The best future "sustainable" energy source

[Merle]

Let's look at our alternatives for a future "sustainable" energy supply.

First, note that I put "sustainable" in quotes. Nothing is fully sustainable. Everything in some way increases the entropy of the universe. For this exercise we will count a process as sustainable if it leaves the planet in essentially the same state, except for consumption of non-renewable fuels or deterioration of non-renewable minerals.

Now let's compare our energy alternatives on a level playing field.

Here's the ground rules: First, your energy solution must pay full compensation to restore the environment for all the damage it does including releases of carbon into the atmosphere. Second, your energy solution needs to pay all the costs of safely disposing all its wastes including worn out solar panels, captured carbon, and nuclear wastes. And third your solution must pay up front all the fair market price of an insurance plan or government program to cover any damages it might cause, including possible future releases of waste materials in the next 200 years.

Now we turn it over to the free market. Who will win?

I think we would have 3 major competitors:

a) Fossil fuels with carbon capture.
b) Alternative energies (Wind/solar with batteries/hydro storage.)
c) Nuclear.

Now let's do a thought experiment in which these compete in four rounds:

1) Meet the current electricity demand.
2) Provide energy for all industrial high-temperature heating applications currently dominated by fossil fuels.
3) Provide the energy to make the materials for all things made from fossil fuels, including plastics, fertilizers, and pesticides.
4) Provide global transportation.

May the best energy-provider win!

Round 1: Electricity.
I suspect fossil fuel costs would increase 50% due to paying for the carbon capture. All three might take a hit on the costs of long term disposal and insurance covering their wastes. Also, wind and solar become very expensive when they need to provide energy storage for periods with little sun and wind. So my money is on nuclear, but electric costs could easily cost 25% more under these ground rules (and get worse when we consider round 2.)

Round 2: High-temperature heating for industrial processes.
Here fossil fuels currently have a huge advantage in that they can be burned to provide the heat directly. Other sources usually need to first make electricity. All three sources are currently in the same price ballpark for making electricity. But when generating electricity, fossil and nuclear fuels have an innate thermodynamic limit to their efficiency in that only about 1/3 of their heat is actually usable to make electricity. Even with that disadvantage, they compete well with wind and solar. But when fossil fuels have the opportunity to provide heat without first losing 2/3 of their energy in making electricity, the gloves are off. There is nothing that comes close to fossil fuels in most large industrial heating applications. If we make them pay for carbon storage, prices easily rise 50%. But they still would easily win this round.

My money is on fossil fuels.

That is, until fossil fuel supplies start to dwindle. And then we are left with electricity from other sources. Many industrial heating processes don't even have equipment or process designs that can do this without fossil fuels. Prices can easily soar to 400% of current, provided people were willing to pay for it. But people won't be able to afford that. Hence, anything involving things like concrete, steel, and glass will be too expensive for widespread use. Construction would take a hit. In other words, there would be a major economic downturn. And that would feed back to round 1 above.

Round 3: Materials currently made from fossil fuels.
Again, the existing fossil fuel processes have a clear advantage. Sure, we can make things like ammonia and hydrogen to provide alternates ways to get the materials, but that is going to be quite expensive. Again, I am betting of fossil fuels to win this round. That is, until fossil fuel supplies start to dwindle.

Round 4: Transportation
This one gets ugly. How would you use carbon capture on a car? Sure, you could try to capture carbon from the atmosphere, but that is far more dilute from the carbon in a smokestack. So the capture process is going to be expensive. I think for all three options, you end up with the power being generated in power plants with the power distributed over the grid to charge batteries for electric cars. No more internal combustion engines. And then you run into all the ecological problems of mining the materials for those batteries and disposing the old ones. That's going to get messy.

Probably nuclear wins this round, provided we could build all the power plants, electrical grid, and electric cars we needed. But whoops. We may have lost that in round 2.

That's why no country on Earth is serious about going carbon-neutral. The cost would be far to great. And they certainly don't wish to be the only ones doing this. What good would that do?

If you have read this far, you probably suspect I am not bullish on the future. You are correct. See https://iidb.org/threads/we-are-overloading-the-planet-now-what.27921/ .

Your turn. Place your bets.

 

[bilby]

I suspect fossil fuel costs would increase 50% due to paying for the carbon capture.

I suspect that you have zero basis for that number. Why not 100%, or 150%, or 10%?

What carbon capture technologies currently exist, how effective are they, how scalable are they, and what do they cost?

 

[bilby]

Other sources usually need to first make electricity.

Nuclear power can provide process heat using molten salt as the heat exchange medium. "Usually" is irrelevant; Do, or do not, there is no "usually".

 

[Merle]

Other sources usually need to first make electricity.

Nuclear power can provide process heat using molten salt as the heat exchange medium. "Usually" is irrelevant; Do, or do not, there is no "usually".

Can you explain to me how you would use molten salt as a medium to make steel from iron ore using nuclear energy?

