For context, nuclear and peaker natural gas are the two most expensive sources of electricity in overall lifetime cost per energy output nowadays. It's not clear what exactly he's comparing there on the natural gas side.
LCOE assumes that electricity generation is comparable. However, renewables have a high variability, which puts a much higher load on the grid.
The grid investments are sizeable. You not only need to add a lot of batteries, you also have to make other investments, for example to add moment to the grid, because unlike big turbines like nuclear, water or gas, solar or small wind turbines have almost no moment of inertia, which was one of the problems behind Spain's power outage.
This isn't new stuff, it's all solvable and countries already do this; the power outage of Spain would've been impossible in Germany for example. It's just important to highlight that with old-school power plants, you don't need a lot of that stuff to stabilise the grid. You need to include the grid costs when calculating the true LCOE, which most of these charts, including the Wikipedia one, don't do. Wikipedia isn't lying about that; they outline this very fact as one of the key weaknesses of the LCOE metric.
When grids set up markets to let people compete to provide those grid balancing services batteries totally dominate. Which suggests that is just another area that modern renewables win and reduce costs.
On the other hand Nuclear LCOE generally assume they can sell a high proportion of their power for the next 40 years.
So really the big hidden assumption is that solar won't eat half their market in that timeframe. And then solar plus batteries eats into it further. Which would drive up their cost, letting solar plus batteries win more business in a vicious cycle.
With the recent Iberian power situation half their nuclear was offline because they were already in a huff because they weren't being paid enough money.
exactly that is why we need to put electrolyzers into mix, that way we can have load on nuclear and on renewable at same time, we need insane amounts of hydrogen for chemical industry anyway.
also chemical industry needs big investment because they have to change mindset about procuring carbon and other inputs in net zero economy.
(similar thing as what some datacenter companies say they do with buying nuclear capacity)
i think most people do not want to understand, they want socialized grid payed by citizens instead of putting real energy price into pricing for goods/services.
hydrogen as energy carrier, not as transportable comodity. hydrogen as MEANS not as a goal. we need iron + water to have from 20 sec up to seasonal storage of energy in megawatts per meter cubed...
99.9999% of people do not understand that point about inertia, you are one of them. and no it was not problem with spain, problem with spain was badly selected and configured inverters. if someone says otherwise he is liar.
" with old-school power plants, you don't need a lot of that stuff to stabilise the grid."
you just need proper sizing of renewables inverters + firmware update...... so no you do not need to have inertia of huge mass in turbines. also 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of all problems stem of peoples need to regulate grid to flat line for nonsensical reasons, IF you have slight artificially made "fluctuations in grid" which are generated by all inverter synchronized and planned ahead, there is no problem. grid has to have "pulse". THAT is decentralized / new grid. what you are describing is Stanley/Westinghouse grid. so mixing is resulting in nonsense.
I see this sort of thing so much. Renewable and storage costs have changed so fast that using numbers from even a few years ago gives misleading results. Going back 12 years you might as well be using numbers from another world.
but LCOE is price only for WATTS, not for watts at specified time!!! you need watts at night too. so be careful about that, this mistake can make shareholders loose interest in your point...
but yes, LCOE of PV+12hour battery was lower then nuclear, even before 2020/2019 saga...
Nuclear is still more expensive even when you account for the cost of storage and transmission. So your point is a good one but it doesn't alter the conclusion.
My impression was that stratospheric aerosol injection has been kept out of the public consciousness deliberately. If the public discussed it now, they’d learn quickly about things like termination shock, and the calculable consequences to weather systems depending on where the sulphur is injected (eg Inject over Norway and mess up el Nino), and come to the conclusion that it’s a pretty undesirable option. If, however, it’s left to the last minute, fossil fuels can continue, and then use this as a “last resort” card.
Termination shock is already happening as we've been decreasing the amount of SO2 in the air we breathe. Peak global SO2 emissions were 131 million tons in 1979. Now it's 69 million as of 2022. We've been removing the sunscreen that unintentionally cooled the Earth, and one of the reasons why 2023 and 2024 were the hottest in recorded history.
The next step is to redeploy the SO2 that has unintentionally cooled Earth and do it better in the stratosphere with a fractional amount that we've tolerated since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
The last point about "fossil fuels can continue" is also called moral hazard. Regardless of SAI or not, we're going to keep using whatever is the cheapest and accessible fuel we have available, and right now, it's hydrocarbons pulled from the ground. We've already gotten good at recklessly warming our planet and unintentionally cooling it, so we might as well get good at cooling intentionally.
