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The Nuclear Option

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Re: The Nuclear Option

#151

Post by gmac »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #133
gmac wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. The amount of land or sea, which latter makes for a dearer installation but is much easier to find in densely populated countries like the UK.

2. My understanding is that, sure, you can't have a grid that runs purely on wind, but you can go a lot higher than we currently do without much trouble. The issue with massive new nuclear is that outages can take a sizeable percentage of your generation off-grid unexpectedly at a moment's notice (Hinkley will I believe represent 7% of UK grid capacity), which in a sense is a worse intermittency problem than you get with renewables (which tend to ramp up and down more smoothly and broadly in line with weather forecasts). Also, battery storage can help.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#152

Post by dv_dt »

rurounijones wrote: post #20
dv_dt wrote: post #18

Just about every builder and operator of large nuclear fleets of reactors have all outright said or implied by their actions that nuclear is uneconomical vs renewable power options. The massive bulge of capital and scheduling needed points to humans not being able to build a next generation of nuclear plants in time to head off the worst climate change, and renewable energy sources being both faster and cheaper to bu…

I can get the "We cannot build them in time" part but the whole "It is not economical to build them" strikes me as a pretty crazy position to take. Uneconomical compared to the massive disruption that climate change will bring to our civilization? Are we fighting to save our future or not? Discarding a proven technology that will massively reduce our carbon emission for an unproven "We still have problems to solve ar…

> "It is not economical to build them" strikes me as a pretty crazy position to take.

Why, no matter what resources you allocate financially, if you have X dollars, you can do more and sooner with X building renewable sources than if you split it between renewables and nuclear.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#153

Post by dv_dt »

rurounijones wrote: post #50
darkmarmot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have a very simple large-scale storage system that's already in use across the world: pumping water uphill. It's just not as economical as rain when you factor in the efficiency losses from generating and transferring power twice.

And pumping water uphill is a regional solution that requires specific regional geography, to me that does not class as "scalable". I should be more specific in that to me "scalable" is a solution that can be deployed anywhere without require specific regional properties. Maybe you think this is unneeded and that a lot of region specific solutions can cover the storage requirements. However another posted did point o…

Nuclear power plants are also regional solutions that requires specific geography....

Re: The Nuclear Option

#154

Post by toomuchtodo »

kortilla wrote: post #100
toomuchtodo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is stopping anyone from building modern nuclear reactors except debt markets and utilities. The problem is that no one wants them (compared to other generation technologies). Timoth3y in another thread explains it extensively: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19168057

That’s wrong. Debt markets are reflecting the risks of the plants being stopped by orgs like the NRC, etc. The debt markets don’t favor it precisely because so many different parties can block new builds.

I disagree with your assertion. It's simply time value of money. As an investor, you don't want to wait decades for a higher risk low return that may never materialize, or the bond defaults entirely because your nuclear plant is shuttered for safety or political reasons. Could government insure the bond? Yes! But then they're subsidizing nuclear when that money could go into renewables and storage.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#155

Post by philipkglass »

jessaustin wrote: post #118
jabl wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) We can (and should!) build multiple plants in parallel. The sooner we start the better. 2) Countries like South Korea manage to build nuclear plants in around 4 years or so. The secret is that they have standardized on a design, and are building it again and again. There is hope that SMR's will make it easier to produce plants on time and budget, but those are still some years off. 3) Compare how the carbon emissi…

If that is actually true, then we should just hire the South Koreans to build some power plants for us. If that experiment actually produces safe functioning USA-located power plants within budgeted costs, then we can worry about Americans learning to build similar plants.

The South Koreans only build reactors that fast when building in South Korea.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...

Barakah 1, built in the UAE by South Korea, was originally supposed to take 5 years, operating in 2017. It has been delayed a couple of times. Bad news from December 2018:

"Cracks found in containment building of UAE nuclear power plant built by S. Korean companies"

http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_internation...

It may still start in 2019. We'll see. But we're already at nearly 7 years.

Also, "countries like South Korea" is a club consisting of South Korea and nobody else. Other countries touted for their continued embrace of nuclear power, like Russia, China, and France, don't build reactors that quickly. If you want information right from the source, use the IAEA's Power Reactor Information System and look at the time between construction start and first grid connection for commercially operating reactors.

Here's France:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

Their newest commercially operating reactor Civaux 2 took 8 years between construction start and grid connection. They have another, Flamanville 3, that will be newer when/if completed, but it has been under construction for 11 years.

