Hey, I wouldn't put myself in the Anti nuclear camp. Its just the costs, they're high and increasing.

My point about nuclear not being dispatchable is that if wind is going to be the cheap backbone, then any expensive generation has to find a niche that works around that. Nuclear doesn't have that niche.

I seem to be taking a longer view than you, maybe in the 20 - 30 year time frame you're right. But in that sort of time frame is it even worth trying to start building a new nuclear power station? Where after all the politicking you've spent 10 years before you've even broken ground.

> Its just the costs, they're high and increasing.

This is only because of economies of scale (China is building many nuclear reactors and they seem to be fine).

Also no one ever factors storage / higher grid costs / backup generation into costs of renewables. When people use such double standard no wonder nuclear seems uneconomic!

> I seem to be taking a longer view than you, maybe in the 20 - 30 year time frame you're right. But in that sort of time frame is it even worth trying to start building a new nuclear power station?

EDIT: I misread your point, but I will leave this here as it seems to me important point anyway

In this time frame there is not even a _talk_ about having renewables backed by storage / carbon neutral backup generation (because that would be lol expensive with current tech). So you're proposing majority generation being fossils fuels? I thought climate change was important or something.

We _might_ get there with battery tech, but

1) nuclear will benefit from load balancing grid scale storage as well

2) in the meantime we will burn fossil fuels, alright?

"This is only because of economies of scale"

It probably is part, but not all of the problem, people want safe reactors, that isn't cheap.

To answer your point 2. There isn't going to be a nuclear plant to step in anyway, they're such long term projects. If you plonk down a nuclear power station now, fine. But in 20 - 30 years you're going to have new nuclear power stations in a landscape that is hopefully already dominated by solar and wind, and nuclear just doesn't fit around renewables (which are cheaper when the winds blowing/suns shining) well enough to succeed.

Your point 1 is potentially good for nuclear, if it raises the usage factor. Nuclear's economics are based on running 24/7 but you can't do that with renewables.

>To answer your point 2. There isn't going to be a nuclear plant to step in anyway,

To this same point, what is? We don't live in a world of magic. We can't just plop down magical battery systems that don't even exist. Those are also 10-20 years out, from being invented, let alone built. Your argument is moot unless you provide an alternative that can be built right now. If you actually have one, I'm sure every pro-nuclear person would support it. Because our alliance isn't with nuclear, it is with the Earth.

> has to find a niche that works around that. Nuclear doesn't have that

>> Until then we have to face the duck curve. So what are our choices? Natural gas, coal, nuclear. Take your pick.

I'm not sure if you read that part, so I am quoting myself. I'm getting to the fact that renewables aren't constant energy producers (major part of my post. Pretty much the only part actually).

> seem to be taking a longer view than you, maybe in the 20 - 30 year time frame you're right.

I mean... my whole point is about combating climate change. I'm definitely thinking much longer than 20-30 years.

> But in that sort of time frame is it even worth trying to start building a new nuclear power station?

> I seem to be taking a longer view than you,

These comments seem to be in contention. I'll let you resolve it before I respond any more.

Re long term, I mean I'm thinking of how I can see the grid ideally looking, not in the transitional phase we are in now. Sure if we plonked down a nuclear reactor now, that would be good, absenting cost, but it isn't going to be ready now, or in 10 years, so we need to be looking at what the grid will be looking like, and I hope by that point the grid will be well on the way being green so this power station will be competing against wind and solar, not coal and gas.

Re renewables not being constant. That's my point, and nuclear isn't flexible enough to take advantage. You can make the case for £100mwh batteries because they can step in instantly, nuclear can't, and also, when the winds blowing that's always going to be cheaper, so the massive fixed costs of nuclear get amortized over less and less MWHs.

I think you're not understanding battery tech then. While fossil fuels suck, they just have massive energy densities. Even the most advanced research batteries don't even come close to the energy density of the least efficient fossil fuels (this is why we use fossil fuels in the first place).

> Re renewables not being constant. That's my point, and nuclear isn't flexible enough to take advantage.

I am utterly confused by this comment.You can vary the output from a nuclear reactor. To over simplify it: rods go in, gets less hot, less power; rods go out, gets more hot, more power. You can load balance. This can be done all day, all season, and in any climate (this latter part is actually extremely important and the whole reason why we need diversified energy portfolios). Solar only powers during the day. Wind only powers when it is windy (most wind is morning and evening when there are shifting temperatures).

I am ALL for renewables. But we just have to be real. Batteries aren't there yet and we don't expect them to be there for a few decades. We needed to stop climate change a decade ago. While we should continue investing in new technologies, we have to also start fixing the problem NOW. If it takes 10 years to build something, well then you better start yesterday. But we can't wait 10 years for a new innovation (that might not even come) and then start building (all the while burning fossil fuels in the mean time).

