Over the fold, a piece I wrote for The Conversation. It’s focused on Australia, but includes a swipe at European advocates of a “nuclear renaissance”, the most notable of whom are Macron and (at least until his defenstration) Boris Johnson
Last week, opposition leader Peter Dutton called for Australia to join what he dubbed the “international nuclear energy renaissance”.
The same phrase was used 20 years ago to describe plans for a massive expansion of nuclear. New Generation III plants would be safer and more efficient than the Generation II plants built in the 1970s and 1980s. But the supposed renaissance delivered only a trickle of new reactors – barely enough to replace retiring plants.
If there was ever going to be a nuclear renaissance, it was then. Back then, solar and wind were still expensive and batteries able to power cars or store power for the grid were in their infancy.
Even if these new smaller, modular reactors can overcome the massive cost blowouts which inevitably dog large plants, it’s too late for nuclear in Australia. As a new report points out, nuclear would be wildly uncompetitive, costing far more per megawatt hour (MWh) than it does to take energy from sun or wind.
The nuclear renaissance that wasn’t
Early in the 21st century, the outlook for nuclear energy seemed more promising than it had in years. As evidence on the dangers of global heating mounted, it became clear that the expansion of coal-fired power in the 1990s – especially in Asia – had been a mistake.
And despite the prevalence of slogans such as ‘Solar not Nuclear’, the cost of solar and wind energy was then too high to make fully renewable systems a reality.
The rise of Generation III and III+ designs promised to eliminate or at least greatly reduce the risk of accidents like those at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
The time seemed right for a nuclear renaissance – especially in the United States. Between 2007 and 2009, 13 companies applied for construction and operating licenses to build 31 new nuclear power reactors. But all but two of these proposals stayed on paper.
Read more: Can nuclear power secure a path to net zero?
The first, in Georgia, is expected to be completed this year after running way behind schedule and way over budget. The other project in South Carolina was abandoned in 2017 after billions of dollars had already been poured into it. The same disastrous cost and time blowouts have hit new reactors in France (Flamanville, 10 years behind schedule), Finland (Olkiluoto, which opened this year after a 14 year delay) and the UK (Hinkley Point C, still under construction with cost and time blowouts).
China has built a trickle of new nuclear plants, commissioning three or four a year over the last decade. China currently has about 50 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear power capacity. This pales into insignificance compared to the nation’s extraordinary expansion of solar, with 95-120 gigawatts of additional capacity expected this year alone.
Finland’s new Unit 3 reactor only came online this year as part of its Olkiluoto plant after a major delay. Shutterstock
Nuclear falls short on cost, not politics
What went wrong for nuclear? Despite the claims of some nuclear advocates, the renaissance in the 2000s did not fall short because of political resistance. Far from it – the renaissance had broad political support in key markets.
And, unlike in the 1970s where intense anti-nuclear sentiment was tied to fears of nuclear war, environmentalists in the 2000s had refocused on the need to stop burning carbon-based fuels. Anti-nuclear campaigns and protest marches were almost non-existent.
What stopped the nuclear noughties was a bigger problem: economics. Governments looking at nuclear saw the cost and time over-runs and decided it wasn’t worth it.
As megaproject expert Bent Flyvbjerg has shown, cost overruns like these are typical. First of a kind nuclear plants offer an extreme example of the problem. To date, no Generation III or III+ design has been produced at scales large enough to iron out the inevitable early problems.
At the same time, other energy sources were growing in importance. The United States found ways of tapping its unconventional shale gas reserves.
All the while, solar and wind were getting cheaper and cheaper, driven by generous subsidies from European governments such as Germany and manufacturing economies of scale in China. Solar and wind production ramped up exponentially, growing around 30% a year every year since the beginning of the century.
In Australia, the writing was on the wall by 2007, when an inquiry found new nuclear power would struggle to compete with either coal or renewables. A string of subsequent inquiries have come to precisely the same conclusion.
Could it be different this time?
