As I anticipated, my post on Tesla’s new battery provoked some pretty hostile responses, most notably from pro-nuclear diehards. I’ve written plenty on this (use the search facility), so rather than repeat myself I’ll make an observation drawing on the previous post.
Ten years ago, solar PV was a faintly hopeful technologica prospect, making a minuscule contribution to electricity generation. Today, it’s a reality that is creating massive disruption for electricity utilities around the world. As I said in the previous post, the availability of even moderately cost-effective storage removes the last big obstacle (more on the economics soon)
By contrast, ten years ago, nuclear energy was a mature technology which seemed to be at the beginning of a renaissance. Today it’s further away, in almost every respect, than it was in 2005. Construction times have blown out, costs have turned out to be twice as high or more than expected, the operating record (thanks to Fukushima) is far worse, and the various new technologies (SMRs, Gen IV) have receded even further.
None of this means that the replacement of fossil fuels with renewables+storage is going to happen under current policy settings. But such a replacement is now clearly feasible, much faster, more reliably and at much lower cost, than attempting to reboot the failed nuclear renaissance.
Backing the nuclear horse was a reasonable choice in 2005. But it’s dead, and flogging it won’t revive it.
John Quiggin 
I am genuinely disappointed that nuclear has performed so poorly over the past decade. Fukushima could and should have been prevented and illustrates the difference between what in theory is possible and what in practice takes place. If in practice, ruling regimes are not politically capable of making the technology fail safe, then they ought not to have it.
It’s also perplexing that there seems to be no way today to produce nuclear power plants to a predictable and acceptable budget or on a predictable timeline outside of places like China or possibly Russia where politics is apparently done rather differently — and these are not regimes people are generally enamoured of.
It scarcely matters then what nuclear could do in some fantasy parallel universe. If it’s of no use on the timelines we need, then it’s simply not feasible. And as I’ve noted in the past, if with nuclear comes a whole new rationale for secrecy and repression of the populace in the name of safety and national security, then personally, I’d sooner pay a very substantial premium for ‘renewables’, even if nuclear were cheaper, ceteris paribus.
It might be that some time in the future, the circumstances obtaining might make nuclear power viable, but it seems hard to see at this point.
This is a most odd conclusion since some 70 new reactors are under construction, not all in China. Our own SA is conducting a Royal Commission into going nuclear. A quick reminder where our electricity comes from; 64.5% from burning coal, 20.8% from burning gas, 1.5% from solar, 2.9% from wind power the rest biomass and maxed out hydro. I guess the the 87% from coal and gas is OK then. However almost all transport is currently oil powered and we know that will largely have to be replaced by mid century. Not quite sure where all this energy is going to come from.
Hermit, is there a half life on this?
Thanks for this item John. Some comments:
– A nice feature arising from PVs modular nature is that replacement and recycling of panels should hopefully be straightforward with minimal disruption – recycling of batteries should have been in the past. And recycling should be able to build up incrementally until its a nice sustainable business. Contrast this with nuclear power. Funnily it looks like while I have serious reservations about ‘market economics’ in this case we have not gone down this road because precisely of the economics as much as any protest movement.
– The prospect of us being able on a house by house basis to thumb our noses at IPART and the big energy lobby/suppliers who decided our home grown peak electricity is only worth 7c per kWh but we have to buy peak electricity at 46 c per kWh from the suppliers is delicious. Such empowerment (apologies to Weaselwords) is an interesting fringe benefit. A PV colleague told me a few years back not to worry about the NSW government slashing the electricity tarrif buyback prices because of the likelihood that batteries would get much cheaper. The timing of his prediction now seems dead on. Its just a pity the supply companies have been short sighted in jacking up prices as economies of scale mean feeding power into the grid is still probably much efficient and sensible than having huge numbers of household battery banks.
