Source - The colors of the grids represent CO2 emissions
The title is a reference to the 2021 Texas power crisis
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Just to stir up some shit: France is green because they have a lot of nuclear power. Which means a lot of energy for basically zero CO2. Germany could have been green, but opted to shutdown their nuclear facilities in what can only be described as a "hurt themselves in confusion" move.
The problem with nuclear power is there's just too fucking much of it. You've practically got to give that shit away for free. You're never in a position to squeeze retail electricity consumers for $3000/MwH.
The real meal ticket is down here in Texas, where a handful of gas-powered electric generator companies can form a cartel that fixes prices every time AC demand peaks during the summer. Then you can cash the fuck out by burning $.15 worth of butane for $50.
Germany decided to rely on the cheap and abundant natural gas from checks notes, ah shit.
I like that name for Russia.
and shutdown a brand new reactor as well, which would still be running, more than likely.
That's wrong, nuclear doesn't equal zero CO2, not even close. There are no emissions from producing electric power, but tons of emissions building the plants and reactors, mining the fissile materials (which in large come from Russia, btw), transporting the materials, etc.
Granted, if you're calculating that into renewables, there are emissions, too, but far less per kWh.
Also, nuclear's fucking expensive.
And the "hurt themselves in confusion"-move wasn't to shut down the NPPs (it was originally planned to phase out of coal and nuclear while building up renewables and using gas during the transition), it was to stall the phaseout of coal, expand on gas relying on Russia while halting the expansion of renewables and utterly destroying the PV industry. That's what a conservative government does to you. Thanks, Merkel.
Edit: fck autocorrect
~~You are right, but in this specific chart, they don't include things like building the facilities, mining the materials etc. They just use the CO2 released whilst producing power, which with nuclear is very low. You can click on the chart and zoom in on the data, it's pretty cool.~~ (This is wrong, see edit)
The whole Germany situation is very complex and I was just jabbing, I live very close to Germany and work in Germany part of the time so I know something about it (but probably not everything). To me phasing out the nuclear wasn't that much of an issue, but it could have been done way slower to make sure renewables filled the gap. Buying gas from Russia with the war in Ukraine is going on permanently hurt my soul.
Quickly phasing out nuclear is also a big middle finger to the countries in Europe that are looking to expand their nuclear power, but run up against long lead times. They would have gladly bought nuclear energy from Germany, which would mean way shorter lead times and prevent a lot of extra CO2 during construction of new facilities. Whilst building new big nuclear probably isn't useful in combatting climate change, getting the most out of existing nuclear would have been.
The fuel coming from Russia isn't as big of a deal to me, as there are plenty of sources around the world to buy from. With the amount of gas we've bought from the US recently, we could have easily bought some nuclear fuel as well. Now all these sources have their issues, I don't like being beholden to the US and places like Niger or Namibia can have human rights issues.
Obviously nuclear isn't the future and needs to be phased out, but in my mind this meant decades yet and not the rushed phasing out Germany did.
Edit: Just checked the source, they actually do include things like mining of the fuel, construction of the facilities, transport of the fuel etc. into the CO2 calculation. Nuclear just blows everything out of the water in terms of CO2. Only renewables come close, but in terms of CO2 nuclear is the best.
Yes, the map sources try to include the CO2 emissions of all the chain.
When doing that you see that nuclear still has very low emissions. Nuclear is a lot of CO2 emissions for construction but after that there is not much. The fact that most of the French nuclear reactor are almost 40 years old means that the impact of construction is already diluted.
Uranium mining is polluting, yes, but you need so little that it does not really have a big impact on the CO2/kWh ratio. 1kg of natural uranium produce as much energy as 14,000kg of coal !
What is interesting on this map is that right now the green countries either have a lot of nuclear, a lot of hydroelectricity or both. Country with a lot of wind and solar struggle to meaningfully lower their CO2 emissions. I think it will come but right now the backup power used for when solar and wind production are low is often polluting and counterbalance the low emissions of renewable energy.
Spain has lots of solar and wind and is fairly green.
The yearly average for Spain in 2023 is 160g CO2/kWh (yellow).
25% of their electricity was produced with wind, 22% nuclear, 16% solar and 10% hydro. And also 22% of gas that brought their CO2 up.
I think you mean mining fissile materials. Nuclear is not in the same category of emissions as fossil fuels that burn carbon directly...
