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

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#231

Post by opo » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

jnxx wrote: post #223

opo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...It is all about nuclear no matter the cost. Oddly, this is the exact sort of behavior I sometimes see with the advocates for renewables. Cost should always be a consideration, but when people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid. The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to m…

Rooftop solar is cost-effective. It is already starting to get below the price people pay for getting electricity from the grid.

The levelized cost of energy report I linked too (https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...). is the latest report and is dated OCT 19 2020.

Consumer rooftop solar might be the most highly subsidized form of power in the world, so yes it might be cost-effective for the people getting the subsidies - but that doesn't mean it is not expensive.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#232

Post by manfredo » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #185

manfredo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. The redundancy isn't an issue with nuclear, it's an issue of the notion that we need nuclear and renewables. Just cut out the renewables, and only use nuclear. Using nuclear to fill in the duck curve makes renewables redundant, thus the aversion to nuclear of many proponents…

Nuclear has problems with the load being intermittent because it's too inflexible (you can't realistically run a nuclear plant for 12 hours and then turn it off, you really want it to be running the whole time). If you have nuclear capacity for peak load, then what do you do with that extra energy at off peak times? The solutions for this end up looking a lot like the solutions for dealing with the intermitency of so…

For the third time, the solution is to just save money by ditching the intermittent sources and only using nuclear. Nuclear makes renewables redundant, not the other way around. Nuclear generates power round the clock. Nuclear doesn't suffer from the duck curve, so it doesn't need storage or gas backup plants.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#233

Post by manfredo » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

jnxx wrote: post #217

manfredo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. The redundancy isn't an issue with nuclear, it's an issue of the notion that we need nuclear and renewables. Just cut out the renewables, and only use nuclear. Using nuclear to fill in the duck curve makes renewables redundant, thus the aversion to nuclear of many proponents…

> The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. For one, it needs a cool river with lots of water available for cooling. Which with climate change is, even in the UK, becoming less ubiquitous than it was so far.

It needs a source of water to run heat exchangers, but it doesn't need to be fresh water. It can run on seawater (which can also be used for desalination with the waste heat), or on wastewater.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#234

Post by manfredo » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

jnxx wrote: post #220

imtringued wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also has to be near a reliable water source so that it can be cooled. The bigger the power plant the more geographically constrained it is. France faces low river flow rates in the summer because of climate chance and this forces them to take some of the nuclear plants offline. Otherwise the waste heat would make it impossible for aquatic life to live near those power plants. Ever wondered why someone make an "obv…

Reliable cooling is also a big problem for the nuclear plants in the US East coast. They are away from the shore but well in reach of different types of disasters, like hurricanes, winter storms and flooding. They need reliable cooling and for that they depend on a working electrical grid. There are many ways in which the Fukushima disaster could repeat itself there - in a region which is rather densely populated.

The US east coast does not suffer from earthquakes. A tsunami is a geological event, not a weather event.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#235

Post by wazoox » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:20 PM UTC

jnxx wrote: post #224

wazoox wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use This is the worst argument I've ever read for renewables. With renewable and storage, you need to build at the very least 7 times the capacity. Maybe as much as 40 times the capacity. Because of the low load factor, the fact that it's pretty common to have a full week without wind or without sun, etc.

You can also exchange energy using high-voltage DC lines across the whole continent. Also, wave energy converters like Pelamis are an exciting technology, precisely because they harvest wind energy decoupled in space and time. It is a great opportunity for Scotland, the coast of France and Spain, Japan, Scandinavia and so on. Not totally technologically mature but shown to be viable using 400kW plants. https://www.yo…

Fantastic stuff that doesn't exist and won't exist for a long time at the humougous scale we need. We need to get out of fossil fuels now. Be realistic for chrissake! We need dense, powerful power sources.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#236

Post by manfredo » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

Muanh wrote: post #126

manfredo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe some promising new storage technology will prevail, but solutions that are 5-10 years of development away from being viable have a habit of taking a lot more than 5-10 years to become viable. Until then nuclear presents the only proven way of decarbonizing an energy sector to a great extent that works in any environment. It's true that nuclear doesn't make economic sense relative to running a gas plant and usin…

Ignoring the fact that we don't need 5-10 year development for batteries. You are ignoring the 5-10 year build time for a nuclear reactor.

There exist no feasible plan to build out the storage required to make renewables work within 5-10 years. The US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity every day. About 500GWh every hour. We have about one Gigawatt hour worth of battery storage. We need terawatt hours worth of storage. The availability of battery storage remains off by several orders of magnitude.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#237

Post by opo » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:29 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #168

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m an advocate for taxing carbon and letting the utility companies figure out what is really cheaper. They have the expertise and the incentive.

Exelon has stated that for new nuclear plants in the US to compete with NG CC, CO2 taxes would have to be $300-400/ton. To compete with NG for filling in around renewables, CO2 taxes would have to be much higher than that. Other projections have the economy basically decarbonizing (without needing nuclear) at a CO2 tax of just $200/ton. There's a good reason Exelon is tryin to spin off all its NPPs.

The Exelon proposals I've seen are for a carbon tax of $40 increasing 5% a year. Where are they proposing a $200 tax?

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#238

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

_Microft wrote: post #107

manfredo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that peak power consumption occurs after sundown in most countries. Nuclear power also costs the same to generate power 24/7 as it does to generate power intermittently. So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. This is why people invested in renewables are often very adverse to nuclear power.

Flatten all the curves! \o/ Our daily routines are so synchronized that we see these massives peaks everywhere. Not only in energy consumption but also in road use (congestion), commuting services (packed subway cars) or in super markets (low fraction of total available checkouts needed during most times of the day because their number was dimensioned for peak times). I'm sure you can find other examples if you think…

[deleted]

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#239

Post by radu_floricica » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

skitout wrote: post #144

radu_floricica wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economies of scale. Most of the cost for a traditional nuclear plant is regulatory&decomissioning. If new nuclear can get over that, and it's allowed to go through a couple of iterations (which happens much faster nowadays), there is really no way to estimate how low the price can go. A 10x reduction is not out of question, if you look at SpaceX for example, another industry where innovation has been frozen for decad…

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,…

Why do you frame it as a decision between the two? The market is beyond huge, there are bound to be use cases where one or the other is clearly better.

Also a 10x cost improvement on nuclear would blow everything else away (in a good way). I don't think renewables have the same potential - for one thing, they're a more mature technology (weird, I know, but they've been the focus of global development for quite some time now).

And also there's only so much energy you can get out of solar and wind - you just can't get more than 1.3 kw from a square meter of solar, you have to cover more square meters. On the other hand there's no theoretical reason why you wouldn't have a clean, safe reactor in each car. It's just a technological challenge.

Re: New nuclear plant at Sizewell set for green light

#240

Post by nicoburns » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #232

nicoburns wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear has problems with the load being intermittent because it's too inflexible (you can't realistically run a nuclear plant for 12 hours and then turn it off, you really want it to be running the whole time). If you have nuclear capacity for peak load, then what do you do with that extra energy at off peak times? The solutions for this end up looking a lot like the solutions for dealing with the intermitency of so…

For the third time, the solution is to just save money by ditching the intermittent sources and only using nuclear. Nuclear makes renewables redundant, not the other way around. Nuclear generates power round the clock. Nuclear doesn't suffer from the duck curve, so it doesn't need storage or gas backup plants.

Nuclear does suffer from the duck curve. It has the opposite problem of what to do with the excess power when demand is lower.