Good article on costs. Costs is a topic which is not discussed in the energy transition. As someone who has worked in the energy business for nearly 50 years I will add a point which very few people seem to understand about energy costs and the economy . Everyone believes the economy runs on interest rates it really runs on affordable energy. Nearly every recession for the last 50 years was preceded by a spike in oil prices. Higher energy prices will lead to an economic collapse.
Agreed. I would also add that few understand the sheer scale and complexity of an energy system and how much it varies by geography. I am continually stunned by the “hand waves” that people make on completely overhauling the global energy in just a few decades.
Great point. People tend to forget that labor-replacing energy is what produced modernity and makes our modern life so easy, compared to previous generations. When energy becomes prohibitively expensive, so does maintaining our current quality of life.
1. The article is rubbish, it has overstated the required renewable and storage capacity by a factor of three. There is enough wind and solar in this analysis to generate 3 times Minnesota's annual demand and almost enough storage to supply double its peak demand. It has also understated nuclear costs by a factor of at least two.
2. High energy costs are only a problem for profligate wasters like the US. Denmark has higher energy costs, lower unemployment, lower government debt, a trade surplus and a government budget surplus
Hi Peter, if you read our post a little closer you’ll notice that this is the amount of capacity needed to provide enough electricity on an hourly basis over the course of a year. Generating three times Minnesotas consumption on an annual basis means nothing in terms of hourly resource adequacy.
1. You have 35 GW+ of storage + 2 GW or so of dispatchable capacity to meet about 16 GW of peak demand. As wind and solar never peak at the same time and are certainly never zero at peak demand, there is at least 2.5 times as much storage in GW as you need.
2. Modern wind turbines are increasing their low wind performance because that is where they make money, so rated speeds have fallen from 15 m/s ten years ago to below 10 m/s now and I know from discussions with utilities that they are pushing the OEMs to lower it further. That means that at a ground wind speed of 7-8 miles/hour when a 2010 spec turbine was generating nothing, a 2024 spec turbine will be running at about 20% capacity. By 18-20 miles/h when the old turbine is at about 30-40% output the new turbine will be near rated output. https://www.goldwind.com/en/news/focus-article/?id=922144530118202368
Similarly, solar farms are using bifacial panels which extend output early and late and as the panels and wiring are almost the cheapest part of the farm, it is becoming common to have a 100 MW rated grid connection with 130 and up to 150MW of panels for only a 5-10% increase in cost. This is just like a coal boiler that is built to make the required steam on a cold day with the lowest quality coal from the mine, not just at the optimum temperature and coal quality
Again, the combination of bifacial and high DC/AC ratios means more energy at times where it is valuable, so for the owner overall revenue rises faster than investment.
From a grid perspective the combination means the periods of low renewable output are shorter and shallower.
The Minnesota region has slightly better solar than Victoria Australia and much better wind resources. Victoria is already running at 35% wind and solar. A three year old experiment run at 5 minute intervals measuring actual wind and solar output against demand, shows that even with current technology enough wind and solar to provide 140-150% of annual demand with storage the equivalent of 90% of peak demand for ten hours would be adequate. Now if peak demand occurs on winter nights it might be 100-110% of peak demand for the equivalent of 14 hours. During that 14 hours demand will fall at some point to not much more than half the peak while even on the worst day output from wind and solar will be 45-55% of average or 65-70% of demand assuming that there is 140-150% overcapacity so the 14 hours capacity will be spread over at least 48 hours. However you do expect to retain the existing nuclear, hydro and one would expect an expansion of waste to energy if only to stop biological methane entering the atmosphere, so that will all mitigate storage demand.
The net result of that is you probably need 18-20 GW each of wind and solar and 16-20 GW/220-250 GWh of storage/biomass. As storage costs fall It might pay to increase storage power a little to minimise curtailment on mild windy spring and fall days.
On the other hand if you get rid of your silly tariffs and streamline permitting, solar+ storage is becoming so cheap that customer solar and storage might supply 1/4 or more of demand. In Australia you can install a 10kW solar 5kW/10kWh battery system for about US$13,000. There is no realistic reason why that can't be done in the US, other than all the protection schemes you have for vested interests
You're misunderstanding why there is so much storage.
Installing 35 GW of storage is not about simply meeting peak demand, its about meeting net peak demand over a long period of time. That amount of storage is installed to provide enough energy during wind droughts and low solar output. Real-world data from MISO shows 80 hour wind droughts where wind is operating below 10 percent of its potential output and 42 straight hours where it's below 1.5 percent. Solar capacity factors in winter are routinely 5-10 percent, and if it snows they aren't much use.
This reply is in some ways more worrying, it appears you don't know the difference between GW and GWh. You may need 40 hours storage but you don't need 35 GW
If it is actually snowing solar is not much good but if there is snow on the ground bifacial solar works really well, that is why Norway just installed vertical solar on its national stadium roof. Solar in Southern Minnesota is about 60% more productive than Oslo
So in the worst week, if demand is 30% above the annual average or 1,650 GWh and 2 GW of existing dispatchable capacity supplies 330 GWh, 20 GW of solar supplies 350 GWh and 20 GW of wind supplies 380 GWh you would need 16 GW/600 GWh of storage, assuming your utilities are silly enough not to take advantage of the latest solar and wind technology and you don't import any power. Making a more sensible assumption that they do use the technologies mentioned in my reply, and you do import Canadian hydro it will reduce the storage requirement to about 250 GWh. At current costs in China which will eventually flow through to the US, storage is $90/kWh or $90m/GWh. Lets be conservative and say $150m/GWh so the 250 GWh storage will cost less than $40 bn and the 40 GW of wind and solar about $85 bn so $125 bn total. Finance depreciation and opex works out at about $12 bn/y or $182/MWh. Better still double your trade with Canada and increase solar to 25 GW and you can probably get it to $130/MWh
Given that to guarantee supply from nuclear you will need at least 20 GW of nuclear at $20 bn/GW and in the worst quarter at least 8 GW/ 400 GWh of storage you will have a nuclear/storage investment of $400-500bn with finance, depreciation and Opex of $47 bn/y or over $700/MWh. Or again you could quadruple your import capacity from Canada, send them excess nuclear if they can afford it and get away with 10 GW of nuclear and only 40 GWh of storage and get the cost down to only $350/MWh
When we conducted this analysis, Minnesota state law explicitly excluded large hydro in Canada from qualifying for renewable energy or carbon free mandates. I'm surprised you didn't already know that.
Excellent summary. However, your all solar and wind model for Minnesota would be inherently unstable, even with batteries. Any power grid requires a significant amount of synchronous grid inertia (SGI) for system stability. The GreenNUKE March 4, 2024 Substack article introduces the topic in a nontechnical manner. See: "Why is Grid Inertia Important? - Without sufficient synchronous grid inertia, the grid becomes unstable and a blackout occurs." https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important Clearly, the nuclear power-centric grid would be economical, emission-free, reliable, and have sufficient SGI.
Very true. Wind and solar depend on thermal generators in more than one way, and the inability of wind and solar to provide these ancillary services is talked about even less than system costs. Thanks for the input!
You are welcome! Since 2017, CGNP developed a keen interest in the importance of synchronous grid inertia (SGI.) as the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station contributed huge amounts of SGI while it was running, just like Diablo Canyon currently supplies.
CGNP is now able to show the missing SGI for southern California after January, 2012 is mostly replaced with SGI contributed by PacifiCorp's mainly coal-fired power plants in and near Wyoming. CGNP is working hard to raise the importance of SGI for California decision-makers.
Likely as a consequence of intense PacifiCorp lobbying, many California decision-makers still want to shut down Diablo Canyon. If PacifiCorp's anti-Diablo Canyon lobbying is successful, the market for PacifiCorp's coal-fired generation will substantially expand by about 18 TWh a year. At about 10 cents per kWh when transmission costs are included, that's about $1.8 billion in increased electricity sales each year for PacifiCorp. ( Important California environmental laws such as SB 1368 [Perata, 2006] would be nullified. PacifiCorp would solve the SB 1368 problem via CAISO grid regionalization, which it is aggressively pursuing. )
PacifiCorp wants to shut down Diablo Canyon because they can increase their sales of mostly coal-fired power into California. CGNP believes they were behind the unnecessary closure of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) at the end of January, 2012. Since November, 2014, PacifiCorp and another Berkshire Hathaway Energy subsidiary have sold more than $1.2 billion in electricity at wholesale via an electricity spot market called the Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM.) As noted above, PacifiCorp could sell about $1.8 billion more each year of their electricity if they can force Diablo Canyon to needlessly close.
YES! I get so tired of energy conversations where people just ignore this issue. Wind and solar create "dirty" power that has to be cleaned up using SGI. The only solution is massive batteries that provide artificial SGI. Those batteries do NOT supply "back-up" for wind and solar. That back up is another, added cost of the system in addition to the artificial inertia requirement. Most battery storage schemes are only providing SGI.
What we usually do is share the free inertia we get from other sources of power with wind and solar. Excess SGI is often available. But that is a limited resource and runs out once wind and solar become a significant fraction of the total power produced. 20% wind + solar is fine for most systems. You may even save money. But past that you start running into additional system costs that start to spiral out of control. at 30-40 % wind and solar, you find retail rates are 2-3X what they were. The cost keeps going up and up with every tiny increment of new wind and solar added.
We've known this, more or less, for the last 15 years. It was first discussed in several modeling papers, then various experiments have shown it to be true. How we are still at the point where most green energy advocates don't know this?
I believe that the problem of using batteries to supply large amounts of synchronous grid inertia remains to be solved. (By large amount, I mean the 1,300 MVAR supplied by a one of the pair of DCPP generators.) Any control electronics must handle large instantaneous power flows. Please supply a reference showing these problems have been solved at grid scale, not in a laboratory (I will view skeptically anything written by Amory Lovins and his colleagues.)
I don't disagree with what you are saying here, just saying that most battery installations are NOT intended to solve the intermittency issues with wind and solar but trying to solve other pressing problems.
The Hornsdale power reserve in Australia is an example of this phenomena. It is mostly being paid to provide Frequency Control Ancillary Services, which I assume includes some form of SGI. And I agree - solving this at larger and larger scales becomes much more difficult and expensive.
You are describing one of the "bait and switch" problems associated with solar and wind. These intermittent, unreliable energy sources require considerably more ancillary services to maintain grid voltage and frequency stability. Batteries, pumped hydroelectric storage, and thermal generation are being tapped to provide the necessary ancillary services at considerable additional ratepayer cost.
My introduction to synchronous grid inertia is found here: https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important0 Here's an informative resource: "Inertia: Basic Concepts and Impacts on the ERCOT Grid," April 4, 2018, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT,) Austin, Texas, USA.
