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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

#91

Post by kevinak »

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.

…or maybe a censorship resistant peer 2 peer cash that could also subsidise these plants

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

#92

Post by trenchgun »

cipher_system wrote: post #29
loufe wrote: post #4

What I find shockingly absent in this article is any commentary on budget and cost overruns. I'm definitely not anti-nuclear but it stands to reason that a comparison vs other forms of energy would've been wise to consider.

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…

The Finnish customer paid 5,5 billion euros price for it.

Rest was covered by Areva, since the cost overruns were of their own failure.

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

#93

Post by legulere »

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.

If you have 7 of these and you find a flaw in its design you have to take down the power for the entire country. Something similar happened in France recently: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/saf...

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

#94

Post by parksy »

T-A wrote: post #89
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…

> 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.co…

Here in Perth a good third or more of my electricity is keeping the house cool so some of that is going to average out. We don't have saunas but we do have hot water.

There's going to be an obvious error of margin either side of my napkin calculations but I think the order of magnitude is in the ballpark.

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

#95

Post by sandworm101 »

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 is an entire country, but it also has a population smaller than Toronto or Dallas.

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

#96

Post by Aachen »

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...

When an article starts with chernobyl as example of what mistakes we're likely to make when building a new plant today, it makes me itch to just close the tab and dismiss the opinion of the person who linked it.

Not sure why I even bothered digging into it, but for example one later point is also misleading: "uranium resources will be depleted by the end of this century".

I think I found the source (not that they link it, that would be too easy, but by ducking around for this number):

> the total identified amount of conventional uranium stock, which can be mined for less than USD 130 per kg, [was found] to be about 4.7 million tonnes. Based on the 2004 nuclear electricity generation rate of demand the amount is sufficient for 85 years, the study states. Fast reactor technology would lengthen this period to over 2500 years.

> However, world uranium resources in total are considered to be much higher. Based on geological evidence and knowledge of uranium in phosphates the study considers more than 35 million tonnes is available for exploitation.

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/global-uranium-resource...

I'm not sure how the "city of vienna" can read this and summarize it down to say that we'll plainly run out of uranium by 2100. That's just not what the source says. Maybe that's what makes this "reference" "handy" for people with a certain preexisting opinion?

The same bullet point continues with some other interesting claims, let alone the rest of the page, but let me quickly close that tab before I feel inclined to go down more of these rabbit holes...

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

#97

Post by manquer »

Aachen wrote: post #82
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pushe…

It is less about being cheap and more about being predictable.

Getting consistent funding for new projects is hard when every other project in history has over run both costs and time widely.

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

#98

Post by hackerfromthefu »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #61
rdsubhas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have completely screwed up market price discovery for energy with big govt involvement and subsidies. The numbers I see everywhere are cherry picked to present a winner and loser. e.g. Depending on whose point of view you read, solar/wind prices either includes or not: subsidies, storage, land, weather, green label costs passed on to customers, interest rates, etc. Coal prices either includes or not: labor, import…

I’m hoping all these comments on HN I see that follow the pattern "I was wrong about something important, but rather than admit that, I'm going to believe that the truth is unknowable" are just the first step on someone's journey to accept an unpleasant shock to their ego. It's depressing to think there's a growing army of geeks who have given up on science, rationality and objective reality just because they got suc…

I think the issue is not the geeks grasp of science and objectivity, but the cultures democratization of the talking space to include vast numbers on un-rational and subjective thinkers on equal status with educated and more objective thinkers.

Politics and the funding of state actions seems to be enacted highly subjectively according to power plays and vested interests, with minimal impact from rational geeks.

This is the defining issue of our times in my opinion, the reason climate change is the barely mitigated disaster it's turning into.

We only get a small fraction of the possible benefits of science as a race, because so much of our potential is wasted or actively worked against.

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

#99

Post by rectang »

qwytw wrote: post #88
rectang wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it's not sarcasm — I would appreciate it if you would be a little more generous when interpreting my remark. The proliferation problem is exacerbated incrementally by every additional plant in every additional country — including this one. The issue is not Finland in particular developing nuclear weapons, but any country developing nuclear weapons — especially a country governed by an autocracy. Or a country that might be governed by an autocracy in the future — the last few years have raised the urgency of the problem of democratic backsliding, which we need to figure out how to avert.

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

#100

Post by hackerfromthefu »

yakubin wrote: post #30
8ytecoder wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Energy independence is a cost that’s not factored in. (Then again, solar/wind could serve both factors well)

> solar/wind could serve both factors well Not 24/7.

Sure, but let's build 150% of total needed capacity as renewables, and burn coal for the 5 days a year we still need to.
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