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We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

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Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#231

Post by selectodude »

sampo wrote: post #207
DennisP wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that right now we should roll out wind and solar as fast as we can. However, once those reach high penetration, costs increase rapidly as you attempt to reach 100% clean energy. At that point it helps a lot to have clean dispatchable power. Nuclear plants we start today can fill that role, in areas without available hydro. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...

> costs increase rapidly as you attempt to reach 100% clean energy. France has been running at 75%-80% nuclear for 30 years.

Heck, the State of Illinois gets over 50 percent of its electricity from nuclear and 1/8th of the entire country's nuclear generation. We can do it, even in the USA.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#232

Post by audunw »

umvi wrote: post #141
Klinky wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NIMBYism is everywhere, even for solar and wind. Maybe it's a flaw of Nuclear that you have to stuff its waste in a giant pit inside a mountain. Uranium mining often uses leeching techniques, similar concerns to fracking and groundwater contamination, along with general mining hazards. Additionally rare-earth minerals are needed for a variety of things, even including components within a nuclear plant. I highly doubt…

> Maybe it's a flaw of Nuclear that you have to stuff its waste in a giant pit inside a mountain. Every type of energy plant has wastes. Even wind turbine blades wear out and are dumped in landfills.[0] The difference is that the nuclear waste eventually decays into nothing, while the fiberglass/plastic blades will stay around for thousands of years... [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb.…

But fiberglass is just silicon and hydrocarbons. The same stuff soil and sand is made of. It's not really a huge problem to bury them. There's also huge developments in fiberglass recycling/repurposing these days. Solving this issue will be extremely helpful as wind power is not the only use of fiberglass as I'm sure you know. In fact, wind power could be instrumental in setting up a supply-chain for recycling of fiberglass, since you get such huge quantities of uniform and clean fiberglass from one source.

> The difference is that the nuclear waste eventually decays into nothing, while the fiberglass/plastic blades will stay around for thousands of years...

This is just a ridiculously skewed perspective, and wrong - nuclear waste does not decay into nothing, though I suppose you didn't meant it very literally. And saying anything about what will happen to plastic composites over thousands of years is futile. We are already finding bacteria that break down plastic, and we've already accelerated that process by genetically modifying them to make the enzymes more efficient. Did you know that for a long time, trees did not decay? That's why we have coal. They were essentially like plastics. Bacteria and fungi didn't have the enzymes to break them down.

I'm willing to bet that it'll take way less time for life to develop the ability to break down plastics. Evolution has more genetic material to draw from now, organism now spread across the globe faster, and humans can transfer genes between species and improve genes in the lab.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#233

Post by Gwypaas »

whiddershins wrote: post #183
throwaway8451 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intermittency of renewables is less of a problem if one rids oneself of the medieval seeming idea of energy self-sufficiency. Energy does not have to be produced where it is needed. We can transfer it already. The grid would need upgrades but we can definitely transfer large amounts of energy over long distances. Example from China: 12GW over 3300km at 1100kV DC, for others look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra…

The more we do this, the more susceptible the grid will be to massive outages. I’m not an expert, and I’m sure there’s some way in principle where it could be architected so this isn’t so, but it just seems empirically that the more interconnected the more we see unexpected and enormous outages.

All of Europe is already connected, here where I live in Sweden I don't even remember the last power outage. Happens like maybe once a year that you wake up or get home and the microwave clock has reset.

Map of the European grid: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/

Synchronous grid of Continental Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#235

Post by wwweston »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #213
wwweston wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good counter for some of the points, although there's limits to how much you can count on it. It's less comforting for others, like the limited amount of uranium available and diminishing returns on how to get it.

Uranium seawater extraction vastly increases the accessible amount of uranium: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s... It's about an order of magnitude more expensive than mining uranium. But the cost of fuel extraction is negligible in the context of the rest of nuclear's cost.

The author of the article linked in the top-level comment mentioned seawater extraction:

"as uranium is extracted, the uranium concentration of seawater decreases, so that greater and greater quantities of water are needed to be processed in order to extract the same amount of uranium. Abbott calculates that the volume of seawater that would need to be processed would become economically impractical in much less than 30 years."

