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In case you’re ever wondering, this is an example of your tax dollars at work. Thirty years ago solar and wind generation had to be heavily subsidized with government grants to make them viable in the energy market. Now the technology of both has advanced to the point that it’s undercutting all of the other forms of electricity generation, without subsidization.
Government subsidies work. They’re effective for getting new technologies off the ground.
Good thing we still subsidize petroleum
Good for the oil companies and legislators they own, anyway
Don’t forget the retirees that rely on the stock prices dividend payouts in their 401ks.
Those IRAs and 401ks that are the only alternative after states and corps plundered all the pension systems to buy those politicians.
They are great. As long as they don’t end up like corn.
Or oil and coal, propping up bad energy sources while the clean ones have to often fend for themselves and compete against the subsidies.
Or oil and corn and meat and dairy.
The four elements of power.
They do get subsidized pretty well, which is a good thing in my book.
Not as much as it needs to to compete fairly with the $7 trillion for fossil fuels. The fact they still can compete is great though. It shows how dead fossil fuels should be even if it was just left up to capitalistic mechanisms. Sadly the government interferes in the market in a bad way often for this.
Solar PV tortillas taste awful and hurt my teeth.
Everything I find shows them as still being subsidized and receiving the lions share of energy subsidies, which is fine in my book.
Everything I find shows them as still being subsidized and receiving the lions share of energy subsidies
According to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the bulk of our state and federal subsidies are tilted towards fossil fuels.
As we’ll hear today, the United States subsidizes the fossil fuel industry with taxpayer dollars. It’s not just the US: according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel handouts hit a global high of $1 trillion in 2022 – the same year Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion of income.
In the United States, by some estimates taxpayers pay about $20 billion dollars every year to the fossil fuel industry. What do we get for that? Economists generally agree: not much. To quote conservative economist Gib Metcalf: these subsidies offer “little if any benefit in the form of oil patch jobs, lower prices at the pump, or increased energy security for the country.” The cash subsidy is both big and wrong.
It should be noted that your link only explores federal subsidies, while Whitehouse notes the bulk of subsidization that happen at the state and local level. Texas, for instance, invests enormously in public works that benefit fossil fuel producers while offering the administrative offices generous grants and tax forbearances to operate within the state.
Because energy consumption underpins the bulk of our commercial activities, there is a real net-benefit to keeping raw fuel and electricity prices artificially low. Market rate energy would constrict capital construction and real estate development, reduce employment rates, and increase inflation - generally speaking, it would cut into long term economic growth. The OPEC embargo of the 70s demonstrated as much.
At the same time, fossil fuel consumption yields a host of side-effects - degradation of air and water quality, rising global temperatures leading to more sever weather and sea levels which increase the rate of coastal erosion, wholesale destruction of agricultural land and waterways where spills occur, etc.
So subsidies aren’t bad on their face, but fossil fuel subsidies - particularly at the scale of current energy consumption - carry far too many negative externalities to be considered good long term policy.
Unfortunately, the political benefits of fossil fuel subsidy continue to outweigh the social consequences, leading to a political class that is financially invested in continuing subsidies that have long since transformed into a net negative for domestic growth.
Excellent distinction. Ty for the info
The US has been subsidizing energy infrastructure transitions for over a hundred years. When coal power, nuclear power, hydro etc were new initiatives they all had a big helping hand from tax dollars.
Yes they are still heavily subsidized, but according to Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis utility-scale solar and wind are lower cost ($/MWh) than most other forms of electricity generation, even when unsubsidized. That has been true since at least the 2016 version of the report (check out the chart on page 2). In the 2023 version this is still true.
Wind power in particular is just ridiculously cheap to install and operate, which is why there have been so many new installations over the past decade. Spending money on any other new power generators just looks financially irresponsible at this point. I think this is part of why new nuclear projects keep dying - they get more expensive while wind and solar get cheaper.
Unfortunately, in comparison rooftop residential solar looks like a bad investment.
So yes, wind and solar are still subsidized because the government wants to encourage their use, but they don’t have to be subsidized to be competitive in the energy market.
So now the coal and oil power plants require government subsidies.
Now whether or not any of that has been effective I couldn’t tell you, especially considering those communities aren’t historically fond of democratic administrations.
It is now. But only after we invested in it.
This is a great example of investing in tech even when it’s not practical in the present day. It can pay off later down the line.
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Natural gas isn’t emissions free. We’re talking about wind, hydro, nuclear, and solar.
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A good chunk of that is nuclear which is not cheaper to operate.
It’s worth pointing out that the renewables break down as such (% of all electricity):
- Solar: 6%
- Hydro: 6%
- Wind: 10%
- Nuclear: 18%
Nuclear energy is providing more than any other individual source, making up 45% of all renewable electricity.
Next time you hear someone “concerned about global warming” also fearmonger about nuclear energy, it’s worth considering where their allegiances lie. Most people are misguided, but when it comes to politicians, it says a lot about how much they actually care about sustainability.
There have been studies (this one, for example) that suggest the total radioactivity-related health impacts from coal power exceed that of nuclear power by an order of magnitude. That’s not all pollution-related deaths for coal – just those associated with radon exposure inside of mines, and radioactive materials embedded in coal going out into the environment. For all the fear-mongering about nuclear, it’s hard to find a less dangerous source of base load generation using present-day technologies. Maybe once grid-scale batteries are available at scale, they could replace nuke plants, but that’s a solution ten years too late for an environmental problem we have to fix right now.
radioactive materials embedded in coal going out into the environment
They should put it beyond the environment.
