Th nuclear industry in the West has failed spectacularly since the 70s. In the US, rank managerial incompetence has completely tanked the "nuclear renaissance" started in the last Bush years and throughout the Obama years. Despite large local support, huge regulatory support, and loan guarantees, building nuclear in the US in this century is an even worse deal than Hinkley!
Meanwhile, the nuclear industry falls back on blaming environmentalists and has vague complaints about regulations, but no suggestions on what to change. They refuse to acknowledge their own incompetence and massive failures, preferring to fight lost and old political battles, reliving the past.
There's way too much old, dead, stupid weight in the industry. If any of the new nuclear startups succeed they will need to make sure to avoid falling into the same traps and have a lot more self awareness than the current batch of decision makers and proponents.
Private industry can’t manage big capital projects like this.
The current management framework for these kinds of companies doesn’t allow corporate managers to take risks, and the culture of excessive compensation for executives leads them to price too much risk.
There's been a long campaign to close the Indian Point plant in Westchester County, NY that's only gained traction over the last seveal years. The main concerns are: evacuation in case of emergency, waste storage, terrorism, and environmental impact on the Hudson River due to hot-water discharge. It also doesn't supply that much of the area's total demand and one of the reactors is inactive.
Not saying that means there's no local support elsewhere, but it's definitely not universal. Maybe if it were a new plant things would be different.
The new "nuclear renaissance" plants, Vogtle and VC Summer, were welcomed with open arms.
Older reactors like Indian Point were built before all the risks were fully disclosed to the surrounding population, or at least before the first disasters, resulting in a lot of people dead set against them.
Nuclear has also allied itself with fossil fuel allies, which have of course abandoned nuclear as soon as they were the least bit uneconomic. At least in the US there hasn't seemed to be much emphasis at all on the low carbon aspect of nuclear from proponents, and they are all too happy to rag on renewables with bullshit arguments like land usage. Natural low-carbon allies are still seen as suspect or the enemy. Any reasonable carbon tax would mean that (existing) nuclear could compete economically, but I've never seen a nuclear proponent advocate for that.
While it's clear that nuclear is uneconomical now and in the near future, it's still not quite clear to me if we can do without it.
Solar and wind are great, cheap options right now, and they've really outperformed what people expected over the past few years. Is there enough potential capacity of solar + wind + hydro to meet total future demand though? Are we going to run out of land and coast first?
If we're going to reduce our carbon emissions enough by 2050, we need to electrify heating, industry and transport. That's going to increase electricity demand by a lot.
Carbon capture and storage is pretty clearly dead. Tidal lagoons seem like they're also just too expensive. Neither fusion nor alternative fission technologies will be up and running in time to make much difference to the 2050 target for 80% reduction from 1990 levels (UK specific).
Is there really a concern about running out of land/coast for power generation? I feel like there is a lot of space left.
The bigger issue to me seems to be the move from production we can control to production on nature's schedule. Nuclear plants can "just" "throw another rod in" and generate power as needed.
The promise there appears to be a distributed approach. Getting people installing batteries in homes as standard could make it so buying electricity when it's being produced rather than when you need it is the norm. The economics incentivise this and hopefully the tech is getting there. Combine that with the likely move to everyone having an electric car (read: giant battery) sat on their drive doing the same thing half the time, and maybe that problem is being solved.
No, you can't. I spent 22 years as a operations nuclear plant supervisor and I can tell you this can't be done. Two to four mw/min power increase, depending on several factors, is the norm. Power follows steam demand is an old saw in the industry. You slowly open the turbine valves and dilute the coolant in the reactor to keep things in balance. Control rods are kept fully withdrawn at all times at power.
So the nuclear reaction has constant power output, you just throw the energy you don't want away by using coolant instead of turning the turbines? That sounds.. inefficient.
Not at practical capacities. We're talking about a pair of 1.6GW reactors, so the control rods can adjust total generation by 1.6GW in a matter of minutes. How many batteries would it take to supply 1.6GW for a reasonable amount of time (let's say 24 hours)? How much would that cost?
