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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

#411

Post by fallingknife »

ZetaZero wrote: post #358
fallingknife wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2021 US power consumption was 3.93 PWh. 5500 GWh is a bit over 12 hours of consumption. Not gonna cut it. And that's assuming 100% of the batteries are used for grid storage, and there is no demand growth in the next 8 years.

With Vogtle 3 & 4, the only nuclear plants coming online in the US, the construction costs are now projected to be $30 billion for 2.2 GW. We'd need ~1000 of these size plants to power the US. That's not going to cut it either.

You mathed wrong. You would need a little over 200, but no one is suggesting powering the whole grid with nuclear.

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

#412

Post by ncmncm »

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.

And you can deliver that renewable power wherever it is needed, for a one-time up-front cost, free thereafter.

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

#413

Post by pfdietz »

xienze wrote: post #404
pfdietz wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Which raw material are you talking about? Be specific. Uh Lithium?

It's as if you think Li-ion batteries are the only kind that can exist.

This is a generic problem with anti-renewable arguments: they argue against specific technologies rather than the entire class of possible technologies.

(And then they go and posit all sorts of as-yet unbuilt reactor types, blithely ignoring the irony.)

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

#414

Post by wumpus »

adrianN wrote: post #168
philwelch wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who says Lithium batteries are the best technology for grid scale storage? (Besides Elon, I guess?)

There are multiple kinds of grid storage. Australia, for example, wants these batteries to provide fast-acting frequency stabilization... in addition to stabilizing the output of various wind and solar facilities.

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

#415

Post by ncmncm »

adrianN wrote: post #194
philwelch wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They do in fact leak a bit. Power losses are measured in single digit percents per 1000km. That's not nothing of course, but it's sufficiently low to transmit power from windy places to less windy places and from sunny places to less sunny places.

When opex is free, and capex is falling exponentially, you just put in a little more power upstream.

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

#416

Post by cycomanic »

briandear wrote: post #366
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. The wind doesn't blow as strongly at night. It's much calmer.

Yes and demand is also much lower what is your point? Apart from the fact that your statement is highly dependent on location (it is much less true for sea installations for example).

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

#417

Post by zardo »

Manuel_D wrote: post #347
zardo wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are thermal batteries unproven? I thought they were at the "available for purchase from Siemens and GE" stage of development.

They exist in prototypes, I am not aware of any grid scale energy storage facilities using thermal batteries. Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities? Remember the US uses 8GWh of electricity per minute .

Certainly there are >1GWh thermal storage systems. I'm not sure if any are set up to generate electricity though.

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

#418

Post by sofixa »

moogly wrote: post #307
sofixa wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ones who underestimated Flamanville's cost by 80%? (and it's still not in production) It's an entirely new design of a complicated piece of technology, of course it will be over budget and delayed. Grand Paris Express and the Paris Philharmonic were also over budget and delayed, does that invalidate the opinion of all experts involved in both projects?

> does that invalidate the opinion of all experts involved in both projects demonstrably, yes?

Because the most important thing about a project as complex as a big acoustic-friendly building or multiple hundreds of kms of automated metros or a nuclear power plant is that the predictions about budget and time are perfect?

I wonder what that means for software developers who notoriously struggle to predict basically the same stuff, only on much less drastic scales (if an engineer underestimates how much time and effort a feature will take, usually people don't die. If a building crumbles or a nuclear power plant has an accident or a train crashes people do die).

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

#419

Post by pfdietz »

ElectronCharge wrote: post #216
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 a cost comparison is that currently renewables account for less than ten percent of global energy generation. What do you think will happen to the cost there as available resources dwindle, and demand for equipment increases? Also, I’m not sure those comparisons take into account the ~20 year lifespan of solar panels and windmills, versus the ~40-50 year lifespan of nuclear plants. Finally, another f…

The estimated life of solar panels is much greater than 20 years. There are 38 year old panels still in operation.

The 40-50 year lifespan of a nuclear plant is also somewhat illusory, as planning on achieving that is a bet that competing technologies don't keep getting better.

SMRs are talked about as being cheaper, but they have inherent diseconomies of scale. They need more materials and components per unit power output than large NPPs, and have inherently worse neutronics (this is why NPPs got large). The putative economies of scale of manufacturing are first consumed clawing back this loss, and it's not clear they can even do that.

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

#420

Post by ncmncm »

q1w2 wrote: post #127
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China mostly: 2021 figures: > China was the biggest contributor, adding 121 GW to the continent’s new capacity. Europe and North America—led by the USA—took second and third places respectively, with the former adding 39 GW, and the latter 38 GW. 81% of new electricity generaton build globally was renewables last year.

That does not discuss storage AT ALL. True solar with storage is not economical.

Storage cost is falling even faster than solar. Renewables + storage beats everything, hands down.
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