Japan Sees Nuclear as Cheapest Baseload Power Source in 2040 (financialpost.com) 72
Nuclear power is forecast to be the cheapest baseload electricity source in Japan in 2040, highlighting the government's desire to restart the nation's idled reactors. From a report: The cost of constructing and operating a new nuclear power plant for 2040 is estimated at 12.5 yen ($0.08) per kilowatt-hour, according to documents released from a trade ministry panel meeting on Monday. This cost assumes reactors will be used for 40 years at a 70% operational rate. The meeting was held to discuss the so-called levelized cost of electricity for each power asset, the document said.
A previous study published in 2021 saw LNG-fired power plants as the cheapest power source in 2030. However, the latest analysis includes a cost to reduce emissions, while fuel prices are also higher. Intermittent renewable sources, like large-scale and residential solar, were priced lower than nuclear for 2040, the most recent report showed. However, when including the total system cost, including deployment of batteries, nuclear is cheaper than solar in some scenarios.
Japan is currently in the process of revising its national energy strategy, which will dictate its power mix targets beyond 2030. The government has doubled down on nuclear as a way to curb dependence on pricey fossil fuels. The analysis released Monday also estimated LCOE of ammonia and hydrogen co-fired electricity, as well as pairing carbon capture and storage with LNG and coal power plants -- technologies that the Japanese government is considering for its long-term energy transition. Co-firing with hydrogen boosted the cost of an LNG plant by about 6% for deployment in 2040, while CCS didn't meaningfully change the price.
A previous study published in 2021 saw LNG-fired power plants as the cheapest power source in 2030. However, the latest analysis includes a cost to reduce emissions, while fuel prices are also higher. Intermittent renewable sources, like large-scale and residential solar, were priced lower than nuclear for 2040, the most recent report showed. However, when including the total system cost, including deployment of batteries, nuclear is cheaper than solar in some scenarios.
Japan is currently in the process of revising its national energy strategy, which will dictate its power mix targets beyond 2030. The government has doubled down on nuclear as a way to curb dependence on pricey fossil fuels. The analysis released Monday also estimated LCOE of ammonia and hydrogen co-fired electricity, as well as pairing carbon capture and storage with LNG and coal power plants -- technologies that the Japanese government is considering for its long-term energy transition. Co-firing with hydrogen boosted the cost of an LNG plant by about 6% for deployment in 2040, while CCS didn't meaningfully change the price.
The UK did too (Score:2, Insightful)
Now they have to pay £250 billion (today's estimates) over 100 years to dismantle Sellafield.
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Re:The UK did too (Score:4, Insightful)
In the US yes, they balloon to infinity because (almost) every time we build a nuclear plant we build a new design. This would be like if a car maker only produced two cars every time they came out with a new car. The production costs get enormous when quantities are low. We need to agree on a reactor design and stick with it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/id... [theatlantic.com]
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AP1000 has been around for years.
The issue is that every site is different. Different cooling resources, different geology, different local infrastructure.
As the SMR people have rediscovered, just serialising the production of reactors doesn't really help.
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Cool. Not only a rad place for the next few thousand years, it also enables us to blow the planet and everybody living on it straight into oblivion. For not much more than $500 billion. Real bargain.
Re:The UK did too (Score:4, Insightful)
Now they have to pay £250 billion (today's estimates) over 100 years to dismantle Sellafield.
Sellafield is a special bad case because it's an original experimental messy site. More worrying are ones like Hinkley Point B, which was designed to be a commercial reactor, will take 95 years, [bbc.co.uk] if they stick to estimate. keeps getting delayed and keeps increasing in expected cost, up to 25 billion [reuters.com] so far.
Right now the article says "The cost of constructing and operating a new nuclear power plant" will be 12.5 yen ($0.08) per kilowatt-hour which again suggests that they are again ignoring decommissioning and also insurance, which are really likely the two biggest costs. Its this dishonesty which almost becomes the reason to avoid nuclear more than anything technical. The real technical problems are things like "what if Russia attacks Japan and America again and targets nuclear plants as in Ukriane?" - if the nuclear industry could take the same honest approach to safety that most of the airline industry does, probably there would be a long term place for their product.
