Google commits to buying power generated by nuclear-energy startup Kairos Power

Based on the headline I thought that this was an enormous capital commitment for an enormous generating capacity, but the deal is with a company called Kairos that is developing small modular reactors with 75 megawatts of electrical output each [1]. 7 reactors of this type, collectively, would supply 525 megawatts (less than half of a typical new commercial power reactor like the AP1000, HPR1000, EPR, or APR1400).

Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027:

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/kairos-power-starts-const...

EDIT: Statement from the official Google announcement linked by xnx below [2]:

Today, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.

[1] https://kairospower.com/technology/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841108

Yeah I’m not going to lie, that’s quite disappointing. Google funding several AP1000’s would be huge.

seeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia, why would Google waste $120B when they can get the same output for at most half the price (and realistically more like 1/10th) using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades.

edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B. Build 3GW for overcapacity and you’re still at just 17% of the cost of 1GW of nuclear, and you technically have 3x more capacity. Now figure out how many megapacks you can buy for the $14B/GW you saved https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design (answer: 16GW/68GWh)

Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.

And new AP1000s in the US would cost significantly less, because there are already experienced workers & supply chains from Vogtle and getting a license requires less work too, because you can copy much of Vogtle.

The median build time for nuclear reactors is 7 years. This is archivable if you continue building and not just build 1 or 2 every few decades.

> using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades

We have nothing close to the battery fabrication pipeline to make that timeline true, certainly not at scale. If this move works, Google will have cemented its power needs and economics for decades to come.

That is seemingly such an absurdly high number to get a nuclear planet up and running.

Is the majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?

> Is that majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?

One part this, two parts the economics of a novel technology platform being deployed in a large size, three parts American labor costs and inexperience with megaprojects.

Similar to why we can't build ships [1]: high input costs, notably materials and labour, and a coddled industry that is internationally uncompetitive. With ships, it's the Jones Act and shipyard protectionism; with civilian nukes, it's misguided greenies. (Would note that we're perfectly capable of nuclear production if it happens under the military.)

[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/constructionphysics/p/why-cant...

> Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.

Hence the batteries.

frequently asserted but not true.

https://x.com/DavidOsmond8/status/1843840160842350779

IMO they only continue to exist because of the Jones Act not the way I think you're implying where Jones Act protectionism prevents them from flourishing. High material and labor alone are enough to explain why people wouldn't build ships in the US. What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea? Gone are the days when the US dominates on skill or capacity, and that's not because the US has lost something the rest of the world just caught up with us.

Whenever we're looking at the 1900s and wondering why the US used to be so dominant as an industrial power I think it's incredibly important to remember our industry got all the upside (an absolute torrent of money and demand) and none of the downside (bombing) of two world wars. IMO the US industrial base was riding high on that easily into the 80s and people mistake that dominance for skill and prowess rather than the waning boon of WW2's mobilization and destruction of every other extant industrial power.

I'm fairly pro-nuclear but the EIA (Energy Information Administration) publishes a "Levelized Costs of New Generation" report every year that compiles the total cost of installing new generation, taking into account the fuel, build up, maintenance, interest, and inflationary costs, and nuclear ends up costing more $$$ than other renewable alternatives.

It's no conspiracy why nuclear never gets traction these days -- maybe it was cost-effective 10-30 years ago but renewable technology has gotten relatively cheap. (Shutting down active nuclear reactors earlier than needed is a whole different issue though.)

Here's the report for 2023: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/...

There is no report for 2024 because they are building a new model to take into account even newer technologies: https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/releases/press537.php

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.is/DklaA ("Bloomberg: China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")

Global battery manufacturing capacity was 2,600GWh in 2023 [1], and has probably already exceeded that this year. The IEA projects closer to 4TWh by 2025, and nearly 7TWh by 2030 [2].

You need to pay attention because this is happening fast.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... [2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b...

The scale just isn't there. A single nuclear power plant near me, McGuire Nuclear Power Plant, produced 17,514 GW·h in 2005. The entire potential output of the Tesla (cough Panasonic) Gigafactories in California and China have a combined output of ~50 GWh per year. [0] Nuclear power is amazing at producing a reliable base load of power that massively outstrips our ability to produce and store solar power. Say our load is well aligned with the cycle of solar power and we're ignoring weather so we can derate the amount we want to store to 30% that's 105 years of production out of what I think is the two largest batter plants in existence to store the power produced continuously by a single large nuclear power plant.

[0] https://www.fuld.com/tesla-energy-massive-growth-in-megapack...

Global stationary storage deployed for 2024 will be ~150GWh, and this is accelerating. Batteries are easy, nuclear appears to be impossible (economically speaking).

That right, blame the hippies. Nothing at all to do with nuclear power plants being the one thing that you really do want to be engineered well. But no, regulations are of course to blame!

The rise of the US as an industrial power started in 1800. The US was already dominant before WW1.

The point is there are downstream costs to our moribund shipping industry. We have a internally-navigable waterways we barely use, offshore wind power gets stalled due to lack of ships, et cetera.

Post-WWII effects are one component. But another is that we want a protected shipbuilding industry for its own purposes, which is fine, but that curtails a lot of other production.

> What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea?

Energy. Our energy costs are much lower than theirs.

So using your numbers, it is solidly a little less than half the cost, not one tenth (26GWh seems around the necessarily amount for riding out ~14 hours of darkness. I'm assuming your factor of 3 makes up for seasonal variation and cloudy days). The panels take up 9 acres of land area, and need to be kept clean of snow and dust. The battery lifetime is small compared to expected life of a nuclear reactor, but the battery lifecycle is more straightforward. This seems like the territory of having a reasonable tradeoff between the two, not some unequivocal win for an Internet smackdown about how we should avoid one approach.

Google's entire thing only consumed on average 2.6x worth of AP1000 energy last year. Why does anyone think that the IT industry needs to pull all of the weight of electrifying the American economy by building 7 AP1000 power stations?

Nuclear is still much more expensive than renewables in China, where there aren't too many "misguided greenies" setting policy. Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable, not the other way around.

The faster people can internalize this lesson, the sooner we'll get to economically-viable nuclear power.

> nearly 7TWh by 2030

That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today. (You obviously don't need 1:1 coverage. But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge.)

Now consider EVs. Then add the tens of TWh of annual power demand AI is expected to add to power demand [2]. (And I'm assuming a free market for battery cells, which obviously isn't where we're heading. So add local production bottlenecks to the mix.)

Battery numbers are going up. But they aren't going up fast enough and never could have, not unless we ditch electrifying transportation. Nukes or gas. Anyone pretending there is a third way is defaulting to one or the other.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...

[2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...

So 35 years then to store the power generated 24/7 by McGuire at that rate of production which ignores that the huge spike of AI loads will want 24/7 power, if we're looking at that kind of load I'd rate it at 50% for starters (low to be honest because it doesn't account for how solar ramps up during the day) which is around 60 years. Plus that's giving full capacity to those batteries when ideally we'd only use the middle 60% to avoid deep cycling the batteries daily unless they've completely solved that problem.

The anti-nuclear hippy movements of the 60s and 70s are pretty directly responsible for a lot of the slow down in expansion of nuclear power.

>Between 1975 and 1980, a total of 63 nuclear units were canceled in the United States. Anti-nuclear activities were among the reasons, but the primary motivations were the overestimation of future demand for electricity and steadily increasing capital costs, which made the economics of new plants unfavorable.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Impact_o...

There was a lot scares and FUD about it at the time. To note, I am pro-nuclear.

Nobody claims renewables + battery doesn't work long term. (And not only work, but do so at rock-bottom costs.)

The problem is the timeline. Time out building that additional infrastructure, including expected demand growth, and you always need more power in the interim. Particularly if you're planning on taking coal offline.

If there is an arugment that we can ramp up battery production even faster than we are, the math changes. But we're already in a Herculean effort to mass produce more batteries faster.

The nuclear ain't getting built, these are facts. Even if one breaks ground today, you won't push your first kwh to the grid for a decade, at which point another ~10TW of clean energy will have come online globally.

If AI is using too much power in the short term, destroy demand with policy and economics. We are not beholden to the robot trainers, we just don't provide utility access to the load. Unlimited demand of industrial scales of electrical power isn't a right of some sort.

I don't follow your sums. 50GWh of battery cycled once a day for a year is: 18,250 GWh

So you seem out by around 100x.

Having enough battery capacity to back up enough energy for a few minutes let alone days would require a lot of resources.

I think scaling nuclear power would be cheaper and more environmentally friendly.

Battery manufacturing capacity is greatly underutilized in China. That was battery cell prices there fell by nearly 1/2 in the last year. There is tremendous room for expansion of production.

> and never could have

I could just as easily assert the same of nuclear or gas. It doesn't make it true, although there seems to be evidence that nuclear cannot scale as fast as batteries/solar/wind.

That's per year right?

"But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge."

How much battery storage do you think we need? Surely not a year's worth.

For solar, we'd likely need 10-16 hours of storage to power stuff overnight. Maybe a little more to cover a few cloudy days. Sounds like we are about 5% of that now?

Would be extremely interesting to the the $/MWh for the deal to understand the viability.

Otherwise similar to the NuScale deal which fell through last autumn.

A PPA like agreement which then only kept rising until all potential utilities had quit the deal.

All honor to Kairos if they can deliver, but history is against them. Let’s hope they succeed.

> NuScale has a more credible contract with the Carbon Free Power Project (“CFPP”) for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (“UAMPS”). CFPP participants have been supportive of the project despite contracted energy prices that never seem to stop rising, from $55/MWh in 2016, to $89/MWh at the start of this year. What many have missed is that NuScale has been given till around January 2024 to raise project commitments to 80% or 370 MWe, from the existing 26% or 120 MWe, or risk termination. Crucially, when the participants agreed to this timeline, they were assured refunds for project costs if it were terminated, which creates an incentive for them to drop out. We are three months to the deadline and subscriptions have not moved an inch.

https://iceberg-research.com/2023/10/19/nuscale-power-smr-a-...

5 hours of storage and a 98.6% renewables system.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr...

Investing in nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed.

In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.

This will only worsen the nuclear business case as renewable expansion continues, today being a bonanza fueled by finally finding an energy source cheaper than fossil fuel.

Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns.

They have the capital, and are the ones who need the extra generation capacity now. They will share the cost along with the average consumer as EVs take up a larger proportion of total vehicles on the road.

10-16 hours is not enough at all. On a cloudy day, solar output will only be 15-20%. On top of that, your panels really only generate for 8 hours on a very good day - the sun is a lot dimmer in the early morning and late evening. Really, you need 2x storage for a good day, if you want to deal with two cloudy days you'd want 50-60 hours of storage.

