
Carbon emissions and costs of subsidizing New York nuclear vs renewables - toomuchtodo
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652618326829
======
stephenjudkins
One of the authors is known for _heavily_ cherry-picking his facts, making
some pretty extreme and outrageous assumptions, and suing fellow academic
critics who point this out. Caveat lector.

~~~
jessriedel
For others:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson)

~~~
amacbride
Oh, _that_ guy. Suing PNAS and the author of a study critical of his work is
honestly quite shocking. One would hope the work would stand for itself, or at
least the response should’ve been another paper rather than a lawsuit.

~~~
strainer
You find it shocking that he might have a valid case against them, or that he
has money to waste on legal harassment ?

~~~
archgoon
It is thoroughly inappropriate to respond to legitimate criticism, made in
good faith, published in a reputable journal, with a lawsuit.

It doesn't matter if you're right. If you're right; arguments can be made to
show that your opponents are wrong (and he was in fact allowed a rebuttal
letter in PNAS). Filing a lawsuit breaks any semblance of civility of
discourse and dispassionate pursuit of truth; and results in everyone worse
off, as the discussion has become thoroughly toxic.

It's burning down the entire house because someone disagreed with your
analysis.

~~~
strainer
Whether it was appropriate or not depends on whether the criticism was
legitimate or not. That is the legitimate purpose of legal proceedings to
determine.

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wongarsu
>We compare the cost of maintaining a proposed subsidy for New York's three
upstate nuclear power plants with the cost of replacing the plants with
renewable technologies from 2016 to 2050

Is operating the plants until 2050 really something people consider? From a
brief google search those nuclear power plants were all built in the 70s-80s.
Power plants are usually designed for 30-40 years of operation. Operating them
for 70-80 years seems ill advised from an economic and safety standpoint.

~~~
cbhl
I imagine building a new plant -- even to replace an existing one -- would be
a politically uphill battle.

There are plenty of folks who consider coal or natural gas to be "more
renewable" or "more green" than a nuclear plant.

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loeg
Wait who considers coal more green than nuclear? That's nonsense. Renewable is
understandable as a sort of redefinition of terms, but I don't see how anyone
explains away coal as "green."

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kijin
There is such as thing as "green coal", a.k.a. "clean coal". Methinks it's an
oxymoron, but some people seem to disagree :/

~~~
pjc50
I don't think there's anyone who believes in "clean coal" that isn't a
lobbyist or a dupe of one. Theoretically coal-with-carbon-capture could be
clean, but I'm not sure if any of these have ever been built and they would
have high running costs.

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renewables
So, knowing the way technology works, one has to figure older legacy systems
are painful to deal with. Not always, but usually.

Knowing that most code deployments for server side software cannot claim the
benefits of total rewrite from scratch, many of us would love to get a chance
at trying exactly that.

What would this assessment look like for a nuke-to-nuke replacement, instead
of nuke-to-wind/solar?

In other words, if they abruptly terminated use of all the aging nuclear
plants today, and immediately started building totally new, highly modern
nuclear power facilities, how would that stack up against this research
favoring renewables?

~~~
wongarsu
Nuclear power doesn't look that great from a cost standpoint once you factor
in decomissioning of the plant after use, storing the waste from both fuel and
decomissioning (some of it basically forever), etc. A lot of those have been
externalties payed by the government, making it profitable for the operating
company, but that shouldn't cause us to build more.

If you used modern cutting-edge designs things might look differently, but
anything that is actually being built are updated versions of designs from the
70s. Nobody wants to spend lots of money on research and take the risks with
building more radical new designs.

~~~
DennisP
Nuclear plants are required by law to save up capital as they go for
decommissioning themselves.

They used to be required to pay into a fund for long-term waste storage, and
that fund has about $40 billion now. But after the Yucca Mountain project was
shut down, the nuclear operators had to store the waste in concrete enclosures
on their own properties, so they went to court saying they shouldn't also have
to pay the government to do nothing. In 2013 the courts agreed.

There are actually a lot of companies that want to spend money on R&D and
build radical new nuclear designs, including Terrapower, Moltex, Terrestrial
Energy, Flibe, Thorcon, Elysium, and many others. In the U.S. the NRC makes
this extremely difficult.

A couple years ago I got to sit in a meeting between representatives from
about a dozen of these companies and a former head of the NRC. The reactor
people said their biggest problem was that the NRC requires a near-complete
design before they'll even look at it, and then they give a straight yes or
no. If yes you still just have a paper reactor, and if no then you're done.
The design process costs several hundred million dollars and you have no idea
whether the NRC will let you do anything with it. It's a very difficult
environment for investors.

The reactor people said just a more phased process would help a lot. The NRC
person dismissed their concerns, said it wasn't the NRC's job to help develop
new technology or promote nuclear power, and wasn't interested in climate
change.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I can understand that this makes new nuclear development in the US a non-
starter. Why is the outlook for nuclear just as abysmal in the UK and China
though if their regulators are not as disincentivized to permit innovation?