Re:The UK did too (Score:4, Insightful)
Sellafield was initially set up as a plutonium production facility for nuclear weapons, similar to the US Hanford Reservation operation which is also a disaster in terms of hazardous materials and pollution control (saying that, a lot of the worst pollution in such sites is from toxic chemicals rather than radioisotopes and nuclear material). I understand the locations of the early Soviet nuclear weapons plutonium production facilities are in a similar mess.
I find the "forty year lifespan" and "70% annual operation" figures mentioned in the linked article a little puzzling. Some operating PWRs (including Japanese ones) are being licenced for 60 and even 80 years of operation and new-builds today are expected to be operable for a century. Annual uptimes for modern PWRs and BWRs are typically 80% and higher according to IAEA records.
The price per kWh mentioned will include end-of-life decommissioning and insurance since that's factored into the cost of all nuclear generation in the Western world. Over sixty and more years a nuclear power reactor will produce a lot of electricity and so it's easy to pay for the decommissioning operation from ongoing receipts and compound interest of the accumulated funds.
UK decommissioning of nuclear reactors is done by SafStor (sic), a process where the radioactive parts of the plant are "stored" for about eighty years to let most of the radioactivity decay to the point where final dismantling can be undertaken more easily. The cost savings supposedly make up for the extended supervision of the site during this period.
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The real technical problems are things like "what if Russia attacks Japan and America again and targets nuclear plants as in Ukriane?"
For this specific vulnerability, isn't the problem that there are only a few high energy-output nuclear plants compared to other sources that are more distributed and individually lower-output. If that is the case, then, perhaps the ideas/hopes/dreams for an army of small nuclear plants addresses this issue (even though there are other issues).
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"what if Russia attacks Japan and America again and targets nuclear plants as in Ukriane?"
Then they won't notice the difference in radiation because of all of the fallout coming from Russia - the whole of the northern hemisphere would be uninhabitable.
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If you do the math, it is not true. There are not and has never been enough nuclear materials extracted from the ground to actually irradiate everything to that level. When concentrated in population centers, you could get very high kill rates. You could make for a lot of unhealthy radiation everywhere (increased cancer, etc.) but we don't have the ability to kill everybody with radiation. Personally, I hope we don't attempt to conducy this experiment.
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""what if Russia attacks Japan and America again and targets nuclear plants as in Ukriane?"
"what if America attacks Japan again and targets nuclear plants as Ukraine has been doing. ?"
At least that doesn't imagine things that never happened. I think the reality is that once nuclear weapons are used, power plants are the least of the problems.
But as we have seen in Ukraine, there is the possibility of nuclear power plants being targeted by conventional weapons. Russia's attacks on Ukraine's power grid have excluded its nuclear plants. But the plant in Russian occupied Ukraine has been subject of
Re: The UK did too (Score:2)
Re:The UK did too (Score:4, Informative)
Now they have to pay £250 billion (today's estimates) over 100 years to dismantle Sellafield.
The reference to Sellafield here is completely misplaced. Japan's analysis is about future levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) for nuclear power, which includes factors like modern safety standards, operational lifespans, and emissions-reduction costs. Sellafield's astronomical £250 billion decommissioning cost has nothing to do with standard nuclear power plants or their cost-effectiveness. Sellafield was a nuclear weapons material production facility, not a conventional power plant, so using it as an example is misleading at best and intentionally disingenuous at worst.
More importantly, dragging historical cleanup costs into a conversation about future energy strategy reeks of the sunk-cost fallacy. These legacy expenses—be it from Sellafield or even Fukushima—do not determine the economic viability of nuclear energy in 2040. Japan's decision reflects hard economic realities: emissions-reduction costs, higher LNG prices, and the need for a stable baseload. Pretending that these factors can be hand-waved away by bringing up unrelated decommissioning costs is factually wrong and intellectually lazy.
If we are going to have a serious discussion about nuclear power, let us at least make sure the facts are straight. Comparing apples to oranges does nothing to inform the debate.
