The Economics of Nuclear Energy
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- čas přidán 14. 05. 2024
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This video is based on, and inspired on the amazing Illnois Energy Professors video of the same title: • Economics of Nuclear R... I highly recommend you subscribe and watch his collection of videos.
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Writer/Narrator: Brian McManus
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References:
[1] wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/han...
[2] www.electricitymap.org/zone/G...
[3] large.stanford.edu/courses/201...
[4] www.eia.gov/electricity/gener...
[5] • Economics of Nuclear R...
[6] css.umich.edu/factsheets/nucle....
[7] online.ucpress.edu/cse/articl...
[8]www.montereycountyweekly.com/b...
[9] www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/...
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"requires voters who understand the energy market..."
Well shoot, there goes the future.
Voters don't give a shit about literally anything.
Welp whe now know the energy market, so maybe whe can do something(or maybe not)
@Christian Bai nuclear power can generate way more energy then a solar panel also we have to use to save us some time on earth
@@legolegs87 Build a nuke plant on time and within budget and get back to me. Especially look at nuclear construction debacles like Plant Vogtle in Georgia, USA. The assumptions made by the authors regarding costs are, up to now, a joke.
Whatever the projected costs and time-frames,are double them. That's what informed voters/ratepayers around here understand. Better to hold your breath and wait for fusion,,,,,, OH WAIT! .....
Meanwhile, I went off-grid solar 20 years ago and have been doing great,,,, and I'm a retired nuke engineer.
@@lukasausen don't think, even for a second, that you know anything about energy markets from one youtube video. He said it himself in the video "this is a gross oversimplification".
I'm an I&C Engineer at a nuclear plant. You covered things very well (as I would expect from you!). There are a couple points that weren't covered.
1) Nuclear plants can only run as long as they have the "social capital" required. If the population decided they are uncomfortable with nuclear, the plant will end up shutting down.
2) Instead of spending money on fuel (possibly imported), a Nuclear plant spends it on salaries for well paid professionals. That money stays in the community. Purely commercial plants don't fully take this into account, but government owned/supported plants recognize the benefits.
I imagine the more places you go outside the USA, the less true what you wrote becomes
@@ArruVision Interesting. How many countries have you gone to to visit their nuke plants?
@@bigfish92672 remains fairly true for Canada, but I cannot comment on other nations.
Everywhere the nuclear plants require almost a city worth of skilled personnel, even if they are using a Soviet design. Everybody takes the plants seriously
And with nuclear plants more energy independence is achieved.
Our rejection of Nuclear power was a massive mistake, and the environment has payed dearly for it as we continue to rely on fossil fuels for our electricity
Its so ironic too lmfao.
Between the nuclear power construction and going ham on high speed railway, France got it so right in the 1980s, and her citizens as well as residents are enjoying its benefits even today.
I watched a DW documentary where beachgoers casually enjoy their day, despite there being a large nuclear power station situated nearby. They've become so used to it, and weren't all that concerned. Nuclear gets such a bad rep bc of the failures in Chernobyl & Fukushima, it's a shame.
@@CameronAdamsify And yet even France has legislated to reduce nuclear power's proportion in it's generation mix to 50% by 2035. It has put off any decision on whether to build any more new nuclear plants on hold until it completes building the only plant presently being constructed and it's only Gen III plant, Flamanville 3 in 2022. This plant's construction began in 2007. The last plant to become operational in France was in 1999. Beachgoers may not mind nuclear plants and they have served France and Europe well, but even in France nuclear power is not especially politically popular.
@@bluecedar7914 macron recently changed idea, they want to keep investing in nuclear, also because of the current gas and coal crisis
@@MultiTiago07 Yeah, he committed last week to help fund a Gen IV SMR experimental plant. Time will tell if it is any more successful than Avena's Gen III EPR design. If more successful they may be commercial in time to replace France's older 900 and 1300MWe Gen II plants from the early 2030's onwards, something the EPR design couldn't do this decade. Macron also committed to green hydrogen production and offshore wind farm development, so they probably are planning to stick to the 50% by 2035 plan even if the SMRs become viable to deploy commercially.
13:20 Keep in mind that variable renewables produce additional costs due to the necessity of building up overcapacity, backup, introduction of smart grids, and so on. While it is quite cheap to produce a unit of energy using renewables, it is much more expensive to provide an average unit of energy to a consumer, that, depending on the time of the day and the weather, may come from a cheap renewable source, or from an expensive backup like hydrogen or batteries.
Yup. Renewable energy LCOE always conveniently excludes the immense additional costs required to actually use renewable energies at the grid level. I read somewhere an estimation that if you include just 4-6 hours of energy storage to a solar plant, the LCOE shoots up to 80-100$. And realistically, you'd need at least 14 hours of storage to account for winter and dark days.
nuclear also needs load follower / peakers / fast energy storage
@@ebehdzikraa3855 not in the same way though. Nuclear plants have to constantly produce a consistent amount of energy, and they need storage if/when the demand dips below their production. Solar and wind need to produce energy in excess of demand in order to generate stored electricity at all. The excess energy from nuclear can be channeled toward useful ends such as hydrogen production, desalination, etc.. However, you just have to build more and more wind, solar, and storage capacity to even be able to have storage to buttress against their inherent issues of intermittency. This is part of the reason why a grid dominated by renewables isn't a great idea. Renewables are great for a lot of things, and we should scale them up as much as we can afford, but grids need to be reliable and cost-effective. Factoring in the required storage buildouts and excess capacity required to even equate a single nuclear plant is staggering and only has about half the lifetime, over which solar panels and lithium batteries in particular degrade quite drastically. There may be days where solar and wind outshine nuclear (pun intended), but they are well outside the norm and that is a huge deal. There are very few places on earth that consistently have very clear and sunny days with lots of wind, and for obvious reasons not a lot of people would want to live there.
Exactly.
The additional costs of storage are hardly so dire as all that.
In Australia the AEMO and CSIRO found that renewables *including* storage were still the best option.
Battery storage is one of the most expensive storage options, and was still competitive. Pumped Hydro is the cheapest option for bulk storage and of course quite viable all on it's own.
Even nuclear plant benefit from storage to buffer the daily variation in demand.
Short term thinking is what got us here in the first place.
The sctual problem are republicans
@Boris-Smiff Bullshit! The problem is Republicans' greed and their search for big short-term profit. The belief that profit outweighs everything is why everything is made to be disposable and the world is on fucking fire. Liberals are the only ones willing to make necessary, lasting change.
You said it exactly how I was thinkin'
@Boris-Smiff *neoliberalism
@@wirelesmike73 I think you're thinking the same thing but saying it differently. Neoliberalism allows for short term gains and republicans love that philosophy. I agree it's bullshit. Absolute bullshit. I hope one day the reps realize that
I work at a nuclear power plant, and honestly it's the most amazing piece of engineering I have ever seen.
I did as well and it was but was far to expensive.
I’ve been wondering what is it like to live inside the nuclear power plant. Is it dangerous?
@@ShafiraMeisy Not really. You can even swim in the pool which has the nuclear components. Nuclear kill fewer people than wind power so not many, really.
people are more likely to die falling from bed than from nuclear accident
boilermaker here, im hoping to soon too
The arguments on both sides are complex and I feel that just by discussing them, it makes a difference.
The conclusion that you have drawn may or may not be very accurate, but it makes us think and thats all that is needed. Just people being more aware of stuff affects their behaviour positively.
Thank You for making these videos.
Awesome to see you referring to the Illinois Energy Professor. His videos are really good, and taught me loads about energy production and the economics thereof.
Same, I’m now a nuke soldier, fighting for the future lol
10:05 That's a saddening truth. Politicians only think in 5 years, as it's about them not us
Most politicians care about their constituents, truth is those constituents just end up being 65 year olds who could give less of a fuck about the issues addressed above. Voter turnouts amongst young people are really fucking bad, especially the US.
was about to write exactly this. frustratingly, democracy, by its very nature, creates huge conflicts of interest for the elected politicians in that they care less about doing what's right and more about doing what's popular. in my humble opinion, experts and scientists should be the one making the big decisions because they conclude by analyzing facts, not what you and i happen to be into this year.
@@Ytrearneindre Well the issue with that is when the experts and scientists get the donations from the oil & gas lobbyists. Its much better for them to give us the information, than allow us to vote. New Zealand has a complete anti nuclear policy that is hopelessly out of date...
If politicians can do something that will benefit their party's popularity *now* , they will choose that instead of choosing something that might benefit the world later. It's way easier to flaunt a windmill park built in a year than a nuclear power plant which takes many more years to construct.
@@a1r592 its because unfortunately, everyone is short term focused and vote for those who are quote; sweet shop owners
0:48 France produces 71 percent of its electric energy needs from nuclear, not 61. Anyway, nice video. Please make a video on pros and cons of nuclear energy, gen 4 nuclear reactors and thorium powered nuclear reactors
Down from 76% years ago and will keep falling.
Used to be in the 80% range when I was in school. It was about the only thing I could respect the French for
@@Buran01 now watch our carbon intensity going up thanks to the Greens that force to close perfectly functionning reactors.
