You’ve got some valid points in your criticism of nuclear. They are also points that could be addressed - we built lots of nuclear power plants within budget and timelines, once. Like solar, and like everything, nuclear benefits from scale.
Similarly, there are valid points of criticism that solar gushing ignores: Power is needed 24/7, solar doesn’t deliver power 24/7 and batteries (pumped hydro, chemical, heat etc) are nowhere near large enough to see the whole of society powered through the winter. If we built renewables like we built traditional power plants we would say “I’d like 1 GW, 95% availability, steerable down to 0.6 GW”. Solar right now goes “weeell, not really my problem what you want - I can give you power sometimes and sometimes not”.
So like coal power socialises the cost of pollution, renewables socialises the cost of consistency.
We could instead say “storage is the solar field operators’ concern” and then you’d be able to see what solar really costs”.
And hear me right; I’m ALL in on renewables. I’m also ALL in on nuclear. We need everything that can deliver power with low carbon output. If nuclear goes away, you’ll have to start a tonne of gas peaker plants when there’s not enough wind and not enough sun to power everything.
It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.
batteries haven’t been built in the past because they weren’t needed, but they’re being built today (look up sodium-ion batteries) and they’re cheap and effective.
It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.
We need some nuance here. In e.g. South Korea, I agree. Nuclear is needed.
But here in Australia, nuclear is unfathomably stupid. Not only do we not need nuclear, but it’d take decades to build (because we haven’t built one before so we’d have to first write the laws, then build the supply chain, train the workforce, design a nuclear plant to build (again: we haven’t built one on this continent before, we can’t just assume a design from a different climate will work) and then build it (with a construction workforce we might have to import or train). All up, it’ll take longer than building 100% renewables.
Which is exactly why our far right-wing lunatics are advocating it as an alternative to renewables (note that I said alternative, not complement), and to build more coal plants in the mean time.
The whole battery discussion is similarly stupid. In Australia, you don’t need storage for more than a week. And within that week, renewables rarely reach less than 70% average (note that “fucktons of energy on Monday and fuck all on Tues through Sunday” can still add up to 70% of an average week’s energy, though), and never reaches 50%. What that means is that we will need at most 2x the renewables and half a week’s worth of batteries. And of course realistically it means we only need ~1.43x the renewables (it’s not always worth building to meet every possible once-in-a-blue-moon outage when we can pay people (especially commercial customers) to take their demand offline) and to diversify our energy sources (read: offshore wind and onshore wind peak at dusk and nighttime).
More importantly, sooner or later the combination of renewables and batteries will make the marginal Watt-hour from a battery cheaper than the marginal Watt-hour from burning a unit of gas in a turbine. Especially when chasing reliability will inevitably produce cheap surplus energy to store - e.g. suppose solar has collapsed the market for midday power but a new solar farm might still be profitable just by selling more power from 3PM onwards and before 9AM in the morning. That solar farm still wants a customer for its otherwise-wasted midday power and will take basically any price above zero, which means the cost of battery power is effectively just the cost of the battery itself since the midday solar is essentially free and infinite.
This is already in the process of happening (again, in Australia) and gas turbines are dying.
And seriously, fuck nuclear (in Australia). It’s main advocates here deny global warming is real (or at least deny that humans caused it), reject Net Zero by 2050 as radical and unaffordable, and want to block wind/solar farms and transmission lines as much as they can get away with. They are fucking clowns.
To be fair, I don’t think they actually want to build nuclear, they’re just pushing it as a bad-faith ploy to kill renewables, and if they succeed will immediately pivot to “nuclear unsafe, we should build coal plants instead”. They already need a stopgap since our current coal plants will shut down ~2035 and there’s no way we’ll have nuclear up by then, so if not renewables then we’ll need to build coal or gas as a stopgap (and there’s no way that those coal/gas plants will be profitable if they’re shut down 10 years after construction due to the nuclear plant being ready, so they’ll be even more expensive in that context).
