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First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

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Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#181

Post by gggmaster »

wkat4242 wrote: post #168
chroma wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it explodes ... and what were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people every…

Human deaths aren't the only measure of safety. Pollution into the ocean from Fukushima was huge, unfortunately. Just because it's not as bad as Chernobyl (which was as worst-case as it gets) doesn't mean it's safe.

Why this is downvoted? Propaganda from Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs?

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#182

Post by nicoburns »

Manuel_D wrote: post #139
Retric wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re calculating that storage number as if the solar power plant would have produced power for 24 hours. To simplify if you have 8 hours of power and you store 1/2 of it you need 4h of storage. So our hypothetical 4GW solar power plant produces 2GW for 8 hours and 1 GW for 16. That already batter fits the demand curve than steady state output. However things get better if you instead consider real world demand and…

Again, the demand curve is the opposite of what you claim: peak production happens during the night, at around 9 pm, not during the day. You'd need to supply more energy during periods of non-production, not less. You can't get away with 50% output at night, unless you have some other energy source picking up the slack. And remember, during the winter you're getting less than 12 hours of sunlight, maybe even less tha…

Energy use for heating can be quite easily reduced just by insulating houses (and installing more efficient heating equipment such as heat pumps).

Do we have any idea what the cause of that 9pm spike is? That seems like a bizarre time to be the peak to me (I can't work out what the primary energy users would be at that time).

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#183

Post by FrustratedMonky »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #55
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't dig into details on specific of this project. But any large fixed price project I've been on, it all hinged on verbose specifications. And then any change resulted in change orders. And it becomes a pissing match of who will pay. It is rarely cut and dry.

They are power contracts, not construction contracts. The power company isn't buying a power plant, they're buying power. That's what makes the contract so much simpler.

I'll have to pass. I don't know the power industry that well.

My rule of thumb thought, is that nobody looses 17 billion. That gets passed to the consumer somewhere somehow. In someway obviously or not obviously.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#184

Post by DiscourseFan »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #79
thatswrong0 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My assumption is that rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere pose a much greater existential threat to humanity than localized ecosystem damage resulting from river blockages. But maybe I'm wrong. Speaking of hydro, I do think pumped hydro-storage ought to be looked at a lot more for energy storage (esp. versus giant lithium-ion battery banks), especially as we transition to inconsistent renewable sources like solar and…

But it isn't "localized ecosystem damage". Building dams absolutely fucking destroys the ecosystems upstream and downstream. It's the civil engineering of burning the crops when you retreat. The "new" ecosystem has nothing in common with the prior ecosystems.

I'd rather some species of fish die out than the ocean boils, personally

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#185

Post by Retric »

XorNot wrote: post #166
Retric wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re calculating that storage number as if the solar power plant would have produced power for 24 hours. To simplify if you have 8 hours of power and you store 1/2 of it you need 4h of storage. So our hypothetical 4GW solar power plant produces 2GW for 8 hours and 1 GW for 16. That already batter fits the demand curve than steady state output. However things get better if you instead consider real world demand and…

This is the Australia energy market price and demand dashboard[1]. Note the two peaks: 1 happens at 7am. There's very little solar at 7am even though the sun is up, but demand is at a maximum. The other happens at around 6pm - when people get home. There's also very little solar at 6pm (sun sets at 5pm in Winter, during the day it's longer). Also note the demand fall off in the evening: that's a very lopsided peak, b…

The better you model this the better the number look. First demand falls off a cliff from midnight to 5 am, a steady state nighttime rate will be extremely wasteful but batteries can shift demand to these peaks just fine. Remember 100% of their output is offsetting battery demand which is significant even just at 9AM or 6PM.

Also, your not actually getting 100% solar output over the day. Batteries that could store 50% of your hypothetical maximum are well over half of your expected average output especially in winter when these peaks are most pronounced.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#186

Post by pythonguython »

chroma wrote: post #50

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. Since then, no plant license that was initially submitted to the NRC has started operations. Plant Vogtle was approved by the Atomic Energy Commission (the predecessor to the NRC). Their license was grandfathered in. Building this reactor required a new reactor license (not plant license). Shortly after the reactor design was approved and construction started…

I worked with an engineer that came from the Vogtle project and he would talk about the hoops they had to jump through to get anything done. Even the most basic unassuming weld would require tons of paperwork and cooperation from a lot of people.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#187

Post by pfdietz »

belorn wrote: post #141
pfdietz wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those high points are better addressed by such things as hydrogen-burning turbines. Hydrogen produced from excess renewables during the price troughs, stored underground, then burned at the peaks. Because the capacity factor of these turbines would be low the cost of fuel would be acceptable, and their capital cost would be an order of magnitude below what a nuclear plant would cost, per unit of power output. Europe…

People are naturally allowed to invest in what ever technology they think will fit the role best, such as green hydrogen. No one is investing in that, there exist no hydrogen-burning turbines that burn green hydrogen, but someone could become the first and do that. Producers of green hydrogen are currently more interested in delivering green steel, which pays much better than hydrogen-burning turbines. The general id…

Plenty of investment is going into green hydrogen, to mature the remaining technologies (such as electrolysers and hydrogen combustors) and drive their costs down learning curves.

