The climate hawks that are anti nuclear because of waste really surprise me. If you really think life could be almost made unlivable within a hundred years on this planet then it seems nuclear waste would be way down on the list of concerns compared to carbon generation.
I come across this too. Lots of anti-nuclear types seem to think that the lack of current in-use Yucca Mountain type facilities is some kind of trump card in the debate.
I point out that we're storing nuclear waste now, all over the place, with no ill effects. This doesn't really register for some reason.
I think this is sort of “politics is downstream of psychology”. Some people believe humanity is out of step with nature and that this is a grave sin that must be corrected through actions that may hurt humanity (we have sinned and are due punishment). This is why they don’t really care if we have reliable electricity or access to abundant food stuffs. In the end, we have fallen short of the glory of nature and it’s pure spirits.
I’m more of a “burden of dreams” person when it comes to nature and I don’t think it’s particularly deserving of praise in its pure form, though I am a conservationist and believe if leaving things better than we found it where possible.
One thing the supply chain disruptions of the last several years have driven home is a reminder of the mundane, boring point that geography does, in fact, matter. Not all the time, but when resilience and reliability are essential, it matters most. In light of that, it seems it should be a goal for the US, EU and UK to locate as much of our national security-critical supply chain as possible in the Atlantic basin -- as far from the ability of possible military adversaries to disrupt as possible. So it would be smart to push to develop manufacturing capabilities in the poorer countries in the Atlantic region, on both sides, Caribbean islands like Jamaica as well as Africa and Central-South America.
The Catalyst podcast had an interesting interview with Brett Kugelmass, the CEO and founder of nuclear reactor developer Last Energy. He was very pessimistic about the future of SMRs in the US primarily due to the regulatory climate here. His US based company is building 10 SMRs in Poland.
His take on the regulatory problems with nuclear in the US was particularly interesting. He claimed the problem isn't just the NRC, but rather, it's was actually that the NRC is suffering from a sort of regulatory capture from the utilities due to guaranteed ROI pricing.
>> On the mainland, prices max out in Connecticut at $0.19 per kilowatt-hour.
Minor nitpick, but in New England we're currently paying much higher prices than this thanks to Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the sky high LNG prices that resulted as Europe scrambled to replace Russian gas.
FYI, I just realized this is a repost of an earlier article and that Matt's on vacation in Jamaica right now. I should have figured he wouldn't let something like this, however small, slip through his editorial review process :)
Yeah. It's a weird situation that hopefully will be much better in a few months, assuming international LNG and oil markets don't go nuts again.
For most of the year, New England's natural gas generators use cheap pipeline gas from the Marcellus shale region. Even with the gas price increases this year, shale gas didn't get that crazy this year.
Unfortunately, during the coldest 30 or so days of the year, pipeline capacity to New England can't satisfy electricity and heating demand. The result is usually real-time electricity prices going crazy. During these periods, generators use LNG and oil instead of pipeline gas and prices for both of these have been very very high lately.
Usually, our wholesale electricity prices hang out between 3 cents and 6 cents per kWh during most of the year. On days when gas supply is limited, wholesale prices can shoot over $1.00 per kWh for periods. It only takes a handful of those spikes per year to get very high average retail prices.
The really strange thing is that New England's grid is a summer peaking grid and when these price spikes happen, overall electricity demand is only around 2/3 of its summer max. In other words, there's tons of excess grid capacity, just no gas available to run it.
I know very little about Jamaica, but it's in the Caribbean so should the risk of hurricanes and other extreme weather be a factor? Which energy options are most weather-resilient?
If you mean generating options, South Florida's Turkey Point nuclear plant withstood a direct hit from a Category 5 hurricane (Andrew) and sustained no damage to its containment structures.
And to the extent the grid has become less carbon intensive, don’t be fooled into thinking this is due to that wind farm along the highway outside of town...The bulk of that CO2 reduction is due to replacing coal with natural gas over the last decade. In terms of megawatt hours, coal has gone from 150m (about half of net generation) to maybe 50-60m. Gas use has increased to fill that coal gap and then some.
Open a nuclear plant or a dam and you’re definitely reducing carbon intensity. Open a wind or solar farm and it’s a mixed bag - all that renewable generation has to be backed up by fossil fuels.
” all that renewable generation has to be backed up by fossil fuels”
Same old, same old, in terms of huge logical fallacies: the amount of generating capacity I maintain for emergency use =\= the amount of output I use gas to generate.
Natural gas peaking plants backstopping a large, diverse renewables grid use vastly less gas than when the same amount of capacity is used for base load.
Yes! I’d say Texas is a good example of a mixed bag. The high wind production is great. The C02 reduction (the stat that actually matters) is not as great. (And grid stability and unpredictable financial pressures on producers caused by that much wind in the loop very likely contributed to the 2021 Big Freeze...)
In the February 2021 Texas freeze, about 46000 MW went offline for the week due to the weather. About 18000 MW was from wind and solar not producing, but the other 28000 MW was from natural gas plants going offline because they were not constructed to operate in temperatures that low. A lot of natural gas plants in Texas don't even have storage facilities. They just burn straight out of the (not well-insulated) pipelines. This is more of a question of how we should prepare and build for black swan events like that, and all the trade-offs involved. The Texas grid handled the shorter and smaller freeze a few weeks ago just fine. No plants went offline. All the power outages were due to tree limbs falling on power lines from so much ice, like what happened in my neighborhood.
