One of the things I find amazing about France is that out of all the energy they produce about 17% if from recycled nuclear[0]. Not 17% of the total nuclear power is from recycled, 17% of TOTAL power is from recycled nuclear. That's pretty neat!
And with regards to greenhouse gasses, hard to argue with this [1].
That being said, I don't mind the the reduction to 50% by 2035. Renewables are a good thing. I think there's this argument happening that is renewables vs nuclear which isn't healthy. Nuclear's competitor is coal and natural gas which serve as base loads (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...). If slack can be picked up by renewables and that lessens the requirement for nuclear, that's a good thing. As long as this reduction doesn't involve building coal or natural gas plants in place of nuclear, I'm all in support of it (i.e. nuclear is being replaced purely by renewables). Though I would be happier if the plan was to explicitly discontinue their coal and gas plants first.
Not sure why you were downvoted, but this is correct. Outages are super expensive for a nuclear power plant, and plants take days to start and stop. Not only that, but capital costs are so large, you need to run it as much as possible to have any hope of just keeping up with interest payments.
People think waste is the biggest problem with nuclear, but I think it is huge capital costs and lack of flexibility are even larger problems (not to mention insurance for accidents, but only the government can provide that). Coupling nuclear with some kind of large scale battery would work to even out load requirements, but the only thing that might work is pumped storage, which would require a huge reservoir at a decent elevation, not to mention being pretty inefficient.
Nuclear is mostly so expensive because of the huge capital costs, and lots of (political..) delays when building a new reactor.
Operating costs aren't so bad.
Capital costs for building nuclear reactors have gone up over time. That's partially to pay for necessary improvements to safety. But mostly down to double standards that require much higher standards in nuclear than other sources of power.
For example, coal plants release orders of magnitude more radiation than nuclear plants.
> The paper itself states that this result is only valid not considering nuclear accidents and nuclear waste, nor it considers non-radiological effects
Well yeah, nuclear plants don't release much radiation when there are no accidents and the waste is safely contained. But very often the waste isn't contained properly, and sometimes there are accidents. These events release a lot more radiation than coal plants.
> These events release a lot more radiation than coal plants.
Unless you have data that supports this statement, I'd state the opposite. It's easy to think nuclear accidents release a lot of radiation, but the actual accumulated dose from nuclear power (including accidents) for the average individual over time is very low. Coal, on the other hand, continuously spews out radioactive ash in large quantities.
Granted, other sources of radiation (radon, cosmic rays, medical x-rays, etc.) are a lot larger, but if comparing the two I'd guess coal is the larger culprit even when including nuclear accidents.
> the actual accumulated dose from nuclear power (including accidents) for the average individual over time is very low.
This is only because nobody's living in nuclear disaster zones. If people were carrying on their daily lives in the Chernobyl or Fukushima then their accumulated dose would be much much higher.
As you say, the levels from coal are small enough that other naturally occurring sources are more significant, and thus it has little practical effect on people's lives. On the other hand, nuclear accidents take large areas of land out of use for time scales long enough that they effect several generations.
Yes. Though that only shows that they can afford it, not necessarily that it's more economic than other forms of energy. Power production is highly regulated after all.
(It might very well be economically the best for them. But making that judgement requires more context.)
The first is that it gets you out of needing ordinary batteries, because instead of converting heat to electricity to batteries and back, you can take the heat generated by the reactor during the day, store it in an insulated vat of molten salt and then use that to drive turbines at night. This should be much cheaper than ordinary batteries because expanding storage capacity only requires having more salt in more vats, and salt is much less expensive than lithium batteries.
The second is that if you have a nuclear reactor for generating at night when solar doesn't, the incremental cost of also operating it during the day is lower than the solar generating cost. It can't recover its full fixed costs at the price of daytime solar, but as long as it can recover its incremental cost you still operate the reactor 24/7.
The problem with that approach is you need to scale the surprisingly expensive non-nuclear side of a nuclear plant for the peak load, not the average load. It's not just the salt, it's the turbines and generators and cooling towers. It also increases the number of heat exchangers, and also means you are not building a PWR, but rather a higher temperature reactor. These higher temperature reactors are either unproven (molten salt) or have disappointing track records (helium gas cooled).
