> The "you can't be 100% sure" argument is impossible to defeat, and I don't think this design will move the needle.
You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that.
Meanwhile fossil fuels have killed tens of millions of people, billions of animals, and changed the climate. All directly or indirectly.
Somehow, it's a version of the quote "Kill one man, and you're a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you're a conqueror", a few deaths due to Chernobyl, and people are focused on it.
But those dead miners? Or those old people with lung disease? Or those thousands of miles of bleached, dead coral?
> You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that.
I always think it's funny when HN thinks that Greenpeace is omnipotent. Their very first campaign in 1971 was against commercial whaling, which still hasn't stopped more than 50 years later. Greenpeace also has a decade-long campaign against oil, which has not exactly succeeded.
Why are HN readers so quick to think that Greenpeace is all powerful? Or is Greenpeace just a convenient boogeyman to trot out whenever anyone is critical of nuclear power?
Failure in one endeavour doesn't predict failure in another.
You're making the same logical error you're accusing others of. But if you'd like to know, it's because there's a frequent association between the two. But truthfully I think people use "Greenpeace" as a stand in for any environmentally focused organization because it's the one they're most familiar with. There is direct connection with the nuclear case, but as another user points out the Sierra Nevada Club has uncontestable bias given that there are records showing that they took money from natural gas companies to support their anti nuclear campaigns. (I'm unsure if there's as clear evidence for GP. Maybe someone could link. I'm aware of indirect evidence but if someone has financial statements -- like we have with SNC -- I'd appreciate that)
As for why might success in whaling be different than nuclear? For one, whaling was already a huge established industry, while nuclear was budding. I think that's a key difference you can't ignore. Not to mention that whaling doesn't have a direct connection to bombs, not to mention that biggest bombs we've ever made.... Importantly, I think you're also undermining the success of their anti whaling campaigns. Synthetic oils almost certainly had a larger impact but it wouldn't be surprising if their efforts helped accelerate the adoption. Whaling might not have "stopped" but it has as a global industry.
As for oil, well, again, harder to take down a well established large industry. Especially when so much is dependent upon it and ethics gets complicated when you get into nuance (you want to shut down hospitals?). It's also a not harder to do when you fight against alternatives because they don't pass a purity test, even if they are strictly better (and by a lot).
I think we agree on more than we don't. You're listing very reasonable reasons why Greenpeace has failed to, say, reduce our fossil fuel use to meet the Paris Accords, and why whaling hasn't been completely eradicated. (FWIW my family just got back from Norway, and there were many restaurants and stores that sold whale products for food.)
Having said that, your reasons for the campaign against nuclear power include the fact that it's related to bombs, which has nothing to do with Greenpeace. You also reasonably said that "Greenpeace" is short for "environmental groups at large". To me this means that civil society in general came out against nuclear power, which lead to nuclear power being curtailed, which is... how civil society is supposed to work?
If the underlying argument is "I wish people in the 1980s had a better understanding of the benefits of nuclear power plants and we had continued to build them, albeit with better safeguards" then I would 100% agree with you.
But every time there is a discussion of nuclear power on HN there is a top comment blaming the current lack of it on Greenpeace. It's lazy and intellectually bankrupt.
To say that civil society came out against nuclear power after two high profile disasters, due in part to mainstream environmental groups' campaigning, but also due to high construction and electricity costs, low trust in the industry, and the availability of (imperfect!) alternatives, would be much more accurate, if less exciting to upvote.
> the fact that it's related to bombs, which has nothing to do with Greenpeace.
>> Greenpeace got its start protesting nuclear weapons testing back in 1971.
> "Greenpeace" is short for "environmental groups at large". To me this means that civil society in general came out against nuclear power,
I think you took the meaning different than intended. I'm more saying that someone might substitute "Sierra Nevada Club" with "Green Peace". This includes when people blame.
As to the claim that there was dirty money involved, well I find that when I post sources my comments get less engagement. But here's an example (there's others that are easily searchable. Including governments because yes, weapons and energy production are related. Due to enrichment. They don't need to be, but it is an avenue to justify enrichment even if the quantities are dramatically different).
> But every time there is a discussion of nuclear power on HN there is a top comment blaming the current lack of it on Greenpeace. It's lazy and intellectually bankrupt.
I'm pro nuclear, have a physics degree, and have worked on nuclear tech; I agree with you. But I also think the same is true for the other side (I'll note that I frequently correct many pro nuclear comments. But I'm just tied today and trying to stay off HN more. If you search my history breeder reactors are a common topic).
Truth here is that these conversations are excellently complicated. Climate change is one of the, if not THE, most complicated challenges humans have ever faced. All the sub topics have a lot of nuance and complexity to them as well as a lot of misinformation. Even with strong domain backgrounds these are hard topics! (And I doubt many HN users have strong backgrounds in atomics, PV, battery production, energy transmission, various physical engineerings, and so on, let alone all at once) But I do believe a lot of people care and a lot of people are on the same side (fixing the planet and moving away from fossil fuels). And I think it'd be better if we saw that common ground and would argue as if we're on the same team instead of not. So let's bring what pieces we have to the table. Because when we argue like we aren't on the same team, oil is the winner. But I think we can all agree that be it renewable or nuclear (or honestly some combination that is best suited for a given situation and location) are leagues better than fossil fuels and gas. It's also important to recognize that neither camp offers a full solution to the problem. Luckily their solutions aren't complete overlaps. So please do still advocate your position, but we need to also recognize a common enemy who wants to split us apart. Let's save most of the arguing until they're dead. Clearly fighting each other hasn't worked.
> You're making the same logical error you're accusing others of.
His complaint is that GP stopping nuclear is BS with no evidence. Your comment can be summarized as "I don't see why it couldn't be true" without presenting any evidence that it is true.
Germany didn't quit nuclear power because of Greenpeace. They quit because Japan kept unsafely operating a nuclear power plant that was older than the one in Chernobyl until a tsunami caused a meltdown.
As someone that grew up in the UK in the 1970s and 80s with 3 TV channels that reached the majority of the UK, Greenpeace were a fixture on mainstream news. The past was somewhat different to today.
As a New Zealander born in the 70s I very much remember Greenpeace protesting against the testing of the nuclear weapons, the snap election in 1984, the 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and then becoming nuclear free in 1987. Nuclear power was never going to get of the ground in that environment. In NZ, being nuclear free is like the 2nd amendment in the US.
In the 1970s the BBC news programmes gave huge amounts of air time to Greenpeace and CND. Greenham Common and CND being given the most coverage.
When the only source of information is a daily newspaper, or nightly news programmes, a huge number of people can be influenced by whatever a channel like the BBC was broadcasting.
Unlike today where you can read wikipedia (!) or switch to one of a hundred other channels and simply just not watch the news.
TV set the agenda back then, and the course of nuclear sentiment for a few decades.
That does not address the comment you reply to, which looks at actual results. All the things the comment mentioned are from that same time period too. That shows that all that exposure and "awareness" still being chased today apparently did not help to achieve an actual result. That means that you attempting to show that awareness was achieved does not contradict the parent comment.
This still fails to address the fundamental question: Why do so many HNers think that environmental groups have infinite power to shape public policy around nuclear energy, while they have failed to succeed in any number of other campaigns, including ones that are more serious (climate change) and/or self-contained (commercial whaling)?
Because being against nuclear was and still is to some extent the core idea that unites all green parties. There's nothing else they all agree on and nothing else that defines better the green vote.
Because of that, the green parties in most countries sold their votes in exchange of policies against nuclear as a first priority.
> being against nuclear was and still is to some extent the core idea that unites all green parties
Are there green groups that support whaling? Coal-fired electrical plants? Global climate change?
There are any number of other problems that "green parties" have in common. Having said that, it's important to note that Greenpeace and Sierra Club are not green parties, but non-profit organizations.
> Greenpeace and Sierra Club are not green parties, but non-profit organizations.
The line is much blurrier than you might think. The green parties originate directly from those movements and there's significant exchange with the non-profit world.
And yes, whaling or coal plants aren't pushed as much as nuclear as a subject, that's not even close.
Not wise to generalise - I'm an HN reader and I do not think "Greenpeace is omnipotent".
I used to be a Greenpeace supporter and would donate to them, even. Then I started to get harassed by their "premium donation agents" and stopped. Over the years, I have realised that they have taken up certain good causes (anti-oil, anti-whaling) but have also been rather misguided (e.g. stop all nuclear rather than argue for realistic-safe nuclear).
> against commercial whaling, which still hasn't stopped more than 50 years later
With the exception of a few native tribes in Canada and US, and the countries of Japan, Norway, and Iceland, I am pretty sure that all commercial whaling has stopped. And, the whaling that does remain is sustainable. If what I wrote is correct (I might have missed a country or two), I would say the campaign was successful.
It’s a convenient scape goat. The incredible impracticality of nuclear power is easily reducible to its immense cost vs other sources of energy. But that goes against the nerd creed of nukes smart. The marketplace long ago abandoned nuclear in favor of things that actually work.
>Why are HN readers so quick to think that Greenpeace is all powerful?
The nuclear lobby cant exactly blame the exhorbitant cost of nuclear power for their problems. They need a more exciting scapegoat that isnt "it's 5x the cost of the competition".
Imagine if all the governments of the world came up with a mass produced, cookie cutter, plant, rather than starting all fabrication and design from scratch for each plant?
Construction costs really aren’t the issue, they are just harder to hide. If you could get someone to build you an absolutely free nuclear power plant it still wouldn’t be cheap power. Just fuel itself which is generally assumed to be ‘free’ runs nearly half the cost of solar power per kWh by the time you’re dealing with actual fuel rods you can stick in a reactor not just ore or 99.3% U235 0.7% U235 metal.
Then with that leftover margin, you need to cover everything from land costs to new equipment as thing break over 50+ years. Manned 24/7 operations take ~500 people per GW over the plants full lifetime, as are less obvious expenses like insurance and mandatory downtime for weeks at a time requires something to pick up the slack, etc.
Nuclear just ends up expensive even without any safety concerns.
> by the time you’re dealing with actual fuel rods you can stick in a reactor not just ore or 99.3% U235 0.7% U235 metal.
It's actually possible to run a reactor on natural unenriched uranium. IIRC the first man-made reactor ever, the Chicago pile, used natural uranium. Why did we stop using natural uranium in reactors?
Read up on CANDU, it ends up being slightly more expensive and produces more high level nuclear waste. Currently they’re enriching uranium even if the design doesn’t need to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
There’s a lot of different trade offs you can make with nuclear designs, but so far non of them have been demonstrated to actually be meaningfully cheaper.
Isn't that a chicken and egg problem? These small designs are supposed to be (more) automated, so they wouldn't need huge teams of people 24/7. My main response to the idea of sticking one so far underground is that you might as well just make a geothermal plant.
The physical bit of reactor where the fission happens is left alone in operation. All the pipes, steam turbines, pumps, plumbing, cooling towers, etc etc do and this wants all of that on the surface.
Theoretically stuff like EPR is supposed to be a cookie cutter design.
Actual implementation of said design has had a lot of issues, hence the escalation of costs. And it’s not easy to iron out and iterate on something that is billions of dollars a piece when a solar panel is in the thousands and a wind turbine is in the millions.
It’s just that solar panels can be imported from China without needing a skilled specialist workforce. Yey free market
But nuclear has to be built here, and we in the west suck (especially UK/US, France still holding out) at building any big infrastructure without cost overruns. ‘Free market’ doesn’t like the risks of large, hard to finance, one off projects. And our governments have decided that if central planning doesn’t work, then they don’t need to plan anything at all.
Combine that with lack of skilled staff workforce as all the people who built previous nuclear powerplants have already retired and the western firms wage war against their own skilled engineers, and you have a toxic cocktail.
TL SR: the only reason Small Module Reactors are interesting is because they could be made in China and imported by our lazy system
no, SMRs are interesting because they represent smaller units of power. Nuclear reactors are huge things generating power in one specific location, so they're a large point of failure. In addition they have the opposite coin problem of solar and wind; whereas solar and wind don't generate enough power sometimes, nuclear often generates too much power for the grid, and can't easily be turned up or down. A lot of the pumped hydro we have was not developed for solar and wind storage, but for excess nuclear storage. Most hydro in Japan is pumped hydro for nuclear plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_Japan
If you are going to wind up with the same energy storage problems with nuclear or newer renewables then you may as well go with the cheaper option.
Renewables have the problem on both sides though, they overproduce and underproduce. And the variability of this overproduction and underproduction is much greater than any nuclear plant.
This was a major ordeal as long as we could not conveniently store massive amounts of electricity nor transport it far away, or quickly and frequently balance the grid (hence the need for 'baseload' generation).
Which source states that more than a few minutes will be necessary, once the adequate continental system (storage: including V2G and similar ways such as Powerwalls) will be in place?
> the efficiency is beyond terrible
... when used in transportation. Green hydrogen produced then stored nearby a turbine or fuel cell acting as backup for the grid efficiency is similar to fossil fuels' or nuclear (about .3 to .4).
> That's why no country on earth is managing with those.
> Which source states that more than a few minutes will be necessary, once the adequate continental system (storage: including V2G and similar ways such as Powerwalls) will be in place?
Ever looked at an electricity demand graph? The electricity demand isn't linear, it's not linear in a day, not linear in a week and especially not linear in months either in the northen hemisphere. And the more you decarbonize the economy, the worse it's going to get for renewables here since fossil fuels are used for highly non linear usage.
> Green hydrogen produced then stored nearby a turbine or fuel cell acting as backup for the grid efficiency is similar to fossil fuels' or nuclear (about .3 to .4).
You are mixing up two things. Nuclear, since it's a baseload technology, only needs to adapt itself to the demand, the production can mostly be planned. Renewables on the other hand need to adapt both the demand and the production.
Those efficiencies figures aren't needed for nuclear because you don't need P2G or any of that, you can just adjust the production. So you get the usual production. Nuclear doesn't drop abruptly to 5% capacity and those bandaid solutions aren't really needed.
What you are quoting is the efficiency of the production, which is a totally different subject. The efficiency of the production is more of an indication of how far you can actually go in the future.
Overproduced electricity can be stored. V2G will play a major role.
> You are mixing up two things
I doubt so. I was stating that hydrogen may become a clean backup, replacing fossil-fuel existing plants, some of them (burning methane) may be retrofitted. Water electrolysis done in centralized plants gathering electricity overproduced at continental level in order to obtain and locally temporarily store hydrogen, maybe even benefiting from co-generation, will locally burn it (gas turbine or fuel cell) in order to produce electricity when the grid needs it while renewable sources cannot provide enough.
> aren't needed for nuclear because you don't need P2G or any of that, you can just adjust the production
Nuclear can 'modulate' its output up to a certain level and frequency, which in practice are insufficient. Even over-nuclearized France never enjoyed a zero-carbon grid: each year between 6% and 12% of electricity is produced by burning fossil fuel ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+... ) because exploiting enough reactors to cope with the mandatory load-following and also with the peak load would be way too expensive.
There are safety-related limits (power modulation proportion, duration of a pause needed after each modulation, modulations frequency...) to nuclear load-following capacity, and the very combustible status is a major parameter. Pertinent document (French ahead!): https://www.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi...
Proposed translation: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
Those "bandaid" solution are needed with each and every low-carbon type of source, even nuclear. We have to consider the amount of emissions caused, in each type of system, by those solutions.
