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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

#261

Post by arcticbull »

audunw wrote: post #232
umvi wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's a flaw of Nuclear that you have to stuff its waste in a giant pit inside a mountain. Every type of energy plant has wastes. Even wind turbine blades wear out and are dumped in landfills.[0] The difference is that the nuclear waste eventually decays into nothing, while the fiberglass/plastic blades will stay around for thousands of years... [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb.…

But fiberglass is just silicon and hydrocarbons. The same stuff soil and sand is made of. It's not really a huge problem to bury them. There's also huge developments in fiberglass recycling/repurposing these days. Solving this issue will be extremely helpful as wind power is not the only use of fiberglass as I'm sure you know. In fact, wind power could be instrumental in setting up a supply-chain for recycling of fib…

For balance, consider that nuclear waste is high-energy and can be recycled with modern approaches, also. Fast neutron breeder reactors produce orders of magnitude less waste to begin with, consuming almost all their input fuel, and breeder reactors can take as input nuclear waste also. [1,2,3]

> We are already finding bacteria that break down plastic, and we've already accelerated that process by genetically modifying them to make the enzymes more efficient.

Interestingly enough (and I'm not pointing to this as a solution by any means - just that it's pretty cool), we've found radiotrophic fungi at the elephant foot in Chernobyl. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast-neutron_reactor

[3] https://nationalcenter.org/NuclearFastReactorsSA1205.pdf

[4] https://www.cnet.com/news/fungi-found-in-chernobyl-feeds-on-...

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

#262

Post by toast0 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #206
toast0 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could possibly be too late to start with new nuclear plants, although I'm not totally convinced. If we had them now, nuclear plants would be vastly superior to coal plants for baseload, at least in terms of emissions. The question is, if a nuclear plant takes 20-30 years from project start to being online, how will it compare with what's available then and over the design lifetime (50ish years). Of course, we can'…

Why 20-30 years? Russia started building of Belarus nuclear plant at 2011. It already works and will be completely finished at 2022. Is US nuclear industry significantly behind Russia?

From wikipedia, the most recent nuclear plant to enter operation in the US is Watts Bar reactor 2. It entered operation in 2016, while being under construction for a total of 17 years; 8 years between 1973 and 1985, then 9 more between 2007 and 2016.

The Vogtle plant reactor 3 and 4 project started in 2006, construction started in 2013, and planned operation is 2021; but these things are often delayed. And that was at an existing site. 20 years may be pessimistic, but not unduly so, based on recent experience.

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

#263

Post by mulmen »

epistasis wrote: post #132
mulmen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implication is that the Nuclear Innovation Alliance is biased but still making a good point.

It would be good to do a bit more work to justify that, then. The NIA blog post doesn't even address the core point of the paper. It looks at a correlation of existing energy by US states, where our nuclear was largely built in the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast, the academic paper looks at what has happened to countries , globally, that have tried to build nuclear since the 1990s. And this is a crucial distinction, be…

I’m not making a statement to the validity of DennisP’s comment. Just clarifying the perceived meaning.

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

#264

Post by quicklyfrozen »

vbezhenar wrote: post #206
toast0 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could possibly be too late to start with new nuclear plants, although I'm not totally convinced. If we had them now, nuclear plants would be vastly superior to coal plants for baseload, at least in terms of emissions. The question is, if a nuclear plant takes 20-30 years from project start to being online, how will it compare with what's available then and over the design lifetime (50ish years). Of course, we can'…

Why 20-30 years? Russia started building of Belarus nuclear plant at 2011. It already works and will be completely finished at 2022. Is US nuclear industry significantly behind Russia?

Any US project will face many years of interruptions by protestors, court cases, etc. Given the timespan, the project will also likely face administrations that don't support nuclear and attempt to stall the project.

Unfortunately, people don't believe in climate change enough to acknowledge that nuclear is worth the risk (a risk that would be much reduced by allowing more modern plants to be built).