Moltex claims that interposing a salt store would allow these components to be made to non-nuclear standards, but as far as I know no regulator has agreed with that.
I feel like you're just arguing in favor of building them.
"Unproven" is a synonym for we haven't done it yet, so the only way to prove it is to build them, so building them is the solution to that rather than a problem that should prevent building them.
And if the only problem is regulatory but there isn't actually any reason not to allow it, this too has an obvious solution.
The justification for treating the cooling system as part of the reactor presumably comes from older designs where the active cooling is necessary for safe operation. For newer passively-safe designs, what happens to the heat once it's removed from the reactor wouldn't matter any more than what happens to the electricity once it's removed from the reactor.
Unproven means exactly that. It means customers will not plop down billions to buy them. They will wait until it's demonstrated that the reactors will almost certainly work for their projected lifespans, that all the new parts aren't going to fail early, from all the unknown unknowns that new technology is subject to.
And all that means that new reactor technologies are not going to be really available for decades, and will be competing not with renewables and storage now, but the renewables and storage that will be available for purchase decades hence.
True except nuclear is basically a renewable itself given that we have enough fuel in reserve for 70k years or so. If we could get the capital and operating (including waste storage) costs down, it would basically be free energy. Barring achieving that, it is a problem that we should keep working on, it would be a pity to see nuclear plant development completely stopped (well, unless someone figures out profitable fusion).
For a long-term nuclear strategy you need breeder reactors which extract nearly 100 times more energy from the same fuel (and at the same time help a lot with the nuclear waste problem), or a way of getting Uranium out of sea water.
The 200 years number is for the most inefficient (and producing most radioactive waste) types of reactors, but those reactors are also the only ones USA wants you to have, so...
Most fast/breeder reactors get a knee-jerk reaction from so-called "nuclear haves". I think only France (a nuclear state) and Japan got close to so-called "plutonium economy" when it comes to reprocessing spent fuel, and even they don't use fast reactors on mass scale.
Most high fuel efficiency designs are fast reactors, or they employ extra radiation source to "burn down" the fissile material.
Because the price per kWh for renewable sources is artificially low. To give you some examples: Renewables still have various subsidies (e.g. in construction) while non-renewables are taxed, wind power plants in particular have shorter life spans that predicted, and the wings cannot be recycled but the landfill costs are generally not included.
Tax subsidies for renewables, at least in the US, are small compared to the levelized cost difference with nuclear.
If you look at Lazard's levelized cost of energy report, where wind is far cheaper than nuclear, they assume a 20 year lifespan for wind turbines. This is not unreasonable.
I countered this in another reply to you, but the levelized cost of energy is not a good way of comparing intermittent and baseload power sources since it completely ignores the costs associated with intermittency. Nuclear in particular is penalized heavily here. Since wind and solar are very intermittent, they look very cheap when you look at LCOE, but are very expensive in reality.
Of course LCoE is a simplification, but it cannot be ignored if the differences are large enough, as nuclear advocates wish to do. More detailed analysis has to be specific to particular situations. However, as I have also pointed out elsewhere, when optimizations are performed of the best way to produce output for "real" grids with real weather data, using realistic cost projections for 2030, new nuclear is left at 0%. The LCoE advantages of renewables are so great that the cost of dealing with the intermittency, even to 100% renewables, is less than the cost of using nuclear instead.
Ability to load follow depends on the type of the reactor.
We have a vicious cycle involved here, where old (if made safer) designs that can't load-follow are the only option, due to lack of funding for newer tech (like, late 1970s tech). At the same time the limits we put on nuclear mean that not only regulation-related costs are huge, reactors are made pretty much on one-off or very limited series basis, meaning we don't benefit from any kind of benefits of serial production, including better QA.
There are load-following small, modular reactors (adapted from nuclear submarines) that will even self-seal in case of rupture and that promise the option of just transporting them on trailer car. They languish in design bureau due to issues in getting funding to start even a demo plant in present political climate. China is helping move the tech a bit forward, but that's not enough.
> (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...).
