Even if you could magically increase the number of nuclear reactors started before 2012 tenfold to keep up with wind and solar, you’d have to triple uranium mining overnight to fuel them for the first time.

Paltering.

Corn and soy grown for the purpose of large animal feed exceeds the amount of cropland used directly for human consumption in areas where <20% of calories and protein come from red meat.

Another solution would be adding some intelligence to water heaters. Have a temperature control valve on the output where you set the temperature, and program the water heater get to 160-180°F when electricity is cheap. This would be a thermal battery that would easily level out demand for electricity for heating water.

This has been done for close to a century in wind or run of river hydro heavy countries (as well as some coal ones).

The water heater has a buffer tank and is attached to a meter that only runs when a signal is sent across the power line. This stores about 20kWh for a 300L tank.

Modern insulation would allow going up to a few m^3 for a couple weeks’ worth.

Yes. It costs less and requires less mining to use the most expensive and wasteful storage option. The only reason there aren’t more is a lack of sufficient investment in VRE required to make them useful.

Adding 1GW that runs 80% of the time with months long outages to a grid that has 10GW of power available 95% of the time and 3GW 5% of the time doesn’t fix the issue and requires charging $4000/MWh rather than merely $200/MWh to pay back your boondoggle.

All the people chanting “baseload” understand this but pretend not to.

Four points:

The profile of other is short spikes 5-100 hours a few times a year.

1 year of delay is equivalent to 20 years of exclusively using fossil fuels for “other”.

It’s not even obvious that adding nuclear reactors would reduce this because they’re so geographically and temporally inflexible. France has 63GW of nuclear capacity, <45GW of average load and 61GW of winter peak load with vast amounts of storage available via interconnect to hydro countries. They still use 5% gas on top of the rest of the “other” (which is about 10-25GW).

5% of other from gas adds about 20g CO2e/kg per kWh to the total. Less than the margin between different uranium sources.

Running 40% of the capacity 10% of the time puts your nuclear energy in the realm of $1-3/kWh. The list of ways of generating or storing 6% of your energy for <$1/kWh is basically endless.

That’s about 4-8TW of capacity worldwide. 1kg of uranium is good for fuelling about 750W of reactor on a 6 year fuel cycle. Loading those reactors would require digging up all of the known and assumed-to-exist uranium immediately.

Nuclear is an irrelevant distraction being pushed by those who know it will not work. You only have to glance at the policy history or donor base of the politicians pushing for it in Sweden, Canada, Australia, UK, Poland, etc etc or the media channels pushing it to see how obvious it is that it’s fossil fuel propaganda.

It is obviously obviously true that it’s a non-solution. It fails on every single metric. All of the talking points about alleged advantages are the opposite of the truth without exception.

When you demand free insurance from someone they get to set the risk profile.

Tell you what. You put up collateral equal to the value of any nearby city and everything in it, and you can stop ALARA.

Also even with that it’s still bullshit. Nuclear had a higher negative learning rate before ALARA and is still horrifically expensive outside the US.

Also the suggestion that wind and solar aren’t subject to more extreme regulation on potential harms is even more ridiculous.

Like the free insurance, or the free loans, or the underfunded decomissioning and waste management, or the unremediated mines?

Or is it the storage and grid redundancy required to meet peak load with a generator that runs at constant output and shuts down for months at a time?

“Baseload generator” isn’t a useful concept. And grid reliability (which is a useful concept) is thought about. It just doesn’t fit into a soundbite like winddon’tblowsundon’tshine.

Here’s an example of a full plan https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/major-publications/integrated-system-plan-isp/2022-integrated-system-plan-isp

Or a simpler analysis on the same grid: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for-australia-is-feasible-and-affordable-with-just-a-few-hours-of-storage/

For reference, 5kWh home batteries currently retail for about $1300 so this would add <10% to the capital cost compared to recent nuclear projects. Pumped hydro is about half the price per capacity, but a bit more per watt. The former is dropping at 10-30% per year, so by the time a nuclear plant is finished, storage cost would be negligible.

Here’s a broad overview of a slightly simplified model https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z demonstrating similar is possible everywhere.

Even in the counterfactual case where the ~5% of “other” generation is only possible with fossil fuel, focusing on it is incredibly myopic because the resources spent on that 1% of global emissions could instead be used for the other 70% which isn’t from electricity and has different reliability constraints.

