No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble.
Nuclear fission is the answer.
Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.
Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and the uranium fuel is very cheap, perhaps 10% of the cost of running the plant.
This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if you care about greenhouse emissions.
Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514).
In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were announced a few weeks ago. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).
Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. But you don't hear about it in the mainstream news yet. And many people (Germany, Spain, I'm looking at you) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this.
Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather.
I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?”
We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data.
You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.
Plus if it's not sunny/windy in one part of the country, it may well be very sunny or windy in other parts of the country. We have a whole freaking energy grid!
This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.
If you think you don’t have that grid, your country has to build it (instead of billions and more than 10 years for nuclear). Like the Synchronous grid of Continental Europe [1] and [2] which I far from finished but a good start.
This is what happened to Germany. They tried going 100% renewables and then had Russia take up the slack for the rest of what they needed. Then they realized they had a massive shortfall and then was leaning far too much on Russia to take up the slack.
As someone else pointed out, geopolitics always weighs heavy in energy production. Just like in Germany's case where they relied too heavy on Russia for the shortfall of renewables, then Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia used their energy production as leverage to essentially blackmail Germany into not going along with UN sanctions against them.
However we need to get to total energy independence, I'm all for, and this whole idea it has to be one or the other only lengthens the process of getting there. In the mean time, it puts us in a precarious position to be involved with countries and regime's that don't like us and will never have our best interests in mind.
I assume you mean sanctions in general, not UN sanctions specifically. Russia as a permanent member of the UN security council can veto any resolution, so there is little point in even trying to push something through UN.
There was definitely a period where the "renewables are too expensive" propaganda was winning and right wing German parties were successful in slowing renewables, particularly offshore wind rollout in Germany.
This will have cost them Billions, similar to the British right wing effectively banning onshore wind in Emgland at roughly the same time.
Both nations have done well with renewables, but could have done better and saved money and supported local business at the same time.
The cost of the renewables rollout in Germany is on the order of 2 trillion euros. They produce so much renewable energy that the prices regularly go negative, but then import at much higher prices when they don’t. They pay among the highest prices in Europe, and still their CO2 emissions are among the worst. If wind/solar as a whole were both as cheap as touted and as environmentally friendly, that should not be the case.
The whole world owes Germany a massive debt for their overpayment for renewables. Investing in renewables on a massive scale in the 90's is what really kicked off the virtuous cycle that led to the low costs of renewables today.
Germany would have been much better off building nuclear in the 90's. But because they invested in renewables instead, everybody (including Germany) has a much better option of building renewables in the 2020s.
Your source suggests that providing 95% of Texas energy with wind and solar and batteries will cost the same as providing it with nuclear and batteries.
I'm dubious about many of their assumptions but even your source shows that renewables are the obvious choice to power the world.
It's also interesting that the cost drops 50% if you don't need to cover the last 5%. A shame he didn't go further and calculate at 80% and so on like the recent Australian working paper.
I guess that would show that starting the rollout now would provide lots of savings that could be used to deploy the later percentiles.
The most successful ones have a combination of favorable geographic/geological conditions (geothermal vents, suitable rivers, good offshore to land ratio) and small size. It would be hard for Germany to copy solutions from let's say Iceland or Norway.
Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.
Geopolitics and nuclear power are not always such a great combination - consider the Russian occupation of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine. I'm not against nuclear power in general, but saying it's a great hedge against political risks involved with wind and solar is quite a stretch.
Two units cooling for every unit of electricity, at least with PWR/BWR. At a 10 degree C rise it requires about 50ml of water (per second) per kW of electrical power.
Palo Verde NPP in Arizona happens to be in a rather dry area. It uses treated sewage for cooling and is trying to use rather poor quality groundwater too.
If you ever done a tour on a nuclear facility you'd hear about how careful they need to be managing water temperatures in their discharge pools, you don't want a nuke frying off all wildlife on the rivers and/or lakes nearby. You don't want to create massive ponds of still water for cooling, and you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).
Nuclear power plants only really have an effect on the water temperature if they do not have a cooling tower. This makes the plant considerably cheaper, but, as you mentioned, damages the ecosystem.
Only in rare cases, such as during revisions or emergencies, they might be unable to cool the condenser using the tower-coolant-loop. Then they might have to warm up the water temporarily.
> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).
There is no such failure case that a "discharge needs to happen" for the irradiated water. There is a comparatively tiny amount of deionized and supercleaned water in the reactor that is always cycled around. Even if such a case were to occur (how??), the amount of water would be easy to handle/store.
I mean, classical plants and those based around the regulations that the US currently has on the books thanks to some questionable lobbying in the 60s require large amounts of water, sure.
These are hardly the only viable plant designs that exist. Molten Salt, Pebble Bed, and other designs exist.
China is currently underway building a molten salt cooled Thorium reactor.
Russia has had sodium-cooled reactors [0] for some time. America experimented with them at least back to the 1950s, with the USS Seawolf (SSN 575, not SSN 21) having a sodium-cooled reactor (S2G) for her first few years.
Russia also had lead-bismuth reactors, at least militarily, with the Alfa-class.
Let's stay realistic. You can build as many solar panels as you want in Iceland and you won't get any power from them mid winter. They're not just less effective, they would not be functional for over a month. That's not "everywhere".
That doesn't work very well for the Western North America. After sunset there is nowhere to obtain much solar or wind power. We're not going to build a transmission cable to Hawaii.
The wind slows down a lot after sunset in most of North America. Grid scale batteries aren't really a thing yet. Someday maybe, but it's going to take many years to provision enough to handle the nighttime base load on the west coast.
> You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.
Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.
> Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again.
Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.
Not the same scenario. First, France came through this just fine.
Second, the could have kept those plants operating and taken a more piecemeal approach to fixing the cracks. They shouldn't have, and didn't, because you really want that triple or quadruple redundancy in your cooling systems, but they could have if push had come to shove, the plants were still operational.
But since there was plenty of capacity available, they could afford to take those plants offline and do the checks and repairs all at once.
Intermittent renewables afford you no such optionality.
This event happened in 2022. this is the only year since 1995 where nuclear production fell below 300TWh (278TWh in 2022 vs 360 in 2021 and 320 in 2023).
These cracks are not the only factor for the poor performance on nuclear in 2022 : several reactors had to do their 10-year maintenance (grand carénage), which had been delayed because of the pandemic.
It's hard to extrapolate reliability issues from an event that happened once in 30 years.
Well, that's a false dichotomy, because no-one's (at least no-one reasonable and in good faith) is suggesting shifting the grid entirely to nuclear. Instead, a diverse set of generation sources is ideal, including solar, wind, nuclear and hydro.
Well, the point of this thread is that's only true until a sufficient level of availability is required, and then nuclear (and fossil thermal plants) all of a sudden become a viable option again.
Yep. That was a one-time occurrence, due to (a) inspections being deferred during COVID and (b) France's long time catastrophic underinvestment in their nuclear fleet.
Until March 2023, there was a law in France that made it illegal to increase nuclear capacity in absolute terms and mandated reduction to under 50% in relative terms.
But again, a one-time event, and it doesn't change the high capacity factors world-wide (over 80%) and the extremely high capacity factors in reasonably well run fleets ( > 90% in the US, and also inGermany when they still had nuclear ).
One time or not, need to be able to deal with it, as need to be able deal with the possibility of underinvestment etc. - especially if fleets get much bigger.
1) It caused/aggrevated serious issues on the European energy market at the time
2) Then you might have no electricity for some months every few decades from "one offs"
3) Appeals to humans needing to be different are rarely successful
Electricity supply to consumers was affected how? And please separate this out from the general energy crisis of 2021-2023.
Since we didn't have "no electricity for some months" in this one-off, and, as I explained elsewhere, had optionality, not quite sure how you extrapolate from an event not happening to an event happening every few decades.
Gosh, so we're not ever going to invest sufficiently in battery tech for that to ever work. Glad you cleared that up for us.
But to be clear, it wasn't some random "human nature" that caused the underinvestment. It was official government policy, and that government policy has now been changed.
The renewables mafia that is still in control in Germany was also in control in France. That has been taken care of, mostly by being exposed to the harsh light of Reality™.
The law that mandated reduction and forbade expansion of nuclear was repealed March 2023. They are now expanding capacity, build first 6 and then an additional 8 simplified EPR2 reactors.
And there was one more reason for the lull in investment: France did the initial expansion under the Messmer Plan far too quickly. They nuclearized their grid in just 15 years.
Which sounds great, and of course completely puts the lie to those who claim that nuclear is "too slow". But there is a problem: these nuclear plants are not just quick to build, they also last pretty much forever, at least 60 years, many if not most are being extended to 80 years and the experts say there's no reason not to go to 100.
If you have built all the nuclear power plants you need in 15 years and they last 100 years, you have nothing to build for 85 years (or 65 / 45 years if you assume 80/60 year lifespans).
That's a problem, because your nuclear industry will wither and die in that time.
The supply was there because there was supply from elsewhere (and it happened in an energy crisis - it happened when it happened). France isn't isolated.
Poor policy can happen again - such is human nature. So things need to work under poor policies, too.
> The supply was there because there was supply from elsewhere
Exactly, as I wrote. Which is why they were able pursue the option "shut everything down at once and fix immediately" without any negative repercussions apart from EDFs bottom line for that one year.
(Though that apparently was not the biggest negative impact on their bottom line that year. The bigger one was being compelled by law to sell electricity to their competitors at 4 cents/kWh and having to buy it back at market rates that were spiking due to the energy crisis).
There was also the option "stagger the shutdowns and take a slightly elevated risk of one of the triple-redundant cooling systems failing". Which they might have preferred to reducing electricity supply for the country or accelerating repairs. But they didn't have to do that.
> So things need to work under poor policies, too.
Nothing works under arbitrarily bad policy, and such a standard is not applied to anything in the real world.
Dayjob is in energy market algo trading and DER ancillary services in EU, and I can tell you with confidence this is far from true.
And when the nukes trip for safety reasons - which happens multiple times per year - that’s a GW that just dropped off the grid from one second to the next.
For me, I much prefer the reliability of wind and solar; never seen a correlated failure, and we know their production pattern days in advance.
It’s literally just that having a solar+wind grid that can survive 3 days of bad weather costs 6x as much as a grid that can survive normal day to day.
The number I heard was 8x. Solar is about 50 cents / kW, a "24 hour" solar grid is about $4/kW. But that's still about half the price of a natural gas grid and 1/5th the cost of nuclear.
What about negative externalities? If we were to force all actors to pay for their emissions and toxic by-products, factoring the entire lifecycle into the cost, what would it look like then? If, even with that in mind, solar looses to nuclear, that would be a fairly interesting result.
> I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?”
Something close to that happens almost every year in Europe. Last year there was nearly 3 weeks in winter where there was very little wind across the continent (<20% capacity production on all wind farms), and obviously little to no solar (high latitudes).
Nuclear plants often operate at 90%+ capacity factors, while solar can range from 10-25% depending on location. So you might need 4-9 times more solar capacity to match total energy output.
So depending on the region, you might need 4-9 gigawatts of solar capacity with a higher amount of battery storage to match 1 GW nuclear output. This is because you need to account for winter vs summer, for bad weather etc. Maybe it will take a lot more space and cost more to build than restarting a nuclear plant for 1.6 billion.
Because it’s reasonably cheap to buy two decades of fuel in advance, and it won’t take up much space. If such a thing were a concern, then people would do precisely that.
If it were still a problem towards the end of that period, then you can in fact extract uranium from seawater.
It's also plentiful in many countries, it's just not mined because it's too cheap. But since fuel is under 1% of the cost of Nuclear, if it was a problem we could easy mine more difficult places.
> what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months
Forget about two months, the cost to battery store just for two or three days is enormous. At the same time, it does not happen often enough to justify the cost over just using natural gas as a backup, so that is how it is done.
Many documented cases of non zero marginal cost energy systems failing. And in response we have learnt to eliminate, minimise, and manage risk better in those systems.
But apparently, in zero marginal cost energy it’s impossible. The only energy systems where you can have reliability have rent seeking minerals companies selling you fuel.
The problem is that you need to plan for the absolute worst case, once in a century, scenario and size your batteries accordingly.
Same reason why almost no one goes 100% solar at home deep in the south/north because you'd need 20x your needed capacity in batteries to account for that once in a decade bleak winter week
I don't mean to be cynical, but manifestly this isn't necessary. It's why widespread power outages remain a thing even in rich, highly industrialized countries. American Gulf Coast utilities don't spend astronomical sums on distribution infrastructure to ensure 100% uptime through hurricanes; entire regions end up going hours if not days without power on a regular basis. Likewise, Texas doesn't maintain enough generation and robust infrastructure to make it through every cold snap unscathed.
People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages."
I'm all for nuclear, but let's be honest about how real-world infrastructure truly works. And, yes, I believe this means safety claims of Gen 4+ nuclear are off, just as they were for prior gen plants. Through motivated accounting people arrive at the numbers that are demanded, but knowingly or not the actual risk of an incident will be greater, as it manifestly always has been. At the same time our real risk tolerance is much greater than we claim, and this will eventually be born out in the power markets, whether through greater nuclear, less reliable power, or some other state of affairs.
> Likewise, Texas doesn't maintain enough generation and robust infrastructure to make it through every cold snap unscathed.
Correction: Texas, the state, doesn't require producers to maintain adequate reserve generation or robust infrastructure, and since they are not (except for a couple of small exceptions) connected to other regional grids, they can't be made to do so by the federal government. This is by design. It's a bad design, but one that greatly pleases corporations.
> People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages."
This was not my experience when I lived in Texas. There was a brief moment in time for me (~2017 – 2019) where it was actually substantially cheaper, but only if you had the time and knowledge to scour all of the available plans and run some kind of modeling on them, since some had a lot of weird rules. Around COVID, that changed, and the cost savings evaporated. I check periodically, and it still hasn't recovered. Cheapest I could find for where I lived was 10.1¢/kWh, but that's just the base price. In contrast, my base price in North Carolina, on an REMC, is an annual average of 7.48¢/kWh.
All that to say, Texans were/are paying more than many others for sub-standard service. I bought a generator while there, and had to use it many, many times. I have used it precisely once here in NC, and that wasn't even a real need – sunny, pleasant afternoon, and someone hit a transformer with their car. Lost power for about 2 hours. Could've easily just done without and been fine.
> you need to plan for the absolute worst case, once in a century, scenario and size your batteries accordingly.
For a once-in-a-century situation, you can have alternatives other than batteries. For instance, backup diesel generators; any extra CO2 emitted by them in that situation would be insignificant when spread over a hundred years. And once you're planning for once-in-a-century events, you need backup generators anyway, since you can have failures other than just cloudy windless weather.
What you didn’t mention is the effect that renewables have on the cost of nuclear power. When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop. Because nuclear power has high up front costs, its economics are increasingly eroded as more renewables and batteries are added to the grid.
You’re totally correct that renewables and batteries aren’t yet able to bridge the gap in times of bad weather, but what they are excellent at is spoiling the economics of any other type of cheap electricity generation that comes with high capital costs.
> When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop
In the short run, sure. In the long run, cheap power builds its own demand. A country that commits to a certain amount of nuclear baseload, even if run at a loss in the short term, is injecting a very real industrial subsidy into its system. (The way to ensure you don’t get a dog is to subsidise long-term loans for private borrowers. They still need to make a profit someday. But you reduce the time value of money for them.)
The investment doesn’t make sense for a non-nuclear power. But if you’re already producing nuclear waste at scale for your military, it’s a little silly to pretend you’re safer without a civilian reactor in the middle of a desert while all manner of subs and ships patrol your coast.
You are right which means that the cheap excess solar energy during summer and during the day will drive a boom in those industries which can leverage such intermittent availability of very cheap energy.
The problem you describe seems to be one targeted by the TerraPower project in Wyoming. It plans to operate at 100% capacity at all times (345 MWe), but makes itself more akin to other renewables by incorporating energy storage into its design.
It is supposed to be able to increase capacity to 150% (500 MWe), allowing it to respond to energy scarcity. But it can also respond to energy abundance by storing excess production in molten salt storage tanks.
Residential users make up ~38% of the electricity market in the US.
Where do you suggest the rest of the users should get power from? And how would that work exactly in reality?
Even of the government had to ensure that everyone has access to affordable electricity they'd still have to buy it from someone which fundamentally doesn't change anything.
Profit is… not fake, but fiat. Energy and clean water are real.
With collapsing demographics the current economic system will fall over anyway, either due to inflation or defaults, so maybe it’s a good time to start thinking about how to separate utilities from money.
If I had answers, I wouldn't be saying that it's a good time to think about that.
But you shouldn't assume that things will just continue on as they were in the past hundred years. Boomers are retiring now, when the busters start going into retirement it's going to be a huge mess. Inflation is how democracies die.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
-- John Maynard Keynes.
I think he's onto something as I see the lengths Boing, Intel, FAANG, et. al going to benefit us all everyday...
There are so few corporations which build things to better the world and make money in the process.
99% of the corporations build things to earn money. Their wares sometimes do no harm, but it's the exception.
In many cases, the desire for money, not the need, is the driving force behind the technology. See n startups which are discussed here and categorized as "this is better as X. they're just trying to earn money with no real benefit to anyone".
Did Exxon hide their global warming research to benefit humanity? Of course not. Did Tetra Ethyl Lead added to gasoline instead of Ethanol, just because it was better? No because it was patentable and ethanol was not. Did WV created "better" diesel engines to benefit the humanity? No the engines were only "better" for their bottom line and problematic for every one. Did DuPont hid the effects of forever chemicals because it was beneficial/harmless to the nature? On the contrary.
Companies do whatever they can without breaking laws (or bending them with money) to earn more money. The products we get are side effects of it.
I like this take about current (Generative) AI hype:
The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth.
-- jeffowski (at Twitter/X)
> Their wares sometimes do no harm, but it's the exception.
I disagree with that to a very extreme degree (also it's a very silly thing to say unless you don't see any value in computers, smartphones, planes, automobiles, washing machines, fridges and other appliances).
The things you listed are generally the exceptions. Also the question is whether society/people benefited from VW, Exxon, DuPont etc. to such an extent that it outweighed all of those things?
Of course it's relative, if we value access to cheap and effective transportation, synthetic clothing, various plastic products etc. more than we care about all the negative externalities that's what we get... It's all down to incentives, corporations are inherently neither good nor evil.
> to earn more money. The products we get are side effects of it.
I agree that's true on the whole. But that's why humans do anything at all (replace money with other tangible or intangible benefits). Absolute altruism doesn't scale and isn't in any way sustainable.
They did when they were led by people passionate about the technology. As soon as MBAs got ahold of them, it was all about enriching shareholders in the short-term.
Who pays for it?
If everybody gets all of the above for free, then why would they ever work and contribute to covering the cost of these free for everyone services?
Once a large number of people stop working, who actually works to grow the food? Who builds the houses?
It's interesting that you bring up a large number of people no longer growing food as if that's not the current reality. What do all those people do now that they don't have to work for food?
Someone works grueling hours in the sun to grow it and then the rest of us work and pay those people that grew it money. Is this really a question?
If the people doing the growing are getting all of their needs met why would they grind to produce food to sell for money when they get money for free?
