Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The New Atomic Age We Need

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 211 posts

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#111

Post by vlehto »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #84
masklinn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear plants are also central points of failures, the plant itself needn't even fail, just the electrical distribution from it and you lose 1~6GW. If they pan out, Small Modular Reactors (30MW~300MW range) seem like they could solve many of the issues with existing "large" nuke plants: the sealed core can be built on largeish assembly lines (similar to airliners in size) then floated, flown or driven to site, more…

There's a great deal of engineering/economic appeal to factory made modular reactors, but the weak point is you'd need a cultural shift for people to not be freaked out about having lots of small reactors everywhere.

Also political shift is needed. Currently in Finland you need parliament permission for any new nuclear plant. If you are likely to get only one permission every 8 years, you have to go big to have any impact. Which seems to be the reason why Olkiluoto-3 got so big. Which seems to have contributed to the schedule fuck ups from day one.

For example they had the concrete heating too much while curing when casting the floor. This was because the floor slab was lot bigger than engineers we're used to cast. Yes, they should have taken that into account. But the point is it's harder to take all things into account when you are going to unexplored territory.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#112

Post by guelo »

ommunist wrote: post #57
guelo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that UK is going transport electricity from Kazakhstan back to the UK? presumably via Russia? If so, that seems like a really bad plan.

No, transporting U3O8 is enough. Upd: http://namrc.co.uk/intelligence/uk-new-build-plans/ 4 sites are already acquired for development on British grounds.

Oh sorry I misunderstood that you're talking about fuel production.

But this highlights what I think is the main problem with the large scale nuclear energy vision, it would replace oil with Uranium as the root of geopolitical resource control wars.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#113

Post by PaulHoule »

pdonis wrote: post #75
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

The key problem in my mind is the failure of project management in building reactors. If they said it was going to take 2 years and 1 billion dollars and it stretched out to 3 years and $1.5 billion that is one thing. Back in the 1970s it was more like 2 years stretches to 9 years and $15 billion and you could blame union workers who never did nuclear work before, the no nukes, high interest rates, etc. The industry…

> Nobody is going to put up billions of dollars unless there is some predictability in terms of cost and schedule. The lack of predictability comes from lawsuits, not technical problems in construction. Plants that were completed and ready to go online on schedule were stopped at the last minute by lawsuits, and in many cases were never started up.

Yes and no.

Definitely there have been places and times where people opposed to nuclear energy have filed lawsuits against nuclear power plant construction.

On the other hand many times the trouble is between the constructing company, the electric company and maybe regulators and it usually is in the form of a lawsuit because this is how you decide who owes who money in the end.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#114

Post by riffraff »

Simorgh wrote: post #59
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #41

Where are we at with nuclear fusion? At this time, the only promising progress I know of is happening at Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks[1] where they are developing a truck-sized 100 MW [ corrected from Mhz ] power plant in an incremental, iterative fashion and claiming to have something operational by 2020. As regards solar and other "clean" alternatives, there exists vast potential for reducing daytime electric grid…

ITER (located in France) will build a fusion device to produce net energy, in the next few years - 50MW input and 500 MW output. The project has about €13 Billion investment committed. Perhaps we're on the edge of a new energy area. https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines

but what does "in the next few years" really mean?

As per their own site, by june 2016 they should at most decide a date for when the first plasma will be _scheduled_ to happen. Also, there are probably still decades between a working ITER and commercial reactors.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#115

Post by cbr »

pilom wrote: post #13
T-A wrote: post #8

> We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. Is this really true? In Lazard's 2014 comparison of total cost per MWh, both wind and solar beat coal and nuclear [1]. Costs have fallen so much that it's becoming hard to justify continued subsidies [2]. [1] http://energyinnovation.org/2015/02/07/levelized-cost-of-ene... [2] http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/us-energy-…

The problem is scale. Here is a really good analysis of renewable resources in the UK: http://www.withouthotair.com/ Conclusion: The UK doesn't receive enough sunlight or have enough wind/waves/tidal pools/land to grow food, power cars (of any kind) and meet other energy needs. The UK can never get all of their energy carbon free without nuclear or importing power. The US is in a better place because of solar in the…

What's wrong with importing power?

