It looks like there may be a typo with the estimated year of deployment in Ontario: the estimate is likely for 2028, not 2018.
The article was published on July 11, 2022, but opens with: "Saskatchewan and Ontario have each chosen GE-Hitachi as the supplier of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which could be deployed in the Prairie province by the 2030s and in Ontario by 2018." Then, the article concludes with: "GEH and Ontario plan to construct up to four 300 MWe small module reactors, with the first coming online by 2028."
A separate source by The Canadian Press [0] also reflects an estimate of 2028 for Ontario: "The governments of Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Alberta have put forward a nuclear plan that they say will transition them toward cleaner energy. The provinces’ energy ministers agreed today to a joint plan for small modular reactors, with the first 300-megawatt plant to be built in Darlington, Ont., by 2028."
There is a push by conservative Canadian politicians in Ontario and Saskatchewan to use Uranium.
Saskatchewan wants to have a mining contract. While Doug Ford of Ontario, wants to maintain the energy monopoly in the province, and has actively torn down recently completed and functional wind farm projects.
I would gather that you will be hearing less about this after Doug Ford leaves.
While I also hate Ford and think he's a national embarrassment, 60% of Ontario's power comes from 3 nuclear power plants: Bruce, Darlington and Pickering. We're happy with our nuclear [1]. We'd be happy with wind and solar too - but substantially the entire Ontario grid is already renewable. 92% zero-carbon power. [2]
100,000 years supply is dissolved in the ocean. Breeder technology, and (thorium fuel cycle) are pretty well understood at this point. In fact, CANDU reactors widely deployed already support thorium fuel cycle. The reason we don't use them is because with all the uranium available, it's not necessary.
We could say the same about lithium supplies. It turns out 'mining' something measured in the parts per billion is enormously damaging to environments and quite expensive to the point of impracticality
Early stages, but current state of the art involves putting fabric out that captures the uranium passively. [1]
> Mining of underground uranium has environmental challenges not encountered with extracting it from the oceans. And Wai says the fibers, which have affinity for more heavy metals than just uranium, can likely be used one day to clean up toxic waterways themselves. He says the fibers have potential to extract vanadium, an expensive metal used in large scale batteries, from the oceans instead of mining it from the ground.
Yes, filtering ocean water for material is a well known technique. You need a massive throughput of ocean water for a small output and you also filter salts, other metals, polymers, and sea life. You must further refine those materials to get the stuff you want. You also change the ph of the filtered water in a way that would be disastrous if reinjected, and you consume filter media quickly. That all adds up to a huge waste and massive ecological damage.its simply not practical at scale.
I'm curious why you think deploying some of these fabrics would change the pH of the ocean? There are geological processes which replenish dissolved uranium in the ocean per the article I linked. I haven't seen any particular waste or sustainability concerns. The nice thing about uranium is that it's so incredibly energy dense that you don't really need to pull out all that much. I'm not ready to be so defeatist.
I defer to the researcher.
> "We have chemically modified regular, inexpensive yarn, to convert it into an adsorbent which is selective for uranium, efficient and reusable," said Chien Wai, president of LCW Supercritical Technologies. "PNNL's capabilities in evaluating and testing the material, have been invaluable in moving this technology forward."
Surprisingly not really. The cost of fissile material is extremely small relative to the cost of generated electricity. Raw uranium contributes $0.0015/kWh to the cost of nuclear power. In breeders it’s $0.000015/kWh. The article I linked suggested that even today sweater extraction costs just double what mining costs, so 3/10th of a cent per kWh.
This is why we don’t use breeder reactors right now. The cost of uranium is a rounding error relative to the value of the generated electricity.
"Suggested cost" is speculative. We won't know what it will really cost to scale until we actually start doing it.
There are also reasons to use breeders beyond fuel cost, such as dramatically decreasing the amount of waste and the time the waste is hazardous; both are reduced by 100x each IIRC.
This is from the 2020 IAEA world's uranium resources report [0];
"Meeting high case demand requirements through 2040 would consume about 28% of the total 2019 identified resource base recoverable at a cost of < USD 130/kgU (USD 50/lb U3O8) and 87% of identified resources available at a cost of < USD 80/kgU (equivalent USD 30/lb U3O8)."
Apply some exponential growth to that, and those allegedly 10.000 years would actually end up looking more like not even 50 years.
The 10,000 years refers to the 4 billion tons dissolved in the ocean. However consider that its possible to dramatically extend the useful life of supplies with breeder reactors - and also to use thorium in existing designs such as the CANDU.
Is that really a problem? I mean technically any energy resource is finite/non-renewable due to second law of thermodynamics. That doesn't mean anything in practice.
Darlington, Bruce and Pickering are reaching EoL and all three together supply 60% of Ontario’s electricity. How do you propose the province replace that amount of supply? The go with solar or wind would mean colossal investments in high tension transmission infrastructure, given the distributed nature of those power sources. We already have appropriate infrastructure in place for nuclear distribution; and the added benefit is that these SMRs can power northern regions as well when fully developped
That links says that (a) they were torn down, complete or incomplete, and (b) the company was paid a (huge!) contract break fee for this, as you would expect.
Yes, apparently they tore down 4 turbines, which is a waste of money.
But if you've ever been to Chatham-Kent you'd notice that there are places where you can do a 360 degree turn and never see fewer than 10 windmills in your field of vision. Ontario has 2,600 wind turbines.
Not to mention a MW of wind is not equivalent to a MW of nuke. If you want wind you need a substantial overbuild that is geographically diverse and the necessary transmission to support that, which will cost as much as the generation itself, or you need storage which again costs as much as the generation itself. I am all for wind power, but only when we realistically consider the real world engineering constraints involved.
Obviously if you will rely on wind or solar for baseline, you will need to build out storage. And, equally obviously, you don't waste money building out storage you don't yet have capacity to charge up.
You might consider it a trivial observation, but the economic and physical implications are not trivial. They still cost money, and the physics still don't work if you don't consider them. Any discussion of the cost or viability of a generation source must include the cost and viability of augmenting the weaknesses of that source to address these deficiencies. Anything else is wishful thinking at best and magical thinking at worst.
The physics of practical storage have been fully understood and well internalized in civil engineering for centuries: E = Fx. All that remains unclear is which forms will turn out to be cheapest at the time when they need to be built.
What is known now is that costs are falling even faster than did solar and wind, and are already of similar order.
Not a single country with any manufacturing and/or industry [0] to speak of [1], can just casually cut off their main hydrocarbon supplier without major consequences, nor do nuclear reactors replace such resource dependencies.
If Russia stops delivering gas, then ultimately that will translate to a higher German oil demand, as a lot of formerly gas tailored usage will be retooled to oil.
As Russia is sitting on the single largest gas supply on the planet, nearly a quarter of the worlds supply [2]. While with oil there are a few somewhat competitive non-Russian alternatives [3]
So if Russia's resources will continue to be geopolitically taboo, then a lot of Europe will shift back to oil instead of gas.
You're right, they aren't. Yes, thanks to decades of power-lobbying, viable wind and solar energy were both kept as low-key and forgettable as possible - and shut-down whenever possible. Apart from the vast sums of excessive money involved, lurking in the background was the fearful and sure knowledge that everyone, everwhere had potential and certain access to endless power ... without any constraints or arm-twisting politics.
Yes ... wind and solar ARE in a different universe ... one where all of humanity can and will survive and be free of the pernicious influence of centralized energy overlords, and their wars.
I live in the hotbed of Ontario wind power, the intersection of Chatham-Kent and Windsor-Essex, and if all those windmills only account for 140MW I am very curious where the space would come from to even reach 1000MW. It already feels like they're everywhere.
Exactly, wind and solar are massive environmental disrupters, huge amounts of land and habitat destroyed for small unreliable gains. Nuclear on the other hand is turned into the bogey man of clean energy.
Where do all the out of commission solar panels end up?
Definitely not as carefully stored as the nuclear waste.
Panels are recycled now. Wind and solar don't destroy habitats and don't take up "huge amounts of land". Wind turbines take up negligible land that can be used for other purposes. Agrivoltaics is showing you can even do this with solar and it boosts some crop outputs. I really don't get the renewable hate. It has its place in the energy mix.
Yes, PV waste isn't being addressed a lot right now, but research is ramping up alongside production on these. Alternatives to Si like perovskites may end up easier to recycle as well. Also, PV does produce waste, but it has the advantage of not being radioactive. That isn't to say it's not harmful, just quite a bit less volatile as nuclear. All in all, I do think nuclear should be reintroduced, but it has it's own issues, especially in the US due to construction difficulties (permits, safety, etc). In comparison, PV benefits greatly from economies of scale, and can be deployed at utility scale or in distributed micro-grids, which gives it more granularity then all-or-nothing nuclear.
You can lie, and lie, and lie. You might even get somebody to believe you, but it says more about you than about the topic.
Wind and solar are not, in fact, environmental disrupters. Waste panels are not an environmental hazard, and are in fact extremely valuable. Anyone not warehousing their dead panels is an idiot.
Nukes are lately the darling of big coal, because they guarantee another ten years of sales that in total exceed the cost of that much solar generation capacity. Spent on solar, it would displace the coal immediately.
Colossal investment in transmission infrastructure would be a much better bet than investing in nuclear. It would pay off the way that colossal investments in highways, railroads and fiber have. Betting on nuclear is like choosing circuit switching over packet switching for your network. A fear driven anxiety about reliability that prevents people from understanding that a new way of doing things is possible.
""For this government to rip up contracts and literally rip wind turbines out of the ground is a huge waste of money and makes absolutely no sense," said Green party Leader Mike Schreiner.""
Well, yes. $230m to prevent power being generated, either for ideological reasons or bribes.
At this point in time the cost is Wind: .75/kilowatt hour Nuclear: 0.05/kilowatt hour
Makes sense for a lot of reasons. The most costly energy was the fixed rate 75c per hour that was for ideological reasons going to transform Ontario into the solar power maker of the world. That went to California then and now China.
