Against my better judgement, I got sucked into a minor Twitterstorm over the weekend. The main outcome was to remind me that, while Twitter is useful in the role of a microblog, providing quick links to, and sharp observations on, more substantial material, it is utterly useless as a venue for discussion and debate.
Update : A large number of nuclear fans were eager to tweet and share snarky responses on Twitter, but only three people were willing to debate the issue here. Thanks to David Michie, Jonathan Suhanto and Ben Huxham who did at least respond. For those concerned that I might have a home-field advantage, I suggested that they post on a site of their own, with links, but no one took this idea up. That says it all for the nuclear “debate” on Twitter, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve muted the lot of them. End update.
In this case, the debate was over nuclear power, and this post from last year. It’s reasonable to ask why I would bother arguing about nuclear power, given my frequently expressed view that it’s dead as a doornail. The problem is that nuclear fans like Ben Heard are, in effect, advocates for coal. Their line of argument runs as follows
(1) A power source with the characteristics of coal-fired electricity (always on) is essential if we are to decarbonise the electricity suppy
(2) Renewables can’t meet this need
(3) Nuclear power can
Hence, we must find a way to support nuclear
The problem is that, on any realistic analysis, there’s no chance of getting a nuclear plant going in Australia before about 2040 (see over the fold). So, the nuclear fans end up supporting the Abbott crew saying that we will have to rely on coal until then. And to make this case, it is necessary to ignore or denounce the many options for an all-renewable electricity supply, including concentrated solar power, large-scale battery storage and vehicle-to-grid options. As a result, would-be green advocates of nuclear power end up reinforcing the arguments of the coal lobby.
Looking at the argument set out above, point (1) is generally taken as self-evident, even though the idea of baseload demand is basically a nonsense, at least until the renewables share gets much closer to 100 per cent.
Point (3) is based on the claim that since France did this 40 years ago, Australia can do it today. The fact that France has long since lost the special characteristics that made its dash for nuclear power possible isn’t even considered. When I looked at the issue a few years ago, I concluded that only China had anything like the characteristics needed, but nuclear power has stalled even there.
Coming back to the Australian debate, it’s striking that it’s still going on, given the negative findings of the SA Royal Commission, established at the behest of the nuclear lobby. But I’ll spell out the problem one more time. Let’s look at the most optimistic possible timetable. The hardest evidence relates to the time between the issuing of a contract to build a nuclear power plant and the connection to the grid. The best-case scenario is that of the KEPCO contract in the UAE, one of the rare cases where the construction phase was completed on time and on budget. There have, however, been unexplained delays in startup. The contract was signed in December 2009 and, on current projections, the first plant (of four) will be connected to the grid ten years after that, at the end of 2019.
So, to get nuclear power going in Australia before 2040, we’d need signed contracts by 2030 at the latest. What needs to happen before that goal can be achieved
* First, obviously, both major parties need to be convinced of the case for nuclear power. That’s highly unlikely but let’s suppose it can somehow be done by 2020
* Next, the current ban on nuclear power needs to be repealed. This ban looms large in the minds of nuclear fans, but actually it’s such a minor problem we can ignore it
* Next, we need to set up, from scratch a legislative and regulatory framework for nuclear power, and establish and staff a regulator similar to the US NRC. Bear in mind that there is essentially no one in Australia with any relevant expertise. I’d be surprised if this could be done in five years, but let’s suppose three
* Next we need to license designs that can be built here and, at the same time, completely remodel the National Electricity Market in a way that makes nuclear cost-competitive with both gas and renewables, while not opening the door for new coal (again, three years would be incredibly optimistic)
* Next we need to identify greenfield sites for multiple nuclear power plants, almost certainly on the east coast, and go through the processes of EIS, Environment Court and so on. In any realistic view, this would never succeed, but let’s suppose another three years.
After all that, we have to find companies willing to build the plants, and organize the necessary contracts. Given the absurdly opimsitic schedule set out above, this would have to be done inside a year.
In summary, even on magical assumptions it would be impossible to get nuclear power going in Australia before 2040, by which time we would already have had to close most of the coal-fired generation fleet. It follows that the only effect of nuclear advocacy is to prolong the life of coal-fired power to the limits of technological feasibility.
