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Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

reuters.com

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

#231

Post by nradov »

KerrAvon wrote: post #225
nradov wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the wind doesn't stop blowing after sunset, and grid-scale batteries are a thing

The wind slows down a lot after sunset in most of North America. Grid scale batteries aren't really a thing yet. Someday maybe, but it's going to take many years to provision enough to handle the nighttime base load on the west coast.

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

#232

Post by quantified »

atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

How clean, fast, cheap and reliable is the decommissioning of a plant once its short life is over? Anything that lasts only 50 years is pretty short-term.

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

#233

Post by nradov »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #110
atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

You don't need battery farms to make renewables viable in the US. What you need is to replace the AC grid interconnect system in the US with a HVDC super grid system. The key difference here is that HVDC is exceedingly efficient in energy transfer and has effectively negligible losses compared to AC over distance. The US is big enough that any impact from weather should basically average out over that distance.

That doesn't help after sunset on the west coast when residential demand peaks and there is little renewable power being generated anywhere in North America. In theory batteries or other storage could close that gap but realistically it's going to take decades to scale that up.

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

#234

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jakewins wrote: post #51
atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

> 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…

> We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data

We absolutely do not have long-term climate models with that sort of accuracy.

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

#235

Post by satiric »

himinlomax wrote: post #100
fergonco wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are nimby crowds insane? Accidents may happen. And did happen in the past in that same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

Nobody died at TMI. Nobody died at Fukushima (from the nuclear incident that is, 10000 died because of the Tsunami) Hundreds of people died at Chernobyl. Those are all the major accidents at production nuclear power plant that have ever occured. There are no others. There is just one that was deadly, and it is about as representative of the safety of nuclear power as flying in a 1920s' plane compared to a state of th…

No one died at Fukushima... They did have to evacuate over 150,000 people though. I'm not sure we should be normalizing that.

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

#236

Post by scoofy »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #234
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…

> We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data We absolutely do not have long-term climate models with that sort of accuracy.

We also only have probability distributions, and with all probability distributions, the existence of very bad luck hangs out in the tails.

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

#237

Post by edmundsauto »

greenthrow wrote: post #123
edmundsauto wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the unsafe designs are all 50 years old because of FUD from incidents that are also generally pretty old. I’m not sure it’s comparable to modern designs - this isn’t a “new iPhone every year” deal.

Get out of here with this lie. Before the disaster, nuclear proponents cited Fukushima as an example of how safe modern nuclear was.

I think everyone knew the Mark I boiling water reactors designed in the 1960s was not a “safe by default” design. Open to receipts if folks with some understanding of nuclear designs were on record before that touting its safety.

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

#239

Post by alright2565 »

elil17 wrote: post #49
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…

That's just 500k Americans - far more people have been killed globally.

It's only PM2.5 deaths because those are un-debatable.

Far more will die due to other kinds of pollution it emits, and an unknowable number will die due to the effects of climate change caused by CO2 emissions.

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