Writing in the conservative US magazine National Review, Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute criticises the Democratic Party platform for omitting any mention of nuclear power, and accuses the Democrats of failing to “do the math”. Unfortunately, although he throws some numbers about, he doesn’t do any math to support his key conclusion
But even if we doubled the rate of growth for wind and solar — and came up with a perfect method of electricity storage (which of course, doesn’t exist) — those renewables aren’t going to replace nuclear energy any time soon
So, I’ll do the math for him.
Here’s the data Bryce supplies
* In 2015, America’s nuclear plants produced 839 terawatt-hours of electricity (this industry source says 798), compared to 253 for hydro, 193 for wind, and 39 for solar
* The current rate of growth is 7GW per year for wind, with output of 2.6 TWh/GW, and 5 GW per year of solar with output of 1.5 TWh/GW
That’s enough to check Bryce’s claim. The gap between nuclear and renewables is currently 552 TW/year. The current rate of addition of capacity for solar and wind combined amounts to additional generation 25.7 TW/h per year. Doubling that gives 51.4. So, assuming a doubling of the current installation rate, it would take 10.5 years for renewable generation (including hydro) to surpass nuclear. Excluding hydro it would take 15 years. So, if the goal of policy were to replace nuclear with renewables, the answer is that it could be achieved in the fairly near future.
Of course, replacing nuclear power is not the goal of climate policy. The objective is to replace coal and, as far as possible, gas as sources of electricity.
So,Bryce is right to say that ““widespread retirement of America’s nuclear power plants would make it extremely difficult if not impossible”. If we didn’t know that a rapid shutdown of nuclear power would be a big problem for a decarbonization policy, the examples of Germany and Japan make it pretty clear.
But Bryce is shifting the ground. he fact that The Democratic platform says nothing about nuclear power implies that they don’t have a policy for a rapid shutdown. In fact, the Obama Administration has consistently supported an “all of the above” policy including loan guarantees for nuclear power.
The problem is that new nuclear power is hopelessly uneconomic, and even existing plants are finding it hard to cover their costs. Bryce doesn’t propose a solution, presumably because any solution would require government intervention on a scale so massive as to horrify the readers of National Review.
Still, it might be worth looking at the possibilities for an expansion of US nuclear power in the foreseeable future. Apart from a handful of plants under construction there’s no chance of any new ones in the 10-15 year time-frame we just derived. So, let’s look out a bit further to the early 2030s. On past experience would require starting construction by 2020, which means we can confine our attention to proposals that have already started the licensing process.
In the first flush of enthusiasm for the “nuclear renaissance” of the early 2000s, proposals were put forward to build around 30 new units, typically of 1 GW each. Four of those have gone ahead (over time and over budget as usual), and should be completed by 2020. At least ten have been abandoned, while the remainder are in limbo, being kept alive as options but without any actual prospect of occurring. That’s a maximum of around 15 GW, or around 100 TWh per year.
The new additions have already been offset by closures. Even with the most friendly policy environment possible, we’re bound to see more over the next 15 years, given that many plants are already well beyond their initially planned operating life.
So, even with an all-out effort to implement every currently proposed nuclear power plant, and to keep closures to a minimum, we might get a net addition of 50TWh a year. That’s the equivalent of two years of additional solar and wind at the current rate, which has been increasing steadily over time.
* For completeness, I should mention Small Modular Reactors, which are often seen as the nuclear hope of the future. The only project that’s currently active is that of Nuscale which aims to produce a demonstration plant by 2025. Even if SMRs prove economic (there is no reason to believe this), large scale deployment will be well into the 2030s.
John Quiggin 
Never fear John, Josh will make it all harmonious in Australia
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/20/mr-coals-super-ministry-and-the-challenges-of-merging-energy-with-the-environment
I don’t know how many more times you’re going to have to say all of that, ProfQ, and I don’t even want to count how many times you’ve said it already. Do you even keep count any longer ?
But there is one thing that puzzles me, which is that quite operable and effective nuclear power units have been made on a continuous basis for decades: they’re fitted into submarines and aircraft carriers – and not only by the USA.
