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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?

#411

Post by pfdietz »

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.

Very rare long term outages would not be covered by batteries. For that, you want a rock bottom low capital cost, even if it's much less efficient. Hydrogen makes sense for that use case, burned in turbines.

For seasonal variation, simply overbuilding is also a possibility. No storage would be needed at all in Minnesota, for example, until renewables get to 70% of consumed electrical energy.

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

#412

Post by natch »

vertak wrote: post #390
DanBC wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Might it it be slightly outdated?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...

In theory, there is no difference between theory and reality. In practice, there is.

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

#413

Post by wiz21c »

vertak wrote: post #390
DanBC wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

FTA :

"We think we can replace almost every component in a nuclear power plant," said Jan van der Lee, director of the Materials Ageing Institute (MAI), a nuclear research facility inaugurated this week in France and run by the state-owned nuclear giant EDF.

EDF is state owned just as much as nuclear reactor construction company => I wouldn't trust that guy

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

#414

Post by natch »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #389
DanBC wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The aging effects are largely from radiation and heat.

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

#415

Post by pfdietz »

johnmorrison wrote: post #201
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 energy is regularly significantly (usually more than an order of magnitude, from what I've seen) cheaper for electricity than any other source in comparable countries (e.g. nuclear electricity in Toronto >10x cheaper than coal/solar electricity in Berlin) Nuclear energy is and always has been inherently competitive on total profitability over the course of a plant's lifetime. The main issue is the time it tak…

Nuclear is possibly cheaper if your power plant was gifted to you by the Nuclear Fairy. If you have to pay to have it built, and then service the debt, not so much.

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

#416

Post by jakehop »

swilliamsio wrote: post #395
grey-area wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. The right questions to ask is not 'But what about Chernobyl' (which is unlikely in most countries) but instead: What about decommissioning costs? Fukushima is a good example of costs from a normal accident we can expect from time to time. Costs are at 200b USD and rising, and they still don't have the reactor site under control. Even normal decommissioning is incredibly expensive and usually covered by gover…

"What about Chernobyl" is usually outright dismissed as being an edge case owing its disaster to the Soviet regime, more concerned over image than safety. The real important question, as you aluded to, is "What about Fukushima" - a disaster occuring in a rich, western nation, Japan; Japan is a nation generally seen as being on the leading edge of technology. If a disaster can occur in Japan, it can feasibly happen an…

Of course the probability is never 0,00%. But it is obvious that the Fukushima accident happened due to geological factors. The same power plant would hum away nicely in Germany to this day, where there is little to no seismic activity and none on the scale of what happened in Fukushima.

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

#417

Post by pfdietz »

FooHentai wrote: post #289
faeyanpiraat wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>A giant black solar installation captures a lot of heat that would’ve been reflected back into space. Nuclear plants take energy sequestered in matter and unleashes it to a form that ultimately will decay to heat just the same. This outcome is the same regardless of the power source. If climate change is a relevant concern to the discussion then alongside discussing of sustainable energy there's an equal topic of ho…

And nuclear plants release 2 units of waste heat energy for every 1 unit of electrical energy they produce. A solar field, if its efficiency > the albedo of the ground on which it was built, causes net local cooling. In both cases the produced power is eventually degraded to heat (in the grid and at the consumer), but the overall burden for direct global thermal pollution is lower for solar than for nuclear. Note, of course, that direct thermal pollution is greatly overshadowed right now by forcing from increasing greenhouse gases.

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

#418

Post by extropy »

macspoofing wrote: post #348
rgbrenner wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post conveniently ignores solar/wind + batteries, which is even cheaper than coal.

There is no such thing as batteries for wind/solar. You have battery-based peaker plants and occasionally you may have the right geography to for pumped storage. But no, there is no battery storage technology capable of bridging the variability of wind/solar.

Why not? Its just a function of availability/price.

Assuming some conservative numbers of 1kwh of batteries costs 100usd and can do 2k cycles, that results in extra 5cents per kwh.

With the day/night cycle the utilization could be around 50%. Offset by only roughly half of your electricity needs to be stored. Sunless days would be pain though.

Imo if combined with cheap solar can be competitive.

FWIW my current electricity provider already applies a 1 cent/kwh surcharge for "peak capacity assurance".

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

#419

Post by pfdietz »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #144
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

I cannot stress this enough - we have people allergic to direct development paid for by the state because "it's socialist". Instead we invent all kinds of stupid ways of financing power plants, such a guaranteed electricity price for 50 years ahead, guaranteed profits to attract 'free market investors' for a project thats specified, sited and planned by the government and where all risk is born by the government. Ao…

Also because it's economically inefficient and fertile ground for rent seeking parasites.

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

#420

Post by eeZah7Ux »

natch wrote: post #404

Solve the radiation problem and we are still left with the problems of massive cost overruns, corruption, and centralized control of energy which takes away individual freedom to choose where to spend energy money, because the cost gets passed down to us as taxes and fees. A better idea is to scale up battery production and use renewables. Nuclear may still be needed but as a last / worst option amongst all non-fossi…

It's amazing how HN ignores the problem of centralization vs decentralization of power production.
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