The people with money to invest in the energy sector don’t seem interested in nuclear. They’re looking at the history of cost and schedule overruns, and then putting their money in solar and wind. Regulators do seem willing to greenlight new nuclear projects, but nobody is buying.
If the public were to finance a nuclear power, we have to ask why there’s a good reason to do so when private investment is already rejecting it. There has to be some reason outside of cost effectiveness. One answer to that is recycling all the nuclear waste we already have.
Nuclear is not going to help that. It doesn’t synergize well with wind and solar. You want something that can scale up when wind and solar drop off. Nuclear only makes sense if you can run it at the same level all the time.
There is. Clouds come in, and all that cheap solar goes away. You want something else to ramp up. Clouds go away, solar is dumpling dirt cheap power to the grid, and those other things ramp down.
Batteries and other power storage exist though… just run nuclear to x% percentage and y exists in battery form to cover potential solar/wind/geothermal/tidal outages.
When you have batteries, you don’t need nuclear. You just need solar and wind.
Edit: I’ll also point out that there are other arguments from nuclear advocates (bad ones that don’t realize where we are in the tech development) saying storage solutions aren’t ready. Estoppel much?
The good reason is cost externalities. Nuclear is the only power source that deals with its own waste. No one demands the solar industry recycle their stuff for free or that they pay a carbon tax for the trees that don’t exist because of the panels in the space. Same for wind but add on the birds killed. Same for hydro but the fish killed. Same for coal but add all of us killed.
We all subsidize the waste disposal of the other power sources. Coal gets to dump all that stuff in the air and our collective resource is that much lowered in quality.
Change the market conditions to reflect the true cost and nuclear comes out on top. Even the CO2 used to make the plants is laughably small when you consider that the plants can last over 50 years while solar has to be almost completely replaced in 15.
It deals with its own waste by leaving it sitting in a big pit. That’s not a viable long term strategy. It needs to go to a central facility to be buried for 100k years, or (my preference) recycled in other reactors designed to do that. Neither is being done right now in the US, and both would almost certainly require public subsidies.
This is one of the many reasons that I think nuclear plants should not be corporate owned
I think a lot of stuff that’s currently corporate owned shouldn’t be but that’s a conversation for another time
Edit: Should to shouldn’t
The people with money to invest in the energy sector don’t seem interested in nuclear. They’re looking at the history of cost and schedule overruns, and then putting their money in solar and wind. Regulators do seem willing to greenlight new nuclear projects, but nobody is buying.
If the public were to finance a nuclear power, we have to ask why there’s a good reason to do so when private investment is already rejecting it. There has to be some reason outside of cost effectiveness. One answer to that is recycling all the nuclear waste we already have.
That’s because private companies are incapable of large scale engineering. They want fast profits, not stable infrastructure.
Nuclear is not going to help that. It doesn’t synergize well with wind and solar. You want something that can scale up when wind and solar drop off. Nuclear only makes sense if you can run it at the same level all the time.
There’s no reason you can’t run it at the same level all the time?
There is. Clouds come in, and all that cheap solar goes away. You want something else to ramp up. Clouds go away, solar is dumpling dirt cheap power to the grid, and those other things ramp down.
Nuclear is not the solution to that.
Batteries and other power storage exist though… just run nuclear to x% percentage and y exists in battery form to cover potential solar/wind/geothermal/tidal outages.
When you have batteries, you don’t need nuclear. You just need solar and wind.
Edit: I’ll also point out that there are other arguments from nuclear advocates (bad ones that don’t realize where we are in the tech development) saying storage solutions aren’t ready. Estoppel much?
I can’t believe we’re about to hit 2024 and people are still saying this.
The good reason is cost externalities. Nuclear is the only power source that deals with its own waste. No one demands the solar industry recycle their stuff for free or that they pay a carbon tax for the trees that don’t exist because of the panels in the space. Same for wind but add on the birds killed. Same for hydro but the fish killed. Same for coal but add all of us killed.
We all subsidize the waste disposal of the other power sources. Coal gets to dump all that stuff in the air and our collective resource is that much lowered in quality.
Change the market conditions to reflect the true cost and nuclear comes out on top. Even the CO2 used to make the plants is laughably small when you consider that the plants can last over 50 years while solar has to be almost completely replaced in 15.
It deals with its own waste by leaving it sitting in a big pit. That’s not a viable long term strategy. It needs to go to a central facility to be buried for 100k years, or (my preference) recycled in other reactors designed to do that. Neither is being done right now in the US, and both would almost certainly require public subsidies.
Yup I think a lot of this stuff should be nationalized and that the energy market should be used or simulated to determine the operation of it.