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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

#131

Post by XorNot »

pfdietz wrote: post #78
glimshe wrote: post #21

One project in 30 years doesn't benefit from economies of scale. Nuclear is the only hope we have to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Solar and Wind should be used whenever possible, but they are not 100% of our solution mix, even if they are the majority. If we want to mitigate the impact of climate change, we need to invest in decreasing Nuclear costs and building many more plants in the US.

> Nuclear is the only hope we have to do to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Nuclear would be entirely unsuited for this task. Nuclear provides baseload, it doesn't fill in gaps. If you try to run the reactor intermittently to counterbalance an intermittent source the cost of its output increases massively.

This is such an incredible misrepresentation. The only thing nuclear can't do is respond to sudden demand surges. But that's what batteries can do (it's also the only thing they can do well).

This[1] is the Australian energy market operator dashboard. Note the demand curve. It is not sudden in anyway - it is highly, highly predictable. Nuclear reactors can handle that sort of curve just fine - you roll the control rods in when it's low, pull them out when it's high.

The "inability" of nuclear reactors to handle variable loads is to do with the thermal mass of the reactor pile which can't be changed rapidly, but electrical load generally doesn't change rapidly - it changes very, very predictably at large scale.

Nuclear reactors can handle normal electrical demand flows just fine.

[1] https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e...

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

#132

Post by pfdietz »

belorn wrote: post #123
pfdietz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear is the only hope we have to do to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Nuclear would be entirely unsuited for this task. Nuclear provides baseload, it doesn't fill in gaps. If you try to run the reactor intermittently to counterbalance an intermittent source the cost of its output increases massively.

That is true when the market price is fairly static and doesn't change much. This is how it used to be when fossil fueled power dominated the grid, since the biggest cost is the fuel and that could scale based on demand. For EU this is no longer the case. The difference in market price between low and high can be above 100x. In theory a power plant could earn as much in 4 days as an other plant earn in a year worth o…

Those high points are better addressed by such things as hydrogen-burning turbines. Hydrogen produced from excess renewables during the price troughs, stored underground, then burned at the peaks. Because the capacity factor of these turbines would be low the cost of fuel would be acceptable, and their capital cost would be an order of magnitude below what a nuclear plant would cost, per unit of power output.

Europe has enough salt formations to store many petawatt hours of hydrogen, far far more than would be needed.

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

#133

Post by Manuel_D »

dv_dt wrote: post #107
Manuel_D wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Smaller renewable solar and wind sources with battery storage are perfectly fine, and the correlation in heat with sun works to reduce the need for storage capacity. Again, peak electricity demand does not happen at noon. It happens at around 9pm, when the sun either has set or is about to set. Unfortunately, solar's production does not match demand patterns. > Instead of proposing cross-continent distribution line…

Cloud cover doesn't stop all production, it just reduces it. Just build more solar and more storage and it will still be a fraction of the cost of nuclear. I could answer point by point but all of your "failures" are artificially constrained.

Cloud cover reduces solar production by 10-25%. If you need 10x overproduction, plus storage it's not cheaper than nuclear. That's not even counting factors like axial tilt (during winter the Earth is rotated away form the sun, reducing incoming light per M^2 of land), and the transmission infrastructure required to accommodate the decentralized nature of solar and wind [1] (which nuclear conveniently avoids since it's much more energy dense).

These aren't artificially constrained issues. These are real practical barriers. Why haven't countries the world over completely to renewables if it's cheaper? Because corporations want to screw up the environment because... they're moustache-twirling evil people or something? But the reality is that intermittent sources still have significant barriers to implementation that won't go away without massive, orders-of-magnitude improvements in storage performance. Renewables are good to deploy in an opportunistic fashion, supplementing dispatchable sources during periods of production and then turning the gas back on when they're not producing. But actually producing a primarily renewable grid becomes vastly more challenging due to the intermittency.

1. https://www.vox.com/videos/22685707/climate-change-clean-ene...

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

#134

Post by elihu »

weaksauce wrote: post #71
chris222 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not so sure with overprovisioning, batteries and controllable load. Also pumped hydro and other gravity batteries. We barely have any storage on the grid right now.

> Also pumped hydro and other gravity batteries pumped hydro is not a winner. the locations that could be used are few and far between and require massive amounts of water and wreak ecological nightmare on a wide area.

Pumped hydro can work anywhere that has hills. It's just a lot cheaper in some locations than others, due to favorable geography.

Water use just has to keep up with evaporation on average.

I'm not sure why building a reservoir needs to be an "ecological nightnmare" except in the sense that it's a sudden change to an environment.

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

#135

Post by syspec »

_hypx wrote: post #110
Retric wrote: post #4

“seven years late and $17 billion over budget. At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity” Ignoring interest for those 7 years and all other costs just the overage is insane. 17 billion / ( 1,100,000 kW * 90% capacity factor * 24 hour * 365 days * 50 years) = 4 cents per kWh. Add interest etc and someone lost an incredible amount of money on this project.

Your own math points out that this is a cost effective technology. 4 cents per kWh is quite cheap electricity.

That's an additional flat charge, _in addition to_ the cost it was last month.

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

#136

Post by KptMarchewa »

legulere wrote: post #119
glimshe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you are comparing a hypothetical with a proven system. Nuclear works, and works in large scale in a lot of places - heavy users include France, Lithuania, Sweden and Belgium. One can argue about costs, but costs are at least low enough to be viable, otherwise these countries couldn't exist as they do. You can say that the costs are being externalized to taxes or some other place, but these societi…

France has massive problems with their reactors and leads the world with only 62.6% from nuclear. A comparable number to Denmark that has almost no hydro power. There are several countries with higher percentage of renewables up to 100%. Costs aren't the only problem, new nuclear reactors simply cannot be build fast enough to counteract the climate crisis.

