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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

#271

Post by justatdotin »

hackerfromthefu wrote: post #102
thfuran wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the uranium mines?

I think Australia has plenty. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

not many left operating.

still cleaning up mess at ranger (which has impacted on a dual-listed world heritage national park) and rum jungle (there's a class action of the few surviving workers + their families whose cohort have suffered cancers)

notably still operating is olympic dam, where the huge volumes of radioactive tailings literally spill out on the surrounding land, representing an entirely unmanaged environmental hazard.

uranium mining is unclean unsafe and unwanted

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

#272

Post by phatfish »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #182
pavlov wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seems like there are two colossal wastes of energy that need to be fixed.

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

#273

Post by anonporridge »

pavlov wrote: post #133
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.

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.

Bitcoin's energy use can't balloon arbitrarily large. It's tightly constrained by the miner reward, which is getting cut in half every four years (the non fee part, which is currently less than 2% of the total reward).

Energy wasted by natural gas flaring is 5.5x more energy than bitcoin consumes. Renewable energy curtailment in China alone (turning generation off because we can't consume it fast enough) is almost enough energy on its own to power all bitcoin miners. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons

It's perfectly fine to have a negative opinion of bitcoin and proof of work, but you're wasting political capital in the fight against climate change when there are much bigger fish to fry against wasteful uses of energy that don't have an army of people, businesses, and even nation states (El Salvador) gearing up to fight you to defend their money.

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

#274

Post by seanmcdirmid »

arcticbull wrote: post #237
pfdietz wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disc…

Sounds like we could solve this problem for for nuclear the same way we look to solve problems for renewables: storage.

Isn’t that what the EVs could be? There is also pumped storage, but it requires lots of land, water, and elevation differences (the latter I assume being the issue in Finland).

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

#275

Post by tuukkah »

Aachen wrote: post #202
lazide wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably isn’t, which is why you don’t see it happen much I imagine. If the only land they have is trees, it does restrict the options quite a bit. I also forgot to mention, in most climates trees are a hassle this way, they also grow naturally, so even if you clear the land you need to go back and keep it clear every couple years. Solar has similar drawbacks but worse - you can’t just clear the trees around where…

> If the only land they have is trees, it does restrict the options quite a bit. Just to make sure, did you see the edit of my comment above? I checked out the land cover in Finland, it is actually a fairly high percentage trees and I did some math on putting wind in the other places. Now that I'm writing this I realized a major flaw: not looking at https://globalwindatlas.info earlier. It turns out that Finland look…

The forests are not a big issue for wind in Finland nowadays, you just build towers that are high enough. The biggest problem is the long Russian border. You cannot build a wind farm where it would hide Russian movements from the Finnish radars.

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

#276

Post by acchow »

tuukkah wrote: post #234
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

13 years? Korea has built plenty of reactors in 5 years

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

#277

Post by zucker42 »

tuukkah wrote: post #198
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.

Nuclear won't solve the climate crisis as it's too slow to build.

In 7.5 years (mean time for construction of a nuclear power plant), there will still be oil, gas, and even coal plants in operation in many countries. Nuclear capacity is clearly not useless.

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

#278

Post by belorn »

woodruffw wrote: post #235
pfdietz wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think they were saying that the radioactivity is causing the cancer in those 1/5 people. I read it as two separate points: coal plants simultaneously emit more radiation than nuclear plants, and coal plants cause more cancer via the other chemicals and rare earth elements they emit.

Yes. one of those other chemicals is arsenic which has a tendency to end up in peoples drinking water.

There is a place in the US that has a rather peculiar name of Cancer Alley. It is not a nuclear testing area, nuclear waste deposit area or area for nuclear plants. It is an area know for its petrochemical plants. It illustrate quite well the difference of nuclear waste that people are scared of, and fossil fuel waste that people accept as just normal part of life.

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

#279

Post by Manuel_D »

parksy wrote: post #55
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.

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…

Right. But remember, not all forms of green energy generation are equal. Wind and solar need some dispatchable source as a backup. Hydro works, if you have it. But it's geographically limited. Gas is the typical backup source, but that emits carbon.

Nuclear, as it stands, is the only solution to decarbonizing the energy grid for much of the world. Until some breakthrough in energy storage transpires, or fusion becomes feasible, fission plants remain necessary for decarbonization.

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

#280

Post by kzrdude »

anonporridge wrote: post #273
pavlov wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bitcoin's energy use can't balloon arbitrarily large. It's tightly constrained by the miner reward, which is getting cut in half every four years (the non fee part, which is currently less than 2% of the total reward). Energy wasted by natural gas flaring is 5.5x more energy than bitcoin consumes. Renewable energy curtailment in China alone (turning generation off because we can't consume it fast enough) is almost en…

> It's tightly constrained by the miner reward

reward in a currency for which you buy the energy. This takes into account the current btc/eur price in finland, if that's where you buy the energy, and that's not guaranteed to halve either.

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