Yes, I mean fissile. Damn autocorrect.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Carbon-footprints-of-various-energy-sources-based-on-32-for-all-energy-sources-other_fig1_308114828
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
When accounting for construction, lifetime production, decommission and disposal per mwh produced for all energy sources, nuclear still takes the lead. And it further pulls ahead when you compared land useage per mwh produced per square meter. The only place where Nuclear doesn't have a cutting edge advantage is cost per kwh, and frankly if you're putting profits over sustainability then welcome to being part of the problem that lead to us burning coal cause it was cheap.
The best possible solution for a sustainable future is baseline nuclear power to cover average usage of loads, rooftop solar on existing buildings to make use of surface area not otherwise being used for something useful, and wind turbines added to areas where wind production is viable without displacing other production needs, such as adding it to agriculture fields or low impact areas. This ideal circumstance would also have people abandoning low density housing (specifically suburban single family homes) to move to more high density housing (apartments or multiplex homes that host multiple families) to allow additional land to be set aside for ecological restoration to better balance and preserve what climate we still have and enhance carbon capture. This is obviously a goldilocks solution that will never happen because humans will be humans, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be encouraging it and taking steps to emulate it as realistically as possible.
This is incredibly naive. We have a limited amount of money for the energy transition (because otherwise the problem would already be solved), and the more efficiently you spend that money, the faster we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the air.
Nuclear is by far the most expensive form of energy. If it takes you 30 years instead of 10 to replace all other forms of energy production, you haven't won anything.
If Nuclear was 50%-100% more expensive you might have a point.
But it's not. It's barely more than 10-20% on the most pessimistic charts over lifetime. Civilization can afford nuclear and can't afford to ignore it. And Nuclear price tag only goes down as it benefits from economy of scale, the only thing really hindering it. It doesn't take 30 years to build a reactor, it takes 5-10 depending on bureaucracy people using protest or legal measure to delay it. The time it takes to build a 1,000mW reactor is roughly the same amount of time it's going to build 1,000mW of Wind or Solar production anyways. So to get back to the point: What exactly is yours?
Nuclear is literally 3-4 times as expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
The levelized cost of electricity is exactly the metric you were talking about, over the whole lifetime of the power plant. Nuclear costs are also increasing, not decreasing as you claimed. Building reactors also takes way longer - you can deploy solar and wind in a couple of months to years, whereas all existing nuclear reactors took at least 10-20 years to build. While you're continuously building up renewable capacity , it already starts producing energy, whereas a nuclear reactor will only start producing once it's fully built, meaning that it simply doesn't help us reduce carbon emissions until then, whereas renewables can. How can you be so wrong on a topic you talk so confidently about?
The propaganda of the nuclear industry is truly incredible.
IEA refutes the LCOE figures and gives significantly lower values. And many other experts in the field criticize LCOE as being overly simplistic in ignoring several factors, such as disregarding inflation entirely (over 80% of a NPP's LCOE), giving hilariously optimistic lifespans for renewables (30+ year turbines and solar, most are lucky to still produce power after 20 without serious upkeep) and assuming 100% load conditions throughout the year, something only Nuclear and potentially hydro can hope to achieve, every other form of energy generation having significantly less and more variable output. When you actually account for these factors, lifetime nuclear cost is not 3-4 times greater, especially when you factor in construction and decomission and disposal pricing that always gets packed in with nuclear but somehow never even considered for other types.
As for 30 year construction time? Cite your source, because the global median is 7.5 years. 5.5 years if you remove outliers such Watts Bar which was literally halted for almost a decade due to other difficulties. Most reactors are finished quicker than this. Japan meanwhile is going from breaking ground to connecting to the grid in just about 4 years. It takes a couples months to put up a turbine, but how long do you think it takes to put up 300 turbines? I live in area surrounded by wind turbines, and I'll tell you they aren't putting up 300 in under a year. The park I leave near has slightly over 200 and that took over 10 years to complete despite constant construction crews working to erect them.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-construction-time-for-reactors-since-1981/
https://radiyozh.substack.com/p/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nuclear-reactor-c2a0c6b29116
https://i.imgur.com/KvnkXe6.jpeg
It's the anti nuclear thats astounding, the figures you're presenting are a best misleading when sourced to outright fabrications and lies.
Why don't you share your sources for 10-20% increased costs then? Let me see what you're working with.
I didn't claim 30 years of construction time, what are you talking about? You'll also surely know that you can't just randomly start building a nuclear reactor anywhere - there's a lot of steps beforehand you have to take care of (if you don't want to damage the local ecosystem). These steps take way longer for nuclear than for renewables, pushing your 7.5 years to double or even more. This, in combination with the increased cost as well as the long time until power production starts, makes it a non-starter to solve the climate crisis.