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

#266

Post by Manfredo_1 »

pfdietz wrote: post #241
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, I have cherry picked 100% of the current era new nuclear construction projects in France and the US. How selective of me! /s Yup, precisely. You've conveniently ignored successful projects elsewhere, like the Hanul nuclear power plant and the Taishan nuclear plant. Also, you're incorrect that Votgle is the only nuclear project in the US, Turkey Point is installing two more AP1000 reactors. > It includes such t…

> Yup, precisely. You've conveniently ignored successful projects elsewhere, like the Hanul nuclear power plant and the Taishan nuclear plant. Hanul is in Korea. The nuclear "success" there turned out to be due to massive corruption and corner cutting. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed... Taishan in China. China is basically the single remaining bright spot in nuclear, anywhere in the world…

And we also have examples of France's Messmer plan. And the US nuclear boom during the 1970s. But I'm sure you're prepared to hand-wave away these examples, too.

Countries have built nuclear power beyond 80% of total energy consumption in the case of France. Over 50% in the case of Belgium, 40% in the case of Sweden, and 22% in the case of Korea. Nobody matches matches France with renewable energy. The closest is Denmark with 42% wind power generation. Germany is the only large country with substantial renewable generation (other than hydroelectric or geothermal power), generating 25% of its electricity from wind with a further 9% from solar, but that still adds up to less than 40%. You insist that the market favors renewables, but the share of electricity generation demonstrates otherwise.

Those costs are indeed of historical interest. In particular, when we analyze the cost history we see a clear pattern that serial construction of nuclear plants is cheaper than one-off construction. Production chains for nuclear equipment can leverage economies of scale. We have historical precedence for this relationship between number of plants built and individual plant cost.

You're right: nuclear power wasn't killed by regulation. It was never cost competitive with fossil fuels, and interest in climate change wasn't very strong back then. And when the pace of building nuclear plants diminished, individual plant costs increased.

> You have linked to a solar + storage + transmission solution, not needing any nuclear. Are you sure that's what you were wanting to link to? I'm fine with that solution. Note that the "three weeks of storage" there would be better done with hydrogen than with batteries.

And how much hydrogen electrical storage do we currently have? Again, this solution involves technologies that we have no experience working with at scale. I'm sure these cost estimates are very competitive - just like how analysis predicted nuclear would be cheaper than fossil fuels before we had experience building nuclear plants at scale. These cost estimates exclude the cost of overcoming emergent engineering challenges.

Which is a more reliable prediction?

* Predicting cost of a project based on what it cost to build the projects of the same scale in the past.

* Predicting the cost of a project based purely on educated guesses, or based on small-scale experiments.

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

#267

Post by robertlagrant »

hprotagonist wrote: post #248
jka wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happens to all of us :) In retrospect my comment might have read unintentionally sternly; I was just curious in case it was possible to track down where their policies were misrepresented originally.

I remember Some Organization Who You'd Think Would Hate Nukes In Fact Thinking Nukes Are Fine, i just, uh, picked the wrong name.

From memory, GreenPeace are one of the main reasons we still produce so much carbon: they opposed nuclear power, so we stuck with coal and oil.

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

#268

Post by Manfredo_1 »

wwweston wrote: post #235
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uranium seawater extraction vastly increases the accessible amount of uranium: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s... It's about an order of magnitude more expensive than mining uranium. But the cost of fuel extraction is negligible in the context of the rest of nuclear's cost.

The author of the article linked in the top-level comment mentioned seawater extraction: "as uranium is extracted, the uranium concentration of seawater decreases, so that greater and greater quantities of water are needed to be processed in order to extract the same amount of uranium. Abbott calculates that the volume of seawater that would need to be processed would become economically impractical in much less than…

Read further in the article:

> However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years.

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

#269

Post by wmf »

rch wrote: post #243
wmf wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd be curious to see that. I was only reading the text.

It might have been https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962... which shows the line items.

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

#270

Post by iso8859-1 »

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.

Greenpeace is actively opposed to nuclear. And then you have articles like https://www.citizen.org/article/nuclear-power-is-not-clean-o...

Why even use the term "green" when you can say "low emissions"? That is harder to disagree about.

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