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#116

Post by nitrogen »

guelo wrote: post #112
ommunist wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, transporting U3O8 is enough. Upd: http://namrc.co.uk/intelligence/uk-new-build-plans/ 4 sites are already acquired for development on British grounds.

Oh sorry I misunderstood that you're talking about fuel production. But this highlights what I think is the main problem with the large scale nuclear energy vision, it would replace oil with Uranium as the root of geopolitical resource control wars.

Uranium is fairly abundant AFAIK. Sourcing it is less of a problem than overcoming NIMBY.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#117

Post by johncolanduoni »

Retric wrote: post #100
johncolanduoni wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PS: Photovoltaic panels with 20% efficiency are already close to the theoretical limit (see this chapter’s endnotes Current, world record for concentrated solar is 46%. They are likely referring to the theoretical limit for crystalline silicon based cells (~30% IIRC). This is due to silicon's particular band gap. The record is held by multi-junction cells, which don't suffer from this limitation (which is part of t…

I don't think you need to be overly generous when they suggest the UK needs to be both 100% energy independent and 100% free from fossil fuels, and grow 100% of it's food locally, when the UK imports ~35% of it's electricity in 2013 and ~40% of it's food (1). Let alone fossil fuels. And if we can't meet those goals we need to do X. 1: In 2010, the UK produced 73% of ‘indigenous-type foods’, and is about 60% self-suff…

I wasn't arguing for all his calculations, it's just that his evaluation of the theoretical limit of crystalline silicon cells is accurate. He is correct that it is unlikely that they will get much closer to the theoretical limit than 20% in real life situations.

Some GenIV nuclear reactor technologies have a somewhat clearer path to viability than multi-junction solar cells, which have not been able to beat traditional cells in a price-to-performance ratio. We don't even know if there exist materials and processes that can replicate the performance without the costs; see high temperature superconductivity for a technology that's been stuck at that stage for a while, even in the face of the helium shortage.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#118

Post by ommunist »

nitrogen wrote: post #116
guelo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh sorry I misunderstood that you're talking about fuel production. But this highlights what I think is the main problem with the large scale nuclear energy vision, it would replace oil with Uranium as the root of geopolitical resource control wars.

Uranium is fairly abundant AFAIK. Sourcing it is less of a problem than overcoming NIMBY.

Uranium available for enrichment is not fairly abundant. And U ore deposites are distributed far from fair. Like I said, China has no access to deposits, the UK secured for itself. Russia was effectively cut off Kazakh U resources, leaved with a _single_ mine in Chita region.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#119

Post by nickhalfasleep »

Gravityloss wrote: post #87
mronge wrote: post #77

How does this compare to what Elon Musk says about solar power? In this presentation he shows that a reasonable amount of area could power the entire US (if we used roof tops etc for solar panels). Is that not feasible? https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k?t=187

US has lots of sunny areas with little people, agriculture or wildlife, but UK doesn't. Many European countries are dense and cloudy. It can still help.

I'm surprised they don't invest in production just south in North Africa, it would be pretty trivial to lay cables across to Gibraltar. They would of course have to do it with a sense of economic fairness and fairly pay the countries in money and technology / education transfer.

Re: The New Atomic Age We Need

#120

Post by nitrogen »

Sinaf wrote: post #82
jpdus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! In my opinion Thiel does not think far enough and doesn't talk about the real question: Is fission even (economically) competitive? In my opinion (and from what I've read on this subject), it is not and won't be in the foreseeable future. I will quote myself [1]: >People always forget about indirect costs when talking about cheap nuclear energy (risk factors aside). Nobody has ever built a profitable nuclear po…

Here in Germany we used a salt mine to dispose of our nuclear waste, which backfired, to say the least. [1] How big the eventual costs (the article speaks of "at least €4 billion ($5.3 billion), but more likely somewhere between €5 billion and €10 billion") will be is uncertain, and I can't back this up by any real evidence, but my guess is that those who profited from the waste disposal might not be the ones paying…

I didn't see any evidence in that article that the waste was causing problems in the salt mine. Why is it considered safer to remove it?
Post reply on HN