Why would the vast majority of people in the bottom 50% of the economic ladder work at all if they were getting all of their needs met at no cost to them?
Why stop there? EVERYBODY deserves healthcare and education too!
I would say in a perfect world everyone should have all of these things.
The problem is that the marginal cost to giving each of these things to everyone increases to infinity as we approach 100% of a sufficiently large and diverse population. For example, creating a city water system should efficiently deliver clean water to a large proportion of an urban population. However, not everyone lives in an urban setting and delivering clean water to remote populations can get astronomically expensive.
As rational citizens we must acknowledge this unfortunate reality and figure out how to deal with it fairly and equitably. Profit seeking enterprise has been astoundingly effective at driving down these marginal costs for a whole host of goods for centuries. Many of these things you mention only exist because profit seekers developed and distributed them!
That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output.
The only time it won't scale to meet output is if the price stays high, but if the nuclear energy is already on the grid and has elastic pricing, the rest will take care of itself.
But the price of energy can be negative, so a new nuclear plant might never pay off its cost, even if it provides the public benefit of cheap electricity.
Is it case that the metric we're using does not show the actual price? https://www.squeaky.energy/blog/the-unintended-consequences-... shows a way to get "free" electricity on a regular basis, while it still costs consumers a very non-zero amount. In the case of solar, revenue could be achieved through out-of-market payments (CfD, power purchase agreements, renewable energy certificates).
Or is it the sign that the nightmare battery dominated grid is starting to happen? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-unstoppabl...
Battery operators can choose between strategies designed to maximize revenue, profit, competitive advantage, or competitor losses, over any given timescale and with almost perfect deniability.
> That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output.
If the price of electricity is negative, people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again.
> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.
> people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again.
But will electricity cost enough to justify the huge upfront cost of nuclear plants?
If we have the wealth to build capital-intensive projects that are marginally cost effective, it might be easier to build smelters and desalination plants that only run at 40% capacity, when the sun is out.
Easily solved via sane energy policy. Of course politics will likely make this impossible in the US.
In a rational environment you run your nuclear at 100% 24x7. The cost of the fuel is not material running at 10% vs. 100%. Letting parasitic intermittent power sources screw this up is simply financial engineering by largely bad actors. At least currently.
Then you use intermittent power sources to provide your peak loads during the day, and any excess you ideally start putting into storage - whatever that may be. If you have effectively free marginal power during certain peak times, I'm positive industry will find a way to turn that into money.
I still have hope sanity returns to the energy discussion, but it likely won't happen in the US during my lifetime. The cost of solar and wind is entirely politics - the storage cost is literally never considered when reading articles on the subject. The hidden costs are likely 10x or so what the marginal cost per kwh everyone loves to spew. Lots of folks getting massively rich off this disinformation so there is huge inertia behind ignoring it - even from very smart people that should absolutely know better after a few hours of reading on the subject. Just look at many of the posts here at HN.
The environmental costs of methane (natural gas) are simply not being considered. The methane leaks into the environment are underestimated by at least 10x if not much, much, more. Pivoting from nuclear and to natural gas has been an utter environmental disaster.
It's worth remembering that the anti-nuclear crowd was always backed by big oil, and even in the age where solar and wind are being pushed, big oil benefits as the unmet demand for base load power, in the absence of nuclear, means that they get the business as there is no alternative.
They pulled the green crowd along for the ride hook, line, and sinker.
If we have designed our markets to price cheap, reliable electricity out of the market and instead prefer expensive unreliable electricity, we've really f*ed up.
Spaniard here: we have zero gas and zero uranium nationally sourced, yet thanks to solar, wind and hydro, our energy grid is among the best in the world. We are at 20% nuclear, above global average, and above USA or UK, no need to install more.
Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA. In terms of energy we are good, thank you, and need no lessons from the USA.
Spain also has a hugely different energy market than the United States. Spain is around 5% of the size of the US, being closer to a state in our context. Different states have different climates, making them more aligned with different energy sources. It doesn't make sense to compare the US and Spain in this context.
> We are at 20% nuclear,
Doesn't this prove the parent comment's point, that the best mix of energy is renewables supplemented by a base of nuclear power?
> Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA
This feels unnecessary. Spain has done an amazing job building an energy base, let's talk about how we can export to different countries and climates instead of putting people down.
Fission is a bad complement for solar power. A good complement for solar provides dispatchable fill-in-the-gaps type of power. However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement.
You can get to 100% carbon free by using a combination of overprovisioning, source diversity, geographic diversity, storage and statistics. You can't get to 100% but you can get to an arbitrary number of nines and say "good enough". The grid is only 99.99% reliable so having generation be better than that has little value.
If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid you choose something the opposite of nuclear: something cheap to build but expensive to fuel. For example, synthetic natural gas. The cost of the fuel has little relevance when it only has a duty cycle of 0.1%. And they're cheap to build and likely don't even need building because we already have lots of them.
China built a lot of nuclear reactors in the 2010's, but is slowing their build rate. 10GW/year of nuclear power is not very impressive in a country that built 100GW of solar in the first half of 2024.
That being said, I still support restarting TMI. The main costs of nuclear are in building and decomissioning them. We've already incurred the cost of building TMI and we're already on the hook for decomissioning it, so running it is likely cost-effective once you remove the sunk costs.
What you say makes sense. But what if we need to generate 50 times more electricity than we do now? At some point solar and wind energy will start being very expensive because we'll run out of cheap land. You might think 50 is absurd, but consider this: right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition most of our energy use to electricity. The big culprits are transportation, steel, concrete and fertilizers. That's a factor of 3. Then we want to increase everyone's standards of living to match the current standard of living of the average American or European person. That's another factor of 3. Then we want to increase our (clean) energy use. Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions in the atmosphere. If, as Elon wants, we end up having hundreds or thousands of launches per day, and we want these launches to be net zero, then we need to find a way to manufacture hundreds of millions of tons of synthetic fuel each year. AI will also consume a lot of electricity. We will also need to build cities, if we are to lift billions of people out of their current rural life (in Africa, South America, India, etc). Everybody talks about solar as if the goal is to replace the current generation capacity. But the goal is to do that, and then more, much, much more. I think you need nuclear for that.
> At some point solar and wind energy will start being very expensive because we'll run out of cheap land.
Yes that might happen. But it'll happen at a number much greater than 50X. And it's a problem that'll only happen if we solve the global warming problem first.
> right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition most of our energy use to electricity. The big culprits are transportation, steel, concrete and fertilizers. That's a factor of 3.
But we mostly use fuels that are 30% - 60% efficient plus wastage for production, refining and transporting. Over 2/3rds of the energy we use gets wasted as heat. So we've got a factor of 1/3 to cancel out your 3 here. It's not completely efficient so it's actually about 1.2X, not 3X.
> Then we want to increase everyone's standards of living to match the current standard of living of the average American or European person.
Yep, that's a good 3X, if not more there. But unfortunately it's going to take decades to accomplish this.
> Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions in the atmosphere. If, as Elon wants, we end up having hundreds or thousands of launches per day, and we want these launches to be net zero, then we need to find a way to manufacture hundreds of millions of tons of synthetic fuel each year.
> Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions
Each launch would then be a 0.00001X, and is approximately equivalent to a trans-pacific plane flight. Thousands of flights per year would not be a significant fraction of the Earth's emissions. Hundreds of thousands of flights would be.
- solar is fine up to around 500X
- which won't happen this century
- when it happens power will be abundant enough that the cost calculations will be radically different
- technology will also be radically different. Maybe we'll use anti-matter reactors or something.
> Yes that might happen. But it'll happen at a number much greater than 50X.
It's difficult to say. We are not running out of land, that's for sure. But we are running out of cheap land. Or rather land where it is economical to build solar. Sahara has plenty of empty land, and it is plenty sunny all year long, but there are civil wars more often than not, various militias, corrupt governments, etc. The US has lots of deserts, but also lots of groups with various agendas that find ways to delay projects, and delays can transform good projects into bad projects.
As a concrete example, take California. California is very proud to be a leader in environmental issues. You can find on the state website the installed capacity per year. For the last 5 years it has been [1], in GW: 1.2 (in 2020), 1.5, 2.0, 2.3, 0.9 (in 2024, so far). The year over year growth rates were 26%, 35%, 10% and for this year -60%. This year is not over, and it's possible the numbers are not up to date, but it's quite unlikely we'll get to match last year's numbers, let alone see a double digit growth.
Or take Texas. Wikipedia has their annual numbers between 2007 and 2023 [2]. I did the math, and between 2007 and 2017 they experienced a 90% annual growth. Nice Moore's law at work there. For the next 4 years the average annual growth was 60%. And for the last 2 years, it was 28%. Nothing to sneeze at, but the trend is clear. Why, if the cost of the panels went down?
> Thousands of flights per year
Elon is not talking about thousands of flights per year. Thousands of flights per day. Millions per year. A million launches of 5 kT CO2e each equal 5 GT CO2 each. That's about 10% of the current worldwide emissions. Or about 30% of the current emissions that come from power generation. If we are to use synthetic fuel instead of fossil fuel, and you have a 30% efficiency of making synfuel (which is what a quick google search indicates), then you have a 2x increase in electricity needs.
> However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement.
I think this is why they call it baseload. Yes it costs the same, used or unused... but it's always there, ready to be used. This is its strength, not a defect.
> If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid
But no reasonable person wants that. They want "100% reliability, and who cares where it comes from". If you're environmentally minded, you can tack on a "with no carbon"... but even that isn't the same thing as a "primarily solar grid".
baseload is base load, not base generation. Base generation is not a thing.
Way back when, they realized that grids had a base load below which it never dropped. They realized that if they designed some of their plants without the expensive features which allowed them to be turned on and off quickly, they could build plants cheaper.
You don't design grids for base load, you design grids for peak load in all scenarios. If you can handle peak, you can also handle base.
Baseload is for cost optimization. And nuclear is a horrible way to optimize cost.
One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build.
Nuclear plants that already run, often take days, some even weeks to adjust significant: so if on monday the wind stops blowing, on tuesday it gets cloudy, and on tuesday afternoon everyone needs to charge their EV or fire up the AC, it'll often take until next week friday before a nuclear plant can deliver this. Modern plants are faster, and theres many "hacks" where energy is blown out (wasted) for short peaks down, or where there's always 10% wasted for short peaks up.
So nuclear needs innovation. But most of all, needs to be "just a piece of the puzzle" and never the only piece.
Nuclear fission, and other of this "innovation" isn't there. That's the other slow part of nuclear. Even if its production ready today, that plant won't run for another decade, often 20+ years (except china, which tells you the reason why it's so rediculous slow: NIMBY, regulations, democracy)
So, sorry, aside from all the other (fictive) problems with nuclear (waste, risk etc), nuclear has a serious problem of being just too damn slow to solve *todays* energy crisis on its own.
Edit: Source, I've interned in power plants. A comparable coal plant, took one and a half month to power up from zero to producing electricity: which happened every 5 years for revision and three months to power down. It could adjust 10% in a few hours, but everything over 30% needed week(s) of planning ahead. I made those plannings.
> One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build.
All of those things, to me, mean that it should be a large part of the mix. Nuclear should be the backbone of our energy production, and should be sufficient to supply our baseline needs.
That said, in places where hydro or geothermal are practical, those should be used in preference to nuclear. They're cheaper, more reliable, and just better in almost every way.
Solar, wind, tidal, wave action, and so on should be what we build on top of that baseline. They should be cheaper to build and operate, but far less consistent.
If you want to train a huge LLM, or smelt metals, or do anything that's energy-intensive but not very time-sensitive, you schedule those loads during times where energy production exceeds existing demand.
... and you know when that happens by pricing energy based on availability. Electricity should be cheapest when we have more than we need, and more expensive when the inconsistent sources listed above aren't producing. In other words, market forces are sufficient to make this happen.
In fact, one of the cool things about solar and wind in particular is that they are so aggressively cyclical that it's possible that energy prices could actually go negative - not often, or regularly, but possible. That opens the door to all kinds of use cases that would otherwise never be profitable, and using those types of technologies often leads to efficiency gains that can eventually make them more efficient than the current alternatives.
This market thing is in place already. At least in Europe it is, I've done a project during my energy engineering study for APEX.
The irony, however, is that it's not all that good for nuclear. When prices go down or even negative, a CHP or windmill is shut down in minutes. The nuclear plant (or ancient coal, or even hydro) will go below cost price, or even havs to pay to deliver electricity, because they can't not deliver. And in Europe we are having a few times of negatively priced electricty per year recently.
And contrary to what many people think, nuclear power is rather expensive. For a small part that's political (subsidies and all), but mostly it's because running
a nuclear plant is expensive; its fuel is expensive as hell (it does burn fuel), and storing its waste "guaranteed" safe for some 5.000 years is expensive (incredible timescales; egyptians building pyramids - to now, timescales). Also expensive is it's cooling facilities: nuclear operates on a steam cycle, so it needs a lot of cooling; many places don't have that (anymore). E.g. in France some plants were shut down because rivers dried up too much and they'd be heating up the remaining "trickle" too much with these plants. That makes it unreliable, the way hydro, tidal, etc can be unreliable too.
There are just so much problems with nuclear power. Again, aside from the political "opinions" on it: these well known percieved risks and such. But that makes it a difficult part of that mix. I do believe it should be a crucial part, but also am convinced that part should be as small as possible, due to those downsides, costs. And, as you say, indeed, in places where there's alternatives, you'll find these alternatives are almost always a better option, cost, timescale and operational wise.
> When prices go down or even negative, a CHP or windmill is shut down in minutes.
Negative prices are a symptom that the (day ahead) market is not the real game being played. CfD, production subsidies and renewable credits are the order of the day.
> The nuclear plant ... will go below cost price
> its fuel is expensive as hell
The Bugey plant is also the main reason France must ask the Swiss to let more water through the Seujet Dam. While most of the water is released back into the river, the reactors need a constant, cool flow — and climate change isn’t only making the Rhône’s water scarcer, but also warmer.
> in France some plants were shut down because rivers dried up too much and they'd be heating up the remaining "trickle" too much with these plants
Looking at https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/07/13/frances-nuclear-po... it appears power was reduced due to river temperatures, not river levels. That makes it more a regulatory issue, and probably one solvable with more hardware (extra cooling towers or greater extraction).
One might also ask whether it is worth EDF investing to get the extra few percent total output across the year; the solar peaks during hot weather will tend to reduce the price of electricity, so why not just schedule maintenance at that time of year. Thus PV creates a problem that it partially solves.
Scheduling loads based on energy spot price tends to wreck the economics of manufacturing. If you have to shut down when energy prices spike then you're still paying fixed expenses for PP&E plus at least some labor. It's tough to finance that.
Depends a bit on the "manufactoring". It's not "black"-"white". While it's certainly true for e.g. a brewery or a bike-factory-line, it's less so for aluminum, or chemicals. And even less so for systems like a freezer.
A friend who makes juices and dried fruits on medium scale, plans his production ahead based on the spot pricing: steaming or deep-freezing can be postponed for days, apparently; I helped him with some dashboards and integrations of the pricing-APIs for this.
What I'm trying to say is: yes, a lot of industry won't be able to profit much from these markets. But many can, if they are just willing to change their current ways a little. Not all: many.
Probably, if "future" means 50+ years, so two generations in future.
But not if it means "future" in even overlapping the current nuclear plants that are EOL, 10, 20 even 30 years. Because to replace those nuclear EOL with other nuclear, we'd need to start building plants in 2014, 2015 (which we didn't). The next best time may be now, but "We", at least in Europe aren't doing that either, and AFAIK neither in the US.
TBC: I'm not saying "it won't work, so stop chasing it" on contrary. But shoehorning "fission" into a discussion of a current energy crisis, what this article is about, isn't relevant. Such tech isn't for today, tomorrow. Not even for when your kids grow, up, but at most for your grandkids when they are working - horizons.
Gas peakers are cheap compared to nuclear, and arguably much more appropriate for the foreseeable future when it comes to making up for renewable energy's inconsistency problems.
I mostly disagree with your initial assertion as well. A sufficiently large and diversified grid will largely cover itself, and when it doesn't, that's what peakers and so on will handle.
Nuclear energy is not free from disruptions caused by natural events or other unexpected causes. See for example the nuclear power plants in France that have to shut down in summer because if low water in the nearby rivers used for cooling.
It's always a question of probability and risk. If we get extreme weather conditions that our storage cannot keep up then we have to temporarily reduce usage and in the longer term increase storage capacity.
That said, I'm not against nuclear. But I'm against simplisticly dismissing renewables.
> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
I never understood the hysteria of the anti-nuclear people. I mean, the stats are out there for everyone to verify. Even the worst nuclear disaster killed no more than 100 people[1]. Plus, the new generation of the nuclear reactor can auto shut down when the temperature keeps rising. As for the nuclear waste, we need just one football field to store all the waste even before the recycling, which can recoup 90% of the material.
I'm also aware of the argument that even one death is too many. But if we follow this argument, wouldn't we need to account for the deaths caused by the alternative energy source, like coal? And the death would be in the thousands, right? And why won't we protest that?
For the explanation of hysteria: 1) Nuclear disasters are acute, traumatic events that can have drastic effects on health of people and ecosystems for generations 2) Nuclear power sounds like nuclear bombs and nuclear radiation, both of which are scary and resonate with long-held cultural fears of nuclear technology that have existed since the Cold War.
Basically, yes most fears of nuclear power are irrational. But that's part of the problem—even if nuclear power polluted in a manner similar to coal power and there wasn't the risk of acute disaster, I still think Americans would be quite wary of the technology purely due to cultural priors.
I am pro-nuclear, but I don't think that's exactly the correct argument for nuclear power. I think we can cover the current level of energy consumption with solar and wind. The problem is that we want to live in a future where the world consumes at least 10 times more energy than now. This might seem like an outrageous number, but it's not. The average energy use per capita in the world is 3.5 times lower than in the US. At the least we want the rest of the world to reach the living standards of the current average American person. But we also know that AI will consume exponentially increasing amounts of electricity. The exponential function is funny, you don't notice it until it explodes in your face. Right now AI uses a non-negligible but still small amount of energy, but the growth is clearly exponential. In a world where the energy is not a constraint, in a few decades AI will consume more energy than the rest of the economy combined, although it will be difficult to say what "the rest of the economy" will mean with a world where everything will be powered by AI.
Nuclear has the potential to fulfill all this future growth in energy requirements. The fundamental problem of nuclear is not safety, or waste, or proliferation. It is cost. And this is a solvable problem. The total cost of the 4 Barakah reactors you mentioned was $32 billion, or $5.7 billion/GW. The cost of utility solar is about $1 billion/GW, but the capacity factor is only about 30%, while the capacity factor of nuclear is about 90%. So $5.7 at 90% is still a bit more expensive than $1 at 30%, but if the cost of nuclear goes down by a factor of 2, it's at the same level as solar. And there is no reason to think such a reduction is not possible.
Very few people talk about the land requirements for solar and consequence of de-greening. To generate 1 MW of solar power, approximately 5 acres are needed. This means a 1 MW solar farm fits on a 10-acre space. This overlaps with croplands and grasslands used for livestock grazing. This affects animal movement patterns. Removing native vegetation to make room for solar farms threatens endangered animals and insects which rely on the vegetation for food and habitat.
