I wouldn’t say that either. But right now the tribe in power is all about denying the facts that GHG has a cost at all. They want the pollution to be free and make fun of Tesla accepting a small amount of government subsidies.
As for what you based the cost on : umm, actually, making the cost the world cost is a defensible metric.
Remember that the world economy is interconnected. If, say, major suppliers to the US economy in the Phillipines gets destroyed by the effects of climate change, this increases the market price of whatever they were making. It means that other businesses elsewhere have to take their market segment over, and in a global, interconnected free market economy, this will have an increased cost to that economy.
Also keep in mind that when you are talking about climate change actually destroying certain countries, there is the possibility of floods of refuges and/or wars and/or those countries failing to pay their debts. All impose costs on the rest of us.
A sound analysis would factor in all these risks, multiplying by the probability from the data, and work out the most accurate number possible. I am not saying the Obama Administration’s number wasn’t too high or too low, I don’t know, just saying you can’t pretend that other countries we trade with collapsing or facing massive damage is “zero cost” to us. We certainly don’t benefit unless you deny mainstream economic theories about trade.
There are a few unintended consequences but not those you note in your post.
First of all, let’s look at the size of the problem. Current nuclear fission power generation provides ~20% of electrical generating capacity of the 4,100 terawatt-hours (TWH) of energy demand (2016 numbers). This is produced by the 99 licensed boiling water reactors (BWR) and pressurized water reactors (PWR) with an average power of just over 1,000 MW per reactor, all of which are Generation II reactors licensed for construction prior to 1979. Depending on the scope at which you would intend to deploy nuclear reactors, this would require somewhere from 200 (to replace coal and ‘dirty’ petrofuel planets) to 500 (to replace all forms of fossil fuel) new plants to be constructed and brought on line, assuming comparable power production, and notwithstanding the retirement of any existing facilities for the foreseeable future. (Many current plants are well beyond existing design lifetimes, notwithstanding the obsolescent technology used in them.) Most power plants have between two and four reactors on site, so you are probably considering somewhere between 50 and 200 new sitings for planets.
The first fundamental problem is fuel. All current commercial operating nuclear power plants in the United States are Generation II plants which require enriched uranium (EU) of somewhere between 3.5% and 5% [SUP]235[/SUP]U (the fissile isotope of uranium preferred for power generation). The United States currently has one commercial nuclear fuel production plant, the National Enrichment Facility (NEF), which is and has been at capacity for well over a decade, despite the fact that commercial nuclear plant operators purchase most of their enriched fuel from foreign sources, often partially subsidized by the federal government. The NEF, along with facilties to separate uranium oxide from urania (milled and refined pitchblende ore, also referred to as “yellowcake”) and produce the uranium hexafluoride (UF[SUB]6[/SUB]), are substantial investments which require highly skilled labor, a wide variety of safety and security provisions, and a lot of power to produce, as well as generating a large waste stream of material that has to be securely stored or remediated. The cost and schedule for establishing all of this is a prerequisite for significantly expanding nuclear power production in the United States lest the country become even more dependent upon yet another foreign energy source. In any case, the United States has relatively few deposits of high grade uranium ore and has to procure either material or processed fuel from foreign sources even for its current production schedule. Planning to produce more either means subsidizing the mining from low grade material (which is expensive, wasteful, and polluting) or making strategic alliances with nations which have reserves of high grade material, which is something we have not particularly focused on and are currently not constituted to do with an isolationist trade policy.
The second is the skilled labor to build and operate plants. Constructing nuclear plants which are safe and cost-effective requires highly skilled labor and management oversight, requiring the expertise and effort of experienced millwrights, pipefitters, electricians, and other skilled construction trades as well as the engineering support. If it is not bad enough that US universities are producing fewer nuclear engineers (and those who are produced are getting little experience in the new design and construction of plants), we also have a dearth of experienced tradespeople and especially those who are both certified to work on safety critical systems and are US citizens (required to hold a DoE clearance for many jobs involving nuclear power). I don’t have hard numbers on the labor force but I suspect we’d be hard pressed to simultaneously construct ten nuclear reactors much less hundreds, and increasing the number of skilled and experienced workers is the effort of a decade or more. Once plants are constructed they still have to go through the licensing and certification process, which certifies not only the facility but the personnel training and supervision within it. Again, there is a lack of experienced people to step into these roles which would require an intense effort to train new engineers and skilled maintenance people.
