Nuclear power

[Robert.Boston]

This to me appears to be a completely false statement. Nothing is worse than renewables at handling power fluctuations. Without grid storage, renewables can't load follow at all, other than by eliminating excess supply. What happens when you need more supply? You can't turn the wind or the sun up at will. To supply a majority of power, renewables will be completely dependent on very large scale grid storage. Nuclear can load follow to a degree. If it can't follow fast enough, it could be managed with grid storage of a much smaller degree than would be required for renewables.

Wind turbines can be feathered to reduce output, so it's at least possible to reduce wind generation to prevent excess generation. So by sufficiently over-building the system with wind and being willing to throw away excess generation, you can meet most load conditions with wind alone (no storage). But if the wind isn't blowing, it doesn't matter whether you're 2x or 20x overbuilt....

 

[RichardC]

Good points. I should have written "No country is remotely close to that using solar and/or wind and without first solving the storage problem (not yet solved economically in places that don't have ready access to suitable sites for water pumping), I don't see how they ever will be." Unfortunately, very few places have Iceland's excellent hydro and geothermal resources. I agree with your comments about coal.

There are a rapidly expanding range of options for storage / demand management. Once there is real-time pricing of power on the grid there is likely to be a further expansion of the options. There many loads which can be programmed to reduce demand in response to higher prices including electric car charging, air conditioning, water heating, space heating, lighting, computing. Also, water can be heated or chilled to absorb and store energy for later use, for example see:

http://www.ice-energy.com/ice-bear-energy-storage-system
http://www.ice-energy.com/ice-bear-energy-storage-system
http://greentechadvocates.com/2012/10/25/ge-touts-the-iphone-connected-hybrid-water-heater/

Storage options include local battery storage, vehicle-to-grid, compressed air, flow batteries, and hydrogen. Demonstration projects around the world are proving the technology and driving down the costs. See:

http://www.panasonic.com/business/p..._Battery Storage - Storage Battery System.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_energy_storage_projects
http://www.victronenergy.com/upload...ce-with-the-Victron-Energy-Storage-Hub-EN.pdf
http://insideevs.com/sumitomo-insta...ge-system-using-16-old-nissan-leaf-batteries/
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1079955_nissan-leaf-to-home-power-station-will-it-make-it-to-u-s
http://www.hydrostor.ca/home/
http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/124...ership-for-underwater-energy-storage-in-aruba
http://www.forbes.com/sites/uciliaw...rage-californias-new-green-tech-battleground/
http://www.energyexcelerator.com/wp...0/HawaiiEnergyStorageProjects_July2013_v3.pdf

 

[omgwtfbyobbq]

Wind turbines can be feathered to reduce output, so it's at least possible to reduce wind generation to prevent excess generation. So by sufficiently over-building the system with wind and being willing to throw away excess generation, you can meet most load conditions with wind alone (no storage). But if the wind isn't blowing, it doesn't matter whether you're 2x or 20x overbuilt....

IIRC this isn't an issue with sufficient grid interconnects. Over a large enough area, enough wind is blowing that some percentage of that output can be treated as effective baseload, with the same availability as baseload coal.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf

 

[Robert.Boston]

By Ontario law, residential consumers cannot be charged real-time prices. Strange but true. We have a ways to go before that third of the load is really in the game. Frankly, though, it's the least important third: businesses are much more sensitive to power costs and foresighted enough to make investments to manage those costs. But put those same people at home, and the reasoning goes soft.

On the storage point: I heard from a very well-placed friend that Tesla (not Solarcity) is actively marketing grid-scale storage options to utilities.

 

[Skotty]

IIRC this isn't an issue with sufficient grid interconnects. Over a large enough area, enough wind is blowing that some percentage of that output can be treated as effective baseload, with the same availability as baseload coal.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf

This is a little more reasonable, but a lot of renewables advocates are also pushing local power generation. A huge interconnected grid that can balance it all out better is the opposite of that.

 

[nwdiver]

This is a little more reasonable, but a lot of renewables advocates are also pushing local power generation. A huge interconnected grid that can balance it all out better is the opposite of that.

???? How is locally produced power generation that is also interconnected to the national grid the opposite? VERY few "renewable advocates" that I speak with want to move away from a national grid. I know when I say I'm opposed to "centralized generation" I don't mean wind farms. IMO there will always be a place for large wind farms and a national grid since wind and solar compliment each other and 8MW wind turbines don't do well near cities.

