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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

#241

Post by coryrc »

pydry wrote: post #218
UltraSane wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

In January 2025, solar generated 1.5TWh of electricity in Germany (in June it generated 10TWh): https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat...

In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels.

You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#242

Post by lenerdenator »

Tangentially related: the Swiss built a research-focused nuclear reactor in a cavern. It had a meltdown in 1969, and they were able to keep the decontamination/decommissioning efforts to a minimum by just entombing the thing in concrete.

Honestly, so long as the water table isn't too close, that's not a terrible place to put a nuclear reactor.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#243

Post by p2detar »

Arodex wrote: post #116
vablings wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have a misunderstanding of what a SMR is supposed to be. Nuclear power plants are eye watering levels of expensive. The require massive scale and cost with lengthy approvals and requirements, the fundamental idea of SMRs is to move that cost and approvals into a smaller scale so that multiple standard units can be produced and deployed in a turnkey situation, they still will be expensive but the time to d…

>The problem with solar is that you need power 24/7 and solar will not make power in the night. Ok, question: for the cost of one nuclear power plant, how many batteries can you have? For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop?

> For the cost of the R&D of one next generation nuclear reactor design, how many next generation battery and solar panels technologies can you develop

This is a horrible argument. Yeah, let’s not spend money improving technology. We wouldn’t have increased Solar panel efficiency if we followed such ill advice.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#244

Post by lenerdenator »

jltsiren wrote: post #192
UltraSane wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.

One of the bids for the third reactor was for KEPCO's APR-1400. Like the other bids, it was too expensive to make sense without subsidies. China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.

> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.

Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#245

Post by TheCondor »

bilekas wrote: post #146
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…

Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.

Did waste management become a solved problem?

In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think the deadline to move it is still nearly a decade away.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#246

Post by coryrc »

triceratops wrote: post #237
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…

> It’s only expensive and brittle because environmentalists have choked it to death How did they succeed with nuclear energy but fail so miserably with everything else - fossil fuels, meat, even whaling?

Because they were useful idiots funded by fossil fuel companies.

(also US whaling is nearly banned by the US and most countries, and we're not going to go to war with Japan over it)

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#247

Post by sharpneli »

thomasmg wrote: post #238
bilekas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.

Solar, wind and hydro are all much cheaper, far safer and more efficient these days.

Hydro has a natural limit. After you have put a dam to every river that’s it. And the Swiss aint far from that.

There are also cloudy days without much wind, and those are quite harsh during winter.

What should one do then? Just shut everything down?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#248

Post by Perseids »

flextheruler wrote: post #92
Arodex wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries. You even have the industrial prowess to make it all in the country step by step, whereas nuclear reactors are such humongous engineering projects that building the capacity is very out of reach. Edit: and with the Mediterranean and rivers warming severely - and the latter even suffering from draught - how a…

Solar, wind, and even hydroelectricity are too dependent upon the environment to make up the entire electricity generation capacity of any major industrial country. With renewables, even with batteries, the actual production is within a range. Couple that with demand also being in a range you get uncomfortable possibilities at play. And while colder water is definitely preferable for cooling, I'd have to imagine that…

The limit is not how cold the water needs to be for the power plant, but how hot it can be for the river ecology to not take (too much) damage. Even in Germany power plants regularly need to be shut down.

> 2022 was another consecutive year in which water levels of major European rivers – such as the Rhine, the Danube, and the Rhône – were dangerously low and the water temperatures very high. This caused severe problems for the operation of nuclear power plants across continental Europe. Energy companies in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere had to shut down their nuclear power plants partly or fully because there was not enough cooling water available or, more commonly, because the cooling water that was returned to the river became too warm (Barber, 2022; Limb, 2022; Miller and Vladkov, 2022). Environmental regulations, designed to protect the riverine flora and fauna as far as possible, stipulated that nuclear power plants were not allowed to release cooling water above a certain temperature (European Parliament and European Council, 2000; IKSR, 2022b). The resulting unplanned outages — and the efforts by nuclear operators to avoid such disruptions — highlight pressing concerns about the sustainability of nuclear energy, particularly its impact on river ecosystems in an increasingly warming world (see Fig. 1).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142152...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#249

Post by Kon5ole »

cryptonym wrote: post #223
esarbe wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

France also produces less CO2, sell electricity at reasonable and stable cost. If fossil fuel weren't massively subsided (impact the environment for free, wars with taxpayer money), Nuclear would have made a massive dent. Producing the same with other sources will have a massive immediate impact on the land / environment.

I like the idea that fossil fuel should take the hit from the impact on the environment, but don't see why nuclear should at the same time get a free pass for Chernobyl and Fukushima. Surely nuclear needs to take the hit from those as well in order to make the comparison apples-to-apples?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#250

Post by BadBadJellyBean »

rayiner wrote: post #212
adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A country can do things that are not financially viable.
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