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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

#441

Post by DeathArrow »

Sharlin wrote: post #259
at_compile_time wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

We (Finland) are probably not going to move towards electric heating to any significant degree. Currently direct (resistive) electric is already the most common means of heating in single-family homes and other low-density residential buildings. Heat pumps are fortunately becoming popular especially in new development, and with them a significant reduction of electricity use compared to direct electric. For condos an…

>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.

I don't believe that waste heat is plenty. Here, in Romania, we use the waste heat from the nuclear power plant as district heating but that is enough for a small town near it.

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

#442

Post by ciphol »

robertlagrant wrote: post #424
dghlsakjg wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do EVs mostly be charged at night? We have electricity run to almost everywhere there is a road, and every building that we spend any significant amount of time in. We can charge at work or on the street during the day. Basically anywhere a car is stationary. With the right incentives and infrastructure we can shift electric vehicle charging to daytime, or whenever there is excess generating ability coming from t…

> Why do EVs mostly be charged at night? Because most people don't drive at night.

Most people don't drive all day long either. They drive half an hour at a time several times a day, going to work or school or the mall and back. The remaining ~22 hours a day are available for charging.

If a country has abundant solar power (probably not Finland!) it would make more sense to wire up workplace parking lots so that EVs could absorb the excess midday electricity.

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

#443

Post by realusername »

afterburner wrote: post #154
realusername wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You start to understand the issue of comparing the raw cost of kWh of renewables to stable energy like nuclear, if you have to build N times the capacity, the cost per kWh is just N times more expensive.

But unlike nuclear, solar/wind is constantly getting cheaper. Nuclear is, frankly, doing the opposite.

Doesn't matter if you can't build a grid with only those and still need gas or nuclear aside. The real cost of renewable in a functioning grid is probably 5 times higher of what's advertised when including externalities.

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

#444

Post by ciphol »

Gwypaas wrote: post #388
roenxi wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The negative learning rate is a strong signal of interference by the regulators. More than anything else it shows how excessive safety regulations are strangled the industry. 1970s nuclear safety standards, despite it all, were still better than the energy strategy the world adopted from 1970-2020. Killing off nuclear in search of a perfect power system was a stupid strategy, and failed. The only unfortunate point of…

And Fukushima would never happened if you were smart about it. Regulations are written in blog.

Fukushima has killed only a handful of people. Fossil fuels kill hundreds of thousands of people every year.

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

#446

Post by legulere »

krzyk wrote: post #430
sandworm101 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more than 14%. It looks like this plant, all three reactors together, might eventually cover a third of Finland's needs. But those are 2020 numbers. Increased electrification, especially EVs and moves away from gas, will probably reduce that percentage. In that context, the third reactor is only incrementally more powerful than those already running at the facility. "The Olkiluoto plant consists of two boiling…

> boiling water reactors It amazes me that we are still using steam power (mostly 18th and 19t century discovery AFAIR) in such advanced systems.

What is so advanced about it? We’ve had pressurized water reactors since the 50s

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

#447

Post by rndgermandude »

Manuel_D wrote: post #406
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…

Granted, the cost for solar and wind fail to account for the cost of storage to accommodate their intermittency. If your country has hydroelectric dams, then that works. But for the rest that don't have the right geography for hydro, they burn fossil fuels. Nuclear provides a path for decarbonization. Solar and wind do not, until a massive breakthrough in energy storage is invented. And nobody knows when that will ha…

We don't need massive breakthroughs in energy storage. And the goal is overall carbon-neutral, not carbon-zero. And other than wind and solar, we also have hydro and geo-thermal. The latter might become a very important part of the mix, as it would be relatively easy to securely and relatively cheaply deploy a lot of small scale heat pump power plants, requiring fewer massive power line installations, with the added benefit that geo-thermal basically works independent from the time of the day and weather conditions.

As for storage, one way to "store" energy is hydrogen, which we can then burn as needed. We can probably get the efficiency of that to 70% (for hydrogen-burning larger-scale power plants).

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is another existing option, with an efficiency of about 70-80%.

It's also OK to have some carbon emissions if you can manage to have other measures neutralizing that. We can e.g. use renewable biofuels (e.g. wood, biomass from algae or crops) which "use" a lot of carbon while growing to remove a lot of the emissions the power plants produce, and can with filter technology remove the rest to a degree where we'd still be neutral overall.

As I see it, we already got all the basic building blocks, and now it's a matter of optimizing them further and further, and more importantly figuring out the development and deployment (including financing, investment incentives, etc) and logistics (building the additional power lines required is a massive, politically-charged, often NIMBY-kind challenge here in Germany, and from what I hear in a lot of other places including the US too).

The deployment and logistics is a general problem of electrification, even with nuclear. People want to plug in their EVs near where they live, and want heat in their homes, so you either need additional power lines or (smaller scale) power plants close to people and industry, either way.

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

#448

Post by clusterfish »

chmod775 wrote: post #408
clusterfish wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coal and gas sure, but renewables are obviously dependent on weather. Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can". When there is significant oversupply of energy from solar, it gets sold for pennies on the dollar to neighbouring regions, and when the sun doesn't shine, you're sol.

>Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can" Energy prices can be negative when there's not enough load but too much supply. Not every power source can be just switched off.

That's not what this is about. Negative electricity prices are rare, and do not account for the massive difference in utilization between renewables and nuclear. By the way nuclear power output can be ramped up and down by a lot, and in a matter of minutes in case of unplanned problems, even if it can't (really shouldn't) go to dead zero.

The person I responded to claimed that nuclear plants run at close to 100% because they bid low because the marginal cost of their electricity production is low, but the same is true for renewables like wind and solar. Yet these renewables run at much lower utilization rates - because of weather and daylight cycle, not "because they can", except in rare cases of negative prices as you mentioned.

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

#449

Post by Gwypaas »

ciphol wrote: post #444
Gwypaas wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Fukushima would never happened if you were smart about it. Regulations are written in blog.

Fukushima has killed only a handful of people. Fossil fuels kill hundreds of thousands of people every year.

That is why we should immediately replace fossil fuels with renewables right?

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

#450

Post by mrlonglong »

Ciantic wrote: post #298
mrlonglong wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're doing it a lot better though. Progress has been good.

As someone else pointed out, we aren't doing enough of these to iron out the kinks. If it's literally copy it might be going much better just because it's second. Now we should figure out where to build third! It should go even better.

A decision will be made soon on building Sizewell C. Again, this will be the same as Hinckley C.

It should be noted that Hinckley C is penciled in to start operations in 2026. Hopefully if they give Sizewell the go ahead this year it will be in service 2031.

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