[HN Gopher] Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmen...
___________________________________________________________________
Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes
Author : mdp2021
Score : 324 points
Date : 2023-04-21 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nationalinterest.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (nationalinterest.org)
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| Cue the atomic fanatics vs the renewable cult discussion. Has
| been discussed a thousand times on HN recently and it always
| seems both are just shouting how the other side can not see the
| obvious superiority of their fav energy source.
|
| why cant we have a bit of both? renewable seems very good long
| term and nuclear is also nice for transition. but I wouldnt want
| to live next to one of those crappy leaky french reactors.
| Kuinox wrote:
| > but I wouldnt want to live next to one of those crappy leaky
| french reactors.
|
| Well both side complain about truth and disinformation, and
| this affirmation is far from reality.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Because our for-profit energy sector has decided not to invest
| in nuclear, even with government subsidies. This is basic
| business. Are you as the CEO of an energy company going to
| invest tens of billions of dollars into a plant that won't be
| operational for decades or are you just going to stand up more
| wind farms where you can start realizing a profit the next
| year? If you want nuclear, you simply cannot have an energy
| grid dependent on companies who's goal is profit. This is why
| all of the talk about how great nuclear is simply doesn't
| matter. The market doesn't support it and we're ruled by the
| markets.
| epistasis wrote:
| No, we can't have a bit of both, because despite heroic efforts
| with tens of billions of dollars being dumped into nuclear
| since 2008, it hasn't produced.
|
| We tried four reactors back then, using a new regulatory
| process that was supposed to speed construction and reduce
| costs. Instead, costs and timelines ballooned 3x. Two of the
| four reactors were abandoned half-way through construction,
| resulting in rate payers holding the bag for billions of
| dollars and no Wh delivered to the grid. Executives are being
| criminally prosecuted for fraud.
|
| The other two reactors are supposed to complete late this year,
| but I don't think any honest person should rely on such
| timelines when they inevitably slip every single time.
|
| Nuclear is not something we can realiably build. We are bad at
| big construction jobs to begin with. But when you add in
| training up massive new workforces for extremely specialized
| welding or concrete pour skills, it's hugely inefficient
| because we don't know how to utilize this labor effectively.
| People sit idle for months, waiting for their chance to work.
| Just a gigantic clusterfuck of logistical (mis)management.
|
| And construction productivity has stagnated since the 70s,
| while manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof. We
| should use our limited construction capacity to build factories
| to manufacture things, not spend it on nuclear reactors. $15B
| spent on solar or battery production facilities will churn out
| many many GW year after year of additional capacity, whereas it
| only buys a single GW of nuclear. And that's in the best case
| scenario where we actually finish the damn reactor...
| evilos wrote:
| I guess you think the Koreans and Chinese are just
| fundamentally different from everyone else then because
| they're pumping out reactors just fine, today.
|
| The French, Americans, Russians, and Japanese have all had
| periods of time where they built them quickly and cost
| effectively too. But then various institutional rot sets in.
| We're going to have to keep building big things anyways so
| it's not like having that capability is wasted.
| epistasis wrote:
| There definitely are fundamental differences in our
| capabilities here, and you seem to believe the same too.
|
| Look, for example, at the challenges that are being
| experienced as we try to build chip fabs in the US.
|
| Instintutional knowledge and capability are real things.
| And I definitely think that construction capability is an
| important thing to build.
|
| But let's improve our construction capability on building
| real things that get built and improve our capabilities,
| such as battery factories or solar panel factories or
| transmission lines or other things that get build closer to
| on-time, and then use those contractors that succeed to try
| more ambitious projects.
|
| Let's not piss away billions of dollars with no sustained
| knowledge growth or construction capacity improvement.
| Trying to build even, say, 10GW of new nuclear right now
| would be posing away 90% of the capital. We don't even know
| who we would really hire for this!
|
| Until we have a track record that's strong enough to
| attract investment, I don't see the rush to burn money on
| nuclear builds. It won't help the climate, and it doesn't
| even help the nuclear industry.
| evilos wrote:
| We already paid the first of a kind cost at Votgle,
| ordering several more AP1000s is exactly what we should
| do at this point. We now have a workforce that has made
| the mistakes and knows what not to do.
|
| If you don't want to do that, you can do what the UAE did
| and hire the Koreans to teach you how to build plants.
| They went from no nuclear program to 5.4 GW of clean
| energy in 10 ish years.
| scythe wrote:
| >We tried four reactors back then, using a new regulatory
| process that was supposed to speed construction and reduce
| costs. Instead, costs and timelines ballooned 3x. Two of the
| four reactors were abandoned half-way through construction,
| resulting in rate payers holding the bag for billions of
| dollars and no Wh delivered to the grid.
|
| These were the Westinghouse AP1000 units to be installed in
| Georgia and South Carolina, contract beginning in 2008. It's
| worth noting that four other AP1000 units also from
| Westinghouse were built and installed in China, beginning
| construction in 2009 and entering into operation in 2018. The
| total cost of both systems was slightly more than half the
| cost of the failed project in South Carolina.
|
| >And construction productivity has stagnated since the 70s,
| while manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof.
|
| You seem to be arguing that we shouldn't bother building
| major projects, but I think this implies the opposite: we
| need to find ways to fix the construction industry. The US is
| currently facing a situation where cities can't grow like
| they used to; growing cities quickly become unaffordable,
| where by contrast Chicago sustained rapid growth for decades
| before the Great Depression.
| epistasis wrote:
| We go into the energy transition with the economy and
| construction capacity we have, not the construction
| capacity we wish we had.
|
| The time to transition is now, and making that transition
| with the ample tools we have right now is a good thing.
| It's not an argument that we _shouldnt_ improve
| construction. It 's an argument that we should at a minimum
| do what we know how to do.
|
| If you have ideas on how to improve construction efficiency
| in the US, it's an absolutely massive addressable market
| that gets too little attention, and should definitely be
| addressed. I would love to go work for somebody that is
| fixing construction, if I had the right skills. I would
| love even more to do it myself, but I have zero experience
| or ideas.
| aclatuts wrote:
| I feel like the oil industry has astroturfed nuclear energy,
| and NIMBYs love it because they know there can not be any
| significant nuclear capacity that will come online until 2030
| at the earliest. Which is my biggest problem with pro nuclear
| arguments.
| runarberg wrote:
| I don't think you are wrong. This article in particular is
| written by a consultant that works for a lobby group who's
| largest funders include energy companies with large fossil
| fuel portfolio, looking at the author's twitter profile and
| writing history revels he's only real concern with coal seems
| to be that China is doing it but not USA (there is also a
| bunch of FUD spreading around renewables, climate denialism,
| and conspiracy theories, including the great reset).
| dale_glass wrote:
| > why cant we have a bit of both?
|
| Because they're economically incompatible.
|
| Nuclear is very expensive to build, and wants to run 24/7 to
| offset costs. They also want to run continuously.
|
| The problem is that renewables are cheap, but intermittent.
|
| So take an economically rational marketplace. I can either buy
| the same amount of power for $1, or for $2, what do you think
| I'd choose? $1 of course. Power is power, I don't want to pay
| more than I must.
|
| So any time I can buy renewables for $1, nuclear makes no
| revenue. This pushes off its payoff into the future. This isn't
| a good situation to be in. Time goes by, components get older,
| people get impatient, more renewables keep getting built.
|
| Now you're a bank considering a loan for nuclear you think
| might be paid off in 20 years. Or if renewables keep growing,
| maybe in 40. Or if they really take off, maybe never. Risking
| billions that way doesn't sound enticing, now does it?
|
| If nuclear made money we wouldn't be seeing these blog posts
| show up over and over. Money solves many problems and greases
| many palms. If nuclear was profitable, every other problem
| would be solvable. Not enough safety? Money can buy that. Too
| close to people? Money can put a plant further away. Legal
| problems? Money pays for lawyers.
|
| The logical end state of all this seems to be that renewables
| kill off the profitability of nuclear badly enough that nobody
| builds it (relatively speaking). Eventually the grid
| destabilizes and this forces urgent measures to shore things
| up. The final state I imagine is a very renewable-heavy grid,
| after a period of chaos in the middle.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| The average age of nuclear plants in the US is 40 years old.
|
| I can't believe that modern nuclear plants wouldn't be
| dramatically more profitable.
|
| Even if they weren't, it would be worth government incentives
| to prevent grid destabilization as wind and solar take over
| as the main sources.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Nuclear has only ever gotten more expensive, never cheaper.
| SMRs seem interesting, but at this point they're more
| science fiction than reality.
| epistasis wrote:
| I did see a more recent and very comprehensive paper that
| found a few countries where costs haven't ballooned, or
| even fallen by very tiny amounts. Whether those
| situations can be replicated is unclear.
|
| But even if we get to the best case scenario of small
| cost drops, nuclear will never compete with the tech
| cruces of storage and solar. It does not have the
| characteristics of a tech with falling costs, without a
| complete revolution in its operation, the likes of which
| I have not seen imagined by anyone. Thorium and SMRs are
| minor tweaks that who not reach the type of tech
| revolution needed to make nuclear into a tech with
| falling costs.
|
| There might be a few niche locations for which nuclear is
| the cheapest option, such as maybe Finland who was able
| to finally get their new single reactor online, a year
| delayed from the first time they declared it online. But
| these are the exceptions. Unclear is it a general purpose
| technology, it should be viewed as useful only in special
| circumstances where traditional tech fails.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Nuclear plants aren't used for grid stabilization, because
| they can't be. They take hours to days to change power
| levels.
|
| Fast-responding natural gas plants are used for rapid
| response to changing load. Hydro (storage or regular) as
| well. More recently, energy storage systems like the huge
| system Tesla deployed in Australia.
|
| If I had a dollar for every HN commenter that doesn't
| understand the basics of grids and generation but considers
| themselves an expert in how awesome nuclear is...
| dale_glass wrote:
| > I can't believe that modern nuclear plants wouldn't be
| dramatically more profitable.
|
| I can.
|
| First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl
| happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That
| costs money. Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better
| backup plans. That costs money. Renewables skip this
| completely.
|
| Second, renewables also benefit from progress, but a lot
| more. Solar and wind are mass industry production. Each
| iteration is cheap. Experimentation is cheap and safe and
| done all over the world. Production is highly amenable
| towards automation. Nuclear isn't.
|
| So we have factories pumping out millions of solar cells,
| but we don't have factories pumping out millions of nuclear
| vessels, because nuclear plants are rare, one off projects
| that don't justify mass production, and are too rare to
| have a robust industry and lots of competition.
|
| > Even if they weren't, it would be worth government
| incentives to prevent grid destabilization as wind and
| solar take over as the main sources.
|
| Yeah, but there are other options that can be used. Eg,
| yeah, we can spend decades building nuclear and waiting
| until it starts to work, or we can do things like improving
| the grid transmission which works out to simple tasks that
| are doable much faster and amenable to mass production.
|
| Same goes for say, pumped hydro and battery storage. Those
| things can already be done, and you can start doing it much
| faster than you'll get nuclear built.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl
| happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That
| costs money.
|
| Western nuclear power plants always had containment
| buildings, so no, this isn't a factor.
|
| > Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better backup
| plans.
|
| Most places aren't subject to magnitude 9.1 earthquakes,
| so no such plans are needed.
|
| Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale. Building
| a nuclear power plant involves constructing things like
| pressure vessels and steam generators that have no market
| outside of nuclear power construction. The price history
| of nuclear plants demonstrates this: The plants built
| during the nuclear boom during the late 60s and early 70s
| were some of the cheapest forms of decarbonized energy
| production [1]. Producing a run of 40 steam generators
| [2] is a lot cheaper than a run of 4 steam generators.
| Same with pressure vessels, and other costly components.
| Serialized production of the same design yields cost
| savings.
|
| > Same goes for say, pumped hydro and battery storage.
| Those things can already be done, and you can start doing
| it much faster than you'll get nuclear built.
|
| No, we can't. This is just hand-waving away the biggest
| obstacle to widespread deployment of intermittent
| sources. Hydro storage is geographically dependent: you
| essentially need to be able to create an artificial
| alpine lake, and it needs to be close to an existing lake
| or river in order to fill it.
|
| Battery storage remains prohibitively expensive. The
| actual cost of battery storage is much higher than the
| raw cost of lithium batteries [3]. Labor, installation,
| and DC to AC conversion equipment leads to net costs of
| ~$500/KWh.
|
| This is why plans for a grid primarily powered
| intermittent sources assume that some other battery
| chemistry or hydrogen storage will make energy storage
| essentially free.
|
| 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030
| 142151...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear
| _power...
|
| 3. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-
| storage-co...
| Kon5ole wrote:
| >Western nuclear power plants always had containment
| buildings, so no, this isn't a factor.
|
| You can't build a building that contains a steam
| explosion from a runaway reactor. If you could, the
| reactor could be made indestructible in the first place.
|
| Chernobyl has cost over 600 bn since 1986 and costs
| billions per year still, and will do so for the
| foreseeable future. The same goes for Fukushima.
|
| Such costs could appear at any time, anywhere in the
| world that has a nuclear reactor. For example due to
| negligence, acts of war or terrorism. No earthquake
| required.
|
| >Hydro storage is geographically dependent: you
| essentially need to be able to create an artificial
| alpine lake
|
| True if you want to create it from scratch, but many
| countries already have lots of hydro that could be
| increased by adding pumps to existing dams. Other
| countries can use other methods, like store heat, for
| example in molten salt. Thermal solar power plants
| generate power even during the night. Or you can generate
| Hydrogen or Nitrogen. Or you can store pressurized air on
| the ocean floor. Or you can use batteries.
|
| There are a number of options, and they all have the
| benefit of being safe enough and cheap enough that they
| can be made by anyone anywhere, even at small scale.
|
| I personally think that the ease of deployment will be
| the killer feature for storage, as it was for solar.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Most places aren't subject to magnitude 9.1
| earthquakes, so no such plans are needed.
|
| I've seen this argument repeated a lot lately, and it's
| annoying, because it focuses entirely on the wrong thing.
| What went wrong with Fukushima was not the earthquake
| itself, but the _flooding_ caused by it. A lot more
| places in the world are vulnerable to flooding than they
| are to earthquakes (I myself live in one of these: zero
| noticeable earthquakes, a lot of rain-caused flooding and
| landslides, and next to a nuclear power complex). And
| AFAIK, all or nearly all nuclear power plants in the
| world reviewed their backup power systems after
| Fukushima, to make sure their generators and power
| switches are not in an area of the plant which could be
| flooded.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| To be more specific, the tsunami caused by it. And
| without the massive 9.1 earthquake there would have been
| no tsunami. Flooding from rain or snowmelt is far more
| gradual.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > Western nuclear power plants always had containment
| buildings, so no, this isn't a factor.
|
| The point is that nuclear is safe because we've been
| making it safer over time, and that rarely makes it
| cheaper. The specific ways in which that's done isn't the
| point.
|
| Mass production in general is made cheaper by simplifying
| and cutting corners. Nuclear isn't terribly friendly
| towards this, you can't just go "How about we use 30%
| less concrete?"
|
| > Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale.
|
| Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely
| because of what you said, they have no other market use.
| You'll need to convince industries that it's worth
| scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That
| will be tricky.
|
| > No, we can't.
|
| You're missing the point. Here's what I envision:
|
| 1. Renewables continue to eat nuclear's lunch 2. Nuclear
| keeps not getting built 3. Eventually grid destabilizes
| 4. People want solutions, right now
|
| At point 4, nobody is going to sit there and wait 5-10
| years for nuclear to be built. Yeah, batteries are
| expensive, but remember Tesla's battery in Australia that
| got done in 100 days?
|
| So that's how I see things going. Once the shit hits the
| fan, urgent solutions will be needed. And pretty much
| everything is much faster than nuclear.
|
| I'm not envisioning some utopic future, but one where
| problems will be ignored until something goes quite
| wrong, that's going to suck for a while, then things get
| hurriedly rectified in a huge rush and at great expense,
| but that will still favor non-nuclear solutions.
| zdragnar wrote:
| > Mass production in general is made cheaper by
| simplifying and cutting corners
|
| This is painfully wrong. Go shopping for pretty much any
| industrial part, and you'll pay through the nose for a
| few. Order a few dozen, and you get massive discounts in
| price for identical products.
|
| It takes time and effort to configure machines and
| tooling to produce something. Those are fixed costs- the
| more you order, the per-unit price of those fixed costs
| drops.
|
| > Once the shit hits the fan
|
| That's not gonna happen. No climate model is predicting a
| doomsday event. It's going to continue to be a slow,
| gradually worsening crisis at worst. From a political
| perspective, it'll never need an urgent solution, because
| next year isn't going to be significantly different from
| this year- just a little bit. Even for those people who
| finally realize they're going to be displaced, no urgent
| solution could possibly turn back the clock, short of a
| massive deployment of C02 removal from the atmosphere.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > That's not gonna happen. No climate model is predicting
| a doomsday event.
|
| I'm not talking about the climate. I'm talking about the
| grid.
|
| My prediction is that we'll keep on building renewables
| until renewables break the grid, then patch it up in a
| hurry, and nuclear will still not be built in the end.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > The point is that nuclear is safe because we've been
| making it safer over time, and that rarely makes it
| cheaper. The specific ways in which that's done isn't the
| point.
|
| Er, no it _is_ the point. We 've always been using the
| safety mechanisms you specified, so it's not going to
| affect costs because those safety features have _always_
| been there.
|
| > Everything does, but nuclear benefits less. Precisely
| because of what you said, they have no other market use.
| You'll need to convince industries that it's worth
| scaling up for that, and that it won't backfire. That
| will be tricky.
|
| Quite the contrary, it makes it benefit _vastly_ more
| from economies of scale. For example, one of the central
| components in a wind turbine is an alternator or dynamo.
| We make alternators for all kinds of products, so
| doubling the production of wind turbines doesn 't
| remotely double the market for alternators because wind
| turbines are only a small segment of the market for
| alternators.
|
| By comparison, nuclear pressure vessels are only used for
| nuclear power plants. Thus doubling the production of
| nuclear pressure vessels doubles the market for pressure
| vessels. Serialized production of nuclear power at scale
| would easily expand the market for nuclear power
| components by an order of magnitude. The same cannot be
| said of wind turbines and alternators.
|
| You're missing the context that renewables are currently
| being used to _supplement_ a primarily fossil fuel grid.
| This means we don 't actually have to accommodate the
| intermittent nature of renewable production. Once
| renewables saturate the energy market during peak
| production, things become a lot harder for renewables.
| You're comparing apples to oranges when you compare an
| intermittent source to a non-intermittent source.
|
| People want solutions right now, and intermittent sources
| are not a solution until cheap and scalable energy
| storage is invented. Which it hasn't. We have
| geographically-limited options like hydro which are good
| for the regions that have access to it. But for
| everywhere else, it's either continue to use fossil fuels
| or nuclear power.
|
| > Yeah, batteries are expensive, but remember Tesla's
| battery in Australia that got done in 100 days?
|
| How much does it store? Media reports this as "2,000
| megawatt seconds" [1]. In other words, 0.55 megawatt
| hours. This is less electricity than a small nuclear
| plant produces _every minute_. To put this in perspective
| the US alone consumes about 12 TWh (or 12,000,000 MWh) of
| electricity every day. We 'd need tens of millions of
| these battery facilities.
|
| Again, there's a reason why plans for a primary renewable
| grid assume hydrogen storage, or some new battery
| chemistry will be a silver bullet for storage.
|
| 1. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-
| battery-beg...
| dale_glass wrote:
| > Er, no it is the point. We've always been using the
| safety mechanisms you specified, so it's not going to
| affect costs because those safety features have always
| been there.
