Yeah no shit. We already knew nuclear was not profitable, but it’s clean & makes tons of power, so it’s a good deal for everyone that isn’t a business & wants cheap & clean energy.
I'd love for you to see the Uranium and Thorium mines in Canada and tell me how clean that looks to you.
Uranium and thorium mines are just as clean as the rare earth metal mines needed for PV cells. This is kind of a moot point. We need carbon free energy now and solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear are all part of the mix of solutions needed. There are many considerations currently being made to determine which technologies should be used in what locations.
Make sure to compare with a West Virginia mountaintop-removal coal mine.
The point of this research is that renewable are cheaper. So why would we invest our money in the more extensive option?
Government isn’t business. It should not be chasing a profit margin. The decisions should be around sustainability, ecological friendliness, and robustness against failure
Unfortunately, government is a business. They are beholden to the same profits and losses that any other business is subjected to based on market conditions. The government has to answer to shareholders (citizens) and it's creditors (BoC and other countries).
In more general sense profitability is robustness against failure.
If only there were organizations of people who were known for building really high quality technology without a profit motive... Like some kind of space program 🤔🤔
They had a profit motive, like space race, cold war and all that. You know, USA and USSR were really preparing for The Global Thermonuclear War back then.
And, of course, all the people participating in that were being paid.
Nah, due to Negative Externalities and things like Tragedy Of The Commons it's quite common for companies to be making massive profits whilst destroying the very environment they need to thrive.
I mean, look at Polution, look at Global Warming, look at Overfishing, look at the 2008 Crash - without an external entity (i.e. the State) to force them to change their ways or rescue them, most economic entities in the pursuit of profitability will act in ways that systemically will eventually destroy the very things they need to be profitable.
Stuff like Negative Externalities is pretty basic Economics.
That naive idea of your of how economics works probably came from stuff you heard from politicians, not from reading books...
While without a profit motive of any kind they won't exist.
I really don't get how those things you mentioned existing negate what I said. These are orthogonal. Well, except for that weird logic that it's about choosing between two teams, but nobody can be that stupid, right?
Nuclear should be the only non renewable power we use at scale. Oil makes sense for emergency situations (it's portable and is stable forever) and where energy density is most important (like aircraft, for now). Coal can fuck right off.
oil is ironically not stable forever
Though most people's idea of "old bad gas" is defined not by pure gasoline, but ethanol-containing gasoline. Ethanol gasoline is hydrophilic -- leave a can sitting over winter, and you're going to get some rough running and billowing water vapor coming out the exhaust. Pure petroleum products are way more stable.
In my opinion clean is anything that doesn't emit out of smokestacks.
Also in this case it doesn't emit out of smoke stacks while the sun's down and the wind's not blowing.
Dams are terrible for the environment so hydro is out. Nuclear is cleaner than hydro.
Um.... dams and nuclear tend to go hand in hand. They need shit tons of water in reserve for cooling. Alternatively, they can draw river water in, but any power plant that dumps hot water into the river is damaging the aquatic ecosystem.
What? Damns have nothing to do with nuclear. You're thinking of in Ukraine and that's unique situation. Also that dam was blown up and the nuclear power plant didn't explode.
Take the nuclear titties near me, not a dam in sight.
Yes, because it is right next to the ocean. I wasn't saying all nuke plants have dams. All nuke plants have water, and sometimes to have a sufficient quantity of water, dams need to be built. North Carolina has zero natural lakes, every lake in NC is made by a dam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuire_Nuclear_Station
cleaner*
than fossil
people say "clean" when they mean "doesn't produce greenhouse gasses". Nuclear power is absolutely not "clean". Waste sites will need to be monitored for like a thousand years to prevent everything from natural disaster leakage to terrorist aquisition of nuclear materials. The reality is a new powerplant is just the 5% down payment on a nuclear waste mortgage.
Waste sites will need to be monitored for like a thousand years to prevent everything from natural disaster leakage to terrorist aquisition of nuclear materials
Or build breeder reactors to convert the waste back into fuel and eliminate it entirely. Building nuclear power would literally reduce the amount of nuclear waste we have versus doing nothing.
And yet, all these pseudoscience anti nuclear people who talk about nuclear waste all the time don't seem to be advocating for that. Curious, isn't it?
Look the psuedoscience anti nuclear people aren't going to be what kills nuclear power.
The problem is the option is to "replace pseudo science oil barons with pseudo science nuclear power barons." Society isn't largely run by scientists, its run by lawyers and business idiots.
If you operate under the assumption nuclear will be treated more carefully and delicately than oil, well I too would like to live in that star trek communism universe.
It will get dumped in water supplies. It will end up in food supplies. The reality is there is a difference between "looks good on paper" and "even some lawyer who doesn't believe in germ theory won't fuck it up".
That's a very valid point, but it isn't unique to nuclear. Solar panel manufacturing produces some nasty chemical waste. Some might be manufactured using hydrofluoric acid even, which scares the living shit out of me.
There are going to be safety and waste issues with everything, and they're going to be different types of hazards. I would rather drink water contaminated with some nuclear waste than have contact with hydrofluoric acid. Ideally I'd like neither.
I'm not entirely sure what the solution is. It's hardly worse than oil (which also uses HF!), but that's not adequate. What we need is regulations and regulators that make it cheaper to throw as much safety factors as possible on something vs pay fines for violations. I'm confident we have the technology needed, we just need to make sure it's actually used.
If the pro nuclear people managed to build something that actually eliminates nuclear waste, it would take away most arguments of the anti nuclear people.
The technology exists, and has for decades. It wasn't economical so it wasn't considered for commercialization, although some companies are looking at it now.
If the anti nuclear people actually bothered to do proper research, perhaps we would've had enough support and outcry to build more of these reactors over the last several decades.
Depleted uranium can't be used in fission bombs.
The nuclear fuel is pointless from military perspective...
It just get burred into the ground, and there isn't like 50 GTons if it every year
The question has always been what does one do when the renewables aren't providing enough power (ex: nights, etc). The current solution is natural gas. It would be a big improvement if we would use a carbon-free source like nuclear instead.
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is an old and proven method for load balancing intermittent power sources. Would like to see more of that as geography permits.
The "as geography permits" part is a big obstacle, unfortunately.
Actually it isn't if you stop only looking at places that are also suitable as power plant, that is, have a big river flowing through them.
You can do pumped hydro in an old mineshaft.
Can you? To store the energy you need to pump up; to use it you need to flow back down. Where is the ‘down’ or ‘up’ from a mine shaft?
I’d also question if the volume would be worth it.
Edit: maybe you are thinking compressed air?
...the up is at the surface and the down is at the bottom of the mine shaft? I'm not talking about horizontal ones, of course. You let water in, generating power, and then, to regenerate empty space and with that the capacity to again generate power, you spend energy to pump it up.
As to volume, there's some gigantic mineshafts, but even small ones might warrant small installations it's not like some pipes and a pump and generator are much of an investment. Of course, don't try that in a salt mine geology will play an important part.
And lastly: Mineshafts aren't the only option. There's a lot of mountains, and they have many sides, and also plateaus and valleys. Build two concrete basins, connect them via pipe, ship in water from somewhere, voila, pumped hydro storage.
I guess I wasn’t clear where on the surface the storage is. Do they still make a dam type area to store the ‘high’ water, or is it just a different part of the mine which is closer to the surface?
I was able to find some mine numbers… yeah; insane. Especially something like an open cut mine which is functionally already lake shaped.
Not in China.
It's an obstacle for anything, including nuclear. Just ask Japan.
That will not remotely cover baseline loads and is not without significant efficiency loss due to the pumping phase.
All commonly used forms of energy storage have some efficiency loss. Pumped storage is not perfect but my understanding is that it usually comes at a 10-25% loss, which isn't all that shabby all things considered.
According to the article, the researchers concluded that nuclear reactors are not a good fit for that role.
The growing idea is to just have a shit load of renewables, everywhere. The wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun shines through the clouds. If you have a ridiculous excess total capacity then even when you're running at limited capacity you could still cover the demand. Basically, most of our renewable infrastructure would actually be curtailed or offline a lot of the time.
And that opens up opportunities for energy intensive industries like aluminium or hydrogen production to run whilst there's an excess of energy
I'm all for green hydrogen production, it's using hydrogen in place of fossil fuels that bothers me. We already have a shit load of demand for hydrogen from industrial uses, and it would take 3x the world's total renewable capacity in 2019, dedicated solely to hydrogen production, to meet this with green hydrogen. If we start adding transportation into that demand we'll never make it, and it will be far less efficient than other energy sources (eg batteries).
So yeah, we should have green hydrogen production, but we shouldn't listen to those same people when they say they think it should also be used for transportation. That's just trying to increase the size of the market to increase profits.
Hydrogen works well with a renewable grids because you can take advantage of the times there is excess energy production so that power doesn't just go to waste.
We do need to be careful because hydrogen is often sold as a pipe dream by gas companies to convince us to use gas (e.g. "this new gas turbine power plant can be converted to hydrogen", even though that'd be a workload less efficient than fuel cells).
As for its use in transport, it looks like battery electric vehicles have won that battle for personal vehicles. Both have their advantages but in practice there are few enough fuel stations for hydrogen and enough chargers that that's not going to flip.
However, batteries are entirely unsuitable to long distance, high load transport like trucks. Ideally they'd be replaced by rail, but that's not happening anytime soon in many places so hydrogen likely will be the solution there.
Here's an example of what can be done with 5 hours of storage. 5 hours is a 25% participation rate of V2G where the participants offer a third of their battery capacity.
If going with the (false) assumption that nuclear can hit 100% grid penetration, it would take decades to offset the carbon released by causing a single year of delay.
The lowest carbon "let's pretend storage is impossible and go with 100% nuclear" would still start with exclusively funding VRE.
Lol at trying to pass that link off as a valid, unbiased source.
lol at a rando discrediting an article that gives supporting data. Did you even read it? Write your own well supported opinion and submit it here. We’ll wait.
Oh is that a new rule? You can't point out garbage, bias sources unless you've written a dissertation on it? Fucking rube.
Good point. You are a garbage biased source.
Great comeback. Very cute.
But why don't you go ahead and go get a juice box and let the adults speak.
TIL an "adult" is someone who denigrates a link without even reading it or having any substantive data points to support their points. Sounds like you have plenty of juice boxes to give out.
consumers may also help reduce system costs by adapting their electricity consumption to the availability of renewable energy
From the linked paper. They mention some other options for storage like batteries (plenty of environmental issues there though) but based on the quoted text I have a hard time taking this seriously if they actually expect people to change their behavior.
Plug in car. Press the "I would like to only pay $100/yr to fuel this please" button.
Later when you leave for work press the "I would like the house to be cool when I get home and also want to pay half as much for AC" button.
Buy the 1.5m wide water heater that stores 10kWh of hot water and lasts a week between heatings rather than the 70cm one that lasts a day.
Such an unconscionable burden.
I think innovation at the consumption end is going to help a lot. On Technology Connections I saw an electric induction stove that could be powered from a regular socket. It had a battery that would trickle charge throughout the day and then use the batteries to power the induction cooktops, as well as a couple of plugs. If widely deployed and in other appliances, with a little smarts that could provide power leveling at the home level.
Another solution would be adding some intelligence to water heaters. Have a temperature control valve on the output where you set the temperature, and program the water heater get to 160-180°F when electricity is cheap. This would be a thermal battery that would easily level out demand for electricity for heating water.
Or you could do thermal storage by heating a house very warm/cold prior to a large cold snap/heat wave, and letting it coast down/up to a temperature instead of heating/cooling a lot during the cold/hot weather. He's got a video on this technique here
Another solution would be adding some intelligence to water heaters. Have a temperature control valve on the output where you set the temperature, and program the water heater get to 160-180°F when electricity is cheap. This would be a thermal battery that would easily level out demand for electricity for heating water.
This has been done for close to a century in wind or run of river hydro heavy countries (as well as some coal ones).
The water heater has a buffer tank and is attached to a meter that only runs when a signal is sent across the power line. This stores about 20kWh for a 300L tank.
Modern insulation would allow going up to a few m^3 for a couple weeks' worth.
Combine that with some radiant floor heating on a nice thick concrete slab and you could use the battery for home heating. (Though it would need a lot of water.)
"Not enough power from renewables? Just turn off your fridge for a few days and you'll be fine!"
Honestly that sentiment has strong "blame the consumer" vibes that seems to pervade climate arguments.
Sure, people can reduce consumption, but at best its a stopgap, not a solution.
