Pinker polymathic

What is Pinker’s supposed area of expertise?

Nuclear power is sort of the original High Tech story. Endlessly promoted by ‘news’ and general interest publications that were in fact pure public relations. Usually the writers unaware they were simply doing PR. Something that might be said of most ‘news’ and information media. Usually those whose output reached the editorial page were pure PR people. Directly paid by the promoters. For the others it was stenography or what we ID today as fanboy-ism.

In the US the need for PR was especially vital because of the pretense that nuclear power is a free market phenomena. Instead of course it has always been hugely subsidized. From the designs to the liability insurance to the fuel to the long term fuel storage is has always been absolutely dependent upon government subsidy. Still, 60 years on the pretense that it is a free market industry successfully endures. 60 years is a long time to maintain an absurd fiction and it speaks to America’s almost touching naivete that the fiction, supported by the deepest of the deep state and powerful corporate interests, same thing I suppose, persists.

If anyone ever did an accounting of the total balance sheet results of nuclear power I am certain the losses would be stupendous. Remember too the cost of long term spent fuel costs still can’t be accounted for. There is no way the ‘market’ would do nuclear power if it was free. Obviously the risk is too high but when government intervenes to mitigate, hide or pretend to assume the risk no project can be denied. Fracking and self driving cars and the entire credit market, the mother of all markets. have followed this exact path.

Don’t get me wrong I am not some Libertarian saying if the ‘free market’ was only allowed to do its work all would be well. The point is there is never a free market. Markets will always be corrupted. Or alternately if not corrupted it is simply the case that government determines the winners. That is the ultimate truth. It makes no difference what the economic system is. Economic outcomes are always determined by government.

I am constantly reminded of the many who still think we aren’t serious about climate change unless we embrace Nuclear in a big big way. They seem to have been smitten by the anti-renewables meme “the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow”, and hence seem to be stuck in the renewables can never be the answer bubble. Seems to be a failure to mark to market.

Omega says: “I am constantly reminded of the many who still think we aren’t serious about climate change unless we embrace Nuclear in a big big way. ”

I don’t find that very puzzling? Many people are OK with nuclear energy as it currently exists, with the downsides as they exist.

If you are one of those people, then nuclear power shows a clear, proven, low-surprise path to a zero-CO2 grid. The only thing in the way, from that perspective, are the people who do not like the current situation (be it cost or accident risk or waste disposal or proliferation or whatever)

Renewables are more of a gamble. There is a clear path to 50% or perhaps even to 80%, but the last step is still vague. Cheap batteries, long distances grids, demand management, hydrogen, there is a plethora of possibility, but it still has to work. It might disappoint, and public opinion does not seem willing to accept much disappointment.

Then again, if you are not happy with nuclear energy, then it is even more of a gamble than renewables. People have already spent decades in vain to solve the downsides of the current systems, it’s not clear that there is much possibility left. The article promises us beautiful ” generation 4″, but that is mostly paper dreams at the moment – much vaguer than the renewable plans.

It appears almost certain that China will fall a bit short of its original 2020 target of 58 gigawatts of nuclear capacity. But China did resume new reactor approvals last month after a 3 year hiatus.

China to invest RMB 81 bln to build new nuclear reactors

Chinese nuclear projects built in China still don’t produce particularly cheap electricity.

China sets floor prices for 3rd gen nuclear projects

Floor prices range from 0.4151 to 0.435 yuan per kilowatt hour, depending on province. At current exchange rates of 0.1489 CNY per USD that’s $62-$65 per megawatt hour. By way of contrast, utilities in the US are signing large scale solar power purchase agreements for between a third and a half of that price. Demand that can’t be filled by renewables alone — when not firmed by batteries — is going to combined cycle natural gas plants at $40 per megawatt hour. Even if you could get new American nuclear prices down to Chinese prices, natural gas generation would still be more economical in the absence of emissions regulations.

Granted, American solar projects benefit from a 30% investment tax credit. But apply the exact same tax credit to nuclear projects and they’re still not as cheap as renewables in most regions of the US. Further, the “artificial” low prices of solar projects (from ITC) are at least partially offset by the equally artificial high prices following Section 201 Solar Tariffs imposed from the beginning of last year. If both tariffs and investment tax credits are zeroed out, I foresee large scale solar generation growing robustly in the US and nuclear projects still not competing. Absent coordinated national action against emissions, renewables/batteries/gas are going to replace all of the elderly coal generators that are dying off in the US. Even with coordinated action against emissions, nuclear is the higher-cost option that will be viable only after cheaper gains at the margin with renewables have been exhausted.

I also write on lots of different things. On the blog, I’m happy to state my views on all kinds of topics, as I would in ordinary conversation. But when I write for the general public, citing my professional affiliation, I try to stick to areas where I have some claim to expertise.

That is why you don’t get regularly featured in the NYT. /s

I think that WLGR @4 has it right, Pinker can lob out lofty-sounding ever-so-convincing arrant nonsense with the best of them, and has his bestselling books and constant requests for his clear and obvious expertise from people who either don’t know what they don’t know or have an agenda they want him to push.

With all the acclaim, he, like Peterson and Shapiro are essentially Potemkin Intellectuals.

They often look, act and sound the part, but when you actually examine their ideas and statements, they’re meaningless fakes.

I found this article about the scale of China’s renewable energy projects, and in particular its plans to shift huge amounts of energy from wind and solar in the west to the eastern mega cities. It’s worth noting that while Gen IV nuclear has been a glitter in the eye of western technophiles for at least a decade, the Chinese engineering sector very quickly set about solving all the major technical barriers to transferring energy from where it is generated to where it is used. There are still big problems in this project but it’s very clear that the Chinese government sees renewables as a very important part of its energy sector. The US could do the same thing of course, but there is no political will for it. Yet we’re supposed to believe that public opposition to nuclear is a serious problem …

If they can develop some small, reasonably efficient nuclear reactors (probably in part for space exploration purposes down the line), then nuclear might be able to make a comeback at some point. Having to develop it in the form of gigantic plants with heavy upfront costs and water consumption seems to be a deal-breaker, and the economics are increasingly lousy compared to renewables+storage.

China is scheming to exploit and possibly to export its prodigious solar and wind energy generating capacity (see China’s Ambitious Plan to Build the World’s Biggest Supergrid). So far they’re struggling to integrate their megavolt inputs into an otherwise conventional transmission system. It would appear that a command-and-control economy allows them to build awesome infrastructure which they can’t actually use, yet.

Maybe they could make modular nuclear reactors, handy little things you wouldn’t mind in your neighborhood, thriftily reusing reaction byproducts, throttling up and down to balance the load, but such a development hasn’t made the news.

And to tie it up with a pretty little bow, the NYT op-ed’s fleeting allusion to “shifting regulations” and “supply-chain and construction snafus” as contributing to higher post-1970s nuclear power costs is, among other things, a way of flagrantly glossing over one of the great underdiscussed scandals in the history of modern science, the use of Navajo Nation lands for decades beginning with the Manhattan Project as the US’s primary domestic source of uranium. Not only did this involve massively inadequate safety regulation of mining and processing sites, including a 1979 uranium mill spill in New Mexico that released more radioactivity than the Three Mile Island incident a few months earlier, all of which has helped contribute to extreme rates of radiation-related medical conditions among the Navajo that continue to this day; and not only did it involve the employment of thousands of Navajo miners without the slightest effort to inform them about the dangers of radiation exposure in the mines, let alone follow appropriate exposure precautions or provide appropriate compensation or treatment; but apropos Pinker’s abovementioned oh-so-grave concern for bioethics, one neat little side project was a long-running series of Tuskegee-esque medical experiments by the US Public Health Service on unwitting Navajo research subjects to study the health effects of radiation exposure, results from which were still being published in allegedly reputable scientific journals as late as 1998.

So boo hoo, your precious nuclear fuel is more expensive now than it was back in the good old days when men were men and Injuns were animals, go cry me a goddamn river and don’t spill any uranium into it either.

And to expand on JWM’s point, nuclear makes a bad adjunct to renewables during the transition, since, absent high capacity, low cost storage, renewables are variable and need a variable complement. Nukes, with their high fixed and low variable costs, are a bad match.

I liked how Jason Stanley defended Pinker by saying more or less that Pinker’s a good guy but has a tendency to attract hordes of alt-right screwballs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qubr4MZZSfU

Hmmm…what was it about something that walked like a Duck?

The trouble is that the longer we have to wait for fast-responding nuclear plants to start being designed, the less likely it is that that there will be any point actually designing them. I noticed the other day that Siemens are shipping newly developed 500 kV/63kA switchgear to China because over 3Mm+ distances that stuff makes real sense. I fear that once again nuclear power is a solution in 20 years time to a problem we have today, and one you can buy commercial off the shelf solutions for.
Now, if the nuclear people could come up with a solution to the political obstacles that would be a huge contribution. Instead they’re focussed on the traditional “if you can’t win instead try to damage your opponent”.

(Siemens site seems down right now but wikipedia covers one 2001 HVDC project… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Tian–Guang )

@1
Telling the rich and powerful what they want to hear.

eg

According to Wikipedia:

Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1973. He received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from McGill University in 1976, and earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979 under Stephen Kosslyn. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University.

From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive science (1985–1994), and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive neuroscience (1994–1999), taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96.

He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children’s language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children’s learning of verbs.

JQ OP:

“Then suddenly, the article shifts gears, claiming that the crucial problem is irrational public fear of radiation, nuclear accidents and so forth. The obvious question to raise is: how does this supposed climate of fear manifest itself?”

Lots of ways.

1. You noted that “it might have been worth [Pinker et al.’s] mentioning that South Korea has stopped new nuclear power.” It might have been worth your mentioning that this is a textbook case of antinuclear elites ginning up irrational fear. President Moon Jae-in campaigned on a platform of shuttering the nuclear industry because of its alleged apocalyptic danger. The election was preceded by the release of a popular movie about a nuclear disaster that swayed public opinion, and Greenpeace hosted free screenings.

2. During Governor Andrew Cuomo’s attacks against the Indian Point nuclear power plant, he repeatedly went on TV and talked about having to evacuate all New York. The state’s lawsuit to stop the plant’s relicensing heavily cited a scenario written for Riverkeeper by antinuclear scholar Ed Lyman, who envisioned a terrorist attack featuring an airplane crash followed by a ground assault assisted by an inside man, with a possible death toll in the hundreds of thousands. (Cuomo may have been motivated more by political calculation than personal fear, since he gave subsidies to upstate reactors while pandering to the alarmism of downstate greens.)

3. Greenpeace occasionally stages mock terrorist infiltrations of French nuclear plants to alarm the public.

4. The NRC’s aircraft impact rule, explicitly premised on a 9/11-style terrorist attack, had a major impact on the cost of the AP1000 projects in the US. Westinghouse had to redesign the containment building to meet it, and the NRC took years to vet it, delaying the start of the project while it mulled issues like whether the building could handle a tornado as well as an airliner. Construction of the new design, a composite of concrete sandwiched between steel plates, has proven difficult and has become a major driver of costs and delays. The Chinese AP1000s have a conventional containment building, one reason they fared somewhat better.

5. The Obama Administration’s illegal suspension of the Yucca Mountain Waste Depository was pushed by opponents of the project, including Sen. Harry Reid, with disaster scenarios ranging from volcanic eruptions to, yes, terrorist attacks.

Should I go on?

JQ OP

“Nor is there any evidence of significant resistance at the regulatory level, where numerous plants have had their licenses extended…. the only anti-nuclear protest I could find was back in 2011, and appeared to have no effect at all on the project.”

This is a blinkered and misleading view of the anti-nuclear movement and the regulatory state. The anti-nuclear movement is not “protesters;” it’s lawyers, environmental professors, judges, politicians and policymakers. They don’t need to protest because they control formidable levers of power. The regulatory system is not just the NRC but a broad array of politicized regulators that have power over nuclear plants and strongly influence their economics.

