CleanTechnica
![](images/images_11_26_2021/thumbnail_San_Onofre.jpg)
Nuclear Power Won’t Save the World.
It Won’t Even Help.
Originally published at
Green Energy Times.
An Old
Paradigm
The electricity most of us use comes from a
system that was designed mostly over a hundred years ago. It was built
around concepts that benefited customers of that time. It started with
baseload power plants with transmission lines carrying the electricity
to towns and cities where customers lived.
A baseload power plant is designed for
efficiency of scale and operation. In those days, that meant it had to
be as big as possible. Since any ability to ramp power output up or
down quickly would cost a lot extra, the plants were designed to have
constant output. With constant output, a baseload plant had be sized
to meet a demand that could be counted on always to be there. This is
the base load, the lowest load that the grid would ever have over the
course of time.
Since the baseload power plant was designed
to cover the lowest load, any amount of electricity that would be in
excess of that would have to come from other sources, all of which
cost much more to run. They were load-following plants and peaker
plants.
Baseload power plants were sited based on
cost and access to resources they needed. Typically, they went up on
inexpensive land at some distance from the market they served. They
had to have access to fuel resources, which often meant that they
needed their own docks or rail sidings. Also, they were often placed
on bodies of water to take care of their cooling needs, which are
great, because only about a third of the heat they produce could be
used to generate electricity.
Originally, baseload plants mostly burned
coal. When nuclear reactors were brought online, starting in
mid-century, they fit right in with what was the current paradigm of
the time. The difference was that they produced nuclear waste instead
of air pollution and carbon dioxide.
We might
note for reference here that when the state of Vermont was looking for
a contract to replace electricity it had been getting from the Vermont
Yankee (VY) nuclear plant, the owner of VY made an offer that they
said the state could not refuse. It was the equivalent of 6.5¢ per
kilowatt-hour (kWh). The state immediately found cheaper renewable
electricity.
A New Paradigm
By contrast, today the least expensive
source of renewable power need not be large. Solar panels operate at
the same efficiency whether they be in utility-scale arrays or on a
residential roof-top. Significant amounts of
electricity can be generated by solitary wind turbines.
Of course there is a statement, “The sun doesn’t
always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow,” which happens to fall
into a range of unintentionally disingenuous to simply deceptive. The
amount of electricity coming from a given solar array is really rather
predictable and tends to come best in periods of light winds. And wind
turbines do best when the sun is not shining brightest, so they
compliment each other. But more to the point, while a single wind
turbine can be idled in calm weather, the wind never stops blowing
over wider geographical areas.
We might ask
whether the problem of variable output of wind and solar power is as
big as the problem of inability of baseload power to follow loads. The
answer to this can be seen in the relative costs of electricity from
load following and peaking plants, on the one hand, and batteries, on
the other. We could do a detailed analysis of this, but it is really
not necessary because the utilities are showing the results of their
own analyses.
A number of utilities are replacing plants powered
by natural gas, which includes most load-following and peaking plants,
with solar arrays and batteries. In one case, Entergy Mississippi is
planning to replace older natural gas plants with solar and windpower.
In the case of Entergy Arkansas, a combined-cycle (base-load) natural
gas plant it had planned will not be built, and the company will build
renewable resources instead. (KATV.com)
Comparing Nuclear Power With Solar +
Storage
An article in
PV Magazine
in August compared the cost of two new nuclear reactors with a
combination of solar photovoltaics (PVs) and battery storage that
would replace them functionally, as dispatchable power sources running
full time. The article is titled, “Solar challenging nuclear as
potential climate change solution.”
The author, who
had some expertise in systems that include solar+storage (S+S), used
actual costs for the Vogtle reactors that are being built in Georgia.
The two reactors, which have been under construction since 2013, are
expected to come online in 2022 and 2023, at a cost of roughly $30
billion, including $3 billion in finance costs. Their capacities will
be 1,117 megawatts each.
The PV Magazine
article calculates the cost of a solar array big enough to provide the
same output as the nuclear reactors in the winter in Georgia. It
assumes battery storage to supply the output of the nuclear plants for
16 hours, increased by 10% to be safe.
The author
shows that the cost of the S+S system designed to replace the two new
Vogtle reactors would cost a little less than $17 billion. That would
represent a saving of about $10 billion, not counting finance costs.
While that
sounds impressive, the article fails in a number of respects. Here are
some:
Output of the
S+S system is calculated to be the same as nuclear in the dead of
winter. The nuclear plant’s output will be constant year round, but
the S+S system will produce far more electricity nearly all year than
in the dead of winter. The value of the extra electricity from S+S is
not accounted for.
The cost of the nuclear plant does not include the
backup systems it requires, but the price calculated for S+S does.
The load-following and peaker plants used to work
with nuclear power, are slow to react to demand changes. By
comparison, battery backup can respond nearly instantly, making it far
more valuable.
Nuclear waste
is an unsolved problem that the US government guarantees, at taxpayer
expense. The same is true for insurance, which is covered by the
Price-Anderson act. S+S systems do not have comparable costs.
The author does
not take into account Wright’s Law, a recognized law of economics
referred to as “the learning curve.” It suggests that construction of
a battery system of the size envisioned would be sufficient to drive
the cost of storage down quickly enough to reduce the cost of the S+S
system itself.
Electricity from new nuclear facilities is very expensive. It becomes
far cheaper once the system is paid down. Please refer back to the bid
from VY, of 6.5¢/kWh. By comparison the cost of electricity
from S+S is very low. A
report from February, 2020, which appeared at
S&P Global, “Falling
US solar-plus-storage prices start to level as batteries supersize,”
says that power purchase agreements have dropped into the range of
3¢/kWh to 4¢/kWh. But the costs of solar, wind, and battery systems
keep falling. According to the US DOE’s National Renewable Energy
Laboratory, in an article published at
CleanTechnica, the costs of S+S systems declined by over 12%
from the first quarter of 2020 to the same quarter in 2021 alone.
Nuclear As
An Answer To Climate Change
There are some who feel that the nuclear
industry may have a way to become relevant in the new “small modular
reactors.” An article on this appeared in the October, 2021, issue of
Green Energy Times, “When It Comes to Nuclear Power,
‘Advanced’ Isn’t Always Better.” It explained that rhetoric
around these reactors seemed to be unrealistic and achievable
timetables were not able to help when we need most to address climate
change, which is right now.
I would suggest that nuclear industry
numbers about costs, timelines, and safety have historically been far
off the mark, a problem that those promoting newer types of reactors
have not addressed at all. In fact, it is almost as though the
industry has three types of numbers.
There is one
type that is simply correct, but it only relates to results of simple
calculations.
A second type
of number is one that relates to such things as the cost of a reactor
or the time needed to build it. These seem very often to be off by a
factor of 2. If a reactor is expected to take five years to build and
cost $6 billion, it is probably best to bet that it will take ten
years and cost $12 billion.
The third
type is safety analysis calculations that can actually be checked have
historically been off by an order of magnitude. Given the types of
reactors that have operated commercially, the safety analysis made on
them, and the time they have been running, we should probably have had
one commercially operating reactor experience a partial or full melt
down worldwide since commercial nuclear plants first started
delivering energy. Instead, we have had eleven – that we know of.
All told, we might say that
putting money into nuclear power goes beyond being a monumental waste.
It detracts from the overarching issue of dealing with climate change
by making that money unavailable for dealing with the problem using
less expensive, more reliable energy that can be built far more
quickly.
Featured image: San
Onofre nuclear plant (awnisALAN,
CC-BY-SA 2.0)
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