Why would I want to cover the entire desert with solar panels instead of having one neat little tube shaped steam box?
You know three nuclear power plants (spanning 19 reactors) in Ontario provide electricity for 9 million people? How many solar panels and wind turbines would you need to put in their place?
A solar PV facility must have an installed capacity of 3,300 MW and 5,400 MW to match a 1,000-MW nuclear facility’s output, requiring between 45 and 75 square miles of land cover. That's twice the size of Manhattan. [1] Ontario has a generating capacity of 13.5GWe of nuclear energy. That would be almost 1000 square miles of solar panel - 4x the city of Toronto.
I actually don't really care that nuclear's more expensive. It's the better option.
Meanwhile, the Pavagada Solar Plant in India is rated at 2050 MW, with a footprint of 37 km^2, or 14 miles^2.
Though if you really want to compare like-for-like environments, I think a better comparison is the Noor Abu Dhabi, which is rated at 1177 MW with a footprint of 8 km^2, or 3 miles^2.
And of course that’s in addition to possibly of reaching a significant fraction of demand with rooftop PV, which is otherwise wasted space and which nuclear reactors can’t use.
Heck, you can put the PV onto the outside surfaces etc. of the nuclear reactor if you want. Or between the wind turbines.
I have nothing against dollar but the way. I’m all for a mix of nuclear and renewables to effectively meet our energy demand. Nuclear is great for providing base load.
No, nuclear is actually not that great for that. You need a power source that is cheap to scale up to cover discrepancies between supply and demand. If you build nuclear capacity for that you might as well just run it all the time and not build renewables. Nuclear has very small marginal costs, but huge up front capital expenses. You really don't want to run it at 10% load most of the year to cover the times where neither the sun shines not the wind blows.
But that ceases to make any sense the second you have renewables cheaper than nuclear. Then renewables start cutting into that base load as well, whenever they can.
Cost is extremely important, though. Energy costs propagate everywhere. Want to make some aluminium? That costs a lot of electricity. Want to serve some data? Got to power the servers with something.
If your electricity cost is too much, industry will move elsewhere.
If you try to subsidize it, that money will have to come out of somewhere.
Nuclear electricity is really cheap, building the plants is the expensive part. And yeah, I'm fine with reallocating the $5T in fossil fuel subsidies from 2010-2021 towards constructing said plants. [1] Then hopefully we'll also recognize some economies of scale.
Nuclear will never win the economy of scale war with renewables.
Solar is extremely amenable to mass manufacturing. You can pump out solar panels by the millions. Then it all goes together with various metal brackets, wiring, and electronics, all of which have long been mass manufactured. They're made in many places and have uses in multiple industries, and there's plenty competition.
Wind is very amenable to mass manufacturing. Generators, gears, various nuts and bolts can all be mass made. The actual towers and windmills are definitely more specialized though.
And trailing way behind that is nuclear. You need to deal with radiation, use exotic alloys, and have a bunch of very specific tooling and instrumentation with lots of regulations and certifications. Plus lots of redundancy to make sure nothing bad happens.
And they have exactly the same "cheap electricity". A solar panel just sits there and makes power, only it comes for cheap from a factory in China and you don't need various backup systems. You can just build more solar instead, which produces more money.
That depends on how you set up your electricity market. Since these markets are necessarily designed from the top down, we can set the rules however we like.
You can also determine, by optimization, what the most cost effective energy system would look like. If you do this you will discover that nuclear may not have a place in it.
Of course you can set up a market system where nuclear is favored, but that would be a market system that would likely not be delivering the lowest overall cost solution to the optimization problem.
"May." I haven't seen anyone actually do that, have you? All I see are researchers ignoring nuclear and proving that an all-renewables grid is possible, not that it's cheaper than a grid including nuclear.
At one point MIT had a US grid simulator online and I played around with it for a while. The cheapest fossil-free combination I found was solar and nuclear. Basically enough nuclear for nighttime demand, and enough solar for extra daytime demand. Wind+solar+storage was a good bit costlier.
And that was with conventional nuclear cost. We should probably find out whether, in practice, it's cheaper to mass-produce passively-safe small modular reactors in factories.
It models minimum cost combinations of renewables, batteries, and hydrogen to supply synthetic baseload given historical weather data (insolation, wind) in various places. It can also include nuclear (enable option "Dispatchable 2", which is based on EPR.) Twiddle the cost assumptions as you like to see what dominates.