Tow it outside the environment
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We’d be better suited to reduce emissions, that’s for sure.
What is renewable about nuclear? It’s not a fossil fuel, but uranium has to be mined and is a finite resource just like oil.
Uranium isn’t the only fuel source, for one. Fusion reactors, if we can figure out the underlying science, world likely use hydrogen. New generation reactors can use Thorium, and breeder tractors are able to generate usable fuel from nuclear waste.
Not to mention, uranium is finite but we have enough supply of it to develop other technologies while we still reduce emissions via nuclear.
And this is discounting new technologies which could allow us to create a large artificial uranium supply.
It’s not renewable but we have something like 200 years worth. It’s a cleaner stopgap than fossil fuels until we figure out fusion and build up renewable capacity.
200 years with current technology.
With breeders reactors such as superphenix built in the 90s you can multiply this amount by almost a 100.
After a millennia if we still rely on the same technology and we start to worry about the supply we can start seawater extraction of uranium. Seawater extraction is not considered economically viable right now but it as the potential of bringing the supply nuclear reactors for another few billions years.
So from a practical point of view it could be considered as renewable or close to it.
Nuclear has been at that supply level since the 1970s. Other parts of the world have much higher renewable mixes in their energy inputs. For example, Germany:
Nuclear is not necessary to meet climate change targets. In fact, it’s so damned expensive to deploy and maintain, it will harm meeting those targets.
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2023/03/PE23_090_43312.html
And because they shut down their nuclear plants, they had to start burning coal again, which is about as bad an energy source you can get when it comes to emissions and pollution. Their coal use % went up from 2021 to 2022. They may have a higher renewable mix, but they’ve also increased their emissions. Not to mention, they also significantly reduced their energy imports from France – the majority of which is generated by nuclear energy. They are replacing clean energy with coal.
France is actually a significant counterpoint as well. They’ve got 65%+ nuclear energy, and renewables just add to the percent of clean energy sources. Considering they’re doing much better than Germany in terms of not using fossil fuels, I believe they are an example to follow over Germany – which means nuclear is critical to meet our climate goals.
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Yeah I don’t see this so much as a nuclear problem but a universal problem. Everything requires maintenance, from oil refineries to solar farms.
And because they shut down their nuclear plants, they had to start burning coal again…
Unrelated and a whataboutism.
It’s completely relevant to a discussion about renewable energy and meeting emission targets. What’s the benefit of having a higher renewable mix if your total GHG emissions are consistently going up?
Germany has generated more CO2 than it would have if it had kept nuclear technology, and that’s an indisputable fact.
That’s like arguing why take chemo if it only makes you sicker in the short run. 🤔
To use your analogy, we don’t know if this chemo will actually cure them. It could make them just a little better, but it needs to be worth the suffering.
Our goal at the end of the day is to reach 0 emissions as soon as possible. If the increased coal and gas that Germany is using now because of eliminating nuclear energy results in zero emissions much quicker, I’ll happily agree with you. As it stands however, Germany has not proven out a reduction in carbon higher than their recent increases.
There is no climate justification for cutting out nuclear energy. If there was, we’d see a net detriment in France and a net positive in Germany with regards to the justification. If that exists today, I’d be more than happy to read about it. If you’re going to argue that it’ll exist tomorrow, you’ll need projections that are made on reasonable assumptions and that show the difference. Again, I’d be happy to look at those.
It was completely relevant to the discussion. That’s not a whataboutism.
He changed the topic from nuclear to coal.
Don’t forget geothermal. California has a little of that
Geothermal is not quite to the point where we can represent it with a whole number percentage value, but it’s getting there! If we’re going to include sub-1% generators, burning wood has geothermal beat out at 0.8%. Geothermal is cool, though!
Burning wood is extremely important for reaching 100% renewable.
It’s one of the only pilotable renewables energy. Even with a lot of battery there is still long period with very little sun and wind that will require to fire up a thermal power station.
Wood is a very good candidate for that.
The only thing that’s keeping carbon-free power from growing faster is natural gas, which is the fastest-growing source of generation at the moment, going from 40 percent of the year-to-date total in 2022 to 43.3 percent this year. (It’s actually slightly below that level in the October data.) The explosive growth of natural gas in the US has been a big environmental win, since it creates the least particulate pollution of all the fossil fuels, as well as the lowest carbon emissions per unit of electricity. But its use is going to need to start dropping soon if the US is to meet its climate goals, so it will be critical to see whether its growth flat lines over the next few years.
Uh… So, listen. I work in the Nat Gas sector. And while I’m happy to confirm that its far cleaner, easier/safer to transport, and more efficient than coal and liquid oil, I’m going to have to pump the breaks on the enthusiasm. We are definitely not “emissions-free”. One of the larger investments we’ve made, in the last few years, has been in detecting gas leaks along our existing lines and plugging them. And we definitely still flare off excess and lose reserves during transit as circumstances dictate.
Way back in the 1970s a small upstart energy company known as Exxon had one of its engineering departments estimate the ecological impact of drilling into the East Natuna gas field off the coast of Indonesia. This was primarily a natural gas reserve, accessible without the modern fracking and cracking techniques used throughout the Permian and Delphi Basins.
