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Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

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Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#151

Post by sunshinesnacks »

coldpie wrote: post #22
jeffbee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables with batteries are cheaper than new nuclear or even new natural gas.

Does that price include enough storage to heat the entire Twin Cities area (~4M people) for six continuous weeks of average -20C weather with overcast skies, where power failure means widespread death and property damage (broken pipes)? It might do, I don't know, but I'm skeptical. That's a lot of power! My gut feeling is a baseload solution is better for that kind of situation, though what I'm really advocating for…

You might be surprised at the rigor applied in studies like the NREL Standard Scenarios, viewable here: https://scenarioviewer.nrel.gov/. I'm guessing the Twin Cities region doesn't actually see 42 days of overcast skies, but if it does, that can be captured in these studies. And transmission is important - load in the Twin Cities area does not have to be served by generation in that area.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#152

Post by coryrc »

jeffbee wrote: post #103
coryrc wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a New Deal-type mobilization to build https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Communit... everywhere across the country. Like building the Hoover Dam, it will generate massive amounts of carbon-free energy for a long time and with a relatively short ROI. It's embarrassing parallelizable. We could be off fossil fuels for heating in fifteen years across all homes, saving thousands of dollars a house…

52 entire dwellings on 250 acres? Thanks but no. You would literally need to pave America to make this happen. 50 dwellings on one acre is at the low end of the urban density scale.

First, that's literally not even close to true about paving.

But I meant retrofit all existing housing stock with solar collectors and heat storage, neither of which require much room.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#153

Post by miguelazo »

kennend3 wrote: post #131
miguelazo wrote: post #37

So glad we finally designated the permanent repository for nuclear waste in the United State. /s Since the waste will almost certainly not be accepted by another state, I would like to know where it will be stored in Georgia. I have some guesses, based on the demographics of adjacent populations, but perhaps the many HN nuclear boosters have some specifics?

looks like we found "that guy".. the one who posts about the enormous amount of used fuel circling the globe looking for a home. There is a nuclear power plant not far from me. it went "live" in 1973 and all the spent fuel to date is still stored on site. Step 1 : sit in a pool for around 10 years Step 2 : sit in a dry canister for a few more decades. Eventually we need to find a better solution, but the fact remains…

Okay, cool. So as long as there's never a natural/man-made disaster that disturbs said pool, no problem. Good thing that would never happen in a place like Georgia.

And yeah, eventually we'll take care of it. Just like we've been saying for 50 years.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#154

Post by shrimp_emoji »

miguelazo wrote: post #153
kennend3 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks like we found "that guy".. the one who posts about the enormous amount of used fuel circling the globe looking for a home. There is a nuclear power plant not far from me. it went "live" in 1973 and all the spent fuel to date is still stored on site. Step 1 : sit in a pool for around 10 years Step 2 : sit in a dry canister for a few more decades. Eventually we need to find a better solution, but the fact remains…

Okay, cool. So as long as there's never a natural/man-made disaster that disturbs said pool, no problem. Good thing that would never happen in a place like Georgia. And yeah, eventually we'll take care of it. Just like we've been saying for 50 years.

Burning fossil fuels produces more net harm than any amount of radioactive waste ever will. Radioactivity just manages to be scarier than air pollution and climate change because our psychology doesn't map well to reality because we evolved to be afraid of fast-moving problems, not slow-moving ones.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#156

Post by onepointsixC »

woeirua wrote: post #21

How much solar could they have built for the same price? Just doing some very rough calculations, they could have built enough panels to output several times as much peak power as they can with the nuclear reactors. Even including storage costs, they still could have probably built a system with more productive capacity than the nuclear reactors. This project is almost certainly the last conventional fission reactor…

For 50 years of operation your solar plant would have had all it's panels replaced at least once and your batteries would have probably been replaced 5 times, if using todays' technology.

Solar only appears cheaper if you removed every external cost from it.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#157

Post by onepointsixC »

hefferbub wrote: post #46
coldpie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only half of a Twitter. That sounds like a joke, but honestly, it's not. $20B is absolutely nothing compared to the costs of not taking immediate action on climate change.

13 years is immediate? Let’s please not have our future depend on building giant, fragile things that are obsolete technologically and financially before they are even completed. Wind and PV have some challenges, but they get online fast. Plus they are both riding down a steep cost S-curve, so (for the foreseeable future) the more you build, the cheaper the next one gets. No one could say that about Nuclear with a st…

>13 years is immediate?

Yes. Please tell me the alternative solar or wind solution which can provide us with a carbon free grid in 13 years. There is none. You have to hand wave and pretend that maybe the next 13 years of battery technology will be fundamentally different than the past 30 years since the invention of the Lithium ion battery. Even if we had the battery solution today we don't have the global manufacturing capacity.

Solar and wind go online fast and turn stable grids into pricy unstable ones as you increase their share of production. Meanwhile Nuclear is ready, today. And if you cut down on some of the regulatory burden it could be built sooner.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#159

Post by adev_ »

jfengel wrote: post #32
coldpie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get around the fact that you need baseload and/or storage. Both are hard problems. Some locations have regional baseload solutions like hydroelectricity, but many don't. Nuclear is a solution that works anywhere, but like you say, it's expensive. Storage is similar: there are some regional solutions (pumped hydro), or a difficult and expensive general solution (chemical batteries). There's no single answer…

Gas peaker plants solve the problem, with no additional costs. We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions. At that point it would be much cheaper to look elsewhere for more improvements. There's no need to invent a reason for massive new energy infrastructure. The gas pl…

> Gas peaker plants solve the problem, with no additional costs.

> We don't have to get carbon production to zero. If we run the gas plants even as much as 10% of the time for no-sun-no-wind-flat-batteries conditions, you've still cut 90% of carbon emissions.

And now instead of paying for the expense nuclear power plant, you have to pay:

- Pay for 3x the raw capacity of the plant in solar and wind because they never run at peak capacity

- Pay for the battery for storage

- Pay for the Gas power plant that will never be cost effective because running 10% of the time.

And you still emit more CO2 than a damn nuclear power plant.

Re: Georgia nuclear plant begins splitting atoms

#160

Post by Gwypaas »

Manuel_D wrote: post #135
Gwypaas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the 20% cost reduction the last two generations lead to. That would change Flamanville 3 from exorbitantly expensive to exorbitantly expensive. The French nuclear program as a whole has had a huge negative learning curve. The more they've built and learned the more expensive they have become. Sure you can brush of 20% with a lot of money down the drain, but that does not make it in any way economical.

At the end of the day, the cost of reactors built when there was large scale serial production was considerably cheaper than they are now: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151... The "negative learning curve" both in France and in the USA happened as the pace of reactor construction slowed. The "negative learning curve" you're referring to is actually the loss of the economies of scale.

We had economies of scale in the 50s when it was the cheapest? Or was it because we had this attitude towards nuclear engineering?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core#Second_incident

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