Thanks for addressing this. My main concern about nuclear energy (which is why I vote no) - is similar to my concern about SAI (stratospheric aerosol injection) which is likely to be considered necessary - our political economic systems are not collaborative enough and sufficiently public-good oriented to have systems in place on a global level or even national level that can manage safety of these technologies and handle crises. In the face of global warming we already see societal and political disruptions, civic breakdown, water shortages, rising sea levels, food shortages in much of the world and all kinds of supply chain disruptions. With increased climate catastrophes, wars and political disruption potentially leading to un-manned or even attacked nuclear power plants (as is happening in Ukraine now), I have no confidence that such plants could be kept safe . SAI requires global continuous operation and unified action over decades. Nuclear power plants require reliable stable governance and societal structures for safe operation. I have no confidence that we can expect that.
Nope, we can't do it all with wind and solar, because of the enormous land requirements -- not just for the panels and wind turbines, but the power lines to connect to the grid. Already in the US opposition to new siting of wind/solar farms and power lines is greatly slowing deployment, and we are still far from even 50%. That leaves only nuclear plants, which can be located where retired power plants are already connected to the grid, and can be deployed economically at scale if any of the small ones under development work out. Plus, in any case, our climate situation is so desperate and urgent that we need to try all viable alternatives.
Nice, clear write up of the issues, Andy. I am rather frequently asked about adding more nuclear generated power to the mix and your post will help me give an answer about the challenges nuclear faces.
Nuclear energy is hardly the answer. The article fails to mention long term radioactive waste and nuclear weapon proliferation issues. Regarding economic issues, you can take the huge capital investment required by nucs and invest in increasing energy efficiency of our building stock and reduce demand (kw) and usage (kwh) by magnitudes larger than created by any nuclear plant (a point made by work locally in introducing zero energy homes and buildings in the Sacramento area). Additionally you can use that nuc capital and invest in large scale Renewable production of hydrogen to be used as fuel substitute for fossil fuels. This is a no brainer Amory Lovins discussed and proved more than 30 years ago. Finally proping up the nuc industry just keeps a large, centralized industry alive that benefits a plutocratic class that would've die decades ago if exposed to true market conditions and not fed humongous public subsidies. As mention so many times by others more eloquently than me the best, safest nuclear reactor is the one 93 million miles away - the sun.
Right so I’m going to disagree largely but I hope you find this useful.
I highly recommend listening to a recent planet critical episode on nuclear power, it totally blew my expectations of almost all the downsides of nuclear out of the water. Safety, efficiency, cost, speed of delivery, ease of construction, location limitations etc etc. I’ll touch a few points here but I can’t do it justice. It’s only an hour or so. Most of the conceptions we have about nuclear simply don’t match up with the real world stats and have more to do with associations made with nuclear weapons during the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s (largely unwarranted fears of weaponisation).
What is most striking to me however with regards to the comparison to wind and solar is the mining problem.
Any discussion of wind and solar should include a consideration of mining impact, escalating scarcity of resources, energy use (from limited remaining oil reserves!)
This is not so apparent right now, but scaled to the degree that we would need to replace the electricity grid AND somehow generate the energy for transport worldwide, even at reduced levels!would necessitate orders of magnitude more mining, and a repeat of that mining once the materials are exhausted/ cannot be recycled any more. Experts are arguing if we have enough material on the planet for an energy transition, let alone rebuilding / revamping in the future - that alone should be worrying and more widely considered.
This is when factoring in building sufficient overcapacity and storage to handle intermittency, the decreased quality of ores worldwide, and the very long time scale to develop new mines.
If we’re going to go solar / wind the only way it’s going to work (globally) is when coupled with massive degrowth of industrial nations. Which we need for sure, but I don’t see happening before disaster in our political environment. I think solar wind is the answer for growth in poorer nations with decentralised power, but nuclear is the way to get through the coming disaster without total system crash, after which recalibration and rethinking might be more possible.
