Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear energy is clean

collectifission.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 709 posts

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#541

Post by ncmncm »

iso1631 wrote: post #516
ncmncm wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, if you could, it would still be massively more expensive. For the price you get many times as much renewable generation.

We've kicked the can so far down the road that the cost isn't really a factor any more -- both Nuclear and Renewable are less than the cost of doing nothing. The question is what Sadly nobody in charge seems to be bothered. Europe should have been plating the Iberian peninsular in solar for the last 10 years, especially after Crimea. Germany was doing great with solar until about 2015, when it pretty much stopped. Fr…

Germany seems to have been building out a fair bit of wind.

Enough? No, but more than others.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#542

Post by adrianN »

tomp wrote: post #416
Gwypaas wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why statistics scares you? The interesting thing is the correlation factors and then choose an uptime requirement. > South Australia is at the vanguard of the global energy transition, having transformed its energy system from 1% to over 60% renewable energy in just over 15 years. > By 2025/2026, the Australian Energy Market Operator forecasts this could rise to approximately 85%. > South Australia’s asp…

Wow you literally picked the sunniest driest place on Earth. Now do NYC or Germany. Long winters, rainy summers, lot’s of fun with solar!

Germany is building more wind turbines than PV panels.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#543

Post by cycomanic »

godelski wrote: post #328
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…

> > 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.

So the argument is: because we haven't managed to actually find a long term storage we can make up numbers about recycling and lifetime of the waste?

And just dismissing the reasons as NIMBY is grossly over simplifying things, there are massive uncertainties about not just the storage, but also the logistics of the transport, the maintance etc..

> 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.

Where are the real world examples? The only place that has now opened a long term storage facility is Finland who just opened it (and that supposedly was largely due to political pressure because the project had run so much over time and budget), we actually don't know if they can run it let alone for 1000s of years. The low energy storage facility in Germany is a mess already after a few 10s of years (in Asse 2 they stored the low intensity waste in meta drums inside a former salt mine. Water got in, not really a good combination).

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#544

Post by belorn »

pydry wrote: post #525
belorn wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure what you mean here. Like, a link to fengning? Kaprun? Snowy 2? Provide a source that shows a company which business model is to buy renewable energy when the price is low and then sells it when the price is high, recovering the cost of investment and operations by the margin between the low and high price point. Shouldn't be hard. I can provide a link of a company which business model is to buy groceries a…

>Provide a source that shows a company which business model is to buy renewable energy when the price is low and then sells it when the price is high, recovering the cost of investment and operations If you read the literature of any of the three projects I just mentioned it will give the numbers. >What does not count is a pumped storage that operate as a grid balancer, where the profits is not from the margins betwe…

I have read multiple literature from projects like those and they are all very similar. In the future, when there is overcapacity of renewables energy and the price is right, then it may become financial viable to operate the storage for renewable energy and sell the energy when demand is high. Until then however, for financial and practical reasons, they don't.

Snowy 2 is expected to come into operation in 2024. The key role, published on their website: System security and reliability – Snowy 2.0’s on-demand energy generation can respond within minutes to changing market needs.

They also have feasibility studies:

3. Commercial (omitted) 4. Business Analysis and Modelling (omitted)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A5ol58HEbqSaKG9D21CVGt-ntWx...

It will still be an interesting project to keep an eye on once it get online. If they can operate beyond doing grid system security and reliability, then it might become a proof of concept for renewable storage solution.

So do you got any source for a current operated pumped storage that buy renewables when supply is high, store the renewable energy, and then sell the supply when supply is low? If pumped storage for renewable is a solve and currently economical viable solution then surely a single example should exist? Rather than talking about FUD or "thread layers deep into the 1,543rd article", just link to an existing company doing pumped storage for renewable and be done with it. Do they exist or do they not?

If the answer is no, they don't exist but they may in the future then that is that. It is good that they try. It is good that they built infrastructure that may be used in the future for this purpose. Continue with the experiment and proof of concepts. With energy prices going up in many places they might very fast be working for this purpose, or at the very least replacing gas based generators that exist to create system security and reliability.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#545

Post by endominus »

pfdietz wrote: post #460
endominus wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, how about; it's safer than literally every other method of energy production? Less deaths per thousand terawatt-hours produced (90) than wind (150), solar (440), or hydroelectric (1400). https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

I already addressed that argument. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295591 If a statistical human life is worth $9 M, then 440 deaths per thousand TWh adds $0.004/kWh to the cost of solar. This cannot overcome the large cost advantage solar and wind have over nuclear in most places (even with storage costs included). Also, the 440 figure is, I believe, assuming rooftop solar. At scale to power the world solar w…

And I happen to think the NRC is wrong and the vast number of safety regulations imposed on nuclear power is harmful to the ultimate goal of getting off coal as quickly as possible. We should be building more nuclear reactors, even if we lower safety standards to do so, to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and the ongoing ecological disaster they entail. But that won't happen because both fossil fuel lobbyists and environmentalists loathe nuclear power.

