Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize • Hacker News Board

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#31

Post by quelsolaar » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

Nuclear is not a viable solution, due to public opinion.

A nuclear reactor has an incident once every 10.000 years. If we divide that with the number of reactors we get an accident every 30 or so years. (Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukusima, ligns up well with that)

Every time there is an accident, the public turns against nuclear for 5-10 years. Add to that that it takes a decade to plan and build a reactor, and you realize that once we double or triple the number of reactors, accidents will be so frequent, that the public wont stand for additional expansion within the time it takes to build more reactors.

We need 10x nuclear to solve global warming. Thats a major accident every 3 years or so. Yes, Nuclear can be made safer, but probably not by as much as needed. Even a country like Japan, who has high safety standards, and a historical heritage of nuclear fallout, has had an accident, and most new reactors are likely to be built by China who has less then stellar safety record.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#32

Post by bilbo0s » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

addicted wrote: post #15

Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers... Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propos…

This.

I don’t know much about how things work in other nations, but in the US, the government is not as readily liberal with the necessary subsidies. When you consider the slow motion train crash that is Vogtie, you can see the issue. Government doesn’t want to out and out pay for everything, so they set up structures that actually turn out to be more problematic than simply handing over 50 billion would be.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#33

Post by ianai » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

istjohn wrote: post #22

addicted wrote: post #15

Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers... Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propos…

FTA: New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition. ... Currently, as M.I.T.’s Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer, has written, a company proposing a new reactor design faces “the prospect of having to…

“Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.” just that is all I need to know to prefer nuclear to coal.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#34

Post by Andrew_nenakhov » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

hugi wrote: post #24

cm2187 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much because Merkel decided so in the days following Fukushima. Not exactly the result of long term strategy.

Fukushima was an excellent demonstration of what can happen. You devastate huge areas of land and make them unlivable for generations. This is especially applicable to the United States that has proven entirely unable to handle it's own nuclear waste and just accumulates it at the sites where it's generated, waiting for disaster to happen.

Huge areas of land unlivable for generations is an overstatement. Fukishima and Chernobyl exclusion zones are lush green forests that where wildlife thrives.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#35

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #29

pfdietz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. If renewables are cheap, then batteries and other storage will just serve to reduce the fraction of time renewables are not covering demand (why charge the batteries with nuclear if cheaper renewable power is available?) The smaller this fraction is, the worse nuclear does economically.

What if you need twice as much electricity in the winter as in the summer? You're either going to need double the renewable capacity (4 x if you're solar-based) or some kind of super battery. Which doesn't exist yet. The point for nuclear isn't just to cover demand curves; it's that to decarbonize the entire economy you need to both switch current electricity production to low-carbon sources and increase the capacity…

Solar is headed toward as little as $0.01/kWh, an order of magnitude cheaper than high capacity factor nuclear. At that price, you cover seasonal shifts by some combination of overbuilding and curtailment in the summer, plus production of hydrogen. You burn the hydrogen in the winter in relatively cheap gas turbines (simply cycle turbines + generators are around $400/kW). This would be much cheaper than seasonal low capacity factor nuclear.

The other thing that will happen is that energy-intensive industry migrates to lower latitudes where there's less seasonality. Sorry, Europe.

I don't think nuclear advocates have gotten through their heads just how dire the situation is for nuclear energy. It is just not anywhere close to viable now, or even needed, and you do yourselves a disservice by concocting flawed arguments that let you think otherwise. Nuclear is going to survive only by large reductions in cost (and those costs are not due to some conspiracy of your political adversaries; they are due to the complexity and difficulty of the technology). Otherwise, it's going the way of vacuum tubes and magnetic bubble memory.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#36

Post by thangalin » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 10:15 PM UTC

addicted wrote: post #15

Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers... Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propos…

> It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time.

"The estimated cost of the remaining border wall segments are between $15 and $25 billion, with each mile of fencing costing $16 million." [1]

"The total investment for the stellarator itself over 1997–2014 amounted to €370 million, while the total cost for the IPP site in Greifswald including investment plus operating costs (personnel and material resources) amounted to [$1.2 billion USD] for that 18-year period." [2]

It's more a matter of funding than cost, IMO.

[1]: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/cost-of-...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X#Financing

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#37

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 10:17 PM UTC

thangalin wrote: post #36

addicted wrote: post #15

Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers... Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propos…

> It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. "The estimated cost of the remaining border wall segments are between $15 and $25 billion, with each mile of fencing costing $16 million." [1] "The total investment for the stellarator itself over 1997–2014 amounted to €370 million, while the total cost for the IPP site in Greifswald including investment plus operating costs (…

Stellarators (and fusion in general) will be notable for being an energy source that makes even nuclear fission look cheap.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#38

Post by DennisP » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

addicted wrote: post #15

Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers... Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propos…

"Nuclear is expensive in the U.S." seems like an inadequate rebuttal to an article that spends so much time explaining why it's expensive in the U.S. and how to fix it.

Some countries are able to do nuclear at much lower cost, e.g. South Korea.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#39

Post by DennisP » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 10:20 PM UTC

rargulati wrote: post #20

addicted wrote: post #15

Nuclear power can save the world.... If the US can build reactors at 1/10th the cost they do right now. That’s the solution. Not the much cheaper clean energy sources that already exist and are being built out in record numbers... Nuclear is great. It just loses out because it’s too expensive and worse, it gets more expensive with time. If the reasoning behind that is based on irrational human fears then first propos…

Can you give more information on why this is? Any recommended reading to better understand where and why the costs increase?

The article explains pretty well why it's expensive, and how to fix it.

Re: Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

#40

Post by theothermkn » Sat, Apr 06, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

OisinMoran wrote: post #25

If this interests you, I would highly recommend reading this article on molten salt reactors [0]. TL;DR: Molten salt reactors are safer (can't have a meltdown if it's already melted), smaller (could fit on the back of a truck), able to run on more abundant materials like Thorium (which in turn come from more politically stable regions), and to top it all off: not only do they leave much less nuclear waste, they can a…

A quibble:

The point about meltdowns is cute, but probably wrong; the insurance against meltdown is a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity, if I understand correctly. In other words, the thermal expansion drives the fuel out into the piping as the reaction heats up, away from the compact reacting core, and also reduces the density in the core, allowing more neutrons to escape.