 

[omgwtfbyobbq]

I don't think anything about locally generated power is in opposition to a large interconnected grid. Lots of distributed renewables are good, and that includes local rooftop solar/etc

 

[macpacheco]

While I am totally pro nuclear, I've recently made an interesting math:
1Km x 1Km land = 1GW worth of photons (in the summer for temperate land, year round in equatorial land, somewhere in between for tropical land).
With 30% efficient solar panels + inverter/transmission losses, such land should be able to produce 250MWe of grid scale power.
Scale up to 10Km x 10Km, that's 25GWe worth of power, that's 1/3 of Germany's peak demand or 1/4 of Brazil's peak demand.
We don't quite have 30% solar PV at cheap costs yet, but should have 25+% efficient panels by 2016 and 30% efficiency affordable panels should land by 2020-2025.
The real problem isn't the solar component, it's how to store energy for the night or how to produce after the sun is down.
Assuming US$ 200 million / GWh of Li-Ion utility scale storage, that's 20 billion USD for 100 GWh worth of storage.
It's really funny (no, not really), that most solar PV investments are going into temperate land, the worst place to do solar, instead of equatorial/tropical land, where either there is no winter, or they have very mild winters (in terms of insolation).
The more one thinks, the more a rational person comes to the conclusions that solar is being done in the most stupid possible way in the world today.
Germany should be adding nuclear, and paying north africa, central america, middle east to go solar ! Much better for the environment.
I know, I'm utterly ignoring politics, thinking strictly from technical / scientific standpoint.

 

[macpacheco]

Wind turbines can be feathered to reduce output, so it's at least possible to reduce wind generation to prevent excess generation. So by sufficiently over-building the system with wind and being willing to throw away excess generation, you can meet most load conditions with wind alone (no storage). But if the wind isn't blowing, it doesn't matter whether you're 2x or 20x overbuilt....

Wind is barely cost competitive with all of its current subsidies, specially the advantage of wind and solar having priority over everything else in the grid, so wind is too expensive to throw any of its VIP electricity away.
That's my main issue with Solar/Wind nuts, they fail to do the math / physics under which the real world operates, they are always dreaming.

 

[nwdiver]

Wind is barely cost competitive with all of its current subsidies, specially the advantage of wind and solar having priority over everything else in the grid, so wind is too expensive to throw any of its VIP electricity away.
That's my main issue with Solar/Wind nuts, they fail to do the math / physics under which the real world operates, they are always dreaming.

I don't have to do the math or speculate... I bought and installed a system... $18k upfront ($12.6k after FTC). It's a ~10kW system and has produced ~9000kWh since it went on-line March 4th. Should produce 400MWh over 20 years. Even if I replace an inverter in that time (unlikely) that's $21k/400MWh = $0.053/kWh. The panels should last ~60+ years. I don't clean my panels... the wind/rain work fine.

The cost of solar and batteries keeps falling while the cost of nuclear keeps rising... I'm employed by the nuclear industry (for now); I've given it up for dead. The FACTS speak for themselves.

Centralized Power Generation is living on borrowed time...
Barclays Downgrades Utilities On Solar Threat - Business Insider

 

[omgwtfbyobbq]

I agree with nmdriver, the writing's on the wall. We're pretty much at a point where someone who can move their electricity use to something like 75% daytime/25% evening could throw together an offgrid solar system with a gas/propane generator backup that would cost less (levelized) than grid power in most locations.

 

[macpacheco]

I don't have to do the math or speculate... I bought and installed a system... $18k upfront ($12.6k after FTC). It's a ~10kW system and has produced ~9000kWh since it went on-line March 4th. Should produce 400MWh over 20 years. Even if I replace an inverter in that time (unlikely) that's $21k/400MWh = $0.053/kWh. The panels should last ~60+ years. I don't clean my panels... the wind/rain work fine.

View attachment 51890

The cost of solar and batteries keeps falling while the cost of nuclear keeps rising... I'm employed by the nuclear industry (for now); I've given it up for dead. The FACTS speak for themselves.