A quick search revealed businesses on average in Germany paid more than double the Connecticut price for electricity last year. So, yeah, you'd think maybe Jamaica could make the numbers work if they could get ample electricity. But of course there are other inputs besides electricity, including skilled labor, various industrial support services, good transport/logistics, and so on.
(It's possible the Ukraine situation made electricity prices spike in Germany in 2022?)
I think the bigger question is why would you *want* to develop a sector that has to produce a lot of industrial waste and air pollution (I'm no expert, but it seems like it must, right?) on a beautiful tropical island (or really anywhere). If I'm starting from scratch I'm going with the cleanest type of manufacturing possible. I appreciate Matt's words regarding the desirability of developing export manufacturing, but man, nonferrous metals seem like a dirty way to go about doing that. (But sure, you've already go the ore...so....it's tempting). I just feel larger countries are in a better position to deal with the negative environmental externalities.
To my understanding, aluminum-smelting is less nasty than a lot of others, though I could be wrong. That said, the world's biggest aluminum-smelter is also an island noted for its natural beauty--Iceland. So however bad aluminum-smelting might be, clearly there's some way to deal with it that not only (1) works on islands but (2) is compatible with a thriving tourism industry based on natural beauty.
Of course, Iceland is orders of magnitude larger and less densely-populated than Jamaica, not to mention much richer, so maybe Iceland's solutions wouldn't work. But on the other hand, to my understanding, the aluminum smelting in Iceland, while distributed around the island, did start and remains active in the Capital region around Reykjavík, which is much more comparable to Jamaica in terms of population density (about the same) and which is actually much smaller than Jamaica in terms of area. So whatever Iceland is doing in the Capital Region, it might be replicable in Jamaica, provided there is enough cheap, clean electricity. (On that front, Iceland just happened to win the world's clean energy lottery by having both cheap geothermal and cheap hydro.)
"the world's biggest aluminum-smelter is also an island noted for its natural beauty--Iceland."
I actually just recently learned about this from the OECD's web-based game "Tradle" ( https://oec.world/en/tradle/ ), which all good Slow Boring readers should be playing. (I successfully got Iceland by, I think, the second to last guess, but that was all about isolating the answer from the geographic hints.)
Yes, it's a fascinating game in terms of making you think about the economies of countries that aren't necessarily headline news for the business section. Something I also like about it as compared to a lot of the on-line word games is that it provides enough starting information so, if you're reasonably educated about economics + geography, you can actually make a sufficiently informed guess to sometimes get it correct on the first try. (That said, it is sometimes "unfairly" tricky -- I believe certain sectors are tracked in such a way by national governments that for some of the small sub-national territories/protectorates things don't show up as exports that you'd expect. E.g., there are several of the small Caribbean territories that show no fishing exports at all, probably because France, UK, and/or Netherlands are logging those in the national figures, but that can make it difficult to recognize you're dealing with an island.)
More clean and culturally closer to home - I think Jamaica has a golden opportunity to benefit from being a global capital for cannabis and cannabis tourism.
Of course, Jamaica has held these titles for generations, its just only a criminal element benefited much. Now, its finally politically feasible for it to be wholly legitimized, taxed, regulated, exported, advertised, made into all inclusive stoner vacation packages etc
Cannabis isn’t typical agriculture. It is an extremely high value cash crop that has enriched many, all the wrong people, for way too long. Once legalized, it is generally grown high tech for maximum quality with skilled and specialized labor. The sales figures are astoundingly large and it is not confined to agriculture-only, there is significant processing in the production of concentrates and edible products. That later processing piece however only occurs with legalization (not decriminalization.)
Tourism can also be very lucrative but agree a manufacturing export economy would be better on the whole. But there are not a ton of really successful small island manufacturing nations - its logistically extremely difficult to be competitive globally manufacturing on an island typically unless you are taking advantage of unique resources.
Iceland has aluminum production but thats due to very cheap/abundant geothermal. Taiwan has excellent hi-tech manufacturing, but that doesn’t seem within reach for Jamaica any time soon.
I don't know about aluminum in particular, but a lot of German industry benefited (past tense) from cheap Russian natural gas. How are German aluminum exports doing at the moment?
Firstly, Jamaica's energy demand is not going to be terribly seasonal, because the place doesn't have seasonal variations in temperature. The warmest month has maximums of about 92 Fahrenheit, the "coldest" 86.
Secondly, energy production from solar panels is only varies about 20% from the best to the worst month, compared to a factor of 2 in a place like Portugal, or 5 in northern Europe.
The point being, you don't need massive overbuilds of renewable energy, or masses of seasonal storage, to supply the vast majority of energy needs in a place like Jamaica. Solar, wind, batteries, and a bit of pumped hydro (Jamaica's highest mountains are 7500 feet high, if you can't find an environmentally and physically appropriate location for a pumped hydro plant there's something seriously wrong) will be more than adequate to supply Jamaica's energy needs.
As for siting, the nice thing about solar panels is that you can put quite a lot of them straight on building roof and cut your electricity bill. Yes, that requires sensible regulations, but which is the bigger flight of fancy - a nation like Jamaica pulling off sensible regulation of rooftop solar panel installations, or pulling off a world-class nuclear regulatory environment, particularly as the only plausible partner has what Matt has regularly described as a dysfunctional regulator?
By the time any of the vapourware small reactors are actually demonstrated and producing power (and it remains to be seen whether they will be any cheaper than the disastrous nuclear megaprojects limping to life across the developed world) Jamaica could have replaced a large chunk of its oil imports with renewable energy, and saved a pile of money in the process.