>No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble.
I'm in favor of nuclear too, but this is a ridiculous point. Your first sentence mentions solar and wind and your second only addresses solar. If the sun doesn't shine for n+1 days, the wind is still going to be available most or all of those days.
The discussion of incorporating variability into the power grid is incredibly unsophisticated on HN.
The US (and Europe) are big places with diverse energy demand and weather patterns, and smart renewable energy developers will seek out resources that are decorrelated with existing supplies because the power can be sold at higher prices.
Batteries are also getting cheap enough to profitably arbitrage intraday price variability.
Another thing that gets ignored in these discussions is that in any net zero scenario there is going to be a fair bit of green hydrogen/biofuels/synfuel produced for transport and industrial use. A fraction of that could be diverted to gas peaker plants when monster dunkelflautes manifest themselves.
You don't need battery farms to make renewables viable in the US. What you need is to replace the AC grid interconnect system in the US with a HVDC super grid system.
The key difference here is that HVDC is exceedingly efficient in energy transfer and has effectively negligible losses compared to AC over distance.
The US is big enough that any impact from weather should basically average out over that distance.
There are huge downsides though because moving power generation further and further from where it’s used opens you up to more disruption from terrorist attacks on the grid (and cyber attacks) unless you also do less centralized production which is going to be more expensive.
That's the thing. HVDC works better in a decentralised manner. You don't have clocking to deal with so instead it's mainly a matter of just hooking power production and power draw up to what is basically a big cross-country busbar.
And you can connect as many bridging connections as you want without having to worry about phase or desync. Instead more connections generally just means power goes from production to consumption along more efficient paths.
That doesn't help after sunset on the west coast when residential demand peaks and there is little renewable power being generated anywhere in North America. In theory batteries or other storage could close that gap but realistically it's going to take decades to scale that up.
That's 16 hours of sunlight but more importantly that allows the US to distribute energy production from hydro, wind, and geothermal production across the country.
During the daylight hours solar is great of course but my point about power averaging out had more to do with the other forms of renewable energy.
You'd be in trouble even if you had nuclear power. If the sun stops shining, our agricultural yields will approach zero and everyone would have to stay close to district heated buildings, due to the extreme cold.
"No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather."
Generally agree. However, I want to point out that it could defined be possible if designed the right way. You can use "batteries" like pumped hydro, which could protect against longer duration outages. Bonus is that when there's no sun, there's usually rain, which one would hope would also offset some of the draining of the water.
The issue of dunkelflaute is measurable and you can approach it the same way that storms are rated as being 100,1000-year storms. Not that I wouldn't appreciate more nuclear.
Three mile island already hit jackpot once in the statistics game and it didn't only go offline for a few days. And it is true that fuel cost are not the driving factor for fision. I am all in, if power companies really have to pay for all security and lifecycle costs upfront.
How clean, fast, cheap and reliable is the decommissioning of a plant once its short life is over? Anything that lasts only 50 years is pretty short-term.
and remember, it's only fair to include the cost of carbon capture to return the carbon into the soil, since the cost of nuclear in these discussions will include both the cost of disposal and cleanup of disasters that only happen several continents away.
I realize this isn't the HN popular opinion, but nuclear power will be great once:
1. People are educated about true risk AND forget about Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Or the need to have iodine pills if you live near one. ("If it's so safe, why do I need the iodine pills?")
2. Bad actors face actual prison time, not just corporate fines. Meanwhile, today, the bad actors still get bonuses.
3. We grow a lot of crops in the desert in the US. We need a lot of water to do that. There's gigawatts of solar potential there. And the cost of one reactor is $35B US for 1GW. For solar/wind you could have 10GW for around $10B US and then there's $25B US for batteries.
This is nonsense. If you're going to cite arbitrary "N+1 days of bad weather" then I can cite "N+1 severe natural disasters" where the nuclear reactor is engineered to withstand N. And unlike the theoretical "disaster" due to extended bad weather taking renewables down, this has actually happened in recent memory with Fukushima. And this was a true disaster, not just a power outage.
Nuclear is not safe. Every time proponents say "new designs are safe" eventually a new disaster proves this lie. Then the nuclear proponents say "oh well that was an old design, new designs are safe!"
Nuclear is too expensive. Renewables even with storage are way cheaper! We can way over build renewables. We can distribute them, because "bad weather" is regional. All for much cheaper than nuclear.
Stop pushing this out-dated, unsafe and expensive technology. Its time has passed.
In terms of single-incident, I believe hydro takes the lead due to the Banqiao Dam failure (floods over 12,000 square kilometers killing ~30k directly then ~100k more from water contamination and famine). But even that's still dwarfed by the more gradual impact of climate change on the planet from fossil fuels.
Dam failures absolutely destroy vast areas and can contaminate them with oil and gasoline by flooding settlements. In fact hydroelectric power has killed a surprising amount of people.
Suppose you have a devastating earthquake that wrecks renewable power sources in an area. Bad part is you're out of power for a good while. But the second-order risks are very low - maybe some people are killed by falling wind turbines or solar panels, but there isn't any equivalent of radioactive contamination making the place uninhabitable for years.
Banqiao Dam failure alone flooded over 12,000 square kilometers, killing ~30k directly then ~100k more from water contamination and famine.
Even solar still requires various minerals the extraction and processing of which has environmental impact - like tailing ponds of toxic substances that frequently leak, particularly from earthquakes and extreme weather.
But to be clear, the human and environmental impact of solar, wind, nuclear and hydro pales in comparison to that of fossil fuels.
I specifically made my comment about wind and solar. I am not a big fan of large scale hydro for just this reason, as well as the impact on aquatic ecosystems.
> I specifically made my comment about wind and solar
You said "Suppose you have a devastating earthquake that wrecks renewable power sources in an area" - hydropower is considered renewable. I also did address a similar risk of solar (barely anything compared to fossil fuels, but same applies to nuclear).
Focusing on deaths is a nice trick of the nuclear industry because the largest negative impacts of their disasters and even non-disaster costs of operation are still terrible but do not manifest as immediate deaths.
This isn't just counting immediate deaths - else it'd just be ~30 for Chernobyl and ~0 for Fukushima.
In fact, Fukushima's death count seems to primarily be down to that "people had died indirectly as a result of the physical and mental stress of evacuation" - which I feel should at least partially be put on the tsunami that killed 20000.
To be fair, the unsafe designs are all 50 years old because of FUD from incidents that are also generally pretty old. I’m not sure it’s comparable to modern designs - this isn’t a “new iPhone every year” deal.
I think everyone knew the Mark I boiling water reactors designed in the 1960s was not a “safe by default” design. Open to receipts if folks with some understanding of nuclear designs were on record before that touting its safety.
"Citation needed" is the lamest response. I am not your personal Google assistant. Nuclear proponents just like you cited Fukushima as a hallmark of reliability to "disprove" its dangers to me. There were articles highlighting it. These are obviously hard to find now with the digital rot of the last decade. Sorry I didn't print out copies to hand out to you many years later.
People touted the safety of cars in the 1920s. Compared to today’s standards, they were wildly unsafe. The mere fact people were wrong before doesn’t mean they are wrong today. “What some people once said” is not as strong an argument as “designs are demonstrably better engineered”
That doesn’t mean there is no risk. It’s still ok to be scared of nuclear power for new unknown reasons. But let’s not pretend that designs aren’t wildly better now.
The worst part of this is, Thorium-based reactors seem to be the future of nuclear, but because of FUD and politics, no one is funding research to find out whether the theoretical thorium reactors are the way to go forward.
> Constellation, which plans to spend about $1.6 billion to restart the plant, is awaiting permits and expects the facility to come online by 2028 [and] would provide Microsoft with 835 megawatts of energy.
I don't quite understand how this makes sense financially for Microsoft. A 1 GW offshore wind farm costs about 1 billion [1]. The Gemini Solar + Battery Storage Project in Nevada is about 1.1 billion (690 MW + 380 MW battery). [2]
With solar, wind and battery prices continuously trending downwards, how does it make sense to invest in nuclear which nearly always has cost overruns, bad PR and unknown potential future costs?
These old plants are ridden with hidden costs, and I would bet all of my money no one at Microsoft is aware of the scale of this. I'm not talking "hidden costs" like you didn't do your homework. I'm talking hidden costs like you need to be on the inside, on the ground, to know about. Hidden costs like "everyone subtly nods but doesn't say it out loud" kind of hidden costs.
The NRC has beyond suffocating regulation for nuclear energy. This is maybe a good thing in some regards. But let me put it this way:
Imagine you bought a car from 1975 and could _only_ put in original parts. Need a new battery? Better find out how to get a factory one from 1975. Can't get one from 1975? Be prepared to pay millions, perhaps tens of millions, for a mountain of testing and certification for a new $100 part that is still just an off the shelf battery.
It's hard to say without knowing the details of the contract. I highly doubt Constellation put themselves in a position to be vulnerable to cost overruns. Or perhaps they see the deal as a shiny pendant they can dangle in front of dumb PE money when they want to cash out in the future.
Trust me, cynicism is well warranted with these ancient plants.
All of the articles say the deal is Microsoft agreeing to buy power for 20 years. It's possible that's wrong/incomplete, but it would be weird. Constellation's stock rose 20%, so the market at least thinks they'll make decent money on it.
And it may be an "ancient plant" but it was operational 5 years ago, under Constellation's management.
How many MWH does that battery array store? MW is a useless number for energy storage. HN should know better.
Edit:
The article linked states:
> Roughly, one could assume that the energy storage portion of the project – 1.4 GWh worth
So, at the 690GW (which is unrealistic) nameplate capacity of the solar field, they are installing roughly 120 minutes worth of energy storage to back it. This is actually a better number than most projects I've seen, but still utterly inadequate and representative of the typical project.
Battery arrays aren't primarily rated for their storage capacity but for their ability to provide/consume power.
At the moment the goal of battery storage additions to solar plants is to soften their peak power production and broaden the time they provide power to extend to the morning and dinner time.
Right. So a useless number when it comes to energy storage discussions. It simply extends the duck curve an hour or three before you need use someone else’s power.
Thanks for the correction on GW vs MW. Not a great typo.
Nuclear plants trip off all the time. It was a big problem in one of Texas' recent cold snaps where people died.
And many of those nuclear down times are for month+ times. Good luck getting enough batteries to get through that!
Offshore wind typically has a capacity factor of ~50%. Add a smaller number of batteries than you would need for nuclear, and it's going to be cost competitive against any new build.
As far as if it's cost competitive with TMI, I'm not so sure. New build nuclear is likely going to be >$190/MWh. Running the numbers being bandied about for the "Pennsylvania GDP increase", which is a really funny way to say "cost of the electricity for 20 years," and you get $115/MWh. Which is really pricy still. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to get TMI going again, just that it's pricy, and there's likely lots of other constraints that went into deciding to do this.
You'd need to adjust those for capacity factor, but I wondered the same thing.
The AI space seems to have weird overlaps with nuclear that I don't quite get.
Not sure if it's just the social circles the AI people run in.
Zuckerberg was all excited on a podcast about how energy was the limiting factor for AI, waited for him to say something about how cheap and fast rollouts of renewables made sense but no, nuclear. Even this refurb is talking minimum 4 years to get going. All very strange.
Maybe the lead time is faster because refurbishing a plant is easier than building one from scratch? Just speculating but that comes to mind for me. If their need is immediate term then this could be the "throw some money at the problem to make it go away".
Not to mention this nuclear reactor was only shut down in 2019. They're upgrading and recommissioning something that was mothballed because the economics didn't work, all of five years ago.
People reacting to the name are imagining that this means re-opening the other unit, which melted down in 1979. It's more fun to imagine and react to that than to learn that this was an operational plant until a few years ago.
It makes no sense. Bill Gates is a huge nuclear proponent for bad reasons and I'm sure somehow this is related, wherher it's just that Microsoft decision makers have read his bad takes or because he actually pushed for this terrible idea.
More nuclear is a good thing. FAANG nuclear is even better, because they will be be ready and equipped to push back the insane NIMBY crowd(s) and also don't need to be worried about getting reelected.
Coal plants have killed a minimum of 500k people over the past 20 years[1]. It's not an accident in that case, it's known and planned for (or at least easily predicted enough that it should have been).
But when a few hundred people, or really just 0 people[2] die in one place at one time, people lose their minds.
I tried to do the math once to figure out if Japan would have been better off building a coal power plant instead of Fukushima, the nuclear plant that had the worst disaster in any western country. It was a surprisingly tough question.
Those studies of coal plant deaths are basically only counting people who died in mining disasters or were killed while operating the power plant. If you add in climate change effects, air pollution including radiation from flyash, and groundwater pollution the figure is almost certainly much worse; but also very hard to calculate with any certainty.
First off - plenty of people are against coal plants for health reasons in addition to the environmental reasons. There is nobody cheering coal and blocking nuclear (and please don't bring up the Germany decommissioning of nuclear plants and keeping open coal plants because it doesn't speak to what I just said). Secondly, Three Mile Island represents the path to a possible outcome. Just because disaster was averted doesn't mean that the thinking about safety shouldn't be focused on the worst case scenario instead of the one that actually happened.
I’m not the person you responded to, but have an honest question here since we are specifically talking about NIMBYism: How much less of NIMBY is there against coal power plants? For example are there examples of people rejecting NPP in their vicinity while accepting CPP?
The worse impacts of coal plants disproportionately impact disadvantaged communities that don't have the resources to be effective NIMBYs.
Coal also has a much wider low-level impact: for instance, it's not safe to consume more than small amounts of fish from the great lakes because of mercury levels, largely due to coal power plants.
Germany has been closing tons of nuclear power plants because of protests. They've recently also moved an entire town and a highway to make space for digging up more coal.
I'm not really answering your question, but it does seem like nuclear NIMBYs are more effective than other ones.
They get a fairer run than nuclear - it is conceivable that a coal plant gets built and is allowed to run. However I imagine the US followed the same broad trends as everyone else in the 90s and started restricting infrastructure construction for environmental reasons so it is probably quite challenging to get a plant built.
There is a reason all the growth is happening in Asia. Their focus is on improving their wealth and material standard of living.
How is that a valid comparison though? Fighting against a coal plant makes sense, fighting against a nuclear plant doesn't - that's the key difference.
The context of the discussion is Not In My Backyard-protests and blocking of plants. Are the people protesting one in their “backyard” not protesting the other?
It's only PM2.5 deaths because those are un-debatable.
Far more will die due to other kinds of pollution it emits, and an unknowable number will die due to the effects of climate change caused by CO2 emissions.
Well, not coal plants but emissions. I guess those nymbis would also be against having all that pollution concentrated in their back yard.
My point is that it is not insane. Maybe selfish. Not willing to have risks with potential catastrophic results near your home is the most normal thing.
And with nuclear, the probability is very low, as with planes. Yet it happens. All the time. Our generation went through three once in a lifetime crisis in the last two decades.
It's insane because killing people is the modus operandi of fossil fuel power - and I'm not even talking about climate change. People often die on oil fields and in mines, toxic waste from coal plants leaches into our water supply, and ash enters our air and causes asthma and heart problems. Coal alone has killed about 460,000 Americans in the 21st century: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-pow...
Nobody died at Fukushima (from the nuclear incident that is, 10000 died because of the Tsunami)
Hundreds of people died at Chernobyl.
Those are all the major accidents at production nuclear power plant that have ever occured. There are no others.
There is just one that was deadly, and it is about as representative of the safety of nuclear power as flying in a 1920s' plane compared to a state of the art Airbus.
That's still pretty much a freak incident and insignificant compared to the direct damage (i.e. even if we exclude CO2) burning fossil fuels (especially coal is causing)
Accidents will happen daily. Those accidents are extremely well controlled. You are providing an excellent example by jumping to that insane NIMBY conclusion. I think MS can successfully bulldozer these extremely weak arguments about catastrophic accidents better than I could. Stay tuned.
A corporation getting its way, irrespective of the democratic will of the people, or rather, those "insane NIMBYs". Corporatocracy truly is a beautiful thing.
But were said people well-informed to begin with? Voting can only work if everyone's on the same page regarding both the policy being implemented and its consequences, thus being able to defend their best interests. If the people have been consuming provably false messaging pushed by a fossil fuel industry lobby and sensationalist media, can they be trusted to make a choice that affects not just themselves their entire city, nation, and planet?
The representative democracy does attempt to solve this problem; you pick a representative you understand is aligned with your interests on the issues you do understand and trust they and their experts will do well on the rest.
It's not a perfect system, but unless the populace can be given free time and education to consider individual policies based on reliable evidence and not hearsay from biased sources, it's the best we can do.
> A corporation getting its way, irrespective of the democratic will of the people, or rather, those "insane NIMBYs". Corporatocracy truly is a beautiful thing.
Generally a NIMBY is anti-progress and very selfish, putting themselves ahead of everyone. My dad was called to help resolve TMI during the meltdown and was part of the engineering design group the the Beaver Valley nuclear power station. People were complaining they had cows dying of radiation years before the plant was completed. NIMBYs suck.
In this context, progress would probably refer to moving to a power source that doesn't kill people or destroy the planet. I think that is generally pretty agreeable even if you want to get into a definitional argument.
You can define it how you like, the nature of a NIMBY is that whatever it is, they don't want it near THEM (hence Not In My Back Yard) and affecting THEM, but they don't care about how it may affect others. If they were against whatever the thing is it wouldn't matter if it were their backyard or someone else's, they're only concerned with THEIR lives. When all you care about is you, you don't care about others and that's anti-progress.
the democratic will should be only on state or common goods. On their land persons should be able to do whatever whitlist following safety guidelines. including operating a nuclear facility
Something that isn't discussed enough is that nuclear power is extremely safe. According to Our World In Data (https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy), it produces the fewest emissions per gigawatt -- solar and wind both have substantial overhead -- and the second-fewest deaths, after solar, of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydropower, wind, solar, and coal. The misguided perception nuclear is more dangerous is due to its unfortunate habit of clumping deaths. People remember Chernobyl, but not Bill, who died mining coal, even if there are a thousand Bills all over, their total deaths dwarfing Chernobyl's.
The climate activists should really be advocating for nuclear. It's cheap, has the lowest emissions, and is really safe. But, of course, people will object. It's hard for PR to say that, even if you can show the data. People rarely change their mind because of data.
There has been a generation of activists and NIMBYs campaigning and protesting to artificially inflate the cost of nuclear, while having this delicious benefit of now being also able to claim about the cost of nuclear.
The ballooning of costs is not even significantly due to changing safety requirements, but often due to compliance and environmental requirements. Those are political requirements that could be removed in one fell swoop.
Also you can't really make meaningful conclusions based on that plot due to obvious reasons. It only includes "Number of nuclear reactors shutdown worldwide". The construction peak was ~1980. The oldest commercial plant was opened only 68 years ago and obviously the early plants much less safe and had a shorter lifetime which introduces another bias...
This was the original dream from the 60s, where we would be building so many plants that the power would be too cheap to meter.
This of course is nonsense because it requires the entire industry to ignore market conditions for no good reason. You can't fight the market, not on a large scale, and especially not in the US. Power plants are only built if they will be profitable in a reasonable time frame. If power was too cheap to meter then nobody would be building new plants, there would be no return on the investment.