1. Take the closure of the San Onofre nuclear plant in California. Southern California Edison made a plan to restart one of the reactors, where heat-exchanger tube wear was actually within regulatory limits, to bring in money while repairs where made. Under heavy political pressure the NRC nixed that and required a license amendment review, which opened the door for Friends of the Earth lawyers to drag out regulatory proceedings for years while the plant sat idle—but staffed, per regulations—and bled money. For good measure, Senator Barbara Boxer, a foe of nuclear power, asked the Justice Department to start a criminal investigation of SCE executives (a request that she dropped when they agreed to retire the plant). With that kind of pressure, no wonder the plant threw in the towel.

2. The decision to close the Indian Point plant was made in the context of a legal action by the state environmental authority to force the plant to build billion-dollar cooling towers because of (trumped-up) water-quality issues in the Hudson River. That looming regulatory expense weighed heavily in the “economic” decision to shutter the still quite profitable plant, part of Entergy’s strategy of exiting the nuke-hostile Northeast.

3. Water-quality regulations and cooling tower threats have been used against many plants. Oyster Creek closed last year because the state of New Jersey threatened to impose cooling towers (although terrorist attacks were also mentioned in the proceedings). The plant struck an agreement that let it stay in operation until 2019 in exchange for shutting down ten years before its license expired.

The Diablo Canyon retirement decision was also reached in the middle of a water-quality proceeding that could have imposed cooling towers costing up to $10 billion, which was cited by PGE as a major factor in the “economic” case against continued operation.

The water-quality issue—nuclear cooling-water intake kills a lot of plankton and small fry and slightly warms the water—is a lot like the issue of wind farms killing thousands of raptors and bats every year. The difference is that wind turbines have been exempted from regulations protecting raptors and bats, while nukes are hounded by regulators for killing plankton.

4. Anti-nuke organizations in many instances exercise quasi-governmental regulatory power themselves.

A glaring example of this is Diablo Canyon. The anti-nuclear groups Friends of the Earth and Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility were formally included, along with Pacific Gas and Electric, in a state-selected panel debating whether to impose cooling towers on the plant. Also included was an RE-technology NGO with executives from the RE industry, who are direct competitors of DC, on its board. None of these groups have any relevant expertise in marine ecology, the substance of the issue, and at least one had substantial material conflicts of interest. Nonetheless, the anti-nukes were right there in the inner counsels of the regulatory state deliberating on the plant’s fate.

Then came the decision to close the plant. This was not, as you might imagine, an agreement between DC and the state utility commission or the environmental regulator. It was an agreement between the plant’s owner PGE and a group of private parties, including the anti-nuclear groups FOE, NRDC and A4NR and a union local representing the workers who would be axed. PGE agreed to close the plant in 2024-5 in exchange for the anti-nuke groups dropping their lawsuits and supporting compensation payments to the company, cost recovery for stranded assets, which they would normally fight to the death, and a reprieve from cooling towers. The state utility commission’s only role was to rubber-stamp the agreement, which they duly did although they voided the weak provisions to replace a small part of the plant’s output with RE. Thus died a great public resource of clean energy at the hands of private, unaccountable but well-connected green ideologues making decisions that should be made by neutral state regulators with the public interest in mind.

In California the anti-nuclear movement is the regulatory state. Jerry Brown was an anti-nuclear activist. Gavin Newsom is anti-nuclear. Michael Picker, President of the California Public Utility Commission, is anti-nuclear. John Geesman, a lawyer for A4NR, is a former member of the California Energy Commission.

@Matt 9

“If both tariffs and investment tax credits are zeroed out, I foresee large scale solar generation growing robustly in the US and nuclear projects still not competing. Absent coordinated national action against emissions, renewables/batteries/gas are going to replace all of the elderly coal generators that are dying off in the US. Even with coordinated action against emissions, nuclear is the higher-cost option that will be viable only after cheaper gains at the margin with renewables have been exhausted.”

So the consensus in this discussion is that nuclear is too expensive, wind and solar are cheap, grid expansion and storage will solve the problem of unreliability, Steven Pinker should shut up.

Now a reality check.

Matt, you’re right, wind and especially solar PPAs in the US are getting sensationally cheap, in the 2-3 cents per kwh range for some solar projects. Unfortunately, that’s having no effect on the growth of RE, which has stagnated over the last 3 years and declined sharply last year.

In 2016 the US total non-hydro RE generation grew by about 52 twh, in 2017 by 50 twh and in 2018 by 40 twh, 20 percent less than in 2017. Wind and solar account for virtually all that growth. Solar grew 16 twh in 2016, 22 in 2017 and 19 in 2018, with non-utility staying flat at about 5 twh each year and utility solar growth dropping from about 17 twh in 2017 to 13 twh in 2018. Wind growth was 36 twh in 2016, 27 twh in 2017 and 21 twh in 2018, so a persistent slowdown in growth.

Wind and solar are growing and helping abate carbon, but with such low PPA prices one would expect them to be growing by leaps and bounds. Instead, they are trudging along, even flagging.

Maybe Trump’s solar tariffs are to blame, but wind had an even sharper slowdown with no tariffs. And it’s not clear that the tariffs are making much difference. PPAs are very low despite tariffs. And much of the growth in RE is probably not too price-sensitive because it is driven by state RPS mandates that utilities have to meet regardless of cost.

It’s also not a depressed market; last year electricity consumption grew substantially, up 143 twh, for the first time in years. Most of that rise was supplied by natural gas, up 172 twh, which also replaced a chunk of coal generation, which dropped 59 twh. Total fossil-fueled electricity rose 115 twh in 2018, almost three times as much as wind plus solar (hydro shrank by 9 twh), and FFs’ share of the US electricity supply edged up from 62.9 percent to 63.5 percent.

I’m not seeing robust growth for wind and solar there. I’m seeing an avid market for fossil fuels, a grudging acceptance of wind and solar, per subsidies and mandates, and a frozen market for nuclear and hydro.

WS growth is stagnating globally as well. 2018 wind installations were 53.9 GW, barely up from 2017’s 52.6 GW and well down from 2015’s peak of 63.7 GW. 2018 solar growth did tick up to 109 GW after 2017’s 99 gw, (the equivalent of maybe 20 dispatchable gw) but that’s not much acceleration, and it’s well short of what’s needed to curb fossil-fuel growth, which easily outpaced WS again last year with strongly rising emissions.

So the conundrum: wind and solar are super-cheap, but they are not catching fire in electricity markets. Why not?

I think they are just not very valuable as electricity sources. Greens and econ profs may not think reliability matters, but utilities and grid planners do, which is why they prefer coal and gas to WS with a cheaper PPA. An indicator of this is curtailment and negative pricing, an increasing problem that means that the grid thinks a growing portion of WS output is worth less than nothing.

Storage and grid expansion won’t solve the problem. Their growth is in fact a bad sign. Hundreds of billions of dollars that should be spent on building clean power sources are being diverted to non-generating infrastructure to cope with the instability of wind and solar output, which is becoming disruptive at a mere 5 percent penetration of global electricity supply. As that diversion grows it will crowd out more investment in WS generators. But it won’t stop developing countries with rising electricity demand from investing heavily in fossil fueled plants: WS is nice, but reliable power is a necessity. So WS is helping out, but it is falling further behind fossil fuels and not making a dent in emissions. That won’t change for a while.

And yeah, Matt, it is possible to do a stable grid with WS and plenty of gas capacity and a little storage. That’s not going to get you to 100 percent carbon free, but it will be a lot cleaner. The problem is that we have green thought leaders like AOC hectoring us that we have to go 100 percent by 2030 or the world will end–and do it without nuclear because that’s too risky!–while in the fine print we see that their strategy will still have quite a bit of gas. Compared to that narrative, Steven Pinker’s is the soul of reason.

It is uncomfortably true that when people are desperate, they will pay more for a service. Nuclear power is uneconomical now, but in a desperate world this may not be so.

It is also uncomfortably true that we have not done the studies that would allow us to say with confidence that wind and solar will be enough.

I am not aware of anyone running the numbers. We have guesswork on deploying renewables extensively. We have only a prototype smart grid, which renewables demand. Research on new nuclear technologies is largely design; few prototypes are being constructed. If it were in my power I would put my old colleagues at the national labs on the job and get some numbers worked out. Above all, we need to get started.

I am starting to feel like we are looking at FFexit. As the deadline gets nearer and nearer, we panic, but we do not know what to do.

Here, have some barking sea lions.

Many thanks to those among you who took the time to respond to my query regarding what Pinker reliably is and is not.

I have not read his popular works, but the message that comes across from those in my social circle who refer to him in support of their arguments, he is a latter day Professor Pangloss.

I live in South Carolina and knew quite a few of the people who were working on the failed power plant. It failed due to a combination of engineering, management and construction inadequacies. Having spent quite a bit of time looking into the reasons for it’s failures the conclusion I’ve drawn is that the US does not have the managerial, bureacratic and construction competence to deliver nuclear power economically (unlike France in the 70s, say). And incidentally, this power plant received huge subsidies and was designed in such a way that the cost of financing was extremely low. If it had succeeded – hell if it had succeeded at the original cost, we would have been locked into expensive power.

Secondly, let’s say somehow the US learns how to do expensive infrastructure projects. Well there’s a further problem – nuclear power delivers expensive and inflexible energy. As a partner to renewables it’s useless because you can’t substitute nuclear for renewable energy. A nuclear power station cannot be spun up quickly, or shut down quickly. This means that they run 24 hours generating the same amount of power. Practically this means you have two choices:
1) Limit generation to your lowest load (during the night hours)
2) Build more capacity than you can use during the night, knowing that energy will not be used (thus raising the cost of each MW)

So nuclear is either a small part of the solution (option 1), or a wasteful solution (option 2).

And yes I get it – there are a bunch of unproven technologies just round the corner which will: “yada, yada – have you seen my flying car”. Nuclear is the ultimate “this time it will be different” technology. Yet somehow it always disappoints.

Norway and Iceland are nearly 100% renewable? Does that mean hydroelectric and geothermal count as renewables again?

What are the estimates for the long-term effects of mining, transporting and assembling the materials for a much larger energy grid?

So the consensus in this discussion is that nuclear is too expensive, wind and solar are cheap, grid expansion and storage will solve the problem of unreliability, Steven Pinker should shut up.

That’s not my position. It’s more like “the less expensive options will be used first.” In states with mandates to decarbonize, solar and wind are the least expensive way to make progress for the foreseeable future. I agree that decarbonizing electricity with renewables gets much more expensive as the fossil component approaches 0%, because it would require vast storage (e.g. underground caverns storing renewable hydrogen) to cover seasonal imbalances in production/consumption.

Perhaps seasonal-scale storage with renewables can’t be economized and additional nuclear power, despite high absolute costs, becomes relatively more affordable than seasonal storage as fossil share approaches 0%. I’m not rejecting that possibility! But I also don’t see any American grid where the crossover has already happened and could justify new nuclear projects starting this year.

American solar growth last year was blunted because the price shock from Section 201 tariffs caused some projects planned in 2017 to delay construction. Both the ITC rates and tariff rates decline yearly through 2021. By 2022 the solar ITC extension will be over and so will be the tariffs. I expect robust growth then, because there’s a longer term trend toward lowering capital and operational costs for large scale solar projects. The PPAs being contracted this year are a sign of what’s to come. If I’m wrong in a few years, I will happily admit where I erred and update my predictions accordingly.

Wind capital costs have been pretty flat for the past few years, unlike the declining costs seen in solar, so I’m not surprised that installations have been flat too. The most interesting current development in American wind is the planning of large offshore projects by states that don’t have good onshore wind resources. Costs per MWh will be higher than onshore projects in the central US, but perhaps still worth it for densely populated coastal areas.

An indicator of this is curtailment and negative pricing, an increasing problem that means that the grid thinks a growing portion of WS output is worth less than nothing.

