[HN Gopher] Nuclear power is too slow
___________________________________________________________________
Nuclear power is too slow
Author : jseliger
Score : 121 points
Date : 2022-12-16 15:07 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jackdevanney.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jackdevanney.substack.com)
| shawndrost wrote:
| The article talks about learning curves, but learning curves
| apply to airplanes, not airports. Nuclear is the latter.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| It seems you missed the conclusion in which they state that
| there is unlikely to be a learning curve beyond the build of
| the first unit or two as evidenced by France and Japan's build
| times. They also did a decent job of showing that the average
| build time should be around 4 years which is equivalent to the
| build of a coal power plant and that the time it takes in both
| cases is determined by how long it takes to build the boiler
| and turbine. The swelling of timelines appears only when large
| changes in regulation enter the picture.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| So make reactors more like airplanes, then. Or rather, ships.
| mkl95 wrote:
| It's crazy to think it would only take a few thousand plants to
| power the entire world, or about 15 times the ones we have today.
| But even another few hundred plants could completely change the
| geopolitical landscape. Nuclear power is a cheatcode we refuse to
| use.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| Waste storage.
|
| If zealous supporters of nuclear asked for nuclear waste to be
| stored in their neighborhoods, I'd be on board for more nuclear
| power right now.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| If zealous supporters of coal plants asked for the fumes to
| go into their neighborhood I still would not be on board.
| Have you ever seen the effects of coal power? Like really -
| lived there?
|
| I have and it is not pretty at all. I would take a correctly
| stored nuclear waste right away.
| otikik wrote:
| If you start calling the other side "zealous", make sure you
| are not one first.
| thehappypm wrote:
| How much waste do you think will be produced? We're talking
| about less than a typical landfill's worth of waste for the
| entire world.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| So instead we just pump energy waste / byproducts in the air?
| goodpoint wrote:
| There are a lot of problem related to nuclear, including its
| cost, the centralization of political power and the
| centralization of the energy grid.
| S201 wrote:
| > the centralization of political power and the
| centralization of the energy grid.
|
| Sounds a lot better to me than relying on the middle east
| and Russia for fossil fuels.
| goodpoint wrote:
| That's called false dichotomy.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Waste is stored on site until it's quite a bit less
| radioactive, this can and has been done for decades. The fear
| of shipping this cooled down waste and burying it in a
| mountain is entirely unfounded and the only reason it hasn't
| happened is people spreading unnecessary fear.
| cpwright wrote:
| I had an active nuclear plant in my neighborhood (Indian
| Point Energy Center) until the NY government made it
| untenable to continue the relicensing process. I would be
| perfectly fine with the plant continuing to run and
| continuing to have onsite storage of the waste. It provided
| 25% of the power for our county and NYC, employed 1500 people
| directly, and paid for roughly 1/3 of our children's schools.
| Shutting it down was a mistake, nuclear is so upfront capital
| cost intensive that it is a waste to stop a functional plant.
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm willing to take some nuclear waste right here, and I
| understand if the glowing green barrels aren't available so I
| can take the green glass.
| S201 wrote:
| Waste isn't a problem, or at least not a problem that can't
| be solved with a bit of effort. Let's stop repeating the
| scary propaganda line that there's mountains of highly
| radioactive waste pouring out of nuclear power plants that is
| just waiting to irradiate our neighborhoods because we don't
| have anywhere to put it.
|
| > If all the electricity use of the USA was distributed
| evenly among its population, and all of it came from nuclear
| power, then the amount of nuclear waste each person would
| generate per year would be 39.5 grams. That's the weight of
| seven U. S. quarters of waste, per year!
|
| And that's not even assuming that the "waste" was recycled
| into usable fuel again creating a mostly closed loop fuel
| cycle:
|
| > Nuclear waste generally is over 90% uranium. Thus, the
| spent fuel (waste) still contains 90% usable fuel! It can be
| chemically processed and placed in other reactors to close
| the fuel cycle. A closed fuel cycle means much less nuclear
| waste and much more energy extracted from the raw ore.
| Additionally, this process allows you to convert your waste
| into chemical forms that are totally immobilized.
|
| Source: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html
| delecti wrote:
| I agree that nuclear waste is an overblown problem, but
| that link entirely ignores the structural components that
| become radioactive. There's lots of things like concrete
| and steel that need to be contained as well.
| S201 wrote:
| Is that not only an issue when a plant is permanently
| decommissioned? That seems like a fairly easy problem to
| solve as well: Bury it like you would any other nuclear
| waste that can't be reprocessed; or melt the steel down
| and use it in a new reactor.
| mjevans wrote:
| Not an expert; but offhand I recall that irradiated
| materials, in addition to being harmful to biological
| entities like humans, are also changed by the absorbed
| radiation. Effectively they gain impurities from it. The
| best course of action would be to let the halflifes decay
| and then return it to the raw material stream.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| The halflife of irradiated equipment isn't that long
| (it's what you call low level waste), you just bury it
| and wait till it becomes less radioactive.
| Symbiote wrote:
| You can't just announce the problem is "easy to solve".
|
| The other article on the front page is about the
| decommissioning of Sellafield, predicted to take over a
| century.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33997375
| DennisP wrote:
| That's only a problem for a few decades though.
| delecti wrote:
| I don't think that actually meaningfully helps all that
| much. Storing it for 2 years, 30 years, or 500 years, are
| nearly the same problem from a political perspective.
| "Where to keep it" is really the question "where to put
| it", and then you leave it there because moving it is
| dealing with the problem "where to put it" all over
| again.
| beders wrote:
| Keep falling for the narrative of the nuclear power
| industry.
|
| Denying the basic problems with recycling, TRANSPORTATION
| and storage is not helping.
| S201 wrote:
| Man, the source I listed is literally from a guy with a
| Ph.D on the topic. Where exactly am I "falling for the
| narrative of the nuclear industry?" An industry which, by
| the way, hardly exists in the US anymore.
|
| > Denying the basic problems with recycling,
| TRANSPORTATION and storage is not helping.
|
| Do you care to elaborate on what any of these supposed
| basic problems actually are?
| yodelshady wrote:
| I would very happily have one in my neighbourhood, so kindly
| stop slandering me.
|
| Here's the deal: I get that, and am connected to the grid,
| you don't, and no fossil back up for either. Virtue
| signalling over a gas grid is _killing_ people, people I
| know, and I don 't like people who support that. No
| "batteries maybe in some mystical future". We had carbon free
| tech _forty years ago_. If you frustrated that you too are
| responsible for the destruction I now see _everywhere_.
| yellowapple wrote:
| I hereby volunteer my bedroom for nuclear waste storage if it
| means more nuclear power right now.
| amluto wrote:
| I would love a nuclear plant in my neighborhood, especially
| if I could buy power from it without going through PG&E. I
| have trouble imagining waste storage being cost effective
| here.
|
| Large nuclear wants to be somewhere that the (physically
| enormous) electric station and connection to the grid makes
| sense. Small nuclear could go near where power is used. Waste
| should be somewhere with inexpensive land and in a convenient
| location for putting the waste there.
|
| If there were container-sized reactors that produced a few
| tens of MW, they could go all over the place. Fancy
| neighborhoods could pay a premium to put them in fake houses.
| But the waste would probably be much more economical to
| handle by moving the entire container to a service facility,
| refueling at the facility, and handling the waste at or near
| the facility. This would be in an industrial area, just like
| other large warehouses or factories.
| Lammy wrote:
| > Large nuclear wants to be somewhere that the (physically
| enormous) electric station and connection to the grid makes
| sense.
|
| Like Bodega Head where you can actually visit the never-
| finished reactor pit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodega_
| Bay_Nuclear_Power_Plant
| amluto wrote:
| To be fair, if it was going to be a Fukushima-style
| boiling water reactor that can fail dangerously if it
| loses power, sticking it that close to a major fault line
| in an isolated area may not be the best idea.
| Lammy wrote:
| I honestly don't believe that :)
|
| At Fukushima, the reactor SCRAMed successfully and it was
| the seawater that took out the generators powering the
| decay-heat cooling system. If California experienced a
| wave that could crest Bodega Head's yuge natural seawall
| then we have bigger problems lol
| https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ht-
| bin/tv_browse.pl?id=96773349539f93...
| arcticbull wrote:
| Do you know how many people died from radiation as a
| result of the Fukushima accident? Zero. Maybe one
| depending on how you count.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| Your terms are agreeable.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| If zealous deniers of nuclear asked for storage of other
| power waste to be stored anywhere other than the sky, they'd
| realize their argument is worthless.
| Lammy wrote:
| Really makes me wonder what the world would be like now if
| Watergate hadn't happened: https://atomicinsights.com/why-did-
| richard-nixon-so-strongly...
| jpeter wrote:
| Or imagine if Chernobyl didn't happen.
| akiselev wrote:
| Nixon canceled the Mars program where the vast majority of
| cutting edge nuclear research was happening - tech like the
| nuclear lightbulb (search my comments for details) that could
| have matured and saved us by now. He was no friend to
| nuclear, just the entrenched nuclear industry.
| devgonewild wrote:
| The world would be a better place if Nixon never existed, how
| is it possible for one person to do so much damage
| downrightmike wrote:
| If Nixon hadn't sent his people to Vietnam in the late 60's
| and promise the Vietcong a better deal if they walked away
| from negotiations, He wouldn't have been able to run on
| 'winning the war' and we would have been out of Vietnam FIVE
| YEARS EARILER. Nixon was a fuck up, and is still screwing the
| world today. Piece of shit.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| It takes too long to build, though. Because everyone is sitting
| around bitching about how it takes too long to build instead of
| building it.
|
| "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago."
| rmason wrote:
| It takes too long to build primarily because opponents tie
| things up with lawsuits and challenges. Federal research
| money is available for competitors but not nuclear. One Utah
| Senator tried to for something like fifteen years to get
| money to build a modern thorium reactor sample plant. He
| never succeeded but there was plenty of money for things like
| Solyndra.
|
| Thankfully thorium research has become so attractive that
| it's now attracting private money but we've lost a couple of
| decades.
| pydry wrote:
| I know, right? Why build a solar farm in 6 months or a wind
| farm in a year when you can spend five times as much and have
| a nuclear plant ready in 10-15 years?
| otikik wrote:
| In 6 months you don't even have _the permission for
| building_ a wind farm (or a solar farm). Source:
| https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2022/10/15/solar-
| farm-...
| benj111 wrote:
| I suppose it's how you define 'build'.
|
| If I build an IKEA bookcase, do I time the build from
| when I throw the instructions away, or when my
| significant other decides to buy it between mouthfuls of
| meatballs?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| If you think the NIMBYism for renewables is bad, imagine
| trying to build a nuclear plant in your backyard. In
| fact, the majority of problems with nuclear being slow to
| build boil down to "the NIMBYs wont have it".
|
| This is probably a place where nuclear and renewable
| advocates could come together and fight back against the
| NIMBYs who would rather you just built more coal plants
| next to the poors. Because NIMBYism is just lower-case c
| conservatism with extra steps.
| bombcar wrote:
| NIMBY can be solved with enough money and willpower; we
| don't have that right now.
|
| It can also be reduced or solved by telling people
| outside "the area" they don't get a say.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Because the solar farm is going to saturate the energy
| market on sunny days, and fail to produce energy at night
| and on cloudy days. There's diminishing returns on
| intermittent energy sources once peak production is
| saturated. Comparing intermittent sources of electricity to
| dispatchable sources of energy is comparing apples to
| oranges.
| pydry wrote:
| It's insane to fret about saturating the energy market
| when 40% of electricity is produced by gas on a sunny day
| and electric car drivers are gagging for differential
| pricing tariffs.
|
| Intermittent electricity produced now is worth more than
| baseload in 14 years later.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Exactly. Worry about saturating when we are actually
| close to that happening.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| It's not just close to happening, it already _is_
| happening in Australia and Hawaii:
| https://solarbuildermag.com/policy/grid-saturation-
| lessons-f...
