Not mentioned in the article (as it is not being funded by the world bank):
China building world's largest hydropower dam in Tibet (reuters.com)
* Hydro project located on Yarlung Zangbo in Tibet
* Project to dwarf Three Gorges Dam on Yangtze River
* Start of construction fuels surge in engineering, related shares in stock market
* India, Bangladesh have expressed concern about the dam's impact
Nuclear fuel is cheap, if you can somehow reduce the capital costs associated with building them, they are a good base load solution. Couple them with hydro storage and you have the ability to deal with demand spikes. I don’t think China is going to stop investing in nuclear or solar anytime soon.
Sorry if I'm mistaken but I reckon solar panels (and especially batteries) produce much more waste. Also they require vast areas for the same energy. You should keep all the variables in the equation and not just say how quickly you can dish out some panels.
Probably not reliable but this is what ChatGPT outputs over 100 years, assuming equal output (100 TWh total):
Type Nuclear_Waste(tons) Solar_Waste(tons)
-------------------------------------------------------------
Solid_Total 12_000–23_000 6_000_000–20_000_000
Hazardous_Toxic 2_000–3_000 (HLW) 600_000–1_000_000
Longevity >100_000 years ~500 years (some metals)
Land_Required ~0.1–0.2 km² ~5–10 km² For 1 TWh/year of continuous output
I still dream of a future where nuclear batteries can be fitted in every item that needs it, but we can't get there without development. There's only so much energy a square meter of panels can output.
"Waste" is a nebulous term; it usually means "is not currently recycled". But you can't build a waste-recycling industry until after there's lots of waste to recycle, for simple economics of scale. Using waste as a justification to not build new stuff is just stupid.
Batteries especially are just absurd - they're ~10% lithium (and it's mostly in the electrolyte, which realistically means the electrolyte is 100% electrolyte, excuse the tautology), whereas 'lithium ore' is mostly 1-3% (there's some higher, even as high as 8%, but it's mostly 1-3% IIRC). With sufficient scale, that stuff will disappear like scrap copper left on the curb for an hour.
But what to do in Finland during the winter months? I'm massively pro solar, and I'm sceptical of nuclear, but this seems like a problem to me. Batteries work well on shorter time scales but not over the entire year.
The good thing about northern regions is that they tend to be wet and have low population density. This is pretty good for pumped hydro even if batteries aren't cheap enough at a particular time. But it's not clear when the manufacturing costs of batteries will hit a minimum. So far they continue to decrease.
> The solar panels installed in China during the past 2 years produce as much electricity as all of their nuclear plants combined.
Because it doesn't have very many nuclear power plants relative to its size? France has the same number of nuclear reactors as China despite being a much smaller country.
I'd argue 50-60 nuclear power plants having the same energy output as millions (billions?) of solar panels is a win for nuclear - it's much higher energy density, much smaller environmental footprint, much smaller infrastructure investment, etc.
Worth mentioning that while France has 57 operating reactors and China has 58 operating reactors, it's also the case that China has an additional 38 under construction (with plans for more again) compared to France having zero additional reactors under construction (despite announcing plans for new reactors three years past).
I would add that also a lot of solar power is funded by small capital (homeowners). There is no real way for small capital holders to fund and gain profits from nuclear energy, and installing wind or water turbines are not realistic at 99% of homes.
And at night, nuclear power plants produce infinitely more power than solar. Same during winter months.
Solar simply can't work alone for northern countries without insane amount of batteries. We're talking about having a MONTH of supply in reserve for Germany. It's probably even worse for Finland.
I thought it was cost-competitive with something on the scale of mega-dams and takes about as long to finish too. Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
> Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
The water requirements of nuclear power stations cooling systems can cause significant issues. The discharge of heated water back into rivers and the sea is also a major problem.
The largest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde) is cooled by evaporating treated wastewater. Water is water and you get about 0.3kWh of electricity for each evaporated kg of water.
Nuclear is cost competitive if you have a reliable cadence of building plants and if folks get out of the way of location permits and waste storage and people can actually make decisions about them without endless debates and lawsuits. The problem is one-off designs and the decades long gap between project inception and when investment returns start coming in. As opposed to solar where I could order a few panels and accessories online and start producing energy within a week. Obviously larger solar projects take more planning but if you've got a roof, a credit card, and an electrician on hand you can start producing electricity or expand your production in a very short time achieving break even in a few years.
The ideal big dam is Hoover Dam. Large, deep canyon in a desert. Narrow, deep canyon dam site. Hard rock geology. No major towns or agricultural areas in the area to be flooded above the dam. That's the best case.