|
| Again, the point is a generic one. When we find a problem
| with nuclear, we add extra safety systems. Those cost
| money. This is something much rarer with say, solar or
| wind because there's less that can go wrong, less backups
| needed, and breakage is much more acceptable.
|
| > We make alternators for all kinds of products, so
| doubling the production of wind turbines doesn't remotely
| double the market for alternators because wind turbines
| are only a small segment of the market for alternators.
|
| But it does mean there's factories already pumping them
| out, plentiful production capacity, competition, and
| cheap prices.
|
| > People want solutions right now, and intermittent
| sources are not a solution until cheap and scalable
| energy storage is invented.
|
| I don't think you're still quite getting what I'm getting
| at.
|
| Consideration on the level you speak of doesn't exist.
| Nobody is in charge of the whole system, so a full
| functional system doesn't matter.
|
| People will build intermittent sources because they're
| cheap to build, and because intermittency isn't the
| provider's problem.
|
| Then things break, and people will seek solutions. There
| will be a rush and various patchwork solutions being
| implemented in a panic.
|
| You're thinking like a sane person, trying to transition
| to a different stable system and ensuring it will work
| properly from the start. I think that won't be the case.
| We will keep pushing until things break, everyone will
| blame everyone else, and we'll need to fix things in a
| hurry.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Again, the point is a generic one. When we find a
| problem with nuclear, we add extra safety systems. Those
| cost money.
|
| And again, we _already_ added that safety system. There
| is no "extra safety systems" because it's already there.
|
| > But it does mean there's factories already pumping them
| out, plentiful production capacity, competition, and
| cheap prices.
|
| Exactly: production is already at scale so making a large
| order for a bunch of alternators isn't going to lead to
| further saving because it's a drop in the total market
| for alternators. As a contrast to nuclear power
| components - where nuclear plants are the _only_ market -
| so a tenfold increase in the production of nuclear plants
| leads to a tenfold increase in the production of pressure
| vessels.
|
| > People will build intermittent sources because they're
| cheap to build, and because intermittency isn't the
| provider's problem. Then things break, and people will
| seek solutions. There will be a rush and various
| patchwork solutions being implemented in a panic.
|
| Correct, and the solution to intermittency that we've
| found is to burn fossil fuels. The battery storage
| facilities being provisioned are nowhere near large
| enough to be significant. Hydroelectric storage requires
| specific geographic features, and isn't widely available.
| You're right: when we have shortages of electricity
| people will implement solutions. And the solution grid
| operators have found to the intermittency problem is to
| continue burning fossil fuels.
| evilos wrote:
| Everyone is assuming/hoping that a majority renewables
| national energy system is possible/economical. I don't
| think it is, but even if you do it's a gamble. No one is
| sure because it's not been done before. At a minimum
| you'll have to build several thousands of miles of new
| transmission and millions of panels/turbines. Those
| panels/turbines will last maybe 30 years. Batteries
| aren't going to cut it, you'll need underground hydrogen
| storage. That's never been done for energy storage
| before. And hydrogen is a lousy battery, you'll get half
| your energy back out at best. There's too much
| uncertainty.
|
| Nuclear fits our existing grid paradigm, and it can be
| built quickly if we let ourselves. Japan's median reactor
| build time was under 4 years. France built out their
| nuclear fleet in 15 to 20 years. It's literally been done
| before.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| A bit pedantic here, but majority renewable national
| energy systems have been built but only with
| hydroelectricity. Norway and some other countries
| generate >95% of their electricity from dams.
|
| But of course, dams can't be built everywhere, so it's
| not a scalable solution.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Why would you expect modern nuclear plants to be more
| profitable? Most of the costs of a nuclear plant are
| capital costs, which have been increasing faster than the
| increases in what the generated electricity can be sold
| for.
| llsf wrote:
| True, it is mostly a capital cost for nuclear. That is
| probably why it makes more sense to get it paid by
| government.
| pydry wrote:
| Isnt this "argument to moderation"?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The issue is that nuclear largely makes renewables redundant.
| Nuclear is just as cheap to run 24/7 as it is to run half the
| time, unlike fossil fuels.
|
| Right now, the way we're using intermittent sources is to shut
| fossil fuel plants off when renewables are producing and turn
| them back on when they are not producing. Intermittent sources
| are essentially supplementing a grid based in fossil fuels.
|
| If we use nuclear plants to fill in the gaps in intermittent
| sources' production curves, then we'd have already built enough
| nuclear capacity to run the grid without intermittent sources
| so we'd just run nuclear plants at full capacity and eliminate
| the need for intermittent sources.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| I feel like most people I know who push Nuclear are already
| arguing for the use of both, and it's the renewable side that
| argues that Nuclear is too dangerous to use or not necessary.
| Or have you come across a lot of Nuclear proponents arguing
| that we shouldn't be using solar energy at all?
| wolfram74 wrote:
| I was very pro nuclear a few years ago, at this point solar
| is so far up the learning curve and experiences so many
| economy of scale benefits, it's really hard imagining what
| kind of regulatory framework would be able to make it
| economically competitive.
|
| We collectively in the form of consumers and governments
| decide how expensive a thing is, and for 50 years, thanks in
| part to a lot of coal lobby money, decided nuclear should be
| more expensive than coal, so we got all the radiation /and/
| all the CO2 associated with coal power plants, we can't
| change that history at this point.
| runarberg wrote:
| The author of this article for one is someone who does not
| believe renewables should coexist with anything. Preferring
| continued use of coal over expanding renewables:
|
| > Possibly, wind, solar, and utility-scale batteries can play
| some role in consistent electricity. Until that takes place
| coal, natural gas, and nuclear are the only sources of energy
| to electricity that provide this benefit for grid
| stabilization and human longevity.
|
| https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/coal-versus-wind-
| rene...
| epistasis wrote:
| The only people I meet who argue in favor of nuclear also
| spend a ton of time arguing against solar, wind, and storage.
| They also actively promote outdated incorrect knowledge of
| these technologies.
|
| YMMV, of course!
|
| For an example in this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35658964
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| I do find it pretty crazy that anyone would argue against
| solar (and wind where it's viable) at this point, it's just
| way too cost efficient. (The feasibility and cost of grid
| scale storage is where my concerns lie)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Renewable energy is the answer, on a scale large enough to solve
| the energy requirements.
|
| The other part of the equation completely ignored by everyone is
| _energy saving_.
|
| There's really no systematic effort at all to reduce the amount
| of energy society consumes.
| andruby wrote:
| Of course there is.
|
| Incandescent lights have been banned for years in most European
| countries to speed up the adoption of led-lighting. Street
| lights are being replaces by leds. Tax cuts and subsidies are
| given for energy efficient housing.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I knew someone would say "but light globes!". Yes of course
| all appliances are now energy rated etc.
|
| In some countries inefficient lightglobes are banned.
|
| But I'm not talking about that - I'm talking about systematic
| change in behaviour of homes and business to try to use less
| energy, perhaps encouraged through tax or other incentives.
| jhp123 wrote:
| the article mentions that 2 billion tons of coal would be needed
| to manufacture solar panels to meet half of today's global energy
| needs with renewables. That is about 3 months of global coal
| consumption at current rates. If we decide to go all in on
| nuclear instead, we can turn off the coal plants in a mere 15
| years or so.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Think of all the new disasters we'll get to experience with
| thousands of new nuclear power plants.
| llsf wrote:
| France has been using nuclear power plants for more than 50
| years, producing up to 75% of all electricity and exporting
| to other countries, and did not suffer any disaster. There
| has been natural nuclear power plants that has been running
| for few hundred thousand years (e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine)... so nature did it
| before us, and nature did not really care and left all the
| waste on the site. We have found more efficient ways to
| produce, reuse the waste and properly dispose it.
| illiarian wrote:
| Relevant: "Germany's 66.5 GW of installed wind is only producing
| as much as the 3 reactors that turned off last night used to
| produce."
| https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396
| stefan_ wrote:
| Relevant, for when you are a simpleton that believes in cherry-
| picked data.
| [deleted]
| Krasnol wrote:
| Wind alone produces ~20% of the recent years electricity in
| Germany.
|
| Nuclear produced only half of that in recent years.
|
| The whole renewable energy production covers ~40% of all the
| energy produced. Despite 16 years of almost full stop of
| expansion.
|
| https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...
| illiarian wrote:
| > Wind alone produces ~20% of the recent years electricity in
| Germany.
|
| Yearly production means nothing on the night when it produces
| single-digit percentages of its installed capacity, does it?
| 7952 wrote:
| Yes absolutely, if the goal is co2 reduction.
| lispm wrote:
| We can import electricity from the European grids we are
| connected to.
|
| For example my region has recently brought up a 1.4 GW HVDC
| underwater cable, which can be used in both directions. It
| connects North Germany to Hydro power in Norway.
| illiarian wrote:
| > We can import electricity from the European grids we
| are connected to.
|
| Ah yes. The magical grid that will surely have the
| capacity to supply all of Germany's power if suddenly
| there's night and no wind just in Germany (and nowhere
| else in Europe, stopping at the border, apparently).
| lispm wrote:
| This is rare and currently we have a diverse mix of
| electricity production. When wind gets more dominant, it
| will be offshore and connected to a larger North Sea
| grid. Then storage will be more important and also more
| viable.
|
| I'd guess that in ten years the max capacity for wind
| electrical energy in my region (Northern Germany) is
| around 2 to 3 times larger than the max demand. Thus
| large scale storage will be build up.
| illiarian wrote:
| > This is rare
|
| This literally happened just 6 days ago.
|
| > we have a diverse mix of electricity production.
|
| Yes, yes we do: coal and biofuel (so more burning), and
| corn for biofuel is taking up 6% of Germany's land area.
|
| > When wind gets more dominant, it will be offshore and
| connected to a larger North Sea grid
|
| So, some magical future
|
| > I'd guess that in ten years the max capacity for wind
| electrical energy in my region (Northern Germany) is
| around 2 to 3 times larger than the max demand.
|
| Max capacity means nothing when production is low.
|
| > Thus large scale storage will be build up.
|
| More magical thinking (there are currently no grid-scale
| storage solutions that would've survived just one night
| from the link I provided)
| lispm wrote:
| > This literally happened just 6 days ago.
|
| On what day it happened is independent of how often this
| happens, for how long, with what demand and the amount of
| other electricity supplies..
|
| > So, some magical future
|
| A nice slogan you have here. It sounds cute, but
| essentially it is pessimistic and anti-technology.
|
| We heard this twenty years ago. This year the share of
| renewable energy for electricity production is 50%. In a
| decade it will be much higher. The prices for deployment
| are going down. The cost for nuclear is going up, nuclear
| projects often have huge cost overruns and are slow to
| deploy. Example: The 'new' Finnish EPR reactor is 8
| billion Euros more expensive than planned (up from 3
| billion to 11 billion Euros) and 13 years late. Without
| government invention the building company from France
| (Areva) would have been killed - it had to take a 5
| billion Euro loss from building the power plant with a
| fixed-price contract.
|
| > Max capacity means nothing when production is low.
|
| A high max capacity means that it makes sense to invest
| in storage and backup technology.
|
| > More magical thinking (there are currently no grid-
| scale storage solutions that would've survived just one
| night from the link I provided)
|
| We also currently have not the wind dependence. In the
| future this will change with more offshore wind farms.
|
| That has nothing to do with 'magical thinking', it has to
| do with investments into technology and the created
| market conditions. Grid scale in the future means that
| there will be a large amount of storage options, backup
| supplies and diverse forms of demand steering.
| illiarian wrote:
| > On what day it happened is independent of how often
| this happens, for how long, with what demand and the
| amount of other electricity supplies..
|
| This was a regular sping night in a nation of 80 million
| people in the middle of Europe. Which means that for a
| lot of the rest of Europe it was also a quite night.
|
| > It sounds cute, but essentially it is pessimistic and
| anti-technology.
|
| No. It's realistic. Every time you show problems with
| intermittent generation by renewables, the answer is
| "sometime in unknown future we will surely build enough,
| and enough grid storage to boot".
|
| > The 'new' finnish reactor is 8 billion Euros more
| expensive than planned
|
| --- start quote ---
|
| Almost three-quarters of hydropower, water, coal and
| nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49%
| on average,
|
| https://www.offshorewind.biz/2016/12/02/offshore-wind-
| projec...
|
| --- end quote ---
|
| Cost overruns are not unique to nuclear. Especially
| considering how underinvested nuclera has been for the
| past 20-30 people who keep spreading FUD.
|
| When there's political will, there are results. Fuqing
| Nuclear Power Plant in China: 6.1 GW nameplate capacity.
| Built over 14 years at 1 reactor per 6 years.
| Operational. Estimated cost 16 bln USD.
|
| > We also currently have not the wind dependence. In the
| future this will change.
|
| I shudder to think about the future where we depend on
| whether or not the wind will blow at night.
|
| > it has to do with investments into technology
|
| There are also laws of physics and reality.
| lispm wrote:
| > This was a regular sping night in a nation of 80
| million people in the middle of Europe. Which means that
| for a lot of the rest of Europe it was also a quite
| night.
|
| Nothing happened. In ten years we have 80% renewable.
| Again, nothing will happen.
|
| > the answer is "sometime in unknown future we will
| surely build enough, and enough grid storage to boot".
|
| Look at a nuclear power plant. If one starts building
| today, the reactor could be ready in 5, 10 or twenty
| years. In Finnland the EPR was 13 years late.
|
| Renewable can be deployed much faster and more reliable.
|
| > Almost three-quarters of hydropower, water, coal and
| nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49%
| on average,
|
| The new Finnish reactor was 3.6 times more expensive than
| planned. That's a much larger price increase.
|
| > When there's political will,
|
| of a dictatorship
|
| > there are results. Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant in China:
| 6.1 GW nameplate capacity. Built over 14 years at 1
| reactor per 6 years. Operational. Estimated cost 16 bln
| USD.
|
| Try to do the same in Western Europe...
|
| Btw, China deploys two large coal power plant blocks
| every week. -> to quote you: "When there's political
| will, there are results."
|
| See the share of nuclear in China:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
| #/m...
|
| Tiny.
|
| > I shudder to think about the future where we depend on
| whether or not the wind will blow at night.
|
| I don't.
|
| > There are also laws of physics and reality.
|
| Another slogan. What does it have to do with energy
| politics and technology?
| the_third_wave wrote:
| We - in Sweden - noticed this when we saw our electricity
| prices go through the roof due to those interconnects
| enabling German prices to trickle back up the lines.
| Thanks to the boneheaded "green" politicos in Germany
| shutting down nuclear power plants we'll be paying more
| for our electricity in the coming years. Please, German
| neighbours, vote out those watermelons and put some sense
| back in to the Bundestag.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Back? Are you even aware that no party besides a small
| fascist party want nuclear back or did anything in recent
| years to stop the exit? The previous Government (today's
| largest opposition) had 16 years to stop the nuclear
| exit. They didn't. Even before Fukushima.
|
| I wonder where you got this approach from since you've
| obviously not come up with it by yourself through
| research.
| lispm wrote:
| If nuclear is so great in Sweden, why were so many plants
| closed there?
| illiarian wrote:
| Politics. Then politics. Then FUD and more politics.
|
| As a result last year energy prices shot up and there was
| nothing to counterbalance energy shortages.
| lispm wrote:
| Energy is always politics.
|
| Nuclear has been expensive in Sweden.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Nuclear power in Sweden was expensive due to the
| "effektskatt" [1] (power output tax) which was levied
| specifically on nuclear power, ostensibly to pay for
| dismantling nuclear power plants after they were shut
| down. This tax made up about 25% of the production costs
| in the end [2].
|
| [1] https://naringslivets-medieinstitut.se/det-var-
| marknaden-som...
|
| [2] https://skatteupproret.se/skatt-pa-karnkraft/
| Krasnol wrote:
| So it actually showed the real price of nuclear since
| dismantling is part of it.
| illiarian wrote:
| And yet power plant closures were entirely due to
| politics, not the cost.
|
| Now the price of energy in Sweden _quintuples_ depending
| on demand:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1271491/sweden-
| monthly-w... I am just _so_ glad that the _expensive_
| energy is out of the picture. (That was sarcasm, I chose
| to pay for electricity coming from nuclear, and it 's not
| meanigfully more expensive than other types)
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Due to the same "green" politicos having been in power
| the last 8 years [1]. The power plants they closed could
| have been kept in service - they had been recertified up
| to 2035 - but they closed them anyway. This was a
| political decision, not one based on demand - support for
| nuclear power has surged in Sweden - or technological
| deficiencies.
|
| [1] https://08nytt.se/naringsliv/mp-erkanner-avvecklat-
| karnkraft...
| [deleted]
| _ph_ wrote:
| Just to avoid any misunderstandings, the schedule to
| close all nuclear reactors in Germany by the end of 2022
| was set by CDU/CSU together with the FDP. Which then went
| on to curb the buildup of renewables.
| realusername wrote:
| > Yearly production means nothing on the night when it
| produces single-digit percentages of its installed
| capacity, does it?
|
| It's even worse than that actually because the electricity
| demand isn't linear during the year.
|
| So technologies which can produce reliably during the high
| loads are inherently worth more than the others.
| ben_w wrote:
| Other way around, the installed capacity is the meaningless
| number, the actual production is the only thing that
| matters.
|
| By way of example: install PV upside down, "capacity" is
| the same, but now it's useless.
| illiarian wrote:
| > Other way around, the installed capacity is the
| meaningless number, the actual production is the only
| thing that matters.
|
| This is beautifully put, thank you
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables.
| Plus renewables are extremely intermittent power sources.
| Nuclear solves both the land-use and consistency problems.
|
| Plus, from the article: "...to build enough wind turbines and
| solar panels to supply at least half the electricity needed
| for global consumption 'would require two billions tons of
| coal to produce the concrete and steel, along with two
| billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades. [And]
| more than 90% of the world's solar panels are built in Asia
| on coal-heavy electrical grids.'"
|
| https://www.manhattan-institute.org/if-you-want-renewable-
| en...
| schleck8 wrote:
| > Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables.
|
| I'm from Northern Germany where all the wind turbines are
| and you are wrong
| Krasnol wrote:
| No we won't.
|
| There are plenty of studies on the topic. Those areas are
| there and already identified. Wind alone would just double
| to manage the Energiewende by 2050:
| https://www.naturschutz-
| energiewende.de/aktuelles/flaechenve...
|
| I don't get your other argument.
|
| If you push for renewables instead of wasting money on over
| due and over budget nuclear reactors, you can create an
| industry at home. Create massive amounts of jobs and
| improve on the technology.
|
| It's already happening and those improvements are way
| faster than everything we've seen with nuclear in the
| recent decades.
| illiarian wrote:
| > If you push for renewables instead of wasting money on
| over due and over budget nuclear reactors
|
| --- start quote ---
|
| Ernst & Young (EY) has found that an average power and
| utility megaproject is delivered 35% over budget and two
| years behind schedule
|
| Of the megaprojects surveyed, 64% were delayed and 57%
| were over budge. Almost three-quarters of hydropower,
| water, coal and nuclear infrastructure projects were over
| budget by 49% on average,
|
| --- end quote ---
|
| https://www.offshorewind.biz/2016/12/02/offshore-wind-
| projec...
|
| "Data shows the avg. 50MW PV construction project delays
| cost $2M. The average solar construction project is
| delayed by about 20% with the consequences hovering
| around $2M in costs."
|
| https://percepto.co/solar-construction-delays-budget-
| overrun...
| ben_w wrote:
| > nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49%
| on average,
|
| Ahem.
| illiarian wrote:
| Let me fix that quote for you:
|
| "Almost three-quarters of hydropower, water, coal and
| nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49%
| on average,".
