Our world faces 'unprecedented' spike in electricity demand The world is going to need a lot of new electricity generation in the next three years to keep up with an "unprecedented" spike in demand, says the International Energy Agency (IEA) – and it's going to be a tough goal to meet. The IEA's report examines the current state of the electricity market and how it's likely to change …
You forgot to add the price difference you pay and those big s*ckers pay in your complain.
Completely off grid is too expensive for the most, but as off-grid as possible, so the grid is only there as your Uninterruptible Power Supply. Though some would like to discuss the definition of "Uninterruptible" depending on the region they live. I live in an area with very good reliability.
I live in South Africa where, due to some of the most brilliant governance ever seen until Trump took office again this year, we have had this problem for some time. When things deteriorated to the point of having up to 8 hours of power cuts a day (known as "load shedding" here) those who could afford it installed rooftop solar. That alone fixed a major part of the problem. The vagaries of the coal market (price drops which made it less profitable for crime cartels to steal coal from the power station supply chain) and the stagnating economy resulting in less demand, have helped as well. This has led to almost a year of almost no power cuts. Our Minister of Electricity (yes, we've got one!) and Eskom, the state-owned power generator, are wrenching their arms out of their sockets patting themselves on the backs for the "improvements" they've made (which analysts and engineers agree are practically non-existent and the deterioration of the power stations continues) but it's a well-known fact that rooftop solar has made a massive difference.
But few people are completely off grid. They use rooftop solar when there is enough sun but, especially in areas with more cloudy weather, still rely on the grid to make up for the shortfall. And that poses a new problem: during an outage (planned or otherwise, since breakdowns in the grid are common) people use whatever solar power they have, use stored battery power to make up for the deficit, and resort to using generators if they can and have to. But when grid power is restored, many (in fact most) installations begin to recharge the storage batteries from the grid to at least some extent, especially if there's no sun. This creates a load peak that in turn overloads the grid.
As a result, many outages (planned or otherwise) are followed by a much longer one due to the overload created by all the battery chargers that kick in when grid power is restored.
So going partially off grid will help the individual, and it can help to reduce the load on the grid when all goes well. But when all goes not well, it can exacerbate the problem. An obvious solution would be to regulate grid-based battery recharging to spread the load. But this requires considerable legislation that is difficult to implement and enforce. The general sentiment among the consumer tends to be "Stuff it, they let me down badly, now I'll look after myself and recharge my batteries as quickly as possible before they let me down again". Understandable, to be sure, but from a grid stability standpoint it's not exactly helpful.
> An obvious solution would be to regulate grid-based battery recharging to spread the load.
There is one idea for that in Germany, which might work for South Africa as well. The control is the price you pay or receive. Both change on an hourly base, maybe later on a 15 Minute base when it has shown to work well. This will make the individuals with their home batteries (or cars) NOT charge since the price is over 60 ct/kWh and wait until it is below 20 ct/kWh. The other way around: When the payout is at 15 ct/kWh they will pump their electricity into the grid, and don't when it gets below 5 ct/kWh, down to 0 ct/kWh, but not negative. Due to various effects the 1:4 price difference between supplying and getting from the grid seems to be the right fit, which I agree on. Others say 1:3 would be right. And some demand 1:1 of course.
If possible combine with you car battery instead of home battery. Technically already possible and tested to work (how many in South Africa do have electrical cars?). You set the minimum you want to keep in your car battery, and the rest is regulated automatically by your smart-home stuff. Without internet-cloud dependency of course, except for the current electricity prices to poll.
The advantage doing it this way is that not every home installation which could supply below 25000W peak needs an direct control unit to be regulated down by the supplier. Simply showing "0 ct for each kWh" at the central .xml or .json (and web) made available to the public should be enough and is much simpler to implement. Could even be region dependent where you live in Germany, which might give the Bavarian politicians finally the push to get beyond their childish NIMBY regarding solar/wind.
Other details are that the price .xml/.json you download could include the predicted prices for the next ten or more hours since a lot of the demand can be predicted quite well.
Footnote: Currently solar installations with 25000W or more, by sum of panels, are required to be controllable by your energy supplier (in Germany). Some suppliers shut them completely down so the owner had to get his electricity demand from the grid instead of his own solar panels. There are multiple law suits which regard that fraud. Some already won, and those which are still going will probably win too.
This will make the individuals with their home batteries (or cars) NOT charge since the price is over 60 ct/kWh and wait until it is below 20 ct/kWh.
This assumes homes have batteries, 'smart' appliances and if not, are prepared to tell kids that yes, they might be hungry, but wait an hour and maybe it'll be cheap enough to cook. Or heat, or boil a kettle etc etc. Reality is all that will happen is the 'smart' meter might flash a 60c/kWh tariff, assuming the display is working and consumers will just have to take it or leave it, if they want hot food. What consumers actually want is the standard rate to be <20ct/kWh, and to spend less than they're currently being forced to spend thanks to regulatory capture by the 'renewables' scumbags.
Reduce energy costs and we'd reduce energy poverty, inflation, social spending, healthcare costs and make our economies more competitive. That would then leave figuring out a way to get property speculators to pay for the power they (might) need.
Did you bother actually reading the post he is replying to and then the post itself? This isn't about "normal" energy usage, it's specifically about avoiding the load peak that comes right after an outage from people HOME BATTERY!! charging kicking in straight away. Something that would be avoided if (like nearly all home battery system controllers now common) if it checks against current net pricing and the battery doesn't start charging when the power first comes back on. People don't have to avoid just putting the kettle on because the power is a bit more expensive, comparatively the cost of that's very small. But it avoids the load peak of battery charging overloading the grid and subsequently browning out immediately, causing an even longer outage as they then likely have to isolate a large grid into small sub sections and bring them online one by one, waiting for that bit of grids load to stabilize and drop before powering on the next bit, meaning an outage could last for many hours or even days. The average rage people will actually pay would still be low (below 20ct/kwh), just not if they start pulling massive amounts of power right after a blackout.
I am not your name, so yes, I did-
There is one idea for that in Germany, which might work for South Africa as well. The control is the price you pay or receive. Both change on an hourly base, maybe later on a 15 Minute base when it has shown to work well. This will make the individuals with their home batteries (or cars) NOT charge since the price is over 60 ct/kWh and wait until it is below 20 ct/kWh.
The average rage people will actually pay would still be low (below 20ct/kwh), just not if they start pulling massive amounts of power right after a blackout.
So you seem a bit confused about tariffs, human behaviour and demand management. So there's a blackout due to a dunkelflaute meaning no wind or solar. Blackout may be delayed by a few minutes as grid-scale batteries rapidly discharge. Power comes back on.. and what happens? Me, I'd probably want to make a coffee, take a shower, cook a hot meal, which would cause a demand spike. The only way to try to manage that spike is through 'smart' meters telling customers that if they really want their coffee now, it's going to cost them 60ct/kWh. If someone has an EV, batteries and has configured those with price caps, then they might defer charging until the price drops to 20ct/kWh. Or they might not, and the power trips out again. But it's a price signal, not a control.
I guess this might get even more fun depending on the tariffs and priority the grid batteries get. They're not for providing power, they're for making lots of money from arbitrage, ie charge when prices are low, discharge when high. Plus making millions by providing synthetic inertia and grid stabilisation, which they can't do if the batteries are flat. So then if they'd also be expected to pay the 60ct/kWh premium rate as well..
Takinng a shower, cooking a meal, etc aren't the big loads. They're peanuts at grid scale. I'm not claiming anyone is not doing those things based on cost. Because noone will be deterred by it. Trying to charge (at full chat) a depleted battery bank or an EV is the big problem. It's not an immediate need or desire, it's something that can be easily programmed to delay starting, and something that IS easily regulated by setting grid scale variable pricing. Set price per Kwh for the affected region high and batteries and EVs don't start charging. After a while the grid stabilises, the initial peak of showering, cooking, heating, etc has damped and prices come down. THEN the big loads of battery banks and EV charging comes online.
Takinng a shower, cooking a meal, etc aren't the big loads. They're peanuts at grid scale. I'm not claiming anyone is not doing those things based on cost. Because noone will be deterred by it. Trying to charge (at full chat) a depleted battery bank or an EV is the big problem.
Nope. They're well known problems, and why we built this-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
In a common scenario (known as TV pickup), the end of a popular national television programme or advertising breaks in commercial television programmes results in millions of consumers switching on electric kettles in the space of a few minutes, leading to overall demand increases of up to 2,800 MW
TV Pickup is probably a lot harder to predict now given a lot of people have stopped watching broadcast TV. But there are more people who might want a coffee when the lights turn back on, so X million households wanting 3kW within a few mins of that happening. There aren't really that many EVs or battery banks installed, and especially not ones with a 3-phase supply to do 'fast' charging, mainly due to the cost.. But then the people that want & can afford to install that are also the people who probably don't sweat the electrons, and just want them now because they're less price sensitive.
But that's just the kinda thing that happens when you have what's laughably known as an energy policy, and legislate for EVs, decarbonisation and 'renewables' without really thinking through the costs and problems. Which might be why in the UK, new EV charging installs are supposed to be on a seperate supply & meter so there might actually be some control possible. Or just charging an EV VED on those supplies.. But then if there's extra duty on 'red' electrons, people will just figure out ways to charge from their regular supplies and evade the duty, and VOSA can't exactly dip EV batteries to detect this.
It's not an immediate need or desire, it's something that can be easily programmed to delay starting, and something that IS easily regulated by setting grid scale variable pricing.
Nope, you're still not getting it, but gives me the chance to make an analogy I forgot to make earlier. You're confusing control and indicate, which is an X-thing (3 & 5. normally. hopefully).
