Yeah, nuclear is hard because it was strangled in the crib for 50 years and it’s hard to make up that ground on time scales for net 0. It still remains the better bet for decarbonizing the grid and all the other neat ideas seem mostly like party tricks and nothing more. I think China in particular is interesting because there’s a good chance that they’re building enough capacity that their costs start to decrease & they become the world leader in fission plants. Specifically interested in what they’re doing with MSR designs because they should be much much cheaper than traditional HWR designs. But yes, it’s going to take us a minute to rebuild and restart our fission know-how as a species. It’s also telling that China is building a heck of a lot of fossil plants (natural gas & coal) in addition to lots of solar. That’s because they have a lot of electrification to do (they have a massive rural population & they also have much more transportation that needs to electrify to use grid power). Solar is a fine companion to handle daytime peak growth (which is why they’re reaching TW scale with solar) but that baseload growth remains a problem which is why they’re building so many fossil fuel and nuclear plants.
I don’t want to re-litigate the “fission didn’t fail economically, it was killed” perspective (which I find unconvincing: people have proven they’ll put up with much more dangerous things if they’re profitable.) But we need to replace the entire global fossil fuel industry in 20-30 years, and the only possible way to do that is with energy sources that can be mass-produced in a factory with all the scale and efficiency improvements and virtuous cost and production flywheel that entails. Solar and wind are on this trajectory. Storage is plausibly on an earlier stage of this trajectory. Nuclear might get onto this trajectory through modular reactors, but those don’t exist and are at the “maybe” research stage with huge questions still unanswered. By contrast, commercial battery deployment and production is economical and projected to hit 6.5TWh by 2030.
As a related datapoint on “party tricks”, China built more solar and wind in the first nine months of 2023 than all 26 nuclear reactors it has under construction. They’re likely to build even more next year. The need for baseload is a valid point, but the trajectories of renewables vs. non-modular nuclear are so different that it’s hard to see nuclear catching up enough to make a difference.
Given that China is building out more coal plants than all other countries combined, I think that’s telling about the efficacy of renewables to achieve net 0. They’re targeting 2030 for peak CO2 emissions because they’re trying to cheaply electrify as much of their population as possible as quickly as possible because the CO2 reduction efforts that will dominate 2050-2100 will impose significant economic growth challenges & China wants to make sure they’re in a more stable position to compete with the West.
Yes, China is building a huge amount of solar capacity, but AFAICT it’s all about absorbing peak growth as they add more consumers of electricity. Baseline growth remains a huge problem and China is solving that with a mix of nuclear and fossil fuels. I fully expect China will continue to ramp up nuclear as they get better at it.
And EVs are a huge iceberg problem for the electric grid as they currently don’t run off the grid and represents a massive amount of energy consumption that will be added to the grid. On top of that they consume a huge amount of battery production which means there’s not that much left over for grid scale batteries. We also have no existence proof of economical grid scale batteries at any meaningful scale. You also have to overbuild your solar by quite a bit so that you can charge the battery up when the sun is shining to time-shift that excess capacity into the night.
Solar is fine and it’s not a knock against it, but there’s simply no trajectory to reach net 0 CO2 emissions and you will end up with a hybrid grid. 18% nuclear would represent a huge CO2 reduction because all that capacity would otherwise be fossil fuels (because the alternative is not building batteries because that tech doesn’t exist yet). MSRs are a neat party trick but honestly I think China’s approach of SMRs is a far safer bet in terms of being a massive cost reduction, safer, and use waaay less water & are far less of a research project. My hunch is that they’re also standardizing their nuclear plant designs to keep costs in check. Keep in mind that France is 90% fossil fuel free in their grid even though nuclear only represents ~60% of energy produced.
I haven’t read anywhere that fission failed due to economics - it has always been price competitive with fossil fuels. It’s the regulatory burdens & concerns about safety (some valid, most not) that strangled its growth. Do you have any links suggesting nuclear construction is uneconomical?
The latest estimates are that China’s emissions will peak next year and then enter a structural decline [1]. The 2030 number is generally viewed to be obsolete now (that’s how fast things are moving.) This is even with the new coal capacity they’re building, which they’re structuring to be “idled” (through government payments not to generate.) They’re also building large amounts of solar capacity in the west and in deserts, with continent-scale HVDC interconnects.
Right now the (global) goal isn’t 100% renewable energy, and it won’t be even by 2030 or 2040: a grid that’s 70-80% renewable with 20-30% average fossil emissions will be a massive improvement and will keep us on track for decarbonization. The interesting question is whether battery storage will decrease in price fast enough to deliver that remaining fraction, or whether we’ll have to build the remaining 20% with fission by 2050/60. Batteries are already economical enough that we have 5GW deployed in CA for infra-day time shifting. It seems like an incredibly long bet to imagjne that after three more decades of technological and manufacturing improvements their cost won’t have dropped enough to make them a viable competitor for nuclear. For my own part I wish I could take the other side of that bet, since I think it would be a good one. But we’ll have to wait and see.
