Nuclear energy is more expensive than renewables, CSIRO report finds::Renewable energy provides the cheapest source of new energy for Australia, a new draft report from the CSIRO and energy market operator has found.
Let’s not nickel-and-dime the green transition. Nuclear energy has a role to play, and so do renewables. The most urgent thing now is to get as much electricity generation off fossil fuels as possible. Building nuclear power plants is an important part of this, especially in countries like China and India which would otherwise default to burning coal.
Let’s not nickel-and-dime the green transition
Nobody is suggesting we should.
Nuclear energy has a role to play
Did you read the article? It only has a role to play if you’re into wasting money.
The most urgent thing now is to get as much electricity generation off fossil fuels as possible. Building nuclear power plants is an important part of this
Can you explain why nuclear would be a part given how long it takes to deploy in comparison to renewables? Nuclear also has a habit of being behind schedule and costing more than projected.
especially in countries like China and India which would otherwise default to burning coal.
The article is about Australia.
It really seems like people can’t get past the fact that while nuclear did have an unfair reputation, it’s just too late to make use of it.
Like yeah, it sucks that people blocked it and we built tons of fossil fuel power instead, but now we just have a better option and we can give up that fight.
Nuclear power and cognitive dissonance. That’s why people are still touting SMRs as the future, except they cost even more than traditional nuclear. Also, they don’t exist.
Ah yes, “X Technology doesn’t exist yet, so it’s stupid and useless and people that support its development are dumb”
You see it so often
Both China and Russia have built operational SMRs. (Not to mention the fact that the nuclear reactors we’ve had for decades in military submarines and ship are SMRs). They exist.
We don’t have enough data about the economics or SMRs to say for sure, most (but not all) economic models put LCOE for SMRs at half the cost of traditional PWR nuclear reactors.
It’s hard to judge from the current smr projects what the costs will be. The largest cost in building nuclear power is all the regulatory oversight. Every PWR plant is different and needs to go through the entire process from scratch. But once we have some successful and proven SMR designs. They can be mass produced from the same vetted and approved designs without needing to go through the massively expensive design process again.
SMRs are simpler too. Which makes them cheaper. They don’t need as many layers of redundant safety systems like traditional reactors do. Even in the worst case scenario, an SMR can meltdown and a person living next door would be perfectly safe.
All of that adds up to the a lot of potential cost savings if we mass produce them.
If we can build enough solar or other renewable power to replace fossil fuels without nuclear, great.
But most people have no idea just how much it’s going to take. We need to not only replace all the fossil fuels on the grid today. Plus have extra capacity to charge storage for use when its night and cover the added demand of all the electric cars, trucks, furnaces, everything else that needs to become electric.
We need to be building nuclear too. We can’t build enough solar and wind fast enough.
For the love of God, look up the importance of maintaining grid frequency and which energy sources are reliable enough to do it.
Because renewables cannot. Our other option is to build insane infrastructure that can transmit DC long distances, which China has done. However, most countrie do not have the wealth or resources to do this.
Someone didn’t read the fucking article…
There are literally countries that went all in on nuclear power (france and switzerland come to mind), that now regret that play and are trying to transition away from them. Not for safety reasons, just because they are extremely expensive to operate and they become a money pit when renewables eat away at the base load that they were built to supply. You have nuclear plants paying people to take their power during the afternoons because they cant shut down quickly when the sun comes out.
who told you they are regretting ?
Look at energy maps. France has one of the greenest energy mixes around and sells energy to Germany(and others) which cannot produce sufficient power for itself in Winter.
Also Germany at many instances end up playing the neighbours to buy their electricity Or selling it lower then 0.01€/kWh on days of overproduction.
sells energy to Germany(and others)
Usually Germany is exporting more to France than it’s importing, 2023 is an exception this year it’s almost even, with a slight lead for France. Have some charts.
I am aware of that but that’s due to Compulsive exporting by shunting the prices to near 0€ as there is overproduction on sunny days.
if you look at the net value of exported vs imported electricity. Germany is strongly in deficit.
