141–150 of 246 posts
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Capital markets compete on a level field.
The vast majority of nuclear power plants weren't funded privately.
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Good questions. One of the founders of ThorCon wrote a book (link to review[1]) about why we can't afford nuclear power (among other things), and it's not really anything to do with the essential cost of building a plant, it's a lot of regulations that don't really make sense and don't make anyone safer. I don't want to over-simplify regulation into the common "more vs less" scale -- some regulations make sense and o…
The easiest solution to getting rid of the crufty old regulations would be by shutting down all obsolete nuclear power plant designs and building new ones. Considering the financial cost of a single nuclear meltdown, upgrading your entire fleet is basically free. That upgrade will save you a trillion dollars in clean up costs.
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Flow batteries look interesting, but they have moving parts. That is probably fine for large utilities who can staff people to maintain these batteries. It is probably not fine for a small solar and battery install house or village.
if big batteries are cheap, you don't need small ones. the reason small batteries are common now is that they are price competitive. if new batteries are developed that are cheap, but need large sizes, the cost of moving the power around is negligible.
From their Design page, under the "Overview" subheader: >> ThorCon is a molten salt fission reactor. Unlike all current nuclear reactors, the fuel is in liquid form. It can be moved around with a pump, and passively drained in the event of a casualty. Casualty? Huh?
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> There's some material science that needs to be ironed out for commercialization Worth noting that this is no small thing. Materials science is the limiting factor of all molten salt reactors, and has yet to be solved satisfactorily.
I like how Moltex asked "wait, why are we pumping all this fuel around in the first place?" https://youtu.be/7qJpVClxzVM?t=536
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We will build out storage, and transmission lines, to "get us through the night".
I hope we will, the problem currently is that this is not competitive compared to just burning natural gas. This is because the externalities related to global warming are not accounted for when the market determines the price of gas. Electricity will be more expensive either way and this really hasn’t sunk in yet. Were these costs accounted for, nuclear would be quite competitively priced, even with newer more moder…
We have squirmed in the grip of petroleum and coal megacorps for decades, and will finally be free of them.
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For most projects, there's at most four hours of storage, just enough to shift peak daytime supply to peak evening demand. That's not the same as getting through the night, or having enough overcapacity to meet demand in cloudy winter weeks. Lazard puts the wholesale cost of solar PV plus four hours storage at $165 to $296/MWh: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Until we have more renewable generating capacity online, four hours is plenty. As the share of power generation increases, building more storage is favored. Lazard's figures are (as is proper) for existing storage, not for the much cheaper storage that will be built. It is generally a mistake to assume people controlling billion-dollar budgets have no idea what they are doing.
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Regulation prevents all technical progress for 40+ years is a good thing. Its just mind-blowing that such a statement can be made on a site called 'Hacker News'. Lets promote fear of technology and use regulation from preventing new technology to replace deadly dirty coal for decades and decades. What an amazing plan anti-nuclear people have been pushing for the last 50 years.
It has saved us from being saddled today with many more of these leaky ramshackle contraptions that would have cost a $billion each to take apart. I live near Indian Point, recently shuttered for leaks. I expect to be made to pay for dismantling it. I am glad I won't need to pay for several more. Money spent on nukes could have been spent bringing renewable costs down. We could have had solar and wind decades earlier…
I believe that if we had strict but sensible regulation around nuclear power, it would have long ago driven coal and natural gas power out of business, putting us in a way better position to deal with climate change. Even with Light Water Reactors -- but if we had sensible regulation, we'd have long ago developed much better designs and refined them, driving the price down even more. I've seen a graph that shows how nuclear was getting cheaper all the time, when suddenly the trend reversed and it started getting more expensive.
Here's the kind of insanity that results from our current nuclear regs in the USA:
"A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained.
The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial."[1]
I'll totally admit that if we had never made any investment into nuclear, it's possible that renewables might have had more R&D and investment earlier. But it's also possible that we might have just become more reliant on fossil fuels.
I think we both share a pretty deep concern for climate change, and if it turns out that renewables + storage are the only real solution, I'm totally happy with that. It's just that I think that with nuclear we can get off fossil fuels faster. I may be wrong.
[1] https://radiationeffects.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Rock...
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Yes but that costs quite a bit more than PV. Lazard puts it at $126 to $156/MWh. https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... That overlaps with Lazard's range for conventional nuclear. And there are lots of reasons to think molten salt reactors in general would be significantly cheaper. Thorcon thinks it can get their cost down to $30/MWh.
Lazard's figures are for the cost of storage already built, not for the cost of the storage that will be built, a much lower figure.
Lazard is the source that most renewables advocates point me to, to prove how uncompetitive nuclear is. If your counterargument is that future costs will be lower than today's costs, then I think it's fair to also consider the costs Thorcon and others estimate for molten salt reactors.
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Until we have more renewable generating capacity online, four hours is plenty. As the share of power generation increases, building more storage is favored. Lazard's figures are (as is proper) for existing storage, not for the much cheaper storage that will be built. It is generally a mistake to assume people controlling billion-dollar budgets have no idea what they are doing.
Yes, and building more storage raises the cost by quite a lot, as you can see by Lazard's cost figures for storage. Nuclear can easily be competitive in a grid not backed by natural gas, especially if MSR companies like Thorcon are successful in lowering nuclear costs.