[HN Gopher] First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in ...
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First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation
Author : ano-ther
Score : 343 points
Date : 2023-12-27 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eia.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eia.gov)
| ano-ther wrote:
| See also:
|
| "Georgia nuclear rebirth arrives 7 years late, $17B over cost"
| https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtl...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
| apengwin wrote:
| A good start!
| briandear wrote:
| If we're worried about cost overruns, then perhaps cancel the
| California high speed rail boondoggle. That project could buy
| several nuclear reactors.
| api wrote:
| I have a very strong impression that the perpetual money pits
| of California (rail, the amount spent on homelessness without
| progress, etc.) aren't bugs but features... for someone. That
| money is going into someone's pocket.
| icelancer wrote:
| As usual it's some from Column A and B. Hard to tell
| sometimes what is graft and what is incompetence.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| A little of A, B, and C.
|
| A) Idealistic voters with little interest in detail or
| execution.
|
| B) Hard working state employees executing in an
| ineffective way because they are working on over
| constrained problems with conflicting and sometime
| impossible goals.
|
| C) A number of opportunists that take advantage of poor
| rulemaking and bureaucratic disorganization.
|
| For what it is worth, I dont think corruption is a major
| driver of problems, but bad policy detached from the
| practical considerations.
|
| One simple example is SF parks maintenance:
|
| The city wants to keep invasive species out, so it has
| staff to remove them. The city also believes in livable
| wages, so the workers make >100K. Residents dont like
| pesticides, so the workers must hand weed. Hand weeding
| doesnt work, so the City periodically also pays outside
| consultants to come in and take care of the invasives
| (with pesticides and low paid workers).
| zbrozek wrote:
| Our electeds simply don't care what anything costs, and as
| a result we have (probably) the worst cost disease on the
| planet.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _electeds simply don 't care what anything costs_
|
| California has a referendum system. That so few
| referendums focus on cutting costs says something about
| its voters' priorities.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Sure does! That's why I used "electeds" rather than
| "representatives", to make really clear the connection.
|
| On the other hand, the state is losing population on an
| absolute basis (and relatively even more so against a
| backdrop of national growth). So some folks are voting
| with their feet. I'm eagerly awaiting the day when I'm
| free enough to do the same.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _why I used "electeds" rather than "representatives",
| to make really clear the connection_
|
| I'm arguing the opposite. The voters have the tools to
| oppose the state government's size. That they don't use
| them signals support in broad terms.
| solarpunk wrote:
| Probably best to diversify infrastructure investment
| across... multiple projects.
| danans wrote:
| The difference is that there are many cheaper viable
| alternatives to the firm power that nuclear provides,
| including renewables+batteries ($60/MWh and dropping) and
| enhanced geothermal ($80/MWh and dropping). Heck, even
| natural gas combined-cycle + carbon capture/storage is
| cheaper on an LCOE basis (~$60/MWh) than nuclear ($180/MWh
| and rising) [1]. It would be great if nuclear could be cost
| competitive for equivalently firm power, but its costs are
| increasing, not decreasing.
|
| In contrast, the only real alternative to air travel for high
| speed transportation between Northern and Southern CA is high
| speed rail. The "Hyperloop" has been exposed (charitably) as
| a failure, and personal vehicle travel (even electrified) is
| not an equivalent to HSR in a state as big as CA.
|
| None of that is to say that the CA HSR project has been well
| planned/executed or that the costs have been well estimated.
| But that doesn't obviate the need for high speed ground
| transport in the state.
|
| 1. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-
| april... (pages 2 and 31)
| rjbwork wrote:
| Problem is that we don't build the damn things anymore, so each
| one is bespoke and expensive. Ideally we'd keep building them
| and develop the expertise and make it a more repeatable
| scalable process.
|
| I worry instead that the lesson taken from this will be
| "nuclear is too expensive and ineffective".
| bordercases wrote:
| Both Ukraine and the Red Sea collapsing has produced ads for
| uranium mining in Saskatchewan, Canada. These kinds of ads
| don't run without government support; since public opinion is
| often extremely uninformed, I expect the pivot to nuclear to
| happen with or without pundits vocalizing their views.
| corethree wrote:
| We don't really build anything anymore. The "expertise" has
| transferred to Asia. Anything we build we'll build worse,
| slower and more expensive.
|
| Except for airplanes that's one of the few things we still do
| better.
|
| My overall point is I highly doubt nuclear powerplants will
| be built here in any major way. Will it happen in Asia? Far
| more likely.
| bordercases wrote:
| According to my sources, Hong Kong has an engineer
| shortage. They still want the je ne-sais quoi quality of
| North American trained engineers.
| corethree wrote:
| I would say Hong Kong doesn't illustrate the overall
| story.
| mayama wrote:
| To be specific it's airplane engines, 5th gen turbofan
| engines. China started building COMAC airplanes too,
| probably with questionable maintenance and serviceability
| story, that they can push with govt airlines. They are
| still having trouble with modern turbofan engines though.
| corethree wrote:
| One airplane isn't a full story. The US and Europe still
| lead the way here.
|
| I believe engines are from Rolls Royce which is European.
| bumby wrote:
| "Machinery" (not including airplanes) is still one of the
| largest exports of the US. The list [1] of exports by size
| is:
|
| Mineral fuels including oil: US$378.6 billion
|
| Machinery including computers: $229.6 billion
|
| Electrical machinery, equipment: $197.7 billion
|
| Vehicles: $134.9 billion
|
| Aircraft, spacecraft: $102.8 billion
|
| Optical, technical, medical apparatus: $99.1 billion
|
| Gems, precious metals: $92.5 billion
|
| Pharmaceuticals: $83.5 billion
|
| So the top 3 "non-aircraft" machinery categories are still
| exported at 5x the amount of aerospace. It seems like
| people [2] are still interested in the stuff the US
| manufactures.
|
| [1] https://www.worldstopexports.com/united-states-
| top-10-export...
|
| [2] https://www.usitc.gov/research_and_analysis/tradeshifts
| /2020...
| corethree wrote:
| Yes but Asia dominates the "building" category overall by
| a massive margin.
|
| It's just true.
|
| Pharmaceuticals, medical and gems are off topic.
|
| I'm sure there's other small niches the US dominates in.
| But overall what I said is the objective truth no matter
| how much you desire it to be not true.
|
| If Asia doesn't dominate a niche yet they are
| aggressively on track to dominate in the near future.
| bumby wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what you mean by "building"? It's a
| nebulous term. If you mean, building infrastructure,
| that's true, but also partly because the US invested
| heavily in the same type of infrastructure a generation
| or two prior. I would disagree with the pharmaceuticals
| because that is a manufacturing-intensive industry.
|
| Throwing out gems (because that probably isn't a good
| case, like you said), it still amounts to over $1.3
| trillion in exports. I'm sure other countries would love
| that kind of "niche" business.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I sometimes imagine how cool it would be if some of the
| worlds biggest billionaires got together and just did some
| crazy mega project and didn't care about profits.
|
| This nuclear plant cost ~$34 billion USD. What if Bill Gates,
| Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and a few others just got together
| and built 10 or so nuclear power plants? I wonder if that
| could actually bring down the price to build them.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Money, at that scale at least, is pretty good at
| calculating business cases. And the money is on renewables,
| especially solar. And the solar Wp cost for modules is,
| with some special cause exceptions, following Moores law.
| Nuclear not so much, all those plants have is delays and
| cost over-runs.
| erngkejr wrote:
| They've always been bespoke and expensive. Where have you
| been?
| jdewerd wrote:
| Studying history. The cost of nuclear was low until we
| stopped building 50 years ago.
|
| https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-
| costs-u...
|
| It's a pity -- if we had kept up the pace, we'd already
| have completely decarbonized our grid, but instead we are
| barely starting. Ah well. At least solar and wind _finally_
| became economical. Any path forward is a good path, even if
| it 's 50 years late.
| hedora wrote:
| At the moment, coal and probably gas is more expensive
| than solar, purely due to the turbines and generators.
|
| Nuclear relies on the same subsystems, and it's unlikely
| they'll get significantly cheaper any time soon.
|
| Having said that, I think nuclear could be made cost-
| competitive with coal and natural gas, at least in
| theory. Also, it's unclear that we'll be able to build a
| reliable, net carbon negative power grid without a large
| number of nuclear plants.
| XorNot wrote:
| Solar _cannot_ provide reliable power. It 's cheaper
| because it doesn't solve a massive part of the problem.
|
| Do the actual math on what it takes to get a reliable
| solar kWh onto the grid and suddenly it's a lot more
| expensive.
| hedora wrote:
| Perhaps they were in France, where the plants are neither
| bespoke nor expensive.
|
| They reuse blueprints, and make use of interchangeable
| parts, unlike the US nuclear. As a bonus, they can train
| people once, then transfer them between identical nuclear
| plants. Also, if there is a near miss at one plant, they
| apply the safety upgrades to the whole fleet.
| hef19898 wrote:
| France is past tense so, they have one reactor under
| conszruction and 6 _proposed_ and not even planned...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| How much did they cost in France? How much do they cost?
|
| > They reuse blueprints, and make use of interchangeable
| parts, unlike the US nuclear. As a bonus, they can train
| people once, then transfer them between identical nuclear
| plants. Also, if there is a near miss at one plant, they
| apply the safety upgrades to the whole fleet.
|
| That all sounds good as a first impression, but I've
| learned to ask: Are those the primary bottlenecks and
| costs?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| EPR has been a total disaster, to the point where the
| state took over Areva.
| mp05 wrote:
| I had a professor in an facilities course mention the
| improved level of industrialization of nuclear plant
| construction as a big reason why France managed to be
| successful with nuclear energy in a way that other
| countries have not. If so, is this one of those dreaded
| examples of the free market failing our actual best
| interests?
| mk89 wrote:
| I heard or read somewhere that in China they had the same
| issue - like in every mega project, there are deadlines and
| ... well it doesn't really fare well. So the issue is real.
| Joeri wrote:
| MIT found that reusing a design made plants more expensive to
| build, not less, because of costly on-site last minute design
| changes.
|
| Taking your point more charitably, it is indeed the lack of a
| sustainable nuclear energy industry that routinely builds
| plants that causes costs to skyrocket. There is a chicken and
| egg situation: nuclear projects don't get funded because
| they're too expensive, so there is no chance to develop
| expertise in how to build them cheaply, which causes the few
| that get greenlit to be built by rookie teams that make
| rookie mistakes that cause costs to skyrocket.
|
| The MIT study into the causes of cost overruns:
| https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > costly on-site last minute design changes
|
| I clicked through to the actual study ( https://www.cell.co
| m/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30458-X?_r... ) and I
| couldn't find a single sentence mentioning on-site last-
| minute design changes. I searched for "change" and tabbed
| through all of the results. The closest thing was mention
| of Westinghouse changing construction standards halfway
| through an ongoing project, which required many changes to
| the project design. But, that's one project.
|
| So my question is: Is it possible that the MIT News Office
| can't understand MIT journal articles?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Problem is that we don't build the damn things anymore, so
| each one is bespoke and expensive.
|
| When we built them more often, weren't they bespoke and
| expensive?
| Georgelemental wrote:
| No, they were much cheaper in the 70s and 80s!
| EduardoBautista wrote:
| Maybe if they can continue the momentum and learn from this
| project, the next reactors will be cheaper?
