We have cheap fusion. A giant reactor in the sky. Solar should be massively scaled, along with battery capacity and pumped storage. China is crushing in this.
Very situational on where it can be used, and requires some very careful cost calculations.
Ignoring the local effects of their construction, a damb breach is one of the worst man-made disasters possible. Mantinence and error margin must be very very carefully accounted for. There is a reason the world bank stopped funding them, and it wasnt purely enviromental. (Some badly managed projects led to expensive and dangerous situations)
So when relevant it's most powerful energy source avalible. But the list of preconditions and caveats is massive.
Hard agree on pumped hydro and other forms of grid-scale storage, but can you understand concerns around batteries? There are environmental ones on the mining/metals side, but producing and disposing of them in a clean manner is often hard. Getting them from anywhere save mostly china is hard (if you want large, dense, affordable, and grid-scale options) and depending on somebody who's nobody's geopolitical friend is probably a bad idea.
> but can you understand concerns around batteries?
No I can't. Just recycle the batteries, and you've solved both concerns in one go. Lead acid batteries have a >99% recycling rate, the economics for recycling EV & grid storage batteries are even better.
"Just Recycle the batteries" is a massive understatement of the effort involved. The economics of Recycling ev batteries is autrocious. (They're glued into the frame of the car (differently for each model), needing manual dissasembly to not risk fire)
It took 20 years of standardisation and effort to raise lead acid batteries to 99%, and they're as simple as batteries get. Large scale recycle of litium batteries (including the cobalt and nickel) requires changes in how batteries are made to be (either or both) less energy dense and more expensive.
Pumped hydro is the best bet for gridscale. And i'm hoping sodium batteries roll out for EVs within the near future.
I thought it was cost-competitive with something on the scale of mega-dams and takes about as long to finish too. Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
> Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
The water requirements of nuclear power stations cooling systems can cause significant issues. The discharge of heated water back into rivers and the sea is also a major problem.
The largest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde) is cooled by evaporating treated wastewater. Water is water and you get about 0.3kWh of electricity for each evaporated kg of water.
Nuclear is cost competitive if you have a reliable cadence of building plants and if folks get out of the way of location permits and waste storage and people can actually make decisions about them without endless debates and lawsuits. The problem is one-off designs and the decades long gap between project inception and when investment returns start coming in. As opposed to solar where I could order a few panels and accessories online and start producing energy within a week. Obviously larger solar projects take more planning but if you've got a roof, a credit card, and an electrician on hand you can start producing electricity or expand your production in a very short time achieving break even in a few years.
But what to do in Finland during the winter months? I'm massively pro solar, and I'm sceptical of nuclear, but this seems like a problem to me. Batteries work well on shorter time scales but not over the entire year.
The good thing about northern regions is that they tend to be wet and have low population density. This is pretty good for pumped hydro even if batteries aren't cheap enough at a particular time. But it's not clear when the manufacturing costs of batteries will hit a minimum. So far they continue to decrease.
> The solar panels installed in China during the past 2 years produce as much electricity as all of their nuclear plants combined.
Because it doesn't have very many nuclear power plants relative to its size? France has the same number of nuclear reactors as China despite being a much smaller country.
I'd argue 50-60 nuclear power plants having the same energy output as millions (billions?) of solar panels is a win for nuclear - it's much higher energy density, much smaller environmental footprint, much smaller infrastructure investment, etc.
I would add that also a lot of solar power is funded by small capital (homeowners). There is no real way for small capital holders to fund and gain profits from nuclear energy, and installing wind or water turbines are not realistic at 99% of homes.
And at night, nuclear power plants produce infinitely more power than solar. Same during winter months.
Solar simply can't work alone for northern countries without insane amount of batteries. We're talking about having a MONTH of supply in reserve for Germany. It's probably even worse for Finland.
The ideal big dam is Hoover Dam. Large, deep canyon in a desert. Narrow, deep canyon dam site. Hard rock geology. No major towns or agricultural areas in the area to be flooded above the dam. That's the best case.
Without flooding enormous ecosystems and disrupting river flows, and on average half the CO2 emissions per unit of generation than hydro has, and a staggeringly lower land use per energy footprint (hydro is 100x larger, wind is 10x larger). Nuclear seems like one of the only sane choices from an environmental point of view.
Mainly because regulators got scared and started adding line items for bogus safety reasons (like expecting to see background radiation levels far below those seen at coal plants due to the fly ash).
Nuclear has never been particularly affordable. It's always been more expensive than coal or gas, even in France in the 70s-80s and China in the 2010s.
Ignoring the local effects of their construction, a damb breach is one of the worst man-made disasters possible. Mantinence and error margin must be very very carefully accounted for. There is a reason the world bank stopped funding them, and it wasnt purely enviromental. (Some badly managed projects led to expensive and dangerous situations)
So when relevant it's most powerful energy source avalible. But the list of preconditions and caveats is massive.
Ditto for the panels themselves.
No I can't. Just recycle the batteries, and you've solved both concerns in one go. Lead acid batteries have a >99% recycling rate, the economics for recycling EV & grid storage batteries are even better.
It took 20 years of standardisation and effort to raise lead acid batteries to 99%, and they're as simple as batteries get. Large scale recycle of litium batteries (including the cobalt and nickel) requires changes in how batteries are made to be (either or both) less energy dense and more expensive.
Pumped hydro is the best bet for gridscale. And i'm hoping sodium batteries roll out for EVs within the near future.
The water requirements of nuclear power stations cooling systems can cause significant issues. The discharge of heated water back into rivers and the sea is also a major problem.
So, hell no, nuclear is not competitive with mega-dams. It's not even competitive with small dams.
Finland spent 18 years and 11 bn euros to get 1.6 GW of nuclear, the US spent 7bn in subsidies and got some 20 GW of solar in 2022 alone.
Countries going for nuclear will wait decades to get the same power that solar can add in weeks.
Nuclear basically makes no sense at all in 2025.
(For nighttime use dirt-cheap batteries and natural gas now, even cheaper batteries and generated hydrogen gas later).
Because it doesn't have very many nuclear power plants relative to its size? France has the same number of nuclear reactors as China despite being a much smaller country.
I'd argue 50-60 nuclear power plants having the same energy output as millions (billions?) of solar panels is a win for nuclear - it's much higher energy density, much smaller environmental footprint, much smaller infrastructure investment, etc.
Japan builds them in 3 years. USA took about the same during the heights of its use.
Solar simply can't work alone for northern countries without insane amount of batteries. We're talking about having a MONTH of supply in reserve for Germany. It's probably even worse for Finland.
The ideal big dam is Hoover Dam. Large, deep canyon in a desert. Narrow, deep canyon dam site. Hard rock geology. No major towns or agricultural areas in the area to be flooded above the dam. That's the best case.
Most later dams are at worse sites.
Cadillac Desert is a great history of American dam building and the Bureau of Reclamation
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
> China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
That is not an intrinsic truth. We have chosen to make it economically unviable.
Most things get cheaper to build with time. Nuclear is an outlier where it used to be affordable and now it isn’t. That’s insane.
Here's how much it cost to build nuclear in France during its golden age: https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs. Adjust for inflation and draw your own conclusion.
China's nuclear costs are more opaque, but are estimated at $3B per GW. Again, not competitive.