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Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

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Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#521

Post by lispm »

logifail wrote: post #505
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…

> Most of them are in the European Union which worked for years on building a joint energy market. Germany and Austria severed their single electricity pricing zone in October 2018[0]. "Slow grid expansion" was identified as one of the major factors in this decision. [0] https://www.apg.at/api/sitecore/projectmedia/download?id=24f...

The demand for the grid expansion in Germany is due to increased need of transferring wind electricity from North Germany to Mid and South Germany. Germany has a large change where the energy producers will be. Handling this will take many years.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#522

Post by cycomanic »

pharke wrote: post #507
cycomanic wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's right there in the article, but it seems many here commenting did not even read it: Many US nuclear plants are incapable of cycling power output up or down without changes to procedures or equipment.

Where? Searching for 'peak' returns no results and going through the results for 'gas' doesn't turn up anything about peaker plants for nuclear.

I just cited the section in my post. US nuclear plants can not follow load at all, some European ones have some ability, but it's generally not enough.

If you compare France and Germany gas portion of the overall electricity production is quite similar (it's a bit tricky to compare, Germany produced 12% and France 7% but in different years, France gas accounts to 10% of their installed capacity)

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#523

Post by uecker »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #504
uecker wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assumptions are all wrong. Total output decreased from 632 TWh in 2010 to 588 TWh in 2021. Coal and lignite decreased substantially 117 TWh + 146 TWh in 2010 to 55 TWh + 110 TWh in 2021 (with a substantial reduction in CO2 emissions). gas use remained stable with 89 TWh in 2010 and 90 TWh in 2021. At the same time nuclear decreased from 141 TWh and 69 TWh and renewables increased from 105 TWh to 233 TWh.

Difference might be accounted for by capacity versus actual factor use - though 2021 might not be a representative year because of COVID if you are referencing the latter. But I can only guess. Your statistics are useless without a source. Mine: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...

Why do you cite "net power generation capacity" when you care about use?

Actual generation:

https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/STR...

gas use / CO2 emissions may actually be lower than electricity generation implies if more modern plants are installed.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#524

Post by lispm »

chrischen wrote: post #481
jhgb wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I pointed out above, this would not have changed anything with respect to the need to import gas from Russia. Nuclear generation is not a substitute for gas imports. Even worse, they can't "cancel their nuclear shutdown process" even if they wanted. First of all, the shutdown deadline had been firmly set in law twenty years ago, so it would require a major legislative effort to make another law. Second, even if th…

According to Wikipedia the denuclearization process was canceled until Fukushima happened. “ On 14 March 2011, in response to the renewed concern about the use of nuclear energy the Fukushima incident raised in the German public and in light of upcoming elections in three German states, Merkel declared a 3-month moratorium on the reactor lifespan extension passed in 2010.[29] On 15 March, the German government announ…

This was just going back to the earlier phase-out decision by the red/green government. The Merkel decision to slow down the phase-out was highly controversial and would have seen mass protests. Then the Fukushima-accident (where a single earthquake was enough to take out the whole nuclear industry of an advanced industrial country) happened and the decision was reversed, again.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#525

Post by s1artibartfast »

cycomanic wrote: post #268
acidburnNSA wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should be building the best LWRs right now to decarbonize immediately: ABWR, APR-1400, AP1000. My favorite decarbonize rapidly at scale idea is to build a shipyard-based nuclear reactor gigafactory and mass-produce floating PWRs. (This was actually almost done in the 1970s in Jacksonville Florida. They had a manufacturing license from the NRC, the world's largest gantry crane installed and, everything [1])…

So if nuclear is significantly more expensive that wind/solar like stated in the original article and faster to build (or are you disputing the numbers?), why would we not use the same money to instead build more renewables to get us there faster?

The classic answer is storage and on-demand production. Massive pumped storage is one partial solution the solar energy but I think the environmental impact is great enough that it would prevent it from ever being implemented in the United States.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#526

Post by belorn »

cycomanic wrote: post #520
stingraycharles wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so Europe's dependence on Russia is even stronger for Uranium than for gas I’d argue that it’s not about % coming from Russia that reflects dependence, it’s how easy you could switch to another supplier. How difficult would it be to find a different provider for that Uranium?