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Yes it will, but experience from South Korea says it won't be
| cheap enough to matter. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30380897.
| perihelions wrote:
| And also:
|
| https://www.justice.gov/usao-sc/pr/top-westinghouse-nuclear-...
| ( _" Top Westinghouse Nuclear Executive Charged with
| Conspiracy, Fraud in 16-Count Federal Indictment"_)
|
| That's the failed project OP blithely elided over as:
|
| - _" Two other Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were planned for a
| nuclear power plant in South Carolina, but construction was
| halted in 2017."_
|
| I'm really, really strongly in favor of nuclear fission power;
| but the American attempts this decade, and this company in
| particular, have been a grotesque failure. We _really_ seem to
| have forgotten how to build things.
| applied_heat wrote:
| Elon to the rescue ?
| dexwiz wrote:
| Sure, let his companies blow up a few to learn how to build
| them. /s
|
| Rockets and cars are one thing. But that risk equation
| doesn't work for nuclear.
| applied_heat wrote:
| He has shook up and revitalized two industries and proven
| his ability to execute and get people motivated to do
| significant work with physics and manufacturing and
| project management that are complex. It doesn't seem that
| far fetched to me and aligns with his sustainable energy
| focus but downvoters seem to disagree!
| lawn wrote:
| This is always the case when you build large one-off projects.
|
| If you continue to build reactors non-stop you'll learn how to
| make the process more efficient and be able to make better
| estimates.
|
| Surely we software developers should appreciate how hard making
| accurate estimates is? And this isn't a 2 week sprint we're
| talking about, but a gigantic engineering project.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| But are we going to build reactors non-stop? Is there either
| private-sector funding for this, or government subsidies to
| make it happen?
| FredPret wrote:
| Yes, of course.
|
| Power demand increases. Technology improves. Installed
| capacity ages out.
|
| There will always be a need to build new plants, might as
| well lean into it and be proactive.
| afterburner wrote:
| Unless the technology becomes obsolete. There are other
| ways to generate power.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I found this list which shows "under construction",
| "planned" and "proposed". It does not look like the US is
| planning to build a lot of reactors. https://world-
| nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
| epistasis wrote:
| These were not one-off reactors, it's just that the first
| ones went so poorly that everything else was cancelled. There
| were four that were started at roughly the same time. There
| were many other sites getting order ready.
|
| Westinghouse used a new regulatory process that had been
| created specifically at the request of industry to speed the
| design and build of AP1000s. Despite this, Westinghouse did
| not deliver constructible designs, and the contractor
| soldiered on with on site modifications. Westinghouse screwed
| up so bad that they nearly bankrupted Toshiba, their owner.
|
| So we have two failed holes in the ground at Summer in South
| Carolina, something like a $10B monument to corruption, with
| utility execs going to jail for their fraudulent reports.
|
| All the other sites that were eyeing AP1000s to replace aging
| reactors have now backed out. The disaster was too big. What
| exec wants to go to jail for a nuclear reactor? What exec
| wants to lose their job for greenlighting what has a not-
| insignificant chance of bankrupting the entire utility.
|
| Nuclear is too risky, but public perception is off, it's not
| running reactors that have the risk, it's the financial risk
| to anybody who wants to build one.
| Exoristos wrote:
| Surely much of the crippling cost is due to hostile lawfare and
| regulation.
| BoiledCabbage wrote:
| Damn, if only we didn't have to build them safely we could
| make them so cheaply.
| sonotathrowaway wrote:
| We build planes safely, but those same parts are 3x the
| cost. Safety isn't the reason why it's more expensive.
| willis936 wrote:
| Safety and bureaucracy are orthogonal. Bureaucracy is a
| slowing force, which is sold as being correlated with
| safety. The more layers of abstraction needlessly added,
| the more likely there will be systems engineering failures.
| bumby wrote:
| > _more layers of abstraction needlessly added_
|
| I think you're betraying your bias here with the added
| term "needlessly". There is some (maybe even most)
| bureaucracy that is inefficiently applied, for sure. But
| it is meant to address some risk. Maybe it's a risk that
| you (personally) don't care about, or aren't even
| cognizant of, and that's when it becomes easy to declare
| it "needless." We should be looking to streamline our
| risk mitigation and align it with risks that the public
| cares about, not throw it out altogether.
| willis936 wrote:
| You're betraying your bias by insinuating I suggested
| throwing out risk mitigation. I advocated for streamlined
| risk mitigation by highlighting the risk of unnecessary
| complexity.
| the8472 wrote:
| They are subject to a regulatory ratchet that almost
| guarantees that you won't make a profit. I.e. if a new
| safety measure becomes "economically feasible" because you
| increased cost efficiency somewhere else then regulators
| would adjust their calculations in the future and make
| additional requirements because they would now be feasible.
| This can even lead to requirements changing during the
| construction time of a plant and require expensive
| retrofits.
|
| https://freopp.org/rethinking-u-s-nuclear-energy-
| regulation-...
| UberFly wrote:
| This is the case for all public works projects. The red-tape
| overhead is crazy. Regulation is necessary but the
| bureaucratic maze that has to be negotiated is a huge
| problem. I worked on a public rail system and the down-time
| waiting for permission on everything was draining.
| Joeri wrote:
| Regulation is actually not a large driver for nuclear project
| cost overruns according to this MIT study:
| https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118
| kragen wrote:
| if that were the case, the prc, the us navy, and the russian
| navy would be mostly or completely nuclear-powered
| credit_guy wrote:
| Somehow all the articles criticizing Vogtle keep mentioning the
| cost overruns, the additional cost to consumers, but don't
| mention that in Georgia people pay less than the national
| average price per kWh (11 cents vs 12.7) while sunny
| California, for example pays about twice the average (24.3
| cents per kWh). In my state, NY, where 2 reactors were
| decommissioned in 2020 and 2021, the average price is 22 cents
| per kWh.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
| bobthepanda wrote:
| This cost premium has always existed.
| https://ballotpedia.org/Historical_state_electricity_prices
| credit_guy wrote:
| Good point. Could it be that Georgia already generates a
| lot of power from its existing nuclear reactors, and has
| been doing that for a few decades?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I mean, all that data is also from when California and
| New York both had operational reactors.
|
| In 2013, CA generated 17 out of 200 GW from nuclear. GA
| generated 32/120 GW. NY generated 44/136GW. So at least
| in the case of New York, it generated more power from
| nuclear as a percentage than GA, and had higher
| electricity prices, so there doesn't seem to be a
| correlation. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/state/
|
| It probably has more to do with the fact that electricity
| is deregulated in CA and NY, where implementations were
| infamously botched: https://truenergy.com/deregulated-
| energy-states/
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| This is how your link describes deregulation in
| California:
|
| "very limited and is conducted by a lottery system called
| DirectAcccess"
|
| There was a semi-deregulation in 1996, but it was largely
| rolled back in 2001. So any price data post data 2001
| should be bucketed in regulated.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Georgia has some of the largest coal plants in the
| country. The power company (Georgia Power, part of
| Southern Company) was allowed to pre-bill customers for
| the costs of the new plant well over a decade in advance.
| If you lived in Georgia before the new units came online,
| you paid to have them built but received no benefit from
| them. Investors in Southern Company received unwarranted
| protection from the consequences of poor project
| implementation and cost overruns on the back of the
| utility's customers.
| bumby wrote:
| Your same source has information on the relative
| proportion of generation [1]. Nuclear is at about 26.5%,
| while coal is about half that
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=GA
| colechristensen wrote:
| This power plant and related Westinghouse bankruptcy were major
| contributors to Toshiba's problems and sale recently discussed
| here.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67757333.amp
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38706547
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| If I was a betting man, I would put money down that Vogtle 4 is
| the last nuclear reactor that gets built in the US. Solar and
| batteries are just too cheap for nuclear to compete. The world
| will be installing a terawatt of solar capacity per year soon.
|
| *excluding research or military reactors of course.
| UberFly wrote:
| I would take that bet. Nuclear tech will also continue to
| improve.
| stetrain wrote:
| Nuclear does not seem to be on the mass production curve that
| solar and batteries are.
|
| Even if you could design a reactor that itself can be mass
| produced at that scale, you still need to do the same with
| selecting and getting environmental and public safety
| approval for installation sites and production,
| transportation, and disposal of the fuel and waste.
|
| I'm not against nuclear from a technological perspective, but
| I just don't see it being economically competitive with
| effectively printable devices like solar and batteries given
| the current direction of the cost curves on each.
| the8472 wrote:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1129876/china-nuclear-
| po...
| stetrain wrote:
| How do costs compare? What's the site approval process
| like in China vs the US?
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Compare this graph with more than nuclear, and notice how
| lagging nuclear is compared to any other renewable.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-
| consumption
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Nuclear might not be able to compete in the U.S. and
| Europe, but that's largely because of a ridiculous
| regulatory regime and has very little to do with the actual
| tech.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| People love to say it, but is there evidence? I've never
| seen it - which doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but that
| this claim needs it.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Nuclear was much cheaper in the 1970s and early 80s:
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-
| Construction-C...
|
| This wasn't just due to regulatory influence, it was also
| due to economies of scale. But the two are related, more
| regulation results in fewer builds. Fewer builds reduces
| economies of scale and thus increases costs. Which
| results in even fewer nuclear builds, and so on.
| edm0nd wrote:
| We can thank the hippies of the 60s and 70s for all their
| anti-nuclear silliness for making the nuclear industry
| heavily over regulated.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| There was also the Soviet nuclear fireworks project in
| the 80s that didn't help much.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| China has installed more renewable energy than the rest
| of the world put together last year. I'm pretty sure we
| can rule out any "ridiculous regulatory regime" issues
| there.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| They're also building a lot of nuclear:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1129876/china-
| nuclear-po...
| willy_k wrote:
| If you're going to try to determine how China is
| approaching nuclear power, it's probably more useful to
| look at data related to that [0], instead of drawing
| conclusions from tangential data.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| The point I was making is that China isn't inclined to do
| things just to appease some regulatory requirement. They
| are also building an incredible amount of Coal power.
| willy_k wrote:
| Ah, I think there's a misunderstanding of the parent
| comment. They aren't necessarily saying that the problem
| is pro-renewable regulation, just that there are heavy
| (safety) barriers for nuclear.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Yeah, the safety standards for nuclear reactors
| exaggerate the dangers compared to the alternatives that
| are suitable for base load generation
| throwjnkjk wrote:
| Slave labor is always cheap. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolg
| ov/files/ILAB/images/storyboar...
| XorNot wrote:
| Batteries are nowhere near able to meet any energy storage
| demands of the grid.
|
| The simple question to ask yourseltis why do battery
| installations always get quoted in units of power - GW -
| and _not_ units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually
| use?
|
| (The answer is: because they're terrible for it. Batteries
| hold about 3x they're rated power valie as energy - which
| means the 10 GW or whatever someone quotes is good for
| about 3 hours at that output. Great for grid stability,
| expensive and useless for long term storage).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| For that to happen in the US, (1) we need to focus on more
| numerous, smaller modular reactors, (2) the NRC needs
| certification timeliness requirements forced on it (and more
| funding if there's an actual lack of resources), and (3)
| specific project requirements need to be frozen _before_
| construction (no more up-requiring mid-construction).