> 100mw output of batteries costs $38m, so 16 of those costs $0.6b, 3% of the cost of Hinckley C, even assuming no more overruns.
So 24 hours' worth would cost 72% of the cost of Hinkley C, and that's not including any amount of power generation. Looks like wind/solar + enough batteries to timeshift their output to match consumption would end up costing more.
> Ok that only gives you 1 hour of charge, but your requirement was changing in minutes. These batteries respond to load change in milliseconds.
The ability to change quickly is only part of the problem; if you want to run the country on wind or solar then you need to be able to handle several overcast or calm days in a row.
> if you want to run the country on wind or solar then you need to be able to handle several overcast or calm days in a row.
On a country scale yes, but not on a continental scale. Although in the case of solar, you probably just want to have peak output twice the size you’d expect for naive insolation, and it looks like it’ll be cheap enough soon enough for that to be economical.
Batteries, like hydro reservoirs, can be charged from inflexible energy sources when they have surplus output. It really isn’t fair to compare them to energy sources as they can smooth over the inflexible ones.
Again, batteries make sense with inflexible energy production methods. So if you want to use that coal more effectively, get a bunch of batteries or a lake up a hill to pump into.
Is there enough potential capacity of solar + wind + hydro to meet total future demand though?
Yes. And very easily too. ANU did a study in Australia and found pump hydro could cover 100% of the supply needs while only using a small fraction of available sites. Australia is a very flat country so I'd imagine it is even easier in most countries.
That shouldn't really matter. It was something like 1% (?) of the available sites to make Australia 100% renewable. So in the US it might be 15% - except that the US has a lot more mountains and a lot more water near population centers.
We could provide the world's total energy needs by covering a small portion of the Sahara desert with solar. We are not running out of land anytime soon.
There is also a practical limit where wind energy takes too much energy out of weather systems, affecting climate, but that point is also far beyond the current world energy usage.
We're not running out of renewable energy anytime soon.
>We could provide the world's total energy needs by covering a small portion of the Sahara desert with solar.
The Sahara desert is extremely sandy, and extremely windy, which makes it a pretty terrible, or at least prohibitively-expensive place to build a solar farm.
It is also extremely complicated and extremely expensive to transmit large amounts of power over long distances, particularly across national borders (everyone's on a different AC standard), particularly across many national borders.
Wind at say 1GW in 200 square miles (dogged bank figures)
Total sea area therefore is 1 million gw or 1,000tw, or 24ktwh/ day
Need 200k twh for global energy usage, with 30% to spare
Wind loading of average 25%, you need to cover less than 10% of the sea area to produce enough evergy to replace every form of power on the planet - not just electricity.
That's for the entire global energy production (and then some), including transport, heating, industry, not just electricity.
10% of land is set aside for agriculture, which is about 1/3 of 10% of water, but gives an indication. That's an area far larger than the entire US (including Alaska). We use a lot of space.
But you wouldn't produce your entire output from wind. In a desert you get about 2kwh per day from solar per square metre, or 2gwh per square km, or 100,000 SQkm of land for solar.
That's under half the size of Arizona's desert, or 1% of Sahara.
It's a mess of a deal, but what was the alternative? On a nice windy day we're getting away with no coal, relying on a mix of ~8GW wind, ~25GW gas and ~7.5GW of existing nukes, but on a cold still day we're pretty much flat out on 10G of coal, 25G of gas and 7.5GW of nukes, so until someone can find an alternative for ~17GW (coal+nuke) or a way to store ~30GWh worth to get us over the evening peak without coal+nuke then we need to keep nukes going. Of course it's going to be a cost overrun, but I am glad that Flamanville etc are being used as the debug points first.
Lots of options, but here's one: $20B buys massive amounts of HVDC to interconnect and trade with distant parts of the continent and enable trade in both directions for intermittent renewables. HVDC has shorter lead times and lower cost overruns too. Multiple lines are important too, because those massive inverters don't work 100% of the time.