> France has massive problems with their reactors and leads the world with only 62.6% from nuclear.

Yet, France consistently produces half of Germany's CO2 per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

I would consider that a giant success of nuclear energy.

> A comparable number to Denmark that has almost no hydro power.

Denmark is not relevant - they import giant majority of their energy. Right now they barely produce at all: https://i.imgur.com/69SI5J9.png

> Costs aren't the only problem, new nuclear reactors simply cannot be build fast enough to counteract the climate crisis.

They could be build fast enough if we did it _seriously_, and not as vanity projects.

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s... Is the suggestion to just import the energy?

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

#137

Post by belorn »

legulere wrote: post #119
glimshe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you are comparing a hypothetical with a proven system. Nuclear works, and works in large scale in a lot of places - heavy users include France, Lithuania, Sweden and Belgium. One can argue about costs, but costs are at least low enough to be viable, otherwise these countries couldn't exist as they do. You can say that the costs are being externalized to taxes or some other place, but these societi…

France has massive problems with their reactors and leads the world with only 62.6% from nuclear. A comparable number to Denmark that has almost no hydro power. There are several countries with higher percentage of renewables up to 100%. Costs aren't the only problem, new nuclear reactors simply cannot be build fast enough to counteract the climate crisis.

Are you talking about consumption or production?

In term of production a country can easily go above 100% renewable by selling a lot of it during periods of optimal conditions. Naturally, a country can not above 100% in terms of consumption. Denmark for example is a massive exporter in terms of production, but also a massive importer in terms of consumption and has a very large dependency on imports. They are not self sufficient despite producing more energy that they themselves consume.

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

#138

Post by pfdietz »

XorNot wrote: post #131
pfdietz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear is the only hope we have to do to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Nuclear would be entirely unsuited for this task. Nuclear provides baseload, it doesn't fill in gaps. If you try to run the reactor intermittently to counterbalance an intermittent source the cost of its output increases massively.

This is such an incredible misrepresentation. The only thing nuclear can't do is respond to sudden demand surges. But that's what batteries can do (it's also the only thing they can do well). This[1] is the Australian energy market operator dashboard. Note the demand curve. It is not sudden in anyway - it is highly, highly predictable. Nuclear reactors can handle that sort of curve just fine - you roll the control ro…

Your counterargument there betrays a complete misunderstanding of the point I was making.

I wasn't claiming that nuclear power plants couldn't technically ramp up and down. I will happily stipulate that they could. I was arguing it was economically ludicrous to do so. That's because most of the costs of nuclear are fixed: capital cost, financing costs, fixed manpower costs. If you operate the power plant at low capacity factor, the cost per unit of energy produced increases inversely, just because these fixed costs are being spread over less output.

Nuclear either makes sense for baseload or it doesn't make sense at all. Trying to retreat to an application for which it isn't suited, like covering for intermittent renewables, is a losing game. There are any number of alternatives that would be much cheaper.

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

#139

Post by Manuel_D »

Retric wrote: post #128
Manuel_D wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but those battery backed solar plants usually only have 2-4 hours worth of storage. They're not actually producing full output throughout the night. The cost of batteries would skyrocket if countries actually tried to provision 12 hours of battery storage. Because the US alone uses 500 GWh of electricity each hour. This is greater than the global battery production figures in 2022 [1]. 1. https://www.spglobal.c…

You’re calculating that storage number as if the solar power plant would have produced power for 24 hours. To simplify if you have 8 hours of power and you store 1/2 of it you need 4h of storage. So our hypothetical 4GW solar power plant produces 2GW for 8 hours and 1 GW for 16. That already batter fits the demand curve than steady state output. However things get better if you instead consider real world demand and…

Again, the demand curve is the opposite of what you claim: peak production happens during the night, at around 9 pm, not during the day. You'd need to supply more energy during periods of non-production, not less. You can't get away with 50% output at night, unless you have some other energy source picking up the slack. And remember, during the winter you're getting less than 12 hours of sunlight, maybe even less than that if you consider that cloud cover eliminates 75-90% of solar power output.

These factors do depend on geography. Hotter climates do see more energy use during the day to power A/C. But on the flip side, colder climates see even more energy demand during the night to heat homes. And unfortunately this also coincides when solar is producing the least amount of energy due to fewer sunlight hours, axial tilt, and more cloud cover.

There are niches solar can carve out: Las Vegas and Australia have loads of empty space, clear weather, and hydroelectricity that can fill in periods of non-production. But nuclear power is a much more flexible solution. All you really need is water to cool the reactor, and 80% of the population lives within a hundred miles of the coastline (you just need water, not fresh water).

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

#140

Post by zamalek »

KerrAvon wrote: post #63
glimshe wrote: post #21

One project in 30 years doesn't benefit from economies of scale. Nuclear is the only hope we have to make up for the gaps in generation for solar and wind. Solar and Wind should be used whenever possible, but they are not 100% of our solution mix, even if they are the majority. If we want to mitigate the impact of climate change, we need to invest in decreasing Nuclear costs and building many more plants in the US.

Counterpoint just because someone has to go against the pro-nuclear orthodoxy here: economy of scale won't fix nuclear power. You will never get the cost (or risk) down far enough with existing technology, and none of the advanced technologies have panned out so far. And large scale renewables + battery storage are good enough.

> or risk

That really casts doubt on your assertions. Nuclear carries significantly fewer risks than coal (which operates in the nuclear failure state all the time).

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