https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center
"New York City's greenhouse gas emissions from electricity have increased from approximately 500 to 900 tons of CO2 per MWh from 2019 to 2022 as a result of the closure."
And for that matter, if you are worried about CO2 emissions, you could make that be part of the requirements.
Gas is a bit more expensive than the ideal green model, but cheaper on average. It also can be built anywhere on a comparatively small land parcel, and can provide easily scalable energy 24/7/365.
What they should not do however is to simply look at potential generation capacity and have that be the only important criteria. Voters has clearly demonstrated that they will vote for politicians that can promise stable grid and stable pricing, rather than having those being controlled by the market.
I suspect much of the perception of nuclear being too dangerous comes from the fossil fuel energy lobby.
I'd welcome someone to try to run the numbers on this. I tried myself, but I just don't have the expertise. Don't forget to account for almost all of our current heating coming from natural gas burned on-premise. Then, expand your analysis to include all buildings in all northern climes. Is there even enough materials on the planet to build all those batteries? Do batteries even work at -40 degrees? And that's just one set of challenges, every area has similar but different problems for renewables to tackle.
The answer is both: put huge money into renewables and into nuclear. Nuclear is a proven tech. It works. We understand it. We stupidly threw away all of our skill to build it, and put up huge regulatory roadblocks. But those are solvable human problems, if we care to do it.
Storage for renewables is still a huge question mark, which we should also dump a ton of money into, but we need a solution today. Nuclear is here.
Splitting up the world in areas and then claiming you need to solve a different problem in each is throwing away probably the most cost effective way to get cheaper energy, more grid interconnection and more price mechanisms to shape supply and demand.
They generate 57 Twh right now. That's about 10% of the current production of the entire nation of Canada just for one US state.
I think you are greatly underestimating the scale of the United States compared to Canada.
What's commonly done in these arguments, and you did some of that, is declare that from first principles nuclear is the solution and we aren't only doing it for other reasons. Yet while there are plenty of simulations of doing full grids with only solar, wind and batteries there's never one where a full nuclear roll-out actually makes sense economically.
Ah okay! That's our disconnect. Do go run the numbers on how much natural gas we're burning up here. It's a lot, like seriously a lot. How many batteries will we need to ensure that amount of energy is available for (say) 2 weeks of continuous cloud cover at -10 ~ -40 degrees F? Keep in mind that if it fails, people will die. I don't feel confident enough in my own analysis to share it, but do try it out yourself for an exercise. It's pretty eye-opening.
> Yet while there are plenty of simulations of doing full grids with only solar, wind and batteries
I would love to see this! Can you share some? Do they account for converting Minnesota's heating needs from natural gas?
I don't know what a "nuclear roll-out simulation" is, exactly. As stated earlier, my position is that we should be building both nuclear and renewables. We should build whatever makes sense for the area in question. If renewable+storage can solve all of an area's needs, then that's fantastic and we should absolutely do that.
If I understand right, you are arguing we should not be building any nuclear, even in Minnesota. I'm unconvinced that renewables+storage alone can solve the Minnesota winter problem. I'm asking if you can provide a link to an analysis showing that we can feasibly and cost-effectively solve the Minnesota winter problem without any nuclear power. Can you please link to one?
Any simulation where building nuclear power plants makes economic sense would do.
> I'm unconvinced that renewables+storage alone can solve the Minnesota winter problem.
You're again asking for simulations about Minnesota specifically which doesn't make sense. Unless you're thinking of seceding from the union and closing the borders to energy trade, as long as the US as a whole can do it Minnesota in particular can be a net energy importer in winter if that's what's needed. Here's the RethinkX simulation of that:
https://www.tonyseba.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Rethinki...
"Our analysis makes severely constraining assumptions, and by extrapolating our results from California, Texas, and New England to the entire country we find that the continental United States as a whole could achieve 100% clean electricity from solar PV, onshore wind power, and lithium-ion batteries by 2030 for a capital investment of less than $2 trillion, with an average system electricity cost nationwide of under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour if 50% or more of the system’s super power is utilized."
This is almost 5 years old at this point. Others have linked other such analysis. At this point asking people to show them simulations for renewables while trying to argue for nuclear is disingenuous. Renewables are the ones being built out at scale all over the world while nuclear struggles to deliver new projects and doesn't seem to have a viable path to being cheap.