In practice, support for nuclear power in Australia is support for coal. Tony Abbott understands this. It’s a pity that Ben Heard and others don’t/
John Quiggin 
I agree entirely that getting nuclear power going in Australia would be politically impossible. The question I posed in the “twitterstorm” was whether it was possible for a country (any country) to rapidly decarbonise using wind & solar alone. Because it is my understanding that we must now *rapidly* decarbonise globally.
I thought your question was not “is it possible?” but “has it been done already”. Given rapid tech progress, answers are “Yes” and “Not yet”. In the Australian context, policy implication is “forget nuclear, hurry up on renewables”.
Well, if it’s been done already that’s pretty compelling evidence that it’s possible. Is Germany rapidly decarbonising in your opinion? If not, is there an example of a country or state anywhere in the world that is rapidly decarbonising using wind & solar alone?
Denmark is often seen as a poster child for decarbonisation and renewables. In 2015 its electricity consumption was 60% renewables, 20% coal with the rest mostly biomass and renewables. (So says Wikipedia.)
The Electricity Sector in Denmark Wikipedia page will also show you that Denmark imports ~5000GWh annually from nuclear and hydro powered Sweden and Norway. This is what allows Denmark such a high percentage of wind. Even so, Denmark’s electricity carbon intensity ranges from 80-350g/kWh during the day. France is below 50g/kWh all day everyday. Have a look at http://www.electricitymap.org.
@DM Given that France can’t repeat whatever it did in the 1970s, and that many others have tried and failed, why do you think this isolated case can be replicated?
Have you looked at the Grubler analysis of increasing costs in France, summarized in my National Interest article? Have you considered the special conditions discussed in the article, which don’t apply anywhere today, not even China as it turns out.
I have no problem is accepting renewables more so given how much they are reducing in cost here however am I correct you are assuming batteries are aligned with solar and wind farms so dispatchable power is available at a flick of a switch alah Finkel or how Tesla battery operates and has had an effect on wholesale prices?
@JQ Not isolated. Sweden decarbonised rapidly as well in the 1980s even faster than France. I find it curious that something that has been done before in two countries can’t be done, but something that has never been done in any country can be done. I admire your confidence, especially when the consequences of getting this wrong is a 4C world. I’d suggest a more prudent approach would be to throw everything we have at this, regardless of the economics. I’m not sure how you price the end of civilisation.
@JQ FWIW, I have no issue at all with continuing the major investment in renewables globally. Up to around 50% renewables share is affordable (cheap even) and works well, but it’s that last 20% that’s questionable in my mind. I’d appreciate your thoughts on this which suggests that costs rise sharply as renewables penetration approaches 100%
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-reason-we-cant-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/
Sweden is mostly hydro. If you have plenty of hydro, it’s easy to get to 100 per cent renewables with existing technology, which is precisely what Sweden is planning to do as it phases out nuclear.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/sweden-renewable-energy-target-2040-country-on-track-a7381686.html
Not a good exhibit for your case.
On the bigger question, given the urgency and magnitude of the task, it’s important to go for the cheapest emission-free options. Back in 2004, it looked as if nuclear was likely to be one of them, so I cautiously supported it.
https://johnquiggin.com/2004/05/24/global-warming-and-nuclear-power/comment-page-1/
Now it’s obvious that the best long-run options are solar PV and wind, augmented by a wide range of storage technologies. In the short run, existing gas can provide the necessary flexibility while we phase out coal.
@DM Your source on batteries buries the lead. In the case of a single state like California with high seasonal variability, his main example, the cheapest solution is almost certainly a long-distance transmission line to the Texas-Plains States network. The cost would be in billions not trillions. Existing battery technology is enough to cope with diurnal variability ( the fact that the sun doesn’t shine at night) at moderate cost.
‘
And we haven’t even considered Concentrated Solar Power, which is mostly uneconomic under current conditions, but cheaper than new nuclear for which it substitutes just fine.
There’s a fairly straight forward flaw in your understanding of the economics of electricity. Increasingly, around the world where significant renewable energy of the intermittent and variable nature exists, there is increasing incidence of zero (or less than zero) wholesale prices.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-06/negative-prices-in-power-market-as-wind-solar-cut-electricity
It’s not so much about misleading & misused metrics like LCOE being bandied about as to what is “cheaper” (it isn’t btw); the key is the economic viability of the energy mix we choose. Which ideally will also be low CO₂. Remember the dot-com fiasco? At its core the same mistake is being made. Revenue still needs to be higher than Costs, even in a socialist wonderland. Otherwise in a publicly owned system we’ll pay for the energy through our taxes. Which would be a huge mistake.