Passively safe small reactors are the latest in nuclear magical thinking. Yes, this time, the it-will-be-cheaper promise will be real, unlike all the other times it was a lie. At some point Charlie Brown the Nuclear Stan needs to realize Lucy is going to pull away the football again.
Edit: From some initial attempts, using their EPR costs does leave nuclear out entirely, in both the US and China. However, cutting the nuclear capital cost in half results in a grid that is completely nuclear.
And it's not all or nothing. Reducing nuclear capital cost to 2/3 of the EPR value, the US gets a mix of sources with 63% nuclear.
Whether such cost reductions are feasible, we'll see. You may be right, but I'll note that we have never actually tried mass-producing lots of small passively-safe reactors, or done more than early experiments with MSRs. I'm glad there are companies and countries giving it a shot.
Edit2: Actually, even current production nuclear technology can get us there, if we follow the lead of the most effective countries. See figure 12 in this study of global nuclear cost curves: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
> However, cutting the nuclear capital cost in half results in a grid that is completely nuclear.
With the 2020 assumptions? Do that with the 2030 numbers and renewables will still be on top. 2030 is probably what you want to use right now, since any nuclear plant started now isn't going to be in operation before about then.
Note that some assumptions for 2030 have already been superseded. For example, it assumes hydrogen electrolysers cost 600 EUR/kW; China is already selling them (domestically and for export) for half that.
The EPR numbers are rather optimistic. Flamanville 3 and Vogtle 3 and 4 are now costing around 11,000 EUR/kW, nearly twice what was assumed (and four times the capital cost after we halve that number.) Yes, things went wrong in those projects. That tends to happen with nuclear and cannot be ignored. Renewables usually come in within 10% of promised cost.
Also, remember this is for synthetic baseload, not a grid with variable demand. The latter will favor renewables since that means some of the energy from nuclear will now be going into storage, just like from renewables. The synthetic baseload case is the best case for nuclear.
Can you provide a source for hydrogen electrolyzer cost? My quick google didn't show obvious results, though there's plenty to dig into.
Certainly nuclear looks bad if you use the worst costs available. My claim is that South Korea, for example, has achieved much lower costs in production, so our issues are more with mismanagement than the technology itself.
If I plug your hydrogen cost into the scenarios in my other new comment, it lowers the cost at which nuclear starts to appear on the US grid, but there's still a point within the range of the world's production nuclear costs where nuclear takes over.
South Korea's costs seem to have been related to corruption. That will work until the first accident, and as long as people aren't going to jail (as they did in S. Korea.)
South Korea isn't the only country with decent nuclear costs. See the study I linked.
US nuclear costs are related to the fact that we build reactors as occasional one-offs, throw in long political delays, and sometimes change regulations in the middle of construction. We're probably not going to change any of that, so it's good we do so well with wind and solar. But our situation is not the situation everywhere.
Most of the other ones in Figure 12 there are France. But now France can't replicate what it did before (the EPR cost overruns have been frightful) so the validity of those earlier points is called into question. As I understand it, the accounting of those cost of that earlier buildout is sketchy, with military nuclear rolled in in a way that can't be untangled.
Also, their default nuclear lifetime is 25 years, and we have many reactors older than that running right now. In my tests above I changed the lifetime to 60 years. Justification for that here: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...
For some countries, even the original capital cost of 6000 is viable with a 60-year lifetime. Two I tried are Thailand and, ironically, Germany, both of which went 100% nuclear that way.
Assuming a 40 year lifetime in an environment of rapidly declining costs (for the competition) is dubious. Note that we're already seeing some nuclear plants in the US that can't compete just based on their operating costs. TMI's remaining reactor was cash flow negative for six years before it was shut down. It still worked fine, it just didn't make sense to keep running it. Plenty of other plants are cash flow positive but aren't selling their output at a price that would justify their replacement with a new NPP.
One can view the strong position of gas-fired generating capacity in the US not just as a consequence of the low cost of natural gas, but also the low capital cost, which limits the downside risk of future competition. A combined cycle power plant might cost 10% or less the capital cost of a NPP, per unit power output.
Nuclear today is competing against cheap, dispatchable natural gas. That's not relevant to a model of a carbon-free grid, where nuclear could displace the higher costs required to get dispatchable power from wind/solar.
