Nuclear capacity is expected to rise by 14% by 2030 and surge by 76% to 686 GWe by 2040, the report said
This is only good news if it displaces thermal coal and gas generating stations.
When it comes to generating electricity, nuclear is hugely more expensive than renewables. Every 1000Wh of nuclear power could be 2000-3000 Wh solar or wind.
If you’ve been told “it’s not possible to have all power from renewable sources”, you have been a victim of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and industry – is feasible and economically viable.
This is all with current, modern day technology, not with some far-off dream or potential future tech such as nuclear fusion, thorium reactors or breeder reactors.
Compared to nuclear, renewables are:
- Cheaper
- Lower emissions
- Faster to provision
- Less environmentally damaging
- Not reliant on continuous consumption of fuel
- Decentralised
- Much, much safer
- Much easier to maintain
- More reliable
- Much more capable of being scaled down on demand to meet changes in energy demands
Nuclear power has promise as a future technology. But at present, while I’m all in favour of keeping the ones we have until the end of their useful life, building new nuclear power stations is a massive waste of money, resources, effort and political capital.
Nuclear energy should be funded only to conduct new research into potential future improvements and to construct experimental power stations. Any money that would be spent on building nuclear power plants should be spent on renewables instead.
Frequently asked questions:
- But it’s not always sunny or windy, how can we deal with that?
While a given spot in your country is going to have periods where it’s not sunny or rainy, with a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.
- Don’t renewables take up too much space?
The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.
- Isn’t Nuclear power cleaner than renewables?
No, it’s dirtier. You can look up total lifetime emissions for nuclear vs. renewables - this is the aggregated and equalised environmental harm caused per kWh for each energy source. It takes into account the energy used to extract raw materials, build the power plant, operate the plant, maintenance, the fuels needed to sustain it, the transport needed to service it, and so on. These numbers always show nuclear as more environmentally harmful than renewables.
- We need a baseline load, though, and that can only be nuclear or fossil fuels.
Not according to industry experts - the majority of studies show that a 100% renewable source of energy across all industries for all needs - electricity, heating, transport, and industry - is completely possible with current technology and is economically viable. If you disagree, don’t argue with me, take it up with the IEC. Here’s a Wikipedia article that you can use as a baseline for more information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy
Most renewables aren’t effective 100% of the time. Solar only works during the day, wind generation only works when there is wind available. Both of these aren’t viable in every location on the planet and both are highly variable. Geothermal and Hydropower are both extremely location dependent, and will not work in 99% of locations.
The issue with renewables is and has always been base load generation. Solar, wind, etc. are great when they are viable, but base load that is available and can be adjusted up or down as necessary at any point in time is something they cannot do. The energy storage requirements for highly variable renewables like that are not viable with current storage technologies.
Base load is where things like coal and natural gas work extremely well, with renewables reducing load when they’re available. Nuclear should be viewed as a safer and more environmentally friendly base load replacement, not something to replace renewable technologies like solar or wind.
Modern geothermal plants are much more versatile and can be used basically anywhere.
With a mixture of energy distribution (modern interconnectors can transmit 800kV or more over 800km or more with less than 3% loss) non-electrical storage such as pumped storage, and diversified renewable sources, this problem is completely mitigated - we can generate wind, solar or hydro power over 2,000km away from where it is consumed for cheaper than we could generate nuclear electricity 20km away.
Climate varies from year to year. Just in the recent years there are variation of 25% on the scale of the whole Europe. With climate change it’ll probably get worse. And load balancing on the scale of a continent has never been done without nuclear and fossile.
What’s your point? If the sun stops shining everywhere for a year we’re all fucked anyways. If the wind stops blowing it’s because the sun has died. And if water decides to suddenly start disobeying the laws of physics then I think we will have bigger problems than turning on the TV.
You’re looking completely ridiculous there. There are clouds in the sky and wind. These do affect solar and wind production. And these do vary from one year to another. The distribution of solar exposition or wind is not a constant, even on a continent scale.
This means you need to account for variations from one year to another. Which means you need incredibly large quantities of storage (probably not feasible), or incredibly oversized production capacity (not feasible either).
When antinuke people complain that nuclear lost capacity last year, that’s the same with solar and wind, but it’s random for the renewables when it’s technical planning that was poor for nuclear.
Pumped storage is as geologically limited as hydropower. Not to mention it has the same or worse ecology concerns with rapidly changing water levels. That’s not a silver bullet solution.
