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A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

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Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#361

Post by powcontech »

flgb wrote: post #135
clarionbell wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they need replacement components for any of this. Which they will need evry couple of years. Then they will need centralized infrastructure in form of manufacturing plants, roads, rail and finally (because it is imported from China most likely) ports. Every step producing greenhouse gasses or other pollution. Self sufficiency of this sort is largely a sub-urban myth. A comfortable, optimistic one, but a myth no…

"evry couple of years" .. umm nope. Try every 10-20 years for the inverter and every 20-30 years for the panels. Roof-top solar in Australia is cheap and almost ubiquitous.

A 5 kW inverter at a house is different from a 500 kW inverter in the desert

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#362

Post by daniel-cussen »

caymanjim wrote: post #340
robotnikman wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The nuclear plants need to be built near water Not always. The Palo Verde nuclear plant in my state is in the middle of the desert far from any body of water, and also the largest in the country in terms of net generation.

For those like me who wondered how it cools: it evaporates municipal sewage.

Hey that's one way of reusing water. Two birds with one stone. Somebody has to deal with that shit.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#363

Post by ncmncm »

belorn wrote: post #348
ncmncm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are dozens of storage methods that all work, the only remaining uncertainty being which will be cheapest, or otherwise most useful. Hydrogen and ammonia synthesis will not be cheapest, but will arguably be most useful. It is strange that people proposing storage methods frequently seem unable to reason about cost, so propose absurdly expensive realizations of their ideas. What will end up deployed will be the m…

I have read both government studies on energy storage solutions and studies done by financial advisors to people who invest in the energy sector. The issue is always the high cost, with only specific places and situations where it is economical viable. In particular, if you can discharge the storage 365 days a year from 100% to 0%, selling at fairly high peak price, and do so for a capacity of 1-6hrs (depending on lo…

Making a business out of selling stored energy has weird incentives. Storage is better integrated into a system along with generating and transmission capacity. A business shaving peaks has been shown to work, and to favor maintaining a few minutes' worth of battery at high wattage capacity.

Green hydrogen will be getting very cheap. It makes no sense to assume prices for everything will stay the same as the world changes around them.

Natural gas generation equipment is easily retrofitted to burn synthetic hydrogen or ammonia, along with compressed air, so such purchases are not wasted. Burning along with compressed air yields more energy than the sum what you would get just burning, and separately running compressed air through the turbine. (Compressed air storage is really cheap to build out.)

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#364

Post by onethought »

arcticbull wrote: post #352
ncmncm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rare-earth magnets are often used in wind turbines, but very far from always. CdTe PV is made on glass. They are common mainly in the US, mainly because of import tariffs. But Cd and Te are valuable and easily extracted from panels, so, no, they will not end up in landfills. The Si ones may, but very highly-purified Si is also valuable. Thin-film cells likely to be used in future cells use very little material. So, y…

Not reaching, citing.

Your first citation doesn't resolve.

Your second one refers to "black sludge" in Mongolia... but doesn't actually say anything about Solar or Wind production.

Am I missing something?

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#365

Post by ClumsyPilot »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #337
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ban nuclear to focus on renewables if I was king of the world." I have seen thos banged about a lot - where does the idea that banning nuclear would somehow improve our ability to build renewables come from? What is the basis for it? 'most of the noise around nuclear is clearly climate change denial.' Again, why? Why do not believe that 90% of noise about nuclear is well intentioned people seeing an alternative solu…

Nuclear is more expensive than renewables. If we spent the same money on renewables we'd get more done. It's not overly complicated. The vast majority of people advocating for nuclear simply cannot hold in their criticism of renewables. That's because believing lies about renewables is a basic requirement for thinking nuclear is a useful solution in a world rapidly deploying renewables.

"Nuclear is more expensive than renewables. If we spent the same money on renewables we'd get more done. It's not overly complicated."

By that logic, we could be taking money people spend on casinos and spending it on renewables - we'd get more done and that money was being wasted by definition.

