261–270 of 632 posts
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.
Luxembourg has 1/7th the population and could run off ONE of these.
The USA has 60x the population so would need about 420 of these?
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Nothing will solve the climate crisis in the time frame it takes to build a nuclear reactor. If you start building now, you get part of the solution in the future.
Finland is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2035. Do you suggest that if we start planning now, we can rely on having new nuclear plants operational in 13 years? Also note that we wouldn't be buying them from Russia because of the current war, and China would be risky in the same way. There's a current project where the only offer was from Russia and that one is being suspended indefinitely right now.
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Nuclear won't solve the climate crisis as it's too slow to build.
Nuclear is slow to build as we dont have much experience to build it. More we will build it, the better we will become in it
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Depends how much area you want to repurpose (note that it includes roads, power lines, and regular tree trimming near those power lines in addition to the turbines themselves), but I'd estimate that with current and projected Finnish population density, this would actually be a realistic option, yes. Now that I think of it, I've never anyone speak of the impact on wildlife, nor seen a wind turbine in a forest (only e…
Forests are a hassle to work in, and add a lot of extra costs. It’s often cheaper and better in many ways to clear the land first if you’re going to do wind there. 1) wind moves faster/freer the higher you are above the ground. the height of the trees moves the ‘ground’ up, without actually moving it up from a foundation or structure perspective. So you spend the money for a 300 ft tower, but only get 200ft of usable…
Now you are just making things up. The bigger and stronger trees are, the more valuable they are as timber. But there is plenty of non-forest land to use, and wind is wholly compatible with mixed use with developed farm and pasture, which is why we see that instead.
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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.
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All these arguments are moot, see the research: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html https://whatisnuclear.com/fukushima.html ...etc.
No the arguments are still the same. We have to build lots of bigger, standardised reactors which will then reduce the cost due to experience and economies of scale. But then of course someone has to subsidise the tens/hundreds of billions in upfront investment to get to that point. Where as with renewables this was all done decades ago. And we are now at the point where it is orders of magnitude cheaper than nuclear…
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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?
Sadly NuScale seems to be struggling to meet timeline and cost targets, and there were some headlines last year about the sponsoring utility pulling out of the project. I'm rooting for them but it doesn't look good.
The RR project is still just on paper really, and is closer to a medium sized reactor than SMR. Maybe they've cracked the code? Maybe not, we'll see.
Every nuclear thread here people chime in with a reflexive "just build nuclear smarter" answer without actually addressing why every prior attempt at this has failed. A lot of people don't want to develop an understanding of the challenges more sophisticated than smugly blaming environmental activists, over regulation, etc.
Look at these projects from the prospective of potential private investment. Anyone doing basic due diligence is going to realize that the odds are stacked against a project hitting it's time and cost goals. Then you look at the trend lines for levelized cost of renewables + storage, and you realize that even in the best case scenario, within 2 decades you may be squeezed out of the market even if the efficiencies of scale and learning kick in.
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Nuclear won't solve the climate crisis as it's too slow to build.
At the very least we should stop shutting down current nuclear power plants. Any newly built renewable generation should be used to retire fossil fuel plants first , and once those are gone then we can consider retiring (current) nuclear.
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1.6GW is a pretty standard install in nuclear. For scale the largest nuclear install Kori is the current largest in operation at 7.4GWe installed capacity[2]. It achieved 74+% capacity last year which is an important point missed when looking at energy _delivered_ to the grid. By contrast US plants achieve much higher capacity factors, with Diablo Canyon in California producing 2.2 GWe at a _lifetime_ operation capac…
1.6 GWe is huge for a single nuclear reactor. EPRs are on the high end. Most nuclear reactors are closer to 1 GWe. Nuclear plants with multiple reactors on a site certainly do often go well above 1.6.
This is an understatement. The three largest nuclear power reactors in the world (Taishan 1, Taishan 2 and Olkiluoto 3) are all EPRs.
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As soon as private industry is funding and running nuclear power including the decommissioning costs, plus selling their energy at market rates (in the UK we have guaranteed the new nuclear plants rates that are higher than the next most expensive generators costs) then I'll believe that. The only way these are remotely economical is when they are funded by the tax payer before the are built, while they run, and afte…
The problem is that markets are supremely bad at building a stable electricity grid. So on one hand wind and solar are getting cheaper per MW, but it doesn't include the effect they have on destabilising both the grid and electricity markets - in fact, solar getting cheaper is probably going to cause a stop on buildout in some places, because the price of solar MW is going to be too low to deal with all the time you'…
Thus far, a renewable euro has been just overwhelmingly better used to build out generating capacity, even where intermittent. The only problems in storage are picking which will be cheapest or otherwise most valuable -- e.g. hydrogen, ammonia, and liquid air are entirely the latter -- and that by waiting, you get more for your euro. Storage cost is plummeting much faster even than solar, and solar is already so cheap that building 2x, 3x, 6x overcapacity is in easy reach.
The cheapest, most efficient present storage is pumped hydro, which can be used in very many places where native hydro generation cannot be, i.e. almost anyplace with hills. But iron-air battery factories are under construction, for very cheap and safe storage, and that will compete with many other alternatives. Each has strengths for certain places, all work, and operating cost is in all cases very small, so building "the wrong one" just means you spent more up front than you maybe had to.
Trotting out the "ooh, storage" argument only demonstrates you don't have one.
