Uranium is $128.30/kg
After enrichment, conversion and fabrication that’s $3400/kg for 4.95% fuel.
At 36-45MWd/kg and a net thermal efficiency of 25% or $12.5/MWh up front.
With a 90 month lead time (72 month fuel cycle and 18 months inventory) at 3% this is $16.2/MWh
Are we talking just nameplate capacity or including the energy storage needs in the price? It’s not really apples to apples unless you compare the costs of running each 24/7
And are we taking into account safe storage of nuclear waste for thousands of years (which we as civilization still don’t even have) or not?
Today’s journalists are really superficial.
That’s what blew me away. People keep saying a lot of hand wavy stuff about storage but when you really dig into there isn’t a great solution other than keeping an eye on it for a few hundred years. Making private company’s responsible for stuff that generates no profits and requires repeated Inspection’s and maintenance doesn’t sound good to me.
We absolutely need nuclear. But we should approach it cautiously. I don’t think discussion about nuclear is as cautious as it should be. But that’s par for the course with humanities track record
There’s no need to consider nuclear. The power storage requirements for a 100% - epsilon renewable grid are vastly smaller than the amount of battery that will be deployed to EVs in the next few years.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
Those batteries can be used either after they degrade to the point where the EV needs a new one, or while still in the EV if a small fraction of owners participate in V2G.
Additionally the accessible uranium reserves cannot make a significant impact on the world’s energy requirements.
In 8 million tonnes of accessible natural uranium there are about 56,000 tonnes of U235. Fissioning all of this yields around 5000EJ of thermal energy Exhausting all techniques of reprocessing and breeding that have actually ever worked, there’s about 10,000EJ.
The world used 620EJ of primary energy last year so the absolute most generous interpretation is there are 16 years of accessible fission energy, In any realistic scenario it’s much, much less.
The amount of energy that can be provided via fission with current technology isn’t a meaningful contribution and can’t be deployed in a meaningful timeframe.
There may be niches where GW scale LWRs are a much better choice than other options. On the off chance they do crop up, what little uranium 235 there is should be reserved for those.
It still sounds crazy to most people : it’s a long way to go that should be paved for speeding up modern consciousness.
Fun fact, That “thousands of years” of storage is entirely a man made limitation.
95% of nuclear waste is unspent fuel. That’s the source of the “thousands of years” waiting for the more energetic parts of the unspent fuel to decay.
There are a couple of nasty decay side products that last a long time in there, but those can also be fed into a reactor to be burned away. That’s about 1% of waste. (mostly plutonium)
Pretty much everything else, the remaining ~4% or so of waste, is only really super dangerous for about 60-90 years, and only radioactive for about 300.
Another fun fact, a lot of that 4% is actually valuable in various industry, including nuclear medicine.
I always point to this video on the subject.
Sadly, Jimmy Carter signed a ban on refining waste, and then got it incorporated into some international agreements. He thought we would just bury the waste again, it came out of the Earth, it could go back in until we were ready to refine it and move on. Sadly, Nymbyism killed that plan.
Are we talking about present or future?
Nuclear has a chance in thorium and malten salt reactors, uranium is made for nuclear booms, not for safe energy generation.
Sadly, no one is investing enough in thorium and malten salt to make it available in next 10-20 years, we have better chance in fusion than thorium.
Until than, sorry, but while you are right, that technology is not yet available.
Okay, some basic physics here, to make thorium useful, you have to convert it to uranium (specifically uranium-234)
That’s how a molten salt reactor functions, they use a seed of fissile material to breed the thorium into protactinium, which then decays into uranium.
Once you have the u-234, you can use it to breed the thorium, but you do need that seed of either u-235 or plutonium.
As for u-235 and u-238, well, those are full of harvestable energy as well. U-235 is what we burn in reactors because u-238 is fertile, not fissile. U-238 breeds up to p-239, which can explode if you know what you’re doing, but can also be burned in a reactor for massive amounts of power.