There's stuff like heaters and to a degree things like washing machines that can shape the time they're active to whenever there's a lull.
Consider Britain: Each time the BBC runs a popular show you get an energy usage spike once it's over because people are getting up and make themselves a cuppa. Doesn't really make sense to run the heater in the tank for your shower at the same time, or charge your car, that can wait a bit.
Nuclear is a terrible fit for peaker plants, that's not how it works. If it isn't selling energy at as close to 100% of the time as is feasible it's losing money.
Nuclear is not, and cannot be, a gap coverage solution. Due to xenon/iodine poisoning and decay heat management you need to keep a reactor critical as long as possible to be economical. That's independent of the problem of keeping the water hot that fossil fuel generators share. You can't just turn a reactor on and off.
It can provide a baseload though where solar can provide extra power during the heat for places where the summer and days are the power intensive part, rather than winter and nights. You still need a short-term stop gap as the sun sets but it's still hot out, but even if that was just powered by NG it would be a huge step forward. Adding greener energy storage options to store extra power nuclear or wind could generate overnight would be better.
Btw, could a small percent of nuclear reactors be turned on/off seasonally, potentially transporting fuel between the north in the winter and the south in the summer?
Yes, but if you spend the money making a reactor, you really should just use it. Uranium is pretty cheap, it's the reactor that's expensive.
Fair. If a grid was just powered by batteries, solar, wind, and existing nuclear plants, which would be the most effective to turn off when demand is too low?
Keep the reactors running to avoid that issue. As long as they are providing enough power when the renewables aren't, we successfully cut out natural gas from the power grid.
Columbia station load follows within a certain range set by nearby hydro. It can be done. The economics aren't even that bad, as fuel is one of the cheaper inputs to the reactor.
While I agree completely, it is troublesome that you, BombOmOm, are saying this... :/ username checks no fly list out.
Sometimes, a kinetic response is the only reasonable reaction. ;p Asking nicely doesn't stop a Russian war of conquest.
The best solution is having EVs plugged into the grid at night. VTG is the easy solution to peaker needs.
Then you are getting into the issue of the power company eating up your charge cycles on your EV battery. Who pays for the fact that my battery now has half the design lifetime due to constant cycling because it's feeding the grid?
These are easily solved details. For example, by providing power on the grid you are in essence a power company. Perhaps you get reimbursed based upon what you provide. You know net metering is already a thing, right?
I’m just saying that we might need to get away from the idea that a car battery is solely an owner expense. They’d have to be subsidized or there would be huge equity issues. And yes “I do know about net metering,right.”
Yes you are correct in stating that if you used your car battery for grid usage you would need to get reimbursed for that. And I gave you an easy solution. This could actually be a profit center for EV owners and if you have your car plugged into the grid at peak times, you would get reimbursed more per kWh (ie TOU) with the net metering. Win/win for everybody except utilities and fossil fuel providers.
The renewables-only crowd is just ignorant about this simple fact.
The future of energy will be dominated by solar and nuclear power. With hydro, geothermal and wind playing supporting roles, depending on geography.
The only question is, how much fossil fuels do we burn until then?
Those who oppose nuclear are really just in favour of burning fossil fuels in the interim. But the inevitable switch to nuclear will come as fossil fuels are depleted.
Nature has given us the atom as the most dense and durable way to store energy. That will never change.
Typical energy density of ore in a new uranium mine burned in an LWR is about the same of coal.
All of the economic/not too damaging stuff together would power the world for about 3 years.
Profitability is so much not the point here and also, there's no reason for different energy production sources (especially ones that are base power vs incidental power) to be in conflict. Do both of them.
We don't have to like it but unfortunately profitability is by far the number one driver for...well everything. So little is accomplished by way of altruism. People are greedy. The best way to successfully incentivize climate action is for environmentally friendly actions to become the most profitable and be advertised as such.
So I agree with you that both options should be used. But I disagree that profitability is not the point. Money is always the point and always has been.
Price of energy is key to the success of every economy.
Yeah exactly. None of it is profitable if you can't meet instant demand changes at any time of day. Build the nukes to meet full demand needs and supplement them with "more profitable" options for redundancy.
None of this is profitable if you can meet demand power at will either.
It's just a scarcity game that those in power use to keep things ticking along.
What is infrastructure to most, is a tuned revenue machine to a very few.
The purpose of a system can be determined by its output, and it's working quite well in that aspect.
I've never had a rolling black out or brown out but we burn coal around here and there are proposals for some small nuclear sites. Yes there's some solar and wind as well but we are a net exporter of energy to the western states.
There is, actually, a conflict. Renewables are more dynamic in production. You can turn them on and off quickly, you can scale them quickly too. You can't do that with nuclear plants. Baseload is not a goal, it's a limit. That's why the nuclear energy sector is friends with the coal sector.
I would love to know what oil company you heard that from, since it's absolutely not true. You can both turn them off quickly (faster, in fact, than LNG or Coal), start them up quickly (sub minutes) and change production quickly. These have all been features since 1960's era reactors, and we're around 10 generations past them.
I think they might be referring to turning down the reactors, which I think is an actual difficulty with them. By no means however is it a reason to not use them, it just means you employ it wisely. Have it meet most of the demand, and use solar and wind and others to supplement to full demand.
That's not difficult. Nuclear is extremely expensive.
With renewables you just sell it to the grid for whatever gas generated electricity is going for. Which is currently still a fucking lot. Thanks Russia.
Thanks Russia.
Oh, it gets worse. Russia is big on nuclear, they have a whole agency that deals in nuclear in Europe, it's called ROSATOM.
This is related to other post with the fossil-fuel sponsored ecomodernist girl whining about Greenpeace and nuclear:
K, but this isn't about profits. This is about not destroying the environment, which nuclear can help with (you know if nobody bombs the plant)
But it's also about cost. Nuclear is far more expensive upfront, more expensive to maintain, and more expensive to decommission. Cheap, agile renewables will be an easier option for the vast majority of the planet
We would be really stupid to worry about money when trying to save the planet. But, what did I know, I'm just some guy on the internet
Financiers tend to worry about money, yes.
First option: a wind/solar plant with costs that aren't going to increase substantially, power being sold within a couple of years therefore repayments will begin quickly.
Second option: a nuclear proposal - massive costs upfront, that will inevitably skyrocket while the completion date slips and slips, and power being sold 10-15 year in the future so repayments are a long way off.
It's not a difficult choice.
If your argument is that we should nationalize the energy sector so government can get involved more directly to mitigate financing issues, sure. We both know that's not going to happen.
How does one provide power when the renewables don't provide enough power (nights, etc)? Our current solution is natural gas. Nuclear is a huge step up as a carbon-free provider.
Storage, there are many options. Pumped hydro is great for places with elevation change, molten salt is great for desert climates. Batteries, green hydrogen, compressed gas, etc.
We've been storing energy for thousands of years. It's not difficult in the way nuclear fusion, SMRs, or thorium are difficult.
We're also moving towards EVs. I'd like to see investment in using a fleet of connected EVs as a giant battery. Your energy company can pay you for making 10-15% of your EV battery available for grid storage and you can opt out if you need that extra range for a trip.
The largest battery on the planet would power my workplace for less than two hours- if it could meet the instant demand, which it cannot.
I'm all for energy storage, but I realise there's a lot of work to do.
1,200MW isn't enough? Where do you work?
Why do you think batteries can't meet instant demand? That's kind of their whole thing.
Nah, the power company likes the profits from nuclear way better.
The secret is that they can bill the ratepayers for all the cost overruns, while keeping the extra profits on the cost-plus construction contract for the shareholders.
(Source: I'm a Georgia Power ratepayer being absolutely reamed for Plant Vogtle 3 and 4, and the Georgia Public Service Commission isn't doing a single goddamned thing to hold Georgia Power to account or to help people like me.)
Yeah, but think of the poor corporations.
Stop all the hate for nuclear. It's just a way for the fossil fuel industry to cause infighting among those of us who care about the climate. If we can make energy free or close to it, we should. The closer everything comes to being free the better.
People pushing nuclear is a way for fossil fuels industry to keep us reliant on them for the next 20 years while we build power plants.
More than that as we will need to pay them to maintain storage which they won't be keen to do without tons of government and tax payer assistance
Nuclear is the future. Stop trying to deny it. We should all be running it by now this shit was made like 60 years ago. But no, we'll just eat smog I guess. Damn my feeds are kind of depressing today.
Fission is today. Fusion is the future.
It blows my mind we are avoiding this? You want jobs? Clean stable energy? Its fucken here dude. Just build some plants. They only need to be properly maintained to avoid disaster. If we truly are an intelligent species that should be easy as hell.
They only need to be properly maintained
And there is the issue.
I hate that its true, but yeah. Our city management accross the nation has long been pocketing maintenance budgets. Cause shit is run down everywhere in "the greatest nation".
"disaster" is a big word for what happens with a nuclear accident.
The fire in Hawaï or the climate change are disasters. A hurricane is a disaster. Chernobyl or fukushima were disasters in the media much more than in the reality of things.
Cars kill more people every year than nuclear energy did since we use it. In fact, this is still true even if you account for atomic bombs...
Energy should be nationalised. Energy does not need to be run for profit. It should be at a cost.
Even if it's nationalized we still want energy generation as low cost as possible so we can use the national budget for other things.
Sure, but cost isn't the sole (or main) consideration when you remove profit-motive.
Also, you only need to break even, so it will always be more affordable than private sector.
That just goes for everything, though. Thats not specific to any one industry. Clean and abundant energy will come at a cost and that should just be acceptable.
No its not, anyone thats actually gone over the basic numbers knows this. Nuclear power is expensive to build, takes decades to start and takes a lot of highly skilled workers. Wind is cheaper per MW, more profitable, buildable in 6 months, can be put in even remote areas, does not require highly skilled workers for normal operation and is more carbon efficient.
We should probably use both. How much mw/hr does wind produce compared to nuclear? Once nuclear is up and running what are the continual costs and what are the benefits? Theres a lot more to ask here than just "what is more profitable". Your points on winds' adaptability is good as well as your points on timeframe. But I don't think a single energy source is the actual answer. I'm thinking we supplement these energy sources with each other and that would bring us completely off fossil fuels.
How much mw/hr does wind produce compared to nuclear?
That depends entirely on how much of each you build, but wind is less expensive to build per MW than nuclear. Once nuclear is up and running what are the continual costs and what are the benefits? Nuclear costs more to run as the systems are far more complicated in order to make them safe and you need a relatively large workforce of highly trained mechanical, electrical and nuclear engineers which cost a lot to employ. Whereas for the most part wind farms are completely autonomous, in exchange for very few benefits. The profitibaility takes into account quite a lot really and so its better to build the more profitable one as you can then use that profit to build more, which gets us off of fossil fuels faster./
"Capacity factor is the feature highlight of this info-graphic poster. To make a graphic representation of how this compares to one nuclear power plant rated at 1154 megawatts (MW), this shows the full count of all 2077 2-MW wind turbines in a 24"x36" poster. This is what would be required to match the nuclear power plant output even if this array of turbines could hypothetically run continuously at only 25 percent of its rated capacity."
I'm giving you sources. You can downvote but I don't see your numbers reflected in any study.
Okay? I never said anything contrary to that though? So what's your point?
The cost per MWh produced over a year, with grid + storage costs, is the number that matters. Wind and solar combined are much cheaper than nuclear there. For a source look that the most recent csiro gencost report. It's produced by the Australian national science body and basically says that in the best case if smrs reach large scale adoption and operate at a very high capacity factor... They're still way too expensive for the power they produce when compared to wind and solar with transmission and storage.
To get off fossil fuels faster it needs to be economic, and nuclear isn't economic. Renewables are
But why would you not use them in tandem when nuclear produces energy 24/7 and the others dont? What do we do if there isn't sufficient wind for days? What happens when the sun is no longer focused on our hemisphere? I'll look up the study but I don't see a reason to axe one over the other.
Because we could use the money spent on nuclear to build more renewables and supporting infra (storage and transmission) than if we also built nuclear. The renewables will snap be finished and replacing the fossil fuels a lot sooner than the 10-15 years for a nuclear reactor.
If you look up studies into it you need a lot less storage than you'd expect to run a fully renewable grid, as the scale of the grid stabilises it to weather fluctuations. Winter also is a problem that can be overcome. That gencost report is a decent starting point, there are plenty of other studies into it though. The low cost of storage is also especially true if you're looking at the first 99% of the grid.