~~~
godelski
I don't know about the UK, but China has been building new reactors. In fact,
that's what's gotten some reactors to a TRL status where they can build them
in America.

But from people that I've talked to in the UK, they seem to be more afraid of
nuclear than Americans. This seems to be a common trend in Europe. Many people
citing radioactive mushrooms from Chernobyl.

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xupybd
Are they including the cost of storing power for peak demand and low
generation times?

~~~
toomuchtodo
New York state has pumped hydro storage facilities. Any other gaps will be
filled by natural gas until utility scale battery storage comes down in price.

[https://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/43242.html](https://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/43242.html)

[https://www.nypa.gov/power/generation/blenheim-gilboa-
pumped...](https://www.nypa.gov/power/generation/blenheim-gilboa-pumped-
storage)

[https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/12/17/new-york-ups-its-ener...](https://pv-
magazine-usa.com/2018/12/17/new-york-ups-its-energy-storage-goal-3-gw-
by-2030/)

~~~
jabl
> gaps will be filled by natural gas until utility scale battery storage comes
> down in price.

So emissions will actually rise, until Magic Future Tech (TM) arrives to save
our bacon? Great plan. Just great.

Well, if not the climate, at least the fossil industry will be happy about
this paper.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> So emissions will actually rise, until Magic Future Tech (TM) arrives to
> save our bacon? Great plan. Just great.

That's exactly how we arrived with solar and wind so cheap between the 70s and
now. Batteries _will_ get cheaper, as demand for them for EVs brings more
manufacturing capacity online.

[https://electrek.co/2018/08/02/tesla-
gigafactory-1-battery-p...](https://electrek.co/2018/08/02/tesla-
gigafactory-1-battery-production-20-gwh/)

> “At the end of July, Gigafactory 1 battery production reached an annualized
> run rate of roughly 20 GWh, making it the highest-volume battery plant in
> the world by a significant margin. Consequently, Tesla currently produces
> more batteries in terms of kWh than all other carmakers combined.”

> Panasonic recently commented that ‘production at Tesla is gaining momentum’
> and they plan to add 3 battery cell production lines. It should result in an
> annual production rate of 35 GWh.

> At 35 GWh, they would be producing at the originally announced production
> rate, but Tesla has since increased the planned total capacity to 105 GWh of
> battery cells and 150 GWh of total battery pack output.

~~~
xupybd
I agree with you. That demand will drive production up and economies of scale
and research will drive costs down. But I still think the article should
include all the facts. The storage / peak supply side of things is very
expensive at present and it seems to have been left out of the equation. I'll
be super happy when renewable are end to end the cheapest options. That's
going to be a great day, but I don't think we're there yet.

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belorn
Winder power is never just wind power. Looking at the power generation of
example Germany we see a massive 75%+ use of wind power in good conditions,
but then see it all replaced with coal + oil + gas when it is not.

Power generation is no longer based on demand. Weather sets the energy price,
which dictate when it is economical to use fossil fuels. Wind is already at
the point where the price per wat is fantastic, the environmental effect
minimal, but if you include the need to infuse dirty energy when weather is
not optimal the average wat start to look very different.

If we have to pick between wind + coal, or only nuclear, the carbon emission
will favor nuclear. An other version is wind + fewer nuclear plants and lower
energy usage during low wind conditions, but there is only so much that the
energy usage drop when prices goes up. There is also a bunch of wind +
"battery" research, but I have not heard of any national power grid fully
investing in that.

~~~
benj111
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. You make some reasonable points.

