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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

#161

Post by locallost »

Georgelemental wrote: post #50
locallost wrote: post #27

The article starts by praising the French nuclear program in the 70s. Yet, that same nuclear program is currently going through a complete debacle, failing to provide for its own country's needs, and is partially the reason prices are going into the stratosphere on the whole continent. If you can't factor in the reality of what is actually happening as we speak as a potential risk for your analysis, well... The Frenc…

France's nuclear plants are failing to provide for the country's needs because incompetent politicians shut down perfectly functional plants like Fessenheim, and in general refused to invest to maintain the system and preserve expertise. French nuclear didn't fail on its own merits, it was sabotaged.

That's a stretch considering how many of them are out currently. Things either work or they don't. There are always growing pains, but nuclear has had way over 50 years and it hasn't worked.

I listened to parts of the recent John Carmack interview, and he touched on nuclear and it was the first time I heard somebody pro nuclear say something sensible on the topic. He said, based on everything he knows, it shouldn't be as expensive as it is and there just needs to be someone like Musk with SpaceX to make a business case. I neither agree not disagree because I don't know, but at least the faith in it is based on something, it acknowledges it doesn't work right now, but here is what needs to happen. All the rest are pretty much like this article, nuclear is the only option because it is, and that's it, move along. That doesn't cut it.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#162

Post by ch4s3 »

pfdietz wrote: post #112
ch4s3 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thinking boils down to this question. What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out? Batteries may reach some practical limits and not end up being feasible for global grid scale storage. Would we rather live in a world where we grind out building more nuclear capacity, one with rolling blackouts in the OECD, or runaway climate change?

> What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out? The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all. So, it's just a financial risk. If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised (for example, in the estimates used to compare renewable…

> The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all.

Smart grid tech could easily fail to be able to deal with the complexity of balancing lots of dynamic demand and output. It could simply be too hard to do that with software in real time needing to react to signals over a great distance in real time.

As for batteries, they could be too expensive, clusters large enough for over night power could be dangerously fire prone, or we could have problems with lithium supply/recycling/disposal.

>If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised

Yes, of course it might be. But it may turn out to be much cheaper if we settle on a few well understood designs and stamp them out largely in factories. I'm not advocating for going all in, just getting the ball rolling as a contingency.

If renewables live up to their promise and batteries deliver in the next 10 years then I'll be celebrating along with everyone else. However I think it makes some sense to build some new nuclear plant designs now just in case renewables and batteries take longer to mature than expected.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#163

Post by epistasis »

eric-hu wrote: post #156
epistasis wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I request a citation that it was a major cause of Texas' power outage, because looking at this graph, there is a step-down in nuclear generation on Feb 15th from 5 to 4 gw, but that's smaller than the step-downs in natural gas (-15 gw), coal (-5 gw) and wind (-5 gw). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#/media...

I believe those numbers are correct. Perhaps "major" is a subjective position, but an unexpected drop of 20% is quite major, IMHO.

Whereas wind was expected to drop in output, because wind is intermittent, and any primarily renewables based grid will have large overages of generation capacity to account for that. (Just as we currently have large overages in capacity for traditional generators).

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#164

Post by frozencell »

mcronce wrote: post #22
jonnybgood wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada has 3 out of 4 currently operating nuclear plants in Ontario. France has them scattered throughout the country. I believe that’s why Ontario is specifically mentioned.

Ontario is also twice the size of France and 1/4 the population; they're at least in the same order of magnitude. I'd call it a reasonable comparison.

> Ontario is also twice the size of France

You certainly mean Metropolitan France*. France is at least 10 times the size of Ontario.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#165

Post by fi358 »

askvictor wrote: post #147
fi358 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Perhaps in theory, although transmission losses would be large. But I wouldn't want to be on the mercy of distant countries, perhaps on different continent, for getting energy, especially during winter. And as there are other possibilities than solar energy, I don't see why to go for solar energy instead of the other alternatives.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#166

Post by pyuser583 »

pintxo wrote: post #19

I am curious, was there ever a time were insurance companies did offer risk insurance for nuclear power plants? If not, then nuclear has been killed by it's risk profile.

Working for an insurance company, I feel really uncomfortable with that.

Insurance prefers short policy durations: a year long, preferably.

Anything longer and the level of uncertainty becomes massive.

For an oil well, a year long policy is fine. Nuclear requires decades.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#167

Post by bluejekyll »

pdonis wrote: post #145
bluejekyll wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incre…

>> 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.

No, I mean the new ones you mention, people will make mistakes building the new ones, including the failsafes, regardless of the physics.

> Nuclear reactors of course require regular maintenance, like any large industrial plant, but those costs alone are not a significant impact.

It's not the cost I'm responding to, but more the idea that human error will be entirely removed. People will be responsible for that maintenance, they will screw it up.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#168

Post by epistasis »

jwie wrote: post #148
SECProto wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lac…

Military reactors are different from civilian reactors in at least two ways: 1) military fuel would not be allowed in civilian hands, and 2) military reactors have essentially an infinite budget, and have few economic constraints.

The challenges of using military reactors in other settings go far beyond questions of "political will"

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#169

Post by pyuser583 »

jmyeet wrote: post #13

I'm familiar with the argument that nuclear power is the answer to greenhouse gas emissions. Still, this article is the next level of pro-nuclear propaganda as it launches into quite the anti-environmentalist screed. For example: > The postwar American environmental movement began as an outgrowth from the eugenaics movement. and > Having fallen out of favor during World War II due to its associations with Nazism, eug…

The argument against Chernobyl is Deepwater Horizon.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#170

Post by Schroedingersat »

WalterBright wrote: post #11

Effective CO2 reduction can only happen if a sensible and effective policy is taken, to wit: 1. a tax on the carbon content of fuels 2. nuclear plants for base load power and the rest will be taken care of by natural market forces. Green energy will never be practical without nuclear power: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-...

Just do the first one. No need to force the issue. If nuclear is amazing as claimed it will be adopted. If the claims are the same empty ones we've heard for 70 years then we'll get some electrolyzers and gas turbines running green ammonia
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