That's the trade off. Wait and burn fossil fuels, or do what we can to get off them now and build better stuff as new technology is created. I for one would like to act NOW.

To me the trade of is build a wind farm in a couple of years to replace that coal fired power station, or build a nuclear power station in a couple of decades to replace it.

From a cost perspective wind is cheaper, it's in place years earlier, both those thing then lead to over sizing it for when the winds weak, but then you've got masses of cheap electricity when the wind blows, lets make hydrogen, or some other inefficient but good enough electric storage medium. By now that nuclear power station is probably built, but it can't compete against wind when the winds blowing, and it still has to compete against the hydrogen power plant when it's not.

We've seen countless times how 'good enough' wins in tech. I'm saying wind and some (however crappy) storage medium is good enough. Yes its JavaScript rather than Smalltalk or Lisp, yes essays could be written about how X is better, but it works, and if it doesn't there are a dozen lower cost, lower risk, quicker things to try than building a nuclear power station.

> To me the trade of is build a wind farm in a couple of years to replace that coal fired power station, or build a nuclear power station in a couple of decades to replace it.

Then I understand the confusion. Let me explain. Wind's output isn't constant over the course of a day. Even worse, wind is not constant over the course of a year. (The same goes for solar)

So what do you do when outputs are low and demand is high? (A common occurrence) You use a fuel. Those are batteries, fossil, or nuclear. Those are the choices (hydrogen isn't there yet, nor is it actually 0 emissions since in production they use CH4 not H2O). Batteries do not have enough capacity to get us through moderate stretches of low activity, which is why we haven't gotten rid of fossil fuels. We need to be able to store energy. I don't know how many times I have to say this, but it isn't nuclear vs wind (I LOVE wind! I WANT more wind!). It is the fueled sources we are arguing about. And we can't pretend that we don't need fuel (unless we're willing to relocate massive amounts of people and entire nations).

The best batteries come nowhere near the storage capacity of the worst fossil fuels (all are dwarfed by nuclear).

This debate isn't about "best" vs "good enough" it is "not enough" vs "enough". We can't do it with just renewables alone. We need fuel. And it isn't all about the costs you see. A lot is the costs you don't see, which is why we're so desperate right now (we needed to fix climate change a decade ago, we can't wait another decade or two for batteries to catch up).

So in principle I agree with everything your saying. But the difference is that the facts just don't agree with your perception.

Hydrogen can be made from H2O, and abundant cheap electricity, which you would get from over building renewables to cover the lulls, because it is variable.

You say we can't wait a decade or 2. To return to Hinckley Point C, it was announced in 2010, a nuclear licence was granted in 2012. Construction is due to begin this year, it is planned to start actually generating somewhere between 2025 and 2027. Do we have time for that? That's 15 years minimum, how many wind turbines could you build in that time? You could build both, but then the turbines risk cannibalising the market for nuclear before its even built, and then you're betting that none of the energy storage technologies are going to pan out. Yes hydrogen is a long shot, and lithium batteries probably won't be cheaper, or compressed air, or bio fuels, or CO2 to methane, and cars probably won't end up getting used for smart storage, and the smart grid probably won't take off. But saying none of them will work? And then look at the price curve for wind and solar, what will they cost in 15 years time?

If we had the nuclear power stations now, fine, but they aren't here now, they're 15 years away. In 15 years we can build a lot of solar and wind thats getting cheaper and cheaper and we can try a lot of energy storage mechanisms too.

And investors are going to be thinking the same, so they won't want to front the money, so it's up to government, but that adds bureaucracy, time, cost and somewhere in there a recession or a government that can't justify spending billions for jam tomorrow, so funds get cut, etc, etc, etc.

I entered this thread saying cost was the issue. Even if we ignore that, the political battles over such a long time frame are massive. Over and above the battles to make the case for fighting climate change. 'Greens' aren't even united on the issue, let alone a nation, over a generation.

So to me the unproven storage bet is the better bet.

> Hydrogen can be made from H2O, and abundant cheap electricity, which you would get from over building renewables to cover the lulls, because it is variable.

"Can" and "are" are very different things though. You've been continually talking about price and the economics being above most other factors. The reason methane is used is economic. Those that tell you that hydrogen is being done with water are selling snake oil. But even using methane it is still expensive, difficult, and dangerous (no one wants to be riding in a vehicle with tens of thousands of PSI under their feet).

To your other point, I agree. It sucks. I'm not going to act like we can just make nuclear plants appear. Building any major infrastructure takes a long time.

> So to me the unproven storage bet is the better bet.

My position is only slightly different. I'm also betting on the unproven storage. But we can't have a high risk portfolio. We should definitely invest in risky avenues, but we also need to invest in blue chips.

