The head of the Australian energy market operator AEMO, Daniel Westerman, has rejected nuclear power as a way to replace Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations, arguing that it is too slow and too expensive. In addition, baseload power sources are not competitive in a grid dominated by wind and solar energy anyway.
Even if we started to build nuclear plants like crazy right now, it would be decades for them to make a real impact. Building a single nuclear plant is very expensive and time consuming. Building up the necessary supply chain to build a lot of them would take much longer. In the meantime, you can build huge amounts of renewables in just a few years for a fraction of the cost, even if you factor in storage.
Not only that but the cost of renewables and storage is still coming down rapidly. You’d better hope that you’re not priced out of the energy market before your construction time plus payback period is up if you start building nuclear.
Lemmy most of the time: Makes fun of people always bringin up “the economy” as if that’s what’s really important
Also Lemmy when it comes to nuclear: “But the economy!”
What happens in case of a sudden abnormal weather event that blocks out most of the sunlight? Picture a super volcano eruption covering the sky in ashes for thousands of miles. Or think back to the extinction of dinosaurs, where after a meteorite crashed into earth the sun was blocked by dust for several years. Or just think about northern European countries that barely get any light in winter; Portugal is a very sunny country, we have invested a lot into solar, and sometimes we still get energy from Spain (who use nuclear btw).
Also, I’ve been hearing this whole “it takes too long to build nuclear plants” since at least early 2010s; imagine where we’d be if we’d just started building plants then. I can picture the same thing being said in 2035-2040, while fossil fuels still have not been completely dropped.
I’m not sure what kind of sudden weather event covers all the sun for Australia. Seems a little farcical
I already mentioned 2.
Or think back to the extinction of dinosaurs, where after a meteorite crashed into earth the sun was blocked by dust for several years.
Picture a super volcano eruption covering the sky in ashes for thousands of miles
Here’s a quote from the wiki on super volcanos:
Large-volume supervolcanic eruptions are also often associated with large igneous provinces, which can cover huge areas with lava and volcanic ash. These can cause long-lasting climate change (such as the triggering of a small ice age) and threaten species with extinction. The Oruanui eruption of New Zealand’s Taupō Volcano (about 25,600 years ago) was the world’s most recent VEI-8 eruption.
Also, you wouldn’t need it to cover all of Australia to be disastrous, just enough to block a significant amount of solar farms.
If you’re talking about an extinction level event like that which caused the death of the dinosaurs then I think we have bigger problems.
There are historical accounts of volcanic activity blocking the sky, I think in Europe, for a few years. For all we know it was the whole planet. That would definitely disrupt solar energy collection without being an extinction level event.
Diversity is a genuine factor of fossil fuel free energy generation.
Literally no sun for years would mean no crops which means everyone and all their animals would be dead
then I think we have bigger problems
Care to point them out? As I’ve said, and expect to be common knowledge on a (I would expect) scientifically leaning community, the dinosaurs weren’t killed by the meteor, their death was caused by the blacking out of the sun. You have access to energy, you can make air filters, grow food, purify water. If you don’t have energy, then you die.
Regardless, this is a deflection from the main point, that was merely an extreme example, even volcanic eruptions could cause huge disruptions if you depend too much on solar power.
Care to point them out? The fact all our crops would die is a big one
I think if a planet killer asteroid hits it won’t exactly matter our solar panels don’t work mate
sight
The meteor didn’t kill the dinosaurs, it was the dust cloud that did so by blacking out the sun. If you have sources of energy that are not reliant on the sun, it is very much possible to survive it. You can use artificial light to make grow food, and you can even make air processors if plants start dying. But you can’t do that if you have no power.
no shit. and if it happened now, the dust cloud would essentially kill our civilisation as we know it. a small percentage of people would survive, and it wouldn’t matter if they had nuclear power or not, there are other power sources other than solar. arguing for nuclear in case a planet killer blankets us in dust for decades might be the worst argument I’ve heard in favour of nuclear
I don’t think anyone mentioned the economy here in this thread, so I’m not sure what the relevance of that is unless I’m misunderstanding your criticism there.