I can see how you might think that when you're inventing things I've said.
https://lemmy.world/comment/11278397 you can't even keep your story straight in the same comment chain.
Can you... can you literally not read? That comment doesn't say anything about nuclear reactors taking 30 years to build. Or do you think a single nuclear reactor is enough to replace all fossil fuels? I wasn't talking about a single nuclear reactor in that comment.
I don't know how to better explain it to you. Re-read the comment a couple of times, maybe you'll notice?
they absolutely should be decreasing, the problem is that gen 4 plants don't exist yet, if they did it would be substantially lower.
Also this isn't propaganda, you're pulling this out of your ass, the nuclear industry is fucking DEAD homie.
Well, if reality disagrees with you, it's usually not reality that's wrong. You can say that prices should have been decreasing, but I can show you that prices did not decrease, they increased, whereas prices for renewables have been decreasing.
Also, nuclear energy is the dream of the current fossil fuel industry - it's centralized (no individuals can produce their own energy), it's heavily subsidized (otherwise it would be way too expensive), and negative effects are socialized (cleanup is oftentimes not fully covered by the operator, and they also won't be held accountable in the case of accidents). They are terrified of renewables, as they'd lose control and gain more competition.
and housing prices are fucking insane, it doesnt mean that building houses is expensive.
Prices should have been decreasing, like they should have been with housing. But due to a lack of funding and manufacturing, modern nuclear power plants have very little R&D investment, and the entire labor pool surrounding nuclear plant fabrication doesn't really exist anymore.
The primary reason for the prices of renewables falling is more than likely china and chinese subsidies gunning for a market dominance, followed by technological advancement, Unfortunately these advances don't solve the problem of solar panels needing silicon, and batteries being expensive, and wind turbines being a maintenance nightmare, as well as a disposal nightmare (most wind turbine blades are made out of fiber glass, good luck have fun)
It's not the dream of the fossil fuel industry, if it were, it would be a successful technology that was actively in use, because the only thing fossil fuel companies care about is making money. Why do you think they wouldn't do nuclear if it was feasible? The answer is that it isn't in comparison to fossil fuels like oil and coal. And that's it.
Yes the grid is centralized. What next, going to the grocery store is centralized? Wait until you figure out what walmart did.
Exactly. This means that pumping money into this sector is ineffective if the goal is to combat climate change - the optimal build times will most likely not be met for any of the initial reactors that could be built, which pushes the first day of power generation back further and further. Renewables start to give some power immediately while you're building up more and more capacities.
Given the technological advancements and the current prices, it's a good idea to start investing massively. If this should affect pricing negatively instead of positively (it was the latter before), investments could ensure local production. Every country will want access to silicon anyway for chip production, so this is not a new problem, just a difference of scale.
The price of batteries keeps falling and falling. Recently, the price of renewables + grid-scale storage has fallen below the equivalent price of nuclear energy. Given the current pricing trends, investing in nuclear means hoping that the trend reverses. With renewables and grid-scale storage, you're simply betting on the same trends of the last decade continuing.
Just like with nuclear energy, these are problems of investments and scale. Because of the supply of used turbine blades increasing, there has been a lot of development and investment into recycling them, and the situation has already improved a lot. You're, again, hoping that the same will happen for nuclear energy on a short-enough timescale.
And that somehow means it should stay centralized? A decentralized grid has a bunch of advantages: lower costs for the individual participants, higher resilience during catastrophes, lower impact of maintenance/disruptions/attacks, and a much shorter time to first production.
i mean sure, but the more we do this, the less and less options we have in the event that idk, china stops fucking selling solar panel pre reqs and we get put 10 years behind automatically. Or the event that cobalt turns out to the new fucking asbestos or something. And it starts killing people on the regular. Though unlikely.
