this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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It really seems like people can't get past the fact that while nuclear did have an unfair reputation, it's just too late to make use of it.
Like yeah, it sucks that people blocked it and we built tons of fossil fuel power instead, but now we just have a better option and we can give up that fight.
Nuclear power and cognitive dissonance. That's why people are still touting SMRs as the future, except they cost even more than traditional nuclear. Also, they don't exist.
Ah yes, "X Technology doesn't exist yet, so it's stupid and useless and people that support its development are dumb"
You see it so often
Both China and Russia have built operational SMRs. (Not to mention the fact that the nuclear reactors we’ve had for decades in military submarines and ship are SMRs). They exist.
We don’t have enough data about the economics or SMRs to say for sure, most (but not all) economic models put LCOE for SMRs at half the cost of traditional PWR nuclear reactors.
It’s hard to judge from the current smr projects what the costs will be. The largest cost in building nuclear power is all the regulatory oversight. Every PWR plant is different and needs to go through the entire process from scratch. But once we have some successful and proven SMR designs. They can be mass produced from the same vetted and approved designs without needing to go through the massively expensive design process again.
SMRs are simpler too. Which makes them cheaper. They don’t need as many layers of redundant safety systems like traditional reactors do. Even in the worst case scenario, an SMR can meltdown and a person living next door would be perfectly safe.
All of that adds up to the a lot of potential cost savings if we mass produce them.
If we can build enough solar or other renewable power to replace fossil fuels without nuclear, great.
But most people have no idea just how much it’s going to take. We need to not only replace all the fossil fuels on the grid today. Plus have extra capacity to charge storage for use when its night and cover the added demand of all the electric cars, trucks, furnaces, everything else that needs to become electric.
We need to be building nuclear too. We can’t build enough solar and wind fast enough.
For the love of God, look up the importance of maintaining grid frequency and which energy sources are reliable enough to do it.
Because renewables cannot. Our other option is to build insane infrastructure that can transmit DC long distances, which China has done. However, most countrie do not have the wealth or resources to do this.
Someone didn't read the fucking article...
There are literally countries that went all in on nuclear power (france and switzerland come to mind), that now regret that play and are trying to transition away from them. Not for safety reasons, just because they are extremely expensive to operate and they become a money pit when renewables eat away at the base load that they were built to supply. You have nuclear plants paying people to take their power during the afternoons because they cant shut down quickly when the sun comes out.
who told you they are regretting ?
Look at energy maps. France has one of the greenest energy mixes around and sells energy to Germany(and others) which cannot produce sufficient power for itself in Winter.
Also Germany at many instances end up playing the neighbours to buy their electricity Or selling it lower then 0.01€/kWh on days of overproduction.
Usually Germany is exporting more to France than it's importing, 2023 is an exception this year it's almost even, with a slight lead for France. Have some charts.
I am aware of that but that's due to Compulsive exporting by shunting the prices to near 0€ as there is overproduction on sunny days.
if you look at the net value of exported vs imported electricity. Germany is strongly in deficit.
Also the overproducion isn't great cause he renewabke the LCOE is calculated at install time but the actual cost it's larger as you end up giving away the electricity (Very difficult to assess on the free market)
In addition to that Germany's energy mix has 5-8x carbon intensity as that of France.
The German solution isn't economical and by far not ecological. hey but they do better than Poland so that's something.
Reducing dependence on their aging expensive nuclear power infrastructure has been a campaign promise of every French president for the last decade. Switzerland just voted via referendum to shutter their nuclear fleet, Germany has phased out nukes almost entirely.
The reality of it is: They're expensive. They generate waste which could theoretically be reused or even locked away in underground vaults, but it's frequently just stored on site in reality. And whether the danger is real or perceived, no one wants to live next to a nuke, because if things go wrong, they go very wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see nukes make a comeback, I think they're a valuable part of the energy mix. I actually know a guy in crypto who is trying to set up financially strained nuclear plants with on-site crypto miners to help them gain back some of that lost revenue from paying people to take power during light load periods. Which I think is a fantastic use case and a great way to make Bitcoin less environmentally destructive. There are other dispatchable loads that could fill the same niche (water desalinization, green hydrogen production).
But the unfortunate reality is that nuclear plants are dying right now, and unless something big changes they're going to be driven out of existence by wind and solar.
they aren't being driven out of existence by wind and solar that's just wrong.
They are being driven out by prolitics and fear of the unknown.
Waste is problem which has been blown out of proportion in the media.
Nuclear is more expensive than wind comparable to solar. Major point in it's favor is base load reliability. Look at capacity factors of the major base load providers. Solar is barely 26%/ Wind 24%/30% on-/off shore and Nuclear is 3x of that and highly predictable (as it's downtime is planned maintainsnce).
Pure wind solar would have to be 300% average load(heating excluded!!!) with nearly 15day storage to have a blackout probability on under 1%.
I am genuinely all for Wind and Solar. Although my comments on this post might lead one to think otherwise.(independence of power for countries is a big + for Wind Solar which is a - for Nuclear)
But I am for fastest road to green electricity... more like just do everything to get rid of CO2 intense production methods.
Another great point!