The nuclear renaissance dies, forgotten and bankrupt

But there is still the argument that it might be really useful in the zombie apocalypse.

Main factor is that nuclear can be made safe enough by re-burning radioactive waste and cheap enough so that it dies very slowly but while contributing decently to phasing out hydrocarbons without abrupt energy shortage.
We shouldn’t argue whether nuclear energy should be zero in the short time frame, but how close to 10% compared to all renewable energy is good cost-benefit & risk/reward equation number for nuclear energy in some countries, if not in many countries.

Its mainly PV solar wot done it. Gas fracking certainly hurt nuclear (and coal, and renewables) in the US, but much less so in the rest of the world.

Absent the dramatic price falls in PV solar the nuclear renaissance would be proceeding worldwide – and (at the risk of incurring obloquy from old ban-the-bomb people here) I reckon absent those falls it would have been far the least bad option.

Contra John, I think we should still be putting a bit of money into research on it to diversify risk because there is every prospect of lowering nuclear’s cost with new designs and approaches (eg thorium). More speculatively, it is also worth throwing the odd few billion towards fusion research on the same grounds. But these are no longer the main game in town.

I did indeed see this story at breakfast yesterday — I’m going to pat myself on the back now, okay? — but my takeaway was: “Here’s another example of infrastructure spending being prohibitively costly in the USA. Why?” See also: NYC’s aging and failing subway system (while even London is preparing to open a new line); the apparent impossibility of building out high speed rail in the NE corridor; etc.

I am sure John and CT commenters know much more about this than I do. So is it correct to lump this nuclear boondoggle together with other examples of infrastructure costs running out of control? And any compelling arguments as to what’s behind it all? (Some anecdata: I met an American wind turbine engineer on a train in the UK recently. He was frustrated and pessimistic about a skills deficit affecting US construction crews.)

This Westinghouse bankruptcy filing is just a minor hiccup. As of 1 August 2017, there are 58 reactors under construction worldwide with 20 in China alone. The good news for nuclear power advocates is that 162 reactors are on order or planned in 23 different nations. These reactors have approvals, funding or commitment in place, and are mostly expected in operation within 8-10 years. A further 349 reactors have been proposed with specific program or site proposals. China is leading the way and as the World Nuclear Association states: “China has become largely self-sufficient in reactor design and construction, as well as other aspects of the fuel cycle, but is making full use of western technology while adapting and improving it.”
AP1000s under construction in China are unaffected by the Westinghouse bankruptcy filing. Wang Binghua, chairman of China’s State Power Investment Corporation, recently said that his company will make sure its first two AP1000 stations at Sanmen and Haiyang will start producing electricity by end of 2017.
Besides, the AP1000 is not the only reactor design in the world. The Chinese are building ACPR1000, Hualong 1 and EPR reactors and have plans for numerous CAP1000 reactors. Future AP1000 units will now be CAP1000, which is a local standardisation of the design. Additionally construction will start this year on a CAP1400 reactor in Shandong Province.
Then we have other reactor types such as the Russian VVER range, of which several are under construction and many more are planned. India mostly uses the PHWR design and aims to supply 25 per cent of electricity from nuclear power by 2050.
Nuclear power is undergoing a Renaissance despite what any luddite may think. Nuclear power has enormous energy density and will provide cheap power 24 hours a day, every day. Not just when the wind blows or sun shines. This is what the world needs to lift everyone out of poverty.
I haven’t been paid by the nuclear lobby to say this. I just look at the facts.

@7

Are there any actual functional generation four nuclear reactors out there? (I have checked Wikipedia, which says no.)

I am expecting the same fate for my local pair – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station

Though hopefully later on in the process after they have pumped a lot of money into the local community.

Nuclear plants are expensive, but… so what? We should look at plants as infrastructure projects, not moneymaking schemes. There’s no reason why a fabulously wealthy society like the United States shouldn’t subsidize projects like this if it’s going to reduce emissions. Nuclear plants should be constructed as public utilities owned by the state, not farmed out to contractors.

Any solar facility can be insured against business losses like any other business. Nuclear power can only be “insured” by implicit or explicit governmental assumption of risks and clean up costs. With the value of this “insurance” calculated in, nuclear power becomes even more expensive and should not be a part of our conversation going forward.

So many people are arguing about the expense of wind/solar using out of date cost data. For some it is a deliberate tactic, for others they simply take five or ten year old data/conclusions for granted.
If instead you try to make reasonable projections of future cost -we are still moving up the learning curves), then things get really interesting.

AHubbard uses heroic (or anti-heroic) assumptions about storage needs. Such as assume absolutely zero solar and wind for some period of time (usually a week or two). Then assume
everyone is consuming juice as the maximum load. Then assume every bit of energy must come from a battery. So they come up with huge numbers. But we all know those assumptions are wrong -particularly if the grid can move energy over long distances.

Don’t forget Blighty

They should manage to build Hinkley Point with a reasonable profit at that insane subsidy rate. Just from memory, the not over budget return assumptions were pretty high. What is it 9 pound per kw/h or sth like that right? The big question remains why the hell would you pay a much higher subsidy rate for nuclear than for renewables. Almost as if the logic is “but windmills are ugly in my countryside, they got more externalities than nukes”.

“it is heavily subsidized in the countries where it is running”

Er, so? The whole POINT of government action to tackle climate change is that you can’t just rely on free market prices to sort it out. It was free market prices that got us into this mess – a world heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

California’s electricity demand is declining as its solar supply ramps up. Increasing efficiency is still the low-hanging fruit.

Imagine how much energy could be saved by banning coats and ties and allowing office buildings to make t-shirts and shorts the default attire in summer.

It feels like this thread needs a better understanding of the difference between the combined energy consumption of a modern society versus the amount of energy it is possible to produce through complete utilization of renewables (barring any serious technological leaps forward in energy efficiency or conversion).

The work that does that is here: http://www.withouthotair.com/, more specifically it is this chapter (http://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml), which compares the the total energy consumption in the UK (195kWh/day/person maximum) versus the total energy produced by utilizing all available renewables available to the UK (180kWh/day/person maximum), which wouldn’t ever be a very likely scenario. A more likely scenario in the the near future is the production of about 10-27kWh/day/person from renewables and a consumption of about 125kWh/day/person. This leaves a pretty serious gap for the UK that can only really be filled with nuclear energy and some mitigating factors.

Basically, from a purely practical perspective any serious attempt to deal with the coming catastrophe of global warming is going to have to consist of a combined arms approach that includes:
– Renewables
– Nuclear
– Reduced energy consumption
– Improved efficiency in industrial and agricultural systems

There are also other reasons not to write off the need for nuclear. As fresh water becomes more scarce (the US is depleting its fresh-water aquifers far faster than it is replenishing them: https://water.usgs.gov/edu/gwdepletion.html), we’ll probably end up needing nuclear-powered desalination plants to churn out enough fresh water just to stay alive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Cogeneration).

At this point, the actual conversation about which alternative energy source to use to mitigate AGW is pretty much done: we’re going to need to use all of them and as quickly as possible.

John – the book doesn’t really talk about costs, just the physical limits.
For countries like Australia, Canada and the USA, where there is plenty of land, sure, the case for nuclear is much weaker.
For the UK, or most European and Asian countries, which have population densities a hundred times higher than Australia, the low power density of renewables mean that as Pavel said, absent very large efficiency improvements, renewables will take a large fraction of the area of a country. This hasn’t changed in the past decade, and is unlikely to get better by a factor of more than 2 ever, so either Wales is filled with solar panels and wind farms, nuclear and other less land intensive technologies make up a big fraction of the mix, or large amounts of energy is imported from outside Europe.

Back in the 1980’s, the US Defense Department sponsored the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit program to accelerate the development of electronics to meet its anticipated demands. Many, most of the tech giants formed partnerships to investigate exotic technologies to achieve those daring goals. Intel, however, stood apart, claiming that it projected that it would achieve the desired performance with silicon.

The tech press breathlessly reported the first and second brassboard benchmarks, after which the project was abandoned. Moore’s law won.

John, your picture of the nuclear industry is grossly distorted because you’ve left out the successful nuclear projects, which greatly outnumber the AP1000 and EPR failures. In recent years cheap reactors delivered on time and on budget are the rule.

