[HN Gopher] White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to hel...
___________________________________________________________________
White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help meet climate
targets
Author : pseudolus
Score : 596 points
Date : 2021-05-05 13:14 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| downrightmike wrote:
| Really? Just spend the billions to build them directly and cut
| out the bloat.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| This should not happen without a long term plan for where are
| they are going to put the waste.
| molszanski wrote:
| Do you know how much waste in m^3 do we actually produce?
| opanitch wrote:
| new nuclear technologies have long answered this question. some
| of the new reactors even run on spent fuel from older reactors.
| Keep reading!
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The long-term "waste" is Plutonium. Half-life 24,000 years. We
| don't want to have to secure it for that long, but we already
| _have_ tons of it, so the answer is to permanently destroy it,
| because Plutonium is fissionable. It can be used as reactor
| fuel.
|
| So the answer for what to do with the waste is to build
| reactors that use it as fuel. That not only doesn't create more
| long-lived waste, it gives us a way to get rid of what we
| already have.
| quench wrote:
| I thought that was what fast breeder reactors did. They have
| only low grade waste. The disadvantage is that you don't get
| free plutonium to put in your nukes
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| There are some political ramifications to admitting that
| you use plutonium from civilian reactors to make nuclear
| weapons. It's possible that they're doing this without
| admitting it and that's the reason reactors that consume
| rather than produce plutonium are disfavored. But in that
| case you still don't have a "waste storage problem" -- you
| know what you're doing with the plutonium, you're just not
| admitting to it.
|
| But I don't think the scale adds up for that. We don't need
| this amount of plutonium to make weapons, even if that's
| what we're doing with some of it. So still destroy the rest
| of it.
| cbozeman wrote:
| You mean Yucca Mountain, that sits largely unused to this day?
| xroche wrote:
| Nuclear waste handling is a non-issue. The volume are totally
| manageable, and future generations of nuclear plants won't
| product much (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-
| neutron_reactor)
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| What is your long term plan for what to do with all of the
| carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere?
|
| Both are immense problems with immense dangers, but it seems to
| me that one is clearly easier to solve.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| so we didn't plan for the problem in the past, so we
| shouldn't bother this time? that's pure whataboutism and not
| helpful
| nharada wrote:
| The urgency is different. You don't earthquake-proof your
| house while the living room is on fire.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| An even more apt analogy might be: if your living room is
| on fire, you should dump water on it. You shouldn't let
| the fire rage because the water could damage the carpet.
| [deleted]
| moate wrote:
| "Repair an entire planet's atmosphere" vs "store a few
| hundred tons of radioactive material safely" are definitely
| very different levels of problems.
|
| Not to mention the possibility that spent fuel could be of
| use to future generations for _some_ kind of future science
| and it would all conveniently be in one place.
| EricE wrote:
| or if you burn today's "waste" in reactors that can easily
| do so, you not only don't have to securely store it while
| also getting carbon neutral energy that will displace
| existing fossil fuel derived sources.
|
| Nuclear is predictable which means it's perfect for base
| load generation. Something all the other "clean"
| technologies are not.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| Brief and speculative but very timely[1]. Displacement of carbon
| is critical, as well as permanent carbon economies that tax at
| 50-100 $/tCO2. Systemic and sub-systemic shock is one core.[2]
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-
| business/white-... [2]
| https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/9-9-20%20Re...
| lolsal wrote:
| When it comes to acting on climate change, we really need to stop
| thinking about 'money'.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| Brief and speculative but very timely[1]. Displacement of carbon
| is critical, as well as permanent carbon economies that tax at
| 50-100 $/tCO2. Systemic and sub-systemic shock is one core. [1]
| https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/white-...
| [2]
| https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/9-9-20%20Re...
| molszanski wrote:
| Totally support it.
|
| The doomsday clock is ticking and we don't have time to waste
| debating. We must buy time now
| rland wrote:
| Imho, if we want to move forward as a species into something like
| the "next level" of civilization, we need to pour trillions of
| dollars of effort into building a full stack of nuclear energy.
|
| University programs, technical schools, research labs, and a
| robust supply chain for plant construction and maintenance.
|
| The energy density of nuclear fuel would have convinced any
| higher rational society to do this decades ago. There is no
| contest, not with solar, not with coal or NG. Pound for pound
| (including all of the cladding, reactor vessels, and everything
| else), nuclear plants produce just _so much energy._
| suster wrote:
| I have seen this argument about energy density before, I still
| don't understand it. Why is the density of energy generation so
| important?
| rland wrote:
| The quantity of easily extractable energy available from
| nuclear fuel dwarfs anything else known. A single nuclear
| fuel pellet contains the same amount of energy as a ton of
| coal. 20 tons if all of the energy is extracted.
|
| How many tons of easily exploitable coal/ng/etc exist in the
| world? Nevermind easily exploitable: how much energy exists,
| period, in fossil deposits?
|
| It's dwarfed by nuclear fuel. 1 cm3 to 20 tons.
|
| Energy density also makes things easier. You can transport a
| year's worth of energy on one train. You can ship it to
| remote areas. To get a lot of energy out of the ground, you
| don't need a huge extraction process like fracking or strip
| mining.
| suster wrote:
| I'm not being obtuse - I still don't understand why this is
| important. Is 'ability to transport a lot of energy on a
| train' really key? Renewables have a completely different
| model for how they are distributed and how their supply is
| constrained.
| rland wrote:
| There are two "renewable" sources of power: solar (wind
| and hydro are there with solar, but their energy
| potential is smaller and their downsides larger) and
| nuclear*.
|
| Solar makes a lot of energy, but:
|
| - you need a lot of land to make energy
|
| - energy generation scales poorly with materials required
|
| - you lose efficiency because you have to transport the
| power from the optimal place to every other place
|
| By contrast, nuclear can be built anywhere regardless of
| climate (greatly reducing transmission loss), fuel is
| fairly widely distributed (i.e. every big political bloc
| has a good source of uranium), it provides continuous
| power, and material costs are low to build massive
| plants. And there is a _lot_ of energy stored in the
| world 's nuclear reserve. Way more energy than is stored
| in coal/ng/oil. Because of the energy density of nuclear
| fuel, if you add a little bit more material input, you
| get a lot more power. Not true with solar or any other
| source.
|
| You can't run an entire advanced economy on solar, or
| even majority on solar. By contrast, you can have a 100%
| zero emissions economy run entirely on nuclear. My main
| point would be that if we want to continue to grow
| technologically, energy production must be centered on
| nuclear, with enhancements to efficiency provided by
| solar energy. Energy is the ultimate constraint on human
| development.
|
| That's not what we have, though. Most people think that
| we can completely de-carbonize using solar energy which
| is false. Running an entire grid on batteries at night is
| a pipe dream -- the US grid has 3 seconds of energy
| storage _total_. By contrast, the technology for a
| completely de-carbonized modern economy exists _right
| now_ with nuclear.
|
| * I consider nuclear "renewable" because there's so much
| energy that in the short term, it may as well be.
| threwaway4392 wrote:
| Building a startup for on-demand nuclear plant submarines for
| coastal cities worldwide.
|
| Coastal mayors and governors have access dashboard to order
| nuclear submarines and pay by the hour. Submarine plant comes
| within a week, plugs itself to the local grid from the shore and
| electricity flows in. You may want to reserve an instance for a
| year or the submarine may move to a higher bidder municipality.
| Emergency cooling handled by construction even in worst case
| scenarios, no pumping necessary.
|
| Regulations are fine because the submarine plants are not built
| in your country. Nuclear waste moves out of the country with the
| submarine when submarine is done powering your local grid. A
| real-time marketplace lets cities and countries worldwide bid to
| host the waste for good money.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Cute idea, but nuclear submarines aren't that powerful. Output
| for ballistic submarine reactors are in the 150-250MW range.
|
| For reference, natural gas power plants can hit the GW range
| easily. Even those diesel backup generators you see outside of
| hospitals and such are about 1kW. You could throw a bunch of
| those on a tanker ship and probably provide more power output
| than a nuclear sub reactor.
| anon9384929 wrote:
| This is misleading. Gas turbines used for power plants
| usually put out 100-250mw. Most gas plants just stack 3-5 of
| them together in a common location - same thing could be done
| for small reactors.
| shadowfaxRodeo wrote:
| Nuclear power isn't safe.
|
| If it were, then massive amounts of money and time wouldn't go
| into trying to make it safe. Nuclear control rooms wouldn't be
| locked down like Fort Knox. And every major population center
| would have a nuclear power station nearby.
|
| There's this idea that the only thing stopping nuclear from
| saving the world is a bunch of hippies perpetuating a myth that
| it's not safe -- like nuclear energy is a genetically modified
| tomato.
|
| It's not that. It's actually just not safe -- or rather, the only
| way of making it safe is by having round the clock security, big
| brains monitoring it the whole time, and lots of money.
|
| So, given that climate change will bring with it more pandemics,
| civil unrest, and natural disasters, is it wise to assume that
| there will always be people around who know how to look after
| nuclear power stations? Or people who can stop terrorists who
| want to make dirty bombs from the waste?
|
| There's a reasonable argument to be made that it's a risk we
| should take to avoid worse distasters.
|
| But, given that there are cheaper alternatives, that don't take a
| decade to build, why don't we just not build nuclear?
|
| Let's generate non-controversial power, while massively reducing
| our usage.
| xroche wrote:
| It's the safest energy, even safer than solar or wind
|
| Source: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/06/update-of-death-
| per-te...
| shadowfaxRodeo wrote:
| Sure, but that's sort of absurdly missing the point.
|
| 0.04 deaths per TWH of nuclear vs 0.01 deaths per TWH of
| solar in 2012!
|
| Am I seriously supposed to ignore the fact that nuclear
| metldowns have the potential to kill millions of people --
| because they didn't in 2012?
|
| Edit: sorry that sounded mean.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Am I seriously supposed to ignore the fact that nuclear
| metldowns have the potential to kill millions of people --
| because they didn't in 2012?
|
| Can you elaborate on how meltdowns are supposed to be able
| to kill millions of people? We've already experienced the
| worst-case scenario in a nuclear catastrophe: Chernobyl.
|
| I'm not exaggerating when I say this was a worse-case
| scenario: A complete reactor containment failure with no
| secondary containment. Burning fuel rods were directly
| exposed to the atmosphere for days. In the end this
| directly killed 50 people. A few thousand were estimated to
| eventually die from cancer related to the incident. But to
| date only 60 people are known to have died due to radiation
| exposure from Chernobyl.
|
| So yeah I think you're several orders of magnitude off in
| your risk assessment of nuclear power.
| shadowfaxRodeo wrote:
| By giving a city radiation poisoning.
|
| > A few thousand were estimated to eventually die from
| cancer related to the incident.
|
| How many people could conceivably be downwind of a
| nuclear meltdown? I think it could be much much more than
| that.
|
| I can't imagine why we would not include the people who
| eventually die of cancer.
|
| That's just meltdowns. Given that you can also use
| nuclear material to create weapons, I'd also point you
| toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki as examples.
|
| The point I was making in my original comment, is that
| it's only safe when the systems are in place to keep it
| safe.
|
| Which is not something you can guarantee.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > > A few thousand were estimated to eventually die from
| cancer related to the incident.
|
| > How many people could conceivably be downwind of a
| nuclear meltdown? I think it could be much much more than
| that. I can't imagine why we would not include the people
| who eventually die of cancer.
|
| The several thousand figure _does_ include the people who
| are predicted to eventually die from cancer.
|
| Only 31 people died as a direct consequence of the
| meltdown.
| EricE wrote:
| Nuclear power is very safe - far safer in aggregate impacts to
| the environment than any other technology. And even more
| important, it's predictable - something most other "clean"
| energy sources are not.
|
| As for "cheaper" - citation needed. Especially for handling
| base load requirements in reliable and predictable ways. Most
| of the cost around nuclear power, especially in the United
| States, is from bloated, ineffectual policy decisions designed
| to artificially suppress it.
|
| I do agree we should be doing more with the existing "waste" -
| we should be burning it in better reactor designs instead of
| burying or storing it. Note I didn't say newer or modern
| designs - we have had the technology since the 50's to burn
| what we (ridiculously) term "waste" today but it wasn't pursued
| for numerous political and ill informed social issues. These
| designs also coast to a natural stop if their support systems
| are interrupted, negating the problems of active systems (like
| cooling) failing leading to problems in most of our currently
| deployed reactors.
| beders wrote:
| A almost 1% failure rate is not safe. Not by a long shot.
| Would you fly planes that had these failure rates?
|
| Also, it is the potential of catastrophic events that is the
| issue here.
|
| Look at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant on the central
| coast in California. This thing sits on a fault line. Without
| a retrofit, it wouldn't have survived a Fukushima event.
|
| If this thing would have blown up, half a million people
| would have been directly affected and massive cleanup costs.
|
| That is unacceptable risk and it is economically unjustified
| to add more risk by building additional plants.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| I think OP meant nuclear is only safe because of massive
| capital expenditure making it safe. A community of almost any
| size can run a bank of solar panels or wind turbines safely,
| but a nuclear planet needs an well-trained and expensive
| staff on standby to monitor and address any issues.
| shadowfaxRodeo wrote:
| This is exactly what I meant.
| shadowfaxRodeo wrote:
| > Nuclear power is very safe
|
| But is it only safe, because lots of time and energy goes
| into making it safe? If the systems keeping it safe no longer
| exist -- let's say all the security staff are killed by a
| pandemic, or there's a civil war, or society collapses, is it
| still safe?
|
| I can put a solar panel on my roof and not have to worry
| about it destroying my neighbourhood -- even in the event of
| a disaster.
|
| > cheaper
|
| It's well documented now that solar is the cheapest energy
| source.
|
| That may well be because it's had a lot of investment --
| maybe if people weren't so afraid of nuclear it would be the
| cheapest instead -- but given that it isn't and we're on the
| clock...
|
| Using old waste to power nuclear reactors sounds like a good
| idea -- but is it possible in our time frame? If yes, then
| I'd be on board, but I suspect the answer is that it that it
| isn't.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| What ever happened to those shed sized fission generators that
| were going to be safely running under or next to our houses? Did
| we forget about them?
| thinkcontext wrote:
| There are a variety of small modular reactors (SMRs) under
| development, not shed sized more like small town sized. NuScale
| is the furthest along, they are licensed by the NRC and have a
| project due to come online towards the end of the decade.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Thank you, I couldn't remember what they were called. There
| were stories of 1kW vSMRs which would be placed near a house:
|
| https://www.reutersevents.com/nuclear/mini-reactor-
| builders-...
|
| Seems like this idea didn't get traction.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| A broad carbon price that starts small but rises gradually over
| time would be better than passing a hodge podge of half measures.
| Virtually all economists say this would be more economically
| efficient (cheaper) and it doesn't create distortions by favoring
| politically popular projects over less sexy but more effective
| solutions.
| epistasis wrote:
| I used to think this, but this book convinced me otherwise:
|
| https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Making+Climate+Policy+Work-p-978...
|
| If we treat all industry as spherical cows, a common carbon
| price comes out as a great way to incentivize industrial
| change.
|
| However, once we get into the particulars of different
| industries and the varying levels of difficulty they have in
| decarbonizing, and the very different levels of lobbying power
| they have to influence that price, and the difficult of
| enforcement across different sectors, a common shared policy
| across all sectors starts to be far less efficient than
| tailoring the solution to each industry.
|
| For example, steel is pure commodity, very difficult to eat any
| cost from stranded assets, and has far less ability to call up
| capital to solve the problem than, say, natural gas. So the
| price will have hugely different consequences for steel than
| natural gas production, and there are different tailored
| industrial policies that will make the transition happen much
| more time- and cost-efficiently.
| NumberWangMan wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand. Wouldn't that mean that steel
| producers just end up passing on more of the cost to
| consumers in the form of higher prices, resulting in reduced
| steel consumption? It sounds like a tax would work fine.
|
| By the way, I'm working on the assumption of a carbon price
| applied on fossil fuels at the source, such as the Energy
| Innovation Act would include.
| asdff wrote:
| Consumption would only be reduced for industries that have
| a viable alternative. Maybe you can replace steel for some
| applications, but not all, and for those the costs will be
| passed on to the consumer who will bear this tax and will
| have no alternative on the market.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I think that's the point of the carbon tax.
|
| That customers will feel price pressure from their most-
| carbon-emitting activities and commodities is precisely
| the point. This will encourage finding alternatives. No
| demand is entirely inelastic.
| asdff wrote:
| How long it takes for the market to produce viable
| alternatives is an open question.
| dahfizz wrote:
| The argument isn't that this wouldn't work, its that this
| would be sub-optimal.
|
| Squeezing extra tax out of poor people who have literally
| no alternative is not going to be a popular plan.
| Allowing for a hint of nuance in your public policy would
| incentivize switching to alternatives where possible,
| while also incentivizing the development and adoption of
| alternatives where they don't currently exist.
| NumberWangMan wrote:
| People have thought of this--a popular kind of proposal
| is to return all the tax money as a dividend to everyone
| evenly, to ease the financial burden.
|
| I think a carbon tax with dividend actually fits the
| criteria you are describing pretty well.
| dTal wrote:
| Wouldn't this have the perverse incentive of poor people
| _wanting_ large emitters to keep emitting, because it
| directly puts food on their table?
| NumberWangMan wrote:
| In a sense yes, but I wouldn't call that an incentive,
| any more than I have an "incentive" for Chipotle to give
| me free burritos. I'm not the one making the decision
| there. The people who are doing the polluting have the
| right incentive, and that's what matters.
|
| If the amount of the tax were fixed, the dividend would
| decrease over time, but the tax gradually increases as we
| get better and better at doing things without emitting
| greenhouse gases. The eventual target being net zero
| carbon. Based on the tax level in the Energy Innovation
| Act as an example, this is predicted around 2050.
| cwkoss wrote:
| > Allowing for a hint of nuance in your public policy
|
| I am highly skeptical that is it possible for American
| legislation's 'nuance' to tilt a simple tax law in any
| direction but towards enriching the rich and powerful.
|
| I feel like carve outs would be great for lobbyists and
| the politicians they pay patronage to, but it would
| destroy the effectiveness of the carbon tax: the
| industries with enough political power would negotiate
| exemptions because "there are no economically feasible
| alternatives" but making carbon-expensive activity
| economically infeasible is the core purpose or the carbon
| tax.
|
| Exempting any industry in particular is just corruption.
| dahfizz wrote:
| I absolutely agree. I have no faith that the government
| would do anything other than half measures at best. I
| consider policy discussions like this totally
| theoretical/intellectual
| angry_octet wrote:
| But isn't it the point to make, e.g., steel and concrete
| construction include external costs? Vs, e.g. wood? Or
| renovating buildings instead of tearing down and
| rebuilding?
|
| You could also have tax paid off over time. E.g. a
| concrete building that lasts 60 years, vs a stick build
| that lasts 20. Bricks are frequently recycled, >100 year
| lifetime.
|
| I'm open to hearing counter-examples, i.e., where there
| is an external cost to not manufacturing a high CO2 cost
| product. The examples I've seen so far are really
| arguments about competition with BRICS economies, and
| their bizarre exemption from controls.
| jsharf wrote:
| Yes, but maybe steel is more essential to society than
| burning natural gas. But natural gas companies make more
| margin so they can afford the carbon credits, meanwhile
| steel has tighter margins so it gets passed to the
| consumer. This means it might disproportionately limit the
| consumption of things based on how much money they make.
| This is all fine until construction becomes more expensive
| because you can't easily get the steel you need for
| buildings (what if you were trying to build a clean energy
| power plant and. Is it's too expensive?). Some things are
| essential and need protection from the free market (ex,
| hospitals have diesel backup generators. Those would become
| more expensive). You could add a government subsidy for
| steel, but now you're stacking laws on top of each other
| and playing centrally organized government. Which doesn't
| work well.
|
| The downside to having separate laws per industry is that
| you'll get insane workarounds (see import tariff law).
| Carbon is carbon -- so workarounds are easy. For example if
| natural gas is taxed higher than steel, you'll have natural
| gas companies producing just enough steel to be qualified
| as steel production companies so that they get the lower
| rate. Or something like that.
|
| Choosing policy is tremendously difficult. We could
| deliberate all day. despite what I've said, a carbon tax is
| better than doing nothing, and we would be wise to start
| creating/increasing carbon taxes already.
| suster wrote:
| If a) steel is more essential to society than burning
| natural gas and b) steel production is carbon-intensive,
| then an across-the-board carbon tax has two effects.
|
| 1. In the short term it makes steel more expensive. But
| because steel is essential, we still use it, it just
| costs a little more. If you're building a clean energy
| power plant, or making a generator for a hospital, some
| of the tax revenues could go to you, to make those things
| still affordable.
|
| 2. In the longer term, there are now huge financial
| incentives to either reduce the carbon consumption of
| steel production, or to replace steel with something
| which uses less carbon. Which is what you want.
| YPCrumble wrote:
| You claim that "the price will have hugely different
| consequences for steel than natural gas production" as if
| that's a problem so big that we should agree with you that a
| carbon tax is not a great solution. Why is that so bad -
| isn't raising the price of steel exactly what a carbon tax
| should do?
| dmlerner wrote:
| I think the idea is that the steel/gas price changes would
| be disproportionate to their real carbon uses.
| ahmedalsudani wrote:
| How would that happen?
|
| If the price is set on carbon, I'd expect it to be
| proportionate.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Here's the thing. Nobody wants to admit that solving climate
| change will involve reducing the standard of living of a lot
| of people. Some things will be more expensive, and people
| will consume less. If you think about it, without massive
| technological innovation, how could it be any other way?
| epistasis wrote:
| They don't want to admit it because it's not clear it's
| true. Except perhaps for cars, because we need to
| drastically reduce vehicle miles travelled as we can't swap
| out our fleet fast enough and transportation miles are the
| biggest, hardest to solve sector of US emissions.
| Personally, if regulations allowed more living without
| cars, I think we would all have massively higher quality of
| life. The suburban lifestyle of living on a tiny island
| that can only be left with a car has drastically reduced
| most people's health, left them isolated, and has effects
| like making it so kids no longer play in streets. Allowing
| more people to live in neighborhoods where their daily
| errands and school drop offs could be met by short walking
| or biking trips would drastically improve their quality of
| life, instead of piling the family into the SUV and
| spending hours in traffic everyday.