 

[bilby]

Even with that disadvantage, they compete well with wind and solar

Even when you gloss over the cost of storage, which you don't seem to have really considered here at all.

 

[bilby]

Other sources usually need to first make electricity.

Nuclear power can provide process heat using molten salt as the heat exchange medium. "Usually" is irrelevant; Do, or do not, there is no "usually".

Can you explain to me how you would use molten salt as a medium to make steel from iron ore using nuclear energy?

No, I probably can't. I doubt either of us have sufficent time for me to even teach you the basic physics or chemistry you would need, in order to grasp any such explanation, and then there's engineering, economics, and a fair bit of politics in which you also demonstrate insufficient understanding.

On the off-chance that I might not be completely wasting my time, here's a link to some existing uses of molten salt process heat in steelmaking.

Of course, it's likely easier to just go via electricity; But you seem to imagine that doing so would present an insurmountable cost hurdle (while simultaneously imagining that carbon capture and storage or grid scale batteries wouldn't). It's difficult to tell whether you are merely woefully ignorant of the various technologies and their costs; Or just hugely biased and so willfully ignorant of the facts.

Either way, you are building an argument on sand - if your wild-ass guesses about the costs of various technologies (some of them purely hypothetical) are correct, then - surprise, surprise - your preferred conclusion becomes inevitable! <Stands back in amazement!>

 

[Merle]

I suspect fossil fuel costs would increase 50% due to paying for the carbon capture.

I suspect that you have zero basis for that number. Why not 100%, or 150%, or 10%?

What carbon capture technologies currently exist, how effective are they, how scalable are they, and what do they cost?

You suspect wrong. I write:

Global warming is caused by carbon dioxide in the air from the fuels we burn (Linyan, 1996). This could lead to catastrophe. With no good plan in site to reduce that to manageable levels, people have turned to the hope that someday we can capture the carbon dioxide and bury it. But we are gambling our civilization on little more than a promise that this will work (Dyke, 2021, Foley, 2023, Babacan, 2020, Trenberth, 2022). Not only is large-scale use of this technology unproven, every step of the way the vast quantities of carbon dioxide produced–more than three pounds for every pound of fuel that we burn–are a risk of an accident happening (Zegart, 2021; Zegart,2021a). -- We are Trashing the Planet

I also posted a link saying it comes out to $0.44 per gallon to capture the carbon from that gas. ( https://iidb.org/threads/we-are-overloading-the-planet-now-what.27921/page-48#post-1163541 ). That's based largely on estimates with unproven technology. I think it will be much higher.

As I make clear above, my figure is what I suspect if I was placing bets on future technology.

 

[Merle]

Other sources usually need to first make electricity.

Nuclear power can provide process heat using molten salt as the heat exchange medium. "Usually" is irrelevant; Do, or do not, there is no "usually".

Can you explain to me how you would use molten salt as a medium to make steel from iron ore using nuclear energy?

No, I probably can't. I doubt either of us have sufficent time for me to even teach you the basic physics or chemistry you would need, in order to grasp any such explanation, and then there's engineering, economics, and a fair bit of politics in which you also demonstrate insufficient understanding.

On the off-chance that I might not be completely wasting my time, here's a link to some existing uses of molten salt process heat in steelmaking.

Your link talks about using molten salt in heat treating and annealing of steel, not in making steel from iron ore. So it doesn't apply to the question I asked. Your link says nothing about getting to the temperature, heat transfer rates, and process conditions needed to make steel from iron ore.

And I would think there would be serious issues with transmitting molten salt at high temperature through miles of pipe to various manufacturing sites.

Trying to make steel from iron ore without substantial carbon emissions is very complex. See Sandalow, David, et.al., 2019, ICEF Industrial Heat Decarbonization Roadmap, ICEF, p. 34.

 

[Merle]

Even with that disadvantage, they compete well with wind and solar

Even when you gloss over the cost of storage, which you don't seem to have really considered here at all.

LOL! I have talked endlessly about the high cost of energy storage when using wind and solar. I mention it specifically in the opening post.

Wind and solar can be competitive when it comes to using them for a small portion of our overall electricity. But if we tried to run the whole grid off wind and solar, it would require extensive energy storage, and that makes this concept impractical.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Other sources usually need to first make electricity.

Nuclear power can provide process heat using molten salt as the heat exchange medium. "Usually" is irrelevant; Do, or do not, there is no "usually".

Can you explain to me how you would use molten salt as a medium to make steel from iron ore using nuclear energy?

No, I probably can't. I doubt either of us have sufficent time for me to even teach you the basic physics or chemistry you would need, in order to grasp any such explanation, and then there's engineering, economics, and a fair bit of politics in which you also demonstrate insufficient understanding.

On the off-chance that I might not be completely wasting my time, here's a link to some existing uses of molten salt process heat in steelmaking.

