This is an interesting economic quirk I hadn’t thought about.
Solar energy is inherently variable as the sun rises and sets but also with weather changes. Nuclear is the opposite of variable, as it can’t be turned up or down quickly. Energy storage continues to be one of the big gaps in our clean energy strategy.
The problem with nuclear is an example of why deregulation was stupid. As a society of electricity consumers, we are sitting on lawn chairs on a railroad track with an electric train approaching us. It's obvious to anyone with a pulse that electric cars are ramping up and will displace the current fleet, and equally obvious that that operating model (plug in your car at night) will increase base load requirements.
So because we've detached planning from electrical generation and distribution, we have 50 different sets of cartels optimizing for short term returns on the spot market. The various electrical shit-shows in California and Texas are like failed-state levels of dysfunction. North of NYC, electrical supply rates are up 50% because we turned off a massive reactor complex and replaced it with volatile natural gas. We're decommissioning nuclear at a point in time just before we need it, environmentalists were bought by gas extraction people and Wall St. accounting is very bad at dealing with capital assets with 50-100 year lifecycles.
If you think about it the "energy storage" problem is absurd. Installing millions of inefficient distributed battery cells in potentially millions of buildings, for want of adequate electrical generation is beyond dumb, and the scale of waste and wasted value is staggering. It is solely a byproduct of a market designed to maximize producer profit.
It’s insane that the environmentalist movement is inadvertently supporting the fossil fuel industry due to their traditional stance on nuclear. Modern civilisation requires reliable base load and nuclear seems like the only viable option which satisfies both the reliability and globally accepted environmentally sustainable goals.
The environmentalist movement, anti-nuke section, had little to nothing to do with the downfall of nuclear power. It was always and only economics, nothing else contributed to this. Nuclear is very complicated and thus very expensive, and this has nothing to do with regulations. Everything about generating power from nuclear is just expensive. If there was any opportunity to turn a profit with nuclear power, and I mean even the slightest margin of profit, you could not keep investors away, nor prevent nuclear power plants being built in every county in the country. There is a false narrative that supporters of nuclear energy seem to insist on perpetuating, which is that if the idiots would stop being so irrationally afraid of nuclear, we could have cheap, clean energy. This is a completely false position. The scardies have nothing to do with it. It is all and only economics that is killing nuclear power, and nothing else whatsoever enters into it.
Hydro?
In the US, opposition to nuclear energy is more like opposition to homeless shelters - people don't want the plants near them. I don't think environmentlists are that powerful politically as to significantly impact the trajectory of nuclear power policies in the US, otherwise, they would have the power to significantly impact climate change policies too.
Besides, what I have seen is that environmentalists are pretty divided in term of nuclear energy. There are strong opponents like green peace and Sierra clubs, there are strong supporters and there are many who are ambivalent. This further reduces their political power as a group.
I think nuclear energy supporters should stop blaming environmentalists as they are pretty much non-factor if they want nuclear power.
No, this is the opposite of what is true. In most places, load peaks in the evening, just as the sun sets.
Looking up the data [1], the more nuanced answer is that load peaks in in the evening in the fall, winter, and spring. Only in the summer does solar energy match load.
[1] https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e...
This might be true in California but peak in Poland and many other places is after sun sets.
West facing panels help, but the ROI isn't as good without variable energy pricing.
It strikes me that transitioning to electric cars could become less viable the more we rely on renewables+batteries, as grid scale battery storage could hugely exacerbate shortages of battery materials.
Though on the other hand grid batteries would also spur more research into battery tech which could change the game for both grid & mobile batteries.
It seems like a huge gamble commiting to grid storage in the hopes of big innovations down the road instead of doubling down on baseload nuclear.
The issue is no states, cities, population want to issue permits to build them. Its political to the point no one will touch it.
If you’re a courier or something you’re exempt.
There was never a deregulation that happened. In fact deregulation is what's needed to revive nuclear power. Competition in the power market is illegal in most states.
Similar to the charter school scam, the scrappy upstarts bonded out lots of debt to buy up power plants and subsequently became a powerful lobby to keep their cartel tight.
Some of the remaining municipal energy co-op utilities were exempted from deregulation, and all of them have lower cost structures.
I know Massachusetts is a similar story, not sure about others.
As a result of that deregulation, the grid is often optimizing for cost, instead of reliability, which can lead to problems. Saving 5% on your power bill is great, but it's less great if the consequence is, say, not having any power one week of the year.