For my comment specifically I’m not worried about the economy, but the unit cost of energy. Simply put if nuclear has a higher unit cost that means we can’t replace as much fossil fuel generation vs other lower unit cost sources of energy for the same price.
I agree with your criticism of folks complaining about the build time, back in 2010 it was probably worth building nuclear. That’s no longer the case and the fact that people (imo incorrectly) used this criticism in 2010 doesn’t mean that it’s invalid now in the mid 2020s.
Disasters is an interesting perspective to take and to be honest I haven’t really thought much about it before. You have, however, picked a very specific and unlikely event here and I’m wondering why you went with that. There are a great many potential disasters that can impact a power grid from earthquakes, extreme weather and even deliberate attacks or acts of sabotage. I think for most of these, having a more distributed grid is likely more resilient and these are much more realistic scenarios than a civilization ending level event like you described.
At the end of the day, we need to decarbonise immediately using the whatever technology is at hand. My criticism of nuclear is that it’s no longer the cheapest or fastest way to achieve that, but I’m open to being wrong. Your disaster scenario wasn’t particularly convincing though at least for me.
For my comment specifically I’m not worried about the economy, but the unit cost of energy. Simply put if nuclear has a higher unit cost that means we can’t replace as much fossil fuel generation vs other lower unit cost sources of energy for the same price.
I’ll put it another way so you might better understand my point: what would you have said 10 or 15 years ago when someone mentions that solar is a bad idea because it would cost more? Because up until recently it did cost more, and people did use it as an argument against it. And now your (and other people’s) main criticism of nuclear is that it’s not as cheap as an energy source that we’ve been heavily investing into for a decade.
You have, however, picked a very specific and unlikely event here
I showed several examples. The ones you mentioned, such as earthquakes, are not likely to affect one source more than another, but events which block out the sun obviously disproportionately affect the production of solar energy.
it’s no longer the cheapest or fastest way to achieve that
Neither was solar when we started to invest in it, as I mentioned earlier. That came from improving and investing in the technology - which also bumped solar into the safest energy source, right after nuclear, which used to be the safest.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at here to be honest. When nuclear was the fastest, cheapest option we should have been deploying that. Now that it’s not, we should still be deploying the fastest cheapest thing. Solar, wind and batteries continue to be on a rapidly declining cost curve, even back in 2010 but it was still too early to roll them out at huge scale. It’s unlikely nuclear will be catching up any time soon barring major breakthroughs like fusion.
I also strongly disagree with your statement that disasters would impact nuclear and renewables equally. One of these things is certainly much harder to clean up and recover than the other if there is significant damage from an environmental disaster.
We should be rolling out the best available technology at the current time and continuing to improve our generation technologies, including nuclear, as we always do. I’m not sure why we would do anything else.
I think I understand what he is getting at.
Your argument is that we should build the fastest, cheapest option.
Up until recently, fossil fuels were the fastest, cheapest option. He is getting at the point that by your logic, we never should have moved off of coal and gas and started investing in solar because it wasn’t fast and cheap.
People didn’t follow your logic and instead heavily invested in solar and wind until it actually became the fastest, cheapest option that it is today.
Nuclear could have a similar rise in fiscal efficiency if we invested in it.
But his original point is that you are focusing on “the fastest and cheapest” (i.e. what is best for “the economy”) which is the entire reason we are in this mess to begin with, because everyone wanted what was best for “the economy” and always kept the profitability of the energy companies as a high priority. This is the same thing you are repeating now.
We should not care what is the fastest and cheapest. We should be spending a metric fuck ton of all of our collective money to switch 100% over to green energy both in nuclear AND renewables . The worst thing that will happen with that plan is we overbuild and energy becomes very cheap and energy companies don’t get their precious profits. Again, “oh no the economy.” Nationalize energy. It doesn’t need to make a great profit, it needs to be severely regulated and it is a basic human utility in the modern day.
