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About the hype around nuclear power generation among conservatives. Sorry, I do not have a well articulated text to defend here, this is more of probe into the subject, since I feel I am probably missing some fundamental logic here.
It seems to me the support for nuclear energy is a sort of pet cause for conservatives. Not because of the wonders of the technology, but for what it signals.
Given the financial cost of this type of energy source compared to other low emission energy sources, I am yet to find a defense of Nuclear as a feasible strategy for lowering CO2 emissions that comes across as based, good faith argument by someone with true concern about the issue, rather than an attempt at subverting the discussion around energy transition.
Or are there people who truly believe that nuclear energy is a part of energy transition strategy so meaningful it is worth joining forces with those raise the flag as a form of subversion? Any reading recommendation of up to date, nuanced, good faith arguments for nuclear energy?
It's a while since I read The Whole Earth Discipline, it was published in 2009 so I'm not sure whether that counts as properly up to date, but the author Stewart Brand is Bay Area hippie royalty and the book is vocally pro nuclear as well as pro genetic modification and pro urbanism.
An official annotated online version is available at https://discipline.longnow.org/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Contents.html
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OK I'll bite. There is a huge difference in used land area used when compared between the same amount of power generated between wind power when compared with nuclear power. Because when you calculate in the Capacity Factor (and actually look further down on the actual combined capacity of wind compared with nuclear you see the difference is 3x). I'll give you the initial number 1000 MW of power from a nuclear power plant and the average size of wind power plant of 3 MW. How many turbines do you need to get the same amount of power when you have the Capacity Factor in the calculation? I'm not going to run the numbers for you! You need to calculate them yourself to understand the argument. You need educate yourself on how much forests are cut to avoid wind shear on the turbine blades, to have maintenance roads and so on. And how that deforestation affects the fauna around the turbines. There are cost calculations on the displacements of humans but seldomly I see a monetary value associated with the environmental costs of displacement of wildlife. I crunched the numbers and I think that the environmental costs of just the land use with what I know about wind power made me pro nuclear.
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I think the fundamental logic is also that we (broadly we, humans) get better at the things we do more of. So looking at nuclear in the US right now is not really looking at its potential had we stayed the course in 1970 rather than taking a left turn towards fossil fuels.
We can also look at France and their experience scaling expertise. They are one of the few countries actually lowering their CO2 footprint despite continuing to export energy to Germany.
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Is it possible to look at the state of Germany and think the other side of the issue is correct? It seems so simple there's no reason to discuss it, except as a distraction from the obvious example of terrible "green" energy policy.
I just don't feel the need to argue at this point. Just cut green subsidies and purchase mandates, and run cover for a NuclearX to solve the problem.
I'm not even particularly pro-nuclear, because solar-gas-hydro might very well be cheaper. I'm just fed up with green manipulation, dog piling, excuse-making, and histrionic crusading. And I'm especially sick of arguments that go "prove X to my satisfaction, haha you didn't satisfy me I win again"
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Have you done any research on this yourself? Are you familiar with, e.g., the very low cost of nuclear energy in South Korea?
I'm pro-nuclear, but I don't exactly have an essay written up on as to why – it's an aggregation of various things I've read over the years. But if you do a quick Google you'll find sources like this one (I haven't read it, but I've skimmed it and I think it covers the points you are interested in).
Obviously, if nuclear isn't financially acceptable in cost, I am interested in hearing about it. But my priors, based on osmosis, is that that cost is at least partially artificially inflated, and that there are a lot of hidden environmental costs to "clean" energy methods like solar.
One of the things the article I linked notes to is that wind and solar (which take up tremendous amounts of space) are heavily subsidized, whereas nuclear energy (at least in the US) is burdened by overregulation. In South Korea, nuclear is cheaper than wind and solar.
