[HN Gopher] Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings re...
___________________________________________________________________
Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power
market
Author : hhs
Score : 456 points
Date : 2022-03-12 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| rdsubhas wrote:
| What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this _one_
| power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country 's
| electricity needs. 7 of these could power an entire country,
| 24/7.
| legulere wrote:
| If you have 7 of these and you find a flaw in its design you
| have to take down the power for the entire country. Something
| similar happened in France recently:
| https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/saf...
| Aachen wrote:
| If only we could have both types of energy source. Cover the
| gaps in solar/wind with nuclear, cover the gaps in nuclear
| with solar/wind. Sprinkle a small amount of pumped hydro and
| battery storage on top and what a world it could be.
| est31 wrote:
| Nuclear can't be shut down / turned on on a short term
| basis, there is a lot of inertia. It might be a solution
| for seasonal issues only, but in Germany, there's usually
| wind during the no-sun season, and sun during the no-wind
| season.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep!
|
| And let me be provocative (and probably downvoted here)... it
| also works during windless nights!
| LatteLazy wrote:
| That's the average. But you'd need a few more for peak demand
| and a few more for when these are offline for maintenance,
| refuelling etc.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Ideally, you overbuild and have some flexible consumer of
| electricity that can arbitrarily ramp consumption up or down
| to suck off any excess supply whenever inflexible basal
| civilization demand doesn't match supply, e.g. ramp up when
| everyone is asleep and ramp down if a reactor needs to go
| offline.
|
| This is called demand response,
| https://www.energy.gov/oe/activities/technology-
| development/..., and it's probably as important of a
| component to future grid management as energy storage.
| retrac wrote:
| Right. A useful sink for surplus energy could be something
| like surplus heat or electricity to synthesize carbon-
| neutral fuels. We're not likely to get large electric
| aircraft anytime soon.
| kevinak wrote:
| ...or maybe a censorship resistant peer 2 peer cash that
| could also subsidise these plants
| anonporridge wrote:
| Electric aircraft doesn't really strike me as this kind
| of customer. Aircraft has relatively inflexible fueling
| demands based on customer demand that is reserved weeks
| ahead of time.
|
| Bitcoin mining is commonly promoted as this kind of ideal
| electricity consumer. Hydrogen production could be
| another.
|
| However, I think more interesting for this community
| would be to build some kind of demand response general
| computing datacenter. Basically, sell computing resources
| with poor availability guarantees, but at a cheaper rate
| than standard datacenters.
|
| i.e. we'll run your batch jobs very cheaply, but we can't
| give you strong guarantees about how long it will take
| because we have to wait for excess grid electricity to
| have the energy to run them. Best case that's every
| night. Worst case we won't be able to run anything for
| weeks because Texas is going through another freak winter
| storm.
| toast0 wrote:
| If you have datacenters on multiple grids (and
| applications that are favorable to being moved around),
| you could direct traffic to where energy was abundant.
| This is not uncommon for large commercial sites; you can
| usually get a better rate from the utility if you commit
| to demand response, and it's not too hard to shift load
| if you're already doing multi-site for
| reliability/continuity)
| Gare wrote:
| > Electric aircraft doesn't really strike me as this kind
| of customer. Aircraft has relatively inflexible fueling
| demands based on customer demand that is reserved weeks
| ahead of time.
|
| I think you misunderstood. The parent comment implied
| that excess electricity could be use to produce synthetic
| fuels (via carbon capture) to power conventional
| airplanes, ships or other machinery.
| anonporridge wrote:
| I did misunderstand. Thanks!
| dahfizz wrote:
| A bit of pumped hydro storage would also satisfy those needs.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| PSH could not bridge demand for long enough. Maintenance
| cycles on nuclear reactors can be quite long.
| krasin wrote:
| Make it 8 stations instead of 7 to have an excess of
| energy and then use the extra energy, when there's not
| enough demand, to produce fertilizers or other energy-
| intensive goods.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I suspect in today's world of maximizing capital efficiency,
| and being able to contract in large numbers of people, the
| very expensive power plant won't be offline for long for
| maintenance.
|
| They'll probably shut the plant down, and have 500 workers
| come in to replace everything that needs to be replaced, and
| then power it up again within a few days, and let it run for
| another 6 months or so.
|
| Everything will be planned on workplans, and most won't
| require specialist knowledge... Eg. "Replace pump 205 in
| building C with this pump. Required skills people: 2x
| plumber, 2x electrician".
| akiselev wrote:
| Most reactor downtime is due to refueling, since that
| requires cooling down the core through several stages.
| AFAIK it's not practical to do it safely and economically
| in under a few weeks.
|
| Most reactor maintenance is already done during refueling
| so there isn't much more room to optimize that downtime.
| (though that may change the older a reactor gets)
| _n_b_ wrote:
| Most reactor downtime is actually for maintenance during
| refueling windows. As I mentioned in another comment,
| there is experience doing refuelling-only outages in <10
| days. If everything goes well, you can startup a PWR from
| cold shutdown to hot full power in 3 12 hour shifts
| _n_b_ wrote:
| That is exactly how nuclear outages work. Everything is
| planned in a resource-loaded schedule and many of those
| resources are just there for the outage.
|
| Finland is actually somewhat known for running short (1
| year) cycles with very very short (<10 days for refuelling
| is not unheard of) refuelling outages every other cycle
| alternating with slightly longer maintenance outages. A
| more typical scenario in the US would be 18 month cycles
| with a 30ish day outage. Some plants are moving to 24 month
| cycles with slightly longer outages.
|
| Capacity factor for nuclear plants in the US is
| consistently around 93% (similar figures in many other
| countries as well), which is significantly higher than
| other generation sources.
| pavlov wrote:
| What's depressing is that you'd need ten of these giant power
| plants to power Bitcoin mining.
|
| And by the time you finally got those ten $10B plants online,
| Bitcoin's energy use would have ballooned to some even more
| absurd number, assuming we do nothing to stop the current
| trajectory.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| You'll need three times more to power all the standby devices
| in the US, and nobody is doing something as simple as to
| powering down their tv/console when they stop using it.
| People don't even unplug their chargers after their phone is
| charged.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I know but... Bitcoin!!!!!!
| mustyoshi wrote:
| Due to usage fluctuations it's not quite that simple
| logicallee wrote:
| I found a link in its Wikipedia page:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20130116000447/http://www.hs.fi/...
|
| "Suomenkin uusi ydinvoimala maksaa 8.5 miljardia euroa" which
| translates to "Finland's new nuclear power plant will also cost
| 8.5 billion euros."
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It is more than 14%. It looks like this plant, all three
| reactors together, might eventually cover a third of Finland's
| needs. But those are 2020 numbers. Increased electrification,
| especially EVs and moves away from gas, will probably reduce
| that percentage. In that context, the third reactor is only
| incrementally more powerful than those already running at the
| facility.
|
| "The Olkiluoto plant consists of two boiling water reactors
| (BWRs), each producing 890 MW of electricity, together
| comprising 22% of the country's electricity generation for
| 2020.[1] A third reactor, Unit 3, is expected to be online in
| January 2022, and at 1,600 MW, will by itself satisfy 14% of
| the country's electricity demand."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
| cinntaile wrote:
| It's 14%. The other reactors are from the 70s and that's not
| what he meant even though he used the word plant.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| If those EVs are mainly charging at night, where does the
| extra peak load come from? Or is this just a case of not
| being able to shut off as much NG/Hydro generation at night
| (since nuclear can't really be turned on and off at will)?
| at_compile_time wrote:
| Electrification goes beyond cars. Think of how much fuel
| they need for heat in Finland. Electrification means
| replacing that fuel with electricity.
|
| And many reactors are able to modulate their output, either
| by absorbing neutrons to slow the chain reaction, or by
| letting steam bypass the turbines.
|
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-ways-nuclear-more-
| flexi...
| pfdietz wrote:
| Nuclear reactors could modulate their output, but they
| would take a grievous economic hit if they do so, because
| most of their costs are fixed, independent of the power
| setting.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Certainly this is cheaper than paying people to buy your
| electricity (as sometimes happens in California because
| of solar plants).
| pfdietz wrote:
| Since solar panels can go to zero output onto the grid
| instantly, this is just a matter of improper design (of
| the equipment, or of the regulatory regime.)
|
| In any case, the cost/kWh from nuclear is computed
| assuming flat out (except for refueling outages). Reduce
| that generation at the levelized cost increases. It's
| already very much higher than renewables; curtailing
| nuclear output would make that discrepancy worse.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Sounds like we could solve this problem for for nuclear
| the same way we look to solve problems for renewables:
| storage.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Except if I have batteries, why should I charge them with
| expensive nuclear energy when I can charge them with
| cheap renewables? The nuclear plant will be forced to
| compete with those renewables for this market, which will
| limit what it can earn with the otherwise curtailed
| output. This is not as bad as losing it entirely, or even
| paying for someone to take it, but it's still going to be
| a net negative for the plant's economics vs. running all
| out selling at the calculated cost.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Nuclear plant can provide heating for free. It has to be
| located in Helsinki, though.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| It's the incentivized/induced demand problem. Build out a
| new freeway, suddenly it's full of traffic. Same thing for
| power. If you make power cheap people find more ways to use
| it.