Decades of accumulated safety regulations have added massively to the capital costs to nuclear reactors and offer covering fire for fossil fuel lobbies to continue to distract people with renewables, which are always just around the corner and about to overtake everything (between 2009 and 2019, the global share of energy produced by renewable sources has risen from 7% to 10% - a real green revolution!).

But here's the real kicker - when nuclear reactors get taken offline, as happened in California and Germany recently, they are replaced by fossil fuels. Not solar. Not wind.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#546

Post by ZeroGravitas »

credit_guy wrote: post #501
pfdietz wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can store electricity from day to night, but not from Summer to Winter. Hydrogen can do that.

I agree with you that Hydrogen can do that. Or that at least it stands a chance. Both nuclear and Hydrogen are unproven at this point, for the scale we need. Europe has chosen to bet it all on Hydrogen. Although, in the last one year France decided to get back in the game of building nuclear. I see no talk of Hydrogen in the US.

Space X are building the worlds largest Green Hydrogen project in Texas (intended for turning into methane for rockets amongst other things).

Will probably be one of those things where there will be a new worlds largest record every month for years and it'll get into arguments about who has actually started production and so on, but it's definately a global thing.

Current headlines suggest US Green Hydrogen could be the cheapest in the world due to some mooted subsidies:

https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/world-s-large...

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#547

Post by belorn »

ncmncm wrote: post #535
belorn wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find equally disingenuous and dishonest to talk about pumped storage for renewables when they do not exist as a viable economical model. If you want to blame the lack of renewable generation capacity then feel free to do so. Pumped storage could in theory, in the future, when the time is right, be cost effective. We don't know. We are not there yet. Its a financial model to be to be tested when and if we get there.…

What is this "financial model" you imagine? Utilities will need storage, and will build whatever is cheapest. In some places that will be pumped hydro. End of story.

If you are wondering why a company need a financial viable model to operate on then I can't help you.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#548

Post by TedShiller »

jaredklewis wrote: post #526
TedShiller wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Political will aside, finding a place to store this stuff doesn’t seem like a massive problem. How about your backyard?

In what sense? In the literal backyard of my house? No. Of course, I also support windmills, water reservoirs, lithium mining, and electric car factories and don't want any of those in my literal backyard either. The idea that it is hypocritical to advocate anything you wouldn’t want on your own residential property seems like such an obviously ridiculous idea, I'm not sure it makes sense to rebut. There are countles…

> In the literal backyard of my house? No.

Ok, so storage is a problem.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#549

Post by shakow »

cycomanic wrote: post #530
shakow wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany definitely does do abysmally w.r.t. the money they invested: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map After billions over billions poured in wind & solar, they have roughly the same carbon-load on their electricity than US, Russia, or the Balkans.

Are you color blind? Germany is definitely a lighter shade of brown than the US on average (you should really also use a 5 year not 30 day average), also the amount of "billions" that Germany poured into solar and wind is still significantly below the subsidies that coal received (for largely political reasons), likely as many or more subsidies were also poured into US fossils. It's amazing how all the nuclear propon…

> Germany is definitely a lighter shade of brown than the US on average

It is now that we are in the middle of the day and that solar starts to take over; it was not when I posted the chart this morning.

> why is that?

I don't argue against renewables, I argue against wrong arguments.

Here is Germany average CO2/kWh, bottom 10 in Europe between Romania and Bulgaria, with an average of ~320gCO2/kWh: https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/greenhouse-gas-emission-intens...

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#550

Post by shakow »

ncmncm wrote: post #538
shakow wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I living in an alternate universe? US, UK, Russia, France have been putting nuke plants in submarines for half a century, most of these countries have done the same with surface ships, be it carriers or ice-breakers, Russia has built nuke plants on barges to provide power for remote areas; heck, the US even ran a nuke plant on a plane, and I am the one being desperate?

Yes. Yes, you are. In none of those cases have economic considerations been dispositive, or even of much interest.

That's moving goalposts; of course small-scale production is going to cost an arm and a leg. The original post said it was impossible, not expensive.
Post reply on HN