Anything's pocketable with sufficiently large pockets ;-)
The Psion would fit well into a coat or jacket pocket, or cargo pants/shorts, and easily fit into a satchel or messenger bag.
The Psion S3 dimensions are 165 mm x 85 mm x 22 mm (6.50 in x 3.35 in x 0.87 in). Contrast the iPhone 15 at 147.6 mm x 71.6 mm x 7.8mm (5.81" x 2.82" x 0.31"), and the iPhone 15+ at 160.9 mm x 77.8 mm x 7.8 mm (6.33" x 3.06" x 0.31"). Other than thickness, these are pretty comparable.
What it offers most specifically, however, is a useful and usable set of capabilities, in both hardware and software: full keyboard, email, calendar, Web, word processing, spreadsheet, contacts.
I've known journalists who've used it as their mobile platform for gathering and filing news stories, which also means it passes the "professional use" test.
Somehow it's been 13 years and none of the available phone OSes have managed to be as usable or user-focused as WebOS was. Nor as easily hackable. The hardware was smooth like a river rock in your pocket, but still had an easily found physical slider switch to silence the device. It had wireless charging as a standard feature. And the software stack was familiar to any desktop Linux user with just a custom display layer on top. Complex multi-tasking was effortless on it (thanks in part to the gesture area and also the OS's cards interface). And it combined all contacts and messages regardless of communications channel into a unified interface. Oh, also, replaceable batteries!
Unfortunately HP played musical CEOs (three in less than a year) and one of them didn't see phones or PCs as businesses they should be in.
Former owner of Nokia E71, Nokia N900 (both user replaceable battery), Planet Computers Cosmo Communicator and Astro Slide (like old Psion keyboard): not really. The keys on this smartphone are very small, therefore annoying to use. The larger they are though, the bulkier.
You're also stuck in either portrait or landscapr mode. Whereas a touchscreen smartphone can reuse the touchscreen for say watch a movie or use different input (like say gamepad).
I believe the current innovation trend lies in those small foldables. Of course, small form factor and dual screen has disadvantages for battery, repairability, and ridiculously high price.
iPhone 4 was a great size and looked great, but the sharp edges would wear through your jeans in a way that the earlier iPhones did not. That's my only complaint.
Amen. An updated 4" flagship would be incredible! They say that small phones are for people with small hands, but no-one can one-hand a 6" phone without holding it like an idiot. I want the claw grip back!
That and I also have small hands. My current phone is a Pixel 4a, and it's already way past my comfort zone. It's frustrating to use with one hand, and, believe it or not, most of my phone usage is one-handed. It's like all phone manufacturers have collectively forgotten about ergonomics.
These exists that somewhat popular Logitech mouse, I don't remember the exact model, but it's "ergonomic" and modern enough that it has USB-C and bluetooth. I've also seen curved modern keyboards, albeit those are rarer.
The glove80 is nice but it's by one guy if I'm not mistaken. When it comes to ergonomic stuff by big companies I'm still not so sure. Yes logitech made an ergo keyboard but they probably released 5 or 10 "regular" ones for one ergo one.
The implication is that it's a voluntary political decision to forgo more reliable sources of electricity. There's basically zero chance of that happening in any political entity, hence that expectation is optimistic.
Of course, it frequently happens involuntarily, and just saying "get used to it" is pessimistic, as you say.
Both reflect the same thing: it's politically untenable to voluntarily accept poor reliability of electricity supply.
IIRC, the sum total of all fusion research throughout all of history is USD$100-200B. It's obvious governments/industry/humanity doesn't really want it, or they'd go fund it.
The lack of funding angle isn't really convincing.
Modern designs depend on material science and computing abilities which could never have been made in the 70's no matter how much money was thrown at it.
Fusion-relevant materials research could have absolutely advanced with funding back in the 70s. Lithium compatible structural material and 14MeV neutron source experiments immediately come to mind, not to mention tritium permeation and extraction. There was tonnes to learn, and they chose not to fund it.
You could put teleportation on that bottom squiggle as well. Sometimes you stop funding things because it isn't physically possible or we have better alternatives.
