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Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

allianceforscience.cornell.edu

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Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#21

Post by hans1729 »

toxik wrote: post #6

The big problem for nuclear in Sweden at least is that no new staff has been trained for a long time. We couldn’t really run our shutdown reactors if we tried.

The same applies for Germany; our plants that have been shut down can, de facto, not be reactivated. The effort would be too big, and the industry lacks the experts as priorities shifted for obvious reasons.

In other news, Germany just started a partnership with Quatar to import Gas, because, you know, we don't want to support abusive regimes :-) Everything just gets more messy and distorted by the day.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#22

Post by seanw444 »

pastor_bob wrote: post #14
chadash wrote: post #3

I have heard a lot of chatter recently about how nuclear has fallen out of favor among certain circles on the left. Can someone explain what the reasons for that are?

fukushima

If Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only examples of major catastrophe they can point to, and one wasn't even directly caused by malpractice of the employees, and the last one that was malpractice was nearly 40 years ago... then I don't even know. The best I got is "they're stupid."

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#23

Post by rtkwe »

chadash wrote: post #3

I have heard a lot of chatter recently about how nuclear has fallen out of favor among certain circles on the left. Can someone explain what the reasons for that are?

One of the main reasons is the nuclear waste which for the purposes of the timescales of human civilization and planning are indefinitely dangerous. In the US in particular there's never been a great plan implemented to actually deal with that waste long term. It mostly just gets shuffled around to current running reactors when one shuts down.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#24

Post by happytoexplain »

api wrote: post #4

Wait… someone in the realm of politics changed their mind in a… sane… rational direction? I feel like I could count instances of that in my lifetime on one hand. Everywhere on the political spectrum everyone seems to have been utterly losing their minds for a long time.

There are many things to bring out the negativity and sarcasm for about politics, but there seem to be reasonable arguments both for and against nuclear power. That's not to say that you can't consider one argument to be obviously better than the other, but the leap to "any opposition to my side is unreasonable and deserves to be snidely made fun of" is part of what's ruining politics.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#25

Post by hans1729 »

rdl wrote: post #18

Is this a case of politics, like science, proceeds one funeral at a time? Did the 1970s anti-nuclear people age out of the party leadership and membership so this could get revisited?

Not just aging out, idealism as a political motive is essentially dead, because it's a luxury that can't be afforded anymore.

The new green line - everywhere - isn't "nuclear bad", it's "act on climate change or everybody, including your kids, will pay the price". The entire board changed, figures and strategies notwithstanding.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#26

Post by happytoexplain »

seanw444 wrote: post #22
pastor_bob wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fukushima

If Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only examples of major catastrophe they can point to, and one wasn't even directly caused by malpractice of the employees, and the last one that was malpractice was nearly 40 years ago... then I don't even know. The best I got is "they're stupid."

Why are you implying that natural disasters don't "count"? That's not a very pragmatic stance. If an earthquake has drastically different effects on two different power sources, than that is one difference you must consider. I'm for nuclear power, but you shouldn't call people stupid for petty reasons.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#28

Post by layer8 »

epistasis wrote: post #16

This is great, and hopefully it will stop the premature shutdown of existing nuclear reactors. But it's pretty tiny climate news overall. Nuclear reactors are aging out and nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore. Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor, which won't come on line…

> nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore

Given the huge subsidies for nuclear reactors, did they ever know? Regardless of the environmental merits, it’s not a cheap technology, and due to the limited number of reactors built it’s not exactly a competitive market either. At least at this point in time, building new reactors is necessarily slow and expensive.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#29

Post by photochemsyn »

Funding for the source is interesting:

> "The Alliance for Science is a global communications initiative based at the Boyce Thompson Institute, an independent nonprofit research institute affiliated with Cornell University. Our primary source of support is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."

The article does gloss over where Finland would source its uranium from. A GW-scale nuclear power plant burns through ~200 tons of fuel rods per year, and Finland's supplier seems to have been the Russian state-owned uranium outfit Rosatom:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/rosatoms-unit-seeks-...

Finland does have plans to start mining and refining uranium ore, but it looks like they'll produce only enough for one reactor:

> "Last year, 35% of Finnish electricity production came from the country’s four nuclear reactors, whose owners Fortum and TVO buy their nuclear fuel from other countries including Russia, France and Canada."

Anyone holding ownership in Canada's high-grade uranium ores is likely going to do well by this move. About that...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/25/bill-gates-nuclear-power-wil...

Regardless, countries like Finland which are solar-limited for much of the year are the obvious place for nuclear. Whether they can make their domestic uranium mining operations 'clean and fossil-fuel free', and secure reasonably priced contracts for importing the rest of their required reactor fuel, remains to be seen.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#30

Post by PaulHoule »

epistasis wrote: post #16

This is great, and hopefully it will stop the premature shutdown of existing nuclear reactors. But it's pretty tiny climate news overall. Nuclear reactors are aging out and nobody in Western Europe or the US seems to know how to build in a cost competitive way anymore. Deploying 5GW of solar and storage, or 3-4GW of wind, is far easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to build a new reactor, which won't come on line…

It's not that simple.

People quote low prices for renewables today that we might be scoffing at in 50 years just like we scoff at the early claim that "nuclear power is too cheap to meter"

Specifically, you can't compare a nuclear reactor that delivers predictable power to solar and wind systems that deliver power when they want to deliver power. Germany has already had episodes where the spot price for electricity went under zero -- yet to make the electric grid work they have to burn natural gas when renewables aren't available.

The story for storage looks better than it ever has but it is still orders of magnitude more expensive more expensive than it needs to be to be practical.

People fantasize about feeding excess renewable energy into systems that run intermittently that capture carbon directly from air, synthesize hydrogen and e-fuels, etc. Trouble is that most of the systems have a high capital cost: e-fuel production has a crazy high capital cost as it is, if the factory is running only 20% of the time then bam... capital costs are 5x greater per unit.

The LWR struggles to compete with other energy sources for several reasons, not least of which is the high capital cost of the steam turbine and associated heat exchangers. There is hope:

https://www.moltexenergy.com/

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