On a grid when it comes to the "production = consumption" rule there are 2 big types of challenge:
1/ short-term adjustment (under a few seconds). Nuclear, per se, just cannot cope. It is done by the sheer inertia of the turbo-alternator drive shaft. On a renewable system it can also be done this way, thanks to flywheels. It is already done.
2/ long-term adjustments. It is either done by reducing the output of production units, or storing or wasting it or (if production isn't sufficient), by a reserve of "production" units (batteries, green hydrogen turbines...).
> Those "bandaid" solution are needed with each and every low-carbon type of source, even nuclear. We have to consider the amount of emissions caused, in each type of system, by those solutions.
Well no, they simply aren't. It's true that nuclear simply cannot do the same as gas but renewables on the other hand are in a league of their own way outside of any baseload tech. That's why they are considered intermittent.
No nuclear fleet drops to 5% capacity for weeks at a time like solar or wind, that's simply not a thing.
> short-term adjustment (under a few seconds). Nuclear, per se, just cannot cope. It is done by the sheer inertia of the turbo-alternator drive shaft.
The nuclear fleet takes around 30min to adapt the production right now in France. Not only it is done but it works in real life right now, unlike large scale P2G, green hydrogen or batteries which aren't used anywhere on earth for grid management.
> Overproduced electricity can be stored. V2G will play a major role.
Unfortunately no it can't. Unless there's a new breakthrough, dams is all we have for large scale electricity storage. And we can't count on tech which doesn't exist yet.
At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding, even Germany which built tons of supposidly green hydrogen pipes will use them for transporting ... gas.
Well no, unfortunately that doesn't work either. And the best example is winter 2022 where the whole western europe was out of wind for 3 weeks.
That's a nice idea but unfortunately it doesn't work with the real figures.
You can even check right now on electricity map, most of the EU countries have similar wind capacity production at around 20%. (Terrible figure in itself but that's another debate)
Edit : I forgot to answer that part.
> Even over-nuclearized France never enjoyed a zero-carbon grid: each year between 6% and 12% of electricity is produced by burning fossil fuel ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+... ) because exploiting enough reactors to cope with the mandatory load-following and also with the peak load would be way too expensive.
Unfortunately, France replaced a lot of the coal plants with gas plants to follow up renewables and is now stuck with it. France only had a single gas plant before 2010.
The consensus at the time was that those renewables would eat up the share of the gas plant and they could be removed altogether.
We now know that it doesn't work and the gas plants are there for good.
Green hydrogen is a work in progress, granted, however such "it was never done before" argument would have condemned France attempt do produce most of its electricity thanks to nuclear power.
>> Overproduced electricity can be stored. V2G will play a major role.
> Unfortunately no it can't.
What do you mean? Electricity cannot be stored?!
> Unless there's a new breakthrough
I proved (above) that stationary batteries already are a thing, quickly growing up.
> even Germany which built tons of supposidly green hydrogen pipes will use them for transporting ... gas.
Yes, due to a lack of finance and a very debatable plan (transporting hydrogen is more and more probably doomed).
> winter 2022 where the whole western europe was out of wind for 3 weeks.
> most of the EU countries have similar wind capacity production at around 20%.
20% is the usual load factor for terrestrial wind turbines. Offshore is way better (about 2x) but not as widely deployed. The goal is not to maximize a load factor but to produce enough energy to serve the needs, at minimal total long-term impacts and costs.
> France replaced a lot of the coal plants with gas plants to follow up renewables and is now stuck with it. France only had a single gas plant before 2010.
Here is a list of some fossil fuel backup plants and their building/extension dates: Brennilis (1981, 1981, 1996), Dirinon (1981), Gennevilliers (1991), Vaires-sur-Marne (2008, 2009), DK6 (2005)...
> The consensus at the time was that those renewables would eat up the share of the gas plant and they could be removed altogether.
True, however this will only be fully possible when the French fleet of renewable plants will be complete. We are far from this as France is notoriously way behind, partly because it wastes money on nuclear late-and-overbudget projects (EPR...). France was punished by the UE because it missed its own renewable objectives, there is no other case in the UE ( https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/eu-beats-2020-re...).
In France RTE is in charge of the grid (less the "last kilometer") and is a subsidiary of EDF (electricity producer, head of the nuclear sector. Here is what it officially and publicly declares about this: https://www.youtube.com/live/xP4jL4b_Nnk?si=g2-cryDt62TyJWuA...
Translation: "I absolutely confirm that technically every running wind turbine reduces the amount of consumed gas somewhere".
All the other existing gas plants in France were built post 2010 for renewables.
> We are far from this as France is notoriously way behind, partly because it wastes money on nuclear late-and-overbudget projects (EPR...).
France spent more than a hundred billions on new renewables alone (roughly half of the total cost of the nuclear grid). It's true that the results look even worse than the EPR though. And it's not counting these new gas plants and external costs on the nuclear grid in the total.
The renewable investments look so bad that there's people like you who think they haven't been done but they have.
There's multille reasons France is bring the nuclear program back from the dead and one of them is that the renewable investments underdelivered.
> In France RTE is in charge of the grid (less the "last kilometer") and is a subsidiary of EDF (electricity producer, head of the nuclear sector.
RTE benefits from grid investments for renewables so yeah it's not a surprise they are all for it. They are especially afraid of a merge to go back to the previous statu quo.
Remember that big hole in the production on the graph before? That's exactly the time where the president of RTE made a public speech for building renewables, when they produced closed to nothing.
You wrote that "solar and wind" can drop "to 5% capacity for weeks at a time", and I ask for the source of this, in order to check that if, contrary to all scientific studies, it is true for a mix (wind, solar...) deployed on whole continent. Guess what? It isn't! Check "How synchronous is wind energy production among European countries?" (Monforti, Gaetani, Vignati). This is also true in China (check Liu, Xiao Wang, Dai, Qi "Analysis on the hourly spatiotemporal complementarities between China's solar and wind energy resources spreading in a wide area") and America ("Is it always windy somewhere? Occurrence of low-wind-power events over large areas" (Handschy, Rose, Apt).)
> Daunkelflaute
It's "Dunkelflaute" (only one 'a')
"a single event usually lasts up to 24 hours" and "more than two days over most of Europe happen about every five years" (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute ), here is for your "weeks at a time". Moreover regions outside North of Europe are way less impacted.
> are used for very low scale grid management
And what exactly forbids to manage all local grids this way? This is more and more true, as being able to isolate a local grid is useful.
> The only large scale tech to store electricity are dams
As of 2022, the total combined energy capacity of electric vehicle (EV) batteries sold in Europe reached approximately 690 GWh, and grows very quickly.
Note: dams are a renewable source.
> The only exisitng gas plant stil used before 2010
> As of 2022, the total combined energy capacity of electric vehicle (EV) batteries sold in Europe reached approximately 690 GWh, and grows very quickly.
Lol, so for context, a single French person is using 2.5GWh/year. One single inhabitant.
France is consuming 1.2TWh of electricity per DAY in winter.
So the whole electric vehicle fleet in the whole Europe is worth half a day (being generous) of electricity just in France during the time which is the tightest in electricity. That's so low it's not even worth mentioning. And that's the whole Europe compared to a single country, that's not going to make it.
> Note: dams are a renewable source.
There's also pretty much no new place where you can build one in a developped country as it's an old technology.
> You wrote that "solar and wind" can drop "to 5% capacity for weeks at a time", and I ask for the source of this
Solar produces most of it's production during 6 months and only gives 3% of the yearly production on each month of January and February. That's the two months where the countries are using the most electricity for context and need the most production.
For wind, that happens regularly, even right now as we speak, Germany has a 7% capacity which isn't far.
> deployed on whole continent. Guess what?
The wind production is synchronized right now, you can check it. That's another kind of strange of being shown the reality right now and denying it.
Here is the statistics, when it blows in Germany, it blows in France and when there's no wind in France, there's wind in Germany either.
> This is highly debatable as the real total cost of the nuclear fleet is disputed. Remember: EDF's debt now surpasses 50 billion €...
No it's not disputed, there's extensive reports in France on that subject as it's a common talking point.
I don't know any study about the external costs of renewables though so 100 billion for around 10% of the production is the best scenario. And calling it a failure seems pretty fair even with the most generous figures possible.
At the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding anyway, if it had worked, the nuclear program wouldn't have been brought back from the dead. France already tried ambitious renewable investments to replace the nuclear fleet during a whole decade and it failed. What the country got instead was mediocre results for the price paid and an increased dependency on gas which proved to be a huge issue with the Russian war. Those who don't learn from the past are condemn to repeat it.
If you basically ignore that they are all built in China. I'd say that's the most centralized mainstream technology to generate electricity by far, it's all down to a single country. We could even say it's down to a single person even, the power being so vertical in China.
> easy to scale.
Well if you don't care about how you are going to pass the winter maybe.
France also invested heavily in nuclear because they develop their own nuclear weapons. So a knowledgeable industry is key, even though the materials aren't exactly the same.
France spent around half of the cost of the nuclear grid on renewables and the result isn't even close. Renewables underdelivered by a huge margin in the past 10 years compared to what the country thought they would. That's a actually one of the reasons of the nuclear rebirth in France, along with the Russian war.
Greenpeace has become this wholly inelegant shortcut to mean the inefficient outrage-based left-leaning movement focused on problems with small impacts on our world-ending climate problems.
People are not afraid of a whale dying in the middle of the ocean. Concerned, yes (maybe), but that's it.
People are very much afraid of radiation thanks to a lot of misinformation, crappy movies, and yes, also to the fact that radiation is damn scary and dangerous.
Greenpeace and the green parties, while meaning absolutely well, have been useful idiots who helped shape the public opinion against nuclear and effectively doom an incredibly clean competitor of coal, oil and gas.
Doesn't matter - time's up. Wind and solar are now a viable alternative for generation, for a small fraction of the cost of nuclear, and if the Lithium and Sodium chemistries actually hit the implausibly low costs they are thought to be destined to, storage will also be solved before a single new nuclear plant can be built in the West. Pity, we would have a substantially less fucked planet by now.
The Soviets were pretty big on "nuclear all the things", given their expertise in it. (Chernobyl being more of an economic and operational/communication fuckup)
And also, it was a better solution to their particular set of challenges: powering remote installations far from the nearest urban center (and powerplant).
Anti-nuclear sentiment in Europe seems to have hardened as a consequence of (a) Chernobyl, (b) Germany realizing they'd be on the front lines in any war, & (c) various other nuclear incidents (US and UK).
In fact its self serving, in that reducing your own reliance on oil frees up more of your production for sale. Lets not forget that the latter Soviet Union was in large part propped up by the proceeds from its oil sales.
The Western antinuclear movement had their own agency and motivations, but because they happened to align with Soviet interests they may have received material support from the Soviets. If they did, that would make them useful idiots rather than puppets. Useful idiots mean well, they have more than enough good intentions to pave a long road with, and they are completely unwitting when it comes to whatever role they had to play in the broader geopolitical conflict.
Actually it is obviously inconsistent. (I think you meant to say, "It may seem inconsistent on the surface, but if it serves their overall agenda it can still make sense for them", or something like that). But that's not the concern here.
Which is simply: even after several iterations on this topic -- no one seems to be able to point to any actual indications of the Soviets having promoted such propaganda in the West.
What the hell are you talking about? That’s like saying it’s inconsistent for a basketball team to try and score points while also trying to prevent the opposing team from also scoring points. It’s certainly adversarial, but so was the geopolitical relationship between the Soviet Union and the West.
> I think you meant to say…
Don’t patronize me. I meant to say exactly what I said.
The basic messaging ("Nuclear power is good for me, but not for thee") is plainly and obviously inconsistent. I'm genuinely at a loss to understand why you would contest this.
The hypothesized messaging, that is. There's no evidence of such a propaganda campaign from Soviet side in those years (cover or overt), so this entire discussion is moot anyway.
There's no need to "allege" that they did. There was tons of propaganda to that effect in 1950s/1960s (just as there was in the U.S. at the time, though this has been largely forgotten). For example:
Finland was absolutely part of the West, despite its non-aligned status.
It was definitely not "third world", and you aren't even using the term correctly. As Wikipedia explains:
In the Cold War, some European democracies (Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland) were neutral in the sense of not joining NATO, but were prosperous, never joined the Non-Aligned Movement, and seldom self-identified as part of the Third World.
> Finland was absolutely part of the West, despite its non-aligned status.
You’re making a tedious semantic argument while conceding my central point, that Finland was non-aligned. I’ve heard of respectful disagreement but you’ve managed to pull off disrespectful agreement.
The only point here is that, throughout the course of this thread - you've been consistently very sloppy both with basic geographic and historical facts, and in your core logic regarding this completely untenable theory about alleged Soviet influence that you've been holding onto.
And when people do fact-check you, you say they're making "tedious semantic arguments", or being disrespectful.
There's nothing disrespectful in their doing so, of course. They're just setting the record straight -- again, chiefly in regard to this nutty theory you've been promoting. If anything, they're doing you a favor.
Though I do agree that this discussion has gotten quite tedious.
You’re the one who’s been tediously nitpicking irrelevant points and attacking imaginary strawmen. For instance I never actually said that the Soviets supported antinuclear movements in the West by which, in the context of the Cold War, I obviously mean “the countries aligned with the United States and against the Soviet Union”, a set of countries that Finland was not, in fact, part of. It wouldn’t particularly surprise me if the Soviets backed those movements, because they backed a lot of similar movements, but I don’t have any particular evidence about the antinuclear movement in particular.
My point—which seems to be well-received since it’s up about 12 points—is that if the Soviets did, in fact, support these movements, it wouldn’t be inconsistent with their own use of nuclear power, or even their efforts to develop nuclear power in “non-aligned” countries in an attempt to curry political favor. Your attempts to claim otherwise are bizarre and incoherent, and none of your fact checks are factual or indeed even relevant to the topic at hand.
You're conveniently quoting me out of context. That comment continued:
> they may have received material support from the Soviets. If they did....
It should be obvious that it would have served the interests of the Soviet Union if their geopolitical adversaries had less abundant energy and less practical expertise in nuclear technology. I make no claims about whether or not the Soviets attempted to advance these particular interests by interfering in the domestic politics of their adversaries, even though they did interfere in other ways to advance other interests.
> Which "interests" were you referring to, other than the interest of discouraging nuclear power development in the West?
There is no “other than”. Discouraging nuclear power development in the West (by which in this context, I am reiterating because it was insufficiently clear earlier, I mean the countries aligned with the US and against the USSR during the Cold War) was the Soviet interest that would have been served by Soviet attempts to interfere in the domestic politics of Western countries (by which I mean “First World”, US-aligned countries, just so we are crystal clear on that point).
And I expanded on that point, actually:
> It should be obvious that it would have served the interests of the Soviet Union if their geopolitical adversaries had less abundant energy and less practical expertise in nuclear technology.
Why would you expect some other Soviet interest to be served? Perhaps you were confused by my use of the superficially plural term “interests”? In that case, please forgive the imprecision of my language. As I’ve explained, the Soviet interest in curbing the use of nuclear power in Western countries (by which, let me remind you, I mean countries that were Soviet adversaries) was multifaceted, but in common usage, when someone speaks of a country’s or a party’s “interests”, they are not necessarily thinking of some countable number of distinct points of interest.
Vladimir Bukovsky charged the Western disarmament movement (in particular the CND) with taking Soviet funding in the 1980s. YMMV up to your credence in him.
Noted, but to the extent the Soviets may have aided the CND -- their interest seems to have been in its pro-disarmament, rather than its anti-nuclear industry stance.