There's absolutely no reason to believe that fusion power is impossible. It being very, very difficult and very, very expensive to reach a practical system is the problem.
But you're right about better alternatives. Right now that alterative is a combination of solar, wind, hydro and storage, with perhaps a bit of more exotic systems (wave power? solar towers?) in the mix.
They looked into this concept a while back and came to the conclusion that unless the population density was great enough along the guideway, the maintenance cost was too high.
The U.S. seems to be able to maintain a quite impressive railroad system for freight purposes, in what is still the largest rail transport network of any country in the world. Passenger transport withered away as long-distance road travel and cheap air flights out-competed it. With sufficient ingenuity and capital expenditure, I wonder if perhaps it could be revived?
Is this article a joke?
- The chapter titled "Advanced reactors may make waste problem worse" mentions nothing about waste.
- The chapter titled "Not likely to help cut emissions" acknowledges that it would help cut emissions.
- HALEU fuel is needed to offset the smaller size of the reactor core, which results in increased neutron leakage: nope.
- "Factory construction is a risk": compared to traditional, behemoth reactor construction? Really?
There's more, but I'm at work. Is this article actually a joke?
It does appear like a bit of stream-of-consciousness opinions from the ex-regulator, pulled together for the article.
I would imagine there were no chapter titles to begin with and were added editorially in an almost random way.
It really would be good to see some comprehensive solution to the waste issue from someone who knows more and could not be considered amusing by anyone else.
> The chapter titled "Advanced reactors may make waste problem worse" mentions nothing about waste.
I think that's just a mistake in placement of headers? The next chapter does talk about waste: "In fact, a recent U.S. National Academy of Science analysis noted that advanced reactors do not solve the problems of nuclear waste and may, in fact, exacerbate the problem."
A simple typo or editing mistake does not make an article a joke.
> "Not likely to help cut emissions" acknowledges that it would help cut emissions.
No it does not. It feels like you must have skimmed the article very fast.
"Certainly, existing nuclear power plants play a significant role in greenhouse gas reductions and will continue to do so."
Of course existing nuclear power plays a role. We should absolutely not shut them down if it can be avoided. Whether NEW SMR reactors will help more than just investing the same amount in renewables is an open question.
> HALEU fuel is needed to offset the smaller size of the reactor core, which results in increased neutron leakage: nope.
What a helpful comment /s
Care to elaborate?
> "Factory construction is a risk": compared to traditional, behemoth reactor construction? Really?
Uh yeah.. really.
I really don't get how SMR proponents just take it for granted that the huge cost downsides of going small can be fully offset by mass production. Especially considering that we're not really talking about all that huge volumes of production any time soon anyway.
Imagine if you tried to claim that you could make the MWh cost of wind power go down by building smaller wind turbines in larger volumes. You'd have a really hard time defending that position. The trend is clearly favoring going bigger and bigger, even if the challenges related to construction and transportation is huge.
The "behemoth reactor" construction model is well proven, and physical factors dictate that it's the solution with the lowest potential construction costs. So yeah, going for an unproven model that MIGHT make up for higher costs with efficiencies associated with factor construction is absolutely a huge risk.
I would judge that someone falsely claiming that 14 year olds are being killed in sawmills as a result of policy changes they dislike is the one deliberately trying to derail the conversation more than someone who correctly claims "no, that is false".
The burden of proof is certainly on the person claiming there's an increase in child labor death. However just because they didn't provide proof doesn't make the claim "false".
The increase in child labor-related deaths is happening and will continue as child labor laws are rolled back in states across the US.
> The increase in child labor-related deaths is happening and will continue as child labor laws are rolled back in states across the US.
You’re accepting the claim because you already believe it to be true, but both you and the original person making the claim have no evidence for this. This is a very dangerous style of political argument. “Well, there are no facts here, but this claim reinforces my already existing beliefs, so the vibes check out!”
We want policy around workplace safety to be evidence based, not vibes and feels based, because the former will save lives and the latter will not.
I'm curious why you think these laws were enacted in the first place? Do you think there was not evidence back then which convinced a majority of people to want that big change?
They were based on mountains of data, collected methodically over a number of years to make an ironclad case for reform. That’s good law making! I support this!
