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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

#281

Post by 0xy »

pydry wrote: post #35
radford-neal wrote: post #29

From the article: "No nuclear energy program has ever launched without heavy state intervention — the capital costs are just too high for private entities to take on." I think this misses the real reason. High capital costs are no barrier to private financing as long as the eventual profits will accrue to the investors . But in this highly-regulated industry, investors can't put money into nuclear plants thinking tha…

In the UK Hinkley point C got a strike price of £92.50 per megawatt hour guaranteed for (i think) 35 years. By contrast wind got about £39-£41 for two years. Future years will likely be even lower.

Ignores the price of inconsistent delivery and the inevitable huge costs of batteries and/or gas peaking plants to supplement the inconsistent power from wind.

Nobody ever factors in these costs to the price of solar or wind, and I find it extremely disingenuous. Nuclear can still be pumping power on a windless sunless day with 100% green energy.

Solar and wind? Either use batteries (expensive, not really renewable) or gas peaking plants (nearly worse than coal, not renewable, expensive).

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

#282

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #192
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right. If we build nuclear plants to fulfill peak energy demand (which coincides with a lack of energy production from solar) then there's not reason not to just run the nuclear plants 24/7 and skip building solar altogether. This is why nuclear power and intermittent sources end up being a dichotomy in practice. Solar does provide a good way to mitigate carbon emissions in the meantime, even if it's role in a fully…

One of the interesting possibilities for new nuclear plants is on-site thermal storage. Store heat from the reactor in a heat sink when solar is generating, use the heat to generate power when it isn't. That handles the daily load variation and lets you trade half the required nuclear capacity for cheap solar.

It also means you have more turbines on site than the reactor needs on its own, so you can add a furnace burning whatever you like (hydrogen, biofuels, synthetic methane), and that handles the days when renewable output is below average.

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

#283

Post by dTal »

piva00 wrote: post #140
pfdietz wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Unless you run your nuclear power plant at high capacity factor, the cost of power from it inflates unacceptably. It's an economic issue, not a technical issue.

That's the whole point of nuclear, hydro or coal though, they need to be run at high capacity to be economically viable, have long spin up and down times and are costly to maintain. You use them as the basis of the grid and use wind and solar that are more prone to fluctuations to fill up the demand when necessary, less batteries needed as the base load can always be delivered by nuclear/hydro. Coal is basically dead…

>use them as the basis of the grid and use wind and solar that are more prone to fluctuations to fill up the demand when necessary

Er, how does this work? You can't control when wind and solar produce power, so how can you use them to "fill up the demand when necessary"? If anything, using a fluctuating source on top of already fluctuating demand just increases the amount of power storage you need.

A power source that ramps up and down quickly is more convenient than one that ramps up and down slowly, but both are miles more convenient than one which ramps up and down uncontrollably.

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

#284

Post by manfredo »

epistasis wrote: post #211
Manfredo_1 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ERCOT puts their panning pipeline out in the open; I'm relying on an ERCOT expert that said this as a summary of the August 2020 XLS raw data [1]. About 950 MW is as far along to have an interconnection agreement. Grids think of energy sources primarily in terms of power, not in terms of energy, so that's the number that gets reported to ERCOT. Grid ops dispatch W, not Wh. We may never know the exact GWh for these pl…

4 hours of 17 Gigwatts would represent 20% of the ~300 GWh global lithium ion battery production [1]. That's a massive storage plant, and such a plant would represent an order of magnitude increase in battery storage. But consider the fact that the US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity daily. Plans for an economy powered by wind and solar call for anything from 12 hours to 3 weeks of storage depending on how much overproduction we're building.

Manfredo_1 was the account I created on mobile, responding to a comment I made on desktop (password manager, so no way to log in on mobile). Everyone so far seems to have inferred continuity from the name similarity, but if it's a cause for confusion, I've imported my password to mobile.

1. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...

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

#285

Post by yetanothermonk »

pfdietz wrote: post #122
sradman wrote: post #97

> Reactors from civilian plants don’t blow up like atomic bombs... No they don't, but they do blow up like industrial hydrogen gas explosions. Loss of coolant accidents are unforgiving in boiling water reactors and quickly fail catastrophically (in the engineering sense). > the 1950s design CANDU reactor is small enough to be considered “modular” Ummm, no. I stood in front of reactor #4 at Darlington just before it w…

Fast reactors could, in principle, blow up like atomic bombs (in the sense of having a prompt supercritical reaction with unmoderated neutrons.)

In practice though, there are control rods and MSRs have freeze plugs into drain tanks right?

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

#286

Post by dTal »

est31 wrote: post #193
pfdietz wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Unless you run your nuclear power plant at high capacity factor, the cost of power from it inflates unacceptably. It's an economic issue, not a technical issue.

Well then you should ask yourself: is building this nuclear reactor cheaper than buying some batteries or converting excess energy to LNG to store it for later? If it is, then a nuclear power plant is economical, if it isn't, you should do the alternatives instead.

Well hang on, the nuclear reactor generates power while the storage only.. stores. You have to include the (lifetime!) cost of the storage plus the presumably renewable energy source you're feeding it with. (Of course you need storage with both systems to cope with demand-side fluctuations, but you'll need a lot more with wind/solar to deal with supply-side fluctuations.)

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

#287

Post by rayiner »

heimatau wrote: post #242
rayiner wrote: post #239

This mistakenly assumes that the Green New Deal is about averting climate change. It’s not: https://news.yahoo.com/aoc-chief-staff-admits-green-12440835... > The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti said to Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts, according to a Washington Post reporter who attended the meeting for a profile published Wednesday. > “D…

The GND is a quick read (or even a quicker skim). People should just read it [1, 2]. I support GND and it's surprising how the news outlets let this narrative grow. GND is a social justice document more than a Renewable Future. I hope others take the brief time to read it. [1] - Reader read: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/08/heres-the-full-text-of-... [2] - Official document, pdf: https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/s…

It’s not merely a social justice document. It’s about achieving social justice in a specific way: through government, union, and activist group-led “national mobilization.”

It’s far from the market-oriented approaches being implemented in Europe, such as carbon pricing.

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

#288

Post by dTal »

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.

It's strictly better than wind and solar, which take an indeterminate and totally uncontrollable amount of time to turn on and off.

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

#289

Post by jmull »

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.

> Nuclear energy should be part of a "Green New Deal"

If Biden’s energy plan is the green new deal, then it already is...

As a political football of a marketing term, people are never going to agree on what composes it.

But it seems that nuclear has become practically mainstream as part of green energy plans. Not that there isn’t plenty of residual resistance from “green” groups with historical objections to nuclear.

Hopefully every group that actually cares about climate change will take a fresh, objective look, to see if they can’t get aboard after all.

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

#290

Post by pfdietz »

yetanothermonk wrote: post #285
pfdietz wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast reactors could, in principle, blow up like atomic bombs (in the sense of having a prompt supercritical reaction with unmoderated neutrons.)

In practice though, there are control rods and MSRs have freeze plugs into drain tanks right?

I was thinking fast reactors with fuel elements that could rearrange in a serious accident. That would be harder in a MSR, but concentration by precipitation or volatilization and condensation would have to be ruled out.
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