591–600 of 672 posts
Here in the US it's been shackled and shamed out of existence but it's also had all innovation and improvement barred as well.
Look to buying nuclear technology at a premium from India or China in the future just to catch up with where we should have been.
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…
> It has nothing to do with economics Nuclear power is not profitable. It has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with economics. If nuclear power were profitable, you could not stop it. If nuclear power were profitable, the regulations would change with a quickness, because motivated investors remove any and all roadblocks to their money. If it wasn't for the absurdly bad economics, bad track record p…
If by "nuclear" you mean pressurized solid fuel reactors, well yeah I agree.
But EVERY nuclear idea out there? Come on, the orders of magnitude of power density, availability of thorium an others for fuel, there has to be SOME design that is safe and economical.
But "economics" is a moving target with Solar/Wind cost improvements year on year.
That will eventually stabilize. Then there's a fixed target.
I hope that:
1) this target puts all the PWR people and their entrenched regulatory influence and reprocessing and lobbying to death. That does exist, and it is a major blocker. Too many people are making money as old nuclear circles the drain.
When that gets permanently put to bed, then ...
2) Then some LFTR/pebblebed/whatever design starts getting actually researched and invested in. The LFTR people claim that it's illegal to do liquid reactor research, which is why the pebble bed is being researched. I don't know the regs to know if they are telling the truth, but it does show lots of "chilling effects".
Then you target an actual number. Probably would require an iterable and scalable design.
Space may be the other good pusher.
But it's going to be a couple decades before nuclear should think about pushing anything to market, and the old nuclear should be shut down when battery storage gets good enough to replace it.
A couple decades is a generation, and it will clear the table of the old guard.
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In my totally college graduate circle of ~30 yr old friends, amongst the females, most of whom work white collar jobs, 90%+ Goop is worth billions. People eat this stuff up.
That is depressing. Though I guess from a purely rational point of view religion is no different.
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> I think you are confusing a conclusion, which can be rendered as a Yes or No decision No, the decision on what energy sources to use is not a Yes or No decision, unless you are willing to seriously reduce your energy consumption. This is more like a budgeting process, where the total has already been decided. Just like in a budgeting process, where you have to choose between welfare, healthcare, defence, environmen…
> the decision on what energy sources to use is not a Yes or No decision This is not exactly what I meant. With "can be rendered as a Yes or No decision" I meant that any more-or-less question "can be refomulated, so that someone can vote either in favour or against", which is what happens when a debate needs to be brought to a practical conclusion. (Well, there is of course also the option to abstain from voting, bu…
> You might argue that in the light of the current situation, Germany's last three nulcear plants to be shut down this years should run a little longer.
(or at least, that's how I interpret "You might argue that").
From my point of view, shutting those down had been a bad decision for a while, and was still wrong. You seem to argue that even if this was considered, it shot down for political reasons. I would argue, from my limited knowledge about German politics, that it is not a surprise that the Green party would not take that path.
I suppose from the perspective of the perspective of government in Germany given the pre-existing situation as the war started, this may not be black and white.
From my perspective, and I suppose many peple who see Germany from a distance, we may see this over a longer time period, back to March 2011 and perhaps beyond. In that context (and with my view on nuclear power), shutting down the plants this spring is just the culimination of a string of bad decisions. So with my context, it was clearly wrong, even if inertia may have made it inevitable.
So I suppose it depends on perspective.
> Germany wants to switch completely to renewable electrical energies by 2035 (all energies by 2045).
Germany wants to do that, clearly. But is it realistic. I'm reading articles such as this one:
https://energywatch.com/EnergyNews/Policy___Trading/article1...
This does not instil confidence, to say the least. Also, this clearly illustrated the problem with renewables, namely their intermittent nature. For ALL energy to be provided by renewables (and not depend on non-renewable production in other countries), the grid probably needs several days consumption worth of storage capacity.
Actually getting a point where Germany is able to produce a number of GWh equal to the yearly production is quite easy by comparison. Storage is the hard part. The numbers I've seen so far, indicates that many houses with solar panels have batteries with the capacity to store 5-10 kWh, but if you want to rely on batteries for a few cold, cloudy days in the winter in a row with no wind (and addition have power for your commute in your electric BMW, at autobahn speeds), you may need ~100x that, for EACH house.
Hopefully we will se a revolution in the cost of batteries over that period, but I still consider this pretty optimistic.
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Will putting $10^x in nuclear save more lives then putting $10^x into renewables,grid updates and batteries? You are proposing an intervention so it should be benchmarked against other interventions.
Hard to estimate that, when putting $10^x into nuclear for serious R&D may yield surprising results. Also, why not benchmark $10^x in nuclear vs. $10^x in coal or fossil fuels?
It might however that money could spend making solar panel factories for enxt gen solar cells which yields real results.
> Also, why not benchmark $10^x in nuclear vs. $10^x in coal or fossil fuels?
You can do that comparison, however since coal is not competitive in that metric you will not learn anything about how society should allocate money. We are proposing an intervention in the economy. We should try to only do the most efficient allocations.
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You could turn that on its head. Had Germany created uranium stockpiles in 2014, enough to last, say, 5 years, they would not be vulnerable to this tactic in the first place.
Considering that you can't use raw uranium but need fuel assemblies, you'd need a replacement manufacturer of fuel assemblies, not just a uranium stockpile. But of course Germany was scheduled to shut down its nuclear power plants in 2022-ish anyway so a stockpile would have been largely meaningless.
Anyway, my argument i built on the premise that Germany should never have shut down their nuclear power plants (except when they truely are "spent") and instead built a large number of new ones.
If their nuclear capacity was about the same as the French, it would make a lot of sense to have a strategic stockpile of ready-to-use fuel, both in case supply is restricted for political reasons and because it would serve as a hedge against price fluctuations.
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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.
From my point of view, his behaviour in 2014 was much like Hitler in 1938. What he did this year, was similar to Hitler's attack on Poland in 39.
Some people were maybe surprised in 39, but I think most reasonable people had stopped trusting him at least by the time he marched into Prague.
Just like France and England should have started much more serious rearmament after that, I would argue that EU countries should have started preparing for a conflict after 2014.
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> You can't convert about 40 million households [1] in a year or two. Who's talking about a year or two? Germany has been pushing for russian gas since the 90's, against all logic.
It's against logic if your only consideration is geo politics. And even then, many have argued economic cooperation builds peace and security through mutual trust and dependency. In the light of current events, this way of thinking has been discredited, but it's far from self evidently irrational.
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Actually, gas heating can _easily_ be replaced with heat pumps assuming cheap electricity is provided.
That's a trick the Germans will have to do about 50 million times to get rid of their gas dependence in all their households. That's going to be bottle necked on the availability of heat pumps and trained people to install those. It will be interesting to see how quickly that industry can scale. Providing the electricity for those pumps is the easy part of the problem. That just requires doing a bit more of what they…
In any case, not all heat pumps are that expensive, and it is also possible to have hybrid heat pumps and air conditioners.
Had Germany decided to phase out natural gas for heating in 2014, and replace it by nuclear power, ovens and heat pumps would definitely be able to keep up with the reactor build rate.
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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?