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#236

Post by audunw »

Manfredo_1 wrote: post #200
pfdietz wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Votgle and Flamanville projects that you like to cherry-pick. Yes, I have cherry picked 100% of the current era new nuclear construction projects in France and the US. How selective of me! /s I suppose I should also have included all the projects that were abandoned before ground was even broken? > Also, I'm not sure why you think weapons programs have anything to do with nuclear power generation's supply chain. Th…

> Yes, I have cherry picked 100% of the current era new nuclear construction projects in France and the US. How selective of me! /s Yup, precisely. You've conveniently ignored successful projects elsewhere, like the Hanul nuclear power plant and the Taishan nuclear plant. Also, you're incorrect that Votgle is the only nuclear project in the US, Turkey Point is installing two more AP1000 reactors. > It includes such t…

> Nuclear costs are historical costs. We know what nuclear costs, because we've built it before. And we've built it at scale.

Do we really know the real costs? How many countries outside of Canada has designed and built reactor cores without a nuclear weapons programme? How do you untangle the huge amount of money poured into nuclear weapons programmes from nuclear energy? Do you account for education/training of nuclear engineers and scientists? I know what you'll say - that we must account for it with the alternatives too. But those educations are more general purpose, so it's not directly comparable. You don't need to educate lots of "wind power scientists" to continue to scale wind power, and their education wouldn't be wasted if it turned out that wind power reached a dead end.

The costs of future nuclear power is absolutely hypothetical costs. You simply can't just magically reproduce the exact same conditions as the mid/late 1900s. At the very least, I'm sure that most countries will demand reactors that are fundamentally more safe than the reactors built during the golden area of nuclear power. So the reactor technology will not be the same. You might call it irrational, and I'd be inclined to agree. Most reactors of that era was incredibly safe. But you can't wish away human irrationality. Maybe you can educate people, but not without massive resources poured into education and public relations. Add that to the indirect costs.

We don't have strong government countries in the west anymore, governments that can just push through huge multi-decade bets like that. And I don't see any chance of that changing. So the most likely path for a nuclear renaissance is through small modular reactors, since you might find applications with shorter return on investments, and then gradually scale it up. But that's a a fundamentally different model from the golden area of nuclear power, so historical lessons about costs do not apply.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#237

Post by polote »

ip26 wrote: post #230
polote wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't compare nuclear and wind/solar, how are you going to power the lights at night when there is a no wind ?

In addition to other points made, I wanted to add, at the altitude large turbines reach, there is almost always wind, around the clock.

This is not the case, wind is not enough, the production depends on the strength of the wind

"In particular the occurrences of wind blowing below à 8 m/s (4 Beaufort, blue line) are far from being negligible, and that winds of 7 Beaufort or over, which are necessary to get the full power of the above wind turbine, blows much less than 50% of the time."

https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/renewables/how-ma...

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#238

Post by maerF0x0 »

corn13read wrote: post #164

Liquid Salt and Thorium are the best wins we have today until we figure out fusion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w Simple facts.

+1 And: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

And : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySqaLbYBB_c

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#239

Post by rayiner »

This mistakenly assumes that the Green New Deal is about averting climate change. It’s not: https://news.yahoo.com/aoc-chief-staff-admits-green-12440835...

> The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti said to Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts, according to a Washington Post reporter who attended the meeting for a profile published Wednesday.

> “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” he added.

Re: We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal

#240

Post by eloff »

vbezhenar wrote: post #206
toast0 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could possibly be too late to start with new nuclear plants, although I'm not totally convinced. If we had them now, nuclear plants would be vastly superior to coal plants for baseload, at least in terms of emissions. The question is, if a nuclear plant takes 20-30 years from project start to being online, how will it compare with what's available then and over the design lifetime (50ish years). Of course, we can'…

Why 20-30 years? Russia started building of Belarus nuclear plant at 2011. It already works and will be completely finished at 2022. Is US nuclear industry significantly behind Russia?

Yes. US construction in general takes longer and costs almost an order of magnitude more for large infrastructure. Why? Higher standards certainly. Higher pay too. But you can't tell me Russia is less corrupt with a straight face. So what accounts for the difference? I think it's disturbing that the US is forgetting how to make things in general.
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