The Hornsdale power reserve hasn't caught fire. The Victorian Big Battery did during installation. It was back on line within a few days. Hornsdale is tiny compared to many batteries being installed around the world or even in South Australia
As for synchronous grid inertia a 1,200 MW Nuclear power plant with an inertia constant of 9 can supply a total of 180MWs of energy during a 0.5 Hz frequency excursion. If the fall takes 2 seconds a 1,200 MW battery can supply 2,300 MWs. If the recovery takes 30 seconds, the NPP withdraws all that energy to recover its inertia and if necessary the battery can supply another 36,000 MWs. I.e. after 32 seconds net inertia contribution zero, net battery contribution, 38,000 MWs.
Australia’s biggest battery cleared for testing following fire debacle
Energisation testing is set to resume from tomorrow for Neoen’s 300 MW / 450 MWh Victorian Big Battery, following the fire which caught global attention and destroyed two of its Megapacks on July 30.
.....just last Friday, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) instituted proceedings in the federal court against the company in regard to its 150 MW/194 MWh Hornsdale Power Reserve (HPR) for alleged breaches of the National Electricity Rules. The AER claimed Neoen’s South Australian facility did not provide the frequency control services it was paid for........ OK.. it was "Big Battery" for the fire. There is no way the 150 MW Hornsdale equals the 2,275 MW Diablo Canyon Power Plant.
Those poor old Danes at 71% wind and solar or the South Australians at 70% or the Spanish at 45% must not have got the memo about grid stability, particularly the Danes with the most reliable grid in Europe or the Spaniards with the cheapest power costs or even those silly Germans who have 1/5th of the lost time per customer of neighbour France and have reduced reserve utilisation while wind and solar increased to 49% of annual supply
The problem with greens is you have no idea how the grid actually works.
Denmark isn't an isolated grid. It is also a very small market for electricity. Interconnectors to neighboring countries, in particular Norway which exports hydroelectricity and Sweden which exports mostly hydroelectricity and nuclear electricity, provide extra power when electricity consumption exceeds generation. Denmark is a net importer of electricity. By about 10%.
The ONLY way this works in Denmark is because of these interties and buying and selling vast amount of electricity to and from Norway and Sweden. It also depends on Denmark being a small market for electricity.
When Sweden built its grid, it built a 130% grid. That means it's generation assets can supply 130% of peak demand. This is normal and typical - you always want to meet peak demand, AND, you may occasionally have power station closed for maintenance and what not. 130% ensures the lights stay on. That means you always have about 30% of generation capacity available to sell to someone.
In 2022, Denmark produced 35 TWh of electricity. Sweden generated 166 Twh. But, likely they could generate 30% more. Norway generated 156 TWh but could generated 30% more. See how that works? That extra generation capacity in Sweden and Norway allows Denmark to have 71% wind, because they can always sell the excess, and buy energy to cover any deficiency. Even if the wind suddenly stopped in Denmark, they would be able to call Norway and Sweden to bail them out, since they have excess generation capacity to cover all of Denmark's needs. It's literally a switch flip away.
If Denmark demand was the same as Sweden or Norway, this wouldn't work. If Sweden and Norway switch to wind and solar, this doesn't work. As it is it works, but only if the Danes pay some of the highest energy costs in the world, $0.38-0.40/kwh. In the U.S. we pay about $0.15/kwh.
This solution is replicated in South Australia, where the grid simply wouldn't function, unless it was a small market tied to a much larger market powered with coal. Oh, and they pay $0.37/kwh.
So, this is an expensive solution they require a small demand market tied to a huge supply, with enough capacity to cover shortfalls. In the U.S. we have Iowa that is 57% wind - but that only works because a) Iowa has low demand and b) it has an intertie with a larger market, in this case Illinois and Wisconsin. If Illinois and Wisconsin tried to go 57% wind this whole scheme would collapse.
If you care about the environment, and about climate change, shouldn't you care enough to learn any of this? how the system works, and why it is like it is?
It is true the Danes do trade with Sweden, Norway and Germany and indirectly with half a dozen other countries, but they have a surplus of generation which they did not have prior to 2021. In 2015 they imported 17% of their electricity. For the last three years they have been net exporters.
All grids have surplus generating+ import capacity. In 2010 when wind and solar were negligible the US had 770 GW of thermal capacity 100 GW of hydro pumped hydro and 96 GW of nuclear to supply a peak of 630 GW and an average of 440 GW and they still imported electricity from Canada and Mexico
Even Norway and Sweden occasionally import power. Wind generation in Norway is equivalent to 2/3rds of its net exports and wind and solar in Sweden generate more energy than net exports.
"That extra generation capacity in Sweden and Norway allows Denmark to have 71% wind, because they can always sell the excess, and buy energy to cover any deficiency."
That is what I said. Your comeback is they are currently net exporters (so?). And other markets import and export electricity (so?).
Wanna guess how much Denmark makes exporting electricity? Zero. In fact, it's a negative number - they pay people to take their exported energy. Their net exports of electricity are like someone with a net export of sewage. It's not a good thing, and why they pay so much for energy.
What I'm saying is a small market can have large fraction of nondispatchable sources, if it is attached to a much larger market and they increase energy prices to some very high number, to pay for the high inefficiency of that solution.
Question - why were power plants always built as close to cities as possible? Why are grids often isolated from each other? If storing energy is a good idea, why don't all power plants do it? Why don't nuclear power plants have great big batteries so they can load follow?
The Danish example can't be replicated on wider scale. That is the point of what I wrote.
The Australian grid uses a variety of fossil-fired generators to supply the required SGI. Neither solar nor wind supply significant amounts of SGI. There have been Australian power grid collapses doe insufficient SGI.
When?. There has never been a grid collapse due to lack of inertia. There was a grid collapse due to a lack of generation when a major powerline collapsed taking out 20% of supply and then an intertie overloaded because a gas plant that was supposed to be supplying backup didn't. That problem occurred before the Hornsdale battery was installed.
In Victoria recently 60% of coal capacity tripped offline when some powerlines collapsed, 3% of customers were shed as a precaution for an hour
Old news, Have you not heard of virtual machine mode in batteries, synthetic inertia on wind and solar farms or even the occasional synchronous condenser
I'll go with physics instead of marketing exaggerations. See this concept of "Critical Inertia" in this ERCOT paper "Inertia: Basic Concepts and Impacts on the ERCOT Grid," April 4, 2018, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT,) Austin, Texas, USA.
Again old news. Inertia is a store of energy. Batteries and synthetic inertia provide the same service at far lower cost, that is why Texas has sailed through record demand this summer with far lower stress on the grid than two years ago
I worked at a nuclear plant for 11 years and following that was a member of a small team responsible for load forecasting and plant dispatch (scheduling when a plant was on or off line and at what output level) for a major metropolitan area with 10-12 operating reactors. Unless there has been miraculous changes in the last 10 years, nuclear plants are not properly classified as dispatchable resources. Yes, they can, with difficulty and additional costs operate at lower output if necessary but the current fleet of reactors were designed as base load, not dispatchable resources. In fact, some plant owners operating in locational pricing markets have threatened to shut down the facilities because "free" wind at night depresses the power price when demand is low and the reactors receive negative value for their output. The planning model when the current fleet of reactors was built was to use these as base load units (that's how they achieve 93-97% capacity/availability factors) supplemented by dispatchable coal and simple cycle and combined cycle gas turbine powered plants. As of 2006, the industry was working on solutions to this dispatchability issue but I am not familiar with current operating practices and how or if this problem has been solved. According to publicly available information, the next generation of reactors are designed to be dispatchable. Otherwise, thanks for continued excellent reporting and analysis.
Natrium claim prospects with their molten salt reactor, the plant for which incorporates a thermal store to make it more dispatchable in the sense of adjusting output to match demand https://www.terrapower.com/natrium/
That's a good way to do it with high temperature reactors like liquid sodium, molten salt or HTGCRs. Supposedly costs $50/kwh stored, which is a good deal cheaper than batteries.
Another way would be BEV charging, which is best done at nighttime, using surplus baseload nuclear power.
And cogeneration methods are also amenable to nuclear. Using surplus nighttime heat for Ammonia or Methanol production and desalination. Or stored low grade heat for greenhouses and building heat/hot water.
And they can build NPPs just as dispatchable as any steam plants, almost as good as gas turbines. After all they do that in submarines all the time. It just is not the most economical way to use power reactors.
Also battery storage is much more economical with nuclear baseload than wind or solar. With nuclear you can reliably and consistently store low cost nighttime electricity to supply high cost daytime power demand.
A large NPP is also the ideal host for large scale hydrogen production, especially paired with SOEC to take advantage of the efficiency of using steam vs water as electrolyser feedstock.
Make them reversible SOEC for peaking capability and it’s the anchor resource for a grid, even if it includes a significant amount of VRE.
Any idea of using battery backup at scale is financially irresponsible. Also it’s my understanding that “carbon capture “ can’t be done at scale. Of course it doesn’t need to be done because it’s a waste of resources.
Due to the current policy environment, our work is generally focused on finding the least cost ways to reduce emissions while maintaining reliability. Carbon capture is still in its infancy, but at least we can turn this technology on, which is why it’s more cost effective than overbuilding wind and solar and using batteries.
Agree. We need a strategy to place ads on tv, radio, internet etc countering the claims of the “green agenda “ most people are busy living their lives and don’t take time to educate themselves. This is exactly why the green movement gets legs, they push a narrative, even though it is bad policy. People watch it, read it, hear etc then they accept it as truth. The counter argument to this madness needs to be pushed in the same way. The press is obviously not able to perform its duties anymore, so the great people on Substack need a way to get their views and actual facts in the narrative so people get a wake up before it’s too late.
There is no way carbon capture can compete with nuclear in a $/ton CO2 avoided basis. Not even close. So there is no rationale to using it until virtually all our energy supply is switched to nuclear. And then we can simply plant more trees or put NPPs on barges out in the deep ocean and pump up nutrients from the sea floor causing a bloom in phytoplankton. And a large increase in sea life. Even if reducing CO2 emissions is unnecessary.
Remember, seeding the oceans with iron was rejected out of hand by the green lords and masters even though the one experiment that snuck through was extremely successful...
Which once again proves that the Green Overlords really don't give a damn about CO2 or the environment, they are really only using it as a narrative to enrich themselves while impoverishing us.
Well, I was operating off of memory, so I could be wrong. Let's start there.
Nevertheless, I'm pretty certain I remember reading about a study being executed, I think off the US Pacific coast that found a substantial increase in salmon afterwards. Probably more than 10 years ago.
That's all I have memory wise. I also remember the lead proposing larger studies, and being trounced on by the "never disturb anything anywhere, human impact is completely evil" folks.
