It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.
Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.
What’s wrong with nuclear?
People still buying into oil company FUD from the 70s
It’s a poor solution for what people like to call “baseline power”.
The argument goes: solar and wind don’t provide consistent power, so there has to be some power generation that doesn’t fluctuate so we always have X amount of power to make up for when solar/wind don’t suffice. Nuclear is consistent and high-output, so it’s perfect for this.
Unfortunately, reality is a little different. First problem is that solar/wind at scale don’t fluctuate as much. The sun always shines somewhere, and the wind always blows somewhere. You have to aggregate a large area together, but that already exists with the European energy market.
Second issue is that solar/wind at scale regularly (or will regularly) produce more than 100% of the demand. This gives you two options: either spend the excess energy, or stop generating so much of it. Spending the excess requires negative energy prices so people will use it, causing profitability issues for large power plants. As nuclear is one of the most expensive sources of energy, this requires hefty subsidies which need to be paid for by taxpayers. The alternative is shutting the power plant down, but nuclear plants in particular aren’t able to quickly shut off and on on demand. And as long as they’re not turned on they’re losing money, again requiring hefty subsidies. You could try turning off renewable power generation, but that just causes energy prices to rise due to a forced market intervention. Basically, unless your baseline power generator is able to switch off and on easily and can economically survive a bit of downtime, it’s not very viable.
Nuclear is safe. It produces a lot of power, the waste problem is perfectly manageable and the tech has that cool-factor. But with the rapid rise of solar and wind, which are becoming cheaper every day, it’s economic viability is under strong pressure. It just costs too much, and all that money could have been spent investing into clean and above all cheap energy instead. I used to be pro-nuclear, but after seeing the actual cost calculations for these things I think it’s not worth doing at the moment.
As for what I think a good baseline power source would be: I think we have to settle for (bio-)gas. It’s super quick to turn off and on and still fairly cheap. And certainly not as polluting as coal. We keep the gas generators open until we have enough solar/wind/battery/hydrogen going, as backup. If nuclear gets some kind of breakthrough that allows them to be cheaper then great! Until then we should use the better solutions we have available right now (and no, SMRs are not the breakthrough you might think it is. They’re still massively more expensive than the alternatives and so far have not really managed to reduce either costs or buils times by any significant margin).
Maybe fusion in the future manages to be economically viable. Fingers crossed!
The sun always shines somewhere and wind always blows somewhere. Now we just have to install x-times the global energy demand in production capacity and also the infrastructure to distribute it around the world and also make sure that this hyper centralized system is not used against us and then already we have a perfect solution without nuclear. Ez pz, no more CO2 in 500 years.
You don’t need to install X-amount of global demand. Battery/hydrogen storage can solve the issue as has been demonstrated repeatedly in various research. And with home battery solutions you can even fully decentralise it.
I don’t understand your centralisation argument, nuclear is about the most centralised power source there is. And it can be threatened, as seen in the current Ukraine-Russia war.
Solar and wind can scale up to the demand. Nuclear actually has a much harder time doing that, as materials are far more rare and expensive, and it takes much longer to build. If anything, the time argument works against nuclear, not in favour of it.
Hydrogen storage, you have got to be kidding me. It is abysmally inefficient and the same kind of FUD spread by the fossile industry.
Batteries are so extremely expensive that also has to be a joke. How much does a battery for a single day cost? Say, relative to the GDP?
Nuclear is far more local than solar and wind transfer in-between continents, obviously.
Batteries are becoming less expensive every day. The market doubles almost every year, which is impressively high-paced.
You also don’t need battery storage to last a day. Most places only need approx. 6 hours, with particularly sunny countries being able to get away with having only 4 hours.
You maybe also be confusing local generation with centralised power generation. Nuclear is local, but also extremely centralised. Solar/wind transfer is very decentralised, same goes for battery storage.
Hydrogen is in its infancy. The tech is promising but whether or not it will prove its worth is still to be seen.
There are about 2 weeks without sun and wind in the whole EU every once in a while (don’t remember, like every 3 years?). How are 6 hours supposed to help? How much would these only 6 hours of storage capacity cost (pick some country, perhaps not Norway or Iceland).
I doubt that’s true. Especially no sun sounds highly dubious, I don’t think the Earth stops spinning every now and then. Oh, and do note that solar panels are still producing even in cloudy conditions.
There’s no period during which renewables stop producing. “6 hours” refers to the capacity if renewables stopped producing entirely, but in reality this never happens. At worst efficiency drops far enough to dip below demand, at which point the storage would have to kick in to make up the difference.
Building that much storage still costs a lot of money. I haven’t seen many cost estimates actually, probably because the market is developing at a very quick pace at the moment, driving costs down. A decent home battery solution costs 4000-10000 euros per household, but doing it at a larger scale may be cheaper.
Why would you even say something so stupid? I highly doubt that you are interested in a discussion.
