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Hetzner Price Adjustment

docs.hetzner.com

301–310 of 312 posts

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#301
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way storing the spent fuel would cost so much that it would generate 38c/kWh of costs. For example the total lifetime costs of Onkalo (Finlands spent nuclear fuel storage site) is estimated to be 3.5 billion. Lets take the new OL3 reactor as a example. It produces at 1600MW which comes to around 14 million MWh in a year so 14 billion kWh per of electricity produced yearly (slightly less in reality with do…

That is only right if we completely ignore the cost of the final disposal and such. As always in this calculations they forget to add the cost for the 15.7 billion years of nuclear waste maintenance. If we talk about the cost for the normal consumers (tax payers) this must be included. Don't you think? But if we do the profit talk, you're totally right. What a fantastic business model this is, isn't it?

Nuclear waste doesn’t last 15.7 billion years. It’s radioactive for hundreds to thousands of years. I expect this is why the waste site would cost $3.5B to store forever. Waste isn’t terribly heavy or large so the storage is largely fixed to dispose of many, many reactors.

And there’s a bit of unused space in Finland :)

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#302
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way storing the spent fuel would cost so much that it would generate 38c/kWh of costs. For example the total lifetime costs of Onkalo (Finlands spent nuclear fuel storage site) is estimated to be 3.5 billion. Lets take the new OL3 reactor as a example. It produces at 1600MW which comes to around 14 million MWh in a year so 14 billion kWh per of electricity produced yearly (slightly less in reality with do…

That is only right if we completely ignore the cost of the final disposal and such. As always in this calculations they forget to add the cost for the 15.7 billion years of nuclear waste maintenance. If we talk about the cost for the normal consumers (tax payers) this must be included. Don't you think? But if we do the profit talk, you're totally right. What a fantastic business model this is, isn't it?

After a few years the fuel is cool enough to passively cool. At that point you just bury it underground.

The facility (Onkalo) does not need any maintenance once it has been filled up and closed as you just fill the whole thing making access to it very very hard as it is 520m under ground so a couple kilometers of tunnel to dig through to get to it. (clay sediment at the bottom where the vessels are and concrete for the pathway up)

As I said the 3.5 billion is the projected total lifetime costs of the permanent storage site Onkalo. So that is the total cost (to the best of our ability to estimate for it)

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#303
post #140
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no LNG terminal in Latvia the closest one is in Lithuania. Also AFAIK it doesn't even have enough capacity for the three baltic states let alone Finland. So chances are you most of the gas your buying through Estonia is Russian, just sold be some reseller.

Ok I got the country wrong but it is being bought from that terminal. https://www.helen.fi/en/news/2022/helen-to-break-away-from-r... with similar moves by the other gas buyers in Finland. Only pipeline connection from Russia to the Baltics is this pipeline (Balticconnector) as it connects to the Finnish gas grid that has its own pipeline to Russia and through the national grids and the pipeline between Lithuania and…

The capacity of the LNG terminal in Klaipeda is 23,9 TWh per year, Lithuania alone consumed around 24 TWh per year in before this year. While consumption is probably going to be lower this years due to the massive spike in price there still is no way it can provide enough gas for Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland.

>Only pipeline connection from Russia to the Baltics is this pipeline

No. Latvia has a direct connection to Russia at Korneti which is where the majority of natural gas consumed in the Baltic states is imported at. So even if Finland buys any gas from the terminal in Lithuania that only means that more Russian gas is consumed in the rest of the Baltics (so effectively pretty to close to being the same as just buying it directly from Russia)

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one knows where to put the trash They do, though. That is where the “trash” is. They have become so adept at it, they made a museum out of one facility[0]. Two misconceptions that benefit from being clarified: 1. There is very little waste for the amount of energy produced. If we only used nuclear, it would amount for 40 grams per person per year[1]. 2. The waste is not trash, it is extremely valuable. It was va…

You're talking about fuel, and we're talking about trash. From refinement to the reactor and spent fuel processing, the nuclear power industry generates a huge amount of trash that is low-grade radioactive and thus cannot be just dumped in a landfill. The nuclear industry has had over seventy years to get their act together regarding fuel recycling. They'd rather just dump it into pools on-site because it's cheapest…

I think the two are not exclusive and IMHO a big part could be these small-nuclear-reactors coming up.

I think renewables are very important, but just this week was a comment about Netherlands (I think) where the comparison was 200sqm against 4400 wind turbines and somewhat 20sqkm if you compare nuclear vs. wind/solar.

If you take a look at Switzerland, I have no clue where to put 4k wind turbines. Hell, even 1000 won't have enough space (or you will waste so much forests or agrar or you'll put them into alps and waste the scenery, which will break tourism).

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be miracle fuel if any country in the world would have solved the waste problem by now. Finland is close, but still not done.

Research what France does. They recycle the waste because it is not waste, it just needs processing and can be used again. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...

They're not reducing their waste to zero, so that's not a full solution to the waste problem.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't the grid install these somewhere for less than every home doing their own installation? The net effect would be the same but might be cheaper overall.

It could and it might even be more efficient. That doesn't mean home installation is not a huge market though. It also has access to different capital.

> It also has access to different capital

This is what I think the real benefit is, and also why I think we'll see both. I don't see the political will or financial commitment materialising for large scale energy storage in the short term because it's an upfront cost to a taxpayer whichever way you slice it.

Individuals are free to self-fund their own battery pack installations though, and can then decide if the upfront cost is worth the reduction in rates to shift energy usage to non-peak times. Once that sufficiently takes off it becomes easier to sell the public at large on the idea, and will also drive down costs, at which point I could see wide-scale grid storage becoming thing. At that point, renewables are scalable to almost 100% of energy usage (assuming vehicles and industry transition away from combustion machinery).

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rush out of nuclear fission power still shocks me. It's a miracle fuel. It really is wonderful. It solves climate change almost by itself, or it would have, had Chernobyl and Fukushima not been reported so irresponsibly.

It would be miracle fuel if any country in the world would have solved the waste problem by now. Finland is close, but still not done.

Well, my home is powered with a miracle then.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/BN-800-running-o...

> BN-800 running on 60% MOX

> The reactor core itself was refuelled and is now using 60% mixed uranium-plutonium oxide fuel, supplied by TVEL and manufactured at its Zheleznogorsk site. The plutonium for this was produced from uranium during the operation of other nuclear power plants and recovered from the used fuel assemblies through reprocessing.

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! It's a really interesting usage. Maybe it developed in a similar way as "badass" to convey a sense of (positive, approved) vaguely dangerous wildness and coolness. It kind of makes sense here -- Hetzner's competitors probably hate this "notorious" behavior of being so good at ruthlessly[1] slashing prices [1] See, another example of this sort of thing. Cool!

Interesting, didn't know that. Thanks for elaborating!

You still don't! I was speculating :)

Re: Hetzner Price Adjustment

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot price (+margin) contracts became common in Finland at least some years ago. Most energy companies provide them now. The margin is something like 0.30–0.40 cent/kWh. We buy energy from any Finnish seller with contract separate from transfer of electricity (a natural monopoly).

That margin is more than many commercial and industrial customers pay in Washington State. In the cheaper public utility districts here, the per kWh price is only double those rates, with no time of day pricing or similar shenanigans.

The poster said it's an extra 0.4 cents/kWh, not 0.4 USD/kWh.

Our contract in Sweden is NordPool market price + 0,006 USD/kWh. Typical electricity prices in Sweden is anything from 0,001 USD/kWh to 0.5 USD/kWh, it varies widely day by day. This is what enables people to be able to save by using electricity when it's almost free.

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