|
| This is still probably a good thing, but something to
| consider.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| I think you mean induced demand?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Does that suggest that one plant will satisfy 36% of the
| country's electricity demand?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Finland is an entire country, but it also has a population
| smaller than Toronto or Dallas.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| This is if you count the Greater Toronto Area and the
| Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex respectively, to be clear
| (Finland has five and a half million inhabitants).
| brianwawok wrote:
| Finland has 5 million people. I am pretty sure there are
| existing plants in the world that could satisfy the entire
| country if moved to Finland. There are 10ish dams that
| produce over 10k MW
| tomcam wrote:
| Finlands's population is about the same as the Cape Town,
| Melbourne, or Boston areas
| Aachen wrote:
| > 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7
|
| ...if you continue to heat with gas, drive on petrol, fly on
| petroleum...
|
| I don't want to be the party pooper but that renewable energy
| has to cover more than current electricity consumption does get
| overlooked continuously. Less by governments than by the media
| and general public, thankfully, but still.
| p_l wrote:
| It's IMO an often overlooked reason to combine nuclear with
| renewables, and instead of looking at scaling down energy
| usage to match renewables' intermittent nature, design for
| overproduction and push it into easy to switch on
| electrolysers to provide green hydrogen feedstock for steel
| production, fuels for systems that can't depend on batteries,
| even CO2-neutral syntin for aviation and space where
| batteries don't have the density or just don't work.
| parksy wrote:
| By population that's one reactor of this scale per million
| people. To replace all other sources of electricity, 8 thousand
| such reactors would feed the current world's population. We'd
| need just shy of 500 more to keep up with population growth by
| 2030 - or at least 500 new reactors globally per decade.
|
| (edit - assuming everyone uses the same amount of power
| globally as the average person in Finland which - why shouldn't
| they be able to - and - obviously they don't)
| omgJustTest wrote:
| 1.6GW is a pretty standard install in nuclear. For scale the
| largest nuclear install Kori is the current largest in
| operation at 7.4GWe installed capacity[2]. It achieved 74+%
| capacity last year which is an important point missed when
| looking at energy _delivered_ to the grid. By contrast US
| plants achieve much higher capacity factors, with Diablo
| Canyon in California producing 2.2 GWe at a _lifetime_
| operation capacity factor of 90+%[1]. Scaling up nuclear, at
| high reliability is not such a stretch as some other energy
| scaling problems.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
| [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kori_Nuclear_Power_Plant
| roenxi wrote:
| FYI; looks like your early comments attracted too many
| downvotes and your account was automatically shadowbanned.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| 1.6 GWe is huge for a single nuclear reactor. EPRs are on
| the high end. Most nuclear reactors are closer to 1 GWe.
| Nuclear plants with multiple reactors on a site certainly
| do often go well above 1.6.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| jddil wrote:
| Next time start by not writing a comment that doesn't add
| value and is against HN rules. What in particular is wrong
| about their analysis?
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| For one, it assumes the average human consumes as much
| electricity as the average Finn.
| somebodythere wrote:
| The average human consumes much less energy than the
| average Finn. (Though that number is likely to grow as
| the world becomes more industrialized.)
| parksy wrote:
| That's a good point, people in Finland use more per
| capita than 80% of the global population, so if everyone
| were to have the same energy standards as Finland we'd
| probably need more like 10k reactors and 600 per year
| give or take.
|
| Or we stick with the status quo, force everyone into
| their lane, and probably need like 3000 to 4000 reactors
| to serve current needs, and 150 to 200 per year. Give or
| take.
|
| I think that's still in the same ballpark orders of
| magnitude-wise.
| xupybd wrote:
| You really could have added a lot of value here. Clearly
| you know a bit about the situation.
|
| Please try and bring your knowledge to the table not your
| offense at someone else's error. I seriously think you
| could have a lot to offer.
| parksy wrote:
| I also would like to be corrected in what my error was,
| for what it's worth.
| dTal wrote:
| The person you are replying to is not the same person as
| the one who made the content-free reply. You might want
| to follow your own advice.
| Archelaos wrote:
| How much more nuclear wast does that imply per decade?
|
| How many more meltdowns per decade?
| belorn wrote:
| Less radioactive waste than coal power plants, and
| significant less devastation compared to continuing funding
| wars by buying gas, oil and coal.
|
| Energy generation is always a trade off. Right now the
| world is reacting to the fossil fuel funded wars created by
| one such trade off. We are also in the middle of causing
| irreversible climate change, which would cause more damage
| than any amount of meltdowns or nuclear waste could ever
| get near.
|
| Naturally there are alternatives. If money were no
| objection then green hydrogen looks pretty nice, and one
| could always extract heat from the core of the earth as
| long the technology was safe enough to do so. As soon we
| have a technology that get proven to be cheaper, safer and
| more scalable than nuclear we should all switch to that.
| Buying natural gas from Russia is for multiple obvious
| reason not that.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Less radioactive waste than coal power plants
|
| Less radioactive EMISSION during NORMAL OPERATION than
| coal plants (and I think that ignores radioactivity
| released in uranium mining). The amount of radioactivity
| in the spent fuel rods of a nuclear plant is vastly
| higher than that liberated by a coal plant.
| belorn wrote:
| It is estimated that around 1/5 of people living around a
| coal ash lake has gotten cancer. Thankfully there are no
| such number for people living near nuclear plants, or
| around sites of nuclear waste disposal. The amount of
| people who has died to radiation thanks to coal vastly
| outnumber the amount of people who has died to nuclear
| waste. If we including mining, coal mining is a symbol of
| one of the most dangerous job a person could do, and it
| has harvested many more souls than uranium mining.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Coal ash is nasty stuff, but that's very likely due to
| chemical toxicity (things like arsenic, especially in
| Appalachian coal), not radioactivity.
|
| BTW, your chance of dying from cancer in your lifetime is
| about 20%, so I'm not sure that the 1/5 figure you gave
| there means anything.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I don't think they were saying that the radioactivity is
| causing the cancer in those 1/5 people. I read it as two
| separate points: coal plants simultaneously emit more
| radiation than nuclear plants, _and_ coal plants cause
| more cancer via the other chemicals and rare earth
| elements they emit.
| pmorici wrote:
| Alternatives like coal give off substantially more
| radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant
| does under normal operations.
| pfdietz wrote:
| That's only if you ignore the radioactivity in uranium
| mine tailings.
| nitrogen wrote:
| That was already in the environment to begin with.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It was in the environment already in the same sense the
| uranium in coal was also in the environment already.
|
| Maybe the problem is the uranium mine tailings are safely
| off in some poor country, not in the US where the coal
| ash would be?
| vanilla-almond wrote:
| _" How much more nuclear wast does that imply per decade?"_
|
| The popular YouTube channel _The B1M_ has an interesting
| video on how Finland is tackling nuclear waste:
|
| _Finland might have solved nuclear power 's biggest
| problem_ (2021):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYpiK3W-g_0
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Nuclear power's "biggest problem" has been solved for
| decades. You can put everything in giant metal canisters
| and sink it into bedrock. It's vastly more expensive than
| doing nothing, but now that politicians are going to be
| held accountable for their fuckups they'll allocate the
| money.
|
| And even after all that it's still far less expensive
| than remediating coal output.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| No remotely modern reactor has melted down.
|
| Just as you wouldn't factor Amelia Earhart's plane into
| 2022 air safety prognoses, you shouldn't use Chernobyl
| reactors for nuclear safety.
| orlovs wrote:
| I love this reply. We can go even further. If we would
| approach air safety in such way as Nuclear, then de
| Havilland DH.106 Comet would be first and last commercial
| jet.
|
| Nuclear fision reactors safety technology have moved
| further. There are challenges, but we havent even tried
| to solve them fully (as we were busy improving gas
| burning efficiency)
| omginternets wrote:
| What are the biggest safety improvements that have become
| mainstream since Chernobyl?
| polski-g wrote:
| Control rods aren't tipped with iron. Iron has a positive
| coefficient of reactivity.
| stevage wrote:
| That's a great analogy.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Everything has downsides, and it has to be compared to the
| alternatives.
|
| In Finland's case, the realistic alternatives are burning
| coal or burning Russian gas. (If the Finns dedicated a
| substantial chunk of their forests to this one generator,
| they could maybe use biomass.)
