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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

#671

Post by laurencerowe »

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…

The Chinese demonstration plant is only 2MW thermal / 300KW electrical with the one currently under construction expecting to up that to 60MW thermal / 10MW electrical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR_(Chinese_reactor_project)

The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#672

Post by lukan »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #549
lukan wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"At some depth it ceases to matter despite what the activists seem to think." Yes, but to be really safe, that point might be so low, it becomes really expensive, also getting it all there without accident - which is the whole point, of course radioactive waste can be treated safe and sound - but that is expensive and people and companies and governments are known to be sloppy.

Sure but the limited volume really puts an upper bound on the expense. You could package it in containers small enough for a single person to carry and then have people individually walk them down to the bottom of the mponeng mine and it would still be reasonably affordable.

Have people walk with radioactive material sealed in lead containers down some km into a mine and back up?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#673

Post by coryrc »

chickenbig wrote: post #659
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…

> 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. Domestic heating has little to do with industrial base. Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.

> Domestic heating has little to do with industrial base.

It does because 1. they're both fighting for now-expensive imported natural gas 2. rates go up for everybody to pay for the malinvestment in solar

> Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.

I meant "for Germany". Those are a problem for others.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#674

Post by lukan »

int_19h wrote: post #669
bjourne wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.

And yet China is building new nuclear plants just as fast as it's building solar and wind. It's almost as if the "grinding halt" was political in nature.

Source needed, a quick search if mine showed very different numbers:

"China aims to reach 110 gigawatts (GWe) of nuclear capacity by 2030."

"China installed over 430 GW of renewables in 2025"

In other words china installed last year alone 5x the energy capacity in solar and wind, what the are planning to have in 2030

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#675

Post by frm88 »

mpweiher wrote: post #653
Krasnol wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know it will still be properly monitored in 100 years? What about 1000? How would you know if there are even people left who know what it is?? May be societal collapse isn't a problem. Maybe we're having a nice new beginning but someone finds some nice, warm stuff?

In 100 years: sure. Unless we have civilizational collapse in which case a bit of nuclear waste will be the least of our problems. It won't have to be monitored for a 1000 years. First, by that time the level of radioactivity is very low, and when it's in a deep-geological repository (like the ones we already use for vastly greater amounts of highly toxic chemicals that never decay) it is gone. We know enough about h…

We know enough about how geology works.

We also know how a BLU-122 works. Can you be sure the US wouldn't use one on its allies in yet another moment of irrational tantrum? What about Russia?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#676

Post by laurencerowe »

pepperoni_pizza wrote: post #279
spikels wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.

Can you share where those numbers are from? I'd like to run a similar calculation on my own country. Also I'm curious if you know how geography fits into this (like sunlight hours and stuff).

Solar and batteries will be extremely expensive if you have no other backup but you could probably get to 80% quite cheaply with solar and around 12h of storage.

Geography absolutely matters since seasonal dips in solar generation is basically impossible to fix cost effectively with storage at more northerly latitudes as storage only makes financial sense when you can cycle it daily rather than yearly.

The contiguous US is much further south than Northern Europe so it has an easier time of it. But you ideally want wind too since it is anti-correlated with solar.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#677

Post by Jolter »

mpweiher wrote: post #656
Jolter wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden recently did the same: in order for companies to agree to make new reactors, the government had to promise them a price floor for the electricity they produce. The price floor suggested is more than twice the current price on the spot market. That means that, for the lifetime of those reactors, Swedish taxpayers will be subsidizing production of nuclear power. I thought the idea was that they would be profitab…

The biggest risk for nuclear is the government. That's why the government has to indemnify the companies against those risks. Spot market prices are not total system costs.

You’re right, the total system costs include a lot of things, including disposal of spent fuel. Which is apparently so expensive, nuclear can’t compete with renewables fairly.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#678

Post by lukan »

remarkEon wrote: post #552
Gibbon1 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.

Yeah I too long for a future (or a present, I guess?) where entire fields and mountainsides are covered in glass on top of the natural landscape, instead of a football field sized building used to hold rocks close together to boil water.

Maybe have a look at that by now old old image. Notice the red square. It is a bit larger today, but the principle stays the same

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DESERTEC-Map_large.jpg

There are enough roofs and waste lands for solar.

But out of curiosity, would you like to live next to a nuclear plant/uran mining/radioactive waste deposit?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#679

Post by Jolter »

Scroll_Swe wrote: post #623
crote wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear base load is a lie. The aforementioned subsidies aren't just for the electricity it produces, it is also for the electricity it could produce. The nuclear plant has a right to sell electricity to the grid at a certain price. Market price too low? The government pays the difference. No demand? The government buys the unused production capacity. In practice this means that during periods of excess you are shutt…

Okay so we turn off all nuclear like Germany? Now what?

Straw man.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#680

Post by Foskya »

starbix wrote: post #6

This is going to be a huge waste of time and money until we realize that building new nuclear power plants will be too expensive and too late, since we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then. Instead we could also just join a French project, who have way more experience. We should focus on extending our hydro power storage capacity instead. There will be a referendum anyways, s…

> we'll have figured out a renewable energy concept that'll handle the load by then"

Seems like wishful thinking. If anything with the current electrical trends there will be even more demand for energy in the future and unless some miracolous clean energy source is invented, nuclear (or fossil fuel) will need to be used

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