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Ultra Safe Nuclear

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Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#481

Post by socialdemocrat »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #448
socialdemocrat wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not an extraordinary claim. This is well know. Look up levelized cost of energy on Wikipedia e.g. or lookup the latest British Government report on current and projected Energy cost.

I looked, and what I've found tells me that you make a false claim. Your lack of sources is just as telling. Solar and wind power have their merits, but they are not the ultimate solution to clean power problem.

> I looked, and what I've found tells me that you make a false claim. Your lack of sources is just as telling.

God... so frustrating dealing with dumbasses that don't know even the most basic shit about energy production and cost. Not sure if you are just trolling. But here goes. Here are costs by different sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Costs will vary between country. But here is cost e.g. for France. Nuclear EPR is 100 euro/MWh. Solar farms is 43.24 euro/MWh.

Next, the UK. Nuclear PWR is 93-121 pounds/MWh. Onshore wind 47-76 pounds/MWh. Solar 71-94 pounds/MWh.

How about the US. Advanced Nuclear 71-92 dollars/MWh. Onshore Wind 28 to 62 dollars/MWh. Solar 29 to 48 dollars/MWh.

Here are the estimates from British BEIS: https://www.carbonbrief.org/wind-and-solar-are-30-50-cheaper...

> Solar and wind power have their merits, but they are not the ultimate solution to clean power problem.

Said nobody ever. Solar and wind are dirty cheap hence any clean energy system will have to try to use as much of these as possible to save money where possible. We can supplement with geothermal, hydropower, biomass, power-to-gas, compress air storage, flow batteries, metal powder combustion, and even SMR with molten salt thermal energy storage.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#482

Post by socialdemocrat »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #449
socialdemocrat wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned we got tons of other options besides solar power. EVs are now increasingly beating gasoline cars on cost of ownership and these often have batteries large enough to store the power required for 4 days of a regular western household. I doubt you will be entirely without sunshine for 4 days straight.

> I doubt you will be entirely without sunshine for 4 days straight. Come to Russia, some place like Yekaterinburg. Or Saint-Petersburg, where the sun can be unseen for months.

Repeating myself for the 3rd time: There are other options beside solar power, so why keep harping on this?

In fact Denmark gets about 65% of their power from wind. The UK also gets a lot of their power form wind. For many norther countries, wind power has quite a lot of potential.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#483

Post by Hypx »

macspoofing wrote: post #471
pfdietz wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/07/03/nrel-study-backs-hydr...

>A National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study concludes that by 2050, hydrogen storage lasting for two weeks “is expected to be cost-effective.” 2050!!! By 2050 we'll also have Fusion and other mythical power sources.

To be fair, hydrogen is one of those "mythical" power sources. It just happens to be the one that is becoming viable in the short-term and is not dependent on some future discovery.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#484

Post by socialdemocrat »

evgen wrote: post #452
socialdemocrat wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is such a ridiculous and disingenuous argument. The numbers are minuscule compared to fossil fuels it is replacing. You make it sound like solar power is dangerous. That is total BS. And nuclear numbers are totally unreliable so this is just an apples to orange comparison anyway.

You have made a lot of claims about solar power that have been completely unsourced and are easily shown to be false. For all of the scary noises made by anti-nuclear activists it is actually a power source with an extremely good safety record. Solar and wind power kill more people every year, but the deaths are spread out and appear to be routine so no one really notices. This is why ignorant people are afraid to fl…

You haven't backed up a single claim, so get off your high horse.

> actually a power source with an extremely good safety record.

Sure... there are lies, damn lies as statistics. Read this e.g. https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/07/hit-series-chernobyl-has...

It captures part of the story hidden by your "statistics" about nuclear power.

Chernobyl was so full of lies and coverups that it is hard to know the full truth. What we know is that this accident has enormous cost and psychological impact all over the world.

In my home country Norway 37 municipalities still struggle with radioactive fallout from Chernobyl 33 years later. It is affecting the agricultural sector. That is just my home country. This kind of issues exist all over Europe. I remember what this was like in the aftermath because I lived through it.

But there is always some young punk who thinks he is a smart ass and knows everything, but never actually lived through it. You read some statistics years later, which doesn't capture of fraction of what it was like.

Fukushima is the same lie. People are like, nobody died so it was all cool... yeah.... except the cleanup is a crazy complicated an massive job which by some estimates could cost up to 660 billion dollars.

A smaller country experiencing such a disaster would have their whole economy destroyed by such an expense.