This is also why nobody builds nuclear power plants anymore. They are too expensive to build and can't compete on price. Especially not with renewables cratering the price. There's a reason solar installs are outpacing even the most optimistic projections from a few years ago. You can argue theory all day long on the Internet, but the people doing the actual work have made their decision.
While this is better than loading up a coal power plant, the way I see it, it's still a tragic situation. Even if AI used purely fossil-free electricity (which it doesn't), it's still putting pressure on our grids and energy production. The green energy AI consumes if the green energy some other less lucrative industry will not consume. Big tech is currently scraping their net neutrality plans left and right...
Yeah. The only way the sentiment "I don't like that ___ is using energy, even though the energy is completely clean" makes sense is if they've already made up their minds that ___ is bad, and thus any energy usage is bad. The energy usage argument is a red herring; it's actually just a value judgment on AI itself.
> If you're an AI hater, it's frustrating to see what you consider a useless technology growing to take up more and more of our energy mix, eating into climate gains being made from the immense growth of renewable energy. If you're an AI maximalist, on the other hand, the significant energy use projected for AI is a small price to pay for a technology that you think will revolutionize our lives much more than technologies like air conditioning, refrigeration, or the automobile ever did.
> The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. In the long run, AI's energy use will likely level off at a significant but not grid-melting level that's roughly commensurate with the collective economic value we as a society get from it. Whether the trade-offs inherent in that shift are "worth it" involves a lot of value judgements that go well beyond how much electricity a bunch of servers are using.
Was anyone else horrified because they thought the powerplant was going to be run by a Microsoft AI? (TFA is about Microsoft purchasing nuclear power to run their AI)
My sister is a geologist who works at nuke plants (regulatory stuff, determing if they're in legal areas to build, ground contamination, etc). She always complains that it's an old-mans (this was in her 20s, 20 years ago) group of staff everywhere with guys who had incredibly light educations on what they're actually working on and had been in the business, and sometimes at the same plants, for decades. Some 40-50+ years.
We might have a severe lack of people who can work in the field at plants and tech getting involved is probably a good thing on making that field more prominent for new students than it currently is.
This article says it will be the first restarted nuke. But there is also a restart in process in Michigan. Will this beat the Michigan one into full operation?
Can someone explain why it's going to take so long to fully decommission TMI-2, the old reactor?
Reading the commission report, they have about $733m in the decommissioning fund, while decommissioning is projected to cost $1B. Active demolition projected to start 2046, completed in 2052. They've started some work on debris demoval, but it looks they're going to take a break 2030-2046 to let the fund accrue (at expected 2% real RoR) enough to get the fund to $1B.
Isn't that insane? So from 2030-2046, it will just sit there "mothballed" with a minimum spent on security and so on, just for the fund to gain value?
Maybe this is going to shed more light on the subject? Looks like the coolant and 99% of fuel have been removed, maybe it's to also give more time to the radioactivity to subside.
Presumably all the things that have gone wrong have been fixed? I can honestly say the micro reactors and pebble beds look far more fail safe than the typical PWR/BWR that must have power and a pump running as I understand things to prevent catastrophe.
The Three Mile Island incident happened in one reactor at this plant in 1979, but the plant kept operating its other reactors without any further incidents until they shut down in 2019 due to economic pressures (primarily the low price of natural gas).
If this story shocked you, do yourself a favor and check out Erik Townsend's docuseries on the need for nuclear to even come close to filling humanity's need for energy in the coming decades.
Maybe we should take some the money being put into AI and direct it towards fusion research. The rest of the funds can be spent on AI to help with fusion research. Once we have fusion we can forget about the awful fission era and also get on with healing the planet.
Presumably they’ve signed an agreement to buy the power (delivered through the grid) from the plant operator at a contracted price. The plant operator can then get finance for the work required to actually deliver on the contract.
A lot of renewable energy projects were financed through similar agreements, called PPAs.
They are just buying the power. Microsoft's goal is 24/7 matching, so every MWh of power they use is matched by a MWh of clean power (generated in that same hour) that they paid for. This is called market-based carbon accounting, as opposed to location-based accounting which considers the source of the electricity that is actually used by the company's infrastructure.
There are pros and cons of each approach, market-based is a little less intuitive but not necessarily worse, it depends on the application.
> market-based carbon accounting […] not necessarily worse
They are better for the corps communication and worse for anyone else.
Transporting electricity over distance has a non trivial cost in $ but also ressources and energy, as well as relocating an industry near a clean energy source or optimizing the production units.
Carbon-matching systems are great for entreprise wanting to claim they don’t produce carbon (24/7 carbon neutral) while they do. It does not depict the CO2E one (entreprise) did product de facto.
If the recommissioning requires 20% of the work of new-build (in time and money), I'd rather have the "normal" 50-100% overrun in costs and time happen on recommissioning vs new-build.
The delay is usually heavily on the permitting/legal challenges/etc. stage, not actual concrete-pouring and equipment installation, so an already-once-permitted site will probably do better relatively, too.
Extra reactors at exising operating sites would make even more sense, though. Putting 2-4 extra AP-1000 at ~1GW/ea at each of the 54 facilities operating today would be huge and minimal incremental risk, and if there were a shortcut one time permitting process for it...
It turns out that nuclear is easy to build around the world.
Average construction times have been more or less constant the last five decades and are currently at 6.5 years (trend: slightly falling). Median (typical) time is lower.
And this particular refurbishment is in one of the countries with serious cost and schedule overruns for its nuclear build, and a country and specifically a region that is bad at physical infrastructure.
This is a country that simply hasn't built nuclear for ages. And the only one (two reactors) it did build was a brand new design (FOAK - First of a Kind). With COVID happening.
It sounds like a refurbishment of a plant that was working just fine until 2019, not a new build of a design where you don't even know if it can be built.
(The originally submitted Vogtle-3/4 design could not be built)
In fact, last I checked they had already planned this refurbishment, but could not obtain the funds to do it, and thus shut down the plant instead.
Wow. AI has already accomplished more positive in a few years of big commercial stuff (admittedly as a side effect) than cryptocurrency has since, say 2009. :(
Crypto created a trillion dollars out of thin air (well, slightly thicker air from more CO2). AI is poised to do the same, but also has already polluted the entire internet with worthless slop.
If using a ton of energy has to happen then I'd prefer it be generated from nuclear, but I don't see the need to supply LLM data centers with a ton of energy as a positive.
Solving the political problems behind nuclear power (getting TMI restarted being one of the more difficult politically but easier technically), and generally bringing the "build more nuclear" to forefront.
(Although to be fair there's been a fair bit of wind and solar subsidized heavily by crypto, as well as flare gas power generation, and a bit of PV solar)
While I love to see nuclear get a comeback from new tech ventures and commercial impetus, it's also interesting to point out how one now mostly hears crickets from the people who screamed about the energy consumption of crypto. AI has so far mainly managed to generate enormous amounts of spam sludge, pollute the already toxic landscape of social media with auto-generated garbage, and lead to a level of data prying and mass data ripping by the big tech companies that makes their previous efforts seem almost quaint.
This shit is largely what this voracious drive for more power is helping build. Even crypto wasn't this shitty, since at least its fundamental application wasn't nearly so broadly parasitic. Yet now I hear very little about uselessly burning vast loads of energy.
I guess if the companies responsible for the above trash heap are largely the same ones that hire or indirectly subsidize the jobs of so many people in the tech world as represented by a site like HN, then the whole dumpster fire is okay.
I'm also fairly sure that OpenAI, Microsoft and others would happily burn baby seals in coal furnaces if it meant powering their precious AI data needs. It's only for PR that they make useful noises about using clean power.
It's unfortunate that Three Mile Island is a meme. Objectively this is a good thing, but it will create headlines and stoke more pearl clutching around AI power consumption.
> and stoke more pearl clutching around AI power consumption
Yeah, as shown by this very thread (and that your comment is greyed out).
Nuclear energy is good. Whether or not AI consuming that energy is good or not, depends on how much you value AI as a technology. No one cares about how much energy gaming PCs or refrigerators uses, because their existence is not currently controversial.
I don't think insults are called for, but I directionally agree that protests against atomic power, largely based on needless fear and lack of understanding, caused the world a lot of damage. If we could compare the world we have today to the counterfactual where anti-nuclear protests hadn't stopped progress, I believe a lot of people would be ashamed of their actions. Some already are. But the net effect of the anti-nuclear movement was to prolong the use of fossil fuels by many critical decades.
I am angry because if it had not been for her and the movement that rode on her coattails, we'd long have been weened substantially from fossil fuels and we'd be in a very different world today.
She caused this. She is not even owning it; though it can't be undone. She is responsible for more damage to the environment than GW Bush or Shell Oil. People don't realize the magnitude of the damage she inflicted.
Fascinating. How will we live ok back in, say five years, at this very funny period from, 2018ish to 2022ish when our echo chamber made us believe ESG was going to save the world.
How far we’ve come. Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!
ESG ended up being a scam. Lots of these things are nothing but cover to make money off of people’s concern for the enviro.
All you need to look at is the carbon footprint of people who clamor and demonstrate for green policies. Including idiots gluing themselves to roadways —all the idle traffic they create and the manpower necessary to remove them and repair the damage. It’s a sucker’s game.
Saying ESG is entirely a scam because some ESG backers travel in airplanes is like saying climate change is a hoax because it was colder than usual in Peoria today.
ESG is a huge thing. Some of it is greenwashing, some is outright scam, some is legitimate pressure to make better environmental decisions.
But insisting that ESG proponents can’t make suboptimal individual choices is silly.
Ah yes. Some people use airplanes so we need to keep burning coal, who cares when the sea levels rise and the water wars begin! The important thing is that some people acted silly by gluing themselves to the road! Can't give in to them, even if it would save the world for our children.
You're not trying to convince the choir, you're trying to convince the masses.
Sure, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Branson, Albert Gore, Barrack Obama and high schoolers are impressed, but not the mom and dad working jobs that are teetering, driving beaters and facing pressure from cheap labor. They see these people jet-setting being hyper-overconsumers and think, what the hell? They see these people increasing their wealth promoting change, but they don't change. Why should I change, they're not changing, they're adding more!
> Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!
Or just hope. AGI is a capitalist's wet dream: it would completely undercut labor's power or allow it to be replaced completely, and it could also allow the developer to muscle out a large fraction of other capitalists from the economy.
Even though AGI would be terrible for the rest of us, it's got so much upside for VC types they can't help themselves.
It’s even worse. If you have money and are against deploying AGI once we get there you still want to be the first to achieve it, because it’s the only reasonable chance of stopping others… assuming you can even align it.
You're claiming it would be terrible for the rest of us, without supporting that assumption in any way. It's not a fact, pseudo scifi action movies don't count as facts.
> You're claiming it would be terrible for the rest of us, without supporting that assumption in any way.
I literally explained it. I straightforwardly applied the technology to our existing social/economic structure.
And changing the social/economic structure is probably harder than developing the technology and requires precisely the kind of power that a successful AGI technology would remove (e.g. workers can't strike to keep their jobs when the boss is planning to lay them all off).
> It's not a fact, pseudo scifi action movies don't count as facts.
Honestly, the "AGI will be so great/everything will be fine" assumption relies less on facts and more on sci-fi fantasy than anything I said.
> You did not explain anything, you just said that something would happen, without any reasoning why or why no counter effects would happen.
If you think that, the problem's on your end of the connection. The most charitable read of your comment is you're expecting a level of exposition that is not actually required, especially given the common context of what exists now.
Personally, I think you're actually doing more of what you're accusing me, for instance your sibling comment of:
> The economic system is not set in stone. If everyone is irrelevant to it, the economic system becomes irrelevant to everyone, and a parallel system gradually replaces it.
You're basically hand-waving a future and saying "everything will be fine." And you're also misunderstanding some significant things in a kind of black and white way. E.g. I never said "everyone [would be] irrelevant [to the economic system]," I said labor would be. That's a lot of people, but not everyone.
AGI in an internet connected world is capitalism end-game. Once you have AGI, labour (both physical and intellectual) becomes redundant, humans have a "value to the system" approaching zero.
Our economic system is built on a series of assumptions that fundamentally cannot survive AGI, and nobody is really even trying to grapple with that fact.
The economic system is not set in stone. If everyone is irrelevant to it, the economic system becomes irrelevant to everyone, and a parallel system gradually replaces it.
No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble.
Nuclear fission is the answer.
Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.
Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and the uranium fuel is very cheap, perhaps 10% of the cost of running the plant.
This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if you care about greenhouse emissions.
Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514).
In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were announced a few weeks ago. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).
Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. But you don't hear about it in the mainstream news yet. And many people (Germany, Spain, I'm looking at you) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this.
Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather.
I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?”
We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data.
You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.
Plus if it's not sunny/windy in one part of the country, it may well be very sunny or windy in other parts of the country. We have a whole freaking energy grid!
This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.
> We have a whole freaking energy grid!
You actually don't. Not one fit for that purpose, at least without significant investment, permitting hurdles, delays etc etc.
If you think you don’t have that grid, your country has to build it (instead of billions and more than 10 years for nuclear). Like the Synchronous grid of Continental Europe [1] and [2] which I far from finished but a good start.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
2: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/
Yeah, the grid is the part of this that doesn't get discussed enough.
Can't we do both?
This is what happened to Germany. They tried going 100% renewables and then had Russia take up the slack for the rest of what they needed. Then they realized they had a massive shortfall and then was leaning far too much on Russia to take up the slack.
As someone else pointed out, geopolitics always weighs heavy in energy production. Just like in Germany's case where they relied too heavy on Russia for the shortfall of renewables, then Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia used their energy production as leverage to essentially blackmail Germany into not going along with UN sanctions against them.
However we need to get to total energy independence, I'm all for, and this whole idea it has to be one or the other only lengthens the process of getting there. In the mean time, it puts us in a precarious position to be involved with countries and regime's that don't like us and will never have our best interests in mind.
I assume you mean sanctions in general, not UN sanctions specifically. Russia as a permanent member of the UN security council can veto any resolution, so there is little point in even trying to push something through UN.
Germany did not make a real effort at truly going 100% renewable. There are other European countries doing it for real and having wild success.
No real effort? >50% of Germany's power came from renewables in 2023. That sounds like a massive effort to me.
There was definitely a period where the "renewables are too expensive" propaganda was winning and right wing German parties were successful in slowing renewables, particularly offshore wind rollout in Germany.
This will have cost them Billions, similar to the British right wing effectively banning onshore wind in Emgland at roughly the same time.
Both nations have done well with renewables, but could have done better and saved money and supported local business at the same time.
The cost of the renewables rollout in Germany is on the order of 2 trillion euros. They produce so much renewable energy that the prices regularly go negative, but then import at much higher prices when they don’t. They pay among the highest prices in Europe, and still their CO2 emissions are among the worst. If wind/solar as a whole were both as cheap as touted and as environmentally friendly, that should not be the case.
The whole world owes Germany a massive debt for their overpayment for renewables. Investing in renewables on a massive scale in the 90's is what really kicked off the virtuous cycle that led to the low costs of renewables today.
Germany would have been much better off building nuclear in the 90's. But because they invested in renewables instead, everybody (including Germany) has a much better option of building renewables in the 2020s.
Renewables are too expensive.
Especially once you take systems costs into account, which you must, but renewable fanbois never do.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...
Your source suggests that providing 95% of Texas energy with wind and solar and batteries will cost the same as providing it with nuclear and batteries.
I'm dubious about many of their assumptions but even your source shows that renewables are the obvious choice to power the world.
It's also interesting that the cost drops 50% if you don't need to cover the last 5%. A shame he didn't go further and calculate at 80% and so on like the recent Australian working paper.
I guess that would show that starting the rollout now would provide lots of savings that could be used to deploy the later percentiles.
If you use old numbers for something that drops 80% in cost in a decade, you get bad numbers.
The most successful ones have a combination of favorable geographic/geological conditions (geothermal vents, suitable rivers, good offshore to land ratio) and small size. It would be hard for Germany to copy solutions from let's say Iceland or Norway.
Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.
Geopolitics and nuclear power are not always such a great combination - consider the Russian occupation of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine. I'm not against nuclear power in general, but saying it's a great hedge against political risks involved with wind and solar is quite a stretch.
That required a war. Turning off gas to Eastern Europe does not.
> Nuclear can be built most places.
Nukes require lots of cooling, needing access to large amounts of water from water bodies, that's definitely not "most places" by definition.
> Nukes require lots of cooling
Two units cooling for every unit of electricity, at least with PWR/BWR. At a 10 degree C rise it requires about 50ml of water (per second) per kW of electrical power.
Palo Verde NPP in Arizona happens to be in a rather dry area. It uses treated sewage for cooling and is trying to use rather poor quality groundwater too.
https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2020/02/25/palo-verde-nuclear...
That’s most places humans live isn’t it?
If you ever done a tour on a nuclear facility you'd hear about how careful they need to be managing water temperatures in their discharge pools, you don't want a nuke frying off all wildlife on the rivers and/or lakes nearby. You don't want to create massive ponds of still water for cooling, and you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).
This limits a lot nuclear facilities placement.
> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
And Brits are not exactly leaping into action about raw sewage discharges into rivers.
Nuclear power plants only really have an effect on the water temperature if they do not have a cooling tower. This makes the plant considerably cheaper, but, as you mentioned, damages the ecosystem.
Only in rare cases, such as during revisions or emergencies, they might be unable to cool the condenser using the tower-coolant-loop. Then they might have to warm up the water temporarily.
> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).
There is no such failure case that a "discharge needs to happen" for the irradiated water. There is a comparatively tiny amount of deionized and supercleaned water in the reactor that is always cycled around. Even if such a case were to occur (how??), the amount of water would be easy to handle/store.
I live a few miles from a nuclear plant. I am far more concerned about the coal plants that are also nearby.
Nuclear power plants have been and are bing built in deserts, so no, this is not a hard requirement, just a "nice to have".
Dry cooling towers do exist (though I am aware they also have disadvantages).
I mean, classical plants and those based around the regulations that the US currently has on the books thanks to some questionable lobbying in the 60s require large amounts of water, sure.
These are hardly the only viable plant designs that exist. Molten Salt, Pebble Bed, and other designs exist.
China is currently underway building a molten salt cooled Thorium reactor.
Russia has had sodium-cooled reactors [0] for some time. America experimented with them at least back to the 1950s, with the USS Seawolf (SSN 575, not SSN 21) having a sodium-cooled reactor (S2G) for her first few years.
Russia also had lead-bismuth reactors, at least militarily, with the Alfa-class.
[0]: https://www.neimagazine.com/news/mox-use-at-russias-bn-800-r...
Bullshit. Sun and wind can be built everywhere. They're just more effective some places than others. But they are cheaper than nuclear everywhere.
Let's stay realistic. You can build as many solar panels as you want in Iceland and you won't get any power from them mid winter. They're not just less effective, they would not be functional for over a month. That's not "everywhere".
There's a reason i said "sun and wind."
That doesn't work very well for the Western North America. After sunset there is nowhere to obtain much solar or wind power. We're not going to build a transmission cable to Hawaii.
the wind doesn't stop blowing after sunset, and grid-scale batteries are a thing
The wind slows down a lot after sunset in most of North America. Grid scale batteries aren't really a thing yet. Someday maybe, but it's going to take many years to provision enough to handle the nighttime base load on the west coast.