“The high operating and maintenance costs of running a reactor can make them uneconomical in some markets”
And “sometimes they operate at a loss”
They’re specifically talking about operational costs and excluding upfront costs.
Chemical storage doesn't seem like it'd operate anywhere close to pump-hydro scale, but chemical storage will be a component of frequency-regulation, and maybe anything involving 30-minutes or less of storage. This is still useful, but pumped hydro is so much bigger than all other forms, that its hard to imagine an adequate replacement moving forward.
CAES looks promising. Still smaller than pumped hydro, but there's more geography that works with it.
It's not as clear cut. Cold start up and shut down of nuclear reactors take time, but there's lot of in between and nuclear still has quite a lot of flexibility: for instance, you can quickly modulate the power output down to 50% without special considerations (you can also go lower, but then it starts using the uranium quicker[1]), or you can even go off while staying hot and in pressure, which means only the fission divergence needs to be redone, this is usually done during the week-end.
And keep in mind that modern (= high yield) fossil plants also have limited flexibility: a supercritical coal plant takes a lot of time to warm up, and so does a CCGT.
[1]: or more precisely, since the power is controlled by top-down control rods, you end up burning uranium in the bottom more than in the top, which means replacing the fuel earlier.
>This is an interesting economic quirk I hadn’t thought about.
this "quirk" should be a non-issue with a functioning energy market. if renewables are flooding the market with cheap electricity, but only during the day, and there's a massive deficit during the night, then the deficit would cause prices to go up and make the remaining generating capacity (natural gas, nuclear) more profitable.
UK demand in winter is nearly 2x higher than summer (and will grow even more with switching gas heating to heat pumps), at the same time solar output is ~10% of that at summer. Wind energy is higher but is unpredictable and in very cold snaps (when demand is greatest) tends to result in very low wind output.
This problem is the biggest one to solve (and not sure how solvable it is). In essence it's possible to smooth out daily output with renewables, but annual output is very difficult. You are talking TWhs of storage requirement.
There's no reason prices should ever be negative... except for a lack of power sinks. If there were intermittent hydrogen production facilities, or direct air capture of carbon + a carbon market that rewarded that, the intermittency accounting quirk would correct itself.
>"Matt Crozat, senior director of policy development for the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), said the industry is "encouraged" by the creation of the credit program, but is still pushing for more permanent economic support."
The Nuclear Energy Institute looks like it's an just industry trade group that likely retains some powerful lobbyists.
Look at ~2001/02 -- ENRON...
My energy bill went from $100/mo to over $1,000/mo for NO REASON..
My power was shut off in february because my regular energy bill literally went up 10X during that period (no change in use) -- and I was ~25 and it was the first downturn, and while I owned my house - I had to borrow money from parents to pay the fucking power bill due to enron shenanigans... (san jose ca, so not even super cold/winter conditions)
--
Look at fuel prices right now - same fuckery about today: When the war started and fuel went to $90/barrel - the gas pump first time ever went to $3/gallon...
Look at fuel prices today $92/barrel --
$5.19 at the pump.
Yeah - FN BS.
Only if you assume the demand stays constant, but it doesn't; Demand is usually the highest when PV output is also the highest, the middle of the day when everybody is at work, using all kinds of electricity drawing machines.
In California, demand peaks are around 6-8pm, well past the peak of solar production. This disparity has a name, the "Duck Curve". You can view the near real-time power demand on the CAISO[1] website. Your region may have a similar way to see live demand.
Not quite, the mismatch in timing between solar generation and energy demand has been called the "duck curve" [1][2]. Peak demand is normally in the evening when people are done with work [3].
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...
Especially if these plants produced a lot of pollution that was also not accounted for.
The rods soak up neutrons. the reactor is designed so that its power would increase if the rods weren't there. The rods are what keeps the k == 1 (basically how the neutrons change in time. K == 1 is no change).
So don't think of the rods as a throttle valve in your car, i.e. this throttle angle corresponds to this much torque and therefore power. The rods are best thought of as controlling the rate of change of reactor power.
This is why the reactor is built so that the neutrons increase when fully withdrawn - because you have to start it! If the reactor is being started, the rods are withdrawn until the power wanted is achieved. Then the rods are lowered.
Note this is a far more complicated problem; this is a very serious operation because at the very start, except for your neutron starter, you only have "prompt" neutrons that can very quickly cause an increase of power. Once the reactor has stabilized the "nuclear waste" inside it releases non-prompt neutrons that are part of the neutron budget and are easier to control.
