The concept of baseline power is no longer needed. Scientists wrote about that for years now. Battery storage and smart grids are growing faster and cheaper than nuclear ever could.
If there was enough funding or political backing anything could get done by 2050. That’s a huge amount of time. Any time someone mentions a climate goalpost like that they are pulling the cloth over your eyes
We needed to get this shit done 10 years ago. Any delay in removing all fossil fuel emissions now is just a matter of how bad we want climate change to get, rather than preventing it. Net zero by 2050 is a fucking eternity away and is a shit goal, and all the projections that get us on track to 1.5 °C of warming have us extensively using carbon capture which is entirely unrealistic.
Existing nuclear plants in France work, they can load follow to some degree, and renewables can make up the difference with minimal energy storage. But at a certain point you have to stop investing in renewables if you have minimal energy storage and your electricity solution is working.
I am going to emphasize that last part: IF you can’t get enough energy storage, and IF your energy mix is fine, you must stop investment in renewable installations. Without enough storage, the baseload+peak paradigm works, you just have to regulate it.
Amazing how you get downvoted with no reply even though your comment is the truth. People who claim to be environmentalists who are also against nuclear energy are seriously dumb.
Fuel isn’t easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That’s not desirable.
Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don’t have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.
Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it’s insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
The reason people don’t answer to that bs anymore is because it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side.
Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it’s insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
The costs of decommission are included by law in the price of the energy, and the Nuclear Power Plant owners are required to set aside that money in order to smoothly decommission the plant with no extra costs.
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
There are secure enough strategies to contain the, honestly small, amount of spent fuel we produce today. It’s just that it’s scary and no one wants a nuclear deposit in their backyard, but in reality it’s still orders of magnitude safer than dumping millions of tons of pollutants in the air with coal power plants.
How many people do you think will die in 2025 due to Nuclear Energy? How many per MW/h? And I remind you that Germany closed all Nuclear Plants before closing all Coal Powered Plants.
Sure but if we succeed at mitigating cimate change effects to a reasonable degree, civilization will survive for centuries, during which a reactor that uses itmight become available. It’s a minor problem blown out of proportion, as opposed to CO₂ emissions, which are the opposite.
Even if this were true this doesn’t help with the very real issue that we can’t build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn’t have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it’s solution.
Because batteries aren’t as dangerous as reactors, are still making massive improvements on energy density and seem feasible to me. Doing anything useful with nuclear waste has been discussed for decades and no-one has come forward with any really promising results. The waste has been around for long enough if anyone could have done something productive with it it likely would have happened already.
The german solution was to build more coal power and shutter nuclear power and then pretend that by using accounting sleight of hand you had a “net-zero” carbon solution. But that’s bullshit.
That is true but that isn’t a constructive way of arguing about what we should be doing now to benefit the future. You can have the right of saying “told you so” if you need it so badly. I don’t really care. We need to solve this problem though and arguing about the chances nuclear could have had in the past is just distracting.
And the solution to that will not be nuclear power. Not in the near future because it takes too long to build and we need to cut CO2 now. And I’m also not convinced it’s a good long-term strategy based on the other points I’ve mentioned.
If we could magically build reactors in time with the needed capacity to replace coal and gas (which it doesn’t really btw starting and stopping nuclear plants takes way longer than necessary to react to demand changes) this would be a different discussion. But as it stands now it’s just a distraction from what we need to do: build renewable energy sources.
this is why we still need nuclear, to replace the fossil fuel baseline.
The concept of baseline power is no longer needed. Scientists wrote about that for years now. Battery storage and smart grids are growing faster and cheaper than nuclear ever could.
Can storage technology reach 100% coverage by 2050? Because that’s the target for net-0 afaik.
If not, we should invest in something else to help us reach that goal, and Nuclear seems the most promising medium-term solution.
If there was enough funding or political backing anything could get done by 2050. That’s a huge amount of time. Any time someone mentions a climate goalpost like that they are pulling the cloth over your eyes
We needed to get this shit done 10 years ago. Any delay in removing all fossil fuel emissions now is just a matter of how bad we want climate change to get, rather than preventing it. Net zero by 2050 is a fucking eternity away and is a shit goal, and all the projections that get us on track to 1.5 °C of warming have us extensively using carbon capture which is entirely unrealistic.
Existing nuclear plants in France work, they can load follow to some degree, and renewables can make up the difference with minimal energy storage. But at a certain point you have to stop investing in renewables if you have minimal energy storage and your electricity solution is working.
I am going to emphasize that last part: IF you can’t get enough energy storage, and IF your energy mix is fine, you must stop investment in renewable installations. Without enough storage, the baseload+peak paradigm works, you just have to regulate it.
Amazing how you get downvoted with no reply even though your comment is the truth. People who claim to be environmentalists who are also against nuclear energy are seriously dumb.
Answering from a German perspective:
Fuel isn’t easy to source and will put us into a new dependency like gas did with russia. That’s not desirable.