Senior scientist of Exxon, James Black, authored a report estimating the impact of drilling and burning off the fuel in the East Natuna reserve, and concluded it would result in a significant increase in global temperatures. This lead Exxon to commission further studies, in the late 70s and early 80s, to estimate the full impact of their drilling and refining practices. The end result was a model of climate change that has mapped neatly to current climate trends
I say this because while natural gas is relatively cleaner, it is by no means clean. And with the increasing rate of energy consumption occurring globally, our reliance on natural gas is decidedly not contributing to an emissions free future.
I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that natural gas is emissions-free.
6% Solar + 6% Hydro + 10% Wind + 18% Nuclear = 40% “emissions-free”
They certainly exist. There was a Dutch guy in another post bragging about his micro-nation being 100% emissions free because he kept seeing his government bragging about being “100% green energy,” while the supermajority of their electricity was generated with natural gas (being the only significant fossil fuels they had and it being relatively easy to source from neighbors)
The point isn’t there was one guy who fell for it, the point is there will be people mistaking natural gas for actual green energy instead of just being less harmful, or being unaware of what’s actually producing their electricity simply because there is a deliberate effort to mislead people about it by, among other things, conflating terminology like “green” and “emission free.”
The article doesn’t do a good job of explaining the 40%, you have to infer it. But when you do, it isn’t natural gas, but solar + wind + hydro + nuclear.
This is actually fantastic news. 40% renewable, 40% natural gas, and 20% coal is a huge step in the right direction.
The article doesn’t do a good job of explaining the 40%
I thought the chart was pretty clear. Although I guess they could’ve color coded it.
I think color coding it would’ve helped a bit yeah. Especially if they used the same color for wind and hydro and solar and nuclear. Otherwise you read 40% in the headline and the first thing which draws your attention is 44% natural gas
Here’s some overtime graphs up to 2020:
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Thanks for continuing to prove why weevils are the best beetles.
That’s a very cool article, I didn’t know the US was actually making the change so quickly.
Weirdest part of the article is the included pie chart from the US Energy Information Agency showing the usage of different types of energy, but the entire pie is orange, like every slice of different energy is orange.
They need one art guy, just one.
I didn’t mind the pie chart, the slices are labeled clearly, no need to use coloring like you have to read a legend.
Kind of you
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Why? Nuclear power is the most complex and expensive option of any clean energy source from what I know.
Nuclear power is good for its consistent output that is independent of outside factors like wind, clouds, or drought. Plus much of the cost of nuclear is tied with the construction of the plant not the operating costs, so a paid off plant isn’t particularly expensive.
Plus much of the cost of nuclear is tied with the construction of the plant not the operating costs, so a paid off plant isn’t particularly expensive.
I wish that were true. Nuclear plants built in the 60s and 70s (but still operating today) was losing money in Ohio. So the power companies bribed the Republican Ohio Speaker of the House $60 million dollars to pass a law that citizens have to pay extra fees totally over $1 billion dollars to power plants so that power companies can make a profit on nuclear. The bill was passed, and signed into law by the governor of Ohio, and years passed before the investigation found the bribery scandal.
That former Ohio Speaker of the House was sentenced to 20 years in prison finally.
The bad bribed-passed law is still on the books in Ohio and citizens are still paying extra to artificially make nuclear profitable for the power company. Here’s just a small source for the whole sorted story..
So no, even old built nuclear power plants are still more expensive that nearly all other electricity sources in the USA.
They’ve had to keep upgrading them - the percentage of nuclear is the same, but no new plants have been built, so that extra power has come from research on how close to the red line they can actually run.
New reactors just came online in Georgia this year. A $15 billion dollar planned project that cost $30 billion with overruns.
So new or old, nuclear is really expensive electricity.
A coal power plant is rougly the same cost per GW as solar or wind, doesn’t mean we should build more of them. I agree it’s expensive, but so were solar and wind a couple decades ago. Government investment helped research, development, scaling up - imagine if that had been done in the '80s, we wouldn’t be building natural gas plants right now.
Besides maybe coal
That consistent output isn’t as useful as you think. Solar and wind are ridiculously cheap, so we would want to use them when they’re available. That means winding down nuclear plants when those two spin up. I’m turn, that means those initial construction costs you mentioned aren’t being efficiently ammortized over the entire life of the plant.
What we can do instead is take historical sun and wind data for a given region, calculate where the biggest trough will be, and then build enough storage capacity to cover it. Even better, aim for 95% coverage in the next few years, with the rest taken up by existing natural gas. There’s some non-linear factors involved where getting to 100% is a lot harder than 95%.
This is the trap. The fossil fuel industry has co-opted wind and PV solar by way of filling in the gaps and transitioning to net zero emissions. Of course, the gaps will always be there and the transition will never complete and “net zero” seems to just leave the door open on fossil fuels forever.
Nuclear power, on the other hand, has the reliability that @[email protected] mentioned and it closes any of the gaps from wind and solar right up. You don’t have to quickly cut the power on a reactor if it’s sunny or windy, just divert it to hydrogen and ammonia production. Even if the efficient high temperature electrolysis tech isn’t ready yet, it doesn’t really matter since it’s emissions free. Furthermore, nuclear power produces good heat/steam to support cogeneration and various industrial processes.
