Greed and corruption blew up South Korea’s nuclear industry • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by pcr910303 » Fri, May 03, 2019, 12:32 AM UTC

joecool1029 wrote: post #101

pcr910303 wrote: post #91

Okay, I’m a South Korean citizen. That, is one aspect. Consider another aspect. Nuclear reactors are dangerous. That doesn’t change. We get the Fukushima accident much more prominently because Japan is so close th Korea and everyone (literally everyone) had to worry about eating Fukushima fish. Nuclear reactors are dangerously close to so many cities, and that can’t change, because our country is too small, and there…

> Nuclear reactors are dangerous. Doesn't Korea have coal? Shows up as over a quarter of your generation. Have you been to a region that uses coal for energy generation and seen what it does to the land? Mining it causes heavy metal pollution of water that kills people, the fish pick up mercury and lead, and people consume the fish. Shouldn't you be more concerned about coal plants in China contaminating your waters?…

> Shouldn’t you be more concerned about coal plants in China contaminating your waters? Oh course we are concerned, and for what I know our government is keep contacting the Chinese government; however it is hard for Korea to make changes in China’s energy plans. Korea is both migrating from neuclear reactors, coal plants, etc... to LNG plants (which are much more clean and do not produce much dust) and renewable energy.

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

#122

Post by manicdee » Fri, May 03, 2019, 2:32 AM UTC

new4thaccount wrote: post #120

Gibbon1 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To have reliable baseload power with renewables You have to be careful baseload power isn't the same thing as battery backed (time shifted) renewable power. Coal and Nuclear baseload power exists for two reasons. Excess generating capacity at night. And the inability of coal and nuclear plants to shutdown. It's cheap because of oversupply. Time shifted renewable's is more expensive because of under supply. Some per…

You also need base load during the day when wind is blowing and it all of a sudden disappears. Don't say this doesn't happen as I've seen it many times. Think about it. Wind might be 30% or more of your dispatch and then it just disappears quickly (even with multiple forecast vendors you are lucky to have a 2 hour warning). At this point you have to either have a lot of headroom (excess thermal generation for times l…

You have seen wind disappear from an entire continent during a very cloudy day?

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

#123

Post by manicdee » Fri, May 03, 2019, 2:37 AM UTC

jatsign wrote: post #62

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…

Does anyone know if Saudi Arabia has explored solar power. Seems like they have a lot of unused land that gets a lot of sunlight...

There has been significant noise in the space, with a SoftBank project set up to install 200GW of solar projects. That project was cancelled relatively quickly though.

I am not up to date with current projects.

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

#124

Post by new4thaccount » Fri, May 03, 2019, 2:55 AM UTC

manicdee wrote: post #122

new4thaccount wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also need base load during the day when wind is blowing and it all of a sudden disappears. Don't say this doesn't happen as I've seen it many times. Think about it. Wind might be 30% or more of your dispatch and then it just disappears quickly (even with multiple forecast vendors you are lucky to have a 2 hour warning). At this point you have to either have a lot of headroom (excess thermal generation for times l…

You have seen wind disappear from an entire continent during a very cloudy day?

In the USA a very large geographical subsection can lose many GW of instantaneous wind generation across an hour, which can be concerning if the system is currently running pretty economic (not a whole lot of excess reserves).

The way dispatch is done is completely different than the way it was done 10 years ago and also completely different than the way it was designed in so many ways.

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

#125

Post by mschuster91 » Fri, May 03, 2019, 10:12 AM UTC

wbl wrote: post #49

mschuster91 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In terms of disaster potential it's on the order of hydroelectric. Water disappears. Yes, a failed dam may kill thousands to tens of thousands, but the land is generally immediately reusable without major problems as long as there is no chemical industry in the floodpath. A nuclear reactor blowing up, though? The immediate death potential is mostly limited to the on-site staff and the "liquidators" (as evidenced in…

We permit people to live in Denver or some towns with elevated radium in their water. Heck you can have basements in New Jersey. Are you sure we're drawing a consistent line on radiation exposure?

> Heck you can have basements in New Jersey.

According to UNSCEAR radon (which you probably mean?) actually causes 9% of lung cancers in Europe: https://www.focus.de/gesundheit/ratgeber/krebs/vorbeugung/ti...

> Are you sure we're drawing a consistent line on radiation exposure?

We're not doing this, and the result is (easily!) preventable illness and death.

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

#126

Post by realityking » Fri, May 03, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

bboygravity wrote: post #64

mschuster91 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our coal infrastructure is on the way to be phased out, it won't be around for long-term any more - the Kohlekommission proposed 2035-2038 for the final shutdown, with 12.5 GW of 42.6 GW capacity going offline until 2022 (per https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2019-01/kohlekommission-kohle... ). What's left will be gas and renewables.