While nuclear certainty can adopt to grid demand quite well, if you have a good reactor.
However it leads to bad utilization of your plant.
For that reason, many of the next generation nuclear companies are designing their system to produce hot solar salt, like a Concentrated Solar Power Plant would.
Moltex Energy for example, hopes to deploy a 1GW reactor that heats up solar salt (ie heat battery), and then us that to drive 3 CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbines) that are mass produced for coal and gas plants to produce 3GW of electricity when prices are high. This is a major improvement over traditional PWR have much less heat and have to use insanely expensive bespoke steam turbines (that are also insanely huge).
This is a good idea not just because it you can sell when prices are high and sell a lot, but also the nuclear island would only make a much smaller part of your total project cost, thus reducing the overall cost risk.
Its by far my favorite design of all advanced reactors designs out there.
Their solution for dealing with the 'pumping' problem is brilliant and their idea to make the liquid salt reducing is an incredibly neat way to avoid corrosion issues.
Moltex looks really interesting. Although does it have a significant financial advantage over using renewable electricity to heat the salt? Because naively a grid connected molten salt battery would be more useful than one that is coupled to a nuclear reactor.
> I think there's this argument happening that is renewables vs nuclear which isn't healthy. Nuclear's competitor is coal and natural gas which serve as base loads
Well in France the goal of reducing the nuclear share is to increase the intermittent share (Solar and Wind), so it's definitely a Nuclear vs Intermittent
Intermittent sources need a stable source to produce electricity when they can't and they also need changes in a network that is not built for withstanding a production this variable. The end result is that intermittent ends up being more expensive and, because it needs gas, to supplement it, emits more CO2 per kWh. France is the last country where intermittent sources should be propped up (if propped up at all)
> Though I would be happier if the plan was to explicitly discontinue their coal and gas plants first.
Coal is pretty much nonexistent in France, however gas can never go away because even though nuclear plants have amazing flexibility, it's still not as flexible as gas, which is used for very high very sudden demands. Unfortunately there aren't many ways to do this particular job (hydro still isn't as flexible)
There's no good ecological, economical or safety-related reason to reduce nuclear to 50%, especially if it is intended to be replaced by Solar and Wind
There's no good ecological, economical or safety-related reason to reduce nuclear to 50%, especially if it is intended to be replaced by Solar and Wind
There is a very simple and fundamental reason to "reduce nuclear": France has a fleet (roughly 60) of aging nuclear power plants. Many of them already reached their planned life time and are kept working by extending their life time. But nuclear reactors definitely age, so this extension can keep them operating only so long before it becomes a real safety hazard. But France isn't building enough new reactors to keep the numbers up. Currently they have one or two in construction, with construction times over 10 years, the numbers game is obvious. They don't "want" to reduce the nuclear production, they have to.
At the same time, France has ideal conditions for renewables. A very sunny south, lots of wind on the west and north coasts. Add to that a big supply of water power, this should cover most storage needs. The European electrical grid already plays a large role in the energy balance - France is usually selling surplus nuclear energy across Europe - and could do so even more with renewables.
> Many of them already reached their planned life time
That's a misunderstanding of how nuclear plants are built. They don't have a "planned life time"; they have a "safe window" of 10 years, and it is reexamined every 10 years. The age of a reactor doesn't have an incidence on whether it should be stopped or not, only this decennial visit can say if it is safe to continue or not, and if it isn't, what needs to be done to make it safe again. The organ in charge of that (ASN, Agence de Sûreté Nationale) is an independent entity and has the know-how to do their work diligently. If they say it's safe, it's safe.
> At the same time, France has ideal conditions for renewables. A very sunny south, lots of wind on the west and north coasts. Add to that a big supply of water power, this should cover most storage needs
For every kW of installed intermittent energy you need a kW of gas to still have electricity when the intermittent doesn't run. Propping up intermittent is propping up gas and that's the sadness of it.
Also, pretty much all developed countries in the world are at capacity in terms of hydro. We can't build more dams at large scales, unless there's a magic way of creating mountains.
The rate of nuclear reactor production being low isn't a force we of nature, its a choice. They choose to produce reactors slowly, and hence they choose to transition away from nuclear and to renewable and imported coal in whatever ratios.
