261–270 of 567 posts
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> Isn't really a think when we thing about the time scale of nuclear waste... it is. drill a few miles down into the miles-thick crystalline salt in the permian basin. it will not go anywhere for millions of years.
There is no Permian Basin in Germany ...
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Base load results from demand, not from supply. You positively, absolutely must provide a certain amount of power at all times. > In any case it's no law of nature. Yes it is. It's a law of human nature :-)
The relationship of supply and demand in the grid is an equation, if they don't match you get blackouts or other funky things. When you have dynamic pricing, variable supply works out, as nobody is obligated to produce any fixed amount of power. Yeah,base load still exists as in the dictionary definition (floor of aggregate power supply and demand), but it ceases to be a fixed level that is a hard production quota.
No, thats not really how it works out.
Baseload should actually be called baseload demand. The idea of baseload demand, is that there is some minimum level of electricity, that will always be demanded, almost no matter how high prices go.
Or, in other words, there is some about electricity demand is very inelastic.
So no, you can't just increase electricity costs. Because then electricity costs will massively spike, and cause huge amounts of problems.
You are massively underestimating the amount of problems and costs that it would put in people for demand to be as elastic as you want it to be.
It would be way cheaper and better for everyone, if there was simply enough baseload supply to meet the baseload demand.
There's a lot of straw men being fought in the comments again. The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Proponents of nuclear power like to pretend the opposition exists merely on the basis of "but what if it goes boom!", so they don't need to face the reality that countries like Germany are sitting on a l…
Sold problem for decades. This is an economical question. Can we store nuclear waste in reliable manner for a long time that we can afford when operating a nuclear power plant.
Yes we can. Case closed.
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> demand adapts to more variable supply and dynamic pricing You want demand to adapt? I'm supposed to turn the lights out when the wind's not blowing, or what? Demand shouldn't adapt, supply should adapt. Connect more and bigger power grids, add energy storage to the grid in large enough quantities. Your "solution" is like telling people to give up cars. They won't.
Yes, you get the gist of my position (for cars too).
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Call me irrational but storing small amounts of highly radio active material in many locations is, from my point of view, basically asking for a dirty bomb to happen at some point. It only needs an event like the end of the soviet union to happen in a single country on earth and any terrorist organization would be able to buy enough of it. I acknowledge that this may happen anyways with the current situation but your…
Dirty bombs aren't an issue. You might want to ask yourself why we've never seen one used, especially if you understand how easy it is to obtain the necessary materials. IIRC we've only caught a handful of devices (none exploded). Also we have to consider when it explodes, it just doesn't make enough radiation. It is pretty difficult to generate enough radiation that would actually cause an increase in cancer rates (…
The current trend in Kabul are bombs that get stuck onto vehicles by passing motorcyclists using magnets. It’s quite terrifying, since the ease essentially allows terrorists to enact a widespread campaign against civil service and civil society. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/world/asia/afghanistan-ma...
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> The main issue with nuclear power in Europe has always been the storage of nuclear waste, for which many countries still don't have a long-term solution. Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It's actually the best type of waste that exists. It's extremely dense, is solid and any leakage can easily detected. And the best part of it, 95% of it can be recycled: > https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-.…
The big problem with recycling spent nuclear fuel is that the required reprocessing is much worse in terms of safety than the nuclear power plants themselves. Lots of lovely, toxic, highly radioactive solutions which are practically iching to go prompt critical and ruin everyone's day. I think the only reprocessing program which managed not to be a safety train wreck is France's, and I half-suspect they might have ju…
Are you kidding? What kind of nuclear waste has even the remote possibility to go critical that is produced by a VVER reactor that is pretty common?
Here we go again: 1. Nuclear has much worse failure modes. The Cybernobyl Exclusion Zone is quite literally 1,000 square miles [1]; 2. Advocate like to talk about reprocessing as a solution to the waste problem. It seems to be missed that this is limited to spent fuel reprocessing. This appears to have significant cost and safety issues; 3. Separately to spent fuel, you also have to store enrichment byproducts (eg UF…
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I see you still haven't learned what dispatchable means.
Do you disagree with Wikipedia's definition? "Dispatchable plants have varying startup times. The fastest plants to dispatch are hydroelectric power plants and natural gas power plants. For example, the 1,728 MW Dinorwig pumped storage power plant can reach full output in 16 seconds.[4] Although theoretically dispatchable, coal and nuclear thermal plants are designed to run as base load power plants and may take hour…
"Dispatchable generation refers to sources of electricity that can be dispatched on demand at the request of power grid operators, according to market needs. Dispatchable generators can adjust their power output according to an order.[1] Non-dispatchable renewable energy sources such as wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV) power cannot be controlled by operators."
https://www.nmppenergy.org/feature/dispatchable%20resources
"Dispatchable fuel resources include nuclear, coal and natural gas. These fuel sources are highly reliable because each fuel is a constant supply. These are known as baseload resources."
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Nuclear-stands-out-a...
"Nuclear stands out as clean, dispatchable firm power, says Kwarteng"
You are confusing dispatchable with flexible.
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Just for everyone to have a picture, uranium doesn’t take much room because it is quite heavy: 19.1g/cm3, denser than lead (11.3) but slightly less than gold (19.3) and plutonium (19.8).
Energy density is the main reason you don't need much volume of uranium. Fission is just extremely energetic. That c² factor in E = m c² is huge (9 * 10¹⁶). It is really hard for humans to intuit about factors of ten to the power of 16 or 17.
In this case the units (for speed²) you want are m²/s² = J/kg
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The problem is that in the meantime the alternatives that are actually being used are killing thousands of people a year right now .
Nuclear is not an alternative. It has a lot of unwanted side effects and it just does not scale to solve the problem. It's extremely costly, comes with costly unsolved problems and is slow to build up.
So does literally every other power source. Nuclear is, if anything, among the least bad options in this regard.
> and it just does not scale to solve the problem.
It absolutely does, if we're willing to actually try.
Evidently, we'd rather just keep killing ourselves with coal.