Nonsense. Conservatives have brought up nuclear for decades as a way to play “gotcha” with anti-nuclear progressives. Maggie Thatcher, for example, embraced the science of climate change early on as a way to push nuclear. It was never serious, though. Always a political game that resulted in no new nuclear being built while coal and oil continued to ramp up.
I think Thatcher just wanted to privatize, deregulate, and liberalize as much as she could, all fundamentally bad moves from the perspectives of both labor and greenhouse emissions concerns.
The problem is that there are currently no good (cheap, scalable) technologies to store these large amounts of electrical energy.
There are several lines of storage research that only need to be ramped up to mass production at this point. Since stationary storage doesn’t have the weight restrictions that electric car batteries do, there are many different viable options. Flow batteries, sodium batteries, pumping water uphill, big tower of concrete blocks on pullies, hydrogen electrolysis, big ceramic block that gets hot. Some will work wherever, others are only viable in certain situations, but there are many options and we only need one of them to work at scale.
When nuclear tries to make improvements, it tends to do one thing per decade. If it fails, wait another decade to try the next thing. Last decade, it was the AP1000 reactor. It was hoped it would make a single, repeatable design that would avoid the boutique engineering that caused budget and schedule overruns in the past. Didn’t work out that way. This decade, it’s Small Modular Reactors. The recent collapse of the Utah project doesn’t give much hope for it.
Even if it does, it won’t be proven out before 2030. We’ll want to be on 90% clean electrical technology by then if we have even a hope of keeping climate change at bay. There is no longer a path with nuclear that could do so. Given project construction times, the clock ran out already.
While I don’t disagree that it’s going to be too late, I do think SMRs are likely to go the distance, at least abroad.
The reality is that we aren’t going to hit 90% carbon free by 2030 without a huge social and political shift. There’s just no way that is happening in 6 years. I really hate being a downer about it but I think we need to face the facts on it.
Pumped hydro works well for storage, although it basically has the same problem as hydro power - it’s only available in places with water and elevation changes.
Yes, but an elevation change of 100 meters is enough for one: The one near me for example
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Kruonis Pumped Storage Plant (the KPSP) is located near Kruonis, Lithuania, 34 km (21 mi) east of Kaunas. Its main purpose is to provide grid energy storage. It operates in conjunction with the Kaunas Hydroelectric Power Plant. During periods of low demand, usually at night, Kruonis PSHP raises water from the lower Kaunas reservoir to the upper one using cheap surplus energy. The station is designed to have an installed capacity of 1,600 MW but only four 225 MW generators are currently operational. With a fully filled upper reservoir the plant can generate 900 MW for about 12 hours. The KPSP uses hydro-resources of artificial water pools existing at different geographical levels. The electricity from this power plant is supplied to a 330 kV electricity line to Elektrėnai, where the largest fossil fuel plant in Lithuania is operating, and Kaunas. During a surplus of electricity generation, the KPSP uses the surplus electricity to pump water from the lower pool to the upper pool. During an electricity output deficit, the Kruonis PSP operates as a regular hydro power plant, letting water flow from the upper pool to the lower pool to generate additional electricity. With a fully filled upper reservoir the plant can generate 900 MW for about 12 hours. Kruonis Plant is the only pumped-storage station in the Baltic states.The Kruonis PSP Industrial Park and Kruonis Technology Park were created as the location, infrastructure and low electricity price are attractive for data centers.A neighbourhood for workers of the Kruonis pumped storage plant plant was built in the 1980s and early 1990s in Elektrėnai, expanding this city of specialists in energetics by area and inhabitants roughly twice.Interesting! Still way too much elevation needed to be useful for us in Holland though. 😆
If every home was a battery instead of an armory that would be a really cool redundant storage infrastructure. Likely not financially viable compared to centralized storage but it would be kind of cool if their was no immediate central reliance on power so any interruption in power generation could withstand say 1 week of storage reserves nation wide before outages started trickling off to support say hospitals, heating above 40 degrees, etc. Entirely too complicated I’m sure but just a neat thought I had after reading your comment.
Even current lithium-based battery storage is already cheaper than nuclear.
It does not make sense to compare the price of energy storage (lithium batteries), with the price for generating electricity (nuclear energy), or do you mean something else?
People have a hard-on about nuclear being “baseload” power and renewables being intermittent. Solar/wind plus batteries to add dispatchability is a valid comparison to nuclear if you only want to talk about baseload.
I totally agree with this. A lot of places have cheap electricity in off-peak hours, as a workaround to this limitation (steady output).
I think that this obsession about intermittent power comes partially from the idea that any new sources of power must be drop-in replacements for the systems that we’ve had for so many decades. However those systems run the way they do as an accident of technology, not because of a careful analysis and design to match optimal usage patterns.
I appreciate seeing a serious, well thought out comment posted from a lemmynsfw account!
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Yes, running them at a lower level, and yes, that would be my point. You can run them down when renewable sources pick up, but that’s inefficient. Solar/wind don’t mix well with nuclear; you’re leaving something on the table if you try.
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Consistent output is certainly useful when you break down demand into a constant demand + variable demand. For instance, if demand is typically 200-350 kWh, you could build a nuclear plant to generate 200 kWh and constantly run while you meet the varying 0-150 kWh demand with wind and solar.