Ok back to mines. Mining uranium on the other hand is apparently extremely small scale, incredibly clean and highly regulated. They don’t get much press, maybe because of tight regulations on visits. They are also small and boring! Compared to the mining damage, energy use and pollution caused by fossil fuels it is incredibly favourable, and I think it will be likely much better than solar/wind/ batteries too, if not already now, certainly once these scale up. The demanding regulations already have made a system of creating the cleanest mining operations on the planet. I learned to my surprise that regular mine tailings are always dangerously radioactive (isotopes present in ALL spoil, extracted in huge quantities) whereas water leaving uranium mines is basically drinkable. Also that uranium ore is extremely dense, so less spoil, and more abundant than is widely appreciated. When coupled with modern reactor designs that will reuse their own waste and in real world tests right now, there is definitely enough uranium to scale up even without sifting the sea for it. (Uranium is present everywhere in small quantities).
Similar comments can be made about nuclear waste, it’s remarkably clean and easy to store safely long term. The idea that it’s a ticking bomb awaiting one errant missile or terrorist just doesn’t work in practice.
Regarding accidents.
It’s like comparing an airline crash to motoring accidents. One gets all the press, the other kills millions more quietly in plain sight. Also new reactor designs just won’t go critical like old ones - mistakes have been learned from.
Compare the number of deaths, illnesses (and inconvenience/loss of business) caused by nuclear vs fossil fuels and other mining operations, and divide by amount of energy generation. Nuclear is much safer, and cleaner (see deaths and illness associated globally to particulates).
Wind and solar will be better than fossil fuels probably, but again- MINING! Massive amounts of material, recycling problems, space required and land use changes etc all rack up costs to human and environment that make these green techs much less green when scaled.
I think that’s enough to chew on - again, I’ll try to link to the episode, have a listen and look into the guest. Thanks for your work! 🙏
Being realistic, new nuclear will not be able to contribute significantly to emissions reductions before 2040 to 2045. That does not mean that we should not continue to develop advanced nuclear. I think we should target having 10 to 20% nuclear generation by 2050. It generates about 19% of our electricity now.
I worked in fusion research for 34 years. I'm not buying the 17.8 years, try 30 or 50, maybe longer. We definitely should not be counting on it to help us get to net zero.
So far, most new generative capacity has not led to a decline in fossil fuels burned (nor plastic produced), keeping us on track for climate breakdown and a massive amount of pollution.
Nuclear, as naturally taxpayer funded, is likely another cash cow, and acts as a deterrent from a transition to a decentralised, clean energy system.
You should check out The Gordian Knot Substack. It debunks all your arguments against nuclear. And solar + storage on the scale of nuclear power (1+ GW delivered with 93% reliability, every day of the year) is wildly more expensive than those LCOE estimates suggest.
It's hard to keep 'apples to apples' in this discussion, but 1 GW of solar in the Northeast US is 5 GW of panels, because solar is less than 20% capacity here. Maybe 4 GW if you have batteries. So the prices should reflect that. Winter, and wind lulls, are another issue.
The criticality of those issues are what's behind this interview from the late David MacKay.
One of my biggest concerns on the problem is waste -- if memory serves (which is to say, I could be wrong here), we're creating ~10,000 year problems associated with waste storage. Am I overreacting on that front?
On your topic: I have to agree that nuclear is probably not the answer. Partly because of economics, as spelled out in your column. Partly because of politics, which would prevent allowing nuclear plants nearly everywhere, and would also prevent spending a lot of government money to improve the economics.
But, the "solar and wind are cheap" argument is pretty incomplete. I haven't seen anyone in the industry claim that solar and wind can survive without government subsidies and mandates, particularly if interest rates return to something normal like 5-7%. However, this is also incomplete.
It's plainly clear that solar and wind are cost effective for some applications. Solar cells have been cost effective for satellites since the 1970s because any alternative is much more expensive for satellites. Solar cells have been cost effective for decades to power roadside emergency phones because they don't require miles and miles of power lines. At least, I assume they've been cost effective because I've seen them everywhere since before anyone worried much about green energy.
Solar cells are clearly worth something in some applications. Rooftop solar in southern California performs a useful peak-shaving function, where they provide maximum output in early afternoon, when demand for electricity is highest for air conditioning. It may even be cost effective for such applications.