Centralized Power Generation is living on borrowed time...
Barclays Downgrades Utilities On Solar Threat - Business Insider

Over the last few months I took the time to take an intro to nuclear technology online course.
It was very enlightening.
Coursera.org
Before this course I had a fairly neutral view from off the shelf nuclear technology like Westinghouse AP1000 / Areva EPR.
I came out of the course with a even better view, with a clear understanding that the biggest problems of nuclear isn't the hard costs of building and operating a nuclear power station, instead that the real problem is only the regulatory system, political oposition and lack of proper education about radiation among the public.
Nuclear is expensive because anti nuclear forces today have a much bigger say inside the NRC than the pro nuclear ones. The NRC is running a major hatchet job on nuclear power, from within the government.
Fukushima is safe to live again, lesser risk of cancer than living in downtown Tokyo, yet, Tokyo isn't being evacuated and Fukushima still is off limits.
The Chernobyl area is filled with animal wildlife and about a thousand humans that moved back despite all the military checkpoints.
All the nuclear safety standards that make nuclear so expensive is a result of lack of low to intermediate levels of radiation hazard research. We now have that data from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, but the NRC insists on ignoring it, taking it fully into account would result in drastic reduction is nuclear licensing/remediation/safety costs. Bottom line is if we too the current NRC regulatory framework seriously, we would need to evacuate Denver and Salt Lake City !
Hard upfront nuclear costs are lower than solar or wind (considering the added costs of peaking power plants to provide backup to solar and wind, while NEW nuclear runs 365x7 with very little maintenance stops, fully scheduled, newer nuclear plants operating for 5-15 years have achieved 97% uptime, with only fully scheduled maintenance downtimes).
Electricity generators with longtime running nuclear reactors see their nuclear assets as their cash cows, being actually cheaper than coal and natural gas to operate after 20 yrs running.
Of course, I would much rather have Molten Salt reactors running on Thorium and started up with the current spent nuclear fuel. But in the meantime, nuclear is the only electricity source that could power a fossil fuel free world today. Look no further than the essentially halted Germany renewables plan, that reduced emissions by 5% after increasing renewables share from 10% to 23%, reducing baseload nuclear and coal, but with a huge increase in fossil fuels burning for peaking powerplants.

 

[Timothy]

The secret is nuclear fusion. My car runs on a nuclear fusion power plant--it just happens to be 93 million miles away. Bwahahahahaha!!!

 

[nwdiver]

Over the last few months I took the time to take an intro to nuclear technology online course.
It was very enlightening.
Coursera.org
Before this course I had a fairly neutral view from off the shelf nuclear technology like Westinghouse AP1000 / Areva EPR.
I came out of the course with a even better view, with a clear understanding that the biggest problems of nuclear isn't the hard costs of building and operating a nuclear power station, instead that the real problem is only the regulatory system, political oposition and lack of proper education about radiation among the public.
Nuclear is expensive because anti nuclear forces today have a much bigger say inside the NRC than the pro nuclear ones. The NRC is running a major hatchet job on nuclear power, from within the government.
Fukushima is safe to live again, lesser risk of cancer than living in downtown Tokyo, yet, Tokyo isn't being evacuated and Fukushima still is off limits.
The Chernobyl area is filled with animal wildlife and about a thousand humans that moved back despite all the military checkpoints.
All the nuclear safety standards that make nuclear so expensive is a result of lack of low to intermediate levels of radiation hazard research. We now have that data from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, but the NRC insists on ignoring it, taking it fully into account would result in drastic reduction is nuclear licensing/remediation/safety costs. Bottom line is if we too the current NRC regulatory framework seriously, we would need to evacuate Denver and Salt Lake City !
Hard upfront nuclear costs are lower than solar or wind (considering the added costs of peaking power plants to provide backup to solar and wind, while NEW nuclear runs 365x7 with very little maintenance stops, fully scheduled, newer nuclear plants operating for 5-15 years have achieved 97% uptime, with only fully scheduled maintenance downtimes).
Electricity generators with longtime running nuclear reactors see their nuclear assets as their cash cows, being actually cheaper than coal and natural gas to operate after 20 yrs running.
Of course, I would much rather have Molten Salt reactors running on Thorium and started up with the current spent nuclear fuel. But in the meantime, nuclear is the only electricity source that could power a fossil fuel free world today. Look no further than the essentially halted Germany renewables plan, that reduced emissions by 5% after increasing renewables share from 10% to 23%, reducing baseload nuclear and coal, but with a huge increase in fossil fuels burning for peaking powerplants.