To make nuclear viable these days, advocates believe, means making it safe, cheap and easy to build. No more megaprojects. Instead, build small reactors en masse on factory production lines, ship them to where they are needed and install them in numbers matching the needs of the area.
Advocates hope the efficiency of factory production will offset the lower efficiency associated with smaller capacity. Ironically, off-site mass production and modular installation is the basis of the success of solar and wind.
To date, the most promising reactor design is NuScale’s VOYGR. It has yet to be produced and the US company has no firm orders. It does have preliminary agreements to build six reactors in Utah by 2030 and another four in Romania.
Solar and wind are modular systems, built in factories. So you can add more capacity easily. Shutterstock
If all are built, that’s still less than the capacity of a single large Gen III plant. More strikingly, it’s about the same as the new solar capacity installed every single day (~710 MW) this year around the world.
Even with US government subsidies, NuScale estimates its power would cost A$132 per MWh. In Australia, average wholesale prices in the first quarter of 2023 ranged from $64 per MWh in Victoria to 114 per MWh in Queensland.
So why, then, is Australia’s opposition still talking about new nuclear? Dutton claims Australia’s future nuclear submarines to be built under the AUKUS deal are “essentially floating SMRs”. This is a red herring – while submarine reactors are small, they are not modular.
The simplest answer is political gain. Announcements like this yield political benefits at low cost.
The US, UK and France have decades of experience in nuclear power, even if failures outnumber successes. So yes, there is a slim chance the latest “nuclear renaissance” will succeed in these countries.
But in Australia, promises to create a nuclear power industry from scratch based on as yet unproven technologies and in competition with cheap renewables is simply delusional.
{ 34 comments }
superdestroyer 07.12.23 at 3:48 pm
What has killed nuclear along with many other large projects is that no person, group, or company has the management capabilities to handle projects that takes more than a few months.
In the U.S., from education reform, to resolving social security funding, to balancing the annual budget deficit seems beyond the management skills of anyone in government. In the private sector, building a nuclear power plant, a pipeline, high speed rail, a new airport, a hydro-electric program, or an expansion of public transportation seems beyond the management skills of the private sector to be on-budget and on-time.
It there some field of management science or economics that studies the inability of management to handle large projects?
B.T. Bardia 07.12.23 at 4:30 pm
Energy density and sustainability are two factors you did not consider in this opinion article, written more as a hit piece in this reader’s opinion. Take for example a NuScale VOYGR-12 design, which boasts 924MW of power at peak generation. It is the same size plant as one of the 4 or 6 module designs. That one plant will take up 2,500 acres and operate for at least 60 years.
In comparison, a windfarm of that capacity would be 41,000 acres , with turbines requiring replacement every 20 years. For solar, those same metrics would be 5,636 acres and ~30 years (all data from http://www.nrel.gov). Add to all this that nuclear power would be a 24/7 operation and would not require batteries – which should never be considered as a safe, reliable, or sustainable energy solution due to the harmful ways they are produced and disposed of alone – it is unrealistic to expect wind and solar to power the requisite energy demands for any country.
I will offer that I agree that the building of nuclear plants is cost-prohibitive, but that is more of a statement on the limitations of our socio-economic system which was built primarily on the use of oil to fuel the world we live in. If we decide that it is not worth the environmental risk to use fossil fuels, than we immediately by into more expensive power costs.
some lurker 07.12.23 at 4:31 pm
I recall reading an article that explained how nuclear plants need so much cooling water that a 100% nuclear grid in the USA would be impossible…and this was from the 1950s, I think. Looking for that reference, I learned that nuclear plants only operate at 33% efficiency. Some information on cooling needs can be found here. Given the costs, delays, and environment impact, wind and solar look to be much better options. That plus a reduction in usage (more efficient lighting and HVAC solutions) give us more flexibility than a huge sunk cost nuclear plant. Even the ambitious designs for floating plants from the early 70s are limited by their size and where they can be sited.
John Q 07.12.23 at 6:35 pm
BTB @2 I don’t think waste disposal is the knockdown anti-nuclear argument that some critics of nuclear see it to be. But it’s bizarre to see it deployed in favour of nuclear and against batteries.