Seriously, the Liberal Party (a conservative party), the National party (rural party, also conservative) and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON is like Nigel Farage’s party I think, BTW I’m assuming you’re British because your instance is feddit.uk) are absolute clowns on climate policy (and nuclear). Although it doesn’t help that the Libs have completely collapsed to the point that One Nation is looking to eat their lunch in the next election, so they’re currently trying to out-One Nation One Nation, which they’re obviously failing because they can never be as One Nation as One Nation so voters will just vote for the genuine article. And One Nation’s policies (assuming they have any) are unfettered by any concern about actually getting into power and implementing them, with Pauline Hanson (and her fellow party members) will respond to questions about their policy by trying to pick a fight and throwing names (a comparison to Trump isn’t too far off).
Anyway, I don’t know whether nuclear would be a good idea in UK, and it might well be, but it’s stupid in Australia and so is basically everyone who advocates for it (in Australia) at this point.
Completely agree on your nuance point. There are regions that can run on 100% renewables; Australia may be one on solar, the Nordics another with abundant hydro and wind + small area so interconnect is cheap.
That doesn’t matter. Uranium isn’t that rare, and we only need a power source that kicks the can down the road long enough to build renewable alternatives. Once we start running out of uranium, its price will increase and it’ll be profitable to replace nuclear plants.
The only reason the same logic doesn’t apply to fossil fuels is that climate change is an externality that will kill us long before we run out of fossil fuels.
If nuclear solves the problem for a century, then in 2126 our solar, wind, batteries, enhanced geothermal, wave etc will be very mature and able to replace nuclear quite easily.
I hear your argument, it’s old. But I also listen to news, and the storage problem seems to not be a technological problem anymore. Battery storages for the evenings/nights are almost trivial today, it’s a matter of just allowing investors to build.
For winters, the solution could be green methane in existing storages, and for that we’ll also need gas plants. Green methane is sorta inefficient to produce, I get that, but we’re still in a phase where we need much more solar and wind to get across spring and fall. Simultaneously we need to shut the existing production off in summer. Let’s not do that, and produce inefficient methane instead.
But for this transformation we’re constantly held up by the “what about nuclear” argument straight from the fossil lobby playbook. Sorry to say that, but if you are pro sustainability you should be careful whose arguments you repeat. Just like the individual CO2 footprint, there are a number of popular stories propagated by the fossil lobby with the purpose to sow doubt, and therefore stagnation.
Let’s take a country like the UK, which is well ahead in the renewable transition compared to most other countries. In the last 3 years we’ve had 619 periods where renewables covered less than than 50% of our mix, the longest lasting 19 days (October-November 2024), where the average cover was 16%. Let’s work out on the basis of just that single dunkelflaute as an instructive example.
To see us through that period Britain would have needed 12 TWh of storage. How much is that? Well, we have 0.04 TWh of total storage, across pumped storage and batteries (pumped storage almost double our grid batteries - and when I say grid batteries that counts for every single battery installation at home too, because they are tracked when they are installed in the G98/G99 application).
So you need to make our storage 300x larger just in Britain. And don’t say “we will just import electricity from other countries”, the dunkelflaute covered almost all of Europe.
How did we get through that one? Gas, gas, gas, burning all across Europe, plus a lot of coal in Eastern Europe.
Could we conceivably install 300x more storage in every country (bear in mind the situation is worse in most other countries, so adopting 300x across Europe is optimistic)?
Yes sure, everything is conceivable. You could dig out every mountain for water storage and strip mine the whole planet for the metals you need for batteries.
But if you add nuclear to the mix, prices fall dramatically, since nuclear adds baseload, meaning your dunkelflautes get much smaller and fewer. It’s a lot more conceivable with nuclear in the mix.
Look, I’m not one of those “nuclear will fix everything” people. Nuclear has downsides, but so does everything else. The key is to mix upside and downsides, not rely on one single thing out of philosophy (whether renewable or nuclear).
If you think “storage is solved” I urge you to speak to someone who works in grid management.