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| So don't build more solar in those locations. That's not
| an excuse for other places where this is not the case.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| 40% of electricity may be produced by gas on a given day,
| but that 40% is being produced mostly at night - which is
| is not going to be displaced by further investments in
| solar. "Base load" isn't a reference to generation, it's
| a reference to demand. Base load refers to the load
| during the lowest period of energy demand in a 24 hour
| period. Unfortunately, load peaks when solar is producing
| no energy and load at its base when solar is producing
| the most energy [1]. Without storage, these excesses of
| solar production when load is at its base cannot be
| shifted to the time when load is at its peak.
|
| Renewables look great if you just look at generation. But
| the goal isn't simply to generate clean energy, the goal
| is to _displace_ fossil fuels. This is why non-
| intermittent sources like nuclear and hydroelectricity
| are, contrary to your assertion, far more valuable for
| decarbonization.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve#/media/File:C
| alifor...
| oliwary wrote:
| That does not mean the second best time is to start now
| though! The second best time to start could be never,
| assuming that renewables and storage will become
| significantly cheaper and more efficient in the next decades,
| which does not seem unlikely.
| propagandist wrote:
| The law of diminishing returns suggests that it's unlikely.
| danhor wrote:
| The law of diminishing returns has thus far been wrong on
| battery and renewables. Previous estimates often were
| wrong due to assuming a slowdown. Not to say it can't or
| won't happen, but unlikely isn't the word I'd use.
|
| The last two years were weird, especially regarding
| batteries due to prices increasing, but I'd put that on
| Covid and the resulting mess.
|
| Especially as solar & wind is already cheaper than
| everything else by far, so the critical part is batteries
| which is a broad field with a huge increase in relevance
| & research over the past few years.
|
| The chances are pretty good, but of course a slowdown
| could still happen.
| beders wrote:
| It's cheatcode with a 1% catastrophic failure rate we
| rightfully are _not_ using.
|
| The article is neglecting a few critical details, to say the
| least.
| rglover wrote:
| Then the money being wasted on all of the renewable stuff
| should be invested in nuclear safety improvements. Problem
| solved.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Nuclear power is a half baked technology that hasn't had any
| real advancement since the Cold War ended.
|
| Unfortunately advancing the technology is beyond us. Like going
| to the moon, the costs are too high. Nuclear can and is
| commercialized, but the technology is still extremely
| complicated and dangerous given how relatively primitive it is.
|
| Maybe go global scale with 10th gen nuclear, but what we have
| is barely better than 50 years ago still.
|
| Case in point most reactors today are not failsafe, as in an
| emergency once their backup generators fail the core will
| meltdown.
|
| Edit: I would go on to argue that our technology has actually
| regressed. The technology has not kept up with regulations
| which means the time to build is getting longer. The answer is
| not rolling back regulations - you really want to live near a
| plant built with less regulations? The answer is actually
| improving the base technology - which is much much harder, but
| necessary to achieve a design that is both cheap to build and
| inherently safe.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| > hasn't had any real advancement since the Cold War ended.
|
| That's just plain ignorance.
|
| > Case in point most reactors today are not failsafe
|
| Most reactors in use today sure, but we've already
| established that we haven't been building new reactors for a
| while now. Any new reactor built today would be failsafe.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| The 'new' reactors are barely more advanced than the old
| ones and even more complicated.
|
| Nuclear is pretty high end technology, it needs real
| investment to move forward. The government has shown little
| interest. Few reactors are built, what we have is aging,
| the number of people doing R&D is next to nothing.
| hbrn wrote:
| > technology is still extremely complicated and dangerous
|
| That's a common fallacy.
|
| If you look at mortality rate _by terawatt-hour_ for each
| energy source, nuclear is going to be orders of magnitude
| below coal /gas/oil.
|
| Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them, but
| driving the same distance by car is way more dangerous.
| hinkley wrote:
| Precautionary Principle doesn't work that way. Also you're
| assigning a terawatt value for a human life. We do that
| anyway often enough, but when you do it consciously it's
| ghoulish.
| otikik wrote:
| The point of the "Nuclear waste" is that it is perceived
| as dangerous. If someone gives a numerical argument to
| rebate a perception and your comeback is that "using
| numbers like that is ghoulish", then I know who is
| winning the argument.
| hbrn wrote:
| If you're willing to look at it from a different lens,
| I'm actually _increasing_ value of a human life that has
| already been assigned naturally.
| pjscott wrote:
| Ignoring the tradeoff doesn't make it go away, and if you
| _don 't_ consciously put a value on a human life, you'll
| probably wind up far from the Pareto frontier. In this
| case, for instance, thinking in terms of deaths-per-TWh
| is exactly what you want in order to fulfill our energy
| needs with as few people dying as possible. If a little
| "ghoulishness" saves lives, then I'll happily be a ghoul.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Like, how else should we talk about the topic in any
| other objective way? Sure, the death of any person is
| said and tragic. But true zero and true one probability
| simply doesn't exist in reality. And we require energy,
| otherwise hospitals could not operate killing much much
| more people. So simply by that logic, one can minimize
| the amount of human suffering by nuclear.
|
| And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable energy
| sources kill a shitton of more people per unit energy,
| release orders of magnitude more _radiation_ , let alone
| other carcinogenic gases.
| hinkley wrote:
| Humanity isn't a process of talking about things in an
| objective way. You're talking about people as if they are
| numbers.
|
| > And it is a fact, that non-nuclear, non-renewable
| energy sources kill a shitton of more people per unit
| energy
|
| I once heard the circus of Congressional, reactionary
| policies described as thus:
|
| "Something has to be done. This is something, so we will
| do it."
|
| Yes, that's all perfectly true, and something absolutely
| has to be done. Many things actually. We're making good
| progress on a number of them. And turning off coal fired
| plants at a steady clip. It matters what you replace it
| with.
|
| One of the things missing here is that when humans are
| involved, choices and the illusion of choice apply a
| multiplier on the risks. People volunteer for risks all
| the time, and they are happy to do so. Which is
| effectively what this is saying:
|
| > Same thing with planes: people are afraid to fly them,
| but driving the same distance by car is way more
| dangerous.
|
| If we only cared about traffic numbers we'd ban
| automobiles and force everyone to take public transit and
| airplanes to go anywhere. We'd save more people than we
| would by replacing coal with nuclear, and banning the
| cars would also reduce death by pollution by something
| like 10%.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Do you count deaths caused by mining rare minerals which
| is needed for the production of renewables?
|
| Re your car example: And that's why everything should be
| talked about in context. Cars are essential for our
| modern lives and it would be close to impossible the
| negative impact of its disappearance. And the relevant
| such context for energetics is the deaths per unit
| energy.
| 7952 wrote:
| Some risk and complexity is just intrinsic. Flying is risky
| because of hitting the ground. Nuclear power is risky
| because of the nature of radioactive material. Mitigating
| those risks add complexity and cost.
|
| You need more redundancy, higher quality materials, better
| QA, more pro-active maintenance, more security, etc. And
| many of your staff will need to be very highly trained and
| expensive. This all adds up in terms of expense and
| timescales. Flying may be cheaper but we all still drive!
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Coal power kills a million people every year. Go check how
| many die from nuclear then x15 that as a thought experiment
| and then tell me which technology is dangerous and half baked
| hinkley wrote:
| Are you comparing deaths so far or total lifetime mortality
| of the effluent from both processes?
| bottlepalm wrote:
| I guess people don't like abandoning entire cities for
| decades when an accident happens.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Poisoning the entire planets food chain with mercury on
| the other hand...
| hinkley wrote:
| Nuclear power is not half-baked, it's corrupted. The powers
| that be co-opted it for nuclear weapons programs. We chose to
| invest exclusively in war-time applications while pretending
| to seek peacetime uses.
|
| Only now are we going back and looking at solutions that
| don't create ingredients for fission and fission-fusion
| warheads, and the lack of progress there means that countries
| who we don't want to join the nuclear arm's race are in a
| prickly position because the nuclear plants they can build
| leave them with ingredients the UN doesn't really want to
| proliferate.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Plenty of countries without nuclear weapons have extensive
| nuclear power industries: Belgium, Slovakia, Sweden, Korea.
| emj wrote:
| Sweden had a nuclear weapons program, it was moth balled
| in the seventies but only tore it down just now.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| You could argue if it weren't war we wouldn't have nuclear
| power or have landed in the moon, and many other things.
| There are many technologies out there completely
| obtainable, but without the investment of billions it won't
| happen.
|
| Commercialization is the commoditization of an established
| technology. Many technological leaps are far beyond what
| any company is capable due to the amount of investment and
| risk required.
|
| Biotech for example is so far behind compared to our
| advancements in computers.
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| A passively safe reactor was demonstrated 36 years ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I.
| ..
|
| Most reactors today are older or based on older designs, but
| this is largely for regulatory reasons, not because we don't
| have the technology.
|
| (And even these older reactors are among our safest energy
| sources: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Maybe if they've been maturing that experimental design for
| 36 years then you'd have a point, but they haven't so you
| don't.
| Julesman wrote:
| The arguments around this are always weak and spurious. I've been
| at this too long to take the bait from any trolls who 'have it
| all figured out.'
|
| By no measure or justification is splitting the atom a good idea.
| There are few things more short sighted than arguing we should
| figure out what to do with nuclear waste because we haven't quite
| nailed solutions with ZERO waste.
|
| People who minimize the significance of both nuclear waste and
| absolutely inevitable nuclear disasters just aren't thinking with
| any foresight or vision about the core concepts of
| sustainability.
|
| But then that's it. A lot of people advancing Nuclear power
| aren't environmentalists at all. Learned that the hard way.
|
| No nukes!
| steeve wrote:
| It's sad you didn't spend that same energy educating yourself
| about geological storage or Gen IV. Oh well.
| stopping wrote:
| Nuclear is going to have to play a significant role if we want
| to get off fossil fuels. By all accounts nuclear is far safer
| and cleaner than fossil fuels (even amortizing the disasters),
| and so it is a suitable replacement if we can make it
| economically viable and publicly acceptable like it used to be.
| Solar and wind are already economically viable (even compared
| to fossil fuels), but still leave some key problems unsolved
| (e.g. baseline power at night). We might be able to solve this
| with batteries and other grid storage solutions, but these
| aren't yet scalable in the way that nuclear energy can be.
| LorenDB wrote:
| When I saw the title I immediately thought of the nuclear engines
| in Kerbal Space Program, which have a famously low amount of
| thrust (although they are efficient) :)
| hinkley wrote:
| The common reaction to "this process is too slow" is to ask the
| question, "what if we made it fast"?
|
| As I mentioned the last couple of times this topic came up, I am
| concerned that the answers to that question that have already
| been offered are ignoring how the statistics of scalable system
| work and particularly where they overlap with the Rule of Large
| Numbers.
|
| It's been suggested that if we want to go fast what you do is
| make a bunch of small reliable reactors and then co-locate them,
| but if you make something that's 10x as reliable, the assumption
| is that having 10x as many of them results in the same failure
| rate, and the same consequences. But that's not quite how
| statistics work, or for that matter equipment.
|
| When you have 100 of something, there is always preventative
| maintenance or repairs going on. We have storage array designs
| specifically to deal with this problem in data centers by just
| letting equipment fail and then replacing whole units, because
| the labor involved with reacting to each event is simply too
| high. That's not particularly unique to IT. That's just a fact of
| large scale operations. You keep spare tools because some of them
| are going to break every week. You swap them out and -maybe-
| someone repairs them, or cannibalizes them.
|
| With mechanical equipment, maintenance materially affects the
| reliability and safety of the job site. Suspending maintenance
| and repairs because you've been pre-empted by the failure of
| other equipment leads to risks stacking up higher and higher. Can
| I do scheduled maintenance on Reactor 3 if Reactor 50 ate itself
| yesterday? At some number of reactors, every plant has
| experienced one catastrophic failure. What do you do with that?
| What can you do with that?
| angry_octet wrote:
| Exactly correct.
|
| The techniques for repair of radioactive equipment are still in
| their infancy, and seem to progress only with each accident
| (due to their inherent costs). Robots die in minutes in a hard
| radiation environment, and we don't make any new
| microprocessors with rad hard techniques (though maybe RISC V
| will change that).
|
| From a safety critical analysis POV there has been a huge
| change in technical capacity over the last 20 years, but no one
| in the field would say we're close to strong safety, especially
| now in regards to software intensive systems. IoT just isn't
| going to be the same with radiation, you can leap from a
| correct state to an unsafe one at any point, dozens of bits
| being flipped every second, transistors misbehaving, faults
| between silicon layers... Completely unrelated logic is in the
| same fault compartment of critical trusted logic.
|
| So if you have 50 reactors, that's 50 control systems, plus the
| shared infrastructure (water/electricity/data/fuel in and out,
| fire suppression). If you remove one for refuelling you're
| moving/vibrating a radioactive system with _lots_ of pipes
| which are now fragile due to radiation. All the stress analysis
| techniques we use on planes are very hard to use on plants due
| to lack of access. It seems to me like we 're just beginning to
| understand the complexity of SMRs and, contrary to the PR, they
| will take a long time to mature.
|
| Everything about nuclear is nonlinear and coupled. Production
| line techniques are all about equipment that operates in the
| known region, and the consequences are not too bad when it
| departs from that because the operator is at fault.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I feel like currently nuclear power is like early space flight.
| It works, it is fairly safe, but super expensive and very
| bespoke. NASA cost+ model comes to mind.
|
| What we need is SpaceX for nuclear, maybe without Musk's volatile
| narcissism. It seems like the business of building nukes,
| challenging as it is, is eminently doable, just bogged down by a
| plethora of processes not optimised for viability.
|
| As much as solar and wind are nice, people who live in sunny
| windy places seem to struggle to imagine a north European winter
| with no sunshine or wind, and massive energy requirements. Good
| job we have vapourware
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| This is only measuring the time from first shovel to completion.
| In reality, the period before first shovel is often much longer.
|
| Best case scenario is China, where it takes them about 3 years to
| do the planning and then 2 years to do the build. In the US it
| seems to be about 20 + 20. I can see the build phase coming down
| to about 5 years, but it's hard to imagine the planning phase
| taking less than 10...
|
| And it's not the nuclear part of the regulation that makes it
| slow in the US. In a country where it takes over 30 years to go
| from initial planning to completion of High Speed Rail, every big
| project seems to take forever and cost way too much. Nuclear
| specific regulation doesn't help, but I don't think it's the
| primary problem.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| China has built an impressive amount of high speed rail in the
| last two decades, but I expect they must have been planning
| that through the 90's, and the amount is probably because they
| dared to construct several projects simultaneously.
| sct202 wrote:
| Even in China it takes a while, China's Sanman power plant uses
| the same Westinghouse reactor design as Vogtle in Georgia. Both
| started plants construction in 2009, and Sanman finished 9
| years late, while Vogtle is slated to finish next year.
| melling wrote:
| "The French were able to hold their build times below 6 years up
| to about 1985"
|
| You'd think if the future depended on it, build times could be
| reduced.
|
| 8500 global coal power plants produce 20% of emissions.
|
| Retiring coal power plants was a no-brainer decades ago.
|
| Instead we've been building more.
| pydry wrote:
| >You'd think if the future depended on it, build times could be
| reduced.
|
| That seems to be what Japan did until Fukushima went boom.
|
| >Instead we've been building more coal plants.
|
| That seems to be what Japan did after Fukushima went boom.
|
| To be fair, coal has quite widely replaced all around the world
| in the last 8 years by a mix of wind, solar and gas. It's now
| almost as unattractive to investors as nuclear power is.
| mindslight wrote:
| At this point, there are multiple well-developed western
| economies with regulatory regimes that are generally trusted to
| adequately keep the perverse incentives of business in check.