Storage and grid expansion won’t solve the problem. Their growth is in fact a bad sign. Hundreds of billions of dollars that should be spent on building clean power sources are being diverted to non-generating infrastructure to cope with the instability of wind and solar output…

This is nonsensical. If the marginal value of additional solar or wind energy is zero in a given area, then building storage or expanding the grid is building a clean power source, because they can draw on zero-cost energy. A storage facility in effect is just another power plant. How could it not solve the problem?

All that matters is the sum cost of renewables + storage, which appears to be close to if not already cheaper than conventional sources. And those costs are continuing to decline rapidly.

For anyone who’s wondering if they should take Will seriously, here’s a fun fact about nuclear. It requires energy storage solutions if it is to be ramped up beyond the base load because you can’t ramp them up and down in response to energy demand on the grid. In the past it was pumped hydro, which is super cheap and practical. If you want to scale up nuclear generation then you also have to ramp up energy storage, or accept that you will be pointlessly generating energy much of the time (thus raising the cost per MW).

And for large scale energy storage nobody that I know of is seriously considering Lithium. Leading technologies include thermal storage (which may become something houses can use), compressed air/gas, hydrogen and flywheels. Focusing on lithium is what you would do if you were either ignorant, or deliberately constructing a dishonest argument.

Also I have no idea what he’s getting at with the grid. We have an expanded grid today in both the EU and the US (which is why one of my clients will occasionally buy energy for Florida from New England when trading conditions get really bad). The problem with them are transmission losses. We have the technologies to significantly reduce those losses which would be a really good idea because REDUCING ENERGY LOSSES IS A REALLY GOOD IDEA.

The sad truth of power generation is that there is only one good solution, natural gas powered generators: flexible, pretty efficient and cheap (oh and bad for the environment – nothing’s perfect). Every other solution has a host of problems, that require additional engineering solutions to address (this is actually a significant reason for the decline of coal).

So focusing on the engineering problems that surround renewable energy, while ignoring those that surround nuclear is pretty dishonest.

One additional point – nuclear is a terrible partner for renewable energy. Let’s say that wind collapses all over Europe and you need additional power. Well nuclear isn’t going to help because it takes at least a day to spin one up.

Will, I missed your OOPS! I see you picked up on the error.

“Battery storage to bridge that gap would cost $1.6 trillion.”

Which is $53.3 billion a year over thirty years, or 1.5% of Germany’s GDP. That doesn’t sound that much, given the private sector will be doing a lot of the spending, and it’s less than half the amount Germany currently spends per year on electricity consumption, solar panels, and wind turbines put together.

With coal being phased out, renewables + storage is guaranteed to be profitable. The money everyone used to pay to coal power companies, now goes to …

@52. What “theory” are you referring to? Social Studies (aka “Social Science”) mandarins would do better to couch their ideas in non-Science dick-envy terms.

David Golumbia by blurbing the embarassingly “Not Even Wrong” Chris Knight is hard to take seriously any longer for anything outside his particular area of expertise:

https://www.chrisknight.co.uk/category/noam_chomsky
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/letters

“claiming that the crucial problem is [ir]rational public fear …and so forth.”
New Yorkers and other Lilco bond holders will remember the Shoreham disaster: Build a reactor and don’t turn it on and then the contortions that William J. Catacosinos, the Lilco chairman and trained economist went through to make sure that the bonds were ultimately paid. The climate of fear would be manifest at the underwriter level–it is a bad investment. You cannot build what you cannot finance.

Cian 49, 41

1. “For anyone who’s wondering if they should take Will seriously, here’s a fun fact about nuclear. It requires energy storage solutions if it is to be ramped up beyond the base load because you can’t ramp them up and down in response to energy demand on the grid”

More like a fun fallacy. French nuclear plants ramp up and down on an hourly basis to follow load. The EPR reactor can ramp up and down at a rate of 2.5 percent per minute between 25 percent and 60 percent of nameplate power, and at 5 percent per minute between 60 percent and 100 percent rated power. It can ramp from 25 percent to full power in less than 30 minutes. That’s almost as fast as a gas plant.

“The sad truth of power generation is that there is only one good solution, natural gas powered generators: flexible, pretty efficient and cheap (oh and bad for the environment – nothing’s perfect)…. One additional point – nuclear is a terrible partner for renewable energy. Let’s say that wind collapses all over Europe and you need additional power. Well nuclear isn’t going to help because it takes at least a day to spin one up.”

So you’re saying that instead we should burn gas when wind collapses. Of course the premise is false; nuclear can spin up in minutes. But the deeper question is why we are expected to ramp down nuclear in the first place to accommodate wind; that does nothing to abate carbon. The real problem is that wind is a terrible partner for nuclear. So how about doing it the other way round? Just curtail wind when it overproduces and threatens to destabilize the grid, and let the nuclear plant run full steam 24/7/365. Then there won’t be any (specious) questions about ramping, and we won’t have to burn gas.

2. “Also I have no idea what he’s getting at with the grid. We have an expanded grid today in both the EU and the US (which is why one of my clients will occasionally buy energy for Florida from New England when trading conditions get really bad).”

Germany is spending tens of billions of euros building high-voltage lines from the windy north to the industrial south. Its population and electricity use are stagnant; it is expanding the grid solely and explicitly to accommodate surges in wind power. All that expense would be unnecessary if there were no wind power, so it should be charged to the system costs of the wind turbines. That’s what I’m getting at.

Cian 41,

1. “The US does not have the managerial, bureacratic and construction competence to deliver nuclear power economically (unlike France in the 70s, say).”

France didn’t have a nuclear industry until the 1970s, but they managed to train one up right quick. Same with the US. There was no significant nuclear construction industry in the US before the mid-1960s, yet Oyster Creek, one of the first plants, was finished in 1969 at a cost of $1000 per kw, very cheap.

The problem is not competence but simply that nowadays nuclear is over-regulated, from the gold-plated designs down to the basics of concreting and welding, which under NQA strictures are maniacally over-burdened with regulation and paperwork. The latter leads to delays and slow work and rework of tiny details and cost overruns.

2. “Nuclear is the ultimate “this time it will be different” technology.”

No, the argument is more like, “this time, it will be the same.” Same as the cheap, rapid buildout of early US nuclear, same as the cheap, rapid buildout of French nuclear, same as the cheap, rapid buildout of Korean nuclear, same as the cheap, rapid buildout of Chinese nuclear… If the technology is freed from the strangling overregulation and actively hostile government policy it suffers nowadays, it will post the same good performance as the historical norm. You’re cherry-picking the failures without looking at the history of successful performance.

Area Man 47

“If the marginal value of additional solar or wind energy is zero in a given area, then building storage or expanding the grid is building a clean power source, because they can draw on zero-cost energy. A storage facility in effect is just another power plant.”

Storage isn’t a net energy source, it just shifts the time energy is released into the grid. After subtracting storage losses, it’s a net energy sink. And it’s not clean if it’s storing coal-fired electricity. Most of the large utility-scale batteries you read about are not “firming” solar and wind; they are storing grid power, which has some RE but also includes nuclear, coal, gas, whatever is on the grid when the battery is charging.

It’s true that if a wind or solar farm is being curtailed, adding storage for curtailed output will increase the plant’s total output, or rather restore it to its maximum; in that sense the added storage is functioning to increase useful electricity production. But we should regard that as part of the generating plant, not as an independent energy source. Unfortunately, storage in non-trivial amounts is expensive and impairs the plant’s economics.

On the grid scale, utilities used to be able to invest all their WS money in new generators because penetrations were low enough to avoid grid problems or curtailment, so they were getting the maximum WS energy for their money. To the extent that they now also have to invest in storage and expanded transmission, which are net energy sinks, to cope with WS instability and curtailment, that will take away from the pot of money for new RE generators and act as a brake on RE growth. We’ve seen this happen in Germany, China, elsewhere.

It’s just common sense. As WS penetrations grow more money needs to be spent on infrastructure to integrate it, which will crowd out some investment in the WS generators themselves.

Will, I had a reasonably long post three-quarters — half, really — written that set out exactly why you were doing things wrong and what you could do to improve your own happiness, but I deleted it because in the final analysis it didn’t actually need to be said at that length or in that detail.

Short form: write less think more.

Also: if you come out of a conversation with the same knowledge and beliefs that you went into the conversation with, you’ve gained nothing and cost yourself time. To “lose”, to change your mind, is to win, is the only win.

Will, have you spoken to any indigenous Americans about the pollution of their water supplies by uranium miners and the consequences for their health? I suggest you try that.

You say that nuclear is “over regulated” and I wonder, what level of regulation do you think would be more appropriate? The level of your commercial aircraft industry, which has just seen an entire fleet of aircraft grounded because of safety issues? The level of your food industry, with its regular nationwide outbreaks of salmonella and e. coli that don’t happen in other developed nations? The level of your prison industry, where people are smearing desperate messages on the walls of their cells in their own blood? The level of your mining industry, where a man who went to prison for corporate manslaughter is running for a senate position with your pro-business party? The level of your media industry, where one of the major providers regularly allows videos of mass murder to be circulated and where one of its major players has incited a nationwide movement to harass the parents of dead children? The level of your mercenary industry, which is in league with a foreign power and gets away with actual murder on the streets of foreign cities? Or maybe you prefer the model offered by your small arms industry? Which lower level of regulation do you think is appropriate for the nuclear industry?

I don’t know how to tell you this nicely, but you live in a failing state. In 10 years it will be a failed state, squatting in between two oceans and belching out physical and cultural pollution that the rest of the world has to deal with. Failed states shouldn’t be allowed near nuclear power. They can’t manage the waste and they can’t be trusted not to pollute their neighbours. You guys have shown yourselves to be completely incapable of handling mining pollution or CO2 pollution, and have actively resisted even the smallest attempts to handle your CO2 pollution, even though it’s a very easy problem to fix. If you can’t fix those problems, why on earth would anyone think your regulatory systems – at any level of regulation you care to mention – would be able to handle the nuclear industry.

Just give it up – your nation can’t handle this stuff. You should be advocating for technology that is appropriate to a failed state, not the kind of technology that requires an advanced social democratic society with well-functioning regulatory systems and the ability build actual infrastructure.

So, are we expected to believe that we can develop and implement a safe, economic way to store nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years, but can’t develop and implement a safe, economic way to store electricity for a few hours? Isn’t science wonderful.

Will@62. But of course a 1-2% cost increase from 2017 to 2018 was a big deal, when the trendline is something close to a 10% decrease. So given current policies and incentives solar needs decreasing cost to drive growth. But barring draconian policies -which Trump would gladly deliver if we let him, solar growth should continue, as new solar becomes a better bargain over time.

Some figures from last year, 10,18,24,35. This are the percentage cost decreases last year for onshore wind, solar, offshore wind, and storage. Admittedly one years improvements are not a very reliable way to determine the future trajectory, but its clear that all these technologies are becoming dramatically cheaper year after year, if this can be sustained then RE power will be revolutionary-ly cheap before long.

Matt 64,

“From 1980 to 1990 nuclear generation went from 251.1 TWh to 576.9 TWh, an annualized growth rate of 32.6 TWh. I predict that solar output growth will surpass that rate in the 2020s.”

That’s not an apples to apples comparison of decarbonization performance until you normalize for population, electricity demand and GDP. Nuclear in the 1980s was growing that fast from a much smaller economy and workforce, and was proportionately displacing FF power and emissions at a much higher rate than solar would be in the 2020s at equal absolute growth rates. Solar in the 2020s would have to grow a lot faster in absolute terms than nuclear in the 1980s before it would rival nuclear’s benchmark.

but about this ”failed-state-thingy” –
are we sure? – as it seem to be such a… a ”cultural thing” when Americans come out with all these crazy ideas about… anything – and somewhere else I read that the whole English speaking world has gone mad – but I don’t think the Neu Seeländer -(and ”the Aussies”?) have -(gone mad)

Perhaps it’s just the fault of ”TEH Internet”?
It’s sooo tempting to post all of this silly nonsense -(like that ”nuclear” makes any sense) –
and so somebody who probably works for ”nuclear” -(like Homer) posts all this… this ”stuff” Homer would post on TEH Internet?