Check out the article I linked, maybe do some research yourself, and report back :)
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I think what you are missing is that there are parallel developments which call into question whether the high price is actually inherent to the technology in the way we've been led to believe. The most direct parallel here is space launch. Not very long ago, the price per kilogram to orbit was high enough to make satellites prohibitively expensive for anyone but nation states and extremely well-capitalized corporations. Human spaceflight was all but unthinkable for anyone except national astronautics programs. The conventional wisdom was that this is just the nature of the problem: rockets are expensive and expendable, development requires decades of engineering, and there are no real major technological advancements achievable without new fundamental breakthroughs.
But this turned out not to be the case! SpaceX entered the market and proved that using iterations of well-known designs, hiring the right people and compensating them properly, and leadership pushing hard at schedules and milestones while also driving on costs, you actually could dramatically lower the cost to orbit beyond what anyone thought possible, while still being profitable!
So with this context, there's lots of reasons to be skeptical that the cost and feasibility barriers cited for nuclear power are real. As with liquid-fueled rockets, this is a reasonably well-developed and very well-understood technology. The bulk inputs are concrete and steel, inexpensive things we know how to build with. We don't need fundamental breakthroughs. What we need are industry leaders with the drive to engineer better reactors designed for safety and mass production and for the NRC to streamline the permitting process to something with clear, reasonable requirements. Unlike with rockets, we unfortunately also need reform in the building permitting processes that are also used to block or delay every other major infrastructure project, but I don't think that's an impossible dream.
So, your interlocutors may well believe that the cost factor, as real as it is today, not be inherent to the technology, and that we have everything we need to unlock the capability to manufacture and deploy nuclear power facilities as quickly and cheaply as combustion turbines, if only the right combination of leadership and policy falls into place.
I do not think this is the reasoning behind it. I personally believe that nuclear fusion may render all other power sources obsolete in our lifetime, but I do not think more nuclear powerplants with out current tecnology in the foreseeable future.
As far as I know and until I see sources that convice me otherwise, they are too costly, and that gets in the way of more cost-efficient green power generation - and even of nuclear research, depending on how you allocate the budget.
I am yet to see in the general debate someone trying to defend nuclear energy with the argument of accelerating technology development
Would it be fair to say, then, that if it could be demonstrated that the costs are not inherent to the technology, then you would support (or at least not oppose) nuclear power installation?
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In 2025, I see the good-faith conservative pro-nuclear stance as mostly a reminiscent stance on "what could have been". It would have been absolutely viable, it would have been the better decision. Noah Smith describes the sentiment well in his introduction here.
But in 2015, this wasn't clear at all, yet. There is a long history of even experts catastrophically underestimating the exponential growth of solar and battery industrial capacity (that first graph is powerful). So in today's discussions, there's always the chance that conservatives are comparing 2015 nuclear against 2015 solar + batteries. This is a much easier proposition to defend.
But yeah, last year the US installed over 40 GW nameplate capacity of new solar. We won't ever be below that in the next 5 years, either. Grid-scale storage of this much solar might also shortly be a non-issue, since forecasts are that the world economy will produce at least 8 TWh of new lithium batteries this year. That's several hundred percent over demand, and it's hard to describe how insane that development is. That's enough batteries to put a 50kWh battery into every single new vehicle built in 2025. Since we're not doing that, batteries will get cheap enough for grid-scale storage.
Even with conservative estimates for the capacity factor of those new panels, that's the equivalent of at least 7 new reactors completed, each year. I don't think there's any case where we relax regulation sufficiently and then plan, develop (if we want to do any of the cool - small modular, thorium, ect. - things pro-nuke people want) and finance that many new reactors per year, even if we grant a 10 year lead time.
Solar+storage+nuclear are all complementary technologies.
As I understand, grid-scale storage allows nuclear to operate at a high load factor by soaking up extra overnight production when demand is super low.
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These figures are only possible because China massively over invested in production. They're all losing money hand over fist right now, and we're getting cheap overproduced EV cells because of it. I talked about my new bargain basement solar UPS in the last fff thread for an example of the fire sale deals you can get.
And even with those deals (8 cents/Wh!) my batteries for a 1 day backup were still 3x more expensive than the solar.