|
| For the rest of the word, we are having that massive
| technological innovation right now that will increase
| quality of life globally. For electrifying the developing
| world, micro grids with renewables and storage will be
| immensely cheaper than building our massive transmission
| grids and large centralized production.
|
| Industrial sectors have the least clear path to
| decarbonizations, as well as sea-freight and flight, but if
| we can solve electricity and transportation in the next
| decade we have a few years so solve these far smaller
| sources of emissions.
|
| There is a lot of reason to be worried, but there's also a
| ton of reasons to be hopeful. GDP is already decoupling
| from emissions, and I think as we decouple it further, we
| will find a higher quality of life for the vast majority of
| people, both in developed or developing nations.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| It's not going to be a dystopia, and yes, urban
| design/zoning in the US is absolutely terrible. I hate
| it. I could rant about it for hours.
|
| But if we have to drastically reduce ground freight and
| shipping emissions to reduce co2 emissions enough, which
| we do, goods will be more expensive. And it's also not
| free to switch private cars to EVs. If goods in general
| are more expensive, then peoples' money goes less far.
|
| To be clear, I am in favor of this. Maybe you can make
| the very wealthy eat the cost, but somebody has to pay
| for it, and I can't see how it doesn't result in lower
| _mean_ quality of life.
| NickM wrote:
| _Here 's the thing. Nobody wants to admit that solving
| climate change will involve reducing the standard of living
| of a lot of people._
|
| I don't think that's necessarily true. It will be expensive
| to switch to renewables, certainly, but the ongoing
| externalities and subsidies for fossil fuels are _already_
| extremely expensive to society. Even if you completely
| ignore climate change, the costs in terms of healthcare and
| QALYs just due to air pollution alone are tremendous.
|
| We have the technology we need to solve climate change
| already, the problem is not that people aren't willing to
| make the necessary sacrifices, the problem is that it's
| hard to get past societal inertia and overcome entrenched
| special interests.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I'll have to read the book because I thought this was
| actually the strength of the method not a weakness - that
| difficulty to decarbonize means it'll either push
| alternatives that are easier to into the market or allow the
| market to pay the cost to do the difficult changes in the
| most efficient way it can find.
| v77 wrote:
| This is the reality of carbon taxes as implemented in some
| Western European countries and Canada. A generic tax that
| applies to a limited set of activities then a sector-by-
| sector specific plan for most large industries depending on a
| lot of factors.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I suppose I should really read the book. But I am suspicious.
| To me having a carbon tax emphatically does _not_ mean
| embracing some "capitalism solves all problems" ideology.
| Direct intervention is still needed, but direct intervention
| works best in conjunction with carbon taxes. You don't want
| the market trying to "route around" your direct intervention
| because there is no incentive to play ball.
|
| See https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/07/RI... for more of that.
|
| If anything, it's actually this sort of nuclear subsidy that
| could be too hands off --- if it's like a 1990s throw money
| at ISPs for fibre with no strings attached tpye thing. I
| would say Carbon tax and nationalize the nukes.
| whazor wrote:
| I think we also need trade agreements to consider carbon tax,
| otherwise you would have unfair competition.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| A carbon border price was in Biden's campaign platform and
| it would be one of the best political moves he could make.
| US industry has a big advantage in carbon intensity over
| China, so a price would advantage domestic industry and at
| the same time put pressure on China to clean up faster.
| Both of these are big political problems for Biden.
| angry_octet wrote:
| The current systmt is really distorted. Coal from
| Germany/Australia/US is taxed differently to coal from
| China/Indonesia. Products made from brown coal energy in
| China are untaxed. Chinese steel production using coal from
| Australia results in Australia having a carbon debt, but
| not China. If a ship is made with Chinese steel, no tax.
| Made with American/EU steel? Taxes.
|
| If a ship burns the filthiest high sulphur bunker oil then
| it pays no more tax than a sail boat.
|
| We can't fix climate change with exceptions for everyone.
| specialist wrote:
| Book criticizes failed market based efforts. (Duh.) Carbon
| pricing is a tax, not a market solution. (Right?) Further,
| most recently, carbon pricing policy proposals have been
| decoupling price from impacts, in recognition that good
| policy accommodates good politics.
|
| So it seems to me the authors of carbon pricing proposals
| agree with this book, and pivoted accordingly.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Depends on how it works. "Offsets" for example basically allow
| companies to pay other companies to not cut down trees that it
| wouldn't cut down anyway. A direct tax on carbon emissions
| would avoid that sort of thing.
| nostromo wrote:
| The only way to make this work is to put the carbon tax into a
| fund that the US government has no access to, and to empty the
| fund every year, writing each American a check.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Agreed. This is the approach favored by Janet Yellen, Biden's
| Treasury Sec and everyone from the NRDC to Exxon.
|
| https://clcouncil.org/
| kstrauser wrote:
| So, tax cuts. Got it.
| nostromo wrote:
| Read the comment again, it's not a tax cut.
|
| It's a revenue neutral tax _increase_ on carbon, returned
| to the people who are now paying more for just about
| everything.
|
| Poor people who don't use much carbon will net benefit. The
| rich who are now paying a bit more to re-fuel their private
| jets will pay a bit more.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's literally a tax cut, but appropriately targeted at
| the not-rich this time.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I don't know if that's better or worse, but my intuition is
| that a sweeping, solve-all solution will take forever to get
| through and measures like this are easier to push through
| faster. In software terms, it's more akin to a gradual refactor
| than a rewrite.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Unfortunately, at least in the US, Congress doesn't appear to
| work that way. If they pass something, it is assumed to solve
| the problem, and they won't want to touch it again for at
| least a decade.
| maxekman wrote:
| EU Emissions Trading System
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Exactly. Put the costs where they really are.
|
| I would make a bit of of a change, though--make the carbon tax
| refundable. Lets say you tax CO2 emissions at $100/ton. You
| then pay $100/ton to anybody who effectively sequesters CO2.
|
| In fact, I would pretty much scrap the emissions rules and
| replace them with taxes of this sort. There should be no
| acceptable level followed by fines, there should be a cost from
| the first gram.
| travisporter wrote:
| Is this different from the "trade" of cap and trade?
| sagarm wrote:
| Yes, because in cap and trade the amount of pollution is
| decided by policy and price by the market.
|
| In this fine-based policy, the price is set by policy and
| quantity by the market.
| p_j_w wrote:
| Not sure if a price that "starts small" is enough at this
| point. It may have been 15 years ago, but it seems like now it
| won't be enough to stave off a massive disaster. If there's
| only political will to start small, then obviously we should do
| that. It seems like the can kicking of the past has come to
| bite us in the ass, though, and these sorts of actions will not
| do it.
| michael1999 wrote:
| A small price now, combined with projections that it will
| rise substantially over time will still affect the
| calculations of any major capital purchase. Of course,
| convincing people the price will rise is made difficult by
| the lack of seriousness to date.
| epistasis wrote:
| Given the uncertainty of climate effects, we should actually
| be starting very very very high, and then bringing it down as
| we have more certainty about the worst case effects. I need
| to find that paper from financial analysts that say that
| simpler, more politically achievable schemes with low
| starting prices completely mismodel the financial risk...
| emodendroket wrote:
| Unless you're advocating some kind of fundamental change in
| our systems of economy and government it seems kind of
| pointless to point out how a plan which has no hope of
| making it through might be better.
| epistasis wrote:
| Any sort of carbon tax has no hope at all in the US! But
| pointing out that the optimal form is also the least
| politically acceptable is, IMHO, important for choosing
| how we address climate change and what sort of policies
| we choose.
|
| Because "no hope" in politics can become "certain
| outcome" with only a few switches in influencers. The US
| is subject to minority veto in all of its national
| legislation, so if the Koch influence were to cease, or
| if there was a (shocking) change of heart from that huge
| influence on the minority political power that is the
| roadblock to a carbon tax, that could all change.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Gasoline should be at least $25/gallon by now. So putting
| that aside, large-scale investment in nuclear seems to be the
| best option.
| sjburt wrote:
| With a $5/gallon tax, you could pay $600/ton for direct air
| capture of carbon. This is the current price for small test
| installations. There are claims that this could decrease to
| as little as $40/ton with scale.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Any literature on this? I've not really followed the idea
| of carbon capture (other than planting forests and
| stuff).
| kansface wrote:
| I've been reading "Seeing Like a State", and this reminds me of
| the sort of legibility problems that States historically had
| around taxation. The premise of the book is that the State
| reorganizes society to make it easier to administer often times
| to the detriment of society itself. For instance, a medieval
| European kingdom wants to tax grain - there are no markets
| which determine the price of grain. There is no universal
| measurement, there is no universal language. Instead, each
| village has its own tradition founded upon hundreds of years of
| bitter dispute between the local lord, the peasants, and the
| local clergy. A peasant is given some number of baskets each
| year and is told to fill them up. The peasant and the lord
| don't trust each other. The peasant suspects baskets are bigger
| this year and the lord suspects the peasant will scheme to
| avoid filling them. So, everything is codified - the basket is
| filled from a certain height (eg shoulder) with a grain with a
| certain amount of wetness to a certain level - either mounded,
| semi-mounded, potentially leveled off with a specific tool,
| etc... Any changes to the system stand to create a revolt.
| Also, no one has a surname, detailed maps for productivity of
| fields don't really exist, and lets say 90% of males in England
| have 1 of 6 names. Peasants don't own anything anyway, but they
| have complex rules around the communal usage of land (even
| though that's illegal). Kings are forced to rely on the local
| knowledge of lesser lords as middlemen who can navigate the
| local systems without causing revolts; they in turn refuse to
| do anything to fix a system that benefits them greatly.
|
| Anyway, that's about what I see happening if you try to tax
| carbon. There is no legibility into what causes pollution from
| the outside - you can't look at the good itself, you must know
| the history of all inputs down to the raw goods and then some!
| If you just tax the creation of carbon domestically, you will
| encourage offshoring everything that necessarily pollutes to
| places that will pollute way more. If you just tax big players,
| businesses will split off divisions to be under the limit. If
| you just tax certain industries, you will send them offshore
| (apart from air travel). The righter solution would be to
| implement a carbon VAT, so that you align the incentives of
| producers and consumers. Now, you are in the business of taxing
| grain from peasants! How much pollution goes into foreign
| steel? Who knows? Are their carbon offsets real? Do we just put
| a tariff on foreign steel which feels sorta right? That will
| violate trade deals and will doubtlessly punish the honest
| players the most, once again encouraging more pollution.
| pyrale wrote:
| > A broad carbon price that starts small but rises gradually
|
| That would have been the plan 30 years ago.
|
| Right now, we can either turn it up to 11 when the scheme
| starts, or face horrible consequences.
| stupendousyappi wrote:
| Noah Smith has an article on Substack arguing that economists
| have largely failed to produce useful research on climate
| change, in part because of a preoccupation with carbon taxes to
| the exclusion of other research topics. The article is
| subscription only (edit: not true, see reply below), but his
| four big points are these:
|
| * First, academic economists have basically ignored the topic.
| A survey of top economics journals found that, out of 77,000
| total articles published, only 57 (0.074%) were about climate
| change.
|
| * Many of the most cited papers have turned out to be crap,
| with basic calculation and data coding errors the authors have
| had to publish corrections for. Smith argues that this is
| partly because economists don't collaborate with other
| researchers much, especially natural sciences like climate
| change.
|
| * The most important model for integrating climate change into
| macroeconomic analysis is the DICE model created by Richard
| Nordhaus. But the DICE model has big problems, the most
| important of which is that, due to discounting of future
| economic effects, it basically ignores the welfare of future
| generations. The DICE model also assumes that preventing
| climate change will be very expensive, and hasn't adjusted for
| recent technology advances on that front.
|
| * Last, economists have been obsessed with carbon taxes, and
| haven't dealt with how politically unpopular they are,
| especially in international negotiations. This is, IMO, similar
| to how economists love to promote free trade, saying that the
| losers can be compensated via money from the overall economic
| gains, leaving everyone better off, and ignoring that this
| never, ever actually happens.
|
| I'm in the camp that thinks that economists haven't earned a
| ton of credibility on the specific topic of climate change. Our
| best shot, IMO, is massive R&D efforts and CO2-removal
| geoengineering (especially wave-powered olivine weathering, as
| promoted by Project Vesta). Accompanied by crippling taxes on
| heavy emissions industries, but I think people will have an
| easier time accepting those if it's clear that governments are
| pursuing alternatives to taxes too.
| bun_at_work wrote:
| This sounds like a good article, I'll check it out. However,
| the claim that free trade doesn't lead to gains for losers in
| the economic sense is inaccurate. The poorest people
| worldwide have seen massive improvements to quality of life,
| even if things aren't perfect. Looking just at historical
| infant mortality rates, food/water access, education, and
| other broad metrics indicates life has been massively
| improving over the last century, worldwide. It's naive to
| think that free trade hasn't contributed to that.
|
| As a quick example, free trade has allowed more developed
| nations (like the US) to leverage the labor markets in less
| developed nations, like China. As a result, money has flowed
| into those labor markets and increased the quality of life in
| those areas.
|
| To be clear, those labor markets aren't perfect, and free
| trade as a universal good is a ridiculous idea. My point is
| just that free trade has led to a lot of good the world over
| and the referenced statement is over simplifying something
| that is very complicated.
| angry_octet wrote:
| I agree with your view on economists, but CCAS is a clown
| show that politicians use to delay taking real action.
| Biological and geoengineering strategies have promise but it
| will take decades of research, and we need to act now.
|
| As far as convincing people, the way Canada gives taxpayers a
| big carbon tax refund is a good way to sell it. People love
| getting a summer bonus, and it still pushes people towards
| better solutions.
| notJim wrote:
| That post isn't subscription only:
| https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-has-climate-
| economics-...
| ABCLAW wrote:
| Thank you for this link. This was a very worthwhile read.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Glad to see it too.
|
| I wish there was some discussion of carbon tax _and
| dividend_ though. Like I absolutely agree that the orthodox
| "supply constraints and everything is a tradeoff"
| macroeconomics is nuts, and climate resilience doesn't need
| to suck, but we also can't just have electric-car are way
| there.
|
| We simply need to make driving suck more, separate from
| making taking the train suck less, and Carbon tax +
| dividend is a great way to do that fairly and with minimal
| pain.
| notJim wrote:
| I'm not convinced a carbon tax is politically viable. For some
| reason, they are incredibly unpopular. In very blue Washington
| state, they've made several attempts to pass one, and each has
| failed. The most recent was basically the cadillac of carbon
| taxes, they threw in everything you can throw in to address
| concerns. It still failed.
| abraae wrote:
| A carbon tax would be more popular at if it was redistributed
| to the citizenry.
|
| Carbon tax is different from other taxes as the primary
| purpose is not to raise money for govt, it's to reduce carbon
| producing activity.
|
| So take all the proceeds and distribute directly to every
| citizen to use as they want - e.g to buy petrol if that's
| their choice.
|
| When people see those checks arriving they'll be more
| positive.
| bluGill wrote:
| What is the point? My gas bill goes up, only partially paid
| for by this check that I'm getting. A few who don't buy gas
| see some extra cash, but most people don't see any option
| to not drive so they lose.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| The biggest changes will be made by businesses since they
| are much more price sensitive than individuals. A lot of
| things will happen that you don't even notice
|
| Say you are choosing between 2 otherwise identical
| apartments that include utilities in rent. One building
| is more energy efficient than the other thus can charge
| less in rent and still make as much profit. Even though
| you are getting a dividend check you will still choose
| the lower priced apartment (if you are a rational
| economic actor).
|
| Multiply this scenario across the billions of economic
| decisions across the economy and it adds up quickly.
|
| In your specific scenario, since the initial tax is low a
| few pennies in added cost won't really matter, gas prices
| go up and down already. But you know that the price will
| continue to rise, so if you are a rational economic
| actor, the next time you buy a car you will take that
| into account. And by the time you need a new car the
| price of EVs may have declined enough to be cheaper than
| a new gas car, as they are predicted to be by the middle
| of the decade (fuel and maintenance are already
| significantly cheaper).
| colinmhayes wrote:
| You get the same refund whether you buy more gas or not.
| The point is it incentivizes people to use less carbon.
| bluGill wrote:
| My point is most people don't see their gas consumption
| as something they can change. There are a few who will,
| and eventually more fuel efficient cars become popular,
| but for the most part people see gasoline as something
| you need to buy to live life. So if the price goes up
| other things get cut first. In other words gasoline is
| not very elastic, which we already know. When people
| start to see that carbon tax is why they can't live, they
| will vote to kill it.
|
| In the US we are not in a situation where drivers are a
| small enough minority that they can be ignored.
| notJim wrote:
| > A carbon tax would be more popular at if it was
| redistributed to the citizenry.
|
| The Washington state plan included this redistribution.
| People didn't go for it.
| roamerz wrote:
| I'd prefer to see continuing or additional tax credits for solar
| and battery storage directly to the consumer. This would dovetail
| nicely with an infrastructure plan by making the incentives
| higher for panels made in the U.S.A. Keeping the incentives
| directly to the consumer would take a good deal of the chances of
| corruption and back room deals out of the equation I.E. the
| Solyndra scandal.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| Why not both?
| xwdv wrote:
| Someone once told me don't make the perfect be the enemy of the
| good.
| tharne wrote:
| We're not talking about the perfect vs. the good here. We're
| talking about a power source (nuclear) that can result in
| virtually unlimited harm to human life in cases of serious
| failure vs. power sources that, while not as well-developed,
| are much lower-risk long-term.
| xwdv wrote:
| Ah yes, unlimited harm to human life in cases of failure,
| versus the unlimited harm to human life and planet earth
| that comes guaranteed everyday with the use of coal and
| gas.
| tharne wrote:
| Don't put up a straw man. Folks who question the safety
| of nuclear are not advocating for coal and gas, they're
| advocating for increased investment in myriad other clean
| energy sources. Suggesting that anyone who questions
| nuclear is advocating for coal and gas is a bad faith
| argument.
| FredPret wrote:
| There are no other clean technologies that can deliver
| power at scale on their own. Solar and wind and hydro
| takes up immense amounts of what should be undisturbed
| natural environment. Solar and wind needs storage, in the
| form of hydro or batteries.
|
| Nuclear is a proven, safe tech that pumps out steady,
| squeaky-clean energy. People imagine that it's dangerous
| because of high-profile accidents but don't see the daily
| small catastrophes caused by every other tech.
|
| Nuclear wins, hands down. It's just such a no-brainer.
| It's like we're back in the days of Edison and Tesla and
| AC vs DC.
| asd4232 wrote:
| Nuclear is still better than coal and gas. At this rate we
| will never limit temperature below 2.1C pre-industrial, so
| anything that gets helps getting rid of fossil fuels ASAP
| is a good deal.
|
| Also, even worst-case scenario like Chernobyl ultimately
| wasn't that bad. Several natural disasters in the 2000's
| have killed way more than it did.
| tharne wrote:
| > Also, even worst-case scenario like Chernobyl
| ultimately wasn't that bad.
|
| The problem with statements like this is that we don't
| actually know what a worst case scenario truly looks
| like. The day before Chernobyl, the worst-cast scenario,
| by definition, not as bad as Chernobyl. Similarly, the
| engineers who built Fukishima were aware of tsunamis and
| earthquakes and built the plant to withstand what was
| considered the worst case scenario at the time. Then an
| even worse case scenario happened.
| adrianN wrote:
| It's fairly simple to find an upper bound for the damage
| a nuclear incident can cause. Take all the radioactive
| material in the reactor and put it in the most dangerous
| location, like the air or an underground aquifer. I don't
| understand why you think that the worst case scenario
| somehow got worse after Chernobyl.
| roamerz wrote:
| Wasn't that bad. Wow. Maybe in a Excel spreadsheet kind
| of way it wasn't that bad but what a horrific experience
| for those involved - humans, animals and the environment.
| tharne wrote:
| 100%. We should be promoting energy sources that don't have
| catastrophic outcomes when somebody inevitably makes a serious
| operational error.
| axoltl wrote:
| We have come a long way since the RBMK reactors in use at
| Chernobyl. Generation III reactors are significantly safer
| than the older nuclear reactors. They are now passively safe,
| in that they shut themselves down without operator
| intervention.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
| rangoon626 wrote:
| You are correct. And there's other good research going on
| too, but people like this won't hear it.
| r00fus wrote:
| My major beef with nuclear is the water impact [1], not
| waste fuel - latter of which we have good solutions to. Not
| to mention exclusion zones.
|
| If all Nuclear had desalination, it still wouldn't offset
| it's waste heat capture problem which ruins downstream
| ecologies.
|
| [1] https://monarchpartnership.co.uk/nuclear-power-water-
| consump...
| rangoon626 wrote:
| Which ones are those? As far as I can see, ALL "clean energy"
| has some trade offs.
|
| Mining lithium is a horrible, polluting process that wastes
| tons of fresh water. One thing to put small quantities into
| phones and computers. Another to suggest that they should be
| used for all cars (unless the end goal is to have only the
| super rich driving cars).
|
| Solar panels involve mining coal (so much more moving away
| from the coal economy) and quartz, and will pile up as toxic
| junk after 10 years or so.
|
| Wind turbines can't be repurposed after their useful and
| short (comparatively) life and will pile up as junk.
|
| It's not even a question of "don't have catastrophic
| outcomes", it's a question of a slow-moving guaranteed
| catastrophic outcome, or the possibility of a fast
| catastrophic outcome.
| volkl48 wrote:
| > Solar panels involve mining coal (so much more moving
| away from the coal economy)
|
| I can't think of any use for coal in production of a solar
| panel, so is your argument here that manufacturing anything
| uses electricity and therefore coal?
|
| That doesn't seem like a good argument. Especially given
| that a nuclear plant tends to involve a huge quantity of
| concrete (which gives off major amounts of greenhouse gases
| and requires mining as well).
|
| > will pile up as toxic junk after 10 years or so.
|
| The lifespan of a commercial panel is 25-30+ years (most
| look to be warrantied to 25)
|
| Failure rates appear to be very low, per NREL:
| https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2017/failures-pv-panels-
| de...
|
| And in reality, many will continue producing power longer
| than that, just at a lower rate than their original
| nameplate capacity. I expect most of those solar farms will
| wind up in service for many decades.
|
| Claiming that their lifespan is 10 years is something I
| feel needs some sort of supporting evidence.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| The issue with solar is that there are a lot more deaths for
| a given amount of energy than for nuclear. Yes, they're
| spread out so it's less dramatic, but overall nuclear is
| safer and also produces very useful medical isotopes.
|
| What's really missing for nuclear is economics of scale. If
| we could just organize a repeatable build model so many
| operational challenges would be solved.
|
| That said, I'll take anything. Wind, solar, batteries, tidal,
| nuclear. They're all far, far better than coal or oil from a
| public health and climate change standpoint. It's such a
| shame so much was wasted on the Iraq War, since the entire
| USA could have been powered by green energy with half what
| was spent.
| kazinator wrote:
| This is some cockamamie figure that is based on rooftop
| solar panel installers having accidents and falling down.
|
| A fall from a rooftop while installing a solar panel is
| _preventable_ ; it is not a necessary consequence of solar
| energy. That worker didn't have to die for the sake of two
| terawatts; he or she could have used safety equipment and
| common sense.
|
| If we are counting deaths that way per amount of energy, we
| must count electrocutions among the energy user base too,
| not only installation and production side deaths.
|
| If there are health risks and accidents working in a solar
| panel factory, that ought to be counted.
|
| Installations and deaths across the entire grid should be
| counted: deaths of all electricians installing any sort of
| residential and commercial wiring, transformers on poles
| down the street, and everything else.
|
| Possibly deaths arising form unreliable electricity should
| also be counted as risks of energy use. If a few people die
| in a heatwave because their AC cuts out due to a blackout,
| maybe those are energy-related deaths.
|
| Health problems and accidents in solar panel factories
| should be counted, as well those in mines for nuclear ore,
| and industries that produce all grid components: wiring,
| switch boxes, transformers, you name it.
|
| Deaths in every vehicular accident involving an electrician
| en route to a repair job should also be counted (whether
| the electrician was at fault or not).