Californians for Green Nuclear Power (CGNP) has been following the only grid-scale carbon capture and storage project involving a coal-fired power plant in the world. The name of the project is SaskPower's Boundary Dam 3 (BD3) In summary, this project that has been running for almost a decade has been an extremely-expensive way to capture carbon. The cost is in the neighborhood of $300,00 Canadian per metric ton of CO2. There are huge parasitic losses in the coal-fired power plant. Reliability has been a challenge. Most of the CO2 still goes up the smokestack or is released after the CO2 has been used for enhanced oil recovery. CGNP will be providing additional details in an upcoming GreenNUKE Substack article regarding coal-fired power. There are many dirty secrets.
We either go along with the Malthusian, DeGrowth, Deindustrialization, Misanthropic plan of our Ruling Overlords, or we have to get serious with Nuclear Power.
The reality is Pressurized Water Reactors are a bad design for commercial Nuclear power and should have long ago been replaced with more practical designs. It didn't help that we put military cement heads in charge of commercial nuclear power development in the US where the whole development began. Eugene Wigner and Alvin Weinberg should have led nuclear development in the US, not Rickover, who should have stayed with Military applications only.
Molten Salt Small Modular Reactors most likely was always the best path forward. The big thing about SMRs is this crap about maybe building one here and one there, at best one or two a year is pure bullshit and just another scam. Why didn't they do the same with Wind & Solar?
SMRs only work when you have giant factories turning out thousands a year. And we need tens of thousands per year.
The best description of what should be and needs to done with nuclear is right here. It can and should be the cheapest energy source on the planet. Nothing else will be able to compete:
Energy Transition: Nuclear SMRs vs Renewables, Energy Transition Crisis:
Key point, close the NRC. It is a broken organization, riddled with corruption. I mean they have a graduate in Divinity as chairman. What a joke. The states can regulate their own nuclear reactors.
Centralization is a dismal failure. ITER is a perfect example of what a disaster centralization is. A giant $65B boondoggle which was already obsolete when construction finally began. After the plan began in 1985. Now the parts don't fit and another ten year delay, at least 2039 before it will operate. A hundred smaller, modern, using state-of-the-art magnets would have been far, far more effective and sensible.
“SMRs only work when you have giant factories turning out thousands a year. And we need tens of thousands per year.”
It ain’t gonna’ happen. Once you apply the same techniques of manufacturing SMR’s like automobiles on a production line you the have the issue that if a problem is found sometime down the road (excuse the pun) that necessitates the equivalent of a recall, you’d have to shutdown all SMR’s affected, customers would just love that. And of course there’s the question of toxic radioactive waste as no matter how little there is the more reactors the more toxic radioactive waste there would be, but nobody wants to talk about that. And then there’s my old favourite: - “No nation on earth has ever been able to launch or maintain a nuclear program without huge and continuing subsidies [tax breaks]. Nuclear power, in other words, never pays for itself; absent a stream of government handouts, it doesn't make enough economic sense to attract enough private investment [where are the institutional investors falling over themselves to get a slice of the action] to cover its costs, much less meet the huge and so far unmet expenses of nuclear waste storage, and in the great majority of cases, the motive behind the program, and the subsidies, is pretty clearly the desire [USA] of local government to arm itself with nuclear weapons at any cost" - "Dark Age America" - John Michael Greer
And that would seem to be born out here:- The French nuclear giant EdF, the government owned company that manages the country's vast fleet of nuclear power stations, has reportedly scrapped its plans to develop a new design for small nuclear reactors because of fears of soaring costs. 4 days ago https://reneweconomy.com.au › fr... French nuclear giant scraps SMR plans due to soaring costs, will start over | RenewEconomy 🤔
Hi Jeff, I’ll leave it to this article to reiterate what I’ve been saying as to why SMR’s (and the same applies Conventional Nuclear Plants) just don’t cut it when it comes to cost and delivery:- “Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check” — Too expensive, slow, and risky for investors, and they're taking focus off renewables, say IEEFA experts” 👉https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/03/small_modular_reactor_criticism/ 🤔
Nonsense. FERC Form 1 filings which provide detailed cost information for individual power plants. These filings establish that Diablo Canyon's nuclear power typically undercuts the cost of PG&E's natural gas-fired power plants. CGNP has raised this point repeatedly in our filings before the California Public Utilities Commission and before FERC.
I haven't heard of any big issues for solar panels (catching fire), wind turbines (catching fire, collapsing and throwing blades or ice chunks for a couple kms), gas turbines (blowing up), gas pipelines blowing up, planes crashing, ships sinking or even automobile recalls, all of which are made on assembly lines and are more complex than NPPs.
Again this nonsense that Nuclear power is some magical tech on the cusp of blowing up every second. There used to be natural nuclear reactors running happily for millions of years. Water flows, neutrons moderated, nuclear heat generated, water boils away, reaction stops, more water flows, reaction restarts. No significant migration of dangerous isotopes found, after millions of years of operation. Pretty simple minded.
Nuclear federal subsidies are some 200-300x lower than wind & solar subsidies. But you talk about nuclear, not wind & solar. Fossil subsidies are higher than nuclear, and always have been. With minimal subsidies, utilities in the US were completing 1 NPP per month by 1974 and ordering 2 per month. No subsidies needed. They did that because they were highly profitable.
And I don't know about France. The Malthusian Bankster stooge Hollande, tried to destroy Nuclear power in France, pushing EDF to focus on wind & solar. Including idiotic solar roadways. (cost 10X more than even home solar). Their EPR is the worst designed GenIII reactor on the planet. A total flop. They've already admitted to having blown it on Rocketry, their Ariane just can't compete with SpaceX.
And your astrologer buddy knows zip about nuclear, and even less about energy. Get a reputable critic.
Mr Smith, I no more like WT’s PVP’s, Utility (Grid) Sized batteries, EV’s, Hydroelectric Dams, or mining, I could go on but for brevity I won’t. Nuclear uses massive amounts of FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils in its construction and maintenance, concrete, steel, fertiliser (yes fertiliser, see if you can guess where) glass, plastic, transportation, I could go on but again for brevity I won’t. We are nearing the tip of the carbon pulse, some believe we already are on the downward slope and that by 2027 it will be evident. Once that happens and it’s accepted by mainstream media just like AGW it will almost certainly be a case of USING LESS ENERGY. And so the building of Conventional or SMR’s just won’t not happen, it all comes down to the fact we need more than electricity to survive and key to those is clean water, food, heating, and for some cooling, and shelter.
As regards a reputable critic (believe I’ve posted this to you before Mr Smith) I give you polymath Dr Vaclav Smil, this is what he’s had to say of Nuclear:-
“The ultimate extent of the task of moving to carbon-free electricity generation depends on the as yet unknowable contributions of other generation methods and the eventual extent and modes of electrification. The fate of fission is perhaps the main uncertainty. Despite decades of promises that the arrival of large numbers of small modular reactors (SMRs, up to 300 MW) was imminent, and that they would resurrect stagnating electricity generation by nuclear fission, and despite some 80 different designs, in 2023 not a single SMR was operating anywhere in the West. China has only a single test prototype (IAEA, 2023). Similarly, proponents of geothermal generation stress its enormous potential, but practical advances have been slow there too.” Taken from Dr Vaclav Smil’s essay presented to JPMorgan Private Banking, March 2024🤔
Regards your comment Mr Smith on John Michael Greer you missed out besides being an Astrologer he’s also a successful author of nonfiction and fiction books, an Archdruid, and esoteric philosopher, and so far he’s been proven right on Nuclear. And of course there’s nothing like the Nuclear industry being really confident in itself with headlines like these:- The French nuclear giant EdF, the government owned company that manages the country's vast fleet of nuclear power stations, has reportedly scrapped its plans to develop a new design for small nuclear reactors because of fears of soaring costs. 4 days ago https://reneweconomy.com.au › fr... French nuclear giant scraps SMR plans due to soaring costs, will start over | RenewEconomy 🤔
The Baltics built the same size / speed train California wants to for an ourgrageously expensivve $6B. The California one is projected to cost $125B. And no one gets the joke. Don't blame it on
Gavin though-- that boondoggle started years before he got there and he can't kill it.
Well he is part of the boondoggles. He's a member of the Pelosi, Brown, Getty crime syndicate and undoubtedly that high speed rail is just one of many scams he has facilitated. Including the nonsensical efforts to shutdown Diablo canyon NPPs. He only reversed that decision under extreme outside pressure.
It's a bit of a joke to call NuScale an SMR, since it is as big as a conventional reactor at a lower power output. It's kind of like the failed EPR, designed explicitly to please the corrupted regulatory bureaucrats who have been bribed to endlessly repeat their mantra = SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY!!!!!!. With current nuclear already being the safest source of energy on the planet by far. You might as well call them DESIGNED BY GREENPEACE.
“It's a bit of a joke to call NuScale an SMR, since it is as big as a conventional reactor at a lower power output.”
The large size is likely the reason New Brunswick and Ontario are considering it to replace &/or add to their large-size CANDU fleet.
Of course our CANDUs are reaching the end of their short ~50year life expectancy and will soon need to be decommissioned.
What are the odds of eternal NuclearWaste storage soon being found? Does anyone care that twill contaminate our descendants’ ground water, centuries after the American Empire ends? (Why not put it back into the uranium mines whence it came? The indigenous locals won’t notice the glow, will they?)
Since when is New Brunswick or Ontario considering it? That's nonsense. Ontario's going with the BWRX-300 and more CANDUs. New Brunswick is looking at the Moltex SSR. While continuing to maintain their existing CANDU which haven't reached the end of their life. They can be maintained indefinitely, using the domestic supply chain, not imported from China.
Easy to reprocess Spent Nuclear Fuel with pyroprocessing or molten salt reprocessing. The only way to go. Then all that is left is a trivial amount, 0.17oz to supply Canada or USA per capita primary energy consumption for 80yrs. That needs only 300yrs storage. Easy-peesy drop it down a borehole. No other form of energy is even remotely close to that low level of waste, and that waste is contained unlike wind/solar/fossil waste.
Don't make ignorant statements about things you know nothing about.
Think about this - it takes the NRC LONGER to review the design for a reactor than it takes a company to design it from a blank sheet of paper.
At Arkansas Nuclear one you have two reactors. One is a B&W 836 ME reactor...the other is a combustion engineering 988 MW reactor. Both broke ground in 1968. People wonder why there is not reduction of costs at scale - what scale? If every reactor is a custom one-off FOIC, you'll never cut the costs.
Not just the NRC. Most of them in the West are like that. Even the Canadian regulator, which is better than most, quoted Elysium minimum 12yrs from submitting their design for their liquid chloride, molten salt, fast modular reactor to possible approval.
I don't know whether they charge them $400/hr like the NRC does for their *"work*". Undoubtedly the NRC is full of recent DEI and CRT fully woke graduates. They send them on college courses to learn what a neutron is. Charging the applicant $400/hr for their time.