Of course, it's likely easier to just go via electricity; But you seem to imagine that doing so would present an insurmountable cost hurdle (while simultaneously imagining that carbon capture and storage or grid scale batteries wouldn't). It's difficult to tell whether you are merely woefully ignorant of the various technologies and their costs; Or just hugely biased and so willfully ignorant of the facts.

Either way, you are building an argument on sand - if your wild-ass guesses about the costs of various technologies (some of them purely hypothetical) are correct, then - surprise, surprise - your preferred conclusion becomes inevitable! <Stands back in amazement!>

What you are showing is an approach useful for some aspects of it, but not for refining--it's not hot enough.

 

[Jarhyn]

Other sources usually need to first make electricity.

Nuclear power can provide process heat using molten salt as the heat exchange medium. "Usually" is irrelevant; Do, or do not, there is no "usually".

Can you explain to me how you would use molten salt as a medium to make steel from iron ore using nuclear energy?

No, I probably can't. I doubt either of us have sufficent time for me to even teach you the basic physics or chemistry you would need, in order to grasp any such explanation, and then there's engineering, economics, and a fair bit of politics in which you also demonstrate insufficient understanding.

On the off-chance that I might not be completely wasting my time, here's a link to some existing uses of molten salt process heat in steelmaking.

Of course, it's likely easier to just go via electricity; But you seem to imagine that doing so would present an insurmountable cost hurdle (while simultaneously imagining that carbon capture and storage or grid scale batteries wouldn't). It's difficult to tell whether you are merely woefully ignorant of the various technologies and their costs; Or just hugely biased and so willfully ignorant of the facts.

Either way, you are building an argument on sand - if your wild-ass guesses about the costs of various technologies (some of them purely hypothetical) are correct, then - surprise, surprise - your preferred conclusion becomes inevitable! <Stands back in amazement!>

What you are showing is an approach useful for some aspects of it, but not for refining--it's not hot enough.

This is correct. Nuclear (hopefully) never gets the original source hot enough to melt steel (or else the reactor would break), and you can't heat a body beyond the black body temperature of the source. You could hear a forge, or keep the steel hot enough to form easily with that heat, but you could never actually take it to melt for refining or smelting that way.

There are, obviously, ways to get stuff hotter than a black body source, but not without an active component adding heat to a closed system.

 

[steve_bank]

The better question is what level of energy consumption is sustainable.

Yiu first have to quantify the amount of energy is required. That brings in population and industrial production.

From what I have read and heard from the wind and solar industry is that wind and solar can not completely replace current energy demand let alone growth like EVs.

If you want to get rid of fossil fuels to keep the status quo nuclear has to be part of it.

The ttl solar energy incidence at the surface of Earth is finite. There is only so much area where it is practical to put solar panels.

The amount energy that can be derived from wind is finite.

I am sure there are studies that quantify maxim global wind and solar energy.

There are online tools that given latitude and longitude and time of tear the average power density at the surface. There are working soalr power stations oeated by utilities.

 

[bilby]

Other sources usually need to first make electricity.

Nuclear power can provide process heat using molten salt as the heat exchange medium. "Usually" is irrelevant; Do, or do not, there is no "usually".

Can you explain to me how you would use molten salt as a medium to make steel from iron ore using nuclear energy?

No, I probably can't. I doubt either of us have sufficent time for me to even teach you the basic physics or chemistry you would need, in order to grasp any such explanation, and then there's engineering, economics, and a fair bit of politics in which you also demonstrate insufficient understanding.

On the off-chance that I might not be completely wasting my time, here's a link to some existing uses of molten salt process heat in steelmaking.

Of course, it's likely easier to just go via electricity; But you seem to imagine that doing so would present an insurmountable cost hurdle (while simultaneously imagining that carbon capture and storage or grid scale batteries wouldn't). It's difficult to tell whether you are merely woefully ignorant of the various technologies and their costs; Or just hugely biased and so willfully ignorant of the facts.

Either way, you are building an argument on sand - if your wild-ass guesses about the costs of various technologies (some of them purely hypothetical) are correct, then - surprise, surprise - your preferred conclusion becomes inevitable! <Stands back in amazement!>

What you are showing is an approach useful for some aspects of it, but not for refining--it's not hot enough.

But electricity will do for that part, so it doesn't matter as long as your electricity comes from fission.

 

[bilby]

The better question is what level of energy consumption is sustainable.

No it isn't. That's a terrible question, because it contains:

1) An unquantifiable variable (what do you mean by "sustainable"?), so the answer is a matter of opinion; And

2) It assumes counterfactually that all "energy consumption" is roughly similar in its impact on whatever you mean by "sustainable", which is clearly nonsense (the level of energy consumption from wind power that is "sustainable" is presumably many orders of magnitude different than the "sustainable" level of consumption of energy from burning lignite); And

3) It assumes that we are even able to reduce energy consumption (or even growth in energy consumption; or even growth in per capita energy consumption) without significant ill effects, including damage to the environment. This assumption is highly dubious.