You've got that backwards. The wind is stronger at night in most of North America.
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-69f8723dccb62f0572daf...
> You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.
Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.
> Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again.
Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.
Not the same scenario. First, France came through this just fine.
Second, the could have kept those plants operating and taken a more piecemeal approach to fixing the cracks. They shouldn't have, and didn't, because you really want that triple or quadruple redundancy in your cooling systems, but they could have if push had come to shove, the plants were still operational.
But since there was plenty of capacity available, they could afford to take those plants offline and do the checks and repairs all at once.
Intermittent renewables afford you no such optionality.
If the sun don't shine, the sun don't shine.
If the wind don't blow, the wind don't blow.
This event happened in 2022. this is the only year since 1995 where nuclear production fell below 300TWh (278TWh in 2022 vs 360 in 2021 and 320 in 2023).
These cracks are not the only factor for the poor performance on nuclear in 2022 : several reactors had to do their 10-year maintenance (grand carénage), which had been delayed because of the pandemic.
It's hard to extrapolate reliability issues from an event that happened once in 30 years.
Well, that's a false dichotomy, because no-one's (at least no-one reasonable and in good faith) is suggesting shifting the grid entirely to nuclear. Instead, a diverse set of generation sources is ideal, including solar, wind, nuclear and hydro.
Dunno, all the nuclear advocates seem to contrast it with wind/solar, which are also much cheaper and quicker capital investments.
Well, the point of this thread is that's only true until a sufficient level of availability is required, and then nuclear (and fossil thermal plants) all of a sudden become a viable option again.
Nope, virtually all nuclear advocates call for combined renewable/nuclear grids.
Nuclear and reliable renewables for base load, intermittent renewables for intermittent load where and when it matches.
Wind/solar are not cheaper. Per kWh they are more expensive. Thanks to China, they are a lower and smaller-grained capital investment.
Why did they have to be checked all at once? That sounds like a design or regulation problem.
Practically, a lot of nuclear power plants can be down at the same time for maintenance etc., so you need to overbuild quite a bit there as well then
No. Nuclear power plants are super reliable and available.
German und US plants had/have capacity factors of well over 90%, and the downtimes are scheduled.
The "overbuild" is minimal.
France in 2022 didn't have a lot of capacity down at the same time? Availability was at 40% of maximum capacity for about a month at it's lowest.
How these things will be managed in the real world matters, too, not just how it could play out hypothetically.
Yep. That was a one-time occurrence, due to (a) inspections being deferred during COVID and (b) France's long time catastrophic underinvestment in their nuclear fleet.
Until March 2023, there was a law in France that made it illegal to increase nuclear capacity in absolute terms and mandated reduction to under 50% in relative terms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=isgu-VrD0oM
But again, a one-time event, and it doesn't change the high capacity factors world-wide (over 80%) and the extremely high capacity factors in reasonably well run fleets ( > 90% in the US, and also inGermany when they still had nuclear ).
One time or not, need to be able to deal with it, as need to be able deal with the possibility of underinvestment etc. - especially if fleets get much bigger.
1. They were able to deal with it. And had even more options to deal with it.
2. A one time event has little to no effect on overall capacity factors.
3. Underinvestment is very easy to deal with: invest adequately.
1) It caused/aggrevated serious issues on the European energy market at the time 2) Then you might have no electricity for some months every few decades from "one offs" 3) Appeals to humans needing to be different are rarely successful
Electricity supply to consumers was affected how? And please separate this out from the general energy crisis of 2021-2023.
Since we didn't have "no electricity for some months" in this one-off, and, as I explained elsewhere, had optionality, not quite sure how you extrapolate from an event not happening to an event happening every few decades.
Gosh, so we're not ever going to invest sufficiently in battery tech for that to ever work. Glad you cleared that up for us.
But to be clear, it wasn't some random "human nature" that caused the underinvestment. It was official government policy, and that government policy has now been changed.
The renewables mafia that is still in control in Germany was also in control in France. That has been taken care of, mostly by being exposed to the harsh light of Reality™.
The law that mandated reduction and forbade expansion of nuclear was repealed March 2023. They are now expanding capacity, build first 6 and then an additional 8 simplified EPR2 reactors.
And there was one more reason for the lull in investment: France did the initial expansion under the Messmer Plan far too quickly. They nuclearized their grid in just 15 years.
Which sounds great, and of course completely puts the lie to those who claim that nuclear is "too slow". But there is a problem: these nuclear plants are not just quick to build, they also last pretty much forever, at least 60 years, many if not most are being extended to 80 years and the experts say there's no reason not to go to 100.
If you have built all the nuclear power plants you need in 15 years and they last 100 years, you have nothing to build for 85 years (or 65 / 45 years if you assume 80/60 year lifespans).
That's a problem, because your nuclear industry will wither and die in that time.
Which it pretty much did.
The supply was there because there was supply from elsewhere (and it happened in an energy crisis - it happened when it happened). France isn't isolated.
Poor policy can happen again - such is human nature. So things need to work under poor policies, too.
> The supply was there because there was supply from elsewhere
Exactly, as I wrote. Which is why they were able pursue the option "shut everything down at once and fix immediately" without any negative repercussions apart from EDFs bottom line for that one year.
(Though that apparently was not the biggest negative impact on their bottom line that year. The bigger one was being compelled by law to sell electricity to their competitors at 4 cents/kWh and having to buy it back at market rates that were spiking due to the energy crisis).
There was also the option "stagger the shutdowns and take a slightly elevated risk of one of the triple-redundant cooling systems failing". Which they might have preferred to reducing electricity supply for the country or accelerating repairs. But they didn't have to do that.
> So things need to work under poor policies, too.
Nothing works under arbitrarily bad policy, and such a standard is not applied to anything in the real world.
> and the downtimes are scheduled.
Dayjob is in energy market algo trading and DER ancillary services in EU, and I can tell you with confidence this is far from true.
And when the nukes trip for safety reasons - which happens multiple times per year - that’s a GW that just dropped off the grid from one second to the next.
For me, I much prefer the reliability of wind and solar; never seen a correlated failure, and we know their production pattern days in advance.
Hopefully you have multiple reactor designs so that if an issue with one is found, you don't stop all reactors just reactors of the same design.
> We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data.
Exactly. And everyone is putting their heads in the sand over this calculation.
Seasonal energy storage is simply not a problem we have even begun to solve yet. We know the numbers, we're just not talking about them.
It’s literally just that having a solar+wind grid that can survive 3 days of bad weather costs 6x as much as a grid that can survive normal day to day.
The number I heard was 8x. Solar is about 50 cents / kW, a "24 hour" solar grid is about $4/kW. But that's still about half the price of a natural gas grid and 1/5th the cost of nuclear.
What about negative externalities? If we were to force all actors to pay for their emissions and toxic by-products, factoring the entire lifecycle into the cost, what would it look like then? If, even with that in mind, solar looses to nuclear, that would be a fairly interesting result.
The total lifecycle cost of nuclear is massive - rehab'ing a nuclear plant would be well into the 10s of billions.
> I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?”
Something close to that happens almost every year in Europe. Last year there was nearly 3 weeks in winter where there was very little wind across the continent (<20% capacity production on all wind farms), and obviously little to no solar (high latitudes).
Spain isn't part of Europe? It's sunny in the winter.
90% of European solar farms are not in Spain.
Also, Spain only has a ~2 GW connection to France to sell their solar power to the rest of Europe.
You "just" need to get all of that energy north somehow...
Was Spain immune?
Another way to look at that is we only need to increase wind capacity by 5x to cover that event.
Nuclear isn’t a replacement for solar and wind. It’s additive.
Build all of it.
>“what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?”
Anything alive after that wouldn't be human and wouldn't be worried about electricity.
Nuclear plants often operate at 90%+ capacity factors, while solar can range from 10-25% depending on location. So you might need 4-9 times more solar capacity to match total energy output. So depending on the region, you might need 4-9 gigawatts of solar capacity with a higher amount of battery storage to match 1 GW nuclear output. This is because you need to account for winter vs summer, for bad weather etc. Maybe it will take a lot more space and cost more to build than restarting a nuclear plant for 1.6 billion.
Somehow you never hear these people say "What if the nuclear fuel supply chain becomes compromised for an arbitrarily extended period."
Because it’s reasonably cheap to buy two decades of fuel in advance, and it won’t take up much space. If such a thing were a concern, then people would do precisely that.
If it were still a problem towards the end of that period, then you can in fact extract uranium from seawater.
It's also plentiful in many countries, it's just not mined because it's too cheap. But since fuel is under 1% of the cost of Nuclear, if it was a problem we could easy mine more difficult places.
Or start recycling the "waste". Which still contains >95% of the energy of the original fuel.
Problem is: raw Uranium is too plentiful (=cheap) for recycling to be worth it.
"Problem"
This is true even before you start talking about reprocessing spent fuel with breeder reactors.
> what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months
Forget about two months, the cost to battery store just for two or three days is enormous. At the same time, it does not happen often enough to justify the cost over just using natural gas as a backup, so that is how it is done.
Many documented cases of non zero marginal cost energy systems failing. And in response we have learnt to eliminate, minimise, and manage risk better in those systems.
But apparently, in zero marginal cost energy it’s impossible. The only energy systems where you can have reliability have rent seeking minerals companies selling you fuel.
You make very legitimate point which I appreciate; I agree than in aggregate weather forecasting should be fairly reliable as regards sun and wind.
Question though... do we understand the tail risk from volcanos on solar outputs, either natural-occurring eruptions or maliciously-triggered ones?
The problem is that you need to plan for the absolute worst case, once in a century, scenario and size your batteries accordingly.
Same reason why almost no one goes 100% solar at home deep in the south/north because you'd need 20x your needed capacity in batteries to account for that once in a decade bleak winter week
I don't mean to be cynical, but manifestly this isn't necessary. It's why widespread power outages remain a thing even in rich, highly industrialized countries. American Gulf Coast utilities don't spend astronomical sums on distribution infrastructure to ensure 100% uptime through hurricanes; entire regions end up going hours if not days without power on a regular basis. Likewise, Texas doesn't maintain enough generation and robust infrastructure to make it through every cold snap unscathed.
People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages."
I'm all for nuclear, but let's be honest about how real-world infrastructure truly works. And, yes, I believe this means safety claims of Gen 4+ nuclear are off, just as they were for prior gen plants. Through motivated accounting people arrive at the numbers that are demanded, but knowingly or not the actual risk of an incident will be greater, as it manifestly always has been. At the same time our real risk tolerance is much greater than we claim, and this will eventually be born out in the power markets, whether through greater nuclear, less reliable power, or some other state of affairs.
> Likewise, Texas doesn't maintain enough generation and robust infrastructure to make it through every cold snap unscathed.
Correction: Texas, the state, doesn't require producers to maintain adequate reserve generation or robust infrastructure, and since they are not (except for a couple of small exceptions) connected to other regional grids, they can't be made to do so by the federal government. This is by design. It's a bad design, but one that greatly pleases corporations.
> People say one thing--"we require 100% uptime"--but do another--"but I'm only willing to pay a fraction of the price it would take to achieve that, and then I'll complain bitterly during the inevitable power outages."
This was not my experience when I lived in Texas. There was a brief moment in time for me (~2017 – 2019) where it was actually substantially cheaper, but only if you had the time and knowledge to scour all of the available plans and run some kind of modeling on them, since some had a lot of weird rules. Around COVID, that changed, and the cost savings evaporated. I check periodically, and it still hasn't recovered. Cheapest I could find for where I lived was 10.1¢/kWh, but that's just the base price. In contrast, my base price in North Carolina, on an REMC, is an annual average of 7.48¢/kWh.
All that to say, Texans were/are paying more than many others for sub-standard service. I bought a generator while there, and had to use it many, many times. I have used it precisely once here in NC, and that wasn't even a real need – sunny, pleasant afternoon, and someone hit a transformer with their car. Lost power for about 2 hours. Could've easily just done without and been fine.
> you need to plan for the absolute worst case, once in a century, scenario and size your batteries accordingly.
For a once-in-a-century situation, you can have alternatives other than batteries. For instance, backup diesel generators; any extra CO2 emitted by them in that situation would be insignificant when spread over a hundred years. And once you're planning for once-in-a-century events, you need backup generators anyway, since you can have failures other than just cloudy windless weather.
You absolutely don't. You just keep some gas peaker plants around for those rare occasions.
> We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data
We absolutely do not have long-term climate models with that sort of accuracy.
We also only have probability distributions, and with all probability distributions, the existence of very bad luck hangs out in the tails.
We'd be screwed if a Mount Tambora black swan event happened again.
The cost effectiveness plummets after one point.
What you didn’t mention is the effect that renewables have on the cost of nuclear power. When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop. Because nuclear power has high up front costs, its economics are increasingly eroded as more renewables and batteries are added to the grid.
You’re totally correct that renewables and batteries aren’t yet able to bridge the gap in times of bad weather, but what they are excellent at is spoiling the economics of any other type of cheap electricity generation that comes with high capital costs.
> When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop
In the short run, sure. In the long run, cheap power builds its own demand. A country that commits to a certain amount of nuclear baseload, even if run at a loss in the short term, is injecting a very real industrial subsidy into its system. (The way to ensure you don’t get a dog is to subsidise long-term loans for private borrowers. They still need to make a profit someday. But you reduce the time value of money for them.)
The investment doesn’t make sense for a non-nuclear power. But if you’re already producing nuclear waste at scale for your military, it’s a little silly to pretend you’re safer without a civilian reactor in the middle of a desert while all manner of subs and ships patrol your coast.
You are right which means that the cheap excess solar energy during summer and during the day will drive a boom in those industries which can leverage such intermittent availability of very cheap energy.
The problem you describe seems to be one targeted by the TerraPower project in Wyoming. It plans to operate at 100% capacity at all times (345 MWe), but makes itself more akin to other renewables by incorporating energy storage into its design. It is supposed to be able to increase capacity to 150% (500 MWe), allowing it to respond to energy scarcity. But it can also respond to energy abundance by storing excess production in molten salt storage tanks.
And thank-you for making the point that utilities should be socialized and not a profit center.
EVERYBODY deserves clean water, electricity, housing and food.
Residential users make up ~38% of the electricity market in the US.
Where do you suggest the rest of the users should get power from? And how would that work exactly in reality?
Even of the government had to ensure that everyone has access to affordable electricity they'd still have to buy it from someone which fundamentally doesn't change anything.
they could use renewables?
Right, and? Will that also be socialized? Or will they have to build their own grid?
Without profit there is no reason anybody will provide those. Countries that tried socializing food - starved.
Capitalism is the only one that brought plenty - because there is an incentive to do so.
Profit is… not fake, but fiat. Energy and clean water are real.
With collapsing demographics the current economic system will fall over anyway, either due to inflation or defaults, so maybe it’s a good time to start thinking about how to separate utilities from money.
> how to separate utilities from money
Forced labour? Central planning? Requisition? How exactly would that work? Somebody still needs to build and operate those power plants.
Also commercial and industrial users consume >60% of all electricity in the US, should they also be subsidized? Or subsidize residential users?
If I had answers, I wouldn't be saying that it's a good time to think about that.
But you shouldn't assume that things will just continue on as they were in the past hundred years. Boomers are retiring now, when the busters start going into retirement it's going to be a huge mess. Inflation is how democracies die.
Well they did overall, throughout their entire existence, didn't they?
There are so few corporations which build things to better the world and make money in the process.
99% of the corporations build things to earn money. Their wares sometimes do no harm, but it's the exception.
In many cases, the desire for money, not the need, is the driving force behind the technology. See n startups which are discussed here and categorized as "this is better as X. they're just trying to earn money with no real benefit to anyone".
Did Exxon hide their global warming research to benefit humanity? Of course not. Did Tetra Ethyl Lead added to gasoline instead of Ethanol, just because it was better? No because it was patentable and ethanol was not. Did WV created "better" diesel engines to benefit the humanity? No the engines were only "better" for their bottom line and problematic for every one. Did DuPont hid the effects of forever chemicals because it was beneficial/harmless to the nature? On the contrary.
Companies do whatever they can without breaking laws (or bending them with money) to earn more money. The products we get are side effects of it.
I like this take about current (Generative) AI hype:
> Their wares sometimes do no harm, but it's the exception.
I disagree with that to a very extreme degree (also it's a very silly thing to say unless you don't see any value in computers, smartphones, planes, automobiles, washing machines, fridges and other appliances).
The things you listed are generally the exceptions. Also the question is whether society/people benefited from VW, Exxon, DuPont etc. to such an extent that it outweighed all of those things?
Of course it's relative, if we value access to cheap and effective transportation, synthetic clothing, various plastic products etc. more than we care about all the negative externalities that's what we get... It's all down to incentives, corporations are inherently neither good nor evil.
> to earn more money. The products we get are side effects of it.
I agree that's true on the whole. But that's why humans do anything at all (replace money with other tangible or intangible benefits). Absolute altruism doesn't scale and isn't in any way sustainable.
They did when they were led by people passionate about the technology. As soon as MBAs got ahold of them, it was all about enriching shareholders in the short-term.
It certainly brought plenty to some people, didn't it? Other people still get nothing.
Fewer and fewer get nothing. Capitalism raised billions out of poverty and continues to do so, in every place it is allowed to work.
Who pays for it? If everybody gets all of the above for free, then why would they ever work and contribute to covering the cost of these free for everyone services?
Once a large number of people stop working, who actually works to grow the food? Who builds the houses?
Communism does not work.
Everyone pays for it.
It's interesting that you bring up a large number of people no longer growing food as if that's not the current reality. What do all those people do now that they don't have to work for food?
Someone works grueling hours in the sun to grow it and then the rest of us work and pay those people that grew it money. Is this really a question?
If the people doing the growing are getting all of their needs met why would they grind to produce food to sell for money when they get money for free?
Why would the vast majority of people in the bottom 50% of the economic ladder work at all if they were getting all of their needs met at no cost to them?
Who said anything about "free"?
Why stop there? EVERYBODY deserves healthcare and education too!
I would say in a perfect world everyone should have all of these things.
The problem is that the marginal cost to giving each of these things to everyone increases to infinity as we approach 100% of a sufficiently large and diverse population. For example, creating a city water system should efficiently deliver clean water to a large proportion of an urban population. However, not everyone lives in an urban setting and delivering clean water to remote populations can get astronomically expensive.
As rational citizens we must acknowledge this unfortunate reality and figure out how to deal with it fairly and equitably. Profit seeking enterprise has been astoundingly effective at driving down these marginal costs for a whole host of goods for centuries. Many of these things you mention only exist because profit seekers developed and distributed them!
> Many of these things you mention only exist because profit seekers developed and distributed them!
You mean governments signaled the creation of a market by printing and lending free money to build those systems ?
That same government is now over 30 trillion dollars in debt.
That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output.
The only time it won't scale to meet output is if the price stays high, but if the nuclear energy is already on the grid and has elastic pricing, the rest will take care of itself.
But the price of energy can be negative, so a new nuclear plant might never pay off its cost, even if it provides the public benefit of cheap electricity.
> But the price of energy can be negative
Is this a sign of over-investment?