So I have a 'smart' meter sitting by my desk and it's telling me my cost now per hour is 5c. Yey! This indicates errr.. likely charge based on the 'smart' meter's sample interval. If I wander over to turn on my 3kW kettle, it'll tell me my cost per hour will be higher. But the 'smart' meter (or its display) is actually dumb, and won't know the kettle only takes a miinute or so to boil. Energy companies are probably less dumb and would probably charge me for say, 5mins at 3kW and I just have to live in hope that the conversion to units used doesn't screw me. But it's energy, so it probably will and explains why, despite the claims that 'smart' meters would save me money.. it hasn't.
And regulators don't really help with that, but the lobby has sold them on the idea of 'demand management' by price indicators. So generally ways to screw consumers by creating exciting new tariffs that cost more. Currently, 'smart' meters don't actually seem to offer any control, so it'll turn EV charger or battery charger on or off based on a variable tariff. Sure, that could be 'easily programmed' on the consumer side, if the kit supports that and the person trusts whoever's installed & programmed it. And as the 'grid' might only be overloaded locally, you might want some more granular control over when devices are permitted to turn on to avoid tripping out that part of the network. Of course if you're an electricity supplier, charging everyone say, 60c/hr (or part thereof), regardless of actual load because this is how 'windfall' profits get made.
> This indicates errr.. likely charge based on the 'smart' meter's sample interval.
This is not how the electricity market, at least in Europe, works. Which is where the price comes from. Your smart meter does not tell the price by whatever you currently use, it is just dump measuring what you use and when, and it MIGHT show the price from the back-channel communication connected to the electricity market, not what you imply or guess. The price is dictated on what the European electricity marked says regarding demand and capacity. There are several very smart people out there already doing that at home with normal stuff available. Tibber as supplier and information source for your electricity, which has an per hour market price fixed in advance. Some working on a open source smart-home control with that in mind. That stuff is on github already, but not open since not yet release-ready - therefore you have to check the docker images in the German forum. In video form if you can understand German or can take youtube auto-translate (which is well, I would call it quality, but better than nothing).
I know I am repeating myself that we have the reality here. It works. And I hear from other parts of the world, including USA, that it works. We are definitely not the only one in the world doing that. And your denial of reality - well, I am just happy you are far away on the other side of the pond. And I am happy to know enough good people on that other side of the pond to wish it will work out without civil war, despite people like you. Currently I see you as lost case - maybe you need a dose of VC (currently reading John Brunner, The Stone That Never Came down. Some of his famous books did not stand the passage of time well, but that one does).
...and it MIGHT show the price from the back-channel communication connected to the electricity market, not what you imply or guess. The price is dictated on what the European electricity marked says regarding demand and capacity. There are several very smart people out there already doing that at home with normal stuff available. Tibber as supplier and information source for your electricity,
60mins showed how Germany deals with 'misinformation', so perhaps prepare to have your mobile phone seized. Unlike the German officials being interviewed, I won't laugh when that happens, but I might mutter about democracy, freedom of expression etc.
But you are wrong. The meter I have in the UK has a display unit supplied by Scottish Power, and made by this company-
https://chameleontechnology.co.uk/solutionsold/smart-in-home-displays/#ihd3
So the effective price isn't 'dictated on what the European electricity market says', it, and any ability to act on price information is determined by your contract with your energy provider. If they don't supply any tariff information to your meter, or give you any ability to act on that data, then you don't have the ability to 'control' anything. But this is the problem with 'smart' meters, in that they're actually very dumb, and very expensive. The UK's wasted billions on 'smart' meters that mostly just offer an ability to remote disconnect supplies. Tibber is just Germany's answer to the UK's Octopus and an electricity retailer making money by offering slightly smarter meters, apps and 'innovative' tariffs that offer the ability to transfer money from your bank account to theirs.
Oddly, AFAIK no 'smart' meter in the US or Europe offers consumers smart functions like tariff rates from competing suppliers and the ability to select the cheapest rate with the push of a button. Can't think why that is..
Yeah noticed :D. But he is on the other side of the channel. Formerly EU (still Europe of course). With either France, Belgium or Netherlands between. Doubt he'd go directly to Germany. "other side of the world" enough in this case.
>” why, despite the claims that 'smart' meters would save me money.. it hasn't.”
I had never really got the logic behind the claim either other than because the display defaults to money, it encourages people to focus on money saving rather than energy saving. Hence with money saving, people are more interested in swapping to a cheaper supplier than actually investing in energy saving.
From reports, when the meter is first installed many will investigate turning stuff on and off to see the effects, but the novelty soon wears off.
The smart meter on its own is incapable of telling me just how much electricity my weekly wash, tumble dry and ironing costs in energy and money.
Now with my bill being divided into standing charge, variable grid charges and raw energy costs(*), the smart meter is even less useful as the cost to date bears little resemblance to what appears on the monthly bill.
My smart meter display is constantly telling me I’m over budget, yet I know my annual energy consumption has remained very stable, (my average annual consumption of electricity over 20 Yeats has been 4200kWh, a significant slice of which is consumed by my central heating/hot water pump (hence why I am skeptical about an air heat pump actually consuming less electricity).
(*) my energy company (Scottish Power) bulk purchases energy on long-term contracts, hence has control of the raw energy price, they also have control over their own costs which form the standing charge, however, they don’t have control over the national grid and energy distribution network and thus have started to separate these costs out and remove them from their fixed price tariff pricing.
> Me, I'd probably want to make a coffee, take a shower, cook a hot meal
Please post a video on youtube doing all that at the same time.
About the rest: You really underestimate the power of money? As 'murican?? When you can save money without anybody noticing so you don't "come of cheap"??? And still brag with your overpriced whatever which you can afford since you saved money without anybody noticing the method???? You make it hard not to point at the white house right now to regarding what "power of money" means...
Please post a video on youtube doing all that at the same time.
Hmm? You mean you don't? I do this most mornings. Fall out of bed, head for the kitchen, put the kettle on and maybe some food, and then jump in the shower. Once clean, eat breakfast, drink coffee and call it good. Multi-tasking ftw! Especially when the smoke detector will let me know if I've spent more than the EU-mandated 3mins in the shower.
About the rest: You really underestimate the power of money? As 'murican??
Nope. Hence why I keep mentioning the billions being trousered by the 'renewables' scumbags who've convinced our useless politicians that 'renewables' are the cheapest evah! Except ever since we went back to using pre-Industrial power generation, our energy bills and inflation have rocketed. The only thing that might have been understimated is the stupidity of politicians like Ed Millibrain. Or Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia who after being dazzled by the EU sponsored light show, might have noticed that their electricity went from around €60 to €260MWh. Take that Russia!
You make it hard not to point at the white house right now to regarding what "power of money" means...
Point at Harris instead. How much did she waste to lose an election? Harris should have learned from her time working under Willy Brown that it ain't what you've got, but what you do with it. But the EU really could use a DOGE of its own. Downside is the EU isn't really a democracy, so there's no chance of that happening
You are indeed a lost cause if you talk like that. And more if you actually believe that or paid to tell such nonsense. I think it is time for mass-reporting you out of this forum.
Ah, such a show of democracy and freedom of expression. You don't like what I'm telling you, so you want to silence any dissenting voices that might burst your bubble. Or you don't understand sarcasm, or the way the EU actually works. This explains it-
https://susproc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/product-bureau/sites/default/files/contentype/product_group_documents/1581682812/1st%20draft_Technical_background_report_Criteria_for_taps_and_showerheads.pdf
and is derived from this-
Regulation (EC) No 66/2010 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2009 on the EU Ecolable
So a max flow rate of 8 litres a minute for most EUro showers that will have been foisted on unsuspecting people, because they'll find it hard to buy non-Ecolable shower heads or units. No more power showers, and another effect of 'trickle down' EU policies. Oddly enough, you can still find decent showers in 'luxury' properties that find and fit '0-star' showers.. sometimes after the building inspectors have left. But one of those diktats that's almost as sensible as the EU's plans for 'energy saving' kettles that would limit them to 1kW heaters rather than 3kW.. Which showed the EUrocrats don't really understand physics, or that by dribbling on their citizens, people might just stay in their showers for longer. But the Regulations have thought of that one given timed showers are already in the regs, just haven't been enforced for residential properties.. yet.
That background report is more about harmonisation between members so all within the Single Market can create products that can be sold across the Single Market and customers know this 0, 1 or 2 star product made in Austria is the same as a similarly starred product from Italy.
>” Except ever since we went back to using pre-Industrial power generation, our energy bills and inflation have rocketed.”
Energy bills were rocketing before the first wind turbine was erected in the UK. Remember the original purpose of the green levy was allow the energy suppliers to invest in energy saving, ie. Subsidise energy saving measures such as loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, insulated hot water tanks…only later was it used to subsidise wind farms etc. The reason why the government did this was it didn’t want the spend to be on its books because then it would be counted towards the government’s borrowing limits which all EU members had signed up to. (*)
Inflation has rocketed due mainly to corporate greed, trying to satisfy the forecasts of deranged financial analysts.
(*) Interestingly, one of the challenges is making this debt and thus its servicing liabilities more visible without (idiots) claiming it is the current government (which ever colour) who have increased the national debt.
> Currently solar installations with 25000W or more, by sum of panels, are required to be controllable by your energy supplier (in Germany).
Suspect if that was the UK we would be seeing 24990W installations, with those wanting more splitting the installation across multiple “independent” (yet wholly owned) companies…
I suspect that not only the UK does this, but everyone who can. Some changed their house to have, on paper, a second flat with a separate meter just to do what you describe. For a simple reason: Get some dark clouds in three layers, and you get only 1250 Watt out of 25000 Watt on Germanys darkest day. The satellite animation looked funny: lowest cloud cover immobile, which I could confirm by using this new fangled thing called window. Middle cloud cover slowly creeping, top cloud cover slowly creeping, but 90° different direction. Now, if you have the chance to get double of that on that darkest day...
>” so the grid is only there as your Uninterruptible Power Supply.”