However, data from 1910 is accurate for 1910, not for 2024. If children are dying en masse in workplaces today, it ought not be difficult to collate the data required to tighten the laws further. And yet, all I’ve seen is assertions, vibes, and vague conspiracy theories.
Policy making is a balancing act; we calibrate laws for the circumstances as they develop. The only way to do this intelligently, or even competently, is on the basis of evidence.
Fair. I am willing to wait for evidence that a 14 year old was killed in a sawmill as a result of these policy changes before cementing my conclusion that it was a false claim.
The use of hyperbole is actually misses the point and derails the conversation.
If a point is valid and clear hyperbole isn't needed. Concerns over children dying in job related accidents or being made to work extreme hours or in bad conditions is a fine point. Children falling into sawmills just muddies the waters and will draw in people who disagree that that is a concern at all.
(Background: I am an engineer that has spent most of their career in energy - fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables - the whole shebang. I care deeply about climate change, and recognise the non-negotiable need of humanity for ever-increasing amounts of energy.)
Take it from me - I would absolutely love renewables to displace all other forms of energy. However, from an engineering point of view, I know this is simply not feasible without some strong developments in energy storage and distribution. With today's technology, nuclear is the only real threat to the hegemony of fossil fuels, and the only practical hope of reaching climate goals (let alone long-term energy security goals). I think the fossil fuel industry knows this, and so frame their anti-nuclear rhetoric as a renewables-vs-nuclear debate, backing renewables.
If I wore a tinfoil hat, I would say that a lot of the support for renewables (and hostility towards nuclear) was encouraged/stoked/funded by the fossil fuel lobby.
There's an interesting blog that catalogues cases where the fossil fuel industry has scratched on nuclear. If you're interested, I'll link it below.
As for SMRs specifically, I think they have a lot of legs. Reactors that can be assembled (and serviced) in factories would go a long way to lowering the overall cost of the reactors (even accounting for the reduced energy-cost density of the individual reactors).
Questions welcome. I created an account just to give my two cents on a field to which I have dedicated my career.
1. We need to be at net-zero by 2050 (and realistically based on the fast-moving temperature increases happening around us) maybe decades before that. SMRs haven’t been practically deployed yet, and don’t seem likely to be even minimally deployed until at least the 2030s if ever. How are we going to displace all forms of fossil fuel on the miniscule runway we’ll have left?
2. We have to deploy vast numbers of SMRs to the entire planet, including places with much worse security guarantees than first world nations. How do we propose to secure the huge amounts of fissile material and waste these reactors will use/produce. I’m not worried about fission bombs necessarily, but I am worried about pollution and dirty bombs.
3. “Without major improvements in storage” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. We’re seeing massive declines in storage prices and huge increases in production. If storage follows a curve similar to Solar PV, a huge fraction of the profitable applications for nuclear will be gone to cheap renewables and storage. Even if it doesn’t, renewables and today’s batteries are already driving fossil sources off the grid. How do we pay for a technology that will only have a few use-cases left after all the low hanging fruit has been eaten?
PS The last question is not a troll. It’s very obvious that renewables are going to generate something like 80-90% of our power. I’m open to the possibility that nuclear could make up the remaining 10-20%. But the economics of that chunk will be messy, since SMRs will have to compete with dirt cheap electricity when the sun/wind are available (even if storage stays expensive.) I highly doubt that SMRs are going to outcompete Solar PV when the sun is shining. What do the economics of the mostly-renewables-and-storage-with-SMRs-as-backstop world look like?
> We’re seeing massive declines in storage prices and huge increases in production.
Just in the last 9 months I’ve seen LFP prismatic cells from China drop 50% in price (and about 10% in pack volume). Add to that the variety of grid scale storage tech emerging out of R&D into the real world, by the time a nuclear reactor built today is coming online, it will be obsolete. More importantly, as renewables reach overcapacity, we need fast dispatch ‘peaker’ plants, not baseload, which makes gas a better transitional power source than nuclear, and batteries the end game
> I’ve seen LFP prismatic cells from China drop 50% in price
The comp would be the Nth-run cost of an SMR. It’s not something being produced anywhere close to utility scale to be topical over the next 20 years.
The world is bifurcating along renewables + gas (peaker), mostly the West, and renewables + coal (peaker-ish) and nukes (base), more Asia. Batteries may eventually replace some of that. But there are higher-value uses for them than grid storage for the foreseeable future (most obviously transport).