You have to wonder - what in the world are they actually doing for all that time and money? I get paid to review highly technical reports - reports that take a team of five people six months to write can be very thoroughly reviewed by one person with about a week's effort. Sometimes we have resolution meetings where we hash out some highly technical points. Thus takes a couple of days extra, maybe.
There seems to be no time limit for these reviews, hence they go on as long as people doing the reviewing need work.
Nuclear waste storage is only an issue because environmentalists and NIMBYs, funded by socialists like Soros, make it so. High level waste takes very little space, which is why it is currently easily stored on the premises of the nuclear plants. Low level waste is a low level toxin, and can just be buried.
Soros is a capitalist in the most literal sense. Calling him a socialist is a level of absurdity that invalidates everything else in your comment, because it marks you as someone too disconnected from reality to be worth listening to.
Soros is a financial traader, not a capitalist. And he supports far left causes, which means if he isn't a socialist, he sure doesn't mind favoring them against capitalis,.
We don't have any SMRs? I'm no engineer, but don't we have dozens floating around in our oceans on submarines, aircraft carriers and destroyers?
Another point is employment. There is a push for highly skilled employment, and having some dude cut the grass and wash the glass on a 2,000 acre solar 'farm' is not a highly skilled job. But 300-400 trained workers at a nuke plant would fit the bill. I'm surprised Uncle Sam hasn't figured out that their pay would be highly taxable. No wait, if forgot who's in charge.
I totally understand where you are coming from. We don’t have any currently providing electricity to the grid in the U.S. which is unfortunate but hopefully won’t be the case ten years from now.
You won't see them in the US if politicians don't slap some sense into the NRC. Instead of letting the NRC tell them what policy is going to be. That's not the way a Democracy is supposed to work.
System cost - need to keep telling this! Just a note of caution describing nuclear as dispatchable. Possible but not great for existing reactors and similar designs. True, many new generation reactors will have this capability to a great extent. Perhaps generating hydrogen when nuclear is in excess is worth including in the discussion. Other - good to see realistic assessment about upfront costs.
Thanks Isaac -maybe need to qualify in your discussion (?). My understanding - as renewables increase, with variability and duck curves, dispatchability is more critical and an import part of the system. Why NG will be around for awhile, but certainly hope nuclear can move along faster and step in.
The big problem for nuclear is if you have nuclear available to buffer wind & solar, then eventually utilities will recognize that they have no use whatsoever for wind & solar. Add all that grid expense, storage, transmission, infrastructure to save a tidbit of nuclear fuel worth <0.3 cents/kwh? Imagine all the landfills that will be filled sky high with discarded wind, solar & transmission hardware.
Good point. There are so many facets to this. Just wish there was a more logical rollout. My sense is it's good to have a mix generation methods and some locations/situations are more favorable for different types of generation. Certainly the US lost a lot of ground being antinuke for so long and it will require capital, foresight and patience to reach the low cost per kwh mentioned.
That seems to make sense, but the reality upon careful analysis and actually using realistic numbers for a reliable grid is that there is zero point to ever build another wind turbine or solar panel. All of our investment should be going into nuclear.
Fuel cost for nuclear is less than 10% of operating expenses, so even if one must let the reactor run and bypass the steam turbine to match load, the inefficiency is still cheaper than having wind and solar on the grid and all the intermittent nonsense that entails.
I can get initial nuclear costs even lower by using the Calvinball math you so hastily dismiss. You foolishly assume the need for costlier SMRs to handle peak load. I will just build another base load nuclear plant, but then assume I will then acquire the limitless free battery storage & new transmission infrastructure that I've heard so mch about to send all of my stored nuclear energy wherever it is needed, wherever it is needed.
(I have another idea whereby I launch a hostile takeover of Taco Bell by using their coupons to purchase stock shares.)
The me this says it all..... the important thing to do is have a plan! - Some sort of plan - not just go from patching one disastrous policy to another depending on the way of the wind and the voracity of the lobbyists.
quote: "If your main priority is reliable, low-cost power, keeping the existing coal and natural gas plants online and building new natural gas plants as needed will be the more affordable option. If decarbonizing the electric grid is your main priority, building new nuclear power plants will deliver a superior value to electricity customers, with reliable service at a lower cost than a grid powered largely by wind, solar, and battery storage. "
Or do both, but have a plan for affordable, reliable power betting on the technologies we have, not some pipe dream that may never materialize.
I often like to ask wind/solar advocates, "Do you really want to bet the climate on magical batteries becoming available, or mystical grid management schemes?"
They aren’t betting the climate, they are betting our lives.
Same goes with the rich idiots like bill gates who because they got rich with a widget now believe themselves smart enough to save the earth thru geo engineering the atmosphere.
These people all need to be taken out before they do something costing millions or billions of lives.
Their ideas have much more downside than anything Hitler Stalin or Mao ever considered.
One point for my education please: despite being sold on their many advantages, I didn't think nuclear plants fitted well with the definition of dispatchable power, which is the strong point of gas plants. Are they not best for steady generation 24/7?
With a new government here in the UK and all the main parties seemingly besotted with wind and solar, lobbying for a change of course toward nuclear is going to be uphill, but it's very helpful to have decent analysis for reference. Fortunately, unless the new government decides against, nuclear does have a future, though not with the right commitment, and we haven't (yet) gone down the German path.
If by dispatchable you meant rapidly load follow, then not all gas plants do that either.
Note that in the article's cost chart there's an entry for CC gas which is very low. This is combined cycle and it does not load follow well. It runs very very efficiently at a constant rate.
Then there is the entry for natural gas CT which does load follow extremely well, but also has a cost listed which is almost three times as high as nuclear.
Nuclear can be made to load follow by measures as simple as bypassing the steam turbine. You waste fuel, but fuel in nuclear is less than 10% of the Op. Ex. whereas fuel in natural gas generation is 85% of the Op. Ex.
"Dispatchable" usually means a source that absent a malfunction can be turned off and on at will, but not necessarily quickly. So, for example, wind and solar are not dispatchable, because if it is night time there is nothing humans can do to activate solar and if the wind is not blowing wind cannot be activated no matter how hard the politicians breathe hot air.
But nuclear, gas, coal, and most hydro can be activated as and when needed. Their output may or may not vary quickly moment to moment on demand, but that's a different quality.
Good one guys, where would we source our nuclear fuel? Presently we depend on offshore sources. Would we reopen domestic mining and redevelop domestic enrichment?
Close the fuel cycle. That was the original plan of the smart scientists at Argonne National Laboratory. They developed a far superior method of fuel reprocessing called pyroprocessing. With an EROI of 9000:1. Even using the inferior PUREX method, France supplied 88% of their domestic electricity consumption with 5oz of natural uranium/yr per capita. Around $15 worth per person. Oh but Jimmy Carter, the Trilateral Commission appointed presidential candidate, and a Malthusian, banned nuclear fuel reprocessing.
Not only can we close the fuel cycle, but we also already did.
When the Soviet Union collapsed there was a mass retirement of nuclear missiles. Everyone was nervous about the fissile materials, so the United States agreed to buy it, under the provision it be used in nuclear power plants. We bought the uranium and plutonium from the Soviet bombs, fashioned new fuel rods, and burnt them in reactors.
Worked just find. Naturally the same process could be used to recycle spent fuel rods, but for some weird reason nobody decided to apply it...
The obstacles are political, not physical. The USA and Canada have plenty of Uranium. Certainly we could do as you mention, but will we is a more fraught question.
I have heard low numbers, and a search resulted in a bit less than $5/MWh. The costs are saved up as you go and I believe are part of the listed costs of nuclear generation
In the USA, both paid for by fees collected as part of the generation cost and already included in the cost of electricity.
Note, that nuclear is the only energy source that does this. Sequesters all of its waste stream, and finances its own waste management and eventual decommissioning.
Decommissioning wind adn solar every 20 years is a huge cost just around the corner adn then it continues forever, because wind and solar have such a short lifetime. And zero funding and zero consideration of how to fund decommissioning wind/solar has been conducted.
After the deregulation of the electric power industry, redundancy and reliability took second place to cost and distribution. We are poised for another Solindra fiasco when the holder of the Palisades nuclear plant goes bankrupt and defaults on the federally guaranteed loans. The proposed timing of reopening is fanciful since all new licensing is required. My guess is not 2025 but 2030 is more likely.
The difficulty of reopening is multiplied when we realize that the reactor was built by a company no longer in reactor design and their business was sold to Westinghouse. About 10 yrs ago, Westinghouse was bankrupt and much of their manufacturing was sold to Toshiba. After reorganizing, Westinghouse promoted their Gen III reactor design, but had an agreement with China for many of the components, so these units have mostly been built in China. Gen III design is still a pressurized water reactor but may require extensive rework of the old unit. Now DOE is promoting GEN IV designs which are totally different than Palisades.
When trying to rebuild the station, don’t be surprised if China is represented in the supply chain.
Good article on costs. Costs is a topic which is not discussed in the energy transition. As someone who has worked in the energy business for nearly 50 years I will add a point which very few people seem to understand about energy costs and the economy . Everyone believes the economy runs on interest rates it really runs on affordable energy. Nearly every recession for the last 50 years was preceded by a spike in oil prices. Higher energy prices will lead to an economic collapse.
Agreed. I would also add that few understand the sheer scale and complexity of an energy system and how much it varies by geography. I am continually stunned by the “hand waves” that people make on completely overhauling the global energy in just a few decades.
YES. I'm so frustrated by this as well, the blithe hand waving. ignoring all the details of how the energy system actually works.
"Make it work, engineering nerds!"
That is, I think, the biggest problem.
LOL
Sounds like some CEOs that I have worked for!
“Make my stupid idea a reality, or you are fired!”
And "Also, don't tell me my idea is stupid, tell me it is genius!"
Great point. People tend to forget that labor-replacing energy is what produced modernity and makes our modern life so easy, compared to previous generations. When energy becomes prohibitively expensive, so does maintaining our current quality of life.
1. The article is rubbish, it has overstated the required renewable and storage capacity by a factor of three. There is enough wind and solar in this analysis to generate 3 times Minnesota's annual demand and almost enough storage to supply double its peak demand. It has also understated nuclear costs by a factor of at least two.
2. High energy costs are only a problem for profligate wasters like the US. Denmark has higher energy costs, lower unemployment, lower government debt, a trade surplus and a government budget surplus
Hi Peter, if you read our post a little closer you’ll notice that this is the amount of capacity needed to provide enough electricity on an hourly basis over the course of a year. Generating three times Minnesotas consumption on an annual basis means nothing in terms of hourly resource adequacy.
No
1. You have 35 GW+ of storage + 2 GW or so of dispatchable capacity to meet about 16 GW of peak demand. As wind and solar never peak at the same time and are certainly never zero at peak demand, there is at least 2.5 times as much storage in GW as you need.
