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We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

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Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#151

Post by hcurtiss »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #134
tertiary wrote: post #30

First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also…

> my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. Spot on. People often ignore the political problems of nuclear power: - Centralization of control encourages corruption and the hiding of incidents - Power stations make excellent targets in case of war. The bigger they are, the bigger the impact - Nuclear power stations a…

Then build them smaller. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a34198830/tw...

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#152

Post by [deleted] »

polote wrote: post #133
pydry wrote: post #7

Why Renewables Aren't the Reason for California Blackouts: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renew... LCOE of various energy sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... https://neon.energy/Hirth-Ueckerdt-Edenhofer-2015-Integratio... suggests that wind energy has up to 50% higher "real" cost than typical LCOE measurements because of variability, however, this still put…

You can't compare nuclear and wind/solar, how are you going to power the lights at night when there is a no wind ?

[deleted]

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#153

Post by Manfredo_1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #144
manfredo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got it backwards. We've built nuclear plants. We've encountered unknown difficulties and overcome them. Our cost estimates for nuclear power are historical estimates. We did built nuclear at scale before, and it did cost less. By comparison, the cost estimates for building things like massive amounts of energy storage are cost projections . These costs represent what we think these projects will cost. But thes…

Yes, we've built nuclear power plants. And we've discovered they are complex and expensive, and we've discovered they take forever to design, and that very often the construction process fails and the investment is lost. Energy storage technologies have the property that they can rapidly iterate new designs, on a smaller scale than nuclear. They are inside nuclear's decision loop. The mammals are outbreeding the dino…

But the point is, we have built nuclear at scale. And built it at scale. France has over 70% of its electricity coming from nuclear, Belgium over 50%. The US is at ~10%. We've encountered the emergent issues, and fixed them. Cost estimates on nuclear are historical estimates. They're not projections.

We haven't built energy storage at anywhere close to the required levels of scale. We have 4 minutes worth of energy storage. Most of that is from hydro electric storage. 1% and 3% are from battery and thermal storage, respectively [1].

What will be the cost of scaling this up to the hours or days required to make intermittent sources viable? We can only offer cost projections: what we think massive grid-scale projects will cost. But cost projections do not include the costs of unknown engineering challenges. Remember, early nuclear proponents claimed it would be an order of magnitude cheaper than fossil fuels and had the studies to prove it. But real-world experience demonstrated otherwise. What makes us think that increasing our amount of energy storage by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude won't encounter similar unforeseen costs?

We have built nuclear at scale, and yes we have discovered engineering challenges that increase cost. But we haven't built energy storage at scale, and we haven't encountered it's unforeseen engineering challenges.

This post offers an excellent analogy on this topic [2]. With nuclear, we've walked this path, and know firsthand the difficulties it takes. With new technologies we're looking at the map. Those are two fundamentally different measurements of cost.

1. http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-grid-energy-storage-facts....

2. https://www.quora.com/Why-are-software-development-task-esti...

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#155

Post by kmonsen »

BurningFrog wrote: post #85
aplummer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define short term; I think by the time a reactor you start today comes online, we are already pretty screwed

If this is a reference to the "we only have 12 years to save the planet" meme, that is just a thing that went viral. There is no science behind it.

Because there is no clear line between saving and not saving. It's just degrees of badness the longer we wait. I heard there are some inflection points when it becomes warm enough for methane to escape from the tundra in Siberia.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#156

Post by smnrchrds »

tupputuppu wrote: post #87
Retric wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stable governments don’t do this because it calls into question all the other agreements they have made.

Yet even the most stable western democracies do it often enough to make investors consider nuclear power plans too risky - not because of the technology but because of political risk. For instance here in Finland companies that invested in nuclear made good profit, because of not having to pay costs related to carbon offsets. Politicians saw the profits, considered them "windfall" and taxed them away. So why would yo…

> For instance here in Finland companies that invested in nuclear made good profit, because of not having to pay costs related to carbon offsets. Politicians saw the profits, considered them "windfall" and taxed them away.

Can you please expand on this a bit? Did they the change the law to tax something that was previously un-taxed? Did they tax it at an effective 100% rate so all the benefit would go to the state and none to the investors, or did the investors benefit too?

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#157

Post by pfdietz »

DennisP wrote: post #89
aplummer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define short term; I think by the time a reactor you start today comes online, we are already pretty screwed

It's clear that right now we should roll out wind and solar as fast as we can. However, once those reach high penetration, costs increase rapidly as you attempt to reach 100% clean energy. At that point it helps a lot to have clean dispatchable power. Nuclear plants we start today can fill that role, in areas without available hydro. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

Nuclear would be utterly terrible for filling in the last part of a renewable-dominated grid. As in, ludicrously expensive, compared to other non-nuclear, non-fossil alternatives.

The article you point to talks about "firm, low carbon sources". This kind of source for this last bit would be something like hydrogen, not nuclear. A nuclear reactor operating at 10% capacity factor to "fill in" for renewables would be producing power at $1/kWh or more, which is uncompetitive vs. hydrogen by a massive margin.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#158

Post by pdonis »

tertiary wrote: post #30

First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear. Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also…

> you can have both

Not if the Green New Deal sucks up all the resources for "renewables" that will never provide anything close to the base load power we need.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#159

Post by Manfredo_1 »

est31 wrote: post #92
DennisP wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that right now we should roll out wind and solar as fast as we can. However, once those reach high penetration, costs increase rapidly as you attempt to reach 100% clean energy. At that point it helps a lot to have clean dispatchable power. Nuclear plants we start today can fill that role, in areas without available hydro. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

Nuclear power isn't very "dispatchable", it takes long times to be turned on vs off. But it might be useful for seasonal use in the winter when there is less sun.

A nuclear plant costs the same to run at full capacity all year round as it does to run it at partial capacity. Just run the plant at full capacity all year round, and save money by building less solar.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#160

Post by Manfredo_1 »

cinntaile wrote: post #9
pfraze wrote: post #2

Strongly behind this for the merits of the technology which are just unquestionably better results for the costs and risks. I’d also really favor making nuclear energy an era-defining technology, like IT was for the 80s-20s. I think it’s wise to have big technological ideas drive progress, and as much as I care about “green,” it’s an uninspiring concept compared to nuclear.

I don't see what you base your claims of unquestionably better results for the costs and risks on? Current nuclear energy production is quite expensive, it's on par with the costs for offshore wind iirc. The risks, well... Privately insuring a nuclear power plant is pretty much impossible from a cost perspective. That's why governments, the tax payers in other words, have to assume the full risk in case something goe…

So it nuclear costs as much as offshore wind, but it's not intermittent? That's very strong advantage: non-intermittent generation avoids the need to overproduce and store energy.
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