Fortunately we've already got ~5GW+; but cold still winter days are tending to affect large areas at the same time for extended periods of time; those are the days when everyone is at peak usage and has ~no solar. The last time the UK power grid had to raise a warning (a few years back) was a cold still February when the whole continent was low on wind generation, and you could see that a couple of weeks back where we were running coal generation and exporting to France (well the EU grid) at the same time.
We have a significant amount of HVDC already. Not sure how that helps as there is still many many days when there is 0 wind across the whole of the EU.
Not to mention as the article states the closest big nation, France, is on the verge of an energy crisis itself....
Solar battery backed is under $100/MWh (wind even cheaper), and those costs will decline rapidly as battery manufacturing scales up.
Nuclear will never get cheaper, not to mention the rapidly increasing decommissioning costs everyone is keeping off the books. Batteries are mostly non toxic and easily recycled.
A backup battery for the 10-day wind lull from Dec 5th to Dec 15th in the Pacific Northwest would cost $90B and be a football field 100 stories high. Then it'd have to be replaced every 20 years. The footprint of something like that from a land, mining, and carbon standpoint is not trivial.
That doesn't sound quite right. Nuclear is very energy dense and has very low footprints in terms of land, fuel, mining, pollution, waste, and everything else except capital cost. I hope we can figure out how to build them cheaper.
Acres per Megawatt Produced for different energy sources [1]:
Coal 12.21
Natural Gas 12.41
Nuclear 12.71
Solar 43.50
Wind 70.64
Hydro 315.22
Maybe today, but with demand (and thus potential profit) for grid-scale storage increasing we see a lot of promisimg research in that area. Li-Ion is engineered for completely different tradeoffs, so there's massive room for improvement.
The 4 GWe wind farms have an average capacity factor of 35% so over ten days that's 336 GWh or 4.8 million Teslas, and that's just for the fraction of electric generation that's wind in the PNW. Scale that up to full electricity and then full energy and you're looking at a pretty serious challenge. Batteries are generally not what people consider for grid-scale power. The 100% renewable Stanford superstar, Jacobsen (who's suing his scientific critics), doesn't even use batteries in his scenarios (he uses pumped hydro and hydrogen instead).
The problem with battery backed is getting longer storage; The UK government has just reduced the subsidy for storage technologies that can't keep it going for a few hours; See https://www.emrdeliverybody.com/Lists/Latest%20News/Attachme... for the full assesment of how they came up with that.
Other states who rely less on their military nuclear threat arsenal showed how to manage this small problem. Just act rationally without corrupt politicians and lobbyists who turn around the facts.
Renewable energy easily can provide all that.
Guatemala runs mostly on biomass energy from their sugar industry, Germany runs on wind. There's enough cheap biomass and solar and wind.
https://www.electricitymap.org/
If the project has some amount of delay (which is likely when you see Flamanville or Olkiluoto) it's going to end up as a really good deal for the British Government because there are high penalty fees in that deal. For EDF, not so much, that's why the project met that much resistance inside EDF.
Flamanville - cost overrun. Olkiluoto - cost overrun. Hinkeley Point C - cost overrun. You see the pattern? The bane of the nuclear industry is not safety, but cost. Too expensive and risky to build and decomission.
The bane of nuclear energy is management: everybody working at EDF knew Flamanville was going to be more costly than budgeted, and everybody[1] know HPC is a bad idea, yet the management (especially the CEO, Jean-Bernard Lévy, who never worked in the energy industry beforehand and became CEO because of its political acquaintance) decided to go all-in on this.
I guess it's easier when you can't lose anything if things go bad: the former Areva CEO, Anne Lauvergeon didn't have any problem becoming board member in many big corporation[2] after her terrible management lead Areva to bankruptcy ...
[1] : the CFO resigned to protest against the deal, and the trade unions were strongly against
Wow, just wow. From the cost overruns, to the deal to pay almost twice the going rate for power, to learning that France has 50+ nuclear plants that need to be replaced in the next 10 years, the article is just a fountain of bad news.
It's a great lesson in things that have a long lead and a long tail can be hugely derailed by technology.