| It would be an interesting regulatory experiment to charter a
| project that would be subject to a different regulatory
| environment than the country in which it was physically built.
| For example, a nuclear plant in the US that was exempt from all
| US regulations, but had to meet all of the French ones - built
| by French companies, inspected by French inspectors, etc. Just
| a wholesale transplant of the entire business/regulatory
| culture, as a point of competition.
|
| (Obviously there are a thousand ways for this to go wrong, but
| entertain the idea anyway)
| dv_dt wrote:
| If you follow French next gen design builds, this has not been
| the case. Not as bad a US builds, but not exactly on time as
| the earlier builds.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Thus far only a couple of the French next gen builds have
| been built in France. During the Messmer plan, dozens of the
| same design were built. The fact that the former is more
| expensive than the latter isn't contradicting the claim that
| serial production is cheaper than one-off production.
| LastTrain wrote:
| It would really have helped the argument if coal had not been
| turned into a culture war. Are we all ready to admit that coal
| sucks now?
| mindslight wrote:
| My grandpa didn't die of black lung just so you can go around
| spreading baseless lies that coal might be harmful. (/s)
| kristopolous wrote:
| If that's the framing, solar and wind are the clear economic
| winners right now:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
|
| There's been rapid progress with those two in particular that's
| made it shockingly cheap. Solar cost is down about 95% in 10
| years.
|
| If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will have a
| real hard time catching up.
|
| I'm still pretty excited about the idea of fusion space travel
| though. Trips to Mars could be done, depending on what thrust
| system can be built, in about 1-3 months (compared to about 9
| now) and because the fuel is denser, longer high speed trips
| become feasibly possible, like to Jupiter in 4 months. For a
| comparison, it took Galileo 74 months to get there when it
| launched in 1989.
|
| The idea of humans, say, landing on Europa in the 2030s might
| now be on the table.
| rpep wrote:
| It's questionable whether the price can stay as low as it
| currently is though. The three major manufacturers of wind
| turbines are basically operating at a loss on the turbines
| themselves. The price can't go much lower.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| As an aside, we don't need fusion to go anywhere on the inner
| Solar System. Fission is more than sufficient for that.
|
| (Fission looks like enough for interstellar travel too, but
| it's way harder to refuel.)
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| Yup and when there's no sun and no wind, like in winter in
| most places, you need something else, or batteries, which are
| ridiculously expensive both in $ and CO2 per kwh. Solar and
| Wind just can't do base load today, and you can't turn off
| the natural gas / coal plants that back them when they don't
| work.
|
| This is a classic case of "doing the first 50% is easy, doing
| the last 50% is 99% of the work".
| arghwhat wrote:
| Uh, winter is windier than summer, caused by the stronger
| temperature gradients.
|
| In the last 12 months in Denmark, wind produced over 3
| times more power in January and February (the coldest month
| of the year) than it did in August. This is completely
| opposite of solar which peaks in July. In that sense they
| complement each other quite well.
|
| Reference: https://ens.dk/service/statistik-data-noegletal-
| og-kort/maan...
| themitigating wrote:
| Why wouldn't there be sun in the winter in most places?
| adamsb6 wrote:
| In the northern hemisphere the winter solstice is five
| days from today.
|
| Where I am, in Seattle, the sun will be above the horizon
| for only about 8.5 hours. It will also likely be cloudy.
|
| Contrast this with the summer solstice, where we get
| about 16 hours with the sun above the horizon.
| peteradio wrote:
| Ironically during a nuclear winter event which may or may
| not be a fraudulent science meme concocted during the
| cold war. And yet we have had points in fairly recent
| human history where we had years long stretches of
| problems caused by volcanic activity. All we need then is
| some way to turn nuclear fuel directly to enriched
| calories.
| prottog wrote:
| I don't know what GP meant about "most places", but I
| guess generally places that have a winter (away from the
| tropics, that is) are cloudier in the winter, as well as
| by definition having lower solar irradiation. Most of
| Europe is in the unenviable position of having higher
| power requirements precisely when solar potential is at
| the lowest[0].
|
| [0]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Typical-winter-
| and-summe...
| Archelaos wrote:
| Renewable energies are much more diverse than just solar
| and wind. There is also waterpower and biomass which makes
| a considerable part of renewable energy in many
| countries.[1] Niche sources like geothermal and tidal power
| might become more important in the future. There are other
| types of energy storage available and in research than
| batteries.
|
| Then there is the path to improve energy efficience in
| industry and private consumption, which both have a lot of
| potential, and to replace fossil energy sources outside of
| electricity production with renewables, such as heat-pumps
| for buildings.
|
| [1] E.g. for Germany, biomass is almost as important as
| solar for electrical energy. Source:
| https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-
| Unternehmen/Energ...
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Um, isn't biomass just burning wood and waste? How is
| that helpful? It seems to be pretty regressive.
|
| https://energytransition.org/2020/07/the-secret-burning-
| of-t...
| Xylakant wrote:
| Burning wood/biomass or gas generated from biomass
| releases the CO2 that has been captured by the plant
| while growing. Replanting the same plant will capture the
| same amount again. It's effectively solar energy using
| photosynthesis instead of solar cells. So it's a
| renewable energy, as long as you replant what you
| harvest.
|
| The problem correctly pointed out in the article is that
| often the replanting comes after the harvest, or does not
| effectively happen at all - at least for wood pellets.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I would imagine it taking out plenty of minerals and
| nutrients from the soil though, needing constant
| fertilizer usage which comes with its own set of
| problems.
| Xylakant wrote:
| The minerals remain in the ashes. Other nutrients may be
| an issue, but for example when producing biogas, they're
| essentially in the leftover parts of the plant. Biogas is
| mostly methane, so carbon and hydrogen.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Oh I see, thanks!
| goodpoint wrote:
| There's plenty of wind across the world in winter.
| kristopolous wrote:
| What an antiquated argument. If you can't understand
| Geoffrey Moore's crossing the chasm and what those trends
| look like in market segments, I can't help you
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California#/media
| /...
|
| I don't need a degree from HBS to see where this is going
| eternityforest wrote:
| Pretty sure you can turn natural gas on and off to some
| degree to back the solar, that's part of why everyone likes
| it so much.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Turning on a power plant is a slow and cumbersome
| process. If you need them to handle loads in excess of
| renewable capacity, or to handle sudden lows, you
| unfortunately need to keep them running...
| yodsanklai wrote:
| It's comparing apple and orange. Solar/wind aren't available
| on demand. How much would cost a wind power plant that has
| the same guaranteed power as a nuclear plant, including
| batteries for storage? what would be the environmental
| footprint of such a thing?
| kristopolous wrote:
| The whole purpose of electrical grids is to stabilize such
| things.
|
| The word "guaranteed" is about lowest variance - most
| predictable. What is prone to unscheduled maintenance,
| breakdowns, forced outages, etc.
|
| The forced outage rate of solar is almost 0, wind is about
| 1%. https://rmi.org/fuel-hand-make-coal-nuclear-power-
| plants-val...
|
| In practice, forced nuclear outage is 1-2%. An additional
| 7% downtime is scheduled outages for refueling. Coal is
| about 15%.
|
| Here's a live report: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-
| collections/event-status/... You can see about 7 are
| offline.
|
| Disruptions are normal, daily, common occurrences and in
| practice, solar is pretty reliable in places like the
| Southern California desert where the grid-scale
| installations are built (example: https://www.google.com/ma
| ps/@34.7923792,-118.4060493,17707m/...). They are subject
| to occasional monsoons, but that's why there's more in
| other places such as down near the mexican border (https://
| www.google.com/maps/@32.7188416,-115.6454361,19457m/...).
| That's not farmland being replaced with solar panels btw.
| Instead it's called agrivoltaics
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics)
|
| This is still early, scroll down to the map here:
| https://www.seia.org/research-resources/major-solar-
| projects... ... that's the kind of redundancy we're talking
| about.
| S201 wrote:
| > If that trend keeps up in the 2020s, anything else will
| have a real hard time catching up.
|
| That's the problem though: *IF* that trend holds. Past
| performance doesn't guarantee future performance.
|
| Climate change presents an existential threat to civilization
| so relying on a single trend holding seems like a fairly
| risky bet to make if you ask me.
|
| In that vein, I'd argue for throwing everything at the
| problem. Build it all, wind, solar, geothermal, and nuclear.
| If we overshoot and spend billions more than was necessary,
| great, that's a hell of a lot better than undershooting and
| losing trillions from entire economies shutting down.
| kristopolous wrote:
| This isn't just hopes and dreams though. There's an economy
| of scale argument called Swanson's law which is expected to
| continue for the forseable future:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law
|
| There's also quite a bit of research going on into
| different cell technology
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency). The
| current physics wall puts it at about theoretical 4-fold
| increase in electricity per square meter compared to what
| we have today without consideration of the cost of
| manufacturing or longevity, which is expected to again,
| continue to improve.
|
| Also as far as land goes, people are really bad thinking at
| scale. If you look here: https://www.seia.org/research-
| resources/major-solar-projects... you'll see all the
| installations and the ones planned. The sun doesn't shine
| every place, on every day, sure, but when you have that
| kind of coverage it's a different story.
|
| There's a lot of arid desert out there and lots of
| potential for combining solar panels with existing food
| farms through something called agrivoltaics:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics ... many crops
| do as good or better with shade so this is just a straight
| increase in profit per acre for those crops with the dual
| use of energy generation.
|
| This is all pretty new. The cost tipping points in favor of
| solar just happened a few years ago. We're seeing one of
| Clayton Christensen's graph of disruptive technology in
| real-time right now (see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
| where solar went from being the most to the least expensive
| in about a 5 year period)
|
| Everything hits a physics wall, of course but not only does
| it look like there's still plenty of runway with solar
| before we get there but there's also lots of unexplored
| opportunities such as, just throwing this out there, a
| solar capturing wind turbine that can cleverly capture
| energy both ways. The point is this is still extremely
| greenfield
| S201 wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not arguing against solar here. We
| should be building as many forms of non-carbon-emitting
| energy generation as we possibly can.
|
| A challenge of large solar plants like you're describing
| is getting the energy to where it's needed and when it's
| needed. A ton of solar panels in the desert does no good
| if there's no way to store that energy or get it to a
| city a few hundred miles away. All of that requires
| significantly more investment in storage mechanisms and
| interconnectors to move it around the grid. The latter
| actually being most concerning to me simply because of
| NIMBYs fighting projects to build more high voltage power
| lines because they're ugly and ruin views from their
| properties. It's hard to quantify that, but when you need
| to run so many power lines over such long distances that
| touch so many people's properties it becomes a permitting
| nightmare which dramatically slows down, or even cancels,
| projects.
|
| I also touched on this in another comment below: In terms
| of storing solar energy with our current method of
| lithium-ion batteries, well, the cost of lithium is up
| ~500% in the past two years and is expected to stay that
| way for the foreseeable future:
| https://www.economist.com/the-economist-
| explains/2022/06/09/...
|
| As to Swanson's Law, sure, I get where the trendline
| currently is, but as a counterexample: How's Moore's Law
| holding up these days?
|
| I'm sure there's plenty of articles about different
| battery storage methods and all that being researched,
| but the fact is that we need proven, on-demand energy
| generation that drops into the existing grid NOW and
| nuclear provides that. But by all means, build all of it:
| nuclear, wind, solar, etc. Having too much carbon-free
| energy is a much better problem to have than too little.
| kristopolous wrote:
| First let me dispatch this "existing grid NOW and nuclear
| provides that" - it's a 7 year average lead time as of
| 2022; solar is 2. And if you granted all the
| accelerations you're going to propose to solar or wind as
| well, it'll still beat nuclear. It's just simpler and
| cheaper to deploy. It's also expandable and upgradable
| and you can start producing after the first station is
| done. Your 2022 nuclear reactor will still be based on
| 2022 technology in 2072. The solar farm, however, will be
| current with the times as the parts are swappable.
|
| The predicted end to Moore's law had been anticipated for
| many years. This took nobody by surprised. The only
| surprise really is that it went on longer than expected.
|
| From all indications we're in the solar version of the
| 1980s right now on the Moore's law timeline and in the
| future we'll see a solar PV equivalent that's as
| remarkable as say, the 2TB microsd card - imagine cheap,
| high-efficiency newspaper thin panels that you buy
| packaged like those plastic ponchos from a 7/11 that you
| just unfurl onto the ground, plug in and power whatever
| you feasibly need.
|
| The future of solar will be like telling someone in the
| 1980s that we live in a time where we give away 32gb of
| storage for free with company logos stamped on it at
| trade shows and it is so normalized that nobody takes any
| notice.
| S201 wrote:
| > First let me dispatch this "existing grid NOW and
| nuclear provides that" - it's a 7 year average lead time
| as of 2022; solar is 2.
|
| Nuclear can certainly be made quicker if we had the
| political will to do so but I'm not going to try to argue
| that it's quick. That said, if we would have invested in
| this 20 years ago like we should have it wouldn't have
| been a problem. The argument has been "wind & solar are
| going to ramp up so quickly in the near future so why
| build nuclear?" and then it takes longer than we thought
| and underwhelming progress is made.
|
| Regardless of how long it takes:
|
| > The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The
| second best time is now.
|
| > It's also expandable and upgradable and you can start
| producing after the first station is done. Your 2022
| nuclear reactor will still be based on 2022 technology in
| 2072. The solar farm, however, will be current with the
| times as the parts are swappable.
|
| This argument doesn't really make sense. You can't add
| reactors to a nuclear plant? Or retrofit them as needed?
| The primary form of generating all forms of electric
| other than photovoltaics uses steam to spin a turbine;
| that's the same now as it was 100+ years ago. Who cares
| if it's 2022 technology in 2072 if it's producing useful
| electricity?
|
| I'm sure solar panels have some runway to the technology,
| but that's not the point here. Solar currently does not
| have the ability to drop into the existing grid with
| large scale, on-demand energy nor will it in the
| foreseeable future. It's a slice of the energy pie, but
| to say that it's going to improve so much doesn't mean
| it's a wise idea to put all your eggs in that basket.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Solar power including storage is already the cheapest form
| of energy. Any further improvement is just gravy.
| vkou wrote:
| If it's so cheap, batteries included, why are the most
| optimistic industry projections only putting it at 20% of
| the US grid by 2050? [1]
|
| Why are they projecting that coal gas consumption will
| continue to grow, year over year for that same time
| period? [2]
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50357
|
| [2] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/production/sub-
| topic-03.php
| philipkglass wrote:
| The second link shows that natural gas increases steadily
| for exporting and for domestic industrial consumption. If
| you click the Excel link under the table graphics [1], it
| shows that natural gas consumption for generating
| electricity remains below 2020 demand levels until 2047.
| As for why they think that demand will pick up in the
| late 2040s after decades of stagnation, I'm not sure;
| maybe it's projections of population growth finally
| overcoming trends in fuel efficiency.
|
| I will note that the EIA has badly underestimated
| renewable electricity growth in the past. Their
| projections are very restrained, far from "optimistic
| industry projections." You can read a retrospective on
| their past forecasting here:
|
| https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/retrospective/
|
| In particular look at the electricity section of the
| table, "Comparison of AEO Reference case projections with
| realized outcomes, 1994-2021." The EIA underestimated
| future usage of solar power 80% of the time and future
| usage of wind power 84% of the time. The _magnitude_ of
| the underestimates was actually worse for solar power,
| though.