“Scale economies are crucial, but no current reactor design is being constructed in numbers large enough to realise them.”

This claim is crazily wrong. China has brought 22 of its CPR1000 reactors on line during the last 8 years. The latest one grid-connected three days ago, after a construction period of 4 years 7 months, at a total cost of about $3200 per kilowatt. Feed-in tariffs for Chinese nuclear power are lower than the FITs for wind and solar. That’s a cheap, fast, large-scale deployment by any measure.

China blundered in shifting its focus to the AP1000 and EPR models; it should just keep cranking out CPR1000s while developing Gen IV reactors. But its Hualong 1 model, a Gen III extension of the CPR1000, may succeed—the first two builds are going well so far.

South Korea’s Gen III APR1400 reactor is another success story, with the first Korean builds coming in at about $3200 per kilowatt and 7-year construction periods (including two-year delays caused by installation of cables with fake quality certifications). They have also been a success at the Barakah plant in UAE, with the first of four reactors due on line next year after 6 years of construction. The Barakah reactors cost $4600 per kilowatt, a little more than half what the American AP1000s cost.

Unfortunately, further APR1400 builds have been put on hold because the new Korean president announced the phase-out of nuclear power (to be replaced by gas pipelines from Russia). This has nothing to do with the superb performance and economics of Korean nuclear power, which have decarbonized 30 percent of the electricity supply at a cost less than that of coal-fired power, and everything to do with hysterical anti-nuclear politics.

The nuclear renaissance has indeed built reactors quickly, cheaply and in large numbers (replicating earlier successful deployments in France, Japan, Germany, Sweden and elsewhere). What’s hurting the industry isn’t the inherent logistics and economics, it’s scare-mongering politics.

I think every almost single word in bad Jim’s comment at 34 is wrong, or at least misleading. VHSIC started in 1979, but Intel had already developed the 4004 chip in 1970, and all their subsequent chips up until the Pentium (?) were based on its design. They “stood apart” because they had developed a commercial chip in 1970. This appears to have been recognized by the department of defense, probably because the goal of VHSIC was not to “investigate exotic technologies to achieve these daring goals”, but to “establish processes to design and fabricate chips with characteristics necessary for department of defense needs.” They also “viewed the program as a mechanism to encourage the commercial electronics sector to develop production capabilities suitable for the military market.” The DoD also expected that “at the same time commercial R&D activities have been and will be developing ICs with similar feature sizes, but the VHSIC chips are designed for specific military applications.” (These quotes taken from here). Indeed, you can find reports on the VHSIC program online that make clear what it was doing.

Also, the core component of Intel’s most successful Intel chip (the 4004) was developed by Faggini in 1968, when he worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, who were involved in FHSIC (again, I learnt this from an old copy of New Scientist). Of course, that was 10 years before FHSIC started so …

Also, the FHSIC final report lists a variety of performance properties for chips developed there, including for example (page 129) a vector arithmetic/logic unit capable of 75 million instructions per second, which appears to be comparable to Intel chips of the time (disclaimer: there are a lot of different benchmarks that are hard to cross compare, and it’s difficult to identify from the final report what year specific chip developments came out).

And finally, the brassboards were first released in 1986 and the program finished in 1989, so the impression that the press breathlessly reported the first and second benchmarks and then the project was abandoned is slightly wrong. The project was intended to last 10 years, it lasted 10 years, and the brassboard benchmarks were near the end of the project.

It’s as if massive government funding of tech projects works …

Faustusnotes: The maths is all there in the book, it might be wrong, but you can work out where you disagree with the numbers if you’re inclined. I couldn’t work out where exactly you were getting your figures from, but http://wiki-solar.org/analysis/norms.html has some numbers:
For the UK:
950 MWh per year per MW(peak) and 2.4 ha per MW(peak)
2.6 MWh/day per MW(peak), so 2.4 ha gives 2.6 MWh/day
meaning the solar plant has an average power density of 110 Wh/day/m^-2
Which gives 1.1 kWh/day for a 10m^2 installation, so Without Hot Air is actually being generous.

Other than the way it was funded (which was scandalous), I’ve seen nothing local to suggest that the SCE&G contractors did anything wrong (other than communicate poorly). The problem is that building a nuclear power station is uneconomic.

Also, when people use ‘baseload’ as an argument for nuclear power, that’s always a tell that they don’t quite know what they’re talking about. While baseload is important (it’s the minimum amount of power that you need to generate), it’s significance for nuclear power is that this is the maximum that you can efficiently generate. Nuclear power stations produce the same amount of energy 24 hours a day – they’re very inflexible. Once you generate more than the baseload, you’re accepting that a certain proportion of your energy will be wasted (or you need batteries – in which case the same arguments that apply to renewables come into play).

One of the big economic arguments for gas powered stations compared to coal fired ones, is that they can be switched on and off very quickly, thus reducing wastage.

My big argument against nuclear power in the US is that I think political corruption is such that they won’t be regulated, or maintained, properly. Maybe nuclear power stations are different to chicken plants, or bridges, but I’m not confident.

“the combination of renewables, storage and energy efficiency” and smarter, more flexible grids.

Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air introduces a good way of looking at the problem: bottom-up, for both production and consumption, and quantitative all the way.

There are two major quantitative mistakes and one major conceptual mistake (IMO) in the book.

Quantitatively:

He assumes that solar modules cheap enough for large scale deployment will be only 10% efficient.</b< (Page 41, "Well, if we covered 5% of the UK with 10%-efficient panels, we’d have … 50 kWh/day/person. I assumed only 10%-efficient panels, by the way, because I imagine that solar panels would be mass-produced on such a scale only if they were very cheap, and it’s the lower-efficiency panels that will get cheap first."). Even really cheap Chinese panels now have an entry level efficiency starting around 14.4%. Assuming that MacKay did the rest of the calculations correctly, the large scale solar contribution goes up proportionally to 72 kWh/person/day. Ask me in another two years and the baseline module efficiency is likely to be higher yet. MacKay probably imagined cheap but inefficient thin film solar vs. more expensive, more efficient crystalline silicon solar. That seemed plausible 10 years ago. Now the cheapest panels, the most efficient panels, and the most common panels are all based on crystalline silicon cell technology. There’s never going to be a cheap 10% module that gets used on a large scale because low efficiency cells incur too much additional systemic costs.

The other big quantitative mistake was on the demand side. Instead of using the actual per-capita consumption of the UK, MacKay takes a “typical moderately affluent” person’s consumption and multiplies it by the entire population of the UK (page 22). This leads to large, systematic over-estimates of consumption; for example, on page 30, he acknowledges in a footnote that he’s estimating 50 km of car travel per person per day even though the reported number for the UK is 30 km/day. He’s estimating 166% of the true value! Most of the time he doesn’t compare his “typical moderately affluent” person’s consumption to actual per-capita values, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most of his demand numbers are similarly over-estimated compared to reality. It’s a bizarre choice to posit 100% of the population consuming like the 8th or 9th income decile, especially coming from someone who proclaims quantitative rigor over “hot air.”

Conceptually:

The biggest single energy consumption block is “stuff” (chapter 15) — embodied energy in goods, basically. “…the biggest item in the average British person’s
energy footprint is the energy cost of making imported stuff.” (Page 93). But why on Earth is he adding up the embodied energy of American soybeans, Chinese steel, and Taiwanese microchips and trying to source that same embodied energy within the geographical boundaries of the UK? He didn’t mention in the forward that this book was going to take a sharp and unexpected turn to “sustainable autarky” 15 chapters in. And if he’s not imagining autarky, then sustainability just means that goods produced outside the UK need to use sustainable energy too. Not that the energy for making imported goods in foreign factories needs to be sourced from the UK. If the largest single chunk of UK energy consumption comes from foreign goods, that actually makes sustainability easier, because most of those foreign imports are produced in countries with better sunlight resources than the UK itself possesses.

AHubbard:

Omega Centauri thinks that ~15 days of storage is overkill, and Kiwanda suggests that PV+10 hours of storage is adequate to count as baseload. Omega has a bit of a point, although it comes with massive tradeoffs. How much storage do you need?

