221–230 of 309 posts
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Indeed! Rail and nuclear power seem to play out the exact same tragedy. Very sad.
If you like trains and nuclear, you should move to France, we have lots of both. And pastry too ;)
(The Macron -- Le Pen culture war politics might be even more depressing than here, too. At least I think the right side is winning here in that arena.)
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Eh, the basic economics of a PWR or even BWR are quite sound and you don’t need fancy tech to change that. Even with very expensive uranium and very expensive turbines, it doesn’t change that (depending on the number of orders of magnitude we’re talking about of course). And if you’re making 10x-100x of the things in a few years, it actually gets cheaper for both, since you can build a series of turbines, or reopen a…
Nuclear is very expensive, that's why even countries very positive to nuclear aren't happily replacing their old reactors. France did the math recently, 100 billion euros for 10 new reactors. The old ones are better from an economical point of view so it's much better to try and keep them going.
(1) If you could build a nuclear reactor for the sticker price, there's the problem that other energy sources got cheaper, specifically natural gas fired Brayton cycle turbines. To justify nuclear power at the sticker price you need to price carbon emissions.
(2) Nuclear power plants cost many more times to build than the sticker price. Some people blame delays on opposition to nuclear power, but the delays seem intrinsic to the process in industry. AP1000 construction was hung up in the U.S. because it was hung up in China (where environmentalists get shot) and it was hung up there because the factory had trouble make a pump that was supposed to be easier to make.
On one hand you could make the case for a real accounting of the type (2) problem (which I suspect is a game of "Poker" where suppliers quote a lowball price because they know buyers will keep putting chips in the pot.) But I think a more radical approach to the type (1) problem is necessary.
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What happens to the used cores?
They have to be disposed of. That creates waste. This is the same as with any other power generation method that exceeds it's lifespan. 15 years is not that different from 20 years for a wind turbine or 30 years for a solar panel.
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Yes, the reactor cores would have to be replaced every 12-15 years. But if the reactors are mass produced and designed to swap out the cores, it doesn't have to be too expensive.
The core will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years will it not?
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Nuclear isn't dispatchable - most reactors have a design output and are not intended to be ramped up and down. They require a big chunk of actual dispatchable power (natural gas mainly) to provide demand following. LACE is a measure which takes into account the value of the generated electricity as well as the cost of production but nuclear does poorly here also as much of its output occurs when wholesale prices are…
A better term might be "non-intermittent". Nuclear plants produce the same amount of energy regardless of time of day or wind speed. And power output can be modulated with more aggressive cooling. Same thermal output of the reactor, but lessened electrical output. By comparison, any plan for a renewable grid requires massive storage capacity. Most hand-wave this away by assuming some new technology will effectively m…
Does that mean a grid relying heavily on nuclear needs massive amounts of storage?
No - it means you need to have redundant capacity which is the solution also used for wind and solar. The benefit of nuclear in this regard isn't that it's "non-intermittent" - it's that the most common failure modes for a nuclear nuclear are statistically independent (except when it's not like in a natural catastrophe situation - like Fukushima).
But as a grid operator trying to match supply and demand, it's just a variant of the same problem.
The solution preferred by grids heavily dependent on wind for example is simply to over-provision wind and use de-rating while maintaining natural gas capacity reserve (which is relatively cheap). This approach is relatively proven at this stage with some European countries deriving around half their electricity from "intermittent" renewables.
Nuclear is clean, it is safe but it is not cheap. It's safe and clean because of it's moderately priced. I stand by nuclear because it's cleanness and safeness which can't be compared to anything else. What will we generate electricity with in non-windy cloudy days? Coal? LNG? ESS? Note that all of those options are more dangerous, more expensive and more dirty than nuclear.
Is it safe considering the 1000 square miles of Ukraine that Chernobyl made uninhabitable? How safe are they against terrorist attacks, an attack by a rogue state or in a conventional war?
Actually, if you are in a war or you are a terrorist, there are much more high value targets than a structure with 1.3m thick re-enforced concrete plus 1cm thick steel dome.
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Nuclear is always touted as such a good idea on this site, but I want to take the opposite stance. - Nuclear power has inherit risks that are not present in other forms of modern energy generation. You can claim that todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such thing as 100%. If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn’t acceptable. - Nuclear waste is difficult t…
> If humans build it, it will fail, and a single catastrophic nuclear plant failure isn’t acceptable. We do people focus so much on the danger aspect of nuclear energy only? Why not the thousands of people who died of dam break, the millions who die of lung failure due to exposure to polluants, or, the elephant in the room, the dozens of millions whoe die and will die of climate change? Sure, it's very sad that a han…
"Ah yes, remind me how many windmills we would need to produce as much energey as a NPP?
About 1500.
I've been prodding friends in the climate movement about their community's historical opposition to nuclear power lately. In my view, opposing nuclear power after 1989 (Hansen's testimony to the US Senate) is anti-climate. I've held up France as an example of where we could be in an alternate history where states did not bow to anti-nuclear activism. Unfortunately, from the article, it seems France is heading in that…
France is only reducing to 50%. That still means France will be the world leader in nuclear energy. I'm not sure why both pro nuclear and anti-nuclear people see this as the end of nuclear power in France. Far from it. Energy should be well diversified. This is a good move for France and nuclear in general. There are some advantages to solar and wind but they can't support the entire network itself. France's goal is…
The US produces a lot more energy from nuclear and has a lot more reactors.
China and India are building a lot more new reactors than France.
The nuclear industry in Russia and South Korea is as vibrant as France (South Korea getting around 30% of its energy from nuclear today is extremely impressive given where their economy was at just 40 years ago).
And at 50%, France will drop below Ukraine.
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The core will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years will it not?
Which is nowhere near as big a deal as it sounds. The damage it will do (on average) if glassed and buried 100ft under ground is absolutely negligible at the scale we are talking about (global climate change and energy in general). Yes, there's a 1 in 10000000 chance that 2000 years from now industrial age humans recovering from the apocalypse might dig a well in exactly that location and thousands will get sick with…
But what about if we had a Reactor Dump storing 100's of these reactors, and then something happened to that dump, either it was hit by a meter or it was intentionally attacked in some way. Could that result in an apocalyptical type event?
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> The inherit risks are supremely low and the catastrophic failure mode for nuclear plants isn't a nuclear winter, in the absolutely worst case it's a contamination of the area where the plant was built. Well, not really. While the probability of an accident is indeed low (but not super low by any means, as near misses are often not publicised), the damage/cost of an accident follows a heavy-tailed distribution. As a…
> So high in fact, that there is no market price for it. As a result no nuclear power plant worldwide is insured That's a very confident and incorrect statement. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n... As for accident vs costs of cleanup, like I said, new plants are designed not only to eliminate accidents from causing failures, but also such that if a failure happened, it would be completely…
"The main purpose of the [Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity] Act is to partially compensate the nuclear industry against liability claims arising from nuclear incidents [...]."
"By 1966 it had become apparent that the industry would still be unable to obtain adequate private insurance, so the act was extended until 1976. [...] In 2005 it was extended again through 2025 via the Energy Policy Act of 2005."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...