So... a little on my background... I'm a graduate of the US Naval Nuclear Power school. I spent 4 years operating a nuclear power plant on an aircraft carrier and 5 in the commercial nuclear world. I understand nuclear power. It is safe but it's also expensive; you can't have that level of safety without the expense. A new AP1000 plant costs >$5B and generates ~9000GWh annually. That cost is very unlikely to fall below $5B(best case) the Vogtle plant in Georgia has already exceeded $7B;

http://www.southerncompany.com/what...ion/nuclear-energy/pdfs/Vogtle-Fact-Sheet.pdf

The 20 year levelized capital cost of an AP1000 plant @$5B is $0.03/kWh with a 90% capacity factor. The cost to operate a nuclear plant is ~$0.01/kWh, transmission and distribution costs ~$0.02. So best case nuclear is ~$0.06/kWh. Vogtle is likely to cost ~0.09/kWh... and this is all assuming a 90% capacity factor. The O&M costs of a nuclear plant do not decline much by using it less. The equipment costs of solar PV is at a 20 year average of ~$0.04/kWh and will likely be <$0.02/kWh by 2020. It is inevitable that distributed generation and wind will begin to eat into the capacity factor of thermal plants in the next decade. This will utterly destroy the financial viability of ALL thermal generation.

http://web.ornl.gov/sci/nsed/outreach/presentation/2006/Belles_Seminar_R1.pdf

The pressure vessel of a nuclear plant is designed for a 60 year life... the steam generators, turbines and generators are not. The replacement steam generators for the San Onofre Nuclear power station in California cost $671M for units 2 & 3. A design flaw forced the plants to shutdown and eventually decommissioned.

http://www.power-technology.com/projects/songs-steam/

The only equipment that requires routine replacement in a PV system is the inverter... and even those should last ~20 years. The true life span of solar modules is unknown since few modules have been in the field for more than 10 years. This study shows that they are very likely to be long-lived...

http://www.us.schott.com/photovolta...ute-long-term-study-schott-solar-26-years.pdf

Utilities have very little incentive to make an investment in a new AP1000. Especially when their losing money on their current nuclear fleet.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...140309_1_quad-cities-plant-byron-plant-exelon


Their customers on the other hand are probably paying ~$0.12/kWh and would have tremendous incentive to purchase a PV system that would cost $0.04-0.10/kWh depending on if its a DIY or pro install.

 

[Jeff Miller]

So... a little on my background...

PV is not displacing nuclear - cheap gas is. For example, most of the 2.2Gw capacity lost from shutting down the San Onofre plant will come from gas:

Californias Plan to Replace San Onofre Nuclear: Green Success or Natural Gas Giveaway? : Greentech Media

Burning gas emits CO2. Lots of CO2. And methane is released in drilling. And there are other environmental costs of fracking. So when we replace nuclear with gas, we're going in exactly the wrong direction. Sheer madness.

More generally, I'd like to know how your analysis of the cost of nuclear is affected if we were to actually price carbon and methane emissions in proportion to their expected damages? Would the 'cheap' gas that is currently making nuclear uncompetitive continue to be cheaper if we were to include the real cost of carbon?

You are correct about the cost of new nuclear plants - they are expensive to build. But it's worth asking why that is and whether it is something that can be changed, rather than assuming, as many people do (not you, but many people) that it's some inviolable law of nature that nuclear has to be expensive.

There are a number of reasons why nuclear plants are currently expensive to build. One reason is a truly Kafka-esque regulatory structure. Let me give one topical example. The EPA is currently requesting comments on whether they should revise their standards on emissions from nuclear plants, including emissions of krypton-85, a completely harmless element which is produced in small quantities by nuclear plants. Because krypton-85 is totally harmless, decreasing the amount that can be released would do nothing for public health, but would increase the cost of operating nuclear plants, including new Gen-IV designs. An good analysis if here:

http://thebreakthrough.org/index.ph...posed-epa-rules-are-kryptonite-to-new-nuclear

and also here for more details:

Energy From Thorium Discussion Forum View topic - Should the U.S. EPA change its regulations Kr-85?

(My wife worked as an enforcement attorney for the EPA for 13 years before leaving after the birth of our second child, so I am not reflexively anti-EPA or anti-regulations; but regulations need to be sensible and they need to consider the 'big picture', as in 'does it make sense to regulate x to death when the alternative is y which is much worse?' This is the kind of question the EPA and NRC don't seem to grapple with sufficiently.)

