If you ignore nuclear waste and plant decommission costs then nuclear still beats renewables although even that is probably no longer true 15 years from now when that plant comes online. But you are now going from hypotheticals of needing public support to just ignoring costs. And we are already giving nuclear the benefit of not making them pay for accidents.
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Thanks. I’ll have another look at some of these claims. I’m pretty sure I have come across ones where they allegedly include such costs, but I’m sure there are all sorts of ways to play with the numbers. I’d be a little surprised if the IEA ignored it completely.
I don’t suppose you have a link where you think all costs have been appropriately accounted for and compared.
Even just comparing those three, they don’t seem that different. The error bars are wide.
I don’t know that they didn’t. I imagine these people are experts and wouldn’t hand wave that away, but I’m still looking through to see if it is specifically mentioned somewhere. I’ll let you know if I find it.
I wish organisations on either side of the argument were truthful or we had someone neutral reporting on this but we don’t. I went from supporting more nuclear plants to being against it because the pro nuclear side isn’t making their case anymore. Even nuclear friendly organisations that claim to include decommissioning cost are not far ahead of renewables anymore. The decommissioning costs included are always numbers significantly lower than the actual reported costs of ongoing decommissioning efforts that haven’t even completed yet. They never include ongoing cost for waste storage either for obvious reason as technically you need to store some of that shit for 10.000 years. So my conclusion is that if you include it all renewables are ahead these days.
As mentioned before this was not true in the late 90s when I had my first discussions on this topic but renewables have made a lot of progress since then while we still don’t know what to do with nuclear waste and no nuclear plant site has been fully decommissioned in all that time.
Well France has its own problems with their nuclear power stations now. Since a lot of them are of the same type they have similar problems now that they come of age. Then you have the lack of water to cool them. Also France gets most of its Uranium from Niger which just had a coup. Macron is already talking big and I doubt they will simply accept that they cant get uranium from Niger anymore. So we are on the brink of another military intervention.
In other news a german supermarket is doing an experiment this week by having 9 products for their real price on the shelves. That means all the externatilites(CO2, water, soil and so on) are included increasing some of goods by 94%. Ofc all the right wingers already go apeshit. First they didnt read the full articles(just the headlines which are obv clickbaity by some of the news sites) that its only about 9 goods for a week and then they want to boycott because they dont want to be lectured. People simply dont want to be reminded what kind of impact their consumption makes.
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One big issue with variable renewables (wind, solar) is that they are highly correlated.
The more you can build high voltage transmission between uncorrelated resources the less storage you need.
The technology to do this is high voltage direct current (HVDC)
To do this over land you need to
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Seperately engineer every step of the route, together with all the approvals etc which are difficult.
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You also need to ship the cable on relatively small sections (that you can fit on a truck) and then figure out how to get it to each location, and then connect it together at leach location.
To do it over sea, the basic costs are higher, because you need to insulate the cable mainly, but you can do it in larger sections, on really big ships.
My hypothesis, based on not much other than me thinking about it, is that costs for undersea cables scale differently than overland the more you do it.
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In a high base load grid, this is what you would expect. As the share of renewables increases, you will see it being used to move daytime solar energy to night time peak demand.
You would expect nightime filling even more in locations with high nuclear, as you design the grid to get the most out of your fixed investment.
Dispatchable.
Nuclear is uninsurable. Every single nuclear power plant in operation is implicitly insured by a state
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Regulations slow construction. AFAIK a nuclear plant doesn’t actually take a decade or more to physically build, it takes that long because of regulatory hurdles. Those same hurdles will slow building an electric grid based on renewable energy, too.
Increased cancer cases around Fukushima and 3 mile Island = 0.
Some of these sites that estimate nuclear costs factor in meltdowns at way too high of a rate when the reality is it is near 0 and the factored cost should be near 0 as long as they are semi-competently run.