When the answer to your question entails an opinion, a falsehood, and a questionae assumption, it is a bad question.

A better question by FAR is the question implied by the OP - How do we ensure that people have access to as much energy as they want, at prices similar to or less than today's prices, without fucking up any significant parts of our environment?

 

[bilby]

Let's look at our alternatives for a future "sustainable" energy supply.

First, note that I put "sustainable" in quotes. Nothing is fully sustainable. Everything in some way increases the entropy of the universe.

No shit.

For this exercise we will count a process as sustainable if it leaves the planet in essentially the same state, except for consumption of non-renewable fuels or deterioration of non-renewable minerals.

Why? This is a terrible definition.

Now let's compare our energy alternatives on a level playing field.

Oh, yes! Let's do that.

Here's the ground rules: First, your energy solution must pay full compensation to restore the environment for all the damage it does including releases of carbon into the atmosphere.

OK.

Second, your energy solution needs to pay all the costs of safely disposing all its wastes including worn out solar panels, captured carbon, and nuclear wastes.

Good.

And third your solution must pay up front all the fair market price of an insurance plan or government program to cover any damages it might cause, including possible future releases of waste materials in the next 200 years.

Hmm. All the damages it "might" cause is UNLIMITED damages, for absolutely any and all choices. You just rendered the problem impossible to address, because literally EVERYTHING might cause damage.

The only current power source that comes anywhere close to meeting your impossible standard here is nuclear power, which is the only technology in human history whose waste has never hurt anyone or been released from safe storage into the wider environment.

But I can't help getting the sneaking feeling that this clause wasn't added with the intent of helping the case for nuclear power, and that the help it actually provides to that technology was both unintended and unwitting.

Now we turn it over to the free market.

Why? Are we all suddenly supposed to be radical libertarians who won't accept government control of technology, even in the cause of environmental protection?

Who will win?

I think we would have 3 major competitors:

a) Fossil fuels with carbon capture.
b) Alternative energies (Wind/solar with batteries/hydro storage.)
c) Nuclear.

I think you have already firmly ruled out a) and b) with your prerequisites.

Now let's do a thought experiment in which these compete in four rounds:

1) Meet the current electricity demand.

OK. You'll also need to meet future increases in demand, as poor people in places like Africa who currently don't have it, decide that life is better with reliable and affordable electricity.

2) Provide energy for all industrial high-temperature heating applications currently dominated by fossil fuels.

This can simply be done via electricity as an intermediate step. It's a "nice to have" efficiency, if you can get it, but it isn't critically or even significantly important. Electricity from wind power can run electric arc furnaces; Burning coal, oil, or gas aren't necessary, they're just cheap - and they are cheap because they don't pay for their carbon emissions or other wastes and environmental impacts.

3) Provide the energy to make the materials for all things made from fossil fuels, including plastics, fertilizers, and pesticides.

This is included already in 1) and 2).

4) Provide global transportation.

Also already included in 1) and 2).

May the best energy-provider win!

Round 1: Electricity.
I suspect fossil fuel costs would increase 50% due to paying for the carbon capture. All three might take a hit on the costs of long term disposal and insurance covering their wastes. Also, wind and solar become very expensive when they need to provide energy storage for periods with little sun and wind. So my money is on nuclear, but electric costs could easily cost 25% more under these ground rules (and get worse when we consider round 2.)

Fossil fuels are completely incapable of meeting your criteria regarding the future harm from waste, and are out of the competition immediately. Even if we tone down your excessive requirements for future safety, the sheer quantities of waste imply a significant risk; Just piling it up somewhere could be (and has been) deadly.

A similar problem of sheer scale arises if you attempt to include (still hypothetical) storage for intermittently generated electricity; There are fundamental physical limits on how small a storage system can possibly be, because the energy is stored by electrons in atoms, and the amounts of energy we are discussing imply very large numbers of such atoms. This is why Lithium is a desirable material - it's the lightest solid element, so you carry around the least practical mass of nucleons per chemically usable electron.

And the cost of storage is astronomical, partly because you gotta buy all that lithium, and partly because you need massive excess generating capacity to charge the batteries while still supplying power to consumers. See https://www.technologyreview.com/20...t-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/amp/

Round 2: High-temperature heating for industrial processes.
Here fossil fuels currently have a huge advantage in that they can be burned to provide the heat directly. Other sources usually need to first make electricity. All three sources are currently in the same price ballpark for making electricity. But when generating electricity, fossil and nuclear fuels have an innate thermodynamic limit to their efficiency in that only about 1/3 of their heat is actually usable to make electricity.

Which would be a problem if the other 2/3 were completely unusable for literally anything. But that's not the case; The inability to melt steel isn't an indication that an energy source has no value for any purpose whatsoever. So this "problem" is a red herring.