Globally, we are investing $1.5tn into new gas pipelines and terminals [1]. Anyone thinking those are transitional investments that will be written off in the next 20 years is deluding themselves.
> Anyone thinking those are transitional investments that will be written off in the next 20 years is deluding themselves.
I absolutely do not. Whether it’s nuclear or gas, transitional plants will either need to be subsidized or guaranteed by governments. As batteries come online, gas and nuclear will be dead.
> It’s not something being produced anywhere close to utility scale to be topical over the next 20 years.
I’m not sure that’s true, even for LFP. But flow batteries, pumped hydro, sodium ion are already there in terms of scale and economics, and don’t remove from storage where volumetric/gravimetric density matters, as with mobility.
Multitudes of other solutions like hydrogen production and more experimental energy storage are being actively researched, and I’d wager we’ll see more technologies in the mix in the next 1-2 decades that makes the nuclear discussion moot
> transitional plants will either need to be subsidized or guaranteed by governments
This isn’t some hypothetical, this is current investment being made under known terms.
Europe (nor America) can’t afford a trillion-dollar bail-out of its brand new gas terminals and pipelines. When demand starts being saturated, the existing infrastructure will take priority: every gas turbine, terminal and pipeline being built today will crowd out renewables down the line.
> As batteries come online, gas and nuclear will be dead
Possibly. Everyone seems to like a monoculture. The pro-nukes want only nukes. The pro-batteries want only renewables + batteries. Given that divide, it makes sense we’re betting on gas for the long term.
> I’d wager we’ll see more technologies in the mix in the next 1-2 decades that makes the nuclear discussion moot
There is a certain price for renewables and storage where, yes, gas infrastructure will absolutely be dead. I don’t know what that price is: but it exists. And it won’t be the first time entire generations of capital investment have been torn up and thrown in the trash. Go out and take a look at what remains of the industrial Midwest.
But 20 years, where gas gradually becomes a backup seasonal fuel source and is increasingly displaced by renewables and storage? That is absolutely consistent with a net-zero-by-2050 world. And probably a shorter timeline than the one that gives us ubiquitous SMRs, unfortunately.
> is a certain price for renewables and storage where, yes, gas infrastructure will absolutely be dead
My point is the infrastructure is endogenous. Trillions in gas infrastructure investment creates real pushback against the price being allowed to get that low.
For Exhibit A as to how this will progress, see PG&E in California.
> This isn’t some hypothetical, this is current investment being made under known terms.
Not sure what you mean here. Is it that private sector investments into gas? If so, it can't be said that it's a good investment. Plenty of bad investments happen, even in so called 'efficient' markets. At the end of the day, making a gas plant is a bet that we'll need more power than renewables can provide 1 - 2 decades from now.
> terminal and pipeline being built today will crowd out renewables down the line
If the energy can be had for cheaper, it will taken from renewables, though the losses may or may not be underwritten by the government.
If the argument is that renewable capacity will be insufficient 2 decades from now, well it would seem we'd need to vast increase in demand for that to be the case. That's not implausible, but certainly energy demand has been shrinking in western nations due to efficiency gains. Even AI, which seems set to increase energy usage, will be subject to efficiency gains as custom silicon, more efficient nodes, photonics, and other technological advances come into play
> Everyone seems to like a monoculture.
I'm not talking about a monoculture. As evidenced in this thread, I've talked about a mix of energy with gas in the equation. All I'm talking about is economics. Solar panels keep on giving (well past their previously expected lifetime of 15 years), wind farms keep on giving, with very little extraction or transport required, though transmission and, for now, backup, seem to be the pain points.
Personally I prefer nuclear from a conservation viewpoint – the waste and water usage problems not withstanding — as there's less land usage, and not a huge amount of extraction required.
> Barring antimatter weapons, no.
If we were to entertain this hypothetical, seems like there would be military budget enough to build whatever nuclear generators they need for their weapon (as they do for subs). I'm not sure on what timeline antimatter weapons enter the equation, but we could add the other hypotheticals of fusion or Dyson Spheres in the mix too
> I’m not worried about fission bombs necessarily, but I am worried about pollution and dirty bombs.
