> Even if its cheaper to build small reactor vessels, MANY of the other costs become more expensive in larger numbers.
There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now. With sodium and other batteries projected to reduce storage cost, it is even more unlikely that SMR could be price competitive in future grids. SMR is the only way that dying western nuclear industry could attempt to deal with ballooning compliance and finance costs and hope for revival. China or India doesn't have this compliance cost and still build conventional nuclear.
Even for the SMR usecase that got funding recently, mega datacenter electricity, there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production. Some are using tech that is already being used in oil fracking industry for decades, so new geothermal tech scaling up has far less roadblocks technology and compliance wise. So other than military and mobile civil applications like nuclear icebreaker, I don't see the chance of SMR succeeding anywhere else.
To a first approximation, China does not build nuclear power. Nuclear's share of power production in China is 4% and dropping. It seems to me that the main reason China keeps building a relatively tiny amount of nuclear is strategic. Reasons like ensuring they never forget how and ensuring they always have buildable designs so that if something changed they could ramp up the program. And probably even more likely: nuclear expertise is important to the country's military.
But coal is still 49%. The whole point of nuclear in a carbon-free, mostly-renewable grid is to avoid needing enormous amounts of storage and overproduction. That's a need that doesn't come up when you're still half fossil.
If you want to decarbonize as fast as possible, it makes sense to focus on rolling out wind/solar/battery as fast as possible for now, but keep developing nuclear technology to cover the last bit where it starts getting especially expensive to replace fossil with renewables without losing reliable power. That's exactly what China appears to be doing. They're not just building a few reactors, they're also the world leaders in developing various GenIV designs, like molten salt reactors.
The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy) The remaining 2-10% is nat gas, if you have a piped source, or coal if you don't.
But 98% renewable doesn't mean you can hit 100% by adding 2% more of something else, it means your something else has to supply ~100% of the power 2% of the time.
If China is aiming for that cost-optimal 90-98% renewables, that means they need to build a lot of coal.
It would also be better if you ate only vegetables and drove an ultralight (ebike) good luck. I personally like being able to turn on my lights 100% of the time
It's not about lights, it's about electricity always being available.
And well, always having power available (for domestic, but also for expensive production facilities that looses money while idle) using renewables is a lot more expensive than generating most of your power with renewables
Solar battery is not by any stretch of any possible definition the cheapest generation to deploy. Not even close. We do a disservice to the entire conversation saying easily falsifiable things like that. At 90% penetration solar + battery has a LFSCOE somewhere around $800/mwh depending on the study. Natural gas is something like 30-60. Solar panels are cheap. Building the required transmission and storage to service those panels is far more expensive than the panels themselves.
Increased renewable generation is an important goal, but we need to let the facts guide the path, not the other way around.
A) I am an electrical engineer who makes a living designing control systems for renewable generation. I know more about most of this than just about anyone in this conversation.
B) the post I am replying to is specifically calling for a 98% solar grid.
You replied to: "The most cost efficient new-build grid is 90-98% solar/wind/battery depending on your locales insolation & wind coverage. (Source Ember Energy)"
There's a big difference between "letting the facts guide the path" and tilting at strawmen built out of straw nobody else even brought into the discussion.
If you'd like to make the point that "cost of panels" can be misleading when supporting components and interconnects begin to take up the lion's share of costs then that sounds like a noble thing to remind folk of, but ideally not as a segway into shilling more fracking which includes untold environmental costs as externalities.
That's a fundamental problem with nuclear plants. Their classic "baseload" niche is gone. Like the intermittent sources, wind and solar, they need storage to hold what they overproduce during peak periods.
This is also true of geothermal, which, like nuclear, is almost all fixed capital cost.
It's only a problem because of capitalism. Every plant needs to independently make money, so nobody wants to be the ones spinning down because that's their profit margin dwindling.
But society would be better off with excess generation. So we either need a system where some are incentivized to spin down, perhaps by being paid a consistent amount regardless or something like that, or we need publicly owned power generation that doesn't care about profit.
This argument assumes we must build nuclear power.
The problem is that electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin. Now that we are moving beyond a purely centralized design.
Think about a homeowner or factory with their own renewables and storage.
They fundamentally operate on marginal price by choosing when they use their own system and when they buy from the grid.
If you add state owned reliable power to this mix they will cherry-pick. Their own cheap electricity when it delivers and the states subsidized reliable electricity when it doesn’t.
