France is no longer building nuclear reactors. Nobody is, really, certainly not at "do something about greenhouse gasses" scale. The problem is economic. The vast bulk of the cost of a reactor is up-front construction, amortized over 30-50 year lifespans. That requires predictable energy prices, in a market where solar prices dropped over 80% in a decade. There are three different major energy sources all running half the cost of nuclear right now.
This rather impacts the risk of the up-front capital investment. Which affects the cost of the capital upwards. Which in turn makes building new reactors that much more expensive.
We should be building renewables because they're cheaper, safer (please, don't waste breath with nonsense arguments), and far more politically palatable. "Energy storage at the necessary scale has not been demonstrated". Of course it's been demonstrated. It's a problem with a thousand solutions. It's just a matter of getting costs down and production up (which in turn drives down cost). Batteries, thermal, compression, gravity storage... there are so many ways to store and release energy.
I see the "can't store at scale" argument everywhere, and it's utter nonsense, and it never comes with supporting math or facts.
> France is no longer building nuclear reactors. Nobody is, really
The Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors believes the following countries are building nuclear reactors: Argentina, Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, China, France, India, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Why would France need to keep building reactors? They're not building more of them because reactors last close to a century.
> That requires predictable energy prices, in a market where solar prices dropped over 80% in a decade. There are three different major energy sources all running half the cost of nuclear right now
And how many of those sources emit no carbon, and deliver power all around the clock? Geothermal and Hydroelectric can, but those are geographically limited.
Solar thermal is zero carbon and 100% uptime, but it's still expensive. Costs are dropping rapidly, though. And as stated earlier, solar + storage or wind + storage also meet your requirements, and are technically viable. It's just a question of cost. Cost of PV solar has dropped so much in the past decade that it could become the winner, even factoring in storage costs. Wind has far less storage costs, because the "What if the wind stops blowing?" theory that sounds so clever isn't really held up by decades of actual data.
We could wait for solar thermal to get cheaper than nuclear (and assume that the cost of nuclear also remains static). Or we could just build nuclear power. The latter has the advantage of having consistent generation regardless of weather and time of year, and consuming a fraction of the amount of land.
Wind power has consistent output over long periods of time. But we still need to make the power grid resilient to fluctuations, which would require immense amounts of energy storage. To put it in perspective how infeasible energy storage is, take a look at California's latest energy projects. The current largest storage plant has 183MWh of capacity, and a planned one has a predicted 300Mwh of capacity[1]. By comparison, the Diablo Canyon plant generats 2,2000MWh of energy every hour [2]. These two energy storage plants can only store 5 minutes and 9 minutes worth of power generated by the Diablo Canyon plant respectively.
Is cost a factor, or is cost not a factor? Pick one. You asked if there was clean, consistent renewable, I gave you solar thermal, and acknowledged it's still cost-prohibitive. But I also expect its cost to plummet as experiments turn to production and lessons are learned.
First of all solar thermal is still intermittent and subject to weather and seasonal fluctuations. It has a built in thermal battery so it's consistent on a 24 hour basis, but it's still a variable source of energy.
Cost is a factor but not the only factor. Intermittency is a factor. Geographic limitation is a factor. Land consumption is a factor.
Cheap intermittent energy is an okay supplement, but cannot reliably deliver when it is needed. Hydroelectric and geothermal are great, non-intermittent clean energy but are impossible to build without the right geography. Fossil fuels are cheap, and deliver power anywhere but emit carbon. Nuclear power isn't as cheap as fossil fuels or intermittent sources. But it's the cheapest non-intermittent source that isn't geographically dependent.
If our goal is to fully replace fossil fuels, then nuclear is the best option (besides building geothermal and hydro where we can). Sure, solar thermal can deliver clean energy without the need for additional energy storage. But we could build twice as much capacity with nuclear and use a fraction of the land, and avoid having to build larger plants in the north and south, and avoid seasonal output fluctuations.
