Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation? • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by Manfredo_1 » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 10:38 AM UTC

jerven wrote: post #352

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nucle…

The batteries need to be replaced every 5 to 10 years depending on how many cycles they can endure. By comparison, the AP-1000 is rated to last 60 years. Furthermore you're being very pessimistic with the $20 billion dollar cost estimate for the AP1000. Plants with equivalent output have been built for less than $10 billion.

When you include the cost of storage, solar and wind is still enormously more expensive than nuclear. The reality is that we don't event know what storage at this scale would even look like. It would take 800 years of global battery production at the current production rates to reach the 3 weeks of energy storage required to decarbonize the US with renewables. And that's with the infeasible idea we're dedicating 100% of batteries to grid storage: no EVs, no smartphones, all grid storage. And again, this is just for the US's storage needs.

Forget cost, energy storage at this scale isn't event possible with one current levels of technology.

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

#382

Post by phicoh » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 10:39 AM UTC

Aachen wrote: post #312

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 lan…

That does not compute. The netherlands needs about 40000 wind turbines to cover current needs. The Netherlands is about 40000 km2. So you need roughly 1 wind turbine per km2 for current needs which is completely doable. Of course we need more in the future, but there is plenty of space.

At the same time, building off-shore wind turbines is profitable today.

In contrast, nobody is going to invest in nuclear if nuclear has to compete at the same conditions as now hold for off-shore wind (which includes putting up a reserve now for when the wind turbine needs to be removed). And of course, people find wind turbines ugly, but nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant.

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

#383

Post by timoth3y » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 10:44 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

That statement is true, but you are overlooking that fact that the reason nuclear power kills so few people is because we focus so much on the risks.

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

#384

Post by adrianN » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 10:47 AM UTC

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #334

adrianN wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You use the word "smart grid" as though it just automatically makes electricity usage go down. A smart grid works by redistributing load to when there is power. A smart grid almost always needs storage, unless it's doing simple things like running your dryer where it's just a matter of turning on your appliances at a certain time of day. If you're at he from 7pm to 8am, and you want your home to be heated while you'r…

I use "smart grid" to mean that the electricity provider has a measure of control over the load. For example they can turn heating in your home on or off as long as the temperature stays within a band defined by you. This is not science fiction, it exists today. I know people who use it already.

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

#385

Post by steeve » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 10:48 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #157

steeve wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the cost of a MWh of nuclear comes from the cost of capital (interests). [1] Put differently, if capital is backed by the state, that the $/MWh could be a _lot_ less than it is. 1. https://imgur.com/a/4mAlUbO

Things are much cheaper when someone subsidizes them. If the state funds nuclear at below the rate the market would give, that's a subsidy. It could mean, for example, that the state is taking on financial risk that would otherwise have been accounted for in higher interest rates.

This is not a subsidy but a loan.

If the state wants to stay out of it, but only has to say: "we are going to be using nuclear power for the next 40 years", and the interests will naturally go down because the investment is safer, and so everybody would pay less.

One would think that the state backing (either politically or financially) investment in infrastructure would make sense, since it benefits everyone.

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

#386

Post by raxxorrax » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 10:49 AM UTC

dane-pgp wrote: post #161

Lazare wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously zero deaths is a great target, yes. Obviously zero deaths is impossible. No energy production method causes zero deaths; even wind and solar have a death toll (eg, from workers falling off things, construction accidents, manufacturing processes, etc), and yes, at the scale we're talking about that adds up. Everything causes deaths when you're talking about thousands of TWhs. At most you can minimise the dea…

The buried lede from that article: > But Japan relies on coal for more than a third of its power generation needs. And while older coal plants will start retiring, eventually reducing overall coal dependency, the country still expects to meet more than a quarter of its electricity needs from coal in 2030. So this decade Japan's reliance on coal power will roughly drop from 33% to 25%. To provide even more context, Ja…

> Japan's energy consumption has been falling since before the 2011 disaster

That is really surprising. Can this be traced back to a cause. Some industry that closed down or did appliances and lighting got that more efficient?

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

#387

Post by kohlerm » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 10:49 AM UTC

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…

Note that cost would also include getting rid of the nuclear waste, which AFAIK is still not a solved problem. E.g. you could send the waste via rockets to thes sun, but that would be very costly ;-) The problem with the statistics is also that we cannot rely on averages here. E.g. one big accident might cause huge environmental issues. Estimating accurately how likely that is seems difficult to impossible

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

#388

Post by reitzensteinm » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 10:49 AM UTC

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #337

reitzensteinm wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. How about we use the carbon free method of generating electricity that France has used to generate most of it's electricity for close to half a century? We don't have to wait for a miracle that makes batteries cheaper, we don't have to scale up battery production by several orders of magnitude. If we buil…

You don't need a "miracle". Hornsdale was installed for $500/kWh, which works out to $125/MWh of storage at 4000 cycles. Prices have already decreased by over 30%, so we're probably at $100/MWh today.

If you need to store half your generation on a diurnal cycle, add it on to the LCOE of ~$50/MWh for utility scale solar, and you are cost competitive with the LCOE of nuclear today.

Lithium battery production is going to skyrocket regardless of whether it's used for grid storage; we're going to need enough for a billion cars over the next decades, even if the world converted to nuclear. Prices will continue to fall just as they have.

I am a strong believer that we should have embraced nuclear, given what we know now about climate change. But starting in 2020 with next to nothing, we're just now passing parity where renewables are starting to win, and the gap is going to get larger.

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

#389

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 10:51 AM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #379

koheripbal wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show me the costs associated with decommisioning a hydro electric dam? This is a hurdle people are only throwing in front of nuclear plants. Nuclear plants can run indefinitely if maintained - just like all major infrastructure.

I think we should be building nuclear everywhere, but it's important to realise the life of a nuclear power plant is between 20 to 40 years. https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/29402043133.pdf > It is evident that the average age of power reactors in the IAEA's Member States is increasing. (See accompanying graphs.) By 2000, more than 50 nuclear plants will have been providing electricity for 25 years or longer.…

Surely the same aging effects also affect dams too, though?

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

#390

Post by vertak » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 10:53 AM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #379

koheripbal wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show me the costs associated with decommisioning a hydro electric dam? This is a hurdle people are only throwing in front of nuclear plants. Nuclear plants can run indefinitely if maintained - just like all major infrastructure.

I think we should be building nuclear everywhere, but it's important to realise the life of a nuclear power plant is between 20 to 40 years. https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/29402043133.pdf > It is evident that the average age of power reactors in the IAEA's Member States is increasing. (See accompanying graphs.) By 2000, more than 50 nuclear plants will have been providing electricity for 25 years or longer.…

This study is from 1987. Might it it be slightly outdated?

This article from 2009 addresses the lower age estimates from the 1980’s era, saying reactors could last for 80 years or even more.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-pla...