Except now thanks to climate change the water levels might drop below the intake in lake Mead. Lake Powell is even worse, Glenn canyon dam was always a mistake, and it might stop producing power next year.
Without flooding enormous ecosystems and disrupting river flows, and on average half the CO2 emissions per unit of generation than hydro has, and a staggeringly lower land use per energy footprint (hydro is 100x larger, wind is 10x larger). Nuclear seems like one of the only sane choices from an environmental point of view.
Nuclear has never been particularly affordable. It's always been more expensive than coal or gas, even in France in the 70s-80s and China in the 2010s.
Mainly because regulators got scared and started adding line items for bogus safety reasons (like expecting to see background radiation levels far below those seen at coal plants due to the fly ash).
We have cheap fusion. A giant reactor in the sky. Solar should be massively scaled, along with battery capacity and pumped storage. China is crushing in this.
Very situational on where it can be used, and requires some very careful cost calculations.
Ignoring the local effects of their construction, a damb breach is one of the worst man-made disasters possible. Mantinence and error margin must be very very carefully accounted for. There is a reason the world bank stopped funding them, and it wasnt purely enviromental. (Some badly managed projects led to expensive and dangerous situations)
So when relevant it's most powerful energy source avalible. But the list of preconditions and caveats is massive.
Hard agree on pumped hydro and other forms of grid-scale storage, but can you understand concerns around batteries? There are environmental ones on the mining/metals side, but producing and disposing of them in a clean manner is often hard. Getting them from anywhere save mostly china is hard (if you want large, dense, affordable, and grid-scale options) and depending on somebody who's nobody's geopolitical friend is probably a bad idea.
> but can you understand concerns around batteries?
No I can't. Just recycle the batteries, and you've solved both concerns in one go. Lead acid batteries have a >99% recycling rate, the economics for recycling EV & grid storage batteries are even better.
"Just Recycle the batteries" is a massive understatement of the effort involved. The economics of Recycling ev batteries is autrocious. (They're glued into the frame of the car (differently for each model), needing manual dissasembly to not risk fire)
It took 20 years of standardisation and effort to raise lead acid batteries to 99%, and they're as simple as batteries get. Large scale recycle of litium batteries (including the cobalt and nickel) requires changes in how batteries are made to be (either or both) less energy dense and more expensive.
Pumped hydro is the best bet for gridscale. And i'm hoping sodium batteries roll out for EVs within the near future.
Sand batteries aren't batteries - they output heat instead of electricity. You could use them to feed a steam turbine, but then you're paying for the steam turbine.
That said, sand batteries are amazing for the heat users who can use them - just plug em into some off-grid solar/wind (and/or on-grid, and make money by buying electricity when the prices go negative) and you get 24/7 heat for the price of intermittent renewables.
Consistent rainfall in certain areas seems to be an issue with climate change , does your mega damn rely on snowmelt for topping up, that may start to be a problem?
Not mentioned in the article (as it is not being funded by the world bank):
China building world's largest hydropower dam in Tibet (reuters.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44631938https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...
Please can we just get back to building nuclear
The solar panels installed in China during the past 2 years produce as much electricity as all of their nuclear plants combined.
Finland spent 18 years and 11 bn euros to get 1.6 GW of nuclear, the US spent 7bn in subsidies and got some 20 GW of solar in 2022 alone.
Countries going for nuclear will wait decades to get the same power that solar can add in weeks.
Nuclear basically makes no sense at all in 2025.
(For nighttime use dirt-cheap batteries and natural gas now, even cheaper batteries and generated hydrogen gas later).
Nuclear fuel is cheap, if you can somehow reduce the capital costs associated with building them, they are a good base load solution. Couple them with hydro storage and you have the ability to deal with demand spikes. I don’t think China is going to stop investing in nuclear or solar anytime soon.
Sorry if I'm mistaken but I reckon solar panels (and especially batteries) produce much more waste. Also they require vast areas for the same energy. You should keep all the variables in the equation and not just say how quickly you can dish out some panels.
Probably not reliable but this is what ChatGPT outputs over 100 years, assuming equal output (100 TWh total):
I still dream of a future where nuclear batteries can be fitted in every item that needs it, but we can't get there without development. There's only so much energy a square meter of panels can output."Waste" is a nebulous term; it usually means "is not currently recycled". But you can't build a waste-recycling industry until after there's lots of waste to recycle, for simple economics of scale. Using waste as a justification to not build new stuff is just stupid.
