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Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

austinvernon.site

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Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#631

Post by jhgb »

webmaven wrote: post #255
jhgb wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that takes up 100-1000x the land Practically irrelevant unless you're Singapore or the like. > always has a few % of its installed capacity down for maintenance That's true for a nuclear power plant fleet as well. There's always some downtime for maintenance and/or refueling (although usually you prefer to do both at the same time, sometimes unplanned outages are still a thing). > and doesn't provide predictable ou…

> Nonsense. Why would wind power plants require any lithium? I think the idea is to ameliorate the unpredictability of wind capacity by storing excess off-peak power for low-generation periods. There are better solutions, but they are mostly less generic and often better implemented close to the point of use.

> There are better solutions

That's a good euphemism for "this solution is a spectacularly bad one". Storing electricity in lithium batteries is the last thing you want to do when balancing the grid. You want to start with demand response, then continue with overgeneration, then continue with pumped hydro. In the future (when we will have replaced natural gas by synthetic hydrogen as part of the demand response) then possibly continue with expending stored synthetic gas in a CCGT plant (this would be especially suitable for the "dunkelflaute" events).

Grid storage lithium batteries for large-scale storage (not things like frequency regulation) are somewhere at the end of the cost scale and it's not something you really want to do since you need those batteries primarily for mobile applications. Even if you wanted lots of stationary batteries, there might be better candidates -- I still want to see some company to cut their teeth on advanced NiFe batteries, for example.

One thing you could do as part of the demand response step, however, is modulating the charging rate of BEVs. But personally I consider this to be more a part of the transportation sector than energy generation as such.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#632

Post by jhgb »

roenxi wrote: post #627
jhgb wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you noticed the news about Gazprom possibly intentionally keeping gas reserves in Germany low for months before the Russian invasion in preparation of said invasion. You can't make a strategic stockpile if your potential enemy is your supplier and preventively doesn't allow you make those stockpiles in the first place so that you didn't have this way out.

You're misjudging the differences between uranium and gas. Transporting and building a uranium reserve would be relatively easy; maintaining a 10 year stockpile and importing from Canada, Australia or Kazakhstan via a circuitous route are all feasible. This doesn't work with natural gas because they needed a lot of it and moving it around is capital intensive. The situations are completely different. The energy densi…

> You're misjudging the differences between uranium and gas.

So do you.

> Transporting and building a uranium reserve would be relatively easy; maintaining a 10 year stockpile and importing from Canada, Australia or Kazakhstan via a circuitous route are all feasible.

See, that's the problem. One of the differences between natural gas and uranium is that (outside of CANDU reactors) you can't use the uranium "as is". To use uranium for pretty much anything useful, you need certain high-tech facilities. By production capacity, almost half of those facilities (according to [1], it's 46 percent) is in Russia.

The way things are, you can't build a stockpile if the expected value of uranium fuel production outside of Russia is lower than the expected value of uranium fuel consumption outside of Russia, which I believe is currently the case. As long as this remains to be a case, any stockpile will dwindle, not grow.

[1] https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/research/commentary/re...

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#633

Post by jhgb »

trashtester wrote: post #596
jhgb wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty sure you can have your stockpiles pre-assebled, or close enough that the final step is trivial. 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…

Or, they could just shut down their nuclear plants and the problem with nuclear fuel stockpile goes away as well. And in fact, this is vastly easier to accomplish, and exactly the thing they're already doing.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#634

Post by jhgb »

trashtester wrote: post #582
jhgb wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say that comparing the purchase of gas to the purchase of uranium is uninformed, if not dishonest, for two reasons: - Fuel costs for nuclear is only 15-20% of the total cost, half of which is the uranium itself [1]. For natural gas, the majority of the cost is the fuel, even during "normal" times What seems "uninformed, if not dishonest" to me is the argument that fuel price matters here. Imagine this: Your…

