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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

#371

Post by jacquesm »

philwelch wrote: post #368
cinntaile wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally use peaker plants or backup fossil fuel or hydro for that use case, at this point in time batteries are used to supply power for a couple of hours at best. You need that backup power anyway for when the nuclear plant is out of commission for some reason.

Regardless of how you're generating your power, you're going to need to overprovision your generation capacity slightly to account for downtime. You only need storage if all of your generation capacity is offline at the same time, which is inevitable with solar power (nighttime), possible with gas (pipeline failure?), but less inherently likely with nuclear. > backup fossil fuel In practice this means fossil fuels be…

I sincerely believe that HVDC is a game changer here, it allows you to move energy around at a fraction of the losses that were considered normal before allowing for overcapacity in one place to be used elsewhere eliminating a major requirement for storage, on that scale there is no lack of combined sun/wind availability.

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

#372

Post by Melatonic »

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…

I think the thing I never hear people talk about however is redundancy and consistency. Wind and Solar are great and likely should be a huge huge portion of our power production. Something like Nuclear though we can project huge consistency (assuming the plant does not get destroyed by a giant natural disaster) long term and day to day.

Personally though I really have always liked Geothermal!

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

#373

Post by adrianN »

thereddaikon wrote: post #356
adrianN wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't see what that has to do with nuclear plants or solar farms. My original point was that complaining that uranium isn't evenly distributed is a red herring because you don't build power plants on top of the mines. Whereas you do have to build solar farms where the sunny days are plentiful.

Most places where people live have enough sun and/or wind to meet demand.

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

#374

Post by jacquesm »

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.

But they do. Normally. A fraction of the fuel transmitted through the pipe will be lost, seals, punctures, breaks, medium changes, over-pressure release through venting and so on.

> Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant factor in power distribution.

Not all that significant in short range transmission, and until we figured out HVDC a major factor in long range transmission but the number of HVDC links that are coming online is increasing rapidly making this much less of a problem. The gear used for this is very impressive stuff, it is a different level of semiconductor engineering than what you normally have kicking around the yard but it works and is deployed at scale already with very good results.

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

#375

Post by pydry »

tomp wrote: post #132
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…

> A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party. “asap” LOL Here in the real world, we have Germany, which has the strongest pro-green anti-nuclear agenda in Europe, but is (1) building coal plants, (2) financing Russian war and (3) blocking sanctions on Russia to save its economy (along with Hungary who are doing it for political reasons). The…

Germany is not building more coal plants it it shutting them down.

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

#376

Post by jacquesm »

areyousure wrote: post #183
adrianN wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Undersea cables. There are plenty between Norway and Germany for example.

In case anyone is curious, I found this interesting background reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_power_cable That said, there is only one submarine power cable connecting Norway and Germany, and it's been operational for one year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HVDC_Europe.svg

This is the future and it will eventually create a global connected grid. DC allows the coupling of 60 Hz and 50 Hz grids without a problem too.

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

#377

Post by E39M5S62 »

ncmncm wrote: post #236
Manuel_D wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not familiar with this area. Can you explain why it's a trivial technical matter, and what the solution(s) are?

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

#378

Post by gnicholas »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #369
photochemsyn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'handwave the unsolved-at-scale' ? All you have to do is look at Australia: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-f... > Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South…

> the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant. Yes this is generally my argument. If you take the money you would spend on nuclear and spend it instead on solar, wind, gridscale storage, as well as EV and home battery rebates, you end up with a much more robust distributed energy production grid with very low maintenance…

But if you just price in the cost of the rebates, aren’t you overlooking a large chunk of the cost, which is borne by homeowners? That’s still a cost, even if it’s not being directly paid by the government.

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

#379

Post by ncmncm »

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.

Batteries will be a negligible fraction of utility storage, so that is moot.

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

#380

Post by elteto »

pydry wrote: post #375
tomp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A far better plan for Europe would be to go 100% renewable asap, meaning no need for fossil fuel imports from any party. “asap” LOL Here in the real world, we have Germany, which has the strongest pro-green anti-nuclear agenda in Europe, but is (1) building coal plants, (2) financing Russian war and (3) blocking sanctions on Russia to save its economy (along with Hungary who are doing it for political reasons). The…

Germany is not building more coal plants it it shutting them down.

What are they going to do then? Go back to candles?
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