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I mean, yes? We should seek to contrast fatalities across
| every major energy source if we can?
|
| But given that we don't have perfect numbers we have to
| go off of the ones we have, and solar installations are
| over 4x the death rate than nuclear. The only reason I
| bring it up is this constant barrage of anti-nuclear
| sentiment even though nuclear works great in countries
| where it is approached correctly. Canada and France, for
| example, have professional, reasonable cost nuclear that
| create the medical isotopes we need.
|
| It's all besides the point though, because coal is 1000x
| more fatal than nuclear, and like I said in my original
| comment, I'll take anything but coal and oil.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-
| worldw...
| LatteLazy wrote:
| So cheap it needs huge subsidies. So safe no one will insure it.
| So clean we have no idea how to deal with the waste. So simple
| they take decades to build.
| MR4D wrote:
| A better idea - have the navy build them and then sell the
| completed, operational plant (say, after a year of successful
| operation) to the highest bidder in an auction. Put whatever
| constraints are needed on the sale, and guarantee the
| construction for a decade.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Is it legal for the military to manufacture and sell products
| to the public?
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think the manufacturing is required to be contracted out.
| The military can and does sell many things if they no longer
| have need for them. You can find some of that stuff in
| surplus shops, but they even sell old aircraft and other
| vehicles.
| mywittyname wrote:
| At that point, they should create a government-owed corporation
| to hand off operation to.
|
| End-of-life for plants is a huge issue. The owners of plants
| are obligated to collect fees for cleanup, decommissioning, and
| remediation of power plant sites. But what has happened
| (unsurprisingly) is that operators will sell these plants to
| someone else, who signs a contract, accepting all future legal
| liability for any issues resulting from operations or cleanup,
| then those cleanup fees (which total in the hundreds of
| millions) get put into an escrow account.
|
| Of course, these new owners are _limited liability
| corporations_ who find that it 's cheaper to provide campaign
| donations to high-level state officials who then pressure state
| agencies to allow half-assed measures to be used for
| containment of toxic chemicals. This is an ongoing issue in
| right now because so many coal plants have been driven out of
| business.
|
| If these people won't spend an extra million bucks to line coal
| ash containment ponds appropriately, I have no faith they will
| do so with significantly more expensive nuclear waste.
| danans wrote:
| > At that point, they should create a government-owed
| corporation to hand off operation to.
|
| The difference is that rightly or wrongly, the public doesn't
| see the military spending as wasteful government spending in
| the way they see spending on the Postal Service or for some,
| health programs like Medicaid.
|
| There's an argument that a way to sell renewables to the
| climate change denying sections of the population is to have
| the military involved in its implementation.
|
| If you think about it, the military has functions of 1)
| protecting the US against existential threats and 2)
| providing a path toward a dignified livelihood for a lot of
| the population. Climate change also poses existential
| threats, and there is an opportunity to create a path to a
| dignified livelihood for many people by tackling it with
| renewables.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| The military isn't going to want anything to do with
| renewables. They run on oil, almost exclusively. The
| military's exalted position in society is also largely
| artificial. Yes it serves to defend the country but it
| could be far smaller and still achieve that. No this should
| be a civilian effort, although it could be a state one.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Naval reactors are currently built by GE and Bechtel. They are
| designed at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, a national lab of
| DOE, operated by Fluor. Fluor is a parent company of NuScale
| which just got a license from the NRC to be able to build a
| civilian small modular reactor (SMR). Their first project is
| scheduled to come online at the end of the decade.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| US Naval reactors are not a substitute for commercial power
| plants. They use highly enriched fuel, and are optimized for
| small volume and low maintenance costs, not net generation
| efficiency. They're at least one if not two orders of magnitude
| smaller than what's economic in power plants, and they are not
| in any way built with an efficient "model T" style production
| line.
|
| US Naval reactors are not some silver bullet no one has thought
| of. They're a different tool, and it's not clear the Navy would
| be particularly more effective in creating a future of factory
| built small modular reactors vs any other company that's
| attempted it so far.
| Klinky wrote:
| Exactly, people who bring this up don't understand the
| different one-off reactor designs used in maybe a handful of
| vessels, or that the Navy reactors are meant to go without
| refueling for up to 25 years. They are also made by third-
| party contractors, not hand-built by the Navy itself.
|
| The complexity, capital costs and liability risks make
| commercial "small nuclear" unfeasible. It's "go big or go
| home".
| [deleted]
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Yeah, I learned this harsh lesson doing deeper research in
| recent years. I was really hopeful for NuScale and similar
| SMR style approaches, but now I understand more clearly why
| that's so unlikely to work out.
|
| I'd love it if someone shows up tomorrow with some clever
| idea that changes the capital costs and long timelines, but
| I don't think we should be allocating significant capital
| towards that as hope alone.
| asdff wrote:
| Do they ever use a parked carrier to power something? It
| seems like it would be useful to run at least a portion of a
| base using a carrier anchored in the harbor, or as response
| to downed power infrastructure after a natural disaster.
| Quick googling indicates an aircraft carrier allegedly could
| be able to power 12,000 homes.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| No. The naval plants are optimized to generate steam for
| the propulsion turbines first, and electric generation
| capacity second. Plugging generation capacity into a grid
| is far more complex than plugging in a consumer appliance.
| It'd require a lot of dedicated infrastructure on the
| carrier, and suitable tie in points from the grid.
|
| The US did have a floating nuclear power plant for a while,
| intended for disaster response and such. It ultimately
| didn't prove to be useful enough vs the cost and complexity
| of keeping it running. Russia recently completed
| fabrication of a modern take on the same idea, but it's not
| clear how useful that will be to them other than being as
| part of a suite of nuclear technologies they're marketing
| militarily.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| I was talking to an ex-navy reactor man at a bar once. He said
| one of the most important things for naval reactors is to make
| sure you were making the "right kind of bubbles." I never found
| out if this was some kind of navy joke or if he was talking
| about Nucleate boiling.
| pow_pp_-1_v wrote:
| Hmm. That's an interesting idea. Seems like they are experts in
| building relatively small nuclear plants and maintaining them
| in harsh conditions for years. Wonder if it's feasible though.
| Maybe they are too slow to build. Maybe they are too expensive.
| evgeniysharapov wrote:
| Why Navy ? Does it have to be in the sea ? If on land then
| Westinghouse or Duke could build it just as well if not better.
| newsclues wrote:
| Because of this guy
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover
| beastman82 wrote:
| Because they're already doing it regularly
| natch wrote:
| They don't contract it out to Westinghouse or other similar
| companies?
| protomyth wrote:
| Its actually really complicated on the supplier end.
| There is a lot of joint stuff with contractors and the
| DOE.
| natch wrote:
| Yeah I'm not sure why they think the Navy is doing it...
| I think the Navy is "just" the customer. Of course
| there's a lot involved in being the customer too.
| protomyth wrote:
| I don't think the Navy is "just" the customer in a normal
| DOD contracting sense. It looks like more joint research
| and DOE involvement. Plus, mix it multiple contractors
| and locations and you have a very complicated chain.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| I think the premise is that the US Navy is quite good at
| building nuclear power plants as multiple reactors power each
| and every submarine and Aircraft carrier we have. By the
| numbers the Navy has more nuclear powered ships than the US
| has nuclear power plants. There's also precedent for smaller
| scale plants that are lower maintenance and less dangerous.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I wouldn't necessarily say they are less dangerous. The
| designs can be very different and might even require more
| maintenance and safely procedures than the land based ones.
|
| Also, the Navy isn't the the one actually building it. The
| contracting companies do that. Many of the people who run
| the systems in the Navy leave and become
| contractors/consultants for the higher pay.
| protomyth wrote:
| _the US Navy is quite good at building nuclear power
| plants_
|
| They are also really good at the operational aspects.
| javajosh wrote:
| It's a neat idea; based on the fact that the Navy has a lot of
| operational experience with nuclear power (especially small
| heat sources)? How well does that experience translate to a
| large-scale reactor? And is the Navy particularly good at
| building things? I would imagine that the (private) shipbuilder
| has at least as much knowledge around the tech.
| lvspiff wrote:
| I think its more fund the navy under the guise of a defense
| spending bill that ends up going for an RFP to energy
| companies to build the reactors "for the navy"
| loeg wrote:
| The Navy acquires many reactors annually and operates a ton
| of small to medium reactors. I think they mostly buy the
| reactors from contractors, but either way, they have a ton of
| operational experience.
|
| Maybe funding it via the navy is politically palatable.
| natch wrote:
| "for a decade"
|
| There's the problem, this kind of short term thinking that is
| just long enough to let someone else deal with it.
|
| Also, guarantees on paper don't mean as much as physical
| reality. Ask any native American or Fukashima resident about
| how much guarantees are worth.
| EricE wrote:
| Fukasima was a dumb design from the start, and plenty of
| people pointed it out before it was built. Holding it up as
| the poster child for why _all_ talk about nuclear power
| generation should not even be discussed is beyond
| disingenuous.
| natch wrote:
| What you said shows exactly why the point was valid.
|
| This is what happens with nuclear power projects: They can
| take a dumb design, as you said, and people point out the
| problems beforehand, as you said, then it is built, as you
| said, regardless.
|
| It's important that it was still built even though people
| said, beforehand, that it was, as you say, dumb. This is a
| key point really. These things are still built regardless
| of the quality of the design.
|
| And then later, reality and physics have their say.
|
| And all the guarantees and promises are broken, and the
| costs are way higher than were accounted for.
|
| Of course some designs are better, and that is fantastic.
| I'm all for safety and predictability. I have other
| problems with nuclear, having nothing to do with radiation
| or safety, but I agree that there are much safer designs.
|
| Even though there are better and worse designs, and
| Fukashima may be a bad design with a bad placement, this
| lack of full accounting for potential costs is a recurring
| pattern with these huge boondoggle projects.
| EricE wrote:
| So because we did some dumb things in the past we can
| never do new things in the future?
|
| Great argument.
| pkaye wrote:
| I think we should switch to some of the newer nuclear reactor
| implementation. There is one that Bill Gates was funding which is
| supposed to substantially safer according but other similar ones
| should be evaluated.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| The biggest joke about this is that subsidies are not what's
| preventing nuclear power. It's your states DNR, the EPA, NIMBY's,
| and the market containing very few people to employ for the job.
| How is getting a subsidy gonna help when the EPA protects
| wetlands? How is a cheaper reactor for a power company going to
| help when the DNR says you have to fulfill absurd rules when
| constructing in an area that ruins wildlife but satisfies the
| NIMBY's? What about NIMBY's who get to petition construction near
| them? Nuclear power just isn't gonna happen here and subsidies
| are just gonna be trickle up kickbacks to CEO's. There is too
| much government mandated bureaucracy involved that prevents this.
| Environmentalists and pro nuclear power people typically want
| their cake and eat it too. Too bad to make for "greener" energy,
| you have to destroy a significant part of the world to do it
| meaning lax EPA regulations. But to do that would be an affront
| for some outrageous impossible to maintain morality system.
| Sometimes you gotta bend the rules to get good things done.
| hirundo wrote:
| I support nuclear power and oppose subsidies for it. A better
| approach is to remove subsidies from their dirtier competitors.
| Mvandenbergh wrote:
| In the absence of a carbon tax, the next best approach is a
| subsidy that only applies to non CO2-emitting technologies
| funded from general taxation.
|
| Since there is not sufficient political consensus for the
| former in the US, the latter is a good interim solution.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. And it's super annoying when people use the
| fact that a subsidy isn't as efficient as a carbon tax (or
| some other broad measure) as justification for ending it
| (without a carbon tax replacement). For instance, Virginia (a
| Blue state) passed a usage fee on EVs (that's actually higher
| than the typical state gas tax would be for the same distance
| traveled in a regular vehicle) in order to "compensate" for
| the fact that EVs don't pay gas tax. Therefore turning the
| Pigouvian gas tax into an anti-Pigouvian fee for acting on
| the desire to use more efficient and lower emissions
| transportation. (Not to mention you ALSO were taxed on
| electricity and the battery... plus personal property tax for
| the battery... just to add insult to injury.) I guess because
| of the (false) perception that only rich f**ks buy electric
| cars. "Oh, but it's JUST for paying for the roads!" Yeah,
| like the Pigouvian aspect didn't matter and as if the state
| gas tax is solely used for roads.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Both
| datavirtue wrote:
| The french didn't need anything fancy. They stadardized and
| then scaled production of reactors. They now have the cheapest
| energy on the planet, sell excess to others, and have no carbon
| output from electricity generation.
|
| "Freedom fries?"
| pfdietz wrote:
| They now are moving away from nuclear because they are
| finding it impossible to build new ones affordably.
|
| Also, I think you're confusing cost and price there.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I support not destroying the planet. Whatever gets the job done
| at this point. Removing subsidies is a political shitshow, and
| you're effectively saying "I support a decades-long political
| sparring contest while the planet burns."
|
| I think it's safe to say we're not operating under a
| democracy/republic anymore, so whatever will appease the
| coroporate/banking overlords the quickest is the best path
| forward.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| As someone opposed to nuclear power, I agree with both points.
| Nuclear power cannot exist without subsidies for development,
| construction and all the externalities.
|
| It can't exist in a free market or a leveled playing field.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > It can't exist in a free market or a leveled playing field.
|
| Right, because free markets are not capable of pricing in
| externalities (and in fact they actively incentivize
| externalities). If they were capable of this, fossil fuels
| would be prohibitively expensive, and nuclear would be cheap.
| citilife wrote:
| I think a better approach is to change some of the regulation.
| Most of it is good, but some of it is kinda insane. My father
| worked on nuclear plants in the 70-80's. According to him, from
| the 80's on it effectively was so much regulation that it was
| not at all worth building a plant.
|
| With technological advancement, a little change in regulations
| could go a long way.
| nebukadnezar wrote:
| Good book what should be done:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nuclear-Power-Been-
| Flop/dp/109830...
| Tostino wrote:
| If you know, I would love to hear some of the specific
| regulations that he thought were ineffective and or hampering
| our nuclear power construction. I've seen it mentioned in
| this thread without specifics.
| lalaithion wrote:
| Nuclear radiation safety is assessed using the "As Low As
| Reasonably Achievable" standard, which essentially says
| that if you make a nuclear power plant produce power at
| half the price of the next-door coal power plant, you have
| to spend all of the increased profit on increased safety
| measures. Nuclear can never out-compete non-nuclear power
| under that regulatory regime.
| citilife wrote:
| According to my father, the unions were requiring some
| crazy stuff like you had a pipe fitter do X, then a
| different pipe fitter do Y. Both had to be on seperate
| days.
|
| My dad actually left his role when he was stuck in a pipe
| shaft in 120 degree heat. A pipe fitter went up and the
| person who helped him out of the pipe and was fired for not
| following protocol.
|
| The regulation came in when they started codifying the
| union rules. There was also an incident where Westinghouse
| and GE were faking inspections. I don't have specifics on
| hand.
|
| Generally though, it seems corrupt. At least at the time,
| the unions essentially controlled construction and wanted
| to line their pockets, the politicians also lined their
| pockets. Eventually, the cost was too high to build.
| [deleted]
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I feel like it would be far more politically practical to add
| subsidies to Nuclear rather than take away existing subsidies
| on other things.
| ineedasername wrote:
| If we're treating this as a world-critical issue, we shouldn't
| wait for market forces to fix it. Like evolution, market forces
| may converge on good solutions, but not quickly enough to save
| a species from near extinction.
|
| So, yeah, stop subsidizing dirty companies, but also subsidize
| those solutions that get us out of this mess faster.
| spamalot159 wrote:
| The capital requirements for starting a nuclear company is
| likely much large than starting, say, an EV company. Subsidies
| for EV companies greatly helped in getting the technology off
| the ground. Subsidies might be a necessary evil in this case.
| eloff wrote:
| In general I oppose subsidies, but I think it's a good idea
| here. Nuclear solves some major problems with other types of
| clean energy - it's just prohibitively expensive. I'm all for
| exploring all alternatives to fossil fuels in parallel - I
| think the seriousness of the climate situation warrants it.
|
| But that cost is largely a function of strong regulations and
| lack of innovation. If the government gets the ball rolling
| with subsidies it might get to the point where it doesn't need
| them anymore. Reducing regulation where appropriate could help
| too - but in general there are risks and regulation is
| warranted.
|
| And because it makes so much sense - implement a carbon tax
| that ramps up slowly to the full cost of the externalities of
| fossil fuels. It's the most effective thing to fight climate
| change, but instead of doing that we actually subsidize fossil
| fuels?!? I don't get it.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Ideas about how to run governments need to be thought of in
| context of how the government operates. If was emporer of the
| USA, I would do what you suggest. But if I was president, I
| probably could not.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| In a free market perhaps, but nuclear power comes with loads of
| government oversight and regulations (and therefore costs) due
| to the inherent risk factors. Given that, subsidies seems
| appropriate.
| EricE wrote:
| One would think the ultimate "subsidy" would be making the
| current regulatory environment more rational, no?
| asdff wrote:
| The problem is capital doesn't care about the big picture.
| Nuclear power is an upfront costly measure, you don't see a
| return for perhaps decades. That's fine if you are a public
| agency since in time, this will pay for itself, and the concern
| is about bettering the public in the best way possible, not
| making a quick return on investment.
|
| It's not fine if you are a private energy company with
| shareholders who are looking to take on a gain and who are only
| looking at life one quarter at a time. Executives would rather
| invest in something cheaper where their investors will see a
| quicker return, because that's how executives keep their jobs.
| Executives and shareholders care about themselves and their
| profit, while the government is designed to care about the
| collective, although its great power is frequently commandeered
| by individuals seeking personal profit.
| natch wrote:
| According to 2014 Elon Musk, if you cover the same square
| footage as taken up by a nuclear power plant and its exclusion
| zone with solar cells, you'll get more electricity than the
| nuclear power plant would have supplied.
|
| 2014 was a long time ago. It's possible both technologies have
| improved since then. I wonder why we don't hear about this
| comparison more.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| The same I would think is true with coal power plants. Our
| local coal plant has a huge footprint, especially when you
| consider the cooling pond/lake, scrubbers, support buildings
| etc. This is not even considering the mining of fissile
| material/coal to feed these facilities as well, which also
| often have a large footprint as well. Plus the additional
| storage of waste, both short term and long term.
| JoshTko wrote:
| That's for conventional nuclear. Small reactors will take a
| order less as they have structurally safer designs.
| bluedino wrote:
| In Tuscon, or Seattle?
| politician wrote:
| That didn't seem right, so I looked up nuclear exclusion
| zones -- those things are huge!
|
| [1] https://cdn.britannica.com/s:800x1000/00/196800-050-E30A2
| B4A...
| fulafel wrote:
| I think the exclusion zones estabilished after NPP
| accidents may be different from the exclusion areas as
| designed as safety precautions
| (https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-
| collections/cfr/part100/p...).
| jsight wrote:
| I think this is a more realistic example. Note the
| proximity of houses: https://goo.gl/maps/GJQYr8yg6EYxSmZeA
| vidarh wrote:
| They are huge, but they're also rare, and excessive.
| Especially for Chernobyl the exclusion zone includes vast
| areas no more radioactive than, say, Denver or other high
| altitude cities, and people kept working at Chernobyl
| (several of the reactors remained operational) for many
| years, and people have kept living within the exclusion
| zones. It was probably the right thing to set it as big as
| it was given we didn't know better at the time, but if
| anything Chernobyl has shown that the effects are far less
| severe than feared.
| politician wrote:
| Yeah, but per the Musk quote, I bet you really could pack
| enough solar panels into the Chernobyl exclusion zone to
| overtake the power produced by the plant itself.
| vidarh wrote:
| Quite possibly. But that is the only plant in the world
| with an exclusion zone that big, so it doesn't
| generalize. As such it's meaningless.
|
| It's likely to remain the only one with an exclusion zone
| that big given what we have learned about how low the
| lethality of Chernobyl was.
| EricE wrote:
| Probably because it ignores the fact that solar isn't
| predictable (nighttime? clouds? dust?) and nuclear is.
|
| Solar is NOT a replacement for nuclear. It absolutely can
| augment power generation, but it - especially solar cells -
| is not a reliable base load provider.