So, while waste in the reactor is being accumulated and while the fuel burns up, the position of the rods to achieve stable power changes! Furthermore these changes are different in different parts of the reactor so each rod is individually changed (actually I think there are two sets of rods, not all of them are individually actuated)
What I do know is that the older reactors weren't really the type that could "spin up" or "spin down". Control rods always existed on nuclear power plants, even the oldest designs.
-------
In any case: "Connecting" those rods up to a computer so that the reaction can get hotter or run cooler would be the basis for variable power output.
American nuclear submarines use them, as does France's power generating reactors.
As far as electrical output is concerned, nuclear power is just as variable as any other turbine based power generation system. Just divert the steam away from the turbines and you are no longer making electricity. Therefore, through creative plumbing, you could easily adjust the amount of power generated by controlling how much steam is going to the turbine. The issue is that while you are diverting steam, you are wasting money by running the reactor.
Also, what you're saying can be done by, for example, electrolysis of water to make hydrogen. I'm currently working on fuel cells that can be operated in reverse; that is they generate electricity from fossil fuels when needed (at very high efficiency) but absorb excess electricity by producing hydrogen.
Really what you're proposing is accomplished more efficiently by stored energy. The problem is that we've tapped out the easy ways to redistribute load, or store energy decades ago.
A nuclear reservation is generally a good place to lay out solar and wind arrays, whether the plant itself still operates or not.
The power not stored though is of course still just a problem in general for efficiency sake - I wonder if there is something we could pair with nuclear plants that would use the otherwise wasted energy to accomplish something productive.
[1]: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
Its something I've said before, you overbuild nukes, and use the excess capacity for water desalination, jet fuel production, CO2 recapture, or any other energy intensive process which creates a product that can be easily stored.
Nuclear energy is basically free once you have built the plant.
Maybe an interesting way to do this would be to give "power" grants to local students or universities - applications could be sent in with proposals and test projects and then those who are accepted would get access to free power during excess times and maybe also some kind of warehouse like workspace / nearby location. Could be a huge educational benefit and drive innovation.
It used to be not-too-dishonest when compared to coal, but always was compared to hydro. Now we have solar and wind, besides.
We are going to need to figure out how to handle more intense seasonal weather in the south east US. Florida has already done a decent job hardening their transmission lines and making sure their grids can stand up to cat 5 storms (the way they weathered Irma was incredible, compared to Maria in Puerto Rico just weeks later) but transmission lines are easier to replace than generators.
Then, transmitted power is cheaper, but storage serves when transmission drops. The effect is amplified when transmission is from or through another country.
Shocking.
People like to make noise about the impact of mining the materials needed for solar. Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium?
Their cost of construction per GW is not competitive with wind and solar - it's typically thousands of euros per kw. Whereas wind and solar can go from construction to energy production (and carbon paypback) on a timescale of months, nukes take years to build.
The United Nations Economic Commission For Europe released a report in 2021 on the life cycle emissions (including construction, operation, and decommissioning) of various power generation options and found nuclear to be the lowest overall at 5.5 gCO2eq/kWh [1].
Do you have sources for this? I completely concur that nuclear energy is too expensive, problematic and by now much too late to help with the climate crisis, but from what I found it is quite competitive with wind and solar in total CO2 emissions per kwh of energy (the numbers I found were all between 5 and 25 gram Co2/kwh for these three, compared to >500 for any fossil alternative).
This makes sense to me since turbines and panels also need to be manufactured, transported and installed, after all...
While I agree with you in general, the amount of uranium needed to run a power plant should be orders of magnitude smaller than is necessary to build and equivalent solar farm
But I do worry about the 8g/m^2 of cadmium mounted on top of houses some of which will burn down.
Both uranium mining and renewables mining have issues - I'm not going to debate or compare them because I don't know enough about the topic but due to the energy density of uranium I wouldn't be surprised if nuclear was better overall
Cost is the real issue - the cost and timescales of nuclear reactors are massive issues, and they are significantly worse short-term investments than wind and solar.
However, energy storage is not a solved problem, so until it is nuclear is not competing with wind and solar - it is competing with gas and coal, to which it has advantages in almost every category (excluding cost)
Long term that cost will go down, but it's always going to make the calculation much less simple than it seems at first glance, solar might be the cheapest form of power at the moment, but it's not the cheapest single source to run an electricity grid by a wide margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Seawater_recove...
>Well, what about the impact of mining and refining uranium?
I'd be willing to wager significant money that on a MW for MW basis, the environmental impact is higher for solar just due to the energy density alone.
"The gas, which would otherwise have been burned off, is instead routed to a bitcoin processor.