“Ten hours” is a vague unit of storage, and the Lazard discussion was, again, an “example”. But generally, the amount of storage needed to make solar immune to diurnal variation is obviously about a half-day’s worth, and given that consumption from 6pm to 6am is overall maybe 80% of consumption the rest of the time, “ten hours” is a reasonable idea of what’s needed. Moreover, given the lack of blizzards, or even much overcast, in large areas of, for example, the US; the fact that the wind is often blowing when the sun isn’t shining; the use of batteries to smooth production for *both* sun and wind; and the existence of transmission systems that reduce variability of power production relevant to a location, including extending the effective daylight hours, I think there is no need to estimate costs for “batteries sufficient to supply the US on their own for sixteen hours”, and the like.

While the demise of the listed reactors appears to be a fact, I would not share your assertion, nor your enthusiasm for this outcome.
Nuclear power has a very important role to play in future generation of electricity and the main challenge it faces now is the continued move toward more efficiency on the part of many consumers (better motors, LED lights, etc.) as well as the depressed price of petroleum products across the globe.
Nuclear will have a voice in the future, just as it does now.

I would add a (c) to John@49. New reactors, even if they make no economic sense, might be the best method of plutonium (and maybe neptunium) disposal.

I think nuclear power has a future in some parts of the world where solar PV really will not do the job, either because of lack of land or lack of sun (ultimately both problems might be resolvable by long-distance HVDC networks – but that’s some way off yet). That’s why, as I said, we should still be working on Gen IV and Gen V designs. But for most of the world other renewables have killed nuclear stone dead.

And yes, a lot of the commenters here are excessively Americocentric or Eurocentric. There’s more to the planet than the Britain or the US; the first has long lost hegemony while the second is visibly losing it.

Yes, thanks, TF79, well said!

@ 57
Yes it’s interesting that waste doesn’t come up. I’d like to say that I oppose nuclear because of the danger to life and the problem of waste/storage disposal. I think that viewpoint somehow gets excluded from the discussion as being ’emotional’ or ‘irrational’ but it’s actually a legitimate and important one.

The other thing that I think is not included in the discussion enough is demand reduction. There are some extraordinary figures being tossed around here about energy consumption – far higher than we ‘need’ in any sense.

It’s a viewpoint I always try to put, although there’s a surprising (to me) amount of resistance – our health problems are related to ‘over-consumption’ and sedentary lifestyles across the world. There is still a proportion of the population (less than a billion now) who have an ‘energy deficit’ but the great majority of us consume too much – it would actually be better for us to be more physically active and to rely less on machines (eg motorised transport, processed food) in many areas of our lives.

I’ve been accused on CT of ‘new puritanism’, ‘virtue signalling’ etc etc but I have to keep saying this – we would actually be better off if we reduced our energy demands in much of everyday life rather than assuming that we must have the same lifestyles only powered by renewables. I’m all in favour of renewables, but I’m also all in favour of people getting out of their bloody cars and walking, or riding a bike.

@Val, while I am all in favour of cycling (etc.), I just don’t see how it can be more than a small sideshow in the CO2 issue.

I live in the Netherlands, probably the most bicycle-centred country in the world. Bicycle usage is something like 10 to 20 times higher than in Australia (I believe you were from Australia? ). This surely has an effect on car usage, but it’s minor. 17 billion bike kilometers a year, against 140 billion car kilometers. If we aim for a severe reduction in the CO2 impact from car use, then Netherlands-style bicycle usage is hardly a beginning.

I am honestly struggling to imagine how we could change this country (already the most bike friendly!), to make a bicycle a viable alternative to a car for most trips of most people. It’s not impossible, but so much more extreme than ‘only’ replacing the electric grid and all the cars. It would involve a replacement of the entire build-up stock, relocation of most of the people, most of the workplaces, changing so many social relations…

@Omega: One of the issues with renewables is that there are so many options, none of which work. So, bio-fuels. I haven’t done a deep enough dive into the numbers for bio-fuels, but a few percent-yearly-use is a major investment into bio-fuel production, and one that I would MUCH rather earmark for transportation than grid: while EV are promising, unless self-driving cars drop the fleet size dramatically, we aren’t going to be able to build enough to replace the whole fleet, so net-zero-carbon fuels are going to be needed. Even then, you are talking about (a) a full bio-fuel industry (b) a full set of conventional power plants capable of powering the whole US (c) AND a full set of renewable production capable of powering the whole US. Even if the bio-fuel industry at the scale needed is possible, the end result is prohibitively expensive, and will be spewing extremely nasty pollution.

@TF79 and others: While I know that people are scared of nuclear waste, from a direct public health perspective, it is purely a manufactured issue. See, e.g https://newmatilda.com/2016/03/03/nuclear-waste/. I don’t blame people who haven’t examined the numbers for worrying, but we’ve gotten to the point that the only reason people worry about it is because, well, people worry about it. So you can stop worrying! Yay!

From a secondary, people are scared, so will be stressed and stress is unhealthly and fear can lead to bad decisions perspective it is an issue (see the Fukushima evacuation, where the Japanese government tormented and killed its citizens for no justifiable reason) but that can be dealt with through other means.

In debates about nuclear power, as in many other political disputes, there are the arguments that hold water and the arguments that persuade people and they aren’t usually the same. Dealing with nuclear waste is supposed to be a terrific problem, for example, but what’s lacking on that front are not viable solutions but the political will to implement them. It’s just easier to scare people about waste than to raise other objections. The dubious economic viability of new nuclear plants is actually harder to get around than the hyped difficulties of waste storage. One genuine and seldom discussed obstacle is the long-term issue of nuclear fuel—if you go balls out for nuclear, you’re either going to have a uranium shortage or go in for plutonium recycling. Equally daunting is the question of the management of nuclear plants. Nuclear power is one area where there are huge advantages to scale in terms of safety, efficiency, and economics. The best run nuclear plants on the planet are French, but duplicating the performance of EdF is pretty hard to do in countries that lack France’s tradition of centralized public bureaucracy run by cadres of elite engineers and administrators. To put it mildly, I’m not very sanguine about the prospect of a flock of new plants operated by Southern California Edison.

One downside to making a big deal out of waste disposal is that we’ve got to deal with the waste that already exists even if we build no new nuclear plants. Proposing that any solution will have to meet impossibly high standards has so far meant that a lot of hot waste is sitting around in ponds all over the place because nobody knows how to engineer a facility that won’t have any problems for 10,000 years. For my money, getting this stuff to some godforsaken corner of Nevada is progress.

I don’t think I’ve ever called anyone a puritan but from memory the point at which I parted company with green egalitarianism was someone on CT declaring that all communities needed to produce their own food so people like me would need to abandon London to live in a village. Also someone else deciding that we couldn’t have kids because they’d produce too much carbon…

Ahubbard at 68, the Japanese government did not torment and kill its citizens. A small number were mandatorily evacuated from the immediate path of the plume when people were unsure what might happen, and an evacuation advisory (be ready to evacuate) was applied to a small region of low population. The zones set up by the Japanese govt were smaller than those demanded by foreign countries (eg the us demanding a 50km exclusion zone). The reason people died is that they were elderly people living in nursing homes who could not get access to food and medicine because private distribution networks broke down. They then evacuated over a two week period and some of the nursing homes experienced no increase in mortality. This idea that the Japanese govt killed its citizens by forcing an evacuation is a pernicious lie. There’s a difference between mismanagement and errors in a world first event and “tormenting and killing” your citizens.

Also contra AHubbard, let us remember that the risk from Fukushima arose from nuclear waste that was at risk of burning. It’s not exactly on a par with the modern health consequences of coal but nuclear waste is dangerous and nuclear power is extremely dangerous if not well managed. Sure well managed nuclear power is very clean and very safe but well managed nuclear power requires some strong conditions. Boosting nuclear requires recognizing those conditions.

Val, cycling for commuter reasons is not actually much of a calorie burner. Walking is better.

One way that Amsterdam could become more cycle friendly is by introducing Chinese mobile style schemes, which really seem to increase bike use. But the issue with bike use is in countries where it is dangerous and derided , like the U.K. You need a cultural change to get that. In Japan when a family have a baby they buy a bigger bicycle – in oz they buy a bigger car. There’s a lot of things need to change before Ozzie parents will buy a bike to take their kids to school.

@74: If there are people arguing against renewables and for nuclear power, on green grounds, they are just silly. I just think that nuclear is a component of a response to climate change; people who advocate, say, shutting down nuclear reactors are not doing the fight against climate change a favor in my view.