As for nuclear disasters, I would watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM&t=545s How many nuclear disasters has France had who has run on 70-90% nuclear power for many decades? As for spent nuclear fuel, spent coal ash is literally radioactive for longer than spent nuclear fuel and per unit energy it produces more radioactive waste and we have no qualms about that. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Kn2l3MoisDs We don’t even test for radioactivity around the extreme majority of coal plants in the world.
Oh yeah I see what you mean, that’s my bad then for not being clear. We should build the fastest, cheapest green option. Yes we should keep investing in nuclear generation research, if it becomes the best option in the future we should build it. Right now it’s not so we should build the best thing right now, is basically my view for the previously mentioned points.
I agree nuclear is safe, I’m not worried about that. The only reason we were discussing disasters was because it was brought up against solar. I think nuclear is a clean, safe option that should be on the table but it’s not the best option anymore.
Or think back to the extinction of dinosaurs, where after a meteorite crashed into earth
We now have the technology to alter the trajectories of asteroids (tested on the DART mission), and have a fairly comprehensive catalogue of the big ones. I don’t expect this to be an issue.
What happens in case of a sudden abnormal weather event that blocks out most of the sunlight
The neighbor has sun then. Buy it there. Or store the power.
Always the same old platitudes.
Australia doesn’t have neighbors…
Exactly. Sure, shutting down existing plants is dumb af (looking at you, Germany). But building new plants now with the aim of having an impact on climate change just isn’t the most effective decision.
Most of those were very old. I’m glad we’re not the ones who will find out how long you can really run one if those things before it fails.
That’s not precise. A nuclear plant can be built in like 5 years. And the supply chain is not the issue when you have lots of orders. But there are not many. It’s also not precise to say you can build huge amounts of renewables instead. Probably Spain doesn’t need nuclear, since it’s got plenty of sun. On the other hand many countries don’t have areas that have enough sun and consistent wind.
Id also say that the part you said that cost of renewables combined with storage would be a fraction of the cost, that is completely false.
A nuclear plant can be built in like 5 years.
Can you point to any nuclear plant in a Western country that was built in five years in the past thirty years or so?
And the supply chain is not the issue when you have lots of orders.
Seriously? Building reactor vessels is a very specialized task that only few suppliers are even capable of. Add to that uranium mining, fuel rod production, fuel logistics and a host of other components - and all that will just fall from the sky once enough orders are signed?
On the other hand many countries don’t have areas that have enough sun and consistent wind.
Germany is already at over 50%, many other countries are far ahead of that. Your point has no factual basis.
Id also say that the part you said that cost of renewables combined with storage would be a fraction of the cost, that is completely false.
Here’s a source
Can you point to any nuclear plant in a Western country that was built in five years in the past thirty years or so?
what about the rogue boyscout one
Use this one weird trick to get free energy from your old smoke detectors!
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why did you specify in the west :)? You know why you did that, because nuclear plants do get built in 5 years elsewhere.
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emm, yes very much so. Like you said, they’re are even a few suppliers who can do that. They just need enough orders for it to make sense.
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you should check that data again. Renewables are great, but some countries have better access than others. Right now Germany is building gas plants and burning coal and there is no end in sight for that.
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I might check that file later thanks, but what I’m taking about is just plain physics. You can not store enough energy today to make a big difference at any cost. And the cost is really high and can not be close to what a power plant can generate on the fly. It’s just can’t. Especially if you are taking lithium batteries.
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yup, and no waste issues that have to be held on site in cooling pools for decades (assuming a final storage point is ever resolved in your country).
we already know that we must improve transmission infrastructure across the board, if we’re going to have to do that either way, might as well embrace grid storage and go with as much renewable generation. AU, your Great Australian desert could power most of the southern pacific if you want to get wild :D
This boggle my mind. We turn out about one or two nuclear subs a year. It really shouldn’t take that long.