We simply cannot be reliant, on two forms of power generation. We need to invest in nuclear as well, it will take a while, however there are still current gen 3 and gen 2 (though outdated and old designs now) that you could be building and manufacturing. Nuclear energy is a very reliable, though not immediately accessible source of power, it's value should not be understated, you build a nuclear plant and you get 30-50 years of continual power production at a capacity factor of greater than 80% most of the time. Compared to solar having probably 30% (actually supported by the math too btw) capacity factor including optimal power consumption and storage it won't change much.
by the way, the rhetoric and arguments you're using for solar and wind right now are the same that were being used for nuclear power prior to chernobyl, fukushima, and TMI, all of which, except for chernobyl were relatively mild accidents. TMI didn't even have any reported radiation leakage, as it was all contained within the PCV, which did it's job. (though every single one of these should've been prevented to begin with)
i don't disagree, i think it's promising, but i think we're shooting ourselves in the foot here by not also dedicated focus to nuclear power, which is objectively a really good match for renewables, it takes significant load off of something like solar storage, while providing significant peak production during the midday, thanks to solar.
to be accurate, it's fallen below the cost of literally all power production methods entirely, i believe. We're still at a technological wall in terms of effective battery technology, we're hopeful for a breakthrough, but we have no guarantees other than, science always seems to move forward. The practicality in cheaper more commodity based battery technologies, is... Minor at best. The only practical source we have currently is those using heavy metals. We simply need more time.
and investing in solely renewables means you hope that nothing bad ever happens to the renewables market, surely nothing bad has ever happened in similar market segments prior to now? The economy and market was doing incredibly well up until 2008, until it all imploded.
This is a rather naive conceptualization of the market forces at play here. Nuclear energy situates itself into a different market segment, it serves a different purpose. Theoretically there is nothing stopping you from building tons of renewables, and then using it to subsidize nuclear energy, for example. That would be an incredibly valuable investment of that time and money.
yeah, i think there is plenty of time, we just have to conscious about what we're doing and not do goofy shit like, burn shit tons of coal in the mean time. We're quite literally already fucked, we have two options. One is to speedrun as fast as possible out of it, which is likely going to end disastrously (global energy market collapse, for example) or we can take a brisk but metered pace, hoping that it will simply, be good enough, and bet on the reliability of that out pacing the speedrun alternative.
Even russia is investing lots of R&D into nuclear power, in fact they're the leading developer with china following shortly behind. Both of them see it fit to invest money into those fields. Why should we not do the same?
it has advantages and disadvantages, it would be nice to have a fully decentralized grid, but this is going to increase the cost of housing, and maintenance drastically. Putting lots of people out of home ownership if they weren't already. Plus it also puts the centralized energy grid itself out of the market, which is the primary R&D driver for the field, presumably it would still exist otherwise, but there's no guarantee there. Markets are a cruel beast. It could also significantly hamper the pace at which we go renewable as well. Since now instead of hiring and training contractors at company scale, you're dealing with it across the country, across multiple different types of contractors, who operate under different principles, maintenance is vastly more problematic.
If you want to put solar and storage on your own property, you can. If you want to tie into the grid, you also can. There is nothing stopping you from doing either one of those. Hell if you want to go live in the middle of nowhere and build your own microgrid, again, there is nothing stopping you.
That's technically true, but more a consequence of fossil fuel infrastructure peripheral to the power plant itself. Switch your rail network to full electric and use more electricity in your steel manufacturing (already the predominant modern foundry production technique), you'll solve a big chunk of this problem.
After that you're talking about CO2 produced by setting concrete to build the plant, and that's functionally a push relative to any other power plant that also uses concrete (basically all of them, concrete is popular for a reason). You're also moving well below the carbon emissions targets we need to hit by 2050, so its an efficient move.
German domestic firms were making huge margins on Russian gas imports right up until the Ukraine War broke out. That's a big problem with fossil fuels. They're still incredibly cheap to mine, with a lot of the cost coming via markups in the retail sector. There's also a huge incentive to simply import PVs from countries with dirt cheap labor costs. So.... mostly China with a bit of Canada thrown in there. Germans, like the Americans before them, no longer want to invest in industrial capital because it has a shit ROI. They want to invest in the FIRE and Tech Sectors, because they've got crazy high returns.
So more and more industrial capital keeps getting dismantled, with imports filling the gap. And nobody really seems to care about what this does to domestic security or capacity in the event of supply chain disruptions, because that's Future Peoples problem and we're making so much money right now.
This map underrepresents emissions from NPPs. The emissions that are assumed for nuclear are lower than everything you find in literature and are 1/5th to 1/10th of what reputable sources state. That being said, this map is otherwise a great resource and i like it very much.
Really? Because they use the figure given by UNECE, that's a pretty good source I feel? The report it comes from is also very thorough.
What sources have you seen that state a number 10 times higher? Would be interesting to see where the difference is and what numbers they give for other sources.
It will take some time but I will answer with sources. Can you post the source used in the map i have never been able to find anything that came close.