– A few months ago a petition by ‘scientists’ was organized to support nuclear power.
https://theconversation.com/its-time-for-environmentalists-to-give-nuclear-a-fair-go-35488?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%2016%20December%202014%20-%202230&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%2016%20December%202014%20-%202230+CID_ce5431a3d31bc01cbee9c7e411ed81af&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=Its%20time%20for%20environmentalists%20to%20give%20nuclear%20a%20fair%20go
http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/12/15/an-open-letter-to-environmentalists-on-nuclear-energy/
On one hand it was interesting to see the line up of so many people whose expertise/affiliation in conservation biology is as impeccable as their good intent (no irony intended). But on the other hand almost the entire list of worthies appeared to be from outside the relevant disciplines of energy science or environmental impact. Thus one has to ask on what basis did they form their opinions.
Sadly in my opinion the ‘open letter’ relied on giving the mistaken impression that conservation ecologist = environmental expert in the general sense which is just not so from my exposure to such people. This equation almost seems to ape the old mistaken proposition the climate deniers tried floating – that climate science is not valid because some scientists from outside the relevant disciplines didnt agree despite their lack of expertise.
Hopefully as we see the potential of PV most of the signatories will change their minds though I doubt the letter’s pair of faciliators will do so.
Nuclear energy has always been a trust issue with me rather than a technological one. A bunch of know-it-all secretive liars & fools run the nuclear industry. It not whether a reactor will leak radioactivity or not but the fact that it will happen because profit is king and safety is for sissies.
No matter how many fools are involved in the PV industry, vast areas of the countryside are not polluted forever because they didn’t check the welds or do effective maintenance or wonder what that button does. Even cleaning up the mess decommissioning a reactor that hasn’t exploded costs effectively infinite money which no on ever puts up.
@Fran Barlow
The plain fact of the matter is that nuclear fission material on earth is a limited resource too. It’s finite and not renewable. The best science I have found on the topic indicates economic reserves of uranium will be substantially exhausted by the current reactor fleet (retire some old and add some new plants for about the same steady number) by about 2055.
Uranium recovery from seawater might (only might) have an EROEI of 1:1 or 2:1 at best. It would be a massive exercise which would further wreck our oceans. It would take a fleet the size of the world’s current fishing fleet to run it (lay out and haul in the collectors at sea uranium “farms”. Nuclear fission power is a dead horse as J.QW. says. I expect fusion power about the same time that the Visitors arrive from outer space and “gift” us blue energy.
Hang on a minute, solar power is fusion power! It’s that giant fusion reactor in the sky, called the sun.
Oops, dont know how that W got into J.Q. Yes I do, clumsy fingers.
Hermit, if anything comes out of the SA royal commission other than mining bans are pointless on antiproliferation and local environmental grounds, I will be extremely surprised.
I wrote a piece on the topic a few months ago covering the issues in more detail.
Nuclear has always needed – absolutely depended upon – a depth of commitment to the climate problem from both Labor and Coalition transcending political tribalism – like they never doubted the problem was a real and serious threat to future generations of Australians, our Scientist are great heroes for giving us ample prior warning… or something equally unlikely and absurd. Something still lacking.
Labor policy is anti-nuclear, Coalition policy is antithetical to nuclear.
There was never the least prospect of nuclear from Labor or Coalition before Tesla’s announcement and there’ll be less after. For more than a decade the only function nuclear energy has in Australia is for political pointscoring – populist anti-nuke cheersquadding from Labor and from the Coalition it’s the reliable bar too high and red rag to the green extreme – that they would like us to think is who climate action is pandering to. It works to build the impression that it’s green vs sensible dichotomy, not a green vs batbug greedy one.
I think nuclear may also serve as the Coalition’s implied suggestion of a fallback climate policy that actually looks serious but that, oh, too bad, is still much too unpopular, damn those greenies, to commit to. Not for all the coal in Queensland.
@Fran: One can’t expect nuclear power to perform better based on designs derived from a 1947 patent. Britain reduced it’s R&D personnel from over 7000 in 1992 to about 500 in 2004 (coincidental with energy privatisation back in the early 1990s). Those remaining don’t research new reactor concepts or designs they research trivial matters such as decommissioning. Further to that: actual physical (aka real) R&D is expensive and restricted. The usual requirements of the private sector such as fast ROI provide minimal funds from there. There’s some limited private funding in North America, some of it from, believe it or not, tar sands companies!