What is it that makes it possible to reliably make these reliable units but somehow doesn’t translate into onshore electricity generators ? Couldn’t they just make a bunch of shipboard style nuclears and instead ship them out to form landed power stations ?
@GrueBleen
When something is made for the military, cost is not the main concern. When you want to use these reactors for civilian use, their costs become relevant. Perhaps that is the problem?
Wind power is intermittent, dependent upon the weather and season. So all wind power must be backed up by an equal amount of fossil fuel plant. For example, in UK wind capacity utilization is 28%. If we had 50GWe of wind we could expect 14GWe on average. A maximum of, say 45%, and a minimum of 1%. [Individual farms may peak at 60% but the whole peaks closer to 45%]. UK wind could be delivering anything between ½GW to 22½GW of electricity with an average of 14GW. How does John Quiggan expect the grid system of cope at the minimum and maximum times?
The problem is that fossil fuel backup plant is not economic when it can only make an intermittent profit. Plant owners need to be able to predict revenues. Otherwise they are at the “mercy of the wind”. There are very good reasons why commerce stopped relying on wind power in the 19th century. Who will provide the fossil fuel backup plant required for a wind powered system? Certainly not renewable energy cowboys.
SA Employers on verge of shutting down due to renewable energy: http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/key-sa-employers-on-verge-of-shutting-down-as-power-prices-surge-during-storms/news-story/e397f45514f90115ad4da65a009feb44
PS: Bryce addressed wind power intermittency in his book: Power Hungry, which John Quiggan is well advised to read.
JQ – Thanks Johnno. JC
That Adelaide Advertiser article is a mixture of half truths and plain BS.
destroys it.
JQ, the people you are arguing against can’t do math. 😉
The energy issue will solve itself now. The most economical and least destructive (in terms of negative externalities) will prevail. This will be renewable energy, mainly solar, wind and hydro.
However, the climate change issue and waste issues will not solve themselves. Much more needs to be done on that front. This will include the need to evolve our economic system beyond capitalism which is a very crude, wasteful and damaging system viewed from social and environmental perspectives.
I’m sad to see John Quiggin writing so irresponsibly, promoting intermittent renewable energies like solar and wind over nuclear power. If you think childish gesture politics will solve the world’s problems you are badly misinformed. Nor is there any waste issue to speak of with nuclear power. Per unit of electricity made, Australian coal already releases more radioactivity than nuclear plants ever will. The high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power is small in volume, contained, and the most active radionuclides decay to nothing within 300 years. What’s left over can be recycled to new fuel. This makes nuclear power the “greenest” energy we have. A fact not lost on the Sierra Club of the 1960s who also supported nuclear power as a more environmentally friendly energy source than hydroelectricity. I’m sad to see irresponsible lefties trashing the planet by promoting more environmentally harmful technologies like wind, solar, hydro and geothermal.
Australian wind and solar are just an excuse to continue burning coal for electricity. Because wind and solar only supply intermittent electricity. The problems raised by intermittency will _never_ be economically addressed using energy storage. You will always be burning fossil fuel if you go the wind/solar route.
@totaram
Could be, mate, though of course cost is never entirely not a consideration.
However, at least the actual nuclear units themselves seem to work robustly and reliably – at least I haven’t heard of any nuclear explosions on either US or Russian vessels … though I think at least one of the Russian ships did have some problems and may even have sunk.
I thought maybe scaling might be a factor; it does take quite a bit of electricity to power a nuclear sub, and quite a bit more to power an aircraft carrier, but even more, I guess, to power even a moderately sized town. And then there’d be all the cooling water, radioactive waste etc.
Couldn’t just distribute them around the suburbs of Melbourne, I guess. Probably have to set up a ‘farm’ somewhere a bit out of town and connect them to the grid, but I reckon that wouldn’t be too hard.
Wind power is intermittent, dependent upon the weather and season. So all wind power must be backed up by an equal amount of fossil fuel plant.
Err, no.
From vague memory, this material is covered in high school, probably in year 11. Non-correlated random variables, is a key-phrase that should lead you there.
@Mark Pawelek
Because wind and solar only supply intermittent electricity. The problems raised by intermittency will _never_ be economically addressed using energy storage.
