Comment by ZeoVII
3 months ago
TBF, Nuclear is the most efficient and "cheap" way to lower greenhouse emissions and tackle climate change. It is nice to see China go this way, hopefully they will lower their dependency on carbon and fossil fuel sources for energy generation.
If only the rest of the world would also adopt this mentality; Germany went the other way, rejecting nuclear and they are now dependant on carbon for their energy...
I don’t know what you mean by efficient and “cheap” but even China’s lower costs for nuclear construction vastly exceed the cost of wind and PV solar that China is building. They built more renewable power generation capability in just part of 2023, even adjusted for capacity factor, then all 26 reactors they had under construction. All that remains is storage, and China is also massively dropping the prices on battery grid storage.
I would contend the coal lobby successfully killed terrestrial fission power. It would have been a good replacement in the 60s and 70s when solar was still underdeveloped but now solar has worked out enough kinks that it's intrinsic advantages (larger exposed construction surface allows for better parallelization, less significant failure modes allows for weaker regulatory environment, less significant scaling advantages allows for easier "right sizing" of installations, and others) are going to be hard to surmount.
No, solar still hasn't figured out how to replace the power demands of the grid. It can only supply daytime power (if that) and makes the grid more unstable requiring fossil fuel peaker plants to supply gaps in production. Grid batteries are still insanely expensive and remain production capacity limited, not to mention all sorts of other problems that will come up installing that much battery capacity. Solar is only cheaper than Nuclear when you ignore the battery requirements to make it a more fair comparison of ability - when you include battery requirements, solar is more expensive by a fair amount which is ridiculous when you consider that Nuclear has gotten more expensive since the 1960s which doesn't happen to technologies unless you stop producing (which we did).
> Nuclear is the most efficient and "cheap" way to lower greenhouse emissions
This is false. New nuclear is much more expensive than renewables in most cases. It's possible there are places in the world where renewables are particularly expensive and new nuclear could approach being competitive now, but even that will not last as renewables continue down their inexorable experience curves -- experience curves that nuclear has failed to exhibit.
This comment is being grayed but is it wrong? I want to believe that nuclear is just a miracle solution, but my impression was likewise that it is now even more expensive than solar/wind, at least in the Western world
> it is now even more expensive than solar/wind, at least in the Western world
Correct with that caveat.
China is able to build it cheaply enough that it rivals solar/wind + gas, which is what the West is doing. (Solar/wind + battery is cute, but it's been crowded out by the quicker-deploying gas infrastructure, as well as the higher prices EV manufacturers are willing to pay for supply. The threat to gas was nuclear baseload, which could support a smaller battery footprint, but the gas lobbyists seem to have successfully dispatched it.)
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> Germany went the other way, rejecting nuclear and they are now dependant on carbon for their energy...
As you can see the data does not support this claim of yours. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Total power consumption went down due to industry moving out of the country due to increasing electricity cost due the country exiting nuclear power. It's depressing.
What's depressing is how wrong your comment is. You seemingly ignored the Ukrainian war which has lead to sanctioning Russia and the end of cheap Russian oil and gas in Germany. Spot electricity prices are at pre-war levels nowadays, so whatever lack of nuclear power you are imagining is seemingly irrelevant.
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So the link shows in 2001 nuclear generated 482.92 TWh; in 2022 wind plus solar generated 485.12 TWh. Granted coal was down in that time but gas was pretty much flat (except for 2022 when there were extenuating circumstances).
That is primary energy. Only one third of that can actually be turned into electricity.
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The claim was that Germany has now become dependent on carbon based energy sources, the link I posted shows it has always been dependent on carbon based energy sources. The dependence hasn't changed all that much in the last 20 years, it went down a bit but not much.
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Oh, come on. Nuclear can't help us because it is too slow to be built out and too expensive today while all renewables technologies are cheaper and on a continued downward price trajectory.
New Nuclear won't matter. Keeping existing running is a no brainer.
> Nuclear can't help us because it is too slow to be built out
In the West. China can build out nuclear power plants quicker than we can lay HVDC.
But they aren’t. China is building nuclear faster than the West, but they still require seven years per new plant. Their original plan was for nuclear to be 18% of the grid by 2060, but their renewable buildouts have made that number seem much too high. The existing nuclear designs can’t really provide dispatchable power for the vast renewable grid they’re building, either.
The answer for nuclear (if there is one) is factory built SMRs. Those exist in the experimental phases. If SMRs take off, the current designs aren’t going to matter. If SMRs don’t take off, nuclear itself probably isn’t going to matter.
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> Germany went the other way, rejecting nuclear and they are now dependant on carbon for their energy...
This bullshit narrative needs to die. Germany is less dependent on fossil fuels than it has ever been before, and weathered the withdrawal from Russian sources without any serious problems.
(And here's where you move the goalposts to "it could be even less less dependent!!")
Electricity costs skyrocketed and manufacturers moved to lower-cost countries. If everyone moved back to farming the land by hand and stoped using tech, they would also be less dependent on fossil fuels but I don't think many want to make that trade.
> Electricity costs skyrocketed
They are now back to the level of 2021.
> and manufacturers moved to lower-cost countries.
Some loudly talked about it in hopes of pulling in some subsidies and that got vastly overreported for propaganda reasons.
Aren't they building new coal(!!!) power plants recently?
No, unless you count 2009 as "recently", which was the time when the last coal power plant construction in Germany started (GKM 9). And yes, that was a mistake. But it was certainly not "recently".
In 2020, the last coal power plant was connected to the grid (Datteln 4). It was delayed, as it wasn't clear for quite a while whether it was even legal. But the decisions that have been made to build these plants were made 15-20 years ago.
It could be recent expansion of coal mines and recommissioning old plants that you're thinking of.