> Do people readily go to school to study nuclear engineering?
Yes, people do study nuclear engineering. I was considering that path myself in university, but ended up going more towards science and doing several years of research in nuclear physics labs instead.
I'm very glad I didn't end up doing nuclear engineering. The nuclear industry stagnated and failed to address cost problems and bad project delivery (cost overruns, delays, etc).
Somewhat, but the nuclear industry did a massive PR campaign to address that.
Blaming perception or "green activists" or "fear of scawy radiashun!" is an easy straw-man for them, but the real obstacles are more practical and harder to address: the economics of nuclear are not good. This is compounded by a problematic history of delivery problems.
> > Do people readily go to school to study nuclear engineering?
> Yes, people do study nuclear engineering.
Note I said "readily" not "really". I see you made the calcluation when you made your decision.
It's a shame really because I believe nuclear power has great promise in benefitting society.
Too bad the moonshot level investment in nuclear went towards military ends (france in 80's excepted). And too bad funding is dependent on political whim.
Although solar and wind is working, I worry that might be a "save ourselves rich" strategy.
When you look at this table:
material energy density mj/kg
Uranium 22,394,000,000
Diesel fuel 38.6
Lithium-ion battery 2.63
I think it would be nice to think about the benefits of growth on the high end not just savings on the low end. I believe making energy available in ever-increasing plentiful quantities at low (to zero) cost would really change the world.
Nah, the nuclear industry got a TON of R&D funding too, and continues to. Plus I don't think you realize just how much governments subsidize and assist nuclear power. $8-10 billion per reactor is more money than companies can easily plunk down for an investment that takes decades to pay off. They rely on government loans, subsidies, and loan guarantees to raise capital and help fund the projects.
Loan guarantees are a particularly common example -- for example, last year the US govt provided $3.7 BILLION in loan guarantees for the troubled Vogtle reactor builds in Georgia. The way loan guarantees work is that the government agrees to pay the debt owed if the company goes bankrupt or cannot complete the project; this is surprisingly common actually, since the same project had already driven Westignhouse to file bankruptcy.
Solar and wind aren't likely to make a handful of people extremely rich -- the profit margins on the components are pretty low due to the high degree of competition pushing them down. Building solar and wind farms to sell their power does produce a solid and reliable financial return on investment, but it's still less than 10% (even though the energy return on investment is good).
> When you look at this table [energy density]
For power generation, energy density is largely irrelevant.
Also these energy densities are apples-to-oranges comparisons. You can't burn uranium without a fairly large, heavy reactor. There are no "nuclear cars." Similarly diesel requires an engine although it's smaller. Batteries aren't a power source on their own, they're storage, and you're not "burning" them up.
Today I learned that Wikipedia and OurWorldInData are "press releases"...
Yes, we get it that you have a wholly irrational dislike of renewable energy and are willing to grasp at straws to argue against it.
> because all those intermittent sources are 30%+ backed by NG generators which can be spun up/down on demand and over the past 15 are super cheap to install
I'm trying to follow what you're arguing here and it makes no sense. You're arguing that the Northwest is simultaneously using almost all renewables and using tons of fossil fuels...? It can't be both.
We'll ignore the fact that according to your link, wind+solar is less than 10% of the electricity generation there, and there's no real evidence of a big investment in either, just the pre-existing hydro power.
No, I just don't like people who pretend that wind/solar are actually going to solve the CO2 problem by pointing at some future technology or pricing model that is going to save us while stubbornly refusing to accept a 70 year old technology that is actually carbon free.
That is what got us were we are today. Because back in the 1970/80's people argued the exact same thing (no nukes, solar will save us). And what happened? We got more coal plants because they were way cheaper except in the few places that actually built nukes. The same argument happened in the 1990s/2000s and what did we get? A few percent of wind/solar, and a shift to NG due to fracking.
_TODAY_ if you want a competitive solution you build somewhere in the ballpark of 20-70% wind/solar and back it with NG.
Where will that put us in over the next 40 years?
Its going to create even more C02 because power utilization is going up. All that is going to do is slow the rate of increase, which is exactly what the current charts are showing. The rate of wind/solar rollout is barely exceeding the demand curve and in a lot of places its regressing, particularly in places where ancient nuke plants are being replaced by "green" technologies.
Yes, sure wind+NG is better than NG or coal, but its a shit solution. If batteries actually get cheap then we can do 2x wind+battery, but that isn't here today. What we have today are nuke plants, just like we did 40 years ago. If back then instead of waiting for the future to save us we were more pragmatic the ice caps wouldn't be melting.