They don't have money for AC but will be able to afford rooftop solar? Really? I think you're missing that Matts suggestion is to use nuclear to generate an order of magnitude more energy then they're using now, not an amount that's "adequate" for their low energy lifestyle. A few wind turbines and rooftop solar panels doesn't get them there
Either way you have a bunch of infrastructure to finance. One is a low risk technology which can be deployed incrementally and starts generating revenue almost immediately and has a bunch of providers offering concessional interest rates to low and middle income countries specifically for these types of projects. One is a high-risk technology with comparatively long lead times with fewer players willing to finance.
Unfortunately nuclear is just not a low cost solution even in the best of circumstances, if you’re not including externalities of burning fossil fuel. I don’t see it reducing Jamaica’s energy costs without international carbon trading.
As far as I understand, per unit generating power, construction costs alone make advanced nuclear currently much more expensive than solar or wind, and those technologies essentially have no operating costs while nuclear is expensive to run.
I’d love to see island nations attempt to capture power from ocean currents and tidal forces - tons of energy there that could be harnessed cleanly.
Your cost estimates are based on dealing with a constant onslaught of lawsuits and proceduralism. You’re also thinking of custom site built large reactors not the small modular reactors Matt’s talking about.
I’m not sure how many times we need to have this discussion before you do something other than come back with the same false talking points the next time as if we never spoke, but the technology is intrinsically expensive to build, made worse by our inability to deal with complex projects of any sort.
Regardless of what we do regarding permitting, occupational exposure limits, regulation, and NIMBYism, the only model which will bring the vision implied by your last sentence to life is the one in which I can plop an SMR off the back of a flatbed onto a mat foundation and build a Quonset hut around it. Otherwise, each site is a custom structure, 100% of the time, and the vast majority of capital costs, delays, and financing clusterfucks are found in the structure surrounding a reactor, not what’s inside the pressure vessel.
As long as I am building a reactor shield vessel able to withstand a sizable direct strike from a mid-sized aircraft, which will still be necessary from both practical and public opinion perspectives, there is little hope of driving costs down sufficiently to compete with renewables with gas peaker backup today and renewables with storage backup tomorrow.
A fully ramp-capable SMR would be a perfect candidate to replace storage, where cost parity is much easier to achieve, but does not exist.
I've been part of several discussions with you about this, and I thought Brian Potter's deep dive into the costs were fascinating. Its a three part series starting here:
My general takeaway from it was that nuclear faces a skeptical public that believes any failure at a nuclear power plant is unacceptable. That is the driving force behind massive regulation which then means that its hard to build at scale which causes a shortage of skilled labor and suppliers which means that projects take much longer than anticipated which means that the financing costs become enormous.
I read it, commented a bit there as well. But I don't really think your synopsis is an accurate summation of his articles:
I'd summarize the series thusly:
1. The technology's ultimate failure mode is genuinely catastrophic, meaning the degree of redundancy required to ensure that any failures which do occur will not reach that level is high, driving massive costs in construction and engineering.
2. Furthermore, the long life of the capital plant ensures that even when you do learn-by-doing as part of a massive building campaign, you lose that experience long before the time has come to replace all of the plants constructed the first time.
3. The industrial ecosystem which feeds into effective nuclear power construction is immensely complex and insanely wide-ranging; there is basically only one way to build nuclear power plants (Gens. I-III+) and it draws on a depth of expertise entirely outside the scope of any other construction project.
4. A skeptical public has compounded these issues with additional and very burdensome regulation which is likely unneccessary.
Which leads me to the synthesis argument I've been making here each and every time:
Solve point 4, by all means. I agree *completely* that ALARA is a shitty regulatory framework and the NRC sucks. But don't expect it to do much of anything except lower the operating costs for existing plants and allowing them to require marginally less subsidy money to stay in operation. If that's where your policy intervention stops, the only way to make new-build nuclear power cost competitive is going to be to cut corners on point 1, which is where we part ways. The proper solutions to point 1 go via point 3, and they are complicated industrial policy of the sort the US hasn't ever done well. I do not think it coincidental that America's ability to build nuclear went to shit as our shipbuilding industry moved across the Pacific and our dam-building drive wound down, because those are the two most important precursor "training" industries.
To make matters worse, even if you do that, then 70 years later point 2 is *still* going to come back and bite you on the ass, necessitating that you figure out how to do all it again unless you've sustained a booming export market in the interim.
I'm not sure that point 4 is solvable so long as the public is convinced that #1 - any failure at a plant is unacceptable. He points out a couple of times that the NRC has attempted to reduce the regulation on nuclear plants and those have faced fierce public resistance!
An unwillingness to tolerate any risk means that the costs will be extraordinarily high and that's not being driven by ALARA or the NRC, so much as those are the consequences of a public that feels that way.
edit - also, I didn't see comments from you there unless you're commenting under a different name :shocked face:
I’m unable to find anything either. Which is funny because I’ve hallucinated a clear memory of discussing his specific points with another commenter there at the time of publication.
Now I’m left wondering which bits of that memory are accurate, because all cannot be: time, place, people involved…
That’s a bit of a mischaracterization of #1, but you’re correct that it’s the uninformed public view of #1, which is among the reasons I think there’s no point in pursuing nuclear.