A second important reason why nuclear is expensive has to do with the shortcomings of the current default design - pressurized and boiling water reactors - that date from the 1950s. This basic design was first chosen because it works well in submarines as you of course know. But it is far from optimal for commercial power plants. The basic issue is that these plants operate under very high pressures. Because of this, you need these massive steel pressure vessels and massive concrete containment structures to contain steam and hydrogen explosions in case cooling is lost. This adds a lot to the cost. A much better way to go design plants that entirely avoid the need for operating under pressure altogether. Many Gen-IV designs do this.

Things that do not add to the cost include nuclear waste. Nuclear waste needs to be dealt with, but on a technical level this is not a hard problem. Yucca Mt would work for storage for example. And many of the new nuclear designs actually burn waste for fuel. The waste problem is entirely political and has at its base an irrational and disproportionally large fear of the dangers posed by radioactivity relative to the dangers posed by other types of power generation (like climate change).

The Breakthrough Institute has an excellent 71 page overview on how we can drastically reduce the cost of nuclear:

http://thebreakthrough.org/images/pdfs/Breakthrough_Institute_How_to_Make_Nuclear_Cheap.pdf

In the short term, they recommend: a) inherent, passive safety features (to eliminate all the costly multiply redundant active safety features now required), b) using off the shelf parts, c) modular design and d) favoring designs with higher thermal efficiency. At the same time, they call for three policy reforms: 1) expand public support for nuclear innovation, 2) identify and prioritize key technological challenges that have application across a variety of new designs and 3) licensing reform. They also stress the importance of encouraging competition so that a many designs and companies can compete, unlike the current situation where we are effectively locked in to an old and sub-optimal technology (LWR and its variants). If this was all done, the cost of nuclear would plummet.

Regarding your prediction of the demise of ALL thermal plants on the decadal time scale - that is not going to happen (I would be happy if it did, but it won't). It is instructive to note that the pro-renewable, anti-nuclear Germans are building brand new coal plants right now. If they thought they would be obsolete in a few years or even decades, they would not be doing this.

It seems very clear to me that if our goal is to decarbonize rapidly, we need to implement a large scale Manhattan style nuclear program, in addition to continuing to push renewables and conservation as far as we can. Simply hoping that solar and wind (without cheap storage, which does not exist) are going to be the dominant total energy sources by 2050 is just that - a hope, which I fear is extremely likely to be unfulfilled, to the detriment of our descendants, not to mention the many wonderful species that we share the planet with.

 

[macpacheco]

So... a little on my background... I'm a graduate of the US Naval Nuclear Power school. I spent 4 years operating a nuclear power plant on an aircraft carrier and 5 in the commercial nuclear world. I understand nuclear power. It is safe but it's also expensive; you can't have that level of safety without the expense. A new AP1000 plant costs >$5B and generates ~9000GWh annually. That cost is very unlikely to fall below $5B(best case) the Vogtle plant in Georgia has already exceeded $7B;

http://www.southerncompany.com/what...ion/nuclear-energy/pdfs/Vogtle-Fact-Sheet.pdf

The 20 year levelized capital cost of an AP1000 plant @$5B is $0.03/kWh with a 90% capacity factor. The cost to operate a nuclear plant is ~$0.01/kWh, transmission and distribution costs ~$0.02. So best case nuclear is ~$0.06/kWh. Vogtle is likely to cost ~0.09/kWh... and this is all assuming a 90% capacity factor. The O&M costs of a nuclear plant do not decline much by using it less. The equipment costs of solar PV is at a 20 year average of ~$0.04/kWh and will likely be <$0.02/kWh by 2020. It is inevitable that distributed generation and wind will begin to eat into the capacity factor of thermal plants in the next decade. This will utterly destroy the financial viability of ALL thermal generation.

http://web.ornl.gov/sci/nsed/outreach/presentation/2006/Belles_Seminar_R1.pdf

The pressure vessel of a nuclear plant is designed for a 60 year life... the steam generators, turbines and generators are not. The replacement steam generators for the San Onofre Nuclear power station in California cost $671M for units 2 & 3. A design flaw forced the plants to shutdown and eventually decommissioned.

http://www.power-technology.com/projects/songs-steam/

The only equipment that requires routine replacement in a PV system is the inverter... and even those should last ~20 years. The true life span of solar modules is unknown since few modules have been in the field for more than 10 years. This study shows that they are very likely to be long-lived...

http://www.us.schott.com/photovolta...ute-long-term-study-schott-solar-26-years.pdf

Utilities have very little incentive to make an investment in a new AP1000. Especially when their losing money on their current nuclear fleet.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...140309_1_quad-cities-plant-byron-plant-exelon


Their customers on the other hand are probably paying ~$0.12/kWh and would have tremendous incentive to purchase a PV system that would cost $0.04-0.10/kWh depending on if its a DIY or pro install.

