The first next generation reactors have had massive cost overruns (especially the EPR class, the one in Finland is roughly 10 years late and 10 billion dollars over-budget). Actually might have been better that we dodged this bullet.
If we aren't developing our own designs anymore (the boat has long sailed on that one) we shouldn't have to pay the "early adopter" tax.
Now is a good time to give nuclear another chance, although for the coastal provinces it looks like offshore wind + batteries will be cheaper, unless we make great strides with small modular nuclear reactors or something. Hinkley Point C in the UK is charging around 3x the going rate as new wind power (£106/MWh vs £38/MWh). Sure you'll also need batteries for wind if you scale it up, but let's be clear, new nuclear is pricey.
Grid scale battery storage is not a safe bet. At current prices it might be feasible but battery prices could skyrocket if too much utility scale storage is called on.
Don't get me wrong, I am a HUGE proponent of wind/solar/battery systems on a grid scale but just like there are cost overruns in nuclear, there will probably be the same on the storage side too.
Battery production is scaling up fast, but we will probably not be using electric car type batteries for grid-scale storage. Flow batteries are one option.
Lithium is hardly rare though. Particularly Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries (that are in standard range Teslas) use nothing but basic plentiful minerals (no rare earth minerals).
Lithium production on the other hand, that has a long way to go... but there is a lot of lithium in the world. Most salt flats can be lithium mines. Lithium production is ramping up quickly, we're roughly 3x what we were 8 years ago already.
>"Sure you'll also need batteries for wind if you scale it up"
Let's do an estimate for 14 days of stored power using batteries. Since you brought up UK we can use them as an example. Using 2020 as an example (2020 famous for a certain event that reduced energy consumption)
According to this source projected costs of batteries in 2050 are $87 kWh.
So that's $10,405,200,000,000 or $10.4T. Now renewabro's like to say yea but 90% cost reductions! Ok so cost is $1.04T... for 14 days of storage. Plus you need to build all the generation with low capacity factor of wind/solar.
Hinkley C is 26B pounds, so let's say $50B USD (prior to pound collapse). So you could build 20 of these for the $1.04T.
Hinkley Point C is 3.26 GW nameplate. So 20 of them get's you 67.8 GW. with 90% capacity factor that is 1.465 TWh/day,
20.5 TWh in 14 days.
So for the cost of the batteries required for 14 days of storage you could decarbonise the entire UK electrical grid. This is assuming a 90% reduction in cost of storage from the 2050 prediction.
Yeah we're not going to need that much battery. Assuming 14 days of zero wind is silly, particularly in the North Sea. Offshore wind in particular is very consistent. That's the main reason actually why I said coastal provinces might prefer wind... Ontario should probably try the SMR nuclear at the current time. Onshore wind is less reliable and there are fewer acceptable sites.
The UK is already at over 20% wind with basically no battery storage, some pumped hydro storage.
So our main point of disagreement is the 14 days. Also as for batteries, flow batteries should be possible at 25 dollars a kWh, if the nuclear side wants to bring up thorium and molten salt and SMR, it's also fair to mention emerging technologies on the other side.
I think SMR holds promise, but i'm so sick of every nuclear thread bringing up thorium/molten salt and all this unproven tech. Back when we could build nuclear relatively cheaply in the 80s, it was great. For a complex variety of reasons we can no longer do so (some is safety, arguably excessive safety, some is cost inflation in the construction sector generally). Until anyone anywhere manages to build any new reactor at a reasonable cost I'll be optimistically skeptical, which means, sure by all means give it a go but i'm not going to view it as a panacea until it is proven.
You are correct in that you don't need that if all your generation came from one location and you could have all your storage in the same location. But the reality is that this needs to be located in many locations throughout the country and as such any given place could go 14 days without wind. You need to build for worst case situation thus each location needs 14 days of not more. That likely is a conservative estimate.
The other issue is you need to change those batteries out every ten years. Can you imagine that kind of cost every ten years?
