Cost matters. If you can build renewable power at a fraction of the price, why go nuclear? We can keep gas as backup until storage solutions are better developed.
If money was no issue you could just build a ton of pumped hydro in Scotland and or batter storage.
And if you absolutely want to spend on nuclear power, spend it in SMRs and molten salt reactors. ThorCon is probably not that far from a working solution if given enough funding.
> If money was no issue you could just build a ton of pumped hydro in Scotland and or batter storage.
Wikipedia says "The potential for further practical and viable hydroelectricity power stations in the UK is estimated to be in the region of 146 to 248 MW for England and Wales,[4] and up to 2,593 MW for Scotland.[5] However, by the nature of the remote and rugged geographic locations of some of these potential sites, in national parks or other areas of outstanding natural beauty, it is likely that environmental concerns would mean that many of them would be deemed unsuitable, or could not be developed to their full theoretical potential." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_United...
Pumped-hydro storage doesn't need existing water, but the national grid averages 30GW and peaks at 40GW ( http://grid.iamkate.com/ ) are there enough places to build "a ton of pumped hydro" for that kind of size which are suitable for the above criteria as well?
There are many other solutions than traditional pumped hydro when it comes to electrical storage : new pump hydro on isolated reservoirs (eg gordon butte), battries (eg flow batteries), compressed air, liquid air, stacked bloks, heat to energy come in mind
And you can store energy as heat or cold, which is easier and cheaper, with a bigger potential
And you can have an impact on the demand side, with energy efficiency and demand-response
> If you can build renewable power at a fraction of the price
We keep thinking of "building renewable power" as "we can produce this amount of watts at peak". What we should demand of these projects instead is "we can provide this amount of renewable power 24/7". There is a big difference. We're ending up in a situation where we can "build renewable power at a fraction of the price" for half of the time. For the other half we rely on fossil fuels but we don't see the issue because we're focused on the amount of clean watts we get at peak.
> What we should demand of these projects instead is "we can provide this amount of renewable power 24/7".
Humans have always adapted to power being available in different quantities and forms over time. This is why we have corn stores, mills, corned beef, and cold houses. No farmer expects that the sun makes his corn grow in January. In the end, we adapt to our environment, and we have done that though all the ages. Today, we can make it technically much smarter, for example by adding a price signal to electricity, and generating hot water for doing laundry during strong-wind night hours. If this is cheaper and more efficient than battery storage, then why not do it?
This is a solved problem, particularly in the UK. Battery prices are constantly dropping and pumped storage is a proven solution. It requires investment, but far less than fission plants.
It is far from a solved problem, in fact it is a problem that shows the simple solutions to be infeasible. Battery prices are several orders of magnitude above where they would need to be to provide true grid-scale storage and production capacity is a fraction of what would be required for same. Pumped storage is a dead-end solution because we have simply run out of places for effective hydro and are quire soon going to run out of places where we can turn existing hydro resources into pumped storage.
There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables, which is why they continue to become a bigger and bigger problem as more and more production shifts in that direction.
> Battery prices are several orders of magnitude above where they would need to be to provide true grid-scale storage and production capacity is a fraction of what would be required for same.
Thankfully prices are falling, efficiency improving, and massive battery factories are planned. The growth of EV means that will continue. Peaker plants are already being replaced with batteries.
> Pumped storage is a dead-end solution because we have simply run out of places for effective hydro
Nope. There is large pumped storage being built in Scotland right now and there are hundreds more glens where it would be feasible.
>There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables
Just as one example that may well magic away these problems, grid attached storage in the form of electric cars and home storage is growing massively right now. It may be we rethink entirely our centralised approach to production and storage.
Fission is expensive, centralised and carries heavy decommissioning costs and extreme tail risks. Fusion may someday give renewables a worthy rival but till then the falling prices mean nuclear has had its day.
Scotland can provide, at most, less than 5% of required capacity if you turned every available loch into pumped storage. Claiming that pumped storage is in any way a viable grid-storage system that can handle baseload in the UK is inaccurate.
Even if every battery production facility on the planet was dedicated entirely to producing storage batteries for the UK it would take almost half a decade to meet the requirements. You can claim that more will be built, but there are resource pipelines involved that are not as elastic and just throwing a pile of money at someone to build a factory. Battery production is growing, but nowhere near fast enough to meet the requirements for grid scale storage.
Right now fission has no competition from renewables+storage because the storage part of that equation remains a fantasy.
This is where a market solution should be used. Set up the conditions for minimum delivery of carbon-free power for a given period and let private companies bet on it. If people can deliver a battery solution that exclusively use renewable to charge them, and do this cheaper than nuclear, then they win the bid.
They don't get to use natural gas as a backup. They also need to be held liable to maintain the minimum capacity just as effective as more expensive solutions, but if they are willing and able to do that cheaper then they should win the bid and we should let them deliver carbon-free energy.
In the EU there is actually already a market of different contingents of electrical energy with different availability guarantees. Sources with high availability are more expensive and this helps to finance the required technology. And all this works rather in an evolutionary way. For example, we can, today, predict how much wind power will roughly be generated within the next days, and we can adjust reserve capacities with different costs to even that out. It is not only feasibly but also the economical thing to do.
Yes, we do have that system and people do bid to deliver energy. We do however allow fossil fuels to be used when wind power is not producing, and such, the carbon-free reserve capacities are competing against fossil fuels on production cost without the external cost of climate change being added. The economical outcome of that is an constant increase in fossil fueled capacity in practically every country in EU, with new fossil fueled power plant being built today even when we know that the climate can't take it.
The costs and risks involved in large scale power generation facilities isn't really fit for private companies and market competition. And when you add a market element to it, companies might cut corners to increase profits ( or minimise losses), and you certainly don't want that.
> We can keep gas as backup until storage solutions are better developed.
No thanks. Continuing burning fossil fuels until a better solution exist is not going to work. Climate change is already causing long term damage on a global scale, causing species to go extinct, raises water levels, expands deserts, displaces people, and is a problem that need to be taken serious. No waiting for a future technology yet undiscovered.
If we stop building new fossil fuel plants and only build nuclear and renewable, then maybe in 20-30 years we will reach a zero carbon energy grid. Given some of the most optimistic research, that might give us a small chance in prevent global crisis. A small chance. Continuing to burn gas until we have something better developed will rob us of that small chance. A 2x cost in energy, while somewhat costly, is still small cost compared to the consequences long term if we continue to burn fossil fuels.
Renewables are intermittent, pumped hydro could work at the expense of destroying Scottish national parks.
Freewheel storage could also work. But SMRs are not ready yet, as outlined in the article. MSR thorium reactors are far in the future, probably past 2030. The closest to being done is NuScale's design which is a natural circulation PWR. But it was just approved this year. Also Russia has a barge with two naval reactors, but theycre small and I don't see the UK licensing Russian designs anytime soon.
If money was no issue you could just build a ton of pumped hydro in Scotland and or batter storage.
And if you absolutely want to spend on nuclear power, spend it in SMRs and molten salt reactors. ThorCon is probably not that far from a working solution if given enough funding.