It is telling that a country with basically none of the American barriers to nuclear (NiMBYism, slow construction) is also shifting focus to solar and wind. It’s just simpler. You can put up a solar panel tomorrow and start generating power.
A solar panel is a self-contained prefab power generating unit. Even with all of the advancements in nuclear, we still don’t have anything like that.
I was going to say... if a country like China, with its massive engineering/building capacity and authoritarian "efficiency" cannot hit their nuclear construction targets, it is quite telling how difficult it must be in reality to build nuclear reactors in general.
I am still very pro-nuclear but it seems PV + wind + battery storage are coming down in price much faster than people expected and it just makes sense to build more since the incremental cost is so low, especially compared to something like nuclear. That said, there's no reason to not pursue both options, which apparently China is doing but at a slower pace for nuclear.
> You can put up a solar panel tomorrow and start generating power.
And you don't spend 10,000 years hoping & working to make sure nothing goes wrong with the 95% of fuel (unburned) & decommissioned reactors debris you wind up with in the end.
There are good tech answers to try to decrease these problems, but they'd involve building more advanced nuclear fuel lifecycle reactors. Which no one is going to fund. Especially since waste seems to be externalized from generation.
To this day I think that nuclear is the best way to produce clean and abundant energy. There only one problem. Only governments build nuclear reactors and if you want to innovate in this space you need to deal with these institutions which adds a lot of complexity.
Solar on the other hand appeals to the public and can be deployed in large scale facilities. Large scale economics apply directly and we can see that by looking at the historic price per kW[1].
Finally, me as a nuclear advocate own 14x550w panels + a 20 kWh battery. I’m off grid > 95% of the year. Solar is unstoppable now.
Aside from the complexity, part of the issue when comparing nuclear and solar is this: In the US we like to externalize our environmental damage as much as possible, which was one of the “benefits” of moving manufacturing to China. This has been one of the main effects of the environmental movement in the US, simply making a lot of things infeasible. As long as the US environment is clean, damage elsewhere is tolerated. (Maybe that wasn’t the intention, but it is the result.)
With solar we can externalize the environmental damage almost 100% if the panels are manufactured somewhere else. We would install them somewhere else if we could, too. With nuclear there is always some underlying amortized risk of problems, and this perceived risk is impossible to externalize. Again, what is important is the perception of damage rather than actual damage.
Of course I’m also not quantifying the actual damage from either one. I’m not sure which one is worse in terms of raw material extraction or CO2 emissions per lifetime KWh produced. I checked and it seems solar might be higher for CO2. But that difference isn’t going to matter if nuclear doesn’t get built.
Lets say I had the knowledge and engineering to make a home scale (say 0.5-1.0 KW) reactor RTG or similar that could be sold as a sealed box you attach to a wall has sensors for various safety measures and just chucks out AC power all day long. At the cost of $5-10k that makes decent economic sense if it would keep going for about 25 year life time. I think that is potentially doable fairly safely with fuels other than Uranium 235.
You can vaguely do this DIY today using the long life radioactive glow sticks and some solar panels and get a constant power device but its very inefficient and too expensive for the power it produces and its half life is too short.
There is I think no viable way to make that business reality. The government intervention would be absurdly high and it would never make it to market even if the cost of the device was economically competitive with a Solar or Wind setup. This is one of the ways Solar and Wind became dominate, they scale really well from the small to the large, especially solar which the panels on the roof of a house are the same in a multiple MW power station.
There's a lot of inconvenient truths one needs to accept if they want to advocate for widespread nuclear energy. Specifically, there are very real nuclear proliferation concerns which cannot be ignored. Alternative clean energy sources, which are safe on the global scale, can made widely available with proper investment. That should be the future.
In the Pacific Northwest, I see rooftop solar panels half-covered with mildew. I wonder how that affects the power generation, and how often one would have to climb up on the roof to scrape them clean.
The article is about industrial generation, not home solar which is largely a vanity thing still. Go look for mildew on a big solar farm on the other side of the Cascades.
You'll need to dig through all the wind turbines and dams to find them though. The PNW has better choices than solar anyway.
It’s very difficult to estimate the true cost of nuclear power because so many resources are spent on safety features rather than the basic stuff essential to power generation.
New construction cost per energy out can vary by 5x, even against the grain of expected purchasing power parity advantages:
A coal power plant costs $2M - $5M per megawatt just in capital costs. A solar plant costs $1M per MW. Given a coal capacity factor of 0.9 and a solar of 0.3, they're roughly equivalent.
A coal power plant is similar to a nuclear plant -- they heat water to turn a turbine to generate water. There's no way a nuclear plant would ever be cheaper than a coal plant to build, and it would have to be to be competitive with solar in cost.
That is the true cost of nuclear, though. Costs associated with social licensing are just costs, no different from labor or materials. The safety requirements may be excessive and irrational, but they're not going away while the general public remains fearful. Any cost that can't go away in a realistic universe is ... just another cost.