We have the technology to do all of this right now. It’s not 10-20 years out, it’s today. What we don’t have is an easy way to overcome decades of oil company anti-nuclear propaganda.
It’s U233
So it is… That’s what I get for typing that completely by memory.
U-234 is the side product… It’s another fertile form of uranium that can form when you don’t get the protactinium out fast enough…
You also get U232 and a bunch of other actinides. Then you have to turn your reactor off because the void coefficient and delayed neutron fraction keep changing and you don’t want it to go prompt critical.
Then you have a bunch of gamma emitting salt there’s no clean or affordable chemical process for separating, and you leave it lying around for 50 years before finally burying it at huge expense.
You did get the benefit of pointing to your failed experiment every time someone points out that LWRs are unsustainable though, so that’s nice.
Maybe BN-800 will finally be run in breeding mode but not as an obvious shell game to make weapons grade plutonium now that it’s more than a year old and catching fire as often as every other sodium cooled reactor?
No breeder program has ever worked. The best was a couple of low burnup proofs of concept of breeding. They all failed trying to do proof of concept for the reprocessing step – usually after many billions in subsidies.
Running a full fuel load of the steady-state isotope mix hasn’t even been attempted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superphénix
Super Phoenix was a prototype super breeder reactor built in France. It has issues in the first years (normal for a prototype) but by the end it was running with an availability of 96%.
Like every other program, if it never made more fissile material than was loaded with, and then ran on that material, it’s just a U235 reactor that caught fire more often
Also you’re lying about the second part https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=178
You see, the rule of thumb is very easy. If a nukebro or industry PR tells you something, there’s a 96% chance it’s a lie until someone else checked and they backpedalled at least 5 times. This is in spite of being forced to report the truth through other channels much of the time.
This is a myth. Fissile isn’t fertile. No breeding program has ever worked and none even aspire to burn all the actinides.
You’re also pretending the only waste product is spent fuel.
95% of waste is un-burnt uranium. That’s the full truth.
The 1% of waste that’s plutonium is the full reason we don’t allow reprocessing or breeding programs. Even though there’s no evidence of any country using their civilian nuclear power program to create weapons.
No, they use their military nuclear programs to do that.
If you watch the video, it covers all of it. Every side product, every decay product, and it walks it through several thousand years of decay.
You’re still trying to conflate U238 which isn’t a fissile element with nuclear fuel. This is a lie. It’s like saying plastic waste is un-fusioned carbon and hydrogen and is actually nuclear fuel. By the most tortured definition it is true, but you have not communicated anything. Instead you are intentionally misleading.
You’re also trying to pretend U238 and Pu239 are where the danger is. Pu240, Am and fission products are the radioactive part. Extracting the Pu239 doesn’t change the dangerous radioactivity meaningfully.
You’ve also doubled down on pretending spent fuel is the only waste product. 95% of the waste by volume is not high level waste and most of the high level waste is not spent fuel.
This propaganda technique and method of lying is called paltering.
U-238 is fuel, you just need to run a reactor type that was mostly banned in the 70s. Otherwise u-238 is not a big deal to handle. If you don’t want to burn it, just bury it where you found it, or convert it to the oxide and mix it with a few thousand gallons of water before dumping it out at sea. (which is where 99% of uranium can be found)
And yeah, plutonium is the dangerous stuff, but it’s also the best fuel you can get. Sure, Pu-240 is an issue, but it’s also solvable. And by solvable, I mean that it’s one more neutron away from being fuel again. This does slow the reaction, after all, it takes multiple neutrons to become fissile again. Pu-241 is back to being fuel. Pu-242 is not fuel, but also has a low cross-section.
That video I linked talks about all of this. It runs through a typical burn of a light water reactor, and breaks down what percentage of everything is in the waste, from day one out to several hundred thousand years. It also gives a dollar amount for each part on the open market.
