[HN Gopher] Nuclear technology's role in the world's energy supp...
___________________________________________________________________
Nuclear technology's role in the world's energy supply is shrinking
Author : hacksilver
Score : 103 points
Date : 2021-03-09 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Regardless of what you think about new nuclear's potential, we
| need to protect and upgrade (and possibly even resurrect
| recently-mothballed) existing nuclear power plants.
|
| "Oh, we're going to replace that nuclear power plant with wind
| and solar!"
|
| Oh, really? Are you going to do that AFTER phasing out fossil
| fuel plants or BEFORE? Because if it's before, you're making the
| case that climate change is a lower priority than retiring the
| cleanest and one of the cheapest and safest power sources
| humankind has ever developed. Because you could ALWAYS choose to
| just replace those fossil power plants with wind and solar and
| batteries instead, but you're making the decision to keep that
| fossil fuel plant running longer than it needs to.
|
| Similar argument for getting rid of existing hydroelectric dams.
|
| And I'm talking about long existing plants, here. All those
| cement emissions (and reservoir emissions for hydro) already
| happened and were "paid for." We need to protect all near-zero
| energy sources until the last fossil power plant on the continent
| is decommissioned. Then go ahead and retire your nuclear or hydro
| power plant.
|
| (Addressed to no one in particular, but these arguments in favor
| of premature retiring of functioning clean energy power plants
| are widespread and it ticks me off. Plus, retiring them early
| also increases the cost of electricity, which slows
| electrification. I bet electric cars would be a LOT more popular
| --and fossil fuel cars less popular--in Germany if their
| electricity price weren't so insane.)
| protastus wrote:
| I agree with the need to maintain and upgrade nuclear plants.
|
| However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and
| safest power sources humankind has ever developed".
|
| The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1
| trillion.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...
|
| There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and
| contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden
| cost and safety risks.
|
| Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable
| under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if
| negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.
|
| Back to your point: we need to collectively admit that climate
| change relates to our practice of postponing the costs of
| pollution -- a massive economic externality that needs
| correction. The solutions are expensive and require commitment.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Storing spent nuclear fuel (etc) is not a "hidden" cost. It's
| actually included in the cost of nuclear fuel, at least in
| the US.
|
| Fukushima, for all the flaws (including some paranoia that
| led to unnecessary evacuations, etc), still didn't kill
| anyone even though thousands of people died in the tsunami.
| That's how safe nuclear is.
| protastus wrote:
| The US does not have a permanent storage solution for spent
| nuclear fuel and highly radioactive waste.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_wa
| ste_r...
| godelski wrote:
| WIPP exists[0]. This is just for weapons waste (which is
| a much higher concern btw). But honestly storing waste
| material on site isn't that big of a deal. The DOE has
| also invented significantly better storage systems in the
| last 50 years but simulations and small scale testing do
| not count as proven enough for large scale testing
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| But there are other deep geological repositories around
| the world.[1]
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What's more likely to kill us, nuclear waste or climate
| change?
| [deleted]
| roenxi wrote:
| The US has been using order-of-magnitude the same amount
| of nuclear power since the 80s. This has been a non-issue
| for longer than most HN commentators have been alive.
|
| If politicians ever decide it has become an issue, the
| storage facility can be constructed.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > still didn't kill anyone
|
| That's not a compelling argument, when the premise is
| misleading. While you (and others) split hairs over what
| "kill" means, people actually die from it.
|
| https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-
| disaste...
|
| https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effec
| t...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| "Psychological effect" is not very convincing, especially
| since much of the psychological effect is due to paranoid
| over-zealous evacuations. Nuclear being blamed for the
| psychological problems caused by people (including
| officials in particular) being irrationally afraid of
| nuclear. People directly die from natural gas explosions
| or falling off roofs installing solar panels pretty
| regularly.
|
| There was an actual tsunami that killed thousands of
| people directly. And worsened, slightly by climate change
| ocean level rise (by us refusing to decommission fossil
| fuel plants).
| swixmix wrote:
| Nuclear power is only as safe as the people who are
| involved in it. In this case, the Fukushima power plant
| wasn't funded like it should have been because people
| weren't interested in nuclear power. Turns out that's both
| extremely dangerous and hard to control.
|
| Also, what do you mean by paranoia and unnecessary
| evacuations? Nobody could even guess what was going to
| happen. When will explosions happen? How many? What
| direction will the wind blow? The power plant was out of
| control. The US government didn't assist with evacuations
| until AFTER the first release which spread contamination
| south hitting Tokyo, and east hitting their own USS Ronald
| Reagan.
|
| Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say
| to those who were contaminated.
|
| "That's how safe nuclear is."
| clusterfish wrote:
| Bringing up the cost of a nuclear disaster is like seeing a
| news report of an aircrash and concluding that cars are a
| safer means to travel.
|
| Air pollution kills millions of people and costs trillions of
| dollars, every single year. Much of it is caused by burning
| fossils.
|
| https://www.oecd.org/env/tools-
| evaluation/thecostofairpollut...
|
| I don't know about you but I would rather a power plant's
| exhaust would be contained in small rods rather than
| dispersed globally and embedded as microparticles in my
| lungs.
|
| Moreover, it's the environmental activists who prevent the
| construction and operation of long term storage sites for
| spent fuel, and in general threaten the industry,
| disincentivizing the development of new reactors designed to
| reduce waste. You don't get to do that and also complain that
| the storage problem isn't being solved at the same time.
| godelski wrote:
| > However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and
| safest power sources humankind has ever developed".
|
| I'd rewrite it as
|
| > one of the safest power sources humankind has ever
| developed[0]
|
| because this is difficult to dispute. Cost is a more
| complicated matter and depends what you're counting and how
| you're comparing. Are you including tragedy of the commons?
| I.e. carbon emissions, mining, storage (batteries, waste,
| etc), land usage, etc. If any of these are included in the
| costs the price changes quite a bit and I'd argue it is not
| in good faith to compare solar and wind to hydro, coal,
| nuclear, etc if you don't include battery storage/costs
| because intermittent energy isn't equal to continuous (unless
| you over allocate).
|
| To continue along the line of the gp the worst case estimates
| of nuclear deaths (including future deaths) is still lower
| than 8 years of of coal in the US using the best case stats.
| If we use more reliable data (the consensus from the UN and
| other independent studies) even including future deaths are
| lower than a single year of coal's best case in the US. So
| how much do you value human life? Because we're talking about
| 81 people[1] (4k if we assume we don't get better at treating
| cancer over the next 20 years) vs 39k PER YEAR (low 7.5k high
| 42k per year US coal particulate related deaths). Let that
| sink in again: 31 people died immediately from Chernobyl, an
| additional 50 due to Chernobyl, 0 from 3 Mile Island, and 0
| Fukushima. Those are the deaths of nuclear power.
|
| > The order of magnitude of Fukushima ...
|
| > Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that
| reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in
| practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in
| the real world.
|
| I'm often frustrated by Fukushima being brought up and people
| implying that it came down to human stupidity. Yes, that was
| a factor, but there was a much larger and significantly more
| important factor. The earthquake that caused the tsunami was
| the largest in recorded (by actual measurement) history (for
| Japan) and the 4th largest EVER recorded. The second largest
| recorded was an 8.5 in 1896 and the second largest theorized
| was an 8.9 in the year 869. Remember this is not linear
| growth. Based on this the likelihood of an earthquake and
| tsunami like that happening within the lifetime of the
| powerplant was incredibly low. Were the earthquake an 8.5
| Fukushima wouldn't have happened. It is an absurd statement
| to chock this up to human fault. We're talking about an
| absurdly rare and freak event, and no one died.
|
| As to the cost of the cleanup (which includes tsunami cleanup
| as well as radiation fwiw), well we could make it a lot
| cheaper if we reduced the acceptable levels of early death by
| radiation. The hard part is that there may or may not be
| small radioactive particulate on the ground and this could
| get introduced into water or food (getting inside the body).
| Letting people move back would still likely result in less
| deaths than coal does per year. I'm not advocating for this,
| I think that'd be insane, but why is this insane? Why is
| pumping out more coal not more insane? What's the difference?
| We're talking about human lives and livelihood here. When it
| is more humane to send people back to live in a radioactive
| zone than keeping coal plants online, maybe we should re-
| question our priors. What issue are we trying to solve?
| Because if it is saving human lives we're doing a pretty bang
| up job. If it is cost, ditto. If it is climate, ditto.
|
| The arguments being made here are often absurd. There is no
| question that nuclear is clean and safe. The question is
| about cost, how much you value human life, how much you value
| carbon, and how much you value pollution. But if you think
| lives are cheap, climate change isn't real, and (not or)
| pollution isn't a big deal, then yeah, continue fighting
| against nuclear because it is costly.
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-
| worldw...
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-
| kno...
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Someone heard they'd need to hire a cleanup contractor and
| saw nothing but piles of money. No way it will cost anywhere
| near that much just to make the area safe. Most of the
| contamination was in water that's already gone to the ocean
| and raised the ocean's background by an utterly negligible
| amount.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| If it costs more money to keep these dinosaurs running than
| installing solar and wind and batteries to replace natural gas
| and coal, then... you're wasting money on nuclear.
|
| "Old nuclear" is fundamentally not cost competitive with
| current solar/wind, and it's only going to get much much worse
| in the next decade, especially if perovskites hit mainstream
| utility solar and cheap grid storage (such as that military
| salt water battery or increasing-density LFP) becomes a
| reality.
|
| The barrage of hydrogen, nuclear, and synthetic fuel stories is
| indicative of the desperation of the market reality of
| solar/wind/electric vehicle/battery economics to
| oil/gas/nuclear/ICE.
|
| Once the price curves flatten out, then maybe next-gen
| hydro/nuclear/geothermal can chase a stable price point. I do
| think nuclear can still beat solar/wind once the economics of
| those stabilize and with the right regulatory, after all I'm a
| LFTR stan.
|
| "Old Nuclear" plants will be propped up by the military that
| want their weapons grade isotopes.
| belorn wrote:
| Storage with solar is currently generally economical
| competitive for about 75% of output for 4hrs, with a charge
| cycle per day.
|
| In order to replace fossil fuels using wind and storage you
| would need significant more than 4 hours, using a much slower
| charge cycle. If we want to have something like 1 week of
| storage, with an expected charge cycle of 2 weeks (ie one
| week where the wind is producing more than the grid, followed
| by one week where it is producing less), we are talking about
| 42x in capacity, and the investment will get repaid 14x
| slower for each dollar invested.
|
| Prices will need to drop and production will need to be
| heavily increased before batteries is viable for wind, and
| until then more fossil fueled power plants is being built in
| order to match the capacity of wind.
|
| If I had to choose between battery and nuclear, my choice is
| neither. Simply ban fossil fuels while we wait for people to
| make up their mind.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > "Old nuclear" is fundamentally not cost competitive with
| current solar/wind,
|
| That's like saying that someone who owns 90% of a publicly
| traded company is worth $9 billion just because the stock has
| a market cap of $10 billion. If they'd actually try to cash
| that stock, they'd run out of buyers and the stock price
| would go way, way down.