The argument here is "We don't have good enough batteries and we don't know when we get them. Let's fund them more. But also in the mean time let's use current technology to make sure that we have some fallback. Because having no fallback is going to leave us in a worse position."

This is a negative sum game. We don't come out positive in either scenario (at least not till we can do real terraforming). We've pushed the buck down the road for too long. Now the game is risk minimization and reduction.

We have very similar positions. We have the same goal. You talk about how we're not unified, well I only see that because it is easier to focus on the differences in positions. But it really looks to me that we have more similarities than difference. So if you want unity, then let's recognize that.

Renewable hydrogen to cover the last 10-20% would be much cheaper than using nuclear to cover that last 10-20%. We are not using renewable hydrogen now because CO2 emissions have not be sufficiently penalized, but if that happened new nuclear would still not have a place at the table.

There's no way to make enough batteries for 100% renewable grid, everyone on the planet would need an electric car sized battery, which means you'd need 10000 gigafactories iirc.

Which is why I suggested 50% nuclear, 50% renewable. That's still about 100x more renewable than we have today

It's not just batteries. It's batteries, and transmission, and pumped hydro, and dispatchable demand, and overproduction w. hydrogen to soak up the excess, and burning hydrogen in turbines for very rare long lulls.

The cost optimized system will exploit most or all of these, and have no place for expensive baseload sources. Nuclear with its current cost structure and cheap renewables simply don't fit well together.

"everyone on the planet would need an electric car sized battery"

This is basically what we're aiming for (in the west at least) anyway, with EVs?

Are you saying we don't have the materials to do it? Or we don't have the factory capacity for it?

Batteries can be made from a variety of materials, and we supply near enough 1 car per person in the west, so batteries should be doable?

Id hope some combination of said car batteries, continent spanning grids, smart appliances would get us most of the way there.

The biggest flaw with this model is what happens on cloudy, still weeks? I guess some kind of waste to energy, wood, and bio gas, hydrogen power station would be less expensive than a nuclear reactor.

I can't speak for the person you're responding to, but

> Are you saying we don't have the materials to do it?

Yes. At least without substantially expanding mining operations.

> Or we don't have the factory capacity for it?

We're NOWHERE near that kind of production level.

> The biggest flaw with this model is what happens on cloudy, still weeks? I guess some kind of waste to energy, wood, and bio gas, hydrogen power station would be less expensive than a nuclear reactor.

Not if we price in carbon emissions.

I also have to mention that there are plenty of places that people live where it is almost always cloudy and almost never windy (at the same time). I will keep saying this: we need diversified energy portfolios. The key though, is we don't want any of those sources producing emissions, or to at least minimize them as much as possible (we're playing a negative sum game here)

"Not if we price in carbon emissions"

All those things can be carbon neutral, except waste to energy.

Obviously though yes, those places with no wind, sun or other resources. Nuclear will have a place.

> Obviously though yes, those places with no wind, sun or other resources. Nuclear will have a place.

And the unfortunate part is that those places hold a fair amount of the world's population. We're not asking for nuclear in places that are sunny and windy. We don't need it there. We're asking for it in places that aren't.

95% of the world's population lives below 50 N/S latitude.

Suppose we want to get rid of all carbon sources, and minimize the amount of energy storage required due to the high cost.

Is it possible to minimize storage with nuclear? Yes, in theory, you spec the fixed generation amount for the peak demand and then have excess supply the rest of the time. Inefficient, but it works. This is clearly not the optimal mix however.

Is it possible to minimize storage with solar? No. It doesn't generate at night, that requires an enormous amount of energy storage to overcome, pure solar is a fail.

Is it possible to minimize storage with wind? Yes, but you have to match the peak demand with the minimum wind output. That's going to explode costs even worse than pure nuclear. Combining wind with storage to smooth out the load might be better, but by the time that's cost effective, so would using a smaller amount of storage to smooth the day/night load for nuclear and reduce the amount of generating capacity you need there too. Also, wind is not the cheapest generating technology to begin with (solar is cheaper).

So what happens if we combine them?

Solar plus wind is better, but still problematic. Wind generates at night, except when it doesn't. On a still night you could have to survive the whole night almost entirely on stored energy, but if you need almost as much storage capacity as for pure solar then you might as well make use of it every night and take advantage of the cheaper generation from solar than wind.

Wind + nuclear doesn't seem especially interesting either. The problem with wind in general is that its output varies randomly and doesn't track demand whatsoever, so you end up needing a large amount of storage proportional to the amount of wind generation you have. And wind isn't that cheap and storage is really expensive.

