
Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable? (2011) - fulafel
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6021978
======
gambler
Anti-nuclear FUD. I wonder who's paying for this stuff.

 _> Currently, the total global power consumption by mankind is about 15
terawatts (TW) —so the question we address is: Can nuclear power feasibly
supply at least 15 TW?_

This is a downright _idiotic_ question. Humans use and will continue to use a
variety of different energy sources. Which sources specifically depends on
economic viability that differs based on the location, availability of raw
materials, current energy prices and government incentives.

If you're really serious about preventing drastic climate change due to C02
emissions, you should consider scaling up _all_ energy sources that don't
produce CO2.

Recommended viewing:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKH_iLhhkTyt8Dk4dmeCQ9w/pla...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKH_iLhhkTyt8Dk4dmeCQ9w/playlists)

~~~
fsh
I don't think that shallow dismissals and conspiracy theories add much to the
discussion.

~~~
sdinsn
Oil companies fund anti-nuclear groups. This is not a conspiracy theory, it's
a fact.

By the way, your comment is nothing but a shallow dismissal of his comment...

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StillBored
You have to question the assumptions if the basic math at the beginning
doesn't even seem right. They claim 440 reactors today need to scale to
15,000. That is a 34x increase.

Yet,
[https://www.ieer.org/ensec/no-1/glbnrg.html](https://www.ieer.org/ensec/no-1/glbnrg.html)
says that 18% of worldwide generation is already nuclear. So, to get to 100%
that would be ~5x, not 34x.

So, just that one change pretty much blows most of their argument away,
particularly if you assume that simply replacing many of the existing reactors
would give a capacity increase due to turbine/heat efficiency improvements now
done at modern plants.

So the scare mongering about having to build/replacing a reactor each day
sounds like utter bollocks.

~~~
adrianN
This is probably a confusing on your part between energy consumption and
electricity consumption. For a fossil free future we also have to replace
fossil fuels used for heating and transportation. It's likely that we won't
need a 1:1 replacement (by far) because heating and transportation can be done
much more efficiently with electricity (thanks to heat pumps and the
efficiency of electric motors).

~~~
anonuser123456
Funny thing about heat pumps.

Right now they primarily use refrigerants that have ~2000 times more GWP than
CO2. They need to be refilled every 5-10 years.

My brother had one installed recently. They leaked the entire contents twice
due to over tightened connectors. A back of the envelope calculation indicates
that his heat pump will emit more GWP gas than if he has just burned natural
gas by a wide margin.

Recently I recall reading an analysis that half of the heating since the 70s
is attributable from refrigerants.

So while heat pumps are more efficient from am energy standpoint, with current
refrigerants they are not helpful for climate change.

~~~
RickJWagner
I think it may have to do with where you live.

I've been in the same house in south-central USA for 15 years now. It has a
heat pump, first I've owned. It provides reliable, inexpensive service. I have
only good things to say about the heat pump.

I hope the additional emissions (if that's factual) are offset by the many
years of reduced electricity usage (which I am certain is factual.)

------
stevenwoo
This needs a 2011, neglects discussion of implications of construction of
first long time nuclear waste storage facility in Finland couple of years ago
(i.e. is that scaleable or even repeatable given politics now that we have an
example) [https://psmag.com/ideas/the-hiding-place-inside-the-
worlds-f...](https://psmag.com/ideas/the-hiding-place-inside-the-worlds-first-
long-term-storage-facility-for-highly-radioactive-nuclear-waste)

------
bcatanzaro
Sure, if you restrict yourself to 1950s technology, Nuclear is pretty
handicapped.

It’s just crazy to me that these articles presume some sort of revolution in
solar technology scalability but forbid nuclear power from using any better
design than the first one we invented.

~~~
zionic
Given the scale of the fossil fuels industry, I wonder how much money they
spend yearly on demonizing nuclear.

~~~
666lumberjack
I'm convinced that the reason so many oil and gas companies are on board with
scaling up intermittent renewables is because it secures demand for natural
gas for future.

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himinlomax
Re: nuclear waste

Deep core drilling seems to solve all the problems. Burying waste 3 km deep
under 2 km of dirt makes it immune to even geological timescale movements. It
also solves the problem of security; it's hard to see how a bad actor could
drill a 2 km deep hole without being noticed.