|
| Solar and wind are great now, because we can pick a random
| spot and build it without needing storage and don't have many
| people objecting to it. (Yes, the lawsuits are there already,
| but so far we've only gotten to the low hanging fruit. It'll
| get much worse before we're anywhere near 50% green energy.)
| It's cheap if you just look at the cost of the pure
| panels/turbines.
|
| The earth has a finite amount of habitable land. If you start
| filling that up with solar panels, land price will increase
| because you have to buy it from people that wanted to plant
| crops there or live there. A few countries like the USA and
| Argentina have it easy, but most places don't have large
| swathes of land laying around completely unused with wind and
| sun aplenty.
|
| We currently use about 162 PWh worldwide, only 27 of which is
| electricity[1]. We're barely starting to make a dent in
| electricity production and what you hear left and right is
| "not in my backyard" and "not on my the neighbor's roof that
| I have to look at every day" (--my dad). We'd barely have the
| space if people wouldn't complain, let alone if we can only
| build it away from civilization. And that's replacing
| electricity production alone, we haven't really started on
| transportation, making things (cement, steel, plastics, ...),
| growing things (fertilizer, cow farts), and heating/cooling.
| What's more: due to only replacing a tiny percentage of
| electricity production with solar and wind, we aren't yet
| seeing the need for large scale energy storage, which seems
| like it will easily triple the cost with current technology
| (my takeaway from [2], p. 76).
|
| You might counter with putting the stuff on sea instead to
| avoid the finite land issue. The primary problem there is
| that this is not where people live, increasing the cost of
| construction, maintenance, and energy transportation. For
| example, wind on sea is about as expensive as nuclear (I
| should start keeping notes on which sources I looked at
| before and copy-paste texts instead of memorize and
| reiterate). Solar I don't know, but for some reason we're not
| doing that on the same scale as wind, presumably for a good
| reason. There just aren't any easy shortcuts here, only
| compromises.
|
| Let's not dismiss fission energy just yet. It might seem
| expensive today, but between a known ~2x price increase (iirc
| going full nuclear would increase the energy price by that
| much from today's price, though France has me wondering if I
| might be misremembering) and a larger cost if you do
| solar/wind+batteries+need-to-win-lots-of-lawsuits-for-space
| (which works out to be about 3x for just the hardware, using
| today's technology), I'll have fission reactors please. Until
| we have better tech, let's get started with the current tech
| and _hope_ it becomes obsolete and we get cheaper energy with
| a sunk cost rather than not try because we might sink some
| cost.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_energy
|
| [2] How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have
| and the Breakthroughs We Need - Bill Gates - 2021
| tomohawk wrote:
| Some additional info along the points you make
|
| https://asiatimes.com/2021/03/wind-and-solar-reliance-would-...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I'm not against solar and wind. We actually COULD do 100%
| solar, wind, and storage. See here: https://model.energy
|
| _However_ , it's going to take much longer if we start with
| phasing out nuclear before fossil, which means spewing
| massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. We can't
| afford that time.
| krupan wrote:
| Has anyone ever done an actual detailed comparison of
| unsubsidized nuclear vs. unsubsidized wind/solar? I'd love to see
| a breakdown of not just dollar costs, but environmental impacts
| like how much land is required, wildlife affected, supplies
| acquisition, lifetime of the equipment, disposal of waste/worn
| out parts, etc.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I have a very stupid naive question: can a green grid supply
| enough energy to power a hadron collider, that kind of huge
| scientific R&D things ? It seems wind and solar can provide for
| the normal grid but what about industries hungry for a lot of
| throughtput ? Huge batteries ? How does it work ?
| thinkcontext wrote:
| CERN is like any other big customer of the grid. They have very
| specialized technology on their premises but they shouldn't
| have to really care how the electricity they consume is
| generated. The point of "the grid" is that it is able to serve
| all the customers plugged into it. If "the green grid" isn't
| able to serve CERN, then it will have failed many other
| customers as well.
| Armisael16 wrote:
| You just build more solar panels/wind
| turbines/geothermal/whatever.
|
| Why wouldn't renewables be able to scale?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| In my very child-like view of how electricity works you need
| sustained massive input to feed massive machines.
|
| Like we need boosters that are really powerful to lift us off
| from earth's gravity well, that's why we can't hook up our
| space shuttles to an outlet in the wall because it doesn't
| deliver enough raw power.
| Armisael16 wrote:
| I mean, yeah, you do. Why wouldn't renewables be able to
| power a grid that runs those things? CERN doesn't have an
| on-site power plant - it just hooks into the European grid
| via a French substation (it also has a connection to a
| Swiss substation as a partial backup, but it isn't used
| during normal operation).
| Krasnol wrote:
| There is a pattern to those countries where it's not shrinking:
|
| * Only four newcomer countries are currently constructing nuclear
| power plants and all are plagued by financial difficulties and
| delays
|
| * An econometric analysis suggests that countries classified as
| potential newcomers tend to be less democratic
|
| * On the supply side, the dominant driving force is the
| geopolitical interests of countries that export nuclear power
|
| https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.74261...
| cybert00th wrote:
| >Today, nuclear power supplies about 10% of the world's energy,
| down from 13% in 2010. Its use might continue to fall, although
| it will remain a part of the global energy mix for many decades,
| with a role in decarbonizing energy supplies as the fossil-fuel
| age comes to a close.
|
| An overly optimistic statement if every I saw one. China is a
| case in point,they're bringing more and more fossil-fuelled power
| stations online by the year.
|
| And at that rate, the rest of the world risks being left behind
| in energy poverty or becoming dependent on China et al for their
| energy needs.
|
| Wars have been fought over less.
| fuoqi wrote:
| It's quite disingenuous to project Chernobyl and Fukushima to
| modern reactors. When you hear about them, always remember that
| they were designed in 60s and represent the second generation of
| nuclear reactors. The nuclear technology came a LONG way since
| then and modern reactors are counted as generation 3+.
|
| After Fukushima safety requirements for reactor designs have been
| revisited and what do you know? Modern VVER reactors satisfies
| them without any changes! I suspect other modern designs have
| performed similarly in this regard.
|
| Also when you hear about issues with construction time/cost or
| about nuclear waste storage, examples are usually US-specific.
| There is also Olkiluoto plant, but its issues are more about
| building a new reactor design using an Agile-like methodology.
| Nuclear waste problem can be more or less solved with "burner"
| reactors and fuel recycling, the field in which Russia and France
| have promising advancements.
|
| Should the old reactors be retired? Yes! Should we abandon the
| nuclear energy for fashionable renewables? Absolutely, no! At the
| very least until the storage problem will be properly solved.
| hinkley wrote:
| Don't.
|
| Compare.
|
| Percentages.
|
| Stand-up Maths called this out recently and it's good to mention.
| I think this might be the video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aokNwKx7gM8
|
| Give me the output and our total consumption please.
| _Microft wrote:
| Don't compare absolute values only either, show both.
| hinkley wrote:
| Yes! I'm glad to see this idea seems to be spreading around
| HN . Show both, or you're lying to part of your audience by
| omission.
| kylegill wrote:
| It actually served to make me more skeptical to the article
| only seeing percentages. Thanks for calling that out as well.
| hinkley wrote:
| Punchline is at ~12:45 for anyone who doesn't want to watch a
| bunch of stuff about voting.
|
| Basically you can only compare (or add, or subtract)
| percentages if the quantities they represent are exactly equal.
| And since the quantities of power production change from year
| to year, they're doing the same thing he's complaining about.
| tchvil wrote:
| His books and Rubik's appearing little by little in the back
| are hilarious.
| hinkley wrote:
| I didn't even notice it until right after he bagged on the
| other guy for doing it. By the end it's just a shelf of his
| books.
| rrrazdan wrote:
| While usually people use percentages in the wrong way, in this
| case they used and compared them the appropriate way.
|
| Percentage here is used as a ratio of total output and a
| decline in that ratio over time is a decline in role. Exactly
| what the articles headline asserts. It doesn't matter that
| nuclear may have grown in absolute numbers. The assertion is
| that its role has declined which is true.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's still a bit sketchy because total output matters in a
| world where we push for more efficient use of power.
|
| Could we put enough fancy light bulbs and triple glazed
| windows and heat pumps out there to run everything on nuclear
| (I am biased against nuclear but I'm also biased against coal
| externalities) and solar/wind? What's our shortfall? In this
| case it's not the % of nuclear I care about. It's how much
| base load it can provide.
|
| Bad budgeting is one of my peeves about software and so I get
| a little grumpy when I see it happening elsewhere.
| 0xmohit wrote:
| Bitcoin's role in the world's energy consumption is increasing.
| techrat wrote:
| You could even argue that if it wasn't for Bitcoin, we could
| shut down another unsafe Nuclear power plant or two.
|
| https://www.dw.com/en/why-does-bitcoin-need-more-energy-than...
|
| >Back at the start of 2017, Bitcoin was using 6.6 terawatt-
| hours of power a year. In October 2020, that was up to 67
| terawatt-hours. Now a few months later, it has nearly doubled
| to 121 terawatt-hours, the Cambridge researchers found, enough
| to run their entire university for nearly 700 years.
| cletus wrote:
| I'm not sure which issue is more polarizing on HN: nuclear power
| or Bitcoin.
|
| So fission power is easy: I know this will upset the nuclear
| fanboys on HN but (IMHO) it has no future. And it's not because
| the technology can't be safe. It's because humans ultimately
| can't be trusted with:
|
| - Acquiring, extracting and storing the fuel;
|
| - Dealing with the toxic byproducts (eg UF6);
|
| - Maintaining the plants to a sufficient degree of safety on thin
| profit margins that are the norm for utilities;
|
| - The failure modes are awful; and
|
| - Dealing with the waste.
|
| Governments currently cover some or all of these to some degree
| so I'm not sure we're seeing anything close to the true cost of
| nuclear power factoring in the above. Nuclear power thus far
| seems to have been far more of a political statement than an
| economic choice.
|
| As for fusion power, that's more murky. I really hope there's
| commercially viable fusion power in our future but... I'm not yet
| convinced there will be.
|
| Fusion works for stars because the process happens really slowly
| (per unit mass) and the masses are so large that gravity contains
| the "mess".
|
| Heating a fluid to 100M+ Kelvin is always going to have
| turbulence issues and we don't have a good story for containing
| the neutrons without destroying our containment vessel. I believe
| He3 fusion would be (mostly?) aneutronic but... He3 is super-rare
| (for us here on Earth).
|
| I believe solar has the brightest future. When (not if) getting
| stuff in orbit is sufficiently cheap that we have industry and
| permanent residence off Earth then solar is an amazing option.
| I've seen one estimate that a solar collector in space produces
| about 7 times the power of an Earth-bound one (night/day cycles,
| no weather, no atmospheric interference).
