2179
Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear stance
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
2179 points (94.1% liked)
World News
38977 readers
2337 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Batteries+solar runs $77/MWH with current technology. Nuclear runs $175/MWH with current technology (both of these numbers are TCO, not just running costs) 1 and 2. Months back I did a fairly exhaustive analysis on reddit. Wish I'd kept a link of that, but I cut and ran. More importantly, a nuclear plant is usually "locked in" to current efficiency for 50 years or more, where solar farms and battery farms can be traded up. By end-of-life, that nuclear plant will still be a $175/MWH-TCO plant, but could be competing against solar+battery in the order of $50/MWH TCO as large scale battery tech is skyrocketing of late.
I ended up anti-nuclear from a position of knowledge and research, not a position of "omg it's nuclear". I started pro-nuclear until I did the math a LOT.
Per Nuclear Power Economics and Project Structuring, the capital cost accounts as 60% of the total cost of ownership. Yes it's in the green (capital-wise), by year 10-15. But 60% of Every penny that needs to be spent on a nuclear plant is spent before you hit the "on" button. Solar plants go green in 5 years, but more importantly, you amortize the cost (and continue to do so) over the life of the plant. The latter is always more feasible for a large scale project.
Compare that to solar roofs, solar parking shades, windmills that can often be installed in "spare lots", etc.
EDIT: And to be clear, I'm not even saying there may never be an appropriate use for a nuclear plant in going green. There's just very few of them. Going solar in a big city is a custom gig, but dropping a nuclear plant in its outskirts, not so much. Luckily for me in the US, there's a whole hell of a lot of unused or unusable land just begging for solar plants.
According to the EIA.gov, nuclear is between 36 and $88 per megawatt hour for LCOE for advanced nuclear. Your numbers are way off.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf
Strange. I must be mis-reading your numbers, because the chart I'm reading on your link shows an LCOS/LCOE between $88 and $98... The numbers I was quoting was probably conventional nuclear, and that's a fair correction. I would really appreciate if you are able to address why my references disagreed with your reference, as I didn't come out with my numbers off-the-cuff. Is it conventional vs advanced nuclear, or is it a different measurement entirely?
Note also, however, that Advanced Nuclear still loses to Solar handily in every single chart presented in that document. In addition, none of that addresses the front-loaded cost of nuclear vs solar, which amounts to an entire order of magnitude.
And yet you made simple mistakes like assuming that nuclear reactors only last 40 years?
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-reactor-much-longer-you-might-think
When your assumption is flawed by literally a possible 50% (or more) of the nuclear reactors lifetime your evaluation is useless. Your numbers are useless without evidence or citation especially when you make easily disprovable assumptions from the get go.
What magic technology have we invented? You realize that lithium ion batteries are 1980's technology right? We haven't made any significant advancements in battery technologies in decades. All we do is repackage it so we can charge/discharge them faster. That's not capacity.
Yes, that's what I said. Remember we're in it for long term solutions. Not bullshit hand-wavy nonsense.
Yes 100,000 little projects vs 1...
And I'm not even Anti-solar... after all it's literally just second-hand nuclear production... But it's just that. Second-hand, and why settle for "Second" when we can harness first hand? I'm just not dumb enough to assume it's the answer to all our problems.
No. No I didn't. I was using the lowest life expectancy for nuclear because it steelmanned nuclear for my other critiques. You want to use longer ages, that means you're prepaying 60% of that longer age at cost. I find it interesting that you called me out on trying to give nuclear more benefit. That said, IAEA holds with 30-40 year life expectancy on a nuclear plant so I think the steel-man I chose is acceptable.
Lithium Ion batteries are being used at large scale now, sure. It's dishonest to say the ones being built today for utility-scale power are 1980's technology, just as it's dishonest to pretend that nuclear power is what it was in the 1950's. But there are also advancements in molten sand batteries, and even utility scale water energy storage is going down in price (though I believe it's still slightly more expensive than nuclear).
