Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Long Now Foundation does it that way "to foster long term thinking".
Why only one zero then?
tomcam is using five https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33043629 so maybe you should go for six.
Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy
271–280 of 298 posts
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
If solar and wind are not mature, that just means there's even more room for them to improve. And they're already beating the pants off nuclear globally for new generating capacity. If you extend the demonstrated empirical experience curve for solar assuming PV dominates world energy production, cost might decline to just $0.01/kWh.
Solar and wind is not being anything as long as we haven't got a solution for storage. As it is now wind and solar are backed up by dirty sources like gas, coal and biomass and that isn't about to change any time soon.
The difficulty of solving the storage problem is greatly overstated. The big issue with storage will be which of the many possible approaches comes out on top. It's an embarrassment of possibilities, not an unsolvable problem.
BTW, nuclear isn't going to power the world with current thermal reactors (there's not enough uranium), so hand wringing over storage should be matched by that for the more difficult problem of making breeder reactors safe and affordable. So far, they've been more expensive than current commercial reactors, and they suffer from safety issues due to Pu and 233U producing fewer delayed neutrons, so they operate closer to prompt criticality.
(Unlike breeders, storage is actually getting installed on grids around the world these days, and costs are coming down.)
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Specifically, aluminum might replace steel because steel is being moved to an electrically reduced metal, with electricity separating oxygen from the oxide (indirectly perhaps, using electrolytic hydrogen). But aluminum is already electrically reduced. The cost advantage of using cheaper coke to make iron goes away.
Steel moving to being electrically reduced could happen for regulatory reasons, as you seem to be suggesting, or it could happen because the electricity becomes cheaper than the coke, at least during the daytime.
Even so, this reduces the cost difference between iron and aluminum, so we'd see more applications shift to aluminum.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m an ex navy nuke (I did the whole thing, school through startups, sea trials, refuel, operations, maintenance, was nuke mechanic). I think some of the main impediments to adoption of navy-style training, operations, and maintenance in the civilian world are that the work is challenging and high stress. The school is very mentally and spiritually challenging to most people. When you get to the fleet the work is ver…
I get the "nuclear maintenance school is mentally challenging" ... but I am fascinated by spirtually challenging - could you elaborate?
I can only speak for myself, although I would say I was pretty average as far as people who finished the school. My class had a fifty percent drop rate. Two people killed themselves that year. My good friend was the “petty officer of the watch” and found one of the people that jumped off of their second story common area balcony head first. The housing areas were named after ships so we made gallows humor jokes about them being in the xx diving squad. The school had zero cheating, a very fast pace, and very specific grading requirements. This led to a grade meritocracy that seemed gaussian in nature, distributed around a very specific skill set centered around quickly testing. Some people easily skated by. Others struggled. Some from both groups failed out. I think that seeing people be put into a meat grinder like that was more than I was prepared for. I believed in some kind of justice in the world, or at least in the man-made systems we created but didn’t encounter that. There is also the chance that everyone goes through experiences that change their outlook on life, but that was my lived experience. If you are interested there is a book that was passed around that tells it better: https://www.swm1.com/life%20in%20the%20nuclear%20navy.pdf I didn’t write it but it was pretty accurate and really funny IIRC.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chernobyl used a neutron moderator with a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity (liquid sodium), while U.S. Navy reactors use water, which has a negative coefficient of reactivity. The more energy you put into the water surrounding the reactor, the less reactive it allows the reactor to be. This has a stabilizing effect on the system. U.S. Navy reactors are inherently stable and inherently safe. To answer yo…
Chernobyl did not use liquid sodium. It was a graphite moderated thermal spectrum reactor with water as the coolant.
I appreciate the correction. I had fusion of knowledge with a different reactor accident. https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/nuclear-plant-acciden...
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steel moving to being electrically reduced could happen for regulatory reasons, as you seem to be suggesting, or it could happen because the electricity becomes cheaper than the coke, at least during the daytime.
Even so, this reduces the cost difference between iron and aluminum, so we'd see more applications shift to aluminum.
Agreed! To be more specific, the volume electrochemical equivalent of trivalent iron is 8.83 μm dm²/A/hour (and that's the form of iron in hematite), and for aluminum it's 12.4 μm dm²/A/hour, calculated in units(1) as 26.982 dalton / (2.70 g/cc) / 3 e. Usually metal prices are quoted per kg, not per liter, so it might be better to calculate these as 190 μg per coulomb for iron and 93 μg per coulomb for aluminum: iron would still be cheaper, costing 49% as much (assuming the Faradaic efficiencies are comparable and the other aspects of the processes are of insignificant cost, which are obviously wrong assumptions), but right now aluminum costs US$3.10/kg (USGS MCS 2022) and steel is more like US$1.30/kg (same source: US$110 billion ÷ 87 million tonnes raw steel).
