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To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

nytimes.com

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Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#381

Post by stymaar »

niels_olson wrote: post #3

My undergrad is in Physics and I took engineering classes in Rickover Hall. I was stationed on a nuclear ship. Even after deploying for the Fukushima disaster, I am a fan of nuclear power. But I have a hard time justifying new investment in an era where solar is competitively priced. The downside of solar is approximately 0 compared to the downside of a reactor accident. I'll even allow for the high, high likelihood…

> Even after deploying for the Fukushima disaster, I am a fan of nuclear power.

I'm quite the opposite, I'm really affraid of this technology where everything could go wrong if your are not paying 100% attention to every single details. This is quite the opposite of the way our era works where everything most be done as quickly and cheaply as possible.

> But I have a hard time justifying new investment in an era where solar is competitively priced. The downside of solar is approximately 0 compared to the downside of a reactor accident.

Price is a really bad metric in this case, as long as people use most of their electricity by night or during winter (which is the case in most of Europe, and in the US for everybody living nothern than DC) your can't rely on solar as your main power source.

Solar only makes sense for regions where the biggest power consumer is air conditionning. For countries like Morroco, Saudi Arabia and maybe California, but don't expect solar to be relevant to supply Beijing, New York or Paris.

It will never happens until we make enormous breakthrough in electricity storage (which I bet we'll never do at this scale).

Their is no silver bullet, especially when we talk about renewable ressources, and the best energy is the energy we don't consume !

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#382

Post by iamgopal »

Its quite fun to imagine, how ultimately the urge to share your life with other ( all trillion $ semiconductor industry for what, sharing your cat pic ? ), has propagated whole era of advance semi conductor technology, which in turn have been primary cause of reduction in solar power price.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#383

Post by jessaustin »

avar wrote: post #289
Qwertious wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No matter how detailed your design, or solid your physics and mathematics, they cannot win an argument with someone who is simply afraid of the concept." Yes, politics muddy the water rather badly for fission. Let me offer a much more rational drawback: Time. Nuclear plants take a decade to build (on paper; in reality they miss deadlines constantly and you're lucky if it's done within 20 years). A PV solar farm take…

> Nuclear plants take a decade to build That very much depends on the country & regulatory environment. If you browse through the ones China has been building [1] it seems to be taking them around 5-7 years from breaking first ground [2] and 5 years or so to add additional reactors to an existing site [3]. You can browse through other countries on that site & Wikipedia to see how long these things take to build. The…

Everything gets built faster and more cheaply in China than in e.g. USA. Nuclear plants aren't special in that sense. There are trade-offs involved, and probably we could build stuff a bit faster here, but let's figure out how to build highways cheap and fast before blithely assuming we have the answer for cheap and fast nuclear plants.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#384

Post by ldp01 »

evgen wrote: post #349
philipkglass wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both France and Germany are net electricity exporters on an annual basis. But when France sends surplus nuclear electricity to its neighbors that's supposed to be a plus for nuclear technology. When Germany sends surplus renewable electricity to its neighbors that's supposed to be a minus for renewable technology. Both nuclear and renewable generation are rigid in their own ways; neither is as flexible as gas powered…

This is because in energy production timing matters. If you over-produce and dump your energy into our shared grid then I must throttle back my base load production, and then when the sun goes down and you do not have enough capacity to handle your needs and require me to increase my production so that you avoid brownouts then your energy production plan is flawed. If the only way you can make your energy production…

But it's a private market? the only people who should be suffering are those who own generation equipment which can't keep up with the higher rate of change of dispatch. E.g. Steam turbine operators.

I think your point has some merit if the net effect is higher power prices overall. Unfortunately I don't have this information...

Either way, the reality is that renewable technology is making the slow-ramping generators uneconomical. Even if you remove wind-farms from the supply side of the equation you still have roof-top solar eating into the demand side and creating a daily demand profile which requires gas/liquid fuel generators to match.

I've seen a recent example of a cool summer day (Australian) where the daily demand minimum actually occurred at mid-day due to coincidence of maximum roof-top solar generation and low air-conditioning use! Under this kind of scenario your nuclear/coal steam turbine will be running at a horrible financial loss...

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#385

Post by gnud »

Crito wrote: post #339
grzm wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless we develop viable (and affordable) grid-level battery technology Do you think grid-level energy storage needs to be batteries, as opposed to other forms? If so, why?

There is only so much pumped hydro storage you can make...

Pumped hydro seems simplest, and we often have the power plant already in place.