Whereas government policy papers could massage figures and make optimistic projections, the prospectus, which provided financial information for potential investors, could not bend the truth. “A government paper was one thing,” said the former civil servant, “but if the figures were misleading in the prospectus, it was a criminal offence. That was not at all like a government paper, to be honest. It was quite a moment for us all.”
The UK needs more power, however between off shore wind (half the price of Hinckley even now), and mass energy storage - not just dedicated batteries but also 10 million electric cars plugged in to sockets, I don't see this being financially suitable.
I was astounded at the cost of the new Belarus nuclear power plant being built by Russia near the Lithuania border.
2,400 MW of power, for $11 billion to build it. Based on the size of the Belarus economy (GDP per capita), that'd be like the US spending $120 billion to build a new nuclear power plant.
It's counterintuitive to me why the plants need to be so enormous, with the incredible amount of concrete and enclosure when there are nuclear subs running around at a tiny fraction of that size. (And yet with humans in even closer proximity than the nuclear power plant staff).
> there are nuclear subs running around at a tiny fraction of that size.
That never have to make a profit. And that's the key.
The US Navy is INSANE about keeping the reactors properly tuned and serviced. The number of staff they throw at assembling, servicing, and decommissioning their nuclear vessels is astounding.
I would guess that one of the hardest parts of building a nuclear reactor is compliance with all relevant regulations. That effort probably doesn't scale linearly with reactor size, so building the biggest plant you can afford is the best investment.
I wonder about this too. Perhaps there is some combination of regulations and economies of scale that push nuclear power build projects in this direction. I'd be interested to know why we don't see more smaller reactors, or fewer even bigger ones.
Big nuclear projects are too slow to start nowadays and need stability over the long term (40-60 years). This is probably unsustainable economically and unwise technologically in liberalised markets. That said, Generation IV reactors in a small modular format will be equally expensive as first of a kind and difficult to assess by the national regulators that give the go ahead. So what for nuclear? Bear in mind that if transport goes fully electric in the next 15-20 years, then the world will need almost double the baseload electricity it needs today, irrespective of improved efficiency of existing sources and similar reasoning. China and Russia are going long with new nuclear while the liberalised West is shutting down its plants or extends their life at a loss while thinking of phasing out. Another big dependency in sight then?
The Guardian is left leaning but it doesn't strongly support any party.
And as a matter of fact this plan was initially proposed by a Lib Dem MP[0] (he was also a Guardian columist after that). That reference also notes that nuclear expansion was favoured by most Labour MPs at the time.
I didn't say "slightly" and they are nowhere near the extreme left so your Hitler comparison is bizarre. Editorially they are closer to the centre left although some of their columnists are more leftwing.
And just because both the Labour party and the Guardian are to the left, it doesn't mean they will blindly support each other.
You're right you didn't say slightly, I apologise. And the Hitler thing was an extreme example but you understand what I was trying to say.
Personally, I do perceive a strong anti conservitive and pro labour bias in that paper, even in simple ways like using flattering pictures of Corbyn and unflattering ones of May. So when i see an article on a complex subject that leads with an anti government headline I'm automatically reading it with the fact that these people hate the conservitives in mind and I thought that should be pointed out to others who might not be aware of that.
There wasn’t a hint of party political bias in this article. The financial facts of the funding of this power station speak for themselves, no matter what colour your tie.
The headline of the article is '...how could the government strike such a bad deal'.
I actually don't agree that facts always speak for themselves. I think it's very easy to pick naked facts to lead the reader where you want them to go without explanation of the decision making process or what the alternatives were.
Meanwhile, the nuclear industry falls back on blaming environmentalists and has vague complaints about regulations, but no suggestions on what to change. They refuse to acknowledge their own incompetence and massive failures, preferring to fight lost and old political battles, reliving the past.
There's way too much old, dead, stupid weight in the industry. If any of the new nuclear startups succeed they will need to make sure to avoid falling into the same traps and have a lot more self awareness than the current batch of decision makers and proponents.