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Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#231

Post by 7952 »

fundatus wrote: post #62
Manuel_D wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is cheaper when built in serial production. That's the basic conclusion of any analysis of the history of nuclear power construction. There's nuance as to why, but the basic pattern is that putting an order of 40 steam generators [1] is cheaper than a run of just 4 of them. Similar deal with specialized pumps and other nuclear power components. Suppliers can re-use infrastructure and expertise, and get…

> Nuclear power is cheaper when built in serial production. That's the basic conclusion of any analysis of the history of nuclear power construction. There's nuance as to why, but the basic pattern is that putting an order of 40 steam generators is cheaper than a run of just 4 of them. Similar deal with specialized pumps and other nuclear power components. Suppliers can re-use infrastructure and expertise, and get be…

I have worked on large infrastructure projects and this doesn't surprise me at all.

* Repeat projects bring a new set of biases. People see it as an opportunity to "get it right this time".

* People are excited about the new project (more bias).

* The presence of expertise and experience will make contractors want to charge more rather than less.

* New contractors may bid for the project at a low price but lack that hard won experience.

* Efficient manufacturing is a difficult and expensive field in its own right. It will be more complex than building the initial run. And the scale of production may never justify that.

* Many contractors will bring expertise and experience from other fields. But you will also compete for their time with other projects. The guys doing the massive civils contract are sought after by the tunnelling project or the roads project.

* Civil engineering is very dependant on the site and can be very expensive even if it is technically trivial.

* You work in an economy with a high cost of living. Salaries grow.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#232

Post by etchasketch »

philipkglass wrote: post #91
tuatoru wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong safeguards are also needed in iron smelters and steel foundries, in ammonia synthesis, and in making aluminum. In the mining of coal and extraction of oil and natural gas. Yet all these materials are cheap.

The LD50 for arsenic in rats is 15 milligrams/kg: http://whs.rocklinusd.org/documents/Science/Lethal_Dose_Tabl... The LD50 for strontium 90 in hamsters (90 day survival) is 2 millicuries per kilogram: http://www.rrjournal.org/doi/abs/10.2307/3573895 Given strontium 90's specific activity of 142 curies/gram ( https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19680020487 ), in mass terms that's 14 micrograms/kg for the LD50. Gram for gr…

This is an excellent explanation and it captures why the regulation around nuclear energy is so strict.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#233

Post by makeitdouble »

jwie wrote: post #215
makeitdouble wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other. Is it fearmongering when incidents actually happened and right now we have a country that could potentially have a reactor get destroyed by act of war ? You seem to focus purely on the technical part, and swiping away the margin for human error, unpredicted issues, political incompetence, and straig…

Nuclear power is not without risk. Those risks are far more attractive compared to the risks of not using it. Nuclear power is far simpler than people would intuitively believe. The nuclear reactor boils water at scale, the steam spins an electric generator via a steam turbine. The steam plant side of things is well understood technology, almost 170 years old at this point, nuclear power itself is about 70 years old.…

> There is simply no evidence that nuclear power is dangerous

Wait, what? You even started your own reply with “Nuclear power is not without risk.”

> a lot of evidence to suggest it is the safest, most effective power source we have created.

A lot of evidence also suggest the opposite. Again, you took the time to explain how technically nuclear was simple, without engaging with the context it is used in.

PS: Fatalities per thousand terawatt hours is an interesting metric, except it completely ignores non lethal effects (cancers can be survived, and might also not be attributed to exposure officially, same way low dose exposure don’t have obvious consequences that feed the numbers), and environmental issues that don’t lead to standard air pollution, like soil and water contamination for instance. Basically that’s looks like a feel good number to discredit coal, but isn’t that relevant in any other context.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#234

Post by Koemul »

chickenchicken wrote: post #129
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is planning to build 150 reactors by 2035, and has not then doubled the nuclear share in a decade, so economic or not, there's evidently some appeal there.

Yeah and a multiple of that in renewables

To put it in numbers (actual production per year, not capacity) [1] [2]:

  China nuclear 2010: 75 TW/h
  China nuclear 2021: 408 TW/h (+333 TW/h)
  Worldwide nuclear: 2768 => 2800 (+32 TW/h)

  China solar 2010: 0.7 TW/h
  China solar 2021: 327 TW/h (+326 TW/h)
  Worldwide solar: 34 => 1033 (+999 TW/h)
Luckily, nuclear doesn't really care about solar, since they complement each other perfectly (wind is a different story and it is already much bigger than nuclear).

However, China is a country that is pretty much perfect for nuclear: Little unnecessary regulation, no green party, expertise in nuclear technology, and excellence in constructing large scale construction projects.

So if nuclear is getting overtaken by solar even in China, then I don't see how it will be able to compete in the west against wind and solar.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy#nuclear-energy-gen... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy#solar-energy-gen...

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#235

Post by Schroedingersat »

WalterBright wrote: post #219
Schroedingersat wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do the first one. No need to force the issue. If nuclear is amazing as claimed it will be adopted. If the claims are the same empty ones we've heard for 70 years then we'll get some electrolyzers and gas turbines running green ammonia

Building nuclear plants requires that the government remove legal and regulatory hurdles that stifle them, like endless lawsuits.