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/production/excel/sub
| topic3_...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The EIA is very consistently very wrong.
|
| https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/07/12/has-the-
| international...
| [deleted]
| S201 wrote:
| Regardless of how cheap it may be, the storage of solar
| power is still a big problem. If we're on the topic of
| cost trends and batteries, the price of lithium is up
| ~500%.[1] That's making batteries more expensive than in
| the past and given all of the demand for them I don't
| really see it going down any time soon, at least not
| until new lithium mining plants are built mainly in South
| America, which still isn't likely to drop prices again in
| the near future.[2]
|
| 1. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
|
| 2. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-
| explains/2022/06/09/...
| kaba0 wrote:
| But we really should not make energetic decisions into a free
| market question. Of course market prices are a fundamental
| aspect, but going all-in on a single, cheapest source will be
| a huge liability and the whole thing should be planned for.
| E.g. it really makes sense to have a base load and a quick to
| turn on/off load for spikes in energy usage. Nuclear is very
| useful for the former and I don't see not using it (besides
| renewables of course!) a great decision.
| melling wrote:
| If it's cheaper than coal then why are we still building so
| many coal power plants?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/26/too-
| many...
|
| Coal is at record levels.
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/wireStory/report-
| worlds-...
|
| Removing coal power plants would have made a noticeable
| difference.
| Aunche wrote:
| The expensive part of coal power is the coal itself. The
| upfront costs for the power plant are quite low. This is
| the opposite of solar. It has an very high upfront cost,
| but for the next couple decades, you only need to pay a
| little for maintenance, so the amortized costs are cheaper.
| However, poorer areas of China can't afford this large
| upfront cost, but they still have a lot of demand for
| energy, so they build new coal plants.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Also this is always how transitions look. Incandescent
| bulbs were still sold next to LEDs, CRTs were still
| manufactured during the LCD transition, platter drives
| are still for sale during the SSD revolution, people
| still buy gas cars.
|
| There is a time before commodity prices are hit at scale
| but when it happens, the price floor of the new
| technology will be below the price floor of the old
| technology (for instance the cost of a big screen TV) and
| that's when the old technology finally exits. Solar still
| has a long way to fall.
|
| We're in a transition and they always look like this.
| ljf wrote:
| Coal plants are also digging coal to directly use in steal
| processing.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| We're adding a lot more renewable than anything else.
|
| 80% of power plant capacity added in 2020 was renewable.
|
| https://www.irena.org/news/pressreleases/2021/Apr/World-
| Adds...
| melling wrote:
| if we only have 8500 coal power plants globally and this
| is the single largest source of emissions, shouldn't we
| be trying to eliminate 20% of global emissions?
|
| Furthermore, if renewables are cheaper shouldn't we
| immediately stop adding to the coal problem?
|
| We need to replace a billion gasoline powered cars, etc.
| Coal power generation seems like an easy thing to do.
| themitigating wrote:
| Electric cars are betweeb 2x and 4x more efficient than
| gasoline powered cars. Take a look at the MPGe.
|
| https://insideevs.com/news/597460/tesla-efficiency-
| depends-o...
|
| Of course that varies with temperature and driving style.
|
| My question is-
|
| What is better for the environment, A gas powered car or
| an electric car where the electricity comes exclusively
| from coal?
|
| Short and long term.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > What is better for the environment, A gas powered car
| or an electric car where the electricity comes
| exclusively from coal?
|
| Rhetorical question, I assume. A coal powered EV is still
| something like 15-20% less polluting than a gas powered
| car. And the EV gets instantly more efficient when the
| coal plant inevitably gets replaced with something
| cleaner.
| NalNezumi wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the reasons we are
| building MORE coal (and biofuel) plants because the addition
| of solar and wind have added volatility to the electricity
| supply?
|
| With few exceptions in the world, in a electricity grid the
| supply and demand of electricity have to be 1:1, and if wind
| and solar is adding volatility to that supply, another
| _flexible_ power source suddenly becomes very profitable and
| useful.
|
| Nuclear is costly to turn on/off, but coal, biofuel and
| natural gas isn't. So turning it on/off based on the shortage
| caused by sustainable sources is why they're coming back,
| have been my understanding
| VintageCool wrote:
| I think you have to be very careful with the word "we"
| here.
|
| Coal's market share in the US has been eroding for 15 years
| and will likely fall below nuclear soon. It has been
| replaced by natural gas and, more recently, renewables.
|
| The reason that we "worldwide" have been building lots of
| coal plants is that China has been building lots of coal
| plants. This is despite China also building world-
| dominating quantities of nuclear, wind, and solar.
|
| The reason China is adding so much coal appears to be that
| provincial officials get to book coal power production as
| economic growth internal to their province. By contrast,
| the electricity from renewables in Xinjiang shipped over
| HVDC transmission lines does not boost their province's
| economic growth numbers so they do not want to use it even
| if it would be cheaper.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Coal is not flexible. They are massive heat plants, so an
| on/off cycle takes about a day.
| NalNezumi wrote:
| Ah ok thanks for correcting me
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Perhaps they don't turn off but merely down? Is that a
| day? Is there even such a thing as different levels of
| operation?
|
| Even if not a day, maybe still not responsive enough.
|
| Then again, maybe it gets you close enough that now you
| only need a smaller more doable version of some otherwise
| unrealistic gap filler like batteries or thermal mass or
| gravity mass etc.
| infamia wrote:
| That is not correct. Coal and gas fired power plants have
| turndown capabilities where they can decrease their power
| genration very quickly by 75%-90% or so depending on the
| plant.
|
| https://www.babcockpower.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/02/exte...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Is it common for those huge old plants to use pulverized
| coal?
|
| I imagine all the new ones use it, and thus all the new
| ones can change their outputs in a matter of minutes,
| instead of hours. But that still makes coal one of the
| slowest sources to react to grid volatility, and sill
| basically useless to compensate wind oscillations, only
| useful for the solar cycle.
| infamia wrote:
| I've seen some really old plants and they've all used
| pulverized coal, since it burns more consistently. It
| basically explodes when it ignites due to the
| temperatures involved. Coal and gas are both really good
| at responding quickly to varying load requirements.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Comparing intermittent sources with non-intermittent sources
| is comparing apples to oranges. A realistic comparison would
| also include the cost of energy storage, as well as
| transmission line construction to support energy transport
| [1]. Intermittent sources are shockingly cheap if you naively
| compare on a watt-hour basis, ignoring the cost of storing
| and releasing energy. Unfortunately, storage at the scale
| required remains expensive and unfeasible [2] and are
| actually rising due to lithium prices rising 10x over the
| last few years [3].
|
| 1. Wind and solar need to be built in specific places, and
| thus have to move large amounts of energy over long
| distances. This frequently requires expansions to the energy
| grid: https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-
| clean-ene...
|
| 2. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-
| co...
|
| 3. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
| jules wrote:
| Measuring cost by installed capacity is highly misleading
| because solar and wind need storage to be reliable sources.
| The cost of storage dwarfs the other costs, and battery
| prices have stagnated.
| kristopolous wrote:
| The reason battery prices are down 97% since 1990 is
| because of better battery chemistries coming along.
|
| Currently there's a few more in the pipeline (including
| silicon) that lead market forecasters to predict the long-
| term (think 2030) trend will continue.
|
| The downhill road of pricing has had some bumps but it's
| very assuredly, extremely downhill
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| So Wright's Law applies to batteries but not to nuclear
| power?
| kristopolous wrote:
| Yes, that's what the historical data from the last 50
| years supports.
|
| There's giant periods without any movement. Batteries
| have been around for centuries for instance.
|
| These model can be a bit imaginative at times and nuclear
| may start its journey on it any day but so far it doesn't
| look like it has.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| That graph just really says it all haha. It's all we need to
| look at. Which way are the arrows pointing? No need for
| millions of words trying to justify and explain a way for
| nuclear to work.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| And PV is now off the bottom scale of that chart.. Some
| combination of overbuilding PV and Wind capacity + ever-
| improving battery tech "won" the energy market. Gas peakers
| and other stand-by sources will contribute for decades to
| come but when they're pricing out new nuclear builds at
| >$0.10/kwh wholesale, no amount of "but capacity factor!"
| will matter.
| yashap wrote:
| Solar and wind are fantastic, cheap sources of power, but
| they have their limits. They generate power when the sun
| shines and the wind blows, which is not necessarily when
| humans need it. We still aren't very good at storing this
| power for use later, at large scales, in cost effective
| ways. So for now solar/wind needs to be paired with power
| sources we have greater control over, which mostly means
| nuclear, coal, natural gas, hydro, etc.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
| eternityforest wrote:
| By the time we cover all the daytime load with solar,
| they will probably have better batteries though.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| By then we'll _probably_ have figured out fusion too.
| wpietri wrote:
| > You'd think if the future depended on it, build times could
| be reduced.
|
| Possibly not! We have gotten worse at building large things.
| One interesting explanation comes via Poppendieck's "Tyrrany of
| the Plan": https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-
| tyranny-of...
|
| Her prime example here is the Empire State Building, which was
| built on time and on budget even though they had not finished
| designing it when they started building. The basic notion is
| that contrary to the current paradigm, more planning does not
| necessarily make things better.
|
| On my own account I'd add that the rise of The Plan corresponds
| to a rise in a managerial caste (driven in part by the
| invention and rise of MBAs) that took power from people with
| domain-specific expertise. Much of that managerial work relates
| to developing, maintaining, and enforcing The Plan. But this is
| so much the dominant paradigm that it's hard for many to even
| imagine alternatives. A good book here is Spender & Locke's
| "Confronting Managerialism":
| https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...
|
| So it may be that even if the future depended on it, build
| times could not be reduced because it's paradigmatically
| impossible. For basically the same reason that a lot of large
| software projects are clusterfucks: the POSIWID-type purpose of
| many organizations is not the work they're supposed to be
| doing, but protecting and benefiting the people supervising the
| work.
| notahacker wrote:
| I suspect that having up to 3000 people per day working for a
| pittance in the middle of a global financial crisis was a
| larger factor in getting the Empire State Building built on
| time and budget than lack of planning or middle management...
|
| Either way, I'm not sure Depression-era construction
| approaches are really what we want for nuclear plants.
| peteradio wrote:
| I think largely I agree but I'm personally sensitive to too
| much disparagement of having a plan at all. I doubt the
| empire footers were dug and poured prior to a plan. The
| important part is knowing when phase 1 can be executed and
| then phase 2 until the last phase so that all the layers are
| in the correct order. If you have incompetent planners or
| perhaps even people with disincentive to complete then you
| wind up digging out the electrical after the walls are
| finished.
| dv_dt wrote:
| This could just mean that the ESB had a budget and schedule
| w/ sufficient margin. The rise of more managed planning meant
| that everything is pre-optimized and all margins are slashed
| - the planning process as it is operated in the modern day is
| generally all about getting to minimized commitments.
| wpietri wrote:
| It could mean that. After reading the article, would you
| like to make that claim?
| lamontcg wrote:
| > a rise in a managerial caste
|
| That's the problem right there.
|
| Pro-nuclear people like to scream about the hippies putting
| up too many barriers to nuclear plants.
|
| Really it is just all the same middle-managers and dynamics
| at the jobs that they work at everyday.
|
| Everyone is willing to spend another few million dollars and
| a few weeks of delay, which only increases the fiefdom they
| control, to mitigate some risk and diffuse any possible blame
| to the rest of the committee.
|
| But that also means that we're not going to ever build like
| China unless our management culture fundamentally changes.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| I think there's another thing driving "The Plan," which is
| that each party involved is trying to race to the local
| maximum of efficiency. We need the plan to be finished so
| that the whole building can be value engineered to reduce
| waste (material, labor, whatever).
|
| If you plan the whole building and know the exact forces it
| is going to encounter in different conditions, you can then
| spec the exact amount and type of materials you need, which
| means those have to be created to more exacting standards and
| there is less tolerance for deviation from The Plan.
|
| There is an environment component to this in that we
| shouldn't be intentionally wasteful, but trying to engineer
| in too much precision seems less efficient when you zoom out
| for anything that is not mass manufactured.
| wpietri wrote:
| I agree, but think it's even worse. I think the key local
| maxima being pursued are the personal interests of
| managers.
|
| Long ago I worked on a project for a financial company. The
| exec in charge, known to us as The Hammer, had made big
| promises to poobahs higher up. So for no real-world reason,
| his employees worked death-march hours to have everything
| done by the arbitrarily chosen date. As the year's end
| approached, it was obvious that there were big problems in
| performance and quality, with a lot of bugs in place and
| absurd operational requirements. (If I recall rightly, it
| was so over-complicated a single in-house release took a
| conference call with more than a dozen people going over a
| checklist of more than 40 steps.)
|
| Did The Hammer pause the work, do some root cause analysis,
| and improve the situation? Of course not. He demanded
| everybody work even more hours and ignore anything but the
| highest priority issues. And so the project limped across
| the finish line at the last minute, with an enormous
| backlog of cleanup to do before they could add a single new
| feature. The team was exhausted. And after the celebratory
| lunch the next week, they were also demoralized, as they
| all got The Hammer's hearty congratulations and $50 gift
| cards.
|
| But none of that mattered, because The Hammer's bosses got
| positive status reports with everything in the green. He
| was then quickly promoted to a more impressive position in
| a different area, meaning that the code base he had
| created, which resembled a pile of manure covered with
| Christmas paper, was now the problem of some other sucker.
| I'm sure it eventually had to be rebuilt, providing another
| hero story for another ladder climber.
|
| If I had to guess, the amount of waste on that project was
| north of $5 million. But by The Hammer's measure and that
| of his bosses, it was a great success, because they either
| didn't know or didn't care about the waste.
| bombcar wrote:
| We like to refer to manager "fiefdoms" as being "feudal"
| but they really aren't - feudal lords couldn't just leave
| their lordship and jump into another larger one somewhere
| else.
|
| I'm not sure it's a problem that's entirely solvable
| without some kind of outside force.
| cm2187 wrote:
| It's not magic, when you build series like France did in the
| 70s and 80s (I think they were building 8 or 9 reactors a
| year), the time and cost reduce. When every project is a unique
| design, they cost a lot and have lots of delays. Wind and solar
| would be much more expensive without economies of scales (and
| if the cost of dealing with their volatility would be factored
| in).