But this isn't sustainable long term, even assuming relations with China don't deteriorate the way everyone seems to be planning. And it's certainly not sustainable on the backs of the laughable US solar industry, which is a mix of subsidy farmers and outright scammers.
Storage might solve the daily duck curve, which is more than I expected to ever be possible, but there's no way to meet seasonal demand with batteries; in most of the US winter energy use more than doubles while solar produces 1/10th of what it does in summer, because the sun just isn't here (Europe could solve this one by colonizing the Sahara, admittedly). There's no way to make solar scale with those numbers, especially when you're trying to make that winter energy demand double or triple again with electric heating mandates.
I want to run the math on North-South and East-West HVDC transmission that all the greens handwave as a solution, but just don't have the figures to make a useful guess. But as seen in the northeast they won't let us build power lines either, so it's a moot point.
I've heard that wind energy is an effective complement to solar; when solar is weak wind is strong. Can wind energy make up for the solar energy shortfall during the Winter?
No, that was something the German greens picked up as propaganda. Wind is just incredibly intermittent. Where I live it will go still for a week at a time. It survives because of massive per-mhw subsidies that pay a flat rate even if nobody wants to buy the power produced (currently $27.5/MWh, but only for union-built projects, thank you "inflation reduction act" lol).
Btw, that green "biomass" line on the first chart is literally wood chips imported from the US and Canada. Nobody ever talks about this but I find it hilarious.
In a lot of places the meh wind areas do see a slight increase during winter, but the best ones come from summer diurnal winds blowing through passes.. So a propagandist can quote the 16mph figure to give a low price, then quote the winter increase to excuse variability.
Similar trick with quoting on-shore costs together with off-shore production.
In both Europe and the US, wind stops producing at all during those cold still days in winter, when heating demand is at peak.
Hilariously in Washington wind also vanishes during heat waves, because the ocean air is no longer cold & high pressure enough to flow up the Columbia gorge to the low pressure interior. So all wind energy does is get paid to make energy when nobody wants it and screw up energy markets with "you must buy renewables first" mandates.
Fascinating. Is off-shore wind any better? Furthermore, is it plausible, or even feasible, to get around renewable energy intermittency by using hydrogen or other means of chemical energy storage? If, as you say. wind energy produces energy when it isn't needed, it seems potentially lucrative to buy that low price energy, transform it into a chemical, then sell high when the wind isn't blowing. This would also mitigate the energy efficiency blow you eat when converting to chemical energy, because you'd be using cheap excess energy in the first place.
Plausible? Sure. Feasible? Not really. It's one of those things that is technically do able, but so inefficient it begs the question of why other than ideology.
All 'we'll store on green energy when it's on for use when it stops' schemes fundamentally require (a) excess capacity when the weather is 'on' (or else there is nothing to store), and (b) so much excess capacity that the energy-ecology 'savings' of the green production aren't outweighed by the energy/ecological costs of the energy storage infrastructure.
Consider your chemical storage premise. Your wind power / solar power / whatever power has to be so much savings that it can not only cover the utility of the off-cycle power load, but also the ecological costs of the storage system. If this is chemical, this means all the ecological costs of producing the chemicals, moving the chemicals on-site, storing the chemicals, utilizing the chemicals, dealing with the chemical byproducts, and all the human personnel / infrastructure upkeep associated with running the site.
And if this does pan out... it's useful for precisely one geographic location, and all the green energy infrastructure inputs (rare earths, etc.) that could have been used elsewhere, aren't, because you're building over-capacity for the storage system.
By contrast, you could just... have a single power planet capable of meeting baseload power, and then let the same green-material inputs be used elswhere.
And this doesn't get into the questions like 'how can I get the most efficient use of my limited green tech input materials.'
There is far more energy demand than there is green energy supply, and in any combination of 'clean' and 'dirty' fuels, your ecological maximization isn't 'how do I get a specific city green,' but 'how do I minimize the total amount of dirty outputs.' It turns out, this is often best done by... targeting the least efficient dirty-fuel economies first, not the most.
