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Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

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241–250 of 306 posts

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#241
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean using nukes, nukes started today will ensure burning fossil fuel for at least ten more years while we wait for them to come online. Money (including cost overruns) spent on them will be unavailable to build out renewables that would displace fossil fuels immediately. Electric synthetic ammonia is mature tech. It just takes a long time to build the factories to produce the needed amount of synthesis equipm…

> Electric synthetic ammonia is mature tech I'd prefer a nuclear plant nearby, ammonia is toxic: https://abc13.com/ammonia-truck-disaster-houston/1332062/

One incident almost 50 years ago, with no long-term effect, is not a red warning.

Ammonia as an energy storage medium grows an already very mature use. Millions of tons of ammonia are handled every year.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#242
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For facilities with more than 1GW capacity Wikipedia has a list [1] (though note that that's merely the turbine's capacity, the total amount stored is the GWh figure that's missing for half of the entries). There's also a list specifically with installations that aren't pumped hydro, but none of those would make the list above because of their limited capacity [2]. Pumped hydro dominates the storage game so far, both…

Last time I checked there doesn't exist a commercial operated pumped hydro that buy renewables when supply is high and sell when the weather/season has changed. I found one plant on the wikipedia list that is at least operated commercially by an private energy company, but they use it to balance their network of fossil fuel power plants when they shut down or start up. During starting/stopping the grid need to stabil…

Obviously until there is enough renewable energy capacity to charge up storage, there will not be storage built to charge with it.

Posting "storage isn't built out yet" says nothing informative. Before it's built, it hasn't been built.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For facilities with more than 1GW capacity Wikipedia has a list [1] (though note that that's merely the turbine's capacity, the total amount stored is the GWh figure that's missing for half of the entries). There's also a list specifically with installations that aren't pumped hydro, but none of those would make the list above because of their limited capacity [2]. Pumped hydro dominates the storage game so far, both…

Pumped hydro is extremely dependent on geography. Yes, the extant plants have favorable cost-per-capacity, but that number will only get worse as less favorable sites are used for it.

Pumped hydro potential turns out to be surprisingly independent of geography. What is espectially dependent on geography is placement of already-built dams.

But pumped hydro is not the only kind of bulk energy storage.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#244
post #231
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikipedia article on pumped hydro mentions some perhaps surprising variations that do not depend on mountain geography. CAES -- compressed air -- is quite mature. Until recently it was considered to have insufficient round-trip efficiency, but that doesn't matter so much anymore. Again, there are numerous interesting variations, including pumping air into a vessel anchored to the sea floor via a pipe from an onsh…

Calling green hydrogen cheap is a bit of a stretch. The Swedish government produced a government report on the viability of it a couple/few years ago and the price was around 10x compared to nuclear, and that just for producing it. Storage and transportation would be additional costs on top. There is a reason why there aren't any current investments Sweden/Finland/Germany in order to create green hydrogen for energy…

There is not need to transport hydrogen when it can be made right on the spot where it is needed.

Cost of green hydrogen is in free fall, just like all storage media, as factories ramp up.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#245
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electric synthetic ammonia is mature tech I'd prefer a nuclear plant nearby, ammonia is toxic: https://abc13.com/ammonia-truck-disaster-houston/1332062/

One incident almost 50 years ago, with no long-term effect, is not a red warning. Ammonia as an energy storage medium grows an already very mature use. Millions of tons of ammonia are handled every year.

> One incident almost 50 years ago

Smaller incidents happen every year, example for Canada: https://www.technicalsafetybc.ca/case-study-ammonia-release-...

> Millions of tons of ammonia are handled every year.

Fertilizers are handled in even larger quantities, generally safe most of the time, yet accidents do happen. This alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion killed comparable count of people to Chernobyl + Fukushima combined.

I consider a nuclear power plant way safer than a facility which handles bulk quantities of toxic or explosive stuff.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear waste is process and reactor specific. These are engineering problems and are several magnitudes of order smaller problems to deal with that dealing with carbon waste.

