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Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant

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Re: Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant

#61

Post by ZeroGravitas »

lnsru wrote: post #55
KennyBlanken wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is not zero-carbon nor is it "cheap." It's the most expensive form of power generation. Meanwhile solar, wind, and BSS are the cheapest and continue to get cheaper as volume goes up and all the tech around them matures. More and more storage methods are being developed and put into use. Utilities and grid operators have lined up behind solar, wind, BSS, and HVDC transmission. That's what they are funding, ins…

The thing is that educated people like HN users see very simple thing: 1 kW nuclear can be safely replaced with 20 kW well distributed renewables. While solar is dirt cheap wind isn’t. Especially offshore wind. And the math clearly shows advantages of nuclear.

Offshore wind is cheaper than coal in China now. Which also makes it much cheaper than nuclear in China.

Onshore wind is only very slightly more expensive than solar in China too, most projects overlapping in cost ranges, both roughly half the cost of coal.

This is reflected in their deployment numbers, which also feeds back into cost reductions.

Re: Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant

#62

Post by jillesvangurp »

bruce511 wrote: post #43

The overriding impression I get is that the whole facility is complicated. There are lots of processes in place, and lots of very trained people required to keep it all running. The size and complexity of the control rooms for example, but also the inevitable maintenance and inspection of all the piping etc. Even the details of the cleanup (checking each store foot, grinding surfaces etc.) I've recently been on a tra…

Base load is one of those terms that nuclear power proponents love because it turns a negative in a positive. Nuclear plants are very expensive to turn off and on. Nuclear plants leave you no choice but to leave them running 24x7, even when power that is an order of magnitude cheaper is available most of the time. Proponents call this base load. But technically it's just very expensive power that you can't turn off when it's completely redundant.

Flexible load is where the action is these days because renewables sometimes push energy prices into the negative whenever there's too much of it. Having to expend fuel during such times is a negative thing.

The big benefit gas plants have over coal and nuclear plants is that you can turn them off and on quicker. So you don't have to run them 24x7. Newer coal plants are similarly cheaper to use for backup power generation. A common mistake with assumptions about Chinese coal plants is that yes they build lots of them. And no, they mostly aren't running a lot. Their coal use actually is starting to decline. The new plants are more flexible and they use them to replace the older ones.

Renewables are plenty and cheaper most of the time. Batteries can deal with short term fluctuations and help time shift renewable power to cover peak loads in the morning and evenings.

And if you can bring online some gas/coal power when it's actually needed, there is no need for base load.

In practice this is still quite often but not most of the time and gradually declining. With dirt cheap renewables + batteries coming online by the hundreds of gw per year, the ability to turn the rest off is the most important feature with backup power generation.

Nuclear plants remain stupidly expensive and lack this feature.

Re: Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant

#63

Post by cjd8 »

moomoo11 wrote: post #50

sorry but five MILLION pounds of nuclear waste? how does that work? sounds like a lot.

I would assume that it's not just the fuel, but also the construction materials etc. It's in the article that they had to grind down the surfaces of the spent fuel pool, the residue from that would probably weigh a lot on its own!

Re: Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant

#64

Post by lnsru »

defrost wrote: post #58
lnsru wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that educated people like HN users see very simple thing: 1 kW nuclear can be safely replaced with 20 kW well distributed renewables. While solar is dirt cheap wind isn’t. Especially offshore wind. And the math clearly shows advantages of nuclear.

> And the math clearly shows advantages of nuclear. If that's the case and the advantages are so sharp and clearly defined, ... Then why did Australia's latest CSIRO (National Science body) energy options for the nations future report* clearly state that nuclear was not an economically pragmatic choice compared to renewables? Any chance "Nuclear V. {X}" is a qualified comparison with edge cases and nuance? * https://…

I heard Australia is pretty sunny country. If that’s right they can go with solar and be alright. Sweden has less options for sure.

Re: Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant

#65

Post by modo_mario »

lukan wrote: post #54
wat10000 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The waste thing is weird. We're able to dispose of other highly toxic substances. One dangerous thing frequently mentioned about nuclear waste is that it remains dangerous for thousands of years. But many other dangerous substances remain dangerous forever . It seems like having a concrete span of time makes it scarier even though it's objectively better.

Have you ever dealt with radioactive substances? "We're able to dispose of other highly toxic subst.ances." With this statement I don't think so, so maybe educate yourself about a topic before making objective statements? Chemical toxic substances can be processed into non toxic. They do not radiate through the walls, they do not make other materials also toxic by having it in the same room. Also ... the amount of ra…

>Have you at least done a search on how much radioactive waste there is?

It's very little even for the US a country that at the behest of it's fossil fuel industry bans the reuse of it's nuclear fuel.

Also if I remember well only a small share of that waste (about 3%) is long lived and veryradioactive.

Re: Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant

#66

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

asah wrote: post #14
natnat wrote: post #11

What a depressing outcome. This could have powered hundreds of thousands of households, cheaply, without adding any CO2 to the atmosphere.