#http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/07/07/3789508/china-solar-energy-night/
The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.” – The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903
http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/famous-predictions-that-were-spectacularly-wrong/story-fn6vihic-1226889769437
However, at least the actual nuclear units themselves seem to work robustly and reliably – at least I haven’t heard of any nuclear explosions on either US or Russian vessels … though I think at least one of the Russian ships did have some problems and may even have sunk.
Sure. This is all tied up with socially-engineered safety systems that simply don’t scale to large civilian deployments.
Our usual approach to risk management works like this: We track the rates of minor injury-causing incidents, identify the areas that are running close to the safety line, and flag and rectify hopefully before we get a major, not-exactly-tolerable, incident. This doesn’t work with nuclear, because even “minor” incidents can be pretty lethal; normal processes rely on there being ample space to thread the needle between “minor incident” and “dekadeath or better”, but nukes we really can’t do that.
Small-scale systems can use a more holistic safety approach, direct observation and intervention, but this doesn’t scale. Military trains people to rigorously follow protocols, which helps circumvent this… but not everyone can work that way [I can’t], and most of the ones that can are already in positions where their abilities are needed. You can’t get the staff.
Forcing coal and gas into intermittency is exactly the direction we need to go; existing plant needs to fit itself into the role of backup to renewables, under arrangements that somehow reward them for maximising the time spent offline. Far from being cause for renewable penetration to be curtailed it can and should be the incentive required for kickstarting large scale investment in storage. It becomes an emergent defacto carbon price – a feature of open electricity markets in the presence of low cost intermittent energy. If that seems unfair on those operating fossil fuel plants – go suck lemons; passing on the full costs and consequences in the form of climate change onto our future in a climate responsibility avoidance scam is more unfair. As long as our electricity industry is assisted in it’s desire to not make those investments they won’t. Only when they are forced to do so they will do it.
It would be better if this transition were done in an orderly, planned way, but so long as the industry incumbents duck and dodge and do so with government assistance it will be disorderly and disruptive. If that sounds like having to jump in the deep water before we’re sure we can swim it still looks better than the absolute certainty of irrevocable global climate disaster that delaying our commitment and keeping on as we are.
Restricting renewable energy for being too cheap and too successful – and cutting it’s legs out from under it because it has would be the absolute worst outcome. Subsidies to kick the storage industry into high gear sound much more achievable than subsidies for nuclear.
@Collin Street
What gibberish was that Collin? : “From vague memory, this material is covered in high school, probably in year 11. Non-correlated random variables, is a key-phrase that should lead you there.”
* What material?
* “Non-correlated random variables” <- what's this? Add a bit of technobabble to make yourself sound clever?
* You did something at high school but you can't remember!
What did you study at high school which is relevant to maintaining a reliable 100% always on national electricity grid? I'm genuinely curious. I did nothing relating to it. Everything I know about electricity grid reliability I learnt since.
@Mark Pawelek Gas peaker plants in the USA have capacity factors between 5% and 10% (source: EIA). Their owners know this when they build them. All electricity grids have massive amounts of capacity, much of which is unused at a typical time. This is a simple consequence of the cyclical nature of demand. As JQ has pointed out more times than you have apparently read qualified sources, 24/7 baseload generation plants are a bug not not a feature, as their inflexibility is a costly constraint on the supply system.
As James Wimberley says, I’ve covered spurious arguments about baseload power many times. Use the search facility on the site.
Irony Alert On:
Gee, if only we could weaponise solar power, then we could get for it the same massive subsidies that nuclear power has received.
Irony Alert Off.
You can use wind and solar to supply a part of your electricity, but the rest is for fossil fuels. Global energy demand is set to double. Even if renewables could provide 50%, fossil fuel and biomass will not be reduced.
Baseload is no ‘myth’. A grid cannot be kept stable without dispatchable capacity equal at least to peak power demand.
The IPCC includes nuclear in almost all of the scenarios which are consistent with 450 ppm.
People who fight nuclear power (help raise political, cultural and technological barriers to its efficient implementation) put our common climate/energy future at risk.