But the choice how many new reactors are getting built happens for a reason: in France it is clearly the price, not political resistance. If a nation like France, which runs to 75% on nuclear, doesn't build new reactors, who else would be doing it?
And of course, their currently sole attempt to build a new reactor confirms this: late and way over budget. The new reactor in Flammaville already costs 12 billion, but it isn't operating yet. And that is only the building costs. Do the math what this means for the renewal of the whole fleet of French reactors.
The administration of this new reactor's construction was a farce from the beginning: they expected to be able to build this reactor in half the time and half the price it took when France was building 10 reactors in parallel, ie when it still had experience. There is no doubt that the estimation was not just optimistic, but unrealistic (not my word, the word of the rapport on the overblown budget of this reactor)
That said, it's still going to be a good amount. The danger that too many people do is that they don't understand the amount of power a nuclear plant produces, especially when they compare it to wind turbines or photovoltaic panels.
The construction of the entire French fleet of reactors was done for 100 billion current euros, and you can clearly see the effects in terms of CO2 (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/FRA/france/carbon-co2-..., starting in 1980). If you consider the changes in safety thresholds, rebuilding it anew is in the order of 300 billion euros. 300 billion euros is the amount Germany spent between 1996 and 2014 to build renewable capacity, and yet their emissions of CO2 barely dropped (https://www.statista.com/statistics/449701/co2-emissions-ger...).
A wind turbine or a solar panel is cute if you're talking about powering your own home (even though you'll need more than one) but if we're talking about an entire country with its industry, it's far from being a viable solution. It's always been a problem of scale.
It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy though. As we build fewer reactors we lose economies of scales, we lose sub-contractors, we lose the knowledge to build these reactors efficiently and without incurring huge financial penalties due to delays and sub-standard deliveries by contractors. This in turn is used to justify building fewer reactors which creates this feedback loop.
You can always expect the first type of a new reactor (like this EPR design we've been working on) is going to face challenges, missed deadlines and cost inflation. If in the long run you plan to build a hundred of those it doesn't matter as much as if you only have 4-ish reactors in the pipeline.
You will never get economies of scale with nuclear. There is just not enough of them being build and wouldn't be even if we'd go full nuclear. You need to build to local conditions etc..
Also for those of you who say it's a problem of too much regulation. That's a hilarious proposition: yes sure let's remove regulatory control over technology which could yield large areas of densely inhabited aras no go zones for 100s of years (even if it's 10s it would be unacceptable). It's not like it has been shown over and over again that if you remove regulatory control companies will start taking shortcuts to maximize profits
There might not be huge economies of scale but there seems to be a baseline under which we basically lose our capacity to build more power plants. At this point we have additional delays and costs (and loss of trust) because of manufacturing errors. That seems to be a real problem for Areva nowadays.
The prospects are poor. Cost improvement comes from iteration and learning, and demand for new reactors is low. Even when they are built, the time span is so long that learning is balanced by forgetting.
No, intermittent sources need an affordably dispatchable source to produce when they can't. A steady, fixed cost source like nuclear, that must be producing most of the time to minimize the cost of its output, is unsuitable for acting as a backup to intermittent sources.
That's assuming you're using the steady source to cover for the intermittent source when it isn't generating. If you're using the steady source to replace the intermittent source entirely (as France had been doing) then it is producing most of the time and you don't have that problem.
This is probably the largest impediment to a 100% renewable grid. You might be able to get over the solar day-night thing with batteries if you had to because you can justify a lot of batteries if they're getting used every night, but the thing where sometimes it's cloudy for a straight month is a serious issue.
Right, it's an either-or situation. And now, with renewables crashed in cost and continuing to fall, it look's like renewables are winning.
You bring up batteries, but they would not be used for long term load leveling. The optimal solution is some combination of overcapacity w. curtailment, batteries for short term leveling, and hydrogen for long term leveling. Simple cycle turbine power plants can have a construction cost maybe ~5% of the cost/kW of a nuclear power plant (CC, around 10%), so building them and letting them sit idle most of the time is not a big deal.
