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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

#511

Post by ncmncm »

Vecr wrote: post #503
ncmncm wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TMI and Fukushima had containment, for all the good it did.

It did a lot of good? TMI slagged the core but the containment held, and Fukushima's cores (the ones that melted, obviously) was still mostly covered, the hydrogen explosion was the major problem.

TMI vented a very large amount of radioactive krypton. (Given its density, it would better be described as dumped to the river, where it spread out along the banks downstream, gassing riverfront neighborhoods.)

Fukushima's containment exploded in hydrogen detonations, and vented a great deal of radioisotopes. They are today flushing tritium to the ocean, which seems wasteful; we will want the 3He that decays to.

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

#512

Post by Manuel_D »

schiffern wrote: post #486
Manuel_D wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, the same arguments do not apply. Lithium ion battery production is essentially a chemical industry. It cannot become cheaper than its input materials. Most of the cobalt produced goes to lithium ion batteries [1]. Eventually, the battery industry hits the ceiling of what extraction industries can supply and shortages are already on the horizon [2].

Nuclear power plants are mostly steel, concrete, and copper. They need to be manufactured to precise tolerances, but the cost of a nuclear plant isn't driven by the cost of concrete and steel as rae inputs. The nuclear industry accounts for a negligible share of steel, copper, and concrete consumption. The lion's share of the cost is in the design, approval, and construction of the plants. Unlike batteries, these are factors that benefit from building the same repeated design. A serial run of 40 heat exchangers is a lot cheaper than a one-off production of 3 or 4 heat exchangers. This is why nuclear plants were so much cheaper in the 1970s and 80s when the same designs were built repeatedly.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1143399/global-cobalt-co...

2. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shortages-flagged-ev...

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

#513

Post by Manuel_D »

ncmncm wrote: post #499
E39M5S62 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Many billions of dollars are today going into constructing factories worldwide to produce equipment for storage of numerous kinds. It takes time to build the factories, and then time to run them to build out the storage capacity. There is, thus far, little use for storage, because there is not enough renewable generating capacity yet to charge up storage. (Charging it by burning fossil fuels would be stupid.) By the…

Note that none of these exotic storage systems have ever actually been deployed commercially. Yes, liquid nitrogen is used for things like cooling. But no one has deployed a grid-scale storage system using liquid nitrogen. Liquid hydrogen has been used in rocket launches, but has not been used for energy storage. These technologies are mature in applications besides energy storage. They are not at all mature in the context of energy storage. Grid-scale storage systems using these technologies remains the stuff of prototypes and white papers.

This commenter is also incorrect in the claim that there is not enough renewable capacity to charge up storage. California , Hawaii, and other energy markets often hit days of excess renewable production. Proponents of energy storage promised that companies would swoop in to store and resell this excess energy. But this has not materialized, because energy storage is not nearly so simple or cheap as this commenter claims it is.

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

#514

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

> Nuclear technology has been up to the task for the past fifty years.

Nuclear's position at this point is "we had a meh run, but next generation will be better, pinky promise".

On a global scale for the past fifty years we had 2 meltdowns, a country attacking another's nuclear facilities as a threat, and no clear replacement plan for the aging reactors in most countries even as they are way past the set date for decommission ing, and se still don't see how to cheaply deal with the waste.

People tend to brush the "political problems" under the rug, but they are real issues either way, so not taking them into account when doing comparisons wouldn't be fair.

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

#515

Post by ncmncm »

Manuel_D wrote: post #513
ncmncm wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many billions of dollars are today going into constructing factories worldwide to produce equipment for storage of numerous kinds. It takes time to build the factories, and then time to run them to build out the storage capacity. There is, thus far, little use for storage, because there is not enough renewable generating capacity yet to charge up storage. (Charging it by burning fossil fuels would be stupid.) By the…

Note that none of these exotic storage systems have ever actually been deployed commercially. Yes, liquid nitrogen is used for things like cooling. But no one has deployed a grid-scale storage system using liquid nitrogen. Liquid hydrogen has been used in rocket launches, but has not been used for energy storage. These technologies are mature in applications besides energy storage . They are not at all mature in the…

You can insist until you are blue in the face that these are all untried and exotic, but you will be wrong throughout. And you know you are wrong as you say it.