The fossil fuel industry was the one stopping nuclear in the 20th century because they were worried about being replaced. Maybe you should also look at who’s talking points you’re copying
Lithium-ion has pretty big operational safety concerns (thermal runaway) and as far as I know we haven’t completely figured out the recycling either.
Pumped storage has massive environmental implications and is typically very difficult to get approved by local governments.
Flow batteries are still a very infant technology. There’s very big design differences between manufacturers that have very big tradeoffs. But I do believe these will “win” the storage race, eventually.
Flywheel and gravity storage don’t have the magnitude and duration requirements for grid-level storage solutions.
Lithium grid batteries are a non-issue for safety, in practice. They’re LFP (which is really forgiving heatwise, as lithium batteries go) and adding a ton of passive cooling isn’t a big deal since weight isn’t a problem when it’s stationary. And sodium-ion will only be better in this regard.
Recycling is overblown as a problem. Like any industry, recycling needs scale to be economical, and every new tech isn’t recycled at scale until 1) it’s produced at scale, and 2) that generation produced at scale reaches EOL and needs to be recycled.
In practice, recycling lithium batteries is a non-issue because a lithium battery contains an entire battery’s worth of lithium (it’s ~10%+ lithium - and that lithium is a liquid that, when drained out, is >99% lithium!), whereas lithium brine is like 0.1% lithium. It’s not hard to recycle most of the battery, and the other parts will only be learned after we have mountains of free dead batteries to practice on, not before.
I listen to news, some of them dedicated to sustainable energy markets, but I’m not an engineer nor so I pretend to be. That news reported in depths about how many large scale battery power plants want to get permission, being blocked primarily by regulation, not technology.
You’ve got some valid points in your criticism of nuclear. They are also points that could be addressed - we built lots of nuclear power plants within budget and timelines, once. Like solar, and like everything, nuclear benefits from scale.
Similarly, there are valid points of criticism that solar gushing ignores: Power is needed 24/7, solar doesn’t deliver power 24/7 and batteries (pumped hydro, chemical, heat etc) are nowhere near large enough to see the whole of society powered through the winter. If we built renewables like we built traditional power plants we would say “I’d like 1 GW, 95% availability, steerable down to 0.6 GW”. Solar right now goes “weeell, not really my problem what you want - I can give you power sometimes and sometimes not”.
So like coal power socialises the cost of pollution, renewables socialises the cost of consistency.
We could instead say “storage is the solar field operators’ concern” and then you’d be able to see what solar really costs”.
And hear me right; I’m ALL in on renewables. I’m also ALL in on nuclear. We need everything that can deliver power with low carbon output. If nuclear goes away, you’ll have to start a tonne of gas peaker plants when there’s not enough wind and not enough sun to power everything.
It’s a mix, not a battle. Kill nuclear and you pretty much kill decarbonisation.
batteries haven’t been built in the past because they weren’t needed, but they’re being built today (look up sodium-ion batteries) and they’re cheap and effective.
The underlying issue with energy is always storage. That has always been the appeal of fossil fuels and now nuclear.
Shelf stable energy ready to be unlocked in a rock or liquid that nature provides right out of the ground.
We need some nuance here. In e.g. South Korea, I agree. Nuclear is needed.
But here in Australia, nuclear is unfathomably stupid. Not only do we not need nuclear, but it’d take decades to build (because we haven’t built one before so we’d have to first write the laws, then build the supply chain, train the workforce, design a nuclear plant to build (again: we haven’t built one on this continent before, we can’t just assume a design from a different climate will work) and then build it (with a construction workforce we might have to import or train). All up, it’ll take longer than building 100% renewables.
Which is exactly why our far right-wing lunatics are advocating it as an alternative to renewables (note that I said alternative, not complement), and to build more coal plants in the mean time.