|
| Coal kills two orders of magnitude more people per GWh than
| nuclear--and it does that when operating nominally, not
| when malfunctioning--and it produces three or four orders
| of magnitude more waste and more environmental harm from
| mining.
|
| Russian gas has geopolitical/national security problems.
|
| Biomass is a roundabout way of burning diesel fuel and gas,
| while degrading and eroding forest soils and polluting
| watersheds.
|
| The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to
| five significant figures.
| trulyme wrote:
| > The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero,
| to five significant figures.
|
| That's a weird metric (one meltdown is quite a
| catastrophe) and the calculation seems suspicious too.
| Between Chernobile and Fukushima I don't see how this
| could be correct.
|
| I do find your other points more convincing, though with
| some "citation needed" wrt. coal.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I can't speak to the meltdown statistic, but for coal:
| just the burning alone is responsible for hundreds of
| thousands of premature deaths annually[1].
|
| And that's before we consider the environmental and
| health risks of ash ponds[2], which can (and have caused)
| heavy metal pollution in nearby groundwater supply. The
| largest industrial spill in US history happened barely a
| decade ago, and was an ash pond[3].
|
| Edit: I can personally recommend "The Buffalo Creek
| Disaster" (ISBN 9780394723433) as a writeup by a lawyer
| involved in a similar coal ash accident (one that
| directly killed over 100 people).
|
| [1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_pond
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_
| coal_fly...
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| WHO has particulate air pollution from fossil and biofuel
| killing just about 8 million people per year (a Chernobyl
| of people (short + long term) every 7 hours). Add in that
| they also cause climate change and non-combustion sources
| like nuclear, wind, solar, hydro all look pretty darn
| awesome.
|
| https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution
| pishpash wrote:
| And heat-polluted waste waters? People keep pretending
| there are no externalities.
| lazide wrote:
| If the biggest externality is heated water in a subarctic
| climate, or nuclear waste that gets stored on-site
| indefinitely in casks and produces no notable leaks or
| accidents (like has been done in the US for a long time
| now), the externalities are way less than literally any
| other form of energy production. That includes Dams,
| solar power, geothermal, wind, you name it.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > And heat-polluted waste waters?
|
| That's hardly unique to nuclear plants; in particular,
| coal plants typically have lower thermal efficiency.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| What prevents heated waste water from being used
| for...heat? Surely Finland uses central heating plants
| that pump hot water throughout the city (or maybe that's
| just a Chinese/Russian thing?). What makes waste heat
| water less suited to heating, higher entropy?
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think it just not hot enough after electricity
| production. So temperature is not high enough after it
| passes through turbines. Specially due to distances
| involved.
| ProblemFactory wrote:
| Combined Heat and Power in Finland is very common, much
| more so than in rest of Europe. 80% of the fossil fuel
| power plants output both electricity and heated water.
| Compared to (quick googling) 8% in the US and 11% in EU.
| kortilla wrote:
| No, people aren't pretending that. Heat pollution in
| water is a tiny local issue compared to global warming.
|
| It's like complaining that a wool blanket is itchy so it
| might be better to catch hypothermia and die.
| T-A wrote:
| > assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as
| the average person in Finland which - why shouldn't they be
| able to
|
| Finland's climate is an outlier:
|
| _One-third of energy consumption in housing was electricity
| in 2018. [...] 47% of electricity was used to heat indoor
| areas and 36% to household appliances. The remainder of
| electricity was used to heat domestic water and saunas._
|
| https://www.thenomadtoday.com/articulo/finland/energy-
| consum...
| parksy wrote:
| Here in Perth a good third or more of my electricity is
| keeping the house cool so some of that is going to average
| out. We don't have saunas but we do have hot water.
|
| There's going to be an obvious error of margin either side
| of my napkin calculations but I think the order of
| magnitude is in the ballpark.
| neoromantique wrote:
| Cooling a house is more energy efficient than warming one
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Isn't it the other way round?
| krallja wrote:
| It's a question of temperature difference. Cooling a
| house from 40deg to 20deg uses approximately the same
| energy as heating it from 0deg to 20deg. But it gets much
| colder than 0deg C in Finland, while it is very rare to
| have temperatures above 45deg C anywhere in the world.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| It's not just that. To make something colder using a heat
| pump, you must heat up something else by the equivalent
| amount. Actually more, because of losses.
|
| Whereas making something warmer can be done without a
| heat pump, by releasing stored chemical energy, at nearly
| no losses.
| stavros wrote:
| Heat pumps are more energy efficient than resistors, so I
| guess it depends on the method.
| [deleted]
| xyzzyz wrote:
| It's not that extraordinary. For example, one power plant in
| Poland provides 20% of all electricity consumed in Poland.
| Sadly, it's a coal plant, one of the biggest in the world. It
| also burns lignite, which makes it even worse.
| mikaeluman wrote:
| Finland has no other good source of energy. In Sweden and Norway
| we have hydro capacity that covers more than 50% of need. Then we
| can cover the rest with nuclear and a small portion of wind
| power.
|
| In Finland nuclear is the only option. Happy to see it come
| online.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Define a good source: there is no silver bullet to stop the
| climate crisis. Traditionally, there's a big share of hydro in
| Finland too (23% of electricity production in 2020), and the
| market has been building a lot of wind lately (share 12% in
| 2020, capacity growth 30%).
|
| In heating, heat pumps (geothermal and others) are growing fast
| (market share 16% in 2021).
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Is wind not possible?
| Aachen wrote:
| Depends how much area you want to repurpose (note that it
| includes roads, power lines, and regular tree trimming near
| those power lines in addition to the turbines themselves),
| but I'd estimate that with current and projected Finnish
| population density, this would actually be a realistic
| option, yes.
|
| Now that I think of it, I've never anyone speak of the impact
| on wildlife, nor seen a wind turbine in a forest (only ever
| on open farmland). Considering both noise and large shadows
| moving constantly, I assume it will have some impact. (I did
| hear that bird strikes are a non-issue in relative terms.)
| Even Wikipedia has no info on anything but birds/bats for on-
| shore installations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment
| al_impact_of_wind_p...
|
| Edit: double checked that Finland is actually mostly forest:
| [PDF] https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/landuse/land-cover-
| country-... Screenshot from relevant part of PDF:
| https://snipboard.io/KFDEIr.jpg
|
| The 9+5+4=18% water bodies, arable land, and pastures/mosaics
| (respectively) might also be a good target.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_power_density says 1.84
| W/m2, so at 18% of 338'662 "hundreds ha" = 61 billion m2 you
| get 112 GW which translates into 983 TWh after a year (8760
| hours). Looking at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Finland that's 2.6
| times more energy than they used in 2013 (this includes
| heating, driving, etc. but not things like imported clothes,
| plastic products, etc.). All this is considering only the
| land area, not sea.
|
| Future work: calculate how many years of monopolizing the
| world's steel production it takes to get these things
| produced, much less built in the middle of nowhere with
| frozen winters.
| lazide wrote:
| Forests are a hassle to work in, and add a lot of extra
| costs. It's often cheaper and better in many ways to clear
| the land first if you're going to do wind there.
|
| 1) wind moves faster/freer the higher you are above the
| ground. the height of the trees moves the 'ground' up,
| without actually moving it up from a foundation or
| structure perspective. So you spend the money for a 300 ft
| tower, but only get 200ft of usable height. Not fun.
|
| 2) trees grow into things, fall on things, burn at
| inconvenient times, and are generally a maintenance
| headache.
|
| 3) many types of trees are very, very strong and require
| expensive heavy equipment to clear at large scales,
| especially if you need to remove a lot of stumps. So it
| adds extra cost above some already significant costs of
| land.
|
| If you already have some cleared land somewhere, assuming
| all other factors are equal, it will definitely be
| preferred.
| Aachen wrote:
| That sounds like a world of pain. Between the displaced
| wildlife and released carbon from all those trees, I'd be
| quite curious if that's even worth it.
| lazide wrote:
| It probably isn't, which is why you don't see it happen
| much I imagine.
|
| If the only land they have is trees, it does restrict the
| options quite a bit. I also forgot to mention, in most
| climates trees are a hassle this way, they also grow
| naturally, so even if you clear the land you need to go
| back and keep it clear every couple years.
|
| Solar has similar drawbacks but worse - you can't just
| clear the trees around where you'd put the windmills and
| roads, you'd need to clear pretty much everywhere
| including from where they would shade the panels. Which
| greatly increases the footprint.
|
| Trees can of course be burned for heat and energy, but
| it's a time consuming, dangerous, and inefficient process
| (time/land/manpower) compared to petroleum extraction. It
| tends to only happen for individual use, at small scale;
| or when heavily subsidized from taxes on petroleum
| products.
| Aachen wrote:
| > If the only land they have is trees, it does restrict
| the options quite a bit.
|
| Just to make sure, did you see the edit of my comment
| above? I checked out the land cover in Finland, it is
| actually a fairly high percentage trees and I did some
| math on putting wind in the other places.
|
| Now that I'm writing this I realized a major flaw: not
| looking at https://globalwindatlas.info earlier. It turns
| out that Finland looks about average (just eyeballing it,
| I can't figure out how to use this area energy yield
| tool, it just gives me a blank image instead of a simple
| number).