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The thing about apples and oranges is they are both a fruit. And the common factor of being a fruit here is that no estimation for nuclear power ever covers the end of life abandonment costs. They all just assume you leave the shit sitting there forever, which is great when you are funding it from ongoing operation, not so good if the operator goes bankrupt or the plant permanently shuts down. We saw Japanese policy in action during Fukushima. There was 2x as much spent fuel sitting in storage on site than
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>>no estimation for nuclear power ever covers the end of life abandonment costs.
This is just a lie, decomissioning costs are paid by plant operators and figured into total cost [eia.gov]
It is a sign that you have a poor argument when yo have to support it with lies
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This is just a lie, decomissioning costs are paid by plant operators and figured into total cost
In Canada nuclear power has always had a surcharge for waste disposal. A site has now been selected for our long-term repository and construction should begin before the end of the decade.
https://www.nwmo.ca/en [www.nwmo.ca]
On a related note, they are breaking ground and doing site prep for the first of four planned SMRs at the current Darlington nuclear power station.
https://www.opg.com/projects-s... [opg.com]
Too bad we cannot also harness the energy of the anti-nuclear crowd's heads exploding.
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>>no estimation for nuclear power ever covers the end of life abandonment costs.
This is just a lie, decomissioning costs are paid by plant operators and figured into total cost [eia.gov]
It is a sign that you have a poor argument when yo have to support it with lies
Presumably provisions for decommissioning, both quantity and mechanism, vary from country to country. The question is, are they adequate? Costs 50, 80 or 100 years in the future are hard to estimate, even with good intentions, and proponents of nuclear power have an incentive to minimize them and have little risk that they will ever be held to account.
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Sure, let me do the work for you
>>Presumably provisions for decommissioning, both quantity and mechanism, vary from country to country.
Not really, there are international standards that over 150 countries subscribe to, here is an example these standards give to decommissioning [iaea.org]
3.5. One of the main responsibilities of the government is to ensure that
mechanisms for providing adequate financial resources are put in place, so that
an appropriate level of funding is available to decommission facilities in a
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Decommissioning != abandonment cost. The decommissioning you're talking about is removing the fuel and leaving everything in place which is literally what everyone does, and isn't remotely the same thing as completely remediating a site. In virtually all cases you can cite the "decommissioning" involves keeping a site active and running but not operating. Where the operator wants to actually abandon the plant the government has stepped in to foot the bill. Where remediation and demolition are involved the c
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The thing about apples and oranges is they are both a fruit. And the common factor of being a fruit here is that no estimation for nuclear power ever covers the end of life abandonment costs. They all just assume you leave the shit sitting there forever, which is great when you are funding it from ongoing operation, not so good if the operator goes bankrupt or the plant permanently shuts down. We saw Japanese policy in action during Fukushima. There was 2x as much spent fuel sitting in storage on site than fuel for the operational reactors because they had no functioning long term plan for it.
LCOE is a good metric, but just like LCOE for coal power it ignores a lot of externalities that may form cost later.
While you make a fair point that externalities are often overlooked in energy cost analyses, your claim that nuclear LCOE calculations "never cover the end-of-life abandonment costs" is flat-out wrong in the context of Japan's analysis. The LCOE figures we are discussing explicitly include decommissioning costs and provisions for waste management, as these are standard components of comprehensive LCOE assessments for nuclear power.
For example, analyses [ieej.or.jp] by the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ) and
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While you make a fair point that externalities are often overlooked in energy cost analyses, your claim that nuclear LCOE calculations "never cover the end-of-life abandonment costs" is flat-out wrong in the context of Japan's analysis. The LCOE figures we are discussing explicitly include decommissioning costs and provisions for waste management, as these are standard components of comprehensive LCOE assessments for nuclear power.
I specifically used a different word than decommissioning. Decommissioning in the nuclear industry involves removing fuel, putting up a sign saying keep out and employing a security guard to make sure no one goes in. There is no remediation. The waste management is borderline non-existent usually just using the waste facilities from a new reactor to store the old one.