It would be nice if we had a 100% reliable grid around here; every storm season we don’t. The goals of reliable and cheap are not the only ones. When they are re-purposed by opponents of climate action into the political attack points for preventing commitment to the necessary transition to low emissions they are misleading and counterproductive.
There is no prospect of nuclear energy for Australia and with most of the political support for nuclear residing within the same LNP that is opposed to climate action that support, such as it is, cannot be mobilised effectively. Climate science deniers at mainstream level killed it’s prospects deader than anti-nukers from the fringe ever could. It’s far more convenient to them to allow anti-nuclear sentiment to go largely unopposed – just an occasional remark from a minister here and there to maintain the illusion – and credit the fringe with far more influence than it actually has; then governments can back away from something they don’t really want that much and blame shift as they do so. The shift to low emissions is stalled and is counted as a victory for the movers and shakers of a nation virtually floating on a deep bed of coal.
Nuclear energy’s only functions in Australia now are as political blunt instruments for whacking at renewables and environmentalism and for providing a way for climate concerned conservatives to double-think their way to being unconcerned about their own inaction; they can tell themselves it’s all the greenies fault!
We can’t know how the final result will be achieved or how much it will cost. From energy industry experts expressing absolute certainty solar could never provide enough power to be significant , they have shifted ground to being absolutely certain it is so significant it will damage the industry beyond repair, then shifted to being absolutely certain storage tech can never store enough to matter. The goal is a good one, an essential one; even if we don’t know how we’ll do it we need to commit to it and right now renewables are the only ones we have at hand.
@GrueBleen Why can’t these be back up by other renewals that aren’t intermittent such as thermal and tidal? Also it would be rare for the wind not to blow somewhere in the state. Same goes for the sun. We are a big country.
The current campaign by News Ltd, the AFR and the Grattan Institute against intermittent renewables is of course a campaign to defend the profits of fossil fuel generators. But I think the current price problems in SA, although largely due to market manipulation, do illustrate why the RET is a second-best carbon pollution control mechanism. I would prefer a combination of a price on carbon and direct regulation instead of the RET. I know John probably can’t comment on this because of his position on the Climate Change Authority, and I know he has previously written on why he has come to love the RET, but I do think experience has shown the RET to have quite significant flaws.
I’m not saying the RET is the only imperfection in our carbon pollution control mechanisms . There are also issues with the rules of the National Electricity market, and the rulings of the regulators in this space.
@Florence nee Fed up
Not at all sure what you’re referring to here, Flo, since I haven’t been writing contra so-called “intermittent” renewables at all.
But I would make the observation that the discussion on renewables so far has been way out of date. Renewables, at least of the solar kind, aren’t nearly so “intermittent” as they once were. Just for a prime example, Portugal very recently managed 107 consecutive hours with electricity totally sourced from “intermittent” (and steady) renewables:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/18/portugal-runs-for-four-days-straight-on-renewable-energy-alone
And Spain has had solar thermal generators capable of 24 hour (and close to 24/7) operation for some time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Spain#Solar_thermal_power_plants
So please try to keep up with the state of play, folks, we can take the debate past Bryce ‘trutherism’, can’t we ?
Oh, and incidentally, Australia, via the ANU has, or at least had, its own contribution to this (apart from Fresnel solar mirrors, that is) in terms of ammonia closed system solar energy:
http://stg.anu.edu.au/research/storage/ammonia.php
And there is another problem. Our nuclear capitalists have not made provision for billions of extra costs to decommission plants after 30-50 years or to replace them with much vaunted “new safer models”.
It will cost 1.5 billion to decommission the Indian Point 2 and 3 plants in Vermont.
This is $30 million per year for 50 years.
See; Billions needed
The nuclear industry is nothing but economic and inter-generational insanity.
Renewable power is winning on cost. That argument is over. The shame is that this win has come too late to save us from some degree of dangerous climate change. What degree remains to be seen. The renewables’ burgeoning win has come too late because of the delaying and obfuscation tactics of old, entrenched fossil capital and nuclear capital, each receiving massive subsidies and near complete immunity from paying for negative externalities. This sclerotic system (neoliberal capitalism) is adjusting far too slow to environmental, real-world requirements.