Building new dams in the west is almost entirely unfeasible. Too much environmental impact sensitivity (maybe a good thing) and NIMBYisim (not so good)
Manitoba Hydro spends a lot of marketing money on making renewable resources attractive, specifically Hydro Generating Stations. Isn't the newest one from 2018?
I have noticed that bad things' energy output is measured in watts, and good things' energy output is measured in "homes powered". It's probably taught in journalism school nowadays, it's pervasive.
I just came back from a few days up in Grey-Bruce and there are signs all over the place angry about the proposed NWMO waste diposal site up in Teeswater there. Very divided community about the issue. (Then again the same rough area or just east of it was extremely bitter about wind turbines some years ago, too, so can't please everyone...)
This article is specifically about Canadian provinces installing these reactors. Having a good solution to the waste problem is a large part of that decision.
The calculus will surely be different for somewhere else that doesn't have those solutions in place.
Thanks for that link. Just got back from Ontario, I'm really surprised that wind generation is so low, they have a lot of wind turbines in south western Ontario. On my hour long drive to the beach I could almost always see one. I saw lots of solar as well.
Yeah, southern Ontario is super flat and mostly farmland. It's a great place for wind to set up. Solar as well, but solar takes up so much land that would be better used as farmland.
Unfortunately, a lot of the local communities consider the wind turbines eyesores and the current Premier is against them for that reason.
there are too many wind turbines concentrated in a small area in Chatham-Kent. I agree with the community’s sentiment though i am in the pro-renewable energy camp. They look horrible because there are too many of them.
Maybe. There's an open question around whether hydro can handle that much more variable load. Climate change is changing rain patterns, which changes the parameters around hydro dams.
Look at Texas- they only fall apart 1-2 days per year, but that's enough that it's a crisis every time. How confident are we that our hydro dams can sustain us in the worst case every year or decade?
I think to achieve it, we would need to see financial incentives, direct or indirect, to have everyone buying up power batteries for their homes, reducing the variable load. Maybe price incentives like nearly free electricity at night and extra costs during the day, etc.
People in Texas will be conserving power for most of the summer to "protect the grid". There's a good chance the power won't fail spectacularly like it did in the winter, but their lives are impacted.
> it's still failing if they're having as many blackouts as they currently are.
We've had zero blackouts where I live in Texas. Not saying they don't exist, but they haven't been happening in my area and people seem to be very hyperbolic about it.
> We've had zero blackouts where I live in Texas. Not saying they don't exist, but they haven't been happening in my area and people seem to be very hyperbolic about it.
For most of the state, there appear to be no blackouts so far. Be careful and safe. I'd have some sort of back up plan for AC if I were you. This heat sucks. A few links for someone's edification and perusal.
Oh, to be clear, I'm all in favour of hydroelectricity. I grew up beside a hydro dam with many neighbours who worked there. It's great stuff.
My concern is that we'd be talking about perhaps doubling the variable output needed from the existing system if we turn off the gas plants. Instead of needing 1 MW from them on a hot summer day, we suddenly need to ask them to provide 2 MW. Maybe it's doable, but it's asking a lot.
Imagine you've got a proposed project that will double the peak demand on my database. I say "What's the problem? The database works fine. There's no need to upgrade the hardware!". Same idea.
And climate change just adds more uncertainty, because droughts and floods are more common- while hydro does best with a steady input of water. I'm certain Quebec will be fine, because it's not planning to try to double the peak load on its plants.
Agreed. While climate change is a real threat, I don't think many people realize just how much water is in Canada, and Quebec in particular. Snow/rainfall patterns certainly can fluctuate, but Canada experiencing severe water shortages would mean the rest of the world is long past the crisis stage.
Much of Texas is in severe drought. Southern Ontario, where the bulk of the hydro is produced, is also in moderate drought. Quebec is only expiring a small area of drought way up in the north where there is no human activity. Not exactly comparable.
They looked at the price tags of these reactors vs solar and wind, and chose the lowest number, fine. But I've never heard of a nuclear project coming in at under multiple times its original estimate, and taking a decade or more longer than expected. Has any new nuclear power come online anywhere since Fukushima?
Olkiluoto isn't fully online yet, that's expected to happen in December after it didn't pass trials and required repairs. It would then be 13 years late and cost about four times what was planned. The other two are looking like they're going in a similar direction.
Thirteen years late and four times over budget for the first new plant in Finland in 42 years. I bet if they build a second one, it won’t take so long nor be so over-budget.
In the UK, the Hinkley Point C project is over-budget and late, partly because they had problems with their initial concrete pours that necessitated exceptionally costly and time-consuming rebuilds. But as Hinkley gets closer to completion, the lessons learned are being transferred to Sizewell C, another EDF plant. [1]
The world needs these large nuclear plants and we can’t just give up because the first few constructed went over budget and took too long.
The lesson learned is there are sizeable overruns to be reaped on Sizewell, too, and not to be passed up.
The world is notably worse for these projects diverting money away from renewables that would have already been displacing carbon emissions for a decade by now.
> Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy, so pity we don't build it better.
In what way? For the price that they actually cost after construction you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar, and a CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over.
All so you can make your energy infrastructure beholden to one fuel supplier where your country is not allowed to produce any yourself. Then you have to find somewhere to put the waste for millenia.
And that only if you're on the short list of countries that the US, China, or France will even sell fuel to.
>CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over
None of this have ever happened beyond "research" projects at extremely small scale. You can't take nuclear "actually cost after construction" - which in some countries like Korea or China is maybe 20% more than original estimations - and apply assumption that anything of this is actually able to scale, not even talking about cost of this.
The price difference between wind energy when the supply is high and nuclear when the supply is low is well over 10 times here in northern Europe.
If I can choose the time and place for when to do the trade, I would make a huge profit trading 2 units of energy and getting 1 unit back later at my specified time and place. The top price is around 40cent per kwh when the wind is still and demand is at its peak, compared to ~3c kwh when the wind is at the maximum production and demand is at the lowest. paying 6c worth of wind power and getting 40c when I specific it would be massive profit.
Green hydrogen if burned for energy would cost about 3-10 times that of nuclear per kwh. In the future that cost might go down but for now that is a bit (which is why no one are producing green hydrogen in order to produce energy). Again, if you are willing to sell green hydrogen for the price of nuclear, eating the loss, then sign me up. I will happy buy that and sell it for minimum 3x of what I pay for it since there are plenty of industries that want energy when demand is high and supply is low.
The cost of energy is not determined by how much it cost to produce. It is determined by the time and place it is delivered. 1 unit of energy produced today is not fungible for 1 unit of energy produced tomorrow. Only energy produced at the same time can be evaluated based on how much they cost to produce.
Storage that has a reliable 365 charge/discharge cycles each year can be economical viable, especially when the discharge window of peak price is just a few hours. Solar + lithium battery work great in countries where the primary source of energy can be solar every day of the year.
Wind power doesn't work like that. Instead of a daily pattern of high and low supply, you get random amount of weeks and days of high supply followed by random amount of weeks and days of low supply.
Storage need to discharge in order to generate profits. If you get 30-50 discharge cycles each year, then those periods need to provide profits for the cost of 365 days of operations and it also need to repay the original investment.
One way to get around this is with subsidies. This is how some fossil fuel plants operate, called "reserve energy". When the wind blow they don't run the generator, but they still get paid through tax money. Then they start the engines when the wind isn't blowing and demand exceed supply. This scheme helps to reduce the peak price in northern Europe, through obviously it isn't really that cheap. It mostly just hide the true price behind subsidies.
Yes, the fact that such a strong incentive exists, and yet it hasn't been done, shows that cost is so much that even a 10x price difference isn't enough to pay for it.
I'm pretty sure it's done quite frequently. It's a pretty simple battery system with--apparently--an 80+% round-trip efficiency to it.
The biggest problem is getting permission to move that much water around. I live next to a lake and shudder at the regulatory hurdles I'd encounter building something like this. There'd be at least 4 government agencies before I even negotiated to sell to the public utility.
It would be obviously stupid to build storage that there is not enough renewable power to charge up from, yet. So, its not having been built yet only proves money is better spent on generating capacity.
Makes no difference what generates it. OP said that power prices vary by 10x from peak to trough. If you charge from the grid when cheap you can make 10x per cycle selling it back.
Can you show any sources for "same price = double the capacity in <renewable> + CAES storage"?
That's a lofty claim and I have heard CAES storage at economic scales is still unsolved, else we'd see a rocketship company in the space. If you do know of a stealthy rocketship here, who is it?
The reason you don't see "rocketship" investment is because the problem isn't hard enough, no matter how well you solve it you wouldn't be anywhere close to virtual monopoly. But despite that, hydrostor.ca got an investment of a quarter billion earlier this year, and they already started projects for A-CAES facilities in the GWh range (comparable to smaller pumped hydro) when their funding was less than a tenth of that (I suppose actual projects wouldn't be included in that funding, I think they see themselves as a project specialist, not as an owner/operator even if some/most/all current projects seem to be subsidiaries, perhaps a bit like spacex/starlink if you like space analogies).
Finland’s low population density means the amount of economically viable wind is more than enough to meet annual power demand.
Production increased from 2.3 TWH in 2015 to 7.8 TWH in 2020, and capacity keeps increasing jumping from 2.3GW in 2020 to 3.3GW in 2021. And that recent growth has been without subsides.
The point was the resource is available and cheaper than any alternative, not that they are actually going to say replace everything else.
Wind really scales best with hydro as you only get so much rain per year, but you have a great deal of flexibility when you release it. As Finland has a great deal of hydro they can make use of plenty of wind.
Heeeeyy, don't make reasonable judgment. This is solar and wind we're talking about, the solution to every climate problem. Even if there's no wind or no sunlight
you are aware that you are posting on an article about Ontario and Saskatchewan, correct?
