Solar power is simply indirect nuclear power anyhow. If we can do what’s happening in the sun in a bottle - then no need to produce panels. If there is material in stars to produce solar power, then there is more potential nuclear power. I’m for both, and solar seems distributed in a way that makes me think it’s better for human society, but since stars are made of fissable materials - by definition there is more “potential energy” in fission than solar, since solar is simply a subset of fission at a distance.
Solar is fusion and not fission [1]. If you can't even get that right, why should anyone take these weird pro-fission arguments seriously in 2020?
The solution is to keep using existing nuclear power and develop renewables for replacement. Nuclear fission plants take at the very least 10 years (!!) to go online from the day construction begins. And that leaves out years of planning and dealing with contracts.
It's too expensive, dangerous and redundant in the face of emerging renewable tech which is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the month.
Renewables are not a replacement for existing nuclear power unless you either add fossil fuels or batteries to the mix. Countries which currently are replacing nuclear power do so with a combination of renewables and fossil fuels, with fossil fuels burning when renewables are not producing.
Batteries, usually reverse hydro power, is an interesting future technology. Some argue it is significant more developed than fusion. The bigger question is if its economically competitive compared to fission. There is costs and energy loss in every single step of producing electricity from renewables, transmitting it to the battery, converting it into potential, recreate the electricity, and finnally transmitting it to the end users. With fission you go directly from the power plant to the end user. Reverse hydro power plants also take a long time to build and either use a lot of land or coast. If you build it on land it also release a lot of methane as top layer of the land decompose.
Countries which currently are replacing nuclear power do so with a combination of renewables and fossil fuels
Which countries? Germany for example isn't - yet. We're still in a place where we can reduce usage of both fossil fuels and nuclear, though that won't last unless we figure out effective means of energy storage.
As an example, Sweden. People will use fossil fueled energy when the choice is between people freezing in their home or burning fossil fuels. Sweden rely on a mix between hydro and nuclear, but it is not feasible to extend hydro beyond current capacity. The nuclear plants however is getting older, and politically people want to shut them down. Something has to produce the energy, and during the winter it is imported fossil fuels energy when the wind is not blowing.
Germany as an example illustrate the issue quite nice, as can be seen live at electricitymap.org. When the wind is blowing the country goes green with around 70% of energy being produced by wind. Very sunny days you get around 20% solar. Days like today that is a bit rainy and not very windy, and you have 60% fossil fuels. The constant is nuclear around 10%, so remove that and the above numbers will go up depending on weather conditions.
German anti-nuclear activists like to tout the percentage figure of renewables in the country, but that's not the right metric to look at : the coal+gas baseline is so bad in terms of CO2 emissions, that even in ideal conditions when wind production is 70%, German electricity's carbon intensity is still way higher than in France, Sweden or Iceland (
Coal causes 35.000 premature deaths in Europe every year, and 7 of the 10 most polluting industry sites on the continent are German lignite power plants.
The hypocrisy and constant lecturing from Die Grüne needs to stop.
Sure. But that doesn't make Germany an example of replacing nuclear with fossil fuels. From 2002 to 2019, percentage wise, fossil fuels went down by 1/3 (from ~60% to ~40%) and nuclear by 1/2 (from ~30% to ~15%).
Since electricitymap gives current say 40% coal and 15% gas, to a total of 55%, I assume fossil fuels are not down to 40% all the time. What you are describing is the average.
Feel free to prove me wrong, but when the wind over Germany is still (<4ms) and its night, the amount of energy production using fossil fuels are higher than 70%, and thus at peak, fossil fueled energy production is higher now then before when nuclear stood for 30%.
and thus at peak, fossil fueled energy production is higher now then before when nuclear stood for 30%
But that's an irrelevant metric: What matters is the total CO2 released, ie the integrated value. So short-term, you replace coal plants by gas peakers, and transition to next-gen storage mechanisms long-term (better batteries, cryogenic storage, power-to-gas - the latter is especially interesting as Germany has pre-existing gas infrastructure than can store hundreds of TWh, and we use natural gas anyway for heating and industrial purposes).
What matters is to close down the fossil fuel plants for good. The output of wind is on average 45% of maximum capacity for offshore wind, meaning if you have 100% of wind during optimal conditions and 0% when the wind is still on average you get around 45%. For land based wind parks the numbers are low, around 25%.
So far there is very little investment to build out wind beyond having 100% wind in optimal conditions. Germany has almost hit that point, and if we look at neighbor Denmark then we can see what happens when it does reach 100%. Building wind beyond full capacity turns uneconomical quickly, as investors found out in Denmark.
The result is that the coal and natural gas plants will burn and continue polluting the world. The competitiveness of renewable is based on the cheap initial costs while it goes towards max capacity. The price tag does not include overcapacity, the batteries, cryogenic storage, power-to-gas and so on. It works fine as long as we don't think about the fossil fuels that get burned when the wind is still.
Nuclear plants have a linear cost. Going from 10% to 20% cost just as much as going from 90% to 100%. No overcapacity, no batteries, no conversion loss. You add 10% nuclear plants and you can demolish 10% fossil fueled plants. You build 10% additional wind farms and the same old fossil plants must remain. You demolish 10% of the nuclear plants, and you have to build the same amount of new fossil fueled plants in order to compensate when the wind is not blowing. New fossil fueled plants are going to get used, investments is going to be repaid, and political influence fill make sure that they continue to operate.