If we go by the article you provided (and I am skimming it properly) - it doesn't mention nuclear power at all.
The nuclear disarmament movement achieved nothing and just because the Soviets supported something and maybe groomed some members doesn't mean they were pulling the strings. Having read about the KGB in London makes it seem like it was a pretty amateurish organization that never recovered from Operation FOOT. There are allegations that a leader of the Labour Party was a KGB agent, and still no one would insinuate that the Labour Party was a front of the KGB.
Some of the things in the world may never be known for certain. The layman can look at the constellation of factors that lead up to an event.
The NKVD/KGB/FSB was and continues to be known to engage in kneecapping actions in enemy states. Many Northern nations were kindled into taking an anti-nuclear stance. It is taking a lot of initiative for Northern Europe to extricate itself from dependence on Russian natural gas. Russia used natural gas control as retaliation following sanctions.
Occam’s Razor would suggest these things are linked.
Given the incredibly organic nature of anti-nuclear (power) sentiment during its heyday (the 70s-80s), when everyone was freaked out over TMI and Chornobyl; and the fact that so far, there've been no "revelations" of the Soviets or their latter counterparts having funded or infiltrated any of these groups (apart from attempting to influence the disarmament issue) --
Occam's Razor would seem to cut the other way, actually.
That is inconvenient. You could change your own organization, and nobody wants that. Much better to defend each and every problem on your own side as a distraction and that acknowledging your side's issues would only help the other side, and to concentrate on pointing out what others do wrong. That way you have zero responsibility to actually change anything.
I didn't see anything in that in that wikipedia article about it. Besides, the claims of defectors are frequently exaggerated and fall apart. They have a strong tendency to try to say what they think their audience want to hear.
Doesn't need to be a big conspiracy. Find groups that are saying what you want said, help them along.
Simple test. Look for issues which aren't really green but which benefit Moscow (and these days, Beijing.) Where do the "green" groups stand? I haven't been paying attention for quite a while because I spotted too many such things long ago and figured Moscow was pulling the strings.
Last month a bus caught fire in some random village in Czech Republic and apparently that was Putin’s fault too.
This is getting to the point where I have to check if he is hiding in the closet before I leave the house
Meanwhile we have dozens of official think tanks influencing our politics and their sources of funding are not disclosed. Could be oil companies, could be China, could be the devil himself!
> You can thank Greenpeace and CND and their misinformed campaigns for that.
You can thank the USA and the war against Japan for that. It’s pointless to try to ignore that Hiroshima and Nagasaki did happen.
That’s the paradox. Nuclear fission probably would never have become viable without the massive investment in its weaponisation but the same weaponisation made it unpalatable as a source of energy.
I think there remains a deep seated association between nuclear energy, the nuclear weapon armed powers and imperialism amongst the members of most green parties, which are all historically alter-mondialist.
No you can't. Nuclear power plants werent very connected to nuclear weapons and the public didnt think of nuclear weapons when thinking of power reactors.
Only after anti-nuclear misinformation got huge starting in the 70s.
The key to understand what started in the 70s is obviously the Vietnam War.
The fact remains that nuclear opposition is rooted neither in safety concerns nor in environmental impacts. If you ignore that, you are condemned to always miss the point - which is often happening when people discuss the nuclear question to be fair.
This is not a battle of reason but a confrontation between two incompatible moral frameworks.
Renewables don't provide base load capacity, though. What do you do when it's dark and the wind isn't blowing? You either burn some carbon or split some atoms. Those are currently the options available.
Hydropower storage is geographically limited. Chemical storage is not available at the scale required. Plus most batteries produced are going to EVs. Remember, the world uses ~60 TWh of energy per day. And it's not not the day and night cycle that needs to be smoothed out, it's also seasonal fluctuations that can last for weeks.
All the other options haven't been built at scale. Hydrogen storage, giant flywheels, compressed air have all been suggested, but aren't deployed widely enough to prove viability.
It is. But the issue is that storage systems are quite expensive and not nearly as green as what feeds them.
Interestingly when you include these nuclear is much more competitive. But this depends on the studies and you should pay very close to the assumptions those studies make. Regardless, these are always in aggregate. So even with biases the case always is made that when considering the heterogenous nature of environment that some places will favor nuclear and others will favor renewables (which is again nonhomogeneous as wind and solar aren't always strongly coupled and certainly hydro isn't available everywhere). This is true for the studies that show the best results for nuclear and the studies that show the worst. A major problem with these discussions is people are operating on aggregate assumptions and acting as if it's one or the other.
One interesting part that people might not be aware of is hydrogen production. Nuclear is often argued as a base load so the question is what to do when the sun is shining and wind is strong? You can throttle nuclear but this is not cost effective. But you can in turn produce hydrogen, which can even be used to cheapen and make renewable storage more green. One of the biggest concerns here though is that hydrogen production might be so valuable that nuclear producers might favor that over providing base load.
So as everything, the reality is much more complicated than our general conversations reveal. It's even far more complicated than what can be included in a HN reply. But I hope I gave a sufficient response than can also point to more information.
Obtaining electricity thanks to industrial renewable (see Lazard's LCOE) is way (and more and more) cheaper than with nuclear.
There are many ways to alleviate unwanted impacts of 'intermittency' (PEM membranes, central plant enabling many sites exposed to different wind regimes to feed it, batteries...)
Hydrogen overproduction (from the grid perspective) isn't a challenge because various industries need huge amounts (~94 millions metric tons/an) of it.
Therefore the 'hydrogen' approach favors renewable sources.
Most of what you are talking about is theoretical and the real costs will become apparent only once someone tries actually doing it. Meanwhile, nuclear power is proven technology for decades, worldwide.
Established by make sure you know the assumptions it makes too. Don't just take data at face value, make sure you know what the data actually is telling you and importantly what it doesn't tell you.
I'm talking about nuclear power plants in general, which have been in use since the '50s. Not a specific type of reactor. If 'it was proven' then I guess France's electricity shouldn't be cheaper than Germany's? Oh wait...
The point is about total cost, and considering all public money invested the French nuclearization isn't a cheaper way. Just compare tax pressure in France and Germany, and their public fundings for the grid.
Moreover in case of any mishap (major accident, hot waste wandering around...) all bets are off.
What tax pressure are you talking about? Germany has higher income tax than France. Also, even if nuclear power is a bit more expensive–why should we race to the bottom price tag when we're trying to fight a climate crisis? Isn't preserving vast natural areas and ecologies (instead of covering them up with solar and wind farms) worth a bit more money? Isn't it worth it to reduce pressure on strip-mining huge amounts of earth to eke out some meagre amounts of minerals for batteries?
> Moreover in case of any mishap
Reactors are designed to shut down (full containment) and have been for many years now, so no 'all bets' are not off. That's just FUD.
All taxes considered (not only income tax)
"the highest shares of taxes and social contributions as a percentage of GDP being recorded in France (48.0 %), Belgium (45.6 %) and Austria (43.6 %)."
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
> Isn't preserving vast natural areas and ecologies (instead of covering them up with solar and wind farms) worth a bit more money?
Indeed, however the burden related to renewable sources is often way less than presented as off-shore wind turbines (globally the biggest reserve) don't use any land and offer sanctuaries to exhausted seas, while solar panels on roofs and agrivoltaics... aren't really a burden, either.
> Isn't it worth it to reduce pressure on strip-mining huge amounts of earth to eke out some meagre amounts of minerals for batteries?
These raw materials have substitutes and they are recycled.
Uranium is a fuel (disappearing gradually), has no substitute, is hardly recycled in practice and as ore grades are diminishing greenhouse-gas emission associated to its obtention will augment.
>> Moreover in case of any mishap
> Reactors are designed to shut down (full containment)
Clearly write: "a major nuclear accident in France is simply absolutely not possible" and everyone knowing about all this will immediately grasp that you don't know what you are writing about. An hydrogen / vapor explosion is possible, and it may let dangerous stuff escape in the wild, and this is true in France. The subject of debate is not this danger but the associated risk (probability and effects of such an events).
Talking about overall tax levels is a red herring. We have to look specifically at the costs of power generation (both internalized and externalized).
> the burden related to renewable sources is often way less than presented
Surely you're joking. Wind turbines are the size of football fields and they basically can't be recycled after their useful lifespan of 20 years. They have to be buried, using up huge amounts of space.
> Uranium is a fuel (disappearing gradually)
Again, I hope you're joking, because leaving aside all the existing uranium mines operating today, even leaving aide the fact that spent fuel can be recycled (and a lot of if is even today!), we know how to extract it from seawater. If you think seawater is a scarce resource, I don't know what to tell you.
> write: "a major nuclear accident in France is simply absolutely not possible" and everyone knowing about all this will immediately grasp that you don't know what you are writing about.
As opposed to writing 'as ore grades are diminishing greenhouse-gas emission associated to its obtention will augment' which is perfectly legible to everyone? Sure dude.
Also, you realize that the burden of proof lies with the person claiming something is possible, because you can't prove a negative, right? You know that's not how the scientific process works, right?
Source? The real TCO isn't. Fact: EDF gobbled during decades public money and various advantages, and is now crushing under a >50 billions € debt
> the carbon intensity of generation is 10 times lower than Germany's
In the 1960's France coal reserves were vanishing (France switched to nuclear) while Germany's were massive (in RDA it was huge). This is the root cause.
Nope. This is now illegal in most nations. Even recyclable blades now exist, and old ones are more and more burnt in cement killns.
> uranium
> spent fuel can be recycled (and a lot of if is even today!)
Nope. Source? Even France doesn't recycle (MOX) more than a few percent, and it only is recyclable once. Industrial real 'eternal' recycling (possible with renewables, as most components such as copper or aluminium are 'infinitely' recyclable at human timescale) of uranium isn't achieved anywhere. If it is, please state where and how.
> we know how to extract it from seawater
This is nothing more than an old dream. Please state (source) where it is, at industrial stage. It simply isn't, anywhere, and all attempts (since the 1970's) failed, and this is a well-know fact. Quote: "pumping the seawater to extract this uranium would need more energy than what could be produced with the recuperated uranium". Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-j2/docs/e...
The remainder being almost entirely fossil fuels including 25.6% from burning coal, largely necessary because Germany chose to phase out nuclear energy.
Electricity is not the whole story either. Renewables accounted for less than 20% of Germany's primary energy consumption in 2023.
The point is, removing the remaining 1/3rd of fossil fuel production becomes a lot harder. The issue is that renewables other than hydro and geothermal are all intermittent. Build as many solar panels as you want, you're not going to satisfy nighttime demand without massive storage facilities.
10 GWh of storage is peanuts. That's what one nuclear plant produces in about 5 hours. The USA uses 500 GWh of electricity per hour.
The first step is just to build enough renewables and enough battery to last one average day. That gets you to 95% of reducing CO2. Then you can think about if it even makes sense to replace those cloudy yet/windless days.
We just need to spend on the most economic places to save CO2.
World electricity consumption is 60,000 GWh per day. "Last one average day" is much greater than existing battery production can satisfy - it's around 40x annual battery production to achieve just 12 hours of storage. And that's ignoring the fact that electric vehicles are consuming the vast majority of battery production. Making any serious efforts towards grid-storage would set back EV adoption.
Using EV as grid storage is not feasible. One, many vehicles are used for business, utilities, and public transit. So they'll be driven during the day, and charged at night. This is going to increase load during hours of non-production, the opposite of storage. Two, no san grid operator is going to accept a situation where much of their storage capacity will just drive away for vacation, or in anticipation of a disaster. The predicted exponential rise is still an order of magnitude less than the scale required, and the vast majority of it is not going to grid storage.
Wind is subject to intermittency, too. It's not a magic bullet that eliminates storage. Unless you're overprovisioning wind by a factor of 10 (in which case it's not cheap anymore), you'll still have weeks-long stretches where there is insufficient energy.
Hydro is really the only non-intermittent carbon-free energy source besides geothermal and nuclear power. The reality is that wind and solar are only cheap in the context of a non-intermittent source that can fill in for the intermittency of renewable production. Running a minority of your grid on solar and wind, supplementing gas plants is one thing. Running a grid mostly wind and solar is totally different beast.
But you can't deny the reality that the electricity supply is rapidly changing and that the issues of non-intermittency are turn out as not so relevant than anticipated. We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to. Batteries are helping us rely less on them and since cost of batteries and PV/wind is trending so strongly down, it is already happening that many markets prefer batteries over using gas/coal plants.
This will push down CO2 emittance. That all that matters really (at reasonable cost).
> We have the existing non-intermittent power plants and can use them if we need to.
Not if you want to solve climate change. Reducing emissions to 50% of present levels and then just keeping them there isn't going to prevent climate change. Overproduction during peak hours doesn't help unless you have a way to release that energy in non-peak hours.
Again, growing battery production isn't actually resulting in grid storage. Even dedicating 100% of battery production to grid storage isn't going to make significant changes in grid storage, but it will stop EV adoption.
> Sorry this just false. Battery deployment for electricity grid storage is progressing with unprecedented and accelerating speed.
And what, exactly, is that speed? The US plans to deploy "15GW" (presumably the authors mean GWh of storage, GW is not a unit of storage) of grid storage in 2024. That's less than 2 minutes of storage!
Again, global battery production is only about 6-700 GWh (be careful with figures that cite capacity, which is distinct from actual production). And very little of that is dedicated to grid storage.
Those figures are about maximum dispatchable power usually for a time of more than 1 hour (2 to 4 seems typical).
So 16 GW battery allow you to power the US similarly to 3x times the power of the largest US nuclear reactor for probably 3 hours.
If such projects are economically feasible now, the economics are just getting better and better and this means we will see exponential growth. California is seeing improved grid stability and reduction in CO2 emissions due to batteries today.
Somewhere between 4 and 8 minutes worth of storage deployed over the span of a whole year is not even remotely close to feasible. Even diurnal storage to even out solar production will require 8-12 hours worth of storage. Seasonal intermittency will require days or even weeks.
Since 2020, battery prices have gone flat. Moore's law works because computers get faster as transistors get smaller. That's not the case for batteries, or most other goods. A new car cost a million dollars in 1900, $100k in 1910, and $10K in 1920. Would it have been reasonable to assume that a new car would cost $10 by 1950? Of course not, the steel and rubber in the car is worth much more than $10. A car cannot cost less than the input materials used to build it.
I guess, fair amount of NIMBY there (if you don't like wind power next to you, you also don't like storage next to you in a lot of cases), some subsidies might also have had some effects on storage vs production built. Not everything is capital efficient in all places, too, of course.
1) Pump water uphill and let it run downhill. There is a massive amount of viable geography for this all over the world.
2) Batteries
3) Charge more money for electricity so people shift their demand.
4) Make hydrogen, store it and burn it to make the electricity.
Surprisingly, if you only did 4 (which is the most expensive) all of the time for every watt of power generated from solar and wind it would be very expensive, but would still be a bit cheaper than nuclear power. Nuclear power is just that expensive.
And the price only gets more horrendous if you try to use it as a peaker.
It can be solved at continental-level. Germany already sells part of its overproduction (wind, solar...) to Austria and Switzerland, to have it stored by their dams.
Whatever happened to the notion of local/decentralised energy?
Plus it relies on countries at both ends wanting the interconnection. Sweden and Norway are not so happy about other countries taking their hydro energy when it suits the market.
> relies on countries at both ends wanting the interconnection
Exactly as, right now, each and every country in the continental grid sometimes starts a production unit in order to help a neighbor in need. Everyone gains by playing according to this rule.