My personal opinion is that in 40 years what is going to solve this problem is a giant war, because wishing for the future to save us hasn't worked yet.
You're trying to argue that the solar market in 2020 looks the same as it did in the 1970s? Seriously? When the cost of solar PV has dropped 70% just in the last decade alone...?
I can't even find LCOE figures that far back, but the cost of solar modules in 1975 was just over $100 a watt. Today, a solar panel can cost as little as $0.50/W
That's literally a TWO HUNDREDFOLD decrease in price, and modern panels last longer. This is like arguing that computers are useless in 2020 because in the 70s they were not very powerful.
> If batteries actually get cheap then we can do 2x wind+battery, but that isn't here today
In the field, people bidding on energy projects are doing mixed solar+storage and wind+storage at prices comparable to nuclear or lower. Today. With 2020 tech and 2020 pricing, not 2025, not 2030. Granted, these aren't including a lot of storage right now (1-4 hours generally) but as battery prices continue to drop that will increase.
Given how costs are dropping as the technologies scale up, in 2025 people won't even think twice before choosing renewables+storage over nuclear, because it'll be a no-brainer.
> What we have today are nuke plants, just like we did 40 years ago.
Yes, that's the problem. Nuke plants plants have advanced technologically in the last 40 years, but in terms of cost they're actually more expensive because we found more failure modes (and need to prevent them).
And this is disappointing because I worked in nuclear physics for a few years and really wanted to believe that nuclear energy was going to save us... and it catastrophically failed to deliver.
It's not looking so hot for SMRs right now though. NuScale, one of the most promising SMR companies, is losing backers for its first big reactor build. This is a result of cost under-estimates and delays:
> announced that completion of the project would be delayed by 3 years to 2030. It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion.
Unfortunately it has become a pattern now for the nuclear industry to promise that the next tech will suddenly make nuclear energy cheap and fast to build. They consistently have failed to deliver on their promises -- the fiasco of the AP1000 reactor build at Vogtle in Georgia is a recent example.
It seems like the problem of the nuclear industry is the industry, not the technology itself. They're too used to relying on fat taxpayer subsidies, and are not well equipped to compete against other energy sources on the free market.
The reactors being built today are Gen III/Gen III+ designs: AP-1000, the EPR, VVER-1200/ AES-2006, APR1400, etc. These include all the design and engineering refinements we've been able to cram in. They're a far cry from 30-60 year old tech.
Unfortunately most of the new reactors built in the US and Europe have run massively over time and over budget, despite new technology. Vogtle 3&4 in Georgia drove Westinghouse bankrupt. These were modern AP-1000 models. Flamanville 3 in France (an EPR) is running nearly triple its cost estimate and the delivery time ballooned to 15 years. Olkiluoto in Finland (the first EPR) went massively over time and budget as well. These reactors were specifically designed to be more cost-effective and promised much lower prices, but failed to deliver.
The problem in the nuclear industry isn't the technology itself, but the fact that they consistently fail to deliver projects within their allotted time and budget. Unfortunately this shows no signs of changing, and renewable energy industry looks poised to completely out-compete them in the energy market.
I say this all as someone that used to have high hopes for nuclear tech, after working in nuclear physics research all throughout university.
They may be gen3 and gen3+ and newer designs, but they are still just working on the old regular fission model. I'm talking about using breeder or FAST reactors, which are completely different in the underlying physics. So far I believe there haven't been any of those built commercially but have been in testing for 60 years without issue.
There's a reason countries don't build breeder reactors. Fuel costs are a tiny fraction of the costs for a nuclear powerplant: less than 10%. Breeders save a bit of money on fuel in exchange for a higher capital cost (cost of construction). For reactors, capital costs are a huge factor because reactors are extremely expensive already ($8-10Bn per reactor in the US/Europe). Increasing that further more than balances the savings on fuel.
Thus, breeders generally end up being more expensive than a conventional BWR or PWR.
Here I should mention that I spent some time in nuclear physics research. There's a lot of misinformation floating around about nuclear energy. Most of the "miracle solutions" don't live up to their promises (especially thorium tech and breeders). If they did, we'd already be using them -- nuclear engineers are not fools, and most of these reactor concepts have been kicked around for literally decades.
One other point: the physics behind breeders and conventional slow-neutron reactors isn't fundamentally different. Both neutron capture ("breeding") and fission ("burning") reactions happen in both, the ratios in a breeder are just optimized to favor the first process more. In fact in conventional light water reactors, around a third of the energy released comes from fissile isotope bred from fertile isotopes such as U-238.