Would any other system adjust faster? We do not know for sure. What we do know, from real world data already in, is that this system does not adjust nearly fast enough.
Lord it never ceases to amaze me how cocksuredness and ignorance are positive correlates. Mark P, go away and do some serious reading and thinking in economics and statistics (especially decision theory – the field our host made his academic name in) before you comment again.
Ikonoclast, some us have been saying for a long time now that neoliberal capitalism – in the form of getting the price of carbon right – is far the most effective and feasible way of adapting fast enough. ‘Taint the economics of capitalism that has been in the way, but its actually existing politics.
In these uncertain times, it’s good to know that derp, at least, is alive and well. 🙂
@derrida derider
“…cocksuredness and ignorance are positive correlates…”
I think it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it’s quite common in the species homo sapiens sapiens, I understand.
I found this extract from the Wikipedia article on the Dunning-Kruger effect very interesting. I think I might try the lemon juice trick next time I try to rob a bank. (My bank robbing attempts so far have been unsuccessful, but try, try and try again).
‘The phenomenon was first experimentally observed in a series of experiments by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the department of psychology at Cornell University in 1999. The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, because lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras. The authors noted that earlier studies suggested that ignorance of standards of performance lies behind a great deal of incorrect self-assessment of competence’.
@John Goss
Hilarious! I didn’t see this before. Lemon Juice indeed!
Perhaps I am overlooking something, but to me it seems that the gap between nuclear and renewables is 839 – (253+193+39) = 354 TWh/year (not 552 TWh).
This would require an additional:
– 354/2.6 = 136 GW of wind (if only wind is used)
– 354/1.5 = 236 GW of solar (if only solar is used)
To put this into perspective, US total windpower is now 75 GW, solar 30 GW. If the growth rate is 10% per year, the required extra installations could be done in a mere 10 years.
So Prof. Q’s conclusions stands.
@John Goss
My bank robbing attempts so far have been unsuccessful
Perhaps you should not only try the lemon juice but arrive during business hours?
I heard of two aspiring young bank robbers who arrived 5 minutes after closing time at the local bank, decided to rob a convenience store instead, were rapidly pursued by the police so took hostage the girl friend of one of the robbers.
So we went from a failure to tell time to 10 to 15 years in prison within about 15 minutes.
@John Goss
He robbed two banks. So he got away with the first one. You have not disproved the lemon juice hypothesis, statistically.
@GrueBleen
The actual investment choices of CSP developers shed light on the baseload myth. Gemasolar in Spain was built with a lot of storage to demonstrate the feasibility of running a plant of this type in 24/7 baseload mode, which it did. But SFIK no CSP plant since has been built with an equivalent amount of storage. It does not pay and is not operationally needed at present. Demand at 3 am is low, and since power from your famous baseload plants is practically given away to large users, there is little incentive today to economise (say by changing security lighting to LEDs or adding sensors); we can’t assume that it is some sort of technical minimum. AEMO’ s 100% renewable electricity scenario for Australia settled on 6 hours as the optimum amount of CSP storage, enough to cover the evening load to midnight.
Sorry, your maths don’t work out either. People do not buy kWhs, not really. They buy RELIABLE power. They demand that the utility provide power, when, where, and how much they want for as long as they want it. The UnREliables can’t do that. Hydro could, but there isn’t enough of it around to replace petro-carbon fueled sources. So, in order to be able to replace reliable nuclear, you must not only build enough unREliables but enough storage and then enough ADDITIONAL unREliables to counteract the innefficiencies of that storage.
In the mean time, 15 years of building nuclear powercould replace not only all the unREliables, but effectively all the petro-carbon sources too!
Sorry, your maths don’t work out either. People do not buy kWhs, not really. They buy RELIABLE power.
You of course have market research demonstrating this, no, and are not merely projecting your personal preferences over the entire population or extracting “data” whole-cloth from your rectum?
[you’ve made an empirical claim about people’s preferences and are arguing for a policy based on your empirical claim. You need to actually provide an empirical basis for your claim; the statements you are arguing against are empirically-based and to stand against them you need something of equal strength.]
