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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

#321

Post by froh »

croes wrote: post #259
tietjens wrote: post #2

Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.

Still no storage for nuclear waste, long construction times and expensive as hell. Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge? The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.

and a municipality willing to have the German finale nuclear waste storage in their backyard.

the Söder Challenge is Legend:-)

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#322

Post by theptip »

Retric wrote: post #301
theptip wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms. See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats. I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.

None of what I said really relates to safety. 3 mile island was a complete non issue when it comes to safety, but one day the nuclear reactor went from a useful tool to an expensive cleanup.

Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors.

I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.

My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.

I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#323

Post by cdavid »

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…

Since the OT is about EU, it is important to keep in mind that costs per MW are much lower in EU than in the US (or the UK).

E.g. according to https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e..., UK/US is ~10 millions GBP, France ~4.5, and China/Korea/Japan around 2.5.

I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#324

Post by quotemstr »

Retric wrote: post #283
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…

> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup wi…

> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.

You have to take scale into account. This is 20 years of spent fuel.

https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/21474836...

That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor.

You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture.

> small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully.

Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#326

Post by epistasis »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #55
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…

You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there. Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.

Unless by "taxes" you mean "delivery charges" this is simply untrue.

The generation is cheap. The delivery, the grid cost, is 3x-5x the cost of the generation.

It's all PG&E and the regulators's fault, for not containing costs more.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#327

Post by acidburnNSA »

tstrimple wrote: post #315
acidburnNSA wrote: post #62

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 think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves. I see this over and over again in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. No one wants to risk tripping up the regulations so company lawyers write up crazy and often conflicting “requirements” to satisfy legislation. The limitations placed by company council are often far more restrictive than…

I have ideas of a plan to help in nuclear, which is to make open source reactor company quality assurance and engineering procedures that establish clear compliance with regs but also incorporate all sorts of efficiency lessons learned

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#328

Post by tstrimple »

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…

Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#329

Post by kgabis »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #237

I'm totally fine with people attempting to build new fission plants. More power to them! I just don't see it happening. They cost too much and take too long. Not holding my breath here.

By some weird accident they stop being that expensive and long to build when you cross the border into China.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#330

Post by epistasis »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #178
reenorap wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG&E is in no way a victim here. Their CEO is being paid $50M a year, and our rates got increased 6 times last year. Nevada the next state over, the prices are 20% of California's.

Victim, no. Being over regulated doesn't necessarily hurt a company if all their competitors are subject to the same regulations. It's consumers who pay the price. 5x the price, apparently, if Nevada is any indication.

It is under regulation that is the problem here. PG&E has caused multiple huge disasters through negligence that have caused deaths and billions in damages that they pass on to rate payers. And this is after they redirected funds for maintenance directly to executive compensation.

The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes.

A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.

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