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First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

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Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#51

Post by Manuel_D »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #35
Manuel_D wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are non-intermittent kilowatt hours, though (and the maintenance that does need to happen is known in advance). One energy demand at peak production is saturated, intermittent sources become a lot more expensive since storage needs to be provisioned. Some markets are fast approaching this scenario: https://reneweconomy.com.au/california-duck-curve-now-a-cany...

A Tesla megapack holds 3MWh and is warranted for 15years. If you use the entire capacity daily for duck curve shifting and it dies the day after its warranty runs out, (3MWh * 365 * 15), that's 16 TWh. A megapack costs $1.8M, for a cost of 11 cents per kWh. That's cheaper than the fully loaded cost of Vogtle. But of course you don't have store every kWh used. Peak demand in the summer is caused by A/C and corresponds…

3 MWh is a trivial amount of storage. That's less than 10 seconds of this plant's output. To put this in perspective, the USA uses 11.5 TWh of electricity each day. That's just under 500 GWh per hour. You'd need a lot of megapacks to provision 8 hours of storage. The Eland project you mention has 4 hours of storage, it's not a 24 hour production system.

The reality is that renewables are currently only viable to supplement a grid primary backed by a dispatchable source of energy. If you have loads of hydroelectricity, that's fine, but the regions that don't have hydroelectric potential are going to be stuck burning fossil fuels until a massive storage breakthrough is found.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#52

Post by jakewins »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #49
jakewins wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is dope and we should build tons of it, but it ain’t our only hope; plenty of other alternatives to build at the same time. Eg hydro, overprovisioning solar or wind, transmission to remove local weather variations, coupling wind and solar, demand flexibility. Fervo just started its first full-scale new-gen geothermal plant, for instance; 24/7 firm power. You might like David Roberts interview with Tim Latimer…

Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.

True but PV+wind make our existing dams go much further - recall most of them operate as giant annual batteries, they refill in the rainy season once per year, then dispense that energy over the dry season.

Adding PV means hydro can save much more of its water, just dispensing to “fill in the gaps”. This is already how the hydro in Norway and Sweden operates, you can see it daily if you look at the hourly power breakdowns by generation type.

But I agree, I hope we will get to a point where we can decommission the big dams..

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#53

Post by JohnFen »

justrealist wrote: post #36
JohnFen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> become a major fossil fuel exporter Wouldn't doing that undo a lot of the gains from this? If we export fossil fuels instead of burning them, we aren't really decarbonizing. We're just having the carbonization take place somewhere else.

It offsets significant carbon production elsewhere (especially if we only export natgas), and defunds from some of the worst governments on earth.

> It offsets significant carbon production elsewhere

Does it? Or does it simply increase the amount of fossil fuels being used elsewhere?

> defunds from some of the worst governments on earth.

That has nothing to do with decarbonization, though.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#54

Post by Manuel_D »

Scoundreller wrote: post #17
Manuel_D wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are non-intermittent kilowatt hours, though (and the maintenance that does need to happen is known in advance). One energy demand at peak production is saturated, intermittent sources become a lot more expensive since storage needs to be provisioned. Some markets are fast approaching this scenario: https://reneweconomy.com.au/california-duck-curve-now-a-cany...

Wouldn’t solar, as an intermittent source, be well correlated with demand in Georgia? Sun’s out = heavy AC load? Doing any grid 100% solar needs a lot of storage, but there’s gotta be a perfect point that mostly shaves peaks really nicely. (Yeah yeah, it can be cloudy and hot+humid, but still)

Demand typically peaks in the evening, around 9pm. This is right as the sun sets, where solar is tapering off. It's not "shaving peaks" about half your electricity consumption (including peak consumption) is going to happen during periods of non-production.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#55

Post by bryanlarsen »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #48
bryanlarsen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every other kind of power project is built using fixed price bids. If a company bids $3B for a natural gas plant or solar plant and the project costs more than $3B to build the company is on the hook, not the ratepayer.

I didn't dig into details on specific of this project. But any large fixed price project I've been on, it all hinged on verbose specifications. And then any change resulted in change orders. And it becomes a pissing match of who will pay. It is rarely cut and dry.