2. Modern wind turbines are increasing their low wind performance because that is where they make money, so rated speeds have fallen from 15 m/s ten years ago to below 10 m/s now and I know from discussions with utilities that they are pushing the OEMs to lower it further. That means that at a ground wind speed of 7-8 miles/hour when a 2010 spec turbine was generating nothing, a 2024 spec turbine will be running at about 20% capacity. By 18-20 miles/h when the old turbine is at about 30-40% output the new turbine will be near rated output. https://www.goldwind.com/en/news/focus-article/?id=922144530118202368
Similarly, solar farms are using bifacial panels which extend output early and late and as the panels and wiring are almost the cheapest part of the farm, it is becoming common to have a 100 MW rated grid connection with 130 and up to 150MW of panels for only a 5-10% increase in cost. This is just like a coal boiler that is built to make the required steam on a cold day with the lowest quality coal from the mine, not just at the optimum temperature and coal quality
Again, the combination of bifacial and high DC/AC ratios means more energy at times where it is valuable, so for the owner overall revenue rises faster than investment.
From a grid perspective the combination means the periods of low renewable output are shorter and shallower.
The Minnesota region has slightly better solar than Victoria Australia and much better wind resources. Victoria is already running at 35% wind and solar. A three year old experiment run at 5 minute intervals measuring actual wind and solar output against demand, shows that even with current technology enough wind and solar to provide 140-150% of annual demand with storage the equivalent of 90% of peak demand for ten hours would be adequate. Now if peak demand occurs on winter nights it might be 100-110% of peak demand for the equivalent of 14 hours. During that 14 hours demand will fall at some point to not much more than half the peak while even on the worst day output from wind and solar will be 45-55% of average or 65-70% of demand assuming that there is 140-150% overcapacity so the 14 hours capacity will be spread over at least 48 hours. However you do expect to retain the existing nuclear, hydro and one would expect an expansion of waste to energy if only to stop biological methane entering the atmosphere, so that will all mitigate storage demand.
The net result of that is you probably need 18-20 GW each of wind and solar and 16-20 GW/220-250 GWh of storage/biomass. As storage costs fall It might pay to increase storage power a little to minimise curtailment on mild windy spring and fall days.
On the other hand if you get rid of your silly tariffs and streamline permitting, solar+ storage is becoming so cheap that customer solar and storage might supply 1/4 or more of demand. In Australia you can install a 10kW solar 5kW/10kWh battery system for about US$13,000. There is no realistic reason why that can't be done in the US, other than all the protection schemes you have for vested interests
You're misunderstanding why there is so much storage.
Installing 35 GW of storage is not about simply meeting peak demand, its about meeting net peak demand over a long period of time. That amount of storage is installed to provide enough energy during wind droughts and low solar output. Real-world data from MISO shows 80 hour wind droughts where wind is operating below 10 percent of its potential output and 42 straight hours where it's below 1.5 percent. Solar capacity factors in winter are routinely 5-10 percent, and if it snows they aren't much use.
I'd encourage you to read about our methodology in our report. https://files.americanexperiment.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/The-High-Cost-of-100-Percent-Carbon-Free-Electricity-by-2040-in-Minnesota.pdf?v=1663000647&_gl=1*yhplq1*_gcl_au*MTc4NjExNzg0NS4xNzE5MjYyODM3*_ga*MTY3ODc0NTgyNy4xNjI4MzcyMjU1*_ga_03BRYTYNY0*MTcyNDE2NTEwNS45NTYuMS4xNzI0MTY3MjU2LjUwLjAuMA..
This reply is in some ways more worrying, it appears you don't know the difference between GW and GWh. You may need 40 hours storage but you don't need 35 GW
If it is actually snowing solar is not much good but if there is snow on the ground bifacial solar works really well, that is why Norway just installed vertical solar on its national stadium roof. Solar in Southern Minnesota is about 60% more productive than Oslo
So in the worst week, if demand is 30% above the annual average or 1,650 GWh and 2 GW of existing dispatchable capacity supplies 330 GWh, 20 GW of solar supplies 350 GWh and 20 GW of wind supplies 380 GWh you would need 16 GW/600 GWh of storage, assuming your utilities are silly enough not to take advantage of the latest solar and wind technology and you don't import any power. Making a more sensible assumption that they do use the technologies mentioned in my reply, and you do import Canadian hydro it will reduce the storage requirement to about 250 GWh. At current costs in China which will eventually flow through to the US, storage is $90/kWh or $90m/GWh. Lets be conservative and say $150m/GWh so the 250 GWh storage will cost less than $40 bn and the 40 GW of wind and solar about $85 bn so $125 bn total. Finance depreciation and opex works out at about $12 bn/y or $182/MWh. Better still double your trade with Canada and increase solar to 25 GW and you can probably get it to $130/MWh
Given that to guarantee supply from nuclear you will need at least 20 GW of nuclear at $20 bn/GW and in the worst quarter at least 8 GW/ 400 GWh of storage you will have a nuclear/storage investment of $400-500bn with finance, depreciation and Opex of $47 bn/y or over $700/MWh. Or again you could quadruple your import capacity from Canada, send them excess nuclear if they can afford it and get away with 10 GW of nuclear and only 40 GWh of storage and get the cost down to only $350/MWh
When we conducted this analysis, Minnesota state law explicitly excluded large hydro in Canada from qualifying for renewable energy or carbon free mandates. I'm surprised you didn't already know that.
You do if its four hour storage.
Excellent summary. However, your all solar and wind model for Minnesota would be inherently unstable, even with batteries. Any power grid requires a significant amount of synchronous grid inertia (SGI) for system stability. The GreenNUKE March 4, 2024 Substack article introduces the topic in a nontechnical manner. See: "Why is Grid Inertia Important? - Without sufficient synchronous grid inertia, the grid becomes unstable and a blackout occurs." https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important Clearly, the nuclear power-centric grid would be economical, emission-free, reliable, and have sufficient SGI.
Very true. Wind and solar depend on thermal generators in more than one way, and the inability of wind and solar to provide these ancillary services is talked about even less than system costs. Thanks for the input!
You are welcome! Since 2017, CGNP developed a keen interest in the importance of synchronous grid inertia (SGI.) as the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station contributed huge amounts of SGI while it was running, just like Diablo Canyon currently supplies.
CGNP is now able to show the missing SGI for southern California after January, 2012 is mostly replaced with SGI contributed by PacifiCorp's mainly coal-fired power plants in and near Wyoming. CGNP is working hard to raise the importance of SGI for California decision-makers.
Likely as a consequence of intense PacifiCorp lobbying, many California decision-makers still want to shut down Diablo Canyon. If PacifiCorp's anti-Diablo Canyon lobbying is successful, the market for PacifiCorp's coal-fired generation will substantially expand by about 18 TWh a year. At about 10 cents per kWh when transmission costs are included, that's about $1.8 billion in increased electricity sales each year for PacifiCorp. ( Important California environmental laws such as SB 1368 [Perata, 2006] would be nullified. PacifiCorp would solve the SB 1368 problem via CAISO grid regionalization, which it is aggressively pursuing. )
Very Interesting.
Excellent post.
Interesting. why does Pacificorp want to shut down Diablo Canyon?
PacifiCorp wants to shut down Diablo Canyon because they can increase their sales of mostly coal-fired power into California. CGNP believes they were behind the unnecessary closure of San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) at the end of January, 2012. Since November, 2014, PacifiCorp and another Berkshire Hathaway Energy subsidiary have sold more than $1.2 billion in electricity at wholesale via an electricity spot market called the Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM.) As noted above, PacifiCorp could sell about $1.8 billion more each year of their electricity if they can force Diablo Canyon to needlessly close.
YES! I get so tired of energy conversations where people just ignore this issue. Wind and solar create "dirty" power that has to be cleaned up using SGI. The only solution is massive batteries that provide artificial SGI. Those batteries do NOT supply "back-up" for wind and solar. That back up is another, added cost of the system in addition to the artificial inertia requirement. Most battery storage schemes are only providing SGI.
What we usually do is share the free inertia we get from other sources of power with wind and solar. Excess SGI is often available. But that is a limited resource and runs out once wind and solar become a significant fraction of the total power produced. 20% wind + solar is fine for most systems. You may even save money. But past that you start running into additional system costs that start to spiral out of control. at 30-40 % wind and solar, you find retail rates are 2-3X what they were. The cost keeps going up and up with every tiny increment of new wind and solar added.
We've known this, more or less, for the last 15 years. It was first discussed in several modeling papers, then various experiments have shown it to be true. How we are still at the point where most green energy advocates don't know this?
I believe that the problem of using batteries to supply large amounts of synchronous grid inertia remains to be solved. (By large amount, I mean the 1,300 MVAR supplied by a one of the pair of DCPP generators.) Any control electronics must handle large instantaneous power flows. Please supply a reference showing these problems have been solved at grid scale, not in a laboratory (I will view skeptically anything written by Amory Lovins and his colleagues.)
I don't disagree with what you are saying here, just saying that most battery installations are NOT intended to solve the intermittency issues with wind and solar but trying to solve other pressing problems.
The Hornsdale power reserve in Australia is an example of this phenomena. It is mostly being paid to provide Frequency Control Ancillary Services, which I assume includes some form of SGI. And I agree - solving this at larger and larger scales becomes much more difficult and expensive.
You are describing one of the "bait and switch" problems associated with solar and wind. These intermittent, unreliable energy sources require considerably more ancillary services to maintain grid voltage and frequency stability. Batteries, pumped hydroelectric storage, and thermal generation are being tapped to provide the necessary ancillary services at considerable additional ratepayer cost.
My introduction to synchronous grid inertia is found here: https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important0 Here's an informative resource: "Inertia: Basic Concepts and Impacts on the ERCOT Grid," April 4, 2018, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT,) Austin, Texas, USA.
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2018/04/04/Inertia_Basic_Concepts_Impacts_On_ERCOT_v0.pdf
As an added "bonus" the Hornsdale power reserve has caught fire at least once.
The Hornsdale power reserve hasn't caught fire. The Victorian Big Battery did during installation. It was back on line within a few days. Hornsdale is tiny compared to many batteries being installed around the world or even in South Australia
As for synchronous grid inertia a 1,200 MW Nuclear power plant with an inertia constant of 9 can supply a total of 180MWs of energy during a 0.5 Hz frequency excursion. If the fall takes 2 seconds a 1,200 MW battery can supply 2,300 MWs. If the recovery takes 30 seconds, the NPP withdraws all that energy to recover its inertia and if necessary the battery can supply another 36,000 MWs. I.e. after 32 seconds net inertia contribution zero, net battery contribution, 38,000 MWs.
Australia’s biggest battery cleared for testing following fire debacle
Energisation testing is set to resume from tomorrow for Neoen’s 300 MW / 450 MWh Victorian Big Battery, following the fire which caught global attention and destroyed two of its Megapacks on July 30.
