Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution • Hacker News Board

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#111

Post by mrjangles » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 1:59 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #54

elihu wrote: post #50

I'd be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper, that's what's going to get built. Also, renewables don't require a high degree of trust in the human operators to manage risks appropriately. I think that's really the main sticking point with nuclear; reliable reactors can be made, but how do you manage the humans who maintain the plants in a way that's not susceptible to corru…

> d be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper Cost is not just a single factor. Energy density is very important too. Solar farms take huge amounts of space to produce very little energy compared to a nuclear plant.

A solar farm that produces the same power as a nuclear power station (1GW) requires 1000 3MW turbines (33% efficiency) at 700 meters apart.

That's 500 square kilometers of turbines (something like 200 square miles).

I once did the calculation and it came out to something like 10 times as much concrete and steel to build the turbines as it would have taken to build the nuclear power plant.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#112

Post by na85 » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 2:00 AM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #108

lizknope wrote: post #89

Does the US really need more electricity generation? Electricity use is stable or even dropping although 2020 may be an outlier. Electric cars will change this though. At a personal level I use significantly less electricity now compared to 15 years ago. HVAC replacement, insulation upgrades, computer and consumer electronics power reductions, lowered my summer electric bill by 40% https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a…

Yes, huge amounts of it. Aside from electrified transport, there’s also a lot of industrial processes that use natural gas for direct heating. We need a lot of extra electricity generation to cover these cases. Some of these can be shifted when renewables are overproducing, others cannot. Our grid literally cannot handle the demand that electrifying transit and industry would create.

A lot of places do what's called cogeneration: rather than buy electricity and gas, they just buy more gas and generate electricity on-prem, using the waste heat for heating their facilities/boilers/whatever.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#113

Post by Krasnol » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

mrjangles wrote: post #78

elihu wrote: post #50

I'd be fine with more nuclear power plants, but if wind/solar plus batteries are cheaper, that's what's going to get built. Also, renewables don't require a high degree of trust in the human operators to manage risks appropriately. I think that's really the main sticking point with nuclear; reliable reactors can be made, but how do you manage the humans who maintain the plants in a way that's not susceptible to corru…

Solar, wind plus batteries (and other intermittent sources) are only cheaper because it is subsidized by the base power stations. Only about 20% of the cost of coal and 5% of nuclear comes from the fuel. Almost all costs are fixed costs. They need to be paid regardless of whether people use the power or not. But in the current system, those who use solar or wind and only use base power occasionally aren't paying thos…

If you'd add the cost of maintaining radioactive waste for thousands of years on the cost of power, you'd end up with even higher prices and how do you think those reactors came into existence in the first place? Not even Bill Gates wants to pay for his reactor by himself.

Here are state subsidies for energy sources in Germany in Billion: https://i.imgur.com/NbaNLK4.jpeg

Than there is maintenance. EDF will have to pay staggering 100 billion € to increase the life of their fleet for another 10 years and the price won't go down in the future. Even though the fleet is quite well maintained and France relies on it, accidents, overheated rivers, too cold winters force them to buy (often dirty) power from Germany.

LCOE for nuclear is only surpassed by peak gas: https://i.imgur.com/gRj8GS0.jpeg

https://zenodo.org/record/5573719

So yeah...number juggling is quite trendy in Shillenbergers Astro-Turf but it won't change the facts: nuclear is too expensive and too slow to fight climate change.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#114

Post by natmaka » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

Rebelgecko wrote: post #69

KarlKemp wrote: post #35

The International Monetary Fond, not known to be populated by treehugging hippies with naturalistic fallacies as a major character trait, published this beautiful graph: https://blogs.imf.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/eng-april-4... Nuclear now costs three times as much as solar & wind! And that data ist from 2017. Both technologies are also not showing any slowdown in improvements, while nuclear tends to get more e…

I think it's misleading to compare peak nuclear generation against peak solar/wind- in order to be comparable with nuclear's baseload, renewables need to be built in conjunction with a boatload of batteries. Otherwise you just end up burning fossil fuels at night time.

In order to cope with renewables variability various approaches complement each other but need investments in order to produce the baseload: continent-scale wind generation patterns benefiting from lo-correlation between wind regimes, a mix (wind, solar, biomass...), storage, smartgrid...

Money spared because they are more and more cheap will be invested in those ways, letting us benefit from their main characteristics (no major risk, no combustible, very low emissions, no dangerous waste, no risky and expensive decommission...).

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#115

Post by ashtonkem » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 2:03 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #112

ashtonkem wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, huge amounts of it. Aside from electrified transport, there’s also a lot of industrial processes that use natural gas for direct heating. We need a lot of extra electricity generation to cover these cases. Some of these can be shifted when renewables are overproducing, others cannot. Our grid literally cannot handle the demand that electrifying transit and industry would create.

A lot of places do what's called cogeneration: rather than buy electricity and gas, they just buy more gas and generate electricity on-prem, using the waste heat for heating their facilities/boilers/whatever.

