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

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#221

Post by tuatoru » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 5:10 AM UTC

elil17 wrote: post #195

I like nuclear and I used to think it was a silver bullet. I still believe that nuclear is very safe for life (in fact, it is even safer than solar on a per-kWh basis due to the high number of deaths associated with people falling off roofs while installing panels) and the enviroment, but I now understand more about some of it's disadvantages. Specifically: 1. It is very expensive. Nuclear has a levelized cost of ove…

I used to oppose nuclear, but I now think it's a worthwhile backup, or perhaps one strand in a diversified approach to getting off fossil fuels.

There is, sadly, no one single technology that can replace fossil fuels for even any one major category of use (electricity, industrial, buildings, transport). We're going to end up with a massively more complicated energy supply system.

In this context I think it's still worth pursuing nuclear.

The cost argument has only arisen recently. As late as 2010 nuclear was competitive, or at least not obviously uncompetitive apart from its massive regulatory burden.

It seems to me that a lot of nuclear's costs arise from the "as low as reasonably achievable" doctrine (ALARA), which in turn is founded in the "linear no threshold" theory (LNT) of the effects of radiation.

LNT is falsified by the health statistics of the Denver population vs the coasts, and many other real-world observations.

If fission had fixed, scientifically determined thresholds and performance standards to work to, and a less hostile regulatory environment (removing the veto of NIMBYs), it would really interesting to see how it competes. It can scale up to the necessary scale in 30 years.

Fusion, on the other hand, can't conceivably help us with the transition in the time we have available. It'd be best to park it for 50 years and redeploy those physics Ph. D.s into material science for photovoltaics, batteries, electrolysis, and fuel synthesis.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#222

Post by clavicat » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

dave333 wrote: post #102

Haven't read the paywalled article but the idea that nuclear is clean compared to coal is ridiculous as evidenced by Chernobyl and Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Windscale. Nuclear pollution is about 1 trillion trillion times worse than coal and is sufficiently common - roughly one major nuclear accident per decade to be non-negligible. It's not safe to assume nuclear power is getting safer when terrorism and na…

>the idea that nuclear is clean compared to coal is ridiculous as evidenced by Chernobyl and Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Windscale

What kind of “evidence” is that? If you add up all the deaths that resulted from these disasters, it’s an small fraction of the people that die from coal pollution every year—670,000 in China alone. How are you getting a trillion times worse?

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#223

Post by rsj_hn » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

elihu wrote: post #194

rsj_hn wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how are you getting that coal is not profitable? Demand for coal is at an all time high. Check out coal prices. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/coal We are also producing more coal than ever before (modulo the dip during covid lockdowns), and coal use is projected to increase: "Global coal production is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.3% between 2021 and 2025 to reach 8.8 billion…

By that chart it looks like mining coal is quite profitable. On the other hand, if you're generating electricity from coal, high coal prices make generating electricity from coal more expensive, and thus less competitive with nuclear or renewables.

The price represents the intersection of supply and demand. Since supply of coal is steady, the higher price is coming from an increase in demand.

Of course coal purchasers would prefer a lower price, but the fact that the price is high is proof that there is great demand for coal. This does not mean that there is not demand for renewables, either. Both the usage of renewables and the usage of coal is predicted to increase.

See https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49976

Increases in coal-fired generation in Other non-OECD Asia—which includes Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand, among other countries—will account for over 75% of our projected increase in global coal-fired generation from 2030 to 2050. For Other non-OECD Asia, we project that renewable energy sources will account for about 60% of the generation increase over the projection period, primarily from wind and solar. Coal-fired generation will account for nearly all of the remaining growth.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#224

Post by wahern » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

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…

> In Europe, people have no problem building nuclear cheaply and on time.

Not true, unfortunately. The same political dynamics that made nuclear expensive in the U.S. eventually made it expensive in Japan, France and, mostly recently South Korea. None of those countries, which were global leaders during their respective nuclear industry booms, can build nuclear nearly as cheaply as they used to; certainly not domestically, and not even internationally as the absence of continuous construction meant loss of skilled labor and project management expertise. See, e.g., https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-u... (Google other more recent articles that better detail the current state for South Korea.)