These bad faith arguments are so tedious. Yes something is going to be expensive if misguided opponents use ever legal, extralegal and procedural obstacle to stymie every example and run costs up as high as they can. And then they crow about how expensive it all is.
“Yes something is going to be expensive if misguided opponents use ever legal, extralegal and procedural obstacle to stymie every example and run costs up as high as they can”
This is an unfortunate reality of nuclear energy. Misguided or not, opponents are dug in deep and will put up a maximalist fight. We shouldn’t ignore this because we don’t like it.
Fwiw, I’m generally in favor of nuclear energy to replace fossil, just see it being a tough fit for Jamaica, at least without global carbon trading.
That is not the argument I am making and have made every time discussion of the issue has arisen in the past.
You've never addressed *any* of the substantive criticism, because you and the rest of the nukebros cannot. You can parrot a handful of talking points which account for perhaps 10% of the existing cost structure of nuclear energy, handwave the rest away as also the result of overregulation (with no evidence), never engage with people who have real-world experience, relevant professional expertise, or insider knowledge, and go on about your day secure in the "knowledge" that the establishment is screwing everything up.
As it stands, I'm not going to restate the exact same arguments I've made each of the last three times, to which you had no rejoinder and from which you ran away. But if you wish to actually engage in a substantive discussion of why you believe they're wrong, instead of blatantly mischaracterizing them before slinking off, I welcome it.
The main body of the article above is discussing the prospects for SMR in Jamaica, a place that must import LNG plus build renewables which are likely to harm the tourism industry (or at least limit the potential locations). Can you address the conditions on the ground in Jamaica and similarly placed island countries? Because it seems you are arguing against SMR in the US. I’m no expert on comparative costs, but I am also under the impression that nat’l gas while much Better than coal/oil from a carbon release point of view is still going to produce carbon pollution…is rather tricky to avoid spillage, etc.
Why wouldn’t you combine SMR with renewables? Why is nat’l gas better and especially for a country that must import it?
IMO, the main problem, which Matt sort handwaves away, is that it's tough to have nuclear satisfy much more than 50% of total generation on a grid. Generally, you'd have to pair it with an almost equal amount of flexible generation like natural gas or battery storage.
This is due to nuclear power's inability to economically follow load (eg fast ramp). There's been progress on the technical challenges of load following with nuclear, but even if all the engineering issues were solved, you'd still have the problem of utilizing only half of the capacity of a super-expensive capital asset. In the case of nuclear that nearly doubles the cost of its already very expensive output.
I did address your criticisms numerous times. You don’t seem willing to engage in a substantive discussion so I don’t think this line of argument is worth pursuing.
You talk only about ALARA and the NRC, and when I seek to drive discussion of shielding structure construction, complex staging, construction and fabrication bottlenecks, industrial capacity and workforce development, high degrees of congestion and spatial conflict in plant and structural systems, fabrication and welding challenges, inspection difficulties, scale testing, materials uncertainty and flaws, and a host of other issues, all of which collectively destroyed the last two US-based projects and have driven massive time and cost overruns in the UK, India, China, France, and Finland (each of which have vastly different industrial ecosystems and regulatory structures than the US), you disappear in the blink of an eye, like fucking clockwork.
Your argument only holds up as long as you can hold out ALARA and the NRC as the root of all evil to the ill-informed. It implodes catastrophically as soon as you so much as glance at the recent history of nuclear power construction *globally*, well out of their reach and in countries with no analogue to the overly-conservative regulations you focus on.
You know *so little* about this beyond "ALARA bad" that you're unable even to cite the counterexample that might point a path forward for III+ and IV generation reactor construction, namely the ROK's major build-out campaign. You have no idea how relatively successful it's been, nor any grasp of why, and have no insight into how its success might be replicated in the US. Trust me, "deregulation" ain't the answer there.
This is the fourth time we've done this. I am assuming you will *still* fail to discuss or address actual construction issues, because you have no experience dealing with them, don't understand them, and thus cannot speak to them at all.
It doesn’t have to be cheap power to reduce electricity costs for an island nation - it just needs to be cheaper than *petroleum* on an island. Petroleum makes up very little of the electricity generation on continents, but it’s useful for islands and for backup generators for small sites because there’s already a major infrastructure for delivering it. Even though petroleum is more expensive on an island, the things that are usually cheaper than petroleum on the mainland suffer even more from being on an island - natural gas and coal require even bigger imports than petroleum, while wind, solar, and hydro need a lot of land. If nuclear in Jamaica could be the same cost as nuclear in Vermont, that would reduce electricity costs a lot.
Their aluminum industry has mostly shut down as reseling their power contracts has been worth more than their output, and previously its been effectively subsidized?
The climate hawks that are anti nuclear because of waste really surprise me. If you really think life could be almost made unlivable within a hundred years on this planet then it seems nuclear waste would be way down on the list of concerns compared to carbon generation.
I come across this too. Lots of anti-nuclear types seem to think that the lack of current in-use Yucca Mountain type facilities is some kind of trump card in the debate.
I point out that we're storing nuclear waste now, all over the place, with no ill effects. This doesn't really register for some reason.
I think this is sort of “politics is downstream of psychology”. Some people believe humanity is out of step with nature and that this is a grave sin that must be corrected through actions that may hurt humanity (we have sinned and are due punishment). This is why they don’t really care if we have reliable electricity or access to abundant food stuffs. In the end, we have fallen short of the glory of nature and it’s pure spirits.