I will agree though that we need to run numbers on this to determine the best approach. I don’t have a feel for what wins out if we make larger solar and wind farms – increased cost for the additional capacity, or increased efficiency from economies of scale.
The storage capacity is the hard part. Batteries aren’t really a viable option (we don’t really have good enough batteries, limits on how many can be made with current resources, etc).
Dams would be good (pump water uphill when electricity is cheap and release when you need the energy back), but dams are not a viable option everywhere and also have a high environmental impact and are arguably not the safest thing for a community.
I read somewhere recently about the idea of putting smaller batteries in individual homes, basically distributing the power ahead of time to a certain number of places so they are not taking from the grid in peak times, but it would be hugely expensive still, and I also question if we have the ability to make so many batteries, much less get enough people to install them.
We have plenty of options. Grid storage doesn’t have the same size and weight limitations that electric cars do, which opens up many more possibilities. Flow batteries are getting cranked up for mass production, and that’s probably all we need. Even if that doesn’t work out, there are other directions to go.
Don’t leave out the deconstruction of old nuclear plants after their operational time and the storage of radioactive waste. It’s very laborious and expensive.
Hydro is also quite independent but it’s heavily dependent on geography. That’s how Canada is able to be much ahead in renewable energy.
Also, having nuclear in a 100% low carbon grid is great to stabilize the grid.
A French study showed that having around 13% of nuclear in the grid reduce the solar and battery capacity needed by a factor of two compared to no nuclear.
Nuclear power is bad for its consistent output because demand is not constant. You could of course run some energy hungry chemical reaction when there is more power than demand, make hydrogen to use for synthetic fuels for example or build a battery to store the excess power for when the demand is high. But is is of course much cheaper with renewables.
Total demand is not constant, but you can represent total demand as a sum of a given constant demand plus variable demand. Say for instance the average demand varies from 200-350 kWh a year. You could run nuclear power plants to generate 200 kWh worth of electricity, and use solar/wind for the remaining 0-150 kWh demand. It would be fairly efficient to have nuclear provide a base load of some kind while solar and wind vary to meet the full demand.
Hydro is best as a giant battery bank, and pairs quite well with nuclear.
And yet, after many decades of solar, wind construction. It is the energy source in that pie chart that is sizeable (just as much as all wind and solar) and extremely stable (probably for the last 50 years), without any major construction in the past 30 years minimum.
Wind/solar only ramped up in the last 10 years, not decades. That’s when they got cheap. Really cheap. It’s nuclear that had a huge head start.
To be fair, Plant Vogtle just turned on Unit 3 earlier this year and Unit 4 should be coming soon.
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That’s a good thing. It means lots of hours of well paying engineering and construction work.
Nearly all of nuclear in the USA was built decades ago. Instead of being “paid off” and being cheaper, its still more expensive to generate electricity with nuclear than nearly all other electricity sources in the USA.
I’m not sure what you are referencing, but there are good reasons why nuclear power is expensive: lots of engineering and construction hours, strick safety and quality standards for design and materials, and no externalities, since decommissioning and waste handling have to be accounted and baked into the final utility cost to consumers. In other words, even if it’s difficult to pay off a nuclear power plant (in a liberalized energy market of course) it’s still money well spent. The same requirements and expectations should have to apply to other industries as well.
Are you arguing its a “good thing” for existing built plants or for propose plants yet to be built? I wasn’t sure, but the result is the same for both. Nuclear is too expensive for what it provides in the face of better alternatives. I’m happy to back my statements with sources. Which position were you arguing?
There is one thing that new nuclear reactor designs can provide that there is no good alternative for, and that’s consuming existing nuclear fuel. We can use breeder tractors to convert our existing waste into usable fuel for newer reactor types (I want to say Thorium but I’m not positive).
Our best outlook for the future is for us to build at least as much of these are necessary to clean up our nuclear waste.
There is one thing that new nuclear reactor designs can provide that there is no good alternative for, and that’s consuming existing nuclear fuel. We can use breeder tractors to convert our existing waste into usable fuel for newer reactor types (I want to say Thorium but I’m not positive).
Building reactors just to reprocess fuel would be a really bad way to solve that problem. If we are requiring reprocessing, there are other countries that run these that we could just ship our fuel to.
Breeder reactors bring some serious security problems
One of the really great things about civilian nuclear power in the USA is that the fuel or waste can never be built into a nuclear bomb. Our reactors run on Uranium-238. This is the most common isotope of uranium and its plenty fissile to reach criticality for power generation. Nuclear bombs use Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239.
The way a Breeder reactor can reprocess fuel is by turning “spent” Uranium-238 into, you guessed it, Plutonium-239. Plutonium-239 can be used to generate electricity in reactors too. So now you’ve got civilian power plants that are housing and handling weapons grade nuclear material. The security of the facility, supply chain, workers and everything suddenly has to go through the roof. All of those things increase the total costs to the resulting electricity. With nuclear already being more expensive than other cleaner and dirtier alternatives, running Breeder reactors makes that nuclear power yet more expensive again!
My position is simply that it’s a good sign if nuclear power is more expensive than other types. We should be suspicious of anything that claims to offer a better deal.
What an unusual stance. You eluded to the externalities of other sources as your concern. For coal I would agree. However, for wind and solar the studies have shown those to be substantially cheaper even with externalities factored in.
