The problem with 100% solar+batteries is that you need to massively overbuild for the system to meet demand. It's far more cost-effective to have some portion of generation come from a firm, weather-independent source. The main options are fossil fuels, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Since fossil fuels emit carbon and hydro and geothermal are geographically limited, nuclear is the best option in a lot of places.
That's the opposite of what you want. You want something that is cost-effective to operate at a 10%, 1% or 0.1% duty cycle. Like nat gas or hydro. Not nuclear.
And overbuilding isn't the only lever you have to ensure coverage meets your target 99.99% level -- geographic diversity works really well (the wind is always blowing somewhere), and wind power production is usually negatively correlated with solar power production.
Natural gas and hydro are firm power. You're correct that nuclear is not a good backup power source, but that's not the suggestion. The question is whether adding high-capacity-factor firm generation reduces total system cost. In regions where hydro and geothermal are unavailable, nuclear is the next best low-carbon option. I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 100% renewables, especially transmission capacity between regions.
I think you're underestimating the costs and difficulties associated with 99.99% renewables and/or using it as a straw man against the highly inexpensive and achievable 95% renewables.
You're also underestimating the costs of using nuclear to achieve 99.99% reliability on top of a grid with 95% renewables: in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power. In which case you might as well ditch the renewables. But the world does not have the quadrillions needed to go 100% nuclear. The world does have the 10s of trillions needed to go 95-99% renewable.
>in that scenario you need nuclear capable of supplying ~100% of your power.
Where are you getting that from? Again, nuclear doesn't need to be a full backup, and nobody is suggesting we ditch renewables for nuclear. A perfectly viable solution would be a grid with a majority of power coming from renewables and storage, with enough nuclear generation to reduce the amount of overbuild necessary and to stop burning natural gas.
>Individually, each firm technology delivers substantial cost reductions relative to portfolios restricted to wind, solar, and energy storage alone. Additionally, because each technology occupies a distinctive functional niche in the electricity system, having all of these technologies available optimizes the utilization rate of each resource and reduces system costs by up to 10% relative to cases with just one class of firm resource.
If you're using nuclear as a backstop in that way, you're using the same statistical techniques that let you use cheaper, less reliable sources of power for backstop.
You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
I am very dubious of any energy policy coming form Germany because they have managed to make their electricity among the most expensive in the world while STILL being high carbon.
> You need to have dispatchable capacity equal to or greater than your base load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
Just one word change needed:
You need to have dispatchable capacity equal or greater than your peak load in order be able to guarantee you will be able to deliver it with 100% reliability year round.
Solar produces incredibly cheap power for the daytime hours, pushing any nuclear off the grid (why would a data center buy expensive nuke power in the hours when cheap renewables are available?). Nuclear needs to be running and selling power at its high price 24/7 for it to be even close to economically viable. Only supplying power that people want(due to its high price) during the night is fatal to nuclear.
base load demand does not mean it has to be met with a constant matched source, and in fact that no longer works economically.
Natrium has an interesting design for a 345MW reactor that has thermal storage that can boost output to 500MW for 5.5 hours. This lets it increase output during peak prices.
I mean, sounds kinda cool. But that 2023 idea is very clearly not going to happen in the current US political environment.
We’re in an era of brutal capitalism, and nothing else matters but price. Not even emissions sadly. Green compacts like this have no chance, and neither do nukes. Unless they pay the right bribes for some subsidies.
The Trump admin is actually very pro-nuclear power. They are ending the "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (ALARA) standard in favor of fixed limits which is actually a good idea, possibly the only one the Trump admin has ever had.
i know they are (or claim to be). Im extremely unconvinced that meaningfully changes the flawed economics of nuclear power. I would love to be proven wrong and a wave of innovative economically competitive nuclear technology emerges... possible, but seems vanishingly unlikely.
I think we'll see a few companies and projects connected to the administration get grants and tax breaks and favors, pull a few headlines, seem like there's movement. Maybe even build something! but ultimately be a meaningless footnote in the energy transition. Just another grift for the most corrupt admin in US history.
The flawed economics of nuclear are largely due to the NRC basically making it as hard as possible to make a new reactor. China and Korea can build reactors for reasonable cost per watt.
thats, not true at all. Safety costs a little, but they are fundamentally massively complicated, huge, specialized, EXPENSIVE things to build. They require 100s of staff to run at all times. The insurance is so expensive only nation states can back them. The economics are flawed because on modern grids with cheap renewables, they will never pay back the ridiculous up front capex. Relaxing regulations changes very little about this situation.
China and Koreas are massively state subsidized (koreas 51%, chinas 100%). Which obscures the real cost, and these state enterprises dont have to pay insurance or decommissioning. Which is the only way you can make them work today - massive state subsidies.
if your argument is "well without regulations someone could build a reactor that somehow avoids all these economic constraints" . Maybe, but today thats a fantasy.
You can't compare wind and solar to nuclear you have to compare wind and solar with enormous amounte of battery storage which is extremely expensive and it would be hard to make enough storage
That is soft on timeline, skills and expertise, sourcing to make it happen, etc. All the things that caused the Australian scientific body's energy feasibility report to conclude that nuclear in Australia (no existing reactors, staff, etc) wasn't economic or rational given so much can be done with the upfront cost of nuclear that immediately begins with returning energy compared to an uncertain timeline and blowouts not returning energy for ???
> Australia is the best case scenario for solar power.
Yes. (and no - it's a big country)
The USofA is also a large country with the same land area (mainland USofA at least) and many places suitable for solar and wind.
The South Australian capital, Adelaide, is on the 35th parallel (South), what works there likely works in the US at or below the 35th parallel North.
The essential point is that nuclear isn't a flat parameter free answer to all that ails - some places it makes no economic sense, other places it makes good economic sense ... and there's a world in between.
You just keep moving the goalposts and not responding to arguments. Until you have some idea of how nuclear is ever going to be cost competitive on today’s grids, good day to you.
If solar becomes 2 times cheaper, it will be economical to capture nitrogen from atmosphere and produce ammonia and use that for long-term energy storage and fuel. And with that one does not need massive solar overbuild.
This does not require any magic technology, just scaling up what is available today is enough and will definitely happen within the next 20 years, before small nuclear will have any effect.
If I recall correctly solar panels are already so cheap that to halve the installed cost again will require most of the efficiencies to be found in other costs like manufacture of associated hardware and equipment and installation. I don't know if those costs will be so easy to reduce.
It would be good to see a techno-economic analysis of this. For instance, taken to the limit, if solar were free what would be the CAPEX and OPEX to produce the ammonia? In addition, the plant to consume the ammonia to produce electricity would not be free.
Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it require temperatures over 600 Celsius to get to 70% percent of efficiency and not exactly small, with cheap way to produce ammonia they would provide energy dense batteries that could run for months if necessary.
> Ammonia does not require a plant to generate electricity. While fuel cells running on it
OK, so it requires a plant of fuel cells. And the cost per kW (i.e. discharge capacity) is? And it requires some facility to produce the ammonia; what is the cost per kW of electricity consumed, and at what efficiency?
Numbers would help to assess the proposal, given the claim that a halving of the cost of electricity from solar would make all the economics for ammonia work.