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Finland has a vast and long coast that could be used to
| build on or offshore farms. There are also wave hydro
| systems and Finland has many rivers etc that could be used.
|
| Really a choice to go nuclear. Not a necessity.
| hayksaakian wrote:
| Will be interesting to see how a modern plant stacks up to the
| aging ones running in most of the world
| f_allwein wrote:
| Handy reference on why nuclear power might not be such a good
| idea as some people think:
| https://www.wien.gv.at/english/environment/ombuds-office/arg...
| Aachen wrote:
| When an article starts with chernobyl as example of what
| mistakes we're likely to make when building a new plant today,
| it makes me itch to just close the tab and dismiss the opinion
| of the person who linked it.
|
| Not sure why I even bothered digging into it, but for example
| one later point is also misleading: "uranium resources will be
| depleted by the end of this century".
|
| I think I found the source (not that they link it, that would
| be too easy, but by ducking around for this number):
|
| > the total identified amount of conventional uranium stock,
| which can be mined for less than USD 130 per kg, [was found] to
| be about 4.7 million tonnes. Based on the 2004 nuclear
| electricity generation rate of demand the amount is sufficient
| for 85 years, the study states. Fast reactor technology would
| lengthen this period to over 2500 years.
|
| > However, world uranium resources in total are considered to
| be much higher. Based on geological evidence and knowledge of
| uranium in phosphates the study considers more than 35 million
| tonnes is available for exploitation.
|
| https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/global-uranium-resource...
|
| I'm not sure how the "city of vienna" can read this and
| summarize it down to say that we'll plainly run out of uranium
| by 2100. That's just not what the source says. Maybe that's
| what makes this "reference" "handy" for people with a certain
| preexisting opinion?
|
| The same bullet point continues with some other interesting
| claims, let alone the rest of the page, but let me quickly
| close that tab before I feel inclined to go down more of these
| rabbit holes...
| f_allwein wrote:
| > Accidents in nuclear power plants can have disastrous
| implications. As in the case if Chernobyl, large areas around
| the site remain unusable forever
|
| What exactly about this do you not buy?
|
| And what is your solution for storing nuclear waste safely
| for hundreds of thousands of years?
| schleck8 wrote:
| Before 100 thousand years have passed humanity will easily
| be able to send nuclear waste.
|
| We got from horses to Lamborghini Huracan in a century.
| Aachen wrote:
| I should really make template comments. Being asked to
| explain why Chernobyl is not a realistic scenario in the
| 2020s, with all the available information and previous
| discussions, has been getting really old...
|
| See https://whatisnuclear.com/chernobyl-main.html#again
|
| Or even just another comment in this very thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653778
|
| Or the fact that it hasn't happened despite hundreds of
| active nuclear power plants around the world (not all in
| countries that you would expect to have high safety
| standards).
|
| Or the safety statistics in general:
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| Same with the waste issue. Nobody asks what the proposed
| solution is for CO2 storage (it will remain for billions of
| years! The horror!) when proposing to keep open coal/gas
| plants a bit longer until we have solar/wind/hydro+storage
| all set up, but with nuclear we need to find more reasons
| for the phase-out.
|
| Here's another info page:
| https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
|
| > If these materials are burnt in fuel through recycling,
| nuclear waste would only remain radioactive for a few
| hundred years
|
| And that's ignoring that we're also managing to deal with
| the waste so far just fine, also without recycling.
|
| (The tally is at 40 minutes time wasted for these two
| answer so far, also because most of the previous one was
| 'researched' and written on mobile. How long did it take to
| ask the question? This is why I contemplate templates.)
| cipher_system wrote:
| You put the waste into containers and bury them deep into a
| geologically stable mine that you then seal shut.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_rep
| o...
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, it seems a bit like using the Bhopal disaster as an
| argument to not build any more chemical plants, or the
| Herald of Free Enterprise disaster as an argument to stop
| using passenger ships. Chernobyl was a flawed design
| incompetently operated.
|
| > And what is your solution for storing nuclear waste
| safely for hundreds of thousands of years?
|
| While it's a problem, it's actually a fairly tractable one,
| because the volume of high level waste is small and it
| doesn't leave the plant as part of normal operations. For
| coal power, for contrast, we store much of the waste in
| peoples' lungs.
| exdsq wrote:
| > Nuclear waste from power stations can be used as raw
| materials for nuclear weapons.
|
| I imagine it's almost impossible to manufacture nuclear weapons
| 'quietly' with waste and sanctions/agreements stop this
| happening, while countries that go against these are able to
| manufacture nuclear weapons anyway (North Korea). So I don't
| think this is as big a risk as suggested.
|
| The rest seem solvable by focusing on better secure designs and
| then moving from Uranium to another source. I don't know the
| difficulty of this but I can't imagine it's insurmountable?
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Good job Finland. I respect the opinions of the environmentalists
| and agree with most of what they say, but until we have something
| more reliable that can put out power 24/7 year round, we need
| more new, modern nuclear plants.
| threeseed wrote:
| It doesn't work in every country but renewables with storage
| can provide 24/7 power.
|
| And it's a fraction of the price of nuclear.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Do you have a source regarding your pricing claim?
|
| Renewables are usually cheaper per W, but way more expensive
| in real world usage (battery storage + full life cycle costs)
| pfdietz wrote:
| See for yourself: https://model.energy/
|
| The area around Finland and Eastern Europe is one of the
| worst in the world for renewables, though.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Renewables with "magic" storage. Wind can be low for a month
| for a whole country (cf UK last year). There is no storage
| technology that can store that much power at scale. What you
| need is an alternative on demand source of energy, which cost
| is always omitted when looking at renewable energy cost.
| jahewson wrote:
| Outside of pumped hydro, storage is very expensive. Would
| need something like a 15x reduction in storage costs to be
| competitive with nuclear.
| cm2187 wrote:
| And where do you build that hydro? I hear some people
| suggesting Europe using the valleys in Sweden and Norway.
| Imagine the EU electricity grid at the mercy of one of
| Putin's submarines. The rest of Europe doesn't have many
| valleys left to flood.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Nuclear won't solve the climate crisis as it's too slow to
| build.
| orlovs wrote:
| Nuclear is slow to build as we dont have much experience to
| build it. More we will build it, the better we will become in
| it
| throw0101a wrote:
| At the very least we should stop shutting down current
| nuclear power plants.
|
| Any newly built renewable generation should be used to retire
| fossil fuel plants _first_ , and once those are gone _then_
| we can consider retiring (current) nuclear.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Nothing will solve the climate crisis in the time frame it
| takes to build a nuclear reactor. If you start building now,
| you get part of the solution in the future.
| tuukkah wrote:
| Finland is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2035. Do you
| suggest that if we start planning now, we can rely on
| having new nuclear plants operational in 13 years? Also
| note that we wouldn't be buying them from Russia because of
| the current war, and China would be risky in the same way.
| There's a current project where the only offer was from
| Russia and that one is being suspended indefinitely right
| now.
| liketochill wrote:
| https://archive.ph/PVCeB
| loufe wrote:
| What I find shockingly absent in this article is any commentary
| on budget and cost overruns. I'm definitely not anti-nuclear but
| it stands to reason that a comparison vs other forms of energy
| would've been wise to consider.
| cipher_system wrote:
| Something like this. The project started in 2000, construction
| began in 2005 and should have been completed in 2010. Original
| cost was 3 billion euro but landed on over 10 billion euro.
|
| It is the first nuclear reactor in Europe for 15 years so not
| much working experience or available sub contractors.
|
| Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a
| third of the cost and time of that.
|
| If nuclear energy should be considered, much more must be built
| more continuously.
| trenchgun wrote:
| The Finnish customer paid 5,5 billion euros price for it.
|
| Rest was covered by Areva, since the cost overruns were of
| their own failure.
| afterburner wrote:
| They're going to be recouping their costs somehow, I doubt
| Finnish customers are done paying.
| krono wrote:
| > Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build
| at a third of the cost and time of that.
|
| Any insight into the why?
| cipher_system wrote:
| I read a report on that a while back, can't find it now but
| these are the highlights I remember:
|
| * The overall design must be done before construction
| starts, also no room for regulatory changes. Waterfall is
| better than Agile for nuclear.
|
| * Experienced project management, work force and supply
| chain.
