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this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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Now do Georgia's Vogtle reactors 3 and 4, which came in at 34 billion for 2 x 1200mw plants, 21 billion over the original 14 billion estimate, and took over 14 years to build, 8 years behind schedule.
Im glad these powerplants finally got built. They will help, but nuclear is just not reasonable anymore. Its a slow, expensive tech, especially when we are making such leaps and bonds with solar/battery.
It's slow expensive tech because we don't invest in it.
Every technology is slow and expensive when you have nearly an entire generational gap in knowledge and experience.
You'll know that I'm not saying solar and wind are not cheaper, they all exist in a different capacity and fill in the gaps they best fit.
We have invested decades and billions into reactor tech. The DOE just announced another 900 million for SMR, on top of previous billion dollar grants. So far, every SMR company has failed to make any progress. The DOE even certified one for use and it still can't get it done.
Meanwhile, solar/battery research is getting funding from tons of sources, government and corporate, and exploding forward in every direction. Solar arrays are being deployed all over the world at insane rates, propelled mostly by just how inexpensive, safe, effective and easy it is to deploy. Its because of solar/battery that we may even hit some of the 2030 "pie in the sky" climates goals that were set across the world.
Its pretty clear which of the two techs we should be spending time on.
Both. There aren't enough rare earth materials to build enough solar panels to completely erase power plants. Panels have a devastating mining issue similar to batteries as well. Solar has lots of hidden costs no one talks about. It's cheap just like batteries but the opportunity cost is huge. Nuclear meanwhile has a high upfront cost which is the real reason it scares away investors. Also political anti nuclear nutters don't help with financing issues.
Solar panels can be made of many different types and volumes of material. First solar, the largest manufacturer in the US, uses a differenr process than chinese panels for example. Perovskite solar cells, which are not just yet ready for prime time but are advancing rapidly, don't use any.
Nuclear power has its own mining and rare material problems, in the form of uranium. You have to dig into the earth for it, and then after you use it, poison part of the planet forever. We still dont know what to do with all the nuclear waste we alrwady made.
Not exactly an ecological win.
Thorium is 3-4 times more abundant than uranium, is generally safer to use and would produce less waste that is also less radioactive and can become safe in a reasonable timeframe (few centuries compared to few hundred/thousand? centuries). Historically the main issue with Thorium has been that it's not as sexy as uranium because you can't make nuclear weapons out of thorium.
Perovskite uses rare earth metals too, so while they increase efficiency they are just as destructive
You can fit all the nuclear waste jn the world in one football field. It's not alot.
Perovskite are iterating through many different materials as the science settles on them, but one of the positives is that the materials aren't nearly as rare.
This is not true because of radioactive waste water, containment vessels and spent fuel rods, all of which are highly radioactive along with your football field of actual spent fuel, but okay.
If we could do this or something like it, why haven't we? Is it because no one on earth wants that football field? Is it because we tried this at sites like Hanford, Washington and its been a half century of ecological disaster?
People undersell just how destructive the entire radioactive waste cycle is. Nuclear is way, way better than coal and oil, but solar/batteries kick its teeth in here.
Again, your hostility to Nuclear is completely misguided. Even the UN admits that Nuclear is needed to solve climate change https://news.un.org/en/interview/2024/06/1151006
China is building dozens of new Nuclear reactors while being the capital of solar panel manufacturing. There is no teeth kicking necessary. Nuclear kicks teeth out of everything in terms of reliability. Solar kicks teeth on speed and cost. Don't be a propaganda machine
Reminds me of this comic. Seeing it first hand with people like you
https://i.redd.it/9o6czv4wa58c1.jpeg
Ha, uses a modified stonetoss comic to reply to me and doesn't address any issues I just brought up in the previous comment. Neato. Glad to know you dont have any answers to nuclear waste either. Youre in good company.
Im pro nuclear, but I am also pro basic math. Solar/battery are cheaper and way faster to build, and designed correctly, offer equivalent baseline loading as nuclear. It's a no brainer to back burner any nuclear project for solar/battery, and that's exactly what's happening.