Maybe those studies are wrong and nuclear would be economic for that last 1%. However, if we can get to 99% years earlier by just building renewables then discover that it's harder than expected to get to 100 (somewhat unlikely, especially as more storage tech is developed), we can build nuclear then. The net carbon from getting off the majority of fossil fuels years earlier will probably make it the better decision anyway.
Also just noting that my views are based on what I've read about Australia so you should also find peoperly researched cost analysis for your country. Also for renewables to work well in smaller countries they'll need to develop more interconnects their neighbours etc.
More profitable AND safer. Humans are too stupid, lazy and bureaucratic to use nuclear.
To be fair though per terrawatt hour nuclear is safer than wind power and only beat in safety by solar.
Gotta love anti nuclear activists getting more and more desperate.
You're being decarbonised. Please do not resist.
I would love to be decarbonised, but unfortunately i dont have the patience to wait 2 decades for it to happen.
How long do you think it takes to build renewables? It's been about 20 years since most countries have started implementation and no country is 100% reliant on renewable energy or could store even a night's energy needs without generation.
It’s been about 20 years since most countries have started implementation and no country is 100% reliant on renewable energy or could store even a night’s energy needs without generation.
Lot to unpack here.
There are actually a few countries that have 100% renewable capacity such as Iceland or Scotland and a lot more that are very close.
Yes we could be 100% renewable by now but the ff industry has done a lot of lobbying and conservative politicians have dragged their feet.
It has been a lot longer than 20 years since countries started building nuclear, yet were not 100% nuclear, is that a fault of the technology? or the politicians and NIMBYs?
Wind works at night, so you dont really need to store a nights worth of energy, especially as energy consumption is much lower at night.
Decarbonised by a stagnant and expensive industry that's friends with coal? Unlikely.
Do you think you may be confusing the cause with the effect?
Alright, tell me how many more nuclear reactors are needed globally. Let's just start with decarbonizing electricity production.
And, next, tell me how long do you think that will take, judging based on the average reactor construction time since, say, 1990.
Or look it up, maybe someone wrote an article with such a response.
The best time to build them was decades ago, so clearly the second best time is to... Never? Your argument is taken straight from the oil and coal industries -- it would take too long to build up renewables infrastructure, so let's just not do it? We shouldn't build windmills, because you can't tell me how many we need globally?
You're grasping at straws. If you care about climate change, and you trust in science, there's only one valid viewpoint on nuclear energy. I welcome dissenting opinions however and would be more than happy to hear why you disagree. Just know that I took courses in college on nuclear reactors and their design as part of my degree, as well as environment engineering, and I currently work in the green energy field -- by no means am I automatically correct, but I want to see an argument that's based in science and recent scientific studies and analysis, let's say anything past 2015.
The best time to build them was decades ago, so clearly the second best time is to… Never? Your argument is taken straight from the oil and coal industries – it would take too long to build up renewables infrastructure, so let’s just not do it? We shouldn’t build windmills, because you can’t tell me how many we need globally?
You seem to be unaware of the plans and needs to reduce GHGs. We do not have decades to waste.
You're right, and that's why it would be foolish to build exclusively nuclear. It's also foolish however to not build any nuclear. The long lead time means we need to start ASAP so it's ready ASAP. With proper government action targeting bottlenecks in the process (I believe there's only one manufacturer in the world for a certain type of reactor shielding) we can speed that up.
Diversification is the way to go. At the very least, we should build enough reactors and breeder reactors to consume existing nuclear waste and drive that to effectively 0.
On top of all that, the bottleneck for deploying solar and wind en masse isn't actually solar and wind facilities (although we certainly need those) but our electric grid. It needs an upgrade in order to integrate alternative energies, and I believe estimates on doing that are ~10 years. We might end up in a situation where a nuclear reactor is actually faster to build, depending on the type.
I could not disagree more. Renewables are cheaper safer easier to deploy and secure the grid. Nuclear is dead.
Nuclear is the safest energy. It has the fewest deaths per kWh produced. Some modern reactors are able to consume nuclear waste to generate fuel as well. If you want to minimize nuclear waste, we need to build at least some reactors to shove existing waste into.
Nuclear keeps our already unsafe grid more unsafe. It’s too expensive and accidents, while rare, are disastrous. Nuclear is dead.
WTF are you talking about. You can't just claim it's unsafe and it makes the grid unsafe. Nuclear is INCREDIBLY SAFE. Other than a few disasters that happened decades ago it has the lowest deaths/kwh. And it won't help contribute to the BILLIONS of deaths that are coming due to climate change. Your fear of some Chernobyl disaster is irrational.
The solution is decentralization, which for the most part is solar and wind. Ironic that you are learning about this on a decentralized social media platform.
Until we are able to sort out the cost/tech to make a green-sourced grid (such that the role of utilities is to capture surpluses from when the sun shines and the wind blows and sell it back when transient sources aren't producing) nuclear is going to be an important part of a non-carbon-producing energy portfolio.
Already it's cheaper to bring new solar and wind online than any other sort of electrical production; the fact that those are transient supply sources is the last major obstacle to phasing carbon fuels entirely out of the grid. If nuclear can be brought safely online it could mean pushing the use of fossil energy entirely into use cases where energy density is critical (like military aviation)
If we measured the amount of destruction to our environment that fossil fuels cost long-term I bet they'd stop being profitable really quick.
Oil companies knew all about this since at least the 70s, and it was still very very profitable for them.
Turns out humans are selfish.
What about when the grid is almost entirely renewables? Is nuclear cheaper than just storage? What about storage one it's already been implemented to the point of resource scarcity?
No, nuclear is always more expensive in real world conditions. Places with mostly renewables plus in-fill from batteries and transient gas generation are a lot cheaper than nuclear. eg. South Australia.
But transient gas generation produces much more ghgs than nuclear, and when accounting for the ghg potential of metanen and normal pipeline leakage, it is even more damaging than coal.
Except overprovisioning your total load by 30% with nuclear capacity doesn't allow turning the transient gas off
It's required less and less as other forms of generation are added to the mix. eg. Tidal and pumped hydro.
1kg of lithium produces about 10kWh of storage for 15-20 years. 3-12 hours of storage is plenty for a >95% VRE grid.
1kg of uranium produces about 750W for 6 years.
There are about 20 million tonnes of conventional lithium economically accessible reserves (and it has only been of economic interest for a short time).
There are about 10 million tonnes of reasonably assured accessible uranium (not reserves, stuff assumed to exist). It has had many boom/bust cycles of prospecting.
Lithium batteries are not even being proposed as the main grid storage method.
Cobalt is the difficult one, especially with the child workers mining it.
Cobalt isn't even in most EV batteries anymore, and LMFP is replacing NMC next year.
Sodium ion will then replace LFP the year after.
It's also real weird how people only ever care about french colonial exploitation of africa when it comes to materials they pretend are in renewables and not when they're flooding villages drinking water with uranium tailings.
Profit doesn't equal good. Renewables take a lot of materials and fabrication to upkeep. Im sure theres more money to be made in renewable than there is in nuclear, that doesn't imply one is better than the other.
Its a relatively recent development however since the panels and turbines got quite a bit cheaper. Nowadays solar/wind ends up fairly similar and Nuclear is about 3x the price (with gas being more and coal being nearly 7x more). That is only some of the story as you need some storage as well but it doesn't end up in favour of Nuclear. 15 years ago Nuclear was a clear win, its just not anymore the price of Solar come down fast.
If you include the full costs of the nuclear programs including the various subsidies, wind has been cheaper for decades, possibly since before nuclear was a thing.
If we had an energy system owned by the people and not ran for profits, nuclear would be a viable, and probably even the preferred, option. We do not. We're probably going to have to fix that to get a practical and reliable clean energy grid.
No, it would just bankrupt the state. Just because something is state owned, doesn't mean the cost vanishes.
Infrastructure in this country is already so heavily subsidized by the federal government (and state, if you live somewhere that actually cares about your well-being) that we're already pretty much paying for it all.
What do you do with the waste in that scenario? Who pays for that? Or for insurance?
Who fucking cares about profit, our planet is dying.
anyone with a basic understanding of economics?
Like either we spend fuck tons of money subsidising nuclear to make it profitable or we can focus on wind and companies will build it themselves because its profitable.
What do you think is more likely: that I don't understand the basics of how capitalism works? Or maybe that the comment was a criticism of the worship of the "free market," and considering profit-motive to be the be-all, end-all?
Well considering you're conflating a market economy with capitalism.....
I care. I care that we don't make a rash decision for a potential short term solution. Why not ramp up solar / wind and other alternatives?
Storage, we have less Lithium than you seem to think, and pumped hydro is not a solution -- not that it's not a universal solution, it's simply not a solution. Implementation costs more than a nuclear reactor and maintenance and security costs are way, way higher than a nuclear reactor. We, unless you want to adopt a powerless overnight lifestyle, need on-demand power generation. Nuclear is the best, safest, cleanest, most feasible option for that until we remove all precious metals from energy storage technology.
I disagree. Nuclear is too slow costly and a huge security risk for an already unsafe grid. We need energy decentralization in addition to decarbonization. Renewables like solar and wind are 100% the best step.
The planet is fine, and will be fine after we've gone, much like it was fine after the other mass extinctions. What's dying is the environment that supports human life. Less snappy, granted, but I feel like emphasising that this is our problem and not something we should do for others might be worthwhile.
Do you never get tired of being pointlessly pedantic? Yes, the planet, as in the big rock floating in space, will continue to exist. Thanks.
There's a point to my pedantry here. Did you read my whole post or just the first few words?
This is such a weird thing to research because a government (or governments) can directly or almost directly control what is profitable in a society based upon what is needed.
not really, while the government can do stuff like incentivize this only shifts the cost somewhere else
Check out the farm bill, or ethanol in gasoline, or various other things. They also can disincentivize things, outright ban things, and add untold cost to competing stuff in order to make yours more profitable than theirs.
The research done here had to be within the existing regulatory environment, which is not a fixed constraint at all but rather a product of government and industry actors.
And all of that is just talking about more indirect controls commonly applied in neoliberal leaning countries, some countries directly control how much things cost and how much overhead there is.
Government can just take over and control whatever it wants. With no business allowed to operate the cost and therefore profit don't matter
I wonder how this determination is affected by the boondoggle that is the public funding of nuke plant construction with huge overruns paid for by consumers.
It's getting close to the point where even if you are handed one it's more cost effective to build a wind farm and let it sit.
A MWh of wind is about $33 and O&M for a MWh of nuclear is about $30.
Everyone seems to be focused on electricity production, but ammonia production (ie nitrogen fixation) for fertilizer is often overlooked. Right now it is accomplished mostly with natural gas. If we're supposed to do it instead with wind and solar, we're going to have to rely on simple and inefficient electrolysis of water to generate the hydrogen needed for the Haber process. Nuclear power plants have the advange of producing very high temperature steam, which allows for high temperature electrolysis, which is more efficient.
When you consider our fertilizer needs, it becomes clearer that nuclear power will have to play the predominant role in the transition away from fossil fuels.
No on all fronts.
The only reactor designs with any sort of history don't produce steam at high enough temperature for the sulfur cycle and haber process.
The steam they do produce costs more per kWh thermal than a kWh electric from renewables with firming so is more economic to produce with a resistor.
Mirrors exist. Point one at a rock somewhere sunny and you have a source of high temperature heat.
Direct nitrogen electrolysis is better than all these options. It's had very little research but the catalysts are much more abundant than hydrogen electrolysers and higher efficiencies are possible.
Using fertilizer at all has a huge emissions footprint (much bigger than producing it). The correct path here is regenerative agriculture, precision fermentation and reducing the amount of farmland needed by stopping beef. Nitrogen electrolysis is a good bonus on top of this.
One way or another, I'm pretty sure that we need fertilizer. What is the source of GHG if the fertilizer is produced without natural gas or other fossil fuels?
NO2, methane from byproduct/digestion, soil carbon release from land overuse. Downstream methane release due to nitrate pollution.
The overwhelming majority of cropland is for "biofuel", industrial chemicals and animal feed.
Industrial scale regenerative agriculture has lower yields in the short term, but doesn't emit NO2 and leave behind a dust bowl (requiring clearing a new forest).
Eating crops directly rather than feeding cows is far more effective than changing fertilizer source. Eating organic crops uses a small fraction of the crop land that eating beef fed on intensively grown corn does.
Biointensive methods have many times the yield as industrial agriculture but are very labour intensive -- automating them would save a lot more emissions.
Precision fermentation uses a tiny fraction of the land per unit of protein/nutrients.
