Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self deception is a terrible scourge. I hope you can overcome it.
being judgmental is not good either.
Certain disappointment, likewise.
Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
741–750 of 818 posts
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#742Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wit…
Germany was dependent on fossil imports all along. What has changed is they import less, now, than when they ran the nukes. They will import decreasing amounts as they build out more renewables.
It is a fact that the nukes shut down would have needed a great deal of expensive work to continue operating. Germany elected to spend the money on wind, instead, and it bought them more actually delivered wattage than the shut-down nukes had provided.
If nukes were not the most expensive power source going, I would be all for it.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why people don't talk about the water usage involved in pumped hydro when the vast majority of the Western United States is dealing with record low water levels + sinking due to groundwater usage.
Pumped hydro doesn't use up the water. It goes back and forth between the lower and the upper reservoirs. Some evaporates, for sure, but that's a tiny fraction of the water that would be evaporated cooling a NPP of the same power output.
Sure it doesn't use water, but it's still taking water out of the ecosystem. Why is that not considered when we have record low water levels.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#744Earlier quoted context omitted.
It could be larger than baseload, but it's unlikely to be any less than baseload.
They are completely unrelated and yes in general they would be much smaller than baseload. Why wouldn't it? What the GP described is essentially what gas peakers do.
> yes in general they would be much smaller than baseload. Why wouldn't it?
Because if your baseload is your minimum power consumption (which generally occurs at night) and you have a windless night (therefore your renewables are generating 0 power), your "gas peakers" will have to provide the entire baseload amount of power.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#745Earlier quoted context omitted.
Batteries are the most expensive storage. A negligible fraction of utility storage will be batteries unless some new battery chemistry is very, very cheap. Almost all current utility storage is gravity. That probably won't change.
Hmm. Last time I suggested that[0], I was quickly shot down. I still don't really know why, but as I'm no geologist or civil engineer, I'm willing to believe either a yes or a no at this point. I definitely don't see any other gravity batteries being useful on this scale. [0] specifically I suggested that there was a lot of room for a lot of additional pumped hydro — I don't mean my more recent claim, which is merely…
There is, in fact, scads of room for add'l pumped hydro. What there isn't room for is more native hydro generation, which needs watershed and a dammed-up river. But pumped hydro only needs an elevated depression. That has actually been a dike around the top of a hill. Natural topography is cheaper, e.g. a box canyon with a dam at the mouth. An alpine pond with no outlet is cheapest of all.
People like to insist pumped hydro is badly limited by geography, but hills are very common, and need not be nearby: transmission lines work very well. Transmission losses matter little when top-line generation has zero opex and minimal capex. You just build a little more of it.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#746Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth, I'm not suggesting using breeder reactors as a primary source of electrical power, but as an option for reprocessing transuranic waste and spent fuel. So totally different levels of scale. Also, the main reason we haven't invested in breeder reactors is that it turns out uranium isn't actually scarce enough to justify it.
Oh but you have to use breeders (or perhaps sea water uranium extraction) for a global nuclear-powered economy. Burner reactors run out of sufficiently cheap uranium in less than a decade at that scale. That pesky "scale" thing again.
That doesn't mean every single reactor needs to be a breeder reactor; it means you have a small number of breeder reactors, which we've done over half a century ago.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your search skills do not define the limits of investment or build-out.
There are no ammonia electric storage plants under construction. You write that there's many under construction, all over the world. Yet you fail to identify one such plant that's actually under construction.
Ammonia synthesized electrically is not restricted in how it may be used. Identically the same ammonia will be used for many things: burned in combined-cycle turbines for power, burned in retrofitted cargo ships displacing bunker oil, made into fertilizer, injected as working fluid into warehouse-scale refrigeration systems, dissolved in water for window cleaner, used as feedstock in a thousand other chemical pipelines, sent abroad in tankers, mixed into hydrogen fuel to scavenge NOx. It is exactly its wide usefulness that makes it attractive. Similarly for hydrogen.
Insisting that a synthesis plant must jealously direct every last liter produced to be tanked and later burned in a local peaker turbine is fetishism. The ammonia doesn't care, and neither does the synthesis equipment owner: any customer who pays is a good one.
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#748Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are no ammonia electric storage plants under construction. You write that there's many under construction, all over the world. Yet you fail to identify one such plant that's actually under construction.
Ammonia synthesized electrically is not restricted in how it may be used. Identically the same ammonia will be used for many things: burned in combined-cycle turbines for power, burned in retrofitted cargo ships displacing bunker oil, made into fertilizer, injected as working fluid into warehouse-scale refrigeration systems, dissolved in water for window cleaner, used as feedstock in a thousand other chemical pipelin…
[deleted]
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are no ammonia electric storage plants under construction. You write that there's many under construction, all over the world. Yet you fail to identify one such plant that's actually under construction.
Ammonia synthesized electrically is not restricted in how it may be used. Identically the same ammonia will be used for many things: burned in combined-cycle turbines for power, burned in retrofitted cargo ships displacing bunker oil, made into fertilizer, injected as working fluid into warehouse-scale refrigeration systems, dissolved in water for window cleaner, used as feedstock in a thousand other chemical pipelin…
[deleted]
Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future
#750Earlier quoted context omitted.
Each dollar diverted from renewables to nukes brings climate catastrophe nearer. Starting a new nuke means burning coal for an extra decade, and at the end of that decade getting much less power per euro, displacing correspondingly less CO2, than if you had built out renewables instead. There is simply no contest. Even refurbishing a nuke instead of building out renewables is a losing proposition. Just continuing to…
you dont need 10 years to build a nuclear plant, most of delays are due to " political limitations" and construction/design inexpertise. South Korea build them on 56 months on average. Scale matter
In the US and Europe, it takes ten years. Or 20.