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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

#161

Post by bryanlarsen »

Manuel_D wrote: post #82
bryanlarsen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a trivial amount of storage for a trivial amount of money. Do the math, don't hand wave. The Eland project provides 24 hour power with only 4hr of storage. That's the demand curve in action.

> It's a trivial amount of storage for a trivial amount of money. Do the math, don't hand wave. Sure thing! Right now we have an annual battery production rate of 500 GWh globally [1]. If we're going to use global battery production figures, we need to use global electricity consumption, which is about 70 TWh per day [2]. How much storage we'll need varies, depending on the mix of solar and wind. Estimates I can find…

Your link 3 also contains this line: "The solar heavy network wouldn’t need energy storage with an HVDC network."

IOW, the US could build a 100% solar+wind+hydro grid WITHOUT ANY STORAGE. The wind is always blowing somewhere in the US.

Of course that much HVDC and overbuild would be ridiculously expensive, but some HVDC and some batteries are a lot cheaper than only HVDC or only batteries.

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

#162

Post by blibble »

mywittyname wrote: post #60
laiewjrliawej wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

meanwhile the Chinese have 22 power stations under construction and 70 planned

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

#163

Post by Manuel_D »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #142
Manuel_D wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a trivial amount of storage for a trivial amount of money. Do the math, don't hand wave. Sure thing! Right now we have an annual battery production rate of 500 GWh globally [1]. If we're going to use global battery production figures, we need to use global electricity consumption, which is about 70 TWh per day [2]. How much storage we'll need varies, depending on the mix of solar and wind. Estimates I can find…

The US alone has 800GWh of battery plants in the pipeline, to come online before 2026.[1] China has multiple TWh's worth. We can build 35TWh or even 350TWh of batteries a lot faster and than we can build the multiple TW of nuclear plants that would be necessary to decarbonize electricity without storage. 1: https://publications.anl.gov/anlpubs/2022/11/178584.pdf > The reality is that peak energy demand happens at nig…

The "pipeline" you're referring to is a measure of battery manufacturing capacity. This is not nearly the same thing as actual production figures. Capacity utilization in 2022 was under 35%. In other words, 100 GWh of capacity only translated into 35 GWh of battery production. This is because the majority of cost of lithium ion batteries is in raw materials, namely cathode material [1]. A huge amount of capacity is useless if you don't have the input materials to feed your factories.

You can't store energy in a battery factory, you store energy in batteries. Cite the actual production figures, not the stated capacity figures (spoiler alert: it was just under 500 GWh last year.).

And to reiterate, the vast majority of this production is not going to grid storage, it's going to EVs and electronics. Even if battery production matches the predicted growth, it's still vastly insufficient to provision grid storage without heavily crippling EV rollout.

> Eland is producing at a rate identical to the California demand curve, it's in their contract. It's the solar producers who don't have solar along with consumer rooftop solar that's causing the duck curve daytime demand drop

Again, electricity demand at night is still high: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx

Demand remains high well into midnight. I'm not sure why you think matching the demand curve is somehow going to mean you're going to get away with less storage. Unless Eland is going to be producing much less than its nameplate capacity at all times of day, 4 hours of storage is nowhere near enough for it to match the demand curve. And remember, solar is also subject to cloud cover. I'm sure Eland has clauses exempting it during periods of cloud coverage otherwise they'd need weeks of storage not hours.

> If I have a plant that produces 1,000 MW during the date and 100=MW at night, that's technically 24 hours of production. But clearly this is not the same thing as a nuclear plant that produces 1000 MW at all hours. But the former costs 1/10th of the latter, so you build 10 of them to get 1000MW at night and 10000MW during the day.

The former doesn't have a price tag, because no amount of money in the world will buy you that much lithium ion batteries. Again, the world uses 70,000 GWh of electricty per day, most of that being consumed when solar is not producing electricity. No amount of money can fulfill that amount of storage.

1. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

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

#164

Post by wskinner »

chickenchicken wrote: post #153
chroma wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it explodes ... and what were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people every…

It shows that the people who considered the location and plant to be safe enough to be wrong.

If your standard for “safe enough” is that no one will directly die or be injured, ever, then the only feasible solution is no electricity at all.

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

#165

Post by blibble »

yodelshady wrote: post #88
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.

If you ever doubt that the US has a simply fucking insane advantage in primary resource extraction and consumption, consider your comment. You think $40 per MWh is expensive . Wholesale rates in Europe hit SIX HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE EUROS PER MWh last year because of gas supply issues and unfavorable weather . Spot prices have gone higher still, over one order of magnitude higher actually, those were futures contra…

> Oh, fun fact; the largest producer of nuclear power in Europe is suing its government because it was forbidden from selling at that market rate. It had to sell at 40 cents per kWh. Not to consumers of course, to the fucking glorious private sector, aka resellers, who did sell it to consumers at market rate.

don't you all love the European Union's Single Electricity Market?