I do agree with you that the market has spoken pretty decisively here, and thus that the future is renewables. However, that’s a different thing from wanting the entire sector to vanish.

Re consumption changes: a lot of this has already been done, in the form of energy efficiency. However, a lot of the related infrastructure is built in: people have purchased houses far from their work, in many cases largely because of exorbitant costs for urban dwellers. And large fixed costs, for things like electricity, hit poor people much harder than they do wealthy ones. There are also “sunk costs” in things like cars and trucks, but those have a shorter life cycle than houses, and are thus more amenable to changes in things like fuel efficiency rules. There are a lot of reasons why this approach (basically, ratcheting up efficiency requirements in design) is going to be more successful than mandating changes in behavior, especially since the latter run into the sort of problems indicated above.

“In Japan when a family have a baby they buy a bigger bicycle – in oz they buy a bigger car.”
And, in the US they buy a giant SUV. Not because they need the space for junior, but because they think having a few tones of metal will keep her safe.

If we didn’t push our causes out of fear they might “turn” people conservative we wouldn’t be very good at politics would we? And why do we blame “political correctness ” for a persons decision to turn conservative? We asked this person not to say “nigger” so they voted for an economics wrecker like dubya, who killed a million people? That’s their fault, not ours. Why do so many people coddle these idiots with special exemptions from basic responsibilities because their precious feefees get hurt when they’re reminded to be nice about whole groups of people? Why the soft bigotry of low expectations for white proto racists? And don’t tell me they’re not racist – if you vote for economic wreckers, gangsters, criminals and traitors (i.e. Conservatives) because someone told you it’s not nice to call people sluts and niggers, you’re a racist. If how you talk about people you don’t know is more important to you than whether your president is a treasonous mass murdering orange shit gibbon, you’re a racist.

Not to mention that these people who turned conservative because of pc only exist in the conservative imagination…

Interesting how this has turned from Nuclear power, to PCness.

Today I think PC has become a derogatory term, representing an almost cartoon version of
character assassination based on someone speaking a social heresy. Arguably, this is more a case of perception, rather than reality. Nevertheless there has been a definite tactical change on the left, whereby deeply damaging social and/or legal sanctions are applied towards those whose speech and/or actions identify them as a regressive. So there is a certain amount of fear that one might misspeak once and find himself the object of a witch-hunt. I suspect that rarely actually happens, but it has great salience to the emotional mind.

So what I am advocating, is not giving up on these causes, which I heartily agree with btw. But, in realizing that those who have demonstrated that they are not fully reformed are humans, and humans make mistakes, need forgiveness and so on. Love the sinner hate the sin sort of stuff.

Sorry for repeated posts but just making the point that change can happen – between the 2001 and 2011 census:

-travel to work by car as driver in the suburb I am in dropped from 42.1 to 32.6%,
– travel by train increased from 7.8 to 11.3%
– travel by bike increased from 5.2 to 11.6%

(Travel by tram, which has always been quite popular, only increased by 1% from 15.9% to 16.9%, but I bet it could be more if the trams were more frequent eg every three minutes instead of six, and not so crowded at busy times!)

Trains only run about 18 mins apart here even at busy times so there’s a lot of capacity to increase that.

So yes – change is possible and is happening. We could – and should – stop spending money on roads altogether and start spending it on public and active transport, but we need to imagine the future instead of being stuck in the past.

@ 84

Also
“Interesting how this has turned from Nuclear power to PCness”

Can I remind you that you are the person who introduced political correctness to the discussion?!

@James Wimberly 67, on the Copiapo solar plant,

Copiapo is a worthwhile project, but it’s definitely not a “steady 24/7 supply,” nor can it “run like a nuclear power plant.” And it’s not as cheap as advertised because, even though “unsubsidized” by theChilean government, it will get additional revenue beyond the 6.3 cent per kwh by selling SRECs on the international market. It’s substantially more expensive than the Barakah desert nuclear plant being built in UAE. Copiapo is an example of how overblown solar hype can get.

Copiapo has two 130 MW heliostat fields driving twin 130 MW turbines and also charging the molten salt storage tanks with heat. Projected generation will be 1,800 GWh/y, giving a 79 percent capacity factor on the 260 MW nameplate capacity. That’s a sensational CF for a solar plant, but it’s also an accounting trick, because it leaves out the capacity of the 150 MW PV field appended to the plant. Counting the PV, the plant’s actual capacity will be 410 MW, and the production of 1,800 GWh/y gives a CF of 50 percent. That’s still stellar for a solar plant, but it’s a far cry from the 90 percent CF of a nuclear plant.

The 79 percent turbine CF for Copiapo belies its claim of 260 MW, 24/7 power. There will be many hours each week when the plant is outputing less than its nameplate, and some cloudy days (they do happen in the Atacama), when it generates next to nothing. Even with 14 hours of storage, an overcast dawn will shut the plant down.

Even though a 79 percent CF is close to a nuke’s 90 percent, Copiapo’s chaotic weather-induced shortfalls are different in kind. Nukes routinely run for more than a year at a stretch at full capacity without any interruptions whatever. Downtime is usually for refuelling and maintenance scheduled long in advance. That’s true 24/7 reliability that solar can’t match, even with storage.

Copiapo’s unreliability spells fossil-fueled backup. The issue is clarified in SolarReserve’s “Baseload Solar Power” sales brochure: “For full 100 percent availability in off-grid scenarios, a relatively small amount of fossil fuel can be used on cloudy days.” So, no, Copiapo’s “baseload” does not mean steady 24/7 solar power. When clouds inevitably roll in, diesel will burn.

Copiapo won’t burn the diesel itself. It’s selling its power to mines that already have diesel generators that can take over when Copiapo conks out. Because the diesel backup is located at the mine rather than the power plant, the Copiapo plant technically does not use fossil-fueled backup; its customers definitely do.

Copiapo is still very useful. It will make lots of reasonably cheap, clean power that will greatly reduce mine emissions while offloading the reliability problem to the mines’ diesel sets.

But its not the “baseload” panacea that hypesters claim when they imagine Chile running its whole grid off of Atacama solar plants. If Chile did that, there would be many days each year when long cloud fronts would shut down the whole Atacama sector, Chile would need fossil-fueled backup sufficient to run the whole grid.

Even with storage, even in the Atacama, solar can’t do baseload.

@JQ 74,

1. “I don’t have a really strong view on this, but you need to take account of opportunity cost. The funds needed to finish the project could be allocated to additional wind power instead.”

The implication of the Shellenberger piece you cited is that there is no opportunity cost advantage in cancelling VC Summer to build RE, because the VC Summer lifecycle LCOE is about the same as the cost of RE.

“Unsurprisingly, Shellenberger argues for “reliable” nuclear, as opposed to “chaotic” wind. But even to get to equal cost, he has to rely on the fact that ” South Carolina and its neighboring states have the worst onshore wind resource in the US “. Given an improved grid, both the cost advantage and the reliability advantage would be gone, since SC could import wind electricity from more favored locations.”

Plains wind is cheaper than SC wind, but transmitting it to SC costs a lot of money. We have good estimates for how much. Two independently proposed 700-mile wind transmission lines would each add 3 cents per kwh to the cost of the wind power shipped. One of these is a project to ship Panhandle wind to Tenesseee; transmitting it a further 400 miles to SC would add another penny or so, which would eliminate any price advantage of the Panhandle wind.

You’re positing an “improved grid” to integrate cheaper wind regions, but you’re not taking into account the system costs of improving the grid (or other system costs that wind and solar offload onto the grid, like the cost of storage).

You’re being rather niggardly with your research on this topic.

Will, a few points:

The us international trade association puts the cost of nuclear power in The UAE at 11c per kWh, and fossil fuel at 7. Your estimate is wrong! And why is the cost 11c and not higher? Because the UAE plants are built by a govt owned organization, ENEC. The latest information on barakah is that its first plant is behind schedule, having missed its 2017 deadline, because it can’t meet the conditions of its operating license. Good low risk power! And this despite the fact that the UAE has decided to go ahead with nuclear power despite not having a full waste disposal plan in place, and having no doubt built the thing with its trademarked trafficked labour strategy.

