"Nuclear is likely to be 9% to 12% of generation in 2035" - this is absurd. We should have much more aggressive targets for nuclear. Because it is the cleanest, safest and most reliable source of 0-emission power.
France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear now.
Before the typical "nuclear is too expensive/takes too long to build" comments start: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html. Understand why this is the case and how it's entirely reasonable to fix those problems with sufficient will & funding.
That page doesn't really describe how to fix the problems. Nobody really knows, and there's lots of speculations, but if there was an answer it's easily a trillion dollar reward.
What's your point? The guy doesn't have a few billion to single handedly throw at the problem to test them out. There are feasible solutions to make it less expensive, whether or not they get put into practice is a different topic. The point is that nuclear is not inherently and permanently as expensive as it has been for the past few decades.
> And it didn't address the time scale issue at all.
The time scale issue is directly related to the cost issue. Costs are so high not due to material costs, but because of the engineering and construction overheads. Standardize the designs, streamline the approval processes and both construction time & costs will decrease.
And to your solar point, until there's a viable way to store the energy that solar produces it's not a solution on its own regardless of how cheap it is. Same goes for any renewable that doesn't have the on-demand characteristic of nuclear.
To be clear: I'm not saying to not use solar. I'm saying to build solar, wind, nuclear, AND whatever else. I honestly don't really care how expensive any of them are anymore because the costs of not stopping carbon emissions will be far higher than the cost of building these renewable/nuclear generating stations.
How can the design be standardized? Each location has its own risks to deal with. Extreme heat in Arizona, earthquakes in California, flooding in Florida. Every nuclear plant is a bit different. There is no economics of scale when building nuclear plants.
Reactor designs such as the AP1000 can be and are standardized.
> Extreme heat in Arizona, earthquakes in California, flooding in Florida.
Earthquakes happen everywhere to varying degrees and flooding typically doesn't happen with some warning. I'm not sure about extreme heat being a large problem? If it is, then don't build there. Build elsewhere and then build powerlines to get the power where it's needed. Sure, different areas involve different threats, but you can make a set of designs that work in different areas instead of doing bespoke designs for every one.
> There is no economics of scale when building nuclear plants.
There is to a certain degree. Consider the Vogtle 3 & 4 project. It was hugely over budget in costs and time. Westinghouse went bankrupt during its construction. One (of many) reasons for this was the lack of nuclear construction knowledge left in the US because we stopped building reactors. There are other pending nuclear projects that will now benefit from the knowledge and experience that was re-learned from the Vogtle project. Having an active industry most certainly does bring some economies of scale to life.
There's not enough lithium on planet Earth even for all the electric cars we'll need, don't even start on using lithium batteries for large-scale storage.
The only hope here is that Magnesium-based batteries will become a thing.
EDIT: OK, it seems that I mistook the "mineable lithium deposits" number for the whole lithium available :)
Anyway, unless there is a major technological breakthrough we are looking at few decades of lithium shortages. I expect countries to actually fight wars over lithium they way the US used to fight over oil. So, in the end, building nuclear plants seems more reasonable than building solar and then praying for cheaper batteries.
Lithium is roughly 0.002–0.006 wt% of the earths crust (concentrated in brines to much higher levels of course).
It's no Iron (5% of the earths crust), but it is widely prevalent, and at #33ish most common elements on Earth, it's more about proving reserves of what used to be a niche material, than ACTUAL rarity. Nickel, Zinc, Copper are #23, 24 and #25 for instance, and lead is #36.
We have no shortage of Lead, but mostly because it is a byproduct of Silver mining. It's typical for lead to go for $1/lb.
So that means the price reductions will continue at that same rate? Extrapolation of a trend is not a forgone conclusion with anything. In fact, the price of lithium has gone UP in the past two years. Batteries may very well not be getting cheaper for the foreseeable future.
If we were to start that now, it would add only 1% generation capacity, and that's assuming that all projects finish within 13 years (unlikely) and that none of the construction projects are abandoned as unfinishable in any way that makes financial sense (which happened to 50% of the reactors started in the US in the 2000s).
There's an assumption that we can simply rebuild what we built in the past, but technology has changed quite a bit, construction costs have risen quite a bit, and the lessons we have learned from prior reactors means that we dont want to build the prior designs.
Nuclear is a technology without a solid track record, and which has failed in the US, and in France, and in Finland. In these latter examples, we can't blame regulations or public support. Personally, my hypothesis is that construction productivity has been so stagnant compared to manufacturing productivity growth, that nuclear no longer makes sense for advanced economies. Economies at earlier stages of development with lower labor productivity and therefore lower labor costs, may be able to build nuclear cost-effectively.
We might be about to discover that every power policy in Europe has failed, there are a lot of people hoping for a warm winter. I'd be very nervous if their fossil fuel, nuclear, renewable or gas policies were being adopted where I live. There is a serial problem in the west where people aren't taking energy security seriously. If we were, we'd have been building nuclear reactors 13 years ago and we'd be building them now for 13 years in the future.
For this comment, I also looked up the Texas thing [0] from last year to see if there was a solid consensus on what happened yet RE wind energy's contribution. I imagine there must be some Wikipedia edit wars happening over whether to show the 7th on this graph [1] because it makes it look like Wind was pretty useless at stopping people from freezing to death in winter.
