Mostly agreed, but: "If you want clean power in your lifetime, support fission plants."
Not anti nuclear or anything, but you really want a large share of wind+solar. Less hard to handle waste and cheaper. Once we are approaching 80% wind+solar we can discuss how to best deal with the difficult remaining 20% (load shifting, expanded transmission grids, storage, CCX and Carbon2Gas gas plants and nuclear are all options that are possibly going to play a role).
They're only cheap and low-waste if you don't have to worry about storage, and that needs to be solved well before the 80% point. Battery manufacture is pretty dirty, and even if the environmental issues were not a concern, it's not clear that enough raw materials (rare earths, etc.) exist in the world to move the entire power grid to intermittent sources plus battery storage. And so far, no alternative storage sources have proven themselves broadly viable (pumped hydro is probably closest but requires fairly specific climate and geography).
Personally I'm with Bill Gates on this one: we basically need an innovation miracle to solve our energy and climate problems, but probably just one, and it can be in any of four or five different fields (renewables + storage, fission, fusion, biofuels, carbon capture, etc.). Success in any one of those spaces is far from guaranteed, so we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket, and should be aggressively pursuing all of them in the hopes that at least one will pan out.
Could you please point me to reputable studies that back up your claim that storage will be needed before very high penetration?
Even for extremely high carbon reductions (95% on 1990) the best models I've seen consider transmission lines and sector coupling considerably cheaper. And these models make very aggressive assumptions on the fall of battery prices. E.g.:
Edit:
The thing to look at is figure 11. on page 16. It gives a policy trade off. Given political limits on the amount of transmission grid extension (x axis) what is the cost of the economically optimal mix of technologies (y axis). Left graph shows sector coupling, right graph shows sector coupling. The second graph almost completely eliminates the need for battery storage.
Nuclear is not in this mix, partly because this is exploring policy constraints on transmission capacity in the context of Europe (and nuclear is pretty much a non-starter politically) but it clearly shows that the idea that large amounts of battery are inevitable is outdated.
I'll leave you with a quote from the conclusions:
"The All-Flex-Central scenario with optimal transmission costs just 13% more than today’s system [even when excluding health benefits]"
You're right that arrangements that mostly avoid storage are possible, but might not be cost efficient in a way that leads to their eventual adoption, and any mass adoption of renewables at high percentages of overall capacity requires some kind of major investment beyond the cost of generation itself, to deal with the intermittency, be it storage or transmission (and the latter is really only helpful if by "renewables" you mostly mean wind -- the intermittency of solar is obviously highly correlated over broad geographic areas). Still, I think the more interesting question isn't "could it be done" -- it's pretty clear that it could -- but "could it be done in a manner that's cost-competitive with non-renewable technologies," and there's pretty abundant research at this point that shows that any advantages renewables have in terms of levelized cost of ownership get more than wiped out once these kinds of investments are factored in; see, e.g., https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... From the executive summary:
> Despite the sustained and growing cost-competitiveness of certain Alternative Energy technologies, advanced economies will require diverse generation fleets to meet baseload generation needs for the foreseeable future
with specific numbers in the actual report.
It's easy enough to focus on Europe or the Americas where the rich have the comparable luxury of being able to overpay for generation if the political will is there, but the overwhelming majority of new generation capacity brought online globally in the next century won't be in these places, it will be in Asia, Africa, and South America, as these countries work towards developmental parity with the West. We need to come up with solutions that aren't just possible, but cheap, and deployable in places that are starting from basically nothing in terms of modern grid infrastructure, and where hyper-inefficient diesel generation is currently the norm, to the extent that electricity is broadly available at all (as is the case in large parts of Africa in particular today).
Again: this isn't to say that renewables can't work, or that any other particular technology will or won't be the solution. We just don't know yet, both in terms of feasibility and economics.
The study I linked to looks at nothing but the cost of dealing with intermittency and comes to the conclusion that it's barely more expensive than the current system.
Also, once you go into the developing world context a lot of things change. What is difficult and expensive in the European context is to guarantee the last few hours of electricity a year. If you can take an area that has a few hours of electricity a week to that point, you have a massive win already. Plus you can build sector coupling in from the beginning.
In a green field scenario you _really_ want wind/solar as a decentral bootstrapping technology that scales down, that can get you a really long way.
Bangladesh has >5 million solar home systems installed. That's a Norway or a Denmark population running 100% on decentral off-grid solar.
Edit:
An important point here is to be aware of time horizons. A study looking at a 2025 or a 2030 system looks very different from one that looks at a 2050 system. If the foreseeable future means the next ten years, then sure.