> taking their hydro energy
Because, right now, the system is far from being complete: not enough production units deployed on the continent, interconnections, lines, storage... This transition, a huge ordeal, is in progress.
> help a neighbor in need. Everyone gains by playing according to this rule.
Not so for Norway, where electrical prices have gone up as a result of all of these inter-connectors and a drought. Norwegian people and businesses have lost out. Politicians have taken note.
> The larger the interconnection the bigger the failure domain
True, however we have to consider the chances of a given proportion of the grid to fail: a more spread-out and heterogeneous (wind, solar...) fleet of production units is way more robust.
> power is political
True, however such incidents are rare (this one dates back from 2018) and their extent more and more reduced as grid-control devices and backup plants are continually enhanced.
As already shown there is no way for nearly all nations to ever hope to obtain an autonomous grid, and even those able to plan on this will obtain a less-robust and more expensive grid. Team play is becomes more and more mandatory and efficient, on all accounts, and bad players may lose the support of the biggest group.
> electrical prices have gone up
Yes, because there now are not enough ways to store, causing some over-pressure on existing ones. Storing in order to sustain the grid when production isn't sufficient only makes sense if we store overproduction, and overproduction remains rare (esp. at continental-level) because way too few renewable are producing. We reached the very first step: more and more overproduced renewable electricity, which triggers investments towards the next step: massive storage. V2G is a major contender.
You need more than that. My memory is that solar needs something like 16 hours of storage assuming perfect weather. And it gets much worse if you don't have perfect weather.
No you don't need more than that because electricity grids do not consist entirely of a single form of generation. Have you considered learning something about this topic before commenting?
Judging from their other comment I think they seem to be some kind of nuclear/anti-environmentalist zealot. In this comment they assumed wind power didn't exist. In the other comment they said that my current electricity tariff (3) would get people lynched and crater the economy rather than getting me to put my laundry, dishwasher and car charger on at a different time of day.
This kind of abject extremism is sadly par for the course on topics like this due to the kind of propaganda that the nuclear industry spews out. It generates zealots.
Yes, obviously I did because you responded to it below.
I find it amusing that when I cited a study that modeled exactly this scenario you poured scorn on it because it was modeled around a specific country. You didn't respond with actual figures demonstrating that this altered the results significantly, you just said "AUSTRALIA EASY MODE".
Seriously?
Yet the guy that presumed that the wind doesnt blow... ever? You didnt respond to that.
It's an interesting insight into the mind of a nuclear activist.
I'm certainly not anti-environment. It's just I recognize that the only path forward that is both possible and not horribly destructive is nuclear. The technology to make renewables practical simply does not exist even on the horizon. The storage problem is always handwaved away with "batteries" or "hydrogen"--the greens never do the numbers because that will expose the fact it doesn't work.
Renewables reduce oil and gas use. Period. You still need just as much generating capacity and you still release a lot of CO2.
And in that other comment what I said is that going pure renewable would get people lynched for how badly they wrecked the economy. The "green" approach is basically "pay no attention to the fact that the storage tech does not exist." In the real world we see it *increasing* emissions. (Shut down nuke, the load falls onto gas because it actually exists.) What would happen to our economy if power was dollars per kWh?? Because that's what it would take to ensure the lights always stay on in a pure renewable environment.
>With that in mind, exactly one year ago I started running a simple simulation of Australia’s main electricity grid to show that it can get very close to 100% renewable electricity with approximately five hours of storage
Worst case scenarios can be provisioned for by storing and burning hydrogen.
The roundtrip cost of electricity generated this way is expensive (it's ~50% efficient) but even then it is still cheaper than the cost of baseload nuclear power electricity.
1) Pump what water up what hill? You need vast quantities of water and terrain capable of being dammed at reasonable cost. Few sources of water can be pumped at that rate without causing considerable trouble. And places with lots of water tend to be rather sparse in suitable hills. (If the terrain isn't pretty flat the water runs fast and doesn't stick around to be vast quantities of water.)
2) Not even in the ballpark of economic.
3) You'll really crater our economy, you'll get lynched and people will go back to the old way.
4) You realize the low efficiency of the loop you are proposing and big storage headaches it causes?
And nuclear power isn't "just that expensive". Rather, US nuclear power is by regulation defined as too expensive. There is a horrible provision in the nuclear world: "as low as reasonably achievable." Sounds good, and probably is good in the medical side. But on the power side it inherently defines nuclear as too expensive because if it wasn't too expensive then additional "safety" (which I find questionable, there comes a point where additional "safety" means more to break and thus doesn't really work) would be reasonably achievable.
The Republicans keep crusading about "too much regulation" but because they're not actually interested in the best possible outcome they miss the biggie: We should define that which is say 2x as safe as the status quo is deemed safe enough. And the flip side of this, that which is 2x as dangerous as the status quo is deemed unsafe. (I'd be open to different ratios, I just need to put something down.)
Let's look at the reality.
Nuclear safety? It's about 10x as good as natural gas. (5x if you count Fukushima--but all of those deaths are from the evacuation. Staying put had an expected death toll of zero.)
Natural gas is about 10x as safe as oil.
Oil is about 10x as safe as coal.
Yes--coal is 1000x as dangerous as nuclear.
(And note that these numbers do not include any harms from climate effects and thus are actually an understatement.)
Waste? There are two basic types:
Low-level: stuff that might have been contaminated. Compare it to ambient (things which aren't hotter than ambient shouldn't be treated as nuclear waste) to see if you need to care, usually you don't.
High-level: Yeah, it's hot. Very hot. But we are handling it wrong. The problem is that in the name of preventing proliferation we made reprocessing a dirty word. Plutonium is plutonium, isn't it? No. Bombs need Pu-239 with low amounts of Pu-240. It's extremely hard to make a bomb from reactor plutonium because it's got gobs of Pu-240. Yes, they can be separated--but anybody who can separate them can also separate U-235 from U-238. Pretty much the same thing, it's just the plutonium is 3x harder to separate.
Reprocess the spent fuel. 90% of it goes back into the reactor, even more if you're using a breeder design. Of what's left there are some commercially useful isotopes. Cobalt-60 would be pretty nasty spread over the environment but it's pretty darn good at killing things you really want dead. Say, to make shelf stable meat and dairy products. Once you get done with that you have some actual waste. Which will decay to ambient in 10,000 years and note that most of that decay is in the early part. You simply don't need elaborate precautions.
Actually that's completely backwards. Hydro is the only source that has saved thousands of lives (beyond the production of electricity element) by preventing flooding and providing a secure water supply.
While that's horrifying, the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles into the atmosphere or water which sparks conversations about global catastrophic disaster
> While that's horrifying, the dam doesn't bleed radioactive particles
Another way to put it: if the worst case happens, and a dam breaks and floods a large area, you can immediately go there and walk all over the damaged area with little more protection than a pair of sturdy boots. The worst you'd find would be things like transformer oil and some generator lubricants.
A nuclear plant that emitted like a coal plant would be shut down pronto.
And consider the Palo Verde nuclear plant. They had to get an NRC exemption on radioactivity of their discharge water. They had a little problem: their intake water didn't meet the discharge water requirements. They're using reclaimed sewage water--and getting the radioactivity that goes down the toilet from nuclear medicine patients.
I'm personally much less worried about the radioactive materials from a uranium nuclear power plant than I am from coal or bad decisions on how to dispose of radioactive waste products.
We'd likely lower our radioactive footprint by completely switching from coal power to uranium.
The parent comment is not comparing coal and nuclear. The parent comment is comparing hydroelectric dam failures with nuclear power plant failures (on normal operation, neither nuclear power plants nor hydroelectric power plants leak any significant amount of radiation into the atmosphere).
Not sure how the cultural revolution has anything to do with the number of people exposed to be killed in case of failure. In any case that's the worst one but not the only one:
List: the low amount of victims (given the amount of existing dams and electricity produced/stored) and the causes (many acts of war) seem enlightening to me.
Moreover this list is laughable: Malpasset, for example, was not a hydroelectric station.
Spot on. I think as humans we respond to acute pains (ie: natural disasters, nuclear reactor meltdown) cause we can observe extremes in real time. But the heat cranking up year over year, wildfires getting worse year over year, its gradual but far more lethal. We are numb and ineffective at responding to the slow threats I fear, government/corporations are also not incentivized to care it seems.
It's just a common glitch in human thinking and happens multiple times a day in your life. We constantly swap much lower expected value catastrophic events for much higher expected value dispersed bad events. We almost always socialize costs much larger in aggregate but much smaller individually to avoid costs much larger individually but much smaller in aggregate. You see this in traffic laws every day with lower speed limits being preferred over a slightly higher chance of someone being killed in a car accident. You see this in food and medical regulation constantly, you see it in environmental rhetoric, etc. It's just basically the way a majority of humans work. Something breaks in our mind when we try to compare high cost but extremely low probability things to anything else.
It's not just about death counts. It's about pollution as well. Chernobyl has polluted a huge area which is closed off to this day and won't be able to be used for decades more. Fukushima pollution is all over the Pacific.
And dismantling is a huge cost that is often left to the state because the operators don't bother factoring it in.
Even then, that may say more of the negative impact of human industry and urbanization on those species and their habitats, as opposed to the safety of any isotopes.
It is not about "fossil fuel or nuclear". Fossil fuel has few (and fewer and fewer) advocates. it is about "renewable or nuclear", and the trend is clear:
I think the biggest advantage to such a reactor is that it solves two major issues in nuclear power. Containment costs and disposal costs. Containment is solved by the thousands of feet of rock and disposal is just filling in the hole with concrete and dirt.
You are right though that you will never win the safety argument. Nuclear has become entrenched in our culture as a world ending bugbear. Meanwhile the actual possibility of world ending climate change is just scooting along while people picket nuclear facilities and wind turbines.
It’s not quite that simple, though. Yucca Mountain was supposed to be extremely geologically stable, and people still couldn’t swallow that pill.
You still need some level of containment along with environmental studies and the additional complexity of excavating a large underground cavern. Even then, someone will be concerned (possibly rightfully so) about groundwater contamination. Fracking is a prime example of how connected that all can be.
The problem with Yucca Mountain wasn't just the fact that they were storing waste there so much as the transportation of the waste through towns and cities. In this case, once the waste is created it is already in place to dispose of a mile underground solving another issue.
Mostly NIMBY problems that apply for the repository apply for transportation, but in lesser scale. Yucca was not as dry or geological stable as initially thought, and the requirements for "permanent" disposal are very stringent, so Yucca is not considered anymore for long-term storage.
I think the closer comparison would not be Yucca Mountain so much as deep bore hole research. You could essentially use the same equipment for boring your reactor hole to create disposal pits.
Maybe a breeder reactor would still be built to burn all this "waste" which is 90% fuel. Nuclear fission energy can become way cleaner when the political logjam around extracting and burning plutonium is unclogged.
New Mexico recently had one explode due to improper materials used for absorption of liquid waste. To be frank I don't think it's worse than the chemical spills that happen routinely like the train in Ohio, but it isn't a small deal either.
Yeah, the testing is bonkers. But really nothing can withstand enough heat and pressure. Eventually your container just turns into a liquid. I love this video of the testing:
> Containment costs and disposal costs. Containment is solved by the thousands of feet of rock and disposal is just filling in the hole with concrete and dirt.
Containment and disposal is largely a red herring. It's actually more or less a solved problem, from a safety perspective, because it turns out that the laws of exponential decay mean that you can just store it with proper shielding and it's safe for storage pretty much anywhere. I'm oversimplfying, but only a little bit - the public's perception of "nuclear waste" is extremely untethered to the actual reality.
The whole fiasco with Yucca Mountain was driven not by science, but by a desire to appease objectors by adhering to an arbitrary and unscientific perception of safety, not an actual assessment of the risks.
> while people picket nuclear facilities and wind turbines
Where are you seeing this? Nuclear energy has lost a lot of energy for active support, but active protest ("picket") of nuclear facilities is exceedingly rare these days. Wind turbines are a different matter: they're sustainable, but they're opposed by monied individuals/groups who don't want their beachfront views "ruined".
I agree with you that the requirements for permanent safe storage are very high - thousands of years with no leak, besides others - but nonetheless, even with simpler requirements, Yucca - or any other georep - was not deemed safe.
It wasn't so much deemed unsafe as not safe enough. Pretty much everyone involved threw up their hands and said screw it we'll store on-site which is WAY less safe than Yucca or deep bore sites. Meanwhile we have casks exploding in New Mexico which should have been buried 3 miles underground decades ago.
The cost isn't so much the materials themselves as the regulatory burden imposed by them. You need to guard them indefinitely even after the plant is shut down. You need to inspect them regularly. If the waste is a mile underground under a couple megatons of rock and concrete then it's not a lasting cost to the company that built it.
> The cost isn't so much the materials themselves as the regulatory burden imposed by them. You need to guard them indefinitely even after the plant is shut down.
These are all issues for fossil fuel extraction as well, and I have bad news for you about how this problem is currently handled.
Exactly. Tons of abandoned oil wells left for the taxpayers to clean up. But of course we can’t demand that all new wells post bonds for the cleanup costs in advance, that would make them unprofitable.
It depends on what you define as long-term. For a few decades, with proper inspections, sure. For the geological time frames needed for nuclear waste disposal, definitely not.
Wow. A perfect example of Silicon Valley's detachment from reality.
Burn ass loads of VC to solve problems that don't exist while creating a host of new ones? Awesome.
A leak or accident in one of these deep-buried reactors could contaminate vast underground water reserves, rendering them unusable for generations. The environmental and human cost would be catastrophic and irreversible.
I'm curious how you reached this conclusion. The same method for storing these reactors during operation is the best method for disposal of waste. Unless you are storing your reactor in an aquifer, a containment breach would be bolstered by thousands of feet of rock and concrete well casing. This is infinitely preferable to a vessel breach on the surface which will contaminate both air and water sources.
On thing I never see in these discussions is the toll on workers via radiation exposure. I worked at a nuclear plant in the 1990s and the exposure allowed to outage workers who worked six months a year was something like 5 REM, or 50yrs off radiation in 6 months. Are these deaths included in the statistics? It appears not - part of the issue undoubtedly is causal attribution to a cancer that occurs many years later. A cursory search of the literature suggests that not a lot of work has been done on this.
You went from dose to questioning whether their deaths are included. Did you have knowledge that there were there an abnormal number of deaths among the outage workers?
5 Rem is 50 mSv; the Wikipedia Sievert page lists this as "U.S. 10 C.F.R. § 20.1201(a)(1)(i) occupational dose limit, total effective dose equivalent, and the global average background radiation dose is 2.4 mSv/a, so ~20 years worth of background radiation.
Define "safe". We've built less than a thousand commercial reactors ever and we've had multiple incidents where the impact will be felt for decades if not centuries.
Nuclear advocates hand-wave away Chernobyl ("because Soviets") like they're the only ones who can cause an industrial accident. But what about Fukushima? Over $100 billion has been spent on the clean up and compensation so far, with the ultimate cost to approach $1 trillion, require tech that hasn't been invented yet and will take decades if not a century or more [1]
And for what? The highest LCOE of any power source used for mass power generation.
Now this idea (Deep Fission) is an interesting one. It's basically a take on geothermal where instead of relying on natural heating (eg from lava) you basically just use a small reactor. If anything goes wrong, you just bury the whole thing. This requires some more thought about what the failure modes look like and some analysis on what the cost of power is. It is an interesting idea though.