@@louisdrouard9211 Not really. The world's stock of technologically viable fissionables is not that large, so perhaps waiting for better technologies to use that resource more efficiently, like better reprocessing or the ability to suspend fission for prolonged periods, would be far preferable to cooking through all the fuel and leaving future generations none.
Nuclear fission whether it is more efficient or not requires a massive up front capital expenditure and risk. That is not the way investment works now.
As for thorium - as above, but also add billions and billions to design, demo and fully prove that plant actually works and then add decades to sell and build them.
You'd be better off to wait for Nuclear fusion.
Everytime again I'm impressed at how competent and with missing almost nothing or nothing important these display videos show data
Superb narration, graphics, animations and research. Thank you.
The Illinois EnergyProf is a criminally under-rated channel, hopefully he sees a lot of love from the community from that shout-out.
Thanks, I’ll check him out
I love him
I’ve watched all of his vids on nuclear at least once
No climate change?
Electric vehicles yes ?
No CO2 in the world to save the climate?
EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD NEEDS NUCLEAR, So no CO2, yes ?
The 'Illinois Energy Professor' youtube says that nuclear is extremely profitable AFTER 20 YEARS of operation and nobody wants to risk investing.
If all electric then no petroleum, no gas, no coal. Triple the electric demand, yes?
So TRIPLE the power plants?
So TRIPLE the main grid capacity. More towers, more cables.
So TRIPLE the 'poles and wires' to the streets and homes and businesses and industries?
Nuclear is more expensive than fossil fueled electric power.
More Infrastructure $ BILLIONS and $BILLIONS and.....?
More decades and decades and......
More construction workers and nuclear construction workers.
More nuclear operators?????
All nuclear accidents were human caused. Design failure or operation failure.
100,000 nuclear power plants.
75 years fighting nuclear proliferation.
Massive military defence costs 👏 😳
90% of the world's population is in dictatorships, no problem there?
Mr Putin threatened nuclear weapons if the USA military tries to stop him from killing his neighbour's children, no problem?
If Nuclear power is the only way to stop CO2 we are f....ked.
Every building is at the end of the grid.
Every building can have a solar PV system on their roof.
The grid is UNLOADED.
The existing grid only needs to be smart.
Three time zones across most continents.
Nuclear industry agrees EV 👍
Auto industry agrees EV 👍
Even fossil fuels agrees EV 👍
Governments agree EV 👍
Renewables agree EV 👍
Investment industry agrees 👍
USA Military does not agree with NUCLEAR in every country, military budget will explode.
TOTAL COSTS ARE WAY BIGGER THAN ANYBODY IS SAYING.
Government Garrentees profits for 60years to 100years.
No insurance company will touch it.
"... Requires a Voter to understand..." - Oh sh***t
When TPTB have been spending decades dumbing the people down in order to better control them...
Made my day
Fist of all, great video! I'm always amazed by the quality of your videos, they're astonishing! Aslo, I'd like to point out that in France many reactors can throttle down their power up to 50%, as they have developed a technology that let them control the power production. So, these nuclear plants are not base station power plants, as they cover the power consuption peaks too.
It's really not hard to throttle a nuclear reactor, it's mostly dealing with the neutron deflectors and pulling them out of the reaction to slow it down.
The issue is running it at anything besides 100% is inefficient and there's almost no reason to unless you are relying entirely on nuclear.
So nuclear makes a very very good base for everything else.
thank you brother your videos are very informative:)
feels like a line graph with profit/loss on the y axis and years in the x axis is easier to read.
Watch the video that he based this on, it makes much more sense in that context. This video is little more than a direct copy of it, just with added stock footage
yeah, the blocks kinda confused me tbh
Yes
I THINK it was MSNBC, that recieved complaints for using a bizzare concentric circle/bullseye type graph, that was difficult to understand, and not suitable for the data represented. So...I've seen worse !
@@Lixn1337 Its a little shorter and easier to understand, which can be useful for people without enough time to watch the whole lecture. I still enjoyed the lecture though.
It's also amazing how much the set-up to deal with renewables varies by region. I live in a northern area with lots of hydro but almost no solar investment. For us the challenge isn't day-night fluctuation in energy; it's that hydro is insanely productive during the spring run-off in Feb-May. We have to spill over the dams because we can't use all of the electricity. But the challenge is could we store say an entire extra month of power and release it over the other months? The thinking now is that batteries wouldn't be effective at seasonal storage, and more effort is going into the production of hydrogen or synthetic methane for long term storage.
Or ammonia to store hydrogen.
In an ideal world, you could do what most hydro plants do. Loads of hydroelectric plants across the world pump overrun into a high elevation reservoir. When demand falls beneath available supply, you use some excess energy to fill the reservoir... when demand is high and naturally available supply is lower, you open the reservoir floodgates and run it through the dam again.
The difficulty is that to pull that off requires geographical demands that may not necessarily be available. If you don't have enough land available to set up your reservoir, you really don't have a means of making this method work.
Tl:dr
Giant pistons
Use the hydroelectric dams to pump up a large section of earth (with water), and when you need power, you can release the breaks and let gravity do its thing.
Germany is doing Power-to-Gas, chemical storage as H2 or CH4. More leading edge, Power-to-Biofuel. Energy tends to be in greatest supply from renewables when biomass waste is most in oversupply. Wood wastes from timber, cellulose from stover in the fields, dried out and chipped and turned by renewable electric-fueled pyrolysis into biochar and VOCs, in turn refined to biodiesel, biogas, even aviation or marine biofuel; and when demand is higher than supply, simply burn the hydrogen-richest portion first in a net carbon negative cycle. Excess biochar? Sequester in the ground as soil amendment to reduce need for fertilizer and irrigation, making farms more drought and flood resilient.
This approach embodies aggregation, ancillary frequency control, arbitrage, chemical production and storage in ways nuclear can't touch, no matter what sort of shell game 'economics' a fast-talking Physics professor presents.
and gravity storage, if you have a hill close by to put a storage cistern at the top and bottom of. Really want a mountain and a set of cisterns for that much storage, though. Also to use: huge flow batteries.
thanks for the video
great source of information regarding economics of Nuclear Energy
0:59 This is because Germany wont stop using coal for energy production until 2038. Hopefully this will change in the next few years.
*Economics Explained intensifies*
_"but"_
Literally watched a vid by them first and then saw this 😁
I got confused when I didn't hear his voice. I actually assumed it was Economics Explained.
Yeah, imagine if he titled it "The Economics and Logistics of Nuclear"
Taking on both EE and Wendover
T_ C yes ... I agree.
It's great when CO2 production adds nothing to costs...
Yet they always complain about CO2 emissions and telling us to go renewable yet nuclear is just as great as an option
@@snakevenom4954 And for example in the EU, if your plant produces CO2 you have to buy emissions rights, which costs money and adds to the overall cost of the plant.
Its also great when they dont include the high costs of dismanteling the nuclear power plant as well as long time storage(1 million years) of the waste it produces.
@@Kepe I heard of that tax and loved the idea of it from the beginning. Never understood why it isn’t in the US already
@@losminthos Active Nuclear reactors have to save a certain amount of money for very MW they sell which covers the decommissioning cost. Plus the decommissioning cost is only a few million dollars for the reactors ad another few million for the building. Not too much considering the reactor will generate sever billions of dollars in income over its 40 year life. Why don’t we talk about solar or wind waste? Did you know solar panels aren’t being recycled? So every single solar panel is thrown out into Africa or the ocean after its 20 year life. I’m taking large amounts of lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals that are toxic for the rest of eternity. Did you know Nuclear power is the only energy source where the waste is contained in safe casks? Every other one releases its waste into the ocean or into the air. Nuclear has saved 1.8 million lives. 0 people died in 3 mile island and Fukushima combined and 51 people have died in Chernobyl. Compare that to the countless oil spills, hundreds of people mining coal that die, the thousands of people that die of air pollution every year (which solar and wind contribute to) and the tons upon tons of waste from solar panels and wind turbines
I agree with part of your presentation. The French proved the small reactor factory built concept in the 1960's when they built their very successful nuclear power station grid from this type of small reactor. You mentioned how well their system works then totally ignored their model and only analyzed the bloated; HUGE one off nuclear teakettle designs they have been building here and elsewhere. These designs are kind of like redesigning a jumbo jet from scratch every time you build one: REALLY STUPID. Small modular, factory built is WAY cheaper. Small modular reactors: Liquid Fueled Thorium Molten Salt is orders of magnitude better yet.
There are a number of fundamental problems of any solid fueled nuclear reactor. Nuclear fuel ALWAYS swells due to the intense radiation, reaction byproducts quickly contaminate the reaction and cannot be remove from the solid fuel, unless the fuel is recycled. Also it only allows utilization of a very small portion of the energy in the nuclear fuel (about 1-3%), requiring fuel bundle replacement in about 18 months. When the core is decommissioned you still need to store the highly radioactive waste for thousands of years. Spent fuel MUST be continuously covered in highly purified water for at least centuries to keep the fuel bundles below melting temperature. The continuous heat from the fuel, evaporates the water quickly (hundreds of gallons in a short period of time) ALL spent fuel is currently stored in pools, on site at the nuclear plant and there are no plans to recycle it as it is expensive and hard to do conventionally. Uranium is somewhat water soluble (Thorium is not), so there is a groundwater contamination concern.