I think before that happens the wealthy land owning Republicans in Miami will Pull Themselves Up By Their Bootstraps and get a $1 trillion Federal government bail out to somehow try to change the infrastructure to deal with rising water levels. I am not convinced that it will work, but they will try because it won’t be their money. Personal Responsibility!
Georgia’s brand-new nuclear plant has finally come online…but brother, it ain’t cheap…
In Georgia, almost every electric customer will pay for Vogtle. Georgia Power currently owns 45.7% of the reactors. Smaller shares are owned by Oglethorpe Power Corp., which provides electricity to member-owned cooperatives, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and the city of Dalton. Oglethorpe and MEAG plan to sell power to cooperatives and municipal utilities across Georgia, as well in Jacksonville, Florida, and parts of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.
Georgia Power’s residential customers are projected to pay more than $926 apiece as part of an ongoing finance charge and elected public service commissioners have approved a rate increase. Residential customers will pay $4 more per month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. That could hit bills in August, two months after residential customers saw a $16-a-month increase to pay for higher fuel costs.
The high construction costs have wiped out any future benefit from low nuclear fuel costs in the future, experts have repeatedly testified before commissioners.
“The cost increases and schedule delays have completely eliminated any benefit on a life-cycle cost basis,” Tom Newsome, director of utility finance for the commission, testified Thursday in a Georgia Public Service Commission hearing examining spending.
It wasn’t even close in the 90s. A problem with renewables has been people using old data and old in this case is just a few years. Solar costs half of what it did in 2015.
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Unsure how many billions of $ my province has invested in wind and solar, but it’s up there.
Current live grid make up for Ontario:
I’m going to say the externalities of nuclear is probably a net positive and no other energy source can say that. The positives of medical isotopes being created outweigh the negatives of the waste in my opinion.
Bright sunny day at noon in the middle of Summer in Ontario and solar makes up 1.4% of our power, no clue on the wind conditions, but it’s 0.1% currently.
We’re currently exporting some of our power to Quebec according to that site because it’s not a hot day and Quebec buys up all the power when it’s cheap and then sells it back to us and the USA when it’s expensive as they can store power. I’m not an expert, but I assume hydro is one of the only power sources that can store power efficiently currently.
In some places hydro is nearly 100% of their power - Norway, Albania, Paraguay, Ethiopia and others. Some places have the geography and water for it. Some places don’t.
We definitely can’t get all our power from nuclear, at least, not without the costs blowing out completely.
A key concept in understanding this stuff is the duration curve.
Imagine all the hours in the year. Then sort them from the highest amount of electricity needed to lowest.
You get something like the shape above.
If you think about your capacity to generate this electricity, it means that some of your generation capacity will only be used for a few hours per year, some will be used 1 to 5% of the year, some will be used 20% of the year, and some will be used 90 to 100% of the year.
How much you utilise your power station per year changes the unit cost.
If you see a cost figure for nuclear of $100 per mwh, that assumes it runs for close to 100% of the year. Nuclear has high start up costs and low running costs (effectively zero).
So if you run it for 50% of the year, it will cost $200 per mwh, 25% $400 and if you run it for 0.01% of the year (and something has to) it will cost $1,000,000 per mwh.
You can’t make the system work with elements at $1,000,000 per mwh, even if you only use it occasionally, it doesn’t work.
The duration curve means you need a mix of generation types. As well as baseload (high start up costs, low running costs) you also need peaking plant, which tends to have high running costs and low start up costs.
So yeah, this is a little complicated. And the reason why nuclear won’t work with lots of renewables is a similar argument but more complicated.
And to go back to your original post, saying “I don’t understand why this means X” instead of “this doesn’t mean X” would have got a different response.
Yeah Russia is trying to destabilize Western Africa right now to fuck with France. Most of the rallies have Russian flags, etc. and anti-Western propaganda. We’ve lost a few democracies to Russian backed and funded juntas recently. They are trying to take control of the continent from the West and China. I watch France24 (in French to learn) and they are covering it extensively (including the radioactive material issue)