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Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

reuters.com

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

#131

Post by berkes »

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…

No.

An energy mix is the answer.

One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build.

Nuclear plants that already run, often take days, some even weeks to adjust significant: so if on monday the wind stops blowing, on tuesday it gets cloudy, and on tuesday afternoon everyone needs to charge their EV or fire up the AC, it'll often take until next week friday before a nuclear plant can deliver this. Modern plants are faster, and theres many "hacks" where energy is blown out (wasted) for short peaks down, or where there's always 10% wasted for short peaks up.

So nuclear needs innovation. But most of all, needs to be "just a piece of the puzzle" and never the only piece.

Nuclear fission, and other of this "innovation" isn't there. That's the other slow part of nuclear. Even if its production ready today, that plant won't run for another decade, often 20+ years (except china, which tells you the reason why it's so rediculous slow: NIMBY, regulations, democracy)

So, sorry, aside from all the other (fictive) problems with nuclear (waste, risk etc), nuclear has a serious problem of being just too damn slow to solve *todays* energy crisis on its own.

Edit: Source, I've interned in power plants. A comparable coal plant, took one and a half month to power up from zero to producing electricity: which happened every 5 years for revision and three months to power down. It could adjust 10% in a few hours, but everything over 30% needed week(s) of planning ahead. I made those plannings.

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

#132

Post by qwytw »

bayindirh wrote: post #122
qwytw wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they did overall, throughout their entire existence, didn't they?

There are so few corporations which build things to better the world and make money in the process. 99% of the corporations build things to earn money. Their wares sometimes do no harm, but it's the exception. In many cases, the desire for money, not the need, is the driving force behind the technology. See n startups which are discussed here and categorized as "this is better as X. they're just trying to earn money…

> Their wares sometimes do no harm, but it's the exception.

I disagree with that to a very extreme degree (also it's a very silly thing to say unless you don't see any value in computers, smartphones, planes, automobiles, washing machines, fridges and other appliances).

The things you listed are generally the exceptions. Also the question is whether society/people benefited from VW, Exxon, DuPont etc. to such an extent that it outweighed all of those things?

Of course it's relative, if we value access to cheap and effective transportation, synthetic clothing, various plastic products etc. more than we care about all the negative externalities that's what we get... It's all down to incentives, corporations are inherently neither good nor evil.

> to earn more money. The products we get are side effects of it.

I agree that's true on the whole. But that's why humans do anything at all (replace money with other tangible or intangible benefits). Absolute altruism doesn't scale and isn't in any way sustainable.

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

#133

Post by mpweiher »

pjc50 wrote: post #82
closewith wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather. Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.

> Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.

Not the same scenario. First, France came through this just fine.

Second, the could have kept those plants operating and taken a more piecemeal approach to fixing the cracks. They shouldn't have, and didn't, because you really want that triple or quadruple redundancy in your cooling systems, but they could have if push had come to shove, the plants were still operational.

But since there was plenty of capacity available, they could afford to take those plants offline and do the checks and repairs all at once.

Intermittent renewables afford you no such optionality.

If the sun don't shine, the sun don't shine.

If the wind don't blow, the wind don't blow.

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

#135

Post by mpweiher »

RandomLensman wrote: post #87
closewith wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather. Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.

Practically, a lot of nuclear power plants can be down at the same time for maintenance etc., so you need to overbuild quite a bit there as well then

No. Nuclear power plants are super reliable and available.

German und US plants had/have capacity factors of well over 90%, and the downtimes are scheduled.

The "overbuild" is minimal.

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

#136

Post by mpweiher »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #107
himinlomax wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Was Spain immune?

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

#137

Post by jgtrosh »

berkes wrote: post #131
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…

No. An energy mix is the answer. One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build. Nuclear plants that already run, often take days, some even weeks to adjust significant: so if on monday the wind stops blowing, on tuesday it gets cloudy, a…

> > Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy.

> No.

> An energy mix is the answer.

Maybe that “No.” was unnecessary.

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

#138

Post by mpweiher »

fergonco wrote: post #19
1970-01-01 wrote: post #14

More nuclear is a good thing. FAANG nuclear is even better, because they will be be ready and equipped to push back the insane NIMBY crowd(s) and also don't need to be worried about getting reelected.

How are nimby crowds insane? Accidents may happen. And did happen in the past in that same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

What were the effects of the TMI accident, in your opinion?

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

#139

Post by RandomLensman »

mpweiher wrote: post #135
RandomLensman wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically, a lot of nuclear power plants can be down at the same time for maintenance etc., so you need to overbuild quite a bit there as well then

No. Nuclear power plants are super reliable and available. German und US plants had/have capacity factors of well over 90%, and the downtimes are scheduled . The "overbuild" is minimal.

France in 2022 didn't have a lot of capacity down at the same time? Availability was at 40% of maximum capacity for about a month at it's lowest.

How these things will be managed in the real world matters, too, not just how it could play out hypothetically.

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

#140

Post by mpweiher »

rgmerk wrote: post #16

Hmmm. 50 years old and out of action for half a decade. That’s going to require a lot of work to persuade the NRC it’s safe to operate. Given how difficult it’s proven to build new nuclear around the world, what are the odds of this recommissioning being on time and budget?

It turns out that nuclear is easy to build around the world.

Average construction times have been more or less constant the last five decades and are currently at 6.5 years (trend: slightly falling). Median (typical) time is lower.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...

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