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Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

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Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#401
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you basing these statements on?

Take the UK as an example. It’s estimated that to decommission our former nuclear sites (built between the 1950s and 1980s) will cost around £260 billion[1] and take 120 years to complete. This includes the cost of decommissioning closed nuclear plants, disposing of waste, and cleaning up contaminated sites. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...

The UK is very much an outlier in the nuclear sector as they went with impossible to refurbish gas cooled reactors. Their experience is unlikely to resemble other countries.

In the US at least, the cost for all decommissioning and fuel handling are built into the cost of electricity sold by law.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That costs money. Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor. > Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better backup plans. Most places aren't subject to magnitude 9.1 earthquakes, so no such plans are needed. Nuclear power benefits from economies of scale. Buildin…

>Western nuclear power plants always had containment buildings, so no, this isn't a factor. You can't build a building that contains a steam explosion from a runaway reactor. If you could, the reactor could be made indestructible in the first place. Chernobyl has cost over 600 bn since 1986 and costs billions per year still, and will do so for the foreseeable future. The same goes for Fukushima. Such costs could appe…

> You can't build a building that contains a steam explosion from a runaway reactor. If you could, the reactor could be made indestructible in the first place.

Wrong: we can, and do, build concrete domes that contain a potential steam explosion. The pressure vessel has to connect to steam generators, control rods, and more whereas the secondary containment does not. Furthermore, once the pressure vessel explodes, the water boils off and is no longer being heated by the core.

> Chernobyl has cost over 600 bn since 1986 and costs billions per year still, and will do so for the foreseeable future. The same goes for Fukushima.

Got a source for these claims? Especially the "billions per year still" for Chernobyl? Even the more extreme estimates claim $200B for Fukushima, and much of that is speculative (nowhere near that much has actually been spent).

> Other countries can use other methods, like store heat, for example in molten salt. Thermal solar power plants generate power even during the night. Or you can generate Hydrogen or Nitrogen. Or you can store pressurized air on the ocean floor. Or you can use batteries.

Except for solar thermal (which was never cost competitive, and still suffers from intermittency due to weather), all of these things are experimental. Like I said: in order to make intermit energy sources feasible, we need some new form of energy storage that yields order-of-magnitude improvements over existing storage systems. Maybe some of these will be our silver bullet for storage. Maybe not. Most don't want to gamble the future of civilization on the guess that some silver bullet will be found.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a straightforward lie. Decommissioning a nuclear power plant down to a "brown field" can cost about 10% of its construction cost. Even grossly mismanaged decommissioning projects are at about 25%. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Seco_Nuclear_Generating...

Nuclear decommissioning costs in the UK are estimated to reach £260 billion[1]. It would be interesting to compare that to the inflation-adjusted construction costs for the plants. My suspicion is that it’s significantly higher. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...

This is mostly because of the Sellafield site, which was used for nuclear weapons production. It's also the site of the infamous Windscale nuclear reactor fire.

The US has the same problems with Hanford.

But I don't think this is fair to ascribe these costs to modern civilian nuclear power programs.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#404
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is assuming/hoping that a majority renewables national energy system is possible/economical. I don't think it is, but even if you do it's a gamble. No one is sure because it's not been done before. At a minimum you'll have to build several thousands of miles of new transmission and millions of panels/turbines. Those panels/turbines will last maybe 30 years. Batteries aren't going to cut it, you'll need under…

A bit pedantic here, but majority renewable national energy systems have been built but only with hydroelectricity. Norway and some other countries generate >95% of their electricity from dams. But of course, dams can't be built everywhere, so it's not a scalable solution.

Fair, I meant 'intermittent' when I said 'renewable'. Geothermal and hydro are very different since they can be relied upon for the most part. Hydro sometimes has issues with water levels, which may be exacerbated by climate change.

That's the other baffling part about advocating for solar/wind grids. We're anticipating major disruptions. Why would we want to be MORE exposed to climate change?

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#405
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear is not really suitable for load-following, at least not the installed capacity. That's not quite the case. You can load-follow with nuclear, but it requires reactors to be designed for that. France does this, for example. You also can simply keep reactors working at a constant level and just dump excess power into their cooling system. This is not as bad as it sounds, because fuel is just about ~5% of the t…

>This is not as bad as it sounds, because fuel is just about ~5% of the total cost of the produced nuclear energy. Therein lies the problem. Capital costs dominate nuclear plant costs and they are high . If you load followed such that you kept the reactor at an average of, say, 50% nameplate capacity that would lead to a levelized cost per MWh of about 2x$168 = $336. (LCOE listed here is $168: https://www.reuters.com…

I question your estimation of the capital cost. LCOE for most nuclear power plants is way below that: https://www.oecd-nea.org/lcoe/

For the US it's $33 per MWh, so doubling it still gives reasonable cost.

