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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

#391

Post by cycomanic »

sofixa wrote: post #233
cycomanic wrote: post #157

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. 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 constru…

Yes and the reasons that they don't get extended indefinitely is because it gets increasingly expensive to modernise and follow the new rules. On top of that is that regulators are becoming more reluctant to extend the lifetime, because the unknown factors increase (cue complaints about regulation). The reason they don't get extended that it is not economical compared to using wind/solar instead. Why do you think coal plants don't get operated indefinitely?

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

#392

Post by ncmncm »

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…

If you don't have renewables for a while, and transmission line availability flags, you import anhydrous ammonia from the tropics. So, you need only minimal over-provisioning and local storage.

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

#393

Post by ncmncm »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #54
adrianN wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is energy storage at scale unsolved when we can synthesize Methane quite easily? Grid scale storage is just a matter of cost. It's unclear which technology will be the most cost effective, but if we wanted to we could just store energy as Methane and pay the 50% efficiency cost.

If this is so simple, why don't we do it? Or is that the question you're asking? Of course, that 50% efficiency cost seems like a bit of a bear in itself. If you lose half of the stored power, that would seem to significantly drive up the total lifecycle cost of a Watt of wind power. (Recognizing, of course, that not all of it must be stored.) The cost and inefficiency (==cost) of storage seems like an unfortunate th…

That is all capex. Renewable capex is still in free fall. Storage too.

The more you use it, the less it costs, per kWh.

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

#394

Post by ncmncm »

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 as simple as E = mgh. We do that industrially, billions of times a day, worldwide, and have for centuries.

To cite uncertainty about storage is only to admit you have no argument.

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

#395

Post by ncmncm »

Melatonic wrote: post #372
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!

Nukes and geothermal both depend on steam turbines, which are down for very expensive maintenance 10-20% of the time. That is why those can't compete with 0% opex renewables + storage.

Nukes, of course, have lots of other opex on top of the turbines, and also crippling capex.

Geothermal might be able to compete at very high latitudes where the alternative is shipping in synthetic ammonia from the tropics when wind flags and transmission lines don't deliver.

But steam turbine s are absolutely not getting any cheaper or more reliable.

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

#396

Post by goodpoint »

nonethewiser wrote: post #17
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…

Sunlight and wind distribution is quite uneven.

...and yet you'll find that there are very few people living in places with insufficient sun, insufficient wind and no geothermal/tidal sources.

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

#397

Post by infamouscow »

ghusto wrote: post #167
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

The Germans take any opportunity to "do the right thing". I won't go into my beliefs on where that comes from, other than to say it's an emotional place, and not a logical one. So they often end up doing the wrong thing. I actually feel sorry for them.

> I actually feel sorry for them.

I felt similarly. Then I learned about Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc

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

#398

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

ncmncm wrote: post #329
q1w2 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are missing the point. With continued investment and improvements to technology nuclear will be much cheaper and faster to deploy. Compare wind/solar prices from the year 2000, and imagine we've spent the last 22 years giving nuclear the same level of attention and promotion as them.

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

#399

Post by lelag »

dane-pgp wrote: post #365
lelag wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Falsehood ? What do you know about building windmills ? I admit that I don't myself know much, but I can tell you that you need at least: - A modern metallurgy industry using coal to make steal - Possibly a chemical industry to make composite material - A logistic industry to move components around the world using petrol (all the solar and wind renewable production is based in china) - Cement to build your fondation…

> A modern metallurgy industry using coal to make steal Nuclear reactors also require steel (and a chemical industry and cement) but fortunately that doesn't require coal: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/19/green-steel-...

Sure but that wasn't the point.

The point is that those that claim that we can replace fossils fuel entirely by wind and solar based on the current price of wind and solar production produced by an industry doped with fossil fuels at every stage are deluding themselves.

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

#400

Post by ncmncm »

cthor wrote: post #249
cycomanic wrote: post #170

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 scaremonge…

GP refers to "last decades" but that source is from 2011 with data ending at 2009. Do you have data for the last decade?

There is no way that any renewable subsidies in the past decade could match the many decades prior. And, those subsidies are still running.
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