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Nuclear energy is clean

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#281

Post by m2fkxy »

pfdietz wrote: post #277
mcronce wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hydrogen storage exists on PowerPoint slides that usually slightly understate the overhead required to build new, or adapt current gas infrastructure. Spoiler: those problems are not trivial to overcome. That's why they're mostly PowerPoint projects.

Hydro storage works, and along with hydro power, it is usually well exploited in countries that can benefit from it (e.g. alpine). Problem is you tend to run out of valleys and villages to flood after a certain point.

Why chase paper or limited impact solutions when massively available and clean ones already exist?

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#282

Post by tshaddox »

hackerlight wrote: post #227
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…

> The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially but the costs of nuclear are not improving. So where can I see a cost comparison that factors in the cost of storage ? I've probably seen 20 people say this exact same thing and have never been able to find an actual cost breakdown that supports it.

You obviously need to factor in the cost of storage if you want to abruptly replace all electricity generation with solar and wind, but I’m also interested in the question “how much non-renewable power generation can we replace with solar and wind before we even have to start worrying about storage?”

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#283

Post by nl »

hackerlight wrote: post #227
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…

> The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially but the costs of nuclear are not improving. So where can I see a cost comparison that factors in the cost of storage ? I've probably seen 20 people say this exact same thing and have never been able to find an actual cost breakdown that supports it.

> So where can I see a cost comparison that factors in the cost of storage?

There are plenty around. This is probably the best: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... (make sure you scroll down to "Levelized Cost of Storage")

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#284

Post by Krssst »

squarefoot wrote: post #33
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…

Russians never wanted to truly damage any reactor, including the one at Zaporizhzhia; they made some noise to spread fear and remind the world about the dangers of nuclear war and what could happen should anyone think of attacking them over there. Then they seized the reactors to take control of powerful sources of energy so they could cut them at will, then amassed weapons there for being the safest places around. T…

Could one aim be to increase anti-nuclear sentiment in Europe to further delay/prevent nuclear power development which would reduce dependency on Russian fossil fuels?

Although this would have no effect short-term since plants take a long time to build.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#285

Post by pfdietz »

m2fkxy wrote: post #281
pfdietz wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hydrogen storage exists on PowerPoint slides that usually slightly understate the overhead required to build new, or adapt current gas infrastructure. Spoiler: those problems are not trivial to overcome. That's why they're mostly PowerPoint projects. Hydro storage works, and along with hydro power, it is usually well exploited in countries that can benefit from it (e.g. alpine). Problem is you tend to run out of vall…

At least you seem to be admitting these are actual technologies. We are now just haggling over the cost.

The estimates for the costs of storage needed to turn renewables into baseload aren't enormous. This is why Exelon abandoned the idea of building more nuclear power plants, and instead focused on storage.

BTW, the available locations for off-river pumped hydro are enormous. On a global scale it vastly exceeds what would be necessary for a 100% renewable world. There are areas without the vertical relief needed, but other storage technologies could work there.

The salient thing you see when looking at storage is that there are so many different ways to do it. Nuclear stans are loudly asserting that none of them can work. This is a very strong assertion and deserves much more detailed argument than the usual bare assertion.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#286

Post by Panzer04 »

bob1029 wrote: post #273
p1mrx wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I must admit to not being an expert in the matter - but it seems odd to expect inverters to spontaneously desync. Grid-tie inverters take their cue from the existing grid presence, so it's not like we'll have a grid full of inverters attempting to drive their own frequency slowly getting out of sync. I don't actually know how they work, but presumably they will attempt to match the available frequency at their outputs within some tolerance of their own notion of 50/60Hz (eg. they want 50Hz, if grid is 50.5 they will match that, if grid is 51 problems might start - but that's a bit contrived)

A grid without rotating generators would act differently, for sure, as you won't have varying frequency to indicate if the grid is overloaded - you'd have to rely on different measures to understand how close parts of it might be to failure.

"Bad actors" in the grid can already cause severe problems regardless of spinning generators; if a power station goes offline the unexpected load spike can easily trip off most of the grid anyway. Smaller, distributed generators/inverters if anything are more reliable, as a fault in one is less likely to constitute an outsize portion of power generation. "Grid inertia" today is largely a result of the total machinery attached to the grid just massively outweighing any individual actor.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#287

Post by winkeltripel »

Flocular wrote: post #68
lmm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how does that compare to the business-as-usual shutdowns of solar (every night, cloudy days, winter as a whole) which unlike nuclear are highly correlated between separate plants? If storage is cheap enough then solar will be an important part of the mix. But unless you have the right geography for geothermal or hydro (which probably means flooding a bigger area than the chernobyl exclusion zone before you've eve…

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.

But the storage costs for winter are on the order of 100x the power generation. Solar does not contribute to baseload, so it's just a waste of effort, talent, and resources.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#288

Post by nl »

tshaddox wrote: post #282
hackerlight wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The costs of solar, wind and batteries are dropping exponentially but the costs of nuclear are not improving. So where can I see a cost comparison that factors in the cost of storage ? I've probably seen 20 people say this exact same thing and have never been able to find an actual cost breakdown that supports it.

You obviously need to factor in the cost of storage if you want to abruptly replace all electricity generation with solar and wind, but I’m also interested in the question “how much non-renewable power generation can we replace with solar and wind before we even have to start worrying about storage?”

This paper does much of the modelling for that: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9 (although it's from 2019 so renewnables costs have dropped significantly).

Basically if you have 5% of electricity generation from non-renewable sources (eg gas fired peaker plants) then electricity costs fall and you only need storage at $150/kWh (which is available now).

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#289

Post by cycomanic »

This article perfectly exemplifies the arguments in discussions. Lets just concentrate on the waste discussion. The article says heavy metals in solar panels are a problem (I kind of agree, although the way it is described makes it out like we are talking about huge amounts, in reality the lead in solar panels is largely from soldering so very small amounts. Orders of magnitude more are being used for other applications (like car batteries)). They then say that recycling is currently still a problem (sort of true, although there are companies who say they can 100% recycling solar panels already). Similarly for wind they say we still don't know how to recycle the carbon blades, again sort of correct (but there are many other applications of carbon fibre which produce much more waste).

Then when it comes to nuclear waste however, the argument is we can ignore pretty much all long lasting waste, because of some development in the future will make recycling of spend fuel rods feasible. So essentially he is comparing the current state of solar panel recycling to some future potential nuclear waste recycling. That's a dishonest comparison. Moreover ignoring the amount of waste from dismantling the nuclear power plant (which needs to go into nuclear storage because it is radioactive due to irradiation), while talking about the carbon fibre from wind turbines is also disingenuous.

We see the same argumentive structure when talking about the economics; the current state of renewables is compared to some potential future state of nuclear. While in reality renewables are on an exponential cost reduction trajectory and all the nuclear potential is completely unproven.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#290

Post by nopenopenopeno »

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…

This is wrong. Nuclear energy is very cheap, green, and reliable.

The problem with nuclear is the very large initial investment required, which delays the time to profit.

In other words, there is no problem with nuclear energy. The problem is with our economic system that demands short-term profits.

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