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| > I'm not sure which issue is more polarizing on HN: nuclear
| power or Bitcoin.
|
| ...and every time there's the same litany of poorly researched
| talking points repeated ad infinitum.
|
| Almost nobody ever points out the systemic risks of highly
| centralized power plants in case of war or civil war or
| terrorism.
| moistbar wrote:
| The nuclear waste argument is a purely American one. European
| countries (France specifically) have a multi-reactor chain
| where each successive step uses the "waste" from the last step.
| While this doesn't eliminate the need for long-term storage
| completely, it does reduce the potency of the leftovers since
| they're not being discarded after using ~3% of their total
| stored energy (a la the US).
|
| Additionally, fission isn't the only way to get energy out of
| uranium. Nuclear batteries, such as the ones powering Curiosity
| and Perseverance, can't melt down like a traditional reactor
| and will continue working until all the energy stored inside it
| is gone. This is the type of nuclear power I'd like to see gain
| prevalence for many reasons, foremost of which is the ability
| for each household to have its own source of electricity
| independent of a power grid.
|
| Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to beam
| that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector is as
| useful as if nothing were there at all.
| ben_w wrote:
| > foremost of which is the ability for each household to have
| its own source of electricity independent of a power grid.
|
| While I'm all in favour of each home (or apartment block)
| being energy independent, I very much do not want widespread
| access to even RTG material.
|
| Consider: average power use is about 1 kW, 1000 J/s, and that
| the "dead in 1-2 days with treatment" radiation absorbed dose
| is merely 30 J/kg, so any domestic power supply is capable of
| killing an adult in 2-3 seconds of full exposure... or, more
| likely, a tiny flake imbibed or inhaled due to either malice
| or incompetence would have the same effect during one night
| of sleep.
|
| > Solar in space is all well and good, but without a way to
| beam that power back to Earth, a space-based solar collector
| is as useful as if nothing were there at all.
|
| I'm definitely against beamed power, at least until we get a
| single planetary government.
|
| Anything which beams with a higher power flux than sunlight
| is a potential weapon. Anything which isn't, requires so much
| more land than PV that it's always better to use PV _even
| when you have to put the PV in your nearest desert and beam
| it to you from there using whatever future tech you're
| thinking of to get from orbit_.
|
| (I assume one world government would mean that government
| could authorise itself to build a weapon pointed at itself
| without having to worry it might be secretly planning to
| shoot itself; I don't see how either the USA or Russia could
| ever trust the other if either built one).
| christiansakai wrote:
| When we get that solar panels in orbit, how do we transfer the
| energy back to Earth?
| cletus wrote:
| As other commenters note, there are methods of getting power
| down from orbit and I understand them to be viable, at least
| in theory.
|
| But my point was primarily as a means of producing energy for
| industries and people that are stationed off Earth. For a
| space habitat, solar is just ridiculously good compared to
| the alternatives.
| [deleted]
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Lasers or microwaves are the current candidates.
| isaacg wrote:
| Here's an article from the Department of Energy that outlines
| a few options: https://www.energy.gov/articles/space-based-
| solar-power
|
| Microwaves and lasers are the two options they describe.
| willis936 wrote:
| That's a lot of cooked goose.
|
| In all seriousness, that is a pretty terrifying industrial
| project. I'm not sure how you'd make the failsafes strong
| enough to match the risk of cooking thousands of people
| alive.
| elihu wrote:
| > The long wavelength of the microwave requires a long
| antenna, and allows power to be beamed through the
| Earth's atmosphere, rain or shine, at safe, low intensity
| levels hardly stronger than the midday sun. Birds and
| planes wouldn't notice much of anything flying across
| their paths.
|
| It doesn't look like they mention a specific wavelength
| in the article, but the reference to "long wavelength"
| and "long antenna" seems to imply frequencies much lower
| than what I'd consider microwave.
|
| Generally, the lower the frequency is, the less harm it
| causes to living things. Though I either way I wouldn't
| want to live right next to the ground station. I suppose
| it would be similar to living right next to a radio
| transmission tower or a radar station.
| willis936 wrote:
| I generally expect sub 100 MHz to be called radio rather
| than microwave, but I shouldn't make assumptions.
|
| So you need a quarter wave to be longer than a building
| to make it not a concern, practically it needs to be much
| longer if you're sending serious power and want to keep
| the density down.
|
| Let's aim for a 1 km long antenna in space with voltage
| high enough that ohmic losses are not a concern, or a
| very large superconducting antenna and all of the
| apparatus that goes with it. Millions of volts likes to
| arc when you have debris just floating around everywhere
| in space. Superconducting is much more attractive
| regardless of the extra apparatus.
|
| I don't see many points of concern, though you could
| still damage infrastructure if you aren't constantly
| aligned. Blowing up terrestrial grids isn't as bad as
| cooking people alive.
|
| It would still be the most dangerous thing we've ever put
| in space by a pretty wide margin. Keep space filled
| exclusively with small tin cans is not an accident and
| not entirely due to technical or economic limitations. It
| is a very sensitive political area. Putting anything that
| could be dangerous in orbit makes it dangerous to
| everyone. So your adversary across the ocean blows up a
| reactor? Cool. As long as they don't blow me up.
| gameman144 wrote:
| Moreover, how to keep that from being intentionally
| weaponized, assuming that it _is_ strong enough to cook
| people alive.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I imagine a large solar power-sat in orbit could be
| easily crippled by missiles launched from outside its
| aim-zone, or even well-aimed orbital debris being slung
| around.
|
| I'd worry more about such an installation being
| hacked/sabotaged by someone who doesn't care if the
| billions-of-dollars investment gets turned into confetti
| within a few hours.
| willis936 wrote:
| This is why software is kept out of control systems
| whenever possible.
|
| "They hacked the web interface that tells me how much
| power the diagnostic thinks is being generated so now it
| doesn't agree with the receiver" isn't as scary as "they
| redirected the death ray to a nearby city".
| DennisP wrote:
| The power density wouldn't be near that bad. From
| geostationary, the footprint would be several square
| miles, and birds could fly through the beam without harm.
| Even getting that much focus from phased-array
| transmitters would require a reference signal from the
| ground, so if the beam went astray it would spread out
| much more.
|
| Despite the low power density the ground station would
| still be cheap, since it'd mostly be wire antenna.
|
| (Source: the book _The Case for Space Solar Power_ )
| baybal2 wrote:
| Or you can microwave cities.
|
| Pump few gigawatts of microwaves over a country, and
| revert it to stone age in minutes.
| isaacg wrote:
| That's why the microwaves approach might be preferable to
| the laser approach: "Safe, low intensity levels hardly
| stronger than the midday sun. Birds and planes wouldn't
| notice much of anything flying across their paths."
| technocratius wrote:
| Creative ideas and all, but we're already struggling to
| build, transport and store enough solar energy down here on
| earth. I'm guessing that in the timeframe this needs to
| deliver the cc mitigating benefits, this might be less
| feasible...
| _Microft wrote:
| I guess we do not. The only things one might want to export
| from space to Earth are things that absolutely cannot be made
| on Earth. Everything else would almost certainly be produced
| cheaper on Earth.
| fsflover wrote:
| >It's because humans ultimately can't be trusted with
|
| You can already see what effect nuclear has when the safety is
| not done well (Chernobyl and Fukusima). But even those cases
| kill less people than coal done well.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| It seems like it would be easier and substantially cheaper to
| take existing fracking/drilling tech and go for deep-well
| geothermal, rather than trying to launch a Dyson swarm.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Why not both ? :) Also you don't necessarily need to
| dismantle all planets during Dyson swarm construction- you
| can keep a few as a historical curiosity. Sure, it's horribly
| inefficiency use of mass but still. :)
| tolbish wrote:
| The argument against fusion is that containment vessels aren't
| there yet. So this becomes a debate on the speed of
| containments vessel research.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| LFTR addresses almost all of those issues that you cite. Those
| are "old nuclear". Proliferation (doesn't make weapons isotopes
| as part of its fuel cycle), 99% fuel use and breeding (even can
| use old "spent fuel"), low/zero meltdown risk with a simple
| plug that melts and liquid fuel, scalable, startable/stoppable
| quickly.
|
| But I agree that fission (and fusion currently) is current
| noncompetitive and not worth investment (aside from research)
| until the economies of scale that solar/wind/battery are
| currently undergoing stabilize or plateau.
| graeme wrote:
| The waste argument should be made in comparison to the
| alternative baseload option: carbon.
|
| Carbon waste is worse than nuclear waste, yet is given a free
| pass because it floats and we can't touch it or see it. But it
| is very real.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Even the visible carbon ash is stored, toxic and radioactive
| too. You don't want that contaminating water supplies either.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| I've had this argument so many times in that last month...
| renewables outside of hydro are just not viable as baseline
| power until batteries improve cost and density by several
| orders of magnitudes. Nuclear fission is really the only choice
| we have right now. We can't avoid climate change by relying on
| technologies like fusion power & next gen batteries that
| haven't even been invented yet, let alone mass manufactured.
| tchvil wrote:
| Jean-Marc Jancovici is a French engineer/entrepreneur who
| study energy and climate change for about 30 years. There is
| a single talk I know he gave in China that is in English:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRC5-hAbUGA Unfortunately
| most other talks are in French(auto subtitles maybe). His
| style is a little arrogant and may hit a nerve. But past
| this, all he says is backed by research and physics.
|
| He says renewable can't provide the level of energy we have
| without decreasing drastically our consumption. And nuclear
| fission is the only path we have to reduce our CO2 emissions.
|
| I would love renewable or fusion to cover all our needs, and
| keep my comfortable life as it is today. But I didn't find
| any inspiring talks or readings so far to balance his
| arguments.
| hntrader wrote:
| Maybe you should write an article about that, and put it up
| on HN, given that it's such a common point of
| contention/misunderstanding.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| There are people more knowledgeable then me who have made
| these points better than I could, I'd recommend Vaclav Smil
| as a great source on this. The problem is that his material
| makes for grim reading, and I think many people researching
| this subject are drawn to techno optimism even when the
| numbers don't add up because the subject as a whole is so
| grim.
| samvher wrote:
| Do you have specific recommendations among his writings?
| Hammershaft wrote:
| http://vaclavsmil.com/2017/05/08/energy-and-civilization-
| a-h...
|
| I also recommend looking through his list of books on the
| sidebar.
| ourlordcaffeine wrote:
| The whole "baseline" thing is partly a myth, and there is
| an article about that
|
| https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-
| nothi...
| lukeschlather wrote:
| You're assuming "batteries" which is just wrong. There are a
| lot of economical grid-scale power storage systems. Batteries
| are low-latency storage used to stabilize load - they are
| expensive because they are so quick to change the power they
| provide. Frequency, voltage, current, whatever you need a
| battery can provide in milliseconds. But you don't want to
| run it for days.
|
| If you want to store power overnight you want kinetic
| storage, or possibly power to gas. There are lots of
| technologies available. Some of them are cheaper than
| nuclear, but none of them are economical yet because there is
| no market for day-to-week-scale storage until solar/wind
| start to approach 50% of the power mix.
| clusterfish wrote:
| Building pumped hydro is not going to suddenly be more
| feasible or cheaper as demand for it increases. What else
| can store energy for more than a week at a cost that
| approaches reasonable?
| hntrader wrote:
| What's an example of one that's cheaper than nuclear?
