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Nuclear energy is clean

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#291

Post by dabber21 »

m2fkxy wrote: post #215
KennyBlanken wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind and solar coupled with energy storage systems, all of which have been plunging in price like a rock over the last twenty years.

What large scale energy storage systems are in operation today, or even ready to be rolled out? I quote myself under another of your comment: > Why does Germany performs abysmally wrt. electrical production carbon intensity despite having enough wind/solar installed capacity to cover their consumption?

Because dozens of france's nuclear plants are shutdown for an unexpected maintenance and Germany now has to burn more coal and gas again so france can keep their lights on.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#293

Post by nl »

MisterMower wrote: post #225
brutusborn wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to mention they employ batteries fabricated with toxic chemicals. It’s going to be tragic watching folks try to figure out how to safely dispose of these batteries 20 years from now. Not to mention the carbon that will be emitted to make them in the first place.

Lithium Ion batteries are recyclable and the fact that not many are yet is mostly because of infrastructure rather than any technical issue: https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...

This has improved since 2019 (when that article was written) and now all Tesla batteries are recycled[1][2].

[1] https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/support/sustainability-recycling

[2] https://electrek.co/2022/05/09/tesla-increase-battery-recycl...

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#294

Post by cycomanic »

dron57 wrote: post #269
KennyBlanken wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nuclear industry has had three quarters of a century to be innovative, with enormous public funds pumped into it only because of its defense applications - nuclear weaponry and naval powerplants. 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.

Renewable energy is great, but sun and wind are intermittent. Grids cannot base themselves on renewable energy without some sort of impractical battery storage scheme or major advancements in creating renewable Green Hydrogen for fuel cells.

This argument has been debunked many times. A large enough grid can be based on wind and solar alone, this has been shown for the US in several studies. Storage however is advantageous because it enables to reduce the amount of overcapacity. The good thing is that the way the electricity market works, is that it provides direct economic incentives to develop storage or basing high electricity demand production industry on currently available electricity.

I'm always amazed that many free market proponents who strongly support market solutions, are so in favour of pushing nuclear which by its nature is very monopolised reliant on subsidies, while good market solutions exist. And I say that as someone who is often sceptical of market solutions.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#295

Post by chrismartin »

stmfreak wrote: post #274

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.

We gotta fill the gaps between intermittent output from renewables somehow. Would you rather fill those gaps with fossil fuels? Because that's the choice.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#296

Post by dabber21 »

ekianjo wrote: post #79
lioeters wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nuclear accidents are almost entirely hypothetical Nothing to see here. > Serious nuclear power plant accidents include the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011), the Chernobyl disaster (1986), the Three Mile Island accident (1979), and the SL-1 accident (1961).

This is the same tiring argument - using plane crashes to say that flying is unsafe, because it makes headlines once a crash happens, while tens of thousands of people die every year on the roads. But hey, diffuse deaths, nobody cares about it. So the anti-nuclear guys keeping point at the same list of 3-4 incidents time and time again, unable to recognize the ridiculousness and weakness of their argument - and the f…

stupid comparisons, ironic... how many planes are there? How many of them crashed? And now ask yourself the same thing for nuclear plants

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#297

Post by cowtools »

Retric wrote: post #259
cowtools wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but wouldn't a hydroelectric dam encourage people to build in areas that would be otherwise unsafe, thus putting them at risk of a terrorist attack on the dam?

That’s tricky as people have a shocking propensity to build in flood plains either way and dams only mitigate flooding rather than prevent it. I personally doubt that many people are going to change their mind because the location they want to build their home likely floods every 90 years vs every 30. Bill a friend of mine built a large addition on a house which had flooded twice while he had been living there, once…

I think the economic decision making eventually trickles down from banks and insurance companies who actually do the math themselves and charge building-owners/mortgage-owners competitively. It's sort of an continuous invisible hand.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#298

Post by cycomanic »

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.

The cost comparisons also don't include the cost of waste storage for nuclear. But it is also irrelevant, nuclear also needs storage or overcapacity. France is currently only operating to 60% capacity due to heat and maintance (although I saw some other news that they took all their plants offline for maintanance which I found hard to believe) so you need to overbuild of get storage for nuclear as well.

On top of that nuclear cost estimates are based on running the reactors 100% 24/7 with minimal downtime. If you actually want to make them load following to eliminate gas peakers or storage, the cost for nuclear would go up significantly, because they are so strongly CAPEX determined.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#299

Post by nl »

krupan wrote: post #200
addicted wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear projects globally aren’t collapsing because they aren’t “green”. They’ve been collapsing because of the economics despite green subsidies. And where they have succeeded they’re charging customers a lot more money than equivalent solar and wind alternatives have. This is the problem that needs to be solved. And it’s not clear to me how it gets resolved in a much higher cost of borrowing environment than what w…

Is there really a place where there is equivalent power from solar and/or wind alone?

Very many places.

Germany: 41% of all power was from renewables in 2021 https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/climate-energy/rene...

UK: 43.1% of all power was from renewables in 2020 https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/how-mu...

Australia: 32.5% (2021): https://apo.org.au/node/317318

US: 22% expected in 2022: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#300

Post by Bolkan »

GuB-42 wrote: post #50

> Alpha radiation is completely harmless and doesn’t even get through a sheet of paper. It is indeed harmless outside of your body, but it is devastating inside of your body. The reason is that outside of your body, it is blocked by your layer of dead skin, if it gets to it, your dead skin ends up pretty messed up as it absorbs all the energy of the alpha particle. But no big deal, it is dead, doesn't take part of yo…

So it's analogous to rifle bullet and hollow point pistol bullet comparison.
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