101–110 of 285 posts
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Nuclear and offshore wind are equivalent (median: 12 gCO2eq/kWh) Source: IPCC, 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse_gas_emis...
Although offshore has continued to get cheaper and nuclear only seems to be getting more expensive since then.
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Regardless how expensive it get, it won't burn tons of fossil fuels. Government should just set the conditions for new power and heating infrastructure. No fossil fuels. Zero carbon. A minimum and peak capacity based on current and projected demands. Private companies can bid, but they can't change the conditions. If a private company can more cheaply and faster build massive amount of battery and use exclusively win…
If the whole UK energy grid could become fossil free, and the only cost would be a 2x increase in costs, then that would be to me a fair price to pay. A large number of people would die as a result of such a policy. Fuel poverty is already a significant problem, the UK government gives out 'winter fuel payment' benefits to some, but doubling the price of energy would push a lot of elderly, infirm, and poor people to…
2x increase in cost doens't necessarily directly translate to doubling the price for everyone. For example it could be coupled with a scheme where consuming way above average makes the part which is above much more expensive, depending on income, to yield the ones consuming less and/or low income not having to pay double. Plus taxing overconsumption could be an incentive to getting rid of some needless energy usage.
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> Regardless how expensive it get, it won't burn tons of fossil fuels. Maybe it won’t be a lot once built, but fuel extraction and processing are energy intensive. Also, 10 years of construction and the vast quantity of steel and concrete are going to burn one hell of a lot of fossil fuel. It would be interesting to compare the lifetime fossil fuel usage of all power generators, including construction and disposal (a…
Fair comparison here is overall energy invested for energy obtained. For nuclear, as it is much denser energy-wise then anything else, you need to do the least amount of digging per MW capacity / let alone overall produced MWh. Nuclear is orders of magnitude better than other low-co2 options. For example for solar it is about 6, versus 75 for nuclear. [1] Also instructive to keep in mind just how energy dense nuclear…
The sibling post seems to indicate otherwise though and mentions they're about the same? Any idea where that difference in numbers come from?
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If the whole UK energy grid could become fossil free, and the only cost would be a 2x increase in costs, then that would be to me a fair price to pay. A large number of people would die as a result of such a policy. Fuel poverty is already a significant problem, the UK government gives out 'winter fuel payment' benefits to some, but doubling the price of energy would push a lot of elderly, infirm, and poor people to…
doubling the price of energy would push a lot of elderly, infirm, and poor people to stop heating their homes 2x increase in cost doens't necessarily directly translate to doubling the price for everyone. For example it could be coupled with a scheme where consuming way above average makes the part which is above much more expensive, depending on income, to yield the ones consuming less and/or low income not having t…
The others are already over budget and behind schedule, the private companies meant to be heading them are dropping like flies. This won't end well... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54158091 https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/energy-news/toshiba-withdraw... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/25/hinkley-poin...
Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy due to failed nuclear construction in the U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-tos... Areva, responsible for the construction of Olkiluoto-3 in Finland on a fixed price contract. Restructured and sold all of it's reactor business except Olkiluoto-3, which it still is liable for, to EDF. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areva
Reviving the nuclear industry will be painful and costly, but the same is true for reviving and rehabilitating other heavy industries that have withered away, if and when these countries ever choose to do so. The justifications for resolving ourselves to their death are hypocritical. Both solar and wind power manufacturing industries, not to mention the automobile industry, would be non-existent in the U.S. without heavy subsidies. For example, special trade zones that incentive partial manufacturing of certain wind generator components in the U.S., or in the case of automobiles flat-out quotas. But even then the future of these industries in the U.S. remain tenuous. Fortunately for consumers (but less so for semi-skilled and skilled factory labor), solar panels, wind generators, and cars are easily imported; nuclear plants not so much, not unless the modular reactor designs take off.[1]
[1] Interestingly, the skillsets, including project management techniques, for these industries can't be imported, either. Toshiba bought Westinghouse because they thought they could use their superior heavy industry skills to rehabilitate Westinghouse and the American nuclear industry. But heavy industry skillsets are especially tuned to local industrial supply chains and labor pools, as well as domestic regulatory frameworks. Toshiba couldn't do squat with Westinghouse; it was deadweight from day 1.
