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Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

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Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#181

Post by eigenvector »

ldp01 wrote: post #176
eigenvector wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, a high spot price is not in itself a problem as long as the high price lasts only for a short time and effectively brings needed capacity online. Where you have a serious problem is when spot prices spike, no one responds and load-shedding starts. I appreciate that SA has actually got to the point of load-shedding several times now, which is indicative of a severe problem. However, saying that renewable…

> However, saying that renewables are the cause of this is the same as saying that nuclear is the cause of Chernobyl. Nuclear plants don't inherently melt down if they are properly designed and operated and renewables don't inherently cause load-shedding if they are integrated to a properly planned and operated bulk power system. Isn't this just juggling semantics? Nuclear is very much a necessary condition for nucle…

There are a lot of economic scenarios for a 'peaker' plant that don't necessarily involve it having to recover its full capital cost in just a few days of operation. Often these are plants that have been retired from the energy market due to high operating costs, but can still start up and run for a few hours well below the $1000/MWh level because the owner has already recovered their cap-ex over many years of operation. They may have other revenue streams that cover their operating costs, like black-start services, and operating reserve is just the cherry on top.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#182

Post by Nition »

roenxi wrote: post #113
est31 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, coal is even worse than nuclear. So let's have neither but renewables instead :). Compared to europe, the USA is a big country and it is also further in the south which means more sun for solar collectors.

Hang on, are you absolutely sure that renewables are less damaging than nuclear? The footprint for nuclear is tiny, it might be competitive. Fukashima was a level 7 nuclear distaster, so that is as bad as it gets. The actual damage done is objectivly not that bad compared to a lot of things we have accepted in the past with only increased safety regulation (like dam failures). 2 lvl 7 accidents in 35 years; and desig…

I think people rightly fear a type of damage they can't see. Radiation is scary because you could get a dose of it and not even know it, or have no idea how bad it is. People are taking the devil they know.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#183

Post by antt »

eigenvector wrote: post #166
antt wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently work in data science for an Australian power company. Renewables are the reason why we had electricity spot prices of A$14500/mwh three days in a row, rolling blackouts and the grid being nationalized for several hours. Because of the unregulated attachment of intermittent power sources South Australia has no base load generation any more, this is coal or nuclear stations. Victoria had an incident with on…

First of all, a high spot price is not in itself a problem as long as the high price lasts only for a short time and effectively brings needed capacity online. Where you have a serious problem is when spot prices spike, no one responds and load-shedding starts. I appreciate that SA has actually got to the point of load-shedding several times now, which is indicative of a severe problem. However, saying that renewable…

>First of all, a high spot price is not in itself a problem as long as the high price lasts only for a short time and effectively brings needed capacity online. Where you have a serious problem is when spot prices spike, no one responds and load-shedding starts. I appreciate that SA has actually got to the point of load-shedding several times now, which is indicative of a severe problem.

As you should well know being in the business the spot price has a hard cap of $14500. You should also know that spot prices were maxed out from 3pm to 8pm in Vic and SA on Thursday and would have been maxed out for the whole of Friday if not for AEMO stepping in and effectively nationalizing the electricity market.

Anyone with a spreadsheet and publicly available data can see that the SA shedding events have expanded to Vic for the first time this year. Further anyone who even looks at the ages of the coal plants providing base load generation will realize it will get worse on from here.

For the rest of your points: this is absolutely a technological problem. Physics and maths, contrary to what our old prime minister used to say, are respected in Australia. Electricity generated by heavy spinning things takes a long time to ramp up and down and needs a different grid to that used by renewables and batteries. Batteries are about 5 orders of magnitude too expensive to be used as the backbone of the energy network. So the only things renewables do today from the pov of the network is add spikiness both the production and demand side of the market, making both the market and the grid more unstable, more expensive and worse for everyone who isn't a speculator.

In short: with current technology you can have a stable network or a renewable one, you can have both if you're willing to pay at least 10 times more for electricity.

Or we can build nuclear power plants and solve all our problems for the next 50 years.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#184

Post by eigenvector »

roenxi wrote: post #171
eigenvector wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, a high spot price is not in itself a problem as long as the high price lasts only for a short time and effectively brings needed capacity online. Where you have a serious problem is when spot prices spike, no one responds and load-shedding starts. I appreciate that SA has actually got to the point of load-shedding several times now, which is indicative of a severe problem. However, saying that renewable…

> However, saying that renewables are the cause of this is the same as saying that nuclear is the cause of Chernobyl. Are you suggesting SA renewables suffered an unplanned failure this summer? I havn't heard anything about that and I expect that they have been functioning as expected and that you are mistaken. Do you have a source?

