this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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I disagree, a bit.
Base load is still hard to get with renewables, unless you can get a somewhat consistent level of power from them. That's basically just hydro/tidal and geothermal at this point, and all of those have very limited areas where they can be used.
Nuclear, on the other hand, can be built anywhere except my backyard.
We have four choices:
We can do all of them concurrently, provided there's money for it, but we only give money to the last one.
Exactly. I live in Utah, which is perfect for nuclear:
So why don't we do it? FUD. We should have a nuclear base with solar and wind helping out, but instead we have a coal base and are transitioning to natural gas. That's dumb. And it's hilarious because we sell electricity to California when their backbone isn't sufficient.
It's probably not the best option everywhere, but it's a really good option in many areas.
A consortium of Utah's utilities (UAMPS) literally just pulled out of its commitment to backing NuScale's modular reactor in November 2023. It was a problem of cost, when the construction looked like it was going to become too expensive, at a time when new wind construction is dropping the price of wind power. It basically just couldn't compete on cost, in the specific environment of servicing Utah.
I wouldn't sleep on geothermal as a future broad scale solution for dispatchable (that is, generation that can be dialed up and down on demand) electrical power. The oil and gas fracking industry has greatly improved their technology at imaging geological formations and finding places where water can flow and be pumped, in just the past decade. I expect to see over the next decade geothermal reach viability beyond just the places where geothermal heat is close to the surface.
Yeah, I just saw that news, which apparently happened end of last year. The public wants nuclear (or at least a non-coal base power), but projects keep getting delayed or scrapped due to local lawsuits or local governments pulling financial support.
Geothermal is cool, and apparently there's an active project. It should produce 400MW, which is pretty significant, but still a pretty small fraction of total capacity (~9.5GW).
If the Blue Castle project ever finishes, it'll supply ~1.5GW power. That, with geothermal, could take up ~1/4 of the total energy generation, which would be a really good start. I'd also like to see hydrogen production as a "battery" source (produce from solar, burn at night). Looks like that's under development as well.
Lots of interesting things are happening now, I just wish they started 10+ years ago...
Scrapping the NuScale project had nothing to do with lawsuits. Governments pulled their financial support because projected costs were exceeding what was contractually promised, mostly due to pandemic-related supply chain and inflation issues.
This is typical of nuclear. The industry wants to believe its problem is regulation. It's not, at least not if you want to have better safety guarantees than the Soviet Union did. Its problem is that to be safe, nuclear is expensive, and there doesn't appear to be a way out of that.
Yes, NuScale wasn't scrapped due to lawsuits, I was more referring to the delays to Blue Castle, which was delayed for 3-ish years due to lawsuits.
NuScale is a pretty small operation promising something like 300-400MW. Blue Castle is a lot larger promising ~1500MW.
Initially, yes, but amortized over the life of the plant, it's pretty cheap. It has a high upfront cost and relatively low operating costs. And one of the big operating costs (waste disposal) won't be an issue here, the larger issue is water access for cooling, and that's political (farmers don't want to give up water rights).
My main concern is seismic activity, since if we get an earthquake, it'll likely be very violent. That increases initial costs, but doesn't really impact ongoing costs. Utah just doesn't like throwing large sums of money around, hence the political pushback.
We're still >50% fossil fuels, so I'll support anything that replaces that. I like hydrogen (in development), geothermal (in development), solar (expanding), and wind (seems to be slowing), but that's not going to be enough. Even if all of those were operating today, we'd still be using significant amounts of fossil fuels. I think we will still need nuclear, we have the space and demand for it.
SMR is being built in Wyoming. Construction has started on the first one. It's replacing the coal plant in Kemerrer.
Who’s working to change the perception there?
Perception seems fine, every poll I've seen going back 10 years has been positive for nuclear power. Everyone seems to want it, they just don't want it in their backyard.
The Blue Castle project was (is?) a proposal for a nuclear plant in eastern central Utah, which is pretty far from any urban center and buffered by a mountain range. They won a lawsuit regarding water rights more than 5 years ago, but there have been no updates on it for 5-ish years.
There's a SMR project in S. Idaho that was active recently, Unfortunately, it seems to have missed subscription targets, so it's unlikely to move forward. I don't know where those subscriptions are supposed to come from (I'm interested), but I'm guessing it's cities buying in and many dropped out due to financing not being certain.