|
| No amount of hand waving by solar cell proponents will change
| that. If we ever discover a way to reasonably store
| electrical power that's far more reliable and cost effective
| than chemical batteries then that equation will change - but
| we aren't there today. Nuclear is here now and there are more
| than enough designs that are inherently safe and cost
| effective that never get discussed because everyone
| emotionally freaks out as soon as the word "nuclear" is
| uttered :p
| kolinko wrote:
| Solar + hydrogen is just as predictable as nuclear. It
| costs roughly twice as much (because of 50% loss on
| electrolysis and back), but ends up providing a stable
| power output independent of weather.
|
| It's conparable in place to nuclear if I'm not mistaken,
| and it's fault scenarios are less severe.
|
| Especially in US, with vast amounts of deserts, it seems
| like a no-brainer.
|
| (having said that, climate change is so urgent that I'd say
| do whatever it takes to get to zero emmissions - be it
| nuclear or solar)
| natch wrote:
| In support of your point, I'd add that when doing cost
| comparisons with nuclear, one has to be wary of the
| accounting tricks they play such as not factoring in the
| costs of failure scenarios. Or even end of life
| decommissioning in some cases.
| EricE wrote:
| Except if you are pitching it as a solution for the base
| load problem - where is anyone doing solar+hydrogen at
| scale? Where is anyone committing to doing it at scale -
| let alone in the near future? How do we know it will
| remain economical at scale? All kinds of fun things can
| happen between theory/demonstration and implementation in
| the real world.
|
| We do nuclear at scale _today_. The vast majority of
| blockers from doing more nuclear at scale _today_ are
| political; not technical.
|
| That's the other facet of this that always seems to get
| overlooked.
| suster wrote:
| Do you have an example of a specific scaling problem
| which applies to solar+hydrogen and probably can't easily
| be surmounted?
|
| Or is your argument just "We're not doing it yet,
| therefore it can never be done"?
| natch wrote:
| Solar coupled with modern batteries, obviously.
|
| No hand waving required. It's fine for other sources (even
| nuclear) to fill in the gaps. Also no need for accusations
| of emotional freak outs. I think the nuclear side has its
| fair share of deluded people who for some reason pretend
| that both solar and batteries are not improving year by
| year. And who pretend that solar advocates demand solar-
| only solutions. It's just not the case.
| mirrorlake wrote:
| The demand for battery materials could eventually exceed
| the pace that we can mine them, so the world's grids will
| need significantly more types of non-battery energy
| storage like pumped hydro and flywheels. This will ensure
| that the market for grid storage materials doesn't have
| to compete with the car market's growing demand for
| batteries.
|
| There are a few new flywheel plants that have popped up
| in the US in recent years, and it'll be interesting to
| compare the material costs and benefits over the coming
| decades.
| EricE wrote:
| Where are you going to get enough batteries?
|
| If batteries were viable Elon wouldn't just be talking
| about them.
|
| Batteries are no where near the cost efficiency of, say,
| pumped hydro. Nor can batteries touch the overall
| capacity of pumped hydro. And pumped hydro can't happen
| just anywhere - you need the right physical environment
| for it to be effective.
|
| So yeah, unless you have something more concrete than
| "batteries, obviously" it _is_ hand waving.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Batteries aren't going to cut it. The last I checked
| batteries are an expensive source of power even if you
| can charge them for free. The cost of the battery /
| cycles it can deliver is already more than the cost of
| electricity in most places. We need a major breakthrough
| in storage before renewables are more than a way to
| reduce fossil fuel use in powerplants. (You still need
| the plants, just not as much fuel for them.)
|
| There is also somewhat of a use case for renewables for
| powering things that can make do with highly unreliable
| power. Consider, for example, a desalination plant. The
| heart of the plant is pumping water through membranes--
| but do you really need to do that? Lets build our plant
| differently, build a storage system high enough up that
| gravity provides the pressure. When you have power you
| run the pumps to fill the storage system, when you don't
| have power you don't run the pumps. You need bigger pumps
| and you need a big storage tank but it can be done.
|
| Or flip the scenario--don't pump the seawater in the
| first place. Place your desalination plant on the ocean
| floor and use your pumps to extract the fresh water. In
| this case you need fresh water storage underwater rather
| than salt water storage up high.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| Sure, but nuclear runs 24/7 with dependable output. Build 100
| nuclear power plants and you have 99.9999% uptime and no
| battery.
|
| If Elon is a willing to start selling power walls at 100$ /
| kwh retail at scale then we'll talk.
| frereubu wrote:
| Why not both?
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Nuclear power capital requirements (up front) are one of the
| biggest roadblocks to building new plants, followed by
| regulatory complexity and cruft that hasn't been streamlined to
| allow new reactor designs to be implemented.
|
| Doing both, removing subsidies from dirty energy and moving
| them to nuclear, would be the best case.
| xroche wrote:
| Nuclear power requirements (up front) has also a big issue:
| the cost of money. The only viable solution is to have state-
| owned nuclear energy, because only states can borrow cheap
| money (ie. even at negative rates), where private companies
| are required to bleed interests during decades.
|
| Nuclear is the cheapest energy when state-owned, but struggle
| to compete against coal/gaz otherwise.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Have the Navy run them, make the land Navy bases (Crane
| Naval Support [1] near Bloomington, IN comes to mind).
| Encourage efficiency, require transparency, but have no
| tolerance for safety deficiencies or shortcuts.
|
| [1] https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Warfare-Centers/NSWC-
| Crane/
| Spartan-S63 wrote:
| Or have the government own the plants and lease out
| operation to a qualified commercial operator with
| rigorous certification requirements and regular
| recertification requirements.
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I have more faith in the military chain of command versus
| a contractor who isn't going to give AF if they lose a
| contract and the US gov has to pay out to rehabilitate a
| facility that wasn't properly maintained.
|
| Contractors have less fear than someone who can be jailed
| (and let's be honest, contractors and other commercial
| entities are never held accountable when they cut corners
| for profit and pollute with wild abandon leaving us with
| Superfund sites).
| danans wrote:
| > when they cut corners for profit and pollute with wild
| abandon leaving us with Superfund sites
|
| The military doesn't have a great track record on
| Superfund sites i.e:
|
| https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?i
| d=0...
|
| However, I agree that at least the military has the
| culture that will follow orders if asked, and more
| importantly, it's the only government program that the US
| population is willing to put unchecked amounts of money
| towards.
|
| As Reagan said: "trust, but verify".
| minikites wrote:
| Why does it need to be run by a commercial operator at
| all? What advantage does that confer?
| [deleted]
| fsh wrote:
| The US Navy is not exactly known for great cost
| efficiency or safety.
| winkeltripel wrote:
| [Citation needed]
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Google USS Fitzgerald as well as Fat Leonard, that will
| put you on the path to understanding the pervasive
| problems in 7th fleet. They've chopped off heads in
| leadership, so maybe things are moving towards better,
| but it's undeniable there's been a huge problem festering
| for ages.
|
| Familiarize yourself with the Zumwalt and LCS procurement
| programs. Both are nearly total failures, with the Navy
| grasping at straws to find ways to make the ships that
| have been constructed useful. Congress bears some of the
| blame here, particularly in relation to Zumwalt, but it's
| also clear Navy leadership has been often incompetent in
| planning future acquisitions. Those two programs cost US
| tax payers about $50 billion.
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| It's probably time to abandon the 90s mental model of the
| military as effective and efficient. The cultural rot has
| reached them too. The officer corp will virtue signal all
| day about paying for sex changes for their soldiers, but
| the affirmative action hires that run the place can't get
| anything right anymore. And no one is dumb enough or
| courageous enough to try to fire them. The wastefulness
| of the military budget is at this point legendary.
| Consider the comical flop of the F35 and other such
| boondoggles.
| earhart wrote:
| Source?
|
| It's unclear to me that the military is currently any
| less effective and efficient than it was in the 90s. In
| Hollywood films in those days, it was typically portrayed
| as being incredibly efficient, but that has nothing to do
| with reality.
|
| My own anecdote says that "The wastefulness of the
| military budget" has been an issue for many decades -- go
| look up Eisenhower's warnings of the military/industrial
| complex, and consider that the problem had been building
| for quite a while at that point.
|
| Back then, of course, "cultural rot" would've meant
| "Treating black soldiers as equals"; in the 90s, IIRC, it
| would've meant "Treating female soldiers as equals". Just
| wondering, are you in favor of racism and sexism as well,
| or are you just anti-trans? Please note that anti-trans
| attitudes are likely to age about as well as racism and
| sexism have.
|
| IMHO, every social change feels a little weird at the
| time; you're used to thinking a certain way, and now
| you're told that it's wrong; people take that sort of
| things personally. Other self-righteous people sometimes
| realize they can use the new woke attitude to swan around
| and club people who're moving more slowly -- bullying,
| really, and this bullying is the serious problem on the
| left, not the wokeness itself. We'd all be better off if
| we were better at granting grace to people making good-
| faith efforts to change their habits and attitudes.
|
| So social change is hard. But that doesn't make it wrong,
| or rot, or virtue-signaling; it really does make life
| better for unfairly marginalized people, and as it
| spreads, the power of the leftist bullies will dissipate,
| and we'll be left with a better world overall.
|
| And: if you want to disempower those leftist bullies
| faster, _support_ racial justice, support women 's
| rights, support trans rights. You don't have to club
| people over the head with it; just offer quiet support,
| because it's the right thing to do, and it'll make the
| bullies all the madder if there's nothing they can use to
| feel superior to you. :-)
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| I'm gonna take the other option and keep being against
| chopping off the penises of mentally ill people. Call me
| whatever you want. I only answer to God.
|
| Not all "progress" is good. Societies can change for the
| worse too.
|
| It's true the seeds of our decline were planted long ago.
| Some would say as far back as the Enlightenment or even
| earlier. But things have come to a head rapidly in the
| last few decades.
|
| I've talked to people in the military and federal
| agencies about this, and they agree it's gone rapidly
| downhill lately.
|
| There is a difference between inclusion and affirmative
| action. Including women and gays in the military is a
| mistake, I think, for unit cohesion purposes. But
| affirmative action is much worse, because it creates a
| nomenklatura of untouchable woke hires and promotions who
| run everything but are unaccountable to anyone.
| dd36 wrote:
| Affirmative action hires? are you saying minorities are
| destroying the Navy? Please explain.
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| When was the last time there was a safety incident on a
| nuclear Navy vessel? Or a loss of radiological material?
| I am aware of the culture causing loss of life due to
| overwork and hubris on their non nuclear vessels, but
| nuke specialists run a tight ship, and reactors on land
| are stationary and need nuke folks (not sailors).
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| Just wait for it. The nuclear submarines were one of the
| last holdouts from woke politics and affirmative action,
| but that ended in the last five years. Within a decade
| they will be as woke and mismanaged as the rest of the
| military.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| So did Trump make any improvements on this score? Not
| from what I've seen. It may be more no shooting wars lead
| to degradation.
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| Trump was basically unable to do anything about any part
| of the federal bureaucracy, including the military, which
| is entrenched through a combination of civil service laws
| and Supreme Court decisions that make it impossible for
| the President to effectively control the bureaucracy if
| they don't see eye to eye.
| [deleted]
| zeristor wrote:
| At a guess I'd say that a number of them are regarded as
| Top Secret, a big issue would be hard to cover up.
|
| Although I'd imagine if there were many issues they be
| known about. I'd love to learn morea about nuclear
| reactors on carriers and submarines, but I imagine most
| of the engineering knowledge is secret.
| codebeaker wrote:
| I'll have to dig up a citation. But the [] Three Mile
| Island accident was in part caused by (former) naval
| nuclear specialists making poor choices based on
| optimizing for the wrong things.
|
| My memory is fuzzy, but this 37 minute video [2] has a
| breakdown.
|
| If memory serves, the root causes were faults in the
| pumps and delays in the 28 baud diagnostic printouts
| running minutes or hours behind which left everyone
| operating on bad data.
|
| Part of that was exacerbated by the operators applying
| techniques used on subs (something about preferring to
| keep low pressure in some vessel, because high pressure
| there could sink the boat if containment was lost), the
| TMI design didn't need this as it could vent/blow-off,
| and the operators became somewhat fixated on "trying to
| save the boat" and missed a bunch of procedures.
|
| Of course this doesn't invalidate your point, but even if
| the reactor designs are _really_ similar, it may be a
| mistake to cross train anyone.
|
| (disclosure: haven't seen this video in a year or so, and
| am generally a fan of nuclear power considering the
| alternatives, but it needs to be done with different,
| safer reactor designs and probably with new branding
| because no matter what it's going to take _forever_ to
| convince anyone to trust nuclear, when they associate
| that term with the dangerous, BWR designs that were never
| intended for land)
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xQeXOz0Ncs
| argomo wrote:
| You're blaming F35 cost overruns on trans people and
| minority hires? Wierd, my first guess would have been
| something about the complex and ultimately corrupt
| interplay between military contractors, congressional
| pork-barrelling, and government bureaucracy.
|
| These things usually boil down to money and power, not
| {{cultural_issue_of_the_day}}.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| The F35 was doomed from the start. It was asked to do too
| many roles, inherently making it the jack of all trades,
| king of none. The military would have been much better
| served by making a few related airframes with as much
| commonality of parts as practical.
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| No, not exactly. I'm blaming it on a culture of reduced
| accountability. You can't enforce high standards because
| you will end up firing the affirmative action hires
| first. Inability to enforce high standards is a problem
| with government bureaucracy, and increasingly private
| bureaucracy, in general, but what's notable is that it's
| reached the military and federal law enforcement and
| intelligence agencies, which used to be the exception.
| dd36 wrote:
| The military no longer discharges people? It promotes
| everyone?
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| If the promotion figures don't include enough minorities,
| certain members of Congress get very mad and threaten all
| sorts of things. This is also why academic and honor
| standards at the military academies have collapsed.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| You are spouting pure bigoted nonsense.
|
| The military has been shifting to demographic and gender
| blinded promotion systems, like this for example:
| https://hbr.org/2020/11/reinventing-the-leader-selection-
| pro...
|
| It is in no way the case that affirmative action is being
| used as an excuse to promote incompetent officers, let
| alone that this is somehow destroying the military. In
| fact the military historically has had the opposite
| problem. "Legacy" counts for far to much, particularly
| with the families at military academies, leading to a
| senior leadership structure that is very out of step with
| ordinary Americans, and fails to grapple the cross
| cultural international issues inherent to the US
| projecting military power globally.
|
| Stop disparaging our military with your alt right fantasy
| nonsense. The rank and file certainly don't deserve it.
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| That's just absolutely not true. They are promoting
| incompetent people because of demands for diversity, and
| everyone in the military knows it. There are ways of
| achieving that while still being able to claim you are
| "blind" to this or that factor in the process. And no
| system can be blind because it eventually has to
| incorporate feedback from your commanding officer and
| others who deal with you. Do you think those people don't
| face political pressure to make sure the right outcome
| happens?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| We do *not* want naval reactors!
|
| Normal civilian reactors work on low enrichment uranium
| or even natural uranium--stuff that has no potential to
| go boom.
|
| Even reprocessing isn't the danger it's made out to be.
| First, the plutonium from spent reactor fuel has a lot of
| Pu-240 in it. Bombs need Pu-239, too much Pu-240 will
| make them malfunction. (If you are trying to make Pu-239
| you switch out the fuel rods much more frequently.)
| Second, the reprocessing plant has access to a lot of
| very hot stuff. All you actually need to do in
| reprocessing is strip out the waste products that poison
| the reaction, a fuel rod heavily "contaminated" with
| something like Cobalt-60 won't interfere with reactor
| operation, but it will ensure no thief will make off with
| it.
|
| Naval reactors, however, are built to be as small as
| possible. That means very highly enriched uranium.
| Building a gun-type uranium bomb is easily within the
| range of what Al Qaeda can do, the limiting factor is
| obtaining the materials. Thus naval reactor fuel needs to
| be treated with extreme security.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Apologies if my thesis wasn't clear. I'm advocating for
| Navy administration of the commercial nuclear fleet being
| subsidized by the federal gov, not Naval reactors of the
| same design you'd put at sea. The value is in
| accountability and chain of command ("safety culture"),
| not the marine vessel reactor design.
| minikites wrote:
| Having state-owned utilities also removes the profit
| motive, which is always at odds with safety and
| reliability.
| epistasis wrote:
| I think nuclear might have been the cheapest in the past,
| but it needs to be compared to modern technologies again
| and reassessed if it's going to have that crown now. It
| never got as cheap as it was claimed it would be,
| accounting for loan interest or not. And now we have just
| experienced a decade where intermittent renewables have
| plummeted in cost to below that of fuel-base energy. And
| storage is on that trend too, with storage being added to
| most solar and wind projects these days to increase
| profitability.
|
| Nuclear is characterized by very low opex compared to
| capex, but that ratio is even higher with renewables. If we
| are going to give nuclear the benefit of low capital costs,
| we should also give renewables that same cheap capital when
| comparing to nuclear.
| bgroat wrote:
| I know there's a huge "It depends",
|
| But how much does a nuclear plant actually cost?
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| The most recent plant to go online in the US cost $12
| billion dollars, and had decades long construction
| delays:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant
| xroche wrote:
| > It never got as cheap as it was claimed it would be,
| accounting for loan interest or not.
|
| I would say "citation needed". France typically had a
| documented public investment plan for nuclear energy, and
| is enjoying one of the cheapest and low-carbon emission
| electricity in Europe.
|
| > And now we have just experienced a decade where
| intermittent renewables have plummeted in cost to below
| that of fuel-base energy
|
| I still read this here and there, but strangely,
| solar/wind still need large subsidiaries to exist. How so
| ?
|
| Other renewable such as hydro are fine, though, but they
| tend to be already at their max everywhere.
|
| > And storage is on that trend too, with storage being
| added to most solar and wind projects these days
|
| We don't have real storage solutions for now. Batteries ?
| Won't scale. Reversible dams ? Doable if you have the
| chance to have a lot of hydro.
| adrianN wrote:
| Where batteries stop scaling you can produce Hydrogen or
| Methane. The efficiency sucks, but most countries already
| have infrastructure to store huge amounts of gas.
| pfdietz wrote:
| One can also go to alternate battery chemistries
| optimized for longer term storage. In particular, this
| means capital cost is more important, but specific power
| and efficiency are less important. Electrodes optimized
| for cost rather than ion mobility, for example.
|
| Hydrogen would still be hard to beat for seasonal
| storage, though.
| epistasis wrote:
| I would love to see some documented costs for France, so
| I agree 100% with "citation needed". As for the US, the
| historical document I read that gave me the impression
| that it never got as cheap as claimed was this 1985
| article in Forbes:
|
| https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-
| article-...
|
| > but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidies to
| exist
|
| Citation needed here, too! The unsubsidized costs of
| solar and wind are still the cheapest sources, so they
| don't "need" subsidies to be deployed. The existence of
| tax breaks subsidies for wind/solar doesn't mean that the
| subsidies are needed, any more than the special tax break
| subsidies for oil/gas/coal are needed for those sources
| to keep on going.
|
| > Batteries? Won't scale
|
| This is a very strange claim! Not only do batteries scale
| beautifully in theory, we already have scaled them for
| deployment, with GWh grid batteries that can be scaled at
| the same site to 5-6GWh (Moss Landing, CA). Batteries can
| be deployed in homes, at distribution substations,
| underneath utility scale solar or wind farms, at old
| decommissioned fossil fuel sites so that the transmission
| capacity can be reused, on one side of a congested
| transmission line to avoid massive upgrade costs...
| Batteries are practically defined by their beautiful
| scalability, a real Swiss Army knife for any grid
| application
|
| Current global production capacity for the lithium ion
| types of batteries is 285GWh, which on a GW completely
| dwarfs global nuclear deployment. Projections from the
| battery industry are for this amount to increase 10x
| every five years. And though lithium ion tech is by far
| in the lead, there are many other chemistries perfectly
| suited to grid use (but perhaps not cars), if lithium
| ion's improvement pace ever slows to let them catch up.
|
| We are in a new era for energy, an era that is far more
| like tech, and less like the staid commodity industry
| that energy has been for the past century. Depreciation
| of grid assets is very slow, far slower than the tech
| change of energy tech, so we need to start paying very
| close attention to tech change curves if we don't want to
| waste massive amounts of money and screw up our fight
| against climate change.
| wffurr wrote:
| This isn't about new reactors, it's about operating subsidies
| to keep existing ones running.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| Whether subsidies are a good idea or not in general for
| nuclear is an interesting question. The article states that
| the current plan is to give production tax credits - tax
| credits for energy produced. Such a subsidy, which does not
| help mitigate the up front capital costs, would therefore not
| really address the root problem in the US.
|
| To the more general question though: subsidies are to
| incentivize people (or companies) to do a thing (or do more
| of a thing). In the case of nuclear power, the timelines
| involved in building a power plant are so long, and given the
| uncertainty of having the same tax credits staying in place
| for long enough to impact financial plans, it seems unlikely
| that it would actually have the effect we'd want on nuclear
| power production.
| epistasis wrote:
| I hear about regulatory cruft, but have never heard of
| examples of what would be changed.
|
| We have two recent build sites in the US, one failed
| entirely, and the other is hobbling along. I've read lots of
| analyses and postmortems, and the only regulation-related
| criticisms I've found are that the NRC doesn't regulate
| enough. By only looking for safety of the design,
| Westinghouse was able to submit designs that were safe, but
| not particularly buildable. If the regulators had checked the
| work of Westinghouse to include basic build ability in
| addition to safety, tens of billions of dollars might have
| been saved, and we might have been building more nuclear
| reactors.
|
| But I would like to hear more specific complaints about how
| regulations could change, if it has the chance to improve
| nuclear.
| winkeltripel wrote:
| In the documentary 'inside bill's brain', you hear that
| regulatory problems led his team of physicists to look to
| China for a manufacturing partner and a location to build a
| new reactor (which the trade war between US and China also
| squashed). If they could have built it on US soil, they
| would have.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > But I would like to hear more specific complaints about
| how regulations could change, if it has the chance to
| improve nuclear.
|
| https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop is
| a review of "Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop" by Jack
| Devanney.
|
| Based on the review, the short version is that the
| regulators use the wrong threat model for radiation (LNT),
| and a regulatory model which effectively requires nuclear
| to be unprofitable (ALARA).