Also the overproducion isn’t great cause he renewabke the LCOE is calculated at install time but the actual cost it’s larger as you end up giving away the electricity (Very difficult to assess on the free market)
In addition to that Germany’s energy mix has 5-8x carbon intensity as that of France.
The German solution isn’t economical and by far not ecological. hey but they do better than Poland so that’s something.
Reducing dependence on their aging expensive nuclear power infrastructure has been a campaign promise of every French president for the last decade. Switzerland just voted via referendum to shutter their nuclear fleet, Germany has phased out nukes almost entirely.
The reality of it is: They’re expensive. They generate waste which could theoretically be reused or even locked away in underground vaults, but it’s frequently just stored on site in reality. And whether the danger is real or perceived, no one wants to live next to a nuke, because if things go wrong, they go very wrong.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see nukes make a comeback, I think they’re a valuable part of the energy mix. I actually know a guy in crypto who is trying to set up financially strained nuclear plants with on-site crypto miners to help them gain back some of that lost revenue from paying people to take power during light load periods. Which I think is a fantastic use case and a great way to make Bitcoin less environmentally destructive. There are other dispatchable loads that could fill the same niche (water desalinization, green hydrogen production).
But the unfortunate reality is that nuclear plants are dying right now, and unless something big changes they’re going to be driven out of existence by wind and solar.
they aren’t being driven out of existence by wind and solar that’s just wrong.
They are being driven out by prolitics and fear of the unknown.
Waste is problem which has been blown out of proportion in the media.
Nuclear is more expensive than wind comparable to solar. Major point in it’s favor is base load reliability. Look at capacity factors of the major base load providers. Solar is barely 26%/ Wind 24%/30% on-/off shore and Nuclear is 3x of that and highly predictable (as it’s downtime is planned maintainsnce).
Pure wind solar would have to be 300% average load(heating excluded!!!) with nearly 15day storage to have a blackout probability on under 1%.
I am genuinely all for Wind and Solar. Although my comments on this post might lead one to think otherwise.(independence of power for countries is a big + for Wind Solar which is a - for Nuclear)
But I am for fastest road to green electricity… more like just do everything to get rid of CO2 intense production methods.
Another great point!
Energy generation that works most of the time is more expensive than energy generation that only works some of the time, big surprise. Mason problem is that we need energy all the time and currently can’t store it on a grid level.
More like fission requires massive shielding, tight control of procedures, waste storage sites that don’t exist, and in-depth inspections in order to remain safe.
Yeah, I don’t disagree but it’s a proven technology that can provide a baseline load for the grid. Something we can’t yet do reliably with renewables
There are tons of options for that, mainly energy storage such as batteries, hydro, and green hydrogen. Nuclear is not needed and too expensive among other things.
Hydo is limited in where it can be used and where it can be used if often already is. Batteries can’t yet provide a grid level base load. I don’t know much about green hydrogen but there’s usually a loss of energy when converting from one medium to another.
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Look, I’m all for renewable energy, where it makes sense. When I lived in southern California, BLM had so many wildlife restrictions in place, even for off-roading it was kinda nuts. A lot of it dealt with tortoises. Shortly after moving out of state, they started building solar farms all over the place. They’re massive multi dozens to hundreds of acres in size. Many of them in the same areas they got all worked up about for the tortoises…
Generating the power is only a third the battle. Still need to store and distribute that power. Factor in power demands etc.
What I’m trying to say is, as a species we need to get better. This is a good step. However, the power output of a single nuclear plant to the size shouldn’t be overlooked. We should stop fossil fuel reliance. Nuclear is at this point very understood. Yes some bad accidents happened in the past.
Storing energy isn’t as difficult as it’s made out to be. There’s molten salt, water pumps, boiling/heated water, discarded batteries, even hauling weights up a tall tower.
I’d like to see every building with solar panels and a backup battery to decentralize the grid.
I have a feeling this is where the suburban and rural grids are going. Dense urban areas are likely still going to need power produced off site.
What I’m more interested in will be farms in whether they’ll stay traditional producing food or convert solar farms where food production is not the main focus (see the hops farming solar panels for example).
Please do the maths on "lifting weights up a tall tower.
Actually no, I’ll do it for you.