As for wind, it simply can not compete right now for guaranteed capacity. The adequacy rating for most wind power plants is around 10%, so you need 10x overbuild to even compete.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#406
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There definitely are fundamental differences in our capabilities here, and you seem to believe the same too. Look, for example, at the challenges that are being experienced as we try to build chip fabs in the US. Instintutional knowledge and capability are real things. And I definitely think that construction capability is an important thing to build. But let's improve our construction capability on building real thi…

We already paid the first of a kind cost at Votgle, ordering several more AP1000s is exactly what we should do at this point. We now have a workforce that has made the mistakes and knows what not to do. If you don't want to do that, you can do what the UAE did and hire the Koreans to teach you how to build plants. They went from no nuclear program to 5.4 GW of clean energy in 10 ish years.

I find it baffling that you can know about the disaster at Vogtle and think that it's something that should be tried again right away.

What utility would do this? It is financial suicide. There's no allocator of capital whos going to look at Vogue and think "yes this is worth another shot". None. What investor?

There's two half-built reactors in South Carolina. Who would be foolish to even try to complete them now?

There is literally no one with the expertise to execute on more reactors that thinks we should order more AP1000, because now in 2023 we know much more than we did in 2008 and we know that nobody in the US can build them competitively.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear waste decommissioned from nuclear plants is very compact, almost completely safe at our current levels of handling it, and a lot of bruhaha around it is strictly political.

I don't know "compact" makes anything better about it. Germany has been searching for a hole safe and deep enough for it for years. It costs taxpayer money and they still haven't found one. Meanwhile, the stuff is stored near the plants. Which is not safe. Also stuff which has been considered "safely stored" years ago needs to be dug out again. Which again costs taxpayer money.

Dry cask storage on site is absolutely safe. It's dry waste, there's nothing to leak. It sits in reinforced concrete casks that are rated to last over a hundred years. After that, you can just put it in a new cask and repeat. There's not very much of it so you can just keep it at the site.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#408
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is not as bad as it sounds, because fuel is just about ~5% of the total cost of the produced nuclear energy. Therein lies the problem. Capital costs dominate nuclear plant costs and they are high . If you load followed such that you kept the reactor at an average of, say, 50% nameplate capacity that would lead to a levelized cost per MWh of about 2x$168 = $336. (LCOE listed here is $168: https://www.reuters.com…

I question your estimation of the capital cost. LCOE for most nuclear power plants is way below that: https://www.oecd-nea.org/lcoe/ For the US it's $33 per MWh, so doubling it still gives reasonable cost. As for wind, it simply can not compete right now for guaranteed capacity. The adequacy rating for most wind power plants is around 10%, so you need 10x overbuild to even compete.

Many of the entries in that table (LTO) are for 20 year life extensiom of existing plants, not new plants.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#409
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already paid the first of a kind cost at Votgle, ordering several more AP1000s is exactly what we should do at this point. We now have a workforce that has made the mistakes and knows what not to do. If you don't want to do that, you can do what the UAE did and hire the Koreans to teach you how to build plants. They went from no nuclear program to 5.4 GW of clean energy in 10 ish years.

I find it baffling that you can know about the disaster at Vogtle and think that it's something that should be tried again right away. What utility would do this? It is financial suicide. There's no allocator of capital whos going to look at Vogue and think "yes this is worth another shot". None. What investor? There's two half-built reactors in South Carolina. Who would be foolish to even try to complete them now? T…

I guess you should tell Poland because they've just ordered several.

The first reactor is always the slowest and most expensive because you're going to make mistakes. Building just one is always a mistake. We've paid the deposit, so now we should reap the benefits of having the experience. We know what not to do now. With your attitude, we'd never build anything big.

Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes

#410

Fusion - yes, fission - no. Edit: the cost evolution of fission already points against it, any nuclear bet should therefore be on fusion, not fission.

Fusion is perpetually 50 years away. We don't have that long to wait when we're already crossing points of no return.

Does the world end in 50 years?
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