Eating crops directly rather than feeding cows is far more effective than changing fertilizer source.
cows eat a lot of grass, and usually from land that isn't suitable for crops. the silage they get is mostly parts of plants that people can't or won't eat.
Paltering.
Corn and soy grown for the purpose of large animal feed exceeds the amount of cropland used directly for human consumption in areas where <20% of calories and protein come from red meat.
almost all soy (about 85%) is crushed for oil for human use. the vast majority of what's fed to animals is the industrial waste from that process.
only 7% is fed directly to animals.
i don't know the numbers for corn, but i do know that globally, about 2/3 of all crop calories go to people.
almost no soy goes to cattle at all. calling me "paltering" while jumping from one segment of agriculture to another is just hypocritical rhetoric. try addressing the topic instead of characterizing me.
I said red meat. Pork and chicken need to go too, but that'snot as urgent.
Oh shit, can you imagine if you don't exclude all the fckn costs your fckn process causes you might fckn be mire expensive?
Really?
Surprise?
Like the free insurance, or the free loans, or the underfunded decomissioning and waste management, or the unremediated mines?
Or is it the storage and grid redundancy required to meet peak load with a generator that runs at constant output and shuts down for months at a time?
So first off, the source of this article being pv-magazine makes me immediately skeptical about unbiased reporting. This part really gets me though:
The availability of this electrical source is also questioned in view of the increasingly frequent droughts expected in the coming years, causing, in particular, low river flows and therefore associated problems of cooling power plants.
And availability is not a problem with renewables then? If not the central problem? Hydroelectric is probably the most reliable of the renewables, but then we have the aforementioned problem of low river flows. Droughts could even affect pumped hydro: a much-touted solution to availability problems with wind and solar. For crying out loud, present both sides of the argument fairly! /end rant
At any rate, I can get on board the idea that in terms of adding new generating capacity, renewables may be the most competitive option at the moment? They have come a long way in a short time, though they still face major challenges on the energy storage front.
But in terms of getting away from existing fossil fuel-based power generation, is nuclear not an attractive option? The infrastructure is already there, and would essentially have to be largely abandoned as sunken assets by power utilities switching to something like wind or solar right?
Consider your average coal plant. It is a centralized heat source powering steam turbines connected to large generators and a giant transformer station feeding power out over a network of high voltage transmission lines.
What is a nuclear plant then? It is a centralized heat source powering steam turbines connected to large generators and a giant transformer station feeding power out over a network of high voltage transmission lines. I'm thinking at least some of the existing hardware could be repurposed for nuclear to leverage what already exists? Am I wrong?
Droughts could even affect pumped hydro: a much-touted solution to availability problems with wind and solar. For crying out loud, present both sides of the argument fairly! /end rant
Pumped hydro doesn't consume nearly as much water as a thermal generator. Especially if you cover the reservoirs. It also gives you an emergency backup.
Would you prefer:
Option A where you immediately have no power when the river gets low,
Or option B where you still have power after the river gets low, but can also choose to give up the ability to have some of your power at the end of a week long cloudy period in exchange for water?
Good point. I am not opposed to pumped hydro or other such schemes for storing energy. Nuclear itself tends to be employed for base load power generation and is not especially good at following demand variability. Having supply side variability (from solar, wind, etc.) makes matters worse, of course, and necessitates even more storage. But one way or another, it will be needed, and pumped hydro tends to scale better than say battery farms.
I wonder about option B. As it stands where I live at least, there is not much wiggle room in terms of getting people to use less power in the event of a shortage. For example, the local utility has offered free programmable thermostats in exchange for giving them the ability to control power usage in the event of a shortage, but I understand uptake of the program has been low thus far. I suspect in that scenario, they would have to bring fossil fuel power generation online.
Where I live is not in a drought-prone area at least, but it is also not suitable for pumped hydro given the geography. There was talk in the local news recently about a compressed air storage system that may get built nearby our natural gas plant. This juxtaposition makes some sense when you think about it, since it is a site that already features well-established grid hookups, so they can piggyback on that. The province as a whole is generating something like 60% nuclear, 32% renewables (mostly hydro), and 8% fuels. Recently, there was a major refurbishment of some of the nuclear reactors and it came in on budget and ahead of schedule, so the argument that anything nuclear must automatically involve cost overruns is perhaps no longer true, though good lord we have seen some epic ones in the past, particularly after the utility was privatized.
Really interesting and quite easy to read article.
In fact, the french energy policy is to invest in new "little" nuclear plants.
I'm not sure our politics will consider these scientifical comments...
They still seem to handwave away the issue of baseload, which is entirely frustrating. As I seem to understand it, it's just a 1:1 comparison of costs.
They use nebulous phrases like "Flexibility is more important" and point to batteries or energy saving methods getting cheaper, without actually including it in the comparison.
Although if it's true EU plants were randomly closed from production 50% of the time baseload doesn't really make a difference I guess.
"Baseload generator" isn't a useful concept. And grid reliability (which is a useful concept) is thought about. It just doesn't fit into a soundbite like winddon'tblowsundon'tshine.
For reference, 5kWh home batteries currently retail for about $1300 so this would add <10% to the capital cost compared to recent nuclear projects. Pumped hydro is about half the price per capacity, but a bit more per watt. The former is dropping at 10-30% per year, so by the time a nuclear plant is finished, storage cost would be negligible.
Even in the counterfactual case where the ~5% of "other" generation is only possible with fossil fuel, focusing on it is incredibly myopic because the resources spent on that 1% of global emissions could instead be used for the other 70% which isn't from electricity and has different reliability constraints.
Doesn't the Australian model ask for a 4-6% fossil or other fuel input? I don't see how base load, nuclear or other fuels aren't relevant to discuss, as nucleur is like 4% of global output right now.
Four points:
The profile of other is short spikes 5-100 hours a few times a year.
1 year of delay is equivalent to 20 years of exclusively using fossil fuels for "other".
It's not even obvious that adding nuclear reactors would reduce this because they're so geographically and temporally inflexible. France has 63GW of nuclear capacity, <45GW of average load and 61GW of winter peak load with vast amounts of storage available via interconnect to hydro countries. They still use 5% gas on top of the rest of the "other" (which is about 10-25GW).
5% of other from gas adds about 20g CO2e/kg per kWh to the total. Less than the margin between different uranium sources.
Running 40% of the capacity 10% of the time puts your nuclear energy in the realm of $1-3/kWh. The list of ways of generating or storing 6% of your energy for <$1/kWh is basically endless.
That's about 4-8TW of capacity worldwide. 1kg of uranium is good for fuelling about 750W of reactor on a 6 year fuel cycle. Loading those reactors would require digging up all of the known and assumed-to-exist uranium immediately.
Nuclear is an irrelevant distraction being pushed by those who know it will not work. You only have to glance at the policy history or donor base of the politicians pushing for it in Sweden, Canada, Australia, UK, Poland, etc etc or the media channels pushing it to see how obvious it is that it's fossil fuel propaganda.
It is obviously obviously true that it's a non-solution. It fails on every single metric. All of the talking points about alleged advantages are the opposite of the truth without exception.
I don't know enough about the topic to have an argument against, just trying to educate myself. I am curious how you would respond to this person in another thread:
I assume your response would be essentially similar to your previous comment. That we can develop the battery tech and it would be easier just to use fossil fuels as a bridge anyway?
That's pretty damn cool to hear.
I wish my country (Germany) hadn't crash-shutdown the nuclear power plants we still had after Fukushima and instead shut down the coal/gas ones but eh... at the time, I even agreed with them, but that was at a time when climate disasters were far less prominent on everyone's minds. That now renewables are starting to pull ahead in most things is amazing.
A big problem to solve now will be how to swap the majority of the world away from coal/gas.
Is simple mathematics now "research"
Ok but how viable are those renewables? In Louisiana, dispite all of our water and river, hydroelectric power is impossible, because the elevation is to gradual. In normal weather new orleans is often cloudy for solar panels on a large scale.
The point I am saying is that cost doesn't account for a lot of things
The market absolutely accounts for those things.
If renewables are more expensive in your specific area than nuclear, then that makes sense for your area.
This isn't like choosing a path in a video game. We can do all the things.
If you want profit, why not pick coal or natural gaz?
I mean really?
You know why. denying reality doesn't erase it
If you want to waste all your money, why not pick nuclear?
Electricity should be expensive for all the benefits it brings
And? Who gives a shit? We need whatever is cleanest.
Also renewables.
Also incorrect. We need whatever reduces total cumulative emissions the most.
A solar panel today does a lot more than a nuclear reactor in 2045. And installing 5W of solar (which will average 1W) today only costs you the opportunity to build 0.15W of nuclear (which will average 0.12W).
Nuclear isn't very clean when we can poison a quarter of the earth with it because we're too dumb to handle it.
Renewables don't make money they cost money. They generate revenue because of subsidies and because manufacturing green energy technology is a dirty and extremely lucrative business. The part they dont tell you is that if u wana make solar panels u need to destroy the environment to do it. If u wana build a windmill its millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of precious minerals strip mined out of the earth. Thats your profit.
This is always the response dumb people trying to sound smart give.
Literally any piece of equipment manufactured today requires "precious minerals strip mined out of the earth." You're saying "renewables cause enviromental harm" while ignoring that literally ANY energy source causes environmental harm. WTF is your point?
The point is. Renewable energy isnt there yet. Hydro electric is the best we have. If you want to replace a gas or coal fired grid. You cannot do it with 100% renewable energy. The only tech we have that can replace fossil fuel grids is nuclear power. I'm not saying its the only way. I'm saying its the only thing that works at this time unless something happens to radically reduce energy demand and the type of radical reduction required simply isnt gonna happen. As for the profit. Windmills dont make money. They cost money. They are more expensive to maintain than the energy they produce. 2.5-5m USD to build one. They cost 1.3m USD give a few thousand per megawatt of electricity producing capacity. Maintenances costs can range around 45-50k annually. Land costs. Business overhead. Etc. You go thru that to produce 1-3 MW of electricity.... Thats not enough to do much of anything. And u cannot suddenly demand a huge spike of energy from a windmill farm like you can from coal or gas or nuclear. Solar same thing. Sun not shining? No power.
My point overall is these are not good cost effective alternatives to current energy production. They are expensive and inefficient alternatives to what we have. Are they greener? Yes they are but under the current technology. Green energy doesn't get the job done that HAS to get done.
Same for nuclear if we're being honest
Every wind turbine requires over 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms of neodymium, a RARE EARTH METAL!!!!
Yeah no shit. We already knew nuclear was not profitable, but it’s clean & makes tons of power, so it’s a good deal for everyone that isn’t a business & wants cheap & clean energy.
I'd love for you to see the Uranium and Thorium mines in Canada and tell me how clean that looks to you.
Uranium and thorium mines are just as clean as the rare earth metal mines needed for PV cells. This is kind of a moot point. We need carbon free energy now and solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear are all part of the mix of solutions needed. There are many considerations currently being made to determine which technologies should be used in what locations.
Make sure to compare with a West Virginia mountaintop-removal coal mine.
The point of this research is that renewable are cheaper. So why would we invest our money in the more extensive option?
Government isn’t business. It should not be chasing a profit margin. The decisions should be around sustainability, ecological friendliness, and robustness against failure
Unfortunately, government is a business. They are beholden to the same profits and losses that any other business is subjected to based on market conditions. The government has to answer to shareholders (citizens) and it's creditors (BoC and other countries).
In more general sense profitability is robustness against failure.
If only there were organizations of people who were known for building really high quality technology without a profit motive... Like some kind of space program 🤔🤔
They had a profit motive, like space race, cold war and all that. You know, USA and USSR were really preparing for The Global Thermonuclear War back then.
And, of course, all the people participating in that were being paid.
Nah, due to Negative Externalities and things like Tragedy Of The Commons it's quite common for companies to be making massive profits whilst destroying the very environment they need to thrive.
I mean, look at Polution, look at Global Warming, look at Overfishing, look at the 2008 Crash - without an external entity (i.e. the State) to force them to change their ways or rescue them, most economic entities in the pursuit of profitability will act in ways that systemically will eventually destroy the very things they need to be profitable.
Stuff like Negative Externalities is pretty basic Economics.
That naive idea of your of how economics works probably came from stuff you heard from politicians, not from reading books...
While without a profit motive of any kind they won't exist.
I really don't get how those things you mentioned existing negate what I said. These are orthogonal. Well, except for that weird logic that it's about choosing between two teams, but nobody can be that stupid, right?
