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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

#231

Post by pfdietz »

10g1k wrote: post #143

My 2c: Why nuclear power is a dumb idea. Countries with nuclear reactors: 32. Countries which have had nuclear leaks or meltdowns: 15. Number of nuclear leaks and meltdowns since 1952 (only those which resulted in loss of human life or >US$50K property damage): ~100. About 60% of those have been in the USA, allegedly the most advanced country in the world with the bestest regulation of such things. Note that the USA…

The 300 years comes from the length of time the waste remains self-protecting against amateur diversion of plutonium. After that time, the fission products have decayed so much that the gamma rays are, conservatively, too weak to inhibit such diversion.

It's not that waste canisters can't last more than 300 years, it's that something has to be done with the waste by that time so there's no point requiring they be certified to last longer than that.

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

#232

Post by Manuel_D »

pfdietz wrote: post #229
Manuel_D wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once cheap intermittent sources have saturated the market during peak production, further construction of intermittent sources will do nothing to displace the other 50% of demand that will continue to be fulfilled by fossil fuels. And then we either keep burning fossil fuels and wait until a storage breakthrough happens, or we start building non-intermittent sources of decarbonized energy.

Or we just raise taxes on the fossil fuels until they stop being burned. This will have to be done anyway (along with CO2 tariffs to isolate countries that refuse to do so.) After that, storage gets rolled out. Nuclear never makes sense, and eventually the existing NPPs go away.

We raise taxes on fossil fuels, and then what? More investment in intermittent sources works until peak production is saturated. But now thanks to fuel taxes, lithium becomes a lot more expensive to mine since the heavy machinery is more expensive to fuel. Taxes on fossil fuels would reduce emissions, mostly by contracting the economy. It doesn't translate into more storage build out, and it certainly doesn't solve the orders-of-magnitude mismatch between the amount of storage available and the amount of storage required to smooth out intermittent sources.

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

#233

Post by Manuel_D »

d_sem wrote: post #155
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…

People often fail to compare the opportunity cost of alternative methods to nuclear power. At that time the alternative to nuclear was coal power plants. Radioactive carbon isotopes have harmed many times more people than Nuclear.

I'm being a bit pedantic here, but it's the heavy metals contained inside of coal - cadmium, uranium, thorium - that are the main pollution concerns, not the carbon from the coal itself. Coal is definitely one of the dirtiest fuels, though, besides biomass.

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

#234

Post by Manuel_D »

wkat4242 wrote: post #168
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…

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.

It's huge, but it's dispersed across the massive volume of water in the pacific. Charts like these are scary, until you read the legend and realize that even the bright orange areas indicate concentrations only 0.1% higher than the typical pre-fukushima concentrations of radioactive isotopes: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-coast/science-data/fukus...

Eat a banana and you'll receive a dose larger than anything related to Fukushima.

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

#235

Post by pfdietz »

azinman2 wrote: post #225
pfdietz wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a baldfaced lie (unless you are engaging a No True Scotsman dismissal of the large number of studies that say otherwise.)

https://youtu.be/bkIK4Xo1GRM

Not wasting 100 minutes of my life on that. I'd read a paper defending such a claim. In the meantime, here are a large number of abstracts of peer reviewed papers showing 100% RE is feasible:

https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Comb...

Here's a review article on 100% RE studies:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

"The main conclusion of most of these studies is that 100% renewables is feasible worldwide at low cost."

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

#236

Post by forrestthewoods »

Manuel_D wrote: post #145
forrestthewoods wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hydro is only source of renewable power that generates >50% of any country's electricity grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable... Wind caps out at 42% with Denmark, solar at 15% in Australia. Many countries have nearly 100% of their electricity coming from hydroelectricity. Besides nuclear power, hydroelectricity is one of the few non-intermittent sources of renewable energy - sure, rainf…

That’s a non sequitur.

I never said hydro wasn’t renewable. I said it wasn’t clean. Most people think of hydro as renewable and low carbon and clean. Two are true, one is false. Hydro is dirty and, imho, we should phase it out the same way we should phase coal out.

Nuclear isn’t renewable by most definitions. But it is low carbon and clean.

Nuclear was good 40 years ago. Solar is getting good. Wind I don’t know much about. Hydro is an ok bootstrap but is much dirtier and more problematic than most people realize.

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

#237

Post by pfdietz »

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…

Peak summer demand from A/C can be shifted by making ice, or even by precooling building structure during the low part of the duck curve. All that's needed is to expose consumers to the actual price signals.

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

#238

Post by pfdietz »

Manuel_D wrote: post #169
bryanlarsen wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

In the same sense that commercial breeder reactors are theoretical (which is conservative, as you can't actually buy a breeder reactor). But nuclear advocates don't talk about those much, even though they'd be needed for a nuclear powered world.

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

#239

Post by HackOfAllTrades »

I live in Georgia, and the only thing this plant will do is raise our rates.

It's late (of course) and HUGELY over budget (also of course). The planners always knew it would be way late and way over budget. None of that mattered, because the 'regulatory' system guarantees they get it all back (and more) from the rate payers.

It was also painfully obvious WHEN THIS WAS PLANNED that building Solar and/or Wind would get done sooner and far less expensively.

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

#240

Post by HackOfAllTrades »

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…

"If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity."

Yes, of course. I can only imagine the deaths and destruction that tsunami would have caused if it were a wind or solar plant.

/SARCASM you idiot!

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