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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

#241

Post by RandomBacon »

YeahThisIsMe wrote: post #184
reenorap wrote: post #24

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…

Your rates aren't doing insane shit because you don't have nuclear energy. Renewables are way way way cheaper.

How much of that rate is because China is flooding the market with wind turbine blades and solar panels?

How much would it cost if China turns off that supply?

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#242

Post by beeflet »

a3w wrote: post #161

Clean, mostly. With future? No, it creates primary heat. Wind and solar do not. Water power also does not, but power from damns is not clean if you want an eco-friendly power source. Wind currently also has a bigger environment impact than solar, but is of course a source available more frequently at night [citation needed, just kidding]. And waste we need to dispose of, which no countries has long term experience in…

Primary heat on this scale isn't nessisarially a bad thing. It has a very small impact on the global power balance with respect to the effect global warming.

There are also lots of uses for waste heat. Nuclear plants tend to be paired with some sort of massive hydraulic engineering project, it turns out that a lot of animals like warm water.

I am pretty sure we can figure out how to store nuclear waste if given the opportunity.

>If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful

It's not very finite. There is a ton of it. Even the vast majority of the "waste" we produce could be recycled to produce more fuel.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#243

Post by mpweiher »

V__ wrote: post #67
yellowapple wrote: post #14

[flagged]

I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away. The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology w…

> It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky.

None of this happens to be true.

A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.

Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electricity, transmission (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.

Making the more expensive part of a system several times more expensive to at best save a little bit on the cheaper part seems...foolish. It's like the old Murphy's law "a $300 picture tube will blow to protect a 3¢ fuse" translated into energy policy.

And whether LCOE is actually cheaper with intermittent renewables is at best debatable. Factor in system costs and it is no contest. Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration.

What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain. Since the #Spainout, the grid operator put the grid in "safe mode", which means no more than 60% intermittent renewables. Quick quiz: if that is "safe mode", what does that make >60% intermittent renewables?

Here the Finnish environment minister:

""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.

He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."

https://yle.fi/a/74-20136905

Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.

While no energy source is completely safe, nuclear happens to be safest one we have.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#244

Post by quotemstr »

fmajid wrote: post #240
nicce wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't that rare in general - if the U.S. opens the secrets of nuclear submarines - we had had mini reactors for decades.

And the technology is incredibly mature, submarine reactors were some of the first reactors, period.

Submarine reactors run on super high enriched fuel instantly one could instantly repurpose into a bomb. Lots of gen 4 and 5 reactor designs that combine low cost, compact footprint, and running on less expensive and carefully controlled fuel.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#245

Post by V__ »

quickthrowman wrote: post #209
V__ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away. The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology w…

There is no grid that can be sustained on solar and batteries or wind and solar and batteries or wind and solar and pumped hydro and batteries. Possibly geothermal for base load could replace nuclear and natural gas plants, combined with renewal energy and battery storage.

Why not? Grid scale batteries will allow using solar/wind throughout the day and not only peak times, eliminating the duck curve problem. This is already only a few years away.

This only leaves "Dunkelflaute" as a concern, which can be solved with either hydrogen/gas etc. production and storage during peaks in the summer for example.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#246

Post by Matticus_Rex »

krisoft wrote: post #147
epistasis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which are the fake costs from regulation? We have new builds in Europe of the EPR, in France and Finland, and it has had disastrous costs. China has built some too, presumably cheaper, since they keep on building more. What is the regulatory difference there? I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies. If regul…

> If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution. That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act. That bein…

You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time.

Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure.

If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#247

Post by boringg »

pfdietz wrote: post #228
boringg wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its the same with any massive infrastructure investment - only governments have the balance sheet to build them.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#248

Post by RandomBacon »

epistasis wrote: post #145
reenorap wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes 15 years to build a nuclear power plant. It shouldn't take this long at all and it's strictly because of regulations. If we cut down the time it takes to build a plant the cost plummets.

Which regulations? What would change in the construction process? China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different? I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money." It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plan…

> What is different?

All of the NIMBY roadblocks that ties up U.S. projects in court, that China doesn't give a F about considering they'll displace 1.3 million people to build a damn.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#249

Post by pfdietz »

mulmen wrote: post #159
V__ wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this limitless clean energy source is too expensive, even though it had 60+ years time. I hope the day fusion energy finally has its big breakthrough isn't too far away, but conventional nuclear won't solve our problems.

Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps. Running our own fusion reactors would be great but waste is not limited to fission designs. All nuclear generation has radioactive waste, it’s unavoidable. Grid scale storage with renewables can absolutely meet our needs.

> Wind and solar are literally fusion power with extra steps.

This observation seems entirely useless and pointless. What implication are you saying we should draw from this?

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#250

Post by viktorcode »

pfdietz wrote: post #235
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has stopped actively trying to sabotage France on nuclear energy at every occasion in the EU. That’s a start. Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.

Germany doesn't need to sabotage France on nuclear energy; France has done a fine job of sabotaging themselves.

The historical data shows that France didn't have upwards trend in nuclear generation since early 2000s.[1] I wouldn't bet on it to change regardless of political climate.

1: https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/generation/nucle...

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