New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light • Hacker News Board

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#191

Post by stinos » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:23 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #175

stinos wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for new housing heating costs will be absolutely huge compared to gas Isn't it more nuanced than that? Don't know UK rules, but since you mention new housing: aren't these required to adhere to some minimum of insulation, likewise for renovations, thereby drastically reducing the energy required in the first place (I mean if I just compare our renovated house with my parent's, energy requirement is 4 to 5 times less…

I mean, yes, there are standards, but the standards are sometimes shit. As an example - my friend just bought a very expensive brand new house, fancy insulation, but.....all radiators are like 2 feet wide? Even for the living room where intuitively, that cannot be the correct size of a radiator for that. But apparently(having complained) nope, these are regulation size etc. Now he spends 2x as much on heating for a h…

Wrt insulation I really meant law, not standard. I hope there are no laws limiting the size of radiators? That would not make a lot of sense i.e. story sounds more like whoever was in charge of calculating the size completely messed up.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#192

Post by grey-area » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

evgen wrote: post #190

grey-area wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a solved problem, particularly in the UK. Battery prices are constantly dropping and pumped storage is a proven solution. It requires investment, but far less than fission plants.

It is far from a solved problem, in fact it is a problem that shows the simple solutions to be infeasible. Battery prices are several orders of magnitude above where they would need to be to provide true grid-scale storage and production capacity is a fraction of what would be required for same. Pumped storage is a dead-end solution because we have simply run out of places for effective hydro and are quire soon going…

> Battery prices are several orders of magnitude above where they would need to be to provide true grid-scale storage and production capacity is a fraction of what would be required for same.

Thankfully prices are falling, efficiency improving, and massive battery factories are planned. The growth of EV means that will continue. Peaker plants are already being replaced with batteries.

> Pumped storage is a dead-end solution because we have simply run out of places for effective hydro

Nope. There is large pumped storage being built in Scotland right now and there are hundreds more glens where it would be feasible.

>There is no level of investment that can magic away the storage problems of current renewables

Just as one example that may well magic away these problems, grid attached storage in the form of electric cars and home storage is growing massively right now. It may be we rethink entirely our centralised approach to production and storage.

Fission is expensive, centralised and carries heavy decommissioning costs and extreme tail risks. Fusion may someday give renewables a worthy rival but till then the falling prices mean nuclear has had its day.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#193

Post by dmurray » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

evgen wrote: post #187

dmurray wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery storage has got way cheaper. 4x cheaper per kWh since 2013, according to [0]. They're still not cheap enough to make solar + batteries price-competitive in most markets, but their cost absolutely has been decreasing fast. [0] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/12/04/powering-the-ev-revolut...

Considering the fact that battery storage would need to undergo several orders of magnitude in price reduction to provide true grid-scale storage, does this really matter? Battery storage is, at best, going to provide municipal load for minutes or maybe hours, but it is unlikely to cover a 24-48 hour power ebb anytime in the next few decades.

If battery storage keeps getting cheaper at the same rate, then yes - two orders of magnitude would be seen in twenty years. Absolutely an important consideration if you're considering a big upfront investment in a nuclear plant whose returns will be realized twenty to seventy years from now (or whatever reasonable build time and operating lifetime you come up with).

Needing "several orders of magnitude" improvement is also pessimistic. There are installations that are borderline economically profitable right now (Tesla battery farm in South Australia): another factor of 5 or 10 makes those attractive in many more places.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#194

Post by evgen » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #192

evgen wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is far from a solved problem, in fact it is a problem that shows the simple solutions to be infeasible. Battery prices are several orders of magnitude above where they would need to be to provide true grid-scale storage and production capacity is a fraction of what would be required for same. Pumped storage is a dead-end solution because we have simply run out of places for effective hydro and are quire soon going…

> Battery prices are several orders of magnitude above where they would need to be to provide true grid-scale storage and production capacity is a fraction of what would be required for same. Thankfully prices are falling, efficiency improving, and massive battery factories are planned. The growth of EV means that will continue. Peaker plants are already being replaced with batteries. > Pumped storage is a dead-end s…

Scotland can provide, at most, less than 5% of required capacity if you turned every available loch into pumped storage. Claiming that pumped storage is in any way a viable grid-storage system that can handle baseload in the UK is inaccurate.