|
| Modular reactors are the solution to not having enough
| capital or a long enough timeframe to launch and fund
| megaprojects at a pace that creates economies of scale
| anymore, which is exactly the US problem.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > NRC needs certification timeliness requirements forced on
| it
|
| That's going to be tough: What happens if the day comes and
| they don't yet know? They can't just approve it, so just
| deny it?
| zdragnar wrote:
| The government should cover the losses of the investors.
|
| Various agencies are constantly missing FOIA deadlines,
| and often the only way to get them to actually do the
| jobs they are legally required to do is to sue them in
| court, asking for both the information and to have court
| costs covered.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Nuclear has only ever gotten more cost inefficient. What
| makes you think that will change?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Nuclear was cheaper when more of it was built [1].
| Economies of scale make things cheaper. A production run of
| 40 steam generators is a lot cheaper than 4 steam
| generators.
|
| Proponents of a primarily solar + wind grid are betting on
| a breakthrough in energy storage. If that breakthrough does
| not transpire, we'll either have to give up on stopping
| carbon emissions or use nuclear power.
|
| 1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overnight-
| Construction-C...
| sounds wrote:
| Converting atmospheric CO2 into fuels could contribute to
| this effort. But bacterial and plant-based fuel
| production may still be more economical and produce fewer
| overall emissions than even a solar array and a carbon
| capture plant.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Converting atmospheric CO2 into hydrocarbon fuels
| requires hydrogen as an input, so it'd probably be easier
| to just store the hydrogen directly. Right now, almost
| all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation [1]
| which emits CO2. Electrolysis is inefficient and
| corrosion of electrodes makes it expensive and hard to
| scale. Capturing atmospheric CO2 is similarly difficult.
| Carbon Dioxide is at very low concentrations in the
| atmosphere so it takes a really long time to sequester
| meaningful amounts of it. Similar issue with biomass: it
| produces energy very slowly and doesn't have the scale
| required.
|
| There's a reason why plans for a primarily renewable grid
| assume that compressed air, synthetic ammonia, giant
| flywheels, or something else will provide storage for
| orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries: because
| existing storage systems aren't capable of meeting the
| storage demands of intermittent generation. Will one of
| these systems deliver a storage breakthrough? Maybe. But
| it's not wise to bet the future of your electrical grid
| on a technological breakthrough that hasn't happened yet.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming
| gustavus wrote:
| It seems to me that having a couple of nuclear reactors as base
| load spread throughout the country would be more useful than
| having a massive spread out battery & solar infrastructure.
|
| I mean as an example many companies, especially PG&E can't
| maintain adequate powerlines, who is banking on the fact that
| they'll do an even better job when we quintuple the amount of
| infrastructure and they have to develop a whole new domain of
| expertise based in battery technology.
|
| Not to mention even the supposedly clean, solar and batteries,
| still have an enormous amount of carbon emissions involved in
| their supply chain, and need to be replaced on a fairly regular
| basis.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Grid level solar has batteries installed on site. The site
| acts as a power generator that sells energy to PG&E, they
| don't manage it themselves.
|
| If anything a solar field requires much less operation
| expertise and staff to manage than a nuclear power plant. And
| when it goes bad, it might leech some acid and heavy metals
| into the soil over years, not leave a 10k year radioactive
| exclusion zone.
| Retric wrote:
| Nuclear is extremely dependent on long distance power
| transmission. Nobody wants a reactor in the middle of a city,
| and 1-5 GW of power needs to be sent long distances before
| it's used.
|
| Solar on the other hand scales down to 50MW instillations
| just fine so you can put it near substations etc. Huge solar
| parks make sense in locations with lots of sunlight and cheap
| land, but they aren't the only option just a trade off in
| terms of transmission costs vs generation costs.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Chicago is mostly on nuclear and the reactor is quite close
| to the city, just over the Indiana border.
| Retric wrote:
| Closest is Braidwood which is ~60 miles from downtown.
|
| NYC has East River 1, 2, 6, and 7 in Manhattan. A 650MW
| power plant in queens. (Astoria Energy II power station)
| Another in Brooklyn (Narrows 1-1 to 2-8) plus a few more.
| colmmacc wrote:
| Nuclear power seems like a good option for non-military boats
| too, like container ships and oil tankers. It's already a very
| well proven maritime technology.
| hef19898 wrote:
| That was tried, nuclear reactors on civilian ships, and found
| to be a stupid idea. Too expensive and no real benefit over
| ship engines. By the way, tha vast majority of military ships
| and boats are not nuclear powered.
| davkan wrote:
| Aside from the environmental benefit right? Don't lots of
| large ships burn cheaper fuel higher in pollutants when on
| unregulated wafers?
| api wrote:
| Ships and planes together account for single digit
| percentages of global fossil fuel use and emissions.
|
| It's almost all cars, trucks, and electric power, so
| those are the things it makes the most sense to worry
| about as opposed to things that are much harder to
| decarbonize and account for less emissions.
| davkan wrote:
| Is ship pollution really that negligible?[0] To be clear
| though the entire world is dependent on trans ocean
| shipping, it cannot be kneecapped for environmental
| purposes, but that doesn't mean it's not a relevant part
| of the issue.
|
| [0] https://www.transportenvironment.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2023...
| hef19898 wrote:
| So? The industry, shipping, agreed on standards and a
| plan to reduce CO2 emissions. And if you think nuclear
| power plants on civilian cargo vessels are a good
| idea,consider the following:
|
| - costs for a single ship reactor (shipping is
| _extremely_ price and cost sensitive)
|
| - time, and lost revenue (a ship not carrying cargo is
| only costing money, see above) for refuelling
|
| - piracy and terrorism (I am not really convinced risking
| having some pirate group somewhere capture nuclear
| reactor is a good idea)
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Also, shipping doesn't have a reputation for operating in
| the bright sunshine of law and regulation, with expert
| leadership and engineering. We're not talking about the
| US Navy building and operating nuclear submarines, led by
| Navy officers, who have gone through extensive training,
| have years of experience, a culture of competency, etc.
| davkan wrote:
| Just pointing out a benefit when it was said there was
| none, I agree with all your points here.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _was tried, nuclear reactors on civilian ships, and found
| to be a stupid idea_
|
| We only did a demo ship, which was combination cargo and
| passenger. The principal cost was being rejected from ports
| for their lacking acceptance procedures, a first-mover
| cost. Nuclear shipping has never been "found to be a stupid
| idea." It was simply never explored.
| hef19898 wrote:
| It was, up to the point the only German nuclear powered
| vessel was a cargo ship. It was tried in the heyday of
| nuclear power, and didn't go anywhere. So yes, civilian
| nuclear ships have been tried and found to be expensive,
| not feasible and a dead end, or, if you use different
| words, stupid.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What counts as 'explored'? Full production? A demo ship
| is a signal of exploration.
| DerSaidin wrote:
| What are other options for ships if fossil fuels were
| phased out?
|
| Big batteries?
| https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-07-28/making-
| waves-e...
|
| Hydrogen fuel? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-
| powered_ship
|
| Yeah, those options seem simpler.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Sustainable fuels. It's the solution long haul aviation
| is coalescing around.
| seany wrote:
| Isn't this "technically accurate", but also misleading? The
| list of ships (1) isn't that long, and almost all of them
| had random other issues that made using them as a 1:1
| comparison not really that useful.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#
| Civi...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The NS Savannah [1] was indeed a marketing stunt. But in
| the 1960s climate change wasn't really an issue. If you
| have to ship bulk cargo across the Pacific, nuclear is
| largely your only option. Hydrogen is another potential
| choice, but you'd need a carbon neutral way of producing
| that option. Electrolysis isn't efficient, and steam
| reformation emits carbon dioxide.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
| hef19898 wrote:
| Given that we ship cargo in incredible amounts across
| _all_ oceans, ranging from liquids, bulk to containers
| and cars everyday with zero nuclear-powered carho
| vessels, calling nuclear your only option is odd.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| In case it wasn't clear, I'm talking about carbon-free
| propulsion options. Batteries don't have the energy
| capacity required for long distance shipping, and their
| weight is a big issue for ships. 300 mile range is fine
| for an EV, it's not for a ship.
| hef19898 wrote:
| That's what IRENA worked out in the frame of the
| initiative to decarbonise ocean shipping by 2050 when it
| comes to fuel:
|
| >> In the short term, advanced biofuels will play a key
| role in the reduction of CO2 emissions. In the medium and
| long-term, green hydrogen-based fuels are set to be the
| backbone for the sector's decarbonisation.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Present biomass energy doesn't have remotely close to
| scale required to decarbonize ocean transportation. I'm
| sure the "advanced" part of advanced biomass assumes some
| mega-algae or something else that is far more productive
| than existing biomass, but if that technology hasn't been
| developed yet then you might as well just say nuclear
| fusion is the solution.
|
| Hydrogen is currently produced via steam reformation [1],
| which emits carbon dioxide. Electrolysis is less
| efficient and corrosion of electrodes inhibits scale.
|
| Nuclear maritime propulsion is far more mature than any
| of the alternatives. Submarines and warships have been
| using it for over half a century. Could a technological
| breakthrough create a better alternative? Maybe, but we
| can't move ships with _potential_ technologies until said
| technologies make the transition from "potential" to
| "real".
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming
| hef19898 wrote:
| Then go and get funding for it! Because apparently you
| know better than anyone else who was involved in defining
| this strategy. And given many, to domain experts, just
| hairbrained ideas get, or used to get, VC funding, it
| should be easy, right? And a tremendous market, just
| imagine what a hyper-unicorn one can build by having the
| monopoly on power the cargo vessels of the future!
| codersfocus wrote:
| There needs to be nuclear powered "oiler ships" that stay
| out at sea indefinitely and recharge passing by electric
| ships.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Great idea. Now, either apply to YC with it or convince
| the shipping industry to revise their decarbonisation
| startegy by going full nuclear with nuclear charging
| vessels.
| internetter wrote:
| One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically produce
| about 20 terajoules of energy. One square kilometer of solar
| panels can theoretically produce the same amount (as 50cm^3
| U235) in a day. I'll take this bet.
|
| Edit: Tried to edit the edit but somehow deleted the rest of
| the edit. It was something to the tune of how a big problem
| with renewables is the fact that peak solar production does not
| match peak energy consumption, and storage is very difficult,
| so realistically we'll need a wide variety of energy options to
| fully transition to renewables. Nuclear is reliable and to some
| degree adjustable, helping to alleviate the storage issue.
| Basically, it's my opinion that nuclear works well with other
| renewable sources, and a full renewable transition will
| certainly involve more of it.
| echelon wrote:
| We need two things:
|
| - More energy
|
| - Energy diversification
|
| That includes nuclear, solar, and even more fossil fuels as
| we wean ourselves off of them.
|
| Writing off _any_ form of energy is ideological, not
| practical.
| internetter wrote:
| Agreed minus the fossil fuels bit. It's my belief we should
| not further scale that infrastructure.