> We need to come up with solutions that aren't just possible, but cheap
Renewable energy sources are already cheaper than traditional nuclear energy, in many parts of the world already cheaper than fossil sources, and rapidly getting even cheaper:
And at the same time, Westinghouse had to file for chaper 11 bankruptcy because ... well, nuclear power does not seem to be so economical at all.
As an interesting side note, both nuclear power as well as renewable energy sources have the cost structure that almost all investments are up-front, while the relative amount of running costs is very small. Because in a market system, the marginal cost of production per unit determines the market price, and the market price is therefore close to zero, both technologies have the problem that they actually need subsidies and incentives to be created. In other words, while renewable power sources definitively need incentives, nuclear power also can't exist without huge subsidies.
> Renewable energy sources are already cheaper than traditional nuclear energy
Again: only when looking at the cost of generation alone. It's more expensive if you factor in the storage and/or long-distance transmission necessary for high utilization (even the study I'm responding to says so, though by a smaller amount than I've seen elsewhere -- ~13%).
> well, nuclear power does not seem to be so economical at all.
Nuclear power isn't economical under the current regulatory environment and set of political realities. There's no fundamental reason that that need be the case. More people die from wind and solar per year than nuclear (mostly installers and technicians falling off of things), and obviously both are dwarfed by orders of magnitude by coal once externalities are factored in. If we were as risk-averse with those sources as we are with nuclear, they would be expensive too. Coupled with the slowness of construction eliminating economies of scale or effective market competition, and you don't have a great situation.
(but wind energy was not the primary cause, the main cause was bad planning)
What happens at large scale is that the fluctuations induced by variable wind speeds smooth out over larger regions. And having a large, interconnected grid is usually much cheaper than battery storage.
What would also help is diversification. In Scotland, there was a fascinating project to generate electricity from wave power, the Pelamis wave power converter. It had working 500 kW installation but was scrapped then.
> If we were as risk-averse with those sources as we are with nuclear, they would be expensive too.
A wind power plant blowing up will not cause half of Europe to be contaminated with huge costs to agriculture, like it happened in 1986. You must also not forgot the extreme health costs of uranium mining.
There are papers claiming that the various 100% renewable work by Jacobson, Breuer etc. suffer from a number of wildly optimistic assumptions. See e.g. doi:10.1016/j.rser.2017.03.114 . Also see work by Christopher Clack et al. (one of which caused the infamous Jacobson lawsuit, FWIW), and Jesse Jenkins et al.
Which I find considerably more convincing, given that it addresses the concerns raised in detail and gives a much wider overview of the literature and ideas around.
In my view the response article actually demonstrates that Heard et.al. had an ideological motivated conclusion they wanted to get to and chose evaluation criteria to fit their desired outcome.
> Then you are no doubt aware of the response article:
Yes, I am. I'm not particularly convinced by it, it seems to largely repeat the same claims made previously. Anyway, there's a preliminary informal response to that at http://4thgeneration.energy/response-to-brown/
> In my view the response article actually demonstrates that Heard et.al. had an ideological motivated conclusion they wanted to get to and chose evaluation criteria to fit their desired outcome.
Clearly Heard is a nuclear advocate, yes, but AFAICT the criteria they chose aren't unreasonable. OTOH it's hard to argue Jacobson, Breuer, Brown et al. aren't pushing an ideology either, since they claim to be motivated by decarbonizing the energy supply, yet they are excluding one of the very few sources which, historically, has provided large-scale low-carbon energy.
To make Fusion work, there is a lot of unproven technology required.
For renewables not.
And the storage is a problem yes, but not one that requires miracles. Just investing.
(And there are much more technologys around than just batteries. Air-pressure storages for example. Or hydrogen. Or different H2 based ones like Methan, etc.
or artifical lakes for water pump storage, etc.)
But to make Fusion work any time soon, there are indeed miracles required. If it works one day, nice. But I would not bet on it, to solve any problems we have today.
> To make Fusion work, there is a lot of unproven technology required.
For the critical issue of tritium breeding, it is more like non-existing technology. What is meant to bridge the gap between today's plasma physics experiments and working power plants includes a large amount of fairy dust. It is not a valid comparison to compare that against the advantages and disadvantages of the existing renewable sources. Even the Pelamis wave power plant (which was discontinued for whatever reasons) is far far closer to large-scale energy generation than any nuclear fusion process could be in the next 50 years.
I think this is incorrect. Renewables + Storage is possible now. It's only a matter of price. At marginal cost right now solar+wind are cheaper than alternatives, at total system costs it's within a factor of two (or at break even for optimistic studies) of the current system and falling.
Fusion is not possible now. As climate change is happening now, any delay in transitioning to clean and available solutions is purely ideology driven.
This too is a political will problem. Designs for proliferation-resistant gen IV nuclear plants have existed for a long time, and many have been tested. We don't use them because nobody builds nuclear plants any more out of overblown fears of meltdowns (which, incidentally, also can't occur in most gen IV designs).
