[HN Gopher] Saskatchewan, Ontario to roll out mini-nuclear reactors
___________________________________________________________________
Saskatchewan, Ontario to roll out mini-nuclear reactors
Author : voisin
Score : 404 points
Date : 2022-07-14 01:50 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.westerninvestor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.westerninvestor.com)
| nl wrote:
| > which could be deployed in the Prairie province by the 2030s
| and in Ontario by 2028.
|
| Note the "could be".
|
| Can the myth of cheap, safe and quick to deploy fission energy
| please die?
|
| It's not cheap, for good reasons[1]:
|
| > Among the surprising findings in the study, which covered 50
| years of U.S. nuclear power plant construction data, was that,
| contrary to expectations, building subsequent plants based on an
| existing design actually costs more, not less, than building the
| initial plant.
|
| > The authors also found that while changes in safety regulations
| could account for some of the excess costs, that was only one of
| numerous factors contributing to the overages.
|
| It's not safe:
|
| > US nuclear regulators greatly underestimate potential for
| nuclear disaster, researchers say[2]
|
| > Now I was serving on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, [snip]
| In 2009, President Barack Obama named me the agency's chairman.
| [snip] > Afterward, the falling cost of renewable power changed
| the calculus. Despite working in the industry for more than a
| decade, I now believe that nuclear power's benefits are no longer
| enough to risk the welfare of people living near these plants. I
| became so convinced that, years after departing office, I've now
| made alternative energy development my new career, leaving
| nuclear power behind. The current and potential costs -- in lives
| and dollars -- are just too high. [3]
|
| It's always slow to deploy[4]:
|
| > Finland's long-delayed Olkiluoto-3 nuclear reactor connected to
| the power grid for the first time on Saturday, the plant's
| operator said, 12 years after its planned launch. Located on
| Finland's west coast, Olkiluoto-3 is the country's first new
| nuclear plant in over four decades and Europe's first in almost
| 15 years.
|
| [1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
|
| [2] https://phys.org/news/2017-05-nuclear-greatly-
| underestimate-...
|
| [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-oversaw-the-us-
| nucl...
|
| [4] https://www.dw.com/en/finlands-much-delayed-nuclear-plant-
| la...
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Anti-nuke sentiment is the reason we are facing global warming
| right now. Just stop it.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| When the last chapter of industrial civilization is written
| some time in the 2100s the number of people the Greens killed
| in the name of protecting the environment will make every
| war, genocide and mass murdering dictator look like amateur
| hour.
|
| The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is
| unfortunate we have made Earth into hell though.
| kleer001 wrote:
| > the number of people the Greens killed
|
| citation needed
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Hi, y'all I'll take this one for the team. Sorry for
| generally reducing my resource usage and encouraging others
| to do so... I guess I'm excited to stop being compared to
| pol pot or whatever tho.
| zackees wrote:
| nl wrote:
| This is untrue.
|
| 1) Burning fossil fuels is why we are facing global warming
| right now.
|
| 2) Anti-nuclear sentiment is why we aren't living in a
| nuclear waste right now. Even nuclear advocate's argument
| that "nuclear plants are much safer now and the accidents
| that happened at 3 Mile Island/Chernobyl/Fukushima are
| impossible now" implies that anti-nuclear sentiment was
| correct in the 1960's, 70's, 80's, 90's and early 2000s _at
| the very least_!
| strken wrote:
| In terms of fatalities, we're overly scared of nuclear
| incidents, and not scared enough of coal power and
| brownouts.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| You're absolutely correct when you say that less regulated
| nuclear would have caused more incidents. You may also be
| correct when you say the risks aren't properly calculated
| at present. The thing is, _that doesn 't matter_ unless
| they're off by three orders of magnitude. Coal kills so
| many people through pollution that the world could suffer a
| Three Mile Island once a year without killing anywhere near
| as many people as coal does.
|
| It is now theoretically possible that solar, wind, and
| pumped hydro could provide a substantial chunk of global
| baseload power. We could have gotten there decades ago with
| nuclear. It's the fault of the green movement that we
| didn't.
| goodpoint wrote:
| You are conveniently omitting any form of systemic risk
| around nuclear.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| A few more Chernobyl-level incidents could have been worth
| it if it meant less coal plants.
| Joeri wrote:
| _Even nuclear advocate 's argument that "nuclear plants are
| much safer now and the accidents that happened at 3 Mile
| Island/Chernobyl/Fukushima are impossible now" implies that
| anti-nuclear sentiment was correct in the 1960's, 70's,
| 80's, 90's and early 2000s at the very least!_
|
| Every nuclear disaster so far has been unique, and this
| will remain the case going forward, because the nuclear
| sector is always defending against yesterday's failure
| mode. Nuclear power plants are some of the most complicated
| machines mankind has ever built. In such a complex design
| there are too many permutations of failures that can arise
| to allow for designing away all risk. We need to
| fundamentally accept this risk and embrace it if we are
| going to adopt nuclear power on a grander scale. This is a
| big ask on a psychological level for humanity, and that's
| one reason why I think a nuclear upscaling is not going to
| happen. (The other is high and rising cost of construction,
| which is the biggest problem facing the nuclear power
| sector that is on them to solve.)
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Gen II 1970s era nuclear reactors are still among the
| safest forms of energy known to humanity. Anti-nuclear
| sentiment has only prolonged the reign of particulate and
| carbon emitting fossil and biofuel.
|
| If Chernobyl itself was built today, without the post-
| accident modifications, and it ran 5 years and then
| exploded, it'd still be safer than a coal plant running
| normally.
|
| Fossil/biofuel particulate emissions killing ~8 million
| people per year is no joke.
|
| https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution
| nl wrote:
| > Gen II 1970s era nuclear reactors are still among the
| safest forms of energy known to humanity. ... If
| Chernobyl itself was built today, without the post-
| accident modifications, and it ran 5 years and then
| exploded, it'd still be safer than a coal plant running
| normally.
|
| This is only based on the official number of deaths (31 I
| think?). This is known to be false.
|
| Better estimates are hard, but "the Ukrainian government
| pays benefits to more than 36,000 widows of men who have
| died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster".[1]
|
| There were also at least 200,000 people who had to be
| relocated.
|
| I agree 100% we should get rid of coal ASAP! No dispute
| there at all.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-
| ever-kno...
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| > This is only based on the official number of deaths (31
| I think?). This is known to be false.
|
| Actually, it's based on the UNSCEAR number of 4000 deaths
| including latent cancers. Don't use the Ukraine political
| numbers. Use the UN panel of scientist numbers.
|
| https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/areas-of-
| work/chernobyl.h...
| nl wrote:
| On https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
| (which I think is the best source) they use 433 deaths
| from Chernobyl and 2314 from Fukushima.
|
| If they used your 4000 number then Nuclear becomes twice
| as unsafe as solar.
|
| (But the point here isn't the number of deaths in the
| past - because that was moderated by the strong anti-
| nuclear movements. The risk is higher usage leads to
| dramatic increases, because deaths are dominated by
| accidents not constant one-off deaths like from pollution
| which are more predicable)
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| > 2314 from Fukushima
|
| Woah I did not realize they used that figure. Everyone
| agrees that there were between 0 and 1 deaths from
| radiation due to Fukushima (vs between 31 and 4000
| radiation deaths at Chernobyl). There were deaths caused
| by the prolonged evacuation at Fukushima, which must be
| where this figure comes from.
| xupybd wrote:
| To your first point: Yes, but if Nuclear plants were more
| common less fossil fuels would be burnt. Hence anti-nuclear
| sentiment has led to more climate change.
|
| To your second: 3 Mile Island was not an accident that
| caused significant environmental damage.
|
| https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-
| sec....
|
| Chernobyl was a terrible design that should never have been
| built.
|
| Fukushima is an example of the dangers. It was however hit
| by an earthquake 1 magnitude higher than it was designed
| for and a Tsunami. Given it's location it should have been
| designed to handle these possibilities.
| epgui wrote:
| I would argue that Fukushima was a pretty good example of
| how safe nuclear power is. The damage was very well
| contained, and the evacuation measures caused more harm
| than the primary danger.
| mlyle wrote:
| I'm pretty pro-nuclear, but a couple hundred billion
| dollars of damages, a couple dozen direct deaths, some
| people getting maimed, and causing thousands of deaths by
| displacing a large population is a catastrophe by any
| stretch. Yes, fossil fuels may be worse per unit of
| energy generated, but they are never quite this
| spectacular in a single event.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > but they are never quite this spectacular in a single
| event.
|
| Even things like oil spills? I know it's hard (or even
| impossible) to reduce to "overall damage" as the common
| unit, but I know oil spills are catastrophic.
| epgui wrote:
| Catastrophic, and also _much_ more frequent!
| jeltz wrote:
| There have been some pretty spectacular oil rig disasters
| with huge oil spills and >100 direct deaths. I would
| count those on the same scale. And those are in addition
| to the huge numbers of deaths every year and the
| contribution to global warming.
| mlyle wrote:
| I wouldn't, though, because they don't have the impact on
| the population at large and don't cost nearly as much.
| Yes, maybe they impact other industries or recreation in
| an area for awhile.
| epgui wrote:
| A fossil fuel plant operating nominally without any
| incidents will impact the entire population as the fossil
| fuels are consumed and the byproducts of their combustion
| emitted. The number of QALYs / DALYs / deaths lost that
| are directly attributable to air pollution is absolutely
| staggering.
|
| The magnitude of the risks we're contemplating when we're
| discussing nuclear are completely insignificant in
| relation to that.
| xupybd wrote:
| Yes, it's estimated Fukushima will cost a little over
| double you're worst oil spill.
| https://theconversation.com/five-years-after-fukushima-
| there...
|
| But we happily live with oil drilling and transport.
|
| Countries like France show how safe nuclear can be.
| katbyte wrote:
| All avoided by not building a nuclear power plant on the
| coast in a subduction zone prone to intense earthquakes
| and massive tsunamis
| mlyle wrote:
| Yes, but _all_ accidents (not just nuclear) seem to have
| simple, stupid, easily-avoided factors in retrospect.
|
| I know it's tempting to say "oh, if we just don't do
| these 4-5 dumb things-- the risk is gone".
|
| It's s small risk, but boy the end of the tail in what it
| costs is pretty dang high.
| esoterae wrote:
| So far.
|
| No death tallies from the accident will be complete until
| the products have decayed to background levels.
|
| I think this study will take sometime to complete.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| In the mean time keep enjoying yearly trips to tropical
| locations where you can soak up the sun and enjoy some
| BBQ.
| more_corn wrote:
| No. Centuries long burning of fossil fuels is why we're
| facing climate change.
| drewcon wrote:
| So "burn" uranium instead.
| kleer001 wrote:
| and the reason we burned fossil fuels for the last 70 years
| is fear of nuclear power
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| These things can all be true and yet it is still a good idea to
| include some nuclear in our energy portfolio for
| diversification. In particular, my understanding is that
| economic storage of renewable energy has not yet been solved,
| so it might be nice to get some nuclear going in case that
| endeavor doesn't pan out as optimistically as hoped.
| nl wrote:
| Elsewhere on this thread someone posted a great 2019 research
| article that says:
|
| > If other sources meet demand 5% of the time, electricity
| costs fall and the energy capacity cost target rises to
| $150/kWh.
|
| Battery storage is already well under $150/kWh!
| vondro wrote:
| The problem is scale and availability of materials to make
| batteries. Right now almost all the batteries are produced
| for and used in electric cars, however electric cars only
| make around 10% of all the cars consumed.
|
| Now you wanna store enough solar-generated electricity for
| when the sun doesn't shine, worldwide? My napkin math says
| that either the price per kWh will go up, or that some poor
| country with enough lithium will be "politically
| destabilized" soon.
| revertmean wrote:
| > almost all the batteries are produced for and used in
| electric cars
|
| I'm not convinced. I tried a back-of-the-envelope
| calculation, but there were a few too many variables, but
| I _think_ the 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year edge
| out EVs (my main difficulty was comparing smartphone
| battery EV battery)
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| From a little Googling, it seems like an EV battery is
| four orders of magnitude larger than a smart phone
| battery, so about 150,000 EVs sold per year is the rough
| equilibrium point (that's four orders of magnitude lower
| than your 1.5B figure), and it seems like we're selling
| about a million EVs _per month_ , at least as of the end
| of 2021.
|
| https://www.ev-volumes.com/
| nl wrote:
| There's plenty of capacity for grid connected batteries.
|
| For one thing they can use a bunch of tech that doesn't
| work well in cars (flow batteries for example).
|
| And the price goes _down_ because the primary constraint
| is production capacity. More demand means more factories
| mean cheaper prices. See eg the growth in manufacturing
| capacity in batteries and their price decreasing:
| If you look at 2008, there was 6GWh of battery
| manufacturing in the world and 97% of it was in China.
| In 2019, there was around 365GWh worldwide, split into:
| China (75%), US (9%), South Korea (7%) Europe (5%)
| By 2023 we estimate there will be 1,230GWh worldwide:
| China (65%), Europe (10%), US (10%) and rest of the world
| (15%).
|
| https://www.energy-storage.news/behind-the-numbers-the-
| rapid...
