I have a somewhat different take. Batteries + hydrogen production are sufficient to smooth out renewable power generation. That, and their dirt-cheap cost.
But will electrolysis technology advance sufficiently to make green hydrogen cheap? I say probably, but that’s not good enough. We need a portfolio of power sources. It makes sense to invest in an expensive technology like nuclear power, in case we get unlucky and cheap hydrogen technology doesn’t materialize fast enough. It’s a diversification argument.
Bottom line, I’m done with screwing around. Pour funds into everything and anything that can reduce greenhouse emissions. Even the tech that has low expected ROI, like fission and fusion.
While I’m here, I’ll drop some google news stories:
Japan Times: World’s largest nuclear plant sits idle. Seven reactors at the seaside complex were shuttered after the Fukushima tsunami in 2011. Approval for 2 of them was granted by the national regulator, but the local government also needs to approve the plan. Locals receive their power from an entirely different utility: output from Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant goes to Tokyo. I opine that local buy-in is a good thing - the alternative is fiascos like Yuccah Mountain - and that local politicians should be open to receiving national subsidies as they were when the plants were originally sited. A robotics center might be a good fit.
Exactly. I too have reasonably high hopes for hydrogen, as both a long-term storage medium and a feedstock for renewable fuels. But while the basic physics checks out, the economics is yet to be proven.
That’s not the case with solar+batteries. They’re already very cheap, and getting cheaper. We should invest in them enough to keep the economy running, even with disruptions. It’s known to work and no matter how everything else plays out, it will have a dominant role in energy production. So just keep building at a high rate.
As for the rest–yes, we should have some diverse investments, proportional to their viability and timeline (fusion should be way down the list IMO; geothermal should be fairly high). Regarding hydrogen, I like the idea of producing crude, inefficient, but very low cost electrolyzers that make hydrogen with excess solar. No batteries–just run when the sun is good. Ordinarily, your underutilized capital will kill you, but the point is that you drive down the capital costs as much as possible and then bite the bullet on efficiency.
No, that’s not what was said. The reactor as a whole produces tonnes of waste per year. Per-person, it probably is something like a can of coke. Maybe some small multiple of that since SMRs are less efficient than large reactors.
Coal of course does spew tonnes of waste per person per year directly into the atmosphere, where it’s unrecoverable. The nuclear reactor produces tonnes of solid waste total that can be easily stored.
Coal is still nearly 50% of total electricity consumption in Australia. They need to do something about this. It’s pathetic.
Agreed, but starting to build your first nuke in 2025 (if the COALition were to win the upcoming election) is not the way to do that.
The current government ARE doing something - not enough fast enough, I agree, but it’s better than the literal nothing the previous COALition government were doing!
Maybe they should have started 40 years ago. I didn’t realize until now that they have zero nuclear power. And they’re one of the largest sources of uranium! Bizarre.
Also weird is the dominance of coal over gas. It’s not like there are no gas deposits. The US has gone through a fairly rapid decoalification–I don’t know why Australia hasn’t done the same.
At least solar is doing pretty well. Still lots of room for growth, though.
The previous COALition government had ~10 years in power to do something about nukes and they did precisely zero. This is a new thing from them, essentially political cover for their utter lack of commitment - in power and out - to decarbonisation. Ironically it was they who back in the 90s brought in a federal government ban on nuclear power! It’d be funny if it wasn’t so tragic and stupid.
Most of our gas is now for export (and almost entirely extracted by foreign companies). Which drove up domestic prices for it, as local users were then competing with world demand instead of just local.
Well, I’m certainly sympathetic with the idea that entrenched interests often promote far-off solutions that have a good chance of never coming through, “coincidentally” either delaying the transfer of power or ensuring it never happens at all. Sort of a weaponized version of “the perfect is the enemy of the good enough”.
Which is why I think solar+batteries should still be promoted heavily, since it’s so fast, cheap, and easy to install. Every gigawatt of solar means a coal plant can be closed. Will be closed, since it’ll outcompete the least efficient coal plants and make them uneconomical. At least at first–eventually you do start needing to retain some baseload capacity, so it would be nice to have some nuclear plants come online just as coal drops away to nothing. That’ll be a couple decades out no matter what, but in the meantime we can still benefit from partially reduced emissions.