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Many solar & wind plants do have the cost of dealing with
| their volatility built in. For example, 8minuteenergy is
| developing several solar+battery projects and selling that
| energy for 4cents per KWh.
| technicalbard wrote:
| The very first nuclear reactor went from idea to operating in 2
| years. In the middle of WW2.
|
| The only reason nuclear projects take longer than other
| industrial projects is regulatory capture.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| During WW2 the US could build a ship in 39 days. Now it takes
| 10 years.
| goodpoint wrote:
| And you think the safety record of those ships was the same
| as today?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| A hell of a lot safer than a WW2 reactor!
| remarkEon wrote:
| I know this point is made a lot but I'm not sure it's that
| meaningful.
|
| WW2 boats were not the enormously complex network and
| sensor systems that today's are. While, yeah, 10 years is
| extreme, but I don't think 39 days is physically possible.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The 39 day boats built in WW2 were probably more similar
| in complexity to a modern boat than a WW2 reactor is to a
| modern reactor.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| It was Liberty ships--slow, high-capacity, not especially
| durable cargo ships built as fast as possible, assembly-
| line style. The median construction time only got that
| low after the assembly line really got going and they
| were able to work out some kinks. It was over 200 days
| early on.
|
| Warships--none of the capitals ships, certainly--weren't
| built that fast. Not even the cheap-as-hell escort
| carriers we built tons and tons of, I don't think.
| Destroyers and little corvettes and other smalls screen
| and utility ships, maybe some of those weren't too far
| from 39-day construction times.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I would be surprised if some of the systems were actually
| harder to work on back then. Old battleships always
| seemed to have insane amounts of wiring and cabling,
| because they used the nightmarish one signal per wire
| protocol in the pre digital age.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Or because covering half of Europe to the level that in some
| places you, even to this day, have to measure the radiation
| levels of mushroom and wild game is irrelevant?
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-
| radiatio...
| pixl97 wrote:
| Well, and that the nuclear reactors back then commonly had
| terrible accidents and after Chernobyl (and TMI in a lessor
| manner) we realized that you can really screw up the planet
| with a nuclear oopsie whoopsie.
| kaba0 wrote:
| The planet? No, you can't.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The wartime Hanford reactors did not produce any electricity.
| They had no safety containment systems. And they released
| cooling water containing radioactive contamination directly
| into the Columbia River:
|
| https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-
| history/Proce...
|
| _Aside from "possible catastrophes" involving control rod
| failures, enemy bombing, or sabotage, DuPont's greatest
| concerns about reactor operations involved pumping Columbia
| River water through the reactors for cooling purposes. Using
| a "once-through" system, water was taken from the river and
| chemically treated before passing through the core of the
| reactor at the rate of 75,000 gallons per minute and being
| released back into the river. The reactor used canned fuel
| slugs, which prevented radioactive fuel from getting into the
| coolant as long as the cans did not accidentally rupture.
| Even if no fuel escaped, however, there was induced
| radioactivity of the impurities and treatment chemicals
| within the water. Radioactivity thus inevitably entered the
| Columbia. To alleviate possible dangers, DuPont engineers
| diverted the heated and "somewhat radioactive" exit water,
| containing mostly, but not exclusively, short-lived
| radionuclides, as well as certain chemical contaminants, to a
| 12,000,000 gallon retention basin. Each basin was divided in
| two, with the two sides operating in parallel. Monitoring for
| radioactivity occurred at the inlet to the basin, at an
| intermediate point, and at the exit. After six hours,
| radioactivity diminished by a factor of about twenty. With
| radioactivity below the then tolerance dose for complete
| immersion, the water was further diluted with wastewater free
| from radioactivity and returned via underground pipes for
| release in mid-river._
| prottog wrote:
| > The truly unique feature of US nuclear power is the unlimited
| power that was given to federal regulators.
|
| > [...] Congress had effectively told the regulator make the
| rules up as you go. This meant the regulator had no problem
| changing the rules. A design that was legal at the start of
| construction, could be declared illegal any time thereafter.
|
| No capital project would ever break ground with these conditions
| in place. Who would invest billions of dollars in something that
| could be made illegal any day with no recourse? I'm surprised
| that any new nuclear power plants were built at all.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| They were only built with massive subsidies or through legal
| means being able to shift the costs to the ratepayers like the
| now cancelled Virgil C. Summer.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
| yellowapple wrote:
| I'd much rather we be spending massive subsidies on nuclear
| power (and space exploration, and science in general) than on
| an increasingly-bloated military-industrial complex.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| So you don't think we should subsidize technology that
| decarbonizes power production?
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Sure, spend money on solving energy storage even for the
| 99% case and I'm all in!
|
| That would be agtual R&D and not putting another round of
| subsidies in the nuclear companies pockets.
| makotech221 wrote:
| Georgelemental wrote:
| _Someone_ has to foot the bill in the end, and that someone
| is regular citizens--either through their taxes, or through
| their energy bills.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The point is that neither of those is happening because the
| plants are not being built at all.
|
| They are footing an entirely different kind of bill
| instead, paid with an entirely different kind of currency.
|
| Instead of paying for a nuclear plant, regardless by what
| mechanism, they are living with continued use of coal and
| gas, or simply not enough capacity to meet the upcoming
| needs of things like wider adoption of EVs.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| I'm not against government investment in energy
| production, I just don't think it solves the problem of
| nuclear overregulation.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| No single entity solves anything. There is no such thing
| as an unbiased decision maker. Competing interests must
| always have to deal with each other and answer for
| whatever they do. Here we've had an entity with no
| consequences and it's had a negative outcome. It doesn't
| matter that it was a government or a private entity.
| Examples of both abound.
| jerf wrote:
| It doesn't matter who is footing the bill. It is crazy for
| any entity to invest any money under those circumstances.
|
| The solution to one chunk of the government running mad and
| then handing lots of money to some _other_ chunk of the
| government to try to chase after them would... uh... probably
| produce a world fairly similar to what we live in, actually.
| Which isn 't a solution.
|
| Regardless, constantly changing the goal posts with no
| significant costs to the ones doing the changing is a problem
| for _any_ funding mechanism.
| willcipriano wrote:
| As soon as you find someone who isn't a profiteer will you
| let the rest of us know?
| makotech221 wrote:
| The country that takes control of its energy policy seems
| to be doing fine
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chinas-energy-transition-
| in...
| prottog wrote:
| Their plan for 2060 is doing fine. The reality of the
| present is that they burn more fossil fuels than the
| next-largest grid, the US.
| willcipriano wrote:
| There is also the small matter that penalties for
| corruption are a little different in China.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/29/china/huarong-lai-xiaomin-
| chi...
| aeturnum wrote:
| I mean, the Tennessee Valley Authority?[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authorit
| y#Pow...
| willcipriano wrote:
| Seems like plenty of profiteers are involved, only
| looking at cases from the last two years:
|
| https://www.oversight.gov/report/TVA/Sabotage-and-Fraud
|
| https://tennesseelookout.com/2022/06/02/tennessee-valley-
| aut...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/lawsuit-over-
| ten...
|
| https://www.justice.gov/usao-edtn/pr/former-tva-senior-
| proje...
| aeturnum wrote:
| Did you read your links? They seem like really good
| evidence against your position.
|
| There are two individual people who happen to work for
| the TVA charged with individual crimes which don't
| implicate the organization.
|
| There's a lawsuit from profit-seeking companies charging
| the TVA contracts are too long (perhaps true but there's
| no mention of profit).
|
| Then there's a scandal about the TVA reacting badly to
| safety whistle blowers (bad! But also no clear link to
| "profiteering")
| willcipriano wrote:
| A organization is just a bunch of people, and some number
| of them have been caught red handed enriching themselves,
| or in other words profiteering.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Hah - I suppose by that standard all organization are
| criminal organizations (because someone who works in them
| commits crimes). I suppose they are all drug smugglers as
| well (as doubtless some of their employees use drugs).
| Someone should tell the DEA.
|
| I think a more useful model is to look at what "the
| organization" does (as opposed to the people who work for
| it). For instance, Enron's business strategy relied on
| breaking the law. PG&E has been unable (or unwilling) to
| maintain its infrastructure to a level where it is safe
| to operate year round. These things existed outside of
| any individual crimes committed by employees (and it is
| useful to differentiate between individuals who are
| committing crimes in service of organization goals v.s.
| only for private benefit).
| rayiner wrote:
| This line of reasoning makes no sense to me. If the
| government was better at building things than "profiteers,"
| why shouldn't we just have the government build everything?
| Why shouldn't the government make cell phones and iPads? Why
| does Silicon Valley even exist?
|
| In fact, we tried your proposal at scale. Nearly every
| developed country privatized electricity generation in the
| 1980s. Many countries, like India, still have state-owned
| power companies. If they were better, we would know.
| makotech221 wrote:
| Go look at china. They have 100x more clean energy than we
| do.
| rayiner wrote:
| Germany was at 40% renewables last year, and its electric
| generation sector is private. The UK--which privatized
| its electric generation under Thatcher back in the 1980s
| --was at 43%. China was at 29%.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Does low cost Russian gas count as public or private
| prottog wrote:
| China's grid is roughly 2322 TWh or 28% renewable, versus
| the US grid at roughly 857 TWh or 21%. 100x is beyond a
| gross exaggeration.
|
| Crucially, China still has 67% of generation from fossil
| fuel sources vs. the US at 61%.
| 7952 wrote:
| There could bwhate similarity with what aeroplane manufacturers
| have to do. The Max 8 was declared illegal overnight. And new
| planes cost tens of billions to develop.
| p_l wrote:
| 737 MAX was in violation of existing rules though - it just
| wasn't properly checked before.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Who would invest billions of dollars in something that could
| be made illegal any day with no recourse?
|
| 1. The government itself.
|
| 2. Corporations which can rely on being able to influence the
| government to make sure regulations are relaxed, cancelled, or
| not enforced.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| When did the NRC ever relax, cancel, or not enforce
| regulations on the nuclear industry?
|
| [*edit] if you're downvoting, could you please provide an
| example. I'm pretty well read on this and have never
| encountered any regulatory loosening by the NRC.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I was trying to answer the question generally; I don't know
| what the US NRC has or has not done in any detail.
|
| But in the US, the government seems to have funded a lot of
| the practical research activity on Nuclear energy - tens of
| Billions of USD:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies_in_the_Unite
| d...
|
| and I also suppose that the contracts with private
| corporations are such, that they don't just lose their
| money if regulation changes. Although, again, I'm a lay
| person when it comes to the US energy sector.
|
| (PS - I didn't downvote you.)
