Nuclear power (in its current form) is extremely impractical compared to wind and solar.
1. It is obviously dangerous, requiring extreme safety measures.
2. It requires large amounts of water.
3. It is unpopular.
4. It is so complex that building plants regularly exceeds budgets (there is little repetition and thus little learning)
5. It requires ridiculous storage/transport protocols for spent fuel. In Fukushima, one of the biggest concern was the spent fuel pool. That stuff is so hot, you cannot safely move it across the country and thus it has to accumulate on-site.
Compare this to solar and battery storage: You can literally build a factory for both in the same ten or more years it takes to build the nuclear power plant. There is absolutely no physical reason not to produce 100 times as many batteries and solar panels as we do now. Resources are abundant (you can replace rare materials at a slight cost of efficiency).
We are not at the point where we can use 100% solar/wind yet but the path is clear. On the other hand, we might be able to do the same with safe and efficient nuclear power, but that path is much less clear. Molten salt? Micro plants? Thorium? There is no one out there doing any of that fancy new stuff in practice, sonny bet is on mass-scale of solar, wind, and batteries.
> Compare this to solar and battery storage: You can literally build a factory for both in the same ten or more years it takes to build the nuclear power plant. There is absolutely no physical reason not to produce 100 times as many batteries and solar panels as we do now. Resources are abundant (you can replace rare materials at a slight cost of efficiency).
Let's do the numbers. Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada costed $5B. Nuclear costs something like $6B per installed GW. Gigafactory can produce 35 GWh of storage per year, which is just over one day of storage for a single nuclear reactor.
Now, how much these batteries cost? Let's be generous to Tesla, and assume that unit price will be around $100/kWh. That means that the Gigafactory can produce $3.5B worth of batteries per year.
Suppose you have $6B dollars. What would you rather buy, 2 years worth of entire output of Tesla Gigafactory, that would give you 3 days worth of storage at 1GW output, and which would still require spending additional billions on building primary generation (solar and wind), or one nuclear reactor that would give you the same 1GW for next 50 years, with very low operational costs?
Primary battery storage simply doesn't make economic sense at grid scale at the moment. This is not to say that renewables are stupid, or that batteries are useless. It's just the idea of using wind/solar + batteries as a base load just doesn't make sense at current level of technology, and this is why nobody is actually doing it, or planning to do it. If, or when it starts to make sense, you'll see entrepreneurs invest billions in buying up batteries and setting up battery farms. However, this does not make sense now, and will not make sense for probably at least another decade.
Your numbers are not quite accurate. A real world example in the suggests more like $7.5B / Gw for a new nuclear plant and a whopping total of $27B. Gigafactory construction was finished after two years. A nuclear power plant takes at least a decade in practice. So right now that leaves $22B for producing batteries and solar power/wind. The latter costs about $.3/W So $1B gives you 3GW of peak power. You can have ten time the output and produce batteries for $12B over eight years before the nuclear power plant even starts production.
Roofing is the second most dangerous profession in the US. I’m sure solar panels have also killed more people than nuclear incidents.
As for pollution? All energy sources pollute. Nuclear is better than coal. I don’t know how it compares to solar + wind + batteries + hydro, but those last two are definitely big sources of pollution, and batteries are obviously creating more waste by volume than nuclear.
This is a fact that it seems impossible to convince people of (though maybe France was successful), so within the constraints of current politics it might as well not be true.
The problem of renewables is not the power they can produce, but how to handle intermittency. Better electricity networks are one part of the solution, batteries can be as well.
Even with 50% renewables Germany has one of the most stable electricity networks in the world.
Also in the traditional base-peaked system you still need peeking power plants and you have problems with weather effects (in summer water in rivers can get too warm to use it or dry up, in winter it can freeze)
> Safety is not about deaths alone. You can’t ignore the massive costs and [...]
Actually, if we're talking about safety, we can. There are some good total cost analyses, since governments also want to know how power can be produced most cheaply. The US and UK both published reports about this with somewhat varying (but ballpark similar) numbers. But anyway, we were talking about safety.
> [...] and negative personal effects
Okay, please bring on the stats then. I agree that this is relevant to the safety discussion and, thus, the discussion whether we should use nuclear fission going forward, but I never see anyone cite comparative stats on displacement, illnesses, etc. All I ever see is that nuclear kills very, very few people per TWh compared to current energy sources, making it seem very attractive to build as a replacement when looking at this metric. You'd have to have a huge number of people falling ill or being displaced (but not dying) due to nuclear disasters or uranium mining to make it better than our current energy sources.
Yep, the environmental movement successfully dragged its heels for 40 years until something other than nuclear became viable. It's a pity, because if we just hadn't stopped rolling out nuclear 40 years ago, and had merely continued at the same pace, our grid would be 100% nuclear today. Not 20 years from now if we hurry, today. One can only imagine the CO2 we wouldn't have had to remove from the atmosphere. What's done is done, though, and I'm glad there is finally a way forward that meets with their approval.
I really don't see how you can blame environmentalists? Are you saying it was those meddling environmentalists that kept nuclear from dominating... in every country (except maybe france)?
I think the reality is fossil fuel was damn cheap and nuclear was not.
Decades ago, Greenpeace ran an extremely successful campaign to block nuclear plant construction, and to force nonsensical regulations on existing plants.
I imagine they wouldn’t have done so if global warming was well-understood back then.
The largest problem of nuclear price is the price of construction. Construction doesn’t keep up with efficiency gains in the rest of the economy and as a result gets more and more expensive.
Yes, and cleaning up the excess CO2 will be even more expensive, not to mention the unrecoverable damage to ecosystems, even more expensive to paper over.
But they got theirs and in 25 years will be gone.
This is why every cost argument as well as CO2 pricing scheme fails, and why were in the dire straits now.
Without the high price of construction, nuke wouldn't happen at all, in the US. The cost overruns are the gravy train for corruption that motivates the whole process. Cut off cost overruns and corruption, and all the appeal at high levels dries up. Other countries have other dynamics. Small-scale nukes are locked institutionally in competition with big corruption nukes, so at a disadvantage.
Solar and wind start producing competitive power immediately. There is much less room there for corruption, but the immediate income from output drives investment.
I genuinely wonder what makes you say it's dangerous, let alone "obviously dangerous". I'm sure you've seen people cite the statistics about safe energy sources. What makes you think those are all wrong to the point that it's obvious?
You can't just put that at number 1 and then ignore it in the rest of the comment. It would be a big revelation and we need to update books if you know something about nuclear fission accidents that others don't.
1. It is obviously dangerous, requiring extreme safety measures.
2. It requires large amounts of water.
3. It is unpopular.
4. It is so complex that building plants regularly exceeds budgets (there is little repetition and thus little learning)
5. It requires ridiculous storage/transport protocols for spent fuel. In Fukushima, one of the biggest concern was the spent fuel pool. That stuff is so hot, you cannot safely move it across the country and thus it has to accumulate on-site.
Compare this to solar and battery storage: You can literally build a factory for both in the same ten or more years it takes to build the nuclear power plant. There is absolutely no physical reason not to produce 100 times as many batteries and solar panels as we do now. Resources are abundant (you can replace rare materials at a slight cost of efficiency).
We are not at the point where we can use 100% solar/wind yet but the path is clear. On the other hand, we might be able to do the same with safe and efficient nuclear power, but that path is much less clear. Molten salt? Micro plants? Thorium? There is no one out there doing any of that fancy new stuff in practice, sonny bet is on mass-scale of solar, wind, and batteries.