A lot of the pushback is from politicians, not residents. The popular support is there, but our legislatures and local governments are pretty conservative and unwilling to take risks.
"Base load" is not that much. Off shore wind is almost always blowing, and all the other renewables can be stored via batteries or hydrogen (or tanks, in case of biogas). Yes, that's a whole lot of stuff, but the technology exists, can be produced on large scale and (most importantly) doesn't cause any path dependencies.
Nuclear is extremely expensive, as the article highlighted. And to be cost effective, power has to be produced more or less constantly. Having a nuclear power plant just for the few hours at night when wind and sun don't work is insane - and insanely expensive.
Not to mention slow to build. Takes about a decade to get a nuclear plant going. If that is replacing coal, you are burning that coal during construction. The CO2 cost of that should be taken into account when comparing to much quicker renewables (approx 2 years). Also pouring all that concrete. Once it's build, sure it's green, but that is expensive, takes ages and comes with a big CO2 cost to get going.
Or you go renewable now, turn the filthy coal off about 8 years sooner and save a ton of money and CO2 right now.
Nuclear is mostly expensive because of regulations and red tape that are mostly built upon FUD.
That needs to be re-addressed from the ground up. There needs to be a big PSA push on the safety of nuclear and on the true costs and hidden dangers of coal and oil plants to build massive public support, and then we got to fix the outdated regulations.
Also, coal plants aren't cheap. And coal has costs that are heavily subsidized by society. If you could calculate all of the external costs and level out subsidies, nuclear is cheaper and, more importantly, far far safer, than any GHG plant.
Sorry, but we've seen what happens when you build nuclear reactors in a low regulation environment under cost pressure.
It's not pretty.
I didn't say get rid of the regulations, I said review them. They need to be rebuilt from scratch based on modern technology and science, not of the FUD that anti-nuclear lobbyists pushed throughout the 80s and 90s.
The alternative to nuclear isn't coal....
And if you seriously think regulations are the problem, you're denser than the lead shielding you want to get rid of.
That's what the industry wants to believe. Except that US regulators have shown a willingness to sign off on new nuclear power plants as long as you do all the paperwork right and show that you're not some moron who will dump a pile of plutonium in the desert and run water over it to make steam.
Nuclear takes 5 years to build according to initial plans. That's a joke, and everyone knows it. It's going to take 10 years, and the budget will double over initial estimate, as well. That means it will take 10 years before you see a dime back on your investment, and it could all be for nothing if the funding shortfall can't be made up. Some of this is regulations--you know, the kind that keeps another Chernobyl from happening--but a lot of it has been the fact that every plant takes boutique engineering and specialized labor.
The Westinghouse AP1000 design (what they used in Vogtle) was supposed to fix that boutique engineering. It did not. SMRs are also supposed to fix that boutique engineering, but their projects are also failing.
Meanwhile, you could invest your money into a solar or wind farm. It'll start generating power in 6-12 months and start putting money back in your pocket. Nothing about the construction is particularly boutique; it's almost all mass produced stuff. You don't need specialists to put them together, either. There is a track record of solar and wind farms meeting construction deadlines and budget forecasts. Given all that, who the hell would invest money into nuclear?
I think this can be expanded out a bit, to the more generalizable case of matching generation to demand. Yes, storage can be a big part of that.
But another solution along the same lines may be demand shifting, which in many ways, relies on storage (charging car batteries, reheating water tanks or even molten salt only when supply is plentiful. And some of that might not be storage, per se, but creating the useful output of something that actually requires a lot of power: timing out industrial processes or data center computational tasks based on the availability of excess electrical power.
Similarly, improvements in transmission across wide geographical areas can better match supply to demand. The energy can still be used in real time, but a robust enough transmission network can get the power from the place that happens to have good generation conditions at that time to the place that actually wants to use that power.
There's a lot of improvement to be made in simply better matching supply and demand. And improvements there might justify intentional overbuilding, where generators know that they'll need to curtail generation during periods where there's more supply than demand.
And with better transmission, then existing nuclear plants might be able to act as dispatchable backup power rather than the primary, and therefore serve a larger market.