So if revenue keeps hitting $0 per unit, and increasingly so… who on earth will be dumb enough to keep investing in wind & solar?
re: CSP vs nuclear
1) not a “just fine” substitute – baseload-ish, but not fully 24/7. Also tend to use quite a bit of gas to keep its molten salt at the right temperature. The ones that don’t use gas are definitely not 24/7.
2) considering that the CSP project planned/proposed for Port Augusta comes in at around $4/Watt, and so does the nuclear plants nearing complete construction in the UAE (5GW in about a decade-and-a-half), also not cheaper. Getting to less than $4/Watt for generation capacity would be nice, but you should at least get the numbers correct.
@JQ Sweden is not mainly hydro. In 2016 the Swedes produced exactly the same amount (61TWh) from hydro and nuclear out of a total of 149TWh.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sweden
Here is a more in depth discussion of the electricity sector in Sweden which describes Sweden’s nuclear build out as “one of the fastest feats of decarbonisation the world has ever seen”. Look at any long term chart of CO2 emissions in Sweden and this is self-evident.
https://www.vox.com/2016/6/17/11950440/sweden-nuclear-power
In order to not upset climate science deniers – lots of people with power and influence who like nuclear are climate science deniers – nuclear advocates turn to the one meme that won’t upset them; relentless criticism of renewable energy and ‘green’ politics. Given that, at it’s rhetorical core, this is the feeding of the same alarmist economic fear of a transition to low emissions as pro-fossil fuels climate science deniers, they are effectively arguing against their own cause.
Until and unless the political right – where most of the latent support for nuclear resides – actually commits to strong climate action intended to bring on the phase out of coal and gas, nuclear will continue to have no committed backing from the people with power and influence who actually like it. Nuclear will be even less likely to get real and substantial support from these ‘friends’ than High Emissions Low Efficiency coal plants – which the symbolic Senate vote on supporting coal power clearly demonstrates.
Seems to me it is evidence of deep desperation when nuclear rhetoric turns to demanding the support of pro-RE climate concerned types as the essential change of political mindset that will put nuclear on the table. ie they want ‘green’ politics to save nuclear! They are doing this using relentless hostility, condescension and derision; a most peculiar way to win their hearts and minds. And they wonder why they aren’t making headway!
My own view is that the climate issue only has it’s ‘green’ labelling because of persistent failures of leadership from mainstream politics, that failed to make the issue mainstream and the leadership theirs. I’m pleased that ‘green’ politics has stepped up to push the issues along, but I’d be even more pleased if it didn’t need to.
@JQ Looking at the history of hydro, nuclear and wind production, 2015 was a year of particularly high hydro production. Exports were high that year also. I can guess which country those electrons were exported to. A similar pattern is evident in 2012. While undoubtedly there is a trend towards more renewables in Sweden wind production is still modest, 15TWh in 2016 vs 61TWh for hydro and nuclear, and as the Vox piece suggests the Swedes are finding it hard (and very expensive) to replace their nuclear fleet with wind and gas backup.
We do not “need” “baseload” power. Unreliable electricity is perfectly fine and tolerable.
It’s a cost, but it’s not that big a cost. I mean, you should be able to run some fermi numbers: 90% unreliable electricity — one day a fortnight of nothing — represents a 10% hit to production capacity, no? About that. Most factors indicate less:
+ the lost production isn’t lost, just retimetabled [see analyses of the impacts of holidays]; since nobody sane runs at 100% capacity, there’s usually room to make it up later. Output impacts are less than time-lost impacts.
+ the non-labour/non-time resources that would be consumed in the production aren’t: trivially, the loss of productive capacity is going to be less than the lost time, because time/labour isn’t the only input.
It’s only going to be the full 10% in environments where time [rather than demand or material supply/cost] is the only limiting factor, and that’s basically never true. And since current electricity is already less than 100% reliable, all the must-have-power-or-Bad facilities already have auxilliary supplies anyway, so there’s no huge extra cost there.