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| For whatever reason people have a hard time hearing this.
| I've similarly had the same argument over and over again.
|
| Also for whatever reason people love to talk about how mining
| trucks will become EVs, and they always link me to the same
| Komatsu truck which they claim is an EV, but actually has a
| diesel engine and uses an electric power transmission.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| I disagree. The UKs National Grid see a role for nuclear in
| its Future Energy Scenarios
| (https://www.nationalgrideso.com/future-energy/future-
| energy-...), laying out 4 different energy scenarios in 2050,
| but wind will dominate electricity generation.
|
| Also, the current generation of EVs will provide a
| substantial amount of flexibility resulting in PSbillions of
| savings for the UK grid and consumers (see
| https://www.kaluza.com/blog-busting-the-myth-ev-smart-
| chargi...). The addition of Vehicle-to-Grid chargers will
| further allow increased renewables.
|
| With the cost of these technologies decreasing, the
| importance of nuclear power will reduce over time.
| andbberger wrote:
| Ok a lot of nonsense here but just to address one egregious
| point:
|
| There is no waste problem, stop spreading misinformation [1]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
| FooHentai wrote:
| The finns building a long-term storage site for waste
| produced domestically does not equate to their being no
| global issue with long-term nuclear waste sequestration.
| There absolutely is.
|
| The only site in the entire world currently intaking waste is
| WIPP, and it's been dogged by problems:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
|
| The only two other sites that have ever actively taken in
| waste, Gorleben and Morsleben in Germany, are now closed and
| _both_ have severe site stability issues requiring ongoing
| remediation into the billions of euros to ensure the sites
| don 't fail.
| andbberger wrote:
| This project has definitively proved that it's a political
| problem and not a technical one. The solution is to build a
| deep unmarked hole and bury it, duh.
|
| I think it's not that controversial of a statement to say
| that the main problem with nuclear energy in general is
| political. As evidenced by the fact that this thread exists
| and full of people who are trying really hard to find
| problems with our only extant technology for carbon-free
| large-scale energy production. And that we keep shutting
| down perfectly good nuclear power plants. There's just no
| basis on fact here.
|
| Meanwhile, the water is lapping at our feet.
| tinco wrote:
| These arguments are all moot. Even assuming that humans can't
| be trusted with each of these points, then still you are
| exchanging hypothetical lives and hypothetical damage to the
| environment for real lives and real damage to the environment.
|
| Who cares about storing fuel and toxic byproducts perpetually?
| We are destroying our environment _right now_. It 's ridiculous
| we're even still having these conversations.
|
| It doesn't matter if fission has a future, we could start to
| build a hundred power plants today, and the first ones would be
| finished in 5 years, and it would fucking save our planet.
| choeger wrote:
| Nuclear power (in its current form) is extremely impractical
| compared to wind and solar.
|
| 1. It is obviously dangerous, requiring extreme safety measures.
|
| 2. It requires large amounts of water.
|
| 3. It is unpopular.
|
| 4. It is so complex that building plants regularly exceeds
| budgets (there is little repetition and thus little learning)
|
| 5. It requires ridiculous storage/transport protocols for spent
| fuel. In Fukushima, one of the biggest concern was the spent fuel
| pool. That stuff is so hot, you cannot safely move it across the
| country and thus it has to accumulate on-site.
|
| Compare this to solar and battery storage: You can literally
| build a _factory_ for both in the same ten or more years it takes
| to build the nuclear power plant. There is absolutely no physical
| reason not to produce 100 times as many batteries and solar
| panels as we do now. Resources are abundant (you can replace rare
| materials at a slight cost of efficiency).
|
| We are not at the point where we can use 100% solar/wind yet but
| the path is clear. On the other hand, we _might_ be able to do
| the same with safe and efficient nuclear power, but _that_ path
| is much less clear. Molten salt? Micro plants? Thorium? There is
| no one out there doing any of that fancy new stuff in practice,
| sonny bet is on mass-scale of solar, wind, and batteries.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > Compare this to solar and battery storage: You can literally
| build a factory for both in the same ten or more years it takes
| to build the nuclear power plant. There is absolutely no
| physical reason not to produce 100 times as many batteries and
| solar panels as we do now. Resources are abundant (you can
| replace rare materials at a slight cost of efficiency).
|
| Let's do the numbers. Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada costed $5B.
| Nuclear costs something like $6B per installed GW. Gigafactory
| can produce 35 GWh of storage per year, which is just over one
| day of storage for a single nuclear reactor.
|
| Now, how much these batteries cost? Let's be generous to Tesla,
| and assume that unit price will be around $100/kWh. That means
| that the Gigafactory can produce $3.5B worth of batteries per
| year.
|
| Suppose you have $6B dollars. What would you rather buy, 2
| years worth of entire output of Tesla Gigafactory, that would
| give you 3 days worth of storage at 1GW output, and which would
| still require spending additional billions on building primary
| generation (solar and wind), or one nuclear reactor that would
| give you the same 1GW for next 50 years, with very low
| operational costs?
|
| Primary battery storage simply doesn't make economic sense at
| grid scale at the moment. This is not to say that renewables
| are stupid, or that batteries are useless. It's just the idea
| of using wind/solar + batteries as a base load just doesn't
| make sense at current level of technology, and this is why
| nobody is actually doing it, or planning to do it. If, or when
| it starts to make sense, you'll see entrepreneurs invest
| billions in buying up batteries and setting up battery farms.
| However, this does not make sense now, and will not make sense
| for probably at least another decade.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yep, the environmental movement successfully dragged its heels
| for 40 years until something other than nuclear became viable.
| It's a pity, because if we just hadn't stopped rolling out
| nuclear 40 years ago, and had merely continued at the same
| pace, our grid would be 100% nuclear _today_. Not 20 years from
| now if we hurry, _today_. One can only imagine the CO2 we
| wouldn 't have had to remove from the atmosphere. What's done
| is done, though, and I'm glad there is finally a way forward
| that meets with their approval.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I really don't see how you can blame environmentalists? Are
| you saying it was those meddling environmentalists that kept
| nuclear from dominating... in every country (except maybe
| france)?
|
| I think the reality is fossil fuel was damn cheap and nuclear
| was not.
| legulere wrote:
| The largest problem of nuclear price is the price of
| construction. Construction doesn't keep up with efficiency
| gains in the rest of the economy and as a result gets more
| and more expensive.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Yes, and cleaning up the excess CO2 will be even more
| expensive, not to mention the unrecoverable damage to
| ecosystems, even more expensive to paper over.
|
| But they got theirs and in 25 years will be gone.
|
| This is why every cost argument as well as CO2 pricing
| scheme fails, and why were in the dire straits now.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Without the high price of construction, nuke wouldn't
| happen at all, in the US. The cost overruns are the gravy
| train for corruption that motivates the whole process. Cut
| off cost overruns and corruption, and all the appeal at
| high levels dries up. Other countries have other dynamics.
| Small-scale nukes are locked institutionally in competition
| with big corruption nukes, so at a disadvantage.
|
| Solar and wind start producing competitive power
| immediately. There is much less room there for corruption,
| but the immediate income from output drives investment.
| hedora wrote:
| Nuclear is actually very safe. The article cites a tot of less
| than 100 all-time deaths of plant operators.
|
| It's hard to find global statistics, but 14 people were killed
| by wind turbines in 2011, in England alone:
|
| https://www.quora.com/On-average-how-many-people-do-wind-tur...
|
| Roofing is the second most dangerous profession in the US. I'm
| sure solar panels have also killed more people than nuclear
| incidents.
|
| As for pollution? All energy sources pollute. Nuclear is better
| than coal. I don't know how it compares to solar + wind +
| batteries + hydro, but those last two are definitely big
| sources of pollution, and batteries are obviously creating more
| waste by volume than nuclear.
| legulere wrote:
| Safety is not about deaths alone. You can't ignore the
| massive costs and negative personal effects of Chernobyl and
| Fukushima.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| I cannot ignore negative personal effect of loud wind
| turbines and healthcare cost of the PM10 and finer
| particulates either.
|
| No, renewables cannot provide all the power we need even if
| humanity scales down the energy use, which is not going to
| happen.
|
| (Batteries, even sodium-sulfur, at these scales are
| impossibly expensive, same with pumped storage.)
| legulere wrote:
| Which renewables are producing PM10 emissions?
|
| The problem of renewables is not the power they can
| produce, but how to handle intermittency. Better
| electricity networks are one part of the solution,
| batteries can be as well.
|
| Even with 50% renewables Germany has one of the most
| stable electricity networks in the world.
|
| Also in the traditional base-peaked system you still need
| peeking power plants and you have problems with weather
| effects (in summer water in rivers can get too warm to
| use it or dry up, in winter it can freeze)
| dan-robertson wrote:
| This is a fact that it seems impossible to convince people of
| (though maybe France was successful), so within the
| constraints of current politics it might as well not be true.
| gandalfian wrote:
| Funnily enough most of these issues people mention with
| renewables are the same ones Britain faced introducing nuclear
| power! They coped by shaping demand with variable electrify
| tarrifs, creating the world's largest electrical vehicle fleet
| (milk floats) and charging them off-peak, encouraging storage
| heaters and electric water cylinders in houses and building
| pumped storage hydro. What goes around comes around. If you want
| hope for the future look at
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruachan_Power_Station
| [deleted]
| doggydogs94 wrote:
| My observation is that climate activists would much prefer a new
| coal plant to a new nuclear plant.
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| A bad thing for climate change.
| tyronehed wrote:
| Fukushima--that's why nuclear is held in ill repute.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Why is it that one disaster every other decade for nuclear is
| enough to terminate progress and innovation altogether? It's
| unreasonable. When rockets explode or planes crash, even when
| people die during launches or takeoff, we don't stop trying to
| improve on them. We don't give up on the tech. Something about
| nuclear strikes irrational fear in the general public.
| wp381640 wrote:
| Because when there's a disaster they're huge in cost to the
| point that you can't even insure against them
| chrisco255 wrote:
| How much did 9/11 cost? Did we ban airplane travel as a
| result?
|
| This is completely comparable. The proper reaction to
| disaster is to reform, not to retreat.
| Daho0n wrote:
| Who decides it is irrational? Also _" Something about nuclear
| strikes...."_. Poor choice of words :)
| arkitaip wrote:
| Usually when a plane crashes there isn't a risk for a
| ecological disaster that could lasts centuries if not more.