|
| ALL OF THEM. Not just nuclear.
| ben_w wrote:
| You're the one promoting nuclear as if it's better than
| the rest in this regard.
|
| Nuclear is... just another mega project, just like the
| rest.
|
| You don't get to use that quote to say everything _else_
| is more expense when it 's everything _including_ your
| darling.
| illiarian wrote:
| > You're the one promoting nuclear as if it's better than
| the rest in this regard.
|
| Do not ascribe words to me that I didn't say or imply
|
| > You don't get to use that quote to say everything else
| is more expense
|
| I literally said nothing of the kind
| ben_w wrote:
| Even ignoring all those words you used meaning to me what
| I said they mean (and hence unavoidably "implying" even
| if you now wish to say you were misunderstood, which is
| totally a thing I get and have experienced in reverse):
|
| You know we can see your comments, right?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=illiarian
|
| And you've got a... distinct... writing style, so I
| recognised you from a few days ago before seeing your
| user name:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35618522
| illiarian wrote:
| > You know we can see your comments, right?
|
| Yes, I do.
|
| > And you've got a... distinct... writing style
|
| Ad hominem is not as good an argument as you think it is.
|
| So. This is what I _actually_ wrote, and not what you
| pretend I wrote.
|
| The original statement was this: "If you push for
| renewables instead of wasting money on over due and over
| budget nuclear reactors"
|
| To which I replied: "Almost three-quarters of hydropower,
| water, coal and nuclear infrastructure projects were over
| budget by 49% on average"
|
| Which means only one thing: renewable projects are just
| as prone to time and buget overruns as nuclear. That is
| _it_.
|
| How you imagined what you think I wrote, I cannot even
| begin to comprehend.
| ben_w wrote:
| This:
|
| > Ad hominem is not as good an argument as you think it
| is.
|
| Makes this:
|
| > is totally a thing I get and have experienced in
| reverse
|
| A case in point.
|
| I'm not even going to bother now with the rest; the
| abrasiveness you approach this topic with is
| uninteresting to me, and does not help me learn new
| things.
|
| That's also not an ad hominem, by the way; it's a
| critique, sure, but not even intended as a response to
| the attempted argument.
| switchbak wrote:
| So you chose to ignore his points re: the required fossil
| fuel inputs to create these clean renewable sources?
| ben_w wrote:
| The world burns that much coal -- which is apparently
| enough to make enough renewables for 50% of global
| electricity needs -- every _three months_ , and we don't,
| not even accidentally, set fire to wind turbines or solar
| cells at anything like that rate.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| > Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables.
| Plus renewables are extremely intermittent power sources.
| Nuclear solves both the land-use and consistency problems.
|
| I take no issue with people such as yourself advocating for
| nuclear power, but this particular argument is nonsense.
| You could generate all the energy used over a year in the
| US (100 quads or so) on roughly the amount of land that is
| currently used to produce corn for ethanol. Yeah, that's a
| lot of solar panels, and it may not be the way to get all
| our energy, but running out of land is NOT the issue.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables.
|
| No, you won't.
|
| > 'would require two billions tons of coal to produce the
| concrete and steel, along with two billion barrels of oil
| to make the composite blades. [And] more than 90% of the
| world's solar panels are built in Asia on coal-heavy
| electrical grids.'
|
| Fantastic! The world burns that much coal _every three
| months_ , so after _6_ months we could close all the mines
| and coal power plants, and thereafter all the future PV
| will be made by renewable powered grids.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Except you won't have enough solar and wind alone to
| generate the needs of the world's power demands. I don't
| get why some people like yourself are so against nuclear
| when combined with solar and wind its the best of both
| worlds? We're all in agreement that coal needs to go, but
| switching to just solar and wind is not the sole answer
| and never will be. You will run out of land at some
| point. No one wants to look at fields of spinning
| turbines and solar panel arrays when you can get the same
| effect in a much smaller footprint.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm relatively positive about nuclear power:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35659464
|
| Thing is, the best time to build it was the 60s. Now?
| There's a few cases where I think it's still the best
| option -- ignoring politics, it would be great for
| shipping, and I'd be really happy if that somehow becomes
| a standard outside the military -- but for most cases,
| it's just the most expensive solution to greenhouse
| gases, or joint-worst if you use LiIon as the storage
| solution.
|
| And if you do want to ignore the political dimension, for
| example but not limited to the way that Israel will bomb
| any Iranian reactor _just in case_ the latter might be
| weaponised, then to compare like-for-like you have to ask
| the same about a global HVDC grid -- my fantasy-football
| solution, in that it 's technically possible but still
| extremely unlikely.
|
| > You will run out of land at some point
|
| Ah, no. Not at present power use per person. Even
| England, which is _not at all_ well-placed for solar, has
| enough land to be (electrically) powered by solar alone.
| Remember, civil infrastructure -- buildings, rail lines,
| car parks, etc. -- already has a _huge_ footprint and PV
| can fit on almost any roof and between almost any gap.
|
| (Also the wind can be offshore, apparently that's great
| for people who don't like the look of them on hilltops,
| less so for radar).
| haweemwho wrote:
| > Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables.
|
| Ramping up from 40% to 100% increases land use by orders of
| magnitude? Did I miss something?
| froh wrote:
| nope. you didn't miss anything.
|
| we'd already be there if Bavaria and similar states
| hadn't blocked building wind farms in Bavaria, because of
| the bad looks, or myth busted infrasound, or myth busted
| bird mass extinctions, or very real existential angst of
| Munich's Siemens...
| haweemwho wrote:
| Isn't Siemens in the wind power business as well?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Nuclear produced only half of that in recent years.
|
| It would have produced a lot more if German didn't shut down
| it's nuclear reactors. Plus, France produces over 70% of it's
| electricity from nuclear, sometimes over 80%.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| On a night when wind output was particularly low.
|
| Another way to put this is that variable sources of energy are
| variable.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Particularly low output can happen for a whole month.
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-29/dearth-
| of...
| lawn wrote:
| And variability is _very_ bad. What are you going to do, stop
| using electricity because it 's not windy?
|
| Nah, the solution is to start burning coal, oil and gas, or
| leech off your neighbors who hopefully use something cleaner.
| wyager wrote:
| Until we have energy storage orders of magnitude cheaper than
| we do now, a power source is only as good as its minimum
| output.
| timellis-smith wrote:
| Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable
| supplies which massively increases their cost. When you have
| periods of Dunkelflaute you potentially need to have full
| grid redundancy either through inter-connects, other energy
| generation sources or battery backup, none of which are
| cheap.
| pydry wrote:
| >Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable
| supplies which massively increases their cost.
|
| It is and it does but being 5x cheaper means even a massive
| increase in cost _still_ doesnt put it in the same league
| as nuclear power.
| realusername wrote:
| It has to be way more than 5 times cheaper to compensate
| the drop to single digits capacity percentages like last
| winter.
| timellis-smith wrote:
| That doesn't matter because it's not like you can double
| renewables to increase redundancy (no wind is no wind no
| matter how many turbines you have)- you need another more
| expensive energy source as well.
| illiarian wrote:
| To cover the drop in generation for the night of April
| 15, even 400% wind capacity would not be enough.
|
| It was a rather regular, quiet, night in a nation of 80
| million people in the middle of Europe. Which means that
| it was a quiet night across _much_ of Europe.
| ben_w wrote:
| Indeed, on all counts; it's just that the easy-obvious-and-
| suboptimal solution (LiIon batteries which are the worst
| solution you don't have to explain to anyone) are on-par
| with the cost of nuclear.
| haweemwho wrote:
| It's rare to see flaute all over Europe at the same time.
| You just need some ways to transport energy as well as
| supplement that with storage and you can compensate most of
| this.
|
| If this sounds too complicated an engineering challenge
| then let's not even start to talk about the engineering
| challenges that would make nuclear safer than it is today.
| That's a whole different ballpark.
| chronicsonic wrote:
| What if Europe is at war and some infrastructure gets
| destroyed. Don't we need extra buffer capacity in case
| we're experience what Ukraine had where power stations
| are actively targeted. Or undersea windmill park power
| cables are threatened to be cut.
|
| Unlikely but there is someone with aspirations somewhere
| in Russia.
| haweemwho wrote:
| Good example with Ukraines power station that's actively
| targeted. What type is that one? It's a nuclear plant as
| I'm sure you know. Which basically the whole country
| depends on. I think if anything then that's a counter
| argument. The more centralized your infra is, the more
| vulnerable it is. Nuclear is the most centralized of all
| power sources.
| timellis-smith wrote:
| Oh and while we're about it interconnects just increase the
| systemic risk of multiple regions experiencing Dunkelflaute
| at the same time. And it's not enough to say that this
| almost never happens because in a system that expects many
| 9s of availability almost never is just not acceptable.
| haweemwho wrote:
| Storage can provide base load and for anything non-
| critical you have flexible pricing that automatically
| lets people stop doing things that can be done later the
| week, like charging your Tesla. Markets work. Use them.
| option wrote:
| and is a way to significantly reduce dependence on fundamentally
| authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, etc.
|
| One of the reasons France is like 75% nuclear generation was
| response to arab oil crisis in 70ies
| mdp2021 wrote:
| It seems Uranium has varied sources: Kazakhstan (dominantly),
| then Namibia, Canada, Australia, Uzbekistan, Russia, Niger,
| China, India. The USA also have it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Uranium_Mining_Prod...
|
| I am not sure what other "consumables" are involved.
| lispm wrote:
| Europe has a large dependence on Russia for nuclear technology.
| There are also Russian reactors in Europe. The countries who
| currently lead the deployment of nuclear technology are China
| and Russia, two authoritarian countries.
|
| https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-just-cant-quit-russia...
| option wrote:
| Finland seems to have no issues launching nuclear without
| russians.
|
| But you are right, Russia is big on nuclear. They are
| authoritarian but are not stupid.
| lispm wrote:
| If they were 'not stupid' they wouldn't have invaded
| Ukraine and caused a massive reaction in Europe for
| independence of Russian energy.
|
| If they were 'not stupid' and 'not evil', they wouldn't
| attack a nuclear power plant in the Ukraine. Russia is both
| stupid and evil with its current invasion of its neighbor
| country. The amount of environmental damage caused by this
| war is extremely high.
|
| Russian nuclear technology also does not take care of the
| environment and the population. Problematic reactors are
| being built near large cities.
| option wrote:
| you are making a stupid mistake 99% of Westerners make
| when dealing with Russia. You are projecting your values
| and rationality on them.
|
| I am actually from Ukraine, my family is still there and
| I now leave in USA. I hate russian gov just as much or
| more as any normal human being.
|
| The Western view is that West and Ukraine are winning
| because of costs russian people and army are suffering.
| But another view, closer to ru gov values is that ru
| gained significant territory while Ukraine lost it since
| Feb 22. You make think it is stupid and is definitely
| below their original goal, but it is non-trivial "gain"
| towards what they care about.
| lispm wrote:
| I don't talk about winning. Russia lost almost all
| political influence in Europe. In exchange for small
| parts of the Ukraine which are now minefields.
|
| > their original goal
|
| Their original goal was to conquer the whole of the
| Ukraine in a few days.
|
| What happened was that the parts they have conquered are
| destroyed. They lost >100k soldiers (dead or wounded).
| They exposed their military capabilities to be way worse
| than claimed. They exposed their intelligence service,
| the military and the government to be even more
| incompetent than thought. They gave NATO a welcome boost
| with lots of investments, new members, a common enemy.
| They lost large parts of the European market for import
| and export.
|
| Russia beamed itself twenty years backwards. How stupid
| is that?
| option wrote:
| again, you think it is stupid and I think it is stupid.
|
| But from their perspective (and their perspective guides
| their actions) they are the only ones gaining territory
| in the world, restoring what _they_ think is historically
| just for them.
|
| Again, projecting "common sense" values on putin's
| government failed so many Western politicians.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _Europe has a large dependence on Russia for nuclear
| technology. There are also Russian reactors in Europe_
|
| That seems to be a legacy, not a necessary constraint.
| lispm wrote:
| That authoritarian countries are the main deployers and
| providers of nuclear is no surprise. The central government
| decides and there is no opposition. In most democratic
| countries nuclear is not competitive in the market anymore.
| For a country like Russia it's much easier to sell nuclear
| cheap into the market: they want to make European countries
| dependent on their energy delivery. Western countries have
| much higher technology standards and with market prices
| they are not competitive.
| jpgvm wrote:
| It can be competitive, it's not politically tenable.
| Because it's not politically tenable it can't be allowed
| to be commercially competitive, the forces raising the
| prices will simply increase until it's priced out - such
| is the way of politics.
| lispm wrote:
| > It can be competitive,
|
| Not without market intervention of the government. In
| France the nuclear industry (EDF) is state owned.
|
| > it's not politically tenable.
|
| France. Pro nuclear country with a large fleet of aging
| reactors. -> huge costs of maintaining the reactors,
| large parts of the fleet is offline in the last months,
| building reactors is extremely costly and takes a long
| time, industry had to be rescued by the government.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Where else are you going to go though? Germany threw in the
| towel, nuclear has been stagnant in France and USA for
| decades. Maybe Sweden/Finland? They do it but slowly,
| expensively and are a whole generation behind.
|
| That leaves you with China. Which from an
| objective/technical standpoint is actually excellent
| because their current designs are extremely good.
|
| However it's probably not tenable for the West to procure
| nuclear technology from China. Not that China wouldn't sell
| them plants, they almost certainly would, China has no
| qualms sharing civilian tech but the West couldn't stomach
| it geopolitically.
|
| Which sadly is going to be the state of affairs for all
| cutting edge green energy tech. While the rest of the world
| was sucking off special interests in the fossil fuels
| industry China was taking it's pledge to be carbon neutral
| by 2060 extremely seriously.
|
| This means China is now leading across the board in solar,
| wind, batteries, hydro, EVs, high speed rail and
| importantly nuclear.
|
| Sad state of affairs for the West all things considered. We
| had first mover advantage in all of those fields and pissed
| it away for a few decades of investors profits and
| executive bonuses.
| lispm wrote:
| China especially leads the deployment of coal power
| plants. Two new blocks of coal power plants are getting
| online every week.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Sure but -also- all the other things. The fact they are
| still building coal because they literally can't build
| everything else fast enough doesn't invalidate their
| leadership in all the more advanced technology.
| robomartin wrote:
| I've had an evolution in thinking over the last few years. I did
| a deep dive on both atmospheric CO2 reduction and energy
| requirements for full electrification of transportation, homes
| and industry.
|
| At the time (5 to 10 years ago) it seemed like a very large
| deployment of nuclear power generation had to be a significant
| part of the solution. That isn't at all what I think in today's
| context.
|
| At grid scale, today, I think wind plus storage seems to be the
| most logical answer at many levels: Energy
| production per installed GW: Solar: 1.33 TWh/GW
| (solar is reliably off half the time) Wind: 3.07
| TWh/GW Land use per GW: Solar: 3,900
| acres/GW Wind: 750 acres/GW Land use
| to provide all Tesla Master Plan solar + wind: Solar:
| 12 Hawaii's Wind: 1 Hawaii (area of all islands)
| or, Solar: 30% of California
| Wind: 2.5% of California Annual Operations and
| Maintenance costs : Solar: 1.33 times wind O&M
| Wind: 1.00 Initial investment in factories:
| Solar: $ 11 billion Wind: $212 billion
| Storage required for 95% reliability: Solar: >12
| hours Wind: 3 hours Wind requires 4x
| less batteries, with all the cost, recycling and
| ecological advantages this delivers. Build supply
| chain origin: Solar: Heavy reliance on China
| Wind: Diverse Long term supply chain (maintenance,
| parts, etc.) origin: Solar: Heavy reliance on China
| (forever) Wind: Diverse
|
| The above numbers come from parsing through Tesla's Master Plan
| Part 3 (MPP3) and several of their references. Of course, this is
| US-centric, yet, I think it scales well to other parts of the
| globe.
|
| It isn't a case that combining solar and wind can't provide a
| good solution. It's that idea that wind has enough advantages
| that it can provide reliable clean power generation all by itself
| (with storage). In other words, grid-scale solar would not be
| necessary at the kind of scale proposed by MPP3.
|
| I need to emphasize the above because there's a tendency to point
| out that the combination of wind and solar works very well. And,
| yes, it does. However, that misses the point entirely. The point
| is that geographically distributed grid-scale wind with storage
| does not _need_ any solar to reach 95% reliability (power
| availability) [0] Table 2.
|
| In short, it seems wind would have lower land utilization,
| operation and maintenance costs, startup investment, 1/4 the
| storage requirement, ecological impact (based on only needing 1/4
| of the batteries) and, finally, the potential for a more
| favorable supply chain, both for construction and long-term
| maintenance.
|
| Home-scale solar and storage has nothing to do with my comment
| (after all, we are talking about nuclear power). I am only
| referring to grid scale. Home-scale solar makes sense on many
| fronts.
|
| NOTE: This is the only document outside of MPP3 I used to
| generate some of the above:
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
| teekert wrote:
| This feels like a balanced piece:
| https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-nuclear-power-g...
|
| Spoiler: It depends.
| leashless wrote:
| Nuclear proliferation is the big unsolved issue with nuclear.
|
| My preference is to have US DoD set up plants all around the
| world on its airbases and sell subsidised electricity to the
| national grid of the host country.
|
| DoD needs something to do.
| Always42 wrote:
| The comment quality in this thread is comparable to the average
| reddit thread. My lack of faith in humanity is restored.
| throw-4e451c8 wrote:
| I really thought HN was smarter than that french anti-nuclear
| college kid trying so very hard to appear super
| vague/undecided... but still clearly anti. Guess not.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Or the pro nuclear egos who knows nothing about the poor
| state of almost every nuclear waste disposal plan
| admax88qqq wrote:
| What is the problem with current disposal plans? My
| understanding is that there's rough consensus around just
| encasing and burying it as being safe enough.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If having any faith in humanity was justified we wouldn't be in
| this climate mess in the first place.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Except in the real world where wind + solar account for the vast
| majority of GW added. Nuclear just doesn't matter. It's 2023,
| there's an energy crisis on. Where are the new nuclear plants in
| Europe? Where are the GW of power saving us from rolling
| blackouts in Europe? Nuclear is a no show. It didn't happen. Not
| even a little bit. It didn't matter. Too little (well barely
| anything at all), too late.
|
| There's this pesky thing called cost that nuclear proponents just
| refuse to address. They are all scientific about how nuclear
| works. How great it is. Etc. But when it comes to cost, they
| suddenly check out, go hand wavy, and generally refuse to talk
| numbers. You could do this, you could do that. But nobody really
| likes being put on the spot about what exactly to do for how
| much.
|
| Not a single dollar sign in this article nor the string "dollar".
| Or other common currency such as "Euro". There's nothing else to
| be said about this article. It just completely ignores cost. It's
| all hand wavy and devoid of facts about cost. Very typical. Must
| be deeply embarrassing to read such drivel for an actual nuclear
| physicist with a clue. Guilty by association and it's not a good
| look. If these are your biggest fans, you are royally screwed.
|
| The whole argument for nuclear evaporates as soon as you bring up
| cost. Then it's suddenly about such pesky things as $/mwh and
| delays, budget overruns, etc. And the fact that there are things
| you can buy and install that have very well known $/mwh cost that
| work as advertised.
| dalyons wrote:
| Well said. You can browse through the replies in the threads on
| this post, and see where all the cost questions go unanswered.
| Cost and the basic economics of trying to run a really
| expensive power source at a fixed high price over 40+ years
| when the competition gets cheaper every day. That's the major
| why virtually none get built anymore. And it's not going to
| change.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Cost is not independent of the perception around nuclear
| though, and its influence on regulatory burdens, insurance,
| legislation, nimbyism, etc. So it kind of makes sense to focus
| on other factors. Changing the perception could bring down the
| cost as well.
| k8wk1 wrote:
| Wind and solar are only possible because they use the rest of
| the grid as effectively a giant battery. When the sun shines
| and/or the wind blows, someone else needs to reduce the
| electricity generation. The end result will be that during good
| weather the price of electricity is zero, and during any other
| time the price of electricity is high to pay for unused
| capacity and additional wear and tear on the equipment due to
| additional power cycling.
|
| We are already seeing this in Germany[1], where electricity
| prices are also becoming zero[2] during parts of the day. The
| problem with renewables will become apparent only once the
| reserves of easily dispatchable electricity generation is used
| up across Europe to balance renewable generation.
|
| [1] - https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-
| data1/Dayahead/Area-...