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Iron redox flow batteries are made from abundant
| materials and cost less than lithium batteries. Sodium
| batteries have many of the upsides of lithium and don't
| require it (they require some other scarce materials).
| There are enough empty salt mines and similar to build
| weeks' worth of storage in CAES for less than the cost of
| either.
|
| But none of these solve the issue of months long weather
| fluctuations and disasters entirely in regions where
| pumped hydro isn't viable. For that, grid flexibility
| (such as variable rate Al production and electrified
| steel smelting), gas or hybrid heating/cooling, generator
| backup for essential uses (minimal heating and medical
| facilities), and methane produced from electricity and
| biomass is the answer and the only reason it hasn't
| happened on its own is we don't price in the (absolutely
| massive) externalities of fossil fuels so they're
| marginally cheaper. We also need to cut the low hanging
| fruit that are responsible for most of the emissions
| either directly or indirectly (poorly insulated, overly
| large detached homes, cars, and cows).
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Are detached homes really responsible for the majority of
| emissions, and how is that low-hanging fruit? That seems
| like one of the most expensive options per unit emissions
| reduced. I'm pretty sure industry and logistics are some
| of the most intensive, particularly if you don't pretend
| that goods imported from China or other countries are
| emissions free simply because the emissions weren't
| emitted domestically.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Detached homes are just one of the simpler low hanging
| fruit to fix -- subsidies on insulation and regulation
| rentals and on new homes -- rather than a huge part of
| the whole. It's an easy 5-10% depending on area (with
| side effects of helping the poor and reducing strain on
| infrastructure during extreme weather events) rather than
| a large part of the whole.
|
| About half for heating and cooling in EU,
| https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/energy-
| efficiency/heating... iirc 40% of that or around 20% of
| total was domestic -- it often looks small because it is
| broken dowm into two subsets of electricity and two
| subsets of methane use (and decreasingly kerosene) being
| for water and space heating. Detached homes use at least
| double compared to a row house (twice as many walls, but
| they also tend to be larger and have more windows) or far
| more than a similarly built apartment with one wall, and
| tend to be poorly insulated in places like the US.
|
| Heating and cooling represents a lower proportion in the
| US for a variety of reasons (primarily driving/trucking
| and some differences in industry as well as a colossally
| wasteful military), but a huge amount is caused by cows,
| clearing land for cows, moving cows, cooling cow
| products, moving feed for cows, and producing fertilizer
| to grow feed for cows.
|
| Unrelated, but detached home suburb design is also
| responsible for a lot of other emissions indirectly.
| Larger living space and fewer communal areas leads to
| more travel and more stuff. Things being spread out leads
| to low labour high emissions big box store stuff rather
| than local hand crafted and second hand markets and local
| in season produce. Transit and pedestrian hostile layout
| leads to more driving (and one car per person). Car
| dependent infrastructure leads to more trucking and less
| freight trains. Large centralised shopping centers like
| walmart leads to more uniform goods and just in time
| logistics which depemd on planes. Flight, trucking,
| driving and fossil fuel heating leads to more dependence
| on oil and gas. Oil and gas security is maintained by
| military activity which is responsible for a huge portion
| of emissions. None of this stops if you build a 5 over 1
| and a train line or a medium density village instead of a
| suburb of course, but you make a small dent in every
| step.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| And yet the more renewable a grid gets the less stable and
| more expensive it becomes. Funny how that works in reality
| instead of theory.
| nl wrote:
| This isn't true!
|
| Here are volume weight prices by time for Australia,
| which has been doing a transition:
|
| https://www.aer.gov.au/wholesale-markets/wholesale-
| statistic...
|
| They increase at less than the rate of inflation!
| thrown_22 wrote:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-warning-from-australias-
| power...
|
| Australia is the poster child of what not to do.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| The cost of storage must be factored into the cost of
| renewables, else it's not really a fair comparison. How much
| does it cost to build out 10 hours of storage @ 50% of day time
| generation wattage?
| orthecreedence wrote:
| We're talking about the far north. I think it's reasonable to
| require a lot more storage than 10 hours (and account for
| overcast weather, which is common in winter).
| nl wrote:
| Renewables, _with storage included_ are cost competitive with
| _coal_ now.
|
| Utility scale wind = $26-$50/MWh + wholesale 100MWh storage
| ($55-$97) = $81-$147
|
| Coal = $65-$152/MWh
|
| Nuclear: $131-$204/MWh
|
| These don't include pump-hydro which is a widely used and
| very cheap storage mechanism.
|
| It's much cheaper and better to overbuild renewables and put
| a few cheap gas peaker plants around as backup.
|
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-
| energy-...
| [deleted]
| credit_guy wrote:
| Storage from day to night, not from summer to winter. The
| only solution for seasonal storage is hydrogen, and we are
| far, far from having any meaningful production of green
| hydrogen.
| nl wrote:
| Why would you store from summer to winter? Wind works
| pretty well in both seasons (depending on geography but
| the solution there is better transmission!)
| thrown_22 wrote:
| I love how nuclear is too expensive because it costs
| billions, but long range power lines, which also costs
| billions, are somehow a better waste of money.
| revertmean wrote:
| Long range power cables only cost billions if they're
| >1000km long.
|
| But this is besides the point. Energy companies spent
| money on long range power cables because they calculate
| they can make a profit on the transmitted energy. Nuclear
| power stations spend _taxpayer_ billions because they can
| 't possibly compete commercially. That's the key
| difference.
| xupybd wrote:
| I love that phrase, "a better waste of money".
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Ah yes ye olde 4 hours of storage quotes from the Li(a)zard
| People. Hope you don't run into one of those 3 week wind
| lulls or anything.
|
| Lazard uses the worst possible nuclear builds and ignores
| the good ones. They ignore China, Korea, Japanese, and
| Russian builds. In 2006 Japan was churning out ultra-modern
| ABWR reactors in 36 months (not the old Fukushima kind).
| Unbelievably cheap and effective. Today, China's Hualong
| One builds are fully serialized. Yet Lazard keeps on
| looking at the worst 2 nuclear builds in history and
| ignoring e.g. the necessary cost of new transmission and
| overbuilding in order to actually decarbonize at scale with
| wind solar and gigatonnes of batteries.
|
| Lazard numbers are a farce. Please ignore.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| These are still too big. They will take too long and have huge
| cost overruns.
| charles_f wrote:
| > As a comparison with other non-emission options, BC Hydro's
| 1,100 Mwe Site C dam is expected to cost $16 billion.
|
| I get that this is coming from a website whose name contains
| "investor". As combustible based options go, I think nuclear is
| the least worse, and a site-C equivalent in Sask is probably not
| even an option.
|
| I find it dangerous to a) put nuclear and hydro/wind in the same
| "non-emission" category, especially when nuclear _does_ emit
| radioactive solid waste and the occasional radioactive cloud when
| they go boom, b) to reduce the comparison to a price-tag, where
| indeed nuclear will win
| muds wrote:
| I don't see how nuclear is any more dangerous than any other
| renewable sources of electricity. The law of conversation of
| energy dictates that the residual waste energy has to go
| somewhere for any process. Any and all energy production
| mechanism are going to cause some disturbance in the natural
| order of things. It just turns out that the emissions due to
| "renewable" sources isn't something that does widespread
| ecological or societal damage. A hydroelectricity plant's
| "emissions" are in the form of riverbed erosion however, we can
| optimize around that by putting it in places which minimizes
| ecological and societal damage. For nuclear, we minimize this
| damage by placing the waste matter in large indestructible
| concrete bins.
| mellavora wrote:
| Maybe because of the potential toxicity of the waste product,
| and the lifetime of this toxicity?
|
| storing it safely is a bit more complex than "large
| indestructible concrete bins"
|
| nb. I'm not anti-nuke, just pro good risk analysis
| evgen wrote:
| IMHO the lie is to pretend that hydro is safe or has a low
| impact when it comes to greenhouse gasses. Dam failures have
| killed many more people than nuclear even if you throw in the
| intentional nuclear events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hydro
| would be almost as good as nuclear when it comes to climate
| costs if they would clear the reservoir footprint before
| flooding, but they do not and the decaying plant matter in the
| flood zone adds a greenhouse gas cost that takes decades for
| the dam to counter in "clean" energy.
| [deleted]
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| How would you clear the floodzone without releasing the
| carbon anyway?
| nixonpjoshua1 wrote:
| If too expensive to clear the land currently and so
| currently it doesn't get done, the economic value could be
| at least slightly improved by logging the area for the wood
| if it is mandated to have to clear it first.
| lrem wrote:
| Bury the wood is one idea. I've recently heard that salt
| water is also good for this. This is why mangrove forests
| are 4 or 5 times better carbon sinks than rainforests.
| jeltz wrote:
| But with that logic you could bury the wood, not build a
| hydro plant and then plant new trees.
| lrem wrote:
| Yes please.
|
| Unless that means burning more coal/gas/oil...
| dade_ wrote:
| Site C should not have been built. It is in a relatively remote
| area, so the government was able to strong-arm local residents.
| Hydro has major impacts on the environment, river ecology,
| eliminates farmland, but this is all greenwashed away.
| dTal wrote:
| Nuclear does not "emit" solid waste, it returns it in nice
| sealed containers (in small quantities, over a long period of
| time). When the goal is to minimize environmental impact, it is
| absolutely fair to class it as "non-emission".
| HPsquared wrote:
| The difficult thing is all types of power have their own
| externalities. Dams flood large areas of land in normal
| operation and can potentially collapse. Wind power is
| intermittent and can have 'calm spell', takes up a large area
| and is generally just really big. Nuclear has difficulties
| around permanent waste disposal, and possible risks of accident
| and proliferation.
|
| All of these factors and more (except cost) are on different
| scales and dimensions, so comparing them requires human value
| judgements - inevitably people disagree.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Dams are also uniquely vulnerable to climate change, since
| drought can affect their power output.
| a2tech wrote:
| And local factors--people just assume that if necessary
| they can drain the reservoir (or greatly lower the level)
| to run the turbines to cover for a lack in solar/other
| output, but in the US as soon as you put in a dam you'll
| get home owners and property owners around the newly
| created reservoir fighting tooth and nail to maintain high
| water year round for aesthetics and recreation.
|
| There are ways to minimize this of course, like building
| giant storage tanks, but dammed rivers are going to
| (usually) dwarf man mad retention pools.
| otherme123 wrote:
| Nuclear power also have calm spells. France is enduring one,
| with over 50% of their nuclear capacity stopped due to
| manteinance and other issues
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/business/a-french-
| nuclear...), and are expecting blackouts in the next winter
| if neighbors cannot provide.
| jeltz wrote:
| Yrs, but that is planned maintainance which can be
| coordinated with industry and neighbouring countries. You
| cannot plan for when the wind stops blowing, plus the wind
| is likely to have stopped in neighbouring countries too.
| Countries which use primarily wind rely heavily on
| neighbours with hydroand nuclear.
| otherme123 wrote:
| _Planned_ manteinance? Half power installed under
| manteinance, some of them for cooling corrosion and
| leaks, at the same time, in the worst moment in maybe 10
| years? And fearing blackouts in six months. Worst
| planning ever.
|
| As soon as storage for intermitent sources is
| economically competitive with gas (not nuclear, it
| already is), nuclear as we know it is done.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| I can do this too! Let me try:
|
| As soon as we start building more NPPs thereby training a
| workforce for building NPPs building costs will go down
| 10x and renewables as we know it is done.
| otherme123 wrote:
| Nah, doesn't work the same if costs are historically
| rising. But cost of eolic, solar and batteries are
| steadilly falling.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > I find it dangerous to a) put nuclear and hydro/wind in the
| same "non-emission" category, especially when nuclear does emit
| radioactive solid waste and the occasional radioactive cloud
| when they go boom, b) to reduce the comparison to a price-tag,
| where indeed nuclear will win
|
| It doesn't emit anything, radioactive waste is captured
| entirely on the other side. They also don't go boom.
|
| They're in the same category because they're both zero-carbon
| power. If you want to compare safety, deaths per TWh has
| nuclear right in the same area as wind and solar - less than
| rooftop solar.
| otikik wrote:
| That's a good point. Of course installing solar on a rooftop
| has a small possibility of accident, and the energy produced
| on a single house is not that big. Multiply and you get ... a
| big number, perhaps? Do you happen to have sources?
| arcticbull wrote:
| Ah sorry of course.
