I'm happy if we don't need more nuclear. We're already leaving the place in a sorry state, might as well not litter it with stuff that can kill you if you look at it too long...
The main problem with solar and wind is that they can't be dispatched on demand. The power is incredibly cheap, but you are completely at the mercy of the weather.
What is needed is a source of power which can make up for the freak moments where 1) there isn't any sun, and 2) there isn't any wind, and 3) it lasts long enough that batteries can't cover it, and 4) it has to be widespread enough that you can't make up for it with power from half a continent away.
This power source will only need to be used for a few hundred hours per year but it'll need to carry a significant load, so while its per-MWh running costs are basically irrelevant its one-time per-MW construction costs should be fairly low.
This does not at all describe nuclear power, which has incredibly high construction costs, near-zero running costs, and is expected to run 24/7/365 at 100%.
I'm optimistic about synthetic hydrocarbons for that use case. The infra is already in place for storage, delivery, consumption. You gotta waste some energy to get it, but if sun and wind is cheap most of the time, who cares?
In and of themselves the hydrocarbons are molecules with only Carbon and Hydrogen atoms. So, they're polluting only in the sense that we should not release more Carbon Dioxide into our atmosphere because due to the Greenhouse Effect that causes Climate Disaster.
In terms of regular old "Oh, no, it's toxic" pollution this part was fine, and the problem in the "natural" hydrocarbons is that they were not actually pure hydrogen and carbon - especially coal. So you just wouldn't do that in the synthetics. It's likely easier to make "pure" synthetics.
In terms of climate, the synthetics would be cycling carbon that already exists. So they'd be neutral. Neutral isn't a solution, but it's at least not making the problem even worse which we are aggressively continuing to do as a species.
Because we'd be making them out of CO2 pulled from the atmosphere in the first place. We wouldn't be putting any new carbon into the atmosphere, just recycling carbon that's already there. And the larger our fuel stockpiles get, the more carbon we've sequestered. I think it has better economic incentives than pumping CO2 down into the earth or something like that.
Cycling carbon between CO2 and synthetic hydrocarbons, and presumably using clean energy for the recovery step, seems like basically just a complex solar+battery scheme (and I can't really see it being more efficient, although it produces denser storage). Sequestering the CO2 in carbonate rock makes more sense to me (and that has actual chemical uses too).
Because they would be generated with CO2 by industrial processes or carbon capture. I don't see the process becoming economically viable, and hydrocarbon combustion create other toxic byproducts, compared to hydrogen. It will still make sense for usages that require a high J/kg fuel ratio.
Do you see any other carbon capture scheme becoming economically viable? I mean, if we must put atmospheric carbon in tanks anyhow, why not package it as fuel so that we can burn it later if we need to?
Spring and fall are peak solar collection times, summer and winter are peak energy use times. So collect the carbon in fall, burn it in winter, re-collect it in spring, burn it in summer...
A single solar installation on the scale required to replace the output of one nuclear plant also takes many years to come online. You're not wrong that new nuclear projects take a long time to start producing, longer than any other power solution, but new solar projects of that magnitude don't pop up overnight. There's still bureaucracy, funding, land acquisition (and boy do you need a lot of land for enough solar to offset even one nuclear plant), construction, power grid connections, and sourcing/manufacturing the actual panels.
The median reactor in the US produces 1-2GW. Most nuclear installations have multiple reactors, so capacity is a multiple of that. 1GW of solar generation requires literally millions of solar panels and thousands of acres of land, and still needs the transformers and distribution infrastructure. And that doesn't include any storage capability.
This is a contrived example. You're making it sound like solar is power available now. It simply isn't, on any scale like that. If it takes a decade to bring 1GW of solar online and two decades to bring 1GW of nuclear online, it's not as clear-cut.
Nuclear could be done a lot more quickly than it is and still be safe. Not as fast as solar, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude.
But you don't need "a single solar installation on the scale required to replace the output of one nuclear plant". This is electricity, it's fungible, ten tiny projects produces the same power as one large project.
The UK's biggest solar farm, Cleve Hill has 373 MW nameplate capacity but over the last two years the UK brought 10x that much total subsidised grid solar online - not to mention the unsubsidised which is likely many times more because if you're a gambler the subsidy is mitigating a risk you wanted† I don't have blow-by-blow data for unsubsidised schemes because only the subsidy needs to track that.
† The UK uses Contracts for Difference to subsidise these energy projects. In effect these contracts guarantee you a price, your "strike price" when you sign the contract, plus automatic inflation tracking. But for Solar PV that price can be (and for years now has been) lower than wholesale electricity prices you'd keep outright if you were willing to gamble and risk the wholesale price collapsing. Cleve Hill paid about £3.5M to us because their guaranteed price was lower than the wholesale price they received most of the time.
Nuke, storage, solar and wind. They all work together. You need redundancy, resiliency and dedicate quality power.
No reason for people to splinter the effort on clean reliable power.
If we only go after solar, wind and storage -- how are we ever going to get to long form space travel and continue to level up our technology for energy? How will we get to fusion?
Or subsidizing oil and gas...
It's such a shame that a certain political ideology which strongly believes in the free market (or so they claim) made energy a political issue...
They don't really work together, actually. Nuclear is the opposite of solar, it has a consistent output at all times that makes no sense to stop or curtail. It doesn't play particularly well with renewables, unlike gas, which is expensive to run and polluting, but is already built and can be run when renewables are not producing.
If you add enough batteries, nuclear comes back the original economics.