Don't confuse profit with capital
Define "clean"
Nuclear should be the only non renewable power we use at scale. Oil makes sense for emergency situations (it's portable and is stable forever) and where energy density is most important (like aircraft, for now). Coal can fuck right off.
oil is ironically not stable forever
Though most people's idea of "old bad gas" is defined not by pure gasoline, but ethanol-containing gasoline. Ethanol gasoline is hydrophilic -- leave a can sitting over winter, and you're going to get some rough running and billowing water vapor coming out the exhaust. Pure petroleum products are way more stable.
In my opinion clean is anything that doesn't emit out of smokestacks.
Also in this case it doesn't emit out of smoke stacks while the sun's down and the wind's not blowing.
Dams are terrible for the environment so hydro is out. Nuclear is cleaner than hydro.
Um.... dams and nuclear tend to go hand in hand. They need shit tons of water in reserve for cooling. Alternatively, they can draw river water in, but any power plant that dumps hot water into the river is damaging the aquatic ecosystem.
What? Damns have nothing to do with nuclear. You're thinking of in Ukraine and that's unique situation. Also that dam was blown up and the nuclear power plant didn't explode.
Take the nuclear titties near me, not a dam in sight.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station
Yes, because it is right next to the ocean. I wasn't saying all nuke plants have dams. All nuke plants have water, and sometimes to have a sufficient quantity of water, dams need to be built. North Carolina has zero natural lakes, every lake in NC is made by a dam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuire_Nuclear_Station
cleaner* than fossil
people say "clean" when they mean "doesn't produce greenhouse gasses". Nuclear power is absolutely not "clean". Waste sites will need to be monitored for like a thousand years to prevent everything from natural disaster leakage to terrorist aquisition of nuclear materials. The reality is a new powerplant is just the 5% down payment on a nuclear waste mortgage.
Or build breeder reactors to convert the waste back into fuel and eliminate it entirely. Building nuclear power would literally reduce the amount of nuclear waste we have versus doing nothing.
And yet, all these pseudoscience anti nuclear people who talk about nuclear waste all the time don't seem to be advocating for that. Curious, isn't it?
Look the psuedoscience anti nuclear people aren't going to be what kills nuclear power.
The problem is the option is to "replace pseudo science oil barons with pseudo science nuclear power barons." Society isn't largely run by scientists, its run by lawyers and business idiots.
If you operate under the assumption nuclear will be treated more carefully and delicately than oil, well I too would like to live in that star trek communism universe.
It will get dumped in water supplies. It will end up in food supplies. The reality is there is a difference between "looks good on paper" and "even some lawyer who doesn't believe in germ theory won't fuck it up".
That's a very valid point, but it isn't unique to nuclear. Solar panel manufacturing produces some nasty chemical waste. Some might be manufactured using hydrofluoric acid even, which scares the living shit out of me.
There are going to be safety and waste issues with everything, and they're going to be different types of hazards. I would rather drink water contaminated with some nuclear waste than have contact with hydrofluoric acid. Ideally I'd like neither.
I'm not entirely sure what the solution is. It's hardly worse than oil (which also uses HF!), but that's not adequate. What we need is regulations and regulators that make it cheaper to throw as much safety factors as possible on something vs pay fines for violations. I'm confident we have the technology needed, we just need to make sure it's actually used.
If the pro nuclear people managed to build something that actually eliminates nuclear waste, it would take away most arguments of the anti nuclear people.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/nuclear-waste-us-could-power-the-us-for-100-years.html
The technology exists, and has for decades. It wasn't economical so it wasn't considered for commercialization, although some companies are looking at it now.
If the anti nuclear people actually bothered to do proper research, perhaps we would've had enough support and outcry to build more of these reactors over the last several decades.
Depleted uranium can't be used in fission bombs.
The nuclear fuel is pointless from military perspective... It just get burred into the ground, and there isn't like 50 GTons if it every year
Not how it works lmao
The question has always been what does one do when the renewables aren't providing enough power (ex: nights, etc). The current solution is natural gas. It would be a big improvement if we would use a carbon-free source like nuclear instead.
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is an old and proven method for load balancing intermittent power sources. Would like to see more of that as geography permits.
The "as geography permits" part is a big obstacle, unfortunately.
Actually it isn't if you stop only looking at places that are also suitable as power plant, that is, have a big river flowing through them.
You can do pumped hydro in an old mineshaft.
Can you? To store the energy you need to pump up; to use it you need to flow back down. Where is the ‘down’ or ‘up’ from a mine shaft?
I’d also question if the volume would be worth it.
Edit: maybe you are thinking compressed air?
...the up is at the surface and the down is at the bottom of the mine shaft? I'm not talking about horizontal ones, of course. You let water in, generating power, and then, to regenerate empty space and with that the capacity to again generate power, you spend energy to pump it up.
As to volume, there's some gigantic mineshafts, but even small ones might warrant small installations it's not like some pipes and a pump and generator are much of an investment. Of course, don't try that in a salt mine geology will play an important part.
And lastly: Mineshafts aren't the only option. There's a lot of mountains, and they have many sides, and also plateaus and valleys. Build two concrete basins, connect them via pipe, ship in water from somewhere, voila, pumped hydro storage.
I guess I wasn’t clear where on the surface the storage is. Do they still make a dam type area to store the ‘high’ water, or is it just a different part of the mine which is closer to the surface?
I was able to find some mine numbers… yeah; insane. Especially something like an open cut mine which is functionally already lake shaped.
Not in China.
It's an obstacle for anything, including nuclear. Just ask Japan.
That will not remotely cover baseline loads and is not without significant efficiency loss due to the pumping phase.
All commonly used forms of energy storage have some efficiency loss. Pumped storage is not perfect but my understanding is that it usually comes at a 10-25% loss, which isn't all that shabby all things considered.
According to the article, the researchers concluded that nuclear reactors are not a good fit for that role.
The growing idea is to just have a shit load of renewables, everywhere. The wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun shines through the clouds. If you have a ridiculous excess total capacity then even when you're running at limited capacity you could still cover the demand. Basically, most of our renewable infrastructure would actually be curtailed or offline a lot of the time.
And that opens up opportunities for energy intensive industries like aluminium or hydrogen production to run whilst there's an excess of energy
I'm all for green hydrogen production, it's using hydrogen in place of fossil fuels that bothers me. We already have a shit load of demand for hydrogen from industrial uses, and it would take 3x the world's total renewable capacity in 2019, dedicated solely to hydrogen production, to meet this with green hydrogen. If we start adding transportation into that demand we'll never make it, and it will be far less efficient than other energy sources (eg batteries).
So yeah, we should have green hydrogen production, but we shouldn't listen to those same people when they say they think it should also be used for transportation. That's just trying to increase the size of the market to increase profits.
Hydrogen works well with a renewable grids because you can take advantage of the times there is excess energy production so that power doesn't just go to waste.
We do need to be careful because hydrogen is often sold as a pipe dream by gas companies to convince us to use gas (e.g. "this new gas turbine power plant can be converted to hydrogen", even though that'd be a workload less efficient than fuel cells).
As for its use in transport, it looks like battery electric vehicles have won that battle for personal vehicles. Both have their advantages but in practice there are few enough fuel stations for hydrogen and enough chargers that that's not going to flip.
However, batteries are entirely unsuitable to long distance, high load transport like trucks. Ideally they'd be replaced by rail, but that's not happening anytime soon in many places so hydrogen likely will be the solution there.
Here's an example of what can be done with 5 hours of storage. 5 hours is a 25% participation rate of V2G where the participants offer a third of their battery capacity.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for-australia-is-feasible-and-affordable-with-just-a-few-hours-of-storage/
If going with the (false) assumption that nuclear can hit 100% grid penetration, it would take decades to offset the carbon released by causing a single year of delay.
The lowest carbon "let's pretend storage is impossible and go with 100% nuclear" would still start with exclusively funding VRE.
Lol at trying to pass that link off as a valid, unbiased source.
lol at a rando discrediting an article that gives supporting data. Did you even read it? Write your own well supported opinion and submit it here. We’ll wait.
Oh is that a new rule? You can't point out garbage, bias sources unless you've written a dissertation on it? Fucking rube.
Good point. You are a garbage biased source.
Great comeback. Very cute.
But why don't you go ahead and go get a juice box and let the adults speak.
TIL an "adult" is someone who denigrates a link without even reading it or having any substantive data points to support their points. Sounds like you have plenty of juice boxes to give out.
From the linked paper. They mention some other options for storage like batteries (plenty of environmental issues there though) but based on the quoted text I have a hard time taking this seriously if they actually expect people to change their behavior.
Plug in car. Press the "I would like to only pay $100/yr to fuel this please" button.
Later when you leave for work press the "I would like the house to be cool when I get home and also want to pay half as much for AC" button.
Buy the 1.5m wide water heater that stores 10kWh of hot water and lasts a week between heatings rather than the 70cm one that lasts a day.
Such an unconscionable burden.
I think innovation at the consumption end is going to help a lot. On Technology Connections I saw an electric induction stove that could be powered from a regular socket. It had a battery that would trickle charge throughout the day and then use the batteries to power the induction cooktops, as well as a couple of plugs. If widely deployed and in other appliances, with a little smarts that could provide power leveling at the home level.
Another solution would be adding some intelligence to water heaters. Have a temperature control valve on the output where you set the temperature, and program the water heater get to 160-180°F when electricity is cheap. This would be a thermal battery that would easily level out demand for electricity for heating water.
Or you could do thermal storage by heating a house very warm/cold prior to a large cold snap/heat wave, and letting it coast down/up to a temperature instead of heating/cooling a lot during the cold/hot weather. He's got a video on this technique here
This has been done for close to a century in wind or run of river hydro heavy countries (as well as some coal ones).
The water heater has a buffer tank and is attached to a meter that only runs when a signal is sent across the power line. This stores about 20kWh for a 300L tank.
Modern insulation would allow going up to a few m^3 for a couple weeks' worth.
Combine that with some radiant floor heating on a nice thick concrete slab and you could use the battery for home heating. (Though it would need a lot of water.)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
"Not enough power from renewables? Just turn off your fridge for a few days and you'll be fine!"
Honestly that sentiment has strong "blame the consumer" vibes that seems to pervade climate arguments.
Sure, people can reduce consumption, but at best its a stopgap, not a solution.
There's stuff like heaters and to a degree things like washing machines that can shape the time they're active to whenever there's a lull.
Consider Britain: Each time the BBC runs a popular show you get an energy usage spike once it's over because people are getting up and make themselves a cuppa. Doesn't really make sense to run the heater in the tank for your shower at the same time, or charge your car, that can wait a bit.
Nuclear is a terrible fit for peaker plants, that's not how it works. If it isn't selling energy at as close to 100% of the time as is feasible it's losing money.
Nuclear is not, and cannot be, a gap coverage solution. Due to xenon/iodine poisoning and decay heat management you need to keep a reactor critical as long as possible to be economical. That's independent of the problem of keeping the water hot that fossil fuel generators share. You can't just turn a reactor on and off.
It can provide a baseload though where solar can provide extra power during the heat for places where the summer and days are the power intensive part, rather than winter and nights. You still need a short-term stop gap as the sun sets but it's still hot out, but even if that was just powered by NG it would be a huge step forward. Adding greener energy storage options to store extra power nuclear or wind could generate overnight would be better.
Btw, could a small percent of nuclear reactors be turned on/off seasonally, potentially transporting fuel between the north in the winter and the south in the summer?
Yes, but if you spend the money making a reactor, you really should just use it. Uranium is pretty cheap, it's the reactor that's expensive.
Fair. If a grid was just powered by batteries, solar, wind, and existing nuclear plants, which would be the most effective to turn off when demand is too low?
Keep the reactors running to avoid that issue. As long as they are providing enough power when the renewables aren't, we successfully cut out natural gas from the power grid.
Columbia station load follows within a certain range set by nearby hydro. It can be done. The economics aren't even that bad, as fuel is one of the cheaper inputs to the reactor.
While I agree completely, it is troublesome that you, BombOmOm, are saying this... :/ username checks no fly list out.
Sometimes, a kinetic response is the only reasonable reaction. ;p Asking nicely doesn't stop a Russian war of conquest.
The best solution is having EVs plugged into the grid at night. VTG is the easy solution to peaker needs.
Then you are getting into the issue of the power company eating up your charge cycles on your EV battery. Who pays for the fact that my battery now has half the design lifetime due to constant cycling because it's feeding the grid?
These are easily solved details. For example, by providing power on the grid you are in essence a power company. Perhaps you get reimbursed based upon what you provide. You know net metering is already a thing, right?