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
|
| [2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-
| by-ener...
| jszymborski wrote:
| Well yes, everything emits something. Solar, wind, bananas;
| they all emit radiation as well. "Non-emission" is short hand
| for "non-emission of carbon dioxide" or perhaps more generally
| "greenhouse gases".
|
| If you're concerned about human health, nuclear waste disposal
| is well studied and so are nuclear reactor safety. In fact,
| these small reactors are designed to be too small to create any
| catastrophic event in the astronomically unlikely event of a
| critical malfunction.
|
| It's odd to me that we all take planes despite the fact
| historically many have gone boom, and many a life has been
| lost. Must be something to do with no other viable
| alternatives...
| veltas wrote:
| If a wind turbine catches fire it emits pollutants too. I think
| we're defining on the (usually reasonable) assumption all goes
| well and there isn't catastrophic failure.
| DrBazza wrote:
| How much noxious chemical waste, and by volume, is produced in
| the manufacture of the many thousands of solar panels and wind
| turbines though for the same power?
| xorcist wrote:
| You act like there aren't people who do things called
| "lifecycle analysis" professionally.
|
| There are very uncontroversial answers to your questions,
| even if you personally don't like them.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| I don't think he was acting like there aren't people that
| analyze it, he was just asking for comparative numbers.
|
| If you have an uncontroversial answer to his question,
| simply say it.
|
| You seem to have taken personal offense to his question in
| general.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| It seems impossible to get an actual breakdown out of
| anyone. Every asshole wants to spit out some "number"
| that makes their favorite solution look good. Nobody
| wants to give you a breakdown of the environmental cost
| of various power sources in terms of site
| prep/construction, continued operation, etc.
|
| Intuition says hydroelectric dam is almost carbon free
| for a century or more after you build it (not counting
| watershed disruption). Solar is basically free up front
| but the panels wear out quick and so the supply chain
| must run. Nuclear and wind seem to be in the middle with
| nuclear being closer to the damn and wind being closer to
| solar. But there is no good way to actually get the
| numbers and other stuff you need make the comparison.
|
| Hell, even just trying to compute the amount of diesel
| used per kwh over a given timeline (and this should be a
| really easy thing to quantify in a demonstrably honest
| way) is basically impossible because you wind up having
| to sift through reams and reams of material written by
| people who are just lying with plausible deniability.
|
| I don't care what my power source is. I just want to be
| informed. And the amount of lying I have to identify and
| discard on my way to being informed is too damn high.
| DrBazza wrote:
| A bit of an odd response. I neither "like" or "dislike" any
| "answers" to lifecycle analysis.
|
| What I definitely do not "like" is the dismissal of nuclear
| by saying "nuclear waste" without considering all the forms
| of waste associated with other supposedly "greener"
| solutions.
|
| Solar panels and the stands they are placed are shipped
| (half way round the world) wrapped in acres of plastic,
| cardboard and polystyrene for shipping that is then just
| discarded at worst, and possibly partly recycled at best.
| Broken wind turbines, which happens frequently, are often
| just buried, and so on. Digging the raw materials out of
| the ground and refining them causes waste. Doping chemicals
| to get the rare earths cause waste. Just because in the
| West we recycle much of this, doesn't mean that, in the
| race to the bottom, factories in Asia aren't just dumping
| this stuff out of sight.
|
| https://weather.com/science/environment/news/baotou-
| artifici...
| ezzaf wrote:
| Probably a roughly similar amount to what is created building
| a nuclear, or any other, power station.
|
| What's your point?
| DrBazza wrote:
| > Probably a roughly similar amount to what is created
| building a nuclear, or any other, power station.
|
| I'd love to see some figures that prove or disprove that.
| I'm inclined to disagree and say that more waste is
| produced making solar panels and wind turbines due to the
| sheer volume of them that are being mass manufactured.
|
| > What's your point?
|
| My point is that everyone talks about nuclear waste, but no
| one talks about the toxic chemical waste produced the mass
| manufacture of hundreds of thousands of solar panels and
| turbines, versus the one-off construction of a few hundred
| nuclear power stations, and the extraction of a relatively
| small-by-weight amount of fuel.
|
| Nuclear power is always under minute scrutiny compared to
| "green" power.
| defrost wrote:
| >> Each of the 300 MWe SMRs cost between $1 billion to $1.5
| billion and can provide enough electricity to power approximately
| 240,0000 homes.
|
| . . . with bonus '0' and misplaced comma at no extra cost I
| trust?
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| I made once an estimate that to power the whole energy( not
| power,current,ampere) of the world we need a surface of the sice
| of spain. And I took bad Sunlight into account. .... So I wonder
| why for most countries ... why not go all in solar? Nuclear seems
| so much expensive and wastefull compared to solar.
|
| I know there is the storage problem. But most energy is directly
| consumed or has to be stores for a short period . Heat for
| example. And heat is stored in water.
| tomohawk wrote:
| > A 300W-solar power farm would require 1.5 million solar panels
| and cost approximately $300 million, provided the 1,500- to-1,800
| acres of land needed was free and the sun shone steadily,
|
| It's worse than that. Let's say you get 12 hours of steady
| sunshine every day.
|
| What to do the other 12 hours? For that you'll need storage.
|
| Therefore, you will need to double the capacity of the solar
| array so that during that 12 hours you can both store power and
| deliver power to people who need it.
|
| But then no power store is 100% efficient, so you'll also need to
| add more panels for that.
|
| But then you're never going to get 12 hours of steady power every
| day. You're going to have to increase storage and panels to
| account for that too.
| [deleted]
| chendii wrote:
| Does this still create waste that is dangerous for thousands of
| years?
|
| My understanding is that there is no long term solution for
| storing dangerous nuclear waste. They try burying it super deep
| in mountains. But can't be sure that it won't get out in the next
| few thousands of years.
|
| Everybody watch the documentary "Into Eternity" on the subject.
| Amazing.
| foota wrote:
| The earth is full of uranium, and yet we don't worry about it
| leaking out.
| Tepix wrote:
| Are you even serious?
| gizmo wrote:
| Nuclear waste is somewhat dangerous, but deep inside mountains
| it won't do any harm barring some kind of black swan event.
|
| Compare the risks of living near a nuclear waste storage
| facility and living downstream of a hydroelectric dam. I know
| what I would choose! If you demand absolute certainty over a
| thousand year period you'll be paralyzed into inaction. Any new
| technology and any political action could result in the
| eventual collapse of civilization. But inaction guarantees
| disaster because the status quo is unsustainable. So we have to
| make mundane risk/reward evaluations and from those we conclude
| that we can't do without nuclear energy.
| Tepix wrote:
| You are comparing the aftermath of a power plant with a plant
| that is producing energy.
|
| Would you rather live next to an active nuclear power plant
| or next to an active hydroelectic dam?
|
| There have been cases of increased cancer near nuclear power
| plants.
| piokoch wrote:
| Mini nuclear reactors make a lot of sense especially in the areas
| with a lot of electricity-hungry industry, Polish copper producer
| KGHM is planning to build such reactors for their own needs (they
| use 1 GW a year) [1].
|
| It will make their operations cheaper, saving on transfer losses
| alone on their scale is significant gain.
|
| [1] https://media.kghm.com/en/news-and-press-releases/kghm-
| plans...
| foldedcornice wrote:
| It looks like there may be a typo with the estimated year of
| deployment in Ontario: the estimate is likely for 2028, not 2018.
|
| The article was published on July 11, 2022, but opens with:
| "Saskatchewan and Ontario have each chosen GE-Hitachi as the
| supplier of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which could be
| deployed in the Prairie province by the 2030s and in Ontario by
| 2018." Then, the article concludes with: "GEH and Ontario plan to
| construct up to four 300 MWe small module reactors, with the
| first coming online by 2028."
|
| A separate source by The Canadian Press [0] also reflects an
| estimate of 2028 for Ontario: "The governments of Ontario,
| Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Alberta have put forward a
| nuclear plan that they say will transition them toward cleaner
| energy. The provinces' energy ministers agreed today to a joint
| plan for small modular reactors, with the first 300-megawatt
| plant to be built in Darlington, Ont., by 2028."
|
| [0]
| https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/renewables/onta...
| mistrial9 wrote:
| notice the "western investor" source ..
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| Article goes on to mention a "300W-solar power farm" (could
| power a desktop PC for $300M) and that the SMR could power
| "240,0000 homes".
| Hamuko wrote:
| A low-power desktop PC, since my not-massively-impressive
| gaming PC (i5-10600KF and RTX 3060) draws 330 W from the wall
| at peak.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Eh, my WQHD and FHD monitors, Ryzen 3600, RX 6600 tops out
| at about 320 W, so that should easily be below 300 for just
| the PC ;)
| osuairt wrote:
| There is a push by conservative Canadian politicians in
| Ontario and Saskatchewan to use Uranium.
|
| Saskatchewan wants to have a mining contract. While Doug Ford
| of Ontario, wants to maintain the energy monopoly in the
| province, and has actively torn down recently completed and
| functional wind farm projects.
|
| I would gather that you will be hearing less about this after
| Doug Ford leaves.
| arcticbull wrote:
| While I also hate Ford and think he's a national
| embarrassment, 60% of Ontario's power comes from 3 nuclear
| power plants: Bruce, Darlington and Pickering. We're happy
| with our nuclear [1]. We'd be happy with wind and solar too
| - but substantially the entire Ontario grid is already
| renewable. 92% zero-carbon power. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/canadians-
| support-gove...
|
| [2] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-
| markets/pr...
| osuairt wrote:
| If you have to mine a finite Uranium resource from
| Saskatchewan, you do not have renewable energy.
|
| https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/energy-
| sources...
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| If you have to contend with the expansion and death of
| the Sun, you do not have renewable energy.
| jopsen wrote:
| Just curious, how finite is it?
| thereddaikon wrote:
| CTRL+F tells me Uranium isn't mentioned once in the page
| you linked. So where exactly does it prove that running
| out of Uranium is a problem?
| tedk-42 wrote:
| Agreed. Conflating nuclear with renewable into 'zero
| carbon' is wrong
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| Ah yes, the old "what will we do in 10000 years when the
| Uranium runs out" problem.
| naasking wrote:
| Easily mined uranium will deplete in less than 100 years
| unless we start using breeder or thorium reactors that
| are more efficient in using up fuel.
| arcticbull wrote:
| 100,000 years supply is dissolved in the ocean. Breeder
| technology, and (thorium fuel cycle) are pretty well
| understood at this point. In fact, CANDU reactors widely
| deployed already support thorium fuel cycle. The reason
| we don't use them is because with all the uranium
| available, it's not necessary.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| We could say the same about lithium supplies. It turns
| out 'mining' something measured in the parts per billion
| is enormously damaging to environments and quite
| expensive to the point of impracticality
| arcticbull wrote:
| Early stages, but current state of the art involves
| putting fabric out that captures the uranium passively.
| [1]
|
| > Mining of underground uranium has environmental
| challenges not encountered with extracting it from the
| oceans. And Wai says the fibers, which have affinity for
| more heavy metals than just uranium, can likely be used
| one day to clean up toxic waterways themselves. He says
| the fibers have potential to extract vanadium, an
| expensive metal used in large scale batteries, from the
| oceans instead of mining it from the ground.
|
| [1] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Yes, filtering ocean water for material is a well known
| technique. You need a massive throughput of ocean water
| for a small output and you also filter salts, other
| metals, polymers, and sea life. You must further refine
| those materials to get the stuff you want. You also
| change the ph of the filtered water in a way that would
| be disastrous if reinjected, and you consume filter media
| quickly. That all adds up to a huge waste and massive
| ecological damage.its simply not practical at scale.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I'm curious why you think deploying some of these fabrics
| would change the pH of the ocean? There are geological
| processes which replenish dissolved uranium in the ocean
| per the article I linked. I haven't seen any particular
| waste or sustainability concerns. The nice thing about
| uranium is that it's so incredibly energy dense that you
| don't really need to pull out all that much. I'm not
| ready to be so defeatist.
|
| I defer to the researcher.
|
| > "We have chemically modified regular, inexpensive yarn,
| to convert it into an adsorbent which is selective for
| uranium, efficient and reusable," said Chien Wai,
| president of LCW Supercritical Technologies. "PNNL's
| capabilities in evaluating and testing the material, have
| been invaluable in moving this technology forward."
| naasking wrote:
| > 100,000 years supply is dissolved in the ocean.
|
| Yes, but that's not so easily mined. Point being that the
| cost of nuclear power will go up once the easily mined
| material is consumed.
| [deleted]
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Is that really a problem? I mean technically any energy
| resource is finite/non-renewable due to second law of
| thermodynamics. That doesn't mean anything in practice.
| arcticbull wrote:
| It's the four billion tons of uranium dissolved in the
| ocean and the trillion tons that replenish it as it's
| removed that I was referring to. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/ur
| anium-s...
| Zachsa999 wrote:
| I hear that the Nelson River in Manitoba has an extremely
| large capacity for power production.
|
| Just saying.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Building new dams in the west is almost entirely
| unfeasible. Too much environmental impact sensitivity
| (maybe a good thing) and NIMBYisim (not so good)
| helloooooooo wrote:
| Darlington, Bruce and Pickering are reaching EoL and all
| three together supply 60% of Ontario's electricity. How do
| you propose the province replace that amount of supply? The
| go with solar or wind would mean colossal investments in
| high tension transmission infrastructure, given the
| distributed nature of those power sources. We already have
| appropriate infrastructure in place for nuclear
| distribution; and the added benefit is that these SMRs can
| power northern regions as well when fully developped
| jeromegv wrote:
| Sure renewable energy is not everything, but spending 200
| millions to tear down wind farms is also not how you get
| there https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-
| green-energ...
| bshipp wrote:
| As far as I understood it, they weren't torn down as much
| as the contract was cancelled and more weren't built.
|
| I live in Windsor-Essex and still see new windmill
| projects going up all the time.
| pjc50 wrote:
| That links says that (a) they were torn down, complete or
| incomplete, and (b) the company was paid a (huge!)
| contract break fee for this, as you would expect.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Huge as in the price of Twitter 44 billion or the 1
| billion breakup fee?
| bshipp wrote:
| Yes, apparently they tore down 4 turbines, which is a
| waste of money.
|
| But if you've ever been to Chatham-Kent you'd notice that
| there are places where you can do a 360 degree turn and
| never see fewer than 10 windmills in your field of
| vision. Ontario has 2,600 wind turbines.
|
| https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/10/23/news/wind-
| turbin....
| crypot wrote:
| Ontario's Long-Term Energy Plan is counting on Bruce
| Power to provide a reliable and carbon-free source of
| affordable energy through 2064.
| ttul wrote:
| It's okay. If the Progressive Conservatives wave their
| hands fast enough, they can solve this problem with wind
| power.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Wind? The 24% hydro they have will help bridge demand and
| supply just as it does with nuclear today.
|
| What do you see as the problem with that?