I’m more of a “burden of dreams” person when it comes to nature and I don’t think it’s particularly deserving of praise in its pure form, though I am a conservationist and believe if leaving things better than we found it where possible.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uL99NDUWJ0A
One thing the supply chain disruptions of the last several years have driven home is a reminder of the mundane, boring point that geography does, in fact, matter. Not all the time, but when resilience and reliability are essential, it matters most. In light of that, it seems it should be a goal for the US, EU and UK to locate as much of our national security-critical supply chain as possible in the Atlantic basin -- as far from the ability of possible military adversaries to disrupt as possible. So it would be smart to push to develop manufacturing capabilities in the poorer countries in the Atlantic region, on both sides, Caribbean islands like Jamaica as well as Africa and Central-South America.
The Catalyst podcast had an interesting interview with Brett Kugelmass, the CEO and founder of nuclear reactor developer Last Energy. He was very pessimistic about the future of SMRs in the US primarily due to the regulatory climate here. His US based company is building 10 SMRs in Poland.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/strong-opinions-on-smrs/id1593204897?i=1000600029481
His take on the regulatory problems with nuclear in the US was particularly interesting. He claimed the problem isn't just the NRC, but rather, it's was actually that the NRC is suffering from a sort of regulatory capture from the utilities due to guaranteed ROI pricing.
You know if this is a free un-gated piece it probably makes sense to mention that in your Twitter posts about it to generate traffic.
>> On the mainland, prices max out in Connecticut at $0.19 per kilowatt-hour.
Minor nitpick, but in New England we're currently paying much higher prices than this thanks to Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the sky high LNG prices that resulted as Europe scrambled to replace Russian gas.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a
> CT $0.24 per kWh
> MA $0.28
> NH $0.30
FYI, I just realized this is a repost of an earlier article and that Matt's on vacation in Jamaica right now. I should have figured he wouldn't let something like this, however small, slip through his editorial review process :)
Yikes.
Yeah. It's a weird situation that hopefully will be much better in a few months, assuming international LNG and oil markets don't go nuts again.
For most of the year, New England's natural gas generators use cheap pipeline gas from the Marcellus shale region. Even with the gas price increases this year, shale gas didn't get that crazy this year.
Unfortunately, during the coldest 30 or so days of the year, pipeline capacity to New England can't satisfy electricity and heating demand. The result is usually real-time electricity prices going crazy. During these periods, generators use LNG and oil instead of pipeline gas and prices for both of these have been very very high lately.
Usually, our wholesale electricity prices hang out between 3 cents and 6 cents per kWh during most of the year. On days when gas supply is limited, wholesale prices can shoot over $1.00 per kWh for periods. It only takes a handful of those spikes per year to get very high average retail prices.
The really strange thing is that New England's grid is a summer peaking grid and when these price spikes happen, overall electricity demand is only around 2/3 of its summer max. In other words, there's tons of excess grid capacity, just no gas available to run it.
If life was a thing, money could buy/
The rich would live and the poor would die.
Why the rich man have the air condition?
And the poor man have the fan with the man?
https://youtu.be/s4lpP1k73Tk
(Not sure I've transcribed the end of that last line correctly -- please improve if you can.)
I know very little about Jamaica, but it's in the Caribbean so should the risk of hurricanes and other extreme weather be a factor? Which energy options are most weather-resilient?
If you mean generating options, South Florida's Turkey Point nuclear plant withstood a direct hit from a Category 5 hurricane (Andrew) and sustained no damage to its containment structures.
Germany is a big aluminum exporter and they have pretty expensive electricity. How do they make it work?
PS - I went to Petrojam in maybe 1988 or 1989. I think Van Halen was the headliner...
And to the extent the grid has become less carbon intensive, don’t be fooled into thinking this is due to that wind farm along the highway outside of town...The bulk of that CO2 reduction is due to replacing coal with natural gas over the last decade. In terms of megawatt hours, coal has gone from 150m (about half of net generation) to maybe 50-60m. Gas use has increased to fill that coal gap and then some.
Open a nuclear plant or a dam and you’re definitely reducing carbon intensity. Open a wind or solar farm and it’s a mixed bag - all that renewable generation has to be backed up by fossil fuels.
” all that renewable generation has to be backed up by fossil fuels”
Same old, same old, in terms of huge logical fallacies: the amount of generating capacity I maintain for emergency use =\= the amount of output I use gas to generate.
Natural gas peaking plants backstopping a large, diverse renewables grid use vastly less gas than when the same amount of capacity is used for base load.
So you’re saying Texas getting 24% of its electricity from wind last year is a mixed bag?
Yes! I’d say Texas is a good example of a mixed bag. The high wind production is great. The C02 reduction (the stat that actually matters) is not as great. (And grid stability and unpredictable financial pressures on producers caused by that much wind in the loop very likely contributed to the 2021 Big Freeze...)
In the February 2021 Texas freeze, about 46000 MW went offline for the week due to the weather. About 18000 MW was from wind and solar not producing, but the other 28000 MW was from natural gas plants going offline because they were not constructed to operate in temperatures that low. A lot of natural gas plants in Texas don't even have storage facilities. They just burn straight out of the (not well-insulated) pipelines. This is more of a question of how we should prepare and build for black swan events like that, and all the trade-offs involved. The Texas grid handled the shorter and smaller freeze a few weeks ago just fine. No plants went offline. All the power outages were due to tree limbs falling on power lines from so much ice, like what happened in my neighborhood.