And is Will – – perhaps – –
Homer?

I think I made my last post a bit less clear by referring to primary energy alongside electricity. Let me try again: low-carbon electricity output needs to increase faster — absolutely, in TWh, not percentagewise — than total electricity production in order to actually diminish fossil electricity production. Referring again to the IAEA, Table 3, the US produced 2289.6 TWh of electricity in 1980 and 3037.8 TWh in 1990. In the same time period nuclear electricity production grew from 251.1 TWh to 576.9 TWh. Since total electricity production grew by ~83 TWh per year and nuclear electricity production grew by only ~33 TWh per year (hydro declined very slightly), the US generated more fossil electricity at the end of the 1980s than the beginning. Nuclear power would have had to increase by 84 or more TWh per year in the 1980s to actually make electrical generation from fossil fuels shrink.

From 2000 to 2017, total electricity production went from 3802.1 TWh to 4014.8 TWh. That’s only ~13 TWh per year. If that trend holds, renewables currently need to grow ~14 TWh per year to force an absolute decrease in fossil generated electricity.

OC 69

“But of course a 1-2% cost increase from 2017 to 2018 was a big deal, when the trendline is something close to a 10% decrease.”

Right, except that solar costs are already so low that a 10 percent decrease amounts to a small fraction of a penny in an LCOE that’s already below wholesale market rates. If that’s enough to make or break projects, it means they are on a knife-edge of profitability, or that costs are not exactly as they are indicated in PPAs. I’m not saying solar isn’t cheap, it is, but there may still be barriers of grid systemic costs and lack of value that are holding it back and may not be fixed easily.

AND about forbidding ”nuclear” –

”The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act prohibits confectionery products which contain a “non-nutritive object”, unless the non-nutritive object has functional value.[40] Essentially, the Act bans “the sale of any candy that has embedded in it a toy or trinket”.[41]
In 1997, the staff of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) examined and issued a recall for some Kinder Surprise illegally brought into the US with foreign labels.[42] The staff determined that the toys within the eggs had small parts. The staff presumed that Kinder Surprise, being a chocolate product, was intended for AMERICANS of all ages, including those under three years of age. On this basis, the staff took the position that Kinder Surprise was in violation of the small parts regulation and should be banned from importation into the US.[42]
Kinder Surprise eggs are legal in Canada and Mexico, but are illegal to import into the US. In January 2011, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) threatened a Manitoba resident with a $300 (Canadian dollars) fine for carrying one egg across the US border into Minnesota.[43] In June 2012, CBP held two Seattle men for two and a half hours after discovering six Kinder Surprise eggs in their car upon returning to the US from a trip to Vancouver. According to one of the men detained, a border guard quoted the potential fine as US $2,500 per egg.[44]
In 2012, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) re-issued their import alert stating “The embedded non-nutritive objects in these confectionery products may pose a public health risk as the consumer may unknowingly choke on the object”.[45]
Kinder Surprise bears warnings advising the consumer that the toy is “not suitable for children under three years, due to the presence of small parts”, and that “adult supervision is recommended”.[46]
Since 2017, Kinder Joy eggs (where a toy is not encased in chocolate shell) are sold in the United States, though Kinder Surprise eggs are still banned”.

and please excuse the Ãœberraschungseiquatsch – but it’s just an example for how easy it could be in ”TEH homeland” to forbid any type of ”nuclear” –
and Will – there are ”homes” on this planet where already everything ”runs” with RE-energy – and why in a world would somebody who just has to put a solar panel on his -(or her) roof – insists on using the utmost outdated, complicated and stupid source of energy instead?

Why?

BE-cause ”nuclear” is supposedly ”cheaper”?

Really?

Well – there are a lot of people who are doing a lot of (”Gesamtheitliche”) math lately and they have found out – that if you live in one of these ”lands” where energy is more expensive you – in exchange – might get your health insurance for half price?

Or 5 to 6 weeks of (payed) vacation per year?
Or you get your education for free and don’t have to pay USC 500 000 bucks?
And all of that BE-cause ”the people” in these ”lands” think ”long term” and ”sustainable” and ”Gesamtheitlich” – and they support systems where they get payed ”Living Wages” and thusly – are able to pay ”higher energy prices” –
Which – if you don’t think just ”short term” – soon will come down more and more –
and this WHOLE DEAL – doesn’t exclude any or some ”Yellow Wests” – as they make sure – that with their protest against high energy prices – they still will get paid ”Living Wages” and each year on first of August six or even seven weeks of vacation.

– and I really don’t know if this type of a isolated ”Fachdiskussion” focusing at costs, cost, cost is helpful in order to solve the problem of climate change – as everybody – and especially in TEH homeland probably knows by now – that it is the ”unintended consequences” of such costcostcosteconomics which make -(for example) certain US cities see ”less costly options” as ”a real pest”.

Like – who could have thunked it – that ”a supposedly less costly transportation system” (the name I will not name) – with all of their poor and exploited drivers – circling around day and night can do so much damage?

Which all should remind US – that there is absolutely no reason to make every (flat) inner US city as Bike-friendly and thus as eco-friendly as – for example – Amsterdam.
And if WE are able to forbid Surprise Eggs – and to limit the speed of driving to a dimension which has absolutely no relationship to the available power of the driving machine- WE also could do –
NOW –
what WE have to do in a few years anywhoo – FORBID all ”nuclear driving” in any downtown.

Responding to random Will bullshit:

Outside Germany, the yellow vest riots, touched off by a carbon tax increase, show that there is a limit to how much money people will pay for RE.

The yellow vest riots were about reducing taxes on the wealthy while increasing them on the poor. The trigger point was the carbon tax (applied regressively), but it could easily have been something else.

And should Germany build batteries? No; from an economic standpoint it should build nuclear instead.

No, it should use one of the other storage solutions that makes more economic sense. Your obsessive focus on the least economic solution seems a bit suspect. Yes if you compare a bad solution to nuclear, nuclear looks good (particularly if you ignore how nuclear builds always go wildly over budget).

It’s fairly clear Will that you’ve decided the solution is nuclear, and you will twist any data that comes you way to make new nuclear builds look good and ignore data that makes nuclear look bad. You constantly present renewables in the worst possible way, and constantly ignore data that makes nuclear look bad. If nuclear is as good as you say, there should be a way to make the argument which doesn’t ignore all the problems. Otherwise you’re kind of digging the grave for nuclear.

OK, Cian, but tell that to the numberless greens, many on this blog, who insist that batteries are the solution, and to all the utilities that are investing in them and all the governments that are mandating them.

This simply isn’t true. They are one technology that is being used, and one technology that has been receiving a lot of research money. The rest is just not true.

All the storage forms you ticked off have drawbacks of cost, scalability, efficiency or sustainability—CAES burns natural gas!—and most haven’t gotten beyond a few demonstrations projects or drawing-board concepts.

yes every engineering solution has problems. This is literally engineering school 101. None of these solutions are perfect, or always the right solution. This is also true. None of this should really surprise anyone… Some of these solutions are already proving very successful, others are currently research projects, or being prototyped. Some solutions only work in certain geographies, etc, etc. There will need to be a storage mix, just as there will need to be a generation mix.

Also, one form of CAES burns natural gas. Others don’t. I have no idea whether the amount of gas burnt is significant, or not – and I kind of suspect you don’t either.

CAES, flywheels, hydrogen have all been around for decades or centuries; if they worked well they probably would have caught on by now, the way batteries have. There’s a market for storage.

Stares bleakly at the books on the history of science and technology on his shelves and whistles tunelessly…

That’s not really how technological/engineering progress works…

Will: If the US is a failed state when it comes to CO2 abatement, how did it manage to reduce its CO2 emissions during 2006-2016 faster than either Germany or Japan, where you live? In 2017, under Trump, the US again reduced CO2 emissions by 0.5 percent while Japan reduced them just 0.1 percent and German emissions increased by 0.1 percent. The US declines were from a much higher per capita emissions base, but still the US is decarbonizing faster than Germany and Japan.

Because Japan and Germany made the very stupid decisions to retire their entire nuclear power generation plants. Don’t disagree. In the case of Japan that’s more understandable (there was a bad accident, and one that demonstrated the nuke operators had been lying on a number of issues, which clearly freaked out the Japanese government). Germany less so.

In addition the US experienced a very bad recession in 2007 that among other thiings greatly reduced power demand. Picking 2006 is kind of cherry picking TBH. There are other factors too. Germany has a lot of heavy industry, while the US is rapidly deindustrializing. Also there was a move to replace coal with gas (for economic reasons), which also helped reduce CO2 emissions. Of course it now turns out that carbon emissions for the US have probably been understated due to fracking actually being worse for CO2 than previously assumed.

That’s a sign of a failed state, a government that makes rash, counterproductive decisions out of fear. The US didn’t shut down its nuclear sector because it had a more rational and judicious response, a sign of a competent state.

This seems… hyperbolic.

And the US response is largely due to state and regulator capture by private companies than anything else. The idea that the US government seriously would have considered costing big business a lot of money for environmental reasons doesn’t really pass the laugh test.

Japan’s nuclear accident at Fukushima was much worse than America’s at TMI. By that measure the US is more competent at regulating nuclear power.

Or lucky not to get tsunamis. Who can say…

Also, one form of CAES burns natural gas. Others don’t. I have no idea whether the amount of gas burnt is significant, or not – and I kind of suspect you don’t either.

The kind that burns natural gas has depressingly high gas consumption. The machinery supplier for the only American CAES project using gas claims that “CAES has environmental advantages compared to conventional gas turbines because its combustors use as little as two-thirds the fuel.” Adding that complexity to reduce natural gas consumption by only a third is unattractive. Of course, this American plant was built in 1991. Perhaps someone can build a better plant now. But a better one hasn’t been built yet.

A much smaller (2 megawatt) gas-free CAES project was built in Texas in 2011. The company behind it, General Compression, Inc., doesn’t appear to have published reports about its performance. That company merged with another CAES startup to form GCX Energy in 2015 and there has been a lack of information since. I presume that the merged company quietly failed.

– and perhaps we –
(also Will and Cian?) – could start looking at ”the full story of a country’s contribution to global warming” –
as looking at a country’s total carbon emissions completely overlooks that – for example – US carbon emissions is about seven times Germany’s – while the US population is only four times Germany’s.

In other words:
Each American is emitting a lot more carbon than the average German.

T be more precise – under the measurement of carbon emissions per capita (person) – the average American is responsible for 19.8 tonnes per person, and the average German citizen clocks in at around 10 tonnes.

Will: For one thing, “what’s wrong with 600 GW of wind and solar plus 2.5 twh of storage” is that it doesn’t do the job.

I was slightly out on that, but not by much.

Try 611 GW of wind and solar plus 2.5 TWh of storage instead.

With the same amount of gas Germany has installed now, fired up on just 10 days since the beginning of 2016, that does the job fine.

>99% carbon emissions eliminated from the electricity sector. No more nuclear waste.

For 70-90% cheaper than you claimed, and have already conceded is affordable.

AND only AFTER the average American has succeeded to come down from his 19.8 tonnes of carbon emissions per person, to about the 10 tonnes the average German citizen emits should WE stop wondering why an American -(or Australian?) has the nerve to call Germany ”stupid” in getting of ”stupid nuclear”?

The problem is not competence but simply that nowadays nuclear is over-regulated, from the gold-plated designs down to the basics of concreting and welding, which under NQA strictures are maniacally over-burdened with regulation and paperwork.

You must realize that this stuff begins to sound like a bunch of lame excuse-making after awhile. Why did they start building those plants if they knew in advance that they would get ground down by all the regulations and stuff? And if they didn’t know, why didn’t they? They went right ahead with a multi-billion dollar project that they couldn’t finish on-time or on-budget or even at all.