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Last night, at peak, Ontario was generating ~140MW of
| wind power. Not bad.
|
| Yesterday, all day without variation, Ontario was
| generating 9300-9600MW of nuclear power.
|
| They aren't even in the same universe.
|
| Source: https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
| bshipp wrote:
| I live in the hotbed of Ontario wind power, the
| intersection of Chatham-Kent and Windsor-Essex, and if
| all those windmills only account for 140MW I am very
| curious where the space would come from to even reach
| 1000MW. It already feels like they're everywhere.
| phonescreen_man wrote:
| Exactly, wind and solar are massive environmental
| disrupters, huge amounts of land and habitat destroyed
| for small unreliable gains. Nuclear on the other hand is
| turned into the bogey man of clean energy. Where do all
| the out of commission solar panels end up? Definitely not
| as carefully stored as the nuclear waste.
| bp0017 wrote:
| Yes, PV waste isn't being addressed a lot right now, but
| research is ramping up alongside production on these.
| Alternatives to Si like perovskites may end up easier to
| recycle as well. Also, PV does produce waste, but it has
| the advantage of not being radioactive. That isn't to say
| it's not harmful, just quite a bit less volatile as
| nuclear. All in all, I do think nuclear should be
| reintroduced, but it has it's own issues, especially in
| the US due to construction difficulties (permits, safety,
| etc). In comparison, PV benefits greatly from economies
| of scale, and can be deployed at utility scale or in
| distributed micro-grids, which gives it more granularity
| then all-or-nothing nuclear.
| naasking wrote:
| Panels are recycled now. Wind and solar don't destroy
| habitats and don't take up "huge amounts of land". Wind
| turbines take up negligible land that can be used for
| other purposes. Agrivoltaics is showing you can even do
| this with solar and it boosts some crop outputs. I really
| don't get the renewable hate. It has its place in the
| energy mix.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Yeah, well if they shut down the nuclear plants, they'll
| be generating 0.
|
| So they need to either build a lot of nuclear or build a
| lot of wind.
|
| One of these is cheap, easy and fast, one is hard,
| expensive and slow.
|
| 3-4 years of German rollout of onshore wind would
| probably do the job.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Not to mention a MW of wind is not equivalent to a MW of
| nuke. If you want wind you need a substantial overbuild
| that is geographically diverse and the necessary
| transmission to support that, which will cost as much as
| the generation itself, or you need storage which again
| costs as much as the generation itself. I am all for wind
| power, but only when we realistically consider the real
| world engineering constraints involved.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The same Germany who can't cut Russian oil supplies or
| the country falls apart. Not sure I'd go that direction.
| pydry wrote:
| Going all in on nuclear wouldnt have fixed that. At
| least, not without an additional $2-$3 trillion spent.
|
| The nuclear plants they shut down were a drop in the
| bucket compared to gas, solar and wind.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > actively torn down recently completed and functional wind
| farm projects.
|
| WTF?
| osuairt wrote:
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-green-
| energ...
| jopsen wrote:
| 9 wind turbines is nothing.
| pjc50 wrote:
| ""For this government to rip up contracts and literally
| rip wind turbines out of the ground is a huge waste of
| money and makes absolutely no sense," said Green party
| Leader Mike Schreiner.""
|
| Well, yes. $230m to _prevent_ power being generated,
| either for ideological reasons or bribes.
| ipaddr wrote:
| At this point in time the cost is Wind: .75/kilowatt hour
| Nuclear: 0.05/kilowatt hour
|
| Makes sense for a lot of reasons. The most costly energy
| was the fixed rate 75c per hour that was for ideological
| reasons going to transform Ontario into the solar power
| maker of the world. That went to California then and now
| China.
| snewman wrote:
| Nice. Yeah, the numbers in press articles are basically
| always wrong; it's just a question of whether you can notice
| the error.
|
| https://climateer.substack.com/p/numbers
| unsigner wrote:
| I have noticed that bad things' energy output is measured in
| watts, and good things' energy output is measured in "homes
| powered". It's probably taught in journalism school nowadays,
| it's pervasive.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| To be pedantic, neither energy output is measured in watts
| :P, one of them might have power measured in watts though.
| brightball wrote:
| Whatever happened to the idea of Thorium reactors? It seems like
| this would be the ideal use for them.
| sushibowl wrote:
| Still very much in the research stage. China has one
| experimental Molten Salt Reactor that was supposed to start up
| last year, but I'm not sure what's happening to it right now.
| If everything went as planned that would be the only operating
| thorium-fueled nuclear plant in the world. I think they are
| expecting to have commercially ready designs by 2030.
|
| India has a plan based on a three-stage fuel cycle, where the
| third stage runs on thorium. However they've had significant
| delays and the first prototype breeder reactor of the second
| stage is projected to be finished at the end of this year. The
| third stage is probably still some years away.
|
| India and China are probably the most ambitious in terms of
| thorium fuel cycle research. India has the world's largest
| thorium reserves, and hope to utilize it for their power
| generation. China's most pressing concern is their smog crisis,
| which they hope to solve partly with nuclear power. They are
| also aiming to own most of the intellectual property with
| regards to thorium reactors, and it is part of Xi Jinping's
| drive toward making China carbon neutral by 2060.
|
| Other countries have some small research initiatives but no
| concrete plans to build anything so far as I know.
| ComputerCat wrote:
| Tried to read the article, but just kept picturing Homer Simpson
| 0xTJ wrote:
| I'm always shocked by how many anti-nuclear power people are on
| HN. So many have bought into fearmongering and lies about safety
| that oil and gas companies are happy to encourage. It's a non-
| reweable but quite clean and _incredibly_ safe method of power
| generation.
|
| It produces far less harm to the environment than fossil fuel
| generation, which should be decommissioned as quickly as
| possible. Every time a government chooses too replace nuclear
| generation with fossil fuels out of choice (I'm looking at you,
| Germany), they're a traitor to their own people, and to all
| humans.
|
| And I'll never understand "green" people who actively protest
| against nuclear power. Yes, renewable power is better. But most
| of the power generated comes from fossil fuels, that needs to
| stop as soon as possible, which isn't happening in the short term
| via only renewable power.
|
| I highly recommend watching this video by Kurzgesagt:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ.
| Tepix wrote:
| For me it's the opposite, there's a ton of pro-nuclear people
| on HN who ignore
|
| * our past failures to get long-term storage of nuclear waste
| right
|
| * the cost and time overruns for building nuclear plants in the
| last several decades
|
| * the possible catastrophic failures even in a country like
| Japan
|
| * the long term storage issue and its cost.
|
| These serious unsolved issues are being hand-waved away again
| and again.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| * Long-term storage plans tend to be pretty solid, but then
| people remotely near it get rallied to protest it.
|
| * Any cases of that are management issues, not nuclear power
| generation issues.
|
| * Making safe nuclear reactors is a well-understood
| challenge. Even if you do include all incidents that have
| happened with outdated, flawed reactors, going all the way
| back, nuclear reactors have cause _far_ less environmental
| damage and _far_ fewer deaths per power unit than fossil
| fuels do. Also, this article is about SMRs, which have very
| different requirements.
|
| * Nuclear waste storage is a solved issue, this just repeats
| the first point.
| woleium wrote:
| Will they provide the tritium required to bridge the gap to
| fusion? Canada provides almost all the world supply, but it's
| from stockpiles iirc. Once fusion is up and working, it can
| generate its own tritium, but ITERs tritium generation experiment
| has been massively scaled back, so we need more from nuclear
| reactors.
|
| see https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-
| run... for more info.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| >Once fusion is up and working
|
| That's one gargantuan "once", let's plan our energy generation
| assuming it doesn't materialize, we can always recalibrate if
| it does.
| adrianN wrote:
| Eh, fusion is two or three major construction projects away.
| We're very confident that ITER and DEMO will work. Of course
| funding has been abysmal, so they might be overtaken by
| projects that, for example, use better superconductors.
|
| That being said, fusion will come too late to do something
| about climate change, so we should be building renewables as
| quickly as we can, and, if we have too much money, perhaps
| add a bit of nuclear.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| The question with fusion I never see answered is: "How do
| we convert the heat to electricity?"
|
| If the answer is steam then fusion is as dead as coal and
| nuclear. Or is there some solid state like solar or very
| non-complex working method like a wind turbine which is the
| target?
| sushibowl wrote:
| The answer is always steam turbines, because nothing else
| approaches the practical efficiency of steam turbines
| when it comes to converting heat to electrical power.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| But that is the thing. Pure steam turbine based power
| have been dead since the 80's with the advent of the
| combined cycle gas turbine power plants. You get pure
| mechanical power from the gas turbine and then a tiny
| steam side to harness the last efficiency gains.
|
| That cost difference is the reason coal has died out,
| it's simply not economical to run a large steam turbine.
| adrianN wrote:
| I agree with you in general that it is unlikely that
| fusion will be cost competitive, but the last time I
| checked we still got a very large fraction of our power
| from coal, despite the steam.
| lrem wrote:
| Sorry to break it to you, but coal is still the largest
| electricity source with 36.7%. Over the last 20 years its
| output went from 5.8PW to 10PW (yes, that's petawatts).
| So, nowhere near "has died out".
|
| Source: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
| Gwypaas wrote:
| I should definitely have prefaced it with the caveat
| regarding availability of natural gas infrastructure. Gas
| is cheaper, when you have the infrastructure in place.
| Less developed countries does not have that luxury, and
| therefore choose coal because it was pretty much the only
| thing available until the current renewable boom.
|
| Today we also have LNG, but that seems to mostly be about
| energy independence. Russia can't simply turn off the tap
| for Lithuania or Poland, because they have a more pricy
| alternative method of delivery.
|
| For reference see the dramatic decrease of coal in the US
| in favor of natural gas.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electrici
| ty-...
| 7952 wrote:
| Even if the experiments succeed that could still be a long
| way from a plant that is commercially viable.
| adrianN wrote:
| Well, many people argue that _fission_ is not
| commercially viable without socializing at least some of
| the cost, and yet we're reading articles about new
| fission plants. If you think about it, fossil fuels
| aren't commercially viable either, a large part of the
| costs (global warming...) are socialized.
| Cryptoclidus wrote:
| Coal, oil and Natural gas recieve 5.9 TRILLION dollars a
| YEAR according to the IMF. That's a lot of hydro, wind,
| wave, solar and nuclear power potential.
|
| Fossil fuel companies are parasites.
| samatman wrote:
| The pace of change in the last fifteen years has been
| nonlinear.
|
| Let's not take it for granted, for sure, but let's maybe dial
| back on the "fusion is always 20 years away" jokes. There
| isn't a bigger win for civilization than fusion, leaving
| aside unknowns: immortality might be possible, fusion was our
| only source of energy until the discovery of fission.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Immortality with our meat based brains has so much working
| against it, it might as well be impossible.
| samatman wrote:
| It was a pretty load-bearing "might", agreed.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Yeah but make sure to read the Voodoo Fusion article along
| the way.
|
| https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf
| Gud wrote:
| Interesting how it excludes the most promising fusion
| start ups, especially Commonwealth Fusion Systems. What
| is the point of addressing the challenges fusion face
| when the best contenders are completely ignored? CFS are
| betting that the new breed of super conducting
| magnets(REBCO) will make fusion commercially viable.
| Beyond that, their reactor design is basically from the
| 50s. Tried and true design + modern materials = success?
|
| See Prof. Dennis Whyte, one of the of cofounders of CFS
| explain why he believes that fusion is coming sooner than
| you might think.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Do they have any fusion neutrons or a power conversion
| plant yet? Don't think so.
| serial_dev wrote:
| There were no jokes, a comment said that "let's plan our
| energy generation assuming it doesn't materialize, we can
| always recalibrate if it does".
|
| I hope you will allow people still being sceptical and
| cautious about counting on fusion for at least another
| 20-30 years.
|
| The progress that the physicists and engineers made is
| tremendous and I appreciate everyone's sacrifices to make
| fusion a viable energy source.
|
| However, it isn't one yet and likely it won't be for
| decades. There are still plenty of engineering challenges,
| and once those are solved, comes the economical,
| bureaucratical challenges (just take a look at how bad most
| countries are in building new fission reactors).
|
| Both can be true at the same time.
|
| I don't know about you, but I am planning my life with the
| assumption that the energy I use won't be coming from
| fusion for the rest of it (and I am around 30).
| samatman wrote:
| There's little downside in taking the pessimistic side of
| a bet with an enormous payout on the optimism side.
|
| I'm on the optimism side of that coin though.
|
| It's by no means necessary for a joke to have been made
| in the comment I was replying to, for me to refer to it.
| The cliche is well known.
| [deleted]
| perihelions wrote:
| Canada's *deuterium-moderated* reactors are responsible for the
| world's tritium supply. This isn't that; this is the wrong type
| of fission reactor.
|
| - _" If not for CANDU reactors, D-T fusion would be an
| unattainable dream. "The luckiest thing to happen for fusion in
| the world is that CANDU reactors produce tritium as a
| byproduct," Abdou says. Many nuclear reactors use ordinary
| water to cool the core and "moderate" the chain reaction,
| slowing neutrons so they are more likely to trigger fission.
| CANDU reactors use heavy water, in which deuterium takes the
| place of hydrogen, because it absorbs fewer neutrons, leaving
| more for fission. But occasionally, a deuterium nucleus does
| capture a neutron and is transformed into tritium."_
|
| - _" If too much tritium builds up in the heavy water it can be
| a radiation hazard, so every so often operators send their
| heavy water to the utility company Ontario Power Generation
| (OPG) to be "detritiated." OPG filters out the tritium and
| sells off about 100 grams of it a year, mostly as a medical
| radioisotope and for glow-in-the-dark watch dials and emergency
| signage. "It's a really nice waste-to-product story," says Ian
| Castillo of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, which acts as OPG's
| distributor."_
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I find the volume interesting.
