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Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

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Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#121

Post by weatherlight »

erentz wrote: post #86
weatherlight wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ This. Also, It's the Wall Street Journal, so consider the source, its own by Rupert Murdoch, whose media companies, until very recently were climate change deniers, so from a rather crude sort of climate denialism, they will likely move to supporting technical "climate fixes" spruiked by the fossil fuel industries. This is a more subtle way of sabotaging real climate action.

Why do you think the fossil fuel industry wants nuclear power? How do they benefit? They appear to have gained immensely from the halt of nuclear power deployment in the west. E.g. France famously decarbonised it's electric grid in a couple of decades after 1970s due to the energy crisis using nuclear power. How did this help fossil fuel companies? On the other hand, Germany has continued to be more reliant on coal a…

Electricity is only 28% of global emissions.

If the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.

Nuclear energy now provides about 10% of the world’s electricity from about 445 power reactors.

This isn't hard math.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#122

Post by rhacker »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #45
throwaway821909 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables got cheaper to the point where it's not competitive Counter-argument: Wind and sun are unreliable Counter-counter-argument: Why not build 10x the amount of wind and solar if it's so cheap, and automatically break the circuit when not needed?

You can build even 100x the amount of solar, but the sun will set anyway.

So if you plan on building 4KW solar, and then decide to do 100X that, you can generate ~1800KWH per day (400 * 5 hours per day of ideal sun * fudge factor). If you have the battery storage for that you can probably get through 66 days from one sunny day. The cost would be super prohibitive too, but not everyone needs 100X out there solar to get through some rough days.

My personal plan is 30KW (over the next few years) so I can get through like 4 days. And heck, a stormy day will still generate enough electricity.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#123

Post by zbrozek »

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…

Cheaper electricity means more electrification. The majority of my energy use is natural gas (for home heat) due to its low cost relative to electricity. Plus, there's coal and gas plants to shut down and something needs to replace them.

Quality of life goes up with cheaper energy. If energy were free it would be 22-23 C inside my home right now, rather than 18 C, and I wouldn't be wearing a jacket while sitting on my couch.

Now, the fact that it takes $400 of natural gas per month to keep my home 18 C when it's 11 C outside has a lot to do with how hard it is to get building permits in CA. But that's a different issue.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#124

Post by Krasnol »

mrjangles wrote: post #96
bobthepanda wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affordable by looking at any other measure than the balance sheet, maybe. Nuclear plants that are on time and on budget are exceptions, not the rule.

I read an excellent article written in Physics Today by a nuclear physicist once. For the life of me I have never been able to find it again. But he describes this in detail. Basically, in his description this is entirely due to the environmental movement. Any time a nuclear plant gets planned the green groups move in a mountain of lawyers and lock down the process for years and years. The costs this adds to the proj…

I'm pretty sure I know why you can't find it anymore...this is ridiculous.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#125

Post by erentz »

natmaka wrote: post #85
hedora wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, solar apparently pollutes a heck of a lot more than nuclear. It’s still > 100x better than fossil fuels, and I’m still putting some on my roof, but the figures in the article are surprising.

Nope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

The thrust was correct according to your source, or am I misreading it? Nuclear median 12, Solar 48 (4x nuclear), gas 490 (10x solar), coal 810 (20x solar).

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#127

Post by rsj_hn »

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…

Comparing the price of unreliable energy with the price of reliable energy is like comparing the yield of a bond without taking default risk into account. It's just terrible.

Similarly thinking you can combine a bunch of unreliable energy sources and "tranche" them in order to get a smaller stream of reliable energy is very much like the gaussian copula problem that got us into the financial crisis. Yes, it's possible to do it in theory, but very hard to do so in practice due to the financial incentives involved and lack of knowledge about risk.

The level of discourse in our energy markets really needs to be improved, and quickly, otherwise we are going to make a lot of foolish choices.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#128

Post by naasking »

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…

Easily processed uranium will last us 80 years at current consumption rates. If you start building current nuclear reactor designs everywhere, we'll run out of it in less than 40 years. Then the price will skyrocket, and nuclear is already more expensive than renewables.

We need different nuclear reactors, fast reactors or thorium that use uranium more efficiently to stave this off, but they're more dangerous and still experimental, respectively.

I think we're better off using that nuclear money into building lots of grid storage for renewables.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#129

Post by weatherlight »

It's bullshit.

Electricity is only 28% of global emissions. What about the other 3/4ths?

And on that 28%...

The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) has accurately estimated the planet's economically accessible uranium resources, reactors could run more than 200 years at current rates of consumption.

Nuclear energy now provides about 10% of the world’s electricity from about 445 power reactors.

This isn't hard math.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#130

Post by corban1 »

Krasnol wrote: post #120
stjohnswarts wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agein…

France €0.1765 per kWh 57.3 gCO2/KWh (2019) | Germany €0.3159 (+76.9%) per kWh 468 (+816%) gCO2/KWh (2019)

Seems the success is very clearly visible both environmentally and economically?

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1190067/carbon-intensity... [2] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/press/pressinformation/co2...

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