| adonovan wrote:
| Perhaps I fail to understand, but doesn't this comparison
| depend on a number of parameters such as the total reactor
| fuel load and enrichment, the burn rate, the cost of nuclear
| fuel, the cost of solar PV, the lifetimes of each system, and
| the relative process efficiencies (notably the cost of
| decommissioning nuclear)?
|
| Otherwise you might as well say a teaspoon (or whatever) of
| water has as much potential fusion energy as 1 Kg U235 at a
| fraction of the price. ;-)
| internetter wrote:
| Yes, the amount of estimations I made to get to that number
| is absurd, and very much "best case" with no regard for
| inefficiencies (both nuclear and solar systems are
| currently leaving lots on the table).
| credit_guy wrote:
| Small nitpick: one teaspoon of water has much less
| potential fusion energy than 1 kg of U235, and actually
| much much less than 1g of U235, even allowing for fusion
| technology that does not exist and will not exist in 50
| years.
|
| Here's why.
|
| The Sun transforms hydrogen into helium. But that's a
| fairly complex chain and nobody in the industry or academia
| is trying to replicate that.
|
| When people talk about fusion, here's [1] the reactions
| they are considering.
|
| The best yielding fusion reaction is deuterium-tritium and
| deuterium-helium3 [1]. Tritium and helium-3 virtually don't
| occur naturally on Earth, and deuterium is very rare, at
| about 0.02% of the hydrogen. A teaspoon of water contains
| about 0.5 grams of hydrogen, and out of that about 0.0001
| grams of deuterium. Let's say that someone magically brings
| the necessary tritium or helium-3. How does that compare
| with 1 gram of U235?
|
| The fission of 1 nucleus of U235 yields about 190 MeV of
| energy. 1 MeV is one megaelectronvolt, and is a unit of
| energy. It does not matter how it translates into joules or
| watt-hours. It is the unit used when talking about fission
| and fusion. So, 235 nucleons produce 190 MeV, which is
| about 0.8 MeV per nucleon.
|
| The two reactions mentioned involve 5 nucleons and yield
| about 18 MeV, which means 3.6 MeV per nucleon or 4.5 times
| more per nucleon than U235.
|
| So, even if all the hydrogen in the one teaspoon of water
| was Deuterium and Tritium, in the correct ratios to do the
| fusion, we'd get only 4.5 times more energy than from one
| gram of U235. In reality, from one teaspoon of water we'd
| extract a very tiny amount of deuterium that's usable, and
| we'd need to breed Tritium or Helium-3 separately. By the
| way, separating deuterium from water is a very expensive
| process. The Nazis tried to do it during WW2, and they were
| doing it in Norway. Once the British special forces
| destroyed the plant, the Nazis could not restart the heavy
| water production, and their atomic project basically
| stopped then and there.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Criteria_a
| nd_ca...
| wongarsu wrote:
| The US doesn't lack space. But investors like a quick return
| on investment; meanwhile nuclear reactors only make sense if
| you bet on high electricity prices for the next ~70 years.
| The time a nuclear plant spends on construction and
| decommissioning is about the same as the total lifetime of a
| solar installation.
| tiffanyg wrote:
| Not unreasonable, but I would point out two options (not the
| only):
|
| 1) "Water batteries" - highly efficient (far more than the
| 'chemical' you are apparently referring to) & responsive
|
| 2) Methods for using 'renewables' to produce &/ support
| production of chemical fuels - with the added draw /
| potential goal of 'closing' the 'carbon cycle'
|
| As to #2, one of the ideals that has been kicked around for
| decades is to do something like: use 'renewables' to
| sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into
| something like butanol, for example.
|
| Now, last I was up-to-date on any of this sort of work (~10+
| years ago), the economics were not favorable. Certain types
| of commodity chemical production with 'biological basis'
| (another type of renewable, typically) had much more
| favorable properties economically. And, indeed, you do see,
| for example, (thermo)plastic products made from chemicals
| like "PLA" increasingly. But, the "biofuels" concept is / was
| much more challenging, especially as "fracking" technology
| made great leaps etc.
|
| Nuclear has its pros and cons - blanket disavowal is fatuous.
| Nevertheless, there are substantially more options, systems,
| technologies, etc. in development and _production_ than are
| often discussed in too many of the pro-nuke(s) / no nuke(s)
| 'sniping' chains that have been prevalent in society & on the
| internet since I was a wee tyke myself.
| internetter wrote:
| > use 'renewables' to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and
| convert it into something like butanol, for example.
|
| are you referring to P2X? I think P2X is an awesome
| solution for existing infrastructure, but it's obviously
| not particularly efficient. I am excited about pumped
| storage as well, but my fear there is we'll run out of
| sites, and obviously the 80% efficiency is still not ideal.
|
| By no means am I arguing nuclear is a one size fits all
| solution.
| concordDance wrote:
| > 1) "Water batteries" - highly efficient (far more than
| the 'chemical' you are apparently referring to) &
| responsive
|
| "Highly efficient" is very vague.
|
| What matters here are the numbers:
|
| W/$
|
| J/$
|
| % round trip losses
|
| % losses per hour
|
| Number of cycles before replacement needed
|
| Response time
|
| Do you have them?
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Nuclear is baseload and is the exact opposite of "instantly
| fired up". Best tech for that is gas or battery.
| tonyhb wrote:
| Cant control rods can be lifted or inserted to meet demand?
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| There's typically a range of operation, so you can adjust
| a hundred MW but you can't drop to 0 or spin up from
| standstill without a time consuming process.
|
| Edit: also, the economics are such that you rarely want
| to drop load from a nuclear plant unless it's offline or
| for system reasons. The fuel cost is negligible so you'd
| rather turn off your gas plant or lower the coal plant
| and save on those fuels.
| belorn wrote:
| That assume we still allow coal, oil or gas power plant
| to exist in the power grid. We should probably not assume
| that to be the case, especially after the temperatures
| rises to a break point and some of the major climate
| change crisis occurs.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Cant control rods can be lifted or inserted to meet
| demand?_
|
| Thermally it is difficult to dial a reactor up and down.
| Generally the way nuclear power is modified is by not-
| sending the steam to generators through a by-pass and
| quenching their heat in some fashion.
|
| So thermal generation stays at 100% (or whatever), but
| electrical generation output can be dropped.
| ggm wrote:
| There is a line of reasoning that baseload is a billing and
| profit construction, an artifice of the needs of coal-fired
| and nuclear power.
|
| There is nothing innately wrong with over building
| renewable and storage, and a transmission network.
|
| It's an argument about economics, not physics.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically
| produce about 20 terajoules of energy. One square kilometer
| of solar panels can theoretically produce the same amount (as
| 50cm^3 U235) in a day.
|
| Does the US have more 50cm^3 sized blocks of U235, or more
| square kilometers of land with low land values and high
| annual insolation?
|
| There's an estimated 6 million tonnes of mineable uranium
| reserves in the world [0]. Of which 0.72% is U-235, so we
| have a worldwide reserve of 43200 tonnes, or 43.2 million Kg
| U-235.
|
| Arizona is about 300k square kilometers. If we covered an
| area 10% the size of Arizona in solar panels, then they would
| have produced more energy than all the world's known U-235 in
| just four years. And would continue producing after those
| four years are up.
|
| [0] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-
| fuel-c...
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > If we covered an area 10% the size of Arizona in solar
| panels
|
| And what are the various Friends of Rare Bugs and Small
| Furry Animals groups doing in the meantime?
|
| I joke, but even I would balk at the environmental impact
| of that. Certainly it's going to be greater than any
| equivalent nuclear installation.
|
| > Of which 0.72% is U-235
|
| Fortunately we're not limited to U-235. With breeder
| reactors, there's enough nuclear fuel to run human
| civilization for billions-with-a-b of years.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Cover 4,000 square miles of the USA in surface car
| parks[1] and that's freedom. Suggest covering 11,000
| square miles of desert in solar panels which don't stop
| land being used for grazing or crop growing or insects or
| wildlife, and that's environmental distruction that
| "even" you would balk at.
|
| [1] https://www.archdaily.com/976069/when-5-percent-of-
| the-unite...
| internetter wrote:
| I want to make clear that I am not arguing against solar.
| My belief is that nuclear is an important piece of a much
| larger puzzle. Wind is not reliable, and for solar to match
| the figures you provided, we would need to figure out
| storage, so lets diversify our portfolio :)
| tzs wrote:
| > Wind is not reliable
|
| Surface wind is not reliable. I've seen proposals to put
| turbines on large kites or gliders tethered to the
| ground. There's pretty much always strong winds over most
| of the United States somewhere between the surface and
| 10000 feet.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Figuring out storage is hard if you think in terms of
| Lithium Ion grid-scale batteries, or mountains for pumped
| hydro, but[1] puts forward the idea of synthetic natural
| gas generated by solar panels. That can be pumped into
| existing national gas grids, existing gas storage, and
| sent into existing gas power stations to generate power
| in quiet times. The article says that solar power has
| dropped from $100/Watt in 1976 to $0.50/Watt by 2016, and
| that instead of slowing down as the low hanging fruit has
| been picked, that process is speeding up since 2011 when
| Solar started to become cheaper than other forms of power
| generation, which changed the feedback loops and is
| bringing in much more demand which brings more
| investment, research and production, than before when it
| was an expensive little-used alternative.
|
| This is a linked graph of solar growth compared to
| International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook
| predictions: https://rameznaam.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/05/IEA-Solar-G...
|
| In each of 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013,
| 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, the IEA predicted deployment of
| solar would stop accelerating (line going up) and steady
| off into consistant growth (flatline on that graph).
| Every year they have been very quickly wrong, and the
| 2019 predition of flatline is so wrong that by 2021
| actual production of 190GW was WAYYYY off the top of that
| chart. At this rate we may not need to figure out storage
| nearly as much as we think.
|
| > " _What people have missed is that reaching cost parity
| on fuel synthesis will unlock huge new demand centers
| [and trigger an acceleration in demand
| /investment/research/cost decline of solar created
| synthetic fuels]._"
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32197012
| (article rather than comments)
| datameta wrote:
| Compression of air in underground cavities
|
| > Hydrostor, which is based in Toronto, is one of several
| startups working on fixing those problems. The company
| says it's figured out a way to capture and reuse the heat
| generated when air is compressed, eliminating the need to
| burn gas. It's also figured out a way to make the
| mechanics work in areas where caverns must be dug out of
| hard rock, rather than salt. <
|
| https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2023-01-12
| /th...