A tsunami isn't the sole way to trigger an accident as there is an infinity potential human errors enabling a series of minor incidents leading to a disaster, nor will it always trigger one: another nuclear plant, closer to the tsunami epicenter than Fukushima was, didn't suffer much ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20... ).
Therefore the challenge is: "don't let any room for any human error: design, build, exploit and maintain perfectly" and this is clearly impossible.
Another way is: use an approach (wind, solar...) not letting any room for a disaster.
This is not socially accepted (Act of God in law). It cannot even logically be true - an asteroid falls on your head, whose fault is that?
In this particular case, the powerplant was designed to withstand a certain height of tsunami and this tsunami was larger, breached the sea wall and flooded the generators.
By the way the tsunami also killed 20,000 people, that’s a colossal death talk but for some reason no one talks about it.
This entire hand-wringing about how no-one should die from nuclear feel disingenuous. We could have had zero-carbon grid 50 years ago, in the 70’s just like France. Renewables weren’t ready at the time.
Now millions of people will be displaced or dead by climate change and that could have been prevented.
By 'all accidents' I was referring to industrial accident. I should have specified, please excuse me.
May 'Act of God' qualify an industrial accident?
Even in such a case (asteroid falling on a nuclear plant?) there is a pertinent comparison: if the very same cause (asteroid?) falls on a field of wind turbines or solar panels the net effect will no be a disaster. Therefore the cause for a major nuclear accident is the sheer human decision to build a nuclear plant instead of wind turbines or solar panels.
> the powerplant was designed to withstand a certain height of tsunami
> the tsunami also killed 20,000 people
> no one talks about it
'Act of God'...
The evacuation triggered by the nuclear accident made more than 2,200 victims.
> This entire hand-wringing about how no-one should die from nuclear feel disingenuous
This is a way (granted: inelegant) to state that the effect of the worst possible accident triggered by renewable sources is less daunting than its nuclear counterpart, underlining a reason to prefer renewable sources.
> We could have had zero-carbon grid 50 years ago, in the 70’s
Nope. Nuclear never produced (worldwide) more than ~17% of the electricity and now produces about 9% of it ( https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source ) and there is just enough known exploitable (at current conditions) uranium to feed existing reactors for approximately 130 years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium ). With ~10 times more reactors about 40 years ago we would be in a severe crisis or even stuck. At the time experts knew it (since the 1950's) and planned to industrialize breeder reactors (dividing the need for uranium by about 2 orders of magnitude), but it failed.
> just like France
Nope. France never enjoyed a zero-carbon grid: each year between 6% and 12% of electricity is produced by burning fossil fuel ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+... ) because exploiting enough reactors to cope with the mandatory load-following and also with the peak load would be way to expensive.
> Now millions of people will be displaced or dead by climate change and that could have been prevented
Nope. You are confusing 'electricity' with 'energy consumed'.
> Nope. Nuclear never produced (worldwide) more than ~17% of the electricity
This statement doesn't mean anything and feel disingenuous - we both agree it currently does not produce most of the world electricity. This statistics does not prove or disprove anything.
You have not provided any reasoning or logic to why my counterfactual would be impossible.
> Nope. France never enjoyed a zero-carbon grid: each year between 6% and 12% of electricity is produced by burning fossil fuel
So you are complaining that it's 94% carbon free, better than any major Industrialised economy, by year 1970? What do other countries aim for, 2035 in case of UK? that's 65 years later, you think that's a success? I will take the French deal, thank you very much.
> Nope. You are confusing 'electricity' with 'energy consumed'.
I am familiar enough with the difference to know that you are again and on purpose using a misleading statistic. Most fossil 'energy' consumed is wasted, as combustion based machines are only 30-40% efficient. Replacing Petrol car with electric car cuts energy 'consumption' by a factor of 3. This argument is a farse
Secondly, expected impact from climate change is over 100 million people displaced. One third or one quarter of the emissions is from electricity generation. So millions is accurate.
Thirdly, renewables are worse in this regards because we could have nuclear powered container ships and, if we really wanted, nuclear powered airplanes. You can't have solar/wind powered ships unless you are going back to sails.
Nope. Take it into account all facts described in my previous answer. Short version: to produce at most 17% (and now 9%) of the electricity we built reactors. We therefore now need about 10 times more reactors to have 100% nuclear-produced electricity. Then we need about twice as much to replace most of fossil fuels. Therefore 20x reactors are needed.
Known accessible uranium reserves (~130 years for the existing reactor fleet, and therefore about 6 years for the needed 20x fleet) are not sufficient to sustain this. It was not considered as a challenge as we know of a way (breeding) to close the uranium cycle, thus obtaining x100 more energy. However our numerous and very expensive attempts to industrialize breeding all failed flat ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Notable_reacto... ).
If it is not clear please allow me to avoid wasting my time trying to explain it more clearly.
> you are complaining that it's 94% carbon free
Nuclear is NOT carbon-free (even a 100% nuclear electricity emits, mainly due to uranium mining and enrichment), moreover it needs fossil fuel backup. I'm not complaining, just showing that your statement ("We could have had zero-carbon grid 50 years ago, in the 70’s") isn't accurate (to put it with a friendly tone).
> I am familiar enough with the difference
> This argument is a farse
No. It is not about primary/final energy ( https://ourworldindata.org/energy-definitions ). You wrote "Now millions of people will be displaced or dead by climate change and that could have been prevented" and I showed that is a farce.
> we could have nuclear powered container ships
I doubt so. Think insurance, to begin with. Civilian nuclear exists only because all nations using it neglect to insure it properly, as an exception. How exactly would such a ship be competitive if they cannot access to many (more and more nations are phasing-out nuclear) territorial waters and ports?
Moreover all existing nuclear ships are exploited by military personal (yes, even ice-breakers), that is to say in a context where the TCO is way (way!) higher than in a commercial ship.
The amount of available uranium is also a challenge: all those new reactors will deplete the reserves and lead to some crisis.
To begin with...
> if we really wanted, nuclear powered airplanes.
Source?
> You can't have solar/wind powered ships unless you are going back to sails
> Known accessible uranium reserves (~130 years for the existing reactor fleet, and therefore about 6 years for the needed 20x fleet) are not sufficient to sustain this.
And?
Or do you not understand the terminology of "known reserves" and why no one would bother "proving" known inferred resources to become known proven reserves when there's 130 years worth already.
If you're implying that current JORC reserves* are all that exist and nothing else exists other than that which has had money spent being drilled and modelled and queued up ready to mine then you might need a refresher course on mineral exploration.
* whether uranium, lithium, iron ore, copper, bauxite, oil, gas, etc.
... and no one will invest into nuclear plant which are to be amortized in (best case) 40 years, along with all the megastuff needed to operate them (formation, fuel processing, waste disposal...) if they are not pretty sure to be able to exploit them for at least 40 years. Note: currently all planed nuclear plants replace (at global scale) existing ones and therefore do not cause pressure over fuel (because there are very few of them), and their amortization plans are done upon 60 years.
> If you're implying that current JORC reserves* are all that exist
Nope, however massive prospection since the 1940's largely bumped up after the bubble (nearby 2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_bubble_of_2007#Impact ) didn't lead to disruptive reserves discoveries, therefore this evaluation (about 130 years for the current fleet, at current conditions) is realistic. Who exactly will invest tens of billions of USD to build many nuclear plants (and their auxiliaries) on such a bet?
If there are other ways to obtain enough nuclear fuel at realistic conditions the burden of proof weights on you. Please state at least one.
Bonus: lowering uranium ore grade leads to more emission, threatening the 'low-carbon' qualification for nuclear. Scientific studies are clear: M. Lenzen ("between 10 and 130 g CO2-e/kWhel, with an average of 65 g") and E. Warner et G. Heath ("9 to 110 g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050") https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222817608_Life_cycl...
This is debatable. What is pretty sure is that a field of wind turbines or solar panels just cannot trigger any disaster involving durably dangerous (and difficult to recover) stuff spread on a large geographic zone.
> they still can't be built because of safety concerns
Source?
The first EPR project in France (Flamanville-3) had problems documented in an official report (dubbed 'Folz', per the name of its main author), sadly AFAIK it wasn't translated into English: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville
Short version: it is very late and costs way more than planned, and the most prominent causes weren't "safety concerns" even if the Fukushima disaster happened during this project, and therefore added new requirements which, while non-negligible in absolute terms, were very minor causes of problems for this project.
Seriously this! Nuclear is held to the impossible standard of proving that no one will be harmed by it for the next 4000 years, as evidenced by some pointless bike shedding exercises like designing warning signs that can outlast civilization.
yes, who cares about the generations that come after us. We used to dump barrels with this kind of waste into the sea and nothing bad ever happened with those.
there is pretty strong evidence that Nuclear energy is significantly safer than most energy production with the exception of wind & solar which are similarly as safe. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
The difference is who gets harmed.
For solar and wind the general public generally can’t be affected by any accidents because the deaths are general work place hazards coming from working aloft with heavy equipment.
For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated.
It is not even comparable. If I chose to not work in the solar and wind industry my chance of harm is as near zero as it gets. Meanwhile about all consequences from nuclear power afflicts the general public. Both in terms of costs, injuries and life changing evacuations.
100,000 people dying one at a time over the course of a decade seems to have a lower public relations impact then 1000 people dying in a once-in-a-century spectacularly tragic accident. Even though the total casualties are higher.
Fentanyl is a prime example. I believe (from memory) over 100,000 people die of it each year in the in the US. Everyone knows it's a problem. We should "do something". But, we don't. Nobody cares enough (except as a platitude come election time). However if 1000 people died in a bomb attack (or similar) it would be top news for weeks and they would be scrambling the military and make us take our wedding rings off for scanning at airports.
If 10% of people who died in auto accidents each year were to perish in one horrible spectacular event it probably would be "transformative" as far as public policy.
Fentanyl is an issue because they are preventable deaths.
(Never mind that cracking down actually increases the death rate. And the fentanyl problem came about because of cracking down on heroin. Fentanyl is far cheaper to make and far easier to smuggle due to being much smaller. But it has a tendency to clump and thus when handled by street dealers they can't produce a uniform product.)
> For nuclear power the public is on the hook for cleanup fees from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars and the large scale accidents we have seen caused hundreds of thousands to get evacuated.
How much expense is justified for each life (or year of life) saved from radiation exposure by scraping up the soil and bagging it? Can we justify the evacuation of elderly from close to Fukushima on the grounds that in 20 years time they will have an elevated risk of cancer? How is that balanced with deaths caused by the process of relocation? What about the human cost of an energy shortage caused by shutting down the nuclear power stations in Japan?
The same goes for chemical cleanup (heavy metal poisoning, pesticides, dioxins, PFAs, fly-ash, asbestos).
To make the cleanup decisions we need some notion of tradeoff between cost and benefit. Otherwise we'll end up in a situation where an indeterminate amount of money can be spent on something with no benefit (other than achieving something a politician willed to happen).
This is a common argument in discussions about nuclear power but it doesn't work. You can't claim that nuclear is safe based on history, you have to consider the potential.
A gun is dangerous even if it hasn't killed anyone yet. We know that if you point the gun at someone and pull the trigger they die, hence it is considered dangerous. We knew this even before the first gun killed the first human.
Similarly, we know that nuclear power plants can cause immense disasters in a worst case scenario, even though it hasn't happened yet.
The thing is we do know it can't happen. We had Chernobyl.
It's the worst case for a runaway reactor. Did it cross the prompt critical line or not--I don't think this will ever be resolved but it doesn't matter. We saw what happens--power level through the roof, destroys the reactor, other than the radioactivity it didn't do much.
It's also the worst case for a China Syndrome. Nothing happened, as a lot of the more sane people thought would be the case. The molten reactor core burned through the reactor floor but was no longer in an ideal configuration and thus no longer critical. (And it could not be critical as the moderators were destroyed, which would inherently take it subcritical.) Note that this is inevitable--the margin between critical (below which you don't get the heat to burn into the ground) and prompt critical (where it destroys itself and thus ceases melting) is very narrow.
It's also the worst case for a radioactive spill. No containment dome, fire in the reactor contents. The supposed thousands of radiation deaths simply did not show up. We have about 90 that are clearly caused by the accident. We have a huge variation in the estimated numbers since then, the first that looks reasonable is the UN estimate of 4,000--to a large degree in the people Russia sent in to deal with the situation without proper safety equipment. For comparison the largest coal disaster was 1,500 dead--and I doubt you've ever heard of it.
>The thing is we do know it can't happen. We had Chernobyl.
>It's the worst case for a runaway reactor.
No it was not. The worst case would have been that anyone involved with Chernobyl ran for their lives and abandoned the plant leaving it to burn to the ground, no sarcophagus was built, nobody spent billions on treating farmland all over europe, nobody destroyed animals unsuitable for human consumption for decades and nobody started screening for the excess cancer cases (which occurred everywhere in europe as well as behind the iron curtain) leaving them untreated until too late.
None of that happened, luckily, but it could. Instead people gave their lives at the scene and others have worked their entire careers since to prevent Chernobyl from actually becoming a "worst case scenario".
It is also a mistake to think that Chernobyl is a disaster in the past, it is not over yet. The latest sarcophagus was built not even a decade ago at a cost of over 2 billion USD. Why do you suppose that was deemed necessary?
Well ok, they're as safe as long as we're extremely vigilant but does it then follow that we should be more relaxed about safety concerns? I don't think showing the stats is all that convincing to people when the worst case scenario is so impactful.
My guess is we'll need to see newer safer designs before public options shift.
I would not describe the current nuclear power regulatory system as "Extremely Vigilant." More like "Extremely Litigious." I think lawyers have made more on nuclear power than concrete companies and nuclear engineers combined.
The evidence of safety isn't the issue it's that nuclear accidents however rare have huge implications so stick in people's minds. We're bad, mentally, at appreciating low level dangers that are diffuse like minor pollutants which kill slowly or degrade people's health over time. What does stick in our minds well are singular big events like terror attacks, Chernobyl or Deep Water Horizon.
Even our legal systems address singular events better than low level harms because it's harder to deflect blame because the damages are so immediately identifiable; Fukushima and Chernobyl destroyed their closest cities and areas overnight in ways that they'll likely never recover from and the effects of their poisons are rapidly identifiable.
And unlike wind and solar can be used on-demand akin to coal, making it an extremely attractive option to run alongside renewables, especially year round. Solar panels are literally useless 75% of the year in at least 1/3rd of the US and we still rely on coal because of that. Sure, batteries may exist in the future that can handle solar, and maybe panels will exist in the future that will be more efficient, but we have technology now that can outpace renewables consistently and on-demand.
Which means nuclear and renewables are the worst possible companions imaginable.
Nuclear and renewables compete for the same slice of the grid. The cheapest most inflexible where all other power generation has to adapt to their demands. They are fundamentally incompatible.
For every passing year more existing reactors will spend more time turned off because the power they produce is too expensive.
The production cost of 'renewable' electricity (RE) is increasingly lower than that of nuclear. So when they produce, they are and will be preferred.
This will reduce the effective load factor of nuclear power and therefore increase its production cost (it is only profitable with a high load factor), with a strong feedback.
It gets worse because, on the technical level and despite some progress, nuclear power cannot (due to technical limitation and for safety-related reasons) adjust its production ("load following") to always exactly match demand.
This will promote the deployment of an RE system based on a continental a mix (wind, solar, etc.), smart grid, clean backup (green hydrogen), storage, etc. which will reduce the variability of its production (intermittency effect) so nuclear power will be less and less useful and more and more expensive.