Reading through the report it's quite telling that their examples are 1) a site that is still publicly inaccessible 20 years after demolition,
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While you make a fair point that externalities are often overlooked in energy cost analyses, your claim that nuclear LCOE calculations "never cover the end-of-life abandonment costs" is flat-out wrong in the context of Japan's analysis. The LCOE figures we are discussing explicitly include decommissioning costs and provisions for waste management, as these are standard components of comprehensive LCOE assessments for nuclear power.
I specifically used a different word than decommissioning. Decommissioning in the nuclear industry involves removing fuel, putting up a sign saying keep out and employing a security guard to make sure no one goes in. There is no remediation. The waste management is borderline non-existent usually just using the waste facilities from a new reactor to store the old one.
Reading through the report it's quite telling that their examples are 1) a site that is still publicly inaccessible 20 years after demolition, and never actually disposed of the waste 2) every other example is a rough estimate including from the UK and France who both have only just started and both have already estimated cost blowouts from the first reactor they touched and already involved government financing in both cases.
I retract my earlier statement saying it wasn't considered. I put in a new statement saying it was poorly considered and the estimate is little more than a fantasy.
Your latest comment introduces a distinction between "decommissioning" and "remediation," but the point you are making is far from clear. If the issue is that nuclear LCOE estimates do not fully account for long-term remediation and waste disposal, it would be helpful to state that explicitly and provide evidence to support the claim. As it stands, your argument comes across as vague and relies on anecdotal examples that do not align with the comprehensive analyses we have referenced.
The examples you mentio
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Thank you for a strong and well thought out reply
Let me add to this with, in particular
>>sites still inaccessible or using interim waste storage
Is a completely created situation by anti-nuclear activists who have prevented the creation of long term nuclear waste storage sites in America and, who are therefore responsible for interim waste storage
As you say
>>Let us stick to specifics rather than vague assertions.
Would negate most anti-nuclear arguments, and not likely to be followed by such activ
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Intentionally confusing military weapons development and civilian power production is a bitch move, mostly pushed by the petroleum industry and their bought and paid for enviro-shills
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A lot of Sellafield's waste costs have to do with the early days of nuclear production and not understanding waste.
Another factor (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another factor (Score:4, Interesting)
That is true of all energy sources. Japan cannot produce enough energy to support a modern economy from any domestic source. That's what triggered their attack on Pearl Harbor - sanctions and blockades on their military's lifeblood, oil. The difference is Uranium is dense and durable enough to stockpile for long periods, and they also can reprocess it.
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Japan has excellent offshore wind resources. They don't have much lithium for storage though.
The supply of uranium will be secured for national security reasons. They need to retain the ability to build nuclear weapons within a few months, in case China or North Korea escalates things.
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> They don't have much lithium for storage though.
You don't need lithium for storage.
Fun fact; Sodium salt batteries (Na-S) for grid-scale energy storage has been a thing since at least the 1980s and deployed in Japan in at-scale demonstrations in the early 1990s. Just as good as modern lithium in terms of density and cycle life, uses cheap and abundant materials, and is nontoxic. Only downside is they need to be kept at ~300C which is not super difficult but still requires extra consideration.
=Smidge=
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That's true. I heard that they got the temperature requirement down to a bit over 100C on grid scale sodium batteries in Japan.
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Japan has a lot of storage. Pumped storage. More of it per unit generation than any other country, actually. They need it because nuclear can't follow load. It's nothing like what they would need to store days of wind power, but it's a mountainous place and they've built a lot before so I guess it would not be hard to build more.
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Other than geothermal power Japan has little in the way of primary resources. They've been an energy importer through all of their industrialisation. This won't put them strategically in any worse place than they were before.
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Japan has been experimenting with extracting uranium salts dissolved in seawater to meet their need for nuclear fuel without relying on foreign sources. They have processes already that work for some definition of "work". Extracting the uranium is a fairly trivial chemistry problem, the issue is getting the cost of this process down to where it can compete with imports. Should Japan lose access to uranium imports then they'd likely have enough fuel on hand to hold them over until they can bring domestic
Re: Another factor (Score:2)
Pretty sure the only major economies in the world that don't need to rely on outside energy are the USA and Russia.
The vast majority of countries with net energy exports are petro-states. The only examples I can think of that buck the trend are Norway and the US.