|
| * Build many reactors on the same site and don't use a new
| reactor design.
|
| * Work force is overall cheaper and possibly also more
| productive in Asia.
|
| More or less the same as for everything else, the more you
| do it the better and cheaper it gets but it requires a lot
| of upfront costs.
| [deleted]
| jpgvm wrote:
| They didn't lose their nuclear capability because they kept
| maintaining and building reactors instead of
| decommissioning them. US and to a degree most of Europe did
| not.
|
| China in particular plans to build ~250 new reactors over
| the next few years, most like new HTG reactors based on the
| pebble bed technology Germany sold to them when they
| abandoned their next-gen nuclear plans.
|
| Russia has reactor building capabilities that are still
| current but their domestic needs are stagnating so said
| capability could decay as they don't actually need to build
| modern reactors at this time.
|
| Japan has a similar problem to Russia in that post-
| Fukishima there isn't domestic demand for nuclear reactors.
| However they are building reactors for other countries, in
| particular I think they are planning to build ~20 good
| sized reactors in India.
| ncmncm wrote:
| This "250" number for China keeps being trotted out, but
| nobody knows how we many of those will actually ever be
| built or operated. There is anyway not fuel for that
| many, at present.
|
| It would be more honest to cite the much smaller number
| that have actually broken ground. Nobody knows how many
| of _those_ will be completed, or how many of those
| completed will be fueled or operated continuously, or
| where operated actually mainly generate power, as opposed
| to generating plutonium and tritium for weapons.
| rsynnott wrote:
| To a large extent, because they're building established
| designs. An EPR plant (that is, the same design as this
| one) was completed in China in about half the time of the
| Finnish one, but that would have been informed by the
| problems in building the Finnish EPR, which was the first
| in the world. Another EPR, being built by EDF (a French
| company) in the UK is broadly on-track, and should have a
| much shorter time to switch-on than the Finnish one.
|
| This isn't new; historically, the first couple of examples
| of any given nuclear power plant design have typically seen
| major overruns.
| cbhl wrote:
| Probably large fixed costs (engineers, builders learning
| how to do the thing) amortized over building a large number
| of plants.
|
| China has been constructing a lot of new nuclear power
| plants over the last 15 years -- estimated at ~12 GW in
| 2013, but now closer to 50 GW as of 2021. Wikipedia says 50
| plants as of 2021:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China.
|
| Anecdotally I've heard that temporary pollution control
| measures during the 2008 olympics gave the populace and
| decision makers a taste of reduced air pollution, and gave
| increased political willpower to invest in solar, wind, and
| nuclear power generation.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| EDF (France) keeps building nuclear reactors around the
| world. Not sure whether they are the only EU company active
| in that market, but I doubt it. Either way, _some_ expertise
| definitely exists in Europe.
|
| Germany had spectacular delays and overruns for a new airport
| for Berlin That too doesn't mean Europe forgot how to build
| airports.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| I think this is vastly misunderstood in the (artificial)
| renewables vs nuclear conversation. We keep building
| effectively one-off complex machines, and then flushing all
| that knowledge down the drain by saying it cost too much and
| took too long. Like yes, the first one always takes longer
| and costs more...
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The difference is that nuclear is the only one where the
| first one's cost is measured in the the tens of billions.
|
| Nuclear is just too big for a privatized energy market's
| participants.
| cpill wrote:
| what happened to the micro nuclear?
| thedrbrian wrote:
| We're doing it
|
| https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/
| https://www.theengineer.co.uk/rolls-royce-smr-to-begin-
| regul...
| afterburner wrote:
| You mean the theoretical ones?
| epistasis wrote:
| There's no reason to assume that building the same nuclear
| reactor design multiple time will maintain the same cost or
| decrease. Even with the supposedly successful French
| nuclear program, costs increased over time, there was
| negative learning:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301
| 4...
|
| There's huge huge risk in choosing a particular design and
| building even one of it, because we don't know if it will
| be constructible the first time, and we don't know if
| future builds of the first design will be more or less
| expensive.
|
| When each build is a $10B roll of the dice with variance of
| 2-3x of initial estimates, it's a bit difficult to find
| rational financial backers. Especially when there's not
| that much profit to be had from even a successful build.
| The risk reward is completely out of whack compared to the
| other options for carbon neutral energy.
| roenxi wrote:
| The negative learning rate is a strong signal of
| interference by the regulators. More than anything else
| it shows how excessive safety regulations are strangled
| the industry.
|
| 1970s nuclear safety standards, despite it all, were
| still better than the energy strategy the world adopted
| from 1970-2020. Killing off nuclear in search of a
| perfect power system was a stupid strategy, and failed.
| The only unfortunate point of karmic justice is that
| Europe ended up reliant on Russian gas and in an energy
| crisis as a reward for their stubbornness against making
| the technically obvious choice.
|
| Well done Finland for even managing to get a reactor
| built in the face of all that.
| belorn wrote:
| The other options for carbon neutral energy that does not
| rely on using fossil fuel as part of the energy strategy
| are few and far between. The few suggested solutions tend
| to rely on battery solutions for wind power (at least for
| countries this far up north).
|
| It would be great to see an attempt to such battery
| solution that would cover the same amount of capacity as
| this plant, that can operate for at least several months
| without recharging, in Finish winter, and cost less than
| this plant and be built faster. That would check all the
| boxes, and if such technology already exist, people here
| should really put their investment money into it.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Of course there is, it's happened exactly the way I said
| in South Korea, Japan, and American naval reactors. These
| projects take a long time to complete and there have been
| relatively few of them. It therefore stands to reason
| that the cycle of learning from them and making their
| construction more predictable would take longer than for
| e.g. cars.
|
| Far too many people are generalizing from the French and
| American nuclear programs, both of which built lots of
| reactors in a comparatively short time and then were
| fear-mongered into a standstill by the fossil fuel lobby.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142
| 151...
|
| """In the third era of nuclear power construction in
| Japan, from 1980 to 2007, costs remain between
| Y=250,000/kW and Y=400,000/kW, representing an annual
| change of -1% to 1%. This period experienced relatively
| stable costs over 27 years."""
| forty wrote:
| It's not only the first one. It's at least the first ones
| plural. The same one, being built in France in Flamanville
| by the same company was scheduled to be finished in 2012,
| and is currently planned for 2023 (11 years delay), and
| with crazy over cost like the Finish one.
|
| I don't think there is any reason to think it will be
| different for future ones if any. We'll see what happens
| for the British one (Hinkley Point C), but they already
| know there will be large delays and cost overrun.
| sharken wrote:
| The Wikipedia page on the plant has a very detailed timeline
| of this 22-year long endeavour.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plan.
| ..
| epistasis wrote:
| > Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build
| at a third of the cost and time of that.
|
| When did Japan last build a nuclear reactor? I don't think
| any time recently.
|
| South Korea used to be touted as a success at construction
| without massive overruns, but it turns out that it was
| largely a result or corruption and skimping on safety
| inspections:
|
| https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/s-korea-jails-nuclear-
| work...
|
| As for China and Russia, we don't really have much insight to
| what they are doing as far as safety. China is seems to be
| successful at large scale construction projects in a way that
| we can not replicate in the west, so perhaps their numbers
| are reasonable for construction costs.
|
| > If nuclear energy should be considered, much more must be
| built more continuously.
|
| We would need entirely new designs unlike what has been built
| in the past. Both France and the US have negative learning
| rates when building the same reactor design multiple times,
| and that was 50 years ago when construction was a much more
| effective part of our economies.
|
| I do not believe that nuclear is a smart energy source to
| pursue given our modern production capabilities. There's a
| bevy of nuclear startups trying smaller reactors that might
| be able to constrain construction costs. But in the past
| these designs have been rejected because of the loss of
| economy of scale, as being too expensive per watt.
|
| Of the potential carbon neutral energy sources of the future,
| nuclear is one of the e least practical. It may supply a tiny
| fraction of our future power, maybe 10%, but without a major
| revolution _soon_ on construction, our aging reactors will be
| shut down at end of life without any way to build more of
| them.
| cipher_system wrote:
| Last one was connected in 2009 which isn't that recent but
| there are also not that many projects of this size. China
| and Russia might not be the most thrustworthy and I would
| rather see more more western examples but then we have to
| go back a couple of decades, most of which were excellent.
|
| I agree that a gigantic shift is required and put my hopes
| into mass produced SMRs. It's gonna take time and money,
| yes, just like the shift to EVs and renewables.
|
| Fossil fuels is still above 80% of global primary energy,
| nuclear 5% and renewables excluding hydro 2%.
|
| I really don't think putting all eggs in the solar/wind
| basket is good. They should of course also get heavy
| investments but that doesn't have to exclude nuclear. We're
| gonna need everything we have to end the fossil era.
