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Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

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Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#61

Post by Gwypaas »

audunw wrote: post #51
giantg2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better."' If we look at a long enough timeline, there really shouldn't be much change. The replacement of coal and gas plants would be with much cheaper renewable but also with higher cost nuclear. The average should land near the old price. What we observe is that the renewables have a head start compared to nuclear adoption so it seems like prices are highe…

Or the cost of renewables + energy storage + smarter flexible loads will just become lower than nuclear all-in-all. Seems to me that, now that both transportation and grid management is pouring bucketloads of money into energy storage technology, they'll just continue to improve and come down. I mean, just as some countries are hitting 50%+ of renewables, and the variability is becoming a significant challenge, we're…

> Not that I mind nuclear.. just not sure where it'll fit in in the future. Just used in some key industrial areas maybe?

Nuclear submarines, and that is about it.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#62

Post by kansface »

burlesona wrote: post #9

I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1]. By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nat…

> I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc.,

Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it.

If the US were serious about climate change, I have no doubt we would move mountains tomorrow, but we absolutely are not serious. Sacrifice/compromise/responsibility aren't even part of the conversation.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#63

Post by Gwypaas »

ryan93 wrote: post #59
ElfinTrousers wrote: post #8

Seven years late and $20 billion over budget. Slow clap.

If solar and wind are better then thats what we should do. I wish though that even 1 of the many many trillions in debt we racked up went to nuclear plants. we could have had dozens of plants. prices would probably have gone done if there was a large supply chain and workforce after the first few plants

France had negative learning when attempting to scale up their nuclear industry. Assuming strong learning effects is not given. Nuclear has had 70 years of intense subsidies, and are still far from competing on the open market.

> The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#64

Post by ROTMetro »

jlarocco wrote: post #55
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Georgia Power customers have been paying extra for this plant for something like a decade. Rate payers absorbed much of the risk instead of investors in the company. This was pushed as a way to save on financing costs by getting the money from customers upfront but saving them more long term with lower rates. But it appears the customers, despite prepaying for the plant, aren't going to see those savings. The investo…

> The investors however were insulated from much of the cost overruns. The American way.

Capitalizing rewards, socializing the risks. But socialism is bad folks, m'kay.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#65

Post by jeffbee »

ackfoobar wrote: post #49
sesuximo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to read about this - can you point me towards some reputable articles

Not an article, but I find the summary from Sabine Hossenfelder neutral and trustworthy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo

That's a great video, and I think it's important to point out to the other jackass in this thread that the issue is relevant to Germany because most of that country is north of fucking Saskatoon while this article is about Georgia which is at the same latitude as Iraq.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#66

Post by nwiswell »

kansface wrote: post #62
burlesona wrote: post #9

I feel like the fact that this plant coming online will raise the rates for Georgia electricity is basically the death-knell of nuclear power, at least in it's current form of large central power plants[1]. By comparison, solar and wind seem like classic "worse is better." They don't run all the time, but they're cheap and relatively simple, if you screw up a unit then you get no power from that one unit, but the nat…

> I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it. If the US we…

> Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it.

Stadiums, airports, and semiconductor fabs. But yeah, we are off our game.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#67

Post by NineStarPoint »

ElfinTrousers wrote: post #47
mikeyouse wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are quibbling with the "immediate" part of that plan. It's 10 years later and we don't have a single kwh being used in lieu of carbon-based power, the opportunity cost of that $20B overrun is massive.

That's basically my reservation. I'm not knee-jerk against nuclear, the new ideas in that field like molten salt reactors intrigue me, but at this point it's not such a new technology anymore, we have the better part of a century of historical data to evaluate it on, and it seems that its promise of abundant emissions-free energy on the cheap just hasn't panned out.

It’s not a new technology, but it’s a technology built so infrequently that none of the benefits of being an old technology have been able to develop. We don’t have people experienced in creating the plants, we don't have standard templates to base designs off of, and we don’t have economies of scale.

Mind, we’re not going to get any of those things in the world we live in due to combination of over-regulation and NIMBYism making it impossible to even start a nuclear power project in an efficient manner. So it’s kind of a moot point. But we most certainly don’t have a century of seeing what it would be like if we actually tried to make nuclear power work. We have a century of seeing what happens when we cripple nuclear power due to people’s lack of trust in it.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#68

Post by xattt »

nwiswell wrote: post #66
kansface wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know the HN crowd loves big engineering, and that in theory all these problems could be solved with enough investment and practice building plants etc., Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it. If the US we…

> Has the US successfully built anything big or hard in a generation or two? High speed rail? Subways? Tunnels? Mass transportation? Housing? Any infrastructure, really? We have a political problem and no amount of engineering or investment can fix it. Stadiums, airports, and semiconductor fabs. But yeah, we are off our game.

My melange of big projects:

Space shuttle, reusable rockets, cell phone networks, Fibre deployment

They’re incremental (and out of order of importance), but these radically changed our lives in some way.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#70

Post by Manuel_D »

alexfromapex wrote: post #69

Why are regulators allowing fission reactors, especially in a time of global turmoil, aren’t these easy targets for adversaries?

Quite the contrary: nuclear reactors are essentially housed in bunkers. There was much fretting about the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant during war, but if anything it demonstrates the resiliency of nuclear facilities.
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