I love discussions about nuclear power because they do a really good job showing how the HN demographics are no better at being well reasoned and logically consistent than any other demographic.
It's called illusory superiority.
Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?
461–470 of 619 posts
Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
A magnitude 5.1 earthquake would not have done much to a GE Mark I BWR like the one in Fukushima - the 2011 magnitude 9 earthquake didn't damage the Fukushima Mark I. The tsunami did. This is a bad kind of fearmongering.
Not a joke at all. Just the presence of a old nuclear plant in a place being hit by an earthquake would have created enough reasonable doubts to distroy the tourism in the area. Loses by 2% of the country GDP at least since them. Probably much more if we extend the bad publicity to adjacent Mediterranean coasts. Tourism is like 14% of the Spanish GDP so raise your offer or go away with your nuclear crap. No matter ho…
It's telling that the same argument didn't work in say, France, which has dozens of nuclear power plants (and a fuel reprocessing plant) on the coasts and yet continues having successful fisheries and tourism.
You're implying that Spain couldn't have done the same thing ? Why not ? Are they any less capable ? More sensitive to radiation ?
Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were the builders of Fukushima unaware of the geology of Japan? I would argue that they were aware and still got hit by the risk. I don’t see “well, that specific failure won’t be what gets us in Germany” as especially compelling.
It’s hard to believe they took it fully into consideration. Or more likely someone just said ‘fuck it, just build it’ at some point. Given the costs involved however, I find it hard to imagine tepco will make the same mistake again in the next 50 years or so.
Your first paragraph is exactly my point. What suggests that the plants being contemplated elsewhere in the world won't be subject to the same "fuck it, just built it" decision-making, whether that's around site safety, engineering, fuel handling, waste disposal, and other topics? (Especially because, at some point, you do have to actually say "judging everything, let's build it" which can look to opponents exactly like "fuck it, just build it".)
(Side note: I am pro-nuclear for baseline load in general. I'm also a realist about how likely problems are to repeat/ryhme.)
Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
This death per TWh calculation is naive. In reality modeling and averages are not enough here. If can tell a coal plant kills X people per year, then I can pretty safely deduce it will kill somewhere between 0.9X and 1.1X people next year. (Made up numbers, but the point holds) For nuclear, we can easily estimate with the same models the damage. One miscalculation, or one disastrous outcome can cause 50000 deaths, or…
> As long as the extrapolations for nuclear are prone to extreme outcomes The extrapolations for coal are prone to very extreme outcomes, believe me. :-) > nuclear is more unpredictable Citation needed, I think. The impact of coal on the climate and human health is still an open question, and given the scale of its use, a small change in our estimation of impact yields very large changes down the line. I can see argu…
But in the middle, but there closest nuclear plant to Manhattan is 40 miles away. And that’s in a world where everyone avoids nuclear plants like the plague.
Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How much can the provider shave off the load though? if i set my band between 21 and 23 degrees, is the reduction more than a few percent max? Doesn't seem to make a dent given the peak requirement when the majority of the people all shift locations (i.e. go home)?
This paper [1] says up to 8GW in Germany with full integration of heating, cooling and mobility.
[1] https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S03062619150018...
Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
>CPNE de Nogent sur Seine suffered a critical failure, Paris and the entire Île-de-France region, which concentrate most of the French economic power, would need to be evacuated Why ? Paris is as far from Nogent NPP (89 km) as Kiev is from Chernobyl NPP, so there's plenty of space to setup an exclusion zone, even in the worst case scenario of an open core meltdown (which are much less probable with Western PWR design…
> Why ? Paris is as far from Nogent NPP (89 km) as Kiev is from Chernobyl NPP, so there's plenty of space to setup an exclusion zone, even in the worst case scenario of an open core meltdown (which are much less probable with Western PWR designs). You stopped halfway through in your reasoning: a PWR reactor is less prone to reactor meltdown than an RBMK one, AND the consequences would be different . Because there's n…
But this scenario is much easier to handle than an open core meltdown. The Seine supplies drinking water upstream from Nogent. I guess that must be by design when the siting decision was made.
So even the need to discharge contamination in the Seine wouldn't matter that much. It would forbid some uses of the Seine for a few months.
Containment pools can be readily dug to contain discharge until activity levels decay and to dilute the discharge.
These worst case scenarios have already been gamed through during the plant planning process.
Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Its Also building enough battery capacity to offset the night is doable. UK annual consumption is around 300TWH, let's round to 1TWH a day. The nighttime consumption is about half of the daytime's so only 33% needs to be saved. So we need 350GWH of batteries. It will take a while, cost 35 Billion assuming 100 usd for 1 kwh. Or 2 billion a year or 0.6 cents per KWH of energy consumed.
I don't think you can really quote prices when you are talking about battery capacities on the order of the current world wide lithium battery production.
Also, it's interesting that Iceland, with their abundance of geothermal power, don't have an interconnection with Europe. That's only 1000km as the crow flies and yet hasn't been considered economically feasible yet.
Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?
#468Flamanville reactor in France was supposed to cost 3.3 G€ in 2007, it is now at 19.1 G€ in 2020 and called a "mess" by energy minister ( https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en... ). Nuclear energy is great but it is a pain to build, maintain, manage, decommission etc.
> Flamanville reactor in France was supposed to cost 3.3 G€ in 2007, it is now at 19.1 G€ in 2020 and called a "mess" by energy minister ( https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en ...). Your information is very misleading, very. The quote come from the minister of the ecological transition, not 'energy minister', whose official duty is, quoting wikipedia 'responsible for preparing and implementing…
The UK has just finished building the Hornsea Project 1 offshore wind farm. [1]
It had a projected cost of $5.2 billion for a nameplate capacity of 1.2GW and an actual average output of 0.46GW. Scaled to the output of the Flamanville mess (1.6GW), it means that a wind farm with equivalent average output would cost about $18 billion. Though I imagine that the average lifetime of a 174-turbines wind farm over an area of 630 sq kms in the middle of the sea might be shorter than that of a nuclear plant.
Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a joke at all. Just the presence of a old nuclear plant in a place being hit by an earthquake would have created enough reasonable doubts to distroy the tourism in the area. Loses by 2% of the country GDP at least since them. Probably much more if we extend the bad publicity to adjacent Mediterranean coasts. Tourism is like 14% of the Spanish GDP so raise your offer or go away with your nuclear crap. No matter ho…
It's telling that the same argument didn't work in say, France, which has dozens of nuclear power plants (and a fuel reprocessing plant) on the coasts and yet continues having successful fisheries and tourism. You're implying that Spain couldn't have done the same thing ? Why not ? Are they any less capable ? More sensitive to radiation ?
Maybe more smart?
Spain has the biggest fishing industry in EU and is the biggest producer of fish in the area. Period. France is not even close in terms of captures or people employed.
And the area where the plant was about to be raised exports tomatoes to all EU currently. There are kilometers of greenhouses in the countryside. Another activity totally incompatible with the presence of a maybe-cracking-maybe-not ancient nuclear plant.
Re: Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?
#470BBC 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…
There's a significant risk of that price difference expanding to two orders of magnitude. There is a lot of research around solar that is basically about potentially delivering 10x improvements potentially (cumulatively). At a 100x cost differential, things are going to be brutal for investors with sunk investments in legacy power generation. We're talking electricity prices dropping to tenths of a dollar cent per kw…
> lot of research around solar that is basically about potentially delivering 10x improvements potentially (cumulatively)
Can you back that up? Last time I spoke to a guy working on solar, he said a 1% increase in efficiency is considered a great achievement.