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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

#621

Post by Manuel_D »

bob29 wrote: post #597
Manuel_D wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as has been explained to you numerous times, intermittency is an incredibly difficult problem and cannot be solved without some miraculous storage mechanism that makes energy storage effectively free. It's so trivial to solve, yet you neglect to mention the solution. As per your previous comments, you assume that hydrogen, compressed air, or some other form of energy storage will be this silver bullet. This is a…

Interesting that you can understand this concept when its applied to development of grid-scale storage. But you think its easier and risk free to develop from where we are to R&D plus supply chain, operating procedures, and workforce for safe and cost effective nuclear power? Grid storage has no cost history. Nuclear power has a known cost history of being too expensive, and its had trillions of dollars of investment…

The grid storage that has actually been deployed like hydroelectric and battery storage does have cost history. But it's too expensive, and are geographically limited in the case of the former. The grid storage systems like hydrogen electric storage, or ammonia have not been deployed at scale and has no cost history. I'm not inclined to gamble the future of civilization on technologies that we have zero experience building and operating.

By comparison, we have 70 years of experience building and operating nuclear plants. We only need to build 4 nuclear plants for each one we currently have to achieve a 100% decarbonized grid. The cost history of nuclear power shows a clear trend that serial production is cheaper than one off builds.

And you are incorrect about nuclear power not sharing components with existing applications. Nuclear power plants use steam generators, turbines, dynamos, and cooling towers. These are used in other heat engine based power plants.

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

#622

Post by ncmncm »

drewvolpe wrote: post #129
Simplicitas wrote: post #43

Stunning how many well-informed people here are still so distrustful of nuclear energy despite all the advancements.

People are irrationally concerned about low-probability but high severity risks, which is what nuclear is. The chance of someone in the US dying from a terrorist attack is about 1 out of 3 million. It's a rounding error compared with heart disease (1:6), suicide (1:93), storms (1:35k) or even sunstroke (1:6k). Yet, the US spends $52B / year on the department of homeland security.

People are rationally distrustful of habitual dishonesty, corruption, and gross negligence at industrial scale.

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

#623

Post by ncmncm »

photochemsyn wrote: post #28
nonethewiser wrote: post #13

Small distributed reactors sound great, but don't they exacerbate the waste disposal problem? I think the logistics and politics would be easier to manage if the waste production was highly centralized.

I think the idea is that you'd have something like 10 100 MW reactors enclosed in a single facility rather than 1 1000 MW reactor in that facility. You'd probably put all the hot fuel rods in a single cooling pond in that scenario. Security for such a facility would be less expensive than having to manage 10 plants scattered acrooss a wide region, as well. Note that provision of cooling water is also a major issue in…

Multiplying the number of moving parts by 10x cannot reasonably be expected to lead to increased reliability or reduced cost.

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

#624

Post by ncmncm »

johngalt wrote: post #317

The near future looks like Solar + Natural gas. Driven entirely by economic factors. It is cheap to build PV, and Natural Gas plants cost less than sufficient batteries/storage for PV. I used to be very bullish on Nuclear. The numbers just don't pencil out in the US under the current constraints. We would need a vast reduction in the overhead to build a Nuclear plant, or a vast increase in the costs of the alternativ…

Natural gas will soon be too expensive to extract, as ammonia synthesis at $0 opex undercuts it.

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

#625

Post by ncmncm »

tomp wrote: post #477
jnsaff2 wrote: post #150

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)

Planes crash very, very rarely nowadays. Two crashes overseas (correctly) grounded all planes of the type for years. Russia shot one down a couple of years back. A crazy deliberately crashed another in the Indian Ocean.

It is many, many times safer to fly than to drive the same distance. This is almost miraculous. It is also almost miraculous that the measures to make it so safe do not make flying enormously more expensive than it is.