We can try add all manner of markets, fixed connection costs and what not to this but all it does is introduce strange arbitrage possibilities in the market.
Which is why we have settled on net energy markets and then the lowest possible amount of ancillary markets to shore up any gaps which would cause problems for the larger society.
We have needed to build nuclear power since the day it was invented. The amount of fossil fueled power generation is indisputable proof of that.
The only way we don't need nuclear power is if we have some other way of producing the energy we need without dooming the planet, and obviously we do not as we're still burning billions of tons of coal every year. Not to mention gas.
We could have made power generation fully fossil free many decades ago if we actually took climate change seriously. It would have been fine. Sure fossil fuels may have been cheaper, but if you include the damage they're already causing and will cause in the future you could multiply the cost of nuclear by orders of magnitude and it would still come out on top. Plus higher investment would lead to faster improvement in the technology, mass production of components and lower cost etc.
I agree that renewable with storage is cheaper of you price in destruction of habitable zones of the planet. Most people don't, and the dollar cost of the storage is a problem over fossil.
The coal argument about China doesn't hold water when you look at what they're actually building. Around 80% of their new power sources are renewable, and 10 to 15% is coal. They're aggressively focusing primarily on building renewable -- so to say that their coal is 49% is either misleading or entirely missing the point.
This assumes that the renewables built are actually contributing to the economy, which we don‘t actually know for sure. In fact there was an article stating that they discard a lot of the energy produced because the grid cannot deliver. [1]
> China, the world's top producer of solar power, rejected 360 terawatt-hours (TWh) of clean power from January to June, up 49% from the same period a year earlier, according to a report this month by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
which is great, but as i understand it will still lead to an overall decline in share of nuclear power. The scale of their power production is unfathomable
No, almost every one is above 1GW - divide the net capacity by the number under construction to see the power [1]. They appear to be almost all CAP1400 (1.4GW), Hualong One (1.0GW), or CAP1000 (1.0GW). I see a single Linglong 1 (100MW) under construction. Proposed are all above 1GW.
You need to look at where those nuclear plants are being built, in the east, and where the new energy is out west that makes it appear that nuclear is falling behind. Having power generation that doesn’t need to be transported via UHV lines is useful, it also acts as a nice baseline that keeps the grid stable.
China is building more new nuclear power than the rest of the world combined. They’ll soon produce as much renewable electricity as the United States produces electricity
> There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now.
Not a particular fan of this paper, but it does illustrate a point ... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8867359 showed that for the UK to go 100% solar it would need an energy capacity of 1/3 of the total grid energy demand over the year. Figure 6 A shows the big trend of 6 1/2 months of discharge and 5 1/2 months of charge (i.e. cycle perhaps once a year). Seasonal variations do matter.
It also seems like they are constraining the system to have no overproduction.
It’s like assuming that a fossil based system has all its producers generating the expected capacity factor and then smoothing out the season and daily demand changes with storage. Due to the difference between summer and winter demand such a fossil system would also need to have months of storage to compensate.
Which of course is absolute stupidity. When you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve.
The underlying demand and production has not changed so much since then. The requirements for storage still exist, and strongly depend on when the power is delivered as well as needed.
> a fossil system would also need to have months of storage
Coal and gas also get produced in the winter at a relatively constant rate. Plus we know how to handle piles of coal, caverns full of gas, tanks full of LNG, and linepack for shorter duration gas storage.
> you can just overbuild production capacity and leave a far simpler problem to solve
Sure, you then have an economic problem. The effective capacity factor of the intermittents get driven down. How are they going to be paid for, if much of the time the market is saturated?
I find it telling that you call it an ”economic problem” and ”intermittents”. It seems like you have an axe to grind, but not much backing your standpoint anymore. So you’ve fallen to using derogatory.
Those same fossil fuels have the same economic ”crowding” out problem when cheaper sources in the same class delivers.
A single cycle gas turbine would love to get paid running at 100% all year around. It doesn’t because CCGT plants with higher efficiency undercut it.
Just like what happens in renewables. They start crowding out each other. Storage steps in and solves the peaks. More renewables come online until they ”crowd each other out” and around we go.
That’s called being a market. Which you nuke fans seems deathly afraid of given the economics of new built nuclear power.
It is interesting to see how large-scale nuclear is handled.
120% and 60% increase in cost for FOAK and NOAK (Table 2-1), plus no learning rate for nuclear construction beyond that (Table C.2).