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| It's worth noting that the dichotomy you set up isn't quite
| right. The land use for solar and wind isn't an
| exclusionary zone. The area around a wind turbine can be
| used same as before (most often as farmland) without a
| negative impact on its productivity.
|
| And the same is true for solar. In fact, a growing number
| of agro-voltaic projects are seeing a net positive on crop
| yields from solar panels due to the increased shading and
| decreased temperatures.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Is it possible for solar panels to be semi-transparent so
| crops can still thrive underneath?
| philipkglass wrote:
| Yes it is: https://www.pv-
| magazine.com/2021/07/02/transparent-solar-pan...
|
| _"Combining two usage modes based on Insolight's optical
| micro-tracking technology, these modules focus light on
| high-efficiency solar cells," Insolight said in a press
| release. "When aligned, the optical system can generate
| energy (E-MODE), but it is also possible to unalign it to
| 'leak' the light (MLT-MODE). The solar modules therefore
| act like a 'smart' shade adjusting the amount of light
| they let through."
|
| This makes it possible to optimize the photosynthesis of
| plants during the seasons and reduce the negative impact
| of high summer heat on the yields and quality of
| agricultural products, while recovering the rest of the
| light in the form of electricity. Starting from July, the
| panels will be tested for four years on a 165-square-
| meter surface area. They will replace protective plastic
| tunnels on strawberries and raspberries.
|
| "Dynamically adjusting the light transmitted to the
| plants paves the way for increased protection from
| climate variations and possible increases in crop yields
| thanks to the matching of the light to the needs of the
| plants and the lowering of the temperature during heat
| waves via the shading effect," said Bastien Christ, head
| of the berries and medicinal plants group at Agroscope._
|
| A similar project using different module technology:
| https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/31/baywa-re-starts-
| build...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| That's not needed, just have gaps between the panels so
| they provide partial shade. Many food crops can't
| tolerate "full sun" well, and will grow perfectly fine
| even with partial illumination.
| cpill wrote:
| I was thinking of you set the solar up high, to create a
| diet of canopy, then you might be able to grow a rain
| forest under it which doesn't like direct sunlight and
| would allow animal habitat...?
| evilos wrote:
| I remember reading some article that said we could offset
| all of human emissions by painting Vermont stark white or
| something along those lines.
|
| Covering a desert in solar panels seems like the exact
| opposite of that plan.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| There is way way more uranium than that. It is surprisingly
| common. And harvesting it from seawater opens up a supply
| that dwarfs any mining concept.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment
|
| >> Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low
| levels _within all rock, soil, and water_. This is the
| highest-numbered element to be found naturally in
| significant quantities on earth. According to the United
| Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic
| Radiation the normal concentration of uranium in soil is
| 300 mg /kg to 11.7 mg/kg. ... It is considered to be more
| plentiful than antimony, beryllium, cadmium, gold, mercury,
| silver, or tungsten and _is about as abundant as tin_ ,
| arsenic or molybdenum.
|
| How uranium or becomes fuel rods:
| https://youtu.be/9x7DozCqLxU
| duped wrote:
| The uranium can produce power when it's dark outside, unlike
| the solar panels. I wouldn't bet against clean energy that
| can produce on demand. We'll always need it from somewhere.
| est31 wrote:
| > One kilogram of uranium-235 (50 cm^3) can theoretically
| produce about 20 terajoules of energy.
|
| That's missing the huge and expensive nuclear power plant
| around that kilogram of uranium.
|
| If you don't account for the conversion device (for which
| solar is cheaper per GJ than nuclear power plants), then
| light is a much better medium: assuming 15% efficiency, which
| is a conservative estimate, solar panels can convert one
| kilogram of solar light (remember e=mc^2) into 13.5
| terajoules of electricity.
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1+kg+*+c%5E2+*+15%25+in.
| ..
|
| The sun bombards our planet with around 61 metric tons of
| light per day:
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2+*+pi+*+radius+of+eart.
| ..
|
| Where the 6 kwh/m^2 come from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Solar_irradiance#Irradiance_on...
| datameta wrote:
| Hey thanks for adding links to formulas. Great use of
| wolfram alpha imo.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| But remember that a square kilometer of solar panels needs
| maybe ten square kilometers of actual land. Anywhere other
| than at the equator, the panels need to be spaced far enough
| apart not to shadow each other. On a north-facing slop they
| would be even more spaced out. Do that in two dimensions, so
| they can track the sun, and keeping one square meter of
| panels perpendicular to the sun requires a suprisingly large
| footprint.
|
| And trees. Clearcutting forests to make room for a solar
| panels just seems wrong, a captain planet style of evil.
| There are all sorts of places where the terrain just isnt
| suited.
| shwouchk wrote:
| One interesting point that I think is often missed, is that
| solar and wind produce energy roughly at an anticadence to
| each other and so storage is of significantly less of a
| requirement than one might imagine.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Too cheap for "American nuclear" to compete.
|
| Chinese nuclear can compete just fine.
| epistasis wrote:
| Chinese nuclear is not competing very well. There's a
| minuscule amount of it planned, only like 50GW over the
| coming decades. This is not even a drop in the bucket
| compared to what China are doing with batteries, wind, and
| solar.
| gambiting wrote:
| It's 50GW more than anyone else though. There are some
| nuclear projects in US/UK but I'll eat my hat if they
| actually get built at all.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| > The new 1,114 megawatt (MW) Unit 3 reactor joins two existing
| reactors
|
| It's indeed not a lot. At a great cost. That kind of is the
| point. Nuclear is very costly.
|
| Solar, wind, battery storage, and other cheap alternatives are
| indeed being rolled out at a plural orders of magnitude larger
| scale.
| mcint wrote:
| Nuclear is costly _now_*. It wasn't getting built, for years.
| There is so much energy to be had from that, and cost
| learning curves can come down. France's ("small") modular
| reactors, SMR, they even aim to sell internationally, in
| their 2030 plan, are a model. To China no less.
|
| China also builds nuclear reactors, and we can't fall behind
| them. I cannot abide an SMR gap.
| grecy wrote:
| > _China also builds nuclear reactors, and we can 't fall
| behind them_
|
| I, uh, have some uncomfortable news for you.
|
| China are currently building 22 nuclear reactors [1]
|
| China installed 230GW of solar and wind in 2023 [2]
|
| China has over 40,000kms of High Speed Rail, and continues
| to expand [3]
|
| By _any_ measure, you 're falling way behind them.
|
| [1] https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/30/china-is-
| building...
|
| [2] https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-seen-
| installing-230-gw-o...
|
| [3] https://www.statista.com/topics/7534/high-speed-rail-
| in-chin...
| nradov wrote:
| Perhaps, but so far in the US we still don't have any really
| large battery storage facilities connected to the grid. These
| will be necessary if want to have reliable base load capacity
| without building more nuclear or fossil fuel power plants. The
| largest battery storage facility being built right now only has
| 2165 MWh of capacity, which is a drop in the bucket relative to
| demand.
|
| https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/edwards-sanborn-so...
|
| Battery prices keep falling, but the supply chain is still
| constrained and there are huge expenses involved in building
| storage facilities that go beyond the cost of the cells. Other
| storage systems such as pumped hydroelectric or electrolyzed
| hydrogen may play a role but aren't cheap either.
| epistasis wrote:
| There's little reason to build massive batteries at one spot,
| unless you are repurposing an only transmission line.
|
| Instead, a good chunk of grid storage is getting deployed
| right at the generation site of solar (and some wind), which
| allows more efficient use of that transmission line.
|
| Instead, we should be looking for large amounts of total
| install. However, this still won't happen much until it's
| actually needed by the grid, which starts to happen at much
| higher amounts of renewable generation than most states are
| using.
|
| The tech is there, it's being deployed at massive scale where
| needed, and it's dropping in cost as fast or faster than
| predicted.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The tech is not here. The scale of grid storage required to
| fulfill just diurnal storage - let alone days or weeks to
| offset seasonal variation - is far beyond what batteries
| can provide. To put this in perspective, the US _alone_
| uses 12 TWh of electricity per day. The world uses 60 TWh
| per day. Both of these figures are going to increase, as
| poorer countries develop and want amenities like air
| conditioning. Also, as transportation and industrial
| processes are electrified. By comparison, global battery
| production is around 500 GWh per year. Yes, this will
| increase. But most of that production is going to
| electronics and EVs, not grid storage.
|
| This is why proponents of a primarily wind + solar grid
| assume that hydrogen, ammonia, compressed air, giant
| concrete weights, or something else will make energy
| storage nearly free. Delivering the required storage scale
| with existing technologies isn't feasible, so people just
| assume that some other heretofore unproven technology will
| be orders of magnitude better.
| amateuring wrote:
| loll sure
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| I'd bet you will be very wrong
| seb1204 wrote:
| I think you are wrong for the reason parent stated. Safety
| and regulations for nuclear are just too high to be
| competitive with modular solar that can scale and has no
| nuclear waste issue that is still unsolved.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| We don't have enough material for 100% renewables+storage
| worldwide. And it has never been used at scale ever.
|
| Nuclear on the other end, is proven and much more efficient
| land and material-wise.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| > Georgia Power expects another similar-sized fourth reactor,
| Vogtle Unit 4, to begin operation sometime between November 2023
| and March 2024.
|
| The timelines here are so crazy that they accidentally a whole
| year.
| evilos wrote:
| That's a 5 month range chief.
| mburns wrote:
| The dates are correct. They expect it to be operational in Q1
| of this coming year.
|
| https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Vogtle-4-start-u...
| OliverJones wrote:
| It would be great to get a straightforward assessment of the
| improvements in reactor tech in this new plant. "Passive safety
| features" sound pretty good to my untrained ear. But how much of
| this is marketing bullshytt?
| stetrain wrote:
| The article is dated Dec 26, 2023 but the linked announcement
| from Georgia Power is dated July 31, 2023.
| topspin wrote:
| Yes, it's old news. It's not solar/wind so it's not a priority
| for EIA et al.
|
| More recent news in nuclear power is commercial operation of a
| high temperature gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor in China. Their
| first HTR-PM reactor went online a couple weeks ago[1].
|
| [1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-HTR-
| PM-D...
| evilos wrote:
| We paid the first-of-a-kind costs, we should reap the Nth-of-a-
| kind rewards. Replace all the coal capacity with AP1000s.
| philipkglass wrote:
| There's no Federal agency that can decree that sort of policy.
| Coal generator retirement happens on a state-by-state or even
| business-by-business basis.
|
| Some states are going to cling to coal power past its
| economically rational lifespan because important parts of state
| politics are linked to coal businesses. States where coal
| retires for economic reasons will go for least-cost replacement
| (a blend of solar, wind, and natural gas). States where
| environmental concerns trump cost concerns have little if any
| coal generating capacity left to replace at this point.
| evilos wrote:
| There is potential in the federally owned TVA which has
| around 35 GW in its portfolio. Also Georgia has a lot of coal
| and is the state with these new NPPs.
|
| Plus the federal government doesn't need to mandate it. It
| can simply incentivize these plants to be built like it did
| with Solar/Wind.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| I have head that molten salt is much safer but also more
| expensive. Would there be a reason not to go with molten salt?
| evilos wrote:
| It will likely take a minimum of ten years to get a non light
| water reactor certified by the NRC. And that is very
| optimistic. Then you have to build the first of a kind plant
| which is always more expensive and takes longer. Then you
| have to get good at operating these new kinds of plants.
|
| It's true that MSR and Breeder reactors have lots of
| potential benefits over traditional LWRs but the truth is,
| LWRs are more than good enough for right now and we literally
| can't build enough of them if even if we tried.
|
| You wouldn't want to power all of human society off of LWRs
| simply because they only access ~5% of the energy in the
| fuel. But we're so far away from that being a constraint.
| Build LWRs today and keep developing Breeder/MSR tech.
| api wrote:
| MSRs look nice on paper but we don't have any experience
| building them. It would take a gigantic up front investment
| to work out the real world issues and commercialize a
| technology that has a lot of novel aspects like handling
| radioactive molten salt.
