Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe
Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe
Solar module prices reached a new low this week, says Leen van Bellen, business development manager Europe for Search4Solar, a European purchasing and selling platform for solar products. He tells <b>pv magazine</b> that prices will remain low in the short term.
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$60k per MW or $210M for a nuclear reactors worth (3.5GW). Sure... the reactor will go 24/7 (between maintenance and refuelling down times, and will use less land (1.75km² Vs ~40km²) but at 1% of the cost, why are we still talking about nuclear.
(I'm using the UKs Hinckley Point C power station as reference)
Because there are nights there are winters there are cloudy and rainy days, and there are no batteries capable of balancing all of these issues. Also when you account for those batteries the cost is going to shift a bit. So we need to invest in nuclear and renewables and batteries. So we can start getting rid of coal and gas plants.
You're using factors of less than 10 to argue against a factor of 100.
But Germany has no space for nuclear waste. They haven't been able to bury the last batch for over 30 years. And the one that they buried most recently began to leak radioactivity into ground water.
And.. why give Russia more military target opportunities?
I'm not a rabid anti-nuclear, but there are somethings that are often left out of the pricing. One is the exorbitant price of storage of spent fuel although I seem to remember that there is some nuclear tech that can use nuclear waste as at least part of it's fuel (Molten salt? Pebble? maybe an expert can chime in). There is also the human greed factor. Fukushima happened because they built the walls to the highest recorded tsunami in the area, to save on concrete. A lot of civil engineering projects have a 150% overprovision over the worst case calculations. Fukushima? just for the worst case recorded, moronic corporate greed. The human factor tends to be the biggest danger here.
Not an expert, but molten salt reactors are correct. MSRs are especially useful as breeder reactors, since they can actually reinvigorate older, spent fuel using more common isotopes. Thorium in particular is useful here. Waste has also been largely reduced with the better efficiency of modern reactors.
Currently, Canada's investing in a number of small modular reactors to improve power generation capacity without the need to establish entire new nuclear zones and helps take some of the stress off the aging CANDU reactors. These in particular take advantage of the spent fuel and thorium rather than the very expensive and hard to find Uranium more typically used. There's been interest in these elsewhere too, but considering how little waste is produced by modern reactors, and the capacity for re-use, it feels pike a very good way to supplement additional wind and solar energy sources.
If France can find space, surely Germany can.
If Finland could find space, Germany definitely can.
Finland with it's vast swathes of frozen tundra.
Idk, Finland has a much lower population density vs Germany. France is something like 1/2 the population density, but they also have >50 reactors, so surely Germany can find room for a few...
Finland smaller tho.
- Finland: 338,145 km² and 5.6 million people
- Germany: 357,596 km² and 82 million people
Where do you want to put your hazardous waste again?
Yup, but population density should be what matters, because that implies how much usable space there is for waste disposal.
And Sweden.
I think there's a contingent of people who think nuclear is really, really cool. And it is cool. Splitting atoms to make power is undeniably awesome. That doesn't make it sensible, though, and they don't separate those two thoughts in their mind. Their solution is to double down on talking points designed for use against Greenpeace in the 90s rather than absorbing new information that changes the landscape.
And then there's a second group that isn't even trying to argue in good faith. They "support" nuclear knowing it won't go anywhere because it keeps fossil fuels in place.
What isn't sensible about nuclear? For context, I'm coming from the US in an area with lots of empty space (i.e. tons of place to store radioactive waste) and without much in the way of hydro (I'm in Utah, a mountainous, desert climate). We get plenty of sun as well as plenty of snow. Nuclear should provide power at night and throughout the winter, and since ~89% of homes are heated with natural gas, we only need higher electricity production in the summer when it's hot, which is precisely what solar is great for.
So here's my thought process:
- nuclear for base load demand to cover nighttime power needs, as well as the small percentage of homes using electricity for heat
- solar for summer spikes in energy usage for cooling
- batteries for any excess solar/nuclear generation
If we had a nuclear plant in my area, we could replace our coal plants, as well as some of our natural gas plants. If we go with solar, I don't think we have great options for electricity storage throughout the winter.
This is obviously different in the EU, but surely the nordic countries have similar problems as we do here, so why isn't nuclear more prevalent there?
I'm very much in the first camp and need to remind myself whenever I think about arriving due nuclear
A MW of solar averages out to about .2 MWh per hour. A MW of nuclear averages about .9 MWh per hour.
But even so as the UK does it, nuclear power isn't worth it. France and China are better examples since they both picked a few designs and mass produced them.
China's experience indicates you can mass produce nuclear relatively cheaply and quickly, having built 35 out of 57GW in the last decade, and another 88GW on the way, however it's not nearly as quick to expand as solar, wind, and fossil fuels.
MW/h
There is MW which is a unit of power and then there is MWh which is a unit of energy, but what is MW/h supposed to mean?
Thanks for catching the typo.
Nuclear actually around 0.6, because 1/3 is always off for repair and control.
Maybe in the UK where each plant is basically unique instead of having improvements from all the previous iterations. In the US it's around 93%. I don't know how to search China or France's numbers, but I suspect they're similar or better.