Nuclear energy is clean • Hacker News Board

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#321

Post by josephcsible » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 5:20 AM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #318

ekianjo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, your comparison between planes and cars is quite adapt. The airline industry likes to use death per km as a measure and you are correct they come out very safe with that measure. However, experts have argued that it is a very flawed metric because of the vary different distances covered by both means and the way risk is distributed (i.e. for flying the risk is almost entirely in the starti g and landing pha…

But people generally aren't choosing between driving somewhere 120 miles away or flying somewhere 1150 miles away. Generally, someone already has a destination in mind, and then chooses whether to drive or fly to get there. That makes deaths by time an extremely flawed metric, and deaths by distance the correct one to use.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#322

Post by HyperSane » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 5:32 AM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #309

ip26 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, to me their best play is to board the renewable train as a base load alternative to storage, which is not yet mature.

Currently nuclear reactors take well over a decade from construction to start of operation. I think few are willing to bet that storage will still be a problem 10 years from now. Carbon capture from gas natural gas (also an alternative that exists today) is another technology you’d have to bet won’t become economically feasible by the time your nuclear power plant finally becomes operational. Honestly a base-load alt…

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#323

Post by HyperSane » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 5:33 AM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #294

dron57 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 indust…

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#324

Post by joak » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 5:42 AM UTC

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.

Solar and wind have these economic properties:

- the marginal cost of energy is zero (once the investment made producing a kWh is free)

- fix costs are almost zero

For the nuclear energy we have the following:

- the marginal cost of energy is low (the cost of the uranium mostly)

- the fix costs are incredibly high (wether the reactor produce or not, the payroll is the same, the maintenance cost are the same, etc...)

So what happens: on sunny or windy days the regulation imposes solar and wind producers to curtail their production. They are forbade to distribute their free kWh, because otherwise the "baseline" producers (nuclear and coal mostly) will have to stop their facilities or sell their kWh at market price. In both cases they would lose money.

Solar and wind intermittency means the following: you cannot switch them on at will. Nuclear plants have the opposite problem: you cannot switch them off without bleeding money.

The solution for solar and wind is: install enough capacity so the worst day of the year (in winter with little wind) you produce enough to cover the needs. If you add storage and/or long distance distribution you can lower the requirement for total installed capacity.

In this context the only solution for nuclear is the following: you lobby the government to make regulations in your favor and cover your losses. Otherwise you bankrupt. On the long run I bet on bankruptcy.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#325

Post by LightG » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 5:46 AM UTC

Same vibe:

"Fuel scarcity is not a problem. Russia is now a reliable and stable power supplier."

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#326

Post by jaredklewis » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 5:52 AM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #289

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 applicati…

I agree with some of your criticism of the article, but I disagree that nuclear waste is a problem.

Yes, we have to store it somewhere. But all US plants combined make ~5k cubic meters of nuclear waste a year. To put that in perspective, the strategic oil reserve is 100 million cubic meters. A single aircraft carrier is 2 million cubic meters.

Political will aside, finding a place to store this stuff doesn’t seem like a massive problem.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#327

Post by mirzap » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 5:54 AM UTC

otherme123 wrote: post #230

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…

And again, the article does the same mistake they always do: attack wind and solar more than fossil or hydro. Instead of selling nuclear as the ideal companion to solar, it's always a sad try to convince us that we are wrong investing in solar and eolic, and the money should be going to more nuclear. My guess is that utilities are not happy with the decentralization of PV. They like fossils, hydro and nuclear because…

I really can't understand how so many smart people fall for wind/solar promises. If you just think about it you have to realize it is not reliable solution for 21 century, it is not scalable for ever increasing (exponential) energy demand, population growth, land needed for expansion. It is simply stupid to rely on energy produced from sources that are by nature unpredictable (like wind, or sun).

Solar/Wind can and should be present as energy sources, but only as supportive sources, with no more than 5-10% of total production. Everything more than that is risky and countries will have hard wake up call one day.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#328

Post by godelski » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 5:54 AM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #289

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 applicati…

> because of some development in the future will make recycling of spend fuel rods feasible.

Context: They are responding to a complaint that isn't explicit here. That complaint usually comes in the form of: "we have nowhere to put the waste" or "Yucca Mountain was canceled and we'll never have such a facility because of NIMBY." So the response is more "We can store on site and don't need deep geological depositories, here's others who have done it. But if you really want a geological depository, here's Onkalo." We can already do on sight, and this is already being done, so it makes sense to argue about this. If we want to do some smaller scale DGDs then we can do things substantially smaller than Yucca Mountain and have decades to build it.

I think without this context, it comes off as extremely hand-wavy. I'll admit that there is some hand-wavyness, but without something in place all you can argue is "this problem isn't as hard as people think. We can do it, here's real world examples elsewhere." I'm not sure what other argument they are supposed to make.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#329

Post by adastra22 » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 5:58 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #280

adastra22 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scali…

This is a design that is meant to be mass produced in an assembly line factory, then shipped to its destination and plugged into the grid. It definitely had the potential for economies of scale in manufacturing.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#330

Post by adrianN » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 6:01 AM UTC

mirzap wrote: post #327

otherme123 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And again, the article does the same mistake they always do: attack wind and solar more than fossil or hydro. Instead of selling nuclear as the ideal companion to solar, it's always a sad try to convince us that we are wrong investing in solar and eolic, and the money should be going to more nuclear. My guess is that utilities are not happy with the decentralization of PV. They like fossils, hydro and nuclear because…

I really can't understand how so many smart people fall for wind/solar promises. If you just think about it you have to realize it is not reliable solution for 21 century, it is not scalable for ever increasing (exponential) energy demand, population growth, land needed for expansion. It is simply stupid to rely on energy produced from sources that are by nature unpredictable (like wind, or sun). Solar/Wind can and s…

We have a long way to grow before solar energy is not enough for our energy needs.