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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

#371

Post by gpm »

yodelshady wrote: post #355
gpm wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials. Solar panels, wind, and batteries have all dropped in price so much that solar backed by batteries to create stable powers (and/or wind doing the same, or a mix), is in the vast majority of the world…

Batteries cost > $100 / kWh, the industry still considers that a target to brag about: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/lithium-ion-... This is WHOLESALE BOM price, which is about as useful as the price of uranium. That is horrifically expensive.

$100 / kWh capacity, over 10000 cycles, is $0.01 kWh delivered. It's dirt cheap.

Also that's not the cost though. You're looking at vehicle packs not stationary storage packs at that cost. We've seen stationary storage packs get down to $50/kWh last year - with an average pack price of $70: https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/new-record-l...

And prices continue to decay. Those are the most expensive prices you'll ever see going forwards.

And there's other benefits. Batteries distribute well, letting us lower grid related costs by making more constant use of the chokepoints in the grid for instance.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#372

Post by locallost »

m101 wrote: post #319

It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing: - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power - nuclear waste is not a problem - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more po…

I have a better list:

* every dollar spent on building new nuclear will be put to use so late it effectively increases CO2 emissions

* A country like Poland is the biggest emissions perpetrator in Europe, and the fact they are building nuclear means they will stay that way for literally decades

* The fossil fuel exporter countries are pushing nuclear as their agenda. Why do you think that is?

* Not a single country has a working permanent solution currently for waste storage.

* The UK cannot clean up Sellafield at all. They had the bright idea to process waste and are now sitting in hundreds of billions of pounds of estimated costs to dispose of it.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#373

Post by pydry »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #269
pydry wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind. Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro…

>They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun.

Virtually nowhere gets zero sun.

Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.

As well as a very low population density.

It is also possibly the best advert for not using nuclear power ever given the disaster of recent projects (e.g. EDF cost overruns).

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#374

Post by m101 »

Matumio wrote: post #358
durandal1 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only fair way to compare the cost to solar and wind, is if wind and solar producers would have to make power guarantees 24/7 and cover the cost of the production gaps (hint: this makes solar and wind very expensive).

Not sure if that's fair. Sometimes the sun actually does shine, and while you won't get rich selling energy during that time, having electricity available essentially for free during some of the peak hours is worth something. Someone will eventually find a use for free energy. If nothing else, at least we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines.

When the sun shines sure you can power down other power stations, but you still need to maintain them and have them around for when the sun doesn't shine. So when you have lots of intermittent energy it means that you actually cannot shelve your old technology - you still have to maintain it, but now you're paying for the maintenance over less capacity used. This is only one of the reasons why prices are going up in heavy renewable grids.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#375

Post by onraglanroad »

lenerdenator wrote: post #369
onraglanroad wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind. People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.

I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it. I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.

That's a fair point. It's a difficult sell to say you have to pay more to help out your fellow citizens, in most countries.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#376

Post by WalterBright »

legitster wrote: post #365
chinathrow wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate why waste is not a problem?

They could do what the fossil fuel industry does and just disperse it into the atmosphere until it disappears behind background radiation. Realistically deep geologic storage is absolutely fine, and even if it's not happening now, all of the waste can be safely stored above ground for hundreds of years.

After the Fukushima disaster, radioactivity was detected in the seawater off the west cost of America. This, of course, threw people into a panic, despite being detectable only with very sensitive equipment and was not a danger to anyone or anything.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#377

Post by KennyBlanken »

SXX wrote: post #349
m101 wrote: post #319

It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing: - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power - nuclear waste is not a problem - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more po…

Biggest problem is that people not aware of how many closed down or not built nuclear power plants been replaced with coal power plants. And coal kills more people in a week than all nuclear incidents killed in all history of humanity. Not even mention that coal power plants release more radioactive materials too.

The reason people are not aware of it is because it's utter tripe.

In the US, coal generation has been falling for twenty years because it's more expensive than wind and solar. Same reason nuclear is being phased out - grid operators can get power cheaper via wind, solar, import/export, and battery storage.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#378

Post by chpatrick »

TheCondor wrote: post #245
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.

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…

I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#379

Post by m101 »

gpm wrote: post #341
m101 wrote: post #319

It is depressing reading hacker news threads on nuclear power because of just how misinformed so many people still are. These things are all true, and it's on the reader for not knowing: - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power - nuclear waste is not a problem - nuclear energy comes in many forms. Not only high pressure reactors - we are all going to be poorer, and live in a more po…

> - nuclear power is expensive by choice. It is not inherent to nuclear power Nuclear power is fundamentally expensive. It's large pieces of infrastructure, involving handling and securing extremely dangerous materials. Solar panels, wind, and batteries have all dropped in price so much that solar backed by batteries to create stable powers (and/or wind doing the same, or a mix), is in the vast majority of the world…

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-is-too-expensive

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/what-is-nuclears-should-...

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-two-lies-that-killed...

https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-case-for-1-msv-per-d...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#380

Post by WalterBright »

Matumio wrote: post #358
durandal1 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only fair way to compare the cost to solar and wind, is if wind and solar producers would have to make power guarantees 24/7 and cover the cost of the production gaps (hint: this makes solar and wind very expensive).

Not sure if that's fair. Sometimes the sun actually does shine, and while you won't get rich selling energy during that time, having electricity available essentially for free during some of the peak hours is worth something. Someone will eventually find a use for free energy. If nothing else, at least we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines.

> we can turn off all coal, gas and oil plants while the sun shines.

Those plants are not designed to be turned on and off, and both must be done gradually and carefully to avoid cracking the turbines.

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