Nuclear Advocates Are Rabidly Hostile to Renewable Energy—But Why?
To their shame, many pro-nuclear groups spend more of their resources tearing apart the wind and solar industries than promoting their own. Here’s a great example, a graph that shows that solar and wind are too expensive.
But there are two problems with this:
1) The idea that renewables are inherently more expensive than traditional fuels is essentially false; it is only through cherry-picking the very best data points so as to deliberately misrepresent the issue that one can arrive at this conclusion. From EnergyFactCheck.Org:
- According to the financial advisory firm Lazard,wind energy is the cheapest source of electricity in the United States, regardless of subsidies. (Lazard, September 2014, http://bit.ly/16JaWtm)
- Lazard also found that utility-scale solar, geothermal energy, biomass, and energy efficiency are already cost competitive with natural gas and coal, even without subsidies. (Lazard, September 2014, http://bit.ly/16JaWtm)
- The average U.S. wind power purchase agreement signed in 2013 was for $0.025 per kW/h. That’s about 1/4th of the average retail price for electricity in the U.S. (U.S. Department of Energy, August 2014, http://1.usa.gov/1Gagp6R)
- The price of solar energy dropped by 80% from 2008 to 2013. (IRENA, September 2014, http://bit.ly/1GmbLbm)
2) Even if this weren’t the case, saying that the costs associated with a nascent industry are too high is really asinine. In their early days, adding machines cost more than abacuses, calculators cost more than slide rules, computing with PCs cost more than it did with mainframes, and getting information from the Internet was more difficult and expensive than going to a local library. The cost of energy from wind and solar is falling every day; ignoring that requires real effort, not to mention a distinct lack of honesty.
I repeat my advice to the pro-nuke people: advanced nuclear has real potential, but it’s not enhanced by running down renewables with specious arguments. You folks are better and smarter than this.
The problem is this:
Nuclear energy is pure baseload. Some fanatics will mention efforts for load-following reactor designs, but that is hokum. The NRC would never allow such a thing, and NIMBYism would stop any experimental reactor builds even if the NRC was suddenly replaced by doppelgangers under the control of nuclear power advocates.
So we have a reactor design that is absolutely baseload. It operates at ~95% capacity until it is shut down for maintanence – when it’s at 0% capacity.
Renewables – on the other hand – are variable power sources and require either balance power (not nuclear), massive energy storage solutions, or load following demand (ahem – Windfuels).
Since most nuclear power advocates are not aware of the prospect of Windfuels, and anyone who knows anything about energy storage knows that it is not cost effective in many broad areas of high wind or high solar resource… the nuclear advocates feel that any advance in renewables will encroach upon the demand for baseload power – as each renewable option will require more balance power.
It’s only through the advent of a load-following demand that nuclear and renewables can become complementary rather than competing for the same energy storage.
I hear you, and it DOES make sense that the two are in competition with one another, but personally I’m swayed by Amory Lovins’ analysis of our daily load curves and how they can be met with a combination of efficiency, renewable resources (including variable ones), and a fairly small amount of storage: http://2greenenergy.com/2015/05/24/amory-lovins-40-year-energy-plan/.
Just saw Amory, and, since he’s not actually an engineer or scientist, he doesn’t get what energy density means. So he advocates expending several times more valuable resources, including land & species, on wind/solar ‘farming’ than we need to.
And, still ending up with several % variation in power delivery & reliability. Power companies don’t sell power, they sell 0.9999 reliability power. Wind/solar can’t do that. And, the crutch of storage simply means spending 1/CF more on wind/solar devices, and on storage that must do a very difficult trick — accept a charging rate, unpredictably, but at 1/CF times the average load that will drain the storage. That’s a very expensive, difficult system to build/maintain.
Imagine buying a V8-engined business vehicle and finding out it only averages the energy delivery of a V2. Do you buy 5 or 6 more and hire folks to drive them to do your work?
;]
The reality of energy density is what true environmentalists are concerned with. It’s why my dear old sierra Club’s motto used to wisely be: “Atoms, not dams”. The Chinese & others know this. Naive, self-appointed ‘greens’, who don’t bother to study facts, actually endanger their and our country’s future.
—
Dr. A. Cannara
650 400 3071
Thanks, Alex. We advocates of solar and wind are pretty-much aware of the variability and power density issues. But, as we’re demonstrated at ever-increasing volumes all around the globe, neither renders renewables impotent to change the world.
In the UK, a recent report indicated that a recently agreed nuclear power station – due to come into service in 2025 will require twice as much subsidy as it would cost to achieve the same thing with solar plus storage
Gary,
I’m skeptical, but not entirely dismissive, of the findings of that report (which I haven’t read)… Does the report assume the same time frame? If so, what is that time frame? Nuclear power costs more on the initial build, but it makes up for that by lasting ~60+ years. If the report were only for a fixed period of 10 years or so… I could believe it… or if they offered an incredibly steep discount rate for additional years. But they would have almost had to have manipulated the study in order to result in those findings. The U.K. has a miserably poor solar resource, so the LCOE for solar is significantly higher there than in good regions of the U.S., and in those “high sun” regions of the U.S., nuclear and solar are a toss-up in terms of LCOE – even before the cost of storage is factored in.
I love the “nuclear costs” fribble! Take the fave ‘greens’ whipping boy plant in Finland — $11B over its $4B budget.
If it sells its 2+GW of juice at German pricing, it pays for itself in 3 years and then runs for decades, printing ~2000 Benjamins/hour, even if only charging $0.10/kWHr.
Imagine if it got carbon credits?!
;]
The hijacking of the environmental movement by ‘green’ politics and business investment for subsidy will be reason for our descendants to ridicule our naivete. As they spit on our graves, they may well ask: “What happened to the old Sierra Club wisdom? ‘Atoms, not dams'”.
Sadly many self-proclaiming ‘enviro folks & orgs show breathtaking disrespect for fact, as do climate deniers.
—
Dr. A. Cannara
650 400 3971
Hi, Gary. Can you post a link to it, please? I have a whole audience of people in my pro-nuke group that needs to understand this.
Got your email. Thanks.
See http://atomicinsights.com/saving-the-environment-from-environmentalism-2/