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

bbc.com

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

#311

Post by glogla »

tonyarkles wrote: post #44
jwilliams wrote: post #35

This article implies radiation is the only objection to nuclear power, which isn’t true. It also fails to mention any alternatives (renewables) at all. Both seem major omissions.. especially from the BBC, which I always found was a bit more balanced on these topics.

So far the largest solar plant in the world is about 1500MW in China. That’s still only a fraction of the largest nuclear facilities in the world. And solar plants only work during the day, to a first approximation (yes, there are storage approaches that sort of work, in some parts of the world.) Overall, most renewables don’t really come all that close to nuclear as far as generation capacity goes...

The other thing is that 1500 MW solar with capacity factor of 11 % (that's number for Germany) is going to deliver significantly less energy than 1500 MW nuclear plant with capacity factor 98 %.

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

#312

Post by Aachen »

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…

Copying another comment of mine since you're making the exact same argument as a sibling comment:

Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy.

With nuclear we'd be making faster progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever (basically how the rollout is going in most countries right now). But in the end it's cheaper yeah! Just that we can take more than a decade to build a few plants and we'll still be faster than with only wind and solar (exception: if you're in a country with water and significant height differences, by all means choose that over nuclear). Let's first get CO2-neutral, which is an asap job, with any means not more expensive than off-shore wind (we're building that anyway so apparently anything cheaper will do) and then worry about how to get to a final, perfect state.

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

#313

Post by adrianN »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #288
adrianN wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can avoid a lot of storage requirements by making your grid smarter and electrifying transportation and heating. 60% renewables are possible with hardly any storage at all, certainly less than 12 hours. Shifting demand is always cheaper than storage. Once you've electrified transportation, you have hundreds of millions of car batteries that can help out with demand spikes. That distributes the high upfront cost o…

Electrifying heating doesn't improve this situation, it worsens it drastically. People come back home after work and turn on the heat or AC right as the sun goes down. A big part of why renewable generation is so high in Germany is because they mostly heat their homes with gas (which emits carbon, but doesn't factor into electricity generation statistics). Using car batteries for storage doesn't solve the fundamental…

Eletrifying heating helps a lot if you integrate it with a smart grid. People generally don't care whether their home is 21 or 23 degrees warm, but the difference enables a lot of load shifting. I know people who take advantage of this today. This is btw, also true for many industrial processes.

You'd integrate your car battery with the grid because you'd get cheaper charging in return, or some other form of monetary reward.

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

#314

Post by Aachen »

bboygravity wrote: post #310

Has anybody else noticed that this pro-nuclear "news" seems rather orchestrated throughout Europe/"The West"? These pro-nuclear ideas have recently been in the news and hot in politics in at least 4 European countries that I frequent and where I speak the language. All around the same time. Is this manufacturing consent in action? Who's behind this and why? There are no new arguments or information that I see for or…

Nope, haven't noticed that at all. I have yet to meet the first European in real life that's neutral, let alone in favor of, nuclear. I live in a border region between Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. They always bring up the (false) safety argument and when they discover that's an airplane vs cars kind of fear, they start about costs, which is not more than the off-shore wind we're already building. (And someone really ought to tell France.) Somehow they aren't convinced by logic in the end and most would rather shut down nuclear plants in their back yard before the coal plant that causes much greater damages.

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

#315

Post by hannob »

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…

> 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

Can you state in which country nuclear has to pay all the externalities up front? And if that country has any nuclear to begin with? (I know from Germany that the opposite was always a major point of criticism - the insurance nuclear plant operators need is limited, lots of the responsibility and costs of nuclear waste handling has been transferred to the state.)

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

#316

Post by lazyjones »

rgbrenner wrote: post #149

BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter. You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time y…

Can you back these figures up? No, you can't. Long-running nuclear plants like France's are much cheaper to operate and maintain than wind/solar. Wind turbines get decommissioned after 10-15 years around here (typically because government funding expires and they can't compete on the energy market), solar is better but still needs expensive storage capacity to make it competitive in availability.

Unless you assume France's nuclear plants are still benefiting from taxpayers' funding decades after they were built, the market has proven that nuclear power is far cheaper than wind and solar.

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

#317

Post by reitzensteinm »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #284
reitzensteinm wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent compared the price of one MWh of power from a natural gas plant with the capital cost of building batteries that can store one MWh. This is a type error.