|
| "Whats your annual yield?"
|
| "100 grams...."
|
| I wonder if there are other elements being produced and sold
| that have such low yearly yields. Bonus points if they are
| super expensive.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Probably botox. A syringe of botox has 100 units, a unit is
| 5.0 x 10 power -11 grams. [2]
|
| How much botox is produced per year: 800 million units [1]
| = 0.04 grams
|
| Average cost per injection is $466 [3]
|
| Allergan's $2.8 billion Botox empire (2017), on track to
| grow to $4 billion by 2020 [4]
|
| [1] https://www.brightnewme.co.uk/want-to-know-what-its-
| like-ins...
|
| [2] a unit is 5.0 x 10 power -11 grams:
| https://toxedfoundation.org/botulinum-toxin-and-botox/
|
| [3] https://www.plasticsurgery.org/cosmetic-
| procedures/botulinum...
|
| [4]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-26/inside-
| fo...
| otikik wrote:
| Antimatter would be the top one, I think. Next one is Lunar
| regolith.
| techdragon wrote:
| I think there's probably quite a few "commercially
| valuable" isotopes (since Tritium is just good old Hydrogen
| with extra neutrons) that have similar low yearly yield,
| but I would honestly expect most of them are for medical or
| industrial imaging or upstream inputs to those industries.
|
| In some cases the half lives of the isotopes are so short
| they literally have to be produced on demand at a facility
| nearby, which usually means they can only be produced/used
| by facilities with their own equipment for producing them,
| or they are colocated on some sort of larger campus where
| they happen to have a suitable isotope producing
| accelerator as their neighbour.
|
| Fluorine-18 is used in certain kinds of PET scans for
| cancer imaging, and has a half life of 109 minutes!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine-18
|
| Technetium-99m is one of the most commonly used
| radioisotopes for medical imaging and has a half life of
| just over 6 hours
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium-99m so the usual
| mechanism is to ship the material that decays into
| Technetium-99m because the Molybdenum-99 parent isotope has
| a half life of 66 hours so lives long enough you can
| actually ship usable amounts around. So while this one is
| obviously not a low yield isotope, it really shows how the
| half life of the isotope can be worked around to make an an
| isotope a useful product.
|
| Its a little hard to give simple numbers for a lot of these
| since they get measured by "activity" in Becquerels (Bq) as
| that's the useful metric based on how they get used, so
| giving "mass" would involve a lot of math and some guesses
| based on how efficient supply chains are (since you might
| produce twice as much and just "eat the difference" letting
| it decay if you have no other good way to get it to the
| user faster) but its a very fascinating industry.
|
| Theres some fascinating information about how this sort of
| stuff gets made https://www-
| pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1340_web.p... if you
| want to find out just how "fiddly" it can be to do
| chemistry with elements that might just decide to change
| what they are while you're working with them.
| pletnes wrote:
| Tritium is highly radioactive, since the half life is 12.3
| years. It decays by beta decay to Helium-3.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| I was going to say rhodium, but it's actually 30 tonnes a
| year, so quite a lot.
|
| Most of the synthetic elements (like technetium, it's in
| the name) probably have similar or far lower yields to
| tritium since they all are produced by transmutation and
| that requires monstrous amounts of energy.
|
| Not an element, botulinum toxin has billions of doses made,
| but the total production is well under a gram.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The entire premise the founders of nuclear energy wanted was
| a cycle of fission byproducts into other useful things.
| Nuclear waste wasn't. The war on nuclear proliferation
| scuttled that.
| arbitrage wrote:
| Who are these "founders of nuclear energy" you reference?
| st_goliath wrote:
| > ... approximately 240,0000 homes.
|
| > ...
|
| > A 300W-solar power farm would require 1.5 million solar panels
| and cost approximately $300 million.
|
| ... watt??
| Tepix wrote:
| Must be 300 MW just like the nuclear reactor.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Yeah those numbers don't make sense, 300W should fit on a van
| but wouldn't power very much. Wonder how much sunshine they get
| up there.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| The thing to keep in mind about that number and how small it
| seems... the entire province of Saskatchewan only has 1.17M
| people, about half of us are concentrated across two major
| cities (~600k people) and the rest are very sparsely
| distributed throughout the rest of the huge land mass. Overall,
| the 2016 census listed 432,620 private households through the
| province, so one of these reactors is providing half of our
| residential power. It's a huge win for us, since our base load
| is currently coal...
| tiku wrote:
| Perhaps change the headline.. "by 2030".
| mabbo wrote:
| I think it's worth pointing out that nuclear is pretty well loved
| in Ontario. Around 2/3 of our energy is coming from it already.
|
| https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
|
| Nuclear is the base load, alternatives supply what they can, and
| hydroelectric dams and gas plants act as the variable load
| supply.
|
| If we can just lose the gas plants, we'd be pretty close to zero
| carbon. And I think that achievable.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _If we can just lose the gas plants, we 'd be pretty close to
| zero carbon. And I think that achievable._
|
| Another 2500-3000 MW of nuclear would take up some more of the
| base load, and allow hydro to deal with most of the variable
| load.
| mabbo wrote:
| Maybe. There's an open question around whether hydro _can_
| handle that much more variable load. Climate change is
| changing rain patterns, which changes the parameters around
| hydro dams.
|
| Look at Texas- they only fall apart 1-2 days per year, but
| that's enough that it's a crisis every time. How confident
| are we that our hydro dams can sustain us in the worst case
| every year or decade?
|
| I think to achieve it, we would need to see financial
| incentives, direct or indirect, to have everyone buying up
| power batteries for their homes, reducing the variable load.
| Maybe price incentives like nearly free electricity at night
| and extra costs during the day, etc.
| ironlake wrote:
| People in Texas will be conserving power for most of the
| summer to "protect the grid". There's a good chance the
| power won't fail spectacularly like it did in the winter,
| but their lives are impacted.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| > There's a good chance the power won't fail
| spectacularly like it did in the winter, but their lives
| are impacted.
|
| Perhaps the magnitude of the failure is lower, but it's
| still failing if they're having as many blackouts as they
| might have later this summer.
| warmwaffles wrote:
| > it's still failing if they're having as many blackouts
| as they currently are.
|
| We've had zero blackouts where I live in Texas. Not
| saying they don't exist, but they haven't been happening
| in my area and people seem to be very hyperbolic about
| it.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| > We've had zero blackouts where I live in Texas. Not
| saying they don't exist, but they haven't been happening
| in my area and people seem to be very hyperbolic about
| it.
|
| For most of the state, there appear to be no blackouts so
| far. Be careful and safe. I'd have some sort of back up
| plan for AC if I were you. This heat sucks. A few links
| for someone's edification and perusal.
|
| https://poweroutage.us/area/state/texas
|
| https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/farmersville-
| immedia...
|
| https://www.kiiitv.com/article/news/local/is-your-power-
| out-...
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/texas-power-shortage-
| electricity-er...
|
| https://www.texastribune.org/2022/07/10/texas-blackouts-
| powe...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-11/texans
| -as...
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/texas-power-breaks-record-
| heat-122512...
| jeromegv wrote:
| Quebec is having 94% hydro (and has been for what, at least
| 2-3 decades now?) and is not suffering 1-2 days of falling
| apart every year.
| mabbo wrote:
| Oh, to be clear, I'm all in favour of hydroelectricity. I
| grew up beside a hydro dam with many neighbours who
| worked there. It's great stuff.
|
| My concern is that we'd be talking about perhaps doubling
| the variable output needed from the existing system if we
| turn off the gas plants. Instead of needing 1 MW from
| them on a hot summer day, we suddenly need to ask them to
| provide 2 MW. Maybe it's doable, but it's asking a lot.
|
| Imagine you've got a proposed project that will double
| the peak demand on my database. I say "What's the
| problem? The database works fine. There's no need to
| upgrade the hardware!". Same idea.
|
| And climate change just adds more uncertainty, because
| droughts and floods are more common- while hydro does
| best with a steady input of water. I'm certain Quebec
| will be fine, because it's not planning to try to double
| the peak load on its plants.
| bshipp wrote:
| Agreed. While climate change is a real threat, I don't
| think many people realize just how much water is in
| Canada, and Quebec in particular. Snow/rainfall patterns
| certainly can fluctuate, but Canada experiencing severe
| water shortages would mean the rest of the world is long
| past the crisis stage.
| randomdata wrote:
| Much of Texas is in severe drought. Southern Ontario,
| where the bulk of the hydro is produced, is also in
| moderate drought. Quebec is only expiring a small area of
| drought way up in the north where there is no human
| activity. Not exactly comparable.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Nuclear is appreciated here but there is definitely controversy
| about the usual: cost overruns and waste disposal.
|
| e.g. refurbishement of Darlington was hundreds of millions over
| budget: https://globalnews.ca/news/3795801/darlington-
| refurbishment-...
|
| I just came back from a few days up in Grey-Bruce and there are
| signs all over the place angry about the proposed NWMO waste
| diposal site up in Teeswater there. Very divided community
| about the issue. (Then again the same rough area or just east
| of it was extremely bitter about wind turbines some years ago,
| too, so can't please everyone...)
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Waste disposal is being handled. We're going to dispose of it
| in very deep tunnels in very geologically stable Canadian
| Shield rock formations.
|
| https://www.nwmo.ca/en/Site-selection/Study-Areas
| treespace8 wrote:
| Thanks for that link. Just got back from Ontario, I'm
| really surprised that wind generation is so low, they have
| a lot of wind turbines in south western Ontario. On my hour
| long drive to the beach I could almost always see one. I
| saw lots of solar as well.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Yeah, southern Ontario is super flat and mostly farmland.
| It's a great place for wind to set up. Solar as well, but
| solar takes up so much land that would be better used as
| farmland.
|
| Unfortunately, a lot of the local communities consider
| the wind turbines eyesores and the current Premier is
| against them for that reason.
| naasking wrote:
| > solar takes up so much land that would be better used
| as farmland.
|
| Agrivoltaics:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
| eldaisfish wrote:
| there are too many wind turbines concentrated in a small
| area in Chatham-Kent. I agree with the community's
| sentiment though i am in the pro-renewable energy camp.
| They look horrible because there are too many of them.
| naasking wrote:
| Here's a Google street view of a wind farm in Chatham-
| Kent:
|
| https://www.google.ca/maps/@42.2920464,-82.2696581,3a,75y
| ,14...
|
| Personally, I find the overhead power lines to be far
| uglier. The wind turbines look cool, but are barely
| visible from the road.
| kleiba wrote:
| Good for you. Other countries are less lucky with their
| search for suitable places to put their nuclear waste:
| https://www.dw.com/en/germany-launches-new-search-for-
| perman...
| patientplatypus wrote:
| jesstaa wrote:
| So it's estimated to cost 4x the cost of wind or solar today and
| it's not being deployed for at least 10yrs. Sounds like a
| bargain.
| [deleted]
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Can you share your math? How much storage are you factoring in
| for renewables?
| jesstaa wrote:
| The numbers from the article are:
|
| * $300 million for equivalent solar
|
| * $200-400 million for equivalent onshore wind (they don't
| mention offshore wind which is more cost effective over it's
| lifetime)
|
| * $1.5 billion for the SMR
|
| Assuming solar and wind stay the same price for the next
| decade (which they definitely won't) that's a 4-5x
| construction price difference. The article didn't mention
| lifetime, decommissioning or running costs, which is likely a
| significant difference too.
| brutusborn wrote:
| Your numbers don't include storage, and you have basically
| ignored the parent comment. I think this shows that you are
| discussing this in bad faith
| mikefallen wrote:
| https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9.
| Tldr $20 per kilowatt hour in energy capacity costs. That's
| how cheap storage would have to get for renewables to get to
| 100 percent.
|
| Also the land requirements for huge solar / wind
| installations is another downside. Nuclear at scale is a
| clear winner especially in seismically stable regions of NA.
| nl wrote:
| Awesome link!
|
| > If other sources meet demand 5% of the time, electricity
| costs fall and the energy capacity cost target rises to
| $150/kWh.
|
| So just 5% of grid supply from something like gas lets you
| use storage for baseload now!
|
| Battery storage is now available for as low as $55/MWh.
|
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-
| energy-...
| brutusborn wrote:
| It's not critical, but I think you are looking at the
| wrong page. $55 is on the /MW basis, the next page shows
| $131/MWh which is still good.
|
| The source is "Lazard estimates", but I can't find
| anything close to this in reality. Pumped hydro is meant
| to be super cheap, but is currently ~ $100/kWh. I'm
| starting to agree with the other commenter that Lazard is
| bunk.
|
| "Pumped hydro is already the cheapest energy storage
| technology in the world in terms of cost per installed
| kilowatt-hour of capacity. Total project costs range
| between $106 and $200 per kilowatt-hour, compared to
| between $393 and $581 for lithium-ion batteries, World
| Bank figures show."
| https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/pumped-
| hydro-mo...
| nl wrote:
| Lazard is generally regarded as pretty credible.
|
| BloombergNEF says $145-167 per MWh.
|
| > If you do that calculation at the global level, we
| evaluate the LCOE for recently financed projects is at
| US$150/MWh including charging costs. That's our
| benchmark. We have a range around that benchmark which
| goes from US$115/MWh in China.
|
| https://www.energy-storage.news/behind-the-numbers-the-
| rapid...
| noptd wrote:
| >Lazard is generally regarded as pretty credible.