We need to drastically increase the amount of renewables energy in the world, mainly solar and wind since hydroelectricity is already close to the maximum installed capacity.
I think everyone can agree to that.
The next question is how much and what do we need around it to power a whole country with a minimum of CO2 emissions.
I know about 6 scenarios that has been done for France, if anyone knows about similar scenarios for other countries please share them.
All the scenarios include some degrees of flexibility in the consumption.
To be able to have a stable grid all the scenarios have to include battery storage and thermal production. Today thermal production in the world is mostly gas and coal that are terrible for climate but to have no emissions it will probably be biomass, biogas or hydrogen.
Including a bit of nuclear in the mix (13% nuclear/87% renewable) greatly help to stabilize the grid. This small amount of nuclear divides by 2 the amount of solar needed, divide by 2 the amount of battery storage and reduce by 30% the need for thermal power station compared to a scenario with 0% nuclear and 100% renewables.
There is other scenarios with more nuclear but it shows that nuclear can ease a bit the pressure on renewable energy.
In this case, to replace the last 13% (16GW) of nuclear in the mix we would need to install 90GW of solar + 9GW of thermal power + 13GW of battery.
It shows having a power grid fuelled with renewable energy will become exponentially difficult has it get close to 100%.
There is probably a good ratio between 50%-90% of renewables energy and nuclear energy can be a very good candidate for the rest.
Most studies suggest that a 100% renewable source of our energy needs is completely viable. That should be our goal. It’s much easier and cheaper to aim for that - what benefit would nuclear give? It’s just much more expensive for all the downsides.
given that you are so confident of this can you explain how a 100% intermittant grid deals with a two week dunkleflaute? Im keen to know what the solution is given that storage to cover that for the uk currently (without electrifling transport or heating) would cost in excess of a trillion dollars.
As I said in my comment, yes 100% renewable is possible but adding a bit of nuclear make it easier to achieve and cheaper.
Nope, it will make it harder and more expensive.
To be able to have a stable grid all the scenarios have to include battery storage and thermal production
Totally wrong - you need to source this claim if you’re going to make it. All of the studies I have found claim the opposite - wind power is the best for stabilising a grid both in energy demand and frequency response. With renewables and pumped storage there is no need for batteries or for fossil/nuclear power.
The source is at the bottom of my comment, you can refer to it. It’s only in french unfortunately but nothing an online translator can’t help with.
On the other hand you are welcome to provide your sources too.
I can’t read French well enough to really dig in to your source and the website doesn’t seem to work for Google translate and it’s too much text to copy/paste, sorry, so I can’t really confirm what you say except the fact that I looked on the site and I saw that they didn’t include pumped storage, which seems extremely foolish. I’m guessing that they were bribed by the nuclear power companies in some way.
If you go into the detailed explanation (and can read French) they do have some hydraulic pumping included in their “batteries” section.
In their 100% renewables scénario on a peak consumption (105gw) hour and peak energy production (sun at zenith) they would store the excess production like such:
- 7.2gw to water pumping
- 22gw to static batteries
- 2gw back to the grid (chatting electric vehicles I guess).
Also even in their most nuclear scenario (50% nuclear, 50% renewables) they still include 7.2gw of water pumping.
I’m curious of why you put so much value in water pumping? As a Quebecois I have a small notion of how disruptive (flooding of vast areas of land, massive amounts of concrete, dead rivers downstream of the dam ) water reservoirs for hydroelectricity can be and I have a hard time imagining a viable way of relying extensively on that technique.
Here are some sources. You can also run your own study yourself by just googling “average kwh price nuclear” and “average kwh price wind” and see how it looks. You can also google “average co2 eq emissions total lifetime nuclear” and likewise for wind/solar PV.
2022 Electricity ATB Technologies and Data Overview, annual technology baseline:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-the-climate/a-59853315
Mycle Schneider, author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report: “Nuclear power plants are about four times as expensive as wind or solar, and take five times as long to build. When you factor it all in, you’re looking at 15-to-20 years of lead time for a new nuclear plant.”
Differences in carbon emissions reduction between countries pursuing renewable electricity versus nuclear power, published in nature energy: "We find that larger-scale national nuclear attachments do not tend to associate with significantly lower carbon emissions while renewables do. "
The last paper is insane. France has one of the lowest co2 emission in the world because of nuclear. Meanwhile Germany and Spain have increased their emission despite insane investment in renewable.