Then there are places like Mexico and Sudan that aren't petro states, but have internal issues that keep them underdeveloped. Mexico would just go from being a narco-state to a petro-state. Sudan can't be developed until they've figured out who's in
Willful (Score:4, Insightful)
when including the total system cost, including deployment of batteries, nuclear is cheaper than solar in some scenarios.
In scenarios in which you ignore the actual decommissioning cost, yeah.
Cradle to grave are the only measurements which matter. Pretending the plant will last forever doesn't make the math valid, it makes the conclusion invalid.
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Re: Willful (Score:2)
" But I've never even seen a cost estimate to dispose of solar panels in a way that isn't an environmental catastrophe. If you're going to bury them in a landfill, you could just put your nuclear energy facility there too."
Nonsense. Modern panels are required not to leach even if crushed.
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> dispose of solar panels in a way that isn't an environmental catastrophe
Define "environmental catastrophe" first.
PV waste, even assuming no recycling, is projected to be less than 10% of all e-Waste through 2050. Hardly anyone seems to be flipping shit about that. The total amount of waste is also absolutely dwarfed by other waste streams. These numbers also do not reflect efforts to improve and expand the recycling of dead PV panels.
And while some types of PV panels do contain small amounts of toxic m
Averages away (Score:2)
In scenarios in which you ignore the actual decommissioning cost, yeah.
Since the decommissioning happens after around 100 years or more, the cost of decommissioning is less than a rounding error to the cost of electricity the plat produces over that time.
I think Japan knows a wee bit more about the actual financial aspects of nuclear than you.
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I think Japan knows a wee bit more about the actual financial aspects of nuclear than you.
What would you possibly know about people knowing things?
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That's great to say now. Not so great to say when a design flaw in the plant pops up and the operator sues the contractors who built it, who subsequently get into a legal fight with the company that designed it, and they each want to blame each other until the operator of the plant gives up and decommissions it early just to not have to burn money on it any more.
Yes, this happened. [wikipedia.org] They were originally licensed for 35 years, and only operated (kind of) for 16 before never starting it up again due to prema
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Nuclear is heavily subsidised at all levels in Japan. They want to retain the ability to build a bomb, and the taxpayer is still picking up part of the bill for Fukushima (along with bill payers).
They have big legal issues too. Any new plant will be strongly objected to.
Obligatory three-eyed Japanese fish reference (Score:3)
Obligatory three-eyed Japanese fish reference (Blinky [app.goo.gl]!) from The Simpsons. TFS is as if Fukushima never happened [wikipedia.org].
that is the USA you get godzillas with japan nukes (Score:2)
that is the USA you get godzillas with japan nukes
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Why would Fukushima have an impact on TFS? It's not like anyone is proposing Japan build 40 year old reactor designs and bury emergency equipment in a basement. If you wanted to point to major past incidents then we should stop all oil and gas production too. But we don't. We investigate, we understand, we learn, and we adapt and move on.
Fukushima is actually quite irrelevant to the discussion here. Your post is like saying we shouldn't build any new cars because a 1959 Ford Galaxy had no seatbelts or crump
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Why would Fukushima have an impact on TFS?
Please explain the cleanup of all past and future nuclear waste. Your technical details will be appreciated, 'cuz all I see are a whole lot of remaining residual radioactive problems at Fukushima still, not to mention all the remaining nuclear waste and its many half-lives.
Normally whole countries don't cede land mass for accidents like what happened at Fukushima and Chernobyl. Look at modern Ukraine for example, to further my point regarding any willing loss of land.
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Please explain the cleanup of all past and future nuclear waste. Your technical details will be appreciated,
I actually already entered this discussion in another thread, but nuclear waste again has zero to do with Fukushima. If you want to discuss this either join one of the threads in progress or start another one. Otherwise you're currently off topic.
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Modern Nuke Nukers use NUKES, not LUDDITE wind and solar!
Nukes!
Political lies (Score:1)
Nothing else. The Japanese could eventually become energy independent, but not anytime soon and not on this path. Hence a hallucination is created here.
