Activists who embrace nuclear power • Hacker News Board

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#281

Post by pyrale » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

A significant part of the cost issues come with how the market is structured. If consumers can buy power on a hourly basis, nuclear plants can not be more expensive than gas/coal (and even with some carbon tax, this is not going to be sky high prices), and can not make a profit during abundant renewable availability, because renewables drive prices close to zero.

If you structured markets by selling kW rather than kWh, renewables would have to bear the cost of low wind/sun availability, either by building storage or by pairing with fossil power producers. This would price the stability of production, which is simply not priced today.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#282

Post by screye » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk.

Disposal of nuclear waste is a huge expense, but the main waste product generated by natural gas (CO2) gets away scot free despite literally being the cause of what might be our generation's biggest problem.

The end-of-life expenses of nuclear plants are included in the cost sheets, but dams get away scot free.

Material procurement is justifiably expensive, since security measures for handling nuke-fuel are far more stringent. But, that is more a virtue of global politics than the actual cost of nuclear energy.

Another cold-start problem is that the USA does not have the same experience with frequently building nuclear plants, vs say a country like France has. Thus, any new contractor spends extra money to be the first to wade through bureaucratic / training related challenges that would otherwise have been resolved if building nuclear plants was more common place.

Just saying, the numbers for energy source comparison aren't always as fair as they look.

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> Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal.

Wow, I didn't know we were that close to dealing with the storage/temporal variability problem. If we can solve that problem with money to spare, then I can see the adoption of solar + wind going up through the roof.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#283

Post by sudosysgen » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #242

sudosysgen wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but solar plus wind does not allow the flexibility to plan for the worst case and come out ahead.

Wind across enough longitude is impossible to not exist at all given temperature differentials creating wind and the rotation of the earth. Wind compliments solar beautifully because things cool off at night from the lack of sun making it produce more power then. If the earth no longer rotates across the axis or the sun goes out the lack of power is irrelevant to in that worsr case scenario.

This is not sufficient. Wind doesn't have to not increase at all, it just has to be down somewhat, or be too high.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#284

Post by codecamper » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

systematical wrote: post #4

Go heavy nuclear and invest in fusion. The later will lead to clean abundant energy and eventually a reduction in resource scarcity. What is the economics of air? That's the economics we want.

Luckily we already have a working fusion reactor. It's 92M miles away, but it's a big one. All that is required are some solar panels and wind turbines to harness its power.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#285

Post by jasonwatkinspdx » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #257

epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. Solar and win…

You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements.

Wind power can share land with other uses.

There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#286

Post by ortusdux » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #160

ortusdux wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a fair amount of research into molten salt reactors, and if we can solve the containment issue they should be very cost effective. The molten salts are extremely corrosive, which cuts their lifespan down to ~5 years. Newer designs should reach 10 years and there is extensive research into designing systems that will last 20+ years. They should be much cheaper to build and operate because they have several i…

This is solving the wrong problem, and therefore will not advance nuclear. Cost is the impediment to nuclear, not any sort of safety concerns. That molten salt reactor will need to have a negative cost in order to compete with the cost of stored renewable energy. The future of nuclear energy must either abandon the thermal steam cycle for electricity generation, or generate massive value from the nuclear reaction par…

> Cost is the impediment to nuclear, not any sort of safety concerns.

Safety systems and regulations greatly inflate costs. Any reasonable, safe measures that can be taken to reduce them will make nuclear more profitable.

A good example of this is small modular reactors. Current nuclear plants need to be approved by regulators on a case by case basis. Nuscale, a SMR company, is the first to get their module design signed off by the nuclear regulatory commission. This means that they can build them at volume and skip most of the red tape.

Analysts expect Nuscale's systems to be 1/4 to 1/3 cheaper than current nuclear plants. Imagine the price reduction of a SMR with half the complexity.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#287

Post by sudosysgen » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

merb wrote: post #266

sudosysgen wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but solar plus wind does not allow the flexibility to plan for the worst case and come out ahead.

you know that after a hurricane it's way harder to restart a nuclear power plant than a wind turbine right? it's incredible hard to power a nuclear plant if your grid is destroyed. basically you can't start a nuclear power plant with no power at all.

