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

#221

Post by belorn » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #196

belorn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less radioactive waste than coal power plants, and significant less devastation compared to continuing funding wars by buying gas, oil and coal. Energy generation is always a trade off. Right now the world is reacting to the fossil fuel funded wars created by one such trade off. We are also in the middle of causing irreversible climate change, which would cause more damage than any amount of meltdowns or nuclear wast…

> Less radioactive waste than coal power plants Less radioactive EMISSION during NORMAL OPERATION than coal plants (and I think that ignores radioactivity released in uranium mining). The amount of radioactivity in the spent fuel rods of a nuclear plant is vastly higher than that liberated by a coal plant.

It is estimated that around 1/5 of people living around a coal ash lake has gotten cancer. Thankfully there are no such number for people living near nuclear plants, or around sites of nuclear waste disposal. The amount of people who has died to radiation thanks to coal vastly outnumber the amount of people who has died to nuclear waste. If we including mining, coal mining is a symbol of one of the most dangerous job a person could do, and it has harvested many more souls than uranium mining.

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

#222

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

jdavis703 wrote: post #214

pfdietz wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear reactors could modulate their output, but they would take a grievous economic hit if they do so, because most of their costs are fixed, independent of the power setting.

Certainly this is cheaper than paying people to buy your electricity (as sometimes happens in California because of solar plants).

Since solar panels can go to zero output onto the grid instantly, this is just a matter of improper design (of the equipment, or of the regulatory regime.)

In any case, the cost/kWh from nuclear is computed assuming it's running flat out (except for refueling outages). Reduce that generation and the levelized cost increases. It's already very much higher than renewables; curtailing nuclear output would make that discrepancy worse.

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

#223

Post by ajsnigrutin » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 10:22 PM UTC

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.

Yep!

And let me be provocative (and probably downvoted here)... it also works during windless nights!

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

#224

Post by nitrogen » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #208

pmorici wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatives like coal give off substantially more radioactivity into the environment than a nuclear plant does under normal operations.

That's only if you ignore the radioactivity in uranium mine tailings.

That was already in the environment to begin with.

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

#225

Post by cm2187 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #166

lizardactivist wrote: post #145

Good job Finland. I respect the opinions of the environmentalists and agree with most of what they say, but until we have something more reliable that can put out power 24/7 year round, we need more new, modern nuclear plants.

It doesn't work in every country but renewables with storage can provide 24/7 power. And it's a fraction of the price of nuclear.

Renewables with “magic” storage. Wind can be low for a month for a whole country (cf UK last year). There is no storage technology that can store that much power at scale. What you need is an alternative on demand source of energy, which cost is always omitted when looking at renewable energy cost.

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

#226

Post by woodruffw » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

trulyme wrote: post #183

tuatoru wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> The number of new meltdowns per decade rounds to zero, to five significant figures. That's a weird metric (one meltdown is quite a catastrophe) and the calculation seems suspicious too. Between Chernobile and Fukushima I don't see how this could be correct. I do find your other points more convincing, though with some "citation needed" wrt. coal.

I can't speak to the meltdown statistic, but for coal: just the burning alone is responsible for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths annually[1].

And that's before we consider the environmental and health risks of ash ponds[2], which can (and have caused) heavy metal pollution in nearby groundwater supply. The largest industrial spill in US history happened barely a decade ago, and was an ash pond[3].

Edit: I can personally recommend "The Buffalo Creek Disaster" (ISBN 9780394723433) as a writeup by a lawyer involved in a similar coal ash accident (one that directly killed over 100 people).

[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017936118

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_pond

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

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

#227

Post by Krasnol » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #171

freemint wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See this nuclear positive website that doesn't have an imprint (I can find on mobile). I wouldn't bcall it research either. Summary would probably be fair.

It contains links to the research.

Yeah but only where it fits the narrative which in the question of cost for example leads to this:

1) If markets valued the low-CO2 nature of nuclear, they’d be doing better

2) Multiple hypothetical approaches to reduce nuclear costs are ongoing. No one knows for sure if any of them will work, or which one will work best

3) Factory-produced large reactors on floating platforms is a surprisingly intriguing idea to make reactors cheap

or: 1) make everything else more expensive so we look better

2) let me consult the magic orb because I have nothing in my hands

3) I have a nice idea

Meanwhile we have HERE just another example of hilariously expensive reactor. Actual facts. Waved away with theories like "we don't have the people with experience anymore" which leaves you with the thought: should inexperienced people build nuclear reactors at all?

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

#228

Post by cm2187 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 10:27 PM UTC

jahewson wrote: post #194

threeseed wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work in every country but renewables with storage can provide 24/7 power. And it's a fraction of the price of nuclear.

Outside of pumped hydro, storage is very expensive. Would need something like a 15x reduction in storage costs to be competitive with nuclear.

And where do you build that hydro? I hear some people suggesting Europe using the valleys in Sweden and Norway. Imagine the EU electricity grid at the mercy of one of Putin’s submarines. The rest of Europe doesn’t have many valleys left to flood.

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

#229

Post by pfdietz » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 10:27 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #221

pfdietz wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Less radioactive waste than coal power plants Less radioactive EMISSION during NORMAL OPERATION than coal plants (and I think that ignores radioactivity released in uranium mining). The amount of radioactivity in the spent fuel rods of a nuclear plant is vastly higher than that liberated by a coal plant.

It is estimated that around 1/5 of people living around a coal ash lake has gotten cancer. Thankfully there are no such number for people living near nuclear plants, or around sites of nuclear waste disposal. The amount of people who has died to radiation thanks to coal vastly outnumber the amount of people who has died to nuclear waste. If we including mining, coal mining is a symbol of one of the most dangerous job…

Coal ash is nasty stuff, but that's very likely due to chemical toxicity (things like arsenic, especially in Appalachian coal), not radioactivity.

BTW, your chance of dying from cancer in your lifetime is about 20%, so I'm not sure that the 1/5 figure you gave there means anything.

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

#230

Post by rhn_mk1 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 10:28 PM UTC

krallja wrote: post #220

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it the other way round?

It’s a question of temperature difference. Cooling a house from 40° to 20° uses approximately the same energy as heating it from 0° to 20°. But it gets much colder than 0° C in Finland, while it is very rare to have temperatures above 45° C anywhere in the world.

It's not just that. To make something colder using a heat pump, you must heat up something else by the equivalent amount. Actually more, because of losses.

Whereas making something warmer can be done without a heat pump, by releasing stored chemical energy, at nearly no losses.