I’m not sure why you seem to think nuclear and renewables are competing, but you’re just objectively wrong. Non-consistent and on-demand power generation literally go hand-in-hand. There are coal power plants that rarely turn on because they are only turned on when the grid needs to offset peaks, something that cannot be done with current renewables, even with your incredibly expensive batteries (which are mostly going into EVs anyway, and thus are a moot point.
Additionally, California is ideal for solar panels, but I assume you haven’t put even an ounce of thought into how New York or Chicago will handle it, have you?
Because every industry has capital costs that you want to repay by using it as much as you can.
There is a very small amount of people working on low-capital industries (normally with higher operational costs), and they seem to be close to some gain here or there. But almost all of our knowledge is biased against turning things off.
> Because every industry has capital costs that you want to repay by using it as much as you can.
that's the bit I don't quite understand - yes, in a simple economic model where you want the numbers to go brrr, it makes sense, but is there a physical limit? could a country decide to own the big facility and use the excess electricity and sell the results to commercial ventures? the government can afford to have a piece of land taken that doesn't return a profit 100% of the time?
I am uniformed on this, but those industries likely take time to scale up. A large scale desalination plant requires a significant amount of infrastructure.
No one will want anything from your desalination plant in Norway, and shipping water is not a thing because it becomes too expensive.
The next problem is energy cost vs. duty cycle. The less you run due to only utilizing cheap prices the higher the impact of fixed costs on your business.
Smelting cant base their production on when excess energy might be available. They need that energy now. Desalination might be a good sink but again, if water is needed now and there's no excess then what? That's why we have base load.
That basically means nuclear is the main competitor to renewables. Nuclear has extremely high Capex, so want to run as much as possible. Renewables are dependent on the weather and want to produce when the sun is out or the wind is blowing.
I believe both have their uses, but I don't buy they go together well.
Solar panels can still generate year round even when cloudy. It’s not as efficient sure but it’s not useless. That’s why you have a blend of renewables.
> It’s not as efficient sure but it’s not useless.
In the UK I've seen a system which produced 0.5kWh/day in mid-winter and 35kWh/day in summer. That kind of variation is hard to overbuild for.
> That’s why you have a blend of renewables.
Yes, we then have to build wind turbines, plenty of under-utilised transmission (because wind is in the wrong place), methane CCGT/OCGT backup (and they need to receive capacity payments to keep them in business) and perhaps eventually electrolysers to convert excess electricity to H2 (which then have to operate at low utilisation). The overall system seems quite complicated and more complex than the first step of deploying cheap solar panels so save a bit of methane.
The costs are not really due to regulations. They are because the construction industry is not exactly known for quality.
We know how to design safe nuclear reactors. We just can't build them cost-effectively, because there is always some subsubsubsubcontractor that doesn't bother doing things by the book. Then an inspector notices that something is wrong and orders it dismantled and rebuilt. And this will be iterated until everyone manages to do the right thing at the same time.
This is a propaganda talking point from anti-nuclear activists that is misleading and/or false. There are several misleading or incorrect levers used to justify this statement. The first sleight of hand is looking at the cost of headline capacity of intermittent sources. The second sleight of hand is the assumption that our current (insane) energy market pricing structure is reasonable. There's also the significant caveat that intermittent generation will depend on backstopping by carbon-emitting sources like natural gas. Finally, even reducing "capacity factor" to a single number is garbage. The minimum production really matters, and for intermittent sources, the minimum is zero.
Which is all to say -- it is not clearly and obviously correct to say that nuclear generation is cost prohibitive, and repeating it as if it were is a signal of bad faith.
And it is not really about "cost" anyway. It all hinges on the willingness of people with access to capital to take a risk. That could be a bank, large company, government etc. Renewables has managed to do that convincingly. Nuclear less so. And there are many good reasons for that.
And this one may cheaper than what we are used to. What is the important part.
(I still think it won't compete with solar+batteries. It still needs valves, turbines, and moving generators. Those things used to be considered cheap, but are becoming incapable of competing nowadays.)
the cost is because of the never ending redtape and legislation around safety. every design is obsolete by the time it's built because there's a new regulation that must be observed - so we never achieved economies of scale.
Sorry, can't make that argument after Fukushima unless there is foolproof passive safety like a LFTR plug.
A problem with organizationally managed safety is just the human error problem, and two that human organizations come to resent and undermine regulations, particularly at the management level. This attitude is rite in the nuclear industry in America, and similarly from what I can tell from tepco management of Fukushima.
Nuclear needs a scalable price competitive meltdown proof full fuel usage reactor. I think LFTR, materials issues aside, is the solution, but possibly even that won't be able to compete long term with solar wind even with miraculous materials engineering.
It's "funny" how much nuclear has to plan and prepare and care about its waste while Petrochemical companies get to just pump most of their waste, including radioactivity and mercury, directly into the air you breathe.
Ain't it funny how only the companies who aren't already rich have to do the stuff that protects people.
Kinda. I'm in favor of using more nuclear power but I am concerned that the current designs (all?) require active cooling, even post power down, for extended periods of time. We saw with Fukushima how that can go wrong.
How do you deal with the situation where the electric grid goes down for multiple days or weeks for whatever reason?
As others have said it seems that digging isn't cheap. My question is, is it even safe ? Surely if there is an accident or incident, there are the same issues if not more, groundwater pollution for example, risk of explosion, potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes ?
>so if it does manage to overheat, the nuclear reaction will automatically dampen itself down.
This seems extremely blasé. "it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?
I am a believer in nuclear power. It can already be done safe and is being done safe in most cases. This isn't solving any real problem.
"A Mile Underground" is way below most ground water deposits. Most wells are less than 1000 feet deep. The world's deepest aquifer is less than 2 miles deep. You would not bury a nuclear reactor in such a place. Also, nature has multiple buried natural fission reactors just like this.
Essentially what is being proposed here is an artificial geothermal well. The cost of the drilling is offset by not having to pay for the construction of huge concrete buildings and disposal of secondary nuclear waste. Disposal of waste on-site would essentially be filling the well with concrete. You are killing two birds with one stone.
In addition, ground water is usually filtered through miles of sand, coal, and limestone. Well water is often radioactive and needs to be tested regularly because it has been filtered through uranium and thorium decay products. If such a reactor were to be breached, it's waste would not reach the surface unless it were placed in a mile deep spring that no one knew about somehow.
From that article, it appears to have been a singular fission reactor that happened 1.7 billion years ago, which would make study of the ramifications to the surrounding area impossible now, right?
The best part about studying radioactivity is how predictable it is and how easy it is to detect. It's part of how we are able to date the age of earth using Uranium isotope ratios. Decay occurs at predictable rates. The entire earth's crust is contaminated with nuclear byproducts which allow us to learn a great deal about it's formation even a couple billion years later.
Fossil reactors are just an example of the nuclear world we live on. There are also countless other nuclear materials in the earth's crust. It's part of why we have to test for nuclear contamination of our wells.
The destruction of one of these reactors a mile deep would be a blip on the radioactive material being unearthed. We would have to be careful not to place them next to existing aquifers, but they would be way more safe than surface plants which already have an amazing track record.
As far as I can tell from the article, the primary coolant loop extends to the surface, and that's a key aspect of the proposal. Obviously not everything is very far down. The idea certainly is cute, but potential failure modes look more like What If? scenarios than anything else.
I don't see where this is mentioned. I would think they would use a hydraulic cylinder and a heat exchanger to separate the primary loop from the secondary loop.
""it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?"
We humans have a bias. We live in the biosphere, and from our perspective, we are surrounded by it. Everywhere we go from day-to-day, life abounds.
But this is a very deceptive bias. Most of the universe is not the biosphere. Outside of the biosphere, the universe is rather nasty. High levels of radiation are the norm. Extreme temperatures (or what we consider extreme temperatures) are the norm. Very life-unfriendly chemical regimes are the norm, either by being full of nasty chemicals (Venusian sulpheric acid) or, more commonly, being so full of boring chemicals that life is very very difficult (Mars).
This comes up most often in space exploration, when I see someone being concerned about putting nuclear power on the moon, whatever will we do with the waste, and the answer is that the lunar surface is already a radiation hell-hole. If you dump something like that on the surface, yeah, we humans will want to stay away from it, but it's a lot less material change than our intuition thinks. Our intuition wants to say "but what about all the wonderful life that will be affected", because everywhere we go, there is life. But there isn't any on the moon. Nothing will die because we dumped a couple hundred pounds of waste on the surface.
Similarly, the subsurface of Earth below the biosphere... and I include the bacteria living in rocks and the water table and everything like that as part of the "biosphere", we know it goes deep but it doesn't go down forever... is already an incredibly harsh place. The chemistry is already nasty. It's already full of chemicals either too "interesting" or too "boring" to be useful for life.
I'd like to see a good analysis to make sure this isn't going to work its way back up into the biosphere, yes, but your intuition that anywhere we put something, some life is going to be affected, does not necessarily apply to a mile under the surface. "Radiating its surrounding environment" is definitely not an issue in the slightest. There is no "environment" there, in the sense you mean. I'm more worried about what might physically migrate around into something that does have an "environment", but a mile is a long way for anything to travel through solid rock, and it needs to move pretty quickly too to get up into the biosphere while it's still a danger.
I think there's some valid concerns about a meltdown contaminating groundwater, etc.
But I agree that "radiation" is something we should be thinking about more pragmatically. For decades it's been a scary buzzword that the public completely misunderstands and fears. We should be having more rational discussions about it.
Nuclear power has unfairly suffered attacks from "both" "sides" here in the US. The "left" has tended to be generally anti-nuke in what I consider to be very blind ways. And the "right" has closer ties to the fossil fuel industry and has always had a vested interest in torpedoing nuclear. These are vast generalizations with plenty of exceptions, but that's the big picture and I hate it.
Not an expert, just searched for it, but this article suggests - just skimmed it - that while most groundwater is indeed not that deep, there is groundwater several miles down and the interaction between deep and shallow ground water is not well understood.
- I explicitly said both "sides" dislike nuclear, and made no proclamations about which "side" was more anti-nuclear, so pointing out that "red states have nuclear plants" is a non sequitur
- There are quite a few party-independent factors at work as well, obviously, such as the need for plants to be near running water, and the fact that NIMBY anti-nuclear pressure is higher in more populous areas which tend to skew blue
- Red/blue maps at the state level are nearly useless for anything but discussing electoral politics; all states have individual counties that are intensely red or intensely blue, so this level of detail tells us nothing of use
The state with the highest number of nuclear power plants is Illinois. The state with the largest percentage of electric generation from nuclear power is New Hampshire (61%): <https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=43256>.
NPP's location is best characterised as "eastern US", which tends to reflect other factors, most especially population, industrialisation, generation alternatives, and per-capita electrical demand (most especially cooling demand).
Population: the US population is largely concentrated in the east and specifically north-east, which already has a large concentration of nuclear power plants. This elevation-based population catogram gives a good visualisation: <https://infographic.tv/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Visual-US-...>
Industrial output (about 30% of total power consumption) is still concentrated in the old "rust belt", but has increasingly moved toward the south-east. This will drive some power consumption.
Generation alternatives: Coal remains predominant in the Apallachian region (WV, KY, TN) and a fair bit of the central US. The Pacific Northwest has immense hydroelectric capacity. California also relies strongly on hydro as well as solar and natural gas, with nuclear (Diablo Canyon) providing 7% of the state's power. Plains and southern states in particular lack large-scale hydroelectric capacity (possibly excepting the Tennessee Valley Authority, a/k/a TVA).
Per-capita energy consumption tends to be highest in ... AK, WY, ND, and LA, all of which are low-population states. Several of those states have higher heating loads (generally on-site combustion-based) and transportation demands (long distances, sparse populations). But you'll see both higher-than-average energy consumption and higher population in the southern US. Much of that demand is also summer-time cooling load, which is both electrical and fairly continuous over time, a pattern which matches well with NPP operating modes. Nukes like to run continuously at constant output, rather than ramping up and down quickly as with gas and hydro power.
Put that together and ... NPPs tend to be found in Eastern states with larger populations and higher electrical demand. Not exclusively in the SE, but that's a region with a good match generally.
According to the article it is "self limiting" so that risk is very small, and an explosion a mile underground is a lot less threatening than an explosion in a facility on the surface. A mile of rock is going to provide a lot more protection than any amount of concrete and steel.
> potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes
I'm not a seismologist, but I think the risk there is less than the risk of an explosion in a reactor on the surface.
> digging isn't cheap
No. But it might be cheaper than building a large facility above-ground that meets all the necessary safety regulations for a nuclear reactor. And probably produces less carbon emissions in the process as well.
It seems that digging cost is pretty minor when compared to the usual cost of these projects.
As far as safety, I would expect this depth to be below and away from any groundwater, so even with a meltdown there would be no effect on water sources. Presumably if something like Chernobyl happened they would bury the hole and the fuel would just melt its way further down without ill effect. There were plenty of underground nuclear tests already so some of the effects might be understood in practice as well.
I don't think they were meaning to say digging is cheap, just that the cost would be minor when compared to the total costs of other nuclear power projects. It cost something like $34B to add two reactors to Plant Vogtle in Georgia [1]. And cost overruns at a project in South Carolina ended up with an estimate of $25B before the company filed for bankruptcy and the project never got finished. Whereas most of the estimates I have seen are in the single digit millions per mile for drilling. But even $100M in drilling would be minor compared to $25B.
FWIW... Finland has built a deep geological nukewaste repo. Wikipedia's numbers are: 520m (1700 feet) deep for 818 M€. Source of the money: "The State Nuclear Waste Management Fund has approximately €1.4 billion from charges for generated electricity."
HS2 estimating £33 million per kilometer, in the absolute best case of a horizontal fairly shallow tunnel through earth and clay. A 1km hole straight down? I suspect that's going to start at 100m and go up unforseeably from there.
But! What's not apparent until you read the article is that the planned reactor is .. 76cm across. That is, it's designed to fit down an oil well. Effectively you get "artificial high temperature geothermal", a hot object buried deep underground that you circulate water past.
If we can construct nuclear reactors a mile down, doesn’t that mean we can more easily drill for essentially unlimited geothermal power? I realize this is an “obvious” question but it isn’t addressed by TFA.
I'd suspect that you could put a far higher-capacity nuclear power plant in a deep well than you could extract geothermal energy from same.
Most deep-bore geothermal proposals call for many wells to be bored, on the order of dozens to hundreds. These have a limited lifespan (a few decades), and provide relatively low amounts of energy per well (perhaps tens of MW, as compared with 100s to 1,000s of MW from a nuclear reactor).
Scale and efficiency matter.
(I'm not advocating for or against either alternative here, simply noting the relative scale/effectiveness.)
Well, I saw this a few months ago [1]. So I think maybe people are? But the key words in this article are "put a nuclear reactor one mile down" and I'm not sure we have the tech to do that either.
> As others have said it seems that digging isn't cheap. My question is, is it even safe ? Surely if there is an accident or incident, there are the same issues if not more, groundwater pollution for example, risk of explosion, potentially causing further natural events such as earthquakes ?
Digging isn't cheap if you wanted to drill a gas well for yourself. A mile would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe even a million. A million is chump change when talking about a nuclear plant, which are priced either in the tens of billions or possibly even in the low hundreds of billions.
Groundwater is not a mile down.
Nuclear reactors cannot explode in the same way that nuclear weapons explode. But if they somehow could, a mile down isn't going to hurt anyone.
> This seems extremely blasé. "it will fix itself". By radiating the surrounding environment ?