Budget of a country is not like budgeting your personal expenses, and we are limited by resources other than just Money. Like production facilties, pool of talent and skilled workers, natural resources, etc. Nuclear has almost no overlap with renewables when it comes to consuming real resources - so both could be used. Meanwhile money is not real, and when the banks were in danger, trillions just magically appeared overnight.

In UK main obstacle to renewables are idiots who think they own the landscape, and that their view is more important than the future of the planet -> a local group had cash in hand to build a wind turbine, and it took them 4 years to get permission to do so!

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#366

Post by ClumsyPilot »

ncmncm wrote: post #287
Sinidir wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its actually around 70-80% efficient depending on method. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Efficien... Not that this changes the picture of hydrogen powered personal vehicles. Still the only viable option for grid level seasonal storage.

Hydrogen is very, very far from the only viable long-term storage. Liquified ammonia will also be popular. But we don't need any seasonal storage at all, just as we don't have seasonal storage of oil. We only need enough storage to hold out until a shipment of LH2 or LNH3 arrives from the tropics. Efficiency of H2 needs to fold in the cost of getting the power back out: Cf. "round-trip efficiency". But as I said, it…

"It will be made right on the spot, or just down the street. And, won't be compressed, but will be poured in and allowed to boil up to pressure."

Are the efficient machines you are talking about affordable and portable enough to be locally owned?

Also you are talking about hydrogen being poured in - so that would be cryogenic cooling, right? that incurrs an energy cost as well?

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#367

Post by Paradigma11 »

worik wrote: post #70
prawn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also thought we should've developed a nuclear waste industry here in South Australia. There was a 'citizen's jury' on the topic a while back but obviously public opinion swayed political action to rule it out. We have a lot of "unused" and stable land well away from population centres. I imagine transport from afar is an issue though.

Storing waste is too expensive to contemplate. Wherever it is put the high level waste (not much in quantity but...) is deadly and a silent killer for over a hundred thousand years. This is geologically significant time period, and we can make bets, but have no guarantee of any place on Earth being stable on those time scales. So it must be monitored. For a hundred thousand years That would be us making future genera…

But you already have to take care of a nuclear waste depot, nevermind the nasty chemical stuff that never degrades and has to be stored forever.

It does not really matter how big the caverns are where you store the waste so any additional nuclear material stored is basically free.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#368

Post by a_square_peg »

DennisP wrote: post #250
a_square_peg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't know enough about this to know if it's a good idea or not (it sounds like it could be quite useful) but in any case I'm very glad to see Canada doing something new in technology.

Canada is turning out to be quite the country for nuclear innovation, because their regulators are much friendlier to new technology than the NRC in the US. Terrestrial Energy (a molten salt reactor company) has spoken highly of them, and Moltex (another MSR company) moved there as a result.

Oh wow, I did not know that. I had only been aware of CANDU reactors and had the impression that there wasn't much else going on in Canada.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#369

Post by DennisP »

a_square_peg wrote: post #368
DennisP wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada is turning out to be quite the country for nuclear innovation, because their regulators are much friendlier to new technology than the NRC in the US. Terrestrial Energy (a molten salt reactor company) has spoken highly of them, and Moltex (another MSR company) moved there as a result.

Oh wow, I did not know that. I had only been aware of CANDU reactors and had the impression that there wasn't much else going on in Canada.

Aside from those two, there's also Elysium, yet another MSR company, focusing on the fast spectrum. Handy links:

https://www.elysiumindustries.com/

https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/

https://www.moltexenergy.com/

Plus there's General Fusion, the craziest steampunk idea for fusion ever. It's gotten investment well into nine figures, and is building a reactor for a net power attempt around 2025.

https://generalfusion.com/

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#370

Post by sudosysgen »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #175
mjevans wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if much of the waste heat could be expelled in ways more similar to Iceland's geothermal solutions.

Russia has directed waste heat fron reactors into the district heating network, it's perfectly realistic.

Not just Russia, it was relatively common across the Soviet bloc.
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