Even with that disadvantage, they compete well with wind and solar. But when fossil fuels have the opportunity to provide heat without first losing 2/3 of their energy

...and without paying the VAST cost of their environmental harm...

in making electricity, the gloves are off. There is nothing that comes close to fossil fuels

...that can externalise their carbon emissions and other environmental harms...

in most large industrial heating applications. If we make them pay for carbon storage, prices easily rise 50%. But they still would easily win this round.

If we make them pay for carbon storage, it becomes far cheaper to use other energy sources. That 50% figure is, I believe, wildly optimistic, and it doesn't include the cost of mitigating other harms from fossil fuel use; They still have no clue what to do with the other wastes. And environmental damage is not the only problem. Around ten people die in the USA alone, every single year, as a direct consequence of mining coal. I don't know what price you want to put on that, but carbon capture and storage won't resurrect any dead miners, or help their widows and children, or prevent next year's round of fatalities.

My money is on fossil fuels.

Then you would lose your shirt, if competition between power sources were on a level playing field.

That is, until fossil fuel supplies start to dwindle. And then we are left with electricity from other sources. Many industrial heating processes don't even have equipment or process designs that can do this without fossil fuels. Prices can easily soar to 400% of current, provided people were willing to pay for it.

A four-fold increase sounds exaggerated, but not unaffordable. (Of course, you can make it sound much worse by saying "four hundred percent", rather than just "four", if you like). And of course, it's an upper bound. Some things will see much smaller price increases than others.

But people won't be able to afford that.

Why not? What people can afford has been getting bigger and bigger for a few centuries now, and there's no sign of a decline in this growth in affordability of, well, almost everything.

Hence, anything involving things like concrete, steel, and glass will be too expensive for widespread use.

All three are in widespread use because they are incredibly cheap; They may be used less if prices were to increase significantly, but not much less - they are too useful.

Construction would take a hit. In other words, there would be a major economic downturn. And that would feed back to round 1 above.

Large increases in energy cost certainly would cause a major economic downturn; We know this because it has already happened several times in the last century.

We also know that these downturns are survivable and ephemeral, also because we have seen them several times in the last century.

Round 3: Materials currently made from fossil fuels.
Again, the existing fossil fuel processes have a clear advantage. Sure, we can make things like ammonia and hydrogen to provide alternates ways to get the materials, but that is going to be quite expensive. Again, I am betting of fossil fuels to win this round. That is, until fossil fuel supplies start to dwindle.

This is a subset of the issues already covered, and reiterating it doesn't make your earlier analysis any less inaccurate.

Round 4: Transportation
This one gets ugly. How would you use carbon capture on a car? Sure, you could try to capture carbon from the atmosphere, but that is far more dilute from the carbon in a smokestack. So the capture process is going to be expensive. I think for all three options, you end up with the power being generated in power plants with the power distributed over the grid to charge batteries for electric cars. No more internal combustion engines. And then you run into all the ecological problems of mining the materials for those batteries and disposing the old ones. That's going to get messy.

This is a subset of the issues already covered, and reiterating it doesn't make your earlier analysis any less inaccurate.

Probably nuclear wins this round, provided we could build all the power plants, electrical grid, and electric cars we needed. But whoops. We may have lost that in round 2.

We don't need any of that. We can just manufacture gasoline from air at nuclear power plants. Then we can keep our existing cars, and our existing refuelling infrastructure.

That's why no country on Earth is serious about going carbon-neutral. The cost would be far to great. And they certainly don't wish to be the only ones doing this. What good would that do?

The political will to do something (rather than to merely appear to be doing something) is certainly lacking. What we can do about it is what we have always had to do when politicians want to do the wrong thing - we lobby them to do the right thing instead.

If you have read this far, you probably suspect I am not bullish on the future. You are correct. See https://iidb.org/threads/we-are-overloading-the-planet-now-what.27921/ .

Your turn. Place your bets.

Nuclear power is the clear and obvious winner. No other technology comes close.

Cost per kWh is a seriously contentious question. Nuclear power is fairly expensive, but mostly that's because powerful lobbies have spent six decades making it as expensive as possible, particularly in the USA. The cost per kWh is, however, still competitive with other generation technologies to a sufficient extent that plants remain open, and new plants are being built. The OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency gives a levelised cost in the USA of $77.71/MWh for nuclear, based on a 7% interest rate, with a cost on the same basis of $65.95/MWh for gas, and $93.75 for coal; The cheapest Solar PV option (large ground based panels) in the US has an LCOE of $79.84/MWh, and the cheapest wind power (onshore wind, 49% capacity factor) $42.85/MWh but this includes nothing to offset the intermittency of this power (see below). If the Capacity factor of the same onshore wind generator is 35%, the LCOE rises to $65.32/MWh.

