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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

#181

Post by Manfredo_1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #172
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

And the response to that is that (1) that golden age of nuclear was far less successful than you depict, and (2) attempts to replicate it have gone disastrously wrong. Cost overruns and failures have been the norm for nuclear. In France, we don't actually know the cost of that initial roll out. In the US, nuclear construction routinely overran budgets, often by large factors. When PURPA subjected US power markets to…

Cost overruns have been the norm, but nuclear power generation at scale during the 1970s was still at most half as expensive as the Votgle and Flamanville projects that you like to cherry-pick.

The atrophy of the nuclear supply chain is precisely why nuclear plants are cheaper when built at scale. When you have a steady demand for reactor pressure vessels, high pressure heat exchangers, and other specialized machinery for nuclear plants its cheaper on a per-unit basis.

Also, I'm not sure why you think weapons programs have anything to do with nuclear power generation's supply chain. The supply chain issues pertain to the construction of pressure vessels, pumps, and pipes that need to withstand the more difficult environment inside a nuclear reactor. The only intersection that nuclear weapons manufacturing has with nuclear power is uranium enrichment. But the cost of fuel is negligible in nuclear power.

> It will almost certainly be much cheaper than building nuclear reactors, and by a very large margin.

Right, just like how early nuclear advocates said it would almost certainly be cheaper than fossil fuels. We don't know this. This isn't a historical cost estimate, it's cost speculation. And cost speculation fundamentally cannot account for unknown challenges.

> But if it's not, no big deal. We could build reactors later if by some miracle it turns out they're needed.

Trillions of dollars wasted is "no big deal"? Not to mention, exacerbating global warming because we delayed nuclearization of our energy sector pursuing energy storage? These are pretty big deals. Decarbonization of the energy sector is going to be one of the biggest endeavors that countries conduct. It's no time to bet on unproven technologies. We know nuclear is expensive. But we know that it works, and we have experience building it at scale. We're walking in the footsteps of what we've done before, not bushwhacking through unknown engineering challenges.

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

#182

Post by acituan »

dane-pgp wrote: post #62
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…

> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. While that is true in principle, there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly (perhaps because of the upfront costs of nuclear power stations, and the time it takes to build them). "Researchers found that unlike renewables, countries around the world with larger scale nat…

> there is apparently some evidence that investing in nuclear energy causes countries to de-carbonise more slowly

Please don’t ascribe causality without evidence. Even the authors admit upfront that this is a correlational study, with strong confounding variables like GDP.

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

#183

Post by whiddershins »

throwaway8451 wrote: post #178
pdonis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Intermittency of renewables is less of a problem if one rids oneself of the medieval seeming idea of energy self-sufficiency. Energy does not have to be produced where it is needed. We can transfer it already. The grid would need upgrades but we can definitely transfer large amounts of energy over long distances. Example from China: 12GW over 3300km at 1100kV DC, for others look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra…

The more we do this, the more susceptible the grid will be to massive outages.

I’m not an expert, and I’m sure there’s some way in principle where it could be architected so this isn’t so, but it just seems empirically that the more interconnected the more we see unexpected and enormous outages.

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

#184

Post by wolfram74 »

est31 wrote: post #93
wutbrodo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything. Am I crazy, or did the Green New Deal have as an explicit goal the decommissioning of all nuclear plants? EDIT: Ah, apparently that was in the initial released plan, but they changed the language to technically leave the door open for nuclear, without supporting it (and with occasional statements expressing disfavor towards nuclear as a…

Well the currently deployed, old nuclear plants certainly aren't as safe as the new, unbuilt ones the nuclear proponents always like to showcase. Even if you decide towards using nuclear in the future, you should build new reactors from scratch using those new safer designs.

There's that branch of minimalist environmentalism where their favorite nuclear reactor is whatever doesn't already exist. The instant it starts getting built, /somebody'll/ start protesting it.

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

#185

Post by EdgarVerona »

At this point, I will take any and every mix of non-polluting energy we can get.

I do worry about the stability-of-nations risk, but I think if we could plan as a global community for such contingencies we could come up with plans for securing or perhaps even permanent shutdown of nuclear facilities in the event of the collapse of a nation.

Ultimately, I think we are at the point where we need to take more drastic action, and nuclear can certainly fit into that for avoiding the worst outcomes of climate change.

I also hope that we come to a point as a society where we are willing to make and enforce laws that will help us prevent a similar event as the ones that brought us climate change. We were systematically and intentionally lied to, over and over, by oil and related industries. Technology that would aid us was scrapped for the sake of short term profits. Scientific analysis was hidden. Lobbying allowed the practices to continue. Lies were allowed to be propagated to the public to the extent that, even today, many people doubt climate change is even happening despite overwhelming evidence. These need to be crimes, as they have real victims: and unlike many person-to-person crimes, these corporate crimes can affect our entire society.

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

#187

Post by Manfredo_1 »

sudoaza wrote: post #171
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

There is also the mining and purification of the fuel which uses energy and water and generates waste in itself.

Sure, but there's also the mining and purification of silicon to produce solar power. Same with the mining and purification of steel and aluminum to produce windmills.

The energy density of uranium is much, much greater than all of the alternatives. It's is, literally, a million times more energy dense than natural gas and about two million times more energy dense than coal. You only need to mine a little bit of fuel to generate a lot of power.

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

#188

Post by Gibbon1 »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #173
api wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I seldom see brought up is that different energy sources work best in different places. Solar works great in the Southwest. In the upper Midwest where it snows and is overcast a lot? Maybe not so much. Wind works better there, but wind may not be enough alone and requires even more storage as it usually peaks out of phase with peak demand.

You can transmit power over long distances with surprisingly little energy loss with high-voltage DC. Any sane national plan for renewable energy would include a large amount of long-distance power transfer, if for no other reason than to minimize the variance in power production.

When I look at it I notice that current variation in cost per mwh is much larger than transmission line losses or storage losses.

You look on a map and you notice places where the days of sun shine aren't very conductive to solar are usually within 1500 miles of places where solar works great. Seattle to the Mojave desert is 1200 miles for instance.

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

#189

Post by iso1210 »

Retric wrote: post #79
svrb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "guarantee" from the state is worth a lot less than face value as it can simply legislate away that guarantee.

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

Yet the UK government has admitted in parliament it intends to break an international treaty signed just a few months ago

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

#190

Post by Manfredo_1 »

epistasis wrote: post #167
manfredo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pipe…

What do you mean by 17GW of storage in the pipeline? I'm not seeing this in your sources. Watts isn't a measurement of storage, storage is measured in watt-hours.

To put the mismatch between available storage and required storage in perspective, the US consumes 11.5TWh of electricity daily on average. We have ~25GWh of storage currently. Most of that is in hydroelectric storage, which is geographically limited. Less than a gigawatt is in battery storage. This works out to a few minutes of storage - and a matter of seconds of battery storage.

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