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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

#321

Post by trashtester »

adrianN wrote: post #109
phh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though there are political reasons, the biggest reason is... we had enough reactors for our own usage. We built them so fast, that even if we had cross-partisan will to keep forever using nuclear, we'd still have 30-40 years of gap without making any new reactor. And after a generation of engineers, we need to make reactors again and we're basically doing it from scratch again. There are other reasons: people's…

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

In other words, France needs to hurry up and double if not triple their nuclear capacity, so they can switch to electric cars and heating.

Somewhere to the north-east of Strasbourg would be ideal, not only for the abundant water supply, but also because the location is ideal for export to places in Europe that have not invested enough in stable sources of energy, lately. And if France plans to import power when the wind is blowing in those countries, the grid capacity out of that area will be needed anyway.

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

#322

Post by ncmncm »

q1w2 wrote: post #118
CaptArmchair wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

False.

It took them more than a decade beyond schedule, and 5 billion euros beyond quoted cost.

The finally delivered only because it was clear the money would dry up either way. If they could have strung it out further, they would have

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

#323

Post by trashtester »

heretogetout wrote: post #65
Jorge1o1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ascendancy of wind and cheap natural gas probably had a greater effect, considering the miniseries is only a couple years old.

I suppose now that some of the sources of such gas is being cut, those French nuclear plants will be extremely profitable for a while.

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

#324

Post by atleta »

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 comparing the cost of different energy production means is that most of these have huge externalities. After all, this is why we're still burning hydrocarbons, because they seem cheap compared to anything else, except that we have massed up a huge debt by accelerating climate change. Something that may turn out to be nearly infinitely expensive.

Now the problem with solar and wind is that those also have pretty large energy investment needs at the beginning and given that we still mostly run on hydrocarbons these will also look cheap (include a sizeable amount of externalities).

Other than that, you're right that these articles rarely mention the problem of the fissile uranium supply. From what I've read and heard, without breeder reactors, the known U235 reserves won't last long if we plan to switch the world over. (Not that it's a viable plan to build so many reactors in time.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

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

#325

Post by zosima »

legulere wrote: post #163
lelag wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about it makes me mad. For all their renewable production capacity they still average over 300g of CO2 / kwh with all the gas and coal they burn. All of it, credit to the german green movement trying to save the planet from... Not sure. Even assuming the occasional Chernobyl/Fukushima-level disaster, as terrible as those catastrophes are, nuclear plant accidents are localised and will never threaten mankind…

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.

What does not fit for consumption mean?

Are there more ionizing radiation in a German mushroom or boar than in an average banana?

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

#326

Post by ncmncm »

Manuel_D wrote: post #289
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, no-one can predict the future, maybe we'll all be riding horses. But if, as basically everyone acklowledges, we'll all be driving EVs, then we will charge them from the grid. So they'll be better than grid storage, they'll be responsive demand (with grid storage you need to send the electricity back to the grid, which incurs another efficiency loss).

Sure, if we have all our electricity produced through non intermittent sources we don't need grid storage. EVs charge from the grid and drive around just fine. Nobody doubts that. But if we are going to predominantly use intermittent energy sources we'd need massive amounts of grid storage. Delivering this through batteries is not feasible. We need to conserve battery supply for things that cannot be directly powered…

Grid storage cost is falling even faster than renewables cost. Which you already knew.

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

#327

Post by cycomanic »

BenoitP wrote: post #201
cycomanic wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Ok I didn't know that they implemented load following in France. However, note thatbbecause nuclear power cost is almost completely capex dominated so doing this essentially increases your power cost by the factor that you use for load balancing. So out of economic reasons you hardly ever want to not run a nuclear plant at 100%.

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

#328

Post by carry_bit »

aidenn0 wrote: post #267
Ajedi32 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ).

As we're seeing from Russia and Europe, depending on someone else means you can find yourself being threatened or actually being cut off.

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

#329

Post by ncmncm »

q1w2 wrote: post #125
colinmhayes wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is like saying that the solution to climate change is largely political and you don't see that changing, so you don't think you need to be part of solving that. In fact, it's quite exactly like saying that, because nuclear is the fastest path to solving climate change.

No, nukes are the slowest, and worst performing.

Starting a nuke, we get no power out for a decade or more, and get much less power at the end than building renewables with the same money, which furthermore start displacing carbon immediately.

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

#330

Post by cycomanic »

xienze wrote: post #283
cycomanic wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear has the same issue of intermittency. You have to either overprovisioning if you use nuclear or use battery storage. Nuclear is much more expensive than wind/solar so if you follow an overprovisioning strategy the best is to build wind/solar capacity, because it buys you more. Moreover, the larger and more integrated grids become (this is happening already for economic reasons in Europe) the less this is an is…

> The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night. Is it enough wind to meet all the demand at night? And what happens when it stops blowing as much as expected for a long period of time[0]? You still need baseline power generation for quite some time to come until those questions that, well, keep getting hand waved away are solved. 0: https://fortune.com/2…

There are many studies which showed how much overprovisioning you need to go to 100% renewable with different size grids. None of these are outrageous, but it's also nothing we currently need to think about. We can easily scale up renewable capacity to 70% without significant overprovisioning. So we really just need to build lots more renewables at the moment.
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