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Also because of the natural gas boom. Better than coal sure
| but worse than nuclear.
| Drybones wrote:
| The cost of nuclear today has more to do with the fact that we
| aren't building nuclear plants. There are minimum companies
| with small operations making nuclear reactor technologies for
| just maintenance of existing ones and military contracts. If we
| were building new nuclear plants with modern reactors, the
| costs wouldn't be a big deal anymore because the production of
| them would have scaled better.
|
| But instead we're spending tens of billions on windmills and
| solar panels that won't last 15 years or operate well in many
| regions, including Germany and especially south Germany. This
| is why Germany is now reliant on France's nuclear power to
| handle the majority of its power needs and the citizens are
| paying massive premiums for it. Not the government.
|
| So maybe we should ignore the pesky cost issue cause we
| certainly ignored the financial and economic cost consequences
| of solar and wind.
| reso wrote:
| The argument that costs will come down if we build more
| nuclear worked in the 1950s, but we know now where that goes
| now. Build More nuclear and costs come down. With more plants
| there are inevitably more nuclear incidents, the public
| realizes these things can make entire nations uninhabitable
| if they fail, and then they demand a halt to nuclear, pushing
| prices back up.
|
| Nuclear prices have baked in the public sentiment on the risk
| of meltdowns. The prices are efficient.
| Krasnol wrote:
| The authors profile is even more hilarious than the article:
| https://nationalinterest.org/profile/todd-royal
| speakfreely wrote:
| It looks like he keeps writing the same article over and over
| again.
| speed_spread wrote:
| It looks like he has someone's agenda and is getting paid to
| push it.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Nuclear power is the way. If you have something to refute from
| the article, please do so. Otherwise I'll just lump you in with
| the rest of the green-party fanatics who think solar and wind
| will solve our energy needs.
| Krasnol wrote:
| It is the way of wasting money while facing the reality of
| cheap and truly clean alternatives. It's the way backwards.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/amorylovins/2019/11/18/does-
| nuc...
|
| And I'm sorry I hurt your feelings by pointing the obvious
| bias of the author.
|
| This was not intended.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| LOL, no hurt feelings here. I support nuclear power along
| with renewables which have their niche places to
| contribute. But to completely ignore nuclear in favor of
| just wind and solar is idiotic and misguided.
| runarberg wrote:
| Some relevant quotes from the same author:
|
| > The United States under a Biden administration, similar to
| the British, would move towards an unsustainable, and national
| security risk by eliminating fossil fuels, and killing people
| who need electricity and global security the West provides.
|
| > The weather and climate are dynamic and ever-changing. Thus,
| this hysteria is a giant ploy to deprive people of freedom and
| liberty instead of providing them with affordable and flexible
| energy.
|
| Googling the author you can see he works for a lobby group
| called E4 Carolinas whos biggest funders include Duke Energy
| and Dominion Energy both massive energy companies with a
| massive fossil fuel portfolio.
|
| I think we can conclude the author has some obvious biases
| which benefit his employer.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _Googling the author_
|
| It is at the bottom of the page, explicit.
|
| > _Todd Royal is the Senior Project Analyst for E4 Carolinas,
| a non-profit energy advocacy firm located in Charlotte, North
| Carolina, where he is working on a three-year grant for the
| U.S. Department of Commerce 's Economic Development
| Administration focusing on a value chain study for the
| advanced nuclear technology sector (Generation IV reactors,
| SMRs, and advanced reactors). Todd lives outside of Dallas,
| Texas_
| switchbak wrote:
| He also doesn't seem to have much of an educational nor career
| grounding to be making such proclamations. Not saying he's
| wrong, but he doesn't seem to be an authority on the subject
| per-se.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Whether astroturfers or free thinkers, I think the baseline
| requirement for any pro discussion should be prefaced with a
| redlined doc of the NRC reactor construction code citing all the
| oppressive regulations whose deletion will lead to our nuclear
| utopia.
|
| Stop factifantisizing and show us all the ways to move fast and
| break all things nuclear.
| themagician wrote:
| My 2C/:
|
| We live in a world where all work goes to the lowest bidder and
| people will always cut corners if they believe the liability
| won't fall on them.
|
| The entire world could be safely powered off nuclear energy if it
| wasn't for pesky humans that will always lie, cheat, and steal
| from each other. Given that human greed is unavoidable and a
| nuclear accident can pollute an area for 10,000 years it's
| probably best to recognize our own flaws as we consider what to
| do with it.
|
| I mean, here in the US we have a hard time operating trains
| without catastrophic failure.
| rullelito wrote:
| An alternative to emotional arguments is to look at the
| statistics.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| That argument is not emotional, it is rational: assessment
| highlights risks.
|
| The quantification of those risks is another matter.
|
| The parallel fact, for example, that nuclear weapons require
| maintenance, and that maintenance requires budget, may make
| some shiver - not because of an "emotional" idea. It is
| because you look.
|
| --
|
| Update: children behave.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The statistics confirm, people are greedy and while quickly
| cut corners when given the opportunity to enrich themselves
| in the short term.
| themagician wrote:
| When you actually look at the statistics around large
| infrastructure projects the results are not comforting.
| Corners are always cut. Maintenance delayed. Just the "cost
| of doing business". Trust in both governments and large
| corporations is not exactly at an all time high. People know
| that companies will throw radioactive waste and scrap
| materials into the rivers if they can get away with it.
|
| Conversely, the emotional argument is the only one that
| brings nuclear power back. You must convince people that
| these projects can be done safely. You must convince people
| that, "This time will be different."
|
| Look at what just happened in Germany. Or don't.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Or, you can simply educate people -- this time doesn't need
| to be very different (though it certainly can be), because
| already-existing nuclear is very safe. Liability prevents
| companies dumping radioactive material, and radioactive
| material is _very cheap to store!_ There 's no benefit from
| dumping it. Yes, mildly irradiated water sometimes gets
| into rivers, and if you look at the amounts and risks it
| turns out to be quite reasonable relative even to solar and
| wind.
|
| What happened in Germany was not rational, and it was not
| by any means good for the environment, or a net positive
| for German health and well-being.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| It _would_ be, it not for the realities of dealing with human
| politicking.
| tanyajenkins1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| haweemwho wrote:
| > Only nuclear power is carbon-free [...]
|
| You can stop reading right there as this immediately identifies
| this piece as disingenuous at best, more likely though
| propaganda.
|
| The whole process is definitely not "carbon-free". Uranium
| extraction, transport and processing produce emissions. Building
| the plants and maintaining them does. Eventually demolishing
| does. Transporting the used fuel as well as building and
| maintaining storage facilities does.
|
| All those factors are usually brought up in detail for things
| like solar and wind plants. It's just disingenuous not to count
| them for nuclear power.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| My biggest issue with these proposals is one that is at the
| heart of the documentary here and put pretty succinctly:
|
| https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/containmen...
|
| How can we contain or dispose of some of the deadliest, most
| long-lasting substances ever produced? How to we ensure it
| lasts well beyond the possibility of our civilization currently
| and mark it in such a way that its clear to others its
| dangerous. Without those answers I am not sure how we can argue
| its better/safer.
| the_mungler wrote:
| The story gets better here when you consider that most
| "waste" can actually be reused (93% of uranium fuel rods used
| in LWRs could be recycled). Also consider, more radioactive
| materials (the parts we can't currently recycle, outside of
| some exotic hypothetical reactor designs) have shorter half
| lives, and so aren't a problem for as long.
|
| The best containment proposal I've seen is deep geological
| disposal.
|
| Also consider, making fuel rods removes some radioactivity
| from the environment, so if you change the requirements from
| "keep all byproducts contained forever" to "keep all
| byproducts contained until radiation levels are no worse than
| where we got it from" the problem becomes more tractable.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| In mythical breeder reactors that, which all the built ones
| have been even less economical than regular PWRs.
| the_mungler wrote:
| No, I'm talking about recycling fuel rods for use in our
| current nuclear reactors. I'm fuzzy on the details, but a
| fuel rod becomes unusable way before all the uranium is
| used up because of a build up of "nuclear poisons" which
| interfere with fission in the reactor. You can also get
| some plutonium when recycling, which can also be used in
| a LWR.
|
| I'm not talking about exotic breeder reactor designs, or
| molten salt reactors. France has been recycling fuel rods
| for some time now. The U.S. just prohibits this due to
| proliferation concerns.
|
| Edit: breeder reactors are usually more about being able
| to use other less rare elements for fuel, like thorium,
| or being able to use more common isotopes of uranium.
| Yes, they often propose using recycled waste to "kick
| start" the breeding process, but they're not needed to
| recycle fuel rods.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| All of that can be true and yet still trivial in comparison to
| the emissions that would be eliminated by replacing all fossil-
| fuel electrical generation with nuclear.
|
| Nuclear works at night and in locations that aren't good for
| solar or wind generation. Nuclear with a relatively small
| number of generating sites feeding a large distributiion
| network fits in with our existing electricial infrastrucure
| better than the widely dispersed generation that solar and wind
| provide.
|
| We need leadership that will just clear the way for liquid
| metal, fast neutron reactors that don't need refined fuel and
| produce less waste. If you believe that carbon emissions are an
| existential threat to human survival, it's time to stop
| fretting about nuclear proliferation and waste disposal. The
| challenges of those issues are tiny compared to global climate
| change.
| haweemwho wrote:
| Well, you didn't actually address my comment, which had
| nothing to do with solar working at night or similar. It's
| useful to keep separate arguments separate since jumping
| around if something doesn't suit your liking is not a sincere
| discussion style.
|
| > If you believe that carbon emissions are an existential
| threat to human survival
|
| FWIW, I don't believe that. Humans will survive, unless we do
| something like a nuclear weapons armageddon, but that's not
| because of climate change. Not directly at least. Those of us
| in privileged will have an easier time adapting to a changing
| climate, the rest of our species won't have it so easy. And
| later generations will need to live with the consequences as
| well. But they will adapt too. If they've never seen a frozen
| north pole, it will not be odd to them.
|
| Even if it _was_ an existential threat to human survival, I
| wouldn 't care. Why would I? It's a species that mostly
| doesn't care about other species survival. Did you recently
| check how many species we have brought to extinction? Over
| 90% of large predatory fish are gone (shark, tuna, ...).
| Buffalos almost went extinct. Gorillas, sea turtles, .. I
| don't think the human species has much moral ground to argue
| it should survive and I won't move a finger to help.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| > unless we do something like a nuclear weapons armageddon
|
| FWIW, the _only_ way nuclear weapons wipe out all of
| humanity _is_ if they start unprecedentedly large fires
| that change the climate.
|
| At peak, we had about 80k nukes (way less now). That's
| nowhere near enough to kill all 8bn people (as spread out
| as we are).
|
| The way nukes end humanity is blacking out the sun and
| reducing plant/food output.
| haweemwho wrote:
| > At peak, we had about 80k nukes (way less now). That's
| nowhere near enough to kill all 8bn people (as spread out
| as we are).
|
| Directly? Probably not. But the contamination from
| fallout is more than sufficient to poison a significant
| fraction of humans over a not-too-long time horizon and
| provide everybody else with a significant cancer risk.
| The ensuing chaos and resulting breakdown of civilization
| will do the rest. Don't believe it? Ever seen the panic
| when toilet paper is at risk to run out at Walmart?
|
| Those who still remember the Chernobyl disaster are aware
| what that meant for Europe. A single plant, and everybody
| got warned and could take precautions.
| jonahx wrote:
| > It's a species that mostly doesn't care about other
| species survival.
|
| As opposed to which species that do?
| haweemwho wrote:
| Geez, I'm really worried about discussion styles here.
|
| Nobody claimed that other species do. That has little to
| do with the question of why I should care about our's
| surviving.
| jonahx wrote:
| Your argument is "Why care about a selfish species that
| kills other species indiscriminately while pursuing its
| own ends?"
|
| But that is every species. So why care about any of them?
| Why even care that we are killing off the gorillas or
| fish? They are equally selfish -- only less powerful.
|
| And if your answer is that you don't, then you're just
| arguing for nihilism. If you do, then again: what do you
| think is so specially evil about humans?
| haweemwho wrote:
| I appreciate that you elaborated your thoughts. That
| makes for a much nicer discussion!
|
| I'd turn your argument around. We seem to not care about
| any of the N-1 species. Why treat the remaining one
| specially? Because we belong to it? I don't find that
| convincing. Maybe we're focusing too much on individual
| freedom that suddenly caring about the species as a whole
| seems is odd. The population around me, as a whole, is
| giving pretty few f*ks about me. I basically just return
| that attitude.
|
| Or, to formulate it differently, I'd get on board caring
| about not just the survival but flourishing of our
| species, if we'd extend that courtesy to all the other
| species around us.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _And if your answer is that you don 't, then you're
| just arguing for nihilism_
|
| Sure, and nihilism is a useful philosophy too.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > The whole process is definitely not "carbon-free".
|
| How do you think those windmill parts and solar panels get from
| the manufacturers to the end users?
|
| I personally don't see solar and wind able to provide enough
| energy to electrify an entire nation's fleet of freight
| haulers. Nuclear, maybe -- assuming they build a bunch of
| little plants so a truck can "refuel" in the middle Wyoming
| away from large populations.
|
| Maybe Wyoming isn't the best example as it's _always_ windy
| there but the point stands.
| haweemwho wrote:
| I did address your first remark in the end of my comment:
|
| > All those factors are usually brought up in detail for
| things like solar and wind plants. It's just disingenuous not
| to count them for nuclear power.
|
| I did not talk about how much energy is provided or what to
| do about freight haulers.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| I honestly believe that most of the carbon calculations
| come from the pro-renewable folks to promote whatever pet
| project they're on about. Nobody seriously considering
| building a nuclear power plant is going to care about some
| "externalities" amortized over its 50-75 year lifetime.
| haweemwho wrote:
| > I honestly believe that most of the carbon calculations
| come from the pro-renewable folks to promote whatever pet
| project they're on about.
|
| Sounds like reflection to me, if anything.
| quantum_mcts wrote:
| > You can stop reading right there as this immediately
| identifies this piece as disingenuous at best
|
| Or you can keep reading it and see that it literally says "It
| is a misnomer to say renewables are carbon-free compared to
| nuclear power." And discusses the very things you stated was
| disingenuously discounted.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| One tanker could supply the worlds uranium needs. Zero
| required to transport sun and wind. Beats the thousands used
| for oil and gas.
| onethought wrote:
| These articles never answer the question: if the suggested
| cost of nuclear power investment instead went to batteries
| and renewables, what's the Gigawatt difference?
|
| We know nuclear is clean. But Solar and batteries are cleaner
| AND recyclable.
| evilos wrote:
| Almost nothing about civilization is emissions free. In the
| context of comparing energy sources, it's a totally reasonable
| statement. It's only when you present it cut-off like you did
| that it sounds wrong. You're criticizing half of the tagline of
| the article, of course it won't contain all the nuances.
| tomp wrote:
| Probably a good idea to read the rest of the article. They
| explain why.
|
| > Whereas nuclear power accounts for all materials through the
| decommissioning phase--and surprisingly, 90 percent of all
| materials from a nuclear power plant can be recycled--compared
| to old wind and solar platforms, which generate millions of
| tons of waste
| haweemwho wrote:
| Again measuring with different standards. Depending on the
| design of a typical wind turbine, you can recycle 90-95% of
| those as well. And that's without a prime design criterion of
| maximizing recyclability, which could be mandated by law and
| then you'd achieve close to 100%.
|
| The sentence is just as disingenuous as the initial sentence
| that I criticized.
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| Uranium extraction can be electrified. You're the one spreading
| an obviously mistaken view.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Correct, but transport, steel manufacturing, etc. are also
| required for solar, wind, hydro, and whatnot. The real question
| you're asking is, "what is the net carbon emissions of nuclear
| power?".
|
| And the answer is that it's lower than most renewables:
| https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and...
| runarberg wrote:
| Google the author, who he works for, and some of the stuff he
| has written in the past, I think describing this a propaganda
| is actually giving this an easy way out.
| colordrops wrote:
| Right, conflict of interest is more like it.
| gcheong wrote:
| I think it's more disingenuous not to have quoted the rest that
| qualifies this statement compared to renewables:"...and able to
| meet growing U.S. calls for electrification and global needs
| for basic economic growth". The rest of the article goes into
| details about what you get for the amount of resources put into
| renewables vs nuclear and why nuclear outperforms once an
| investment is made.
| zackees wrote:
| The same thing can be said of solar panels and wind turbines.
|
| The truth is that the once the power plant is built it
| generates clean power for decades. That power can then be used
| to power things like building new power plants.
| haweemwho wrote:
| > The truth is that the once the power plant is built it
| generates clean power for decades.
|
| That is not the truth. The typical fuel cycle in fission
| plants is 3-6 years.
| korroziya wrote:
| Most pro-renewables news articles are disingenuous at best, or
| propaganda.
| haweemwho wrote:
| Even if that's true, it's hard to criticize while doing the
| same thing.
| schainks wrote:
| _All_ powerplants have those problems, not _just_ nuclear. I
| agree it's a bit sensationalist of them to not consider the
| whole picture and declare nuclear "carbon free".
|
| What are the total carbon emissions over the life time of usage
| including construction, operation, maintenance, and destruction
| of a nuclear plant vs a fossil plant?
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if a nuclear plant emits far less
| carbon overall than a fossil-powered plant while operational
| for the same power generation and lifetime of use when
| considering those factors.
| haweemwho wrote:
| "X is the only foo that doesn't suffer from Y!"
|
| "But it does!"
|
| "Well so does every other foo!"
|
| You see that this is not a good argument, don't you?