SEPTEMBER 28, 2021 BELLA PEACOCK https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/09/28/australias-biggest-battery-cleared-for-testing-following-fire-fallout/
.....just last Friday, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) instituted proceedings in the federal court against the company in regard to its 150 MW/194 MWh Hornsdale Power Reserve (HPR) for alleged breaches of the National Electricity Rules. The AER claimed Neoen’s South Australian facility did not provide the frequency control services it was paid for........ OK.. it was "Big Battery" for the fire. There is no way the 150 MW Hornsdale equals the 2,275 MW Diablo Canyon Power Plant.
Those poor old Danes at 71% wind and solar or the South Australians at 70% or the Spanish at 45% must not have got the memo about grid stability, particularly the Danes with the most reliable grid in Europe or the Spaniards with the cheapest power costs or even those silly Germans who have 1/5th of the lost time per customer of neighbour France and have reduced reserve utilisation while wind and solar increased to 49% of annual supply
"Danes at 71% wind and solar."
The problem with greens is you have no idea how the grid actually works.
Denmark isn't an isolated grid. It is also a very small market for electricity. Interconnectors to neighboring countries, in particular Norway which exports hydroelectricity and Sweden which exports mostly hydroelectricity and nuclear electricity, provide extra power when electricity consumption exceeds generation. Denmark is a net importer of electricity. By about 10%.
The ONLY way this works in Denmark is because of these interties and buying and selling vast amount of electricity to and from Norway and Sweden. It also depends on Denmark being a small market for electricity.
When Sweden built its grid, it built a 130% grid. That means it's generation assets can supply 130% of peak demand. This is normal and typical - you always want to meet peak demand, AND, you may occasionally have power station closed for maintenance and what not. 130% ensures the lights stay on. That means you always have about 30% of generation capacity available to sell to someone.
In 2022, Denmark produced 35 TWh of electricity. Sweden generated 166 Twh. But, likely they could generate 30% more. Norway generated 156 TWh but could generated 30% more. See how that works? That extra generation capacity in Sweden and Norway allows Denmark to have 71% wind, because they can always sell the excess, and buy energy to cover any deficiency. Even if the wind suddenly stopped in Denmark, they would be able to call Norway and Sweden to bail them out, since they have excess generation capacity to cover all of Denmark's needs. It's literally a switch flip away.
If Denmark demand was the same as Sweden or Norway, this wouldn't work. If Sweden and Norway switch to wind and solar, this doesn't work. As it is it works, but only if the Danes pay some of the highest energy costs in the world, $0.38-0.40/kwh. In the U.S. we pay about $0.15/kwh.
This solution is replicated in South Australia, where the grid simply wouldn't function, unless it was a small market tied to a much larger market powered with coal. Oh, and they pay $0.37/kwh.
So, this is an expensive solution they require a small demand market tied to a huge supply, with enough capacity to cover shortfalls. In the U.S. we have Iowa that is 57% wind - but that only works because a) Iowa has low demand and b) it has an intertie with a larger market, in this case Illinois and Wisconsin. If Illinois and Wisconsin tried to go 57% wind this whole scheme would collapse.
If you care about the environment, and about climate change, shouldn't you care enough to learn any of this? how the system works, and why it is like it is?
It is true the Danes do trade with Sweden, Norway and Germany and indirectly with half a dozen other countries, but they have a surplus of generation which they did not have prior to 2021. In 2015 they imported 17% of their electricity. For the last three years they have been net exporters.
All grids have surplus generating+ import capacity. In 2010 when wind and solar were negligible the US had 770 GW of thermal capacity 100 GW of hydro pumped hydro and 96 GW of nuclear to supply a peak of 630 GW and an average of 440 GW and they still imported electricity from Canada and Mexico
Even Norway and Sweden occasionally import power. Wind generation in Norway is equivalent to 2/3rds of its net exports and wind and solar in Sweden generate more energy than net exports.
"That extra generation capacity in Sweden and Norway allows Denmark to have 71% wind, because they can always sell the excess, and buy energy to cover any deficiency."
That is what I said. Your comeback is they are currently net exporters (so?). And other markets import and export electricity (so?).
Wanna guess how much Denmark makes exporting electricity? Zero. In fact, it's a negative number - they pay people to take their exported energy. Their net exports of electricity are like someone with a net export of sewage. It's not a good thing, and why they pay so much for energy.
What I'm saying is a small market can have large fraction of nondispatchable sources, if it is attached to a much larger market and they increase energy prices to some very high number, to pay for the high inefficiency of that solution.
Question - why were power plants always built as close to cities as possible? Why are grids often isolated from each other? If storing energy is a good idea, why don't all power plants do it? Why don't nuclear power plants have great big batteries so they can load follow?
The Danish example can't be replicated on wider scale. That is the point of what I wrote.
The Australian grid uses a variety of fossil-fired generators to supply the required SGI. Neither solar nor wind supply significant amounts of SGI. There have been Australian power grid collapses doe insufficient SGI.
When?. There has never been a grid collapse due to lack of inertia. There was a grid collapse due to a lack of generation when a major powerline collapsed taking out 20% of supply and then an intertie overloaded because a gas plant that was supposed to be supplying backup didn't. That problem occurred before the Hornsdale battery was installed.
In Victoria recently 60% of coal capacity tripped offline when some powerlines collapsed, 3% of customers were shed as a precaution for an hour
Malarkey!
Do fossil fuel interests incent you to make such posts?
Old news, Have you not heard of virtual machine mode in batteries, synthetic inertia on wind and solar farms or even the occasional synchronous condenser
I'll go with physics instead of marketing exaggerations. See this concept of "Critical Inertia" in this ERCOT paper "Inertia: Basic Concepts and Impacts on the ERCOT Grid," April 4, 2018, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT,) Austin, Texas, USA.
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2018/04/04/Inertia_Basic_Concepts_Impacts_On_ERCOT_v0.pdf
Again old news. Inertia is a store of energy. Batteries and synthetic inertia provide the same service at far lower cost, that is why Texas has sailed through record demand this summer with far lower stress on the grid than two years ago
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/infrastructure/ercot/2024/06/07/489942/texas-could-face-a-grid-emergency-rolling-blackouts-in-august-ercot-report-says/
ERCOT is predicting rolling blackouts this month, so...? not so much sailing as falling down a flight of stairs....
I worked at a nuclear plant for 11 years and following that was a member of a small team responsible for load forecasting and plant dispatch (scheduling when a plant was on or off line and at what output level) for a major metropolitan area with 10-12 operating reactors. Unless there has been miraculous changes in the last 10 years, nuclear plants are not properly classified as dispatchable resources. Yes, they can, with difficulty and additional costs operate at lower output if necessary but the current fleet of reactors were designed as base load, not dispatchable resources. In fact, some plant owners operating in locational pricing markets have threatened to shut down the facilities because "free" wind at night depresses the power price when demand is low and the reactors receive negative value for their output. The planning model when the current fleet of reactors was built was to use these as base load units (that's how they achieve 93-97% capacity/availability factors) supplemented by dispatchable coal and simple cycle and combined cycle gas turbine powered plants. As of 2006, the industry was working on solutions to this dispatchability issue but I am not familiar with current operating practices and how or if this problem has been solved. According to publicly available information, the next generation of reactors are designed to be dispatchable. Otherwise, thanks for continued excellent reporting and analysis.
Natrium claim prospects with their molten salt reactor, the plant for which incorporates a thermal store to make it more dispatchable in the sense of adjusting output to match demand https://www.terrapower.com/natrium/
That's a good way to do it with high temperature reactors like liquid sodium, molten salt or HTGCRs. Supposedly costs $50/kwh stored, which is a good deal cheaper than batteries.
Another way would be BEV charging, which is best done at nighttime, using surplus baseload nuclear power.
And cogeneration methods are also amenable to nuclear. Using surplus nighttime heat for Ammonia or Methanol production and desalination. Or stored low grade heat for greenhouses and building heat/hot water.
And they can build NPPs just as dispatchable as any steam plants, almost as good as gas turbines. After all they do that in submarines all the time. It just is not the most economical way to use power reactors.
Also battery storage is much more economical with nuclear baseload than wind or solar. With nuclear you can reliably and consistently store low cost nighttime electricity to supply high cost daytime power demand.
A large NPP is also the ideal host for large scale hydrogen production, especially paired with SOEC to take advantage of the efficiency of using steam vs water as electrolyser feedstock.
Make them reversible SOEC for peaking capability and it’s the anchor resource for a grid, even if it includes a significant amount of VRE.
It is not a molten salt reactor - it is a sodium fast reactor with a molten salt battery.
Any idea of using battery backup at scale is financially irresponsible. Also it’s my understanding that “carbon capture “ can’t be done at scale. Of course it doesn’t need to be done because it’s a waste of resources.
Due to the current policy environment, our work is generally focused on finding the least cost ways to reduce emissions while maintaining reliability. Carbon capture is still in its infancy, but at least we can turn this technology on, which is why it’s more cost effective than overbuilding wind and solar and using batteries.
Agree. We need a strategy to place ads on tv, radio, internet etc countering the claims of the “green agenda “ most people are busy living their lives and don’t take time to educate themselves. This is exactly why the green movement gets legs, they push a narrative, even though it is bad policy. People watch it, read it, hear etc then they accept it as truth. The counter argument to this madness needs to be pushed in the same way. The press is obviously not able to perform its duties anymore, so the great people on Substack need a way to get their views and actual facts in the narrative so people get a wake up before it’s too late.
Definitely need to start broadcasting the truth.
Grab your pitchforks ...err laptops and head to X.
There is no way carbon capture can compete with nuclear in a $/ton CO2 avoided basis. Not even close. So there is no rationale to using it until virtually all our energy supply is switched to nuclear. And then we can simply plant more trees or put NPPs on barges out in the deep ocean and pump up nutrients from the sea floor causing a bloom in phytoplankton. And a large increase in sea life. Even if reducing CO2 emissions is unnecessary.
Remember, seeding the oceans with iron was rejected out of hand by the green lords and masters even though the one experiment that snuck through was extremely successful...
Which once again proves that the Green Overlords really don't give a damn about CO2 or the environment, they are really only using it as a narrative to enrich themselves while impoverishing us.
Interesting! A reference to the one that snuck through would be appreciated.
Well, I was operating off of memory, so I could be wrong. Let's start there.
Nevertheless, I'm pretty certain I remember reading about a study being executed, I think off the US Pacific coast that found a substantial increase in salmon afterwards. Probably more than 10 years ago.
That's all I have memory wise. I also remember the lead proposing larger studies, and being trounced on by the "never disturb anything anywhere, human impact is completely evil" folks.
Yeah like it's as if humans never disturb anything anywhere already.
I’m interested in that. Thanks I’ll do some research to find out more!
