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Nuclear energy is clean

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#271

Post by pfdietz »

m2fkxy wrote: post #268
pfdietz wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That problem inflates the cost of solar and wind a bit, but it's not enough to save nuclear.

But... it's not about cost. It's about having energy available . If weather reports show overcast and low winds, and your grid runs on wind/solar power only, who cares about their electricity bill? There won't be any kWh available to consume.

The cost goes up a bit when you augment solar/wind with enough storage to make it always available. But it's not enough to save nuclear.

Of course it's about cost, the cost of achieving that availability.

Oh, I see. You are somehow imagining that storage cannot exist. Please stop.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#272

Post by kristopolous »

rkhassen9 wrote: post #162

Only clean if you don't count the 24,000 years half life of the waste. Funny how 'waste'does not sound like a very clean word. What is clean is living in a way that doesn't consume so much energy. Can implement right now with no longterm repercussion, just a bit of short term pain of self control. Kind of like taking care of our own bodies.

HN is the boostiest of the boosters with nuclear. It's just a bunch of cheerleaders.

Just pass on all mentions of it. They've got absolutely zero interest in material reality here. It's completely fantasy driven. It's not worth it. They're way too ideologically committed

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#273

Post by bob1029 »

p1mrx wrote: post #241
bob1029 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with synthetic inertia supplied by every inverter, you will still eventually run into a situation where the system begins to oscillate wildly if you do not have enough spinning mass.

What does a large spinning mass do that a computer-controlled inverter with batteries cannot?

I will grant you a hypothetical wherein the inverters are all perfectly synchronized by some central system and have no reliance on grid voltage as the primary signaling mechanism.

But, this is a precipitous arrangement. If there is any drift in the clocks or some fault in the sync protocol, you can quickly wind up with a completely dead grid (because all your inverters will have killed each other).

Spinning metal is very simple and robust. The failure modes are all much more gradual in nature. Today, one or 2 bad inverters would not start a chain of horrible events because hundreds of tons of metal are not easily perturbed. Without inertia, a bad element in the grid can have substantially more impact.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#274

Post by stmfreak »

Clean because no one has yet measured the ten thousand year containment costs and unintentional releases.

Clean because we have somehow written off the devastation of Chernobyl and Fukushima as trivial.

I don’t want a nuclear plant within 100 miles of my home because I have lived through three meltdowns and do not want to be displaced by a fourth.

But sure, in the moment nuclear emissions are super green.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#275

Post by mcronce »

pfdietz wrote: post #271
m2fkxy wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... it's not about cost. It's about having energy available . If weather reports show overcast and low winds, and your grid runs on wind/solar power only, who cares about their electricity bill? There won't be any kWh available to consume.

The cost goes up a bit when you augment solar/wind with enough storage to make it always available. But it's not enough to save nuclear. Of course it's about cost, the cost of achieving that availability. Oh, I see. You are somehow imagining that storage cannot exist. Please stop.

Oh, I see. You are handwaving away the nonexistent storage tech required to stand up a power grid. Please stop.

The fact is that without inventing new storage tech, which might or might not be possible, the only options for powering the world are nuclear or burning more carbon.

Personally, I'd rather humans still have a viable habitat in a century.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#276

Post by champtar »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #205
joak wrote: post #165

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…

100% correct. Not only have nuclear costs not improved in the three quarters of a century it has existed, it's only gotten more expensive while wind and solar have plunged, dramatically, in costs. 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.…

> They take many hours to adjust power levels.

FYI, France nuclear reactor can vary power level 80% in 30min

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suivi_de_charge ('Les réacteurs sont déjà capables de faire varier leur puissance de 80 % à la hausse ou à la baisse en l’espace de trente minutes')

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#277

Post by pfdietz »

mcronce wrote: post #275
pfdietz wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost goes up a bit when you augment solar/wind with enough storage to make it always available. But it's not enough to save nuclear. Of course it's about cost, the cost of achieving that availability. Oh, I see. You are somehow imagining that storage cannot exist. Please stop.

Oh, I see. You are handwaving away the nonexistent storage tech required to stand up a power grid. Please stop. The fact is that without inventing new storage tech, which might or might not be possible, the only options for powering the world are nuclear or burning more carbon. Personally, I'd rather humans still have a viable habitat in a century.

Batteries don't exist? Pumped hydro doesn't exist? Hydrogen doesn't exist?

All these storage technologies exist. The churn right now is to figure out what flavor of storage is going to win, and how much they will end up costing after they go down their experience curves. But if some aliens held a gun to our heads and insisted we build storage now, it could be done.

The weirdness from you guys, thinking that obviously existent things don't exist.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#278

Post by internet_user »

bad_alloc wrote: post #9

We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…

Solar leaks heavy metals into top soil. Most of solar is not recycled properly. Nobody seems to worry about that at all.

If a solar facility gets carpet bombed during a war, you think it's more likely it will all just get somewhat cleaned up, and lots of it will be left in-situ and plowed over, or someone will actually remove every little dust particle? I think the lazy way out is what is most likely.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#279

Post by Krssst »

cesarb wrote: post #107
TheDong wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure Of course, the Geneva Convention bans attacking dams, just like it bans attacking nuclear power plants. The pollution from burning coal has already killed more people than nuclear disasters conceivably could. If…

> Hydroelectric dams typically cause even more damage when they fail, but I rarely see people worrying about whether using them for power will lead to war-time issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure I believe the reason people worry less about hydroelectric dam failures is because, if they fail, they do not leave behind a contaminated area. Besides, it's just water; many people are used to floods caused by…

I guess there's also the argument that in case of dam failure, most people don't live to tell the tale, so it does not stay in the news for a long time.

In case of nuclear incident, actual death may be lower but the affected people will keep being concerned about health issues and complain (rightfuly so) about the necessary relocation, which makes for stronger staying power in the news.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#280

Post by epistasis »

adastra22 wrote: post #232
epistasis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, SMRs are the hope, but it's just a hope. It's the right idea to switch away from construction to manufacturing, but it's unclear how quickly the manufacturing process could scale.

With the approval of a SMR design, isn’t this no longer just hope?

For someone like me, who believes the problem is not regulatory approval but the difficulty and cost of the build, I'm no more hopeful than pre-approval. But I have never questioned whether a good design could be conceived and approved.

But if someone thinks that construction/manufacturing is easy and the difficult part is regulatory approval, then perhaps this is cause for hope!

The renewable industry has been scaling at levels that are fairly hard to imagine, and yet people continually doubt its ability to scale fast enough to meet the challenge of the energy transition. SMRs are unfortunately decades behind and haven't even gotten a single device manufactured. So I think there are serious questions about how quickly SMRs could scale up to a GW/year, or 10GW/year, or the TW/year that we really need.

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