Is it case that the metric we're using does not show the actual price? https://www.squeaky.energy/blog/the-unintended-consequences-... shows a way to get "free" electricity on a regular basis, while it still costs consumers a very non-zero amount. In the case of solar, revenue could be achieved through out-of-market payments (CfD, power purchase agreements, renewable energy certificates).
Or is it the sign that the nightmare battery dominated grid is starting to happen? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-unstoppabl... Battery operators can choose between strategies designed to maximize revenue, profit, competitive advantage, or competitor losses, over any given timescale and with almost perfect deniability.
(or is it something else?)
Did you read the post you’re responding to?
> That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output.
If the price of electricity is negative, people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.
> people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again.
But will electricity cost enough to justify the huge upfront cost of nuclear plants?
If we have the wealth to build capital-intensive projects that are marginally cost effective, it might be easier to build smelters and desalination plants that only run at 40% capacity, when the sun is out.
I'll take "What is market failure?" for 400, Alex.
Easily solved via sane energy policy. Of course politics will likely make this impossible in the US.
In a rational environment you run your nuclear at 100% 24x7. The cost of the fuel is not material running at 10% vs. 100%. Letting parasitic intermittent power sources screw this up is simply financial engineering by largely bad actors. At least currently.
Then you use intermittent power sources to provide your peak loads during the day, and any excess you ideally start putting into storage - whatever that may be. If you have effectively free marginal power during certain peak times, I'm positive industry will find a way to turn that into money.
I still have hope sanity returns to the energy discussion, but it likely won't happen in the US during my lifetime. The cost of solar and wind is entirely politics - the storage cost is literally never considered when reading articles on the subject. The hidden costs are likely 10x or so what the marginal cost per kwh everyone loves to spew. Lots of folks getting massively rich off this disinformation so there is huge inertia behind ignoring it - even from very smart people that should absolutely know better after a few hours of reading on the subject. Just look at many of the posts here at HN.
The environmental costs of methane (natural gas) are simply not being considered. The methane leaks into the environment are underestimated by at least 10x if not much, much, more. Pivoting from nuclear and to natural gas has been an utter environmental disaster.
It's worth remembering that the anti-nuclear crowd was always backed by big oil, and even in the age where solar and wind are being pushed, big oil benefits as the unmet demand for base load power, in the absence of nuclear, means that they get the business as there is no alternative.
They pulled the green crowd along for the ride hook, line, and sinker.
There is nothing inherent or natural about that scenario, it is all due to the failure to properly design electricity markets.
See also: the 2001 California electricity crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000–2001_California_electrici...
See also: Enron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000–2001_California_electrici...
If we have designed our markets to price cheap, reliable electricity out of the market and instead prefer expensive unreliable electricity, we've really f*ed up.
Spaniard here: we have zero gas and zero uranium nationally sourced, yet thanks to solar, wind and hydro, our energy grid is among the best in the world. We are at 20% nuclear, above global average, and above USA or UK, no need to install more.
Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA. In terms of energy we are good, thank you, and need no lessons from the USA.
Spain also has a hugely different energy market than the United States. Spain is around 5% of the size of the US, being closer to a state in our context. Different states have different climates, making them more aligned with different energy sources. It doesn't make sense to compare the US and Spain in this context.
> We are at 20% nuclear,
Doesn't this prove the parent comment's point, that the best mix of energy is renewables supplemented by a base of nuclear power?
> Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA
This feels unnecessary. Spain has done an amazing job building an energy base, let's talk about how we can export to different countries and climates instead of putting people down.
Fission is a bad complement for solar power. A good complement for solar provides dispatchable fill-in-the-gaps type of power. However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement.
You can get to 100% carbon free by using a combination of overprovisioning, source diversity, geographic diversity, storage and statistics. You can't get to 100% but you can get to an arbitrary number of nines and say "good enough". The grid is only 99.99% reliable so having generation be better than that has little value.
If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid you choose something the opposite of nuclear: something cheap to build but expensive to fuel. For example, synthetic natural gas. The cost of the fuel has little relevance when it only has a duty cycle of 0.1%. And they're cheap to build and likely don't even need building because we already have lots of them.
China built a lot of nuclear reactors in the 2010's, but is slowing their build rate. 10GW/year of nuclear power is not very impressive in a country that built 100GW of solar in the first half of 2024.
That being said, I still support restarting TMI. The main costs of nuclear are in building and decomissioning them. We've already incurred the cost of building TMI and we're already on the hook for decomissioning it, so running it is likely cost-effective once you remove the sunk costs.
What you say makes sense. But what if we need to generate 50 times more electricity than we do now? At some point solar and wind energy will start being very expensive because we'll run out of cheap land. You might think 50 is absurd, but consider this: right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition most of our energy use to electricity. The big culprits are transportation, steel, concrete and fertilizers. That's a factor of 3. Then we want to increase everyone's standards of living to match the current standard of living of the average American or European person. That's another factor of 3. Then we want to increase our (clean) energy use. Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions in the atmosphere. If, as Elon wants, we end up having hundreds or thousands of launches per day, and we want these launches to be net zero, then we need to find a way to manufacture hundreds of millions of tons of synthetic fuel each year. AI will also consume a lot of electricity. We will also need to build cities, if we are to lift billions of people out of their current rural life (in Africa, South America, India, etc). Everybody talks about solar as if the goal is to replace the current generation capacity. But the goal is to do that, and then more, much, much more. I think you need nuclear for that.
> At some point solar and wind energy will start being very expensive because we'll run out of cheap land.
Yes that might happen. But it'll happen at a number much greater than 50X. And it's a problem that'll only happen if we solve the global warming problem first.
> right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition most of our energy use to electricity. The big culprits are transportation, steel, concrete and fertilizers. That's a factor of 3.
But we mostly use fuels that are 30% - 60% efficient plus wastage for production, refining and transporting. Over 2/3rds of the energy we use gets wasted as heat. So we've got a factor of 1/3 to cancel out your 3 here. It's not completely efficient so it's actually about 1.2X, not 3X.
> Then we want to increase everyone's standards of living to match the current standard of living of the average American or European person.
Yep, that's a good 3X, if not more there. But unfortunately it's going to take decades to accomplish this.
> Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions in the atmosphere. If, as Elon wants, we end up having hundreds or thousands of launches per day, and we want these launches to be net zero, then we need to find a way to manufacture hundreds of millions of tons of synthetic fuel each year.
> Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions
Each launch would then be a 0.00001X, and is approximately equivalent to a trans-pacific plane flight. Thousands of flights per year would not be a significant fraction of the Earth's emissions. Hundreds of thousands of flights would be.
- solar is fine up to around 500X
- which won't happen this century
- when it happens power will be abundant enough that the cost calculations will be radically different
- technology will also be radically different. Maybe we'll use anti-matter reactors or something.
> Yes that might happen. But it'll happen at a number much greater than 50X.
It's difficult to say. We are not running out of land, that's for sure. But we are running out of cheap land. Or rather land where it is economical to build solar. Sahara has plenty of empty land, and it is plenty sunny all year long, but there are civil wars more often than not, various militias, corrupt governments, etc. The US has lots of deserts, but also lots of groups with various agendas that find ways to delay projects, and delays can transform good projects into bad projects.
As a concrete example, take California. California is very proud to be a leader in environmental issues. You can find on the state website the installed capacity per year. For the last 5 years it has been [1], in GW: 1.2 (in 2020), 1.5, 2.0, 2.3, 0.9 (in 2024, so far). The year over year growth rates were 26%, 35%, 10% and for this year -60%. This year is not over, and it's possible the numbers are not up to date, but it's quite unlikely we'll get to match last year's numbers, let alone see a double digit growth.
Or take Texas. Wikipedia has their annual numbers between 2007 and 2023 [2]. I did the math, and between 2007 and 2017 they experienced a 90% annual growth. Nice Moore's law at work there. For the next 4 years the average annual growth was 60%. And for the last 2 years, it was 28%. Nothing to sneeze at, but the trend is clear. Why, if the cost of the panels went down?
> Thousands of flights per year
Elon is not talking about thousands of flights per year. Thousands of flights per day. Millions per year. A million launches of 5 kT CO2e each equal 5 GT CO2 each. That's about 10% of the current worldwide emissions. Or about 30% of the current emissions that come from power generation. If we are to use synthetic fuel instead of fossil fuel, and you have a 30% efficiency of making synfuel (which is what a quick google search indicates), then you have a 2x increase in electricity needs.
[1] https://www.californiadgstats.ca.gov/charts/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Texas
> However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement.
I think this is why they call it baseload. Yes it costs the same, used or unused... but it's always there, ready to be used. This is its strength, not a defect.
> If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid
But no reasonable person wants that. They want "100% reliability, and who cares where it comes from". If you're environmentally minded, you can tack on a "with no carbon"... but even that isn't the same thing as a "primarily solar grid".
baseload is base load, not base generation. Base generation is not a thing.
Way back when, they realized that grids had a base load below which it never dropped. They realized that if they designed some of their plants without the expensive features which allowed them to be turned on and off quickly, they could build plants cheaper.
You don't design grids for base load, you design grids for peak load in all scenarios. If you can handle peak, you can also handle base.
Baseload is for cost optimization. And nuclear is a horrible way to optimize cost.
No.
An energy mix is the answer.
One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build.
Nuclear plants that already run, often take days, some even weeks to adjust significant: so if on monday the wind stops blowing, on tuesday it gets cloudy, and on tuesday afternoon everyone needs to charge their EV or fire up the AC, it'll often take until next week friday before a nuclear plant can deliver this. Modern plants are faster, and theres many "hacks" where energy is blown out (wasted) for short peaks down, or where there's always 10% wasted for short peaks up.
So nuclear needs innovation. But most of all, needs to be "just a piece of the puzzle" and never the only piece.
Nuclear fission, and other of this "innovation" isn't there. That's the other slow part of nuclear. Even if its production ready today, that plant won't run for another decade, often 20+ years (except china, which tells you the reason why it's so rediculous slow: NIMBY, regulations, democracy)
So, sorry, aside from all the other (fictive) problems with nuclear (waste, risk etc), nuclear has a serious problem of being just too damn slow to solve *todays* energy crisis on its own.
Edit: Source, I've interned in power plants. A comparable coal plant, took one and a half month to power up from zero to producing electricity: which happened every 5 years for revision and three months to power down. It could adjust 10% in a few hours, but everything over 30% needed week(s) of planning ahead. I made those plannings.
> One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build.
All of those things, to me, mean that it should be a large part of the mix. Nuclear should be the backbone of our energy production, and should be sufficient to supply our baseline needs.
That said, in places where hydro or geothermal are practical, those should be used in preference to nuclear. They're cheaper, more reliable, and just better in almost every way.
Solar, wind, tidal, wave action, and so on should be what we build on top of that baseline. They should be cheaper to build and operate, but far less consistent.
If you want to train a huge LLM, or smelt metals, or do anything that's energy-intensive but not very time-sensitive, you schedule those loads during times where energy production exceeds existing demand.
... and you know when that happens by pricing energy based on availability. Electricity should be cheapest when we have more than we need, and more expensive when the inconsistent sources listed above aren't producing. In other words, market forces are sufficient to make this happen.
In fact, one of the cool things about solar and wind in particular is that they are so aggressively cyclical that it's possible that energy prices could actually go negative - not often, or regularly, but possible. That opens the door to all kinds of use cases that would otherwise never be profitable, and using those types of technologies often leads to efficiency gains that can eventually make them more efficient than the current alternatives.
This market thing is in place already. At least in Europe it is, I've done a project during my energy engineering study for APEX.
The irony, however, is that it's not all that good for nuclear. When prices go down or even negative, a CHP or windmill is shut down in minutes. The nuclear plant (or ancient coal, or even hydro) will go below cost price, or even havs to pay to deliver electricity, because they can't not deliver. And in Europe we are having a few times of negatively priced electricty per year recently.
And contrary to what many people think, nuclear power is rather expensive. For a small part that's political (subsidies and all), but mostly it's because running a nuclear plant is expensive; its fuel is expensive as hell (it does burn fuel), and storing its waste "guaranteed" safe for some 5.000 years is expensive (incredible timescales; egyptians building pyramids - to now, timescales). Also expensive is it's cooling facilities: nuclear operates on a steam cycle, so it needs a lot of cooling; many places don't have that (anymore). E.g. in France some plants were shut down because rivers dried up too much and they'd be heating up the remaining "trickle" too much with these plants. That makes it unreliable, the way hydro, tidal, etc can be unreliable too.
There are just so much problems with nuclear power. Again, aside from the political "opinions" on it: these well known percieved risks and such. But that makes it a difficult part of that mix. I do believe it should be a crucial part, but also am convinced that part should be as small as possible, due to those downsides, costs. And, as you say, indeed, in places where there's alternatives, you'll find these alternatives are almost always a better option, cost, timescale and operational wise.
> When prices go down or even negative, a CHP or windmill is shut down in minutes.
Negative prices are a symptom that the (day ahead) market is not the real game being played. CfD, production subsidies and renewable credits are the order of the day.
> The nuclear plant ... will go below cost price > its fuel is expensive as hell
The fuel is cheap. https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... estimates 9.33 USD/MWh (2018 prices) for fuel.
> in France some plants were shut down because rivers dried up too much and they'd be heating up the remaining "trickle" too much with these plants.
https://www.politico.eu/article/when-the-water-runs-dry-why-...
> in France some plants were shut down because rivers dried up too much and they'd be heating up the remaining "trickle" too much with these plantsLooking at https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/07/13/frances-nuclear-po... it appears power was reduced due to river temperatures, not river levels. That makes it more a regulatory issue, and probably one solvable with more hardware (extra cooling towers or greater extraction).
One might also ask whether it is worth EDF investing to get the extra few percent total output across the year; the solar peaks during hot weather will tend to reduce the price of electricity, so why not just schedule maintenance at that time of year. Thus PV creates a problem that it partially solves.
Scheduling loads based on energy spot price tends to wreck the economics of manufacturing. If you have to shut down when energy prices spike then you're still paying fixed expenses for PP&E plus at least some labor. It's tough to finance that.
Depends a bit on the "manufactoring". It's not "black"-"white". While it's certainly true for e.g. a brewery or a bike-factory-line, it's less so for aluminum, or chemicals. And even less so for systems like a freezer.
A friend who makes juices and dried fruits on medium scale, plans his production ahead based on the spot pricing: steaming or deep-freezing can be postponed for days, apparently; I helped him with some dashboards and integrations of the pricing-APIs for this.
What I'm trying to say is: yes, a lot of industry won't be able to profit much from these markets. But many can, if they are just willing to change their current ways a little. Not all: many.
> > Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy.
> No.
> An energy mix is the answer.
Maybe that “No.” was unnecessary.
Maybe.
Probably, if "future" means 50+ years, so two generations in future.
But not if it means "future" in even overlapping the current nuclear plants that are EOL, 10, 20 even 30 years. Because to replace those nuclear EOL with other nuclear, we'd need to start building plants in 2014, 2015 (which we didn't). The next best time may be now, but "We", at least in Europe aren't doing that either, and AFAIK neither in the US.
TBC: I'm not saying "it won't work, so stop chasing it" on contrary. But shoehorning "fission" into a discussion of a current energy crisis, what this article is about, isn't relevant. Such tech isn't for today, tomorrow. Not even for when your kids grow, up, but at most for your grandkids when they are working - horizons.
But not cheap.
Gas peakers are cheap compared to nuclear, and arguably much more appropriate for the foreseeable future when it comes to making up for renewable energy's inconsistency problems.
I mostly disagree with your initial assertion as well. A sufficiently large and diversified grid will largely cover itself, and when it doesn't, that's what peakers and so on will handle.
Nuclear energy is not free from disruptions caused by natural events or other unexpected causes. See for example the nuclear power plants in France that have to shut down in summer because if low water in the nearby rivers used for cooling.
It's always a question of probability and risk. If we get extreme weather conditions that our storage cannot keep up then we have to temporarily reduce usage and in the longer term increase storage capacity.
That said, I'm not against nuclear. But I'm against simplisticly dismissing renewables.
> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
I never understood the hysteria of the anti-nuclear people. I mean, the stats are out there for everyone to verify. Even the worst nuclear disaster killed no more than 100 people[1]. Plus, the new generation of the nuclear reactor can auto shut down when the temperature keeps rising. As for the nuclear waste, we need just one football field to store all the waste even before the recycling, which can recoup 90% of the material.
I'm also aware of the argument that even one death is too many. But if we follow this argument, wouldn't we need to account for the deaths caused by the alternative energy source, like coal? And the death would be in the thousands, right? And why won't we protest that?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
For the explanation of hysteria: 1) Nuclear disasters are acute, traumatic events that can have drastic effects on health of people and ecosystems for generations 2) Nuclear power sounds like nuclear bombs and nuclear radiation, both of which are scary and resonate with long-held cultural fears of nuclear technology that have existed since the Cold War.
Basically, yes most fears of nuclear power are irrational. But that's part of the problem—even if nuclear power polluted in a manner similar to coal power and there wasn't the risk of acute disaster, I still think Americans would be quite wary of the technology purely due to cultural priors.
I am pro-nuclear, but I don't think that's exactly the correct argument for nuclear power. I think we can cover the current level of energy consumption with solar and wind. The problem is that we want to live in a future where the world consumes at least 10 times more energy than now. This might seem like an outrageous number, but it's not. The average energy use per capita in the world is 3.5 times lower than in the US. At the least we want the rest of the world to reach the living standards of the current average American person. But we also know that AI will consume exponentially increasing amounts of electricity. The exponential function is funny, you don't notice it until it explodes in your face. Right now AI uses a non-negligible but still small amount of energy, but the growth is clearly exponential. In a world where the energy is not a constraint, in a few decades AI will consume more energy than the rest of the economy combined, although it will be difficult to say what "the rest of the economy" will mean with a world where everything will be powered by AI.
Nuclear has the potential to fulfill all this future growth in energy requirements. The fundamental problem of nuclear is not safety, or waste, or proliferation. It is cost. And this is a solvable problem. The total cost of the 4 Barakah reactors you mentioned was $32 billion, or $5.7 billion/GW. The cost of utility solar is about $1 billion/GW, but the capacity factor is only about 30%, while the capacity factor of nuclear is about 90%. So $5.7 at 90% is still a bit more expensive than $1 at 30%, but if the cost of nuclear goes down by a factor of 2, it's at the same level as solar. And there is no reason to think such a reduction is not possible.
Very few people talk about the land requirements for solar and consequence of de-greening. To generate 1 MW of solar power, approximately 5 acres are needed. This means a 1 MW solar farm fits on a 10-acre space. This overlaps with croplands and grasslands used for livestock grazing. This affects animal movement patterns. Removing native vegetation to make room for solar farms threatens endangered animals and insects which rely on the vegetation for food and habitat.
>No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble.
I'm in favor of nuclear too, but this is a ridiculous point. Your first sentence mentions solar and wind and your second only addresses solar. If the sun doesn't shine for n+1 days, the wind is still going to be available most or all of those days.
The discussion of incorporating variability into the power grid is incredibly unsophisticated on HN.
The US (and Europe) are big places with diverse energy demand and weather patterns, and smart renewable energy developers will seek out resources that are decorrelated with existing supplies because the power can be sold at higher prices.
