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

Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

technologyreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 130 posts

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#51

Post by rayiner »

bilbo0s wrote: post #48
rayiner wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first paragraph misses the mark, because, unlike a nuclear plant, a windmill or solar plant isn't a standalone power source. To have reliable baseload power with renewables, you need massive battery storage. Right now, you don't factor in the (very high) cost of building battery storage into the cost of wind power because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power. But the co…

> because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power... That's right. So why would you not decommission all of that incredibly expensive nuclear, and draw down your use of the coal plants to fill in the gaps? That's how most dispatch stacks work. It's just common sense. Consumers want to save money. Utilities want to make enough money. There's just no way you use nuclear in any sc…

Coal can't dispatch fast enough, and most coal plants are at the end of their lifecycle and need to be replaced. So you have to build new baseload capacity, usually gas. (And really, you still need a bunch of batteries to handle short-term fluctuations in renewables output.) The problem, then, is that you have all new coal or gas plants, which are expensive capital assets, that you're basically using for standby power. (And they incur operating and maintenance costs even when not running.) You can't say that electricity from renewables is cheap without accounting for the cost of that standby capacity renewables require. A nuclear plant, by contrast, doesn't need a bunch of coal or gas plants sitting around on standby. You can shut down that old coal plant, stop paying the workers, reuse the land, etc.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#52

Post by SiempreViernes »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #44
bilbo0s wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive. Witness Vogtie. Take away all taxes and regulations, then compare the price of, say, Iowa, building a nuclear plant instead of just slapping up windmills wherever they want. (Remember, we're assuming zero regulations. So while slapping up windmills would normally be incredibly illegal, we're able to do that under the conditions that our thought experiment postul…

Don't disagree with anything you said here, however: > and they have the old coal plants to fill in the gaps ...this is the problem with solar and most renewables. They have gaps. The question, it seems to me, is are we in a fight for the survival of our species, or not? If we are, then we should pull all the stops. I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to have a liveable planet. I'll pay the bloody premium…

Get more hydro then as it's faster at adapting to changing loads than nuclear.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#53

Post by rurban »

What they didn't explain was that this crazy APR1400 is the same design is the one of most dangerous and experimental US reactors, South Texas and Palo Verde, with vessels of double size and half the security measures. The only ones matching them in size and dangerousness were the experimental Korean 1400 ones.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#54

Post by skybrian »

rayiner wrote: post #43
bilbo0s wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive. Witness Vogtie. Take away all taxes and regulations, then compare the price of, say, Iowa, building a nuclear plant instead of just slapping up windmills wherever they want. (Remember, we're assuming zero regulations. So while slapping up windmills would normally be incredibly illegal, we're able to do that under the conditions that our thought experiment postul…

Your first paragraph misses the mark, because, unlike a nuclear plant, a windmill or solar plant isn't a standalone power source. To have reliable baseload power with renewables, you need massive battery storage. Right now, you don't factor in the (very high) cost of building battery storage into the cost of wind power because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power. But the co…

It's not really baseload power (which runs 24-7) that's needed. It's backup power that runs much less often. That has different economics.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#55

Post by epistasis »

rayiner wrote: post #51
bilbo0s wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power... That's right. So why would you not decommission all of that incredibly expensive nuclear, and draw down your use of the coal plants to fill in the gaps? That's how most dispatch stacks work. It's just common sense. Consumers want to save money. Utilities want to make enough money. There's just no way you use nuclear in any sc…

Coal can't dispatch fast enough, and most coal plants are at the end of their lifecycle and need to be replaced. So you have to build new baseload capacity, usually gas. (And really, you still need a bunch of batteries to handle short-term fluctuations in renewables output.) The problem, then, is that you have all new coal or gas plants, which are expensive capital assets, that you're basically using for standby powe…

Baseload is not the necessity, the necessity is to match the power to the load.

Up until now, baseload has been a convenient way to do that matching because baseload was usually the cheapest source of power.

Once baseload is no longer the cheapest source, it's time to re-evaluate that model. Also, when we have a global communication grid and lots of flexibility in our load schedule, it's also fine to re-evaluate how we are doing pricing for electricity.

That time is now. Utilities are highly regulated, and both utility and regulator are slow to adapt to the quickly changing technology that they're now confronting, after nearly a century of glacial technology change. But they will adapt. As we must not only change our economic mode but also become carbon neutral.