What I'm saying that is the loss of system security events that have occurred in Australia this summer are not inherent to the operation of the grid with high renewable penetration, but rather a failure of the system operator to plan adequately for foreseeable system conditions and contingencies, just like Chernobyl was not an inevitable occurrence linked to the underlying technology. So using the SA load-shedding events to say "renewables can't work at large scale" is similar to citing Chernobyl as a reason not to build new nuclear plants.

However, there was a very well documented failure of LVRT performance on wind turbines during the 2016 SA blackout.

https://www.nerc.com/pa/rrm/ea/Lessons%20Learned%20Document%...

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#185

Post by chiefalchemist »

darkerside wrote: post #101
chiefalchemist wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point it's fairly obvious that the continued use of fossil fuels will lead us to danger than fission. Perhaps we're trading one devil for another, but the devil we know is not sustainable. We'' just have to figure out how to deal with the fission devil until we get fusion. Hopefully, fusion isn't too far off.

> Perhaps we're trading one devil for another, but the devil we know is not sustainable Trading the devil you know for the one you don't is wisely considered a bad idea

Note: I didn't say we don't know the fusion devil. We do. Just perhaps not as well as the fossil fuel devil.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#186

Post by open-source-ux »

harry8 wrote: post #143

Where's the actual data on safety to people of nuclear vs coal vs wind/rain/sun?

This 2017 article doesn't include renewables in their energy source comparison, but does include nuclear and coal. The conclusion is pretty clear even if it's not what everyone wants to hear: coal has been responsible for thousands more deaths than nuclear.

https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#187

Post by antt »

eigenvector wrote: post #181
ldp01 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, saying that renewables are the cause of this is the same as saying that nuclear is the cause of Chernobyl. Nuclear plants don't inherently melt down if they are properly designed and operated and renewables don't inherently cause load-shedding if they are integrated to a properly planned and operated bulk power system. Isn't this just juggling semantics? Nuclear is very much a necessary condition for nucle…

There are a lot of economic scenarios for a 'peaker' plant that don't necessarily involve it having to recover its full capital cost in just a few days of operation. Often these are plants that have been retired from the energy market due to high operating costs, but can still start up and run for a few hours well below the $1000/MWh level because the owner has already recovered their cap-ex over many years of operat…

This works well for the current 30 minute market. At 5 minutes there are no non-battery plants, other than hydro, which can start up fast enough to provide power to the market.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#188

Post by justatdotin »

abootstrapper wrote: post #35

Ya know, I feel like renewables are the future, but we’re kinda running out of runway here. I think a nuclear + renewables strategy is a great way to get us past fossil fuels quickly. Once we’re over fossil fuels we can tackle replacing nuclear with something better.

couldnt be morong.

nuclear is very slow to deploy and limited in capacity. the industry suffers from significant latency and tight bottlenecks.

the 2018 world nuclear outlook, a dubiously bullish and optimistic predictor of industry trends, shows that the most ambitious likelihoods for capacity growth will struggle to match total global demand growth - and that's assuming most plants up for (or past) retirement get license extensions. Nuclear is just too slow to make a meaningful dent in carbon-fueled power, and that's even before we consider cost.

renewables are our future, but also my present. My home produces more power than i need; half the houses in my street have their own solar panels; the shopping centre and church down the road are plastered in them. And although the local power company is 99% gas, they're buiding a medium-scale solar farm down the hiway; nearby small towns are fully solar already; and the next-largest city is building a battery farm to enable them to be more than 50% renewable within 10 years.

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#189

Post by mrfusion »

tomcam wrote: post #149

Nuclear energy sounds great to me except for the disposal of nuclear waste. I cannot seem to find any convincing references that we can do it safely over the long-term. Can someone help me with that?

This folk on Reddit had a great response to that. A bit too long to paste here so I’ll leave the link: https://pay.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7v76v4/what_is_s...

Re: Bill Gates promises to add his own billions if Congress does nuclear power push

#190

Post by simplecomplex »

4rt wrote: post #138
simplecomplex wrote: post #75

We already have enough land to power the entire US with solar. The future is renewables not pushing the can down the road with Nuclear, ignoring all of its negative externalities. Bill Gates doesn’t need government to build solar either.

land has never been even close to the shortage for any kind of electricity generation.

All the more reason we should be replacing the whole grid with it.
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