Due to technological trajectories set in motion by past policy, a global irreversible solar tipping point may have passed where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets, without any further climate policies
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Why won't we build more nuclear plants?
Politics mostly. It would be a solution, but it requires building a ton and building them fast. We can build nuclear power plants in a few years, but it usually takes a decade to work through the legal hassles opponents will put through. When factored in, not worth it anymore. And I am really angry at them because we could already be in a post-fossil fuel without this misguided pseudo-environmentalism.
Take a look at the cost overruns for Plant Vogtle 3 and 4 and it'll answer your question.
I like nuclear a lot too, but it does have its drawbacks:
Expensive. Plants are expensive to build and maintain. They also take like 5-10 years to build from scratch.
Water intensive. In the coming century water is going to a really hot commodity as water reserves dwindle. Having a power source that relies on lots of water might not be a good idea.
Fuel sources. Not about what's fueling it but where is coming from. Uranium is only found in certain deposits and if your country either doesn't have a source in house then they need to have political clout and money to obtain it. Everyone likes to point to France as a nuclear powered country but where did they get their uranium? Niger. The same Niger that just had an anti-french coup, cutting off their supply.
Maybe future tech like SMRs will make it more viable but for now the solar/geothermal/wind route will be a much quicker and easier replacement for fossil fuels.
Niger supplied 20% of Frances uranium over the last ten years. The coup is not a threat to Frances electricity supply at all as France can buy urnanium ore from others countries with ease. The problem is that Russia has nearly half of the global uranium enrichment capacity and we all have seen that Russia should not be trusted when it comes to energy security.
Regarding scarce uranium, if more money was poured into perfecting a thorium based molten salt design, we would have enough readily available fuel to power the world for over a thousand years, as Thorium deposits are quite common.
However I'm not hopeful that Nuclear will become a significant power source in any reasonable timeframe, at least in america, due to the massive amount of red tape making building them slow and costly. Though I hope I'm wrong about that.
For 1. grid size matters a lot. It is always sunny and/or windy somewhwere, so if you can transport the electricity with a good enough grid you can cut down on storage. In the EU the lowest share of renewables on a single day was 23% of electricity production of what over the entire year was 37.6%. 8.3% of total production on the worst day was from solar and wind the rest mainly hydro and biomass. Btw that was 06/12/2022.
Point is that seasonal electricty storage for renewables grid is absolutly not needed and for a continetal sized grid you mostly run to about a days worth of storage and some smart grid management. We also already have hydro power reservoirs, which have some truely massive storage capacity, if used not for baseload, but for dispatch.
Hydrostorage is absolutely nothing and can not be significantly increased, just like hydro power. Take a calculator and see how long it lasts. World wide it's 180 GW of power and 1.6 TWh energy, as per wiki. The USA need over 4000 TWh yearly, they empty the whole world capacity of hydro storage from 100 to 0% in 3 hours. Just the USA alone.
That was exactly my point, you do not need a global grid for this to work a continent sized one already does a great job. That was why I used the EU as an example. As for seasonal storage the worst month last year had 42.8% renewables, which was March, the best was February so a month earlier with 60.0%. The average was 49.7%. So we are talking 20% up or down. That is also true when you just look at wind and solar. Average was 47.15GWh and the worst month was 40.97GWh and the best 59.00GWh. So again fairly even distribution over the entire year. So no need for seasonal storage, unless you have something super cheap.
That is real world data and not some crazy stuff. You basicly just have to overbuilt by 50% and add a days worth of storage to the EU grid to work and the ability to move around electricity.
Also I am talking about hydro power, which per wiki only makes up 16% of global generation. That has storage capabilities built in current reservoir power plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#Properties
You need enough storage to get over a Dunkelflaute . How much is that for Europe? How much do we have now?
Right now Sweden and Norway have 118GWh of hydro storage and there is more in other EU countries. That alone is enough to power the EU for two weeks or so. But even that is not entirly needed as Europe is large and diverse enough geographically to have different weather in different countries. So power can still be moved. Even on the worst day of last year wind and solar were still able to produce 8.5% of the EUs electricity production so 37% of average levels.
At 2800 TWh of annual electricity demand/production in Europe, 118 GWh lasts for about 22 minutes. 2 weeks would take 1000x the storage capacity, about 100 TWh.
Sorry, I mean TWh and not GWh. For Norway it is 87TWh as here: https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftproduksjon/
and for Sweden as well: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228782162_A_Nordic_energy_market_under_stress#pf2
So yes it is a thousand times more, my bad for mixing up units.
Thank you. However, that is the yearly amount of energy. Not the maximum storage capacity at one point. Like (dis)charging a battery once <-> discharging it many times over the year. So over the whole year this massive storage was able to produce the energy needed in 2 weeks.
It is absolutly the storage capacity at one point. . As in the first link:
That is not that crazy. It just means that less then 10% of global hydro reservoir storage is in two European countries, with a lot of water and mountains. Hydro is by far the biggest storage capacity we have. To put it in the words of the iea and globally speaking:
Source: https://www.iea.org/reports/hydropower-special-market-report/executive-summary
So that are the numbers for dams (since pumped storage is extra and much smaller). That is not (electrically) rechargable storage. It is storage, but bound to the influx of water and with many constraints about how much water can be released at what point, how much it has to have at least or at most at which point in year to prevent floods or droughts etc. That is not the kind of storage we need for solar and wind. And while the storage capacity is high, the available power output is not. Since they maximum anyone would install is going to be correlated to the influx of water, not to the fastest possible draining of the reservoir - which nobody would ever want to do.
Also, thank you for the interesting discussion.
Most of that is fine during a dunkelflaute. The only really big issue is not having enough generating capacity, but even that likely works out. The most fuel generation during a single week last year was 24,302GWh so 144GW running throu. Sweden and Norway can generate 49GW in hydro at full power. Even the best weeks still have over 12TWh of fossil fuele generation in the EU, so that certainly goes a long way to solving the problem of dunkelflaute.
But you are right, most of the year smaller storages to cover a night or so, is all you need. So you still want some TWh of battery and pumped hydro storage. That preserves hydro storage and is needed to balance the grid. Biomass is also worth a look for long term storage.
it's not future tech, it's present tech
Cost mostly. It's really expensive, enough so that the first ~80% of the shift off fossil fuels is going to happen using solar + wind + storage.
To make sense for the last 20%, it's going to need to come down in price enough to beat the emerging longer-duration storage technologies. Not at all clear to me that it can do that.
I think you're best suited to answer your own question. Since you're the one who wants to build nuclear, why don't you do it?
If the answer is expertise, no problem, just hire people.
If the answer is money, just band together with others. Online discussions always have tons of people who want the same thing you do -- you can pool your resources.
big oil kneecapped it and enviromentalists still think they're thinly veiled bomb factories. you can tell because you substitute "thorium" for "nuclear" and favorability shoots up way more than you'd expect taking into account non-hysteria reasons