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Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

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

#261

Post by zosima »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #150

I recently read the Serhii Plokhy book Atoms and Ashes, where he discusses 6 most notable nuclear accidents in depth. And his conclusion was pretty grim. Paraphrasing: If we bet on nuclear for mitigation of climate change, it is inevitable that nuclear accidents will happen more often. Also each accident causes a major setback in peoples minds regarding nuclear safety and the next Fukushima might kill off a lot of pr…

There is quite clearly not even remotely 100.000 premature deaths from Chernobyl.

The only cancer that clearly went up in immediate connection to Chernobyl was thyroid cancer, and that was in most cases very treatable. It's also unclear how much of the increase in incidence, was due to increased screening. Thyroid cancer seems to have affected the general population, but in a dose-dependent manner, where the increased risk became really low when looking outside the cleaning crew.

On top of that there is some evidence to suggest that the risk of leukemia and other blood cancers increased in the cleaning crew. (But still really low numbers). And as far as I know no signs of increased blood cancer rate was seen in the general population.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28929329/

It actually appears that the largest loss of human life from Chernobyl happened because of panic. Women chose abortion because of the perceived increased risk of malformation in offspring. As far as I am aware, the actual increased risk of malformations has not been detectable, and I presume it to be negligible.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8516187/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ywyqzv/why-hundreds-of-thous...

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

#262

Post by dosenbrot »

Brometheus wrote: post #153
dosenbrot wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc... Depends. With just the cost per kWh is photovoltaic cheaper, but you would need additional storage for the nighttime, so it would become more expensive than nuclear. Also this didn’t account for winter time (in Germany photovoltaic make 5-10% compared to summer) and storing a half year worth of energy is going to be funny.(this will cost way way more tha…

Its only mid-november til mid-february that really sees a strong dip in production.

And the other months it's a not-so-strong dip in production (Jan 16%, Feb 31%, Mar 57%, Apr 94%, Jun 100%, Jul 100%, Aug 87%, Sep 60%, Okt 41%, Nov 22%, Dec 13%). This means (for germany) we have to install more than 170% PV and store 3 months worth of energy for half a year (or install 800% and don't store anything). It's just a very rough estimation, but it's clear that one can't compare the cost of 1kWh PV to 1kWh nuclear (at least if one doesn't live in the desert).

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

#263

Post by gfodor »

rectang wrote: post #58
gfodor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is going to do it, and you seem to believe the safety profile of nuclear energy technology has been frozen for 50 years. It's extremely strange to think something as broad as the process of nuclear fission can be spoken about as having a universal, never changing risk-profile, regardless of technological advancement. We don't do this for any other technology. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/c…

The fundamentals of that risk profile haven't changed — you still have high concentration of radioactive materials in a single geographic location. The risk profile for nuclear is unlike that of other technologies. They told us it was safe back then. They tell us its safe today. They will always tell us it's safe. The fundamentals tell us they're wrong.

"The fundamentals" is doing a lot of work there. It's fundamentally unsafe to move at a high velocity in a meat-based body. Does this mean the risk profile of high speed transportation is invariant across technology?

The "fundamentals" you speak of boil down to the first principles analysis, based on physics, of the possible states a nuclear energy production system can get into. This is not invariant with regards to technology. It seems far too reductive to claim "putting radiocative materials together in the same location" should box out all civilian use of a energy production mechanism.

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

#264

Post by ZeroGravitas »

user_7832 wrote: post #230
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear power. This is either stupidly wrong or stupidly right. Stupidly right, there's fairly new nuclear plants in operation that there's no real reason to shut down, so will probably be running in 2050. Stupidly wrong, it seems to be placing some entirely unwarranted implication that without nuclear we'd be lost, when most serious analysis agree that renewables…

>Stupidly wrong, it seems to be placing some entirely unwarranted implication that without nuclear we'd be lost, when most serious analysis agree that renewables will be about 80% of energy production, which doesn't really leave much room for nuclear to take all the credit. >IEA's net zero roadmap... I'd like to make a slightly vague rebuttal to your slightly vague rebuttal (ofc not your fault if the IEA doesn't expl…

It gets a mention, just not a starring role:

> By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from nuclear.

So "no path to clean energy without solar" and "no path to clean energy without wind" are a bit more defensible, though in both cases, we'd just build more of the other one.

"no path to clean energy without hydro"? Maybe, again we'd just build more solar and wind.

So, if someone waves a wand and magically makes nuclear disappear (or just economically unattractive) then I think the our path is still fairly clear. No real need to take that path unless nuclear becomes much more relatively expensive, but it's definately an option, and possibly one we'll gladly take because it's cheaper.

