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

reuters.com

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

#81

Post by exdsq »

f_allwein wrote: post #43

Handy reference on why nuclear power might not be such a good idea as some people think: https://www.wien.gv.at/english/environment/ombuds-office/arg...

> Nuclear waste from power stations can be used as raw materials for nuclear weapons.

I imagine it's almost impossible to manufacture nuclear weapons 'quietly' with waste and sanctions/agreements stop this happening, while countries that go against these are able to manufacture nuclear weapons anyway (North Korea). So I don't think this is as big a risk as suggested.

The rest seem solvable by focusing on better secure designs and then moving from Uranium to another source. I don't know the difficulty of this but I can't imagine it's insurmountable?

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

#82

Post by Aachen »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #52
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

It usually goes like this: Chernobyl! Fukushima! Radiation! Waste! Death! Death!! DEATH TO ALL HUMANITY!!!

And if you manage to convince someone this is an airplane crash type of problem, they start about the finances.

And they're right about it not being the cheapest option, so what can you say? They win the argument.

Next time you meet the person is at a protest where they don't want a solar farm where there is now a nice forest or pasture, no 24/7 moving shadows from huge wind turbine blades and that's after they pushed for a law to require more space between the edge of town and the nearest turbine, protesting for fish rights when hydro is being proposed (if that's possible in their area in the first place)...

People also love to gloss over that electricity is 10% of the problem. Whenever you see a headline about Germany having run on 90% renewable power last month or whatever, mentally replace that with 9% because energy used in transportation, building heating, etc. don't count towards this. And then we haven't even touched upon the problem of cement/steel/plastic yet, we're going to need breakthrough materials or negative emissions with capturing plants that, you guessed it, also require electricity.

It's apparently very hard to understand that we need to work on all fronts, not pick a partial solution and wait until that's exhaustively implemented (all reasonably available space occupied) 15 years down the road, then wonder why emissions are at record highs (see 2021).

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

#83

Post by crote »

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

- Time. This one took over a decade and a half to build, and that's pretty normal

- Cost. Literally billions of dollars, all upfront. This one was budgeted at $3B and ended up costing $10B+.

- Inflexibility. Almost all of the cost is in building one, so if you aren't running it basically 100% of the time at 100% capacity you are losing money.

When it comes to $/MWh, nuclear simply can't compete with fossil or renewable when demand is low. And you can't run it to pick up high demand because it gets even more expensive. The private market is simply not interested in them, unless they get a government guarantee that forces their production to be bought at a fixed price.

And there's of course the whole safety and waste argument, but I consider that to be secondary. All in all, nuclear is a could-have-been and mostly a side-effect of nuclear arms development. Neat technology, but there are way better options.

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

#84

Post by sandworm101 »

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.

It is more than 14%. It looks like this plant, all three reactors together, might eventually cover a third of Finland's needs. But those are 2020 numbers. Increased electrification, especially EVs and moves away from gas, will probably reduce that percentage. In that context, the third reactor is only incrementally more powerful than those already running at the facility.

"The Olkiluoto plant consists of two boiling water reactors (BWRs), each producing 890 MW of electricity, together comprising 22% of the country's electricity generation for 2020.[1] A third reactor, Unit 3, is expected to be online in January 2022, and at 1,600 MW, will by itself satisfy 14% of the country's electricity demand."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant

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

#85

Post by _n_b_ »

akiselev wrote: post #74
londons_explore wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Most reactor downtime is actually for maintenance during refueling windows. As I mentioned in another comment, there is experience doing refuelling-only outages in <10 days. If everything goes well, you can startup a PWR from cold shutdown to hot full power in 3 12 hour shifts

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

#86

Post by throwaway894345 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #84
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.

It is more than 14%. It looks like this plant, all three reactors together, might eventually cover a third of Finland's needs. But those are 2020 numbers. Increased electrification, especially EVs and moves away from gas, will probably reduce that percentage. In that context, the third reactor is only incrementally more powerful than those already running at the facility. "The Olkiluoto plant consists of two boiling…

Does that suggest that one plant will satisfy 36% of the country's electricity demand?

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

#87

Post by brianwawok »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #86
sandworm101 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more than 14%. It looks like this plant, all three reactors together, might eventually cover a third of Finland's needs. But those are 2020 numbers. Increased electrification, especially EVs and moves away from gas, will probably reduce that percentage. In that context, the third reactor is only incrementally more powerful than those already running at the facility. "The Olkiluoto plant consists of two boiling…

Does that suggest that one plant will satisfy 36% of the country's electricity demand?

Finland has 5 million people. I am pretty sure there are existing plants in the world that could satisfy the entire country if moved to Finland. There are 10ish dams that produce over 10k MW

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

#88

Post by qwytw »

rectang wrote: post #63
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It usually goes like this: Chernobyl! Fukushima! Radiation! Waste! Death! Death!! DEATH TO ALL HUMANITY!!!

You left out proliferation of dual-use technologies. The fewer countries with advanced nuclear capabilities, the more thinly spread the expertise necessary to build nuclear weapons. If Russia didn't have nukes, its imperialistic ambitious would be curtailed. The ability to shield conventional assaults behind a nuclear threat is destabilizing for the rules-based world order.

Is this also sarcasm? So you're saying that building this plant has increase the chance Finland will try to acquire Nuclear weapons? And Russia has nukes purely due to political and military reasons, they'd still have more than enough of them if they mostly started closing/stopped building new plants after Chernobyl.

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

#89

Post by T-A »

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…

> assuming everyone uses the same amount of power globally as the average person in Finland which - why shouldn't they be able to

Finland's climate is an outlier:

One-third of energy consumption in housing was electricity in 2018. [...] 47% of electricity was used to heat indoor areas and 36% to household appliances. The remainder of electricity was used to heat domestic water and saunas.

https://www.thenomadtoday.com/articulo/finland/energy-consum...

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

#90

Post by xyzzyz »

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.

It’s not that extraordinary. For example, one power plant in Poland provides 20% of all electricity consumed in Poland. Sadly, it’s a coal plant, one of the biggest in the world. It also burns lignite, which makes it even worse.
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