|
| The review describes briefly what needs to be changed.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| It looks like private enterprise is maybe incompatible
| with Nuclear Power then. I find this to be pleasing, and
| we should simply side step private enterprise and build
| public plants.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| How did you get that from the linked article? Or are you
| just shooting from the hip based on bias?
| epistasis wrote:
| This is great, thank you!
|
| Setting a firm limit on radiation release ahead of time,
| rather than one based on economics like ALARA just seems
| like it would be far safer. The other examples also seem
| like they are bad regulations that don't help safety or
| construction either. Would be great to see if they could
| result in more efficient construction.
| tlb wrote:
| Another way of setting a limit on radiation would be:
| 1/10 as much as an average coal plant per kWh. Current
| nuclear plants are already below this, because coal
| plants release a fair bit of radioactive material into
| the air, from trace elements like thorium in coal.
|
| When regulations prevent deploying something 10x safer
| than the currently deployed alternatives, they're not
| making us safer.
| kilotaras wrote:
| Acronyms used:
|
| LNT stands for Linear No Threshold: cancer risk is
| directly proportional to dose, that doses are cumulative
| over time (rate doesn't matter), and that there is no
| threshold or safe dose. This contradicts studies that we
| have about people who received enough CUMULATIVE doses of
| radiation that they would be dead if it was at the same
| time.
|
| ALARA: Radiation should be As Low As Reasonably
| Achievable. In practice this means that any cost
| reduction simply means freed money that you're now
| required to spend on safety.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah, that's utterly stupid. We need to define a value
| per life saved and apply it across the board to safety
| regulations. Any safety regulation that comes in cheaper
| than that is required, no safety regulation that comes in
| more expensive than that is required. There should be no
| singling out of industries. All such regulations must
| include a reasonable description of how it can be done
| for that cost--which can be challenged in court.
| Likewise, outside groups can challenge proposals which
| have been rejected by showing there's a cheaper way to do
| it. (And this would include companies that stand to
| benefit. A company that comes up with a cheap enough way
| to implement a safety measure can get it mandated. While
| this could cause a monopoly situation they can't exploit
| it because if they make it too expensive the rule goes
| away.)
| pfdietz wrote:
| > is that the regulators use the wrong threat model for
| radiation (LNT)
|
| Nuclear fans like to complain about the LNT, but I don't
| think they're really thinking this through.
|
| In a nuclear accident, most of the population exposure
| will be a minor increase spread across a vast population.
| At those doses, we basically cannot check whether LNT is
| true or not -- the small cancer incidence it predicts is
| statistically invisible against all the other causes of
| cancer.
|
| So foes of LNT want to say "we can't show LNT is
| correct", which is fine, but then they say "so we must
| assume the actual effect is smaller, perhaps zero", which
| is not fine. The evidence doesn't support that second
| step, and this is not a court of criminal law where
| radiation must be presumed innocent unless found guilty
| beyond a reasonable doubt. One might very well argue that
| one should take a precautionary approach, which is to
| assume that low level radiation has the worst effect it
| could have that is not ruled out by evidence. This would
| imply even larger threat than under LNT.
| mywittyname wrote:
| A lot of it is chicken-and-egg problem. New nuclear plants
| are so rare that they each end up with being slightly
| different from one another, which adds to regulatory
| requirements.
|
| If we started mass producing plants, there would be
| stronger push for uniformity in design and that would
| translate into significant cost savings. But no one is
| going to start mass producing plants because it's so
| difficult to get just one plant online.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| > By only looking for safety of the design, Westinghouse
| was able to submit designs that were safe, but not
| particularly buildable.
|
| Because the commission is biased towards safety above all
| else. They need to be more realistic and not cave in to
| fearmongering. The design needs to be safe, but against a
| realistic threat model.
|
| The designs also need to be assembly line and not so highly
| customized. French style reactor designs are good for this
| reason. Part that holds the reactor? Fine, evaluate for
| weather and calamity resistance and build per location. The
| reactor? Hope you like black.
| baix777 wrote:
| I don't see any evidence humans are smart enough to
| operate nuclear power safely. There are too many examples
| of humans not fully understanding nuclear, or just being
| stupid with nuclear. For example, building a nuclear
| power plant near an earthquake fault line in CA, or where
| tsunamis occur in Japan. We can't get the basics of
| safety right here.
| jtolmar wrote:
| Even with all the disasters included, nuclear power is
| safer than almost all other kinds (the exception being
| very large hydro plants), per unit energy.
| quacker wrote:
| Interesting. I know nuclear power is far safer than it's
| general reputation.
|
| Is nuclear really safer than solar?
|
| This[1] has some data and estimations for death rates
| _measured based on deaths from accidents and air
| pollution per terawatt-hour (TWh)_ , which suggests
| nuclear has 0.07 deaths per TWh, which is marginally
| higher than wind (0.04), hydro (0.02), and solar (0.02).
|
| So, it's very close!
|
| 1. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
| pfdietz wrote:
| At the # of deaths produced by nuclear in normal
| operation, or by wind or solar, the "deaths" are
| dominated by the statistical lives due to the cost of
| energy itself.
|
| The NRC uses a value of $9M for the value of a
| statistical life. That is, it is worth spending $9M if
| that will save one expected life.
|
| Nuclear, solar and wind have deaths/energy somewhere in
| the ballpark of 1 life per 10^10 kWh. So, at $9M/life
| this cost is roughly $0.001/kWh. This is very small,
| which says that even minor differences in the cost of
| energy from various sources will be more important than
| the direct number of lives lost.
|
| (This would not be true of fossil fuels, though.)
|
| TLDR: it's more important to reduce the cost of energy
| from these non-fossil sources, and to choose the sources
| with lowest cost, than it is to make them safer. For
| nuclear, inherent safety could be useful if it would
| enable cost to be reduced, but not because nuclear needs
| to be safer.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| That's bad data. Nuke is getting blamed for the Fukushima
| deaths that were due to the evacuation--neglecting the
| fact that the safest option was to stay put. If you
| replace the evacuation deaths (IIRC ~500) with the stay-
| put deaths (most likely zero) you about halve the nuke
| death rate.
|
| The larger deployment of utility-scale solar does seem to
| have reduced it's death rate. (Many of the solar deaths
| are from falling off the roof during installation or
| maintenance. Utility-scale solar is normally on the
| ground and with better safety measures.)
| jtolmar wrote:
| > Nuke is getting blamed for the Fukushima deaths that
| were due to the evacuation
|
| I think this is fair. /All/ deaths from nuclear and
| renewable power are due to accidents and bad decisions.
| Accidents and bad decisions aren't going to go away. It
| takes a monumentally boneheaded decision to make a
| nuclear power plant dangerous, but apparently the rate of
| monumentally boneheaded decisions is one per thirty years
| at our current level of nuclear power usage.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> but apparently the rate of monumentally boneheaded
| decisions is one per thirty years at our current level of
| nuclear power usage._
|
| That rate is very likely to increase as time goes on and
| reactors become older and thus more prone to failure/some
| freak low probability incident happening.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I have a hard time coming to the same conclusion.
|
| All of the problems with nuclear reactors have happened
| to plants which were designed and constructed in the
| 1950->1970s. As it turns out, we've learned a ton about
| safely operating nuclear plants. The problem is upgrading
| these old plants rarely happens and getting newer plants
| to replace them is equally daunting.
|
| There are 3 examples of major nuclear plant problems.
| That doesn't seem like too many.
|
| In contrast, there are hundreds of operating plants. The
| newer ones are particularly safe because they require
| positive input to keep the nuclear reaction going. Any
| sort of earthquake, tsunami, mudslide, etc that causes
| the plant systems to fail will cause the nuclear reaction
| to be halted.
|
| Chernobyl, 3 mile island, and fukushima are all
| impossible in plants built in the last 25 years. (Gen III
| or newer)
| michael1999 wrote:
| The US army tried and failed. The US Air Force tried and
| failed. The marines keep trying. Japan has had several
| fatal accidents in their civilian program just handling
| fuel. Even the navy limits them to specialist roles, and
| their success and safety record might all hinge on the
| legacy of one gifted man (Rickover).
|
| I support research and trials of the SMRs, but you might
| want to consider the possibility that it really is hard
| at the full-system level. The human mind does not readily
| understand invisible, exponential process like radiation.
| DennisP wrote:
| _Every_ power source has accidents. Deaths per TWh for
| nuclear are comparable to wind and solar. Every form of
| fossil is much worse. Hydro beats everything for major
| disasters; Banqaio Dam killed 26,000 people immediately
| and many more in the aftermath.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> Deaths per TWh for nuclear are comparable to wind and
| solar._
|
| A statistic that only works because epidemiological
| studies into the long term effects of radiation exposure
| are extremely difficult, complex and time consuming.
|
| Something made even more difficult by the fact that we
| blasted uranium fallout in the atmosphere that's hanging
| around to this day, so getting a non-affected control
| group has become pretty much impossible.
|
| Ain't helping that any research attempting to investigate
| the problem will very quickly be labeled as highly
| controversial by pro-nuclear lobbies [0]
|
| [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2696975/
| DennisP wrote:
| What makes it even more difficult is natural background
| radiation. The global average is 2.4 millisieverts/year,
| with the US averaging 3.1 and Japan averaging 1.5.
| Medical scans add 0.6 mSv/year. Airline crews get an
| extra 2 mSv/year.
|
| By comparison, atmospheric nuclear tests added 0.11 mSv
| at their peak in 1963, declining to 0.005 mSv/year today.
| Chernobyl added 0.04 mSv in 1986, declining to 0.002
| today. The nuclear fuel cycle adds 0.0002 to the global
| average, and is required to be less than 1 mSv for all
| members of the public.
|
| The highest natural background radiation is in Ramsar,
| Iran, with 6.0 mSv/year. Studies are ongoing but the
| evidence so far shows no negative health effects.
|
| Note that Sieverts are normalized to the health effects
| on the human body. Any concerns about different types of
| radioactivity are already accounted for in this
| measurement.
|
| Chernobyl and Fukushima of course caused larger exposures
| to nearby inhabitants, and these exposures are accounted
| for in the statistics I mentioned.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert
| freeflight wrote:
| _> or where tsunamis occur in Japan_
|
| This one is particularly interesting considering
| Fukushima wasn't the first time something like that
| happened. On the other side of Japan is the Kahiwazaki-
| Kariwa plant [0], the largest of its kind on the planet.
|
| In 2007 that plant was already hit by an earthquake,
| shaking the plant beyond design basis, it was shut down
| for 21 months after that.
|
| And even tho it wasn't affected by the 2011 earthquake
| that blew Fukushima up, it still was shut down to
| implement safety improvements, it remains shut down to
| this day with no date for resuming operations.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-
| Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow...
| sokoloff wrote:
| Look at the US Navy operational record for nuclear power.
| That might convince you that humans can do it.
| hanniabu wrote:
| This isn't fearmongering:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26348520
| epistasis wrote:
| What is an example of this fearmongering, and what
| expense did it cause?
| agloeregrets wrote:
| From the outside, you have large-scale accidents that
| caused a lot of fear that killed the drive for us.
| Notably Three Mile Island in the US and the effects of
| seeing what happened in Chernobyl that was drummed up by
| the US government to show failures by the Soviets (even
| though the Soviet reactor design was far more dangerous).
| Additionally, I live near a plant and they hold extreme
| safety training on iodine distribution and such to school
| children that makes kids fear the plant.
| epistasis wrote:
| No denying that there's been fearmongering in general.
| But I'm still asking for an example of what regulation on
| the construction of nuclear plants should be changed.
| pfdietz wrote:
| What killed the drive for nuclear in the 1970s in the US
| was more that the costs came in very high, that electric
| power demand growth suddenly moderated, and that the grid
| was opened to external non-utility competition by PURPA
| in 1978 (four months before TMI).
| EricE wrote:
| How about starting with mountainous environmental impact
| reports that no one reads? Theres lots of room for
| maintaining effective oversight while making the overall
| processes more efficient. The problem is the current
| processes were designed to be onerous due to those
| lobbying against nuclear power.
|
| Also with new concepts like micro reactors or reviving
| long abandoned technology like liquid thorium reactors
| that would burn what we stupidly label "waste" and if the
| active systems are interrupted coast to a stop on their
| own instead of running away like our fast breeder water
| based designs a lot of the existing regulations and
| requirements are suddenly moot.
|
| Most importantly Nuclear is the only "clean" technology
| that is predictable and controllable. Until you have a
| way to reliably meet base load requirements, fossil fuel
| generation is going to continue.
|
| So if you really do think that climate change represents
| impending doom, resisting nuclear power is pretty dumb.
| It's not perfect - but there isn't any technology that is
| perfect or without some risk. Pretending nuclear is the
| only energy technology with serious issues is also dumb.
| 50 years of people painting nuclear as the boogie man
| hasn't helped either. If you strongest arguments are
| emotionally based those aren't very good arguments at
| all.
| DennisP wrote:
| I have one that's specific to new technology.
|
| A few years ago I got to sit in a meeting between reps from
| a bunch of GenIV reactor startups, and a former head of the
| NRC. The reactor people had one complaint: that the NRC
| required near-complete blueprints before they would even
| look at a design. It cost several hundred million dollars
| to get to that point, then the NRC would give a flat yes or
| no. If no then you were out of business, and if yes then
| you still just had a paper reactor.
|
| That's a really difficult environment for investors. They
| said it would be a huge help just to have a multi-stage
| process. The NRC person was unsympathetic, said it wasn't
| the NRC's job to help develop nuclear technology, and
| brushed off climate change arguments.
|
| Fortunately Congress has gotten involved since then and
| things seem to be improving a bit.
| freeflight wrote:
| Tbh I can understand the need for near complete
| blueprints: Trying to judge a systems safety, based on
| plans of only half the system, does not sound like it
| would be a very useful judgement.
|
| What's to prevent cutting massive corners after the
| original half plan was approved?
| DennisP wrote:
| They weren't asking for final approval at an earlier
| stage. They were just asking for feedback along the way.
| That way they wouldn't have to guess whether their basic
| idea had a chance, and they could make changes to address
| concerns before spending hundreds of millions nailing
| down the details on something the NRC could have told
| them it considered fundamentally flawed. It would also
| help them with investors, when they could show favorable
| early feedback.
| joelvalleroy wrote:
| Their job is to enforce safety, not good business
| decisions. :)
| EricE wrote:
| So don't build big plants. Micro reactors are far cheaper,
| easier to maintain and a distributed network of micro
| reactors would greatly reduce the burden on our already
| archaic national electric grid.
|
| Kill two birds with one stone and all that...
| dukeyukey wrote:
| I love the idea, but how much energy to micro-reactors
| provide today, on a commercial basis?
| thinkcontext wrote:
| NuScale is the furthest along. Their design has been
| certified by the NRC, their first project is scheduled to
| come online towards the end of this decade.
| EricE wrote:
| As much as you need. Modern designs are modular - chain
| together as many as you need to provide base load and
| also provide some overage so you have coverage when they
| do inevitably need servicing.
|
| Or since they are modular if significant long term loads
| shift geographically, you can easily move them around to
| where needed too.
|
| I agree the concepts of massive plants aren't desireable
| - luckily there are alternatives if we can ever get past
| the emotional arguments and actually discuss things
| rationally.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| They sound awesome, but as far as I know they still
| haven't been commercialised so their potential is still
| largely unknown.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| NuScale is still moving, but they have slipped on
| schedule and budget, far enough some of their project
| partners have pulled out.
|
| So far everyone who's pursued this small modular reactors
| built by factories approach has failed in the ambition.
| Doesn't mean it's impossible but just maybe we should be
| a bit more bearish than bullish on the idea of this
| sparking a revolution in the capital costs and time
| scales of nuclear power.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| One issue with micro-reactors is that they make non-
| proliferation harder. It's much easier to verify that no
| uranium goes missing from 100 giant reactors than 100,000
| small ones.
| DennisP wrote:
| You could always install the 100,000 small reactors at
| 100 large sites.
| criddell wrote:
| I assume the risk is that a bad actor could make a dirty
| bomb from the uranium. If that's the case, how does the
| risk of that compare to the risk of other attacks against
| our water supplies, pipelines, bridges, or even poison
| gas attacks?
|
| How do you compare the deaths from a distributed reactor
| network to the deaths from additional global warming?
| xxpor wrote:
| Are there any micro-reactor designs that use non-enriched
| or minimally enriched uranium? My understanding is that
| natural uranium isn't really that dangerous, even in a
| dirty bomb, and then in terms of proliferation it already
| isn't that hard to get it.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah. Uranium for sale, no permits: https://unitednuclear
| .com/index.php?main_page=product_info&c...
| evgen wrote:
| The 100,000 smaller reactors can still be put in the same
| place as the 100 giant reactors to make inspection and
| monitoring easier. The modular design makes incremental
| capacity upgrades easier, makes maintenance and repair
| easy, and helps to put more testing and QA on the modular
| design. Just think of it as 100 locations where you can
| either have 1 giant reactor each or up to 1000 modular
| micro-reactors.
| EricE wrote:
| As others pointed out - just because you have lots of
| micro reactors, they all don't have to be in individual
| locations.
|
| And there are far more easily obtainable things than
| uranium if you want to construct a dirty bomb. Another
| fantastic anti-nuke red herring.
| [deleted]
| caffeine wrote:
| You are assuming the objective is clean power.
|
| But if the objective were to curry favour with as many people
| as possible, subsidising everything works better than leveling
| the playing field.
|
| Everybody gets a taste.
| deelowe wrote:
| Politics is like 25% solving problems and 75% a popularity
| contest and that's being generous. No sane politician would
| ever remove something providing a benefit until well after
| it's outlived it's usefulness.
| king_magic wrote:
| I'm fine with subsidies for nuclear power given the absolutely
| terrifying stakes of unchecked climate change.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| Yes, I'd much rather that my taxes go to an up-front long
| term investment than have it blown away reacting to something
| that could have been prevented!
|
| It's a good investment for taxpayers, unlike subsidizing dino
| juice.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| Nuclear is expensive because of regulatory interference. The
| NRC literally has a mandate to increase cost.
|
| If nuclear had to compete with coal on actual safety, nuclear
| would already be cheaper than coal.
| koheripbal wrote:
| The notion that there are large subsidies for fossil fuels is
| not backed up by the data.
|
| There are currently more subsidies for solar and wind.
| r00fus wrote:
| This is laughable. What do you call the $5T+ cost of the Iraq
| Wars if not a direct subsidy for oil.
|
| Hell the 2003 invasion was originally called "Operation Iraqi
| Liberation" - before that blatant of an acronym was deemed
| unseemly.
| Tostino wrote:
| Yeah, just got down-voted for stating the exact thing in a
| different part of the thread.
|
| It's amazing that this is being glossed over now when it
| was such a major part of public discussion at the time.
| Seems like someone pushing an agenda.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The notion that there are large subsidies for fossil fuels
| is not backed up by the data.
|
| The absence of Pigovian taxes to internalize te environmental
| externalities is a _de facto_ subsidy equal to the value of
| the externalized negative impacts (it 's paid by society at
| large through the externalized impacts rather than through
| government, but the impact is the same.)
| moreira wrote:
| Calling it a subsidy makes it seem like it's something
| governments are doing on purpose. That they can easily say
| "this subsidy has expired, we're not giving it to you
| anymore". That is not the case.
|
| Implementing a new tax for CO2 emissions is a much, much
| bigger political endeavour than simply letting a subsidy
| expire and not renewing it.
|
| That's why there's not much value in perverting language to
| somehow argue that fossil fuels are subsidised. They are
| not, there's no way to "remove subsidies from their dirtier
| competitors", as the parent poster suggested.
|
| There is a way to tax CO2 emissions, but that's a different
| discussion altogether.
| Tostino wrote:
| I think you view subsidy a little too narrowly. I'd be
| inclined to toss in a good chunk of the money spent in
| Iraq over the past ~20 years as a fossil fuel (and
| military complex) subsidy.
| akvadrako wrote:
| That doesn't make any sense. US is a net petroleum
| exporter and the cheapest fuel comes from domestic
| natural gas.
| natch wrote:
| Domestic natural gas is only "cheap" because the
| government is allowing frackers to extract resources from
| the commons without paying for the costs of the problems
| they cause.
|
| "Cheap" in quotes because anyone who thinks it is cheap
| is not accounting for some significant hidden costs.
|
| The tragedy of the commons applies here. If you are not
| familiar with that, it's worth looking up. I'll assume
| you are.
|
| Government can have a role in mitigating the tragedy of
| the commons by having the industry pay for the problems
| they create.
|
| Or government can look the other way, which is a defacto
| subsidy.
|
| We didn't used to be a net exporter. Part of the reason
| fracking even got the traction it has now is that
| government was alarmed by how much money they were paying
| for the oil wars, and got desperate for any way to stop
| the bleeding.
| Tostino wrote:
| Just because you don't think it makes sense doesn't mean
| it wasn't one of the rationales for the war. https://en.m
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_Iraq_War#O...
| suster wrote:
| Firstly the US was not a petroleum exporter at the time
| of the Iraq wars.
|
| Secondly, one take on the Iraq war was that it happened
| not to obtain fossil fuel resources, but rather to obtain
| control over them, and prevent them being exploited in a
| way which threatened the interests of US and/or Saudi
| oil.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Calling it a subsidy makes it seem like it's something
| governments are doing on purpose.
|
| Governments are not unaware of the environmental impacts,
| so that impression is accurate.
| natch wrote:
| This assertion doesn't even pass the laugh test.
|
| Massive repeated bailouts for the fossil fuel auto industry,
| gutting of EPA regulations to redefine pollution so as to let
| oil and gas and auto industries avoid financial
| responsibility for the pollution and other environmental
| damage (fracking quakes for example) they cause, and multi-
| trillion-dollar decades-long wars and military engagements
| all in the service of oil and gas, taxpayer funded, would beg
| to differ with your claim.
| cameldrv wrote:
| The subsidy is that they get to emit CO2 for free.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| Join the club? I mean, if they're doing it for free then we
| all are - if we're paying then so are they.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Yes, that's why taxing carbon would be useful; it
| encourages all emitters to find solutions in parallel.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I support serious measures to address climate change and oppose
| anything that gets in the way of such measures. If the
| government wants to give a free pony to people who installs
| solar panels, that's fine by me. More optimal policies are
| preferably, of course, but that's a secondary concern.