| jotm wrote:
| > China is seems to be successful at large scale
| construction projects in a way that we can not replicate in
| the west
|
| Are they? Considering that their population is higher than
| the whole of North America + EU + Russia combined, wouldn't
| it be fair to compare it that way? Sure, it's one country
| as opposed to several, but still, the population plays a
| huge role in this "amazing construction at scale".
| afterburner wrote:
| Even worse, it was meant to be finished in 2009, not 2010.
|
| It took over 4 times as long to built as pitched, and over 3
| times as expensive.
|
| Everyone doing comparison calculations with renewables,
| _remember that_.
| yawaramin wrote:
| What do you think would be the cost of depending on Russia for
| energy?
| lostlogin wrote:
| The benefit is that it's likely quite cheap. Can you really
| not think of a downside?
| [deleted]
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Yup. Energy independence is a cost that's not factored in.
| (Then again, solar/wind could serve both factors well)
| yakubin wrote:
| _> solar /wind could serve both factors well_
|
| Not 24/7.
| threeseed wrote:
| If you store it then it can be 24/7.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Sure, but let's build 150% of total needed capacity as
| renewables, and burn coal for the 5 days a year we still
| need to.
| realusername wrote:
| You start to understand the issue of comparing the raw
| cost of kWh of renewables to stable energy like nuclear,
| if you have to build N times the capacity, the cost per
| kWh is just N times more expensive.
| afterburner wrote:
| But unlike nuclear, solar/wind is _constantly_ getting
| cheaper. Nuclear is, frankly, doing the opposite.
| lazide wrote:
| When you do the 2-3x (minimum) for wind and solar + keep
| the coal plant around and ready to go at a moments
| notice, including stockpile fuel and maintain it, it
| starts getting really expensive really fast.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Gas plant. Coal is much more expensive than gas, by every
| measure, and is much less adjustable to immediate
| requirement. The only reason any coal is still being used
| is installed base and market inertia.
| thfuran wrote:
| Where are the uranium mines?
| mantas wrote:
| A single shipment from wherever can last a looooong time.
| It's not like gas or oil where you need continuous
| supply. And there're deposits in civilised world.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| I think Australia has plenty.
|
| https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-
| library/country-pr...
| RobertMiller wrote:
| Kazakhstan (under Russia's sphere of influence) is the
| largest producer at 36% of the global supply (5% from
| Russia itself.) It can be purchased from countries like
| Canada (15%) or Australia (12%). The next two are Namibia
| and Niger, each producing 8% of the global supply.
| lazide wrote:
| The US also has very large stocks on states like Utah and
| Arizona. Generally hasn't been considered economically
| worthwhile since WW2 however.
| burmanm wrote:
| Solar is not a viable solution in the north. The energy
| usage goes up when solar generation goes down.
|
| For wind, we're too small country - there are always days
| without any wind. There are even days without any wind in
| nearby countries included.
| zamalek wrote:
| With the success of anti-nuclear rhetoric, we became pretty
| incompetent at building these things. It's just like the space
| program.
| threeseed wrote:
| What rhetoric ? Nuclear is objectively far more expensive
| than renewables.
|
| That's the reason it has struggled for traction.
| belorn wrote:
| This is why nuclear does not compete with renewables during
| optimal weather conditions. Nuclear compete with fossil
| fuels when demand exceeds that of what renewables can
| produces, usually during periods of non-optimal weather
| conditions. Right now the price on the energy market is
| determined by fossil fuel and Russia is using this fact in
| order to fund their military invasion. Any period where
| renewable productions dips below demand is an opportunity
| to extract money from EU into that invasion.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The anti-nuclear crowd being successful might just be an
| alternate spin on the failure of the nuclear industry.
| Juliate wrote:
| Or the actual spin/might of the fossil-extracted energy
| industry.
| bckr wrote:
| ... which is in bed with the Russian oligarchy... who are
| expert in disinformation ...
| aunty_helen wrote:
| The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| The truth lies in the resolution of the conflict in
| Chernobyl,
|
| and in every place connected by water to Fukushima.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Or at either end. Or, nowhere near either number. When
| you are making up numbers to announce, you pick according
| to the audience, not any physical constraint.
| rdsubhas wrote:
| We have completely screwed up market price discovery for energy
| with big govt involvement and subsidies. The numbers I see
| everywhere are cherry picked to present a winner and loser.
|
| e.g. Depending on whose point of view you read, solar/wind
| prices either includes or not: subsidies, storage, land,
| weather, green label costs passed on to customers, interest
| rates, etc. Coal prices either includes or not: labor, imports,
| duties, mining, environmental costs, health costs, etc.
|
| Lately I've come to a conclusion that we can make any of these
| methods appear equal, higher or lower by shifting the books.
|
| Atleast I'm happy that this article is focusing only on the
| benefits and outcome, rather than invent winners and losers.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I'm hoping all these comments on HN I see that follow the
| pattern "I was wrong about something important, but rather
| than admit that, I'm going to believe that the truth is
| unknowable" are just the first step on someone's journey to
| accept an unpleasant shock to their ego.
|
| It's depressing to think there's a growing army of geeks who
| have given up on science, rationality and objective reality
| just because they got sucked in by some propaganda and tied
| their identity a bit too firmly to it to ever escape.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| I think the issue is not the geeks grasp of science and
| objectivity, but the cultures democratization of the
| talking space to include vast numbers on un-rational and
| subjective thinkers on equal status with educated and more
| objective thinkers.
|
| Politics and the funding of state actions seems to be
| enacted highly subjectively according to power plays and
| vested interests, with minimal impact from rational geeks.
|
| This is the defining issue of our times in my opinion, the
| reason climate change is the barely mitigated disaster it's
| turning into.
|
| We only get a small fraction of the possible benefits of
| science as a race, because so much of our potential is
| wasted or actively worked against.
| skybrian wrote:
| I don't see why it shouldn't be a reason for being hopeful?
| Admitting ignorance is generally a step in the right
| direction. No reason to be depressed about it.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Admitting ignorance is no indication that the number is
| closer to what you wish it were. Increasing uncertainty
| increases uncertainty. Increased uncertainty undermines
| investment, which depends mainly on confidence.
|
| But literally every reactor ever built depended more on
| government extraction and concentration of capital (i.e.,
| politics) than on market forces, making it all even less
| predictable.
| rectang wrote:
| If we leave energy decisions to an under-regulated "free
| market", we guarantee that market forces will select for the
| most short-termist, externality-spewing choices possible.
|
| What do power execs care if they leave behind ruins decades
| down the road? They will have already made their money and
| enjoyed it.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| That isn't something you typically see from Reuters.
| [deleted]
| pstuart wrote:
| Yep. I think the only chance for embracing more nuclear would
| be to have smaller modular reactors that can be built on an
| assembly line. And while we're dreaming, moving to Thorium as
| the fuel.
| [deleted]
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Very distinct things. China is actively deploying modular
| reactors while thorium salt reactors have many unsolved
| problems, mostly with durability that will need substantial
| advancements in material sciences to become viable.
| pstuart wrote:
| Acknowledged -- I was smooshing thoughts together.
| Brakenshire wrote:
| It's not too distant a dream, the Rolls Royce small modular
| reactor designs have just been submitted for approval:
|
| https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/rolls-royce-
| submits-...
| alvarlagerlof wrote:
| I'm betting they don't get approved.
| [deleted]
| forty wrote:
| It was shipped with 12 years delay, and has caused billion in
| loss to the builder Areva/Orano. They are building a similar
| one in France which will have at least 11 years delay, and also
| billions of costs overrun.
|
| Areva/Orano being a french state owned (mostly) company, this
| is probably largely paid for by the French tax payer.
| firekvz wrote:
| Comming from a country where nucler power is nowhere near the
| radar, what is the case against nuclear power? it seems such a
| nobrainer for me to use
| iso1631 wrote:
| Extreme cost (money and time) to get it built
|
| Difficulties in managing waste
|
| 20 years ago I was all for nuclear, then I looked at terrible
| projects in Europe, like in the Finland and the UK, and
| realised that it's too little too late. Europe can't build
| nuclear, so rather than trying to fight a losing battle for
| another 20 years, Europe should be massively investing in what
| it can do (offshore wind, tidal, solar, pumped hydro)
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Plus proliferation of material for nuclear weapons.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://whatisnuclear.com/non-proliferation.html
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm thinking proliferation as positive. Just think of
| countries recently in war had nuclear deterrent. They might
| not have been invaded in first place. Everyone having
| nuclear weapons would make world much more peaceful and
| safer place.
|
| That is unless we sanction all nations that have nuclear
| weapons and blockade them from international trade until
| they get rid of them and subject themselves to being open
| to inspections for couple centuries.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| > Everyone having nuclear weapons would make world much
| more peaceful and safer place.
|
| That's the happy path.