Still; moving those off of fossil fuels will put a lot of strain on our grid. Some of those facilities will put solar panels up and run their energy intensive processes during the day, but not all of them will. The grid needs to be able to handle that process, or we’ll just keep consuming fossil fuels.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#116

Post by rhacker » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

engineer_22 wrote: post #33

gefhfff wrote: post #14

Not true, it's too late for nuclear power. Additionally it is quite expensive compared to renewables and makes the burden on future generations even bigger. Anyway, don't shut down any working plant early... We need everything we have atm

The dirty little secret is that renewables are consumable. They wear out and have to be replaced. Like discount shoes: they're cheap, they don't look good, and you throw them away after a while.

The cool thing about solar panels is that they are recyclable like old clothes. People are super super happy buying 5 year old panels for $80 that are rated at 250 watts but are giving someone like 235 now.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#117

Post by laurencerowe » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

hilbert42 wrote: post #61

nickdothutton wrote: post #10

Realistically if we were going to go big on nuclear we needed to do so 30 years ago. In the UK at least, it takes decades for planning permission and more decades for design, build, commissioning, and finally entry of a reactor into operational service.

"In the UK at least, it takes decades for planning permission and more decades for design, build, commissioning, and finally entry of a reactor into operational service." In France it's another matter altogether, there are nuclear power stations everywhere and about 70% of the country's energy comes from nuclear. (Years ago, during a conference I was at in Avignon we even had a tour of the nearby UF6 gaseous diffusio…

While it used to be a different matter in France, they last completed a reactor more than 30 years ago and the one currently being built is beset with the same time and cost overruns as those in the U.K.

> A third reactor at the site, an EPR unit, began construction in 2007 with its commercial introduction scheduled for 2012. As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor.[1] In July 2019, further delays were announced, pushing back the commercial date to the end 2022.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#118

Post by sabujp » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

The market agrees, just look at recent prices of uranium, uranium mining companies, and now nuclear infrastructure companies are also starting to take off

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#119

Post by corban1 » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 2:06 AM UTC

KarlKemp wrote: post #73

corban1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are comparing two energy sources, one that provides constant power 99.999% of the time and one that provides volatile power ~35% (if best) of the time? These price graphs hide the obvious fact. Normalize solar and power by adding the price to make the source constant(shitload of ESS maybe?) and removing government incentives.

Yeah, I, too, read slashdot when those arguments were still current. Now, they just aren’t. The stats above are already levelized. The change in output is also smaller than what people believe: with solar and gas as two independent systems, some improvements to interconnects to allow averaging over larger regions, smart devices on the consumer side picking the right times to recharge (and maybe even de-charge when it…

Not a single one of the power source/price studies I've seen has normalized the price in regards to making the source constant or government incentives. Not one.

Energy sources have their caveats. Nuclear plants using rivers decrease output when rivers overheat. Solar panel efficiency falls 0.38% per degrees celcius under and over 25. We think failing nuclear and gas is a big deal because it's reliable most of the time. We do not think failing solar panels in night (because they can't produce energy) or hot and cold weather is not a big deal because it's designed to be that way. If that's the case, how is it viable to compare the prices?

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#120

Post by Krasnol » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 2:06 AM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #72

shirro wrote: post #40

Nuclear is one of a number of alternatives that needs to be seriously considered but due to the long timelines and high costs of nuclear it is also one of the best stalling tactics for the fossil fuel industry seeking to extend the life of their assets. Possible increased adoption of nuclear in the future is not a reason to avoid setting sunset dates for emitting technologies now and commence transition to whatever l…

We can't afford to wait or not to hedge our bets. Nuclear is a hell of a hedge since we know it works. We know the French model works really well, but for some reason we, the country with the most heavily armed forces in the world, can't "protect" it. BS, moneyed interests and tree huggers are keeping us from fixing the problem until fusion comes along or uber cheap battery density 100x better than what we have curre…

> We know the French model works really well

It works so "well" that the French taxpayer will have to pay the UK so they can deliver their guaranteed energy prices the over-due and over budget reactor they desperately try to finish will generate.

It's so fantastic that every summer they have to buy dirty coal energy from Germany because their rivers get too hot and every winter because...it's too cold and their ageing fleet is breaking down all the time.

The success is so staggering that they plan to reduce their fleet by 50% until 2030 and replace that with renewable energy.

Hooray...

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Edit: since the Astro-Turf reached me and I can't reply anymore due to downvotes, here are the answers to Bayart:

> I don't down where you get that broadly France relies on German coal in the summer and winter.

Why do you try to lie about something everybody can google. This is the first result for "France river hot":

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...

> Pretty much the entirety of the problems we've had with the EPR program has to do stopping building nuclear power plants for decades and losing the associated skill-set and industrial base.

Weird because EPR didn't stop building. They just stopped building in France so this can't be right. Also: the reactors currently still under construction started construction when all the people from the peak construction times where still there. They still can't manage to build on budget or on time. Not even close.

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@corban1:

Only because Germany doesn't hide their subsidies doesn't mean that the French taxpayer is not paying for their ageing fleet (or overpriced projects abroad) with their taxes...

Also the fact that coal is an important job motor in troubled regions of Germany which is why it's still there (but is being phased out completely soon).