We'll figure it out. There is too much at stake and there are already a gazillion engineers out there going to bed every night thinking about how to solve this problem.

Innovation is the grim reaper of analyst reports. No one at my company notifies an investment bank when we have a breakthrough internally (lol).

And you are applying this equally across all American industry? The production of chlorine by electrolysis consumes twice as much electricity in America than Google consumes worldwide. But I don't see you up here calling for Olin Chlor Alkali to build nuclear power stations, for some reason. Are you suggesting that the American chemical industry lacks capital?

> All honor to Kairos if they can deliver, but history is against them.

History is not really against them. Our current reactors (mainly pressurized water reactors) are the way they are because Admiral Rickover determined that PWRs are the best option for submarines. He was not wrong, but civilian power reactors are not the same as the reactors powering submarines.

PWRs are expensive mainly because of the huge pressure inside the reactor core, about 150 times higher than the atmospheric pressure. For comparison, a pressure cooker has an internal pressure about 5 times higher than the atmospheric pressure, and such a cooker can explode with a pretty loud bang.

The Kairos Hermes reactor design is based on a design that was tested in the '60s, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment [1]. While such a reactor can be used to burn thorium, Kairos decided to go with the far more conventional approach of burning U-235. The reactor operates at approximately regular atmospheric pressure. This should reduce considerably the construction costs.

Of course, there are unknowns. While the world has built thousands of pressurized water reactors, it has built maybe 10 molten salt reactors. For example one quite unexpected effect in the MSRE was the enbrittlement of the reactor vessel caused by tellurium, which shows up as a fission product when U-235 burns.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a very conservative organization, and they don't have much experience with molten salt reactors because nobody has. It took them 6 years to give NuScale an approval for a pressurized water reactor, design that they knew in and out. My guess is that they will not give Kairos an approval without at least 15 years of testing. But Google's agreement with Kairos is quite crucial to keep this testing going.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment

> 525 megawatts

:(

That's.. not very much.

So typical of Google. Dip their toes in a new field. Get lots of press. Move on to the next thing.

Generally the worst case is two weeks. In the middle of winter you often get cloudy low wind days for that long. Of course how you handle those worse cases are days need not be how you handle typical. If you can handle 16 hours of no input this will over the typical cases this will be enough to max a massive dent in carbon emissions and we can fall back to existing gas (or even coal) plants for the rest. Plus a lot of power use can turn off when needed - give my company a discount and we can turn the factory off.

> nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed

We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift. Again, excluding EVs and AI. That’s why we’re reänimating coal plants and building new gas turbines.

I’d also love to see the numbers on that simulation going from 98.6% coverage to what we expect from a modern grid. (And if the balance is provided by gas or something else.) It should surprise nobody that going from 1 sigma to 2 can cost as much as 2 to 3, even if the percentage gap is much smaller.

> Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy

Europe has invested €1.5tn into new gas infrastructure. That doesn’t go poor without a fight and collateral damage.

Maybe you just found a great place for a company like Google to invest in.

The NRC is many things, but a front for "anti-nuclear hippy groups" is not one of them.

A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.

Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.

Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.

  The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

Cheaper? No, not even close. Environmentally friendly? Debatable, but wait for new tech.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/iron-air-battery-renew...

That says pretty much the opposite of what you claim.

nuclear literally takes 10x the time to build as renewables+batteries. That's like the whole reason why it doesn't get built.

In this context, what is a "modern grid"?

Could you possibly read the article you're replying to again?

Even skimming through it discusses the coverage of wind and a not 50/50 system particularly to cover winter & night time. There is also discussion of a ~2% from "other" and how much storage capacity is required.

The article even goes into using wind & solar data for the simulation and reducing further the output to be conservative.

France, with all their nuclear base, just raised their estimate for new reactors (I'm so shocked!):

> State-owned Electricite de France SA has raised its estimate for the future construction costs of six new atomic reactors in France by 30% to €67.4 billion ($73 billion)

6 reactors, 1650MW each, $7B per 1GW vs Vogtle's $17B. Planned. In 2 decades, after it's finally built, it will have doubled of course lmao.

Based upon?

Looked through the thread and it looks asserted but I don't see the counter not true point.

> Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable

As far as Europe is concerned, there seems to have been various political move and lobbying to affect energy independence (e.g. France): economy is transformed energy, so by nuking (…) energy independence, you're suffocating countries. The military role of nuclear is furthermore crucial; civil & nuclear must be correlated.

That's to say, giving up nuclear is not something a sane, well-driven country should do lightly, regardless of ideologies.

It's a tricky topic; what I regularly hear from economists is that wind & solar are still far from being able to compete with nuclear. And because of the previous two points, people can't but frown upon "green" arguments, even if the underlying intentions are honest and well-intended.

(China may not have misguided greenies, but it has a strong incentive to sell whatever it's offering).

> The Kairos Hermes reactor design is based on a design that was tested in the '60s, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment

MSRs are a costly distraction. They are not viable without literally hundreds of billions in research and development money. That's why all the MSRs startups are failing long before they even start the licensing process.

> For example one quite unexpected effect in the MSRE was the enbrittlement of the reactor vessel caused by tellurium, which shows up as a fission product when U-235 burns.

It was not unexpected. The _main_ issue with MSRs is that they have to contain fluoride salts that release elemental fluorine radicals as a result of radiolysis. So the reactor vessel walls will be eaten up by them, rather rapidly. Especially when reactors are scaled up to a level that makes them practical. And then you have all the fission byproducts that literally include almost all the Periodic Table.

> edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B.

No, it's not. Right now it's probably more than $10B a GW if you want the same level of reliability as nuclear.

> Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.

Only if you don't care about reliability.

Seems like you didn’t read the quote from the abstract. Here’s the relevant part:

> with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.

I call BS on that.

> pressure cooker has an internal pressure about 5 times higher than the atmospheric pressure

This isn't really accurate. The majority of pressure cookers you can buy operates at an absolute pressure of only about twice the atmospheric pressure.

If China had a super cheap nuclear design they would be very happy to export that the same way they export their other technologies like EVs, high speed trains, solar panels, batteries, etc. But it simply does not exist.

You’re asking us to trust your gut reaction over a peer-reviewed study. Do you have any qualifications or experience in the field?

Ok. And they are still dangerous if they explode. Imagine what happens if something at 150 atm explodes.

According to their web site at https://kairospower.com/technology/ it uses a molten fluoride salt based coolant but unlike the MSR/LFTR designs the fissionable fuel is not dissolved into the coolant; instead, the Kairos reactor design puts the fissionables in pellets that are intended to remain solid while in operation; it looks more like a pebble-bed reactor than a MSR/LFTR.

During the Messmer plan the French installed 56 reactors in 15 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...

So you're saying that in 1.5 years the same thing can now be done with renewables and batteries?

In 2027 it will easily have been done in a bunch of places ?

> a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost

Yes, nuclear is more expensive. SMRs should help with that, but their expense has never been contested.

But marginal economics aren't everything. Renewable and battery production isn't ramping up fast enough to make that margin available at scale. This doesn't seem capital contrained, either--every major economy is throwing gobs of cash at the problem.

> Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables

False economy. A dollar not invested into nukes doesn't go into renewables--partly because of the aforementioned scaling problem, it tends to wind up in gas.

We’re spending trillions of dollars of new money on gas infrastructure with decades of life and financial liabilities attached to them because we need the power, have maxed out renewables and are left with a choice: gas or nukes. Opposing nukes isn’t playing for renewables, it’s playing for gas.

Yes, you are right, I was wrong. The Hermes design is even more conservative than the MSRE design. It is basically the same design as the helium-cooled reactor HTR-PM that China started operating two years ago, only that the helium cooling is replaced with FLiBe cooling; this achieves a higher power density plus a higher rate of passive cooling in case anything goes wrong.

This IAEA report [1] has more details about this design, and the dozens if not hundreds of other types of molten salt reactor designs. The relevant section for the Kairos Hermes design is 4.5 (pages 41-44).

[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/STI-DOC-010-4...

> seeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia

Vogtle 4 was (IIRC) 30% cheaper than Vogtle 3.

The problem with nuclear in Georgia, and in the US, was that no one remembers/ed how to do it, and so all the lessons of yore had to be relearned, and the supply chain had to be stood up.

If you put in an order for several reactors, the very first one (especially of a new model, like Vogtle 3 was) will be expensive AF. The second will be expensive. All models after that will be at a more 'reasonable' cost.

Nuclear reactors are just like any other widget: the cost goes down with economies of scale. If you order 4 or 8 reactors at one sites they'll get progressively get cheaper (there is a floor of course). If you then put in an order at a second site, and move the workforce (or a portion) there, the lower costs will still be present.

If you start and stop construction, or order a whole bunch of different models/types, then there economies of scale goes out the window.

I obviously understand it's not a 100% solar system. If it was you would need to be able to deal with at least 2 weeks of bad weather, not two days, and you would have to take into account winter (dropping to about 5 hours instead of 8).

Additionally, mixing solar and wind is not as easy as it seems, because the two are correlated. If you have a major storm that makes wind energy impossible due to wind speeds above ~100km/h, you will also have clouds making solar energy unworkable. I'm not aware of any simulations modelling a 95+% solar/wind grid for storage needs, taking into account extreme weather patterns, grid topology, and equipment damage, but if you do then please link it.

I don't see any article linked in the comment I replied to. Perhaps you're mixing up two comment chains.

> During the Messmer plan the French installed 56 reactors in 15 years.

Canada (mostly Ontario) built 25 reactors in 35 years:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Canada#Power_...

From the 1980s to the 2000s, it took Japan roughly 4-5 years between start of construction and commercial operation for a number of reactors:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

This is all about the revival of pebble-bed reactors, which were attemped several decades ago but had problems with the graphite pebbles breaking down and releasing graphite fragments that clogged the pipes, basically. China is way ahead on this with helium-cooled versions. The big deal is that in the event of complete power loss (see Fukushima) they go into shutdown without melting down, although if the coolant lost and replaced with air you would get a nasty Chernobyl-style graphite fire. Still an improvement in safety. See:

> "Several high-temperature thermal neutron–spectrum pebble bed reactors are being commercialized. China has started up two helium-cooled pebble bed high-temperature reactors. In the United States, the X-Energy helium-cooled and the Kairos Power salt-cooled pebble bed high-temperature reactors will produce spent nuclear fuel (SNF) with burnups exceeding 150 000 MWd per tonne. The reactor fuel in each case consists of small spherical graphite pebbles (4 to 6 cm in diameter) containing thousands of small TRISO (microspheric tri-structural isotropic) fuel particles embedded in the fuel of zone these pebbles."