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| This is why we look at the actual amount of carbon
| released, not just a binary yes/no. I mean even if you had
| a magic power source that did not emit one single molecule
| of C02, a FUD spreader like you could use that exact same
| argument the first time a worker sparks a cigarette.
|
| So tell me, how much C02 does mining uranium emit as
| compared to a coal station on a kg/Watt basis? six orders
| of magnitude less? seven?
| haweemwho wrote:
| > a FUD spreader like you
|
| Eh, what? That's not a very nice thing to say.
|
| > So tell me
|
| No, I don't need to. I refuted a claim. You can move the
| goal posts, but I won't participate in that game.
|
| Obviously a coal plant emits more CO2 than a nuclear
| fission plant. But the criticized sentence contained the
| words "carbon free". Which is just not true. I don't see
| how pointing that out is FUD.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I think if the original poster had mentioned in a
| balanced way and as kind of a footnote that, sure nuclear
| isn't 100% carbon free but has some emissions, then
| people wouldn't have reacted so harshly.
|
| As it stands, the poster said that this (a bit
| exaggerated) claim somehow negates anything else there
| and that's just wrong.
|
| For practical purposes, nuclear power is as green as it
| gets so attacking it in this way is rather cheeky.
| vesche wrote:
| It's clear that nuclear power is superior to gas, coal, wind,
| solar, etc. However... nuclear power plants are expensive build,
| they take a very long time to build, and many countries are in
| the process of retiring their infrastructure [0].
|
| The vast majority of active nuclear power plants in the USA were
| built in the late 60s to late 70s and typically took 10 years
| from the initial construction before they became operational [1].
| Which means that almost all of our nuclear power infrastructure
| in the United States is ~35 to 50 years old. Optimistically, we
| can only hope that most of these plants will operate until ~2040.
|
| Given how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant we really
| should have been building them all throughout the 80s, 90s, and
| 2000s- but we stopped building them in the late 70s. The only
| nuclear power plant that I'm aware that's been built since 1978
| is Plant Vogtle which started in 2013 and is expected to be
| finished sometime this year.
|
| Still, there is some hope for nuclear energy into the future with
| the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) [2] and the recent
| advancements in fusion power [3].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
|
| [2] https://www.cfppllc.com/
|
| [3] https://twitter.com/ENERGY/status/1602679966163906561
| bottlepalm wrote:
| A power generation system that can't lose power itself without
| resulting in a major disaster is far from 'superior'.
|
| What I mean is the spent nuclear fuel must be kept cool at all
| costs, backups are finite. There's already been a few accidents
| and many close calls, none as bad as they could of been. Scale
| up nuclear to find how to bad it can get.
|
| The NRC said so itself -
| https://www.science.org/content/article/spent-fuel-fire-us-s...
| vesche wrote:
| I think fear-mongering about nuclear power risks is really
| unfortunate. The rewards far outweigh the risks. Sure, we
| could live in a world where we could tell everyone to stop
| using so much damn energy- but that's not our reality.
| There's some really good data and charts here (especially the
| "What is the safest and cleanest source of energy?" diagram
| at the top) - https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-
| growth
|
| In the USA we've poured an incredible amount of money into
| wind energy and it simply hasn't been very effective relative
| to the cost.
| bitwize wrote:
| Renewables are cheap and far less risk-prone. Not going all in on
| renewables is a footgun for industrial societies.
| cl0ckt0wer wrote:
| We need to to both, at least until we develop economical energy
| storage at appropriate scale. That may not ever happen.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| renewables are not cheap when you factor in decommissioning
| which nuclear power does. FTFA: "The International Renewable
| Energy Agency calculates that old solar panel disposal to meet
| 2050 Paris Accords 'will more than double the tonnage of all of
| today's global plastic waste.'"
| Krasnol wrote:
| Nuclear only factors in decommissioning in the way that it
| gives the responsibility away to future generations...
| stuff4ben wrote:
| what does that even mean? Nuclear factors in
| decommissioning to the cost of running it. Wind and solar
| have even more limited lifespans than nuclear plus there's
| the millions of tonnes of waste generated when you
| decommission them.
| illiarian wrote:
| Nuclear waste decommissioned from nuclear plants is very
| compact, almost completely safe at our current levels of
| handling it, and a lot of bruhaha around it is strictly
| political.
| Krasnol wrote:
| I don't know "compact" makes anything better about it.
| Germany has been searching for a hole safe and deep
| enough for it for years. It costs taxpayer money and they
| still haven't found one. Meanwhile, the stuff is stored
| near the plants. Which is not safe. Also stuff which has
| been considered "safely stored" years ago needs to be dug
| out again. Which again costs taxpayer money.
| carry_bit wrote:
| Nuclear is dense, comes with months worth of storage built-in,
| and lets smaller countries be self-sufficient for a while
| without having to rely on other countries.
| kulahan wrote:
| Renewables are absolutely not less risk-prone. Per kw
| generated, nuclear energy is the safest and it's not even kinda
| close. Renewables also cannot output a steady amount of energy.
| Maybe there's a massive drought upstream. Maybe there's no wind
| today. Maybe it's a cloudy day.
|
| Nuclear is THE ONLY SOLUTION. We would need such a hilarious,
| painful amount of renewable energy sources just to survive, let
| alone thrive. Or, we could just build a few thousand reactors
| around the world.
| ben_w wrote:
| "Only" is much too strong a word.
|
| Geothermal and tidal are both as reliable as it gets.
|
| A global HVDC grid with PV in the deserts will get you 100%
| renewable all by itself (probably not the cheapest and it
| would take a decade of current global metal production, _but
| it would work_ and the resistance losses aren 't bad enough
| to veto that idea).
|
| Nuclear is safest though; or at least it was when most PV was
| rooftop, I don't know if the assumption used in the "deaths
| per TWh" chart are still valid.
|
| Also:
|
| > Maybe there's a massive drought upstream.
|
| You're not wrong, but when that happens, lots of people will
| starve because the farms don't get the water that the hydro
| dam would normally store but in this hypothetical never
| received in the first place.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Renewables aren't going to fail in a way that makes an entire
| city uninhabitable for decades.
|
| If you want proof that renewables are the solution, look at
| California's power supply for yesterday. Just 2x the
| wind/solar/batteries of what's installed now could easily
| replace all fossil fuel and nuclear.
|
| https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
| tstrimple wrote:
| Risk isn't only measured in physical danger, but also
| financial risk. Which is exactly why for-profit energy
| companies aren't investing in nuclear. It's economically the
| worst possible approach when your concern is profit.
| kulahan wrote:
| Well no, it's because the upstart cost is insane. I could
| build a bunch of wind turbines for a few million, or drop
| BILLIONS into an already-existing reactor design, or even
| _more_ money into getting a new design approved.
|
| If SMRs were more of a thing, a town could build their own
| power plant for a few million bucks, removing the natural
| monopoly that exists.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| What about microreactors?
|
| > _The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)
| requests a pilot program to construct a microreactor for
| energy resilience by 2027. Also, the Pentagon's Strategic
| Capabilities Office is seeking proposals for a mobile
| microreactor demonstration_
|
| > _A recent report ... estimates the cost to generate
| electricity from the first microreactor will be between
| $0.14 /kWh and $0.41/kWh. [...] Future costs are
| estimated to decrease to between $0.09/kWh and $0.33/kWh.
| Costs are expected to decrease after demonstration,
| licensing and initial deployment and will depend on the
| location and type of owner, whether private or public_
|
| https://inl.gov/trending-topic/microreactors/frequently-
| aske...
| 7952 wrote:
| You are talking about an amount of money that exceeds the
| easily available resources of the developer. That is true
| of nuclear but it is also completely normal in
| renewables. Projects if all types need financing. That
| could be a $200k anaerobic digester on a farm or a $7b
| offshore wind farm. But at every level the investor or
| bank will need to do due diligence and understand the
| risk.
|
| Different types of project require different levels of
| expertise to do that.
|
| A battery storage site is relatively simple and within
| the scope of smaller investors. An offshore wind farm
| might need large banks and energy companies. A nuclear
| power plant is in a completely different league in terms
| of expertise required. A bank will find it difficult to
| even understand the risk.
| runarberg wrote:
| It is generally not cool to call something astroturfing here on
| HN. But googling the author of this article Todd Royal you can
| see he is a consultant for a lobby group called E4 Carolinas
| which is heavily funded by big energy companies who have big
| investments in the fossil fuel industry. In the past he has
| written articles with titles such as _"Why Climate Panic Is
| Unfounded Hysteria"_ where he accuses advocates for renewables of
| astroturfing, while advocating for the continued use of fossil
| fuels:
|
| > What the entire climate change, global warming, renewables over
| fossil fuels and electrify society movement is really about is
| one thing--money--clean energy is now worth trillions of taxpayer
| dollars. Government-sponsored science and economic growth at its
| worst picking clean energy over fossil fuels and internal
| combustion engine vehicles. These are disastrous energy policies.
|
| > The existential threat narrative of global warming only solved
| by destroying global economies by switching to intermittent,
| expensive renewables over reliable fossil fuels is foolish
| according to Dr. Steve Koonin, a physicist who served as
| Undersecretary for Energy during President Barack Obama's first
| term.
|
| All the while pushing a conspiracy narrative and climate change
| denial:
|
| > It's particularly painful because climate doomsday scenarios
| are all historically wrong. Climate panic is simply unfounded
| hysteria. The weather and climate are dynamic and ever-changing.
| Seemingly, it's a giant ploy to deprive people of their freedom
| and liberty.
|
| > Blackouts are the future for the United States, European Union,
| Great Britain, and Australia if they continue on this clean
| energy transition.
| iisan7 wrote:
| thank you. I as well was interested to read something new
| interesting on the energy future. This, however, was not it.
| The author is "working on a three-year grant for the U.S.
| Department of Commerce's Economic Development Administration
| focusing on a value chain study for the advanced nuclear
| technology sector"? Seems like a waste of money if this is the
| kind of output we're seeing.
| mistersquid wrote:
| Nuclear reactors are desirable targets for hostile forces, like
| Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant which was targeted by
| Russia. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-ukraine-
| she...
| wyager wrote:
| Any electrical infrastructure is a strategic target. If it's
| not a power plant, it's a substation.
| haweemwho wrote:
| If you have solar on every domestic rooftop, you can't bomb
| all of them.
|
| I mean, you can try, but then energy shortage is not on top
| of the list of problems that the population has.
| wyager wrote:
| If you have solar on every domestic rooftop, that also
| doesn't actually let you address realistic power
| consumption patterns.
|
| If we're talking about not-yet-extant technology that would
| allow solar to meet 24/7 demand at grid scale (like power
| storage that costs 1% as much as it does now), we might as
| well be talking about small-scale-fusion power, which is
| also resistant to being bombed and is generally better than
| solar+batteries for other reasons.
| haweemwho wrote:
| No? How many ovens, washing machines and dryers usually
| run at 2am when it's dark?
|
| Sure people don't charge their Tesla at noon when solar
| production peaks, but saving that until the evening when
| the 15 miles use of the car battery need to refill is not
| a significant engineering challenge. Running a nuclear
| power plant is magnitudes harder.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| The difference is its not easy to turn a nuclear plant 'off',
| quickly, and even then it still needs power to keep the spent
| fuel cool. If the plant loses backup power (which is finite)
| then you'll get a disaster with the spent fuel pool boiling
| off and the fuel itself igniting spreading radioactive ash
| for miles.
|
| The point is it's very dangerous to have a nuclear power
| plant in the middle of a warzone.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Yes, but the consequences are different. If Russia destroys
| an Ukrainian nuclear reactor, there are grave, long lasting
| consequences for the Ukraine and possible larger parts of
| Europe, we still have enough contamination from Chernobyl
| still. Russia did destroy large parts of the rest of the
| Ukrainian power infrastructure, as they targetted it, when
| they weren't shooting at hospitals. But the power
| infrastructure is mostly back up, at least partial repairs
| were achieved. So quite a difference.
| orbit7 wrote:
| This would be a game changer for global energy and transport if
| it got in front of the right people
| https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...
| Julesman wrote:
| This is objectively false and I always have a hard time believing
| that this is an organic opinion free of industry influence.
|
| Nuclear power is the power industry's answer to "clean" energy
| because it preserves the centralized delivery system in place. It
| does not disrupt the current distribution model.
|
| No matter what you think of the safety of nuclear power, what I
| said is a fact and the industry spends billions on PR, lobbying,
| and even online trolls, trying to get people to agree.
|
| Nuclear power is objectively not safe, with the one caveat that
| we are talking about long term. In the long term even one
| accident is absolutely devastating to entire regions of the
| planet. This risk is simply NOT acceptible.
|
| In other words, even if wind and solar are more expensive or less
| profitable, they are simply better alternatives from the
| standpoint of humanity's continued existence on the planet.
|
| There is no effective argument about this. I always get hit with
| the safety argument when I say this, but it's just all fully
| false. There is no safety argument because even an outlying and
| unlikely scenario is too devastating. And these scenarios, given
| enough time, simply will occur.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Nuclear power is the power industry's answer to "clean"
| energy because it preserves the centralized delivery system in
| place. It does not disrupt the current distribution model.
|
| Which is a good thing. Energy demand is centralized in big
| population centers, so centralized production is easier to
| deploy.
|
| One of the big issues with renewables is that due to the low
| energy density and geographic variations in power output, they
| often need to be built far away from where energy is in demand.
| This puts more strain on transmission networks:
| https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/30/178686...
|
| > Nuclear power is objectively not safe, with the one caveat
| that we are talking about long term. In the long term even one
| accident is absolutely devastating to entire regions of the
| planet. This risk is simply NOT acceptible.
|
| Incorrect. People seem to forget that we detonated hundreds of
| nuclear warheads in the atmosphere. Chernobyl was exposed to
| the atmosphere and burned for weeks. Chernobyl really was the
| worst-case scenario: an explosive meltdown in a reactor with no
| secondary storage. It really doesn't get any worse than that.
| We already have good data on the adverse impact of nuclear
| incidents, and while bad they're not nearly as devastating as
| you make them out to be.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| I mean, certainly. Well, maybe not _the_ answer, but whatever.
|
| However, are we actually capable of building new reactors and
| managing their operation in the private sector? I'm not talking
| about _possibly maybe_ here. Are we actually ready, today, to
| build a new reactor within reasonable time at reasonable cost? I
| don't know, but my gut feeling says no. We cannot even build
| roads like that.
|
| Furthermore, is operating these reactors economical? Current
| reactors are not. They externalize lots of cost factors.
| illiarian wrote:
| Current renewables also externalise a lot of factors. Any
| production at scale externalises a lot of factors.
|
| Unfortunately, the discussion is so emotionally and politically
| charged, that I'm afraid no one is actually properly
| calculating all the costs, and risks etc.
| Tade0 wrote:
| China can. Russia as well. It appears that the secret
| ingredient is totalitarianism.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| No, China can not build nuclear economically. That's why
| they're drastically reducing their nuclear goal while they
| continue to scale up coal and solar.
| llsf wrote:
| Actually the secret ingredient might be more "central
| planning". Mostly used in socialist/communist countries, but
| US/UK know how to do it, when the stake is high enough (e.g.
| war). One could argue that climate change is sort of a war,
| threatening the national security.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Chernobyl happened largely because plant admins wanted to
| please (or were afraid of) their higher-ups. Russia has had
| numerous secretive incidents in their southern military
| nuclear production sites, and more recently? Mysterious
| things like "high winds"...
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/russia-
| suspected...
|
| In China? Taishan has been plagued with problems.
| rullelito wrote:
| To every windpower fanatic in the comments. What is the plan for
| days when there is little wind? I guess coal?
| epistasis wrote:
| Battery storage, solar, stored hydrogen, demand response, long
| distance HVDC, advanced geothermal.
|
| The answer is tech from the 2000s, not 1900s tech.
|
| Power industry folks are used to a field where tech hasn't
| changed for decades. It's time to get over that and use the new
| things that have been developed that will reduce the cost of
| energy, increase energy abundance, and advance society. We need
| to let go of the obsolete.
| retrac wrote:
| Wind goes well with gas turbine generators, since they can
| match their output to demand and the supply of wind. Every
| watt-hour of wind energy you capture, is a watt-hour of gas you
| don't burn. Worst case scenario is no wind and you're burning
| gas -- which is already a main electric source.
|
| Taken too far you would get into this weird situation of over-
| spending for capacity, and having surplus wind energy when it's
| windy, while still burning gas when it's not. But as a moderate
| contribution to a grid, 10 - 30% of supply perhaps, especially
| where gas is a primary source already, it makes a lot of sense,
| in some places.
|
| I hope no one expects to actually run everything on 100% wind
| power.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Hanging your hat on fossil fuel base load generation seems
| unwise.
| ben_w wrote:
| 1. There's a _lot_ of ways to store energy
|
| 2. There's a few ways to transport power
|
| 3. Wind isn't the only renewable, though it can be really cheap
|
| At this point, I'm having to remind myself of the xkcd lucky
| 10,000, because it feels disingenuous to even need to _ask_.
|
| And I'm saying that as someone who really hopes the new fusion
| companies succeed, and that nuclear _should have_ been used to
| move the world away from coal (and ship fuel) in the 60s
| onwards, and lament the risks and accidents were handled so
| poorly by the politicians.
|
| But now? Meh.
| lispm wrote:
| Import electricity, for example. We have here a 1.4 GW line to
| Norway for hydro power. Generally Germany is surrounded by many
| countries which share electricity. There are many wind farms in
| and around the North Sea.
|
| Yes, Germany is a large net exporter of electricity.
| [deleted]
| eric-burel wrote:
| As a French not expert in the matter but living near nuclear
| plants:
|
| - one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
|
| - rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants
| correctly
|
| - nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of power
| this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only an
| abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)
|
| - the government wants to simplify control organism and laws
| around building new plants
|
| (References are easy to find if you want confirmation)
|
| I am not against nuclear power, but it has to be done properly
| and safely, which is certainly not the case around here.
|
| Edit: it seems the fusion (no pun) of regulation organisms has
| been rejected by the senate. Still annoying to see this law
| discreetly pass, with no parliament debate outside of the senate,
| during a political crisis
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| Nuclear fusion will be the answer to baseload energy
| requirements without the need to worry over meltdown concerns.
|
| There will be no need to do city or urban planning around
| radioactive fallout or leaks because fusion simply doesn't have
| those problems.
| acdha wrote:
| It'd be great but ... when does it go online? I'm not going
| any more and it's been "real soon now" for my entire life. We
| no longer have decades to wait, especially when we can cover
| the vast majority of needs with renewables for less money.
| mathiasgredal wrote:
| How does nuclear fusion solve the issue of rivers getting too
| hot, such that the plant has to shut down?
| m_a_g wrote:
| There are fusion reactor designs that don't use water. They
| directly convert to electricity with magnetic fields.
| llsf wrote:
| Are you sure about this ? Not heat is produced ? Cold
| fusion has been controversial in the 80's
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion) and never
| really escape the lab.
| [deleted]
| willis936 wrote:
| They're likely referring to p+B11 fusion which is a
| potentially viable reaction that emits all its energy as
| accelerated charged particles (a current), which can, in
| theory, be slowed down by inducing a current in a coil
| (direct conversion). This skips the thermal cycle of
| electricity generation. There would still be heat, but it
| would be contained to the plasma with some amount of
| leak/waste.
|
| There are a great number of asterisks on this. We are not
| close to making a p+B11 reactor.
| q1w2 wrote:
| That isn't much of an issue unless the river is extremely
| small. The huge amount of water traveling on most rivers
| with nuclear plants is orders of magnitude more than what's
| used in to do the heat transfer in the reactor.
| retrac wrote:
| Nuclear power supplies about 50 - 60% of electric energy in
| Ontario, with 18 reactors currently operating, built 1970s -
| 1990s.
|
| Activated water with tritium in it has been released
| accidentally a number of times, and small amounts of tritium
| and other gasses are released by any reactor, but no unapproved
| leaking besides that has ever been made public.
|
| There are of course ecological problems with the heat, but all
| the reactors use one of the Great Lakes as a heat sink and
| water supply itself isn't a problem.
|
| The CANDU design can be fuelled online and most of the reactors
| have been online over 80% of the time, including refuelling,
| maintenance and refurbishment projects. The later designs hover
| around 90%.
|
| They were expensive to build, and the last plant was _really_
| expensive. This was due to various reasons, including post-
| Chernobyl reviews, and pausing construction for over a year due
| to a labour dispute, and high interest rates.
|
| Still, amortized over more than half a century they've ended up
| being the second-cheapest source of power in the province,
| after hydroelectric. Government is casting around for
| replacement options as the reactors are retired over the coming
| decades, but nothing concrete in the short term.
| Retric wrote:
| That's an accurate but misleading description of what's going
| on because Ontario is part of a much larger grid. https://en.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss... It's
| like saying a town next to a nuclear power plant is 90%
| nuclear, that's "true" but only works because other areas
| don't rely on 90% nuclear.
