Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 818 posts

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#101

Post by phh »

adrianN wrote: post #49
unchocked wrote: post #32

I will hazard that the problems with nuclear are not technological but political, and the economic problems with nuclear are there because of political reasons. France gets ~75% of its power from nuclear, safely and economically. France inhabits the same physical world as the rest of us, but is different politically. If there were a will, there would be a way. If the environmental movement had paid more attention to…

France is currently not building enough reactors to replace those that will need to be shut down due to age in the near future. They would need to build a lot more if they wanted to satisfy demand for heating and transportation. I assume they have good reasons not to build more reactors.

Even though there are political reasons, the biggest reason is... we had enough reactors for our own usage.

We built them so fast, that even if we had cross-partisan will to keep forever using nuclear, we'd still have 30-40 years of gap without making any new reactor. And after a generation of engineers, we need to make reactors again and we're basically doing it from scratch again.

There are other reasons: people's fear of nuclear became quite real (either because of greenpeace, or local green political parties). There's also a bit of hubris I think, rather than making some "easy" "usual" reactor model, we decided to do our brand new own, which has its own cost: If Flamanville's EPR had succeeded, we would likely have made more reactors and we would already be producing >100% of nuclear power

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#102

Post by fartsucker69 »

cycomanic wrote: post #85
unchocked wrote: post #32

I will hazard that the problems with nuclear are not technological but political, and the economic problems with nuclear are there because of political reasons. France gets ~75% of its power from nuclear, safely and economically. France inhabits the same physical world as the rest of us, but is different politically. If there were a will, there would be a way. If the environmental movement had paid more attention to…

France is not using their reactors economically. They have been told multiple times by the EU that the reserves that operators have to provide for decommissioning of plants are much too low. So this means that the government/the taxpayers have to foot the bill. And we have not even talk about long term storage cost which are typically never taken into account. So yes it is a political decision, France is willing to h…

This is afaik true about nuclear power plants in general. They are one of the least cost-efficient energy generation sources out there because of their insane construction and running costs. In some countries they never make their money back, even if run by private companies, and only exist because of subsidies when they were built.

However, they are by far the most practical and safe way to generate ludicrous amounts of environmentally friendly energy out of all technologies that we have available. Even solar can't match up. If you factor in the really long term cost on every country on this planet due to climate change for example, this footed bill is chump change.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#103

Post by jeffbee »

IMTDb wrote: post #84
jeffbee wrote: post #4

I know HN is just desperate for that i-told-you-so moment when fission rises from irrelevancy to save us all from climate change, but it's just not going to happen. Look at this figure [1]. The amount of proposed solar and wind and battery projects in the United States at the end of 2021 was 1000s of time larger than the amount of proposed nuclear power projects. And one big difference is the renewables are actually…

> The amount of proposed solar and wind and battery projects in the United States at the end of 2021 was 1000s of time larger than the amount of proposed nuclear power projects. Your article links to capacity not effective production when customer needs it . The issue with electricity production resides in being able to reliably produce electricity when customer needs it, not when planet aligns for [insert preferred…

Please explain said "basic physics". I'll wait.

California is building battery storage at a rate of ~2500MW/year. There are ZERO physics problems standing in the way of this. And there is considerable innovation in fixed batteries like iron-air flow batteries, ones that exist and aren't just VC scams like most of the nuclear stuff.

https://www.energy-storage.news/california-utility-pge-propo...

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#104

Post by acidburnNSA »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #87
photochemsyn wrote: post #12

Funny article in that it doesn't discuss lifecycle costs. A side-by-side comparison of the cost of grids powered by nuclear power plant relative to those powered by wind/solar/storage is what I'd expect to see from a 'paper of record' like the NYTimes. Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of w…

As far as life-cycle costs go: what about end of life? That's the big elephant in the room. Over the past decades, a couple of hundreds of plants have been build globally. Doing nuclear fission safely is a massively complex technological undertaking. While the basic principles are by and large the same, the concrete designs of each of those plants aren't similar. Therefor, decommissioning a nuclear plant is equally c…

Nuclear plants pay a fraction of their revenue through their life into special decommissioning funds that have so far been more than enough to perform full greenfield decommissioning.