Also, let’s not forget Uranium has a finite supply. A few years ago the IAEA estimated that at high usage scenarios (which might actually be happening now), by 2040 28% of remaining supplies would be used. Depending on different factors, that could either accelerate and run out not too long after, which is even for us a pretty short time. Other estimates were thinking up to about 200 years left, at current rates, 10 years ago so indeed not taking AI etc into account.
In the nineties they said there is only 30 years worth of oil at that times consumption.
If the need arises, we will find the uranium.
Source? I was a kid in the seventies and the OPEC shit show brought a lot of fresh of discussion and investigation into peak oil, and that was expected to be around now , but nobody I heard from said it would run out. Have some wikipedia with that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
May I quote that the predictions were decent, however “It has been recognized that conventional oil production has peaked around 2005–2006. What has prevented peak oil from then on is US tight oil which rapidly increased since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. Additionally, but to a lesser extent, Canadian oil-sands production has helped increase oil supply since 2008.”So yes, more sources were found, however they were mostly obtainable by tight oil, AKA fracking, and as we all know, fracking is economically viable only when all environmental and other damage is externalised.
Lol. Relax. Seriously, take a few deep breaths and maybe turn off your device for an hour.
Nobody cares about what you wrote. It’s not even the topic of conversation.
I care about what they wrote
Mkay…
There are 4 billion tons of uranium in the ocean
There’s also a fuckton of gold in the ocean, just waiting for someone to figure out how to filter the entire ocean and pull out the individual atoms. All at a profitable price point.
Same with uranium. Which means it’ll never happen.
We will have cracked fusion, mined the far side of the moon for helium3 and brought it back to terra before we crack that nut
For context; we’ve only mined ~200k tonnes of gold historically with an estimate ~50k tonnes left. The ocean holds 20milion tonnes, worth over $770Trillion and it’s not cost effective to get it out.
The environmental damage you will cause by digging shit up from the oceans, if that’s even possible, will be insane. Absolutely insane, completely bonkers, but it does prove once again that nuclear fanbois don’t give a rat’s arse about the environment.
You don’t have to dig anything, it’s literally in the water, you could filter it out. In theory.
You must be obnoxious on purpose, pulling our legs here, right? By the time we’ve collected enough for one fuel rod, humanity will either be extinct or evolved into some sort of powerful plasma creatures https://spectrum.ieee.org/uranium-from-seawater
How did you get that conclusion from the article you linked? The article talks about a material that can recover 6.63 mg/g per week of uranium from seawater, so a ton of it would produce just over 10lbs/week. If you produce a large enough amount of that material and put it to work it will add up to a useful amount of uranium in a short amount of time.
Too bad we closed the door on thorium reactors, I bet whoever made that decision is really
upsetrich right now
The alternative for base load is batteries, not wind and solar renewables, since they are intermittent. We don’t have a good idea yet of just how expensive massive grid storage is yet, but the lead time would definitely be shorter.
We do though. The cost is really land and rust. Iron oxide batteries are cheap and long lasting but low power density. Perfect for grid storage in a lot of places.
The alternative to base load is load shifting, just move most loads to when enough power is available. Or in other words, base load is a thing because big power plants like nuclear and coal are slow and someone’s gotta use that power at all times.
Load shifting is the destruction of economic value, because it means people are making choices that aren’t optimal for their own lives.
Time is often written off in economic considerations, but that’s unwise because time is the most limited resource people have.
Most work is done when the sun is shining. Appliances can be remote controlled or automated. Studies have show that only 10% of energy consumption has to be „smart“ to cut off 90% of the duck curve. The rest can be done with batteries and other storage.
Drill a hole and a deper hole and pump/turbine water between them.
That’s really really expensive unless you already have natural upper and lower reservoirs.
It is? More than batteries?
Im surprised.
Based on some numbers I looked up a couple of years ago:
LiPo 15¢/Wh
Flywheel 15¢/Wh
Compressed air 12¢/Wh
Pumped hydro 11¢/Wh
I’ll try to dig up the sources when I get home, but the cost advantage isn’t too large, so digging your own reservoirs would put it as more expensive.