What do you base your reasoning on that wind and solar are not factoring in externalities?
Nuclear is the most regulated one. Start requiring full recycling / disposal of solar or wind and how expensive do they get?
Nuclear is the most regulated: True. Accidents in nuclear have the most consequence, by far, of any generation source.
I would imagine that if we’re just going for disposal, solar and wind are still pretty cheap. With zero recycling wind turbine blades can just be buried after their 25 year life cycle. source.
Same landfill disposal option is available for solar panels at $1 to $5 per panel. source
This would be the level of disposal nuclear has, except low and high level nuclear waste is much more costly and potentially destructive even after disposal.
Burying it in the ground with no considerations for leachants is not what nuclear disposal is.
It’s not significantly more expensive though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
And even if it was, it has other benefits.
Like using significantly less land, and being safer.
It can also work as a source of heat for district heating or various industrial processes, and since the plants themselves have no emissions, they can be reasonably placed in cities for this purpose without harming people. Using heat directly is more efficient than converting it to and from electricity.
Nuclear has it’s place.
It’s not significantly more expensive though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
I’m looking at that source it shows:
- nuclear $6,695-7,547 /kw
- solar pv $1,327 /kw
At the most generous calculation (of nuclear costly only $6,695) that puts nuclear power at 5 x more expensive that solar PV. So if you have a theoretical pure electricity bill on solar PV of $100/month, your theoretical pure electricity bill on nuclear of $500/month.
I’m not sure how you reach the conclusion that nuclear is not significantly more expensive.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Different methods of electricity generation can incur a variety of different costs, which can be divided into three general categories: 1) wholesale costs, or all costs paid by utilities associated with acquiring and distributing electricity to consumers, 2) retail costs paid by consumers, and 3) external costs, or externalities, imposed on society. Wholesale costs include initial capital, operations & maintenance (O&M), transmission, and costs of decommissioning. Depending on the local regulatory environment, some or all wholesale costs may be passed through to consumers. These are costs per unit of energy, typically represented as dollars/megawatt hour (wholesale). The calculations also assist governments in making decisions regarding energy policy. On average the levelized cost of electricity from utility scale solar power and onshore wind power is less than from coal and gas-fired power stations,: TS-25 but this varies a lot depending on location.: 6–65
‘Natural’ gas is just gas. It’s not a clean emission free fuel. It’s better than coal but by no means a clean fuel.
It has about half the carbon emissions of coal. Much much better, but no where close to clean.
Better than coal is its main selling point.
And converting coal power plants to natural gas can be a partial interim solution on the way towards larger amounts of non-polluting generation.
Also needs less coal.
And after that less natural gas, but getting rid of coal should be the higher priority as it is the greater polluting fuel.
Fair. I wonder if the chart includes the coal typically needed to make steel.
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Okay I guess it should have been obvious to me.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
China is one of the world's largest producers of nuclear power. The country ranks third in the world both in total nuclear power capacity installed and electricity generated, accounting for around one tenth of global nuclear power generated. As of February 2023, China has 55 plants with 57GW in operation, 22 under construction with 24 GW and more than 70 planned with 88GW. About 5% of electricity in the country is due to nuclear energy. These plants generated 417 TWh of electricity in 2022 This is versus the September 2022 numbers of 53 nuclear reactors, with a total capacity of 55.6 gigawatt (GW). In 2019, nuclear power had contributed 4.9% of the total Chinese electricity production, with 348.1 TWh.Nuclear power has been looked into as an alternative to coal due to increasing concerns about air quality, climate change and fossil fuel shortages. The China General Nuclear Power Group has articulated the goal of 200 GW by 2035, produced by 150 additional reactors.China has two major nuclear power companies, the China National Nuclear Corporation operating mainly in north-east China, and the China General Nuclear Power Group (formerly known as China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group) operating mainly in south-east China.China aims to maximize self-reliance on nuclear reactor technology manufacturing and design, although international cooperation and technology transfer are also encouraged. Advanced pressurized water reactors such as the Hualong One are the mainstream technology in the near future, and the Hualong One is also planned to be exported. China plans to build as many as thirty nuclear power reactors in countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative by 2030. By mid-century fast neutron reactors are seen as the main technology, with a planned 1400 GW capacity by 2100. China is also involved in the development of nuclear fusion reactors through its participation in the ITER project, having constructed an experimental nuclear fusion reactor known as EAST located in Hefei, as well as research and development into the thorium fuel cycle as a potential alternative means of nuclear fission.
I, too, want the one that will take longer and cost more than alternatives.
I don’t think you understand what the alternatives are
Yeah, no. I used to be pro-nuclear. Then I looked at how the economics have changed over the last 10 years, and I changed my mind like you’re supposed to when presented with new information.
I like how governments are supposed to shit their money out of the window to support renewables with billions in incentives but when the matter is investment in nuclear power suddenly it’s unsustainable economics. Let’s ask Germany how their 600+ billion euro “energiewende” is going shall we?
Nuclear got tons of subsidies. Lots of those plants were built for the dual purpose of energy and making bombs. It’s unlikely the United States would have half the reactors it does if not for the Cold War.
At this point, it’s a matter of what’s most efficient for energy alone, and that ain’t nuclear. Take out every subsidy in every form of energy, and the people with money to invest will put it all in wind and solar.
