Power production is a subject about which I’m not especially knowledgeable. I know a decent amount about what the options are, but a whole lot less about the exact mechanics of how they work. It’s something I’m trying to learn more about, but it’s far less of a priority to me than other aspects of climate change and the politics surrounding it. As I’ve said before, I think the primary obstacles are social and political, rather than technical. That is true for renewable energy, it’s true for agricultural changes, and it’s true for nuclear energy. I was looking through the youtube channel for Yale Climate Connections, and I came across this video, which I think serves as a good example of what I’m talking about:
Leaving aside my reflexive annoyance at having to listen to Bill Gates talk, I think there’s useful information in there. I also think there are parts of the video in which we can clearly see there are a couple limitations in perspective. The first one is the rather fatalistic take on whether new nuclear reactors will be cost-competitive with renewables, as though economics are just a force of nature, rather than the deliberate result of government policy. The idea that cost should be a primary concern in responding to climate change continues to be one of the most apocalyptic mind-viruses of our age, and it’s infuriating to see otherwise intelligent and well-educated people showing those symptoms.
The other thing I want to quibble with is this:
The first small modular reactor will be eight, ten years from now. We need to have pretty much solved the whole problem, and have overwhelming momentum to zero carbon electricity by that time
There’s one aspect of this that’s fine – Dr. Makhijani is absolutely correct about the scale of action needed within the next decade, if we want to keep the warming below two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial temperatures. We certainly should want that, but whether or not we actually achieve it, life will continue, and we’re going to need a lot of power generation. If we miss that mark, we’re going to need more power if we want to avoid mass death unlike anything our species has seen. I get why there has been so much focus on avoiding this crisis, but just because we’ve largely failed at that doesn’t mean it’s “game over”, and I think Makhijani’s framing there can do real harm.
A huge portion of this crisis was caused by a societal inability to make decisions based on long-term outcomes. We can’t afford to continue that. That’s why I think societal change is such an important element of this. It’s also why resilience needs to be the focus. My primary objection to nuclear power, over the last few years, has been something that’s mentioned in the video – all conventional nuclear power plants rely on a constant supply of water for cooling. Some of them are far more efficient in their use and re-use of water than others, but for all of them, things like drought, heat waves, and flooding are a concern for safety and for efficiency. That’s not a reason to discard the technology, but it is a reason to build with the assumption that our infrastructure will be subjected to conditions unlike anything we’ve seen before. That goes for everything we’re doing to deal with climate change. If, as seems increasingly likely, we miss the 2°C mark, then life is going to get a whole lot harder. We’re going to need to spend increasing amounts of energy cooling our homes and places of work, keeping crops alive, repairing infrastructure, and so on. Nuclear power – including the small, modular designs mentioned in the video – could be a powerful tool in that effort, but only if we’re clear-eyed about the conditions under which it will be used.
We don’t get to just give up if we haven’t solved everything in a decade, and that means we need to consider how technology like this can and cannot be used in a much hotter world. We’re at a point, horrific though it is, where we need to be planning for the scenarios we’d been hoping to avoid, and frankly people like the ones involved in this video need adjust their thinking to account for the passage of time. I think we should absolutely be continuing the momentum of wind and solar power. I also think that adherence to the focus on the two degree deadline, and the idea that this all has to be done via capitalist competition, are both perspectives that do more harm than good.
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The cost of survival seems a silly thing to argue with people who presumably enjoy fine dining as a perk of being rich. Food is always a net loss when considered in isolation (and when the survival benefits are discarded) but I haven’t heard of any billionaires starving to death lately.
My primary objection … nuclear power plants rely on a constant supply of water for cooling.
So the tons of high-maintenance bio-accumulative toxic waste persisting for millennia don’t bother you much? Talk about “a societal inability to make decisions based on long-term outcomes”…
There is nothing, nothing that comes immediately to mind, qualitatively negative about nuclear power. There are toxic wastes but everything has toxic wastes associated with it. If not as process output then as manufacturing. Coal has tailings from mining, ash, mercury and acid rain. Wind and solar have a lot of toxic materials generated during manufacturing. Oil plants are messy, pipelines leak, and burn. Natural gas explodes and burns. Concrete used in all these plants isn’t without environmental consequences.
That said nuclear has serious quantitative and temporal negatives. Wastes are not just fuel. It is the plant itself, and everything used to process fuel or protect workers. Some of this decays to a safe level in a few years. Or decades. But some of this is going to have to be isolated, and guarded, and monitored for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The costs, and potentially massive amount of damage that can be done if it wanders off or leaks, are astronomical.
Back in the day solar and wind were , mostly, pipe dreams. Nuclear made a lot of sense. There were all the same issues but give some creative engineering, and a lack of alternatives, nuclear was still a pretty good deal. Now, nuclear isn’t really viable. Energy storage and renewable steam plants, like biomass and waste to energy, seem to be the more practical bridge to the future.
The reason waste is not my primary concern, is that we’re already going to have to deal with a HUGE amount of toxic waste, including radioactive waste. Most of that has come from the fossil fuel industry, some comes from other resource extraction.
The way we deal with mine waste for the stuff used to make renewable energy is also toxic, and sometimes radioactive. We have to completely overhaul how we handle waste in general, both toxic and “non-toxic” (to whatever degree that term has meaning).
We have a better idea of how to handle radioactive waste than we do of how to handle a much hotter Earth without enough power.
As Gerrard will no doubt attest, nuclear power isn’t something I spend a lot of time pushing for, because I’d like as much power as possible to come from renewables, but I think it’s important that we have options, and the harm done by nuclear power is practically non-existent compared to the harm that has been done by day-to-day operations around the world with comparatively little opposition.
I should also say my comfort with nuclear power is largely conditional on major changes in how our society is governed. I don’t want nuclear plants that are operated by people trying to make a profit, or reduce their budget. I want them operated by people whose homes are in the exclusion zone, and who get actively rewarded for going above and beyond when it comes to safe operation.
As Lanir said, price should not be a consideration here. We need systemic change.
Not just nuclear power plants. Basically all thermal power plants involve a (Rankine cycle) steam turbine. Theoretically, those can have an efficiency of around 64%. But in practice it’s more like 50%.
So for a 600 MW (thermal) power plant, you get around 300 MW of electric power, and 300 MW going out via the cooling water/steam. Hence the big cooling towers; it takes a lot of energy to vaporize water.
Although sometimes that heat is used as district heating for homes or process heating for factories.
Abe Drayton @ # 4: I don’t want nuclear plants that are operated by people trying to make a profit, or reduce their budget.
So nukes work for you, in Utopia?
That means opposing them, across the board, until we reach that state. Even then, expect, ahem, technical difficulties.
@Pierce – you think a more democratic society is a utopia? Ok, then yes. In utopia. Sure.
I’m curious in what world you think we’ll have a sufficient response to climate change without massive changes in how society works.
When you focus on the waste from nuclear plants, it makes it seem like you think there’s no problem with waste from renewable energy. There is, and in either case we need to figure out ways to safely deal with it rather than whatever is cheapest. That’s also not going to happen until we reach what you call a utopian society, but it’s not justification for avoiding solar power.
Regarding Waste: The low-level waste (gloves, clothing, cleaning supplies, etc.) is already less radioactive than many common natural sources, and can be safely landfilled. The intermediate waste (neutron-activated reactor parts and such) needs a short time-out of maybe a hundred years before it is ready to go into recycling. If you look, for example all the waste that remains from Connecticut Yankeee (satellite image at tinyurl (dot) com/vbxcb9sr ) the three casks at the end hold all the activated reactor parts. Those radioisotopes are mostly embedded in structural metals, so even if something blasts those casks open, they aren’t going to spread. High-level waste (spent fuel) is deadly if you hug it without shielding, or break open the pellets and ingest the contents, or drop a few tonnes of it on someone. In practice, it turns out these are not difficult things to avoid, so after decades of handling hundreds of thousands of tonnes of the stuff worldwide, the death toll from that has yet to budge from zero. Plastic buckets and window treatments have a higher actual death toll.
And right now, several teams (Elysium, Moltex, Southern Co. etc.) are developing molten salt fast reactors which should be able to consume our existing supply of spent fuel (also depleted uranium, surplus bomb fuel, and some other waste heavy-nuclides we’d like to get rid of). Consumption would turn these into fission products, most of which are usable or stable, or will reach stable quickly (10 years or so) and the remainder would be on the order of a couple-hundred kilograms per gigawatt-year of heat. Mix those with glass and put them roughly a mile deep down a Deep Isolation-style borehold (already demonstrated in Texas) and they won’t bother anyone or anything at the surface for the roughly 300 years it will take them to reach ambient levels of radioactivity. The supply of potential fuels we already have in storage embodies roughly 10,000-terawatt years of heat, so it will take a while to consume it (all the heat we’ve ever gotten from all fossil fuels is only now reaching 700 terawatt-years), so it will need some temporary storage. But the heat energy revenues per tonne of fuel would be worth more than the value of a tonne of gold, so there would be some financial incentive to look after this resource.