Let’s raise a metric ton 10 storeys. A storey is about 3 meters, making that 1000kg going 30 meters up. Mass (1000kg) x g (9.81m/s² ≈ 10m/s²) x height (30m) is about 300,000 joules of energy. We don’t use joules much, but they are the amount of energy you use is you draw 1w for 1 second. 300,000Ws. 3,600 seconds in an hour, so 83Wh.
Not kWh, Wh. You might run your TV for an hour.
You’d need to lift 100 tons 100 storeys to get it to kWh. 83kWh. A car battery worth of storage.
This is the reason pumped-hydro storage is a thing. To make lifting a mass a decent energy storage solution, you need a lot of mass. About the order of one lake of water. One plant I visited in Scotland has a reservoir of 10 million tons of water elevated 400 meters, to give it 7GWh of storage. That’s a fairly small one, and 36 men died building it back in the 50s/60s.
Gravity storage needs BIG numbers.
It’s not difficult, but it is expensive and inefficient. There are very few financially viable battery technologies on the market currently, and although incremental improvements are happening on that front, there are also roadblocks (lack of raw materials like cobalt, toxic metals, thermal runaway fire risks), we really need a big breakthrough before we’ll see large adoption of batteries.
It’s worth pointing out too that we aren’t using newer designs as much, which incorporate inherently safe features.
It’s actually ironic. If we built new reactors we could build breeder tractors to generate fuel for them from nuclear waste. This fear mongering of nuclear energy prevents us from reducing that number.
They’re going with older designs for cost reasons. Per the article, you’re taking something that is already not cost effective and proposing to make it even more expensive.
This is basically common knowledge now. CSIRO report pointed to similar conclusions for several years, at least since 2021 when I started to notice.
What is relevant to real life (since Australia probably never will get nukes) is that even assignning system costs only onto VRE, they are still almost the same LCoE in a 90% VRE system. This is again consistent with previous reports.
After Australia pass 100% VRE, exporting green hydrogen in the regional market will probably handle the last remaining flexibility needs. Exporting electricity directly to SE Asia is less likely but still a possibility.
Renewables cannot main grid frequency, which is crucial in America. We transmit AC power. You either accept nuclear or accept no electricity. This is fear mongering propaganda to keep us dependent on fossil fuels because that’s the only other way to maintain grid frequency.
This article also specifically says IN AUSTRALIA. So it isn’t even a comprehensive statement. We need nuclear. Get over it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The report says electricity generated by solar and on-shore wind projects is the cheapest for Australia, even when accounting for the costs of keeping the power grid reliable while they’re integrated into the system in greater proportions over time.
It estimates the changing costs of electricity produced by coal, gas, solar, wind, nuclear, bioenergy, hydrogen electrolysers, and storage such as pumped hydro and batteries.
CSIRO’s scientists say until recently, discussions about the potential cost of using nuclear energy in Australia have remained theoretical, with a lack of data from completed commercial projects hindering attempts to make worthwhile calculations.
This year’s draft GenCost report also provides more data on the estimated “integration costs” for variable renewable technologies.
It says most new-build technologies, like renewables, can enter an electricity system and provide reliable power by relying on existing capacity already deployed, but as their share increases, which forces the retirement of existing flexible capacity, the system will find it increasingly difficult to provide reliable power supply without additional investment.
"Mind you, the integrated system plan was released last week and it did emphasise that although it is likely to be a renewable future, we’ll still need gas as a supporting technology.
The original article contains 754 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Just read the article again and it’s kind of suspicious the way the article ends by saying that natural gas will have to be part of the future energy mix. Seems like there might be some co-optation going on, or at least a failure to consider the costs of trying to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the power supply using just wind and solar.
“It’s a good technology for filling in the gaps around renewables, as well as storage and other methods for making sure that power’s still reliable…”
This does make some sense, like having a diesel generator in your home for the few times a year the power goes out. It’s also useful for shutting up the, “sometimes the wind doesn’t blow and there’s no sun at night” crowd.
I eagerly await all the Nuclear fanboys to explain why this unfairly overestimates the cost of nuclear or was put out by the fossil fuel industry to … make renewables look good.