We need to get off all fossil fuels, including natural gas. Solar+Wind can't power the grid alone.
Germany has a one trillion euro renewables plan that so far managed to increase its renewables output from 10% to 23% leading to a disappointing reduction in greenhouse emissions of just 5%.
China is building a boatload of AP1000's. Do you think they would be doing it if the economics were that bad ?
There is no solution to climate change without nuclear, none. Everybody saying otherwise is either lying to himself or is a professional propagandist.
You are picking off the worst case nuclear cases, and showing those as the norm. Most nuclear powerplants never suffer from a design flaw. A few have been licensed to operate to 60 yrs and have already passed 40yrs of operation.

Nuclear as is done by the NAVY is expensive. Show me a single thing they NAVY does that is cost effective ! The NAVY will never be the example of how to do something in a cost competitive way.

20 year levelized capital cost of an AP1000 is 0.03kWh, so after 20 years the plant is paid off, and the total average cost drops like a rock !
The reality is the problem is the regulatory/political/social missinformation about nuclear is the real problem. The real money spent on actually building and operating a nuclear powerplant isn't that expensive.

 

[wcalvin]

The Chernobyl area is filled with animal wildlife and about a thousand humans that moved back despite all the military checkpoints.
All the nuclear safety standards that make nuclear so expensive is a result of lack of low to intermediate levels of radiation hazard research. We now have that data from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, but the NRC insists on ignoring it, taking it fully into account would result in drastic reduction is nuclear licensing/remediation/safety costs. Bottom line is if we too the current NRC regulatory framework seriously, we would need to evacuate Denver and Salt Lake City !
Hard upfront nuclear costs are lower than solar or wind (considering the added costs of peaking power plants to provide backup to solar and wind, while NEW nuclear runs 365x7 with very little maintenance stops, fully scheduled, newer nuclear plants operating for 5-15 years have achieved 97% uptime, with only fully scheduled maintenance downtimes).
Electricity generators with longtime running nuclear reactors see their nuclear assets as their cash cows, being actually cheaper than coal and natural gas to operate after 20 yrs running.
Of course, I would much rather have Molten Salt reactors running on Thorium and started up with the current spent nuclear fuel. But in the meantime, nuclear is the only electricity source that could power a fossil fuel free world today. Look no further than the essentially halted Germany renewables plan, that reduced emissions by 5% after increasing renewables share from 10% to 23%, reducing baseload nuclear and coal, but with a huge increase in fossil fuels burning for peaking powerplants.

Agree. But nuclear regulation is burdened by nearly all nuclear power plants being unique (except for a few sites with multiple reactors built at the same time). Moving a resident inspector from one site to another requires training on the stuff that is different at the new place--not just its history, but original unique design. The off-the-shelf standardized designs are such a small percentage.

One really has to dig into this technology before you realize that most popular beliefs about it are not justified. Fifty deaths in fifty years (nearly all at Chernobyl) is a better safety record than anything else, Dam collapses cause far more deaths. Then there is coal, with 5,000 miner deaths each year in China alone, with the Ukraine in second place. That's a huge price for ignorance.

 

[nwdiver]

The two main reasons I'm pessimistic about the future of nuclear power is the falling cost of solar PV and where the addition of new generation is economically beneficial. More and more new generation is going to be added on the customer side of the meter. This is going to decrease any incentive to add new generation. A utility may build a nuclear plant to generate MORE power... it's much less likely they will build a nuclear plant REPLACE existing generation. Solar PV is already at a price point where bundling a professionally installed $35k PV system into a mortgage will lower the electric bill more than it raises the mortgage making a PV system "free".

We need to get off all fossil fuels, including natural gas. Solar+Wind can't power the grid alone.
Germany has a one trillion euro renewables plan that so far managed to increase its renewables output from 10% to 23% leading to a disappointing reduction in greenhouse emissions of just 5%.
China is building a boatload of AP1000's. Do you think they would be doing it if the economics were that bad ?

