More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade • Hacker News Board

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#611

Post by samatman » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 11:22 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #423

JohnBooty wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry. Also, talking about kWh c…

> building a fission reactor takes one or two decades > and its kWh is costlier than alternatives > It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry. That is not true, t…

Not only are the costs comparable to a carbon thermal plant, the generating equipment is identical, and the cooling needs are also identical.

Solution: build nuclear cores as close to existing coal plants as possible, shut the coal plant down, and move everything from the steam boiler to the wires to the nuclear plant.

Repeat until no coal.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#612

Post by indymike » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 11:27 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #609

indymike wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their field involved exactly zero need for economic analysis. This is just dismissing the argument without addressing the assertion that the vast majority of cost in building nuclear is imposed by overly burdensome regulation. > Naval reactor "engineering laboratory technicians" (SMAGs) are reputed among submariners as habitual liars. From personal experience, ELTs were held to the exact same zero tolerance for lie…

I doesn't make up SMAGs' reputation: all I know is what retired "nukes" report. Ask them .

I was a nuke.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#613

Post by einpoklum » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 11:57 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #172

einpoklum wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's way easier. Is that why power plants go years over time and hugely over-budget? > It has been working fine since the 1950s. Oh, yeah, just fine, not a hitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident... > Waste problem is solved The solution being: Ignore it, I guess? > net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution And we fight wars for peace too. > It's zero carbon Not if you coun…

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident ... How many industries are there where the list of notable accidents has such few fatalities? I mean, have you actually looked at the accidents on that list? The vast majority of them are basically garden-variety industrial accidents--and there's only so many because people are minded to exhaustively list every mishap that occurs at a nuclear power plant…

Probability of accident * Expected damage of accident = Expected damage of activity/project.

Nuclear has had non-negligible probability of accidents, including dangerous accidents. The expected damage of the dangerous accidents is millions dead and injured, and potential destruction of very wide ecosystems.

An accident in a coal power plant mean a bunch of coal burning. Which is bad, but several orders of magnitude less.

... And that's all while ignoring the question of waste management; and damage to reactors due to attacks at wartime.

Now, has technology improved in recent decades? I'm sure it has, to some extent. But the credibility and trustworthiness of the organizations building nuclear power plants has not improved, certainly not to the level at which lay-people - like myself - are willing to take their word for it. And that includes key world state governments.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#614

Post by Schroedingersat » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 12:17 AM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #416

bratbag wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost factor isn't as relevant as you think, as this is an apple's to oranges comparison. Renewables are too unreliable to act as baseline generation for a country. In the UK last year for example we had very little wind, so we had to ramp up our gas power output to make up for our shortages in renewables. We burned through much of our gas reserves before the Ukraine war started, because of Renewable power unreliabili…

Just repeating the baseline myth does not make it true. Nuclear does not compete with gas it competes with coal and renewables. It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers. Moreover nuclear is not the beacon of reliability, Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60%…

> Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60% capacity due to maintanance and weather (when it gets hot nuclear plants have to shut down or reduce output significantly).

It's important to use the real deal-breaking flaws when pointing these things out. The relevant figure is availability because capacity also includes energy that could be produced but was not due to having nowhere to put it.

Availability is 70-80% in France and UK and 80-90% in the US.

But due to the long timeline of refuelling cycles you still need a full baseload backup. So nuclear needs long term storage or other uncorrelated backup more than renewables if anything.

The upside is it's easy to have two uncorrelated nuclear plants, so overprovisioning by 30% is sufficient.

That makes something that is already more expensive than solar with the same overprovisioned net capacity factor, and a green hydrogen plant with capacity sufficient to cover, and full gas backup infrastructure even more expensive though. Probably not enough to cover the costs of hydrogen storage yet or someone would be doing it (ignoring massive nuclear subsidies), but prices of batteries, solar panels, and electrolyzers are dropping rapidly. Hydrogen storage or green methane production only needs to become marginally cheaper to make it start happening even sans subsidies.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#615

Post by Schroedingersat » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 12:20 AM UTC

toxik wrote: post #432

cycomanic wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just repeating the baseline myth does not make it true. Nuclear does not compete with gas it competes with coal and renewables. It is often technically difficult but more importantly economically prohibitive to run nuclear as on demand sources. So for both renewables and nuclear you need some sort of storage or peakers. Moreover nuclear is not the beacon of reliability, Frances nuclear plants were running to only 60%…

Calling it a myth doesn’t make it a myth. Power companies have been saying exactly this for years: they need PLANNABLE power generation. Building 3x solar or wind plants means 3x volatility.

If the goal is 1 unit net, then min(3x, mean(x)) has massively lower variance than x.