I used to oppose nuclear energy, mainly due to high pressure steam explosions (3 times so far) and long term storage of highly radioactive fuel for 10k+ years. I have changed my mind, but only if we build Thorium liquid fueled, Molten Salt reactors (such as LFTR) instead of the boiling water conventional reactors we have now. Currently Thorium is a waste product of a number of mining operations, is orders of magnitude more plentiful than uranium and is basically as safe as dirt (it needs conversion inside the reactor to become useful fuel, conversion takes 30 days and is free). Molten salt solves ALL of the fundamental problems of boiling water reactors, as part of their nature. They also cheaply and easily burn current stocks of used fuel rods leaving only a small residue that is safe in about 300 years. They effectively use about 95+% of the nuclear energy in the fuel. No expensive explosion proof containment structure needed, as it cannot explode (it operates at ambient air pressure). They are walk away safe (Oak Ridge Tennessee ran a molten salt reactor safely for 6,000 hours and performed walk away safe tests on it at full power in the 1960's). In fact they shut it down every weekend because no one wanted to stay. They are well suited to the SMR form factor and easily allow continuous removal of very valuable medical isotopes on an ongoing basis. These medical isotopes are impossible to remove from boiling water reactors. They also provide high temperature waste heat that can be used in many high temperature processes now, such as steel, fertilizer or concrete making, just to name a few. Desalinization of sea water on a huge scale is easy and cheap.
The only remaining hurdles are some slight metals compatibility proving needed. Chemical separation is a far superior and cheaper process. The inventor of the nuclear tea kettle reactor (Alvin Weinberg) said it was fine for military use but was a very poor choice for commercial reactors, as we have seen 3 times. For many years he strongly promoted the Thorium, liquid fueled reactor as a far superior choice. Thorium is useless for making bombs which is one of the main reasons they used uranium instead back in the 1950’s. See Thorium Alliance you tube videos for a good overview. An excellent boiling water reactor problems review is a 1hr You Tube video:
Nuclear Disasters & Coolants czcams.com/video/8Pyq8kCeiYs/video.html
Always funny when someone invent history as he pleased. Enjoy your delusion! You should send your money on one of these start up :D
You can't estimate costs on a thorium reactor when none of them are actually producing commercial power...
@@TOleablemonk US stopped all rerseach in the 60 because it was deem as too dangerous. French stopped all reseach after catastrophic events in 2012. Canada stopped all reseach in 2010 because they can't even see a schedule for commercialisation. I heard of simulation in China but no experimental projects.
I could say that unicorn urine is the futur of energy and start to rise funds and people on internet will lobby for unicorn urine...
@@pierregravel-primeau702 hell no. he should send me the money. I'll build these reactors! Just watch me. :-D
Its worth looking into the total system emissions for thorium reactors when factoring in emissions during mining transportation etc. its questionable if its worth investing into when currently normal renewables become cheaper at fast rates and are currently much more useful to invest in than nuclear reactors.
Thank you for this great content
"Nuclear is being replaced by Renewables"
Let me fix that...
"Nuclear is being replaced by *Natural Gas* "
But gas gets replaced by batteries once solar production get high enough, so it can still works!
the problem is that no one is taking into account the environmental impact of batteries production, they don't last forever and cause a lot of damage to produce.
@@danilooliveira6580 all batteries are recyclable. Battery technology continues to improve exponentially. Lithium is cheap and low impact in mining. Lead is a dangerous neurotoxin, nothing except car starter batteries use dangerous lead sulfuric acid batteries. Lead is still emitted by coal plants, car wheel weights, bullets, and discarded car batteries.
Lithium ion batteries are fully developed. You won't get any more dramatic improvements out of them. If you mean maybe other types of batteries, then maybe.
The funny part is lead-acid car batteries are cleaner and safer than li-ion. They're just too limited in what form factors they can take and how heavy they are compared to output.
Unlike li-ion, lead-acid is actually fully recycled in practice.
@@zolikoff "Lithium ion batteries are fully developed.", "Unlike li-ion, lead-acid is actually fully recycled in practice.".
Tesla "Hold my beer".
"It's competing with larger, baseload plants" Nuclear is the gold standard for baseload
Yeah exactly. Power production remands consistent all year round and the fuel lasts for a ridiculously long time. It is the perfect source for baseload.
Exactly, so you now have to compete with the other baseload plants instead of following demand like a gas plant would. The latter is of course more profitable per kwh delivered to the grid.
It is important to understand what baseload means. Basically it is a more or less fixed amount of energy that is required at all times. We have chained ourselves to the idea that only big powerplants can deliver that. But freeing our mind a bit and looking in other places can help.
Let's have a look at banking. Banks take money deposits from customers in various forms (from longterm bonds to daily retractable cash account deposits) and lend this money out again as loans or overdrafts. So banks need to be careful not to lend all the money out on a longterm basis that they only have been given on a short term basis. But they can still do that - up to a certain degree - the so called deposit base.
the deposit base is the amount of money people will have reliably laying around on short term accounts most of the time - so you can lend it out on a longterm basis without risk of illiquidity (unless a bank run happens, which is rare)
Now let us transfer the concept of that to base load.
All you need to do is to calculate the amount that a big grid of renewable energy sources (ideally battery backupped) can provide even if the wind is calm and the days are rainy. Compare that with the base load that your grid demands and you know by how much you need to "overbuild" your renewable grid with extra turbines and solar panels to match the base load with a renewable "deposit/production base".
And for the times that base load is exceeded you switch on the gas plants as well as in the rare occasion that for whatever reason its dark and dead calm in the whole country at a previously unexpected level.
Big "base load" powerplants may not be needed at all. Just as banks don't need to rely on longterm bonds only for lending out money.
@@catriona_drummond well you see that's why we should still use nuclear. Nuclear can be the base load with the battery backed up solar and wind as the short term demand. Solar and wind even basically require this as solar is most effective in the mid day while most power is used at night. Solar also produces the most power in the summer but power demands peak in the winter. This means to effectively use wind and solar you need mass storage, not just some storage. We need to hold what we make in the mid day to night and you can go a whole week of little sun light so about enough storage to hold us for a week or two. This cuts out gas entirely as that is the main contributor to climate change. Sure it's more economical but it's not as sustainable.
Plus there isn't enough lithium in the world to be converted to power banks. You need to more go along the lines of pumping water into reservoirs or more a liquid battery instead as they are less effected by weather, hold charge more efficiently with lower losses, and can be scaled much larger up.
Plus the cost for a solar or wind array to be the main energy supply is way higher than you think. It's the whole reason Germany actually has much higher energy costs then France as does California have higher costs then places like Texas or Pennsylvania. The cost to back up a solar array for example basically doubles you cost and doubles you land needs. This means you pay more for land to produce the same amount of energy. Plus, while solar tends to be viewed as cheap, not quite when you are talking mass production. Remember that solar panels rarely function at 100% their rated performance and they do degrade over time as well. When you calculate the cost to produce a nuclear plant vs a solar array of equal energy output with backup storage for it, costs end up being nearly identical. This is kinda something he really skipped over. Solar is cheaper on it's own but only about half. The storage is just as expensive as the panels and using systems like reservoirs requires special zoning permits and more legislation if that's what they go for making the costs comparable to the nuclear plant. The difference is the nuclear plant has a consistent output while the solar array fluctuates greatly depending on weather, season, time of day, or even just the heat.
Wind is straight up inferior to solar in my eyes though. It requires constant maintenance making it cheap to build but more costly over time. Not to mention that it takes up a huge area of land to make a decent amount of energy as the blades have to be well separated and they have to he far enough apart so if one falls they don't all come crashing down say if a tornado hits.
@@Skylancer727 You haven't understood a word i wrote, have you? My point was exactly that we DON'T need big plants for base load.
People: Nuclear bad, it makes radioactive waste.
Also people: setting the Earth on fire by putting a fat blanket of carbon dioxide around it.
When you realize how just how insanely complex the things that we take for granted are, and originally think is very simple
Why do people often talk about natural gas like its a renewable source of energy?
I thought the plan was to rid the world of all nonrenewable energy.
Fossil gas is not _as_ horrifyingly dirty & polluting (in the non-greenhouse gas sense) as coal or oil, so it's popular as a stopgap to fill peaks in demand that current renewables infrastructure can't handle. Might also be more efficient. But ofc it's still finite & makes climate change worse.
Plus, it might be easier to sequester CO2 from the air for storage (or car fuel) and turn it into gas, compared to petrol? Not sure how important that is.
Because the industries about producing natural gas, including upstream oil & gas industry and midstream oil & gas industry are insanely profitable and have been heavily invested.
It's the only way that solar and wind can claim to be profitable. This is why a lot of "environmentalist" organizations look the other way when natural gas plants are being produced, claiming "it's okay because it'll only be temporary".
About 1-2 billion people use wood for energy in this world, those people need coal, natural gas and nuclear, then renewable if there is enough resources
In a sense it is once the rest of our power ecosystem gets to that point. Obviously it isn't today and we pull substantially all of our natural gas out of the ground. But long term it can become an energy storage solution when we use renewable energy to make methane (natural gas == mehtane with contaminants) out of atmospheric CO2 and water. Renewable only requires that you "close the loop" so to speak; you can still burn stuff if that's what ends up being convienient, you just can't be pulling it out of the ground. This would all fall under "carbon capture" which is still not ready for prime time. I doubt this would be ever be a winner for storage on the scale of hours or days, but if you need longer term reserves natural gas/methane is cheap and easy to store (and 100% efficent if you use it for heating).