You really need to internalize the fact that the American nuclear industry has had its chance and it clearly failed. Pretending that there’s a unicorn that will fix it all isn’t going to help. It really doesn’t even matter what the source of the problems are, you can’t just wish them away.

.. but when we are all driving electric vehicles, won’t we recharge our cars overnight and hence store the energy in fuel cells for release during the day? We could even have a rate that only switches on when wind power goes above a critical level? Isn’t that the point of electric vehicles as green vehicles? And if every vehicle in the world does that, isn’t that a significant amount of storage of renewable electricity?

I’d just like to thank Will Boisvert for a really helpful series of posts here.

Like others on the thread, I suspect that the west is currently institutionally incapable of the kind of grand-scale civil engineering he’s arguing for, and that it’d take more than global disorder, famine & species loss to change that. But these excellent (and amazingly good-humoured) posts have done a lot to clean up my thinking on the alternatives.

JQ 82

“(1) What policy changes do you think would be needed to get this plant built and (2) how long would it take, assuming the changes were implemented straight away.”

That plant’s not going to get built because it’s too expensive, $10 billion for an untried ESBR design by GE. The point is to get away from gold-plated Gen III+ behemoths and build old, mature, el cheapo Gen II.

Here are policy changes to get *a* plant built at Fermi or wherever:

(1) Rescind NRC’s aircraft impact rule.

(2) Buy a CPR1000 reactor from the Chinese. It’s a good Gen II+ design, the upgraded granddaughter of a Westinghouse design that’s very common in the US. It has an excellent construction and operating history, with 20-odd on line in China, all built fast and on budget for $3,000-$3500 per kw. The last one came on line in 2017, so there are plenty of experienced project managers around. The supply chain largely overlaps with the Hualong 1, so it’s still intact.

The CPR1000 isn’t licensed in the US—and that’s the policy problem. There’s no question that it’s a safer design than any currently-operating reactor in the US, but it might not pass muster at NRC today without very expensive upgrades, and in any case would take many years to get licensed. No rational reason to go through that rigmarole because we know the plant is safe and it has already been vetted by IAEA, an expert accrediting agency. Just rubber-stamp the design and start in on building it tomorrow.

(3) Extend and make permanent all the subsidies, preferments and mandates for renewables—and give them to nuclear too.

–“ My answers: 1. A substantial subsidy relative to renewables, even after including generous capacity payments. 2. At least 10 years.”

I think with those reforms we could realistically bring in nuclear at $4,000 per kw in the US, maybe less. I don’t think it needs more subsidy than renewables to get built—but it might be worth them. It’s a better quality of power, so it could merit a PPA premium commensurate with lower overall system costs. With nuclear a utility planner would be looking at an initial 20-year LCOE of $60-70 per mwh until the mortgage is paid, higher than WS in many places, but then a further 40-60 years of operation at $20-30 per mwh. Maybe he’s also thinking about the endpoint of engineering a carbon-free grid, with no more gas competing in capacity markets, when nuclear avoids the cost of grid expansion, storage and overbuild. The present-day relative market pricing of WS vs. nuclear PPAs might not capture all those cost considerations that planners think about long term, which is why they might build the nuke instead of the immediately “cheaper” WS.

As for a timetable, from a standing start it would take maybe 7 years to bring a plant on line. But once series production kicks in they will come on line faster by routinizing planning and building multiple reactors per site at 4-5 years build times.

Even if it takes 10 years before power flows, that’s not a deal-breaker. Contra AOC, we are not going to finish decarbonizing the world in 2030; in fact we will have barely begun. If it takes 10 years to kick the nuclear industry into high gear, it’s worth the effort; there will still be a vast ocean of FF to displace.

We need a new regulatory mindset of fast, cheap and safe as opposed to the current mindset of slow, hideously expensive and only slightly safer. I think it unlikely NRC and Westerm goverments will undertake that paradigm shift because of politics, but in practical terms it is feasible.

One ray of light is NuScale, a 700 MW multiple-SMR design. The designers say they can bring it in at $4,200 per MW in America, but it’s untried so we have to be skeptical of that. They do, however, have a Utah utility lined up as a buyer, willing to gamble on it. Their license application at NRC is doing well. It’s an incredibly safe design: the reactors are small, so they can be cooled forever first by water pools and then air with no power or human supervision; it’s underground, so no aircraft vulnerability, etc. Crucially, NRC seems willing to acknowledge the plant’s intrinsic safety and loosen regulatory binds. For example, they are discussing limiting its emergency planning zone to the plant boundary instead of the usual 10-mile radius, thus conceding that a major radioactive release that threatens the public just won’t happen. (That doesn’t mean Gen II is meaningfully less safe; we’re talking tiny disparities in infinitesimal risk here. The important thing is that NRC is moving toward the recognition that nuclear safety can justify relaxed regulation.)

NuScale is small so it has high per-kwh operating costs, but that could be remedied by building several units on a site once the constructability is proven. If it can win a regulatory regime that regards it as intrinsically safe, rather than as an intrinsic threat that has to be over-armored against disaster, then maybe it will be freed to vigorously pursue engineering and operational tweaks and staffing reductions that would seriously cut costs—the normal trajectory of innovation and economizing.

Lots of things worth trying, so don’t write nuclear off.

It has an excellent construction and operating history, with 20-odd on line in China, all built fast and on budget for $3,000-$3500 per kw. The last one came on line in 2017, so there are plenty of experienced project managers around. The supply chain largely overlaps with the Hualong 1, so it’s still intact.

$3,000 per kw is not cheap. That’s even assuming there are no hidden costs for insurance, decommissioning, waste disposal and the things could be built in the US on budget/time.

Also in response to nastywoman. Yes Germany’s emissions are half those of the US. That actually makes the US look better than it should though, as Germany is an exporter and has a number of carbon intensive industries (e.g. steel). The US imports much of it’s carbon-intensive goods, so it would probably be reasonable to include a fair chunk of China’s emissions as those of the US. Fortunately the Chinese are at least taking global warming seriously.

The biggest contribution to global warming that we could make would simply to remove the US from the map.

The OECD tracks statistics on Carbon dioxide emissions embodied in international trade. If you click through to the dashboard, you can see that for the most recent year with data available (2015) China produced 9280.9 million tonnes of CO2, but only 7977.9 million tonnes of that was embodied in domestic final demand. The other 14% went to exports.

I’m skeptical of framings that put the focus on consumers instead of producers, though. “It’s not Georgia Power’s fault that they emit so much carbon dioxide — they’re just supplying the inexpensive energy desired by the millions of people who buy from them.” I don’t buy it. And I don’t buy it any more when we’re talking about Chinese businesses than when we’re talking about American businesses.

“The CPR1000 isn’t licensed in the US—and that’s the policy problem. There’s no question that it’s a safer design than any currently-operating reactor in the US, but it might not pass muster at NRC today without very expensive upgrades, and in any case would take many years to get licensed. No rational reason to go through that rigmarole because we know the plant is safe and it has already been vetted by IAEA, an expert accrediting agency. Just rubber-stamp the design and start in on building it tomorrow.”

Now, I actually agree with that. And Will is right that we will at best be in the middle of the transition in 2030 (and probably not even there unless we really get a move on). And 3000/KW isn’t bad. Utility solar is about $1000 per KWhour today, which with a capacity factor of roughly 20% is more expensive than Will’s hoped for cost. Of course I expect solar to be $.60 or less by then, but there still is the intermitancy thing.

But, I also think its vanishing improbably that we will pursue that course of action. One reason in NIH (Not Invented Here). And our validation procedures are exceedingly onerous. I was once tangentially involved in selling an obsolete computer to a national lab. They claimed “we can no longer compile it and must use an old binary”. But I think the real reason was the code was validated many years ago, and any trivial change -even a simple recompile would trigger the need for revalidation, which costs millions of dollars and years to accomplish. Cheaper to emulate past computers than to ever switch to something new. [Not so different from why Boeing choose to do the 737MAX, rather than follow the engineers recommendations and design a new airplane, too many flaming regulatory hoops you are forced to jump through. So once Fukushima happened I stopped touting Nuclear and admitted we will have to decarboniize with Nuclear -because it just ain’t gonna happen.

and about:
”The biggest contribution to global warming that we could make would simply to remove the US from the map”.

– as WE can’t do that – a good start could be – if the US – or our fellow US citizens would start to take a bit of advice from European friends – who produce half of their emissions and who already –
or actually a long time ago –
have written ”nuclear” completely OFF?

OC 113

NIH and legacy designs:

I think utilities would build foreign designs. American utilities were considering French EPRs before the costs ballooned, and Japanese ABWRs.

CPR1000 is essentially the legacy model in your analogy. It’s pretty similar to many Westinghouse PWRs that are operating in the US, from which it is descended; a very familiar and comfortable technology to American engineers and utilities.

I agree that it would be hard to get NRC to rubberstamp a CPR1000, but that’s clearly a dysfunctional regulatory mindset, not a problem with the technology.

NW 115,

“a good start could be – if the US – or our fellow US citizens would start to take a bit of advice from European friends – who produce half of their emissions and who already –
or actually a long time ago –
have written ”nuclear” completely OFF?”

Europe hasn’t “written ‘nuclear’ completely off.” It has a lot of nuclear power. In 2017 Europe produced 850 terrawatt-hours of nuclear energy, a smidge more than the 847 terrawatt-hours in the US (gross). There are currently 8 reactors under construction in Europe, in England, France, Finland, Belarus and Slovakia, compared to 2 in the US.

It’s true that European nuclear is shrinking in the face of some hostile politics. Aging reactors aren’t being replaced, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium are all phasing out nuclear power and France is planning to shrink its sector by one third. Those developments will markedly slow Europe’s decarbonization, so not something to celebrate.

Will, to clarify it was 448 GW of wind, and 163 GW of solar. More wind or less solar in Germany’s mix doesn’t work nearly as well.

Those figures include all of Germany’s electricity exports to the rest of Europe – and make the assumption there’ll be no upgrades to continental and intercontinental interconnects in the next thirty years.

The most problematic period for Germany was between 16/1/2017 – 25/1/2017. That was the only time in the last >3 years the gas had to come online to cover the shortfall.

Wind in the UK during that same period averaged 29% capacity factor.

ENTSO-E Transparency Platform – Generation By Production Type

Assuming similar scale ups in the UK, that alone would have generated more than the UK and Germany’s total electricity consumption put together.

It would have easily covered Germany’s shortfall during those ten days, which peaked at 770 GWh one on day, and averaged 250 GWh per day. UK wind would have been generating in excess of 4 TWh per day by comparison.

It would take 12 GW interconnect capacity to supply Germany with 350GWh / day. Or 25-30 GW to supply Germany, France and several other European countries shortfalls as well.

Currently UK-Europe interconnect capacity is 4 GW. That’s forecast to grow to 11 GW by 2025, based on current projects underway, so it’s not unfeasible at all to reach 25-30 GW by 2050.

The gas is unnecessary at that point.

European Commission: Projects of common interest – Interactive map

Korea is a pretty high-wage country, and it’s building its APR1400 for about $4,000 per kw all-in. It looks like the APR1400 will actually win its NRC license, so it’s an even better possibility for a US build. I think $4,000 isn’t outlandish for an American CPR1000, with parts sourced from China.

Korea is a country known for being to achieve complex civil engineering projects at low cost (Spain is another one oddly). The US last I checked is the most expensive place in the world to do civil engineering projects.

The main reason for this seems to be a combination of project management expertise (I don’t think Americans realize how poor US managerial skills are at this point) and poor construction skills in the US (ditto). My guess, based upon other projects, would be that the cost to build something in the US would be at least double that of Korea. Based upon previous nuclear projects it would also be very late and it least double the original estimate.

Contrary to what Faustusnotes is stating, while corruption is clearly a huge problem in the US, it doesn’t seem to be the principle reason for project failures. Not that I disagree particularly with his assessment of the US today.

