An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse • Hacker News Board

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#221

Post by bryanlarsen » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

akvadrako wrote: post #23

bryanlarsen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the world was completely solar, we'd need 30TWh of batteries, which would cost about $3T. [0] $3T would buy 200 GW of nuclear power plants, about 3% of what's needed. 0: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-pow...

Current all-in battery costs are about $200/kWh. Daily global energy use is about 400 TWh. That would be an 80 trillion dollar battery for just one day of backup. That just isn't feasible to build near term and it isn't even enough to prevent blackouts. Plus the current methods probably don't scale that far, so the cost is even higher.

We need a lot less than a day of backup.

To deal with the capriciousness of renewable energy, in order of preference:

- time of use pricing - use a mix of renewable energy sources - demand reduction incentives - interconnect regions - overprovision - storage

If the first 5 things are done well, not much storage is needed.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#222

Post by bryanlarsen » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #30

bryanlarsen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the world was completely solar, we'd need 30TWh of batteries, which would cost about $3T. [0] $3T would buy 200 GW of nuclear power plants, about 3% of what's needed. 0: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-pow...

Finally and (slightly) anti-nuclear piece worth reading. Yes, solar is easy for capitalism, but I'm not sure building all those batteries is. Building smaller pre-fab nukes vs building larger battery arrays seem pretty close in terms of challenges. You don't have a citation on "$3T would buy 200 GW of nuclear power plants", and I very much doubt that extrapolation, because if any sane planner got the $3T budget, the…

It's all relative. Yes, a $3T order for nuclear would reduce costs. But a $3T order for batteries would also reduce their cost. Which would reduce more? I posit the batteries.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#223

Post by belorn » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 2:19 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #148

namdnay wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity in France is so cheap that EDF has had to raise domestic electricity prices in order to make it possible for other providers to compete

This is wrong in two ways. First off, electricity in France isn't particular cheap by European standards (which already is not cheap)[1] Secondly, the EDF is debt-laden and heavily subsidized by the French state, this is why other providers cannot compete. Nuclear energy itself is on the expensive end when it comes to energy sources. As the article points out, France has not even allocated a third of the money it nee…

Looking at the European data for energy subsidy (https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/en34-ener...), the energy sector that get most money is fossil fuels and by a large margin. Renewables comes in second.

Nuclear do get most money for research and development compared to other energy sources, but I have a hard time see how that translate to energy prices. R&D usually goes to universities.

If we use France specifically, according to the report here (https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/progress_on_ene...):

"In France, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Ireland and Finland, the highest shares were spent on fossil fuels (although in absolute terms, the fossil fuel subsidies in France were slightly lower than in Germany).

Both Germany and France is at the same time dwarfed by the amount of subsidies given to fossil fuel in the US. Nuclear subsidized is a tiny dot on map compared to the billions being spent on coal, oil and gas.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#224

Post by mlyle » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 4:33 PM UTC

vimy wrote: post #218

mlyle wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Expecting current political and economic structures etc to remain for thousands of years is silly, so we do need a more permanent solution to a long-term problem. 2. Keeping lots of nuclear waste in spent fuel pools just increases the risk picture unnecessarily.

If society collapses a small uninhabitable region is the least of our problems.

If there's a regional instability for a year or two and spent fuel pools boil off and then waste melts through, possibly poisoning the groundwater for that region, that's a big problem.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#225

Post by berkes » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

rich_sasha wrote: post #210

berkes wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that not make a great argument for more European integration in energy infrastructure? Where Spanish solar, Danish and Dutch North Sea Wind, Norwegian Hydro, or Swedish Geothermal, power Poland on the days when its own wind and solar is below whats needed? I'm from the Netherlands, and many fellow countryman and politicians have similar excuses for not going renewables (there is little Sun, no space for windmil…

I'd be up for that. I am concerned about how that works in practice. Leaving aside technical issues (can you really push power from Spain to Latvia? Is it really true that total renewable power in Europe can always power the whole continent?), this is an economic project larger than the Euro or the vaccine roll-out. There will be weekly issues of power redistribution - who gets it when there's a shortage? Whose job i…

> can you really push power from Spain to Latvia? Is it really true that total renewable power in Europe can always power the whole continent?

Both: yes. and no.

If "renewables" is only solar and wind: then certainly not. But the total mix: certainly.

And "distribution" is more than pushing electricity from Malta to Iceland (which is rather inefficient) but also "build the datacenter in malta (edit: next to the sea-cooled solar farm)" or "build that new aluminium-forge in iceland where there's a surplus (edit of free geothermal power), rather than in east-poland where it will be coal-powered".