The plan for Texas was never to rely on wind, and how could they, wind is not reliable!
The plan was to rely on natural gas and nuclear, which are supposed to be reliable, but which were not in Texas.
Therefore, more solar and storage is probably the best way for Texans to gain reliability. Texas had the same problem with frozen gas and nuclear plants a decade earlier, knew it was a problem, and refused to fix it.
Decentralization is the only way for people to protect themselves with grid mismanagement like that, which means home solar and storage.
And it comes down to, utilities didn't spring for the cold weather package on their turbines. Effectively deciding that during extreme cold snaps they would rely on natural gas power plants. Which were also brought down by the cold snap.
With enough energy almost anything can be done. The most extreme example I go to is solving adverse effects of climate change on crops: simply build giant greenhouses - you have the energy to power artificial sunlight, desalinate water, etc.
With that in mind, this isn't the sort of lead you could easily (or even reasonably) catch up to. The manner in which an energy superpower would operate would be completely alien to compared to what we know today. China will come to economically dominate the planet unless America (or some another country) catches a wake-up call.
"Nuclear is likely to be 9% to 12% of generation in 2035 under three of NREL’s scenarios but could more than double to 27% with siting and permitting constraints on generation and transmission, models found. But that is unlikely because the cost-effectiveness of investments in wind, solar, storage and transmission is “clearly” better than that of new nuclear, NREL’s Denholm said."
More than half of France's nuclear reactors are out of commission right now, so for the foreseeable future that "70%" is more aspirational than anything.
We are obviously not going to meet all of our energy needs — especially for certain high-demand applications — from solar and wind alone, but there are some significant advantages to a decentralized power grid that the pro-nuclear folks don't seem to factor into their arguments. Assuming we can build it out, a decentralized grid ought to be much more resilient to the sort of problems France is facing right now.
This is fairly liberal use of the term "decentralized." Building many more nuclear plants is still "decentralized" in that some of them can be offline and the system still works.
Major solar and wind installations are typically concentrated in similar generating stations as nuclear plants are. Many more people will likely have solar on their homes, but it's not like wind and solar is going to lead to a purely decentralized grid where every small community is generating their own electricity. There will always be large scale generating stations for the bulk of grid electricity.
> More than half of France's nuclear reactors are out of commission right now
COVID and corrosion issues being investigated led to that, but the fact is that France has had a reliable clean electricity supply for decades before that.
The US can build a plant in 13 years. It's a matter of dedication and willingness. And pissing off a minority of vocal opponents.
It takes longer because of the crazy regulations driven in part by environmentalists who complained about nuclear for decades while fossil fuels were the only other option.
But the USA has the resources, skills, technology and money to do so in a short period of time.
The USA hasn't built a sizable number of reactors for 40 years. We haven't completely lost the skills, but they've sure atrophied.
It takes China 10 years to build a reactor, and they've built lots of them in the past 20 years and don't have the regulations you decry. There's no way that the US can do it in anywhere close to the same time frame that China can.
It's not just the rules and attitudes about nuclear making things slow. We can't build a subway station in any sort of reasonable timeframe or budget.
I believe there are some. If you want to build new reactor designs, it is almost impossible because of the approval you have to get for the design. If I recall, Terrapower was pretty much told they had to prove the tech somewhere else before building here. They planned to build a reactor in China but that was halted because of the trade war? If you are building a reactor with older designs most people say we shouldn't build with, yea there isn't as much push back.
They should build it then, and be willing to suffer financial penalties if they can’t. Otherwise they’re making empty promises. Watch what someone does, not what they say.
None of this is correct, the projects have not been stopped due to environmentalists, or regulations, or even willingness. It's just been construction incompetence that caused billions of dollars to be abandoned on a half-finished project at VC Summer. And it's the same construction incompetence that caused Vogtle to be so far behind schedule and so far over budget.
If somebody has regulations to change, it's time to propose them.
US can build reactors in 13 years in the same fictional scenario where Russian government can be competent and can substitute all the foreign components it needs, especially electronics, with home grown ones.
Back in the real world, US is taking decades to build a railway and Russia's import substitution programm is 90% fraud - they buy from Czech Republic kits for assembly of Tractors, out them together in Russia and call them 'russian-built'.
You cannot just hand-wave away political issues, incompetence and corruption.
Yes, and the problem was that way too many of them were over budget and delayed. Even before Three Mile Island, orders for new nuclear had slowed massively because utilities realized that ther massive risk for financial boondoggles.
Those nuclear reactors are now reaching their end of life, and will need to be phased out. France is realizing what happens when you don't replace your aging fleet fast enough: massive unreliability and extended shutdowns for maintenance and fixing things.
France also started to build new nuclear in the 2000s, at Flamanville, but it has been an utter debacle, that's ongoing to this day. It's to the point that even though the president has said he's going to order more reactors, it seems unlikely that many of them will ever complete.
Building the same model of reactor a second, third, and fourth time has resulted in increasing cost in both the US and France.
There are a few countries that have shown positive learning rather than negative learning, but there's questions about how much of that is from corruption and cheating rather than actual process improvements. (I'm thinking of South Korea here)
France gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear now.