But solar + nuclear is excellent. The demand for electricity is higher during the day, which is when solar generates. Solar doesn't generate at night, but nuclear does. So you spec enough nuclear generation for the minimum nighttime load and use solar to both handle the higher daytime load and charge up the much smaller amount of energy storage you need to handle just the baseload-to-peak load differential in the few hours between when solar stops generating and people go to sleep, instead of the whole demand for the whole night.

You can also then price electricity higher during the night, which makes perfect sense when the solar that generates only during the day is the cheapest generation technology, and then nuclear pays for itself by beating solar+storage on cost for twelve hours a day while allowing you to cut your required solar generating capacity more than in half for the other twelve hours.

> Is it possible to minimize storage with solar? No. It doesn't generate at night, that requires an enormous amount of energy storage to overcome, pure solar is a fail.

A grid dominated by solar means power at night will cost 2-3 times day time rates. And demand for it will drop sharply.

Demand only drops if it becomes more expensive than it is already. If the difference is that solar during the day becomes super cheap then you don't get a reduction in demand during the night, you get more demand during the day.

That doesn't reduce the amount of nighttime generation capacity you need at all, unless people can shift demand from nighttime to daytime, which they largely can't. Most of the things that run at night either have to run 24 hours or have to run at night because you need light when it's dark and heat when it's cold.

Worse so, if demand for electricity drops at night that doesn't mean that people are going to go to sleep. That means they are going to use cheaper alternatives to make light. That has bigger consequences in emissions.

My worry would be people continuing to use carbon sources to generate more heat than light. With LED lights as efficient as they are, nobody is going to replace them with lanterns. The real trouble is if people don't replace their existing oil and gas furnaces with electric heat pumps, because that's something we need to happen but also has the disadvantage of requiring an initial capital expenditure. Adding higher nighttime electrical costs on top of that would not be helpful.

> but also has the disadvantage of requiring an initial capital expenditure.

It's a good augment their for electric companies to be the ones finance residential heat pumps and be able to count the installation as an asset.

> Adding higher nighttime electrical costs on top of that would not be helpful.

Higher nighttime costs would be definitely an issue with residential heat pumps.

> Solar is cheaper, so why not cover 100% during the day

Because you still need something to cover the night, but if the thing that covers the night also generates during the day with minimal incremental cost, there is no cost benefit in unnecessarily duplicating that capacity again.

> wind is cheaper, that starts covering the night time

Except when it doesn't, and that's the problem. You have a huge wind farm that generates 50GW when the wind is blowing but only 5GW when it's still, and you have 25GW of minimum load at all times. On the night when you average 5GW generation for twelve hours, where does the other 240GWh of power come from? Your options are "build a peak 250GW wind farm instead so it never generates less than 25GW" (completely hopeless) and "build 240GWh of energy storage" (ouch) which then prices wind out because it's cheaper to use the batteries you need for a still night on every night and charge them with solar instead, and cheaper still to build 25GW in nuclear capacity.

> And while you're spending the decades getting that power station built you're also having to explain why you aren't building out solar and wind to cover demand

Because you are building them too. We can do two things at the same time.

> the problem is solar is cheaper, so its profitable for someone to build 50MW of solar.

That's not how that works. The unit cost of generation is inconsequential compared to the fixed cost, so you don't stop generating at any point and you just take the market price whatever it is.

Suppose nuclear needs to average $10/MWh to meet costs but solar can do $8/MWh during the day. Then as long as nuclear can get $12/MWh at night, it can match solar on price during the day and still cover costs. And solar + storage can't beat $12/MWh at night while the storage costs much more than $4/MWh. So then it's unprofitable to build the other 25MW in solar capacity because it would only get undercut on price during the day by nuclear which can make up the difference at night.

And it's the same thing for wind or anything else. Once you have 25GW of nuclear generation, nobody is ever going to be able to undercut it on marginal cost -- they'll never stop generating power and selling it for the market price, even if it would cause the plant operators to yield negative overall returns, because selling for an unprofitable market price is still less of a loss than getting nothing. And since everyone knows that ahead of time they don't bother to build a bunch of unprofitable wind turbines and that doesn't happen to begin with.

> If it takes you 5 years to build the 25MW of solar, but the nuclear takes 15 years, theres a 10 year gap between solar build out finishing and nuclear being ready to take over from that coal plant. What do you do? 10 years of burning coal? or continue building solar so your covering as much demand as you can? But then why retire all that solar when the nuclear plant comes online?

There is no hope of replacing the entire grid with solar in five years time. The production capacity for that doesn't exist, and would be unprofitable to create because once you've replaced the entire grid with solar all those new panel factories you just paid to build would go idle.

What actually happens is that you add solar as fast as you can and it's still not enough, and you add nuclear at the same time and if we're lucky then together they're enough.