The bigger question is: what would a reliable electric system look like, and how much of it could be powered by renewables? Cost per kW is only mildly interesting. Due to intermittency, solar and wind get about 12-15% of nominal output. Adjusting for this, taking Andrew's figures, the capital cost of solar is about $6-8,000 per kW, or about $10-14,000 per kW with storage, for effective 24-hour capacity. This would imply that an all-renewable system isn't much cheaper than an all-nuclear system. Likewise, German energy agency (dena) found that only about 5% of large-scale wind installation could be relied on for capacity planning, meaning that installing say 100,000 mW of wind capacity would need 95,000 mW of reliable generating capacity to maintain system reliability. (https://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/events/2006_grid/Martin_Hoppe.pdf) This study is now 18 years old - maybe things have changed since.
Andrew's expertise isn't in operating a power system. Neither is mine. I'll concede that solar power is likely cost-effective for some applications. I'd like to hear from someone who can talk about the bigger picture: How much of energy needs can realistically be met by renewables? What would the resulting energy system look like, and how much would it cost? How would emissions under such a system compare to our current system? What would this imply for affecting climate change?
If Germany is our model, it seems that the resulting system generates more carbon emissions than before the "Energiewende", at much higher cost. If California is our model, it seems that the resulting system relies on paying Arizona to use renewables that aren't needed at some hours, while still giving very high energy costs and rolling blackouts.
we already have a high capacity renewable energy source in Geothermal as well as ocean power sources ......tidal and wave . Wave power systems are currently undergoing trials in Europe.......
As long as Doubt, Deny, Delay persists within major political parties as their primary response to global warming nuclear cannot even leverage existing support for nuclear effectively. Nothing was worse for nuclear than their principle supporters turning climate science denier.
Without genuine underlying commitment to zero emissions advocacy of nuclear devolves into "oh, too bad, we have to keep using fossil fuels" with blameshifting - and far too much nuclear advocacy is clearly dedicated to saving fossil fuels from renewable energy, not saving planet Earth from climate instability. To people genuinely concerned about climate the insincerity of anti-renewables nuclear advocacy can be palpable - it is a bar held too high to force everyone under, not over, making perfect (the nuclear of their imagination) as the enemy of good enough (renewables) or just better than nothing.
The end of climate science denial would do more for nuclear than green politics supporting nuclear ever could - except that without the doubt, deny, delay politics it will be market forces; when the wall of denial comes down they will invest in renewables over nuclear out of their free market ideology, on the basis of cost.
And nuclear is never going to be suitable for the "last 20%" problem within an RE rich system - they won't compete with wind and solar, but with batteries, pumped hydro and demand management that takes advantage of cheap power when there whilst avoiding the high cost power.
This lays out most of the relevant information about nuclear. A few things are omitted, but I appreciate the brevity. Investors need to wait well over 10 years or even 20 to see a return on building nuclear energy plants—far to long for most to wait and have capital tied up. Most plants in service today are "2nd generation" PWR or BWR reactors which are very safe compared to Chernobyl's RBMK design, for example. We are already exploring "4th generation" nuclear that promises higher safety and higher efficiency in the steam turbine portion by using higher temperatures. There is promise for nuclear energy, but as you said, wind and solar are already pretty cheap and getting cheaper.
Thanks for addressing this. My main concern about nuclear energy (which is why I vote no) - is similar to my concern about SAI (stratospheric aerosol injection) which is likely to be considered necessary - our political economic systems are not collaborative enough and sufficiently public-good oriented to have systems in place on a global level or even national level that can manage safety of these technologies and handle crises. In the face of global warming we already see societal and political disruptions, civic breakdown, water shortages, rising sea levels, food shortages in much of the world and all kinds of supply chain disruptions. With increased climate catastrophes, wars and political disruption potentially leading to un-manned or even attacked nuclear power plants (as is happening in Ukraine now), I have no confidence that such plants could be kept safe . SAI requires global continuous operation and unified action over decades. Nuclear power plants require reliable stable governance and societal structures for safe operation. I have no confidence that we can expect that.