As for average costs it’s a farce. Renewable prices are negative sometimes because you produce loads of energy when you don’t need it. If it wasn’t for nuclear and fossile to produce energy when you need, there wouldn’t even be a functioning power grid.
Coal, especially lignite being better for the environnement than nuclear is a very good joke.
I assume it’s a good example of German humor.
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doesn’t nuclear require less land than renewables?
Ofc. Looking at people who put solar panels on their roofs, it is enough for a household. Apartments use less power, but have much less roof per apartment. And industries use more power then households.
I think it’s feasible (including electric cars), especially since we got hydro and stuff.
Real Engineering on youtube did calculations and such, so i recommend people to look there.
PS Funny how wind and hydro are just indirect solar.
The United States has enough land paved over for parking spaces to have 8 spaces per car - 5% of the land. If just 10% of that space was used to generate solar electricity - a mere 0.5% - that would generate enough solar power to provide electricity to the entire country. By comparison, around 50% of the land is agricultural. The amount of land used by renewable sources is not a real problem, it’s an argument used by the very wealthy pro-nuclear lobby to justify the huge amounts of funding that they currently receive.
Fuck cars
Then where would we park?
In the other remaining 7 parking spaces per car?
now these renewable zealots are waging a war on cars!
I honestly can’t tell if this is sarcastic anymore, internet arguments are so stupid they defy parody at this point :P
:P
We need a multi pronged approach depending on the availability of resources and location. It’d be nice if we could stop digging and throwing all that carbon into the air eventually, sooner rather than later.
It’s far faster and more efficient to build and scale out renewables than nuclear. Nuclear is slower and more expensive.
A lot of lies of wrong stuff here. The environment for example is much more damaged by renewables, because you need truckloads of space to build the wind or solar farm. China demonstrate how hydro can be damaging too. And it usually ignores the need for energy storage. Both solar and batteries need high quantities of minerals, so that’s not better than anything else here. Nuclear is arguably a lot better because of the energy density of the mined material.
Ecologists these days seem like a cult that would rather see the world burn in coal and oil than to see even one nuclear power plant built. And this based on ignorance, fear and lies. It’s sad.
A lot of lies of wrong stuff here
You’re certainly doing your part. Example:
The environment for example is much more damaged by renewables, because you need truckloads of space to build the wind or solar farm
Utilizing available space for renewables is hardly damage, is it? The rest of your post isn’t much better.
Available space is free to build? That’s the least ecologist sentence I read in an ecology or energy discussion. Next you’ll tell me green fuel is renewable and green won’t you?
What the fuck are you babbling about?
The entirety of the US could be powered by solar power if they converted 10% of land which is just parking spaces to solar farming, and there would still be enough parking spaces left in the country to have seven for every car. The amount of land required for the benefits is completely inconsequential.
Meanwhile, for nuclear:
- more CO2 equivalent emissions per kWh than renewables
- very harmful extraction of uranium ore
- industrial processes to refine uranium ore are polluting
- huge quantities of concrete are consumed to build a nuclear plant, concrete is an extremely environmentally harmful material
- huge amounts of industrial traffic moving astronomical quantities of materials across the country for building and dismantling plants
- huge amounts of water consumed and irradiated by operating plants
- much more maintenance required
The space might be available in the US, but it’s not in Europe.
The co2 emission from nuclear is less than from renewables. That’s a hard fact.
Lithium extraction is as bad a uranium.
The quantities needed to build solar or wind are far larger than for nuclear. And need to rebuild them twice or three times more often.
You need to stop to make up fantasies about renewables.
This is only good news if it displaces thermal coal and gas generating stations.
Is there another plausible scenario? Wind and solar are getting so cheap, that displacing either with nuclear is like flushing money down the toilet.
Wind and Solar aren’t reliable, so you either need storage or a backup source to compensate when demand peaks above production from renewables.
Absolutely! The way I see it, grid energy storage is something we really need to improve dramatically.
Yeah, but there really aren’t that many good options for it. Pumped Hydro is by far the best but limited by geography.
That’s what I thought until I watched this video.
I assume you mean the “limited by geograpghy” bit? It’s a pretty good video overall, but the US and Australia aren’t the best examples here. You guys have tons of space and a rather low population density. But large parts of Northern Europe we have some insanley densly populated areas and no site for pumped storage nearby.
Yeah, that’s exactly it. Initially I thought it was pretty much impossible to find suitable locations any more, but apparently there are lots of sites left. Highly populated areas are obviously a lot more challenging. The point is that as opposed to having exactly zero locations, it seems that we do have some options here and there.