Eyeballing it I’d say an X percent unreliable power represents maybe an x/2 impact in output. We’re talking a few percent; significant, but not overwhelming. Tolerable, and we know this because “unreliable electricity” is a current problem in large parts and people tolerate it pretty well.
I mean, not that I’m encouraging “unreliable electricity!!” but it’s the big problem that everyone’s presenting with renewables and it’s just… not actually that big a problem? Managable with curently-known techniques, impacts of a scale with other problems we put up with? Plainly more tractable than climate change?
[and you never-ever-ever see pro-nuclear or pro-coal people running these sorts of numbers. Either they don’t know how or why to run a cost-benefit analysis — in which case they don’t know what they’re talking about and should be ignored — or they can but they don’t like what it shows, in which case they’re liars and see above.]
I never ever want to see anybody talking about “baseload” power and why it’s needed unless they already have a cost-benefit analysis and rejection of the above beforehand. Never again.
The climate change battle is over. Humanity has lost. A catastrophic level of climate change is now certain excepting some few highly unlikely black swan events. This is not a cause for defeatism. A good command system knows when a battle is lost and stages a careful, defensive retreat. Trying to hold a line which cannot be held will lead to complete, unmanaged collapse. Humanity now has to plan its defensive retreat (a managed collapse) in the face of advancing climate change. Of course, we should continue with ameliorating measures and all relevant scientific researches. These will facilitate the retreat or retrenchment (call it what you will) of our wasteful and damaging economic system.
When it comes to low-lying coastal regions and desertification zones this retreat will be literal. There will also be a need to retreat from high levels of consumption to much more frugal consumption levels. The promotion of over-consumption will have to cease and the need for conservation of reserves and resources be highlighted. Command economies based on rationing and requisitioning will likely be necessary for societal survival. Whole nations will be put on an existential survival footing. The ones which cannot achieve this will collapse completely.
A defining event, in the form of a “salutary disaster”, will perforce have to occur before humanity, peoples and governments, properly realize their existential peril. One wishes this were not so but it is clear that “mere” scientific and economic warnings are simply not heeded. Nature needs to produce an irrefutable “demonstration” event which terrifies humanity into real action. Sooner or later this will happen. Let us hope we or our descendants can save a portion of our species and civilization from that point on. It would be saddening to think that the evolution of human intelligence was a pointless and maladaptive event on the evolutionary fitness landscape.
I agree on the essentials with Ikonoclast.
As I see it, w fell for the old X/Y problem & lost. That was the reason for my contribution to the discussion on twitter.
The more I thought about a response to the discussion we were having, the more depressed I got. As it is, I’m living with a self-imposed ‘demand management’ on energy & water. It is painful & I can’t see too many people accepting it without significant … encouragement. Good luck to us & our kids.
Old XY problem
https://www.scienceparty.org.au/the_x_y_problem
@Jonathan Sutanto “There’s a fairly straight forward flaw in your understanding of the economics of electricity. ” When I get comments like this, I feel like a climate scientist dealing with uneducated denialists like Bolt. I don’t claim to be infallible, but I am a professor of economics, Fellow of the Econometric Society and author of numerous articles on energy economics. Before you try setting me straight, you might think a bit harder about your argument. Hint: think about the difference between “minimum” and “average”
@JQ I agree that if you have a lot of hydro getting to 100% renewables is (relatively) easy. But what if you don’t? What if you don’t have a convenient neighbour with loads of hydro and nuclear on tap like Denmark does? This is the reality for most countries including Australia.
@JQ And again I must insist that Sweden is not “mostly hydro”. The year (2015) referred to in the Independent article was a year of much higher than usual hydro generation. That hydro generation was exported, and more than likely exported to Denmark. That same year Denmark had higher than usual imports.
@Jonathan Sutanto… as JQ said it doesn’t matter if the price occasionally hits 0c. On the one hand the storage technologies will want to take advantage of is those low points, and as storage expands we’ll see a new base price emerge as multiple stored energy providers charge up at the cheapest points they can find. But before that happens it’s the average energy prices that matter.
I’d like to see every solar pricing article show a joint solar+storage price, but I think we’ll see it play out less clearly.