How about you go review the tables showing how little solar energy these provinces receive in the winter?
So when we need energy to heat our homes and power our lights, our solar output is also greatly reduced?
Solar may be great further south, where it is sunny all year round, but in the north we need reliable power all year long, including our cold and dark winters.
It doesn't get cold and snow here for no reason, it is caused by the reduction in solar energy we receive.
So the best place in canada for solar and one of the better places. Where capacity factor in mid winter is still above 10% and cost per installed watt of output capacity during mid winter is less than the present value of the sticker cost of this nuclear project (excluding running costs and overruns and associated infrastructure and security costs) which won't even be running during the most important decade for stopping climate change? That Saskatchewan?
this will be the case when we transition from natural gas for heating. as it currently stands, electrical demand--with the exception of Quebec--generally is dramatically lower in the winter than the summer.
Using rather bullish on wind+solar+storage https://model.energy, to get stable baseline we need overbuilding of 10x the output power, so 2x + storage gets us nowhere, at least for Polish weather and sunlight data.
> you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar
And the capacity factor of wind is ~33%, which means you need ~3 times as much wind as nuclear. The capacity factor of solar is ~25%, so you need four times as much:
You've only quoted half of what you're replying to. You can get the solar, and the wind, and the storage, all for less than the cost of building nuclear once accounting for cost overruns.
It's also with noting that nuclear has a higher capacity factor, but it's not 100%.
And that's priced into the LCOE which is a tiny fraction of nuclear -- especially once you factor in the costs of security and infrastructure, and the public being left holding the ball during decomissioning and waste storage, and of being the USA's and the next Kochs' patsy because now your entire energy infrastructure depends on them for fuel.
And then LCOE isn't even the right metric, because what matters is the CO2 produced by 2040, not the CO2 produced between 2040 and 2100 as we have to solve this now, or the world will be too unstable to finish a nuc.ear reactor, let alone run one until decomissioning. This makes the LCOE of renewables a little higher, but for nuclear it is between 10x and infinity times the cost per unit carbon.
Was also the first thing that I noted. They're comparing fictional nuclear prices with real renewable prices.
One more thing though that makes this calculation even more ridiculous: They're comparing today's wind+solar prices with a tech that's supposed to be available in the 2030s. Like, they're assuming wind+solar won't progress in the next 10 years. That's... a very unrealistic thing to assume.
Bear in mind that those known renewable prices are always including the little asterisk "* prices only computed when sun is shining and wind is blowing".
Renewable prices are computed as : "I put $XXX and got this much electricity during the year, so price per watt is $YYY -> renewable is cheap"
That calculation is not reflective of the reality of the needs. People - and anyone in charge of maintaining a power grid - think like so :
"I need YYY watts of electricity now, how much $XXX do I need to put down to get it ?"
That amount is massively higher in price per watt with renewable, because renewable can sometime works at >90% of their potential, and provide cheap and abundant electricity or they can decide to work at < 1% and be completely useless. And I have never seen anyone advocating for renewable that is willing to say "Please do cut my home line to save electricity when it's dark and windless - even in November - if batteries are low. I think it's better than building reliable backup supply".
Nuclear is the preferred choice here because you are going to get electricity in those situation at the push of a button. Maybe prices will be higher than the price per watt of renewable, but it will provide electricity when no amount of wind farms and solar panels are going to do the job. Meaning when prices of renewable are approaching infinity. In that case, expensive nuclear is still cheaper than failing renewable. Batteries can help renewable, but no one in anywhere near the ability to store energy for a whole country for weeks in cold countries, when days are very short and wind can just decide to stop blowing. There are other options than nuclear - like the usual coal, gas and oil, but they have their own problems - like CO2 emission. Other options include geothermal and hydro but they have ecological aspects as well, and tend to be more expensive than nuclear.
> but no one in anywhere near the ability to store energy for a whole country for weeks in cold countries, when days are very short and wind can just decide to stop blowing
Sure they do, the storage is just called hydroelectricity. There are parts of the world (eg Tasmania) with months of energy storage.
For the realised cost of nuclear and construction timeframe of nuclear, you could build a resilient supply with a distributed transmission grid and a mix of batteries and pumped hydro.
Did you pick Tasmania because it is just about exactly on the other side of the planet of Ontario? Are you going to pump the hydro through the earths core? Months of energy storage for ~500.000 Tasmanians is like a day or two for the ~15 million Ontarians.
Actually the article mentions, that solar is running at 40% capacity on average (according to industry data)
And it's STILL cheaper than nuclear watt for watt.
That being said, I think nuclear power is a necessary part of a sustainable energy mix, because it is much easier to satisfy ground load with it, and you don't have storage issues. (But this article is stupid at best and disingenuous at worst)
Yes, I always find it odd that people act like solar being cheap at noon matters at midnight. We might as well say coal is free underground so renewables are a non-starter.
We need energy at a specific place and time. Renewables don't meet those needs. We get them where the weather permits when the weather permits.
The _really_ interesting point is: They still come up short (or close enough that it doesn't make a difference). And that's the most optimistic thing proponents are willing to come up with.
You also have to consider distribution infrastructure. Currently, the Ontario grid is built to hand distribution from majority nuclear sources. When replacing nuclear reactors with wind and solar, it changes the centralized nature of the grid’s power source. The government then needs to invest big bucks into re-orienting the grid towards distributed distribution. Given that would mean going from one extreme to another, it’s no question why the government would feather replace nuclear with nuclear
You can be skeptical all you want but given that most of Ontario's power already comes from Nuclear, and Ontario operates the largest nuclear facility in the world by both reactors and output, you are yelling into the wind.
Right, unlike wind and solar, the predicted cost of a nuclear SMR is not based on real-world data, you have to take the word of the vendor who is selling it to you.
There are actually quite a lot of them, the AIEA maintains the PRIS database: https://pris.iaea.org/pris/
You will see a lot of them being connected to the grid since.
Plus you could get those renewable systems online tomorrow (or get them much much cheaper in 2030), vs nuclear where you pay today and then just hope it doesn't massively overrun time and budget...
1. Nuclear is probably not the lowest number. See Lazard's analysis of levelized energy costs:
https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
on the whole / on the average, Nuclear in 20221 is $167 / MWh while solar is $36 and wind is $38. Now, granted, maybe these mini-reactors are cheaper than the average, and maybe solar and wind are effectively more expensive etc. - but I doubt it's that much of a difference; and the figures quoted are not "levelized costs", so they may be neglecting various factors, such as maintenance of older reactors or waste storage (which needs to happen for hunderds or thousands of years).
2. The reason you yourself gave - "over schedule, over budget" : Even if you want to choose what's cheapest, it can't be what's cheapest as proposed, but what's cheapest as projected to cost.
3. Price is not everything. On the one hand, there's the question of availability of the renewables (e.g. you might need some storage as well); and on the other, there are the grave safety concerns from nuclear reactors.
4. Price is not everything. II : Greenhouse gas emissions. Nuclear is not "emission-free", since you need to count emissions due to Uranium-mining and processing, not just the electricity generating reaction. IIANM, there are significant emissions to take into account as well relative to solar, wind, geothermal etc.
Mini nuclear reactors make a lot of sense especially in the areas with a lot of electricity-hungry industry, Polish copper producer KGHM is planning to build such reactors for their own needs (they use 1 GW a year) [1].
It will make their operations cheaper, saving on transfer losses alone on their scale is significant gain.
Will they provide the tritium required to bridge the gap to fusion? Canada provides almost all the world supply, but it's from stockpiles iirc. Once fusion is up and working, it can generate its own tritium, but ITERs tritium generation experiment has been massively scaled back, so we need more from nuclear reactors.
Canada's *deuterium-moderated* reactors are responsible for the world's tritium supply. This isn't that; this is the wrong type of fission reactor.
- "If not for CANDU reactors, D-T fusion would be an unattainable dream. “The luckiest thing to happen for fusion in the world is that CANDU reactors produce tritium as a byproduct,” Abdou says. Many nuclear reactors use ordinary water to cool the core and “moderate” the chain reaction, slowing neutrons so they are more likely to trigger fission. CANDU reactors use heavy water, in which deuterium takes the place of hydrogen, because it absorbs fewer neutrons, leaving more for fission. But occasionally, a deuterium nucleus does capture a neutron and is transformed into tritium."
- "If too much tritium builds up in the heavy water it can be a radiation hazard, so every so often operators send their heavy water to the utility company Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to be “detritiated.” OPG filters out the tritium and sells off about 100 grams of it a year, mostly as a medical radioisotope and for glow-in-the-dark watch dials and emergency signage. “It’s a really nice waste-to-product story,” says Ian Castillo of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, which acts as OPG’s distributor."
I think there's probably quite a few "commercially valuable" isotopes (since Tritium is just good old Hydrogen with extra neutrons) that have similar low yearly yield, but I would honestly expect most of them are for medical or industrial imaging or upstream inputs to those industries.
In some cases the half lives of the isotopes are so short they literally have to be produced on demand at a facility nearby, which usually means they can only be produced/used by facilities with their own equipment for producing them, or they are colocated on some sort of larger campus where they happen to have a suitable isotope producing accelerator as their neighbour.
Technetium-99m is one of the most commonly used radioisotopes for medical imaging and has a half life of just over 6 hours https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium-99m so the usual mechanism is to ship the material that decays into Technetium-99m because the Molybdenum-99 parent isotope has a half life of 66 hours so lives long enough you can actually ship usable amounts around. So while this one is obviously not a low yield isotope, it really shows how the half life of the isotope can be worked around to make an an isotope a useful product.
Its a little hard to give simple numbers for a lot of these since they get measured by "activity" in Becquerels (Bq) as that's the useful metric based on how they get used, so giving "mass" would involve a lot of math and some guesses based on how efficient supply chains are (since you might produce twice as much and just "eat the difference" letting it decay if you have no other good way to get it to the user faster) but its a very fascinating industry.