Regarding profitable nukes: this is actually what we want. We need an energy revolution, and profit routinely drives technology revolutions. The alternatives need something like global social, cultural, political, and financial revolutions, and those are much more rare, difficult, messy, geographically small, and have a bad habit of going horribly wrong. The key to profitable nukes is making them inherently safe–no chance of meltdowns, or hydrogen explosions, or pressure ruptures, or mass contaminant dispersals, etc.–and several designs in the works look like they have good potential to achieve those goals.
Regarding cooling: today’s reactors need massive cooling because they don’t operate hot enough for reasonable efficiency without it. Smaller, hotter reactors would be more efficient and could send out a larger fraction of the heat through the transmission lines, and they’d also have enough high-value “waste” heat to drive water desalination, fuel and fertilizer production, industrial processes, district heating, etc. before the final residual cooling, which could greatly reduce the water cooling needs or might even work with just air-cooling. And designs like the Thorcon unit will sit out in the ocean, which makes for a pretty-reliable heat-sink.
Regarding time: yes, old-tech nuclear is dying, and the new builds going on over the next ten years will be slow and will struggle to keep up with the closures of the old plants. But nobody is projecting we’ll be off fossil fuels in ten years, and most projections are that emissions will be nearly as bad as now, as billions of people climb out of energy poverty. (Also, there is no time-limit on the usefulness of being able to consume spent fuel, DU, bomb fuel, etc.) So even if next-gen nukes are the Plan B that we develop for insurance, it’s insurance we’re probably going to need. And several of the new designs could have buildout rapid enough to meet any level of market demand, so the greater the profit, the faster the rollout. The very first few units will probably not be market competitive, but we supported wind and solar for the many years they were not competitive, and nuclear has good prospects for getting there a lot faster.
On the energy poverty point, I think it would be a mistake to assume that’s all going to be fossil fuels. Photovoltaic and wind power, depending on how they’re used, are often going to be better for places without electricity, because they don’t require a constant supply of fuel to work.
Solar water heating in particular is cheap and doesn’t require special resources, and there’s a lot you can do with hot water.
Nobody is assuming that all of the growth in energy demand in the developing world will be met by fossil fuels. But everybody is projecting that a sizeable chunk of it will be supplied by fossil fuels.
Here’s the latest mainstream projection out to 2050 based on our current trajectory, with the options that are available now: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/energy-and-the-environment/outlook-for-future-emissions.php
That is a really bleak picture, and most of that growth in emissions takes place in the developing world. We are going to need to make some massive changes to that trajectory, and so far, it doesn’t look like policy or economics with our current technology options is going to make an appreciable dent in it. We should still push for the policy changes, of course, but we should also be aggressively pursuing the development of better technology options for the future.
Abe Drayton @ # 7: … you think a more democratic society … – won’t have profit motives or budgets?
We seem to have rather different concepts of “democracy”…
I think we need viable energy solutions sooner than it will take to reach Le Guin’s Urras society in The Dispossessed.
… it makes it seem like you think there’s no problem with waste from renewable energy.
Radwaste – even the fantasy version that kronk tries to sell us @ # 8 – comes in a couple of orders of magnitude more hazardous than silicon slag, at minimum.
We’re talking about stuff like heavy metals, not just slag.
And yes, radioactive waste is dangerous, but it’s also something we know how to contain, if we bother to do so.
As to profit motives and budget, that depends entirely on how things are run. But yes, a society that actually empowers the people and is governed by them and for them is far more likely to prioritize safety. It’s not hard to set up incentives towards doing things right and away from corner-cutting.
And again, as with renewable energy, this is not something that I expect to just happen. That’s why I focus so much on social and political topics, and on ways to build collective power and work for political change.
Because without that, all of these conversations are just spitting in the wind.
[I submitted this yesterday and for some reason it did not show up. Not sure why but here’s trying again. If the original does show up, I hope someone can delete the duplicate.]
Toxic wastes from solar PV manufacturing and rare earth mining are mostly not a problem. They may have sickened and killed a few people, but that’s mostly in China, where they have done a good job at covering that up and squelching protests. So it is mostly out of sight and mind for the general public, and hardly any wind farms or solar farms are opposed on the basis of some obscure waste problem in a faraway land. Nuclear power spent fuel, on the other hand, is a problem, not because of any issue with its containment, health or safety record, but because people have such a terror over the danger spent fuel could pose to someone 50,000 years into the future that they will literally demand that it not be used to displace coal power that continues to devastate entire landscapes and to sicken and kill many millions of people (without even getting into the potential climate and ocean acidification impacts). I know it’s not rational, it might not even be sane, but there we are. So if nuclear energy is going to have any shot at being a substantial contributor to displacing fossil fuels, we will need to develop ways to securely eliminate any far-future hazard potential.
And towards that end, we have some good-looking options in the works, but it will take a few years before they will be far enough along that we can try them out. I know it is popular to call them fantasies because they aren’t already here, but if you do the development work it takes to make them real, that’s the ordinary process by which fantasy becomes technology.
Abe Drayton @ # 12: … stuff like heavy metals…
Gallium arsenide and its ilk won’t do you any good, but once containerized they tend to stay put. Radioactive materials eventually break down just about anything you them in.
… radioactive waste is dangerous, but it’s also something we know how to contain…
Whoever told you that surely lied to you about other things as well.
… a society that actually empowers the people and is governed by them and for them is far more likely to prioritize safety.
“A society” does not run waste-control projects; managers do. And managers have incentives to trim expenses & inflate results.
It’s not hard to set up incentives towards doing things right and away from corner-cutting.
Oh? Who’s achieved that, successfully, over long periods of time? Even the unlimited-budget Pentagon regularly has to deal with contractors who sneak in inferior substitutes for specified components.
… without that, all of these conversations are just spitting in the wind.
Lotta that goin’ ’round lately.
@Pierce –
Are you seriously arguing that because it hasn’t been done under our current system, it’s impossible to do?
Are you seriously arguing that the Pentagon is somehow separate from capitalism and its incentives?
Do you really believe that, or are you just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks?
[… radioactive waste is dangerous, but it’s also something we know how to contain…]
“Whoever told you that surely lied to you about other things as well.”
From the NIRS link:
“95% of all the radioactivity created in the U.S, from all sources including nuclear weapons production, is contained in the irradiated fuel—or high-level radioactive waste—from commercial nuclear power reactors.”
See? They say it’s contained.
Abe Drayton @ # 15 – no & no.
But I do observe that every modern system I know anything about has problems specifically driven by managerial motivations, and that socialists of several stripes have created ecological disasters. (Have we ever had an anarchical society which lasted long enough to deal with sustainable energy production?)
kronk @ # 16 – My first through third responses to you would surely violate our esteemed host’s commentation rules, whatever those are. If he has any regarding jejune asininity, you probably just broke them. Go ‘way.
Again, I don’t buy that argument. We have to do a lot of things that have never been done before, and there are going to be downsides to every choice we make. As I said before, I’m not suggesting we stop the roll-out of renewable energy. I think we should dramatically increase it. I’m also aware that doing so, and increasing the production of batteries along with it, is going to generate a huge amount of hazardous waste, of a kind that is regularly mis-managed and allowed to make people sick. We need to increase renewable energy and we need to revolutionize how we handle hazardous waste, and how we decide what’s worth the expenditure of resources. Perhaps you missed it, CO2 is not the only thing at unsustainable levels. Just as greenhouse gas pollution has destabilized the climate, so to is chemical pollution destabilizing ecosystems. We need to deal with that as we increase renewable energy and power storage.
I also think we should continue to research and experiment with nuclear energy, because it has a huge amount of potential, and we may need that, and we should find safe ways to dispose of the world’s radioactive waste, repurpose and reuse “spent” fuel, and render use of that technology safer.
I do not see these as mutually exclusive.
@ Pierce R. Butler # 17
Okay Mr. Serious, facetiousness aside then. You brandished that NIRS link in seeming rebuttal to Abe’s view that spent fuel is something we know how to contain, (if we bother to do so). But I’m not seeing how that link rebuts his view. In fact, that link even says “watch for Alerts that will provide ways you can help implement policies that will serve to reach the goal of isolating dangerous radioactive waste from the environment for its full hazardous life.” To me, that sounds like they believe they know how to contain radioactive waste for its full hazardous life–which would actually support Abe’s view. Are you sure you posted the right link?
Abe Drayton @ # 18: … I’m not suggesting we stop the roll-out of renewable energy.
I never said you did, and I agree we need lots more asap.
… going to generate a huge amount of hazardous waste…
Also agreed, along with the implication we should regularize anticipating and minimizing negative consequences. (Prime example: mercury in compact fluorescent lights.)
… so to[o] is chemical pollution destabilizing ecosystems.
Further agreement. We already had a gigantic ecological crisis in process before global heating took the spotlight, and it continues to accelerate.