Fertilizer which they can’t make because the steam isn’t hot enough.

Every single pro nuclear argument is a fractal of terrible ideas and gaslighting.

NO2, methane from byproduct/digestion, soil carbon release from land overuse. Downstream methane release due to nitrate pollution.

The overwhelming majority of cropland is for “biofuel”, industrial chemicals and animal feed.

Industrial scale regenerative agriculture has lower yields in the short term, but doesn’t emit NO2 and leave behind a dust bowl (requiring clearing a new forest).

Eating crops directly rather than feeding cows is far more effective than changing fertilizer source. Eating organic crops uses a small fraction of the crop land that eating beef fed on intensively grown corn does.

Biointensive methods have many times the yield as industrial agriculture but are very labour intensive – automating them would save a lot more emissions.

Precision fermentation uses a tiny fraction of the land per unit of protein/nutrients.

Droughts could even affect pumped hydro: a much-touted solution to availability problems with wind and solar. For crying out loud, present both sides of the argument fairly! /end rant

Pumped hydro doesn’t consume nearly as much water as a thermal generator. Especially if you cover the reservoirs. It also gives you an emergency backup.

Would you prefer:

Option A where you immediately have no power when the river gets low,

Or option B where you still have power after the river gets low, but can also choose to give up the ability to have some of your power at the end of a week long cloudy period in exchange for water?

1kg of lithium produces about 10kWh of storage for 15-20 years. 3-12 hours of storage is plenty for a >95% VRE grid.

1kg of uranium produces about 750W for 6 years.

There are about 20 million tonnes of conventional lithium economically accessible reserves (and it has only been of economic interest for a short time).

There are about 10 million tonnes of reasonably assured accessible uranium (not reserves, stuff assumed to exist). It has had many boom/bust cycles of prospecting.

Lithium batteries are not even being proposed as the main grid storage method.

Here’s an example of what can be done with 5 hours of storage. 5 hours is a 25% participation rate of V2G where the participants offer a third of their battery capacity.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100pct-renewable-grid-for-australia-is-feasible-and-affordable-with-just-a-few-hours-of-storage/

If going with the (false) assumption that nuclear can hit 100% grid penetration, it would take decades to offset the carbon released by causing a single year of delay.

The lowest carbon “let’s pretend storage is impossible and go with 100% nuclear” would still start with exclusively funding VRE.

Also renewables.

Also incorrect. We need whatever reduces total cumulative emissions the most.

A solar panel today does a lot more than a nuclear reactor in 2045. And installing 5W of solar (which will average 1W) today only costs you the opportunity to build 0.15W of nuclear (which will average 0.12W).

Plug in car. Press the “I would like to only pay $100/yr to fuel this please” button.

Later when you leave for work press the “I would like the house to be cool when I get home and also want to pay half as much for AC” button.

Buy the 1.5m wide water heater that stores 10kWh of hot water and lasts a week between heatings rather than the 70cm one that lasts a day.

Such an unconscionable burden.

Typical energy density of ore in a new uranium mine burned in an LWR is about the same of coal.

All of the economic/not too damaging stuff together would power the world for about 3 years.

You save the water in a hole, then pump it back and forth. You can cover it with PV to stop evaporation

This is also good for the droughts as you have emergency water.

It’s getting ose to the point where even if you are handed one it’s more cost effective to build a wind farm and let it sit.

A MWh of wind is about $33 and O&M for a MWh of nuclear is about $30.

No on all fronts.

The only reactor designs with any sort of history don’t produce steam at high enough temperature for the sulfur cycle and haber process.

The steam they do produce costs more per kWh thermal than a kWh electric from renewables with firming so is more economic to produce with a resistor.

Mirrors exist. Point one at a rock somewhere sunny and you have a source of high temperature heat.

Direct nitrogen electrolysis is better than all these options. It’s had very little research but the catalysts are much more abundant than hydrogen electrolysers and higher efficiencies are possible.

Using fertilizer at all has a huge emissions footprint (much bigger than producing it). The correct path here is regenerative agriculture, precision fermentation and reducing the amount of farmland needed by stopping beef. Nitrogen electrolysis is a good bonus on top of this.