Theres some fascinating information about how this sort of stuff gets made https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1340_web.p... if you want to find out just how "fiddly" it can be to do chemistry with elements that might just decide to change what they are while you're working with them.
I was going to say rhodium, but it's actually 30 tonnes a year, so quite a lot.
Most of the synthetic elements (like technetium, it's in the name) probably have similar or far lower yields to tritium since they all are produced by transmutation and that requires monstrous amounts of energy.
Not an element, botulinum toxin has billions of doses made, but the total production is well under a gram.
The entire premise the founders of nuclear energy wanted was a cycle of fission byproducts into other useful things. Nuclear waste wasn’t. The war on nuclear proliferation scuttled that.
Eh, fusion is two or three major construction projects away. We're very confident that ITER and DEMO will work. Of course funding has been abysmal, so they might be overtaken by projects that, for example, use better superconductors.
That being said, fusion will come too late to do something about climate change, so we should be building renewables as quickly as we can, and, if we have too much money, perhaps add a bit of nuclear.
Well, many people argue that _fission_ is not commercially viable without socializing at least some of the cost, and yet we're reading articles about new fission plants. If you think about it, fossil fuels aren't commercially viable either, a large part of the costs (global warming...) are socialized.
Coal, oil and Natural gas recieve 5.9 TRILLION dollars a YEAR according to the IMF. That's a lot of hydro, wind, wave, solar and nuclear power potential.
The question with fusion I never see answered is: "How do we convert the heat to electricity?"
If the answer is steam then fusion is as dead as coal and nuclear. Or is there some solid state like solar or very non-complex working method like a wind turbine which is the target?
The answer is always steam turbines, because nothing else approaches the practical efficiency of steam turbines when it comes to converting heat to electrical power.
But that is the thing. Pure steam turbine based power have been dead since the 80's with the advent of the combined cycle gas turbine power plants. You get pure mechanical power from the gas turbine and then a tiny steam side to harness the last efficiency gains.
That cost difference is the reason coal has died out, it's simply not economical to run a large steam turbine.
I agree with you in general that it is unlikely that fusion will be cost competitive, but the last time I checked we still got a very large fraction of our power from coal, despite the steam.
Yes, there are financial structural reasons coal is still used. They amount to institutionalized sunk-cost fallacy. Those will take decades to root out.
Sorry to break it to you, but coal is still the largest electricity source with 36.7%. Over the last 20 years its output went from 5.8PW to 10PW (yes, that's petawatts). So, nowhere near "has died out".
I should definitely have prefaced it with the caveat regarding availability of natural gas infrastructure. Gas is cheaper, when you have the infrastructure in place. Less developed countries does not have that luxury, and therefore choose coal because it was pretty much the only thing available until the current renewable boom.
Today we also have LNG, but that seems to mostly be about energy independence. Russia can't simply turn off the tap for Lithuania or Poland, because they have a more pricy alternative method of delivery.
For reference see the dramatic decrease of coal in the US in favor of natural gas.
The pace of change in the last fifteen years has been nonlinear.
Let's not take it for granted, for sure, but let's maybe dial back on the "fusion is always 20 years away" jokes. There isn't a bigger win for civilization than fusion, leaving aside unknowns: immortality might be possible, fusion was our only source of energy until the discovery of fission.
There were no jokes, a comment said that "let's plan our energy generation assuming it doesn't materialize, we can always recalibrate if it does".
I hope you will allow people still being sceptical and cautious about counting on fusion for at least another 20-30 years.
The progress that the physicists and engineers made is tremendous and I appreciate everyone's sacrifices to make fusion a viable energy source.
However, it isn't one yet and likely it won't be for decades. There are still plenty of engineering challenges, and once those are solved, comes the economical, bureaucratical challenges (just take a look at how bad most countries are in building new fission reactors).
Both can be true at the same time.
I don't know about you, but I am planning my life with the assumption that the energy I use won't be coming from fusion for the rest of it (and I am around 30).
Interesting how it excludes the most promising fusion start ups, especially Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
What is the point of addressing the challenges fusion face when the best contenders are completely ignored?
CFS are betting that the new breed of super conducting magnets(REBCO) will make fusion commercially viable. Beyond that, their reactor design is basically from the 50s.
Tried and true design + modern materials = success?
See Prof. Dennis Whyte, one of the of cofounders of CFS explain why he believes that fusion is coming sooner than you might think.
There will be no commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power. It would cost >10x fission, which is already not competitive, and gets less so every day.
Total worldwide annual production of tritium is under 10 kg.
It is just barely possible Helion could succeed someday.
Not sure why you were downvoted. As a Canadian I’ve never heard the expression northern provinces, because that’s nonsense they basically all start at the border.
While this is correct, I can understand any confusion. I've never seen a Canadian address form that said "Province or Territory: _______". I'm pleased if a form switches from asking for 'State' to 'Province' when the country is changed.
> As a comparison with other non-emission options, BC Hydro’s 1,100 Mwe Site C dam is expected to cost $16 billion.
I get that this is coming from a website whose name contains "investor". As combustible based options go, I think nuclear is the least worse, and a site-C equivalent in Sask is probably not even an option.
I find it dangerous to a) put nuclear and hydro/wind in the same "non-emission" category, especially when nuclear does emit radioactive solid waste and the occasional radioactive cloud when they go boom, b) to reduce the comparison to a price-tag, where indeed nuclear will win
IMHO the lie is to pretend that hydro is safe or has a low impact when it comes to greenhouse gasses. Dam failures have killed many more people than nuclear even if you throw in the intentional nuclear events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hydro would be almost as good as nuclear when it comes to climate costs if they would clear the reservoir footprint before flooding, but they do not and the decaying plant matter in the flood zone adds a greenhouse gas cost that takes decades for the dam to counter in “clean” energy.
Bury the wood is one idea. I've recently heard that salt water is also good for this. This is why mangrove forests are 4 or 5 times better carbon sinks than rainforests.
If too expensive to clear the land currently and so currently it doesn't get done, the economic value could be at least slightly improved by logging the area for the wood if it is mandated to have to clear it first.
The difficult thing is all types of power have their own externalities. Dams flood large areas of land in normal operation and can potentially collapse. Wind power is intermittent and can have 'calm spell', takes up a large area and is generally just really big. Nuclear has difficulties around permanent waste disposal, and possible risks of accident and proliferation.
All of these factors and more (except cost) are on different scales and dimensions, so comparing them requires human value judgements - inevitably people disagree.
Nuclear power also have calm spells. France is enduring one, with over 50% of their nuclear capacity stopped due to manteinance and other issues (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/business/a-french-nuclear...), and are expecting blackouts in the next winter if neighbors cannot provide.
Yrs, but that is planned maintainance which can be coordinated with industry and neighbouring countries. You cannot plan for when the wind stops blowing, plus the wind is likely to have stopped in neighbouring countries too. Countries which use primarily wind rely heavily on neighbours with hydroand nuclear.
Planned manteinance? Half power installed under manteinance, some of them for cooling corrosion and leaks, at the same time, in the worst moment in maybe 10 years? And fearing blackouts in six months. Worst planning ever.
As soon as storage for intermitent sources is economically competitive with gas (not nuclear, it already is), nuclear as we know it is done.
As soon as we start building more NPPs thereby training a workforce for building NPPs building costs will go down 10x and renewables as we know it is done.
And local factors--people just assume that if necessary they can drain the reservoir (or greatly lower the level) to run the turbines to cover for a lack in solar/other output, but in the US as soon as you put in a dam you'll get home owners and property owners around the newly created reservoir fighting tooth and nail to maintain high water year round for aesthetics and recreation.
There are ways to minimize this of course, like building giant storage tanks, but dammed rivers are going to (usually) dwarf man mad retention pools.
> I find it dangerous to a) put nuclear and hydro/wind in the same "non-emission" category, especially when nuclear does emit radioactive solid waste and the occasional radioactive cloud when they go boom, b) to reduce the comparison to a price-tag, where indeed nuclear will win
It doesn't emit anything, radioactive waste is captured entirely on the other side. They also don't go boom.
They're in the same category because they're both zero-carbon power. If you want to compare safety, deaths per TWh has nuclear right in the same area as wind and solar - less than rooftop solar.
That’s a good point. Of course installing solar on a rooftop has a small possibility of accident, and the energy produced on a single house is not that big. Multiply and you get … a big number, perhaps? Do you happen to have sources?
Nuclear does not "emit" solid waste, it returns it in nice sealed containers (in small quantities, over a long period of time). When the goal is to minimize environmental impact, it is absolutely fair to class it as "non-emission".
How much noxious chemical waste, and by volume, is produced in the manufacture of the many thousands of solar panels and wind turbines though for the same power?
A bit of an odd response. I neither "like" or "dislike" any "answers" to lifecycle analysis.
What I definitely do not "like" is the dismissal of nuclear by saying "nuclear waste" without considering all the forms of waste associated with other supposedly "greener" solutions.
Solar panels and the stands they are placed are shipped (half way round the world) wrapped in acres of plastic, cardboard and polystyrene for shipping that is then just discarded at worst, and possibly partly recycled at best. Broken wind turbines, which happens frequently, are often just buried, and so on. Digging the raw materials out of the ground and refining them causes waste. Doping chemicals to get the rare earths cause waste. Just because in the West we recycle much of this, doesn't mean that, in the race to the bottom, factories in Asia aren't just dumping this stuff out of sight.
Sure, and we bury spent nuclear fuel and supposedly is a problem according to some groups. If we bury it deep enough, remote enough, and remove access to it, how is it a danger? If the human race loses the ability to read warning signs to stay away, I suspect we've probably lost the ability to tunnel a thousand metres underground as well. It's really not the problem people make it out to be. We have signs around cliffs, electric pylons, and other things with a much higher risk of actual death, and people obey those...
