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EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#231

Post by bryanlarsen »

beeflet wrote: post #214
bryanlarsen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost. Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No…

It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward

I'm talking about capital costs, not operating costs. $3B/GW for a coal plant is about 5X as much as natgas.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#233

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #124
tietjens wrote: post #2

Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.

Germany has stopped actively trying to sabotage France on nuclear energy at every occasion in the EU. That’s a start. Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.

France is sabotaging France on nuclear.

Flamanville 3 is a complete joke and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.

A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#234

Post by ryao »

a3w wrote: post #141
IAmBroom wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old, bad design - from the 1960s, in fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor states that the 1960 reactors are most used, today. In the west. Contradicting that western reactors are safe, while eastern designs are not.

The Chernobyl plant had known construction defects that could impair safety. These things would prevent a western plant from starting operation, but did not stop the Soviet plant from beginning operation:

https://inspectapedia.com/structure/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Disast...

They did not even have any automated safeties in place, because their philosophy was “faith in the worker” while the western philosophy is “humans are fallible”:

https://www.eit.edu.au/engineering-failures-chernobyl-disast...

They then ignored their own safety procedures when operating the plant, which ultimately is what caused the disaster.

Saying that Soviet designs being in the same generation as western designs makes them equally safe/unsafe is quite wrong when you look at the details. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was one mistake after another.

That said, the plant was designed by a country that shot down a civilian airliner that had strayed into their airspace due to a navigational error, when they knew it was a civilian airliner:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007

They had no regard for human life, so of course, they built things that are incredibly unsafe. There is no end of examples of them simply not caring about human life.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#235

Post by pfdietz »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #124
tietjens wrote: post #2

Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.

Germany has stopped actively trying to sabotage France on nuclear energy at every occasion in the EU. That’s a start. Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.

Germany doesn't need to sabotage France on nuclear energy; France has done a fine job of sabotaging themselves.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#236

Post by hvb2 »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #148
jama211 wrote: post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter. It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large…

> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.

Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.

Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#238

Post by beeflet »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #50
ben_w wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenpeace is both halves of the name. While I agree that nuclear is green, IMO Greenpeace are correct about it not being compatible with the "peace" half: the stuff that makes working reactors is the most difficult part of making a working weapons. This also means that during the cold war they suspected of being soviet plants. Those suspicions and yours could both be correct for all I know.

Also nuclear requires a powerful state to manage it safely, which has peace-related side effects.

Are you considering a world in which nuclear weapons do not exist at all?

I don't know how you are going to disarm the current stable-state of mutually assured destruction.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#239

Post by pfdietz »

pil0u wrote: post #230
jama211 wrote: post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we wan…

Even with that, renewables are cheaper.

One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#240

Post by fmajid »

nicce wrote: post #149
mixdup wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc Part of that is because they are so…

It isn't that rare in general - if the U.S. opens the secrets of nuclear submarines - we had had mini reactors for decades.

And the technology is incredibly mature, submarine reactors were some of the first reactors, period.
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