|
| Right now, it seems the most likely outcome is that we keep
| using fossil fuels, so I'm desperate for _anything!_
|
| (The exception are measures such as banning plastic straws,
| which I oppose because it's actually a significant
| inconvenience--which means spent political capital--but will do
| exceedingly little for the planet.)
| exabrial wrote:
| Couldn't say it better. Subsidies don't work out the way you
| want. Look at ethanol: it's an incredibly dirty fuel source
| (using tons of diesel to make "fuel", smart!) but the ethanol
| lobby and unions have entrenched themselves permanently so its
| not worth the fight.
| telchar wrote:
| What unions are involved in ethanol? That's primarily the
| corn farmer/big ag corps' interest.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| It just occurred to me that the EV transition will also
| affect food prices, that should be interesting. Big agro and
| big oil batting against it. Not sure how we are making even
| the little progress we are.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Indeed, 40% of US corn is used for ethanol so the potential
| effect could be huge. However, there's a lot of movement
| afoot in the ethanol industry for using carbon capture. My
| guess is given the Ag lobby biofuel will be retained for
| some time.
| macksd wrote:
| Clearly you don't know how to run up $28 trillion in debt.
| minikites wrote:
| >A better approach is to remove subsidies from their dirtier
| competitors.
|
| I see this argued a lot for many industries, has it ever
| actually happened for any of them? It doesn't seem realistic,
| but I'd love to be wrong.
| superkuh wrote:
| Nuclear power in the united states can never be economical
| because the laws are designed to make it so. I am not being
| hyperbolic. Literally, the standards call for all emissions to be
| ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable.
|
| https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
|
| > This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize
| that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power
| to be cheaper than its competition. Nuclear can't even innovate
| its way out of this predicament: under ALARA, any technology, any
| operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply
| gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more
| stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to
| make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else.
| Actually, it's worse than that: it essentially says that if
| nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their
| job.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26836075
| dv_dt wrote:
| Nuclear makes little sense for climate targets. The construction
| is too expensive and too slow - allocating capital to nuclear
| ends up slower than allocating the same capital to renewables for
| hitting climate targets. If you look at reports of lifetime costs
| for utility scale energy, Nuclear is the most expensive and will
| likely remain so for the foreseeable future. Solar and wind is
| already 3-4x cheaper than nuclear, and by the time the decade is
| out it will likely be 10x cheaper even with attendant storage.
|
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
| Robotbeat wrote:
| There is no renewable energy source that is faster than simply
| maintaining existing nuclear capacity. Lots of nuclear power
| plants are at risk of closing. A small subsidy to keep them
| open until we build out sufficient renewables to shut down all
| fossil fuels is a freaking steal considering the effects of
| climate change.
| hinkley wrote:
| Solar and wind are nuclear power. We keep the reactor 93
| million miles away, in a huge gravitational containment system,
| and even so tens of thousands of people die from cancer caused
| by the radiation every year in the United States alone, despite
| two layers of shielding and multiple kinds of voluntary
| prevention protocols.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| That's only because nuclear hasn't seen serious investment in
| generations. That's why solar and wind has come down.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| Loan subsidies passed under GWB were supposed to result in a
| nuclear renaissance in the form of Westinghouse's AP1000 GEN
| III+ reactor. The 2 projects started under Obama have been
| unmitigated financial disasters. One was cancelled after
| spending $9B on a hole in the ground, the other is about to
| come online after going 2x+ over money and time budget.
|
| All other AP1000 projects in the US have been cancelled. No
| one in the US is going to order an AP1000 unless the
| government takes on construction risk.
| dv_dt wrote:
| China seriously invested in it heavily, met a modicum of
| success in building a wave of nuclear plants, but near the
| middle of the full plan decided to halt any new construction.
| I think even with low regulation, and a focused investment it
| was turning out more expensive than the alternatives.
|
| Personally, I think looking at the data so far, we should
| just stop investing in fission plants, continue research of
| fusion plants, but put a practical focus on building
| renewables to meet climate targets to get the most reduction
| for the buck.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| Casey Handmer has a related take:
| https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-
| pow...
|
| > The reason solar is winning is because the manufacturing
| technology can be iterated every six months, so the learning
| curve is much faster. Nuclear power plant technology is
| iterated roughly every 25 years, or twice in the lifetime of
| a plant. Many first generation plants are still operational,
| while few third generation plants have been commissioned, and
| fourth generation plants are still in the planning stage.
| Even if every design iteration was a factor of 10 better than
| the previous one, solar, iterating 50 times faster, could
| outdo this improvement over the same timescale with a mere 5%
| improvement per iteration. Since this is roughly the solar
| learning rate, we can now ask if each nuclear design
| iteration is 10x better than its immediate predecessor.
| Obviously not.
|
| There's definitely an argument that some part of that slow
| iteration speed for nuclear is political and unnecessary.
| Clearly if we built more plants they would iterate faster.
| But realistically at this point...is it going to happen?
| LaMarseillaise wrote:
| > Nuclear makes little sense for climate targets.
|
| I do not care only about the climate - I care about the
| environment. The entire planet should not be covered with solar
| panels and wind turbines. Whether or not it is more expensive,
| I support nuclear because it is the right thing to do.
| legulere wrote:
| Rooftop photovoltaics alone could produce 40% of US
| electricity: https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/eyes-on-
| environment/the...
|
| You don't need to cover the whole planet.
| LaMarseillaise wrote:
| Current US electricity. To decarbonize transportation and
| industry, we will need 200-300% more. That drops rooftops
| to 10%, and that does not account for night and winter
| (overbuilding and storage).
| bongobingo wrote:
| I've yet to see any renewable plan that could cover big
| northern cities.
|
| Where are we going to build a solar farm to cover NYC, DC, and
| Philadelphia? There is 9 hours of daylight in the dead of
| winter, and it's not exactly known for being sunny in January.
|
| NYC alone needs 11,000 megawatt hours per day. My back of the
| envelope fermi estimate is a solar farm covering approximately
| 16,000 acres. Forget the metro area, that's just for NYC.
| Probably double if you include the entire metro area.
|
| You aren't going to find that kind of land within 300 miles of
| NYC.
| ineedasername wrote:
| 1) Offshore wind
|
| 2) Rooftop solar
|
| 3) National grid improvements that make transferring power
| from renewable sources further away more efficient
|
| 4) There are massively huge areas of empty land within 100
| miles of NYC. This map shows roughly the 100 miles west of
| NYC. Take note of all of that unused space, which is most of
| it: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7560624,-75.4552232,17041
| 4m/...
| notJim wrote:
| Why is there a requirement that power be generated within 300
| miles? NYC already gets plenty of power from further away
| than that. With HVDC transmission, we can transmit power
| thousands of miles efficiently. PNW hydro power is used in
| LA, for example.
| burkaman wrote:
| First of all, did you look at a map? 300 miles from NYC gets
| you to upstate New York, or western Pennsylvania, or rural
| West Virginia. Second, NYISO, which covers New York State,
| already imports lots of power from Quebec, Ontario, New
| England, and PJM (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland,
| Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, and more).
|
| We do need more transmission (another thing the White House
| is working on: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-
| room/statements-releases...), but power import/export over
| long distances is already commonplace.
|
| Edit: And if you really want to look to the future, you could
| read the proposal for a North American Supergrid:
| http://northamericansupergrid.org/
| Wohlf wrote:
| You say 'did you look at a map' but have you looked at a
| topographical map? I don't see much room that isn't either
| protected forests or the Appalachian mountains, in some
| cases it's both.
| burkaman wrote:
| Well, I don't know enough about the industry to analyze
| specific locations, but it's easy to find real-world
| projects in upstate NY and elsewhere:
| https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2020/03/large-
| scale-so.... The projects named in that article will
| apparently get more than halfway to the "11,000 megawatt
| hours per day" estimate.
|
| Anyway, the more important point is that we already have
| large regional grids across the country, and while it's
| obviously nice to have generation and consumption close
| to each other, it's not a requirement.
| dv_dt wrote:
| offshore wind...
| strictnein wrote:
| You need baseload power. On a dark windless night, when
| everyone is charging their electric cars, you can't just have
| brownouts and blackouts.
|
| And sure, you can imagine a power grid that's smart enough to
| handle all of that, but implementation of something like that
| isn't any faster than the construction of more nuclear power.
| adrianN wrote:
| Most countries are pretty far away from the amount of
| renewables where you start requiring lots of storage. You can
| easily do 50% renewables for electricity with hardly any
| storage at all.
| Maximus9000 wrote:
| I agree, but not with the "50%" number.
|
| "Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large
| scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on
| intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of
| our electricity." Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy - 2010.
|
| https://grist.org/article/2010-02-22-energy-secretary-
| steven...
| legulere wrote:
| The how does Denmark manage 60%, and Germany 50%?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rene
| wab...
| minigab wrote:
| "This article is a list of countries and territories by
| electricity generation from renewable sources every year.
| Note that most countries import and/or export
| electricity, so the percentage figures do not reflect the
| percentage of consumption that is renewable based. "
| suster wrote:
| They export cheap wind-generated power to Norway when the
| wind is blowing, and import it back for a higher price
| when it isn't.
|
| Norway has a lot of hydro which they used the revenues
| from North Sea oil to install. (Their geography and
| population density also helps.)
| Maximus9000 wrote:
| Technically, from your own numbers... Denmarks
| intermittent renewables (wind + solar) is 43%. Germany is
| 34%. Biofuel & Hydro are not intermittent.
|
| I don't know, that's pretty impressive. Maybe they have
| international connectors with other countries? I think
| Germany buys Nuclear power from France? or maybe they
| have a super stable kind of wind.
| legulere wrote:
| Germany is a net-exporter of electricity to France.
| Especially in summer when nuclear reactors have to be
| shut down, because the water temperature in the streams
| they use already is too high or when the tide is too low,
| or in winter when the rivers freeze.
| class4behavior wrote:
| With renewables your base load comes from stored power or
| potentially trade; that is, connecting Americas to Africa or
| Asia.
|
| As long as you are able to scale your storage, you'll be able
| to fill it up with solar energy.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Increasingly, nations are analyzing their grid requirements
| and concluding that 100% renewables is feasible, the baseload
| concept ends up being a constraining requirement that nuclear
| plants levy upon the rest of a future grid design.
| belorn wrote:
| Here in Sweden we have a date when nuclear plants will be
| gone. We got a date for when internal combustion engines
| will be gone from the roads. We have a plan for when the
| sum of green exports of energy will exceed that of total
| consumption of energy.
|
| We do not have a date for when fossil fuels will be removed
| from the energy grid. No date, no plan, no strategy,
| nothing. What we do have is three distinct plans in order
| to address the stability problem from renewables.
|
| 1: Continuing subsidize fossil fuel plants to operate in
| ready mode for when demands exceeds that of renewables. Oil
| for now, natural gas in the future.
|
| 2: Expand the ability to buy fossil fueled energy from
| nearby countries for which we sell our green energy. One
| can pretend that the import of dirty energy does not exist
| if the total amount of green export over a year is higher
| than the import.
|
| 3: Future technology that does not exist yet and tend to
| change from year to year based on what currently sounds
| like interesting-but-decades-from-being-invested-in tech.
| This year it is wind to hydrogen in dedicated ocean
| windfarms with massive pipelines of hydrogen, burned in
| retrofitted natural gas power plants. It has the upside
| that more natural gas power plants (and pipelines for
| natural gas) can be built in the pretense that at some
| later date we can use that wind produced hydrogen if it
| ever get built.
|
| The result is investments and subsidies goes to mix of
| renewables and fossil fuels, which is a far cry from 100%
| renewables.
| dv_dt wrote:
| https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/C
| oun...
|
| I am reminded of the quote attributed to Arthur C Clarke.
|
| If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that
| something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but
| if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably
| wrong.
|
| There are scientists and engineers who say getting to a
| 100% renewable grid is possible.
| belorn wrote:
| Is it possible to create enough gas powered power plants
| and hydrogen storage facilities to have 100% of a nations
| capacity running for several weeks during the winter?
| Yes. Can it all be generated from ocean based windfarms
| with pipelines? Yes. Will it be cheap? No.
|
| Just the production side, the cost in a 2019 study put
| the numbers around $7-9 per kg of hydrogen. This does not
| take into the account the cost of the pipeline, the
| storage facility, or the gas powered power plant.
| Remember that return of investment only occurs when
| demands actually exceeds that of cheaper renewable
| production, unless government steps in and adds subsidies
| like it does today with oil.
|
| Is massive amounts of hydrogen a cheaper and safer
| alternative to nuclear? Given the lack of commercial
| built and operated hydrogen wind farms I suspect the
| answer is no on the commercial side. On the safety side
| it would be interesting to hear about operating large
| liquid hydrogen pipelines and storage facilities.
| coolspot wrote:
| Theoretically, yes.
|
| With enough batteries and 2x-3x power production over
| demand you can have 100% renewable grid.
|
| It might require to cut amazon forest and cover it with
| solar panels, but possible, yes.
| pfdietz wrote:
| One does not need 2-3x power production over (average)
| demand. With some combination of transmission, batteries,
| and (importantly) hydrogen storage, the overcapacity
| needed can be quite modest.
| infamouscow wrote:
| Are any of those nations comparable in both population and
| land mass to the US?
| adrianN wrote:
| Is there a reason to believe that a solution that works
| on the scale of a reasonably sized country suddenly stops
| working on the scale of a tight federation of states or
| comparable size?
| dv_dt wrote:
| As the Texas power outage demonstrated, the US grid is
| not monolithic. Having more interconnected regional grids
| actually makes it easier to get individual regions to
| high renewable percentages while allowing the market to
| continue to mature lower cost storage. Storage is
| slightly behind the solar manufacturing S-curve in terms
| of dropping costs, but once a number of EV supply plants
| start ramping up, I think that cost optimization will
| strongly drop storage costs.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Butter and guns my friend
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| You're not responding to the premise of the article: subsidize
| existing nuclear, not new nuclear. You're taking on an easier
| argument, but instead you need to clarify: how is allowing
| carbon-free existing nuclear fall due to price a good thing for
| the climate?
| dv_dt wrote:
| I am perhaps missing it, but my takeaway from the article was
| that doesn't seem to actually specify existing nuclear,
| preferring to talk about nuclear subsidy. If it were only
| existing nuclear I would mostly agree on keeping it save for
| certain certain end of life reactors (e.g diablo canyon built
| near an earthquake fault).
| ralala wrote:
| I guess you also don't need insurances for nuclear plants.
| Nobody will be able to pay in the worst case.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Actually, nuclear power plant operators have special
| liability protections:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Act
| class4behavior wrote:
| Nuclear power plants aren't just an all-or-nothing kind of
| risk. There is plenty that could go wrong and either halt its
| operations or affect its environment. For instance, a lot of
| plants increase the average temperature of the rivers they
| dump their cooling water in. That issue has become more
| threatening over time since climate change is doing the same.
| pydry wrote:
| US plants have to insure for disaster up to $200 million. The
| taxpayer is on the hook for the rest.
|
| In Fukushima total cleanup costs could go up to a trillion
| dollars : https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-
| final-costs-...
| tharne wrote:
| What could go wrong?
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Probably very little? Modern reactor designs do not have the
| same risk of catastrophic failure that older designs like the
| Fukushima plant had.
| tharne wrote:
| Folks thought the same thing about Fukushima at the time. If
| history has shown us anything, it's that we're consistently
| not as smart as we think we are.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| It is not as though the Fukushima operators were
| blindsided. They knew exactly what would happen if they
| could not restore power within a certain period of time;
| they could not restore power and the disaster proceeded as
| anticipated. What makes modern reactors different is that
| the worst case is not a catastrophe, and a loss of power
| does not cause a catastrophe. With older reactors the
| design philosophy was to make the worst case sufficiently
| unlikely; with newer designs the philosophy is to not have
| a catastrophic worst case.
| wffurr wrote:
| Note that this is for keeping existing reactors open, not build
| new ones.
| belorn wrote:
| The current strategy in many countries is to first generate as
| cheap energy as possible, and then subside alternative sources to
| be ready when the cheaper energy can't fulfill demand. The
| cheapest energy source get determined by market forces, while the
| alternative is about the government buying stability.
|
| I would suspect that the nuclear subsidies is taken from the
| later strategy and not the former. Companies can still compete on
| the market to produce the cheapest possible energy, while the
| government are moved away from fossil fuels and into alternatives
| that are clean and provide the desired stability for which
| existing subsidies are paying for.
| clomond wrote:
| Yeah While on one hand I am supportive of more money going to
| clean energy tech / infra build out, I can't help but be
| disappointed that this legislation ISN'T technology agnostic.
|
| We are at the point now where there are enough "options on the
| table" (solar, onshore offshore wind, hydro, nuclear, various
| storage applications ) that incentives should go towards the
| cheapest "clean electrons", regardless of technology. This way
| the money contributed as subsidy can go the furthest distance.
|
| Nuclear power's Achilles heel on the economics side are
| particularly problematic for new builds. With increasing
| construction costs (compared to declining solar and wind), an
| almost 10 year timeframe to build out, and potentially half a
| century operating lifespan, it can be hard to ultimately pencil
| out. That said, nuclear refurbs and upgrades of existing setups
| is probably a better direction, even if life extension is likely
| to be more limited.
| antattack wrote:
| Give green power a chance - fully invest in solar, kinetic energy
| power projects for 10 years and only then decide if nuclear power
| is needed.
| rangoon626 wrote:
| Yes, for ten years we should mine lithium in massive quantities
| and dump the toxic dirt into the waterways surrounding the
| mining sites.
| [deleted]
| asd4232 wrote:
| It's safer to invest both in green power and nuclear. As long
| as we get rid of fossil fuels ASAP it's a victory, we can
| always replace those nuclear plants with solar/wind in 50 years
| if that seems to make sense by then.
| doczoidberg wrote:
| what are we doing with the nuclear waste? I mean in reality not
| in theory. Aren't renewables cheap enough also with energy
| storage?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM2RxWtF4Ds
| EricE wrote:
| We should be burning it instead of burying a viable energy
| source.
| typeformer wrote:
| This won't end well
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Maybe they could sneak the funding into the F-35 program.
| williesleg wrote:
| I like burning oil and shit.
| antattack wrote:
| The title should be:
|
| White House eyes subsidies for _existing_ nuclear plants to help
| meet climate targets.
| class4behavior wrote:
| You mean a title for those who don't read the article but still
| vote or comment as if they did? But as far as I know, the
| purpose of titles is to make you want to get the paper or visit
| the site and read the article, not fully summarize the topic. .
| Robotbeat wrote:
| If you want to treat climate change as an existential threat,
| then you do whatever it takes to keep all existing nuclear
| running until fossil fuel plants are gone from the entire
| continent. And you put a little money to subsidize/stimulate new
| nuclear on the off chance some of the advanced nuclear concepts
| work out (or as a backup in case renewables improve slower than
| we think).
|
| You don't have to stop or even slow renewables deployment to do
| this. They are fairly different industries with different
| workforce's, so there are resources to do both simultaneously
| without significant interference. And you're not going to get
| "too much" electricity as cheap abundant electricity will help
| accelerate decarbonization of other things like building heat and
| transport and industrial processes.
|
| Existing nuclear ESPECIALLY must be protected. And existing
| hydro. Number 1 and number 2 (tied with wind) clean energy
| sources.
|
| Nuclear power produces as much energy in our country as coal. We
| can phase out coal twice as fast if we at very least keep nuclear
| around a few years longer.
| asdff wrote:
| It is so upsetting to see CA close down precious nuclear power
| plants, not because they have built a better alternative to
| using natural gas or other dirty fuels to cover this load, they
| haven't, but because it is unprofitable to do the required
| maintenance and necessary improvements.
|
| The need for profit is killing our planet. When it comes to
| basic essential things like shelter, energy, food, water,
| profit is pure parasitic loss and should be eliminated. These
| things really should run at a loss, considering these things
| generate all other economic activity there is, but we insist
| that they must be run privately and for profit.
| burlesona wrote:
| I mean, if everything runs at a loss, we eventually all
| starve to death.
|
| I think there's a big difference between running things "for
| profit," which I agree is not always necessary, and
| attempting to run things "cash flow positive."
|
| When we have resources like electricity that are very
| feasible to charge for, one of the best ways to make sure our
| overall system is operating efficiently and not just wasting
| resources is to charge for the resource and aim for slight
| cash-flow positive - the goal being to break even with a
| small margin for error.
|
| If break-even isn't economical under the current market
| rules, but something is a social good we want to maintain,
| like nuclear power, we can adjust the rules of the market.
| This actually makes sense for base load power, as we know
| there's a floor that we don't want to fall beneath, and
| renewables are so elastic that we sometimes fall below that
| floor. Plus the transmission network needs to be kept in
| balance, so we can't actually handle huge swings in power.
|
| But the solution here is not to say "profit is killing our
| planet," it's to fix the rules of the market to get the
| outcome we want. Profit, in general, is a good thing. But
| yes, sometimes the system gets into a state where bad
| outcomes are profitable, and we do need to fix that.
| minimuffins wrote:
| > and we do need to fix that
|
| I can't see any way of fixing it that doesn't entail
| interfering with the (supposedly) natural operations of
| profit seeking in the market.
|
| At some point we need a state (or somebody or something
| that is in charge and able to reconfigure and manage
| economic processes "from above"), some agent or authority
| to be able to say, "Build this. Don't build that. Do it
| even if it doesn't make any money." Or we'll eventually
| experience our own very profitable self negation.
| hexane360 wrote:
| I think you and the parent comment actually agree quite a
| bit.
|
| The parent comment is saying "profit is killing our
| planet", and you're basically saying "markets aren't
| killing our planet". The resolution, of course, is that non
| profit-motivated organizations can exist and participate in
| markets.
| foxbarrington wrote:
| If the negative externalities that are killing our planet are
| included in the cost, those killers become less profitable.
| This can be done via taxes or other means.
| inopinatus wrote:
| Unfortunately, oligopolies invariably perceive such
| measures as incentive & opportunity for regulatory capture
| i.e. corruption, which resets progress.
|
| It follows that correcting the energy market requires also
| restructuring the sector.
