The problem with all these costs is that we only get to know the real costs in hindsight.
With oil and gas, the hidden cost was climate change. Although global climate change was imagined as early as 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius [1], it was not publicly acknowledged by the "7 Sisters" [2] until April 2014 [3]. We think we know what oil and gas costs with what we pay at the pump, but those costs usually miss the $500 billion in direct subsidies [4], the military costs of protecting those interests and of course the costs of neutralizing climate change.
With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Again we get the sticker shock once it is too big to fail. I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" for the next thousands of years. So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation.
I'm not arguing for or against one form of energy. Rather I am arguing for more transparency in our presentation of the costs.
> long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price.
Actually they do. The US has been collecting money from nuclear plants for disposal for literally 50 years.
In fact, they have an absurd amount of money since this money has been collecting interest. It it political deadlock and systematic incompetence that prevents the solving of this problem.
And in addition, long term storage is an incredibly dumb solution for most of this 'waste' and is a fundamentally flawed policy that again, is simply systematic incompetence.
> I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood"
Disagree, put it in my garden. I don't care. You can leave it there for the next 100 years. Seriously, its not hard to store, it just stands there and does nothing and is 100% harmless unless you come up with some plot of Armageddon style logic.
> So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation.
Its accumulates on-site because of systematic incompetence in the federal government.
> and the cost of nuclear accidents
The likely hood of such accidents is incredibly small, even if you assume 100 years of nuclear power for 100% of the population the chance of really series accidents is very low. And even lower if we consider next generation nuclear.
One thing to remember about nuclear waste, or radioactive material in general, is that the high-level waste has the shortest half-life, and the longer half-life waste is low-level radioactive.
With waste with a half-life of 10,000 years for example, each 2 atoms will on average emit one particle or photon in that time. Many generations of people could eat or drink those atoms safely. You could live your life next to a pile of it, and get very little radiation over your lifetime from long half-life radioactive atoms.
The long term storage of this waste is a concern, for sure. But it is a concern for the far future, and we can delay addressing it for decades with impunity (which we have been doing, actually). But we are facing a climate emergency that must be addressed right now. Nuclear waste is the least of our worries at the moment.
I appreciate your overall point, but it's probably also worth considering the concentration or dilution of that waste. When you mention eating or drinking the atoms, or living next to a pile of them, the radiation dose will obviously depend both on the atoms' half-lives and on the overall number of atoms.
There's an extra Avogadro factor of around 23 orders of magnitude when going between atoms and grams, so those atoms really add up -- if they are highly pure and concentrated, at least.
Secondly, regarding waste, I share your view, and I think there’s an additional travesty that we’ve had breeder reactor technology for decades. That can significantly shorten the volume and half life of waste while also producing new nuclear fuel. Non proliferation concerns are cited for why it’s not used, but I don’t see why America can’t operate them within its own borders.
The US is not, in fact, collecting money for disposal, and has not been for years.
The US is, instead, handing back all the money that was collected to the remaining nuke operators.
Not, notably, to the ratepayers it was collected from.
This is fallout from a court case where nuke operators argued that disposal was flimflam, so the money was collected fraudulently. The court agreed, and ordered the money returned. Not to those it came from, but just to whoever was still operating.
These are important points you're raising that change the course of the conversation significantly, so please also add citations so that folks can see them, otherwise, the argument falls flat and gets dismissed.
Links or your argument is just noise. Here is the closest I could find to what you are talking about, explicitly saying an appeals court ruled against a nuclear operator trying to get the refund you are talking about:
Non of this is in the least bit convincing. And your sources mostly provided by the US highly political and mostly nonsensical discourse that ignores a whole bunch of very relevant information.
Waste is an incredibly easy problem to solve: bury it in impermeable bedrock. That said, there's no real point in storing existing nuclear waste since we don't reprocess our fuel. So the existing waste is a source of fuel in the future.
Solar and wind should also be transparent in the fact they require fossil fuels to fill in gaps in production. Thus, they do not represent a solution to climate change but merely delay it. Thus the cost of solar and wind includes the cost of climate disaster.
Solar and wind currently use fossil fuels to fill in gaps, but they don't require that. It's just that while we're still burning fossil fuels without CO2 charges, using them for gap filling is the cheapest thing that will do it.
