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

#611

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 9:39 PM UTC

russnes wrote: post #605

ncmncm wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We will never have any way to interfere with the planetary magnetic field, in any circumstance.

Blasting our way back to the stone age will succeed in chopping off CO2 output suddenly, though. The climate could then return to normal in only a century or three, if the sudden change did not instead trigger an ice age or something.

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

#612

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

CRConrad wrote: post #595

ncmncm wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he is making up imaginary impediments to wind power build-out. If trees could be a problem, they would be built in ways that trees would not be a problem, full stop.

> No, he is making up imaginary impediments to wind power build-out. No, he is pointing out very real impediments to wind power build-out in forsests. > If trees could be a problem, As has been convincingly shown elsewhere in the subthread that they can, if one were stupid enough to build one's windmills among them. > they would be built in ways that trees would not be a problem, full stop. i.e. not in forests. Which…

In fact wind turbines are routinely erected in forests with no difficulty. But, we neither need to build them there, nor need to avoid building them there. Talking about trees as if they were a problem for wind turbines is just noise. Complaining about that fact being pointed out is more noise.

You have contributed exactly nothing of any substance to the discussion.

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

#613

Post by ncmncm » Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #584

ncmncm wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With laser drilling, geothermal is no longer geographically dependent. That will, of course, still need to be developed to production. But it is a (large) incremental process improvement, not a whole different technology. First you said hydrolysis was not practical at all. Today you say 200 MW facilities are not big enough. What will you say tomorrow? Why not admit it now?

You could point to flywheels as a form of energy storage. But unless you actually have the ability to operate them at sufficient scale, that's irrelevant. People have been investigating laser drilling for a decade at least [1], yet it hasn't resulted in widespread geothermal adoption. Throughout this whole thread you've been pointing to proposals and plans as though simply having plans is a demonstration of viability…

Thus, it is good that nobody is talking about betting the future of civilization on any such thing. We have well-proven storage methods, and a large variety of promising alternatives, almost all of which depend on no new physics, just old-fashioned civil engineering. Any of those few that would need a "breakthrough" they don't get will be easily forgotten. Most of the failures will be for alternatives that turn out to be slightly less cheap than others.

60 years, by the way, pushes the boundary of "most of a century".

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

#614

Post by dendrite9 » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 12:02 AM UTC

CRConrad wrote: post #505

dendrite9 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Finland: 22.5% comes from hydropower. I suppose I'm stuck associating Tampere, Finland (Nokia) with hydropower 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 a…

>Finland is on the whole much flatter, so has less favourable conditions for hydro power.

Yeah, I had Quebec in mind as a similar geography without the large mountains of the Rockies and Cascades. I didn't account for just how flat Finland is, and how high a big chunk of Quebec is. Interestingly at first they appeared similar, the high points are quite close. But looking at elevation profiles it was clear how misleading that can be.

It looks like I was a bit mixed up, the structure I was thinking of is called the Finnish Mankala system. Energy producers are owned by parties that bear the costs of operating the company. Owners receive shares of electricity at cost, any unwanted portion is sold by them into the Nordic market. This means that output is effectively contracted to each owner over the life of the plant. The private owners are mostly heavy industry with a high demand for base-load power, and hence low costs are critical for them.

FWIW the plant construction appears to be a fixed price contract with a consortium of plant suppliers: AREVA GmbH, AREVA NP SAS and Siemens AG, which are jointly liable for the obligations under the plant supply contract until the end of the plant unit's warranty period.

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

#615

Post by Manuel_D » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 4:51 AM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #613

Manuel_D wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could point to flywheels as a form of energy storage. But unless you actually have the ability to operate them at sufficient scale, that's irrelevant. People have been investigating laser drilling for a decade at least [1], yet it hasn't resulted in widespread geothermal adoption. Throughout this whole thread you've been pointing to proposals and plans as though simply having plans is a demonstration of viability…

Thus, it is good that nobody is talking about betting the future of civilization on any such thing. We have well-proven storage methods, and a large variety of promising alternatives, almost all of which depend on no new physics, just old-fashioned civil engineering. Any of those few that would need a "breakthrough" they don't get will be easily forgotten. Most of the failures will be for alternatives that turn out t…

We have well proven storage methods that don't scale. We have unproven storage mechanisms that we hope will scale.

Let's actually put this in perspective: Global electricity consumption is about 60 TWh daily, which works out to about 2.5 TWh per hour or 40 GWh per minute. Plans to run a wind and solar grid predict a 12 hour storage requirement to generate 80% of our energy from wind and solar [1], and weeks of storage for a 100% wind and solar grid. And remember, this is on top of the cost of actually generating all that energy in the first place. If people want to prove that these storage mechanisms are viable, then how about they build one minute's worth of storage. If we don't even have one minute's worth of storage provisioned, then I see zero reason to be confident in the ability to build hours, days, or weeks of storage.