Those with huge capital investments may resist, but as you say, we can repurpose that old coal plant and reuse its connections to the grid, which are valuable and expensive to recreate. In Moss Landing, California, gas turbines are getting replaced by over a GWh of lithium ion battery. The change will happen as soon as utilities start bringing recent pricing into their planning process.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#57

Post by arethuza »

davidgay wrote: post #28
clarkmoody wrote: post #26

Nuclear power presents the perfect storm for negative public image: - Environmental movement went anti-nuclear in the '70s for no particular reason. - Fear Sells in the media. Nothing strikes fear like the invisible killer of radiation. Nuclear disasters get media attention like nothing else. - Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Being t…

> Nuclear weapons are scary, and rightfully so. And they share a word in common with "nuclear power," so there you go. Now you're being specious. They share rather more than a word, they are based on the same physical process.

Yes, but the design of a nuclear power reactor and a nuclear weapon are pretty different - for a start the really nasty bit of most nuclear weapons is the fission of the secondary tamper by neutrons from the fusion component of the secondary.

Nothing like that happens in a nuclear power station.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#58

Post by sara17372 »

Sometimes our feet smell are so bad even we feel ashamed due to our feet smell Now you can get rid from this just follow this simple method https://zoomtips.blogspot.com/2019/04/Smelly-feet.html

Guy made world record He drive car on two wheels See his video how he is driving http://bit.ly/2ZOYaWX

See the video of this man he is catching balls and he is wearing blindfold http://bit.ly/2Vx4Mdl

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#59

Post by bilbo0s »

rayiner wrote: post #51
bilbo0s wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because you still have all those coal, gas, and nuclear plants providing baseload power... That's right. So why would you not decommission all of that incredibly expensive nuclear, and draw down your use of the coal plants to fill in the gaps? That's how most dispatch stacks work. It's just common sense. Consumers want to save money. Utilities want to make enough money. There's just no way you use nuclear in any sc…

Coal can't dispatch fast enough, and most coal plants are at the end of their lifecycle and need to be replaced. So you have to build new baseload capacity, usually gas. (And really, you still need a bunch of batteries to handle short-term fluctuations in renewables output.) The problem, then, is that you have all new coal or gas plants, which are expensive capital assets, that you're basically using for standby powe…

>So you have to build new baseload capacity...

No, you don't. The coal plant in another Alliant Energy area has been around since roughly 1900? or so. It's been updated several times. Never was there a need to rebuild from scratch any coal plant. (This is Madison Wi btw.) Now we stopped using coal there in 2011, (all gas now). But the point is, all the renovations are much cheaper than building a nuclear plant. Utilities around here, (the midwest), are run by old, stodgy, conservative guys who are generally not prone to rash action. There are very few executives around here who are going to build entirely new plants because the machinery in the old one has reached its end of service life. They are going to replace the machinery, at a fraction of the cost. I don't think executives in other parts of the nation are all that different in this regard. Now all that said, even if they did completely tear down and rebuild their plants, which they wouldn't, but even if they did, it would still be cheaper than building a nuclear plant.

So the coal plants are fine. And as I mentioned elsewhere, whatever you use to fill gaps will be a transitional technology. Wind turbines will become more efficient. (Work at lower windspeeds.) Pumped hydro storage will be built in new and innovative ways. What will fill the gaps in 2069 will bear little resemblance to what is filling the gaps in 2019. Because the new methods will likely be not only more clean, but much cheaper to boot.

And incidentally,

>You can't say that electricity from renewables is cheap without accounting for the cost of that standby capacity renewables require...

the 2 cents per kWh people see on their bill does factor in every source in the dispatch stack.

Re: Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry

#60

Post by fulafel »

cglace wrote: post #35
nickelcitymario wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for no particular reason I don't think that's quite accurate. It may be more accurate to say they were misinformed or miscalculated. The reasons were that they believed, and many people still do, that nuclear was bad for the environment because: 1) It required mining to extract the resources necessary, and mining isn't exactly a green activity. 2) Nuclear disasters are unquestionably bad for the environment, and ba…

It there any sources of energy that doesnt depend on mining at some point?

Yes, but many people are reluctant to give up electricity which is hard to use without metals. But wooden windmills, water mills and heating with fire are tried technology.
Post reply on HN