A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028 • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by modo_mario » Wed, May 04, 2022, 9:18 AM UTC

mrep wrote: post #269

modo_mario wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear is a more expensive sources of energy than our alternatives Not in the very long term. Upfront it's really expensive yeah. >(uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel) A very small portion and isn't Australia a big exporter? Might as well set up refinement capabilities. >with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be…

You can make gas with electricity [0], it does not have to come from the ground. Here in the states nuclear is now about 3x as expensive as wind/solar [1]! And to make matters even worse, you generally want to run nuclear at 100% all the time because of the high initial costs but summer peaks can be twice winter lows which means you would need to have a ton capacity that hardly ever gets used whereas gas is by far th…

>You can make gas with electricity [0]

And it is still extremely inefficient to my knowledge with some roadblocks towards improvement that are hard to overcome. Hydropump storage doesn't seem grand from an intuitive perspective but probably ends up doing better.

>Here in the states nuclear is now about 3x as expensive as wind/solar

Now spread that costs over a proper lifetime, calculate in the costs of storage and/or variable demand backup and the adjusted distribution infrastructure and don't ban things like fuel reuse technology to reduce waste at the behest of fossil fuel industry and it looks a lot better.

https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/image/png/2020-12/lco_b...

>but summer peaks can be twice winter lows

Is this in Arizona and the likes? I feel like America really need to get it's head out of it's ass and dis-incentivise living in deserts with water problems to boot as well as some other common sense things. The CO2 output per capita being twice that of the EU and a bunch of other countries and that after a whole lot of improvement on the US front makes it clear this is not just a developed world thing but rather that some core issues are not being looked at.

>whereas gas is by far the cheapest option for handling variable demand.

And a fossil fuel with a climate change impact much much higher than most people expect.

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

#382

Post by pfdietz » Wed, May 04, 2022, 9:21 AM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #36

wumpus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you spend the same amount of money on solar/wind instead? How did that turn out?

Why would I want to cover the entire desert with solar panels instead of having one neat little tube shaped steam box? You know three nuclear power plants (spanning 19 reactors) in Ontario provide electricity for 9 million people? How many solar panels and wind turbines would you need to put in their place? A solar PV facility must have an installed capacity of 3,300 MW and 5,400 MW to match a 1,000-MW nuclear facili…

The land argument against solar is economically foolish. In most places, the value off land is a tiny fraction of the cost of the solar installation. We have lots and lots of land, far more than is needed to power global industrial society with solar energy, and that land is very cheap.

If the cost of land ever did become a global constraint on solar energy, it would be because the other parts of solar had become incredibly cheap. At that point, solar would already have consigned all other energy sources to oblivion.

The value produced per hectare per year from a PV field is much greater than many other current uses of land, such as raising lifestock, growing grain, or commercial forestry. If solar is deemed impractical because of land usage, so should those other uses.

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

#383

Post by pfdietz » Wed, May 04, 2022, 9:25 AM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #238

dale_glass wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that ceases to make any sense the second you have renewables cheaper than nuclear. Then renewables start cutting into that base load as well, whenever they can.

That depends on how you set up your electricity market. Since these markets are necessarily designed from the top down, we can set the rules however we like.

You can also determine, by optimization, what the most cost effective energy system would look like. If you do this you will discover that nuclear may not have a place in it.

Of course you can set up a market system where nuclear is favored, but that would be a market system that would likely not be delivering the lowest overall cost solution to the optimization problem.

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

#384

Post by pfdietz » Wed, May 04, 2022, 9:27 AM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #142

clarionbell wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are not solar cells, those are water heaters. In the interest of being honest. No wonder they still work, those are literally water pipes embedded in a roof panel. No inverter, no battery, nothing. The only thing they have in common with solar cells people install today is the fact that they are powered by sun.

Worth noting that people do still install those today in addition to PV panels. PV panels seem to get 20-30 years of use, which isn’t bad at all. And I believe they usually still work after that time, just with reduced efficiency.

It is my understanding that residential solar water heating is moving to PV + heat pump water heaters.

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

#385

Post by oblio » Wed, May 04, 2022, 9:31 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #264

oblio wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's silly for electricity. Electricity will never, ever be a free market. The barriers to entry are almost insurmountable, especially capital requirements (production + distribution, especially distribution) but also the myriad safety regulations. Might as well involve the government and gain some accountability, because with corporations, there is 0 accountability.

One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is? Realistically the grid needs to be nationalised or under an arms-length wholly government owned corporation. You can't have competing grids. The grid is the market. The UK tried privatizing it (and the rail infrastructure, and the broadband infrastructure) and ended up taking electricity and rail national again. O…

> One of those definitional things; it'll never be a truly unregulated wild west market, but then what is?

Well, I didn't say "unregulated". You can have regulation that doesn't create huge barriers to entry.

What would be a free market today? Something with very low barriers to entry (capital, expertise, legal requirements) and with lots of competition.

For example real estate agents in some developing countries. They frequently have only a high school degree (if that), they don't really need a ton of money to get started (just some nice clothes and some time), and the legal aspects are mostly covered by notaries, anyway. In many developing countries the real estate market is not consolidated so you have a million independent real estate agents, who frequently don't even have exclusivity for the property they're selling. So you could literally have 10 agents promoting the same property.