Wrong way round, it is mostly there but not necessarily there when you need it to be there.
The art is designing your in house systems so as to enable some form of running when the grid isn’t there.
For example: I curse my current house as it has been designed with respect to the pressurised water main always being present; we had our second 24+ hr outage last weekend, it meant the toilets could be flushed once - emptying their cisterns before having to resort to other means - fortunately I installed rain water collection, so we gained a few extra flushes. Retrospectively changing the system to use a roof tank (traditional UK setup until the 1990s) would require too much work, due to other construction and reinstatement considerations…
> Wrong way round, it is mostly there but not necessarily there when you need it to be there.
Well, it is both ways. Not one way :D. I did not explicitly mention that. However since the grid is so reliable here the preparation for grid fail is not that important and can be done a year or more later when you decide that you don't want to pay the e-company for running your fridges at night. But getting there costs 4000 € minimum (hardware only) if done right (i.e. at least 10 kWh as minimum + 5 kWh for each person). But if you only save 50ct each night on year average for something that happens less often than every five years, you start to calculate whether it is worth right now, or whether you wait until you upgrade something else which needs more (Example: RTX 5090 for gaming at night? With AMD 9950X3D² (² is for extra cache on both chiplets), new board, PSU etc... Wait, NOW the battery makes sense so "save" the money that new rig would cost in electricity! :D - could be up to 3 € each night alone, possibly more if I use the oven for fresh pizza, without the day savings)
> I curse my current house
Woah, yeah, indeed cursed! I'd put full throttle on getting independent in your case too! Water here is even more reliable than electricity, and tap water is drinking water quality.
...is people.
I have every confidence that nature, armed with its unlimited access to time, will correct the destructive anomaly that is humanity and make better choices in the future.
(Icon voicing our impending eviction, and to urge the universe onward in our absence.)
Yeah, people like me. I helped, on a small scale, to build some of the underpinnings of what became the modern tech sector. I get to look back on what we started and what it turned into, and to weigh my contributions - for good or ill - to both the timeline and the decline.
I understand that it's uncomfortable to look some truths in the eye, especially when we see our own reflections grinning back at us, so I'll give equal thought to killfiling my post - or maybe a mod will get to it first.
Often the ease of false comfort readily assuages the discomfort of truth.
I think you are on the money. The article says we need to build 1TWh per year for the next 3 years. If we take into consideration simple construction time (ie. Ignore planning etc.) and the time needed to upgrade infrastructure to distribute the electricity, it is obvious it is not going to happen.
This is the real goldmine for all SMR designs.
Too bad soooo many of them just re-hashes of the PWR and BWR.*
Just expensive ways to make poor quality steam to drive expensive made-to-order steam turbines.
*Including all the designs that won money out of HMG. Group-think, poor technical evaluation skills and brand recognition ("It's an RR reactor. It must be good. Why?) win every time.
Too bad soooo many of them just re-hashes of the PWR and BWR.*
What would you suggest as an alternative?
Group-think, poor technical evaluation skills and brand recognition ("It's an RR reactor. It must be good. Why?) win every time.
I think the why is pretty simple. RR's been making SMRs for a long time and has a proven track record. They've made the only reactors to have gone critical in the last couple of decades. So ok, those have been in submarines, but that's a tragedy of the Commons, and the Commons being twats like Millibrain. I think the RR design is also good because at 300MW-ish per unit, it's a decent chunk of capacity that hopefully can get installed quickly.
But this is a handy data dump that might act as a wake-up call for the UK. But probably won't-
https://www.neso.energy/document/346781/download
Only £242bn needed to meet Millibrain's 'Clean Power 2030' plan to hand lots of money to the 'renewables' scumbags, and then there'll be a general election.
I really think nuclear is the only possible future right now as wind and solar cannot cut it no matter how much you build. And if anyone posts the thing about a solar array on the equator I will respond 'do the maths, its fake!'.
My gripe with the nuclear path for the last 40 years is we are still not addressing the recycling issue. The UK, the US and to a lesser extent France and Canada (as they actively recycle) have HUGE stockpiles of 'slightly used' fuel that we've been collecting since the 70s and keep wringing our hands about what to do with it. It can't take that many big brain PhDs to come up with a way to use this spare fuel. Back in the 40s and 50s the US, UK and other countries were building all sorts of reactors and trying all sorts of fuel cycles before the US navy sorta decided for almost everyone else that the light water reactor was the one to use. It seems we've forgotten how to science as the decades have trudged on.
Certainly, lets get some bloody reactors built! Hinkley C should have been done a bloody decade ago! There is no technical reason why we can't build such things in the UK in a sensible amount of time. Sizewell C should be running, as should many others. But that doesn't stop us researching other types.
> wind and solar cannot cut it no matter how much you build
The funny part is that Germany, not at the equator, shows it works surprisingly well. And we are FAR off from what is possibly only with our roof and a few not-so-large solar + wind farms. And it is the cheapest by a far margin. Our (still current) government eased up on some regulations, which fuels a grassroot movement which, in the end, already makes a bigger chunk of our solar power than anybody would have expected. The only sources cheaper are water and, when done right, bio-gas-fuel. I hope they use some of our former nuclear plant premises as battery storage, 'cause the electricity infrastructure is already there. There are TONS of commercial battery storage applications in Germany. Currently more than three times the need of Germany's yearly consumption of electrical power. And they are there 'cause MONEY is in it, without needing subsidiaries, nothing "green". (To clear up the typical English ambiguity: Applications in term of apply for a permission to build and operate, not application in the sense of app-y-knowledge or apply-procedure. Boy, there are times where I love the precise German language...)
> It can't take that many big brain PhDs to come up with a way to use this spare fuel
Take a closer look at what is left there. At the atomic level, which isotopes are there, what kind of radiation, how much of it and so on. Then you calculate the factor you need to make them usable. There is a reason why those plants, which can use that type of fuel are only run on big subsidiaries, and to test whether it works. Take a tenth of the subsidiaries, and you have enough to invest in solar, wind and battery.
Actually, the whole atomic power craze started > 50 years ago only 'cause they needed weapon grade isotopes, combined with "the plant operator is responsible for the used nuclear fuel" and "the bigger risks are taken up by the government".
"The funny part is that Germany, not at the equator, shows it works surprisingly well"
Are you sure? From an outside observer perspective who works for a German owned company you're not doing that well.
Germany has electricity prices that can exceed even the prices in the UK and both are pretty much dependant on imports from other countries.
Yes there are days when wind and solar can produce 'enough' but they are rare at this time of year.
Right now Germany's CO2 per kW is double that of the UK and 12x that of France.
"Currently more than three times the need of Germany's yearly consumption of electrical power"
Citation needed. From what I can see this includes home battery storage which is not going to help on an industrial grid scale. The numbers I've seen also give about 20GWh of storage in total which is about 20 mins of runtime for Germany.
"Take a closer look at what is left there"
I can tell you, about 95% unused uranium, mostly U238. The remainder is mostly non-fissile material that absorbs thermal neutrons a bit too well.
"cause they needed weapon grade isotopes"
Very little weapons grade material, if any, has come from commercial reactors. The plutonium produced from the typical commercial reactor cycle is hard to purify. In the UK we had 2 commercial reactors, Calder Hall and Chapel Cross, that were specifically modified to produce bomb grade material and they had to run a different fuel cycle. These were also really rather low power reactors for the same reason.
> The numbers I've seen also give about 20GWh of storage in total which is about 20 mins of runtime for Germany.
Currently 226 GW (note the missing "h") are waiting to get the OK. The typical maximum power needed for DE 60-70 GW. You COULD complain about the missing run time estimate there, but you won't create energy storage so small on commercial scale to only bridge 20 Minutes, rather 2 hours. However: If you keep on insisting on 20 Minutes, then that is enough to fire up slower renewables like water, then bio-fuel and so on. Atomic, on the other hand, is the slowest to handle such peaks. It needs several hours up to days to start up, and cannot be regulated up and down to quickly. Unless you want as much power as Chernobly put out in the last few seconds of operation. So atomic has to be designed with a lot overhead if you only want to use that. To add to that: It is a European wide grid, not just Germany wide, though we still export a lot more energy than import - even after our atomics are now gone for more than a year. Look at France how they are struggling...
If you can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF6RRbk1znY , with the sources for you to check on https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FWybtJJrZ7rVCNbsrhawgxNq5DM1n6umnzx4wo4lCOk (which include links to articles deliberately creating a panic, and what the actual data says).
I will take into account you might not be a native English speaker but you said:
"Currently more than three times the need of Germany's yearly consumption of electrical power"
You used a time based claim in there. 3x the yearly consumption is many many TWh given that there are 8760 hours in a year.
There may well be 3x the instantaneous power requirement connected to the grid, or waiting to be connected, but the fact is Germany, like the UK, can go days with very poor wind and almost no sun.
Those GW of power need to be turned into GWh.
3x the instantaneous power requirement however is more than enough to buffer for slower (but more efficient) power plants to be able to take over load. The one of the big problems we're having with renewables currently is that the energy plants that can regulate fast enough to keep up with renewabels swings are usually less efficient plants because things like pre-heating, tap off cycles etc, take a lot of time to regulate up and down without causing problems or damage. If we can guarantee that we can taper on and off from renewabels with a predictable time frame, then suddenly we can switch to the most efficient plants we can make without having to worry about on-ramp and off-ramp time.
So watching the video, apart from the presenter appearing very anti-nuclear, he presented graphs to show the 'extra capacity' but the averaging was over a very long period of time. The graph used to show a 'worst Dunkelflaute day' was still averaged over the day.
When you add in long term averages everything looks better.