Right now the comparison between France (61 GWs of installed nuclear) and Germany (130+ -!!!- GWs of installed renewables) is disastrous. Their choice to phase out their remaining plants was criminal but the policy is dumb in general, tying themselves to coal and gas power for the realistic future. I’m very curious to see when (or if) they’ll ever get to the same emission levels and how much time and money they’ll have wasted by then.
BTW. Nuclear Power Plants pay themselves up in decades of operation. Of course a privateer is not extremely keen in this kind of investment. That is exactly why countries are supposed to invest in strategic infrastructure, which are partly indirectly financed by privateers through treasury bonds.
I agree shutting down fictional nuclear plants is dumb. Doesn’t mean we should build new ones.
Wait really, no joke??
Not in my state, we’re like 10-15% emission free wind and solar), and like 60-70% from coal.
Believe it or not, your state was included in the national average
Wait. That’s how averages work? The more you know…
What I think is interesting is just how variable it is. This Wikipedia article breaks it down by state. There’s no obvious political explanation here, and even very similar states have very different energy production.
For example, here’s the top 10 (with 2016/2020 presidential party vote):
- Vermont (D) - 99.7%
- South Dakota ® - 82.7%
- Washington (D) - 81.9%
- New Hampshire (D) - 71.6%
- Idaho ® - 70.2%
- Maine (D) - 66.1%
- Oregon (D) - 65%
- Illinois (D) - 64.5%
- South Carolina ® - 60.8%
- Kansas ® - 60.8%
And the bottom 10 (ignoring DC):
41 - Massachusetts (D) - 17.8%
42 - Ohio ® - 17.4%
43 - Florida ® - 17.4%
44 - Missouri ® - 16.6%
45 - Utah ® - 12.4%
46 - Indiana ® - 9.8%
47 - Kentucky ® - 7.6%
48 - Rhode Island (D) - 7.2%
49 - West Virginia ® - 5.1%
50 - Delaware (D) - 3.2%So 6/10 of the top 10 are states that voted Democrat, and 7/10 of the bottom 10 are states that voted Republican. That trend doesn’t really tell the story though (3 of the next 5 voted Republican), which is really interesting because it’s such a political talking point at the national level (e.g. Dems are in favor of green energy, Reps are in favor of fossil fuels).
Even some very similar, adjacent states have very different generation numbers:
- Alabama (43%) vs Mississippi (20%)
- Idaho (70%) vs Utah (12%)
- Tennessee (59%) vs Kentucky (8%)
So there’s a lot of progress that can be made at the low end by pointing at their neighbors.
The states themselves are different. The state I live in (washington) is about 70% hydroelectric for example, and that just wouldn’t work in a lot of other places
Sure, WA is an outlier because of its geography (more consistent rivers), but other states that are very similar to each other have huge differences. So it’s not something that’s easily explained by geography or local politics.
I see two possibilities here:
- US stagnates at some percent because the bottom states refuse to change
- bottom states follow their neighbors’ lead and renewable adoption accelerates
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In my area, the lack of nuclear has been largely due to FUD. I’m in Utah, and every time nuclear has been suggested, the public has shot it down, despite having the perfect geography for it. The plant could be placed on the west side of the mountains where few people live, so even if there’s a disaster, it’s not going to impact the populated valley, and there’s a ton of space in the desert to bury the waste. Also, coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, yet we have coal plants here.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
This is a list of U.S. states by total electricity generation, percent of generation that is renewable, total renewable generation, percent of total domestic renewable generation, and carbon intensity in 2021.What I think is interesting is just how variable it is.
The states themselves are very different from each other.
Try breaking it down by county.
It’s better than nothing. Hopefully we can speed this up in next couple of years.
That’s actually better than I thought.
In my city they had everyone switch to renewable energy, they sent Mail out stating that your energy source will automatically change unless you opt out.
LOL how are they going to change the energy source that powers an individual house if they “opt out” ??
Did they run separate power lines to every house that is on a switch between the power sources? It’s not like a network packet that you can route to a destination, it’s going to go down the lines the same way unless the circuit is broken.
My state separates power “distribution” as the responsibility of the utility, from “generation” as an attempt at a competitive market. I choose my source f power by choosing what generation company I pay. Clearly, electrons are electrons, but for the power I use I pay a 50% renewables company to generate
Suppose Provider A is 100% renewable and Provider B is 100% fossil. Both providers generate power and feed the same grid (which is managed separately from the various energy providers). The same grid powers all homes. Householders get to choose whether to buy from Provider A or Provider B. If you support renewables then you buy from Provider A; their share goes up and B’s share goes down. And vice versa for B. In addition the government juggles A,B as well as C,D,E,etc to provide the overall service to the country.
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If 90% of households have clean energy selected, and 10% prefer to pollute, the city will buy the relevant amount of clean energy.
My city gave no option. It only buys clean energy
Same AFAIK – Akron, OH.
Why do they need to ask? I ask as in the UK we all get our power from “the grid”, and don’t have much say over what the energy mix is there.
Because for some reason in my city “delivery” cost of the renewable energy costs 12% more than non-renewable.
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That sounds like a problem worth solving, and I can’t think of a reason it would be the case without using the words “kickbacks” and “corruption”
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This makes electric cars less polluting with every passing day as this percentage increases.