@James Wimberley
Yes, James, doubtless we’ll have to adjust and refine our technology as the usage grows. Your point is taken, but you’ll forgive me if I think that even now, a CSP that is operable just until midnight wouldn’t be entirely successful at powering New York, or even London. And in a decade or three, not even Sydney or Melbourne.
But at the present my concern was just to get past this “intermittent” nonsense that true unbelievers love to throw around as though it’s an unanswerable knockout. It simply isn’t and anybody gratuitously throwing that into the conversation should be unceremoniously thrown out of the conversation.
‘Renewables’ can be stored either at the source or at the product. For instance, solar power can be stored as molten salt or as chemical manipulations (eg the closed system ammonia plant from ANU that I have a sentimental feeling for).
But they can also be stored as ‘product’ – eg as electricity in batteries or, maybe, if nanotechnology improves, as giant capacitors. Or as chemical manipulations – eg electrolytic breakdown of water into hydrogen and oxygen (or, indeed, ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen) which can later be combusted to drive turbines. Or summat.
And even wlnd power can actually be stored ‘at source’ by getting the wind turbines to drive compressors which store large amounts of highly compressed gas that can later be released to drive turbines etc. And, incidentally, the same idea can be used for solar by utilising unused generated power during the day to store compressed air. Or to pump water up into a reservoir from which it can be used for artificial hydroelectric generation. Etc etc.
Do stop me if you’ve heard enough.
@Dolf Johnson
“When, where and how much you want” is not the same as “a fixed amount, 24 hours a day, regardless of how much you want”. You should do a search of the blog on the baseload fallacy.
@GrueBleen
You are quite right. There are even more ways energy can be stored. Every solar hot water system stores heat energy in the hot water for use later. This is notwithstanding the fact that mains electrical backup or gas heater backup might be used on some nights under some usage patterns. Every passive design, climate controlled and well-insulated house can set up and store heat energy (or maintain an energy gradient) for “use” later.
Of the industrial methods, molten salt heat storage is beginning to look very efficient although it depends on the kind of power generation it is coupled with. Distributed smart systems will play a huge role in managing power systems. Generation can be integrated and smoothed from many sites over a distributed geographical area. Consumption patterns can be matched closer to production patterns by pricing systems / automated systems. Storage can be integrated into this setup also. The intelligent distributed system will be able to decide, of all the ways to route energy , where it is most economic and useful to send it for use or storage. Straightforward cascading logic utilising demand parameters and pricing parameters will give the answers (within the characteristics of power networks optimised to function in this way). I am not saying the practical network design in detail is necessarily straightforward, or even cheap, but the systems analysis principles of using cascading logic to achieve these goals should be straightforward. Especially if we remember that such a fully integrated, smart distribution network is a natural monopoly as network which may well cater to mutiple micro, meso and macro producers.
@Ikonoclast
To me, Ikono, the point is very simple: in all human endeavours there’s thresholds, and there is always a major threshold between “under development” and “in production” (as we old-fashioned ADPers might say). And ‘intermittency overcoming technology’ has well and truly crossed that threshold.
Whereas, I might just agree with ProfQ that nuclear fission power has still got major thresholds to cross. But I sincerely hope it does cross them – or, against all the odds and the known physics, we can develop nuclear fusion power – because, being a cautious (and precautious) chap, I like insurance. And since climate will change with or without our prodding and/or our permission, then I have no idea what might happen to the frequency, persistence, area of coverage etc of the clouds and/or what might happen to wind patterns over the coming tens of millenia.
Therefore, I really would like a useful electric generation technology that in no way depends upon the ‘cooperation’ of nature. Just like I’m sorta happy, despite the cost and the anti-climatic power source, that Victoria has a desalination plant. Then I won’t worry so much about Milankovitch Cycles.
@GrueBleen
You miss my point on CSP storage. The investors who put their capital into CSP plants know that they can buy an arbitrary ratio of storage to peak generating rating, up to simulating a 24/7 must-run coal or nuclear plant. They choose not to do this, which shows that in their business judgement the need, as expressed through market prices, is not there today, given the amount of must-run and other despatchable capacity already in the grid. Ivanpah did not put any in at all, though fractional storage is more typical. It is not usually a good heuristic to assume that businessmen are unable to calculate their best interests.