By comparison, we'd need to build 9 nuclear plants for each one that presently exist to generate all of our electricity from nuclear. Any only 8 if we eliminate everything but nuclear and hydro. Also, It's 68 years since the first nuclear electrical plant and 80 years since the first fission reactor.

1. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

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

#616

Post by namibj » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 5:25 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #480

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just that. To make something colder using a heat pump, you must heat up something else by the equivalent amount. Actually more, because of losses. Whereas making something warmer can be done without a heat pump, by releasing stored chemical energy, at nearly no losses.

Heating something with chemical energy by combustion (for example) has a large second law loss -- there's a large increase in entropy in combustion, and in transmitting the high grade heat to the low temperature of the building being heated. Because of these avoidable entropy sources, it's possible to be smarter, for example to use a gas-fired heat pump to achieve a COP of > 1.

Yeah, a simple absorbtion refrigerator (gas fired) is already way better than a gas oven. The plumbing is just more expensive than works often be worth it, and the nice low-temperature systems run on what's essentially an ammonia destiller.

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

#617

Post by ncmncm » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 7:07 AM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #615

ncmncm wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thus, it is good that nobody is talking about betting the future of civilization on any such thing. We have well-proven storage methods, and a large variety of promising alternatives, almost all of which depend on no new physics, just old-fashioned civil engineering. Any of those few that would need a "breakthrough" they don't get will be easily forgotten. Most of the failures will be for alternatives that turn out t…

We have well proven storage methods that don't scale. We have unproven storage mechanisms that we hope will scale. Let's actually put this in perspective: Global electricity consumption is about 60 TWh daily, which works out to about 2.5 TWh per hour or 40 GWh per minute. Plans to run a wind and solar grid predict a 12 hour storage requirement to generate 80% of our energy from wind and solar [1], and weeks of storag…

Electrolysis was well understood for a century before we knew fission existed.

Pumped hydro has always worked at scale.

You keep repeating that storage is not built out. We know. Before it can have been built out, it will need building out. But nukes are also not built out. Which can get done faster?

You just really wish storage tech was harder than it is because you need that for nukes not to look like the obviously bad investment they have proven, by "most of a century" of experience, to be.

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

#618

Post by CRConrad » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 9:21 AM UTC

freemint wrote: post #606

CRConrad wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Many, probably most, Web sites the world over have "About Us" or "Contact" pages. It's just that they're not universally called "Impressum" ("Imprint"); that's a Germany-only thing.

So saying "a Web site without an imprint" as if that in itself somehow showed the site were somehow bad is, if it's about a non-German site, just stupid. HTH.

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

#619

Post by CRConrad » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 9:22 AM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #612

CRConrad wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, he is making up imaginary impediments to wind power build-out. No, he is pointing out very real impediments to wind power build-out in forsests. > If trees could be a problem, As has been convincingly shown elsewhere in the subthread that they can, if one were stupid enough to build one's windmills among them. > they would be built in ways that trees would not be a problem, full stop. i.e. not in forests. Which…

In fact wind turbines are routinely erected in forests with no difficulty. But, we neither need to build them there, nor need to avoid building them there. Talking about trees as if they were a problem for wind turbines is just noise. Complaining about that fact being pointed out is more noise. You have contributed exactly nothing of any substance to the discussion.

> You have contributed exactly nothing of any substance to the discussion.

Did you?

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

#620

Post by pfdietz » Tue, Mar 15, 2022, 10:49 AM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #615

ncmncm wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thus, it is good that nobody is talking about betting the future of civilization on any such thing. We have well-proven storage methods, and a large variety of promising alternatives, almost all of which depend on no new physics, just old-fashioned civil engineering. Any of those few that would need a "breakthrough" they don't get will be easily forgotten. Most of the failures will be for alternatives that turn out t…

We have well proven storage methods that don't scale. We have unproven storage mechanisms that we hope will scale. Let's actually put this in perspective: Global electricity consumption is about 60 TWh daily, which works out to about 2.5 TWh per hour or 40 GWh per minute. Plans to run a wind and solar grid predict a 12 hour storage requirement to generate 80% of our energy from wind and solar [1], and weeks of storag…

If nuclear is to power the world it also needs technologies that have not been proven.

Today's thermal reactors, if they provided the entire 18 TW of primary energy demand, would consume in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year. This would consume known uranium resources in less than a decade.

So, either seawater uranium would be needed (which would have to be scaled up by something like 11 orders of magnitude from what has been demonstrated) or breeder reactors would be needed (also not a proven technology, and likely more expensive than thermal burner reactors.)