Nuclear's main cost is capital, so using an artificially low lifetime biases heavily against nuclear. The model accounts for operating costs separately. Whether other tech will make nuclear uncompetitive is what we're trying to find out with this model; if we start by assuming that, and limit nuclear lifetime accordingly, then we're making a circular argument.
I did notice that fixed O&M costs are expressed as a percentage of capital cost, so if I take them at face value and halve the capital cost, to be conservative perhaps I should double the O&M from 3% to 6%, which I hadn't done before. That doesn't change the German and Thai results, since for those I only changed lifetime. But in the US, it means capital cost of 3000 still results in a grid without nuclear.
That's only 2.1% of 6000. If we lower capital cost without lowering O&M, we get 4.2% of 3000. That puts a small amount of nuclear back in the US market.
However, they default to a discount rate of 10 for nuclear, and only 5 for wind/solar/battery. I don't see any reason to use different numbers here. Setting nuclear to 5, with the above changes, gets us back to a 100% nuclear US grid. Even if we take O&M back up to 6%, a capital cost of 3000 and discount rate of 5% means a 100% nuclear US.
Comparing overall grid cost of two examples: With no nuclear (due to 10% discount), the US average grid cost is 53.7 EUR/MWh. With 100% nuclear (due to 5% discount and 3000 capital cost), the US grid cost is 48.6 EUR/MWh.
In any case, this has changed my view somewhat. I'd thought that nuclear was a clear winner over storage, but it looks like nuclear's place is at least marginal in the US. We have copious wind and solar, and nuclear only lowers overall grid cost if we can manage the sort of nuclear costs they've achieved in South Korea. But in countries less favorable to wind/solar, nuclear dominates.
Yes. I've been saying that for nuclear to survive in the US, up front costs have to be cut at least by a factor of 3. This is going to be tough. NuScale's SMR doesn't appear to be able to do this.
If we start seeing CO2 taxes here, the way forward will be displacing gas using increased renewables, and if there are enough times where gas goes to zero then adding storage to serve that. Getting to 100% will require additional storage (and likely hydrogen), but even before that the environment will become quite hostile to new NPPs.
You can, but why would you set up the market backwards?
The whole idea of base load was that nuclear is very cheap, but inflexible. So you optimize, generating as much as possible with nuclear, then filling in the variable bits with more expensive to run, but more flexible generation.
Cheap renewables have completely wrecked that model though.
You set up the market to get the lowest possible total energy cost. If the lowest system design is to have nuclear as part of the mix instead of massive amounts of storage, then there's nothing backwards about setting up the market to support that.
Right now we have a market where wind/solar don't have to pay for the externalities imposed by their intermittency. That is backwards.
Well, if you're going to account for all externalities, that sounds like a good idea, but I don't think nuclear would fare well under such a model.
Fukushima cost around $200 billion to clean up. I don't think that got factored into the cost of the power it sold.
Now I guess the answer here is insurance, but any insurance company that signs up for a potential payout of $200 billion is going to charge quite the premium, which won't make the already expensive nuclear power any more attractive.
And how do you even calculate the premium here? It's not a house or a vehicle with an easy to determine cost. We're talking about evacuating an area of unknown size for however long might be necessary.
The reactor in the article would have been completely unaffected by the events at Fukushima.
In any case, my point is a different one: energy that's available on demand is more valuable than energy that is not, and we should price it as such. If we don't, we end up doing things like backing up our wind/solar with fossil...which also doesn't have its externalities priced in.
Well either nuclear is cheaper than renewables+backup (for peak load), then you want to use 100% nuclear, or renewables+backup are cheaper, then you want to use 100% that. I don't see a scenario where you run nuclear for baseload and renewables+backup for peaks, but maybe I'm wrong.
Well, if the renewables in question were hydro, I'd say you're wrong, because hydro is fantastic for scaling up and down on demand.
But since we're mostly talking about solar, that doesn't apply. What may apply is that solar will have highest output when it's sunny, whereas in a hot climate, demand will peak when it's sunny — which aren't quite the same thing, but strongly correlated.
That said, you need to be able to handle hot, cloudy days, and for that reason you may be right that you're best off going entirely with one or the other.
I’d choose both if the difference is small. Don’t want to risk geopolitical issues with either one, so mix them. How big a cost gap between them is worth the security benefit is not something I can even guess at, to the extent that I can believe I may even be wrong to suggest it can ever happen.