Realistically, the nuclear industry will just decide in a few years that it's too hard to properly dispose of waste and they'll dump it unsafely somewhere that it harms humans. This will be easier to do in countries that already have large hazardous waste problems. In the US it will require a great deal of lobbying, but at least 1/3 of the population will support it if they think it makes the economy stronger and sticks it to their enemies.
- Too expensive.
Nuclear power plants usually operate for 40-80 years, making their ROI after the 20 year mark (greatly varies). The report's choice of "10-15 years" for a return on investment is suspicious, as it corresponds more to the life of PVs and wind turbines.
- Too slow.
The first instances of a new design always take longer than the mass production instances. It's madness to compare prospective factory-manufacturable reactors to the behemouth reactors we are used to today. (Also, from memory, I think Japan once made one of those behemoth reactors in 22 months... delays are often not for technical reasons).
- Too risky.
Without storage and/or distribution solutions, renewables will inevitably depend on fossil fuels; this applies both to service economies and manufacturing economies. The difference is that nuclear captures is externalities, unlike fossil fuels.
- A bad fit.
I actually agree with this one in some cases. For example, Australia has abundant land and great weather; they could probably get by with pure renewables. However, countries like Germany (which has so-so weather and some heavy industry) would be hard-pressed to do the same. They could achieve 100% renewables by giving up certain industries, but I don't think that's reasonable to ask.
- The Boeing Problem
Boeing's fall from grace has everything to do with perverse incentives and regulatory failure. If the public is crucifying them for dodgy planes, I imagine they'd do even worse for making dodgy reactors. Regulation is a must for nuclear, and never has anyone serious thought otherwise.
I love nuclear stuff, and I agree with you that SMR have a very good chance to become cheaper. I think we, the society, should invest in nuclear (specific nuclear fission) because of the immense energy density of uranium and thorium.
Yet, I think reaching our climate goals is entirely doable without nuclear.
Why? Net zero does not mean zero emissions. It means emissions equal to sinks. Right now in the US all the emissions coming from natural gas power plants are equal to all the sinks (generally forests) [1]. When I tell people that they are surprised. Here's the numbers: electricity contributes 25% to the emissions, and natgas power plants generate 45% of the emissions associated with power generation [2]. So 11.25% of emissions come from these power plants. The greenhouse gas sinks for the US are at 13%.
So, if we ditch all the coal power plants (which is happening right now, at high speed) and we build a lot of solar and wind, and keep all the current natural gas power plants as peakers, then we will be well below net zero.
> For example, Australia has abundant land and great weather; they could probably get by with pure renewables.
Maybe we (Australians) can do 100% renewable. We will see. But even if we never do (and it's not entirely clear how it's possible), it's hard to see a place for nuclear here.
Since you say you follow this closely, you are probably aware one Australia state is at 70% renewables. That's 70% average, over a year. Unlike other places you hear about with a lot of renewables, South Australia has no hydro. Like the rest of Australia SA is pretty flat, so it has no pumped storage either. In fact there is nothing special about SA at all, other than it has no coal or gas, and is at least 500km from anywhere else of note so transmission lines cost a small fortune. It's not an ideal place for renewables, but beggars can't be choosers.
I'd love to say SA hitting 70% was a master stroke of forward planning. It was anything but. You will hear some politicians claim the did it for climate change. Maybe it was, but what they did happened to coincide with taking cheapest option on the table at the time, over and over again. Solar and wind are damned cheap when they are only contributing 10%. Getting to 70% is more expensive, but they already had the natural gas peakers so at each step the options on the table were to import more natural gas, or put up a wind turbine and use less gas. Each % reduction gets asymptomatically more expensive of course. Over provisioning helps, but typically solar drives the price negative during the day now. They claim they will get to 100% in 2027, but without storage I don't have a clue how that's possible without using the transmissions lines to states with coal generators and some creating accounting.
It's possible the current 70% made the grid a unstable. It's hard to know. They did loose power for days, but the proximate causes were some transmission lines were blown over in the worst storm in decades, inter-state interconnects were down for maintenance, and wind turbines tripping out because of the spikes created by the first two. I'd love to say that had been anticipated and they were the victim of delays in building storage, but storage was deemed to be a money losing proposition. Hell, I'd even like to say the engineers stood up and said "we can fix this with a battery", but that didn't happen either. What actually happen is there was a political shit storm over whether the outage was caused by renewables, and the SA government found itself under an enormous amount of pressure to announce a fix. Elon, the masterful dick waving salesman that he is, proclaimed he could fix the issue by installing the world's biggest battery in 100 days - or it was free. It made headlines around the country, and they took him up on it despite the fact that it cost a small fortune and everyone knew it would lose money.