(2024) "Safeguards and Security for High-Burnup TRISO Pebble Bed Spent Fuel and Reactors"

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2023.2...

and

https://www.powermag.com/nuclear-milestone-chinas-htr-pm-dem...

Sorry, was writing on a mobile. Here's a more detailed explanation why it's pure BS.

Because it's simply magic thinking. They postulate a "future fully sector-coupled system" and then say that if this somehow magics into existance, then everything's peachy.

Basically, "a sector-coupled system" allows transforming excess power into something useful (district heating, hydrogen, steel, etc.), and shedding the load and/or providing some power back when there's not enough generated power available.

In other words, if you solve the problem of providing 1 month of energy storage for Germany and Denmark, then renewable energy is basically free. Duh.

The problem is that "sector-coupled systems" don't exist, and their creation will result in far, far, far, far more expenses than building fucking PWRs.

Sort of - nuke plants are fundamentally phenomenally complicated compared to true economies of scale technologies like solar. You won’t reap 100x cost savings in nukes, no matter how many you build

The Kairos design does not dissolve the fuel in the salt.

> We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift.

A decade to have significant amounts of battery storage is actually a pretty optimistic timeline compared to nuclear. Nuclear plant construction times are on the order of a decade or (realistically) two decades in the West, if you include planning. In China they're managing 7 years, but their nuclear buildouts, while impressive, aren't trending an upward path when compared to renewables (see chart here [1].) SMRs might change this, but they're years from leaving "research" status and entering the mass-production/learning curves that could make them cost competitive.

This doesn't make me happy. If I thought nuclear was viable on the timelines we have to dampen climate change, I'd be 100% in favor of it. If we could assemble the political will to raise taxes and build nuclear at "wartime" speeds, I'd say go for it. I'm also very much in favor of SMR development, just not willing to bet the house on it.

As it stands, there isn't anywhere near enough nuclear power in the planning pipeline for nuclear to matter much on a 20 year timeline.

In any case, we are not going to a 100% renewable/battery grid in 10 years. The first goal is to get renewables to 90-95% or more of power generation, massively overbuilt with short-term battery storage backed by intermittent fossil fuels for the remaining 5-10%. This will represent a massive reduction in emissions. The last 5-10% will have to be completed over the next couple of decades, and the increasing battery production trend gives hope that it can be.

The worst problem with existing nuclear is that with a 15-20 year planning/construction timeline and the current molasses build rate, new nuclear plants will arrive right at the moment when cheap storage is eating the economic use-cases that make them financially viable.

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/China-r...

Nuclear is a terrible investment in 2024. Price per delivered megawatt-hour is guaranteed to be much lower for a combination of solar+battery+wind.

-- Edit --

To clarify, "Nuclear is a terrible investment for private industry in 2024." However, I understand why nation states (and their equivalents) would want a diversity of power sources. There many be non-economic reasons why nations want to build nuclear over solar+battery+wind.

OK, that's interesting. And it's far better than MSRs, but it still exposes fluoride salts to radiation. It also is a pebble bed reactor, so it'll have all the problems of pebble beds: cracking pellets, difficulty in fuel reprocessing, more nuclear waste, etc.

But yes, this design might be actually feasible for small reactors. But I bet that it won't be cheaper and it'll be impossible to scale to levels approaching PWRs.

You raise a very good point. I need to do some research to understand your comment.

1) Google uses about 25 terawatt-hours per year. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/788540/energy-consumptio...

2) An AP100 nuclear reactor can produce up to 10 terawatt-hours per year. Source: https://canes.mit.edu/overnight-capital-cost-next-ap1000#:~:....

That is incredible to think just how much power that a single nuclear reactor can produce!

> although if the coolant lost and replaced with air you would get a nasty Chernobyl-style graphite fire

Or alternatively, radioactive dust could be released into the atmosphere such as THTR-300 did.

INL did a gap analysis in 2011 between what was known and what needed research. The german AVR reactor had technical issues that weren't expected -- dust being one of them.

https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/5026004.pdf

From what I can tell the dust issue is still a point of contention.

> If China had a super cheap nuclear design they would be very happy to export that

China "plans to export nuclear power reactors in the future" [1]. It's early stages, but being done through Belt & Road [2].

[1] https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/how-china-has-become-the-world...

[2] https://www.cipe.org/resources/chinas-nuclear-dragon-goes-ab...

> * Nuclear plant construction times are on the order of a decade or (realistically) two decades in the West, if you include planning*

Sure. Forecasting twenty years out is tough. But our forecasts out 10 years show the power crunch easing to almost no degree--we'll still likely be making the same tradeoff then as now. (And, I suspect, still filling the gap with gas in teh west.)

You're broadly correct: we need to build faster. There is no reason we can't build a large plant in under a decade and an SMR in a few years. The latter is what Google is experimenting with here. It's a long shot. But so is hoping battery production scales the orders of magnitude necessary for it to become a utlity backbone over the next decades.

> first goal is to get renewables to 90-95% or more of power generation, massively overbuilt with short-term battery storage

We don't have the battery pipeline. What we're repeatedly getting is renewables plus gas generators. There is no world in which you put down trillions of dollars of gas infrastructure and then poof it in a few years because it's no longer needed.

It's likely enough battery capacity if you combine batteries with e-fuels for longer term storage.

Assuming batteries are used for all storage use cases is one of the classic errors of energy system analysis.

And now that's not realistic, given their track record on EPR.

Ok, we've changed the title to language from the article itself (edited to fit HN's 80 char limit) which seems both representative and neutral. If there's a better title, we can change it again.

(Submitted tile was "Google funding construction of seven U.S. nuclear reactors")

> If we could assemble the political will to raise taxes and build nuclear at "wartime" speeds, I'd say go for it.

Tepco, Russia, and MetEd all lied to or misled the public about the nature of their respective accidents.

Not enough people who were alive during those incidents have died.

This is why China installed 217 GW of solar last year, but only 1.2 GW of nuclear.

There's something to be said for space. A nuclear reactor takes up far less land than an equivalent amount of wind and solar generation. That's quickly going to become a limiting factor in wind/solar rollout and already is in some smaller countries (unless they're willing to bulldoze their entire land to cover it in solar panels)

> They are not viable without literally hundreds of billions in research and development money.

The US produces 40000 billion kWh every decade, so that doesn't really seem that bad to me.

> why China installed 217 GW of solar last year, but only 1.2 GW of nuclear

And 114 GW of coal [1]. Don't do nuclear, and that becomes 115 GW of coal. Nuclear and renewables aren't competing for market share.

Everyone is putting down renewables as quickly as possible. But we need more power, so we fill the gap with one of gas, nuclear or coal.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...

People say trillion dollar corporations need to start taking steps to limit climate change, then when they do, "Why should trillion dollar corporations need to pull their weight?"

This top-down corporate order will make more change than Americans can individually.

Not super relevant but pressure cookers only go up to about 1 bar. They definitely would blow before 5.

> That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today.

I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting powering a portion of the grid with batteries that are cycled once per year. One can optimistically cycle one or even twice a day (if wind peaks when the sun is down). Or you can try to ride through a week of bad weather, but natural gas is not actually a terrible solution for that. And those batteries last for a lot longer than a year.

So I think your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years.

When solar and wind and sodium ion batteries are basically there and probably don't need as much investment and R&D (or it's happening anyway from 1000 existing funding sources), it's probably bad. Or at least unlikely to happen.

SMRs can potentially do something that renewables can’t: they could be placed near the loads in places with no space for renewables and without relying on the grid. Think industrial areas or even cities or towns that are surrounded by other developed land. The grid moves slowly, and electricity prices via existing transmission lines are, in many areas, hilariously inflated for a number of reasons. A hypothetical portable, easy-to-acquire SMR producing power at $100/MWh would not be an amazing deal if a large electric utility bought it, but a $100/MWh would be an amazing price in quite a few markets if a small utility could actually buy at that price and deliver via a small last-mile distribution system.

Why are you comparing the rate of change of battery storage capacity, the vast majority of which if grid connected will be used for at most diurnal storage, to yearly energy consumption?

Holy mother of all type errors there.

Multiply it by 365, and it implies that in 2030 alone, we will create enough battery storage to time shift almost 10% of our total electricity use today.

This is not a stat that should inspire pessimism.

Citation for my sibling comment and that which you replied to:

https://www.energy-storage.news/arizonas-biggest-battery-sto... (“Arizona’s biggest battery storage system goes online to feed Meta data centre demand”)

https://orsted.com/en/media/news/2024/10/orsted-has-complete... (“With a 300 MW solar PV capacity, Ørsted’s Eleven Mile Solar Center will produce enough renewable energy to power 65,000 US homes while the battery can store 1200 MWh of power.”)

(~2 years from planning to commissioning)

The first article refers to 2018 in the future tense, and the second article is three years old without a single announcement of a Belt and Road nuclear plant since then.

That wont work because the tesla webpage has a maximum order quantity of 1,000 units... /s

> natural gas is not actually a terrible solution

Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.

> your 1/4000 should be more like 1/10. Give it a few more years

The former is calculated from projected 2030 battery production to present energy levels. An essential component of strategy is knowing on whose side time is. Battery production won't reach 1/10 for at least a few decades. That's the point. We need an intermediate solution, and if that's going to be gas, we have to live with the fact that (a) emissions will continue and (b) we perpetuate trillions of dollars of capital infrastructure that will be as difficult to take down in the future as coal has been today.

Sure. But why? MSRs don't have any real features that are worth spending that much money.

Modern PWRs are just as passively safe, if they lose cooling and melt down, the molten fuel will be safely contained by the core catcher.

Uranium is also not scarce, and if we want to get into breeding reactors, existing fuel reprocessing is an established industry, on which we _already_ have spent several hundred billion dollars.

Sodium batteries theoretically should be cheaper than li-ion, but they are not yet there in practice. And they still won't solve problems with polar vortexes in the US or a month-long Dunkelflaute in Germany.

What other activities are prohibited in your dream dictatorship?

Everyone is a libertarian until it’s their commons experiencing the tragedy. Strange to think that having regulations around large scale electrical loads is a dictatorship. It’s okay for us to collectively say no, depending on the circumstances.

> Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.

There's a crossover point. If you use natural gas to provide <1% of yearly electricity needs, and you save a zillion dollars while doing so, you can find cheaper ways to decarbonize by the same amount.

> Natural gas is a great solution. It's why we're using it. But if your focus is decarbonisation and electrification, nuclear is better. Even if it's pricier.