One of the reasons why nuclear power became 4 times more expensive than it was back in the 1960s is regulatory ratcheting. B. L. Cohen “The Nuclear Energy Option”, 1990, Chapter 9: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html Believe it or not, regulatory ratcheting is still happening in the West today for generically approved designs. You try building something then having the regulator rewrite your design half-way through its construction!
These battery packs are great. If you live in Australia.
Not quite sure how they are meant to fix the seasonality issues you get across Europe, the USA, China or, for that matter, Tasmania.
One of the few good things you can say about the global finance industry is that it does not include nuclear fans. See Hinkley: the only bankable nuclear project is one where all, all the risks are borne by the taxpayers, in lifetime contracts written in their blood.
It’s why I stopped bothering supporting nuclear power programs, except research for small reactors for use in spacecraft (a small reactor with power in the tens of kilowatts would be invaluable for interplanetary robotic space exploration). Even if you believe, as I do, that it’s a safe, reliable, and very valuable source of low-carbon energy, it just requires a major political commitment for expansion that doesn’t exist outside of China.
In the time it takes for us to finally put up new nuclear plants, we’re going to have way, way more expansion in solar capacity as well as storage. It’s the same problem that bedevils fusion power research – even if they somehow figure out how to make it work in a commercially viable fashion by 2050 (unlikely), there will already been some major path dependency present with society having gone down the massive solar-wind-tidal route of renewable energy.
We won’t know whether nuclear reactors are a net source of or sink for energy until a few have been fully decommissioned. A vast amount of oil, cement, steel etc have to be spent to render the current fleet safe, if that is even possible. Average life is less than 25 years.
Given the big wave that wiped out large slabs of Japan I think the nuclear plants there did quite well. Nobody has been killed from radiation. Obviously a more modern design like an AP1000 would have done better and probably wouldn’t have had the failure at all.
They’re not. No-one else has suggested that they’re supposed to. What battieries do is even out supply on a day-to-day basis. They make sense for homeowners with solar panels on the roof, and that’s what they’re designed and sold to do.
That idea can scale up, and we’re seeing that on an experimental basis, either as a few MWh of suburb-scale storage, or larger storage units often on the site of power plants. At the extreme, thermal solar plants are being built around storage so they can produce dispatchable electricity.
In Tasmania they increasingly use hydro in a very similar way. Rainfall is stored on a more or less annual basis, and used when there’s not enough power from other sources. Currently there’s so little PV and wind in Tassie that hydro is the baseload supply. But all it would take is a single decent wind farm to change that. And in Tassie wind probably makes more sense for local large-scale renewable generate than solar does.
But right now in Australia utility scale storage is very hard to justify because the government continues to subsidise legacy coal plants that produce “baseload” power in the sense that they take days or weeks to start up and shut down, so they end up paying people to take their electricity at low-demand times. The overall effect is to push the price of off-peak power down, decreasing the value of a battery that stores energy to use during that overnight low demand period. But there will be a transition, after which it will be worth storing that low-cost power and using it during the peak times. Hopefully by then we will have stopped subsidising the coal plants and they will have become more valuable as scrap metal than power plants.
I’m waiting for somebody to rebut the 87% coal and gas dependency for electricity and near 100% dependency on oil for transport. It seems a device not yet on the market that stores half a day’s electricity for a house will change everything.
Here’s another argument for nuclear… it can make nontrivial emissions reductions. In Australia we have reduced net emissions by 3% for the period 2000-2014 at some cost to manufacturing jobs. Stationary sector emissions are now about 184 Mt out of 536 Mt. If we replaced all coal and combined cycle gas baseload leaving just gas peaker plants we could perhaps knock off 150 Mt. That’s a stunning 28% further reduction in emissions.
You have to ask whether those who’d disallow nuclear are serious about big emissions cuts. I picture them a decade from now with their batteries wondering why the coal trains keep coming.
People just don’t get the simple fact that the uranium supply is limited. The current reactor fleet will substantially exhaust economic deposits by 2055. There is no point increasing the size of the reactor fleet. The fuel aint there.