With the newer breeders (FAST), the main difference is safety. You don't need the same control mechanisms because they automatically cool down due to the physics of them so that they don't melt down. I'd imagine that FAST reactors eliminating the need for ever increasing safety tech and complexity of it for conventional reactors would be a cost savings (or at least make it close). Not to mention the clean up costs when you compare to a conventional reactor that could melt down, even if it's rare.
I'm not saying that the engineers are idiots. But there are some engineers (supported by government or corporate funds) still building new prototypes and testing new designs, such as FAST. Especially in the US, a driving reason that new designs aren't used is that there have been few built I'm recent decades - partially due to lower cost alternatives and also due to public opinion.
Passive safety is what you describe. That's a requirement for reactors to be classified as Gen III, so all of the models listed above have some variant of that.
> eliminating the need for ever increasing safety tech and complexity of it for conventional reactors would be a cost savings
Passive safety features are useful, but they don't end up replacing active features (you still need to control the reactor during normal use). At best they might allow for reducing the redundancy level on a critical system -- which might save a bit bit of money, although not much.
Better safety is always a great feature in general, but it's not close to making breeders cost competitive on its own.
> Not to mention the clean up costs when you compare to a conventional reactor that could melt down, even if it's rare.
Actual meltdowns are exceedingly rare (and catastrophically expensive + devastating), so you don't really factor them into the cost equation for a normal reactor.
> Especially in the US, a driving reason that new designs aren't used is that there have been few built I'm recent decades - partially due to lower cost alternatives and also due to public opinion
Mostly cost tbh -- nuclear energy has been historically somewhat unpopular (especially after major accidents) but there's a lot of industrial projects that continue anyway despite being unpopular (oil pipelines etc). The financials for nuclear reactors are not great (it's a big, financially high-risk investment that takes decades to really pay off), so there's less incentive.
I think people -might- be more on board if they knew the nuke plant sitting a couple of miles away wasn't going to go critical/poison their local acquifer and was provably safe beyond a doubt even to skeptics. I think that's what it will take, otherwise solar will have to be our savior.
Residential solar is expensive because you don't have the same economy of scale you see in utility-scale deployments. Also something like 1/3 of the cost is "soft costs" such as marketing and the crazy red tape associated with permitting.
The latest academic modelling shows that we can meet 70-80% of energy demand from renewable energy alone, even without storage. All it requires is building a modest excess of capacity and a 50/50 wind/solar mix. When it comes time to add storage, battery storage costs have been plummeting and already dropped 75% over the last 6 years: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-levelize...
But if its truly cheaper than all the worlds CO2 production problems are solved!!
Energy is sufficiently deregulated in enough of the US that they will sell to the areas that aren't, just like France was doing with all its "old dirty" nukes, to the countries around it building "green".
I can't tell from your graph, but I saw an actual cost estimate a couple months ago that points out what has been true for the past 10 years of "wind is cheaper" metrics.
Which is that its not, because its not continuous (or controllable) power delivery. Nor does it account for the fact that it also needs to be overbuilt if its going to supply an energy storage system either. Nor does it account for the energy storage costs.
So, yes in absolute KW produced its cheaper, but that does little but create an oversupply problem. Which is why in places like TX the power costs frequently go to zero when the wind is blowing and spike at other times. Making cheap power when you don't need it doesn't help. What TX needs is lots of power at 3PM (when in theory solar would be useful, but the existing smaller plants aren't making money either).
The net result in TX has been lots of wind install, but even more gas install. Because the gas plants are actually making money. If big battery plants are economically workable then we would also see a lot of companies arbitraging the free wind energy into $ when the price spikes but we don't see that either.
So its not a simple/sure bet like is being claimed.
It's not solved yet, because energy is not deregulated enough, and entrenched financial interests won't go down without a legislative fight.
For example, in Ohio several state legislators were purchased, and passed regulation claiming to "save" nuclear but what it really did was bail out coal and prevent the cheapest source of energy from competing in the market. The most surprising is that this corruption is actually resulting in prosecutions, and the top regulator has now resigned too:
Funny you should bring up Texas, it actually is installing massive batteries, with 17GW in the pipeline last time I heard. And natural gas is dwindling to nothing, getting replaced with solar. ERCOT is one of the very very very few places where cheapest cost can actually win, and it's where we are going to see natural gas die first because of that.
