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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

#481

Post by natmaka »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #206
vanilla-almond wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How much more nuclear wast does that imply per decade?" The popular YouTube channel The B1M has an interesting video on how Finland is tackling nuclear waste: Finland might have solved nuclear power's biggest problem (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYpiK3W-g_0

Nuclear power's "biggest problem" has been solved for decades. You can put everything in giant metal canisters and sink it into bedrock. It's vastly more expensive than doing nothing, but now that politicians are going to be held accountable for their fuckups they'll allocate the money. And even after all that it's still far less expensive than remediating coal output.

Each and every time someone claims that we can perfectly predict bedrock future for hundreds of thousands years to come I have to remind us that plate tectonics only was admitted by geophysicists during the 1960's.

Hoping to know enough and for sure about all this is... a hope.

Stating that we know what our descendants will need/do in a so distant future is even more funny.

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

#482

Post by pfdietz »

bigbugbag wrote: post #451
throwaway473825 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EPRs are on the high end. This is an understatement. The three largest nuclear power reactors in the world (Taishan 1, Taishan 2 and Olkiluoto 3) are all EPRs.

Taishan 1 has been shut down last summer due to what seems to be a design fault and may not be restarted. It is feared that all other current EPR suffer the same design mistake, but there are currently no plan to stop them.

China is not going to build any more EPRs. They are going with their home grown LWR design.

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

#483

Post by russnes »

maffydub wrote: post #432
russnes wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. 42 million megawatts is 42,000 gigawatts. A quick google search tells me that typical power output of a nuclear power plant is around 1 gigawatt. So a single nuclear power plant would be roughly equivalent to 0.002% of earths geothermal energy radiation. It doesn't sound like much, but for something as crucial as the earth's magnetic field, I wouldn't want to reduce it one bit. I guess if the heat is radiated…

> if we start digging into the core and allowing energy to escape faster, we would effectively speed it up, right? I don't think we're even digging through the crust - there'd still be the mantle (~100x thicker) before we got to the core. In numbers, I believe the deepest borehole is ~12km deep... and the Earth has a radius of >6000km. We're barely scratching the surface.

My concern is fundamentally whether or not we are siphoning energy out of the core faster than it would otherwise escape.

Since the layers are directly connected, it doesn't sound like to me that you'd have to dig into the very core for that to happen.

Of course at the current state of affairs the effects are miniscule, but it doesn't sound like a very good investment as something to potentially scale up in the future to where it will actually matter.

If it turns out to be a problem, how hard would it be to insert fuel back into the earth's core to sustain the magnetic field?

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

#484

Post by pfdietz »

jahewson wrote: post #194
threeseed wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's nonsense.

https://model.energy/

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

#485

Post by HeavyStorm »

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.

It's even worse: most generators transfer mechanical power to electrical energy.

Hydroelectric plants, nuclear reactors, gas and oil plants, all of them depend on mechanical movement.

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

#486

Post by pfdietz »

cipher_system wrote: post #128
epistasis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. When did Japan last build a nuclear reactor? I don't think any time recently. South Korea used to be touted as a success at construction without massive overruns, but it turns out that it was largely a result or corruption and skimping on safety inspections: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/s-korea-jails-nuclear-wor…

Last one was connected in 2009 which isn't that recent but there are also not that many projects of this size. China and Russia might not be the most thrustworthy and I would rather see more more western examples but then we have to go back a couple of decades, most of which were excellent. I agree that a gigantic shift is required and put my hopes into mass produced SMRs. It's gonna take time and money, yes, just li…

> most of which were excellent.

Even in the first nuclear build out in the US, large cost overruns were very common. Forbes magazine was famously critical of this in a 1985 cover article.

There's a reason the US stopped building NPPs back then and it wasn't green mind control.

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

#487

Post by pfdietz »

rectang wrote: post #99
qwytw wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this also sarcasm? So you're saying that building this plant has increase the chance Finland will try to acquire Nuclear weapons? And Russia has nukes purely due to political and military reasons, they'd still have more than enough of them if they mostly started closing/stopped building new plants after Chernobyl.

No, it's not sarcasm — I would appreciate it if you would be a little more generous when interpreting my remark. The proliferation problem is exacerbated incrementally by every additional plant in every additional country — including this one. The issue is not Finland in particular developing nuclear weapons, but any country developing nuclear weapons — especially a country governed by an autocracy. Or a country that…

An interesting example is Japan. Japan has a large reactor grade plutonium stockpile. This was ostensibly for their fast reactor program, but that's dead now. So, the plutonium just sits there. It's not ideal for weapons (being reactor not weapons grade) but it can be made to work, so Japan has the potential capability to make thousands of warheads if they need to.

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

#488

Post by smoe »

justatdotin wrote: post #268
throw0101a wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they have an EOL for a reason...

One of the oldest nuclear power plant in operation worldwide is Beznau in Switzerland, which has been running since 1969. It is currently scheduled to start shutting down in 2030 which will then take 10-15 years. The other plants are scheduled to start that processes in 2040-45. So unlike Germany they are not at a point of no return yet and according to Wikipedia that type of plant could potentially extend their lifespan to 80 years instead of 60.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beznau_Nuclear_Power_Plant

In don't know the situation in all of Europe, but there could be potential to buy us quite of lot of time to really ramp up alternatives.

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

#490

Post by cplusplusfellow »

ncmncm wrote: post #400
Ekaros wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing that we have test plant with geothermal and the depth required is 6,4km even with laser drilling the effectiveness might not be so great.

We will need to wait and see. It might end up cheaper to ship in ammonia synthesized from solar in the tropics. Most likely it will be a combination of several: normally, delivery by transmission line because cheapest, but with geothermal held ready for strategic backup, and stockpiled ammonia for load peaks. Shipping will get cheaper as fuel does, but is already astonishingly cheap.

In what way is shipping fuel expected to get cheaper?

I’m not aware of any significant and serious efforts to replace ships with a green fuel, and they comprise a huge percentage of our emissions.

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