[HN Gopher] Nuclear's role in a net-zero world
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Nuclear's role in a net-zero world
Author : rntn
Score : 14 points
Date : 2024-03-24 21:28 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (knowablemagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (knowablemagazine.org)
| bananapub wrote:
| on a sidenote, it's important to be extremely cynical about
| people pushing nuclear to the exclusion of other things - at
| least in Australia, it's now being pushed by the climate
| denialist Right, who have pivoted from "climate change isn't a
| thing" to "we need to build nuclear reactors".
|
| Australia has ~zero nuclear industry (it has one research reactor
| for medical radioisotopes), and so the best case would be driving
| an oil tanker of money up to some company like EDF and getting
| them to do it. how's EDF doing at that sort of thing lately?
| Hinkley Point C in the UK (which has existing nuclear reactors,
| including on that exact site, as well as a nuclear weapons
| program, and at least in the past, lots of money) is currently
| looking to take 21 years from announcement (2010) to the latest
| hugely delayed completion estimate of 2031. the latest cost
| estimate is that it'll cost $AU100 billion dollars.
|
| there's also endless grifting from the "SMR" nuclear people, who
| insist this time it really does almost exist, so we should stop
| doing all this hard work on improving the grid and renewables and
| instead just give them cash and they'll magically solve our
| problems.
|
| tl;dr at least some parts of the pro-nuclear-power lobby is
| actually just trying to end efforts to minimise climate change
| damage.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It's important not to dismiss good ideas just because you
| dislike the people saying them
|
| If more nuclear gets us away from Fossil Fuels faster it's a
| good thing
| bananapub wrote:
| not sure what you're replying to?
|
| of course one shouldn't "dismiss good ideas just because you
| dislike the people saying them", but if your country doesn't
| already have a nuclear industry then it's too late to get to
| net zero with nuclear.
|
| of course you can plan for using it later, but you can't get
| distracted by it now or fall victim to scams by well-funded
| and malicious groups.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > If more nuclear gets us away from Fossil Fuels faster it's
| a good thing
|
| His point is that in Australia, it won't. And it doesn't
| matter how much evidence you put in front of these people to
| show them that. You can't even tell them it's costly because
| they reject even that provable fact.
|
| Renewables plus firming is orders of magnitude cheaper and
| faster than any form of nuclear ever will be in AU and
| getting cheaper every day to boot. To which the response will
| simply be "nuuhh uhhh".
|
| https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-
| space/energy/Ene...
| Swizec wrote:
| If more nuclear takes 20+ years to build while we can get
| wind farms online next month, is it really faster?
|
| I love nuclear but have to admit it's dead until we figure
| out how to build these things faster. You can get 10MW of
| wind built in 2 months. A nuclear plant gives you 1000MW
| (1GW). You need to build that in less than 50 months (4
| years) to compete with wind. And wind can already deliver
| incremental value for most of those 50 months so lead times
| aren't a problem.
|
| When's the last time anyone built a nuclear plant in 4 years?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Just comparing MW when wind is blowing is never going to be
| useful or result in a productive discussion. You need
| compare nuclear with other useful, base load generation
| methods in terms of build cost/time/CO2 per MW.
| Swizec wrote:
| I believe the numbers I quoted are averages, not only
| when the wind is blowing. Source:
| https://www.ewea.org/wind-energy-basics/faq/
|
| Here's a better number: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-
| many-homes-can-average-wind-tu...
|
| > At a 42% capacity factor (i.e., the average among
| recently built wind turbines in the United States, per
| the 2021 edition of the U.S. Department of Energy's Land-
| Based Wind Market Report), that average turbine would
| generate over 843,000 kWh (843MWh) per month--enough for
| more than 940 average U.S. homes
|
| For comparison, an actual nuclear reactor in practical
| use produced 4,697,675 MWh in 2017. That's the equivalent
| of 5572 of those wind turbines.
|
| That's a lot of wind turbines. But if we can build 278
| wind turbines per year and it takes 20 years to build a
| new reactor. They're even.
|
| USA currently builds 3000 turbines per year.
| https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-wind-turbines-are-
| install...
|
| So I think even with 42% capacity, wind is winning. We'd
| need to build 10 reactors per 20 years (1 every 2 years)
| for nuclear to beat wind.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Yep, agreed, it's pretty much dead, unless the SMR people
| can figure out the low-end. There's a reason why our anti-
| nuclear friend directed his vitriol there, lol.
|
| That said, I hear that China is building nuclear. We might
| be able to import the know-how, or develop the political
| will to spin ours back up. A bit of national jealously goes
| a long way.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| He didn't say he dislikes them.
|
| He said they were people who were provably lying about the
| very existence of the problem that they now claim nuclear
| will fix (in 2 decades, at great expense).
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Any political cause larger than a certain size will have
| someone stinky in the big tent. There are stinkers in the
| renewables tent too, does that mean we should boycott solar
| panels? Of course not. Same here.
|
| See also: think of the children.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| on another sidenote, it's important to be extremely cynical
| about people claiming that all nuclear is being pushed to the
| exclusion of other things. This straw man is made of straw.
|
| I'm glad that after 40 years renewables are finally viable as a
| nuclear alternative... but if we just hadn't stopped building
| nuclear and continued building at the same pace (no learning
| curves assumed) we would already be done decarbonizing the
| grid! It takes some really special thinking to call that a
| grift. Instead, we are just starting to decarbonize, and with
| 100 gigatons of extra CO2 in the atmosphere from US emissions
| alone. I am glad we are un-stuck, but gee, I have a really hard
| time chalking up the concerted effort to kill nuclear and keep
| it dead as a "win."
| jemmyw wrote:
| I don't know much about the politics of this in Australia, but
| at you have uranium exports already, wouldn't it be an ideal
| country to build nuclear power?
| schneems wrote:
| Whether pro or anti nuclear, one paper I feel every engineer
| should read is "Do Artifacts have Politics" that asks the
| question "divorced from creator or user intent, do
| inventions/technologies/artifacts contain and/or promote a
| political will". Here's a link
| https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf (hint, the
| answer is "yes" but the journey is more important than the
| destination).
|
| It's a surprisingly easy read too. More like a long blog post
| than a dry paper. One of the examples in there is nuclear
| technologies, which is what brings this up for me.
| codefeenix wrote:
| Why not title this "Nuclear's role in the world" because NetZero
| is still a company that does stuff. Also, why the apostrophe?
| trhway wrote:
| To me nuclear is like those big iron servers of 90's losing to
| the horizontally scaled "datacenters" of solar panels and wind
| generators. Generic economics, physics, network and other
| considerations, when all the domain specific peculiarities are
| stripped, seem to be very similar.
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