we’re less fucked if we build nuclear power in addition to as much renewable power as we possibly can make happen.
Fair point, I get a little snippy on this subject due to the overwhelming amount of bullshit I encounter.
What do you think about this?
"Connecting solar and wind capacity levels needed to reach net-zero grids by 2035 could require as much as $25-50 billion in transmission investments. This includes spending on new interconnection facilities, network upgrades to existing transmission infrastructure, new high voltage lines to connect renewable rich areas and upgrades to inter-regional transmission capacity.'
https://economics.td.com/ca-interconnection-challenges
It sounds like it's mostly down to a lack of investment in the grid which is completely solvable pretty quickly. Given this, I'm still not seeing a case for new nuclear. Do you have any sources to support your argument that it's still needed?