Posted by geox 1 day ago
There is - arguably a case for nuclear power in cold miserable places like Canada or Northern Europe because solar - by far the cheapest form of renewable energy, and still with a substantial runway to get cheaper - produces the least amount of energy precisely when those places need it most.
Australia, being a warm, sunny place, has far less seasonal variation in solar production, and at worst bas a grid that needs roughly the same amount of energy in winter and summer peaks.
Even in a net zero scenario things like running a gas turbine on biomethane or synthesised hydrogen for that last few percent of demand will make more economic sense than building nuclear in Australia.
If someone figures how to churn out SMRs for $3.95 each, sure, that would change matters, but that remains a hypothetical possibility that Australia does not have to plan around.
Peak electricity demand occurs when solar generation has dropped to nearly zero. It's not the last few percent, it's the last 90 something percent demand. This is the entire problem with solar (and wind, though slightly different patterns).
If you're going to "they should just" it, you really need to know at least that. It's just a hard problem even in Australia. The reason these "dirt cheap renewables" have not been pushing electricity prices down to historic lows anywhere in the world is that you've kind of been had by the marketing.
Solar and wind are very important and very cheap where applicable, and with more storage, better grids, and consumers that are better adapted to them they should gradually improve. But they are not going to "just" anything.
Remember how wind and solar was so cheap that it had already killed coal? That was a common mantra I heard maybe 20 years ago. Since then solar panels and wind turbines have become even cheaper and better so surely they must be moving on to just about killing off natural gas too... But no, it turns out 60% of Australia's electricity is generated by fossil fuels today, 40% being coal which is twice the amount that solar generated. How could that be possible decades after coal had been killed by solar? Really was some pretty wild propaganda.
This is not due to government corruption and incompetence and a cabal of coal barons preventing renewables. Nuclear maybe, but solar no. There is electricity generation surplus when solar is working in Australia, they turn off wind turbines and solar panels and try to give the electricity away for free. Cost of solar panels being zero would make approximately no difference to those 20% solar and 60% fossil fuels numbers.
And as much as a cyclist I dislike cars, the nice thing about electric cars is the potential that most often they can be charged at a time when it is convenient for the network. Mind you, cars just sit around 95% of the time.
So it's no longer "just solar" with a biogas turbine for the remaining few % demand, is it? It's solar with batteries to cover 3x the current daily solar output plus perhaps more to deal with multi-day fluctuations.
> That's a new trend and easy to miss
It's not new and not easy to miss, it's obvious they need storage to cover any more demand. This has literally been the biggest issue for solar for at least 20 years.
> but it will push out coal and gas.
Maybe. How much more credible are these claims than the "solar killed coal" idiocy from years ago? I mean solar and battery tech does continue to get better so you can mindlessly point to that and yes if it kept continuing surely it would push out fossil fuels (everywhere including airplanes and ships). But if we are talking actual timeframes and realistic technology projections?
Nuke shouldn't replace Solar, it shouldn't be a competition. Nuke should push coal and gas out.
Solar isn't just about having big empty spaces either, it needs to be located near where people who service it actually want to live. AEMO used to have a policy of not revealing where upcoming solar projects were to be located, leading to multiple competing solar farms, only the first of which would be connected to the grid, the remaining projects being left sitting there doing nothing until transmission upgrades could be completed.
Not to mention, we dont have anything like the battery capacity needed to hold daytime voltage overnight. The Elon Musk battery in SA being famous for supplying a few minutes to hold over a voltage drop from a QLD coal plant failure, while gas came online to support it.
Nuclear isnt as bad as they say for cost either. Every report funded in Australia factors in the sovereign risk that the government might start or permit a project and kill it due to politics.
Theres no practical reason why we couldn't mirror the British rollout, bringing a reactor on every 3-5 years or whatever it was, except that most of those blokes are retired and we would like the british did, build the nuclear industry here from scratch.
Speaking of which, do you happen to know how many TBq (or what) other methods are putting into the atmosphere and hydrosphere?
Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case.
We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.
PV solar + batteries is a dead simple, solid state design that's easily scalable without huge up front capital requirements. We're not at the point yet where nuclear doesn't pencil out anywhere, but with current trends it's getting closer by the year.
I wish we built more nuclear 20-30 years ago when the competition was coal and gas but unfortunately we didn't and now the equation has changed. Shutting down existing reactors that are still viable is a bad move to be clear, but new plants are becoming increasingly hard to justify economically.
That's a very ambitious statement, every piece of hardware has lifecycle limitations. Engineering things for "infinite" lifetime significantly drives up the cost of the resulting product in most cases.
I would certainly hope the radiation-exposed parts of nuclear power plants are engineered for a very long life, but… there's water and metal involved, these things do need maintenance. And the non-irradiated parts probably need to be maintained much more frequently, e.g. the turbines certainly won't live forever.
As a matter of fact, solid state devices tend to last much longer, and PV is one of very few completely solid state power generation technologies. (It does, unfortunately, suffer from general sun exposure damage.) Personally speaking, without some digging I wouldn't make any claims which of them lives longer, it feels like it could go either way by quite a bit of margin.
I would love it if somebody who has recently built something like a fission plant could give us a report as to exactly what happened that caused this.
I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like.
If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station.
But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.
To hit 100 sq km at 50% panel efficiency would mean averaging 20 watts per sq meter (obviously wrong). Even assuming a paltry 10% panel efficiency would only get you to 100 watts per sq meter.
Jokes aside, Canada is well positioned to lead a nuclear renaissance, now that they have easy access to raw materials, easy access to cooling facilities and they can export surplus to energy hungry neighbor, it also makes it a good candidate for hosting lots of datacenters
just join the US already
We should have more nuclear, but they should be run for profit to hold them to account instead of massively indebting them to create public sector crony slush funds the way the current hydroelectric system has been run into the ground.
Relying on Trump or any other clown, makes no more sense.