I find it amusing that you argue chiles solar plant costs should be compared after accounting for its ability to sell carbon credits, while neglecting to consider that barakah is government subsidized while the chile plant is unsubsidized. Furthermore, you present no evidence that the plant will sell carbon credits (checking briefly I find that the first ever carbon credit project in Latin America is not for this project). So essentially we see an unsubsidized solar plant producing electricity for nearly half the price of a government owned nuclear plant, and you say we should neglect this sticker price because the plant could make money from carbon credits. You also want us to ignore the fact that the nuclear plant you focus on is 30% more expensive than a fossil fuel plant in the same country and is only running at all because the UAE government is willing to massively subsidize it to ensure energy diversity. And then you also quietly avoid mentioning that the thing is behind schedule, and thus probably over budget (KEPCO have to pay a lot of staff while they wait for it to start operating “sometime in 2018”).

So your real point could be repackaged as: a country that wants to diversify its energy supply is willing to subsidize a govt owned nuclear power plant that costs twice as much as a private plant in chile, but the nuclear plant is better because the chile plant might also make extra money beyond its sticker price from carbon credits (though it isn’t yet) and is cheaper than fossil fuel power in a country that has its own fossil fuel supply. And the solar plant is worse despite being half the cost of the nuclear plant which is delayed by a year already and doesn’t have a waste disposal plan.

And the nuclear plant has been built in a sun drenched desert.

Are you sure you don’t have a better comparison to offer?

AHubbard: Looks like you missed this.

Will Boisvert:

The projected 1700 GWh/year at Copiapó translates to about 194 MW on average, which sounds about right for a nameplate solar capacity of 410 MW. This is less than “260MW, 24/7”, it’s true, although possibly “>=260MW, 75% of the time” is being counted as “baseload”. An overcast morning would imply production at about 20% of nameplate, or about 80MW: a reduction, but not a “shutdown”.

The notion that the use of PV at Copiapó amounts to an “accounting trick” regarding energy output is dubious: what’s described is a high reliability energy system, using an effective combination of solar technologies, that delivers power above a baseline that has no diurnal variation. The “gotcha” that the power is 50% of the nameplate capacity amounts to the observation that the sun shines only during the day: it doesn’t matter.

The UAE is known for its wonderfully cheap labor force; I imagine that helps with at least some of the Barakh nuclear plant costs.

An estimate of ten cents per KWh is at the low end of Lazard’s estimates for concentrated solar; again, as I noted above, Lazard estimates that already PV + batteries can be in range of the low end of CSP cost.

Meanwhile, Georgia rate payers are already kicking in a bit less than a penny per KWh on their bills, to pay for the new Vogtle plants that do not, and may never, produce any energy.

Regarding subsidies: nuclear has a long history of a variety of subsidies. In the U.S., over 1959 to 2010, they were possibly more than the resulting energy was worth. New York is subsidizing the operation of their nuclear plants, and Illinois is likely to: Exelon likes subsidies for itself, if not for renewables.

To add to Matt’s point … KEPCO did indeed build the UAE plant on time and budget, but the plant is still expected to be delayed by a year (at this stage) for reasons outside KEPCO’s control. Nuclear plants are about more than just big construction projects – they also have complex staffing requirements and safety rules that lead to big problems in meeting licensing demands. And nuclear power without those safety and licensing rules is a very dangerous proposition (I agree with Matt that nuclear plants done properly are safe and clean – but the “done properly” part is part of the reason they never end up getting done on time or budget).

It’s worth remembering too that every delay in a nuclear plant as a carbon-zero alternative means that a fossil fuel plant continues to belch out CO2, and a strategy that relied on delayed nuclear plants will mean a delay in our response to global warming. We don’t have a lot of time left for delays.

@ Faustusnotes 96-97, on the Barakah nuclear plant in UAE.

1. “The us international trade association puts the cost of nuclear power in The UAE at 11c per kWh, and fossil fuel at 7. Your estimate is wrong!”

Faustusnotes, no. My estimate of 7.6 cents per kwh is on the high side. A new estimate by the source for your 11 cents per kwh figure now puts the cost of Barakah power at 7.0 cents per kwh.

Your figure of 11 cents came from the export.gov website, with no reference. It does cite IRENA as a general source, and I found a 2016 IRENA report on energy in the Gulf region which does give the 11 cent figure. (They also reckon an 80 percent CF for nuclear; at a reasonable 90 percent, the cost would drop to 9.8 cents.) [“Renewable Energy Market Analysis: The GCC Region”]

IRENA gives two sources for the 11 cents figure. One is a 2015 blog post by Robert Scribbler about solar power in the UAE. In that article he gives a figure of 11 cents per kwh for nuclear power, but it’s for nuclear in Europe (probably based on the EPR). IRENA misread the 11 cents as applying to UAE nuclear.

IRENA’s second source for 11 cents was a 2012 slide by consultant R. Mills (Robin Mills) with Manaar Energy (“Middle East Energy Outlook”). But in a 2016 article in The National (“Robin Mills: Ovepriced Nuclear Mega-projects like Hinkley Point are not the way forward”) Mills revised his estimate and gave a likely cost for Barakah power of 26 fils (0.26 dirham per kwh). At current exchange rates, 26 fils is 7.02 cents per kwh.

This is in good agreement with my own estimate of 7.6 cents per kwh, if a bit lower.

2. “The latest information on barakah is that its first plant is behind schedule, having missed its 2017 deadline, because it can’t meet the conditions of its operating license.”

The plant was finished on time, but the Barakah operators need more time to train on the functioning APR1400 in Korea because that started up two years later than anticipated. Barakah 1’s commissioning is therefore delayed until 2018, but the subsequent reactors should not be affected.

Copiapo’s sister CSP plant at Crescent Dunes suffered a leak in the molten salt system shortly after starting up and had to shut down for 8 months. Teething pains.

4. “ So essentially we see an unsubsidized solar plant producing electricity for nearly half the price of a government owned nuclear plant, and you say we should neglect this sticker price because the plant could make money from carbon credits.”

FN, I wrote about I-RECs. Those are a different thing from carbon offset allowances. According to the I-REC standards board, the international group tasked with verifying the I-REC trading regime, in Chile “there are no restictions to issuance.” That means any renewable generator gets to sell an I-REC for each mwh produced, as long as they comply with I-REC verification standards. Copiapo will definitely do that—not to do so would leave money on the table.

5. “You also want us to ignore the fact that the nuclear plant you focus on is 30% more expensive than a fossil fuel plant in the same country and is only running at all because the UAE government is willing to massively subsidize it to ensure energy diversity.”

Huh? What’s the “massive subsidy” to Barakah? Robin Mills, the original source for your 11 cent number, now says that Barakah will cost 7 cents per kwh and be “cheaper than gas.” UAE PV is cheaper still, but that’s also with I-REC subsidies and without storage, which means it definitely is subsidized and of a grossly inferior quality to nuclear. UAE wants nuclear because it wants reliable low-carbon power, which solar can’t do.

6. “And I would add, the UAE is also eligible to sell carbon credits under the same scheme as chile, so we really should be comparing the plants on their sticker prices.”

FN, did you read the article you cited? It was about I-RECs—a completely different thing from carbon offset allowances. I-REC means International RENWABALE Energy Certificate. Nuclear is not eligible.

But yeah, let’s look at the sticker prices: Barakah, $24.4 billion for 5.4 GW, or $4,519 per kw; Copiapo, $2 billion for 260 MW, or $7692 per kw. Barakah is way cheaper per kw, and each kw generates 11 percent more electricity than Copiapos’. Copiapo has lower operating costs by 1-2 cents per kwh, but that’s not enough to compensate Barakah’s big advantage in lower capital costs and higher productivity. There’s just no way Copiapo’s power is cheaper than Barakah power, and the apparent low Copiapo price per kwh has to be due to the I-REC subsidies.

@ Kiwanda 100,

1. “An overcast morning would imply production at about 20% of nameplate, or about 80MW: a reduction, but not a “shutdown”.

Kiwanda no, under cloud cover Copiapo’s heliostats can’t generate at all—they can’t focus cloudlight on the tower enough to sufficiently heat the molten salt working fluid. So on an overcast morning, with the storage exhausted from generating all night, all 260 MW of heliostat generation is dead zero.

That leaves the 150 MW of PV, but under overcast that by itself will do possibly 20 percent of PV nameplate. So the plant will do, optimistically, 30 MW, or 12 percent of nameplate capacity, for just part of a cloudy day. Come sunset, the plant is dark.