Sure! This is the report: https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20March%202022.pdf
It has a description of the methods and the ISO standards they use to determine life-cycle CO2, from the cradle to the grave numbers. It also includes all the references and sources. I'm sure there's a lot more info available about the research they did, but this is the high-level report.
The UN seems like a pretty reliable source and the report seems very thorough, but I'm not qualified to say where they went wrong. So I would love to see what other sources say on the subject.
Edit: They even state in their report why the value they give for nuclear is on the low end of most accepted literature:
But even if you double the amount, it's still the best or at least one of the best.
Lifetime CO2 numbers listed here are accurate. The only time NPPs have worse CO2 figures is when they are shut down prematurely (see: Germany.) The actual act of nuclear generation produces no CO2, and mining Uranium is difficult but significantly more efficient than than coal and when comparing the amount of silicon needed for solar to make 1mw compared to uranium needed for NPPs to produce 1mw, the uranium still has has better a better track record. Hydro is a mess with so many different designs that some aren't that impactful where others devastate entire ecosystems just by existing so it's difficult to realistically talk about it objectively.
We need NPPs, Wind and Solar if we want a dependable and sustainable power grid, but that's just one small part of a sustainable future that we desperately need to change the way we live to avert global climate catastrophe.
And replace it with coal. Burn the C, add O2
Germany didn't shut down nuclear and replace it with coal, no matter how often you read it online.
They shut down nuclear and reduced coal at the same time, while doubling overall output.
Ok, they shut down NPPs instead of coal. Now happy? Oh, and increased fossil gas.
To stir up some more shit, nuclear power has the same hidden emissions as lithium and the same political problems as oil, nuclear waste excluded.
Accounting for mining, construction, operation, decommission and disposal, nuclear has less emission that Solar.
The political problems are entirely artificial, fabricated by the fossil fuel competitors and have been soundly disproven.
Nuclear waste is no where near the problem people assume it is. A single plant doesn't produce more than it can store onsite during it's entire operation and 100% of all the waste can actually be recycled and ran through newer generation breeder reactors to 'burn' the radioactivity and render the resulting 'waste' safe as background radiation within a decade or so in a cooling pool. The only reason this isn't already common practice is nuclear fuel is so abundant it's not as profitable to do this, It'd be the equivalent of a coal power plant halting using coal for a few weeks so they could shovel in trash from a nearby landfill until it was empty. Less overall power output for less profit.
This is spot on. The economics is what really kills nuclear. The cost to build and operate a plant vs the revenue you get out of it won't break even until 25/30 years. Compare that to a natural gas plant that'll be profitable in ~5 years.
You'd think this is the kind of thing where governments would step in with subsidies, but that gets halted due to oil and gas lobbyists.
Neoliberal capitalism is bad at long-term projects. That's why we're struggling so much with climate change mitigation. A lot of the gigantic power projects that required such long-term planning were built in the New Deal era and the postwar industrial boom. During this time, corporate tax rates and workers' salaries were high because the government was genuinely afraid of worker power.
Building a modern nuclear power plant requires subcontracting it out into what is essentially a builders' market in which companies compete with each other for pieces of state-level building grants. None of these companies want to undertake risky long-term ventures like a new nuclear reactor because they want to maximize their short-term revenue (profit). So they jack up the prices until the project budget is overrunning already in the planning stage, and it's doomed from the start.
you don't even really need to subsidize it, you just need to front the cost for the plant, build it, and the produce power. Might be time for a nationalized US power company.
not quite, since you have to reprocess the fuel, and the problem is that it's cheaper to just manufacture new fuel, so it doesn't make any financial sense. What's more likely is modern lead/salt cooled reactors using new fuel, and burning it past what we burn existing fuel. And potentially subsidizing waste reprocessing to burn it as well.
This is also ignoring the refueling operation being standard procedure. So it's more like a coal plant shipping in trash, which requires finding a source of trash, and one in a large enough quantity, and then burning it through the coal plant (without having to shut it down) and then having to find a source for coal, afterwards. It's just tedious.
It's also not "less overall power output" because again, the nuclear plants are simply designed with refueling in mind. So that's just an unfair comparison.
even if it was fair, nuclear plants have a capacity factor SIGNIFICANTLY higher than most fossil based production plants, and as a result, produce energy more efficiently and reliably over their lifetime.
same hidden emissions as lithium, but at a vastly smaller scale, because compared to something like coal mining, a dude with a pickaxe could supply what an entire nation dedicated to coal mining could do.