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EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data does not back up this narrative: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun... The share of electricity production that coal lost is primarily take up by wind and solar, not gas.

The devil is in the details. The easy part is now done, and further significant increases in solar/wind in Germany are not going to happen. Renewables now dominate generation during the optimal periods, but there's nothing on the horizon for other times. Your graph also ignores energy used for heating and for industrial processes. Their electrification is now stalled by high energy prices.

> not going to happen … nothing on the horizon for other times

Batteries and storage.

> heating and for industrial

That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#222
post #213
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enrichment requires feed stock, and active reactor fuel is much higher in fissionable isotopes than the uranium with which it was fed originally. The U238 naturally breeds up into stable-ish U/Th/Pu isotopes which you can totally turn into a bomb. Obviously there are such things as "breeder reactors" that are deliberately designed for this. But there's really no such thing as a can't-be-used-for-bombs reactor.

If you're going for the enriched uranium route to a bomb, nobody is going to start with used nuclear fuel, because dealing with the highly radioactive spent fuel is such a huge PITA. If you're going for the U233 (from Th) or Pu route, yes then you need a reactor and spent fuel reprocessing. But not enrichment of spent fuel.

That "nobody" is misapplied. Certainly it applies to existing nuclear powers, but that's not the demographic in question.

Not everyone has a U mine or pre-existing bomb industry. The question is whether or not having a reactor makes producing bombs easier or not, and clearly the answer is "yes", bomb-making is easier (yet, sure, still a "PITA") if you have a reactor core handy to start with.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why did Fukushima happen?

The main reason is a combination of negligence by the owner of the plant and not enough enforcement of standards. The fukushima powerplant was known to have sea wall lower then required and as such was vulnerable to a tsunami (this was known for quite a long time) Combined with backup power in the basement (also against standards) For an example of what happens to a reactor build according to safety requirements see…

It also had a design flaw that has not been present in most nuclear reactors since the late 70s.

"Modern" designs have the ability to self cool in case of emergency by using an ice containment condenser or similar solutions.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#224
post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

If Germany invested all their renewable money into nuclear, they would be carbon-neutral today. Not by 2050 but today. Instead the CO2 per capita in Germany is 2x the one in France. And France had built their reactors in the 70s for a modest price. The "whole load more renewable energy" idea is peak wishful thinking and it's incredible people still buy it today.

No they couldn't have. Germany has spent $700B on renewable energy and need 250GW of power. Not even China could have built 250GW of nuclear power for $700B although they could come close. Germany likely would have needed to spend $5T.

Much of that $700B was spent in the 2000's and 2010's when renewable was more expensive than nuclear. But renewables are far cheaper than nuclear in the 2020's.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting. I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves. https://whatisnuclear.com/new…

I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process a…

Maybe this article?

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...

There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.

https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/large-lwr/col-hold...

The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too!

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-construction...

A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#226

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the pric…

As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.

At some point the electricity will be near-free, and we'll just pay transmission fees

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#227
post #106
post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

If you factor in all the cost usually externalised in nuclear power, it’s often a lot more expensive than people realise. Decommissioning nuclear waste and old reactors is a huge, time-consuming, and thus extremely expensive operation.

Nuclear waste is a problem caused by activists preventing disposal sites like yucca mountain from being built

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#228

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the pric…

This should be a quick reminder to the crowd -- Nuclear is almost always a public/private partnership to manage the project development costs and to keep the cost of capital in a reasonable range. The costs are large for a private company to put up the capital with the risk involved.

In other words: nuclear is not viable unless the risks are offloaded to the public. Privatize profits, socialize risks.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#229

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the pric…

[flagged]

No one is saying there shouldn't be regulations on nuclear.

But our regulations on nuclear are utterly insane -- every time I get someone to read into the reasons nuclear here has been so much more expensive than safe nuclear in other countries with more reasonable regulations around it, they come away shellshocked. It takes a while to understand what's going on, because it's truly death by a thousand cuts, but the unifying principle is the NRC's ALARA ("As Low As Reasonably Achievable") principle (with honorable mention going to the NRC's Linear No-Threshold harm model, which despite the evidence assigns a linear cancer incidence to radiation dosing).

Getting radiation exposure "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" sounds like a nice idea. But there's no lower bound, so the costs scale infinitely, gutting the incentives to innovate and invest. If the prices of other forms of energy go up, regulators intentionally raise the costs of nuclear comparably by increasing what must be spent on reducing radiation exposure. New innovative plant design that increases margins? Guess what -- that's another opportunity to use the money to lower radiation exposure even further.

The lack of a lower bound results in absurd results, because we long ago decreased the exposure from plants to far below background radiation levels, and far below the levels at which we've been able to observe harm.

We need to replace the LNT model with a sigmoid model that aligns with the science on radiation harms, and we need to remove the infinitely-scaling ALARA standard. Doing these will not increase risks, but will decrease costs a large amount in the short run and even more in the longer-term.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#230
post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
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