Update: here’s an interesting map for potential locations. If you’re in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Stockholm or other flat regions, you’re not going to see any pumped hydro any time soon. However mountains of Norway, Spain, France, Italy and Germany look a lot better in that regard.
Actually, Poland, Hungary, and England are probably the worst locations, but fortunately there are still many opportunities elsewhere in Europe.
Currently that backup/storage is mostly fossil fuels, so building nuclear would displace fossil fuels. As long as nuclear remains expensive, we will only build it because not emitting CO2 is socially valuable.
Nuclear would have to get a lot cheaper to eat wind/solar’s lunch. Maybe that could happen someday, but it’s not worth worrying about now.
the other scenario is coal stays online to meet a growing demand…
Unfortunately, there is. Let’s think about the situation in China or India.
They already have plenty of coal power, and the need for energy keeps on growing. If they replace coal with nuclear, their energy production can grow that way, but it’s goin to re quire lots of investments. However, in a situation like that there’s little incentive to do so when you can just keep your coal power running and build more nuclear to meet the energy needs of the country.
Maybe if China had access to more oil they could switch to natural gas like the West did…
Wind and solar are so cheap because they have had investment and research done for years. Nuclear hasn’t had that type of investment because people have reservations about it.
Give nuclear all the money “renewables” have been getting and you will see prices drop.
This sounds like hyperbole. Nuclear has been powering the world for decades. It may not have enjoyed sexy headlines, but it’s hard to believe billions of dollars has been invested in new plants without any research.
1960s nuclear has been powering the world for decades. Even most new plants are using reactor designs from over half a century ago.
New reactor designs exist and some have even been tested on the small scale, but nuclear power is an extremely conservative industry. That molten salt reactor built in China not that long ago that made all the news as a “new” reactor type? The US first tested that design in the 1960s, and the no further research was funded by anyone despite the fact that the prototype worked very well.
The current hope is that Small Modular Reactors catch on and drag the rest of the nuclear industry with them. They tend to use newer and potentially much safer designs.
That’s just not true. The Westinghouse AP1000 was given type approval in 2011. It’s what is referred to as a GEN3+ reactor. A lot of R&D was put into simplifying the design, reducing the number of pipe runs, valves, pumps etc compared to GEN2 reactors. It also used large sub assemblies that were factory built off-site then moved for final assembly.
In theory they should have been cheaper to build, but they weren’t. Large assemblies that don’t fit together properly need a lot of very expensive site time for rework. There were other issues on top of that, which just compounded the assembly problems. It’s how Vogtle ended up going from $12B to $30B+, and V.C Summer went from $9B to an estimated $23B when the project was cancelled while under construction.
The EPR units from Areva were similar GEN3+and received type approval in the early 2000s. They had similar cost overruns, for similar reasons.
I have strong reservations about SMRs. So far the cost/MW is about on par with traditional reactors while the amount of waste increases by 2 to 30x traditional reactors depending on technology used.
There are reasons why reactors moved from 300-600MW units to 1000MW+ in the first place. The increased output would cover what was thought to be marginal increase in costs. That turned out to be at least somewhat true.
They can call it whatever they want but PWR is an old design. They polished the design a bit, so what? It’s still an overblown pressure cooker.
Industrial scale reactor designs take a ton of time and money and experience to research. Research reactors are only a step in the middle of the process, and nobody’s been willing to take any new designs past that.
SMEs have potential not because they’re particularly efficient or cost effective, but because stand a chance of pushing the state of the art. They offer a way around the whole “I’m not paying $40bn for an unproven design” problem.
Recent research on nuclear has been litteraly sabotaged by ecologists and politics.
Yep, it’s more pro-nuclear bollocks.
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Meanwhile in Ukraine…
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/06/1197574725/russia-ukraine-war-nuclear-power-plants
This is only good news if it displaces thermal coal and gas generating stations.
If it doesn’t, I guess it’s fairly neutral news as far as climate is concerned.
hahahahahahahahaahahaha, pull the other one!
https://www.power-technology.com/news/nuke-plant-india-begins-operations/
India just finished this one, has 3 more under construction, and plans for 16 more.
Does not matter what the utterly corrupt Country is doing to shovel cash to their cronies. The story is pure and total fantasy. It shall never happen.
it’s literally happening in India tho
Where as it is not 2030 and nothing like a 28% increase has occurred, no it is not though.
