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Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

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Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#211

Post by hangonhn »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #45
Arodex wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every SMR startup is failing. The more they progress, the more they revise their costs upwards. SMR make as much sense as space datacenters. You can gaslight investors, you can gaslight HN, you can gaslight a national parliament full of lobbyists, but you can't gaslight thermodynamics.

Doesn’t China have SMRs?

Just one so far and it's not particularly small compared to a more conventional reactor.

Russia actually does have a smallish SMR but it wasn't terribly cheap to build nor operate. IIRC it is in the form of a ship and used to power a city somewhere in the north.

SMR has a place for sure but no one has demonstrated the unit costs savings of making a lot of them yet.

You can actually get some, if not most, of the economy of scale by doing a fleet build of one specific design. The US seems to be working on that and picked the Westinghouse AP-1000. I think that initiative has a decent chance of succeeding. The first few will be slow and expensive to build (even China has had delays with their nuclear roll out) but the subsequent ones will get cheaper and faster to build. This is how some countries did it during the first nuclear power expansion era.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#212

Post by rayiner »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #183
rayiner wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death. They’re the third biggest villains of climate change, after consumers and oil companies. If the whole developed world had nuclearized the way France did, our discussions about climate change would be entirely different. We would have decades more runway to avoid 2C+ scenarios. We would have already electrified vast swaths of the econom…

Ah yes, environmentalists have been running the world for the last few decades. Nuclear has never been financially viable and to the degree there has been “environmental” opposition it’s been NIMBY opposition to either the siting of the reactors or the siting of the disposal. But again, the primary reason no one is building nuclear is because it’s incredibly expensive.

> Nuclear has never been financially viable

We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#213

Post by sajithdilshan »

jokteur wrote: post #32

This still has to pass with the people in a referendum. The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic. Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full fro…

I really hope Swiss people learned a lesson from Germany and vote to build nuclear power plant. We need more investment in research on how to build safe, efficient power plants and ways of re-using spent nuclear fuel

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#214

Post by tialaramex »

Gud wrote: post #160
esarbe wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also incredibly expensive and brittle and cannot be moderated without additional costs[1]. At this point nuclear is just a dead horse. It hasn't managed to displace fossil fuels in over 70 years - a feat that renewables have done within 20 years. Nuclear is too slow and too expensive. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/france...

Every time this argument comes up, “it’s too slow and expensive “, I ask that person to please explain to me how my home country Sweden managed to build all those reactors in the 70s and 80s both fast and cheap? They’ve been amazing for us, despite the fact that some of them was recklessly shutdown prematurely by an ignorant political class.

What counts as "fast and cheap" ?

For the renewables "Fast and cheap" turns out to mean you get the paperwork in the winter and you build a solar farm that summer, it's not quite sowing wheat - teams of competent people building the farm isn't the same thing as just chucking the seeds into the dirt with a machine, but the timeframe isn't so different.

Sweden's nuclear plants seem to have taken maybe 6+ years from breaking ground (not paperwork) to first power, so if you begin today you might have a plant in 2032 at the earliest. I can't see any prices, not even a CfD strike price for Sweden's new proposed plants.

The UK agreed £92.50 strike price (2012 prices) for the new nukes it may never actually receive, but unlike Sweden the UK has never pledged to relinquish nuclear weapons so to some extent having a native "nuclear" capability is relevant to national security.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#215

Post by s1artibartfast »

Arodex wrote: post #128
suddenlybananas wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nuclear will also boil over Swiss rivers and shallow lakes. What on earth are you talking about?

Slight hyperbole, but nuclear reactors in Switzerland and France shut down more and more often because the water needed to cool them down is already too hot: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-adaptation/beznau-nucle... It is far from boiling, but these limits are there to avoid killing all life in the rivers.

I think it would be more accurate to say "avoid killing the most vulnerable life" crossing the line would not be the end of the world.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#216

Post by empiricus »

pmontra wrote: post #139
_diyar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. As a. swiss voter, this is close to my heart. 50% of all energy in the swiss economy is oil / gas. Of the remaining 50% (electricity), 2/3 are generated by hydro. The remaining ~1/3 by nuclear fission. Swiss electricity prices are sky-high, and the demand for electricity is going to continue to rise. To remain a competitive industrial economy, to transition away from oil/gas, and to offset any potentia…

As you are Swiss, where would you get the uranium from? I expect that the Swiss Alps have some mine, especially in the south west (I didn't check) but is that enough? You might end up swapping a dependency from foreign providers of oil and gas with a dependency from foreign providers of uranium.

to my knowledge, the cost of uranium is almost negligible compared to the capital cost of building the plant. so as long as a market exists, you can choose whatever strategy: buy a big buffer, or just don't care if price oscillates x times.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#217

Post by jrflowers »

yulker wrote: post #177
lopis wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's not part of the EU as a member, Switzerland is quite literally in the EU.

Just the opposite. It's literally not in the EU. It's literally in Europe but not in the EU.

I like that you ignore that “in” means “inside” in one sentence and then use that exact meaning of the word in the following sentence

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#218

Post by pydry »

UltraSane wrote: post #188
pydry wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China and South Korea build everything more cheaply because they have a better developed industrial base. Solar and wind is still vastly cheaper for them and still much cheaper when paired with storage.

solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.

This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says.

The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.

Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd need 5 hours of storage to get to ~97% renewable: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#219

Post by wil421 »

jokteur wrote: post #32

This still has to pass with the people in a referendum. The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic. Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full fro…

What kind of environmental impact does hydro have in Switzerland? I’d expect it’s less because they are in the mountains.

I’m against a lot of Hydro power in the US because the environmental damage is high. Plus I like to fish and they have huge impacts on the ecosystems. But these are relatively flat places compared to Switzerland.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#220

Post by zchrykng »

esarbe wrote: post #165
cloudie78 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should take note that you’re uninformed or intentionally spreading false information and misrepresenting reality. Fact of the matter is it takes a large upfront investment to build a nuclear reactor and it has a longer time horizon before it becomes profitable in comparison to something like a gas or coal power plant. It comes down to whether or not the country, government, citizens and country have the ability t…

There's no false information there. Nuclear is complex and so expensive that despite 70 years of tinkering and trying it hasn't managed to make a noticeable dent in fossil fuel. It's also slow, with building times up to more than a decade. France tried it. Now their nuclear operator is €50 billion in the negatives, makes about €3 billion per year in profits and has to invest about €150 billion in new reactors, upgrad…

It hasn't made a significant contribution because of panic after the various accidents and the "environmentalists" deciding to advocate against it when it was the clearest path to accomplishing their stated goals.
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