Why did the two nuclear physcisists die?
They had an odd number of uranium atoms and decided to split it even
they're not very clever then
They got hit by a car, because it was more likely than due to their jobs.
😂
Oof*
News report: 2 physicians die from corona virus
Another amazing quality video
Great fact presentation. Thank you.
Very important to realize there are newer reactor designs and modular designs that are much smaller and cheaper to build, and the more we build the faster and cheaper they would get. Nuclear reactor development is still in it's infancy. Looking forward to the future video on modern reactor designs.
Renewables with a nuclear backbone is clearly the right choice if we are just willing to put in the work.
Current issue we have is how to dispose of nuclear waste. Everyone seems to have a strong opinion on this
@@Dudenier it doesn't have to be a big problem. Dry cask storage is already doing a pretty good job and if we switch to Fast Reactors we can radically decrease the period of time the waste remains radioactive. From tens of thousands of years to just a few centuries. There's no perfect solution, but I believe next generation nuclear technology has the potential to be the best power source in the near future.
video maker slating nuclear power on purpose
If we’re building reactors like that, renewables would only have marginal place in our system.
Nuclear, solar and wind all want to run at 100% capacity. They don't play well together at high outputs because load following means wasted energy(and thus money). Natural gas+nuclear or natural gas+renewable works very well because gas can cheaply reduce output.
Actually, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) - the owner of Diablo Canyon - is in bankruptcy. The primary reason for this is that PG&E was found to be the cause for many of the wildfires in California in 2017, 2018, and 2019. There is a video (czcams.com/video/pfUPUV6-VEM/video.html) of this fire starting near the Geyserville Geothermal Plant that was online and transmitting power even though much of Northern California was in a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS). PG&E has publicly acknowledged that it has massively under invested in its infrastructure resulting in a dangerous environment that will take a decade or more to fix.
So, using PG&E as a model for investing or making good decisions (see San Bruno pipeline explosion as another example) is a serious mistake. I am not saying that a serious company might not have made the same decision, but using PG&E as your example undermines the video.
He also did not mention that natural gas facilities are not perfectly safe either, and in fact are much more dangerous on the whole than nuclear (44.4x globally, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, and in the US specifically where there have been no deadly meltdowns, 40,000x, though this might not be a perfectly fair comparison). www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
Even counting the worst disasters, which we have learned how to prevent, nuclear causes the least number of deaths of any power source (though wind is close). I think it was disingenuous the way he brought it up in a list of things that disadvantage nuclear even though it is a major advantage. And while spent fuel storage is an issue, at least in the USA, it is also one we are capable of solving, if only Congress cared enough to do it.
In summary, nuclear disasters are big and rare, so you hear about them. Natural gas plants (and in fact all petrochemical processing facilities in general) have explosions and fires and leaks all the time, so commonly that nobody even mentions it unless, like, the whole plant is destroyed.
Very True.
I don’t think it undermines the video. Maybe they’ve deliberately kept it simple?
If the plant could make back the cost of the upgrades then it would be financially viable and a going concern they could sell on, rather than mothballing it. Surely they would sell it on, especially if they need the liquidity?
Would it not be safe to assume then, that the economic argument given here still stands; That it is not financially viable?
@@anthonygarvey1 California's public sentiment is also very anti nuke which doesn't help either. That's just one plant but they're being shut down up and down the state.
@@killerbee.13 He did mention nuclear can be safe, but at a financial cost. The overall good safety record is due to the high cost investments into safety.
Well done.Exellent explanation
The single biggest issue with nuclear is still, IMO, a lack of public understanding. People look at anything to do with “nuclear” or “atomic” the same way a young child looks at shadows in a dark room: They don’t understand it, and it scares them because of that.
or more people are becoming aware of its short comings. Thats without the environmental concerns. Stop being in love with nuclear and see it for what it is, a niche product that is over sold.
@@andyfreeze4072 You'll need to be more specific than that, since I have yet to encounter an anti-nuclear positionist who wasn't, often through no fault of their own, propagating outright lies.
Hope these smaller, modular nuclear reactors from startups pull through. That’ll make it competitive. Nuclear is still better for the environment than natural gas.
its also statistically safer than basically every alternative already, and that's in spite of the decades of advancements that have been made since most of the active reactors were built :P
@@nuarius statistics doesnt Help you when a npp blows up in a dense populated area for example in central europe you will have a damage Worth of 2000 billion Euros. Who is going to pay that?
@@nuarius And yet most of the world still can't be bothered to build proper waste storage or even waste processing facilities. Both of which have been fully workable on paper for decades. Human logistics can't be overlooked.
Nuclear is better for the environment than literally any other currently available energy source.
Trollsama With MSR molton salt reactor types, this won’t be the case.Copenhagen Atomics expects to have one ready for production by 2028. Thise you can have close to cities, no sweat.
I watched that professors lectures on the economics of nuclear energy some months ago and I’m glad that you mentioned him
The only issue I had with his lecture were the numbers.
The nuclear power plants in Europe and US were supposed to be 3 to 6 bn and are now 15 to 28bn and the construction time jumped from 6 to over 15 years.
Those real numbers should have been included to show the financial risk.
The nuclear industry is misleading people into believing that all radioactive, ultra-hazardous nuclear fuel is burned in the fuel rods. Huge amounts of it remain in spent fuel rods. As to plutonium, read about it being used in fuel rods in Fukushima. Not all of it is burned and it is very, very difficult to separate the most dangerous isotopes from the waste. It is the most dangerous substance ever created. See greentumble.com/7-reasons-why-nuclear-waste-is-dangerous/
Nuclear power is the one mistake that you can make today that all of your children and descendants, down to your great, great, grand-children, will still hate you for having made, if they know that you are the cause of their problems. (Given the 24100 year half-life of Plutonium 239 most of it will delay in 100,000 years but if you have a kilo of it in one barrel, enough will remain AFTER 100,000 years, to kill thousands.) Thorium and reprocessing so far are a dream. Fusion will probably arrive first.
It makes no sense to allow the nuclear industry to make billions while they create nuclear waste that the government will then have to pay to store for hundreds of thousands of years. You will need guards for that whole time: nuclear waste may not make good nuclear bombs, but if you are a terrorist and put an explosive inside of a barrel of nuclear waste (which process will probably kill you but they do not seem to care about their lives), you can contaminate an entire city by blowing that barrel of nuclear waste up in the middle of a large city.
Most inhabitants will either then move out or die or suffer hideous cancer. Fukushima ALMOST resulted in that occurring in Tokyo. I sure hope that Thorium is developed and actually works as advertised, but for now, the nuclear industry which I assume employs you, wants to create extremely dangerous and very hard to store hazardous, nuclear waste due to GREED and then have the government bear the cost of storing it for hundreds of thousands of years! That is OUTRAGEOUS!
You, nuclear industry people, are as bad as the parasitic banksters that want to gamble with the banks' money and then have the government bail them out when their bets wind up losing money, while they keep the profits when their bets pay off. We had to pay $29 TRILLION due to the last bailout. See CNBC's "The Size of the Bank Bailout: $29 Trillion."
How much will it cost in present value to store nuclear waste for OVER 100,000 YEARS! Because they want to GET all of the profits now through lies then have the government bear all of the costs for 100,000 years thereafter, so they are effectively PARASITES. We should pass laws making the nuclear industry people personally liable for those costs and personally liable if there is any harm from any nuclear accident whatsoever, then those parasites will stop urging irrational, nuclear power plants.
@@mim8312 Okay first off the banks across the world got a $29trillion bailout and not just the USA like you are somewhat implying. Should it have been on a loan basis? YES 100%. Was it? NO. I am one of the people that think the government should LET a business fail if it goes under. I also think the people that chose to invest in those establishments should also feel the loss.
In 2008 (maybe 2009) the banks in the USA were bailed out to the tune of about $1trillion or so and the executives got multi-million dollar bonuses AFTER the bailouts. If you want to point fingers at ANYONE point them at politicians and not the banks. The USA and the rest of the western world has a serious issue with corrupt politicians and greed as a whole.
Also on a side note: Thorium being a "dream" is a huge joke the Thorium hipsters don't understand that: Thorium is extremely unstable and only has 1 isotope that is "somewhat" unstable by any reasonable measure. It might not be AS radioactive as Uranium or Plutonium, but it is FAR more unstable which is the main reason thorium has not been used. Plus concentrated Thorium is radioactive so a meltdown or in this case an explosion would result in a huge area becoming radioactive.
@@mim8312 Don’t bother making an argument against Nuclear ever again. Especially since you brought up half life. Uranium has a half life of over 1 trillion years
Simple Solution: Clean, safe and reliable Moulton Salt Reactors!
China's spending billions perfecting the technology and we're doing almost NOTHING!!!
Thanks for the research.