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Japan could go tidal power or geothermal power and has other options. Solar is not really what they should go for, except as an additional thing.
Proportional costing (Score:2)
You want nuclear – fine. But the cost should be proportional to proximity to the plant. Downwind and “close” free power, far away and upwind – full price, etc. The cost should reflect the risk. Dramatically reduced energy costs would counteract the NIMBY effect.
Tidal power (Score:4, Insightful)
If the amount of money that has been spent on fission research had gone into the use of tides and waves, that would have long been established as the best source of renewable; no issues with lack of wind or sun, and, especially in the case of Japan, available close to the centres of population. But no, we were misled by the promises of nuclear boosters, and now are stuck with massive clean up costs...
Re:Tidal power (Score:4, Informative)
If it was truly an easy source of energy capture, investors would be jumping on it. But wave/tidal power isn't fundamentally hampered by lack of investment or research, but by its operating environment.
Let's list the challenges of wave/tidal power:
1. Power is not constant, which require designs to add physical or electrical energy storage elements for power smoothing.
2. Harshest environment on earth for moving machinery due to extreme variation of power input, corrosion, and fouling from sea life
3. Peak performance is dependent on specific geographical features/topologies which limits locations suitable for installation.
4. Potential for significant environmental impacts from installation and operation.
All this means that wave/tidal power is extremely difficult to harvest at all, let alone at a market-competitive price.
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" fouling from sea life"
Don't worry, the Japs will have already eaten all the whales, dolphins, squid and fish that might get stuck in the turbines.
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Good News: a testing ground for solving those problems is about to come online [fastcompany.com] off the coast of Newport, Oregon, courtesy of PacWave and Oregon State University.
They're putting in 20MW worth of undersea cable transmission capacity and did all the permitting and environmental work to create a test bed for companies to try their designs with. Before this, every company had to do all that shit themselves which is why barely any of it actually happened. The hope is that this can accelerate tidal power R&
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Good news? Maybe... My point above was that spending money and resources for testing doesn't guarantee success as the GP seems to think.
The UK and others have been running test sites for decades with limited success. And a successful platform in one region doesn't necessarily guarantee success in another region.
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Can you imagine the reaction when someone proposed building a massive offshore oil rig the drill down and extract the black stuff, then pipe it back to shore? All the mechanical equipment, the harsh environment, the sea life fouling it, the shear depth at which it needs to operate.
Now we get the same reaction to tidal and deep water wind turbines (because shallow ones are already proven to work).
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If it was truly an easy source of energy capture, investors would be jumping on it. But wave/tidal power isn't fundamentally hampered by lack of investment or research, but by its operating environment.
Let's list the challenges of wave/tidal power:
1. Power is not constant, which require designs to add physical or electrical energy storage elements for power smoothing.
2. Harshest environment on earth for moving machinery due to extreme variation of power input, corrosion, and fouling from sea life
3. Peak performance is dependent on specific geographical features/topologies which limits locations suitable for installation.
4. Potential for significant environmental impacts from installation and operation.
All this means that wave/tidal power is extremely difficult to harvest at all, let alone at a market-competitive price.
Your claim that tidal power is "extremely difficult to harvest at all, let alone at a market-competitive price" ignores significant advancements and successful projects proving its viability.
Tidal energy's predictability gives it a key advantage over other renewables like solar and wind, which are weather-dependent. While initial costs are high, projects like the MeyGen tidal array in Scotland are already generating power for the grid and attracting investment. As with wind and solar, early-stage costs are
Fukishima: $470,000,000,000-$660,000,000,000 (Score:2)
Ring of fire (Score:2)
Here in New Zealand, also on the same ring of fire as Japan, we currently get 20% of our power from geothermal sources, https://www.gns.cri.nz/researc... [gns.cri.nz], making it excellent baseload to compliment solar and wind. Hydro makes up the rest of our baseload, but option that may n
Baseload is now useless (Score:2)
This is just another way to sell nuclear, by trying to justify its production costs higher than renewables'.
It won't work, because baseload was necessary due to technical limitations which aren't anymore.
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/k... [nrdc.org]
https://www.e3g.org/news/e3g-e... [e3g.org]