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Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

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Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#461

Post by sto_hristo »

missedthecue wrote: post #28
sto_hristo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually that "modern tech" of yours is the subsidized one. President Obama was basically trumpeting how many new and awesome futuristic jobs those solar parks will create when the government unleashes the cash flood. Nothing competes with nuclear. It's just pure physics - atom is the biggest source of energy on this planet according to current physics. Whoever can't agree with that reality fact should see a psychiat…

Not sure what you mean by "nothing competes with them". There are fewer nuclear power stations in the world than there were five years ago, and there will be fewer in five years than there are today. Hardly anyone wants to build them anymore. They just don't make sense.

That is just politics speaking. Massively subsidizing renewables and smack talking nuclear is an easy pass to a political career. But reality is immutable - nuclear energy is without competition.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Check the above. Denmark is 100% nuclear free (runs on mostly renewables but it imports), Germany i think runs on about 10% nuclear. France runs in 70% nuclear. The cost speaks for itself.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#462

Post by trashtester »

pvaldes wrote: post #325
Gravityloss wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany could have cancelled their nuclear shutdown process. But saving face is more important than Ukrainian lives.

> saving face is more important [for Germany] than Ukrainian lives. I understand that the propaganda works, but lets not fall in the error of blaming Germany for this war. Germany are victims in this situation, not aggressors. This narrative just divert the focus from the only responsible. Paying somebody for a product will not force him/her to invest the money in crimes. Russia could have spent this money in buying…

Ukraine is the victim. The main secondary victims are poor countries who depend on wheat imports.

Germany is not an aggressor, per see, but their poor judgement in their relations with Russia has certainly contributed.

Germany may point to WW2 and say "Never again", but if they insist on looking that far back, one could even argue that they made the biggest contribution of all to the apparent of Putin to surround himself with buffer states.

And while we are back in WW2, German aggression in the 1930's is one of the primary reasons everyone in Europe (except, it seems, Germany and Hungary) become so paranoid when a powerful a country start to annex it's neighbours.

Had Hitler stopped after taking the Sudetenland in 1938, modern Europeans might have been much less likely to assume that Putin would annex all of Ukraine and then proceed to Poland, the Baltics etc.

By no means to I blame modern Germans for what happened 80 years ago, but I do hope that Germany can put WW2 behind them, and do their share in contributing to stability in Europe going forward.

Imagine what the situation in Europe would be if someone like Trump wins in 2024, and decides to pull the USA out of NATO?

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#463

Post by MomoXenosaga »

gtirloni wrote: post #427
pvaldes wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> saving face is more important [for Germany] than Ukrainian lives. I understand that the propaganda works, but lets not fall in the error of blaming Germany for this war. Germany are victims in this situation, not aggressors. This narrative just divert the focus from the only responsible. Paying somebody for a product will not force him/her to invest the money in crimes. Russia could have spent this money in buying…

It's somewhat Europe's fault when it's obvious what will be done with the money.

Was it obvious? All these gas contracts were made decades ago. That Putin unmasked himself as Stalin 2.0 was a bit of a shock.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#464

Post by prawn »

azurezyq wrote: post #201
charlieyu1 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And China isn’t building major nuclear plants anywhere near the capital. All on southeast.

It's not true. For example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiyang_Nuclear_Power_Plant

550km away, for anyone else curious. (Not implying this is or isn't far away.)

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#465

Post by lispm »

shakow wrote: post #410
lispm wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has been a large net exporter of electricity for years. 18.9 TWh in 2020. Of that 52.5 TWh were exports and 33.6 TWh were imports. What you may have missed is: Germany is in the middle of Europe surrounded with a bunch of neighbor countries. Most of them are in the European Union which worked for years on building a joint energy market. Thus various electricity exports and imports are NORMAL. Note also that e…

> Germany has been a large net exporter of electricity for years. 18.9 TWh It does not mean anything if they can't decide when they export it. Waht matters though, is that most of the time their electricity has an awful carbon footprint w.r.t what the wealthiest country in Europe should afford. All the rest is but mental gymnastics to try to justify that.

> It does not mean anything if they can't decide when they export it.

That makes no sense. The market (demand & supply) decides. The static model is long past.

> Waht matters though, is that most of the time their electricity has an awful carbon footprint w.r.t what the wealthiest country in Europe should afford.

