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Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#401

Post by acidburnNSA »

Daho0n wrote: post #267
krustyburger wrote: post #6

When she first contemplated working at Diablo Canyon, she imagined the rat-infested Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on “The Simpsons,” where green liquid oozes out of tanks. Eventually, like Hoff, she changed her thinking. “What we were doing actually aligned with my environmental values,” she told me. “That was shocking to me.” You can tell from my username what an enormous fan of The Simpsons I am. One of the few t…

>leaves you thinking that using nuclear power at all is incredibly dangerous and foolish No one in his right mind can state with a straight face that nuclear power isn't incredibly dangerous. It might not be foolish with the right regulations and safety -that can always be debated- but no one can pretend nuclear power isn't incredibly dangerous if they know anything about it. The whole reason for all the regulation i…

I think you mean hazardous. Dangerous implies a hazard is regularly manifesting in measurable harm.

Many people claim that nuclear is not unduly dangerous, and have good statistics to back it up. Certainly no one would argue that it isn't hazardous.

Similar things can be said about fire.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#402

Post by pfdietz »

StreamBright wrote: post #306
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's straightforward accounting to address the issue you mean. Go read Lazard's levelized cost of energy slides. The cost comparison isn't some sort of mystery everyone but you is getting wrong.

Thanks, it just confirming what I thought. Solar is in the same bracket as nuclear. The difference is pretty small. Adding the energy density to the mix makes it obvious which one is a better option.

The difference is substantial, not small, and energy density is irrelevant.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#403

Post by afterburner »

StillBored wrote: post #395
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…

The costs of wind/solar are basically lies. The numbers are based on best case generation and fail to account for storage, and overbuild requirements to supply that storage. AKA today you say wind is X dollars a MWh, but in order to actually be free of NG or other fossil fuels it needs to be built at some multiple of total demand (say 3X) to compensate for low periods. Then there you need sufficient storage (4 hours…

Are you seriously bringing up the wind turbines that ERCOT repeatedly failed to winterize and failed in a major storm as evidence that wind turbines are bad? This is an extremely bad faith argument. Wind turbines in the rest of the country where it's even colder aren't failing, because they're actually built for the weather, and the power company didn't cheap out.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#404

Post by pfdietz »

Robotbeat wrote: post #355
cbmuser wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind and solar need backup power plants and therefore *CANNOT* replace nuclear power plants.

Well, they can, but it’s a lot harder than people realize. To replace 1GW of nuclear completely in Virginia without a bunch of transmission, you may need about 14GW nameplate solar and about 50GWh of storage. It’s not cheap. Source: here, with 0 as exponent, 2011 as the year, 2020 cost scenario, and only solar and battery storage. https://model.energy

I assume that was with just batteries for storage, not batteries and hydrogen. Adding hydrogen often greatly reduces the overcapacity needed in those model solutions.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#405

Post by ben-schaaf »

ashtonkem wrote: post #375
dismayedjim wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't wipe a continent out with the worst case coal plant failure. A reactor going critical and exploding, however "impossible" would do just that. Look at the Saudi plant going up. It is jokingly referred to as "a car with no seatbelts".

You’d be surprised how many people die every year from coal power exhaust. People naturally overweight low frequency high impact events like a nuclear meltdown but drastically undervalue high frequency low impact events. Someone dying early because they lived too close to a coal plant doesn’t make the news, but in terms of actual human impact it trounces nuclear’s impact by multiple orders of magnitude.

Coal power plants also carry a lot more radiation into their surrounding environment than nuclear power plants: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#406

Post by pfdietz »

selimthegrim wrote: post #396
philipkglass wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rare earth metals etc. The rare earth elements are the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium [1]. None of these elements are needed to manufacture solar panels. The only rare metal used in quantity by solar panels is silver, which is used to make electrically conductive pastes for cell contacts [2]. The question of what resources solar panels require is deliberately muddied by a couple of vested interests. 1) Junior…

Hafnium is used in some next generation MEG solar cells, to say nothing of ITO electrodes

Hafnium is not a rare earth.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#407

Post by selimthegrim »

pfdietz wrote: post #406
selimthegrim wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hafnium is used in some next generation MEG solar cells, to say nothing of ITO electrodes

Hafnium is not a rare earth.

Thanks for the correction! I did think its price had gone up permanently these days though.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#408

Post by opo »

afterburner wrote: post #37
biren34 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm squarely of the opposite opinion. There are 2 main concerns I think "only renewables" solutions miss: 1. Impact on land usage. The sheer amount of land required to provide 3-4x global use is impractical and has major environmental consequences. It's not free to pave over large areas with solar panels or make huge swaths of air unsafe for birds. 2. Cost of storage is usually projected using current prices with som…

You're worried about birds? Better raze all buildings and kill all the cats. Wind turbine bird deaths are negligible. https://www.evwind.es/2020/10/01/the-realities-of-bird-and-b... You know you can set up solar panels on roofs, and in the desert, right?

The issue isn't so much the number of birds, but the type:

>...Although fatality rates for raptors may be lower compared to passerines, raptors are especially vulnerable to collisions due to their flight behaviors. Given the life history traits of raptors (i.e., long-lived and low reproductive rates) their populations are more at risk of decline from the number of different sources of impacts that affect these species on a daily basis.

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds/...

This isn't to say that means we should drop wind, but we shouldn't hand wave away the issue and pretend it is not an issue.

>...You know you can set up solar panels on roofs,

The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is at least as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

>...and in the desert, right?

Advocates also describe how we will rebuild the electrical grid to move vast amounts of solar or wind power across the USA. This will not be cheap or easy or particularly easy to protect from terrorism. Even the relatively small proposed Tres Amos SuperStation hasn’t been completed yet. This cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#409

Post by StillBored »

afterburner wrote: post #403
StillBored wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs of wind/solar are basically lies. The numbers are based on best case generation and fail to account for storage, and overbuild requirements to supply that storage. AKA today you say wind is X dollars a MWh, but in order to actually be free of NG or other fossil fuels it needs to be built at some multiple of total demand (say 3X) to compensate for low periods. Then there you need sufficient storage (4 hours…

Are you seriously bringing up the wind turbines that ERCOT repeatedly failed to winterize and failed in a major storm as evidence that wind turbines are bad? This is an extremely bad faith argument. Wind turbines in the rest of the country where it's even colder aren't failing, because they're actually built for the weather, and the power company didn't cheap out.

It was mostly the NG plants the didn't get winterized and weren't available, in some cases due to lack of NG. The wind actually was after some initial glitches AFAIK working as expected. Pretty much everything failed (including a nuke).

My point wasn't that there were failures, its that the wind capacity was pretty poor leading up to the failures too. Why that is, isn't clear to me other than its apparently not unusual to have significantly less during the winter in TX. This isn't usually a problem because the demand is low as well.

(random link with graphs, these are a bit harder than the one I was looking for but are good enough https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/climate/texas...)

edit: maybe the first graph here https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/02/17/3-graphs-that-shed-li... shows just how poorly the wind was performing, even before the storm relative to its peak.

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