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Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

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Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#551

Post by Manuel_D »

webmaven wrote: post #330
Manuel_D wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, bury it underground in impermeable rock. Short of a meteor strike right on top of the repository, it will not make its way out to the surface.

The best impermeable rock (ie. granite) formations for this purpose are in the eastern US. Congress excluded them from consideration as sites when they mandated the selection of Yucca Mountain as the sole site in 1987.

Exactly: the waste problem is a political one, not an engineering problem.

But it's moot anyway, because the US doesn't reprocess it's waste. So today's nuclear waste is a source of fuel later and it's be a waste to bury it before reprocessing anyway.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#552

Post by ZeroGravitas »

kyrra wrote: post #549
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe low carbon power sources like nuclear would have done better if the WSJ hadn't been telling people that Climate Change didn't exist/wasn't a problem/wasn't caused by humans/was being pushed by communist beaurocrats for their own devilish purposes.

That's not their opinion as far as I can tell. They have published Lomborg a lot that mainly says that it is changing, but the impact won't be that bad and can be mitigated. Holman Jenkins also has a similar stance. https://www.google.com/search?q=Bj%C3%B8rn+Lomborg+site%3Aws... https://www.google.com/search?q=jenkins+climate+site%3Awsj.c...

They are famous climate denialists, and have been for decades:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fiddling-while-th...

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#553

Post by nebalee »

paganel wrote: post #489
jillesvangurp wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't underestimate the Germans. They'll get this done. They'll be pretty far done executing those plans in five years and probably will raise the ambition level rather than lowering it. I also predict they will trigger a pretty big economic boom doing so. All that money flowing into the economy will do a lot of good. They've actually been criticized for holding back too much in the last few decades. This looks like…

Don’t think the Germans still know how to “get it done”. Afaik their power transmission network hasn’t received significant improvements (even though I had last read something on the subject a few years ago, maybe things have changed) and their energy prices were among the highest in Europe before this war started. I’m also very bearish when it comes to their car industry efforts to transition to EVs, but that’s a sl…

Regarding the extensions of the transmission grid the latest monitoring report (in German only) is available here: https://data.netzausbau.de/Vorhaben/Monitoring/Monitoringber...

About 25% is done or currently being build, about 50% is in the approval phase.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#554

Post by lazide »

natmaka wrote: post #426
lazide wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple hundred years of proven reserves, with massive deposits known but not proven. It’s never been worth doing more than scratching the surface. If uranium was used much more, there are economic amounts that are filterable from seawater even.

Seawater: "pumping the seawater to extract this uranium would need more energy than what could be produced with the recuperated uranium" Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/jones-j2/docs/e...

I’ve usually heard it in reference to an add on process to other reasons we move seawater around - desalination, power plant cooling, etc.

very good point though on end cycle efficiencies!

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#555

Post by webmaven »

Manuel_D wrote: post #551
webmaven wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best impermeable rock (ie. granite) formations for this purpose are in the eastern US. Congress excluded them from consideration as sites when they mandated the selection of Yucca Mountain as the sole site in 1987.

Exactly: the waste problem is a political one, not an engineering problem. But it's moot anyway, because the US doesn't reprocess it's waste. So today's nuclear waste is a source of fuel later and it's be a waste to bury it before reprocessing anyway.

There is supposed to be a second facility for retrievable waste, but the planning process for it can't begin until the first facility is commissioned.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#556

Post by shakow »

lispm wrote: post #465
shakow wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, do…

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

Indeed, the supply. And what is the very charateristic of Germany's renewable supply? That they do not have any inluence of it. They have to sell when the weather is sunny and windy, and have to buy or burn coal otherwise.

> does not make the average German richer.

That does not really matter, as the average German does not pay for a nuke plant; the federal goverment does.

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

What really matters is that we move fast to low-carbon energy; renewable is the cherry on the cake.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#557

Post by jhgb »

himinlomax wrote: post #342
jhgb wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pumped hydro is already maxxed out pretty much everywhere it's possible The Australian National University recently disagreed: https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent... . But even very large amounts of pumped hydro storage are probably not the cost optimum -- according to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429211... , the optimum lies in the direction of significant overgene…

> The Australian National University recently disagreed This is a worldwide assessment. Look at Northern Europe, and notice the complete lack of dots on the map. > Interestingly enough for Germany, the period less likely to suffer from prolonged lack of wind is winter Want you bet your freezing bottom on it? "Less likely" does not cut it for a vital commodity. Famine, drowning and thirst also occur when a commodity t…

> This is a worldwide assessment. Look at Northern Europe, and notice the complete lack of dots on the map.

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say here. Northern Europe generally doesn't need the kind of sites that this study was looking for (a pair of locations vertically separated and horizontally close with a river close to the lower location); they already have "once-through" hydro plants on rivers with reservoirs high in the mountains.

> Want you bet your freezing bottom on it? "Less likely" does not cut it for a vital commodity.

I don't have to "bet my freezing bottom" on it. The "less likely" part means lower expected value of energy needs not satisfied by a combination of solar and wind power. This lower expected value translates into lower expenditure of backup supplies such as synthetic gas being expended for that purpose, and therefore the lower average annual cost of using such supplies. That makes this approach viable.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#558

Post by jhgb »

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…

The law I was talking about was passed in 2002, if I'm not mistaken. It specified what "remaining energy", so as to speak, would the German utilities be allowed to extract from already operating reactor units before decommissioning them, which, based on their average output, would have been around 2022-ish. I'm not quite sure how any of those things you're citing are relevant to this, since they don't say anything about repealing this law in which these things where mandated. The fact that in 2022-ish (nowadays really in 2023) Germany is going to do what Germany said in 2002 that it would do in 2022-ish hardly seems like "swift change of political course" to me.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#559

Post by BenjiWiebe »

psadri wrote: post #117

My theory - technology advances at the rate of half life of each buying cycle. Phones advance quickly because people replace them every 2-3 years. Cars, every 7-10 years. Nuclear reactors every 59 years. Hence the slow rate of advancement.

Wouldn't it be more likely to be the other way around? e.g. the reason people buy new phones so often is that new features come out so often.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#560

Post by ncmncm »

Manuel_D wrote: post #550
ncmncm wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all geothermal was, like nukes, built long before renewables got so much cheaper that literally anything else.

Quite the contrary. Places where geothermal is accessible, like Iceland, have extremely cheap Energy costs. That's why they export a lot of bulk aluminum [1]. It's very energy intensive - it basically involves arcing electricity through rocks - so much so that aluminum ore is shipped to Iceland to get processed there. 1. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iceland_Export_Tre...

Yet, Iceland's energy infrastructure was, as I said, mostly built before energy from renewables got even cheaper than theirs.

Very little new geothermal is being built because it cannot compete, most places.

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