By comparison, in Korea, the LCOE of nuclear power is just US$40.42/MWh, making it the cheapest even before the cost of intermittency is considered. The inherent cost of nuclear power is very low, and that shouldn't be a surprise - nuclear power is very simple technology, once you have produced a suitable fuel. You put the fuel in a big lump wrapped in concrete and steel, and it gets really hot. You needn't do much else, and you don't even need to put new fuel in (or remove the "waste") for at least several months. Plants last for many many decades, largely because of this simplicity and lack of moving parts.

The anti-nuclear lobby love to quote low costs for wind power, which really does have low LCOE, but this is somewhat misleading. The viability of a power plant is not solely determined by the cost of its output - it's also a function of the value of that output. A kWh of electricity at 3pm on a sunny and breezy afternoon in California can be worth less than nothing - that is, you have to pay the grid to take it off your hands. The same kWh on a still, hot evening, just after sunset, can be vastly more valuable - but wind and solar generators cannot take advantage of that high wholesale market price, unless they stored electricity generated when prices were low. But of course, storage is expensive. An LCOE calculated without including the cost of such storage results in figures that appear artificially low, and give a misleading idea of viability and profitability.

Deaths and environmental damage are perhaps less contentious. Deaths are difficult to fudge the numbers on for any technology, and the deaths per TWh for various sources were calculated by ExternE, a European project that set out in 2005 to calculate the various 'external' costs of energy, including public health and environmental impacts, and their data on deaths per TWh have been widely reported since that study (P. Bickel and R. Friedrich, Externalities of Energy, European Union Report EUR 21951, Luxembourg (2005); I haven't got a link to the original paper online, but reports such as James Conca's and Brian Wang's give the figures) was published. Their initial figure of 0.04 deaths/TWh for nuclear power was later revised down to 0.01/TWh, on the back of lower than projected actual cancer deaths amongst Chernobyl survivors, and the absence of a detectable increase in such deaths across Europe; James Conca's article linked above has been updated with this new information. Whichever dataset you choose, nuclear power is by far the least deadly way to make electricity, with only onshore wind coming close.

Environmental damage is not as clear cut as deaths, and depends on what you consider 'damage', and on how much of it you are willing to tolerate. Typically, the tolerance of environmental activists varies by technology, with a nuclear plant that raises river water temperatures by a couple of degrees being 'bad', while the mining of rare earths for wind turbines is simply ignored. On a like-for-like basis, nuclear power is one of the least damaging to the environment of any electricity generating technology. The materials used are small in quantity per kWh generated, and waste streams are completely managed and segregated from the environment indefinitely - a claim no other industry, power generation or otherwise, can match. Iida Ruishalme's Thoughtscapism blog is an excellent place to find hard data on the environmental impacts of nuclear power; She is a cell biologist and always backs her arguments with solid references. https://thoughtscapism.com/2017/11/04/nuclear-waste-ideas-vs-reality/ is a good starting point; https://thoughtscapism.com/2017/11/...astest-and-lowest-cost-clean-energy-solution/ is another article in which she addresses these questions.








The last four paragraphs above are a copy/paste of a post I made in a previous discussion of nuclear power; I saved a copy because the same basic slurs just keep being repeated over and over by the anti-nuclear lobby

 

[Merle]

And third your solution must pay up front all the fair market price of an insurance plan or government program to cover any damages it might cause, including possible future releases of waste materials in the next 200 years.

Hmm. All the damages it "might" cause is UNLIMITED damages, for absolutely any and all choices. You just rendered the problem impossible to address, because literally EVERYTHING might cause damage.

No, I did not say power companies must pay all possible damages they might cause in the comparison above. All I asked is each solution "must pay up front all the fair market price of an insurance plan or government program to cover any damages it might cause". So if your solution has one chance in a million of killing a thousand people, then the cost of the solution for the sake of this comparison must include the fair market price for insurance or a government program to cover this. Such insurance might not even be available, but this comparison assumes each supplier would be responsible for the fair market cost of such insurance if it existed. That is only fair that this gets included in the comparison.

2) Provide energy for all industrial high-temperature heating applications currently dominated by fossil fuels.

This can simply be done via electricity as an intermediate step. It's a "nice to have" efficiency, if you can get it, but it isn't critically or even significantly important. Electricity from wind power can run electric arc furnaces; Burning coal, oil, or gas aren't necessary, they're just cheap - and they are cheap because they don't pay for their carbon emissions or other wastes and environmental impacts.

We can certainly do some industrial heating by substituting electricity for fossil fuels. But it is not yet known if electricity can commercially replace all such fossil fuel heating applications.

A similar problem of sheer scale arises if you attempt to include (still hypothetical) storage for intermittently generated electricity; There are fundamental physical limits on how small a storage system can possibly be, because the energy is stored by electrons in atoms, and the amounts of energy we are discussing imply very large numbers of such atoms. This is why Lithium is a desirable material - it's the lightest solid element, so you carry around the least practical mass of nucleons per chemically usable electron.