If in fact they were exotic and untried, billions of dollars would not already be committed to factories to produce them in industrial volume. The processes involved are used industrially billions of times worldwide every day.

You only wish they were exotic because you imagine it would make nukes more appealing. But nothing can make nukes appealing. They get less so with each passing day.

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

#516

Post by bell-cot »

ncmncm wrote: post #497
bell-cot wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planning nuclear power plants based upon the Chernobyl disaster is kinda like planning road and bridge construction based upon the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse - ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940) ) Such disasters should only be a small - if bright red - footnote to a good policy: "NEVER build anything resembling this historic disaster. And if anything ever shows operational characteristic…

They all resemble a historic disaster, more or less. Renewables don't, though.

Ah, no. The (numerous) historic disasters which most renewables resemble are those where civilizations implicitly assumed that the current climate - patterns of wind, rain, temperature, etc. - would continue indefinitely. Then...SH*T, the climate changed, often over rather large areas, and the civilization(s) which had conveniently assumed that that couldn't happen suffered or failed.

(If you're not familiar with this in the context of renewable energy, then you might want to google for news stories on what the long-term drought in the western U.S. is doing to the "sure thing, forever" supply of hydroelectricity at many of the major dams.)

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

#517

Post by pfdietz »

megaman821 wrote: post #491
ncmncm wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cycle efficiency is trivially resolved by feeding in more zero-opex power. But hydrogen efficiency is improving as fast as all renewable tech.

I agree that hydrogen efficiency doesn't matter here, but the capital expenditure to build a giant electrolyzer with 5% utilization doesn't really make sense. The cost of the electrolyzer is the things that needs to greatly fall if hydrogen is going to be used for long-term storage.

Electrolyzers driven by otherwise curtailed renewables would have a capacity factor much higher than 10%. If I go to https://model.energy/ and solve for the optimal solution for the US for 2011 weather and 2030 cost assumptions, the capacity factor of the electrolyzers is 43%.

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

#518

Post by ncmncm »

Manuel_D wrote: post #247
ncmncm wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely no need for batteries to provide for storage, so that is a misleading assertion.

And what, pray tell, would we be using for storage instead? Surely you're not going to suggest some untested and unproven storage mechanism like hydrogen storage, ammonia, thermal batteries, etc. Those technologies have never been built at anything remotely close to grid-scale, and thus we have no idea what they'd actually cost when we attempt to build them at grid scale. Batteries and hyrodelectric storage are the o…

> what ... would we be using for storage instead?

You are already well aware of numerous alternatives. Insisting they are "untested" is not fooling anybody.

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

#519

Post by belorn »

photochemsyn wrote: post #62
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…

'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…

Grid scale storage need two things to be viable. Capacity and duration. The battery solutions being rolled right now are those that operate on the scale of hours, being charged each day and then discharge each night. When you can reliable assert that you can fully charge the storage each day, and reliable know you can sell the full charge each night at the price point when the market peaks, it becomes fairly trivial to determine when revenue will exceed that of investments.

Solar + battery is great in those locations, and basically no one is aruging using nuclear when solar and battery is viable for 365 days of the year. Australia has a fairly large desert where such assumption would be true. Finland, Sweden, Germany, France, UK and most of Europe do not have reliable 365 days of sun each year. There aren't many investors spending their money to build solar + storage in northern Finland.

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

#520

Post by ncmncm »

woeirua wrote: post #227
mperham wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you mix in wind too.

And there are still days (like during Texas' winter power fiasco) where neither the sun, nor the wind are strong enough to generate sufficient power from renewables alone. How people still believe that you can get by without any baseload power generation capacity is beyond me.

How do we get by without "base load power" today?

Answer: We import fuel. We will have no reason to give up the ability to import fuel at need. We might even stockpile some.

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