Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by arcticbull » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 6:50 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #471

mcronce wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have sufficient battery capacity to power your grid through a 90th percentile worst case scenario solar outage? 95th? 99th? How long can it go without running coal and gas? Nuclear works when you want it to. Solar and wind work when they want to. That's a very big difference when you're producing the electricity people rely on to live their daily lives.

It's a very common mistake to think that batteries are to be used to get to a 100% renewable grid. Hydrogen can be much cheaper for (say) the last 10%, because (1) hydrogen has very low capital cost per unit of storage capacity, and (2) the efficiency hit of going through hydrogen vs. batteries is less important when it's just 10% of the total. Think of batteries and hydrogen as analogous to cache memory and main mem…

> Hydrogen can be much cheaper for (say) the last 10%, because (1) hydrogen has very low capital cost per unit of storage capacity, and (2) the efficiency hit of going through hydrogen vs. batteries is less important when it's just 10% of the total.

Basically all hydrogen comes from fossil fuels. It's just natural gas with extra steps.

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

#602

Post by pfdietz » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 7:19 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #601

pfdietz wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very common mistake to think that batteries are to be used to get to a 100% renewable grid. Hydrogen can be much cheaper for (say) the last 10%, because (1) hydrogen has very low capital cost per unit of storage capacity, and (2) the efficiency hit of going through hydrogen vs. batteries is less important when it's just 10% of the total. Think of batteries and hydrogen as analogous to cache memory and main mem…

> Hydrogen can be much cheaper for (say) the last 10%, because (1) hydrogen has very low capital cost per unit of storage capacity, and (2) the efficiency hit of going through hydrogen vs. batteries is less important when it's just 10% of the total. Basically all hydrogen comes from fossil fuels. It's just natural gas with extra steps.

That's true right now, but that doesn't mean that hydrogen has to come from fossil fuels in the future (any more than most electrical power coming from fossil fuels right now means that that must also be the case in the future.)

When describing hydrogen for energy storage in a 100% renewable grid, the hydrogen would be produced by electrolysis using renewable energy.

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

#603

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 7:28 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #592

ncmncm wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

How else could a fusion power plant generate power?

D-H3 and H-B fusion release their energy in a form that can be extracted electromagnetically, with no detour through heat and turbines, so at least in principle could be cheaper to use than fission, unlike the D-T fusion that ITER etc. target.

There are projects working on these. They have much higher activation energy, so are harder to make happen -- for hydrogen-boron fusion, much, much harder. Helium-3 is scarce, effectively available only from decay of tritium, all of which has to be synthesized, then it needs to decay, with a half-life of 12 years.

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

#604

Post by manquer » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 7:32 PM UTC

Aachen wrote: post #111

manquer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is less about being cheap and more about being predictable. Getting consistent funding for new projects is hard when every other project in history has over run both costs and time widely.

If mere cost/time predictability were the problem we could double any worst-case projection. Even at that price point it's something I think we should pursue alongside the more renewable sources. That electricity has been dirt(y) cheap in the past decades was great, but that's just not sustainable. But yeah if we argue for another five years before getting started on at least the legislation/planning stages (after wh…

Just double the worst-case project ?

Firstly, the plant above has costed more than 3x projected time or money, so doubling is not going to solve anything.

Secondly, forget civic planning, could you or I go to our companies and say just double by budget because we don't know how to plan well ? What is the guarantee our plan is at least 50% accurate ? i.e. only 2x is enough ?

Poor planning cannot be solved by increasing budget (time or money), even in non public projects, work has tendency to get expanded to meet the budget, basically if Norway had thought 2x the $3B and actually budgeted $6B, they would likely have spent $20B in the end.

All this is only for operational life of the plant, it does not even include long term costs of waste storage because no one can even model that well enough or budget for it today.

I am not saying we shouldn't do nuclear, we really should, but truly commercial plans are meaningless unless we can handle costs better, We should invest more on that, there is encouraging work in SMRs(Small Modular Reactors) that could potentially address these concerns, until then most plants are experimental high risk projects from a public plan perspective.

