Well, "By the end of the century" is almost 80 years away, that is significantly longer than any normal nuclear power plant lasts.
Also it is very difficult to know which exact price someone pays for uranium because they normal dont buy on the spot market, but via long lasting contracts.
So from my point of view we don't have sufficient information for a proper estimation of the situation.
The end of the century at current rates of use which means about 77 years. At just 10% increased use annually that would double roughly every 7 years which means it won't last nearly that long.
The real key factor is as the cost of uranium continues to go up and suffers potential shortages and supply issues the cost of installing solar and wind continues to drop - they got planning permission for a solar farm near me about a year ago and it's already half way through having pannels installed, the speed they can do it is only going to keep increasing especially as more automated tools get developed. Then there's the almost certainty of a breakthrough in chemistry reaching market which significant reduces cost and increases the range of locations suitable which would again drastically lower price per kWh while the price of running nukes continues to rise and they're locked into decades of economic loss or they'll choose to close them and all that investment and effort will be for nothing.
@Wirrvogel @CAVOK Uranium is not really finite. There is an upper limit to its cost, when it becomes commercially viable to extract it from sea water, which itself leeches it from the entire earth's surface. But before that, there are enough options, as uranium is much more ubiquitous, and more evenly distributed about the world than oil — and peak oil hasn't really happened either yet, despite forecasts for decades.
Solar ans wind power will never ever be a good baseline energy production méthod. It’s complementary.
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/...
No, it is a perfekt baseline energy production method. France is buying our renewable energy, because it can't produce enough with its broken nuclear power plants and the ones not producing full because of the drought. The numbers do not lie.
Also, what I see in that graph is that your grid's baseline isn't renewables, but fossil fuels. That's shameful.
Is that why you're reopening coal plants?
Ah yes, 4th generation nuclear reactors will save us, as will fusion reactors. We could make stuff work with existing technology, but that's somehow not good enough. The whole future plans section of the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor reads like the technological challenges of these type of reactors are not as solved as you state it in your post.
Well, you can potentially design them in a way, that you can control the energy output more easily. However, then they will be even less economical than they are now. If you run at lower output, you waste more fuel.
@Sodis @MattMastodon Nuclear power plants can quite easily do load following. It happens regularly e. g. in France. However, since it has the lowest running costs, other sources are usually cut first as far as possible.
@MattMastodon @AlexisFR @Wirrvogel
The optimum imho is:
The bulk of the generation from wind and solar, and nuclear for 15% - 20% base load. Also some Geothermal where cheap but it's potential is small.
Grids improved to cover local and intermediate renewable generation, and extended to facilitate import/export.
Variable electricity pricing for demand shifting.
The result is vastly reduced need for storage, probably batteries used intelligently in a hierarchy of grid and home, compared to the naïve "just build wind and solar and batteries."
Then add in:
- A 90% transition from personal cars to free green public transport (#FGPT), taxis, e-bikes, bicycles, and walking.
This all needs no new technology (although for nuclear there are several advances not yet used at scale: molten salt, small, modular, U238, thorium), it needs a fraction of the rare earths, and delivers a huge in reduction steel production courtesy of car recycling.
#Energy #Renewables #ClimateCrisis #Climate #Nuclear
[P.S. Dams damage eco-systems so I'm not in favour of more hydro generation, and pumped hydro storage needs the spare water too.
Biomass not "net zero" and obviously not "zero" which we actually need. It's just more carbon burning plus extra pollution from the agriculture and other products of combustion. It increases land use, and at present the industry is full of corruption with trees being burned sometimes alongside shredded car tyres... and subsidised!]
It can’t be scales up and down following need.
Yes, it runs at full power most of the time. That's what being a "baseline energy source" means.
I wonder how long until all those people always glorifying atomic energie come here...
Usually this community is full of them even in threads only talking about renewables.
This is one of the main problems with atomic energy that we haven't got any idea how to solve - Germany got pretty much all of their uranium from Russia - France from an unstable country like Niger - it's just not something you can extract easily in countries that care about their citizens so it'll always come from a shitty place.
I wonder how the Venn diagram looks between those people that defend atomic everywhere and the people telling you all about how bad electric cars are because of their batteries...
it's just not something you can extract easily in countries that care about their citizens so it'll always come from a shitty place
First two countries for known reserves are Australia and Canada, together they hold around 40% of all the uranium reserves of the planet. Uranium could also be extracted from seawater, obviously at a much higher price.
It's just that it's easier to extract it where exploitation rights for land is cheap. But that's unfortunately also true for many materials we need for renewables
Yeah but even though we're using the cheapest Uranium possible atomic power is STILL much more expensive than renewables - I wonder how insane the prices would be if you only took Uranium from good sources.
Also those costs almost never include the cost of securing the waste for thousands of years since you can't just leave the waste laying around out of fear of dirty bombs.
Sure it looks decent in a vacuum but with all the factors playing into it from Uranium being a limited resource that costs a lot to the waste-management it's just much more expensive than just spending the money you'd need to buy one plant on renewables and energy-storages that are also ready to go a lot faster...
the price of atomic energy is like 10% coupled to the price of uranium. the equipment, the salaries, the security measures, all those things are so much more expensive compared to the fuel.
people rarely grasp what 4 magnitudes of energy density increase mean.
yeah but how much more is Uranium if it's mined in Canada compared to the one from Niger or Russia?
sure it's not the main cost-driver but it's not irrelevant either.
Also: an installed solar-panel is very cheap in maintenance - and most of the running costs of are heavily influenced by inflation, too It just doesn't make sense to push for building more atomic reactors - keeping the ones already there running IS making sense but building new ones that may start producing energy in 10 years AND are massively expensive is just not a reasonable investment
This is one of the main problems with atomic energy that we haven’t got any idea how to use
Doesn't this apply to almost any form of power generation? Fossil fuels and raw materials for nuclear fuels are often imported from undemocratic or unstable countries. As are many of the raw materials required for renewable power generation and storage.
Using this as an argument againt nuclear power is as intellectually dishonest as the people using it as an argument against electric cars.
I wonder how long until all those people always glorifying atomic energie come here...
You mean the realists who want to eliminate carbon emissions with more than wishful thinking? Or the people trying to educate against decades of the oil and gas corporations' anti-nuclear propaganda and fearmongering?
Ah yes, much better to keep building new coal or gas plants instead. "Fuck the planet, we're trying to save a dime."
A few days ago someone said France was planning an attack to Niger after the coup. I'm not defending the coup but that's how colonialism used to work: I conquered you, your sources (uranium) are mine. And nobody ever thought about using it locally for elecricy production.
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The question is more like: "How dependent is France on uranium which is a finite resource?"
"The demand for uranium continues to increase, but the supply is not keeping up. Current uranium reserves are expected to be depleted by the end of the century, and new sources of uranium are hard to find. As a result, uranium prices have been steadily rising, with some estimates predicting a doubling of prices by 2030. This is causing a global uranium squeeze, where the demand for the resource is outstripping the supply."
France: Let's build more nuclear plants, also do not invest into renewable energy, also since we are used to wars for oil, why not having wars for uranium in the future too?
save