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Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

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Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#611

Post by naasking »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #439
JanSt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also many institutes (e.g IDW) constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc. These people are constantly invited to present these „Zukunftsenergien“ as opposed to the old bad nuclear in talk shows. And yet Germany, after two decades and c…

- LCOE of solar and wind beats the pants off of nuclear and coal currently. If it isn't in Germany, well, that's a political and management issue. - maybe you keep the existing nuclear around for levelling, well, fine. But just be ready for it to get "nuked" once the battery/storage costs combined with wind/solar drop under everything. That day isn't today, and it isn't next year, but with cheap sodium ion and many o…

> - LCOE of solar and wind beats the pants off of nuclear and coal currently. If it isn't in Germany, well, that's a political and management issue.

LCOE isn't the only factor of relevance. That's partly how Germany got into its current situation, because LCOE doesn't account for intermittency.

To solve that you need a large interconnected grid and huge overcapacity of renewables (and even then you'll have some brown outs), or you need long-term grid storage, which still has limited options at this time. The LCOE of renewables is not so rosy after you include all of these considerations to achieve the same stable service as a nuclear plant. We might get there in 20 years, but we're not there yet.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#612

Post by gattilorenz »

markvdb wrote: post #526
arcticbull wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think those aren't solved problems? First, fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years. [1] And even to answer your original question directly, there's a whole area of study that's fascinating on how to provide long-term warnings. [3] Not necessarily in the Australian outback, Yucca Mountain is a great choice. [2] [edit](That area is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site…

> fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years. Hundreds of years is not acceptable. Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time. Look at the Zaporizhia atomic energy site for an extreme example of what I mean. The problem is not just the time scale either. There are other areas humanity fails at time and again. P.S. Thank you nevertheless for poi…

> Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time.

There's plenty of buildings that took centuries to make, this projects are comparatively simple/require less coordination once started.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#613

Post by arcticbull »

pfdietz wrote: post #582
arcticbull wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well no, we have plenty of data that shows in reality, nuclear is the safest (lowest deaths per TWh generated [1]), among the lowest-carbon intensity (lower than solar, higher than wind) [2] and with seawater extraction has the potential of being renewable. Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from. So-called environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without a…

The safety of nuclear assumes no nuclear accidents. Also, at the low deaths/TWh of renewables and nuclear w.o. accidents, the "cost of deaths" (at the $9M/statistical life that the NRC uses) is swamped by the direct cost of the produced energy. So renewables continue to beat new nuclear on the cost front, w. cost of deaths added in.

The safety of any power source projects past performance onto future performance. This is a tautology, and not really relevant as we have 80 years of experience and nuclear provides 20% of US power. It provides almost 40% of Canada's electricity. 10% of the world's electricity. We have plenty of samples necessary to make an informed projection.

The direct cost of produced energy is very low with nuclear - super low. Just ask Ontario. [1] There is a large cap ex cost at the start, but you can amortize it over 80 years - whereas solar and wind has to be replaced every 20-30.

Nuclear prices in all externalities in its cost assessments due to the onslaught of attacks whereas other energy prices in almost nothing. Coal kills about 100 people per TWh, and at the same $9M NRC cost, coal should cost about $1/kWh.

[1] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#614

Post by WalterBright »

pvaldes wrote: post #587
WalterBright wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flora and fauna in the Chernobyl exclusion zone appear to be thriving.

In some cases, yes, in other it seems that they are sink areas that are simply constantly being nurtured with migrant animals from the surroundings (Some birds for example). Is complex. And we need to remember that some people was poisoned just a few months ago for digging trenches in Chernobyl in the middle of a war. The danger is still there forty years later.

Poisoned is a relative term. The rates of cancers and deaths from the Chernobyl disaster varies by an incredible amount depending on what source you look at.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#615

Post by naasking »

xorcist wrote: post #483
concordDance wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power was ended in Germany for political reasons. The public has an incorrect idea of how dangerous nuclear power is and how dangerous nuclear waste is and it was easier for the politicians to go along with it for points than stand it's ground. If you're making policy based on scientifically inaccurate ideas then you aren't respecting the science.