No I'm not, I have no idea how you are getting that idea. I'm asking for an analysis showing that Minnesota's winter needs can be met without building nuclear plants. That's it. You can solve that problem in any way you like, including importing power from other states and nations.
> Here's the RethinkX simulation of that
Thanks for the link. I focused on the New England scenario, as it's the most similar to Minnesota of the 3 scenarios. It doesn't seem to account for heating. This is the problem I keep coming to in these analyses. See page 25:
> Our model takes as inputs each region’s historical hourly electricity demand ... For the New England region, our analysis applies to the ISO New England (ISO-NE) service area which provides 100% of grid-scale electricity generation for the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Our heating is not supplied by electricity. I definitely believe that our current electricity demand may be met by renewables in a feasible timescale, but that leaves out the massive hole of heating our buildings.
The only reference I could find to New England's heating is this little note at the bottom of page 46:
> If New England chose to invest in an additional 20% in its 100% SWB system, for example, then the super power output could be used to replace most fossil fuel use in the residential and road transportation sectors combined (assuming electrification of vehicles and heating).
But I don't see any actual numerical analysis backing this up. Given their analysis earlier only spoke about electricity usage, I'm not super convinced by this one sentence.
Additionally, the New England scenario suggests they need 1,232 GWh of storage to supply only 89 hours of electricity for the area. Even if we agree that's a sufficient amount of time, the currently largest energy storage facility on the planet is only 3 GWh[1]. We would need 410 such facilities for New England alone. Can we really scale battery tech up that much, especially given resource constraints like Lithium and copper? Maybe! Hopefully! But it's a big question. Meanwhile, nuclear is here now, and it works. I don't think we should be betting our future on unproven tech.
[1] https://electrek.co/2023/08/03/worlds-largest-battery-storag...
(1) Diurnal. You need to store maybe 12 hours of production to get through the night. It's believable that this could be affordable with batteries.
(2) Seasonal. In a place like Minnesota you either need to overbuild solar panels by a factor of 3 or so, or you need a lot of storage, probably not batteries, but maybe some kind of chemical or thermal storage. Casey Handmer would point out that you could use excess energy in the summer for industrial activities but that could be easier said than done because the capital cost of a factory that runs 1/3 of the time is 3x that of one that runs all the time.
(3) Dunkelflaut. Sometimes you have a rough patch of cloudy weather and little wind, so the requirements are worse than (1).
It's rare to see credible analysis of the grid-scale cost of a solar + storage system because of (3) -- you can quote a reasonable price for batteries that will supply power "almost" all the time, but costs rise explosively as you increase "almost". With different requirements for reliability the cost of a storage-based system could be "a bit less" than "nuclear power plants built without bungling" or it could be much more. It also has to vary with your location though people talking about the subject don't seem to talk about that which contributes to people talking past each other. (In upstate NY I could care less about Arizona)
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
The cheapest grid is 90-97% renewable (depending on location) in 2025. As battery prices go down, that number gets higher.
40deg lat includes a _lot_ of the world.
And Russia? And the northern EU? And many parts of China, Japan, northern US (NYC!? Buffalo?). Northern Italy, Germany, Switzerland? Does everyone who dips below 0 deg F get to burn gas? -10F? If the infra remains in place with that kind of demand, don't you see the costs being low enough that people elsewhere will want to do that rather than transition to carbon-free for the fun of it?
It's hand waved away like this, but did anyone do the analysis as suggested? My guess is the results will not be as easy to wave away as you suggest. But OTOH, maybe heat pumps + overcapacity solar arrays will do it. Who knows?
We could ignore them completely and focus on the most viable areas and have years and years of work to be done. We are not building nearly as fast as we should.
Minnesota, Russia, Buffalo, et al are not a reason to delay significantly ramping up renewables in other places.
This is not a worthwhile subject to discuss in this context. It's rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
> if we replaced all viable capacity outside of cold dark areas of the world it would be fine to continue burning gas there
with
> we would have decades of more time to solve these issues in cold areas
As in: Ignore vs Delay. It's clear in hindsight, but wasn't on first reading.
the point is that it's not a problem that should slow down adoption of renewables everywhere else, we don't need to debate nuclear vs renewables because of cold while non-cold areas are still burning tons of fossil fuels constantly
saying "but what about cold!" only serves to add further fuel to the constant drag created by the fossil fuel industry, they love these arguments because it sows consumer doubt — they go as far as to fund anti-renewable activism under the guise of environmentalism to a similar effect
Wait, what? Who in this discussion suggested it was?