The whole battery discussion is similarly stupid. In Australia, you don’t need storage for more than a week. And within that week, renewables rarely reach less than 70% average (note that “fucktons of energy on Monday and fuck all on Tues through Sunday” can still add up to 70% of an average week’s energy, though), and never reaches 50%. What that means is that we will need at most 2x the renewables and half a week’s worth of batteries. And of course realistically it means we only need ~1.43x the renewables (it’s not always worth building to meet every possible once-in-a-blue-moon outage when we can pay people (especially commercial customers) to take their demand offline) and to diversify our energy sources (read: offshore wind and onshore wind peak at dusk and nighttime).
More importantly, sooner or later the combination of renewables and batteries will make the marginal Watt-hour from a battery cheaper than the marginal Watt-hour from burning a unit of gas in a turbine. Especially when chasing reliability will inevitably produce cheap surplus energy to store - e.g. suppose solar has collapsed the market for midday power but a new solar farm might still be profitable just by selling more power from 3PM onwards and before 9AM in the morning. That solar farm still wants a customer for its otherwise-wasted midday power and will take basically any price above zero, which means the cost of battery power is effectively just the cost of the battery itself since the midday solar is essentially free and infinite.
This is already in the process of happening (again, in Australia) and gas turbines are dying.
And seriously, fuck nuclear (in Australia). It’s main advocates here deny global warming is real (or at least deny that humans caused it), reject Net Zero by 2050 as radical and unaffordable, and want to block wind/solar farms and transmission lines as much as they can get away with. They are fucking clowns.
To be fair, I don’t think they actually want to build nuclear, they’re just pushing it as a bad-faith ploy to kill renewables, and if they succeed will immediately pivot to “nuclear unsafe, we should build coal plants instead”. They already need a stopgap since our current coal plants will shut down ~2035 and there’s no way we’ll have nuclear up by then, so if not renewables then we’ll need to build coal or gas as a stopgap (and there’s no way that those coal/gas plants will be profitable if they’re shut down 10 years after construction due to the nuclear plant being ready, so they’ll be even more expensive in that context).
Seriously, the Liberal Party (a conservative party), the National party (rural party, also conservative) and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON is like Nigel Farage’s party I think, BTW I’m assuming you’re British because your instance is feddit.uk) are absolute clowns on climate policy (and nuclear). Although it doesn’t help that the Libs have completely collapsed to the point that One Nation is looking to eat their lunch in the next election, so they’re currently trying to out-One Nation One Nation, which they’re obviously failing because they can never be as One Nation as One Nation so voters will just vote for the genuine article. And One Nation’s policies (assuming they have any) are unfettered by any concern about actually getting into power and implementing them, with Pauline Hanson (and her fellow party members) will respond to questions about their policy by trying to pick a fight and throwing names (a comparison to Trump isn’t too far off).
Anyway, I don’t know whether nuclear would be a good idea in UK, and it might well be, but it’s stupid in Australia and so is basically everyone who advocates for it (in Australia) at this point.
Completely agree on your nuance point. There are regions that can run on 100% renewables; Australia may be one on solar, the Nordics another with abundant hydro and wind + small area so interconnect is cheap.
My point is globally. Globally we need nuclear.
Australia has a perfect proposal -https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/isp/2024/2024-integrated-system-plan-isp.pdf
the planet has a finite amount of uranium. It’s rare.
That doesn’t matter. Uranium isn’t that rare, and we only need a power source that kicks the can down the road long enough to build renewable alternatives. Once we start running out of uranium, its price will increase and it’ll be profitable to replace nuclear plants.
The only reason the same logic doesn’t apply to fossil fuels is that climate change is an externality that will kill us long before we run out of fossil fuels.
If nuclear solves the problem for a century, then in 2126 our solar, wind, batteries, enhanced geothermal, wave etc will be very mature and able to replace nuclear quite easily.
New nuclear power plants and current reprocessing can absolutely make this a non-problem. There’s plenty of radioactive material.
I hear your argument, it’s old. But I also listen to news, and the storage problem seems to not be a technological problem anymore. Battery storages for the evenings/nights are almost trivial today, it’s a matter of just allowing investors to build.