The enormous capital costs demonstrates how expensive it makes solar and wind in simple terms. Even if we measure in terms of cost per watt hour stored and drawn over the lifetime of the batter it's still hugely expensive. Most batteries can support 300 to 1,000 charge and discharge cycles. So in terms of overall cost of storage, that's still in the range of $200 to $700 per MWh of energy stored and drawn over the li…

US oil consumption increased by almost 100x from 1900-1970. In 1850 it was just a few thousand barrels annually! That orders of magnitude more batteries are needed is not in itself an issue, as long as the solution itself is sound.

NMC chemistry (as used in Hornsdale) is good for 3000-4000 cycles, although it's about 50% more expensive than LFP, at least if you buy them from CATL.

This isn't going to be cheap. But it is feasible, and if you care about carbon I'm not sure how else you do it.

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

#318

Post by coffexx »

ncmncm wrote: post #241
lightgreen wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have evidence that batteries are cheaper than say nuclear? I only heard of the opposite, batteries are prohibitively expensive.

Batteries are only the most of expensive of many candidates for energy storage. But, as was demonstrated in Australia, adequate.

But only adequate for a very narrow use-case so far, _not_ as a daily driver.

Here in South Australia where I live the Hornsdale installation (the Tesla one) is capable of storing 150MW. Its purpose is not to drive the entire grid every day, but to help deal with minor fluctuations in supply and demand, and mitigate brown/blackouts during emergencies. In-between those times it stores electricity while prices are cheap, and sells when the prices are high to turn a profit

The overwhelming source of electricity across Australia is supplied by fossil fuels (despite our abundance of clean nuclear fuel).

The entire reason the installation was built in the first place was because of a series of brownouts and blackouts caused by interruptions in the supply of electricity from interstate one day (we don't generate enough by ourselves sadly). It caused a fairly large political situation to develop, and resulted in the construction of the Hornsdale installation.

Contractually Hornsdale is obliged to be able to supply 70MW for 10 minutes, or 30MW for 3 hours on demand during emergencies. For some perspective, the current load on the grid as at the time I started writing this is 2150MW(6pm local time).

Australian battery installations are simply not operating at the scale you want them to be here. Hornsdale has a niche it is filling quite admirably, but be careful when you use it as an example of grid-scale viability. It's simply not.

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

#319

Post by jillesvangurp »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #287
jillesvangurp wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic reality is that battery on the grid is out-competing gas peaker plants in a lot of places because even with the current scarcity and price levels in the battery market, it seems economical to buy them by the MWH. Technically, peak prices dropping because of solar/wind is a problem of everything else being too expensive. Battery storage solves that problem by being cheaper. Of course we'll need many TWH a…

> The economic reality is that battery on the grid is out-competing gas peaker plants in a lot of places because even with the current scarcity and price levels in the battery market, it seems economical to buy them by the MWH. Do you have any citation for this because I've seen no evidence that this is true. The largest grid scale lithium battery is barely a drop in the ocean by comparison to the energy consumption…

I just read the news in the energy market. I think California just ordered a few MwH of battery from Tesla. They seem to be doing a brisk business of selling batteries to grid providers in a market that is entirely supply limited. There are loads of companies working on alternate storage technologies.

You are right that there is very little right now. But I'd counter that that is growing rapidly and that that is inspired by those investments paying off for their early adopters.

Short term stabilization is actually the key problem that needs solving with energy peaks (which are inherently short term). The sun comes out quite reliably every day to provide a predictable minimum of power levels. Basically solar and wind combined are quite OK. Things like seasonal variation are actually more predictable and something you can plan for. Extended freak periods of clouds with no wind across an entire continent is not a really thing. Such effects tend to be local and temporary. So we can fix a lot by simply moving power around (with cables, another proven technology).

The unspoken presumption with storage critics is that we'll need unspecified days/weeks/months of storage for such apocalyptic conditions. As far as I can see this is simply wrong and not something that energy companies are putting a lot of serious money on the table for.

I've actually seen zero credible evidence for this; not even a ballpark number of how many TWH of storage that would be needed. So, I'll bounce that question right back at you: how much TWH/PTW do you think is needed/economically justifiable and why? That will allow us to put a price tag on it.

The reality is that interconnected grids means the sun is always shining somewhere and wind turbines out on the water or wherever are always providing some power somewhere. If you look at the market, grid connectivity and storage are exactly two things where investments are happening. Long term storage seems much less of a concern for grid providers. Mostly 2-4 hours seems to be the sweet spot of what grid providers seem to be spending on.

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

#320

Post by relativitypro »

Yes. We do many worse things to ourselves, and they have all the potential and realized risks that nuclear promised. The only difference? We’ve been inundated with ads from the coal industry.

Deaths from nuclear power, including all the heritable effects from all nuclear accidents, are less than all power sources except hydro.

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