So. Can someone Eli5 to me ? There's a large consensus on climate change (it's caused by humans, it's getting worse, it will increase catastrophes). Only people on the fringe regularly and vocally claim otherwise (there's no climate change, it's natural, it won't have any impact, impacts are good, it's all activist's fault because they scared use and we didn't act).
Reading HN and its heated debates around this topic, I don't see any consensus on nuclear vs renewables. Not even a consensus like "it's the mix, stupid".
Do our scientists have a consensus on how to power our societies in regards to climate change ?
If not, is it because it's too soon to settle on something ? Or there's too much bad science fabricated ? Or do we have have the choice, all things being equal: go full nuclear, or go full renewables or go mix but... as a specie we (or our leaders) collectively choose not to ?
The academic debate is generally dominated by two concerns around nuclear energy. The first one is that nuclear energy is by far the most expensive form by unit of energy produced. New project like to claim the opposite, but that is always before cost overruns and years of delay. In general the final price tag may be 2-3x as much than the estimate. Plant Vogtle in Georgial for instance went for $14B to $34B. Nuclear power plants also need water for cooling, so they are sensitive to both drought and extreme heat. Which is generally when you most desperately need electricity. Meanwhile, the same crowd claims to have economics on its side when railing against renewables, which are the cheapest unit by unit, and a great contingency plan for extreme weather events, like the disasters in Haiti.
But the bigger concern raised is that some calls for nuclear are a "cop-out". Nuclear happens to be great for damming up demands for renewable energy, while buying time for existing production capacity. It is not unusual for projects to run for years before any tangible construction is done, and even then it is not unusual for advanced projects to be cancelled for cost overruns. Meanwhile, you can have a solar panel on your roof in a couple of months. So it has some of the qualities of ExxonMobil calling for a carbon tax because they know it is unlikely to happen.[^1]
So overall, the academic debate over nuclear does not have much to do with its technical characteristics, it mostly has to do with the political dimensions of who the advocates are and what their goals or interests are. And if you are in favor of nuclear, it is still a good idea to look at who is on your side and consider what their motivation for fighting that fight is.
Nuclear energy debate suffers from the classic problem of impedance mismatch between the supporters and detractors regarding the unit economics at scale.
Current data we have is based on bespoke plants. Utterly maddening overhead. This is the cost disease plaguing any kind of infrastructure/construction/high-unit-cost projects in the "developed world".
If you build one plant per decade, then there's no incentive to streamline, no economies of scale, no overlapping s-curves of improvement, no real industrialization and standardization.
Lack of scale leads to discontinuities, change aversion, lack of innovation, pork and barrel politics, and so on.
See the Boeing 737 MAX fuckup. The regulatory environment created a cost jump so huge, that Boeing risked too much.
I think it's even worse, because so many plants were built in the 70s and 80s, and then there is a large gap. So we don't even have the routine and economies of scale associated with an s-curve anymore. And new plants promise better safety and new features, so we would really start all over again on the s-curve.
This is just another lie. Costs increased very nearly monotonically during the peak of construction in the late 70s and 80s. And during every other country's peak of construction including china right now.
> The first one is that nuclear energy is by far the most expensive form by unit of energy produced.
Now that the world is waking up to understanding the LCOE is a wholly inappropriate metric for systems cost comparisons, this statement is more clearly no longer true.
With the firming included, nuclear is right there in the mix, cheaper than most 100% ___ with storage options.
You might have included the wrong link there. And with nuclear, always consider total cost, not operating cost. Not impossible to determine, but less reliable data floating around. You would have to take the cost of all failed projects as well as the cost of decommission and storage. For nuclear, the cost is a little bit funny. You have huge upfront cost, then lower running cost, and then a very long tail obviously.
You're right. Add the cost of storage or overprovision for demand fluctuation, add rapid dispatch, then planned and unplanned downtime to nuclear and the $150-200/MWh balloons even further.
Touche! I would argue though that the anti (existing) nuclear energy movement is separate from advocacy for investing into renewables over nuclear for new capacity.
I disagree on the separateness, at least to some extent. Solar and wind are less of an existential threat to coal/oil/gas than base-load-capable green energy sources like nuclear, geothermal, and hydroelectric; the fossil fuel industry therefore has a clear vested interest in bankrolling advocacy for solar/wind over others (especially nuclear, since it's less geography-dependent than geothermal or hydroelectric and therefore a greater threat). If/when battery storage proves to be feasible for providing that base load, I suspect we'll see similar pushback from the fossil fuel industry under similar pretexts (cue the videos of African toddlers slaving away in the lithium mines, cue the battery fires, etc.).
Solar for peak, nuclear for base. We need both, and advocacy for one at the expense/exclusion of the other tends to make me suspect ulterior motives.
Oh, I meant separate as in separate sets of people. Two sets of people with different goals. The original anti-nuclear crowd is a social movement that aims to shut down existing nuclear capacity or to blockade new construction. The other is an academic circle of people that advocates in their paper for the allocation of money to renewables this year over nuclear power in 5--10 years. That second set of people is not concerned as much with existing capacity.
With recent improvements in renewables, renewable positive people have said "we now think 100% wind, solar, battery is feasible" after a few years of saying 80% renewables is doable and the last 20% is tricky and people less enthusiastic about renewables are saying "we're still thinking that having 10-20% nuclear might work out slightly cheaper".
Even countries like France and Japan which are very nuclear positive, are not talking about 100% nuclear and have aggressive renewable rollouts planned:
> Again, it’s all about balancing out VRE. The easiest way to do that is with fast, flexible natural gas plants, but you can’t get past around 60 percent decarbonization with a large fleet of gas plants running. Getting to 80 percent or beyond means closing or idling lots of those plants. So you need other balancing options.
Because neither make any sense except as ways to justify continuing burning fossil fuels, but to disguise that fact from themselves, a believer needs to invent the most absurd conspiracy theories.
This is an economics and politics question, not a science question. Science has delivered the tools, it's a question of how we pay for it and who pays for it.
Scientists don't have a good track record providing answers to economics and political questions. OTOH, neither do economists nor political scientists.
> > I don't see any consensus on nuclear vs renewables. Not even a consensus like "it's the mix, stupid".
What I got is that nuclear (fission v.3/4 and fusion) are the "swing for the fences" technologies, while renewables are the "stuff largely remains what is today but without CO2 so people 80 years from now won't be living in a +3C world"
Personally I am rooting for fission and fusion because technological stasis is a recipe for disaster. Nukes will be flying way before the 3C treshold becomes a concern, people need constant improvement in their quality of life, if that doesn't happen they'll seek satisfaction into subjugating others.
Thermal generation is much more constrained than PV via waste heat.
LWRs also can't even match current world energy consumption for a variety of reasons.
On top of that, energy isn't quality of life. Happiness indeces and life expectancy are not better in Bahrain, Qatar and USA than Uruguay, Switzerland, and Spain.
A mix would always be nice because of diversification. I don’t think anyone wants full nuclear.
Building water, geo and hydro is (as of now) cheaper to build compared to nuclear [citation needed]. And it’s also “free” energy. Why not use it to reduce the usage of nuclear fuel?
Reading HN and its heated debates around this topic, I don't see any consensus on nuclear vs renewables. Not even a consensus like "it's the mix, stupid".
Do our scientists have a consensus on how to power our societies in regards to climate change ?
If not, is it because it's too soon to settle on something ? Or there's too much bad science fabricated ? Or do we have have the choice, all things being equal: go full nuclear, or go full renewables or go mix but... as a specie we (or our leaders) collectively choose not to ?