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The Nuclear Option

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Re: The Nuclear Option

#131

Post by pfdietz »

gotocake wrote: post #35
i_am_proteus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the control rods were also bizarre and had graphite bottoms, so the first part of a trip (scram) was adding reactivity. Prompt critical is prompt.

I believe the rods were graphite, just like the moderators. Of course the problem with that was that by the time they were inserted the reactor was already out of control. All the graphite rods did was burn, which certainly didn’t help matters! Worse, after a while the blocks of graphite used as the moderator also burned, and was difficult to extinguish. What they needed (other than better reactor design) was a ready…

The control rods had a plug of graphite on their ends, I believe, which made reactivity briefly increase as they were first inserted.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#132

Post by 666lumberjack »

PavlikPaja wrote: post #122

I'm going to attack nuclear from an entirely new point of view: What if thorium or uranium have other, yet unknown uses? We could be burning potentially invaluable resources for relatively unimportant amounts of energy.

This argument could be applied to literally every depletable resource in existence. If utilized efficiently with reprocessing and breeder reactors the world's proven Thorium + Uranium reserves would last thousands of years, even powering 80-90% of world energy use. By that point we should be using either fusion energy or beamed power from panels in solar orbit, depending on how optimistic you are - and if uranium does turn out to have a miraculous alternative use we'll have a sufficiently developed space program to mine it from somewhere other than Earth.

I disagree with the notion that we'd be producing 'relatively unimportant amounts of energy' when we're talking about the only geography-independent near-zero-carbon energy source with the proven capability to provide base load power for an advanced economy, unless you think anthropogenic climate disruption is no big deal.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#133

Post by mcjiggerlog »

gmac wrote: post #112
gotocake wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is cost prohibitive. Really, because it’s widely employed around the world. If you have some evidence that it’s “cost prohibitive” though I’d love to see it. Evidence mind you, not flat declarations devoid of substance. Additionally, it's hard to predict and account for that one-in-a-million catastrophe that creates a nuclear wasteland. The sample size is too small. Many decades and thousands of reactor…

Nuclear power is cost prohibitive. How about: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36160368 ? For the cost to be prohibitive, it only really needs to be dearer than an alternative that's at least as good. That alternative is now wind: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948 .

Wind is not a like-for-like replacement for nuclear. The amount of land wind would need to replace just one nuclear reactor is many orders of magnitude greater.

Renewables must be supported by a reliable base-load supply, which effectively means you need to choose between either nuclear or fossil fuels.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#134

Post by TheHypnotist »

_delirium wrote: post #51
gotocake wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is cost prohibitive. Really, because it’s widely employed around the world. If you have some evidence that it’s “cost prohibitive” though I’d love to see it. Evidence mind you, not flat declarations devoid of substance. Additionally, it's hard to predict and account for that one-in-a-million catastrophe that creates a nuclear wasteland. The sample size is too small. Many decades and thousands of reactor…

A weaker statement than a flat out "nuclear power is cost prohibitive": current-gen nuclear power seems to be having serious cost problems, even in countries that previously successfully built out nuclear, and even where there is a relatively favorable political environment. Whether this is due to fundamental reasons or not is of course another question. One example is the new-generation Électricité de France EPR des…

In my locality, a glut of natural gas is putting pressure on Nuclear costs. They simply can't compete because NG is so plentiful.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#135

Post by mcjiggerlog »

audunw wrote: post #124
rurounijones wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know scalable storage for base-load is not a solved problem. Has that changed? Personally I find it hard to believe that we can live on renewabls until a european country goes 1 year completely on renewables (I guess Germany is probably the best candidate for that since they are going all-in).

This touches on an issue, that renewables don't need to be paired with base-load plants (which nuclear has traditionally been), but with load-following and peaker plants. Traditional nuclear power plants are base load plants, but any development in new nuclear plants should focus on designs that are better at load following, in order to complement rather than compete with renewables.

I agree that we should be investing in R&D, but what renewables have to be paired with is the technology that we have available to us here and now. If you want load-following energy then that means fossil fuel. If you want base-load then you have either fossil fuels or nuclear.

If we want to have any chance of meeting our climate goals then it seems like nuclear, optionally paired with renewables, is our only option.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#136

Post by olau »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #68
godelski wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think they fall into one of 2 camps: 1) They don't believe in anthropocentric climate change (probably deflecting by taking this stance) 2) They don't believe the economic destructive power of climate change. Be that by disbelief, thinking it is over stated, or just not being good at thinking about the future (which a lot of humans aren't. We're terrible at it)

There are two issues here. One is, are we currently pricing carbon appropriately? And obviously not. But if we did then it would be an economic issue -- make emitting carbon more expensive than alternatives and people would naturally gravitate to alternatives. But then we have the second issue, which is that we don't want the alternatives to be significantly more expensive than the status quo, and we may want to take…

We already know that renewables can handle the entire grid. There are plenty of papers out there exploring this matter.