Batteries especially are just absurd - they're ~10% lithium (and it's mostly in the electrolyte, which realistically means the electrolyte is 100% electrolyte, excuse the tautology), whereas 'lithium ore' is mostly 1-3% (there's some higher, even as high as 8%, but it's mostly 1-3% IIRC). With sufficient scale, that stuff will disappear like scrap copper left on the curb for an hour.
But what to do in Finland during the winter months? I'm massively pro solar, and I'm sceptical of nuclear, but this seems like a problem to me. Batteries work well on shorter time scales but not over the entire year.
Finland's electricity production is already 95% non fossil fuel, so you don't need to worry about them.
The good thing about northern regions is that they tend to be wet and have low population density. This is pretty good for pumped hydro even if batteries aren't cheap enough at a particular time. But it's not clear when the manufacturing costs of batteries will hit a minimum. So far they continue to decrease.
Great comparison to use the most delayed neuclear power plant constrution in human history to extrapolate an argument. Really fairly done.
Japan builds them in 3 years. USA took about the same during the heights of its use.
> Japan builds them in 3 years
Japan hasn't built a new nuclear plant in 20 years.
> The solar panels installed in China during the past 2 years produce as much electricity as all of their nuclear plants combined.
Because it doesn't have very many nuclear power plants relative to its size? France has the same number of nuclear reactors as China despite being a much smaller country.
I'd argue 50-60 nuclear power plants having the same energy output as millions (billions?) of solar panels is a win for nuclear - it's much higher energy density, much smaller environmental footprint, much smaller infrastructure investment, etc.
Worth mentioning that while France has 57 operating reactors and China has 58 operating reactors, it's also the case that China has an additional 38 under construction (with plans for more again) compared to France having zero additional reactors under construction (despite announcing plans for new reactors three years past).
* https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
* https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
I would add that also a lot of solar power is funded by small capital (homeowners). There is no real way for small capital holders to fund and gain profits from nuclear energy, and installing wind or water turbines are not realistic at 99% of homes.
And at night, nuclear power plants produce infinitely more power than solar. Same during winter months.
Solar simply can't work alone for northern countries without insane amount of batteries. We're talking about having a MONTH of supply in reserve for Germany. It's probably even worse for Finland.
Make nuclear cost-competitive and people will start building it.
I thought it was cost-competitive with something on the scale of mega-dams and takes about as long to finish too. Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
> Except unlike dams, you don't disrupt river flow and cause water-rights disputes (and potentially wars).
The water requirements of nuclear power stations cooling systems can cause significant issues. The discharge of heated water back into rivers and the sea is also a major problem.
How major? Would not a temporary lake be sufficient to dissipate heat?
The largest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde) is cooled by evaporating treated wastewater. Water is water and you get about 0.3kWh of electricity for each evaporated kg of water.
The unit economics of dams get more and more competitive when their size increase.
So, hell no, nuclear is not competitive with mega-dams. It's not even competitive with small dams.
Nuclear is cost competitive if you have a reliable cadence of building plants and if folks get out of the way of location permits and waste storage and people can actually make decisions about them without endless debates and lawsuits. The problem is one-off designs and the decades long gap between project inception and when investment returns start coming in. As opposed to solar where I could order a few panels and accessories online and start producing energy within a week. Obviously larger solar projects take more planning but if you've got a roof, a credit card, and an electrician on hand you can start producing electricity or expand your production in a very short time achieving break even in a few years.
It was cost-competitive before it faced ridiculously unfair regulations due to being so easy to fear-monger about.
There is a finite amount of hydro in the world. They will run out of viable dam locations pretty quickly at this rate.
All the good sites were used by 1940.
The ideal big dam is Hoover Dam. Large, deep canyon in a desert. Narrow, deep canyon dam site. Hard rock geology. No major towns or agricultural areas in the area to be flooded above the dam. That's the best case.
Most later dams are at worse sites.
Except now thanks to climate change the water levels might drop below the intake in lake Mead. Lake Powell is even worse, Glenn canyon dam was always a mistake, and it might stop producing power next year.
In which continent?
For the curious:
Cadillac Desert is a great history of American dam building and the Bureau of Reclamation
$80B is buying 40MW of hydro. What would that get you for nuclear? 4MW?
Looks like at least 30GW
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Without flooding enormous ecosystems and disrupting river flows, and on average half the CO2 emissions per unit of generation than hydro has, and a staggeringly lower land use per energy footprint (hydro is 100x larger, wind is 10x larger). Nuclear seems like one of the only sane choices from an environmental point of view.
Wind's land-use footprint is almost completely non-exclusive.