John Q 07.12.23 at 6:45 pm
And, at least for an Australian audience, the area required for solar isn’t a big deal. Many of us can fit enough solar panels on our rooftops to be self-sufficient (with batteries of course). Every year we install about half as much rooftop solar as the entire NuScale project. And of course, there’s plenty of land for utility scale solar, as is also true for Utah I’m sure.
oldster 07.12.23 at 7:35 pm
I had thought that the main argument for supplementing wind and solar with nuclear was the issues about intermittent supply from wind and solar, esp. at night.
While it’s true that the cost of solar is now cheaper than the cost of nuclear during the day, the cost of solar at night is very high, when you figure in what is required to provide backup power. Maybe it’s batteries, maybe it is hydro reservoirs where water is pumped all day to flow down at night, maybe it’s some new solution. But they all cost money, and all of them should be included in any attempt to compare the cost of solar to the cost of nuclear.
The question of land use — Australia is perhaps uniquely fortunate among nations in the amount of land it has that could be covered in solar panels without anyone noticing the loss. Endless hectares, and nearly all of them sunny. Things look different in e.g. the Netherlands, where land is scarce and the sky is cloudy.
I say this as an American who has panels on our roof which provide practically all of our electricity needs, though they do this by over-generating in the summer and then relying on the central utility’s use of natural gas in the winter. Solar is great! But it will always rely on other sources for backup and for intermittency. We need to choose our backup sources, whether hydro or batteries or natural gas or coal. Given that mix, nuclear may still be worth considering for some places for some uses, even if it will not make sense in Australia.
Jonathan 07.12.23 at 7:51 pm
The space requirements for solar and wind are completely insignificant when compared to agriculture. Given the ability to mix the two uses in some cases it’s irrelevant. If 1% of the land used for pasturage in the US was used for solar grazing you could power the USA with solar.
Ebenezer Scrooge 07.12.23 at 9:33 pm
@ 3 Some Lurker: Nuclear plants are thermal plants. The efficiency is set by the temperatures of the working fluid, and has to be well under 100%–low 40’s are the practical limit for any thermal plant, I think.
In defense of nuclear, it provides reliable baseline power, which solar and wind do not. However, the need for baseline power seems to be shrinking, with the development of demand management and energy storage technology. However, the pecuniary costs of nuclear indeed seem uncontrollable.
Luis 07.13.23 at 1:24 am
Thanks for the link to Megaprojects and Risk; looks interesting.
Along the same lines, Dave Roberts had a great podcast on why the price of solar, batteries, and wind keep dropping like a stone, while nuclear remains steadily expensive. Sounds like the researchers he interviews come to a similar conclusion: it is less about regulation and more about how industry learns. Really interesting and worth a listen:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/which-technologies-get-cheaper-over
bad Jim 07.13.23 at 5:05 am
It’s not a good idea to bet against energy storage, not even lithium batteries. Even the practically obsolete lithium batteries in my Chevy were an amazing innovation ten years ago. Companies all over the world are furiously investigating every sort of variation on the physics and chemistry of this category.
Until recently it was my expectation that once the batteries in my car were no longer suitable for automotive work they’d be repurposed for stationary employment, but it now seems more likely that they’ll be recycled, even though recycling facilities have barely begun to be brought into existence. The problem is that batteries of one design are too different from another and not numerous enough by themselves to be worth the trouble of retrofitting.
This summer California is exporting more electricity in the middle of the day than it’s generating from gas. The surprise is that it’s actually being exported instead of curtailed as it was in previous years. This suggests that we’re already not that far from having enough wind and solar generation, given sufficient storage.
greenview 07.13.23 at 2:25 pm
In spite of the cost, what about development of IFR designs which are capable of using spent fuel? This would provide a solution to elimination of existing long term nuclear waste while producing energy as well.
