Of course there are batteries! But factoring them in seems to increase the cost significantly. Power lines and cross-continent smart grids are fine, too — but also not free to build and operate.
So a self-contained unit that does not depend on weather, does not need refueling, and includes its own energy accumulator has some appeal.
Why does electricity at night need to cost the same as electricity during the day? Would Western civilization collapse if it cost twice as much? Three times as much?
How much trouble do we need to go to so aluminum smelters can run at 100% capacity at 2 AM?
If you're going to shut down factories at night, that itself is a cost that should be accounted for. If you're shutting down for eight hours a day, you increase capital costs by a third.
That's worth paying if it's the only option to address climate change, but if the main argument against nuclear is cost, it's not a fair comparison if renewables externalize cost to the customers.
(Also, aluminum smelters in particular take damage if they shut down more than five hours or so.)
its not a property of molten aluminum to freeze in 6 hours, it depends on the thermal insulation.
what I proposed was to have a secondary sealed thermal bath of aluminum which gets molten during cheap power and which returns heat during expensive power to maintain the temperature of the primary (work) batch of aluminum so that the work batch doesn't freeze
the heat can be transfered with an appropriate working fluid.
since the secondary thermal bath aluminum doesn't need to satisfy client demands (specific alloy etc) the alloy can be chosen so as to have a suitable melting point for such a setup
Right. So show me the balance sheet where building out reactors makes sense. Because as of right now it clearly doesn't, and the proof is that no one is building reactors but everyone is building windmills.
This is an incredibly weak argument, as most of the opposition to nuclear power even before widespread renewable deployment was political, not economic. Maybe the economics have changed with renewables, but that needs to be proved rather than can be inferred by the lack of US reactors being built.
Take Germany’s recent denuclearization, the efforts are completely political, there was no mention of balance sheet optimizations or concerns. China, India, Russia, among others are all building reactors - either we must agree they are fiscally irrational, or realize that there is an economic case to be made for nuclear power.
>most of the opposition to nuclear power even before widespread renewable deployment was political, not economic.
Most of the opposition to nuclear power was about a whole lot of things other than politics or economics. Decades of quantifiable failure after failure in the environmental, construction quality, maintenance, radioactive discharge, siting-safety, and waste-handling realms, to name just a few. Everywhere the problems were the same, whether they were covered-up or not. The problems were those of an arrogant energy industry primarily concerned with minimizing expenses. The facts weren't political ... although the many, many cover-ups certainly were.
To overlook all that history and suggest that nuclear is just a political football is absurd. Had it been a quantifiable success, little of the resistance would have evolved. And Karen Silkwood might not have died. There was a lot of money and power at stake, and little tolerance for realistic concerns. The industry earned the disrespect it continues to enjoy.
Remember the widespread promise "Too cheap to meter"? In what year was that promise kept?
I agree the take above was reductive, especially in truncating the historical aspects of nuclear power, so much so that in the general case it is incorrect. Collective amnesia is not a solution to yesterday’s nightmares.
I think there is hope that the new generation of nuclear scientists and companies have learned lessons, and I support giving them regulated room to prove it. America has a lot of bad energy policy (Fracking, mountaintop mining, to name a couple in addition to your comment’s nuclear perspective) - improving on that is important, but making it worse is not acceptable (Nor am I a fan of gambling with such large minimum bets).
Irrespective of my failures, the core of the original critique I think stands insofar as the argument it was responding to was not self-sustaining.
Edit: I don’t mean to age you, but I am honestly too young to remember “Too cheap to meter”. I can see where historical memory, or the lack thereof, has colored our respective perspectives, though, in important ways
Everyone is building heavily subsidized windmill. And nobody is building reactors[1] mostly because it's really unpopular (which it pretty much deserves IMHO after decades of shady practices) but it's not a matter of technical merit (and it's never the case).
I'd suggest looking through Lazard's levelized cost of energy slide decks. The unsubsidized price of renewables is indeed substantially less than nuclear.
Next look at the time scales for building new nuclear. Then look at the trend lines in the cost of storage, particularly utility scale lithium batteries.
You don't have to be a genius to realize this makes new nuclear a bad bet purely on the finances. Even if you waved a magic wand to eliminate any environmental opposition, the only way new nuclear is getting funded is if government picks up the tab. And that's what we see globally.
One of the reasons NuScale and the linked company above are getting investment traction is exactly because they're attempting to reduce the capital costs and timelines. That's a bet investors are more willing to take, even if the technology is unproven yet.
> Then look at the trend lines in the cost of storage, particularly utility scale lithium batteries. You don't have to be a genius to realize this makes new nuclear a bad bet purely on the finances.
You are off by more than one order of magnitude! For non-hydro renewable to be self sufficient, you need between 200h and 600h of storage[1]. So to replace a 1300MW reactor, you need 3000MW of renewable power (assuming 33% load factor, which is a good one for renewable) AND at least 200GWh of storage! The storage cost just dwarfs the cost of everything else (and because it won't last 40 years, you'd need to pay for it at least twice!).
Solar and wind power are financially interesting because: the grid handles the load variations, subsidies, and the financial markets financing short-term projects easily compared to bigger one expected to run for 60 years.
Non-hydro renewable are nice when you want to reduce fossil fuel consumption in a grid where most electricity comes from fossil fuel (and ideally not too much coal), but on a purely technical standpoint, they are no match for nuclear. The thing are never purely technical though, and overall I'm sceptical about the future of nuclear.
> For non-hydro renewable to be self-sufficient, you need [8-25 days] of storage.
If you're adamant on generation following load, low transport, probably no overgeneration, no hydro and absolutely no backup biomass, gas or similar, then yes, you probably need 25 days of storage.
It would be good to have at least a couple of days or weeks of energy buffer in the world's supply chain, but that can take many forms. Electricity and lithium batteries seem a bad choice for the bulk of it.
And NuScale appears to be failing on that, with the UAMPS buuld being delayed one year per year for the last four years, and still only 30% subscribed. In the meantime, costs have escalated 70%.
Of course there are batteries! But factoring them in seems to increase the cost significantly. Power lines and cross-continent smart grids are fine, too — but also not free to build and operate.
So a self-contained unit that does not depend on weather, does not need refueling, and includes its own energy accumulator has some appeal.