If you come up with some combination of carbon-free energy sources and storage that covers 90% of grid energy needs, and you need to fill in the gap, and that gap is a whole lot of power but only for a handful of days a year, then I don’t think nuclear is a good option at all to fill in the gap. The capital expense would be absurd.

Decarbonization is great, but in the real world, decarbonization per dollar spent is what matters. Instead of spending a zillion dollars on nuclear peaker plants, spend a lot fewer dollars on gas peaker plants and the the rest for more effective environmental improvements.

Ok we can all agree that the US has not a land problem. This argument is relevant in Europe but the US has more than enough space power transmission is a problem but it's solvable.

CATL’s first generation sodium batteries, shipped in Chery cars are $77/kWh

CATL’s lithium phosphate batteries are more expensive for now at >$100kWh.

Sodium batteries are definitely cheaper in practice, but much lower energy density.

The question is how far CATL can push energy density, and the second generation is claimed to be >200Wh/kh.

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/catl-and-byd-to-start-pro...

https://www.westchestercleanenergy.com/post/record-low-lithi...

Nuclear may not be competitive for electricity, but it could be a viable option for district heating. If you ignore electricity generation completely, you could make small simple low-pressure reactors and hide them underground. There is a spin-off company from a national research institute in Finland that believes it can make 50 MW (thermal) reactors for €100 million, with some municipal utilities semi-committed to buying ~15 of them.

The theory, at least, is that making SMRs in a factory allows for a steeper and more sustainable learning curve

> Both Hermes and ETU 3.0 will be built using modular construction techniques, with reactor modules fabricated in Kairos Power's facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which will be shipped to Oak Ridge for assembly.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/work-begins-on-f...

Intermittency is a tough thing to handle. The US uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. The word used 60,000 GWh per day. Evening out daily fluctuations, let alone seasonal fluctuations, demands an enormous amount of storage.

> Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027

Sounds great in theory, but it took NuScale Power 6 years to get their design approved? I hope the AI hype lasts that long then maybe the world would have two certified 75 MWe SMR designs.

Also the NuScale Idaho plant was cancelled last year when cost estimates balooned 3x. 9.3bn for a 460 MWe plant?

We already have rain and hydro power plants. Batteries are similar: they store a finite amount of energy. So battery PV and wind have their place as peaker plants to replace gas fired power plants and hydro. Otherwise one could just smelt aluminium with the excess electricity like the Germans do.

> In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.

This is happening because of subsidies given to renewables (renewable energy certificates, net metering, guaranteed feed in prices, CFD) plus policies at the national and EU level (EU Renewable Energy Directive). Take away these policies and you are left with a low quality (intermittent) energy source that requires far more expensive storage to produce power when it is needed.

1 bar is atmospheric pressure. I.e., as far as you in your kitchen are concerned, no pressure at all.

Can Google get 2GW for $34B anywhere in the world? This is the value proposition of modular small reactors.

The cost of nuclear in Georgia today is essentially subsidized by decades and decades of past investments.

And as much as some people might like that you can’t simply move Georgia and place it next to your data centers.

You don't have to imagine, it happened several times.

https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/ high chances it'll be more expensive than ap1000 overall /kwh

because 1 - 1gw of solar capacity isn't the same as nuclear, even 3gw of solar isn't the same as 1gw of nuclear (to get a proper perspective, look at germany's grid yesterday& how much overcapacity of solar/wind they have and how much was actually generated/imported). 2 - vogtle unit 4 was 30% cheaper than unit 3, proving positive learning curve, meaning (in theory, according to https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/ ) new builds should be significantly cheaper

In eu France is the biggest net exporter in the EU while Germany with huge renewable capacity net imported 20+TWh this year. Look how Germany's generation was yesterday to get a sneak peek

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... here's another one or this https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/

is it? New plants cost 3-3.5bn for a stable 1gw output. For renewables - much more needs to be built to provide same reliability or compensate with fossils

china has a super cheap design called hualong and they plan to export it the way russia is exporting their designs. Another plan is finishing local adaptations of ap1000 that can be reselled without licensing problems

look at germany's yesterday output and tell me how much batteries they'd need to cover such a drop in generation

1.2gw of storage means in 4hr it's gone if solar and wind are weak

yes it'll be cheaper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/

https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... Lazard report for lcoe is so funny because they assume 4h storage will be enough to cover the demand

Just because the US has a lot of area doesn't mean it should all be paved over and turned into solar farms. "Who needs nature and green spaces? It could be cheap electricity instead" is a mindset the next generation will hate us for, just like our generation resents previous generations for thinking "Why not burn coal? It's cheap electricity and there's lots of air left."

The US has a massive green space problem. It's a country of roads, parking lots, and corn fields and it's a problem that's visible from space.

Don't take this as opposing solar energy. I support it versus fossil fuels. But if nuclear is viable, I'm for it.

Energy density is a bit less relevant for grid storage, though. Not like you run out of space to put them.

The thing about R&D spending is that it is speculative. Even if that question does have satisfying answers; it is unreasonable to expect people to prove that R&D will have a commercially successful outcomes with foresight.

This is only because it is profitable for Germany to do so, not because of lack of capacity. Germany imports energy when there is low demand (and price) and exports when there is high demand (and price). Look at this chart: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_trading/chart.htm?l=...

> > why China installed 217 GW of solar last year, but only 1.2 GW of nuclear > > And 114 GW of coal [1]. Don't do nuclear, and that becomes 115 GW of coal. Nuclear and renewables aren't competing for market share.

That is true for China, since their overall energy demand is growing massively. But is that also true for other parts of the world like the US or EU? Because looking at the electricity production [1] this doesn't seem to be the case. So in those markets they would compete for replacing existing fossil power plants. I think we can expect some growth, but not on a level even close to China.

[1] https://yearbook.enerdata.net/electricity/world-electricity-...

You can't just invent a number because you like it more. Solar and Wind are cheaper than nuclear even if you go beyond LCOE and include system costs. Even the nuclear lobby acknowledges this nowadays and has switched to other arguments.

Dunkelflaute simply doesn't exist. It's clearly visible in the charts of the last years that wind and solar almost ideally complement each other in Germany. Why else do you think Germany managed to stay above 50% renewables for every single month this year so far? In which season is the mythical Dunkelflaute supposed to appear?

another reason is to fire up coal less.

Again, look at yesterday generation. They were not able to satisfy local demand with renewables and bumped up coal+gas by a lot.

Also, if you look at the numbers - the price difference isn't that huge but trade difference is huge. This year export price is less than 1$ more than import. Problem is Germany net imported 25TWh so they are still in a big trade deficit and it continues to grow considering dunkelflaute is ahead

> The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a very conservative organization

I'm glad they are, actually! Personally, I'm not really convinced by the "small modular reactor" concept. Ok, so building a big nuclear power plant is expensive. But is it really cheaper to build 10 smaller nuclear power plants (which all need to conform to the same safety regulations, need maintenance, personnel etc.) instead?

I firmly believe that iteration is the key to good engineering. SpaceX has got where they are (partly) due to running flight after flight with incremental improvements each time. The problem with the massive reactors is that you get to build only a couple of them, so you never get to take advantage of learnings to make the next one better/cheaper/quicker.

Yes, Germany is targeting a 80% renewable electricity mix by 2030 and 100% by 2035. They have no illusions about being perfect today. Their current status is 65% renewable for 2024.

Maybe stop looking at instants and start looking at the larger picture: keeping our cumulative emissions as low as possible.

Starting a nuclear construction project which won't deliver any decarbonization for 15-20 years is accepting large cumulative emissions.

A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.

Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.

Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.

> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

Which is confirmed by Sweden continuing its renewable buildout with both the cheapest electricity prices in Europe and no subsidies on the books for new renewable production.

So basically it's one economy of scale (making something bigger means the costs for safety, maintenance, personnel etc. are proportionally lower) vs. another economy of scale (making more of one thing decreases the costs per "unit"). Place your bets...

About your comparison to SpaceX: the approach of building a rocket, launching it, letting it explode and then using the gathered data to make the next one explode later (or not at all) is fine for rockets, but I wouldn't want to see it applied to nuclear reactors.

I believe the thought is that the cost of regulatory and safety measures do not scale favorably with reactor size. You don't have separate facilities so much as 10 reactors on the same site, so you don't need to increase personnel 10x.

Actually proving this with a deployed design seems to be the challenge, though with strong headwinds against nuclear across the board, favoring proven designs over newer ones is at least a little faster. That's not a flaw of the design, but intrinsic to the social and political environment.

California would like a word with you. Gas generators are increasingly being forced off the grid with storage.

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/

Storage costs are today lower than the most aggressive projection for 2050 according to one widely cited US DoE study from 2023.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-149971818

> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605...

Yes, that shit study which models supplying the entire grid with one energy source and lithium storage through all weather conditions.

I would suggest reading the study I linked so you can see the difference in methodology when credible researches in the field tackle similar questions.

The credible studies are focused on simulating the energy system and market with real world constraints. Which apparently works out way cheaper when not involving nuclear in the picture.

> https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/

That entire report is an exercise in selectively choosing data to misrepresent renewables and present nuclear power in the best possible light and wishful thinking.

To the degree that the prominent "renewables vs. nuclear" graph they keep repeating on the webpage and figure 6 in the report is straight up misleading.

This is the source:

What is different about different net-zero carbon electricity systems?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266627872...

Utilizing storage costs from 2018 and then of course making the comparison against the model not incorporating any hydrogen derived zero carbon fuel to solve seasonal problems.

Which is todays suggestion for solving the final 1-2% requiring seasonal storage in the late 2030s.

Something akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity because they run too little to be economical on their own, but zero carbon.

Would they have chosen the ReBF model the difference between made up optimal nuclear power and 2018 renewables would be: $80-94/MWh and $82-102/MWh.

It is essentially: Nukebros writes reports for nukebros, they confirm their own bias. Simply an attempt to justify another massive round of government subsidies on nuclear power.

Yes, the study incorporates no lithium storage. Including storage we will easily reach far above 90% renewable penetration.

When we get to the final percent in the 2030s we can utilize akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity markets [1] but zero carbon.

Peaker plants today already run too little to be economical on their own, essentially what in our current grids constitute seasonal storage and emergency reserves.

Simply update the terms for the capacity markets to require the fuel to be zero-carbon. It can be synfuels, biofuels or hydrogen. Whatever comes out the cheapest.

As we electrify transportation we can shift over the massive ethanol blending in gasoline in the US to be our seasonal buffer. [2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_market#Capacity_ma...