Germany isn't the wealthiest country in Europe. That it has more inhabitants than, for example Norway, does not make the average German richer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_distribution_in_Europe

What really matters is that the we move fast to renewable energy.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#466

Post by Archelaos »

trashtester wrote: post #423
Archelaos wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a simplification is very hypocritical in my eyes. Even Ukraine itself is not shutting down the Russian gas pipeline on its territory "to save Ukrainian lives". And the sanctions against Russia are not so complete that the West is blocking every cooperation. For example, no one wanted to immediately stop the cooperation regarding the International Space Station "to save Ukrainian lives", because the cost would ha…

> But it is usually not black and white. I would agree in 99% of cases. But when it comes nuclear power vs coal and gas, the only data I can find seems to make this issue completely black and white (at least for developed countries). As far as I can tell, nuclear is not only safer, but even MUCH safer than coal and gas, regardless of what parameters you look at. All argument to the contrary, seem to follow one of the…

> But when it comes nuclear power vs coal and gas, the only data I can find seems to make this issue completely black and white (at least for developed countries).

I think you are confusing a conclusion, which can be rendered as a Yes or No decision, with the reasons that lead to such a conclusion. Even if your own conclusion is very clear, the process of weighing pros and cons can still be quite complex and difficult. This is what I meant when I said that such issues are usually not black and white. In such debates as how best to support Ukraine or how best to care for our planet, I think one should first and foremost recognise that people, who come to a different conclusion from oneself, do so with the best ethical intentions and are perhaps no less intelligent or manipulated than oneself is. Of course, there might be a lot of people on either side which are not, but I am sure there are also a lot of people, who know there math and physics very well and nevertheless come to a different conclusion. Then the real intellectual work starts: listen, listen, listen and refine your arguments. I do not mean that you should not be allowed to completely disagree, but that showing respect to other smart people's opinions is an important individual virtue as well as an important public virtue in a democratic society, which benefits much more from a reflective style of debate than from a confrontation of We against the Others.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#467

Post by cinntaile »

emteycz wrote: post #432
cinntaile wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kinda the point of an interconnected electricity grid, it allows you to import the cheapest energy available. I don't get the argument here. Sometimes it's renewable, sometimes it's gas, sometimes it's coal, sometimes it's hydro, sometimes it's nuclear...?

The argument here is that a country that keeps talking about green energy, ecology and renewables for decades is now using much less ecological methods of power generation than nuclear, and they keep badmouthing nuclear too.

Germany abandoning nuclear has been decades in the making, it does not come as a surprise. If we look at the whole picture without focusing on one particular energy source, then we can see that they have reduced their CO2 emissions over the years. Not by much, but it's expected to improve when they close down their coal plants.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#468

Post by freemint »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #91
camel_gopher wrote: post #71

NuScale power just went public. Their modular 77 megawatt reactor was designed to be easy to operate and have passive failure modes. https://www.nuscalepower.com/

construction cost?

Higher than traditional nuclear per kWh.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#469

Post by trashtester »

trashtester wrote: post #448
patall wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to that, Rosatom was even set to build a new nuclear power plant in Finland [0]. Supposedly, because the french built one is taking too long to be build. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

From what I've been reading lately, South Korea is currently the country with the best expertise in building cost-efficient nuclear plants. Maybe Finland should switch vendor. [1]. https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/historical-construction...

@Gwypaas. Do you have any numbers about how much the corruption you're referring to affected the total price? It can be hard to tell from a few headlines.

Anyway, despite these cases, I would expect corruption to be a smaller problem with a Korean vendor than with a Russian one. At least in Korea, corruption is being prosecuted.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#470

Post by Trombone12 »

kyrra wrote: post #138
JoeyBananas wrote: post #122

It has nothing to do with economics, nuclear energy is stagnant because the industry is a regulatory hell. From eia.gov: Of the 104 operating nuclear power reactors in the United States: The last construction permit for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1978 for Progress Energy Inc.'s Shearon Harris plant, near Raleigh, North Carolina. The last operating license for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1996 to the T…

Not an expert here, but from a commentary piece from 2021: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-... > In 1957 the internationally recommended limit for radiation exposure was about 15 times the natural background radiation that people absorb from rocks and cosmic rays. Without evidence of harm from exposures within the 1957 limits, the U.S. had by 1991 ratcheted its public limits down to less t…

> This is a common theme that the WSJ opinion pages push.

Am I reading this correctly when I take it to mean that you think something being on the WSJ opinion pages gives it credibility?

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