Great work Sir thank you
As someone that works in the energy sector, I have a few comments. One thing missing in the natural gas turbine (CT's) calculation is what is referred to as "equivalent hours of loss of life". What this is, every time you shut a CT down, and then start it up again, it suffers severe loss of life due to the heating dynamic. After a certain amount of loss of life hours, these units need to be taken out of service for inspection, this is no small feat, as the turbine needs to be exposed and inspected. Also, renewables (which include biomass, literally burning trees, which is another matter altogether) only constitutes about 11% of all installed capacity with in North America. At any one time only about 2.5% of all energy produced in North America is renewable (DOE).
in the video, they mention Fukushima and show a picture of Chernobyl, but what they don't mention is the thousands of reactors that have run without incident their entire life. Thorium reactors are now being developed and are far safer than current installations and have the ability to produce more energy.
I love the environment, but, am a realist, until the ability to store energy, Solar (which takes up MASSIVE amounts of real estate, and is hugely subsidized, that is why the costs look so low) and Wind (same problems as solar, not to mention the resources required to make and install them) they are not feasible. So, if you like the dark and want to go back in time, the choice is yours.
Stop talking sense! Wind and solar are magic! Physics and the whole "energy density" thing are bullshit. :P
Oh don't get me started on biomass. Here in Europe some people think importing wood from South America and burning it is somehow green.
the thing is, when a nuclear plant goes bad, the consequences reverberate through millennia, not merely decades or centuries. dealing with the waste is a big deal that lots of people seem willing to ignore (at least in these comments). hopefully research can start to provide results, as fossil fuels wont last forever and battery tech can't yet make wind and solar viable
@@berengerchristy6256 that's actually incorrect, for starters modern reactor design can literally not suffer the kinds of failures like Chernobyl, and the new thorium molten salt reactors could never even have an accident like Fukushima, they are literally 100% passively meltdown proof, literally every person on the planet could die and a molten salt reactor would just sit there and slowly cool down, never be a threat to the environment or anyone.
If you mean the "waste" from operation again this is an area where the general public is greatly misinformed, modern reactors produce miniscule amounts of waste, and what little waste they do produce is easily handled, unlike coal and gas, or even solar (making solar panels produces a ton of dangerous industrial waste), these all dump a significant portion of their waste products into the environment. And the molten salt reactors which are far more efficient and produce far less and less dangerous waste products than modern reactors can actually have their fuels supplemented with the "waste" from modern plants.
@@berengerchristy6256 And yet even when fossil plants go 'good', we know that they are having impacts of the same or greater magnitude through global warming.
They have to decided to close down Diablo Canyon?
Reason: That's Complicated = Politics
Diablo Canyon is known in the state of Cancer to cause California.
@@sofuckingannoying If it causes California then I say shut it down.
*that's complicated = democrats lol
Commiefornia doesn't deserve nuclear
@sofuckingannoying apparently everything is carcinogenic in California
1:35 "Wind is intermittent...Needs to be propped up, and natural gas is the perfect solution for that." I disagree. Peaker plants are inefficient and very expensive. Battery storage is not only shown to be much cheaper, but the market shows it being more profitable this year in the U.S. The cost of battery storage fell to half cost this year, and is forecasted to again next year. 81% of new power generation in the U.S. is made of solar and battery storage.
A lot of arguments against nuclear involve talking about how the tech hasn't evolved but it's cause we crippled it's evolution , It's like we stopped developing computers in it's early age and now We are looking at pictures of giant computes from mid 1900's and saying this tech would have never made it
Real Engineering: "A nuclear power plant takes 6 years to be built"
Brazilians: cry in Angra 3
France : Cries worse than brazilians in Flamanville 3
@@technikleo3797 And then there is Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, being now the 3rd most expensive building in the world
Chinese: Laugh in 100 simultaneous reactors being built
@@VarietyGamerChannel hopefully the Chinese are giving more thought to safety than the soviets did, but sadly that isn't really the CCP's MO
@@thejse007 As I've maintained for decades, the ONLY reason nuclear energy exists is simply because it is so insanely expensive. It's hard to "lose" a few £million here and there when you're spending peanuts on a wind/solar farm, but when you're spending £billions on a pointless, dangerous nuclear reactor, paying for a superyacht or a small tropical island to help the politicians "make the right choices" is a relatively small price to pay.
Btw French Nuclear energy that was at 6gCO2/kWH dropped to 4gCO2/kWh thanks to new methods of purification ! Yay Vive la France ! 🇫🇷 🇫🇷 🇫🇷 🇫🇷 🇫🇷
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s c'est + la faute de l'ASN qui applique la sûreté de façon trop stricte, et elle est complètement déconnectée de la réalité économique.
@@user-nu1vn3yy9s oui le nucléaire ne sera jamais à 100% sûr... par conte il gérera toujours mieux le risque que les autres énergies : le solaire fait 4x plus de morts, l'éolien 10x, et littéralement toutes les autres énergies (biomasse, hydro, gaz, fioul et charbon) font plus de morts par an que le nucléaire en 40 ans.
Vous voulez être cohérent ? Débarrassez vous de toutes les énergies qui font plus de morts que le nucléaire. Mais bon on sait très bien que le lobby antinucléaire est soluble avec ceux de Big Oil et de la finance...
13:17 if this factors in the far higher standard of regulation that delays and increases the cost of getting nuclear plant accepted, then it logically follows that if nuclear was more accepted and less politically toxic for illogical reasons then nuclear is actually more competitive on an even playing field.
If it doesn’t then I’m just spewing hot air
Hi found a small error, time 4:35 you dollar amount had an extra zero. Your block has $56,7000,000. Great video nonetheless.
Also, at 0:26 you say $2.3 trillion but the number in the video is missing 3 zeroes!
@@MrPatropolis55 lol
Kill me then.
and at 4:40 there is another 0 on the 56 million D:
@@fivade6534 Mathematics mistakes are a real part of real engineering. Everyone makes mistakes like that. NASA lost a spacecraft due to mixing up metric and imperial. American bridges have collapsed in recent times due to mathematics mistakes. He's simply trying to increase the authenticity of his real engineering videos to make them as real as possible. 😛
The most expensive part of nuclear energy is convincing the public that it is worth far more than the cost of building.
False. The most expensive part of nuclear energy are Corrupt companies and government who are cutting fundings on maintenance and cover up that resulted in nuclear disasters.
Nuclear power plants is safe in my opinion. But facts of the matter is. Majority of countries in the world, including the rich one, are corrupt. Humans are the main reason why I'm scared of nuclear. Not the nuclear itself.
You can't sabotage windmill or solar panel that resulted in heavy destruction of the environment.
Also, big percentage of world population actually lived within the earthquake zone. This options is not good for them.
NNT Flow There have historically been multiple major environmental disasters from disposal of wastes from solar manufacturing plants. We don’t really have this issue in the US, because of regulation requiring recycling and disposal of waste materials, but then again it is in part because of these regulations that solar manufacturing in the US will likely never compete with Asia.
However there are multiple very nasty chemical compounds that are created in the production PV solar. Dichlorisilane for example when combined with a nearby stream can produce chlorine gas, which is extremely lethal.
Additionally seismic risks are calculated and reported for every nuclear reactor in the US by the NRC using data from the USGS. While it is important to recognize these risks, the video really doesn’t go into the details of the seismic upgrades required for Diablo Canyon.
Yes Diablo Canyon is in California and yes it’s located near a fault. It’s also rated to withstand a 7.0 magnitude earthquake, which is a greater rating than ANY BUILDING in a 200 mile radius is built to.
The issue is that a new report analyzing the fault line called the Hosgri-Shoreline fault determined that it was theoretically possible for the fault to experience a megathrust strike-slip in which the seismic energy would resonate across the entire fault zone and double in potential output leading to a maximum 7.8 magnitude.
However the San Luis Obispo and State of California response is very questionable for this study.
1. Diablo Canyon is so far the only energy station that was been required to upgrade for a higher seismic rating in the entire county, despite the fact that nothing is rated for 7.8.
2. There is zero geological evidence that a 7.8 magnitude has ever occurred at this location.
3. The city of San Luis Obispo does not have an emergency response or planning for an earthquake of 6.0 magnitude or greater.
4. The Public Utility Council for the State of California was more concerned about a tsunami impacting the plant like in Fukushima more than the earthquake impact. Even though Diablo Canyon is a completely different type of reactor, the theoretical maximum magnitude is significantly lower than that of Tohoku, the distance and depth of the fault zone relative to the plant is smaller and Diablo canyon sits 50 feet above sea level.
All of this comes down to some at best questionable requiremts that should really be characterized as incredibly sketchy....
@@brian2440 is there any environmental damage that caused by production oroperation of nuclear power plants?
Remember, the main issue with nuclear is the public has no clue about it, they’ll believe all they hear and none of what they see. Education is the most powerful tool today, and controlling what is taught will dictate the future. Physics classes are damn near forgotten in some states, let alone if they do have one it’ll barely touch on nuclear physics.