|
| The failure path with an unhinged dictator causing global
| destruction also gets much more likely.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Then again the so called "rational" actors would be less
| likely do bad things. Just imagine how much better place
| world would be if in response to drone strike by Obama or
| Biden the NYC or Washington DC was hit by nuclear weapon.
| That would surely put end to those antics.
| crote wrote:
| - Time. This one took over a decade and a half to build, and
| that's pretty normal
|
| - Cost. Literally billions of dollars, all upfront. This one
| was budgeted at $3B and ended up costing $10B+.
|
| - Inflexibility. Almost all of the cost is in building one, so
| if you aren't running it basically 100% of the time at 100%
| capacity you are losing money.
|
| When it comes to $/MWh, nuclear simply can't compete with
| fossil or renewable when demand is low. And you can't run it to
| pick up high demand because it gets even _more_ expensive. The
| private market is simply not interested in them, unless they
| get a government guarantee that forces their production to be
| bought at a fixed price.
|
| And there's of course the whole safety and waste argument, but
| I consider that to be secondary. All in all, nuclear is a
| could-have-been and mostly a side-effect of nuclear arms
| development. Neat technology, but there are way better options.
| fsflover wrote:
| All these arguments are moot, see the research:
|
| https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
|
| https://whatisnuclear.com/fukushima.html
|
| ...etc.
| freemint wrote:
| See this nuclear positive website that doesn't have an
| imprint (I can find on mobile). I wouldn't bcall it
| research either. Summary would probably be fair.
| fsflover wrote:
| It contains links to the research.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Yeah but only where it fits the narrative which in the
| question of cost for example leads to this:
|
| 1) If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear,
| they'd be doing better
|
| 2) Multiple hypothetical approaches to reduce nuclear
| costs are ongoing. No one knows for sure if any of them
| will work, or which one will work best
|
| 3) Factory-produced large reactors on floating platforms
| is a surprisingly intriguing idea to make reactors cheap
|
| or: 1) make everything else more expensive so we look
| better
|
| 2) let me consult the magic orb because I have nothing in
| my hands
|
| 3) I have a nice idea
|
| Meanwhile we have HERE just another example of
| hilariously expensive reactor. Actual facts. Waved away
| with theories like "we don't have the people with
| experience anymore" which leaves you with the thought:
| should inexperienced people build nuclear reactors at
| all?
| threeseed wrote:
| No the arguments are still the same.
|
| We have to build lots of bigger, standardised reactors
| which will then reduce the cost due to experience and
| economies of scale. But then of course someone has to
| subsidise the tens/hundreds of billions in upfront
| investment to get to that point.
|
| Where as with renewables this was all done decades ago. And
| we are now at the point where it is orders of magnitude
| cheaper than nuclear. And getting cheaper by the day.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| It usually goes like this:
|
| _Chernobyl! Fukushima! Radiation! Waste! Death! Death!! DEATH
| TO ALL HUMANITY!!!_
| rectang wrote:
| You left out proliferation of dual-use technologies. The
| fewer countries with advanced nuclear capabilities, the more
| thinly spread the expertise necessary to build nuclear
| weapons.
|
| If Russia didn't have nukes, its imperialistic ambitious
| would be curtailed. The ability to shield conventional
| assaults behind a nuclear threat is destabilizing for the
| rules-based world order.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://whatisnuclear.com/non-proliferation.html
| qwytw wrote:
| Is this also sarcasm? So you're saying that building this
| plant has increase the chance Finland will try to acquire
| Nuclear weapons? And Russia has nukes purely due to
| political and military reasons, they'd still have more than
| enough of them if they mostly started closing/stopped
| building new plants after Chernobyl.
| rectang wrote:
| No, it's not sarcasm -- I would appreciate it if you
| would be a little more generous when interpreting my
| remark. The proliferation problem is exacerbated
| incrementally by every additional plant in every
| additional country -- including this one. The issue is
| not Finland in particular developing nuclear weapons, but
| _any_ country developing nuclear weapons -- especially a
| country governed by an autocracy. Or a country that might
| be governed by an autocracy in the future -- the last few
| years have raised the urgency of the problem of
| democratic backsliding, which we need to figure out how
| to avert.
| yakubin wrote:
| The countries which are least trustworthy wrt nuclear
| weapons are the ones that aren't going to ask the
| public's permission. An autocracy doesn't need to power
| itself by nuclear plants in order to have nuclear
| weapons. On the other hand having a sustainable, clean
| source of power not tied to autocratic regimes lowers the
| leverage those regimes hold over democratic countries.
|
| In my particular country, a major chunk of the public
| budget goes towards paying fines to EU for use of coal,
| all while our government periodically passes bills
| allowing it to borrow more money from the central bank,
| increasing inflation. Negotiations with neighbouring
| autocratic countries can be pretty tough, when they can
| threaten us and rest of Europe, which is going to put
| pressure, with stopping energy transmission. Energy
| shortages in some parts of the country were a regular
| occurrence for decades, even before the current political
| problems.
|
| Lack of nuclear plants does nothing to prevent a nuclear
| war, while it harms us on many very tangible levels.
| rectang wrote:
| See https://whatisnuclear.com/non-proliferation.html#how-
| is-nucl... for one of the mechanisms whereby dual-use
| technology presents issues: obtaining fissile material is
| difficult, and while nuclear power plants are not a
| prerequisite, they make it easier.
|
| I agree that dependence on geopolitically and
| environmentally problematic fossil fuel sources is a
| pressing concern.
| jrockway wrote:
| I don't think it's sarcasm. Maybe North Korea is a better
| example. It would probably just be "Korea" if they didn't
| have nukes, but you can't exactly go in and overthrow the
| government when they can just wipe out all human life on
| the peninsula in an instant.
|
| (People get upset at the implication that one country
| would take over another country, but the people of North
| Korea would probably not be worse off if that happened.
| Instead they suffer greatly because nobody can help
| them.)
| RobertMiller wrote:
| > _It would probably just be "Korea" if they didn't have
| nukes_
|
| Their first nuclear test was in 2006. Even their
| production of refined uranium and plutonium only began in
| the 80s, decades after the war came to a standstill.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Russia imperialistic ambitions would be far more modest if
| Europe and US wouldn't fill Putin's coffers with hundreds
| of billions of dollars and euros in exchange for oil and
| gas. You know, the things they use instead of Nuclear
| energy.
| rectang wrote:
| Indeed, we are left with (from my perspective) all bad
| choices in the short-to-medium term. In the US, we made a
| least-bad calculation when choosing the environmental
| cost of fracking over the geopolitical costs of depending
| on dictator oil. Now Europe gets to make similar
| calculations.
|
| I'd sure like it if less inherently dangerous
| technologies were further along. But every year they are
| gaining.
| Aachen wrote:
| And if you manage to convince someone this is an airplane
| crash type of problem, they start about the finances.
|
| And they're right about it not being the cheapest option, so
| what can you say? They win the argument.
|
| Next time you meet the person is at a protest where they
| don't want a solar farm where there is now a nice forest or
| pasture, no 24/7 moving shadows from huge wind turbine blades
| and that's after they pushed for a law to require more space
| between the edge of town and the nearest turbine, protesting
| for fish rights when hydro is being proposed (if that's
| possible in their area in the first place)...
|
| People also love to gloss over that electricity is 10% of the
| problem. Whenever you see a headline about Germany having run
| on 90% renewable power last month or whatever, mentally
| replace that with 9% because energy used in transportation,
| building heating, etc. don't count towards this. And then we
| haven't even touched upon the problem of cement/steel/plastic
| yet, we're going to need breakthrough materials or negative
| emissions with capturing plants that, you guessed it, also
| require electricity.
|
| It's apparently very hard to understand that we need to work
| on all fronts, not pick a partial solution and wait until
| that's exhaustively implemented (all reasonably available
| space occupied) 15 years down the road, then wonder why
| emissions are at record highs (see 2021).
| manquer wrote:
| It is less about being cheap and more about being
| predictable.
|
| Getting consistent funding for new projects is hard when
| every other project in history has over run both costs and
| time widely.
| Aachen wrote:
| If mere cost/time predictability were the problem we
| could double any worst-case projection. Even at that
| price point it's something I think we should pursue
| _alongside_ the more renewable sources. That electricity
| has been dirt(y) cheap in the past decades was great, but
| that 's just not sustainable.
|
| But yeah if we argue for another five years before
| getting started on at least the legislation/planning
| stages (after which we could still declare it a sunk
| cost, based on how the situation looks in 2027), we might
| as well forget about it.