And the cost of storage is astronomical, partly because you gotta buy all that lithium, and partly because you need massive excess generating capacity to charge the batteries while still supplying power to consumers. See https://www.technologyreview.com/20...t-rely-on-batteries-to-clean-up-the-grid/amp/

I agree. I have already provided several links regarding the high cost of battery storage. This is a good link I had missed.

Solar and wind are going to have a hard time meeting most of our grid demand, because they are intermittent in nature, and thus require a lot of expensive battery storage.

Nuclear is better, but it also has a storage problem. Once nuclear gets running, you cannot quickly shut it off. So, we typically use fossil fuels to throttle the supply of electricity back when the demand is low. When France hits low demand, they use the excess power made by nuclear to pump water up into the mountains to be used to make more electricity later. Or they sell the excess to Germany or Belgium. This would be a big problem for nuclear if we didn't have gas plants online that we could throttle back.

Round 2: High-temperature heating for industrial processes.
Here fossil fuels currently have a huge advantage in that they can be burned to provide the heat directly. Other sources usually need to first make electricity. All three sources are currently in the same price ballpark for making electricity. But when generating electricity, fossil and nuclear fuels have an innate thermodynamic limit to their efficiency in that only about 1/3 of their heat is actually usable to make electricity.

Which would be a problem if the other 2/3 were completely unusable for literally anything. But that's not the case; The inability to melt steel isn't an indication that an energy source has no value for any purpose whatsoever. So this "problem" is a red herring.

We have discussed this before. Thermal power plants require cooling on the discharge side to cause a low pressure to help pull the steam through the turbine. Hence, a large portion of the heat energy is lost in a power plant.

Yes, we could use waste steam coming off power plants to do low-grade heating applications like heating buildings after it comes through the turbine. This isn't done much, but can certainly help. There is a lot of investment required for the infrastructure to do this.

in most large industrial heating applications. If we make them pay for carbon storage, prices easily rise 50%. But they still would easily win this round.

If we make them pay for carbon storage, it becomes far cheaper to use other energy sources. That 50% figure is, I believe, wildly optimistic,

I had quoted a source that said the cost of carbon capture was about $0.50 per gallon, which is far less than 50% of the cost. However, I don't think this figure included transporting and storing the carbon, which can bring the cost much higher. I estimated 50%, but I too expect it is much higher.

Michael Barnard indicates that Chevron's demonstration with carbon capture missed much of the total cost and is not scalable. It was largely a gimmick by fossil fuel companies to burn waste natural gas to run a carbon capture system to provide CO2 that they could use to flush out wells and get more petroleum. The gas they burnt to run the carbon capture equipment emitted half as much carbon as the equipment absorbed from the atmosphere. Chevron got cheap publicity but didn't do anything much for the environment. See Chevron’s Fig Leaf Part 1 (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4), Clean Technica.

Round 4: Transportation
This one gets ugly. How would you use carbon capture on a car? Sure, you could try to capture carbon from the atmosphere, but that is far more dilute from the carbon in a smokestack. So the capture process is going to be expensive. I think for all three options, you end up with the power being generated in power plants with the power distributed over the grid to charge batteries for electric cars. No more internal combustion engines. And then you run into all the ecological problems of mining the materials for those batteries and disposing the old ones. That's going to get messy.

This is a subset of the issues already covered, and reiterating it doesn't make your earlier analysis any less inaccurate.

Probably nuclear wins this round, provided we could build all the power plants, electrical grid, and electric cars we needed. But whoops. We may have lost that in round 2.

We don't need any of that. We can just manufacture gasoline from air at nuclear power plants. Then we can keep our existing cars, and our existing refuelling infrastructure.

I have previously showed you where this claim goes wrong. See Synthetic Fuels Won’t Save the Planet, so Don’t Say They Could.

Nuclear power is the clear and obvious winner. No other technology comes close.

Cost per kWh is a seriously contentious question. Nuclear power is fairly expensive, but mostly that's because powerful lobbies have spent six decades making it as expensive as possible, particularly in the USA. The cost per kWh is, however, still competitive with other generation technologies to a sufficient extent that plants remain open, and new plants are being built. The OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency gives a levelised cost in the USA of $77.71/MWh for nuclear, based on a 7% interest rate, with a cost on the same basis of $65.95/MWh for gas, and $93.75 for coal; The cheapest Solar PV option (large ground based panels) in the US has an LCOE of $79.84/MWh, and the cheapest wind power (onshore wind, 49% capacity factor) $42.85/MWh but this includes nothing to offset the intermittency of this power (see below). If the Capacity factor of the same onshore wind generator is 35%, the LCOE rises to $65.32/MWh.