As a general rule, bigger / more capital-intense generator plants are more efficient per volume of fossil fuel than smaller / cheaper engines. XYZ gallons of fuel in a generator plan will produce more energy, and at less greenhouse gas, than XYZ gallons of fuel distributed to cars. Since electric power grid charged vehicles are still getting their power from the generator plant regardless, you'd rather fuel-generators / battery cars than battery-generators / fuel cars.
Now consider that your chemical-storage thought is really just an awkward battery, and the feasibility should be clearer. Could it be done? Sure. Would it be better for the environment than not? Probably not, given that the 'not' isn't 'nothing is done' but the alternatives that could be done.
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I'm not opposed to solar, but it takes up considerably more space than an equivalent nuclear plant, and is worse for the environment.
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While people do overstate the difference, solar nameplate and grid-scale storage nameplate and practically usable values are not identical. I'm pleasantly surprised by the growth of solar, as someone who was genuinely very pessimistic in the late 00s, but there's still a number of limitations to the technology.
On the flip side, a ton of the financial limitations to nuclear power are regulatory, and often regulations established by people who explicitly want to smother nuclear power completely. It'll require some uptooling to bring down costs, but there's a massive amount of low-hanging fruit. I like the SMRs for a variety of technical reasons, but even 300-800 MW plants are really not the sort of thing that should take decades to construct, and that time component is what absolutely murders the financial model.
Now, there are limits to the technology -- just as solar can't beat nuclear for baseload capacity, nuclear's near-uniquely bad for peaking power. I don't think nuclear can or should displace most renewables, and I'd be surprised if they all together can completely displace LNG peaker plants in the next couple decades. But there are reasons beyond politics to argue for them both.
And, of course, just as Biology is Mutable argued, just because the problem is political doesn't mean it's solvable. It may be that there's no way to get those anti-nuke nuts out from regulations, or the only way to do so is extraordinarily costly.
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Seems to reinforce my impression that people who insist in this are either acting in bad faith, or echoing those who are.
I'm out for the serious actors who defend expanding nuclear programs, have palpable knowledge, and concern for climate change - if there is anyone who fits this description.
I'm not sure it's all bad faith and malice. I don't want to downplay the amount of uncertainty with the geopolitics and economics of renewables and storage, and the facts still change quickly.
For one, the vast majority of production capabilities (solar, wind, batteries) is in China, of course. (Trade) war would put all developer timelines in peril. Also, it's not so sure how energy pricing on a grid heavy on renewables and storage will shake out. Sweden stopped building several large wind projects because of their economics: if it's windy, all the wind parks ruin the spot market for each other and don't make money. Is it's not windy, they don't make money. Storage could change that, but of course installing to much storage to quickly could result in the same thing...
So in a way, nuclear is a classic conservative position. We know almost everything about how a nuke-heavy grid would look like. The geopolitics are far safer. We know exactly how much over budget each rector would land.
And I also believe it's important to dream big. Maybe the trump admin deregulates nuclear in a big way. Maybe some republican states move in concert, and also deregulate and unify their remaining regulations. Maybe there's a subsidies project on the scale of what other countries have been pumping into renewables. Maybe there's a Manhattan project 2.
And while I'm a firm believer in solar+batteries, I would welcome it. We really could use all hands on deck when we Electrify Everything^TM...
I don't know any highly technical pro-nuke experts, but construction physics has the analysis on the regulatory landscape
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If you want good-faith engagements, it would probably help not to poison the well by categorically dismissing all previous (but ambiguous) engagements as bad-faith and aligned with a general political tribe.
Particularly when you base it on a conclusion as a settled point (relative financial cost) without even making a position on the elements that make it a disputed premise. (I.E., what the relative costs are by what metric, what you believe the relative costs would be if you remove imposed regulatory burdens from one side and regulatory subsidies/requirements on the alternatives, what the relative costs of the political advocacy/opposition dynamics were reversed, etc.).