… we should find safe ways to dispose of the world’s radioactive waste…
And I concur on this too. We differ in that I demand we do this first and cease production of more until we have this in hand. (Not that I expect my demands to matter to anybody – you know how that feels.)
kronk @ # 19 – Pls note that “that NIRS link” contains numerous links to relevant subtopics of nuclear waste – and most those also consist mostly of introductions to other links. From one of those links:
I greatly doubt they intended to insinuate an adequate permanent solution exists; they advocate dry casks as an improvement over storage pools, but strongly critique the deep-underground proposals you so blithely consider all we’ll ever need.
Note also that just about all the posts on that site are from 2019 or earlier: more glamorous (or at least more immediately threatening) crises tend to draw attention and funding away from even very minor attempts to raise major alarms. That all-too-human tendency in itself illustrates the irresponsibility of our generation leaving our poisons for future thousands of generations to
clean upsuffer from.Imagine, say, that every bomb exploding in Gaza could rupture a tank of radwaste left over from powering Cleopatra’s hair-dryer. We’d curse her generation with every breath – but each of the factions there would continue to make and set off more bombs.
@ Pierce R. Butler # 20
“From one of those links: … ‘The rule essentially relies on an assertion that storage of the waste in dry casks will be safe into the indeterminate future–even eternally; even though the agency acknowledges that a more permanent solution must be found.'”
The purpose of that action was to trigger a moratorium on licensing. Previously, the issuances of new and extended licenses rested on the confidence that the spent fuel would always be stored or disposed of safely, but with the cancellation of Yucca Mtn, the basis for that assumption went away. So the NRC issued a ruling that cask storage could count as indefinitely safe, and thus could serve as the basis for continued licensing. NIRS fought the ruling, not out of disapproval of cask storage per se, but to keep it from being used as a justification for continued licensing and production of more spent fuel.
“I greatly doubt they intended to insinuate an adequate permanent solution exists; they advocate dry casks as an improvement over storage pools, but strongly critique the deep-underground proposals you so blithely consider all we’ll ever need.”
The option NIRS has pushed for for years is something they call “Hardened On Site Storage”–basically beefed-up cask storage. Their opposition isn’t to deep underground storage per se. Ever since their “Mobile Chernobyl” campaign decades ago, their opposition has centered on the transportation of spent fuel. They oppose centralized disposal sites (temporary or permanent) because that would mean thousands of shipments over great distances and probably going through cities.
I see David Lochbaum (then with UCS) provided testimony at that action. Years later, he would resign from the UCS and join the advisory board of the Deep Isolation team. Lochbaum had long been uneasy both about the mass transport associated with a centralized repository, but also with long-term cask storage at the surface. The Deep Isolation strategy offered a third way–many boreholds to cut transport to a minimum, and deep burial which would avoid the vulnerabilities of surface storage.
“That all-too-human tendency in itself illustrates the irresponsibility of our generation leaving our poisons for future thousands of generations to clean up suffer from.”
We are dumping a lot of forever-poisons into the environment that will probably be a clean-up problem for many generations. But spent fuel is already contained, so that isn’t a clean-up problem. And we are developing options for dealing with it right now which weren’t even being considered ten years ago, and it is easily possible we will soon come up with more ideas we aren’t considering now. It seems bizarre to think that we could be capable of having and developing all these ideas, but then assume that none of them can ever work and that none of the next hundreds of generations will have even one successful idea either so that for many thousands of years they will simply adhere to whatever “final” disposition plan we decide for them.
In the early days of petroleum refining, the process of making kerosene and lamp oil produced large quantities of a noxious, toxic, dangerously-volatile waste by-product we call gasoline. We didn’t know what to do with it, so we tried dumping it, burning it, and storing it, and each of those had major problems. So there was a lot of angst and furor regarding what to do about the gasoline problem–until we developed engines that could make use of it, and then all that desperation and wailing just disappeared. We know the basics of how to turn spent fuel and DU and other heavy isotope “wastes” into vast amounts of high-value energy using fast neutrons, but there are a lot of ways to do that. So the challenge at this point is to try to figure out which ways have the best shot at being very safe and cheap and we are now pursuing multiple approaches. As soon as even one of them gets close enough to make it worthwhile to tap into those resources, that could similarly render all those far-future worries moot.
kronk @ # 21: But spent fuel is already contained, so that isn’t a clean-up problem.
Might as well say, “The ax murderer is locked in the bathroom, let’s go back to sleep.” This is neither valid nor honest – piss off.
And we are developing options for dealing with it right now which weren’t even being considered ten years ago, and it is easily possible we will soon come up with more ideas we aren’t considering now. It seems bizarre to think that we could be capable of having and developing all these ideas, but then assume that none of them can ever work …
To start with that last line: the “argument from personal incredulity” shows up in every worthwhile list of logical fallacies, and it always fails.
As to the rest, you illustrate the point I tried to make to our esteemed host at my @ 2: viable long-term solutions to the high-level nuclear waste problem consist of vaporware, and all related issues require keeping that foremost in mind.
@ Pierce R. Butler # 22
“Might as well say, “The ax murderer is locked in the bathroom, let’s go back to sleep.””
Do you know of any actual examples where spent fuel has escaped and killed anyone? Even one person?
“This is neither valid nor honest – piss off.”
You know, nobody is forcing you to read or respond to anything I say. But you can’t stand the thought of others being able to see a view that disagrees with yours. So the only way you can protect others from these dangerous ideas is to demonize the heretic and try to drive him away. The funny part is that you are attempting this on a Freethought blog.
“the “argument from personal incredulity” shows up in every worthwhile list of logical fallacies, and it always fails.”
Talk about fail, that’s not even close to right. The argument from personal incredulity is basically the attempt to negate a proposition (a belief, an assumption, a claim, etc.) because someone does not see how it could be true. An example would be “spent fuel cannot be safely and securely contained because I personally don’t see how it could be.” What I did was point out that an assumption was bizarre, particularly in the face of indications it is not a sound assumption. All I’m doing is giving my reasons for not accepting a proposition as true. That’s not a fallacy. That’s reasonable skepticism. And again, it seems like someone on a Freethought blog ought to understand how that works.
“As to the rest, you illustrate the point I tried to make to our esteemed host at my @ 2: viable long-term solutions to the high-level nuclear waste problem consist of vaporware”
Vaporware is stuff that is actually put on the market for sale while it is still in the concept or development stage. The mere fact of something being a concept or still in development is not enough to qualify it as vaporware. And being in development also does not establish that it cannot work or will never be available. And while our most promising long term options are being developed, it seems only sensible to defer any decision on a long-term solution. There’s no urgent need to make a decision now, and it would be dumb to settle on a 50,000 year plan when there’s a good chance there will be better options that make it obsolete in just a few years.
I think maybe this conversation is reaching the end of its usefulness, though I guess if you want to continue it you can.
What I will say is that in my quest to alienate the world, tomorrow’s post will be about some of my problems with nuclear power, highlighted by current events in Ukraine, and why I think extreme caution is warranted when deciding when, where, and whether to build new plants and/or storage facilities.
What fun!
Abe Drayton @ # 24: I think maybe this conversation is reaching the end of its usefulness..
We have yet another locus of concurrence.
… tomorrow’s post will be about some of my problems with nuclear power…
Looking forward to it!
Pierce, the fundamental problem is that you believe radioactive waste is a thousand, maybe a million, times more dangerous than what it really is. Take plutonium for example. It’s about as dangerous as caffeine, gram for gram. Google “the myth of plutonium toxicity” by Bernard Cohen. Yes, directly ingesting large amounts of plutonium is hazardous for your health, but no more than is true for caffeine give or take, and there is no remotely plausible pathway for sufficient concentration to be infested or inhaled from a leak from a deep underground borehole. With sufficient dilution, it’s harmless. That fact, combined with the other fact that the total amounts that we have are miniscule, means that nuclear waste will never hurt anyone.
Are you aware of the underground natural nuclear reactors at Oklo, Gabon? We’ve done the experiment. After a billion years in a water rich environment, the plutonium moved 5 ft. This isn’t models or projections or theories. This is hard measured fact from an experiment that has been running for literally a billion years.
Abe, cost matters for two big reasons. One if it’s too expensive, then it’s literally impossible to do. Solar and wind are basically in this situation. The other problem is the political fiat problem – most people, and especially in the poor world, are unwilling to spend more for energy. For many it’s a matter of life and death. Pumped water is safer than river water. Medicine often requires refrigeration. Safe food often requires refrigeration. The creation of food depends vitally on the creation of inorganic fertilizers which is hugely energy intensive to make. With this context, its going to be really, really hard to convince people to use a more expensive energy source.consider CFCs and the ozone. Afaik, the real reason we stopped using CFCs was not because of international cooperation. It was because we discovered alternatives that were cost competitive.
Oh, and nuclear power plants don’t need a steady supply of water to cool them. The power conversion systems of nuclear are the same as coal plants, and there are coal plants that don’t use any open evaporative water systems, aka they use dry cooling. It’s totally possible and currently done. It does raise the total effective price of an optimistic nuclear power plant by about 50% because of the significant hit to thermal efficiency in the power conversion system, but it can be and has been done for coal and therefore it could be done for nuclear too again because they use literally the same parts.