It's like I said in another post, nuclear is held to some mythical higher standard of scrutiny than other forms of energy generation despite it being better in every way except for up-front cost. All the spent nuclear fuel, ever, takes up less volume than the picture in the bbg article.
It seems impossible to get an actual breakdown out of anyone. Every asshole wants to spit out some "number" that makes their favorite solution look good. Nobody wants to give you a breakdown of the environmental cost of various power sources in terms of site prep/construction, continued operation, etc.
Intuition says hydroelectric dam is almost carbon free for a century or more after you build it (not counting watershed disruption). Solar is basically free up front but the panels wear out quick and so the supply chain must run. Nuclear and wind seem to be in the middle with nuclear being closer to the damn and wind being closer to solar. But there is no good way to actually get the numbers and other stuff you need make the comparison.
Hell, even just trying to compute the amount of diesel used per kwh over a given timeline (and this should be a really easy thing to quantify in a demonstrably honest way) is basically impossible because you wind up having to sift through reams and reams of material written by people who are just lying with plausible deniability.
I don't care what my power source is. I just want to be informed. And the amount of lying I have to identify and discard on my way to being informed is too damn high.
> Probably a roughly similar amount to what is created building a nuclear, or any other, power station.
I'd love to see some figures that prove or disprove that. I'm inclined to disagree and say that more waste is produced making solar panels and wind turbines due to the sheer volume of them that are being mass manufactured.
> What's your point?
My point is that everyone talks about nuclear waste, but no one talks about the toxic chemical waste produced the mass manufacture of hundreds of thousands of solar panels and turbines, versus the one-off construction of a few hundred nuclear power stations, and the extraction of a relatively small-by-weight amount of fuel.
Nuclear power is always under minute scrutiny compared to "green" power.
The sheer mass of nukes is revealed by their cost. That cost is for concrete and steel, both with well-documented impact. The cost of solar and wind equipment is concentrated in high-grade material refinement involving very small actual mass.
So, your inclination misleads you, and you seek to similarly mislead others.
The effective opposition to nukes is based on thoroughly rational analysis of costs. Simply, by any rational accounting, nukes cost much more than favored alternatives.
I don't see how nuclear is any more dangerous than any other renewable sources of electricity. The law of conversation of energy dictates that the residual waste energy has to go somewhere for any process. Any and all energy production mechanism are going to cause some disturbance in the natural order of things. It just turns out that the emissions due to "renewable" sources isn't something that does widespread ecological or societal damage. A hydroelectricity plant's "emissions" are in the form of riverbed erosion however, we can optimize around that by putting it in places which minimizes ecological and societal damage. For nuclear, we minimize this damage by placing the waste matter in large indestructible concrete bins.
Well yes, everything emits something. Solar, wind, bananas; they all emit radiation as well. “Non-emission” is short hand for “non-emission of carbon dioxide” or perhaps more generally “greenhouse gases”.
If you’re concerned about human health, nuclear waste disposal is well studied and so are nuclear reactor safety. In fact, these small reactors are designed to be too small to create any catastrophic event in the astronomically unlikely event of a critical malfunction.
It’s odd to me that we all take planes despite the fact historically many have gone boom, and many a life has been lost. Must be something to do with no other viable alternatives…
If a wind turbine catches fire it emits pollutants too. I think we're defining on the (usually reasonable) assumption all goes well and there isn't catastrophic failure.
Site C should not have been built. It is in a relatively remote area, so the government was able to strong-arm local residents. Hydro has major impacts on the environment, river ecology, eliminates farmland, but this is all greenwashed away.
> A 300W-solar power farm would require 1.5 million solar panels and cost approximately $300 million, provided the 1,500- to-1,800 acres of land needed was free and the sun shone steadily,
It's worse than that. Let's say you get 12 hours of steady sunshine every day.
What to do the other 12 hours? For that you'll need storage.
Therefore, you will need to double the capacity of the solar array so that during that 12 hours you can both store power and deliver power to people who need it.
But then no power store is 100% efficient, so you'll also need to add more panels for that.
But then you're never going to get 12 hours of steady power every day. You're going to have to increase storage and panels to account for that too.
Keep in mind that wind and solar power figures typically quoted are for max effect. For solar that means noon on a cloud-free day. Most hours of most days, and all the nights, are not like that. So if you want a realistic comparison with something like a nuclear reactor, which can run steadily for months on end, you need to apply a significant multiplier for additional area and batteries.
Or according to another comment: spend the saved money (vs nuclear) on storage and smile instead? I don't know a lot about it, but what I know is enough to be pretty sure dismissive single-line statements (in either way) are usually not at all the full picture.
What storage? What tech? How would you scale up?
You see, it's easy just to write things down and live in a dream that's enough to solve problems. But actually it's not.
I thought by mentioning explicitly 'either way' I made it clear that the only dream I'm living is is the skeptical one, not leaning one way or the other, merely observing and pointing out that indeed it's very easy to write things down as if they are the sole truth. While they actually aren't.
I don't think handwaving away the long term storage of nuclear waste and the risk of contaminating large areas can just be ignored, especially with a new unproven reactor design.
Long term storage is solved from a technical perspective, it's a political problem at this point. Deep holes in geologically stable places are ideally fit for purpose, and most of the really nasty stuff isn't' danger after about 200 years.
The Fukushima disaster is expected to kill precisely no one from the surrounding area due to radiation exposure, and the highest exposure among 36,478 dosimeters in Fukushima city in 2011 was 2.7 millisieverts with an average of 0.26 millisieverts. The 2.7 millisievert is believed to have come from a badge left in luggage that was x-rayed. A dose of 0.26 millisieverts is the same as the exposure from to round trip flights between NYC and London.
Yes. Manitoba already exports a lot of electricity to the Minnesota, Wisconsin, Saskatchewan, Ontario. It'll soon be bringing online the Keeyask dam as well which will add capacity for 400,000 more homes.
For today. But I presume when these reactors are completed, the question is will that surplus be enough for the energy needs of ~2030. And there the answer is "we need to build more generation". No?
Canada is a surprisingly unconnected federation of almost independent provinces. We don't have a great east-west interconnection between the provinces.
I mean, we have trade barriers between provinces. It's insane.
A big reason that Ontario can't / doesn't is that the demand centers in Southern Ontario are ridiculously far from the generation centers in Manitoba. Toronto is 1800 km straight from the new Keeyask Dam. This is over unpopulated muskeg that is expensive to build on in the first place and difficult to access for maintenance.
If it's cheaper to build these nuclear reactors as compared to "importing" hydro power from another Canadian province (these comments make it sound like it's another country) remains to be seen. Maybe it even looks that way from current estimates, but from past experience most estimates on the cost of building nuclear power plants are a bit optimistic...
Manitoba exports huge amounts of electricity to Ontario, SK, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and with the new Keeyask dam coming online it'll have capacity for 400,000 new homes. There's also still 1000s of MW of untapped potential in Manitoba, if investments would be made in dams and transmission.
The recent hydro project mentioned in the article is a lot more expensive than the Nuclear Options, although they may have cherry picked their data. It amounts to ~ 2x the cost.
"BC Hydro’s 1,100 Mwe Site C dam is expected to cost $16 billion"
> A 300W-solar power farm would require 1.5 million solar panels and cost approximately $300 million, provided the 1,500- to-1,800 acres of land.
I assume 300W is actually 300MW. If that's correct, solar panels are still much more convenient, also considering that power plant will require many acres of land for the building, pipes, etc. Solar panels have zero waste too. What am I missing?
Recycling for solar panels is already being worked on. Recovering things like silver is pretty interesting. The main challenge is waiting for obsolete panels. Just not a huge business yet.
Nuclear plants also need decommissioning of course. Seems to be expensive due to all the radioactive material.
Canada has plenty of sun. Most of the populated parts are at the same latitude as central Europe. They have hydro and wind too. And not a very large population.
People place higher expectations on recycling than is merited. I'm not arguing it's better or worse than nuclear in the long run. Just saying there is waste.
Also, latitude is irrelevant. If central Europe got as much snow as Canada they'd probably have far less solar panels.
The flip-side is that there are not a lot of toxic or harmful materials in solar panels. It's mostly silicon (aka sand).
Nobody talks about recycling coal. Not a thing. You burn it, it's gone and added to our atmosphere. Burning the equivalent in coal for even a single solar panel's life time production in energy, is probably quite a lot. Latitude is very relevant. Germans put lots of solar on their roofs for the same reason that that is probably a popular thing in Canada. Because they are at the same latitude.
Toronto is at 44 degrees latitude. Berlin is further North at 52 degrees latitude. Madrid would be 40 degrees latitude. Most of the US is below 49 degrees latitude. Most of Canadian populated areas get more than enough sunlight.
You might have a point with northern Canada or Alaska. Though those too get awesome amounts of light in the summer, which is why you might find people investing in solar there too. Just lots of economic benefits even if they work less well in the winter (or not at all in the polar circle). As it is, it makes plenty of sense for Germans to put solar on their roofs.
Until night hits. Then it turns out you need a ton more solar panels to overproduce in the day to store energy in your expensive energy storage system. Which is inconvenient.
Except it turns out we don't use much energy at night...
Solar aligns very well with daily energy demands, and storage helps smooth it out. In the end we will have a massive energy surplus and finding ways to use that extra energy will be big business.
Cars are the perfect source of smart consumers, you can think of a smart consumer like storage since they allow you to shift load but without having to pay the price of the round trip efficiency loss.
They sit still for 22-23 hours per day allowing making them perfect as long as we have chargers wherever you park your car. Which should be an easy mandate to enforce.
> ...as long as we have chargers wherever you park your car. Which should be an easy mandate to enforce.
You also need to modify (heavily) the electricity distribution lines and infrastructure to add the capacity to actually power such a large number of chargers.