But those things are true. Why would anyone even bother to rebut them? Can you rebut similar facts about nuclear power? Like, high level nuclear waste can’t be made safe except by waiting at least a thousand years? Nuclear plants can’t be made to not discharge radioactive material? Nor, for that matter, can coal plants. The only fail-safe “nuclear” plants are the ones that use fusion and store the waste 8 light-minutes away.
You’re so close. The difference is purely price. Right now in Australia I can buy a ready-made home battery system with a 10kWh capacity… for about $45000. Tesla is offering the same thing for about $5000. That’s a radical change.
But the fantasy with fission is that we can use other fuels and turn some of the high-level waste into further fuel. If that turns out to be true we could get an enormous amount of power out of known reserves. I haven’t seen anyone run the numbers, but I suspect the best case is that we end up with an area the size of Australia covered in waste dumps, but we’d have generated an awful lot of electricity. And even the current transport minister would be impressed by the sheer amount of concrete available (one careful owner, only slightly radioactive… well, most of it would be only slightly radioactive. Do you feel lucky?)
Here’s some images of a dry cask farm from an antinuclear group
http://necnp.org/httpwww-3yankees-com-connecticut-yankee-maine-yankee-and-yankee-rowe/
That’s yer basic nuclear wasteland. Maybe they didn’t have images of how silicon is made in China using coal.
Uranium depletion is not a problem this century. Then we have thorium then we have breeder reactors with several prototypes running well. Worry about just getting to the end of the century.
@Moz of Yarramulla
Yes, my statement is predicated on the basic fact that most current fission fuel cycles are once through; one use only. Indeed, the term “cycle” is not applicable. Plans for multiple cycles and using thorium fuel are still pipe dreams with at least 20 years to commercial application if ever. As J.Q. has pointed out, this is far too late to help reduce CO2 emissions in time. Meanwhile, solar power and wind power are technically “there”, or close to it, right now.
IIRC a lot of the world’s uranium enrichment occurs in Russian plants built during the cold war and the nuclear arms race. That huge cold war arms race investment is still under-writing nuclear fuel enrichment to this day.
Footnote: My memory is correct. The 2015 numbers on the World Nuclear Association site show that Russia enriches at 30,000 thousand SWU/yr out of a world capacity of 61,450 thousand SWU/yr per year.
(Actually, the table is ambiguous about the unit type. Is it thousand SWU/yr or just SWU/yr.? Nevertheless, the ratio is clear, very close to 50% for Russia.)
Why bother, you can see the Australian version (44 gallon drums) sitting outside Lucas Heights in Sydney. And some discussion of how best to deal with them… http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2012/05/03/3494030.htm
@Brett
Supporting nuclear reactors for use in space seems sensible. Waste is no problem if it can be directed into an orbit that deposits it either on the moon or towards the sun.
I assume the costs are for moving a kg of waste from earth orbit to a lunar or solar trajectory are a fraction of the costs of originally reaching earths orbit.
Hermit,
Uranium depletion is a problem this century if the fuel “cycles” remain predominantly once-through as they are now. Reputable scientific studies show uranium being substantially exhausted at current use rates by about 2055.
Sudies which claim greater recoverable reserves are made by business management consultants with no scientific knowledge or standing. Their reports regularly include categories like “yet to be discovered reserves”. They book up big numbers under this and other spurious categories.
Look at the uranium discovery rate on page 9 in this slide show.
Click to access Declining%20Discovery%20Rates%20-%20the%20Real%20Story%20-%20AMIRA%20Conference%20March%202010.pdf
It very clearly shows that the world is substantially “prospected out” with regard to uranium dicoveries. We can conclude with a high degree of certainty that few or no large finds are left to be found. The trend is clear.
However, I don’t expect your beliefs to be affected by facts. Hopefully others who check the graph will see the facts for what they are.
Footnote: It would be false to draw any conclusions about the condition and security of that facility you link to simply from the photos. However, one cannot simply assume that it is safe and innocuous because it looks like that on the outside. Radiation is invisible. Deterioration, cracks and leakage can be hidden, sometimes even from close inspection.
