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Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#141

Post by bobthepanda »

makeitdouble wrote: post #118
alerighi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.

Nuclear energy stays a bad fit when you factor in that it needs to combine: - sustained political will and capital - high morale (contractors and controllers need to not collude to hide flaws/cut corners/inflate prices) - excelent design and on par execution - excelent risk assesment and long term vision - stable geopolitical situation No country currently has a combination of all the above, all the nuclear plants we…

It fails at less than half the points? I’ll give you geopolitcal stability, but all the other things suck too.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#142

Post by epistasis »

eric-hu wrote: post #130
qqqwerty wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't about nuclear vs coal. It is about nuclear vs renewables. And what it really comes down to is that nuclear is really expensive and takes way too long to build. For every nuclear plant you build, we can build the exact same generation capabilities for about half the cost and it can be built in a quarter of the time[1]. That means that the renewable solution will have already mostly paid for itself before th…

From the article you quoted: > In order to replace the two nuclear plants while the sun is down, the batteries would need to replicate two 1.117 GW power sources for 16 hours. The total energy storage capacity would be 39.3 GWh, after we add an extra 10% for safe measure. Sorry, but no. This is a brittle system proposed. A 16 hour battery backup doesn't account for bad weather events like hurricanes, let alone more s…

A major cause of Texas's power outage was nuclear tripping off.

Meanwhile, massive amounts of batteries are far less brittle than the single point of failure like a nuclear reactor. Same with solar. It's the difference between building one massive mainframe and having a data center. In the data center you plan for failure, plan for individual nodes to go down, and the whole system becomes incredibly reliable because of the elimination of SPOF.

Solar and batteries distributed over a wide geographic area work fantastically, and this is a primary way that Texans will plan for their own energy security in the future, when they don't want to use fossil fuel based generators.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#143

Post by Sporktacular »

"today’s so-called environmentalists"

The nuclear industry had decades to fix its economic, safety and environmental issues but sat on its hands instead. If half of the subsidies they received over that time when into research we would have fixed the renewable storage problem a decade ago.

There is not and never will be enough uranium on this planet to completely power humanity for more than a few decades. Fission was only ever a temporary measure. Turns out "today’s so-called environmentalists" as the author disparagingly calls them, and not arrogant industrialist cheerleaders, had it right all along.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#144

Post by Manuel_D »

hef19898 wrote: post #139
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are by building power plants without cooling towers. Problem is not enough water, but because water discharged back to river is too hot.

I always liked simple answers to comokex questions like, e.g, nuclear power plant cooling. Especially when they come with pre defined scape goats.

It's not a complex question, and river temperature is not a scapegoat. It's the the explicit reason why the plants aren't operating at full capacity: https://www.powermag.com/nuclear-power-production-curtailed-....

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#145

Post by pdonis »

bluejekyll wrote: post #84
pdonis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people always seem to find new and innovative ways to f[oul] up That's why the passive safety features I referred to don't depend on people at all; they depend on the laws of physics, which are certainly more reliable than people. :-)

I assume people are still building [those things](edit: these new reactors), and I also bet they require some regular amount of maintenance.

> I assume people are still building those things

If you mean older reactor designs without the passive safety features I mentioned, I don't think the US is building much of anything.

> and I also bet they require some regular amount of maintenance.

Nuclear reactors of course require regular maintenance, like any large industrial plant, but those costs alone are not a significant impact. To the extent there are increased maintenance costs for nuclear, they are more than offset by lower fuel costs.