Im glad this reactor finally got finished. Im also glad China is building nuclear. With its directed economy, total disregard for local and global ecology and totalitarian government, they can streamline nuclear deployments in a way that makes them viable. When they are done and they offline all the coal and oil plants they have also built, it will be a good thing. For the rest of the world, and especially the US with its wide open and near endless federal land, solar/battery makes the most sense.
The only real competition is "Enhanced geothermal." There is a 400MW plant that is being built in Utah right now that should come online in 4 years. If they can stay on target, then nuclear is really fully dead.
Can't wait to see enhanced geothermal take off tbh. I know that the drilling tech couldn't really get us to the depth we need to see the right energy gains, but you are right that there are companies out there looking to make strides.
Geothermal is not viable in many places such as earthquake prone areas and also the east coast where the mantle has cooled significantly compared to the west coast which still has a hot, fresh plate in comparison. There are not too many viable places in the US for large scale geothermal power. Utah is in the sweet spot of a fresh plate in the west but far from major fault lines
This is "geothermal anywhere", not bog standard geothermal. They use drilling tech developed by the oil and gas industry to dig far past normal thresholds, making geothermal way more viable.
It's a pure baseload tech with no nuclear downsides. Current projections are that it could supply roughly 20% of all US power. A perfect compliment to solar/battery, and still faster and cheaper than nuclear, SMR or otherwise.
Still nothing to say about Hanford, huh?
Even if wind and solar make huge progress, they will likely never be as efficient regarding raw materials efficiency and land use. Land use is the main contributor to biodiversity loss.
I don't think peremptory opinions about technologies are going to help. We should use what ever technology is the most reasonable and sustainable for each specific location.
There is no particular reason solar "needs" to use any new land at all, given that we can just put it on the roofs we already have.
And the fact that we do dedicate land to it instead of only doing rooftop just goes to show that land use isn't anywhere near as important a problem as you insinuate.
Your comment is pure FUD.
Total land used for all power to be supplied by solar would be a hilariously tiny percentage of land, so this just reads like a solar version of "its killing birds" to me.
Agrivoltaics also side steps this non issue, as interlacing solar panels into farm land increases yields for many crops while making efficent use of space that's already spoiled any biodiversity. Can you do that with a nuclear reactor?
Nuclear could take over existing coal plants which would allow use of otherwise unusable land that's been polluted by coal. It would require regulatory changes though, as the coal plant is already irradiated beyond allowed levels for nuclear.
Yeah in a perfect world based on some rough data you could supply the entire planet’s energy requirements with a solar plant about 300,000 square kilometers, or basically the size of Arizona, which translates to about 0.2% of the total landmass on earth. That being said, I’m curious what a solar plant the cost of this nuclear plant would look like, and where they’d put it. I think centralized vs distributed land rights and compensation is really tougher than the tech at this point.
wtf? Decentralized production is one of solar's greatest advantages.
Nevada just built a hybrid 1400MW solar/battery plant for 2 billion dollars in 2 years.
That 1400MW is solar panel + battery output, so it doesnt match nuclear's steady state, but ive done the math on these projects before. We should be able to can build a 3000MW solar generating plant with 1200MW battery supply for 16hrs at roughly a cost of 17 Billion dollars, or 1 Vogtle nuclear plant. My time estimate was 6 years. This would output 2x the power of the Vogtle plant during the day, and output just as much as it over the night.
The above makes solar/battery not only way more productive than nuclear, but way safer, and way faster to built. All of that is just with demonstrated, everyday tech available today. It ignores all the huge advances being made in various batteries and panels. In the decade+ that it would take to open just one more reactor, we will likely be able to 2x-3x the power and speed to build at a lower cost with just solar/battery.
Nuclear was the right answer for the last 50 years. That's no longer the case.
Something to note about this chart is that ground-mount silicon solar PV isn't considered for sharing land use with activities such as farming in comparison to how onshore wind is (i.e. agrivoltaics).
NREL in the US estimates that there are currently ~10.1 GW of agrivoltaics projects spread across ~62,400 acres (or ~7 m^2 / MW).