Comments on the video.
Gods I hate this video. So full of dishonesty.
Conventional nuclear power does have learning curve benefits. Just look at South Korea where costs have decreased year over year for decades. We don’t see it today in the West for three big reasons: We keep changing designs, and we keep using inexperienced crews instead of the same crews over and over again, and an explosion of often needless and overly strict safety regulations that happened after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. You can look at plots of overnight capital costs, and see how they increased by 3x in the west right after Chernobyl.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106
The video is basically assuming that hourly spot price markets is a better system than a free market that allows long-term purchase agreements. This is nonsense. These kinds of markets have been very carefully created by solar and wind lobbies along with their friends in natural gas for their own personal benefit. They drive up costs for end consumers, and they move money from poor people to the rich solar, wind, and gas lobbies. Give an equal playing field that allows long-term purchase agreements, and nuclear will be just fine.
It says that big nuclear power has failed financially. Nonsense – Vogtle and Hinkley C will still be quite cheap, especially compared to solar and wind. Once you start dong things the right way, e.g. South Korea, then you get closer to an order of magnitude cheaper. Big nuclear in the west has failed because government policies have been specifically designed to make it fail. The anti-nuclear Greens won.
As discussed elsewhere, water cooling is not required. Without it, conventional plants costs may be up to 50% higher, but using water for regular cooling is not required.
This “40% of water is used for cooling in power plants” is dishonest. They briefly describe why it’s dishonest, but not in enough detail to avoid purposefully misleading their audience IMAO. I don’t have the numbers offhand, but rhetoric of this sort is often flagrantly dishonest because of how they conflate meanings of the word “used”. When a farm uses water and no one else can use that water. When a conventional nuclear power plant uses water, most of that water is put right back into the river, just slightly warmer, and it can be used by someone else.
“There is no question that renewables plus storage could do it.” — Tell that to most of the climate scientists that call this a “mirage” or “almost as bad as believing in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy”. This video doesn’t even acknowledge that most climate scientists think pretty firmly otherwise, and thus this video is completely full of shit.
What is the security problem of nuclear power? The only people who have ever attacked a nuclear power plant are IIRC Greenpeace Germany with a rocket propelled grenade, which, by the way, did absolutely nothing. In a war like in Ukraine right now, yea, that’s a worry. Otherwise, terrorism and security is not a particularly noteworthy concern.
Wind and solar prices don’t matter. They could be completely free and they would still be too expensive because of the auxiliary costs of turning intermittent electricity into useful electricity. Transmission costs alone would be more than the nuclear solution. Storage and backup costs alone would be more than the nuclear solution.
Solar and wind are not the cleanest. Nuclear is.
The people in this video are delusional, but, then again, so are many people, including the blog owner and several other commenters. And again I say this because I have the scientists on my side, and they have special interest groups who are probably funded by fossil fuel money on their side.
“I want nuclear power to be part of that mix, but they have to earn it.” — Liar.
Gerrard – costs matter in our current system
The current cost of things is is not, and never has been representative of the “actual value”. It’s representative of how much people can get away with charging, plus how much blood and treasure is spent keeping prices lower by forcing poor nations to provide the raw goods demanded by rich nations.
The way we calculate cost right now is deeply flawed, and makes it extremely difficult to assess what limits are due to physical limitations, and what are due to how we’ve designed our economic system.
I don’t live in a delusional netherworld that thinks that current costs are somehow completely disassociated with the material and labor inputs. Yes, costs as they stand now don’t capture at all sustainability, and that’s bad, but it’s simply laughable to say as you just did that modern costs are a political fiction and not deeply based on material and labor requirements.
And you missed my points seemingly purposefully. Let me spell it out. People who are dying today don’t care about sustainability at all. They care about doing what they need to, to get through the day. Modern costs capture this pretty well. It’s impossible to sell people in the poor parts of the world on sustainability when they’re starving, and dying of preventable waterborne illness because they don’t have a modern water system, or dying because they don’t have refrigeration for medicine and vaccines, etc. That is why cost matters. Going from no electricity to a little bit of reliable electricity makes a huge, huge difference in the quality of life, and you can’t run refrigeration, water systems, and the haber process on solar and wind intermittent electricity alone.
Depending on how you manage it, you absolutely can run refrigeration off of solar power, especially if the container is well-insulated. Fridges and freezers don’t need to be constantly on, and cooling them just during the day can make a huge difference in food preservation.
A solar panel can also run things like filters and pumps.
And yes – going from no electricity to a little bit of reliable electricity makes a huge difference in quality of life. That includes electricity that’s reliably generated during daylight. It all depends on how you use it.
And unlike fossil fuels – or nuclear – the amount of existing infrastructure required for reliable access to power is far less for things like PV panels.
The places you’re talking about don’t have power grids to convey nuclear-generated electricity, and don’t currently have the resources to build and maintain those grids. Getting solar panels batteries, and equipment that runs off them to such a place is a far easier solution the nuclear for areas that currently have zero power, and far less volatile in every sense of the word than the kerosene that’s often what’s available.
And finally, I didn’t say that 100% of modern costs are political fiction – I said that at least some portion is political fiction, and how much that is varies depending on the material in question.
I’d argue that the costs of fossil fuels are artificially LOW, rather than artificially high, for example.
Oh, and if I was going to try to run the Haber process with solar power, I wouldn’t be doing it with electricity, I’d use a concentrated solar furnace.
Not in the real world. Look at the recent experiments of solar power plus batteries to an IIRC small village in India. It didn’t work. They wanted on the grid because solar + batteries did not meet their needs, and they got on the grid.
You and other Green advocates keep saying that the infrastructure for 100% Green plans are cheaper / smaller / better / whatever than nuclear hydro plans, but this is simply not how it works in reality. The reality is that 100% nuclear and hydro plans have cheaper upfront capital costs, and this is true even for today’s cost overruns of Hinkley C and Vogtle. LCOE is a financial accounting trick that hides this truth.
I know your house is on the grid. Why don’t you go off the grid and see how well that works? Or read about the experiences of others who have instead of just making shit up? It’s easy to play pretend at engineering and just assert things work because it seems like it would in your head as opposed to doing the actual hard work of math and engineering.
e.g. put your money where your mouth is. If it’s so fabulous and cheap and easy, then why aren’t you doing it?
We’re not talking about grid vs. leaving the grid, we’re talking about no grid and no likelihood of a grid in the near future, vs intermittent power that’s enough to charge phones, run a filter, and provide some light.
YOU were the one who said a small amount of reliable power beats no power at all.
I don’t know why you think that these are different scenarios. They’re not. It seems like you know that going off grid is highly impractical for you. Why do you think that being off is not highly impractical for poor non-white people in other countries which are historically colonized by white people? You’re trying to create some kind of middle space where none exists. If you can’t heat your water, refrigerate your food, charge your cell phone, etc., with an off-the-grid solar+battery setup, then neither can someone in India, Africa, South-East Asia, etc. This kind of Green energy supremacy that you preach is just another kind of colonialization.
I honestly wouldn’t mind it, but I don’t have the money to set myself up.
And in case you missed it, I’m not suggesting that individual people all choose to live the perfect life simultaneously, so it’s a bit odd of you to call me a hypocrite for not having personally invested money I don’t have in things that aren’t available to me. This is not a problem that’s going to be solved in an individualist framework.
I think that everyone should have access to a power grid, and to internet, but that’s not mutually exclusive with distributed power generation. If we’re talking about a systemic overhaul of the how everyone does power, then why not ensure that people who want it can have PV power while they’re waiting for the grid to reach them? I’m not even suggesting that the places I’ve been that use kerosene generators get rid of what they have, but there’s zero question that a PV setup would improve their lives and reduce their reliance kerosene.
You seem obsessed with the notion that not only is renewable energy insufficient, but any use of it is bad and evil, and doesn’t work even when it does.
What I know is that, since I installed my PV roof system, I’ve paid zero to the electricity company (actually, they have paid me).
So I get my hot water, cooking, dishwasher, clothes washer, air conditioning, refrigerator, computer, TV, lights and whatever else I use for free. Paid off in under two years, has a twenty-year life.
(These are facts, not speculation)
—
Abe, you perceive correctly. Gerrard once asserted (I might be paraphrasing) that we should not spend even one dollar on renewables, because that meant one dollar less for nuclear power plants.
(Care to dispute that, Gerrard?)
—
And, of course, I’ve also noted that generating electricity is not the only source of greenhouse emissions, such that even were electricity fully decarbonised there would still be emissions, and the problem would not be fully solved thereby.
Re: #40
“I’ve paid zero to the electricity company (actually, they have paid me).”
If that was a situation where the company was free to choose when and whether to buy your surplus, and they bought it at the going wholesale price, I would call that an equitable arrangement. If this was one of those mandates where your fellow ratepayers were forced to buy your surplus at retail prices even when it was not needed, I would call that something else.
kronk, don’t know where you are, but here (Qld, Australia) the energy market is privatised; lots of different companies with lots of different plans, and retailers are separate from generators.