~~~
xhrpost
Aren't there experimental reactors that can "burn"/use the waste of
traditional reactors?

~~~
opwieurposiu
A fast reactor can burn the waste of thermal (traditional) reactor.

One design is the TWR

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor)

~~~
acidburnNSA
Still needs long term disposal in the end.

~~~
magduf
It's better than pumping your waste into the atmosphere for everyone to
breathe.

------
wazoox
All of this is interesting, but for instance it states that nuclear plants
occupy large amount of land (20.5km2 on average) and needs lots of resources.
However without a comparison to alternative technology, this is a moot point.

Having a quick look at requirements for solar plants, it's easy to check that
typical ones occupy about 14km2 per GW of power. So solar requires several
orders of magnitude more land than nuclear (taking into account actual power
production: 80% yield for nuclear, 15% at most for solar).

Furthermore, it's also easy to check that contrary to nuclear plants where
land grab is largely a safety zone, a solar plant actually covers land with
hardware, most of it requiring much more rare earths and exotic materials than
nuclear power plants (where 95% of stuff in weight is concrete and steel).

The actual take for me is the following: in the coming years, we'll go through
a huge reduction in energy availability, because fossil fuels are at least 80%
of world energy consumption and they'll run out at some point anyway; which
implies a huge reduction in economic activity. This is absolutely unavoidable
in the next few decades unless some actual miracle such as cheap and easy cold
fusion happens _real soon now_ .

~~~
Tade0
_a solar plant actually covers land with hardware, most of it requiring much
more rare earths and exotic materials_

The most exotic material in crystalline solar panels is silver or perhaps tin.
No rare earths whatsoever.

~~~
wazoox
To be a somewhat believable alternative to nuclear, you'll also need tons of
batteries. Many, many tons of them, full of lithium and cobalt and other
things. Because a solar plant produces power along a very steep bell curve
centered around noon, while a nuclear plant produces linearly exactly the
amount you're asking for 80 to 95% of the time.

This is only alluded to in the article, but intermittency is a major nuisance
and hinders significantly actual utility of renewable power, because we need a
base level of production they're totally incapable to provide unless backed
with literal mountains of storage (storage technology at scale we don't know
how to build or manage today).

~~~
Tade0
_while a nuclear plant produces linearly exactly the amount you 're asking for
80 to 95% of the time._

Only if it serves as baseload. In other cases you have to throttle it, which
quickly makes the whole business much more expensive per kWh.

And this is the reason nuclear will never be _the_ solution. Overprovisioned
renewables combined with gas peaker plants are simply way cheaper and much
faster to deploy.

Also batteries needen't be li-ion. Here's an example of a company that is
currently in the process of scaling up their battery product:

[https://eosenergystorage.com/](https://eosenergystorage.com/)

~~~
Accujack
>Only if it serves as baseload.

...which is the whole point of nuclear. It's constant power.

The means to manufacture, service and maintain battery capacity sufficient to
meet our civilization's energy needs from renewables simply does not exist in
any technology, period.

~~~
Tade0
But demand is not constant. You either have unmatched supply/demand or
expensive power.

For this reason nuclear is already losing on the economical front.