It does until we achieve many times cheaper storage technology. Existing storage solutions don't provide nearly enough capacity to scale (especially since Li is very scarce, and is also required for cars and other modes of transport).
Hydrogen (or Methane) are an existing storage solution that scales very easily. The truth is that currently we have so little renewable generation capacity that we save more CO2 by building more wind turbines and PV per dollar than by building storage.
No, hydrogen and methane storage do not scale easily. Almost all hydrogen production is done through steam reformation, which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis has continued to be difficult to do at scale, due to inefficiency and difficulty in getting reliable electrolysis sytems. Then there's the issue of storing and transporting that hydrogen, which is mostly handwaved by assuming there's a salt cavern handy wherever people need to store hydrogen.
Synthetic methane requires hydrogen as an input, so all of the above applies to it, too. It also requires as source of carbon dioxide. Extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is not viable, which leaves either scavenging CO2 byproducts from industrial processes and biofuels. Both of those are not in sufficient availability to produce synthetic methane at grid scale.
We already have excess renewable generation in several energy markets. And it's been the case for years, but the promised energy storage revolution has not come to pass.
Electrolysis can easily be done at scale. A couple of megawatts of electrolysis equipment is about the size of a shipping container. Many such systems are in operations right now and have been for a decade. The technology is fairly mature and reaches efficiencies of 70-80%. You also don't need salt caverns to store the hydrogen. You can store it underground without a salt cavern. Sure, there are losses, but they're not unmanageable.
We're also not going to run out of industrial processes that produce large amounts of carbon dioxide, at least as long as we still build things out of concrete, so if for some reason hydrogen is too hard to transport or store, we can pay the extra price of turning it into methane and use all the infrastructure that we already have for natural gas. We can even recapture most of the carbon when we burn the methane again.
This really doesn't scale to the level of a whole country, or continent, having to contend with low power output for months, as recently happened with wind in Europe. And even if it can in principle scale, it's unproven and requires much more complex ops than a nuclear plant, which has been a well understood solution for decades.
Not to mention, this requires huge over-production, which is a problem in areas with already high land usage, such as Europe. It is probably much less of a problem in the USA, so maybe there the calculations are different.
I'd you're going to be the future of the planet on something, getting on a solution that has worked for over half a century is a lot safer than something that has never been done outside of prototypes.
"Let's just use fusion for all our energy needs. We don't need fission, nor do we need wind and solar. Just because it hasn't been done now, doesn't mean it'll never happen. If you don't support this you're just an anti-fusion conservative reactionary!"
But you see, going with renewables is not betting the future of the planet. We absolutely know that renewables can do it. The technologies all exist now. All that we're doing is quibbling over how much it would cost.
The worst case for renewables would be that costs stop declining. Stack the deck just right and nuclear might end up a bit cheaper. But this is just a financial risk, not a risk of the planet. And if one is looking at financial risks, one must also look at the risk of cost overruns in nuclear. Unlike with renewables, which typically come in within 10% of the contracted cost, nuclear plants are famously subject to enormous cost overruns. Factors of 2, 3, or even more.
Pretending that the promises of nuclear will absolutely come true, but that renewables haven't absolutely demonstrated their cost declines will continue, is a blatant double standard and not how one does proper analysis. That's why utilities and financiers have walked away from new nuclear, especially in markets where they're not allowed to foist overruns off on the ratepayers.
> But you see, going with renewables is not betting the future of the planet. We absolutely know that renewables can do it. The technologies all exist now. All that we're doing is quibbling over how much it would cost.
We have lots of experience with hydroelectricity. So we can just build more dams, it's all just a question of cost right? With more money we can just build more dams until we reach 100% hydroelectric generation right? This is the kind of logic you're using.
Possibility and feasibility are two different things. Lithium ion batteries exist, but we'll never deploy a day's worth of battery storage. The scale just isn't there. No amount of money thrown at the problem is going to make it possible.
