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The Nuclear Option

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Re: The Nuclear Option

#91

Post by ben_w »

agumonkey wrote: post #41
dv_dt wrote: post #18

Just about every builder and operator of large nuclear fleets of reactors have all outright said or implied by their actions that nuclear is uneconomical vs renewable power options. The massive bulge of capital and scheduling needed points to humans not being able to build a next generation of nuclear plants in time to head off the worst climate change, and renewable energy sources being both faster and cheaper to bu…

Jean-Marc Jancovici, engineer in the energy field and pro nuclear, said that the math on renewable is bogus. And that if you don't want nuclear, money should be spent on energy saving measures like heat pumps and building insulation. I do understand how tempting are renewables, low risk, low entry cost..

Ironically, and I say this as someone who is very pro-solar, nuclear power is the safest power source around. Deaths per TWh are lower just because of how many people generally die falling off rooftops and that being a common place to install them.

http://www.edouardstenger.com/2011/03/25/a-look-at-deaths-pe...

Re: The Nuclear Option

#92

Post by pjc50 »

atombender wrote: post #78
trimbo wrote: post #5

Sigh. I've been arguing this for so long, and gave up about 5 years ago. I can't think of a more scalable way than fission to combat carbon, yet it won't happen for so many reasons. * There are too many solar and wind success stories to point to. "Why can't NYC be like Scotland with wind power?!" You start to list the reasons and the response is "we can accomplish it if we put our minds to it!". It's an endless cycle…

There's a new book out, reviewed recently by the New York Times, that wants to change that perception. "A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow" [1] is co-written by an engineer who lays out the case for nuclear power. The authors think that rapid deployment of nuclear power is the only way to avoid a climate catastrophe. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/books/revi…

How rapid is "rapid deployment of nuclear power", given that the plants take decades to build?

Re: The Nuclear Option

#93

Post by bogle »

pdonis wrote: post #69
rurounijones wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not the right metric. I guess that opinion comes down to whether you think Climate Change is an existential threat to our civilisation or not. If you are of the opinion that it is then costs be damned and build everything: Renewables, Storage, Nuclear. If we end up with more power than we need then we can shutdown excess or funnel that into powering carbon capture technologies if we ever get there. If you ar…

> I guess that opinion comes down to whether you think Climate Change is an existential threat to our civilisation or not. Not necessarily. I don't think climate change is an existential threat to our civilization; human civilization has already dealt with problems much bigger than the average temperature going up by a couple of degrees and sea level rising a couple of feet. (Personally, I think the biggest existenti…

> already dealt with problems much bigger than the average temperature going up by a couple of degrees and sea level rising a couple of feet

With respect, I think you may be underselling the effects! The chaotic knock-on of species loss; water pressures causing human migration; a loss of half of the ice on the third pole (the Himalayas) that provides water to over a billion people; acidification of the oceans. We could go on but the point I'd like to hammer home is this isn't anything at all like the previous crises in our brief 60k year sojourn: the anthropocene is an apocalyptic event that will wipe out half of the species on earth (probably).

Re: The Nuclear Option

#94

Post by jabl »

atombender wrote: post #74
godelski wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> France: 44 Billion would be saved by investing in rewables instead of nuclear >link I can't read French so I can't comment on this report. I'm not saying it is wrong or your conclusions are wrong. But I would say that there's an unfortunate thing happening and it is that bad information and research is being done. In fact we don't have to go far back in HN history to find this post > https://news.ycombinator.com/it…

Countries like Sweden and Norway also don't want to build out any new hydro infrastructure at this point -- hydroelectric dams have a considerable ecological impact, something rarely mentioned when renewables are discussed. These countries are famous for their hydropower today, but some of these projects met with considerable protests at the time they were built (such as the Alta-Kautokeino waterway [1] in 1979-1981)…

In most developed countries hydro is more or less fully exploited already. It provides a lot of low-C dispatchable electricity, which is incredibly valuable, but there isn't much potential to increase it. So it isn't by itself a solution to how to decarbonize the world economy.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#95

Post by agumonkey »

ben_w wrote: post #91
agumonkey wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jean-Marc Jancovici, engineer in the energy field and pro nuclear, said that the math on renewable is bogus. And that if you don't want nuclear, money should be spent on energy saving measures like heat pumps and building insulation. I do understand how tempting are renewables, low risk, low entry cost..

Ironically, and I say this as someone who is very pro-solar, nuclear power is the safest power source around. Deaths per TWh are lower just because of how many people generally die falling off rooftops and that being a common place to install them. http://www.edouardstenger.com/2011/03/25/a-look-at-deaths-pe...

it's not flat statistics the issue, it's the high risk and high complexity. Solar roof can kill if they fail but it's quite easy to see and deal with. Nuclear plant failures are too extreme and complex. There was a research center not far from my town, and every year people are worried that their thyroid issues aren't due to past experiments polluting the underground water supply. It's never conclusive but always on people's mind.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#96

Post by 666lumberjack »

rtpg wrote: post #30
rurounijones wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can get the "We cannot build them in time" part but the whole "It is not economical to build them" strikes me as a pretty crazy position to take. Uneconomical compared to the massive disruption that climate change will bring to our civilization? Are we fighting to save our future or not? Discarding a proven technology that will massively reduce our carbon emission for an unproven "We still have problems to solve ar…

It's not that nuclear is unproven, it's that _renewables at this point are proven_. You can build huge (or tiny! it's super scalable) fleets of renewable energy sources pretty economically, with a ~0% chance of making surrounding areas uninhabitable for 20 years if there's a failure. Yeah sure a truckload of uranium goes a long way but building the plants is really hard even when you look past the regulatory issues.