@James Wimberley
Well if you say so, James. I thought I’d got the idea that at currently applicable rates of usage over the ‘representative’ 24/7 period and at the current state and cost of 24/7 CSP that, in fact, 24/7 CSP is ‘uneconomical’. So far so good ?
But then I went on to envisage, at least in my own mind, a time when large fossil fuel generators had all closed own – mainly in order to avoid ruining our one and only habitable planet – and that the 24/7 power supply would be a mix of Solar PV, solar thermal (eg CSP), wind and the lesser sources such as hydro, tidal, geothermal etc having taken over the complete electricity supply – especially since Australia doesn’t have, and is almost certain never to have, nuclear fission plants. Is this where you reckon I “missed [your] point” ?
As to businessmen’s ability to “calculate their own best interests”, well no, I would never make the assumption that they can’t do so … but then, given the rate of business bankruptcies and failures, especially amongst startups, and especially amongst large-scale startups, I wouldn’t necessarily make the assumption that they can, either.
@Collin Street asked : You have market research demonstrating that people prefer reliable power to random power?
Yes I do Collin. Here I am, a sample of one. I want electricity when I need it. It’s no good to me at 3:00 am in the morning.
Take your solar and wind junk and do what you will with it, provided I don’t get any of it I’m happy for you to have all the intermittent power you can handle.
> I want electricity when I need it.
Sure, And you’re willing to pay for it, which means given that the actually-existing grid isn’t actually 100% reliable you’ve equipped yourself with reserve-power solutions the details of which you can provide.
… no?
It’s worth noting that the Robert Bryce that prompted Pr Quiggin’s article does not accept the science on climate. Which rather brings into question the reliability of his “professional” judgement.
By failing to support the goal of a transition to low emissions he shows he is incapable of providing any truly compelling reason to greatly expand the use of nuclear power and especially for using it to replace fossil fuels, ie his arguments look like one part of a broader anti-environmentalist, anti-renewables agenda, one that will not admit the full and true costs of the supposedly cheap and 100% reliable, mostly fossil fuel based legacy electricity systems. His lauding of nuclear over renewables is not about nuclear for climate at all and is less a defence/promotion of nuclear than, when stripped to it’s essentials, a defence of fossil fuels.
Renewables are the only low emissions pathway currently available in Australia – and the internally contradictory positions of Robert Bryce mirror closely the internally contradictory positions of Australia’s most prominent nuke spruikers – which only confirms how bereft of sincerity they are. So long as our nuclear advocacy refuses to distance itself from climate science denial and it’s goal of not fixing the climate problem it can’t even use that reason effectively to change anyone’s mind.
Pro-renewables climate advocacy seems very unlikely to rescue nuclear from irrelevancy so long as the primary arguments are that it’s proponents are idiots.
@Ken Fabian
Well said.
@GrueBleen
The time to worry about your problem will be when renewables are 80% or so of overall electricity demand, the rest being met by gas peakers, and we want to get rid of those too. This is at best 15 years from now. We don’t know and can only very hazily estimate the costs at that time of the numerous competing technologies for clean despatchable supply. The right strategy for now clearly is to invest in R&D in a wide portfolio of these, and to deploy wind and solar gangbusters, as if there is a tomorrow. Utilities generally have a supply obligation, and are sufficiently skilled to buy the backup and storage they need meanwhile.
Always on, 24-7-365, ultra safe, clean nuclear power with storage costing about an addition 10% extra is possible now. Base price for MSR will be ~ AUS $47 / MWh, add 10% for storage. Less than AUS $53 / MWh for 24-7-365 system. We can build this LMFB or MSR with additional molten salt storage now. All the technology was worked out ages ago. It can meet all electricity needs with variable demand sated. Outlined here for LMFB but equally applicable to MSR http://skylaneengineering.com/images/estorage.pdf
@Mark Pawelek
If it can compete on cost and safety without subsidies then good luck to it. I just don’t happen to believe it can compete. If you believe it can compete when commercialised then go ahead and invest in the IPO when the time comes. Don’t try and convince us. Some of us might compete and stop you snapping up all the IPO stock you want.