Nope, we can't do it all with wind and solar, because of the enormous land requirements -- not just for the panels and wind turbines, but the power lines to connect to the grid. Already in the US opposition to new siting of wind/solar farms and power lines is greatly slowing deployment, and we are still far from even 50%. That leaves only nuclear plants, which can be located where retired power plants are already connected to the grid, and can be deployed economically at scale if any of the small ones under development work out. Plus, in any case, our climate situation is so desperate and urgent that we need to try all viable alternatives.
Nice, clear write up of the issues, Andy. I am rather frequently asked about adding more nuclear generated power to the mix and your post will help me give an answer about the challenges nuclear faces.
Nuclear energy is hardly the answer. The article fails to mention long term radioactive waste and nuclear weapon proliferation issues. Regarding economic issues, you can take the huge capital investment required by nucs and invest in increasing energy efficiency of our building stock and reduce demand (kw) and usage (kwh) by magnitudes larger than created by any nuclear plant (a point made by work locally in introducing zero energy homes and buildings in the Sacramento area). Additionally you can use that nuc capital and invest in large scale Renewable production of hydrogen to be used as fuel substitute for fossil fuels. This is a no brainer Amory Lovins discussed and proved more than 30 years ago. Finally proping up the nuc industry just keeps a large, centralized industry alive that benefits a plutocratic class that would've die decades ago if exposed to true market conditions and not fed humongous public subsidies. As mention so many times by others more eloquently than me the best, safest nuclear reactor is the one 93 million miles away - the sun.
Right so I’m going to disagree largely but I hope you find this useful.
I highly recommend listening to a recent planet critical episode on nuclear power, it totally blew my expectations of almost all the downsides of nuclear out of the water. Safety, efficiency, cost, speed of delivery, ease of construction, location limitations etc etc. I’ll touch a few points here but I can’t do it justice. It’s only an hour or so. Most of the conceptions we have about nuclear simply don’t match up with the real world stats and have more to do with associations made with nuclear weapons during the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s (largely unwarranted fears of weaponisation).
What is most striking to me however with regards to the comparison to wind and solar is the mining problem.
Any discussion of wind and solar should include a consideration of mining impact, escalating scarcity of resources, energy use (from limited remaining oil reserves!)
This is not so apparent right now, but scaled to the degree that we would need to replace the electricity grid AND somehow generate the energy for transport worldwide, even at reduced levels!would necessitate orders of magnitude more mining, and a repeat of that mining once the materials are exhausted/ cannot be recycled any more. Experts are arguing if we have enough material on the planet for an energy transition, let alone rebuilding / revamping in the future - that alone should be worrying and more widely considered.
This is when factoring in building sufficient overcapacity and storage to handle intermittency, the decreased quality of ores worldwide, and the very long time scale to develop new mines.
If we’re going to go solar / wind the only way it’s going to work (globally) is when coupled with massive degrowth of industrial nations. Which we need for sure, but I don’t see happening before disaster in our political environment. I think solar wind is the answer for growth in poorer nations with decentralised power, but nuclear is the way to get through the coming disaster without total system crash, after which recalibration and rethinking might be more possible.
Ok back to mines. Mining uranium on the other hand is apparently extremely small scale, incredibly clean and highly regulated. They don’t get much press, maybe because of tight regulations on visits. They are also small and boring! Compared to the mining damage, energy use and pollution caused by fossil fuels it is incredibly favourable, and I think it will be likely much better than solar/wind/ batteries too, if not already now, certainly once these scale up. The demanding regulations already have made a system of creating the cleanest mining operations on the planet. I learned to my surprise that regular mine tailings are always dangerously radioactive (isotopes present in ALL spoil, extracted in huge quantities) whereas water leaving uranium mines is basically drinkable. Also that uranium ore is extremely dense, so less spoil, and more abundant than is widely appreciated. When coupled with modern reactor designs that will reuse their own waste and in real world tests right now, there is definitely enough uranium to scale up even without sifting the sea for it. (Uranium is present everywhere in small quantities).
Similar comments can be made about nuclear waste, it’s remarkably clean and easy to store safely long term. The idea that it’s a ticking bomb awaiting one errant missile or terrorist just doesn’t work in practice.
Regarding accidents.