[2]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=27&t=10

lmao, you say shit study but you suggest using green h2 as backup which not only isn't economically feasible (for now at least) but current generators are either using a mix with gas or use pure h2 with huge nox releases due to high temp burning. Not just that, most lcoe costs magically assume that 4h storage is enough. Look at yesterday's Germany generation and tell me how 4h storage will be enough there. Or maybe I should link to amount of subsidies Germany is pouring each year in renewables like https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-29/germany-s... or like https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-looks-specia... It's funny that when I ask ren-bros how much subsidies edf in France is getting they are either silent or are linking to price shielding that's totally unrelated and is present in most eu countries after russia's invasion. Renewable bros as usual are dunking on nuclear and promoting their clean supply like a mecca without facing hard reality - most renewables now are subsidized by fossils and will be in any close future

And can be recharged as soon as the wind or the sun comes back.

The sizing of batteries and power sources is highly region specific, and the places where it makes sense today with current manufacturing capacity, don't have to be "everywhere" for it to be fine where it's actually done; and given the roll out rate of renewables, we also don't need to wait until battery output per year can totally displace the existing and currently running gas plants, just back up the newly installed renewables themselves - 4h in this case is how fast the PV farm would recharge those batteries in the best case, the average output of a PV plant is about 10% of the peak, so this is really a 40 hour battery pack not a 4 hour pack.

they don't target 100% by 2035. They want to close last coal plant by 2038 which is a bit optimistic looking at yesterday's generation. For gas it's even worse - the plan is totally unrealistic and their planned h2 ready plants that'll use gas initially, will probably still use a mix with gas when/if green h2 becomes reality or they'll replace the generators with pure h2(unlikely) which has huge nox emissions due to high burn temperature

Larger image is yesterday's generation + https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-29/germany-s... and https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-looks-specia...

And nuclear construction can be much faster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant or you can look at projects from China

That entire report is an exercise in selectively choosing data to misrepresent renewables and present nuclear power in the best possible light and wishful thinking.

To the degree that the prominent "renewables vs. nuclear" graph they keep repeating on the webpage and figure 6 in the report is straight up misleading.

This is the source:

What is different about different net-zero carbon electricity systems?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266627872...

Utilizing storage costs from 2018 and then of course making the comparison against the model not incorporating any hydrogen derived zero carbon fuel to solve seasonal problems.

Which is todays suggestion for solving the final 1-2% requiring seasonal storage in the late 2030s.

Something akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity because they run too little to be economical on their own, but zero carbon. Can be hydrogen or biofuel derived. We will know in 10 years time.

Would they have chosen the ReBF model the difference between made up optimal nuclear power and 2018 renewables would be: $80-94/MWh and $82-102/MWh.

It is essentially: Nukebros writes reports for nukebros, they confirm their own bias. Simply an attempt to justify another massive round of government subsidies on nuclear power.

copypaste I see))

Pressure is very often stated as gauge pressure, i.e. zero-referenced against ambient air pressure. 1 bar gauge pressure is roughly equal to 2 bar absolute pressure.

I mean, look at Germany's grid yesterday& today and tell me, with such overcapacity, how much more overcapacity it would need and how much storage it would need to cover such events with low wind and solar?

I do agree on not letting nuclear reactors explode, but I did use the SpaceX example on purpose. Before SpaceX started to do it, the concept of iterating to that degree on rockets was unthinkable. There was a self reinforcing loop of "rocket launches are expensive, so we must plan for every contingency, so the launch cycle is long and expensive". SpaceX proved that wrong.

I think small modular reactors are the way out of the similar cycle we've got for nuclear reactors. And I think that building a small number of large ones is going to be a lot better if we're also building a large number of small ones and learning.

It's like not building a y houses for 30 years and then building a massive skyscraper. If that's all we do then we'll only ever have one way of building a skyscraper because there's no room to experiment on other construction materials and techniques.

if you don't care about any externalities (like spacex), sure. but I doubt hospitals or just normal people who need electricity would be super happy about power sources failing because the people building them subscribed to the "move fast/break things" mentality instead of actually building reliable/safe infrastructure at the cost of it taking longer

I had to check the numbers because it grabbed my attention.

No issue with your quoted figure of 30,000 TWh (annual) global electricity consumption.

But we only need to do 7TWh of battery supply in year 1 (or say only 1-2 of that makes it to grid storage).

30,000/365 is 82 TWh daily. So that’s the number to crack, surely? Because a significant percentage of storage will be to make up for wind and solar, which generally approximately follows some sort of diurnal cycle?

If we will be closing in on a couple TWh annual storage capacity in 6 years (leaving aside any real synchronised attempt to get vehicles to be part of large scale distributed grids) then only a few years on from 2030 we’re going to be able to store a significant percentage of our daily energy demands

Or just overbuild your generation sources?

>Before SpaceX started to do it, the concept of iterating to that degree on rockets was unthinkable.

I'm pretty sure that was what NASA was going to do all the way back in the 70s before their funding got slashed. It was a novel idea but not a novel idea that SpaceX was particularly responsible for, just one they threw capital at because the government stopped caring after the space race.

Nuclear power research, by contrast, never really suffered from a lack of available funds. They were throwing money at mini reactors back in the 90s, saying all the same stuff about how mass production would bring down the price.

>Graham says that the CSIRO modelling showed that at very high levels of wind and solar, a maximum of half a day’s average demand was needed for storage. In some areas of the grid, only around three hours might be needed.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/much-storage-needed-solar-wind-p...

Sadly, there's far, far, far too much FUD floating around about storage (understandably, coz wind+solar threatens the nuclear+carbon lobbies), and not enough thorough and realistic studies like this one.

I've heard people say "oh you cant pay attention to this study because it's in Australia which must be discounted because [reasons], what about [ other country ]?", and I'd welcome seeing an alternative study making appropriate assumptions, but none of these comments so far come attached to anything other than FUD.

I've also seen far, far too many people build or cite a "naive" models that make inappropriate assumptions (e.g. that zero power is generated at night by wind).

NASA funding far exceeds SpaceX’s and always has. It shouldn’t take 4% of the US federal budget (NASA funding during Apollo) to run a hardware-rich design process!

Apollo was wound down because the government wanted NASA to focus on the space shuttle and all sorts of other things as well as slashing the total budget by a huge amount.

So, while in theory it may have had the money, in practice it did not.

I use the approximation of annual capacity factors for PV being 10%, which means 10x. Wind has a higher capacity factor IIRC between 35% and 85% and that heavily depends on location.

A realistic answer would need me to spend at least a month dealing with finding historical satellite cloud cover data, wind records, correlations leading to nationwide dunkelflaute, the planning options for where new stuff can be built, etc.

And even then, that varies depending on international grid connections, and how much storage is on the grid.

The Shuttle cost $48 billion to develop in inflation-adjusted dollars — contrast this with the ~$5B spent on Starship development thus far. It’s hard to defend the claim that NASA is or ever has been under-funded.

Fluoride salts by themselves are very radiation resistant, chemically more so than water. The biggest concern would be liberation of elemental fluorine, but if the salt is kept slightly reducing (which one can do in a sterile salt without dissolved uranium) the fluorine instantly reacts back to fluoride. The slightly reduced salt is also preferred to limit corrosion, allowing the vessel and pipes to be made of stainless steel (FLiBe with dissolved uranium needs special more expensive alloys because chromium would dissolve.)

Activation is also low. The two concerns would be traces of tritium from the two-step activation of beryllium (formation of 6He by (n,alpha) reaction, decay of 6He to 6Li, then (n,t) on 6Li), and also formation of 10Be (half life, 1.4 million years, but the thermal neutron capture cross section of 9Be is only 8.5 mb). The chemical toxicity of beryllium would considerably exceed its radiotoxicity, I imagine.

We should see some increase in electricity consumption due to displacement of direct uses of fossil fuels. For example, use of heat pumps in place of natural gas furnaces, electric cars in place of IC engine vehicles. Add to that the ever popular AI and general data center consumption motivating this announcement (but I wonder how much of that is going to move to places with cheaper electricity.)

Our energy infrastructure isn't particularly reliable right now. Power outages, while not at the level of a third world country, are quite frequent. Nuclear is the highest energy density power generation you can get. Investing in reactors that are less susceptible to explosions (Like a molten salt reactor) is an important step and it's really only viable if you can iterate which means building modular reactor. If you read the article you'll see that most of their iteration and experimentation is without the nuclear material. Something that is possible because the reactor itself is small and can be run through a bunch of safety checks without the dangerous parts.

The route that Nuscale and Kairos are taking is both cheaper and safer than large scale reactors. And we are going to need something to fill the gaps when there is no wind or solar generation available if we want to get off fossil fuels.

cf yearly are good for some purposes but bad for others. Again, look at Germany's coal/gas use yesterday vs today as well as wind/solar generation and imports. If you don't want fossils, how would you cover such events? France was outputting towards Germany equivalent of 3-4 npp and 2 additional from Switzerland, max being about 12+GW from neighbors. How would it be financially viable considering there are many other days when demand will be met for day hours? New solar/wind will not be able to sell energy at negative prices unless they get subsidies. Germany already spends 20bn/yr for price subsidies and their grid is far from overcapacity and that doesn't account for other subsidy types like for transmission for renewables

We have been attempting "small modular reactors" since the 1950s. They've never worked out. In the same sense that tiny coal plants never worked out.

Large physical scale is everything with old school power generation technologies due to various scaling laws.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...

Today's values, from what I've seen, this country could run on just wind if it had 10x more than now, but it doesn't really need that in isolation, it's just that PV was harder to judge because the graph wasn't even close to a flat line.

https://www.energymonitor.ai/power/live-eu-electricity-gener...

> New solar/wind will not be able to sell energy at negative prices unless they get subsidies.

They already do, in good weather.

> 20bn/yr for price subsidies and their grid is far from overcapacity

And how much of that was for a guaranteed price made way back when the stuff was still expensive?

New PV is, by itself, the single cheapest source of electricity; even adding on batteries only takes it up to somewhere between gas and nuclear depending on the specifics.

> and that doesn't account for other subsidy types like for transmission for renewables

How's that a subsidy? I've not seen the breakdown of bill costs here, but back in the UK there was a split between connection cost and use cost.

> traces of tritium from the two-step activation of beryllium

Also from the 6Li absorption of 1 neutron. The Lithium used is almost pure 7Li, at 99.995%. But there is still 50 ppm 6Li in it.

Even without subsidies solar and battery are cheaper than nuclear and are getting cheaper by 15-20% a year. So no nuclear is unlikely to be cost competitive any time soon unless they get some new tech for nuclear

> Power outages, while not at the level of a third world country, are quite frequent. Nuclear is the highest energy density power generation you can get.

Well that is more because the American grid is suffering from a mountain load of neglect-debt to a tune that paints the infamous German railways as saints - the Camp Fire for example was most likely caused by a C-hook breaking after many, many decades of neglect [1].

