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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

#301

Post by Manuel_D »

Retric wrote: post #284
Manuel_D wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Raw lithium is a small fraction of the cost of battery, using recent costs your looking at ~4% of total battery price from low purity lithium. People focus on it because of the name rather than nickel-cobalt-manganese or whatever the specific chemistry actually used. They also confuse mining costs with manufacturing costs when looking at ultra pure lithium ready for use in batteries but that’s like conflating the cos…

Cathode material is half the cost of a lithium battery. Manufacturing is only 24%.

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

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

#302

Post by Manuel_D »

Retric wrote: post #281
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.

Wind + solar + hydro can go well past 50% without any batteries. Batteries are getting ever less expensive and production just keeps ramping up even faster. We really don’t need any major breakthroughs beyond economies of scale to see sub 7c/kWh rates 24/7/365. People are already deploying 50% battery backed solar because it’s cost competitive vs both base load and peaking power.

Hydroelectricity alone can produce 100% of some countries electricity, but other countries can't produce any [1]. Hydropower is geographically limited, in that you need the right combination of a river and a valley to build a dam. You can't just scale out hydroelectric power.

No country produces the majority of its electricity from wind and solar. Australia produces the 15% and 13% of its electricity from solar and wind respectively. Denmark produces 2.5% and 42% from wind and solar [1].

Unfortunately, battery prices have stopped dropping and started increasing [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable...

2. https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-...

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

#303

Post by Kon5ole »

mywittyname wrote: post #200
lamontcg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that is the root problem. Nuclear plants are too big, and we can't build big things cheaply in this country. The idle corruption of middle managers is what kills these kinds of projects.

It's not corruption; people in power don't want nuclear, and so the industry is regulated into its current quagmire. No other industry faces moving goalposts like nuclear does. The USA can move mountains if it really wants to. But as it stands, the country is doing everything it can to keep that mountain right where it is.

>people in power don't want nuclear, and so the industry is regulated into its current quagmire. No other industry faces moving goalposts like nuclear does.

I think it's the other way around. We only have nuclear today because people in power wanted it for strategic reasons. Getting lots of energy now and paying for it later seemed like a good idea at the time, so the goalposts were artificially placed to make it look financially viable. "We'll figure out the waste thing later, let's go!"

Politicians are tempted by the same thing today. Voters worry about electricity prices, so give them power today and let their grandchildren pay for it!

France dictated the price of nuclear to a point that bankrupted the operator, even though the same operator basically neglected maintenance to a point where the plants have to be taken offline for - I kid you not - rust.

The problem is that now we are the people having to pay, and nuclear has the unfortunate property that you have no choice but to pay, no matter how wrong the estimates have turned out to be you can't just abandon the project.

Any other power plant can simply be abandoned if it turns out it was a bad idea, and the costs will stop.

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

#304

Post by cauch »

cpleppert wrote: post #255
cauch wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not at all the point. Imagine the following game: you throw three dices. If the three dices are not ending on 1, you win 1 dollar. If they are ending on three 1, you lose 100'000 dollars. If you throw the dice ten times, you will, with high probability, not have three 1 (the probability of appearing is 0.5% per throw). You will probably need to throw more then 10 times before loosing. But when loosing, you wil…

There are hundreds of nuclear power plants that have been in operation for decades. Most operating nuclear power plants run with dramatically higher uptimes than what they were originally conservatively designed to meet. Nuclear power plants are operating in an active war zone right now! Six reactors were the site of a military battle and ended up sustaining damage beyond anything foreseeable by the designers. Every…

Again, you miss my point.

"hundreds of reactor in operation for decades" is NOTHING. These plants have a large number of differences, and are located and operated often very differently. At the end, you have something like "10 plants operated for ~10 years under conditions A", "10 plants operated for ~15 years under conditions B", ...

SIX! Six reactors were the site of a military battle and ended up sustaining damage beyond anything foreseeable by the designers. Six is NOTHING. You cannot say "I trust that nuclear is intrinsically well-design to resist to military conflict" based on SIX cases. The damage may have been lucky. Or even may have been unlucky (I'm not saying that nuclear is unsafe, I'm just saying the stats says you cannot conclude).

The only people who pretend we have incredible knowledge about how to run nuclear plants safely are either people who also demonstrate they don't have any idea of what they need to check to "demonstrate safety", or they are experts that are on the left side of the Gaussian curve: they are as numerous as as-much-qualified experts who pretend nuclear plants are proven very unsafe (in other word: they are cherry-picked experts, and do not represent the consensus which is: nuclear plants are too complex, too diversified, too sensitive to surrounding circumstances and not yet used enough so that we can scientifically conclude)

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

#305

Post by credit_guy »

epistasis wrote: post #288
credit_guy wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair. But what about South Korea, China, India, Turkey? In China you can't probably trust the official cost numbers (I'm not even trying to google for them). But you can't deny the astonishing pace they've built in the last decade: in 2012 they had 12 GW of nuclear capacity, in 2022 this went to 52 GW. 40 GW in one decade. France built 41 GW of capacity between 1980 and 1990, and the US 44 GW between 1970 and…

Those countries have costs of labor far far below Western countries. There are also huge questions about corruption and actual work performed. For example, Sourh Korea, the least corrupt country there with the highest cost of labor, put executives in jail for their fraud on safety certifications. My personal hypothesis is that nuclear is only kind of affordable for a very narrow band of technological advancement, whe…

> Those countries have costs of labor far far below Western countries

That could be for some labor, but not all. The US is still in the game when it comes to automobiles. Well, when it comes to Tesla, it looks to me Tesla is eating everyone's lunch. The US is still in the game for other very high tech things, like military hardware. Or industrial trucks (think Caterpillar).

