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The Nuclear Option

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Re: The Nuclear Option

#141

Post by acidburnNSA »

forkandwait wrote: post #117
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…

I have heard that France standardized it's nuclear design, and has been very successful with that. Not exactly COTS, but not like starting over each time either.

So has Korea and for a time, Japan. That is absolutely key and has led me to promote the idea of open source nuclear reactor design.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#142

Post by 666lumberjack »

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.

There's nothing in principle preventing private companies from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and storing what remains in long-term underground storage. It's just illegal for them to do the reprocessing and too politically unpopular for any local government to consent to having a storage facility built on land it manages.

It's misleading to refer to a 'magic government solution' as though the nuclear industry is expecting the government to invent a magic wand that will disappear spent fuel with a flourish of the hand.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#143

Post by PavlikPaja »

666lumberjack wrote: post #132
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 doe…

There are no other resources depletable in the same sense - even if you burn coal or oil, equivalent resources can be synthesized. The rest is usualy not depleted in the literal sense, only put into use and may need to be recycled to be used elsewhere. But the elements used in nuclear fuel are completely destroyed in the process and there may be no easy way to recreate them.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#144

Post by marcosdumay »

Johnny555 wrote: post #6
skybrian wrote: post #4

Given the construction costs, the case for keeping existing, already paid-for nuclear plants open seems a lot stronger than building new plants that won't pay for themselves for decades. Who knows what the electricity market will look like then? Solar and wind infrastructure is now mass-produced and competition is driving costs down. It's unclear what forms of energy storage will win, but I would expect it to be comp…

Except that's why we have so many power plants based 1950's era designs instead of safer, more modern plants.

Just 15 years ago the outlook was completely different, and investing in nuclear made way more sense than in unobtanium cheap renewables. Thus it can not explain why people stopped investing in nuclear 70 years ago.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#145

Post by marcosdumay »

lsfanwetew233 wrote: post #111

As far as I can tell every top level comment in this thread claiming that Nuclear is more expensive than wind/solar is simply wrong. -- First of all, complaints about the capex of nuclear make little sense if you are trying to argue for wind/solar; as the only reason you could plausibly make a case that solar/wind enjoy a comparable marginal levelized cost as fossil fuels is assuming that the cost of capital is insan…

> First of all, complaints about the capex of nuclear make little sense if you are trying to argue for wind/solar;

I'm having a hard time making sense of this claim. You compare the costs of wind/solar to nuclear basically by capex only, why does the cost of capital even matters? Why what relation do fossil fuels beating them on under developed countries change how one compares to the other?

Re: The Nuclear Option

#146

Post by 666lumberjack »

olau wrote: post #138
666lumberjack wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Renewables aren't any better at load following than current nuclear technology, and unlike nuclear energy there's no potential for the development of proposed designs that do have load-following capability. Never mind the fact that intermittent renewables themselves are the reason the 'mostly base load with some load following' model is obsolete, precisely because they can't be relied upon to generate electricity on demand.

Denmark is definitely the poster child of wind energy (and intermittent renewables in general), but it benefits enormously from utilizing the existing pumped hydro storage of Sweden and Norway, which is an option the vast majority of countries don't have. The economics would look at lot worse if they were having the build out batteries to provide that storage capacity instead of taking advantage of what's already there.

Just saying 'you need to have a firm grip on leaks' is trivializing a significant engineering problem. Existing natural gas plants have a 1-9% leak rate, and given than leaking fuel is a complete waste of money we can safely assume that doing better than that is non-trivial. Given that in the case of carbon-neutral 'synthetic' methane you have the possibility of leaks at the manufacturing plant as well as in transmission/storage, it's reasonable to expect a figure closer to the higher end of that spectrum, which makes lifetime emissions from Wind/Solar sources significantly worse than Nuclear on a per-GWh basis.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#147

Post by michaelt »

pfdietz wrote: post #130
michaelt wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason politicians don't back nuclear is because of the way our political system operates. A politician might believe our nation will need more power plants within the next 20 years. But they're incentivised to do the thing that, relatively, will be best for their near-term re-election prospects. And just think of all the things that are better for their re-election prospects than a nuclear power plant in their c…

No, the reason nuclear is shunned is largely one of cost. Rate payers don't want higher rates. Nuclear has led to huge financial risk displaced to the rate payers, and they don't like it. And they let their politicians know they don't like it.

Well, I think there's more than one reason, corresponding to the multiple points in the posts by trimbo and 205guy.

And one of those reasons is political, independent of finance. I agree other reasons are financial.

The reason I think there are political reasons independent of the financial is because I've seen politicians oppose waste incinerators and windfarms in the face of local opposition, even though they were entirely privately financed.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#148

Post by xythum »

kijin wrote: post #75
sasavilic wrote: post #73

One thing we always keep forgetting: spent nuclear fuel, which is highly radioactive. It has to be kept safe for years and somehow I don't this is really calculated into price of nuclear electricity. But if we had a reactor that wouldn't have issue with highly radioactive waste, then it would be a different story.

Keeping radioactive waste far away from anyone who might be harmed by it, even for thousands of years, is a solved problem. We know how to bury stuff deep underground in a geologically stable region. Or if you prefer, throw it in a subduction zone. As with most things nuclear-related, the real problem is NIMBY. If a country as large and sparsely populated as the U.S. can't agree on a place to bury nuclear waste, ther…

Would this not become more of an issue if nuclear actually was embraced on a global scale? I mean, eventually we would run out of safe storage - the question would then be whether that would be in 20, 50, 100 years (and whether some better option would exist by then).

Disclaimer - I have no idea of the numbers involved so aware this may be a ridiculously trivial issue

Re: The Nuclear Option

#149

Post by 666lumberjack »

PavlikPaja wrote: post #143
666lumberjack wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doe…

There are no other resources depletable in the same sense - even if you burn coal or oil, equivalent resources can be synthesized. The rest is usualy not depleted in the literal sense, only put into use and may need to be recycled to be used elsewhere. But the elements used in nuclear fuel are completely destroyed in the process and there may be no easy way to recreate them.

Uranium and Thorium could be produced by nuclear transmutation in the event we discover some miraculous property they have ten thousand years from now. This is non-trivial, but it's essentially the process used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons and we managed to get pretty good at that.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#150

Post by kijin »

xythum wrote: post #148
kijin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping radioactive waste far away from anyone who might be harmed by it, even for thousands of years, is a solved problem. We know how to bury stuff deep underground in a geologically stable region. Or if you prefer, throw it in a subduction zone. As with most things nuclear-related, the real problem is NIMBY. If a country as large and sparsely populated as the U.S. can't agree on a place to bury nuclear waste, ther…

Would this not become more of an issue if nuclear actually was embraced on a global scale? I mean, eventually we would run out of safe storage - the question would then be whether that would be in 20, 50, 100 years (and whether some better option would exist by then). Disclaimer - I have no idea of the numbers involved so aware this may be a ridiculously trivial issue

One of the reasons we're producing so much radioactive waste is that we're too scared to reprocess spent fuel.

There's a lot of fissionable material remaining in the "spent" fuel that can be recovered, enriched, and thrown back into a reactor. The more cycles you put it through, the less waste you'll end up with. But the same process can also be used to make bombs, so we force everyone to keep the spent fuel in a bunker or something.

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