Even if we started to build nuclear plants like crazy right now, it would be decades for them to make a real impact. Building a single nuclear plant is very expensive and time consuming. Building up the necessary supply chain to build a lot of them would take much longer. In the meantime, you can build huge amounts of renewables in just a few years for a fraction of the cost, even if you factor in storage.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Not only that but the cost of renewables and storage is still coming down rapidly. You'd better hope that you're not priced out of the energy market before your construction time plus payback period is up if you start building nuclear.
Lemmy most of the time: Makes fun of people always bringin up "the economy" as if that's what's really important
Also Lemmy when it comes to nuclear: "But the economy!"
What happens in case of a sudden abnormal weather event that blocks out most of the sunlight? Picture a super volcano eruption covering the sky in ashes for thousands of miles. Or think back to the extinction of dinosaurs, where after a meteorite crashed into earth the sun was blocked by dust for several years. Or just think about northern European countries that barely get any light in winter; Portugal is a very sunny country, we have invested a lot into solar, and sometimes we still get energy from Spain (who use nuclear btw).
Also, I've been hearing this whole "it takes too long to build nuclear plants" since at least early 2010s; imagine where we'd be if we'd just started building plants then. I can picture the same thing being said in 2035-2040, while fossil fuels still have not been completely dropped.
I'm not sure what kind of sudden weather event covers all the sun for Australia. Seems a little farcical
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I don't think anyone mentioned the economy here in this thread, so I'm not sure what the relevance of that is unless I'm misunderstanding your criticism there.
For my comment specifically I'm not worried about the economy, but the unit cost of energy. Simply put if nuclear has a higher unit cost that means we can't replace as much fossil fuel generation vs other lower unit cost sources of energy for the same price.
I agree with your criticism of folks complaining about the build time, back in 2010 it was probably worth building nuclear. That's no longer the case and the fact that people (imo incorrectly) used this criticism in 2010 doesn't mean that it's invalid now in the mid 2020s.
Disasters is an interesting perspective to take and to be honest I haven't really thought much about it before. You have, however, picked a very specific and unlikely event here and I'm wondering why you went with that. There are a great many potential disasters that can impact a power grid from earthquakes, extreme weather and even deliberate attacks or acts of sabotage. I think for most of these, having a more distributed grid is likely more resilient and these are much more realistic scenarios than a civilization ending level event like you described.
At the end of the day, we need to decarbonise immediately using the whatever technology is at hand. My criticism of nuclear is that it's no longer the cheapest or fastest way to achieve that, but I'm open to being wrong. Your disaster scenario wasn't particularly convincing though at least for me.
For my comment specifically I’m not worried about the economy, but the unit cost of energy. Simply put if nuclear has a higher unit cost that means we can’t replace as much fossil fuel generation vs other lower unit cost sources of energy for the same price.
I'll put it another way so you might better understand my point: what would you have said 10 or 15 years ago when someone mentions that solar is a bad idea because it would cost more? Because up until recently it did cost more, and people did use it as an argument against it. And now your (and other people's) main criticism of nuclear is that it's not as cheap as an energy source that we've been heavily investing into for a decade.
You have, however, picked a very specific and unlikely event here
I showed several examples. The ones you mentioned, such as earthquakes, are not likely to affect one source more than another, but events which block out the sun obviously disproportionately affect the production of solar energy.
it’s no longer the cheapest or fastest way to achieve that
Neither was solar when we started to invest in it, as I mentioned earlier. That came from improving and investing in the technology - which also bumped solar into the safest energy source, right after nuclear, which used to be the safest.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here to be honest. When nuclear was the fastest, cheapest option we should have been deploying that. Now that it's not, we should still be deploying the fastest cheapest thing. Solar, wind and batteries continue to be on a rapidly declining cost curve, even back in 2010 but it was still too early to roll them out at huge scale. It's unlikely nuclear will be catching up any time soon barring major breakthroughs like fusion.
I also strongly disagree with your statement that disasters would impact nuclear and renewables equally. One of these things is certainly much harder to clean up and recover than the other if there is significant damage from an environmental disaster.
We should be rolling out the best available technology at the current time and continuing to improve our generation technologies, including nuclear, as we always do. I'm not sure why we would do anything else.
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Exactly. Sure, shutting down existing plants is dumb af (looking at you, Germany). But building new plants now with the aim of having an impact on climate change just isn't the most effective decision.
Most of those were very old. I'm glad we're not the ones who will find out how long you can really run one if those things before it fails.
That's not precise. A nuclear plant can be built in like 5 years. And the supply chain is not the issue when you have lots of orders. But there are not many. It's also not precise to say you can build huge amounts of renewables instead. Probably Spain doesn't need nuclear, since it's got plenty of sun. On the other hand many countries don't have areas that have enough sun and consistent wind.
Id also say that the part you said that cost of renewables combined with storage would be a fraction of the cost, that is completely false.