|
| Meanwhile that same money would buy loads more power in
| solar/wind and batteries, which are proven technologies that
| are getting progressively cheaper.
|
| An alternate timeline where we do MSRs in the 1950s and phase
| out coal by 1990 would have been possible but we didn't do
| that and there are better alternatives now.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| "In 1989, Korea began construction on their first domestically
| developed OPR-1000 design... Twelve reactors of this standard
| design began construction between 1989 and 2008, and their
| costs declined in a stable manner... representing a 13% cost
| decline (1% annualized)." (Lovering 2016)
|
| The problem is, even after reaping this cost decline, totaling
| 50%, nuclear power is still noncompetitive in South Korea. They
| were built for energy independence after oil shock, not for
| cheap electricity.
| evilos wrote:
| Same source as you (Lovering 2016), the Koreans built several
| 1 GW plants for an overnight cost of 2 Billion USD per plant
| or less in many cases. A seriously impressive feat. The graph
| seems to show a far greater cost decline than 13%.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/J90HtWm.png
|
| The Koreans just recently ousted an administration that was
| overtly hostile to nuclear energy and had declared a phase
| out. Now they are planning on increasing the share of nuclear
| electricity to 35%. https://www.world-nuclear-
| news.org/Articles/South-Korea-incr...
| erngkejr wrote:
| I was a nuclear engineer for eight years and I left the industry
| because I felt like I was taking crazy pills. Every time someone
| says "nuclear is the only practical solution for climate change,
| it's not possible to build solar or wind fast enough or cheaply
| enough", you can point them to this press release. All the
| nuclear supporters I know deal heavily in magical thinking,
| completely ignoring the factual reality of the industry.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Could you elaborate? Having read the press release I'm not sure
| what you mean
| cableshaft wrote:
| From the linked article, we get how much power it generates
| 1,114 MW (or 1.114 Gigawatts), how long it took to build that
| reactor (started in 2009, so 14 years), and how much it cost
| (planned $14 billion, final $30 billion):
|
| > The new 1,114 megawatt (MW) Unit 3 reactor
|
| > Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009.
| Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial
| operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project
| ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns.
| The total cost of the project is now estimated at more than
| $30 billion.
|
| Meanwhile:
|
| "Utility-scale solar capacity in the U.S. electric power
| sector increased from 61 gigawatts (GW) in 2021 to 71 GW in
| 2022, according to data from our Electricity Power Monthly.
| Wind capacity grew from 133 GW in 2021 to 141 GW in 2022."[1]
|
| So solar increased 10 Gigawatts last year and wind grew 8
| Gigawatts. About 18x that one nuclear reactor we've managed
| to complete since 2016. In a single year.
|
| Also wind and solar is cheaper than the cost of nuclear
| energy now:
|
| "Nuclear energy is generally more expensive than wind and
| solar energy. The IEA report estimates the cost of
| electricity from new nuclear plants to be between $60 and $70
| per MWh (megawatt-hour), while the cost of electricity from
| onshore wind and solar PV is estimated to be between $30 and
| $60 per MWh."[2]
|
| So wind and solar is faster and cheaper. The only main
| benefit is a nuclear plant can still keep generating power in
| inclement weather (which is still important, but doesn't make
| it cheaper or faster than wind and solar).
|
| [1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960
|
| [2]: https://medium.com/@liam.m.obrien/nuclear-vs-wind-and-
| solar-...
| selimnairb wrote:
| > So solar increased 10 Gigawatts last year and wind grew 8
| Gigawatts. About 18x that one nuclear reactor we've managed
| to complete since 2016. In a single year.
|
| Nuclear capacity factors are over 90% [1]. Wind is around
| 30%, solar around 25%, so it's really ~5 GW (solar and wind
| capacity added), vs. ~1 GW nuclear fission added (and we're
| not trying that hard to build more nuclear plants).
|
| [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/data-and-
| statist...
| kevincox wrote:
| It is quite hard to compare $60-70 for year-round super
| stable power to $30-60 for bursty power.
|
| That being said, unless there is a huge regulatory shift it
| seems like nuclear won't get much cheaper and solar and
| wind will continue to do so, so comparing those numbers
| will get easier to compare as the costs spread further.
| XorNot wrote:
| Which is all irrelevant, because neither is dispatchable:
| you get what you get when they're able to produce it.
| evilos wrote:
| I mean, we know we can build nuclear plants quickly because
| we've done it before. It is physically possible. China and
| Korea can still do it today.
|
| If you just mean the bureaucracy is impossible to defeat, it
| would just take political will. Which we are seeing more and
| more of recently. The first of a kind build is always slow.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I hear a lot of magical thinking about wind and solar too, with
| some magical pixie dust solving the intermittence problem but
| nothing practical being built at scale.
| klipklop wrote:
| Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do
| not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks.
|
| I didn't run the math but I'm guessing it's not feasible to build
| a battery pack large enough to ride out winter in some areas. The
| SF Bay Area, sure, but I suspect blackouts will be common in
| solar+battery only areas.
|
| A preferred solution would be a mix of both with nuclear handling
| disruptions due to weather.
|
| One technology for power generation should not "win". Employing a
| variety of power generation methods will give you the most stable
| power grid.
| slashdev wrote:
| Batteries are not for riding out winter, they're for evening
| out the daily load.
|
| You have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation,
| as well as make long-distance interconnects. Pumped hydro is
| also extremely interesting for obvious reasons.
|
| Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive. But that's
| mostly an artificial problem caused by regulation. Can we solve
| that without sacrificing safety? Can we even solve it at all?
| Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and
| poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal variation_
|
| At which point it ceases to be as cheap.
| loandbehold wrote:
| Not necessarily.
| viraptor wrote:
| That sounds like a kneejerk response. Got a source for it?
| It's not like we didn't know about it all the time, yet the
| large solar systems were built.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _sounds like a kneejerk response. Got a source for it_
|
| If you have 120% solar capacity in the summer so you have
| 100% in the winter, that's obviously going to be more
| expensive than just building 100%. This is basic
| utilisation.
|
| Also, diminishing returns: the most-productive spots for
| solar will be built out first.
| viraptor wrote:
| That wasn't your claim. You said it stops being cheap -
| does it? Compared to alternatives?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _You said it stops being cheap - does it? Compared to
| alternatives?_
|
| "As cheap." Solar will keep getting cheaper until
| saturation, then overshoot while it gets a bit more
| expensive. The equilibrium will shift from time to time
| as technology advances. But there are fundamental limits,
| and power demand is only going to grow.
| wolfram74 wrote:
| As the seasonality of power becomes more and more
| pronounced, it'll make more and more sense to make
| seasonal loads. Cheap to build but electrically expensive
| to operate manufacturing processes that take advantage of
| borderline free power in the summer months that don't
| have much capex to amortize in the winters.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| Depends on the latitude and weather patterns. For
| instance you might need 25 (or much more) higher capacity
| to generate as much power in December as you would in May
| in most of Northern Europe (that should be pretty obvious
| though).
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Unlike nuclear, which is too expensive when you don't
| overbuild it, and becomes simply stupidly expensive if you
| contemplate overbuilding it.
|
| Overbuilding nuclear is so preposterous that nuclear fans
| just pretend you magically don't need to, to prevent their
| fragile dream from being crushed by reality, and let them
| continue to steer at renewables and all the problems they
| face as every nation on earth builds then out at massive
| scale.
| kragen wrote:
| you don't need to overbuild nuclear; nuclear plants
| commonly have a capacity factor of over 80%
| Tommstein wrote:
| > Unlike nuclear, which is too expensive when you don't
| overbuild it, and becomes simply stupidly expensive if
| you contemplate overbuilding it.
|
| > Overbuilding nuclear is so preposterous that nuclear
| fans just pretend you magically don't need to, to prevent
| their fragile dream from being crushed by reality, and
| let them continue to steer at renewables and all the
| problems they face as every nation on earth builds then
| out at massive scale.
|
| Why would you need to overbuild nuclear power plants?
| Other than planning for future growth, but I don't think
| that's what people generally mean by overbuilding, it's
| more like avoiding "it's been cloudy/windless for a few
| weeks now so back to the 1800s it is."
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| That's not automatically true. As the price continues to
| drop even over building renewables can be cheaper than
| other options. Nuclear is very expensive so there's a lot
| of wiggle room.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| I find it hard to imagine solar could ever be cheaper
| than nuclear during winter in Northern Europe.
| hef19898 wrote:
| No need to imagine, because it is. At least if you
| believe electricity market prices reflect reality.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| What is?
|
| > At least if you believe electricity market prices
| reflect reality
|
| I don't see how is this relevant if we're talking
| specifically about solar.
|
| Above ~53deg solar production during December is ~20 (to
| way more than that farther you go north) lower than in
| December.
| hef19898 wrote:
| And still, PV generated electricity during these periods
| is priced cheaper on the spot market than nuclear. Funny,
| right? It is almost as if the parties investing billions
| and making billions selling and buying electricity
| figured out the financials behind all that.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Yeah, PV and gas are the cheapest new power to build
| today.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| That's tangential and doesn't change the fact that solar
| barely produces anything during winter if you go far
| enough north (and you don't have any way to store the
| produced power for at least 4-5months).
| hef19898 wrote:
| The answer to that is simple: powerlines, wind, hydro...
| No idea why people think solar has to be local, wind
| requires powerlines and nuclear for some reason isn't
| neither...
| hef19898 wrote:
| Gas not so much, at least not in Europe. There the
| ranking (cheap to expensive) is: Solar and wind, coal,
| oil, nuclear and gas (roughly). Coal is that cheap
| because CO2 certificates are way underpriced.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > And still, PV generated electricity during these
| periods is priced cheaper on the spot market than
| nuclear.
|
| I still don't understand what you're trying to say. It's
| priced at what the market is willing to pay regardless of
| the source. How is this relevant?
|
| The variable costs for solar are insignificant so of
| course you're going to keep the panels turned on and sell
| the power.
|
| In Northern Europe you can only make money from solar
| during summer/spring. If you had to overprovision by
| 10-30 times there is no way it would be financially
| viable (energy prices would be close to 0 during peaks
| and you would still barely produce any power during most
| of winter) without some sort of long term "storage"
| (maybe hydrogen or something)
| hef19898 wrote:
| Electricity is priced, at least last time I checked the
| European ones, at generating cost (variable cost
| excluding fix costs). Guess what forms of electricity
| generation have basically zero variable costs? Wind and
| solar. And guess what, those utility scale projects are
| calculated based on these conditions, and still
| profitable, even in winter.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _not automatically true_
|
| It very obviously is. Solar power (and wind) are
| constrained by the planet's insolation. Even assuming
| perfect efficiency, we start approaching diminishing
| returns _based on power input_ within a century.
|
| Now assume imperfect efficiency and resource constraints,
| and you see that cliff approach within decades. This is
| fine. It's the law of diminishing marginal returns. It's
| why a diversity of sources almost always beats
| monosourcing.
| kragen wrote:
| your projection that human world marketed energy
| consumption will increase by a factor of 1000x within a
| century may be correct, but it is far outside the range
| of mainstream predictions, and far faster than current
| growth
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_con
| sum... shows total energy supply (excluding agriculture)
| growing from 8700 million toe in 01990 to 14500 million
| toe in 02021, a 67% increase, or 1.66% per year.
| extrapolating that until 02123 we get only a factor of
| 5.4x growth, not the 1000x you're predicting
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _projection that human world marketed energy
| consumption will increase by a factor of 1000x within a
| century may be correct_
|
| We currently produce about 2% [1] of the Earth's
| insolation, or 6% of that which hits land. So you're
| talking factors of 16 to 50, which at 2% growth means 140
| years to the former. Again, assuming perfect efficiency
| and no clouds, _et cetera_.
|
| If we assume 50% efficiency (still with no clouds) and
| covering half of all the Earth's land in solar panels, we
| have about 70 years. It's ludicrous to assume we won't
| see diminishing marginal returns in a quarter of that
| time.
|
| [1] _26 936 TWh [a] / (340 W/sqm [b] x 510mm sqkm x 1000
| x 365 days x 24 hours)_
|
| [a] https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-2026113/v1
| /1dff0a...
|
| [b]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget
| Symmetry wrote:
| The price of solar panels is likely to fall to ever lower
| levels but the labor involved in installing them and the
| land they use up are much more likely to be the binding
| constraints in the future. Though we do have the twin
| strategies of building out the power grid to put solar
| generation in high availability areas and shifting
| electrical consumption to times of sunlight as
| mitigation.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yeah, of course. If you take the first answer to the GP,
| that is a bit outdated, it's as expensive as 1/4 of the
| nuclear costs.
| jdewerd wrote:
| When nuclear takes off in China but not the USA, we'll figure
| it out. But not until then.