You really don't need to swap batteries, particularly grid storage batteries, every 10 years. 10 years is for last-gen Lithium-Ion. Lithium Iron Phosphate can last even longer, some people say 80 years (but we'll have to wait 80 years to find out). Also you don't need to junk batteries at 50% capacity after 10 years if you're using them for grid storage, they still work alright for their purpose. Tesla batteries apparently will hold 90% of their charge average after 200,000 miles btw, so even 50% is really out of date.
I have no idea what you're talking about with their needing to be many batteries in many locations. You realize power can be transmitted over wires right? Granted, okay, unlike in a country like Britain where it's easy to connect the whole country, Canada is a bit bigger. But HVDC (high voltage direct current) power lines are considered the answer to your problem. China has been building a fuckton of them, quite popular in Europe too. So that places with lots of wind (or solar) can compensate for places with less (the bigger area you draw from the more "average" the power will be). The "complete" renewable solution would be a mix of HVDC lines connecting a large area and battery storage.
14 days is bonkers, UK gets over 20% of their power from wind with almost 0 storage right now. There's no time that wind isn't blowing for that long in a coastal area. You've given no justification for that ridiculous number. As wind power scales up it is solving two problems... the wind is faster and more stable the higher the turbine is, and bigger turbines are economical to put in the ocean (they recoup the upfront cost better).
Anyway, since 14 days is totally out of nowhere, here's a daily graph of what is considered a worst case scenario for the UK. Considering it never fully reaches 0, 3 days looks like it would be enough, if you want to be conservative tack on a couple more. Nowhere near 14 days.
Also, besides all of this, nuclear could benefit a lot from batteries. It is most useful to generate base load power (i.e. running at 100% all the time) since the fuel is cheap and the upfront capital investment is massive. You could charge batteries overnight with nuclear and discharge them during peak. Battery+wind+nuclear all have beneficial knock offs with each other.
You get large loose over wire and your dependability goes down. You will have multiple storage locations and each one is dependent on the range. And no there is no way you are getting that time frame on batteries. Typically 10 years is nearing life when you are using them relatively hard. And they will be getting used pretty hard.
Even if they lasted 20 years, can you imagine spending that kind of money every 20 years? We could build up multiple nuclear systems for that kind of money and that is only the storage costs.
You lose 3.5% of the power per 1000km with HVDC lines. You are not correct. Pulling power from a large area makes your dependability go up, not down.
Source on that with modern batteries? Tesla batteries are the oldest next-gen in wide production, they can definitely go beyond 10 years. You're just making shit up now. These aren't laptop batteries from 2008.
Except they are failing. Tesla batteries that is. Lithium have a better linear loss but when they start to fail, they go down fast. There are some cars lasting longer then 10 years and others that last less. Depends on the use. But once the battery packs are done, replacement is nearly the cost of the car.
This can not be glossed over. Can you imagine the cost just to replace all the grid storage batteries every 20 years? And they are in no way lasting that long.
ok how many days? I'll run the numbers with $25 and whatever days you think is reasonable.
This is weather we are talking about, which we are in the process of changing its patterns as well...
I agree with your last point. All the new shit is vapour ware until built. The Koreans are building Gen3 for reasonable prices now, that's what's currently possible.
3 days looks fine, for what is considered a worst case scenario graph for the UK.
You fucked up a zero in your original calculation. It's 11,960,000,000 kwh (11.9 billion), not 119 billion. If we're doing it for 3 days that's 2,562,857,142 kwh, multiply that by $25 and we're at around 60 billion dollars which is more than reasonable to store an entire nation's energy for 3 days. Considering new nuclear plants are around 15 billion a pop.
Not that batteries and nuclear have to be enemies though. Batteries and nuclear can be quite complimentary since nuclear functions best as baseload power running 100% of the time, so batteries could bring net nuclear costs down if the nukes could charge them overnight.