Right, but its the NG that enables the wind because of said load following. That combined with the fact that they are super cheap to build, and the US has a huge glut in NG due to fracking and regulation on how much we can sell internationally.
But, that isn't the point. The point is that even if we go to a ~70% wind model, we will _STILL_BE_WORSE_OFF_THAN_FRANCE_WAS_40_YEARS_AGO_.
The "Green energy" movement there is _INCREASING_ their CO2 production.
> The point is that even if we go to a ~70% wind model, we will _STILL_BE_WORSE_OFF_THAN_FRANCE_WAS_40_YEARS_AGO_.
No.[1]
Denmark has about 48% of their energy from wind, and their per capita carbon emissions are at the same level as in 1960.[2] Ireland with 33% is at the same level as in 1980.[3] Portugal with 27% now has the same emissions as 1990.[4]
There is a trend here.
> I don't get why this is so hard to understand for all those down voters.
You are ignoring data that doesn't agree with your hypothesis.
Click the link and look at the graph in my parent comment. Gas started rising in 2002, when wind and solar had an invisibly small presence in the US market.
It sure sounds like you were arguing that renewable energy had a time-travel effect causing the construction of gas before the renewables were added?
People are downvoting because what you're saying makes no sense.
You realize that the natural gas plants sit mostly idle when renewables are producing enough power, right? And the more renewable capacity we build, the more often that happens?
> Worse, at the current rates, we won't get there for decades.
So, about the same timespan it took to execute the Messmer plan in France, and at a fraction of the cost? (The Messmer plan was France's big nuclear buildout from the 70s through the 90s.)
On a side note, even if we started building reactors today they probably wouldn't be operational for a decade or more (including planning time).
Since 2019/early 2020, the data disagrees with your assessment. Gas plants are leaving the interconnection queue, and massive amounts of solar and wind are coming in:
> But if its truly cheaper than all the worlds CO2 production problems are solved!!
I mean, the International Panel on Climate Change certainly thinks renewable energy is a core part of solving carbon emissions. Their special Report on 1.5C AKA SR15 (https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/) says:
> In 1.5°C pathways with no or limited overshoot, renewables are projected to supply 70–85% (interquartile range) of electricity in 2050 (high confidence).
For the 3 scenarios where we achieve needed emissions reductions, renewables are 48-60% of electricity generation in 2030, and 63-77% in 2050.
> Energy is sufficiently deregulated in enough of the US that they will sell to the areas that aren't
In the US in 2020 the majority of new generating capacity being added is from solar or wind: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42495# -- and if you do the math for capacity factors (around 40% for wind, 25%ish for solar, 60% is for natural gas) then you'll find that solar and wind capacity generates more electricity than the gas.
If the US grid operators and utilities are building all this renewable energy capacity, perhaps they know something...??
> in places like TX the power costs frequently go to zero when the wind is blowing and spike at other times.
Isn't that what a free market is supposed to do -- respond to supply and demand? Last I checked, we don't say that the stock market is broken because it goes up and down.
> that does little but create an oversupply problem
Are you saying free excess power is a BAD thing? I can think of a TON of ways to take advantage of a temporary oversupply; capturing it in storage is only one of them.
> If big battery plants are economically workable then we would also see a lot of companies arbitraging the free wind energy into $ when the price spikes but we don't see that either
Now we're seeing a race to install batteries. Energy arbitrage is only one of the possible income streams -- grid services such as frequency regulation are an even bigger source of funds. The "Big Battery" in Australia has already paid for itself after just a couple year and they've already increased capacity by 50% and are installing a second one in Victoria.
> balancing with gas
In the US, gas capacity is mostly replacing dirtier, more expensive coal powerplants. I don't see a problem with using spare gas capacity to help balance the grid while storage gets ramped up -- the renewable generation is directly replacing fossil fuels except when they need an extra boost.
Worth noting that Unit 3 at Olkiluoto in Finland was started before Flamanville and it hit massive cost overruns and delays as well. It was another EPR -- it's not like Flamanville was the very first build of this design, they had another to learn with.
> CGN Power, the listed unit of state-owned China General Nuclear Power, China’s largest nuclear power projects developer, has announced a 17 per cent capital increase at its Taishan nuclear project, raising concern cost overruns and commissioning delays will continue.
> The company will inject 2.94 billion yuan into its 51 per cent-held unit Taishan Nuclear Power Joint Venture, which will see the unit’s total registered capital to 28.6 billion yuan from 24.4 billion yuan, the company said in a filing to Hong Kong’s bourse late on Tuesday. Provincial government-controlled Guangdong Yudean, the province’s largest power producer, owns 19 per cent stake, and CGN’s French technology partner EDF holds 30 per cent stake.