So how is $140/MWH total cost of energy over the life of a nuclear plant "the long haul" over $77/MWH total cost of energy over the life of a nuclear farm? Do we need to discuss how that kind of math works? Building solar+battery plants, running them till EOL, rebuilding them from scratch and repeating several times is still **half ** as expensive as producing the same amount of energy with a nuclear plant until it reaches EOL.
And considering that cost is effectively more like $1,000/MWH or more for the first few years, how exactly are we going to get carbon neutral any time soon by literally adding an order of magnitude to our costs?
Sure. Being able to plop it down at a massively high price does have its uses. Note I said there CAN be appropriate uses for nuclear. Just not many of them. The price is just unreasonable. And very often, space isn't really an issue. Those 100,000 little projects are still cheaper than that 1 project nuclear for the amount of energy created.
For several reasons. First, the sun is in a state of nuclear fusion which is at least 4x more efficient than can be achieved with fission. Second, the sun is gonna burn whether we harvest that energy or not. Third, the most expensive part of a any nuclear power prospect is causing and containing it. We get to skip that step with solar.
I guess I am "dumb enough". Between the power created from the sunlight itself, and wind and hydroelectric power created indirectly by it. The numbers all work out.
How much of that $140 is labour?
Seems an odd question. Since I'm not sure what you're getting at, my answer might or might not be of value.
The only thing I know offhand about the breakdown is 60% of the total lifetime cost of electricity is in construction costs, a number that is disgustingly through the roof and why using nuclear power for the whole world is unfeasible. It's that bad.
The rest is "day to day costs" which are far lower with nuclear than other forms of energy. Which would be great if it didn't cost so much to build a nuclear plant.
Countries with a lower PPP would get the lifetime cost closer to parity, if a handful of project experts etc are brought in at Western rates and local labour is used for the build and operation. If the federal system of government for that country streamlines the registration process while mandating key critical compliance steps (for instance, full test and verification on the containment system but not the light switch in the control room toilets, which I have read is an issue with the US regs) it would seem that non-us countries would be able to do nuclear cheaper per MWh.
Cheaper than $140, or cheaper than Solar? Someone just got back to me with claims of lower Nuclear numbers... and even in those claims, Nuclear simply could not get anywhere close to Solar.
Probably a third of that cost is tied up in NRA certification with 32 different federal and state licensing bodies, planning, EIS statements which average 6 years to write, and the political approval process.
While you're waiting those six to 10 years to get your project started, you're going to see a construction cost inflation rate of what, 25 to 30%?
Care to substantiate that the red tape amounts to more than 100 years worth of the same MWH of solar? Or is that just your gut feeling?
Also note, even if the construction cost were 30% inflated, nuclear is still losing handily to solar by the figures I cited.
I was half joking, although cost escalation would actually account for a major portion of the cost increase.
We did a new building project. Started during 2021, and by the time we received the final bids costs had increased 50%. All within 6 months. We're at 10% cost escalation this year alone.
Imagine 6 years of that.
However, it also sounded like these companies had no clue what they were doing. Similar to California High Speed Rail.
Of course. That happens. Luckily, we have countries like China with less red tape to use to measure. They've been building a lot of nuclear and solar. Their end-to-end solar looks like around $750M per GW (possibly including storage? Not sure. About $2.2B for a 3.3GW plant). Looks like they're spending about $5B per GW of nuclear.
Sorry I don't have the solar reference anymore. I was building a math equation for another comment and realized they weren't talking price, so scrapped it without thinking.
Since those numbers seem to match US figures, I think people in the Western World forget that a lot of bid cost increases or "escalations" are due to the fact that companies try to low-bid to win the contract, knowing every little inconvenience will require a cost increase. It evens out more than people want to admit.
Yeah I hate dealing with that. Then they send back every design decision to be reopened, resulting in literally years the meetings to decide which source for which equipment, all the while the Costco up to the point where if we just built a damn thing 5 years ago then it would have been cheaper than trying to go with a low bid now. Not to mention years of delays.
Agreed. It doesn't end up saving a penny, but it definitely leads to greased wheels along the way and richer politicians.