I cannot decide if this is ingenious, incredible dumb, or maybe both at the same time.
Where does the "1 mile down" come from? That seems more like based on emotion than on science / engineering. If it isn't, I'd like to see some of the tradeoffs of different depths.
I could imagine that drilling this deep might be the most expensive part, so if you could get away with, say, half of the depth, that would be quite the advantage.
What do we know about the safety tradeoffs of putting a reactor that far underground?
I'm not trying to shoot down the idea, it's just so unexpected that I feel I haven't even begun to think of the right questions yet.
I believe that the 1 mile down comes from the current proposed methods of disposing of nuclear waste. Essentially, you place the reactor in it's final resting place, removing the need to transport it to a disposal site. Depending on the site you would bury either deeper or shallower depending on the geological stability of the region.
Where to even begin.
1. Temperature - The higher the temperature difference, the faster the loss of heat. How will the steam maintain it's energy (temp) in that long pipe.
2. Drilling each borehole is no small feat, and uses lots of energy and materials, all of which have associated embodied energy costs. Is is really worth it once all that work is done?
3. Geothermal. Interesting analogy, why not just use that instead. Boom, no additional radioactivity required.
This whole things sounds very Rube Goldberg machine like.
1. We currently produce steam using geothermal in similar situations. This is not a lot of information on depth on Wikipedia but I did see there was an abandoned plan to drill down 2mi at The Geysers and Reykjanes is 8,900 ft deep(1.6 mi) so I wouldn't worry about the ability to minimize heat loss.
2. The idea is to use the earth as a substitute for the containment building, so as long as the cost of drilling are less than those costs, it would be a net.
3. Geothermal is not readily available at shallow depths everywhere. The deeper you go, the higher the costs. Also with some types of geothermal you run the risk of earthquakes, as they use the same process as fracking to develop the wells.
Also for 1., why does the steam have to come all the way back up to spin a turbine? Can't you just have the Turbine down the shaft too? I get that there's other tradeoffs than that, but I figure the closer to the source the less leakage/parasitic loss there'd be
Unless the concern is that there's too little energy after going through the turbine that the water may condense and fall back down the "wrong side" of the pipe and add a bunch of resistance to the turbine.. although I'd imagine it might still be cheaper to do some one way valves and pump out the drainage pans while still being a net energy producer
And, supply of coolant versus the delivery of steam is constructed in a mile long heat exchanger. Perhaps this can be solved by high pressure, high flow - but if it for some reason halts for just a minute OP's little reactor is already in the China syndrome mode.
Or just use reactor designs that have a negative void coefficient and won't end up in a positive feedback loop.
There are many to choose from now.
The high cost of nuclear fission plants comes from deliberate government, petro-corporation and environmentalist attempts to kill it off (usually funded by petrostate interests like Russia, Qatar or oil corporations directly).
Positive feedback loop isn't the only risk of nuclear power. Fukushima had a negative void coefficient too, right? Rather than pretending there's negligible risk, I'd rather say it's there but the alternatives are worse.
Right. We have to bite the bullet on nuclear power sometime, and it may as well be now.
I've nothing against green renewable energy and welcome it but we not only need reliable base load energy but lots more of it than we have now—and that base load will continue to increase at an exponential rate into the future (especially so with conversion to EVs).
Making a move to nuclear has almost become a necessity whether we like it or not. We've now three-quarters of a century of nuclear engineering experience behind us and it's pretty much sorted. It's not without risk but it's now about as safe as any of our other major engineering infrastructure.
> we not only need reliable base load energy but lots more of it than we have now
The simulation studies I've read show that the US can get to 90%+ clean energy with existing renewables and storage solutions quite "easily", and likely at a far cheaper price tag and much faster than if new nuclear was part of that mix at all. So what are you basing your views on that new nuclear has to or should be part of the mix?
We should deregulate and clear the way for fission startups, but I don't expect them to be able to compete with renewables+storage on either a cost or time basis.
"So what are you basing your views on that new nuclear has to or should be part of the mix?"
My position is that nuclear energy should be part of the mix.
That said, I've struggled for years before arriving at that position. I say that as someone who once worked on the surveillance side of nuclear energy, my job was (as part of a team) to ensure that nuclear power plants/industry were safe and that nuclear materials were safely secured and not diverted for nefarious purposes.
It is just not possible for me to fully justify my position here as it would require a full-length blog to do so. I will say however that my above comment was based on a number of factors, the first is that despite some recent progress in fusion it won't be a viable option for decades. Second, the demand for power is increasing exponentially, as I've mentioned elsewhere (_ph_), we've been perpetually on the edge of just having enough power with precious little in reserve for many decades when in fact we really need much more energy than we have now (unfortunately, again, I cannot do full justice to that point here).
Third, this story—at least at face value—shows how nuclear reactors could be installed safety and quickly and at a significantly lower cost than traditional above-ground ones.
I'd suggest you watch Sabine Hossenfelder's YouTube post on the problems and high costs of constructing of nuclear power plants in the present political climate. Essentially, I agree with her position but I'd point out that her video was made before this 'underground' proposal (personally, I've held the view for years that deeply-buried nuclear plants—if constructed property and with safety in mind—would be a pretty good solution in respect of all three key factors: cost, safety and speed of construction: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5EsBiC9HjyQ.
> but we not only need reliable base load energy but lots more of it than we have now—and that base load will continue to increase
The term "base load" is not that useful; it's just the amount of load which can be supplied by generators which cannot vary their output quickly, like coal power plants. An increase on "base load" only means you can use more of these slow power plants (coal, nuclear), instead of requiring more flexible power plants (gas peakers, hydroelectric, solar, wind, batteries); but you don't have to.
No. As nuclear power cannot compete price-wise with renewables and is also a bad companion to renewables, it is already internationally on a retreat. As mentioned by the sibling comment, "base load" isn't the relative term. "residual load" is what counts in the day of plentiful renewables - and nuclear is exceptionally bad there. One needs gas or fast storage like hydro and more and more batteries here.
Residual or base load - leave the semantics out of it. The fact is the world has been stuggling to just keep ahead of its energy requirements for the last century or so—and it's still in that situation. One would have to be blindfolded not to have noticed the Texas Power Crisis, and it's not alone by any stretch.
We need much, much more energy than we have now for advanced industrial processes—many hundreds of percent more energy per capita and its growth will be exponential. That's what will happen, like it or not—or it will in some places.
Society has a choice, tread water and keep its head just above to stop drowning as it's been doing for years or swim with the flow. On indications it seems the swimmers won't be the US or the West. I'm putting my money on newly developing countries who've no cultural baggage about such matters.
Well, the difference between residual and base load determines what kind of power plants you need. The wrong one doesn't help you.
Yes, we will need more electricity, and renewables are the only way to facilitate that. They can be built up quickly and they are way cheaper. So if you want more power, you need renewables.
> Or just use reactor designs that have a negative void coefficient and won't end up in a positive feedback loop.
Positive feedback loop isn't needed for a nuclear accident to happen. Sure it's what happened in Chornobyl, but not in TMI or Fukushima. And from an engineering perspective Chornobyl isn't that interesting as an accident example because it's mostly a product of brainwashed egotic manager who had all the power over the engineers.
Also it's not always entirely straightforward to keep the void coefficient negative at every point of the operating cycle, especially if things go wrong: PWR have a negative void coefficient most of the time but not 100% of the time: when the reactor is cold you put tons of boric acid into the water to counteract the reactivity and avoid divergence, but at this particular time the void coefficient is positive because of the high level of Boron. Of course in regular events it doesn't matter because the reactor is off, but that's something that can also happen during an emergency situation where you inject a massive amount of boron in the water (there are scenarios where you do that).
But again, the reactor's power getting out of control isn't the biggest risk anyway, the biggest problem comes from the fact that residual power is still annoyingly high even when you've shut down your reactor and you need to deal with it. The fact that you can't just shut it down and everything's OK when something is wrong is the real pain of working with a nuclear reactor.
Source: I have a nuclear engineer specialized in immediate response to incidents and accidents at home.
And the high cost mostly comes out of the fact that we don't build nuclear reactors as series + the fact that we finance it at insane rates. Antinuclear activists have their responsibilities in that, but even without them I suspect most states wouldn't be doing the right thing either: nuclear isn't a good fit for neoliberal thinking anyway.
> And from an engineering perspective Chornobyl isn't that interesting as an accident example because it's mostly a product of brainwashed egotic manager who had all the power over the engineers.
Pretty sure it's actually extremely interesting.
The test was considered such a non-risk that it required next to no oversight [1] [2]. If something that doesn't require oversight results in a nuclear disaster then something is wildly wrong with your regulations and design.
If it's not interesting from an engineering perspective then why did the nuclear community write a post-accident report [1] and then update it 7 years later [2]?
Perhaps _now_ it's less interesting as the faulty design has been studied at least twice with computer simulations (and a lot more skepticism on the initial Russian presentation which blamed the operators).
TMI also wasn't mainly an engineering problem: it was the way the incident reaction guidelines where written and how crisis group was set up that was the largest cause, and as such there has been little engineering changes following TMI but a lot of organizational changes.
> the void coefficient is positive because of the high level of Boron
With more heat the boron atoms (and water) get further apart. Fun times.
> the high cost mostly comes out of the fact that we don't build nuclear reactors as series + the fact that we finance it at insane rates
The UK has had a hard time getting this. Sizewell C is still pending a final investment decision (while we risk the loss of experience from Hinkley Point C), although the Regulated Asset Base model may help reduce the finance rates.
China appear to get it, mind you. 11 new reactors forecast to cost 33B USD, using experienced teams. But they have energy security issues.
That's exactly my point about it not being an engineering problem: you can't solve it with reactor design.
But it has been addressed with governance rules, in my country's power plant the guy responsible for safety is hierarchically independent from the guy responsible for running the plant so the later cannot command the former and let his hubris destroy the plant.
While this is mostly true. There is also a lot of truth in the argument that nuclear reactors are somewhat dangerous. I often find that the danger is exaggerated, but it does still exist. For instance, how much less stressful would the Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia have been if the reactor vessel was a mile underneath the area instead of on the surface. How much less of an issue would Fukushima have had if the spent fuel pool had been a mile under sea level?
If running reactors under the surface isn't significantly more expensive than surface containment then I think it's a wonderful idea.
That cat has been out of the bag for half a century. There are currently over 11 thousand warheads in existence. Enough to turn every major city in the world into a smoke plume that will blanket the earth for years to come. In addition, countries don't really use commercial reactors for breeding weapons grade materials anymore. Usually they will provision reactors specifically for that job. Like the Los Alamos Savana River facility.
Also, there are a lot more ways to produce weapons grade nuclear materials now than there were in the 1970s when most of these weapons were created. The invention of lasers, high temperature superconducting magnets, higher quality centrifuge materials, and better particle accelerators have made the creation of weapons grade material way easier.
In other words, when it comes to weapons proliferation, we are so utterly screwed. Only political change will ever reduce the number of weapons in existence. Commercial power production isn't even a factor.
There aren't very many nuclear-weaponized countries in the world right now. Otherwise, the whole Iran Nuclear Deal issue would've been moot. Even Russia won't hand over nukes to Iran.
We aren't building these reactors in Iran. In fact, Iran maintains the capability to produce weapons using it's own reactors and centrifuges. It has it's own stockpiles of Uranium.
This was a response to the comment about nuclear weapons proliferation being a cat out of the bag. It's not out of the bag yet. Iran has been "nearly there" for several years already, and that's only wrt the enriched uranium, not the actual weapons.
Another important example because they're at war, Ukraine. And in the vaguely possible event of an Asian Pacific war, Japan and Australia have no nukes, but that's more by choice.
This is irrelevant for the US and Western Europe, Russia, China, and Japan. It's likely irrelevant for India, Pakistan and Israel, but afaik they're still lower scale when it comes to proliferation.
Sure, the terrorists will dive right down the mile deep shaft to get non-weapons-grade material. /s
Nation-states don’t have any problem getting uranium…and weapons proliferation isn’t a concern with any nuclear power. In other words, these could be installed widely in suitable US, British, French, Israeli, Russian and Chinese locations with no concern at all.
It sounds like geothermal without using the earth as the heat source. What benefits does this have over geothermal, which is proven and safe, and also ticks the 'non-nuclear' box which makes it considerably easier to convince a population to live next door to?
Two main advantages exist. One is that geothermal is not available everywhere. In some places, wells have to be absurdly deep. (The deepest one in finland is 4 miles deep) Second, the temperature of the nuclear reactor is much higher than the geothermal well, allowing you to get much more energy out of a single bore hole.
There could be a few benefits to what is proposed in the article, here are my semi-educated guesses.
1. Less dependent on local geology. Geothermal wells are well suited for hot, non-pourous (?) geology.
2. Might be cheaper. It can take years to drill the wells for a closed loop system (e.g. Eavor), less for a fracked geothermal well (e.g. Fervo). I imagine drilling a single borehole for this is way simpler.
3. Less water loss. Fracked geothermal well wells can be pretty lossy (20%?). If water supply is an issue your options may be limited.
I read once upon a time that when they attempted to do deep-drilling geothermal, they discovered that the surrounding rock loses too much temperature over a course of just a couple years to be useful. At least at the depths that can be drilled.
Just guessing here, but I think it would have a much smaller footprint.
Google tells me the largest geothermal power plant is in California and it's gigawatt scale and takes up something like 45 sq miles of space.
The other factor might be location flexibility. You can probably dig a mile down just about anywhere but geothermal needs access to magma chambers. Are those everywhere?
No, not really. Geothermal can work wherever there's a big enough positive temperature anomaly in the ground. Rift systems with hydrothermal heat can work as well as regions over a deeper magma plume.
Exploiting shallow magma chambers is only possible in a couple regions like Iceland.
> can work wherever there's a big enough positive temperature anomaly in the ground
And is that in as many places as you can dig a mile down? IS the temperature delta in those places on the same order of magnitude as when magma chambers are tapped? If not, gigawatt scale plants would take even more space, no?
Are you separating digging holes from drilling holes? Digging out something like a mine for people to be in to that depth is definitely hard and you are right there is a very limited number of those.
That is not really what the article is discussing though. They are talking about putting it down a drilled hole, and a mile is a very common depth for drilling. In a USGS publication summarizing deep wells in the US through 1998 [1], it talks about a dataset of more than 20,000 wells over 15,000ft (4,572 m), more than 1,000 wells over 20,000ft (6,096 m), and 52 over 25,000ft (7,620 m).
Which would then suggest the alternate approach of just push down cold water and get back hot water without any nuclear reactor at the bottom of the hole. We're not talking hot hot everywhere, but possibly still useful.
> The average temperature gradient for planet Earth is 20 °C per kilometre. In many areas around the world the gradient is higher, and the temperature increases at a faster rate with depth below the ground. With a temperature gradient of between 50 and 100 °C geothermal resources are more readily accessible. Above 20 °C geothermal waters can be used for direct uses like greenhouses, aquaculture and district heating applying heat pumps. Above 75 °C the water is hot enough to be used for electricity generation using binary cycle technology. Above 160 °C flash steam generation can be used to produce clean, renewable electricity. Source: Geothermal Resources Council
In places where Geothermal is cheaper than this you will in fact see a lot of Geothermal wells. Geothermal works great in geologically active regions. This option works best in geologically inactive regions. The two options complement each other in my opinion.
