New research shows renewables are more profitable than nuclear power

This article is about profitability, not cost to net zero. They are very different things. It also ignores the cost of scale, go all in on say solar today and that doesn't make more panels available, the increased demand would raise prices and suddenly its not so profitable.

Nothing is as simple and easy as people want it to be.

Any money that goes to nuclear could be going to renewables, which would get us there more quickly.

That's a false dilemma. Nuclear and renewables provide different things, so they shouldn't be compared directly in an "either or" comparison, and certainly not on cost. Nuclear power provides a stable baseline, so you don't have to rely on coal/gas/diesel powered generators. Renewables cheaply but opportunistically provide power from natural sources that may not always be available but that can augment the baseline. The share of renewable energy in the mix is something engineers should figure out, not "the market".

Also, monetary cost shouldn't be the only concern. Some renewables have a societal cost too, for example in the amount of land that they occupy per kWh generated, or visual polution. I wouldn't want to live within the shadow flicker of a windmill for example.

Uranium and thorium mines are just as clean as the rare earth metal mines needed for PV cells. This is kind of a moot point. We need carbon free energy now and solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear are all part of the mix of solutions needed. There are many considerations currently being made to determine which technologies should be used in what locations.

Make sure to compare with a West Virginia mountaintop-removal coal mine.

Government isn’t business. It should not be chasing a profit margin. The decisions should be around sustainability, ecological friendliness, and robustness against failure

Don't confuse profit with capital

Nuclear should be the only non renewable power we use at scale. Oil makes sense for emergency situations (it's portable and is stable forever) and where energy density is most important (like aircraft, for now). Coal can fuck right off.

In my opinion clean is anything that doesn't emit out of smokestacks.

Also in this case it doesn't emit out of smoke stacks while the sun's down and the wind's not blowing.

Dams are terrible for the environment so hydro is out. Nuclear is cleaner than hydro.

cleaner* than fossil

people say "clean" when they mean "doesn't produce greenhouse gasses". Nuclear power is absolutely not "clean". Waste sites will need to be monitored for like a thousand years to prevent everything from natural disaster leakage to terrorist aquisition of nuclear materials. The reality is a new powerplant is just the 5% down payment on a nuclear waste mortgage.

The "as geography permits" part is a big obstacle, unfortunately.

That will not remotely cover baseline loads and is not without significant efficiency loss due to the pumping phase.

And that opens up opportunities for energy intensive industries like aluminium or hydrogen production to run whilst there's an excess of energy

Lol at trying to pass that link off as a valid, unbiased source.

Plug in car. Press the "I would like to only pay $100/yr to fuel this please" button.

Later when you leave for work press the "I would like the house to be cool when I get home and also want to pay half as much for AC" button.

Buy the 1.5m wide water heater that stores 10kWh of hot water and lasts a week between heatings rather than the 70cm one that lasts a day.

Such an unconscionable burden.

I think innovation at the consumption end is going to help a lot. On Technology Connections I saw an electric induction stove that could be powered from a regular socket. It had a battery that would trickle charge throughout the day and then use the batteries to power the induction cooktops, as well as a couple of plugs. If widely deployed and in other appliances, with a little smarts that could provide power leveling at the home level.

Another solution would be adding some intelligence to water heaters. Have a temperature control valve on the output where you set the temperature, and program the water heater get to 160-180°F when electricity is cheap. This would be a thermal battery that would easily level out demand for electricity for heating water.

Or you could do thermal storage by heating a house very warm/cold prior to a large cold snap/heat wave, and letting it coast down/up to a temperature instead of heating/cooling a lot during the cold/hot weather. He's got a video on this technique here

"Not enough power from renewables? Just turn off your fridge for a few days and you'll be fine!"

Honestly that sentiment has strong "blame the consumer" vibes that seems to pervade climate arguments.

Sure, people can reduce consumption, but at best its a stopgap, not a solution.

Those potentially have the same issue. The solution to filling the gaps in production from renewable sources is not necessarily more panels or more windmills, it's having energy storage somewhere to keep surplus energy when it's being produced (e.g. during the day, or when the wind is blowing) available to be used when it's not.

So in your example, each home could also have its own battery bank. Or, a larger battery bank could be placed somewhere on the electricity grid.