Californians for Green Nuclear Power (CGNP) has been following the only grid-scale carbon capture and storage project involving a coal-fired power plant in the world. The name of the project is SaskPower's Boundary Dam 3 (BD3) In summary, this project that has been running for almost a decade has been an extremely-expensive way to capture carbon. The cost is in the neighborhood of $300,00 Canadian per metric ton of CO2. There are huge parasitic losses in the coal-fired power plant. Reliability has been a challenge. Most of the CO2 still goes up the smokestack or is released after the CO2 has been used for enhanced oil recovery. CGNP will be providing additional details in an upcoming GreenNUKE Substack article regarding coal-fired power. There are many dirty secrets.
We either go along with the Malthusian, DeGrowth, Deindustrialization, Misanthropic plan of our Ruling Overlords, or we have to get serious with Nuclear Power.
The reality is Pressurized Water Reactors are a bad design for commercial Nuclear power and should have long ago been replaced with more practical designs. It didn't help that we put military cement heads in charge of commercial nuclear power development in the US where the whole development began. Eugene Wigner and Alvin Weinberg should have led nuclear development in the US, not Rickover, who should have stayed with Military applications only.
Molten Salt Small Modular Reactors most likely was always the best path forward. The big thing about SMRs is this crap about maybe building one here and one there, at best one or two a year is pure bullshit and just another scam. Why didn't they do the same with Wind & Solar?
SMRs only work when you have giant factories turning out thousands a year. And we need tens of thousands per year.
The best description of what should be and needs to done with nuclear is right here. It can and should be the cheapest energy source on the planet. Nothing else will be able to compete:
Energy Transition: Nuclear SMRs vs Renewables, Energy Transition Crisis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBF2fGUO5cQ
Key point, close the NRC. It is a broken organization, riddled with corruption. I mean they have a graduate in Divinity as chairman. What a joke. The states can regulate their own nuclear reactors.
Centralization is a dismal failure. ITER is a perfect example of what a disaster centralization is. A giant $65B boondoggle which was already obsolete when construction finally began. After the plan began in 1985. Now the parts don't fit and another ten year delay, at least 2039 before it will operate. A hundred smaller, modern, using state-of-the-art magnets would have been far, far more effective and sensible.
It should have been called ITER sine fine - Latin for journey without end.
“SMRs only work when you have giant factories turning out thousands a year. And we need tens of thousands per year.”
It ain’t gonna’ happen. Once you apply the same techniques of manufacturing SMR’s like automobiles on a production line you the have the issue that if a problem is found sometime down the road (excuse the pun) that necessitates the equivalent of a recall, you’d have to shutdown all SMR’s affected, customers would just love that. And of course there’s the question of toxic radioactive waste as no matter how little there is the more reactors the more toxic radioactive waste there would be, but nobody wants to talk about that. And then there’s my old favourite: - “No nation on earth has ever been able to launch or maintain a nuclear program without huge and continuing subsidies [tax breaks]. Nuclear power, in other words, never pays for itself; absent a stream of government handouts, it doesn't make enough economic sense to attract enough private investment [where are the institutional investors falling over themselves to get a slice of the action] to cover its costs, much less meet the huge and so far unmet expenses of nuclear waste storage, and in the great majority of cases, the motive behind the program, and the subsidies, is pretty clearly the desire [USA] of local government to arm itself with nuclear weapons at any cost" - "Dark Age America" - John Michael Greer
And that would seem to be born out here:- The French nuclear giant EdF, the government owned company that manages the country's vast fleet of nuclear power stations, has reportedly scrapped its plans to develop a new design for small nuclear reactors because of fears of soaring costs. 4 days ago https://reneweconomy.com.au › fr... French nuclear giant scraps SMR plans due to soaring costs, will start over | RenewEconomy 🤔
More B.S..
Subsidies to nuclear are scores of times less than subsidies to wind and solar and only slightly higher than subsidies to fossil fuels.
Fossil: ~$.60 per MWHr equivalent
Nuclear: $2 per MWHr
Wind: $20 - $70 per MWHr
Solar: $40 - $90 per MWHr
And commercial nuclear power has nothing to do with and does not enable arming oneself with nuclear weapons.
But just keep trotting out those exhausted lies from the ancient anti-nuclear cupboard of deception.
Hi Jeff, I’ll leave it to this article to reiterate what I’ve been saying as to why SMR’s (and the same applies Conventional Nuclear Plants) just don’t cut it when it comes to cost and delivery:- “Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check” — Too expensive, slow, and risky for investors, and they're taking focus off renewables, say IEEFA experts” 👉https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/03/small_modular_reactor_criticism/ 🤔
Nonsense. FERC Form 1 filings which provide detailed cost information for individual power plants. These filings establish that Diablo Canyon's nuclear power typically undercuts the cost of PG&E's natural gas-fired power plants. CGNP has raised this point repeatedly in our filings before the California Public Utilities Commission and before FERC.
I haven't heard of any big issues for solar panels (catching fire), wind turbines (catching fire, collapsing and throwing blades or ice chunks for a couple kms), gas turbines (blowing up), gas pipelines blowing up, planes crashing, ships sinking or even automobile recalls, all of which are made on assembly lines and are more complex than NPPs.
Again this nonsense that Nuclear power is some magical tech on the cusp of blowing up every second. There used to be natural nuclear reactors running happily for millions of years. Water flows, neutrons moderated, nuclear heat generated, water boils away, reaction stops, more water flows, reaction restarts. No significant migration of dangerous isotopes found, after millions of years of operation. Pretty simple minded.
Nuclear federal subsidies are some 200-300x lower than wind & solar subsidies. But you talk about nuclear, not wind & solar. Fossil subsidies are higher than nuclear, and always have been. With minimal subsidies, utilities in the US were completing 1 NPP per month by 1974 and ordering 2 per month. No subsidies needed. They did that because they were highly profitable.
And I don't know about France. The Malthusian Bankster stooge Hollande, tried to destroy Nuclear power in France, pushing EDF to focus on wind & solar. Including idiotic solar roadways. (cost 10X more than even home solar). Their EPR is the worst designed GenIII reactor on the planet. A total flop. They've already admitted to having blown it on Rocketry, their Ariane just can't compete with SpaceX.
And your astrologer buddy knows zip about nuclear, and even less about energy. Get a reputable critic.
Oh yes, quoting The Astrologer again. Just as bad as having a Doctor of Divinity running the NRC.
Watch the video, the guy (who actually knows something unlike the Astrologer) corrects all your disinformation in the video.
Mr Smith, I no more like WT’s PVP’s, Utility (Grid) Sized batteries, EV’s, Hydroelectric Dams, or mining, I could go on but for brevity I won’t. Nuclear uses massive amounts of FREE FINITE Flammable Fossils in its construction and maintenance, concrete, steel, fertiliser (yes fertiliser, see if you can guess where) glass, plastic, transportation, I could go on but again for brevity I won’t. We are nearing the tip of the carbon pulse, some believe we already are on the downward slope and that by 2027 it will be evident. Once that happens and it’s accepted by mainstream media just like AGW it will almost certainly be a case of USING LESS ENERGY. And so the building of Conventional or SMR’s just won’t not happen, it all comes down to the fact we need more than electricity to survive and key to those is clean water, food, heating, and for some cooling, and shelter.
As regards a reputable critic (believe I’ve posted this to you before Mr Smith) I give you polymath Dr Vaclav Smil, this is what he’s had to say of Nuclear:-
“The ultimate extent of the task of moving to carbon-free electricity generation depends on the as yet unknowable contributions of other generation methods and the eventual extent and modes of electrification. The fate of fission is perhaps the main uncertainty. Despite decades of promises that the arrival of large numbers of small modular reactors (SMRs, up to 300 MW) was imminent, and that they would resurrect stagnating electricity generation by nuclear fission, and despite some 80 different designs, in 2023 not a single SMR was operating anywhere in the West. China has only a single test prototype (IAEA, 2023). Similarly, proponents of geothermal generation stress its enormous potential, but practical advances have been slow there too.” Taken from Dr Vaclav Smil’s essay presented to JPMorgan Private Banking, March 2024🤔
Regards your comment Mr Smith on John Michael Greer you missed out besides being an Astrologer he’s also a successful author of nonfiction and fiction books, an Archdruid, and esoteric philosopher, and so far he’s been proven right on Nuclear. And of course there’s nothing like the Nuclear industry being really confident in itself with headlines like these:- The French nuclear giant EdF, the government owned company that manages the country's vast fleet of nuclear power stations, has reportedly scrapped its plans to develop a new design for small nuclear reactors because of fears of soaring costs. 4 days ago https://reneweconomy.com.au › fr... French nuclear giant scraps SMR plans due to soaring costs, will start over | RenewEconomy 🤔
Bull he's proven right. He hasn't been right on even one point. He's a know-nothing.
Yes and Newsom can't get a high speed rail train moving after 20yrs and $25B but China is building thousands of kms of them, annually. Go figure.
The Baltics built the same size / speed train California wants to for an ourgrageously expensivve $6B. The California one is projected to cost $125B. And no one gets the joke. Don't blame it on
Gavin though-- that boondoggle started years before he got there and he can't kill it.
Well he is part of the boondoggles. He's a member of the Pelosi, Brown, Getty crime syndicate and undoubtedly that high speed rail is just one of many scams he has facilitated. Including the nonsensical efforts to shutdown Diablo canyon NPPs. He only reversed that decision under extreme outside pressure.
Don’t forget NuScale abandoning SMR development too.
It's a bit of a joke to call NuScale an SMR, since it is as big as a conventional reactor at a lower power output. It's kind of like the failed EPR, designed explicitly to please the corrupted regulatory bureaucrats who have been bribed to endlessly repeat their mantra = SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY!!!!!!. With current nuclear already being the safest source of energy on the planet by far. You might as well call them DESIGNED BY GREENPEACE.
“It's a bit of a joke to call NuScale an SMR, since it is as big as a conventional reactor at a lower power output.”
The large size is likely the reason New Brunswick and Ontario are considering it to replace &/or add to their large-size CANDU fleet.
Of course our CANDUs are reaching the end of their short ~50year life expectancy and will soon need to be decommissioned.
What are the odds of eternal NuclearWaste storage soon being found? Does anyone care that twill contaminate our descendants’ ground water, centuries after the American Empire ends? (Why not put it back into the uranium mines whence it came? The indigenous locals won’t notice the glow, will they?)
Since when is New Brunswick or Ontario considering it? That's nonsense. Ontario's going with the BWRX-300 and more CANDUs. New Brunswick is looking at the Moltex SSR. While continuing to maintain their existing CANDU which haven't reached the end of their life. They can be maintained indefinitely, using the domestic supply chain, not imported from China.
Easy to reprocess Spent Nuclear Fuel with pyroprocessing or molten salt reprocessing. The only way to go. Then all that is left is a trivial amount, 0.17oz to supply Canada or USA per capita primary energy consumption for 80yrs. That needs only 300yrs storage. Easy-peesy drop it down a borehole. No other form of energy is even remotely close to that low level of waste, and that waste is contained unlike wind/solar/fossil waste.