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| Why hasn't nuclear taken off in China?
|
| I keep hearing that it's not cost effective anymore, to
| slow etc. but if it's actually mostly regulation that's
| hindering the built out (regardless of the risks) shouldn't
| China with their impressive portfolio of warpspeed
| megaprojects have been an ideal example of scaling the next
| generation of this tech?
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| China is building nuclear reactors faster than any other
| country.
|
| At the moment, they have 21 new reactors under
| construction.
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| Interesting. 21 doesn't seem like much compared to the
| 300+ there's been in US, 330 in China, 170 in EU etc,
| until you see theres zero retired units in china compared
| to large amounts in the rest of the world.
|
| Still though. 21 seems to indicate they are actually
| betting on something else.
|
| https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-nuclear-
| powe...
| resolutebat wrote:
| China is betting on all the things at once: they're the
| world leader in building out new solar, new wind, new
| nuclear and new coal power simultaneously.
| tzs wrote:
| They also say they are going to approve 6 to 8 more per
| year indefinitely.
| aurelwu wrote:
| 21 reactors under construction even with a short build
| time of 7 years is just 3 finished per year, and with
| China having ~15x the population of Germany that would
| amount to 0,2 reactors finishing per year in Germany.
| Multiplied with 1,4 GW that would add ~0,3 GW capacity
| resulting in about 2,5 TWh additional electricity
| generated per year which is 0,5% of annual current german
| demand. Do that for 20 years and you'd be at 10% of
| current electricity demand or about 5-7% of the demand in
| 20 years from now - or in other words micro-optimisation.
| kragen wrote:
| prc is hedging their bets by building some new reactors,
| but it's not competitive with pv and wind (which they are
| building far more of), even at the dismal capacity
| factors they've achieved so far for reasons I'm unclear
| on (possibly a shortage of hvdc transmission capacity)
| hackyhacky wrote:
| If there's any area to not skimp on safety regulations, I'd
| say nuclear is it. I think the alleged blight of
| "overregulation" has become a conservative mantra but without
| much basis in fact.
|
| Or maybe I'm wrong. You seem to know a lot about nuclear
| regulation. Can you tell us a specific, unnecessary
| burdensome regulatory rule that you feel is holding back
| progress?
| slashdev wrote:
| What world do you live in that you don't see the burdensome
| regulation everywhere. Don't know anyone with a business?
| Never investigated how zoning works? Never filed taxes?
| Never used the healthcare system?
| hackyhacky wrote:
| I've used all of these services and they all have
| problems. I can't say that those problems are due to
| "excessive regulation." In the case of healthcare, for
| example, most of the problems come from insurance
| companies who allegedly operate in the free market. I am
| strongly in favor of business, zoning, and environmental
| regulations because they provide valuable function.
|
| Moreover, none of that is relevant to nuclear regulation.
| I asked for a specific example of an overly burdensome
| and unnecessary regulatory rule.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Not building out nuclear has an huge opportunity cost:
| fossil fuel plants kill people every day from pollution.
| Excessive nuclear safety regulations cost more lives than
| they save by slowing the transition away from fossil fuels.
|
| (Example: the Vogtle plants were delayed in part because
| the NRC decided, after having previously approved the
| design of the plant, to change its mind and require that
| the plant be able to withstand a jetliner impact.
| https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-
| vogtle-a... )
| konschubert wrote:
| You can also use hydrogen (or Ammonia) for long term storage.
| It's one of the few use cases where hydrogen makes sense.
| kragen wrote:
| for long-term storage it might be better to convert the
| hydrogen to something more easily storable, such as propane
| or octane, or to make a different electrolytic product such
| as aluminum
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Ammonia is another interesting storage fuel option.
| kragen wrote:
| yes, that's mentioned in the comment i was replying to,
| but while it's appealing in some ways, i feel that it is
| not as appealing as the options i mentioned for reasons
| of accident hazard, noxious combustion products, lower
| density, and risk of corrosion
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > You have to overbuild renewables to handle seasonal
| variation
|
| Not at all feasible with solar throughout much of Europe. Of
| course wind is a much better option there.
| belorn wrote:
| Pumped hydro used to exist here in Sweden during the 1970s.
| They were phased out because they are not cost competitive.
| They built nuclear power plants instead because those were
| cost competitive at that time.
|
| It would be funny if the cost has switched between pumped
| hydro and nuclear, but I suspect they haven't. What really
| pushed out both were cheap natural gas and oil. Even now, new
| gas powered plants are being planned to be built within the
| next 5 years. I don't see a solutions to this without new
| regulation putting a clamp on the fossil fuels.
|
| The one hope I have for pumped hydro is that our current
| hydropower fleet are outdated and far outside of minimum
| environmental standards. Combined they have managed to drive
| species to the brink of extinction, basically being large
| meat grinders for migrating fish. The solution of catching
| the offspring and fly them to Sweden to be implanted back
| into lakes is a terrible solution that have little to no
| scientific support. With the required investments into
| modernization, reverse hydro might not be too expensive to
| include, assuming again that the economics of the concept
| start to make sense.
| kragen wrote:
| grid-scale storage becomes more profitable when your
| primary energy production is more intermittent. current pv
| is something like 10x cheaper than nuclear before you
| factor in intermittency, and that opens up a huge market
| for grid-scale storage that didn't exist in the 01970s.
| pumped hydro was replaced by dispatchable gas, but gas is
| more expensive now, and batteries are cheaper
| cplusplusfellow wrote:
| > Nuclear as it exists today is not cost competitive.
|
| At the risk of stating the obvious, this notion entirely
| depends upon your definition of costs, and the definition of
| what is competitive. It's vastly more costly to society to
| have unreliable power (e.g., blackouts, brownouts, or weeks
| on end of lowered usage restrictions) than it is to have
| slightly more expensive electricity.
|
| There is no rich country in the world with expensive energy.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Yes, I always want to scream "what about the quality of the
| power?" when people make claims about cost-competitiveness.
| Electricity is a commodity on the surface, but, as with
| many technologies, depending on the use case, differences
| in the qualities of the underlying source matter a great
| deal. Reduction of all costs to currency can be a damaging
| abstraction to impose on systems that inherently involve
| trade-offs between qualities.
| alex_young wrote:
| One benefit of building excess capacity of renewables - free
| electricity to power your automobile. If we actually priced
| excess energy smartly people would charge their cars in the
| daytime and spend ~ 0 to drive most of the year.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > an artificial problem caused by regulation
|
| Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical realities of
| nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost is like
| calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of water.
|
| > Bloated regulatory agencies seem to have infiltrated and
| poisoned every aspect of society with no relief in sight.
|
| It's often repeated, including by a certain political
| grouping, but never established IME. Unregulated markets,
| such as cryptocurrency, privacy, etc. seem to cause most of
| the problems. The FAA, etc. do well IME. They fail when
| undermined by a political class that benefits from fraud (the
| same trying to prevent the IRS from collecting legitimate
| taxes.)
| theLiminator wrote:
| > Maybe it's a real problem caused by the physical
| realities of nuclear. Calling regulation an artificial cost
| is like calling sewage treatment an artificial cost of
| water.
|
| That's just plain wrong. I don't know whether regulations
| in this case are bloat or not, but you're basically saying
| that regulations are never bloated, which is abjectly
| false.
| cm2187 wrote:
| You can't solve the variability of wind by overbuilding.
| Output can go down to <5% for more than a week several times
| a year. So the only way is storage. On a massive scale. Or
| having another source that makes sense to modulate. LNG is
| one (though carbon based).
| Symmetry wrote:
| It's not that the agencies regulating nuclear are bloated but
| that they're given a mandate that nuclear must be as safe as
| possible rather than being held to some finite standard of
| safety.
| hedora wrote:
| Even in the SF Bay Area, there were widespread power outages
| coupled with extended storms/clouds last spring.
|
| Lots of solar + battery systems got propane generator upgrades
| this year.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The people saying that might live far from the equator, where
| wind power helps balance solar in winter but people in general
| live fairly near it and energy intensive industry will migrate
| in that direction to follow the cheap power.
| malfist wrote:
| Power is easily transmitted and losses are minimal. There's no
| reason to think you need local solar power generation in a
| cloudy region.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Grid connection is a real problem. Solar power in US waits
| years for grid connection.
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/06/outdated-us-energy-grid-
| tons...
| conjecTech wrote:
| Nuclear is already about 20% of US electricity generation. I
| don't think many people are suggesting taking that offline.
| When people are talking about being all solar, wind and storage
| they are talking about _new_ generation. So the eventual
| solution would still be a mix of all of those.
| chockablock wrote:
| You don't need to 'ride out winter'; there's a sweet spot
| around 100-hour storage where you can unlock a huge amount of
| grid resiliency and decarbonization (you can keep as many
| dispatchable gas plants sitting nearly-always-idle to address
| risk of any freak long-tail events.)
|
| https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "the people saying solar and battery only future"
|
| I think I never, ever heard or read anyone saying this, and I
| think I follow/participate in the debates, before it was cool
| and everywhere.
|
| Renewable people rather sound like this:
|
| "Employing a variety of power generation methods will give you
| the most stable power grid."
|
| Where of course quite many "green" people don't want nuclear at
| all in the mix. Rather more of long distance energy transport
| (HVDC). And otherwise any option that works and does not
| pollute, or pollutes less.
|
| (And personally I am not antinuclear as long as the alternative
| are fossil fuels, so they should be used as a transition
| technology and long term rather reserved for other application,
| like powering things in space and remote important sites)
| hackerlight wrote:
| > Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future
| do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks.
|
| This isn't a big problem. Wind is negatively correlated with
| solar, and electricity can be sent across long distances
| (intra- or inter-country) with minimal loss, and overbuilding
| eliminates a lot of the variability issues. Variability across
| geographies and across modes cancels out.
|
| Nuclear is pretty good, but solar and wind is simply better.
| Way cheaper and quicker to implement, less resistance from
| NIMBYs who have an irrational fear of leaks, less valid
| concerns of enabling nuclear weapons proliferation, less
| technical know-how requirement. It's the most brain-dead
| obvious calculus if you know the actual facts, costs and trade-
| offs.
|
| And time is of the essence. Eliminating 80-90% of emissions in
| 4 years (with only solar and wind and without batteries, yes
| this is possible whilst being cheaper than nuclear) means less
| emissions than eliminating 100% of emissions in 20 years with
| nuclear.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _Wind is negatively correlated with solar_
|
| Yes, but not strongly. It is definitely a problem, as seen in
| Texas on cold mornings where solar isn't getting much light,
| winds are still, and people need heat.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Right, and that's why it's infeasible to get 100% from
| renewables without storage, but we're not going for 100%,
| we're going for 80-90%. The objective is to address climate
| change, and to do that we need to minimize the area under
| the curve of emissions from now onwards. Renewables in my
| view is more effective at achieving this objective (with
| the added bonus of being cheaper).