|
| Just like the town, Ontario exports power to other areas and
| imports non nuclear power. If everyone used 50-60% nuclear
| there wouldn't be anyone to export that power to on low
| demand weekends etc which would drive up prices. The area
| also has a great deal of hydroelectric power which reduces
| the need for peaking power plants.
|
| Nuclear has already played a significant role in reducing
| climate change, but it just can't economically scale to
| supply nearly as much power as wind and solar. And much worse
| when you have a high percentage of Wind and Solar adding
| Nuclear to the mix just doesn't work very well because base
| load power becomes less valuable.
| retrac wrote:
| It's not just about the cost. The mix of nuclear and
| locally-available gas and hydroelectric makes for a self-
| sufficient energy strategy, and that has always been a
| major concern. Yes, Ontario is synchronized with the US
| grid but it could disconnect if necessary. Electricity is a
| valuable but not critical export economically.
|
| As with France, a substantial influence on historic policy
| was to build surplus generation for economic security
| reasons. Could have just imported coal and oil. But Ontario
| does not have much coal or oil. Same with Quebec and
| hydroelectric.
|
| Renewables provide the same sort of decentralized benefit,
| of course.
| Retric wrote:
| At the scale of the worldwide electricity grid cost is a
| major concern.
|
| If the difference was a few billion globally then that's
| trivial compared to the issues from climate change, but
| you can't hand wave things once the difference starts
| crossing into the trillions.
|
| France was able to heavily subsidize Nuclear and while
| their economy took a real hit it wasn't such a big deal.
| Bangladesh and other developing countries simply aren't
| capable of making those kinds of trade offs and nobody is
| going to subsidize nuclear power in the 3rd world on the
| scale they would need.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| >Still, amortized over more than half a century they've ended
| up being the second-cheapest source of power in the province
|
| Even after 50 years you have accumulated only a small
| percentage of the total costs related to the plant. They will
| most likely cost more money after they have been
| decommissioned than they did during operation.
| q1w2 wrote:
| This is only if you demolish them, which makes as much
| sense as demolishing the Hover Dam.
|
| There is nothing intrinsic that requires the plant to be
| ripped apart. It can be run indefinitely like any large
| concrete structure.
| cyberax wrote:
| This is a straightforward lie. Decommissioning a nuclear
| power plant down to a "brown field" can cost about 10% of
| its construction cost. Even grossly mismanaged
| decommissioning projects are at about 25%.
|
| For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Seco_Nucl
| ear_Generating...
| Reason077 wrote:
| Nuclear decommissioning costs in the UK are estimated to
| reach PS260 billion[1]. It would be interesting to
| compare that to the inflation-adjusted construction costs
| for the plants. My suspicion is that it's significantly
| higher.
|
| [1]
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-
| nucle...
| evilos wrote:
| What are you basing these statements on?
| Reason077 wrote:
| Take the UK as an example. It's estimated that to
| decommission our former nuclear sites (built between the
| 1950s and 1980s) will cost around PS260 billion[1] and
| take 120 years to complete.
|
| This includes the cost of decommissioning closed nuclear
| plants, disposing of waste, and cleaning up contaminated
| sites.
|
| [1]
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-
| nucle...
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Without doing a lick of research into the particulars of
| this plant the statement scans based on storage
| requirements for high level radioactive waste alone. Some
| of this shit has to be stored for several multiples of
| recorded civilization before it becomes anything like
| safe. We're talking borderline geologic time scales.
| evilos wrote:
| Fortunately that's not true. The fission products that
| are actually dangerous only stick around for 300 to 600
| years [1]. After that, you'd have to ingest what is left
| to be harmed. We have existing facilities [2] in the US
| where we can bury waste in such a way that it essentially
| becomes crystalized in salt after 100 years. Water moves
| centimeters per billion years in this salt. This one
| facility could easily service the entire country in
| perpetuity, even with 100x increase in nuclear energy.
|
| Despite what the antis will tell you, the waste aspect of
| nuclear energy is overwhelmingly positive. And the crazy
| thing is, spent nuclear fuel isn't even waste. 90% of the
| energy is still in there. So why on earth would you bury
| it?
|
| [1]:https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fs4euEoWYAAx65C?format=jp
| g&name=...
| [2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6no0FmPk84
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Nuclear power supplies about 50 - 60% of electric energy
| in Ontario, with 18 reactors currently operating, built 1970s
| - 1990s._
|
| Cf, "Supply" tab:
|
| * https://www.ieso.ca/en/Power-Data
| Retric wrote:
| Yep, and that looks great wind, hydro, and nuclear
| providing 100% of power at 3pm on a Friday at 2.5c/kWh. But
| what happens on the weekend when demand for power drops
| even more?
|
| Unfortunately the nuclear power plant operator losses money
| even faster than they are right now.
| k8wk1 wrote:
| Low electricity costs are a problem for all electricity
| plans, not only nuclear.
|
| Renewables are even more susceptible to this because the
| weather affects all renewable plants of the same type
| similarly across wide geographic areas, so there will be
| times when they all generate more than is needed and
| nothing can be done about it. What's worse, the output is
| unpredictable, so there's little opportunity for some
| business to base its operation on renewable electricity
| generation patterns.
|
| At least the weekend demand drop is predictable, so
| businesses can use this predictable opportunity to reduce
| their costs and thus reduce the impact the weekends have
| on the profitability of nuclear and similar dispatchable
| plants.
| evilos wrote:
| Based on the graphs from that site, demand never drops
| low enough to need to lower the output of the nuclear
| plants.
| Retric wrote:
| Nuclear isn't the only type of power that has low
| marginal costs. Curtailing wind for nuclear is just as
| much an economic loss as curtailing nuclear for wind.
| tarr11 wrote:
| I wasn't aware of the nuclear problems in France. Here is some
| explanation of the problems.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/why-nuclear-powered-...
| eric-burel wrote:
| Regarding the government response the article omits the plan
| to simplify legislation around building new plants. This law
| might not even be debated in parliament, only senate.
| Nodraak wrote:
| > one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
|
| Please share numbers demonstration health hazards. For ex,
| bananas are radioactive. Should we outlaw bananas?
|
| > rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants
| correctly
|
| That's wrong. In 2022, the power output had to be reduced by
| 0.18% (not a typo)
| (https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1645696906327388160).
| In addition, Nuclear plants can work even in the desert:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
|
| > nuclear plants are very unreliable
|
| That's also wrong. Please share numbers. Nuclear has a load
| factor of 95% and its down time can be scheduled (maintenance).
| Wind has a load factor of 30-40% (and output is unpredictable),
| solar has a load factor of 20%, hydro requires mountains.
|
| > the government wants to simplify control organism and laws
| around building new plants
|
| When controls are too tight, nuclear is too slow ; when
| controls are too loose, nuclear is dangerous. Face je gagne,
| pile tu perds.
|
| The goal is less CO2, and for that any low carbon energy source
| is good.
| eric-burel wrote:
| You are making good points, however about the leaks, we
| obviously shouldn't wait for them to be dangerous to worry.
| It's hard to prove risks, it's also hard to prove the lack of
| risks if only for the living ecosystem around the plant. The
| leaks show issues in the alert system, it's not the first
| time it happened, and an engineer sued the plant for
| dangerous mismanagement. Doesn't mean we should drop nuclear
| energy either.
| lukas099 wrote:
| And of course all risks should be weighed against the known
| risks and downsides of the alternatives.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"Nuclear has a load factor of 95%"_
|
| That's very optimistic. Perhaps an ideal nuclear plant with a
| perfect operating record might approach 95%, but real-world
| load factors are lower as most plants end up requiring
| extended outages for repairs as some point in their lifetime.
|
| France's lifetime load factors for its nuclear plants are
| around 77%, but that declined sharply in recent years to 72%
| in 2020-21 and even lower in 2022 due to many plants being
| taken offline for repairs. In the UK, load factors are even
| lower: 67% during 1970-2017.
| pydry wrote:
| I didn't realize it went as low as that.
|
| Some wind farms can hit 65%
|
| https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/worlds-first-
| fl...
| emsign wrote:
| I don't know in what parallel reality you live, but France is
| having massive energy problems due to their reliance on
| nuclear right now. And it's only getting worse with rivers
| drying up more and more and power plants needing more and
| more maintance as they age. Building new plants is hugely
| expensive unless you lower standards, and security is already
| worse in reality than in the books as of now, you don't want
| to go lower than that and cut more corners.
| otherme123 wrote:
| By reliability he refers to french nuclear plants stopped for
| months due to mantainance and repairs (mainly leaks that
| couldn't be scheduled).
|
| Painting nuclear as a 100% free of problem energy makes
| people sound as car salesmans. As of today, nobody want to
| finance or insure them. As soon as you say "ok, build them
| reactors if they are so perfect", nuclear advocates want the
| state to jump in and asume the costs, the consumers to pay an
| extra price, the safety regulations back to 1960 and the
| future people to deal with the residues.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > the consumers to pay an extra price
|
| The (botched) green energy transformation has given the
| country I live in top 3 highest electricity prices _in the
| world_ and it 's not even particularly green at all.
| Literally cannot get worse. And it seems to me that one
| half doesn't understand how incredibly bad high energy
| prices are both for people and industry, while the other
| half cheers at the prices because it causes
| deindustrialization and pushes towards degrowth -
| mainstream talking points of the current generation of
| climate activists here.
| [deleted]
| artemonster wrote:
| Germany?
| cyberax wrote:
| > By reliability he refers to french nuclear plants stopped
| for months due to mantainance and repairs (mainly leaks
| that couldn't be scheduled).
|
| That's not quite correct. France deferred maintenance
| during COVID and scheduled the downtime in advance. The
| inspections then found potential problems, so other
| reactors did additional maintenance and checks.
|
| They could have been deferred further if needed, but
| politicians were not willing to make the call.
|
| > Painting nuclear as a 100% free of problem energy makes
| people sound as car salesmans.
|
| Nuclear energy is the one that is actually proven to work
| and be reliable enough to completely displace fossil
| generation. Nothing else is coming close to that, including
| solar and wind.
|
| > As of today, nobody want to finance or insure them.
|
| Russia is busy exporting nuclear power plants. A nuclear
| reactor can be built within 6 years, two reactors within ~9
| years (they're built in parallel).
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Nuclear is not really suitable for load-following, at
| least not the installed capacity. Some are technically
| capable but load-following seems to be quite taxing on
| the equipment due to pressure and temperature cycling.
|
| However it is very suitable for base load generation,
| there's a reason why oil and coal companies lost their
| marbles in the 50s and astroturfed anti-nuclear into
| existence.
|
| I'm not sure if that's their most-effective campaign ever
| or if it's a tie with BP's popularization of the carbon
| footprint, which atomizes responsibility for climate
| change and has successfully delayed systematic action for
| decades. And even managed to get greens and climate
| change activists to do their work for them. Just like
| with nuclear. It's actually, genuinely incredible.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Nuclear is not really suitable for load-following, at
| least not the installed capacity.
|
| That's not quite the case. You can load-follow with
| nuclear, but it requires reactors to be designed for
| that. France does this, for example.
|
| You also can simply keep reactors working at a constant
| level and just dump excess power into their cooling
| system. This is not as bad as it sounds, because fuel is
| just about ~5% of the total cost of the produced nuclear
| energy.
|
| Most nuclear power plants do not do this because they
| don't need to do it.
| mech7654 wrote:
| To be fair the french have had some massive problems with
| their fleet recently. There were issues discovered where
| (IIRC) a supplier that made pressure vessels used steel that
| was not of sufficient quality and covered it up for decades,
| only to be discovered recently- this required major downtime
| and expense. Other issues have resulted in lots of nuclear
| plant downtime in france as well recently.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Stuff like this should yield criminal charges.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| In France it does.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| I heard almost exactly the same thing about Japanese
| reactors, are you sure you're remembering right, that it is
| definitely the French because it seems a bit of a
| coincidence
| MezzoDelCammin wrote:
| Nope, he's got that right. It's been a pretty major
| recurring story in the news in France through this
| autumn. I haven't really followed through the details,
| but the idea was that several reactors were down for a
| planned overhaul/maintenance for something like this
| (material defects) through the summer. As the delays
| ("nuclear projects are never on time") piled up story was
| "will they make it in time for winter". Pretty nail
| biting actually, specially if You add up to it the halt
| on Russian gas
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Repondre en anglais serait impossible pour un tel niveau de
| mauvaise foi et de malhonnettete intellectuelle.
|
| > one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
|
| Je suppose qu'il s'agit du Tricastin, ou il y a de temps en
| temps des petits rejets de Tritium detectes, parce qu'il n'y a
| pas vraiment d'autres centrales proches de Montpellier qui ont
| des emmerdes. "Regularly" est un mensonge, et omet aussi les
| quantites qui fuient. Oui, c'est un probleme qu'il y ait une
| fuite, et le CRIIRAD bosse dessus des que ca arrive, mais on
| parle de radioactivite non seulement tres minimes, mais
| extremement diluees aussi.
|
| >rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants
| correctly
|
| Non. On decide de ne pas rejeter de l'eau chaude dans les
| rivieres parce qu'elles sont deja tres chaudes et qu'on a des
| normes pour eviter d'endommager la vie aquatique qui sont
| extremement basses, et basees sur une moyenne de temperature
| annuelle. Dans la pratique, on pourrait faire monter largement
| les temperatures des cours d'eau sans danger encore, mais on ne
| le fait pas justement pour eviter des surprises. Et c'est
| oublier que ce probleme n'existe que pour les centrales n'ayant
| de pas de tours aerorefrigerantes, auquel cas _il n'y a aucun
| probleme de refroidissement_
|
| >nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of power
| this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only an
| abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)
|
| Jean-Jose Mauvaise Foi frappe fort la. 60 ans de production
| sans aucun incident majeur, il aura fallu trois vagues de covid
| + des conditions meteorologiques defavorables + un probleme
| structurel relativement mineur (mais corrige du coup) qui a
| cause un alignement des arrets de centrales.
|
| >the government wants to simplify control organism and laws
| around building new plants
|
| Fallait pas donner une majorite relative aux tares.
|
| Bref, comme d'hab, finir sur un "je suis pas contre le
| nucleaire hein" tout en donnant des arguments dignes du pire
| article de Reporterre.
| MikeCapone wrote:
| France has been mismanaging its fleet and signally for years
| that they want to move away from it, under-investing in it,
| etc. It's not the technology's fault.
|
| Germany had some of the best managed plants in the world --
| until they decided to shut them down, leading to more coal
| being burned and more dependence on other countries like
| Russia...
| uecker wrote:
| Germany is exiting both nuclear and coal. In the time from
| 2010 to 2022 where 14/17 of nuclear plants were shut down
| generation from coal was reduced from 263 TWh per year to 181
| TWh. Renewables increased from 105 TWh to 254 TWh. I also
| would have preferred to leave the nuclear plants running
| longer and exit coal faster, but in the overall scheme of
| things it does not matter too much. Nuclear is basically
| irrelevant. It is too expensive and slow to build. In
| reality, renewables will take over everything very quickly.
|
| Gas and coal imports from Russia stopped completely. But
| guess what still depends on Russia: The nuclear industry in
| Europe and the US.
| illiarian wrote:
| Too bad numbers don't work when it's a quiet night, and you
| have to burn gas, caol, and biomass to make up for those
| nuclear reactors you've shut down:
| https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396
| k8wk1 wrote:
| Also, the reason this is only possible at all is that
| Germany uses the rest of Europe as a giant battery to
| manage the non-dispatchability of renewables. The import-
| export balance often changes by as much as one third of
| Germany consumption in 12 hours [1].
|
| The electricity prices are also becoming zero[2] in
| Germany during parts of the day, which is a great outcome
| only on the surface. As this progresses, the consequence
| will be that renewable electricity producers aren't
| getting paid during their prime generating hours. This
| means even more subsidies will be required going forward
| to bring additional production. It will become more
| apparent once the reserve of easily dispatchable
| electricity sources is fully tapped to balance renewables
| across Europe. We will see very high prices during
| mornings and evenings and whenever it's cold and dark.
| The fossil fuel plants that are turned on during these
| periods will need to earn enough to address the
| additional wear due to quick power cycling and to keep
| being maintained for the rest of the time when they are
| unused.
|
| [1] - https://www.smard.de/page/en/marktdaten/78?marketDa
| taAttribu...
|
| [2] - https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-
| data1/Dayahead/Area-...
| illiarian wrote:
| > dispatchable electricity sources is fully tapped to
| balance renewables across Europe. We will see very high
| prices during mornings and evenings and whenever it's
| cold and dark
|
| It's already a problem in Sweden. It exports electricity
| to Germany when demand is high... which leaves nothing to
| Sweden, and the prices skyrocket. https://www.bloomberg.c
| om/news/articles/2022-08-12/swedish-m...
| uecker wrote:
| Sorry, I am not interested what a nuclear shill posts on
| twitter. Here is the source for my numbers (which are the
| official ones). Sorry, in German but I assume you can
| guess the labels: https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/03/STR...
| illiarian wrote:
| Again: _total_ numbers mean absolutely nothing on a night
| when there 's zero production from renewables.
|
| That "shill" is showing _data_. Just the fact that you
| don 't like this data doesn't make it invalid.
|
| Right now it's night in Germany, and even though the wind
| is blowing, it's only at 40% generation. And look,
| there's coal, supplying 22%, and gas supplying another
| 9%: https://imgur.com/a/3bYudyd
| locallost wrote:
| I don't get this bogus argument. Germany is using the least
| coal in its history for electricity. The data is very easy to
| find, but it's a knee jerk reaction that they got rid of
| nuclear and so they must've replaced it with coal. Not true
| at all, and it's getting tiring reading this nonsense.
| illiarian wrote:
| They replaced it with coal, gas and biofuel (that is,
| burning more stuff):
| https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1647799729734971396
| _ph_ wrote:
| 50% of the German electricity are now renewable, wind,
| solar, biomass, water. In 2022, Germany was creating and
| exporting a considerable chunk of electricity to help
| plugging the holes left by the switched off French
| reactors.
| eric-burel wrote:
| I am cautious on technology vs management. It's like the
| people who thinks death penalty is great in theory but the
| justice system is imperfect in practice: maybe, but you can't
| have one without the other. Nuclear plants have to be managed
| and that's an issue too.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Did you had a look at what Europe didn't stop importing from
| Russia due to lacking alternatives... _cough cough_.
|
| I also don't get how an article can claim a global solution
| if nuclear currently is at 10% and we cannot keep up with
| supply and plants and and and.. this wont scale to 100%, not
| even 50 or even 20% of future global needs, would deplete
| cheap enough enable resources too quick... and what also is
| always forgotten: our world will likely have more, not less
| conflicts, unfortunately. Have fun managing this plants with
| wars all around and rivers going empty.
|
| Yeah yeah all the issues happening and brought up again is
| just stupid people, mismanagement, etcetc.. But that
| unfortunately is humanity :/
|
| Just no :/ especially as there are good enough and more
| sustainable other alternatives.
|
| > Germany had some of the best managed plant
|
| Better than France, likely agrees.. but still awful and that
| sentence is a joke. If that is your bar, good night. German
| infrastructure is currently rotting at record pace, happy we
| got those plants out there.
| realusername wrote:
| > - nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of
| power this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only
| an abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)
|
| Why we don't talk like that about renewables though? While the
| nuclear production was down to 65% capacity, renewables were
| down in the same time to ... 8%.
|
| To be fair, the renewable production was lacking even more than
| the nuclear one at that time, despite being the worst
| maintainance event during the past 40 years.
| froh wrote:
| in Germany more than 40% of the total water consumption is
| cooling water evaporation.