Another issue with the video is he talks about the Europe wide grid and makes a claim that it 'ensures electricity is generated where it is cheapest' (I'm willing to accept a lost in translation on that claim) but the issue is even within most countries the grid capacity doesn't exist to move electricity like that and it certainly doesn't exist on a continent wide scale. Germany gets electricity from its direct neighbours and that is it. They won't be getting cheap solar from Spain for example.
What has been happening is that countries with interconnects to places like the UK and Germany are using them to sell electricity at inflated prices. Norway is considering cutting its link to Germany due to the prices. Contrary to popular belief the interconnects are not reducing costs, they are driving them UP. If the UK didn't have a 4GW link to France and 1.5GW link to Norway, plus some others, we'd have probably actually fixed our energy problem. We've just become reliant on others to bail us out. And Germany was thrust into this situation when nordstream went kaboom. And its why some of my colleagues over there are on 4 day weeks.
He is indeed not a friend of nuclear power. But investment cost, building a new reactor would be > 10 years, in Germany though > 20 would be more realistic how "fast" our administration is. Let alone the missing personnel to operate it. Solar plant (larger, not my home stuff) consists of roughly 10 different parts, and done. Can be set up in less than a month. Add batteries and you have about 20 different parts, and less than two month build time if you are slow. And if something goes wrong, not much damage possible with LiFePO since they don't have that runaway-burn problem. Or use a simpler battery type, since space is not the issue high density is not needed. Cheap to build, easy to maintain. Nuclear power is listed with about 100000 different parts, not easy to build, not easy to maintain, and not cheap. Needs constant very high security, and each maintenance cycle takes it out of production for months. In the end it is a financial thing, not green. The green part is just a welcome side effect.
(edit: I forgot that, compared to coal, gas and nuclear plants, wind is very easy and fast to set up as well)
The worst Dunkelflaute graph included the minimum-maximum. Since he has actual scientific education he even explained how min-max-median bars work earlier in the video. And the day of the Dunkelflaute has such a bar, i.e. the dot as median, and the red lines to the top and bottom. We didn't even need to touch the reserve power, which would have been to fire up the gas. But even that darkest day has 10% renewable as source. From my personal statistics: Indeed that day was the darkest, my "BKW" solar stuff is up there for nearly a year now and it works, currently saving at least 550€ each year. And will be extended based on the real experience with "typical German weather" - i.e. I will have enough solar power even with that Dunkelflaute without batteries (maybe add them later). Not for everything at the same time :D, but enough for normal flat consumption and the boiler (classical heating element style) to have warm water. Rest would be from grid, but a fraction of what I would need without.
The peaks: The Europe wide grid can take those peaks for two simple reasons: It is high-voltage, and we never can have europe-wide such peaks. Within Germany we have thee layers: High voltage (>=100000 V), medium, and low (up to 1000 V). The biggest problems of distribution are in the medium and low, but the high voltage needs upgrade too since Bavaria constantly pulled the NIMBY with a lot of stupid excuses for decades about renewables.
There is another effect if you have your own solar power, which is much stronger that I anticipated: You adjust your power/energy usage to make the most of it. It is that what I call "Nänäää, little david-jou can have his little sting against the evil corpo-goliath EnBW" effect. But I am not alone, companies like Zott (yoghurt makers) do the same on a much bigger scale, including tricks like "cool the cooling-house down to 2°C at day, and let it heat up to 4°C at night" and a lot of other fine tunings to decide to run power hungry machines either when they have lot of solar power from their own plant or when the price is currently at record low. Saves them money in the end too.
For the point about the European price fights: Indeed, there are a few things that must change. He touched that part only in that video, in short: Private solar plants, like mine could be, don't get a fixed price any more, rather either 0 or depending on the current market price. He has a longer video on that topic where he explains those problems in detail.
For me: I don't calculate on getting money for the electricity I pump into the grid. For now my plans are simply targeted to use as little power from the grid as possible. That is already enough to have a return of investment within five to seven years. The most expensive part is the roofer who put that stuff up there, since this is a 50°C steep roof which is FAR FAR above my capabilities to do anything there.
"Since he has actual scientific education"
You assume I don't ;)
What he did not show was the fluctuations in the renewable generation, the yellow at the top. The red dot and bar was the LOAD and its fluctuations, not generation and its fluctuations. It is not a very good graph.
"We didn't even need to touch the reserve power"
He didn't specify what the reserve was. I would say that gas would be included in konventionelle. He says the prices were 90c/kWh so you're already into the expensive generation methods.
Also worth noting that more than half of Germany is actually further south than the bottom of England and in terms of average solar insolation Germany generally fares a lot better than the UK as we are sticking out into the Atlantic and get all the bad weather. Northern Germany gets similar solar performance to the southeastern England.
> You assume I don't ;)
Actually I think I didn't. I simply don't know and can only reply to what you write. Wasn't my plan to be offending towards you, especially since you actually read and take the time for good answers, quite rare. Possibly the "German directness of expression" problem. On the scale of "directness" only the Danish beat us Germans - only by a small margin. There is a graph somewhere, lost the link though :D.
In the video he said that this graph is a simplification, and he links to the actual source data. His audience has a wide knowledge spectrum, due to his participation in petitions to simplify solar regulations for private installations with only 600 or 800 Watt, limited by the inverter. You and I obviously know how those graphs work, and how the distribution of measurements are displayed. Again I am sorry if I offended you.
The reserve in DE is usually gas, but not for the reason it would make sense. They could fire up coal, bio-gas and so on as well. But when they fire up "normal" gas they earn more money, so they do what a company does to earn more money. There is a growing stronger movement to reform the E-market pricing in Germany and Europe since this generates the wrong incentives in todays world. The prices were indeed at 90 ct/kWh, but I was lucky since my contracted E-company is among the "four base supplier" with a lot stricter regulations. So it was strictly limited to 37 ct/kWh for me, and is at 41 ct/kWh since March 2024. OTOH I pay more ct/kWh now than others do, but the solar stuff is working against it so well that switching does not make sense (yet).
"Solar plant (larger, not my home stuff) consists of roughly 10 different parts, and done. Can be set up in less than a month. Add batteries and you have about 20 different parts, and less than two month build time if you are slow. And if something goes wrong, not much damage possible with LiFePO since they don't have that runaway-burn problem. Or use a simpler battery type, since space is not the issue high density is not needed. Cheap to build, easy to maintain. "
Yes, but energy production density is a huge issue. When you take an entire field of solar panels or a nuclear power plant site and look at them in terms of W/sqM, nuclear wins even though a lot of the site inside the fence is just buffer and car park.
I'm not running down solar, I use it myself and keep adding to it, but I'm not asking the electric company to come take away the lines (can't do that anyway due to city regs). While a nuclear plant has a limited and slow throttle, there's a constant base load a grid needs which is a good fit for nuclear power. What I see as being needed is a dynamic pricing system so when there's a plethora of renewable power available, prices lower and entities can take advantage by charging things with batteries in them and using that energy later when supply is more limited and prices go up. It was windy at my house last night. If I had an EV and electricity prices were low due to all of the turbines nearby going like mad, I would have charged to 95%. I would have also turned on some electric heat. Today is as calm as a really calm thing so those turbines are just sitting there. Who cares what the nameplate rating is for the whole farm when they aren't moving. Even when they are moving, it's not that profitable at 1am on a Friday night when demand is way down.
Being completely off grid does indeed not make any sense. The best one can do with his own battery power is to cover the night or as fallback when the grid goes down for fridges and internet router. However, the grid here is very very stable. The last outage was years ago, and it only affected about 1/4th of Bernhausen (not me, the industrial area, a digger ruined a cable...)
The low energy density of solar, compared to nuclear, is IMHO compensated by "can be put anywhere", like this example, which would otherwise be wasted space. The "Solarpark Traufwiesen" area directly south already finished May 2024 (google maps picture is old), in this case with Agri-PV - the area below the panels is used by farmers, so the space is used double. All three together produce 8800 MWh per year, enough for ~2000 homes. If you look a bit around in that area you see a lot of solar roofs, some even "2nd gen". The second generation installations are more densely packed, and either flat or with east-west facing direction (at about 15° to 20°) to spread the production more evenly across the day.
This decentralized energy production is the reason why I can say: It works, here is the reality. If our government of 2013 wouldn't have kicked in a hard brake there by not only killing the revenue for pumping into the grid, but putting a huge wall of regulations designed for > 10000 MWh producers onto those which produce less than 10 MWh, we would still be at the top. Those regulations, not the missing revenue, were the reason why Germany fell behind. And is catching up since 2021 when the rules were gradually changed again by our current "still in for a week" government.
"the area below the panels is used by farmers, so the space is used double. "
There are seas of commercial solar farms near me and from time to time I see a flock of sheep inside the fences that I expect are brought in to control the plants. I can't say if either side is billing for their part of the equation. If crops are being grown, they have to be something that doesn't have an issue with being in the shade and is hand planted and picked since getting machinery in and around the panels will be a chore. The panels also have to be installed at a greater height at a higher cost so the combination needs to pay off. My nearby panel farms aren't all that high which makes installation less expensive and easier to clean and service. I do think that farms are a good spot for solar PV. There's often bits of land that aren't useful for growing. Running pumps on solar so it's easy to distribute/pump water for animals can be quite handy as well as not being needed 24/7 since a watering trough is the "battery". I'm also thinking that EV charging stations around a very large property can mean all sorts of AG equipment can be electrified without the need to bring it back to the barn for recharging.
Covering commercial building roofs with panels is what I see as the lowest hanging fruit. It's up and out of the way, acts as a shade in summer which might lower AC bills and the power can be used on-site for the most part with an excess put on the grid. Our local hardware store has a big system on their roof and a couple of owners ago I asked about ROI and was told that it was quite good. The per annum return was better than a good portion of the inventory. We didn't get into specific numbers.