@
”Europe hasn’t “written ‘nuclear’ completely off.”

Yes it has – as your are writing ”that Europe still has a lot of nuclear power” – but like the love for ”antique furniture” – any type of love or even like of ”nuclear” is gone – not only in the ”YUUUGEST” EU economy – Germany but also in all these other European Economies who still try to work through the wrong decision for nuclear they made one or two decades ago – which only proves that no other energy source might be as expensive and thusly difficult to stop – as ”nuclear” – after one made twenty years ago some pact with this ”idiotic devil”?

In 2017 Europe produced 850 terrawatt-hours of nuclear energy, a smidge more than the 847 terrawatt-hours in the US

AN 121

1. “It would take 12 GW interconnect capacity to supply Germany with 350GWh / day.”

Hmm. It seems like 12 GW of interconnector could supply at most 288 gwh per day, assuming no transmission losses.

Your modeling also seems to be using daily and weekly aggregate data, which can hide shorter-term shortfalls and thus underestimate grid instability. Blackouts and load-shedding incidents that last a few hours are annoying, costly and sometimes dangerous, which is why grids have such strict reliability standards of 99.9-plus percent.

Also, interconnectors go both ways. You would have to model not just periods when Britain overproduces RE to supply Germany’s grid but periods when Britain’s RE flatlines and the interconnectors are draining the German grid instead of supplying it.

I assume your modeling is OK as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really resolve issues of comparative cost, land-use and politics.

2. “it was 448 GW of wind, and 163 GW of solar. More wind or less solar in Germany’s mix doesn’t work nearly as well.”

Good, wind is much more productive than solar in Germany. But wind costs more, so the wind-heavy grid will run an extra $50 billion or so. Even if in theory you could do away with gas backup altogether with interconnectors to Britain (more $billions) you’re still talking a trillion-dollar German WS system, compared to a potentially $360 billion nuclear system to do the same job, without British help or overbuild.

3. “The most problematic period for Germany was between 16/1/2017 – 25/1/2017. That was the only time in the last >3 years the gas had to come online to cover the shortfall. Wind in the UK during that same period averaged 29% capacity factor. Assuming similar scale ups in the UK, that alone would have generated more than the UK and Germany’s total electricity consumption put together.”

You are talking about scaling up to several hundred GW of wind in Britain, and that is not a good assumption. Already at 20 GW there is fierce NIMBY opposition to onshore wind farms, local planning counsels are rejecting them, the government has stopped subsidizing them and installations have stalled. Offshore wind is still getting built, but slowly, and it is 2-3 times more expensive.

RE politics are nowhere near as docile in Britain, France, and elsewhere in Europe as in Germany, and even Germans may reject the overbuilding of the countryside.

4. “The gas is unnecessary at that point.”

The fixation on getting rid of all FF in a WS system is another element of dysfunctional purism that greens need to jettison. A WS-dominated grid really needs a gas backstop, and can still achieve pretty high decarbonization. Trying to get the last few percentage points of gas off the grid balloons your costs and your overbuild for a negligible benefit in emissions, while leaving us vulnerable if the weather gods decide to toy with us. It’s such a disadvantageous cost-benefit equation that, realistically, we are never going to give up gas entirely in a WS-dominated system. Gas is not ideal in my book, but it’s not a deal-breaker either. Anti-nuclear greens need to resign themselves to keeping gas on the grid; that makes the WS project feasible.

John, I’m sure Will can find a way to blame that delay in UAE on anti-nuclear activists. UAE is famously open to dissent, after all!

Will, you’ll note that I didn’t include wage differentials in my original list of reasons why Americans can’t do infrastructure. You raised that furphy, just to dismiss it. Cian makes my point for me: Americans are terrible at infrastructure, can’t build anything, and that’s why your nuclear plants are overpriced. It’s the same in the UK where Hinckley is becoming an extremely unpopular disaster and multiple organizations are trying to pull out of it even though they’re being offered guaranteed future prices.

In short the reasons that Korean power plants work in Spain will not make them work when Koreans build them in the USA. Stop blaming hippies and start blaming management!

Will said: No, much of the embodied labor in the plant is still Korean. Korea would supply the parts and civil-construction modules. (Ocean freight is cheap, so won’t have much impact on cost.) On the other hand, some of the embodied labor in the cheap Korean plants is lazy, incompetent, corrupt, overpaid American labor because American companies supply some of their components.

You do understand that we were not talking about factory workers, but construction workers. And nobody (other than you) said that construction workers were lazy, or corrupt. And that in fact you are completely misrepresenting the argument (again) because you don’t want to deal with it. So I will lay out as clearly as I can:

1) Building a nuclear power station is a massive civil engineering job that requires a lot of on site labour and building expertise. At this point I’m not sure if you even realize this frankly. On site skills and expertise are extremely important.
2) US construction skills are by international standards pretty low. This is due to a combination of inadequate training and anti-union/low wage management sentiment. This is not the workers fault – it is the fault of the US state and the managers/owners of construction firms. Building a nuclear power station requires a skilled construction workforce. This is a problem for the US right now.
3) Construction Project Management skills in the US are also very low. This has been cited in numerous studies as a bit contribution for why US construction projects routinely go way over budget/schedule. Indeed, it was a major contributor to the failure of the nuclear power station in South Carolina.

That’s it. I was even careful to point out that political corruption in the US does not seem to be a particularly significant contributor to costs. Note that I didn’t say ‘worker corruption’ – that was your contribution. Your anti-worker sentiment is noted. Good for you.

At this point I don’t really see the point in continuing any of this. A financial case against nuclear in the US has been laid out. You have mostly ignored this case, and when you have responded to it you have misrepresented and obfusticated the original arguments. You have also accused myself, Faustusnotes and John of making arguments that we were careful not to make.

Cian makes my point for me: Americans are terrible at infrastructure, can’t build anything, and that’s why your nuclear plants are overpriced.

The weird thing is that this is true in many but far from all cases. American construction costs for natural gas fueled power plants, large solar farms, and large onshore wind farms are competitive with or even a bit lower than similar projects in other developed countries. Large American electricity transmission projects can take an exceptionally long time to get approval if they cross state lines and need interstate consensus. They are constructed at reasonable costs and speeds once all approvals are in place.

Given the recent experiences of France and Finland, I’d even say that our recent attempts at new reactors are comparable with contemporary attempts at new reactors in other developed countries. South Korea is exceptionally good, not typical, when it comes to building new domestic reactors. Historically, the only electricity projects that have a worse time matching schedule projections than nuclear projects are large reservoir-backed hydroelectric projects [1]. These too tend toward “every site has a unique design” and have a similar problem of being monoliths with complicated interdependent work.

Americans do seem to be stuck with exceptionally expensive and slow subway, bridge, and tunnel projects. I have read many thousands of words from people trying to identify the cause(s) and nothing seems to describe the full elephant.

[1] An international comparative assessment of construction cost overruns for electricity infrastructure

JQ 128

Yes, the Barakah plant is delayed per:

1) Cracks and voids in the concrete. Those aren’t unheard of in nuclear construction and they can be patched, but I have no idea how much it will cost—probably not enough to make an impression on a $25 billion price tag. But the delay itself will add a lot to financing costs.

2) Training delays. Plant staff were supposed to train on the Korean APR1400s but the opening of those plants was delayed so Emirati staff are behind in their training.

Is all that a harbinger of cost blowouts for the APR1400 in the future? Maybe not. The Shin Kori 4 APR1400 in Korea is starting up this month after a 9-year, very troubled build. It did not have concreting issues, but it did have to have substandard cables with forged quality certifications ripped out and replaced. It also was held offline for two years after it was finished in 2017 for further seismic studies after a Korean EQ rattled politicians. (The studies showed the plant was fine.) Despite all the problems, the plant’s cost was still about $3.1 billion (($4.65 billion all-in?) for 1.34 GW, pretty cheap. And SK4’s specific issues aren’t likely to recur. So worth more tries, maybe the teething pains will subside.

You could look at the APR1400 builds and call them fiascoes. But again a reality check: SK4 and its twin SK3 between them generate three quarters as much electricity every year as the entire Australian wind and solar sectors combined did in 2018. They will do that for 60 years, no storage or grid expansion required. Barakah by itself will generate half again as much yearly energy as Australia’s combined WS sector did last year. Despite the patching and delays, as decarbonization tools these reactors are worth the investment.

So we’re not paying an exorbitant decarbonization opportunity cost by enduring repeated “fiascoes” as we try to get the nuclear formula right. Even the fiascoes almost always yield incomparably productive and valuable clean-energy factories. And if we can work through the problems to get the formula right, as we have in the past, then there’s an enormous payoff for the climate, air quality, landscapes and economics. The argument “because fiascoes, we should stop building nuclear” is wrong-headed.

Cian 131

You are arguing that the US suffers an unusual and general deficit in construction and management skills that make it impossible to build any nuclear plant as cheap and fast as the Chinese and Koreans do. I argue instead that the problems are caused by specific bad designs and regulatory regimes, and that with a cheap, mature design with a mature supply chain, like the CPR1000 and possibly the APR1400, the US nuclear industry would perform well.

You haven’t cited any evidence to support your argument, and it doesn’t ring true for the economy or the electricity sector as a whole. As Matt 133 pointed out, the US does quite well at building gas-fired power plants, RE plants and transmission grids, after permitting. That doesn’t support your theory.

If there is a peculiar US inability to build nuclear plants, it must be shared by France and Finland, which have as much trouble as we do. But none of these countries had trouble building nuclear fast and cheap in previous decades. They began having trouble when designs and regulation became more complex and cumbersome. All this supports my theory that complex design and cumbersome regulation is to blame for troubled nuclear builds. To fit this evidence to your theory we would have to believe that general deficits in construction and management skills strike random countries at random times, but always, by pure coincidence, when nuclear designs and regulations grow more cumbersome.

And the present-day example of China supports my argument. China had cost overruns and multi-year delays building its EPRs and AP1000s, just like America and France and Finland did, but had no trouble building CPR1000s at the same time. That’s because EPRs and AP1000s are just much harder to build than CPR1000s. The design really matters.

A close look at the American AP1000 builds provides plenty more evidence for regulation and especially design being primary drivers of the difficulties.

The design was immature. The detailed blueprints necessary to build the plant weren’t complete when construction started, and Westinghouse chronically missed deadlines in delivering them to construction managers and the module factory at Lake Charles, La. When the blueprints were finished, they often proved to be hard or impossible to build, either at Lake Charles or on site, and had to be redesigned, so more delays until the redesigned blueprints were issued. And the awkward designs led to low productivity at Lake Charles and on site.

Regulators didn’t help by imposing design changes like the hard-to-build composite-panel shield wall for the containment building. Also, the immature design led to dozens of license amendment requests being filed throughout the build which had to vetted by NRC before going in—that takes time.

There were also major problems with an immature supply chain. Components large and small from outside suppliers, from the giant coolant pumps to water tanks, had design and redesign problems that caused delays. To try to catch up work was farmed out to novice suppliers who then had problems coming up to speed on novel and ill-crafted parts.

The Chinese had all the same problems building their AP1000s, and suffered similar delays. At the same time they had no trouble with their CPR1000 builds. So clearly the main problem is with the design, not a general deficit of construction and management skills in the people building them. There was indeed a management problem, but one specific to Westinghouse management’s failure to produce a good, constructible design (and perhaps the utilities’ due diligence failure in not catching that).

Again, a build with a mature design, established supply chain and experienced construction managers won’t suffer those problems.

FN 136

1. “Will, being in this thread with you is like being in a conversation with a 40-something single guy who can’t hold down a long-term relationship. “There was this woman A but that failed because of reason X… then there was this chick B but that fell apart because of Y … and of course there was C but she was bad because of Z … and then there was …” Every reason for every failure is unique and different and none of them seem like they’re his fault, but everyone in the conversation can see that this pattern of “unique” reasons all falls down to one common underlying factor – him. They even try to point this out to him, but he’s having none of it – he thinks it’s all feminisms fault…”

No, I’m not offering a grab-bag of arbitrary, unique and different reasons XYZ, I’m offering a single consistent excuse: nuclear plants get more cumbersome and expensive, mainly in response to regulatory pressures, which slows or stops deployment. Reverting to proven, mature, cheaper designs would therefore solve the problem.

