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All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

world-nuclear-news.org

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Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#321

Post by tonypace »

DisjointedHunt wrote: post #36
arrrg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With renewables baseline doesn’t make sense. Nuclear doesn’t combine well with renewables, not in a way that would complete the picture. Meaning: you can’t build something that works with only those two building blocks. Even more: baseline is not at all needed with renewables. Renewables need to be combined with power sources that can be turned on and off quickly and on demand. Nuclear emphatically cannot provide tha…

Nuclear changes the game completely. Think of the most audacious, energy intensive expense of effort that’s deemed infeasible today? Let’s consider something like desalinating water from the pacific and continuously pumping it inland to the Australian Outback or the middle of the Sahara. With an investment in Nuclear, hypothetically, it’s cheaper. Present nuclear reactors have a high cost of operation simply because…

You have your enormous electric desalination plant, or metal smelter. It needs cheap electricity to be profitable, but there is cheap enough electricity during the day to be feasible. As a result, coal is now dirt cheap. You build a coal plant to keep working at night.

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#322

Post by rurban »

Great news. At least there is some hope in politics, when they detect this high-paid lobbyists trying to selling their dangerous crap and super expensive power stations, when they still don't know after decades how to get rid of their radioactive waste. Not speaking about the risk yet.

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#323

Post by iamstupidsimple »

Oddskar wrote: post #258
DisjointedHunt wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t say it’s wrong. I said it villianizes those fuels. We needed fuels as a society for those 3000 mile flights over the pacific that ships your iPhone here. Energy “subsidies” are a strategic investment in securing your lifestyle. Just look at Europe right now as they head into winter with sky high natural gas prices. They’d go ahead an strike any deal that secures their supplies so they do t freeze half to dea…

I think you've somehow missed the vital part: our lifestyle is not sustainable. We shouldn't aim to sustain something that simply cannot continue.

Okay, you first.

I'd much rather find a way to maintain people's lifestyles, reduce emissions (and make it even better in the process).

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#324

Post by cesarb »

cnlevy wrote: post #270
sudosysgen wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need both overprovisioning and storage.

Storage for 3 months https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/29/sse-says-low-wind-dry-condit...

> Storage for 3 months

The parent comment said overprovisioning and storage. With enough overprovisioning, you'd need storage for half a day at most (keep in mind that the parent thread was talking about pure solar with storage, not wind). The question on this sub-thread is: what would be the optimal (minimum cost) balance between overprovisioned solar and storage, and what would be the cost of that solution (the question was about 1GW, but it probably scales almost linearly), with similar reliability to pure nuclear (I'm assuming this pure nuclear scenario is overprovisioned too, since it has to deal with refueling pauses and the occasional electrical faults)?

(Of course, except for very small isolated networks, a real-life solution would not use only pure solar and storage; adding other things like wind to the mix would probably decrease the cost while keeping the same reliability.)

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#325

Post by newacct583 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #277
quonn wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read exactly the same on HN 10 years ago.

Gotta love anti-nuclear folks. They work to hinder nuclear development and then point to the lack of nuclear progress as “evidence” that nuclear is a pipe dream.

Stop with the conspiracy theories. There are no "anti-nuclear folks" in this thread. It's a bunch of people looking at a balance sheet and trying to decide on how to prioritize energy spending. And nuclear doesn't fit. Maybe it will. But it doesn't. It's not there. If you have $100M to spend on non-carbon electricity right now you build a wind farm, not a reactor.

That's the problem you have to fix. Make something people want, basically.

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#326

Post by nitrogen »

Kon5ole wrote: post #311
lokimedes wrote: post #182

As long as nuclear energy is treated as PICK_ANY(obsolete, uneconomical, systemically dangerous) it leaves me with zero hope for humanity. Nuclear is way more than technology, it's Prometheus' fire. It may burn the unprepared but it is incomparable to anything else we possess. That factor million more energy per gram than chemical reactions should be enough for us to treat it as literally unlocking the next level of…

Earth gets hit by 170 000 TW of sunshine every hour. That's more than the yearly global consumption of energy. If we could capture only 1% of that, we'd have 80 times more than we need, from just the sunshine reaching earth. This makes the photovoltaic cell and related technologies more interesting than nuclear to me. A way more abundant energy source with none of the downsides of nuclear is clearly within our reach.…

Listing large numbers and then saying "if only we could get this small percentage" doesn't make for a solid business plan, and it doesn't make a solid energy plan either. We're talking about insane amounts of land, for one thing, and ignoring distribution for another. Plus "80x more than we need" assumes a fixed level of need forever, humanity capped off, the book of progress written and closed.