| thow-58d4e8b wrote:
| As a rule of thumb, greenhouse gas emissions are roughly
| equally split between electricity production,
| transportation, heating, agriculture and industry, about
| 20% each. Transportation is electrifying rather quickly in
| Europe, heating at a bit slower pace. So it's a bit better
| than "10% of the problem" - it's about 20% now, becoming
| ~40% in 10-15 years, eventually lowering total emissions by
| ~60% probably some time around 2050
|
| Agriculture and industry are tough nuts to crack. With
| electricity, transport and heating, it's a problem of
| scaling out. With agriculture and industry - we don't even
| have a blueprint yet
| Aachen wrote:
| Fair enough. My figures are from 2013 and even then it
| was better than 10% (namely 12.7% in the Netherlands
| where I'm from; that's the latest info Wikipedia has).
| I'll use 20% as a rule of thumb going forwards because
| that's indeed more future-proof.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Fear based on feeling, not on facts. That's it.
|
| By any objective metric, nuclear is by far the best choice for
| stable base power generation.
|
| "But what if it explodes" - and there goes all rationality.
|
| Humans will take constant death from coal power plants rather
| than a minuscule chance of a larger catastrophe in a nuclear
| plant.
| pfdietz wrote:
| "But what if it explodes" is actually a valid question for
| fast reactors, since they can potentially go prompt fast
| supercritical in a serious accident. Edward Teller was
| famously suspicious (in 1967) of fast reactors for this
| reason.
| ljf wrote:
| As soon as private industry is funding and running nuclear
| power including the decommissioning costs, plus selling their
| energy at market rates (in the UK we have guaranteed the new
| nuclear plants rates that are higher than the next most
| expensive generators costs) then I'll believe that.
|
| The only way these are remotely economical is when they are
| funded by the tax payer before the are built, while they run,
| and after they close down.
|
| Any examples that goes against that? I'd be very interested
| to learn about them. I think as a way to ensure energy
| independence and remove fossil fuels they are good, but we
| cannot pretend they don't come with massive costs, and don't
| yet pay their own way.
| p_l wrote:
| The problem is that markets are supremely bad at building a
| stable electricity grid. So on one hand wind and solar are
| getting cheaper per MW, but it doesn't include the effect
| they have on destabilising both the grid _and_ electricity
| markets - in fact, solar getting cheaper is probably going
| to cause a stop on buildout in some places, because the
| price of solar MW is going to be too low to deal with all
| the time you 're not producing - either due to lack of sun,
| or due to curtailment.
|
| And we do not really have any storage available - the only
| systems that are 1) not experimental 2) usable for anything
| other than frequency stabilisation; are the pumped hydro -
| and those are geographically limited. At least when it's
| windy, you can use wind turbines as sinks for stability.
| Intermittent nature of solar and wind is too intermittent
| for most industrial sinks.
|
| Meanwhile unpredictable nature of generation from wind and
| solar push the grid to buildout LNG/petroleum powered gas
| turbines, due to their very short delay on ramping up/down
| (IIRC, second only to hydro). So you end up in situation
| where market approach to electricity is going to prevent
| decarbonisation, unless you hugely upend what is being
| bought on the market.
|
| Personally I've been thinking of electricity market paying
| only for predictable (aka "dispatchable") low-carbon power
| plants, or at least with huge priority. Solar and Wind
| could still compete on such market by being paired with
| storage systems into Virtual Power Plants (something that
| already exists), and the rest of the generation would be
| sold on spot market during peaks, or preferably to
| dedicated sinks like green hydrogen production.
| londons_explore wrote:
| * Plants are very expensive to build. Due to massive upfront
| costs, it cannot beat wind/solar today unless you use very
| unusual financial models. (ie. assume interest rates are zero
| for 50 years). If nuclear plants were built more frequently,
| cost would come down a lot - it turns out making everything
| bespoke is hugely expensive.
|
| * Lots of public opposition due to the public being scared of
| nuclear waste, nuclear accidents, etc. The public far prefers
| taking on invisible risk (like the lung cancer risk from
| coal/oil/gas emissions) than the huge event risk of a nuclear
| meltdown, even if the overall harm to human lives is higher.
| cipher_system wrote:
| Keep in mind that Finland is on the same latitudes as Alaska
| so solar doesn't work that great when needed the most.
| liketochill wrote:
| It is only producing 100 MW of 1600 MW which they should achieve
| by July. Congratulations to all of the engineers there!
| cbmuser wrote:
| It's actually been built by SIEMENS/Areva which is ironic
| because Germany is on the brink on shutting down all of its
| nuclear power plants.
| mrits wrote:
| Is it a possibility to ramp them back up?
| legulere wrote:
| Siemens dropped out of the project and constructing nuclear
| power plants because of how much of a failure this reactor
| was.
| hnarn wrote:
| I'll avoid the tiresome linguistic debate about what
| qualifies as "irony" and instead point out that sure, while
| Siemens is a "German" company, giving a _multinational
| corporation_ a national identity very often does not make
| sense. Siemens has ~300 000 employees, and while it 's one of
| Germany's biggest employers with ~100 000 employees in the
| country, that still means two thirds of the company does not
| work in Germany.
|
| Also, Areva is French and Siemens hasn't held any shares in
| the company since 2009.
| dry_soup wrote:
| Electricity prices are through the roof in Finland right now.
| This was even the case before the war started. We import an
| incredible amount of LNG from Russia, a lot of which is used for
| electricity production if I have it correct, which we would of
| course like to be independent of. But for the time being we have
| spikes of 60-70 cents/kWh electricity prices. Hopefully OL3 will
| help this somewhat.
|
| Finland has another nuclear power plant under construction as
| well... or at least we did, until the war started, now I don't
| know what will happen. Rusatom was supposed to supply the reactor
| for Hanhikivi nuclear power plant, which was also severely
| delayed.
|
| Russia is also an important supplier of nuclear fuel to Finland.
| burmanm wrote:
| We don't import a lot of LNG from Russia. Gas coming from
| Russia comes through the pipes, not LNG. However, we don't even
| use gas a lot in Finland (it accounts 3% of the total energy
| production).
|
| The electricity prices are through the roof for other reasons
| (and have been for almost a year now) and are not related to
| Russia at all.
| dry_soup wrote:
| Care to elaborate?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Finnish market is tied to other Nordics that are tied to
| central Europe. So it is cascading effect. Main culprit for
| Nordics really is poor levels of hydro reservoirs. And high
| prices in Central Europe leading to prices also increasing
| here.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| This is surprising to me, I found this number for
| Finland: 22.5% comes from hydropower. I suppose I'm stuck
| associating Tampere, Finland (Nokia) with hydropower as
| well as the Venmork plant in Norway that was sabotaged
| during WW2. I realize that doesn't mean much however.
|
| I have to do some reading, but my understanding was that
| the Finnish plant is using an alternate funding structure
| from many of the existing nuclear installations. Less
| direct subsidies or more risk directly on the commercial
| entities?
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| Couldn't you buy nuclear fuel from e.g. France instead?
| belorn wrote:
| For a while, Russian nuclear fuel was cheaper. There are
| alternative sources if the political interest to not fund
| Russian exceed the economical interests.
| roschdal wrote:
| blibble wrote:
| at that point we're already in a nuclear war due to the EU
| collective defence provisions
| oblak wrote:
| what are you talking about?
| RobertMiller wrote:
| It's a BWR, the worst case failure mode looks something like
| Fukishima. Certainly a mess, but "set on fire" makes me think
| you're imagining another Chernobyl. BWRs don't catch fire like
| that. If something went very wrong, the reactor and containment
| buildings might pop and make a big mess, but it's not as though
| there's _a thousand tons of graphite_ there to catch fire. It
| 's not an RBMK.
|
| Edit: Actually it's a PWR, the other two reactors at this plant
| are BWRs. Still, similar worst-case scenarios.
| rectang wrote:
| The possibility seems remote right now and I dislike the
| inflammatory framing, but I think this touches on one of
| fundamental drawbacks of nuclear power: it is hard to engineer
| plants to guard against catastrophe because there's a lot of
| energy stored in an inherently dangerous form.
|
| Hydroelectric power is often similarly vulnerable: you can
| engineer the dam to hold, but when something outside of
| tolerances appears, the downstream consequences are severe.
| Compare with solar or wind, where the energy source is not
| concentrated and so plant machinery is comparatively inert.
|
| We are continually reassured by proponents that today's designs
| are invulnerable, but both history and the fundamentals of
| energy storage bespeak the limitations of such assurances.
| orangecat wrote:
| _We are continually reassured by proponents that today 's
| designs are invulnerable_
|
| Not invulnerable, but the expected harm is far less than
| fossil fuels under any reasonable assumptions.
| zh3 wrote:
| I'm pro-nuclear, but having been following this for a long time
| and it's not exactly a model that's leading the way.
|
| Especially as I'm in the UK, and we decided to build a copy of it
| (Hinckley Point) even after all the flaws become known.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| We're doing it a lot better though. Progress has been good.
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