> Except it turns out we don't use much energy at night...
Well, people don't but heating does. It is quite popular to produce heat for floor heating during the night (because there are tariffs where night energy is cheaper) and disable it at (part)day - floor heating has large inertia and keeps the house (or at least feet) warm for longer.
Solar has this issue, that a lot of people mount them and the highest amount of electricity produced is during the same period of time and during summer, where you have the most production you don't need heating - some use air conditioning, but it is not necessary in cooler parts of the world (and it uses less energy than heating).
Do people use much energy during the day in winter though?
At higher latitudes, the sun doesn't shine nearly as long, and the days are often overcast for weeks on end. Your storage needs to smooth over weeks, not hours!
The cost of that storage, and the solar array, would be much higher than the nuclear plant.
You'd be surprised at how low grid-scale solar/wind plus storage costs have dropped, especially once taking into account full lifetime operating costs.
Optimally, you build an energy mix for the worst day of the year, not storing *electrical energy for the long term (other types like heat/pimped hydro may make sense at those timescales)
> Do people use much energy during the day in winter though?
Saskatchewanian here! Your use of the word "energy" here is critical. We use a ton of _energy_ non-stop through the winter. Looking through the last year worth of statements, my wife and I used 1,794 m^2 of natural gas in Feb 2022, and 59 m^2 of natural gas in June 2022. Conversely, we seem to average about 700-800 kWh of electricity every month, but last August we used 1,456 kWh and the most recent bill had 1,159 kWh (electric air conditioning).
We use a crap load of natural gas to heat our homes throughout the winter, and that basically drops to nil during the summer (only the hot water heater). Electricity varies less, but there are huge summer spikes.
What nuclear does, from my PoV, is give us not only a road out of burning coal (ick) for our base load electricity, but also makes electric-heat-conversion a more viable proposal. While the temperatures do get cold enough sometimes that a heat pump/HRV loses its effectiveness, getting to a point where we have a COP of 3-4 using the heat pump and backing it up with resistive heating is a huge win if the electricity powering those devices isn't coming from a coal-fired plant.
Typically the coldest days are near peak darkness with clear skies and no wind.
I’ve lived in places in the US where the sun didn’t shine for an entire month in a particularly bad season. I have no idea what a month long utility-grade battery looks like but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist.
In winter solars produce fraction of the energy that they do in summer. You would need to oversize them 10x or even more. But then, during summer it would be wasted, unless you have a large accumulator.
Even if Saskatchewan was in the middle of the desert the solar panels had perfect efficiency, it would still produce half the power of a similarly rated base load nuclear plant. And Canada isn’t a desert and some places don’t receive sunlight for weeks at a time.
Just some days ago Australia's National Science Agency published a report where they found that renewables with integration costs remain the cheapest option. Naturally that submission didn't do well on HN because it isn't nuclear energy fluff.
What happens when after 5 or 10 years of the deployment of a dozen of these one of these shows signs of a critical part getting cracks, for example a pipe. Then all the remaining reactors will have to be shut down as well until the part is not only replaced, but the replacement has been certified.
Isn't it better to put more effort into a big one instead?
Large reactors are generally much harder to maintain and keep safe - there are a lot of reasons why they become significantly more difficult to keep safe, so I think that's the reasoning behind this.
> The IC [Isolation Condenser] pool has an installed capacity that provides 7 days of reactor decay heat removal capability. The heat rejection process can be continued indefinitely by replenishing the IC pool inventory.
It would be nice if we were building reactors that could shut down without any external input. NuScale seems to be closest to production with a walk-away safe design. In other words, change "7 days" to "infinity days".
What I don't understand is why they are still not done at scale, i.e. build 10 of these in the same spot and get the economic advantage and especially keep the security and risk things isolated.
> they consider things like the possibility of using a central facility to produce high-performance concrete parts for the plant, as we have shifted to doing for projects like bridge construction. But this concrete is often more expensive than materials poured on site, meaning the higher efficiency of the off-site production would have to more than offset that difference. The material's performance in the environment of a nuclear plant hasn't been tested, so it's not clear whether it's even a solution.
Article says they are building 4 at the same site - there are economies of scale in generation / transmission and in security, but more
important building smaller plants may keep the cost overruns lower.
The boring answer is that they're much less fuel efficient than what their size would suggest. As in, almost an order of magnitude. There are both science and engineering challenges to solve before they get competitive with established designs. That's why they haven't taken over.
I made once an estimate that to power the whole energy( not power,current,ampere) of the world we need a surface of the sice of spain. And I took bad Sunlight into account. …. So I wonder why for most countries … why not go all in solar? Nuclear seems so much expensive and wastefull compared to solar.
I know there is the storage problem. But most energy is directly consumed or has to be stores for a short period . Heat for example. And heat is stored in water.
Not without its fair share of criticism, budget overruns and all other problems associated with building new nuclear reactors these days, but it did happen
There is less scope for corruption around SMR, so little demand when the main attraction of nukes is their prospect for a long-term corruption cash cow.
I'm always shocked by how many anti-nuclear power people are on HN. So many have bought into fearmongering and lies about safety that oil and gas companies are happy to encourage. It's a non-reweable but quite clean and incredibly safe method of power generation.
It produces far less harm to the environment than fossil fuel generation, which should be decommissioned as quickly as possible. Every time a government chooses too replace nuclear generation with fossil fuels out of choice (I'm looking at you, Germany), they're a traitor to their own people, and to all humans.
And I'll never understand "green" people who actively protest against nuclear power. Yes, renewable power is better. But most of the power generated comes from fossil fuels, that needs to stop as soon as possible, which isn't happening in the short term via only renewable power.
* Long-term storage plans tend to be pretty solid, but then people remotely near it get rallied to protest it.
* Any cases of that are management issues, not nuclear power generation issues.
* Making safe nuclear reactors is a well-understood challenge. Even if you do include all incidents that have happened with outdated, flawed reactors, going all the way back, nuclear reactors have cause far less environmental damage and far fewer deaths per power unit than fossil fuels do. Also, this article is about SMRs, which have very different requirements.
* Nuclear waste storage is a solved issue, this just repeats the first point.
These cost estimates do not include the maintenance of the waste products of nuclear energy production.
These costs are astonishingly!
If the 10,000 year costs fell on the producers and consumers directly (this is how it should be), they would quickly have a different point of different view
Do you mean that for the purpose of backing up wind and solar, it will be cheaper to use fossil fuels and sequester the carbon, than to use nuclear energy and sequester the waste?
Hadn't looked at it that way yet, that actually sounds really attractive. If they can be maintained and operated at under 1k per house per year then that's competitive with what I pay now.
I wonder why it's so cheap when calculated this way it seems competitive with solar panels when I expected it to be a factor ten more expensive (of course solar panels wouldn't really work that far north).
Especially not if we manage to electrify everything. The average American uses a little over 9kW of primary energy continuously. You can probably safely divide that by three if you use electricity, but still.
Yeah the pay back time is long but the cost of operation is so much lower than traditional fuels. It will pay off if it remains running for long enough.
Except wind and solar cannot be used to sustain base load energy demands. Until battery technology improves drastically the issue with solar and wind is the variability of output. One of the greatest challenges of operating a power grid is matching the supply of electricity with demand. Thats why they build gas and coal plants to meet peak energy demand periods. Nuclear energy supplemented by win and solar is by far the cleanest way to meet our energy needs currently.
Alternately, if wind and solar can be made absurdly cheap, there are are less-energy-efficient but lower-cost per unit output forms of storage that can help. Pneumatic storage is promising for this for example. So like instead of one wind turbine and one battery, you build two wind turbines and one pneumatic energy storage vessel and get the same amount out.
Oh no. You only get one unit of wind, one unit of solar, one unit of methane by electrolysis, and one unit of combined cycle gas plant for the same price rather than the usual of double all that.
However can we figure out how to get the same result with twice the energy and the ability to store it indefinitely at 40% efficiency. Especially given that the costs of all these technologies are going down at two digit percent per year.
Coal plants in particular are dramatically unsuited for the rapid changes in output to respond to changing demands for power.
Gas plants on the other hand are. And gas plants are cheap!
Overbuilding renewables with combinations of solar, geothermal (where available) and wind gives pretty good availability on it's own and with gas plants as a backup it gives you plenty of grid stability.
Edit: A link you posted elsewhere (thanks!) points out how well this works:
> If other sources meet demand 5% of the time, electricity costs fall and the energy capacity cost target rises to $150/kWh.
Battery storage is already well below this $150/kWh price.
Again, this is only for very short term storage. We are comparing apples and oranges.
As an example, for most of Aus, 5 hrs storage will only work for <80% renewables [0]. It's only practical on smaller scales which doesn't mean it isn't useful now but just means that the ~$100/MWh systems will not be practical everywhere, especially when renewables become more ubiquitous.
Edit: I had a deeper look at the NREL paper and most of their costs seem to be in the $100s/kWh rather than MWh. E.g ~$300/ kWh for 6 hour systems on Fig. 6.
The caveat is mentioned in the link, right after the price comparison. "provided the 1,500- to-1,800 acres of land needed was free and the sun shone steadily" considering the price of land recently... that may need a better estimate than just the cost of the tech.
Also the land requirements for huge solar / wind installations is another downside. Nuclear at scale is a clear winner especially in seismically stable regions of NA.
It's not critical, but I think you are looking at the wrong page. $55 is on the /MW basis, the next page shows $131/MWh which is still good.
The source is "Lazard estimates", but I can't find anything close to this in reality. Pumped hydro is meant to be super cheap, but is currently ~ $100/kWh. I'm starting to agree with the other commenter that Lazard is bunk.
"Pumped hydro is already the cheapest energy storage technology in the world in terms of cost per installed kilowatt-hour of capacity. Total project costs range between $106 and $200 per kilowatt-hour, compared to between $393 and $581 for lithium-ion batteries, World Bank figures show."