Russia:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

Latest commercially operating reactor Leningrad 2-1 took 9 years.

China:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

Newest commercial reactor Hayiang-2 took 8 years.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#156

Post by philipkglass »

JackPoach wrote: post #106

There's just no way nuclear is making a come back until the economic issues are resolved. Almost all nuclear projects are over budget and over time by 2x or 3x, except for plants built in/by Russia, India, China

As I mentioned in another comment, China and Russia don't build reactors all that quickly. Their newest commercially operating reactors Hayiang-2 and Leningrad 2-1 took 8 and 9 years respectively.

India is slower yet. Their newest reactor Kudankulum-2 took 14 years to build:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....

Could the US build a reactor in 14 years like India does? I think so, even with my currently-low opinion of the industry's ability to plan. But I also don't see how to guarantee institutional support that lasts 14 years. Neither utilities nor politicians have the tools or incentives to support something that takes that long to gestate.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#157

Post by dv_dt »

pdonis wrote: post #67
dv_dt wrote: post #18

Just about every builder and operator of large nuclear fleets of reactors have all outright said or implied by their actions that nuclear is uneconomical vs renewable power options. The massive bulge of capital and scheduling needed points to humans not being able to build a next generation of nuclear plants in time to head off the worst climate change, and renewable energy sources being both faster and cheaper to bu…

None of this has anything to do with technical problems with building nuclear reactors. The US Navy has been hiring private contractors to build them for decades with no such issues. (And Naval reactors have more stringent requirements than commercial ones, because of the widely varying loads they have to deal with.) The so-called "cost savings" in France are due to unrealistically optimistic assumptions about renewa…

Navy reactors have completely different design parameters, one of which is the use weapons grade fuel...

Re: The Nuclear Option

#158

Post by AnthonyMouse »

olau wrote: post #136
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

This is all inherently speculation. If you assume the current cost trends continue, maybe everything is fine. But what happens if you scale production by a factor of fifty or more? Do raw materials prices for things like lithium or rare earth metals go up due to demand? Do average operating costs rise once the most cost effective installation sites are already occupied and the low hanging fruit has been picked in general? Are we analyzing numbers from existing installations that have selection bias in favor of factors that the remaining sites don't have, e.g. lower vs. higher population density?

Doing a long-term analysis on something with this level of complexity inherently has large error bars. Even if "everything will be alright" is a likely result, we still need to address the non-negligible probability that it isn't.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#159

Post by pdonis »

bogle wrote: post #93
pdonis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess that opinion comes down to whether you think Climate Change is an existential threat to our civilisation or not. Not necessarily. I don't think climate change is an existential threat to our civilization; human civilization has already dealt with problems much bigger than the average temperature going up by a couple of degrees and sea level rising a couple of feet. (Personally, I think the biggest existenti…

> already dealt with problems much bigger than the average temperature going up by a couple of degrees and sea level rising a couple of feet With respect, I think you may be underselling the effects! The chaotic knock-on of species loss; water pressures causing human migration; a loss of half of the ice on the third pole (the Himalayas) that provides water to over a billion people; acidification of the oceans. We cou…

> this isn't anything at all like the previous crises in our brief 60k year sojourn

We do not know that this is true. Alarmists claim it, but they have no evidence to back it up. For example, we don't know what the ice in the Himalayas was like, say, 6000 years ago. We do know that as glaciers are retreating now, they are uncovering evidence of human habitation in many mountain areas, which is evidence that there have been previous warm periods where there was no ice there as well. That is evidence against the claim you are making. But you don't hear about that from alarmists.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#160

Post by pfdietz »

tjpnz wrote: post #3
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

We need nuclear. Not only is a reliable carbon-free source of nuclear energy, even if wind and solar continue to develop where they provide all the power for day to day use, we can use the excess energy generated to drive CO2 removal from the atmosphere. It is seeming less likely that we able to change course in time such that just stopping carbon emissions prevents disaster. We will likely also need to actively remo…

It's our best chance going forward (short of Fusion) but how do you go about calming people who are quite rightfully scared by it? I live in Japan which has a long history with nuclear but after Fukushima people take to the streets whenever a nuclear plant comes (or is announced to come) back online. If a country like Japan can still screw nuclear up so monumentally I don't hold out much hope for the rest of the worl…

"Fusion" and "best chance" don't belong in the same room, never mind the same sentence. "No chance" or "fat chance", on the other hand...
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