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| Millennia. Epochs. Modern humans have been around for less
| time than some of this waste will still be hot.
| kvakkefly wrote:
| If the half life is that long, it's not very dangerous as
| energy / time is very low.
| hinkley wrote:
| Only if the decay product is not itself radioactive. I
| could alternate between alpha decay and something
| nastier. And if it's radium then even alpha decay is a
| problem because it can be aspirated.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I'd pick the occasional localized radioactive hazard over
| global destruction caused by anthropogenic climate change. That
| is if we even had such disasters again with current generation
| nuclear tech.
| tyronehed wrote:
| Considering the amount of concrete the goes into making a
| nuclear reactor, nuclear power is not a solution to our
| climate crisis.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| No, nuclear has much better Energy Return on Investment
| (EROI) than any other energy source.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
|
| Don't get me wrong, it has other problems but EROI ain't
| one of them.
| hinkley wrote:
| Have you seen how much radiation from Fukushima has sailed
| out to sea? It's bad.
|
| I really think we need to ban building heavy industry next to
| bodies of water or high in critical watersheds. We have
| enough transit infrastructure now that we should be looking
| at the precautionary principle when zoning for things that
| can get a free ride on the wind or waterways and therefore
| spread over heavily populated or critical nature corridors
| just due to inability to stop a problem the moment it is
| detected. It's designed for making a company's biggest
| mistakes into everybody's problem instead of theirs.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Go live in fukushima's radioactive zone for a couple of
| months and then be so glib about nuclear disasters.
| unhingingdog wrote:
| You'd get about a 1 mSv dose, and be fine. I'm more worried
| about the 200,000 or so daily premature deaths due to
| fossil fuel pollution.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Nuclear was already considered a risk before Chernobyl by a
| portion of the population. Fukushima just reaffirmed that.
| hobofan wrote:
| What Fukushima mainly highlighted is that humans are too
| stupid to self-regulate, which is a necessary requirement to
| running these nuclear reactors safely. There were many prior
| safety concerns that were ignored, and all that in a country
| experienced with nuclear power.
|
| If they didn't manage to ensure that they were operating
| their plants safely, I don't know why I should trust my local
| regulatory bodies to.
| hef19898 wrote:
| That is common tone, isn't it? The Soviets were quite
| experienced with nuclear reactors as well, and yet
| Chernobyl violated their own rule and regulations during
| design and construction. And operations. And since this
| happened already it will happen again.
|
| I changed my mind on nuclear power so, now I see it as an
| important stop gap to transform our electricity production
| to renewables. Existing nuclear power plants would allow us
| to phase out fossil fuel now. And they would buy us time to
| figure out storage for renewables. New nuclear plants won't
| help, so, their construction time is simply too long.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Nuclear was in ill repute before Fukushima. The only reason
| Fukushima even happened was because we stopped building new
| nuclear plants to replace the old ones decades ago.
| ncmncm wrote:
| > " _that did not lead to any loss of life, but, 7 years later,
| some 31 people died_ "
|
| Undercounting casualties of nuke disasters has a long tradition.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Question: how much is building new nuclear plants about producing
| nuclear weapons?
|
| Is that still important? In the UK we're spending an INSANE
| amount of money on a new reactor and I'm wondering if that has
| anything to do with the government's motivation.
| hannob wrote:
| A lot of people think that the only reason Hinkley C is built
| is exactly this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
| news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...
| philipkglass wrote:
| Global nuclear generation increased by 95 terawatt hours (TWh) in
| 2019, relative to 2018:
|
| https://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/g...
|
| Global wind and solar generation increased by 265 TWh in 2019:
|
| https://www.rechargenews.com/wind/global-wind-and-solar-ener...
|
| Nuclear was still well ahead in 2019 with 2657 TWh vs. 2103 TWh
| for wind and solar (699 solar, 1404 wind). But if these relative
| growth rates continue it will take only 3.3 years for solar +
| wind generation to eclipse nuclear generation globally ((2657 -
| 2103) / 170).
|
| Hydropower is still the far-and-away leader of non-fossil
| electricity generation at 4306 TWh in 2019 (106 TWh growth over
| 2018):
|
| https://www.hydropower.org/news/invest-in-hydropower-to-tack...
|
| But it's a lot harder to build new hydro projects than new wind
| or solar projects.
| cbmuser wrote:
| And how much of that _generated_ electricity from solar and
| wind is actually produced on demand?
|
| Electricity generated from nuclear power can follow the load,
| neither wind nor solar can do that meaning you will _always_
| need backup power plants.
|
| Germany has 50% renewable energy in its electricity mix, yet
| their greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector are
| seven(!) times as compared to France.
|
| There is a reason why China is nuclear power plants like crazy.
| They understand that electricity is worthless if it can't be
| produced on demand.
|
| > https://twitter.com/YanQinyq/status/1368830510210899968
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Nuclear isn't on demand power like natural gas or hydro. It
| is consistent (like coal, unlike solar or wind), but you
| can't turn it off when you don't need it! Ideally, you can
| pair it up with some batteries or pumped hydro to save the
| power you generate when it isn't in demand. Practically
| speaking, a nice mix of different sources can cover for
| each's weaknesses.
| VistaBrokeMyPC wrote:
| You absolutely _can_ turn it off when you don 't need it.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Restarting a reactor takes quite some time even with
| nuclear power densities.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| It is to a point possible to follow the load with a nuclear
| power plant by changing moderator setup, but only base load
| and not peak. Blocks cannot be easily stopped and started,
| but they can be throttled enough to handle the changes in
| demand. It is hour-scale tuning.
| bdauvergne wrote:
| You can see on demand modulation[1], it's possible to
| variable 5% per minute of the full power generation of all
| nuclear reactors (of 60 GW).
|
| [1]: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-
| delectricit... look at 3 september 2018 for example, min is
| 36GW, max is 41GW, on one day.
| Retric wrote:
| Nuclear can't follow the load without becoming vastly more
| expensive. France is heavily dependent on exporting
| subsidized electricity generated by nuclear _at a loss_ and
| importing renewable and fossil fuel generated electricity.
| But even with that massive exchange for load balancing they
| still have excess nuclear generation driving up costs. Just
| compare capacity factors between US and France to understand
| the true story.
|
| It looks fine on paper, but France was dependent on other EU
| countries avoiding nuclear.
| bdauvergne wrote:
| Actually France nuclear industry is harmed by the current
| chilliness of the EU, lead by germany, toward nuclear power
| generation. If EDF could choose, they would prefer a bigger
| market to export its technology inside the EU.
|
| The problem of capacity factors of french nuclear reactors
| is caused by excess generation by renewables (mostly wind
| from north sea) that cannot be stopped and is sold at quasi
| negative rates. It's clear when you see the capacity factor
| has been decreasing for the last decades without much
| change in the number of reactors online in France.
| philipkglass wrote:
| China has significantly reduced its nuclear ambitions over
| time. Back in 2009 it planned to have 86 GW of installed
| nuclear capacity by 2020. It actually reached 47.5 GW in
| 2020. See this recent post and its children for citations:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26216394
|
| China is the world's leader in building new nuclear reactors.
| And in building new solar farms. And in building new wind
| farms. China is the world's biggest energy producer, so it is
| going to lead on a lot of absolute energy measures.
|
| China can build reactors cheaper than the West, but it can
| also build solar farms cheaper than the West. China is adding
| output from renewables faster than from nuclear projects.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| You forgot to mention China is also the world's leader in
| building new coal plants.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I don't particularly want to defend China, but at least
| they have contributed to the fundamental "victory"
| economics of solar being able to challenge natural gas.
|
| And yes they are totalitarian, but at least they have
| some awareness of GHG emissions and are executing on
| alternative energies and EV and battery production and
| research.
| gcheong wrote:
| But at what true cost has this "victory" come at when we
| know China is more than willing to look the other way
| when it comes to the environmental costs of mining those
| resources at least in the short term.
| https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-
| toxic...
| philipkglass wrote:
| Solar panels don't need rare earth elements.
|
| Some wind turbine generators use rare earth element
| permanent magnets, but they only account for 21% of the
| market. The rest use electromagnets. See Figure 37 in
| this report:
|
| "IRENA Future of Wind (2019)"
|
| https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publicat
| ion...
| Roboprog wrote:
| Any numbers on China's coal plants?
| technocratius wrote:
| Keep in mind that hydropower is extremely disruptive to the
| water ecosystem up and downstream of the facility, destroying
| habitats and biodiversity. Definitely not the type of side
| effects you'd consider OK if it's your mission to combat the
| effects of climate change...
| Hammershaft wrote:
| As water becomes more scarce hydro power is also creating
| geopolitical instability that threatens war. Look at the
| Ethiopian dam project that threatens to dry out the nile, or
| Chinese dam projects that threaten to cut off agricultural
| water to some of the most populated regions in India.
| technocratius wrote:
| Exactly
| samcheng wrote:
| With glaciers and mountain snowcaps melting, I'd guess that
| developing countries would continue to invest in hydrological
| engineering projects. They give electricity, yes, but they
| also help prevent flooding, and provide year-round water for
| irrigation and cities.
|
| The slow spring melt of mountain snow turns into a sudden
| post-storm flood, if the temperatures are warm enough...
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Hydro is terrible when measured in TWh / deaths, mostly due to
| Banqiao. Nuclear is by far the best by this metric (ahead of
| even solar and wind).
| Hammershaft wrote:
| I'm not being hyperbolic when I say some of the remaining
| spots for hydro threaten the spectre of nuclear war in the
| future.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEo4NNo7oaM
| medium_burrito wrote:
| I'm amazed how few people are aware of this. Even
| conventional conflict beacons- an unstable Ethiopia + Egypt
| coming to blows, for example.
| AJ007 wrote:
| Dams have a life expectancy of 50-100 years. Globally, most
| dams are past their life expectancy. If they don't abruptly
| fail, then they eventually silt up and become useless.
| notJim wrote:
| Hydro seems to also have bad implications for wildlife
| habitat. Here in the Northwest US, there is a lot of desire
| to remove some dams to restore salmon habitat. I'm not quite
| sure if this is because these old dams were built before
| habitat preservation was a major consideration, or if it's an
| irreconcilable problem.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Yes. The Elwah dam they tore down recently was built long
| ago before conservation was much of a concern. More to the
| point: it wasn't really economical to keep such small scale
| hydro going.
|
| The large dams on the Columbia and Snake are fairly safe
| from being eliminated, even if they do cause some habitat
| loss.
| ncmncm wrote:
| "Some habitat loss" meaning upcoming extinction. But the
| reservoirs provide irrigation that makes it politically
| inexpedient to take them down.
|
| Turning them off while fry are heading downstream ought
| to help, some.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| I never understand people who oppose hydropower on an
| environmental basis. Here is the fact. A lake made by a
| hydroelectric dam is not much different from a naturally
| formed, river fed lake. Different river fed lakes have
| existed for billions of years. Yes, they fill with silt
| over time. No, the sky does not fall. See Stanley Pool for
| an example of a natural lake fed by a major river, i.e. the
| Congo.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| The problem in the PNW is that these lakes are bad
| habitat for our native salmon. The more dams we make, the
| less habitat there is for the salmon. It's not a matter
| of "oh we just don't like them on principal." Rather,
| they tore down the dam in Elwha because it eliminated
| what was previously a thriving spawning ground and
| replaced it with a silty lake full of invasive species.
|
| Everything is interconnected, and it's a really typical
| technocratic attitude to say that it's fine in isolation.
| "Who gives a shit? It's just a bunch of fish." Analytical
| people eschew context. Analysis is about reducing
| everything to components. And guess what -- it has led us
| astray here.
|
| It turns out in the PNW that salmon are a major part of
| the food chain for a lot of animals, and our hydropower
| efforts are suppressing that food chain. It's also making
| it really hard to find enough salmon to fish for
| ourselves.