Slightly off topic, but did Christine Milne jump or was she pushed?
Hermit, I don’t think anyone expects this product to be the answer, just one step along the way. But it is more than a mere incremental step because the pricing of the first really mass marketed version of this technology looks very affordable – lower priced than the optimists expected, let alone the naysayers. It’s priced where it can be expected to be taken up enthusiastically. 10 years of warranty is good but if they are offering optional upgrades to 20 year warranties it suggests they expect them to be reliable for that long.
It’s also not the only serious scale storage player – just one with a high public profile. Alevo got started with no fanfare but they have serious money backing their utility scale batteries, enough to finance their first big projects themselves – they are keeping mum on details and make no offers to put the technology into the public domain like Tesla, but more cycles and longer life is reputedly where they expect the greatest gains in affordability. And there are others.
The parity price with grid delivered fossil fuel electricity may be difficult to pin down – varying according to location and government policies and interventions on pricing – but it does look like it is already being undercut. Definitely undercut given that we still don’t include the climate consequences in energy pricing and FF’s are heavily subsidised by the passing of these costs to future generations.
Despite the ’empirical’ evidence of insufficient takeup of solar such a trend is made of the actual processes that underpin it, including half hearted policy efforts, greenwashing, outright hostility and I suspect some giving of enough rope in the certainty that the reputation of renewables would be blackened forever by their abysmal failures. And those failures would take the whole climate issue into oblivion with them.
Expect ever more rooftop solar, and as the Tesla’s and Alevo’s make larger scale storage solutions available – and they really are going to be doing that at lower prices than anything so far – a resurgent interest in and willingness to finance large scale projects.
Pretty much what hermit said about solar providing less than 0.5% of our total stationary and transport energy.
I’d certainly agree that there’s a dead horse being flogged in there somewhere.
However, this point has me on the edge of my seat “the availability of even moderately cost-effective storage removes the last big obstacle (more on the economics soon)”.
Pretty straight forward -> solar water + demand efficiency + solar electricity + batteries + converters and grid ties/coupling + installation = no change from 30 grand, plus significant replacement costs every 5-12 years. Plus still need an electric car upgrade scenario. Plus much lower ability to incorporate any of this significantly in highrises etc.
So you are still an order of magnitude++ away from going anywhere. Possibly better than nuclear, but possibly not.
You can have variations on this, which is what we have now -> less than 0.5% penetration.
Ikon this link says conventional uranium will last 90 years
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Uranium-Resources/Supply-of-Uranium/
but there are many options. Let’s just burn coal instead.
Be wary of extrapolating trends. Around 1970 when the Snowy Mountains Scheme was completed renewable energy was said to supply a third of Australia’s electricity. By 2014 is was just 13%. Using those endpoints I make it an arithmetic decline of (33-13)/44 call it half a percent a year. In two centuries Australia will have no renewable electricity at all.
I note trend extrapolators favour zigs not zags or maybe it’s the other way round. Residential PV installation peaked in 2010-2012 and has been in marked decline since then but you don’t hear that.
Hermit: If we are to decarbonize the economy, then (among other things) 100 per cent of coal-fired electricity needs to be replaced by some combination of renewables, nuclear, energy efficiency and reduced use. Your argument seems to be
1. 100 % of coal-fired electricity is a big number
2. ???
3. We have to go nuclear
What is the missing step here?
@iain
Let’s assume your numbers are correct for a typical family household, and amortize the whole $30 000 over 10 years. That’s $3000 a year, against which we can offset current expenditures on electricity and gas, say $1500 a year. Median household income in Australia for a typical family is around $75 000. So the cost of completely decarbonizing household energy, on your numbers, is around 5 per cent of income. There are a bunch of reasons why your numbers are too high, but still this makes the point: with existing technology, we can decarbonize the economy at a cost which is small in relation to total income, and even smaller relative to the income growth projected over the period to 2050.
@John Quiggin
Spending another 5% of income to get the same thing is not nothing.
I’m not basing my optimism for renewables on extrapolation, but on them passing a crucial price parity threshold that is a profoundly important consideration.
