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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

#731

Post by mlyle »

ncmncm wrote: post #677
mlyle wrote: post #272

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%. > 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…

Nukes' utility factor will fall rapidly as renewables and storage undercut them. Each decrease in utility factor multiplies their per-kWh cost, making them increasingly uncompetitive, and that at a steadily increasing rate. Nukes will shortly be mothballed, to perhaps be fired up once in a while in response to spiking demand.

You continually do this: reply to the same comments multiple times from different angles hours apart; make unsupported assertions that storage will fix everything, etc.

It doesn't lead to productive conversation.

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

#732

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

ncmncm wrote: post #700
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to France, those losers still generate 70% of energy with nuclear plants, instead of following the lead of their German colleagues in denuclearizing their energy grid.

Yet, France has no plans to build replacements for the large majority of plants soon to age out. What they will build is purely politically motivated. Those probably will not be completed, as they would be uncompetitive, but ratepayers might be forced to make them profitable by paying way more for power than their neighbors. Germany elected to build out a great deal of wind generation capacity rather than refurbish a…

> Germany elected to build out a great deal of wind generation capacity rather than refurbish a much smaller capacity of aged, ramshackle nukes. That has worked out extremely well, and they continue.

Really? It has worked really well?? Thanks to these really well policies, Germany has an unbreakable dependence on Russian has [1] and has paid billions of euros to Putin's murderous regime since the start of the war with Ukraine [2].

If this is 'really well', I'd rather pass.

In conclusion, I suggest you start looking more rationally on energy generation, I sense a lot of anger and unexplained hatred towards nuclear power ('aged, ramshackle nukes' is not a rational sensible argumentation).

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/world/europe/germany-gas-...

[2]: https://crea.shinyapps.io/russia_counter/

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

#733

Post by orthecreedence »

pfdietz wrote: post #523
orthecreedence wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, this is the biggest part of the debate. It's not whether solar is up to the task or not, it's whether supply chains can support solar. From what we've seen, no, they cannot. You can provision the solar plant and the storage array, but there likely just won't be enough panels or batteries being produced to build it. Pumped hydro storage is only viable in some places, and from what it seems to me all the other…

The supply chain for solar is in a much healthier state than the supply chain for nuclear.

Yes, at the current scale. Can it scale up to the task of entirely replacing fossil fuels before we can build the nuclear plants that can give the same output?

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

#734

Post by philipkglass »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #693
sandos wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, but didn't we already say that renewables are cheaper per kWh? So then with any storage renewables should still be the cheap bulk generation.

You said that, that doesn't mean it is true. And it probably isn't true north of 50 degrees of latitute where lots of the people who need energy live. France's nuclear fleet has an all-in cost of 7c/kWh, which is roughly the same as the cost of solar or wind power in France, but without the need for storage or smart grids that doubles the cost of solar/wind. (For all this remember that France has about a third of the…

For all this remember that France has about a third of the insolation of California or Arizona per year, or maybe half at best in some places.

I don't think that is correct. This is a table of average insolation for different cities around the world derived from NASA's Surface meteorology and Solar Energy data set: http://stalix.com/isolation.pdf

Los Angeles gets 5.4 kWh/m^2/day. San Francisco gets 4.9. Lyon, Paris, and Toulouse get 3.7, 3.3, and 3.7 respectively.

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

#735

Post by pfdietz »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #726
pfdietz wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can fully agree that green groups have opposed nuclear. I call bullshit on the absurd idea that the global failure of nuclear is due to these groups.

I can hardly call nuclear energy to be a 'global failure'. True, 'green' groups had some success with scaremongering people to be afraid of nuclear energy, but it is generating 10% of energy globally (projected to rise to 15% by 2030 [1] ), with much higher shares in developed countries. If anything, the Fukushima effect has finally weared out, and we'll see new plants constructed which were halted because of that sc…

Well, it obviously is a global failure. It exists in places where people can be forced to pay for it. There is not a single competitive energy market where merchant nuclear reactors have been built to compete in that market. That's because it's just too expensive. Sure, reactors have been built to exploit monopolies, and where political considerations trump economic ones. That's nothing to be proud of.

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

#736

Post by Manuel_D »

ncmncm wrote: post #518
Manuel_D wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes I'm well aware of the numerous alternatives you repeatedly insist are incredibly cheap and scalable, despite the fact that no such systems have been deployed.

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

#737

Post by Manuel_D »

bob29 wrote: post #729
Manuel_D wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

>build 4 nuclear plants for each one we currently have to achieve a 100% decarbonized grid Uhh, mining and uranium enrichment and transportation all require fossil fuels, and more fossil fuel energy than a fueled nuclear produces in electrical energy. Increasing 4x nuclear plants would increase fossil fuel consumption in the nuclear supply chain. Nuclear isn't some secret technology you've just discovered thats being…

> Uhh, mining and uranium enrichment and transportation all require fossil fuels, and more fossil fuel energy than a fueled nuclear produces in electrical energy.

Incorrect. Nuclear power actually has the second lowest net CO2 emissions per energy source, second only to hydroelectricity. Less than solar and wind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...

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

#738

Post by pfdietz »

orthecreedence wrote: post #733
pfdietz wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supply chain for solar is in a much healthier state than the supply chain for nuclear.

Yes, at the current scale. Can it scale up to the task of entirely replacing fossil fuels before we can build the nuclear plants that can give the same output?

Yes. Scaling up solar and wind is much easier. Nuclear reactors require very heavy industry (look at what's needed to forge the reactor pressure vessel of a PWR). Nuclear also requires much higher quality manufacturing. A 1% failure rate on PV modules is acceptable. A 1% failure rate on reactor components is not.

Installing wind and solar is also much easier than installing NPPs. Solar installation does not require expensive highly trained labor, again because the installations are robust to installation mistakes.

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

#739

Post by notabothonest »

redisman wrote: post #582
notabothonest wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wind/solar/storage. On what basis do you make this assertion? Because when it comes to renewables, I very rarely see any inclusion of the costs of additional large scale energy storage (probably because it still remains an unsolved issue) and I never s…

Controversial opinión: we should invest heavily into nuclear and renewables as they seem to synergize quite well

I agree we should invest in both.

The issue comes when people think that renewables are a panacea, and we should start building renewables capacity where it doesn't even make sense. For example; wind power is great in and around the North Sea, but makes little sense in central and eastern Europe. Solar power is great in Spain, Portugal and Italy, but the ROI is very poor anywhere north of the Alps.

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

#740

Post by ncmncm »

pfdietz wrote: post #722
ncmncm wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your and Jeff's statements are wholly compatible.

True. :) I mean that the other approaches appear to have obvious showstoppers (mostly engineering ones for DT approaches), while Helion has at least a plausible path to practicality. (plausible, adj.: superficially fair, reasonable, or valuable but often specious.)

Did you see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31759753

? One of the projects has a plan to get p-11B closer to working. It didn't seem immediately stupid. It would be great to have a system that doesn't depend on unobtainium.

Maybe in 50 years we will be able to take down the wind turbines, or explore the Kuiper Belt at length.

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