|
| You'll see similar problems with the Colorado River. The
| Hoover Dam has basically destroyed all the downstream
| ecosystems that relied on the water to create their
| living conditions. It's an ecological disaster in slow
| motion.
| notJim wrote:
| > that salmon are a major part of the food chain for a
| lot of animals
|
| The rivers in the PNW tend to be nutrient poor, because
| they're mountain runoff. I've read that salmon swimming
| upstream and dying are a major provider of nutrients for
| the upstream ecosystem.
| putnambr wrote:
| I don't think anyone opposes hydropower due to
| reservoirs, the concern is lifecycle species like salmon
| that are born at the headwaters of rivers, live their
| adult life in the ocean, and return to headwaters to
| reproduce. Dams get in the way, and the kill rate of dams
| even with ladders is enormous. The other big concern I
| see is access, e.g. canoeing or kayaking rivers,
| destroying fishing spots, culturally significant sites,
| etc.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| There's another thing that destroys rivers: drying out.
| Not helped with rising average temperatures...
|
| On the other hand with enough investment you can build
| artificial lakes instead. However, current economy does
| not value the abovementioned things enough to build
| artificial lakes.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Again, I will observe that even though more people will most
| certainly die from solar and wind installations due to falls and
| machinery accidents, there is no catastrophic downside. So as
| much as I think Ansel Adams (37-year board member Of the Sierra
| Club) was right, that nuclear is a great solution, it simply
| isn't worth the political capital at this point in history.
| You'll have to wait until the uninformed die out, which will take
| longer than evolution.
| kens wrote:
| > Ansel Adams (president of the Sierra Club)
|
| I thought that was interesting, but I checked and no, Ansel
| Adams was not president of the Sierra Club.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| Good catch, corrected. He was a member of the board of
| directors for 37 years. I apologize, I'm recalling from his
| autobiography, which I read about 23 years ago, on loan from
| a friend.
| bezelbuttons wrote:
| We need to build all forms of renewable energy and stop falling
| into the trap of "Build X not Y" where X and Y are one of
| solar/wind/hydro/nuclear. One form is insufficient.
|
| Nothing will get accomplished with this climate 'whataboutism'
| type of argument. (I'm making a comparison to whataboutism, I
| recognize the difference)
| hannob wrote:
| When you have two solutions to a problem and one works very
| well and the other does not and only makes headlines with cost
| overruns and delays then surely you should "build X, not Y".
|
| I know a lot of HN readers don't like this, but the debate is
| over. Nuclear lost, renewables won. Get over it.
| White_Wolf wrote:
| What makes you think this is a one solution problem? Very few
| things in life are black & white. Life comes in shades of
| gray and problems with multiple solutions(more or less
| optimal for the time when the decision is taken).
|
| Every type of energy comes with downsides:
|
| -Solar - storage and delivery infrastructure costs
|
| -Wind - same as above -Hydro - same as above + if you build
| many/too big you change the center of mass leading to changes
| in the planets rotation speed
|
| -Coal/gas/any fuel burned to produce energy - Usually cheaper
| than other to buil but produces a lot of pollution
|
| -Nuclear - Build cost + waste disposal
|
| Any kind of energy storage you use for any of the above will
| need to be recycled at some point. I would count this as a
| downside for any solution that requires storage to handle
| peak usage and can't be ramped up.
|
| Edit:Some typos(most likely missed some) and formatting
| hannob wrote:
| > What makes you think this is a one solution problem?
|
| I don't think that. I think Solar + Wind complement each
| other nicely. I think hydro can be good if the
| circumstances allow it. I think we'll need to explore a
| variety of storage technologies, better grids and demand
| side management to complement wind+solar.
|
| I just don't think that an extra expensive technology with
| plenty of problems is contributing anything.
| willis936 wrote:
| All intermittent sources dependent on weather is not a
| diverse energy mix.
|
| Also, hydro is not only scarce but awful for the local
| habitat and extremely dangerous. An improper or unplanned
| decommissioning could kill millions of people.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Our current battery technology is just completely incapable
| of transitioning us to a %100 renewable grid at current costs
| and densities. Closing down nuclear plants and replacing them
| with a mix of renewables and lignite coal plants as we've
| seen in Germany has been both an ecological and economic
| disaster. Nuclear fission is a proven baseload power today,
| whereas getting renewables to cover baseload power globally
| requires technologies we haven't even invented yet, let alone
| mass manufactured.
|
| "A cost-optimal wind-solar mix with storage reaches cost-
| competitiveness with a nuclear fission plant providing
| baseload electricity at a cost of $0.075/kWh27 at an energy
| storage capacity cost of $10-20/kWh. To reach cost-
| competitiveness with a peaker natural gas plant at
| $0.077/kWh, energy storage capacity costs must instead fall
| below $5/kWh."
|
| https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9
|
| "The largest announced storage system, comprising more than
| 18,000 Li-ion batteries, is being built in Long Beach for
| Southern California Edison by AES Corp. When it's completed,
| in 2021, it will be capable of running at 100 megawatts for 4
| hours. But that energy total of 400 megawatt-hours is still
| two orders of magnitude lower than what a large Asian city
| would need if deprived of its intermittent supply. For
| example, just 2 GW for two days comes to 96 gigawatt-hours.
|
| We have to scale up storage, but how? Sodium-sulfur batteries
| have higher energy density than Li-ion ones, but hot liquid
| metal is a most inconvenient electrolyte. Flow batteries,
| which store energy directly in the electrolyte, are still in
| an early stage of deployment. Supercapacitors can't provide
| electricity over a long enough time. And compressed air and
| flywheels, the perennial favorites of popular journalism,
| have made it into only a dozen or so small and midsize
| installations. We could use solar electricity to electrolyze
| water and store the hydrogen, but still, a hydrogen-based
| economy is not imminent.
|
| And so when going big we must still rely on a technology
| introduced in the 1890s: pumped storage. You build one
| reservoir high up, link it with pipes to another one lower
| down and use cheaper, nighttime electricity to pump water
| uphill so that it can turn turbines during times of peak
| demand. Pumped storage accounts for more than 99 percent of
| the world's storage capacity, but inevitably, it entails
| energy loss on the order of 25 percent. Many installations
| have short-term capacities in excess of 1 GW--the largest one
| is about 3 GW--and more than one would be needed for a
| megacity completely dependent on solar and wind generation.
|
| But most megacities are nowhere near the steep escarpments or
| deep-cut mountain valleys you'd need for pumped storage.
| Many, including Shanghai, Kolkata, and Karachi, are on
| coastal plains. They could rely on pumped storage only if it
| were provided through long-distance transmission. The need
| for more compact, more flexible, larger-scale, less costly
| electricity storage is self-evident. But the miracle has been
| slow in coming."
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/batteries-
| need-t...
|
| "Given the magnitude of the battery material demand growth
| across all scenarios, global production capacity for Li, Co,
| and Ni (black lines in Fig. 3) will have to increase
| drastically (see Supplementary Tables 9 and 10). For Li and
| Co, demand could outgrow current production capacities even
| before 2025. For Ni, the situation appears to be less
| dramatic, although by 2040 EV batteries alone could consume
| as much as the global primary Ni production in 2019. Other
| battery materials could be supplied without exceeding
| existing production capacities (Supplementary Tables 9 and
| 10), although supplies may still have to increase to meet
| demands from other sectors5,9. The known reserves for Li, Ni,
| and Co (black lines in Fig. 4) could be depleted before 2050
| in the SD scenario and for Co also in the STEP scenario. For
| all other materials known reserves exceed demand from EV
| batteries until 2050 (Supplementary Table 5). In 2019 around
| 64% of natural graphite and 64% of Si are produced in
| China32, which could create vulnerabilities to supply
| reliability."
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-020-00095-x
| kieranmaine wrote:
| As a counter, this article (https://spectrum.ieee.org/energ
| ywise/energy/renewables/what-...) says aim for 95%
| renewables requires battery costs of $150/kWh.
| hntrader wrote:
| To whoever downvoted this, can you please provide a
| rationale as to why?
|
| As a non-expert, the points here are compelling, so I'd
| appreciate that dialogue.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| People who decide to build new plants make their decision not
| from concerns about climate change, but economics. Building a new
| nuclear plant would be like building a new coal plant, but worse
| because by the time it's complete the economics will be even
| poorer in comparison. Nuclear just doesn't make economic sense on
| any measure: cost per GW, time to complete, up front cost,
| regulatory difficulty, etc.
|
| So as much a nuclear advocates wish more nuclear plants would be
| built, unless they want to provide significant subsidies, it's
| just not going to happen. For the same reason you don't shop
| around by finding the highest price you can... no one is looking
| to throw away money. Energy is energy.. no one cares about the
| type of plant it came from.
| nimish wrote:
| Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to
| Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add
| batteries.
|
| Big honking power plants of all flavors are just not
| economically viable. The SMR thing might work, but it'll have
| to do better than wind+solar+batteries which have enormous
| economies of scale.
|
| RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
| sir_bearington wrote:
| > Bingo. Nuclear is just ridiculously expensive compared to
| Wind/Solar. You could overbuild 2-3x and maybe even add
| batteries.
|
| Batteries will never have sufficient capacity to delivery any
| meaningful amount of storage. This is why any realistic plan
| for a wind + solar grid assumes some silver bullet will solve
| the storage problem: synthetic methane, hydrogen, thermal
| batteries, something else.
|
| But who knows if any of those will actually pan out.
| California has already hit saturation with solar power.
| Adding more solar only marginally displaces carbon emissions.
| As far as actual decarbonization goes, nuclear is more
| valuable than raw generation figures present because this
| power is generated 24/7.
|
| > RIP, only France did nuclear right :(
|
| And Belgium. And Slovakia. And China.
| jashephe wrote:
| Isn't pumped storage hydro kind of that "silver bullet"? At
| least in places with the right geography?
| sir_bearington wrote:
| Pumped hydroelectric has good capacity, but doesn't scale
| well. The right geography is the main limiting factor,
| accessibility is a second. The places with good
| hydroelectric potential tend to be very remote, in the
| mountains. It's extremely hard to do large earthmoving
| and concrete construction in remote places. The places
| that have simultaneously the right topology and
| relatively easy accessibility are limited.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| The alternative is essentially big water towers, and that
| has serious construction challenges not solved yet.
| willis936 wrote:
| Pumped hydro is pretty interesting, but highly dependent on
| natural elevation changes to be considered remotely
| economical.
| ourlordcaffeine wrote:
| France did it right-ish. They have to import peak power as
| their reactors cannot ramp quickly enough.
| andromeduck wrote:
| Economies of scale and a heavy reliance on forced labor.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-
| so...
| imtringued wrote:
| Forced labor reminds me of Nazi labor programs.
|
| However, I'm surprised that it's not done to expand the
| military. It's really weird that someone is being forced to
| work for the sake of the entire planet when every other
| nation is trying to wiggle itself out of its
| responsibility.