Interest rates during construction unfairly penalise nuclear as "GenCost uses the simplest way which is to increase the capital cost by the assumed discount rate raised to the power of the construction time" (page 97)." This results in ~20% increase in capital costs against other simple scenarios like equal construction costs across each year.
30 year plant lifetime, rather than say 60 years. That results in ~10% increase in capital costs.
> Those same fossil fuels have the same economic ”crowding” out problem when cheaper sources in the same class delivers.
That line of reasoning only works if there is something to make one plant more expensive to produce electricity than another. For natural gas the cost of fuel is far greater than the CAPEX. For intermittents only the variable OPEX can distinguish between generators, which is mostly for wind and I guess most severely for offshore wind. Cannibalisation is the big problem for intermittents. The notion of succession doesn't work for them.
Now you’re desperately trying to rationalize new built nuclear power.
GenCost has an amazing FAQ section you evidently either ignored, or did not peruse.
For example here they discuss economic life vs operational life, when you live in reality rather than grasping for straws:
> Why is the economic life used in LCOE calculations instead of the fulloperational life?
> The LCOE calculation converts all upfront and ongoing costs to annual costs which is then divided
by annual production. The capital cost component of a technology is converted to an annual
repayment to the debt and equity providers. The annual repayment amount is determined using
the economic life and the weighted average cost of capital. The economic life is shorter than the
asset life for some technologies such as coal, nuclear and hydro. Some stakeholders have queried
why this is so.
> Debt and equity providers require a shorter payback period than the total asset life for some
technologies to avoid the risk that part of the equipment might fail or might need new investment
(sometimes called refurbishment or extension costs) to keep operating safely and reliably. To
determine the economic life, debt and equity providers might look to the warranties provided
with the equipment. They might also look at the typical timing of refurbishments or life extensions
for that technology. The economic life is an input provided by the engineering firm that AEMO
commissions each year as an input to GenCost.
> Some stakeholders suggested that coal and nuclear could access special financing arrangements to
move the economic life closer to the asset life. However, our preference is not to introduce special
arrangements for technologies where there is limited Australian evidence. A common approach to
the LCOE calculation is important to maintain comparability. The 2024-25 report does explore the impact of longer capital recovery periods in Section 2. It finds there is no significant benefit from
the longer operational life of nuclear relative to shorter-lived technologies whose costs have been
falling over time.
Even looking at China and South Korea they see essentially zero learning effects across plants after the FOAK build. Small ones at the same plant.
Crying about FOAK vs NOAK is not even close to solving the absolutely stupidly large subsidies new built nuclear power needs.
Again with the loaded terms. Sad. The market is limited until for example Jevons paradox expands it. Which will never happen with new built nuclear power due to how expensive the electricity is, that leads to energy poverty for generations instead. But I digress.
Look at Texas or California. About all new renewable projects in those markets are coupled with storage.
What you call cannabilisation, and try to paint like the end of the world, is simply the market working. Now pure renewable projects aren’t enough, instead you need to sell the electricity when the consumers demand it.
In just a year or two storage has massively smoothed out the price swings in Texas.
But again, that would require curiosity rather than desperately trying to poke holes the study already answered.
2.2 * 1.25 * 1.1 = 3.025x LCOE for the first nuclear power station.
1.6 * 1.25 * 1.1 = 2.2x LCOE for the second plant.
1.0 * 1.25 * 1.1 = 1.375x LCOE for remaining plant.
Wind/solar is heavily dependent on the required storage (which depends on matching supply and demand), additional transmission and backup generation prices.
Finding the price tipping points is the point of the exercise. When you catch someone's fingers on the scales you realise what the game is.
>For example here they discuss economic life vs operational life, when you live in reality rather than grasping for straws:
It's essentially just saying the market can't think long term enough leading to drastic differences in your calculations. But hence it's typically governments pushing these projects forward.
>The market is limited until for example Jevons paradox expands it. Which will never happen with new built nuclear power due to how expensive the electricity is
But it did happen for nuclear power in the past.
Now you see essentially the opposite.
>Why are you so afraid of renewables and storage?
I'm not. I think it's a great set of technologies. But I think if one tries to get to 100% everywhere one's going to stub their toes on the scenarios where it's not all roses.
Why? Because the storage part is hard at scale in a lot of places and the intermitency more pronounced.
In Texas and Cali are incredibly sunny places in the south of the US.
Silicon valley where it's already an issue gets 3 times as much sunshine hours during winter as let's say berlin and those hours are far less usefull.