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Totally fair. I think the issue has been that the various
| parts of the US government have been working at cross
| purposes with respect to nuclear power.
|
| > and I also suppose that the contracts with private
| corporations are such, that they don't just lose their
| money if regulation changes.
|
| The way the NRC works, they can without notice change the
| rules in a way that will force you to redesign a plant
| that is under construction. If you're too far along
| you'll just have to scrap the whole thing. If you look at
| this list of closed or abandoned nuclear projects, 4 are
| explicitly due to NRC changes[1]. This doesn't include
| any cancelled plans that hadn't begun construction and
| isn't a complete list. If coal power were regulated the
| way nuclear was, there would be no coal power in the US.
| Coal plants release 2 orders of magnitude more radiation
| per kwh than nuclear in the US and in a form that is more
| dangerous, e.g. coal ash which goes deep into your
| lungs[2].
|
| [1]https://www.powermag.com/interactive-map-abandoned-
| nuclear-p...
|
| [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-
| is-more-...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| chinabot wrote:
| That's why most great innovations happen during or just after
| wars. Bureaucracy stifles everything. It would be nice if we
| could fix this without having a war.
| yellowapple wrote:
| You'd think "increasingly-inevitable catastrophic destruction
| of Earth's biosphere" would count as a "war", given the
| projected casualty counts potentially dwarfing all wars
| combined.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Not a real war, but a latent war like the Cold War. Perhaps
| it should be called the Warm War?
| LastTrain wrote:
| The author blames regulation without weighing any benefits, as if
| regulation were there for regulation itself. I am willing to
| listen to an argument that less regulation is needed, but it
| needs to take the benefits of regulation into consideration as
| well.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Japan led the world in nuclear accidents long before Fukushima.
|
| http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/dudzinski1/
|
| https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/1913786/mon...
|
| In fact after reading some detailed descriptions of Monju I can
| only ask "what were they smoking?" because the design of the
| plant didn't seem to take seismic risks seriously at all.
|
| I was watching a documentary the other day that described how bad
| their habits were at Fukushima. That generation of BWR has an
| "isolation condenser" that is supposed to help cool the reactor
| in an accident, when it operates a huge amount of steam blows out
| of two pipes that are called the "Pig's nose".
|
| At 9 mile point in upstate NY they regularly test the isolation
| condenser so everyone there knows what it is like when it is
| working. At Fukushima they had never tried it so when it produced
| just a trickle of steam they thought it was working. Similarly
| they had a pipe that was supposed to deliver water to the reactor
| core but when they really pumped water into it they found out it
| went someplace else. If they'd been responsible (like nuclear
| operators in the US) they would have practiced emergency
| procedures ahead of time.
| api wrote:
| Japanese companies have been great at other things like
| manufacturing and decent at stuff like software. What gives
| when it comes to nuclear plant operation?
| kaba0 wrote:
| I am absolutely out of my depth here, but isn't Japan very
| "agist" (not sure of the correct word)? Just basing it on a
| previous HN thread about Japanese website design, a commenter
| mentioned software company higher managers, who can't use a
| computer and the like.
|
| Some tendency of placing elderly people in important roles
| simply based on respect and not knowledge sounds like a
| plausible explanation, especially when one, high-enough
| people can wreak absolute havoc in a very top-down control
| flow.
|
| But I'm talking out of my ass here, don't take anything
| seriously.
| rurounijones wrote:
| TEPCO has an atrocious safety culture. the operators of the
| Onagawa plant (closer to the epicenter) had a very safety-
| first culture and it showed.
| pigsty wrote:
| There's been lots of fraud revealed lately. Japan has been
| simply covering it up very well.
|
| Just a few examples that I recall this past year or two
| include faking emissions tests for vehicles, faking steel
| quality tests, faking GDP by counting construction costs up
| to four times, and faking about 99% of _clams_ from Kumamoto
| and local fishermen were apparently aware of this for
| decades. All of these issues went on for several years.
| Corruption at all levels has been revealed lately, and when
| you stack this up, all these things passed of as "good
| enough. Nobody will know" can end up in total disasters when
| quality matters.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-revoke-
| hino...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44763905.amp
|
| https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14769587
|
| https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14502921
|
| https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14538401
| duxup wrote:
| Is it a Japan thing or more a human / "industry culture"
| thing where you had bad apples operating and that became the
| SoP?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think it is different in different countries. I think the
| US has a much tougher attitude about health and safety than
| most places. Maybe we pay a cost for that, but it is for
| real.
|
| I spent a year living in Europe and was surprised at how
| much worse nutrition labels were in Europe at the time. In
| Dresden, Germany they still had cigarette vending machines
| all over town and frequently had a candy vending machine
| mounted next to the cigarette machines to get the little
| ones started.
|
| The US has been reluctant to license MOX fabrication plants
| in the US because of the fear of the the danger of
| plutonium dust poses to workers. France has been confident
| that it has it under control. It is a subject that people
| have talked about for a long time without a lot of data,
| but a relatively recent study shows the dangers are real
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28520643/
|
| even if they aren't catastrophic like they were at the
| vermiculite mine in Libby, MT.
| themitigating wrote:
| I feel like you associate concern with safety to making
| people aware or restrictions.
|
| In other words if a country has a higher drinking age,
| better education, and more labels then that country cares
| more about safety.
|
| I think that the actions of the population are a better
| example.
|
| Maybe you mean is "the US government is more concerned
| about safety " but that could be because the population
| doesn't care.
|
| To be fair, Germany has a higher rate of people who smoke
| (around 23% vs 12%)
| dmitriid wrote:
| > the US has a much tougher attitude about health and
| safety than most places.
|
| Attitude? Maybe. In reality? Often not.
|
| No idea why you think nutrition labels are worse and how
| they factor in "health and safety" when corn syrup is
| everywhere in the food in the States and 42% of
| population is obese.
|
| On the other end of the spectrum you have underinvestment
| in critical infrastructure. For example, dams:
| https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-an-era-of-extreme-
| weather-...
|
| There are very few (developed) countries which are as lax
| about health and safety as the US.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > In Dresden, Germany they still had cigarette vending
| machines all over town
|
| We have those in the US, too. Granted, they're usually
| confined to bars, but there's no shortage of bars in the
| average American town.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You would think that the quality movement ideas that have
| made Japanese cars so good would apply to safety but the UAW
| will point out that a US car factory is a much safer
| workplace than a Japanese car factory. Some of that is the
| UAW being a strong union that looks out for its members, some
| of it is the adversarial legal culture in the US.
|
| Japanese workers, for instance, like to make changes to their
| workstations to improve their performance (for instance,
| complete the job more quickly.) In a normal workplace that's
| a great idea, but when you are working with solutions of
| fissionable elements there are many details you need to
| control to prevent a criticality accident, and they evaded
| those controls.
| eternityforest wrote:
| For all the talk about Europe and Asia being ahead of us, I
| think we have the about correct amount of adversarial legal
| culture, maybe only slightly too much, and everyone else
| doesn't have enough.
|
| I hear people saying the hot coffee lawsuit should have
| been thrown out , and to me that's just crazy that anyone
| would want to allow safety standards to go on ignored to
| that level.
|
| Outside of safety related stuff our laws are a bit messed
| up, but I do appreciate the fact that we make an effort to
| keep people safe.
| boppo1 wrote:
| >hot coffee lawsuit should have been thrown out
|
| Lots of these people don't realize factual details of the
| case. I was one such person. But the details are
| convincing.
|
| NSFL/Gore Warning: https://www.deshawlaw.com/blog/the-
| real-facts-of-the-mcdonal...
| nerdawson wrote:
| > I hear people saying the hot coffee lawsuit should have
| been thrown out , and to me that's just crazy that anyone
| would want to allow safety standards to go on ignored to
| that level.
|
| I think it's a matter of taking personal responsibility
| rather than finding someone to blame when you make a
| mistake.
| yellowapple wrote:
| I personally don't think it's reasonable to assume that
| something intended for human consumption would be served
| hot enough to _fuse one 's labia to one's thigh_ if
| spilled on one's lap. In light of that, "personal
| responsibility" doesn't seem to be very applicable in
| that particular case.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I am absolutely empathetic to that poor women, but never
| really understood the physics behind it. You can't
| superheat water under normal pressure, so it capped out
| at 100C (sorry, don't know that in F, but boiling point
| of water). Which is pretty expected for tea, and not
| unheard of from coffee (without milk). I do get the
| economic.. money-grab on the company side that you can't
| feel how bad the coffee tastes if it's too hot, and also
| that it will get to a drinkable temperature when you've
| walked back to your office, but I don't see any evil on
| this part and 90C coffee would not have caused much
| lesser damage. Of course their reaction after the fact
| was very disturbing (ridiculing the poor victim), but
| we've just forgotten how truly terrible any kind of burn
| is, and boiling water is just extremely hot.
|
| Like, any number of news where someone poured boiling
| water on their cheating husband is just behind stupid and
| just shows an absolute lack of understanding of basic
| reality. I'm sure they didn't intend that much damage,
| but they are just dangerously stupid at that point.
| boppo1 wrote:
| According to the case, Mcdonalds admitted it knew that
| 185f coffee caused exponentially worse burns than 135f
| coffee (typical home coffee temp).
|
| Nsfl/gore warning: https://www.deshawlaw.com/blog/the-
| real-facts-of-the-mcdonal...
| dmitriid wrote:
| It's still a testament to how safe nuclear power plants really
| are.
|
| - Bad operators? Check
|
| - Earthquake? Check
|
| - Tsunami? Check
|
| ...
|
| - "There were no deaths from radiation exposure in the
| immediate aftermath of the incident, though there were a number
| of (around 1600 non-radiation related) deaths during the
| evacuation of the nearby population" Wikipedia
| duxup wrote:
| I recall an engineer writing that Fukushima did a lot to
| prove that the idea of a run away meltdown where the core
| melts into a super heated blob that escapes the facility and
| melts its way into the earth was even more unlikely than they
| had thought. If it couldn't happen at a poorly operated / out
| dated facility the odds must be pretty low.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| People all over this thread making the enormously wrong
| point that nuclear is ~safe because Fukushima and Chernobyl
| weren't that bad... There is absolutely no indication that
| either one was the worst case and it's a failure of
| imagination to rely on what happened at either to assess
| the 'real' risk of nuclear.
|
| As just one example -- the pools at Chernobyl below the
| reactor that the engineers had to manually open after the
| meltdown were sufficient to cause a massive steam
| explosion. Sure, some additional fissile material would've
| been spread by that explosion which would be bad -- but the
| real risk is whether a few hundred ton equivalent explosion
| in reactor 4 would have been enough to destroy the
| immediately adjacent reactor 3 building and the reactor 1/2
| building as well.
|
| There were 13GW of thermal energy in the complex and
| between design deficiencies and operator errors, 1/4 of
| that melted down and resulted in a 1,000 sq mi exclusion
| zone. It's absurd to think that was as bad as it could get.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > There is absolutely no indication that either one was
| the worst case
|
| You're trying to prove a negative using Chernobyl (a
| 50-year old design) as some kind of proof.
|
| Even with Chernobyl only 100 deaths are directly
| attributed to the disaster and there hasn't been any
| statistically observable rise in effects like cancer
| since.
|
| So, the greatest nuclear power plant disasters in human
| history caused ... fewer deaths than a single coal power
| plant in a big city.
|
| So yes. We _will_ use them as examples of how safe
| nuclear power actually is.
| notahacker wrote:
| > Even with Chernobyl only 100 deaths are directly
| attributed to the disaster and there hasn't been any
| statistically observable rise in effects like cancer
| since.
|
| The trouble with taking the position that only 100 people
| were killed by Chernobyl and everything else is just
| estimates, is that holding such a position in _good_
| faith means chalking off similar back-of-the envelope
| estimates for deaths caused by exposure to coal plant
| emissions...
| tuatoru wrote:
| We can see the statistics for COPD, and control for other
| factors. We can see the statistics for cancers, and
| control for other factors.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| This is like saying SARS1 was as bad as a modern pandemic
| could be... of course it's not. It was the worst _we 'd
| seen to that point_ but with some bad luck, it could be
| substantially worse. If you assume that the worst thing
| that _has_ happened is the worst thing that _could_
| happen, you 're going to be in for a very bad time.
|
| This isn't remotely to say that Nuclear is 'bad' or that
| we shouldn't build new plants, just that we should be
| clear-eyed about the actual tail risks while designing
| them.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > It was the worst we'd seen to that point but with some
| bad luck, it could be substantially worse.
|
| As we learned the hard way with SARS 2: Coronavirus
| Boogaloo.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > This is like saying SARS1 was as bad as a modern
| pandemic could be... of course it's not.
|
| Of course its not. Meaning "of course it's not like
| saying <insert false analogy here>".
|
| > but with some bad luck, it could be substantially
| worse.
|
| Funny how bad operators + most powerful recorded
| earthquake in Japan's history + tsunami isn't bad luck
| worth considering because there's always worse luck
| around the corner.
|
| > that we should be clear-eyed about the actual tail
| risks while designing them.
|
| We are: the greatest disasters involving nuclear power
| plants have shown that they are incredibly safe. And yet,
| the perception is "this is just waiting for bad luck to
| be so much worse".
|
| Strangely enough when we look at other sources of energy
| by deaths from normal operation (coal plants) or
| historical disasters (Banqjao Dam, 26 000 dead from
| flood, 145 000 dead from subsequent famine and epidemics,
| 11 million homeless), somehow no one goes "oh you cannot
| look at those and state something".
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Of course people look at those and state something... if
| you think that the Banqjao Dam failure is the worst dam
| failure that can happen, you haven't kept up on the news
| regarding the Mosul Dam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo
| sul_Dam#Renewed_stability_co...) or Three Gorges
| (https://www.wsj.com/articles/worst-flooding-in-decades-
| raise...).. So new dam projects are built to avoid the
| obviously worse potential outcomes.
|
| I'm not sure how people are misunderstanding tail risks
| this much but NNT would be ashamed. "Regression to the
| tail" is super important when assessing long-term risk --
| and likely points more in favor of nuclear plants due to
| the insanely disruptive tail risk that climate change
| represents.
|
| But "our repeated accidents didn't end up being too bad"
| isn't the way to assess them.. acknowledging that the
| accidents resulted in thousand-mile exclusion zones, but
| limited loss of life is important but that should
| directly inform the siting of new plants and the
| operation of existing ones (and why it's a good thing
| Indian Point is shutting down).
| dmitriid wrote:
| And yet I don't hear anyone look at those and say "oh no,
| you shouldn't judge by the past, it can always be worse"
| :-\
|
| > But "our repeated accidents didn't end up being too
| bad" isn't the way to assess them
|
| It's a valid way to assess them.
|
| > that should directly inform the siting of new plants
| and the operation of existing ones
|
| What makes you think the new constructions don't take
| that into consideration? What makes you keep saying "no
| you shouldn't say itself because earthquake+tsunami+bad
| operators isn't bad luck enough, there's always worse
| luck around the corner"?
| duxup wrote:
| > it could be substantially worse
|
| You could say that infinitely. That doesn't help you
| avoid anything... could direct you to worse decisions.
|
| We use the incidents we know to inform ourselves about
| probability and etc. It's not just those incidents that
| are considered. And when more data comes along we use
| that too. That's how figuring things out works for just
| about everything.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I mean, in both cases it could have hardly been worse.
| There were failures in the planning, in the operation and
| in external events. Like, what else could be worse? A
| meteor hitting the plant during a terrorist attack?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| I gave one clear example - the pools below Chernobyl
| causing a secondary steam explosion that would've
| resulted in Reactor 3 and potentially 1/2 melting down as
| well.. naively making that disaster 3x worse than it was.
| In Fukushima, the explosion and subsequent power loss
| caused the spent rods from the 4th reactor to nearly boil
| the water away, had workers not been able to gain access
| to the site and manually spray the rods, they would've
| been just burning in the air releasing clouds of
| radioactive gases. Clearly this would've been much worse
| than what happened already, but is mostly unaccounted for
| when people proclaim that the accidents we've seen are
| evidence that those are the worst possible outcomes.
|
| But the whole point is that _we don 't know_ the universe
| of bad things that can happen..