Aardvark Cheeselog 07.13.23 at 2:25 pm
Just as a total non-sequitur, do Australian newspapers do things backwards, so that things than in a US newspaper would be “below the fold” (i.e. hidden from view when the paper is folded and the headline is visible) are “above the fold” instead? Is this something like how the toilets swirl in opposite directions on different sides of the equator?
GMcK 07.13.23 at 3:45 pm
Like high-speed rail in the face of self-driving cars in the US, and likely Australia, small modular reactors missed their chance at the window where technology and economics gave them a chance. The promise of SMRs has been that they would build enough of them that Wright’s Law would kick in and costs would drop to competitive levels as production increased. But the modular reactors turned out to be too late, and too big. The ones that are being ordered are half or a third of the size of the previous generation, not a tenth or a fiftieth, and they are turning out to be nearly as customized per site as their ancestors. Every customization is quantity one, and Wright’s Law doesn’t have a chance.
Meanwhile, the cost of a photovoltaic module is dropping faster than anyone imagined, and Wright’s Law is having a field day. The photocells are still a small part of the cost of a module, and there’s plenty of room left to optimize the rest of the module towards Lego simplicity. And you can even grow grass or other crops in the shade underneath the panels if you make the supports taller and strong enough to withstand back-scratching cattle.
There are so many storage technologies that it’s hard to foresee which one, or if any single one, will become dominant in the end. Pumped hydro is the most mature, but utility-scale lithium batteries have taken a strong lead for Wright’s Law to work with. If you can get past the massive regulatory obstacles slowing development of transmission projects, storage doesn’t even need to be co-located with production. Trucks and railcars full of liquid green hydrogen can fill in for overtaxed and delayed power lines, and because hydrogen is so light, hydrogen tankers don’t damage the roads the way oil tankers do.
Living in a center of petroleum technology, I’d like to see a pivot of fracking towards heat storage (think of a giant ground-source heat pump) rather than extraction. Fracking also plays a part in enhanced geothermal projects, which don’t need storage because the nuclear decays that heat the earth’s core never stop. I have to think that there are secret projects at the big drilling companies aimed at locking up the adjacent intellectual property without scaring conservative investors.
John Q 07.13.23 at 8:43 pm
Aardvark @12 For me, “over the fold” is terminology specific to blogs, meaning what you get when you click on “more”. I didn’t even know it was newspaper terminology.
Relatedly perhaps, Australian newspapers mostly run front-page stories on the front page, or else finish them on page 2 or 3. The kind of thing you see on WSJ in particular, with a couple of paras of text then “go to page Q72” is unusual.
MPAVictora 07.13.23 at 9:52 pm
Really interesting article John but something people forget when talking about nuclear power is medical isotopes. To name one – Mo-99 is used in 40 million medical scans a year and is made primarily by nuclear reactors. It is only one of many medical isotopes that are used for both diagnostic and treatment purposes. We will need some form of nuclear power if we want to continue to have these available.
Alex SL 07.13.23 at 10:15 pm
As so often, I am more puzzled by what motivates people on social media who argue in favour of nuclear power and reject renewables as not feasible, especially given that my territory of Australia has been running on 100% solar and wind electricity for a few years now. And as has already been pointed out, it is absurd to complain about waste generation of solar cells or Lithium mining while advocating the generation of irradiated waste and uranium mining. Why are they like that? Surely they aren’t all bots?
Part of the problem may be that most people don’t actually seem to grasp what sustainable means, nor the implications of something not being sustainable. Say you are making the argument that only nuclear power will provide a reliable energy supply when fossil fuels are phased out. Will uranium deposits last to supply power to a population of billions of people for centuries, millennia even? If not (which is clearly the correct answer), then you are saying that any technological progress beyond the mid-17th century was a mistake and needs to be undone, because you are effectively saying that there cannot be a sustainable electricity supply, ever. Again, why don’t they appear to realise that? What is going on in their heads?
Or perhaps the hope is that fusion will work out in the meantime, I don’t know.