>Crying about FOAK vs NOAK is not even close to solving the absolutely stupidly large subsidies new built nuclear power needs.
Is this not intentionally sidestepping the ludicrous amount of subsidies that have been handed out to renewables in aggregate?
Berlin would need to overproduce insane amounts in summer to handle it's winters.
The flip side is that what you are saying is that nuclear power will be commercially viable into the 2100s. And betting the house on that. While knowing that the electricity they provide is expensive enough to lead to energy poverty for generations.
That seems absolutely insane.
Jevons Paradox did not happen for nuclear power. What happened was crazy cost overruns, cancellations and the industry collapsing into its current state.
Who cares if we get to 95%, 97, 99% or 100% carbon neutral electricity when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, aviation, chemicals, industry, construction and so on?
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Transition that final firming to whatever carbon neutral sources we land on when their emissions matter in the late 2030s and 2040s.
We need to optimize decarbonization per dollar spent with the shortest time to market.
You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world? They aren't needed anymore. Complaining about "equality" because your desired solution didn't deliver in time is a kindergarten level argument.
We've spent the past 70 years subsidizing nuclear power. It just never delivered on its promise.
The relevant question is: Where does Germany spend the next €100 billion today to avoid the most emissions?
And that is certainly not new built nuclear power.
>While knowing that the electricity they provide is expensive enough to lead to energy poverty for generations.
What are you on about?
>Jevons Paradox did not happen for nuclear power. What happened was crazy cost overruns, cancellations and the industry collapsing into its current state.
And the opposite happened in the past whilst europe was building bunch more of them.
>Who cares if we get 95%, 97, 99% or 100% when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, aviation, chemicals, industry, construction and so on?
Funny you say that when some of those are significantly harder. Are you going to turn on steel plants only in summer? Do you think that might have some effect?
>You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world? They aren't needed anymore. Complaining about "equality" because your desired solution didn't deliver in time is a kindergarten level argument.
You should tell my government and the neighbouring governments.
>We've spent the past 70 years subsidizing nuclear power. It just never delivered on its promise.
It did exactly that?
>The relevant question is: Where does Germany spend the next €100 billion today to avoid the most emissions?
it has spent €700 billion to $1 trillion on the energywende (a metric which doesn't properly include a lot of private investment) and ends as one of the worst emitters in europe whilst deindustrialising due to high energy prices.
They jerk eachother off about how high their renewables share of the economy is every summer and then import and fire up the browncoal and gasplants again troughout the other seasons. When that solar panel is producing a 10th of it's average summer output (already below the capacity everyone loves to roll with for articles) in winter there's only one big winner possible.
People like to point out how france's electricity production is subsidised when they come out looking good even when the gov intentionally puts a stick in it's wheels by essentially forcing it to subsidise pricing to competition.
> You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world?
CfD is going strong in the UK; it seems about the only way of deploying it, given the revenue uncertainty associated with market saturation/cannibalisation.
Of course, other subsidies exist. Feed in tariffs. Transmission charges. Capacity and ancillary service payments to provide services that solar/wind do not.
This tells me you are not serious. The easiest nuclear reactors to restart, as per that same nuclear lobby group, were those in the north.
Northern Germany is already overproducing electricity, leading to curtailment of renewables.
What problem are you solving with even more overproduction in the north leading to re-dispatch?
> CfD is going strong in the UK; it seems about the only way of deploying it, given the revenue uncertainty associated with market saturation/cannibalisation.
I love you now are trying to smear off-shore wind costs on everything. Of course not lookign at solar, storage or on-shore wind.
Lets lookat those. In Germany, which still do CFD bids for solar, even though a ton get built on pure market value, the CFD bids today are below the market price for the capture-rate of their electricity.
The CFDs are also structured to not pay out when electricity is zero or negative. They trade money for a tiny bit of certainty. That is how far we've come.
> Of course, other subsidies exist. Feed in tariffs. Transmission charges. Capacity and ancillary service payments to provide services that solar/wind do not.
Who pays when half the French nuclear fleet is offline? Who pays when the majority of the eastern european nuclear fleet is offline? Who pays for the N+1 requirements coming from nuclear power being enormous single points of failures leading to large reserves being necessary?
People like you love to complain about these things, but you can never formulate a solution where nuclear power is required to pay for the problem large single points of failures cause in the grid.
> Northern Germany is already overproducing electricity, leading to curtailment of renewables.