> CGN said the capital injection serves “to enhance its financing ability so as to meet its fund requirements for engineering construction.”
> The project, which CGN said on track to become the world’s first third-generation nuclear reactor built on the European pressurised reactors (EPR) design to achieve commercial operation, was originally expected to have its first generating unit come online in December 2013 followed by the second in October 2014.
> The timetable of the two units subsequently slipped to the first and second half of this year, and further to the first and second half of next year after “comprehensive evaluation on subsequent engineering construction plan and relevant risks,” said CGN a year ago.
China's nuclear industry and the way the government interacts with it is just... very different from pretty much any other country. This is true of some of their other sectors. Yes, they can do some things incredibly quickly by more or less ramming them through at top speed using a combination of government and state-affiliated corporations. But the ways they achieve those results at speed are not necessarily transferable to other countries.
I also get a bit nervous about how fast they've scaled their nuclear sector and pumped out plants. It reminds me a bit of the big historical push the USSR did into nuclear tech -- which culminated in the Chernobyl incident because they overlooked issues they should not have in order to keep things moving fast.
A lot of technology and engineering lessons have been learned since those days... and so far I haven't heard anything specifically concerning about China's nuclear reactor fleet. But there's always going to be a little doubt in the back of my mind.
Yes, nuclear power projects bid below what they know it will cost and then pull a shocked-pikachu face when the final bill ends up several times the original "cost estimate".
Look at Flamanville in France: budget triple the "estimate", 15 years to construct. France has more nuclear energy per-capita than any other country on Earth, so it's not like they don't know how to "do" nuclear.
Right, but it's hopeless to pose this as a moral question, and hope that businessmen & politicians will suddenly start behaving with boy-scout honor.
Those who decline to play by the rules we have ended up with, don't get the contract & go out of business, or don't get elected. It seems like an incentive problem. And a possibly unsolvable one, for huge mega-projects like this -- constructed over decades, dangerous & high-tech, and completely useless until 100% completed.
Wind energy seems much more healthy in this regard. You buy off-the-shelf units, from a factory. If you don't like the first 10 they install, you don't buy the other 90, and still get 10% the power. It's much closer to buying cars, or pencils, which our society is pretty good at optimizing. Every year we improve the process, and these steps add up.
Yeah, and there's not enough viable vendors in the nuclear sector to be able to just switch if someone does not play by the rules.
You are correct that wind has a lot more flexibility in this area than nuclear. It is also much easier to scale a project up by just adding more turbines. In the case of older, smaller turbines they can be replaced with more modern turbines that yield more power (called re-powering).
In general wind power and solar have much better economies of scale too -- the more you build, the cheaper it gets. Nuclear doesn't tend to follow that pattern -- although there are attempts to create it via small modular reactors (SMRS). The jury is out if that will succeed or not (early signs are not great though).
Yes. I wonder whether a push for something like small modular reactors, starting in say 1973, might have got us a real solution. Seems a bit late now, but would love to be proved wrong on that.
Small reactors were part of the original 1st gen nuclear reactors. The world went to bigger reactors in the 60s-70s because it ended up being much cheaper than building lots of small ones. Reactor fabrication is complex, and it's easier to just build them bigger.
From the 90s to the mid-2000s there was probably a window for development in this area. But the nuclear sector stagnated as a whole, and then fracking made natural gas cheap enough that people wouldn't consider it.
The jury is out on SMRs still. They're promising a lot, and the tech and engineering has improved. But plunging costs of renewables mean the window of opportunity for nuclear tech is probably mostly closed in the West. This article from a highly respected energy sector analysis group is worth a read: https://about.bnef.com/blog/scale-up-of-solar-and-wind-puts-...
India and China are the big markets for nuclear right now -- their energy demands continue to grow, and they're building reactors as part of an all-of-the-above model. France MIGHT be a potential buyer of SMRs (their reactor fleet is getting close to end-of-life), but their nuclear companies have put a lot of push behind the EPR design.
> announced that completion of the project would be delayed by 3 years to 2030. It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion.
Unfortunately this is a very old story with the nuclear industry: they consistently over-promise and under-deliver. The closer projects get to completion, the more costs grow and the further the completion date gets pushed out. This has been true of most of the recent builds in the US and Europe.
The tech is fine, but there seems to be something wrong with the industry.
