On average there’s typically a dip during the day something like:
Less of a dip on cloudier days too.
While having a larger power network can help make it easier for a system to provide baseline capacity, it still means that you are creating more capacity than is reflected in the cost estimates.
The cost for renewables is based on maximum output, not actual output. To achieve an expanded capacity by spreading the production over a larger geographic region, you need to actually build a larger capacity than if you were building a conventional fossil fuel, nuclear, or hydroelectric facility, because some portion of the network won’t actually be producing at its capacity at any given moment.
There’s also the fact that large renewable production facilities tend to take up significantly more actual land than something like a nuclear facility.
All the costs are based on maximum output, which is not achieved realistically. You always need more capacity than simply what you are trying to provide.
But a nuclear plant actually produces close to its stated output, all the time, unless you specifically choose to run it at less than capacity. A solar or wind facility does not.
Nuclear reactors are frequently shut down for all sorts of reasons, and are frequently not running at 100% also for a variety of reasons.
A nuclear reactor is capable of producing it’s stated capacity whenever it’s running. Modern reactors, when accounting for maintenance periods, have an availability factor of around 90%. Basically any nuclear or fossil fuel reactor is going to be over 70%.
Solar and wind do not produce their stated capacity for anywhere close to that. Solar has the obvious limitations of only being available during the day, putting it’s availability factor at less than 50%. Industrial wind turbines only produce their stated capacity when wind speed has reached the rated speed for the turbine, which tends to be around 30mph for most turbines. So whenever the wind is slower than 30mph, you are producing only a portion of the facility’s rated output. This doesn’t even count downtime due to maintenance, although for modern turbines maintenance time is minimal, and for solar it’s even less.
To measure the effect of all this, you can look at the capacity factor for various sources, and nuclear had the best of any energy source, generally operating at between 80-100% of its rated capacity at all times. For wind, you generally have a capacity factor of only 20-40%, and solar has a capacity factor of less than 20% in ideal situations like placement in the Arizona desert.
This means that even if you were able to set up a transmission network that allowed you to leverage geographically separated renewable production facilities, you would need to build between two to five times as much capacity in renewable production to effectively match the production of a nuclear facility. So, for instance, to match a twin AP1000 reactor setup, producing 2GW, you’d need at least 8GW of solar, or maybe 4GW of wind.
That has a significant impact on real world cost, even if you are able to deal with the transmission network issues.
Other technologies maybe less efficient but are cheaper to build and run, safer, cleaner even. The hurdle for nuclear is that enormous startup cost and the risk to investors. If you can fix (or workaround by making it a state run project) that you will make nuclear more attractive.
Being able to build smaller safer reactors would be a huge boon.
FWIW, it is NOT an irrational fear. In my lifetime we’ve had quite a few nuclear mishaps. 3 mile island, chernobyl, Japan, etc.
There is a definite non zero chance, especially as the reactors get older and require ever more maintenance, of an “accident”, otherwise known as a disaster.
History has shown that it is not irrational . There is a definite risk associated with nuclear fission. It can be mitigated, but it is definitely there.
PS I support nuclear power, but it’s foolish to pretend it doesn’t come with risks, especially human error
FWIW, it is NOT an irrational fear. In my lifetime we’ve had quite a few nuclear mishaps. 3 mile island, chernobyl, Japan, etc.
It highlights how irrational a fear it is when in a list of only 3 accidents, one of them had absolutely no measurable impact on anyone.
There is a definite non zero chance, especially as the reactors get older and require ever more maintenance, of an “accident”, otherwise known as a disaster.
With a modern reactor like the AP1000, the chance of an accident is damn near zero. It has a core damage frequency of 5.06x10^-7. That means that the reactor would have one core damage event if it runs for 50,600,000 years continuously. And that doesn’t even mean an accident that impacts anyone, it just means some event that actually damages the core of the reactor.
History has shown that it is not irrational .