Also, I’m not basing my case on one man’s unverifiable account of private, intimate relationships, as in your analogy. Regulatory and industrial policies regarding nuclear power are made in public, and there’s lots of public evidence and a scholarly literature to support my argument. We see regulatory ratcheting, we see nuclear plant designs getting more cumbersome and expensive in response, and we see the resulting construction delays and cost overruns. You’re not addressing this evidence.

2. “no amount of effort is going to convince you that the problem is not hippies but the technology itself.”

If you’ll read my 33 above you’ll see that I don’t blame “hippies” but rather lawyers, politicians and regulators, with examples. I specifically argue that the antinuclear movement is not hippies, it is the Establishment.

The problem with blaming “the technology itself” is that there are many counterexamples of nuclear plants having been built cheap and fast and then going on to exemplary service records. So we can logically rule out the possibility that nuclear technology itself is unworkable, since there are so many instances of it working fine. To account for failures in *some* nuclear initiatives we have to look to the specific design and regulatory contexts for those failures. Nothing else makes sense.

Larry Niven in Ringworld imagined the Puppeteer civilization coping with the waste heat (not greenhouse gases) from energy production by moving planets away from the sun, in a Klemperer rosette formation. Which goes to show, in principle there’s a solution to every problem.

Another Nick 140

“For 274 GW offshore wind + 174 GW onshore wind + 163 GW solar + 2.5 TWh storage”

OK, so now the bulk of your wind is offshore. That’s going to raise the cost by another few hundred billion dollars. You’re looking at a price tag close to $1.5 trillion, roughly four times as much as an equivalent nuclear grid. I’m still not seeing the economic sense in that. (By the way, in your modeling are you keeping German biomass on the grid?)

“Current rollout of onshore wind would have to increase x 1.5, current rollout of offshore wind would have to increase x 6. The idea there’ll be 10x as many nuclear stations around the world in 2050 is implausible. Current production over the last 30 years would have to increase x 100.”

The idea that Germany will raise its offshore wind installation rate X6 is also very implausible, since that’s not the plan. Germany’s official plan is to have 20 GW offshore installed by 2030, up from today’s 6.4 GW, a growth rate of about 13 GW per decade. At that rate it will take 200 years to reach 274 GW of offshore wind, assuming wind turbines last 200 years at sea.

Nuclear could easily decarbonize the current German grid by 2060, to judge by Germany’s historical nuclear rollout rates. Germany is yet another unsung example of a successful nuclear rollout. In the 19 years from 1970 through 1988, West Germany by itself built 21.7 GW of nuclear power, with an economy on average less than half the size of Germany’s current economy. Taking into account the much higher productivity of nuclear gigawatts, that’s over double the absolute growth rate of clean electricity that Germany is targeting for its offshore sector. If we normalize that construction rate to Germany’s current much larger GDP, we could reasonably expect to build 22 GW per decade, so by 2060 we could have a fleet of about 90 GW without breaking a sweat, enough to decarbonize the entire current grid, no overbuild, no grid expansion, no storage, no gas, no forests of wind turbines shadowing the countryside, and at dramatically lower cost than just the offshore component of your WS grid by itself.

France achieved a build rate that high. It built about 60 GW in 25 years from the 1970s to the 1990s, also with a much smaller GDP than Germany has today. A German build rate equal to France’s actual build rate would decarbonize the German grid before 2060. If we normalize France’s build rate to Germany’s current economy, it’s quite realistic to forecast Germany completely decarbonizing the current grid by 2050 or sooner with nuclear. Germany probably wouldn’t need to build Korean or Chinese reactors, just the models they already built and currently have running, all of which were built pretty fast and cheap.

“The faster coal and gas are phased out the better. Any proposed solutions should be measured by their efficacy in achieving that.”

Great—nuclear it is, then.

Seriously, you are not going to remove gas completely from a WS grid. When the government says, “to get the last 3 percentage points of gas off the grid we are going to spend hundreds of billions of euros on batteries and erecting another 50,000 wind turbines,” even the Germans are going to get fed up. Gotta be realistic. And don’t worry about it—a wisp of residual gas is not going to destroy the world.

“There are currently 30,000 wind turbines installed in Germany. I don’t find it that difficult to imagine 300,000 three decades from now.”

Yeah, I can picture it too. That’s the problem.

Sorry, I just realised since using the ENTSO-E figures I haven’t been including ‘Hydro Run-of-river and poundage’, and ‘Hydro Reservoir’.

With those added to ‘Hydro Pumped Storage Consumption’, we can do:

136 GW offshore wind + 134 GW onshore wind + 158 GW solar + 3 TWh storage

154 GW offshore wind + 154 GW onshore wind + 165 GW solar + 2.5 TWh storage

In both cases, with biomass still excluded, the gas has to come online for 12 days since 1st Jan 2015, and we’re still seeing over 99% carbon emissions removed from the electricity sector.

Another Nick 144 145

OK, Nick, assuming your modeling is right, all your scenarios are still running $1 trillion plus once we add grid expansion and cost of gas backup or interconnectors, even at optimistic prices. All of them are 3-4 times what an equivalent nuclear grid would cost. My argument was against JQ’s claim that RE plus storage is cheaper than nuclear, and all your scenarios confirm my position.

Are you treating Hydro Pumped Storage Actual Consumption as load or supply?

Will: Are you treating Hydro Pumped Storage Actual Consumption as load or supply?

Thanks for that, that should have been obvious. I was treating it as supply. I’ve switched to using Hydro Pumped Storage Actual Aggregated, and subtracting Hydro Pumped Storage Actual Consumption, as it’s not included in the overall load figures. That significantly improves our results again:

140 GW offshore wind + 140 GW onshore wind + 141 GW solar + 3 TWh storage

150 GW offshore wind + 150 GW onshore wind + 150 GW solar + 2.5 TWh storage

There’s now 14 days of Germany’s currently installed gas capacity required, but that’s still less than 1 in 100 days, which is what I’m aiming to restrict this to. We’re still at over 99% of emissions removed, including 99% of gas emissions. (They’re not entire days of gas required btw, but I don’t have time atm to pare down to the actual number of hours required.)

nastywoman, I’m certainly aware of that. It doesn’t really affect what I’m trying to achieve here, which is to determine the quantities of renewables + storage it would take to cover current electricity demand – and to make it as clear as possible that Will’s storage estimates and cost predictions and fear mongering and tales of famine and darkness and despair were miles off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiloWOFuY08

The more they’re off grid in the future, the more people are likely to adjust their demand when required (eg. cook with a single induction stove top on a medium setting, rather than roasting in the oven for 90mins), which should require less overall storage than I’m attempting to account for.

I’m not so sure Will gets it though, as we can see by his last few comments which have slipped back to ‘how is the government going to afford all of this??’ as opposed to ‘can the economy afford this’.

@JohnQ, I think your 10-year point about nuclear power is true, but also somewhat misleading. For all our happy calculations in this thread, nothing is on track for serious decarbonization by 2030. Worldwide electricity consumption is about 25,000 Twh/year. Primary energy is 150,000

Wind is now adding about 150 TWh/year/year, and accelerating. PV adds another 100, and accelerating harder. Hydro another 100, but with limited scope for acceleration. Nuclear something like 20 to 30, with dips into the negative numbers. Its historic construction peak was about 100 TWh/year/year – similar to wind or solar today.

We need to get a construction rate of multiple 1000s of TWh/year/year of low-GHG energy, and then keep that up that rate for several decades. Such a rate would green the grid while also allowing other energy consumers to move to electrification, and then hopefully cross at some point with falling energy demand. It would be nice if we reach such a construction rate by 2030. The serious decarbonization would then start, not end.

Nuclear might not be ready for that, but neither is anything else right now. The question is not really what we can build in the 2020s, the question is what rate we can sustain in the 2030s, 2040s after ramping up in the 2020s. Will’s claim is that nuclear can eventually sustain a higher rate, because the alternatives will reach saturation difficulties -for the grid, for required space. If he is right about that (big if), then this will quickly make up for a lower construction rate in the 2020s.

Zamfir 150

“Also on the nuclear side, higher opex for nuclear closes part of the capex gap (especially if we’re assuming a worldwide nuclear rollout and higher uranium costs). Easily 10, perhaps towards 20 billion/year for our calculation case of Germany’s current electricity demand. That’s worth another 100 or 200 billion in capex.”

WS opex will also rise. At German capacity factors onshore wind and solar opex is roughtly $10 per mwh, versus $20-30 per mwh for nuclear. But offshore wind has higher opex, which apparently will dominate the grid according to Another Nick. You also have to charge to the WS generators the opex of expanded transmission infrastructure, battery storage and gas backup that they require. And overbuild will reduce WS capacity factors and further raise per-kwh opex. A nuclear grid and WS grid would probably have about the same per-kwh opex.

You also have to factor into the capex gap the faster depreciation of WS assets lasting maybe 40 years and batteries lasting 20-30 years, maybe less, which I haven’t counted above.

Zamfir 150

“Next up: phasing. The really high capex part of Nick’s scenario comes towards the end. Until then, the renewable scenario is plain cheaper for the same GHG reduction.”

No, not really.

1. The high capex part is already here, with curtailment issues and major expenditures for grid expansion and storage now catching up with the WS sector (or rather the grids that subsidize it).

In China extensive curtailment has applied a brake on wind and solar deployments, at less than 10 percent penetrations, and necessitated hundreds of billion of dollars being spent on grid expansion.

Germany is awaiting a $50 billion euro transmission project slated for 2025 before it can (meagerly) accelerate offshore wind deployment. 100 billion more euros of transmission or more will likely be needed to accommodate the scale of deployments Another Nick is envisioning.

In California wind and solar is starting to suffer significant curtailment, with pricey battery storage being mandated by the state to cope with it. It’s worse than that. The coming shutdown of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant was justified in part as a way to ease the problem of solar curtailment—by taking off the grid an enormous quantity of competing zero-emissions energy. In the future solar overproduction will start crowding out wind, hydor and then cannibalizing itself even more, with no net carbon benefit, unless more expensive battery storage is built. Giant transmission lines hundreds of miles long, costing many billions, are also being proposed to address the problem.

This is all happening at pretty low WS penetrations.

2. The “phasing” advantage you perceive only applies to an already developed grid with plenty of reliable generators and no demand growth. In that case WS can displace generation while the reliable capacity keeps the grid stable, with no spending needed on storage or backup because the backup is already there.

That doesn’t hold in the case of a system with growing demand that does not already have reliable capacity to back up new generation. In that case, to service growing demand reliably, backup, storage (and always transmission) has to grow in tandem with the new WS.

This is clear in the case of a developing country starting from scratch. If they want their growing electricity use to be reliable to support development, then at the same time they are building WS they must also build a complete complement of FF plants capable of running the whole grid on their own, and an extra helping of transmission even at very low WS penetration. So capital expenses much higher than the WS generators per se.

This also applies to developed countries if they want to electrify their entire energy system, as they must to decarbonize. Your phasing advantage would only apply if a developed country strictly avoids expanding electricity consumption while WS is deplacing existing FF. No EVs, no electrified heating and cooking etc, so as not to expand demand. If demand does expand then new reliable capacity—FF if it is not nuclear–must immediately be built as well to backstop it.

So either a country slows decarbonization by holding electricity consumption flat, or it has to build a costly package of backup along with its WS. Germany has chosen the former. It has not expanded its electricity use at all during the Energiewende, which it should be doing to decarbonize its off-grid economy. But if they did that they would have to build more FF plants, which would cost a lot and look bad. So the WS strategy has imposed on Germany a slow pace of decarbonization (and still with very high costs).