The "can't melt down" property is usually referred to as "passive safety": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety . These tend to have components that cause all of the nuclear fuel to passively flow out of the reactor and into a cooling chamber in the event of coolant failure. In liquid-fueled designs, this is accomplished via a "freeze plug," essentially a cork made of a low-melting-point material at the bottom of the reaction chamber that's kept solid by active cooling and rapidly melts in the event of a power failure such that the reaction chamber drains. Equivalent mechanisms exist for pebble bed reactors, though, where all the pebbles fall into a cooling chamber. In either case, production reactors have been build that include these features and the physics are very well understood.
Proliferation resistance is trickier, and not all gen IV designs focus here. There are a couple of areas of attention here. The first, and probably more mature development-wise, are alternative fuel cycles like the Thorium fuel cycle that don't produce easily usable fissile material out the other end (and do produce a bunch of U232, which in addition to being non-fissile is also difficult to steal because it's super-dangerous to handle). Secondly, there are designs that breed and then immediately burn fuel in situ without reprocessing, such that there's no point during which the fissile material exists outside the reactor to be stolen. I don't think any of this class have actually been built yet, but the Traveling Wave design is probably furthest along, and TerraPower is building one of those in China with a target completion date of ~2025.
Two important caveats though: these are "proilferation-resistant" in the sense that fuel would be hard for non-state actors to steal; state actors are another concern as that article points out, but they also don't really need to breed fuel, and can just enrich uranium directly without that much difficulty, as Iran and North Korea have both demonstrated, if they're willing to pay for it. At this point the physics are very well-understood, so this is a problem in need of diplomatic solutions more than technological ones. And second, the focus here is on material for fission weapons. I don't think any nuclear technology has good defenses against using material for dirty bombs.
All of that said, I'd still stand by my original point that newer designs are well-understood and dramatically better in these respects than most currently operating plants, and are only not being built (at least in the US and Europe) for political reasons.
I am extremely skeptical about such claims. One such alternative design was the THTR design, which was implemented in the Jülich AVR reactor. It was also claimed to be passively safe.
But there were incidents when the plant was basically out of control. Worse, the design is based on graphite spheres which contain the fuel. That is only safe as long as the spheres in the hot reactor do not come into contact with air, which will cause them to burn, or with water, which will form hydrogenium-oxygen mixtures. Burning graphite was both a main ingredient in the Windscale fire, and in the Chernobyl disaster. There were also important mechanical problems with the spheres. In retrospect, these claims for passive security were unwarranted and the plant was dangerous. With the experience from the AVR, one can also say, that the nuclear industry is not transparent at all about safety problems. Also, it is not only very hard to make such plants inherently safe, if this also very expensive. Unfortunately, this conflicts with the goal of every company, which is to make a profit which is as large as possible.
The AVR was also not a Gen IV reactor (about which the parent/gp claims were made), and was built over 40 years ago. In fact construction began in 1961, and it was commissioned in ‘69, so really it was tech from 57 years ago that was put into practice 49 years ago.
"All of that said, I'd still stand by my original point that newer designs are well-understood and dramatically better in these respects than most currently operating plants, and are only not being built (at least in the US and Europe) for political reasons."
Well your original point was written a bit more absolute...
With this I go along. And as I said, I also prefer fission as the short term solution. But only as a transition on the way to fully renewable (or allmost full, I am for pragmatism).
As there are just many problem involved with nuclear power, like danger and waste and the need for uranium, etc. that you would not have with solar energy. So this is the goal for me, fission power only as a way to get there or where there are not really other options. (submarines, spacemissions, etc.)
I’m not in the US, but I do remember. The thing is I remember other disasters relating to energy, including yearly deaths from pollution. It’s not as though gas, oil, and coal production or use are somehow safe, free from catastrophic failure, and subsequent deaths.
Solar thermal that stores energy in molten salt sounds like a cool technology that can drastically reduce the need for batteries. You could probably set up large solar thermal plants in the Sahara and power Europe via HVDC lines without needing many batteries.
Now look at some of the figures in this slide deck:
https://www.svensktnaringsliv.se/Bilder_och_dokument/mattias...
(in particular, slide 3, showing rate of added generation/year for various countries, comparing nuclear to wind+solar+geo+bio energy, compared to the needed rate of addition of carbon-neutral energy to hit 2 deg C warming goals.) These data are also sourced from the BP statistical review and the World Bank.
If you trust that information, evaluate for yourself whether or not we can reach 80% penetration of wind and solar in time to avoid anything short of catastrophic warming.
