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

Post by lazide » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 3:47 PM UTC

russnes wrote: post #483

maffydub wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 futur…

Post by CRConrad » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #395

lazide wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly am I making up? Timberland owners (at least in my experience owning a lot of timberland) need to time market conditions quite a bit to make a profit. If someone is lucky, an offer for the land CAN coincide with good market conditions for the specific timber they have at the state they have it, but that is far from guaranteed. All the species I happen to have a good stock of went crazy high earlier last y…

And it is pointless to talk about when there is no need to build there.

Post by epistasis » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 3:58 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #248

epistasis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason to assume that building the same nuclear reactor design multiple time will maintain the same cost or decrease. Even with the supposedly successful French nuclear program, costs increased over time, there was negative learning: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... There's huge huge risk in choosing a particular design and building even one of it, because we don't know if it…

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…

Post by CRConrad » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 4:08 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #104

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.

I don't think it's sarcasm. Maybe North Korea is a better example. It would probably just be "Korea" if they didn't have nukes, but you can't exactly go in and overthrow the government when they can just wipe out all human life on the peninsula in an instant. (People get upset at the implication that one country would take over another country, but the people of North Korea would probably not be worse off if that hap…

Post by CRConrad » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 4:18 PM UTC

rectang wrote: post #17

roschdal wrote: post #8

Quoted post unavailable.

The possibility seems remote right now and I dislike the inflammatory framing, but I think this touches on one of fundamental drawbacks of nuclear power: it is hard to engineer plants to guard against catastrophe because there's a lot of energy stored in an inherently dangerous form. Hydroelectric power is often similarly vulnerable: you can engineer the dam to hold, but when something outside of tolerances appears,…