Even this being said, I think brownfield or existing structures for new PV is the way of the future for solar PV. There is so much real estate that could be used and has the potential to offset grid demand growth while providing greater reliability for consumers. You'll need the big players to help with industrial loads, but even then, the growth of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) has the potential to balance loads at the same scale as the big players for the prosumer market.
Edit: I'll also make mention of floatovoltaics, or the installation of solar PV on bodies of water, either natural or artificial. This is a burgeoning side of the industry, but this is another area that could present net zero or even negative land use per unit of energy.
Don't forget solar fences
Something to note about your link to solar fences is that one of the cons mentioned is that panels can't produce power for half of the day because they'll be facing away from the sun.
Bifacial panels exist and can collect energy from both faces of the module. We in the utility-scale space use these all the time. You'd want these over monofacial panels for fence applications
Yes. Bifacial seems like the obvious choice. And the fence should be NS orientation not EW.
If you're trying to maximize energy collection then yes you'll want to face the fence rows NS.
But there are also some benefits for making use of vertical bifacial panels oriented EW. You get a bimodal energy plot: one in the morning and one in the evening when the sun's direct rays shine near horizontal (something NS panels can't collect).
I'd actually be interested in reading the literature on mixing these types of panel orientations to see what the resulting production yields would look like, and if stakeholders like utilities would find any benefit in them to help better manage grid demand in those peripheral times of the day.
Solar fencing produces 3% more yield and 30% more revenue than rooftop.
This is a poor argument. You just did what you explicitly should not do with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results.
The ISO 14044 specifically requires life cycle assessment to include all relevant impact categories. In particular in comparative analysis it is crucial to not single out any one category, but look at the impact on the endpoints, e.g. ecosystems or human health.
https://www.h2.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Einrichtungen/Hochschulbibliothek/Downloaddateien/DIN_EN_ISO_14044.pdf
See page 37 onwards.
Here is the full LCA study, that you drew only one category from
https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20March%202022.pdf
Look at the Endpoint indicators, like "Lifecycle impact on ecosystems, per MWh, in pointes", "Life cycle impacts on ecosystems, no climate change,per MWh, in pointes", "Life cycle impacts on human health,per MWh, in pointes" etc.
Nuclear power does fare well in these categories, but often only marginally different to Wind Power and Solar Power. It certainly does not offset the cost difference, when you also have to include the opportunity costs of running coal or gas plants longer.
This is a poor argument. You just did what you explicitly should not do when engaging in a discussion: building a straw man argument and cherry picking a part of an answer.
I highlighted two rarely mentioned and non-intuitive points about nuclear vs renewables, I bet a few readers learned about it. But, I didn't say renewables shouldn't be used. My conclusion says the opposite, don't have blocked opinions about technologies, use whatever is most adapted to the location, if it's renewable, that's great.
Could you compare it to land used for livestock or car parks or low density housing?
If we went 100% solar is that even noticeable compared to mentioned above.
You just making excuses.
I am not making any excuse, I'm providing additional points to consider.
Pointless points. It's a rounding error in the grand scheme of things. You're just a fossil fuel shill.
Why do you have to reduce a discussion to chilling? What a sad attitude.
I guess you're not in a listening mood, but in case you are, let me state my opinion: I am in favor of all solutions that will help reduce the ecological crisis, which means reducing dependency of fossil fuels, raw materials extraction, and land usage among other things. I think both nuclear and renewables are good solutions for that, but they both have issues, so let's use what is most appropriate for every use case.
Could you not compare unrelated stuff? What you just did is called "whataboutism".
"Land use is the main contributor to biodiversity loss"
Is that not a quote from what is being talked about.
How much of land use that is contributing to biodiversity loss is solar panels and wind? How much is energy in total?
It's fuck all. So yea that is relevant.
Nuclear reactors have always been subsidized by the military. Solar and wind are so much cheaper than anything that came before.
Solar is not sustainable. Maybe one day but today's panels will all have to be replaced in a few decades. For now it's a way to bridge the needed to go fully nuclear.
By replaced, do you mean recycled
No. I mean, hopefully both, but solar panels can't be fully recycled into new solar panels. A bunch of rare materials need to be mined over and over.
