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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

#471

Post by awesome_dude »

Mawr wrote: post #448
throwthrowuknow wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of animal is going to dig through concrete and steel and also be hundreds of meters underground in solid rock?

Apparently the hypothetical future humanoids, somehow ignorant of all prior history, who will, ignoring all warning signs, start eating as much of the waste as fast as possible, then ignoring the obvious connection between eating that stuff and getting sick... I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die". It's conc…

Until we find the Rosetta stone hieroglyphs were unintelligible, and that language only stopped being used 2000 years ago.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#472

Post by jokteur »

wil421 wrote: post #219
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.

Many of the dams in Switzerland have been built before the fifties and sixties, when environmental concerns were much lower. While most of the dams have been built high up in the mountains, a few villages have been buried by the dams.

Today, it would be infeasible creating new dams. The only thing we can do, is raise the height of some existing dams, adds pumping stations and optimise water flow between the dams.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#473

Post by Arodex »

palata wrote: post #290
Arodex wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It is far from boiling, but these limits are there to avoid killing all life in the rivers. Note though that those limits exist just like the emission limits for WiFi: it was a sane number when it was decided. It's not clear at all that raising the temperature a little more will "kill all life in the rivers". It would probably deserve some research.

No, it isn't a made-up number. We know pretty well when do fishes die en masse, as we have seen it in periods of extreme heat before. The research has been done and is how the limits have been defined.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#474

Post by fc417fc802 »

Danox wrote: post #455
tfourb wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".

The Chinese have built a small thorium reactor for research and development, and they went on to build a much larger Thorium reactor which they have refueled on the fly without taking it out of service. I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Ima…

Indeed we live in very different times. If a challenger appears whose success threatens certain aspects of one's worldview rather than compete and improve oneself people figured out that it is much lower effort to adopt a partisan mindset and deny reality. Modern American politics in a nutshell.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#475

Post by Danox »

legitster wrote: post #394
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.

> Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though France got there first. They built out such a massive infrastructure of Nuclear that they are a net provider of energy in Europe. They are also the only country to date that has officially pushed back on old safety models like LNT.

Switzerland is also working jointly with Denmark on a Thorium reactor and I’m sure in light of the continuing situation with Russia/Ukraine, and the fact that the Chinese have already built two Thorium reactors (a small one to work the kinks a much larger one that will go on line in 2029-2030) Danes/Swiss will be stepping up their efforts in this area.

https://www.neimagazine.com/news/china-refuels-thorium-react...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#476

Post by bryanlarsen »

vablings wrote: post #103
Arodex wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>commercially operating And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money. >how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics? Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors. Or solar. And how…

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…

I think you have a misunderstanding of economies of scale.

There are two ways of achieving economies of scale:

1. make things bigger

2. make more of them

Making things bigger generally is more effective when n is small. You need fewer sites, fewer approvals, each of the steps in the process is done fewer times.

When n is large, you can build and optimize a factory for them and achieve economies of scale that way.

Nuclear plants got large to take advantage of economies of scale because n is small. Nobody's building millions or even thousands of SMR's.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#477

Post by Arodex »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #215
Arodex wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://phys.org/visualstories/2024-05-mass-fish-die-vietnam...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#478

Post by TimorousBestie »

onraglanroad wrote: post #357
rayiner wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear has never been financially viable We literally have a whole-ass G7 country that went 75% nuclear back in the 80s.

Because it was paid for by the taxpayer. Why are you suddenly in favour of socialist projects? Shouldn't you be saying they should be privately funded and lets see if they can make a profit selling their electricity?

Winning arguments on the internet is more important than ideological consistency.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#479

Post by coryrc »

tfourb wrote: post #340
coryrc wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we paid dearly for that And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base. > Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind 15TWh in January 2025. Again, yo…

> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the…

> We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).

That doesn't solve your problems in the slightest. You get less than half the return on investment for PV that most other countries in the world get, and does nothing for when your peak energy load is. Every dollar spent on PV requires another dollar on natural gas for the winter and locks you into fossil fuel dependency. Spend the money on something which gives you winter power!

> the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.

That's exactly what I mean. Where can you actually build it? And is that enough? And why spend a dime on solar until you've maximized wind?

> If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?

See, exactly, that's the kind of national conversation you (and here in the USA) should be having. But we don't do that kind of thing any more. The politicians make money lying about the costs of things -- Gerhard Schröder being, I guess, a Russian stooge at best, a great example of downplaying the full costs.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#480

Post by fc417fc802 »

IsTom wrote: post #64
christkv wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could build the reactors inside the mountains to improve the security and effects of things like meltdowns.

It raises cost, makes access difficult in case a recoverable accident happens and there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.

> there's still possibility of groundwater contamination if things go wrong.

That's going to depend on the geology.

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