Then there is the carbon footprint of constructing plants and associated facilities. While it is often claimed that nuclear fission power is ‘carbon neutral’, but this only more-or-less true by limiting the scope of carbon production to the actual power generation process itself. Conventional PWR and BWR require large facilities with thousands of tons of concrete and steel, as well as the transportation and construction carbon costs. While over the lifetime of the plant it will generate more energy per unit ton of CO[SUB]2[/SUB] exhausted, there is a large carbon generation burst during construction (in the span of 3 or 4 years, notwithstanding any licensing holdups). If you could somehow contrive to build 500 plants in a decade, you’d also see a large spike in carbon dioxide production which is not desireable to say the least. Phasing in the construction of plants or offsetting the carbon expendature through using cleaner buring fuel or renewable power generation should be a part of any plan for wide scale nuclear power plant construction.
There is, of course, the issue of disposal of waste. Many dismiss this as a hypothetically ‘solved’ problem, insofar as we could just bury the waste in an underground facility or dump it out in the desert and put a fence around it, but the political and economic reality that we’ve seen around disposal of nuclear fuel and other material indicates that it is still a very real concern even if you are of the opinion that there are no technical concerns. The (now closed) Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository was of insufficient size for even the waste currently sitting in dry cask storage at nuclear plants around the country, much less any future or expanding high grade waste production (as well as storage or remediation for any mid-grade waste streams), and so any plan involving Generation II or III plants needs to somehow account for secure and contained waste disposal, suitable for storing waste that will be hazardous for tens of thouands of years. To address a specific question:
It is only a bad idea if you are sufficiently cynical that bidders will look for ways to cut corners in order to win a short-term financial windfall while ignoring possible hazards to populations ten or fifty years down the road, something that has never happened in the noble history of honorable and foresightful hazardous industries. Snark aside, it should be understood that Nevada was selected as the national repository for high grade nuclear waste not because it was geologically the best site (there is some debate about the long term hazards posed by nearby fault lines and potential permeability of the ground in the facility over hundreds of years), nor geographically optimal (placing waste storage sites regionally instead of having a single repository would be more flexible and reduce logistical costs and difficulties), but because at the time it was selected Nevada had little power in Congress and was already regarded as a wasteland that had been previously used for aboveground nuclear testing.
I’ll say for California, the state has already previously considered and rejected proposals for storing waste from its own plants, notwithstanding the high permiability and large array of faults make siting of any long term storage facility problematic. Washington is pretty unhappy about being home to one of the largest Superfund cleanup sites thanks to the production of nuclear material for military applications. Texas and Idaho, both sparsely settled states with a lot of open land and some suitable geology for storage over thousands of years might consider your proposal but the best sites that will be geologically and hydrologically stable for tens of thousands of years or more are halite formations and prarticularly exhausted salt mines found in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Michigan.
However, the issue of disposal glosses over one of the biggest problems with any plans to use current nuclear fission power production technologies; specifically, that after the cost and effort in enriching the uranium to a fuel grade, it uses less than 5% of the total potential fissile energy of the fuel. The very thing that makes it a hazardous waste is also a waste of effort and money. Conventional reprocessing is prohibitively expensive and produces a large waste stream, as well as the security concerns of disposing of ‘waste’ products that could be weaponizable. However, there are a number of potential full burnup technologies such as the Molten Salt Reactor, hybrid fission fusion and induced fission, and gas-cooled fast reactor, which could be used to extract far more of the potential fissile energy from nuclear fuels, as well as reduce the amount of processing (and potentially use more widely available thorium for at least part of the fuel mixture rather than all uranium) and both the waste stream and mass of the end product waste. It may also potentially reduce the investment cost and carbon footprint of conventional PWR and BWR reactors depending on the complexity of the system.