Ignoring clouds, the daily average insolation for the Earth is approximately 6 kWh/m2. [1] So you get about 0.25 KWe averaged daily per m2. Solar has serious land use issues. It is estimated that 1% of the UK would need to be given over to solar to deliver the current power needs. [2]
Noor II CSP delivers 0.66 TWh and is 6.8km2 (200 MW - peak?)
Ringhals Nuclear Power Plant delivers 23 TWh annually (3955 MWe)
A solar plant using the tech of Noor II and the power delivered of Ringhals would be 237km2 - twice the size of Paris.
> It's a problem with a thousand solutions. It's just a matter of getting costs down and production up
Can you source this? I heard of molten salt, gravity storage etc... but I have not read any paper stating we can scale those solution to 50% or even 20% of our current grid usage
Have you read a paper saying we can't scale those solutions? Can you think of a rational reason they can't be scaled?
The problem isn't "can't". Storing energy is trivial. The problem is cost. How much storage is required, and how much will it cost to build it, and how much will that make the total cost of a new energy system?
All this "can't" stuff is, frankly, reactionary bullshit by some very emotional people who are rather in love with the idea of nuclear energy. That's why you never see hard numbers attached to it.
Storing energy is not at all trivial. You want hard numbers? Here are the hard numbers. California's largest energy storage facility, still under construction, is set to have 300MWh of capacity. By comparison, the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant generates 300MWh of electricity every ten minutes. The largest energy storage facility in the world, still under construction in Utah, is set to store between 1-2 GWh of energy. This is still less than what the plant generates every hour.
Electricity to gas conversion has terrible efficiency. 30-40% for the electrolysis and Sabatier process, and then ~50% efficient for the gas combustion engine. Net efficiency is in the 20-25% range. Hydroelectric storage is geographically dependent. Most of the US is in flat terrain.
California said they would do solar and wind plus storage. Then they realized storage was not possible, and they used fossil fuels instead. Similarly, Germany closed down their nuclear plants, saying they'll build intermittent renewables plus storage. And then they ended up building fossil fuel plants when they realized storage could not fulfill the base load they lost from closing nuclear plants.
Why not store hydrogen? Estimated round-trip efficiency is approximately 40%. Storage in underground caverns / mines.
If most of the energy consumption is supplied directly, the storage part need not be overly efficient as long as it can cover the slack. 40% seems good enough. Even 20% is workable, if need be, just need to over-provision enough PV / wind and the over-provisioning itself significantly reduces needed storage.
If combined with capacious long-distance electrical grid (e.g. HV DC), load scheduling, high-uptime offshore wind, some PV in deserts, maybe thermo-electric solar, some batteries for rapid load following, etc, we really can supply enough power even with 0 coal, gas and nuclear power plants, and it wouldn't even bankrupt us. All we need is will. The technology is already sufficient and with improvements it won't be even that hard.
Trying to rely only on intermittent power sources has huge storage requirements due to weather along with daily/seasonal variation. If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago.
For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is 183 times their current capacity:
>...Based on German hourly feed-in and consumption data for electric power, this paper studies the storage and buffering needs resulting from the volatility of wind and solar energy. It shows that joint buffers for wind and solar energy require less storage capacity than would be necessary to buffer wind or solar energy alone. The storage requirement of over 6,000 pumped storage plants, which is 183 times Germany’s current capacity, would nevertheless be huge.
This rather impacts the risk of the up-front capital investment. Which affects the cost of the capital upwards. Which in turn makes building new reactors that much more expensive.
We should be building renewables because they're cheaper, safer (please, don't waste breath with nonsense arguments), and far more politically palatable. "Energy storage at the necessary scale has not been demonstrated". Of course it's been demonstrated. It's a problem with a thousand solutions. It's just a matter of getting costs down and production up (which in turn drives down cost). Batteries, thermal, compression, gravity storage... there are so many ways to store and release energy.
I see the "can't store at scale" argument everywhere, and it's utter nonsense, and it never comes with supporting math or facts.