Even if every battery production facility on the planet was dedicated entirely to producing storage batteries for the UK it would take almost half a decade to meet the requirements. You can claim that more will be built, but there are resource pipelines involved that are not as elastic and just throwing a pile of money at someone to build a factory. Battery production is growing, but nowhere near fast enough to meet the requirements for grid scale storage.

Right now fission has no competition from renewables+storage because the storage part of that equation remains a fantasy.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#195

Post by evgen » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

dmurray wrote: post #193

evgen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the fact that battery storage would need to undergo several orders of magnitude in price reduction to provide true grid-scale storage, does this really matter? Battery storage is, at best, going to provide municipal load for minutes or maybe hours, but it is unlikely to cover a 24-48 hour power ebb anytime in the next few decades.

If battery storage keeps getting cheaper at the same rate, then yes - two orders of magnitude would be seen in twenty years. Absolutely an important consideration if you're considering a big upfront investment in a nuclear plant whose returns will be realized twenty to seventy years from now (or whatever reasonable build time and operating lifetime you come up with). Needing "several orders of magnitude" improvement…

Those installations are borderline profitable because either they are a small drop in the bucket of the required storage capacity (c.f. Tesla battery farm) or are heavily subsidized to make renewables appear viable. You are also making some large assumptions regarding battery improvements that may turn out to never be realized -- there may be interesting new chemistries and techniques that work for smaller scale but are infeasible for one reason or another at large scale. It is also possible that the opposite is true (e.g. like for fuel cells) where bigger is better in terms of efficiency and production costs, but so far I have no seen any indication of this.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#196

Post by belorn » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

socialdemocrat wrote: post #62

belorn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless how expensive it get, it won't burn tons of fossil fuels. Government should just set the conditions for new power and heating infrastructure. No fossil fuels. Zero carbon. A minimum and peak capacity based on current and projected demands. Private companies can bid, but they can't change the conditions. If a private company can more cheaply and faster build massive amount of battery and use exclusively win…

Cost matters. If you can build renewable power at a fraction of the price, why go nuclear? We can keep gas as backup until storage solutions are better developed. If money was no issue you could just build a ton of pumped hydro in Scotland and or batter storage. And if you absolutely want to spend on nuclear power, spend it in SMRs and molten salt reactors. ThorCon is probably not that far from a working solution if…

> We can keep gas as backup until storage solutions are better developed.

No thanks. Continuing burning fossil fuels until a better solution exist is not going to work. Climate change is already causing long term damage on a global scale, causing species to go extinct, raises water levels, expands deserts, displaces people, and is a problem that need to be taken serious. No waiting for a future technology yet undiscovered.

If we stop building new fossil fuel plants and only build nuclear and renewable, then maybe in 20-30 years we will reach a zero carbon energy grid. Given some of the most optimistic research, that might give us a small chance in prevent global crisis. A small chance. Continuing to burn gas until we have something better developed will rob us of that small chance. A 2x cost in energy, while somewhat costly, is still small cost compared to the consequences long term if we continue to burn fossil fuels.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#197

Post by adrianN » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

GlennS wrote: post #113

adrianN wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With 2 million in the bank you can easily retire to a low cost of living area. That's 50k for forty years.

That's assuming no returns on investment. With £2 million you could spend £75,000 a year and reasonably expect to preserve your $2 million (and grow it by inflation) forever. (Going with 3.75% rule instead of usual 4% rule so you have a safety margin.)

I'm very conservative and don't assume that I can't beat inflation after taxes.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#198

Post by belorn » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #178

Udik wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can build renewable power at a fraction of the price We keep thinking of "building renewable power" as "we can produce this amount of watts at peak". What we should demand of these projects instead is "we can provide this amount of renewable power 24/7". There is a big difference. We're ending up in a situation where we can "build renewable power at a fraction of the price" for half of the time. For the othe…

This is a solved problem, particularly in the UK. Battery prices are constantly dropping and pumped storage is a proven solution. It requires investment, but far less than fission plants.

