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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

#481

Post by ncmncm »

r00fus wrote: post #450
mlyle wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%. Storage seems hard and expensive. We're going to need a whole lot of approaches: - Wind taking a bigger share of renewables - Whatever storage we can reasonably build, including some exotic stuff like power-to-gas-to-power. - Nuclear filling in a little bit - PV comically overbuilt and ro…

PV throwing off excess during peak is fine - if we have storage. Storage is has only recently become feasible, it would likely be utility-grade storage, Powerwall/home storage or Vehicle2Grid integration by the 2050 timeframe. Storage cost being excessive means it's early adoption timeframe. As the need for it becomes clear options will open up.

Storage is cheap and getting cheaper even faster than solar.

Batteries will only ever be a tiny fraction of storage.

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

#482

Post by ncmncm »

mlyle wrote: post #272
ncmncm wrote: 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…

Shipping power 2000 miles is absolutely super-practical.

China has a project to send it 8000 miles from solar farms they are building in Chile, for use during nighttime in China.

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

#484

Post by skrbjc »

ncmncm wrote: post #451
trashtester wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVERYTHING around us is contaminated in some way or another. We are constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation with doses far in excess of the expose you will get from eating those mushrooms. Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg. In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there…

Arguing that leaked radioactive contamination is less harmful than often assumed does not make habitually leaky nukes seem any more attractive, vs. alternatives that leak nothing hazardous at all, ever.

" the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy"

From: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

We seem to have been fine burning coal and not thinking about the radiation that puts into the surrounding environment.

It's also disingenuous to think that there aren't negative environmental externalities from the production and operation of "renewables".

All forms of energy production will have some negative consequences and we need to understand what those are and think of ways to mitigate them, rather than just pointing to what's bad about one form and ignore what's bad about others.

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

#485

Post by nine_k »

philwelch wrote: post #22
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'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible. Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear te…

Also, reprocessing "nuclear waste" from nuclear power stations yields a lot of pretty good fuel for "fast breeder" reactors [1]. This also mostly solves the problem of storing the highly active nuclear waste: you may need like 5% of the current storage capacity if you burn the current "nuclear waste" stockpiles.

Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns. But for the US, or France, or UK, or India, or China (and a bunch of others) this should not be a concern, since they officially have nuclear weapons.

It's mostly the political will, and the public opinion (which are interlinked) that limit a nuclear renaissance. If you talk about subsidies, please remember how huge were the subsidies that kickstarted the current solar and wind booms; early panels and wind towers were completely uneconomical by today's standards, and R&D costs were colossal. But now, with the technology streamlined and the economies of scale kicking in, solar is competitive even without subsidies.

The same could happen to a new crop of nuclear technology, much cleaner and more efficient than the kind we've inherited from 1970s.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

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

#486

Post by schiffern »

Manuel_D wrote: post #225
thehappypm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, put in batteries, still an order of magnitude cheaper than a nuclear plant without any risk of doomsday

Not even remotely true. Global battery production is around 300 GWh per year. The US alone uses 12.5 TWh of electricity per day. The world uses ~60TWh. That's 8 years of global battery output to fulfill just one hour of electricity storage.

> Global battery production is...

Now repeat the same math for global production of new nuclear power plants, in GW/year.

While writing your reply about how this isn't the right way to think about the future of nuclear power, realize that those exact same arguments apply to batteries, too.

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

#487

Post by nine_k »

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.

There is a number of battery chemistries more cheap and even efficient than Lithium-based, but with lower energy density. High energy density is important for handheld devices, for flying devices, even for cars. But stationary energy storage can be much heavier and bulkier per kWh stored, as long as it's cheaper, and can sustain more than a few thousand recharge cycles.

Lithium batteries have the momentum and are dropping in price because of the EV cars revolution happening right now. When solar revolution will happen i utility scale, the utility-type batteries that will emerge may be seriously different.

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

#488

Post by smaddox »

nine_k wrote: post #485
philwelch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible. Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear te…

Also, reprocessing "nuclear waste" from nuclear power stations yields a lot of pretty good fuel for "fast breeder" reactors [1]. This also mostly solves the problem of storing the highly active nuclear waste: you may need like 5% of the current storage capacity if you burn the current "nuclear waste" stockpiles. Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns…

> Yes, the process involves production of Pu-239, which is weapon-grade and may raise proliferation concerns.

Not if you use Thorium breeder reactors.

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

#489

Post by cinntaile »

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…

> In practice this means fossil fuels become the baseload power source.

As the name baseload power implies, it would have to be providing power all the time and that's not what is needed.

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

#490

Post by [deleted] »

E39M5S62 wrote: post #377
ncmncm wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]
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