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Regardless how expensive it get, it won't burn tons of fossil fuels. Government should just set the conditions for new power and heating infrastructure. No fossil fuels. Zero carbon. A minimum and peak capacity based on current and projected demands. Private companies can bid, but they can't change the conditions. If a private company can more cheaply and faster build massive amount of battery and use exclusively win…
Cost matters. If you can build renewable power at a fraction of the price, why go nuclear? We can keep gas as backup until storage solutions are better developed. If money was no issue you could just build a ton of pumped hydro in Scotland and or batter storage. And if you absolutely want to spend on nuclear power, spend it in SMRs and molten salt reactors. ThorCon is probably not that far from a working solution if…
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Why? This article even explains why? It isn't an either or situation. You need a well diversified portfolio of zero (operating) emission technologies. Nuclear is one of those, along with wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal.
The issue is that peak power consumption occurs after sundown in most countries. Nuclear power also costs the same to generate power 24/7 as it does to generate power intermittently. So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. This is why people invested in renewables are often very adverse to nuclear power.
Our daily routines are so synchronized that we see these massives peaks everywhere. Not only in energy consumption but also in road use (congestion), commuting services (packed subway cars) or in super markets (low fraction of total available checkouts needed during most times of the day because their number was dimensioned for peak times). I'm sure you can find other examples if you think about it.
Flattening the demand over time by allowing to spread out daily routines (by not requiring or forbidding certain opening hours or office hours for example) so our infrastructure would not need to be dimensioned for these outsized peaks would be addressing the actual underlying issue. Building nuclear plants and more streets might be an easier task as the other would require personal and societal change ... and people are creatures of habit (which is something we should never underestimate).
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Fair comparison here is overall energy invested for energy obtained. For nuclear, as it is much denser energy-wise then anything else, you need to do the least amount of digging per MW capacity / let alone overall produced MWh. Nuclear is orders of magnitude better than other low-co2 options. For example for solar it is about 6, versus 75 for nuclear. [1] Also instructive to keep in mind just how energy dense nuclear…
Nuclear is orders of magnitude better than other low-co2 options The sibling post seems to indicate otherwise though and mentions they're about the same? Any idea where that difference in numbers come from?
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> So if you build enough nuclear power to fill in the gap in the duck curve, then you could just run those plants all day and ditch renewables. If you build enough nuclear power to fill the gap in the duck curve without storage, and remove fossil fuels, you're basically running entirely nuclear and hydro, and mostly nuclear. You end up building almost double the amount of capacity that you actually use, because you n…
The point is that nuclear is the only known geographically independent way of generating carbon free energy that isn't subject to intermittency. The redundancy isn't an issue with nuclear, it's an issue of the notion that we need nuclear and renewables. Just cut out the renewables, and only use nuclear. Using nuclear to fill in the duck curve makes renewables redundant, thus the aversion to nuclear of many proponents…
Why is "geographical independency" desirable here?
We ditched the concept of self-sufficiency long ago for almost every other product. Your iPhone was not built here. Your banana was not grown here. The corn might have been grown half a country away. The drugs you might have been prescribed were maybe not produced in your country at all. Why would energy be so different in that regard? (#)
Intermittency is much easier solved geographically than temporally. Move energy instead of trying to store it for local use later. Self-sufficiency was necessary in medieval times because it was impossible to move large amounts of things fast and easy. We solved this problem and famines went away as well. Any famine you hear about today is not caused by logistics or unavailability of food in general but by political or societal problems.
High-voltage direct current (HVDC) power transmission also exists. China has power lines that can transfer gigawatts over distances of thousands of kilometers. Today.
Losses of HVDC are roughly 3% per 1000km by the way, so it is not even that half of the energy is lost in the process.
(#) It actually is different in the regard that effects of lost or cut power (the latter in case of talking about a conflict) are more immediate than they are for most physical products. The latter are usually to some degree in transit or storage so production issues are not immediately felt. It feels like this problem can be solved by even more interconnectedness of power grids. (In Europe, more than a TW (Terawatt)of power sources and consumers are connected to the same grid already, even though a relatively low fraction of this power can be moved over larger distances at the moment.)
The others are already over budget and behind schedule, the private companies meant to be heading them are dropping like flies. This won't end well... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54158091 https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/energy-news/toshiba-withdraw... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/25/hinkley-poin...
> The others are already over budget and behind schedule The reason why is important though. Is it because of: 1) Political issues, where the government has set up incentives for the builder to lie? 2) Social issues, where environmentalists attack the project to drive up costs? It seems unbelievable to me that nuclear plant planners are unable to plan because ... dunno, maybe they hear nuclear and lose the ability to…
[1] https://omegataupodcast.net/181-why-megaprojects-fail-and-wh...