Where the US and other Western nations are a bit hopeless is the costs of megaconstructions, be they nuclear power plant or high speed rail, or simply skyscrapers.

But nuclear power plants could be more like Caterpillar than like "massive cathedrals", as you call them.

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

#306

Post by legulere »

belorn wrote: post #137
legulere wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sel…

Iceland both produces and consumes 100% electricity from renewables for instance.

You have the issue you talk about with all generation that isn’t load-following, including nuclear. France solves this by exporting subsidized electricity in time of low demand while importing in time of high demand, which is winter. In the surrounding countries like Italy and Germany you have gas-plants that jump in when needed.

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

#307

Post by JakeFromTexas »

cauch wrote: post #304
cpleppert wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are hundreds of nuclear power plants that have been in operation for decades. Most operating nuclear power plants run with dramatically higher uptimes than what they were originally conservatively designed to meet. Nuclear power plants are operating in an active war zone right now! Six reactors were the site of a military battle and ended up sustaining damage beyond anything foreseeable by the designers. Every…

Again, you miss my point. "hundreds of reactor in operation for decades" is NOTHING. These plants have a large number of differences, and are located and operated often very differently. At the end, you have something like "10 plants operated for ~10 years under conditions A", "10 plants operated for ~15 years under conditions B", ... SIX! Six reactors were the site of a military battle and ended up sustaining damage…

How do you reconcile this kind of thinking with driving a car?

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

#308

Post by coldpie »

Retric wrote: post #269
coldpie wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the root of the pro/against nuclear debate comes down to your outlook on storage :) I'm skeptical that storage can meet our needs (would love to be wrong! haven't seen a convincing analysis, yet), so I think we need a reliable form of continuous power. The only option currently on the table for that is nuclear, so, I boost nuclear. I dislike the nuclear nay-saying, because it further delays an already slo…

What exactly do you find unconvincing? Just comparing grid storage needs vs EV’s suggests battery production capacity isn’t going to be an issue so it simplifies to cost across say 20+ years. There’s a lot of very simplistic analysis that makes things seem vastly worse but you don’t need crazy assumptions for things to look reasonable. Basically the more sources of energy you can add to the mix the cheaper things bec…

> What exactly do you find unconvincing?

Most of the estimates I've seen for storage requirements for current electricity usage are not optimistic[1]. When you add in the huge amount of energy used for heating, which is currently not electric, it gets even worse.

I'd like to see an analysis of how much generation and storage is required to handle Minnesota's natural gas usage[2], with a reasonable guarantee that power will not be lost for more than an hour or two during the entire yearly six month cold weather span. Are those generation & storage estimates reasonable? How much will they cost, how reliable are they, how much room will they take, how many natural resources will they consume? Keep in mind Minnesota will not be able to bogart the entire battery manufacturing capacity of the globe, and remember that this analysis is in addition to the amount required to meet current electricity usage needs. Then, extrapolate that analysis to all other cold weather areas, such as other northern US states and most of Canada. Is renewable+storage really feasible to meet that need?

I've never seen this analysis done, and what I've seen from other analyses makes me think it's not feasible without depending on unproven future tech. But I'd love to be wrong!

[1] For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36949165

[2] Approximately 500 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year. Note also that the usage is not evenly distributed through the year, we use a lot more in February than we do in July. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/NG_CONS_SUM_DCU_SMN_A.htm

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

#309

Post by pfdietz »

_hypx wrote: post #276
pfdietz wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all clear mass production of nuclear power plants will reduce cost. This has not been demonstrated. It runs counter to economies of scale from large power plants.

You pick one reactor design and make dozens of them. That will be much cheaper than building a bespoke reactor type every time.

Again, this has not been demonstrated. Nuclear in France showed negative experience effects.

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

#310

Post by KptMarchewa »

ethbr0 wrote: post #257
KptMarchewa wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm as far from russia apologist as can be - but they blew the bridge part few months earlier, in November. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxHLImMbnAw

They dented and rendered the road inoperable months earlier. But the thing about dams is that they're over-engineered and massive. Even with high explosives it's difficult to demolish one. Hence why dam busting bombs were large (>4000 kg) and still required underwater detonation to boost their power [0]. It wasn't unreasonable for the Russians to expect Ukraine might be able to seize a bridgehead on the far side, reb…

>It wasn't unreasonable for the Russians to expect Ukraine might be able to seize a bridgehead on the far side, rebuild an operable road over the dam, and then rush armor (and logistics) across it.

It was, as much as it was unreasonable for russians - that's why they ran over to that side of river.

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