I’m just saying that we might need to get away from the idea that a car battery is solely an owner expense. They’d have to be subsidized or there would be huge equity issues. And yes “I do know about net metering,right.”
Yes you are correct in stating that if you used your car battery for grid usage you would need to get reimbursed for that. And I gave you an easy solution. This could actually be a profit center for EV owners and if you have your car plugged into the grid at peak times, you would get reimbursed more per kWh (ie TOU) with the net metering. Win/win for everybody except utilities and fossil fuel providers.
The renewables-only crowd is just ignorant about this simple fact.
The future of energy will be dominated by solar and nuclear power. With hydro, geothermal and wind playing supporting roles, depending on geography.
The only question is, how much fossil fuels do we burn until then?
Those who oppose nuclear are really just in favour of burning fossil fuels in the interim. But the inevitable switch to nuclear will come as fossil fuels are depleted.
Nature has given us the atom as the most dense and durable way to store energy. That will never change.
Typical energy density of ore in a new uranium mine burned in an LWR is about the same of coal.
All of the economic/not too damaging stuff together would power the world for about 3 years.
at night perhaps they could sleep
Profitability is so much not the point here and also, there's no reason for different energy production sources (especially ones that are base power vs incidental power) to be in conflict. Do both of them.
We don't have to like it but unfortunately profitability is by far the number one driver for...well everything. So little is accomplished by way of altruism. People are greedy. The best way to successfully incentivize climate action is for environmentally friendly actions to become the most profitable and be advertised as such.
So I agree with you that both options should be used. But I disagree that profitability is not the point. Money is always the point and always has been.
Price of energy is key to the success of every economy.
Yeah exactly. None of it is profitable if you can't meet instant demand changes at any time of day. Build the nukes to meet full demand needs and supplement them with "more profitable" options for redundancy.
None of this is profitable if you can meet demand power at will either.
It's just a scarcity game that those in power use to keep things ticking along.
What is infrastructure to most, is a tuned revenue machine to a very few.
The purpose of a system can be determined by its output, and it's working quite well in that aspect.
I've never had a rolling black out or brown out but we burn coal around here and there are proposals for some small nuclear sites. Yes there's some solar and wind as well but we are a net exporter of energy to the western states.
There is, actually, a conflict. Renewables are more dynamic in production. You can turn them on and off quickly, you can scale them quickly too. You can't do that with nuclear plants. Baseload is not a goal, it's a limit. That's why the nuclear energy sector is friends with the coal sector.
Example of Nuclear-Coal friendship from Poland: https://twitter.com/stepien_przemek/status/1642908210913853442
Example of Nuclear-Coal friendship from the USA: https://www.energyandpolicy.org/generation-now-inc/
A deeper understanding here: "The duck in the room - the end of baseload" https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/the-duck-in-the-room-the-end-of-baseload
I would love to know what oil company you heard that from, since it's absolutely not true. You can both turn them off quickly (faster, in fact, than LNG or Coal), start them up quickly (sub minutes) and change production quickly. These have all been features since 1960's era reactors, and we're around 10 generations past them.
I think they might be referring to turning down the reactors, which I think is an actual difficulty with them. By no means however is it a reason to not use them, it just means you employ it wisely. Have it meet most of the demand, and use solar and wind and others to supplement to full demand.
That's not difficult. Nuclear is extremely expensive.
With renewables you just sell it to the grid for whatever gas generated electricity is going for. Which is currently still a fucking lot. Thanks Russia.
Oh, it gets worse. Russia is big on nuclear, they have a whole agency that deals in nuclear in Europe, it's called ROSATOM.
This is related to other post with the fossil-fuel sponsored ecomodernist girl whining about Greenpeace and nuclear:
Russia lobbied to have the EU include nuclear energy and fossil methane to be included in the "sustainable" taxonomy: https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20220517-greenpeace-report-russland-taxonomie.pdf (PDF)
Russia has a good stranglehold on nuclear energy: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-14/russia-s-grip-on-nuclear-power-trade-is-only-getting-stronger and many European powers ...compliant to that.
Russia's nuclear trade with Europe flowing amid Ukraine war https://web.archive.org/web/20221011224411/https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/russias-nuclear-trade-europe-flowing-amid-ukraine-war-90691865
Russia’s Grip on Nuclear-Power Trade Is Only Getting Stronger https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-nuclear-power-uranium-plants-europe-imports-germany-sanctions-ukraine-war/
Here's an article in German: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/uran-abhaengigkeit-russland-koennte-den-usa-noch-erhebliche-schmerzen-zufuegen-a-cad81a53-4704-4842-a641-1b6191e4add5
It's even more complicated, but building nuclear now in Europe would mean more dependency on Russian nuclear fuel and nuclear tech.
This includes France, the nuclear postergirl:
French Nuclear Power Crisis Frustrates Europe’s Push to Quit Russian Energy https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-power-russia.html
France accused of funding Putin's war effort by buying his nuclear fuel https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/12/02/france-accused-aiding-putins-war-importing-russian-nuclear-fuel/
It's not just complicated, with many limits, but the useless yammer of nuclear-fanboys is just using up air in discourse.
Building more nuclear will not help with with climate warming mitigation. And it has its own problems with climate, as France knows...
(most recent time this happened, again) France to reduce nuclear power generation due to heat wave https://www.laprensalatina.com/france-to-reduce-nuclear-power-generation-due-to-heat-wave/ from a few weeks ago.
Building More nuclear will help with climate warming. None of your links deal with that.
how will it help? the stuff comes online in decades in the future. We need to reduce emissions now.
I agree we need help now. There's a reason it comes so far in the future and all of them are artificial.
If we really wanted to we could build safe nuclear tomorrow. Okay that's a bit of an exaggeration but you know what I mean.
K, but this isn't about profits. This is about not destroying the environment, which nuclear can help with (you know if nobody bombs the plant)
But it's also about cost. Nuclear is far more expensive upfront, more expensive to maintain, and more expensive to decommission. Cheap, agile renewables will be an easier option for the vast majority of the planet
We would be really stupid to worry about money when trying to save the planet. But, what did I know, I'm just some guy on the internet
Financiers tend to worry about money, yes.
First option: a wind/solar plant with costs that aren't going to increase substantially, power being sold within a couple of years therefore repayments will begin quickly.
Second option: a nuclear proposal - massive costs upfront, that will inevitably skyrocket while the completion date slips and slips, and power being sold 10-15 year in the future so repayments are a long way off.
It's not a difficult choice.
If your argument is that we should nationalize the energy sector so government can get involved more directly to mitigate financing issues, sure. We both know that's not going to happen.
How does one provide power when the renewables don't provide enough power (nights, etc)? Our current solution is natural gas. Nuclear is a huge step up as a carbon-free provider.
Storage, there are many options. Pumped hydro is great for places with elevation change, molten salt is great for desert climates. Batteries, green hydrogen, compressed gas, etc.
We've been storing energy for thousands of years. It's not difficult in the way nuclear fusion, SMRs, or thorium are difficult.
We're also moving towards EVs. I'd like to see investment in using a fleet of connected EVs as a giant battery. Your energy company can pay you for making 10-15% of your EV battery available for grid storage and you can opt out if you need that extra range for a trip.
The largest battery on the planet would power my workplace for less than two hours- if it could meet the instant demand, which it cannot.
I'm all for energy storage, but I realise there's a lot of work to do.
1,200MW isn't enough? Where do you work?
Why do you think batteries can't meet instant demand? That's kind of their whole thing.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/05/worlds-biggest-battery-with-1200mw-capacity-set-to-be-built-in-nsw-hunter-valley-australia
We draw a very consistent 950MW, 24hrs a day.
The battery you linked, if it goes ahead, will max out delivery at 400MW, which it can sustain for 3 hours before its 1200MWh storage is exhausted.
Batteries can deliver power instantly, but not beyond their max output.
There's heaps of interest and proposals, and I hope they go ahead. But there's a lot of work to do.
Right, but you realize that's far from typical for a workplace?
Yes, but, funnily enough, we produce a lot of stuff for the renewable energy industry.
For processes like that though, nuclear would make the electricity too expensive to be economic, renewables wouldn't.
The article talks about the coming droughts and water shortages. Pumped hydro is nice, if you have water.
There's evaporation, which can be mitigated by floating solar panels, but pumped hydro is a closed system, it doesn't consume water.
You save the water in a hole, then pump it back and forth. You can cover it with PV to stop evaporation
This is also good for the droughts as you have emergency water.
We*rich countries would be really stupid to worry about money when trying to save the planet.There's a lot of world outside the US, Europe, and China.
This is everybody's problem dude.
Correct. Which is why cheap and agile renewables will remain a good option for less wealthy countries.
Everything is about profits. Otherwise we wouldn't even be in this mess.
Ah, yes, love my last vacations in chernobyl
Nah, the power company likes the profits from nuclear way better.
The secret is that they can bill the ratepayers for all the cost overruns, while keeping the extra profits on the cost-plus construction contract for the shareholders.
(Source: I'm a Georgia Power ratepayer being absolutely reamed for Plant Vogtle 3 and 4, and the Georgia Public Service Commission isn't doing a single goddamned thing to hold Georgia Power to account or to help people like me.)
Yeah, but think of the poor corporations.
Stop all the hate for nuclear. It's just a way for the fossil fuel industry to cause infighting among those of us who care about the climate. If we can make energy free or close to it, we should. The closer everything comes to being free the better.
People pushing nuclear is a way for fossil fuels industry to keep us reliant on them for the next 20 years while we build power plants.
More than that as we will need to pay them to maintain storage which they won't be keen to do without tons of government and tax payer assistance
Nuclear is the future. Stop trying to deny it. We should all be running it by now this shit was made like 60 years ago. But no, we'll just eat smog I guess. Damn my feeds are kind of depressing today.
Fission is today. Fusion is the future.
It blows my mind we are avoiding this? You want jobs? Clean stable energy? Its fucken here dude. Just build some plants. They only need to be properly maintained to avoid disaster. If we truly are an intelligent species that should be easy as hell.
And there is the issue.
I hate that its true, but yeah. Our city management accross the nation has long been pocketing maintenance budgets. Cause shit is run down everywhere in "the greatest nation".
"disaster" is a big word for what happens with a nuclear accident.
The fire in Hawaï or the climate change are disasters. A hurricane is a disaster. Chernobyl or fukushima were disasters in the media much more than in the reality of things.
Cars kill more people every year than nuclear energy did since we use it. In fact, this is still true even if you account for atomic bombs...
Well, it comes at a cost, though: https://apnews.com/article/georgia-power-vogtle-nuclear-plant-bills-rates-9b9481bc44f6a4c985ab7702a553e21e
Energy should be nationalised. Energy does not need to be run for profit. It should be at a cost.
Even if it's nationalized we still want energy generation as low cost as possible so we can use the national budget for other things.
Sure, but cost isn't the sole (or main) consideration when you remove profit-motive.
Also, you only need to break even, so it will always be more affordable than private sector.
That just goes for everything, though. Thats not specific to any one industry. Clean and abundant energy will come at a cost and that should just be acceptable.
No its not, anyone thats actually gone over the basic numbers knows this. Nuclear power is expensive to build, takes decades to start and takes a lot of highly skilled workers. Wind is cheaper per MW, more profitable, buildable in 6 months, can be put in even remote areas, does not require highly skilled workers for normal operation and is more carbon efficient.
We should probably use both. How much mw/hr does wind produce compared to nuclear? Once nuclear is up and running what are the continual costs and what are the benefits? Theres a lot more to ask here than just "what is more profitable". Your points on winds' adaptability is good as well as your points on timeframe. But I don't think a single energy source is the actual answer. I'm thinking we supplement these energy sources with each other and that would bring us completely off fossil fuels.
That depends entirely on how much of each you build, but wind is less expensive to build per MW than nuclear. Once nuclear is up and running what are the continual costs and what are the benefits? Nuclear costs more to run as the systems are far more complicated in order to make them safe and you need a relatively large workforce of highly trained mechanical, electrical and nuclear engineers which cost a lot to employ. Whereas for the most part wind farms are completely autonomous, in exchange for very few benefits. The profitibaility takes into account quite a lot really and so its better to build the more profitable one as you can then use that profit to build more, which gets us off of fossil fuels faster./
I mean even cursory searches say you are wrong. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close, but sure dude.
What is this supposed to prove wrong exactly?