Hermit, again – before the passing of that parity threshold there were economic disincentives that subsidy and policy could only partly mitigate against. Greenwash and clayton’s policies were what we got – not a true commitment to anything except the expansion and ongoing financial viability of the fossil fuel industry. After that threshold we should see broader market incentives coming into play for the first time. With that crucial circumstance being different, prior assumptions about ‘trends’ need to be re-examined.
And, yes PV installation rates have gone down in Australia but is that a “trend” or a short term consequence of governments hostile to climate action and renewable energy taking charge and changing policy? It set back a subsidy boosted industry right on the cusp of it’s ability to carry on without significant subsidy. Rather than transition smoothly, with staged and predictable removal of subsidy and surviving in working order to be in a good position to make the most of new storage technologies, the sector had it’s legs cut out from under. Deliberately, with hostility that is underpinned by rejection of mainstream science and bizarre beliefs about green conspiracies. No surprise that a chief business adviser is a source of such beliefs – climate science denial being, at it’s essential core, the excuse commerce and industry requires to justify their profit protecting opposition to emissions/climate/energy regulation – ie to maintain that great big loophole that allows them to pass major costs to future generations and pretend Fossil Fuels are cheap poverty eliminators.
Hermit, I still have grave concerns about our ability to achieve real commitment to low emissions but I’m finding your arguments a bit disingenous.
Uncle Milton
Spending 5% of income to let your grandkids survive is not nothing either.
John, I am also hopeful about the implications of this technology but please remember that only a declining proportion (a minority?) of Australians own their own home. Power wall is of no use to the rest of us.
I think nuclear advocates should focus on a) preventing shutdown of existing plants (see Japan and Germany’s environmentally reckless decisions) and b) converting major shipping to nuclear. Shipping is a large source of carbon and there are no alternatives on the horizon. Focus on areas where nuclear can make a difference not where it is uncompetitive!
@Uncle Milton
That’s why I call it a cost, though a modest one. Of course, what we get isn’t “the same thing”, it’s “the same thing plus a planet”.
@Faustusnotes
I’ve been talking about technical feasibility, not about the institutions and policies required to achieve the goal. But there are people looking at the problem of solar PV for renters eg
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/solar-for-renters-prepaid-meter-technology-targets-untapped-pv-market-62768
On your second point, I agree with (a). If nuclear advocates would focus on this, rather than making obviously silly claims about new nuclear they might do more good.
I doubt, though that nuclear shipping will ever be cost-effective. I’d rather start with easy efficiency improvements, then look at things like fuel cells and algal fuel oil.
@John Quiggin
$1500 is a lot of money for a household on $75000.
Yes, but not everybody cares about that. You can try and force your preferences – even your scientifically validated of course they are correct preferences – onto other people, but that doesn’t always work out.
The horse is indeed deceased but there’s money in the flogging of it so long as it lasts.
@Fran Barlow
I’m quite startled to find myself agreeing with you and John on nukes. However attractive nuclear power would be in a well managed world without better renewable alternatives, we are not in that world.
The best argument anti-nukes always had was that, humans being what they are, criminal stupidity in design and operation will eventually combine with incredible bad luck somewhere to get a Chernobyl or Fukushima (it really does take both to get a nuclear disaster). That a well designed and run nuclear power station is very safe and quite environmentally friendly is thus a little beside the point.
The other riposte – that alternative technologies such as coal can expect to kill an awful lot more people even without that malignant combination – is quite true. But given that an economically realistic alternative to either nukes or coal seems to be emerging it has lost its force.
@Moz.
If seasonality is not fixed, then for those areas affected – which is where most people actually live – solar cannot be a large component of the energy mix even if the panels are free. Mainland Australia is to some extent a freak case – lots of sun compared to population, relatively low seasonality, existing grid infrastructure. On one hand, it should be the first country to go all-renewable (excepting countries with extreme hydro resources), on the other, if Australia can’t do it, no where can.