If we use Vogtle as a cost benchmark you'd get roughly 5 GW (note you typo'd units to MW).
Given these projects will be overseas we shouldn’t use the extreme outlier of Vogtle in the US as the benchmark.
It’s 40GW of hydro
Nuclear just isn't economically viable. Maybe fusion someday.
> isn't economically viable
That is not an intrinsic truth. We have chosen to make it economically unviable.
Most things get cheaper to build with time. Nuclear is an outlier where it used to be affordable and now it isn’t. That’s insane.
Nuclear has never been particularly affordable. It's always been more expensive than coal or gas, even in France in the 70s-80s and China in the 2010s.
Here's how much it cost to build nuclear in France during its golden age: https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs. Adjust for inflation and draw your own conclusion.
China's nuclear costs are more opaque, but are estimated at $3B per GW. Again, not competitive.
Ontario produces a majority of its electric power from nuclear (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Canada) and manages to sell it at competitive rates (https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/elect...) similar to those in Alberta (https://ucahelps.alberta.ca/your-utilities/rates/historic-ra...) where electricity comes mainly from natural gas after a recent transition from mostly coal. A 2021 report cited at https://www.cns-snc.ca/learn-nuclear/basics-of-nuclear/how-m... finds that nuclear power in Ontario was more cost effective than everything else except hydroelectric power (granted, solar has become much cheaper in just the last few years). And this is in spite of multiple reactor shutdowns.
Yes, running a nuclear power plant is pretty cheap, if you ignore the cost of building and decommissioning it.
why is it different like that?
Mainly because regulators got scared and started adding line items for bogus safety reasons (like expecting to see background radiation levels far below those seen at coal plants due to the fly ash).
Coal plants are dead, partly due to the fly ash. I'm not sure you want to put nuclear in the same boat?
Tell that to China
China has been building them at a relatively lukewarm pace compared to its solar and wind expansion
> China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
We have cheap fusion. A giant reactor in the sky. Solar should be massively scaled, along with battery capacity and pumped storage. China is crushing in this.
Hydro is a great complement for solar, you can decrease flow when the sun is shining, and increase it when it isn't.
Very situational on where it can be used, and requires some very careful cost calculations.
Ignoring the local effects of their construction, a damb breach is one of the worst man-made disasters possible. Mantinence and error margin must be very very carefully accounted for. There is a reason the world bank stopped funding them, and it wasnt purely enviromental. (Some badly managed projects led to expensive and dangerous situations)
So when relevant it's most powerful energy source avalible. But the list of preconditions and caveats is massive.
Yep, and if you can pump water back into the lake with excess solar power when the sun in shining, you now have a giant storage battery as well.
Hard agree on pumped hydro and other forms of grid-scale storage, but can you understand concerns around batteries? There are environmental ones on the mining/metals side, but producing and disposing of them in a clean manner is often hard. Getting them from anywhere save mostly china is hard (if you want large, dense, affordable, and grid-scale options) and depending on somebody who's nobody's geopolitical friend is probably a bad idea.
Ditto for the panels themselves.
> but can you understand concerns around batteries?
No I can't. Just recycle the batteries, and you've solved both concerns in one go. Lead acid batteries have a >99% recycling rate, the economics for recycling EV & grid storage batteries are even better.
"Just Recycle the batteries" is a massive understatement of the effort involved. The economics of Recycling ev batteries is autrocious. (They're glued into the frame of the car (differently for each model), needing manual dissasembly to not risk fire)
It took 20 years of standardisation and effort to raise lead acid batteries to 99%, and they're as simple as batteries get. Large scale recycle of litium batteries (including the cobalt and nickel) requires changes in how batteries are made to be (either or both) less energy dense and more expensive.
Pumped hydro is the best bet for gridscale. And i'm hoping sodium batteries roll out for EVs within the near future.
Sand batteries provide a very nice scalable solution IMO. https://polarnightenergy.com/sand-battery/
Sand batteries aren't batteries - they output heat instead of electricity. You could use them to feed a steam turbine, but then you're paying for the steam turbine.
That said, sand batteries are amazing for the heat users who can use them - just plug em into some off-grid solar/wind (and/or on-grid, and make money by buying electricity when the prices go negative) and you get 24/7 heat for the price of intermittent renewables.
Consistent rainfall in certain areas seems to be an issue with climate change , does your mega damn rely on snowmelt for topping up, that may start to be a problem?
The sun doesn’t have this issue. It's ubiquitous.
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No more dam jokes.
This made me chuckle. Well done!
Dam!