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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

#311

Post by ncmncm »

legulere wrote: post #137
traveler01 wrote: post #60

Don't know how germans thought that closing down nuclear plants in favor of natural gas was a good idea, both politically and environmentally

Nuclear was replaced by renewables in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#/media... It would have made more sense though to first replace coal plants before shutting down nuclear plants.

Germans chose to build out lots of wind instead of spending the money to refurbish ramshackle old nukes. They displaced a lot more CO2 by that choice.

They could have chosen to continue operating the old contraptions unsafely, but chose not to shoulder Fukushima-style risks.

Armchair second-guessing is misleading. Each euro spent on one is a euro not spent on the other.

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

#312

Post by ohgodplsno »

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…

The only way plants are extended is if they meet current nuclear safety rules, not the rules from 40 years ago. Please do literally five minutes of research.

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

#313

Post by pfdietz »

BenoitP wrote: post #211
adrianN wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining of what? Hydrogen as storage medium for example doesn't require all that much mining. Are you assuming storage will be in the form of Lithium batteries?

I'm assuming currently proven tech of batteries. And we need to act now for climate change, with current tech. Electricity to H2 to electricity has horrendous efficiency (about 20% at most IIRC). We'd be much better off CO2-speaking using it to replace coal in steel production, and replace gas in fertilizer production. Both of which are proven tech (but not globally deployed, as coal and gas are cheap)

Power2Gas2Power has low round trip efficiency (say 40%), but as only a fairly small fraction of the energy flow goes through it that doesn't matter that much at the end of the day. If it did, that just means heavy industries would migrate to less seasonally variable places.

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

#315

Post by trashtester »

layer8 wrote: post #229
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?

Mushrooms in Germany are still contaminated today from the Chernobyl fallout: https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

EVERYTHING around us is contaminated in some way or another. We are constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation with doses far in excess of the expose you will get from eating those mushrooms.

Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg.

In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there is any measurable increase in cancer risk.

And breating the air in Berlin for 1 year is MUCH more dangerous than eating those 8000 kg of mushrooms. (Not to speak about taking a single shot of covid vaccine.)

In other words, dispite being scientifically "true", the net effect of an article like this, is to mislead people into thinking that radiation is a lot more dangerous than it is in reality.

If nuclear were to be treated like other health hazards in our environment, the thresholds should be set somewhere between 10000-100000Bq/kg, depending on how much people would eat of that food in a year, not at 600Bq/kg.

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

#316

Post by pfdietz »

xienze wrote: post #304
pfdietz wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What, you think there's some inherent limit on the number of factories that can be built? No, but there are limits on the amount of raw materials that said factories can use to produce equipment.

Which raw material are you talking about? Be specific.

I believe a global renewable energy system can be constructed using only elements available in essentially unlimited amounts, and using those elements at a modest scale compared to industrial society as a whole.

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

#317

Post by johngalt »

The near future looks like Solar + Natural gas. Driven entirely by economic factors. It is cheap to build PV, and Natural Gas plants cost less than sufficient batteries/storage for PV.

I used to be very bullish on Nuclear. The numbers just don't pencil out in the US under the current constraints. We would need a vast reduction in the overhead to build a Nuclear plant, or a vast increase in the costs of the alternatives.

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

#318

Post by ncmncm »

BenoitP wrote: post #211
adrianN wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mining of what? Hydrogen as storage medium for example doesn't require all that much mining. Are you assuming storage will be in the form of Lithium batteries?

I'm assuming currently proven tech of batteries. And we need to act now for climate change, with current tech. Electricity to H2 to electricity has horrendous efficiency (about 20% at most IIRC). We'd be much better off CO2-speaking using it to replace coal in steel production, and replace gas in fertilizer production. Both of which are proven tech (but not globally deployed, as coal and gas are cheap)

Inefficiency just requires extra capex, not opex. And the capex is capex is still falling at an exponential rate. So, no.

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

#319

Post by ncmncm »

paulmd wrote: post #200
ben_w wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't answer the question. What exactly is the problem that needs to be solved?

Scaling up capacity of the storage. There aren't that many sites that are geologically feasible for pumped storage (and it destroys a local ecosystem by flooding and draining it repeatedly) and batteries need rare earth metals (not actually that rare but environmentally toxic to produce). We need O(100x) current production to fully switch away from hydrocarbons. That's a lot of reservoirs or a lot of cobalt that have…

False. You have been corrected on this point before. Please stop posting what you know are falsehoods.

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

#320

Post by ncmncm »

pfdietz wrote: post #284
chelical wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people don't talk about the water usage involved in pumped hydro when the vast majority of the Western United States is dealing with record low water levels + sinking due to groundwater usage.

Pumped hydro doesn't use up the water. It goes back and forth between the lower and the upper reservoirs. Some evaporates, for sure, but that's a tiny fraction of the water that would be evaporated cooling a NPP of the same power output.

Furthermore, putting floating solar on the reservoirs would eliminate much of the evaporation.
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