Here in Europe, we get by just fine with outages measured in maybe a dozen minutes (!) a year [2] - Germany got rid of all nuclear reactors, many old ones in other countries were retired as well (Fessenheim, the most infamous one, in 2020), and while there are new builds, they are often decades late and many billions over budget.

How do we do this? We have strict regulations across the board (mandating stuff such as resilience against bad weather, unlike Texas which IIRC refuses to tie in to the other US grids to avoid such regulation), a cross-continental spanning grid [3], and most especially... we just love to bury our cables belowground, so even in the case lightning or storms hit, the actual impact on the consumers is all but negligible. And as the infamous summer of 2023 shows, the power grid still didn't fail even as dozens of NPPs in France and Switzerland had to completely shut down or significantly reduce output because there was not enough cooling water [4]. Hell we even manage to supply an entire country at war with decent power, despite Russia continuously attacking the power grid.

[1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/long-term-wear-found-o...

[2] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37960/umfrage...

[3] https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/

[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/high-river-temperatu...

NASAs "do stuff" budget is super small because their "keep all the experts on staff" budget is insatiable.

It's not entirely bad though, I'm sure lots of those folks are doing good and important stuff. But I don't think the balance between employment and building things is quite right. At least to my tastes.

One part of the problem with traditional plants is that they are massive mega projects which the US does not specialize in. I am assuming by building smaller you are able to iterate on designs quicker.

I also wonder how much of the cost is tied up in the upfront construction and engineering compared to operations.

Using solid fuel in a msr is certainly a choice.

Hopefully it is just a stepping stone.

Yes. The inescapable tritium production from Be sets the lower bound on how pure the 7Li has to be.

transmission upgrades are needed for renewables due to their distributed nature https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-looks-specia...

> They already do, in good weather.

We haven't reached yet such renewable market penetration to get this problem. It'll happen when a lot of days, 10 day hours will be covered by renewable output.

> And how much of that was for a guaranteed price made way back when the stuff was still expensive?

I have no idea how are these are distributed. Do you have a link for recent vs old projects?

>I am assuming by building smaller you are able to iterate on designs quicker.

Everyone in this thread is assuming this, but you get economy of scale by building lots of the same thing, not by constantly changing things.

...sometimes the brain is smoothed by meetings...

>you suggest using green h2 as backup which not only isn't economically feasible (for now at least)

That's poor logic, h2 as a last-2%er doesn't need to be feasible until we've gotten to the 98% mark. And honestly, h2 feasibility is a function of cheap energy anyway, which probably means midday solar while solar farms are chasing dusk prices.

not, h2 feasibility in the context of power generation depends on many more factors, including how frequent the plant is used when day hours will be mostly tapped by solar generation and how you'll do price compensation. And in the context of h2 for renewables as a peaker, it'll need to be much more than 2%. And again, the emission problem for h2 generation isn't solved yet beyond fuel cells

There is a huge difference between the US accounting for 20% of Global GDP and merely being "in first place" at the end of WWI and the USA having half of global GDP (and 80% of the world's hard currency reserves) at the end of WW2. While also say, having a Navy easily more powerful than the rest of the world combined, and being able to to focus on an upcoming surge in consumer consumption as opposed to desperately struggling to stabilize food production and rebuild cities and industries that had been ravaged by war.

Britain, a victor that had never been occupied, wasn't able to lift many significant food rationing schemes until the 1950s. Bread, which wasn't rationed during the war, had to be rationed from '46 to '48.

There is a meaningful distinction between being the leading industrial power and being the overwhelmingly dominant economic power.

China's average energy cost for businesses is 10c and the US is 13c according to a quick search I did so I'm still not following.

Worth mentioning here that the SpaceX Falcon is the world's most reliable rocket, with a full success rate of 99.24% out of 394 total launches, 325 successful launches of the current version, and 98.5% successful booster landings of the current version, something no other orbital launch system even attempts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

Comparisons to other rockets here:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/spacexs-falcon-9-roc...

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-succ...

At the moment, of course, two astronauts are stuck on ISS after Boeing's new spacecraft, developed along more traditional lines, experienced problems in its first crewed flight. They're awaiting rescue by SpaceX's Dragon, which has flown 16 times with crew and delivered astronauts to the ISS 10 times, all without a glitch. Both companies were awarded their crew contracts in 2014.

Every widget has a price floor since there's parts/materials and labour costs. This is even true for solar.

One simply has to be careful about what something "costs" when you look at the first unit versus the nth unit.

How is overbuilding going to help when the source of the power itself is intermittent? The sun regularly sets and the wind has this unfortunate habit of not blowing. Or, oddly enough, blowing too much.

If we hope to go 100% renewable, storage is a key piece of that puzzle.

It wont help much but it was the actul solution when the main source of electricity was fossil fuels because you could stockpile the fossil fuel

The current analysis is that China's emissions peak this year [1,2] and will enter a structural decline. This is because new renewables are being deployed faster than growth in energy demand. The new coal construction is mostly "dispatchable" production that will be used to backstop the fast-growing renewable grid, with payments going to coal plants in exchange for not generating (and built-in expectations that these payments will rise over the next few years as renewables and storage serve more of the demand.)

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02877-6

I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that the rest of the world is a footnote to China's emissions. Europe's emissions are already dropping fast, though. Presumably if China can decarbonize its economy at the rate it's going, then we presumably the rest of the world (even poorer nations) will be able to fast-follow them due to the learning curve (or else just because China will have so much excess manufacturing capacity that they'll flood the world with cheap renewables.)

and nuclear reactors are incredibly reliable as well. do the ends always justify the means?

Since I don't see moral deficit in the means involved in either example, I don't understand the point of your question.

> When we get to the final percent in the 2030s we can utilize akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity markets [1] but zero carbon.

Capacity markets effectively don't exist in Europe right now. There are plans to create a plan for them by 2027, this is how urgent it is for Europe. But no worries, natural gas is now green, and it's fine to send money to Azerbaijan for it.

There is no pathway for most of Europe to switch to renewables any time soon.

Nuclear also has this problem because it cannot be easily tuned down during low demand periods.

Much of the pumped hydro that exists today was built to handle excess nuclear.

No.

Not even close. Wind and solar are cheap _only_ if you don't depend on them. In particular, for the wind the adequacy rating is about 10% in most places. It means that you can expect 10% of the nameplate capacity to be available at all times system-wide. So multiply the wind energy costs by 10x, and suddenly they are quite more expensive than nuclear.

It's not even a question for the solar, it simply can't provide power during a day without storage.

> Even the nuclear lobby acknowledges this nowadays and has switched to other arguments.

Nope.

Overbuilding doesn't make solar generate power at night. Days with minimal wind can see 10% average wind speeds or less.

> Dunkelflaute simply doesn't exist.

Here's one: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&... - look at the dates between 2019-01-16 to 2019-01-25.

> It's clearly visible in the charts of the last years

I have just provided you an example. Want more? Here's another: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&... - the period between 2023-02-04 and 2024-02-08, then followed by 2023-02-12 to 2023-02-15.

But hey, it's all fake news. When the next Dunkelflaute happens, the citizens are supposed to just sit in their cold homes and think how great renewable generation is during the other times.

Nuclear's electrical output can indeed be turned down, by over-cooling the steam in the turbines. The reactor is putting out the same power, but less electricity is generated since you're deliberately increasing waste heat. This is not efficient so it's rarely done.

Furthermore, too much energy is a far easier problem to solve than too little energy. People can desalinate water, or do any other energy intensive things.

> I've heard people say "oh you cant pay attention to this study because it's in Australia

So a study for Australia should be applicable everywhere else? Like in Germany or Norway?

Nuclear can handle variable loads just fine, if reactors are designed with load-following in mind. France does that, for example.

We have plenty of small but commercially successful natural gas plants, so it doesn't seem to be a general principle. The only scaling law mentioned in your article is this:

> a 400-MW reactor requires less than twice the quantity of concrete and steel to construct as a 200-MW reactor, and it can be operated with fewer than twice as many people. Writing in Science in 1961, a senior member of the AEC worried that “competition [from fossil fuel plants] is indeed formidable” and suggested that “with current pressurized-water reactor technology, lower nuclear power costs can be achieved most readily with large plants.”

Almost all the SMRs we've built have been water cooled reactors, which require a large amount of concrete and steel. Newer designs, such as molten salt reactors, can use a lot less, because they operate near atmospheric pressure, don't have to leave room for a high-pressure pipe break introducing a large volume of steam, and have nothing that can cause a chemical explosion. They're also inherently stable and adaptive to load, with little need for active control. A small modular MSR could well work out.

> The biggest concern would be liberation of elemental fluorine

Yep.

But I'm personally more worried about the pelletized fuel. Pellets are not a great form-factor, and they don't have cladding. Fluoride salts are also far more aggressive than water (mechanically and chemically), so this will limit the maximum specific power of the reactor. So I don't think that something like 1GW molten salt reactor is even possible.

It might be OK if they want to continue using SMRs, though.

> The slightly reduced salt is also preferred to limit corrosion

Sidenote: that's actually not always a great idea. Steel is stainless because it's covered in a film of oxides, and without oxygen it might not be able to form.

This is a problem for the Russian BREST-300 reactor that is cooled by molten lead, they had to do almost 10 years of research to perfect a system that controls the amount of dissolved oxygen in the molten lead. And it's still not clear if they succeeded until the full-scale reactor is built.

In this case, though, I think that they can tune the reducers to react with fluorine preferentially, while still leaving enough oxygen.

Then why not fund fusion reactors?

Or maybe thorium reactors ON A ZEPPELIN! With microwave power transmission. After all, if the objective to spend money on research, then what can be cooler than a nuclear reactor on a blimp?

Iterate on designs quickly in development. Build lots of the same thing in production. Smaller hardware helps for both phases.

Once, if you're just talking about nuclear reactors. The reactor vessel didn't explode at Fukushima, just the outer building due to accumulated hydrogen. TMI didn't explode at all, the fuel melted but didn't breach containment.

“Oh no we have too much power, what are we going to do with it” is a much better problem to have than “the sun and wind are going down at the same time and we don’t have enough power, what are we going to do about it”.

The US has been successfully producing small modular reactors since the 1950’s. We just happen to install virtually all of them inside of submarines and aircraft carriers.

And here's the correlation coefficient between countries:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-coefficients...

Like today we will need peaking capacity in the future, likely either based on hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels.

What we don't need is nuclear power plants which sit idle at all times unless there is a winter dunkeflaute across half of Europe.

Technically yes if you have an entire fleet to both spread the load following across and their manage their fuel cycles since they get less flexible the further into a fuel cycle a reactor is.