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

#605

Post by russnes » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 7:54 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #556

russnes wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Literally impossible to do. And, also, absolutely pointless to worry about. In another century, if we don't blast ourselves back to the stone age first (increasingly likely), energy from hydrogen-boron fusion will dominate wherever solar is impractical, and the geothermal wells will become too expensive to continue operating. So, either way, the whole process is an imperceptible blip.

OK, good. But yeah the high likelihood of returning to the stone age repeatedly makes it even more important for the magnetic field to sustain for as long as possible.

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

#606

Post by freemint » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 8:13 PM UTC

CRConrad wrote: post #514

freemint wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See this nuclear positive website that doesn't have an imprint (I can find on mobile). I wouldn't bcall it research either. Summary would probably be fair.

> See this nuclear positive website that doesn't have an imprint You mean an "Impressum"? That's just some weird thing that AFAIK (almost?) only German Web sites have, because they're required to by German law. The vast majority of sites on the World Wide Web get by just fine without it; it's not like that's some kind of minimum requirement for a reputable site.

I want to see who is behind an advocacy group. If it is a letterbox address and if so what other letter boxes are at this address.

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

#607

Post by qkls » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 9:08 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #385

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar works great in some countries, but Finland? I just don't see it working out there.

Yea, though apparently they get 0.3% of their electricity from solar which seems crazy to me.

There's sunlight around the clock furing summer. Many summer cottages are off-grid and get all elecricity using solar.

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

#608

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 9:21 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #578

ncmncm wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure how practical floating solar would be on pumped hydro reservoirs. The water will go up and down a lot.

It will mostly only go down, anyway, when the sun is not out.

If the panels don't mind settling on the banks, or if they are far enough offshore not to, that will not be a problem. It is already common to float panels on regular hydroelectric generation reservoirs, so the event is anyway familiar to operators.

If the floats are bottom-heavy and attached to cables spanning the reservoir, the water dropping out from under just leaves them suspended. You need cable attachments, anyway, to extract power and maintain spacing.

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

#609

Post by qkls » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

thow-58d4e8b wrote: post #135

Aachen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you manage to convince someone this is an airplane crash type of problem, they start about the finances. And they're right about it not being the cheapest option, so what can you say? They win the argument. Next time you meet the person is at a protest where they don't want a solar farm where there is now a nice forest or pasture, no 24/7 moving shadows from huge wind turbine blades and that's after they pushe…

As a rule of thumb, greenhouse gas emissions are roughly equally split between electricity production, transportation, heating, agriculture and industry, about 20% each. Transportation is electrifying rather quickly in Europe, heating at a bit slower pace. So it's a bit better than "10% of the problem" - it's about 20% now, becoming ~40% in 10-15 years, eventually lowering total emissions by ~60% probably some time a…

The solution for agriculture is to stop eating meat.

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

#610

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #580

ncmncm wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, they are not being operated at grid scale, currently. Things still being built need to finish being built before they go into service. Just yesterday, you said some unspecified "breakthroughs" would be needed. Now you point to construction not finished. You are clutching at straws. The more honest course would be to admit you were just wrong.

The construction hasn't even begun on these projects, and it's unclear whether they will actually be built. The Utah project is still trying to secure funding, We do need a scientific breakthrough to make storage possible. Grid scale hydrogen electrolysis could be that breakthrough, but we don't know if it will live up to expectations. Energy storage is far from a solved problem. You insist that it's been solved, but…

Well-understood energy storage methods need to be built out. Building out takes time. We already knew that. We also know we don't need any breakthroughs before we can build out. We have methods that work now.

That is not to say there won't be breakthroughs, too, that make storage even cheaper to build out. But any storage already built will continue working as well as ever. Any hoped-for breakthroughs that don't pan out will not stall build-out. The worst that can happen is costs plummeting not quite as precipitously as had been expected.

We already see utility-scale hydro storage in use, and utility-scale iron-air battery factories under construction, and utility-scale liquified-air and ammonia-synthesis plants under construction, and utility-scale investment in hydrogen synthesis and storage. Each additional storage technology that begins to come online only improves the picture.

Repeating, again and again, that things that still need to be built out have not been built out yet sheds no light.