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Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

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Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#261

Post by Manfredo_1 »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #234
manfredo wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting this claim? Natural gas costs somewhere between $40 and $70 per MWh [1]. Storage costs for batteries range from $100/KWh (very optimistic) to $300/KWh [2]. But that's per kilowatt hours. That's $100,000 per MWh to $300,000 per MWh. Solar and wind's dispatchability remains its key weakness. Storage at anywhere near the required amounts remains a fantasy. That's why Germany and California are stil…

You can use batteries more than once! If you cycle them once per day for ten years to store solar power until night, your numbers given mean they add $30-100 per MWh to the cost of that stored power (but not daytime use). Not cheap, but in no way a "fantasy". Certainly not in a world with sane carbon pricing.

No, that's not this works. Batteries currently cost ~$150 to $250 per KWh. As in, if you want to store one kilowatt hour, you need to spend $150 to $250 dollars on batteries. If you want to store one megawatt hour, then that's $150,000 to $250,000 worth of batteries. Yes, you can cycle this battery multiple times. I'm not sure how you think that this somehow makes storage cheaper. The fact that you can charge a 1 KWh battery and discharge it 1,000 times doesn't magically make it a 1 MWh battery. Battery cost is measured in terms of cost of capacity, in watt hours.

It absolutely is a fantasy to use this for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the US uses 11.5 TWh of electricity each day. The entire world produces 300 GWh of batteries every year. In order to achieve the 12 hours of storage for 80% renewables we'd consume global battery production for several years. To reach the 3 weeks storage for 100% renewable we'd need 805 years of the entire world's battery production at current levels. Sure, battery production is set to double over the next decade. But we're still talking centuries worth of global battery production to fulfill the storage demands of just the United States. And we're ignoring the fact that batteries wear out after a few thousand cycles.

Again, the idea that batteries are going to make wind and solar feasible is a fantasy.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#263

Post by renewiltord »

pdonis wrote: post #122
icedistilled wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Oh don't forget the other issue: It takes decades to build a new plant. We don't got that time. For the $6 Billion or more it takes to build a nuclear plant that will then take 15 to 20 years to license and build before it generates a single Watt, we could have had a $6 Billion of solar and wind deployed and operating for 12+ ye…

> It takes decades to build a new plant. No, it doesn't. It only takes a few years. What takes decades is resolving all the NIMBY lawsuits.

Sure it does. It takes one decade for America to build 1.7 miles of rail. That's for a thing that is done daily across the globe. Doing a thing that's done rarely? Yeah, I have no hope that there is an American company today that can do it.

By the time we build expertise it will be 2080. And all that capital will be tied up until then. Who even knows if fission will be the right tool then.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#264

Post by faeyanpiraat »

rgbrenner wrote: post #165
Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

solar/wind + batteries is now cheaper than coal and nuclear. And it can be brought online faster with virtually no safety issues. Nuclear had it's day and it's over. At this point subsidizing it is just creating a mess so that we can give money to GE et al for providing something that--thanks to technology--has no value. If you really want to, just give GE the money directly so that we won't have to bother decommissi…

I would assume wind and solar having unknown undesirable secondary effects.

A nuclear power plant is fairly self-contained.

A giant black solar installation captures a lot of heat that would’ve been reflected back into space.

Wind farms slow down wind (obviously..)

We all know how important the gyres in the oceans to preserving the current ecosystem.

Everything is in a delicate balance, if we start messing up something new who knows what would happen.

Are there any studies in this area?

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#265

Post by [deleted] »

doikor wrote: post #251
pfdietz wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the plants I mentioned were 40+ years ago. They are all contemporary. Vogtle is still under construction, Summer was cancelled a couple of years ago ($9B down the drain), Flamanville 3 is still under construction, and the last is near completion. You may be confused with earlier reactors at some of those sites.

Olkiluoto 3 is a new design though. Making a second exact same one again will be much faster and cheaper as you have now worked out most of the issues. Olkiluoto 1 and 2 were both built quickly and on schedule. Mainly because they were already proven designs with tens of other units already built around the world (and the second reactor is practically identical with the first one)

[deleted]

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#266

Post by Manfredo_1 »

choeger wrote: post #236
manfredo wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting this claim? Natural gas costs somewhere between $40 and $70 per MWh [1]. Storage costs for batteries range from $100/KWh (very optimistic) to $300/KWh [2]. But that's per kilowatt hours. That's $100,000 per MWh to $300,000 per MWh. Solar and wind's dispatchability remains its key weakness. Storage at anywhere near the required amounts remains a fantasy. That's why Germany and California are stil…

You are mixing up the price of capacity vs. the price of generating the electric energy. A battery for 100/kwh can be used several 100 to 1000s of cycles.

> A battery for 100/kwh can be used several 100 to 1000s of cycles.

You're making the same error as reitzensteinm. The fact that you can charge and discharge a 1 KWh battery a thousand times doesn't make it a 1 MWh battery.

