Google to back three new nuclear projects • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#271

Post by guywithahat » Thu, May 08, 2025, 9:34 PM UTC

floxy wrote: post #56

I suppose like anything there are multiple reasons, but what are the top 3 why California electric rates are so high (compared to the rest of the U.S.)? https://www.chooseenergy.com/electricity-rates-by-state/ Why doesn't the state encourage more capacity to bring costs down? (to encourage electrification/EVs, etc.) Is it because they are phasing out natural gas? Is it to encourage roof top solar? Or trying to reduce…

It's largely forest fires and regulation. Electricity prices are regulated by the state, and at the same time they mandate certain green energy goals. To hit these goals, electric companies have to ignore infrastructure to build renewable energy sources. If the infrastructure gets too old, it risks starting a fire, which could cost the company billions. When the state sees them lose money after a fire, the state lets them raise prices.

It is a very silly cycle which could be ended by either removing green energy goals so they could improve infrastructure, and to not hold electric companies directly liable for all damage from a fire.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#272

Post by jenadine » Thu, May 08, 2025, 9:42 PM UTC

lostlogin wrote: post #238

concordDance wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster. Probably overselling the "large" there... at least on the scale of global power production.

You wouldn’t call Fukushima a large disaster? The financial cost is at $180 billion US. That seems large.

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan , Japan had about 300 TWh of nuclear for a year at the time of the accident. So $180 billion amount to $0.6/kWh over a year if I'm not mistaken. Not cheap. But if you spread over a few decades then that's reasonable.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#273

Post by jenadine » Thu, May 08, 2025, 9:51 PM UTC

lesuorac wrote: post #218

frollogaston wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the reason. Overall, family homes don't make for very safe or efficient power plants.

Very efficient for distribution though which is expensive (check your utility bill). Don't need to run power lines for hundreds of miles if you have a generator on your roof.

I believe the opposite is true. You still need these hundreds of miles of power line to get you the power during the night or cloudy days. And it is actually more expensive to handle such network because the power distribution is unpredictable and one need to size the network for the worst case.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#274

Post by AlotOfReading » Thu, May 08, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #223

perihelions wrote: post #2

Here's a better article: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_... > "Elementl didn't respond to questions by press time. Its public materials offer little clarity on its actual operations—aside from broad claims about providing "turn-key project development, financing and ownership solutions customized to meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit." > "The nuclear d…

Oh, it's the NuScale guy again. NuScale got far enough to get approval to build a test reactor at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station, which is in Outer Nowhere for good reasons. But they never got enough funding to build it. The trouble with most of these small modular reactor schemes is that their big pitch is mostly "we don't need a big, strong, containment vessel because ... reasons." There's no inherent problem in…

The vallecitos reactor site is still there to look for anyone in the bay area, at least for the next few years. It's along the 680 corridor just south of Pleasanton and it's been quietly producing medical isotopes since the 70s. They shut down the power factors after they discovered that the entire Pleasanton valley is a gigantic active fault zone called the calaveras fault, and the site itself is in a rift from from another, smaller fault called the positas fault.

Probably not the greatest placement in hindsight.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#275

Post by jenadine » Thu, May 08, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC

crote wrote: post #142

nandomrumber wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent safety record, the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle, and believe in a technology we don’t have. If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have mobile / home internet planes. You’d just pay fo…

> a proven technology with excellent safety record Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more. Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up - if a cleanup is even possible at all. It is the only power source…

> the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem

No it's not unsolved. There are burial sites. The spent fuel is kept on the power plant for years so it cools down.

Also even without nuclear power, there would still be nuclear waste to take care of because of the medical, defence, research, and other industries.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#276

Post by ben_w » Thu, May 08, 2025, 10:12 PM UTC

ttfkam wrote: post #116

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A case study for Denmark. Not even using the latest plummet in price of BESS. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192... Generally: Renewables and storage solve somewhere high in the 90s percent. Then throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm. Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the t…

I love how green hydrogen is assumed to become abundant and trivially easy to retrofit into existing infrastructure but fast neutron reactors are automatically considered infeasible by comparison. Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.

> Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.

No, that isn't the easiest way.

The easiest — not best, easiest — way to produce massive amounts of hydrogen is whatever your electrical power source is plus some low corrosion rods in a river.

If you want the cheapest, well, in most cases PV is the cheapest source of electricity — there's variance, sometimes it's wind.