True, Solar + Wind cannot power the grid but Solar + Wind + Storage can and we won't need storage until Solar + Wind exceed ~40% of generation. Even the small amount of wind combined with cheap gas we have now is beginning to render existing nuclear plants "cost prohibitive". China is planning to build 41GWe of new nuclear generation by 2020 but planned plants have a bad habit of getting canceled. Meanwhile last year China installed 12GW of solar and are projected to install over 14GW this year. Even if the rate of installation doesn't increase (unlikely) that's still ~84GW of new solar PV vs 41GW of nuclear. Which, yes, 41GW of nuclear will produce ~2x as much energy since it has a 90% cap factor vs ~20%. It is possible we'll see an expansion of new nuclear generation in growing economies like India and China but very unlikely in developed economies with stagnant electric demand like the US, Europe and Japan.

Burning gas emits CO2. Lots of CO2. And methane is released in drilling. And there are other environmental costs of fracking. So we when we replace nuclear with gas, we're going in exactly the wrong direction. Sheer madness.

I do think shutting down existing nuclear plants is even more foolish than building new ones... Natural Gas and Wind are doing most of the damage to nuclear power but Solar is quickly closing the gap.

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com...-u-s-electricity-generation-coming-from-solar
sorry, couldn't find FERC stats for 2013... if someone has it please post...

Nuclear as is done by the NAVY is expensive. Show me a single thing they NAVY does that is cost effective ! The NAVY will never be the example of how to do something in a cost competitive way.

I've spent the last 5 years working in the commercial nuclear world... the thing you need to understand about nuclear power, that REALLY frustrated me, is that there really isn't a "nuclear industry" like there's a "solar industry", there's a "utility industry". This makes for some unfortunate conflicts of interests. Nuclear Power plants aren't sold to a Wal-mart, Kohls or homeowners, they're sold to utilities; EVERY utility, even PRO-nuclear ones like Excelon, also have a fossil fuel fleet. Nuclear lobbies like NEI are hamstrung to pursue pro-nuclear policies like Cap and Trade. The people that can buy nuclear power plants have little to no interest in seeing a phase-out of fossil fuels... unlike the customers of solar PV.

It seems very clear to me that if our goal is to decarbonize rapidly, we need to implement a large scale Manhattan style nuclear program,

Funded by what? Ask yourself what the easier sell is;

Utility;
Replacing an existing coal plant this is paid for and costs ~$0.03/kWh to operate with a new AP1000 that will cost $0.04/kWh for the first 20 years.
http://www.iea.org/textbase/npsum/eleccostsum.pdf

OR

Homeowner / Business
Finance a Solar PV system that saves them $150/mo and costs $150/mo in financing then becomes FREE when paid off.

If I was king of the world and could replace every fossil fuel plant with nuclear I would... other than that I don't see any economically viable path forward... they're having a hard time enough time keeping the current fleet online let alone building new ones...

 

[Jeff Miller]

I've spent the last 5 years working in the commercial nuclear world... the thing you need to understand about nuclear power, that REALLY frustrated me, is that there really isn't a "nuclear industry" like there's a "solar industry", there's a "utility industry". This makes for some unfortunate conflicts of interests. Nuclear Power plants aren't sold to a Wal-mart, Kohls or homeowners, they're sold to utilities; EVERY utility, even PRO-nuclear ones like Excelon, also have a fossil fuel fleet. Nuclear lobbies like NEI are hamstrung to pursue pro-nuclear policies like Cap and Trade. The people that can buy nuclear power plants have little to no interest in seeing a phase-out of fossil fuels... unlike the customers of solar PV.

This is indeed a big part of the problem. The nuclear industry or whatever you want to call it, is not particularly interested in moving beyond the old LWR designs toward Gen IV reactors. They are like GM in some ways - large, inefficient, unresponsive, and arguably in some ways corrupt - rather than like Tesla - small and innovative. There are a number of small start up Tesla like companies that have good workable designs for Gen IV reactors, designs that are a vast improvement on the current technology. We need to support these companies and let them compete, rather than effectively killing them by requiring a 200+ million dollar + 10 year regulatory review period for their projects, which effectively makes them not viable. China much to its credit is funding and building a number of experimental reactors based on Gen IV ideas. I suspect they will leave us far behind, which is unfortunate as our national labs invented most of the technology.

 

[nwdiver]

China has the dual advantages of a mostly state controlled economy AND growing electric demand. Things that for better or worse Europe, the US and Japan lack.