Point being, I’m benefiting without going off-grid; when I generate excess, my provider buys that (paying less than it charges me for it), and when I don’t, I buy it from them. Don’t worry, they make their money; the plan includes a daily supply charge, a charge to accept my solar power. And yes, they will sell that excess to other customers, and yes, they will make money on the arbitrage and on the savings from not having to buy it from power generating companies.
Thing is, since I (on average) send 4 units of power to the grid for every unit I get from the grid, I still come out ahead after all that.
So, no need to go off-grid to benefit. That’s Gerrard’s all-or-nothing thinking.
Why not give everyone a pony too?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I%20want%20a%20pony
…
You are a leach on the system. You are exploiting poor people on the grid who are not rich enough to afford the up-front investment to do the same thing. You are using grid electricity, but you’re not paying for it. Worse, you’re (legally) stealing money from the grid and from the poor users of the grid. Every bit of money that you get from the grid company is a bit of money that you stole from a poor neighbor somewhere. You are using the grid and its resiliency and 100% uptime, but you’re not paying for it. Instead, you’re making your poor neighbors pay for you. It’s sickening.
kronk
Even at wholesale price, that’s not fair. Other generators provide other useful services that John is not. Thermal generators often provide blackstart capability, and they provide grid inertia and other frequency control services, which John does not.
Nope. Other users would pay the very same whether or not I myself have PV system.
Told you, it’s privatised (but regulated, so that all plans are the same for everyone — explicitly set up so rural and remote communities pay the same as big cities).
Of course I’m paying for it, when I get it from the grid.
And I paid up-front to install the system, too. A$3600 for a 6.6Kw system with a 5Kw inverter.
What a load of rubbish. That money comes from my investment; might as well claim that every generating system is likewise stealing money from poor neighbours.
Again, utterly wrong. First of all, I already noted how I pay a supply charge ($1/day) just to be connected to the grid, and also a solar feed-in charge (so the power company can suck my electricity).
And guess what? In the last two years, I had a power outage in my area (lightning storm took down local transformer) and my power went out. I don’t have off-grid, as I noted, and so when the grid goes down so does my power — I didn’t pay the extra for an isolator and battery system so I can keep power during outages. See, the utilities don’t like it when solar panels are pumping power to the grid when repairs are required.
(As I noted, it’s well-regulated. For example, the inverter does not do instantaneous power delivery on purpose, so that when a cloud moves and sunlight intensifies the output only slowly increases. This is to buffer the grid.)
I already told you, my neighbours’ (rich or poor) electricity price is the same as mine.
In fact, they are actually paying less because of it. So, the very opposite of what you believe.
Re: #45
“And I paid up-front to install the system, too. A$3600 for a 6.6Kw system with a 5Kw inverter.”
And since you used past tense on the payoff, presumably you paid that at least two years ago. That is an impressively low price. Around here (Texas) the cost of that much residential solar capacity would be more like US$16,000 -$19,000. Is solar really that much cheaper in Australia, or was this some special deal you got?
kronk, early 2020, and that was a slightly upmarket price, because I did my research and selected a reputable installer and decent components, rather than the cheapest quote.
Took one day to install.
But yes, that’s what I paid, not what the system cost overall. Here in Oz, there is a government subsidy called Small-scale Technology Certificates (STCs), which in my case (checking the bill) was $3,535, so you can add that.
But they’re available to everyone installing a small system (under 10Kw IIRC), so not special.
(Also, I saved nearly $1,000 by choosing a Chinese brand inverter rather than the premium German version, and so far so good)
—
Walk down my street, pretty much every single dwelling has solar panels. Not a particularly upmarket area — though not a poor area, either.
PS just looked at the app; in calendar year 2021, the system generated 9.85Mwh.
Not too shabby.
re: #47
“Here in Oz, there is a government subsidy called Small-scale Technology Certificates (STCs), which in my case (checking the bill) was $3,535, so you can add that.”
So does that mean the total system cost without the subsidy would have been $7135?
And this was at least two years ago? That still seems incredibly cheap–like less than half the going rate around here today.
So where does the money for this government subsidy come from?
Yes, kronk, that’s what the cost would have been. As for where the money comes from, you can research that for yourself if you want to — the Government, is all I know. And Government money comes in from all sorts of sources.
Mind you, I didn’t have to get that subsidy up-front; what happens is I transfer my credits to my installer and they collect them over time, which I could do instead if I cared to do the paperwork and applications and so forth. I’m pretty sure my installer also profited thereby, but I consider that a fair deal.
Cost vs convenience for me, profit for them. All good.
Anyway, Government financing is complicated. For example, we pay a 10% GST (tax), on most goods and services to the Federal Government which disburses that to the States, so I obviously paid that for the system. And I also pay that tax for the electricity I buy, though my provider does not pay it on the electricity it buys from me, for reasons.
A matter of perspective; from mine, your prices seem incredibly expensive.
—
Anyway, my point was that I’ve invested in a PV system, which in no small part due to where I live is both beneficial to me and to my community, and it didn’t involve going off-grid.
(And I very much am not the rare one who has taken advantage of this opportunity)
Harkening back to the post itself, it’s not like I could install a nuclear power source (even a radioisotope thermoelectric generator) at home, is it? 🙂
Same place as the money for military spending and the money for fossil fuel subsidies.
And the money governments spend to subsidize nuclear power.
Which is fine – I don’t have a problem with governments investing in energy infrastructure and generation. Why do you?
John.
It’s a subtle point. Let me try it again.
Transmission.
Your own source says that transmission costs are about half of total grid electricity costs (“poles-and-wires costs, which typically account for up to half of a bill”).
For the sake of argument, because you have solar on your roof, you consume about half the amount of the grid electricity compared to your neighbor without solar rooftop. Because you purchase half of the electricity, you also only pay half for the transmission. This is not fair. The transmission lines are there to provide you 100% uptime guarantees. Assuming your house max load is about the same as your neighbor, you should be paying the same transmission costs as your neighbor, regardless of how much electricity you actually use. Your neighbor is again subsidizing your electricity use.
You say you pay 1 dollar per day for hookup costs or whatever. This is close to an order of magnitude too small for paying for the transmission that you use.
Other grid services.
Your source is incorrect when it says that all grid costs can be divided into generation and transmission. Principally, there are also grid inertia and other grid frequency control services, and also blackstart capability. The grid stays up, and therefore you have 100% uptime guarantees, because of these other services, which you do not provide. Someone has to pay for these services, and these services are included in the cost of electricity. Because you only pay for half of the electricity cost as your neighbor (for the sake of argument), that means that your neighbor is again subsidizing your electricity use.
In summary
Again, what you need to do is calculate total costs, and then divide by households, and again, because of all of the extra equipment to actually make it work, adding solar and wind raises total costs and thus also raises individual household costs. You don’t see it because you’re being subsidized by your neighbors, e.g. colloquially you’re (legally) stealing from your neighbors, and most often you’re (legally) stealing from your poorer neighbors who cannot afford the upfront investment costs of rooftop solar.
The problem with today’s current market structure is that it was designed for reliable dispatchable generators. It didn’t matter that consumers paid a single cost per unit (Joule) of electricity to cover fuel costs as all as capital costs. However, solar and wind disrupt that dynamic. What should happen is that you should receive a monthly bill for all of the capital costs (transmission, as well as all fossil fuel plant costs) which is scaled to your peak demand in watts, and then receive a second money bill for fuel costs from other generators. That would be a fair distribution of costs. In that kind of system, a homeowner who buys rooftop solar would almost certainly not see enough savings over the lifetime of their rooftop solar system to cover the costs of that rooftop solar system.
PS:
Your country is still like 70% coal. Your source gives the probable reason for electricity prices coming down: cheaper coal (“it said fuel costs for coal and gas were generally lower as well”).
PPS: I might not have been clear enough. A fair billing system would be composed of monthly bill #1 which is scaled to peak household load (in watts) which covers all grid capital including transmission and fossil fuel plants, plus monthly bill #2 which is scaled by grid electricity consumed (no net metering) to cover the fuel costs of plants on the grid. There is no net metering in this scheme. Your rooftop solar would reduce your grid fuel cost bill but not your grid capital cost bill.
If, hypothetically, lots of people moving to rooftop solar would safely allow decommissioning fossil fuel plants – which I believe is largely false, but hypothetically – then and only then would the grid capital cost monthly bill start going down for everyone. What would really happen is most of the fossil fuel plants would still be there to cover peak demand when solar and wind all go down, with some mild amounts of batteries for public-relations reasons and not for any economic or engineering reasons, with lots more transmission to move solar and wind from where it’s produced to where it’s needed. The net result in almost every case is total monthly bills going up for end consumers.
PPPS: There would need to be an additional ad-hoc monthly charge for other grid services, again, grid inertia, other frequency control, and blackstart capability. This additional monthly bill would also be scaled to peak household load. This monthly bill would probably be significantly smaller than the grid capital cost bill and the grid fuel cost bill. The cost for these additional services would not be insignificantly small, but it would be the smallest of the three monthly bills.