|
| btw how does France deal with nuclear waste?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| - one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
|
| In quantities not relevant to safety. We can detect extremely
| small amounts of radiation, down to 1.0001% higher than
| backrgound levels.
|
| - rivers are getting too hot to cool down nuclear plants
| correctly
|
| Not quite: the flow of rivers was low enough that they would
| exceed the 28C temperature limit (ostensibly to protect fish,
| but no adverse impact from higher temperatures has been
| observed). It was entirely possible to cool the plants, if this
| restriction were not in place. Perhaps the solution here is to
| ask for better evidence on the supposed adverse ecological
| impact of higher river temperatures, and examine whether it
| outweighs the global catastrophe of greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| - nuclear plants are very unreliable, we almost got out of
| power this winter and next winter will be equally tough (only
| an abnormally hot winter avoid cuts...)
|
| Quite the contrary: Nuclear plants have some of the highest
| capacity factors [1] of any energy source. France's reactors
| were taken down for maintenance, much of it actually scheduled
| in advance. This is, intentionally or not, cherry picking a
| year with a particularly low capacity factor.
|
| - the government wants to simplify control organism and laws
| around building new plants
|
| Correct, and since nuclear thus far as proven to be one of the
| safest power sources [2] it's a reasonable change to accelerate
| the fight against climate change.
|
| Nuclear is one of the few sources of decarbonized energy that
| is both non-intermittent, and geographically independent.
| Solar, wind, and hydro, are all either geographically
| dependent, intermittent, or both. Plans for a grid based on
| solar and wind almost invariably assume that a nearly-free form
| of energy storage will be invented in order to make these
| generation systems feasible. Unfortunately, such as system has
| yet to be produced. The heat engine made modern industrialized
| society possible, and it's easier to switch to a different
| source of heat than to restructure all of society around
| intermittent energy sources.
|
| 1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity
|
| 2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-
| worldw...
| q1w2 wrote:
| They are referring to the leaking of tritium, which, while
| "technically" radioactive, regular water contains some tiny
| amount of tritium and deuterium naturally. They are barely
| radioactive, and you can actually buy them on Amazon - they
| are not regulated.
|
| To say that the reactor is "leaking radioactive material"
| because of tritium is extremely dishonest.
| evilos wrote:
| > one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
|
| Probably just Tritiated water which is essentially harmless.
| Basically water with extra neutrons and it is very weakly
| radioactive. So weak that you can't detect it with a Geiger
| counter. Since it is water it does not accumulate in organisms.
| Tritium is also naturally created in the atmosphere by cosmic
| radiation.
| q1w2 wrote:
| That's exactly what it is - which is why the comment above is
| so profoundly dishonest.
|
| You can buy tritium on Amazon - it's harmless.
| CodeCompost wrote:
| Somebody I know who works for an emergy company talked to me
| about Thorium reactors that sounded very promising. I'm too
| dumb to explain it but it seemed cleaner and more efficient.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Thorium based reactors have largely the same benefits and
| risks as uranium fueled reactors. See this page written by
| reactor physicist and HN poster acidburnNSA:
|
| https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium-myths.html
| throw-4e451c8 wrote:
| "I am not against nuclear power" - this is litterally the
| calling card of a tactical hit, forum-wise. It very obviously
| means the opposite of what it says.
|
| I generally look at how people perceive things like this as an
| IQ test. At the moment the HN visitors upvoting/downvoting
| things in this thread have failed my baseline IQ test.
|
| How I wish all presumably well-intentioned but badly informed
| and ill-educated people who very often seem to have.. let's
| say, bad luck when thinking would just stop trying to spread
| their gospel via forums in this destructive way. Looking at
| you, vaguely-informed "friends of the planet".
| eric-burel wrote:
| :( no really I try to stay open-minded and found
| contradictory answers interesting, if only because they are
| well documented. My reply is also to the initial article,
| which is on the contrary way too optimistic. Nuclear energy
| is not black or white, I think sharing personal experience as
| someone living near a plant, in a country relying mostly on
| nuclear energy, is relevant.
| throw-4e451c8 wrote:
| Oh no!
|
| "as someone living near a plant"
|
| My first 18 years: I lived 45 km from a nuclear power
| plant.
|
| It helped me getting interested in physics because of some
| in hindsight exceptionally well performed guest lectures
| from a physicist working there in grades 7-8.
| q1w2 wrote:
| You misrepresent tritium coming from a plant as a
| "radioactive leak". That's just dishonest nonsense.
| throw-4e451c8 wrote:
| Please remember; Eric is very open to both the positives
| and the negatives. But do keep in mind the negatives.
|
| Also, did you know that french nuclear power plants
| sometimes are taken down for maintenance. That seems
| super sketchy, doesn't it?
|
| /s
|
| This f*****g thread.
| kyrra wrote:
| For too much radtion, I recommend reading:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-...
| (https://archive.is/LITQT).
|
| I'm not sure how France treats radiation levels, but in the US,
| the guidelines we have set are non-nonsensical.
| acdha wrote:
| > He is now co-founder of fission energy company ThorCon,
| which is developing liquid fuel fission power plants to
| generate electricity cheaper than coal, to solve the world
| climate/energy/poverty crises.
|
| I think nuclear will have an important part of dealing with
| climate change but he has a massive financial stake in this.
| I wouldn't trust that more than I'd trust the Exxon guys who
| told us climate change was a liberal myth for half a century.
| kyrra wrote:
| The problem is that in government, you are rarely if ever
| punished for being top strict with your regulation. You are
| only ever chastised if you are too lenient (or the
| appearance of it). People like scapegoats and will use lax
| regulations anytime they can.
|
| The problem is, a regulator never gets in trouble for being
| top strict. The incentives are totally wrong here and lead
| to bad regulations.
|
| I trust this guy more than the bureaucrat covering their
| butt.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| > - one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material
|
| You need to quantify whenever talking about radiation,
| otherwise it's meaningless. Granite countertops also leak
| radiation, same as bananas.
|
| Also, coal powered plants leak radiation every time they burn
| coal...because coal is radioactive too. They also release
| mercury, which is why we can't eat too much tuna fish.
| eric-burel wrote:
| I mean, accidental leak and nuclear plants are not my fav
| word combination, even when it's limited quantities of
| tritium
| evilos wrote:
| You'd hate to be anywhere near a coal plant then. They
| absolutely spew radiation and don't even really try to
| contain it.
|
| Fact is, every kind of energy is dirty in some way. Nuclear
| energy is one of the cleanest kinds of energy we have by
| far. It's just people have been taught to have an
| irrational fear of radiation. They don't realize they are
| constantly surrounded by it already.
| illiarian wrote:
| > nuclear plants are very unreliable
|
| You mean, they are the most reliable base load and load-
| following power sources we know.
|
| > References are easy to find if you want confirmation
|
| It's just as easy to find confirmation that all the problems
| you listed are the result of neglect and politics of the past
| 20-30 years.
|
| > it has to be done properly and safely, which is certainly not
| the case around here.
|
| As in: France has 56 operable reactors that provide 75% of
| France's electricity... And you call that neither safe, nor
| reliable, nor...
| 7952 wrote:
| Blaming things on neglect or politics just isn't useful. We
| need power sources that have some resilience to those things.
| tremon wrote:
| Can you give an example of a power source that is resilient
| to politics? I struggle to imagine what that would even
| look like.
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| Solar + battery doesn't bother anyone. Wind turbines have
| mild resistance from people who think they are an eyesore
| or people worried about migratory birds.
| AnonCoward42 wrote:
| Coal power plants, wind turbines and mostly anything
| else. They can end up catastrophic in a sense, but not to
| the same degree nuclear fission plants can end up.
| evilos wrote:
| Coal has killed tens of millions from air pollution
| alone. Civilian nuclear power has probably killed on the
| order of a few thousand, at most. The studies that say
| millions have died as a result from Chernobyl is
| propaganda funded by Greenpeace and friends.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > Coal has killed tens of millions from air pollution
| alone.
|
| That stat is effectively impossible to nail down after
| the fact. Air pollution is one metric of am extremely
| complex system, and coal or any other energy source is
| one of countless inputs impacting the environment
| simultaneously. At best we can design and run models to
| help get clues on what impact any one input has, but
| those models will always be rough hints at correlation
| with results that are heavily influenced by the
| assumptions used when designing the model.
|
| You are correct that any studies claiming to put a number
| on how many deaths should be attributed to Chernobyl is
| propaganda. That holds true for the rest as well though,
| including any claims of exactly how many have died due to
| coal or cow farts for example.
| evilos wrote:
| > That stat is effectively impossible to nail down after
| the fact
|
| Sure, but given how long we've been burning coal and how
| dirty it is I'm positive that tens of millions is a gross
| undercount. It's not about getting an exact number. We're
| looking for orders of magnitudes here.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Name a thing that is resilient to both neglect and human
| politics. We'll wait.
| illiarian wrote:
| > We need power sources that have some resilience to those
| things.
|
| None of the power sources have resilience to politics.
| 7952 wrote:
| No but some are more resilient than others. It is much
| easier politically to shut a nuclear power station down
| than remove dirty wood burners from people's houses.
| bumby wrote:
| Exactly. Humans are part of the system, so human factors
| matter to reliability.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Nuclear proponents when trying to sell nuclear love to shout
| about how successful France is.
|
| Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's really
| not that great...and now France's nuclear program is terrible
| and the result of 20-30 years of neglect and politics? Also,
| which part of "nuclear plants are sensitive to environmental
| changes" didn't you get? If there's no cooling water, or the
| water is too hot, the plant can't run.
|
| How many times do people need to be told that with all the
| renewables coming onto the grid, we don't need more base
| load? We need storage. Also, wind keeps working just fine
| when the sun goes down.
|
| Do any of you geniuses realize that it's a _lot_ more
| difficult for the grid to accommodate the injection of tens
| of gigawatts of power, than it is to handle tens of gigawatts
| of highly distributed generation and storage across a large
| region?Guess where utility companies are spending their
| money? Hint: not on nuclear.
|
| Nuclear is the most expensive form of electrical generation
| while wind and solar are the cheapest.
|
| Nuclear capacity takes a minimum of ten years, more like 20,
| to come online and then takes decades longer to go carbon-
| neutral.
|
| Solar and wind take months to deploy and are carbon neutral
| within a few years.
|
| Nuclear plants require a continuous, expensive, complicated
| supply chain and hundreds of people supervising and
| maintaining it.
|
| Solar farms require maintenance that just about any asshole
| with an electrician's license can handle, the panels last for
| decades, and can be recycled. Wind turbines require more
| maintenance but it's standard industrial
| electrical/mechanical stuff, just on a tall stick.
| deeg wrote:
| > Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's
| really not that great.
|
| Relative to...what? Is there any major country that has a
| great power grid, objectively better than France? Certainly
| we have plenty of problems here in the US.
|
| I'm a big nuclear power advocate but of course NP has
| problems, like any human project. It has dangers, like any
| scalable power supply. I support NP because it is better
| than all the rest.
| eric-burel wrote:
| I do agree with that and some replies in favour of
| nuclear energy were totally sensical. The initial article
| is not and should be balanced with issues and yes,
| sometimes irrational fears, we do face as a country
| relying mostly on this energy source. The risk of
| electricity cut was a big deal this winter, might be next
| winter too.
| realusername wrote:
| Sure, France has it's own issues but they are not really
| related to the tech itself.
|
| Point me any other energy company which could have survived
| basically 20 years without proper investments and forced to
| sell back electricity to their competitors.
|
| I would even say that the tech is what made the grid still
| standing against all odds.
| mike_d wrote:
| > Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's
| really not that great
|
| Yet is amazing that even with the poor management of the
| French government, it is still a beacon of hope the rest of
| the world looks to for our energy future.
| bhhaskin wrote:
| Someone on the internet is saying they are French, making
| claims that aren't backed up with sources or data.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Nuclear is the most expensive form of electrical
| generation while wind and solar are the cheapest.
|
| Except if you add the cost of 12 hours of batteries to
| solar it's massively more expensive. You can't just compare
| an intermittent source and a non-intermittent source,
| without factoring in the cost of storage.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| >Except if you add the cost of 12 hours of batteries to
| solar it's massively more expensive.
|
| Nobody knows what nuclear costs, because nobody knows
| what it will cost to handle the waste 10 years from now,
| let alone 100 or 1000 years from now. The solution to
| this for most nuclear operators has been to pay a
| symbolic fee and let the taxpayers cover the rest "in
| blanco".
|
| When accidents happen, costs also arrive very suddenly.
| Nuclear power in Japan is quite expensive already, for
| example.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| We know exactly how to store nuclear waste: bury it
| underground in impermeable bedrock. We already have
| several of these [1]. Furthermore, the figures for the
| costs of nuclear power already include waste disposal
| [2].
|
| Also, since most countries don't reprocess nuclear waste,
| it's actually good to hold onto it since it's a future
| source of fissile material.
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
|
| 2. https://world-nuclear.org/information-
| library/economic-aspec...
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > Nobody knows what nuclear costs, because nobody knows
| what it will cost to handle the waste 10 years from now,
| let alone 100 or 1000 years from now. The solution to
| this for most nuclear operators has been to pay a
| symbolic fee and let the taxpayers cover the rest "in
| blanco".
|
| We have a fairly good idea, Finland built a nuclear waste
| storage facility deep in bedrock for EUR818M:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel
| _re...
|
| > The estimated cost of this project is about EUR818
| million, which includes construction, encapsulation, and
| operating costs.
| shykes wrote:
| > _Someone from France is telling you that actually, it 's
| really not that great..._
|
| If there is one immutable truth about the French psyche,
| it's that things are _always_ "really not that great".
|
| Source: I am French, and left France because of that state
| of mind.
| eric-burel wrote:
| Sorry I don't believe in the existence of country-wide
| psyches. Also not claiming things are great when we think
| they aren't is how we bring progress. I am sharing an
| opinion, which I didn't claim to be a fact either, but is
| based on my understanding the local and national news of
| the last decade.
| llsf wrote:
| Yes, intermittent (sun/wind) only could work with enough
| storage. Do you know if/when we could get enough safe
| storage ? My understanding is batteries is not possible at
| the scale we would need. Pumping water where it is possible
| would be nice, but not sure if it would be enough. Do we
| know the storage capacity than US for instance would need,
| if only using solar and wind ?
|
| Note that the cooling argument would be the same for coal
| or gas power plant. They work the same way. So, until
| enough storage is in place, we might need some base
| production, and it would require access to cold source
| (river or ocean). France had to reduce the activity of some
| nuclear power plants last summer because they have rules
| when it comes to river temperature. The next 8 reactors
| that France is planning to build would likely be build on
| the ocean's shore for that reason.
|
| The cost of nuclear electricity is mostly impacted by the
| cost of money. That is why the cost of electricity from a
| UK nuclear power plant is more expensive than from France
| nuclear power plant. The UK used private capital (higher
| interest) when France use gov funds (lower interest). It is
| correct that it takes time to build a plant, and it
| requires expertise. But it is also true that a power plant
| can run for decades (US and France pushing to 80 years) as
| anything in a plant can be upgraded over time (except the
| pool).
|
| Until there is an efficient storage technology that can be
| deployed at large scale, we might need to run some nuclear
| power plants. No idea for how long ?
| sharemywin wrote:
| Wonder if this could help:
|
| Iron-Air Batteries Are Here. They May Alter the Future of
| Energy.
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a42532492
| /ir...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Maybe - but remember that lithium ion batteries were
| first developed in the 1970s. It wasn't until the 2010s
| that they became so widespread and cheap.
| richardw wrote:
| One alternative is that you overbuild and connect very
| widely. China has 3000+km power connections. If you do
| that you can connect to remote wind, which is never not
| blowing somewhere within 3000km of you. During the day,
| solar nearer the equator could power areas further away.
| That's not the full answer but definitely a useful
| addition to storage.
|
| There are also battery tech like liquid metal that is
| being more widely tested and suits grid storage. That
| scales like crazy if it works.
| nborwankar wrote:
| A counterintuitive alternative is to invest a fraction of
| the costs of nuclear in cleaning up emissions from coal
| plants. We seem to have swung too far by shutting down a
| reliable source of energy when mitigating technologies to
| filter emissions [1] and next generation cleaner
| extraction technologies [2] are coming online to
| massively improve coal driven electric power generation.
| These technologies are DoE funded and patented the former
| has been deployed in production at a 100 Mw plant the
| latter is at a pilot stage in a 30Mw research generator
| at a university.
|
| In any case coal is not going away and there is no single
| "answer" to the planet's energy needs. A resilient grid
| requires a portfolio of energy sources including nuclear
| but it's by no means the single answer as the title of
| the post suggests.
|
| Uranium is "carbon free" but "radioactive waste full" and
| creates multigenerational environmental debt in the form
| of waste - nuke proponents usually hand wave and talk in
| generalities when it comes to this topic. Note the
| comment that "90% of materials in a nuclear reactor can
| be recycled" deftly sidestepping the 10% that will live
| on in deadly form for thousands of years with no solution
| in sight.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3568623/
|
| Google "Biswas Washington University Enhanced
| Electrostatic Precipitation" for more
|
| [2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3
| 817794
|
| Google "Axelbaum Washington University staged pressurized
| oxy combustion" for more
| llsf wrote:
| The radioactive waste is fairly small. US is the country
| in the world with the most nuclear power plants. US
| produces yearly: " The amount is roughly equivalent to
| less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming
| pool" source: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-
| facts-about-spent-...
|
| "More than 90% of its potential energy still remains in
| the fuel, even after five years of operation in a
| reactor.
|
| The United States does not currently recycle spent
| nuclear fuel but foreign countries, such as France, do."
|
| But even if like US does (i.e. does not re-use the
| waste), less than half of olympic pool is pretty small
| given the amount of energy produced. Ideally US would re-
| use the waste, and vitrified the final waste, and then
| producing even less volume of waste.
|
| Then store it. Properly packed it is not "in deadly form
| for thousands of years with no solution in sight". Most
| countries store it deep for 50 years, and then it is safe
| to dispose on near-surface disposal at ground level, or
| in caverns below ground level.
|
| Radioactivity is everywhere e.g. with radon (https://www.
| epa.gov/sites/default/files/2018-12/documents/ra...) at 4
| pCi/L 7 our 1000 people will develop lung cancer. Flight
| attendants get their fair share too. Our body is prepared
| to fix itself when attacked by radiation. https://what-
| if.xkcd.com/29/
| illiarian wrote:
| > Someone from France is telling you that actually, it's
| really not that great...
|
| That person is really just spreading FUD:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35659262
|
| > How many times do people need to be told that with all
| the renewables coming onto the grid, we don't need more
| base load?
|
| Of course we do
|
| > We need storage.
|
| Yes. And it's non-existent. There are literally no grid-
| scale strage solutions in existence.
|
| > Do any of you geniuses realize that it's a lot more
| difficult for the grid to accommodate the injection of tens
| of gigawatts of power, than it is to handle tens of
| gigawatts of highly distributed generation and storage
| across a large region?
|
| Neither are particularly true statements. Also, what do you
| think grid-scale storage would do if not inject gigawatts
| of power into a grid when needed?
|
| > Nuclear capacity takes a minimum of ten years, more like
| 20,
|
| Fuqing Nuclear Power Plant in China: 6.1 GW nameplate
| capacity. Built over 14 years at 1 reactor per 6 years.
| Operational.
|
| Meanwhile the very distributed Xlinks Morocco-UK Power
| Project was founded in 2018, and is promised to start
| powering Britain in 2030.
|
| --- start quote ---
|
| Of the megaprojects surveyed, 64% were delayed and 57% were
| over budget.
|
| https://www.offshorewind.biz/2016/12/02/offshore-wind-
| projec... --- end quote ---
|
| So we know how that will go.
|
| > Nuclear plants require a continuous, expensive,
| complicated supply chain and hundreds of people supervising
| and maintaining it.
|
| > The panels last for decades, and can be recycled. Wind
| turbines require more maintenance but it's standard
| industrial electrical/mechanical stuff, just on a tall
| stick.
|
| Of course it's not _just_ a tal stick. It 's a rather
| complicated machine that you can't even safely get to since
| it's so tall. And that's before we start talking about
| offshore wind farms like Hornsea 2. Yo need a lot of
| specialist equipment to maintain those.
|
| There are 500 to 800 people working on a nuclear power
| plant.
|
| --- start quote ---
|
| Each windfarm tends to have between 7 and 11 employees per
| 100 MW
|
| https://graham.umich.edu/media/pubs/Wind-Turbine-Economic-
| Im...
|
| --- end quote ---
|
| So while fewer than per a nuclear plant, you still have to
| keep in mind that you need to massively overbuild
| renewables because their generation fluctuates.
| sharemywin wrote:
| Wonder if this could make a difference?
|
| Iron-Air Batteries Are Here. They May Alter the Future of
| Energy.