Economically? Load following with nuclear power means an even worse business case than running at 100% 24/7. And nuclear power is already a laughably bad business case when running at 100%.

It means the nuclear power plants shut down and then start losing money hand over fist, eventually closing.

Technically yes if you have an entire fleet to both spread the load following across and their manage their fuel cycles since they get less flexible the further into a fuel cycle a reactor is.

Economically? Load following with nuclear power means an even worse business case than running at 100% 24/7. And nuclear power is already a laughably bad business case when running at 100%.

For the least price sensitive customer in the world: The US navy. That doesn't tend to translate into working products on cutthroat markets.

You don't need to change fuel cycles to reduce the output of a nuclear plant. You can accomplish it by more aggressively cooling the water in the steam turbines, effectively wasting heat (and thus generating less power).

Nuclear is a bad business case compared to a fossil fuel grid. Solar and wind backed by fossil fuels are a better business choice, too. But when it comes to a fossil-fuel free grid, it's the only viable option if you don't have a big source of hydropower nearby. Batteries can't deliver the required storage capacity. Remember, the world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. And as transportation and industrial uses of fossil fuels are electrified, that'll increase.

Notably it also runs the reactors much harder, which has led to situations like France needing to shut all nuclear plants at once for maintenance.

The fuel is burned at the same rate using this method of modulating output. Thermal output from the reactor is the same. Electrical output is reduced because heat is deliberately wasted.

> https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-coefficients...

The problem is, this is average. You _have_ to plan the grid for the worst case scenario. For Germany, the worst case is 1 month of straight Dunkelflaute. It's estimated to happen once in 100 years.

> Like today we will need peaking capacity in the future, likely either based on hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels.

It's not peaking capacity. It has to be more than 100% of the current capacity (once Germany switches to electricity instead of gas for heating). And it'll be mostly sitting idle.

> What we don't need is nuclear power plants which sit idle at all times unless there is a winter dunkeflaute across half of Europe.

Build nukes, remove wind generators. Problem solved.

I’ve actually been aboard a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, where I observed flight operations from the flight deck. I can assure you that it’s a working product. And the Navy is under a lot more pressure to cut costs and economize than many government projects.

Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Most of the costs and all of the shutdowns in nuclear power are primarily motivated by anti-nuclear activism. What you’re describing is a policy choice, not an essential reality.

Also because of widespread adoption of battery electric vehicles.

More applicable than FUD.

I am, as I said, still waiting for models which demonstrate that it is wildly different...

I am not so sure you can build an economy of scale with projects that take a decade to construct and even longer when accounting for approvals and paperwork. The projects are too massive and too long. The contractor that poured the foundation for the last project may no longer be around. It has worked in some areas of the world like China because they have been building from zero and are able to scale mega projects.

The US has more hope to learn by iterating on smaller projects.

The further a region is to the poles, the worse intermittency becomes. Both for solar and for wind: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

> However, the share of solar generation increases less, or even decreases, in higher-latitude countries like Russia, Canada, and Germany (Fig. 2b). These trends continue as more storage is added, so that with 12 h of energy storage and no excess annual generation, 83–94% (average 90%) of electricity demand is met with mixes of 10–70% solar power (49% on average; Fig. 2c).

Even with 12 hours of storage, Germany would be seeing blackouts weekly.

To put this in perspective:

> reliability standards in industrialized countries are typically very high (e.g., targeting <2–3 h of unplanned outages per year, or ~99.97%). Resource adequacy planning standards for “1-in-10” are also high: in North America (BAL-502-RF-03), generating resources must be adequate to provide no more than 1 day of unmet electricity demand—or in some cases 1 loss of load event—in 10 years (i.e., 99.97% or 99.99%, respectively)

So no, even with 12 hours of storage and 50% overcapacity, we'd have an unacceptably unreliable grid.

Also, your linked article is not modelling a carbon-free grid:

> Graham says that the CSIRO modelling showed that at very high levels of wind and solar, a maximum of half a day’s average demand was needed for storage. In some areas of the grid, only around three hours might be needed.

What are these "very high levels of wind and solar"? How much of the remaining demand is satisfied by fossil fuels? The article doesn't say.

Norway is already 100% renewable because it has lots of hydropower. Germany on the other hand, would suffer from an extremely unreliable grid even with 50% overproduction and 12 hours of storage. The further a region is from the equator, the more variability in the production of wind and solar. This study models how reliable grids would be with wind, solar, and storage: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

The issue is that electrical grids have very high reliability requirements (upwards of 99.95%). Plenty of models claiming that small amounts of storage required neglect to mention how frequently they will encounter insufficient generation. Remember, even fulfilling demand 99% of the time is a 20x increase in blackouts.

Also, even just 12 hours of storage globally would be 30,000 GWh of storage. That's still about 50 times the amount of batteries produced annually. The reality is that hydropower is the only feasible form of grid storage.

They don't need to solve month-long dunkelflaute. You burn a little natural gas for that. The priority for climate change mitigation is to get to 97% carbon free soon, rather than 100% carbon free in 30 years. The AUC of emissions is all that matters.

Also, both li-on and sodium are cheap and getting cheaper, so the latter being more expensive currently is kind of moot.

Simulation studies have covered this. It addresses it by providing more power when there is less sunlight and less wind.

Lead is a rather different case, because liquid lead itself corrodes steel. The oxide layer is needed to protect the steel from the lead. FLiBe by itself does not corrode steel.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00109...

When the German soldiers first encountered the US doughboys, they were struck by their height, their excellent food, and their supplies. That was when Germany knew they had lost WW1.

And this was despite having to ship all that stuff across an ocean.

The US was an industrial powerhouse then.

I actually worked on such a model professionally (as in "being paid for it") in 2006, for Germany.

Here's a good overview article: https://energytransition.org/2017/07/germanys-worse-case-sce...

> Germany will always need dispatchability roughly at the level of its annual peak demand

The solution they're proposing is power-to-gas. Which so far has been way too expensive to matter.

If it costs you money to generate power at a time you cannot sell it, that is losing money. Wind and solar are unique in that they have low marginal costs, whereas a nuclear plant requires more staffing and fuel burn.

I don't understand why you're coming about this problem from a "100% nuclear" situation. That's not the case for the world, and likely never will be the case. But heck, let's assume all you've got to work with is nuclear.

You have a baseload. That's basically the minimum load that always exists. You don't have to worry about selling the power, it's already sold. And then you have peak. Both of these are time / weather dependent but we're still quite able to plan days, if not weeks and months, in advance for what those two values will be. As an example, let's get back to the original topic of the article.

If you're Google and you have a particular datacenter at a location, you know what that baseload is. You know what the peak is. It's a pretty simple calculation to figure out what is most cost-effective here. It's probably even easier for you than the local power company, as base and peak loads likely don't fluctuate much for you outside of HVAC keeping up with weather. It might be to use nuclear for just base load and use the local grid for the rest. It might be to over-produce occasionally because that's still cheaper than buying from the local system operator. Hell, you can probably sell any access, but that's more of a problem than most people think.

But the point is nuclear is king when it comes to baseload power supply. And a datacenter, which consumes a lot of power consistently, is almost entirely baseload.

No grid is sized for the 100 year catastrophe. Then we need to make the same calculation for when half the French nuclear fleet was offline.

Consider an even worse issue and expect 80% to be offline for the 100 year catastrophe.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...

In reality we work with statistics. In for example Sweden the “reliability guarantee” is at most one hour of demand exceeding production per year.

That’s a reliability of 99.8%.

Building nuclear power plants would mean locking in enormously more expensive energy costs for everyone, stalling the green revolution in terms of electrification of industry.

This is the problem with nukebros, there’s no logic to the suggestions. Only a complete fixation on nuclear power as the solution to everything.

Which means widespread continued fossil use and energy crisis power cost for the general public.

But that’s a price you’re willing to pay as long as we spend trillions of dollars on subsidies of nuclear power.

> You burn a little natural gas for that.

For that you need to have 100% of idle capacity just sitting there.

> The priority for climate change mitigation is to get to 97% carbon free soon

No, it's not. The priority is to shake down consumers to get as much money to Greenie cronies as possible. That's why Germany is straightforwardly _subsidizig_ new natural gas power plants. With a pinkie-promise to be "hydrogen ready", maybe sometime in 2030-s.

> No grid is sized for the 100 year catastrophe.

Utterly wrong. Grids _are_ sized for that.

> Then we need to make the same calculation for when half the French nuclear fleet was offline.

French shutdowns were _planned_. Nobody died as a result, and it only cost more money than planned as a result of unlucky confluence of events.

> In reality we work with statistics. In for example Sweden the “reliability guarantee” is at most one hour of demand exceeding production per year.

You have it backwards. Sweden is ready to accept one hour of outage per year. Not more than that.

The failure scenario for Germany is not an hour of outage, but a month without energy. Leading to millions of people dead and a total economic collapse.

> This is the problem with nukebros, there’s no logic to the suggestions. Only a complete fixation on nuclear power as the solution to everything.

There's no fucking shame and zero self-reflection with you greenies.

Germany _wasted_ close to $500B on useless Energiewende and is still directly _subsidizing_ _new_ _gas_ _powerplants_. And it'll need to spend even more than that to have even a _hope_ of carbon neutrality, contingent on multiple speculative bets coming true.

Instead they could have used the same amount of money to build a completely carbon-neutral nuclear-powered grid. That would have been available by now. Using technology that was tried and tested in 2000-s.

> Everyone is a libertarian until it’s their commons experiencing the tragedy.

Yeah sure and everyone is a socialist utopian until its their own money/liberty on the line.

If we cannot “collectively” reach a consensus what happens?

Im just pointing out that the original suggestion of “ban ML for environmental reasons” is extreme/ham-fisted. This is what dictatorships do in real life all over the globe “for the greater good”.

Should crypto be a government-approved use of energy? What about manufacturing semiconductors? Building data centers? Producing EVs, solar farms or batteries? Are flights for vacation allowed?

You aren’t thinking about the second order impact of having a government that has the ability to gatekeep energy production for specific use cases…

They’re not. When considering the resilience of the Swedish grid a 10-year winter is used.

So maybe stop with the hyperboles?

Then a ton of post-fact reasoning for why it was actually fine that half the French nuclear supply was offline during the largest energy crisis in a generation.

Please get back to reality.

Wasted? For the first time since the Industrial Revolution we have found a new cheapest near infinitely scalable energy source: renewables.

Nuclear power was the last attempt, it never delivered on the promises.

I love how you say that it would be “available now” when Flamaville 3 started at the same time currently is 6x over budget and 12 year late on a 5 year planned construction timeline.