> What matters is the total CO2 released,
If people really thought so they would look at the electricitymap and look which countries does exactly that. Who has the lowest total CO2? The answer: those that can produce a constant base load without releasing CO2. Hydro or nuclear. Those that have invested most in renewable are not the ones with lowest total CO2.
> "Nuclear plants have a linear cost. Going from 10% to 20% cost just as much as going from 90% to 100%. No overcapacity, no batteries, no conversion loss."
In your nuclear-only scenario, without storage you'd need enough capacity to cover peak demand. This can be 2X or even 3X higher than average demand, so there would indeed be significant overcapacity. Very expensive!
Typical nuclear plants are also not good at demand response: to operate efficiently, their output must remain constant most of the time. Over-capacity at off-peak times is potentially a big problem on grids with a large portion of nuclear.
Some combination of storage, peaker plants, and demand response is required regardless of whether nuclear or renewables are used. The most cost-effective future grids are likely to use a diverse mix of technologies.
Germany absolutely is relying on coal and (Russian) gas to afford its ideological decision to prematurely sunset nuclear plants, at the worst possible time in history : just as climate change becomes an emergency.
The cold hard truth is that it's impossible to operate a grid with solar & wind energy alone, unless and until a hypothetical battery storage breakthrough lands in the next decades.
I've just checked the realtime figures and as I write this, German electricity is 5 times more carbon intensive than in France (72% nuclear) : https://www.electricitymap.org/
New-build nuclear is far more expensive, per kWh, than renewables. In Europe, even off-shore wind - one of the most expensive renewables - is now coming in much cheaper than nuclear projects.
In the US, even many old nuclear plants are struggling to compete without subsidies against renewables and natural gas.
> "Nuclear fission plants take at the very least 10 years (!!) to go online from the day construction begins."
Yes, but that's what the small modular reactors being proposed by Rolls-Royce, and others, intend to solve. If successful, they would greatly reduce the construction time, risk, and cost of nuclear projects.
It's a great project for the technology alone but isn't the projected time frame too late? Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables?
Also, if Rolls-Royce projects 2029 it doesn't mean it's done by 2029 and most certainly not wide scale deployed/operable. So what kind of renewable infrastructure and tech will be deployed 15-20 years from now?
> "It's a great project for the technology alone but isn't the projected time frame too late? Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables?"
It's not a question of nuclear or renewables - we absolutely need renewables, and right now renewables are much cheaper, and can be delivered faster, than nuclear.
But there are regions of the world that may struggle to decarbonise completely without nuclear in the mix. Especially if you consider additional demands in the future from electrification of transport, building heat, etc.
> Where will we be 10 years from now with renewables?
If the electricity storage problem doesn't get solved (which is a pretty small "if", since it requires a very uncertain breakthrough in physics) : nowhere.
In 10 years the climate emergency will be even more salient, but one of coal/gas/nuclear/hydro will still be required in the mix.
Countries that can't have hydro for geography reasons, and have shut down nuclear early for political reasons will be a liability to the rest of the world.
Most likely in that time frame we'll be trying to get by on a mix of renewables and non carbon neutral generation from coal or similar, and we'll also have implemented limits on carbon generation that will effectively be crippling various industries and increasing the cost of various necessities worldwide.
We won't have a choice... it'll be down to either everyone accepting reduced quality of life or nuclear... at which point nuclear starts to look very good.
>It's too expensive, dangerous and redundant in the face of emerging renewable tech which is becoming cheaper and more efficient by the month.
Why are you comparing the state of nuclear energy today with the potential scientific breakthroughs of renewable energy in the future?
If you compare nuclear of today with renewables of today, then the winner is clear. If you compare the two accounting for potential scientific breakthroughs..who knows?
Stars are fusion reactors, not fission. They're mostly made of hydrogen and helium, which account for 98% of its mass: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Tables/suncomp.ht.... You're going to have a hard time building a fission reactor running on hydrogen and helium.
Stellar fusion like that which occurs in our sun is effectively aneutronic, but is also relatively slow, because the limiting step is the combination of two protons into a proton-neutron pair.
You need to keep a lot of hydrogen at plasma-hot temperatures and very high pressures for a long time. So you can't really do it with masses smaller than Jupiter, because smaller bodies can radiate the energy away faster, and produce fewer events from the lesser mass.
So the only technologically effective way to leverage solar is to deconstruct larger stars into red dwarfs between 0.08 and 0.35 solar mass, perhaps with a ferro-platosmiridium core to increase the overall density and make the reactions viable at lower overall mass. Then surround the whole thing with a Dyson shell and Shkadov/Caplan thruster.
Aneutronic reactors are good of course, but the Sun still puts out lots of other dangerous radiation. In particular, ultraviolet electromagnetic radiation from the Sun causes tens of thousands of cancer deaths every year. I have no problem accepting a few percent of that mortality from man-made radiation sources if that helps solving the CO2 emission crisis.
Good. For the foreseeable future, the limit of energy available from solar will be the total surface area of the Earth divided by two.
And that includes hydro from evaporation-rainfall cycling, photosynthesis, and wind. Which basically leaves as alternate energy sources tidal, from the sun and moon dragging the oceans around, energy stored from long periods of solar absorption in ages past, residual geothermal, and nuclear.
A little neutron-activated waste is indeed a small price to pay.
