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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

#161

Post by kristopolous »

pdonis wrote: post #158
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.

It's at least a few orders of magnitude away from ever plausibly getting there. For all intents and purposes, such a concern is imaginary.

And even then, one doesn't preclude the other. Retrofitting power distribution to have less energy loss, buildings with better insulation, more efficient logistics networks for food delivery, these are green new deal issues. None of that is anti-nuclear - they simply aren't related.

By "sucks up all the resources" you'd have to have all humans efforting to do things like this that nothing can be allocated to anything else. That is simply not how reality works.

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

#162

Post by wmf »

rch wrote: post #69
sebmellen wrote: post #10

I agree, but why set up a false dichotomy? Nuclear energy should be part of a "Green New Deal", which shouldn't just be about energy, but pragmatic environmentalism in all fields.

My impression is that the GND is focused on jobs, social programs, and justice issues, which is great, just not environmentalism per se. It might be more effective to expand E. O. Wilson's efforts on biodiversity to include energy policy than to try to have the GND encompass absolutely everything that's happening at the moment.

When I looked at a semi-detailed analysis of one version of the GND, $14T was for the green part and $2T was for the new deal part. I think of it as a small bribe to get more politicians on board.

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

#163

Post by corn13read »

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…

With liquid salt and Thorium reactors all of this is far less "bad" plus the amount of land used for nuclear over solar/wind is exponentially less. You cannot have green new deal and nuclear deal at the same time, we do not have unlimited funding. Plus the amount of harm to the environment and economy from green new deal is incalculable.

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

#165

Post by icebraining »

throwawaysea wrote: post #104

Green New Deal isn’t an energy or environmental program. It is a greenwashed policy proposal that includes essentially the entire far left’s agenda - it uses the word “justice” affixed to many different causes and the cause of environmental protection (rebranded as “environmental justice”) and a dose of mental gymnastics to drag in many unrelated policy proposals that are part of either the social justice or socialis…

> the entire far left’s agenda

Or as the rest of the world calls it, center's agenda. The actual far-left is pretty critical of the GND: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/03/05/deal-m05.html

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

#166

Post by clows »

As long as Nuclear Power costs don't include the long term waste storage it's dishonest about the real costs (just like the oil industry).

Also - current nuclear power plants need cold water for cooling - france had to turn of plants due to heat [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...

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

#167

Post by epistasis »

manfredo wrote: post #127
epistasis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to address the other half of your question, the lower costs for solar and wind take into account the lifetime of the generation, and it's usually measured by the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) which is roughly the lifetime cost divided by the lifetime energy output. This does not take into account the value of the time that energy is delivered, so LCOE is not directly comparable for renewables and dispatchable g…

The issue with renewables isn't recycling, it's storage. Solar generates electricity in a sine wave. Half the day it's generating no electricity. Wind doesn't follow a sine wave, but has the potential to generate lower levels of power for long stretches of time. Wind is consistent on a yearly basis, but variable on a weekly basis.

That's a pretty big shift of the initial question, but it's an important shift!

If you look in the "most free" markets for energy in the US, where there is the most possibility for independent companies to come in and provide generation and other energy resources, we are looking at ERCOT in Texas and PJM in the north.

In these free markets, we are seeing huuuge amounts of storage resources in the interconnection pipeline over the next few years [1].

So where indecent investors are allowed to participate in energy, we are seeing massive influx of capital to build storage, from people that are profit-seeking. Meaning storage, at least this first chunk of it, is already likely to be economically efficient.

That said, when we talk about renewables, wind and solar are largely uncorrelated, and where we have good wind resources we tend to get good wind at night.

And when you look at load on grids, such as Texas' independent ERCOT grid, you see a sinusoidal pattern too [2]. And for ERCOT, with a sinusoidal amplitude of about 20GW, by sheer coincidence there are about 17GW of storage projects in the pipeline. And I'm pretty sure that doesn't include the solar projects that have storage directly on them, which is happening with a huge chunk of solar projects. And though Texas has been good at building wind resources, they have left their solar mostly untapped up until now. So as they start to deploy solar, they are going to get a ton of storage deployed with that too.

The challenge is not longer the technology or the costs, the future challenges will be entirely about regulation, and whether entrenched interests will use regulatory capture to prevent new entrants that can supply cheaper low carbon energy to consumers and industry.

[1] https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/

[2] http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/loadForecastVsActualCu...

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

#168

Post by Manfredo_1 »

leonixyz wrote: post #68

OMG has the uranium lobby woken up again? Follow my reasoning and ask yourself: 1. How long should we stock nuclear wastes securely? >> Basically forever 2. What will happen if we start using more nuclear energy? >> Wastes production will increase 3. Given an increasingly production rate of nuclear wastes, and given the fact that they have to be stocked securely forever, is this going to be economically substainable…

The entirety of the United States' nuclear waste from power generation occupies a volume the footprint of a football field, and less than 10 yards high [1]. The main draw of nuclear power is it's waste: there's so little of it!

1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

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

#169

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #159
est31 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to pay off the initial construction costs. Throwing away half the energy you generate means that you're wasting the large up-front costs.

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

#170

Post by sudoaza »

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 ?

power storage
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