Building a reactor takes a lot of time that we don’t have right now. We need to build that capacity and we need to build it fast.
Look at France and their shit show of new and old nuclear projects. The company building new reactors went insolvent because it’s insanely expensive and last year they had to regularly power down the reactors because the rivers used for cooling got too hot
There is still no valid strategy for securely containing the waste produced for the needed amount of time
The reason people don’t answer to that bs anymore is because it has been discussed to death with no new arguments on either side.
Sure, but it’s very little fuel when compared to coal, gas or oil. Raw Uranium is just 14% of the total energy price for nuclear energy, which means that doubling the price of uranium would add about 10% to the cost of electricity produced in existing nuclear plants, and about half that much to the cost of electricity in future power plants. For Coal/Gas plants, the fuel cost is the main cost by far.
Btw, Russia is not the main producer of Uranium. First is Kazakhstan, then Namibia, Canada, Australia and Uzbekistan
For sure, and likely they won’t help or help marginally to reach 2035 goals, but they can definitely help to reach “net-0 by 2050”. Modern nuclear power plants are planned for construction in five years or less (42 months for Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) ACR-1000, 60 months from order to operation for an AP1000, 48 months from first concrete to operation for a European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) and 45 months for an ESBWR)[47] as opposed to over a decade for some previous plants.
The cost of building new power plants is mostly impacted by delays and overruns, which are often caused by policy changes. For instance, Canada has cost overruns for the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, largely due to delays and policy changes, that are often cited by opponents of new reactors. Construction started in 1981 at an estimated cost of $7.4 Billion 1993-adjusted CAD, and finished in 1993 at a cost of $14.5 billion. 70% of the price increase was due to interest charges incurred due to delays imposed to postpone units 3 and 4, 46% inflation over a 4-year period and other changes in financial policy.
The costs of decommission are included by law in the price of the energy, and the Nuclear Power Plant owners are required to set aside that money in order to smoothly decommission the plant with no extra costs.
There are secure enough strategies to contain the, honestly small, amount of spent fuel we produce today. It’s just that it’s scary and no one wants a nuclear deposit in their backyard, but in reality it’s still orders of magnitude safer than dumping millions of tons of pollutants in the air with coal power plants.
Based on their model, the researchers estimated that 1.37 million cases of lung cancer around the world will be linked with coal-fired power plants in 2025.
How many people do you think will die in 2025 due to Nuclear Energy? How many per MW/h? And I remind you that Germany closed all Nuclear Plants before closing all Coal Powered Plants.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
Sure but if we succeed at mitigating cimate change effects to a reasonable degree, civilization will survive for centuries, during which a reactor that uses itmight become available. It’s a minor problem blown out of proportion, as opposed to CO₂ emissions, which are the opposite.
Even if this were true this doesn’t help with the very real issue that we can’t build the nuclear capacity fast enough whereas renewable energy can be built fast, is already being built, and doesn’t have that problem that needs wishful thinking for it’s solution.
Why do you not include city-scale energy storage as wishful thinking? Unlike nuclear reactors, that amount of storage doesn’t exist.
Because batteries aren’t as dangerous as reactors, are still making massive improvements on energy density and seem feasible to me. Doing anything useful with nuclear waste has been discussed for decades and no-one has come forward with any really promising results. The waste has been around for long enough if anyone could have done something productive with it it likely would have happened already.
How big would a battery need to be to power a single city of 1000000 for 1day?
The german solution was to build more coal power and shutter nuclear power and then pretend that by using accounting sleight of hand you had a “net-zero” carbon solution. But that’s bullshit.
That is true but that isn’t a constructive way of arguing about what we should be doing now to benefit the future. You can have the right of saying “told you so” if you need it so badly. I don’t really care. We need to solve this problem though and arguing about the chances nuclear could have had in the past is just distracting.
No, that wasn’t the solution and it’s not what happened, coal is in decline in Germany since the 90s with a rather steep decline since 2018.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=-1&legendItems=ly5y7&source=public
And alas, we continue to put more CO2 into the air and the planet keeps warming.
And the solution to that will not be nuclear power. Not in the near future because it takes too long to build and we need to cut CO2 now. And I’m also not convinced it’s a good long-term strategy based on the other points I’ve mentioned.
If we could magically build reactors in time with the needed capacity to replace coal and gas (which it doesn’t really btw starting and stopping nuclear plants takes way longer than necessary to react to demand changes) this would be a different discussion. But as it stands now it’s just a distraction from what we need to do: build renewable energy sources.
watch us be repeating the same excuse in another 50 years. yes, nuclear takes a long time to build but that doesn’t mean we should just not do it.
also at the bare minimum we should not be shutting down functional reactors which is happening in europe.
France has plenty of nuclear power.
It doesn’t help with renewable peaks in the slightest.
What is needed are storage solutions and flexible usage that can utilize cheap power at peak times.