This is a much smaller gap than I had expected, so maybe the switch to electrically reduced iron (directly, as in electrolytic iron, or indirectly) won't be as big a change as I thought.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this black and white thinking is really useful. There are inhabited places in the world where solar and wind face real challenges to practicality as the sole source of energy . I would be shocked if we're capable of building an amount of storage that will get the city I live in through the winter, for example. Certainly not for cheaper than a natural gas plant, which is the real competition. Frankly, wh…
If you live in a place that only gets four hours of sun a day, sure, look more into nuclear. But instead of being so "black and white" and insisting it must be nuclear that powers things, also evaluate options like thermal storage to gather summertime heat in reservoirs for use throughout the winter. It's super cheap, and makes a ton of sense in most areas, yet it's so low tech that it gets ignored. I will be black a…
> But instead of being so "black and white" and insisting it must be nuclear that powers things
It sure is a good thing I didn't say anything of the sort or wow I'd be a hypocrite.
I am definitely not the person trying to shoehorn the entire earth into one energy mix box in this conversation. I think the answer to this is likely to vary a lot all over the world.
Also a lot of the world's population is far enough north that winters produce relatively little solar or wind energy. And those places also tend to be massive energy consumers because it's also very cold.
Right now that doesn't show up in electricity stats because of how common in-home gas heating is. In order to decarbonize the northern parts of the world we will need to dramatically increase both electric energy consumption and production, during winter, because heat pumps will almost certainly be replacing gas furnaces.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this black and white thinking is really useful. There are inhabited places in the world where solar and wind face real challenges to practicality as the sole source of energy . I would be shocked if we're capable of building an amount of storage that will get the city I live in through the winter, for example. Certainly not for cheaper than a natural gas plant, which is the real competition. Frankly, wh…
Does your city burn natural gas in the winter? That natural gas is not coming directly from wells, typically; it is stored in underground caverns and pipelines. Hydrogen can be stored just the same way. Power-to-X (where X can be hydrogen or other e-fuels) allows renewables to scale to 100% of the energy needed by society at affordable costs. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
I mean, nuclear might be expensive, time consuming to build, and difficult but at least we've been doing it for 70 years. It's not clear that projections of long term costs on things we haven't even done at scale are going to be realistic when we try them in the real world.
Even if it takes 20 years to build a nuke, that might still be sooner than "power to x" becomes a viable, affordable option for most of the world.
This is the weird thing about this argument: it so often rests simultaneously on an argument for practicality and/or cost effectiveness, but literally any criticism is met with a gish gallop of unproven technology. You can't have this both ways.
In the end, my central thesis here is just that if you think the be all and end all of this issue is cost effectiveness you are optimizing for the wrong goals and it leaves open a giant window for carbon emitting sources to justify their use when renewables don't work for various local reasons.
The thing to be black and white about is carbon emissions. "What energy mix works for place X right now if we try to eliminate carbon emissions asap" is not a decision that's gonna be made on an internet forum.
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy
#279Yes, cost is the issue. Everyone assumes that anyone hesitant about Nuclear power is focussed on the environmental or safety concerns, but that is wrong. The costs (and cost overruns) of the construction and maintenance of Nuclear reactors have been enough reason on their own to be bearish on Nuclear. I'm hopeful that new technologies, such as small nuclear reactions that can be built in a factory, will address this.
NuScale looks to address this, by creating small, modular, self-managing nuclear reactors.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/us-regulators-will-c...
Re: Why are nuclear power construction costs so high? Part III – the nuclear navy
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does your city burn natural gas in the winter? That natural gas is not coming directly from wells, typically; it is stored in underground caverns and pipelines. Hydrogen can be stored just the same way. Power-to-X (where X can be hydrogen or other e-fuels) allows renewables to scale to 100% of the energy needed by society at affordable costs. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
I mean, nuclear might be expensive, time consuming to build, and difficult but at least we've been doing it for 70 years. It's not clear that projections of long term costs on things we haven't even done at scale are going to be realistic when we try them in the real world. Even if it takes 20 years to build a nuke, that might still be sooner than "power to x" becomes a viable, affordable option for most of the world…
You're aware that current commercial nuclear power plants cannot power the world, right? They are thermal burner reactors. Supplying the entire world's current primary energy demand would require about 6000 1 GW(e) (which is 3 GW(th)) reactors. These would use up current uranium resource (not reserve) in about five years.
A nuke powered world will either require radically new sources of uranium (like sea water uranium extraction) or breeder reactors. Neither is available now, unlike cheap electrolyzers for making hydrogen (< $300/W in China).