| gameman144 wrote:
| One of the advantages of nuclear, though, is land-area
| required. Nuclear takes about a third as much land as solar,
| and a fifth as much as wind, meaning that it can more easily
| scale up if energy needs outstrip available land for energy
| production without reverting to the equally land-efficient
| methods of coal and gas.
|
| That said, improvements in the transmission grid _might_ be
| able to remedy that issue, honestly not sure.
| abruzzi wrote:
| This is very interesting to me. On of my (perhaps
| irrational) fears with solar and wind is how much land it
| potentially could take to supply power. I live in a very
| sparsely populated state because my greatest joy in life is
| being as far as possible from "civilization." I spend a lot
| of my free time traveling through craggy jeep trails to
| visit obscure locations (and photograph them.)
|
| If nuclear takes, hypothetically, 200 acres to build a
| power plant, containment, and all the supporting services
| necessary to generate enough power to feed a city, and
| solar takes 600 acres to generate an equal amount (and be
| much safer as well) I'm ok with that compromise, but I
| would have expected that the ratio would be much higher.
| Can you tell me where the ratios you have quoted come from?
| gameman144 wrote:
| Sure, it's at https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-
| full.pdf.
|
| I'm on the same page in terms of pro-solar, but I also
| think having nuclear ready to go is a nice fallback (e.g.
| if rare earth metals for solar and batteries become
| prohibitively expensive or embargoed).
| opo wrote:
| >...I would have expected that the ratio would be much
| higher.
|
| And you are right - the land needed to actually generate
| the power is much different than that ratio.
|
| The strata report is also counting the land use for
| transmission lines which is a big part of the land use
| for any power source and makes the land use for different
| power sources look much more similar than they are.
|
| From the report:
|
| >...Because nuclear energy accounted for 19.55 percent of
| the nation's electricity production in 2015,
| approximately 938,388 acres of land were used to transmit
| nuclear energy in 2015, or 10.312 acres per megawatt.
|
| So of the 12 acres they attribute per megawatt for
| nuclear, 10 acres of that is for transmission lines which
| are going to be needed no matter the source of power.
|
| The report gives an example later:
|
| >...The Arkansas Nuclear One Station requires only 1,100
| acres (1.7 square miles) to produce 1,800 megawatts
| operating at a 90 percent capacity factor. A study by
| Entergy Arkansas estimates that for modern wind and solar
| plants operating at the same capacity, they would require
| 108,000 acres (169 square miles) and 13,320 acres (21
| square miles) of land respectively to produce the same
| amount of power.
|
| https://www.strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-full.pdf
|
| As another data point, in a report on the Diablo Canyon
| nuclear power plant, PG&E reported:
|
| >...To build the equivalent of a 1,000-Mw nuclear plant,
| a solar park would require 11,000 acres of PV solar
| panels and a wind farm would need 50,000 acres of wind
| turbines. By contrast, Diablo Canyon is able to produce
| twice as much power (2300 Mw) in a footprint of
| approximately 545 acres.
|
| http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/hyman1/docs/
| may...
|
| (Land use isn't the only factor obviously, but it is a
| factor.)
| scotty79 wrote:
| You can overbuild and burn excess energy mining crypto. I
| think crypto will be what dictates future energy prices and
| investments.
| throwaw4ybio wrote:
| If you want nuclear to happen:
|
| 1) Disrupt the nuclear construction contracting process. Until
| fleet contractors like Bechtel et al are stopped from
| parasitizing the industry, it's going nowhete due to spiralling
| costs.
|
| 2) Lower the cost of reinforced concrete.
|
| 3) Close the fuel cycle.
|
| 3 is technically feasible, 2 isn't very sexy, but possible. 1
| seems insurmountable.
| paganel wrote:
| > Lower the cost of reinforced concrete.
|
| Is this doable? What's keeping it up? Is it anything
| artificial, like a business cartel or something similar? If
| not, lowering the price would practically mean subsidies.
| throwaw4ybio wrote:
| Cost of materials (e.g. sand) are going up, plus the
| "nuclear grade" upcharge. Add a 2x to 4x multiplier for
| "accidents" that require demolition and rework. :)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| No it is the steam turbine (& associated heat exchangers)
| that makes the economics of the lwr impossible. It is what
| made the economics of the old-school coal burning power
| plants impossible in most places compared to the methane
| fueled gas turbine not to mention wind and other renewables.
|
| The power density of a gas turbine is so much greater than
| that of a steam turbine that a closed-cycle gas turbine
| powerset for a sodium cooled fast reactor would fit in the
| employee break room of the turbine hall of an lwr. Running at
| higher temperatures with liquid metal, molten salt, or gas-
| cooled reactors poses many practical problems, but means
| building a machine that processes more energy with less mass
| thus drastically lower capital cost.
| DennisP wrote:
| Also, a big reason LWRs use so much reinforced concrete is
| that they have huge containment domes. The reason they're
| so big is that the water is pressurized at around 100
| atmospheres, and if there's a pipe break it'll flash into
| steam at a thousand times the volume. You need plenty of
| space for the steam to expand inside containment.
|
| A molten salt reactor is at atmospheric pressure and has
| nothing to cause a chemical explosion. You still need
| containment, but you don't need to contain a large empty
| space.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Yep.
|
| A supercritical CO2 turbine runs at 1000+ psi but if the
| pipes broke and the CO2 sprayed out into that salt, you
| might get an overpressure around 10 psi in a not-too-big
| confinement because the volume of working fluid is tiny.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You would not even run the CO2 plumbing into the
| containment building. There would be a secondary salt
| loop leaving that building.
| andromeduck wrote:
| By gas turbines do you mean scCO2 tech?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The only way it works is if the power consumer owns the
| entire lifecycle (construction, ongoing O&M, etc) (the US
| Navy, for example). There is absolutely no way any commercial
| power purchase agreement buyer is going to spec nuclear when
| they can get renewables backed by storage for pennies per kwh
| [1], both of which have install lead times measured in months
| (versus a decade for nuclear).
|
| Tesla committed to having the Hornsdale Power Reserve built
| in 100 days or it was free [2]. That is what nuclear is up
| against. Please don't argue base load; there is no need for
| base load, only diverse firm dispatchable generation assets
| [3], robust transmission, and demand response for non-
| essential industrial loads.
|
| [1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-plus-storage-
| poised-t...
|
| [2] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-
| environment/2017/11/28/167090...
|
| [3] https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-
| nothi...
| sir_bearington wrote:
| There isn't remotely enough storage available to make wind
| and solar feasible. To put this in perspective, the world
| consumes 60 TWh of electricity daily, about 2.5 TWh per
| hour. We have only a couple GWh of battery storage.
| Hydroelectric provides more, but that's harder to scale
| because you need the right geography.
|
| Once solar saturates daytime demand, provisioning further
| solar power doesn't contribute to decarbonization. This is
| why nuclear is really the only known path to
| decarbonization. Maybe we'll figure out scalable ways to
| provision hundreds of terawatt hours of storage, but we
| might be waiting a long time.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What isn't surprising, because up to now, grid storage
| was only profitable in very few niche cases, and for a
| very short time. Besides, there has been no government
| program to invest on those.
|
| So you are saying that there is some business that has
| always been certain to lose money, and had never had
| government help, and nobody ever invested on it. And you
| are using this fact to suggest that in the near future,
| when that business will become needed and profitable,
| nobody will invest on it either... what isn't a
| conclusion one can make.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://gspp.berkeley.edu/faculty-and-impact/news/recent-
| new... ("The US can reach 90 percent clean electricity by
| 2035, dependably and without increasing consumer bills")
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/europe-
| win... ("Europe has space for enough wind turbines to
| power the entire world, study finds")
|
| https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/ee2523dc632c9b0
| 1df... ("Australia is the sunniest country in the world
| and one of the windiest. Australia's potential for
| renewable energy generation is 500 times greater than
| current power generation capacity.")
|
| https://www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/why-africa-is-
| the-ne... ("Africa has an almost unlimited potential of
| solar capacity (10 TW), abundant hydro (350 GW), wind
| (110 GW), and geothermal energy sources (15 GW). The
| International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates
| that renewable energy capacity in Africa could reach 310
| GW by 2030; which would put the continent at the
| forefront of renewable energy generation globally.")
| sir_bearington wrote:
| Neither of these articles offers a detailed plan on how
| this storage will be provisioned. The second doesn't even
| mention storage at all, only that Europe has enough wind
| power to power the whole world. Sure, but that's not very
| useful if that power isn't delivered when you need it.
| andromeduck wrote:
| yeah and we'll have fusion in 10 years
| Hammershaft wrote:
| We have methane seeping through thawing permafrost today.
| We can't delay decarbonizing our energy mix for
| technologies we haven't even invented yet, let alone mass
| produced.
| andromeduck wrote:
| Yes that is the point, it's basic risk management.
| Betting the farm on future breakthroughs if you consider
| climate change to be an existential threat is being on
| fire and waiting for the fire department because you
| don't wan't to get your soiled jumping to a pond nearby.
|
| Nuclear is by far the best technology we have today so we
| should go with it until we have better options in our
| hand.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Cost effective fission and fusion are always 10 years
| away.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| That's the joke.
| andromeduck wrote:
| just like cost effective and environmentally advantageous
| grid scale batteries at the scales required to smooth day
| and week scale intermittency
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| EDIT: My comment was made before you edited your comment
| from "just like cost effective grid scale batteries" to
| what it is now.
|
| http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-
| facts...
|
| * In 2020, the U.S. had over 23.2 GW of capacity in
| energy storage compared to 1,100 GW of total installed
| generation capacity.
|
| * Globally, installed energy storage capacity totaled
| 173.6 GW.
|
| * 1,355 energy storage projects were operational globally
| in 2020, with 11 projects under construction. 40% of
| operational projects are located in the U.S.
|
| * California leads the U.S. in energy storage with 215
| operational projects (4.2 GW), followed by Hawaii, New
| York, and Texas.
|
| https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/broad-reach-
| pow...
|
| "Two of the planned 10 MW batteries are up and running
| already, with a total of 10 expected online by year's
| end, Vavrik said. That means that BRP and Key Capture are
| running neck and neck for operational capacity in Texas.
| The title of biggest battery operator in the state could
| change hands repeatedly based on the order in which those
| companies' projects wrap up.
|
| The broader story is that multiple experienced energy
| investors are converging on Texas simultaneously. The
| interconnection queue contains more than two dozen
| batteries that are each larger than 100 megawatts; some
| go up to 300, 400, even 500 megawatts."
| sir_bearington wrote:
| To put these in perspective, the US consumes 500 GWh of
| electricity every hour. Of the 23 GWh of existing
| storage, 20 GWh come in the form of hydroelectricity. 100
| MWh of storage only amounts to 1.4 seconds of electricity
| storage. We don't need megawatt hours worth of storage.
| We don't need gigawatt hours worth of storage. We need
| terawatt hours worth of storage. We're 6+ orders of
| magnitude off between the amount of storage necessary,
| and the storage we can feasibly build.
| Armisael16 wrote:
| Why would an continent-scale entity need days or weeks of
| power storage?