GMcK,
Rail versus self-driving cars isn’t a good analogy here, because cars remain a problem even if self-driving and electric. They simply take up enormous amounts of space and cause traffic congestion compared to public transport. They are the most inefficient and wasteful way imaginable of moving people around short of everybody having their own airplane. (One of my favourite memes remains a photo of a massive traffic jam with the inspirational caption “one day, all of these will be electric!”)
As an aside, perhaps is would have made sense to remove the following paragraphs when transferring the text to Crooked Timer, or to add the link to the first?
Read more: Can nuclear power secure a path to net zero?
Finland’s new Unit 3 reactor only came online this year as part of its Olkiluoto plant after a major delay. Shutterstock
Solar and wind are modular systems, built in factories. So you can add more capacity easily. Shutterstock
Moz in Oz 07.14.23 at 12:36 am
there’s plenty of room left to optimize the rest of the module towards Lego simplicity.
I think that’s happened already to a larger extent than people outside the industry realise. Solar farms these days seem to be picking from a list of “row of things that hold collections of panels” where the output of the unit you’re buying is over 100kW. Single axis tracking is an option, as are various height and density variations, as well as degree of kit-assembly and transportation size (not everyone is limited to what fits in a 2 or 3 TEU box). But it’s almost at the “pick options on the website, enter credit card details” level.
FWIW there’s a thriving market in used EV batteries and just about every other sort of battery for that matter. But technology and prices are changing so rapidly that that factor is often a huge barrier to private sales. “I paid $50,000 for this, your offer of $1000 is offensive”… “fine, I’ll buy a brand new one off AliExpress for $2000 then”. There’s a lot more demand than supply so prices are just barely cheaper than new.
Meanwhile you can’t even order a nuclear reactor, let alone compare suppliers. That’s just not how the industry works, it’s closer to choosing an architect to design your new skyscraper.
David in Tokyo 07.14.23 at 5:03 am
“I have to think that there are secret projects at the big drilling companies aimed at locking up the adjacent intellectual property without scaring conservative investors.”
That would be nice, but there’s been some nasty negative experience with geothermal: things like land subsidence and earthquake generation. Last week, a Japanese geothermal test site in Hokkaido started spewing arsenic-laced gas and polluted local streams. (And, yes, this is being done by an oil company.)
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20230707_12/
By the way, the idea that nuclear and wind/solar are in any sort of competition is nuts. Nuclear could/should replace things that wind/solar can’t, like most energy production here in Japan*. (As somewhat of a tech nerd (I did TA freshman chemistry once (although the students weren’t happy)) I’m not convinced that there are significant amounts of scaleable energy storage on the horizon. Certainly some, yes. But nowhere near enough. We need nuclear.)
Also, the cost of nuclear shouldn’t be a problem, since the long-term costs of running even natural gas power generators is insanely huge.
*: My understanding is that Japan has pretty much maxed out its solar-reasonable real estate, wind is being slow to ramp up but isn’t going to be anything like central US, and geothermal isn’t as easy as people thought. However, people are using some amount of individual home geo-heat-sink systems that work quite nicely, apparently (circulatory pipe systems burried in the back yard suck out heat in the winter and dump heat back in the summer.).
John Q 07.14.23 at 5:36 am
MPA Victoria @15 The article is about prospects for new-build nuclear energy. I’m not arguing for closing down existing nukes, let alone banning isotope production
David @18 Offshore wind is a great option for Japan, and much cheaper than new nuclear.
//www.nature.com/articles/d42473-022-00217-8
“I’m not convinced that there are significant amounts of scaleable energy storage on the horizon” You haven’t been following the news, in that case.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=54939
There’s no real scalability issue with storage, except the need to expand refining of minerals like lithium and cobalt outside China, which has a dominant position at the moment
Zamfir 07.14.23 at 10:15 am
@ JohnQ, We need better than the numbers shown in that EIA link, when it comes to storage.