Even so, if you really don’t want the transuranics, just use the thorium cycle. There are a dozen reactor designs that can handle thorium. We just need to let people build them.
Working breeder programs are a myth and condescendingly telling me to watch a video taking a narrow myopic view of things I already know (which ignores all the important points) isn’t helping your point.
Show me where I can find documentation of a reactor running on U238 or Th which actually worked for a complete fuel cycle and wasn’t just the same breeding ratio as a U235 but with extra steps.
You’ve also not addressed the hard bit either, which happens outside the reactor.
Also nobody banned breeders, breeder programs are still eating huge amounts of public money and failing to do anything useful in india and china to this day. Superphenix and Monju also weren’t banned in the 70s. Nor were the BN reactors.
The only reason they exist is for plausible deniability on filthy loss-making Pu separation equipment for weapons, and for people like you to palter with.
Oh you’re a lftr bro.
Do you realise how hilarious it is that your proposed solution to mineral scarcity and toxicity of the product lifecycle is 2kg of beryllium per capita?
This is just the marginal cost of the front end of the cycle ignoring the back end and all other fixed or marginal costs.
Ie. If you already have bought an SMR in a high-solar-resource region, is it cheaper to buy fuel to run it during the day or to buy solar panels instead and turn it off. The answer being it’s a wash right now, but uranium is going up for the moment and solar is going down for now.
Safe storage of nuclear waste hasn’t been an issue for decades. You see it comes from this place called the ground, and goes back into this place called the ground. I know, it’s like science fiction.
It is comparing the cost of nuclear fuel to generate a kWh of electricity vs the cost of a solar to generate a kWh of electricity in what is a great location.
So it excludes the entire construction cost of the nuclear plant as well as operating the nuclear plant. It also excludes any sort of storage costs for running the grid with solar. However we are talking about the UAE for solar, so cloudy days without sunshine are basicly not a thing. So you really only need a nights worth of batterie storage. Most consumption happens during the day, so we are talking maybe a third of total generation would need to be stored. So for a MWh of daily use and $333/kWh. Given that you need 333.3kWh of storage, which costs $111,000 total.
Since this is only fuel costs thou and the nuclear plant has to be built as well, which is not included in fuel costs. So lets look at what 1MWh a day would cost in terms of nuclear power plant. Olkiluoto3 was just finished for $12billion for 1,600MW or $312,500 for a MWh per day.
So in this case you are basicly betting that a nuclear power plant lasts three times longer then the battery storage and battery storage costs are not falling, which is propably not going to be the case. Also a bunch of technologies do not care too much about when they get power. If you for example have super cheap electrolysis to produce hydrogen during the day, that is an intressting use case. Also grids propably have more then just one power source, so stuff like wind power, hydro and so forth might also be options in some grids and solar prices are falling over time.
This particular pearl clutch is even stupider than usual when it was already explicitly not apples to apples. For a time-dependent load you have the other 90% of the budget for the nuclear reactor to figure out storage (or to meet daytime loads or flexible loads).
This comparison is fuelling an SMR you already have vs. turning it off but continuing to staff it and pay for the back end of the fuel cycle as if it were running when it’s sunny and running solar instead.
If the marginal cost of the SMR is higher than the all-in cost of solar, then it is always optimal to build the PV array (so long as the grid is not saturated with solar) even if you already have surplus nuclear. So the much bigger portion of the SMR cost (the reactor and fixed O&M) has to justify itself just on the loads that solar cannot feed.
Of course this is not true everywhere yet (and this does not apply to more efficient large reactors), but the niche for SMRs is smaller than traditional reactors and shrinking.
Why is it always comparing solar vs nuclear. What we need to compare them against is fossil fuels. Nuclear and renewables should be used together if we want to phase out fossil fuel in a timely manner.
The two are compared because money is not infinite and there’s an opportunity cost to picking either one
It’s Dubai we’re talking about here, money is infinite as far as they’re concerned. The alternative to nuclear for a baseline will always be fossil fuels until we can store the surplus of renewables efficiently, which is arguably further away than SMRs.