If your response is to extrapolate current trends in cost reductions for wind and particularly solar, please bear in mind that there are no indefinite exponential growth processes in the real world where transfers of matter and energy are concerned, only processes that show logistic growth. And we can't necessarily predict when we'll reach the plateau phase of logistic growth.
What I conclude from that, personally, is that we shouldn't gamble on continued trends in solar and wind adoption to get us to decarbonization.
Adding nuclear is more expensive than wind/solar _right now_. Not in a hypothetical future but as of this very moment. We know because the UK government has decided to subsidise a new nuclear power plant as a low carbon must run for the future. That is on track for generating electricity in 2025. So I'm not exactly buying the "added capacity per year" stats there as terribly relevant for now.
China is ramping up investments in renewables (including crucial grid strengthening measures) and hasn't approved a nuclear power station in two years (as of beginning of this year, I haven't heard if it has resumed building them now).
Again, I'm not ruling out that nuclear has a role to play. But most of the lobbying for nuclear seems to be based in an instinctive dislike of wind+solar rather than in facts. Nuclear is terribly expensive and there really is a waste problem (even if CO2 is clearly the more severe problem).
> Adding nuclear is more expensive than wind/solar _right now_
Indeed, wind and solar can produce power very cheaply nowadays, which is awesome. We should definitely build more of them. OTOH, due to their variable nature, their value to the grid reduces as their penetration increases, so it's a race of declining costs vs declining value due to increasing penetration.
Nuclear, being somewhat dispatchable, doesn't suffer from this.
Given the magnitude of the climate crisis, IMHO we should build about every low-carbon source we can, as fast as we can. Including wind, solar, and yes, nuclear.
> China is ramping up investments in renewables (including crucial grid strengthening measures) and hasn't approved a nuclear power station in two years (as of beginning of this year, I haven't heard if it has resumed building them now).
Additional investment in transmission lines and sector coupling is politically more viable and cheaper, and already that is stalled. So I'd rather push for that. (Plus we avoid a massive scale waste problem). Let existing ones run as long as possible, and if China or other countries want to go for the nuclear option, great! I'm simply objecting to the idea that that's the only/easiest/optimal option.
The variability of renewables is of course a well studied problem [1] and exactly why, after a certain point, we need transmission capacity (or, more expensive, local storage). The variability averages out on large scales.
Honestly, I don’t even like nuclear power. I just see it’s track record in expanding availability of carbon neutral energy sources. To me, going all in on solar and wind and potentially running into scaling issues down the line after abandoning nuclear energy seems more risky than the waste issue in nuclear power. Also, as I noted in another reply, I think we need a carbon tax to correct our accounting for the different energy sources. After that, if we start lots of different experiments and find that there really are no issues scaling wind and solar, I will be overjoyed at being proven wrong.
A global carbon tax in 1990 would have avoided a lot of the mess we find ourselves in. As it is we don't have the luxury of implementing one. Even something as weak as the Paris agreement hinges on one election in the US. A globally enforceable carbon tax is much much less feasible than universal cheap fusion power.
That said, we are in the middle of the experiment you are talking about. Renewables are cheaper now than new nuclear, despite nuclear having received a massively larger amount of subsidies over the years, there are still many parts of the world that are building nuclear so it's not like we're losing the technology, but really, there doesn't currently seem to be a good reason for building new nuclear.
Let me put it another way, a relatively small island like Ireland is going to be capable of going 100% wind/solar relatively soon. They are not strongly connected to the EU grid. Smaller disconnected islands already have gone 100% renewable. So we will have plenty [1] of test cases of increasing size as we ramp up renewables. Conveniently, electricity is also much more expensive on small islands, so it's also economical to test every technology you want to bring to maturity there first.
If we find that beyond a certain size it doesn't work we'll have a decade of warning before we hit that wall with the big continental size grids.
You make good points. I just don’t think we have the luxury of leaving ourselves in a position where burning fossil fuels might remain more economical than carbon-neutral alternatives. A carbon tax seems the only way to get around that. I agree that a carbon tax remains unlikely, which is why I spend most of my days in a depressed and anxious haze for the future :)
But maybe a group like the Citizen’s Climate Lobby can pull something off (they suggest using the revenue of the tax as a monthly dividend for all citizens. Never underestimate the power of a monthly bribe in generating consensus in the American public).
My bet is on pursuing everything that gets us closer to decarbonization, but it appears there is the most potential in the immediate future for fission. The challenge there is of course economics, which is why I think we need a carbon tax to add the future impact of climate change into our accounting for various technologies.
Not anti nuclear or anything, but you really want a large share of wind+solar. Less hard to handle waste and cheaper. Once we are approaching 80% wind+solar we can discuss how to best deal with the difficult remaining 20% (load shifting, expanded transmission grids, storage, CCX and Carbon2Gas gas plants and nuclear are all options that are possibly going to play a role).