This argument is tiresome. Several strong interests wanted to end nuclear power in Germany for a long time before it finally happened. And it wasn't the greens that did it. That much is public knowledge, there are wikipedia pages and everything. The reason nuclear power ended in Germany was economical . There's no way nuclear can compete with cheap Russian gas, and Germany had over invested in the latter for over two…

> There's no way nuclear can compete with cheap Russian gas

Unless relations with Russia go south. That's some short-sighted economics there.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#616

Post by naasking »

pfdietz wrote: post #610
naasking wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables literally can't beat nuclear at power generation until long term grid storage is a proven thing. We're not there yet.

They can beat nuclear right now -- you get more CO2 reduction per $ from adding renewables than you do from adding nuclear. And you get it sooner. Little or no storage is required. By the time storage becomes necessary, the economic environment (price as a function of time) on the grid will be so hostile to new nuclear that there will be no sense even trying to pretend nuclear makes sense.

You get more CO2 reduction until intermittency or geopolitical issues require you to bring coal plants back online to address energy shortfalls, like with Germany. You'd need an order of magnitude more renewables and a huge grid expansion to even remotely come close to solving energy unreliability in Germany, and even then you'll still have some issues. CO2 reduction is not the only goal, power stability is important.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#617

Post by cratermoon »

willcipriano wrote: post #154

You know how I know environmentalists are just dragging their feet on nuclear for ideological reasons? When we talk about a storage facility for nuclear waste, a scenario they insist you prepare for: if human civilization completely collapses to the point that any of the currently spoken languages on earth are no longer able to be read how to we keep the, whatever comes after us, from busting up the concrete and digg…

Maybe it's more of a problem than pro-nuke people think.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14179-w

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#618

Post by pfdietz »

naasking wrote: post #616
pfdietz wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can beat nuclear right now -- you get more CO2 reduction per $ from adding renewables than you do from adding nuclear. And you get it sooner. Little or no storage is required. By the time storage becomes necessary, the economic environment (price as a function of time) on the grid will be so hostile to new nuclear that there will be no sense even trying to pretend nuclear makes sense.

You get more CO2 reduction until intermittency or geopolitical issues require you to bring coal plants back online to address energy shortfalls, like with Germany. You'd need an order of magnitude more renewables and a huge grid expansion to even remotely come close to solving energy unreliability in Germany, and even then you'll still have some issues. CO2 reduction is not the only goal, power stability is important…

When you need storage, the residual demand is highly intermittent. Coal would serve this rather poorly (and nuclear even more so). Gas would be more likely. However, at that point there are wild swings in the price of power across each day (and possibly across seasons), making storage quite attractive, and it would be rolled out.

If your objection is that storage would not be rolled out instantaneously, I will ask you to try to be more serious. Nuclear isn't rolled out even that fast.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#619

Post by pfdietz »

arcticbull wrote: post #613
pfdietz wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The safety of nuclear assumes no nuclear accidents. Also, at the low deaths/TWh of renewables and nuclear w.o. accidents, the "cost of deaths" (at the $9M/statistical life that the NRC uses) is swamped by the direct cost of the produced energy. So renewables continue to beat new nuclear on the cost front, w. cost of deaths added in.

The safety of any power source projects past performance onto future performance. This is a tautology, and not really relevant as we have 80 years of experience and nuclear provides 20% of US power. It provides almost 40% of Canada's electricity. 10% of the world's electricity. We have plenty of samples necessary to make an informed projection. The direct cost of produced energy is very low with nuclear - super low.…

> The direct cost of produced energy is very low with nuclear - super low.

Only if you ignore the amortization of the cost of financing and building the nuclear power plant. That's fine if the plant is provided by the Nuclear Fairy; not so fine in the real world if we're talking about building new nuclear plants that have to be paid for.

Re: Nuclear turn green as EU parliament approves new taxonomy

#620

Post by mcv »

origin_path wrote: post #599
988747 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting few tons of radioactive material on top of dozens of tons of highly explosive rocket fuel... what could possibly go wrong?

Compared to keeping it on earth, or putting it in the ocean, where there are also many things that can go wrong? Yes, launches can explode, but it's very rare, getting rarer and presumably these rockets could be launched from small islands where if there's an explosion the fallout would mostly be over the ocean.

I once read that 1 kg of plutonium burning up in the higher atmosphere would be enough to kill the entire population of the earth. I'm not enough of an expert to know if that's really true, but I suspect there's a good reason why experts don't consider this a good option. Or at least not yet.
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