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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

#281

Post by TobTobXX »

piva00 wrote: post #200
doublepg23 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s most places humans live isn’t it?

If you ever done a tour on a nuclear facility you'd hear about how careful they need to be managing water temperatures in their discharge pools, you don't want a nuke frying off all wildlife on the rivers and/or lakes nearby. You don't want to create massive ponds of still water for cooling, and you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case someth…

Nuclear power plants only really have an effect on the water temperature if they do not have a cooling tower. This makes the plant considerably cheaper, but, as you mentioned, damages the ecosystem.

Only in rare cases, such as during revisions or emergencies, they might be unable to cool the condenser using the tower-coolant-loop. Then they might have to warm up the water temporarily.

> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).

There is no such failure case that a "discharge needs to happen" for the irradiated water. There is a comparatively tiny amount of deionized and supercleaned water in the reactor that is always cycled around. Even if such a case were to occur (how??), the amount of water would be easy to handle/store.

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

#282

Post by mpweiher »

akvadrako wrote: post #261
Filligree wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it’s reasonably cheap to buy two decades of fuel in advance, and it won’t take up much space. If such a thing were a concern, then people would do precisely that. If it were still a problem towards the end of that period, then you can in fact extract uranium from seawater.

It's also plentiful in many countries, it's just not mined because it's too cheap. But since fuel is under 1% of the cost of Nuclear, if it was a problem we could easy mine more difficult places.

Or start recycling the "waste". Which still contains >95% of the energy of the original fuel.

Problem is: raw Uranium is too plentiful (=cheap) for recycling to be worth it.

"Problem"

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

#283

Post by rgmerk »

Suppafly wrote: post #174
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. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. I'm in favor of nuclear too, but this is a ridiculous point. Your first sentence mentions solar and wind and your second only addresses solar. If the sun doesn't shine for n+1 days, the wind is still going to be available mo…

The discussion of incorporating variability into the power grid is incredibly unsophisticated on HN.

The US (and Europe) are big places with diverse energy demand and weather patterns, and smart renewable energy developers will seek out resources that are decorrelated with existing supplies because the power can be sold at higher prices.

Batteries are also getting cheap enough to profitably arbitrage intraday price variability.

Another thing that gets ignored in these discussions is that in any net zero scenario there is going to be a fair bit of green hydrogen/biofuels/synfuel produced for transport and industrial use. A fraction of that could be diverted to gas peaker plants when monster dunkelflautes manifest themselves.

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

#284

Post by RandomLensman »

mpweiher wrote: post #277
RandomLensman wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One time or not, need to be able to deal with it, as need to be able deal with the possibility of underinvestment etc. - especially if fleets get much bigger.

1. They were able to deal with it. And had even more options to deal with it. 2. A one time event has little to no effect on overall capacity factors. 3. Underinvestment is very easy to deal with: invest adequately.

1) It caused/aggrevated serious issues on the European energy market at the time 2) Then you might have no electricity for some months every few decades from "one offs" 3) Appeals to humans needing to be different are rarely successful

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

#285

Post by rgmerk »

mpweiher wrote: post #276
rgmerk wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this particular refurbishment is in one of the countries with serious cost and schedule overruns for its nuclear build, and a country and specifically a region that is bad at physical infrastructure.

This is a country that simply hasn't built nuclear for ages. And the only one (two reactors) it did build was a brand new design (FOAK - First of a Kind). With COVID happening. Like everything, this gets better with practice.

This is a recommissioning of a 50 year old plant that’s been sitting idle for five years from an era when nuclear plants were all bespoke.

Does that sound more like an nth of a kind project, or a first of a kind project?

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

#287

Post by sgarland »

piva00 wrote: post #200
doublepg23 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s most places humans live isn’t it?

If you ever done a tour on a nuclear facility you'd hear about how careful they need to be managing water temperatures in their discharge pools, you don't want a nuke frying off all wildlife on the rivers and/or lakes nearby. You don't want to create massive ponds of still water for cooling, and you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case someth…

I live a few miles from a nuclear plant. I am far more concerned about the coal plants that are also nearby.

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

#288

Post by sgarland »

cykros wrote: post #254
piva00 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear can be built most places. Nukes require lots of cooling, needing access to large amounts of water from water bodies, that's definitely not "most places" by definition.

I mean, classical plants and those based around the regulations that the US currently has on the books thanks to some questionable lobbying in the 60s require large amounts of water, sure. These are hardly the only viable plant designs that exist. Molten Salt, Pebble Bed, and other designs exist. China is currently underway building a molten salt cooled Thorium reactor.

Russia has had sodium-cooled reactors [0] for some time. America experimented with them at least back to the 1950s, with the USS Seawolf (SSN 575, not SSN 21) having a sodium-cooled reactor (S2G) for her first few years.

Russia also had lead-bismuth reactors, at least militarily, with the Alfa-class.

[0]: https://www.neimagazine.com/news/mox-use-at-russias-bn-800-r...

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

#289

Post by pona-a »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #249
christina97 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s literally just that having a solar+wind grid that can survive 3 days of bad weather costs 6x as much as a grid that can survive normal day to day.

The number I heard was 8x. Solar is about 50 cents / kW, a "24 hour" solar grid is about $4/kW. But that's still about half the price of a natural gas grid and 1/5th the cost of nuclear.

What about negative externalities? If we were to force all actors to pay for their emissions and toxic by-products, factoring the entire lifecycle into the cost, what would it look like then? If, even with that in mind, solar looses to nuclear, that would be a fairly interesting result.

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

#290

Post by phil21 »

oezi wrote: post #272
phil21 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many MWH does that battery array store? MW is a useless number for energy storage. HN should know better. Edit: The article linked states: > Roughly, one could assume that the energy storage portion of the project – 1.4 GWh worth So, at the 690GW (which is unrealistic) nameplate capacity of the solar field, they are installing roughly 120 minutes worth of energy storage to back it. This is actually a better numbe…

Battery arrays aren't primarily rated for their storage capacity but for their ability to provide/consume power. At the moment the goal of battery storage additions to solar plants is to soften their peak power production and broaden the time they provide power to extend to the morning and dinner time. 690 MW.

Right. So a useless number when it comes to energy storage discussions. It simply extends the duck curve an hour or three before you need use someone else’s power.

Thanks for the correction on GW vs MW. Not a great typo.

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