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

#386

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 04, 2022, 10:24 AM UTC

_hypx wrote: post #374

ben_w wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hydrogen path is less energy efficient than the battery path, so it’s only useful if you have really cheap electricity. If the batteries themselves were to remain expensive even as the electricity to charge them/electrolyse water became cheap, I can imagine a scenario where the lifetime cost difference between batteries and hydrogen tanks might be more than the cost of the energy wasted as heat by making the hydr…

Renewable electricity will be nearly free. It makes the argument in favor of hydrogen nearly overwhelming.

[deleted]

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

#387

Post by mrep » Wed, May 04, 2022, 10:42 AM UTC

modo_mario wrote: post #381

mrep wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make gas with electricity [0], it does not have to come from the ground. Here in the states nuclear is now about 3x as expensive as wind/solar [1]! And to make matters even worse, you generally want to run nuclear at 100% all the time because of the high initial costs but summer peaks can be twice winter lows which means you would need to have a ton capacity that hardly ever gets used whereas gas is by far th…

>You can make gas with electricity [0] And it is still extremely inefficient to my knowledge with some roadblocks towards improvement that are hard to overcome. Hydropump storage doesn't seem grand from an intuitive perspective but probably ends up doing better. >Here in the states nuclear is now about 3x as expensive as wind/solar Now spread that costs over a proper lifetime, calculate in the costs of storage and/or…

> Now spread that costs over a proper lifetime, calculate in the costs of storage and/or variable demand backup and the adjusted distribution infrastructure and don't ban things like fuel reuse technology to reduce waste at the behest of fossil fuel industry and it looks a lot better.

The link I posted is from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) published the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) which uses LCOE. It doesn't include hydrogen/methane storage but we are talking 3 times the cost which leaves a lot of room to come out ahead.

> Is this in Arizona and the likes? I feel like America really need to get it's head out of it's ass and dis-incentivise living in deserts with water problems to boot as well as some other common sense things. The CO2 output per capita being twice that of the EU and a bunch of other countries and that after a whole lot of improvement on the US front makes it clear this is not just a developed world thing but rather that some core issues are not being looked at.

Um, like almost everywhere? Honestly, west coast places like SF/LA are pretty unique in not having as much variable temperatures. We definitely get heat waves here in the midwest and it is definitely not a desert.

And now that I think about it, if we are truly to decarbonize that includes heating and heat waves [0] would be childs play compared to polar vortexes [1]. Good luck building enough spare nuclear to heat the entire continent by 40-90 degrees.

[0]: https://cw39.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/06/NATL-HI...

[1]: https://mashable.com/article/polar-vortex-2021-cold-temperat...

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

#388

Post by DennisP » Wed, May 04, 2022, 10:58 AM UTC

Tepix wrote: post #380

DennisP wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The balls sound a lot tougher in the new design. From your wiki link: > spherical fuel compacts each 6 centimetres (2.4 in) in diameter with particles of uranium-235 and thorium-232 fuel embedded in a graphite matrix And from the article on Canada's reactor: > The fuel inside of this vessel are solid kernels made from a mix of uranium, carbon, and oxygen, with each being roughly the size of a poppy seed. These kernel…

Agreed, they hopefully fixed that particular issue. However, it is prudent to expect other problems in new technology. And nuclear reactors need a huge initial investment (they seem to be vastly over budget and time these days) and take a long time until they are available. It seems to be cheaper, safer and faster to go with renewables, doesn't it?

These are reactors small enough to build in factories. That's an entirely different situation from occasionally custom building huge reactors on site.

For now, we should certainly keep rolling out wind and solar as fast as we can. But whether they can run entire countries reliably through all seasons is unproven so far. They're backed up everywhere by hydro where available, otherwise fossil. It's entirely possible that mass-produced passively-safe nuclear will end up cheaper and faster than the vast amount of storage/transmission/etc we'd need for a 100% wind/solar grid.

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

#389

Post by DennisP » Wed, May 04, 2022, 11:06 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #383

DennisP wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on how you set up your electricity market. Since these markets are necessarily designed from the top down, we can set the rules however we like.

You can also determine, by optimization, what the most cost effective energy system would look like. If you do this you will discover that nuclear may not have a place in it. Of course you can set up a market system where nuclear is favored, but that would be a market system that would likely not be delivering the lowest overall cost solution to the optimization problem.

"May." I haven't seen anyone actually do that, have you? All I see are researchers ignoring nuclear and proving that an all-renewables grid is possible, not that it's cheaper than a grid including nuclear.

At one point MIT had a US grid simulator online and I played around with it for a while. The cheapest fossil-free combination I found was solar and nuclear. Basically enough nuclear for nighttime demand, and enough solar for extra daytime demand. Wind+solar+storage was a good bit costlier.

And that was with conventional nuclear cost. We should probably find out whether, in practice, it's cheaper to mass-produce passively-safe small modular reactors in factories.

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

#390

Post by arcticbull » Wed, May 04, 2022, 11:31 AM UTC

hkt wrote: post #377

arcticbull wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is you can’t really move heat too far physically, and turbines are located usually pretty far from houses themselves. Certainly relative to rooftop solar.

No argument here, I was just being a pedant really

I appreciated your comment because I hadn’t actually thought about that before!