Can you give an example of an industrialized first-world nation using Wind + Solar to provide baseload power on a consistent basis? Because if you can't then they're far from proven as anything more than a partial supplement to other energy sources. The economics of Solar/Wind get much worse as you scale past ~30% of the grid because utilization factor goes down and the need for energy storage goes way up.

Right now grid-scale batteries are uneconomical and pumped hydro is only feasible in specific locations (not to mention its ecological impact) so the 'storage' backing renewable installations takes the form of big tanks of methane next to gas turbines. Even when conditions are good and it's not being burned, that methane has a tendency to leak and wipe out a fair proportion of the face-value greenhouse emission savings from swapping to renewables in the first place.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#97

Post by jabl »

niftich wrote: post #42

Some of nuclear energy's challenges get a good amount of coverage: politicians unwilling to support it, citizen opposition, and cost overruns and delays at plant currently under construction. Others, less so. And if we discount politics for a moment, the day-to-day economics of new nuclear barely pencil out. Nuclear needs immense capital expenditure vs. other types of generation. Solar gets generous subsidies and doe…

Existing nuclear plants got as big as they are because of economies of scale. Turns out that a plant twice as big costs less than twice as much as two smaller ones.

But, due to nuclear expansion faltering we build too few of these plants, and thus all of them become essentially first-of-a-kind, which tends to mean a lot of (very expensive!) delays.

I also think SMR's are very promising, trying to break the cycle of ever-increasing costs of big plants through mass production (and passive safety) rather than just making them as big as possible. Think airliner factory rather than one-off megaprojects.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#98

Post by kortilla »

205guy wrote: post #71
trimbo wrote: post #5

Sigh. I've been arguing this for so long, and gave up about 5 years ago. I can't think of a more scalable way than fission to combat carbon, yet it won't happen for so many reasons. * There are too many solar and wind success stories to point to. "Why can't NYC be like Scotland with wind power?!" You start to list the reasons and the response is "we can accomplish it if we put our minds to it!". It's an endless cycle…

I sense some cognitive dissonance here. You want that great carbon-free energy provided by nuclear, and you lament all the reasons it won't happen. Except you have no rebuttal to those reasons and almost sound convinced by their soundness yourself. - Politicians won't back nuclear because of the risk of accident, thus giving legitimacy to the risk and the public's fears. - There hasn't been adequate research and adva…

>Politicians won't back nuclear because of the risk of accident, thus giving legitimacy to the risk and the public's fears.

No, that’s not the case. Politicians won’t back it because of their perceived risk based on their own ignorance. Or, even if they aren’t ignorant, they are focused more on staying in office rather than helping humanity so they don’t take up any projects that the ignorant public might pitchfork about. Neither of these “give legitimacy” to incorrect risk analysis.

A politician being afraid of flying does not give legitimacy to flying fears either. Risk isn’t measured by popularity.

AOC will gain far more popularity from her completely unrealistic green new deal than she ever would proposing something that would actually help based on nuclear. Politicians propose what’s popular, not what’s moral, ethical, or scientifically sound.

>Here's a qustion to help cut through the Gordon knot: at what point is it scientifically rational to accept/shun nuclear?

When peoples’ fears are based on a real understanding/evidence and not their own ignorant imaginations.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#99

Post by kortilla »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17
Johnny555 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that's why we have so many power plants based 1950's era designs instead of safer, more modern plants.

“Safer, modern” plants in the US, the UK, and China are being scrapped because they’re not affordable. Solar, wind, and storage are already cheaper than nuclear. So why build nuclear?

No, storage is not cheaper. That’s a fantasy. If it were true they would be rapidly displacing all energy production in the US.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#100

Post by kortilla »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #45
zanny wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because renewables are regional. They make exceedingly good sense in places like the US midwest or most of Europe where you can build solar / wind and have substantial availability. Solar, by contrast, is much less performant if you live somewhere with less sunlight due to any number of reasons - weather, smog, latitude, etc. Same with wind - it only makes sense to build wind where you get the most wind. And the tric…

No one is stopping anyone from building modern nuclear reactors except debt markets and utilities. The problem is that no one wants them (compared to other generation technologies). Timoth3y in another thread explains it extensively: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19168057

That’s wrong. Debt markets are reflecting the risks of the plants being stopped by orgs like the NRC, etc. The debt markets don’t favor it precisely because so many different parties can block new builds.
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