Batteries are also getting cheap enough to profitably arbitrage intraday price variability.
Another thing that gets ignored in these discussions is that in any net zero scenario there is going to be a fair bit of green hydrogen/biofuels/synfuel produced for transport and industrial use. A fraction of that could be diverted to gas peaker plants when monster dunkelflautes manifest themselves.
You don't need battery farms to make renewables viable in the US. What you need is to replace the AC grid interconnect system in the US with a HVDC super grid system.
The key difference here is that HVDC is exceedingly efficient in energy transfer and has effectively negligible losses compared to AC over distance.
The US is big enough that any impact from weather should basically average out over that distance.
There are huge downsides though because moving power generation further and further from where it’s used opens you up to more disruption from terrorist attacks on the grid (and cyber attacks) unless you also do less centralized production which is going to be more expensive.
That's the thing. HVDC works better in a decentralised manner. You don't have clocking to deal with so instead it's mainly a matter of just hooking power production and power draw up to what is basically a big cross-country busbar.
And you can connect as many bridging connections as you want without having to worry about phase or desync. Instead more connections generally just means power goes from production to consumption along more efficient paths.
> moving power generation further and further from where it’s used opens you up to more disruption from terrorist attacks on the grid
Not arguing, just asking - how is this different from how the Internet works?
That doesn't help after sunset on the west coast when residential demand peaks and there is little renewable power being generated anywhere in North America. In theory batteries or other storage could close that gap but realistically it's going to take decades to scale that up.
That's 16 hours of sunlight but more importantly that allows the US to distribute energy production from hydro, wind, and geothermal production across the country.
During the daylight hours solar is great of course but my point about power averaging out had more to do with the other forms of renewable energy.
You'd be in trouble even if you had nuclear power. If the sun stops shining, our agricultural yields will approach zero and everyone would have to stay close to district heated buildings, due to the extreme cold.
"No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather."
Generally agree. However, I want to point out that it could defined be possible if designed the right way. You can use "batteries" like pumped hydro, which could protect against longer duration outages. Bonus is that when there's no sun, there's usually rain, which one would hope would also offset some of the draining of the water.
The issue of dunkelflaute is measurable and you can approach it the same way that storms are rated as being 100,1000-year storms. Not that I wouldn't appreciate more nuclear.
I personally could tolerate it if Microsoft’s “Ai” is down for a few hours or days per year. Give clippy a break.
Three mile island already hit jackpot once in the statistics game and it didn't only go offline for a few days. And it is true that fuel cost are not the driving factor for fision. I am all in, if power companies really have to pay for all security and lifecycle costs upfront.
How clean, fast, cheap and reliable is the decommissioning of a plant once its short life is over? Anything that lasts only 50 years is pretty short-term.
This user account is spamming the same message into various threads. Correct or not, it leaves a taste.
India has nine nuclear plants actively under construction to be completed between 2024-27 as well.
and remember, it's only fair to include the cost of carbon capture to return the carbon into the soil, since the cost of nuclear in these discussions will include both the cost of disposal and cleanup of disasters that only happen several continents away.
I realize this isn't the HN popular opinion, but nuclear power will be great once:
1. People are educated about true risk AND forget about Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Or the need to have iodine pills if you live near one. ("If it's so safe, why do I need the iodine pills?")
2. Bad actors face actual prison time, not just corporate fines. Meanwhile, today, the bad actors still get bonuses.
(You can kinda blame this one on the simpsons, but I do want for Christmas this year a Simpsons Springfield Isotopes Hockey Jersey with the 3-eyed fish. https://jerseyninja.com/springfield-iceotopes-simpson-hockey...)
3. We grow a lot of crops in the desert in the US. We need a lot of water to do that. There's gigawatts of solar potential there. And the cost of one reactor is $35B US for 1GW. For solar/wind you could have 10GW for around $10B US and then there's $25B US for batteries.
This is nonsense. If you're going to cite arbitrary "N+1 days of bad weather" then I can cite "N+1 severe natural disasters" where the nuclear reactor is engineered to withstand N. And unlike the theoretical "disaster" due to extended bad weather taking renewables down, this has actually happened in recent memory with Fukushima. And this was a true disaster, not just a power outage.
Nuclear is not safe. Every time proponents say "new designs are safe" eventually a new disaster proves this lie. Then the nuclear proponents say "oh well that was an old design, new designs are safe!"
Nuclear is too expensive. Renewables even with storage are way cheaper! We can way over build renewables. We can distribute them, because "bad weather" is regional. All for much cheaper than nuclear.
Stop pushing this out-dated, unsafe and expensive technology. Its time has passed.
> Nuclear is not safe
Nothing is 100.0% safe - but as far as I can find nuclear comes incredibly close[0] even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Taking about just deaths is misleading. Accidents in other energy sources don't render 1,000 square miles of land uninhabitable.
> Accidents in other energy sources don't render 1,000 square miles of land uninhabitable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
That would have rendered 268,596 square miles uninhabitable, at least for several weeks plus recovery time.How about https://www.ferc.gov/media/winter-storm-elliott-report-inqui... ?
In terms of single-incident, I believe hydro takes the lead due to the Banqiao Dam failure (floods over 12,000 square kilometers killing ~30k directly then ~100k more from water contamination and famine). But even that's still dwarfed by the more gradual impact of climate change on the planet from fossil fuels.
Dam failures absolutely destroy vast areas and can contaminate them with oil and gasoline by flooding settlements. In fact hydroelectric power has killed a surprising amount of people.
Suppose you have a devastating earthquake that wrecks renewable power sources in an area. Bad part is you're out of power for a good while. But the second-order risks are very low - maybe some people are killed by falling wind turbines or solar panels, but there isn't any equivalent of radioactive contamination making the place uninhabitable for years.
Banqiao Dam failure alone flooded over 12,000 square kilometers, killing ~30k directly then ~100k more from water contamination and famine.
Even solar still requires various minerals the extraction and processing of which has environmental impact - like tailing ponds of toxic substances that frequently leak, particularly from earthquakes and extreme weather.
But to be clear, the human and environmental impact of solar, wind, nuclear and hydro pales in comparison to that of fossil fuels.
I specifically made my comment about wind and solar. I am not a big fan of large scale hydro for just this reason, as well as the impact on aquatic ecosystems.
> I specifically made my comment about wind and solar
You said "Suppose you have a devastating earthquake that wrecks renewable power sources in an area" - hydropower is considered renewable. I also did address a similar risk of solar (barely anything compared to fossil fuels, but same applies to nuclear).
Focusing on deaths is a nice trick of the nuclear industry because the largest negative impacts of their disasters and even non-disaster costs of operation are still terrible but do not manifest as immediate deaths.
> but do not manifest as immediate deaths.
This isn't just counting immediate deaths - else it'd just be ~30 for Chernobyl and ~0 for Fukushima.
In fact, Fukushima's death count seems to primarily be down to that "people had died indirectly as a result of the physical and mental stress of evacuation" - which I feel should at least partially be put on the tsunami that killed 20000.
To be fair, the unsafe designs are all 50 years old because of FUD from incidents that are also generally pretty old. I’m not sure it’s comparable to modern designs - this isn’t a “new iPhone every year” deal.
Get out of here with this lie. Before the disaster, nuclear proponents cited Fukushima as an example of how safe modern nuclear was.
I think everyone knew the Mark I boiling water reactors designed in the 1960s was not a “safe by default” design. Open to receipts if folks with some understanding of nuclear designs were on record before that touting its safety.
"Citation needed" is the lamest response. I am not your personal Google assistant. Nuclear proponents just like you cited Fukushima as a hallmark of reliability to "disprove" its dangers to me. There were articles highlighting it. These are obviously hard to find now with the digital rot of the last decade. Sorry I didn't print out copies to hand out to you many years later.
People touted the safety of cars in the 1920s. Compared to today’s standards, they were wildly unsafe. The mere fact people were wrong before doesn’t mean they are wrong today. “What some people once said” is not as strong an argument as “designs are demonstrably better engineered”
That doesn’t mean there is no risk. It’s still ok to be scared of nuclear power for new unknown reasons. But let’s not pretend that designs aren’t wildly better now.
A nuclear power plant needs supervision, if it can run N days without but there is no supervision for N+1 days, we are in big trouble.
The worst part of this is, Thorium-based reactors seem to be the future of nuclear, but because of FUD and politics, no one is funding research to find out whether the theoretical thorium reactors are the way to go forward.
You know nuclear power plants have issues in extreme weather too, right? [1]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/climate-events-are-t...
> Constellation, which plans to spend about $1.6 billion to restart the plant, is awaiting permits and expects the facility to come online by 2028 [and] would provide Microsoft with 835 megawatts of energy.
I don't quite understand how this makes sense financially for Microsoft. A 1 GW offshore wind farm costs about 1 billion [1]. The Gemini Solar + Battery Storage Project in Nevada is about 1.1 billion (690 MW + 380 MW battery). [2]
With solar, wind and battery prices continuously trending downwards, how does it make sense to invest in nuclear which nearly always has cost overruns, bad PR and unknown potential future costs?
[1] https://businessnorway.com/articles/cost-of-wind-turbines [2] https://commercialsolarguy.com/americas-first-gigawatt-solar...
As some with contact to the the nuclear industry:
These old plants are ridden with hidden costs, and I would bet all of my money no one at Microsoft is aware of the scale of this. I'm not talking "hidden costs" like you didn't do your homework. I'm talking hidden costs like you need to be on the inside, on the ground, to know about. Hidden costs like "everyone subtly nods but doesn't say it out loud" kind of hidden costs.
The NRC has beyond suffocating regulation for nuclear energy. This is maybe a good thing in some regards. But let me put it this way:
Imagine you bought a car from 1975 and could _only_ put in original parts. Need a new battery? Better find out how to get a factory one from 1975. Can't get one from 1975? Be prepared to pay millions, perhaps tens of millions, for a mountain of testing and certification for a new $100 part that is still just an off the shelf battery.
But the actual investor is Constellation, which has operated the plant for decades. Microsoft is just committing to buy power.
Are you suggesting Constellation will be surprised at the hidden costs?
It's hard to say without knowing the details of the contract. I highly doubt Constellation put themselves in a position to be vulnerable to cost overruns. Or perhaps they see the deal as a shiny pendant they can dangle in front of dumb PE money when they want to cash out in the future.
Trust me, cynicism is well warranted with these ancient plants.
All of the articles say the deal is Microsoft agreeing to buy power for 20 years. It's possible that's wrong/incomplete, but it would be weird. Constellation's stock rose 20%, so the market at least thinks they'll make decent money on it.
And it may be an "ancient plant" but it was operational 5 years ago, under Constellation's management.
How many MWH does that battery array store? MW is a useless number for energy storage. HN should know better.
Edit:
The article linked states:
> Roughly, one could assume that the energy storage portion of the project – 1.4 GWh worth
So, at the 690GW (which is unrealistic) nameplate capacity of the solar field, they are installing roughly 120 minutes worth of energy storage to back it. This is actually a better number than most projects I've seen, but still utterly inadequate and representative of the typical project.
Battery arrays aren't primarily rated for their storage capacity but for their ability to provide/consume power.
At the moment the goal of battery storage additions to solar plants is to soften their peak power production and broaden the time they provide power to extend to the morning and dinner time.
690 MW.
Right. So a useless number when it comes to energy storage discussions. It simply extends the duck curve an hour or three before you need use someone else’s power.
Thanks for the correction on GW vs MW. Not a great typo.
> A 1 GW offshore wind farm costs about 1 billion
A 1 GW offshore wind farm does not produce anywhere close to 1 GW most of the time.
A 1 GW nuclear reactor can produce 1 GW 90%+ of the time, with the downtime being _scheduled_ maintenance.
Nuclear plants trip off all the time. It was a big problem in one of Texas' recent cold snaps where people died.
And many of those nuclear down times are for month+ times. Good luck getting enough batteries to get through that!
Offshore wind typically has a capacity factor of ~50%. Add a smaller number of batteries than you would need for nuclear, and it's going to be cost competitive against any new build.
As far as if it's cost competitive with TMI, I'm not so sure. New build nuclear is likely going to be >$190/MWh. Running the numbers being bandied about for the "Pennsylvania GDP increase", which is a really funny way to say "cost of the electricity for 20 years," and you get $115/MWh. Which is really pricy still. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to get TMI going again, just that it's pricy, and there's likely lots of other constraints that went into deciding to do this.
You'd need to adjust those for capacity factor, but I wondered the same thing.
The AI space seems to have weird overlaps with nuclear that I don't quite get.
Not sure if it's just the social circles the AI people run in.
Zuckerberg was all excited on a podcast about how energy was the limiting factor for AI, waited for him to say something about how cheap and fast rollouts of renewables made sense but no, nuclear. Even this refurb is talking minimum 4 years to get going. All very strange.
Maybe the lead time is faster because refurbishing a plant is easier than building one from scratch? Just speculating but that comes to mind for me. If their need is immediate term then this could be the "throw some money at the problem to make it go away".
Also maybe good for PR?
I doubt that anything that connects to the name "Three Mile Island" is going to be good for PR.
No one died from the incident at Three Mile Island, so I hope that with better access to information people can be persuaded to change their minds.
Not to mention this nuclear reactor was only shut down in 2019. They're upgrading and recommissioning something that was mothballed because the economics didn't work, all of five years ago.
People reacting to the name are imagining that this means re-opening the other unit, which melted down in 1979. It's more fun to imagine and react to that than to learn that this was an operational plant until a few years ago.
>I doubt that anything that connects to the name "Three Mile Island" is going to be good for PR.
This. I'm surprised they didn't figure out a way to rename the place first.
It makes no sense. Bill Gates is a huge nuclear proponent for bad reasons and I'm sure somehow this is related, wherher it's just that Microsoft decision makers have read his bad takes or because he actually pushed for this terrible idea.
More nuclear is a good thing. FAANG nuclear is even better, because they will be be ready and equipped to push back the insane NIMBY crowd(s) and also don't need to be worried about getting reelected.
How are nimby crowds insane? Accidents may happen. And did happen in the past in that same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
Coal plants have killed a minimum of 500k people over the past 20 years[1]. It's not an accident in that case, it's known and planned for (or at least easily predicted enough that it should have been).
But when a few hundred people, or really just 0 people[2] die in one place at one time, people lose their minds.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-pow... [2]: An inter-agency analysis concluded that the accident did not raise radioactivity far enough above background levels to cause even one additional cancer death among the people in the area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
I tried to do the math once to figure out if Japan would have been better off building a coal power plant instead of Fukushima, the nuclear plant that had the worst disaster in any western country. It was a surprisingly tough question.
https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-v...
Those studies of coal plant deaths are basically only counting people who died in mining disasters or were killed while operating the power plant. If you add in climate change effects, air pollution including radiation from flyash, and groundwater pollution the figure is almost certainly much worse; but also very hard to calculate with any certainty.
First off - plenty of people are against coal plants for health reasons in addition to the environmental reasons. There is nobody cheering coal and blocking nuclear (and please don't bring up the Germany decommissioning of nuclear plants and keeping open coal plants because it doesn't speak to what I just said). Secondly, Three Mile Island represents the path to a possible outcome. Just because disaster was averted doesn't mean that the thinking about safety shouldn't be focused on the worst case scenario instead of the one that actually happened.
I’m not the person you responded to, but have an honest question here since we are specifically talking about NIMBYism: How much less of NIMBY is there against coal power plants? For example are there examples of people rejecting NPP in their vicinity while accepting CPP?
The worse impacts of coal plants disproportionately impact disadvantaged communities that don't have the resources to be effective NIMBYs.
Coal also has a much wider low-level impact: for instance, it's not safe to consume more than small amounts of fish from the great lakes because of mercury levels, largely due to coal power plants.
Germany has been closing tons of nuclear power plants because of protests. They've recently also moved an entire town and a highway to make space for digging up more coal.
I'm not really answering your question, but it does seem like nuclear NIMBYs are more effective than other ones.
They get a fairer run than nuclear - it is conceivable that a coal plant gets built and is allowed to run. However I imagine the US followed the same broad trends as everyone else in the 90s and started restricting infrastructure construction for environmental reasons so it is probably quite challenging to get a plant built.
There is a reason all the growth is happening in Asia. Their focus is on improving their wealth and material standard of living.
How is that a valid comparison though? Fighting against a coal plant makes sense, fighting against a nuclear plant doesn't - that's the key difference.
The context of the discussion is Not In My Backyard-protests and blocking of plants. Are the people protesting one in their “backyard” not protesting the other?
That's just 500k Americans - far more people have been killed globally.
It's only PM2.5 deaths because those are un-debatable.
Far more will die due to other kinds of pollution it emits, and an unknowable number will die due to the effects of climate change caused by CO2 emissions.
Well, not coal plants but emissions. I guess those nymbis would also be against having all that pollution concentrated in their back yard.
My point is that it is not insane. Maybe selfish. Not willing to have risks with potential catastrophic results near your home is the most normal thing.
And with nuclear, the probability is very low, as with planes. Yet it happens. All the time. Our generation went through three once in a lifetime crisis in the last two decades.
It's insane because killing people is the modus operandi of fossil fuel power - and I'm not even talking about climate change. People often die on oil fields and in mines, toxic waste from coal plants leaches into our water supply, and ash enters our air and causes asthma and heart problems. Coal alone has killed about 460,000 Americans in the 21st century: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-pow...
Nuclear power plants, in contrast, very rarely have issues: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Its crazy how this resulted in 0 deaths, yet it pretty much halted nuclear power production for good in the US.
If only safety was a matter of system design and operational practices, not geographic location.
Because the alternative, fossil fuel generation, is much, much more polluting and deadly.
Another alternative would be to not build the datacenter...
In this specific case? Sure.
But power needs are increasing whether this datacenter is built or not, so the discussion regarding nuclear has to happen in some context regardless.
Nobody died at TMI.
Nobody died at Fukushima (from the nuclear incident that is, 10000 died because of the Tsunami)
Hundreds of people died at Chernobyl.
Those are all the major accidents at production nuclear power plant that have ever occured. There are no others.
There is just one that was deadly, and it is about as representative of the safety of nuclear power as flying in a 1920s' plane compared to a state of the art Airbus.
No one died at Fukushima... They did have to evacuate over 150,000 people though. I'm not sure we should be normalizing that.
That's still pretty much a freak incident and insignificant compared to the direct damage (i.e. even if we exclude CO2) burning fossil fuels (especially coal is causing)
'have to' is a contested point here.
Accidents will happen daily. Those accidents are extremely well controlled. You are providing an excellent example by jumping to that insane NIMBY conclusion. I think MS can successfully bulldozer these extremely weak arguments about catastrophic accidents better than I could. Stay tuned.
What were the effects of the TMI accident, in your opinion?
> How are nimby crowds insane? Accidents may happen. And did happen in the past in that same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
That would not be a problem. FAANG controls the OSs and the media. /s
A corporation getting its way, irrespective of the democratic will of the people, or rather, those "insane NIMBYs". Corporatocracy truly is a beautiful thing.
But were said people well-informed to begin with? Voting can only work if everyone's on the same page regarding both the policy being implemented and its consequences, thus being able to defend their best interests. If the people have been consuming provably false messaging pushed by a fossil fuel industry lobby and sensationalist media, can they be trusted to make a choice that affects not just themselves their entire city, nation, and planet?