NNT Flow theres rarely any mistakes taken place in nuclear power plants don’t be a moron. It’s very safe and has many backup systems put in place and can be shut off if anything happens
A very important fact that is forgotten here is indeed: the electricity market. When capacities (gas, nuclear, coal, wind) have been built, the plants that can produce electricity against the lowest marginal costs will actually supply to the grid. Currently, due to the low fuel costs of nuclear it has the lowest marginal costs. But wind and solar have almost no marginal costs (no fuel or other variable costs), so this means that when the sun shines or wind blows (=in most countries often) nuclear plants will be outcompeted in electricity mixes with high penetration of solar and wind (which a lot of countries have planned in the future) and their revenues (based on running hours) will be way lower than in this video and payback period around 40-60 years. Thats why no commercial party wants to invest in those plants, only governments themselves could.
Further:
- interest rate of 3% is very low for such riskful investments (which has a lot of impact on such a long payback period, thats why building plants is only possible with large help of the government)
- after the lifetime of the plant a lot of costs are involved to dismantle the plant
very good arguments
So informative!
I would love to see a spot on Moltex Energy’s specific nuclear plant design in one of your future videos.
is that the stable salt fast reactor, with the big thermal reservoir to be used as a peaking plant? that design is cool as HELL
it solves EVERY (real) objection people can have to nuclear, it's insane how clever that reactor design is
real engineering PLEASE do this video!!! it's such a great design, it's exciting
Honorable mention to ThorConIsle too, very cool answer to siting requirements and complications not to mention significantly reduced build times (2 years from order to installation because they leverage spare shipbuilder yard capacity)
@@Bowarecher9183 The principles and complete design of the plant are in a paper titled A Technical Introduction to the Stable Salt Reactor. It was somewhere on their site.
Make a video about thorium reactors and their engineering challenges
and economic challenges.
Gen 4 Thorium/Molten Salt reactors and their potential!
That would be interesting. I really want to see facts separated from bs, because I want to believe into the idea.
@@johneccher9869 for real. It seems legit yet seemingly there is a reason why it isn't ready for prime time yet and i have no idea what that reason is.
Illinois prof already did that.
This is really excellent analysis for an estimate. Well done!
Curious to see the simulations redone if it considers the waste handling and waste storage cost for both natural gas and nuclear. It should have some significance. Also the decomisioning and cleanup cost for a retired plant, according to their respective average ages.
For nuclear to be more economic it needs bigger economies of scale: smaller reactors, standardised design, and more of them. There are a variety of situations where solar wont work and wind is fickle.
The nuclear scare effectively shut down nuclear energy research for decades.
Now that China is massively investing in it the west is starting to wake up, way too late.
Nuclear is a disaster and extinction level event... here in New Zealand we have no problems with hydro and wind and solar...
@@michaelfleming6581 We had dozens of nuclear accidents, you only know of a handful and heavily dramatized by the media. I'd bet you never heard of gas plant accidents, they ain't a nice view either, blindly ignoring a technology because of propaganda is just dumb.
It's also obvious that nuclear isn't the hammer to the nail problem, obviously, if available, you should use alternatives like hydro, but don't forget that they are not perfect either and requires a backup plant usually.
@@hmr1122 H MR I know about the others... Hanford, windscale, Mayak and many others.... there is no anti media coverage about Nuclear you dont even know what your talking about... nuclear is the hammer to nail problem... fukushima and radiation is heating up the oceans and Earth faster than ever before... We dont even hear anything about Fukushima anymore even though it is still a huge huge problem that can not be fixed with the technology we have...
You should look up Dana Durnford on CZcams he tells it straight
@@michaelfleming6581 Wait, wait, wait... Do you *actually* believe that Fukushima is having a measurable impact on the temperature of the PACIFIC OCEAN? Just... Wow.
Making Nuclear Reactors more standard would reduce the costs in the long run.
chucking in "burning natural gas" energy does more enviromental harm than nuclear, nuclear waste is 92% non radioactive waste like clothing tools etc, 7% mildly radioacrtive and only 1% high radioactive which gets contained and buried deep in areas that won't get any development any time soon, radiation disappear in 40-50 years under that ground anyway but the carbon emmitions from natural gas won't leave the atmosphere easily.
Standardization and building them en mass. If we can do for nuclear power what Ford did for cars, this wouldn’t be a question.
Westinghouse made that same argument. Then their design was awful, states lost billions and the company went bankrupt.
Are you adding catastrophic failures into that equation?
Both Fukushima and Chernobyl were + $200Bn disasters, accounting for half of all energy related disaster costs in the world so far.
I'm sure we're going to learn from having nuclear reactors around, but those losses aren't acceptable.
There aren't many countries in the world that can even afford such disasters on their budget.
@@Minuz1 how about we add in clean up costs from normal operations of natural gas plants. Also, the clean up Fukushima is inflated because of stuff like holding hundreds of thousands of gallons of water for a decade because of a teacup’s worth of tritium. That’s barely enough tritium to kill a person if they drank all of it at once.
Great brief although I would suggest some key factors that seperate out renewables from energy dense plants should be acknowledged.
1) renewables require vastly more land per kilowatt of energy produced. That finite land that may otherwise be used for farming/housing/wild areas etc. In many cases the most productive land for solar and wind is also very productive for food production. Energy dense plants like nuclear use far less land, on order of magnitudes that can instead be used for economic output or returned to wild areas.
2) Renewables require vast amounts transmission lines and additional network assets like battery back up and rotating mass condensors or the like to maintain network frequency amongst many other things. These enormous costs to install, maintain and upgrade are rarely acknowledged when claiming renewables result in the cheapest power bills.
3) Network size renewable plants are often quoted by there maximum possible generation capacity. This total capacity is rarely ever reached and may only do so for 10-15% of the day. As a general rule for ever kilowatt of reliable energy production (nuclear, fossil fuel) you remove from a grid you need to replace it with 1.7 times that capacity in renewables.
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I thought this was a Wendover video based off of the thumbnail.
Wendover and real engineering are my life blood
Interesting that if you're here you probably know Wendover and Kurtzgesagt
@@willcolman6948 don't forget mustard
Kuba Jackiewicz agreed, mustard puts out really high quality content
Wendover would have found a way to integrate planes into this video, tho. :D
"A Clean Energy Future Without Nuclear, and Other Fairy Tales for Children"
Nuclear is by far the best option we currently have, followed by coal and natural gas. Politics sucks.
It wont be a fairy tale for the children, they are the ones that are going to have to deal with the waste and pay for it.
Most boomers will be gone in about 30 years, along with the last stupid V8 and comically bad Harley bike, but the last 50 years of rapacious waste, and insane fuel ideas will blight humanity for generations.
Oscar Goldman
Nuclear waste isn’t a problem at all. The volume of a high school gym is enough to store all (Yes I mean all, not annual) spent fuel from an entire country.
The volume of all waste is slightly larger - perhaps an entire high school, not just the gym - but compare that to an average mountain.
Besides, that would be a reason for Turkey not to build its first reactors. France Germany, the US etc. need to deal with the waste that is already there - and I have heard no rational argument why the waste from fifty years of nuclear power should be significantly easier to handle than from eighty years.
On the other hand, it will appear that an accelerated reduction of fossile fuels does make a difference.
@@yaff1851 I humbly suggest that I think you'll get farther with people by saying something like "the waste is a lot less of a problem than you think" than that it's not a problem _at all_ . People are more likely to listen when their concerns are acknowledged than when their concerns are dismissed. I am assuming here that your goal is similar to mine; educating people about the realities of nuclear power.. adding the all-important context..
I'm aware that we have systems for managing the waste, but it does need to be _managed_ , i.e. stored securely. It's a manageable problem, unlike fossil fuel emissions which just go up into the atmosphere.. but it's still a problem. Saying "it's not a problem at all" to someone who is worried and _knows_ that it is in fact toxic and highly radioactive and will remain hazardous (if not stored securely) for decades or centuries.. that person is just going to stop listening.
@@yaff1851 Agreed: Nuclear waste is a monument to how little CO2 waste there is ... when you use an INTERNALIZED waste stream vs. the "magic" of putting it in to the atmosphere. Granted, climate science is unfalsifiable and offers no clear error margins ... but if you can eliminate CO2 and even generate carbon neutral fuels via nuclear reactors ...? Why check to see if the worst case is even remotely correct..? Why deal with all the ecological impact of dams..? Why invest in billion dollar gas plants when we know how much fissile material there is, but cannot know where we're at relative to the volume of gas or oil remaining...or when we reach the peak of either...
*looks at current gas prices*
THIS TAKE AGED WELL!
Well done evaluating the costs between the energy sources. But one thing that should be to be included is, that nuclear power plants can produce way much more than just electricity for the grid. It can produce heat for manufacturing several other products which would cut down the years to profit. A fact that is not available for gas, solar, or wind. Power generation.
When you look at costs you have to keep in mind where that money goes... Building and maintaining a nuclear power plant is mainly going to be done by the local population [EDIT: it was rightly pointed out below that this isn't really the case in many countries, my bad, I have a fairly frenco-centric POV on the subject], and therefore will directly benefit the local economy. Whereas for gas most of the cost comes from buying the gas, and if we're not talking about a big gas producing country that money will just leave the country, and negatively affect our commercial balance. Same thing for solar, where you get those cheap prices by buying from / relocating production to countries like china where the panels are much cheaper to produce.