Another social licensing risk is early plant closure. The levelized cost of nuclear energy is the best case scenario. This number assumes that your country won't become like Germany. What will happen to the ROI of nuclear if there's a moral panic in 15 years forcing early plant closures? Nobody can predict the irrationality of the crowd. Renewables don't face such risks to ROI.
It's also very difficult to estimate true cost of solar at a massive scale.
Most/all solar panels that exist currently can not be recycled in a way that makes ecological or economical sense. Their operational lifetime is NOT "sustainable", nor is their economical lifetime.
Then there's death's per kWh, required energy storage (with its own ecological and economical issues), mining, transportation, CO2 per kWh, etc etc.
IMO nuclear is a pretty clear winner (as a continious energy source), but it's a complex analysis where important details are easily missed.
On HN, there are a lot of nuclear proponents. Any comments from them on this article? Just curiosity from me because I don't know much about this topic.
Nuclear is slower and more expensive to deploy than solar or wind. Nobody should dispute that. We should deploy the latter as quickly as possible. In addition, we should build nuclear plants, certainly until we’ve phased out coal and oil for primary generation.
The article describes China scaling back new plants at a slower pace—about 5 a year instead of ten–but that’s still a multiple of anything we’re doing.
its short and mostly just a description of whats happening. Not much to comment on. Except for the last sentence that says that nuclear "can't" compete with renewables.
Firstly, it's actually competing with coal, which is what is going in instead, and secondly, any regulatory regime that slows nuclear deployment so much that you instead install coal is deeply, deeply flawed. Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years. They need to figure out which roadblocks are slowing it down and remove them.
Regulation is a choice. Sometimes it's a very good choice. But if your options are "highly regulated nuclear" and "coal", then you have made some poor regulatory choices.
The article makes it pretty clear the shift was prompted by their ongoing failure to meet their nuclear goals as well as a dropping cost of renewables, not by a philosophical choice to embrace only renewables.
I've always found these articles about China adopting green policies and shifting its industries towards green energy sources to be suspicious. If they were true then why are China's emission ever increasing year after year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
If their share of renewables / nuclear energy were increasing then there would be a decrease in C02 emissions per capita, but that has never been the case even with the increase in announcements in "green" mega projects over the years.
> If their share of renewables / nuclear energy were increasing then there would be a decrease in C02 emissions per capita
This seems a bit obvious to say, but that wouldn't be the case if the standard of living were also being raised. Also, there's a huge amount of CO2 generated by non-energy means; e.g. building with concrete.
From the article: "Previously China expected that its energy emissions would peak in 2030, but revised forecasts are now indicating that this could happen as early as 2024, 5-6 years ahead of target."
"There is also a caveat to China's rapid build-out of renewable capacity because at the same time it is still adding substantial coal-fired generation."
"China already accounts for 53% of the world's 2,095 GW of operating coal-fired generating capacity, a share likely to increase in coming years as more coal plants are retired in the developed world."
The undeniable fact is that humans are very electricity hungry. Cheap electricity opens up tons of downstream benefits.
I am envisioning something like an international market for clean electricity. Something like an internet for power. This would enable developing countries to leapfrog dirty methods like coal, similar to how many countries leapfrogged over credit cards and cheques we still have in the US. Of course the UHVDC technology may not be ready for it yet.
Coal has excellent politics, especially in India & China.
It’s mineable almost everywhere people live, is burdened by little international regulation (at least compared to nuclear), and is labour intensive enough to create powerful local advocates.
janalsncm|1 year ago
A solar panel is a self-contained prefab power generating unit. Even with all of the advancements in nuclear, we still don’t have anything like that.
hangonhn|1 year ago
I am still very pro-nuclear but it seems PV + wind + battery storage are coming down in price much faster than people expected and it just makes sense to build more since the incremental cost is so low, especially compared to something like nuclear. That said, there's no reason to not pursue both options, which apparently China is doing but at a slower pace for nuclear.
simonebrunozzi|1 year ago
But I don't necessarily disagree with you.
jauntywundrkind|1 year ago
And you don't spend 10,000 years hoping & working to make sure nothing goes wrong with the 95% of fuel (unburned) & decommissioned reactors debris you wind up with in the end.
There are good tech answers to try to decrease these problems, but they'd involve building more advanced nuclear fuel lifecycle reactors. Which no one is going to fund. Especially since waste seems to be externalized from generation.
henry2023|1 year ago
Solar on the other hand appeals to the public and can be deployed in large scale facilities. Large scale economics apply directly and we can see that by looking at the historic price per kW[1].