For years, oil and gas companies have struggled with the problem of what to do when they accidentally hit a natural gas formation while drilling for oil. Whereas oil can easily be trucked out to a remote destination, gas delivery requires a pipeline. If a drilling site is right next to a pipeline, they chuck the gas in and take whatever cash the buyer on the other end is willing to pay that day. But if it’s 20 miles from a pipeline, drillers often burn it off, or flare it. That is why you will typically see flames rising from oil fields.
The process reduces CO2-equivalent emissions by about 63% compared to continued flaring.."
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/15/conocophillips-is-selling-ex...
A better solution would be to interconnect the electricity grid with neighbouring grids. With sufficient size, time-dependent peaks and troughs would be smoothed out.
Keep existing nuclear plants running for as long as safely possible, for sure, but stop throwing good money after bad with new generators. Build batteries (including pumped hydro where able), renewables, and transmission. Throw in some demand response or load shifting for loads that can tolerate being scheduled around renewables production (Google does this for compute using ElectricityMap.org, and Nest does demand response in aggregate as a revenue source, when utilities send a signal to shed AC load temporarily on peak consumption days versus firing up gas peakers).
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Edit: (HN throttling, can’t reply)
@mrits: Telling people what they want doesn’t work. If they want cars (they do), you sell them EVs. You use your margin to build out a global EV charging network and battery factories. I don’t live in traffic, that’s a choice for others to make. The world is full of space batteries can be installed out of the way to meet net zero goals. There is no such thing as an ideal world, just nudges of consumers towards more positive macro outcomes.
Safety costs must be balanced against other considerations, but the biggest and most important is profit. There has to be a profit, it can be for the taxpayer, or the energy consumer, or the government, or the investors--hopefully some for all.
Profit is essential, you have to reap two seeds from planting one.
That really depends on your definition of "fucked-up", but there is a long list of nuclear accidents in the US [0], among the more "fucked-up" ones were attempts to dispose of nearly a ton of left-over fissile material in mere landfills [1] and then ultimately losing track of them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t...
[1] https://thebulletin.org/2014/05/thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that...
What are you smoking? This is blatantly false. We've absolutely had meltdowns, and come very damn close to real disaster (as in - evacuating a 20 mile radius including some 600,000 people close)
Some of this likely stems from a massive gaffe some years ago when California regulators demanded a certain percentage of state generation come from environmentally-friendly sources. PG&E laughed because it already had the largest hydroelectric portfolio in the US and didn't have to change anything. Democrat leadership, angry because they didn't find a way to punish the largest utility in the state, promptly recategorized large hydro as Very Naughty.
Does hydro have an environmental cost? Sure, so does everything. Is it a great way to generate and store electricity? Yes. Does that matter to lawmakers? No.
Good times!
The "evil solar lobby" has been saying for quite some time that solar is much cheaper than nuclear and therefore should play a large role in the post carbon grid. This article seems to reinforce their claims. Do you have a rebuttal, or are you just trying to be contrarian because it makes you feel good?
https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources...
The “massive taxpayer funded bailout” the nuclear industry wants is order of magnitude below what solar/wind/hydro get all the time. No wonder nuclear finds it hard to compete, when government subsidizes its competitors to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
And this doesn't even account for the fact that "Renewables" is a bucket that consists of multiple technology types including solar, wind, biomass and storage. So if those were actually broken out into individual categories nuclear would be the biggest receiver of incentives of the bunch.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Gener...
At the very least, you should compare life-cycle $/MWh, not $/GW.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
Looking at the older report from 2018, we can see costs for plants entering service in 2022:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181227232223/https://www.eia.g...
In 2018 the LCOE for new nuclear built in 2022 was estimated at $92.60/MWh while that from solar PV was estimated at $63.20 (before tax credits) or $49.90 (after tax credits).
The newer report with projections for 2026 shows that both nuclear and solar PV get tax credits, and at that time the nuclear tax credit is actually larger. The after-tax LCOE is $30.43 for solar PV and $70.59 for nuclear.
The earliest report in this series was from 2016. The AP1000 reactors currently under construction in the US started building before 2016, back when solar was considerably more expensive. The decision to build new AP1000 reactors was economically rational given the then-current costs of solar and the then-projected costs of new reactors. The reactor projects went tremendously over budget and utility scale PV costs subsequently plummeted, so building new reactors in South Carolina today would be a much more dubious choice, but I don't fault the decisions made back then.
