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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

#651

Post by ncmncm »

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.

Vogtle will be cancelled before completion. That many $billions for 2GW is nothing short of pathetic.

It cannot be cancelled soon enough.

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

#652

Post by ncmncm »

nabla9 wrote: post #70
jeffbee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The state of California has built more battery capacity in the last six months than the entire nation has built of fission power plants in the last 25 years. It is extremely easy to build batteries for fixed service, and bulk semiconductor manufacturing is the #1 thing that humans are good at. These problems are absolutely solved, the whole industry thinks so, that's why the whole industry is behind pv+wind+storage,…

As I said, order of magnitude error. > has built But enough? Global battery manufacturers have invested so much that they can take total battery capacity to more than 5,500 GWh by by 2030. US would need something like 3000 Gwh of energy storage to replace the base load. (within days, then few weeks). It would would be insane misuse of resources.

A negligible fraction of utility-scale storage will be batteries, so battery capacity hardly matters.

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

#653

Post by lelag »

ncmncm wrote: post #608
lelag wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but that wasn't the point. The point is that those that claim that we can replace fossils fuel entirely by wind and solar based on the current price of wind and solar production produced by an industry doped with fossil fuels at every stage are deluding themselves.

Quoted post unavailable.

You make it sound like I'm anti-renewable. I'm not at all. I'm all for building as much capacity as we can as long as it makes economical sense and I will selfishly have solar panel and LFP batteries installed on my home as soon as I can and before price goes up as I expect they will.

What I'm saying is that we should not put all of our eggs in the same basket hoping that wind and solar are silver bullets that will fix it all (and we know it is not if only for the unsolved energy storage issue). Maybe nuclear is not a silver bullet either, but it's a bullet that we've been successfully leveraged to produced vast amount of predictable carbon-free energy and we should not discard it yet. What I'm saying is that saying solar and wind is cheap by looking at today's price is misleading.

I'm sure that building nuclear power plant has a significant carbon footprint. Building windmills and solar panels also. Yet, in all case, they compensate for all the initial emission after a few years of usage at worse. So it does makes sense to build them all. Just don't let us not use nuclear because we need it: compare Germany and France electricity production carbon intensity for proof if you need it convince yourself.

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

#654

Post by ncmncm »

trashtester wrote: post #629
ncmncm wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nukes are already more expensive. Renewables cost is still in free-fall.

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

#655

Post by ncmncm »

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.

Demand for hydrogen for all uses will drive elecrolyser use to as close to 100% as available energy permits. Ultimately, other cheap storage will be used to drive them.

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

#656

Post by cycomanic »

cthalupa wrote: post #619
cycomanic wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well nuclear proponents handwave away the massively higher costs, the still unsolved long term storage problem (it's been >70 years of nuclear power and there still does not exist a long term storage facility in the world), and insurance for the case of a disaster.

>the still unsolved long term storage problem (it's been >70 years of nuclear power and there still does not exist a long term storage facility in the world) Storage has /been solved/ for decades. High Level Waste is only a tiny fraction of total waste. As it stands, all of the HLW created by all the nuclear plants in the world could be kept in a football field sized area. The vast majority of the rest of the generat…

Here [1] is a picture of the temporary storage at the Yankee nuclear power plant temporary storage (sorry I could not find better pictures from above to give more accurate size). There are ~90 commercial nuclear reactor in the US. I can immediately see that this would not fit into a football field sized area. And this is for a single country and ignores waste that was already transported away. And no things will not decay to harmlessness during the lifetime of a plant. They decay to a level where the containers are not very warm anymore so they can be more easily transported. Also low level waste is not harmless either, and there's going to be a lot of it when decommissioning a plant.

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

#657

Post by ncmncm »

trashtester wrote: post #502
ncmncm wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your argument depends on all existing trends reversing, that tells us all we need to know about your conclusion.

Trends and fashions come and go. My daughter is wearing pants that look that the ones my mother wore some years before I was born. At that time, nuclear power was still popular. And now, perhaps, it is becoming so again. Indeed, the NYT article in the topic is discussing this very question.

Nukes get less competitive with each passing day. But that does not keep shills out of the NYT's pages. Fortunately actual investment does not follow shills.

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

#658

Post by ncmncm »

redisman wrote: post #581
ncmncm wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have renewables for a while, and transmission line availability flags, you import anhydrous ammonia from the tropics. So, you need only minimal over-provisioning and local storage.

But then you presumably need to build these extra power plants that can use that fuel?

We have combined-cycle turbines already. More will be built wherever they will be needed.

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

#659

Post by ncmncm »

sanderjd wrote: post #534
californical wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know there are options like pumped water, compressed air, spinning disc. No idea how feasible they are at scale, but I can imagine a world where physical storage like that could be lower maintenance & cost in the long-term compared to chemical batteries. Even if less efficient, you can get enormous potential storage from pumped water with relatively simple machines compared to massive battery farms.

I'm interested in those alternative technologies, but I suspect they won't scale as well as batteries. Pumped hydro has been around a long time but it hasn't scaled because it is just very geographically specific.

Pumped hydro is far, far less geographically specific than always assumed.

This is partly because it needs no watershed, and partly because transmission lines mean it need not be local.

Anyway pumped hydro is only one of many equally viable alternatives. All will be used. Eventually which ones are cheapest will become clear.

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

#660

Post by ncmncm »

zdragnar wrote: post #501
sanderjd wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What will the rest be?

Kinetic (water gravity, flywheel) or thermal (molten salt baths which can be supplemented with solar thermal). None of these things exist at a large scale except for pumped hydro / water gravity, and that requires very convenient topography and geology to work. Generally, any non-chemical storage system is overpriced (too inefficient) or a maintenance disaster.

A negligible fraction of storage will be in flywheels.
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