For Germany's risk, the the price doesn't make a big differencem, should Russia decide to cut off the supply. As long as the supply is NOT cut off, it matters quite a lot what Germany is paying for it. If the choice (for a set period of energy supply) is to pay either 100 billion euros for natural gas, or 20 billion euroes for uranium, the difference is 80 billion euroes less that Russia could spend to keep their war…

> If the choice (for a set period of energy supply) is to pay either 100 billion euros for natural gas, or 20 billion euroes for uranium

Except that's NOT the choice that Germany is faced with. In the short term, the cheapest way for Germany to cover for any decrease in nuclear generation is to increase her lignite mining, not to buy more gas, which has grown even more expensive. And also notice that this decreases the money Russia would get from 100 billion in your hypothetical example not to 20 billion but rather to 0 billion, all while being even cheaper for Germany.

> As for Russia's enrichment capacity, that is something any advanced country could set up

It would take many years to replace the 46% [1] Russian share of the global enrichment capacity. Maybe more than a few years -- a decade perhaps. After all, this is all highly controlled, specialized equipment. You can't just go and buy it in a supermarket.

> I don't know which take longer, between LNG from other sources or uranium from other sources.

It would absolutely take longer for the world to replace Russian uranium fuel production. They've built is up as a Cold War Project-Manhattan-level strategic project over more than a decade.

> Finally, with nuclear there is always the option of setting up strategic fuel reserves.

As I already responded to someone else, you can't set up a fuel reserve if your expected value of fuel consumption is higher than your expected value of of fuel production (or, acquisition in this case, really).

[1] https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/research/commentary/re...

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#635

Post by trashtester »

jhgb wrote: post #634
trashtester wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Germany's risk, the the price doesn't make a big differencem, should Russia decide to cut off the supply. As long as the supply is NOT cut off, it matters quite a lot what Germany is paying for it. If the choice (for a set period of energy supply) is to pay either 100 billion euros for natural gas, or 20 billion euroes for uranium, the difference is 80 billion euroes less that Russia could spend to keep their war…

> If the choice (for a set period of energy supply) is to pay either 100 billion euros for natural gas, or 20 billion euroes for uranium Except that's NOT the choice that Germany is faced with. In the short term, the cheapest way for Germany to cover for any decrease in nuclear generation is to increase her lignite mining, not to buy more gas, which has grown even more expensive. And also notice that this decreases t…

> It would absolutely take longer for the world to replace Russian uranium fuel production. They've built is up as a Cold War Project-Manhattan-level strategic project over more than a decade.

As I said, I don't know. (EDIT, meaning that I don't know, not that I dispute your claim. It would be nice to have actual numbers.) It does also take years to set up transportation capacity for LNG, including the tankers, terminals and other infrastructure.

Anyway, had the west realized this exposure for real in 2014, I would have expected that at least some increased capacity would be available outside of Russia already, with an increase in capacity every month as we go forward. And had the output of that capacity been put into strategic reserves, one would have some level of reserve while building up more capacity.

What it looks like from your link, is that there was an initative started last year to reduce dependancy on Russian fuel. I suppose time will tell how long it takes to reach reasonable production volumes.

And one thing is obvious. Storing and transporting nuclear fuel is orders of magnutudes cheaper than storing and transporting natural gas.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#636

Post by gregwebs »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #626
gregwebs wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article on the site about solar is equally bad. Both are full of lots of good information but then have some key misunderstandings. The solar article doesn't acknowledge that installing a solar requires installing a gas peaker plant on the grid as well. [1] Although solar certainly reduces carbon emissions (the gas peaker plants only runs some of the time), the result is that the cost to the grid, rather than bei…

The site actually has several articles about why this specific criticism is silly. To summarize: we already have gas plants, and gas storage, leaving them turned off except as a fallback insurance is the sensible option. Even when building new plants, gas plants are the cheapest to build and simplest to run which matters a lot if they're mostly idle, which is why they get used as peakers. https://austinvernon.site/bl…

That’s another mostly great article you linked to. Still though it doesn’t mention the dramatic cost increase of natural gas plants when used as a peaker instead of always-on, and it assumes we can produce as many batteries as we want. It also assumes we can continue producing massive amounts of natural gas in the US and export huge amounts to the rest of the world.