@Quiggin: it is less about the difference between minimum & average, and more about “when”. And when wind & solar are producing ample amounts of electricity, invariably prices will be depressed. When they don’t, the tightening of supply leads to other energy sources, generally this will be gas-fired generation, profiting from it. So looking at average prices will lead to a misreading of what is going on. We are literally talking about Econ101 stuff here. A simple eyeballing of the electricity mix in a place like South Australia is usually sufficient to get a feel for the conundrum.
https://opennem.org.au/#/regions/sa
Now at the time of your comment, 13:30 14 August 2018, the combination of wind & solar were producing *more* than the actual demand. Price: -$14.30/MWh And this has been a good week to observe the swings. The peak on Wednesday 8 Aug 19:30 where almost all supply was gas: ~$260/MWh Given that more wind & solar will clearly make this situation worse for wind & solar, the logical question has to be, why do it?
I’m aware of your qualifications, and I’ll assume you have the ability & talent implicit because of it. The problem here is one of mindset, not expertise or the opportunity to exercise it. Feynman was one of the best at recognising the strength in being able to use doubt of one’s own expertise, and embracing the potentials to be found from discovering you might have actually made a mistake.
@Greg Alexander: so yeah, Storage. And we proceed to the next stage of the discussion where issues like arbitrage need to be understood.
But before I do, you guys understand that in a merit-order pricing system like the NEM, the generators get paid the clearing price for each 30 minute period (that I guess will become a 5 minute one eventually) on what they each produce? Wind & solar doesn’t get much of the $260 price I referred to in my previous post.
Now I shouldn’t need to explain arbitrage on an economics blog, but so you know that I understand it I will. You can exercise an act of arbitrage: buying low & selling high, but the actual act itself then reduces further opportunity for more arbitrage. Your low price rises & the highs reduce, pushing the market to less of the volatility arbitrage exploits & thus the ability of storage to justify its cost-benefit, NPV, etc
Now someone is going to want to say, if the low price rises, then that’s an opportunity to build more wind & solar, and we can then in turn create more arbitrage opportunity for more storage. And again for more wind & solar, leading to even more storage, and so on in a virtuous feedback loop. But that seems to also involve a lot of Unicorn as well. Not sure we want to gamble the threat of climate change on something this flimsy as our preferred strategy. (also I can refer to some of the better academic literature on this, if my distaste for Unicorns isn’t sufficient for you… but this is enough for now)
” We are literally talking about Econ101 stuff here.” Have you even done Econ 101? Greg Alexander got the point, which you seem to have missed.
It still comes down to the average selling price though doesn’t it?
As I said the storage companies will buy at the low price which knocks off the low extremes, and conversely (as you say) does the same to the high extreme. But it still comes down to the average selling price of electricity doesn’t it – the storage just stabilises the prices a little (and must increase the price when adding storage).
(Oh, I’m not an economist. And I’m happy to be told my question is too simple for an economist blog if it is).
@Jonathan I assume you’re saying that the average prices are not relevant because as supply increases the price decreases. This means that the side effect of putting in more wind turbines is that each will earn slightly less, and as the number increases it still leaves a small proportion of gas generators trying to make up the down times at immense cost. Is that what you are saying?
Given the instability of wind sources what are the longest stretches of doldrums that would be need to be addressed? And how does this change if we add solar to the mix?
It still comes down to the average selling price though doesn’t it?
Exactly. The fact that the price is sometimes zero or negative doesn’t matter, as long as the average (during periods when the source is operational) is high enough to give a return on investment. Gas and hydro do well because they can be dispatched when prices are high, and turned off otherwise, Solar and wind do well because they have the lowest capital cost and (almost) zero operating cost. Coal and nuclear generators dislike this kind of market and lobby for capacity payments in its place. Jonathan has the argument backwards.
” legislative and regulatory framework for nuclear power”
Does that include the insurance? And the upfront funding?
As far as I can see no private company is clamouring to build a nuclear power station in Australia. So government owned and insured?
“storage companies will buy at the low price which knocks off the low extremes, and conversely (as you say) does the same to the high extremes”
I believe that is what hydro is good at, pumping back up to storage during quiet times and ready for the next high demand. At least that is what I read, that the Snowy hydro made their money gaming the system.
