In a major reversal, the world bank is backing mega dams (2024)

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.

mcv2• 1 year ago

Tidal, on the other hand, still has plenty of opportunities.

marcosdumay2• 1 year ago

Make nuclear cost-competitive and people will start building it.

notepad0x902• 1 year ago

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).

colechristensen• 1 year ago

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.

zahlman4• 1 year ago

It was cost-competitive before it faced ridiculously unfair regulations due to being so easy to fear-monger about.

V__• 1 year ago

Nuclear just isn't economically viable. Maybe fusion someday.

qwe----32• 1 year ago

Tell that to China

forrestthewoods• 1 year ago

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.

Kon5ole11• 1 year ago

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).

geysersam4• 1 year ago

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.

cyberax2• 1 year ago

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.

debesyla• 1 year ago

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.

aDyslecticCrow3• 1 year ago

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.

umvi• 1 year ago

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.

bapak• 1 year ago

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.

seanmcdirmid• 1 year ago

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.

Gud• 1 year ago

Question to you. Why do you think Olkiluoto 1&2 took 5 and 7 years to build instead of 18?

Nobody is arguing anyone should build reactors the way Olkiluoto 3 was built.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 1 year ago

Countries going for nuclear will wait decades to get the same power that solar can add in weeks.

And it will last 80 years, day and night. Solar can give you what, 20 or 25 years and 12 hours each day? And China can't hamstring your country either by just refusing to sell you more solar panels. There is almost certainly a place for photovoltaic in a nation's power grid as a sidekick to some other more serious technology.

For nighttime use dirt-cheap batteries and

Also made in China.

eviks• 1 year ago

This comparison makes no sense at all since both factors: the huge delays for nuclear and small delays for solar are direct results of policy. So countries going for nuclear will do the going by removing those hurdles

DarkNova6• 1 year ago

The nuclear industry was destroyed in the 2000s. You can try to rebuild an industry with 100s of billions of dollars…

… or you invest that money into renewables and battery technology.

brian-armstrong• 1 year ago

Dammed if you do, damned if you don't

pyuser583• 1 year ago

Dam!

jeffrallen• 1 year ago

No more dam jokes.

tomrod3• 1 year ago

This made me chuckle. Well done!

Rover2222• 1 year ago

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.

landl0rd• 1 year ago

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.

bryanlarsen6• 1 year ago

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.

gonzo41• 1 year ago

Sand batteries provide a very nice scalable solution IMO. https://polarnightenergy.com/sand-battery/

Rover2222• 12 months ago

Tesla (for one example) has massively scaled their battery recycling tech, they are largely recyclable at this point. I haven't read as much on the recyling of the panels themselves. But they have long lives at this point, and there will always be SOME environmental cost to large-scale energy production. Maybe ASI will arrive and give us practical fusion reactors sooner than we think.

bryanlarsen6• 1 year ago

Hydro is a great complement for solar, you can decrease flow when the sun is shining, and increase it when it isn't.

Nition• 1 year ago

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.

aDyslecticCrow3• 1 year ago

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.

bamboozled2• 1 year ago

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.

mcv2• 1 year ago

During the day. We still need storage.

defrost2• 1 year ago

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44631938

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/china-...

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 1 year ago

Pretty sure that's hydrological warfare.

In a major reversal, the world bank is backing mega dams (2024)

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