At 13:41 you say that the reactors should be dispatchable to fit in modern grids with lots of renewables. It's already the case in France where nuclear reactors can raise and lower their load to follow the electricity demands. However that also greatly diminishes nuclear's profitability, as you produce less electricity over the life of the reactor and therefore hurt it's ability to pay itself back. As you explained a nuclear plant costs a ton to build but the fuel is cheap, so unlike gas when you lower the load you don't "save" on fuel, ideally a nuclear reactor would always be running at 100%. Nuclear and solar / wind are not a good match.
this is a good consideration, but if you produce natural gas locally I think it just means that it wins out even further. It's highly unlikely you produce uranium locally, but I would like to see a comparison with this somehow taken into consideration.
you are correct. profitability is lessened but we still have the cheapest energy cost for the consumer than other rich Europeans countries. (and average cost within the 27). And the environmental benefit is massive.
Finland example: 80% of the 3800 construction workers where foreigners: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Criticism Most parts where imported too.
Nuclear engineering is a highly specialist role that involves signing off on a very large risk, so it is essentially not possible to compete as a small business, and the large multinationals with the capital to compete are unlikely to have high percentages of their fee reinvested locally.
While a nuclear power plant is in the load-following mode, it is providing ancillary services to the grid operator. It makes revenue doing this, so it doesn't necessarily diminish nuclear's profitability.
The case of the Diablo Canyon plant is a bit special: The mentioned improvements necessary for a license renewal are basically replacing half of the power plant and still work on the other half. The cooling system is one of the most integrated and most expensive parts of a nuclear plant and earthquake protection starts at the foundation's size and robustness of the power plant and continues from there to the reactor vessel, its supports and all pipes connecting to it or its containment. So they basically have to rebuild most of the plant without improving the efficiency for a license renewal of 20 years in a state that is not exactly friendly to nuclear power. This is an investment with almost sure loss, as it's quite uncertain to be actually running those 20 years.
By the way, Rosatom does build a 1200 MW plant for 3.8 billion $ (Novovoronezh II) and a Framatome N4 is capable to change its load at a rate of 10% maximum power output per minute, outrunning the 6% of the efficient natural gas plants with exhaust heat usage by far. The german nuclear plants do follow the grid's load and Isar/Ohu 2 for example runs in frequency stabilization mode, the king of fast load-changes.
The levelized costs of energy do show that nuclear is in the upper middle range of costs and that's only the case if you won't count any costs of the intermittency of solar and wind in their costs, as Lazard admits in the pdf-file of this study: www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2018/
You will find the costs of storage there, too. Storage needs for Germany are at about 77% of the energy of wind and about 90% of solar. The german electricity prices are the highest in the world and that's mainly because of the subsidies tax for renewables (EEG-Umlage) and the costs of major grid changes to account for the intermittency of renewables. These costs are excluded in the LCOE while nuclear has to pay for all it's costs, eg. disposal of toxic waste, that renewable's production dumps somewhere in the landscape.
2:58-3:25 you make the nuclear plant cheaper by taking a lower value instead of the average or maximum (which would also make sense because if you look at recent projects the costs are clearly increasing more rapidly than general inflation) and make the gas plant more expensive by rounding up.
Very well made video
You forgot to talk about the decommission cost, which is very high for nuclear power plants.
"No one size fits all approach can be used"
Fusion Advocates: Just wait 25 years!
We should have billboards saying “Free Fusion tomorrow!”
Commercial fusion in 25 years is a nice dream, but not a reality.
Václav Zajac fusion is still in beta testing around the world. The Iter fusion reactor for example is currently in construction in france and should open in 2021 or 2023. Not on the grid yet but it's getting there. Chinese had a stable fusion for 60 seconds and could produce 30 MW. I'm sure in 2030 it's coming for the market.
they said that 50 years ago...I mean 75....no no I mean...........
@@BOMEFSY Yeah, however they never understood how difficult the challenge was. We have iter coming online soon which will have the first energy surplus in fusion. And if you think it's impossible, look at the tsar bomba.
3:29 I know that place! It's just a few miles from my house! That's Mount Timpanogos in the background!
I want to say that this video was great, something that I think everyone and I do mean everyone should watch.
I wrote a ridiculously long reply to your Tesla battery video but one of the points i was making is how people are being influenced through politics, media, tribalism, and the "hacks" that people in power use to trick good people into doing bad things.
Nuclear boogeymen, fear of meltdowns, fear of the waste, etc... while are indeed scary but with just how much promise nuclear has absolutely DEMANDS that we put our best and brightest on solving the issues as well as continue to develop world class renewable energy such as solar and wind. There are indeed some absolutely amazing new ideas in nuclear addressing all of this and more such as SMR's and other fuel technologies.
Also i can't remember at the moment but there was some tech developed to deal with spent fuel in a novel and super effective way.
I would love to hear what others think. Nuclear should not be abandoned, it is perhaps the single most important energy technology for humanity going forward save the holy grail of Fusion energy (good luck with that), period. Cheers!
Real engineering had absolutely mind blowing detail in his videos. Deserves credit for the amount of research in each video! Love ya and your adorable Irish accent.
Help, I spilled some Economics Explained into my Real Engineering!
The one sentence that makes it is: "Politicians will not build NPPs, because they can't use it to reelect themselves."
Glad that i subscribed
Yes my two favorite things, economics and nuclear power
How to lose billions?
If a technology that works for fifty years and is then lethal for hundreds of thousands afterward is one of your two favorite things, then I shudder to imagine what your interest in economics might entail. Virgin sacrifice to help the stock market?
@@CinemaDemocratica
1) Gen IV reactors can use nuclear waste as fuel, so that's not a problem anymore.
2) Even if it were, nuclear waste is much more regulated and controllable than every other alternative (except geothermal or tidal energy, those are perfect). Much better to have a few tons of uranium in a concrete coffin underground than thousand of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere causing climate change.
3) If it is radioactive for thousands of years, it means it's half-life is pretty long, which means it doesn't emit lots of radiation. The shorter the half-life, the more radioactive it is.
I thought I clicked on "The Economics of Nuclear War"
Lol. Nuclear war, coming to a world near you!! 2020 is not over yet
The economics of nuclear war is a pretty short math equation. ;-)
The Investment analysis is extremely simplistic. It does not state what type of Gas Plant is installed. Open Cycle or Closed Cycle. More importantly it places no value on the 60 to 80 year life time of a nuclear plant. It does not tell us the lifetime emissions of CO2 from both plants. This is very important.
I think a very popular video would be a video on Highview Power Storage... enjoy your site!
Good job mentioning that nuclear technology can still evolve to become much more competitive. So many just look at the current numbers and discount that better designs, engineering and operation practices along with regulatory streamlining makes it very possible for nuclear to become competitive.
Costs are only a problem until they aren't.
I still have hope for Thorium Liquid Salt Reactors
Neither the Fossil nor the Green mafia will ever allow even an experimental reactor to be built. They already tried to build one small experimental loop in Czech republic and was forced to shut down by the local Green mafia
@@cerverg The fact that almost all isotopes of Thorium are extremely unstable and only 1 is "somewhat" stable speaks volumes of how safe it can be. Uranium has a far more stable isotope that they use for nuclear energy. I am not apart of the green mafia or the natural gas bitches, but even I wouldn't want to live within 100 km of a damn Thorium plant.
@@goldeneagle2066 Fun fact Thorium reactor actually doesn't "burn" Thorium :)))) All the Th232 is transmuted to U233 and that's your fuel that you "burn". You can even mix it with some Pu239 and get rid of all those pesky nuclear weapons. It's just another Uranium reactor where the burn is around 85% compared to traditional Uranium reactor. The waste is radioactive for around 300 years compared to many thousands of years for the traditional reactors. It does not use any water (zero chance of hydrogen explosion the most common problem with traditional reactor) and actually, it's better to be in a dry spot somewhere deep in the ground or in some mountain so I'd happily live on top of one
@@cerverg You don't say! That still fails to fix how unstable Thorium is. I am sorry man the most stable isotope of Thorium is more unstable than the most stable Uranium or even Plutonium isotopes. If you can fix just how unstable Thorium is then by all means go ahead and make one. Until then I personally wouldn't trust one to not have a catastrophic explosion or meltdown of some sort.
@@goldeneagle2066 Do you even know what are you talking about? There's only one naturally occurring Thorium isotope Th 232 and the half-life is 14 billion years that means since the creation of the universe it's been only one time that the Thorium created in the big bang has decayed in half. The most stable Uranium isotope is U 238 (which is also the most common) half-life 4.468 billion years roughly decayed in half 3 times. Tell me which one is more stable? The amount of Thorium is more 4 times in Earth's crust and it does not require isotopic separation like Uranium to extract the tiny bit of U235 which around 0.7% which is the usable uranium. Burning U235 is on part of burning Platinum. 400% Vs 0.7% tell me which one is better as fuel?
It's such a pleasure to read the comments on this channel. Intelligent measured responses.
I came to this video because AsapSCIENCE mentioned it, and linked to it in their "The Biggest Lie About Nuclear Energy" video.
I thought you might like to know that, as well as the fact that I am now also subscribed to your channel, and about to binge-watch every video you've posted in the past one year.
Simple Solution: Clean, safe and reliable Moulton Salt Reactors!
China's spending billions perfecting the technology and we're doing almost NOTHING!!!