Responding to the serious point raised by Jonathan, the cost of the UAE deal is somewhat opaque, since it’s bundled with a 60 year contract worth $60 billion more than twice the construction cost. It seems pretty clear that the construction cost was kept low to encourage future business. It’s notable however that, 10 years after the UAE deal, KEPCO hasn’t made any more firm sales. We have yet to see the price on the UK deal if it ever happens.
But let’s suppose, using your numbers, that nuclear (which we can’t do for at least 20 years) is about as costly as CSP being installed right now. Isn’t it obvious that we should just forget about nuclear and go with what we can already do?
@Quiggin: “Have you even done Econ 101?” Yes.
I’ve explicitly answered your slightly ambiguous reference to minimum & average prices. That should speak volumes to those impartial to the subject matter, and prepared to understand the very real challenges ahead. And people making(or losing) money in the electricity market will be ruthlessly impartial.
So what we need is an empirical test, and I propose Germany. Already has a significant renewable energy capacity, with clear political will to do more. There’s also a specific EEG rule that stops payment of subsidies once prices have been negative for 6 consecutive hours,
https://blog.energybrainpool.com/en/potential-future-loss-of-renewable-energy-plants-through-the-six-hour-rule/
An occurrence that will increase in frequency. The test will be if investors continue to roll out more renewable capacity, because there’s all that coal-fired plant they need to get rid of; or if, as I expect, as renewables increasingly cannibalize themselves, it stops making sense to build any more. Or pick another country. Or even South Australia. That works too as a test case. It’ll make the next decade exciting.
“Isn’t it obvious that we should just forget about nuclear and go with what we can already do?” To which my answer is what’s wrong with doing both? We already know that the cost of each incremental quanta of renewable energy becomes more expensive when the overall system is taken into account, with it escalating fastest when (theoretically) going from 80% to 100%. So by including nuclear in the mix, we have more options as these inevitable obstacles arise.
Also the Korean-built UAE plants are about par-for-the-course cost-wise. They are good at it because they simply build the same design, again & again. Lovering did a paper on it, I can dig it up later.
@upendearth: I’m saying the margins that solar & wind are forced to operate off ~ one of the side effects of zero marginal costs is also zero pricing power (I’ll explain this in a sec) ~ gets squeezed as more solar & wind comes into the same market. And investors in this (or any) infrastructure expect their return on the capital. So at a certain point, they’ll stop. Or at least the savvy ones will. Having increasing incidence of zero or sub-zero prices doesn’t help the profitability of wind or solar. Anyone should be able to figure that one out for themselves.
Larger picture, including storage… if you are really interested, requires a commitment to plowing through the academic literature. This paper by Sisternes, Jenkins & Botterud is one of the better ones,
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h8voz283xho3pj8/Value%20of%20Energy%20Storage%20in%20Decarbonizing%20Electricity%20-%20Applied%20Energy%202016.pdf?dl=0
tl;dr is wind & solar with storage is not *sufficient* It doesn’t get us to deep decarbonisation.
On “zero pricing power”: in a competitive merit-order bidding process like the NEM operates off, it is very efficient at finding the lowest price (despite all the bad press they get when someone is unhappy at inevitable consequences). Consider a bunch of wind & solar plants being able to produce 100% of the supply (which did happen today in South Australia btw). If one operator gets jack of low prices they can always bid a higher price; even more so, a bunch of them could collude to artificially raise the price. Let’s assume they don’t get caught. At some point someone will back stab the others & put forward a slightly lower price in order to have more of their output sold, & then the in-fighting gets them back to the original zero or sub-zero price. i.e. zero pricing power.
“They are good at it because they simply build the same design, again & again. ”
This is a central part of my problem with nuclear and the failure of the French 1970s model. No Gen III or III+ design has been built more than a handful of times, whereas France used to build lots of the same.
In the case of APR-1400, there is *one* unit in operation, and seven more under construction (four at Barakah and three in South Korea). A total of about 11GW, when and if they are complete. That’s about as good as it gets for nuclear designs.
Compare to, say, Vestas which sells 10GW wind capacity every year (about 100 GW in total). To be sure, capacity factors make the gap a bit smaller, but the problem is obvious. And, by comparison with nuclear designs, wind and solar PV are commodity products: one top-tier company’s products are much like another’s.
