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Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

nytimes.com

471–480 of 818 posts

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

#471

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.

And, when it is used for storage, it is at higher altitude, so evaporates less.

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

#472
post #272
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables' capacity factor is much greater than 10%, in practice. If you need falsehoods to make your case, you have no case.

> > The thing is, 183GW from PV is like 20-30GW of nuclear, because nuclear's capacity factor is near 100% and PV's is often near 10%. > Renewables' capacity factor is much greater than 10%, in practice. If you need falsehoods to make your case, you have no case. Residential/commercial PV -- e.g. rooftop solar-- very often is 10% or less. If you want to only look at utility-scale fixed tilt, instead, recent deploymen…

How much solar capacity is actually residential? I'd say quite small since solar is hard to deploy residential + lack of home value improvement.

Nuclear should be part of the equation (it has it's own issues with wastewater) but if adding nuclear means not investing equally or more in solar/wind renewables, that's completely misguided.

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

#473
Everyone arguing over replacing currently energy usage like that will be even close to enough, it won't. Personally im a nuclear fan and I think many of the costs are artificially high by preventing nuclear industry growth and bad legislation that outlaws things like breeder reactors, that said we are going to need wind and solar even with massive nuclear investment just by the total power we need to produce to make industry green.

Electricity generation isn't the only way we use fossil fuels and cause pollution. Fertilizer production needs hydrogen, where does that hydrogen come from? Natural gas. Why? Because not using natural gas increases the energy costs of fertilizer production near 10x over. Since it is currently 1% of total world electricity consumption already, that is a near 10% global increase in electricity demand for one (admitedly large) product. The replacement of plastics with other materials like paper, glass, and metal? All require higher energy input to produce than plastic. Not to mention that plastic will eventually breakdown and release carbon also. As the most economical mines start to dry up and we seek lesser ores to mine, mining and processing electrical requirements will continue to rise. Nearly every chemical reagent all around you causes pollution during products, but it can be 90% solved, mostly by the addition of more electrical electricity for heating, cooling, high and low pressure chambers, ect. to not create so many waste products that we trash into both the atmosphere and the ground and water. We don't use those cleaner methods now mostly because using the electricity to do so costs a LOT more. Nearly every industry on earth can be cleaner, but it costs significantly more electricity which needs to be fairly cheap. Something like concrete production could be done more far more cleanly, but again, massive amounts of additional electricity needed. And that is before we get into things like active carbon sequestering.

Or goals shouldn't be a direct replacement of fossil fuel electricity sources, our goals should be exceeding currently world electrical output multiple times over without fossil fuels, which means we should be producing nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal power across the board in an attempt to meet our extreme future demands.

Maybe solar and wind and batteries will be up to the task in the future with some new technology, but also maybe not. Nuclear is a known feasible solution to providing as much power as we could ever want or need with technology we have right now. Solar and battery tech is often assuming we will continue on the same path of increased efficiency and reduced costs seemingly indefinitely, but you know what, they thought the same thing with nuclear energy until they started hitting some walls in generation efficiency and costs. And if it ends up not being significantly cheaper or easier, you gotta start bringing up questions of land usage and grid complexity on top of everything else.

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

#474
post #132

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…

Renewables are not dependent upon any battery development. Batteries work now, are getting cheaper at exponential rate, and are the most expensive form of storage.

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

#475
post #454

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 storage is that it needs to be planned for the worst case. Imagine three weeks without sun nor wind, even if that happens only once every 5 years it should be planned. And the cost of having batteries that can produce energy during 3 weeks is unlikely to be cheaper than nuclear

No. You need only enough storage to last until an order of fuel arrives. Which is what everybody does literally all the time, now.

There is little storage, yet, because it would be stupid to build out storage there is not enough renewable generating capacity, yet, to charge up. When there is, then storage will be built. All without you lifting a finger.

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

#476
Whether you think nuclear is a good idea or a bad idea, too costly or a price we will have to pay, one thing I can say is true: we have spent so very much time and effort demonizing nuclear power that if it were a good idea, we're going to have a lot of people standing in the way, because the message was received, loud and clear.

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

#477

I recently read the Serhii Plokhy book Atoms and Ashes, where he discusses 6 most notable nuclear accidents in depth. And his conclusion was pretty grim. Paraphrasing: If we bet on nuclear for mitigation of climate change, it is inevitable that nuclear accidents will happen more often. Also each accident causes a major setback in peoples minds regarding nuclear safety and the next Fukushima might kill off a lot of pr…

> Also each accident causes a major setback in peoples minds regarding nuclear safety

Planes are crashing all the time and kill tons of people (way more than nuclear power plants anyways), yet flying is more popular than ever (before Covid, anyways)

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

#478

Please can the nuclear industry stop paying PR consultants. We have one use for the nuclear industry - building scientists who can then build nuclear bombs. IMO this is a reasonable use of public funds - the strategic needs of nuclear weapons are not going away. But please please just accept that and move on. Stop getting in a vital public debate. Nuclear fission is a terrible civilian technology - vastly expensive,…

nuclear fission is actually the safest electricity generation we have right now, and modern reactors are pretty safe and are hard to cause to melt down even intentionally, all of this non-sense is mostly just fearmongering

Managing nuclear fission is something that can be done safely. At fukushima they had (from memory) 6 reactors - 4 had been upgraded and 2 were left un-improved for cost / benefit reasons. The 4 that were upgraded safely failed in the flood - the other 2 caused the problem.

And this is my argument - the reactors were not on their A-game. One slip, one B-level decision, one in decades and decades and the price is paid.

And this is for one of the richest countries on Earth. Who is going to build and run the nuclear reactors in Argentina, Sudan, Belize. Will they be on their A-game in 2045?

Why choose the option with the high cost and the nasty downside when you literally do not have to.

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

#479
post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> batteries need rare earth metals "Rare earths" are a column (edit: ha ha see below) in the periodic table, and are not used in batteries. Some types of electric motors use rare earths, others do not. Here's a primer: https://blog.ucsusa.org/josh-goldman/electric-vehicles-batte...

"Rare earths" are actually the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium [1], not one column of the periodic table. Good information otherwise! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanthanide#Etymology

Ha ha busted! Thanks. As an astronomer I think everything beyond He is a metal.

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

#480
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the number of downvotes, I'm going to take away the idea that, no, the environmentalist lobby does not approve of the increases in mining required to support going 100% renewable ASAP.

You would have concluded that regardless. And, regardless of any other facts.

It's an honest question, but I would challenge you to examine your response critically.
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