It's a tradeoff in the end, because the current generation of renewable energy is so much more expensive and involved than the equivalent in a nuclear energy plant.
I mean in my country, the energy grid is at capacity due to increases in demand AND production. It's very attractive to get solar panels installed on your house, but the grid cannot handle the influx of new production.
Whereas attaching a new nuclear plant to the main grid would be less of a headache.
>the current generation of renewable energy is so much more expensive and involved than the equivalent in a nuclear energy plant.
This may have been true 15 or even 10 years ago, but nowadays the exact opposite is the case.
> It's very attractive to get solar panels installed on your house, but the grid cannot handle the influx of new production. Whereas attaching a new nuclear plant to the main grid would be less of a headache.
How is that supposed to make any sense at all? The grid likes nuclear-flavored power better?
In order to avoid catastrophic climate change (hard to say we even can at this point) - we need anything we can get. Nuclear is part of anything we can get.
Following that line of reasoning. Considering we get 3-6x as much energy investing in renewables compared to nuclear then a single cent in invested into nuclear is an enabler of climate change right?
Does that include the batteries we'd need to have renewables take over the grid?
But we should be dumping lots of research dollars into both, even if we want 95% of the construction budget to be renewables.
Except scaling up starts to cost a lot more when you push it too fast, so we probably should be spending more than 5% on nuclear because it can work in parallel.
Of course it matters. Money and people available to do the work is not infinite. Or do you disagree?
Therefore we have to optimize for the most impact possible. Is spending 3x as much as off-shore wind and 6x as much as on-shore optimizing for impact? Can straight up honestly claim that?
My issue is really the lack of progress with and utilisation of Nuclear over the last 40-50 years. In my opinion the anti nuclear movement resulted in extending the time we continued to burn coal. Quite right, at the moment the larger impact would be with renewables. However my original comment was not only in reference to decisions we are making now but also those of the last 50 years. If we had concentrated on using Nuclear, and not succumbed to the fear about it, we would be in a much stronger position now than we are.
It is simply economics. The anti-nuclear movement is insignificant but a very handy scapegoat. If nuclear made sense on a cost basis it would have pushed through somewhere globally. It's quite telling that not even authoritarian states, or very centrally controlled like France have managed that.
I agree that nuclear would have been preferable to fossil energy. But today renewables is way cheaper than either alternative.
You're using very poor arguments. A lot of whataboutism.
A meteor is coming to destroy the entire world. Do you sit around and wonder, "Is spending money on this really in the best interest of our shareholders for this quarter?"
Consider your example. You have two options proven to work by prior knowledge. Either renewables or nuclear at 3-6x the cost. What do you pick?
There's a statement in the previous paragraph doing most of the heavy lifting: "proven to work". This means no risk, why double invest?
We've already diverted meteors using both renewables and nuclear. Both work. Choose the cheaper option since it's not an one off event, it's an incremental change.
Every nuclear plant or wind turbine is negligible in itself. But the effect is quantifiable and known.
A robust electricity grid needs a variety of energy sources, wind and solar are great until it isn’t windy or sunny for a week. Are week long outages acceptable to you? Not to me. It is not inconceivable that a weather system results in calm weather with clouds for an extended period of time.
So other energy sources are necessary. Nuclear is another practical low carbon energy source and it is worth considering as part of the energy mix. There are many nuclear plants operating and under construction in the world. That they are uneconomic in some countries speaks more to those countries than to nuclear.
1. Geographical decoupling. HVDC connections are barely even newsworthy anymore.
2. Smart consumers. Electrified transports are perfect where you can shift the charging to any point in time it's not actively driven. This without having to pay the round trip efficiency loss since charging the battery is valuable work.
3. Better utilize hydro to compensate for the last bits of intermittency left.
We're so far from a grid where large scale storage would be necessary that dwelling over it and putting forth nuclear as the only solution is ridiculous. You could make hydrogen from your renewable energy and then later burn it and still come out ahead of nuclear. That's how uncompetetive nuclear is.
Permitting new power lines is difficult. Here [0] is an example of a project stalled due to opposition. It is unrealistic to think that someone is going to pay for transmission lines to get built with excess capacity most of the time in case we need to send power from one coast to another. Building power lines is expensive, battery storage is also expensive, so if you want to promote intermittent generation sources far from loads simply add those to the cost when comparing to other sources to make a fair comparison.
People will mostly all charge their vehicles at night, so it won’t be from solar power. Unless the solar has battery storage, in which case we are charging batteries from batteries, which is inefficient.
I’m not sure why you think there is a lot of flexibility in the existing hydro power, there isn’t that much of it and it is often constrained by having to keep rivers flowing or saving water for peaks.
My point about nuclear is that it is competitive in other countries, the problem is that North America can’t competitively build it any more not due to technological problems but political and managerial issues. Imagine global warming could have been avoided by getting really good at building nuclear plants. Look at how much imaginary money has been printed for less catastrophic problems. We could have done it, we still can. Nuclear is uncompetitive because we have somehow made it so here.
a robust grid needs a variety of energy sources, Arguing against any low carbon source is counter productive to me. There is always going to be a need for generation with a characteristic like nuclear power.
Edit: I should also add hydro projects in Canada such as muskrat falls and site C are costing 10-20 billion which I believe is similar to nuclear and also taking a decade to finish.
>People will mostly all charge their vehicles at night, so it won’t be from solar power.
It always amazes me that people assume that.
Take a 3 car household. Lets assume every one is a Tesla. Just for ease of calculation.
To charge a Tesla in 8 hours, one needs a 240v level 2 charger. This is the same type of connection one would need for a washer/drier/oven/stove.
Per car.
Now. You've about doubled the number of high pull outlets in the average home. Most people [sans shift workers] work during the day, and there are only so many hours in the day for people to charge. 3 Teslas could in theory be charged back to back off one outlet, but now you have a nightly ritual. I assure you, people will go for the parallel charge.
Now expand this load to neighborhood scale. Now propagate that to the trandmission infrastructure.
This is not as easy a thing to accommodate once you start sitting down and actually tracking the numbers.
So you think there will be two cars charging at night per house instead of 1?
As long as people aren’t also using their oven and running the drier I don’t see that it changes much for required transmission and generation capacity, but there would be more energy used at night than we currently see.
The more you can use, generally the more you will. And people really discount the drain of say, an extended family who all have to charge vehicles for work the next day.
Meh, I’m not seeing a capacity problem. Either their panel can handle the load or it can’t and then they have to upgrade panel to higher amperage, and if the whole street upgrades their panels then the utility might have a problem.
I think the main problem is going to be that we are going to need a tonne more energy to replace fossil fuels and the daily demand curve with the diurnal pattern is going to flatten right out as people charge all night.
We don't need nuclear energy. We really, really don't.