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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

#231

Post by paulmd »

philwelch wrote: post #169
adrianN wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building pipelines for oil and gas isn't trivial either but we managed to do it.

Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak. Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant factor in power distribution.

> Oil and gas pipelines do not normally leak.

????

> Currently, the most complete bottom-up inventory of natural gas system emissions is the 2012 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Greenhouse Gas Inventory (GHGI). (2) It estimates an overall system-wide methane loss rate of 6.2 Tg/yr of methane, or 1.3% of methane transported (Supporting Information (SI), Section 16) and that the transmission and storage sector (T&S) is the largest emitting segment of the natural gas industry, (2) accounting for about one-third of methane emissions.

> For T&S stations that are required to report to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), this study estimates total emissions to be 260% [215% to 330%] of the reportable emissions for these stations, primarily due to the inclusion of emission sources that are not reported under the GHGRP rules, updated emission factors, and super-emitter emissions.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b01669

Gas will literally bleed right through the seals at a certain rate, especially with the compressor motors, which is no different to the electrical losses from stepping voltage up/down.

And this is actually a huge problem with natural gas specifically because methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas... around 30x as potent as CO2 over 100 years. Losing a couple percent of your methane is a big deal. That is actually what is driving the push for electric-driven heat pumps for home use... it's better to lose a little bit of electricity than to have thousands of miles of poorly-maintained residential gas distribution that even in the best case are leaking highly potent methane through seals.

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

#232

Post by pfdietz »

ElectronCharge wrote: post #216
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 problem with a cost comparison is that currently renewables account for less than ten percent of global energy generation. What do you think will happen to the cost there as available resources dwindle, and demand for equipment increases? Also, I’m not sure those comparisons take into account the ~20 year lifespan of solar panels and windmills, versus the ~40-50 year lifespan of nuclear plants. Finally, another f…

They'll build more factories to make the renewable equipment. What, you think there's some inherent limit on the number of factories that can be built?

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

#233

Post by sofixa »

cycomanic wrote: post #157
ohgodplsno wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Those plants are nearly all close to death. No, these plants are close to the end of their original grant for exploitation. Many of them get renewed for 10, 20 years easily. The US has had plants renewed for 40 years and are still running just fine. > France isnt quite sure what to do. We know what to do, every single scientist from the ASN knows what to do, every economist knows what to do. The non-renewal of nucle…

> >Those plants are nearly all close to death. > No, these plants are close to the end of their original grant for exploitation. Many of them get renewed for 10, 20 years easily. The US has had plants renewed for 40 years and are still running just fine. The moving goal post by nuclear proponents never cease to amaze. When we talk about safety the argument is always: "don't look at these old designs, all these modern…

> don't look at these old designs, all these modern designs are 100% safe

This is only said as an answer to all the people screaming "but Chernobyl was horrible". Old designs are pretty safe too ( especially when terrible bugs like the one that caused Chernobyl are fixed), precisely because they keep getting updated to newer norms during refreshes and refits. There are nuclear power plants out there that were constructed in the 1950s that still work.

OP's point is that most nuclear power plants can have their life extended, at some cost, which is negligible compared to the cost of a new plant, and there's rarely a case where that doesn't make sense ( usually when for some reason the retrofit to update to new standards is too expensive). Why waste that? Prolong the life of existing plants, and build new ones to expand production and eventually replace the old ones.

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

#234

Post by lelag »

logifail wrote: post #210
lelag wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's very possible that you are right, that it's too late, that we can't redevelop enough nuclear capacity in time, that we are doomed to see the world burn.

That won't prevent me from blaming the anti-nuclear crowd that put us in that situation in the first place.

Yes, nuclear is expensive, yes it can be messy but it was our best shot to produce abundant amount of low carbon power. All this talk about switching to wind and solar power omit the inconfortable fact that the current low prices for those technologies are low because we are using fossil fuel to make them.

When you have to make advanced renewable tech with only renewable energy, you will see that it's no longer possible to make it economically either.

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

#235

Post by Manuel_D »

colinmhayes wrote: post #115
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Renewables are only cheaper if you ignore the challenges of using an intermittent energy source. There's no real cost estimate for storing and re-distributing electricity, because there's no feasible plan to build an energy storage system at relevant scales.

Attempting to build just one hour of storage via lithium ion batteries would case the cost of batteries to skyrocket because 1 hour of global electricity use equates to 2,500 GWh. And annual battery output is only around 300 GWh. Supply shock would immediately drive up the cost of batteries.

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

#236

Post by ncmncm »

Manuel_D wrote: post #219
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.

Except those solar panels generate energy intermittently. Not just in the short term due to the day/night cycle, but also over the long term with weather and seasonal shifts. Nuclear is unique in that it's the only geographically independent, and non-intermittent energy source. Hydroelectricity and geothermal are non-intermittent but are geographically dependent. And also fossil fuels, but those emit carbon dioxide.

As has been explained to you numerous times, intermittency is a trivial technical matter that cannot justify diverting capital to nuke construction or operation.

Repeating your falsehoods here does not make them true.

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

#237

Post by phh »

rswskg wrote: post #218
adrianN wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not including transport? That's awful.

One third is including transport and heating.

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

#238

Post by dboreham »

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?

This was the original (1040s, Fermi) idea, hence reactors in Idaho (after becoming alarmed that they had constructed a reactor in downtown Chicago). I think however there's a reason this isn't done now: it acknowledges that large reactors aren't safe (which they're not), therefore begs the question why build them at all. For the idea to become viable, climate change would need to become a much more immediate pressing concern, allowing the trade off to be made between irradiating some Utah desert vs boiling the planet.

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

#239

Post by ncmncm »

Manuel_D wrote: post #225
thehappypm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not even remotely true. Global battery production is around 300 GWh per year. The US alone uses 12.5 TWh of electricity per day. The world uses ~60TWh. That's 8 years of global battery output to fulfill just one hour of electricity storage.

There is absolutely no need for batteries to provide for storage, so that is a misleading assertion.

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

#240

Post by lelag »

tcfhgj wrote: post #228
lelag wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please name a source of that. The environmental department of the german government estimates about 640 euro per ton for the next 100 years. https://www.presseportal.de/pm/62786/4789535

As I answered to my own comment:

> 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.

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