The link shows planned batteries growing to 30 GW in the next few years. Presumably more later, and perhaps faster than those current plans. That’s a good devlopment, but it very far away from “fixing” the storage issue. In rough numbers:
The link does not give energy capacities of those plans. Current utility batteries plans tend to have around 2 hours of storage (2 kWh for each kW of nameplate power capacity), as they are aimed at fairly short-term fluctuations. Order of magnitude, those battery plants then amountto around 100 GWh of storage. The US grid delivers on average around 500 GW of electricity. So that 100 GWh is a minor effect as yet.
A 10-fold increase over those plans seems a reasonably safe assumption for the mdeium term, even without major changes in battery technology. At 1000 GWh (2 hours of full grid capacity), batteries could reliably shift solar power around within 1 day, effectively running the evening and some of the night on daytime sunlight. This is a very attractive use of batteries as you can use the same battery hundreds of times a year.
Next step is smoothing weather pattern variations (combined with long distance grid connections), that occur on a scale from days to weeks. 2 hours of full grid capacity is not much storage for that, now we need (by order of magnitude) more like 20 hours/ 10.000 GWh to make a notiecable difference. About a hundred-fold more than those plans on the EIA website, or somehwat comparable to replacing every car by a battery powered one. For this, grid batteries needs to be several times cheaper than today per kWh, since those “weather” fluctuations are less frequent than the daily cycles. I would say, that scenario is plausible (lots of people are working on it), though not guaranteed to pan out.
The yearly seasonal fluctuation is still far away from that though. For comparison, the US natural gas storage goes up and down by around 2000 bcft in a year, that’ s 600.000 GWh, mostly to cover different heating patterns in winter and summer. That heating-based variation could go down by half or so using heat pumps, but variation in solar PV output adds a similar cycle on top . For example, if solar pV becomes half of current yearly electrity production, and you want to “move” 1 month of solar power from summer to winter, that’s 180.000 GWh. Which has only 1 cycle per year to pay for the capex.
Those seanonal numbers are easily a 1000-fold higher than the plans on that EIA link, in terms of energy capacity. If “batteries” are going to make a dent in smoothing seasonal fluctuations, it will be a very different battery technology than curently being deployed. Most “zero CO2” studies that I have seen either leave some natural gas in the system for this purpose (with CCS), or they replace natural gas fairly 1-on-1 with electrolysed hydrogen (stored the same way, burned in simialr thermal plants). They mostly rely on overcapacity though – build so much PV panels that they deliver in winter, and shut many of them down in summer.
MPAVictoria 07.14.23 at 4:56 pm
“MPA Victoria @15 The article is about prospects for new-build nuclear energy. I’m not arguing for closing down existing nukes, let alone banning isotope production”
Sorry John I didn’t mean to imply that you were. I should have been more clear – the reactors that make these isotopes are for the most part aging and will need to eventually be replaced. We will need to build new reactors if we want to continue to have access to these isotopes was the point I was trying to make.
1soru1 07.14.23 at 6:45 pm
That is the crux of the issue. it is, on the balance of probabilities, likely that some form of storage will be developed that is cheaper than nuclear.
No-one knows, but say 80% likely is plausible. So any investor buying into nuclear, has an 80% chance of losing their money, and any government pushing it has a comparable risk of it being regarded as fools by their successors.
The thing is, the other 20% of futures still exist. It does seem to me to be a bad use of time and energy to campaign against the spending of money on things that only might be necessary.
[1] or, equally, any other expensive measure to tackle global warming
John Q 07.15.23 at 7:48 am
Zamfir: I’m not claiming that the storage issue is fixed, and I agree that batteries can only ever address one part. I’m responding to the suggestion the battery technology is unready, relative to nuclear. The 30GW over a couple of years should be compared to the plans for new nuclear, which amount to around 30 GW by 2035 on the optimistic assumption that all the recent announcements turn into reality (I’m omitting China here, but the same relativities apply)
Isoru1 Any spending has an opportunity cost. There are lots of alternatives (new storage technologies, hydrogen, geothermal) that have better prospects than nuclear, but aren’t getting as much funding
TF79 07.16.23 at 2:12 pm
This is more or less is how I’ve thought about new nuclear builds as well – there was a window 15 years or so ago when wind and solar were still very expensive, but it’s slammed shut pretty hard, and it’s economics and not politics that drives it (similar to natural gas driving out lots of coal in the US). There’s no massive conspiracy, it’s just really expensive! One other unmentioned thing that may have played a role is the Fukushima level 7 disaster in 2011. I remember being at an environmental econ conference around that time, with a few papers touching on nuclear, and there was a real “oh right, this stuff is dangerous when it goes sideways*” tone that hadn’t been there in the previous few years.**
It’s one thing to look at Chernobyl and write it off as a Soviet thing, but a level 7 in Japan was harder to write off and argue that safety measures could be traded off for cost savings.