It’s like comparing an airline crash to motoring accidents. One gets all the press, the other kills millions more quietly in plain sight. Also new reactor designs just won’t go critical like old ones - mistakes have been learned from.
Compare the number of deaths, illnesses (and inconvenience/loss of business) caused by nuclear vs fossil fuels and other mining operations, and divide by amount of energy generation. Nuclear is much safer, and cleaner (see deaths and illness associated globally to particulates).
Wind and solar will be better than fossil fuels probably, but again- MINING! Massive amounts of material, recycling problems, space required and land use changes etc all rack up costs to human and environment that make these green techs much less green when scaled.
I think that’s enough to chew on - again, I’ll try to link to the episode, have a listen and look into the guest. Thanks for your work! 🙏
I’m middle-of-the-road on this. I think we need nuclear for baseload. This is consistent with the role that energy systems modelers believe nuclear should play, https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(23)00029-9?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2589004223000299%3Fshowall%3Dtrue .
Being realistic, new nuclear will not be able to contribute significantly to emissions reductions before 2040 to 2045. That does not mean that we should not continue to develop advanced nuclear. I think we should target having 10 to 20% nuclear generation by 2050. It generates about 19% of our electricity now.
I’m encouraged by recent news reporting cooperation on licensing between the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., https://www.powermag.com/u-s-uk-canada-ink-trilateral-memo-to-cooperate-on-advanced-reactor-licensing/ . The U.K. recently shortlisted six companies in their efforts to encourage the development and deployment of SMRs, https://www.powermag.com/uk-shortlists-six-nuclear-designs-in-smr-competition-intends-to-award-contract-by-summer-2024/ .
Canada will probably be the first to deploy an SMR, the GE-Hitachi BWRX-300, in North America. They hope to complete construction by late 2028. TVA is collaborating on a standard design for the BWRX-300, https://www.powermag.com/tva-opg-synthos-team-to-shape-standard-design-for-bwrx-300-nuclear-reactors/ .
I worked in fusion research for 34 years. I'm not buying the 17.8 years, try 30 or 50, maybe longer. We definitely should not be counting on it to help us get to net zero.
So far, most new generative capacity has not led to a decline in fossil fuels burned (nor plastic produced), keeping us on track for climate breakdown and a massive amount of pollution.
Nuclear, as naturally taxpayer funded, is likely another cash cow, and acts as a deterrent from a transition to a decentralised, clean energy system.
Thanks for the article. No mention of waste disposal?
and this is one of the reasons why continued consumption of fossil fuels is not sustainable.......
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2024/apr/09/tenth-consecutive-monthly-heat-record-alarms-confounds-climate-scientists
You should check out The Gordian Knot Substack. It debunks all your arguments against nuclear. And solar + storage on the scale of nuclear power (1+ GW delivered with 93% reliability, every day of the year) is wildly more expensive than those LCOE estimates suggest.
It's hard to keep 'apples to apples' in this discussion, but 1 GW of solar in the Northeast US is 5 GW of panels, because solar is less than 20% capacity here. Maybe 4 GW if you have batteries. So the prices should reflect that. Winter, and wind lulls, are another issue.
The criticality of those issues are what's behind this interview from the late David MacKay.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/03/idea-of-renewables-powering-uk-is-an-appalling-delusion-david-mackay
An easily referenced comparison of plans and options would be great - an update of MacKay's book.
The UK is hard to solve, the Northeast US is a bit easier, and California should be easiest. But even California has challenges.
Zero carbon UK, at 1 kW per capita or less:
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-carbon-energy-programme/large-scale-electricity-storage/
https://ukfires.org/impact/publications/reports/absolute-zero/
Zero carbon California - an update of this would be handy (maybe it's out there):
http://ccst.us/publications/2011/2011energy.pdf
One of my biggest concerns on the problem is waste -- if memory serves (which is to say, I could be wrong here), we're creating ~10,000 year problems associated with waste storage. Am I overreacting on that front?
On your topic: I have to agree that nuclear is probably not the answer. Partly because of economics, as spelled out in your column. Partly because of politics, which would prevent allowing nuclear plants nearly everywhere, and would also prevent spending a lot of government money to improve the economics.