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/pumped-hydro-mo...
Its not bunk. People are comparing two widely different things and not understanding the difference.
The price of $150 is capacity of a battery. If i want a battery that can store 4 kwh i pay $600.
The other number referencing $55/MWh is referencing levelized cost of storage.
I have a a MWh but instead of using it right now i store it for 4 hours.
Now this MWh costs its initial price + $55.
Apply this example to a KWh where i would pay $0.1 for it if i used it right now
if i want to store it for 4 hours and use it later i have to add $55/1000
to the price or about $0.055.
So a directly used KWh would cost me $0.1. One stored for 4 hours would cost me
$0.15.
Hope that makes sense and explains these different numbers.
> If you do that calculation at the global level, we evaluate the LCOE for recently financed projects is at US$150/MWh including charging costs. That’s our benchmark. We have a range around that benchmark which goes from US$115/MWh in China.
Thanks for the link. I am trying to get my head around the ~1000x improvement and I think it is because we are comparing apples and oranges. ~$100/kWh (like pumped hydro) can last for as long as the water in the reservoir lasts. ~$100/MWh (like the batteries you mentioned) are for <4 hrs reserve.
So the critical question is: how long will grids connected to renewables need reserve? 4 hours doesn't seem like much but I'm not sure the best way to find this info.
Edit: from a 30s google search, 4 hours is only good for <80% renewables in Aus.
[0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/much-storage-back-high-renewable...
80% renewables is huge! It's some years before we get to that level by which time we can expect the 20 hours required for all states to be economically viable.
And in the mean time gas peaker plants provide a viable, cheap and safe compromise without needing nuclear!
> We found in
some cases the battery requirement becomes
very large relative to the load, at greater than
20 hours. In these cases, it was concluded that
additional gas peaking capacity would be more
economic (and biogas was used when the
emission constraint did not allow for natural gas).
Yeah, we can use gas plants until batteries become economical, but why use gas when we could start the switch to a low-emission alternative now. The risks of Nuclear are tiny compared to the existential risks of delaying emissions reductions.
Biogas use isn't practical to replace existing gas supply.
I honestly really wish renewables + batteries could take over but it's too early. Aus has heaps of Uranium, is geologically stable, has strong regulating authorities and geopolitically secure. The perfect spot for low-emissions Nuclear which is practical and possible now in all respects except for politically.
Not to mention the other comments that refute those numbers using the same paper - projects would be closer to ~$100/KWh when storage is taken into account, as shown graphed in the paper itself.
* $200-400 million for equivalent onshore wind (they don't mention offshore wind which is more cost effective over it's lifetime)
* $1.5 billion for the SMR
Assuming solar and wind stay the same price for the next decade (which they definitely won't) that's a 4-5x construction price difference. The article didn't mention lifetime, decommissioning or running costs, which is likely a significant difference too.
The thing to keep in mind about that number and how small it seems... the entire province of Saskatchewan only has 1.17M people, about half of us are concentrated across two major cities (~600k people) and the rest are very sparsely distributed throughout the rest of the huge land mass. Overall, the 2016 census listed 432,620 private households through the province, so one of these reactors is providing half of our residential power. It's a huge win for us, since our base load is currently coal...
Still very much in the research stage. China has one experimental Molten Salt Reactor that was supposed to start up last year, but I'm not sure what's happening to it right now. If everything went as planned that would be the only operating thorium-fueled nuclear plant in the world. I think they are expecting to have commercially ready designs by 2030.
India has a plan based on a three-stage fuel cycle, where the third stage runs on thorium. However they've had significant delays and the first prototype breeder reactor of the second stage is projected to be finished at the end of this year. The third stage is probably still some years away.
India and China are probably the most ambitious in terms of thorium fuel cycle research. India has the world's largest thorium reserves, and hope to utilize it for their power generation. China's most pressing concern is their smog crisis, which they hope to solve partly with nuclear power. They are also aiming to own most of the intellectual property with regards to thorium reactors, and it is part of Xi Jinping's drive toward making China carbon neutral by 2060.
Other countries have some small research initiatives but no concrete plans to build anything so far as I know.
> which could be deployed in the Prairie province by the 2030s and in Ontario by 2028.
Note the "could be".
Can the myth of cheap, safe and quick to deploy fission energy please die?
It's not cheap, for good reasons[1]:
> Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50 years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that, contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the initial plant.
> The authors also found that while changes in safety regulations could account for some of the excess costs, that was only one of numerous factors contributing to the overages.
It's not safe:
> US nuclear regulators greatly underestimate potential for nuclear disaster, researchers say[2]
> Now I was serving on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, [snip] In 2009, President Barack Obama named me the agency’s chairman. [snip]
> Afterward, the falling cost of renewable power changed the calculus. Despite working in the industry for more than a decade, I now believe that nuclear power’s benefits are no longer enough to risk the welfare of people living near these plants. I became so convinced that, years after departing office, I’ve now made alternative energy development my new career, leaving nuclear power behind. The current and potential costs — in lives and dollars — are just too high. [3]
It's always slow to deploy[4]:
> Finland's long-delayed Olkiluoto-3 nuclear reactor connected to the power grid for the first time on Saturday, the plant's operator said, 12 years after its planned launch. Located on Finland's west coast, Olkiluoto-3 is the country's first new nuclear plant in over four decades and Europe's first in almost 15 years.
1) Burning fossil fuels is why we are facing global warming right now.
2) Anti-nuclear sentiment is why we aren't living in a nuclear waste right now. Even nuclear advocate's argument that "nuclear plants are much safer now and the accidents that happened at 3 Mile Island/Chernobyl/Fukushima are impossible now" implies that anti-nuclear sentiment was correct in the 1960's, 70's, 80's, 90's and early 2000s at the very least!
You're absolutely correct when you say that less regulated nuclear would have caused more incidents. You may also be correct when you say the risks aren't properly calculated at present. The thing is, that doesn't matter unless they're off by three orders of magnitude. Coal kills so many people through pollution that the world could suffer a Three Mile Island once a year without killing anywhere near as many people as coal does.
It is now theoretically possible that solar, wind, and pumped hydro could provide a substantial chunk of global baseload power. We could have gotten there decades ago with nuclear. It's the fault of the green movement that we didn't.
Gen II 1970s era nuclear reactors are still among the safest forms of energy known to humanity. Anti-nuclear sentiment has only prolonged the reign of particulate and carbon emitting fossil and biofuel.
If Chernobyl itself was built today, without the post-accident modifications, and it ran 5 years and then exploded, it'd still be safer than a coal plant running normally.
Fossil/biofuel particulate emissions killing ~8 million people per year is no joke.
> Gen II 1970s era nuclear reactors are still among the safest forms of energy known to humanity. ... If Chernobyl itself was built today, without the post-accident modifications, and it ran 5 years and then exploded, it'd still be safer than a coal plant running normally.
This is only based on the official number of deaths (31 I think?). This is known to be false.
Better estimates are hard, but "the Ukrainian government pays benefits to more than 36,000 widows of men who have died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster".[1]
There were also at least 200,000 people who had to be relocated.
I agree 100% we should get rid of coal ASAP! No dispute there at all.
> This is only based on the official number of deaths (31 I think?). This is known to be false.
Actually, it's based on the UNSCEAR number of 4000 deaths including latent cancers. Don't use the Ukraine political numbers. Use the UN panel of scientist numbers.
If they used your 4000 number then Nuclear becomes twice as unsafe as solar.
(But the point here isn't the number of deaths in the past - because that was moderated by the strong anti-nuclear movements. The risk is higher usage leads to dramatic increases, because deaths are dominated by accidents not constant one-off deaths like from pollution which are more predicable)
Woah I did not realize they used that figure. Everyone agrees that there were between 0 and 1 deaths from radiation due to Fukushima (vs between 31 and 4000 radiation deaths at Chernobyl). There were deaths caused by the prolonged evacuation at Fukushima, which must be where this figure comes from.
Debatable, since many of the dose rates many evacuated from are below the level that causes any measurable harm. Temporary short term evac is understandable while the event unfolded but they should have given people dose rates and health info (e.g that less than 300 mSv/yr doesnt cause measurable harm) and let people decide for themselves.
To your first point: Yes, but if Nuclear plants were more common less fossil fuels would be burnt. Hence anti-nuclear sentiment has led to more climate change.
To your second:
3 Mile Island was not an accident that caused significant environmental damage.
Chernobyl was a terrible design that should never have been built.
Fukushima is an example of the dangers. It was however hit by an earthquake 1 magnitude higher than it was designed for and a Tsunami. Given it's location it should have been designed to handle these possibilities.
I would argue that Fukushima was a pretty good example of how safe nuclear power is. The damage was very well contained, and the evacuation measures caused more harm than the primary danger.
I'm pretty pro-nuclear, but a couple hundred billion dollars of damages, a couple dozen direct deaths, some people getting maimed, and causing thousands of deaths by displacing a large population is a catastrophe by any stretch. Yes, fossil fuels may be worse per unit of energy generated, but they are never quite this spectacular in a single event.
There have been some pretty spectacular oil rig disasters with huge oil spills and >100 direct deaths. I would count those on the same scale. And those are in addition to the huge numbers of deaths every year and the contribution to global warming.
I wouldn't, though, because they don't have the impact on the population at large and don't cost nearly as much. Yes, maybe they impact other industries or recreation in an area for awhile.
A fossil fuel plant operating nominally without any incidents will impact the entire population as the fossil fuels are consumed and the byproducts of their combustion emitted. The number of QALYs / DALYs / deaths lost that are directly attributable to air pollution is absolutely staggering.
The magnitude of the risks we're contemplating when we're discussing nuclear are completely insignificant in relation to that.
> but they are never quite this spectacular in a single event.
Even things like oil spills? I know it's hard (or even impossible) to reduce to "overall damage" as the common unit, but I know oil spills are catastrophic.