By comparison, in Korea, the LCOE of nuclear power is just US$40.42/MWh, making it the cheapest even before the cost of intermittency is considered. The inherent cost of nuclear power is very low, and that shouldn't be a surprise - nuclear power is very simple technology, once you have produced a suitable fuel. You put the fuel in a big lump wrapped in concrete and steel, and it gets really hot. You needn't do much else, and you don't even need to put new fuel in (or remove the "waste") for at least several months. Plants last for many many decades, largely because of this simplicity and lack of moving parts.

Now you turn to Korea as your nuclear hero? Yes, Korea has apparently been making nuclear far cheaper than anybody else, but they have taken a lot of criticism for their shoddy workmanship. MIT Technology Review says:

Less than a decade after Barakah broke ground, Korea is dismantling its nuclear industry, shutting down older reactors and scrapping plans for new ones. State energy companies are being shifted toward renewables. Lee’s legacy has collapsed, and the hope that Seoul’s nuclear program could help combat climate change has dwindled to nothing.


From <https://www.technologyreview.com/20...uption-blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/>

Also:

In 2022, the state-owned company KEPCO, builder, owner, and operator of South Korea’s nuclear power plants, filed a record operating loss of KRW32.6 trillion (US$202225.2 billion) and its net debt jumped by 32 percent to reach unprecedented KRW192.8 trillion (US$149 billion). KEPCO’s CEO resigned over the results in May 2023. Under the principle of “selling all available properties” KEPCO announced the sale of its Seoul headquarters building in the heart of Seoul, along with 44 buildings owned by the company. 560 Investor trust has been eroding for a while. KEPCO stocks lost 70 percent of their value over the past seven years (see Figure 46). The downward trend did not change following a new, ultra pro-nuclear administration taking office in mid-2022.


From <https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/...Status-Report-2023-HTML.html#_idTextAnchor281>

That doesn't sound like Korea nuclear power is the hallmark of efficiency.

Investor trust has been eroding for a while. KEPCO stocks lost 70 percent of their value over the past seven years (see Figure 46). The downward trend did not change following a new, ultra pro-nuclear administration taking office in mid-2022.



From <https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/...Status-Report-2023-HTML.html#_idTextAnchor281>

KEPCO is trying to build nuclear plants in other countries. Only UAE is buying in. All countries know they will be desperate for non-fossil-fuel power in the coming decades. If Korea was selling quality reactors at half the price, people would be desperate to get them. But nobody seems to be buying them, and the company that builds them is in serious financial trouble.

KEPCO is still in the course of finalizing its only foreign construction project so far, i.e., the delivery of four reactors to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Barakah project was supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of the implementation on-time on-budget of a nuclear power plant construction in a newcomer country. The project is three years behind schedule and the extent of cost overrun is unknown.From <https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/...Status-Report-2023-HTML.html#_idTextAnchor281>

 

[bilby]

it is not yet known if electricity can commercially replace all such fossil fuel heating applications.

Yes, it is. It can. For a given value of "commercially".

If you don't define the meanings of your weasel words, I reserve the right to assign any meaning that suits my position.

 

[bilby]

Nuclear is better, but it also has a storage problem. Once nuclear gets running, you cannot quickly shut it off.

That's only true if you still live in the twentieth century. I haven't visited it for almost a quarter of a century now; Is the Cold War still going on?

 

[Merle]

Nuclear is better, but it also has a storage problem. Once nuclear gets running, you cannot quickly shut it off.

That's only true if you still live in the twentieth century. I haven't visited it for almost a quarter of a century now; Is the Cold War still going on?

Do you have a source to verify your claim that modern nuclear reactors can be easily throttled to quickly match the instantaneous demand for electricity?

Do you have a source to verify your claim that modern nuclear reactors don't need a source of emergency cooling water?

Or are you just going to endlessly repeat the claims without answering the questions?

 

[Merle]

it is not yet known if electricity can commercially replace all such fossil fuel heating applications.

Yes, it is. It can. For a given value of "commercially".

Maybe it is. Maybe it can.

There are still a lot of questions about how we would do high-temperature industrial heating without high carbon emissions. The ovens and furnaces are integrally tied in to the process. So we need to research the processes with new energy sources, and then rebuild all the equipment. It is a huge undertaking. We can't even be sure we can do it at a reasonable cost for all materials we use today.

See:

Friedman, J., et. al., 2019, Low-Carbon Heat Solutions for Heavy Industry: Sources, Options and Costs Today, Center on Global Energy Policy

and:

Sandalow, David, et.al., 2019, ICEF Industrial Heat Decarbonization Roadmap, ICEF

The executive summary by Friedman, et. al. uses the acronym CCUS ( carbon capture, use, and storage) six times. I think they are too positive on the feasibility of CCUS, but they are correct to recognize the huge problems of doing industrial heating without high carbon emissions. They write:

Most substitute supply options for low-carbon heat appear more technically challenging and expensive than retrofits for CCUS. Even given the uncertainties around costs and documented complexities in applying CO₂ capture to industrial systems, it may prove simpler and cheaper to capture and store CO₂.