Edit: it's less important to worry about that at the moment.
And yeah, we need to decarbonize ASAP.
I think nuclear is a thing we should have done fifty years ago in spades.
I'm not sure it's a thing we should do today when the economics behind solar are just so, so much stronger.
I'd really love to see this investment go to storage projects instead.
Battery tech finally seems to be moving, and I'd like to see the US be able to make plays on the LFP/Sodium battery fronts far more than I want overpriced power from nuclear.
There's arguments to be made about having more transmission so you can move electricity from one place to another, but that's also expensive and difficult to build and comes with downsides like vulnerability to natural disasters and attack along a much longer path. Or, as in California, the transmission is its own latent source of disaster that can immolate the state.
There are also loads that want very large, high-availability power and/or process heat. Reactors would pair well with things like metal refining or electrolysis to get the hydrogen for ammonia production.
At the end of the day, there's never one source of energy which is a silver bullet for everything and the best approach is probably a diverse mix of supply.
The wind chill would drop below -40 most nights, sometimes significantly lower. Wind power won't help much because they need to shut down at the worst times- either too windy or icy.
As much as I love heat pumps, having thousands upon thousands of homes switching to resistive heating because the pumps can't keep up in the evening is going to get ugly.
District heating won't save you; the metro doesn't actually burn enough stuff to heat the cities and a significant part of the population is in semi or very rural areas that wouldn't benefit anyway.
Edit: that same metro just put together a fund to renovate a few blocks of an underserved area. It's in the millions of dollars. I can't imagine the cost of converting the entire area to district heating; it would surely eclipse the entire government budget. This is the sort of thing that will only happen if you have the kind of fiat power of an imaginary wand.
Under market forces, the electric company have no quarrel in sending people a bill that is 12 times the average month for a single month. There is also very luke warm interest in reducing the cost for the consumer by building out storage. The economics has so far not been that great outside of using government subsidizes, and as northvolt demonstrated, not that interested in using loans when the subsidizes run out.
That said, the Finish project of storing hot water for district heating looks like one of the more interesting storage solution. They are also investing into nuclear, so it seems like time will show how the economics will pan out. Heat exchangers are very effective at generating heat for district heating, so the heat storage has some steep competition.
If one were not being cynical it makes sense to some degree in order to simply diversify our non fossil fuel energy sources.
An all of the above approach to decarbonizing makes sense, and nuclear will be a useful part of that.
Most nuclear plants can't do that, they need to run 24/7. Some can, but they're horrendously inefficient and expensive to run that way.
Fair. What do you suggest instead?
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
There's just no motivation for them to take the excess energy by throttling their own.
When you're running you more create wear-and-tear and increase the depreciation rate: this can be costed. There's also probably increased staffing costs during higher levels of operations; also costable.
Depending on the prices offered to the hydro-plant, it may or may not be profitable to run.
If nuclear can't supply peak power needs, then you need batteries or something else to do that. And if you're using batteries, it's a lot cheaper to charge them with solar than with nuclear.
If just running nuclear power plants 24/7 is cheaper than running Solar/Wind when the weather is perfect and backup/storage when not, then why should we scale solar/wind up that much to begin with?
It's not cheaper, it's about 20x as expensive. Running nuclear intermittently is more than 20x as expensive.
Not according to the Ontario Energy Board, which sets wholesale rates; see Table 2:
* https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2024...
If not nuclear, then it's going to be coal, gas, hydro, etc. Of the list, nuclear is the cleanest and least ecologicially destructive (by far).
Scale is what will nail you... every time.
> least ecologicially destructive (by far)
On average. The long tail doesn't look so great.
As long as you don't care about proliferation danger (by militarizing staff and the site), you can reprocess and burn spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors/reprocessors.
The two Western designs built in the last generation are the EPR and the AP1000. The EPR is so unconstructable that it could have been designed by Amory Lovins to put the nails in the coffin of nuclear power. The supply chain for the AP1000 is centered in China. If it wasn't for problems of war and peace the rational thing to do might be ask the Russians to come in and built a VVER.