3. For a given amount of WS generation you get less decarbonization proper than you would with nuclear, right from the start. WS preferentially displaces gas from the grid, a lower-emissions fuel than coal. Nuclear is a perfect substitute for coal, and preferentially displaces the base-load coal layer of the merit order, with higher emissions reduction per kwh of clean electricity, starting with the first nuke that comes on line. Also, when WS does displace gas and coal, it often forces them out of baseload generation and into “balancing” mode where they ramp up and down more, which is less fuel-efficient than running steadily in baseload. So when WS displaces FF, some of that benefit may be lost by forcing FF generators to burn more carbon per kwh on their remaining generation.

That’s assuming WS displace FF at all, which is not always the case. WS often ends up displacing other zero-emissions energy sources. German WS has had almost no impact on greenhouse emissions to date, because it has mainly displaced nuclear. California WS has displaced an enormous amount of nuclear and hydro, with no emissions benefit. France is planning to compensate for its growing WS by shutting down a third of its nuclear fleet and balancing with hydro and gas, with no emissions benefit at all for the money; France will likely recarbonize a bit over the next decade. That’s the phasing of WS in the real world.

Zamfir 150

“If you cannot convince the wider public, you have to work with the costs of gold-plating. The nuclear industry has failed to make that case for decades, with the same arguments you use here.”

The “nuclear industry” hasn’t made these arguments, only a handful of environmentalists have. The industry dances to the tune of the regulator without much complaint, which is why it shifted to gold-plated Gen III.

The wider public almost never hears a coherent case for the safety and benefits of nuclear power. Pinker gets a quarter page in the New York Times. The Chernobyl accident gets an upcoming 5-part miniseries drama on HBO, featuring alarmist misinformation spouted by gorgeous movie stars.

The idea that “the wider public” drives nuclear regulatory ratcheting is mostly wrong. The antinuclear movement is an elite movement operating through elite institutions—law firms, lobbying firms, think tanks, courts, regulatory bodies. The wider public usually doesn’t pay attention to nuclear safety. (Even in Japan after Fukushima, pro-nuclear candidates have done well in elections for Prime Minister, prefectural governors, etc.) The public simply follows the assessment of the regulator on nuclear safety. If the regulator accepts a Gen II plant like the CPR1000, the public will accept that it’s safe.

We have an exact test of this proposition. In 2016 the Watts Bar 2 plant opened in Tennessee, a really obsolete Gen II plant that was abandoned for 20 years and then completed under a grandfathered license. No way would that plant have gotten a new license in 2016 from the NRC, and it certainly doesn’t meet Gen III standards of gold-plating. But there was no public opposition to WB2, despite its seeming reversion to a lower, “obsolete” safety standard. A CPR1000 is a safer plant than WB2. So if the regulator licenses it, the public will accept it.

Sometimes an informed public intevenes to support nuclear power against an antinuclear government. That happened in Taiwan recently when a referendum to rescind the government’s nuclear phase-out policy passed by 60 percent of the vote, after an information campaign by scientists and pro-nuclear environmentalists (not the nuclear utility, which is controlled by the government). Unfortunately, the government then announced it would ignore the referendum, which it cannot legally do under the constitution, and close the nukes anyway.

What stands in the way of cheap nuclear isn’t the public, it’s antinuclear elites—not on the picket lines, but in the government. Challenging the elite consensus against nuclear stands a fair chance of winning public support. Worth a try.

JQ 151

1. “The time from initial approval to operation is almost always 10 years or more, even when construction goes smoothly, which it usually doesn’t.”

China does it in 6-7 years, approval to grid connection. In the West there are lots of existing nuclear plants where site characterization and infrastructure is already done and reactors could be built very quickly.

2. “So, there is no scope for any nuclear contribution to decarbonization before 2030, except for the 50 GW or so currently under construction or ready to start. By then, most developed countries should be coal-free, or nearly so.”

Again, this “2030 or bust” meme is a canard. Plenty of developed countries will be burning coal in 2030. Coal consumption grew smartly last year, up 1.1 percent. In 2030 the global grid will be burning more FF than ever and there will be ample scope for nuclear to supply the clean energy that WS isn’t supplying. The time for reforms to speed nuclear deployment is right now.

And why have you suddenly restricted the conversation to “developed countries” and coal? Do developing countries and gas and oil now not need decarbonizing?

3. “there is no design likely to reach more than 10-15 plants, which is too few for substantial economies of scale, or for the accumulation of adequate evidence on operating performance.”

CPR1000 builds were very cheap and fast at series number 10. The APR1400 came in at $3,500 per kw at series number 2.

There’s no reason why series have to stop at 15. You’re treating arbitrary policy choices as if they were ineluctable laws of nature. That’s a formula for entrenching a status quo that can’t be rationally justified.

LWRs are a well-understood technology, and their “operating performance” is predictable. The Shin Kori 3 reactor posted a 100 percent capacity factor in 2017, its first full year of operation. (It was shuttered for 5 months in 2018 as a pointless “precaution” after an earthquake that did it no damage.)

China’s Sanmen 2 AP1000 posted an 86 percent capacity factor last year, falling short of 100 percent because it was ramping during commissioning tests for most of its operation. Its twin Sanmen 1 posted a capacity factor of 99.4 percent.

The reactors work.

Will says

The antinuclear movement is an elite movement operating through elite institutions—law firms, lobbying firms, think tanks, courts, regulatory bodies. The wider public usually doesn’t pay attention to nuclear safety

I was on the train to Shinjuku 3 chome yesterday, passed through Akasaka Mitsuke and picked up one of the anti-nuclear activists who hangs around ministry buildings there. Tall, middle-aged dude in hakama and white martial arts top, carrying a megaphone emblazoned with no nuke stickers and wearing a yellow bandana. Spent the day standing outside a ministry building yelling at passers-by. I don’t think he’s very elite.

The few times I see anti-nuclear demonstrations here they’re grumpy old men and women in vests carrying home made signs. Is this your elite movement?

As for the idea that the anti-nuclear movement works through think tanks – haha. Which think tank do you work for Will, and who funds it? What are the anti-nuclear think tanks? Greenpeace has 250,000 members in the US, and it’s true one of its issues is anti-nuclear activism. Tell me Will, how many members does your think tank have? Which of the two movements is “elite”? The national movement with 250,000 members that announces on its website that it doesn’t solicit corporate donations, or the Breakthrough Institute, which has a couple of members and a long list of donors including “The Anthropocene Institute” (who funds their glossy website?), The Ahmansons (a pair of rich philanthropists), a bunch of clothing companies, and a bunch of private family funds?

It’s always funny when people who’re funded by philanthropists to work at think tanks selling nuclear power and glyphosate start talking about how activist organizations are elite. How much are you guys paid to market glyphosate and attack the IARC, Will? Have you scrubbed articles about glyphosate safety after it was revealed in court that Monsanto pays scientists to provide favourable reports? Do you think that you’re not an elite movement when you work for an organization that receives this kind of funding?

Do you think that the nuclear industry does not work through “law firms, lobbying firms, think tanks, courts, regulatory bodies”? Do you think Greenpeace get to talk to the British government like this? Do they have the same influence on the EPA and the US government at the moment as the coal industry or as companies like General Electric? Do you think that Greenpeace get as much technical support and lobbying opportunities in South Korea as the nuclear industry does?

It’s okay to complain about anti-nuclear activists. But it’s really grubby to pretend that you’re not an elite movement, while receiving money from a thinktank like the Breakthrough Institute.

In 2016 the Watts Bar 2 plant opened in Tennessee, a really obsolete Gen II plant that was abandoned for 20 years and then completed under a grandfathered license. No way would that plant have gotten a new license in 2016 from the NRC, and it certainly doesn’t meet Gen III standards of gold-plating.

Watts Bar 2 was “about 80%” completed when construction work halted in 1985. It was projected to cost $2.5 billion to finish when completion work resumed in 2007. It ended up about $2.7 billion due to requirements added post-Fukushima. 20% of 1180 MWe at $2.5 billion is $10,590 per kilowatt, or $11,440/kW at $2.7 billion. Either way it doesn’t demonstrate a Generation II “nuclear kilowatt costing $4,000.”

Maybe you’re thinking: That’s not how complex projects work. The last “about 20%” can turn out to take way more than 20% of the effort! I’m sympathetic to that argument. Maybe a Generation II reactor built from scratch to the same standards as currently operating American Generation II reactors would cost only $4000/kW. At best, the completion of Watts Bar 2 leaves that hypothesis untested.

Followup to my last comment: Watts Bar 2 had a more complicated history than I realized. This white paper archived from the TVA web site explains better:

When work stopped in 1985, Watts Bar Unit 2 was considered about 80 percent complete, with a total investment of about $1.7 billion. In the years that followed, various pieces of equipment, such as pumps, motors and valves, were salvaged for use in Watts Bar Unit 1 or in Watts Bar’s sister plant, Sequoyah. A Detailed Scoping, Estimating and Planning (DSEP) study in 2007 found Watts Bar Unit 2 to be effectively 60 percent complete and estimated that Unit 2 could be finished in about 60 months at a cost of about $2.5 billion.

My previous cost-per-watt calculation for finishing the reactor was double what it should have been, then. The estimated cost was really $5295/kW and actual cost was really $5720/kW. Still well above $4000/kW, but not as bad as I first thought.

…the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report today finding that the world is headed for a dangerous temperature rise of 1.5°C by 2030 if dramatic action isn’t taken. This is far earlier than previously thought. The report says the world needs to get emissions down to 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 to avoid hitting the 1.5 mark, which scientists warn is that point at which climate change becomes dangerous to human life.

Emissions are not going to drop 45% below 2010 levels by 2030. Not a single major emitter is on track for that kind of dramatic change. Much less all of them. We have 11 years left to make deep emissions cuts that should have started 30 years ago. It won’t be done on schedule. We’re headed deep into the danger zone.

I fear that the IPCC’s actual warning is turning into “the world is ending 12 years from 2018” by a game of telephone. Humans are not going to do the things the IPCC has recommended fast enough to stabilize temperature rise at a “safe” level, and we’re not all going to die fast enough that we can just stop planning for 2031 and beyond.

Matt 165 167

1. “[Watts Bar 2] doesn’t demonstrate a Generation II “nuclear kilowatt costing $4,000.””

I never said it did. I offered it as evidence that the public will accept “obsolete” Gen II plants being commissioned nowadays. ZF argued that the public would not, and WB2 disproves that. The CPR1000 and APR1400 builds are the evidence that nuclear can be built cheap at $4,000 per kw or less. WB2 shows that we can build mature, cheaper models without public opposition. Only irrational regulatory strictures stand in the way.

2. “Watts Bar 2 was “about 80%” completed when construction work halted in 1985. It was projected to cost $2.5 billion to finish when completion work resumed in 2007. It ended up about $2.7 billion due to requirements added post-Fukushima. 20% of 1180 MWe at $2.5 billion is $10,590 per kilowatt, or $11,440/kW at $2.7 billion…. My previous cost-per-watt calculation for finishing the reactor was double what it should have been, then. The estimated cost was really $5295/kW and actual cost was really $5720/kW. Still well above $4000/kW, but not as bad as I first thought.”

As you write, parts were cannibalized from WB2 and also some just deteriorated during the shutdown and had to be replaced. That put the plant at nominally 60 percent completion when construction restarted. But that’s still not the right factor for converting cost-to-complete into total construction cost because it ignores the large extra overhead of simply restarting, replanning and restaffing the suspended project and the qualitative difficulty of out-of-sequence reconstruction.

The analogy would be taking a car that was 80 percent of the way down the assembly line, then stopping it, shutting down the assembly line, firing all the workers, letting the unfinished car sit in the shuttered factory for 20 years, ripping out 25 percent of the parts that were already installed, and finally deciding to restart the assembly line and finish the car. In that case the final 40 percent is likely to cost more than the whole car would have without the hiatus.