...or the evacuation of highly populated Long Island. Three Mile Island was a * big * deal - if that had happened on Long Island, it would've been unimaginable disaster and permanent stain on NYC. To many people, "three strikes you're out" - 3MI, Chernobyl and Fukushima was the final straw, reasoning that even the Japanese can't safely manage this technology, so "Homer Simpson" stands no chance. Meanwhile, even the c…

The problem is the technology being dependent on a highly sophisticated industrial environment, which is not allowed to go through phases of economic decline and knowledge loss. Nobody has distrust into the engineering, everyone distrusts the social component. Humans do not make for great material when it comes to forming sturdy, reliable organizations.

Re: Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant

#67

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

MostlyStable wrote: post #40
asah wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...or the evacuation of highly populated Long Island. Three Mile Island was a * big * deal - if that had happened on Long Island, it would've been unimaginable disaster and permanent stain on NYC. To many people, "three strikes you're out" - 3MI, Chernobyl and Fukushima was the final straw, reasoning that even the Japanese can't safely manage this technology, so "Homer Simpson" stands no chance. Meanwhile, even the c…

While I think you are accurately describing how people do/would react, the "big deal" you describe killed, injured, or caused adverse health effects for exactly zero people. It is possible that these are inevitable outcomes of human psychology, but a more rational world would have gone full steam ahead on nuclear power, even after all of the events you describe. A Chernobyl level accident every single year would have…

It stands to reason, that climate change costs should be burdened as taxes on technologies that where suggested as full nuclear replacement.

Re: Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant

#68

Post by xienze »

otherme123 wrote: post #51
MostlyStable wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think you are accurately describing how people do/would react, the "big deal" you describe killed, injured, or caused adverse health effects for exactly zero people. It is possible that these are inevitable outcomes of human psychology, but a more rational world would have gone full steam ahead on nuclear power, even after all of the events you describe. A Chernobyl level accident every single year would have…

>a more rational world would have gone full steam ahead on nuclear power Nuclear is not perfect, it has some drawbacks that totally justify not going "full steam ahead". Even if it is the cleanest energy possible and 100% safe guaranteed, it is also very concentrated (at least for now) that makes a plant shutting down for repairment/manteinance a problem, it is expensive to build, it takes forever to increase capacit…

> it is expensive to build,

Is that because the building materials, engineering, and labor are super expensive or because of environmentalists throwing up legal and monetary roadblocks for decades? ("OK, if you can do a decade-long study on the impact of this plant AND make sure no Native American tribes declare a 100-mile area around your proposed site sacred AND you can design it in such a way that it emits less background radiation than a vacuum cleaner, maybe we can advance your proposal to the review stage, which will last a couple years. Too expensive, huh? Shame!")

> it creates dangerous residues

We have a perfectly good storage site (Yucca Mountain), but of course political and environmental opposition is what keeps it closed.

> France is having a problem to install green energy, because their nuclear capacity is so big. The alternative pro-nuclear timeline might be using fossils as the modulable part forever by blocking solar and wind installations.

I don't see how it reasonably follows that leaning heavily on nuclear power would cause France to decide that fossil fuels are somehow a better choice than renewables for that purpose. Pure speculation based on the common anti-nuclear belief that using nuclear power will retard the usage of renewables for some reason.

You're kind of highlighting what's stalled nuclear energy for decades: demanding absolute, total perfection in the face of reality, which is that nuclear is and has been the _best_ overall option for baseload power generation.

Re: Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant

#69

Post by Peanuts99 »

lnsru wrote: post #55
KennyBlanken wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is not zero-carbon nor is it "cheap." It's the most expensive form of power generation. Meanwhile solar, wind, and BSS are the cheapest and continue to get cheaper as volume goes up and all the tech around them matures. More and more storage methods are being developed and put into use. Utilities and grid operators have lined up behind solar, wind, BSS, and HVDC transmission. That's what they are funding, ins…

The thing is that educated people like HN users see very simple thing: 1 kW nuclear can be safely replaced with 20 kW well distributed renewables. While solar is dirt cheap wind isn’t. Especially offshore wind. And the math clearly shows advantages of nuclear.

Having renewables distributed however is the big challenge. We've gone from a world where you have a small amount of large generators in static places to having many generators everywhere. If you don't have the capacity to transfer that energy to where it's being used it doesn't matter how cheap it is.

Re: Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant

#70

Post by pydry »

Peanuts99 wrote: post #69
lnsru wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that educated people like HN users see very simple thing: 1 kW nuclear can be safely replaced with 20 kW well distributed renewables. While solar is dirt cheap wind isn’t. Especially offshore wind. And the math clearly shows advantages of nuclear.

Having renewables distributed however is the big challenge. We've gone from a world where you have a small amount of large generators in static places to having many generators everywhere. If you don't have the capacity to transfer that energy to where it's being used it doesn't matter how cheap it is.

Except it does because the money saved on generation can be used to pay for extra transmission capacity and storage.

Solar and wind aren't 20% cheaper than nuclear power they're 20% of the price of nuclear power.

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