They are power contracts, not construction contracts. The power company isn't buying a power plant, they're buying power. That's what makes the contract so much simpler.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#56

Post by mywittyname »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #49
jakewins wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is dope and we should build tons of it, but it ain’t our only hope; plenty of other alternatives to build at the same time. Eg hydro, overprovisioning solar or wind, transmission to remove local weather variations, coupling wind and solar, demand flexibility. Fervo just started its first full-scale new-gen geothermal plant, for instance; 24/7 firm power. You might like David Roberts interview with Tim Latimer…

Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.

> But hydro sucks more than most people realize.

There's a reason Russia blew up the Kakhovka hydro dam. The down-stream impacts of the flooding were more devastating than what they could reasonably accomplish with conventional weapons.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#57

Post by Gibbon1 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #49
jakewins wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is dope and we should build tons of it, but it ain’t our only hope; plenty of other alternatives to build at the same time. Eg hydro, overprovisioning solar or wind, transmission to remove local weather variations, coupling wind and solar, demand flexibility. Fervo just started its first full-scale new-gen geothermal plant, for instance; 24/7 firm power. You might like David Roberts interview with Tim Latimer…

Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.

Looking this up.

https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html

> Hoover Dam generates, on average, about 4 billion kilowatt-hours. And the lake covers an area of 1,495,806 acres

Rough estimate, 2GW worth of solar produces that much in a year. And requires I think 12000 acres of land. (Open to have phat fingered the calcs)

My take away is it's not even economic anymore and requires flooding 100 times more land then a solar plant.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#58

Post by Manuel_D »

dv_dt wrote: post #25
Manuel_D wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are non-intermittent kilowatt hours, though (and the maintenance that does need to happen is known in advance). One energy demand at peak production is saturated, intermittent sources become a lot more expensive since storage needs to be provisioned. Some markets are fast approaching this scenario: https://reneweconomy.com.au/california-duck-curve-now-a-cany...

Many smaller intermittent sources with non-correlated outages is better for availability than a single dominant source even with preplanned maintenance intermittency. What is the emergency and disaster planning impact if the nuclear plant goes down in the middle of a summer heatwave?

Smaller intermittent sources don't really help since they're still subject to the same weather patterns and earth rotation. Distributing generation across continents would involve massive costs in energy transmission. People like to tout that intermittent sources are more distributed and less centralized. But that's negative facet of renewables, since demand is centralized in population centers, and distributed production means more transmission costs.

The same criticism can be applied to any electricity source: What happens wind stops during a heatwave? Or when the sun goes down? You might say nuclear is less reliable, but the reality is nuclear power has the highest capacity factor of all generation sources: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity#....

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#59

Post by newZWhoDis »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #49
jakewins wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is dope and we should build tons of it, but it ain’t our only hope; plenty of other alternatives to build at the same time. Eg hydro, overprovisioning solar or wind, transmission to remove local weather variations, coupling wind and solar, demand flexibility. Fervo just started its first full-scale new-gen geothermal plant, for instance; 24/7 firm power. You might like David Roberts interview with Tim Latimer…

Hydro isn’t clean (extreme ecosystem damage, both up and down stream); and if we dammed every river it’s a drop in the bucket of what we need. I don’t know how far solar/wind can get us. But hydro sucks more than most people realize.

Absolute nonsense. Your attitude is actively harmful to decarbonization.

Ecosystem change =/= ecosystem destruction. The lake produced by a dam is a far more beneficial ecosystem to a much broader range of life than the river that preceded it

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#60

Post by mywittyname »

laiewjrliawej wrote: post #32
toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone lost an incredible amount of money on this project. All roads lead to Ratepayers (electrical customers). > Georgia Power’s residential customers are projected to pay more than $926 apiece as part of an ongoing finance charge and elected public service commissioners have approved a rate increase. Residential customers will pay $4 more per month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. That could hi…

And that's why I left the nuclear industry. Nuclear power is the safest form of power production we've ever produced (more people are killed per MWh installing and repairing wind turbines than in the nuclear industry) but it has never been anywhere near cost effective and no nuclear project has ever been completed anywhere near on-schedule. Every time I hear someone talk about how the world needs tons of new nuclear…

The sad part is, this is a solvable problem. If the nation really wanted to build a large number of safe, effective nuclear power plant, we could, and probably in a time frame of months, not years. But entrenched interest from natural gas and coal producers combined with anti-nuclear sentiment practically guarantee that will never happen.

Nuclear power is held to too high of a standard to really be a viable source of power, especially in a democracy.

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