It is almost without question that nuclear fission will be required to reduce dependence upon fossil and hydrocarbon fuels (though we’ll still need liquid or condensed hydrocarbon fuels for some transportation applications for the foreseeable future). But this doesn’t mean that nuclear fission power production is some kind of a panacea that will reduce atmospheric carbon production overnight, or even over the course of a couple of decades, even with a concerted worldwide effort. A sensible energy plan going forward would look to replacing the most waste-producing coal and petrocarbon plants with cleaner natural gas, as well as renewables such as solar, wind, and second generation biofuel as a supplemental energy supply while developing and maturing Generation IV fission reactors, and still investing in nuclear fusion research as well as efficiency improvements in solar as the ultimate goal in sustainable power production.
Seriously, nuclear fission should be a part of future energy planning, and the nations wholesale abandoning nuclear fission are acting reflexively toward the Fukushima Diiachi disaster (though it has become apparent that JAEA and Tepco have concealed a number of widespread problems with safety and reliability in the Japanese nuclear industry), but dismissing the challenges and potential hazards of fission power out of hand or assume that nuclear fission can magically replace hydrocarbon energy sources rapidly and without transition cost and time.
What about the problem where it’s particularly incompatible with renewables?
The reason is that as greater percentages of renewables are installed, since they are getting to be really cheap, there will be periods of time where no power at all is demanded from the nuclear plants. This is already starting to happen in California, where wind+solar exceed electricity demand for brief periods of time.
This creates 2 serious problems.
If you can’t find somewhere to dump the power, you have to shut down the nuclear plant, you can’t run efficient turbines at anything but full rated power. After shutdown you cannot ramp power back up quickly.
Nearly all your cost in a nuclear plant you pay whether or not you are running it. All that skilled labor to maintain and monitor it, and especially your capital costs. Only a tiny fraction of your running costs are fuel.
Contrast this to natural gas, especially cheaper and less efficient versions like natural gas reciprocating, which is the cheapest form of power generation per watt of capacity. (over the long term, the increased fuel bill makes it more expensive than natural gas combined cycle). The capital cost is much smaller. You don’t need much labor, just people to come out to fix generators when they break, or need scheduled maintenance, and this is more or less dependent on runtime hours.
Absolutely. No idea why we’d need such a convoluted system. Also…why is gas on list B?? That makes zero sense, especially when the US is experiencing a natural gas boom. Hell, it would make more sense (such as it would make any, which is limited) to put coal in list B and say, well, if you HAVE to have an old style coal plant you need to build a nuclear plant to offset the carbon footprint. :smack:
The whole point is to make people choose between nuclear power and coal. Because from where I’m sitting, that’s probably about the most realistic way to increase the use of nuclear.
But this is sort of like the joke about Henry Ford: you can buy my car in any color you want, so long as you only want black.
If you want people to build nuclear plants, laws can simply direct that a certain percentage of new power plants have to be nuclear. Or heavily subsidize nuclear plants. Or prohibit coal plants. Or do many other things… but some game theory-based plan in which all players end up at the same point – “I have to build a nuclear plant to comply with the law” – is unnecessarily convoluted.
Your idea fails at step 1.
The point of making it difficult and expensive to build nuclear power plants is that a significant group of people don’t want them. Period. Any scheme that makes it easier to build a nuke is by definition to be fought-precisely because it might work. Only plans that increase the cost of nukes are supported because that is the goal of the opposition. Now, perhaps the opposition can be overcome, but they have spent the last 50 years solidifying their position. Overcoming them will be very very difficult.
Precisely, nuclear energy has been put on a face I win, tails you lose situation.
The efforts to comply to ever expanding demands and opposition have had the effect of slowing and increasing the cost of new developments, this in turn is used against nuclear by the same people behind the demands and opposition; it’s a vicious circle and the results have been catastrophic:
Unless you install large battery packs to smooth out the flow, as the Australians did with Tesla’s help. The technology in that department will only improve over time.