But temperature differential storage, pressure differential storage, and creating hydrogen all seems to scale better to me.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#386

Post by Hondor »

roryisok wrote: post #317
ludston wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a worst case scenario, if we go full solar, but are unable to slow a climat change that induce more cloudy weather (because more global evaporation) we are actually solving nothing. In the worst case scenario, all of the nuclear reactors simultaneously explode (because more earthquakes), raining down a radioactive armageddon on the hordes of screaming peasants below.

There was a thread about nuclear power on here during the year, and some commenter had crunched the numbers on how many nuclear power plants we'd need to fully power the planet. It was in the tens of thousands. Even in the best case scenario, at this density we'd be looking at a Fukushima style disasters occurring regularly, not just every 30 years. That's best case scenario. Worst case scenario is that it gets more…

What's wrong with regular Fukushima scale disasters? They're not very deadly. We already have frequent mining disasters in the coal industry and don't care about that. If anything, nuclear power needs less safety to reduce costs and become competitive.

For some reason people are still scared of radiation even after seeing how harmless Chernobyl turned out to be compared to predictions.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#387

Post by jessaustin »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #104
niels_olson wrote: post #3

My undergrad is in Physics and I took engineering classes in Rickover Hall. I was stationed on a nuclear ship. Even after deploying for the Fukushima disaster, I am a fan of nuclear power. But I have a hard time justifying new investment in an era where solar is competitively priced. The downside of solar is approximately 0 compared to the downside of a reactor accident. I'll even allow for the high, high likelihood…

> The downside of solar is approximately 0 compared to the downside of a reactor accident. The downside of solar is that it provides no electricity at night. We should be building enough nuclear to provide the nighttime load and enough solar to make up the difference between that and the daytime load. > The political capital lost in a reactor accident isn't worth it. The only use for political capital in favor of nuc…

My reading of the political argument is a bit different. Recent elections testify to a strengthening antipathy to expert authority. In an argument about nuclear power, the authoritarian experts are all going to be on one side. If the authoritarian experts happen to win, and then within a decade or two something awful happens as it inevitably will, that will just undermine those authoritarian experts even more. Then how will they convince the public to stop eating meat or whatever?

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#388

Post by na85 »

niels_olson wrote: post #3

My undergrad is in Physics and I took engineering classes in Rickover Hall. I was stationed on a nuclear ship. Even after deploying for the Fukushima disaster, I am a fan of nuclear power. But I have a hard time justifying new investment in an era where solar is competitively priced. The downside of solar is approximately 0 compared to the downside of a reactor accident. I'll even allow for the high, high likelihood…

>The downside of solar is approximately 0

Solar doesn't work at night, and suffers greatly on cloudy days.

How will baseline demand overnight be supplied with solar? How will people run their air conditioners and datacentres?

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#389

Post by davewasthere »

lmm wrote: post #308
lispm wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some perspective on the current 'success' of France with nuclear power: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21711087-electricit-d...

Incredibly strict safety regulations are being applied to nuclear plants, because the public is a lot more worried about that. But someone who falls off a ladder installing a solar panel can die just as dead as someone who gets exposed to radiation, and megawatt for megawatt there are a lot more of the former than the latter.

Even without stats to back it up, I'd say that this sounds correct. I love solar, but there are so many instances like this in society. For example, the war against terror (in the US and I guess various other western countries). You're far more likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist, than a terrorist who happens to come from an Islamic religion. Yet the spending on this war against terror is almost limitless.

Imagine if 'TWAT' had been ignored, and the same money had been spent on obesity, or poverty. In fact, the US could have given all 45 million Americans, who live below the poverty line, 20k each.

Actually, put that way, it makes 'TWAT' pretty cheap, especially when compared to the GFC.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#390

Post by jessaustin »

bluthru wrote: post #223
niels_olson wrote: post #3

My undergrad is in Physics and I took engineering classes in Rickover Hall. I was stationed on a nuclear ship. Even after deploying for the Fukushima disaster, I am a fan of nuclear power. But I have a hard time justifying new investment in an era where solar is competitively priced. The downside of solar is approximately 0 compared to the downside of a reactor accident. I'll even allow for the high, high likelihood…

>I'll even allow for the high, high likelihood that more people will die installing roof-top solar than will ever die in the lifetime of all nuclear reactors combined. And this could be virtually zero with proper safety harnesses. (Amateurs almost always neglect them.)

Yeah it's kind of hilarious how people assume all sorts of pie-in-the-sky nuclear innovation will just magically occur, and then turn around and adopt this "the morons falling off roofs, we will always have with us" tragic posture about bolting stuff onto roofs. News flash: somebody built that roof in the first place!
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