Nuclear is so expensive that it's the same range of prices as PV plus batteries. And when you're using the electricity to make hydrogen, with the hydrogen as the storage system, batteries are redundant.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#277

Post by mmooss » Thu, May 08, 2025, 10:12 PM UTC

Duwensatzaj wrote: post #241

mmooss wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right-wing parties and the center-left have been highly effective allies in getting people to demonize and ridicule the progressive left. The reason is, I think, that the progressives have rationally better policies - ones that become mainstream decades later, including much of what is mainstream now - so by demonizing the progressives the center and right prevent people from actually considering the policies.

Coercive eugenics used to be a progressive platform. More recently progressive prosecutors have been tried and the results are pretty clear they lead to increased crime. Consider perhaps the progressive policies have been considered and rejected for good reasons.

> More recently progressive prosecutors have been tried and the results are pretty clear they lead to increased crime.

Crime increases were across the country, regardless of the politics of the prosecutor. They are believed to be tied to the pandemic. In places where progressive DAs remain, crime has subsequently decreased to historic lows - just like the rest of the country.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#278

Post by ttfkam » Thu, May 08, 2025, 10:33 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #276

ttfkam wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how green hydrogen is assumed to become abundant and trivially easy to retrofit into existing infrastructure but fast neutron reactors are automatically considered infeasible by comparison. Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.

> Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power. No, that isn't the easiest way. The easiest — not best, easiest — way to produce massive amounts of hydrogen is whatever your electrical power source is plus some low corrosion rods in a river. If you want the cheapest , well, in most cases PV is the cheapest source of elect…

Since PV needs batteries to be grid-useful (duck curve and all that), it's perfectly reasonable to have both.

And no, hydrogen as the storage system doesn't make batteries redundant. Law of conservation of energy. You are talking about using electricity to split water molecules, presumably more electricity to compress and store the collected hydrogen, and then you have the losses associated with converting back to electricity in a fuel cell or conversion to mechanical energy through combustion.

A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.

Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight. Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels. Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.

Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and logistics apparatus around it.

I have PV panels on my home. I love the idea of decentralized power. But the hydrogen economy is pretty theoretical at this point. Hard to store for any length of time, comparatively low combustion energy, low energy density overall, etc. It may happen, but "may" is a bad bet for long term national policy. I'd rather push more toward electrified high speed trains than hydrogen.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#279

Post by ttfkam » Thu, May 08, 2025, 10:38 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #255

PaulHoule wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more detailed simulations have gotten the less bad a meltdown looks in a fast reactors. Usually some of the molten core flows away and no more critical mass. If it goes over critical there can be some energy release but over time it looks less and less and not a problem to contain. Sodium has its problems (burns in carbon dioxide!) but the chemistry is favorable for a meltdown because the most dangerous fission p…

The problem is you need to ensure it's not bad in any possible configuration from an accident. This is hard to do. Will the energy release at criticality drive the material into an even more critical configuration? Such "autocatalytic" systems were considered for bomb design, but weren't chosen because of the large amounts of plutonium needed. But a fast reactor might have the plutonium of hundreds of atomic bombs. E…

Increasing the heat past a certain threshold reduces the nuclear reactivity. Read up on "passive safety".

Teller may have warned about this in 1967, but nuclear technology hasn't been stagnant since 1967. Folks read his stuff and designed systems specifically to fail safe, not run away. Stop fear mongering based upon a 60-year-old supposition. Stop assuming everyone working in the nuclear industry is an idiot that hasn't thought about safety.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#280

Post by opo » Thu, May 08, 2025, 10:43 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #33

sebastialonso wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never understood the "I'm solar" or "I'm nuclear" crowd. The issue is an engineering problem, not a baseball match. As an system-oriented person, give me a healthy combination of available, battle tested, new and promising solutions, fine-tuning weaknesses with strengths. Go to the stadium to solve your local team/visiting team issues. You are all falling to Big Fossil antics.

The nuclear boosters are particularly odd. I can engage in solar boosterism with my own money: I have 3.7kW on my house. I'm not going to have a backyard reactor, this isn't the Jetsons.

In most places home rooftop solar systems are heavily subsidized by everyone else. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme. One might argue that we should be subsidizing solar energy, but then the subsidies should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much further than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar.

As the statista.com report says >...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If it wasn't for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 122 and 284 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...