Edit2: The entire "cost" and trans-border export/import is already in place and handled in EPEX: a free and open market for electricity: https://www.epexspot.com/en/market-data

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#226

Post by berkes » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

bigfudge wrote: post #203

berkes wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that not make a great argument for more European integration in energy infrastructure? Where Spanish solar, Danish and Dutch North Sea Wind, Norwegian Hydro, or Swedish Geothermal, power Poland on the days when its own wind and solar is below whats needed? I'm from the Netherlands, and many fellow countryman and politicians have similar excuses for not going renewables (there is little Sun, no space for windmil…

When people worry about land-use of solar, I think about exactly this. There are large chunks of central Spain that would be largely improved by covering them in solar panels (joke, but only just in some places).

Or even better: cross the Gibraltar strait and put solar farms in Morocco, Algeria, Mali. Relative cheap maintainance and building, and vast surplus of sun in places where currently only dry sand grows.

And that requires both large and heavy networks towards Europe, but also, moving lots of electricity-heavy industry south. It makes zero sense to build a new coal-power-station in Eemshaven in the Netherlands for some data-center and Aluminium-enrichment-forge (which then ships the aluminium over Europe) when that aluminium-forge could be built in Algers next to a gigantic solar farm in the desert.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#227

Post by vcdimension » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

2trill2spill wrote: post #171

vcdimension wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That link doesn't mention anything about the amount of land required to mine the copper needed for wind turbines. It must be far less than is needed for mining the uranium needed to generate the same power. Think about it; the copper required for the wind turbines is a fixed one-off cost that lasts the lifetime of the turbine, and can be recycled. Nuclear reactors need a continual supply of uranium (about 27 tonnes p…

> It must be far less than is needed for mining the uranium needed to generate the same power. Think about it; the copper required for the wind turbines is a fixed one-off cost that lasts the lifetime of the turbine, and can be recycled. Nuclear reactors need a continual supply of uranium (about 27 tonnes per year for a 1GWe reactor: http://bit.ly/3voR0II ). A single wind turbine can contain 3.6 tons of copper[1], so…

> Also copper concentrations in typical copper ore is not 100 time greater than uranium concentrations. Copper concentrations are about 0.6%[2] and uranium is 0.1% - 0.2%

Sorry, your right, 100x is too high, that was a rough guess. It should be more like 30-60 times higher when compared with enriched uranium (which is what a nuclear power plant uses); it takes 10 tonnes of natural uranium to produce 1 tonne of enriched uranium [1].

So 100GWe of nuclear power capacity uses around 100x25 = 2500 tonnes of enriched uranium per year. The same amount of digging would likely produce between 2500x30-2500x60 = 75,000-150,000 tonnes of copper, lets take the middle value: 112,500

So in 3.2 (360,000/112,500) years the 100GWe of nuclear power capacity has produced the same amount of digging required to produce 360,000 tonnes of copper. Multiply that by 3 to take account of wind turbine inefficiencies and that takes it to 9.6 years.

Current wind turbines last around 20 years, so even if we assume they only use newly mined copper (not recycled), and we ignore all the metals and other materials used to build the nuclear power stations, then the nuclear power stations are still going to require about twice as much earth dug up for mining.

[1] https://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-power-plant/nuclear-fu...

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#228

Post by ajarmst » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

bigfudge wrote: post #204

ajarmst wrote: post #161

Mycle Schneider isn’t a trustworthy source. He’s an anti-nuclear activist with a clear agenda and a history of misrepresenting or obfuscating facts about the industry and its inherent danger.

Without any evidence, this is just an adhominem. Please cite an example of obfuscation or misrepresentation.

Here's the World Nuclear Association on some of Schneider's most recent FUD: https://www.world-nuclear.org/press/press-statements/combatt....

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#229

Post by edbob » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

Shared404 wrote: post #190

edbob wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every power source had some failures, but the only power sources that dropped all the way to 0 were solar and wind. Nuclear operated at 75% of capacity, while fossil generation seems to have been around 60%. Wind recovered slightly and "exceeded projections" by producing in the 15-30% range, but closer to 15% at night when it's coldest.

Doesn't winterize wind turbines Blames turbines for not working when it freezes. I'm so freaking tired of hearing this.

All sources were notoriously un-winterized, but wind generation had the additional problem of not working when there wasn't enough wind, which is why it dropped to 0 at one point. Suggesting that wind would perform adequately if it were only winterized is simply inaccurate. It's common knowledge among non-zealots that wind and solar are far too unreliable to supply baseload generation needs, and that unreliability led to a missing 15-20 GW of generation when we needed it. Base load must be supplied by something else, like perhaps nuclear which performed pretty well despite not being winterized.

Re: An argument that nuclear power makes the climate crisis worse

#230

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 9:41 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #206

edbob wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every power source had some failures, but the only power sources that dropped all the way to 0 were solar and wind. Nuclear operated at 75% of capacity, while fossil generation seems to have been around 60%. Wind recovered slightly and "exceeded projections" by producing in the 15-30% range, but closer to 15% at night when it's coldest.

This isn't true. Gas and coal production suffered a lot more than wind: https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/feb/16/natural-gas-n... Wind ran at about 50% of capacity and that was because it wasn't winterized.

[deleted]