I know of farmers which installed panels between three and five meters above ground. Growing strawberries beneath the 3 meter variant, which like the mixed sun-shade they get that way, and the higher versions allow machines underneath and grow other things (I forgot what they grow, but if a farmer likes that combination nobody should stop them). The mixed share in both cases counters the problem of extreme summer heat and slows drying out the soil.
As for that specific area I mentioned: I cite (the meaning, not literally) from the official Stadtwerke Tübigen site: Last year, SWT and the city of Tübingen held a public idea contest. The winner was Kleinblatt GmbH, setting up a mushroom farm underneath the PV modules.
They have a picture of the finished installation there too, and more details - if you understand German.
I looked but can't find the reference for this ....
In Texas farmers are actively trying to install solar farms as long as they don't lose too much money on the generated power. Why? Because they've noticed that the reduction in evaporation is saving them an absolute fortune in expensive water.
"The mixed share in both cases counters the problem of extreme summer heat and slows drying out the soil."
Getting the plant variety that works the best is key. The solar farms near me plant their panels about 1m high. Fine for sheep to get under, but it would be difficult to do any growing under them. Not that it's very good ag land to start with. Slowing evaporation will be very good in my area. The climate is arid.
From government docs: Load factor (nameplate vs actual averaged over one year), is rarely any better than 2-3% for solar and 12-14% for wind. Considering the amount of good farmland going to solar, you could argue that it's poor investment. Typicasl home soalr in the uk takes 10-20 years just to break even on the capital cost. Have thought about this many times and am in favour, but the economics just don't make sense. Might be great in Southern Spain, but not in Northern Europe.
I broke even in 2.5 years but then I live near the south coast and didn't spend 20k on some ripoff installer.
The price of solar has fallen so far after the FIT dropped to sensible values. When you were getting paid 4x unit cost to generate the systems could be priced quite high. A friend had a system installed for under 4k. I DIY'd, cos I'm like that, and it was under 2.5k.
"I broke even in 2.5 years but then I live near the south coast and didn't spend 20k on some ripoff installer."
Most people call the installer to give them a quote which is nuts. You want to hire somebody with nothing to sell but an accurate assessment on your needs that you can take to an installer for a quote. I know a couple of people that have been handed rip-off quotes that were what the installer wanted to put in, not what they needed. They weren't even asked basic questions such as the kids getting ready to leave home, the hours they worked, etc.
I've thought about starting a business that does proper evaluations for people. I'm not sure if I'd need an electrical contracting license to be insurable when I put current clamps on an electrical service.
"From government docs" <- man you obviously cite documents last updated with data around the year 2000. If the roofer wouldn't be about 66% of the cost here for me, it would be even in less than 3 years. But this is a 50° steep roof, no way I go up there, so it will be around 6 years. Still worth it! I rather pay the roofer, real people doing actual work, than faceless energy companies.
"Contrary to popular belief the interconnects are not reducing costs,"
They CAN introduce risks. If somebody else controls a resource that you need, they own you to some extent (see Russian gas supplies). If your supply lines are very long, you are vulnerable along the entire line. It doesn't even need to be political/military/terrorist risk. One component failing on the East Coast US grid caused the Great Blackout. I've never heard if anybody understood there was a massive single point of failure at the time. I'd not be surprised that there are still many many more in current times that are known about. One lightening strike, one lorry crashing into a pylon, one monkey thinking the insulator looks like food........
I'm sorry but that's simply not true.
A wonder through the archives of the British Nuclear Engineering Society is most interesting.
Firstly the MAGNOX design is essentially US Hanford Pile design which made most of the Pu for the US Bomb programme.
CEGB were persuaded to build reactors when they were told the MoD would by Pu at £2000/Kg which in the mid 50's was (AFAIK) the price of a new Rolls Royce.
The AGR would have done better, with temperatures matching the operating needs of an SoA coal fired power station. But the AERE went down a rabbit hole of using Beryllium, which at the temperature and neutron levels involved produces large quantities of helium, causing "blisters" on the cladding. This has nothing to do with Be's brittleness (they seem to have solved the brittleness problem by impurity control) but (like it's toxicity) is inherent to the element itself. This should have been obvious to the physicists before they designed a reactor around it. Apparently it was not, which meant they couldn't make the AGR work with natural U, as Magnox did.
Read more of what I typed about commercial reactors and weapons plutonium. Only 2 of the MAGNOX reactors in the UK were setup for the correct fuel cycle, the rest were not. Plutonium production also required regular refuelling, something PWRs are very bad at as you cannot refuel on power.
Hanford never used carbon dioxide cooled graphite moderated reactors. Hanford B was water cooled. Initially Hanford was going to use an air cooled pile like the Windscale piles but they realised it was a potential hazard and went water cooled. The brits kept with the air cooled design and set fire to one of them....
AGR fuel elements used stainless steel cladding. They never tried the beryllium ones for real. The issue with the AGR compared to a PWR is that the core is HUGE for the same power output. Water makes for a great heat transfer medium. The use of enriched fuel isn't really a show stopper, very few reactors can use natural uranium.
In fact that is pretty much the sole requirement to make Pu239 in substantial quantities.
The Windscale fire has nothing to do with Magnox designs. .
"They never tried the beryllium ones for real. "
True. The wonder is why they ever thought it was viable, given the popcorning it showed at AGR operating temperature and neutron levels.
"The issue with the AGR compared to a PWR is that the core is HUGE for the same power output."
So what? the walls were 2" welded plate, as were the walls on the Sodium Reactor Experiment.
OTOH for a PWR they have to be 8"thick forgedand there are very few forges on the planet that can cope with that.
"The use of enriched fuel isn't really a show stopper, "
Other than the fact that it jacks up the price 50%, that proportion rises with the enrichment level, which is rising to let PWR's run longer between refuels.
very few reactors can use natural uranium."
In fact all 1st gen designs from the UK, France and Russia could do so and the CANDU (the second most common reactor design on the planet, which has never suffered a TMI , Chernobyl or Fukishima event) can, and has.
Needing enrichment is a feature of PWR's. It is not a benefit. The US Navy had access to enriched uranium, which Westinghouse knew when they designed the PWR's to drive submarines. Very few others had it.
It's a bad way to make poor quality steam. We can and should do better.
"The Windscale fire has nothing to do with Magnox designs"
Please read my previous comment. I never mentioned the windscale piles in relation to MAGNOX. I mentioned the windscale piles in relation to the initial plan for an air cooled reactor at Hanford. "Initially Hanford was going to use an air cooled pile like the Windscale piles". The scientists at Hanford decided the Wigner energy thing was going to be a problem so went for water cooling but the Brits decided they knew better and could cope with the Wigner energy. Well, we couldn't. MAGNOX and AGR run at temperatures high enough that the deformations do not stick in the graphite.
The only link between MAGNOX and the windscale pile is that both are gas cooled and graphite moderated.
The AGR core size is an issue as it needs a BIG building, lots of graphite, lots of fuel rods, lots of control rods... Its just BIG.
I also never said that enrichment was a benefit of a PWR. I said the benefit of a PWR was the smaller core compared to current tech gas cooled.
The reason CANDU and its predecessors can use natural uranium is the DU part. Early French reactors were MAGNOX like, graphite moderated CO2 cooled. Early Russian designs and even the RBMK were graphite moderated. Although the RBMK did need some enrichment. If you can use graphite and a low neutron cross section fuel element you can use natural uranium, its not rocket science.
Not today it isn't.
Back then, with computers running at 10 KIPS (for SoA IBM 650 processors) if you were lucky, it was hard work.
The thing that modern designers have completely failed to take into account is the use of Zircaloy as a structural material.
Hugely exotic in 1953, it's now available from multiple suppliers worldwide (Sandvik of Sweden being quite notable) along with the non-nuclear version (IE with the Hafnium left in) 704 alloy. With a melting point of 1800c. In fact the only thing that makes PWR's and BWR's run at such a low temperature is the water itself. :-(
But the biggest cost driver is the architecture of a reactor, the combination of the fuel cycle and the implementation decisions to use it.
Which in the case of PWR's are staggeringly poor. It's a perfect combination of a)Poor thermal efficiency (which has not improved since the 1950's) b)Difficult construction, both of the RPV itself and the "containment" building, which is roughly 10x the size to contain the flash boiled steam if the RPV ruptures.
High pressure/low(ish) temperature is a very poor choice for economic reasons, not to mention the 10 (best case) to 40 day refuelling window, when the reactor generates zero power.
Post WWII UK nuclear development was based on the joint UK-Canada nuclear weapons program which operated during WWII, located in Canada and entirely paid for by Canada. They were apparently working on a plutonium bomb. The first reactor (a heavy water design) was turned on at Chalk River north of Ottawa a week after Japan's surrender. Rutherford's pre-war Nobel winning research on the atom by the way was done in Canada in Montreal, very close to where the nuclear scientists set up shop for weapons research during the war.
The UK and Canada had an on again off again relationship with the US Manhattan project. The US cut off cooperation once they got all the technology they wanted from the UK because they were concerned that UK companies would dominate the post-war civil nuclear industry because ICL (a UK company) held certain key patents on civilian uses of nuclear power (bought from a French member of the UK team).
After the war ended Canada and the UK split on nuclear development and the joint bomb project got dropped as no longer urgent. Canada then focused entirely on civilian applications. Canada was actually willing to finance the WWII bomb project mainly due to having an eye on post war civilian applications, which were expected to revolutionize industry (this expectation was overblown it turned out).
The UK meanwhile took all the joint research home to work on a bomb but were working on a shoe string budget due to Britain's dire financial condition.
Subsequent Canadian reactors continued to use heavy water while UK reactors used graphite for a very simple reason. The heavy water plants were in Canada (Canada had supplied the US with heavy water for the latter's R&D during the war) while the UK had no such plants and foreign exchange to import it was very tight in the immediate post war period. So, they went with graphite instead, which they did have.
"From what I can see this includes home battery storage which is not going to help on an industrial grid scale. The numbers I've seen also give about 20GWh of storage in total which is about 20 mins of runtime for Germany."