Sure things like hydroelectricity and electrolysis exist, but they have significant barriers to feasibility. The likely path for an attempt at solar and wind grid is to build a bunch of solar and wind, try to build storage, fail, and keep using fossil fuels. Nobody, and I mean nobody has ever built grid scale storage for more than an hour's worth of electricity use (let alone total energy use). Energy storage remains an unsolved problem, and it's not just a question of cost. There's no telling if it can be done even with unlimited financial resources.
By comparison we just need to build 4 nuclear plants for every existing one in the US. No massive 10,000x increase in storage capacity required. No reliance on technology that's never been deployed at scale.
No continent currently runs on nuclear power, not even a single country currently runs on nuclear power. Nuclear power is hence unproven at scale by your logic.
France generates over 70% of it's power from nuclear energy. At it's peak it was over 80%, with the remainder fulfilled by preexisting hydroelectricity.
France gets 70% ef its electricity from nuclear. It only gets about a third of its primary power from nuclear. Clearly, the technology can't handle the task if the country can't even run its electric grid on 100% nuclear. /s
Does not scale, I hear that a lot about everything that isn't nuclear. Maybe people said that to the semiconductor industry before the explosion in person computers or smart phones.
Nuclear has got to have the worse scalability story of any hyped technology ever. Very monolithic system with tight integration between components. Hazardous materials. Complex science and engineering that needs lots of different highly trained people. Exotic materials. High temperatures. Enabling works with quantities in the millions of square metres. Processes that are difficult to model. Endless secrecy for national security. Very strong buildings. Harsh design margins. Sites in remote areas with absolutely no night life.
We should be optimistic about nuclear. But also apply optimism to other technologies and industries. If the petro-chemical industry want to make hydrogen work they will succeed. So will the battery industry and solar. If nuclear can scale than so can they.
And yet for all the complaints about nuclear, France powers over 75% of it's grid with nuclear. Several other countries have it at around 40-50%. Nuclear continues to produce more electricity than wind and solar combined.
And yet for all the scepticism about renewables it has almost caught up with nuclear in a much shorter time.
But my wider point is that we need to be more consistent in how we apply scepticism and optimism to different technologies. In some dimensions that gives a benefit to nuclear and in others the benefit is with renewables or storage.
That hydrogen is currently produced by SMR is irrelevant. Electrolysis is of course trivial to scale, you just build more electrolyzers. There is nothing that prevents arbitrary numbers of them from being operated in parallel.
Would this cost money? Yes. But it would likely cost less than a grid based on nuclear power plants. The key insight is that hydrogen can feed combined cycle power plants, which cost a factor of 10 less than a nuclear power plant of the same power output. So, one could (if necessary) back up the entire grid with CC plants at a fraction of the cost of powering the same grid with nukes. If desired, one could use simple cycle power plants, which (while less efficient) are even cheaper by another factor of about 2, or 20x cheaper than the nukes.
What? How on earth is it irrelevant that almost all of our hydrogen comes from steam reformation? We have very little experience with large scale electrolysis, and its proven to be difficult and expensive to do at scale.
Those gas plants may be cheaper build, but if the electrolyzed hydrogen is expensive the total operating cost is higher since the fuel is too expensive. If you're using single cycle gas plants you'll need even more of this hydrogen, and thus driving up costs. Are you really just comparing cost of construction and ignoring the cost of electrolyzed hydrogen fuel? And remember this is on top of the solar and wind that needs to power this electeolysis in the first place.
Also again, to convert hydrogen to methane you need a large source of carbon dioxide.
A summary of this comment is, "it's cheaper if we just ignore all the technical challenges of synthetic methane."
This is exactly the point I'm making: storing hydrogen for electricity storage has to be done through electrolysis, because steam reformation emits carbon dioxide. But we don't currently use electrolysis for our hydrogen production, because it's not cost competitive with steam reformation. It's not cost competitive with existing energy storage either.
Dude, we use natural gas because that is cheap. Why is it cheap? Because we externalize the costs of climate change. By that argument we should ditch nuclear and burn lignite. It's a lot cheaper and proven technology.
Nobody claimed electrolysis is cheaper than using natural gas. Nobody even claimed that electrolysis is cheaper than batteries at small scales. The claim is that electrolysis is proven technology that is a lot simpler to scale that lithium batteries.