I'm not sure the "enough batteries" part is a good investment, and the original economics is already not competitive with renewables. But maybe after you add in long term storage and the possibility of black swan risks it can make sense to subsidize a bit of other kinds of power on some regions.
If you know the energy system it absolutely does. Theres a large portion of power that is always in demand. Industrial power needs high quality power and constant on.
If you know the energy system and are not operating off out of date thinking, it absolutely does not. Wind and solar shifted with batteries is munching its way through this night time supply window . On a timeframe of 20 years this obsolete “baseload supply” economic niche will absolutely no longer exist.
Money can only be spent once. Similarly, a construction crew can only be at one construction site at a time. Investing in building new nuclear power plants will slow down construction of solar.
Nope. One of the fundamental premises of money is that it circulates. The only way money could not be re-spent is if the money supply were to decrease.
The total volume of new power generation is going to be mostly determined by how much those capital holders value it. If there's more utility in power this year than last, we may see more new starts in generation projects, regardless of which type of generation those projects are doing.
[–] recursive 3 days ago
[–] crote 3 days ago
The main problem with solar and wind is that they can't be dispatched on demand. The power is incredibly cheap, but you are completely at the mercy of the weather.
What is needed is a source of power which can make up for the freak moments where 1) there isn't any sun, and 2) there isn't any wind, and 3) it lasts long enough that batteries can't cover it, and 4) it has to be widespread enough that you can't make up for it with power from half a continent away.
This power source will only need to be used for a few hundred hours per year but it'll need to carry a significant load, so while its per-MWh running costs are basically irrelevant its one-time per-MW construction costs should be fairly low.
This does not at all describe nuclear power, which has incredibly high construction costs, near-zero running costs, and is expected to run 24/7/365 at 100%.
[–] __MatrixMan__ 3 days ago
[–] zahlman 3 days ago
I don't follow. Why would they be any less polluting than natural ones?
[–] tialaramex 2 days ago
In terms of regular old "Oh, no, it's toxic" pollution this part was fine, and the problem in the "natural" hydrocarbons is that they were not actually pure hydrogen and carbon - especially coal. So you just wouldn't do that in the synthetics. It's likely easier to make "pure" synthetics.
In terms of climate, the synthetics would be cycling carbon that already exists. So they'd be neutral. Neutral isn't a solution, but it's at least not making the problem even worse which we are aggressively continuing to do as a species.
[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago
[–] zahlman 2 days ago
[–] defrost 2 days ago
* https://research.csiro.au/carbonlock/geological-properties-o...
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...
[–] khalic 3 days ago
[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago
Spring and fall are peak solar collection times, summer and winter are peak energy use times. So collect the carbon in fall, burn it in winter, re-collect it in spring, burn it in summer...
[–] khalic 3 days ago
[–] caymanjim 3 days ago
The median reactor in the US produces 1-2GW. Most nuclear installations have multiple reactors, so capacity is a multiple of that. 1GW of solar generation requires literally millions of solar panels and thousands of acres of land, and still needs the transformers and distribution infrastructure. And that doesn't include any storage capability.
This is a contrived example. You're making it sound like solar is power available now. It simply isn't, on any scale like that. If it takes a decade to bring 1GW of solar online and two decades to bring 1GW of nuclear online, it's not as clear-cut.
Nuclear could be done a lot more quickly than it is and still be safe. Not as fast as solar, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude.
[–] pjc50 2 days ago
By comparison, the country's nuclear programme is targeting 2050, and I suspect that may get overtaken by events. Although it's still required for nuclear weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Pakistan
> You're making it sound like solar is power available now
It is. It's a thing you can buy from Aliexpress.
[–] tialaramex 2 days ago
The UK's biggest solar farm, Cleve Hill has 373 MW nameplate capacity but over the last two years the UK brought 10x that much total subsidised grid solar online - not to mention the unsubsidised which is likely many times more because if you're a gambler the subsidy is mitigating a risk you wanted† I don't have blow-by-blow data for unsubsidised schemes because only the subsidy needs to track that.
† The UK uses Contracts for Difference to subsidise these energy projects. In effect these contracts guarantee you a price, your "strike price" when you sign the contract, plus automatic inflation tracking. But for Solar PV that price can be (and for years now has been) lower than wholesale electricity prices you'd keep outright if you were willing to gamble and risk the wholesale price collapsing. Cleve Hill paid about £3.5M to us because their guaranteed price was lower than the wholesale price they received most of the time.
[–] khalic 3 days ago
[–] recursive 3 days ago
[–] boringg 3 days ago
No reason for people to splinter the effort on clean reliable power.
If we only go after solar, wind and storage -- how are we ever going to get to long form space travel and continue to level up our technology for energy? How will we get to fusion?
[–] garbagewoman 3 days ago
By researching fusion? Imagine how much research you could do with all the money that you didn't waste on building uneconomical nuclear power plants
[–] pbkompasz 3 days ago
[–] pingou 2 days ago
[–] marcosdumay 2 days ago
I'm not sure the "enough batteries" part is a good investment, and the original economics is already not competitive with renewables. But maybe after you add in long term storage and the possibility of black swan risks it can make sense to subsidize a bit of other kinds of power on some regions.
[–] boringg 2 days ago
[–] dalyons 2 days ago
[–] rcxdude 3 days ago
[–] crote 3 days ago
[–] recursive 3 days ago
Nope. One of the fundamental premises of money is that it circulates. The only way money could not be re-spent is if the money supply were to decrease.
The total volume of new power generation is going to be mostly determined by how much those capital holders value it. If there's more utility in power this year than last, we may see more new starts in generation projects, regardless of which type of generation those projects are doing.
[–] boringg 3 days ago