As for the batteries: citation needed.

~~~
wazoox
Renewables are extremely cheap only because they produce power when it isn't
needed and therefore is literally _worth nothing_.

As for batteries, the biggest batteries in service now are 150MWh. If we want
to power the world with renewable, we'll need TWh of batteries. We just don't
know how to build something like that. We haven't got the technology (lithium
isn't an option at these scales).

Renewables have an effect only as long as you have a steerable baseload of
coal, gas or nuclear to actually feed the demand. They have a positive effect
only as long as you haven't phased out all of your coal. As long as there is
no coal burner left, they'll set a high limit on emissions. Unless, of course,
we build as many nuclear plants as possible in the meanwhile instead of masses
of gas firing plants (400g/CO2/KWh).

We could build batteries and much more solar and wind power plant instead, but
even if we suppose a non-existent cheap battery technology, providing large
scale power this way would be tremendously expensive (5 to 30 times more
expensive than nuclear, depending upon the hypotheses).

Solar has an actual output of 15% its theoretical power. Wind is about 30%
(onshore) to 40% (offshore). So to produce x GW of power, first you'll need x
* 3 to x * 6 GW of installed capacity; second you'll need additional capacity
and batteries to offset times of no wind or no sun. Figuring the price of
several hundred GWh of battery storage is left as an exercise to the reader,
but it can't be cheap. Plus the grid enhancements needed to transport the
additional peak capacity from power plants to batteries, etc.

------
fsiefken
From the Conclusion at the end of the paper addressing all types of nuclear
technologies, fast breed reactors, Generation IV reactors and "fusion or
fission, uranium or thorium":

"Even a lesser goal of several terawatts of nuclear power would run into many
of the outlined limitations. Therefore, the notion of a nuclear utopia is a
false one. But there are two types of nuclear advocates: the nuclear utopian
and the nuclear realist. A nuclear realist would only suggest that we need
about 1 TW of nuclear power as part of our world energy mix. However, one only
has to divide the results, in this paper, by 15 to see that 1 TW still
stretches resources and risks considerably.

One then has to count the cost, consider the safety, the complexity, and the
issues surrounding governance of nuclear power. Also if the technology cannot
be fundamentally scaled further than 1 TW, one has to ask if the same
investment would have been better spent on a truly scalable technology.

It has been suggested that for the same investment, solar thermal farms (with
storage) would exceed the power output of nuclear stations and eliminate many
of the problems [5]. Solar thermal is also scalable as it has the capacity to
deliver hundreds of terawatts should mankind require it in the future.

The weakness of a scalable renewable solution, however, is intermittency. In
the short term, this problem can be addressed via dual use of solar thermal
with natural gas. Then, the natural gas can be phased out, as storage and grid
balancing techniques come online to solve the intermittency problem."

~~~
acidburnNSA
That's a big gamble. We know fracked natural gas emits vastly too many CO2
molecules per kWh generated for decarbonization, and it also leaks methane
through the pipelines.

Nuclear has been a boogeyman to fossil fuels for a long time. Intermittent
renewables with storage are awesome, but when backed by gas they're
antiproductive to decarbonizing.

France deeply decarbonized their entire grid with nuclear in 15 years by
standardizing plants and building in serial. This is a good success story.

Building gas now and hoping it goes away in 50 years is a terrible solution.

~~~
natmaka
In France this 'success story' led to a state law (2015-992, from 2015, the
"loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte") states
that the part of nuke-produced electricity must fall to less than 50% in 2025,
from 72% then, and that renewables must replace it.

In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 10,3% of gridpower in
2017).

The sole reactor currently planned (Flamanville-3) is a complete disaster,
more than 10 years behind schedule and 4x overbudget.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3)

~~~
Reedx
Which is probably a mistake. We need every tool in the toolbox and nuclear is
one of the best we have. It's also worth noting that France has been producing
much cleaner and cheaper energy than Germany, which eschewed nuclear.

And that Flamanville is behind schedule and over budget is not a problem
specific to nuclear. The same thing happens with building bridges or any big
construction project, in many countries. That's a different systemic issue
that needs to be resolved.

~~~
natmaka
Mistake or not, the net fact remains: as experts and themselves users of nuke
power the French are winding it down. We (I'm French) recently closed a plant
(Fessenheim).

Many big construction projects are indeed over budget and behind schedule,
however I'm not sure that 4x budget and 3x time (at least, because it is not
yet completed) for a project which design is only a minor enhancement of an
ubiquitous design is the norm in France.

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littlestymaar
This article is really poor. I don't even disagree with the point they make
since I don't think nuclear is scalable at all, but this article has mistakes
or bad reasonning like in every paragraph!

I'm on my phone so I won't list them all, but come on!

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jwilk
Archived copy, which works with JS disabled:

[https://archive.is/REV0t](https://archive.is/REV0t)