However nobody talks about blocking Russian Uranium imports, while oil and gas is all over the news. Admittedly the values we are talking about are much lower, but if it's easy to switch suppliers it should be a nobrainer, no?

I am unsure what news you are reading but when the war started there was news about switching Uranium imports away from Russia here in Sweden. I would hope that has now occurred, through as mentioned in the article, nuclear refueling occurs once every 12-18 months so who knows if that has yet to become a practical matter. The company that seems to produce most of the fuel that Sweden use is called Westinghouse Electric Company, with headquarters in Pittsburgh, and about 20% of the raw uranium that they processed before the war came from Russian.

The biggest exporter of Uranium to Europe is Niger. We also have Kazakstan, Canada, Australia, and then a bunch of smaller ones. Being close geographical isn't a major benefit for Uranium imports. Blocking Russian Uranium imports should already been done, and if its not, should be made into policy. Since it only is a small portion of the overall imports the effect should be very minor.

I would expect that the American company, by the fact of being American, are already required to follow sanctions related to Russia.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#527

Post by acidburnNSA »

pfdietz wrote: post #383
acidburnNSA wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High energy density can in principle matter, a lot, from a societal point of view. If you only need a tiny amount of fuel to make the world's energy, then the overall impact on land, minerals, ecosystems, wildlife, etc. can potentially be very small, assuming you deliver the rest of the fuel cycle and reactors with reasonably small footprints as well. The fact that current markets don't yet value these things is more…

A sackcloth and ashes approach to civilization, where nuclear's low land use is preferred because we're also going to (for example) ban agriculture because it uses land, is a nonstarter. Society has decided that agriculture is ok, because the concerns of people are more important than the putative concerns of unfettered nature. And if agriculture is ok, so is the land use of PV and wind (which produce much more value…

At global scale, these kinds of things end up mattering a huge amount. This is the basis of Komanoff's "price scales primarily with fleet size" argument. No one remembers that rule, but at planetary scale even seemingly small externalities end up driving costs. Case in point: do you know how many individual anti-wind organizations there are in Germany?

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#528

Post by nickelpro »

chess_buster wrote: post #495
nickelpro wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, back in the real world not only are power grids distributed at a continental level but there also multiple sources of power feeding into that grid, including imported energy generated from renewable sources. There is nothing close to the grid capacity to make this statement true. Germany lacks base load capacity and imports energy from coal and natural gas burning neighbors when their renewables go offli…

the gas plants are build BECAUSE they can switch to hydrogen produced by renewable energy. The hydrogen will be stored in the already existing gas system in form of a mix of hydrogen and methan.

If hydrogen becomes a viable technology I agree it's a game changer to the whole discussion, but today the first pilot program plants are just coming online. It's possible they answer all the open questions that the renewables leave open, I would be delighted if they did.

Today, and in the future if hydrogen hits unforeseen snags, nuclear remains the proven option.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#529

Post by kyrra »

Trombone12 wrote: post #470
kyrra wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

I said that phrase so that people that care know this article was pushed in their opinion section.

Opinion pages don't mean they lie, it means they will use facts to back up an opinion the writer is expressing. Their opinion pages have a slant for sure, but tend to be much on the rails that some other papers.

You are welcome to argue against the point WSJ editorial board (or guest writers, such as the piece I linked) is making on their pages, but outright discounting an argument because of a source is intellectually lazy. Yes, we need to discriminate by source at least some, but that should make us skeptical, not out right reject a point being made.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#530

Post by ClumsyPilot »

webmaven wrote: post #332
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. We still don't have a good long-term plan for dealing with processing waste at scale; Who is 'we' that should come up with the plan? Government? Most westerners don't like government planning - your own post considers government involvement as a downside. We expect the market to manage most things, but markets don't come up with long term plans, that's not their function. If you come with a subject at random and…

> Who is 'we' that should come up with the plan? Government? Most westerners don't like government planning - your own post considers government involvement as a downside. I think an even broader we was implied, that of human civilization as a whole.

Okay, is it possible to answer my question - what aspect of life does Human Civilisation as a whole have a plan for?

Because if there is no area of life that we can indetify a plan for, then the whole criticism doesn't make any sence.

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