And it’s still cheaper than turning into North Korea, which seems to be the suggested alternative.
We could but we won’t. The good news is that China is the biggest CO2 producer, and has the most coal power plants. They also are really good at building infrastructure projects quickly. So I think it is perfectly reasonable to encourage china to build Nuclear power plants, to replace their coal plants.
We can help the process but making it reasonable easy for the US companies, like Intellectual Ventures to sell their technologies to the Chinese. Unfortunately, as was documented in the Inside Bill Gates show, the US government cracked down on any such cooperation.
Now, I’m less than thrilled at selling Chinese companies nuclear reactor, technology since it certainly has the the potential to result in better Chinese nuclear weapons. But if China replace all their coal plants with Nuclear plant it would be make a real difference, so it is small price to pay. It one of the things I’d love to see forward looking candidate embrace.
About that.
(Can’t find the story but bottom line new coal plants planned for China is equal to the current EU coal capacity.)
The article you quote looks to be prepared by a biased consultancy firm. Just using the first paragraph you quoted that where it states Nuclear costs $112-189 is refuted by NEI to be $32 (see Nuclear Costs in Context). Heck, look at who/what WNISR is retweeting and you can see their bias.
As has been pointed out, the rate at which renewables can be be added, they’ll never be sufficient to overtake carbon based fuel (petroleum / Natural Gas / Coal).
Heck, the US Energy (EIA) projects a 50% increase in global energy consumption by 2050 with every type growing except Nuclear. Of course, the way they phrase it, hides the true numbers, but you can see here:
they use a % of total - when your total increase 50%, while it may show that coal is dropping from 26% to 20%, as a total amount, it’s increasing.
Nuclear has an image problem and it is the only carbon neutral energy that can dig us out of this hole.
You can quote costs - it’s because of the sheer numbers of wind farms they are installing, but overtime with tax advantages drying up / maintenance costs skyrocketing, I will be surprised if wind farms show any growth 20 years from now.
The numbers simply are not there - look at the projections EIA are saying! We will be consuming MORE petroleum based products by 2050 than we are now!! How can we possibly be fighting climate change if that is the case??
A long, reasonably balanced and informative article on the status of Chinese nuclear power.
TLDR; China will surpass France in the next two years, the US potentially by 2030. However, Chinese public opinion is against, consistent with public opinion worldwide.
Would it help if it came from Wikipedia?
and specifically:
The Lazard 2018 report was actually my preferred source, but I didn’t quote it because their graphic design is terrible and it makes the thing a giant pain to read. I did quote the Reuters article (which quoted the WISNR report) because it nicely summarized the current trends. You are correct that WISNR paints a rosy picture for renewables, but it’s not just making things up out of thin air.
As I mentioned, there is a lot of complexity involved in pricing these different power sources. E.g. which country you are talking about, what year, inflation, costs of capital, etc. and etc. and etc. and etc. However I have never seen anything like the $32 figure that the nuclear booster group came to. Nuclear is $90+ in every single report I’ve come across.
I did not understand your quoting of the EIA energy consumption projections. You said that the projections show that renewables will not provide enough of our future power, but the projections also show that nuclear power fares even worse in terms of growth. How about let’s just ignore the EIA? :D Wikipedia seems to have problems with them, though I could not actually follow wikipedia’s argument very well through the tables that they showed.
And just to re-emphasize my main point: renewables aren’t the demon that is facing nuclear power. They’re not the enemy. If you’re a nuclear power booster your real problem is that it costs a lot to build nuclear power in the West. That’s the problem you should be trying to solve. Also maybe instituting a carbon tax, which I think both nuclear and renewable proponents can agree on.
I’ve always liked how science fiction writers finesse energy issues. Like FTL travel, it’s usually just there. If humanity could figure out a way to transmit energy with minimal loss over long distances without physical connections, problem solved. Set up ginormous collectors in space to harness solar or other energy and beam it wherever.
Isn’t this conceptually trivial? Focus orbital mirrors at the target surface point to superheat something and drive a turbine? Of course there’s the problem that it’s one hell of a weapon.
This is the most Timex line in the whole thread. Handwaves away the difficulty by announcing its triviality and dismisses its critics as nonsensical. Gaslighting par excellence.
So no part of this statement is true. France built 56 reactors over 15 years. During the 70’s France only brought 8 reactors online for commercial energy production and only a couple of those are still operating. Most of France’s nuclear capability was brought online during the 80’s. And they’re losing their taste for nuclear. France’s general assembly just voted in 2015 to reduce their nuclear production from 70% to 50% of the country’s energy capacity.
Why use France as your example here? During the 1970’s, the United States brought almost 60 reactors online–more than France ever did. The U.S. was and remains the world’s leading producer of nuclear energy.