Germany would have had massive cumulative emissions when still waiting for nuclear power to come online.

But that’s the problem with you guys. You don’t care about emissions. It’s completely fine locking in fossil fuels for 20 years as we wait for nuclear power to come online.

And then in the next sentence you turn around denigrating even a single percentage of fossil fuels as we transition into a renewable grid, before said nuclear would come online.

It’s simply completely senseless. You’re making ridicule of yourself.

did you see France raising their cost estimate for 5 reactors to $73B? France, the shining beacon of nuclear energy.

by the time they build it, the cost of renewables will halve, and their actual cost of nuclear will have doubled again.

If you actually think that is a good idea you can try to give it a go. There are worse things to dedicate a life to and it might have big applications in disaster recovery scenarios or something.

> Wasted? For the first time since the Industrial Revolution we have found a new cheapest near infinitely scalable energy source: renewables.

For the _second_ time. The first time was with the nuclear power. Keep forgetting that, yes?

> Nuclear power was the last attempt, it never delivered on the promises.

France has an 8 _times_ less carbon-intensive grid than Germany. RIGHT NOW. Keep forgetting that, yes? They can go to carbon-neutral with fairly minimal changes.

> I love how you say that it would be “available now” when Flamaville 3 started at the same time currently is 6x over budget and 12 year late on a 5 year planned construction timeline.

Russia is finishing the Bangladesh nuclear power plant. On time and within budget. 2 reactors completely built within 10 years. If Russia can do that, other countries can certainly replicate that.

> Germany would have had massive cumulative emissions when still waiting for nuclear power to come online.

Germany is right now already _locked_ into future emissions for more than 20 years. Even freaking _coal_ (!) is not being phased out until 2038: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-government-says-...

> And then in the next sentence you turn around denigrating even a single percentage of fossil fuels as we transition into a renewable grid, before said nuclear would come online.

Again, zero reflection from your side. Zero contrition, zero knowledge, and endless excuses.

France is literally the next door. Their carbon intensity for energy production is just 12% of Germany's. Right now. Germany in the best possible case won't be able to match that until 2040-s. In reality, it won't happen unless something magical occurs.

Also, if you're serious about the problem of "our nuclear power plants are producing more power than we need and we can't turn them off because then we'll have a power shortage", there are applications to dump "bonus" energy into. You'd run into the same problem with renewables too; the difference is that with nuclear, you can avoid the "not enough energy" problem.

Batteries and hydro are not the only storage options.

If you're not in Texas, there's such a thing as paying to keep capacity available, and then you don't lose money.

And power plants having individual finances in the first place is a policy choice, not a law of nature.

You know? That sounds actually interesting because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-moderated_self-regula...

Hydrogen can be so hawt!1!!

Start of construction is many years after start of the project though.

    > There's something to be said for space.

I see this argument a lot. Yes, the density is very high for nuclear power plants, but you need to build them in the middle of nowhere, for political and safety reasons. So, are we really saving space compared to solar? Plus, there is much less political resistance to solar farms, and almost zero safety issues (for PV).

This comment:

    > unless they're willing to bulldoze their entire land to cover it in solar panels

Your sentiment is interesting. No one says that when we talk about building new farms. Really, that is what people have done for the past 2000 years to alter our landscape. Can you imagine what Brazil looked like in 1800 vs today? Dramatic landscape changes due to farming. Same for US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. California has plenty of desert or very unproductive land that can be covered with solar panels.

You postulated that there are periods existing where there would be no/very low combined and solar for over a month, yet you only posted links to periods of very low wind generation for less than a day.

Even better, if you look at energy flow in the EU grid for e.g. the period from 2023-02-12 to 2023-02-15, you'll see that we actually exported energy to nuclear-powered France, and imported from renewables-powered Denmark.

That's actually a proof that renewables saved the day there, because lack of wind is always only a regional phenomenon.

First, capacity factor is a silly metric to use for this. The industry uses LCOE or system LCOE, because this is about dollars per actual TWh produced, not capacity. In other words: A capacity factor of 10% doesn't matter if building 10x the amount is still cheaper.

With that said, the wind capacity factor in Germany is 20% for onshore and 40% for offshore, so even that was wrong by a factor of 2-4.

50% overcapacity of renewables is still spending way, way less than the equivalent for nuclear. How do the numbers look with 100% or 200% overcapacity, where you're still spending about half of what you would spend on nuclear?

Nuclear power never became cheaper. As evidenced by it's continued languishing only supported by subsidies.

Hydro power did, and is famously called "geographically limited" because we in short order exploited near every single river globally.

France made the right choice in the 70s in the name of energy independence and nuclear weapons. They did not care the slightest about emissions.

The equivalent choice in 2024 to nuclear power in the 1970s is renewables.

"Hurr durr my cherry picked reactor!!!"

While completely ignoring all western projects. The facts are: Flamanville 3 still haven't entered commercial operation and the projected was started at about the same time as energiewende.

Flamanville, HPC, Olkiluoto 3 and Vogtle are the successful western projects. The unsuccessful get stuck in financing limbo like Sizewell C because the needed subsidies are truly stupid.

https://www.ft.com/content/2a5d9462-b921-4577-82c1-4eb508775...

You are proposing that Germany in 2024 should have emissions closer to Poland because you value building nuclear power above curbing emissions.

Lets do a thought experiment in which renewables somehow end up being wholly incapable of solving the last 20% of carbon emissions.

Scenario one: We push renewables hard, start phasing down fossil fuels linearly 4 years from now, a high estimate on project length, and reach 80% by 2045.

The remaining 20%, we can't economically phase out (remnant peaker plants).

Scenario two: We push nuclear power hard, start phasing down fossil fuels linearly in 10 years time, a low estimate on project length and reach 100% fossil free in 2060.

Do you know what this entails in terms of cumulative emissions?

Here's the graph: https://imgur.com/wKQnVGt

The nuclear option will overtake the renewable one in 2094. It means we have 60 years to solve the last 20 percent of renewables while having emitted less.

Do you still care about our cumulative emissions when any dollar spent on nuclear power increases them?

note the word "could"

We have heard better and better batteries being just around the corner for decades at this point.

Sure, maybe a few percent better, but nothing ground breaking.

Yes, these and other innovations will defivinitely increase our overall electricity consumption, but i imagine that it will be a gradual shift as it is aleady happening, since vehicles and heating has long life cycles. It also helps that energy wise these technologies are more efficient, so that offsets some of the increase.

Probably hard to judge right now where AI is heading and if the pace of increased energy consumption remains this high. But i agree that they'll probably end up moving closer to sources of cheap electricity.

Adding more overcapacity just wastes energy. Storage is the main bottleneck to widespread renewable adoption without frequent blackouts. Having more energy when you don't need it is only really useful if you can store that energy.

What are the other storage options? Besides batteries and hydroelectric, there's only prototype technologies that haven't seen any significant deployment at scale. Compressed air, hydrogen, and power to gas have been tried but no at anywhere near grid scales.

Very true. The other factors multiply, though, like reliability and degradation, because there are so many packs involved and because they're expected to work for, well, as long as physically possible.

We have a version of that in Texas, too. There are some commercial cryptocurrency mining operations that pay for a certain level of power capacity, and if the grid is running low on power, the grid just buys the capacity back from them and they stop mining for awhile.

If you find cryptocurrency mining objectionable for some reason, you could apply the same basic principle to things like aluminum refining or desalination.

Five years ago batteries weren’t anywhere near grid scale either. Arguably they still aren’t. That doesn’t mean we should not consider them when talking snot the grid in 2040.

Sure. But we also shouldn't assume they will be successful at grid-scale either. Planning a grid assuming that some future storage technology will be a silver bullet that solves grid storage is a massive gamble.

Hydroelectric storage is the only grid-scale energy storage system available to us, and it's geographically dependent. And the places that are suitable for hydroelectric storage usually don't need it because they can just generate electricity via hydropower anyway. Until your hypothetical breakthrough in power-to-gas or giant flywheels actually happens, this is the state of grid storage.

It's not such a massive gamble if you can just keep relying on natural gas peaker plants in case storage is somehow unsolvable, which seems quite unlikely given that we have a dozen completely different technologies for storage in the pipeline.

The efficiency would decrease primary energy use, if the electricity were being produced from thermal sources, but the amount of electrical energy used would increase.

No, it also makes the probability of supply not meeting demand lower. Overcapacity tends to feature in most analysis of a fully renewable grid because of that and because it's currently cheaper than storage for all but very short timescales.

P2G isn't actually horrendously expensive compared to nuclear power, it's just horrendously expensive to regular old natural gas.

Power to gas for the "worst case scenarios" would also be the last thing you'd do to transition a grid from 97% carbon free to 100% carbon free.

That's still only paying when the capacity is needed. It doesn't do a good job of incentivizing power sources/releases that are needed very rarely.

> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved

Cost assumptions in table 2

Offshore wind 1.9M EUR/MW, 1.67% O&M, 30 year life at 0.51 capacity factor

Onshore wind 1.03M EUR/MW, 2.51% O&M, 30 year life at 0.37 capacity factor

Solar PV 0.6M EUR/MW, 1.50% O&M, 40 year life at 0.14 capacity factor

So they are claiming nuclear (which has a > 0.9 capacity factor in Finland, and 60 year life) needs to have an investment cost between onshore and offshore wind to make sense.

  Due to energy system constraints, there might be reasons for down regulating the nuclear power stations, thus as an output the capacity factor might be lower than 90%, but never higher. The study allows for nuclear power to be down regulated to 25% of the maximum load in for instance hours with high wind and solar production.

So the authors decided that the non-dispatchable wind/solar has market priority over nuclear. Hence it is important to pack out the high nuclear scenario with renewables. Also note how the all renewables scenario adds biogas (presumably from all the pig slurry) to firm up demand along with 6GW of inter-connectors to friendly neighbours.

By way of contrast, https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Nuclea... Page 5 forecasts a 37% reduction in costs when nuclear is part of the energy mix in California.

Edit :- Closer analysis of the high nuclear with district heating scenario (figure 4, in the supplementary material) reveals a total electrical demand of just under 10,000MW (unflexible + heating + transport). Note that the authors have chosen to represent nuclear as a continuous 6,686MW of power (rather than the nameplate capacity of 7,400MW).

> Which is confirmed by Sweden continuing its renewable buildout with both the cheapest electricity prices in Europe and no subsidies on the books for new renewable production.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/09/19/sweden-to-lower-solar...

  The Swedish government raised its subsidy for solar cell installations from 15% to 20% in January 2023. ... The income tax reduction for households and businesses that micro-produce renewable energy was introduced in 2015