This is not a problem for Copiapo because its customers have diesel generators to bridge the gap. But if the whole Chilean grid were to rely on an ensemble of Copiapo’s for its baseload power, the result would be frequent catastrophic power outages for days on end.

2. “The UAE is known for its wonderfully cheap labor force; I imagine that helps with at least some of the Barakh nuclear plant costs.”

Actually, the APR1400s in South Korea are cheaper than the Barakah plant, about $3500 per kw to $4518 per kw. So they can be built cheap even with high-wage labor in a developed country. The UAE build was unusually expensive because much infrastructure, transmission, roads, housing for workers, etc had to be built in the desert wastes.

3. Much of the US “subsidy” for nuclear power was for naval reactors, with civilian reactors a spin-off. That naval reactor technology underlies the whole world’s nuclear sector, so the subsidy should properly be spread over global output. The UCS study you cite was written by an antinuclear activist with uncertainty bars so wide as to be meaningless. I could go on for days on the nonsense in it, please don’t make me.

Pure nonsense.

Fact is, Will, network managers around the world are building “unreliable” solar plants instead of nuclear. Nuclear may well be vastly more reliable… but if people cared, if people thought that mattered… they’d be building nuclear plants rather than solar, wouldn’t they?

I mean, that’s the plain-and-straightforward reality: you might not like it, but it’s what’s happening. And it’s happening for Reasons. And, well. There are two possibilities and a fantasy that might explain this.
+ Possibility one: solar is more reliable than you think, sufficient to live up to modern-day standards of electrical-network reliability.
+ Possibility two: network managers are comfortable with levels of unreliability that make your skin crawl.
[possibilities one and two can work together: that solar is more reliable than you think, to a level sufficient to satisfy network administrators if not you]
+ and the fantasy: that you, Will Boisvert, have access to super-secret knowledge that mere life-long administrators of distribution networks or multiply-doctorated researchers have not the merest shadow of.

Like I said: people are building solar plants and they are not building nukes. How do you explain this, if not one of the three options above?

As you say yourself: “Grid managers in the developed world will never allow reliability to slip.” So… if that’s the case, why aren’t they building nukes?

Thanks to Will Bousvert for confirming my point about CSP at Copiapó, with minor corrections.

The need for some fossil backup is so-what. Nuclear plants at a 90% CF and availability need backup too. The only way to get above 95% is SFIK geothermal; it’s possible to go higher, as there is so little to go wrong, but operators don’t find it worthwhile to invest in the ultra-reliable surface equipment.

CSP has reached its current low prices with trivial amounts of public support for R &D and a handful of smallish companies doing the work (SolarReserve, ACWA, Abengoa, Brightside). This infant industry has just started on the economies of scale and learning. Expect prices to keep dropping.

Will argues like a Gosplan executive doubting that a decentralised market with NOBODY IN CHARGE can possibly provide a big city reliably with food. Grid managers today in many places with high wind and solar penetration (Germany, UK, Denmark, Texas ..) are quite comfortable with the idea and practice of ensuring reliable supply to millions of customers second by second, coordinating a million generators. It’s funny that they so rarely join the dinosaur wake dirge that reliability needs gigawatt generators.

@Val,

Puritanism discussions aside, I would like to note that focusing on personal choices is pretty useless from the perspective of a cost-benefit analysis. Capitalism has done a great job of convincing people that they need to fight AGW individually instead of through political mass action and that guilt for fucking up the planet should be placed at the feet of people who refuse to recycle instead of at the feet of corporations literally doing the majority of the damage. I too practice the three Rs, but given that people contribute a paltry 15% or so to CO2 emissions at the individual level, with the rest coming from mass-scale agriculture, industry and transportation, reducing your personal energy consumption will have a lower payoff for the time than working to pass laws that force major industries to switch to renewables, for example. Personal guilt over consumption is a great strategy to keep people from organizing and taking on the actual despoilers of the Earth. So… spend less time worrying about whether you turned off all the lights and more time making sure your political system isn’t caving in corporate pressure.

@Kiwanda: No, I didn’t miss it. Combining Wind and Solar doesn’t help much. Wind is unreliable on a multi-day time scale, and Solar is always terrible on a daily time-scale. As a result, you cannot rely on either one filling in for the other. Similarly, the USA isn’t actually all that big, weather-system-wise, and saying things like “oh look, the west coast will power the east coast when the east coast is cloudy” just emphasizes how much over-build you are assuming (and thus, massive increased expense).

A fun intellectual exercise: Do you pay the electric company to move the dial (total electricity consumption metric, i.e. hit a minimum number of kWh a year), or do you pay the electric company so that when you flip the switch, the light comes on (power availability metric)?

The way we pay for electricity, bizarrely, assumes the former! In a world without renewables, that turns out to be reasonable enough. However, if we are going to be honest, the way we pay for electricity should be altered towards the second. For example, power companies could bid on yearly guarantees. Company A would provide the first 100 MW for the year (always in demand), company B the second and so forth until you get to company Z providing the last 100 MW of peaking power only rarely called for. That simple switch would immediately force renewables to be *honest* about the fact that they aren’t reliable. They could, of course, pair up with other, more reliable, generators. But then, those other generators would get their cut for acting as insurance. Right now, they don’t: a tragedy of the commons situation.

It’s really funny to see nuclear being sold on its reliability. I’m onto my sixth year of burning carbon because nuclear has been unable to provide any baseload power for six years. Reliable it is not.

Examples of crushing social costs of modern political correctness:

– Alex jones and hannity have millions of viewers
– ailes spent his career sexually harassing women and got a huge payout when he was sacked for it
– cops who murder black men routinely get off without charge
– trump is president
– a neo Nazi sympathizer is his adviser

Yes what this world needs is less hate for the sinner, more hate for the sin.

@Will, I can agree on allowing the same incentives for renewables and nuclear power. Preferably an investment tax credit-like mechanism, or if production-linked payments, then production-linked payments that can’t turn prices negative. (Something like: up to N dollars per MWh, where N is min(23, $currentWholesalePrice).) I don’t think that would be enough to make nuclear attractive again in the next decade or so in the US, but might as well try and see.

Since I hadn’t explicitly mentioned it yet this thread, I’ll note for the record that I also agree with you and others that retiring already-built, working nuclear reactors and adding fossil power is terrible.

lurker, the book that article discusses is ranked 9 in one Amazon category and 15 in another; it’s 6374 in all books on the Amazon site. It’s got a 4.5 rating from 89 reviews. It has a 3.1 rating on Goodreads. Atlas Shrugged is ranked 1596 in books, and lord of the rings 2160. Are you sure you have chosen the best example for the terrifying effects of crushing political correctness?

@lurker

Most examples of the fallout of political correctness fit into roughly three categories:
1. Why can’t I say the N-word anymore without people yelling at me?
2. People are criticizing this thing I like, but it’s still doing OK.
3. A company reduced the number of blatant panty shots by underage characters in a video game for the western market. Western Civilizationâ„¢ is doomed.

I think your example fits in nicely with 2.

(Also, stop derailing the thread)

A few random examples of PC and “callout culture”, at Google, Evergreen State, Steven Universe fandom, the Writers Union of Canada, the Whitney Biennial, Northwestern U, Hypatia, KPFA:
James Damore fired.
Bret Weinstein’s classes and career at ESC disrupted, probably over.
Zamii attempts suicide.
Hal Niedzviecki resigns.
Dana Schutz hounded.
Laura Kipnis put through the Title IX mill, career threatened, sued.
Rebecca Tuvel harassed.
Richard Dawkins speech cancelled.

The classical SF fandom and atheism activism stories.

See also this general discussion, and this one.

Raven 08.08.17 at 11:01 am

Val @ 62: “[I]t would actually be better for us to be more physically active and to rely less on machines (eg motorised transport, processed food) in many areas of our lives. … I’m all in favour of renewables, but I’m also all in favour of people getting out of their bloody cars and walking, or riding a bike.”

