391–400 of 1001 posts
If I was a betting man, I would put money down that Vogtle 4 is the last nuclear reactor that gets built in the US. Solar and batteries are just too cheap for nuclear to compete. The world will be installing a terawatt of solar capacity per year soon. *excluding research or military reactors of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
China has installed more renewable energy than the rest of the world put together last year. I'm pretty sure we can rule out any "ridiculous regulatory regime" issues there.
They’re also building a lot of nuclear: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1129876/china-nuclear-po...
If I was a betting man, I would put money down that Vogtle 4 is the last nuclear reactor that gets built in the US. Solar and batteries are just too cheap for nuclear to compete. The world will be installing a terawatt of solar capacity per year soon. *excluding research or military reactors of course.
Another big advantage of solar, and wind to some extent, is that is distributed. It provides resilience to the network. Nuclear produces a lot of power, sure, but it's one big fat single point of failure.
There's this cry for absolutism in this thread that's just absurd, on both sides. You want a wide multiplicity of power generation plant sizes and technologies, for what should be, at this point in history, solidly obvious reasons.
So, you want lots of Nuclear _and_ Solar. Seeing the two as competing shows just how monopolized our energy markets truly are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was, up to the point the only German nuclear powered vessel was a cargo ship. It was tried in the heyday of nuclear power, and didn't go anywhere. So yes, civilian nuclear ships have been tried and found to be expensive, not feasible and a dead end, or, if you use different words, stupid.
> the only German nuclear powered vessel was a cargo ship I was referring to the NS Savannah [1]. Put her engine and crew requirements on a modern supertanker and you have an economically viable, environmentally friendly ship. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah
And the latest Russian buold programm delivered:
- Artika, laid down in 2013 and delivered in 2017, entry into service delayed from 2019 to 2020 and again to 2021 due damages during trials
- Sibir was laid down in 2015 and delivered operationally in 2022
- Ural was laid down in 2016 and entered service in 2022
- Yakutia was laid down in 2020, planned entry into service is 2024
- Chukotka was laid down end of 2020, planned entry into service is 2026
Source: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-...
That's it for civilian nuclear vessels. Meanwhile, in 2022 (a slow year apparently), 182 tankers, 350 container vessels and 69 car transporters were ordered. I didn't find actual deliveries after cursory search.
Source: https://insights.clarksons.net/2022-shipbuilding-review/
As for the small, mass producable reactors needed for civilian use:
"At the moment, several technology providers are dealing with manufacturing of prototypes, the development processes of which are at different levels of maturity, envisaging more or less a decade before completing proof of concepts."
Source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/maritime-industry-exp...
The first source also has this to say about NS Savannah and the Herman Otto Hahn:
Development of nuclear merchant ships began in the 1950s but on the whole has not been commercially successful. The 22,000 tonne US-built NS Savannah, was commissioned in 1962 and decommissioned eight years later. The reactor used 4.2% and 4.6% enriched uranium. It was a technical success, but not economically viable. It had a 74 MWt reactor delivering 16.4 MW to the propeller, but the reactor was uprated to 80 MWt in 1964. The German-built 15,000 tonne Otto Hahn cargo ship and research facility sailed some 650,000 nautical miles on 126 voyages in 10 years without any technical problems. It had a 36 MWt reactor delivering 8 MW to the propeller. However, it proved too expensive to operate and in 1982 it was converted to diesel.
Meanwhile, the US Navy has nuclear subs and aircraft carriers, but all other nuclear surface vessels have been retired.
In short, we are at least ten years away from a suitable proof of concept reactor design (tue NS Savannah one already showed to be not economical), let alone from having an industrial base to build hundreds of those each and every year.
And therein lies the big problem with nuclear power: it is too expensive and takes too much time to be of any good short term. And if we managed to find a solution short term, and in a lot of cases we already have technical solitions that are deployed, we don't need nuclear mid to long term anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Batteries are nowhere near able to meet any energy storage demands of the grid. The simple question to ask yourself is why do battery installations always get quoted in units of power - GW - and not units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually use? (The answer is: because they're terrible for it. Batteries hold about 3x they're rated power value as energy - which means the 10 GW or whatever someone quotes is good…
> The simple question to ask yourself is why do battery installations always get quoted in units of power - GW - and not units of energy, GWH - which is what we actually use? For the same reason gas power plants and hydroelectric power plants are quoted in MW units, and not on the size of their fuel tanks or reservoir volume (converted to MWh as appropriate): it's the most important number for balancing the grid. If…
Which means they're irrelevant to the idea of grid scale energy storage, because they don't meaningfully store anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ammonia?
Ammonia also requires hydrogen as an input. Ammonia is essentially a storage mechanism for hydrogen, eliminating the need for cryogenic or compressed storage. Basically, you need to find a carbon-neutral alternative to the Haber process [1] to produce ammonia as fuel. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
This caught my eye: "Prior to Vogtle Unit 3, the last nuclear reactor to start in the United States was Watts Bar Unit 2 in Tennessee. Construction on Watts Bar 2 began in 1973 but was suspended in 1985. Work resumed in 2007, and the reactor came online in 2016." More on that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant#Unit_2
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tennessee Valley Authority - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority
Which I believe was the inspiration for the Time Variance Authority in the Loki TV Series.
This caught my eye: "Prior to Vogtle Unit 3, the last nuclear reactor to start in the United States was Watts Bar Unit 2 in Tennessee. Construction on Watts Bar 2 began in 1973 but was suspended in 1985. Work resumed in 2007, and the reactor came online in 2016." More on that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant#Unit_2
I can't even imagine how you'd get the parts, and they probably can't change the plans either. Ok so I decided to look into it a bit more, and here are some interesting details from documents on the nrc.gov and EIA.gov: Here's some context for what was happening in 1985, from the eia: >"As a consequence of the identification of a large number of deficiencies shortly before the WBN Unit 1 license was expected to be is…
One of the bullets on the box is that the AP1000 uses a fairly standardized design, unlike many prior designs which were mostly a patchwork of one-off designs. The AP1000 still being "in production" means parts are available.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There needs to be nuclear powered "oiler ships" that stay out at sea indefinitely and recharge passing by electric ships.
Batteries don't have the required energy density to make electric transoceanic possible travel. They're also heavy and would drastically reduce the cargo capacity of ships. It'd be more effective to just put the nuclear reactors on the cargo ships. Nuclear maritime propulsion is much more mature than long-distance electric propulsion (diesel subs have used electricity, but only over short distances).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_212A_submarine
The reason why those systems aren't deployed to civilian surface ships is easy: cost.