It’s irrational because it ignores the differences of modern reactors to inferior Soviet designs, or imagines that something actually happened at TMI, or thinks that an unprecedented natural disaster like which happened at Fukushima somehow impacts the decision for building reactors on mainland North America. I can guarantee that a plant like Limerick in PA will be hit by zero magnitude 9 earthquakes followed by huge tsunamis, ever.
History has shown that we have a nuclear “accident” about every 10-15 years or so. These things need to be built to last forever, and the bottom line is that we’re not capable of that yet - they may be built to last hundreds of years, but human error in the calculations or the maintenance can/will screw the pooch on that, somewhere, sometime.
Also, if one takes climate change seriously, we have to expect more “unprecedented” natural disasters, which makes the engineering tasks even trickier. Additionally, PA is another state that has gone heavy into fracking, and with Oklahoma now experiencing more earthquakes than California, is it unrealistic to expect more earthquakes in PA? This articleclaims that PA is geologically different from neighboring states, which would be good news, but as we don’t know quite enough about this, who’s to say that that will continue? It could just be prepping for a magnitude 9 at some point… (yes, very VERY unlikely, but how many current reactors were built in earthquake free zones which now are far more susceptible to earthquakes due to fracking activity? I don’t know, but if I lived in an area with both, I’d want to know…
Again, I’m not saying that nuclear isn’t one of our best options (because I believe it is), but the fears are not irrational. Overblown yes, but not irrational.
I don’t think we can estimate the real world large-scale failure rate from so few major events. It’s possible we were just unlucky, and it’s definitely true that new designs are much much safer the ones that failed. Maybe if there were trustworthy records, you could do some sort of analysis based on “near misses”.
On the other hand, based on historical evidence, estimates of failure rates should probably assume an extremely low level of operator competence in the event of an emergency.
History has shown that we have a nuclear “accident” about every 10-15 years or so. These things need to be built to last forever, and the bottom line is that we’re not capable of that yet - they may be built to last hundreds of years, but human error in the calculations or the maintenance can/will screw the pooch on that, somewhere, sometime.
This is silly. Technology has evolved.
I just quoted you the core failure rate of the AP1000. It’s 5.06x10^-7.
That’s pretty much the most reliable piece of technology ever built. That’s pretty much the point of the AP1000. It’s a dramatic reduction in complexity compared to prior reactors, which results in a massive improvement in safety as well as a massive reduction in maintenance.
Additionally, PA is another state that has gone heavy into fracking, and with Oklahoma now experiencing more earthquakes than California, is it unrealistic to expect more earthquakes in PA?
That’s the thing… even with another magnitude 9 earthquake, on par with the largest ever observed by humans EVER, you STILL wouldn’t have another Fukishima. They were hit by a huge Tsunami too. And it still needed humans to screw up the response… AND it was a reactor that was commissioned in 1971.
Furthermore, it’s not as if coal or natural gas mining and burning is 100% safe. I wonder, if we take all the lives lost (and to be fair, property loss) associated with each endeavor throughout the world and put them in per megawatt ratios how they’d each look in the end.
The oft-cited statistic* is that we’d need a Chernobyl-scale nuclear accident every two weeks to equate to the environmental and health issues that coal-burning causes each year.
- obviously open to debate
Look, all I’m saying is that there is a non-zero chance. They wouldn’t have evacuation plans if there was zero chance of a problem. It’s the problems you don’t account for/foresee that are the most problematic.
From a Risk/Reward perspective, nuclear power is one of the safest and most efficient methods we have of generating power, but it is not without risk and unfortunately when the (extremely rare) problems do crop up, they tend to be BIG ones. It is an overblown concern with a lot of fear-mongering around it, but it is not an irrational fear, in and of itself. The risk to fear ratio is way out of whack, but not all of the fears are irrational.
Look, all I’m saying is that there is a non-zero chance. They wouldn’t have evacuation plans if there was zero chance of a problem. It’s the problems you don’t account for/foresee that are the most problematic.
Yes. It’s a non zero chance.
That chance is represented by the core damage frequency, which is one core damage event every fifty million years of operation.
Which is to say that it’s zero for all practical purposes.
