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Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

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Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#201

Post by nradov »

bloopernova wrote: post #88
jakewins wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage s…

Plus if it's not sunny/windy in one part of the country, it may well be very sunny or windy in other parts of the country. We have a whole freaking energy grid! This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.

That doesn't work very well for the Western North America. After sunset there is nowhere to obtain much solar or wind power. We're not going to build a transmission cable to Hawaii.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#202

Post by Braini »

piva00 wrote: post #197
RhysU wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.

> Nuclear can be built most places. Nukes require lots of cooling, needing access to large amounts of water from water bodies, that's definitely not "most places" by definition.

Dry cooling towers do exist (though I am aware they also have disadvantages).

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#203

Post by epistasis »

himinlomax wrote: post #98
V__ wrote: post #65

> Constellation, which plans to spend about $1.6 billion to restart the plant, is awaiting permits and expects the facility to come online by 2028 [and] would provide Microsoft with 835 megawatts of energy. I don't quite understand how this makes sense financially for Microsoft. A 1 GW offshore wind farm costs about 1 billion [1]. The Gemini Solar + Battery Storage Project in Nevada is about 1.1 billion (690 MW + 380…

> A 1 GW offshore wind farm costs about 1 billion A 1 GW offshore wind farm does not produce anywhere close to 1 GW most of the time. A 1 GW nuclear reactor can produce 1 GW 90%+ of the time, with the downtime being _scheduled_ maintenance.

Nuclear plants trip off all the time. It was a big problem in one of Texas' recent cold snaps where people died.

And many of those nuclear down times are for month+ times. Good luck getting enough batteries to get through that!

Offshore wind typically has a capacity factor of ~50%. Add a smaller number of batteries than you would need for nuclear, and it's going to be cost competitive against any new build.

As far as if it's cost competitive with TMI, I'm not so sure. New build nuclear is likely going to be >$190/MWh. Running the numbers being bandied about for the "Pennsylvania GDP increase", which is a really funny way to say "cost of the electricity for 20 years," and you get $115/MWh. Which is really pricy still. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to get TMI going again, just that it's pricy, and there's likely lots of other constraints that went into deciding to do this.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#205

Post by nradov »

Ancapistani wrote: post #176
berkes wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. An energy mix is the answer. One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build. Nuclear plants that already run, often take days, some even weeks to adjust significant: so if on monday the wind stops blowing, on tuesday it gets cloudy, a…

> One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build. All of those things, to me, mean that it should be a large part of the mix. Nuclear should be the backbone of our energy production, and should be sufficient to supply our baseline needs.…

Scheduling loads based on energy spot price tends to wreck the economics of manufacturing. If you have to shut down when energy prices spike then you're still paying fixed expenses for PP&E plus at least some labor. It's tough to finance that.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#206

Post by Yawrehto »

Something that isn't discussed enough is that nuclear power is extremely safe. According to Our World In Data (https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy), it produces the fewest emissions per gigawatt -- solar and wind both have substantial overhead -- and the second-fewest deaths, after solar, of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydropower, wind, solar, and coal. The misguided perception nuclear is more dangerous is due to its unfortunate habit of clumping deaths. People remember Chernobyl, but not Bill, who died mining coal, even if there are a thousand Bills all over, their total deaths dwarfing Chernobyl's.

The climate activists should really be advocating for nuclear. It's cheap, has the lowest emissions, and is really safe. But, of course, people will object. It's hard for PR to say that, even if you can show the data. People rarely change their mind because of data.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#207

Post by Tade0 »

Yawrehto wrote: post #206

Something that isn't discussed enough is that nuclear power is extremely safe. According to Our World In Data ( https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy ), it produces the fewest emissions per gigawatt -- solar and wind both have substantial overhead -- and the second-fewest deaths, after solar, of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydropower, wind, solar, and coal. The misguided perception nuclear is more…

> It's cheap

That hasn't been the case for at least a decade now - not after safety requirements were brought to where they are now.

And that 60-80 year lifetime which is supposed to spread the cost is a myth. Most plants are decommissioned before they turn 40 years of operation:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272139/age-distribution-...

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#208

Post by anigbrowl »

RhysU wrote: post #181
bloopernova wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus if it's not sunny/windy in one part of the country, it may well be very sunny or windy in other parts of the country. We have a whole freaking energy grid! This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.

Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.

Geopolitics and nuclear power are not always such a great combination - consider the Russian occupation of the nuclear power plant in Ukraine. I'm not against nuclear power in general, but saying it's a great hedge against political risks involved with wind and solar is quite a stretch.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#210

Post by jandrese »

Symmetry wrote: post #99
alright2565 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coal plants have killed a minimum of 500k people over the past 20 years[1]. It's not an accident in that case, it's known and planned for (or at least easily predicted enough that it should have been). But when a few hundred people, or really just 0 people[2] die in one place at one time, people lose their minds. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-pow... [2]: An inter-agency analysis conclu…

I tried to do the math once to figure out if Japan would have been better off building a coal power plant instead of Fukushima, the nuclear plant that had the worst disaster in any western country. It was a surprisingly tough question. https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-v...

Those studies of coal plant deaths are basically only counting people who died in mining disasters or were killed while operating the power plant. If you add in climate change effects, air pollution including radiation from flyash, and groundwater pollution the figure is almost certainly much worse; but also very hard to calculate with any certainty.
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