This is how the decision making process has always been. A complete cluster created by special interest groups fighting over their preferred way. It seems everyone hopes to win the fight by yelling at each other, including engineers like yourself. In the end the pollies throw their hands in despair and choosing the easiest option at the time. Everyone, and I do mean everyone including the engineers was wrong about that battery. It made money from the day it was installed. Turns out when a coal fired generator trips out and removes megawatts from the system in a single 50Hz cycle, to the computer controlling that battery that 20 milliseconds looks like an eternity. It can react in microseconds and dump compensating power into the system long enough for a peaker to fire up. And charge a small fortune for doing it. Apparently no one foresaw this, and so no serious grid scale batteries were added. Now everyone has seen they make money new battery installations are springing up like weeds all around the country. Again I'd love to say they are doing it for the climate or for grid stability but no, they are doing it to get on the gravy train. The way we are going about this transition is nothing if not consistent.
Predicting what the end game looks like seems like fools errand to me. 100% renewable seems dubious. But they are at 70% now, so somewhere above 80% seems reasonable by 2030. Maybe they will start building pumped storage by 2050 - stranger things have happened. But using an SMR to fill that 20% gap - that's beyond strange. It's a shitty 20%. You are off most of the time. You have to go from 0 to full peak within an hour or so when the wind stops blowing and the sun ain't shining, and then from full peak back to 0 on a dime. Nuclear might be good at a lot of things, but the one thing it's absolutely hopeless at is load following. Japan having the worlds highest percentage of nuclear is also why Japan has the most pumped storage per unit generation.
The economics aside, nuclear would require a lot of forward thinking and commitment. Clearly when it comes to power generation that hasn't been Australia's strong suite. I don't see it but maybe there is some place in the world that is different. (Who could possibly have thought buying gas from Russia was a good idea?) China would be a good candidate I guess. China does have a 30 year plan for building nuclear. But with the price plummeting on renewables it looks like they've now abandoned it in all but name as they are adding more renewables each year than the nuclear plan called for over it's entire lifetime.
A personal take: the point for SMRs it's not costs nor potential mass-production and so on but a simple thing, they can be moved. We are in a changing world, we know, at least some of us know, we don't really know the future, but we know many will migrate and this means wars but also the inability to made fixed land infra, like roads, rails, electricity grid etc. Long story short: we need to have electricity "with us, moving" and p.v.+storage can works for a large slice of inhabited land but not enough, so we need something similarly easy to locally deploy.
From an outsider's perspective, SFR based designs look like hellish machines which are begging to burst up in flames. In contrast, I love the design of the properties LFR, except the material problems of high temperature lead. And in German circles the Dual Fluid reactor gets a lot of buzz as well.
I have a tremendous love for the fast breeder reactors (particularly Superphénix); that we had that technology so long ago astounds me. However, I recognise that they are technically challenging.
From a modern, pragmatic point of view, I'm very partial to SMRs and AMRs (advanced modular reactors). They are also easier to implement on non-technical grounds (e.g. site permissions).
Lead-fueled reactors are definitely an interesting area, and Russia is in the process of building a 300MWe demonstrator (BREST-300-OD). That being said, they have their own share of problems.
Startup and maintenance is going to be a beast, slowly heating up the reactor to working temperatures is going to take almost a year. The other problem is that it's still not clear if corrosion problems can be solved satisfactorily.
Reactor construction steel is stainless because it has a protective film of oxides on its surface, and lead gradually rubs it away (and then rubs away the construction steel, at a much faster pace). BREST-OD reactor designers spent a decade perfecting a system that is supposed to manage the amount of dissolved oxygen in lead, but it needs to be tested in the actual reactor conditions. With all its crazy temperature gradients and flows.
Another interesting area is light-water cooled breeders. Such reactors _are_ possible, but just marginally. And they have the nasty positive void coefficient, but it looks like it should be possible to compensate for it.
Modern powerplants are closed-loop and do not consume water, although they may dump heat into it. Water is not consumed (in any great quantity) or contaminated, except that which is recirculated inside.