There has been some cool innovation in renewable energy storage such as pairing it with hydro and pumping water back up using access electricity during peak production.
I love these fiction land scenarios that magically change the landscape.
Woah there I’m just saying it’s cool not that I think it’ll save the world or anything.
The innovation is there but it’s not viable yet for a country, or even city wide grid. Hydro is okay but severely limited by geography, rocks up a mountain could work too but it’s also limited by geography to some extent.
This comparison is whether you should build current gen solar in a good location instead of running proposed cheap nuclear plants during the day even after building it.
“let’s do both” is just a delay tactic when only one works and both time and resources are limited.
If your resources aren’t limited and you can afford to pay 20c to abate a kg of CO2 even after saturating the renewable pipeline, then buy solar for anyone in the sunny parts of the global south and abate 15kg of CO2 with the same cost (as well as making their country, health and economy more stable). If you’ve funded all of that, then it’s worth comparing the nuclear reactor to other methods for filling the gaps.
Nobody has committed to step 1 yet, so it’s moot.
Let’s do both works when the alternative is fossil fuels and when we shouldn’t invest a dime more into them as energy sources.
Cool. Sane people can keep building renewables with the tiny margins of funding on the edges, and you can wrest the $7tn/yr of unfunded externalities from the fossil fuel industry. Once you do that we can spend half on nuclear.
I’m very much pro renewables, but without nuclear, ditching fossil fuels for good is a pipe dream. (Look at Germany.) At least until we have proper storage solutions or fusion is viable.
This is more empty rhetoric. What are we even supposed to see when looking at germany? A country whose renewable rollout was sabotaged by a government literally working for gazprom, but is still reducing emissions every year?
If you look at Germany, you see a country which has one of the highest CO2 emission per capita in Europe. Completely agree on the Russian corruption that helped closing the nuclear power plants and slowed down deployment of renewable. In the meantime they’re literally scraping the ground and razing towns to get more lignite to compensate for the closure of their plants. On a totally unrelated note, they’re also buying large amount of nuclear sourced electricity from France. Their carbon intensity even increased two years in a row. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity-power-sector-germany/)
On a totally unrelated note, Germany is net exporting electricity to France every year for decades. This is including this year. The other commentor actually posted a link showing that.
Then I have to ask which towns have been destroyed in Germany for lignite in the last couple years. I know of some villages, but towns are much larger then that.
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Greens and german people in 2000s: Let’s build renewables and then shut down the nuclear fleet because it’s cheaper than the maintenance we’d have to start now.
Literal Gazprom employee and “Close friend of Putin” together: Let’s cancel that and buy gas instead, and also shut down the nuclear plants early.
Emissions: Go down almost monotonically.
Coal use: Goes down almost monotonically.
Russia shills, oil shills and nukebros: How could the greens make emissions go up with their renewables! Better cancel renewables like the Gazprom employee tried to do!
And here’s your “large amount” of between 0.5 and 3%
You sound comically stupid.
Cool story. Yet it’s coal plants and gas plants are going up everywhere in first world countries for baseline supply. That’s another 2 decades of fossil fuels.
Or we can just not pay them and let them go bankrupt by putting solar and batteries directly on loads instead…
Hahaha
How is it that only one works? Nuclear seems more expensive based on this but does it take into account the cost of land, the fact that solar is intermittent, or that electricity from huge solar farms will need to be brought to where the demand is (cities) while nuclear can be much closer to limit losses. Both nuclear and solar have their place and are vital tools in the fight against climate change. The comparison is for the local utilities to decide and trying to compare directly and saying one is always better than the other is ignorant at best.