|
| No they're not, as already pointed out in response to
| your other comments (e.g.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092280), yet you
| continue to cite them as an authority.
|
| Not to mention the other comments that refute those
| numbers using the same paper - projects would be closer
| to ~$100/KWh when storage is taken into account, as shown
| graphed in the paper itself.
| brutusborn wrote:
| Thanks for the link. I am trying to get my head around
| the ~1000x improvement and I think it is because we are
| comparing apples and oranges. ~$100/kWh (like pumped
| hydro) can last for as long as the water in the reservoir
| lasts. ~$100/MWh (like the batteries you mentioned) are
| for <4 hrs reserve.
|
| So the critical question is: how long will grids
| connected to renewables need reserve? 4 hours doesn't
| seem like much but I'm not sure the best way to find this
| info. Edit: from a 30s google search, 4 hours is only
| good for <80% renewables in Aus. [0]
| https://reneweconomy.com.au/much-storage-back-high-
| renewable...
| Sinidir wrote:
| Its not bunk. People are comparing two widely different
| things and not understanding the difference.
|
| The price of $150 is capacity of a battery. If i want a
| battery that can store 4 kwh i pay $600.
|
| The other number referencing $55/MWh is referencing
| levelized cost of storage. I have a a MWh but instead of
| using it right now i store it for 4 hours. Now this MWh
| costs its initial price + $55.
|
| Apply this example to a KWh where i would pay $0.1 for it
| if i used it right now if i want to store it for 4 hours
| and use it later i have to add $55/1000 to the price or
| about $0.055. So a directly used KWh would cost me $0.1.
| One stored for 4 hours would cost me $0.15.
|
| Hope that makes sense and explains these different
| numbers.
| brutusborn wrote:
| I think I understand... are you essentially saying the
| 150 is capex and 55 is opex?
| mikefallen wrote:
| Except wind and solar cannot be used to sustain base load
| energy demands. Until battery technology improves drastically
| the issue with solar and wind is the variability of output. One
| of the greatest challenges of operating a power grid is
| matching the supply of electricity with demand. Thats why they
| build gas and coal plants to meet peak energy demand periods.
| Nuclear energy supplemented by win and solar is by far the
| cleanest way to meet our energy needs currently.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Alternately, if wind and solar can be made absurdly cheap,
| there are are less-energy-efficient but lower-cost per unit
| output forms of storage that can help. Pneumatic storage is
| promising for this for example. So like instead of one wind
| turbine and one battery, you build two wind turbines and one
| pneumatic energy storage vessel and get the same amount out.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Not to mention that load can be modulated depending on
| energy availability.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Oh no. You only get one unit of wind, one unit of solar, one
| unit of methane by electrolysis, and one unit of combined
| cycle gas plant for the same price rather than the usual of
| double all that.
|
| However can we figure out how to get the same result with
| twice the energy and the ability to store it indefinitely at
| 40% efficiency. Especially given that the costs of all these
| technologies are going down at two digit percent per year.
| nl wrote:
| This is mostly untrue.
|
| Coal plants in particular are dramatically unsuited for the
| rapid changes in output to respond to changing demands for
| power.
|
| Gas plants on the other hand are. And gas plants are cheap!
|
| Overbuilding renewables with combinations of solar,
| geothermal (where available) and wind gives pretty good
| availability on it's own and with gas plants as a backup it
| gives you plenty of grid stability.
|
| Edit: A link you posted elsewhere (thanks!) points out how
| well this works:
|
| > If other sources meet demand 5% of the time, electricity
| costs fall and the energy capacity cost target rises to
| $150/kWh.
|
| Battery storage is already well below this $150/kWh price.
|
| https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9
| brutusborn wrote:
| Do you have any non-Lazard data for the claim "Battery
| storage is already well below this $150/kWh price."?
| hdevalence wrote:
| You can go buy them for $100/kWh on batteryhookup.com
| right now if you want.
| nl wrote:
| https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf lists a lot
| of difference references, and the Lazard range covers
| them all.
|
| https://reneweconomy.com.au/solar-wind-and-battery-
| storage-n... gives "Utility-scale battery (four-hour
| storage duration) $145-167 per MWh" and references
| BloombergNEF
|
| Better link for Bloomberg reference: https://www.energy-
| storage.news/behind-the-numbers-the-rapid...
| brutusborn wrote:
| Again, this is only for very short term storage. We are
| comparing apples and oranges.
|
| As an example, for most of Aus, 5 hrs storage will only
| work for <80% renewables [0]. It's only practical on
| smaller scales which doesn't mean it isn't useful now but
| just means that the ~$100/MWh systems will not be
| practical everywhere, especially when renewables become
| more ubiquitous.
|
| [0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/much-storage-back-high-
| renewable...
|
| Edit: I had a deeper look at the NREL paper and most of
| their costs seem to be in the $100s/kWh rather than MWh.
| E.g ~$300/ kWh for 6 hour systems on Fig. 6.
| viraptor wrote:
| The caveat is mentioned in the link, right after the price
| comparison. "provided the 1,500- to-1,800 acres of land needed
| was free and the sun shone steadily" considering the price of
| land recently... that may need a better estimate than just the
| cost of the tech.
| SECProto wrote:
| > it's not being deployed for at least 10yrs
|
| 2028 is 6 years from now.
| xorcist wrote:
| I have a most excellent bridge to sell if you are interested?
| SECProto wrote:
| Sure, the current bridge I'm working on building is
| currently ahead of schedule and on budget (well, within
| expected margins).
| pj_mukh wrote:
| My dad worked on these for the (even further north) northern
| provinces.
|
| I forget which company, but I know one of these were sold as
| being tested to be safe under a direct missile hit in case of an
| attack! Super cool.
|
| Edit: Territories, not provinces. All three of them.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| > _northern provinces_
|
| You mean territories?
| throwawaytemp27 wrote:
| Not sure why you were downvoted. As a Canadian I've never
| heard the expression northern provinces, because that's
| nonsense they basically all start at the border.
| karmakaze wrote:
| While this is correct, I can understand any confusion. I've
| never seen a Canadian address form that said "Province or
| Territory: _______". I'm pleased if a form switches from
| asking for 'State' to 'Province' when the country is
| changed.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Yea my bad. Territories. But maybe not for long! [1]
|
| [1] https://www.nunavutnews.com/news/quassa-says-next-step-
| for-n...
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Good for them. The way forward is with nuclear.
| Linda703 wrote:
| qwertox wrote:
| What happens when after 5 or 10 years of the deployment of a
| dozen of these one of these shows signs of a critical part
| getting cracks, for example a pipe. Then all the remaining
| reactors will have to be shut down as well until the part is not
| only replaced, but the replacement has been certified.
|
| Isn't it better to put more effort into a big one instead?
| djaychela wrote:
| Large reactors are generally much harder to maintain and keep
| safe - there are a lot of reasons why they become significantly
| more difficult to keep safe, so I think that's the reasoning
| behind this.
| rippeltippel wrote:
| > A 300W-solar power farm would require 1.5 million solar panels
| and cost approximately $300 million, provided the 1,500- to-1,800
| acres of land.
|
| I assume 300W is actually 300MW. If that's correct, solar panels
| are still much more convenient, also considering that power plant
| will require many acres of land for the building, pipes, etc.
| Solar panels have zero waste too. What am I missing?
| Krssst wrote:
| Capacity factor: actual yearly energy produced is 10-25% of
| capacity for solar, 89% for nuclear.
|
| Storage cost.
| wewxjfq wrote:
| Just some days ago Australia's National Science Agency
| published a report where they found that renewables with
| integration costs remain the cheapest option. Naturally that
| submission didn't do well on HN because it isn't nuclear
| energy fluff.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32053537
| rdsubhas wrote:
| Winter.
|
| Edit: I wonder why you had to copy/paste only part part of the
| line. They literally address this in the next word:
|
| > ...provided the 1,500- to-1,800 acres of land needed was free
| _and the sun shone steadily_
| gibolt wrote:
| Solar actually thrives in the winter. Panels' enemy is heat,
| and snow is happy to soak that up and quickly melt, sliding
| itself off.
|
| Even during overcast or rainy days, you'd be surprised how
| much sun energy still comes through.
| slimebot80 wrote:
| Ah yes. There is no sun in winter.
| krzyk wrote:
| In winter solars produce fraction of the energy that they
| do in summer. You would need to oversize them 10x or even
| more. But then, during summer it would be wasted, unless
| you have a large accumulator.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| There's no sun under 5 feet of snow. There's also much less
| sun in overcast. And even less sun at northern latitudes.
|
| Oh, and bonus, wildfire smoke blotting out the sun
| regularly in the summers now!
|
| Seems sensible to pick a power source that doesn't depend
| on the sun with that many variables.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I've lived in places in the US where the sun didn't shine
| for an entire month in a particularly bad season. I have no
| idea what a month long utility-grade battery looks like but
| I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist.
| jeltz wrote:
| Yes, that is a thing in parts of the world.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| In 20-30 years you'll have 1.5 million solar panels to dispose
| of. It's not zero waste at all.
|
| We're also talking Canada, which isn't the best for consistent
| sunlight.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Recycling for solar panels is already being worked on.
| Recovering things like silver is pretty interesting. The main
| challenge is waiting for obsolete panels. Just not a huge
| business yet.
|
| Nuclear plants also need decommissioning of course. Seems to
| be expensive due to all the radioactive material.
|
| Canada has plenty of sun. Most of the populated parts are at
| the same latitude as central Europe. They have hydro and wind
| too. And not a very large population.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| People place higher expectations on recycling than is
| merited. I'm not arguing it's better or worse than nuclear
| in the long run. Just saying there is waste.
|
| Also, latitude is irrelevant. If central Europe got as much
| snow as Canada they'd probably have far less solar panels.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The flip-side is that there are not a lot of toxic or
| harmful materials in solar panels. It's mostly silicon
| (aka sand).
|
| Nobody talks about recycling coal. Not a thing. You burn
| it, it's gone and added to our atmosphere. Burning the
| equivalent in coal for even a single solar panel's life
| time production in energy, is probably quite a lot.
| Latitude is very relevant. Germans put lots of solar on
| their roofs for the same reason that that is probably a
| popular thing in Canada. Because they are at the same
| latitude.
|
| Toronto is at 44 degrees latitude. Berlin is further
| North at 52 degrees latitude. Madrid would be 40 degrees
| latitude. Most of the US is below 49 degrees latitude.
| Most of Canadian populated areas get more than enough
| sunlight.
|
| You might have a point with northern Canada or Alaska.
| Though those too get awesome amounts of light in the
| summer, which is why you might find people investing in
| solar there too. Just lots of economic benefits even if
| they work less well in the winter (or not at all in the
| polar circle). As it is, it makes plenty of sense for
| Germans to put solar on their roofs.
| [deleted]
| inasio wrote:
| Ontario and Saskatchewan extend pretty far north (Saskatchewan
| all the way to the arctic circle), very little sunlight in the
| winter.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Even if Saskatchewan was in the middle of the desert the solar
| panels had perfect efficiency, it would still produce half the
| power of a similarly rated base load nuclear plant. And Canada
| isn't a desert and some places don't receive sunlight for weeks
| at a time.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > solar panels are still much more convenient
|
| Until night hits. Then it turns out you need a ton more solar
| panels to overproduce in the day to store energy in your
| expensive energy storage system. Which is inconvenient.
| gibolt wrote:
| Except it turns out we don't use much energy at night...
|
| Solar aligns very well with daily energy demands, and storage
| helps smooth it out. In the end we will have a massive energy
| surplus and finding ways to use that extra energy will be big
| business.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Do people use much energy during the day in winter though?
|
| At higher latitudes, the sun doesn't shine nearly as long,
| and the days are often overcast for weeks on end. Your
| storage needs to smooth over weeks, not hours!
|
| The cost of that storage, and the solar array, would be
| much higher than the nuclear plant.
| gibolt wrote:
| You'd be surprised at how low grid-scale solar/wind plus
| storage costs have dropped, especially once taking into
| account full lifetime operating costs.
|
| Optimally, you build an energy mix for the worst day of
| the year, not storing *electrical energy for the long
| term (other types like heat/pimped hydro may make sense
| at those timescales)
| tonyarkles wrote:
| > Do people use much energy during the day in winter
| though?
|
| Saskatchewanian here! Your use of the word "energy" here
| is critical. We use a ton of _energy_ non-stop through
| the winter. Looking through the last year worth of
| statements, my wife and I used 1,794 m^2 of natural gas
| in Feb 2022, and 59 m^2 of natural gas in June 2022.
| Conversely, we seem to average about 700-800 kWh of
| electricity every month, but last August we used 1,456
| kWh and the most recent bill had 1,159 kWh (electric air
| conditioning).
|
| We use a crap load of natural gas to heat our homes
| throughout the winter, and that basically drops to nil
| during the summer (only the hot water heater).
| Electricity varies less, but there are huge summer
| spikes.
|
| What nuclear does, from my PoV, is give us not only a
| road out of burning coal (ick) for our base load
| electricity, but also makes electric-heat-conversion a
| more viable proposal. While the temperatures do get cold
| enough sometimes that a heat pump/HRV loses its
| effectiveness, getting to a point where we have a COP of
| 3-4 using the heat pump and backing it up with resistive
| heating is a huge win _if_ the electricity powering those
| devices isn 't coming from a coal-fired plant.
|
| Typically the coldest days are near peak darkness with
| clear skies and no wind.
| ptilt wrote:
| Let's discuss that after 2030 when we are going to plug in
| millions of cars at night haha
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Cars are the perfect source of smart consumers, you can
| think of a smart consumer like storage since they allow
| you to shift load but without having to pay the price of
| the round trip efficiency loss.
|
| They sit still for 22-23 hours per day allowing making
| them perfect as long as we have chargers wherever you
| park your car. Which should be an easy mandate to
| enforce.
| jaclaz wrote:
| > ...as long as we have chargers wherever you park your
| car. Which should be an easy mandate to enforce.
|
| You also need to modify (heavily) the electricity
| distribution lines and infrastructure to add the capacity
| to actually power such a large number of chargers.
| krzyk wrote:
| > Except it turns out we don't use much energy at night...
|
| Well, people don't but heating does. It is quite popular to
| produce heat for floor heating during the night (because
| there are tariffs where night energy is cheaper) and
| disable it at (part)day - floor heating has large inertia
| and keeps the house (or at least feet) warm for longer.
|
| Solar has this issue, that a lot of people mount them and
| the highest amount of electricity produced is during the
| same period of time and during summer, where you have the
| most production you don't need heating - some use air
| conditioning, but it is not necessary in cooler parts of
| the world (and it uses less energy than heating).