I am a reasonable guy. I say we can keep the safest reactors. The rest we close down. Perhaps we build new reactors if they can prove the design sufficiently safe. This guys might be okay: https://usnc.com

But really I don't see the point. It is a risky power source, we don't really need more of given that we have excellent alternatives.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#485

Post by pfdietz »

cmehdy wrote: post #460
pfdietz wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world that has transitioned to no fossil fuels, how would renewables be emitting CO2? They wouldn't. In a world transitioning away from fossil fuels, the metric is not how much CO2 renewables use to build, but how much CO2 they displace per $. Renewables, being cheaper than nuclear, allow more CO2 to be displaced more quickly.

There's not a single metric to take but many, first of all. The initial cost in CO2 is absolutely part of the measurement, but if you want to look at finer metrics then you can look at the ratio of estimated CO2 costs over the life of the source over the energy produced too, which gives you good hints as to what requires a lot of emissions to get a lot of energy (which is really what we're trying to curb in the first…

You didn't address the argument I made AT ALL.

And, actually, in a zero fossil fuel world, solar is going to be better (at CO2 production) than nuclear, since you can build solar fields with no concrete. Concrete manufacture produces CO2 even if entirely non-fossil energy is used.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#486

Post by [deleted] »

cmehdy wrote: post #460
pfdietz wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world that has transitioned to no fossil fuels, how would renewables be emitting CO2? They wouldn't. In a world transitioning away from fossil fuels, the metric is not how much CO2 renewables use to build, but how much CO2 they displace per $. Renewables, being cheaper than nuclear, allow more CO2 to be displaced more quickly.

There's not a single metric to take but many, first of all. The initial cost in CO2 is absolutely part of the measurement, but if you want to look at finer metrics then you can look at the ratio of estimated CO2 costs over the life of the source over the energy produced too, which gives you good hints as to what requires a lot of emissions to get a lot of energy (which is really what we're trying to curb in the first…

[deleted]

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#487

Post by caditinpiscinam »

opo wrote: post #285
caditinpiscinam wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Safety is no longer the reason Nuclear is not worth it Why "no longer"? I did some reading on Fukushima the other week (I think it was an anniversary of the accident?) and was surprised to learn that multiple studies predicted the disaster years before it happened, only to be ignored. Even as engineering advances, if people keep choosing to take shortcuts and ignore glaring concerns, does it really matter? Is there…

All indications are that much was learned by industry and the NRC after TMI: "...The NRC said the TMI accident also led to increased identification, analysis and publication of plant performance information, and recognising human performance as “a critical component of plant safety”. Key indicators of plant safety performance in the US have improved dramatically. Those indicators show: • The average number of signifi…

Thanks for the info. Those numbers are more impressive than I would have guessed.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#488

Post by cmehdy »

pfdietz wrote: post #485
cmehdy wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not a single metric to take but many, first of all. The initial cost in CO2 is absolutely part of the measurement, but if you want to look at finer metrics then you can look at the ratio of estimated CO2 costs over the life of the source over the energy produced too, which gives you good hints as to what requires a lot of emissions to get a lot of energy (which is really what we're trying to curb in the first…

You didn't address the argument I made AT ALL. And, actually, in a zero fossil fuel world, solar is going to be better (at CO2 production) than nuclear, since you can build solar fields with no concrete. Concrete manufacture produces CO2 even if entirely non-fossil energy is used.

Renewables are emitting CO2 in their making AND in their maintenance AND when they need to migrate due to climate patterns being unpredictable, and I mentioned that again in another post.

In a world transitioning away from fossil fuels, that world has to transition pretty damn fast from fossil fuels and renewables do not bridge the gap AND do not handle controllability. You never actually mention any solution at all despite the now dozen things I've mentioned about this, and you know full well that (1) your precious means to get energy will cost in their making AND the moving as climate evolves, and (2) the unsteady nature of their output REQUIRES having a controllable source in parallel which DOES NOT make the fossil fuel usage go down UNLESS we use nuclear. And the alternative is that we would simply have de-growth, CONFER the damn original post. I am not taking a stance about that, I am simply stating what AGAIN the damn physics lays out in front of your eyes. It's not my fault if you don't want to read IPCC reports.

I am sick and tired of your unsourced rants that aren't trying to bring any useful argument to the table, and I'll leave it at that. If you want to keep putting your blinders on and think that the sun is almighty, all the power to you. You're lying to yourself and this can cost more than you realize.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#489

Post by pfdietz »

cmehdy wrote: post #457
pfdietz wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's right, and you are grossly overestimating your level of clue. You do not understand the degree to which you do not understand. Dunning-Kruger says hi. I suggest you try to fully flesh out your supposed argument, with as much self-skepticism as you can muster. Your enemy is your tendency to motivated reasoning, where you stop thinking when you get a conclusion you like. The symptom of this is that you present hal…

First, let's get back to the very beginning: my first message gave an explanation to what was pure antagonizing of the "pro-nuclear" people, and I mentioned that it's based on physics (which it is). You're stating a "he's right you're wrong" with an unsubstantiated singular paragraph while I've been giving dozens of elements of reflection over a half dozen posts. That's a bit rich, isn't it? You want something to sub…

Let's go through go through those links and see if they support your claim that "it is painfully obvious that unless you're making calculations about spherical cows there's nowhere near enough resources, surface, and specifically predictability to have renewables be more than marginal for a long time".