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

#626

Post by Manuel_D »

ncmncm wrote: post #605
Manuel_D wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, my criticism of the lack of maturity of cryogenic air energy storage is still correct. The fact that it shares some components with air separation does not change the fact that cryogenic air storage is not mature technology. Similar deal with ammonia energy storage. We've got plenty of experience with synthesizing ammonia for fertilizer production. We've got very little, if any, experience using synthesized ammon…

I.e., you cannot identify any single stage of any of these extremely familiar industrial processes that would make it unsuitable for energy storage or retrieval, so instead invoke ghosts of fear and doubt. Do you imagine the ammonia knows why it is being synthesized, and would balk at being synthesized and tanked for energy storage or fuel? Do you imagine it will object to being burnt in a combined-cycle turbine? You…

Why are you all of a suddenly replying to a super-deep thread? Is pfdietz your alt? Regardless if you're asking about the technical shortcomings of ammonia and cryogenic air storage I'm happy the enlighten:

Ammonia storage would first require a source of hydrogen. Currently almost all hydrogen is produced through steam reformation which releases carbon dioxide. So this has to be replaced with electrolysis, which is more energy intensive and has issues with corrosion of electrodes. Then there's the issue of heating up this hydrogen and nitrogen to ~400C and compressing it to fix the nitrogen into ammonia. Currently this is done through combustion of fossil fuels. That too needs to be replaced with an electric source. All these changes drastically increases the cost of producing ammonia over existing processes.

Cryogenic storage is essentially producing liquid nitrogen by refrigerating air, and then hearing the nitrogen to create a pressure gradient to drive a heat engine. Cooling the air is a huge energy sink, and releasing the energy often has to be coupled with a heat source in order transition the liquid nitrogen to a gas. It's actually using the heat gradient of the ambient air and the liquid nitrogen to drive the heat engine, and that ambient air often doesn't have the required energy density to produce more than a few dozen megawatts. Existing prototypes often scavenge waste heat from a fossil fuel power plant. But again, not an option if you plan to eliminate fossil fuels.

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

#627

Post by Manuel_D »

ncmncm wrote: post #612
Manuel_D wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chernobyl miniseries greatly distorted the impact of the meltdown. They cited the "bridge of death" where everyone supposedly died. In reality there are zero known deaths among people who watched the meltdown from that overpass, and there's even interviews with people who were there. They cited a death estimate of 60,000 when reputable sources estimate 200-1,700 deaths.

False. Cancer rates downwind are sharply elevated.

Credible estimates do include increases in cancer, especially thyroid cancer. That is captured in the estimates of ~1,700. The 60,000 estimates shared by Netflix are not regarded as credible.

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

#628

Post by ncmncm »

tptacek wrote: post #171
jnsaff2 wrote: post #150

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…

It sounds like the argument presented here is that if we actually use nuclear power, there will be more accidents, which will cost us the opportunity of actually using nuclear power.

Each accident saves us from building more nukes than would have been built otherwise. The benefit has probably been well worth their costs.

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

#629

Post by trashtester »

ncmncm wrote: post #610
trashtester wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, France needs to hurry up and double if not triple their nuclear capacity, so they can switch to electric cars and heating. Somewhere to the north-east of Strasbourg would be ideal, not only for the abundant water supply, but also because the location is ideal for export to places in Europe that have not invested enough in stable sources of energy, lately. And if France plans to import power when the w…

The more nukes they build, the farther behind the rest of the world they will get. The rest of the world will be building out renewables, and getting much more power for each euro than France will. France will have more expensive power than everyone else in exact proportion to their nuke construction. Ultimately, the French will buy their power from outside, because the nukes will be unable to deliver at a matching p…

> Ultimately, the French will buy their power from outside.

My prediction is the opposite, that nuclear will remain cheaper than wind in northern temperate climates for another generation.

I suppose time will tell.

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

#630

Post by Manuel_D »

ncmncm wrote: post #604
Manuel_D wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yes, for purposes different from energy storage. The massive amounts of ammonia synthesized through the Haber process for fertilizer production does nothing to demonstrate ammonia's viability…

Quoted post unavailable.

> Electric ammonia synthesis plants are right now under construction all over the world.

Source? I'm not finding any result for electric ammonia synthesis plants under construction right now.

The best I could find is this [1] but it's not a plant under construction, and there still significant challenges to overcome to make this viable.

> You imagine that engineers are idiots who cannot direct existing, familiar processes, unchanged, to new purposes. But engineers are not idiots. Neither are we.

Those engineers have opted not to build any of the storage systems you listed. I agree they're not idiots.

1. https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/ammonia-synthesis-go...

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