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Maybe we'll go full circle and just go to sleep when dusk
| falls like our medieval ancestors.
| vincnetas wrote:
| Its very expensive to put steel plant to sleep.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Oh man. Canada is doing something smart in a very welcome change
| raydiatian wrote:
| [The economics of a nuclear
| reactor](https://youtu.be/cbeJIwF1pVY)
|
| In case this hasn't already been shared
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| They looked at the price tags of these reactors vs solar and
| wind, and chose the lowest number, fine. But I've never heard of
| a nuclear project coming in at under multiple times its original
| estimate, and taking a decade or more longer than expected. Has
| any new nuclear power come online anywhere since Fukushima?
| percevalve wrote:
| There are actually quite a lot of them, the AIEA maintains the
| PRIS database: https://pris.iaea.org/pris/ You will see a lot
| of them being connected to the grid since.
| vondro wrote:
| Olkiluoto EPR reactor in Finland was connected to the grid in
| March this year. There are 2 more EPRs in construction, in
| France and UK.
|
| So yes, there were new power plants coming online, but after
| budget overruns and missed timelines.
|
| Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy, so
| pity we don't build it better.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Olkiluoto isn't fully online yet, that's expected to happen
| in December after it didn't pass trials and required repairs.
| It would then be 13 years late and cost about four times what
| was planned. The other two are looking like they're going in
| a similar direction.
| ttul wrote:
| Thirteen years late and four times over budget for the
| first new plant in Finland in 42 years. I bet if they build
| a second one, it won't take so long nor be so over-budget.
|
| In the UK, the Hinkley Point C project is over-budget and
| late, partly because they had problems with their initial
| concrete pours that necessitated exceptionally costly and
| time-consuming rebuilds. But as Hinkley gets closer to
| completion, the lessons learned are being transferred to
| Sizewell C, another EDF plant. [1]
|
| The world needs these large nuclear plants and we can't
| just give up because the first few constructed went over
| budget and took too long.
|
| [1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/06/23/energy-
| securit...
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| > Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy,
| so pity we don't build it better.
|
| In what way? For the price that they actually cost after
| construction you can get double the capacity in wind, and
| double the capacity in solar, and a CAES plant capable of
| storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the
| same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow
| battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser
| capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the
| gas plant with change left over.
|
| All so you can make your energy infrastructure beholden to
| one fuel supplier where your country is not allowed to
| produce any yourself. Then you have to find somewhere to put
| the waste for millenia.
|
| And that only if you're on the short list of countries that
| the US, China, or France will even sell fuel to.
| p_l wrote:
| Using rather bullish on wind+solar+storage
| https://model.energy, to get stable baseline we need
| overbuilding of 10x the output power, so 2x + storage gets
| us nowhere, at least for Polish weather and sunlight data.
| kennend3 wrote:
| > and double the capacity in solar, a
|
| you are aware that you are posting on an article about
| Ontario and Saskatchewan, correct?
|
| How about you go review the tables showing how little solar
| energy these provinces receive in the winter?
|
| So when we need energy to heat our homes and power our
| lights, our solar output is also greatly reduced?
|
| Solar may be great further south, where it is sunny all
| year round, but in the north we need reliable power all
| year long, including our cold and dark winters.
|
| It doesn't get cold and snow here for no reason, it is
| caused by the reduction in solar energy we receive.
| bshipp wrote:
| this will be the case when we transition from natural gas
| for heating. as it currently stands, electrical demand--
| with the exception of Quebec--generally is dramatically
| lower in the winter than the summer.
| ztratar wrote:
| Can you show any sources for "same price = double the
| capacity in <renewable> + CAES storage"?
|
| That's a lofty claim and I have heard CAES storage at
| economic scales is still unsolved, else we'd see a
| rocketship company in the space. If you do know of a
| stealthy rocketship here, who is it?
| usrusr wrote:
| The reason you don't see "rocketship" investment is
| because the problem isn't hard enough, no matter how well
| you solve it you wouldn't be anywhere close to virtual
| monopoly. But despite that, hydrostor.ca got an
| investment of a quarter billion earlier this year, and
| they already started projects for A-CAES facilities in
| the GWh range (comparable to smaller pumped hydro) when
| their funding was less than a tenth of that (I suppose
| actual projects wouldn't be included in that funding, I
| think they see themselves as a project specialist, not as
| an owner/operator even if some/most/all current projects
| seem to be subsidiaries, perhaps a bit like
| spacex/starlink if you like space analogies).
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at
| the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined
| cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of
| storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing
| enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change
| left over
|
| None of this have ever happened beyond "research" projects
| at extremely small scale. You can't take nuclear "actually
| cost after construction" - which in some countries like
| Korea or China is maybe 20% more than original estimations
| - and apply assumption that anything of this is actually
| able to scale, not even talking about cost of this.
| [deleted]
| belorn wrote:
| The price difference between wind energy when the supply is
| high and nuclear when the supply is low is well over 10
| times here in northern Europe.
|
| If I can choose the time and place for when to do the
| trade, I would make a huge profit trading 2 units of energy
| and getting 1 unit back later at my specified time and
| place. The top price is around 40cent per kwh when the wind
| is still and demand is at its peak, compared to ~3c kwh
| when the wind is at the maximum production and demand is at
| the lowest. paying 6c worth of wind power and getting 40c
| when I specific it would be massive profit.
|
| Green hydrogen if burned for energy would cost about 3-10
| times that of nuclear per kwh. In the future that cost
| might go down but for now that is a bit (which is why no
| one are producing green hydrogen in order to produce
| energy). Again, if you are willing to sell green hydrogen
| for the price of nuclear, eating the loss, then sign me up.
| I will happy buy that and sell it for minimum 3x of what I
| pay for it since there are plenty of industries that want
| energy when demand is high and supply is low.
|
| The cost of energy is not determined by how much it cost to
| produce. It is determined by the time and place it is
| delivered. 1 unit of energy produced today is not fungible
| for 1 unit of energy produced tomorrow. Only energy
| produced at the same time can be evaluated based on how
| much they cost to produce.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The fact that there is a 10x price arbitrage available in
| the market is proof that storage is not economically
| possible currently.
| bshipp wrote:
| Isn't it the opposite? A 10x variation would be an
| incentive to invest in storage systems that capture
| energy at night and release it during the day.
|
| Think a high-altitude reservoir where water is pumped up
| all night and then released all day when it's required.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yes, the fact that such a strong incentive exists, and
| yet it hasn't been done, shows that cost is so much that
| even a 10x price difference isn't enough to pay for it.
| bshipp wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's done quite frequently. It's a pretty
| simple battery system with--apparently--an 80+% round-
| trip efficiency to it.
|
| The biggest problem is getting permission to move that
| much water around. I live next to a lake and shudder at
| the regulatory hurdles I'd encounter building something
| like this. There'd be at least 4 government agencies
| before I even negotiated to sell to the public utility.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-
| storage_hydroelectricit...
| belorn wrote:
| Storage that has a reliable 365 charge/discharge cycles
| each year can be economical viable, especially when the
| discharge window of peak price is just a few hours. Solar
| + lithium battery work great in countries where the
| primary source of energy can be solar every day of the
| year.
|
| Wind power doesn't work like that. Instead of a daily
| pattern of high and low supply, you get random amount of
| weeks and days of high supply followed by random amount
| of weeks and days of low supply.
|
| Storage need to discharge in order to generate profits.
| If you get 30-50 discharge cycles each year, then those
| periods need to provide profits for the cost of 365 days
| of operations and it also need to repay the original
| investment.
|
| One way to get around this is with subsidies. This is how
| some fossil fuel plants operate, called "reserve energy".
| When the wind blow they don't run the generator, but they
| still get paid through tax money. Then they start the
| engines when the wind isn't blowing and demand exceed
| supply. This scheme helps to reduce the peak price in
| northern Europe, through obviously it isn't really that
| cheap. It mostly just hide the true price behind
| subsidies.
| weberer wrote:
| You know Finland gets like 2 hours of sunlight in the
| winter. Its not a particularly windy place either.
| Retric wrote:
| Finland's low population density means the amount of
| economically viable wind is more than enough to meet
| annual power demand.
|
| Production increased from 2.3 TWH in 2015 to 7.8 TWH in
| 2020, and capacity keeps increasing jumping from 2.3GW in
| 2020 to 3.3GW in 2021. And that recent growth has been
| without subsides.
| nixass wrote:
| It's so low density people can even blow from their mouth
| to wind turbine to be self sustainable. You can't just
| install a turbine and call it solved.
| Retric wrote:
| The point was the resource is available and cheaper than
| any alternative, not that they are actually going to say
| replace everything else.
|
| Wind really scales best with hydro as you only get so
| much rain per year, but you have a great deal of
| flexibility when you release it. As Finland has a great
| deal of hydro they can make use of plenty of wind.
| nixass wrote:
| Heeeeyy, don't make reasonable judgment. This is solar
| and wind we're talking about, the solution to every
| climate problem. Even if there's no wind or no sunlight
| PinguTS wrote:
| And in Finland you can replace sun and wind by hydro.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the
| capacity in solar_
|
| And the capacity factor of wind is ~33%, which means you
| need ~3 times as much wind as nuclear. The capacity factor
| of solar is ~25%, so you need four times as much:
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States
| ezzaf wrote:
| You've only quoted half of what you're replying to. You
| can get the solar, _and_ the wind, _and_ the storage, all
| for less than the cost of building nuclear once
| accounting for cost overruns.
|
| It's also with noting that nuclear has a higher capacity
| factor, but it's not 100%.
| [deleted]
| percevalve wrote:
| For the EPR, you also had the Chinese Units, Taishan, that
| were started after but got connected to the grid before. http
| s://pris.iaea.org/pris/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....
|
| Other significant projects to check is the building by KEPCO
| and ENEC, I think BARAKAH-1 was the first unit connected: htt
| ps://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....
|
| There are a lot of teams working on this issue, like Oklo:
| https://oklo.com
| wnkrshm wrote:
| There are some wonderful stories with the EPR, like
| falsification of material analysis records [0].
|
| [0] https://www.french-nuclear-safety.fr/asn-informs/news-
| releas...
| thepangolino wrote:
| wewxjfq wrote:
| Right, unlike wind and solar, the predicted cost of a nuclear
| SMR is not based on real-world data, you have to take the word
| of the vendor who is selling it to you.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > and chose the lowest number, fine.
|
| This is not fine, for multiple reasons:
|
| 1. Nuclear is probably not the lowest number. See Lazard's
| analysis of levelized energy costs:
| https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
| on the whole / on the average, Nuclear in 20221 is $167 / MWh
| while solar is $36 and wind is $38. Now, granted, maybe these
| mini-reactors are cheaper than the average, and maybe solar and
| wind are effectively more expensive etc. - but I doubt it's
| that much of a difference; and the figures quoted are not
| "levelized costs", so they may be neglecting various factors,
| such as maintenance of older reactors or waste storage (which
| needs to happen for hunderds or thousands of years).
|
| 2. The reason you yourself gave - "over schedule, over budget"
| : Even if you want to choose what's cheapest, it can't be
| what's cheapest as proposed, but what's cheapest as projected
| to cost.
|
| 3. Price is not everything. On the one hand, there's the
| question of availability of the renewables (e.g. you might need
| some storage as well); and on the other, there are the grave
| safety concerns from nuclear reactors.
|
| 4. Price is not everything. II : Greenhouse gas emissions.
| Nuclear is not "emission-free", since you need to count
| emissions due to Uranium-mining and processing, not just the
| electricity generating reaction. IIANM, there are significant
| emissions to take into account as well relative to solar, wind,
| geothermal etc.
| Tsarbomb wrote:
| You can be skeptical all you want but given that most of
| Ontario's power already comes from Nuclear, and Ontario
| operates the largest nuclear facility in the world by both
| reactors and output, you are yelling into the wind.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Plus you could get those renewable systems online tomorrow (or
| get them much much cheaper in 2030), vs nuclear where you pay
| today and then just hope it doesn't massively overrun time and
| budget...
| hannob wrote:
| Was also the first thing that I noted. They're comparing
| fictional nuclear prices with real renewable prices.
|
| One more thing though that makes this calculation even more
| ridiculous: They're comparing today's wind+solar prices with a
| tech that's supposed to be available in the 2030s. Like,
| they're assuming wind+solar won't progress in the next 10
| years. That's... a very unrealistic thing to assume.