The land argument against solar is economically foolish. In most places, the value off land is a tiny fraction of the cost of the solar installation. We have lots and lots of land, far more than is needed to power global industrial society with solar energy, and that land is very cheap.
If the cost of land ever did become a global constraint on solar energy, it would be because the other parts of solar had become incredibly cheap. At that point, solar would already have consigned all other energy sources to oblivion.
The value produced per hectare per year from a PV field is much greater than many other current uses of land, such as raising lifestock, growing grain, or commercial forestry. If solar is deemed impractical because of land usage, so should those other uses.
But solar has the benefit that it doesn't need to be centralised, people can cover their own roofs and have a battery to be self sufficient and now you don't even need a grid.
While this is true when the homes are isolated, in many cases there are power grids, and thus in principle can get their (Arctic circle?) winter power from Mexico or Italy (I don’t know where you live).
I think the small number of exceptions are, even collectively, even long term, not problematic to fuel chemically.
What kind of insulation do you have? I keep expecting aerogel on sites like this.
Until they need replacement components for any of this. Which they will need evry couple of years. Then they will need centralized infrastructure in form of manufacturing plants, roads, rail and finally (because it is imported from China most likely) ports.
Every step producing greenhouse gasses or other pollution.
Self sufficiency of this sort is largely a sub-urban myth. A comfortable, optimistic one, but a myth nonetheless.
Yes, total independence is unrealistic and will be until we have von Neumann universal constructors, but we are starting to get to the point where big footprint homes could reasonably be energy-independent for normal daily use.
If every house had solar panels, there's going to be a rolling requirement for on going maintenance.
Let's say, for argument sake, solar panels and inverts are approximately as reliable and long lasting as air conditioners, we'll still need a whole new fairly large industry.
Seems doable, but we'd need to deal with recycling all the parts, still doable, but there's nothing self sufficient about any of that.
I am responsible for maintaining eight 150 Ah 120v dc battery banks. The sites also have diesel generators so the batteries really only get used for the 10 seconds it take the diesel to start, maybe 4 or 5 times a year. The batteries are indoors. So far cells start to go after 5-7 years and then I have to replace the whole bank.
Even 1 decade is optimistic life from current technology batteries that I am being sold from industrial battery sales channels.
be careful claiming that solar PV systems last decades. Many recent builds have components that fail including the panels, junction boxes, the panel-to-panel connectors and the inverters themselves.
Solar isn't as reliable as the solar industry would have you believe. Worst part, a single component failure often takes large sections of the system offline. With domestic systems, that's the entire system.
I’ve heard of issues with contactors failing in cold temperatures and dust or dirt (it is the desert, sand gets everywhere) causing fibre connections to stop working, ruin fans, cause overheating, outages, millions of dollars lost.
"evry couple of years" .. umm nope. Try every 10-20 years for the inverter and every 20-30 years for the panels. Roof-top solar in Australia is cheap and almost ubiquitous.
Every couple years is probably more accurate. Hardware fails all the time, especially at scale. Hard drives fail all the time, solar equipment isn't magically different. Once a full neighborhood has solar, someone will have a defective panel, a defective inverter, an improper install that needs to be redone, storm damage, panels that need cleaning, panels that get damaged from cleaning, or a building gets renovated/replaced/destroyed.
this is far from the truth. NREL have great reports and ongoing research into how often solar panels fail. You are correct in that it isn't every couple of years but it is not as long as 20 years. The number of solar PV panels that have been around that long, let alone survived that long is small.
In other news, the solar cells installed on the White House by Carter apparently still provided energy ten years ago [1], and those who were not broken deliberately likely still do today.
I am all for nuclear - but let's keep the discussion honest.
Those are not solar cells, those are water heaters.
In the interest of being honest.
No wonder they still work, those are literally water pipes embedded in a roof panel. No inverter, no battery, nothing. The only thing they have in common with solar cells people install today is the fact that they are powered by sun.
Worth noting that people do still install those today in addition to PV panels. PV panels seem to get 20-30 years of use, which isn’t bad at all. And I believe they usually still work after that time, just with reduced efficiency.
There's also some cool combo rooftop solar panels/water heaters. [1] By cooling the panels themselves they increase their efficiency by up to 15% (so an increase from ~20% to ~23% total efficiency) - while also heating water for the home.
And yet how many people do that and ditch their grid connections? The reality is having as much electricity as you can use whenever you want for 10 cents a kWh is not something solar/battery provides.