If the United States wants to use 80% renewables we need 12 hours of energy storage, which works out to 6 TWh. Even at a very generous cost estimate of $100/KWh, this works out to 600 billion dollars. The fact that batteries can be cycled for a few thousand cycles doesn't make this any cheaper. It just means we "only" need to spend 600 billion dollars every 5 to 10 years. And we'd still be burning fossil fuels at about 1/3rd the rate we currently do.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#267

Post by reincarnate0x14 »

pas wrote: post #246
manfredo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does that mean nuclear is just a totally great idea? No; the issue with nuclear is cost. Historically it has been quite expensive, but subsidised in opaque ways. In a zero carbon world, it might make sense for baseline generation even if it's expensive; in the world we live in it needs to compete on price. Can it? Compete against fossil fuels? No, but neither can solar and wind. Nuclear power also loses out against…

Just a day ago someone on HM mentioned that the Diablo Canyon plant is being shut down because it would need a 7B USD cooling system (evaporation towers), and building 40 GWh storage would cost less. (I found this ~400 USD / kWh for 4 hours number, that gives 17.5 GW for 4 hours for 7B. by W Cole at NREL.)

I don't doubt that the Diablo Canyon upgrade is expensive, and various interests have been set on killing that plant for decades, but there is no way on earth you're getting 40 GWh of storage in central California at any price within a decade.

The total pumped and gas storage capacity of the United States is only like 25 GWh. Building that would require a majority of the total battery production of the entire planet for a year, and most of that wouldn't even be the right kind of batteries regardless of what technology they settled on. Some sort of dream moonshot project to build that would be awesome, but is completely outside the scope of any modern commercial endeavor.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#268

Post by adrianN »

Lutzb wrote: post #224
ComputerGuru wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is only so relatively expensive because it’s the only fuel source that’s forced to pay up for all the externalities up front (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing to require). A nuclear plant can’t be built if the money to make it safe (as per some specification), insure against all health complications while it’s in operation, decommission it, clean up the site, securely dump all spent fuel, and return the…

In Germany the concept of "Ewigkeitskosten" ist factored in for coal and nuclear.

That is a fairly bold claim. There are laws around it, but it's far from clear whether all the costs are accounted for. There is for example continuous conflict over flooding old mines. That saves a lot of money, but it also risks contaminating ground water with e.g. PCBs.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#269

Post by piokoch »

Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

"the issue with nuclear is cost" the cost is the problem indeed, but the cost is something that can be lowered with sufficient amount of innovation - see how SpaceX managed to lower cost of sending satellites or people to the space.

Nuclear energy researches were stagnant for many, many years - anything "atomic" was considered to be "non-green", and green movements were fighting nuclear energy vigorously, as a result there were not much research done in this area - working on that was a dangerous career choice, people who did that were treated like Holocaust deniers, people who do researches on differences between races or try to cure homosexuality.

Another "success" of ecologist was that they've managed to scare people. As a result finding location for nuclear plant is very hard, there are protests, people do everything to stop building plants in the area, so there is huge cost associated with paying compensations.

Fun fact: in early '90 there was a plan to build nuclear plant in Poland, obviously it was heavily protested, Greenpeace and friends arrived, do their usual stuff like chaining to to whatever they could, etc. The project was abandoned (first government after fall of communism was reluctant to act heavy-handed), however, believe or not, 30 years later people leaving near the planned location still put on their houses "stop atom" banners. I would not believe that myself I hadn't seen them. So instead of having clean energy Poland keeps emitting CO2 (not that the amount is even comparable to Germany emission or other more developed countries, but still).

Cost is also a matter of scale. France, which relays on nuclear energy a lot, managed to make it feasible with a great effect for both economy and environment.

Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

#270

Post by ArnoVW »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #125
Lazare wrote: post #53

Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…

Nuclear is only so relatively expensive because it’s the only fuel source that’s forced to pay up for all the externalities up front (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing to require). A nuclear plant can’t be built if the money to make it safe (as per some specification), insure against all health complications while it’s in operation, decommission it, clean up the site, securely dump all spent fuel, and return the…

In fact, there is considerable concern over nuclear, precisely because it looks like it is underpriced due to underestimation of the decomissioning costs.

The economic lifetime of the first commercial installations is only now starting to end (partly because they have been extended so often). So we do not have that much data to work with, but so far it does not look good:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
"In Europe there is considerable concern over the funds necessary to finance final decommissioning"

Moreover, like the decomissioned reactors, the fuel will have to be stored for a very very long time. Most of the fuel generated since the 40's and 50s is in "temporary storage", in their original installation. We have never built installations that have to last as long as the nuclear storage sites we envision, and we have no idea how the ones we have started to build will hold up over the hundreds if not thousands of years that they have to last.

I can apreciate people taking an optimistic view on this, and saying that these problems should not preclude nuclear. But saying that nuclear is compared in an unfair light due to decomissioning is taking the issue the wrong way around.

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