** Similar vibe to an agricultural economics conference I was at when the first big lifecycle papers came out showing how bad corn ethanol sucks from a carbon perspective – some sad-eyed grad students
1soru1 07.16.23 at 9:29 pm
That may well be the case. But it really does not look to me like you have done the necessary analysis required to justify that claim.
Is nuclear really specifically the worst of all of them, and so the one thing that can be safely defunded?
Can we really even afford to defund any of them? Should we not be spending 3 or 5 or 17 times as much as we are?
Fake Dave 07.17.23 at 11:19 am
The medical isotopes thing is interesting and certainly not at the forefront of the conversation, but possibly indicative of the industry’s best path forward. There are unique industrial and research opportunities afforded by having a steady stream of exotic elements and isotopes and it’s possible to imagine a world where those become the economic product while the power generation becomes the byproduct. Petrochemicals will still be big business even if we stop burning them like idiots (something often missed in the “stranded assets” discourse). I have to imagine that nuclear will retain a similar appeal even if we all collectively acknowledge that it’s a sketchy way to power a city.
Admittedly, the most mature industrial products so far have been weapons of mass destruction (which are always in the background of these debates), but that alone seems to ensure a steady demand in the world as we know it. If not for the security and proliferation issues though, the field would likely have advanced much farther with research cooperation and industrial development and we would be more aware of the peaceful uses of nuclear materials. It might be impossible to rid the world of nuclear weapons without killing the “peaceful” industry as well, but if we could pull off such a thing, that would be the true nuclear renaissance.
TM 07.17.23 at 11:46 am
“So why, then, is Australia’s opposition still talking about new nuclear?… The simplest answer is political gain.”
There are whole political movements dedicated not so much to these nuclear fantasies but, it seems to me at least, to fundamentally opposing practically all and any renewable energy generation. We see this in Europe, where right wing parties these days seem to run almost exclusively on opposition to immigration – and green power. It is hard to understand this in terms of economic interests, it has become a culture war issue. Pro-nuclear is put forward as a pretend alternative but I don’t feel that they really care much about it (beyond the small kernel of dedicated nuclear enthusiasists), it’s mostly about being againt the green energy, against all those changes that the “green dictators” are trying to “push down our throats”.
A more specific point. A real problem for all thermal power plants is heat disposal. Climate heating increasingly provokes outages at nuclear plants due to rivers being too warm or having dried up. Recently somebody claimed that this isn’t a problem, even in Arizona a nuclear power plant is running without cooling water:
“The Palo Verde Generating Station is located in the Arizona desert and is the only large nuclear power plant in the world that is not located near a large body of water. The power plant evaporates the water from the treated sewage from several nearby cities and towns to provide the cooling of the steam that it produces.”
This sounds pretty weird. If this works, why has it never been replicated?
Alex SL 07.17.23 at 11:47 pm
TM,
Not a sociologist, of course, but I feel that something went sproing a few decades ago, and instead of politics of The West being about conflicting economic interests, it is now increasingly about identity and manufactured outrage. I could explain that by concluding that apparently nearly everybody is now so well-off and secure that economic interests don’t matter to them anymore, and because they don’t face real existential problems or conflicts, they make up and inflate fake ones for their atrophied emotions to have something to latch onto.
