Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market • Hacker News Board

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#71

Post by YetAnotherNick » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:51 PM UTC

parksy wrote: post #55

rdsubhas wrote: post #27

What I find incredible is: Once this fully ramps up, this one power plant is expected to satisfy 14% of the entire country's electricity needs. 7 of these could power an entire country, 24/7.

By population that's one reactor of this scale per million people. To replace all other sources of electricity, 8 thousand such reactors would feed the current world's population. We'd need just shy of 500 more to keep up with population growth by 2030 - or at least 500 new reactors globally per decade. (edit - assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shoul…

No post body was provided.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#72

Post by cipher_system » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:52 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #58

firekvz wrote: post #48

Comming from a country where nucler power is nowhere near the radar, what is the case against nuclear power? it seems such a nobrainer for me to use

* Plants are very expensive to build. Due to massive upfront costs, it cannot beat wind/solar today unless you use very unusual financial models. (ie. assume interest rates are zero for 50 years). If nuclear plants were built more frequently, cost would come down a lot - it turns out making everything bespoke is hugely expensive. * Lots of public opposition due to the public being scared of nuclear waste, nuclear acc…

Keep in mind that Finland is on the same latitudes as Alaska so solar doesn't work that great when needed the most.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#73

Post by jddil » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #71

parksy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By population that's one reactor of this scale per million people. To replace all other sources of electricity, 8 thousand such reactors would feed the current world's population. We'd need just shy of 500 more to keep up with population growth by 2030 - or at least 500 new reactors globally per decade. (edit - assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shoul…

Quoted post unavailable.

Next time start by not writing a comment that doesn't add value and is against HN rules. What in particular is wrong about their analysis?

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#74

Post by akiselev » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #49

LatteLazy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the average. But you'd need a few more for peak demand and a few more for when these are offline for maintenance, refuelling etc.

I suspect in today's world of maximizing capital efficiency, and being able to contract in large numbers of people, the very expensive power plant won't be offline for long for maintenance. They'll probably shut the plant down, and have 500 workers come in to replace everything that needs to be replaced, and then power it up again within a few days, and let it run for another 6 months or so. Everything will be planne…

Most reactor downtime is due to refueling, since that requires cooling down the core through several stages. AFAIK it's not practical to do it safely and economically in under a few weeks.

Most reactor maintenance is already done during refueling so there isn't much more room to optimize that downtime. (though that may change the older a reactor gets)

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#75

Post by retrac » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

anonporridge wrote: post #65

LatteLazy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the average. But you'd need a few more for peak demand and a few more for when these are offline for maintenance, refuelling etc.

Ideally, you overbuild and have some flexible consumer of electricity that can arbitrarily ramp consumption up or down to suck off any excess supply whenever inflexible basal civilization demand doesn't match supply, e.g. ramp up when everyone is asleep and ramp down if a reactor needs to go offline. This is called demand response, https://www.energy.gov/oe/activities/technology-development/... , and it's probably as…

Right. A useful sink for surplus energy could be something like surplus heat or electricity to synthesize carbon-neutral fuels. We're not likely to get large electric aircraft anytime soon.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#76

Post by ljf » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #56

firekvz wrote: post #48

Comming from a country where nucler power is nowhere near the radar, what is the case against nuclear power? it seems such a nobrainer for me to use

Fear based on feeling, not on facts. That's it. By any objective metric, nuclear is by far the best choice for stable base power generation. "But what if it explodes" - and there goes all rationality. Humans will take constant death from coal power plants rather than a minuscule chance of a larger catastrophe in a nuclear plant.

As soon as private industry is funding and running nuclear power including the decommissioning costs, plus selling their energy at market rates (in the UK we have guaranteed the new nuclear plants rates that are higher than the next most expensive generators costs) then I'll believe that.

The only way these are remotely economical is when they are funded by the tax payer before the are built, while they run, and after they close down.

Any examples that goes against that? I'd be very interested to learn about them. I think as a way to ensure energy independence and remove fossil fuels they are good, but we cannot pretend they don't come with massive costs, and don't yet pay their own way.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#77

Post by Octoth0rpe » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:57 PM UTC

jddil wrote: post #73

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Next time start by not writing a comment that doesn't add value and is against HN rules. What in particular is wrong about their analysis?

For one, it assumes the average human consumes as much electricity as the average Finn.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#78

Post by epistasis » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:58 PM UTC

Godel_unicode wrote: post #37

cipher_system wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like this. The project started in 2000, construction began in 2005 and should have been completed in 2010. Original cost was 3 billion euro but landed on over 10 billion euro. It is the first nuclear reactor in Europe for 15 years so not much working experience or available sub contractors. Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. If nuclear energy…

I think this is vastly misunderstood in the (artificial) renewables vs nuclear conversation. We keep building effectively one-off complex machines, and then flushing all that knowledge down the drain by saying it cost too much and took too long. Like yes, the first one always takes longer and costs more...

There's no reason to assume that building the same nuclear reactor design multiple time will maintain the same cost or decrease. Even with the supposedly successful French nuclear program, costs increased over time, there was negative learning:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

There's huge huge risk in choosing a particular design and building even one of it, because we don't know if it will be constructible the first time, and we don't know if future builds of the first design will be more or less expensive.

When each build is a $10B roll of the dice with variance of 2-3x of initial estimates, it's a bit difficult to find rational financial backers. Especially when there's not that much profit to be had from even a successful build. The risk reward is completely out of whack compared to the other options for carbon neutral energy.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#79

Post by anonporridge » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

retrac wrote: post #75

anonporridge wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally, you overbuild and have some flexible consumer of electricity that can arbitrarily ramp consumption up or down to suck off any excess supply whenever inflexible basal civilization demand doesn't match supply, e.g. ramp up when everyone is asleep and ramp down if a reactor needs to go offline. This is called demand response, https://www.energy.gov/oe/activities/technology-development/... , and it's probably as…

Right. A useful sink for surplus energy could be something like surplus heat or electricity to synthesize carbon-neutral fuels. We're not likely to get large electric aircraft anytime soon.

Electric aircraft doesn't really strike me as this kind of customer. Aircraft has relatively inflexible fueling demands based on customer demand that is reserved weeks ahead of time.

Bitcoin mining is commonly promoted as this kind of ideal electricity consumer. Hydrogen production could be another.

However, I think more interesting for this community would be to build some kind of demand response general computing datacenter. Basically, sell computing resources with poor availability guarantees, but at a cheaper rate than standard datacenters.

i.e. we'll run your batch jobs very cheaply, but we can't give you strong guarantees about how long it will take because we have to wait for excess grid electricity to have the energy to run them. Best case that's every night. Worst case we won't be able to run anything for weeks because Texas is going through another freak winter storm.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#80

Post by _n_b_ » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #49

LatteLazy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the average. But you'd need a few more for peak demand and a few more for when these are offline for maintenance, refuelling etc.

I suspect in today's world of maximizing capital efficiency, and being able to contract in large numbers of people, the very expensive power plant won't be offline for long for maintenance. They'll probably shut the plant down, and have 500 workers come in to replace everything that needs to be replaced, and then power it up again within a few days, and let it run for another 6 months or so. Everything will be planne…

That is exactly how nuclear outages work. Everything is planned in a resource-loaded schedule and many of those resources are just there for the outage.

Finland is actually somewhat known for running short (1 year) cycles with very very short (Capacity factor for nuclear plants in the US is consistently around 93% (similar figures in many other countries as well), which is significantly higher than other generation sources.