It's interesting watching how the 30minute electricy price has shifted patterns in the UK. 3-4 years ago there was no doubt that the cheapest time was 1am - 4am. These days the overnight dip isn't anywhere near as significant as it was, and it's now equally likely for 1pm-4pm to be the cheapest time of day.
All I can assume is that so many have moved usage to overnight due to "time of use" tariffs that now the demand curve has evened out a bit, and now the extra supply from solar during the day pushes the afternoon price down.
The timing of all those things has been carefully selected by billions of people. Timing is already super important to humanity for other reasons.
There is value in the schedule arrangement we have, which is why there is already sufficient demand to have different electric prices at different times and people still pay it.
The schedule we have arranged contains value. Demand shifting means getting people to do things at times other than they naturally would choose to.
We can’t talk about things like this like they’re free. There’s a big, real, not easily measurable cost to changing the times of day we use energy.
Our solution is to serve us, not the other way around.
Some shifts genuinely are free, though. Wholesale prices for electricity follow a pronounced "duck curve," and drop to near zero (or even negative) in areas where there's a substantial solar base, during the day at certain parts of the year. People will shift their demand for non-time-sensitive consumption (heating, cooling, charging of devices/EVs, batched/scheduled jobs) in response to basic price signals. If a substantial amount of future demand is going to be from data centers performing batched/scheduled jobs, like training AI models or encoding video files, a lot of that demand can be algorithmically shifted.
There are already companies out there intentionally arbitraging the price differences by time of day to invest in large scale storage. That's an expensive activity, that they've determined is worth doing because there's profit to be made at scale.
At household scale, individuals can do that too.
Put another way, we shouldn't talk about current pricing models where every kilowatt hour costs the same as if that arrangement is free.
Plus, the timing of consumption already does naturally tend to follow the timing of solar generation. Most people are more active during the day than at night, and work hours reflect that distribution. Overcapacity in solar can go a long way towards meeting demand when it naturally happens.
There are ways to get demand shift working with residential, but I doubt enough residences would participate.
A lot comes down to smart grid, and integrating high draw appliances that don't always need electricity right now. Like fridges and water heaters. Some may come down to residential storage systems charging during off-peak and being used during peak. And using EVs as an extension of residential storage.
We could also get not so used to expecting a specific level of comfort. Honestly how uncomfortable will we be if the AC or heater doesn't kick in for 10 extra minutes or so, when the clouds part over the huge solar array 500 miles away and there's going to be excess.
Base load is not necessary. It was made because you could build certain types of plants really cheap if they're run all the time at the same level. They aren't a requirement, but rather an economic convenience in an old way of doing things.
Renewables with storage are able to match demand more closely than traditional plants ever could. This results in less wasted power. That means we don't have to replace every GWh of traditional generation with a GWh of renewable.
Hydro and geothermal have both had some interesting breakthroughs the last few years. Small scale hydro can get useful amounts of power from smaller rivers than was feasible in the past. There are places to put them we didn't have before.
There's also high voltage DC lines. The longest deployed one is currently in Brazil, and is about 1500 miles. An equivalent run in the US would mean wind farms in Kansas could power New York, or solar in Arizona could power Chicago. When you can transmit that far, then the wind is always blowing somewhere, and it's sunny somewhere for the entire day, as well.
Nuclear lost its window of opportunity. It may already be cost competitive with putting solar panels in space.
Edit: fixing autocorrect's bad corrections
I agree with all of this as an electrical engineer in the field. Base load is only base load because of the load profile of devices connected to the grid having either an on or off switch. Most of the time this means motors/HVACs, but the world of electronics is coming to that equipment just like how inverters have changed how we export solar PV and wind to the grid. VFDs, soft starters, and the like will make our industrial processes that much more efficient. We just need to spread awareness and ramp up implementation, just as much as for renewables themselves.
So how much would it cost to do geothermal to power a city? It must be wildly infeasible if I’ve never even heard it mentioned. Can significant electric generation be had from that?
It's limited in the geography where it could be useful, such as near techtonic plate boundaries. Iceland gets about a quarter of its electricity that way. Some advancements in drilling techniques have made it more viable in more locations.
https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2023/05/is-geothermal-energy-making-a-comeback