I believe home storage is more efficient than grid level batteries due to people having more incentive to economize if the power goes off and they are feeding off their own battery (provided their system will 'island'. ) It's wonderful that a grid level battery makes it transparent to the consumer that anything is amiss, but it also means that people don't know and, if they are told, might grab all they can while it lasts instead of shifting into eco-mode. If you have a prepaid account and are running close to the end of your deposit, you are more likely to shut off lights and appliances if you can't afford to top up until the end of the week.
My home is heated with solar thermal panels. I do heat the bathroom with an electric heater so it's more comfortable to bathe and found myself switching the heat on and then not jumping in the shower for some time while I did other things. And then the electric bill shows up. To mitigate the problem, I made a temperature alarm that lets me know as soon as the bathroom is a nice toasty temp. Previously, I had no idea how long it took to warm up to where I like it.
Sadly your post is seriously misguided.
Firstly, Canada does no such recycling/reprocessing, so I am curious as to why you think it ever had such a programme.
France is the only European country with an active programme, if you discount Russia's Mayak plant (well known for lots of leaks and a huge history of long-term coverups). The UK stopped reprocessing a few years back after a major leak at the THORP plant in Cumbria. In fact I believe THORP still has the world's largest stockpile of Pu sitting up there even today. The UK could obviously reverse the decision, although that would take a lot of work as we are still dealing with the cleanup operation from the THORP leak which still have years to go before they are sorted.
Japan, India, China have some small-scale operations, but they are pretty piecemeal in comparison to the experience in Europe (UK/FR/RU).
The problem with reprocessing is that it is expensive, and leaks at THORP show that when things go wrong, it costs billions to clean up. I won't even bring up the mess that has taken place at Mayak.
Sizewell and Hinkley's issues are down to differences in the regulatory regime here in the UK vs that of France/US primarily (I admit that I am oversimplifying here for the purposes of the post). The additional steel and concrete requirements under UK regulations have made the changes necessary to the French/US design onerous, resulting in cost and time overrun. Whether those changes are essential is perhaps unclear, but as they have now been baked into the design, we have to run with what we have. That cannot be undone now.
EDF are also facing a cash crunch, and the French government (who owns them) are pushing for EDF to stop expanding in the UK and build in France instead (as it will be cheaper and almost certainly quicker). France also has a lot more sites to play with, and I suspect exporting energy via more HVDC links might be easier to manage rather than building on UK soil. Personally I have serious doubts over whether Sizewell will ever get built after the Hinkley experience. The fact the site was meant to break ground in 2024 and nothing has really happened speaks volumes.
I'm not sure what other reactors you think we should be researching? Perhaps you mean Thorium or other fast breeders, however the claimed benefits are not as they might appear. Even taking that path can end up with a nuclear proliferation problem (contrary to what some commentators think), and the track record of breeders in both the UK and France has not been great. Other countries have also gone down this path with similar (poor) success. Copenhagen Atomics which seems to be the love child of the media at the moment, but so much of their approach seems to be hot air. RR as mentioned above has a lot of experience with SMRs, but obviously in a defence capability. Whether this translates to a real world implementation is unclear. The costs are also potentially higher when compared to just building a large site on a brownfield site, making the mechanics of seeing a RR SMR design in the world unlikely.
The extra steel or concrete we required does not account for the HUGE cost over-runs and slipping of time schedules. Sadly we have a good history of projects being behind schedule and over cost even before we start.
OK, Canada USED to recycle, they foolishly followed the Carter in the late 70s.
The experimental reactors you refer to were mostly built in the 50s and 60s when really we didn't have a whole load of know-how and were very much throwing science at the wall. You can't simply say 'well it didn't work in the past, we must not try again in the future'.
"can end up with a nuclear proliferation problem"
The active word being 'can', doesn't mean 'will'. Everything depends on the fuel cycle. The 'nuclear power always makes nuclear bombs' claim is false.
Canada used mixed-oxide plutonium-uranium fuel for some reactors in the 1990s as part of a program to reduce the world stockpile of nuclear weapons. The reactor operators were being paid to "burn up" the weapons grade plutonium in their reactors. However, once that program ended we stopped using that type of fuel.
The reason it isn't being done today is that uranium is so cheap and abundant that it isn't economically worthwhile for Canada to recycle fuel at this time. France do it in order to reduce the amount of uranium they have to import for national security reasons, but Canada is a major uranium exporter so there's no incentive on those grounds.
Canada has developed multiple processes for recycling nuclear fuel in existing reactors, but these will sit on the shelf until such time as uranium prices rise enough to justify it from an economic perspective. Since Canada's reactors are very efficient at using fuel, the recycling processes are much simpler and less expensive than those currently used for other reactors.
Canadian style reactors can also use thorium, with minor modifications. India uses reactors derived from Canadian designs and these currently use thorium as part of their fuel load as India have lots of thorium but much less uranium. However, thorium fuels are more expensive than uranium, so again there's no incentive for Canada to use them at this time.
Ah yes, I remember India and thorium. Heavy water reactors are more versatile in some ways. Problematic in others.
France and the UK are not well known for their uranium deposits. One of the anti-nuclear arguments is that we'd have to get fuel from Russia. They seem to ignore all the other places it is easily found.
There is no reason for the UK to buy fuel from Russia when they can buy it from Canada, Australia, or any number of other places instead. Russia are simply offering cheap enrichment and fuel fabrication services.
I think a lot of the fuel Russia exports is actually made from uranium imported from Kazakhstan. Customers contract Russia to process this uranium purely on the basis of price. There's nothing stopping the UK from doing this itself.
Anon said: "Firstly, Canada does no such recycling/reprocessing, so I am curious as to why you think it ever had such a programme."
Canada used mixed oxide fuel recycled from nuclear weapons in the 1990s to reduce nuclear stockpiles. However that was a program to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world. Uranium is so cheap and abundant at this time that recycling fuel is not economically justifiable. Canadian reactors use natural uranium, so converting from ore to fuel pellets requires relatively little processing and so is very cheap. The R&D to recycle the fuel has been done, but is currently waiting for uranium prices to rise to make it worth while.
Anon said: "In fact I believe THORP still has the world's largest stockpile of Pu sitting up there even today."
The THORP plant was built to produce fuel for "fast" reactors, not the "slow" reactors which are what are used across the world today. It was based around the premise that uranium prices would rise significantly, making "fast" reactors more economic to operate. However, new huge high grade uranium mines in places such as Canada and Kazakhstan rendered those predictions obsolete, leaving THORP without a market. The French recycling process was based around producing fuel for conventional "slow" reactors, and it turns out they put their bets on the technology that came out ahead in the market.
Anon said: "Perhaps you mean Thorium or other fast breeders ..."
Thorium reactors are not fast reactors, they are slow reactors, just like most reactors in use today. The fuel would be very similar to what the French use in their recycled fuel, just using thorium in place of U238. India uses thorium fuel as part of their fuel load in their existing reactors, which are derived from Canadian designs. If you use a Canadian style natural uranium reactor there is nothing stopping you from using thorium as fuel in it. However, as the fuel requires essentially the same processes to make as recycled uranium fuel, there's no economic incentive to use it unless like India you are trying to conserve scarce domestic uranium resources and use more abundant thorium instead.
"I really think nuclear is the only possible future right now as wind and solar cannot cut it no matter how much you build"
Well, our pea-brained politicians are committed to renewables and you'll have them like it or not, with the costs added to your energy bills. Unfortunately, nuclear isn't much of solution at the moment either because it's unaffordable to judge by Hinkley Point C which has a current strike price of £124.65/MWh, and that will continue to be ramped up by CPI each year until 2063. The EPR design that's years late and wildly over-budget at Hinkley Point is the same design that's over a decade late in Finland, over a decade late in France. Seems nothing was learned building the first two seems unlikely they'll learn much from the third. Of course, wind power projects get the same mad-as-fuck subsidies of an indexed strike price, so taking the example of the Hornsea 1 wind farm, commissioned in 2021, it had an initial strike price of £140/MWh, but with subsequent indexing it gets paid a staggering £194/MWh. Yep, that's right, wind power is freeeeeee say the eco-loons, but it's costing us £194/MWh, and although almost all the costs are sunk capex, it continues to see its price indexed every year by inflation. The same observation applies to Hinkley, that 95%+ of its costs will be the build costs, but every year the owners get a nice pay rise for doing nothing. This is what happens when clueless morons fiddle with the energy system in the sacred name of net zero.
Nuclear SHOULD be our get-out-of-jail-not-quite-free card when it comes to energy. But at the prices it is coming in at, the UK and Europe cannot afford it as an international fleet. Kepco built four reactors generating about 5.4MW in the UAE for $32bn. Contrast that with Hinkley, 3.2GW at around $42bn, or Flamanville 1.6 GW for around $15bn. Nuclear is needed, but if Europe and the UK want it then they need to stop dicking around, and take out 50% of the cost. With the will that could be done, but I don't believe there's any will.
We can't even build a bloody rail line between two cities and we invented the darn thing!
The fact that the EPR was already behind schedule elsewhere should have been a red flag for us. But the Hitachi ABWR had its own issues with the collapse of what was left of Westinghouse.
not addressing the recycling issue. "
It has been addressed
2 things happened in the mid 1970's that put the wind up people.
First India exploded a bomb built on Pu from a CANDU type reactor. Then Three Mile Island turned a $1Bn asset into a $2Bn liability.
This had President Gerald Ford end all research on reprocessing, which was continued by President Jimmy Carter (who had participated in 2 nuclear cleanups, one of the CANDU precursor design NRX and later in Idaho of a US Army design for a field portable (nuclear) power source. Not exactly good advertisements for the safety of the atom :-( )
Before that multiple reprocessing plans had been made, one of the first being onsite at Dresden within a unit of 35" on a side.