GE is pushing the BWRX300 which might get some cost reductions because it doesn't need a steam generator, but the small size doesn't help the economics and the cost numbers they are talking about are amazingly low.
As for simpler construction it has to be proven. The AP1000 was a "modular reactor" in that they tried to make it out of large modules that could be built in a factory and stuck together on site. The factories struggled to make those modules and when they arrived they often needed major rework. The ACP100 was recently completed in China
https://nucleus.iaea.org/sites/INPRO/df13/Presentations/011_...
and press releases boasted that it was one of the most complex construction projects of all time -- what I wanted to hear was "this is one of the most simple construction projects of all time!"
https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/chinese-s...
I'm also hopeful there's a resurgence of interest in Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).
Molten salt, HTGR and LMFBR designs could all be coupled to a supercritical-CO2 powerset which would fit in the employee break room of the turbine hall of an LWR. The steam generators for a PWR are larger than the reactor vessel itself, but a higher temperature reactor could miniaturize them [1].
You still see old literature that claims the LMFBR has a higher capital cost than the LWR but a lot of that comes from the expensive powerset and heat exchangers which have to be doubled to prevent a water-sodium reaction in the primary loop.
So yeah, 4th generation reactors could be a revolution but they are not a bird in the hand and it won't be a matter of "we'll write a check to build a 1 GW reactor" whether you are New York State or Google, it will be matter of "we'll build a test reactor" and it could be another 15 years at least before we get to the TRL 7 stage.
[1] https://www.precisionmicro.com/understanding-printed-circuit...
Going smaller and build lots more brings costs down tremendously. Combined with breeder reactors plus reprocessing to deal with waste.
You'd have to miltarize all staff to deal with profilieration risks and then license out delivery to private corps (utility companies).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_pit
but terribly uneconomical. Optimizing economics is about optimizing power output from a given volume of pressure vessel. The power of a nuclear reactor is limited by the ability to get heat out of the fuel rods and into the coolant so good economics requires producing energy evenly throughout the whole core, which commercial reactors do and submarine reactors do not.
Submarine reactors are worth it, however, because being able to go around the world over and over again without surfacing is of great military value. It's insane how fast a nuclear aircraft carrier can travel, there's enough uncertainty over where it will be in 15 minutes that an attack with a reasonably sized nuclear warhead could fail to kill it so, so china developed maneuverable hypersonic weapons that could punch a hole in the deck with a conventional weapon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21#DF-21D_(CSS-5_Mod-4)_Ant...
If you are gonna blow $10 Billion on a 10 year nightmare project, just buy a ton of solar, wind, and batteries to get 2GW in 5 years.
isn't green energy worth higher energy costs?
The latest nuclear plant in the US was the completion of the Vogtle plant in Georgia, which ran a staggering $22B over budget. Twenty Two Billion Dollars over budget!
$22B, is enough to build the largest solar plant in the US 10 times over (total 5GW). Or about 7 of the largest wind farm (total 10.5GW). Or 33 of the largest battery storage plant. With $2B left over for logistics.
And $14B left over for anything else because the total cost was $36B!
The current state of nuclear doesn't make sense anyway you cut it.
In 2025 the cheapest 24/7 energy grid is 90% green, up to 97% green in sunny locations.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
Love it or hate it, the AI hype has at least lit a fire on nuclear power. If AI winter comes, we at least get to keep the powerplants and receive clean power for decades.
When the AI winter comes, it’s not going to mean the energy devoted to AI applications decreases, it’ll mean the perception of rapid future expansion in profits fueling VC interest in AI goes away. It’s not like we cut back the aggregate energy cohsumption of systems running, say, rule-based expert systems during the last AI winter.
But what happens to the AI in the nuclear winter?
tl;dr it was commissioned, constructed, and closed due to local safety concerns in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident.
Interesting excerpt from the wiki:
In 2004, the Long Island Power Authority erected two 100-foot, 50 kW wind turbines at the Shoreham Energy Center site,[18] as part of a renewable-energy program.[19][20] At a ceremony, chairman Kessel stated, "We stand in the shadow of a modern-day Stonehenge, a multibillion-dollar monument to a failed energy policy, to formally commission the operation of a renewable energy technology that will harness the power of the wind for the benefit of Long Island's environment." The turbines generate 200 MWh per year, or 1/35,000th of the energy the nuclear plant would have produced.[21]
melling•3h ago