Finally, me as a nuclear advocate own 14x550w panels + a 20 kWh battery. I’m off grid > 95% of the year. Solar is unstoppable now.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
janalsncm|1 year ago
With solar we can externalize the environmental damage almost 100% if the panels are manufactured somewhere else. We would install them somewhere else if we could, too. With nuclear there is always some underlying amortized risk of problems, and this perceived risk is impossible to externalize. Again, what is important is the perception of damage rather than actual damage.
Of course I’m also not quantifying the actual damage from either one. I’m not sure which one is worse in terms of raw material extraction or CO2 emissions per lifetime KWh produced. I checked and it seems solar might be higher for CO2. But that difference isn’t going to matter if nuclear doesn’t get built.
PaulKeeble|1 year ago
You can vaguely do this DIY today using the long life radioactive glow sticks and some solar panels and get a constant power device but its very inefficient and too expensive for the power it produces and its half life is too short.
There is I think no viable way to make that business reality. The government intervention would be absurdly high and it would never make it to market even if the cost of the device was economically competitive with a Solar or Wind setup. This is one of the ways Solar and Wind became dominate, they scale really well from the small to the large, especially solar which the panels on the roof of a house are the same in a multiple MW power station.
opmac|1 year ago
WalterBright|1 year ago
dyauspitr|1 year ago
loeg|1 year ago
ajross|1 year ago
You'll need to dig through all the wind turbines and dams to find them though. The PNW has better choices than solar anyway.
spacebanana7|1 year ago
New construction cost per energy out can vary by 5x, even against the grain of expected purchasing power parity advantages:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-britain-is-building-...
pfdietz|1 year ago
bryanlarsen|1 year ago
A coal power plant is similar to a nuclear plant -- they heat water to turn a turbine to generate water. There's no way a nuclear plant would ever be cheaper than a coal plant to build, and it would have to be to be competitive with solar in cost.
hackerlight|1 year ago
Another social licensing risk is early plant closure. The levelized cost of nuclear energy is the best case scenario. This number assumes that your country won't become like Germany. What will happen to the ROI of nuclear if there's a moral panic in 15 years forcing early plant closures? Nobody can predict the irrationality of the crowd. Renewables don't face such risks to ROI.
bboygravity|1 year ago
Most/all solar panels that exist currently can not be recycled in a way that makes ecological or economical sense. Their operational lifetime is NOT "sustainable", nor is their economical lifetime.
Then there's death's per kWh, required energy storage (with its own ecological and economical issues), mining, transportation, CO2 per kWh, etc etc.
IMO nuclear is a pretty clear winner (as a continious energy source), but it's a complex analysis where important details are easily missed.
aurareturn|1 year ago
JumpCrisscross|1 year ago
The article describes China scaling back new plants at a slower pace—about 5 a year instead of ten–but that’s still a multiple of anything we’re doing.
MostlyStable|1 year ago
Firstly, it's actually competing with coal, which is what is going in instead, and secondly, any regulatory regime that slows nuclear deployment so much that you instead install coal is deeply, deeply flawed. Nuclear is orders of magnitude more safer than coal, and has been for 50+ years. They need to figure out which roadblocks are slowing it down and remove them.
Regulation is a choice. Sometimes it's a very good choice. But if your options are "highly regulated nuclear" and "coal", then you have made some poor regulatory choices.
causality0|1 year ago
TeeMassive|1 year ago
If their share of renewables / nuclear energy were increasing then there would be a decrease in C02 emissions per capita, but that has never been the case even with the increase in announcements in "green" mega projects over the years.
robertlagrant|1 year ago
This seems a bit obvious to say, but that wouldn't be the case if the standard of living were also being raised. Also, there's a huge amount of CO2 generated by non-energy means; e.g. building with concrete.
MegaDeKay|1 year ago
janice1999|1 year ago
- CO2 comes from sources other than energy (electricity) production.
- Overall energy usage is increasing, outpacing % growth of renewables.
socks|1 year ago
"There is also a caveat to China's rapid build-out of renewable capacity because at the same time it is still adding substantial coal-fired generation."
"China already accounts for 53% of the world's 2,095 GW of operating coal-fired generating capacity, a share likely to increase in coming years as more coal plants are retired in the developed world."
KevinMS|1 year ago
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
tomohawk|1 year ago
https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/chinas-new-coal-po...
And industrializaing vast swaths of land by covering it with solar panels.
https://www.facebook.com/XinhuaSciTech/videos/solar-panels-o...
janalsncm|1 year ago
I am envisioning something like an international market for clean electricity. Something like an internet for power. This would enable developing countries to leapfrog dirty methods like coal, similar to how many countries leapfrogged over credit cards and cheques we still have in the US. Of course the UHVDC technology may not be ready for it yet.
spacebanana7|1 year ago
It’s mineable almost everywhere people live, is burdened by little international regulation (at least compared to nuclear), and is labour intensive enough to create powerful local advocates.
cash-MeOutside|1 year ago
[deleted]
peter-m80|1 year ago