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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

#201

Post by BenoitP »

cycomanic wrote: post #180
philwelch wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would you need 100% storage supply. Also note if France would go 100% nuclear they would need either significant overprovisioning or storage as well. Nuclear is not an load following source. Even less so if you want to operate economically.

> Nuclear is not an load following source

In France it is, and has been successfully for more than 33 years [1]

[1] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/

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

#202

Post by lelag »

lelag wrote: post #186
legulere wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big percentage of mushrooms and game is still not fit for consumption today in Germany because of Chernobyl. So it's not just local. And even if, Germany is more densely populated than the Ukraine. The Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine is the same size as the state of Saarland.

The externality of emitting 1kg of CO2 has been evaluated between 10000 usd to 100000 usd. Assuming the lower range, the 300 millions tons of CO2 produced by the german electricity production accounts for 3x10^15 USD per years. That's 789 times the german GDP per year taken away from future generations. Now compare it to the GDP of Saarland.

Found the source at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-020-02785-4.

So I made a mistake and it's for 1 ton not 1 KG but my point rest, even divided by 1000: Germany destroy close to their GDP per year with their electrical production emission, which is in my book worse than potentially, loosing a region if you are unlucky.

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

#204

Post by hushpuppy »

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…

> 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.

If you eliminate gas and coal powered plants then the costs of nuclear plant lifecycle is incidental compared to economic losses that a country would encounter if they relied on solar and wind.

The dirty secret about "clean energy" is that it isn't actually very clean. When you eliminate big coal plants and try to use solar or wind, what you are actually doing is moving your dependence from coal to natural gas.

Those wind farms and solar farms require significant investment in numerous smaller style natural gas plants in order to function correctly.

So, right now, when people think they are moving away from fossil fuels they are really just moving to natural gas that is supplanted by solar and wind when conditions are ideal for them to work properly.

If you want to eliminate your dependence on natural gas, then, the only feasible option is nuclear.

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

#205

Post by ncmncm »

fartsucker69 wrote: post #102
cycomanic wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 amount…

Each dollar diverted from renewables to nukes brings climate catastrophe nearer.

Starting a new nuke means burning coal for an extra decade, and at the end of that decade getting much less power per euro, displacing correspondingly less CO2, than if you had built out renewables instead.

There is simply no contest.

Even refurbishing a nuke instead of building out renewables is a losing proposition. Just continuing to operate a nuke instead of building out and then operating renewables is a losing proposition.

The only legitimate use for keeping a nuke running is while you are waiting to bring enough renewables you are building online to wholly displace it, because what you are spending operating it is using up money that could be building more renewables.

This is the magic of exponentially falling costs.

At the point where enough spare renewable generating capacity is available to charge storage, it will be time to start building out increasingly cheap storage.

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

#206

Post by cycomanic »

phil21 wrote: post #52
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…

The primary cost of nuclear is politically driven. I don't know if that matters in a world of actual energy scarcity, I guess we'll be finding out. If you remove liability and the insanity of our current methods of waste storage the costs become outright cheap, especially in an imagined future where there is massive investment into new nuclear infrastructure. By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be…

> The primary cost of nuclear is politically driven. I don't know if that matters in a world of actual energy scarcity, I guess we'll be finding out.

> If you remove liability and the insanity of our current methods of waste storage the costs become outright cheap, especially in an imagined future where there is massive investment into new nuclear infrastructure.

You are misinformed. Nuclear power operators do not have to covee liability costs (no insurance is willing to cover nuclear disaster, so this is a massive subsidy). Also the cost of long term storage is typically not included in cost calculations for nuclear power either. Despite of this nuclear is more expensive than renewables.

> By the metrics people use to judge nuclear, hydro would be the most expensive power source known to man if you were to build one today. Just the land costs would make the entire project nonsensical if viewed solely in that frame.

Just because you say it doesn't make it true. In fact hydro projects have to typically compensate land owners when building a dam.

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

#207

Post by rswskg »

jeffbee wrote: post #199
losvedir wrote: post #166

One thing I don't understand is the uninhabitable zone around Chernobyl is not that big, and the U.S. has plenty of space. And electricity can be transmitted decently far, right? So... is it unreasonable to have lots of fairly low-regulated nuclear power plants in, say, 50 mile uninhabited areas (maybe even make it a nature preserve or something for animals)? And if one or two meltdown, oh well?

If you're willing to dedicate that much land you could just cover it in solar panels and generate 1500GW of peak electricity for less money.

*in the right conditions, ignoring nighttime, winter, northern hemisphere, etc etc...

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

#208

Post by thehappypm »

rswskg wrote: post #207
jeffbee wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're willing to dedicate that much land you could just cover it in solar panels and generate 1500GW of peak electricity for less money.

*in the right conditions, ignoring nighttime, winter, northern hemisphere, etc etc...

Okay, put in batteries, still an order of magnitude cheaper than a nuclear plant without any risk of doomsday

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

#209

Post by jhallenworld »

philwelch wrote: post #160
adrianN wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's a common use of "unsolved at scale". We know how to do it, it just doesn't make economic sense right now. I mean, suppose you have hundreds of GW of storage of some form installed. You could just claim it's still not "solved at scale" because the global energy consumption is even higher.

The global supply chains for lithium batteries are already struggling to keep up just with current demand. Where are we going to get enough cobalt? Hopefully not DR Congo.

>Where are we going to get enough cobalt?

Nobody would use this kind of lithium ion battery for grid storage. Instead use Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePo4) batteries- no cobalt needed. LiFePo4 batteries are absolutely good enough right now for grid storage.

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

#210

Post by logifail »

lelag wrote: post #76
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.

That's in large part due to the work of the german-influenced green movement which did manage to get France to stop building reactors for 30 years or so. In the meantime, the french nuclear industry lost the competency to build new one as demonstrated by the struggling EPR project in Normandy. But at least the many older reactors have been producing low-carbon power since then... Germany's electricity production has…

> In the meantime, the french nuclear industry lost the competency to build new one as demonstrated by the struggling EPR project in Normandy.

If the French (of all people) can no longer get it together to build new reactors even remotely on time and on budget, then maybe we just need to be honest and give up on the "build lots of new nuclear plants, quickly" as a credible medium-term component of a plan to deal with climate change.

"France's Flamanville 3 reactor will cost 300 million euros more than forecast and fuel loading is being pushed back by up to six months, EDF (EDF.PA) said on Wednesday, in the latest setback for a project already running more than a decade late.

EDF now estimates the total cost of the project at 12.7 billion euros ($14.42 billion). Its expected cost has more than quadrupled from the first estimate made in 2004."[0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-announces-new-de...

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