Overproducing some of the time. And pulling electricity from Sweden and Norway at other times.
> I love you now are trying to smear off-shore wind costs on everything.
Why is Denmark running the CfD auction if everything is so rosy for onshore wind and solar (plus batteries)?
> the CFD bids today are below the market price for the capture-rate of their electricity.
OK, they are betting on the future value of the electricity they produce being lower than today.
> The CFDs are also structured to not pay out when electricity is zero
So existing generators with older CfDs have priority over new generators with CfDs? Interesting.
> Who pays when half the French nuclear fleet is offline?
Why were they offline?
> Who pays for the N+1 requirements coming from nuclear power being enormous single points of failures leading to large reserves being necessary?
So the 1.X GW of standby is bad, but the whole-system sized standby required for intermittents is fine? Also let's not confuse the capacity factor of nuclear (including scheduled maintenance) with the odds of nuclear being offline unexpectedly.
> you can never formulate a solution where nuclear power is required to pay for the problem large single points of failures cause in the grid.
Wait, is this where I am meant to talk about SMRs? Or nuclear peaker power stations?
Namely, It's very easy to 'design to load' where you don't need to worry about the next shipment of Coal, or an extended weather event causing excessive cloud cover and depleting your reserves.
Heck, even as far as compared to LPG, you don't have to worry as much about disruptions or possible cost shifts around LPG supply.
Yes, I'm possibly tongue-in-cheek handwaving specific types of 'weather events' here and potential impacts, i.e. Tsunamis... OTOH it's a lot easier in current gen designs to make something that would have minimal risk for something, say, in the middle of nowhere Texas.
To be specific, solar with 4hr storage is price competitive with grid right now. Storage becomes expensive after that at 8hrs even with projected sodium or lithium prices. For a datacenter usage they probably need couple of days storage at 50hrs like the planned google datacenter. Only alternate chemistry batteries that could be scaled up easily like flow, iron air, zinc etc. could be competitive for multi day storage, though most of these are still at experimental or pilot stages.
> Google’s new Minnesota data center comes with the world’s largest battery—and won’t raise electric bills
> The tech giant says it will fund enough new wind, solar, and long-duration storage to cover the project’s power demand and avoid shifting costs to ratepayers.
It works better on a geographically spread-out grid, and the data centers are running into the same limit that renewable plants are, which is that the grid is struggling to keep up (in large part, in many places, due to a history of underinvestment).
Data centers with good load balancing between regions do not need exactly the same power 24/365 so the latest solar-wind-storage is already cheaper in theory. But it would take few years before production of sodium and other batteries will scale up and the mean time a turbine powered by natural gas wins.
> there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production.
If geothermal works economically (outside of volcanic zones where it already does) then it's game over for any other power source except existing dams though because it solves all problems at once.
That'd be a great thing for humanity but I don't think it's worth stopping pursuing alternatives already, because it's still a big "if".
I'm not a geologist, but for comparison, the Siberian Traps[1] erupted for 2 million years, and there have been other large events on that scale. Any heat we release will be insignificant in comparison.
Technically it would, but the same way an individual ant's breath contribute to global warming.
Note that the thermal energy contained in the inner earth isn't a fixed amount: the earth constantly generates new heat from friction and radioactivity, and that new heat is radiated away in space at night, alone the heat captured from the sun during the day. So technically geothermal will increase the efficiency of this heat transfer a tiny bit, but it's really a negligible amount. (In reality the ant's contribution to global warming is probably orders of magnitude than the phenomenon we're talking about here).
Nope. It is very far away from core. Core is very big. And energy is already flowing outwards. So just using it really have not any significant impact.
Real issue is that it is not actually usable everywhere. Again Earth is big and going deep in some places is very hard.
There is no way SMR could beat solar+battery power cost even now. With sodium and other batteries projected to reduce storage cost, it is even more unlikely that SMR could be price competitive in future grids. SMR is the only way that dying western nuclear industry could attempt to deal with ballooning compliance and finance costs and hope for revival. China or India doesn't have this compliance cost and still build conventional nuclear.
Even for the SMR usecase that got funding recently, mega datacenter electricity, there is new geothermal power companies getting funding and are transitioning from pilot projects to production. Some are using tech that is already being used in oil fracking industry for decades, so new geothermal tech scaling up has far less roadblocks technology and compliance wise. So other than military and mobile civil applications like nuclear icebreaker, I don't see the chance of SMR succeeding anywhere else.