Operating costs in general for nuclear reactors are a significantly smaller fraction of total life cycle costs than for fossil fuels. The largest ongoing cost for a nuclear plant is usually the amortization of the initial capital investment, which is larger for nuclear because the plant has extra requirements like secondary containment and radiation shielding that aren't present in fossil fuel plants.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#146

Post by epistasis »

fi358 wrote: post #127
epistasis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what I suggested in my comment: > storage (hydro or battery), to geothermal, to advanced geothermal, to hydrogen, to ammonia storage, to who knows what will be developed over the next few decades With storage on solar thrown in as only one option at the end. And though it will probably be a dominant solution because it will be by far the cheapest most locations, it won't work everywhere. So look to other tech…

At least battery storage seems to be unrealistic solution. The needed amount of energy storage for several months is enormous and in addition to that problem, batteries tend to self-discharge. Geothermal energy and hydro storage are not without problems either. I am not sure about ammonia storage, but it would be interesting to see some calculations about the feasibility of storing so much energy by using hydro or am…

I don't understand how the Green Party could have influenced the choice of using France's EPR versus other tech. Areva designed the large EPR because larger reactors are supposed to be more cost effective than smaller reactors.

How has the Green Party dragged on the process of construction? What delays did they cause? I ask because I don't know the specific causes of all the delays, even the latest since it was first powered on. It's hard to get this info, which makes me suspicious that it's actually a third party causing the delay, because then those doing the building would be able to clearly state a great reason for the delay. Instead we are mostly left guessing st what is going on with construction.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#147

Post by askvictor »

fi358 wrote: post #90
epistasis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The climate efforts of the past 20 years refute both of these claims decisively. First, carbon taxes, when they have been enacted they have not been effective. And there are massive barriers to enacting them, because there is no constituency that advocates for them. The progress we have made with reducing emissions has been through industrial policy of various sorts, rather than through single taxes. For every proble…

At least in countries like here in Finland, you get almost no energy from solar panels during winter months. 12 hours of storage to a solar array is not going to work at least here.

Can't (isn't?) Finland's grid be connected to places where there is solar?

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#148

Post by jwie »

SECProto wrote: post #97
epistasis wrote: post #40

While this is a compelling tale of culture war in the US, I think that the culture war aspect has little to do with nuclear's failure, if anything at all. I am continually offended as I encounter people with Ehrlich's 1970s Malthusianism, but these are not the folks stopping nuclear. Look to France, which has a huge nuclear fleet. Look at what's happened at Flamanville, with a supportive population. What sort of cult…

> What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade? Nuclear plants are massive, complex, tightly regulated capital projects. These require strong project management capacity. Most Western democracies have spent decades systematically outsourcing project management to variou…

The US Navy has been training 20 year old kids to operate the things for almost 70 years. I was one of them. Westinghouse and GE build and refuel, and decommission the existing nuclear reactors in the fleet today.

It’s hard work, but we have the knowledge and workers to run these things and build them today. We still build nuclear reactors in the states, they’re just on submarines and aircraft carriers.

There’s a lack of political will to devote MIC dollars to power production, but it’s not like nobody knows how to do it.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#149

Post by bobthepanda »

Manuel_D wrote: post #140
hef19898 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how politicians are directly responsible for a Europe wide drought making it close to impissible to get enough cooling water to nuclear plants to producr anywhere near nominal capacity.

It's not a question of enough cooling water. It's a problem of how much the plant is allowed to heat the river. Because apparently keeping a stretch of river below 28*C is more important than climate change.

Not killing all the fish in a river is also generally something that should be aimed for, since that can have knock on effects on ecosystems. We’d rather not find out what happens and accidentally instigate some kind of environmental disaster that might lead to farm failures or something unexpected.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#150

Post by kemiller »

Gwypaas wrote: post #94
alerighi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy may seem expensive, because it has a big initial cost to get started, and we tend not to factor the long term effects of what we do. What is the cost of using fossil fuels? What is the cost and the damage done by climate change? An amount of money that we can't even quantify. So sure, burning coal/oil/gas may be cheap now, but it has an enormous long term cost that we just now are starting to pay.

The alternative is not fossil fuels, that's arguing a strawman, it is renewables.

It’s not a straw man, it’s the whole point, and no one is saying not to push as hard as possible on renewables too. Porque no los dos? The best part of nuclear is that it slots in for coal as base load with no other changes. If we can do that until solar+wind+storage catch up we can get to net zero faster.
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