Germany seems to be doing quite well with a large share of wind and solar too.
I think the idea that renewables are fringe power sources is outdated and incorrect.
Yes. Obviously I agree. One subtle thing that doesn’t show up in a simple analysis but does show in the data is you need to consider what renewables are.
With solar, you are talking about a fairly complex chemical recipe on refined silicon, but you do the same recipe over and over and over and over. And every solar cell you make is the same as all the others. Any optimizations you discover make every solar cell you produce thereafter cheaper.
Similar argument for the inverters.
And for the windmills. They are more complex than solar cells but there are a lot of components that you can develop optimal methods to optimize.
You do not even need factory self replication. Plain old 1980s factory automation technology is great at making the same product every time on a vast scale with minimal human labor.
Contrast this to something like nuclear. This is why renewables, despite their drawbacks, already are cheaper than nuclear and the gap is going to just keep widening.
They aren’t fringe, they are niche energy generation sources. And you can’t scale up even Tesla’s large pack battery systems to take the full load of even a moderately sized city, let alone the entire grid…at least not anytime in the near future. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool technology (and I’m invested pretty heavily in Tesla so I WANT it to work and catch on), but it still doesn’t offer wind and solar the ability to scale to become more than a niche source. As for Germany, they are doing pretty well with wind and solar because they buy a lot of their power from other countries, like France that uses that nuclear stuff.
I agree with you partially. The batteries are too expensive and you have a problem where there is a statistical chance of a prolonged shortfall. That is, if you have even twice the solar/wind capacity you need to provide the average amount of power you need, and enough batteries to get you through the average night, you still need an additional source of power because there is still a statistical chance of a prolonged shortfall - but only a small percent chance of that happening.
What’s wrong with using natural gas generators, at least for now, for that? That wouldn’t be niche. You’d get about 50%-75% of your power from renewables + some batteries, and generators for the rest. Or maybe 98% from renewables, it does scale. You just have to install a lot more panels and windmills than you need on average - which is affordable if they are dirt cheap.
In fact, this is how people living off grid who have the deluxe setups do it. They have their solar and maybe their windmill/microhydro, and a big enough battery bank for typical needs. When the battery state of charge gets down to around 30%, they go start up a small generator or some people have it automatic. Generator usually burns propane, since you can have a gigantic tank of it and it doesn’t go bad like gasoline does.
It ends up saving hugely more than it’s cost in fuel. Biggest cost is the batteries, but those could be mass manufactured using recipes that need less or no cobalt for less than they cost now.
I didn’t say anything about natural gas, nor was that even asked, so not sure how I’m ‘wrong’. The poster I responded to made a statement about wind, about solar and about the Tesla battery technology but didn’t mention anything about using natural gas as a backup. Of course you can do this…this is actually how it works today in the real world, with wind and solar taking some of the load and all of the non-niche power generation systems smoothing out the availability. I don’t see what you are saying as making wind or solar less niche…it’s the very definition of why they ARE a niche energy generation source.
I wouldn’t consider “half the load for the state of California” to be “niche, a pissant sideshow”.
I didn’t outright say you’re wrong, but you read the article and tell me.
California is ahead of the rest of the country (and most of the world), and yes, they pay 50% above the national average for electricity. But the cost of solar and wind are still declining. Simple arithmetic tells me if they decline another 50%, it’ll be a no brainer for a lot of the rest of the country as well.
Natural gas has leveled off, it’s a fossil fuel and those turbine plants are very complex and expensive capital equipment. And the fuel itself is a commodity that stops getting produced when the price is low (they stop fracking for it) and the old wells eventually stop producing. So it’s definitely worth installing renewables just so you burn less expensive fossil fuel.
According to this Wikipedia article, the US had about 14% of electricity generation from renewables in 2015. Other Western countries, though much smaller ones, have rates substantially higher than that. I don’t think countries like the UK, Switzerland, Germany, and others are having problems with blackouts, so I think your “small fraction of total demand” metric is unnecessarily pessimistic.