No, it is not a small problem. There are processing plants that show elevated cancer rates in the population living near them and a significant part of radioactivity is just pushed into rivers or the ocean. That is after we have forbidden the practice to just drop nuclear waste in barrels but this is still a legislative shortcoming. Sure, there are better reactor designs and processing methods but they aren't availab…

I did not say it was a small problem, I said the current problem of stopping CO2 pollution and removing what we already have pumped into the environment over the last 200 years are orders of magnitude larger.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#247

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…

> 5GW of solar [in Finland] Okay I'm afraid that's it for me. Being on a discussion board that has to debate "is deploying solar in Finland a good idea?" is not worth it. Incidentally, yes, it took Finland 10 years to build their last reactor. They commissioned it a week or so ago, mere days before Russia disconnected them. Literally nothing we can effectively do to mitigate climate change takes <5 any more, includin…

Refusal to admit that most of the world does not live in Finland seems to be a bit disconnected from reality.

It's good news, but as I said:

> But it's pretty tiny climate news overall.

Japan may also have a pretty good argument for pushing nuclear, as well as a few other places, but they are mostly just doomed to have higher energy prices than other parts of the word because of it. Not high enough perhaps to seriously disadvantage them on the global economy, but higher than places that have better natural energy sources.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No generator provides base load, because load is usage, not power. Lots of places in the world satisfy base load with dispatchable power.

Instead of nitpicking terminology, let's talk about the issue directly: What do you do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? There isn't enough batteries on earth to even make a dent in the storage you would need. We don't want to burn any more hydrocarbons. What are our other options? Massive pumped hydro might get us there, but that construction is on a similar time horizon to a new nuclear plant a…

Let's talk about this directly: what do you do when the nuclear reactor goes down because it's time to refuel, or because it's heating up the river too much in a heat wave (eg in France), or because some sensor valve froze shut in an decade-frequent cold snap (Texas)?

You get the power from some other generator on the grid at a different geographic location.

We can easily get to 80%-90% renewables that way, with current lithium ion storage, and no price decreases. With price decreases, and the huge panopoly of other storage chemistries that are close to shipping, and maybe even competing economically (iron, maybe vanadium flow, maybe zinc air), then we have clear paths to 100%.

But even in France, nuclear never beat this 80%-90% mark, and it would absolutely bonkers insane and unrealistic to consider keeping the US's nuclear percentage at its current 20% of generation, because we can't build and we need to replace ~100 reactors very very very soon. We will be lucky if the nuclear industry could even deliver 10% of electricity needs in the future, because they simply can not build and deliver on their promises. Especially with electrification expanding energy consumed as electricity versus fossil fuels in the coming decades.

Pumped hydro is also very expensive compared to lots of lithium batteries. We will soon be producing many TWh/year of lithium ion, getting to tens of TWh/year by the early 2030s. We can accelerate that curve, or decelerate it based on investments and regulatory structures.

Nuclear is too far behind on tech to catch up. We simply can not grow the workforce or the supply chains of reactors quickly enough to sustain past construction levels at this pace. It would be foolish capital allocation.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#249
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of nitpicking terminology, let's talk about the issue directly: What do you do when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing? There isn't enough batteries on earth to even make a dent in the storage you would need. We don't want to burn any more hydrocarbons. What are our other options? Massive pumped hydro might get us there, but that construction is on a similar time horizon to a new nuclear plant a…

Only a negligible fraction of the storage that will be built will be batteries, so talking about batteries is just blowing smoke. Storage cost is falling even faster than renewables cost ever did. There are many different storage options. Each place will adopt the mix of them that makes sense for that place. Until new renewable generating capacity no longer displaces carbon emission, spending on storage would be stup…

I disagree, we are in the hundreds of GWh/year of lithium ion production now, and it grows 10x roughly every five years.

It's unlikely that any other storage tech can build supply chains quickly enough to compete with that growth. I certainly don't see pumped hydro doing this, unless we can stop relying on geography and construction projects. To make pumped hydro economical we would need something like spheres bolted to the ocean/lake floors, that pump water out and in for storage. And the materials costs for that are not falling in the same way as chemical storage.

Re: Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power

#250
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No generator provides base load, because load is usage, not power. Lots of places in the world satisfy base load with dispatchable power.

> dispatchable power. Using hydrocarbons. The very thing nuclear power avoids.

France's grid is still quite dependent on hydrocarbons, despite being mostly nuclear.

So it's not clear how nuclear helps here.

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