Not exactly, they're still complementary, just not in that specific way.
Suppose you have 100% solar generation with enough batteries to survive the night, and then it's cloudy for a month and they generate half as much power. You can suppress demand some by raising prices, but suppressing it by 50% is unreasonable. Suppose you can suppress demand by 20%. Well then you still need enough long-term storage to cover 30% of your total demand for a month, which is really expensive for something you only use once every two years.
Now suppose you have 50% nuclear and 50% solar. Immediately this gets you out of needing the day/night batteries because nuclear generates at night. Then it's cloudy for a month and you lose half the solar generating capacity, but now you're only down 25% instead of 50%. Suppress demand by 20% through pricing and you only need enough long-term storage to cover 5% of the load.
This also makes the leveling a lot less precarious. If two weeks into the cloudy month it turns out you've already burned up all your long-term storage fuel and it's still cloudy, you can lean a little harder on pricing and get to a 25% reduction even if people gripe about it some. If that happens with pure solar, pricing high enough to cut demand by the full 50% would have people rioting in the streets.
Long term storage of the kind I'm talking about has two parts: a capacity part, and a consumable part. The capacity part is the same whether you need it for an hour or a month, and would be MUCH cheaper than nuclear plants of the same capacity. The consumable part (in my example, hydrogen) would be expensive, if needed for a month. But that doesn't happen very often, so on average the cost is quite reasonable.
It's gas because CO2 is not taxed. Don't tax gas and renewables will prop it up, but also nuclear doesn't stand a chance of competing. Tax CO2, and renewables will displace gas. The CO2 tax for renewables to take over will be lower than the CO2 tax needed for nuclear to take over. So the point you make there doesn't help new nuclear.
What CO2 taxes would do is keep existing nuclear plants operating a bit longer.
You _can't_ replace gas with intermittent. All sources aren't freely interchangeable. Intermittent doesn't work when the sun doesn't shine or when the wind doesn't blow, so you _need_ something to compensate it, and that's always gas.
Don't look at the system as "this source emits X kW when it's running". Look at the system as "the total demand _right now_ is Y xW, how can it be met ?". Because that's what drives the viability of sources of electricity, and whether they can be replaced with another one. Intermittent, by its very nature, isn't enough for producing electricity, it always needs an additional source.
It's always gas right now, because gas is the cheapest.
But if CO2 is taxed, hydrogen (from water electrolysis with surplus renewable electricity) becomes cheaper. And with cheap renewables, renewables + batteries + hydrogen would be cheaper than a system including nuclear.
> And with cheap renewables, renewables + batteries + hydrogen would be cheaper than a system including nuclear
* Definitely not. Looking at France, Solar and Wind are "cheap" because producers can sell on the grid, and the national operator _must_ buy it, at a higher cost than its own electricity, in a move to prop it up.
* Water electrolysis + electricity generation from hydrogen hasn't been proven to work cheaply at scale, what's the biggest project in existence ?
* Batteries are already not cost-effective at high scales
* All of those imply that storage will be on the same site as production; if not, the grid needs to be overhauled (it is built for few stable sources, not for numerous variable sources) and that cost is never taken into account by those who root for this kind of solutions
When I say renewables are cheap, I mean in comparison to NEW nuclear plants. Of course nuclear plants that already exist, where the sunk costs of construction can be ignored, will be more competitive. But France would spend less money building solar and wind instead of building new nuclear plants.
There is little electrolytic hydrogen today because hydrogen is mostly produced from chemical reforming of natural gas and other fossil fuels. Of course, this ignores the cost of CO2 emission from that process.
Batteries are already being installed in the real world, at very large scale. What exactly prevents them from being installed at even larger scale? And their costs are dropping rapidly, just as the cost of wind turbines and PV modules did.
Why hydro is not as flexible? A cable from Germany to Norway is being built to use hydro plants in Norway as energy batteries. This is despite Germany having natural gas plants.
A hydro power plant can't be used as a battery, it must be purposely built as a pumped storage plant. The cable in question allows Norway to sell hydro power to Germany (and if Germany has a surplus, they can sell electricity back). There's no storage solution in it, though.