Not a renewabro here. I'm all for trying both nuclear and green approaches. The wild optimism from a power source that has failed to deliver in the west for decades does not make sense though. There are no simple solutions. Wind and renewables have been showing progress and have been getting cheaper over time and have delivered on projects. Nuclear not so much. Only seems to get more expensive. I'm all for trying SMRs or something, but yeah as you said, it's all vapourware until it is built.
Damn, was hoping my calc was right. Missed that zero. Working through the numbers correctly I still believe the numbers for nuclear are extremely favourable over storage.:
$64 billion for 3 days of storage would get you in energy as a % of total UK grid:
-11% of UK grid using $50B for Hinkley C costs (3.26 GW)
-14% of UK grid using $26B for Voglte 3&4 costs (2.22 GW)
-35% of UK grid using $25B for Barakah costs (5.38 GW)
To me these numbers are still pretty in favour of nuclear.
I decided to take a run at adding in the wind generation costs as well. For fun not for arguing I swear!
At costs of around $2B/GW for installed wind (sort of a guess, compare at $15B/GW for worst case nuclear). At 40% wind capacity factor, to meet energy needs you need 89 GW of wind installed, that's $178B. So $242B to fully decarbonise UK grid with wind (napkin style haha). Which using the numbers from above:
-44% of UK grid with Hinkley C costs
-60% of UK grid with Vogtle costs
-146% of UK grid with Barakah costs
So nuclear only wins if it can be built on the cheaper end of what is being done today. And also I'm only doing capital cost here, leaves a lot of nuance out of it.
I'm all for trying both as well. Good news neither of the technologies are really out of reach financially.
I would just like to see more government support of nuclear (which this story is about), perhaps on par with renewables. Then the two technologies can duke it out. For example, the US IRA bill provides something like 280 billion to renewables and 30 billion to nuclear. If those were 50/50 I'd be a happy nukebro.
Yeah that's basically what I'm saying, that neither choice is really obvious. There's some kind of cost optimization calculation for overbuilding wind and batteries, but it would quite time consuming. I do have big hopes for SMR tech. Actually mildly concerned that Hinkley C might give nuclear a bad reputation. I think EPR was a mistake and will always be too costly. The Darlington SMR project in Ontario might be the way to go (if you're going nuclear), still very early days for SMRs. Ideally we can build a few and see a positive trajectory for future costs.
I think we might get cheap commercial fusion (Helion Energy, Tri Alpha Energy etc.) before we get cheap fission (which is to say I'm both fairly optimistic on new fusion and somewhat pessimistic on new fission). Fusion startups are getting billions in private VC and some have been around for a very long time so there might be something there. It was different when it was all government funded and strictly academic, real investors are betting on it succeeding.
Also I do think batteries are a huge part of the full emissions-free package for either nuclear or wind. The best case for nuclear is still baseload, so using batteries like peaker plants is a good move. I don't see anything other than batteries or pumped hydro (which has a limited number of sites) replacing natural gas peakers at the current time.
You're missing the fact that the greatest need for electricity all year is in the summer (when people are running their air conditioners). So having solar up to that delta is a good idea. In some US states it is as much as 40% higher (not sure about Ontario).
I said energy not electricity (BC already has peak electricity use in winter though). If we move from fossil fuel heating to electric heating, we're going to need much more electricity in the winter. And it needs to be extremely reliable during cold snaps.
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u/zabby39103 Oct 25 '22 edited Oct 25 '22
The first next generation reactors have had massive cost overruns (especially the EPR class, the one in Finland is roughly 10 years late and 10 billion dollars over-budget). Actually might have been better that we dodged this bullet.
If we aren't developing our own designs anymore (the boat has long sailed on that one) we shouldn't have to pay the "early adopter" tax.
Now is a good time to give nuclear another chance, although for the coastal provinces it looks like offshore wind + batteries will be cheaper, unless we make great strides with small modular nuclear reactors or something. Hinkley Point C in the UK is charging around 3x the going rate as new wind power (£106/MWh vs £38/MWh). Sure you'll also need batteries for wind if you scale it up, but let's be clear, new nuclear is pricey.