It is planned to be phased out. Just like nuclear. That means that within 15 years Germany will have to replace roughly 70 % of its constant energy sources (nuclear and coals) by the only scalable constant energy source left: gas. Thereby becoming completely reliant on gas from Russia. Creating a massive geopolicital risk that didn't exist previously. http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/201... I'…

> Thereby becoming completely reliant on gas from Russia.

While currently most imports are from Russia,there‘s an effort to start building LNG terminals to be able to import from the US.

https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-lng/update-1-germany...

Part of this is appeasement to the US but it is a good backup to have.

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

#127

Post by rurban » Sat, May 04, 2019, 8:27 AM UTC

cladari wrote: post #103

rurban wrote: post #53

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.

South Texas is a 4 loop Westinghouse design and Palo Verde is a 2 loop System 80 Combustion Engineering design. Neither is experimental or unusually dangerous.

South Texas is a French P4 Framatime design with 1400 MW vessels, not used anywhere else in the US (rated experimental) just Korea, with the highest incident rate in the US and the biggest vessels.

Palo Verde is also overlarge and so dangerous with any external cooling possibilities (it's in the dessert), that US fighters regularly have to protect it from unknown planes flying nearby. Anti-Terror measures.

Both were labeled experimental and are extremely dangerous. South Texas just recently was very close to a meltdown during the Houston hurricane. The river nearby rose to the levels almost spilling over into their huge coolant pools. It was something like 40cm. They didn't utter a single word.

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

#128

Post by jhayward » Sat, May 04, 2019, 5:49 PM UTC

manicdee wrote: post #122

new4thaccount wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also need base load during the day when wind is blowing and it all of a sudden disappears. Don't say this doesn't happen as I've seen it many times. Think about it. Wind might be 30% or more of your dispatch and then it just disappears quickly (even with multiple forecast vendors you are lucky to have a 2 hour warning). At this point you have to either have a lot of headroom (excess thermal generation for times l…

You have seen wind disappear from an entire continent during a very cloudy day?

We can't really think of the electrical grid as a continental-scale system because it is severely constrained by transmission resources. It as to be modeled as, at best, regional networks with weak interconnection between them.

Even within regions it isn't a well-connected grid.

To give a specific quantitative example within Texas the generation network is modeled as several dozen individual markets (the "nodal market" concept) with generation and load grouped together to form nodes, which are mainly separated by key transmission congestion points.

Lack of transmission capacity sometimes leads to strange artifacts in pricing wind power in Texas, such as negative pricing (due to the Production Tax Credit lowering the floor below zero). These artifacts tend to go away as new transmission capacity comes online and paying loads in more distant markets become reachable.

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

#129

Post by new4thaccount » Sat, May 04, 2019, 8:36 PM UTC

jhayward wrote: post #128

manicdee wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have seen wind disappear from an entire continent during a very cloudy day?

We can't really think of the electrical grid as a continental-scale system because it is severely constrained by transmission resources. It as to be modeled as, at best, regional networks with weak interconnection between them. Even within regions it isn't a well-connected grid. To give a specific quantitative example within Texas the generation network is modeled as several dozen individual markets (the "nodal marke…

Additional transmission lowers congestion costs, but you actually increase the "wind artifact" you referred to as you have even more wind online (depending on where the transmission is placed) bidding in below zero as long as the PTC is still in effect. I don't think any new thermal generation has come online in Texas despite their extremely high shortage pricing, so you're really just putting more wind online with new transmission build outs.

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

#130

Post by nickik » Mon, May 06, 2019, 8:41 AM UTC

joecool1029 wrote: post #92

nickik wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fairness, nuclear is also just incredibly expensive. This is only now wit the current regulation and legal technology. There is no fundamental reason, that nuclear power production should be so expensive. If we go from first principle, nuclear power requires the least amount of land, the least amount of resources and not a lot of people to run. It runs for very long time. Nuclear plants were massively out-compet…

>Nuclear plants were massively out-competing coal in the 80s until there was a huge regulatory changes that essentially killed the industry. Since then no new reactor technology has been license, pretty much all research has been killed, access to nuclear materials is basically impossible, almost no new nuclear plants were built. Are you talking about the US or South Korea? China seems to be investing pretty hard int…

The US and the West in general. China is going in that direction but China is expanding everything quite hard. The are using the 'lets do everything' strategy.

But yes. By now, you can actually order pretty interesting reactors from China. Their Pebble Bed reactor is interesting.