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Even hours runs hundreds of gigawatts.
|
| Spanning a continent only helps wind power and not solar
| power.
| Armisael16 wrote:
| One day of power storage would be 12 TWh (using the 500
| GW number in the post I responded to). That's ~2.7 orders
| of magnitude time larger than the cited current installed
| storage, which isn't even remotely 6+ orders of
| magnitude.
|
| Even if you entirely ignore that hydro component and only
| look at the 3 GWh number, that's still only ~3.6 orders
| of magnitude less than what we'd need for a whole day
| with no power generation whatsoever.
|
| Their numbers are talking about enough storage to
| maintain current usage for half a year.
|
| To your second comment: spanning a continent does
| actually help with solar, since the sun is up at
| different times on the two coasts - that buys you several
| extra hours of power each day. Also obstructive weather
| patterns tend to not reach that far.
| andromeduck wrote:
| 1. Weeklong disruptions are a thing and would occur in
| the event of month long plumes from forest fires, major
| volcanic activity or other long tail natural disasters.
|
| 2. Relying on such a tightly coupled national grid as
| required to deploy that storage is a recipe for disaster
| in the event of any war or unconventional conflict. A few
| shut down transmission lines or stations could cripple
| entire national economy.
|
| 3. Overbuilding completely ignores the very real human
| and environmental costs of doing so. Rare earths are not
| very green, forced labor as used by much of the solar
| industry not very humane. You are condemning millions
| today to hypothetical harm to thousands tomorrow. It's
| insanity.
| sir_bearington wrote:
| > That's ~2.7 orders of magnitude time larger than the
| cited current installed storage, which isn't even
| remotely 6+ orders of magnitude.
|
| But almost all (~95%) of the installed grid storage
| capacity is in hydroelectric storage. The above commenter
| is posting in terms of battery storage in the 100MWh
| range. We would indeed need 6 orders of magnitude larger
| than this even to just have 1 day's worth of storage.
| Hundred megawatt hours vs a dozen Terawatt hours.
|
| Also, the amount of storage could be substantially more
| than a day in a predominantly wind + solar grid. Part of
| variability is mostly daily, with the sun going up and
| down. But both solar and wind are also affected by
| weather. That requires much more substantial amounts of
| storage to get the grid through consistent days of
| reduced production. Estimates to provide a 100% carbon-
| free grid with renewables go as high as 3 weeks [1]
| Armisael16 wrote:
| I'm assuming that your citation is meant to refer to this
| paper: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/201
| 8/EE/C7EE0...
|
| It says that 3 weeks of power storage would be required
| in total absence of a serious overhaul in transmission
| capabilities. I had assumed that was a clear, if
| unspoken, assumption when I was discussion continent
| scale entities.
|
| Also, the poster you originally responded to was
| discussing the literal dozens of installations that
| singlehandedly meet the 100 MWh mark. HN guidelines
| require that I assume this was a simple failure of
| reading comprehension.
| stillyslalom wrote:
| For long-tail adverse events? It's easy to engineer power
| distribution systems for the average case, but unless we
| accept occasional brownouts as a cost of doing business,
| we need to build robustness into our generation fleet.
| Let's say we get another Krakatoa-scale eruption that
| reduces insolation (and thus drops solar & wind output
| while increasing heating demand). Some amount of firm
| generation (hydro, gas peaker, nuclear) is insurance
| against correlated failure in the global climate system.
| sir_bearington wrote:
| "Accept brownouts" really just means "keep using fossil
| fuels" people don't accept brownouts, they buy
| generators. At this point, it's better to just keep
| burning natural gas since combined cycle plants are
| 1.5-2x more efficient than diesel generators.
|
| Hydroelectric is geographically limited, you can just
| build dams where people need additional power.
|
| That leaves nuclear. And since nuclear costs just as much
| to run 100% of the time as it does to run part of the
| time it makes no sense to use it as a peaker. Just run it
| 24/7, and install less intermittent sources.
| andromeduck wrote:
| Yes you're missing the point. Most of that storage is
| hydro and there's a huge gulf between what's required to
| cover prolonged lulls in such as weeks as was observed
| recently in Texas and regularly elsewhere - and to peak
| shave, regulate frequency, and cover until CCGTs can spin
| up as we have now. Until we start getting to the multi-
| GWh scale it's a nonstarter.
|
| Again, you either think climate change is an existential
| problem in which case relying on magic pixiedust in the
| future is an absurd, or you don't. There's no two ways
| about it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I think we disagree about what a future energy grid looks
| like, and that's okay. I enjoy the conversation
| regardless!
| andromeduck wrote:
| 1. Renewables are only pennies per KWh because their
| intermittency, and the carbon costs backups required due to
| it, isn't being priced in.
|
| 2. Look at Texas's recent "hiccup" around Feb 15 and
| compare it to year before. Wind dropped to <10% reliable
| capacity and it was almost all picked up by gas/coal. The
| drop wind/solar production starts a week before the cold
| snap that disrupted everything else.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/
| e...
|
| https://www.wsj.com./articles/texas-spins-into-the-
| wind-1161...
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-political-making-of-a-
| texas...
| jlnthws wrote:
| What about Terrapower and Nuscale? They are building new type
| of reactors, much smaller and allegedly safer/cleaner.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Good developments, but we cannot wait for them. Even the
| coal grids are falling apart now, and building gas to
| replace them is not sane.
|
| On the other hand, once they're available, switching to
| them is perfectly fine, and the 50+ lifetime of LWRs exists
| for a reason. Maybe we will even have workable fusion by
| then.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Nuscale is targeting the end of the decade for its first
| project to come online. Terrapower does not have a licensed
| design yet, so it will be longer.
| gcheong wrote:
| Fine then provide the subsidies. We spend trillions on
| boondoggle military projects without concrete return to
| society. I think the livability of the planet is basic to
| having an economic system to point to as an excuse.
| imtringued wrote:
| That is absolutely the right idea, the question is, what
| boondoggles should we put our money into? If we carefully
| choose the right boondoggle we might even get something out
| of it. If you want to go down the path of nuclear power then
| you must consider a strategy that involves the construction
| of hundreds of new reactors, preferably continuously so that
| you don't run into the "build everything, then nothing and
| once you want to build again everyone has retired" problem.
|
| Keeping nuclear power safe is very easy, you just have to
| decommission old power plants that aren't up to modern
| standards. That's all it would have taken to prevent
| Chernobyl and Fukushima. So why on earth do we build nuclear
| power plants that are difficult to rebuild? Why did we
| believe that immature technology is going to be enough for
| the next 50 years? You need to build more, to replace the
| crappy old power plants, you need to build more, to expand
| the fleet, you need to build more, to update previously built
| plants to a new safety standard, you need to build more, just
| to maintain a workforce.
|
| It's done all the time with solar power and wind. Build it
| for 20+ years, if new tech comes out you just replace the old
| tech once it proves uneconomical.
|
| My personal favorite boondoggles are still housing, internet,
| electric grid and road maintenance. We really need to put
| pressure on the job market through fiscal stimulus. That
| pressure will force companies to wake up and actually do
| something productive.
| [deleted]
| Krasnol wrote:
| If the livability of the planet is important to you, you
| should give the subsidies to renewables: https://pubs.rsc.org
| /en/content/articlelanding/2009/ee/b8099...
| notJim wrote:
| To be honest, I think at this point a shotgun approach is
| the way to go. It seems overly risky to put all our eggs in
| any one basket.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| It's not an either/or though. We can subsidize both.
| Especially now that, in the US at least, we are not really
| fiscally constrained.
| Krasnol wrote:
| No we can't as the budget is not endless. So you invest
| in what makes the most sense and that's not nuclear.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-
| nuclearpower/nucle...
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22
| 146...
| imtringued wrote:
| It's not a bad idea to focus on renewables. But the
| budget is merely limited by full employment.
|
| Think of it this way. If unemployment/underemployment is
| high then it's like having random people sitting in a bar
| doing nothing. A government official comes to the bar and
| sees people doing nothing and tells then what to do.
| What's being lost by telling these people to do
| something? The biggest loss is that these people could
| have done something even better than what the government
| came up with, however they are in a bar doing nothing,
| clearly nobody needs them right now.
|
| The question is, does the nuclear industry actually
| generate jobs that would lower unemployment? Is the type
| of person that is qualified to work on a nuclear reactor
| unemployed? I am leaning toward no, I simply cannot
| imagine the highly vocal trump supporter base being
| filled with academics in hard sciences. If we are going
| to do a nuclear jobs program it might backfire because it
| fails to employ the right people.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| It's not "people doing something". To make power plants
| you need factories running. Produce steel, specialized
| metals, concrete, refine silica sand, produce
| electronics... You need mines for the base materials, and
| factories producing mining equipment. You need some rare
| earth metals, potentially. You need chemical plants too.
| And of course power and water input for the manufacturing
| sector.
|
| All of which is nontrivial amount of investment nobody
| does where there is unemployment, because it's cheaper to
| do it in China as the base and subcomponents are already
| there... (there's also unemployment)
|
| Trap of deindustrialization runs deep.
| gcheong wrote:
| I'm just not convinced that renewables are going to live up
| to their promise as a total solution sans nuclear. I think
| having some investment in nuclear is inevitable and I would
| rather build out excess capacity and be wrong and not need
| it than be right and have to play catch up.
| Krasnol wrote:
| We already have substantial investment in nuclear if we
| want or not. We still have to throw money at this
| radioactive pile of waste for decades and you still have
| to get rid of the old reactors which are still there.
|
| Renewables are getting better and cheaper fast and if you
| have you're not convinced by that, I see no reasonable
| argument for nuclear.
| imtringued wrote:
| It depends, economically speaking, renewables are superior.
| However, you need to convince people who don't believe in
| climate change and only see the downsides of the new tech
| that is being pushed.
| Krasnol wrote:
| AS the private sector is already convinced, I don't see
| much problems there. There is only the remaining
| resistance in old fossil and nuclear with a small and
| desperate astroturf campaign (http://www.tmia.com/old-
| website/News/AstroTurf.htm). The energy issue in the
| always outraged population which became so prominent in
| the recent years is a tiny problem compared to what
| really drives them forward. Just hand them out their own
| solar collectors with some edgy claims on it ;)
| killjoywashere wrote:
| It may be worth noting that the companies that control the
| military nuclear stuff also control the civilian nuclear
| stuff.
| gcheong wrote:
| Fair enough and we can have that discussion but at least I
| know what I'm getting (at least in part) when we build a
| nuclear plant.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| The best solution would be to provide a broad carbon price.
| That way subsidy would be applied to renewables, nuclear,
| insulating your house or things that haven't been invented
| yet.
| cbmuser wrote:
| Hey, another comment that doesn't understand the difference
| between system cost and levelized costs of electricity.
|
| Solar and wind are ONLY cheap if you ignore the costs for
| backup power plants and extra landlines.
|
| We have the highest electricity prices in Germany worldwide. I
| really wished people stopped claiming renewables are cheap,
| they are not.
|
| > https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/
| imtringued wrote:
| The spot market prices in Germany are ridiculously low. It's
| a problem with the compensation/tax structure.
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