What makes you think personal renewable are going to be more efficient than large scale renewables? The sun doesn't magically shine in the middle of the night on personal homes, the wind doesn't magically blow only in residential areas...

Sometimes, a kinetic response is the only reasonable reaction. ;p Asking nicely doesn't stop a Russian war of conquest.

It can provide a baseload though where solar can provide extra power during the heat for places where the summer and days are the power intensive part, rather than winter and nights. You still need a short-term stop gap as the sun sets but it's still hot out, but even if that was just powered by NG it would be a huge step forward. Adding greener energy storage options to store extra power nuclear or wind could generate overnight would be better.

Btw, could a small percent of nuclear reactors be turned on/off seasonally, potentially transporting fuel between the north in the winter and the south in the summer?

Keep the reactors running to avoid that issue. As long as they are providing enough power when the renewables aren't, we successfully cut out natural gas from the power grid.

Columbia station load follows within a certain range set by nearby hydro. It can be done. The economics aren't even that bad, as fuel is one of the cheaper inputs to the reactor.

Then you are getting into the issue of the power company eating up your charge cycles on your EV battery. Who pays for the fact that my battery now has half the design lifetime due to constant cycling because it's feeding the grid?

Typical energy density of ore in a new uranium mine burned in an LWR is about the same of coal.

All of the economic/not too damaging stuff together would power the world for about 3 years.

Price of energy is key to the success of every economy.

None of this is profitable if you can meet demand power at will either.

It's just a scarcity game that those in power use to keep things ticking along.

What is infrastructure to most, is a tuned revenue machine to a very few.

The purpose of a system can be determined by its output, and it's working quite well in that aspect.

Baseload is not a goal, it’s a limit.

I would love to know what oil company you heard that from, since it's absolutely not true. You can both turn them off quickly (faster, in fact, than LNG or Coal), start them up quickly (sub minutes) and change production quickly. These have all been features since 1960's era reactors, and we're around 10 generations past them.

We would be really stupid to worry about money when trying to save the planet. But, what did I know, I'm just some guy on the internet

Building More nuclear will help with climate warming. None of your links deal with that.

More than that as we will need to pay them to maintain storage which they won't be keen to do without tons of government and tax payer assistance

It blows my mind we are avoiding this? You want jobs? Clean stable energy? Its fucken here dude. Just build some plants. They only need to be properly maintained to avoid disaster. If we truly are an intelligent species that should be easy as hell.

We should probably use both. How much mw/hr does wind produce compared to nuclear? Once nuclear is up and running what are the continual costs and what are the benefits? Theres a lot more to ask here than just "what is more profitable". Your points on winds' adaptability is good as well as your points on timeframe. But I don't think a single energy source is the actual answer. I'm thinking we supplement these energy sources with each other and that would bring us completely off fossil fuels.

What do you think is more likely: that I don't understand the basics of how capitalism works? Or maybe that the comment was a criticism of the worship of the "free market," and considering profit-motive to be the be-all, end-all?

Storage, we have less Lithium than you seem to think, and pumped hydro is not a solution -- not that it's not a universal solution, it's simply not a solution. Implementation costs more than a nuclear reactor and maintenance and security costs are way, way higher than a nuclear reactor. We, unless you want to adopt a powerless overnight lifestyle, need on-demand power generation. Nuclear is the best, safest, cleanest, most feasible option for that until we remove all precious metals from energy storage technology.

Do you never get tired of being pointlessly pedantic? Yes, the planet, as in the big rock floating in space, will continue to exist. Thanks.

Check out the farm bill, or ethanol in gasoline, or various other things. They also can disincentivize things, outright ban things, and add untold cost to competing stuff in order to make yours more profitable than theirs.

The research done here had to be within the existing regulatory environment, which is not a fixed constraint at all but rather a product of government and industry actors.

And all of that is just talking about more indirect controls commonly applied in neoliberal leaning countries, some countries directly control how much things cost and how much overhead there is.

Government can just take over and control whatever it wants. With no business allowed to operate the cost and therefore profit don't matter

Infrastructure in this country is already so heavily subsidized by the federal government (and state, if you live somewhere that actually cares about your well-being) that we're already pretty much paying for it all.