I don’t have a nuclear reactor on my roof so whatever weird situation with transmission you are imagining is definitely wrong. Nor can I grow fruit under a nuclear reactor with higher yield and less water. Same goes for land use when you look at the low energy density of new uranium mines (inkai produces about 10-60W/m^2 depending on whether you draw the borders at the region it poisons and makes useless, the whole fenced off strike or the actively mined region). “Hey we can push the harm to the imperial periphery and make our energy supply dependent on putin” isn’t a selling point.
Solar doesn’t randomly break with no warning for several weeks on average once a year on top of having to be offline for three months every two years. It’s intermittent, but fairly predictable.
There’s no indication anywhere that nuclear can achieve more than about a 75% grid penetration (which is what VRE alone with negligible storage does) nor that it synergises at all. Inflexible unreliable power limited supply doesn’t help flexible intermittent supply, you need dispatch for both.
Nuclear is also completely unable to deliver more than about 10% of the needed total energy. There’s not enough recoverable U235 anywhere.
It’s an irrelevant rounding error by every metric except cost and the amount of oxygen the shills suck out of the room.
It’s not that solar is better, it’s that nuclear is not a useful addition by any metric. One of the frequently used arguments to delay decarbonisation is that the nuclear reactor which will arrive later will be so much better, so don’t build renewables now. If it’s still optimal to build solar over about 60% of the world even if the mythical SMR delivers on the same promise new designs always make (and never meet), then there’s no reason to wait.
Did you use chat gpt or something because almost all of what you said made no sense in the context of this discussion. I, like most people, don’t have a solar panel on my roof and nor is it practical to have one. If large cities are to have enough electricity for all of their energy needs, massive solar farms will be needed. I live in Ontario, Canada, a large area with a relatively small population. In a study looking at what is needed to meet future electricity demand, if we only used renewables, around 2-5% of the area would need to be covered by solar or wind. This sounds small but it is a huge amount of land and would be extremely resource intensive. Much of it would need to be far away from where the demand actually is leading to losses in transmission. Farming under solar panels is also laughable because it would render the farming itself impractical or the solar itself much more expensive because it would need to be on a massive raised platform. I am not sure what you are referring to with mines but Canada has one of the largest uranium reserves located in somewhat remote locations. This does not lead to transmission losses, only costs to transport the uranium ore.
Canadian CANDU reactor units can be online for more than a year thanks to their online refueling capabilities. Intermittent is still intermittent which is why solar needs a way to either store energy or it cannot be the only solution (it isn’t).
I am not sure what you mean by grid penetration but CANDU reactors have an average capacity factor of more than 80% which is significantly higher than the less than 25% for solar.
Also, Ontario is currently generating more than 50% of its electricity from nuclear so it can certainly meet more than 10% of the demand if it is suitable for the region.
Where are they delaying decarbonization for the sake of waiting for nuclear? As far as I know, many places are building wind and solar and nothing is stopping them. I am not trying to argue that solar is bad or worse than nuclear. I just think it should be realistically considered alongside of nuclear and any other carbon neutral energy source.
Grid penetration isn’t capacity factor. Learn to read.
Also look up one of the thousands of agrivoltaics projects where it improves yield and reduces water.
And Canada. Canada is precisely where “plans” for new nuclear are being used as an excuse to delay wind (even temporarily banning it).
Did you really tell me to learn to read when you clearly did not read that I am not sure what grid penetration is. Funny. The reason I do not know is because the term is used differently depending on the context so unless you explain what you mean, there is no way for me to know for sure, unlike capacity factor which is used more widely.
I’m sure there are agrivoltaic projects and I am sure they are great. My point is that they will have many challenges to be widely adopted because it will add significant costs to either the farming or the solar installation which is certainly a downside that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Canada isn’t delaying wind because of nuclear. The cancellation of wind projects in Ontario was long before there were any new-nuclear plans, many of which were announced very recently. It had more to do with the limited value and high cost of the wind projects at the time. I do believe that now it is much more suitable and Ontario should invest more into wind and solar projects because they offer tremendous value. However they are. Not the only solution to the ongoing energy crisis. Also, as an aside, other than decarbonization initiatives, Canada does control the energy market on a federal level but at a provincial level.
