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Found on Twitter:
This caught my attention because there is an important point to be made about both the realities of sham "recycling" for the vast majority of discarded material and the shamelessness of corporate advertising/propaganda, but I am (for some reason) surprised at the amount of people using this to dunk on wind power.
To start: Yes, this whole process is probably a waste of time. Landfills are safe and effective™ (and cheap). There is no real reason we can't just bury the blades in a glorified hole in the ground. That said, sending waste materials to cement kilns to be burned is actually a very common method of disposal. Cement kinds have lots of desirable properties for waste disposal. They're typically used for high-calorie materials like oil or organic solvents, but this isn't some hairbrained scheme someone cooked up when they thought EPA wasn't looking.
Does this prove that "green energy" is a scam? Some quick back of the envelope calculations (provided by ChatGPT, but spot-checked by me) indicate that a typical wind turbine over the 20-year life of the blades will produce about as much energy as 18,000 tons of coal. That's 6000 tons per blade. I couldn't find a consistent figure for the weight of a turbine blade, but all of the numbers I saw were between 5 and 35 tons. The idea that burning the turbine blades counteracts the environmental benefits from the clean energy provided is absurd.
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues. I spent about 15-minutes figuring out the right numbers because I wanted to write this post, but I knew intuitively that there would be at least an order of magnitude difference. Gell-Mann amnesia suggests that actually, all public discussions are this bad, I just recognize this one because of my STEM background.
Listening to a recent episode of the Meateater podcast on the ecological impacts of renewable energy and thinking about it afterwards, I formulated my issue with the core premise into three-legged combination of why it doesn't seem like a great idea to build offshore wind, but that may also apply to standard wind and solar installations:
I don't claim any actual expertise and I'm pretty neutral about the whole thing, but I haven't really seen anyone addressing this head-on.
I work in energy project finance. The answer to that question is that small footprint nuclear reactors are not proven. There are zero pilot plants let alone commercial plants. It’s entirely unproven to be economically viable and a quick google shows the target price for a planned pilot plant is $90/MWh. Price as is the price they would need to get for electrons to I assume be profitable. Nearly double the wholesale rate in most of the country.
Standard nuclear I suppose is proven insofar as we actually have functioning nuclear plants right now. The problem is that we can not build them in the USA. Out of the last 4 units we tried, two of them ran up construction costs approaching $30 billion before they threw in the towel and got canceled. The other two at least got built, but again, with a cost of some $30 billion. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-5x as expensive as wind or solar.
We can’t talk about nuclear without acknowledging that the USA, as a country, can’t build nuclear anymore. Anyone who who even tries goes bankrupt. I don’t mean there is a lack of political will, though there is that. I mean we don’t have the manufacturers, contractors, designers, or financial sponsors that know how to do it. It’s really sad.
Sabine Hossenfelder had a good video about economics of nuclear power here. She specifically investigates two claims: that it is slow and that it is expensive. Her counterarguments are as follows:
The overall building time varies from project to project and country to country. In Japan the median construction time is 4 years and 3 months with record being Kashiwazaki-Kariwa unit 6 built only in 39 months and finished in 1996. There is nothing intrinsic in nuclear power for it to be built slowly as is proven by very recent history.
As for price, using levelized cost of energy the nuclear supposedly pricier but only by factor of 2 or 3 compared to the cheapest gas power plants. The biggest disadvantage of nuclear is huge capital cost upfront with related cost of financing the capital. Here the construction time is very important as pouring billions of dollars that sit idle for years or decades ramps up the costs significantly, it may be around 30% of the cost for a project that takes 7 years to finish.
Nevertheless I looked into cost for electricity of two latest finished nuclear power plants. The Olkiluoto-3 power plant that provides Finland with 12TWh or around 15% of electricity a year caused significant drop of electricity cost in Finland to the level of around EUR 60 per MWh. The latest Mochovce 3 reactor also started in 2023 in Slovakia , which together with two older nuclear reactors provides 55% of electricity in the country will help local energy company to fulfill the promise of keeping the electricity price at the level of EUR 61 per MWh.
The biggest advantage of Nuclear is that you can build it where you need it and connect it to the old infrastructure providing good base load of energy. No new grids needed. You have to shell out onetime payment for construction and then you are fixed for decades to come. Which may also be a good thing as was shown during the peak of gas crisis where energy prices exceeded EUR 200 per MWh due to sky-high costs of gas. Additionally it is hard to undersell the benefit of energy independence from volatile countries such as Russia or Middleast even for backup gas plants. And another addition, to me the high upfront capital costs are actually a good feature in a sense - you can build the power plant and then have very low operating costs. But more importantly the revenue from the electricity goes into homegrown industry be it construction companies and other high-tech industry while operational costs also support high-skilled operators of this huge projects at home as opposed to buying solar panels from China or even worse sending money to Russia or terrible petroregimes in Arab world or Africa.
I appreciate the reply and I don’t even dispute this (other than the statement that nuclear is good for keeping dollars onshore. Imported modules make up roughly 20-30% of total cost for a utility scale solar facility in 2024. The rest is onshore. Maybe some imported steel will get you closer to 50%. But it’s not overwhelming).
The rest of your post speaks to a theoretical world for Americans or a global nuclear industry. Citing Japan and Korea is unfortunate not relevant for the USA.
We tried 4 times in the last 20 years. Only two units were built and at great cost. Utilities and investors know the reality of the current market. We can talk about all of this theoretically. But until there is some major changes in policy and pricing, you will not see any new nuclear in the USA regardless of how good it looks on paper.
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