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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

#781

Post by idiotsecant »

frm88 wrote: post #699
idiotsecant wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its bizarre that nuclear power is a left/right thing. It's clean, safe, and immediately displaces carbon emissions elsewhere. It doesn't require decades of storage and transmission improvements that may or may not come. It just works. Today. One day nuclear will no longer be neasessary. Until that day comes it is essential . Anyone who disagrees is confusing wishful that being for physics.

It is also extremely expensive if you include the cost of decomission, waste management into the overall cost per KWh https://www.smartreability.com/nuclear-energy-price-per-kwh/

No, it's only expensive compared to every other generation source that is not expected to price in externalities. When I get to vent my waste product into the open air my mwh is way cheaper!! Who could have guessed? How much does a natural gas plant that captures all waste output cost?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#782

Post by leonidasrup »

gambiting wrote: post #727
LtdJorge wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most plants don't need anything special for waste management. They just put it in dry cask storage and leave those in the outside. Ironically, there's less background radiation around the casks than away from them, since they are so shielded you also get shielded from part of the background radiation too.

In Netherlands there is a nuclear energy museum where you can literally walk around spent fuel casks.

It not like everyone can walk in and out as he wants. But a tour can be arranged in advance. This are controled facilities.

https://prinsfrank.nl/2022/09/12/Visiting-the-only-nuclear-w...

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#783

Post by vablings »

Arodex wrote: post #462
slibhb wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a silly argument. Battery and solar technologies are progressing regardless of people building nuclear. It's simply not the case that we can stop investing in nuclear and use that money to accelerate battery/solar. The best energy strategies are all-of-the-above.

This isn't a silly argument, this is a problem of allocation of resources. We could have had mass solar deployment since the 70s. We chose not to, and allocate the money elsewhere. Nuclear will take away billions in public money, put it into the hands of nuclear industries, to get electricity at twice the going rate, maybe, in twenty years. A white elephant and a waste of effort.

That's exactly the point of SMRs. Do away with the huge capital allocation of public funds to overspend and overrun on infrastructure projects.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#784

Post by vablings »

crote wrote: post #560
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…

> We also know SMRs work very well, considering the majority of the US Navy is powered entirely with SMRs And what's their cost per MWh? Considering they are fueled by highly-enriched uranium: are you okay with most of the world being handed the capability to build nukes?

> And what's their cost per MWh? We do not know but its likely expensive

>Considering they are fueled by highly-enriched uranium: are you okay with most of the world being handed the capability to build nukes?

There are SMR designs that do not use highly-enriched uranium.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69b2f41497f6f...

" The RR SMR uses PWR technology and industry standard LEU fuel and builds on operational experience from existing PWR reactors."

I cite this as RR is the most advanced out of all the other companies working on this afaik

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#785

Post by palata »

Krasnol wrote: post #626
palata wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, destroy a dam and you get a catastrophe. Don't do anything in particular and watch how many people die in the mid-term due to climate change. It's all about risk management.

Yeah but the risk management of a dam is ridiculously small compared to waste which will be dangerous so far into future that we might not know if people will even know what it is. A dam damming water at a hill is obvious. Some warm stuff set up like something really special, is not.

Yet dams have killed more people than nuclear plants.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#786

Post by fp64 »

golem14 wrote: post #498
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…

> We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time. Actually, why not ? I mean this as a serious question. Just like Oregon or New Mexico do not have problems getting (possibly nuclear) energy from California. You just have to believe in the concept of Europe hard enough.

It's a foreign country with its own interests. Switzerland is not part of the EU.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#787

Post by throw0101c »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #776
throw0101c wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you mean unbelievably expensive and takes an eternity to build outside of China and Korea. Japan was able to start construction on a new nuclear reactor and have its construction (and start commercial service) with-in five years, and did so every year from the mid-1980s to the early-2000s: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea... The first unit you build will be expensive, the secon…

The 5 years of construction is the fast part. How many years of planning and permits did it take before they broke ground?

If you have a site that's approved for a nuclear power, there is overhead in getting that approval, but once you have a site you can roll through multiple reactors.

It's similar to the housing crisis: all this talk about pre-built components to make building homes/mid-rises/etc faster ignores all the planning approval and NIMBY objections that need to be ploughed through first.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#788

Post by vablings »

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?

> Ok, question: for the cost of one nuclear power plant, how many batteries can you have?

Not that many. Sizewell C the latest nuclear project in the UK is projected to cost around 50 billion and expected to last for 60 years. We can cut that estimate short to say oh well, About a billion a year for the next 50 years.

Assuming that you can purchase storage at $70/kwh with 50 billion you could purchase around 715GWh of battery storage, at the same output of Sizewell C that means you could output 3.2GW for 200+ hours! wow.

One problem. The batteries will realistically only last somewhere between 10-20 years. A moderate 15-year estimate would be more realistic. Now obviously it's very hard to calculate and account for a reduction in pricing increase in capacity etc... But with today's technology you would have to buy the pack 3.33 times over

So now you go into 0.300 * 715GWh gives you 214.5 GWh and now with that 3.2GWh load it could run for just shy of 3 days. This is like the entire capacity storage of China right now.

So yeah, to answer your question 214.5 GWh of storage

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#789

Post by throw0101c »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #779
throw0101c wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Cheap nuclear" is a pipe dream that has never been realized. Not even Chinese nuclear (no environmentalists there) is anywhere near as cheap as solar. In Ontario, Canada, 50% of all power comes from nuclear and costs CAD 0.12/kWh (USD 0.08/kWh); see Table 2: * https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-2025... On the spectrum from "cheap" to expensive, where would that fall? For many years it was actu…

That's because the utility went bankrupt and its construction costs were absorbed onto the public debt. Nuclear is cheap to operate. It's expensive to build and expensive to decommission. Any analysis that doesn't include those two costs is highly misleading.

> That's because the utility went bankrupt and its construction costs were absorbed onto the public debt.

Ontario Hydro did not go bankrupt.

It was broken up into "constituent" components in 1998, and the a lot of the nuclear plant construction financing debt didn't fit neatly into any one of them, so a separate legal entity was created: Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC).

Ratepayers pay their electrical bills, the money goes to local utilities and entities like OPG and Hydro One, which in turn pay OEFC.

The claim that it was bankrupt was a line used by Mike Harris et co to justify privatization.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#790

Post by throw0101c »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #768
throw0101c wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ontario's Financial Accountability Office, which reports to provincial parliament and is independent of the government, concluded that at least for the refurbs: > * The FAO estimates that the Plan will result in nuclear generation supplying a significant proportion of Ontario electricity demand from 2016 to 2064 at an average price of $80.7/MWh in 2017 dollars. (For reference, the 2017 Nuclear Price is $69/MWh and th…

Last time Ontario built CANDU’s the utility went into bankruptcy and the taxpayers still haven’t paid off that debt.

Ontario Hydro did not go bankrupt.

It was broken up into "constituent" components in 1998, and the a lot of the nuclear plant construction financing debt didn't fit neatly into any one of them, so a separate legal entity was created: Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC).

Ratepayers pay their electrical bills, the money goes to local utilities and entities like OPG and Hydro One, which in turn pay OEFC.

The claim that it was bankrupt was a line used by Mike Harris et co to justify privatization.

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