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Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

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Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#101

Post by otherme123 »

atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

Spaniard here: we have zero gas and zero uranium nationally sourced, yet thanks to solar, wind and hydro, our energy grid is among the best in the world. We are at 20% nuclear, above global average, and above USA or UK, no need to install more.

Get down your "education" horse and solve your own problems first, asuming you are from the USA. In terms of energy we are good, thank you, and need no lessons from the USA.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#102

Post by baq »

nickpp wrote: post #83
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thank-you for making the point that utilities should be socialized and not a profit center. EVERYBODY deserves clean water, electricity, housing and food.

Without profit there is no reason anybody will provide those. Countries that tried socializing food - starved. Capitalism is the only one that brought plenty - because there is an incentive to do so.

Profit is… not fake, but fiat. Energy and clean water are real.

With collapsing demographics the current economic system will fall over anyway, either due to inflation or defaults, so maybe it’s a good time to start thinking about how to separate utilities from money.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#103

Post by nancybelowzero »

nickpp wrote: post #83
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thank-you for making the point that utilities should be socialized and not a profit center. EVERYBODY deserves clean water, electricity, housing and food.

Without profit there is no reason anybody will provide those. Countries that tried socializing food - starved. Capitalism is the only one that brought plenty - because there is an incentive to do so.

It certainly brought plenty to some people, didn't it? Other people still get nothing.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#104

Post by bayindirh »

nickpp wrote: post #83
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thank-you for making the point that utilities should be socialized and not a profit center. EVERYBODY deserves clean water, electricity, housing and food.

Without profit there is no reason anybody will provide those. Countries that tried socializing food - starved. Capitalism is the only one that brought plenty - because there is an incentive to do so.

    Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
    -- John Maynard Keynes.
I think he's onto something as I see the lengths Boing, Intel, FAANG, et. al going to benefit us all everyday...

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#105

Post by bryanlarsen »

atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

Fission is a bad complement for solar power. A good complement for solar provides dispatchable fill-in-the-gaps type of power. However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement.

You can get to 100% carbon free by using a combination of overprovisioning, source diversity, geographic diversity, storage and statistics. You can't get to 100% but you can get to an arbitrary number of nines and say "good enough". The grid is only 99.99% reliable so having generation be better than that has little value.

If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid you choose something the opposite of nuclear: something cheap to build but expensive to fuel. For example, synthetic natural gas. The cost of the fuel has little relevance when it only has a duty cycle of 0.1%. And they're cheap to build and likely don't even need building because we already have lots of them.

China built a lot of nuclear reactors in the 2010's, but is slowing their build rate. 10GW/year of nuclear power is not very impressive in a country that built 100GW of solar in the first half of 2024.

That being said, I still support restarting TMI. The main costs of nuclear are in building and decomissioning them. We've already incurred the cost of building TMI and we're already on the hook for decomissioning it, so running it is likely cost-effective once you remove the sunk costs.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#106

Post by edmundsauto »

greenthrow wrote: post #79
atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

This is nonsense. If you're going to cite arbitrary "N+1 days of bad weather" then I can cite "N+1 severe natural disasters" where the nuclear reactor is engineered to withstand N. And unlike the theoretical "disaster" due to extended bad weather taking renewables down, this has actually happened in recent memory with Fukushima. And this was a true disaster, not just a power outage. Nuclear is not safe. Every time pr…

To be fair, the unsafe designs are all 50 years old because of FUD from incidents that are also generally pretty old. I’m not sure it’s comparable to modern designs - this isn’t a “new iPhone every year” deal.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#107

Post by bryanlarsen »

himinlomax wrote: post #96
jakewins wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage s…

> I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” Something close to that happens almost every year in Europe. Last year there was nearly 3 weeks in winter where there was very little wind across the continent (<20% capacity production on all wind farms), and obviously little to no solar (high latitudes).

Spain isn't part of Europe? It's sunny in the winter.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#108

Post by qwytw »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #74
akamaka wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you didn’t mention is the effect that renewables have on the cost of nuclear power. When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop. Because nuclear power has high up front costs, its economics are increasingly eroded as more renewables and batteries are added to the grid. You’re totally correct that renewables and batteries…

And thank-you for making the point that utilities should be socialized and not a profit center. EVERYBODY deserves clean water, electricity, housing and food.

Residential users make up ~38% of the electricity market in the US.

Where do you suggest the rest of the users should get power from? And how would that work exactly in reality?

Even of the government had to ensure that everyone has access to affordable electricity they'd still have to buy it from someone which fundamentally doesn't change anything.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#109

Post by qwytw »

baq wrote: post #102
nickpp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without profit there is no reason anybody will provide those. Countries that tried socializing food - starved. Capitalism is the only one that brought plenty - because there is an incentive to do so.

Profit is… not fake, but fiat. Energy and clean water are real. With collapsing demographics the current economic system will fall over anyway, either due to inflation or defaults, so maybe it’s a good time to start thinking about how to separate utilities from money.

> how to separate utilities from money

Forced labour? Central planning? Requisition? How exactly would that work? Somebody still needs to build and operate those power plants.

Also commercial and industrial users consume >60% of all electricity in the US, should they also be subsidized? Or subsidize residential users?

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#110

Post by CuriousCosmic »

atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

You don't need battery farms to make renewables viable in the US. What you need is to replace the AC grid interconnect system in the US with a HVDC super grid system.

The key difference here is that HVDC is exceedingly efficient in energy transfer and has effectively negligible losses compared to AC over distance.

The US is big enough that any impact from weather should basically average out over that distance.

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