And what was the core damage frequency for Fukushima prior to the earthquake, tsunami, volcano, Sim City-style disaster?
Edit - from Wikipedia:
During the 2011 earthquake and resultant 15+ meter tsunami on the east coast of Japan, the Fukushima I nuclear power plant suffered core damages at three of its six reactors after the emergency core cooling systems failed due to the extreme beyond design basis conditions. The reactors were General Electric BWR-3 and BWR-4 types inside Mark I containments. These had been estimated to have a core damage frequency between 10−4 and 10−7.
I’m assuming that the 10-7 is about the same as the Limerick plant you’re referencing. Is that about right?
It was not even close to that of the AP1000 reactor.
Fukushima was a generation 2 boiling water reactor, while the AP1000 is a generation 4 pressurized reactor. A key difference is that the design of modern pwr’s is that they are based around passive safety principles. That is, if things go wrong, the system will automatically slow its reaction and shut down, in contrast to a BWR which can potentially get into a state where the reaction will continue automatically.
This is a really important point, because it means that something like Fukushima is literally not possible with a modern reactor like the AP1000. It’s similar to how an event like Chernobyl is basically impossible with any existing Western reactor, and only really possible with Chernobyl’s flawed sand cooled design.
To more directly answer your question though, the BWR-3 in Fukushima had an estimated core damage frequency of around 10^-4. So the AP1000 is around 3 orders of magnitude safer.
Overall cost is the single biggest issue against nuclear, especially over the lifetime of the installation:
‘Europe faces €253bn nuclear waste bill’:
On the wider debate re climate change, ‘Climate change will wipe $2.5tn off global financial assets: study’:
Climate change could cut the value of the world’s financial assets by $2.5tn (£1.7tn), according to the first estimate from economic modelling.
In the worst case scenarios, often used by regulators to check the financial health of companies and economies, the losses could soar to $24tn, or 17% of the world’s assets, and wreck the global economy.
The research also showed the financial sense in taking action to keep climate change under the 2C danger limit agreed by the world’s nations. In this scenario, the value of financial assets would fall by $315bn less, even when the costs of cutting emissions are included.
“Our work suggests to long-term investors that we would be better off in a low-carbon world,” said Prof Simon Dietz of the London School of Economics, the lead author of the study. “Pension funds should be getting on top of this issue, and many of them are.” He said, however, that awareness in the financial sector was low.
Mark Campanale of the thinktank Carbon Tracker Initiative said the actual financial losses from unchecked global warming could be higher than estimated by the financial model behind the new study. “It could be a lot worse. The loss of financial capital can be a lot higher and faster than the GDP losses [used to model the costs of climate change in the study]. Just look at value of coal giant Peabody Energy. It was worth billions just a few years ago and now it is worth nothing.”
The Bank of England and World Bank have warned of the risks to the global economy of climate change and the G20 has asked the international Financial Stability Board to investigate the issue. In January, the World Economic Forum said a catastrophe caused by climate change was the biggest potential threat to the global economy in 2016.
‘World Bank to spend 28% of investments on climate change projects’:
The World Bank has made a “fundamental shift” in its role of alleviating global poverty, by refocusing its financing efforts towards tackling climate change, the group said on Thursday.
The world’s biggest provider of public finance to developing countries said it would spend 28% of its investments directly on climate change projects, and that all of its future spending would take account of global warming.
At last year’s landmark conference on climate change in Paris, the World Bank and its fellow development banks were made the linchpins of providing financial assistance to the poor world, to enable countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the effects of global warming.
“Following the Paris climate agreement, we must now take bold action to protect our planet for future generations,” said Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group. “We are moving urgently to help countries make major transitions to increase sources of renewable energy, decrease high-carbon energy sources, develop green transport systems and build sustainable, livable cities for growing urban populations. Developing countries want our help to implement their national climate plans, and we’ll do all we can to help them.”
John Roome, senior director for climate change at the World Bank, told journalists: “This is a fundamental shift for the World Bank. We are putting climate change into our DNA. Climate change will drive 100 million more people into poverty in the next 15 years [unless action is taken].”