[1] No, that doesn't support your claim (and it's from 2007, an aeon ago in the renewable field). In fact, that abstract says "The negative effects on health of electricity generation from renewable sources have not been assessed as fully as those from conventional sources, but for solar, wind, and wave power, such effects seem to be small"

[2] That states "As a corollary, nuclear energy also occupies significantly less space / land than renewables (several hundred times less in fact)." But that doesn't mean the land area required by renewables makes renewables infeasible. And it also ignores the distribution network needed for nuclear; if that is included, the ratio of land areas needed is much smaller.

He also says "the debate is not about building new nuclear power plants but to retain the remaining ones for as long as possible." So that link doesn't supply justification for building new nuclear plants. I can accept that CO2 taxes (for example) would enable existing nuclear plants to keep operating, at least for a while.

[3,4] Ah, Shellenberger. He was the guy who was claiming PV was dirty because it used rare earth elements from China (spoiler: that's a lie). He fails to make any quantitative argument that land area or other inputs for renewables render it infeasible. And he repeats the tired nonsense about Germany having high energy costs because of renewables (as if that somehow justifies the doublethink that installing much more expensive sources would have led to lower costs.)

[5] And yet more irrelevancy.

Look, if you actually had a cogent argument to support your claim, you could have pointed to a real detailed argument supporting it. But it was bullshit all along, and you know that, so you spewed out a Gish Gallop of irrelevancy. And indeed, how could it have been otherwise? Your claim requires that all possible configurations of renewables, all possible configurations and types of storage, and all possible configurations of energy using activities cannot work. And how could you POSSIBLY establish that? You could have claimed there's a lot of work to be done, and that it's not CERTAIN that renewables could do the job, and for that reason nuclear should be kept alive as an option. But that's not what you were arguing.

Re: Ultra Safe Nuclear

#490

Post by cmehdy »

pfdietz wrote: post #489
cmehdy wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, let's get back to the very beginning: my first message gave an explanation to what was pure antagonizing of the "pro-nuclear" people, and I mentioned that it's based on physics (which it is). You're stating a "he's right you're wrong" with an unsubstantiated singular paragraph while I've been giving dozens of elements of reflection over a half dozen posts. That's a bit rich, isn't it? You want something to sub…

Let's go through go through those links and see if they support your claim that "it is painfully obvious that unless you're making calculations about spherical cows there's nowhere near enough resources, surface, and specifically predictability to have renewables be more than marginal for a long time". [1] No, that doesn't support your claim (and it's from 2007, an aeon ago in the renewable field). In fact, that abst…

[1] Aeons ago means litteraly nothing. You can contemplate gradual improvements to the EROI, but they don't change by an order of magnitude despite the metric truckton of money we've been throwing at the problem. The order of magnitude does not change, the output doesn't really significantly shift either.

[2] Land area occupied by renewables doesn't make it INFEASIBLE, can you stop putting it words into my mouth I did not say? Did you not read the literal dozens of times I've mentioned renewables are worth developing and using? Do you understand that when I compare one with the other, this is not a XOR but an OR and I am talking about orders of magnitude and controllability therefore what actually matters for the bigger immediate changes? Or do you want to wilfully continue to ignore that I've said that about ten times now and dance the same dance again and again?

It's not infeasible, it's merely on average impractical. That is, you need to identify the narrow areas where the installation offsets the CO2 output of the construction + materials + maintenance bill. Yes it does improve, and yes that ROI improves significantly too. Did you read my sentence right now? I don't want you to say again the same damn things, I'm just checking you even read the messages.

But no, the solar output is not what will allow you to keep your fridge running and your shower hot at all times. If you want to sell me the idea of not having power at all time I'm genuinely OPEN to it, but then actually have the sincerity of shifting the debate to something meaningful rather than the same points over and over again.

[3,4] Ad hominem, and you also happen to miss that yes a majority of PV as it stands does not use the awesome research that avoids using involving a decent amount of mining (and that research didn't come for free btw, and that could have paid for next-generation nuclear research for which the current generation already beats by far photovoltaic). So sure, handwave away.

[5 and not 6] So you ignore the IPCC reports? TL;DR am I right? I have nothing more to say to you.

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