Don't make ignorant statements about things you know nothing about.
Sorry even the kids now are immune to your anti-nuclear tropes. Time to move on
Think about this - it takes the NRC LONGER to review the design for a reactor than it takes a company to design it from a blank sheet of paper.
At Arkansas Nuclear one you have two reactors. One is a B&W 836 ME reactor...the other is a combustion engineering 988 MW reactor. Both broke ground in 1968. People wonder why there is not reduction of costs at scale - what scale? If every reactor is a custom one-off FOIC, you'll never cut the costs.
Not just the NRC. Most of them in the West are like that. Even the Canadian regulator, which is better than most, quoted Elysium minimum 12yrs from submitting their design for their liquid chloride, molten salt, fast modular reactor to possible approval.
I don't know whether they charge them $400/hr like the NRC does for their *"work*". Undoubtedly the NRC is full of recent DEI and CRT fully woke graduates. They send them on college courses to learn what a neutron is. Charging the applicant $400/hr for their time.
You have to wonder - what in the world are they actually doing for all that time and money? I get paid to review highly technical reports - reports that take a team of five people six months to write can be very thoroughly reviewed by one person with about a week's effort. Sometimes we have resolution meetings where we hash out some highly technical points. Thus takes a couple of days extra, maybe.
There seems to be no time limit for these reviews, hence they go on as long as people doing the reviewing need work.
Nuclear waste storage is only an issue because environmentalists and NIMBYs, funded by socialists like Soros, make it so. High level waste takes very little space, which is why it is currently easily stored on the premises of the nuclear plants. Low level waste is a low level toxin, and can just be buried.
Soros is a capitalist in the most literal sense. Calling him a socialist is a level of absurdity that invalidates everything else in your comment, because it marks you as someone too disconnected from reality to be worth listening to.
Soros is a financial traader, not a capitalist. And he supports far left causes, which means if he isn't a socialist, he sure doesn't mind favoring them against capitalis,.
We don't have any SMRs? I'm no engineer, but don't we have dozens floating around in our oceans on submarines, aircraft carriers and destroyers?
Another point is employment. There is a push for highly skilled employment, and having some dude cut the grass and wash the glass on a 2,000 acre solar 'farm' is not a highly skilled job. But 300-400 trained workers at a nuke plant would fit the bill. I'm surprised Uncle Sam hasn't figured out that their pay would be highly taxable. No wait, if forgot who's in charge.
I totally understand where you are coming from. We don’t have any currently providing electricity to the grid in the U.S. which is unfortunate but hopefully won’t be the case ten years from now.
You won't see them in the US if politicians don't slap some sense into the NRC. Instead of letting the NRC tell them what policy is going to be. That's not the way a Democracy is supposed to work.
Nuclear uber alles!! My 2 granddaughters living in Bethesda MD will stay cool in summer and warm in winter and I can rest easy - 😉
System cost - need to keep telling this! Just a note of caution describing nuclear as dispatchable. Possible but not great for existing reactors and similar designs. True, many new generation reactors will have this capability to a great extent. Perhaps generating hydrogen when nuclear is in excess is worth including in the discussion. Other - good to see realistic assessment about upfront costs.
Thanks, Fred! For us the main metric of dispatch ability is being able to turn on your source of power. Load following is nice but not necessary.
Thanks Isaac -maybe need to qualify in your discussion (?). My understanding - as renewables increase, with variability and duck curves, dispatchability is more critical and an import part of the system. Why NG will be around for awhile, but certainly hope nuclear can move along faster and step in.
The big problem for nuclear is if you have nuclear available to buffer wind & solar, then eventually utilities will recognize that they have no use whatsoever for wind & solar. Add all that grid expense, storage, transmission, infrastructure to save a tidbit of nuclear fuel worth <0.3 cents/kwh? Imagine all the landfills that will be filled sky high with discarded wind, solar & transmission hardware.
Good point. There are so many facets to this. Just wish there was a more logical rollout. My sense is it's good to have a mix generation methods and some locations/situations are more favorable for different types of generation. Certainly the US lost a lot of ground being antinuke for so long and it will require capital, foresight and patience to reach the low cost per kwh mentioned.
That seems to make sense, but the reality upon careful analysis and actually using realistic numbers for a reliable grid is that there is zero point to ever build another wind turbine or solar panel. All of our investment should be going into nuclear.
Fuel cost for nuclear is less than 10% of operating expenses, so even if one must let the reactor run and bypass the steam turbine to match load, the inefficiency is still cheaper than having wind and solar on the grid and all the intermittent nonsense that entails.
I can get initial nuclear costs even lower by using the Calvinball math you so hastily dismiss. You foolishly assume the need for costlier SMRs to handle peak load. I will just build another base load nuclear plant, but then assume I will then acquire the limitless free battery storage & new transmission infrastructure that I've heard so mch about to send all of my stored nuclear energy wherever it is needed, wherever it is needed.
(I have another idea whereby I launch a hostile takeover of Taco Bell by using their coupons to purchase stock shares.)
So true - if we applied all the BS wind and solar logic to nuclear, it's cost would be $0.01/kwh.
The me this says it all..... the important thing to do is have a plan! - Some sort of plan - not just go from patching one disastrous policy to another depending on the way of the wind and the voracity of the lobbyists.
quote: "If your main priority is reliable, low-cost power, keeping the existing coal and natural gas plants online and building new natural gas plants as needed will be the more affordable option. If decarbonizing the electric grid is your main priority, building new nuclear power plants will deliver a superior value to electricity customers, with reliable service at a lower cost than a grid powered largely by wind, solar, and battery storage. "
Or do both, but have a plan for affordable, reliable power betting on the technologies we have, not some pipe dream that may never materialize.
I often like to ask wind/solar advocates, "Do you really want to bet the climate on magical batteries becoming available, or mystical grid management schemes?"
They aren’t betting the climate, they are betting our lives.
Same goes with the rich idiots like bill gates who because they got rich with a widget now believe themselves smart enough to save the earth thru geo engineering the atmosphere.
These people all need to be taken out before they do something costing millions or billions of lives.
Their ideas have much more downside than anything Hitler Stalin or Mao ever considered.
As the saying goes, let god sort them out.
Excellent again - thank you EBBs.
One point for my education please: despite being sold on their many advantages, I didn't think nuclear plants fitted well with the definition of dispatchable power, which is the strong point of gas plants. Are they not best for steady generation 24/7?
With a new government here in the UK and all the main parties seemingly besotted with wind and solar, lobbying for a change of course toward nuclear is going to be uphill, but it's very helpful to have decent analysis for reference. Fortunately, unless the new government decides against, nuclear does have a future, though not with the right commitment, and we haven't (yet) gone down the German path.
Our main definition of dispatchable is the ability to turn a resource on. Maybe it’s not the widespread definition but that’s how we view it.
If by dispatchable you meant rapidly load follow, then not all gas plants do that either.
Note that in the article's cost chart there's an entry for CC gas which is very low. This is combined cycle and it does not load follow well. It runs very very efficiently at a constant rate.
Then there is the entry for natural gas CT which does load follow extremely well, but also has a cost listed which is almost three times as high as nuclear.
Nuclear can be made to load follow by measures as simple as bypassing the steam turbine. You waste fuel, but fuel in nuclear is less than 10% of the Op. Ex. whereas fuel in natural gas generation is 85% of the Op. Ex.
"Dispatchable" usually means a source that absent a malfunction can be turned off and on at will, but not necessarily quickly. So, for example, wind and solar are not dispatchable, because if it is night time there is nothing humans can do to activate solar and if the wind is not blowing wind cannot be activated no matter how hard the politicians breathe hot air.
But nuclear, gas, coal, and most hydro can be activated as and when needed. Their output may or may not vary quickly moment to moment on demand, but that's a different quality.
A small amount of battery or Natrium style TSS also covers the fast ramping / response part.
Good one guys, where would we source our nuclear fuel? Presently we depend on offshore sources. Would we reopen domestic mining and redevelop domestic enrichment?
Close the fuel cycle. That was the original plan of the smart scientists at Argonne National Laboratory. They developed a far superior method of fuel reprocessing called pyroprocessing. With an EROI of 9000:1. Even using the inferior PUREX method, France supplied 88% of their domestic electricity consumption with 5oz of natural uranium/yr per capita. Around $15 worth per person. Oh but Jimmy Carter, the Trilateral Commission appointed presidential candidate, and a Malthusian, banned nuclear fuel reprocessing.
Not only can we close the fuel cycle, but we also already did.
When the Soviet Union collapsed there was a mass retirement of nuclear missiles. Everyone was nervous about the fissile materials, so the United States agreed to buy it, under the provision it be used in nuclear power plants. We bought the uranium and plutonium from the Soviet bombs, fashioned new fuel rods, and burnt them in reactors.
Worked just find. Naturally the same process could be used to recycle spent fuel rods, but for some weird reason nobody decided to apply it...
The obstacles are political, not physical. The USA and Canada have plenty of Uranium. Certainly we could do as you mention, but will we is a more fraught question.
What about decommissioning and spent fuel ”ldisposal” costs?
I have heard low numbers, and a search resulted in a bit less than $5/MWh. The costs are saved up as you go and I believe are part of the listed costs of nuclear generation
In the USA, both paid for by fees collected as part of the generation cost and already included in the cost of electricity.
Note, that nuclear is the only energy source that does this. Sequesters all of its waste stream, and finances its own waste management and eventual decommissioning.
Decommissioning wind adn solar every 20 years is a huge cost just around the corner adn then it continues forever, because wind and solar have such a short lifetime. And zero funding and zero consideration of how to fund decommissioning wind/solar has been conducted.
After the deregulation of the electric power industry, redundancy and reliability took second place to cost and distribution. We are poised for another Solindra fiasco when the holder of the Palisades nuclear plant goes bankrupt and defaults on the federally guaranteed loans. The proposed timing of reopening is fanciful since all new licensing is required. My guess is not 2025 but 2030 is more likely.
The difficulty of reopening is multiplied when we realize that the reactor was built by a company no longer in reactor design and their business was sold to Westinghouse. About 10 yrs ago, Westinghouse was bankrupt and much of their manufacturing was sold to Toshiba. After reorganizing, Westinghouse promoted their Gen III reactor design, but had an agreement with China for many of the components, so these units have mostly been built in China. Gen III design is still a pressurized water reactor but may require extensive rework of the old unit. Now DOE is promoting GEN IV designs which are totally different than Palisades.
When trying to rebuild the station, don’t be surprised if China is represented in the supply chain.
Great piece lads, enjoyed reading.
Linked another excellent piece on the same topic that was posted earlier this year, that readers will also find interesting.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-nuclear-is-the-best-energy?r=339u8