In a place like Saudi Arabia, solar is fantastic and should make up a sizable portion of installed capacity. However, it should still be backed by a mix to improve grid reliability and this is true for many other places also. The prospect of advanced nuclear reactors should not and as far as I know does not hold back the advancement of renewables.
That sure was a lot of words for “I haven’t looked at Alberta lately”.
Also the agrivoltaic cost pearl clutching is deranged. “What if it costs a third as much as what I’m proposing like already built projects at the same latitude with worse solar resource.”
Don’t like facts getting in the way of juicy greenwashing lies hey.
Renewables can’t be used without the same amount of storage full stop. 3 days is the standard minimum. Their isn’t enough lithium in the world let alone money to make it feasible.
So back on planet earth. Storage is an inescapable necessity for renewables conveniently left out.
Let’s assume that wasn’t at least two different lies (here is an example of an irder of magnitude less) and take it at face value that there isn’t enough lithium.
The current scale of the battery industry is roughly 1TWh/yr of production (with 3TWh/yr where the contracts are already dry).
A 72 hour storage means feeding the load the batteries supply takes at least 14GW (much more if it’s non-uniform).
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/reactors.html#tab=status;status=C;grid--prevStart=2023,2024
Looks like whatever the batteries are being used for, the current nuclear industry can neither replace them nor can it charge them.
Now onto the assertion that the current largest-growing technology is the only possible thing that can be used, and no new resource can be found.
~22 million tonnes of lithium each kg good for a ~10kWh battery, or enough for 220TWh of batteries or 0.8EJ
6-8 million tonnes of uranium 100-140GJ of electricity per kg of natural uranium.
All of the uranium can charge batteries made from all of the lithium roughly 1000 times! So a whole 8 years of doing whatever the batteries are for.
On a 6 year fuel cycle (normal for a Gen III reactor) each kg of uranium outputs rougjly 750W over its life so there’s 4.5-6TW. That’s enough for a 72 hour cycle, but not much shorter, and not if there’s any variation from average load.
Current retail price of consumer ready batteries is $280/kWh for a plug and play unit or $20/W for 72 hour storage (same as vogtle or ol3). Commodity price is $110.
Oh look, the idea that storage is being ignored or is not up to some task that can be achieved with LWRs is another fatuous lie.
Good
Yeah, if you only want meaningful power on a sunny day in daylight hours.
Where’s all this paradigm changing battery tech I keep hearing is on the way for 20 years?
They still generate power even on overcast days. Think about the difference between the middle of the night and an overcast day. It’s still a considerable amount of light.
From experience, I’m aware that they do.
A small fraction of what they generate in direct sunlight.
It’s not a small fraction it’s less but it’s not a small fraction.
Overcast days typically generate about 40% of what they would generate on a sunny day. Remember temperature isn’t relevant, in fact they don’t actually like being too hot, so weirdly solar panels might actually not work very well in the Sahara desert.
So unless you regularly have to deal with San Francisco style fog, and basically only San Francisco has fog like that because it’s quite a weird microclimate, you’ll be alright with solar pretty much anywhere in the world that isn’t inside the Arctic circle.
If the alternative to 50c/W solar is paying $20/W, you only need it to run at 2.5% of nameplate to come out ahead.
No It’s not the fallacy you describe
It arrived over the last 5 years.
Additionally diurnal storage is required for nuclear to meet a variable load anyway (as an 8hr battery is $2.5/W vs $20/W for additional reactor capacity). So the comparison then becomes building the nuclear reactor to run at <25% load factor vs. filling the rest of the load with any other method.
You just don’t need that much storage and at the same time battery storage is already being installed at an exponential rate, much like PV started to some 15 years ago. We also already have hydro and gas peaker plants that aren’t going anywhere for the next 10ish years.