| godelski wrote:
| When San O went down the Friends of the Earth rejoiced
| (activist group mentioned in the article). CA lost 8% of its
| power and put out an extra 10m tons of CO2 the following
| year.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Your comment is typical of the pro-nuclear stance where all
| of the failures are pinned on opponents. San Onofre Nuclear
| Generating Station wasn't closed because of Friends of the
| Earth. It was closed because the new steam generating tubes
| were wearing out two years after being installed. The
| regulators weren't about to let the operator run it as is.
| And the operator didn't want to pay to replace the steam
| tubes again. So they closed it.
| godelski wrote:
| It's possible you're reading something in my comment that
| I didn't intend.
| asdff wrote:
| >the operator didn't want to pay to replace the steam
| tubes
|
| How silly is that? This is kinda my point. 8% of power
| for the most populous state in the second most populous
| nation is no small amount. The operator didn't want to do
| the necessary maintenance, so we opt for a cheaper,
| objectively worse solution, instead of spending the money
| required to do the job correctly. It's not like it was
| physically impossible to fix San Onofre, the engineers
| know exactly what work is required to be done, but the
| beancounters in charge of the purse strings ultimately
| thought better and we are all worse off for it in ways
| that will costs us far in the longrun than this
| maintenance would have.
| jacobolus wrote:
| There are 8.5 million people within 50 miles of that plant,
| and it sits in a geological fault zone that can make large
| earthquakes. The plant is old, expensive to maintain, and
| inspections documented various safety concerns. If anything
| goes dramatically wrong it's going to be an incredible
| disaster.
|
| People can read about the closure etc. at https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_...
| godelski wrote:
| The problem is not that it got shut down for being old.
| The problem is that it didn't get replaced with a clean
| source of energy, be that nuclear or renewables. In the
| typical nuclear fashion the plant ran for far longer than
| it was designed for and people kept putting off
| replacements. I point this out because we need to think
| differently going forward.
| rapind wrote:
| Profit in general is not the problem. It's that we have no
| idea how to price externalities. If you could prove in court
| a correlation between coal production and disastrous weather
| events then you would enable massive class action suits
| against coal producers, eliminating any profit potential. No
| investor would go near it and the problem would solve itself.
| Guest42 wrote:
| I think that models from the reinsurance industry provide a
| certain amount of guidance as to the pricing of the
| externalities and they have been upping their premiums in
| recent years.
| laingc wrote:
| Well, we actually do know how to do this fairly well. An
| Emissions Trading Scheme is the way to go.
| sagarm wrote:
| > not because they have built a better alternative to using
| natural gas or other dirty fuels to cover this load, they
| haven't, but because it is unprofitable to do the required
| maintenance and necessary improvements.
|
| Solar and wind are pervasive and cheap in California. If
| nuclear is no better for the environment and more expensive,
| why should it keep running?
|
| The whole "profit" thing is a way to manage scarce resources,
| i.e. minimize waste. That's exactly what we want.
|
| You're right that for basic needs like shelter, energy, food,
| and water, we shouldn't accept that some people might have to
| go without. So we have tipped the scales through programs
| like section 8, progressive energy rates, EBT, etc to get
| that outcome will still seeing other resources efficiently
| used.
| likpok wrote:
| The competition isn't "nuclear vs renewables", California
| is not going to not build renewables (it got 40% of it's
| utility-scale energy from them in 2018!). It's what you do
| about the rest: over half of CA's energy comes from natural
| gas. If you can keep nuclear alive longer, you can use the
| renewable growth to draw down fossil-fuel energy. If you
| don't, you need to replace the nuclear energy before you
| can start decomissioning any gas plants.
| suster wrote:
| If your long-term goal is a maximum of renewables, there
| is a significant difference between nuclear and natural
| gas.
|
| Nuclear generation can't react to changes in demand very
| fast and so doesn't play well with large amounts of wind
| generation. It's ok with solar, because you can predict
| night-time 8 hours in advance, which is optimal for
| ramping up nuclear generation.
|
| Combined-cycle gas turbines, while they do use fossil
| fuels, are the most carbon-efficient way to get
| electricity from fossil fuels, and can quickly react to
| changes in demand.
|
| So while I agree with the point about not getting rid of
| nuclear too fast, both nuclear and natural gas have their
| place in moving to mostly renewables. Natural gas could
| especially be important if it allows other fossil-fuel
| burning, eg for transport, to be replaced by electricity
| generated with non-zero but low carbon emissions.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > If nuclear is no better for the environment and more
| expensive, why should it keep running?
|
| 40% of power in CA is generated with natural gas. If you
| can close the nuclear power plant and replace it with the
| equivalent amount of solar and wind, you should just keep
| the nuclear plant open and build that amount of solar and
| wind anyways.
| epistasis wrote:
| Nuclear really is not that precious when it comes to solving
| climate change. We have undergone a massive tech shift, the
| consequences of which have not filtered out into many
| academic models.
|
| Seemingly just in time, solar, wind, and storage are scaling
| both in production capacity and in falling costs to solve our
| climate problems. These will be the backbone of getting to
| 80% carbon free electricity in the next decade, and 0% carbon
| not that long after. This will be far cheaper than any other
| source of energy generation we can use, and will save us
| massive amounts of money.
|
| One of the better grid modelers out there, Christoper Clack,
| who has no opposition to nuclear and in the past has made
| strong arguments for it being a cheaper way to get to 0%,
| also has an amazing new mode out this year that says we
| should do something very unintuitive: deploy massive amounts
| of distributed solar and storage close to power meters (e.g.
| on people's homes). This will result in a much stronger
| distribution grid that can both shave peaks of demand,
| resulting in far less very costly distribution
| infrastructure, and which will empower far even cheaper
| deployment of larger amounts of utility-scale solar and wind
| in future decades.
|
| Nuclear would be nice if it weren't so expensive, and if it
| were our only option we should keep it around, but there's
| little reason to create make-work when we have cheaper
| options, and options that will have additional benefits for
| the grid such as greatly increasing reliability and
| resilience. Massive distributed solar and storage will create
| an absolutist rock solid grid that will be able to weather
| disruptions far better than one with large generators that
| become almost like single points of failure.
| minimuffins wrote:
| > increasing reliability and resilience
|
| I'm far from well versed in this area but I was under the
| impression that renewables really suffer in this
| department. The lifespan of a wind turbine is about 20
| years. We don't know exactly what the lifespan of a nuclear
| plant is but it's certainly longer than that. And of course
| the availability on solar and other "harvesting" type
| mechanisms can be inconsistent, up and down as a function
| of weather, etc. What am I missing?
| japanuspus wrote:
| Wind turbines have a design lifetime of 20 years, but
| most will last much longer (source: I work at a large
| offshore wind company).
|
| There are two reasons why everything is still built for
| 20 years: Firstly, there is not pressure on the projects
| to increase lifetime, because the deprecated value today
| of further production in year 21 is basically zero.
| Secondly, the turbines we installed 20 years ago were so
| small that there is really no reason to keep them going.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Decommissioning nuclear is pain in the ass though. A
| turbine can be recycled - everything but the concrete.
|
| And I think that you have some serious metal fatigue in
| some critical nuclear reactor core components.
| epistasis wrote:
| Germany saw a huge increase in reliability over the past
| decade as it increased its renewable percentages. Old-
| timers said that anything above 5% renewable would cause
| grid collapse, then kept on shifting up the percentage as
| renewables increased on the grid and no disasters
| happened.
|
| It does require running the grid differently. But part of
| that is becoming more responsive to constantly changing
| conditions, and a grid that it used to that will have far
| fewer problems then one where a GW reactor trips off
| because of some sensor problem (as happened in Texas). As
| we get closer to 80% renewable grids, then we will be
| used to running backup natural gas plants to keep
| everything running. And the ultimate in resilience and
| reliability will happen as we add more storage. With
| batteries everywhere, we will have buffering all over the
| grid that will make it far far easier to make sure
| everybody has power, and to limit outages to the smallest
| areas possible.
|
| The first year of power shut offs for PG&E's public
| safety in the face of high wind and fire conditions
| covered massive areas. This last year they covered far
| less, as they could focus the power shut offs far better
| with an extra year of work. This sort of finer grained
| granularity and control is what happens as more
| renewables and storage will be added to the grid, as we
| update this impressive machine that we started building a
| century ago. Adding modern communication and control will
| come along with more storage, demand response, and home-
| to-grid power from solar.
| 2trill2spill wrote:
| I think your missing the point of the above poster. Why get
| rid of nuclear power until its replaced with some other non
| carbon polluting source? It just raises the amount of co2
| going into the atmosphere. If all renewable energy grids
| work, great. But don't replace nuclear with fossil fuels,
| like California, Vermont and many others have done.
| epistasis wrote:
| No matter when the nuclear is shut off, it's going to
| cause an instantaneous uptick in fossil usage, because
| that's the dispatchable power we use. Even if you plug in
| an extra 4GW of solar/wind to the grid before you turn
| off the nuclear, the event of turning off the nuclear
| reactor will still make it look like fossil fuel have
| replaced it. (That is, until storage becomes the
| dispatchable replacement not only for peaker plants, but
| also for open cycle or combined cycle natural gas).
|
| The event that is precipitating CA's shutdown has been
| planned for more than a decade. And the cost of keeping
| the nuclear plant would be $7B-$14B, before any of the
| inevitable cost increases that accompany large
| construction projects. $7B for solar and storage will
| easily replace nuclear. At $1/W for solar, and $250/kWh
| for storage, $7B will buy 4GW of solar and 12 GWh of
| storage, and cost overruns are unheard of for solar and
| storage installations.
| zby wrote:
| Not discussing with the falling cost of solar and wind -
| but recently I have read a good argument about why nuclear
| is expensive:
|
| """ Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to
| a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably
| Achievable. What defines "reasonable"? It is an ever-
| tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant
| construction and operation are in the ballpark of other
| modes of power, then they are reasonable.
|
| This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize
| that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear
| power to be cheaper than its competition. """
|
| https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
| belorn wrote:
| In every discussions like this I see so much hope and
| wishes in regard to storage, and yet we are so far away
| from having commercial viable solutions to be combined with
| wind.
|
| Current state of the art storage with solar is commercial
| viable around 75% capacity for 4hrs, with a charge cycle of
| 24 hours. Those numbers are a good improvement over 0%
| storage, but there is a good reason why there are not a
| single commercial operated wind farm that use the same
| technology. Wind does not have a 24hr charge cycle, and
| 4hrs of 75% capacity does not do much when there first
| several weeks of good weather followed by several weeks of
| bad weather.
|
| When northern European countries plans for stability, we
| are not talking about hours. This is why oil power plants
| get subsidized in countries who invest heavily in wind
| power. The reserve energy source need to be profitable
| while the weather is creating negative energy prices,
| regardless for how long such period last, because afterward
| you will need a lot of it to be available for an equal long
| period of time. This is the problem that storage need to
| solve and have yet to find any suitable commercial viable
| answers. You could improve the economic viability of
| current batteries used in PV by 1000% and it would still
| not be economical viable for wind.
|
| When it comes to individuals and personal homes, the answer
| that most experts seems to conclude on is that solar and
| storage is something which comes after more fundamental
| improvements such as heat exchanges and replacing internal
| combustion engines with electric ones. Solar and batteries
| are nice, but the planet is still going to be quite damaged
| if we continue burning massive amount of coal, oil and gas
| in order to generate power that electric heaters demand
| during the winter.
| epistasis wrote:
| However far away storage is from commercial viability,
| it's far closer than with nuclear.
|
| Costs are dropping so rapidly that typical 5-year
| timelines for utility planning and procurement is running
| into some problems. People who make bids have to
| anticipate their costs in the future, so there's
| considerable betting going on.
|
| Agreed on the heat pumps versus fossil heat. I moved in
| the past few years, and replacing all the natural gas is
| my first task before installing solar. By replacing
| natural gas with a heat pump, my total energy consumption
| has plummeted drastically. However, my utility charges
| only about 15% as much for a unit of natural gas energy
| as it does electrical energy, which eliminated the cost
| savings! So now that I better know my total energy
| consumption the switch to solar will happen very soon,
| and save me a ton of money.
| 7952 wrote:
| Battery storage is being built right now in the UK and
| there is a large pipeline of new projects. And scaling up
| is comparatively easy. It is ridiculously modular, suited
| to mass production, and piggy-backs on the global
| electronics industry.
|
| I wouldn't get hung up on paring battery storage with a
| particular generation technology. Just connect it to the
| grid and let the market decide when to charge and
| discharge.
|
| One good reason for colocating battery storage with
| renewables is that you get to share the grid connection.
| That connection can be expensive and will be under
| utilized due to intermittency. So store some of the
| energy in batteries and spend less money on expensive AC
| cables. You can even reverse the flow and take energy
| from the grid.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Also, they can share the inverter(s).
| zbrozek wrote:
| At least in California, the utilities are trying to make
| that distributed generation unattractive through lobbying.
| I'm slowly working towards getting myself off grid to avoid
| the tyranny of PG&E.
| epistasis wrote:
| 75% of my electricity bill is transmission and
| distribution charges. It's beyond preposterous.
| samatman wrote:
| This is still pitting two cooperative undertakings against
| each other, and we really shouldn't do that.
|
| The thing is, we want more power. Like, a lot more power.
| Power is wealth, there is an unlimited number of good
| things we can do with it.
|
| Nuclear power is qualitatively about the best power you can
| have. Absolutely enormous amounts, available on demand,
| constantly. You just can't beat it.
|
| We should heavily subsidize reasearch and development on
| new nuclear energy, until we have ten times as much nuclear
| power as we have now.
|
| And we should do that in parallel with building out so much
| solar that we can rapidly retire coal completely, because
| we want to do that in ten years and that is completely
| feasible with solar + batteries. The new nukes will barely
| be coming online when that happens.
|
| But the 40s will be a renaissance of human culture if we
| have that nuclear power.
| epistasis wrote:
| Agreed that the 2040s have great potential due to
| massively cheaper energy and lots of it, but I disagree
| that nuclear will contribute much. I'm not convinced that
| nuclear has such great qualities compared to renewables
| plus storage, and I think the only reason this is not
| more commonly held is that people have not yet
| internalized a world with storage at the prices we will
| see it within 5-10 years.
|
| Battery storage can scale large, but more importantly, it
| can scale really small. This means that you can throw a
| couple shipping containers of it at one side of a
| congested transmission link, and save tons of money. It
| means that we can make all our houses self reliant for
| hours at a time.
|
| Storage will help us solve the problem of transmission
| lines causing massive wildfires. It will provide massive
| reliability and resilience across the grid. Small nuclear
| won't help much with that, unless is also paired with
| storage.
|
| If nuclear can provide electricity at rates competitive
| with solar and wind, then storage will help nuclear too.
| But if nuclear is not beating the cost of solar and wind,
| then we will have less wealth if we spend our labor
| building nuclear than if we build renewables and storage.
|
| A world built on solar wind and storage will probable
| have peak power capacity 2x-4x more than we need, with
| 2-3 days worth of storage. The ratio between power and
| storage will largely depend on the relative costs of
| storage versus power.
|
| And I think it's time to start thinking about the sort of
| word where we have an over abundance of energy that
| renewables will provide. We will have lots of excess
| energy being produced, and with the right applications
| that can tolerate intermittency, that excess energy will
| incredibly cheap.
| chelical wrote:
| People keep touting the low cost of renewables plus
| storage, but this is incredibly misleading when most
| regions (Germany, Denmark, California, etc.) that have
| high renewable adoption have some of the most expensive
| electricity in the world.
|
| Storage (especially at the current rate of growth) is
| nowhere close to meeting our capacity needs for a 100%
| renewable grid. We can't store enough energy for a single
| day of consumption. Keep in mind we would need to store
| enough energy to handle long periods of low production.
| We're an order of magnitude away from that. On top of
| that, the vast majority of global energy storage is not
| actually provided by batteries, but by pumped-storage
| hydro (expanding this capacity would run into
| environmental issues and physical limitations; we don't
| have enough water in convenient locations).
|
| Battery tech seems way off from providing us the needed
| capacity. Even Tesla is bottlenecked by battery
| production. We'd need to see Moore's Law level growth to
| have enough storage capacity to mitigate climate change,
| but we're only seeing 30% to 40% growth, which is just
| not enough given that it's currently less than a fraction
| of a percent of our total energy storage needs for 100%
| renewable power.
|
| People are also seriously overestimating the time table
| needed to build a nuclear power plant. India, China, and
| Russia have been able to build plants in a few years vs
| 10 years in the West. If we're not pushing nuclear now,
| we'll be burning coal and natural gas for the next
| century.
| samatman wrote:
| Even if it loses the race, we should subsidize research
| and development right now.
|
| This is too important to leave to the back of a napkin,
| is what I'm saying. Breakthroughs in nuclear energy would
| be a big win. The aesthetic and ecosystem costs of
| transforming hundreds of square kilometers of desert into
| solar farms are bearable, but they're real.
|
| The power yield of solar panels in the Belt is also not
| superb given the launch costs. Pretty dangerous to go
| blasting uranium into space on top of a rocket, no matter
| how reliable, but we can go to where the uranium is, for
| the most part.
|
| We don't want to be behind the curve when that time
| comes. Extracting metals from Earth's surface is just
| going to get more environmentally noxious and less
| profitable, as we work through the good veins. We might
| luck out and find a few more rich lodes, but we shouldn't
| count on it, and mining in the ocean is a whole
| unexplored world (just like the Belt): it's closer, but
| it's also an ecosystem, and water is capable of spreading
| solid pollution quite a bit more promiscuously than the
| air is. Groundwater and surface water leaching from mine
| tailings is already very bad, we don't want that
| happening in the ocean. We only have one of those and we
| already beat it up pretty badly.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > Battery storage can scale large ...
|
| This is a lie at our current technology levels.
| LaMarseillaise wrote:
| > They are fairly different industries
|
| Funding for each may actually benefit the others. For example,
| FLiBe salt is being considered as a coolant in some Gen IV
| fission, as well as compact fusion and concentrated solar.
| Production will increase if there is a definite market for it,
| making it easier to obtain.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Annual world production of beryllium is around 200 tonnes.
| Any solution using FLiBe is not scalable.
|
| I very much doubt FLiBe was ever seriously considered for
| solar applications.
| whatisthiseven wrote:
| What about economies of scale? Wouldn't we expect as demand
| rose, more suppliers and production would also come about?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Total world Be resource is estimated to be 100,000 tons,
| although that's likely an underestimate. Still, the MSRE
| (a 7.4MW(th) reactor) used about a ton of beryllium in
| the fuel and secondary coolant salts. The world would
| need several million times the thermal power output of
| the MSRE to replace fossil fuels.
|
| The ARC fusion reactor concept would require even more Be
| per MW(th) of output.
| splithalf wrote:
| Except budgets by definition are limited. We cannot do all the
| things all the time. Sorry to be a buzzkill but we need adult
| minds on this problem, not simpletons who can't understand how
| limited our options are at this point.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| >cheap abundant electricity will help accelerate
| decarbonization of other things
|
| Thinking about them Dogecoins
| surajs wrote:
| achievement unlocked, but seriously, not a single mention of
| fuckushima this deep in the discussion, oh how quickly they
| grow up!
| djdjdjdjdj wrote:
| Do you have a calculation on how much renewable you could make
| if you remove the subsidies?
|
| Nuclear is 4 times more expensive, it would be interesting to
| know if we could boost renewable much further much faster.
| setBoolean wrote:
| Germany would like a word about that.
| starkd wrote:
| This is a good provision, but they are going to have to
| aggressively promote new sources of nuclear power, if they are
| going to feed all the new Electric Vehicles coming online AND
| replace coal. Not just keeping old aging plants operating.
| throwaway_isms wrote:
| >If you want to treat climate change as an existential threat
|
| Chasing that rabbit down the hole, what happens if the US does
| wean off fossil fuel entirely, but countries like Russia and
| China continue (and say it is projected to increase 400X like
| China in the last 30 years). Then its an existential threat,
| does that mean use of force, or limit ourselves to diplomatic
| means that will ultimately fail and just accept the resulting
| existential outcome? Does the analysis change when it is a less
| diplomatically controversial Country such as India?
|
| Alternatively what if those Countries beat the US to weaning
| off fossil fuel and determine overnight any continued US use of
| fossil fuel is an existential threat and act of war?
|
| It sounds like hyperbole but I remember when the US began
| regulating incandescent light bulbs and it was floated by
| certain media outlets as an attack on freedom and liberties. We
| have literally seen murders of people telling others to wear a
| mask during the pandemic, and I watched a news segment claiming
| a normal year sees 150-300 FAA incidents on planes and we have
| seen 1,300 already this year mostly related to passengers
| refusing to wear masks and many times escalating to attacks on
| the airline workers for attempting to enforce the CDC mask
| guidelines. We live in violent and chaotic times, where
| millions and millions of people allow themselves to be worked
| up into mobs by a media that does it willfully and
| deliberately. I don't see it as an easy transition domestically
| much less globally, and those in power don't care about the
| science but seem to froth at the mouth for this kind of
| discontent.
| jokoon wrote:
| It's time we understand that renewables have a poor benefit/cost
| ratio when you compare it to nuclear.
|
| Renewables + batteries will NEVER supply enough energy in a world
| that will require more electricity if it uses electric vehicles
| and move away from fossil fuels. The coal and gaz industry love
| renewables because you NEED gaz and coal if there's no wind or
| sun.
|
| Please look at the number.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| My understanding that is wind/solar are significantly cheaper
| than nuclear is on a cost basis. The costs required to build
| and safely dismantle nuclear plants are major cost
| contributors. The downside of course is lack of baseload, which
| nuclear can cover quite happily, albeit at a higher cost.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Which is an unfair point because we have yet to see what
| costs are associated with safely dismantling and replacing
| all those miles upon miles of solar panels and wind turbines
| will be. Nuclear has been deployed on a larger scale for a
| long time so the costs are known.
|
| How many miles of solar panels, wind turbines, and battery
| backup are needed to produce the same amount of energy as a
| single nuclear plant? I imagine if you do the math at scale,
| it turns out to be negligible, if not more expensive for
| renewables.
| bjourne wrote:
| Old wind power plants are often repowered. Wind turbines
| that have reached their EOL are replaced with newer and
| more efficient ones, significantly incrasing the output of
| the plant:
|
| > "Repowering is happening and will increase. It's a great
| opportunity to get more energy from today's wind farms.