The representative democracy does attempt to solve this problem; you pick a representative you understand is aligned with your interests on the issues you do understand and trust they and their experts will do well on the rest.
It's not a perfect system, but unless the populace can be given free time and education to consider individual policies based on reliable evidence and not hearsay from biased sources, it's the best we can do.
> A corporation getting its way, irrespective of the democratic will of the people, or rather, those "insane NIMBYs". Corporatocracy truly is a beautiful thing.
Generally a NIMBY is anti-progress and very selfish, putting themselves ahead of everyone. My dad was called to help resolve TMI during the meltdown and was part of the engineering design group the the Beaver Valley nuclear power station. People were complaining they had cows dying of radiation years before the plant was completed. NIMBYs suck.
>a NIMBY is anti-progress
And what is "progress"? We both have ideas about what progress is. Are mine the same as yours?
In this context, progress would probably refer to moving to a power source that doesn't kill people or destroy the planet. I think that is generally pretty agreeable even if you want to get into a definitional argument.
You can define it how you like, the nature of a NIMBY is that whatever it is, they don't want it near THEM (hence Not In My Back Yard) and affecting THEM, but they don't care about how it may affect others. If they were against whatever the thing is it wouldn't matter if it were their backyard or someone else's, they're only concerned with THEIR lives. When all you care about is you, you don't care about others and that's anti-progress.
Does your definition of progress say that a civilization that gets safer, cheaper, carbon-neutral power has progressed?
the democratic will should be only on state or common goods. On their land persons should be able to do whatever whitlist following safety guidelines. including operating a nuclear facility
Yeah, 'move fast and break things' is certainly the best ideology for running nuclear plant.
Microsoft is not operating the nuclear plant, so that ideology isn't being applied to the operation of the plant.
Microsoft engineers aren't running the power plant.
Something that isn't discussed enough is that nuclear power is extremely safe. According to Our World In Data (https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy), it produces the fewest emissions per gigawatt -- solar and wind both have substantial overhead -- and the second-fewest deaths, after solar, of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydropower, wind, solar, and coal. The misguided perception nuclear is more dangerous is due to its unfortunate habit of clumping deaths. People remember Chernobyl, but not Bill, who died mining coal, even if there are a thousand Bills all over, their total deaths dwarfing Chernobyl's.
The climate activists should really be advocating for nuclear. It's cheap, has the lowest emissions, and is really safe. But, of course, people will object. It's hard for PR to say that, even if you can show the data. People rarely change their mind because of data.
> It's cheap
That hasn't been the case for at least a decade now - not after safety requirements were brought to where they are now.
And that 60-80 year lifetime which is supposed to spread the cost is a myth. Most plants are decommissioned before they turn 40 years of operation:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272139/age-distribution-...
There has been a generation of activists and NIMBYs campaigning and protesting to artificially inflate the cost of nuclear, while having this delicious benefit of now being also able to claim about the cost of nuclear.
The ballooning of costs is not even significantly due to changing safety requirements, but often due to compliance and environmental requirements. Those are political requirements that could be removed in one fell swoop.
Often mainly due to political reasons though.
Also you can't really make meaningful conclusions based on that plot due to obvious reasons. It only includes "Number of nuclear reactors shutdown worldwide". The construction peak was ~1980. The oldest commercial plant was opened only 68 years ago and obviously the early plants much less safe and had a shorter lifetime which introduces another bias...
It’s not cheap at all? Today it’s the most expensive mainstream power generation method.
This was the original dream from the 60s, where we would be building so many plants that the power would be too cheap to meter.
This of course is nonsense because it requires the entire industry to ignore market conditions for no good reason. You can't fight the market, not on a large scale, and especially not in the US. Power plants are only built if they will be profitable in a reasonable time frame. If power was too cheap to meter then nobody would be building new plants, there would be no return on the investment.
This is also why nobody builds nuclear power plants anymore. They are too expensive to build and can't compete on price. Especially not with renewables cratering the price. There's a reason solar installs are outpacing even the most optimistic projections from a few years ago. You can argue theory all day long on the Internet, but the people doing the actual work have made their decision.
While this is better than loading up a coal power plant, the way I see it, it's still a tragic situation. Even if AI used purely fossil-free electricity (which it doesn't), it's still putting pressure on our grids and energy production. The green energy AI consumes if the green energy some other less lucrative industry will not consume. Big tech is currently scraping their net neutrality plans left and right...
What exactly is the problem? That they're using any energy at all? Well, I don't like that people have lights on after 7 PM...
Yeah. The only way the sentiment "I don't like that ___ is using energy, even though the energy is completely clean" makes sense is if they've already made up their minds that ___ is bad, and thus any energy usage is bad. The energy usage argument is a red herring; it's actually just a value judgment on AI itself.
> If you're an AI hater, it's frustrating to see what you consider a useless technology growing to take up more and more of our energy mix, eating into climate gains being made from the immense growth of renewable energy. If you're an AI maximalist, on the other hand, the significant energy use projected for AI is a small price to pay for a technology that you think will revolutionize our lives much more than technologies like air conditioning, refrigeration, or the automobile ever did.
> The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. In the long run, AI's energy use will likely level off at a significant but not grid-melting level that's roughly commensurate with the collective economic value we as a society get from it. Whether the trade-offs inherent in that shift are "worth it" involves a lot of value judgements that go well beyond how much electricity a bunch of servers are using.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...
Yeah, that's how economies work? If someone offers more for a resource, they get it. More incentive to build better grids.
Was anyone else horrified because they thought the powerplant was going to be run by a Microsoft AI? (TFA is about Microsoft purchasing nuclear power to run their AI)
Nuclear powered Clippy.
Worse: Clippy running a nuclear plant.
As an AI assistant, I'm not equipped or trained to handle an ongoing nuclear meltdown..
I feel like we are living in an episode of the Simpsons at this point
except the electron app running the powerplant cant respond fast enough to the nodding duck
Release from Constellation Energy: https://www.constellationenergy.com/newsroom/2024/Constellat...
Nuclear plant, microsoft and AI on the same phrase. What could possibly go wrong?
I see nothing wrong there.
My sister is a geologist who works at nuke plants (regulatory stuff, determing if they're in legal areas to build, ground contamination, etc). She always complains that it's an old-mans (this was in her 20s, 20 years ago) group of staff everywhere with guys who had incredibly light educations on what they're actually working on and had been in the business, and sometimes at the same plants, for decades. Some 40-50+ years.
We might have a severe lack of people who can work in the field at plants and tech getting involved is probably a good thing on making that field more prominent for new students than it currently is.
"Nuclear Engineer for Microsoft" is a cool title.
This article says it will be the first restarted nuke. But there is also a restart in process in Michigan. Will this beat the Michigan one into full operation?
Can someone explain why it's going to take so long to fully decommission TMI-2, the old reactor?
Reading the commission report, they have about $733m in the decommissioning fund, while decommissioning is projected to cost $1B. Active demolition projected to start 2046, completed in 2052. They've started some work on debris demoval, but it looks they're going to take a break 2030-2046 to let the fund accrue (at expected 2% real RoR) enough to get the fund to $1B.
Isn't that insane? So from 2030-2046, it will just sit there "mothballed" with a minimum spent on security and so on, just for the fund to gain value?
Maybe this is going to shed more light on the subject? Looks like the coolant and 99% of fuel have been removed, maybe it's to also give more time to the radioactivity to subside.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3...
Presumably all the things that have gone wrong have been fixed? I can honestly say the micro reactors and pebble beds look far more fail safe than the typical PWR/BWR that must have power and a pump running as I understand things to prevent catastrophe.
The Three Mile Island incident happened in one reactor at this plant in 1979, but the plant kept operating its other reactors without any further incidents until they shut down in 2019 due to economic pressures (primarily the low price of natural gas).
Wait and see if this will actually be up and running by 2028 at the costs indicated.
https://www.energytransitioncrisis.org/
If this story shocked you, do yourself a favor and check out Erik Townsend's docuseries on the need for nuclear to even come close to filling humanity's need for energy in the coming decades.
I'm generally in favor of nuclear, but the symbolism of reopening Three Mile Island for AI power is strikingly anti-human.
Maybe we should take some the money being put into AI and direct it towards fusion research. The rest of the funds can be spent on AI to help with fusion research. Once we have fusion we can forget about the awful fission era and also get on with healing the planet.
AI might be the thing that ends badly this time. Better than using fossil fuels for it though.
So how would this work? Does this mean Microsoft will build a directly connected data center nearby?
Or is Microsoft just buying power from the plant's owner on the energy market?
Presumably they’ve signed an agreement to buy the power (delivered through the grid) from the plant operator at a contracted price. The plant operator can then get finance for the work required to actually deliver on the contract.
A lot of renewable energy projects were financed through similar agreements, called PPAs.
They are just buying the power. Microsoft's goal is 24/7 matching, so every MWh of power they use is matched by a MWh of clean power (generated in that same hour) that they paid for. This is called market-based carbon accounting, as opposed to location-based accounting which considers the source of the electricity that is actually used by the company's infrastructure.
There are pros and cons of each approach, market-based is a little less intuitive but not necessarily worse, it depends on the application.
> market-based carbon accounting […] not necessarily worse
They are better for the corps communication and worse for anyone else.
Transporting electricity over distance has a non trivial cost in $ but also ressources and energy, as well as relocating an industry near a clean energy source or optimizing the production units.
Carbon-matching systems are great for entreprise wanting to claim they don’t produce carbon (24/7 carbon neutral) while they do. It does not depict the CO2E one (entreprise) did product de facto.
Classic SNL skit from when it was originally shut down.
https://vimeo.com/357925913
Feels like right out of a Westworld plot.
Wait, it literally was.
So someone is paying massive insurance premiums on this right?
Not "privatize the profits, socialize the costs" right?
Hmmm. 50 years old and out of action for half a decade. That’s going to require a lot of work to persuade the NRC it’s safe to operate.
Given how difficult it’s proven to build new nuclear around the world, what are the odds of this recommissioning being on time and budget?
If the recommissioning requires 20% of the work of new-build (in time and money), I'd rather have the "normal" 50-100% overrun in costs and time happen on recommissioning vs new-build.
The delay is usually heavily on the permitting/legal challenges/etc. stage, not actual concrete-pouring and equipment installation, so an already-once-permitted site will probably do better relatively, too.
Extra reactors at exising operating sites would make even more sense, though. Putting 2-4 extra AP-1000 at ~1GW/ea at each of the 54 facilities operating today would be huge and minimal incremental risk, and if there were a shortcut one time permitting process for it...
It turns out that nuclear is easy to build around the world.
Average construction times have been more or less constant the last five decades and are currently at 6.5 years (trend: slightly falling). Median (typical) time is lower.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
And this particular refurbishment is in one of the countries with serious cost and schedule overruns for its nuclear build, and a country and specifically a region that is bad at physical infrastructure.
This is a country that simply hasn't built nuclear for ages. And the only one (two reactors) it did build was a brand new design (FOAK - First of a Kind). With COVID happening.
Like everything, this gets better with practice.
This is a recommissioning of a 50 year old plant that’s been sitting idle for five years from an era when nuclear plants were all bespoke.
Does that sound more like an nth of a kind project, or a first of a kind project?
It sounds like a refurbishment of a plant that was working just fine until 2019, not a new build of a design where you don't even know if it can be built.
(The originally submitted Vogtle-3/4 design could not be built)
In fact, last I checked they had already planned this refurbishment, but could not obtain the funds to do it, and thus shut down the plant instead.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They're not restarting reactor 2. They're starting the one that shut down in 2019.
I think the GP knows that. That's why they said "out of action for half a decade".
Oh, I misread. Never mind then
2019 was half a decade ago.
Or a fifth of a century’s quarter.
Should be renamed Three E's Island.
Tres Comas '''
Wow. AI has already accomplished more positive in a few years of big commercial stuff (admittedly as a side effect) than cryptocurrency has since, say 2009. :(
Crypto created a trillion dollars out of thin air (well, slightly thicker air from more CO2). AI is poised to do the same, but also has already polluted the entire internet with worthless slop.
How is this positive news?
If using a ton of energy has to happen then I'd prefer it be generated from nuclear, but I don't see the need to supply LLM data centers with a ton of energy as a positive.
Solving the political problems behind nuclear power (getting TMI restarted being one of the more difficult politically but easier technically), and generally bringing the "build more nuclear" to forefront.
(Although to be fair there's been a fair bit of wind and solar subsidized heavily by crypto, as well as flare gas power generation, and a bit of PV solar)
While I love to see nuclear get a comeback from new tech ventures and commercial impetus, it's also interesting to point out how one now mostly hears crickets from the people who screamed about the energy consumption of crypto. AI has so far mainly managed to generate enormous amounts of spam sludge, pollute the already toxic landscape of social media with auto-generated garbage, and lead to a level of data prying and mass data ripping by the big tech companies that makes their previous efforts seem almost quaint.
This shit is largely what this voracious drive for more power is helping build. Even crypto wasn't this shitty, since at least its fundamental application wasn't nearly so broadly parasitic. Yet now I hear very little about uselessly burning vast loads of energy.
I guess if the companies responsible for the above trash heap are largely the same ones that hire or indirectly subsidize the jobs of so many people in the tech world as represented by a site like HN, then the whole dumpster fire is okay.
I'm also fairly sure that OpenAI, Microsoft and others would happily burn baby seals in coal furnaces if it meant powering their precious AI data needs. It's only for PR that they make useful noises about using clean power.
> restart one of the units at the noted Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania
Ah yes, the ‘noted’ Three Mile Island. I wonder why this particular plant enjoys a degree of fame? The name certainly is familiar…
Seems like a rebranding might have made sense - like the UK switched Sellafield to Winscale.
IMHO a infamous reactor such as Three Mile Island re-starting, if successful is only good publicity in the resurgence of nuclear power.
Just rebrand it to Five Kilometer Island.
Getting Americans to accept the metric system is probably a taller order than getting them to accept nuclear power.
Hah, good one.
There's something glorious about the optics of using one toxic disaster to power another.
It's unfortunate that Three Mile Island is a meme. Objectively this is a good thing, but it will create headlines and stoke more pearl clutching around AI power consumption.
> and stoke more pearl clutching around AI power consumption
Yeah, as shown by this very thread (and that your comment is greyed out).
Nuclear energy is good. Whether or not AI consuming that energy is good or not, depends on how much you value AI as a technology. No one cares about how much energy gaming PCs or refrigerators uses, because their existence is not currently controversial.
See: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...
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I don't think insults are called for, but I directionally agree that protests against atomic power, largely based on needless fear and lack of understanding, caused the world a lot of damage. If we could compare the world we have today to the counterfactual where anti-nuclear protests hadn't stopped progress, I believe a lot of people would be ashamed of their actions. Some already are. But the net effect of the anti-nuclear movement was to prolong the use of fossil fuels by many critical decades.
I am angry because if it had not been for her and the movement that rode on her coattails, we'd long have been weened substantially from fossil fuels and we'd be in a very different world today.
She caused this. She is not even owning it; though it can't be undone. She is responsible for more damage to the environment than GW Bush or Shell Oil. People don't realize the magnitude of the damage she inflicted.
Fascinating. How will we live ok back in, say five years, at this very funny period from, 2018ish to 2022ish when our echo chamber made us believe ESG was going to save the world.
How far we’ve come. Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!
ESG ended up being a scam. Lots of these things are nothing but cover to make money off of people’s concern for the enviro.
All you need to look at is the carbon footprint of people who clamor and demonstrate for green policies. Including idiots gluing themselves to roadways —all the idle traffic they create and the manpower necessary to remove them and repair the damage. It’s a sucker’s game.
Saying ESG is entirely a scam because some ESG backers travel in airplanes is like saying climate change is a hoax because it was colder than usual in Peoria today.
ESG is a huge thing. Some of it is greenwashing, some is outright scam, some is legitimate pressure to make better environmental decisions.
But insisting that ESG proponents can’t make suboptimal individual choices is silly.
Ah yes. Some people use airplanes so we need to keep burning coal, who cares when the sea levels rise and the water wars begin! The important thing is that some people acted silly by gluing themselves to the road! Can't give in to them, even if it would save the world for our children.
You're not trying to convince the choir, you're trying to convince the masses.
Sure, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Branson, Albert Gore, Barrack Obama and high schoolers are impressed, but not the mom and dad working jobs that are teetering, driving beaters and facing pressure from cheap labor. They see these people jet-setting being hyper-overconsumers and think, what the hell? They see these people increasing their wealth promoting change, but they don't change. Why should I change, they're not changing, they're adding more!
> Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!
Or just hope. AGI is a capitalist's wet dream: it would completely undercut labor's power or allow it to be replaced completely, and it could also allow the developer to muscle out a large fraction of other capitalists from the economy.
Even though AGI would be terrible for the rest of us, it's got so much upside for VC types they can't help themselves.
It’s even worse. If you have money and are against deploying AGI once we get there you still want to be the first to achieve it, because it’s the only reasonable chance of stopping others… assuming you can even align it.
You're claiming it would be terrible for the rest of us, without supporting that assumption in any way. It's not a fact, pseudo scifi action movies don't count as facts.
> You're claiming it would be terrible for the rest of us, without supporting that assumption in any way.
I literally explained it. I straightforwardly applied the technology to our existing social/economic structure.
And changing the social/economic structure is probably harder than developing the technology and requires precisely the kind of power that a successful AGI technology would remove (e.g. workers can't strike to keep their jobs when the boss is planning to lay them all off).
> It's not a fact, pseudo scifi action movies don't count as facts.
Honestly, the "AGI will be so great/everything will be fine" assumption relies less on facts and more on sci-fi fantasy than anything I said.
You did not explain anything, you just said that something would happen, without any reasoning why or why no counter effects would happen.
Yes, both sides of the debate use scifi as facts, I agree. I don't think the other side does it more than you do, though.
> You did not explain anything, you just said that something would happen, without any reasoning why or why no counter effects would happen.
If you think that, the problem's on your end of the connection. The most charitable read of your comment is you're expecting a level of exposition that is not actually required, especially given the common context of what exists now.
Personally, I think you're actually doing more of what you're accusing me, for instance your sibling comment of:
> The economic system is not set in stone. If everyone is irrelevant to it, the economic system becomes irrelevant to everyone, and a parallel system gradually replaces it.
You're basically hand-waving a future and saying "everything will be fine." And you're also misunderstanding some significant things in a kind of black and white way. E.g. I never said "everyone [would be] irrelevant [to the economic system]," I said labor would be. That's a lot of people, but not everyone.
He's talking about the economic consequences.
AGI in an internet connected world is capitalism end-game. Once you have AGI, labour (both physical and intellectual) becomes redundant, humans have a "value to the system" approaching zero.
Our economic system is built on a series of assumptions that fundamentally cannot survive AGI, and nobody is really even trying to grapple with that fact.
The economic system is not set in stone. If everyone is irrelevant to it, the economic system becomes irrelevant to everyone, and a parallel system gradually replaces it.
Sadly "earning a living" goes beyond economy, it is also deeply involved in societal and cultural values.
It really isn't. Just 100 years ago "earning a living" meant growing food themselves on fields behind the house for the majority of humans.