251–260 of 632 posts
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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.
Cooling a house is more energy efficient than warming one
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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.
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It’s not too distant a dream, the Rolls Royce small modular reactor designs have just been submitted for approval: https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/rolls-royce-submits-...
I'm betting they don't get approved.
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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.
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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…
EDF (France) keeps building nuclear reactors around the world. Not sure whether they are the only EU company active in that market, but I doubt it. Either way, some expertise definitely exists in Europe. Germany had spectacular delays and overruns for a new airport for Berlin That too doesn't mean Europe forgot how to build airports.
This is also the nuclear plant (Taishan) that was in the news last year regarding damaged fuel rods.
That's the output from the experts in France so far.
Areva was basically shuttered and written off as a loss during all this. A part of the company only still exists as part of this Finland deal.
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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 lin…
> Accidents in nuclear power plants can have disastrous implications. As in the case if Chernobyl, large areas around the site remain unusable forever What exactly about this do you not buy? And what is your solution for storing nuclear waste safely for hundreds of thousands of years?
"Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from a million years to 30 minutes"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30652334
Obviously this particular idea is still blue-sky but as technology improves, I'd like to think we'll be able to solve problems like this within a few decades.
(although I'm still waiting for my Mr Fusion, Flying Car etc).
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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.
Nuclear can't be shut down / turned on on a short term basis, there is a lot of inertia. It might be a solution for seasonal issues only, but in Germany, there's usually wind during the no-sun season, and sun during the no-wind season.
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What's depressing is that you'd need ten of these giant power plants to power Bitcoin mining. And by the time you finally got those ten $10B plants online, Bitcoin's energy use would have ballooned to some even more absurd number, assuming we do nothing to stop the current trajectory.
You'll need three times more to power all the standby devices in the US, and nobody is doing something as simple as to powering down their tv/console when they stop using it. People don't even unplug their chargers after their phone is charged.
To me, that’s a flaw of the charger if it keeps working when no device is connected.
As for TVs and others, we need to mandate a front-facing power switch, because most TVs/devices don’t have one anymore.
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If those EVs are mainly charging at night, where does the extra peak load come from? Or is this just a case of not being able to shut off as much NG/Hydro generation at night (since nuclear can’t really be turned on and off at will)?
Electrification goes beyond cars. Think of how much fuel they need for heat in Finland. Electrification means replacing that fuel with electricity. And many reactors are able to modulate their output, either by absorbing neutrons to slow the chain reaction, or by letting steam bypass the turbines. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/3-ways-nuclear-more-flexi...
For condos and apartment buildings by far the most common method of heating is district heating (teleheating) [1], and historically this has been very carbon intensive, even though cogeneration of both heat and electricity in one plant is quite efficient (efficiency > 80%; most Finnish thermal power plants are cogen). Fossil fuels and peat are being replaced with more sustainable (mostly wood-based) fuels, but attaining the emission goals requires burning less fuel, period, which means technologies like geothermal boreholes and large-scale heatpump facilities.
SMR nuclear reactors, if they ever become mainstream, would be an excellent source of clean heat and electricity for cities. Current nuclear power plants are located (by design) too far from cities for it to be economical to pipe their waste heat to where it's needed.
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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.
Luckily Putin would never capture a nuclear plant.