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First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

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Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#911

Post by pfdietz »

api wrote: post #66
davkan wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from the environmental benefit right? Don’t lots of large ships burn cheaper fuel higher in pollutants when on unregulated wafers?

Ships and planes together account for single digit percentages of global fossil fuel use and emissions. It’s almost all cars, trucks, and electric power, so those are the things it makes the most sense to worry about as opposed to things that are much harder to decarbonize and account for less emissions.

And a great deal of what's sent by ship is... fossil fuels!

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#912

Post by chris222 »

qwebfdzsh wrote: post #841
chris222 wrote: post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what you think of this recently completed project: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/28/scatecs-540mw-pv-1140mw... With enough storage and onsite renewables you can mimic the stable baseload that Nuclear provides.

Wouldn't enough storage make it much more expensive than nuclear?

Perhaps with todays prices on large lithium storage which I documented elsewhere in this thread at ~$500/kWh installed for a real project in the United States. Most analysts expect that price halves to $250/kWh or lower in the next decade which radically changes the economics.

There are thousands of companies working on battery advancements within the entire stack right now.

Raw material mining, refinement of materials, recycling, cell chemistry, longevity, density improvements, pack improvements, battery managament systems, thermal systems, safety, packaging, kW scale home batteries, GW scale utility batteries, cars, trucks, buses, planes, trains, automobiles, ships. The amount of capital deployed is in the trillions of dollars.

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#913

Post by pfdietz »

cyberax wrote: post #446
MichaelNolan wrote: post #14

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.

> 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. On the contrary, solar and wind are _waaaaaay_ too expensive if you actually want your generation to be reliable. Just ask Texas.

Ah yes, Texas...

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4088

“The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#914

Post by LunaSea »

natmaka wrote: post #871
LunaSea wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that the average electric car battery can power the average home for quite a while (days), and that other EV batteries will be online... Regular houses are too small to make it possible to install enough solar to charge the car though. That's without even considering appartment buildings.

The architecture I described does not imply that those batteries will be loaded by locally-installed solar panels. There will be a grid, as usual, carrying electricity produced by the described mix, mostly by industrial sites (in many geographical areas a large part of it will be offshore wind turbines fleets).

So electric car owners are in effect sponsoring electricity storage?

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#915

Post by pfdietz »

evilos wrote: post #115
erngkejr wrote: post #54

I was a nuclear engineer for eight years and I left the industry because I felt like I was taking crazy pills. Every time someone says "nuclear is the only practical solution for climate change, it's not possible to build solar or wind fast enough or cheaply enough", you can point them to this press release. All the nuclear supporters I know deal heavily in magical thinking, completely ignoring the factual reality of…

I mean, we know we can build nuclear plants quickly because we've done it before. It is physically possible. China and Korea can still do it today. If you just mean the bureaucracy is impossible to defeat, it would just take political will. Which we are seeing more and more of recently. The first of a kind build is always slow.

"If we did it before, we can do it now" is not anything close to a valid argument.

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#916

Post by pfdietz »

klipklop wrote: post #63

Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks. I didn’t run the math but I’m guessing it’s not feasible to build a battery pack large enough to ride out winter in some areas. The SF Bay Area, sure, but I suspect blackouts will be common in solar+battery only areas. A preferred solution would be a mix of both with nuclear handling disruptions due…

Dunkelflauten can be dealt with by burning an e-fuel like hydrogen.

A simple combustion turbine power plant is maybe 1/20th the cost per W of Vogtle 3/4. So one could completely back up the grid with hydrogen burning turbines at a small fraction of the capital cost of powering that grid with nukes.

Using nuclear to handle rare disruptions is ridiculous, as the cost per kWh would be astronomical, far higher than the cost per kWh from nukes used for baseload.

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#917

Post by pfdietz »

wolfram74 wrote: post #149
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sounds like a kneejerk response. Got a source for it If you have 120% solar capacity in the summer so you have 100% in the winter, that’s obviously going to be more expensive than just building 100%. This is basic utilisation. Also, diminishing returns: the most-productive spots for solar will be built out first.

As the seasonality of power becomes more and more pronounced, it'll make more and more sense to make seasonal loads. Cheap to build but electrically expensive to operate manufacturing processes that take advantage of borderline free power in the summer months that don't have much capex to amortize in the winters.

Or, it makes sense for industry to move to those darker skinned places without seasonality.

PV, the anti-colonial energy source. Poetic justice for Europe, don't you think?

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#918

Post by pfdietz »

kragen wrote: post #235
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ammonia is another interesting storage fuel option.

yes, that's mentioned in the comment i was replying to, but while it's appealing in some ways, i feel that it is not as appealing as the options i mentioned for reasons of accident hazard, noxious combustion products, lower density, and risk of corrosion

There's also a possibility of using methanol, which is not as dangerous as ammonia. This would involve some complexity:

1) Have CO2 storage. 2) Make hydrogen by electrolysis. Store the oxygen. 3) The hydrogen is reacted with CO2 to make methanol, which is easily stored. 4) When power is needed, use the oxygen from 2) and the methanol from 3) in an Allam-cycle turbine. The CO2 of combustion is easily separated and put back into CO2 storage.

One ends up needed long term storage of CO2, oxygen, and methanol, but this could be easier than storing hydrogen, especially if the CO2 and oxygen can be liquefied and there are no salt formations to make H2 storage easy.

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#919

Post by pfdietz »

chockablock wrote: post #125
klipklop wrote: post #63

Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks. I didn’t run the math but I’m guessing it’s not feasible to build a battery pack large enough to ride out winter in some areas. The SF Bay Area, sure, but I suspect blackouts will be common in solar+battery only areas. A preferred solution would be a mix of both with nuclear handling disruptions due…

You don't need to 'ride out winter'; there's a sweet spot around 100-hour storage where you can unlock a huge amount of grid resiliency and decarbonization (you can keep as many dispatchable gas plants sitting nearly-always-idle to address risk of any freak long-tail events.) https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/

And then eventually switch over those gas plants to burn hydrogen. If they are nearly-always-idle, the amount of hydrogen needed isn't much.

Re: First new U.S. nuclear reactor since 2016 is now in operation

#920

Post by pfdietz »

aftbit wrote: post #764
klipklop wrote: post #63

Seems to me the people saying solar and battery only future do not live in areas that can be cloudy for multiple weeks. I didn’t run the math but I’m guessing it’s not feasible to build a battery pack large enough to ride out winter in some areas. The SF Bay Area, sure, but I suspect blackouts will be common in solar+battery only areas. A preferred solution would be a mix of both with nuclear handling disruptions due…

Dunkelflaute (dark and calm) is indeed a real problem for a renewable-only future. If you want to maintain current reliability statistics with solar/wind only, you need to overbuild both storage and generation to such an extreme level that it might not be cost competitive in the end. You'll end up building your entire grid for the 100 year dunkelflaute event even though 90%+ of it will be idle most of the time, or yo…

The "extreme storage" hand-wringing comes from the implicit assumption that batteries are used to cover the Dunkelflauten. This is bad engineering.
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