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Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

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Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#131

Post by kennend3 »

miguelazo wrote: post #37

So glad we finally designated the permanent repository for nuclear waste in the United State. /s Since the waste will almost certainly not be accepted by another state, I would like to know where it will be stored in Georgia. I have some guesses, based on the demographics of adjacent populations, but perhaps the many HN nuclear boosters have some specifics?

looks like we found "that guy".. the one who posts about the enormous amount of used fuel circling the globe looking for a home.

There is a nuclear power plant not far from me. it went "live" in 1973 and all the spent fuel to date is still stored on site.

Step 1 : sit in a pool for around 10 years

Step 2 : sit in a dry canister for a few more decades.

Eventually we need to find a better solution, but the fact remains there is not a whole lot of it.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#132

Post by kennend3 »

alexfromapex wrote: post #73
miguelazo wrote: post #37

So glad we finally designated the permanent repository for nuclear waste in the United State. /s Since the waste will almost certainly not be accepted by another state, I would like to know where it will be stored in Georgia. I have some guesses, based on the demographics of adjacent populations, but perhaps the many HN nuclear boosters have some specifics?

From what I’ve researched, there’s not that much waste from reactors anymore. The glowing sludge of doom usually comes from enriched isotopes for weapons.

I have access to the radioactivity diagrams for a 10 year old spent fuel bundle.

Needless to say it is rather radioactive...

But it is easily contained by the water in the pools, and then the dry storage casks it is moved to once it is no longer "thermally hot" and needs constant cooling.

This guy is just your typical anti-nuke posting the classic talking points about all the billions of tonnes of used fuel?

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#133

Post by alexfromapex »

kennend3 wrote: post #126
alexfromapex wrote: post #69

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

Instead of asking sensationalist questions designed to create fear...why not look into it? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S173857331... The studies have already been done, crashing a jet into a nuclear power plant wont do much. I'm more familiar with Canada's designs and the walls are several M thick of reinforced concrete. Not exactly material known for being easy to break into. This is from the p…

You may not be familiar with Socratic questioning. Your response also comes off as rude. The question was meant as a prompt for dialogue not because I didn’t already research this topic.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#134

Post by alexfromapex »

Manuel_D wrote: post #70
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.

It sounds like there was not a direct attack on that reactor so there’s no definitive answer on how bad it would be https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/what-experts-say-an-attack-o...

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#135

Post by Manuel_D »

Gwypaas wrote: post #128
Manuel_D wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described an economy of scale: costs within generations went down. The more plants in the same generation the lower the cost. Flamanville is the first EPR France has built, and this it's not leveraging the intra-generational learnings.

Take the 20% cost reduction the last two generations lead to. That would change Flamanville 3 from exorbitantly expensive to exorbitantly expensive. The French nuclear program as a whole has had a huge negative learning curve. The more they've built and learned the more expensive they have become. Sure you can brush of 20% with a lot of money down the drain, but that does not make it in any way economical.

At the end of the day, the cost of reactors built when there was large scale serial production was considerably cheaper than they are now: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

The "negative learning curve" both in France and in the USA happened as the pace of reactor construction slowed. The "negative learning curve" you're referring to is actually the loss of the economies of scale.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#136

Post by corbulo »

woeirua wrote: post #21

How much solar could they have built for the same price? Just doing some very rough calculations, they could have built enough panels to output several times as much peak power as they can with the nuclear reactors. Even including storage costs, they still could have probably built a system with more productive capacity than the nuclear reactors. This project is almost certainly the last conventional fission reactor…

Peak power is the key word. It's not a constant like Nuclear unless power storage improves many orders of magnitude from where its at right now.

Also given global tensions and solar's reliance on China in its supply chain i'm not sure its the better option.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#137

Post by corbulo »

coldpie wrote: post #16
ElfinTrousers wrote: post #8

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

That's only half of a Twitter. That sounds like a joke, but honestly, it's not. $20B is absolutely nothing compared to the costs of not taking immediate action on climate change.

Do you work at the press office of the construction company? 20B is absolutely nothing? Holy crap

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#138

Post by wil421 »

credit_guy wrote: post #84
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…

Did you check what you are saying? I did that for you: [1] has the average electricity prices in different regions of the US as published by the EIA. As of December 22 (latest data available), the average price for residential use in the whole of the US was 14.96 cents/kWh. In Georgia it was 11.96 cents/kWh. The report also has December 21, and also other sectors (commercial, industrial, transportation, overall). As…

I’m only paying $0.08 cents in Georgia but I’m with another energy provider that has the lowest rates in the state (if their marketing material is correct).

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#139

Post by ianburrell »

jfengel wrote: post #32
coldpie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get around the fact that you need baseload and/or storage. Both are hard problems. Some locations have regional baseload solutions like hydroelectricity, but many don't. Nuclear is a solution that works anywhere, but like you say, it's expensive. Storage is similar: there are some regional solutions (pumped hydro), or a difficult and expensive general solution (chemical batteries). There's no single answer…

Gas peaker plants solve the problem, with no additional costs. We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions. At that point it would be much cheaper to look elsewhere for more improvements. There's no need to invent a reason for massive new energy infrastructure. The gas pl…

We do need to get carbon production to zero, and then negative. But first we need to lower carbon production. Gas peaker plants make a good intermediate step. We can work on renewable electricity. And then work on more renewables and storage to get rid of all carbon, and finally even more renewables and carbon capture.

I have heard that 3x normal load in renewables is enough for nearly all the time with storage for load-shifting during the day. That results in extra capacity most of the time which can be used for carbon capture, making hydrogen, and making legacy fuels.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#140

Post by lmm »

Gwypaas wrote: post #110
belorn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not, but is that question even asked in good faith? Are you not aware that the European grid is made out of multiple different technologies each with a different benefits and drawbacks? Right now the most important aspect of the grid is not price, it is the reduction of fossil fuel dependency. It is not sustainable to use fossil fuels in the short run and it is definitively not sustainable in the long run.…

The problem with nuclear is that every dollar spent on nuclear could have displaced more fossil energy if invested in renewables. Any investment in nuclear prolongs the climate crisis. The next problem nuclear faces is that the CAPEX heavy economic model requires them to run at 100% all the time, they used to be able to do that but renewables undercut them wildly. Now you start to lower the capacity factor of the nuc…

> The problem with nuclear is that every dollar spent on nuclear could have displaced more fossil energy if invested in renewables. Any investment in nuclear prolongs the climate crisis.

Every dollar spent on nuclear, or every dollar spent on gratuitous nuclear regulation? Renewables kill many more people and render far more land uninhabitable per kWh generated; if we normalized our safety requirements then we'd turn off more coal more quickly by going to nuclear.

Germany switched their policy away from nuclear and the result is they've spent more money (just look at the cost of the required grid upgrades alone from their renewable programme) and generated more CO2 (with coal plants being kept open past planned shutdowns, and in some cases even restarted).

There's plenty of space for renewables in the mix, but opposing nuclear doesn't mean more money gets spent on renewables and certainly doesn't mean more emission reduction; quite the opposite.

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