A quick search revealed businesses on average in Germany paid more than double the Connecticut price for electricity last year. So, yeah, you'd think maybe Jamaica could make the numbers work if they could get ample electricity. But of course there are other inputs besides electricity, including skilled labor, various industrial support services, good transport/logistics, and so on.
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/electricity_prices/
(It's possible the Ukraine situation made electricity prices spike in Germany in 2022?)
I think the bigger question is why would you *want* to develop a sector that has to produce a lot of industrial waste and air pollution (I'm no expert, but it seems like it must, right?) on a beautiful tropical island (or really anywhere). If I'm starting from scratch I'm going with the cleanest type of manufacturing possible. I appreciate Matt's words regarding the desirability of developing export manufacturing, but man, nonferrous metals seem like a dirty way to go about doing that. (But sure, you've already go the ore...so....it's tempting). I just feel larger countries are in a better position to deal with the negative environmental externalities.
To my understanding, aluminum-smelting is less nasty than a lot of others, though I could be wrong. That said, the world's biggest aluminum-smelter is also an island noted for its natural beauty--Iceland. So however bad aluminum-smelting might be, clearly there's some way to deal with it that not only (1) works on islands but (2) is compatible with a thriving tourism industry based on natural beauty.
Of course, Iceland is orders of magnitude larger and less densely-populated than Jamaica, not to mention much richer, so maybe Iceland's solutions wouldn't work. But on the other hand, to my understanding, the aluminum smelting in Iceland, while distributed around the island, did start and remains active in the Capital region around Reykjavík, which is much more comparable to Jamaica in terms of population density (about the same) and which is actually much smaller than Jamaica in terms of area. So whatever Iceland is doing in the Capital Region, it might be replicable in Jamaica, provided there is enough cheap, clean electricity. (On that front, Iceland just happened to win the world's clean energy lottery by having both cheap geothermal and cheap hydro.)
"the world's biggest aluminum-smelter is also an island noted for its natural beauty--Iceland."
I actually just recently learned about this from the OECD's web-based game "Tradle" ( https://oec.world/en/tradle/ ), which all good Slow Boring readers should be playing. (I successfully got Iceland by, I think, the second to last guess, but that was all about isolating the answer from the geographic hints.)
Just tried Tradle today! Rather interesting that today's country exports that much wine, though in retrospect it makes sense.
Yes, it's a fascinating game in terms of making you think about the economies of countries that aren't necessarily headline news for the business section. Something I also like about it as compared to a lot of the on-line word games is that it provides enough starting information so, if you're reasonably educated about economics + geography, you can actually make a sufficiently informed guess to sometimes get it correct on the first try. (That said, it is sometimes "unfairly" tricky -- I believe certain sectors are tracked in such a way by national governments that for some of the small sub-national territories/protectorates things don't show up as exports that you'd expect. E.g., there are several of the small Caribbean territories that show no fishing exports at all, probably because France, UK, and/or Netherlands are logging those in the national figures, but that can make it difficult to recognize you're dealing with an island.)
More clean and culturally closer to home - I think Jamaica has a golden opportunity to benefit from being a global capital for cannabis and cannabis tourism.
Of course, Jamaica has held these titles for generations, its just only a criminal element benefited much. Now, its finally politically feasible for it to be wholly legitimized, taxed, regulated, exported, advertised, made into all inclusive stoner vacation packages etc
Agriculture and tourism don’t make a place rich.
Cannabis isn’t typical agriculture. It is an extremely high value cash crop that has enriched many, all the wrong people, for way too long. Once legalized, it is generally grown high tech for maximum quality with skilled and specialized labor. The sales figures are astoundingly large and it is not confined to agriculture-only, there is significant processing in the production of concentrates and edible products. That later processing piece however only occurs with legalization (not decriminalization.)
Tourism can also be very lucrative but agree a manufacturing export economy would be better on the whole. But there are not a ton of really successful small island manufacturing nations - its logistically extremely difficult to be competitive globally manufacturing on an island typically unless you are taking advantage of unique resources.
Iceland has aluminum production but thats due to very cheap/abundant geothermal. Taiwan has excellent hi-tech manufacturing, but that doesn’t seem within reach for Jamaica any time soon.
With it legal in enough places now, I don’t see cannabis tourism being large enough to move the needle even a little bit.
"How do they make it work?"
I don't know about aluminum in particular, but a lot of German industry benefited (past tense) from cheap Russian natural gas. How are German aluminum exports doing at the moment?
This is...not a very good idea.
Firstly, Jamaica's energy demand is not going to be terribly seasonal, because the place doesn't have seasonal variations in temperature. The warmest month has maximums of about 92 Fahrenheit, the "coldest" 86.
Secondly, energy production from solar panels is only varies about 20% from the best to the worst month, compared to a factor of 2 in a place like Portugal, or 5 in northern Europe.
The point being, you don't need massive overbuilds of renewable energy, or masses of seasonal storage, to supply the vast majority of energy needs in a place like Jamaica. Solar, wind, batteries, and a bit of pumped hydro (Jamaica's highest mountains are 7500 feet high, if you can't find an environmentally and physically appropriate location for a pumped hydro plant there's something seriously wrong) will be more than adequate to supply Jamaica's energy needs.
As for siting, the nice thing about solar panels is that you can put quite a lot of them straight on building roof and cut your electricity bill. Yes, that requires sensible regulations, but which is the bigger flight of fancy - a nation like Jamaica pulling off sensible regulation of rooftop solar panel installations, or pulling off a world-class nuclear regulatory environment, particularly as the only plausible partner has what Matt has regularly described as a dysfunctional regulator?
