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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

#141

Post by toast0 »

anonporridge wrote: post #79
retrac wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

If you have datacenters on multiple grids (and applications that are favorable to being moved around), you could direct traffic to where energy was abundant. This is not uncommon for large commercial sites; you can usually get a better rate from the utility if you commit to demand response, and it's not too hard to shift load if you're already doing multi-site for reliability/continuity)

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

#142

Post by rectang »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #127
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.

Russia imperialistic ambitions would be far more modest if Europe and US wouldn't fill Putin's coffers with hundreds of billions of dollars and euros in exchange for oil and gas. You know, the things they use instead of Nuclear energy.

Indeed, we are left with (from my perspective) all bad choices in the short-to-medium term. In the US, we made a least-bad calculation when choosing the environmental cost of fracking over the geopolitical costs of depending on dictator oil. Now Europe gets to make similar calculations.

I'd sure like it if less inherently dangerous technologies were further along. But every year they are gaining.

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

#143

Post by yakubin »

rectang wrote: post #99
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.

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…

The countries which are least trustworthy wrt nuclear weapons are the ones that aren't going to ask the public's permission. An autocracy doesn't need to power itself by nuclear plants in order to have nuclear weapons. On the other hand having a sustainable, clean source of power not tied to autocratic regimes lowers the leverage those regimes hold over democratic countries.

In my particular country, a major chunk of the public budget goes towards paying fines to EU for use of coal, all while our government periodically passes bills allowing it to borrow more money from the central bank, increasing inflation. Negotiations with neighbouring autocratic countries can be pretty tough, when they can threaten us and rest of Europe, which is going to put pressure, with stopping energy transmission. Energy shortages in some parts of the country were a regular occurrence for decades, even before the current political problems.

Lack of nuclear plants does nothing to prevent a nuclear war, while it harms us on many very tangible levels.

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

#144

Post by afterburner »

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…

Even worse, it was meant to be finished in 2009, not 2010.

It took over 4 times as long to built as pitched, and over 3 times as expensive.

Everyone doing comparison calculations with renewables, remember that.

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

#146

Post by afterburner »

cpill wrote: post #124
bobthepanda wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that nuclear is the only one where the first one’s cost is measured in the the tens of billions. Nuclear is just too big for a privatized energy market’s participants.

what happened to the micro nuclear?

You mean the theoretical ones?

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

#147

Post by seanmcdirmid »

pishpash wrote: post #120
Archelaos wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What prevents heated waste water from being used for…heat? Surely Finland uses central heating plants that pump hot water throughout the city (or maybe that’s just a Chinese/Russian thing?). What makes waste heat water less suited to heating, higher entropy?

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

#148

Post by tuatoru »

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?

Everything has downsides, and it has to be compared to the alternatives.

In Finland's case, the realistic alternatives are burning coal or burning Russian gas. (If the Finns dedicated a substantial chunk of their forests to this one generator, they could maybe use biomass.)

Coal kills two orders of magnitude more people per GWh than nuclear--and it does that when operating nominally, not when malfunctioning--and it produces three or four orders of magnitude more waste and more environmental harm from mining.

Russian gas has geopolitical/national security problems.

Biomass is a roundabout way of burning diesel fuel and gas, while degrading and eroding forest soils and polluting watersheds.

The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to five significant figures.

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

#149

Post by Aachen »

legulere wrote: post #93
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...

If only we could have both types of energy source. Cover the gaps in solar/wind with nuclear, cover the gaps in nuclear with solar/wind. Sprinkle a small amount of pumped hydro and battery storage on top and what a world it could be.

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

#150

Post by afterburner »

trenchgun wrote: post #92
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…

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.

They're going to be recouping their costs somehow, I doubt Finnish customers are done paying.
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