Conventional reprocessing ("PUREX") is highly tuned to produce Pu and U, regardless of how much waste is produce (and there is a lot of waste produced).
The "Ideal" process would strip U first (that's 95 percent of the fuel), then all the trans-uranics (about 1.5%, of which 66% is the Pu), then Cs and Sr (which make most of the decay heat outside the TRU's and will decay to 1/1024 in roughly 300 years) and then the rest of the crud. It would do so by generating a minimum of additional wast in the process.
The primary problem is no design of power reactor has ever been designed solely with the requirement "Make the cheapest reactor possible to make the cheapest power possible including burning the TRUs."
The closest with that mind-set were the British AGR and the Atomics International (pt of North American Aviation)'s "Sodium Reactor Experiment." Both AGR and SRE had good features but neither is the whole story. What makes it difficult is to create a new design with existing materials, prefereably the ones PWR's are made out, as they (or very similar country-specific versions) are the only ones common across the world.
That is the only way to get a better design built on a timescale of years, rather than the decades new materials take to receive qualification.
The plutonium for India's nuclear weapon was not produced in a CANDU reactor, it was made in a CIRUS reactor. This was also a Canadian design, but it has no similarities to CANDU other than also using natural uranium fuel.
As a "tank" style research reactor it is more suited to being modified, tuned, and operated to produce weapons grade plutonium than a tube style power reactor such as CANDU.
Just as with uranium, there are different isotopes of plutonium. Only one isotope is considered to be useful in making a nuclear weapon. It is more difficult if not impossible with existing technology to separate that specific isotope from the others than it is to separate U235 from uranium to make a bomb. The only practical way to make a plutonium bomb is to avoid making the undesirable isotopes in the first place, and that requires a reactor designed, tuned, and operated for the purpose, or one which can be modified to do so, such as a tank style research reactor.
The UK's Magnox reactors were designed to produce weapons grade plutonium with electric power as a byproduct. You can't make a plutonium bomb using normal spent fuel from a normal power reactor. No technology to do so exists at this time.
There's a reason that Iran and North Korea spent vast sums of money on uranium enrichment plants to make nuclear weapons rather than making a plutonium bomb from spent fuel. After looking at all the options, they decided it was easier and cheaper to do it that way.
Under international nuclear control treaties there are defined levels of certain isotopes of uranium and plutonium which separate "civil" from "weapons grade" material. There are no weapons issues with respect to civil plutonium based fuels than there are with civil uranium based fuels.
"It can't take that many big brain PhDs to come up with a way to use this spare fuel"
True. In fact it's mostly a solved problem already. However, at present it is not commercially viable to recycle most of that slightly used fuel. However, that will change when the cost of energy (as the inevitable result of supply and demand) will skyrocket and recycling old nuclear fuel will become profitable again.
And we're going to have to. I had some hopes for ITER and similar initiatives, but the way they're currently slipping further and further behind schedule makes me doubt we'll see any commercial fusion generation coming online in less than 20 years.
because of critical mass and geometry, it is physically impossible to use 100% of fissionable material in nuclear fuel. Creative re-processing of waste CAN extract remaining fuel, but apparently is too expensive so we let it decay. U235 does not decay that fast, unlike most fission product isotopes, so really we can store it for a while until only long-lived fission byproducts remain, to make it safer to deal with. But it DOES need to be dealt with.
Even if you put "first generation" spent fuel into he center of a reactor, to squeeze a bit more power out of it, there will STILL be U-235 left over after "2nd time around", just less of it. Back when I was at a prototype reactor they experimented with that idea, decades ago, only PARTIALLY refueling a reactor to see what would happen to the remaining (mostly depleted) fuel assemblies. It was de-rated to "less than 100%" but still worked. Just thought it worth being mentioned.
"I think the why is pretty simple. RR's been making SMRs for a long time and has a proven track record. "
Jelly, if you can figure a good and cheap way to fight all of the lawsuits so that several times as many reactors can be built as opposed to just a few, please tell. Even Alvin Weinberg who can be considered one of the fathers of PWR was of the opinion that there was a better way to build a reactor (molten salt). Cost and safety are the two main sticking points to nuclear power generation, not the size of the plant.
Jelly, if you can figure a good and cheap way to fight all of the lawsuits so that several times as many reactors can be built as opposed to just a few, please tell. Even Alvin Weinberg who can be considered one of the fathers of PWR was of the opinion that there was a better way to build a reactor (molten salt). Cost and safety are the two main sticking points to nuclear power generation, not the size of the plant.
Ah, well, I've always been a fan of the benevolent dictatorship as a form of government. But fortunately HMG may have helped in the UK by altering planning decisions to centralise some of this. Intent may have been to accelerate (or force) planning approval for onshore windmills, but same could be used to fast-track nuclear approvals and JFDI. Especially as energy infrastructure is also CNI, which provides a few more levers to beat opponents with. But there's still a rich and powerful lobby that would object to new nuclear, along with decades of anti-nuclear propaganda raising FUD.
Problem with JFDI is, as the rest of the discussion talks about is what It should be. We know we need a lot of new power to meet decarbonisation targets, feed bit-barns or just power growth. We know 'renewables' can't deliver this, especially if you cut through 'levelised cost' cons that present a misleading and misguided cost. We know nuclear can deliver reliable, practically zero carbon energy. So HMG could announce say, 50-100GW of new nuclear, and start getting on with It.
But that still needs It defining, given lead times, regulation and there's also lobbying from competing nuclear designs. The EU tried to work around this by announcing EDF's EPR would be the EUro Reactor so kind of standardising that design. EPR(2) might not be the 'best' design, but it works. China ordered a couple for Taishan 1 & 2, and brought those into service quicker and cheaper than Europe has managed. Why that is is being studied, and may get around some of the problems that have beset EUro builds. Plus answer questions like why Hinkley was contracted based on 'FOAK' costs when it wasn't the first of its kind. In UK, maybe, in the ROW, nope.
But if there's a pipeline of say, 10-20 standardised NPPs, that provides a healthy order book to industry, jobs & skills development and retention etc. And given the EU also needs more power, commonality and standardisation for fuel production & recycling, so the key part of a successful NPP plan, getting the fuel cycle right.. Or right enough. And maybe adding a couple of breeders. Maybe alternatives to PWRs are better, eg LFTR, MSR, pebble beds, prismatics but we need to do something now. Especially given the long lead times and 30yr+ expected service life.
Problem is we have idiots like this-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeU829DcoKQ
With a stage performance with lots of flashing lights, much woo, much yey and much clap to celebrate the Baltic states disconnection from Russia and achieving energy dependence on the EU. Comments are turned off, otherwise people would probably point out that a consequence of that decision to switch masters was doubling their electricity costs overnight.. And of course for the states on the wrong side of the Baltic, increasing their vulnerability to cable cuts or just the creaking EU CESA. Also had the effect of turning Kaliningrad into an island, so maybe Russia will restart its planned NPPs there.
"brought those into service quicker and cheaper than Europe has managed"
Probably as China doesn't have navel gazing ingrained into its political machine. And sadly it was up to China to discover the, at that time, unknown fuel issues with the EPR.
It appears that Framatome still supplied the pressure vessels.
I wonder who supplied the steam generators? Ah, France for unit 1 and China for unit 2 it seems:
https://www.neimagazine.com/news/taishan-1-receives-components/
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Installation-under-way-of-Taishan-2-steam-generato
The UK is a laughing stock with the bat shed and the fish disco and the world's most expensive power station.
"The UK is a laughing stock with the bat shed and the fish disco and the world's most expensive power station."
Yes, but which is that power station? Is it Hinkley Point C with a price of £124.65 per MWh, or is the UK's subsidised tidal schemes at £277.65 per MWh, or any of Walney, Dudgeon or Burbo wind schemes at £208.35? Even Drax biomass conversion 1 is more expensive than Hinkley, at £138.16.
Then again, why worry people? You're already on the hook for all of these and a whole lot more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeU829DcoKQ
Blimey, what did I just watch? A room full of tailored designer suit wearing political elites clapping along like trained seals and pretending as if Russia forced their energy on the west.
Ursula VderL said 45% of gas, 50% of coal and nearly 1/3rd of oil used in Europe came from Russia prior to 2022.
Lets break this down a bit. Firstly why are we importing coal in 2022? I thought we were desperately trying to get away from it? Maybe it is for steel making. Anyway..
Gas, yes Europe has (eventually) stopped direct pipeline imports from Russia. Still imports via Turkstream it seems. There still appear to be LNG imports from Russia.
What Europe has done is pretty much replace Russia with the US. LNG imports from the other side of the pond have more than doubled. And now the orange man is talking about making US trade expensive unless we buy MORE of his LNG...
I can't find any up to date data on oil, just Europe imports a lot from the US already. Oil is very different to gas as there are lots of different grades needed for different refineries.
But the elephant in the room is that Europe (more accurately Germany) actively fostered its own dependence on Russia in the first place. I forget the German name for this policy, might be Ostpolitik, but basically Germany has been seeking friendly trade relations with Russia for a very long time and really ramped up after 1990. Both Schroder and Merkel followed this policy of trade and that is what gave us Nordstream 1 and 2. Not forgetting Schroder was on the boards of Rosneft, a Russian energy firm, as well as the company that built and run the nordstream pipeline.
This access to cheap gas, including from the North Sea via the UK and Norway, has made parts of Europe extremely dependent on it as an energy source. We brought this on ourselves. And now we are flapping about in panic wondering how we got here and putting on silly shows like this as we pat ourselves on the back.
No-wonder we can't get much right..... We made ourselves dependent on one dictator and are we now busy switching to another?
> But the elephant in the room is that Europe (more accurately Germany) actively fostered its own dependence on Russia in the first place.