It's sort of a battery, you just can't charge it with electricity. If you oversize the generators, you then can discharge the battery when renewable generation is low, and let it charge when renewable generation is high.
Yes, but by using that definition all baseload power generation (coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, etc.) are "energy batteries", which makes the term meaningless. By "energy batteries" when talking about the electric grid, people normally mean different kinds of large scale rechargeable energy storage solutions, such as pumped storage, molten salt, etc.
With oversized generators hydro provides an extra storage that can last weeks and even months at the pick usage depending on reservoir capacity. This is the battery effect that cannot be matched with molten salt.
As I just stated, yes, that's called baseload power. It applies equally to hydro power, nuclear, coal, gas and all other baseload types. If you make them larger they can produce more. "Energy batteries" when talking about the electric grid are generally rechargeable, because as I stated otherwise the term is meaningless and just means "baseload power" in general.
Increasing capacity at hydro power stations or other baseload stations isn't as easy as just "putting a larger generator in". Everything needs to be considered and sized up: turbines, piping, outlets, new environmental assessments, etc., just as in any other type of power plant.
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it's because production in a gas power plant is simply regulated by burning more or less gas. If you need more gas, you can likely buy more. While production in a hydro power plant can be brought up and down by draining the reservoir faster or slower, a hydro plant has a lot of external factors that a gas power plant hasn't.
The current water level in the reservoir, expected drainage and rainfall over the year, environmental regulations concerning water discharge and intake levels, fish, etc. all play into it. Note that a hydroelectric power plant doesn't just generate electricity, it also regulates water levels pretty far up- and downstream from the plant.
Large battery storage I feel in the future can offset the sudden demand giving enough time for nuclear or less carbon producing power to ramp up. We are not there yet but I feel as batteries keep getting cheaper and hopefully smaller we will reach a point where homes and business have enough battery power for few hours of their peak use. This could flatten the demand spikes on the networks as well as maybe allow to use solar power when the sun is not out.
"Storage" is a big word. Methods of storage are not interchangeable with one another.
Think about food storage: your shelf doesn't have the same properties as your fridge, which is not the same as your freezer, which is not the same as jars in your basement. It's the same for batteries: they're good for very short periodicity, but fail at anything beyond the week. So you can't store your energy from the summer to use it during the winter, for instance.
Your point of view is one of a cornucopian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopian), hoping that it is fine to wait for better days because "surely" progress will arrive. The situation is that we don't have some time to think and wait for innovation, we're already a number of decades late. Why wait for something that might or might not happen, in 5, 10, or 50 years, instead of doing what already works today ?
What is good about recycling nuclear? I believe the whole "recycling" in nuclear was a similar ploy like for recycling plastic, in other words mainly greenwashing. The other reason for it being military.
Nuclear recycling is a uneconomical, multiplies (by a significant factor) the amount of waste. Admittedly, less radioactive, but still as toxic and importantly much longer lifetimes, so still needs to be stored for insane length of time.
Recycling of nuclear fuel, outside of helping remove the waste problem, greatly increases your energy reserves.
However, it got essentially scuttled in the name of war as control over access to nuclear technology, even for purely peaceful uses became the dominant doctrine.
No, it was scuttled because it made no economic sense. In the US, Carter's executive order was lifted a few years later by Reagan, but no civilian reprocessing occurred. Separated plutonium has negative value -- it adds more cost to fuel element manufacture than it saves in enriched uranium cost.
And with regards to greenhouse gasses, hard to argue with this [1].
That being said, I don't mind the the reduction to 50% by 2035. Renewables are a good thing. I think there's this argument happening that is renewables vs nuclear which isn't healthy. Nuclear's competitor is coal and natural gas which serve as base loads (nuclear does also have the ability to do variable loads like these. For some reason people think it can't...). If slack can be picked up by renewables and that lessens the requirement for nuclear, that's a good thing. As long as this reduction doesn't involve building coal or natural gas plants in place of nuclear, I'm all in support of it (i.e. nuclear is being replaced purely by renewables). Though I would be happier if the plan was to explicitly discontinue their coal and gas plants first.
[0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/?countryCode=FR&page=country