Good questions but not simple to answer. Weâre only starting to understand how to internalise all the environmental costs of damage caused by burning carbon. Particularly if the environmental costs of renewables are going to be used as a criticism then it is only right that the same is done for the total cost of burning carbon ie changing weather, rising sea levels etc and that is before the more obvious costs of environmental pollution from coal and oil eg air pollution from the combustion in terms of SOx and NOx.
But the reality is that many renewables are already cheaper per kWh to build and operate than nuclear or gas for power generation. Nuclear has always been almost impossible to price as how do you account for the cost of the long term management of nuclear waste? You canât with any degree of certainty. Gas is great until it isnât and the world is held to ransom (not just by Russia but other gas producers). The other problem in the UK is that the more expensive forms of power generation have a proportionally larger impact on overall bills for obvious reasons (ie they cost more to start with and therefore any increases have a disproportionate impact).
Long term storage of nuclear waste is really not such a big deal. All the worldâs high level waste is about one swimming pools worth. We can vitrify and store it underground at stable geological sites.
Fukushima, Sellafield, Chernobyl, yeah, they are tricky problems but they are not normal power station decommissioning.
I like watching their reporters try and report similar to that One America channel that loved trump They are like comic characters not reporters. A bit like Farage on GB news play acting as a reporter.
When i say i like watching them, obviously not on their channel but in press conferences or when John Oliver or Trevor Noah show them
Sorry but that isnât true about the amount of high level nuclear waste for the world. An Olympic swimming pool is 2500m3 and the UK alone already has over 2000m3 of high level waste.
Vitrification is useful in making the waste easier to handle but doesnât remove the radioactivity.
Of course the cost of clean up also includes an awful lot more ILW.
The fact remains that we havenât fully decommissioned a single reactor, let alone built a long term geological storage facility (capable of lasting for thousands of years) so how can we predict the costs with any certainty? The history of nuclear waste management is littered with massive cost over runs and underestimated budgets!
Iâm not saying nuclear canât be useful but letâs not underestimate the challenges (technical and financial).
I share the same sentiment as you. I didnât think nuclear should be in the scene, since it was demonized as this evil thing from all the incidents (which I can understand why). But after reading about the energy and the infrastructure we have build over decades, I understood the output isnât there yet from all the current green energy methods.
Also I read this book which sort of educated me in reality.
The negative sentiment towards the fossil fuel or nuclear infrastructure in public discourse is inflated to believe that we have methods which can get rid of the current ways in an instant and somewhat only money is the driving factor to keep them going.
This simply isnât true and we will be cutting branch we sit on, in an act to save the world. We need to transition out, and I hope too that battery and storage technologies improve 10 fold to give us the output we need.
Huh, thatâs weird, I could of sworn that I have actually stood on the site of a decommissioned nuclear power station. I must have been imagining things. Mind you, I was at work, gets a bit boring sometimes.
Anyway, itâs still a silly argument. Itâs like saying we shouldnât have a vaccination program because it wastes a lot of needles.
There are plenty of decommissioned reactors but I donât think any have been fully decommissioned - even the earliest reactors turned off need 50-75 minimum years to cool before full decommissioning can start.
But hey what do I know - Iâve just worked in waste management for 20 yearsâŠ
Yes, the argument of predicting costs is both wrong and irrelevant. What is relevant is how much is spent (and agreed to spend over the next X years) and we know this exactly.
So for example, stated in the 2020-2021 annual report of the UKâs decommission authority:
our net expenditure for the year was ÂŁ2,447 million compared to the original voted net expenditure of ÂŁ2,606 million.
And when you look through the you see the majority of that money was not related to the UKs civilian nuclear power stations but rather its nuclear bomb making facilities.
Radioactive waste management? Cool if so, but in that case you should know that it doesnât take 50-75 years cool down to start decommissioning.
BR3 operated from 1962 to 1987. It was chosen as a reactor to learn how to do decommissioning, which began in 1989. Today itâs essential a green field near a lake with a few buildings around. For me, thatâs fully decommissioned.
Nuclear waste management in the past used to be laughably bad. At Dounraey they had 70m deep shaft with a tunnel at the bottom going out to sea. Contaminated gloves, overalls (which is what a lot of low level waste is) gloveboxes, maybe even an old Land Rover where unceremoniously chucked in this hole.
It blew itâs concrete top at one point due to hydrogen build up.
Remember anyone can flag any post, it doesnât really mean anything. Itâs with the admins to review (not me and @bitflip were just the sweeper uppers)
Haha, I know buddy!! I was just having a laugh at how someone could feel the need for pressing the button. Never for a second thought it was either of you
Going to the main topic here on Why clean energy investing is the future:
I believe that it is clear that Oil and Gas will continue to be burnt for decades to come. That is, as far as I can see, not the question. Neither is the intermittency of solar or wind. Nor will Nuclear energy deployment or research, in particular fission, stop any time soon. So arguing about these things here is not for me a useful activity.
While the broader market might be cooling, climate tech continues to be a hot ticket, with investment figures for top deals in Q3 outpacing the two previous quarters this year.
Sure we can call this hype and various other things but we canât deny that money is flowing into these areas. For me the questions are around where I should put my money. Progress is rarely linear and humans have problems with predicting change let alone the pace of change.
Remember markets are about âexpectationsâ. Some things will change faster than other bits. Where will that change be? How are our lives going to change because of that? Those are the bets on which money is being placed.
True! You can be a tree hugger or gas guzzler but either way denying green is going to grow massively by either government ignoring or not needing it, it WILL happen big time!
My only issue is, which elements to pick and gamble on succeeding most. What is happening in various parts of the world is only going to build demand for clean tech and probably exponentially very quickly. People/companies/countries are just trying to bleed as much money as possible from fossil fuels until it is nearly or too late to fix. Even Saudi are planning for after oil which tells you all you need to do. They just need to sell as much as possible to secure their future when that happens now.
The next 1,000 unicorns wonât be search engines or social media companies, theyâll be sustainable, scalable innovators â startups that help the world decarbonize and make the energy transition affordable for all consumers.
I think this may well be correct. However Iâm torn. I am not sure I have the skills to pick which companies will make the difference.
I am dubious about hydrogens worth. Fuel Cells, are neat and all but struggle against batteries in a lot of applications. Itâs an energy carrier, the round trip efficiency is poor so it has to make sense from an energy density perspective, trains, big trucks and planes may be ideal. Not real stand out players in this space.
Solar and wind are basically solved, to be commoditised further and efficiency and costs are the most important.
SMRs are cool, but acceptance is still a big issue and a lot can be done with acceptance at big existing conventional facilities, eg Sizewell C, or building new nuclear on old coal plants,
Wildcard? Fusion, maybe. First light fusion, Tokamak Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion Energy, General Fusion (4 of them building in Oxfordshire!) all recieving large private investment and making advancements.
ITER, STEP and DEMO are governmental orgs and are a while off, but if ITER shows a Q above 1 expect the money to flood in to the others.
As @bitflip mentioned above, please do keep the conversation on topic (clean energy investing) and please also do remember to the tone kind, helpful and constructive.
They are like comic characters not reporters. A bit like Farage on GB news play acting as a reporter.