How about we do that after we do the same for trains, and LEVs and bikeways and local insulation regulation and the local bans on solar and wind facilities and the property taxes that are 1000x for a solar plant compared to a coal plant and the taxes on rooftop solar and the free security for nuclear and the government funded price guarantees for nuclear and the free insurance for nuclear in the form of an upper limit for liability.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#236

Post by Sporktacular »

kleene_op wrote: post #226
Sporktacular wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nuclear provided 50 years of low cost energy to France despite an uphill battle in the public opinion. Renewable energy is failing to save Germany this winter despite being hailed as the holy grail for the past few decades." Its ability to supply France in the past is irrelevant to its ability to power global demand in future. The fuel is too limited and the technology too immature to turn this around. Nuclear is un…

> Nuclear has a limited future. Nuclear power is such a dead end China plans to build a hundred of them https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... . Russia, over 20 https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... . Japan, probably concerned about what's brewing over the Japanese sea, is going back at it as well https://www.ft.com/content/b380cb74-7b2e-493f-be99-281bd0dd4... , desp…

They're building new coal plants as well, does that mean coal is also the way of the future, or maybe just a stopgap?

Germany has been working on the demand side so that growth is decoupled from carbon. This is the hard problem and will take decades to achieve. So even if it didn't predict a Russian invasion, the international response and Russia's counter, it made a reasonable bet and deserves credit, even if the dice came up short.

It will be an uncomfortable winter, and tragically some old people might even die. But not more than coal power kills with respiratory problems in the short term. And heatwaves, floods, hurricanes and resource wars kill in the long term.

No one credible called renewables the holy grail, not in their current form. But they're on the right path.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#237

Post by Arnt »

pdonis wrote: post #138
Arnt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digressing, perhaps… do you know anything about why the passive designs weren't built? There are something like 500 nuclear reactors, of which approximately zero use entirely passive safety features. Not 250, not even 50.

> do you know anything about why the passive designs weren't built? Because they're too recent. By the time these designs were developed, the nuclear industry in the US was basically dead, so there has been no real opportunity for them to be commercially deployed.

I seem to recall reading about them in the earlyish nineties. Specifically a fine article about a Swedish gravity-based design, which used electric power to keep things running and many, many failures should result in things being pulled down by gravity and failing safely.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#238

Post by pfdietz »

cyphar wrote: post #230
kristopolous wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many things! The country that had generated the most nuclear power IS the United States and it's also the one with the highest capacity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country The depiction of it as a "failure" is the industry whining like the defense industry whines about not having 50,000 more airplanes Despite being at scale and having 70 years to bring down costs, it's still prohibitively expe…

> Also it's not green. The mining of the fuel isn't, nor is its transportation, vitrification, fabrication, refinement or enrichment. The concrete and cooling of the plant isn't nor is the waste stream side of the equation. It's the classic hyperfocus on a small part of the chain and writing off everything else as externalities. By the same token, no energy production technology is "green". Solar panels use rare eart…

> Solar panels use rare earth metals

This is a falsehood, one that Shellenberger was notorious for spreading.

No, solar panels do not use rare earth metals. That you repeat this well-debunked lie suggests you're getting your talking points from an echo chamber, not reliable sources.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#239

Post by pfdietz »

ch4s3 wrote: post #162
pfdietz wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if storage, smart grids, and conservation don’t pan out? The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all. So, it's just a financial risk. If one is talking about financial risks, one must look at the chance nuclear construction will be much more expensive than promised (for example, in the estimates used to compare renewable…

> The worst case is they end up more expensive than we'd like. There is no chance they won't work out in the sense of not working at all. Smart grid tech could easily fail to be able to deal with the complexity of balancing lots of dynamic demand and output. It could simply be too hard to do that with software in real time needing to react to signals over a great distance in real time. As for batteries, they could be…

Nuclear can't even walk and chew gum, though. The recent attempts to build new reactors (or finish old mothballed partially completed ones) in the US have been fiascos. In France, the efforts have gone from bad to worse. Hypothetical potential problems of renewables pale in comparison to actual failures of nuclear.

At this point, nuclear is very sick, and is going to require very large infusions of resources just to stop the industry from decaying away, never mind improve. All this isn't helped by the clear perception of this situation. Why would the best young people go to work in the nuclear industry now?

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#240

Post by pfdietz »

fi358 wrote: post #133
pfdietz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finland is one of the worst places in the world for renewables. This means that any industry using significant amounts of energy is going to move away from Finland, once fossil fuels are no longer used.

Most of the electricity in Finland is not produced by using fossil fuels. For example during year 2020 14 % of the electricity in Finland was produced by fossil fuels.

I was talking about energy intensive industries, not electricity production. If Finland has to compete with other countries that have cheap renewables, it will lose these industries. As an example of something like that today, look at primary aluminum production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_primary_a...

There are 31 countries on that list, from China to Venezuela. Finland is nowhere on there.

In the all-electric economy of the future, every energy intensive manufacturing activity will start to look like aluminum production.

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