Gerrard, it’s not subtle, it’s mistaken.
Already told you, I send out 4 units of electricity for every unit I consume from my own system.
So my metered usage is super-low (nowhere near half) compared to a household without a PV system.
Looking at my most recent power bill (every 90 days, here) which has a usage comparison based on local averages:
Your home 488kWh1 person 909kWh
2 people 1,395kWh
Also: “Supply charge 90 days $0.9851 $88.66” (yes, not quite 1 dollar, liar that I am 🙂 ).
That supply charge is specifically for sustaining the grid. It’s just for being connected to it.
BTW, it’s not the actual transmission of electrical power that costs money, it’s the infrastructure for transmitting the power and its maintenance)
What world do you live in? Already told you, I had a power failure some months ago. No power at all for 19 hours. There is no such guarantee, and (again!) my connection (“Supply”) covers that; it’s separate from the payment for the actual power I draw.
Wow. Again: the plans are the same for everyone in that plan (regulated!), my neighbours pay exactly the same supply charge as I do (or an equivalent depending on the provider they choose and the plan they select from their provider). But all plans have the equivalent.
So no, no such “subsidy” exists.
I assure you, my provider (AGL) is a rather profitable company with millions of customers. I’m pretty sure they’re squeezing the most out of the market bearing in mind that they have competitors, and they certainly ain’t going broke. I think they know much better than you do how to organise their finances.
In your world, maybe. In the real world (and hey, kronk, I read about Texas) there is no such uptime guarantee. And you do amuse me when you imagine I think the cost of maintaining and upgrading the grid is restricted to its distribution wires.
Didn’t raise my costs — from that last bill:
“How we’ve worked out your bill.
Previous balance and payments.
Previous balance $165.68cr
7 Nov 21 Refund-Cheque $115.68
Balance brought forward $50.00cr”
(I am (part of) an individual household)
Already addressed that. Actually, I am subsidising them, by providing electricity to the grid that would not otherwise exist except for my personal investent. Otherwise, instead of buying my excess at a pittance, the power retailer would have to buy it at market rates.
That was the grid around a decade, a decade and a half ago. Investment has been heavy and ongoing on modernising it. Which is why I’ve tried to tell you about smart grids that manage distributed power generation, in addition to grid storage technologies.
Ahem. Supply charge.
Also, you seem not to get that here, the energy sector is fully privatised; we have electricity retailers, and we have electricity generators. The former buy it from the latter.
That is, the retailer purchases the power from the generator, and sells it to customers.
I am (effectively) a generator, from whom the retailer buys power; so by your contention I too should be paid for my capital costs.
(Oh no, my neighbours are “stealing” from me!)
Well, yes. Weird how it’s cheap, eh?
(https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/australian-fossil-fuel-subsidies-hit-10-3-billion-in-2020-21/)
Mind you, there are no coal plants in South Australia, which is where I lived until I moved to sunnier climes. Retirement is good!
If you’re ever looking for work, I reckon you’d make a good cherry-picker.
The full quotation: “At the heart of the trend was the surge of low-cost renewable energy coming into the system, which the council said was pushing down wholesale electricity costs.
On top of this, it said fuel costs for coal and gas were generally lower as well, while poles-and-wires costs, which typically account for up to half of a bill, had also been coming down.”
John
You’re not truly listening. You’re just skimming to pick out points to attack.
Let me say it shorter – the system that you have where almost all of your cost to the grid is proportional to the energy (joules) that you consume – that is an inherently unfair market structure that unfairly moves money from poor people to richer people like you. In a fair system, most of the bill would be assigned by the typical or peak power usage (watts), with a smaller additional charge for energy consume (joules).
You haven’t addressed this at all.
The fact remains that if you count up your total costs, including rooftop solar and total grid costs, it will be cheaper than your neighbor. That’s a bad thing. You think it’s a good thing, but it’s actually a bad thing. It’s a sign that the system is failing. It’s an unfair transfer of wealth from poor people who cannot afford the upfront investment to rich people who can afford the upfront investment.
The other fact remains that showing that a house still connected to the grid can have cheaper costs under an unfair market structure shows nothing about whether it’s cheaper – or even physically feasible – for every household to adopt the same approach of rooftop solar and maintain such cheap electricity bills.
John
You are a leach on the system, driving up costs for your neighbors, enabled by by others in the public and in who are equally ignorant of how the grid actually works, and/or liars who have deep investments in fossil fuels, and those with a anti-nuclear neo-Malthusian outlook on life.
You’re so vague! Look, peak usage can spike to (say) 20Kw running an A/C, the oven, the water heater, the washing machine, the dishwasher (the biggest users of power in a home) simultaneously. But only an idiot would do that — or, to be fair, only someone who does not benefit from household power management.
Me, I draw the most power when the sun is shining, so that I can minimise the draw when it isn’t and I’m buying it instead of generating it. And 5Kw is plenty for my household.
To go back to my last power bill, note this:
“General Usage 488.271kWh $0.1491 $72.80
Demand 2.754kW $0.0758 $18.79”
The general usage fee is the overall consumption from the grid, the total.
The demand fee is based on the highest draw (peak power usage in your terms) within a half-hour window within in the billing period, which incurs that surcharge of 7.58c per Kw per day for the full billing period. My first bill, I hadn’t realised that.
So peak power usage is indeed part of the billing system.
Oh, spare me. What, I should not spend my money generating green electricity and saving money at the same time?
Such piety! So, I own my own home — therefore I’m stealing from people who rent?
You are getting ridiculous; again, I can afford to install a PV system at home, but I can’t afford to install a nuclear power generator. I mean, if I could, I might.
(Again to the nth: I have no issue with safe and regulated nuclear power)
I am a net electricity producer, like any other power generation entity.
(And, again, it’s “leech”, not “leach”!)
And yet again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve#Benefits_for_the_consumers
(yes, yes, I know… for you, grid storage is a non-starter; better to worry about things like frequency regulation 😉
[I also grow vegetables and herbs and I have chickens; presumably, I am stealing from poor people thereby, who have to buy their eggs and herbs and veggies. Oh, and I have a rainwater tank, too. Such a plutocrat, I!]
In passing, I note that the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power station is being featured in the news.
You are not being charged according to the principles that I outlined. Are you really trying to say that you are?
I doubt that. Before coronavirus, the peak usage in most places was around 6 PM, aka right when solar power dropped to about zero.
Electricity is not a commodity. As long as you continue to talk as though it’s a commodity, you’re in not-even-wrong territory. It doesn’t matter if you’re a net exporter. Being a net exporter doesn’t keep the lights on at night. Thus, that electricity at night is vastly more valuable than the electricity that you produce during the day. Easily 10x more valuable. So, unless you’re paying 10x for electricity during the night compared to electricity that you’re selling at noon, then the system is broken, and you are being subsidized by your neighbors.
Re batteries and grid inertia. The Hornsdale battery earns most of its money from certain frequency control services and not for selling electricity. There are several levels of frequency control. Batteries are not a replacement for grid inertia. No one claims that they are. At best, there are papers that are examining the possibility of multiple independent grid-forming inverters, but no one AFAIK claims that they have an actual working model. It’s all pipedreams right now. You could use synchronous condensors. However, those aren’t cheap either. I know that I’ve explained this to you on numerous times, and with sources, but you blithely continue along, ignoring anything that doesn’t fit your delusion.
We’re a pretty rich country; most of the load spike is for airconditioning.
It’s bought and it’s sold. It clearly is.
<snicker>
Your belief is risible, and I’m tired of reiterating the facts at hand.
Heh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve#Revenues_from_operation
It buys it when it’s cheap (guess when that is?) and sells it when it’s expensive.
But yes, frequency control is quite profitable, too.
As opposed to worldwide centralised nuclear power plants replacing renewables? Heh.
And yet, businesses that operate on a profit motive keep investing in solar and wind.
And profiting thereby.
(See, the fuel is free — and economies of scale are beginning to bite)
John
Things other than commodities are bought and sold. For example, services. What traditionally defines a commodity is that it can be stored for later use. Electricity is not a commodity. Electricity is best understood as a service. Electricity is only useful if it is delivered on-time. Electricity delivered 1 day later is basically useless electricity.
Max electricity demand for South Australia is around 6 PM.
https://medium.com/re-members/the-emu-curve-in-south-australia-553c30d8e243Next you’re going to tell me that air conditioning max load is at noon as well. This is also wrong. The hottest part of the day is around 3 PM. (Citation omitted)
That’s not what Hornsdale does. It does not make most of its money in electricity wholesale market. It makes most of its money in the frequency control market. Do you even know the difference?
