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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

#111

Post by Aachen »

manquer wrote: post #97
Aachen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If mere cost/time predictability were the problem we could double any worst-case projection. Even at that price point it's something I think we should pursue alongside the more renewable sources. That electricity has been dirt(y) cheap in the past decades was great, but that's just not sustainable.

But yeah if we argue for another five years before getting started on at least the legislation/planning stages (after which we could still declare it a sunk cost, based on how the situation looks in 2027), we might as well forget about it.

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

#112

Post by hnarn »

cbmuser wrote: post #59
liketochill wrote: post #5

It is only producing 100 MW of 1600 MW which they should achieve by July. Congratulations to all of the engineers there!

It’s actually been built by SIEMENS/Areva which is ironic because Germany is on the brink on shutting down all of its nuclear power plants.

I'll avoid the tiresome linguistic debate about what qualifies as "irony" and instead point out that sure, while Siemens is a "German" company, giving a multinational corporation a national identity very often does not make sense. Siemens has ~300 000 employees, and while it's one of Germany's biggest employers with ~100 000 employees in the country, that still means two thirds of the company does not work in Germany.

Also, Areva is French and Siemens hasn't held any shares in the company since 2009.

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

#113

Post by fsflover »

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.

https://whatisnuclear.com/non-proliferation.html

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

#114

Post by fsflover »

hackerfromthefu wrote: post #107
iso1631 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extreme cost (money and time) to get it built Difficulties in managing waste 20 years ago I was all for nuclear, then I looked at terrible projects in Europe, like in the Finland and the UK, and realised that it's too little too late. Europe can't build nuclear, so rather than trying to fight a losing battle for another 20 years, Europe should be massively investing in what it can do (offshore wind, tidal, solar, pum…

Plus proliferation of material for nuclear weapons.

https://whatisnuclear.com/non-proliferation.html

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

#115

Post by RobertMiller »

jrockway wrote: post #104
qwytw wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's sarcasm. Maybe North Korea is a better example. It would probably just be "Korea" if they didn't have nukes, but you can't exactly go in and overthrow the government when they can just wipe out all human life on the peninsula in an instant. (People get upset at the implication that one country would take over another country, but the people of North Korea would probably not be worse off if that hap…

> It would probably just be "Korea" if they didn't have nukes

Their first nuclear test was in 2006. Even their production of refined uranium and plutonium only began in the 80s, decades after the war came to a standstill.

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

#116

Post by parksy »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #77
jddil wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a good point, people in Finland use more per capita than 80% of the global population, so if everyone were to have the same energy standards as Finland we'd probably need more like 10k reactors and 600 per year give or take.

Or we stick with the status quo, force everyone into their lane, and probably need like 3000 to 4000 reactors to serve current needs, and 150 to 200 per year. Give or take.

I think that's still in the same ballpark orders of magnitude-wise.

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

#117

Post by skybrian »

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 don't see why it shouldn't be a reason for being hopeful? Admitting ignorance is generally a step in the right direction. No reason to be depressed about it.

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

#118

Post by _svmi »

dry_soup wrote: post #7

Electricity prices are through the roof in Finland right now. This was even the case before the war started. We import an incredible amount of LNG from Russia, a lot of which is used for electricity production if I have it correct, which we would of course like to be independent of. But for the time being we have spikes of 60-70 cents/kWh electricity prices. Hopefully OL3 will help this somewhat. Finland has another…

Couldn't you buy nuclear fuel from e.g. France instead?

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

#119

Post by fsflover »

crote wrote: post #83
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 renewab…

All these arguments are moot, see the research:

https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html

https://whatisnuclear.com/fukushima.html

...etc.

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

#120

Post by pishpash »

Archelaos wrote: post #110
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…

How much more nuclear wast does that imply per decade? How many more meltdowns per decade?

And heat-polluted waste waters? People keep pretending there are no externalities.
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