Not depending on industry specialists that have to retain talent & tools for a 15 year gap in their order books probably helps competing with complex containment structures. They can buy some fairly premium drill bits and still be the lowest bid, if only they can be trusted to promise more realistic service entry date than contemporary "13 years behind schedule" designs.
Drilling has to be extremely cheap and the geothermal heat extremely high to be economical, which is why it makes sense in iceland but not mainstream.
Drilling and putting a nuclear reactor underground, much shallower than the deepest coal mines, can be quite expensive and still be cheap as a part of the total cost of the nuclear power station?
On average, the Earth's crust is over 10 miles thick. There's a pretty big difference between drilling 1 mile and 10 miles - literally an order of magnitude.
The flexible pipe has to be strong enough to withstand 160 bar, wide enough to allow the necessary flow, and at the top tolerate one mile of pipe - filled with water - pulling on it. I have no intuition how challenging that would be. Or maybe it does not have to be very flexible, after all submarine gas pipeline are also flexible to some extend. This seems the more realistic option to me if material science does not get in the way.
On the other hand disassembling two miles of a segmented pipe like the ones used for oil drilling in an hour or two does sound pretty ambitious. Drilling pipes are - according to a quick search - up to 45 ft long, so one would have to unscrew more than 200 connections. One could use longer sections but that will probably complicate the handling at the surface and might not actually help in terms of time.
Yes, it doesn't have to be very flexible. But every pipe is flexible to some extent. I'm thinking about my 25m deep well, with 32mm PE pipe, scaled up. It is flexible enough to be forcefully rolled up into a 5m diameter circle. When I've pulled it out, it has naturally bent into a big arch across my yard, under it's own weight. Scale that up in your imagination.
> Since the water column is a mile high, it would pressurize the reactor by its sheer weight, much like sticking it a mile under the sea, so no need for a pressurizer and the cooling system would be entirely passive.
> In addition, being encased in solid rock far below any water table removes any need for a containment system. If things get really bad, fill in the shaft and cap it.
Why is it cheaper to have this with a ready to activate shaft filling sarcophagus (and the redundant backup systems for that) vs doing it on the sea floor or land + a 0.1 mile deep hole?
I think it's interesting to read people voicing concerns and limitations of the projects in the comments (that's why I came to read them), but I was hoping more people would be excited about the idea. Even if it doesn't work out, I root for people who try out ideas like this.
Every once in a while some crazy idea like breaking down atoms to generate electricity works out and we're all better off thanks to it.
The groundwater contamination angle seems a bit... hand-wavey?
> In addition, being encased in solid rock far below any water table removes any need for a containment system. If things get really bad, fill in the shaft and cap it.
"Solid rock" feels like there's a lot of geological asterisks there. How about the casing around that mile-deep hole? Where do you pump all the inevitable leaks?
9 out of 10 startups go bankrupt, what happens to the hole if the company (or the project-specific LLC) goes belly-up? "Just fill it up" is a bit disingenuous and ignores how groundwater tends to seep into everything given enough dozens of years... Texas is littered with half-capped polluting shale wells that were just kinda left there when the wells stopped being productive and the project-specific drilling LLC was dissolved when it hit the bankruptcy-by-design phase of the corporate lifecycle.
Centuries of potential contamination feels like a risk that should have more than 2 sentences.
The practical arguments in favor of nuclear seem to assume that new nuclear technology only needs to compete with old nuclear technology.
Let's set aside the safety argument. They're claiming $0.46 per kilowatt-hour for a technology they haven't developed yet. I believe that's about an order of magnitude more expensive than what wind can do right now. Heck, right now my local utility's website is reporting a retail spot price of seven cents per kilowatt-hour. Maybe paying six times as much is worthwhile for the reduced carbon footprint relative to fossil fuels, but if that's the argument then just say that rather than weakening your position by calling it "cheap" when it's easy to see that it isn't.
They say 0.46 ¢/kWh. Its a cent sign rather than a dollar sign. It is less than half a cent per kWh for the fuel.
I also found this [1] chart from 2022 which has nuclear fuel costs around 0.6 ¢/kWh and fossil fuel costs around 3.2 ¢/kWh. So the 0.46 would be 1/7 rather than 6x.
The article quotes that number as the cost of the actual nuclear fuel. That number makes no sense - I'm sure it's a typo. They probably meant to say 4/10ths of a cent per megawatt hour. Of course, most of the actual costs come from capital/operations.
This is so silly, it might be just a form of trolling.
A nuclear power plant is a nuclear rector plus a thermal power plant, i.e. a turbine. Even if the safety of the reactor is 100%, what happens if there's an accident with the turbine? How do you perform maintenance? Sure, you have elevators to move people up and down, but how do you move things that are several tons up and down? A typical fuel rod assembly is about 4-5 meters long. The efficiency of the thermal power plant is about 30%, which means you need to dispose of 70% of the heat coming from the reactor. With regular nuclear power plants you use cooling towers; how are you going to do this when you are 1 mile underground? Do you install some pipes that bring cold water from the surface? Sounds reasonable until you do the math and find out you need to move 10 tons per second. The pumps that need to push the water up will need to fight the gravity of a column of water one mile high and push 10 tons each second. The math is not that difficult (potential energy = mgh), such pumps need to have a power of about 150 MW. That's ignoring the friction of the water in the pipe. But that's a big thing to ignore for a mile-long pipe. Oh, and the pressure at the bottom is 165 bar, about the same as the pressure in the reactor. You can avoid this huge pressure by creating moving the water up and down in stages, but that complicates the engineering, and increases the construction and maintenance cost.
This seems of a piece with trying to directly address the concerns of those who are opposed to nuclear power. This does not work, because most of those folks actually are not interested in nuclear power at all, and they will never lack for reasons not to do it. This is true of almost anything: It's always pretty easy to come up with reasons not to do something.
Those who oppose will simply keep coming up with new reasons not to do it. They will only accept a reduction in usage. Anything that allows us to maintain our existing level of energy consumption will not be tolerated.
Fission power is a loss leader non-renewable technology.
Initially the $/kWh is actually one of the lowest cost services, but this hides the $9B subsidy the public pays for construction and the 30000 year waste stewardship.
Some people think easy solutions are without tradeoffs. Yet fission power only makes sense for remote regions and space missions.
Renewables overtook coal this year in some regions. As the economics are an unstoppable force, that will silence the hubris of those that like dangerous toys.
I think you're making my point for me. 30000 year stewardship? 20 years ago it was only a 10000 year stewardship. Either way, it doesn't make much sense.
For one thing, radioactivity is related to half-life. Basically the more radioactive something is, the shorter the half-life and therefore the less time you have to deal with it. When something has a long half-life, that is almost by definition less radioactive. And it's not so hard. Water blocks most of the worst radiation anyway.
More importantly, 10,000 or 30,000 years or whatever is just a really, really long time. Storing and "stewarding" the waste is already a sufficiently solved problem. All of the material your family would use in your entire life would fit in a shoebox, and can be stored in a few gallons of water safely. Borrowing hypothetical problems from that far into the future is an example of exactly what I'm talking about: an effectively un-addressable concern that serves only as a placeholder for "I don't want to. Use less energy."
The reason that solar and wind haven't fallen victim to this is that they don't scale well enough, and would force us to reduce consumption. If they were on track to increase our overall energy production and use, they would lose support.
In general, Uranium fission processes are relatively less nasty than the material mixed with decommissioned weapons grade Plutonium. You would need to model the probabilistic decay chains to figure out at which point the hot material is below inhalation hazard levels.
"The reason that solar and wind haven't fallen victim to this is that they don't scale well enough"
That is a dumb lie, these have already exceeded non-renewable facilities in many jurisdictions last year. While not perfect in every locale, I like distributed solar+battery as they are resilient to localized disasters. Note, many in TX and FL have already shifted over due to faster <8yr payoff periods (i.e. an 18 year service life means near $0/kWh for 10 years).
Fission is a nonrenewable loss leader technology, and should be reserved for remote areas or space missions. =3
You have serious constraints in neutronics when constrained to a drillable borehole diameter and low-enriched uranium. The radial peaking will be high. May still be an ok tradeoff.
> With its promise of limitless energy by breaking down matter itself, nuclear power has long held a utopian promise for humanity
What a strange, science fictional way to describe fission! Surely it's not breaking down matter itself any more than burning wood or coal is. Would you say, about eating a sandwich, that it 'offers the promise of limitless energy by breaking down matter itself'?
This is in fact how it works. You are taking a fraction of the mass of the Uranium and turning it into energy. Although limitless is a stretch. Maybe 100,000 years or so of energy with known deposits of thorium and uranium. Solar is a bit closer to "Limitless."
Exactly! But at time scales over 10k years you may as well say limitless I suppose. By that point you are either extinct or living in O'Neill cylinders at Lagrange points throughout the Solar system and mining asteroids. If not already traveling to other solar systems. I think the safe bet is extinct, given how things are going right now.
No kidding, and far before that point we will be having to build giant radiators to expel excess thermal energy or risk cooking our planet. The future is going to be absolutely nuts if we don't end up killing everyone.
I'm not commenting on the practicality or viability of this. Rather, I see a lot of commenters talking about cost. I understand some projects or technologies would literally be too expensive, but realistically, we need to move away from fossil fuels. We can't just keep polluting the Earth because it's cheaper than clean energy.
Even if it's unnecessary I still think this is a great idea. It's obvious that the people who are scared of nuclear power are not interested in the actual safety data, it's that radiation is scary and has bad connotations.
If it will put people at ease, then just do it so we can finally have nuclear energy.
Naively it seems like a ridiculous idea to put your boiler 1+mi away from your turbine.. am I wrong?
EDIT: There's also the fact that your steam is fighting a 1mi vertical column worth of pressure.. If your steam at the boiler is limited to 600°F that seems counterproductive to put it 1mi underground?
Great, I'd love our groundwater polluted with nuclear waste. Seriously, let's not overthink this. Nuclear power is very safe, even aboveground, if the necessary precautions are taken. This has been known for a while now.
Nuclear reactors in a bunker (like most are built) are also relatively safe and it doesn't need that much tunneling. Nuclear power plant capital costs are already high, tunneling up an area a mile underground would be stupid for most cases.
Perhaps a safer approach would be to keep the steam cycle closed and only have power cables coming up the shaft. The module would need to be much taller, but size is still neglectable in relation to the depth of the well itself.
Humans haven't figured out how to economically build something watertight and structurally sound for 30000 years... most structures will rarely last over 65 years without constant maintenance.
Anything around water, acid rain, or anaerobic bacteria will fall apart in time.
All mines eventually fill with water, and collapse in time.
Putting the PR BS in a hole in the ground does not make it safer. lol =3
1,600 m vertical depth through hard rock at hydrocarbon extraction bore widths is likely 120 days, onshore @ $15,000 US per day (perhaps) + casing costs + everything else.
Given Hinkley Point C is currently at US$58bn estimated and still not open, a mere $2m for a hole sounds very affordable. Could very quickly spend more than that in meetings.
That's the bare minimum for a single unadorned hole to that depth (? there's a lot of detail in the linked report, costs may blow up a bit as depth increases, that detail didn't leap out at me).
It would cause me no great surprise if "a sufficient hole"; widened, maybe three actual close holes for down pipe, up pipe, and reactor vessel, with casings and head mechanics, came to $50 million.
Your point stands, in the great scheme of capital projects of this scale the hole boring and fitting is cheap.
Sixteen odd years ago I tracked, with a group, every global mineral exploration activity and subsequent development. When it came time to launch a mine, deemed to be feasible, and raise forward capital for building plant and processing our lower bounds cut off point was $50 million US - anything smaller than that was too small scale to bring to the attention of our subscribers.
Capital costs for mining plants, power plants, oil and gas extraction run high - and the G20 costs for nuclear plants are fully in the billions.
Which as with everything else in construction these days ultimately ends up taking twice as long and costing thrice the initial estimate. Also, this is the cost for a bore hole. The cost for something with enough diameter to house a reactor will be some orders of magnitude higher.
The article mentions 76 cm width for the reactor they're designing, and oil wells can be up to a meter wide[0], so that price estimate would probably be similar then.
Nuclear needs to deal with the cost issue first. It is woefully uncompetitive.
I failed to see how one mile deep shaft is going to help that, standard boring or not
If you're wanted to dig a mile down for a massive piece of infrastructure, wouldn't geothermal be more price competitive at that point?
I mean part of the problem with meltdowns is the pollution of groundwater. "It's beneath the water table" yeah sure, there's no way fission products can go up a shaft. No way.
So what safety does this really address besides paranoia? I mean I guess if you have a runaway solid rod fuel reaction, you can just drop a bomb down there and blow the fuel rods apart.
Initially the $/kWh is actually one of the lowest cost services, but this hides the $9B subsidy the public pays for construction and the 30000 year waste stewardship.
Some people think easy solutions are without tradeoffs. Yet fission power only makes sense for remote regions and space missions.
Renewables overtook coal this year in some regions. As the economics are an unstoppable force, that will silence the hubris of those that like dangerous fission toys.
Which is why MSRs that use allegedly almost all the fuel seems like such a potential to feasible cost effective nuclear. It's not just the economic cost of waste, it's the publicity/politics around waste transport and storage.
The article. Working a mile down is at the limits of our capabilities. In an emergency situation it’s nearly unobtanium. Like Kernighan’s Law for engineering.
There is no significant fission reactor in the Earth's core. If there were, we could detect the antineutrinos from fission product decay.
I'm not sure where this idea came from. Perhaps from the mistaken notion that uranium, being heavy, sinks into the core? Uranium is actually highly enriched in the Earth's continental crust, by a factor of about 1000 vs. the planet as a whole.
Yes, and considering the cost of a nuclear plant a mile beneath the earth, just spending on geothermal would probably be cheaper, but "go deeper" isn't quite so simple either. Even in places with above average volcanism or a thinner barrier between the surface and mantle, you'd need to drill at least a couple miles down unless you're very lucky, and that extra mile (as a likely minimum) makes a big difference on cost and effort.
The plasticity, or ductility, of rock increases at higher pressures and temperatures, making it harder to drill through it, thus making it rapidly more expensive for additional units of depth beyond a certain point.
> Nuclear fuel, even with all the processing costs included, only comes to about US$1,663 per kilogram (2.2 lb). Because nuclear fuel has such an incredible energy density, that's about 0.46 ¢/kWh – and the fuel costs keep dropping as the technology becomes more efficient.
That’s…not actually cheap? As a consumer, I pay less than half that per kWh delivered at peak hours.
Even the cheapest way to produce electricity nowadays (PV) isn't below 1 cent/kWh (production, not end-user costs) yet and your quote refers to only the costs of the fuel itself.
If your wind/solar energy pricing goes negative, you're not using enough storage. Build more batteries, suck up that excess energy, and maximize feeding back to the grid when on-demand prices are high.
Is already happening for over a year. PV sales is down by 90%, last year there was a sellout of PV companies on brookz.nl and this year they are going mostly bankrupt.
Consumers are now having a PV problem because they have to pay for their panels (I was asked to pay 800 euro per year). So, there is the incentive for many consumers willing to purchase a battery.
An alternative solution is the position of the panels. It is useless to have panels facing south, and don't use the roof, use the facade to improve the off season performance.
The situation is you will need to pay a premium to the utility company once you are feeding electricity into the grid. The mandatory digital meter will register both usage and production flow separately.
The "you can't be 100% sure" argument is impossible to defeat, and I don't think this design will move the needle.
It also provides the argument that wanting to bury reactors 1 mile deep shows how incredibly dangerous nuclear power really is.