Yes, actually.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-really-could-go-nuclear/https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124074“Abstract […] Here we demonstrate the potential for a large-scale expansion of global nuclear power to replace fossil-fuel electricity production, based on empirical data from the Swedish and French light water reactor programs of the 1960s to 1990s. Analysis of these historical deployments show that if the world built nuclear power at no more than the per capita rate of these exemplar nations during their national expansion, then coal- and gas-fired electricity could be replaced worldwide in less than a decade. Under more conservative projections that take into account probable constraints and uncertainties such as differing relative economic output across regions, current and past unit construction time and costs, future electricity demand growth forecasts and the retiring of existing aging nuclear plants, our modelling estimates that the global share of fossil-fuel-derived electricity could be replaced within 25–34 years. This would allow the world to meet the most stringent greenhouse-gas mitigation targets.”
Because of distortions in the market created by government regulation. In a proper fair market, no one would be building solar or wind because it wouldn’t be profitable. Solar and wind are only being built because of massive government subsidies, both direct and indirect. I’ve explained at length in this thread some of the distortions created by government action, but there’s a lot more, including: Government mandate including green energy quotas for grid operators and outlawing nuclear competition, massive direct money subsidies for green generator operators, mandating a priority order for purchasing decisions for grid operators that favor green over nuclear, restricting or forbidding long-term purchase agreements and instead requiring purchases according solely to short-term (e.g. hourly) spot market prices, not paying traditional generators for their grid inertia and frequency control services, not paying traditional generators for their blackstart capability, sometimes not paying traditional generators for their dispatchability (depends on the particular area and whether they have a robust and proper capacity market, e.g. not Texas), excessive and needless costly safety regulations on nuclear, insufficient safety regulations and disposal regulations on solar and wind (looking at you China for your rare Earth metal mining and your Uighur slave labor for making solar cells which is responsible for about 50% of all solar cells produced worldwide). I’m probably forgetting some, but that’s a lot of it.
Being fuel-less is actually a huge downside. It’s the fundamental source or cause of the intermittency. Rather than being a selling point, it’s actually the biggest downside of solar and wind.
PS: Apparently I am partially wrong about my definitions of commodity vs service. Some people do use the terminology in the way that I do, and others do not. My apologies. Allow me to reframe my critique: Electricity cannot be stored for later use. Please stop pretending that electricity can be feasibly stored for later use, e.g. talking about “net export” as being the end-all be-all.
I can’t but start with this:
Um. You and I were just referring to Hornsdale. It’s a damn big battery.
So.
Ahem. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/australia/adelaide
(I lived in Adelaide and environs for decades)
(sigh)
It’s a fucking big battery, for pity’s sake. From my earlier link: “By the end of 2018, it was estimated that the Power Reserve had saved A$40 million in costs, mostly in eliminating the need for a fuel-powered 35 MW Frequency Control Ancillary Service.”
It can pump out 150MW and can hold (currently) 193.5 MWh.
No, truly. Just because you can write a pipedream [your term] down doesn’t mean it ain’t one.
Whatever. Point is you don’t dispute my assertion.
As always, I tell you what is, and you respond with what you wish would be.
And I can tell that forevermore I will be reminding you of the concept of grid storage (you know, like Hornsale!) and you will say it just doesn’t work, and that it’s too expensive.
Like I said: profit motive.
(Should I link for the umpteenth time to the various extant and proposed forms of grid storage?)
What’s the point of this link? Peak sun around 1:27 PM? Ok. That’s fine. Hottest part of the day is still around 3-4 PM, and max electricity usage is still around 6 PM.
Re Hornsdale. It’s not that big, depending on how you look at it. It’s like, what, 5 minutes of total demand of all South Australia or something like that? Reaching 5 minutes is not the same thing as reaching 2-3 days, which is what is required for switching to 100% solar wind. And again, there’s not enough feasibly mineable lithium in the world, and other battery techs are worse.
Your own citation proves me right – Hornsdale earns most of its money from frequency control services, and not from selling electricity on the wholesale market.
France is not a pipedream. It exists. It’s real. 100% renewables countries don’t exist (minus the rare country that has lots of hydro relative to its population).
I do not dispute your assertion that someone can make money from government subsidies. I dispute your underlying assertion that “profitable under a particular market structure” means “makes financial sense for society”.
Re feasibility of battery storage. Liars like you have been saying the same song and dance for literally 60 years straight now. I can supply many quotes from the leaders of the Green movement – some who are still active and mainstream today like Amory Lovins – going back 60 years that finally, this year, is the year that solar and wind are finally viable. They said it in 1970, in 1980, in 1990, in 2000, in 2010, and 2020. They were wrong every single time. What makes you think that they’re right this time?
John
Do you even know the difference between wholesale market, capacity markets, and frequency control markets? Or that there are different levels of frequency control? This is a serious question.
Also, are you really making the argument that the hottest part of the day is when the sun is directly overhead? Really? How can you be this obtuse?
And the Sun is still shining for nearly two hours. That means sunlight.
Duh. That’s the point. Have I enlightened you? 😉
You don’t really get Wikipedia? All the stuff there is a distilled consensus, and various items are variously dated. For example, at the time of that profit figure, it was neither as big as it is now nor is the demand for frequency regulation as frequent or needy. Not the only player in town, these days. What you don’t get is that, as time passes, infrastructure and technology advances.
But hey, if you want to do a bit of Googling and provide me with current figures, I’ll concede that they indeed make most of their money from that alone, and not for arbitraging electricity wholesale prices. BTW, in case you are confused, here’s how it works:
-households with PV systems generate power (when the sun shines) and sell the excess to their provider (effectively, to the grid).
-the more power is being generated by those systems, the cheaper the wholesale power price becomes.
-if one could (say) buy power for a pittance (or even for free!) and store (say) a couple of hundred MWh, and wait until:
-the Sun ain’t shining and the Wind ain’t blowing, oh no! The power is becoming expensive!
-gas plants: “no worries, give us half an hour and we’ll be right there”.
-Hornsdale: “meanwhile, want up to 150Mw instantly? Not cheap, but hey!”
-grid: “aw, shit. Allright, then. :|”
Because it’s become economically profitable. I keep telling you.
Profit motive.
You clearly think that you do. Tell you what, why not prove it to me by summarising how all that works in South Australia?
Mate! The sun doesn’t have to be directly overhead — in fact, it can’t be due to the latitude.
It rises in the southeast, transverses towards the northwest. To this I can attest.
Anyway. Believe it or not, panels don’t just generate power when the Sun is directly overhead.
(My solar panels are well-arranged — one bank of panels faces north, with a roof slope that nicely matches the inclination, and another faces west, to catch the best of the setting sun.
(Also, did you note how my PV capacity exceeds the inverter’s capacity? 6.6 vs 5)
Here. The simple calculation.
Using your numbers. A$3600 for a 6.6Kw system with a 5Kw inverter, aka 2664 USD.
What’s your average demand? 1 KW? Let’s go with that. Current lithium ion battery prices are, what, 160 USD / KWh last I checked. For the sake of argument, 1 day of storage, which is in the neighborhood of what you would need per capita assuming you had a continent-wide lossless infinite-capacity transmission grid. If you’re off grid, it’s closer to 3 weeks, but let’s be generous. 1 day of storage. (1 day) (1 KW) (160 USD / KWh) (1 / 80% max depth of discharge) (1 / 92% roundtrip storage losses) = 5217 USD. And it’ll last 10 years if you’re lucky, and the solar will last 20 or 30 years, and the inverter is about 10 years. So, overall, upfront costs are 2664 USD + 5217 USD = 7881 USD, and yearly recurring costs from capital replacement are, generously, (2664 USD / 20 years) + (5217 USD / 10 years) = 655 USD / year.
Compare that to nuclear. Assume 1 KW for the sake of argument, same as what I assumed your average demand is. Ignoring financing entirely which we should basically do as a society when planning long-term public infrastructure, nuclear at Hinkley C and Vogtle comes out to: upfront capital costs: (1 KW) (13 USD / real watt) = 13,000 USD, and yearly recurring costs, including capital replacement at end of lifetime, fuel, other O&M costs, and decommissioning costs: (1 KW) (0.4 USD / real-watt year) = 400 USD / year. Upfront costs are higher, but once you factor in the cost of the massive amount of additional transmission for the 100% solar wind plan, then nuclear is going to be cheaper. Yearly recurring costs to maintain the system (including capital replacement costs at end of lifetime) is a little cheaper.
That’s the worst case nuclear. Best case nuclear as informed by real historical numbers in France and South Korea look something like this: Upfront capital costs: (1 KW) (2.8 USD / real watt) = 2,800 USD, and yearly recurring costs: (1 KW) (0.14 USD / real-watt year) = 140 USD / year. It’s substantially cheaper on both counts. This is what we as society should be looking at: How quickly can we get there, which is approximated by upfront capital costs, and how much does it cost to maintain once we’re there, which is just the total yearly costs without financing tricks.
And then there’s still the costs for grid inertia, other frequency control services, and blackstart capability, which come for free and/or are much cheaper add-ons for a nuclear power plan compared to a solar wind plan. It really is a magnitude of order cheaper on both upfront capital costs and also on total costs per year (including capital replacement at end of lifetime, fuel costs, O&M costs, and decommissioning costs).
And all of this assumes a wildly unrealistic requirement of only 1 day of storage. You’re going to experience blackouts much more frequently than today with only 1 day of storage on a 100% solar wind plan.