(Note: I live in the UK. I have a 2.76kW array on a south-facing roof and I’m enough of a geek to have 3 year’s worth of weekly readings recorded.. )
@Ikonoclast
If you assume low efficiency once through fuel cycles, no alternative sources of uranium, that rising prices do not make more uranium available, that alternative prospecting plays don’t exist and that every estimate is wrong on the low side you may have a point. But that looks an awful lot like working back from your conclusion.
@Andrew Dodds
“If seasonality is not fixed, then for those areas affected – which is where most people actually live – solar cannot be a large component of the energy mix even if the panels are free.”
Most of the world’s population lives at lowish latitudes, including all of the Indian subcontinent.
Your thought experiment points to exactly the opposite conclusion. If panels are free, you install enough of them to cover daytime needs in midwinter on a cloudy day. (In Inverness you may run out of roofs first, but as noted above this is exceptional. ) You are incidentally installing on E and W orientations. So the storage needed is only overnight.
We won’t of course see exactly this. But at super-low costs – Fraunhofer are predicting 1.5€c/kwh LCOE by 2050 – it will pay to massively overbuild solar, even at 50% mean curtailment. In turn, the large volume of seasonal free electricity can make P2G cheap. Apply the same logic to wind, which is seasonally complementary to solar (Fraunhofer here, pp 39-40), and the costs are even lower. The optimal mix depends on the exact numbers, but there will be a large portfolio of feasible solutions.
My own suggestion is marginal cheating. For security of supply, you need around a 20% reserve. This capacity is rarely used, say 10% of the time. Suppose it’s natural gas: very cheap capacity because you already have it. So you can have a low-cost 98% decarbonised electricity supply. Use the very large savings from 100% purity for offset reafforestation, subsidised electric transport, direct reduction ironmaking or whatever.
@Andrew Dodds
1. I assume once-through fuel cycles because that is the current reality for the most part. It is also is highly unlikely to change.
2. The graph I linked to showed that rising expenditure on prospecting in the last decade produced no rise in uranium finds. Indeed, the finds continued to decline.
3. Rising prices do not create extra resource availability if the resource availability does not exist. Availability of a resource is not only price sensitive it is reality sensitive.
What this whole debate shows once again is that nuclear power supporters believe in magic. I strongly suspect their beliefs belong in the long tradition of alchemy. It would be interesting, from a sociological point of view, to trace the parallels between alchemical beliefs and the modern naive belief in nuclear fission energy as an endless fount of power. These beliefs are held despite the real limits of fissile fuels on earth, the real limits of energy return on utilising diffuse deposits, and the real difficulties (safety and engineering) of nuclear power itself.
In the naive mind, nuclear science and nuclear power are susceptible to being understood in alchemical terms. Transmution is involved. Matter can be transmuted into energy and base metals can indeed be transmuted into gold (though the latter process is not in any way economically viable). This fact of a seemingly miraculous transmutation of matter into energy seems to play heavily on the naive mind. The limits and difficulties of the process disappear in a blaze of credulity and fantasies about endless power.
I would actually be interested to know if anyone has done a study of belief clusters. For example, do those who believe in the endless potential of nuclear fission power on earth also tend to believe in homeopathy, chiropractry, neocon economics and other crank belief systems? I would not be at all surprised to find it so.
The cost of new nuclear will be higher than replacing old cold fired coal stations with new coal stations. If BREE’s assessments are correct
Click to access AETA-Update-Dec-13.pdf
then we see on Figure 9 for NSW in 2020 with no carbon price that a midrange busbar price for large nuclear is $150 per Mwh or 15c per kwh. Supercritical black coal has a midrange price of $75 but current (subcritical technology) prices are near $40. Since supercritical coal produces about 0.8 tCO2 per Mwh the required carbon price to favour nuclear is (150-75)/.8= $94.
Now what Mr Hunt thinks are carbon reductions are currently priced around $13. By the year 2035 when the big baseload plants need to be replaced if Mr Hunt’s spiritual successor is in charge the coal plants won’t be replaced with nuclear. Against this however we have gentailers like Alinta saying they will exit coal by 2030 and AGL by 2050. The key statistic one more time; coal now generates 64.5% of our electricity which this year seems to be increasing at the expense of gas and hydro.