Our big issue is that (IIRC) all the major coal plants will shut down in the next 10 years or so. They are old, uneconomic and unreliable.
What is the COALition’s plan to bridge the gap between that and their first putative nuke coming on line, even in their timeline years after that? They simply have none, it’s all shadow-play. Their sole goal is to win the next election or the one after that; what lies they have to tell to bamboozle the electorate to achieve that is just fine by them. Just fine.
Constellation Energy is in talks with the Pennsylvania governor’s office and state lawmakers to help fund a possible restart of part of its Three Mile Island power facility, the site of a nuclear meltdown in the 1970s, three sources familiar with the discussions said on Tuesday. The conversations, which two sources described as “beyond preliminary,” signal that Constellation is advancing plans to revive part of the southern Pennsylvania nuclear generation site, which operated from 1974 to 2019. The nuclear unit Constellation is considering restarting is separate from the one that melted down.
Yay! I’d say Rancho Seco next, but I think it’s been too comprehensively dismantled, and there’s been too much urban encroachment. Probably not enough water, too.
Once operational, Three Mile Island should erect a statue of Jane Fonda in her honor.
Just completely embarrassing on the part of the EU:
Fortunately, France is pushing back on this abject stupidity. For the record, I am hugely in favor of renewables. However, even better is widespread nuclear, especially since it means they have had low-carbon electricity for decades.
Despite the Germans having a high renewable rate, their bonkers decision to close nuclear plants while keeping coal plants open means they have nearly an order of magnitude worse carbon intensity compared to France:
So France is entirely in the right to give the EU the middle finger here.
Even Italy is not as bad as Germany, but they are at least considering nuclear again:
They do a bit better than Germany due to the low amount of coal, even though they still burn a fair amount of gas (and oil, weirdly).
I’m still a little sad that Kewaunee was shut down…I think they had just had their license renewed, too. I’m also guessing that a restart wouldn’t be economically viable, since they would still be competing against natural gas.
but was pushed back to almost 20:00 after a pro-atomic energy activist scaled one of the pylons in protest at its destruction.
Cooling-tower-huggers just doesn’t have the same ring as treehuggers.
Every nuclear plant that closes means more dead Ukrainians. The Germans haven’t stopped importing Russian gas; they just pay Belgium and the Netherlands to be intermediaries:
The Department of Energy (DOE) announced recently that it will finance the restart of a nuclear power plant through a new program to revitalize energy infrastructure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Restarting the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant, which was shut down in 2022, will be the first restarted nuclear power plant in U.S. history, bringing back much needed clean firm energy supply to Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. DOE estimates that the addition of this clean capacity will prevent yearly emissions equivalent to that emitted by nearly one million gas-powered cars.
Very cool. Seems that nuclear is making a comeback in most rationally-behaving countries. The future is still mostly solar+batteries, but nuclear will make the transition much easier and be very beneficial to grid reliability.
Poland is also getting in on the action:
I guess that’s one way to prevent the Germans from invading you.
Damn, that’s badass. We are truly living in the future now.
I see two ways for this to go, from a PR perspective. Either it goes great, and with Three Mile Island fixed, at least some of the nuclear stigma dissipates…
Or, scaremongering that’s extra effective because scary buzz words like AI, Microsoft, Nuclear, and Bill Gates are mentioned alongside one of the handful events that idiots might remember from history class derails the whole project.
Poland has a smart program: they plan to build 3 conventional nuclear reactors in addition to having a small modular program. With nukes you have to go big or go home: the first reactor is pretty much guaranteed to be expensive. They are also trying to build out their supply chain. We’ll see how that goes.
I wasn’t aware of this but China has a commercial scale pebble bed reactor in Shidaowan. This is the only commercial 4th generation plant operating in the world to my knowledge. This July they completed a test where they turned off external power to the plant and let it cool on its own. They reported success. The Economist magazine:
China is ten to 15 years ahead of America in deploying fourth-generation nuclear technology, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a think-tank in Washington. China is also building conventional reactors far more quickly. Of the 60 or so plants under construction globally, 45% are in China.