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Biggest Earthquake in known history (1000+ years) even!
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Nah, not even the biggest in the past 20 years (Sumatra was
| larger).
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sorry, I meant to say Japanese history.
|
| It's the 4th biggest recorded on the Richter scale.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There were maybe 1600 drowning deaths in the area from the
| tsunami.
|
| What would evacuation deaths even be?
| mh- wrote:
| Deaths that wouldn't have occurred had a mass evacuation
| not taken place.
|
| Here's a paper analyzing the evacuation-related deaths from
| Hurricane Rita.
|
| _> A majority of the deaths (90 /108 or 83.3%) were
| related to the mass evacuation process. Of these deaths,
| 10% were directly related to hyperthermia in motor
| vehicles. The combination of traffic gridlock and high
| temperatures, limitation of air conditioning to reduce fuel
| consumption, reduction of oral intake to decrease restroom
| visits, and conservation of limited supplies is suspected._
|
| https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(16)51609-2/
| f...
|
| (Note: I've limited the snippet here, it's worth reading in
| context from the abstract.)
| sampo wrote:
| > What would evacuation deaths even be?
|
| I think some deaths occurred when evacuating hospital
| patients.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 1600 people is an enormous number of deaths. It would
| have been reported.
|
| I've followed Fukushima news since it happened, and never
| heard of this before.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| The same people making it too slow say it's slow. QED.
| MikeCapone wrote:
| The US Navy could be quite quick building reactors and
| innovating, because it didn't have to go through the same amount
| of regulation. They've operated lots and lots of reactors with
| very little problems for decades.
| warmwaffles wrote:
| Go figure when the government owns the reactor and hires
| technicians to maintain them, they can be built "quickly".
|
| In an earlier post here
|
| > The truly unique feature of US nuclear power is the unlimited
| power that was given to federal regulators.
|
| > [...] Congress had effectively told the regulator make the
| rules up as you go. This meant the regulator had no problem
| changing the rules. A design that was legal at the start of
| construction, could be declared illegal any time thereafter.
|
| The solution may be that the federal government owns the plant
| and contracts out the work. Ultimately, the government would
| have to answer to itself about regulation changes.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| The author is a shipbuilder who wants to use shipyards to mass
| produce large reactors. This is a truly great idea. I just wish
| he focused on regular water cooled reactors for this first rather
| than highly exotic fluid fuel ones.
|
| See also the time we came very close to actually implementing
| this: https://whatisnuclear.com/offshore-nuclear-plants.html
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > Figure 4. French and Chinese nuclear electricity production.
| Source BP Energy Review.
|
| Is shown to demonstrate that nuclear isn't slow.
|
| Yet China has added more solar, _and_ more wind, in that same
| period. So it is slower than either on their own, and much slower
| than both, even at nuclear historical high.
|
| Meanwhile, solar and wind get cheaper and faster each year.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| How about we just tax carbon and let the power companies build
| whatever they think will be cheapest? Let the market do its job.
| All this bullshit arguing about it accomplishes exactly nothing.
| julianeon wrote:
| To me this is what made the recent fusion news exciting.
|
| As far as I'm concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants
| generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don't
| want them. You won't be able to overcome their opposition. What
| more is there to say? Let's move on.
|
| If fusion can get to a point where it can solve the long-lasting
| radioactive waste problem - that would resolve the problem. That
| would get nuclear power adopted by the masses.
|
| We might as well aim for that, however long it takes, because
| that's the only politically viable solution.
| digianarchist wrote:
| Fusion has its own waste problem albeit much more manageable
| than fission and only when the plant is decommissioned.
| SSJPython wrote:
| > As far as I'm concerned, the verdict is in for nuclear plants
| generating highly radioactive long-lasting waste: people don't
| want them. You won't be able to overcome their opposition. What
| more is there to say? Let's move on.
|
| Why should public opinion override the need for energy
| security, which is a national security issue? Sometimes, the
| public makes the wrong decision. The public generally has
| trouble when it comes to differentiating between the short-term
| and long-term. Energy sovereignty should not be subject to the
| democratic will of the populace. Leave it to the experts and
| the technocrats, not the average Joe and Jane who operate with
| asymmetric information.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > Why should public opinion override the need for energy
| security
|
| Ah, you've made the mistake of believing politics is
| rational. There's no reason for this other than "politicians
| would be punished otherwise". Is the public wrong? Yes. What
| are you going to do about it? You can go round and round
| about the way things should be. That doesn't make them so.
|
| > Leave it to the experts and the technocrats, not the
| average Joe and Jane who operate with asymmetric information.
|
| This is going to be an extremely tough sell. Godspeed.
| pydry wrote:
| Putin threw half the world into recession with an economy the
| size of Italy's. That's how little our technocrats cared
| about energy security - we sleptwalked into that entirely
| thanks to them.
|
| Energy security would be better served by throwing the same
| amount of money at carbon neutral alternatives that are
| proven, deployed and already 2-5x cheaper. Solar, wind,
| pumped storage, batteries, etc.
|
| For technocrats, civilian nuclear power is just a means to
| support the military nuclear industrial complex, which
| represents the apex of hard power. Energy security is of
| secondary if not tertiary concern to them.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Why solve the problem today when you can hype a solution
| that will solve the problem in 20+ years and book some of
| those sweet profits from fossil extraction in the mean
| time?
| silent_cal wrote:
| The public has no right to object to piles of nuclear waste?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Because we live in a democracy?
| SSJPython wrote:
| But that's my point: just because a society has a
| democratic political system does not mean everything has to
| be run through the same mechanism. Sometimes, the experts
| need to override the people, no matter how much of a fit
| they throw.
| danenania wrote:
| This is already the case. Unpopular decisions are made
| regularly by all three branches of the Federal
| government, as well as by local governments at every
| level. But even if you can get unpopular policies
| through, there's still the risk that you'll face
| consequences at the next election.
| [deleted]
| Juliate wrote:
| A democracy that is also a product of the availability of
| huge amounts of continuous energy for quite a decent price.
|
| Insert blackouts or raise the price of energy to get access
| to it, day-to-day life, society and economy will not look
| like quite the same.
|
| So a democracy which wants to survive the primary energy
| turnout ahead (oil has to go, and we are all deeply, highly
| dependent on it), takes the means to transform its energy
| usage on one side, and to sustain its energy needs on the
| other.
|
| Removing nuclear-based electric energy will only sustain,
| at the time being, the production of carbon-based
| electricity. Fusion looks definitely better than fission,
| but it's 10s of years away still.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| How are you going to generate power with your fusion plant?
| Steam?
|
| Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive simply from the cost of the
| steam side. Today you can just about give a steam plant free
| energy and it still makes a loss.
|
| Solar or wind does not have this limitation. CCGT gas plants
| gets around it by having a turbine giving raw mechanical power
| and then utilizing the same awful steam side to get the last
| percentage points of efficiency at a much smaller required
| scale.
|
| Unless you can step around the steam turbine I am not so
| positive on fusions future outside of incredibly small niches.
|
| Coal still gets built where gas infrastructure does not exist,
| but that's about it.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't understand this. What makes a steam plant so lossy
| when the source is basically free (ie nuclear)? Is the steam
| somehow expensive to produce?
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Yes, steam is expensive to produce, utilize and cool.
| stavros wrote:
| What's the expensive part when you've got free heat?
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| Literally nothing. But the heat is never actually free.
| You have to build and run a bunch of infrastructure to
| turn the raw heat into steam. Even if you're iceland with
| "free" geothermal you need to spend money to capture the
| heat as steam.
|
| If steam were free like the wind nobody would care.
|
| Comparing efficiency is a really apples to oranges way to
| go about this and should be a massive red flag that
| someone has an axe to grind.
|
| Comparisons across different forms of generation
| typically look at cost (in dollars, carbon output or any
| other metric you want) per energy over the life of the
| thing doing the generating or per some multi year period.
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, that's why I was asking. Why do we even care about
| efficiency? All I care about is dollars per watt/hour.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-
| energy-...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The entire part where you need to build machines to
| gather, use and cool it down.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The last coal plant built in the US cost $600M for 900MW.
| Most of the cost of a coal plant is the apparatus for
| turning heat into electricity (the turbine etc).
|
| Even if you have free heat, turning that free heat into
| electricity is more expensive than solar electricity.
| stavros wrote:
| That's power, you want energy. What is the total cost in
| dollars per Wh?
| einpoklum wrote:
| > uncompetitive ... cost of the steam side ... it ... makes a
| loss.
|
| Huh? Whatever gave you idea that electricity production needs
| to be a profitable endeavor? The considerations for choosing
| technologies should be availability, sustainability, safety
| (of the plant, the population, the environment), etc. - the
| price of electricity can be set arbitrarily afterwards, and
| if there's a loss then taxes will cover it, or subsidies +
| taxes to cover those.
|
| So, the question of whether to use steam or not is not a
| question of profit-and-loss.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Lets create a market of everyone installing solar and
| trying to decouple from the power grid because you're
| forcing them to use more expensive power?
| einpoklum wrote:
| I don't understand your comment. You seem to be
| indicating that I am somehow opposed the wide use of
| solar or that I support wide use of nuclear power -
| neither of which is the case. I'm just saying that steam
| turbines being "non-profitable" is not a consideration in
| whether or not to use them.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| You're proposing using laws or tax payer money to
| subsidize certain power generation. That's bound to lead
| to issues, like for example the now cancelled Virgil C.
| Summer.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
| einpoklum wrote:
| All economic systems (with division of labor) are
| arrangements in which the efforts and the products of
| people's work are channeled in certain avenues. Laws and
| taxes are just some particular mechanisms within such
| systems. You (or I) might find certain laws or taxes
| beneficial or detrimental of course.
|
| Anyway, if the use of steam turbines is justifiable in
| terms of feasibility, efficiency, safety, costs (monetary
| or otherwise) etc. - then it is justifiable, period; and
| if it isn't, then it isn't. And the same goes for nuclear
| power plants. Otherwise you're arguing that we shouldn't
| use technology X because some US state is too corrupt to
| make it work. If that's your argument, I understand where
| you're coming from, but - USers should fix _that_
| problem, not suggest that we forego the technology
| entirely.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Why would anyone subsidize nuclear instead of batteries?
|
| (Well, I know why, and yes, they would favor nuclear jut
| after oil and coal. But it wouldn't happen for any good
| reason.)
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Are steam turbines truly so inefficient? Can you source that?
| Gwypaas wrote:
| They run at 30-35% efficiency with a humongous amount of
| machinery to support them. Heat exchangers, pumps,
| condensers.
|
| Compare that to the simplicity of a jet turbine where you
| get raw mechanical power out. They take pretty much the
| same engine as an airplane engine and instead of having the
| turbofan putting that shaft into a generator. That's all
| there is to it.
|
| Today new built renewables are in most cases cheaper than
| the marginal cost of paid of existing coal and nuclear
| plants. Gas is on the edge.
|
| That is the reality facing these investments.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| >They run at 30-35% efficiency with a humongous amount of
| machinery to support them.
|
| Oh wow, I didn't know that, yikes. Can link me a source
| to find out more?
| Gwypaas wrote:
| From a super pro nuclear source:
|
| > Nuclear plants currently being built have about 34-36%
| thermal efficiency, while one of the new reactor designs
| boasts 39%. In comparison, new coal-fired plants approach
| 40% and CCGT plants reach 60%.(4)
|
| https://world-nuclear.org/our-
| association/publications/techn...
|
| This is the reason for Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR).
| Then you can increase the temperature and through
| Carnot's theorem reach higher efficiency. But now you
| have a pressurized reactor with another host of
| complications...
|
| Since a coal boiler is much simpler in construction than
| a reactor, and do not rely on water to slow down the
| neutrons causing the chain reaction, they can do more
| fancy stuff and use supercritical steam leading to the
| higher, but still not good efficiency.
| Juliate wrote:
| Something I don't get...
|
| Wind turbines are efficient (to convert mechanical wind
| energy into electric energy) between 20% and 45% (with a
| theoretical upper limit of 59%).
|
| Solar panels between 15% and 22%.
|
| Both with variable input energy.
|
| So I am not sure how 34-36% thermal efficiency is so bad,
| especially for a near-continuous production (or at least,
| with a predictable thermal input)?
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Because for a solar panel or wind turbine that efficiency
| is simply lost energy. Catching more is better but as
| long as it is economical it is fine.
|
| For thermal power plants you need to spend money taking
| care of the waste head leading to more costs.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Fascinating, thanks for sharing!
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The last coal plant in the US cost $600M to build. And the
| steam turbine and everything else required to turn heat
| into power comprises the majority of a coal plant.
| Juliate wrote:
| And?
| [deleted]
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Coal and nuclear are uncompetitive
|
| In what sense are there uncompetitive? Do you take into
| account that they work on demand (and not only when wind/sun
| is available).