I’ve bitten my tongue through most of this thread, but on this one point I have to object: Val, there are some of us (like my wife and I) who cannot; who not only must rely on cars (or more likely paratransit vans to accommodate their wheelchairs/carts) for longer distances, but machines to transport them middling-to-short distances as well, and even machines called CPAPs to help them breathe at night — a nighttime power outage is a hardship. Some (like me) have little tiny battery-powered machines implanted in their torsos to help keep their bodies running — my pacemaker battery died without notice in December, in January I was hospitalized with bronchitis, developed pneumonia and congestive heart failure, hit 105°F (~40.5°C), was unconscious and intubated for days, spent a month there, another two months recovering at home before my pacemaker could be replaced. One complicating factor is that I have myasthenia gravis, treatable with medication but incurable, and that causes mobility problems, so I am never going to be able to walk any significant distance, let alone ride a bike.

Your brilliant solution works for young and healthy adults, and shoves everyone else onto ice floes.

I’m pretty sure Val meant the regular able-bodied. you’d be able to get around better by car, as a pwd, and get a parking spot more easily if the ablebods took up bikes more.
Whenever anyone advocates cycling, someone screams that you can’t replace EVERY TRIP. No you can’t. But you can replace quite a few unnecessary car journeys (as well as encouraging people not to drive around in huge SUVs like armoured tanks).

Kiwanda

Sometimes when people get fired, it’s a form of persecution; but sometimes it’s legitimate and reasonable. Sometimes when people are induced to resign, it’s a form of persecution; but sometimes it’s legitimate and reasonable. Sometimes when people are sued, it’s a form of persecution; but sometimes it’s legitimate and reasonable. Sometimes when people’s invitations to speak are cancelled, it’s a form of persecution; but sometimes it’s legitimate and reasonable.

So when you cite the bare fact that people have been fired, or have resigned, or have been sued, or have had their invitations to speak cancelled, as evidence that something is wrong, it makes me doubt the merits of your analysis. So also does the fact that you admit that what you’re citing is a random list of incidents. How can a random selection of incidents support any general conclusion?

@ Faustusnotes 109, on solar and nuclear in UAE,

1. “Will, the mills article you cite still suggests solar is 30% cheaper than nuclear, so unless the economics are very different in the desert we should expect solar to be cheaper than nuclear. If the chile program were transplanted to the UAE desert do you see any reason to expect it to cost more than nuclear?”

FN, I addressed this point upthread in my response to you (104), where I wrote, “Barakah will cost 7 cents per kwh and be “cheaper than gas.” UAE PV is cheaper still, but that’s also with I-REC subsidies and without storage, which means it definitely is subsidized and of a grossly inferior quality to nuclear. UAE wants nuclear because it wants reliable low-carbon power, which solar can’t do.”

The price Mills cited doesn’t include the I-REC subsidies a solar plant will receive, so it is lower than the true unsubsidized cost by probably at least half.

Even if the solar price really were cheaper than Barakah’s price, that’s for PV without storage—not, repeat not, for CSP plus PV plus storage, as at Copiapo. So you can’t use Mills’s price estimate for UAE PV as an indicator of what a UAE version of Copiapo would cost—Copiapo is way more expensive. (With a capital cost of $7692 per kw versus perhaps $1200 per kw or less for PV without storage.)

And PV without storage is so unreliable (and constricted to generating only a few hours each day) that it is in no sense a substitute for a CSP-plus-storage plant, and certainly not for a true 24-7, super-reliable nuclear plant. So the cost comparison you’re drawing between UAE PV and Barakah is meaningless: Barakah and PV are apples and oranges in terms of the quality, reliability and time-value of the power, which means Barakah deserves a steep premium. (Although I’m skeptical that UAE PV really is cheaper than Barakah once I-REC subsidies are factored in.)

As I calculated above, the true cost of the Copiapo plant is about 10 cents per kwh once I-REC subsidies are accounted (maybe a bit more), against 7-8 cents per kwh for UAE nuclear power. There is no reason to believe that price differential would not hold for a Copiapo-style plant in UAE as well.

2. “Until renewables can make up that shortfall in power (which I think was a reckless and stupid move by the German govt) it is not reasonable to say they haven’t replaced coal and gas. In fact if there is no increase in use of gas and coal then it is possible renewables are successfully replacing baseload nuclear. “

What’s at issue here is whether wind and solar can ever count as “reliable” power that the grid can depend on without backup from other reliable technologies. (These could be geo or hydro (to an extent) but those are geographically constricted and can’t scale much; only nuclear and fossil can scale to backstop the whole grid in most areas.)

The answer is no, and Germany is a good example. It started with a full complement of reliable generators in (roughly) 2000. Since then it added 80 GW of wind and solar, almost doubling the country’s total capacity, but during that time it made no net reduction at all in other capacity (and replaced shuttered nukes with fossil). This means that grid planners understand that the “reliable” output from that 80 GW of wind and solar is approximately 0 GW. The stats bear this out, with the entire wind and solar sectors combined producing next to nothing for many days on end during winter, when demand is highest.

Wind and solar just aren’t reliable.

@ Kiwanda 115,

1. “Apparently there are two or three cloudy days per year at the site. So the annual reduction is less than one percent. (And it never will entirely “shut the plant down”, as noted.)”

Two or three cloudy days? Are you sure that tossed-off line in The Guardian is a rock-solid number?

Because I looked up weather data for the town of Maria Elena, Chile, the site for the Atacama-1 plant you referenced. (https://www.worldweatheronline.com/maria-elena-weather-averages/antofagasta/cl.aspx). They give data on monthly “sun days,” which by subtracting gives you the number of predominately cloudy days. In 2016 it looks like Maria Elena had 12 cloudy days. in 2015 it was 18 days. In 2011 there were 36 cloudy days. In Copiapo in 2016 they had 10 cloudy days, in 2015 11 cloudy days, and in 2011 there were 28 cloudy days. (Copiapo is 8 hours south of Maria Elena, so the 2011 data shows that cloud fronts can extend over much of the Atacama.)

So the notion that the sun shines steadily enough in the Atacama to produce 24/7 power is definitely false. The production specs of the plant confirm this. Copiapo’s 79 percent capacity factor shows that clouds will reduce potential output not by your 1 percent, Kiwanda, but 21 percent on average and 100 percent on some nights. Atacama-1 is similar, with an 81 percent CF (despite having four more hours of storage than Copiapo.)

Even on nominally sunny days, clouds could still cripple solar output. The forecast for this Thursday, August 10, in Copiapo calls for “sunny”, but with 44 percent cloud cover. While the plant might be able to meet its nameplate capacity for some of the day, there likely wouldn’t be any excess power to charge the storage salt. So at sundown there would be no stored power and the plant would “entirely shut down” for the night. The weather data show there will be many such days, and worse, throughout the year. And still more days when the plant limps along with continuous but fluctuating production much reduced from nameplate capacity.

So the whole spiel that’s been spun here about the wonders of Atacama solar is nonsense. There will be many nights every year when it produces no power, and many days when it produces far less than its nameplate. It’s useful, but baseload it ain’t. No matter how many desert solar plants Chile builds, it will still need enough fossil backup to run the whole grid when the Atacama goes pitch black.

2. “Yes, probably thermal solar and tidal should be abandoned as significant power sources.”

Huh? You spent all that time defending Atacama CSP and now you say it should be “abandoned?” You’re losing me, Kiwanda.

3. “In one paragraph, the significance of matching demand’s diurnal variation, and shifting the demand for EV charging to night-time. In the very next paragraph, dismissal of demand management of “coercive manipulation”, etc. etc.”

There are two ways of matching electricity supply and demand. One is to have the grid reliably produce more power to meet customers’ autonomous wishes to consume electricity. The other is to restrict customers’ electricity consumption to meet the autonomous production by chaotic wind and solar generators. The first way is useful and humane, the second dysfunctional and coercive—and beloved of green ideologues.

4. “Similarly, you’ve hit, again and again, on the subsidies received by renewables, but somehow the vast subsidies for nuclear you don’t find relevant.”

Could you itemize and quantify the nuclear subsidies? It would help me to respond to your claims if you could do some of the legwork to make them more substantive.

@ Matt 118,

Right, I was too optimistic in the past about the prospects for new reactor designs. But the APR1400 and CPR1000 aren’t new reactors: they have a track record of successful builds at known costs. So the burden’s on you to show why reactors can be built successfully in Korea but not in Germany (where they were built quite successfully in the 1970s and 1980s).