By the time any of the vapourware small reactors are actually demonstrated and producing power (and it remains to be seen whether they will be any cheaper than the disastrous nuclear megaprojects limping to life across the developed world) Jamaica could have replaced a large chunk of its oil imports with renewable energy, and saved a pile of money in the process.
They don't have money for AC but will be able to afford rooftop solar? Really? I think you're missing that Matts suggestion is to use nuclear to generate an order of magnitude more energy then they're using now, not an amount that's "adequate" for their low energy lifestyle. A few wind turbines and rooftop solar panels doesn't get them there
(Sorry, accidentally deleted, reposting)
Either way you have a bunch of infrastructure to finance. One is a low risk technology which can be deployed incrementally and starts generating revenue almost immediately and has a bunch of providers offering concessional interest rates to low and middle income countries specifically for these types of projects. One is a high-risk technology with comparatively long lead times with fewer players willing to finance.
Which one will be easier to raise money for?
Unfortunately nuclear is just not a low cost solution even in the best of circumstances, if you’re not including externalities of burning fossil fuel. I don’t see it reducing Jamaica’s energy costs without international carbon trading.
As far as I understand, per unit generating power, construction costs alone make advanced nuclear currently much more expensive than solar or wind, and those technologies essentially have no operating costs while nuclear is expensive to run.
I’d love to see island nations attempt to capture power from ocean currents and tidal forces - tons of energy there that could be harnessed cleanly.
Your cost estimates are based on dealing with a constant onslaught of lawsuits and proceduralism. You’re also thinking of custom site built large reactors not the small modular reactors Matt’s talking about.
I’m not sure how many times we need to have this discussion before you do something other than come back with the same false talking points the next time as if we never spoke, but the technology is intrinsically expensive to build, made worse by our inability to deal with complex projects of any sort.
Regardless of what we do regarding permitting, occupational exposure limits, regulation, and NIMBYism, the only model which will bring the vision implied by your last sentence to life is the one in which I can plop an SMR off the back of a flatbed onto a mat foundation and build a Quonset hut around it. Otherwise, each site is a custom structure, 100% of the time, and the vast majority of capital costs, delays, and financing clusterfucks are found in the structure surrounding a reactor, not what’s inside the pressure vessel.
As long as I am building a reactor shield vessel able to withstand a sizable direct strike from a mid-sized aircraft, which will still be necessary from both practical and public opinion perspectives, there is little hope of driving costs down sufficiently to compete with renewables with gas peaker backup today and renewables with storage backup tomorrow.
A fully ramp-capable SMR would be a perfect candidate to replace storage, where cost parity is much easier to achieve, but does not exist.
I've been part of several discussions with you about this, and I thought Brian Potter's deep dive into the costs were fascinating. Its a three part series starting here:
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction
My general takeaway from it was that nuclear faces a skeptical public that believes any failure at a nuclear power plant is unacceptable. That is the driving force behind massive regulation which then means that its hard to build at scale which causes a shortage of skilled labor and suppliers which means that projects take much longer than anticipated which means that the financing costs become enormous.
I read it, commented a bit there as well. But I don't really think your synopsis is an accurate summation of his articles:
I'd summarize the series thusly:
1. The technology's ultimate failure mode is genuinely catastrophic, meaning the degree of redundancy required to ensure that any failures which do occur will not reach that level is high, driving massive costs in construction and engineering.
2. Furthermore, the long life of the capital plant ensures that even when you do learn-by-doing as part of a massive building campaign, you lose that experience long before the time has come to replace all of the plants constructed the first time.
3. The industrial ecosystem which feeds into effective nuclear power construction is immensely complex and insanely wide-ranging; there is basically only one way to build nuclear power plants (Gens. I-III+) and it draws on a depth of expertise entirely outside the scope of any other construction project.
4. A skeptical public has compounded these issues with additional and very burdensome regulation which is likely unneccessary.
Which leads me to the synthesis argument I've been making here each and every time:
Solve point 4, by all means. I agree *completely* that ALARA is a shitty regulatory framework and the NRC sucks. But don't expect it to do much of anything except lower the operating costs for existing plants and allowing them to require marginally less subsidy money to stay in operation. If that's where your policy intervention stops, the only way to make new-build nuclear power cost competitive is going to be to cut corners on point 1, which is where we part ways. The proper solutions to point 1 go via point 3, and they are complicated industrial policy of the sort the US hasn't ever done well. I do not think it coincidental that America's ability to build nuclear went to shit as our shipbuilding industry moved across the Pacific and our dam-building drive wound down, because those are the two most important precursor "training" industries.
To make matters worse, even if you do that, then 70 years later point 2 is *still* going to come back and bite you on the ass, necessitating that you figure out how to do all it again unless you've sustained a booming export market in the interim.
I'm not sure that point 4 is solvable so long as the public is convinced that #1 - any failure at a plant is unacceptable. He points out a couple of times that the NRC has attempted to reduce the regulation on nuclear plants and those have faced fierce public resistance!
An unwillingness to tolerate any risk means that the costs will be extraordinarily high and that's not being driven by ALARA or the NRC, so much as those are the consequences of a public that feels that way.
edit - also, I didn't see comments from you there unless you're commenting under a different name :shocked face:
I’m unable to find anything either. Which is funny because I’ve hallucinated a clear memory of discussing his specific points with another commenter there at the time of publication.