For sure. The idea that orbital mirrors in space beaming energy to the surface is anything other than trivial from a “can we do this” perspective is nonsensical. /s
Heh, I’ve always wondered what happened when something got in the way of those beams…
Seriously, I have zero knowledge of the physics involved in such things as orbital or space-based energy collection systems. I’ve just read about them in sci-fi books. My point I guess is simply that even in science fiction literature, much of the energy infrastructure that underpins the high-tech futuristic whiz-bang stuff is left unexplained. Even in hard sci-fi often.
Yeah dude, building nuclear plants is TRIVIAL in this context. It’s well understood technology. We’ve been building them for the better part of a century.
The idea that we can’t do it, is supremely absurd. We’ve already done it in the past.
In less than a decade, we invented technology to go to the freaking moon. We built miles of interstate highway across our entire country. And now, 80 years later, we can’t deploy technology that we’ve already developed? Why? That’s nonsensical.
Sorry, you’re right, I quoted the number from the original mess messmer plan, where their deployment was slower. But the fact remains that freaking France was able to bring 56 reactors online in 15 years, decades ago.
And you yourself point this out:
Then what on Earth would make you think that we couldn’t engage in a large scale deployment of nuclear power?
If we already know how to do it, then what could possibly prevent us from doing it? We are better at making nuclear reactors now. They are cheaper. Industrial construction techniques are more advanced. We are better at building stuff now.
The idea that we couldn’t do this for some technical reason is obviously false.
What would prevent us from doing something that we already fully understand how to do?
The basic problem is that we have no solution.
- Scaling back energy usage is obviously not going to happen. It’s also a guarantee of failure, since impoverishing ourselves will prevent us from coming up with the tech solutions to solve any problem, and won’t be sufficient to have an effect on climate change.
- Renewables are great – at least solar is. It’s also getting cheaper all the time. But it can’t be stored and it only works when the sun is strong enough, so by definition it requires a backing power source. The most reasonable near future is a lot of solar, with natural gas as the baseline power source.
- Nuclear is currently too expensive. It’s also not as safe as we’d like it to be. New ‘next gen’ designs aren’t satisfying IMO – until they’re built and tested for a long enough time, they’re just vaporware. In theory, nuclear would be the way to go. If we ever nail fusion, that’s the obvious solution. But the regulation/safety cost of fission in the US is currently too high – whether justified or not.
And that’s that. If you have hydro or geothermal power where you live, you lucked out. The rest of the world is still waiting for a solution.
EDIT: Also, let’s not forget that our electricity demands are going to go way up as transportation goes electrical (which is great!).
Sadly this is where I think we are too. We will never voluntarily reduce consumption, and we don’t have answers to fix the problem, so eventually the consumption will be reduced involuntarily. Probably catastrophically. The only question I have is whether it will be so late that the planet dies. I don’t GAF if the human race dies off, but I’d hate to see us do that to the animal and plant kingdoms.
Dude - you are missing the point. You post a highly biased “report” and I cherry pick one thing to prove that it’s biased. Now you want to take my one cherry picked item and try to refute it? Go back to trying to show that the article you posted isn’t just pure hyperbole from a biased source.
On costs, LCOE is a place to start discussion but it completely ignores the baseload - there is zero accountability for reliable 24x7 energy supply, eg batteries, thermal, etc. All of which are nascent and unproven at scale. Because without accounting for this, your supposed costs are meaningless.
What part of we need to get rid of coal, oil and natural gas do you not agree with? If you’re OK with these carbon producing electrical generation, then you don’t believe we are in a climate emergency. End of statement and at least I know from which part of the spectrum you are arguing with.
If you are for getting rid of coal, oil and natural gas, explain how you plan on doing that without Nuclear because no one else seems to have figured it out.
They’re working on it!
Maybe you should think about what conceptually trivial means. It doesn’t mean easy.
Please, enlighten me. How safe does it actually need to be? Because nuclear is already the safest source of energy there is.
Because to prevent the destruction of human society as we know it, making certain only ‘cheap’ solutions are considered viable is paramount. /s
I’m increasingly convinced that anyone making this argument doesn’t actually comprehend how bad it’s going to be nor how fast disaster is going to strike.
I guess? I’m an engineer. The devil is in the details. A scientist says “We want to trigger a burst of laser pulses within a couple of miliseconds of an external event. You have the timing precision to do it and you can already fire a burst. Should be easy, barely an inconvenience.” And I respond, “We’d have to redesign our entire laser control system and/or buy a new experimental laser. It would take 6 months and cost at least half a million dollars.” Conceptually trivial is a meaningless concept except for writing science fiction or coming up with interesting thought experiments. Just because I can imagine it doesn’t mean it’s feasible.
Maybe as an engineer you’ll recognize this?
Same idea, just a smaller scale. And I was responding to this:
This is…that solution, on a terrestrial basis. I’m saying it’s easy to look at this and imagine that. I’m not saying you, engineer, should go build it.