@@clarkhowell8267 Molten Salt reactors have been a thing before. The technology is already there but it's not really needed.
Thorium isn't going to be a fuel of the future because in reality it creates design issues that are not simple to overcome, such as isolating material so it doesn't get neutron bombardment while it's undergoing beta decay.
@@mikoi7472 So, what's next in Energy? Cause I KNOW it ain't Fusion.
The Levelized Cost of Electricity metric is skewed in favor of methods like solar as it doesn’t take into account the storage infrastructure needed to make solar and wind viable. Like mentioned in the start of the video, the ability of sources like natural gas to generate on-demand electricity and operate when demand and prices are higher makes it preferable in many ways.
It also doesn’t take into consideration how the concentration of intermittent renewables on a grid network requires larger scales of additional infrastructure.
Under LCOE solar with 20% VRE costs the same as solar with 50% VRE, which isn’t accurate at all.
Economically, generate electricity = generate money. So if your goal is only to produce money, you don't have to add expensive battery if you don't want to.
Yea, some MAJOR issues with LCOE here.
Once you reach 30% penetration like here in Germany system costs dominate capital costs: www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2012/7056-system-effects.pdf
redstone craft guy It’s not that simple. In reality you don’t even really compare a single plant to another plant as made in the mid video. I understand the comparison, and for the purpose of the video and it makes sense because the videos is talking about observed economic impacts largely for consumers. From a utility, state or grid manager perspective this isn’t how energy economics is evaluated, although to be fair it’s substantially more complicated.
Id recommend a couple things for you. First watch the following video about the US Electrical Grid operations and challenges, as well as review necessary upgrades needed to support high renewable concentration as reported by the NREL. Lastly and potentially most importantly read the last study submitted by ANL and LNL on appropriately evaluating costs for energy networks and taking into consideration the real cost of variable/intermittent renewables with respective on its impact to the US Electrical grid:
-“Argonne OutLoud: Ensuring a Resilient Power Grid”
m.czcams.com/video/rJ-57hrPovc/video.html
“Transmission Challenges and Best Practices for Cost-Effective Renewable Energy Delivery across State and Provincial Boundaries”
www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/67462.pdf
“Impacts of Variable Renewable Energy on Bulk Power System Assets, Pricing, and Costs”
eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/lbnl_anl_impacts_of_variable_renewable_energy_final_0.pdf
After the Megaprojects video, a video on why the Hyperloop is actually completely unfeasible would be awesome.
Although you make some good points in the video and do a nice cost analysis you add a lot of unfounded bias against nuclear. e.g.
- You just compared Natural Gas with Nuclear without mentioning the CO2 produced by natural gas or the future carbon cost associated with that.
- You used a very selective decommissioning example (i.e. plant in an active seismic zone). Better question: Why is Germany decommissioning nuclear while France increases it?
- Finally, you use LCOE as a metric for comparing the price of renewables which ignores externalities and the variability of wind and solar. Use something more representative like VALCOE.
12:26 This previous Summer, CA Gov. Newsom mandated energy restrictions with respect to running air conditioners, charging electric vehicles, etc. It doesn't sound like those batteries provide a whole lot of excess (or even sufficient) energy when it's needed most.
Please do a video that includes Thorium MSRs; there's been good activity in that sector for awhile
0:56 in germany there has been much anti-nuclear "propaganda" and nuclear powerplants got shut down so coal was used again for some reason, saying that nuclear wasn't directly substituted with wind and solar but with a history lesson on ancient powerplant types instead
Edit: please take the discussion easy, both sides are kinda right imo, even though I think nuclear is the better solution until we have fusion powerplants.
Yeah and i hate it
Nuclear still suffers from it's disposal problem. You simply can't declare something environmentally friendly when it's producing horribly hazardous waste which we still don't know where to put it - especially in Germany.
@@flohmith5882 There is no scientific problem. You put it deep in the earth where it radiates alongside all the other rocks and dirt and put a thick layer of concrete over it. Problem: That's expensive and nobody wants to pay for it. So it's all in "intermediate" storage currently, where it's a risk that nobody feels responsible for.
All the issues with nuclear power are economic in nature.
@@flohmith5882 It's not a problem at all, you shipped it all to France where it got recycled and used.
@@flohmith5882 "producing horribly hazardous waste which we still don't know where to put it", oh, so you prefer to burn coal, producing horribly hazardous waste the you just dispose into the zatmosphere and forget about.
The video CLEARLY states it is about the Economics of Nuclear Energy, not a debate about climate impact comparisons. I feel like it handled that fairly well. They even brought up the point that these figures are based on old technology and that many more promising ones are in the pipe.
Are factory-built, truck delivered SMRs the key to rapid production and start-up times? Install them sequentially, or in any scheme that works best? Having one or two spares off-line would allow maintenance/repair with no drop in plant output in a plant with many reactors or with common heat and generation units.
Silly prejudices, anybody who excludes nuclear as an option is not serious about stopping climate change.
czcams.com/video/Yl0VtxAbt40/video.html
People who reject often don't understand how it really works and things like the new Chernobyl series don't help things. It's sadly laughable. How many people nuclear power has killed ever vs coal kills yearly...
Mandi Blackwell
What about nuclear waste?
And the amount of building it takes for fully functional nuclear
@@mogheen "Coal is responsible for over 800,000 premature deaths per year globally and many millions more serious and minor illnesses..." endcoal.org/health/
Mining direct death:
Chinese officials acknowledge more than 2,000 coal mining deaths annually, compared with fewer than 50 in the United States.
shorturl.at/gxJUY
Mining respiratory death:
Coal miners' pneumoconiosis (CWP) and silicosis accounted for 95.49% of the pneumoconiosis reported, with 16,658 and 10,072 cases reported in 2016, respectively. The total number of pneumoconiosis cases reached 72,000 for workers up until 2015, with 6000 deaths occurring per year
shorturl.at/pqG12
And you're complaining about spent rods that we now have the tech to actually reprocess spent fuel rods to extend the life? shorturl.at/kuBE0 and even if we dont, it often is put into dry casks where it can stay for over 100 years... And these don't have to take much space. The building that houses Chicago/northern IL's used fuel is smaller than my old apartment. It's safe there w/feet of concrete for walls for a looong time.
This might be hard to include in the calculations, but you also have to take into account the environmental impact.
It is great that nuclear is used closed-system water, but natural gas is far from being a closed system without side-effects to the open nature.
Well in theory you could close off the ventilation from a natural gas plant and store it. Over time it would turn into a tar like sludge that in theory could be burned again. It's a net neutral system. But right now the country gives no subsidies on top of them for using this and cost to implement is higher so nobody does it right now. Gotta love humans am I right?
@@Skylancer727 I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how combustion works. If something has been burnt, it has been burnt. You cannot collect the exhaust gases and burn them again. Closed cycle gas turbines are highly efficient, there is virtually nothing combustible in the exhaust.
I think perhaps you are confusing with carbon capture which is a way to reduce CO2 emissions.
Luke Rieman can you use the carbon catching method on natural gas plants? Aka filter out the co2 or some of it out of the exhaust? (No clue what carbon catching is nor how natural gas plants work btw tell me if what I’m saying makes no sense)
@@blanco7726 technically yes you can, but as of right now there are no incentives to do so and because of that, nobody does. In theory you could just store all of it in a cave under ground or a steel container. If you did it would slowly turn into a sludge of carbon which may be reusable as fuel or could be recycled into the tar used on the road. But unless politicians subsidize this nobody will do it. It's more expensive to recycle this tar then make fresh stuff so it would only be done if they could get a deal to do so.
Right now the only talks were on the cave idea but this may have ecological issues as it may contaminate ground water. Since the alternative is more expensive, nobody wants to do it. It is an option, but unless you vote for politicians that specifically support this, it's just not gonna happen.
@@Skylancer727 Carbon dioxide will not "slowly turn into a sludge of carbon". Carbon dioxide is stable over geological time periods. Converting it into a "carbon sludge" requires chemically reducing the carbon dioxide which will cost considerable energy (more than was produced from burning natural gas to produce the carbon dioxide).
Brilliant videos, a small suggestion to include manpower and maintenance cost for both nuclear and non nuclear.
Would love to see this video updated to add in Wind/Solar/Battery using Tesla's MegaPacks as basis for financial cost of storage. Also the calculation needs to include cost to decommission facilities at End Of Life and cost of pollution plus cost of military support required to ensure gas supply if you as a country don't have a domestic supply.
After writing that sentence I realized the scope of work so I understand if it would not be updated.
Great video though, thanks.
Been watching your videos for a while now. Thank you for all the effort. It's certainly making the world a better place, one mind at a time.
Prism Reactor from GE/Hatachi seems a good way forward, it is small uses reprocessed Nuclear waste or reprocessed weapons grade nuclear material for fuel. Good safety systems and a relatively modern design. But try and have a conversation with some greenpeace activists about it; they can't see past the first word , same problem with golden rice.
The output of nuclear power stations is so much more consistent than wind and solar, the sheer volume of battery storage required to guarantee renewables to power everything is ridiculously huge.
I love the Illinois Energy Professor
My favorite topic! Thank you for making this video, and I'm already looking forward to the follow-ups!!