But what puzzles me is that that is clearly not the case; there are significant numbers of people who don’t have enough money left at the end of the month to buy food, and even more who see themselves locked out of home ownership, and even more who are increasingly personally affected by the impacts of global warming. Why then is the most emotionally charged public discourse hardly ever about any of that material suffering but instead about pronouns, mask mandates, immigration, woke university students, misrepresented crime statistics, or the transition to renewables, issues that either do not affect the angry shouters in any way whatsoever or (in the case of the masks) at most rise to the level of very minor nuisance? Why is a close family member posting hateful cartoons that depict Greta Thunberg as having no brain, when he has never even so much as been slightly inconvenienced by her, and ensuring me that renewables cannot possibly work, instead of getting angry at those who ensure that a few years from now his own children will hardly be able to leave the house on summer days and that a hundred years from now his home will part of the North Sea*?
Billionaire-owned media, yes, but people could just not watch or read those, if they wanted. They are adults with their own agency, after all, and thus require an explanation in addition to Murdoch’s existence.
*) Minor side issue, but when northern Germany and Denmark are underwater, the North Sea and Baltic Sea will effectively be a single Sea. Not sure what implications that will have for their official names.
David in Tokyo 07.18.23 at 12:33 am
TM writes:
““The Palo Verde Generating Station is located in the Arizona desert and is the only large nuclear power plant in the world that is not located near a large body of water. The power plant evaporates the water from the treated sewage from several nearby cities and towns to provide the cooling of the steam that it produces.”
This sounds pretty weird. If this works, why has it never been replicated?”
Off hand, to have a significant amount of treated sewage, you have to have (several times) that much water actually coming in to those cities and towns. So the “we did it in the desert” bit is a bit of a stretch of the truth.
Thomas Jørgensen 07.19.23 at 9:28 pm
Nuclear power does not rely on fresh water for cooling. That is simply not true
.
Seawater works fine and ocean cooling, both direct and evaporative is entirely standard.
Since the vast majority of the worlds population lives near coast lines..
You can also do direct air cooling with some of the proposed reactor designs. China is investing a good chunk in this to address the power needs of their interior.
And frankly, either the global nuclear renaissance happens or we fail at addressing climate change.
Sure.
Some nations which were gifted lavishly by nature can probably make a solar and wind grid work – it really boils down to having very consistent weather so the storage requirements does not kill your grid dead. But a very minor fraction of the worlds population is fortunate enough to live under such circumstances, and all of it needs clean power. That means either nuclear – and it is going to have to be nuclear breeders, really, happens, or the world is fucked.
Sitting in one of the perhaps blessed nations and writing hit pieces is.. not being a good citizen of the world.
Michael Cain 07.20.23 at 2:17 pm
A couple of nit-picks about the NuScale SMR project.
The site is not in Utah, it’s at the Dept of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory. Putting it on one of the existing federal nuclear reserves at least accelerated the approval processes. It is unclear whether any of the western states would allow construction of a new reactor on private land. The Gates-Buffett proposal to build a molten salt reactor on private land in Wyoming that has had no previous nuclear activity will be a real test of that.
The original plan for the NuScale project cooling for the steam loop was that the Dept of Energy would use the federal government’s authority to disregard state water laws and/or interstate water compacts and take water from the Snake River. Once the utilities backing the project discovered how many local enemies that was making, the design was revised to use air cooling, at the cost of several percentage points of efficiency and an increase in the cost of generated electricity.
engels 07.21.23 at 9:54 am
Why then is the most emotionally charged public discourse hardly ever about any of that material suffering
Because public discourse is dominated by the well-off, who are ten times louder, angrier and more self-righteous on any given issue, and who either don’t care about the poor or consciously want to drown them out.
engels 07.21.23 at 10:48 am
OT but is CT Australia going to have anything about the PWC meltdown?
John Q 07.22.23 at 4:38 am
Michael Cain @31 Thanks for these corrections. Very helpful
Engels @33 I’m hoping we can collect the full set. Here’s Deloittes
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/14/deloitte-misuse-of-government-information-senate-inquiry-pwc-scandal
I’ll see if I can post something on the bigger issue of hollowing out of government
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