Profits are what is earned after expenses. It wouldn't bankrupt a state to run energy infrastructure at cost.

How long do you think it takes to build renewables? It's been about 20 years since most countries have started implementation and no country is 100% reliant on renewable energy or could store even a night's energy needs without generation.

nuclear energy is stagnant and decaying.

Do you think you may be confusing the cause with the effect?

But transient gas generation produces much more ghgs than nuclear, and when accounting for the ghg potential of metanen and normal pipeline leakage, it is even more damaging than coal.

Cobalt is the difficult one, especially with the child workers mining it.

Instead of "alternatively" let's say "in addition". We're not going to solve anything with a single solution we need nuclear, we need solar and other renewables, and we need to upgrade the grid. All at the same time.

Precisely this, you can't fix it, if you do not make an effort.

Geothermal power is a lot easier in (say) Iceland than in places with less volcanism.

Geothermal never stops, can be installed in your lawn, and has almost zero maintenance

If you're talking residential geothermal, that won't generate electricity for your home. It can be used for HVAC and water heating though. It isn't zero maintenance, and for most people it is pretty expensive (because they don't have enough land to use the cheaper method for laying the pipes in the ground. Also, call it what it is - Ground-sourced heat pump. Average install price is $30k-$70k.

In many latitudes Air-sourced heat pumps are much much less expensive and perform nearly as well.

I'm hopeful to see cheap to purchase, install, and maintain Ground-sourced heat pump (residential Geothermal) but its not hear yet.

If we want to start discussing the material processing effort then it's going to be pretty hard to call any energy source carbon neutral. The concrete for dams and the steel for windmills don't appear out of thin air.

One way or another, I'm pretty sure that we need fertilizer. What is the source of GHG if the fertilizer is produced without natural gas or other fossil fuels?

Fertilizer which they can't make because the steam isn't hot enough.

Every single pro nuclear argument is a fractal of terrible ideas and gaslighting.

"Baseload generator" isn't a useful concept. And grid reliability (which is a useful concept) is thought about. It just doesn't fit into a soundbite like winddon'tblowsundon'tshine.

Here's an example of a full plan https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/major-publications/integrated-system-plan-isp/2022-integrated-system-plan-isp

Or a simpler analysis on the same grid: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for-australia-is-feasible-and-affordable-with-just-a-few-hours-of-storage/

For reference, 5kWh home batteries currently retail for about $1300 so this would add <10% to the capital cost compared to recent nuclear projects. Pumped hydro is about half the price per capacity, but a bit more per watt. The former is dropping at 10-30% per year, so by the time a nuclear plant is finished, storage cost would be negligible.

Here's a broad overview of a slightly simplified model https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z demonstrating similar is possible everywhere.

Even in the counterfactual case where the ~5% of "other" generation is only possible with fossil fuel, focusing on it is incredibly myopic because the resources spent on that 1% of global emissions could instead be used for the other 70% which isn't from electricity and has different reliability constraints.

Good point. I am not opposed to pumped hydro or other such schemes for storing energy. Nuclear itself tends to be employed for base load power generation and is not especially good at following demand variability. Having supply side variability (from solar, wind, etc.) makes matters worse, of course, and necessitates even more storage. But one way or another, it will be needed, and pumped hydro tends to scale better than say battery farms.

I wonder about option B. As it stands where I live at least, there is not much wiggle room in terms of getting people to use less power in the event of a shortage. For example, the local utility has offered free programmable thermostats in exchange for giving them the ability to control power usage in the event of a shortage, but I understand uptake of the program has been low thus far. I suspect in that scenario, they would have to bring fossil fuel power generation online.

Where I live is not in a drought-prone area at least, but it is also not suitable for pumped hydro given the geography. There was talk in the local news recently about a compressed air storage system that may get built nearby our natural gas plant. This juxtaposition makes some sense when you think about it, since it is a site that already features well-established grid hookups, so they can piggyback on that. The province as a whole is generating something like 60% nuclear, 32% renewables (mostly hydro), and 8% fuels. Recently, there was a major refurbishment of some of the nuclear reactors and it came in on budget and ahead of schedule, so the argument that anything nuclear must automatically involve cost overruns is perhaps no longer true, though good lord we have seen some epic ones in the past, particularly after the utility was privatized.