The death tallies are statistical noise compared to normal cancer deaths, etc, and can't be differentiated.
All you can do is look at the dose and estimate the deaths. Pretty obvious the evacuation-related death toll is going to be one order of magnitude, and perhaps 2 orders of magnitude higher than Fukushima.
Even nuclear advocate's argument that "nuclear plants are much safer now and the accidents that happened at 3 Mile Island/Chernobyl/Fukushima are impossible now" implies that anti-nuclear sentiment was correct in the 1960's, 70's, 80's, 90's and early 2000s at the very least!
Every nuclear disaster so far has been unique, and this will remain the case going forward, because the nuclear sector is always defending against yesterday’s failure mode. Nuclear power plants are some of the most complicated machines mankind has ever built. In such a complex design there are too many permutations of failures that can arise to allow for designing away all risk. We need to fundamentally accept this risk and embrace it if we are going to adopt nuclear power on a grander scale. This is a big ask on a psychological level for humanity, and that’s one reason why I think a nuclear upscaling is not going to happen. (The other is high and rising cost of construction, which is the biggest problem facing the nuclear power sector that is on them to solve.)
When the last chapter of industrial civilization is written some time in the 2100s the number of people the Greens killed in the name of protecting the environment will make every war, genocide and mass murdering dictator look like amateur hour.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is unfortunate we have made Earth into hell though.
Hi, y’all I’ll take this one for the team. Sorry for generally reducing my resource usage and encouraging others to do so… I guess I’m excited to stop being compared to pol pot or whatever tho.
These things can all be true and yet it is still a good idea to include some nuclear in our energy portfolio for diversification. In particular, my understanding is that economic storage of renewable energy has not yet been solved, so it might be nice to get some nuclear going in case that endeavor doesn’t pan out as optimistically as hoped.
The problem is scale and availability of materials to make batteries.
Right now almost all the batteries are produced for and used in electric cars, however electric cars only make around 10% of all the cars consumed.
Now you wanna store enough solar-generated electricity for when the sun doesn't shine, worldwide? My napkin math says that either the price per kWh will go up, or that some poor country with enough lithium will be "politically destabilized" soon.
There's plenty of capacity for grid connected batteries.
For one thing they can use a bunch of tech that doesn't work well in cars (flow batteries for example).
And the price goes down because the primary constraint is production capacity. More demand means more factories mean cheaper prices. See eg the growth in manufacturing capacity in batteries and their price decreasing:
If you look at 2008, there was 6GWh of battery manufacturing in the world and 97% of it was in China.
In 2019, there was around 365GWh worldwide, split into: China (75%), US (9%), South Korea (7%) Europe (5%)
By 2023 we estimate there will be 1,230GWh worldwide: China (65%), Europe (10%), US (10%) and rest of the world (15%).
Iron redox flow batteries are made from abundant materials and cost less than lithium batteries. Sodium batteries have many of the upsides of lithium and don't require it (they require some other scarce materials). There are enough empty salt mines and similar to build weeks' worth of storage in CAES for less than the cost of either.
But none of these solve the issue of months long weather fluctuations and disasters entirely in regions where pumped hydro isn't viable. For that, grid flexibility (such as variable rate Al production and electrified steel smelting), gas or hybrid heating/cooling, generator backup for essential uses (minimal heating and medical facilities), and methane produced from electricity and biomass is the answer and the only reason it hasn't happened on its own is we don't price in the (absolutely massive) externalities of fossil fuels so they're marginally cheaper. We also need to cut the low hanging fruit that are responsible for most of the emissions either directly or indirectly (poorly insulated, overly large detached homes, cars, and cows).
Are detached homes really responsible for the majority of emissions, and how is that low-hanging fruit? That seems like one of the most expensive options per unit emissions reduced. I’m pretty sure industry and logistics are some of the most intensive, particularly if you don’t pretend that goods imported from China or other countries are emissions free simply because the emissions weren’t emitted domestically.
Detached homes are just one of the simpler low hanging fruit to fix -- subsidies on insulation and regulation rentals and on new homes -- rather than a huge part of the whole. It's an easy 5-10% depending on area (with side effects of helping the poor and reducing strain on infrastructure during extreme weather events) rather than a large part of the whole.
About half for heating and cooling in EU, https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/energy-efficiency/heating... iirc 40% of that or around 20% of total was domestic -- it often looks small because it is broken dowm into two subsets of electricity and two subsets of methane use (and decreasingly kerosene) being for water and space heating. Detached homes use at least double compared to a row house (twice as many walls, but they also tend to be larger and have more windows) or far more than a similarly built apartment with one wall, and tend to be poorly insulated in places like the US.
Heating and cooling represents a lower proportion in the US for a variety of reasons (primarily driving/trucking and some differences in industry as well as a colossally wasteful military), but a huge amount is caused by cows, clearing land for cows, moving cows, cooling cow products, moving feed for cows, and producing fertilizer to grow feed for cows.
Unrelated, but detached home suburb design is also responsible for a lot of other emissions indirectly. Larger living space and fewer communal areas leads to more travel and more stuff. Things being spread out leads to low labour high emissions big box store stuff rather than local hand crafted and second hand markets and local in season produce. Transit and pedestrian hostile layout leads to more driving (and one car per person). Car dependent infrastructure leads to more trucking and less freight trains. Large centralised shopping centers like walmart leads to more uniform goods and just in time logistics which depemd on planes. Flight, trucking, driving and fossil fuel heating leads to more dependence on oil and gas. Oil and gas security is maintained by military activity which is responsible for a huge portion of emissions. None of this stops if you build a 5 over 1 and a train line or a medium density village instead of a suburb of course, but you make a small dent in every step.
> almost all the batteries are produced for and used in electric cars
I'm not convinced. I tried a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but there were a few too many variables, but I think the 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year edge out EVs (my main difficulty was comparing smartphone battery EV battery)
From a little Googling, it seems like an EV battery is four orders of magnitude larger than a smart phone battery, so about 150,000 EVs sold per year is the rough equilibrium point (that’s four orders of magnitude lower than your 1.5B figure), and it seems like we’re selling about a million EVs per month, at least as of the end of 2021.
I'd take that headline with a grain of salt. A lack of investment in power generation because of unclear policy goals by the previous conservative government is the real issue - combined with another odd policy where long term gas supply export contracts meant it was cheaper to turn off gas plants than run them!
Basically the previous government wanted someone to build a new coal fired power station(!) but no commercial company wanted to do it and no investors could be found (coal fired stations just cost too much now). The then Prime Minster is famous for bringing a lump of coal into parliament to show how much he loved coal[1].
It's worth noting that no blackouts occurred.
Ironically, the state of South Australia also had a conservative government at the time but had a very pro-renewables policy (this is where the first Tesla big battery was) which took power prices from the highest in mainland Australia in 2018 to the lowest wholesale prices[2]
The cost of storage must be factored into the cost of renewables, else it's not really a fair comparison. How much does it cost to build out 10 hours of storage @ 50% of day time generation wattage?
Ah yes ye olde 4 hours of storage quotes from the Li(a)zard People. Hope you don't run into one of those 3 week wind lulls or anything.
Lazard uses the worst possible nuclear builds and ignores the good ones. They ignore China, Korea, Japanese, and Russian builds. In 2006 Japan was churning out ultra-modern ABWR reactors in 36 months (not the old Fukushima kind). Unbelievably cheap and effective. Today, China's Hualong One builds are fully serialized. Yet Lazard keeps on looking at the worst 2 nuclear builds in history and ignoring e.g. the necessary cost of new transmission and overbuilding in order to actually decarbonize at scale with wind solar and gigatonnes of batteries.
Storage from day to night, not from summer to winter. The only solution for seasonal storage is hydrogen, and we are far, far from having any meaningful production of green hydrogen.
Why would you store from summer to winter? Wind works pretty well in both seasons (depending on geography but the solution there is better transmission!)
I love how nuclear is too expensive because it costs billions, but long range power lines, which also costs billions, are somehow a better waste of money.
Long range power cables only cost billions if they're >1000km long.
But this is besides the point. Energy companies spent money on long range power cables because they calculate they can make a profit on the transmitted energy. Nuclear power stations spend taxpayer billions because they can't possibly compete commercially. That's the key difference.
We're talking about the far north. I think it's reasonable to require a lot more storage than 10 hours (and account for overcast weather, which is common in winter).
Does this still create waste that is dangerous for thousands of years?
My understanding is that there is no long term solution for storing dangerous nuclear waste. They try burying it super deep in mountains. But can't be sure that it won't get out in the next few thousands of years.
Everybody watch the documentary "Into Eternity" on the subject. Amazing.
Nuclear waste is somewhat dangerous, but deep inside mountains it won't do any harm barring some kind of black swan event.
Compare the risks of living near a nuclear waste storage facility and living downstream of a hydroelectric dam. I know what I would choose! If you demand absolute certainty over a thousand year period you'll be paralyzed into inaction. Any new technology and any political action could result in the eventual collapse of civilization. But inaction guarantees disaster because the status quo is unsustainable. So we have to make mundane risk/reward evaluations and from those we conclude that we can't do without nuclear energy.
The article was published on July 11, 2022, but opens with: "Saskatchewan and Ontario have each chosen GE-Hitachi as the supplier of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which could be deployed in the Prairie province by the 2030s and in Ontario by 2018." Then, the article concludes with: "GEH and Ontario plan to construct up to four 300 MWe small module reactors, with the first coming online by 2028."
A separate source by The Canadian Press [0] also reflects an estimate of 2028 for Ontario: "The governments of Ontario, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Alberta have put forward a nuclear plan that they say will transition them toward cleaner energy. The provinces’ energy ministers agreed today to a joint plan for small modular reactors, with the first 300-megawatt plant to be built in Darlington, Ont., by 2028."
[0] https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/renewables/onta...