The author's article on renewables and batteries states "The cost of these batteries is plummeting. Material constraints are not an issue because storage batteries do not require top-tier energy density" [1]. This was reasonable to think just two years ago but now is obviously wrong- and this assumption underpins most of the author's writings on energy.

Energy policy is very unforgiving- missing one important fact or one wrong assumption can dramatically alter the outcome.

[1] https://austinvernon.site/blog/renewablevariation.html

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#637

Post by trashtester »

jhgb wrote: post #633
trashtester wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure you can have your stockpiles pre-assebled, or close enough that the final step is trivial. 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…

Or, they could just shut down their nuclear plants and the problem with nuclear fuel stockpile goes away as well. And in fact, this is vastly easier to accomplish, and exactly the thing they're already doing.

If you scroll up the thread a bit, the context was that someone claimed that Germany would be less dependent on Germany if they had kept more of their nuclear power plants. That is something they might have figured out in 2014.

Going as heavy on natural gas as they have over the last generation, more or less ensures that they are in Russia's pocket. Shutting down nuclear plants does not make that better. In fact, I argue, it makes it worse.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#638

Post by qiskit »

nosianu wrote: post #380
qiskit wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If pipelines between russia and germany ( who had ties stretching centuries and pipelines for decades ) are such an issue for the US, any pipeline between russia and korea or russia and japan are non-starters. After fukushima, we allowed japan to buy lots of gas from russia. There was even talk about Japan and Russia building pipelines. But that got squashed real quick. Instead we forced japan to build LNG terminals…

Yes, Russia has all those great resources. Unfortunately it also has the paranoid aggressive Russian security apparatus in charge that brought us to where we are, which for some strange reason you entirely omit. Also, we have climate change, remember? We are supposed to not use up all the available fossil carbohydrates! The more we bring up the more even more large-scale issues we will have. Making fossil fuels cheap…

No post body was provided.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#639

Post by pojzon »

merb wrote: post #623
pojzon wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every grid needs a stable source of electricity. Wind and Solars are not stable sources of electricity. If its not windy -> turbines are useless. If its cloudy -> solars are almost useless. Nuclear Plant on the other hand produces stable amount of electricity everyday. And molten salt reactors are resistant to human stupidity. Its literally impossible to cause a disaster with this type of reactors. Its physically not…

you know in america and europe solar and wind is stable. it's not like the whole of america is in clouds or has no wind, neither holds true. the problem with the grid is that it's hard to support a wind/solar grid somewhere else. nuclear is not as stable as you wish, just look at france the last months. they imported energy from germany, because a lot of their power plants were down. > And molten salt reactors are re…

They exist and Chinese are building those reactors right now in places with not enough water.

Thise reactors are just overall more expensive than the ones using water as coolant.

Ps.france reactors were built over 50 years ago.. ofcourse they will require maintenance. Newer projects require less often maintenance.

This discussion seems pointless. I wont convince you and you wont convince me either.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#640

Post by gregwebs »

cycomanic wrote: post #232
gregwebs wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article on the site about solar is equally bad. Both are full of lots of good information but then have some key misunderstandings. The solar article doesn't acknowledge that installing a solar requires installing a gas peaker plant on the grid as well. [1] Although solar certainly reduces carbon emissions (the gas peaker plants only runs some of the time), the result is that the cost to the grid, rather than bei…

Gas peaker plants are needed for nuclear just as much. Generally the article is looking at the most favourable conditions for the technology, e.g. only considering OCC and not interest cost for building and decommissioning of nuclear plants.

Nuclear is producing 100% output during peak power needs. Solar varies greatly but in the winter may be producing little output during peak power needs. So yes, a 100% all the time output requires peaking, but a variable power source that is not producing during peak times requires much more.
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