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#225

Post by pxi » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

0xy wrote: post #174

pxi wrote: post #170

It's possible to run a large region (almost) entirely from renewable's, here's the proof: https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m But Nuclear could still an excellent option depending on various metrics. I rather see some 'risky' nuclear options being considered before any of the geo-engineering ideas take hold (as they will if we don't get a move on).

South Australia is building brand new gas peaking plants, and the state says further investment in gas is necessary. So it seems this isn't correct. [1] Gas is not renewable, and it's nearly as bad as coal. It's also worth noting their batteries to store renewable energy are not renewable either, not to mention the huge societal impacts on relying on child slavery to prop up your grid (lithium and cobalt mining have…

Interesting... thanks for the links. SAPGen is a private company so what ever they build will need to compete with all that wind and solar. Also did you look at the graph from Tasmania? - too bad they are doing other unrelated environmentally bad things.

For frequency control, it seems like the Tesla batteries now have some competition in the form of synchronous condensers. For storage there seems to be several better alternatives than lithium.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#226

Post by mk81 » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 5:17 AM UTC

Anyone that looks into this unemotionally comes to this conclusion.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#227

Post by rsj_hn » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 5:18 AM UTC

naasking wrote: post #200

rsj_hn wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the above facts are exactly correct. There is a huge financial incentive for storage. Right now. And yet the storage is not being built in any meaningful sense. At best we have "ideas" but these have not been actually deployed at scale. People keep throwing out ideas, but when there is a crunch they fly in diesel generators or add gas peaker plants. That alone should tell you how expensive the storage problem…

This just isn't correct. There are dozens of pilot projects for novel grid storage systems being built right now all around the world, and existing battery based grid storage like Tesla's megapack have multiple installations already in use, and dozens more planned this year. Pumped hydro alone is already in the hundreds of GW range. The reason grid storage hasn't been built is because batteries were too expensive, bu…

me: At best we have "ideas" but these have not been actually deployed at scale.

you: This just isn't correct. There are dozens of pilot projects for novel grid storage

Really not sure what else needs to be said, so this is where I need to disengage.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#228

Post by voldacar » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 5:19 AM UTC

zeptonix wrote: post #25

TheDudeMan wrote: post #9

California is prematurely closing its perfectly good nuclear reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant#Clos...

There have been several leaks and you know, maybe a state with a lot of earthquake activity isn't the best place to put a nuclear reactor.

You are committing the fallacy of the seen and the unseen here.

Nuclear power could be literally 10x as dangerous, and it would still cause far less harm to humans than existing non-nuclear sources of energy, and that's when you ignore the negative effects on the climate from those energy sources.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#229

Post by cinntaile » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 5:23 AM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #209

cinntaile wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What costs aren't being paid for exactly?

The ones that ensure with several 9's that the lights come on 24/7 regardless of time of day or weather. LCOE covers the generator alone, but not transmission lines, idled gas plants, energy storage, smart load balancing, etc. You can keep big gas plants around in a high intermittent grid and fire them up 10% of the time. The way we view LCOE right now, those plants would be insanely expensive while wind/solar would…

LCOE is just an investment tool to figure out where you get the most bang for your buck as an investor. It does not tell us what the best option is for the energy system as a whole.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#230

Post by zarzavat » Sat, Nov 06, 2021, 5:28 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #153

zarzavat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody who is a fan of nuclear power should be against operating them in earthquake zones. Just look at how much Fukushima set back nuclear power.

That was careless lack of protection against flooding. The quake itself didn't threaten containment.

In hindsight Fukushima should not have been operating in a tsunami zone, and in foresight no nuclear power should operate in earthquake zones or next to volcanoes or in general in any place prone to high-energy natural disasters.

The problem with high-energy natural disasters is that you generally don't get a nice upper bound on the energy, rather you get an exponential falloff in probability of a disaster happening of higher and higher energies. So it's basically impossible to guarantee that the plant will survive, you can only make probabilistic arguments. That isn't good enough.