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Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

carnegiescience.edu

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Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#61

Post by fsflover »

bipson wrote: post #38
fsflover wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> countries that have a lot of (really expensive) nuclear to cover their base load, have zero incentive to invest into renewables Nuclear energy is green energy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987

Let's say there are different opinions on that. I won't adopt definitions forced by countries that also want natural gas plants to be categorized as "green" ("who cares what they emit?!")

This is ad hominem. Nuclear doesn't generate the CO2.

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#62

Post by fsflover »

Tepix wrote: post #41
fsflover wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are non-problems: https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html and https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html .

Let's see, quoting from the second page you linked, under " New builds ": Recent new construction of nuclear plants in the west has been fraught with boondoggle. The troubles with the Westinghouse AP1000 have been the most distressing to me personally, since the design was to be the conquering hero of the Nuclear Renaissance I was so excited about in nuclear engineering undergrad back in the mid-2000s. The July 2017…

The reason is cheap coal, not expensiveness of nuclear:

If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#63

Post by lm28469 »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #55
pydry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pumped hydro is "harder to build"? Fengning cost $1.8 billion for 3.6 gigawatts and took about 7 years to build. Hinkley point C will be about $30 billion dollars for 3.2 GW and will take about 10 years to build. Even prima facie I don't see how building a nuclear power plant could seem easy compared to pushing water uphill.

Worth pointing out that pumped storage can store power for months if necessary, but it can generally only supply electricity for several hours before it runs out. Whereas a nuclear powerplant will supply that electricity indefinitely. So if you have a wind lull that lasts several days you may run into issues unless you have a lot of pumped storage.

It's also worth pointing out that to pump water up hill you still need an energy source...

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#64

Post by lm28469 »

LatteLazy wrote: post #26

As always with nuclear the questions are cost, time and waste. Until there is an actual breakthrough on (at least) one of those three issues we're going no where.

This red cube (each side is 16m) represent every nuclear waste generated by france power plants during the last 60 years, it really isn't as hard to process as people make it. It's a problem but not a deal breaker

https://twitter.com/laydgeur/status/1433463215321669633/phot...

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#65

Post by lm28469 »

deusum wrote: post #2

Why is it so hard to grasp: we don't want to trade our toxic carbon byproduct for toxic fission byproduct?

But since we're not 3 years old toddlers and live in reality we still have to make decisions based on real life possibilities and not based on hippy pipe dreams.

> we don't want

We very much want (need) constant/on demand/large scale energy sources and renweables aren't up for that

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#66

Post by lm28469 »

shafyy wrote: post #11
Ekaros wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? It is not so bad deal... Also what other options we have, trade to toxic byproducts of renewables?

Are you seriously comparing the byproducts of creating renewable energy to the byproducts of nuclear energy? If you ask 100 people, 99 will tell you that they rather live next to a solar panel or a silicon extraction mine than next to a nuclear power plant or a uranium mine.

Ask 100 engineers and you'll probably have a different answer...

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#67

Post by danbruc »

glogla wrote: post #34
kieranmaine wrote: post #17

These sentences sum up the article quite well: "Previous studies have shown that curbing 80 percent of carbon emissions can be achieved by ramping up wind and solar power harvesting installations" and "To nail down that last 10 or 20 percent of decarbonization, we need to have more tools in our toolbox, and not just wind and solar," The "more tools" may be nuclear or it may be storage, depending on the cost of both t…

I'm happy that this is getting some attention. There will never he "just renewable" power grid due to renewables intermittency. The realistic options are renewables + some other energy source, or renewables + a lot of storage. Renewables + storage has a problem: energy storage at scale is not a solved problem at all, either it is hard to build (pumped hydro) not scalable (batteries) or barely in PoC stages (various a…

Another option is to overbuild renewable production capacity and transport the power over larger distances. Probably not the most economical solution and I guess almost certainly not able to completely eliminate storage and non-renewable requirements but it probably can narrow the gap.

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#68

Post by pydry »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #55
pydry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pumped hydro is "harder to build"? Fengning cost $1.8 billion for 3.6 gigawatts and took about 7 years to build. Hinkley point C will be about $30 billion dollars for 3.2 GW and will take about 10 years to build. Even prima facie I don't see how building a nuclear power plant could seem easy compared to pushing water uphill.

Worth pointing out that pumped storage can store power for months if necessary, but it can generally only supply electricity for several hours before it runs out. Whereas a nuclear powerplant will supply that electricity indefinitely. So if you have a wind lull that lasts several days you may run into issues unless you have a lot of pumped storage.

Also worth pointing out that

* Newer wind turbines produce power a lot more consistently (being taller).

* There's a huge amount of cheap, low hanging fruit with respect to demand shaping that we've barely scratched the surface of. E.g. aluminium smelters in germany dont particularly care about having a constant source of power they just want cheap. They dial up and down with the spot cost. Smart storage heaters can displace gas heaters. Cars can be programmed to charge when electricity is cheap.

* You dont actually want a source that produces constant power you want supply to match demand.

* Week long lulls in the wind on a contiental level are actually pretty rare (& tend to happen in summer when solar output peaks). Added to which, offshore lulls tend to line up with onshore peaks and vice versa.

* Nuclear power involves taxpayers buying an option out on potential cleanup costs ($800 billion in Japan).

* Non-nuclear renewables get built a lot quicker than nuclear, are not subject to budget/timetable overruns and are likely to continue plunging in price.

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#69

Post by Turing_Machine »

thejackgoode wrote: post #47

I am curious if there is anyone here who can answer this here. What will happen if a fission reactor is blown as a result of warfare (by a bomb or missile)? Is it Chernobyl-grade hazard or not? Also, how strongly does the danger correlate with reactor size?

What happens if, say, the Three Gorges Dam is blown as a result of warfare?

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#70

Post by korantu »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #21
cameldrv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we do want to trade that. The toxic carbon byproduct goes into the air and causes massive disruption to the lives of billions of people. The toxic fission byproduct is tiny and goes underground in the middle of the desert and disrupts zero people's lives.

Chernobyl and Fukushima disrupted more than a few people’s lives.

And still disrupted (dead) lives per energy generated nuclear is one of the safest options. There was hydroelectric fail with 160000 lives lost, and it is not even mentioned when discussing dangers of energy generation.

[0]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

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