201–210 of 709 posts
Waste disposal isn't that hard. The Onkalo nuclear waste repository in Finland pretty much has it covered. First, you find a hard-rock mountain where geology shows nothing much happening in the last few million years, and there's nothing worth mining. Worldwide, there are many mountain ranges like that. Then tunnel way down, but preferably above the water table. Drill holes in the tunnel floor. Put waste in suitable…
There is this idea that nuclear is not being deployed because people have a wrong perception of risks. However, the main reason is the economy. The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially but the costs of nuclear are not improving. We can blame regulation and the hypothetically wrong public perception about safety, but the reality is that costs cannot go down easily because of the innovation dyn…
And then even after building the plant your community may turn around and decide they don’t want the plant anymore. Then you’re out €1.4bn e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Morgan Housel talks about this case in his talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9pk3ecuucs
Risk perception ties to the country that you live in, generation you are born and values that are instilled in you based on your surroundings.
All this features are outside of your control pretty much but they dictate a lot even in cases like this...
Nuclear power if necessary but not necessarily nuclear power. Over the past decade the economic environment of nuclear power has entirely shifted due the huge drop in the cost of solar and wind. Not only is solar/wind cheap but because these can be built in a year or two, as opposed to decades for nuclear, governments accountants will much prefer them over nuclear. Nuclear will have some niche segments and I see a sm…
A big problem with solar and wind is that they aren't dispatchable. A 100 MWe nuclear power plant fitting in the space of small local power plant isn't equivalent of a 100MW solar or wind plant - for my local area, the equivalent solar/wind plant is about a combination of few Gigawatts of nameplate capacity of solar and wind plants (allowing for very optimistic storage tech, it gets "down" to 1180 MW solar + 410 MW w…
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Radioactive sources have all kinds of applications in industry and medicine. If you have been to the dentist, you have probably been near one. They are dangerous in the same sense that a falling brick is dangerous.
I’m sorry, are you questioning the fact that exposure to strong gamma radiation would kill you? What are you talking about?
There is this idea that nuclear is not being deployed because people have a wrong perception of risks. However, the main reason is the economy. The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially but the costs of nuclear are not improving. We can blame regulation and the hypothetically wrong public perception about safety, but the reality is that costs cannot go down easily because of the innovation dyn…
In the US, nuclear capacity is being replaced by wind and solar at six times the rate it's being "lost"; the hysterics you read here on HN and reddit are just that. And the rate of solar and wind deployment is skyrocketing. The people building grids and investing in generation are putting their money into wind and solar, because it's the cheapest and easiest.
"Several years" is an understatement; it takes years just to go from "everything is completely constructed and wired and plumbed" to "we are connected to the grid." This happened in Canada, where a reactor at an existing plant was brought back into use. The process took years.
You can't just drop a nuke anywhere. In order to be cost-effective, they have to be enormous and run at full capacity as continuously as possible. You can't just drop gigawatts of power generation anywhere you want in the grid,so the grid might have to get reworked or a plant might only be feasible in a handful of geographic locations. The plant needs access to massive quantities of cooling water, and a geologically stable area. They also need to be able to suck down enormous amounts of power, because even when a reactor is shut down and not "generating power", it requires many megawatts of electricity to run all the cooling systems; a reactor takes weeks to stop generating significant amounts of heat. Ditto for startup (this is true of many plants, but especially nuclear.)
They take many hours to adjust power levels. That's not what the grid needs; the grid needs highly reactive power, on the scale of seconds to minutes. Pumped hydro has been doing that in the UK for decades, helping the national grid meet the famous grid surge where everyone flips on their electric kettles when the BBC goes to break during a programming. The pumped hydro facilities in the UK and EU can react within seconds to changing grid demand. The US has pumped hydro as well, but battery systems are getting so cheap, they're competitive and don't have the risks hydro dams do.
Reactor vessels aren't built on-site. The majority are built by Japan Steel Works, one of the few companies in the world that makes reactor vessels. They have fixed capacity, require very high grade metal, and so on. One cannot just snap fingers, throw money at the problem under a "green" funding bill, and get more reactors.
There's also the massive carbon footprint of construction and commissioning, which takes another decade of operation to break even on, if nuclear reactors ever break even. The industry almost completely ignores the carbon impact of mining and refining uranium as well as the carbon footprint of the massive supply chain and workforce it takes to keep a plant running. Meanwhile, solar and wind pay back their carbon footprint in a matter of months to a year or two at most.
We need the very fastest ways to reduce carbon generation, and that will only come from conservation, a radical shift in transportation policy (namely discontinuing subsidizing low occupancy vehicle use), and large-scale conversion to electricity as an energy source.
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Oil refineries also take years to build and are built on site. The difference is that oil goes onto open markets and it is thus possible for oil refiners to get a return on their investment. We don’t need innovation in nuclear. The nuclear technology we have today is already a miracle technology. Can’t speak to Europe but in the US the issue absolutely is regulation. The exact regulations vary by state, but energy gr…
> We don’t need innovation in nuclear The Nuclear industry will need that innovation, in order to remain even remotely competitive with the alternatives. It's not improving faster than those alternatives though.
At a certain point you have to say "sorry guys, you had your try" and let the existing plants wind down. That's what's happening. Nuclear is being replaced by green generation at 6x the rate it's being lost.
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That is just to show that nuclear isn't a magical always-on power source that some of the pro-nuclear folks make it out to be. Also: we can install twice the capacity in MW for solar and still have money left over to put into a smarter grid or storage compared to nuclear.
No. Firstly, you talk about $ per capacity in MW, however solar capacity factor is 20%. Only use a levelized cost per MWh. Secondly, solar needs storage which you think is trivial, but which turns out to be wayyyy more expensive than the solar panels. Some reports[1] only compare short-term (peaker generation) for storage. Nuclear is expensive, but battery storage is far more expensive to cover daily or longer load v…
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Do you have any sources for utility scale batteries with reasonable cost? The biggest I know of are in Australia and are extremely expensive, and provide such little reserve they are basically a rounding error.
Are you talking about lithium batteries? Why on earth?
I find it asonishing that only now I learn that radioactive waste stays much longer radioactive than being dangerous. Also other good arguments are put forward by normalizing material costs VS expected energy production capacity.
radioactive waste stays much longer radioactive than being dangerous If it’s radioactive it’s dangerous. The article points out that radioactive waste doesn’t stay radioactive for very long, contrary to what is commonly believed.
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of rational discussion.