And again, there’s not enough feasibly mineable lithium for this plan to even work in the first place for the whole world. Battery costs just went up. (And regarding the recent claims over the last few months of iron batteries, I see a new battery tech every year touted to solve the problem. This is nothing new. These new battery techs never go anywhere. They’re vaporware. I won’t believe it until I see their full specs published, inventing total inventory, and full operating stats, so that we can make a proper comparison.)
And you’re still an ignorant fool if you think that the hottest part of the day is 1:27 PM and not 3-4 PM. Common sense is not a replacement for a proper grounding in high school physics.
Their generation is substantially less circa 3-4 PM when it’s the hottest part of the day, and their generation is practically nothing circa 6 PM which is the point of peak electrical demand for most households (and the grid at large).
That’s a pisspoor replacement for “Sorry. I fucked up. You were right at the beginning. Worse, I posted a quote from a source as a rebuttal but the quote actually explicitly supported your original position, which means I doubly fucked up. I’m sorry. I’ll try not to do it again.”
Only because of government subsidies. The “proof” is that you’re still on the grid instead of relying on batteries alone.
John,
Seriously, did you not read this before you posted it? Direct quote of your earlier post:
Again, that clearly supports my position. It’s a reiteration of my position. Yet, you posted it as a rebuttal even though it directly supports my position. So, did you even read it at all before posting it? Or do you not understand what the words in context mean? I don’t know which. Either way, that’s a colossal fuckup that deserves a better apology than what you have given thus far.
I get it already! You think I should have spent my money on a nuclear power plant instead of my solar system. I get it, OK?
I don’t agree.
And again, lithium batteries are one way to store grid-scale power. There are other options, not least any number of alternative chemistries, many of them cheaper.
Yes, yes. I get it. Pie-in-the-sky, for you. All talk no walk. Etc.
Thing is, when you started your perorations against wind and solar, there was no such thing as a grid-storage lithium system, either. Yet here they are, now.
In passing: Tesla signs major supply agreement with Northern Territory miner Core Lithium
It’s not exactly a rare metal. It just wasn’t mined much because it was not profitable, back some years ago. Now it is, and mining will ramp up, wherever people see $profit$.
Welcome to the real world.
Lithium is a relatively rare metal.
#33 most common element in the crust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crustIn terms feasibly mineable amounts, there’s about 19 million metric tons in all worldwide reserves.
https://investingnews.com/daily/resource-investing/battery-metals-investing/lithium-investing/lithium-reserves-country/
In terms of predicted total amounts, aka resources, is a bit more. Depends what source you use. IIRC, US geological survey at one point said about 40 million metric tons worldwide.
If we’re serious about solving climate change, that means supplying most of the world’s energy via electricity, and in a solar wind plan, a lot of that is going into storage.
Other numbers which you can look up: 150 g Li metal per 1 KWh of battery. Assume 80% max depth of discharge. Assume 92% round-trip conversion efficiency of storage. Target 1 day at 20 TW. That means our total amount of lithium is: (20 TW days)(150 g / (1 KWh)) (1 / 80%) (1 / 92%) = about 98 million metric tons of pure lithium.
So, more than 4x times the proven reserves and double the estimated total resources. And remember that there are other large industrial users of lithium.
PS: You can run the same calculations for lead and nickel, and come to roughly the same conclusions, e.g. not enough of those either.
You can gish gallop and point to a dozen different battery techs, but the point is that none of them work as well as lead or li-ion, and we know this because they’re not in common use. Anything else is highly speculative, and I’ve seen dozens of vaporware battery startups.
Wow. That was in 2018. Like, years ago. Not now.
Also, I directly and pre-emptively addressed your objection: “For example, at the time of that profit figure, it was neither as big as it is now nor is the demand for frequency regulation as frequent or needy. Not the only player in town, these days. What you don’t get is that, as time passes, infrastructure and technology advances.”
Perhaps ask yourself, why build a 150MW battery to supply 35Mw? It’s grossly excessive of requirements, so whence the additional 115MW?
(Could it possibly be to be able to sell when the time is right?)
—
Only you could imagine that. I’ve seen sources that specifically claim you are quite wrong, but I could not verify the figures on Neonen’s website. Trust me, things have changed since 2018.
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Mate! I bloody well lived there for forty years+. I know damn well what it’s like.
—
Less, yes. Let’s see…
https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=1d&interval=30m
702MW at 6.00pm yesterday. Not too feeble.
Sun is shining.
(You might care to notice, should you follow my link to verify my claim, that today, at 1pm, 47.6% of generation was renewables. Nobody told them the limit is 30%)
John. You fucked up. You clearly attempted to rebut my point by providing a quote and cite, and that quote and cite actually supported my position. I will not engage with you on any other topic ever again until you admit that this was a mistake, and apologize for it. I will bring this up every time that you attempt to engage with me in the future, and I will not directly engage with you any more. Consider this an ultimatum.
PS:
Lying asshole. For the benefit of others, that supposed soft limit was for total daily generation, and not peak generation at noon. The 30% total generation number from solar and wind corresponds roughly to 100% peak generation at noon from solar and wind. John knows this, but John is a lying asshole.
Ah well, good session, but perhaps too spammy. And with diminishing returns.
—
Abe, should I stop enabling Gerrard?
Fuck you John.
Die in a fire. And as a survivor of third degree burns, I truly know what that means.
Gerrard:
Um. As a survivor, you can’t possibly know what it feels like to die in a fire.
So you’re obviously wrong. Again.
Ok, I think we’re well past useful discussion when we get to the torturous death wishes. As a survivor of third degree burns, I’m not super thrilled about that particular wish, especially given that neither of you has any more power to make any of this happen than I do.
Time to cool off.
STCs.
Just a quick clarification on the system of Small-scale Technology Certificates here in Oz.
No citations offered. I am the source (I work in the solar industry here in Oz). Don’t like that? Tough shit. Look it up yourself
First of all it is NOT a government subsidy.
Any PV system designed and installed by suitably accredited persons* that has an array rated at under 100kW peak is eligible for STCs.
The number of STCs a system earns is calculated against the theoretical total production over what is called a deeming period. The deeming period is whole-years, with 2030 being the last year the system will operate. The number of STCs therefore falls each calendar year. The STCs are a one-off issuance and cannot be created without submission of the serial numbers of the PV modules and inverter.
STCs must be purchased at $40 each by the liable entities such as the large dirty generators (operators of coal and gas generators). It is not government money that subsidises the installation of sub-100kW systems. It is the power generators who are compelled by the government to invest in renewables by making it less expensive to do so at the point of sale.
STCs have a market value of $40 each (legislated maximum price – you will see why later). There are brokers and clearing-houses between the entity creating the STCs (the purchaser of the PV system) and the entity purchasing the STCs at $40 each. So open mouths needing feeding. Brokers pay about $36 to $37 for each STC. They sell to the next layer at about $38 to $39 each, who ultimately sell them at $40 each.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. The liable entities WILL recoup on their investment. In the case of STCs, an average household in Oz without solar is levied the cost of about 2 STCs per year (about $80 more on their annual electricity costs). Because the STCs are calculated against production, recouping the cost of the investment in the STCs by the liable entities is based on consumption. Therefore, because a house with solar uses less power from the grid, on average someone like John Morales will be being levied for one STC per year ($40 more on their annual electricity costs).
This is the reason there is a maximum legislated STC price. It is to stop households being ripped off by rapacious capitalist electricity retailers.
These levies for STCs are over and above the supply charges which go toward network maintenance, meter readers, etc. Incidentally these charges vary state to state. JM is charged about $1 per day in Queensland. Where I am, the daily charge is about $1.50 per day. But we have no peak charges (unless we draw more than 100A per phase, in which case what is called CT billing comes into play, and daily charges can be over $10 as what is called a blended cost of supply).
The STC system was created to make rooftop PV solar systems cheaper to purchase up-front. This has been achieved, and rooftop solar PV systems are being installed at levels not anticipated by the creators of the system.
STCs are also created by small-scale wind and hydro systems under 100kW.
Because of this system, the government here has instant access to data showing precisely how much renewables capacity is installed by homes and businesses in any given year. And every consumer of electricity in the country contributes to the investment in renewables under the scheme, including those who also invest in rooftop solar such as JM and over 25% of all households here in Oz.
None of the above is open to argument. If you want to argue with it I suggest that you take it up with the federal government of Australia.
*A suitably accredited person must have a current accreditation with the Clean Energy Council of Australia.
tuatara, wow. Thanks for the detailed info. I stand corrected.
John, no worries.
Actually John, sorry. There was an error in my statement above.
So before our atomic nut job here accuses me of being a lying racist who hates poor people, I correct myself willingly.
Any renewable generator up to 100kW is eligible for STCs.
Again, you’re going against the broad scientific consensus, and citing with a serial liar and troll (John), and yet you’re calling me the nut-job. Sigh
I womder why @89 would think that I was referring to them?
Sigh….
Because I called you racist before? I don’t have the memory of a goldfish you know.