The extra power when 3x > mean(x) is just incentive for developing flexible loads and arbitrage.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#616

Post by tptacek » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

einpoklum wrote: post #613

jcranmer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident ... How many industries are there where the list of notable accidents has such few fatalities? I mean, have you actually looked at the accidents on that list? The vast majority of them are basically garden-variety industrial accidents--and there's only so many because people are minded to exhaustively list every mishap that occurs at a nuclear power plant…

Probability of accident * Expected damage of accident = Expected damage of activity/project. Nuclear has had non-negligible probability of accidents, including dangerous accidents. The expected damage of the dangerous accidents is millions dead and injured, and potential destruction of very wide ecosystems. An accident in a coal power plant mean a bunch of coal burning. Which is bad, but several orders of magnitude l…

At what point do we observe no accident causing millions of deaths or injuries and adjust our "expected damage" calculation? Decades? Centuries?

We can look past the damage caused by an accident at a coal plant and just count the damage caused by ordinary routine operation of coal plants and quickly reach damage figures that eclipse every nuclear accident in history combined.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#617

Post by JohnBooty » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 1:47 AM UTC

logifail wrote: post #405

JohnBooty wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives It didn't and doesn't need to be that way. Obviously we need strong regulatory oversight over nuclear power, but a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations imposed by politicians who are (a) pandering to public fear (b) heavily influence by the fossil fuel industry. Also, talking about kWh c…

> > building a fission reactor takes one or two decades and its kWh is costlier than alternatives > It didn't and doesn't need to be that way [..] a big part of the cost is the need to satisfy incredibly hostile regulations [..] (Alleged over-)regulation is only part of the story. "analysis, done by a team of researchers at MIT, is remarkably comprehensive. For many nuclear plants, they have detailed construction rec…

So how are other countries e.g. South Korea building them faster than the US, yet not suffering nuclear accidents?

I presume the problem is not a lack of engineering talent in America.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#618

Post by BMc2020 » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 1:52 AM UTC

acidburnNSA wrote: post #546

BMc2020 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors.* Because they lose money. Nobody, not the USA, Russia, China, France, Japan, Korea has ever made them profitable. They are always subsidized. The CCP bought Westinghouse AP1000s so they could steal their design and they still couldn't make it work. And you can't blame the environmentalists when it's in China. Full disclosure:…

Cost for deeply decarbonized grids are cheapest if you have low carbon firm energy like nuclear. The LCOE numbers thrown around today are meaningless wrt systems costs. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511... nuclear plants save a fraction of their revenue in a trust that pays for decommissioning. for thr vast majority of plants this has been and will be more than sufficient. therr are excepti…

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I see by your bio you've been on yc since 2013 and a "Nuclear reactor physicist in Seattle. If you want to talk about how best to push the envelope in nuclear for climate change, I'm in!"

Are you J** W***? You haven't updated your blog in a while.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#619

Post by lawrenceyan » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 3:09 AM UTC

lven wrote: post #583

lawrenceyan wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's truly no meltdown risk with micro reactors, I'm all for it. In terms of fusion, I'd much rather make the tradeoff of increased cost in order to remove issues of vulnerability completely. I want to be able to not even have to think about / plan for dealing with a meltdown scenario.

This is it: https://usnc.com/mmr/ I work on it.

This is pretty cool!

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#620

Post by dmitriid » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 4:42 AM UTC

logifail wrote: post #588

dmitriid wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if we want to follow the cheapest generator. Energy isn't just about generation > If nuclear is as necessary, competitive and flexible as some make out, then go right ahead and build your plant(s). Just don't expect taxpayers to underwrite anything. By the same logic taxpayers shouldn't underwrite any renewables: they are significantly slower than nuclear, and have literally zero base load capacity.

> By the same logic taxpayers shouldn't underwrite any renewables: they are significantly slower than nuclear, and have literally zero base load capacity. The cost for offshore wind projects has fallen so fast in the UK that the many of the latest projects don't need subsidies, see this report from Imperial College (London)[0], in fact they'll be paying the government, see this article from Bloomberg.[1] I'm pretty s…

> The cost for offshore wind projects has fallen so fast in the UK that the many of the latest projects don't need subsidies

I'll have to check that. Sensational news usually omit quite a few important details.

> I'm pretty sceptical about the phrase 'base load', when it comes up, such as in a HN discussion[2] from a last week, it seems to be used to describe wanting to choose slow and/or expensive power plants.

No. It means that wind and solar literally produce zero output when there's no wind or there's no sun.

However, life goes on: trains run, homes are being heated, businesses operate, factories produce goods. This is base load.

So, to cover a wind farm or a solar farm that produces inadequate power you need to get that power from somewhere.

Where from?

And this is the question that renewables enthusiasts just brush off as not important.

"We can store energy". No. We can't. Not in the amounts required.

"We just build more". How much more? Does this "more" remain cheap then? Yea, you can transmit it from afar, but it's no mean task in itself. And not cheap either.

But sure. "It's all about keeping slow power plants". What the hell does "slow" even mean in this context, when we're talking about wind/solar which can't even be properly used in load following precisely because they are extremely slow.