More deeply, you need to engage with the issue what’s causing unsuccessful builds. A bad design is part of it in the case of the EPR and AP1000, but the APR1400 is an eminently buildable design. You have to reckon seriously with the possibility that political opposition and regulatory sclerosis are the major impediments, not inherent logistics and economics.

And also, take seriously the issue you initally raised about closing the final 20 percent. How are you going to do it with chaotic weather-dependent RE that will mostly displace other RE rather than residual FF? If you have to bust out storage, multiple overbuilds, greatly expanded transmission and demand management (which will have serious indirect economic effects) to do it, how much will it cost, and how much will it disrupt landscapes and lives? There are 100 percent RE scenarios out there, but they rest on shaky and (particularly in the case of Jacobson) fraudulent assumptions.

Or not. If you’re satisfied with a 20 percent FF grid, make the case for it.

–“Will, I can agree on allowing the same incentives for renewables and nuclear power.”

Good—please write your congressman.

Will Boisvert:

Because I looked up weather data for the town of Maria Elena, Chile, the site for the Atacama-1 plant you referenced. (https://www.worldweatheronline.com/maria-elena-weather-averages/antofagasta/cl.aspx).

Good on you, for finding some data (and, it seems for the first time here, providing a link to supporting information). According to their data, over the last eight years, there were 2754 sunny days: fewer than 6% of the days were cloudy. (Why did you pick 2011, in particular, I wonder?)

The production specs of the plant confirm this. Copiapo’s 79 percent….

Again, very useful data; supporting link?

Huh? You spent all that time defending Atacama CSP and now you say it should be “abandoned?” You’re losing me, Kiwanda.

A very strained interpretation. “Abandoned” meaning of course just, “not much new construction”. Which, as compared to PV, has been the case. (Although there’s some interesting new projects proposed.) As I’ve noted, PV+batteries is now in range of CSP w.r.t. cost, and of course both are now much cheaper than nuclear.

There are two ways of matching electricity supply and demand. One is to have the grid reliably produce more power to meet customers’ autonomous wishes to consume electricity. The other is to restrict customers’ electricity consumption to meet the autonomous production by chaotic wind and solar generators. The first way is useful and humane, the second dysfunctional and coercive—and beloved of green ideologues.

Discounting the heavy-handed rhetoric: sure, dispatchable is better than baseload, which is better than variable. (Although the variability of wind and solar are pretty predictable, which helps.) Since demand is variable, baseload and variable sources will always need to be augmented or curtailed.

Batteries, pumped hydro, and other storage will help considerably, but solar will always be cheaper during the day (conveniently, that’s currently when the demand is greater). So, demand that is dispatchable, and can take advantage of that cheaper source will do so. So what?

Could you itemize and quantify the nuclear subsidies?

Right, I’ve been the one not backing up things up with sources.

Pavel:

Oh noes, some racists, sexists and other clueless idiots got their jimmies ruffled.

James Damore is a fucking “race realist” who wrote a manifesto describing why women and minorities are too inferior to make good engineers. He really laid some biotruths on us.

(What is it with “Oh noes”, anyway? Like “dudebro”, or “bro”, it’s some kind of signal. Bonus points for “jimmies ruffled”, although I thought that was a different kind of signal.)

Various things in his note can be criticized, but no, that’s not what he said.

Poor Richard Dawkins can’t seem to understand that maybe responding to feminists by committing the fallacy of relative privation over and over again isn’t particularly rational. I don’t think we lost much by having his speech cancelled.

Sure, if somebody commits the fallacy of relative privation too darn often, they can’t possibly have anything interesting to say.

Michael Nugent and most of the modern atheists movement was full of misogynistic trash like thunderfoot and the rest of the Youtube Rationalsâ„¢, and PZ Meyers was pretty dead on in calling all of them out on it.

Nugent’s careful and measured discussions rebuke PZ Myers pretty thoroughly.

Also, are you quoting that Jonathan Kay piece from the National Post? You know, the right-wing newspaper that was happy to host Mark Stein until he got a little too racist even for them. Kay is just bemoaning how man, people actually take him and his shitty writers to task for their terrible views, but sort of omits the part where left-wing and social justice bloggers get swamped, harassed and intimidated daily by troll mobs from /pol/, r/the_donald and the daily stormer.

I guess you’re saying that, relatively speaking, Kay is not suffering from much privation.

He just gets “taken to task”, but the just and righteous are in contrast “swamped, harassed, and intimidated”, and any disagreement with them, or criticism, can be lumped together with that. Sure.

I don’t care where an article appears, just what it says.

I await your dismissal of Asad Ahmad, Bret Weinsten, Zamii, Hal Niedzviecki, Dana Schutz, Laura Kipnis, and Rebecca Tuvel for their sins. As we know, there are two sides, and they’re on the wrong one.

you’d be able to get around better by car, as a pwd, and get a parking spot more easily if the ablebods took up bikes more

Only if the infrastructure was kept unchanged. In practice, more people cycling means more cycle-friendly cities, which means more car-unfriendly (for the record, I’m in favour of that, disabled motorists notwithstanding)

And also, take seriously the issue you initally raised about closing the final 20 percent. How are you going to do it with chaotic weather-dependent RE that will mostly displace other RE rather than residual FF? If you have to bust out storage, multiple overbuilds, greatly expanded transmission and demand management (which will have serious indirect economic effects) to do it, how much will it cost, and how much will it disrupt landscapes and lives?

It’s still to be determined. I don’t know what will make the most sense once large grids that are currently majority-fossil reach 80% decarbonization and have to decide what’s best for the next marginal 1%. I think that Jacobson too relies on questionable and speculative extrapolations to push his 100% renewable plan.

I believe that short term storage (at least a few hours) plays some role in future deep decarbonization, whether the primary energy to charge it comes from reactors or renewables. Using hourly data from California’s CAISO grid, 50th percentile fossil electricity production in 2016 was 8116 MW. 80th percentile was 11110 MW. 99th percentile was 20169 MW. Highest hour of the year was 25628 MW (July 27, 5-6 PM). If you want enough nuclear capacity to entirely replace CAISO fossil-peaks without storage or demand-shifting, the overbuilds get pretty large.

(Raw data is available as sequential text files from the CAISO web site.

http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20170808_DailyRenewablesWatch.txt

Just replace the YYYYMMDD part for each day you want. Historical data goes back as far as 20 April 2010.)

@ Matt 141,

Right, as I said the AP1000 proved to be a bad design, very hard and expensive to build. It’s not even a complete design; the blueprints aren’t finished even now.

But that’s not the case with the APR1400 or the CPR1000 or the ABWR (in Japan). They have all been built successfully and are operating. The designs are buildable, mature, economical and proven in the real world–nothing like the AP1000.

So rehashing the failure of the AP1000 is not relevant to the prospects for the models that have proven successful. And given that many reactors were built successfully in France, Sweden, Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1970s and 19980s, I don’t understand why it’s impossible to do so today with one of the proven designs.

J-D:

But if I take the liberty of combining what Omega Centauri has written with what you have written,….
If you have any evidence that people have turned to conservatism and voted for Trump because of incidents of this kind, you haven’t provided it.

Indeed, I haven’t provided specific evidence for a claim I didn’t make.

faustusnotes:

Kiwanda, how is Colin kaepernicks job search coming along? How about milo’s publishing career?

I’m guessing that your point is that Colin Kaepernick is being punished for speaking out. I agree, that’s a bad thing. I don’t think ideological conformity enforcement is a good thing, regardless of setting. The claim here was that the left version of such enforcement was always bad people getting their just desserts. Colin Kaepernick is not a good counter-example for that claim, so I didn’t mention him. Nor do I think that George Ciccariello-Maher should be punished for his views and speech, or that Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor should have been threatened, or that Steve Salaita should’ve been fired, or, I think, Lisa Durden, Teresa Buchanan, Melissa Click, Katherine Dettwyler, Lars Maischak, Kevin Allred, or Ruthie Robertson. What of it?

I don’t know anything about milo’s publishing career. I’m guessing you think it’s relevant because, I’m guessing, he *has* a publishing career, and you’re suggesting that I think that every suppression of someone’s free speech does them some kind of permament damage. No, I don’t, and (though it’s utterly irrelevant to his right to speak, and I very much dislike needing to make such disclaimers), I don’t support milo’s obnoxious views.