This is where a market solution should be used. Set up the conditions for minimum delivery of carbon-free power for a given period and let private companies bet on it. If people can deliver a battery solution that exclusively use renewable to charge them, and do this cheaper than nuclear, then they win the bid.

They don't get to use natural gas as a backup. They also need to be held liable to maintain the minimum capacity just as effective as more expensive solutions, but if they are willing and able to do that cheaper then they should win the bid and we should let them deliver carbon-free energy.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#199

Post by skitout » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

rwallace wrote: post #179

skitout wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the fact is we have now cheap existing clean technologies, with a fast decreasing cost (decreasing cost of energy, and decreasing cost of managing intermittence)... It does not seems wise to bet that SMR will be cheaper than renewable in 10 to 20 years and wait and pray... SMR is not a viable option right now. That is an interesting possibility we should study and work on, that could be a good surprise later on,…

> But the fact is we have now cheap existing clean technologies, with a fast decreasing cost (decreasing cost of energy, and decreasing cost of managing intermittence) The cost of solar and wind energy when the sun shines or the wind blows has certainly decreased a lot in recent years, you're right about that. But decreasing cost of managing intermittence? I haven't heard of any big recent advances in that (aside fro…

There are a combination of different things.

Firstly, better capacity factor for onshore wind, offshore wind becoming cost competitive and the emergence of floating offshore wind reduce a bit the intermittence, then the cost of managing it

Secondly renewable is becoming so cheap that installing more than peak demand and setting up curtailment is cost competitive and reduces the intermittence and the cost of managing it. There are also solar project not optimizing for maximum production, but for producing when needed.

Solar-plus-storage is becoming more and more common for new project, with cost falling. Generally all the batteries cost are in free fall while we are just at the beginning of the market expansion: massive economy of scale are on the way, with proven technologies

More electrical storage are coming... Flow batteries, pumped hydro on isolated reservoir (eg Gordon Butte), liquid air, underground compressed air, stacked blocs, hydrogen... And there are many other tech in the lab at the same level development of SMR. Of course all the promising tech wont be a success or be cost competitive, but with SMR you bet on one tech, here you bet on more than a dozen tech.

Virtual Power plant and Demand-response project and market are blooming (and that is a start)...

This last point open a wider market for thermal storage, with existing cheap and mature technologies, and many developing project (relatively low tech) like inter seasonal heat or cold storage

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#200

Post by jnxx » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #6

LatteLazy wrote: post #3

The others are already over budget and behind schedule, the private companies meant to be heading them are dropping like flies. This won't end well... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54158091 https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/energy-news/toshiba-withdraw... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/25/hinkley-poin...

Regardless how expensive it get, it won't burn tons of fossil fuels. Government should just set the conditions for new power and heating infrastructure. No fossil fuels. Zero carbon. A minimum and peak capacity based on current and projected demands. Private companies can bid, but they can't change the conditions. If a private company can more cheaply and faster build massive amount of battery and use exclusively win…

If we want to speed up the end of fossil fuels, while not increasing poverty, and not artificially distorting markets and technological developments by politically meddling with costs, we have to do these 3 things:

1. Introduce a substantial carbon tax on extraction and import of any fossil energy source. This should include embodied energy, like aluminum.

2. Pay back part of the tax gains to the poorer population in form of a universal basic income (it could be some other scheme but I think this is the best one).

3. Subsidize any form of non-fossil energy generation, INCLUDING STORAGE, from the carbon tax. This subsidy MUST be non-discriminatory, it must not depend on promised future efficiencies in a technology but what it actually delivers, today. And it must give incentive to make any technology, and also energy distribution, consumption and storage, more efficient. It could be, for example, night time storage heaters (which were heavily promoted in the 1950s / 1960s to make nuclear more economical).

What we should NOT do is to subsidize some technology which has been making fancy promises since five decades, without really delivering them. Among other things, this would be market distortion, and precisely because it would reduce our effectiveness in fighting climate change, it would be very harmful. At worst, it would result in that we do effectively nothing, while pretending we do.