I would say though, in the short term, we could stand to increase renewables
massively with out needing to solve the storage problem, virtually every watt
of installed capacity we add is directly offsetting dirty producers.

Grid scale battery storage is just starting to be implemented, theres also
hydro, and 'smart' grid solutions. Whether any of this turns out to be a
silver bullet I don't know.

~~~
belorn
Yes. Short term renewables supplement existing grid and reduce the average
pollution. It is good to reduce the problem and should be used so that on good
conditions it will practically take over all production. However it can not
replace the polluting producers on its own, who seem to have started to switch
operation to mostly when there is not enough renewables to supply the demand
(marginal costs like fuel + investment vs the so-called merit order).

Nuclear could operate just like the dirty producers and only operate when the
combined wind and solar is too low for the demand, which would further reduce
the environmental impact, but the massive investment needed in nuclear makes
the economics of it a bit complex and I have not read if the marginal costs of
nuclear operations make this a viable tactic. It would however reduce the
nuclear pollution down to the gaps where wind and solar is not enough.

That leaves future tech solutions. Smart grids sounds great, through I do not
know how big part of it is a political issue or technical problem. Just
getting the steel industry to focus operation on energy producing peaks seems
to be a major challenge, and they already have the incentive that the energy
get cheaper if they do so. Converting hydro to create burst of power rather
than continuously is also something very interesting but has also both
political and technical issues to solve. Then we have different from of
battery ideas, all from pumping water to different heat capturing concepts,
through I think that is even further away form being implemented on a large
scale.

The article talks about the proposed subsidy, and this is where I think we
need to think about the grid as a whole. If the goal is to fill the gap when
wind and solar can't supply the demand then the discussion should not be
renewable vs nuclear. It is very possible that the specific subsidy is a bad
tactic and they would be better served by trying to narrow the gap with even
more wind and solar, but then we need data to show that existing dirty
producers are preferred over nuclear in order to fill the remaining gap. That
to me is a hard sell, but I am open to be convinced :).

~~~
benj111
"Nuclear could operate just like the dirty producers and only operate when the
combined wind and solar is too low for the demand"

Not quite. Nuclear isn't _that_ dispatchable.

In general I agree though, short term we should be using all tools at our
disposal, long term depends on how energy storage etc works out.

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xvilka
This study forget one important fact - reliability of the wind or solar.
Unless there is a serious breakthrough in the storage technologies, nuclear is
irreplaceable, be it for the good or bad.

~~~
tdb7893
Is nuclear good at scaling up or down production?

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sadris
It's great. France literally does load follow based on demand: raises/lowers
control rods throughout the day.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not permit automated load following
of US nuclear generators. France and Germany nuclear regulators considered it
earlier in the permitting process, hence the functionality exists there (load
following incurs higher maintenance costs for components such as valves, but
does not incur a higher fuel cost).

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toomuchtodo
> Abstract: "We compare the cost of maintaining a proposed subsidy for New
> York's three upstate nuclear power plants with the cost of replacing the
> plants with renewable technologies from 2016 to 2050. Keeping nuclear
> operating with subsidy until 2050 is the most expensive option, costing
> $32.4 billion (2014 USD) over that period in the base business as usual
> case. The least expensive option is to shut down nuclear today and replace
> it with onshore wind, saving $7.9 billion. All analyzed renewable scenarios
> lead to 20.1 to 27.4 Mt CO2 greater life-cycle emission reductions. In
> addition, re-investing the cost savings of the renewable scenarios into
> additional onshore wind increase CO2 savings up to 32.5 Mt."

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kortilla
This is the kind of junk science that ruins energy discussions. Seriously,
hand waving away the energy storage problem of solar/wind by assuming a magic
technology will be created?

Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

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masonic
Does the "replacement" cost include _all_ decommissioning and environmental
remediation costs?

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toomuchtodo
I haven't read the entire paper, so I can't answer if the paper addresses
that. Note that work (decommissioning and environmental remediation) needs to
be done regardless when those nuclear generators reach end of life. In similar
fashion, renewables are less expensive than continuing to run existing coal
generation facilities in several markets, and those coal plants will need to
be decommissioned regardless of ongoing cost comparison.

The cost of remediating all of this legacy generation is going to be eye
watering, every nuclear and coal power plant a Superfund site.

