Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 632 posts

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

#561

Post by ncmncm »

pfdietz wrote: post #477
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that what the EVs could be? There is also pumped storage, but it requires lots of land, water, and elevation differences (the latter I assume being the issue in Finland).

Pumped storage needs a lot of water to start but can then just cycle the water between reservoirs. Some will be lost by evaporation, but that loss isn't that high. I once compared a proposed pumped hydro system in Arizona near Phoenix vs. the water evaporated by the Palos Verde nuclear generating station. Per unit of levelized power output, the pumped hydro system used at least an order of magnitude less water than t…

That analysis ignores the prospect of siting a solar array floating on the reservoir, with benefits of reduced evaporation and cooler, more efficient conversion, an opportunity unlikely to be long neglected.

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

#562

Post by ncmncm »

robertlagrant wrote: post #464
ciphol wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but at night the car will probably be in place for, say, 10 hours, every night. Not faffing jumping between places and trying to find a public charging point. Even just driving to work and charging there is say 6 hours of continuous charging. The main block of time will still be at night.

Also: people who live in apartments will generally find it easier to find a place to charge at work.

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

#563

Post by ncmncm »

tsimionescu wrote: post #433
krzyk wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The funny thing is even fusion plants would produce energy by turning a steam turbine.

Not useful ones.

Predicting here there will be no fusion plants that drive steam turbines, ever. (Unless General Fusion's system turns out to work.)

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

#564

Post by ncmncm »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #485
krzyk wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Mechanical power is usually taken to imply a gear, belt, chain or other lossy linkage. Just rotating a shaft is lossless, and should not count.

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

#565

Post by ncmncm »

Manuel_D wrote: post #523
natmaka wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even nuclear needs fossil-fuel backup, as building enough reactors to cope with peak demand would be way, way too expensive. Even a massively-nuclearized France produces 7% to 12% of its gridpower thanks to fossil-fuel plants. French official historical data: https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/editi...

Nuclear plants can modulate power by more aggressively cooling the reactor. They don't do this because it's effectively wasting nuclear energy, but it can be done.

It can be done, but amounts to decreased utilization, and even greater relative incremental cost, because actual operating cost is the same either way. With nukes already the highest-cost choice, intermittent demand makes them even more impractical.

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

#566

Post by Manuel_D »

ncmncm wrote: post #557
Manuel_D wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coverage I'm reading about this project says it's not only a prototype, it's also a planned prototype. The prototype hasn't even been built yet: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55763356 You said it'd be stored in caves, so perhaps it's a different project. It'd be good to link to this project. The Utah project looks like it's still trying to secure funding, and hasn't broken ground. https://power.mhi.com/regions/am…

To have built them, you first have to plan, fund, and then actually build them, all of which takes actual time. Nobody announces billion-dollar physical construction projects for untested tech.

Right, these alternative energy storage systems are untested technology. Contrary to your prior claims, they're not being built at grid scale currently.

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

#567

Post by ncmncm »

BurningFrog wrote: post #180
Archelaos wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much more nuclear wast does that imply per decade? How many more meltdowns per decade?

No remotely modern reactor has melted down. Just as you wouldn't factor Amelia Earhart's plane into 2022 air safety prognoses, you shouldn't use Chernobyl reactors for nuclear safety.

> No remotely modern reactor has melted down

TMI and Fukushima were both "modern" when built. All reactors that melted down did because operators ignored construction, maintenance, or operating safety standards. Other plants not yet melted down show evidence of more construction standard failings: pumps installed despite failing to meet specifications, bolts of substituted, inadequate steel. Diablo Canyon is built directly on a fault line. Now we learn that new EPR plants are inherently flawed, by design.

Ignoring standards is, by the evidence, itself standard procedure for building and operating civil nuke plants. Our global society, as it is conducted, is by the evidence unable to produce and operate a safe civil nuke.

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

#568

Post by ncmncm »

chii wrote: post #371
acchow wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because Finland has a population of 5.5M Luxembourg has 1/7th the population and could run off ONE of these. The USA has 60x the population so would need about 420 of these?

420 isn't an insurmountably large a number - it's 8.4 per state (lets' round it up to 10 for redundency). at an average cost of $10 billion per plant, that's 4.2 trillion dollars. I think the US has spent more than that on the iraq war and the afganistan war - 8 trillion according to https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar - which could've paid for these 420 plants twice over.

Or, could build out solar, wind, and storage, leaving plenty over for universal health care, university education, clean drinking water and breathing air, mass transit projects, and even fixing bridges.

But US decided to invade Iraq and Afghanistan instead of any of those.

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

#569

Post by ncmncm »

liketochill wrote: post #328
bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of…

Fuel costs are "not brought up" because they are so much smaller than construction and operation cost, not because they are small.

Nuke fuel cost is huge compared to operating cost of solar and wind.

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

#570

Post by ncmncm »

markvdb wrote: post #384
winkeltripel wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of things to consider. The solar and wind need to be overprovisioned, to feed the grid scale batteries to provide baseload. Those batteries are currently not cost effective, which is why there are very few such batteries in use. If you add in the price of battery, wind and solar look rather pricey. Without the batteries, they are helping us reduce the use of fossil fuel plants, but not helping shut…

Look at Latvia. >45% hydro, plenty of space for wind, both on shore and off shore, and hardly any of that potential realised with only 2.2% active wind energy production. Significant public investment in wind energy announced to start construction in... 2026. That is a glacial pace in the face of an ecological and geopolitical crisis situation.

Latvia is still climbing out from under Soviet domination. Rich countries should lead.
Post reply on HN