Yeah but I don’t think nuclear is politically viable. It has bad connotations for your average punter, and it looks extremely expensive because all the externalities are priced in. Very unlikely our listless politicians would take on the nuclear cause. Can you imagine building a nuclear waste dump on land under native title?
I don't care if something is more expensive if it's better haha. Sometimes better things are more expensive. That's why we have subsidies. And yes, I do consider covering an area 4X the size of Toronto with solar panels to be worse than the 3 small buildings in the middle of nowhere (Bruce, Darlington, Pickering) we have now.
I'm saying spending the same amount on solar would leave us worse off.
> If we'd started building reactors when we first said it'd take too long, we'd have all the reactors we need. Instead of saying it's going to take too long, let's just start :)
... and apparently you don't care that there was an alternative that would already be producing a lot of power? Because it doesn't matter how much money you think could have built reactors, the reactor-building community is screwed up.
How does solar produce substantial power in northern and southern latitudes for several months of the year? How about at night? How about during long cloudy periods? Solar usually ends up with carbon based backup. It should be nuclear instead. For solar to really work, it will take massive energy storage capabilities. That is NOT ready to deploy. Until then, solar will only be a partial solution at best.
Anyone who wants carbon free power generation should be pro-solar AND pro-nuclear.
Country the size of Australia could actually build sizeable solar assets across multiple timezones. The "backup problem" is a storage problem that could be solved more locally to the consumption. (houses with batteries, or suburbs, or cities, or states). The "night time" generation problem is a bit BS given electricity demand drops significantly at nigh in Australia, so the storage requirement is no where near the generation requirement.
Just some thoughts. Australia has enough unutilised land mass to generate the global power demand a couple of times over, North Africa also does... so you could build a solution that requires no storage at all.
There is very high demand from 6-10 pm and lesser in morning when solar is not available or very diminished. Also solar still needs cleaning all of those panels. Solar requires rare earths and that is surprisingly toxic manufacturing/refining process. Distribution and transmission is also not as easy as just building everything in Africa and sending it elsewhere. We need a mix of systems in practice.
Solar does not, in fact, require rare earths. (And, incidentally, "rare earths" are very, very far from rare; that is just a name.) And, the cost to clean them once in a while is very low.
You are reaching. The fact is that renewables are the cheapest source of power that has ever happened on this planet, and they are still getting cheaper.
Storage is likewise cheap and very quickly getting much, much cheaper. By the time we actually need any, you will not notice the cost.
You need rare earths for wind power. They broadly come from hellscapes in the far reaches of Mongolia. [1] The reason they're primarily mined in China isn't, as you point out, their not existing anywhere else - it is due to the Chinese being willing to pay the extreme environmental cost of their refining.
The second-most common type of panel, CdTe solar panels still contain cadmium, tellurium and sometimes lead - and all of them to my knowledge have huge quantities of plastic. These are rarely recycled and generally end up buried with the rest of the e-waste in poor countries. [2]
I was talking about solar panels. They are purified silicon… not rare or toxic. You purify it by melting it. The coating of boron or other substance is also not toxic. Compare it to ANY other energy source and it is less toxic in manufacture and of course is completely static in use.
Rare-earth magnets are often used in wind turbines, but very far from always.
CdTe PV is made on glass. They are common mainly in the US, mainly because of import tariffs. But Cd and Te are valuable and easily extracted from panels, so, no, they will not end up in landfills. The Si ones may, but very highly-purified Si is also valuable. Thin-film cells likely to be used in future cells use very little material.
I mentioned building solar across multiple time zones so assets in Perth are still getting sun until 7-8pm in Sydney. Transmission isn’t easy? Compared to what? Building thousands of power plants globally is easier?
You could also look at panels towards the poles where the sun shines longer.
You know three nuclear power plants (spanning 19 reactors) in Ontario provide electricity for 9 million people? How many solar panels and wind turbines would you need to put in their place?
A solar PV facility must have an installed capacity of 3,300 MW and 5,400 MW to match a 1,000-MW nuclear facility’s output, requiring between 45 and 75 square miles of land cover. That's twice the size of Manhattan. [1] Ontario has a generating capacity of 13.5GWe of nuclear energy. That would be almost 1000 square miles of solar panel - 4x the city of Toronto.
I actually don't really care that nuclear's more expensive. It's the better option.
[1] https://www.nei.org/news/2015/land-needs-for-wind-solar-dwar...