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The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

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Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#61

Post by eru »

cycomanic wrote: post #58
cycomanic wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC in Germany the nuclear power operators were essentially allowed to put aside large amount of money taxfree to be used for decommissioning. They used those funds to expand into many other areas (so they could use the funds for high risk investment). I will try to find a source.

Ok adding as another comment. The situation is actually more complicated than that see [1]. Essentially it comes to book keeping, however after 2017 the operators had to pay into a government fund to ensure sufficient funds to decommissioning (currently this holds 24 billion euro). Estimated decommissioning cost for a nuclear power plant are 1.2 billion euro (there is some dispute about the numbers though). This numb…

Thanks!

(I'm German as well. But for other people: Google Translate has gotten really good.)

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#62

Post by imtringued »

jakehop wrote: post #47
coldtea wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. If we could just skimp on policy, and allowed much cheaper construction, less safeguards, and just dumping of byproducts wherever, we'd have much cheaper nuclear power!

No, it’s about the economies of scale of building 50 power plants per year vs 1 per 50 years. Knowledge and know-how is lost and that increases costs. Wind has become cheaper (but not more reliable) because thousands of turbines are being installed each year. If they were built at the same rate as nuclear, they would be even more expensive (and still not able to provide base load power). Nuclear fuel can be stored sa…

This comment is correct about how to reduce costs of nuclear power plants. Pick one design. Build a lot and preferably small reactors. Keep the factories running even if no new plants are being built. If you find a safety flaw with the existing reactors start building a new series and replace old reactors.

The practice of running dangerous/obsolete plants until EOL is absolutely absurd though. How can one tell the people that modern designs will solve all safety problems if plants older than the one at Chernobyl are still operating to this day?

I disagree about what you say about wind though. Wind power is massively benefiting from the same economies of scale that small reactors would benefit except they do so on a much bigger scale.

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#63

Post by eru »

cycomanic wrote: post #56
eru wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not exactly 'covering the landscape'. See https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_161.shtml for some of the math for the example of Britain. See the calculation starting on this page https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_166.shtml > Land use > Let’s imagine that Britain decides it is serious about getting off fossil fuels, and creates a lot of new nuclear reactors, even though this may not be “sustainable.” I…

Land use is not the main issue, but it's worth noting that nuclear power plants can not be build in nearly as many places as wind farms or solar power (as implicitly acknowledged in your coastline example), you need sufficient cooling capability. But the main point still remains, nuclear power is bad at everything but baseload. And pointing at breeder or thorium reactors is exactly the thing I mentioned earlier. Tech…

> You are still ignoring the land use of open pit mining as well.

The book I linked to mentioned some of that. It's just not much of an issue, since you need so little fuel. (And you could filter that fuel out of the ocean, if you really needed to.)

> At the end nuclear is an uneconomic technology with significant unresolved issues even after decades of heavy subsidising, while renewable are cheaper proven and continously getting cheaper. The only reason to keep nuclear on the table is to keep power generation highly centralised and monopolized thus favouring few large corporations. It's ironic that nuclear is often proposed by self-confessed libertarians even though its the epitome of centralised corporatism.

I'm just as happy as the next guy that decentralisable renewable options like wind and solar are becoming more and more competitive. Even the ascent of shale gas is a boon for the environment as long as it is replacing coal.

Nuclear fission (and fusion) are interesting as technologies. And especially fission is contrarian enough these days to attract certain types of admirers.

I do agree that in practice given global public opinion as it is, nuclear power is nigh guaranteed to remain centralised.

I am arguing that nuclear power generation has some flaws, but also that it doesn't have all the flaws.

Nuclear energy also used to serve as a useful reminder to the peak oil doomsayers (and these days to the climate change doomsayers), that in principle we could keep living a very energy intensive lifestyle, even if we were to stop using fossil fuels completely, and even if renewable solar and wind never took off.

Some people seemed to get an almost religious elation out of predicting that our sins would need to be paid for with lots of hardship and privation. Instead of just taking a hit of perhaps 10% of GDP or so to run everything on nuclear instead of oil.

(Similar to how the Club of Rome folks predicted doom from overpopulation. To broad popular appeal.)

As you point out, we are even luckier: renewables like wind and solar haven gotten cheaper faster than expected, so we found an even better alternative to oil and coal.

But it's good to know that there's another backup that in the grand scheme of things is not much worse than cheap oil used to be.

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#64

Post by eru »

baud147258 wrote: post #60
cycomanic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land use is not the main issue, but it's worth noting that nuclear power plants can not be build in nearly as many places as wind farms or solar power (as implicitly acknowledged in your coastline example), you need sufficient cooling capability. But the main point still remains, nuclear power is bad at everything but baseload. And pointing at breeder or thorium reactors is exactly the thing I mentioned earlier. Tech…

I don't know which countries you're talking about, but in France 'renewable' energies are heavily subsided,

Cycomanic never said renewables don't get any subsidies. And that assumption is not needed for their argument.

The comment you are replying to merely said that decades of subsidizing nuclear didn't remove technical issues. And perhaps you can say the comment implied that the technical issues with renewables did mostly go away, without making any comment on whether renewables got any subsidies and on whether they helped or hindered.

