501–510 of 632 posts
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Renewables are only competitive because you are not pricing in either storage or the cost of building and running fossil fuel plants as backups. Add that in and the equation looks substantially different.
You can run power to gas and then burn the hydrogen and still come out ahead of nuclear plants today. They are completely irrelevant.
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Nuclear won't solve the climate crisis as it's too slow to build.
Wind turbines work on average at 18-30% efficiency in Finland. The nadir efficiency is roughly at 6%. You'd need to build 1300+ 3MW wind turbines to match the average production of Olkiluoto 3, or 7000+ turbines to guarantee the same level of constant output that this plant puts out reliably. We had this "too slow to build" -argument 15 years ago, but no other renewables have delivered. We built 67 new windmills in 2…
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...
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That is why we should immediately replace fossil fuels with renewables right?
Ironically, the evidence to date is that'd probably get more people killed due to energy security issues. The last group who tried to apply that logic in defiance of market forces - the Germans - are currently staring at each other wondering what to do about their reliance on Russian gas. If they'd acted rationally, acknowledged Fukushima and moved on with trying to make their nuclear power cheaper instead letting id…
In France nuke-power is backed by gas (which produced 7.5% of the gridpower in 2020).
The sole reactor currently planned (Flamanville-3) is a complete disaster, more than 12 years behind schedule, it will cost at least 19.4 billion € (initial budget: 3.7 billion €).
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They didn't lose their nuclear capability because they kept maintaining and building reactors instead of decommissioning them. US and to a degree most of Europe did not. China in particular plans to build ~250 new reactors over the next few years, most like new HTG reactors based on the pebble bed technology Germany sold to them when they abandoned their next-gen nuclear plans. Russia has reactor building capabilitie…
This "250" number for China keeps being trotted out, but nobody knows how many of those will actually ever be built or operated. There is anyway not fuel for that many, at present. It would be more honest to cite the much smaller number that have actually broken ground. Nobody knows how many of those will be completed, or how many of those completed will be fueled or operated continuously, or where operated actually…
The source is a Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... ) which states that the boss of Chine General Power corp. announced his plans 200GW for 2035, nothing more. Admitting that it is an official governmental announcement (it doesn't seem so(?)) and given that China already has 50GW, that's maybe 100GW new (way less than 150 standard reactors).
Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), and 1200GW planned for 2030. In 2020 China added 71,6GW windturbine power. Even considering the load factors the picture is pretty clear.
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Finnish market is tied to other Nordics that are tied to central Europe. So it is cascading effect. Main culprit for Nordics really is poor levels of hydro reservoirs. And high prices in Central Europe leading to prices also increasing here.
This is surprising to me, I found this number for Finland: 22.5% comes from hydropower. I suppose I'm stuck associating Tampere, Finland (Nokia) with hydropower as well as the Venmork plant in Norway that was sabotaged during WW2. I realize that doesn't mean much however. I have to do some reading, but my understanding was that the Finnish plant is using an alternate funding structure from many of the existing nuclea…
Simply put, Sweden and Norway share the Scandinavian mountain ridge which gives a lot of rain at altitude and dammable valleys; Finland is on the whole much flatter, so has less favourable conditions for hydro power.
> I have to do some reading, but my understanding was that the Finnish plant is using an alternate funding structure from many of the existing nuclear installations. Less direct subsidies or more risk directly on the commercial entities?
Haven't checked recently, but at a guess / from vague memory: Probably shoving off as much as possible of the financing onto the builder / owner, Rosatom (mainly via its Finnish "partners" / subsidiaries), but in the end backed up by State guarantees because who else would voluntarily/ is big enough. All of course dressed up in more or less convoluted arrangements as suitable to make it look a little better / less bad.
(What, me cynical?)
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Something like this. The project started in 2000, construction began in 2005 and should have been completed in 2010. Original cost was 3 billion euro but landed on over 10 billion euro. It is the first nuclear reactor in Europe for 15 years so not much working experience or available sub contractors. Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. If nuclear energy…
I think this is vastly misunderstood in the (artificial) renewables vs nuclear conversation. We keep building effectively one-off complex machines, and then flushing all that knowledge down the drain by saying it cost too much and took too long. Like yes, the first one always takes longer and costs more...
Yup, exactly: And then there is a huge stink about this and no more are built for a good while, so the next one is a first one again. Over and over and over. Lather, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat...
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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…
District heating and heat pumps can be combined in some clever hybrid ways. 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 generat…
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Something like this. The project started in 2000, construction began in 2005 and should have been completed in 2010. Original cost was 3 billion euro but landed on over 10 billion euro. It is the first nuclear reactor in Europe for 15 years so not much working experience or available sub contractors. Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. If nuclear energy…
> Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. Any insight into the why?
> Any insight into the why?
At least as for China, one gets the feeling (from recent news about COVID-19 hospitals being built in a week, the world's largest dam in a few years, etc) that with a population of over a billion, they do it Pharaonic Egypt pyramid-building style: Throw a few thousand engineers and a few hundred thousand construction workers at anything, and you will get something built.
Finland has no other good source of energy. In Sweden and Norway we have hydro capacity that covers more than 50% of need. Then we can cover the rest with nuclear and a small portion of wind power. In Finland nuclear is the only option. Happy to see it come online.
How can Finland not have more hydro resources, not enough elevation difference? In 2009 hydro power was 15% of their electricity. An old number, but it's not too bad, it's something.
Basically, yes.