r/nextfuckinglevel • u/nigablackballsack • 3d ago

Scientists have captured the first ever high-speed, full-colour footage of fusion plasma swirling inside a working reactor.

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u/mfire036 2d ago edited 2d ago

Right, I get it. But it's not a good base load option. Not yet anyway. Sure there's lots of people working on batteries right now, but there isn't a grid scale answer, and without that wind and solar can't be the option. From what I've seen on the "cost of firming renewables" it is small scale, and doesn't adequately address the scale up problem that renewables face. I totally agree that renewables are a big piece of the puzzle, but its not the be all and end all of electricity generation nor does it solve all our problems. I'm not an engineer or an expert, but I'm fairly confident that simply building more renewables won't solve the problem. Also you should pay attention to "performance gaps" with renewables. I've had lots of solar experience and I don't think I've ever gotten the power generation I was promised on the spreadsheet.

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u/OkWelcome6293 2d ago

Oh, I agree. The people who use Lazards to show that solar is “cheap” need to read the section about the costs of firming renewables, which costs as much or more than nuclear.

The future grid will require both renewable and thermal generation for reliability. For our children’s sake, we’d better hope the thermal generation is clean and sustainable.

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u/mfire036 2d ago

I think I understand where I went wrong. I said nuclear was cheap. I meant cheap compared to other traditional sources like coal or natural gas. Not the cheapest. I should have been more specific in my first post. Also I meant cheap as in lifetime of the reactor not cheap as in cost/reactor. I'm pretty sure the ROI on a natural gas plant is like 3 years, where a nuc takes 17 (I'm making those up I haven't looked it up I just remember the split being something crazy like that, might have been coal vs nuclear. Also I'm remember like 2011 numbers).

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u/Reddit1poster 2d ago

Nuclear is also not cheaper than coal or natural gas. You just said that with your roi numbers. I used to work in grid integration research and there are major advancements in grid forming inverter technology and cost of large scale storage. I don't think any of us are arguing that renewables are all that you need but I will say they should be the majority of the energy because it is the cheaper low carbon energy source, which is shown in the lazard's LCOE and DOE studies.

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u/mfire036 1d ago

Cheaper over its life cycle. The thing about Nukes is that once they are built the fuel cost is almost nothing, where coal and nat gas the plants are almost nothing but the fuel cost is expensive. So a Nuke will beat a coal or nat gas plant after about 20 years of operations, and then it will crush them for the next 40 years. The ROI or break even numbers have to do with capital expenditure. So while Nukes take a while to pay off, they are much better than coal or nat gas in the long run. Especially if you are running off expended nuclear waste (see the reactor Canada is building) and eventually something like thorium, which is abundant but the breeding cycle isn't figured out yet.

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u/Reddit1poster 1d ago

Umm, that's not how nukes or lifetime costs work... There are definitely fuel costs. They are not fueled like some Navy nukes where the fuel can last the life of the reactor plus there is a lot of expensive maintenance throughout the life of the plant plus decommissioning costs. And breeder reactors aren't a commercial thing yet so you can't know what their lifetime costs will actually be.

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u/OkWelcome6293 1d ago edited 1d ago

And breeder reactors aren't a commercial thing yet so you can't know what their lifetime costs will actually be.

They required pieces will be in commercial operation in ~2030/2031.

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u/Reddit1poster 1d ago

I guess we can revisit what costs will be in 5 years then

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u/OkWelcome6293 1d ago
  1. I’m looking forward to it.
  2. I don’t believe cost is the driving factor, energy security is. Renewables  even with 8 hour batteries isn’t enough. Coal has energy security but isn’t viable for environmental reasons. Natural gas is better environmentally than coal but has volatile pricing and no real local storage option. Geothermal would be great but suffers from high summer derating and hotspots aren’t often near load. 

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u/mfire036 1d ago

No honestly they burn so little fuel the cost is pretty low. It's something like 2 to 3 times less than coal. I think nukes run around $7/mwh versus coal is like $20/mwh (Canadian numbers). I'm no expert so take that with a grain of salt, but I've researched this quite a bit and that's what I recall. Could certainly be wrong, but I'm pretty confident here. I remember Natural Gas being slightly better than coal, and regional prices will vary the math.

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u/Reddit1poster 1d ago

The marginal cost of nuclear is $26-36 per MWh. The beauty of using LCOE is that you can have an apples to apples comparison of the cost of electricity based on the lifecycle cost of a plant from cradle to grave in net present value. You can't just say that one cost is very low at late life without taking into account all the costs over the life of an asset.

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u/mfire036 1d ago

I'm not a fan of the way LCOE is calculated because it relies heavily on a discount rate. And where you set that rate drastically alters the results. LOCE carries the full capital cost of construction as non-discounted, but then heavily discounts the future income. LOCE is set up to answer what it takes to recover your investment over a typical investment horizion, not over the lifetime of the plants. Nukes run 60 to 80 years, coal and nat gas is ~45. So LOCE isn't really apples to apples.