Yep, Gerhard Schröder was the one who started it big. And Merkel followed that path and improved it. Her party (and FDP) added tons of buerocrazy for solar in 2013. Was always wrong in first place. Two of her BIG three mistakes. Schröder got a very hard backlash on that too, deserved, but not hard enough. (But when Merkel left, seeing what came after her in her party, lets her shine as "lighthouse of modernity" within her party, which probably prevented worse, still...)
"What would you suggest as an alternative?"
That's the real point: without understanding how nuclear energy is turned into electricity, he criticizes SMR's because they fundamentally use old style power plant designs. Last I checked there aren't any solar panels or peltier devices capable of converting zoomies (neutrons, gamma) and/or heat into TRONS (electricity) at anything resembling "power plant scale". So, until then, we use STEAM TURBINES, a century-or-so old technology that works well and is "buildable"
I'd also like to add that coal, oil, and natural gas plants are ALSO "buildable" and the USA will (soon enough) be producing inexpensive oil and LNG reliably and in sufficient quantity to meet UK and EU power needs.
/me is aware the first nuke power reactor was built in the 1940's, with breeders built before that, during WW2. The technique of boiling water to make steam and then electricity (or propulsion), particularly with steam turbines, is much older.
"aren't any solar panels or peltier devices capable of converting zoomies (neutrons, gamma) and/or heat into TRONS"
And this is where fusion gets a bit confusing as the main output from the reaction is super high energy neutrons, which at the moment are being caught by the shielding (making it radioactive, same with fission) and making it HOT.
Yep indeed, the old "make water hot to power a turbine". Just at a higher efficiency level that fission, with byproducts which are easier to handle. Fission leaves huge amounts of radioactive waste in comparison to a few milligram of hydrogen plasma polluted with deuterium and tritium (+ whatever the walls will take). Since fusion has been 20 years away from being productive for 50+ years now we just have experimental truth it will work - I might not live to see it. Tokamak or Stellarator is the question. Stellarator might be better for production and is my current favourite, but the Chinese Tokamak does have impressive results too. The laser-on-H² pellet variant may or may not work for usable energy production - I think it won't, but ruling it out is wrong.
BTW: Both torus-fusion types are currently trying to employ getting the energy with less waste from the walls which take the neutrons by getting more of the energy out of it before it hits the wall at a then-slower speed.
And this is where fusion gets a bit confusing as the main output from the reaction is super high energy neutrons, which at the moment are being caught by the shielding (making it radioactive, same with fission) and making it HOT.
Or looking on the bright* side, the proposal to wrap a big fusion reactor in a bigger blanket of fissile material, and wrap that in heat pipes to generate steam with the fast neutrons driving the fission.
*Hopefully not that bright given that design seems a bit like a slow-motion boosted fission bomb.
Why not build BIG reactors, then? Other than construction time, and needing power NOW, that is...
Smarter still, fire up the decommissioned oil and coal plants, install diesel "peaker plants", and there should be PLENTY of electric power. Man-made climate change based on CO2 is a HOAX, but shifting transportation and heating over to electricity is REAL, and places a GREATER DEMAND on POWER GRIDS! If you don't like "brown outs" and "black outs", you should be building natural gas and OIL burning power too.
An excellent report. Thanks. However, I have to note that at the recent American Geophysical Conference I talked with a number of climate scientists who were not as sanguine about the IEA's prediction of a leveling-off of GHGs, especially in light of the U.S.'s abdication of leadership in transitioning to non–fossil fuel energy sources. I hope the IEA will prove to be correct, but I fear they may be rather optimistic.
Most of us are using much less power than we used a couple of decades ago because of changes to the equipment we use -- lightbulbs now use an eighth or less power for equivalent light and appliances are far more efficient. Even our computers are much more efficient than they used to be. So what's driving the demand?
If its transportation then this will be merely substituting one form of energy for another -- with a likely saving in overall energy use.
I'd like these broad brush reports to be a lot more detailed. Often we find that they're written from an agenda, starting from a desirable conclusion and working back to the (cherry picked) statistics.
edOne thing I've noticed over the years is that even though my electricity consumption has gone down the bill still keeps on going up. This is particularly noticeable when I start using solar generation. At first you end up with a hulking great energy surplus (a negative bill, no less). Then gradually tariff changes are introduced and stability is restored (so shareholders can breathe easier).
"lightbulbs now use an eighth or less"
Lighting is one of the few areas where efficiency has made really major gains. There is some simple physics that says your kettle and toaster just get slower if you try to use less watts. Clothes drying has also improved but only by a factor of about 3, maybe 4. I'd argue that as computers get more energy efficient per unit of speed we just make them faster.
But as you say we are swapping source A for source B, the issue is that source B is the more complex one.
What has changed in the last 15 years is the demand for online services. People just don't comprehend the compute power needed for all those streaming services, office365 etc. We've just moved it out of our homes.
"One thing I've noticed over the years is that even though my electricity consumption has gone down the bill still keeps on going up."
Mines gone up a little since I added a chest freezer and haven't completely got it off the grid. At night when the battery has depleted, it switches back to grid power. I need to add another brick of batteries (recovered 18650's) and one more ~150-200W panel. What the freezer has done is let me buy food in larger quantities and preserve more out of the garden so I'm making fewer trips to the grocery store and can buy larger quantities when things are on offer. It was painful to find a really low price on chicken and know my freezer was already stuffed. Now I have a pressure canner so putting meats into jars that are shelf stable is easier. There's still plenty that I'd rather have frozen, though. In summary, I'm spending a bit more on leccy and less on petrol along with being able to save by buying in bulk. The added benefit is electricity is something I can make on site so converting my cost center there is a step in the right direction.
"Haha, I read there the classic solar infection effect: Once you started you cannot stop."
Yeah. Photographers know it as G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome).
I knew from the start that I was flirting with having enough to keep the chest freezer going completely off-grid even if there weren't a few cloudy days in a row. I'd rather start on the low end and nudge things up rather than calculate for a worst case and then go on to double that, just to be sure. Finding some more laptop battery packs to salvage and another smallish (by today's standards) solar panel isn't very much money. I know a place that has used 170W panels selling for $20ea. It's a bit of a drive and I need to do some suspension work on the car, but buying some is high on the list. Running the evaporative cooler this summer completely on solar would be nice. Once I've covered the uses that make the bill fluctuate the most, I may decide that going any further doesn't have enough return. Until I get an EV.
Turn out your lights when you leave the room, recycle, compost, bike to work, don't fly, go full-on Greta Thunberg.
Do your part to ensure the plutocrat-owned AI server farms keep running day and night gobbling up your information so they can sell it back to you.
Would you deprive Elon of a cross country private jet trip just so you could drive to the supermarket instead of shlepping your groceries home in a hand cart?
"Turn out your lights when you leave the room, recycle, compost, bike to work, don't fly, go full-on Greta Thunberg."
Done, except I walk to work. Bikes are not allowed to be ridden in the house. When I'm in the field, I have to take the car (small economy) since I have a load of gear to bring and jobs can be a fair distance away. As a domestic terrorist, it's a PIA to fly, so I don't. I'm not sure who awarded me the badge and put me on the list (that's claimed does not exist) but I was always randomly selected for extra screening when I would fly to the point where I was considering traveling in circus tights. Nobody wants to see a pale blue Scottish person in the buff with bright lights on.
NetZero is a scam. It will cause poverty, deprivation and social upheaval. Is that the intent? Take prime farmland and cover it with renewables, ramp electricity prices through the roof. Only the rich can afford travel, EVs, to have lights and heating all year? The peasants will revolt or become serfs. Some countries will just give lip service and become rich and dominant with cheap energy abundance. Greenies suckered by the elite want to ban plant food instead of dealing with plastic and other health damaging pollutants.
I think this depends on your planning horizon.
Of all the countries that I know of, China has the longest planning cycle. They think multi-generationally.
They currently produce almost 30% of their energy using clean energy sources. They're also heavily biased towards EVs.
I agree, that in the short term it will be cheaper cash wise to be in oil and gas. But it only take a small trade war or real war and suddenly that gets awfully expensive awfully quick.
If stability is your game, then renewable energy production and storage (water, flywheels, batteries etc) are going to be better long term I suspect.
"I agree, that in the short term it will be cheaper cash wise to be in oil and gas. "
So while it is cheaper, it's a good idea to leverage oil/gas to get into more sustainable energy sources. If one waits until fossil fuels are very expensive, the transition gets even more expensive. We'll all look back and say "we should have started much sooner".
... mostly because it's people arguing based on ideology, i.e. what we imagine the world should be like, rather than what it really is.
**Nuclear power is not clean energy.**
Yes, the spent fuel can be recycled. We've had nuclear reactors for 3/4 of a century now, and in all that time no one has ever recycled the spent fuel on any meaningful scale save for the French, where it is required by law, and they're constantly having to catch violators and make them pay up and clean up.
Let's all say it together:
**Nuclear power is not clean energy.**
It produces some of the most dangerous waste products conceivable. Stop pretending that it is. It makes you sound like a lobbyist from Westinghouse or Mitsubishi.
"It produces some of the most dangerous waste products conceivable."
Let's look at that by the number of people injured/killed through radioactive waste vs. the number from respiratory issues that can be traced to air quality. Should we keep burning coal/gas?
gas = which gas do you talk about? The fuel=gas, or the real-gas=gas ? The later is very clean if done right. The chimneys I see around here on houses and companies all have white smoke. No exception. Those which use oil-based or pellet (=wood) are white too.
The radioactivity is lower only 'cause the paranoia in handling is up. They threw them into the ocean first, together with the surface bomb testing and several accidents, have increased the radioactivity baseline. Steel and iron from before the first bomb got very valuable for medical equipment since their radioactivity is lower. Now imagine we would have handled that stuff for the last 50 years as we did at the beginning. The steel situation is better today, but only 'cause we ARE paranoid in handling that stuff.
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