The crux of pro-nuclear arguments is that the technology provably exists and does not require assumptions of future technological breakthroughs, many of the more often cited relative costs are either imposed (regulatory over-engineering requirements no other power sector has to fail) or selective (concerns over nuclear-related costs in excess to equivalent welfare risks from others), that nuclear is effective baseload power (which is needed for sustained industrial economics at scale) rather than intermittent (which functionally requires additional baseload generation regardless for load-balancing, see Germany), and that many of the premises of 'low emission' energy sources just smuggle away the relative costs (such as not considering the extraction / processing / recycling / end-of-lifecycle costs) or have never been feasible requirements for the goals they were meant to support (i.e. the required amounts of rare earth minerals to supported estimates being magnitudes beyond actual rare earth mineral production) in ways that are both highly grift-able and grifted (see carbon credit markets relations to organized crime).
I do not mean to disqualify the argument. It does seem productive to me, however, to observe the correlated occurrence of seemingly contradicting positions within a group - a lesser regard for climate change, but defending nuclear power - and be extra cautious about potential interests in disguise inside the discussion.
The aspects you brought up are absolutely pertinent to investigate in order to establish a good judgement about the role nuclear should have in the energy transition, but ones that I seldom hear in the public debate. That's why I am out for good sources.
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The electrical grid needs baseload power. In this graph green represents wind production in Sweden each day. A serverhall or steel mill has a fairly constant consumption rate. During During various Dunkelflautes the wind power production has dropped to low single digit percentages of installed capacity.
Some countries like Norway and Iceland are blessed with boundless cheap baseload power from hydro and geothermal. The rest of us need to create it. Nuclear is reliable, not dependent on weather and provides a stable and green electrical grid. There wasn't a single hour in which Germany's electrical grid was greener than France's last year. France bet on nuclear, Germany on fossil fuels with wind when the weather is good.
Too much focus is spent on electricity production and not enough on the grid. A nuclear powerplant 50 km from a city requires a 50 km cable that is operating at an average of 90-95% capacity. Windpower requires multiple power lines that can be a thousand km long to connect the city to various different wind parks, where it might be windy at different times. This is not green, cheap or efficient.
Transmission is under-discussed because most people handwave it, yeah. Our electric co-op is trying to make everyone move to electric heat while already hitting the limits of the undersea cable. So they want to spend another x-million to upgrade that to meet the peak of winter demand, which means it will be used at 20% capacity the rest of the year.
That's an awful lot of expensive copper just sitting in the ocean not earning its keep. Greens always say "oh we'll just build more X" without ever considering the capital costs.
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I understand solar and wind have their shortcomings when in comes to production stability, and that they may have hidden costs. But that it is long stretch from there to concluding nuclear power is generally a worthy complement to them, with aims at minimizing emissions.
As clean and safe and whatever else it may be, there is no way around the price. It consistently ranks among the most costly sources. And budget being the tightest constraint, I cannot imagine it being an important part of the strategy for energy transition - maybe some minor and localized cases, but not more than that.
For a curious layman like me, it is hard to tell serious speech from the noise. But just pointing out that something has a problem does not sell well that nuclear is the best solution.
Nuclear isn't that expensive. France managed to build a majority nuclear grid that has been safe and stable for decades while maintaining sensible electrical prices. The price comes from building one of a kind reactors by companies with little experience while contending with insane levels of regulation.
If you know of a source that demonstrates that and contrasts with alternatives, I would be interested in reading
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As another commenter asked, are you calculating the insane and targeted regulatory burdens as part of this price? Most nuclear plants that have gone up have undergone extreme lawfare designed to put them out of business. Without all of that, do you suppose the cost might go down?
Absolutely that is an important factor for understanding how nuclear weighs against alternatives. I cannot say where we should draw the line between lawfare and necessary checks and rightful disputes, nor can I say what the actual political cost it is to have nuclear powerplants. But would be very interested in reading a source that makes a good case for nuclear power using uo to date data, and its nvironmental and economic effect under different scenarios
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