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| > Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future
| do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks.
|
| Or we've researched it and understand the basics of solar
| technology.
|
| In sunny California solar has a capacity factor of around 25%.
| In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this drops to
| around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do not
| entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly don't
| require enough battery capacity to last all winter.
|
| In terms of capital costs solar is around $1 per watt while
| nuclear is around $10. Combined cycle gas plants are roughly
| the same as solar. It takes a bit more than a year to build a
| solar farm, while a new nuclear plant you're looking at a
| decade. ROI on solar is on the scale of 1 to 2 years. Nuclear
| will be shockingly lucky to have even started construction in
| that period.
|
| When we look at the levelized, unsubsidized cost of energy
| (https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-
| april...) we get a range of $24 to $96 per MWh for utility
| scale solar, while nuclear is $141 to $221 and combined cycle
| gas plants at $39 to $101.
|
| And the trend lines strongly favor solar + storage.
|
| Is it any wonder investors are reluctant to fund nuclear
| projects? For the same amount financed I can build 10x the
| capacity, have half the marginal cost of production, and see
| nothing but upside in 2 years.
|
| Places like Singapore that lack land suitable for utility scale
| solar will need to look to other solutions including nuclear.
| For the rest of us the decision is not difficult.
|
| Seems to me you are unaware of basic facts of the matter while
| you make naive criticisms of solar investment due to a personal
| affinity for nuclear technology.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I think you might want to fix that link address. :)
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Thanks. The way pdf downloads changed in recent versions of
| Chrome keeps tripping me up. So annoying.
| Gare wrote:
| You both raise good points. Yes solar is getting cheaper but
| economical and environmentally friendly long term storage
| (order of several days or even a month worth of energy for a
| hundred million people) is far from a solved problem.
|
| > In sunny California solar has as capacity factor of around
| 25%. In Germany, which is prone to many cloudy days this
| drops to around 10%. So yes cloudy days have an impact but do
| not entirely eliminate solar from contention and certainly
| don't require enough battery capacity to last all winter.
|
| In Croatia yearly capacity factor is around 15%, but the
| problem is it varies wildly throughout the year. In summer we
| get up to 300 hours of sunlight per month, in winter less
| than 50. So yes, on paper the capacity might be enough, but
| one needs to have the ability to store the massive amount of
| energy inter-seasonally.
| loeg wrote:
| > In summer we get up to 300 hours of sunlight per month,
| in winter less than 50. So yes, on paper the capacity might
| be enough, but one needs to have the ability to store the
| massive amount of energy inter-seasonally.
|
| Or overbuild by a factor of 6x or whatever relative to
| summer loads, which is probably less expensive than long
| term battery storage.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Cost of solar in isolation is meaningless. You need to factor
| in the cost of dealing with its intermittency, i.e. no power
| at night, variable power during daylight.
| loeg wrote:
| Yeah, "1W" of solar generation and 1W of nuclear generation
| are not interchangeable. There is a subtle sleight of hand
| in GP's argument.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| That is what capacity factor captures.
| cm2187 wrote:
| No it doesn't. Whether Solar has a 10% or 25% average
| load doesn't matter, you need to build something else to
| deal with needing power at night.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| That is what capacity factor captures.
| concordDance wrote:
| This is a good quality post except for the dig in the last
| paragraph.
|
| I would, however, be curious if you can run the numbers for
| the UK or Germany. How much solar and battery would you need
| to be able to have no brownouts during winter?
|
| Trying some very rough numbers myself:
|
| Currently Germany seems to use around 3.3 trillion kwh[1] of
| energy per year. Likely around 300 billion kwh for December.
|
| Having a look, the solar irradiance in the sunnier parts of
| Germany in December seems to be around 20-30 kwh/m^2.[2]
|
| Cheap PV solar is generally around 30% efficient and 1.5m^2
| costs around PS91 retail[3].
|
| So the order of magnitude solar cost needed for Germany in
| December to not need more than a week's storage is probably
| around EUR2 trillion. Amortised over 20 years that's EUR200
| billion per year...
|
| This doesnt take into account many things like installation
| and maintenance and the reduced prices from not buying
| retail, but it still seems pretty doable, though noticeably
| higher than current spend of around EUR100 billion/year.
| (Which is also roughly what you'd get with French style
| nuclear)
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany
|
| [2] https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/solarenergy/maps_global
| rad...
|
| [3] https://shop4electrical.co.uk/panels/9905-ja-solar-
| jam54s30-...
| cm2187 wrote:
| It doesn't make any sense to use nuclear as a standby source of
| power. Nuclear costs pretty much the same whether you use it or
| not, so it doesn't make any sense to build it and leave it off.
|
| So if you build a nuclear power plant, save yourself the cost
| of whatever else you wanted to use as a primary source.
| credit_guy wrote:
| Nuclear power plants are currently too expensive to not be used
| at 100% all the time (except when you need to perform
| maintenance). Some nuclear power plants are designed to be able
| to load follow, but in practice they don't do it.
|
| Batteries will never be cheap enough to allow for seasonal
| storage. They are good for day-to-night storage. For seasonal
| fluctuations, the best you can do is natural gas. If we convert
| all our energy to solar, wind, hydro, and natural gas for
| peaker plants, we'd be comfortably net negative. In fact, right
| now in the US the CO2 absorption by forests is equal to all the
| emissions produced by the natural gas power plants (which are
| mostly used full time, not in peaker mode). Of course, the US
| produces a lot of emissions from transportation and industry.
| But they can be electrified in time, and the coal power plants
| can be eliminated, and the natural gas plants kept as peaker
| plants only.
|
| The path to net zero, or net negative, does not strictly
| speaking need nuclear energy.
|
| I personally am a huge fan of nuclear, but I acknowledge that
| it is not really needed to fight climate change.
| kragen wrote:
| i agree with almost everything in your cogent and well-
| informed comment, with only two exceptions:
|
| - forests can only increase in biomass up to some relatively
| low limit; you may be correct that in the usa they currently
| absorb more than gas plants emit, but that is not a
| sustainable situation, unless you start cutting them down and
| sequestering the carbon
|
| - you can get pretty far covering seasonal fluctuations with
| simple overprovisioning
|
| also i think you're not taking into account the likely advent
| of mass production of synfuel
| beders wrote:
| There are whole countries who have built stable grids with
| wind, water, solar and battery alone.
|
| Financially building nuclear power plants make absolutely no
| sense.
| lkbm wrote:
| I think solar+battery usually also involves overbuilding the
| solar capacity by a lot and running some HVDC lines. A mix with
| nuclear and wind seems smart to me, but I wouldn't be shocked
| if some cloudy places successfully manage solar+batteries in
| combination with HVDC and/or having some easily-curtailed
| industries in the area.
| sunshinesnacks wrote:
| The good news is that it's very possible to "run the math," and
| people run power generation capacity expansion models and
| production cost/dispatch models to look at these things. And
| then 15-25 years of solar irradiance and other weather data, at
| hourly resolution or shorter intervals, is available for most
| of the world.
|
| Maybe the general public extrapolates from their own
| experience, but grid planners and researchers do much more than
| that.
| samstave wrote:
| There should be a "roof-tile" mandated on every single
| structure built which captures weather information for every
| single structure. And that structure should be able to be read
| by any device which states in a standard format the sunlight
| avg per N, rainfall avg per N and temp. (air quality adds cost,
| but should also be there (staring at Purple's horrific pricing)
| baby wrote:
| Interestingly a year after fusion worked
| p1mrx wrote:
| Fusion has worked since 1952, just not in power plants.
| a_saidi wrote:
| Now copy exactly hopefully at much reduced costs
| gretch wrote:
| I see a lot of the arguments from all sides on "the future is X,
| it cannot be Y!"
|
| To me, this is a false dichotomy.
|
| In my opinion energy is one of the most important pillars of
| society. It is so important that it must be hedged.
|
| I don't think we can afford to put all of eggs in 1 basket, no
| matter how confident we are in a single basket.
|
| I support all forms of sustainable energy advancement and
| research.
|
| We need more nuclear plants AND more solar/wind. And probably
| also geothermal, and tidal, and other things I don't even
| personally know about.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| Oh yeah baby. I love to see it.
| sgu999 wrote:
| Goodonya! Meanwhile we're still waiting for our infamous EPRs
| over here. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
|
| > _The first EPR unit to start construction, at Olkiluoto in
| Finland, originally intended to be commissioned in 2009, started
| commercial operation in 2023, a delay of fourteen years.[3] The
| second EPR unit to start construction, at Flamanville in France,
| is also facing a decade-long delay in its commissioning (from
| 2013 to 2024).[4] Two units at Hinkley Point in the United
| Kingdom received final approval in September 2016; the first unit
| is expected to begin operating in 2027.[5][6]_
| amateuring wrote:
| kudos. we need moaaar of these
| simonw wrote:
| This caught my eye: "Prior to Vogtle Unit 3, the last nuclear
| reactor to start in the United States was Watts Bar Unit 2 in
| Tennessee. Construction on Watts Bar 2 began in 1973 but was
| suspended in 1985. Work resumed in 2007, and the reactor came
| online in 2016."
|
| More on that here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant#Unit_2
| arcfour wrote:
| Jeez. Imagine walking into a construction site from 2 decades
| ago.
| HankB99 wrote:
| Makes me wonder how much effort went into mothballing partial
| construction and then unwinding all of that to get it going
| again. Seems like it would have cost a lot.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Check out Satsop, Washington:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNP-3_and_WNP-5
| cesarb wrote:
| > Construction on Watts Bar 2 began in 1973 but was suspended
| in 1985. Work resumed in 2007, and the reactor came online in
| 2016.
|
| That seems to be common with nuclear power plants. The latest
| one near where I live (Angra 3) has been under construction
| since 1984, and it should be complete in a few more years if it
| doesn't pause again; construction of the previous one (Angra
| 2), according to Wikipedia, started in 1976 and came online in
| 2001.
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