In 2020 in the United States, utility scale solar PV had a capacity factor of 24% while nuclear power had a 92% capacity factor:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Solar and wind seem, thus far, relatively immune to corruption. Most storage methods should be, too. It seems to be because easy estimation of incremental cost leaves little scope for corruption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra?oldformat=true
> Solyndra executives misled federal officials to obtain $535 million in government-backed loans, with the help of former President Barack Obama's White House.
I haven't heard of much large scale wind projects. Most smaller scale corruption happens at the local level and rarely makes the news.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-06/fy-22-bud...
If you never properly fund something then you shouldn't be surprised if it never happens.
U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration, 1976. "Fusion power by magnetic confinement: Program plan"
ERDA report ERDA-76/110. Also published as S.O. Dean (1998), J. Fus. Energy 17(4), 263-287, doi:10.1023/A:1021815909065
https://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion_plan_1976.pdf
Obviously the 1976 chart did not have inflation data from 1976 to 1998, so you can see why we are below Logic I even though the budget is close to 500 M.
The entire PPPL FIRE site is a treat for anyone with some time on their hands.
In my comment I mentioned Magnets being a current barrier, in that case funding in Materials Science or EE would be more relevant and the 500M Fusion Funding number is irrelevant.
Throwing money at problems warms up the industries around them. No one will get good at making HTS tapes unless they can pay to keep the lights on. Also, the plasma physics research is far from complete. Study of burning plasmas (coming with ITER) and different configurations of optimized stellarators (coming never?) are important places to shine the flashlight on.
We aren't on the home stretch, but that isn't a reason to stop, slow down, or even not speed up.
https://science.osti.gov/-/media/budget/pdf/sc-budget-reques...
86 M USD cash, 220 M USD in-kind. The 450 M USD FES budget does not include in-kind contributions. I don't actually understand the accounting here.
Most of that is paid in-kind, which means domestic manufacturing of components sent to ITER, so it's a bit like a stimulus. The US has also (famously) regularly failed to put in what they budget for, even in the past ten years having some years where they contribute less than half of what they agreed to.
Fusion has no practice reason to exist compare to advanced fission. The improvements in energy density are not really relevant factor at that scale, meaning the difference from oil to fission, and oil to fusion doesn't really gain you much.
Fusion fuel cost over the long term is likely more expensive then a fission fast breeder (not to mention a potential of thorium thermal breeder).
Is a fusion reactor going to be cheaper to build then a advanced fission reactor? Not from anything know so far. Advanced fission concept are viable with pretty normal tubes pretty industrial steels or at most advanced aerospace materials. Any fission reactors actually consider would have waste more complex and expensive parts.
The nuclear waste argument is sometimes made in favor of fusion but with the right kind of fission reactor this problem and issue that has very viable practical solutions and storage for a few hundred years is viable.
Sometimes nuclear proliferation is held up as a reason why fusion is good, but that argument doesn't really work either once you think threw it. Access neutrons of fusion can certainty be used for all kind of things.
Are fusion reactors inherently safer? That's questionable. To come up with a scenario where a modern molten salt breeder (or even molten salt reactor) leads to massive safety hazards for anything outside the exclusion zone is very hard to imagine.
The scenarios you have to come up with for both fusion or advanced fission to be massive safety concerns are both possible and incredibly unlikely.
My approach would be to do something like NASA did for Commercial and Crew, have competitive fixed price competition between a group of providers and offer the 2-3 winners of them at least 2 deployments.
Could you, though? Look at the "Nuclear Energy" category. It is entirely devoted to fission reactor research and has a 1.85 Bn USD budget. That's a SPARC every year. Where are the LFTRs on the grid?
Advanced fission is, by contrast, just wildly uncompetitive, and getting more so every day.
What exactly is inherently expensive.
From first principle, total resources invested, advanced nuclear wins by a huge amount. The same goes for land use.
A single building with a modern nuclear reactor in it could replace a gigantic wind-farm.
People consider 'nuclear' to be nuclear built many decades ago with technology principles from even a few decades earlier.
Building something that has such long term aspirations is inherently problematic.
At the same time, if you turn them off, how much of the replacement will be fossil?
If you actually had a carbon price, would they still not be competitive?
Nuclear is truly in a sad state. And those reactors if turned down can't easily be replaced with any next generation designs because they don't exist as a practical product right now.
I think in 100 years people will laugh at as saying things like 'They had all the technology needed back then, why did they use it so badly'? I think that future will be nuclear fission powered, and not sun and solar powered.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/origin-energy-to-b...