I agree we should include the cost of climate change. That's why nuclear is cheaper than solar and wind: because solar and wind require either energy storage or fossil fuels. And since energy storage at grid scale does not exist, solar and wind contains the cost of climate change.
> The claim is that electrolysis is proven technology that is a lot simpler to scale that lithium batteries.
And my point is that this is false. Electrolysis is not proven technology at scale, almost all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation. No, it does not scale better than lithium ion batteries. If we try to build it at scale it'll make solar and wind more expensive than nuclear power.
You provide zero supporting arguments for your point. Megawatt electrolyzers exist today. They existed ten years ago. They don't use anything in large quantities of which supply is limited. You give no reason why we can't just build more of them.
A megawatt is basically nothing. Average load for electricity in the US is 500 GW. How much did that megawatt electrolyzed cost? Does it also include the cost of converting that hydrogen back into electricity? And remember this cost is on top of the cost of generating the stored energy in the first place.
But is it cheaper to build more electeolysis storage, and lots of overproduction in renewables? Well, until someone actually offers hydrogen storage commerically, there's no price. If it were cheap, we wouldn't be using steam reformation.
Oh good grief. Titanium ore is literally dirt cheap. Titanium has been pricey because of how it's made from the ore, not because the ore is scarce. Titanium is the 9th most abundant element in the Earth's crust.
The fact that it's scarce because it's so difficult and expensive to perform the chemical processes to isolate titanium doesn't chance the fact that it's scarce. Unless you have some novel way to drive down the cost titanium, building huge public projects using large amounts of titanium will remain infeasible.
Yes, because we can rely on fossil, nuclear, or hydro to give us reliability and pick up the slack when renewables falter. Just look at Germany, which just approved new coal plants because it needs more energy, and they are stuck to their demented plan of decommissioning nuclear plants.
It's also worth noting that France is producing less than half the greenhouse gases of Germany, despite having significantly less renewables, because it has a serious nuclear infrastructure.
They will continue to require fossil fuels until energy storage comes along and we have no idea when that will occur. So far, all of our storage systems have proven inadequate.
You can't adequately model energy with a single price per MWh. There is more to it than that and that is true of all energy types. But the low cost of renewables is still a feature that grids can exploit. It will make storage viable when it otherwise wouldn't have been.
No source of energy is a silver bullet for climate change. Wind and solar aren't. And neither is the nuclear industry. There just isn't a serious plan for scaling up quickly enough. The supply chain and expertise just doesn't exist and will take years. And moaning about mistakes in the past is irrelevant to the present.
> With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents.
Long term storage is actually trivial, just requires actually storing it.
Counterintuitively, best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea.
This controls the temperature and acts as a radiation shield and there's more a hundred times more life on the surface than in the abyss. Also, no humans who get prissy about 1 in 100 chances of cancer than animals don't fare about. The ocean's also big enough that a your case corroding and some material being dissolved and spreading in the water is irrelevant (unless all your nuclear waste you ever dump manages to escape and spread throughout the ocean rather than just sit in a sullen pile you'll be under EPA limits).
> best way is glassing it and dumping it on the abyssal plane in the sea.
You say as if it's a done deal. Hanford is 14 years behind schedule on this, and now it looks as if it will off-gas toxic chemicals. Original budget was $4B and now is $17B.
The chemical they're using easily ignites and turns into hydrogen cyanide.
With oil and gas, the hidden cost was climate change. Although global climate change was imagined as early as 1896 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius [1], it was not publicly acknowledged by the "7 Sisters" [2] until April 2014 [3]. We think we know what oil and gas costs with what we pay at the pump, but those costs usually miss the $500 billion in direct subsidies [4], the military costs of protecting those interests and of course the costs of neutralizing climate change.
With nuclear, the hidden cost is both long-term storage of waste and the cost of nuclear accidents. The merchants of nuclear power plants do not list those costs on the sale price. Again we get the sticker shock once it is too big to fail. I still have not met anyone who is prepared to have nuclear waste stored in their "neighborhood" for the next thousands of years. So it accumulates on-site, where there was no real planned long-term storage accommodation.
I'm not arguing for or against one form of energy. Rather I am arguing for more transparency in our presentation of the costs.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/humans-first-warned-about-climat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(oil_companies)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiCvGQnweAg