461–470 of 632 posts
Comming from a country where nucler power is nowhere near the radar, what is the case against nuclear power? it seems such a nobrainer for me to use
It usually goes like this: Chernobyl! Fukushima! Radiation! Waste! Death! Death!! DEATH TO ALL HUMANITY!!!
Takes decades to build, will be too late for climate change.
Uranium is also a finite resource
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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?
If they'd acted rationally, acknowledged Fukushima and moved on with trying to make their nuclear power cheaper instead letting ideology determine that part of their energy policy then they wouldn't be in the mess they are in. Instead they pushed ahead with renewables, ignored technical problems like reliability and have ended up looking like fools while literally paying a high price for the privilege. France continues to quietly plod away as a reliable European energy success story.
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.
Okiluoto started in 2003 and was supposed to cost 3 Bns and be ready in 2009. it took 18 years instead of 6 and total cost is difficult to know exactly but is over 12 Bns instead of 3.
Building this plant (and the Flamanville one) put into light so many issues at so many levels that I am surprised it was completed and actually works.
Though the previously completed EPRs in Taishan was stopped since last june after gas leaks have been found in the primary circuit and framatome asked the US for help. Current talks point to a design flaw and the possibility of not restarting this EPRs is on the table. If this is confirmed, this flaw could also affect Okiluoto and flamanville EPRs.
With last winter trend of France finding design flaws in its reactors and being forced to stop them for emergency repairs and maintenance[1] (affecting the most recent and most powerful ones too), nuclear plant do not seems like a sound sustainable choice at least when France is involved.
[1]: https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/entreprises/nucleaire-l...
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> 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.
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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…
> whenever there is excess generating ability coming from the grid That would be nighttime.
Some EVs can automatically charge at these times, and sometimes you get discounts for charging at these times, but you can also usually just set a timer on your charger.
https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/elect...
For example the above suggests it's usually nighttime, but weekends and statutory holidays are also good.
As an aside, I wonder how much money an economy could save by having a new "cheap electricity holiday' which chooses one or two days a year that they announce a month in advance as national holidays when an extreme weather event is predicted.
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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…
You can have tiny heat pumps in every home that share a district-wide pipe as a heat source, you can use giant/deep heat pumps to supply the district-wide pipe and you can do both at the same time. And heat pumps can also be used to cool things, returning heat into the system and allowing for big solar gains in windows, since the heat generated can be re-used when it's more than needed rather than wasted.
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I’m hoping all these comments on HN I see that follow the pattern "I was wrong about something important, but rather than admit that, I'm going to believe that the truth is unknowable" are just the first step on someone's journey to accept an unpleasant shock to their ego. It's depressing to think there's a growing army of geeks who have given up on science, rationality and objective reality just because they got suc…
I'm not sure what identity or propaganda or bias I'm part of, so I humbly accept there may be things I don't know I don't know. But maybe if remotely applicable, an optimistic view can be: that some of those geeks, some of the times care about seeing progress happen, rather than the means.
Throwing your hands up and declaring the whole thing unknowable just because (I assume) the expert consensus is coming up with a different answer than you were confidently told and believed about renewables for decades by talking heads in your media bubble seems a weak cop out.
Either prove to everyone that it's a big conspiracy and you were right all along, or convince yourself that what you were told previously was a big conspiracy. One of these options is true.
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See for yourself: https://model.energy/ The area around Finland and Eastern Europe is one of the worst in the world for renewables, though.
Awesome simulation tool, but why is nuclear power absent from the simulation?
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I'm thinking proliferation as positive. Just think of countries recently in war had nuclear deterrent. They might not have been invaded in first place. Everyone having nuclear weapons would make world much more peaceful and safer place. That is unless we sanction all nations that have nuclear weapons and blockade them from international trade until they get rid of them and subject themselves to being open to inspecti…
> Everyone having nuclear weapons would make world much more peaceful and safer place. That's the happy path. The failure path with an unhinged dictator causing global destruction also gets much more likely.
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Your off by orders of magnitude. Nuclear uses vastly more water than solar power per kWh. “Nuclear Energy consuming roughly 400 gallons of water per megawatt-hour, 320 billion gallons of water were consumed by United States nuclear power plant electricity generation in 2015.” And that’s direct consumption in cooling towers, nuclear indirectly uses power in other ways. By comparison the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight pr…
Most of the water used by nuclear is used to run the heat exchangers, and gets dumped straight back into the river it's drawn from. This looks like it's the source you're quoting [1]. It's pretty clear that nuclear power is a tiny fraction of water usage [2]. Furthermore, in water-constrained areas nuclear plants can be cooled with wastewater [3]. And lastly, plenty of nuclear plants are cooled with ocean water, whic…
However, wastewater is just water. Look at a long river and towns upstream dump their wastewater into rivers that towns and cities downstream collect as municipal water.