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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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