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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?

#351

Post by numpad0 »

pfdietz wrote: post #154
pdonis wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Vogtle, Summer, Flamanville 3, and Olkiluoto 3 weren't delayed by NIMBY lawsuits. They were delayed by construction screw ups. Nuclear power plants are complex, and if they are required to be constructed to high standards, delays and overruns are almost inevitable. A PV field, on the other hand, is much simpler, with much more inherent redundancy, and can tolerate construction mistakes without either safety implicati…

Virginia-class nuclear submarine(GE "S9G" PWR using HEU cores, 210 MWth) takes as little as 1-2 year from laydown to launching. 19 such hulls is in service, 11 in construction.

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

#352

Post by jerven »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #266
choeger wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doll…

600 billion = +/- overnight cost of 30 nuclear powerplants (AP-1000).

And would struggle with providing 500Gw that the battery above could.

At that scale everything is expensive, but the market still seems to say that Nuclear is more expensive than the other options.

My hand-wavy maths aside, the people who sign the checks seem to agree that today (2020, it is cheaper to get power from solar/wind + battery than nuclear). Cost of wind and solar today is what nuclear needs to beat, comparison to gas and coal are not relevant for new build systems (as in neither are getting the same kind of new build capacity as solar/wind in the coming years).

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

#353

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Lutzb wrote: post #226
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they would have cut it to zero by now if they left nuclear plants alone.

That is factully incorrect. Even if Germany had left nuclear on a level of 1995 and replaced aging plants with new plants of the same capcity the net nuclear output combined with renewables would not be enough to offset coal/gas/oil. See https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromerzeugung

This graph seems to show that coal would have been gone by now.

What I getting wrong?

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

#354

Post by VBprogrammer »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #319
VBprogrammer wrote: post #287

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. 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 insp…

For grid stabilization in the UK we already have 28GWh of pumped hydro storage. I'm not an expert in sizing grid infrastructure but I expect we'd need storage of several times that to balance a less dispatchable grid.

The sun is always shining somewhere doesn't work for day / night solar production. Transmission losses are of the order of 0.5% per 100km. By the time you transmit power 20,000km there is nothing left.

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

#355

Post by epistasis »

macspoofing wrote: post #350
reitzensteinm wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just took parent's numbers at face value to show how they were misinterpreting them. I haven't seen much in the way of true apples to apples comparisons. Most solar plants with storage don't have much storage. For instance I saw a link this week on HN for $30 + $15/MWh for solar + storage, but the storage was only one hour of the nameplate capacity. Based on the falling prices of batteries, I don't think it will be…

> solar + storage providing power evenly over 24h (an unrealistic worst case) becomes economical. That's not the the worst case. Solar output varies by season. So you have to have enough storage for multiple weeks. This also means you have to greatly over-provison solar panels so that they not only provide power, but also enough to charge batteries.

No, you don't need storage for multiple weeks, that would be silly.

Solar is so cheap now that already panel generation capacity is frequently getting oversized compared to the potential inverter output, to maximize costs.

Future solar farm design will optimize seasonal generation capacity similarly; size your panels for the seasonal minimum, attach batteries, and you can have year round output of a firm amount with only hours worth of batteries.

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

#356

Post by DoctorOetker »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #340
DoctorOetker wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did you read my comment about Southern Airways Flight 49? its not just about things being bad when an airliner crashes, but about the additional risk incurred. if I can choose between a nuclear power plant getting hit 10km from me, or some silane also 10km from me, I'd know what I'd dissaprove of most. if I can choose between leaving for the next generations a location where surface storage was hit by an airliner, or…

Nuclear waste sits in sealed concrete containers, and is stored by burying it in bedrock with no aquifer. There's so little of it that we can store it securely. Solar panels on the other hand... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1... . Nuclear waste is measured in the tens of thousands of tons. Solar waste is in the tens of millions of tons. Most of it just dumped in landfills. If your concer…

From the abstract:

> End-of-life (EOL) solar panels may become a source of hazardous waste although there are enormous benefits globally from the growth in solar power generation.

It is good that people worry about this new waste stream, and argue incentivizing recycling of this waste stream.

That said, the harmfulness of different types of waste is not compared in kilograms...

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

#357

Post by nabla9 »

nicoburns wrote: post #85
nabla9 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those costs are negligible compared to climate change. Fukushima every 5 years for next 1000 years, or gradually leaking long term nuclear waste, are several orders of magnitude less harmful for humanity or life on earth than climate change.

But investing in wind, solar and storage would be much cheaper still. The fukushima cleanup effort has cost close to $100 billion. Imagine where we could take renewable and energy storag tech with that level of investment.

Investing nuclear, wind, solar and storage is be cheaper than leaving nuclear out.

Nuclear has it's place in the mix.

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

#358

Post by doikor »

hannob wrote: post #324
doikor wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> 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. The second exact same one is actually Flamanville 3, the other one with the massive cost overruns.

Yes. Though they did start building it before Olkiluoto 3 was up and running so can't really use all the learnings from it.

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

#359

Post by Manfredo_1 »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #356
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear waste sits in sealed concrete containers, and is stored by burying it in bedrock with no aquifer. There's so little of it that we can store it securely. Solar panels on the other hand... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1... . Nuclear waste is measured in the tens of thousands of tons. Solar waste is in the tens of millions of tons. Most of it just dumped in landfills. If your concer…

From the abstract: > End-of-life (EOL) solar panels may become a source of hazardous waste although there are enormous benefits globally from the growth in solar power generation. It is good that people worry about this new waste stream, and argue incentivizing recycling of this waste stream. That said, the harmfulness of different types of waste is not compared in kilograms...

> That said, the harmfulness of different types of waste is not compared in kilograms...

Absolutely, the harm from solar panels dumped in landfills is vastly greater than uranium buried 300 meters deep in bedrock. Uranium's energy density is such that we can afford to spend money on tightly securing the little waste it produces. By comparison, most plans for renewable power generation involve covering 2-4% of the Earth's land in solar panels. This is a vast amount of waste to dispose of, and it's not remotely close to feasible to secure it like nuclear waste.

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

#360

Post by numpad0 »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #264
rgbrenner wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somethi…

Don't know about studies but there are enough scary photos for solar that looks great on PowerPoint:

https://sg.catbox.moe/qzkord.png

https://images.app.goo.gl/b7gju1qDFncVwPoMA

https://images.app.goo.gl/BqLwCnkYp918TVhD9

https://images.app.goo.gl/tgQ9fYbnRgKPzaf56

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