Thanks! I guess the hydro is with natural reservoirs?
Yeah I think so
Just cause lithium ion is pretty subsidied and quite energy dense
No way. Far too expensive.
Can Nuclear plant electricity production be run in a decentralised way? No?! Not yet!?
Do we have alternatives to nuclear? Yes!?
We should avoid nuclear then.
The time for nuclear was decades ago.
Now it’s being pushed by fossil fuel shills, who’d love nothing more than a gratuitously expensive 20 year boondoggle to let them have free reign over power generation for all that time, and to simultaneously nix any green plans with “but the nuclear is on its way!”
For a country with a huge amount of land and shore, that makes sense for them. But some form of nuclear (uranium fission, thorium fission, fusion?!) continues to be an important part of the world’s weaning off of fossil fuels
The political context here is that the Australian conservatives (the liberal coalition I suppose), who have been vividly against climate policies and renewables, are now trying to propose nuke projects on coal power plant sites. Many of these coal power plants are soon to be phased out with renewables plus storage in the queue for the freed transmission capacity, so there isn’t really any advantages these sites can offer for nuke projects decades from now.
Of course, any realistic realization of nukes in Australia would be no earlier than 2040 (some even suggest 2050), by then they could already get 100% renewable in energy system easily.
Who would have thought a political appointment is political.
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Exactly. Building nuclear power plants in the 80s should’ve been the way humanity went. Now, advancements in batteries (Sodium ion for example) and established supply chains means that solar/wind + batteries is the way to go.
I don’t agree with ur safety take on nuclear energy though. All nuclear energy accidents were the result of shitty operational management who were warned waaaay before. It’s like airlines in the 60s, where safety standards were hilariously bad. Now, with extremely stringent regulations, we can solve the safety issues.
Shitty operational management is systemic in organisations that operate huge centralized systems though. see: normal accidents accidents
I would disagree. Take a look at airplanes for instance. Good safety policy measures and enforcement can make seemingly high risk operations incredibly safe. Take a look at French nuclear reactors for example. Good nuclear safety policies, hence no accidents.
Take a look at airplanes for instance.
Those things that Boeing builds?
Less people die on airplanes than other modes of transport. So yeah, that’s the level of safety despite Boeing’s bullshit.
Less people travel by planes than other modes of transport.
If you look unitary numbers, planes in general are safer than most things, not by any absurd margin. And Boeing has more than one model that just isn’t safer than most things.
That should show you how bad management can destroy any kind of safety policy. But I guess it won’t, not by fault of the facts.
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Japan has high safety standards
Nobody died at Fukushima and it was an outdated designed reactor that needed to be retrofitted.
You stated that all nuclear a accidents were the fault of lax standards. I gave you a counter example.
Just wanna add that storing energy can also be done in other forms than electricity. For example, pump water up a hill with solar energy during daytime, and use turbines and gravity during the night
Those forms of energy storage r very location dependent and also quite cost inefficient. Chemical batteries make sense almost everywhere. The only problem is shitty Lithium. Replacing it with sodium ion kinda solves all problems.
harness it,
Getting more efficient and cost effective at a rapid pace. Still some environmental concerns over manufacturing, raw materials acquisition, and disposal of old equipment.
store it,
Getting more efficient and cost effective at a less rapid pace. Still significant environmental concerns over manufacturing, raw materials acquisition, and disposal of old equipment.
then distribute it.
Lots of effort and resources needed for this part. Need to subsidize consumer appliance conversion better.
Nuclear waste is incredibly safe and disasters simply don’t happen anymore because of how strict safety protocols are
It’s all very well claiming that nuclear waste storage is safe but you can’t guarantee anything can be kept safe for 10000 years. Humans haven’t managed that for anything, ever.
You can’t really guarantee anything. What we do is play the odds. And the odds are pretty good.
Except you have no emperical basis for judging the accuracy of those odds.
Actually I do. Simply look at injured people because of nuclear power and compare them to injured people because of any alternative.