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

#166

Post by XorNot »

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…

This is the Australia energy market price and demand dashboard[1].

Note the two peaks: 1 happens at 7am. There's very little solar at 7am even though the sun is up, but demand is at a maximum. The other happens at around 6pm - when people get home. There's also very little solar at 6pm (sun sets at 5pm in Winter, during the day it's longer).

Also note the demand fall off in the evening: that's a very lopsided peak, because people stay at home (whereas in the morning they turn on the kettle, then leave). But also note the absolute magnitudes: at the minimum, which is about 4am, demand last night bottomed at about 6,800MW. The peak was 9,800MW. So even the "low demand" was 2/3rds of peak demand, and it took 8 hours to get there. Most of the night, consumption was a lot higher.

But it gets worse: before you're going to recover any real capacity from your solar, the largest demand of the day is about to happen in 3 hours, with the sun just barely over the horizon.

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

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

#167

Post by cauch »

chroma wrote: post #149
pfdietz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NRC was established just about when the first nuclear buildout collapsed under the weight of its own foolishness. Massive cost overruns did nuclear no favors whatsoever, clearly inadequate safety (especially on those first generation BWRs; hello Fukushima), and (most devastatingly) the deregulation of the US electricity grid, with PURPA (in 1978) and later steps opening grids to non-utility providers. Nuclear pro…

Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it explodes ... and what were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people every…

The number of nuclear plants is so small that any example is statistically anecdotical.

Yes, Fukushima did not kill much. Is it because the nuclear is in itself super safe, or is it because we were lucky? We would need ~100 Fukushima before even having a rough estimation.

I think risk cannot be counted as "number of deaths", but as "capacity of losing control". Cars and cows kill a lot of humans. Yet, their risks are controllable: it is not true that if just few things change or if the circumstances are slightly unlucky, suddenly, they will do 1'000 times more deaths. With this way of thinking, we can understand better why scientists are worried about pandemic rather than common cold, even if before the last pandemic (and maybe during, whatever) common colds was killing more.

And it works with coal too: unpredicted effects of global warming are a way of losing control, and it is why scientists are so adamant about stopping using coal.

I don't think it is true that we have judged the other forms of power generation differently than the way we judge nuclear. We judge the same way: based on our current understanding of how easy it is to keep or lose control.

Sure, coal is dangerous and has unpredicted effects. But the reason it was treated differently is because the capacity of losing control with coal were not at all obvious from the start, while they were written in black and white from the start for nuclear.

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

#168

Post by wkat4242 »

chroma wrote: post #149
pfdietz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NRC was established just about when the first nuclear buildout collapsed under the weight of its own foolishness. Massive cost overruns did nuclear no favors whatsoever, clearly inadequate safety (especially on those first generation BWRs; hello Fukushima), and (most devastatingly) the deregulation of the US electricity grid, with PURPA (in 1978) and later steps opening grids to non-utility providers. Nuclear pro…

Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it explodes ... and what were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people every…

Human deaths aren't the only measure of safety.

Pollution into the ocean from Fukushima was huge, unfortunately.

Just because it's not as bad as Chernobyl (which was as worst-case as it gets) doesn't mean it's safe.

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

#169

Post by Manuel_D »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #151
Manuel_D wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper also assumes we'll make have feasible CO2 energy capture and hydrogen electrolysis and storage. It required time, effort, capital, and and multiple engineering breakthroughs . If your plan is contingent on technologies that aren't available... it's just a long winded way of saying you don't have a plan. Actually, we just need improvements in fusion power and then we don't need solar, wind, or battery storag…

The paper assumes CO2 energy capture at $200/ton. That's "scale up existing technologies" pricing, not "engineering breakthrough" pricing.

It also assumes a vast hydrogen electric grid storage network - this is only theoretical, nobody has actually deployed a facility that converts electricity to hydrogen, and back to electricity. At best this is, "scale up heretofore unproven technologies", not "existing technologies".

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

#170

Post by Manuel_D »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #148
Manuel_D wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect, demand peaks right as night starts and the sun goes down. See that peak [1] at 9pm? Battery backed solar is not even remotely feasible. To put this in perspective, the USA alone uses ~11.5 TWh of electricty each day. A battery to last through the night is over 5,000 GWh. 1. https://b698061.smushcdn.com/698061/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

That’s for March 31st, presumably in the northern hemisphere. I assume the curve looks dramatically different for July 31st.

The curve also looks dramatically different in January 31st. March is about the middle between summer and winter.
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