For winters, the solution could be green methane in existing storages, and for that we’ll also need gas plants. Green methane is sorta inefficient to produce, I get that, but we’re still in a phase where we need much more solar and wind to get across spring and fall. Simultaneously we need to shut the existing production off in summer. Let’s not do that, and produce inefficient methane instead.
But for this transformation we’re constantly held up by the “what about nuclear” argument straight from the fossil lobby playbook. Sorry to say that, but if you are pro sustainability you should be careful whose arguments you repeat. Just like the individual CO2 footprint, there are a number of popular stories propagated by the fossil lobby with the purpose to sow doubt, and therefore stagnation.
Storage isn’t a technological problem anymore?!
Let’s take a country like the UK, which is well ahead in the renewable transition compared to most other countries. In the last 3 years we’ve had 619 periods where renewables covered less than than 50% of our mix, the longest lasting 19 days (October-November 2024), where the average cover was 16%. Let’s work out on the basis of just that single dunkelflaute as an instructive example.
To see us through that period Britain would have needed 12 TWh of storage. How much is that? Well, we have 0.04 TWh of total storage, across pumped storage and batteries (pumped storage almost double our grid batteries - and when I say grid batteries that counts for every single battery installation at home too, because they are tracked when they are installed in the G98/G99 application).
So you need to make our storage 300x larger just in Britain. And don’t say “we will just import electricity from other countries”, the dunkelflaute covered almost all of Europe.
How did we get through that one? Gas, gas, gas, burning all across Europe, plus a lot of coal in Eastern Europe.
Could we conceivably install 300x more storage in every country (bear in mind the situation is worse in most other countries, so adopting 300x across Europe is optimistic)?
Yes sure, everything is conceivable. You could dig out every mountain for water storage and strip mine the whole planet for the metals you need for batteries.
But if you add nuclear to the mix, prices fall dramatically, since nuclear adds baseload, meaning your dunkelflautes get much smaller and fewer. It’s a lot more conceivable with nuclear in the mix.
Look, I’m not one of those “nuclear will fix everything” people. Nuclear has downsides, but so does everything else. The key is to mix upside and downsides, not rely on one single thing out of philosophy (whether renewable or nuclear).
If you think “storage is solved” I urge you to speak to someone who works in grid management.
The fossil fuel industry was the one stopping nuclear in the 20th century because they were worried about being replaced. Maybe you should also look at who’s talking points you’re copying
Which battery technology are you referring to?
Lithium-ion has pretty big operational safety concerns (thermal runaway) and as far as I know we haven’t completely figured out the recycling either.
Pumped storage has massive environmental implications and is typically very difficult to get approved by local governments.
Flow batteries are still a very infant technology. There’s very big design differences between manufacturers that have very big tradeoffs. But I do believe these will “win” the storage race, eventually.
Flywheel and gravity storage don’t have the magnitude and duration requirements for grid-level storage solutions.
Lithium grid batteries are a non-issue for safety, in practice. They’re LFP (which is really forgiving heatwise, as lithium batteries go) and adding a ton of passive cooling isn’t a big deal since weight isn’t a problem when it’s stationary. And sodium-ion will only be better in this regard.
Recycling is overblown as a problem. Like any industry, recycling needs scale to be economical, and every new tech isn’t recycled at scale until 1) it’s produced at scale, and 2) that generation produced at scale reaches EOL and needs to be recycled.
In practice, recycling lithium batteries is a non-issue because a lithium battery contains an entire battery’s worth of lithium (it’s ~10%+ lithium - and that lithium is a liquid that, when drained out, is >99% lithium!), whereas lithium brine is like 0.1% lithium. It’s not hard to recycle most of the battery, and the other parts will only be learned after we have mountains of free dead batteries to practice on, not before.
I listen to news, some of them dedicated to sustainable energy markets, but I’m not an engineer nor so I pretend to be. That news reported in depths about how many large scale battery power plants want to get permission, being blocked primarily by regulation, not technology.