The conceivable scenarios are that we will replace coal with coal or bite the bullet on much higher electricity prices. Given the repeal of carbon tax I doubt we’ll opt for higher prices.
@Hermit
Alternatively, climate change could get so rapidly and obviously worse in the next few decades that it scares the **** out of people and they demand change. In about two decades politician and business climate change deniers will run the serious risk of being lynched.
Can we get them on a deck of playing cards please? In fact why don’t we start now. Tony Abbott, Greg Hunt, Maurice Newman,Andrew Bolt,Dick Warburton,… Nominations please. They should be Australians and have power/influence. Not merely internet trolls.
@Ikonoclast
Nuclear energy is Promethean. It’s a sort of ultimate symbol of the capacity for human ingenuity to overcome the limitations of nature (at least, if you ignore its drawbacks).
For me, that Promethean quality of nuclear energy largely explains the often irrational* enthusiasm of its ardent supporters – it ties in with the ideology of technological progress.
Ironically, enthusiasts for renewable energy technologies are also frequently motivated by a similar belief in technological progress. However, green tech lacks the “big-and-powerful” qualities of nuclear – its early links with “small is beautiful” thinking and environmentalist ideas have cruelled renewable energy’s emotive appeal for many believers in a triumphalist vision of progress. That explains to me why so many “libertarians” are enthusiastic about nuclear but ambivalent towards renewable energy, even though nuclear is the ultimate big-government technology – “libertarians” tend to be believers in an uncomplicated idea of progress. The imagery of nuclear energy also appeals to a masculinist impulse which is also common among “libertarians” who, as I’ve said before, exhibit what is essentially a schoolboy’s picture of the world (e.g. Terje on the Powerwall thread referring to that product as a “sad little battery” – he might as well have said it was “girly”).
Of course, none of this has anything to do with the actual merits or otherwise of nuclear and renewable energies as power technologies.
*When I say nuclear enthusiasts are often irrational, I’m not talking about the reasonable claims (such as that nuclear is a relatively safe form of power, or that the dangers of radioactivity are often exaggerated), I’m talking about the glowing talk of breeders and thorium reactors being just around the corner, despite these technologies having been languishing for decades, and the bizarre insistence, in the face of all available evidence, that nuclear energy is about to get cheaper).
@Tim Macknay
I agree. The fascination people have with nuclear power has alchemical, Promethean, Freudian and authoritarian overtones. The myth is one of great manly power, centralised and wielded by the Nietzschean Superman who triumphs over all nature and other men. Nuclear power is intense, brutal, dangerous and quintessentially a form of centralised power. On the other hand, renewables are gentler, more diffuse, more eclectic and more sharable. They promise a more democratic spread of power, meaning physical power, economic power and political power.
Strangely enough, renewables promise more energy (a lot more) than nuclear power. However, this power is diffuse and not amenable to centralised hoarding, command and control. It is also not so amenable to translation into military power. Thus it is despised by those who want wealth and power to be only for the few and not diffused and shared among all the people.
They make absurd statements that wind turbines and solar panels are “ugly” when coal and nuclear power stations are 1,000 times uglier in both the aesthetic and environmental senses.
@Tim Macknay
Back more than a decade, when I used to post in usenet, nearly all the proponent of nuclear power there
a) tended to present nuclear power in strongly masculine terms and ‘renewables’ as for weak and only for the latte-sipping chardonnay set who didn’t have ‘real’ jobs.
b) made a huge fuss about their fascination with engineering
c) were keen to avow their gun fetishism
d) spent inordinate amounts of time in circle-jerking/one-upping each other on the virtues of the various fighter aircraft they’d like to have the country acquire in stupidly large numbers and whom they’d bomb first
e) were seriously hostile to anyone raising issues of biodiversity, empathy with animals etc
f) tended almost exclusively to be climate science deniers.
g) almost always adopted modes of engagement that were vituperative if someone presented as other than affirming them.
It was hard to escape the impression that each of these impulses was driven by a cultural/aesthetic preference for things that were avowals of a particular brand of testosterone enhanced masculinity in one form or another.