@JQ I’d prefer not to be labelled a “nuclear fan”. I’m a fan of a habitable planet well into the future and believe we should consider all options to make that possible.
I wasn’t part of the twitter storm but coincidentally I just wrote the following article and conclude that nuclear has left its run too late in Australia. It’s a response to another article on the same website which argued renewables have led to high electricity prices, only nuclear can provide reliable low carbon baseload etc. I diasagree and try address those issues in the response. http://www.ethos.org.au/online-resources/Engage-Mail/nuclear-too-late-a-response-to-ian-hore-lacy
Negative electricity prices are not a normal feature of a working market. They can only arise from the technical limitations of inflexible coal and nuclear plants, which are dying. Gas, wind, solar, batteries and hydro can just be turned off. You can also reproduce the inefficiency with badly designed contracts. But future renewables-dominated electricity systems will very rarely have negative prices.
@Robert Farago That’s an excellent article, thanks for the link.
The real problem here is that all sides of politics have supported the sale of monopoly energy assets – notably the electricity sector and natural gas production.
In most countries, you only need ‘return on investment’ if the generation asset has been built by the private sector. If it a listed company, then you need sufficient ROI to post a profit for the benefit of your shareholders, to keep the market analysts happy and predatory buyers away.
And then there are those pesky emissions …
At our current stage, it would be a whole lot simpler if, instead of ‘underwriting’ new generation, the federal government built and owned it.
No need for rapacious ROI, no market interference, could be supplying energy at a reasonable price, and a counter to the ever-spiralling costs from private providers.
John will argue the toss on this but, as a currency issuer, the federal government can afford to do this, without undue inflationary pressure – it actually might reduce that if energy prices fell.
Finally, if this approach was adopted, it would be silly not to make at least a large portion of it renewables generation with mega-batteries like in SA,
They have already been proven to be FAR more responsive to load spikes than the old spinning-on-standby turbines of coal and other-fired plants.
Or even pumped hydro.
To address JQ’s OP, nuclear power is unlikely in Australia due to ‘lawfare’ like with Adani coalmine plus civil disobedience to inhibit the actual construction. We also can’t agree on a simple nuclear waste dump, which we almost certainly need, despite our pretty good geology in out of the way desert locations. As a polity, we aren’t going to agree on nuclear power plants along coastline in each state!
Some critiques of the OP, I think in some ways the legislative process would be slower, you probably need a plebiscite along the lines of SSM and to get similar outcomes in favour of nuclear. Drafting that legislation and organising the vote took some time. However, drafting reactor operations, site selection and organising contracts could probably be done concurrently – but if the public says ‘no’ then we’ve wasted hundreds of millions of dollars and man-hours organising stuff for if the public says ‘yes’. That said, if everything went perfectly AND there was a dedicated AND enthusiastic effort, I think those could be done before 2030.
In terms of France being cited as a near solitary country, you could make arguments for fast nuclear builds in countries like Japan, Taiwan as well as hydro dominated countries like Canada and Sweden. The issues with nuclear in Japan and Taiwan have been data falsification and fake parts usage.
In terms of build times, the assumption is a decade is needed – often in the context of pressurised water reactors. However, Japan’s newest reactors (Advanced Boiling Water Reactors) only took 52 months to build and the new GE-Hitachi Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (never actually built) should take 30-36 months. Optimistically, once the first reactor is built multiple could be built concurrently. Pessimistically, you can see that fabricating parts in Japan and shipping them to Australia there is the likelihood of shipping delays, or mutli-million/billion dollar parts being damaged.
In terms of integration with renewables the boiling water reactors should load follow better than existing coal or pressurised nukes. On the downside, another few million rooftop solar panels added during reactor construction must surely make the economics extremely marginal.
On the subject of water – where is it going to come from?
https://qz.com/1351279/the-hidden-water-footprint-of-fossil-fuel-and-nuclear-power-plants/
Coastal plants and seawater?
Or from agriculture?
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4610.0
Unless someone has a spare supply of cooling water tucked away.
Why does it always fail with nuke?
Because they WON’T build them in safe places, even with a gun pointed at their heads and WON’T build dumps in safe places , away from human habitation, water tables, etc.