What we don't know yet is exactly what particular technologies we're going to end up with, especially for the last few percentage points. Probably a mix depending on location.

The reason for we don't know it is that wind and solar costs have been falling exponentially for many years now, while short-term storage is only now heating up and long-term storage not yet really started (well, except hydro).

We know tech that can be used, we know an upper bound on the cost (not prohibitively expensive), but anyone trying to look 10-20 years out in such a rapidly developing cut-throat market are basically just guessing.

10 years ago I was thinking we'd probably have to pay somewhat more for energy, perhaps up to 50%-100%. But in 2014 the Danish energy oversight body (Energistyrelsen) did a complicated analysis that said around 5% more in Denmark. And it didn't take more than a couple of years for their projected 2030 cost of offshore wind turbines to be reached by the market, more than a decade before anticipated.

So I'm beginning to think energy is probably going to be cheaper, perhaps a lot cheaper.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#137

Post by acidburnNSA »

tomohawk wrote: post #128

This highlights the foolishness of relying on magical government solutions. Nuclear power has plenty of promise, if the waste is magically taken care of by an as yet to be implemented solution from the government. Since this solution never arrived, the waste gets stored at each nuclear plant, where it needs to be actively cooled for some period of time.

It would need to stay at the plant for a few years in any case to be cooled. Once it's cool enough for passive dry cask storage, it's also cool enough yo be shipped.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#138

Post by olau »

666lumberjack wrote: post #96
rtpg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that nuclear is unproven, it's that _renewables at this point are proven_. You can build huge (or tiny! it's super scalable) fleets of renewable energy sources pretty economically, with a ~0% chance of making surrounding areas uninhabitable for 20 years if there's a failure. Yeah sure a truckload of uranium goes a long way but building the plants is really hard even when you look past the regulatory issues.

Can you give an example of an industrialized first-world nation using Wind + Solar to provide baseload power on a consistent basis? Because if you can't then they're far from proven as anything more than a partial supplement to other energy sources. The economics of Solar/Wind get much worse as you scale past ~30% of the grid because utilization factor goes down and the need for energy storage goes way up. Right now…

That's not correct. Denmark is currently is currently at something like 45% of electricity from wind, and going past 50% in a year or two IIRC. It's not base load, because you don't need base load - it's an obsolete model from a world of capital-intensive, constant output plants. What you need is to match the demand.

Regarding long-term storage: Exactly. Tanks or caverns filled with methane generated from a renewable source is one possible solution. Of course, you need to have a firm grip on leaks.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#139

Post by acidburnNSA »

pfdietz wrote: post #123
jabl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Existing nuclear plants got as big as they are because of economies of scale. Turns out that a plant twice as big costs less than twice as much as two smaller ones. But, due to nuclear expansion faltering we build too few of these plants, and thus all of them become essentially first-of-a-kind, which tends to mean a lot of (very expensive!) delays. I also think SMR's are very promising, trying to break the cycle of e…

They also got big because of economies of scale of operation. Making a reactor smaller doesn't proportionally scale down the staff you need to operate it. This is relevant when as many as a third of reactors in the US are not even making an operating profit. SMRs will require changes to operational regulation if they are to compete.

Indeed. Many microreactors of the past like the PM3A in Antarctica were just too expensive to operate and maintain so they got replaced with oil. SMRs are great for lower capital cost but they won't just automatically be cheap to operate. The nuclear industry has to focus heavily on getting maintenance and operation costs way down. Some of that is regulatory, but lots of it is inherent.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#140

Post by acidburnNSA »

audunw wrote: post #120
niftich wrote: post #42

Some of nuclear energy's challenges get a good amount of coverage: politicians unwilling to support it, citizen opposition, and cost overruns and delays at plant currently under construction. Others, less so. And if we discount politics for a moment, the day-to-day economics of new nuclear barely pencil out. Nuclear needs immense capital expenditure vs. other types of generation. Solar gets generous subsidies and doe…

This is the most important point regarding nuclear if you ask me. If it is to have any chance at a rebound, it has to start from smaller reactors again. And it has to do be a design that's geared towards load-following rather than baseload, so that it complements renewable rather than compete with it. The focus now should be on massive investments into R&D and smaller scale developments

There are lots of people considering steam bypass, where you can shift the heat from any reactors away from the turbogenerator and into some industrial process like desalination or pulling carbon in from atmo.
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