Now I’m left wondering which bits of that memory are accurate, because all cannot be: time, place, people involved…
That’s a bit of a mischaracterization of #1, but you’re correct that it’s the uninformed public view of #1, which is among the reasons I think there’s no point in pursuing nuclear.
These bad faith arguments are so tedious. Yes something is going to be expensive if misguided opponents use ever legal, extralegal and procedural obstacle to stymie every example and run costs up as high as they can. And then they crow about how expensive it all is.
“Yes something is going to be expensive if misguided opponents use ever legal, extralegal and procedural obstacle to stymie every example and run costs up as high as they can”
This is an unfortunate reality of nuclear energy. Misguided or not, opponents are dug in deep and will put up a maximalist fight. We shouldn’t ignore this because we don’t like it.
Fwiw, I’m generally in favor of nuclear energy to replace fossil, just see it being a tough fit for Jamaica, at least without global carbon trading.
That is not the argument I am making and have made every time discussion of the issue has arisen in the past.
You've never addressed *any* of the substantive criticism, because you and the rest of the nukebros cannot. You can parrot a handful of talking points which account for perhaps 10% of the existing cost structure of nuclear energy, handwave the rest away as also the result of overregulation (with no evidence), never engage with people who have real-world experience, relevant professional expertise, or insider knowledge, and go on about your day secure in the "knowledge" that the establishment is screwing everything up.
As it stands, I'm not going to restate the exact same arguments I've made each of the last three times, to which you had no rejoinder and from which you ran away. But if you wish to actually engage in a substantive discussion of why you believe they're wrong, instead of blatantly mischaracterizing them before slinking off, I welcome it.
The main body of the article above is discussing the prospects for SMR in Jamaica, a place that must import LNG plus build renewables which are likely to harm the tourism industry (or at least limit the potential locations). Can you address the conditions on the ground in Jamaica and similarly placed island countries? Because it seems you are arguing against SMR in the US. I’m no expert on comparative costs, but I am also under the impression that nat’l gas while much Better than coal/oil from a carbon release point of view is still going to produce carbon pollution…is rather tricky to avoid spillage, etc.
Why wouldn’t you combine SMR with renewables? Why is nat’l gas better and especially for a country that must import it?
IMO, the main problem, which Matt sort handwaves away, is that it's tough to have nuclear satisfy much more than 50% of total generation on a grid. Generally, you'd have to pair it with an almost equal amount of flexible generation like natural gas or battery storage.
This is due to nuclear power's inability to economically follow load (eg fast ramp). There's been progress on the technical challenges of load following with nuclear, but even if all the engineering issues were solved, you'd still have the problem of utilizing only half of the capacity of a super-expensive capital asset. In the case of nuclear that nearly doubles the cost of its already very expensive output.
I did address your criticisms numerous times. You don’t seem willing to engage in a substantive discussion so I don’t think this line of argument is worth pursuing.
You have not.
You talk only about ALARA and the NRC, and when I seek to drive discussion of shielding structure construction, complex staging, construction and fabrication bottlenecks, industrial capacity and workforce development, high degrees of congestion and spatial conflict in plant and structural systems, fabrication and welding challenges, inspection difficulties, scale testing, materials uncertainty and flaws, and a host of other issues, all of which collectively destroyed the last two US-based projects and have driven massive time and cost overruns in the UK, India, China, France, and Finland (each of which have vastly different industrial ecosystems and regulatory structures than the US), you disappear in the blink of an eye, like fucking clockwork.
Your argument only holds up as long as you can hold out ALARA and the NRC as the root of all evil to the ill-informed. It implodes catastrophically as soon as you so much as glance at the recent history of nuclear power construction *globally*, well out of their reach and in countries with no analogue to the overly-conservative regulations you focus on.
You know *so little* about this beyond "ALARA bad" that you're unable even to cite the counterexample that might point a path forward for III+ and IV generation reactor construction, namely the ROK's major build-out campaign. You have no idea how relatively successful it's been, nor any grasp of why, and have no insight into how its success might be replicated in the US. Trust me, "deregulation" ain't the answer there.
This is the fourth time we've done this. I am assuming you will *still* fail to discuss or address actual construction issues, because you have no experience dealing with them, don't understand them, and thus cannot speak to them at all.
Prove. Me. Wrong.
My cost estimates are based on known tech.
The problem is that most of the so-called SMRs aren't turning out to be small or modular.
As a result, they're getting bogged down by the same regulatory problems that traditional designs ran into.
Has any current SMR design even started the licensing process in the US?
It doesn’t have to be cheap power to reduce electricity costs for an island nation - it just needs to be cheaper than *petroleum* on an island. Petroleum makes up very little of the electricity generation on continents, but it’s useful for islands and for backup generators for small sites because there’s already a major infrastructure for delivering it. Even though petroleum is more expensive on an island, the things that are usually cheaper than petroleum on the mainland suffer even more from being on an island - natural gas and coal require even bigger imports than petroleum, while wind, solar, and hydro need a lot of land. If nuclear in Jamaica could be the same cost as nuclear in Vermont, that would reduce electricity costs a lot.
Their aluminum industry has mostly shut down as reseling their power contracts has been worth more than their output, and previously its been effectively subsidized?
I am pro-poorer countries getting richer
Sure but hasn’t Canada beaten them to it?
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/SMRs-reactor-GE-Hitachi-Ontario-Public-Power-Aecon-Group-nuclear/641483/