But just in case, it is called “Dunkelflaute”. And no, we do not constantly produce so much more energy that losing a lot of capacity makes us “dip below demand”. We constantly only produce as much as we need. But why even discuss this here? People spend their whole career figuring this out, it is obviously not as simple as you make it out to be. Here a report from the EU. Just to show the scale of the project:
Weird, I’ve never seen these magical two weeks.
Look at the clean-up cost of Fukushima, it’s mental. Then look at the set-up costs, and how long it takes. Compare that to renewables.
Not that I want to disagree with you, but even without comparing to two of the biggest fuckups in human(energy) history nuclear energy is always much more expensive than renewable energy, because it needs a lot of safety mechanisms a much longer and more complicated supply chain, and then finally the costs of decontamination.
Look at costs of dam failures. Or how many people they killed. Or look at the cost of climate change. Fukushima is nothing in comparison. You can also compare it to the cost of the tsunami that actually caused the issue to begin with.
What does the damage of the tsunami have to do with this?
Dams seem an awfully convenient thing to bring up since I didn’t mention them.
Because thousands died from it. How many died from the nuclear power? Ah about 0? 1? here the article about it 360 billion damage (vs <200 billion clean up) 20’000 dead (vs. 0 or 1) By 2015, 4 years after the flooding, still more displaced than Fukushima ever did!
Why should the “what about” about the power plant be do important but not the bigger disaster that caused it? Like who cares about 50’000 dollar cash that is lost when a house burns down and people die?
Why are you bringing up deaths of a tsunami and nuclear power? You’re very transparent; your straw man attempts are way too obvious.
The toxic and deadly trash it makes. Deadly for centuries.
In Germany we still search for an area to dig for ages. We search since 30 years.
In the mean time, you seem to be a big fan of burning coal instead, which only pollutes the atmosphere instead of easily storable material to be buried when we feel we have found a sufficient deep hole that no one is going to look in.
Most nuclear waste issues are vastly over-exaggerated. Most of the nuclear waste is not long term waste. It’s not things like spent fuel rods, it’s things like safety equipment and gear. Those aren’t highly contaminated, and much of it can almost be thrown away in regular landfills. The middle range of materials are almost always kept on site through the entire life of the nuclear plant. Through the lifetime of the plant that material will naturally decay away and by the time the plant is decommissioned only a fraction will be left to handle storage for a while longer from the most recent years.
Nuclear waste can be divided into four different types:
Despite safety concerns, high-level radioactive waste constitutes less than 0.25% of total radioactive waste reported to the IAEA.
These numbers are worldwide for the last 4 years:
I. Germany we haven’t found this sufficient deep hole since 30 years.
And yet, Germany prefers to pollute the atmosphere with the smoke of coal and other fossil rules, than to simply maintain the storage of nuclear waste until a hole can be found or created.
Fukushima, Tchernobyl.
It’s been a while since I read about it, but iirc Chernobyl is suspected to have been sabotage because they turned all the safeties off and then basically walked away until it started melting down.
Fukushima was doomed from the start. Iirc they were told not to build the plant there due to extreme earthquake and tsunami risk, but they did it anyway.
Those two disasters were caused by stupidity and negligence. You can argue that humans can’t be trusted with radioactive materials, but the process itself is pretty safe. Meanwhile coal plants release significantly more radiation over their lifetimes than nuclear reactors do.
At least we‘re on a track to carbon zero as you can see here: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts
It‘s not perfect and could be faster. However, we‘re way better than other countries that don’t move.
Edit: I forgot to mention, that half the year Germanies power is over 50% from renewables. Share is increasing every year.
Your entire argument is a fallacy of saying it is either nuclear or coal, when in reality it is either renewables or coal+nuclear.
It is the same companies that want to continue both coal and nuclear, because it requires similar components in the power plants and similar equipment for mining.
Also the same government in Germany that expanded the nuclear power slashed the build up of renewables, resulting in the long time for coal in the first place.
Stop being a fossil shill. If you shill for nuclear you shill for coal too.
Congrats you’ve fallen for oil company FUD from the 70s.
In what world is nuclear + renewables not a possibility. Nobody here is wanting nuclear + coal. You sit here and bitch and whine about fallacies while your entire argument relies entirely on a strawman.
Many active reactors rely on old designs, we have new ones now that are far cleaner. Some even use existing waste as fuel, so we would be able to get rid of those old stock piles.
Ofc the oil industry is fighting that tooth and nail since it doesn’t jive with their FUD campaign
Yeah and because those new designs are so great we see them installed all over the world. Except the projects take decades, skyrocket in costs and get delayed for decades on top.
Advocating for nuclear power now is in the best interest of the oil lobby. And it is simply impossible to solve the urgent energy transition with it, even if all the miracles promised about it were true.
France is doing just fine with none of those issues.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/frances-edf-faces-uphill-battle-as-europes-demand-for-nuclear-reactors-grows/