Fusion - yes, fission - no. Edit: the cost evolution of fission already points against it, any nuclear bet should therefore be on fusion, not fission.
We should bet on the technology that always 20 years in the future?
Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes
171–180 of 568 posts
Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes
#172Nuclear power can be an answer, but it's not flexible enough to be the answer. The demand for power is variable, and the difference between base demand and peak demand can be 2x or even 2.5x. While nuclear power can be viable for satisfying the base demand, it's viability for the variable part is another question. Then there are cheap renewables. If you don't constrain the market artificially, it tends to build solar…
There are many, many industries that could benefit from electricity being “too cheap to meter” that could suck up the excess production.
Maybe they train GPT-25 only when the demand is low enough the power producers basically give it away?
Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable supplies which massively increases their cost. When you have periods of Dunkelflaute you potentially need to have full grid redundancy either through inter-connects, other energy generation sources or battery backup, none of which are cheap.
>Of course and that needs to be factored into renewable supplies which massively increases their cost. It is and it does but being 5x cheaper means even a massive increase in cost still doesnt put it in the same league as nuclear power.
To cover the drop in generation for the night of April 15, even 400% wind capacity would not be enough.
It was a rather regular, quiet, night in a nation of 80 million people in the middle of Europe. Which means that it was a quiet night across much of Europe.
Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes
#174Question(s) to the nuclear supporters here: 1. Are you talking about global electricity? Or just the West? 2. How much nuclear power do you want? 20%, 50%, 70%, or 100%? Or something else? 3. What nuclear technology? Traditional, Molten Salt, SMRs, or something else? 4. What institutional setting do you image for your nuclear power plants? Private ownership, or nationalized plants like in France? Just curious...
1. Yes! 2. Just some more than we have now. 3. Yes! 4. Yes! Seriously though, I just want some reactor construction to spin up with non ancient reactor designs, to replace some fossil fuel plants. PBR[1] sounds good to me... but what do I know? There are experts who can decide this. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
In the US we're replacing nuclear plants with renewables at a 6:1 ratio.
The only people who think we need more nuclear power plants is the nuclear power industry and the politicians they're heavily lobbying to stay relevant.
Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes
#175> Only nuclear power is carbon-free [...] You can stop reading right there as this immediately identifies this piece as disingenuous at best, more likely though propaganda. The whole process is definitely not "carbon-free". Uranium extraction, transport and processing produce emissions. Building the plants and maintaining them does. Eventually demolishing does. Transporting the used fuel as well as building and maint…
> The whole process is definitely not "carbon-free". How do you think those windmill parts and solar panels get from the manufacturers to the end users? I personally don’t see solar and wind able to provide enough energy to electrify an entire nation’s fleet of freight haulers. Nuclear, maybe — assuming they build a bunch of little plants so a truck can “refuel” in the middle Wyoming away from large populations. Mayb…
I did address your first remark in the end of my comment:
> All those factors are usually brought up in detail for things like solar and wind plants. It's just disingenuous not to count them for nuclear power.
I did not talk about how much energy is provided or what to do about freight haulers.
Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why cant we have a bit of both? Because they're economically incompatible. Nuclear is very expensive to build, and wants to run 24/7 to offset costs. They also want to run continuously. The problem is that renewables are cheap, but intermittent. So take an economically rational marketplace. I can either buy the same amount of power for $1, or for $2, what do you think I'd choose? $1 of course. Power is power, I don…
The average age of nuclear plants in the US is 40 years old. I can't believe that modern nuclear plants wouldn't be dramatically more profitable. Even if they weren't, it would be worth government incentives to prevent grid destabilization as wind and solar take over as the main sources.
> I can't believe that modern nuclear plants wouldn't be dramatically more profitable.
I can.
First, nuclear doesn't always get cheaper. Chernobyl happened, how do we fix that? Containment building. That costs money. Fukushima happened, how do we fix that? Better backup plans. That costs money. Renewables skip this completely.
Second, renewables also benefit from progress, but a lot more. Solar and wind are mass industry production. Each iteration is cheap. Experimentation is cheap and safe and done all over the world. Production is highly amenable towards automation. Nuclear isn't.
So we have factories pumping out millions of solar cells, but we don't have factories pumping out millions of nuclear vessels, because nuclear plants are rare, one off projects that don't justify mass production, and are too rare to have a robust industry and lots of competition.
> Even if they weren't, it would be worth government incentives to prevent grid destabilization as wind and solar take over as the main sources.
Yeah, but there are other options that can be used. Eg, yeah, we can spend decades building nuclear and waiting until it starts to work, or we can do things like improving the grid transmission which works out to simple tasks that are doable much faster and amenable to mass production.
Same goes for say, pumped hydro and battery storage. Those things can already be done, and you can start doing it much faster than you'll get nuclear built.
Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes
#177Cue the atomic fanatics vs the renewable cult discussion. Has been discussed a thousand times on HN recently and it always seems both are just shouting how the other side can not see the obvious superiority of their fav energy source. why cant we have a bit of both? renewable seems very good long term and nuclear is also nice for transition. but I wouldnt want to live next to one of those crappy leaky french reactors…
I feel like the oil industry has astroturfed nuclear energy, and NIMBYs love it because they know there can not be any significant nuclear capacity that will come online until 2030 at the earliest. Which is my biggest problem with pro nuclear arguments.
Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes
#178> Only nuclear power is carbon-free [...] You can stop reading right there as this immediately identifies this piece as disingenuous at best, more likely though propaganda. The whole process is definitely not "carbon-free". Uranium extraction, transport and processing produce emissions. Building the plants and maintaining them does. Eventually demolishing does. Transporting the used fuel as well as building and maint…
Most pro-renewables news articles are disingenuous at best, or propaganda.
Even if that's true, it's hard to criticize while doing the same thing.
Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables. Plus renewables are extremely intermittent power sources. Nuclear solves both the land-use and consistency problems. Plus, from the article: "...to build enough wind turbines and solar panels to supply at least half the electricity needed for global consumption 'would require two billions tons of coal to produce the concrete and steel, along with two billion b…
> Soon you're going to run out of land for your renewables. No, you won't. > 'would require two billions tons of coal to produce the concrete and steel, along with two billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades. [And] more than 90% of the world’s solar panels are built in Asia on coal-heavy electrical grids.' Fantastic! The world burns that much coal every three months , so after 6 months we could close all…
Except you won't have enough solar and wind alone to generate the needs of the world's power demands. I don't get why some people like yourself are so against nuclear when combined with solar and wind its the best of both worlds? We're all in agreement that coal needs to go, but switching to just solar and wind is not the sole answer and never will be. You will run out of land at some point. No one wants to look at fields of spinning turbines and solar panel arrays when you can get the same effect in a much smaller footprint.
Re: Nuclear Power Is the Answer to Global and Environmental Energy Woes
#180It's clear that nuclear power is superior to gas, coal, wind, solar, etc. However... nuclear power plants are expensive build, they take a very long time to build, and many countries are in the process of retiring their infrastructure [0].
The vast majority of active nuclear power plants in the USA were built in the late 60s to late 70s and typically took 10 years from the initial construction before they became operational [1]. Which means that almost all of our nuclear power infrastructure in the United States is ~35 to 50 years old. Optimistically, we can only hope that most of these plants will operate until ~2040.
Given how long it takes to build a nuclear power plant we really should have been building them all throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s- but we stopped building them in the late 70s. The only nuclear power plant that I'm aware that's been built since 1978 is Plant Vogtle which started in 2013 and is expected to be finished sometime this year.
Still, there is some hope for nuclear energy into the future with the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) [2] and the recent advancements in fusion power [3].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...