Note, however, that as long as your grid is still burning natural gas for power, it doesn't make much sense to burn green hydrogen on it too. Eventually the natural gas will get very expensive (CO2 charges if nothing else), but for now price spikes are short term because LNG can be brought in (this is what Europe has done after Russia shut off the gas.)

Green hydrogen is going to have to be something that is produced, because the world uses about 100 million tonnes of hydrogen a year. Ammonia is an essential commodity chemical made from hydrogen. Some 6% of current world natural gas consumption goes to making hydrogen. These markets can and will be served by green hydrogen even before hydrogen is used for grid generation, and this will serve as dispatchable demand to help smooth renewable intermittency even without hydrogen being burned for power generation. And once there are large stockpiles of green hydrogen, it will be a small step to divert some of it for backup generation.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#188

Post by weaksauce »

elihu wrote: post #134
weaksauce wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also pumped hydro and other gravity batteries pumped hydro is not a winner. the locations that could be used are few and far between and require massive amounts of water and wreak ecological nightmare on a wide area.

Pumped hydro can work anywhere that has hills. It's just a lot cheaper in some locations than others, due to favorable geography. Water use just has to keep up with evaporation on average. I'm not sure why building a reservoir needs to be an "ecological nightnmare" except in the sense that it's a sudden change to an environment.

I was lumping dam infrastructure into the "other gravity batteries" which does cause ecological nightmare situations. if they only meant the fringe gravity batteries like block elevators and the like then it's not as bad a thing but you still require a large amount of fresh water which is an issue in a lot of places too.

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#189

Post by cauch »

jychang wrote: post #178
cauch wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of nuclear plants is so small that any example is statistically anecdotical. Yes, Fukushima did not kill much. Is it because the nuclear is in itself super safe, or is it because we were lucky? We would need ~100 Fukushima before even having a rough estimation. I think risk cannot be counted as "number of deaths", but as "capacity of losing control". Cars and cows kill a lot of humans. Yet, their risks are…

Nuclear plants produce 68% of the energy in France. If that’s not statistically relevant, doubling the number wouldn’t be statistically relevant either. For that matter, even in the USA, nuclear power produces about 10% of all electricity. Multiply that by 10 and that’s the entire population as a sample.

That's not at all the point.

Imagine the following game: you throw three dices. If the three dices are not ending on 1, you win 1 dollar. If they are ending on three 1, you lose 100'000 dollars.

If you throw the dice ten times, you will, with high probability, not have three 1 (the probability of appearing is 0.5% per throw). You will probably need to throw more then 10 times before loosing. But when loosing, you will lose a lot too, which makes the bet intrinsically a bad idea (the win does not justify the risk if unlucky).

France has 56 nuclear plants. 56! It's totally unreasonnable to draw conclusion on intrinsic safety of the nuclear plants on such a small number. The fact that you cover the full population with a small number of plants does not change that: it does not change the fact that you cannot conclude scientifically. The same way it is incorrect to say "I only need 3 throws, so it means that the 1-1-1 bet is intrinsically a good idea".

(PS: please do not answer about "loosing 100'000 dollars, but with nuclear disaster, it's not that bad", it's not the point. The point is that statistics is a large number game, and that we just don't have a large number of nuclear power plants to do statistics with them)

Re: First new US nuclear reactor in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia

#190

Post by tourmalinetaco »

ImaCake wrote: post #160
d_sem wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People often fail to compare the opportunity cost of alternative methods to nuclear power. At that time the alternative to nuclear was coal power plants. Radioactive carbon isotopes have harmed many times more people than Nuclear.

Coal dust, sans radioactive stuff, and coal burning emissions also exact a terrible toll on respiratory health. A lot of people have died, or had much worse lives, thanks to the widespread use of coal.

Don’t leave out the coal miners. The history of oppressive companies, grueling work conditions, constant possibility of death through any number of horrible circumstances, and the lifelong damage of unprotected mining on the lungs has harmed generations of families should never be forgotten.
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