Car manufacturing is, itself, a messy process. And we’d all be better off (for a whole host of reasons) if we could move to a public transit system and away from the messy, overly-complex, extraordinarily expensive highways-and-byways personal vehicle system.
Electrified rail and Multi-family homes would dramatically reduce both energy consumption AND housing costs, if we were willing to invest in it at rates comparable to what we spend subsidizing new fossil fuel wells, road expansion/maintenance, and policing of the homeless.
Ride sharing and self driving are a natural combo . A ride sharing system for self driving electric cars & light trucks would be a game changer for ‘last mile’ and intra suburban transport ,
And ride sharing would reduce the manufacturing cost of providing a fleet of these vehicles for a city since fewer vehicles would be needed for the same number of people.
Here are several use cases where it would be ideal.
1: Transport to your residence or place of work from a mass transit station in inclement weather , or for people with heavy things to carry or the disabled who find travel to the mass transit station impractical or impossible.
The vehicle would be stationed in a parking lot/recharging station at the mass transit station and be available for rent via an app , it would then return to the parking lot autonomously and connect to the recharger to be ready for the next person. or conversely it could be summoned via the app and drive autonomously to the customer to be used .
2: An electric light truck variant could be used for moving or furniture delivery.
3: Disabled individuals could have access to accessible electric vehicles on an ‘on demand’ basis making trips to the stores or friends far easier for them. And stores would not need dozens of disabled parking spots or even a parking lot at all , they would only need one or two accessible general use loading and unloading areas near the entrance. and the acres and acres of land that was once a parking lot could be repurposed as a park or community space of some kind , or perhaps rezoned to provide extra housing for an over populated area.
Great except the military pollutes more than 140 countries and there are several wars ongoing. If you really want the climate to stop changing we need to reel in the international shipping industry, the fashion industry, and also the global war machine.
You also have to admit that the US covers for most of the worlds military. Most of nato and many Asian allies have very low defense spending, because the US will cover them. Most of the time when there is a global crisis or localized crisis the US is involved in one way or another.
They should pay us for this service.
“Hey France, are you subscribed to the American security apparatus?”
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the pilothouse of my privately owned aircraft carrier when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was France. “Hey France, are you subscribed to the American security apparatus?”
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France will be fine because they’re surrounded by allies and Russia can’t conquer Europe no matter how much Soviet surplus they run out of.
“It sure would be a shame if anything happened to that nice country of yours…”
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we need to reel in the international shipping industry, the fashion industry, and also the global war machine
Believe you mean “modernize” and not “reel in,” because ending international shipping would be catastrophic worldwide.
If we’re being pedantic, the post said “reel in” international shipping, not “ending”.
Finally some good news.
There’s a lot if you look for it, recent developments in tidal are incredibly positive and we’re absolutely going to see a rapid uptake in marine electrification as existing technology progresses through the market. Most people never really think about the resources used and pollution caused by small boats but one of the big destructive forces at play is the infrastructure requirements - small boats need big boats to supply their fuel stations.
Transitioning away from this system and instead using costal tidal generators to charge electric ferries and barges could be a total game changer in many areas, especially many of the highly trafficked and polluted tidal basins like in north Brazil, Nigeria, or island clusters like in the Philippines. Also the intercoastal waterways around the US and other leisure spots.
We’re making great progress in many areas and I really think it’s important to acknowledge this and cheer it on least we get so caught in a false sense of doom that we just give up.
Its not good news at all, electricity prices have gone up a lot since this net-zero insanity took over. Morons are clapping their hands like trained seals at their bank accounts being drained by corporations and politicians.
No they haven’t. Mine has been the same for a few decades and it’s fine.
Yes they have, rates used to be 0.12/kwh all day long, recently they rolled out a peak pricing scam and it’s 0.22/kwh from 2-7pm, that is nearly double.
Wanting to breath clean air on a habitable planet isn’t insanity.
The air is plenty clean as it is, has been for decades too… as long as you don’t live in California, where the smug is so thick it’s asphyxiating.
The air is plenty clean as it is
Tell that to the people in East Palestine Ohio. Tell that to the people that live near coal plants.
as long as you don’t live in California
Doesn’t matter where you live if the planet is uninhabitable.
This is due to corporate greed. Solar and wind are the cheapest sources of energy in the history of the world.
That’s very surprising, in a good way.
I’d be really curious to see the dollar per kilowatt hour on each one of these.
60% of US electricity still isn’t emissions-free
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But some of the trends now seem locked in for the year: wind and solar are likely to be in a dead heat with coal, and all carbon-emissions-free sources combined will account for roughly 40 percent of US electricity production.
Weather can also play a role, as unusually high demand for heating in the winter months could potentially require that older fossil fuel plants be brought online.
This is in keeping with a general trend of flat-to-declining electricity use as greater efficiency is offsetting factors like population growth and expanding electrification.
Its output has been boosted by a new, 1.1 Gigawatt reactor that come online this year (a second at the same site, Vogtle in Georgia, is set to start commercial production at any moment).
But that’s likely to be the end of new nuclear capacity for this decade; the challenge will be keeping existing plants open despite their age and high costs.
The explosive growth of natural gas in the US has been a big environmental win, since it creates the least particulate pollution of all the fossil fuels, as well as the lowest carbon emissions per unit of electricity.
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