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Nuclear energy is clean

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#591

Post by panick21_ »

adrianN wrote: post #331
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…

The economics of nuclear power don't make it an ideal companion to wind and solar. You want to have backup power for days where it's neither windy nor sunny. So you need a lot of nuclear. But then you want to use renewables when they're available, so most of the time you run your reactors way below capacity. Unfortunately most of the cost of nuclear is capex, so every minute you don't run at 100% makes nuclear power…

That is why companies like Moltex Energy are building a nuclear reactor with a combination of a heat battery. So that they can do 100% utilization and then make massive profit when solar is not there.

However that means you are innovating in nuclear and in heat batteries.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#592

Post by panick21_ »

epistasis wrote: post #126
losteric wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all this is misdirection from the real challenges of nuclear, which is finding somebody who can build it and somebody who is willing to take the financial risk of nuclear, when it looks like a terribles mis allocation of capital, if one's goal is to decarbonize energy. I have read that there is much more nuance in nuclear pricing. Past projects were bespoke and subject to changing bureaucratic requirements. There a…

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.

Man if only we invested some real money into that or at least not have regulation that make it almost absurdly hard to work on the technology.

And we could have done that 40 years ago.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#593

Post by panick21_ »

Flocular wrote: post #46

A good estimate to gauge the societal investment needed to generate electricity in a certain way, is to look at its total cost in dollar/MWh. Wikipedia has a nice graphic prepared for just that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... (which ignores externalized costs like CO2 or nuclear waste) You can see in there that nuclear has triple the cost compared to solar. As we need to replace as mu…

What is more interesting to me is asking the question based on first principles.

If you consider the global electricity and energy demand and wanted to meet it, what you produce the least amount of green house gases, use the least amount of land, require the least amount of mining.

If you actually do that nuclear wins easily witch suggest there is some other process at work that makes sure this is not translated into reality.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#594

Post by panick21_ »

elietoubi wrote: post #4

Super interesting how there is a big push for nuclear in the tech world right now. To play the devils advocate, there are some pretty solid reasons why Nuclear is not ideal.The biggest one to me is the risk or nuclear material proliferation: Iran for instance is hiding their military nuclear program behind a civilian nuclear goal. Nuclear is probably net better than coal but it's not the (only) solution to climate ch…

> Iran for instance is hiding their military nuclear program behind a civilian nuclear goal.

This is so much nonsense. Even the CIA has long said that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. This is just a myth propagated by people who hate Iran. According to Isreali politicans, Iran is '1 year a away from the bomb' since literally 1998. There has never been real evidence presented and many intelligence services have said so.

What Iran in fact needs, is civilian nuclear power. Their power generation was mostly gas/oil and they realized in the 1990s that this was a huge issue. And in fact, Iran asked France to provide that for them. They made a deal with France and France would provide all that is needed and take back all the nuclear waste to France. All of this would be totally monitored by the IAEA.

Now of course the US used their power to prevent this. Then Iran said, well I guess we have to make our own civilian nuclear program. Once they started that the US and Isreal started to publish huge amounts of PR about how Iran was building the bombs and used that as an excuse to make the whole nation suffer.

If you want to build nuclear weapons, civilian nuclear power are not really very useful, there are far better proven methods to do this.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#595

Post by panick21_ »

I_am_tiberius wrote: post #17

I think nuclear power plants aren't worth the risk. I often hear arguments such as that modern reactors don't have the issues old ones had etc.. As long as it can't be guaranteed to me that e.g. a terror attack doesn't cause a 1000 km2 area around the plant to be unlivable for 100 years, I most likely won't change my opinion. I think living in the stone age is better than taking the risk.

> terror attack doesn't cause a 1000 km2 area around the plant to be unlivable for 100 years

That can't actually happen. And if you believe it can, you are wrong.

Please explain the mechanics of how that would happen to me! Ill wait.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#596

Post by panick21_ »

jmyeet wrote: post #26

Ok, so another pro-nuclear puff piece. Why do I say that? Because it talks about nuclear waste without ever mentioning the other kind: fuel processing waste. Nuclear fuel needs to be enriched. Enriching is simply upping the percentage of U-235 (the rest is mostly U-238). Civilian reactors tend to have relatively low enrichment rates. So-called weapons grade is enriched to a very high percentage and requires different…

If we as a people actually invested in technology all those issues could easily be save.

If we had invested in actual advanced breeder reactors this is a non issue.

As an example, a modern molten salt thorium breeder only requires dissolved thorium.

But of course if we stop innovation at the first generation and then do nothing for 50 years we are not gone have optimal technology.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#597

Post by ncmncm »

mcronce wrote: post #577
ncmncm wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coal producers love every nuke project: that represents a solid decade more sales, vs. wind or solar that would start displacing coal immediately, several times as much in the end for the same investment, and then radically less opex.

This isn't really accurate. There's a reason that fossil fuel companies/executives "embrace" intermittent renewables while running decades-long smear campaigns to turn public opinion against nuclear.

That was the old way. Now that coal is clearly doomed, nukes are their lifeline.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#598

Post by ncmncm »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #565
ncmncm wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage is trivial. It will be built after there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from.

Ask anyone with an off-grid solar installation how trivial it is. Hint: The storage costs more than the power. Considerably more last time I looked at the numbers.

Off-grid power has no choice but batteries. Utilities have others.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#599

Post by ncmncm »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #588
ncmncm wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, we will build grid-scale storage. It will be massively cheaper than nukes would have been. Masively cheaper even than keeping them operating, too. So they will be mothballed. But we don't need 10x overbuild: the wind is always blowing somewhere. If not here, there. If not there, here or somewhere else.

We don't have anything that can handle more than an hour or two at the big Gigawatt solar/wind generators and you know it, none of them can economically provide even power at night let alone during peak demand periods. All they can do is help smooth out fluctuations for temporary cloud cover/no wind conditions and such. Technology will have to have a 10x leap or we'll have to wait 30 years for incremental improvement…

Before you build a thing, it has not been built yet. To have that thing, you have to build it first. Having built it, you then have it.

No breakthroughs of any kind are needed for grid-scale storage. It is just civil engineering. It won't be batteries.

Nukes have never, at any time or place, anywhere in the world, operated without massive public subsidy. There is no reason to expect that ever to change.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#600

Post by ncmncm »

largolagrande wrote: post #554
ncmncm wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strangely, not. Water + air + electric in, NH3 + O2 out.

Thanks, I didn't know that. From "Electrochemical synthesis of ammonia as a potential alternative to the Haber–Bosch process" (2019) : Water electrolysis, combined with an improved smallerscale Haber–Bosch process, seems to be a short-term solution for the generation of ammonia from renewables at a matching scale. There is a major research focus on reducing the NH3 synthesis reaction pressure and temperature, while k…

Toshiba is building them, megawatt-scale, thus far. There is still engineering to be done scaling it up to GW, and it will take a lot of money to get that into volume production for the hundreds of GW-scale plants we will need, but the profits are guaranteed.
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