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a42532492
| /ir...
| illiarian wrote:
| I'll believe it when I see it. It's a lot of could should
| would. A lot of tech "revolutions" sizzled away into
| nothingness after initial round of celebratory press.
| briffle wrote:
| > Also, which part of "nuclear plants are sensitive to
| environmental changes" didn't you get? If there's no
| cooling water, or the water is too hot, the plant can't
| run.
|
| That is completely false. Most Gen4 reactors are passively
| cooled. And even older ones, not all require 'once through'
| water cooling. there are other options: https://world-
| nuclear.org/our-association/publications/techn...
| kvgr wrote:
| How can it leaks? Do you have any source? Well you had some of
| them turned off for maintanance, that happens.
| eric-burel wrote:
| Look for the Tricastin plant I don't know enough to answer
| precisely but it has leaked recently and a few years ago. Of
| course it doesn't leak uranium, but other byproducts, which
| not a sign of a well managed plant. Some were stopped not
| just maintenance but the discovery of micro-breaches caused
| by maintenance decades ago. That's actually a sign of proper
| management, but a counter-argument to reliability.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Yep, a 1980 PWR... sounds about right.
|
| Modern reactor designs are so much better. They are also
| basically nonexistent because everyone stopped building
| reactors :(
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Even the old PWRs can be operationally unproblematic if
| you do it right. The German Pre-Konvoi and Konvoi fleet
| had pretty good stats. I'm not sure if Grohnde (shut down
| in 2021) is still the NPP block with the highest total
| production (500 TWhr) or if another block managed to lap
| it. Overall capacity factor of these was around 90 %. The
| US fleet is similar iirc.
|
| The French fleet has been running around 65-70 % CF for
| years, pretty bad, but clearly not _root caused_ by the
| tech branch.
| illiarian wrote:
| - "one of the plant regularly leaks radioactive material"
|
| - "Look for the Tricastin plant I don't know enough to
| answer precisely but it has leaked recently and a few years
| ago. Of course it doesn't leak uranium"
|
| So, your original statement was an untruth. Or "alternative
| facts"
|
| > of micro-breaches caused by maintenance decades ago.
| That's actually a sign of proper management, but a counter-
| argument to reliability.
|
| So you mean microbreaches were made _decades ago_ , the
| plant has operated _for decades_ with no issues, and you
| call that unreliable?
| polishdude20 wrote:
| This thread is a great example of how the meanings of
| words can be taken differently by different people.
| "Unreliable" is less of a description and more of a flag.
| Either it is or isn't. But the original commenter's
| threshold for unreliable = true is much much lower than
| most people's as illuminated in this discussion.
|
| It seems like this is a daily occurrence online and in
| person.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| I'm guessing "micro breaches" refers to hydrogen-induced
| cracks. Media likes to talk about it in bigly,
| threatening terms such as "THOUSANDS OF CRACKS FOUND IN
| REACTOR VESSEL" - of course anyone with half a brain
| starts to wonder "aren't these PWRs?". Much like people
| like to write headlines such as "HUNDREDS OF NUCLEAR
| INCIDENTS AT NPP XYZ", where "nuclear incident" means
| "reported event", which includes such dramatic incidents
| as "a backup valve in some secondary circuit had to be
| replaced because it was stuck" or "a bird flew into the
| transformer, tripping protection and taking a block
| offline".
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| Reminds me of the hysteria surrounding microplastics. I
| saw an article that once that said there are X many
| thousands of microplastic particles in a cubic meter of
| seawater at certain locations. They were actually
| counting individual particles! Why? because expressing
| plastics as a % of total mass or volume makes it so
| negligible as to not be a headline.
| blibble wrote:
| all nuclear power stations emit small amounts of liquid and
| gas radwaste as part of normal operation
|
| mostly tritium and tritiated water that has been activated in
| the coolant circuits (practically impossible to separate)
|
| but some other isotopes (carbon-14, caesium-137)
|
| here's the environmental permit for the UK's most modern
| power station: https://consult.environment-
| agency.gov.uk/nuclear/consultati...
|
| solid radwaste is kept under lock and key though
|
| and the total volume of radioactive waste produced is WAY WAY
| WAY less than that produced burning fossil fuels
|
| (turns out coal is reasonably radioactive)
| fsh wrote:
| No, coal is barely radioactive at all. The small traces of
| Thorium and Uranium are completely negligible. An old study
| from 1978 has estimated that nuclear reactors emit somewhat
| more radiation than coal power plants, but the levels are
| overall insignificant [1].
|
| This is only about emissions though. The _radioactive
| waste_ produced by nuclear power plants has many many
| orders of magnitude more activity than the emissions.
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.202.437
| 2.104...
| blibble wrote:
| > This is only about emissions though. The radioactive
| waste produced by nuclear power plants has many many
| orders of magnitude more activity than the emissions.
|
| yes I should have probably said "emission" not waste
|
| > No, coal is barely radioactive at all.
|
| but you need to burn orders of magnitude more of it,
| producing literal mountains of coal ash and exhaust
| emissions
|
| whereas for nuclear the waste is an extremely small
| volume, of which almost 100% of is captured
|
| scrubbing technologies have also improved since 1978, and
| scrubbing not-very-much thoroughly is a much easier than
| scrubbing vast amounts not-very-well
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| "Small amounts"?
|
| https://www.ap.org/press-releases/2012/part-ii-ap-impact-
| tri...
|
| 45 out of 65 sites had significant tritium leaks, some were
| migrating off site, some were starting to contaminate
| public drinking water.
|
| The nuclear industry is so loosely regulated that a half
| million gallon leak of radioactive water recently
| apparently didn't require them to notify anyone
| https://apnews.com/article/xcel-energy-nuclear-leak-
| tritium-...
|
| Also: "it's better than coal!"...no kidding. It's not
| better than wind and solar. Not in terms of price, time to
| install, time for carbon payback, waste issues, or safety.
|
| That's why grid operators are shutting down _both_ coal
| _and_ nuclear in the US, and replacing it with solar and
| wind (the US has in recent years installed 6x more
| renewables-based capacity than nuclear capacity that has
| been shut down)
| blibble wrote:
| those articles are pretty anti-scientific (especially the
| second one)
|
| 1.5 million litres of radioactive water (tritiated water)
| sounds scary, but they don't report the concentration, so
| it's meaningless
|
| if it was 1.5 billion litres with the same radiological
| content it would be less dangerous
|
| a load of coal ash getting into a river is likely worse
| radiologically and chemically than some tritiated water
| escaping
|
| > Also: "it's better than coal!"...no kidding. It's not
| better than wind and solar. Not in terms of price, time
| to install, time for carbon payback, waste issues, or
| safety.
|
| reliability
|
| if you want the lights to stay on at night when the wind
| drops then you need nuclear
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| [dead]
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Agreed, there are many concerns. But there are many concerns
| with every kind of energy generation, and for any of them,
| problems have to be solved and the system maintained. We, the
| people, have to take our own responsibility to hold our
| governments and companies accountable, if we care about the
| consequences.
|
| ....we could also choose to just use less energy and become
| more efficient. but my guess is nobody would accept it :D
| llsf wrote:
| Very true, and important to understand. Any energy
| transformation would result in production of stuff we do not
| like (trash). The Sun generates tons of trash (luckily for us
| for most localized on the Sun). Nothing is magically 100%
| clean.
|
| Reducing the energy consumption could be done, but few
| government would like it, as there is a direct relationship
| between energy consumption and GDP.
|
| If you want to produce anything (even services) you need
| energy. Cheap and abundant energy will make your economy
| thrive. If we want to power the next GPT and our current life
| style, we would need lots of cheap energy. I can see how
| nuclear could be tempting to use to boost the GDP with a
| minimal environmental impact.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Nuclear waste isn't even trash, it's a resource. Anything
| that's energetic enough to be radioactive is also a massive
| source of untapped energy when processed and burned. In
| fact a hundred years from now we might be digging up the
| "trash" as a cheap source of fuel.
| eric-burel wrote:
| Fun fact, we do send some of this trash to Russia, that
| is able to recycle it and send back enriched uranium.
| chronicsonic wrote:
| Aren't the reactors there too old and being operated above the
| original build age? Not sure so was wondering
| llsf wrote:
| France had to stop some reactors after detecting defected
| pipes. This was not due to age, but manufacturing issue.
| Plants are constantly being monitored and pieces are
| replaced. After 50 years, very few pieces are original. That
| is why US and France keep pushing the retirement age of their
| plants as they function fine.
| tremon wrote:
| That's mainly in Belgium. Most of France's reactors are from
| the 1980s, so they are nearing end-of-life but are not past
| their designed lifetime.
| option wrote:
| please lets avoid binary discussions 100% nuclear vs 100%
| renewables.
|
| I think all reasonable people agree that it should be a mix with
| multi-faceted goals of zero emissions, reliability, low cost,
| stability, etc.
| tanyajenkins1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The author's previous article is slightly less guarded in his
| support for fossil fuels:
|
| https://nationalinterest.org/feature/joe-bidens-little-known...
|
| > The United States under a Biden administration, similar to the
| British, would move towards an unsustainable, and national
| security risk by eliminating fossil fuels, and killing people who
| need electricity and global security the West provides.
|
| And weirdly, for someone so excited about nuclear power, he has
| no idea where we could generate the electricity needed by EVs, so
| we should just stick to fossil fuels there too.
|
| Does anyone else begin to see a pattern emerge?
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Fusion - yes, fission - no.
|
| Edit: the cost evolution of fission already points against it,
| any nuclear bet should therefore be on fusion, not fission.
| barney54 wrote:
| We should bet on the technology that always 20 years in the
| future?
| yellowapple wrote:
| Fusion is perpetually 50 years away. We don't have that long to
| wait when we're _already_ crossing points of no return.
| emsign wrote:
| The National Interest had a Russian spy write for it. Go figure.
| krunck wrote:
| The article doesn't even mention words fusion or fission. Like
| all nuclear power is the same. Be assured the author is a shill
| for the trad fission industry. We don't need that.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| The author is a shill for not discussing a technology which is
| still speculative and has no realistic commercial roadmap?
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Fission plants are the only plants we have that are actually
| useable at this point in time, so of course there's no reason
| to clarify. While we should definitely be putting more money
| into fusion research, if you're worried about an environmental
| catastrophe you don't have time to hope fusion actually works
| sometime in the next 50 years. You have to make plans based on
| what technology you know functions, not a moonshot.
| cinntaile wrote:
| > Solar power requires even more metals, cement, steel, and
| glass.
|
| Why do they always use the same outdated data sources? Cement?
| Yes 35 years ago they thought you needed to put a slab of cement
| under your panels to support them, but we moved on from that.
| Please update to newer, more relevant data sources.
| cschwarm wrote:
| Question(s) to the nuclear supporters here:
|
| 1. Are you talking about global electricity? Or just the West?
|
| 2. How much nuclear power do you want? 20%, 50%, 70%, or 100%? Or
| something else?
|
| 3. What nuclear technology? Traditional, Molten Salt, SMRs, or
| something else?
|
| 4. What institutional setting do you image for your nuclear power
| plants? Private ownership, or nationalized plants like in France?
|
| Just curious...
| RobotToaster wrote:
| 1) both
|
| 2) 200% of current demand, to account for the rise in demand
| caused by climate change
|
| 3) whatever we can build now
|
| 4) Only governments genuinely have the ability to build nuclear
| reactors without any outside intervention or help. Even when
| they are built supposedly privately there's government
| involvement to make sure radioactive material isn't diverted or
| dumped. I can't imagine anyone but the most extreme libertarian
| wants private unregulated nuclear reactors.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| 1)Global. Proliferation risks aren't as relevant to me as
| solving the reliance on fossil fuels. West+China probably needs
| to prove out wide scale usage of it first though.
|
| 2) However much is necessary to create a stable grid with as
| minimal an amount of electricity coming from fossil fuel usage
| possible. I do prefer renewable to nuclear, but I think society
| scale energy storage isn't going to be a solved problem in a
| reasonable time frame. If we only need 20% nuclear to phase out
| most fossil fuel plants, great. I don't know the exact point
| where experts expect that renewables without storage would stop
| being able to create a stable grid without the existing plants.
|
| 3)Ideally MSRs, but given they're still not completely proven
| out it's probably best to start building traditional
| immediately and switch if the currently in production MSR
| plants do in fact work out.
|
| 4)Start nationalized at least, since they're more expensive
| than private ownership allows but necessary for the public good
| (also, yeah, don't really want private ownership of traditional
| reactors). If MSRs work out and economies of scale kick in a
| little as we build out more plants, maybe private ownership
| will be viable at some point.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| 1. Yes!
|
| 2. Just some more than we have now.
|
| 3. Yes!
|
| 4. Yes!
|
| Seriously though, I just want _some_ reactor construction to
| spin up with non ancient reactor designs, to replace some
| fossil fuel plants. PBR[1] sounds good to me... but what do I
| know? There are experts who can decide this.
|
| 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
| audunw wrote:
| These are the kinds of anwsers that makes me think you
| haven't thought through this much.
|
| There are very clear plans for going 100% renewable. See Marc
| Z Jacobsens studies for instance. I wouldn't mind some
| nuclear power myself. But there just doesn't seem to be a
| clear plan about what approach to take. We don't have time to
| just dabble in various new reactor technologies.
|
| To me it seems we could either build old simple reactors that
| we don't really trust anymore. I wouldn't mind, but it's not
| realistic. Or try to get Gen III+ and Gen IV reactors down in
| cost. But will it help? Will it be worth the investments? I
| guess we should at least keep existing nuclear engineers
| employed.
|
| Seems to me that the only barrier now to just going all-in on
| renewables is energy storage. The next next few decades will
| be aaaaall about energy storage and transformation
| technologies anyway.. so there's an argument to be had that
| it's a good thing to just go all in on energy storage R&D.
| That kind of expertise will be critical to decarbonizing
| transportation, fertilizer and metal production anyway.
| Better energy storage makes it easier to decarbonize across
| all sectors. There's excellent network effects. Better
| nuclear only helps decarbonizing the grid, but that's just a
| part of our challenge.
|
| Nuclear is not going to power every country anyway. That ship
| has basically already sailed with solar+energy storage. It's
| just the simplest way to get up and running with electricity
| if you don't have a grid, and as technologies improve,
| developing areas will just continue to scale that up.
|
| The big X factor is advanced geothermal energy. I think once
| the fossil fuel industry sees the writing on the wall, a lot
| of engineers from that sector will go into geothermal. If
| just one of them manages to succeed getting the cost down,
| and drill deeper, what's the point of nuclear fission?
|
| And then there's the fact that nuclear directly contributes
| to global warming by directly heating up the planet. Much
| less than greenhouse gases, but surprisingly much. That's
| extra heat we can't really afford in the coming decades.
| Rivers are going to end up being at the edge of ecologoical
| collapse due to global warming... and we're going to dump
| MORE heat into them?
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| In the US we're replacing nuclear plants with renewables at a
| 6:1 ratio.
|
| The _only_ people who think we need more nuclear power plants
| is the nuclear power industry and the politicians they 're
| heavily lobbying to stay relevant.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| > The only people who think we need more nuclear power
| plants is the nuclear power industry and the politicians
| they're heavily lobbying to stay relevant.
|
| And also quite a few energy experts and the people who
| listen to them. The US nuclear industry's major players are
| bloated cronies satisfied with ALARA and other idiotic
| policies that keep them alive by preventing competition.
|
| If ALARA weren't in place, nuclear would be thriving and
| competitive (and still safe!).
| andbberger wrote:
| CAISO penned a series of increasingly urgent press releases
| on how catastrophic closing diablo canyon would be for grid
| stability when it's closure was imminent.
| matsemann wrote:
| Most of them don't really want nuclear, they just push it as an
| excuse to do nothing right now (at least here in Norway). Yes,
| more nuclear is probably good. But planning, permissions,
| building and getting a reactor up and running probably is 15+
| years most places. We need power before then. So we can't stop
| building wind farms, solar etc. in the meantime. Which is
| really what they want to achieve where I live: avoid wind
| farms, so grasping at everything.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Biggest problem is that people don't understand.
|
| It's black magic, with "radiation". While in reality, it's
| basically just a big steam turbine generator.
|
| Unknown things are scary. Turn on the light.
| epistasis wrote:
| I think this is the least of the problems that nuclear has.
|
| The problem isn't convincing J Random Person off the street,
| the problem is convincing somebody who has control of billions
| of dollars that there's any chance the investment will make
| financial sense.
|
| Until there's a halfway compelling financial argument, until
| there's a way to reliably build a reactor on a realistic
| timeline, nuclear is a pipe dream.
|
| Once there is a way that nuclear can be built and makes
| financial sense, there are tons of locations that would welcome
| a new large source of employment nearby. For example, nearly
| all of the current nuclear reactors that are aging out across
| the US are in cities that don't want to lose the jobs and don't
| mind having nuclear nearby.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Nuclear power can be an answer, but it's not flexible enough to
| be the answer.
|
| The demand for power is variable, and the difference between base
| demand and peak demand can be 2x or even 2.5x. While nuclear
| power can be viable for satisfying the base demand, it's
| viability for the variable part is another question.
|
| Then there are cheap renewables. If you don't constrain the
| market artificially, it tends to build solar and wind until
| nobody knows what to do with the excess electricity. That makes
| power cheap on the average but potentially very expensive when
| the demand is high and the generation is low. Nuclear power, with
| its high capital costs but low operating costs, does not seem to
| be the right answer to this variable demand / variable generation
| problem.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| There are many, _many_ industries that could benefit from
| electricity being "too cheap to meter" that could suck up the
| excess production.
|
| Maybe they train GPT-25 only when the demand is low enough the
| power producers basically give it away?
| Brusco_RF wrote:
| I heard the other day that many Saudi's leave their AC
| running when they leave SA for the summer months. Power is
| THAT cheap.
| jltsiren wrote:
| That is already happening. One particularly promising scheme
| is using electricity to make hydrogen and then using that
| hydrogen in steel production.
|
| But those industries also have other expenses. Even if you
| assume that energy is free, the investment may not be viable.
| epistasis wrote:
| That only makes sense if the idle capital of GPUs is cheaper
| than the energy powering them.
|
| There are very few applications like this, and even fewer
| that are easily distributed to that you don't have to use
| expensive transmission lines to power them.
|
| For example, most new hydrogen electrolysis facilities are
| planning to build direct-connected solar without even
| connecting to the grid, and using the energy directly,
| because letting electrolyzes sit idle for a week is not cost
| effective. And the grid cost would be expensive too. So
| building utility-scale solar without a grid connection makes
| the most financial sense.
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