But, the "solar and wind are cheap" argument is pretty incomplete. I haven't seen anyone in the industry claim that solar and wind can survive without government subsidies and mandates, particularly if interest rates return to something normal like 5-7%. However, this is also incomplete.
It's plainly clear that solar and wind are cost effective for some applications. Solar cells have been cost effective for satellites since the 1970s because any alternative is much more expensive for satellites. Solar cells have been cost effective for decades to power roadside emergency phones because they don't require miles and miles of power lines. At least, I assume they've been cost effective because I've seen them everywhere since before anyone worried much about green energy.
Solar cells are clearly worth something in some applications. Rooftop solar in southern California performs a useful peak-shaving function, where they provide maximum output in early afternoon, when demand for electricity is highest for air conditioning. It may even be cost effective for such applications.
The bigger question is: what would a reliable electric system look like, and how much of it could be powered by renewables? Cost per kW is only mildly interesting. Due to intermittency, solar and wind get about 12-15% of nominal output. Adjusting for this, taking Andrew's figures, the capital cost of solar is about $6-8,000 per kW, or about $10-14,000 per kW with storage, for effective 24-hour capacity. This would imply that an all-renewable system isn't much cheaper than an all-nuclear system. Likewise, German energy agency (dena) found that only about 5% of large-scale wind installation could be relied on for capacity planning, meaning that installing say 100,000 mW of wind capacity would need 95,000 mW of reliable generating capacity to maintain system reliability. (https://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/events/2006_grid/Martin_Hoppe.pdf) This study is now 18 years old - maybe things have changed since.
Andrew's expertise isn't in operating a power system. Neither is mine. I'll concede that solar power is likely cost-effective for some applications. I'd like to hear from someone who can talk about the bigger picture: How much of energy needs can realistically be met by renewables? What would the resulting energy system look like, and how much would it cost? How would emissions under such a system compare to our current system? What would this imply for affecting climate change?
If Germany is our model, it seems that the resulting system generates more carbon emissions than before the "Energiewende", at much higher cost. If California is our model, it seems that the resulting system relies on paying Arizona to use renewables that aren't needed at some hours, while still giving very high energy costs and rolling blackouts.
we already have a high capacity renewable energy source in Geothermal as well as ocean power sources ......tidal and wave . Wave power systems are currently undergoing trials in Europe.......
https://www.oedigital.com/wave-energy
As long as Doubt, Deny, Delay persists within major political parties as their primary response to global warming nuclear cannot even leverage existing support for nuclear effectively. Nothing was worse for nuclear than their principle supporters turning climate science denier.
Without genuine underlying commitment to zero emissions advocacy of nuclear devolves into "oh, too bad, we have to keep using fossil fuels" with blameshifting - and far too much nuclear advocacy is clearly dedicated to saving fossil fuels from renewable energy, not saving planet Earth from climate instability. To people genuinely concerned about climate the insincerity of anti-renewables nuclear advocacy can be palpable - it is a bar held too high to force everyone under, not over, making perfect (the nuclear of their imagination) as the enemy of good enough (renewables) or just better than nothing.
The end of climate science denial would do more for nuclear than green politics supporting nuclear ever could - except that without the doubt, deny, delay politics it will be market forces; when the wall of denial comes down they will invest in renewables over nuclear out of their free market ideology, on the basis of cost.
And nuclear is never going to be suitable for the "last 20%" problem within an RE rich system - they won't compete with wind and solar, but with batteries, pumped hydro and demand management that takes advantage of cheap power when there whilst avoiding the high cost power.
This lays out most of the relevant information about nuclear. A few things are omitted, but I appreciate the brevity. Investors need to wait well over 10 years or even 20 to see a return on building nuclear energy plants—far to long for most to wait and have capital tied up. Most plants in service today are "2nd generation" PWR or BWR reactors which are very safe compared to Chernobyl's RBMK design, for example. We are already exploring "4th generation" nuclear that promises higher safety and higher efficiency in the steam turbine portion by using higher temperatures. There is promise for nuclear energy, but as you said, wind and solar are already pretty cheap and getting cheaper.