A nuclear plant can be built in like 5 years.
Can you point to any nuclear plant in a Western country that was built in five years in the past thirty years or so?
And the supply chain is not the issue when you have lots of orders.
Seriously? Building reactor vessels is a very specialized task that only few suppliers are even capable of. Add to that uranium mining, fuel rod production, fuel logistics and a host of other components - and all that will just fall from the sky once enough orders are signed?
On the other hand many countries don’t have areas that have enough sun and consistent wind.
Germany is already at over 50%, many other countries are far ahead of that. Your point has no factual basis.
Id also say that the part you said that cost of renewables combined with storage would be a fraction of the cost, that is completely false.
Here's a source
Can you point to any nuclear plant in a Western country that was built in five years in the past thirty years or so?
what about the rogue boyscout one
Use this one weird trick to get free energy from your old smoke detectors!
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Also, let’s not forget Uranium has a finite supply. A few years ago the IAEA estimated that at high usage scenarios (which might actually be happening now), by 2040 28% of remaining supplies would be used. Depending on different factors, that could either accelerate and run out not too long after, which is even for us a pretty short time. Other estimates were thinking up to about 200 years left, at current rates, 10 years ago so indeed not taking AI etc into account.
In the nineties they said there is only 30 years worth of oil at that times consumption.
If the need arises, we will find the uranium.
Source? I was a kid in the seventies and the OPEC shit show brought a lot of fresh of discussion and investigation into peak oil, and that was expected to be around now , but nobody I heard from said it would run out. Have some wikipedia with that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
May I quote that the predictions were decent, however “It has been recognized that conventional oil production has peaked around 2005–2006. What has prevented peak oil from then on is US tight oil which rapidly increased since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. Additionally, but to a lesser extent, Canadian oil-sands production has helped increase oil supply since 2008.”
So yes, more sources were found, however they were mostly obtainable by tight oil, AKA fracking, and as we all know, fracking is economically viable only when all environmental and other damage is externalised.
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Too bad we closed the door on thorium reactors, I bet whoever made that decision is really ~~upset~~ rich right now
There are 4 billion tons of uranium in the ocean
There's also a fuckton of gold in the ocean, just waiting for someone to figure out how to filter the entire ocean and pull out the individual atoms. All at a profitable price point.
Same with uranium. Which means it'll never happen.
We will have cracked fusion, mined the far side of the moon for helium3 and brought it back to terra before we crack that nut
For context; we've only mined ~200k tonnes of gold historically with an estimate ~50k tonnes left. The ocean holds 20milion tonnes, worth over $770Trillion and it's not cost effective to get it out.
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The alternative for base load is batteries, not wind and solar renewables, since they are intermittent. We don't have a good idea yet of just how expensive massive grid storage is yet, but the lead time would definitely be shorter.
We do though. The cost is really land and rust. Iron oxide batteries are cheap and long lasting but low power density. Perfect for grid storage in a lot of places.
The alternative to base load is load shifting, just move most loads to when enough power is available. Or in other words, base load is a thing because big power plants like nuclear and coal are slow and someone's gotta use that power at all times.
Load shifting is the destruction of economic value, because it means people are making choices that aren’t optimal for their own lives.
Time is often written off in economic considerations, but that’s unwise because time is the most limited resource people have.
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Drill a hole and a deper hole and pump/turbine water between them.
That's really really expensive unless you already have natural upper and lower reservoirs.
It is? More than batteries?
Im surprised.
Based on some numbers I looked up a couple of years ago:
LiPo 15¢/Wh
Flywheel 15¢/Wh
Compressed air 12¢/Wh
Pumped hydro 11¢/Wh
I'll try to dig up the sources when I get home, but the cost advantage isn't too large, so digging your own reservoirs would put it as more expensive.
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No way. Far too expensive.
Can Nuclear plant electricity production be run in a decentralised way? No?! Not yet!?
Do we have alternatives to nuclear? Yes!?
We should avoid nuclear then.
The time for nuclear was decades ago.
Now it's being pushed by fossil fuel shills, who'd love nothing more than a gratuitously expensive 20 year boondoggle to let them have free reign over power generation for all that time, and to simultaneously nix any green plans with "but the nuclear is on its way!"
For a country with a huge amount of land and shore, that makes sense for them. But some form of nuclear (uranium fission, thorium fission, fusion?!) continues to be an important part of the world's weaning off of fossil fuels
The political context here is that the Australian conservatives (the liberal coalition I suppose), who have been vividly against climate policies and renewables, are now trying to propose nuke projects on coal power plant sites. Many of these coal power plants are soon to be phased out with renewables plus storage in the queue for the freed transmission capacity, so there isn't really any advantages these sites can offer for nuke projects decades from now.
Of course, any realistic realization of nukes in Australia would be no earlier than 2040 (some even suggest 2050), by then they could already get 100% renewable in energy system easily.
Who would have thought a political appointment is political.
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