No sign of a nuclear reactor in sight.
So not very surprising they are not being built there.
Next generation has two approaches, some try to be very adaptable, scaling up and down quickly. Its not like nuclear isn't capable of that if you have the right reactor. But of course you would prefer to run at 100% most of the time.
Other companies basically use a solar salt coolant loop as a heat sink and battery. Basically reusing the technology from Concentrated Solar Plants.
Moltex Energy for example basically expect basically a default 1h battery and then depending on the costumer and where you deploy it you can have a larger battery and a bigger turbine. You should be able to basically mix and match the size of your heat battery and your turbine.
I could also imagine something like Form Energy Iron batteries just sitting right next to a nuclear plant and simply charging those and saving energy in the form as electricity instead of in heat.
Every life on earth, was always sun powered. I doubt that fundamentally changes.
"They had all the technology needed back then, why did they use it so badly'?"
But I agree to that. The technology is there.
Did you know, that you can make batteries in bulk with no rare elements, with just iron, copper and saltwater?
And also, that you can transport electricity over long distances and that we have abundance of sunny desserts?
(and many more concepts of solar power generating, than just solar panels)
But sure, alternativly we can also build thousands of nuclear reactors, that contaminate their environment for a long time if they fail badly. I mean, fission is an quite awesome technology, which at some point of progress probably can handled safely under normal circumstances. But just because of unsolved human social dynamics alone (aka terrorism), it is maybe not very wise to scale them up and spread them everywhere.
But whether solar or nuclear - the main problems that remain, are that in most parts of the world, it is still way cheaper to just burn coal and oil.
I am clearly talking about electricity generation on earth. Seem like a totally unnecessary thing to say as you knew very well in what context I said it.
> But I agree to that. The technology is there.
There is a very large gap been established principles science and commercial license.
> Did you know, that you can make batteries in bulk with no rare elements, with just iron, copper and saltwater?
Yes I know all about companies like Form Energy and many other battery startups.
But if we are actually honest, most of those are not deployed. Most grid batteries deployed today are still Li-Ion.
> And also, that you can transport electricity over long distances and that we have abundance of sunny desserts?
Yes, but all those things come at a cost. Localized energy presentation has been the principle and it made a lots of sense. Starting to in far more long distance energy line and local distribution of that energy had a number of disadvantages.
> But whether solar or nuclear - the main problems that remain, are that in most parts of the world, it is still way cheaper to just burn coal and oil.
That is why I fundamentally believe in nuclear, based on first principles it has the potential to be cheaper. There is no inherent reason a nuclear plant need to be more expensive then coal plant. And nuclear fuel should be cheaper then coal in the long term.
Nuclear plants can be put on a ship or floating platform and put right next to most of the large coast bound cities in Asia. Alternatively you can just go to a place with a coal plant put a nuclear plant there instead.
I just don't see those nations build a distributed networks of solar and wind and battery connected across long distances.
Places like Indonesia are massively expanding with coal, their population lives on the coast.
Because the price of lithium was low enough, to not bother. Now that has changed, so they will become broadly avaiable very soon. And it is not like there is any technological brakethrough required. You can build and order them today. It is more about adopting production processes to it, to make them cheaper than lithium based batteries. But I heard the argument too often, that batteries are not a solution, because of rare earth elements, which is why I brought it up.
"Yes, but all those things come at a cost. "
And yes, they do. The price for renewables is a massive investment in the grid. And the price for nuclear is safety. As far as I know, no private insurance company is willing to take that risk, which is why the states have to step in.
The worst thing that can happen with batteries is a fire (and most saltwater based batteries are actually quite fire proof)
The worst thing that can happen with a swimming nuclear plant is widespread contamination for decades.
It is still advised against eating too many mushrooms or boar meat in my area (central europe), because of one incident 35 years ago, happening 1000 km away.
We would not have this problem today if Ronald Reagan and his political heirs had not killed alternative power investment decades back.
And solar and win power were simpy not ready, no matter what Reagan did.
The simple fact is, green CO-2 free power grids were possible, and they were done in the 80s by France.
The reality is both parties turned essentially anti-nuclear because of the backlash in the 70s.
What is this mysterious storage that you speak of?
The problem with current regulation is that power is treated like a fungible commodity when it is not.
Base load should be priced separately from peak and intermittent generation.
Being slow to start up will be a huge competitive disadvantage. Most storage providers will need a stock of front-end batteries, but there might need to be regulatory support for baseline capacity storage.
If it keeps on moving, regulate it.
If it stops moving, subsidize it.