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

#265

Post by SECProto »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #63
impostervt wrote: post #3

I just finished Bill Gates' "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster". Very good book, and it makes two points (among many others): - To reduce carbon in the air, getting clean electricity is key. If we can do that, we can more easily reduce emissions from other areas. - There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear power.

> There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear power. This is either stupidly wrong or stupidly right. Stupidly right, there's fairly new nuclear plants in operation that there's no real reason to shut down, so will probably be running in 2050. Stupidly wrong, it seems to be placing some entirely unwarranted implication that without nuclear we'd be lost, when most serious analysis agree that renewables…

Expecting global energy consumption to drop 8% in the next 30 years (while also reducing fossil fuel usage to 20% and all of that with carbon capture and underground storage) is... hilariously unrealistic (or very pessimistic for overall energy usage trends). Here[1]'s a visualization of world energy usage over time. Here[2]'s a sketch I just made to show what the IEA apparently thinks will happen to get to net zero (per your post). Here[3]'s a tweet that looks at the IEA's other renewable energy forecasts over time (spoiler: they were laughably pessimistic, which doesn't instill confidence when they instead make a laughably optimistic forecast)...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption

[2] https://imgur.com/a/xvkZSRi

[3] https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1064529619951513600

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

#266

Post by pfdietz »

jeffbee wrote: post #23
rectang wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any Y Combinator companies who are invested in the advance of nuclear power?

There's Helion, a supposed fusion power company, but everything about it screams "fraud".

I think Helion is the most credible of all the fusion companies.

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

#267

Post by aidenn0 »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #165
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.

Not just hundreds of Gigawatts, but also tens of thousands of Gigawatt-hours. Unless you're willing to accept regular black-outs, you need to build enough capacity to account for the occasional long, sustained period of cloudy days with low wind. The cost of that extra necessary-but-rarely-used capacity needs to be factored in to any comparison of wind/solar vs other energy sources.

It might make more sense to have either fossil-fuels as backups for such times, or for HVDC lines to connect geographically disparate regions (it's always sunny or windy somewhere).

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

#268

Post by manicdee »

philwelch wrote: post #147
photochemsyn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say 'primary cost' do you mean construction cost? Again, utility managers will be looking at lifecycle costs, from the cradle (construction) through use (fueling, security, cooling water, maintenance) to the grave (decomissioning). The reason costs are high is not political, it's that the systems involved need to be over-engineered relative to say, a coal-fired power plant, where a breakdown or fire will cre…

> Water pumps for nuclear reactor cooling systems, for example, are the most robustly engineered (and expensive) pumps ever built, as far as I know. Which is not an issue with newer reactor designs, which are no less proven than grid storage.

Grid storage is proven through dozens of working installations earning decent money for their operators, pushing gas peaker plants out of the market.

Newer reactor designs are well simulated but have zero real world implementation.

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

#269

Post by Manuel_D »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #258
Manuel_D wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equ…

Annual battery production for EVs is estimated to grow from 160 gigawatt-hours (GWh) today to 6 600 GWh in 2030 – the equivalent of adding almost 20 gigafactories each year for the next ten years. So we're building those batteries anyway, because EVs are cheaper and better than ICE. It's just a bonus that they'll help roll out renewables too.

Estimates are not the same thing as real production figures. People estimated we'd have 10Ghz single threaded cpu performance by now back in the 90s. Batteries are already approaching supply shortages for input materials: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev...

And as you correctly point out, most of these batteries are going to go to EVs rather than grid storage.

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

#270

Post by ben_w »

mlyle wrote: post #187
ben_w wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2021, we added this many new gigawatts: 183 PV[0], 100 wind[1], 7.88 nuclear (but 8.6 nuclear was also shut down)[2] 28 times that, ignoring the shutdowns (I don't actually know how long wind lasts, IIRC nuclear is "about 50-70 years" and PV is "about 30 years"), gives a total of: 5124 GW PV, 2800 GW wind, 218 GW nuclear. But that's a lower bound for PV, as that's growing with what looks like an approximately expo…

The thing is, 183GW from PV is like 20-30GW of nuclear, because nuclear's capacity factor is near 100% and PV's is often near 10%. Storage seems hard and expensive. We're going to need a whole lot of approaches: - Wind taking a bigger share of renewables - Whatever storage we can reasonably build, including some exotic stuff like power-to-gas-to-power. - Nuclear filling in a little bit - PV comically overbuilt and ro…

Even at 10% capacity factor, and with a sudden cessation of the long term exponential trend in PV, and assuming the 2021 numbers for new nuclear power while ignoring that more was shut down, that still leaves more than twice as much new PV as new nuclear.
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