This article is a joke of renewable propaganda. It makes hypothesis on the worst nuclear trends, and project the renewable trends, ignoring that renewables need fossile to provide consistent output. They also question each and every analysis that pretend nuclear would be good.
This is an anti-nuclear shit post.
Yet studies show that renewables decarbonise faster and the only way for nuclear to complete is basically in a majority renewables grid. Oh, and also be 25% cheaper. Which is not ideal.
renewables need fossile to provide consistent output
If only we had invented energy storage!
Also not even an advantage.
France has nuclear capacity for 550TWh/yr at nameplate for a load of 420-500TWh/yr and several neighboring countries that let them use hydro for storage.
They still produce 40-50TWh from dispatchable sources.
If storage is impossible, then we better build more wind and solar instead of nuclear.
Great news if you want the free market to solve all the world’s problems.
I’m more into ensuring we have a diverse carbon free energy generation future, though, and nuclear is just able to solve the storage problem today, which makes it incredibly valuable to society.
Are there any nuclear plants today that implement energy storage? I know molten salt reactors would be capable but none actually exist as far as I can find.
…so?
For the article, which you apparently didn’t read:
“Given enough time, it may be possible to build a nuclear power plant to the highest safety standards and remain economically relevant, even taking into account the costs of storing nuclear waste for thousands of years,” the scientists concluded. “However, building nuclear power plants requires many years of planning and construction and is expensive, while the climate crisis demands urgency and requires such large investments that profitability is paramount.”
“However, building nuclear power plants requires many years of planning and construction and is expensive, while the climate crisis demands urgency and requires such large investments that profitability is paramount.”
…they say as they ignore the glaring fact that prioritising profit over everything else is literally what got us in to this urgency-demanding mess in the first place, and that depending on the “good will” of people who will refuse to act until and unless something is proven to make them money is only ever going to continue serving them, not the rest of the planet.
I think the person you replied to is valid in wondering why anyone thinks this is a positive development when all it is is more fucking around within the rules of capitalism and somehow expecting capitalism to change…
Pretty sure what he meant is that who cares about profit? Not a discussion we should be having when in a climate crisis brought about by chasing profits.
I say let’s decarbonise ASAP, while looking into a long term zero GHG emissions power grid. There is no one-size fits all when it comes to energy generation and distribution.
We need to do both. The amount of renewable energy that we need to decarbonize or economy is enormous.
Right now we don’t have the industrial capacity to manufacture the amount of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries needed for the transition. We need to ramp up the production, it means new factories, new trained engineers and technicians, new mines for the ore… All of that takes years or even decades to setup. The estimates I saw for the amount of lithium needed implied that we need to multiply the production by a factor of 20 !! Renewables energy also requires a lot of copper. New mines can take decades to open.
We already have some industrial capacity for building nuclear reactors do we should use it. Same for renewables and ramp up as much as we can.
I’m 2020 this is the world primary energy mix :
- Coal: 27.6%
- Oil: 31.6%
- Gas: 25%
- Nuclear: 4.4%
- Hydropower: 7%
- Wind: 2.6%
- Solar: 1.4%
- Other renewables: 0.5%
Right now fossil fuel are still above 80%, it needs to be close to 0% in 25 years. We need to use all the tools we have available: nuclear, solar and wind.
I agree, especially with respect to batteries. It’s not about nuclear vs renewables, it’s about nuclear vs batteries. We can probably scale up energy storage to meet the world’s baseload needs - but we haven’t done that before. It might take a long time, we might hit some dead ends, and it might not end up being as cheap as we hope. But we have seen nuclear power on a large scale so we know what it takes. To be certain we can get zero carbon as soon as possible we should pursue every promising avenue.
Also note that the cost of, for example, solar energy has decreased 94% in the last 35 years because we have (rightly) put lots of resources into research and scaling up production. Meanwhile nuclear investment has been way down for decades. Maybe the cost of nuclear would come down with economies of scale, and newer designs.
Diverting resources from solar and wind which are growing ~25-50% and currently 2EJ/yr per year to nuclear is a net loss given that a 20 year build up of the nuclear industry resulted in <1EJ/yr increase in the 80s. By the time any new reactor is online, the annual production of new PV will exceed the entire nuclear fleet builtnover 70 years.
Just the first fuel load for that much nuclear requires more than doubling uranium mining. Not to mention the iridium, gadolinium etc. or anything outside the core. And this is in uranium resources that are significantly worse than those currently being mined.
The “so much copper” for solar is about 0.4kg/kW for distributed (10% of current mining would cover all electricity in 2 years).
Similarly current lithium production is producing about 1TWh/yr of batteries. 10 years of that is overkill for lithium’s role in grid storage (although about an order of magnitude more is needed if the goal is for everyone to have an EV and we ignore sodium ion, both unrelated to cancelling renewable projects and instead pretendingnto build a nuclear reactor).
You’re also making fossil fuels seem like a bigger contributer than they are. 1J of electricity will provide 5J of space heating or the same travel distance as 5-8J burnt to refine petrol and make an ICE car go. 20% hydro/renewables/nuclear means that only 50% of the actual stuff done is via fossil fuels. Which is not to say heat pumps and electrified transport are trivial transitions, but they are necessary either way.
Is lithium still that important with the new battery technologies emerging?
I’ve been reading that sodium based and even solid state batteries are making leaps and bounds while at the same time we are actively reducing the amount of lithium required to manufacture large capacity batteries, by introducing new formulas based with much cheaper and plentiful elements.
What I would like to see is a ramp up on recycling more and better.
yes qyron
lithium remains a crucial element in the realm of emerging battery technologies, despite the evolution and diversification of battery chemistries. Lithium-ion batteries, which utilize lithium as a core component, have dominated the energy storage landscape for decades due to their high energy density, reliability, and widespread use in various applications, including consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and renewable energy storage.
Sodium ion is commercial now and in the scale-up phase. It’s usable for anything a lithium battery was usable for in 2015, but with some advantages (cheaper, longer lasting, shippable fully discharged, less fire-prone). Other grid scale technologies (ZnBr, Fe, NaS, V, Na-flow) are in the demo stage.
In either case the current scale of the lithium battery industry exceeds the scale needed for diurnal grid storage significantly. Mining a kg of lithium is both lower environmental impact and larger in scale of application (in terms of energy per year delivered by the associated system) than mining a kg of Uranium.
You don’t need to remember me the downsides of mining lithium or uranium.
If the numbers are true, my country has the richest reserves of lithium in Europe and one of the richest in the entire world. But the idea of strip minning it does not appeal to anyone and we have a village actively campaigning to not have a mine set up there, regardless the number of jobs ot could bring there.
Regarding uranium, I actually live in an area where it was once mined the land bears the scars. Nobody really remembers how much rock was cut, crushed and hauled away by train in the day.
But this always brings this to mind: why are we not investing in technology to harvest lithium from salt water? I remember hearing it was a viable option growing up.
You can’t infest every house on every street on every neighborhood with door to door nuclear power plant salespeople. Profitability is the least important metric in my mind for such a huge topic as energy production.
