Energy Matters

There's an interesting theory that surface warming of the Earth is proceeding in a staircase fashion, due to modulation of fossil-fuel-forced warming by El Nino events:

http://euanmearns.com/the-staircase-hypothesis-an-alternative-explanation-for-the-recent-global-warming/

The driving mechanism for this phenomena would be release of stored heat from the oceans (which have been steadily absorbing much of the energy being trapped by increased atmospheric IR-absorbing gases like CO2 and CH4) during El Nino events.

> "The oceans can at times soak up a lot of heat. Some goes into the deep oceans where it can stay for centuries. But heat absorbed closer to the surface can easily flow back into the air. That happened in 1998, which made it one of the hottest years on record. (Trenberth 2013, see above source)"

This forms a prediction of sorts: if there is an another strong ENSO event this year, another stepwise climb of the staircase should play out over the next decade.

Note that even if we eliminated fossil fuel use and deforestation in a year, due to the long-term buffering effect of the ocean, it would take at least a century for the Earth's surface temperature to stabilize (assuming we don't trigger some 'natural' effect like massive marine sediment methane destabilization, etc.). This means as much effort will need to be devoted to adaptation to new conditions as to elimination of fossil fuels from the energy mix, assuming that we all agree that civilizational stability…

The fully-baked lifetime costs of nuclear power are quite vigorously debated; it's hard to get accurate numbers, since in general there are unpriced government insurance policies backing the plants (i.e. the government will step in to pay the $10B cleanup costs in the unlikely event that something goes wrong).

One way of attempting to answer this question is to look at France, where 75% of their power is nuclear; their price per KWh for consumers up to 2015 was lower than the average for Europe (12th-cheapest in Europe according to Wikipedia, and 2nd-lowest for commercial), but that almost certainly doesn't price the government insurance mentioned above [2].

Note that due to a lot of electric heating in residential stock, France is very susceptible to increased demand in cold winters; in such situations they have to import from the rest of Europe, sometimes at peak hours. And as of 2016, a bunch of French reactors were shut down over safety concerns, so the prices there are spiking dramatically [3].

Another approach; let's look at cost per installed MW of power for current projects. For solar, that's now beating wind (and half the price of coal) for the newest installs, at $1.65M/MW [4]. According to the World Nuclear Association (who I'm going to assume will give the best possible numbers that can be said with a straight face), nuclear installs are ranging from ~$2.5M/MW to $7M/MW of capacity, with most cases closer to the high end of that range [5].

Now, load factor…

I love how interested you are in this and your desire to work this out from first principles. I say the equation is not appropriate for the same reason we're having this discussion on the residence time of CO2, particularly anthropogenic. It doesn't account for multiple processes and time scales. The IPCC uses the Bern Model discussed here:

http://euanmearns.com/the-half-life-of-co2-in-earths-atmosphere-part-1/

Frankly I don't care about the 97% agreement. I'm sure it is just as high if not higher in terms of biologists agreeing that evolution is occurring. It's a talking point to get people with no scientific training on board. Unfortunately it has the opposite result in many cases since it's a weak argument from authority.

Excellent point about water vapor particularly when it precipitates and release energy during the phase change. I'm on mobile so not as good at finding things, here's some information from AR4 with sources, AR5 may go into more detail:

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-5-4-2.html

9.5.4.2.1 Detection of external influence on precipitation

Mitchell et al. (1987) argue that global mean precipitation changes should be controlled primarily by the energy budget of the troposphere where the latent heat of condensation is balanced by radiative cooling. Warming the troposphere enhances the cooling rate, thereby increasing precipitation, but this may be partly offset by a decrease in the efficiency of radiative cooling due to an…

Your comment is entirely misleading, based on outdated data, and whitewashes the hell out of nuclear power. The fact you're trying to claim the parent post is bad is not cool.

1. Please look at actual data for power plant construction times. [1] provides an overview. Estimates are useless - if we look at how long things actually take to build... "The mean construction time of 441 reactors in use today was 7.5 years."

3. Are you actually serious right now? Radioactive waste sitting in temporary pools that will be an environmental catastrophe for hundreds of years if they leak isn't a problem? No, just because we tolerate other ecological disasters doesn't make this one ok.

4. This is no longer true, and will definitely not be true in another 5 years. Battery costs are decreasing at a reliable rate year over year. Power plants are already being built making use of them. Here's one going up now with 300MWh of storage [2].

5. No, you look up per capita demand. Here: [3]. It’s been dropping for a decade.

6. Your link does not report solar farm deaths because as far as I can tell there haven't ever been any. Unless you count birds. Rooftop solar is "dangerous" because installers fall off roofs.

[1] http://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nuclear-power-plant/

[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/10/08/the-sun-shines-only-at-night/

[3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=32212

> France is an outlier? OKAAYYYY...

The EPR is an outlier.

Once again: the average time to construct a nuclear power plant is around 7.5 years. Now you can focus all your attention on plants that take longer than those, and you can falsely believe that those outliers are the norm.

But that does not change the fact that they are not. The average was, is, and continues to be 7.5 years. The median is actually a bit lower.

https://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nuclear-power-plant/

> Additionally in 2022 up to half of their fleet was down for corrosion inspections...

Planned and scheduled corrosion inspections. They have regular inspections, seems like a Good Thing™ to me, which they delayed during COVID. So they scheduled them for the summer of 2022. They always schedule them for the summer because that's when electricity demand in France is lowest.

These days, in addition to demand being lowest, supply is large because summer is when all that over-provisioned PV delivers most...just when other demand is lowest. So a good time to schedule such routine maintenance and inspections.

Because nuclear power can be scheduled. Unlike wind and solar. Which just happen whenever Mother Nature feels like it. Big difference.

Far from being "a common misconception", it's definitely true that solar power plants closer to the equator have a higher capacity factor than solar power plants further from the equator. It's true that warm solar panels are less efficient than cooler solar panels, but there are two countervailing effects: solar panels (at a given temperature) become more efficient when more brightly illuminated, and the day is longer and there are less clouds in tropical regions. It turns out that these effects are enormously more important than the thermal effect. That's why PV in the UK has a capacity factor of 11%, German PV 10%, Maine PV 12%, California PV 28%, and Arizona PV 29%.

There's a lovely bargraph in the US at https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39832 and an even nicer colorcoded map of the US at http://euanmearns.com/solar-pv-capacity-factors-in-the-us-the-eia-data/