It is less than 19 years until we will exceed the IPCC’s 2C carbon budget if our emissions merely stay as they are now. Remember, 2017 was a new record in CO2 emissions. Emissions are still growing. Remember also, every further discovery in the climate change field is showing 2C as being less and less likely to be passably safe. In other words, the new thinking is that even plus 2C is going to be very dangerous and damaging. And the way we are going we are more likely headed for 4C plus.
We have made NO progress in stopping the growth of carbon emissions. None, zero, nada, zilch. The amounts of solar and wind we have added have not even kept up with the growth in energy consumption. To date, this is a dismally failed transition. Under BAU capitalism we will continue to fail to transition at anywhere near a rapid enough pace. Until rapid transition of all sectors, not just electricity generation , is mandated by government to happen in one to two decades maximum from now and enforced by strict laws and heavy carbon taxes, then it simply won’t happen fast enough to save us.
Why does it always fail with nuke?
Because the problems with nuclear are technically intractable, or rather to solve them we would need social-organisation tools we don’t currently have. There’s a fine margin between safety and danger, is the problem: nuclear power doesn’t give small-scale tolerable “warning” failures, so we can’t tell when our safety-management cultures are failing. We know how to run extremely reliable safety-management cultures long-term, but only on the small scale. Pilot deployments, military projects. Beyond that… as the number of people expand, you need to add more layers, and more layers at the top means less oversight at the bottom. If nuclear had a safer failure mode we’d spot the small problems and direct oversight to the low-level areas where safety culture was breaking down, but instead we get point failures that can kill millions. We can’t stop that, we don’t have the social tools right now, and “eventually but near-inevitably it will fail and kill millions, and we don’t really know how to mitigate that risk for the scale of deployment we’re looking at” is the kind of thing that leads to failed risk assessments.
Tail risks are difficult to manage. We minimise them largely by not building systems subject to those sorts of tail-risk problems… which pretty much rules out nukes on the large scale until we get a better understanding of how to control human factors in safety management systems.
But some people don’t see human factors. They only see technical factors… which means the only problems they see are the ones that can be fixed with technical measures. Social-structure problems are as invisible as a glass in water. “Sure, but this won’t actually scale because we can’t find the staff” “but there’s no technical problem, all the technical factors are sorted! Why are you stalling!?”, etc.
More than a decade ago, when I was providing consulting advice about the environmental impacts of the then-proposed Barakah nuclear plant in Abu Dhabi, I closed the presentation by pointing out that, by the time the four reactors at Barakah were running, photovoltaics would produce the same amount of electricity at lower cost.
Now, in 2018, not one of the Barakah reactors has yet started, and photovoltaics in Abu Dhabi can indeed produce, at lower cost, the same amount of electricity as those four reactors will produce.
Of the seven continents, Australia is arguably the #1 continent for producing electricity from photovoltaics. If there is any continent on the planet capable of getting more than 50 percent of its total electrical energy from photovoltaics, it is Australia. And if there is any continent where nuclear power is less needed, it is Australia.
“So what we need is an empirical test, and I propose Germany.”
Visit or live in Germany and Australia for a few months. I think you’ll find the climates are extremely different. Specifically, Germany is cold and cloudy, and Australia is warm and sunny. Germany is a terrible country for photovoltaics. Australia is arguably one of the top countries in the world for photovoltaics (and the number one continent in the world for photovoltaics).
“Lovering did a paper on it, I can dig it up later.”
Jessica Lovering has absolutely zero experience in the nuclear power industry. (And in fact zero experience related to electricity generation of any kind.) That doesn’t mean the paper you can dig up is wrong, but given Ms. Lovering’s background, it should be reviewed skeptically. (Which is probably a good way to review everything…but especially things written by people with no experience.)
Above it was said, “If there is any continent on the planet capable of getting more than 50 percent of its total electrical energy from photovoltaics, it is Australia.”
But this issue is not about Australia, solely. It is about the world. And it is not about 50 percent of current total electricity generation or even 100 percent of current total electricity generation. It is about 100% of all energy used by humans on earth. If it isn’t 100 percent decarbonised in two decades or less then we are toast. We are fiddling while the earth burns.
Hi Robert,
I agree with John.
the sunniest place in Germany is not as sunny as the least sunniest place in Australia (northwest Tassie). So yes if any country or region can use solar PV and solar thermal to the fullest penetration, we are one of them.