That nuclear produces more MW/HR than wind at an exponential rate.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-1462/wind-power-and-nuclear-power/
"Capacity factor is the feature highlight of this info-graphic poster. To make a graphic representation of how this compares to one nuclear power plant rated at 1154 megawatts (MW), this shows the full count of all 2077 2-MW wind turbines in a 24"x36" poster. This is what would be required to match the nuclear power plant output even if this array of turbines could hypothetically run continuously at only 25 percent of its rated capacity."
I'm giving you sources. You can downvote but I don't see your numbers reflected in any study.
Okay? I never said anything contrary to that though? So what's your point?
The cost per MWh produced over a year, with grid + storage costs, is the number that matters. Wind and solar combined are much cheaper than nuclear there. For a source look that the most recent csiro gencost report. It's produced by the Australian national science body and basically says that in the best case if smrs reach large scale adoption and operate at a very high capacity factor... They're still way too expensive for the power they produce when compared to wind and solar with transmission and storage.
To get off fossil fuels faster it needs to be economic, and nuclear isn't economic. Renewables are
But why would you not use them in tandem when nuclear produces energy 24/7 and the others dont? What do we do if there isn't sufficient wind for days? What happens when the sun is no longer focused on our hemisphere? I'll look up the study but I don't see a reason to axe one over the other.
Because we could use the money spent on nuclear to build more renewables and supporting infra (storage and transmission) than if we also built nuclear. The renewables will snap be finished and replacing the fossil fuels a lot sooner than the 10-15 years for a nuclear reactor.
If you look up studies into it you need a lot less storage than you'd expect to run a fully renewable grid, as the scale of the grid stabilises it to weather fluctuations. Winter also is a problem that can be overcome. That gencost report is a decent starting point, there are plenty of other studies into it though. The low cost of storage is also especially true if you're looking at the first 99% of the grid.
Maybe those studies are wrong and nuclear would be economic for that last 1%. However, if we can get to 99% years earlier by just building renewables then discover that it's harder than expected to get to 100 (somewhat unlikely, especially as more storage tech is developed), we can build nuclear then. The net carbon from getting off the majority of fossil fuels years earlier will probably make it the better decision anyway.
Also just noting that my views are based on what I've read about Australia so you should also find peoperly researched cost analysis for your country. Also for renewables to work well in smaller countries they'll need to develop more interconnects their neighbours etc.
More profitable AND safer. Humans are too stupid, lazy and bureaucratic to use nuclear.
To be fair though per terrawatt hour nuclear is safer than wind power and only beat in safety by solar.
Source
Not actually safer, per kilowatt hour though.
Gotta love anti nuclear activists getting more and more desperate. You're being decarbonised. Please do not resist.
I would love to be decarbonised, but unfortunately i dont have the patience to wait 2 decades for it to happen.
How long do you think it takes to build renewables? It's been about 20 years since most countries have started implementation and no country is 100% reliant on renewable energy or could store even a night's energy needs without generation.
You can build a 50MW wind farm in 6 months
https://www.edfenergy.com/energywise/all-you-need-to-know-about-wind-power#:~:text=Wind%20farms%20can%20be%20built,last%20between%2020%E2%80%9325%20years.
Lot to unpack here.
There are actually a few countries that have 100% renewable capacity such as Iceland or Scotland and a lot more that are very close.
Yes we could be 100% renewable by now but the ff industry has done a lot of lobbying and conservative politicians have dragged their feet.
It has been a lot longer than 20 years since countries started building nuclear, yet were not 100% nuclear, is that a fault of the technology? or the politicians and NIMBYs?
Wind works at night, so you dont really need to store a nights worth of energy, especially as energy consumption is much lower at night.
Decarbonised by a stagnant and expensive industry that's friends with coal? Unlikely.
https://i.imgur.com/4z837gc.png
nuclear energy is stagnant and decaying.
Do you think you may be confusing the cause with the effect?
Alright, tell me how many more nuclear reactors are needed globally. Let's just start with decarbonizing electricity production.
And, next, tell me how long do you think that will take, judging based on the average reactor construction time since, say, 1990.
Or look it up, maybe someone wrote an article with such a response.
The best time to build them was decades ago, so clearly the second best time is to... Never? Your argument is taken straight from the oil and coal industries -- it would take too long to build up renewables infrastructure, so let's just not do it? We shouldn't build windmills, because you can't tell me how many we need globally?
You're grasping at straws. If you care about climate change, and you trust in science, there's only one valid viewpoint on nuclear energy. I welcome dissenting opinions however and would be more than happy to hear why you disagree. Just know that I took courses in college on nuclear reactors and their design as part of my degree, as well as environment engineering, and I currently work in the green energy field -- by no means am I automatically correct, but I want to see an argument that's based in science and recent scientific studies and analysis, let's say anything past 2015.
You seem to be unaware of the plans and needs to reduce GHGs. We do not have decades to waste.
You're right, and that's why it would be foolish to build exclusively nuclear. It's also foolish however to not build any nuclear. The long lead time means we need to start ASAP so it's ready ASAP. With proper government action targeting bottlenecks in the process (I believe there's only one manufacturer in the world for a certain type of reactor shielding) we can speed that up.
Diversification is the way to go. At the very least, we should build enough reactors and breeder reactors to consume existing nuclear waste and drive that to effectively 0.
On top of all that, the bottleneck for deploying solar and wind en masse isn't actually solar and wind facilities (although we certainly need those) but our electric grid. It needs an upgrade in order to integrate alternative energies, and I believe estimates on doing that are ~10 years. We might end up in a situation where a nuclear reactor is actually faster to build, depending on the type.
I could not disagree more. Renewables are cheaper safer easier to deploy and secure the grid. Nuclear is dead.
Nuclear is the safest energy. It has the fewest deaths per kWh produced. Some modern reactors are able to consume nuclear waste to generate fuel as well. If you want to minimize nuclear waste, we need to build at least some reactors to shove existing waste into.
Nuclear keeps our already unsafe grid more unsafe. It’s too expensive and accidents, while rare, are disastrous. Nuclear is dead.
WTF are you talking about. You can't just claim it's unsafe and it makes the grid unsafe. Nuclear is INCREDIBLY SAFE. Other than a few disasters that happened decades ago it has the lowest deaths/kwh. And it won't help contribute to the BILLIONS of deaths that are coming due to climate change. Your fear of some Chernobyl disaster is irrational.
I'm talking about grid security. https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/problem-us-power-grid-its-too-vulnerable-attacks
The solution is decentralization, which for the most part is solar and wind. Ironic that you are learning about this on a decentralized social media platform.
Until we are able to sort out the cost/tech to make a green-sourced grid (such that the role of utilities is to capture surpluses from when the sun shines and the wind blows and sell it back when transient sources aren't producing) nuclear is going to be an important part of a non-carbon-producing energy portfolio.
Already it's cheaper to bring new solar and wind online than any other sort of electrical production; the fact that those are transient supply sources is the last major obstacle to phasing carbon fuels entirely out of the grid. If nuclear can be brought safely online it could mean pushing the use of fossil energy entirely into use cases where energy density is critical (like military aviation)
If we measured the amount of destruction to our environment that fossil fuels cost long-term I bet they'd stop being profitable really quick.
Oil companies knew all about this since at least the 70s, and it was still very very profitable for them.
Turns out humans are selfish.
What about when the grid is almost entirely renewables? Is nuclear cheaper than just storage? What about storage one it's already been implemented to the point of resource scarcity?
No, nuclear is always more expensive in real world conditions. Places with mostly renewables plus in-fill from batteries and transient gas generation are a lot cheaper than nuclear. eg. South Australia.
But transient gas generation produces much more ghgs than nuclear, and when accounting for the ghg potential of metanen and normal pipeline leakage, it is even more damaging than coal.
Except overprovisioning your total load by 30% with nuclear capacity doesn't allow turning the transient gas off
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&chartColumnSorting=default&stacking=stacked_percent
It's required less and less as other forms of generation are added to the mix. eg. Tidal and pumped hydro.
1kg of lithium produces about 10kWh of storage for 15-20 years. 3-12 hours of storage is plenty for a >95% VRE grid.
1kg of uranium produces about 750W for 6 years.
There are about 20 million tonnes of conventional lithium economically accessible reserves (and it has only been of economic interest for a short time).
There are about 10 million tonnes of reasonably assured accessible uranium (not reserves, stuff assumed to exist). It has had many boom/bust cycles of prospecting.
Lithium batteries are not even being proposed as the main grid storage method.
Cobalt is the difficult one, especially with the child workers mining it.
Cobalt isn't even in most EV batteries anymore, and LMFP is replacing NMC next year.
Sodium ion will then replace LFP the year after.
It's also real weird how people only ever care about french colonial exploitation of africa when it comes to materials they pretend are in renewables and not when they're flooding villages drinking water with uranium tailings.
Profit doesn't equal good. Renewables take a lot of materials and fabrication to upkeep. Im sure theres more money to be made in renewable than there is in nuclear, that doesn't imply one is better than the other.
Its a relatively recent development however since the panels and turbines got quite a bit cheaper. Nowadays solar/wind ends up fairly similar and Nuclear is about 3x the price (with gas being more and coal being nearly 7x more). That is only some of the story as you need some storage as well but it doesn't end up in favour of Nuclear. 15 years ago Nuclear was a clear win, its just not anymore the price of Solar come down fast.
If you include the full costs of the nuclear programs including the various subsidies, wind has been cheaper for decades, possibly since before nuclear was a thing.
If we had an energy system owned by the people and not ran for profits, nuclear would be a viable, and probably even the preferred, option. We do not. We're probably going to have to fix that to get a practical and reliable clean energy grid.
No, it would just bankrupt the state. Just because something is state owned, doesn't mean the cost vanishes.
Infrastructure in this country is already so heavily subsidized by the federal government (and state, if you live somewhere that actually cares about your well-being) that we're already pretty much paying for it all.
What do you do with the waste in that scenario? Who pays for that? Or for insurance?
Who fucking cares about profit, our planet is dying.
anyone with a basic understanding of economics?
Like either we spend fuck tons of money subsidising nuclear to make it profitable or we can focus on wind and companies will build it themselves because its profitable.
What do you think is more likely: that I don't understand the basics of how capitalism works? Or maybe that the comment was a criticism of the worship of the "free market," and considering profit-motive to be the be-all, end-all?
Well considering you're conflating a market economy with capitalism.....
I care. I care that we don't make a rash decision for a potential short term solution. Why not ramp up solar / wind and other alternatives?
Storage, we have less Lithium than you seem to think, and pumped hydro is not a solution -- not that it's not a universal solution, it's simply not a solution. Implementation costs more than a nuclear reactor and maintenance and security costs are way, way higher than a nuclear reactor. We, unless you want to adopt a powerless overnight lifestyle, need on-demand power generation. Nuclear is the best, safest, cleanest, most feasible option for that until we remove all precious metals from energy storage technology.
I disagree. Nuclear is too slow costly and a huge security risk for an already unsafe grid. We need energy decentralization in addition to decarbonization. Renewables like solar and wind are 100% the best step.
The planet is fine, and will be fine after we've gone, much like it was fine after the other mass extinctions. What's dying is the environment that supports human life. Less snappy, granted, but I feel like emphasising that this is our problem and not something we should do for others might be worthwhile.
Do you never get tired of being pointlessly pedantic? Yes, the planet, as in the big rock floating in space, will continue to exist. Thanks.
There's a point to my pedantry here. Did you read my whole post or just the first few words?
This is such a weird thing to research because a government (or governments) can directly or almost directly control what is profitable in a society based upon what is needed.
not really, while the government can do stuff like incentivize this only shifts the cost somewhere else
Check out the farm bill, or ethanol in gasoline, or various other things. They also can disincentivize things, outright ban things, and add untold cost to competing stuff in order to make yours more profitable than theirs.
The research done here had to be within the existing regulatory environment, which is not a fixed constraint at all but rather a product of government and industry actors.
And all of that is just talking about more indirect controls commonly applied in neoliberal leaning countries, some countries directly control how much things cost and how much overhead there is.
Government can just take over and control whatever it wants. With no business allowed to operate the cost and therefore profit don't matter
I wonder how this determination is affected by the boondoggle that is the public funding of nuke plant construction with huge overruns paid for by consumers.
It's getting close to the point where even if you are handed one it's more cost effective to build a wind farm and let it sit.
A MWh of wind is about $33 and O&M for a MWh of nuclear is about $30.
Everyone seems to be focused on electricity production, but ammonia production (ie nitrogen fixation) for fertilizer is often overlooked. Right now it is accomplished mostly with natural gas. If we're supposed to do it instead with wind and solar, we're going to have to rely on simple and inefficient electrolysis of water to generate the hydrogen needed for the Haber process. Nuclear power plants have the advange of producing very high temperature steam, which allows for high temperature electrolysis, which is more efficient.