Power plants can be designed to work in hot deserts. The largest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde in AZ) gets cooled by evaporating treated wastewater.
French nuclear power plants were just not designed for droughts.
They need heat sinks, not fresh + cold + clean water. Even the heat sinks are only really necessary due to concentration of generating capacity rather than the amount of generating capacity. For example, photovoltaic usually has thermodynamic efficiency around 20% while steam plants (nuclear, fossil, geothermal, etc) are usually around 33%: solar panels will release considerably more heat into the environment per unit of energy generated, but since it's spread out nobody cares. Small Modular Reactors are a big step in the "spreading it out until it's easy to get rid of" direction.
What does need (and not just "need" but actually "consume") fresh, cold, clean water (and dry air) is swamp cooling, which for some reason seems to do the rounds as as environmental silver bullet every few years. But that's a different rant.
Wild to me how someone can open with something as ridiculous as recognising "the non-negotiable need of humanity for ever-increasing amounts of energy" and then be taken seriously. Its not only negotiable, its a requirement that we do not maintain such consumptive expansion.
Hey, I'd love to live like the elves in Lord of the Rings, but it's not gonna happen. The first world offloads its manufacturing burden to the third world, then criticises them for polluting the atmosphere with fossil fuels. Also, the majority of the world do not enjoy the standard of living we do in the first world, and they will want to. Like it or not, energy demand will increase. It is non-negotiable unless you think there'll be some great die-off.
The "strong developments" in the grid and storage you speak of is peanuts compared to trying to make nuclear cheap. Big, powerful companies with brilliant physicists and engineers have worked on it for decades. Lots of prototypes, lots of designs that didn't work out in practice.
Today, we don't actually need new tech for distribution and storage, although new tech is being developed and helps.
Chemical batteries for small-scale time-shifting and hydro plus gas plus biomass for larger scale. In 20 years, the youth of today will have to decide if they want to get rid of the last fossil gas - long term storage is on the order of 10% of total energy needed in the studies I've seen. It can be substituted with gas made from biomass. In fact, it's already happening in the country I'm in.
Distribution is just building more connections. I think working on improving the cost of underground connections would help, but it's doable with today's tech, and it is happening.
If anyone's interested, there are plenty of academic papers discussing this, and also a bunch of more accessible articles by this dude:
And yes, it's a complex topic. And yes, there will be some pain points along the way - energy is important to modern society, and it is a large transition that will years to unfold.
I am sorry, but I think most of what you wrote is plain wrong. Yes, I agree, the total amount of energy used by humanity is going up. Especially as there are so many nations on earth which so far only use little energy. On the other side, it will somewhat go down from the current state for many leading industrial nations.
However, the bigger change will be how we use energy. In the last century the whole grid was optimized for a mostly constant load because that is what the then-used technologies, nuclear and coal, could do best. There were even big incentives given to customers to have a mostly constant draw of power. But now this changes. We have energy sources which produce electricity very cheaply, but not at a constant rate. And the experience shows, if the end customer is charged by availability, the consumption patterns change to optimize costs. This will be a big factor in the rollout of renewables.
As the article shows, cost-wise the SMRs can't compete. Renewables are getting ridiculously cheap. And even more: every one can set up renewables. You can go and buy yourself solar panels and put them onto your house or into your garden. The same advantage applies to industry-scale deployments. Same with wind. The only disadvantage with wind are the permits, as wind generators are quite big. But those are still trivial compared to nuclear, as the wind generators are not dangerous in any other sense.
Because they are cheap, the electricity markes are going to be flooded by renewables. That is basic economy. So the question is, how can we complement renewables best, especially to cover the gaps in their production. It won't be one thing, but a combination of several options as they are non-exclusive. Local conditions will put a stronger emphasis on one technology vs. the other. But one thing is clear: it won't be nuclear. Because even in the most optimistic szenarios, nuclear is a bad counterpart, as it is not good at providing varying output. Even if that is technically possible (usually it is not), economically it doesn't make any sense at all. For a transition time, it will be gas, as gas plants are relatively cheap and fast. Gas is expensive, so running the plants infrequently makes sense. The gas can later be provided out of renewable production. Most likely, battery storage will kill that too. But if not, the gas power plants can still be used.
And in all of that I haven't even touched the operational safety, nuclear waste, and of course giving nuclear technology to countries we don't trust.