For waste, there's a separate fund called the Nuclear Waste Fund in the US (and other nuclear-operating countries) that has a current balance of $55B.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#105

Post by eldaisfish »

photochemsyn wrote: post #62
philwelch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible. Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear te…

'handwave the unsolved-at-scale' ? All you have to do is look at Australia: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-f... > Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South…

Your final comparison there is an excellent example of hand-waving away the problem of intermittency. This is something that advocates of renewables regularly want to dismiss because the discussion is a difficult one.

Wind and solar are cheap now because their fuel cost is zero and the cost of grid reliability is borne by us - consumers. In a better world, the cost of balancing the grid at night should be borne by a solar PV generator because it caused the problem.

Even if you match the energy output of a solar and nuclear plant, the component of time is ignored. On a grid powered by solar, where will energy come from at night? How many batteries will you construct? The scale of these batteries is again something that’s dismissed by claims of continental-scale grids but has that been achieved anywhere? All the batteries in the world combined can power à giga watt scale grid for hours. That’s right, hours.

Nuclear is a solution in the here and now. It buys us time to sort through these problems while we work towards a better future.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#106

Post by mgfist »

otherme123 wrote: post #78
mgfist wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The amount of proposed solar and wind and battery projects in the United States at the end of 2021 was 1000s of time larger than the amount of proposed nuclear power projects Because the public has been anti nuclear energy for the past 4 decades. > And one big difference is the renewables are actually built, while the fission projects never make progress. Nuclear energy regulations are an absolute nightmare and mak…

Regulations are a nightmare for good reasons. Nuclear power is safe because regulations are a nightmare. Yes, we could build Chernobyl-like power plants with soviet-like regulations, that are cheap. That leads sooner or later to Chernobyl-like accidents. If nuclear power depends on lowering the safety regulations to be economically viable, it is not economically viable, at least for now. Take for example the infamous…

You're not necessarily wrong. At the end of the day we lost all nuclear expertise when the public turned against it 40 years ago.

Per kwh fossil fuel disasters have killed more people and have caused more damage to the environment. Compare the public reactions to the Three Mile Island Accident vs the BP oil spill.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#107

Post by dukoid »

unchocked wrote: post #32

I will hazard that the problems with nuclear are not technological but political, and the economic problems with nuclear are there because of political reasons. France gets ~75% of its power from nuclear, safely and economically. France inhabits the same physical world as the rest of us, but is different politically. If there were a will, there would be a way. If the environmental movement had paid more attention to…

If you can't insure something reasonably it's not economical. The risk is just externalized.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#108

Post by politician »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #66
politician wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the environmentalist lobby ready to allow the amount of mining required to produce the copper, nickel, cobalt, and aluminum needed to support going "100% renewable asap"?

They are happy to support it when it is done outside their own country (speaking as an American)

By the number of downvotes, I'm going to take away the idea that, no, the environmentalist lobby does not approve of the increases in mining required to support going 100% renewable ASAP.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#109

Post by adrianN »

phh wrote: post #101
adrianN wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France is currently not building enough reactors to replace those that will need to be shut down due to age in the near future. They would need to build a lot more if they wanted to satisfy demand for heating and transportation. I assume they have good reasons not to build more reactors.

Even though there are political reasons, the biggest reason is... we had enough reactors for our own usage. We built them so fast, that even if we had cross-partisan will to keep forever using nuclear, we'd still have 30-40 years of gap without making any new reactor. And after a generation of engineers, we need to make reactors again and we're basically doing it from scratch again. There are other reasons: people's…

Only a third of France's primary power consumption comes from nuclear. That's a long way to go to carbon neutrality.
Post reply on HN