When you consider our fertilizer needs, it becomes clearer that nuclear power will have to play the predominant role in the transition away from fossil fuels.
No on all fronts.
The only reactor designs with any sort of history don't produce steam at high enough temperature for the sulfur cycle and haber process.
The steam they do produce costs more per kWh thermal than a kWh electric from renewables with firming so is more economic to produce with a resistor.
Mirrors exist. Point one at a rock somewhere sunny and you have a source of high temperature heat.
Direct nitrogen electrolysis is better than all these options. It's had very little research but the catalysts are much more abundant than hydrogen electrolysers and higher efficiencies are possible.
Using fertilizer at all has a huge emissions footprint (much bigger than producing it). The correct path here is regenerative agriculture, precision fermentation and reducing the amount of farmland needed by stopping beef. Nitrogen electrolysis is a good bonus on top of this.
One way or another, I'm pretty sure that we need fertilizer. What is the source of GHG if the fertilizer is produced without natural gas or other fossil fuels?
NO2, methane from byproduct/digestion, soil carbon release from land overuse. Downstream methane release due to nitrate pollution.
The overwhelming majority of cropland is for "biofuel", industrial chemicals and animal feed.
Industrial scale regenerative agriculture has lower yields in the short term, but doesn't emit NO2 and leave behind a dust bowl (requiring clearing a new forest).
Eating crops directly rather than feeding cows is far more effective than changing fertilizer source. Eating organic crops uses a small fraction of the crop land that eating beef fed on intensively grown corn does.
Biointensive methods have many times the yield as industrial agriculture but are very labour intensive -- automating them would save a lot more emissions.
Precision fermentation uses a tiny fraction of the land per unit of protein/nutrients.
cows eat a lot of grass, and usually from land that isn't suitable for crops. the silage they get is mostly parts of plants that people can't or won't eat.
Paltering.
Corn and soy grown for the purpose of large animal feed exceeds the amount of cropland used directly for human consumption in areas where <20% of calories and protein come from red meat.
almost all soy (about 85%) is crushed for oil for human use. the vast majority of what's fed to animals is the industrial waste from that process.
only 7% is fed directly to animals.
i don't know the numbers for corn, but i do know that globally, about 2/3 of all crop calories go to people.
almost no soy goes to cattle at all. calling me "paltering" while jumping from one segment of agriculture to another is just hypocritical rhetoric. try addressing the topic instead of characterizing me.
I said red meat. Pork and chicken need to go too, but that'snot as urgent.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/2542095
i didn't see any allusion to any animal except cattle here. am i reading too quickly?
Yes, we're definitely going to have to set up more nuclear power plants specifically to make fertilizer. Nuclear heads are literally brain dead
Fertilizer which they can't make because the steam isn't hot enough.
Every single pro nuclear argument is a fractal of terrible ideas and gaslighting.
Oh shit, can you imagine if you don't exclude all the fckn costs your fckn process causes you might fckn be mire expensive? Really? Surprise?
Like the free insurance, or the free loans, or the underfunded decomissioning and waste management, or the unremediated mines?
Or is it the storage and grid redundancy required to meet peak load with a generator that runs at constant output and shuts down for months at a time?
So first off, the source of this article being pv-magazine makes me immediately skeptical about unbiased reporting. This part really gets me though:
And availability is not a problem with renewables then? If not the central problem? Hydroelectric is probably the most reliable of the renewables, but then we have the aforementioned problem of low river flows. Droughts could even affect pumped hydro: a much-touted solution to availability problems with wind and solar. For crying out loud, present both sides of the argument fairly! /end rant
At any rate, I can get on board the idea that in terms of adding new generating capacity, renewables may be the most competitive option at the moment? They have come a long way in a short time, though they still face major challenges on the energy storage front.
But in terms of getting away from existing fossil fuel-based power generation, is nuclear not an attractive option? The infrastructure is already there, and would essentially have to be largely abandoned as sunken assets by power utilities switching to something like wind or solar right?
Consider your average coal plant. It is a centralized heat source powering steam turbines connected to large generators and a giant transformer station feeding power out over a network of high voltage transmission lines.
What is a nuclear plant then? It is a centralized heat source powering steam turbines connected to large generators and a giant transformer station feeding power out over a network of high voltage transmission lines. I'm thinking at least some of the existing hardware could be repurposed for nuclear to leverage what already exists? Am I wrong?
Pumped hydro doesn't consume nearly as much water as a thermal generator. Especially if you cover the reservoirs. It also gives you an emergency backup.
Would you prefer:
Option A where you immediately have no power when the river gets low,
Or option B where you still have power after the river gets low, but can also choose to give up the ability to have some of your power at the end of a week long cloudy period in exchange for water?
Good point. I am not opposed to pumped hydro or other such schemes for storing energy. Nuclear itself tends to be employed for base load power generation and is not especially good at following demand variability. Having supply side variability (from solar, wind, etc.) makes matters worse, of course, and necessitates even more storage. But one way or another, it will be needed, and pumped hydro tends to scale better than say battery farms.
I wonder about option B. As it stands where I live at least, there is not much wiggle room in terms of getting people to use less power in the event of a shortage. For example, the local utility has offered free programmable thermostats in exchange for giving them the ability to control power usage in the event of a shortage, but I understand uptake of the program has been low thus far. I suspect in that scenario, they would have to bring fossil fuel power generation online.
Where I live is not in a drought-prone area at least, but it is also not suitable for pumped hydro given the geography. There was talk in the local news recently about a compressed air storage system that may get built nearby our natural gas plant. This juxtaposition makes some sense when you think about it, since it is a site that already features well-established grid hookups, so they can piggyback on that. The province as a whole is generating something like 60% nuclear, 32% renewables (mostly hydro), and 8% fuels. Recently, there was a major refurbishment of some of the nuclear reactors and it came in on budget and ahead of schedule, so the argument that anything nuclear must automatically involve cost overruns is perhaps no longer true, though good lord we have seen some epic ones in the past, particularly after the utility was privatized.
Really interesting and quite easy to read article. In fact, the french energy policy is to invest in new "little" nuclear plants. I'm not sure our politics will consider these scientifical comments...
They still seem to handwave away the issue of baseload, which is entirely frustrating. As I seem to understand it, it's just a 1:1 comparison of costs.
They use nebulous phrases like "Flexibility is more important" and point to batteries or energy saving methods getting cheaper, without actually including it in the comparison.
Although if it's true EU plants were randomly closed from production 50% of the time baseload doesn't really make a difference I guess.
"Baseload generator" isn't a useful concept. And grid reliability (which is a useful concept) is thought about. It just doesn't fit into a soundbite like winddon'tblowsundon'tshine.
Here's an example of a full plan https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/major-publications/integrated-system-plan-isp/2022-integrated-system-plan-isp
Or a simpler analysis on the same grid: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for-australia-is-feasible-and-affordable-with-just-a-few-hours-of-storage/
For reference, 5kWh home batteries currently retail for about $1300 so this would add <10% to the capital cost compared to recent nuclear projects. Pumped hydro is about half the price per capacity, but a bit more per watt. The former is dropping at 10-30% per year, so by the time a nuclear plant is finished, storage cost would be negligible.
Here's a broad overview of a slightly simplified model https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z demonstrating similar is possible everywhere.
Even in the counterfactual case where the ~5% of "other" generation is only possible with fossil fuel, focusing on it is incredibly myopic because the resources spent on that 1% of global emissions could instead be used for the other 70% which isn't from electricity and has different reliability constraints.
Doesn't the Australian model ask for a 4-6% fossil or other fuel input? I don't see how base load, nuclear or other fuels aren't relevant to discuss, as nucleur is like 4% of global output right now.
Four points:
The profile of other is short spikes 5-100 hours a few times a year.
1 year of delay is equivalent to 20 years of exclusively using fossil fuels for "other".
It's not even obvious that adding nuclear reactors would reduce this because they're so geographically and temporally inflexible. France has 63GW of nuclear capacity, <45GW of average load and 61GW of winter peak load with vast amounts of storage available via interconnect to hydro countries. They still use 5% gas on top of the rest of the "other" (which is about 10-25GW).
5% of other from gas adds about 20g CO2e/kg per kWh to the total. Less than the margin between different uranium sources.
Running 40% of the capacity 10% of the time puts your nuclear energy in the realm of $1-3/kWh. The list of ways of generating or storing 6% of your energy for <$1/kWh is basically endless.
That's about 4-8TW of capacity worldwide. 1kg of uranium is good for fuelling about 750W of reactor on a 6 year fuel cycle. Loading those reactors would require digging up all of the known and assumed-to-exist uranium immediately.
Nuclear is an irrelevant distraction being pushed by those who know it will not work. You only have to glance at the policy history or donor base of the politicians pushing for it in Sweden, Canada, Australia, UK, Poland, etc etc or the media channels pushing it to see how obvious it is that it's fossil fuel propaganda.
It is obviously obviously true that it's a non-solution. It fails on every single metric. All of the talking points about alleged advantages are the opposite of the truth without exception.
I don't know enough about the topic to have an argument against, just trying to educate myself. I am curious how you would respond to this person in another thread:
https://jlai.lu/comment/1510040
I assume your response would be essentially similar to your previous comment. That we can develop the battery tech and it would be easier just to use fossil fuels as a bridge anyway?
That's pretty damn cool to hear.
I wish my country (Germany) hadn't crash-shutdown the nuclear power plants we still had after Fukushima and instead shut down the coal/gas ones but eh... at the time, I even agreed with them, but that was at a time when climate disasters were far less prominent on everyone's minds. That now renewables are starting to pull ahead in most things is amazing.
A big problem to solve now will be how to swap the majority of the world away from coal/gas.
Is simple mathematics now "research"
Ok but how viable are those renewables? In Louisiana, dispite all of our water and river, hydroelectric power is impossible, because the elevation is to gradual. In normal weather new orleans is often cloudy for solar panels on a large scale.
The point I am saying is that cost doesn't account for a lot of things
The market absolutely accounts for those things.
If renewables are more expensive in your specific area than nuclear, then that makes sense for your area.
This isn't like choosing a path in a video game. We can do all the things.
If you want profit, why not pick coal or natural gaz?
I mean really?
You know why. denying reality doesn't erase it
If you want to waste all your money, why not pick nuclear?
Electricity should be expensive for all the benefits it brings
And? Who gives a shit? We need whatever is cleanest.
Also renewables.
Also incorrect. We need whatever reduces total cumulative emissions the most.
A solar panel today does a lot more than a nuclear reactor in 2045. And installing 5W of solar (which will average 1W) today only costs you the opportunity to build 0.15W of nuclear (which will average 0.12W).
Nuclear isn't very clean when we can poison a quarter of the earth with it because we're too dumb to handle it.
Renewables don't make money they cost money. They generate revenue because of subsidies and because manufacturing green energy technology is a dirty and extremely lucrative business. The part they dont tell you is that if u wana make solar panels u need to destroy the environment to do it. If u wana build a windmill its millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of precious minerals strip mined out of the earth. Thats your profit.
This is always the response dumb people trying to sound smart give.
Literally any piece of equipment manufactured today requires "precious minerals strip mined out of the earth." You're saying "renewables cause enviromental harm" while ignoring that literally ANY energy source causes environmental harm. WTF is your point?
The point is. Renewable energy isnt there yet. Hydro electric is the best we have. If you want to replace a gas or coal fired grid. You cannot do it with 100% renewable energy. The only tech we have that can replace fossil fuel grids is nuclear power. I'm not saying its the only way. I'm saying its the only thing that works at this time unless something happens to radically reduce energy demand and the type of radical reduction required simply isnt gonna happen. As for the profit. Windmills dont make money. They cost money. They are more expensive to maintain than the energy they produce. 2.5-5m USD to build one. They cost 1.3m USD give a few thousand per megawatt of electricity producing capacity. Maintenances costs can range around 45-50k annually. Land costs. Business overhead. Etc. You go thru that to produce 1-3 MW of electricity.... Thats not enough to do much of anything. And u cannot suddenly demand a huge spike of energy from a windmill farm like you can from coal or gas or nuclear. Solar same thing. Sun not shining? No power.
My point overall is these are not good cost effective alternatives to current energy production. They are expensive and inefficient alternatives to what we have. Are they greener? Yes they are but under the current technology. Green energy doesn't get the job done that HAS to get done.
Same for nuclear if we're being honest
Every wind turbine requires over 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms of neodymium, a RARE EARTH METAL!!!!