Nuclear reactors never completely turn off. They have generators that can supply the necessary power to run baseline systems and to restart them at any time.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#288

Post by Daho0n » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #262

Daho0n wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed.

Citation for which part? That solar and wind have huge land-use requirements compared to nuclear (and even other generation sources)? That we need to increase production of solar and wind collectors by several orders of magnitude to fully replace fossil fuel generated power, and by extension need to increase mineral extraction (rare-earth or otherwise) to build them? That every single collector we build today will ne…

Those doesn't look like facts at all but your opinions but feel free to prove otherwise.

Let's start with a simple one:

>solar and wind have huge land-use requirements compared to nuclear

Can you build nuclear in the oceans, safely, like offshore wind turbines? Or on hillsides and in desert hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town (and get people to work there without disrupting the local ecology with local housing etc.) using only land no one wants? Land is not something we have unlimited amounts of and in many places it is only better if it is somewhere else or smaller than what is there now.

Can we build a nuclear plant that is safe? Not according to you or a talking head but to the people who have to live close to it. If you won't you clearly don't believe in it your self so, would you rather live close beside its perimeters with your children in an earthquake, tsunami or hurricane compared to windmills?

>global warming is not the only environmental problem we are dealing with

No, one of the big ones is that the rich countries who have polluted for decades wants everyone to now live up to their rules today which is not going to happen. So before anything else all of us that live in the richest parts of the world have to pay for everyone who doesn't to get environmentally friendly electricity. The problem is global and the people who are being lifted out of poverty today have as much right to use old coal technicology today as we had 50 years ago unless we pay the difference in cost for them.

Will you help pay for electricity in places that need it more than you to save the planet? Because that is the biggest problem we need to solve - not if Sweden use nuclear or Texas upgrade its grid. Those are close to irrelevant unlike the costs of environmentally safe power plants in India, Africa, China, etc.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#289

Post by throwaway894345 » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

FooHentai wrote: post #187

throwaway894345 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not talking about persuading people to install solar, I’m talking about the sheer bureaucratic work (on the part of the utility) to manage contracts with thousands of property owners instead of just one. Similarly, the overhead of servicing thousands of roof-top installations (scheduling appointments, driving to sites, climbing onto the roof, etc) versus a single contiguous site at ground level. I don’t think res…

I don’t follow. You could make the same argument about communal water heating versus having a heater in each home, yet of course such a position would be absurd. Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today. Having it be an arrangement where a power provider owns and maintains the panels isn’t necessary or desirable. Lease-t…

> You could make the same argument about communal water heating versus having a heater in each home, yet of course such a position would be absurd.

If we could cheaply and efficiently transport hot water over miles and miles like we can with electricity then communal water heating would be much more common. Note that communal water heating is fairly normal (i.e., not "absurd") in large apartment, condominium, and commercial office buildings (one large boiler providing hot water for all tenants).

> Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today.

The question isn't whether there's an issue hooking individual residential solar installations up to the grid--no one disputes that. The relevant question is how expensive is it to build and maintain tens of millions of individual rooftop solar installations versus several orders of magnitude fewer, larger installations. According to https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-farm-do-i-..., it would cost at least ~$2.8M to generate 1MW via rooftop solar systems while it would cost only about ~$1M to generate the same amount of energy via solar farm.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#290

Post by jasonwatkinspdx » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

93po wrote: post #280

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear loses to alternatives on a pure ROI basis. Even in places where political opposition or legislation is a total non issue (eg China) you see exactly the same bad math when it comes to the $. I feel like a broken record posting this in every thread about nuclear. There's too many people on this forum that have some sort of smug attitude about not being "scared" of nuclear power and don't bother to learn what's…

I feel like a broken record when people always focus on ROI and up front costs and completely ignore the millon+ people that did every year from fossil fuel usage

Thank you for making this point. I completely agree. I make the ROI argument here because it's the one people listen to, sadly. Living next to a coal or oil fired power plant is one of the worst decisions you could make health wise, particularly for children.