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Try working on demand 20% of the hours since renewables
| easily without anything fancy reaches those levels.
|
| Now your horrendously expensive plant became even more
| expensive.
| dweekly wrote:
| Eh, to a degree it's a marketing problem then. We could relabel
| modern plants as "Quantum Power" and explain (truthfully!) that
| they are very different from older style fission plants that
| were genuinely dangerous.
| joshjob42 wrote:
| What do you mean by long-lived? Fission products all become
| harmless ' less radioactive than the rocks we pulled out of the
| ground initially within ~300 years. That is well within the
| lifetime we can design containment systems for and far too soon
| for language drift to become a serious problem to communicating
| risks.
|
| Actinides produced, ie uranium that absorbed some neutrons but
| didn't fission and so became some other elements lime
| plutonium, americium, etc., do have half lives in the thousands
| to tens of thousands of years but are a much smaller fraction
| of the waste fuel than the fission products. They can also be
| put back into reactors to burn up.
|
| If you reprocess spent nuclear fuel, then you can take all the
| very radioactive fission products and separate them out,
| vitrify them, and put them somewhere. You only get about one
| tonne of those per GWe-yr of reactor power, and as I said, they
| become harmless in a few hundred years. The bulk of the
| remainder is U-238, which is most of nuclear fuel anyway. And
| the remaining ~1% or so is actinides which along with the U-238
| can be mixed with fresh U-238 and U-235 to create new fuel rods
| which then go into reactors.
|
| Thus the only thing you really produce out of a fuel
| reprocessing system is the fission products, which aren't long-
| lived. The only reason the US has a bunch of spent fuel with
| lifetimes of tens of thousands of years lying around is because
| we banned fuel reprocessing for no good reason in the late 70s.
|
| The entire country could run on 3TWe of nuclear power and never
| have more than 900k tonnes of fission products under management
| ever, and could be placed in a total of ~8 million tonnes of
| glass like the French use, taking up a volume roughly equal to
| a square kilometer at a depth of ~3 meters.
|
| Reference for properties of virtified waste:
| https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
| Friendly link on waste reprocessing and properties of spent
| fuel: https://www.orano.group/en/unpacking-nuclear/all-about-
| radio...
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| People "don't want them" because of fear peddling by people
| saying exactly what you're saying right now. Of course you want
| us to "move on" because that means the asinine state of affairs
| people like you have created will not be challenged.
|
| Waste that is "highly radioactive" cannot be "long lasting"
| because physics just doesn't work that way. Anything atomically
| spicy will have decayed into less spicy things in decades,
| typically a handful, dozens at worst, resulting in waste that's
| not really any more harmful than heavy metal laced this or that
| that humanity already deals with in the waste streams of other
| industrial processes. The fact that nuclear waste decays at all
| is really a godsend. You can literally just ignore the problem
| until it goes away. This isn't the case for heavy metals and
| some other types of pollutants. You can NEVER build a house on
| an unmitigated lead mine.
|
| Furthermore, the actual physical amounts of waste produced by
| nuclear are tiny compared to other things. Yucca mountain was
| gonna store waste for _literally the entire nation_.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I've become convinced that fusion power will never be
| commercially viable in the foreseeable future.
|
| Considering: Electrical energy from coal is, right now, barely
| competitive with renewables (which are still continuously
| improving!). Thus, any fusion plant would basically need to
| provide thermal energy for less than the fuel cost in a coal
| plant + the cost of some burners. That includes:
|
| - Vacuum chamber
|
| - Cryocooling
|
| - Huge superconducting magnet assemblies
|
| - Maintenance of all above in a very hostile environment (=>
| thanks to high neutron flux and thus potentially neutron-
| activated materials near the fusion chamber)
|
| Right now, the only halfway credible pathway to a viable design
| is ITERs successor plant; everything else is pure
| vaporware/research project _by design_ , which is obvious from
| the scale alone.
|
| Nuclear fusion is IMO in the same spot as a steam-jet powered
| carriage (heating water, expelling it backwards out of a
| nozzle) would have been in 1500AD:
|
| - Technically possible? Sure.
|
| - Academically interesting? Kind of.
|
| - Economically viable? Hell no (and no amount of progress has
| changed that since!).
|
| I'm very open to having my mind changed, but not optimistic :(
|
| But photovoltaics/wind/battery storage looks all super
| promising, so i guess there is that...
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think that fission will solve some of its long lived depleted
| fuel problems sooner than fusion will(!)
|
| Just like with climate change, for nuclear we need to forge
| ahead with our best knowledge, engineering and belief in the
| future and our competency to solve problems. Let's use the best
| of our problem solving ability. To decline to do what we think
| is the best just because of long-held stereotypes, that just
| holds us back.
| [deleted]
| giardini wrote:
| Wouldn't the USA do better to build small "pluggable" nuclear
| power generation plants similar to those on nuclear submarines?
| Periodically the fuel would be replaced.
|
| https://www.ussjpkennedyjr.org/nuclear-reactors-on-submarine...
|
| Big power plants are "one-offs", with little/no
| interchangeability of parts and each having a unique set of
| problems, costly construction and maintenance.
| yellowapple wrote:
| I suspect a big part of the reason why submarine reactors are
| able to be so small is because they sit on a planet-covering
| heatsink. Terrestrial plants accomplish the same with
| artificial lakes and large cooling towers; the actual "nuclear"
| parts are already pretty small in comparison.
|
| But yes, assuming the cooling systems could be similarly mass-
| produced, it would make sense to mass-produce small-scale
| nuclear plants as well.
| aj7 wrote:
| The contractors slowly learned, and then at an increasing rate,
| that profit was higher when construction was strung out over
| time.
| pydry wrote:
| tl;dr safe, cheap, quick. pick one and a half.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Despite the idiotic downvotes you are absolutely right.
| rpep wrote:
| In the early 2010s, a lobbying campaign against new nuclear in
| the U.K. basically started, including people like the deputy
| prime minister [1] complaining that it was too slow and
| renewables would be faster and it wasn't necessary.
|
| Fast forward to 2022 and we still don't have enough renewables,
| the UK is not very windy at the moment so there's not enough base
| load capacity, and we only have 3 active coal fired power
| stations left. Oh, and we're in an energy crisis and France,
| which is normally a net exporter to the U.K., is needing to
| import energy, making the crisis even closer. It would have been
| pretty useful to have had a new nuclear power station online
| right about now.
|
| [1] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/03/nuclear-
| power-...
| 7952 wrote:
| Hinkley B has been in development since around 2010 and has not
| generated any power. Wind and solar are over 25% of generated
| electricity per year. And most of that capacity was built in
| the last five years. It is growing very quickly.
|
| A few more nuclear power stations would be very valuable. But
| in terms of decarbonisation renewables are just faster.
| Interconnectors are also faster to build and also help avoid
| power cuts.
| simfree wrote:
| There has been plenty of noteworthy pushback against renewable
| energy has been significant, even for offshore wind farms that
| would have minimal view impact.
|
| Pushback against new infrastructure is high in general, causing
| society to lean on inefficient and dirty sources of energy.
|
| We need more modern nuclear reactors, renewables and storage
| since neither can load follow like hydroelectric dams or
| combined cycle natural gas can.
| klabb3 wrote:
| If you wanna put the tinfoil hat on, having a political
| flamewar between renewables and nuclear is so ideal for
| fossil fuel companies that it almost looks deliberately
| architected.
|
| Nuclear proponents are rarely if ever against renewables on
| principle, but rather claim they aren't delivering on their
| promises. The environmentalists OTOH have been radicalized to
| be opposed to nuclear in a dogmatic way, are entirely against
| improving it by lifting research bans etc. The "nuclear is
| not economically viable" argument seen in recent years is
| dishonest from the majority of critics; they were against
| nuclear before and will be in the future, independent of
| economics and regional viability of wind & solar.
|
| Meanwhile, coal, gas and oil are doing absolutely splendid -
| even countries with a strong environmentalist ethos can
| easily be convinced to expand their fossil fuel dependencies
| during a crisis, when their citizens can't afford to heat
| their homes in the winter.
| seanw444 wrote:
| That's a great point. Those that generally fall on the
| "just trust the science, bro" side are also the ones saying
| "nuclear isn't as effective _right now_ , so let's avoid it
| like the plague" and "think of the long term!"
|
| It has always baffled me. This flamewar being pushed by
| fossil fuel companies makes perfect sense.
| canadianfella wrote:
| anonymousDan wrote:
| What do you say to the enormous hidden costs of decommissioning
| nuclear:
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/15/dismantl...
|
| Are these only an issue for legacy sites and not so much for
| new builds?
| pydry wrote:
| >Oh, and we're in an energy crisis and France, which is
| normally a net exporter to the U.K., is needing to import
| energy
|
| They're spending hundreds of billions just to replace ~80% of
| the nuclear plants that are aging out and officially hoping
| that renewables will make up the difference.
|
| It's almost as if it _does_ take too long and cost too much.
|
| Meanwhile the UK is refusing planning permission to solar farms
| at a record rate because who needs electricity that costs PS35
| per MWh now when you can pay PS92.50+inflation for Hinkley
| Point C in a decade:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/25/solar-fa...
| 7952 wrote:
| Some of the refusals may be explained by the increasing size
| of schemes. That is no excuse, but number of refusals is not
| the whole story.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The government granted the licence to build Hinkley Point C in
| 2012.
|
| Construction started in 2017.
|
| It's expected to start producing power in 2027.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
| nine_k wrote:
| So, both sides are right. Nuclear is too slow, but renewables
| are not fast enough / sufficient either.
|
| Another thing is that politicians tend to plan that things
| will continue to go about as well as they are going at the
| moment, and the only major crisis ahead is the one being
| discussed at the moment. Nobody has the nerve to think that
| e.g. France will have trouble with several nuclear reactors
| at once, and a major war erupts in Europe at the same time.
| Ah, and a global pandemic right before that. Who in their
| right mind would vote for an energy budget based on such
| paranoid view of a possible future?
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| France is in trouble because nearly 50% of their nuclear
| reactors are offline due to maintenance.
|
| Sweden has taken down at least one reactor again for
| maintenance.
|
| Using that as an argument that we need more nuclear energy
| seems a bit off.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| 50% capacity factor for nuclear power is an aberration:
| typical capacity factors are over 90% [1] [2]. By comparison,
| capacity factors between 20-35% for wind and solar are the
| norm. Nuclear's capacity factor problems are also solve-able:
| France identified that irregular metallurgy caused faster
| corrosion, and this informs future builds. Nothing can make
| the wind blow more consistently, or make the sun stay in the
| sky for longer.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor 2.
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-
| reliab...
| pasiaj wrote:
| In Finland wind power provides roughly 30% of the nominal
| power on average. The problem is that it fluctuates between
| 0-80%.
|
| The National Emergency Supply Agency calculates 6% of the
| nominal power capacity as the guaranteed capacity of wind.
| Unfortunately even that is overly optimistic.
|
| During days when temperatures hover close zero, wind farms
| are shut down due to the danger from ice debris. This has
| caused zero production days of wind power in Finland during
| the last month.
|
| Our electricity prices have been 30x the normal.
|
| List of causes includes: importing electricity from Russia
| has been halted, unreliability of wind power, delays in
| building new nuclear power, premature shutting down of
| certain carbon based energy production, increased exports
| to Estonia and Germany due to Nordstream/Russia/Ukraine,
| increased exports to Sweden due to maintenance of a nuclear
| plant there. )
| r00fus wrote:
| France has the right strategy but failed to properly maintain
| for years due to stingy previous administrations.
|
| Then Macron's admin decided to push for maintenance all at
| once (likely because they were worried if he lost to Le Pen
| next cycle) but they failed to foresee the Ukraine war and
| loss of cheap Russian gas.
| namdnay wrote:
| France is in trouble because due to the same misguided anti-
| nuclear public sentiment, they stopped building new plants.
| The good news is that Putin has woken people up, and the
| public is now decidedly pro-nuclear.
| deevolution wrote:
| Probably because all of the French reactors are over 20 years
| old and the last operational reactor they built was in 2000..
| how is France going to replace the carbon free energy they
| get from their aging reactors? Average life span of reactors
| are between 20-40 years. Intuition tells me wind and solar
| ain't gonna cut it.
| epistasis wrote:
| France has been trying to start their fleet rebuild at
| Flamanville, but it's proving to take far far too long. 15
| years of construction and it's unclear when it will be
| generating electricity.
|
| Olkiluoto, using the same design, was trumpeted to be ready
| at the beginning of the year, but is still not online.
|
| Intuition tells me that after 4 decades of construction
| productivity being stagnant, we will not have any sudden
| improvements in construction productivity any time soon.
|
| Also, my intuition on wind and solar is entirely different
| from yours. It's already so much cheaper, faster, and
| easier to deploy wind onshore, wind offshore, and solar
| that I can't imagine nuclear being able to catch up. And
| storage is live today, and ready for the grid. We are
| scaling storage production capacity far more quickly than
| we could hope to scale nuclear construction capacity.
|
| The difficulty of commencing nuclear construction at, say,
| 500GW per year, is absolutely staggering. But we will be
| very close to that for wind and solar, correcting for
| capacity factor, quite soon.
| gcanyon wrote:
| For anyone who is (morbidly) curious, the "grisly suicide" --
| described at the time as bizarre, was slashing his ankles and
| neck in a (dry) bathtub
| http://www.strategosinc.com/downloads/nuclear_fizzle-dl1.pdf
|
| That article also has a ton more information on how Babcock and
| Wilcox failed.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Nuclear plants absolutely should take longer to build than a coal
| plant. Of course coal plants are awful and can cause
| environmental disasters, but when there is a flaw in their design
| or construction they don't make an entire area uninhabitable for
| a generation or more.
|
| Once more for the people in the back; we do not need nuclear.
| Renewables and storage are cheaper, faster and less risky.
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