(I would even go so far to argue that most of nuclear's remaining technical issues are from continued government meddling. But that's down to public opinion that wants government control of nuclear power. In places like eg Germany, for a long time the government was much more pro-nuclear than the population.)

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#65

Post by eru »

imtringued wrote: post #62
jakehop wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it’s about the economies of scale of building 50 power plants per year vs 1 per 50 years. Knowledge and know-how is lost and that increases costs. Wind has become cheaper (but not more reliable) because thousands of turbines are being installed each year. If they were built at the same rate as nuclear, they would be even more expensive (and still not able to provide base load power). Nuclear fuel can be stored sa…

This comment is correct about how to reduce costs of nuclear power plants. Pick one design. Build a lot and preferably small reactors. Keep the factories running even if no new plants are being built. If you find a safety flaw with the existing reactors start building a new series and replace old reactors. The practice of running dangerous/obsolete plants until EOL is absolutely absurd though. How can one tell the pe…

Mostly, yes. Some additions: up to a certain size, bigger wind turbines are much more efficient than smaller ones.

Similar considerations apply to some nuclear power designs. In addition, many nuclear power designs are saver per Joule when build on a larger scale.

Of course, safety would still benefit from the experience from building more of any one design.

The absurdity of running old plants past EOL is directly tied to how hard / impossible it is to build new plants.

Crazy enough, the rest of Chernobyl power plant continued to operate for a long time after the famous accident. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#66

Post by evgen »

worik wrote: post #55
petre wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with waste is a policy challenge that's tied to non proliferation, not so much a technical one.

There is no known way to store anything safely for ~100,000 years like what the most problematic nuclear waste (and some parts of reactors, IIRC) have to be stored. It is a small amount, but a insoluble problem Selling out the future generations for cyrrent greed. Nice one

> There is no known way to store anything safely for ~100,000 years

Sure there is. You may not like it, but here it is: encase it in a concrete block and put it on a boat, sail boat to middle of ocean, dump it overboard. Done and dusted. That block of problematic nuclear waste is now going to kill less people over the next 100K years than solar will kill this month.

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#67

Post by petre »

worik wrote: post #55
petre wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with waste is a policy challenge that's tied to non proliferation, not so much a technical one.

There is no known way to store anything safely for ~100,000 years like what the most problematic nuclear waste (and some parts of reactors, IIRC) have to be stored. It is a small amount, but a insoluble problem Selling out the future generations for cyrrent greed. Nice one

It's not really waste, it's mostly useful and rare stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#68

Post by cycomanic »

eru wrote: post #63
cycomanic wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land use is not the main issue, but it's worth noting that nuclear power plants can not be build in nearly as many places as wind farms or solar power (as implicitly acknowledged in your coastline example), you need sufficient cooling capability. But the main point still remains, nuclear power is bad at everything but baseload. And pointing at breeder or thorium reactors is exactly the thing I mentioned earlier. Tech…

> You are still ignoring the land use of open pit mining as well. The book I linked to mentioned some of that. It's just not much of an issue, since you need so little fuel. (And you could filter that fuel out of the ocean, if you really needed to.) > At the end nuclear is an uneconomic technology with significant unresolved issues even after decades of heavy subsidising, while renewable are cheaper proven and contin…

I predict we will need to stop using GDP as a measure for progress. It was invented as a measure for production in war time (WW2) and was incredibly useful for its purpose. However initially it purposefully did not include banking, advertising, military spending..., because they don't add to a countries production capabilities.

It is a terrible measure for human well being. Many things which are actually detrimental increase the GDP (accidents, obesity, depression, pollution...). The inventor of the GDP Simon Kuznets even warned against using it to judge progress, but instead it has become this metric that is the be all.

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#69

Post by tonyedgecombe »

37r6r6u3u3u wrote: post #45
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of 2018, renewable energy accounted for 79% of the domestically produced electricity used in Brazil. Brazil relies on hydroelectricity for 65% of its electricity, and the Brazilian government plans to expand the share of biomass and wind energy (currently 6%) as alternatives. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Brazil

A good point, I was lazy and mainly did a population survey, I was wrong in assuming Brazil was significantly industrialized. I'm not sure that helps your point much though since eventually they're going to want their economy to grow unless your position is that Brazilians don't want their economy to grow.

I'm not sure that helps your point much though since eventually they're going to want their economy to grow unless your position is that Brazilians don't want their economy to grow.

There was no point other than to identify the error in your proposition.

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#70

Post by worik »

evgen wrote: post #66
worik wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no known way to store anything safely for ~100,000 years like what the most problematic nuclear waste (and some parts of reactors, IIRC) have to be stored. It is a small amount, but a insoluble problem Selling out the future generations for cyrrent greed. Nice one

> There is no known way to store anything safely for ~100,000 years Sure there is. You may not like it, but here it is: encase it in a concrete block and put it on a boat, sail boat to middle of ocean, dump it overboard. Done and dusted. That block of problematic nuclear waste is now going to kill less people over the next 100K years than solar will kill this month.

What could possibly go wrong with that?
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