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Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

nytimes.com

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

#111

Post by ZeroGravitas »

fallingknife wrote: post #59
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…

Everybody always says that solar + storage is cheaper. And sometimes there are even studies to support it. But if that's true where is it ?

China mostly:

2021 figures:

> China was the biggest contributor, adding 121 GW to the continent’s new capacity. Europe and North America—led by the USA—took second and third places respectively, with the former adding 39 GW, and the latter 38 GW.

81% of new electricity generaton build globally was renewables last year.

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

#112

Post by philwelch »

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…

French electrical power is 70% nuclear and has an installed capacity of 135 GW of power today. That comes out to 94.5 GW of nuclear power in France alone. Is there any country in the world that can supply hundreds of gigawatts to the grid from batteries today? If not, then the problem of grid power storage is unsolved at scale compared to nuclear.

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

#113

Post by cycomanic »

Jorge1o1 wrote: post #56
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.

The reasons are political… just like in the United States. HBO with their Chernobyl miniseries single-handedly undid years of progress in the perception of nuclear energy.

According to perceptions and advertising about nuclear we should have unlimited power and everything from our cars to our stoves would be running of nuclear. All this should have been possible with just a containers worth of nuclear waste (experts in the 50s,60s seriously said operating a whole country of nuclear would result in maybe a ton of nuclear waste).

Nuclear completely undelivered on this promise. Tschernobyl was just the nail in the coffin.

On top of that has the nuclear industry been one of the strongest lobbying groups against wind and solar, mainly to protect their investments. I would argue on the whole we would have been much further in terms of renewable energy if it wasn't for the nuclear industry.

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

#114

Post by carry_bit »

adrianN wrote: post #61
thereddaikon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing you can pick it up and move it to other places.

Good thing electricity is cheap to transmit.

It's not though; that's one of the reasons all of the grids aren't interconnected yet.

"Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes" also applies here. The amount of energy you can deliver by transporting fuel rods by truck/train/ship is immense.

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

#115

Post by colinmhayes »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #51
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…

> I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Very unlikely. Nuclear costs are sky high only because in the last decades it was suppressed rather than invested in and improved. Had it seen the same level of support the wind and solar energy have, we'd have a dirt-cheap abundance of nuclear power, with very little carbon emissions. Take away the red tape and scaremongering…

South Korea has been constantly building nuclear for decades. The price has come down marginally, renewables are still far cheaper. Yes, the problem is largely political, I don't see a solution to that though.

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

#116

Post by acidburnNSA »

boringg wrote: post #97
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…

The problems with Nuclear are simple and straight forward: (1) Economic not viable if you include the total life cycle cost of the system (i.e. nuclear waste storage and dismantling the asset. Theres a large difference between building new reactors vs running the old ones until the end of life (in terms of economics). Also the modular reactors that are getting a lot of hype right now also still have a nuclear waste d…

> not viable if you include the total life cycle cost of the system (i.e. nuclear waste storage and dismantling the asset.

On the contrary! 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 around $50B.

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RL33461.pdf

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

#117

Post by IMTDb »

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…

The problem isn't the safety regulation, but the opening authorisation regulations. Because we basically forbid the opening of new reactors regardless of their safety we have said to all people with nuclear expertise "Go find another job, you industry is a dead end".

Instead of saying to welders "Learn nuclear grade welding, develop a valued expertise and you are going to have a safe, well paying job for the next 30 years". We told them "this is the last reactor we're gonna do, do the bare minimum and find something else, your job is gone anyway".

Instead of saying to your graduates "Study nuclear and you are going to work in building/managing reactors and provide carbonless energy to your country" we told them "If you study nuclear, all you are going to do is dismantle old reactors we don't want to see anymore".

And surprise: 25 years later we have a very hard time properly building and maintaining reactors. And that is the consequence of the opening authorisation regulations.

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

#118

Post by q1w2 »

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…

> Doing nuclear fission safely is a massively complex technological undertaking.

Finland has proven this to be false.

...and frankly, so did the US even in the 1980s. The roadblock to storage misguided activism, not science or tachnology.

Reopen the Yucca storage facility. It has the space for literally ALL the US's spent fuel storage.

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

#119

Post by otherme123 »

mgfist wrote: post #77
pydry wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was always too expensive. It wasnt hippy peaceniks that killed it. It was money. The odd catastrophe didnt help though. Why there is a resurgence of interest now when dirt cheap solar and wind have effectively rendered it a costly relic of the past is somewhat puzzling. I guess PR campaigns like the OP's link are one reason.

It's expensive when you rely on cheap Russian/ME fossil fuels > Why there is a resurgence of interest now when dirt cheap solar and wind have effectively rendered it a costly relic of the past is somewhat puzzling. If cheap solar/wind was enough right now Europe wouldn't be going through an energy crisis.

Solar is cheap since 2012 or so. 10 years is not enough to make a full shift. But we europeans are going there: 15 GW installed in 2019, 20 GW in 2020 and 23 GW in 2021.
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