Irrelevant to storing nuclear waste for 10000 years, which was what I was talking avout
well we’ve been storing nuclear waste for decades so we can extrapolate
That’s like saying we don’t know if the sun will come up tomorrow, because we can’t see in the future.
Yes, you can.
It’s been stored in the ground since the earth was formed.
Not in a highly refined form
It’s been stored in the ground since the earth was formed.
“not in a highly refined form”
I certainly agree that we’ve gotten much better at safely producing and storing. However, with climate change worsening, we continue to have unprecedented natural disasters in unexpected areas which concerns me the most.
What kind of climate change disaster do you think would cause problems with nuclear waste storage?
This getting heavily downvoted with no replies shows just how much of anti-nuclear is simply based on propaganda and fearmongering, not science. Nuclear is the second safest energy source in the world, nearly tied with solar for first, and actually was the first until not too long ago. And that is despite the heavy investment into renewables and disinvestment into nuclear. If anyone is that worried about the dangers of nuclear to people and the environment, they should turn their attention to hydro-energy (not to speak of fossil fuels, obviously).
What are even the major disasters regarding nuclear? One, Chernobyl, was in the USSR in the 80s; does anyone remember what phones looked like in the 80s? The other was in Fukushima, which is located in a country known for earthquakes and tsunamis, and it was not build to handle such events; and it still was nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl. I think I’ve also heard about one in the UK, but that was in the fucking 50s, and even smaller than Fukushima.
The US had the 3 mile island disaster in the 70s. But I think the actual radioactive release was negligible.
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Fukushima was not a nuclear waste storage site
Some countries have sun, some don’t. They might need nuclear. That is the reality.
Which countries? The UK is famous for its cloudy weather, yet solar is feasible there. Finland and Sweden are building more and more solar. Not sure where you’re talking about.
UK has wind.
I’m taking east Europe for instance.
FWIW, Baltic countries are going hard for solar, see https://lemmy.world/post/17098210
Baltics powered by Finnish and Swedish nuclear.
Well, that’s a bald-faced lie. Maybe if we were only talking about Lithuania, which does import big chunk of its energy budget from Sweden, but Estonia and Latvia generate most of their energy on their own - and according to the linked article, plan to generate even more in near future.
Context is everyting. Here’s some cold hard facts for you:
As of 00:00 on 19/07/2024:
Country From % MW Estonia Finland 37% 358 Latvia Estonia 33% 325 Lithuania Sweden 40% 733 % being the overall percentage of electricity consumption.
So >1GW imported from SE/FI out of ~4GW total in the Baltics is imported from countries with 40-50% nuclear baseload.
source https://electricitymaps.com/
Everyone is or at least tries to portray they are. Your article could be written for almost any country in the world.
But that doesn’t mean a country can be run on solar alone.
Who is suggesting solar alone?
Many people seem to think that’s the idea. I don’t know about you, but when you frame the discussion as solar vs nuclear, that is what you are suggesting.
No, the article definitely could not be written for any country in the world, because it lists concrete actions, numbers for past few years, and concrete plans for next few years.
But judging from your comments here and elsewhere in the thread, you do not care about discussion, and will move goalposts whenever it suits you. You are not a nice person. So, PLONK.
Not true. You don’t seem to know much about energy policies in EU.
But well… Bye
Why does eastern Europe get less sunlight?
It’s like 3 am there
Less than Spain. There is a winter. Geography and suitable areas less common. Distribution network made for power plants.
Nuclear plants can be a better cost effective fit.
Darkovia has zero sun
Until a weather event blocks out most of the sunlight. An extreme scenario would be what happened to the dinosaurs, however smaller scale versions or that, such as large volcano eruptions, seem entirely possible and could heavily restrict the amount of sunlight you have access to for long periods of time.
Portugal lies in Southern Europe, we get plenty of sun, and we make heavy use of solar, but that still isn’t enough sometimes, and I’m pretty sure we sometimes get our energy from Spain, who themselves use nuclear.