| Repowering reduces the number of turbines by a third while
| tripling the electricity output. And it preserves the
| existing wind farm sites which often have the best wind
| conditions. Governments need repowering strategies that set
| the right framework and ensure efficient permitting
| procedures for repowering", says WindEurope CEO Giles
| Dickson.
|
| Most of the material used in wind turbines can be recycled:
|
| > Wind turbines are a valuable source of resources which
| can be reused in the circular economy. 85-90% of a
| dismantled wind turbine are recycled today, including the
| towers, foundations, generators and gearboxes. Most of
| these materials are made up of concrete, steel and cast
| iron which are easy to recycle and for which there is an
| active circular economy market in Europe.
|
| https://windeurope.org/newsroom/press-releases/what-
| happens-...
| dukeyukey wrote:
| We've been running electric wind turbines for 70+ years
| (and non-electric for thousands) at this point, the costs
| are well-known. Less so for solar panels, but still
| decades. And the bonus here is that neither can fail
| catastrophically the way nuclear plants do.
|
| As for size, sure, nuclear plants are more compact. But you
| can't build nuclear plants on top of people's houses, or in
| the North Sea. Investors and actuaries have done the math,
| and renewables are just plain cheaper per Kwh, at least in
| today's landscape.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| This rebuttal doesn't measure up.
|
| You can't compare wind turbines from 70 years ago to
| today. (I noticed the convenient deemphasizing of solar
| farms. Look up issues with abandoned solar farms.)
|
| The last point is moot. Land is abundant in America. I
| also question the hand-wavy "investors have done the
| math"
| EricE wrote:
| No kidding. Search for abandoned wind farm - it's pretty
| frighting. Fiberglass is not easy to recycle.
|
| Same with solar cells. I see them putting up thousands of
| acres of solar cells in the Nevada desert - will be fun to
| see what happens 20 years from now. Local cities who leased
| the land out to those farms are making money now - but are
| they going to get stuck with an expensive clean up if those
| companies go bust in 20 years because the market changes,
| subsidies have ended, etc? It's nuts.
| FredPret wrote:
| Besides the material wastage you mention, also think of the
| habitat destruction this causes. One small nuclear plant
| can replace many acres of noisy, ugly, inefficient and
| bird-killing windmills and panels
| EricE wrote:
| If wind farms are so wonderful why isn't there a huge one
| off the coast of Martha's Vineyard?
|
| People bristle at terms like "virtue signal" - here's an
| opportunity for our "elites" to show some real
| leadership.
|
| I won't hold my breath.
| jhgb wrote:
| > inefficient
|
| Ironically, wind _turbines_ are more efficient than
| nuclear power plants. Solar panels are not, but at least
| they do direct energy conversion from sunlight (whereas
| the nameplate efficiency of nuclear power plants
| additionally ignores the requirements of the fuel
| processing chain that starts with removing mountains of
| ~500ppm ore these days).
| jcrben wrote:
| But are they cheaper when you add the batteries? Doubtful. I
| hear maybe by 2030.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/india/exclusive-india-may-
| buil...
| dukeyukey wrote:
| So run easily-tunable gas turbines when needed, nuclear if
| you need it, and renewables for the bulk of your energy.
| Perfect is the enemy of good here.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| That's not a particularly good solution, since it doesn't
| halt climate change. We're already starting to hit during
| peak renewable production in several states. We're
| reaching the point where those peaker gas plants are the
| main source of emissions that we're trying to eliminate.
|
| Renewables are better on a raw $/KW measure. But that's a
| naive way of assessing intermittent sources. Once you
| start saturating the market during peak production, only
| part of the newly installed capacity actually displaces
| fossil fuels. Non-intermittent sources of energy like
| hydroelectricity and nuclear power aren't subject to this
| constraint
| dukeyukey wrote:
| If nuclear can handle what we currently use gas for, all
| the better, and I'd be totally down with that.
|
| > We're already starting to hit during peak renewable
| production
|
| What do you mean by that?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Solar panels produce energy in a sine wave. Once the peak
| of the sine wave exceeds energy demand, you start hitting
| diminishing returns. The fluctuations in wind production
| are more complicated, but it's subject to the same
| problem. You can over-produce to make up for the troughs
| in energy demand, but the nature of overproduction means
| that a portion of generated energy goes to waste. This is
| already happening in California: daytime energy
| production is saturated.
|
| This is why most renewable plans assume that there will
| be some silver bullet that makes energy storage
| effectively free. Without some way to turn an
| intermittent source into a consistent source, it'll be
| very difficult to decarbonize with wind and solar.
| EricE wrote:
| That's the real problem today - there is no ability to
| compromise. Everything is a zero sum game :(
|
| Nuclear can replace fossil fuels today. If we finally get
| other renewables to a place where they can address issues
| like predictability and reliability, _then_ we look at
| de-commissioning nuclear.
|
| But preemptively removing a very viable tool from your
| toolset is just bananas.
| T-hawk wrote:
| Nuclear is more expensive per KWH basically entirely because
| of the regulatory environment. Not because of anything
| physical about the method or its fuel; it's not more
| expensive in France, for example. Get the costs of regulatory
| compliance down and nuclear becomes the cheapest power source
| for both capital and ongoing costs.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| France's reliance on nuclear is almost 100% government-and-
| geopolitics driven, to avoid relying on foreign states for
| energy imports, the market has little to do with it. I
| can't speak for how much regulation is needed or not, but
| given nuclear failure is catastrophic, I can see why we
| should err on the regulated side. Nuclear is incredibly
| safe, but only because we made it safe by spending on it.
| Solar/wind just doesn't have the same risk profile.
| Diederich wrote:
| I've been ardently pro nuclear for decades now.
|
| > Renewables + batteries will NEVER supply enough energy
|
| NEVER is a long, long time. We definitely need nuclear to step
| in for quite a while, but it's _plausible_ that we can be
| completely renewable and non-nuclear some time in the future.
| enaaem wrote:
| Some time can be a very long time. The goal of the current
| administration is to be net zero emission by 2050. If after a
| certain time, let's say 2025, there are no major break
| throughs in storage technology, then we have to start
| building nuclear plants. It's good that we are preparing for
| that scenario right now.
| Diederich wrote:
| > ... If after a certain time...
|
| Why wait? I'm quite aware of the various downsides of
| nuclear. Yes, it's currently expensive. But one way or
| another, every functional nuclear power plant displaces
| several natural gas and coal plants.
|
| It's really that simple.
|
| If we assume that CH4 and CO2 emissions have a strong
| chance of being an existential threat to our civilization,
| then we can make no other option but to embrace nuclear
| ASAP, even with all of its problems.
|
| At the same time, pour funding into research: there's all
| kinds of fission technologies that show promise in safety,
| cost and in minimizing byproducts.
|
| Even more important, pour funding into batteries and other
| energy storage technologies.
|
| As far as renewables have come, we they have hardly
| scratched the surface for base load requirements. Except
| for hydro in some locations.
| enaaem wrote:
| The time is just an example. But I see that you get my
| point. We need concrete climate goals. We can't wait
| forever for a breakthrough in storage tech to happen
| "someday". To meet these climate goals, there has to be a
| deadline, maybe even tomorrow, where we have to place a
| bet on nuclear.
| elicash wrote:
| It seems like everybody is. Obama admin, Trump admin were
| both pro-nuclear, too. Maybe the issue is that nobody wants
| it _near them_?
| philwelch wrote:
| I'm curious about the assumptions that lead to that
| conclusion. I suspect you're approaching this from a
| viewpoint of energy austerity; if we only consume so many
| gigawatts of power, we can sustainably supply that many
| gigawatts with renewables without needing any nuclear. Sure--
| but why would that be our goal? Why assume that we wouldn't
| have some valuable use for all the energy we can cleanly
| produce?
| Diederich wrote:
| > I suspect you're approaching this from a viewpoint of
| energy austerity
|
| Not really. I'm just saying that all renewable, non-nuclear
| is _possible_...some time in the future.
|
| Realistically, I think even in some kind of idealized
| future, there will be a lot of nuclear power in the mix.
| Hopefully it's safe, low cost and produces minimal harmful
| byproducts.
|
| In truth, if nuclear can get excellent enough, which is a
| real possibility, then it becomes effectively more clean
| than solar and wind, right? The energy density is so high,
| there is a LOT less to build.
|
| Given the choice between our land covered in solar panels,
| wind mills and battery farms, and a few very large but very
| safe and cost effective nuclear power plants....that choice
| gets pretty easy in my opinion. But I'll take the former as
| well, if needed.
| philwelch wrote:
| Sounds reasonable enough.
|
| > Given the choice between our land covered in solar
| panels, wind mills and battery farms, and a few very
| large but very safe and cost effective nuclear power
| plants....that choice gets pretty easy in my opinion. But
| I'll take the former as well, if needed.
|
| From my perspective, there are a lot of things that
| become significantly easier to do if we can produce as
| much energy as possible, ranging from synthesizing liquid
| fuels from air and water (chemically possible but energy-
| intensive) to extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and
| sequestering it in some sterile chemical sludge that we
| can pump into empty oil wells to large-scale water
| desalination (combined with removing the salt). And
| that's just in the realm of climate change and
| sustainability--we are also going to need energy to do
| new things, not just to do the same things we're doing
| now with less ecological impact, or even reversing the
| ecological impacts we've already caused.
|
| We're going to find productive uses of energy faster than
| we're going to be able to develop the energy production
| needed to sustain them. So I'm not sure we'll be given
| the choice--we'll need to do both. The main difference
| being that a high amount of nuclear baseload would
| obviate the need for batteries.
| Diederich wrote:
| Preach!
|
| Seriously large amounts of sustainably created energy
| opens all kinds of doors, and might actually be one of
| the only ways out of our current and upcoming climate
| crisis.
| xroche wrote:
| The other elephants in the room are (1) the material
| requirements (required metals, plastics, glass, electronics and
| reinforced concrete) per GWh, and (2) the required space per
| GWh (less space for buildings, fields or nature).
|
| And solar/wind are also "cheap" because they are mostly
| produced in mainland China, with coal and cheap labor
| (including "very cheap labor":
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/economy/china-
| so...). Not a very sustainable solution...
| hinkley wrote:
| At this point it seems like, for nuclear to play a big role
| in the future power mix, someone needs to fund a program to
| develop carbon neutral concrete that still meets or exceeds
| the construction parameters for part - or preferably all - of
| the concrete used in building these plants.
|
| Since they use so much of it, that would build up capacity
| for other uses, and the subsidy doesn't even have to
| necessarily go straight to nuclear power, which might improve
| the optics.
|
| Here's a discount for specialty concrete that only nuclear
| plants and hydroelectric dams would be interested in...
| beders wrote:
| That is not true. Not by a long shot. We don't need nuclear at
| all.
|
| https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Coun...
| smithza wrote:
| I would rather have seen downvoters approach the merits of
| this claim in comments first. We do not need HN to turn into
| devolving to _ad populum_ for every contentious topic.
| beders wrote:
| I was willing to take the downvote hits. This narrative of
| "we need a baseload" or "the sun doesn't always shine" is
| just not countered often enough.
|
| WWS would be sufficient for the majority of countries
| around the world including the US and all it takes is the
| political will to implement this. Not technology.
| EricE wrote:
| WWS doesn't work without your diverse and distributed
| sources being interconnected.
|
| Which they conveniently hand wave off since that was a
| subject for another paper.
|
| If they had confidence in their ideas, they would at
| least summarize the findings of that paper that justify
| their implying the grid as not being an issue in the
| practicality of their plan. For example: even if the grid
| is 100% reliable (which - spoiler - it's not), what are
| the sizing implications due to transmission loss? How do
| you get power across continents to have true geographic
| diversity? This paper presents all upside with no
| downside? Ha!
|
| Again, nice theory in a perfect world. We do not live in
| a perfect world.
| beders wrote:
| This is an article, not a paper.
| EricE wrote:
| Not sure how that distinction makes a difference. So it's
| an article that makes an incomplete and thus poor
| argument and not a paper that makes an incomplete and
| thus poor argument. Those are still equally bad.
| EricE wrote:
| lol at the irony of the downvote without a response :)
| EricE wrote:
| OK - here's a key question - where do they talk about base
| load and predictable generation? Indeed, they hand wave it
| off with "The present study does not examine grid
| stability, since it is evaluated in separate work".
|
| Well since they are countering the unreliable generation
| arguments with "unreliable generation isn't a problem if
| you have enough diverse sources" - if you can't
| interconnect those diverse sources then you don't have much
| of a solution, do you?
|
| Nice theory, zero discussion of how you make the theory
| practical reality.
|
| Edited after cooler head prevailed.
| pjc50 wrote:
| This is not reflected in the actual electricity market prices.
| EricE wrote:
| Drop the solar subsidies and then let's talk about "market"
| prices.
| adrianN wrote:
| There are many solar plants around the world that produce
| cheap power without subsidies.
| EricE wrote:
| Yup - but they aren't everywhere. Power transmission
| doesn't happen without loss.
|
| One of the many issues with solar that doesn't get
| addressed.
|
| Don't get me wrong - I'm a huge proponent of solar when
| it make sense. I grew up in the Desert Southwest so it
| can make a lot of sense there in particular.
|
| But solar is NOT a replacement for technology like
| nuclear energy.
| wtallis wrote:
| It's not clear to me how current market prices contain enough
| information to support or refute the assertion that
| renewables won't be able to supply enough for a hypothetical
| future where fossil fuels are no longer used even for
| transportation. I think you need to also demonstrate that
| renewable energy prices can remain low even when required to
| scale up significantly beyond current levels, and that we
| won't run out of locations amenable to cheap and easy
| deployment of wind, solar and hydro power.
| aspaceman wrote:
| There's a power plant near me that might be closing. Hope this is
| able to save them.
| exabrial wrote:
| If it's a 1950s-1960s design, it's probably best to let it
| close, or be retrofitted.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It takes long enough to build a nuclear reactor that it makes
| more sense to build it somewhere else than on the site of an
| operating reactor which is still viable to continue
| operations. Keep all the existing plants that can reasonably
| be kept operating online until after the last _coal_ plant is
| shut down, _then_ start retrofitting existing reactors.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| by then, it might be easier to retrofit them with solar
| panels and batteries, or H2 power to gas, who knows? Not
| joking, the lines and transformers are a very big part of a
| new plant cost, and you already have that setup in place.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| So retrofit the existing coal power plants into being new
| nuclear power plants.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| not sure that's going to work, because nuclear requires
| some massive concrete insulation bubbles. Also the
| cooling is wildly different, nuclear power plants are
| built on large bodies of water, If there isn't one,
| sometimes they built a large dammed lake to have enough
| water to cool down the reactors in case of an emergency.
|
| Instead, there are coal-> gas and coal->biomass
| retrofits. Gas works because the installations are TINY
| compared to coal. Look at Drax, this plan would have
| replaced the entire capacity of the coal plant.
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/30/uk-
| sued-...
|
| (I think the plan was dropped eventually).
|
| Nuclear to solar I think there is Chernobyl as an
| example.
|
| New nuclear is a challenge right now, because they're not
| standardized and the costs and timings are insane. Also,
| everyone wants nuclear, unless it's in their county. I
| think we have a good chance of seeing factory produced
| small nuclear reactors that are easier, cheaper and
| faster to install than what we have now.
| periheli0n wrote:
| What happened to nuclear being so much cheaper than coal? Is it
| really just subsidies for coal that tip the balance? Then the
| logical consequence would be to remove subsidies from that. But I
| suspect the "nuclear=cheap" mantra is not the end of the story.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Nuclear has very low marginal cost per watt produced, but has a
| very high upfront cost and very high cost for plant shutdown.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Nuclear promised to be cheaper than coal - but it never
| materialized - not in decades if ever.
|
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
| yaacov wrote:
| Nuclear is cheaper than coal, which is why coal market share is
| collapsing way faster than nuclear's is shrinking. But they're
| both having trouble competing against cheap gas and solar.
| cameldrv wrote:
| Nuclear is cheaper to operate, so existing reactors mostly
| keep running. Construction costs are high for nuclear though.
| Given the current interest rate environment, nuclear should
| be looking more attractive.
| periheli0n wrote:
| What is the TCO of nuclear, factoring in waste disposal and
| eventually cleaning up the site? The one thing Germany
| learnt from exiting nuclear, is that proper demolishing and
| removal of nuclear power plants is quite costly. Plus,
| there's nowhere to safely store the waste.
| molszanski wrote:
| Didn't France, a nuclear power plant "superpower" produce
| like only a half of Wembley Stadium of waste in like 50
| years?
|
| If this is a price of clean air and pushing the global
| warming further into the future we can build a couple of
| mini pyramids of nuclear doom and call it day.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Still you have to put that half Wembley stadium
| somewhere. It's not like you can just put it in landfill
| with the toxicity levels you get from some of the stuff
| is in the micrograms.
| molszanski wrote:
| I think humanity can build half a wembley stadium
| somewhere :) I can store some in my basement if that
| would help
| Manuel_D wrote:
| You dig a hole into impermeable bedrock, and put the
| waste there. Or if you're the Soviets, you just dump it
| into the Arctic ocean.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| I am pretty sure the reason is that France did not ban
| nuclear fuel reprocessing for several decades, and thus
| recycled large amounts of spent fuel elements. In the US
| reprocessing was banned and power plants built up large
| piles of spent fuel rods as a result.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Plus, there's nowhere to safely store the waste.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository#
| Nuc...
|
| There's also no good reason to dispose of waste at the
| moment, since we don't reprocess our nuclear fuel.
| Existing waste is a future source of fuel.
| ryan93 wrote:
| You can easily store waste underground, the democrats
| wouldnt allow it in arizona.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Storing nuclear waste safely underground requires having
| a rock formation that is geologically stable over
| 100,000+ years. Not easy to find. Otherwise the waste
| will eventually enter ground water and from there
| inevitably the food chain.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Where I live, coal is being used less not because of nuclear,
| but because of natural gas.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Due to increased regulation the capital cost of building
| nuclear power plants has gone up about 400% since 1970. It
| _was_ much cheaper than coal, but now it 's a wash.
| sradman wrote:
| > competition from plentiful natural gas, wind and solar power,
| which are rapidly becoming less pricey.
|
| No one questions whether the zero emissions target is rational.
| Natural gas in North America should complement the variability of
| wind and solar, IMO.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Nuclear energy is one answer to the question of how to supply
| 24/7 base load, especially in the night in all conditions.
|
| Cheap high capacity energy storage is needed to make renewables
| competitive as a base load. Until that happens, nuclear is better
| than goal or gas.
| jbunc wrote:
| LoL, 40 years too late. The irony is that if the anti-nuclear
| environmentalist movement hadn't had as much strength in the
| 80's, we would be electric carbon neutral and just have
| transportation to go.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _anti-nuclear environmentalist movement_
|
| This movement was heavily pushed along by the established
| fossil fuel power industry. It's much less "grass roots" than
| it appeared to be on a surface level.
| boringg wrote:
| Nuclear + Solar + Wind + Storage + Hydrogen + Biogas + Small
| hydro. Subsidize all of the above to the point that they are on
| an even playing field of coal and O&G (who are heavily
| subsidized).
|
| To everyone's point removing subsidies is politically challenging
| (especially as this is almost a red / blue state issue) - however
| subsidizing something else so that it has a competitive advantage
| is essentially the same thing albeit the money flow is a bit
| different.
|
| Edit: Why is this getting downvoted so much without any negative
| comments? weird...
| fighterpilot wrote:
| I ask this out of ignorance: How is coal heavily subsidized? Do
| you mean it's subsidized because they're not being charged for
| the emissions that they generate?
| belorn wrote:
| Direct subsidies are from deductions made on taxes and direct
| government investment into modernizing the equipment on older
| coal power plants.
|
| One way they do this is Percentage Depletion. A mine take out
| 10% of the available coal, they can deduct 10% of the value
| of the mine, to the point where the total deductions can
| exceed capital costs.
|
| There is also deduction that came about because they wanted
| to promote domestic energy production and reduce dependence
| on foreign energy fuel, which between the year 2002-2010
| awarded $12.2 billion in tax credit to coal alone.
| sacred_numbers wrote:
| I think that the lack of pollution taxes is the main subsidy,
| but it should not be brushed aside just because it is not a
| direct payment. Coal emissions (not just CO2) are really,
| really bad and kill many thousands of people every year.
| Imagine if the main source of organ transplants was
| kidnapping young people and stealing their organs. Now
| imagine that the government knew who was doing the kidnapping
| and just let them do it because it allowed for an abundant
| supply of cheap organ replacements. Not to mention, all of
| the kidnappers would be out of a job if the government
| cracked down.
|
| Coal power was probably a net benefit in the beginning, but
| there are much better alternatives now.
| belval wrote:
| There are actual direct subsidies for fossil fuels in the US
| mostly as preferential tax treatment.
|
| The Wikipedia page has a nice breakdown:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidy
| [deleted]
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Why subsidize those sources when they are taking over the
| market today?
| nsilvestri wrote:
| The faster we can move off of polluting sources, the better.
| exabrial wrote:
| I was very much for hydro until I joined a wildlife society in
| college and saw how incredibly destructive it is to habitats.
| boringg wrote:
| Agreed - hence small hydro! It takes the energy out of the
| river systems which very much need to keep that majority in
| there.
| exabrial wrote:
| I fail to see how "removing energy" from a river system
| isn't directly destroying a habitat. Things like water
| surges play an important role in create sand bars and other
| microhabitats. It's best to leave them alone.
| boringg wrote:
| I think you misread my comment. I was agreeing with you
| in that we need to keep the energy in the water systems.
| Only small hydro which doesn't destroy rivers /
| ecosystems make sense.
| gfiorav wrote:
| Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker, but verbs that could
| be nouns in a title always has me doing 3 takes to get it right.
| Kind of annoying.
| intrasight wrote:
| Even in the super unlikely case that we institute a (much needed)
| carbon tax, I just can't see nuclear ever being competitive in a
| free market. By "competitive" I mean no insurance subsidies.
| clieagle wrote:
| I guess subsidies make sense but I think it could make a lot more
| sense of the government acted as capital investors or something
| of the sort. Regardless I'm very curious to see how this goes.
| It'd be neat if they used thorium.
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