| IMTDb wrote:
| Bear in mind that those known renewable prices are always
| including the little asterisk "* prices only computed when
| sun is shining and wind is blowing".
|
| Renewable prices are computed as : "I put $XXX and got this
| much electricity during the year, so price per watt is $YYY
| -> renewable is cheap"
|
| That calculation is not reflective of the reality of the
| needs. People - and anyone in charge of maintaining a power
| grid - think like so :
|
| "I need YYY watts of electricity now, how much $XXX do I need
| to put down to get it ?"
|
| That amount is massively higher in price per watt with
| renewable, because renewable can sometime works at >90% of
| their potential, and provide cheap and abundant electricity
| or they can decide to work at < 1% and be completely useless.
| And I have never seen anyone advocating for renewable that is
| willing to say "Please do cut my home line to save
| electricity when it's dark and windless - even in November -
| if batteries are low. I think it's better than building
| reliable backup supply".
|
| Nuclear is the preferred choice here because you are going to
| get electricity in those situation at the push of a button.
| Maybe prices will be higher than the price per watt of
| renewable, but it will provide electricity when _no amount of
| wind farms and solar panels are going to do the job_. Meaning
| when _prices of renewable are approaching infinity_. In that
| case, expensive nuclear is still cheaper than failing
| renewable. Batteries can help renewable, but no one in
| anywhere near the ability to store energy for a _whole
| country_ for _weeks_ in cold countries, when days are very
| short and wind can just decide to stop blowing. There are
| other options than nuclear - like the usual coal, gas and
| oil, but they have their own problems - like CO2 emission.
| Other options include geothermal and hydro but they have
| ecological aspects as well, and tend to be more expensive
| than nuclear.
| [deleted]
| whacko_quacko wrote:
| Actually the article mentions, that solar is running at 40%
| capacity on average (according to industry data)
|
| And it's STILL cheaper than nuclear watt for watt.
|
| That being said, I think nuclear power is a necessary part
| of a sustainable energy mix, because it is much easier to
| satisfy ground load with it, and you don't have storage
| issues. (But this article is stupid at best and
| disingenuous at worst)
| thrown_22 wrote:
| > Actually the article mentions, that solar is running at
| 40% capacity on average (according to industry data)
|
| Fascinating that we've managed to get solar panel working
| at 40% capacity at night.
| ezzaf wrote:
| > but no one in anywhere near the ability to store energy
| for a whole country for weeks in cold countries, when days
| are very short and wind can just decide to stop blowing
|
| Sure they do, the storage is just called hydroelectricity.
| There are parts of the world (eg Tasmania) with months of
| energy storage.
|
| For the realised cost of nuclear and construction timeframe
| of nuclear, you could build a resilient supply with a
| distributed transmission grid and a mix of batteries and
| pumped hydro.
| tinco wrote:
| Did you pick Tasmania because it is just about exactly on
| the other side of the planet of Ontario? Are you going to
| pump the hydro through the earths core? Months of energy
| storage for ~500.000 Tasmanians is like a day or two for
| the ~15 million Ontarians.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Yes, I always find it odd that people act like solar being
| cheap at noon matters at midnight. We might as well say
| coal is free underground so renewables are a non-starter.
|
| We need energy at a specific place and time. Renewables
| don't meet those needs. We get them where the weather
| permits when the weather permits.
| helloooooooo wrote:
| You also have to consider distribution infrastructure.
| Currently, the Ontario grid is built to hand distribution
| from majority nuclear sources. When replacing nuclear
| reactors with wind and solar, it changes the centralized
| nature of the grid's power source. The government then needs
| to invest big bucks into re-orienting the grid towards
| distributed distribution. Given that would mean going from
| one extreme to another, it's no question why the government
| would feather replace nuclear with nuclear
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| The _really_ interesting point is: They still come up short
| (or close enough that it doesn't make a difference). And
| that's the most optimistic thing proponents are willing to
| come up with.
| fenk85 wrote:
| walrus01 wrote:
| Have been seeing tech news articles about mini nuclear reactor
| coming really soon now for about 22 years, so far, none have
| actually happened.
| usrnm wrote:
| > so far, none have actually happened
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
|
| Not without its fair share of criticism, budget overruns and
| all other problems associated with building new nuclear
| reactors these days, but it did happen
| p1mrx wrote:
| China connected an SMR to the grid several months ago:
| https://www.powermag.com/china-starts-up-first-fourth-genera...
| p1mrx wrote:
| https://aris.iaea.org/PDF/BWRX-300_2020.pdf
|
| > The IC [Isolation Condenser] pool has an installed capacity
| that provides 7 days of reactor decay heat removal capability.
| The heat rejection process can be continued indefinitely by
| replenishing the IC pool inventory.
|
| It would be nice if we were building reactors that could shut
| down without any external input. NuScale seems to be closest to
| production with a walk-away safe design. In other words, change
| "7 days" to "infinity days".
| fefe23 wrote:
| I'm stunned by the price difference. 1-1.5 billion for this power
| plant, but only 300-400 million for wind or solar.
|
| We really have come a long way in bringing down prices for wind
| and solar!
| T-A wrote:
| Keep in mind that wind and solar power figures typically quoted
| are for max effect. For solar that means noon on a cloud-free
| day. Most hours of most days, and all the nights, are not like
| that. So if you want a realistic comparison with something like
| a nuclear reactor, which can run steadily for months on end,
| you need to apply a significant multiplier for additional area
| and batteries.
| nixass wrote:
| The problem being you can only cry when there's no wind (or
| solar) while nuclear works 24/7/365 (minus maintenance)
| stinos wrote:
| Or according to another comment: spend the saved money (vs
| nuclear) on storage and smile instead? I don't know a lot
| about it, but what I know is enough to be pretty sure
| dismissive single-line statements (in either way) are usually
| not at all the full picture.
| nixass wrote:
| What storage? What tech? How would you scale up? You see,
| it's easy just to write things down and live in a dream
| that's enough to solve problems. But actually it's not.
| stinos wrote:
| I thought by mentioning explicitly 'either way' I made it
| clear that the only dream I'm living is is the skeptical
| one, not leaning one way or the other, merely observing
| and pointing out that indeed it's very easy to write
| things down as if they are the sole truth. While they
| actually aren't.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Multiply those by the actual production and you'll get an
| equivalent cost.
|
| Per the article, they estimate wind and solar to produce at
| ~40%. The reactors will operate at ~98%, some downtime for
| maintenance.
| Tepix wrote:
| Like the maintenance in Fukushima?
|
| I don't think handwaving away the long term storage of
| nuclear waste and the risk of contaminating large areas can
| just be ignored, especially with a new unproven reactor
| design.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Long term storage is solved from a technical perspective,
| it's a political problem at this point. Deep holes in
| geologically stable places are ideally fit for purpose, and
| most of the really nasty stuff isn't' danger after about
| 200 years.
|
| The Fukushima disaster is expected to kill precisely no one
| from the surrounding area due to radiation exposure, and
| the highest exposure among 36,478 dosimeters in Fukushima
| city in 2011 was 2.7 millisieverts with an average of 0.26
| millisieverts. The 2.7 millisievert is believed to have
| come from a badge left in luggage that was x-rayed. A dose
| of 0.26 millisieverts is the same as the exposure from to
| round trip flights between NYC and London.
| naasking wrote:
| At least double the renewable estimate to add storage to make
| them truly viable.
|
| Add 50% to the nuclear cost because they always go over cost
| and time budgets.
|
| That's probably a fairer overall estimate.
| fenk85 wrote:
| Considering those produce 20-25% (at random) of time, are you
| adding he cost of storage to this?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| This is why nuclear is dying and you don't need the tinfoil hat
| explanations for why. Just like always, it comes down to money.
| joshlemer wrote:
| Why doesn't Saskatchewan and Northern Ontario just import most of
| its electricity from Manitoba?
| xrendan wrote:
| A big reason that Ontario can't / doesn't is that the demand
| centers in Southern Ontario are ridiculously far from the
| generation centers in Manitoba. Toronto is 1800 km straight
| from the new Keeyask Dam. This is over unpopulated muskeg that
| is expensive to build on in the first place and difficult to
| access for maintenance.
| joshlemer wrote:
| Yeah, Southern Ontario is for the time being not possible but
| perhaps Northern Ontario.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Canada is a surprisingly unconnected federation of almost
| independent provinces. We don't have a great east-west
| interconnection between the provinces.
|
| I mean, we have _trade barriers_ between provinces. It 's
| insane.
| epgui wrote:
| It's not at all obvious why you think this question is so
| obvious that it doesn't require a bit more context.
|
| Why would it?
| Pxtl wrote:
| Manitoba has spectacularly cheap and plentiful hydroelectric
| power.
| nine_k wrote:
| But is there enough surplus?
| joshlemer wrote:
| Yes. Manitoba already exports a lot of electricity to the
| Minnesota, Wisconsin, Saskatchewan, Ontario. It'll soon
| be bringing online the Keeyask dam as well which will add
| capacity for 400,000 more homes.
| ztratar wrote:
| For today. But I presume when these reactors are
| completed, the question is will that surplus be enough
| for the energy needs of ~2030. And there the answer is
| "we need to build more generation". No?
| brutusborn wrote:
| I imagine because it is cheaper to produce locally, or Manitoba
| does not have spare capacity. Why do you think they should
| import from Manitoba?
| joshlemer wrote:
| Manitoba exports huge amounts of electricity to Ontario, SK,
| Minnesota, Wisconsin, and with the new Keeyask dam coming
| online it'll have capacity for 400,000 new homes. There's
| also still 1000s of MW of untapped potential in Manitoba, if
| investments would be made in dams and transmission.
| brutusborn wrote:
| The recent hydro project mentioned in the article is a lot
| more expensive than the Nuclear Options, although they may
| have cherry picked their data. It amounts to ~ 2x the cost.
| "BC Hydro's 1,100 Mwe Site C dam is expected to cost $16
| billion"
| rob74 wrote:
| If it's cheaper to build these nuclear reactors as compared
| to "importing" hydro power from another Canadian province
| (these comments make it sound like it's another country)
| remains to be seen. Maybe it even looks that way from current
| estimates, but from past experience most estimates on the
| cost of building nuclear power plants are a bit optimistic...
| brutusborn wrote:
| This article suggests nuclear costs will go down as long as
| regulations are not changed mid-construction, or if
| grandfathering is allowed.
| https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-
| nuclear-p...
| UberFly wrote:
| Probably to diversify and be somewhat self-sufficient.
| jollybean wrote:
| What I don't understand is why they are still not done at scale,
| i.e. build 10 of these in the same spot and get the economic
| advantage and especially keep the security and risk things
| isolated.
| recycledmatt wrote:
| Article says they are building 4 at the same site - there are
| economies of scale in generation / transmission and in
| security, but more important building smaller plants may keep
| the cost overruns lower.
| nl wrote:
| MIT looked at this:
|
| > they consider things like the possibility of using a central
| facility to produce high-performance concrete parts for the
| plant, as we have shifted to doing for projects like bridge
| construction. But this concrete is often more expensive than
| materials poured on site, meaning the higher efficiency of the
| off-site production would have to more than offset that
| difference. The material's performance in the environment of a
| nuclear plant hasn't been tested, so it's not clear whether
| it's even a solution.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...
| xorcist wrote:
| The boring answer is that they're much less fuel efficient than
| what their size would suggest. As in, almost an order of
| magnitude. There are both science and engineering challenges to
| solve before they get competitive with established designs.
| That's why they haven't taken over.
| senectus1 wrote:
| so approx 5k per house... i wonder how long they last for?
| xupybd wrote:
| Yeah the pay back time is long but the cost of operation is so
| much lower than traditional fuels. It will pay off if it
| remains running for long enough.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbeJIwF1pVY&ab_channel=Illin...
| tinco wrote:
| Hadn't looked at it that way yet, that actually sounds really
| attractive. If they can be maintained and operated at under 1k
| per house per year then that's competitive with what I pay now.
|
| I wonder why it's so cheap when calculated this way it seems
| competitive with solar panels when I expected it to be a factor
| ten more expensive (of course solar panels wouldn't really work
| that far north).
| labster wrote:
| A lot of what you pay now is for maintenance of the lines and
| transformers.
| DavidKarlas wrote:
| If you calculate 300MW/240k homes, it comes out at 1.25kW per
| home which is not enough for peak demand...
| adrianN wrote:
| Especially not if we manage to electrify everything. The
| average American uses a little over 9kW of primary energy
| continuously. You can probably safely divide that by three
| if you use electricity, but still.
| [deleted]
| dagaci wrote:
| These cost estimates do not include the maintenance of the waste
| products of nuclear energy production.
|
| These costs are astonishingly!
|
| If the 10,000 year costs fell on the producers and consumers
| directly (this is how it should be), they would quickly have a
| different point of different view
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| I believe the costs for nuclear are longterm.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Drill hole, insert waste: https://vimeo.com/458322589
|
| It's really not that hard, except from a political standpoint.
| dagaci wrote:
| Thats fine, solutions are always fine. But ensure that only
| the consumers of this power and pay for its construction an
| upkeep
| p1mrx wrote:
| Also ensure that consumers pay for emitting atmospheric
| CO2, including backup power when wind and solar are offline
| due to weather.
| freemint wrote:
| And when those numbers are run they turn out cheaper then
| nuclear
| p1mrx wrote:
| Do you mean that for the purpose of backing up wind and
| solar, it will be cheaper to use fossil fuels and
| sequester the carbon, than to use nuclear energy and
| sequester the waste?
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