You realize nuclear power plants have steady maintenance and replacements occurring at all times, right? That a machine being used in nuclear power doesn't make it immune from breaking down? That many of the machines involved have spinning and moving parts working in a high heat environment, whereas PV systems are largely static?
Replacement in a nuclear plant is happening way, way more often than on PV panels, where commodity panels are rated to provide near full power for 25-35 years, and then still provide over 80% power while they very slowly drop off. Solar is the only power source that will continue providing power without constant maintenance.
If "lack of replacement" is your main criteria, you dun fucked up backing nuclear. Solar fits that bill way, way better.
Of course a nuclear reactor needs maintenance and thus also produces infrastructure waste. A lot more than a solar cell. But it dwarfs when you divide by watt-hours. Solar cells produce dozens of times more waste per watt-hour, and stuff that's worse to handle too. Nuclear plants are mostly concrete and steel. Solar panels are glass and rare elements that we can't recycle properly yet.
Like, you didn't really think I was just comparing plants to cells did you? The point is, if the whole world goes solar, how many times over can we replace all of it?
NREL's Solar PV fact sheet on circularity says that conventional solar PV panels have recovery rates of 80-95% given existing recycling infrastructure.
We know how to recycle these things. The fact that we maybe don't do so in a widespread way is because it's still cheaper to throw shit in a landfill or incinerator.
95% doesn't mean you can turn 100 old panels into 95 new panels. The 5% is cobalt and stuff, that needs to be mined over and over. It's great that we have such rates but we're not really lacking in glass.
???
You realize the above is true for basically any building, right? That that's a crazy metric to judge any maintenance effort by? Total weight of the building and then everything in it?
Do datacenters not have replaceable parts because they are mainly concrete and steel? Sure, they may have 10,000 servers that all need to be fixed and replaced constantly but since a datacenter is mostly concrete and steel, it doesn't matter because it's not much by total mass of the datacenter? Same goes for airports, factories, on and on.
I guess if you plonk thousands of maintenance heavy devices into a large enough building then weigh the whole structure, the percentage of the structure that has to be serviced goes down, making overall (by weight) maintenance go down. Airplanes need to be fixed? They weigh basically nothing compared to airports, so "tada!" no they dont!
Skipping over your bizarre metric, solar cell recycling is hitting 95%. That is again, something that isn't relevant with modern panels for 30-50+ years, as they will still be producing 70-80% of their rated power at that time. That's easily enough power to just leave them in use.
Lol and the commenter above you is forgetting about the aluminum of the PV module's frame, as well as stainless steel used for the racking. Those things are super easy to recycle.
Ehh, concrete is very polluting, and nuclear plants need a lot of it. It's not gonna get recycled either. I thought this was obvious. Dunno how you thought that was a dunk.
But we can keep building them. It'll always be expensive, but we don't need much rare material.
I was hoping I'd see cobalt etc in your link, but still not then... For solar cells we need that 5% to be mined over and over. 50 years is nothing if you're talking about renewables. Might as well not care about sustainability at all if you're not talking another 5000 years.
Cobalt is more abundant in the earths crust than thorium or uranium by an order of magnitude.
And we need several orders of magnitude more of it per Wh. We'll run out of sand to make cement to build reactors before we run out of uranium.
Just because those panels will need to be replaced in decades time doesn't mean they won't have value then.
NREL estimates that PV 80-95% of modules' materials can be recovered through recycling, and there is constant academic work on refining the EoL process to better delaminate panels so they can be better sorted and their materials better reused.
I can't find the figure, but I believe the IPCC found in their 6th Assessment Report that the cost to deploy renewables + battery storage, and manage the grid more intelligently on the backend, absolutely demonstrate lower costs than it takes to build new nuclear. I want to say that that finding still out value on our existing nuclear fleet, so we definitely don't want to shut any existing plants down if we don't have to.
I don't think fission nuclear will get our energy systems off of fossil fuels. Fusion nuclear has the potential to do this, but by the time that technology reaches commercial operation, renewables alone will likely be in the multiples of TW of generation capacity.
Nuclear should be part of the future if modularity and MSRs/thorium reactors can breakthrough. Until then, solar/wind + storage baby
I hope, nuclear means nuclear fusion here...