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#327

Post by DangitBobby »

p2t2p wrote: post #174

Basically if you say to me that you care about climate change and then reject nuclear, I stop talking to you and taking you in any kind of seriously. Once you reject nuclear it’s just virtue signalling.

Yes, you can use simple methods like this in every facet of life to have perfect knowledge of all situations. It's truly a marvel that everyone doesn't know everything.

My favorite trick is if someone blinks twice in 10 seconds I know they ate something with garlic today.

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#328

Post by denton-scratch »

lostmyoldone wrote: post #207
lokimedes wrote: post #182

As long as nuclear energy is treated as PICK_ANY(obsolete, uneconomical, systemically dangerous) it leaves me with zero hope for humanity. Nuclear is way more than technology, it's Prometheus' fire. It may burn the unprepared but it is incomparable to anything else we possess. That factor million more energy per gram than chemical reactions should be enough for us to treat it as literally unlocking the next level of…

If it is Prometheus' fire, we are not ready to handle that fire yet. When one of the core concerns of using a technology is to prevent it being used to create weapons capable of obliterating entire cities, we are not as a species mature enough to use it on a wider scale. This is only one example of why we are not ready yet. Nuclear (fission) technology is not the problem, we are the problem. Looking at the recent his…

The issue that concerns me about nuclear power isn't so much weapons (they tend to be well-guarded, and it's hard to make weapons from reactor fuel), but decomissioning.

The UK was one of the first countries to build nuclear reactors; no UK reactor has ever been fully decomissioned, and from what I can see we haven't even got a strategy - WP says they're still working out whether decomissioning should occur over a 20-year or a 100-year span. The UK's first nuclear reactor, Calder Hall, was built in the year of my birth, and decommissioning is estimated to take well into the next century; my grandchildren will have died of old age.

You can stand next to a thermonuclear bomb without a mickey-mouse suit; you can even open it up, take the components out, and render the weapon unusable, fairly easily. Nuclear reactors, not so much.

I have grandchildren under 5. Until we've proved that a reactor design can be fully decommissioned, I don't think we should build more. That's not a problem that I want to dump on their shoulders.

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#329

Post by tejohnso »

go_elmo wrote: post #192
xvilka wrote: post #188

Basically it is just a worthless and meaningless event. "Bla-bla" as per Greta Thunberg.

While it is bla bla it is necessary. How else would you establish political pressure in a democracy? Many green transition tech would be feasible if co2 taxes were established, even within the eu.

> How else would you establish political pressure in a democracy?

Non-violent civil disobedience?

Re: All Applications for Nuclear Energy at COP26 Rejected

#330

Post by it_citizen »

adev_ wrote: post #162
driest wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No you don't from your arguments. One can be a fan of something without trying to blindly apply it to areas where it doesn't make sense. > nuclear reactors designs from the 70s are statistically safer than coal. And kill a lot less than coal. That's a strawman's argument, I'm not arguing for coal, I'm arguing for storage of renewables. > France had one of the cheapest electricity in Europe for 3 decades [...] Nucle…

> One can be a fan of something without trying to blindly apply it to areas where it doesn't make sense. Starting a discussion with a "I'm a huge fan" before spending the next 10 min to debunk the thing is not "being a fan of" but just a sign of being hypocritical, or manuipulative or both. > That's a strawman's argument, I'm not arguing for coal, I'm arguing for storage of renewables. Renewable alone (Without Coal o…

If everybody in the room agrees on the benefits, why not spend most of the discussion debating the drawbacks and the contentious points? That’s a very common situation in my professional life.
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