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Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#291

Post by gretch »

throwawaygulf wrote: post #271
gdubs wrote: post #175

I read Stewart Brand's 'Whole Earth Discipline' about five years ago, and came away pretty convinced by his pro-nuclear arguments. The price situation has definitely changed dramatically in the last few years, with solar dropping remarkably. So some of it may be worth revisiting. But that said, something else has happened in the last five years that has made me a bit ... cautious about being decisive on nuclear. And…

>And that is general global instability. E.g., things sure feel like they've come off the rails recently and things I used to take for granted: that competent people would generally be in charge, has been challenged. There's almost never been a safer time to be alive, and there have been incompetent leaders since time immemorial. Not even a lifetime ago incompetent leadership caused tens of millions of people to peri…

Well the parent comment is simply arguing against nuclear, and given that no civilization before 1940 had to think about nuclear, it’s not a bad take...

Despite being somewhat of a subjective political position, Its not crazy to think late era Obama administration was more competent than Trump administration.

In the past, bad leader + nuclear = Chernobyl

So you completely missed his point, (s)he’s not saying “times are bad now”, they are saying “I see now that times are not good enough”

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#292

Post by pyrale »

subaquamille wrote: post #254
BurningFrog wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fukushima happened after the biggest Earthquake in over 1000 years of recorded Japanese history hit at the right spot to produce an enormous flood wave at the reactor. I'd be careful to draw conclusion from such an outlier.

And radiations in Fukushima will last for the next 1000 years. Do we have the same understanding of "zero error tolerance" ?

At the pace we're going, we're tolerating to make the whole planet a burning hell for the comming millions of years. So I would say we have a pretty high tolerance to disaster, as long as it's happening to our children rather than us.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#293

Post by macspoofing »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #285
macspoofing wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. Solar and win…

You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements. Wind power can share land with other uses. There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar.

>You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements.

No I didn't.

A typical solar panel weighs around 40 pounds. All that material has to be mined from somewhere, then transported, then processed. Some of that material are rare earth minerals that have an outsized mining requirement (like for every 1 pound, you need to turn over 1000 pounds or 10000 pounds of earth). All of that material will need to be landfilled at some point in the future as well, no matter how recyclable the solar and wind collectors are (and today, they aren't recyclable at all).

>Wind power can share land with other uses.

Sure. I didn't say it couldn't or it won't. I'm saying that you will need vast new tracks of land regardless of that fact. Why? Because you need to scale wind and solar collector deployments by several orders of magnitude.

>There is a staggering amount of land out there that's not suitable for even grazing but will support utility scale solar.

I have no idea why you think only 'grazing' areas are the only ecosystems we need to protect.

Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is already under tremendous stress due to human activity - that includes areas like deserts, mountains, ocean floors.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#294

Post by cbmuser »

epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

> It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear.

Another renewables advocate who equals the LCOE (levelized cost of energy) with the system costs, completely ignoring that it’s not the LCOE which drives up the costs for renewables, it’s the necessary backup plants unless you have access to lots of hydro power per capita.

Case in point.

France: 50 million tons CO2 p.a. in the energy sector, 50 g/kWh

Germany: 350 million tons CO2 p.a. in the energy sector, 400 g/kWh

Germany: 31 Euro-Cents/kWh

France: 18 Euro-Cents/kWh

Please stop spreading the “nuclear is expensive” narrative.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#295

Post by throwaway894345 »

pfdietz wrote: post #129
throwaway894345 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do solar and wind cost estimates account for the sheer volume of land? How much land would be required to convert us fully to green energy (where “fully” means not only replacing existing electrical applications but also transforming other fossil-fuel operations such as transport and various heavy industry applications and residential/commercial heating and etc)? Also, don’t we need more storage than 4 hours? What ab…

Yes, they include the value of land. In Texas, for example, land cost for PV might be a couple percent of the cost of a PV field.

Does that assume current land values? Presumably land values go up as the demand for PV-suitable land increases?

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#296

Post by cbmuser »

smallnamespace wrote: post #192
slfnflctd wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal This completely ignores scenarios of extended cloud cover, cold temperatures and low wind (somewhat like we just saw in Texas) where properly winterized baseline power would be the only way to keep everything up the whole way through. Barring future unknown tech, we will always ne…

If your grid covers a large region and you have sufficient transmission, then somewhere , there is excess electricity from wind/solar that you can bring in. Remember, we're talking about a world where building renewables to 4x peak demand would be actually economical. This works on the same principle as an insurance market: it's likely that even at 4x capacity, your local solar farm has a few cloudy days. It's highly…

> It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear.

When it’s night in Germany, it’s night in the rest of Europe.

When there is no wind in Germany, there isn’t usually much more wind across Europe.

Please take some look at actual electricity generating data for Germany (see smard.de) and find out why your assumptions are not correct.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#297

Post by runarberg »

macspoofing wrote: post #257
epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. Solar and win…

It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium.

Sure the supply chain to support the infrastructure required for 10 billion people is a lot on the environment, and we certainly could do a lot better. But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar panels), better forest management, better land use for food production, more careful road design that doesn’t fragment the wildlife, etc. And of course (most important of all) stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and stop warming the planet.

How much land solar and wind farms use seems kind of minuscule next to all these efforts. And given how urgent the climate disaster is, complaining about land use from solar farms seems like a distraction.

Given the timescale we have to react to and reverse the climate crisis the best technology that we have right now is wind and solar. We don’t have the technology nor infrastructure anywhere in the world to replace the fossil fuel plants with new nuclear plants in anywhere close to the timescale needed. Our best bet today is wind and solar (and geothermal and hydro where applicable) even with existing battery technology, it is still a better bet then new nuclear. This thread will tell you why.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#298

Post by throwaway894345 »

maxerickson wrote: post #92
throwaway894345 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do solar and wind cost estimates account for the sheer volume of land? How much land would be required to convert us fully to green energy (where “fully” means not only replacing existing electrical applications but also transforming other fossil-fuel operations such as transport and various heavy industry applications and residential/commercial heating and etc)? Also, don’t we need more storage than 4 hours? What ab…

Winter is hard to store for, but in general there aren't times where both sun and wind are low production across wide areas. Of course solar isn't operating at night, but wind keeps blowing. One way to check this would be to find a wind farm that publishes their output over time. Looks like NREL has some good resources: https://www.nrel.gov/grid/wind-toolkit.html

> in general there aren't times where both sun and wind are low production across wide areas.

I'm sure those times aren't common, but we need to have some answer for when they do inevitably occur. The recent Texas freeze was a once-in-a-century event and I don't think many consider that acceptable (and I would think that the no-sun / no-wind scenarios are more frequent than once-in-a-century). I'm sure someone has researched the amount of storage necessary, but the numbers I've heard from articles and podcasts tend to be in the days-weeks range--much longer than 4 hours.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#299

Post by cbmuser »

Daho0n wrote: post #250
sudosysgen wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a dangerous and wrong assumption. Weather events can have high area. What do you do if a hurricane comes at the same time as high cloud cover?

What do you do if you have to shut down the nuclear power plant in bad weather for some reason? Build a new one as a backup? There's always a weak link if you want to find one, nuclear, wind or whatever.

> What do you do if you have to shut down the nuclear power plant in bad weather for some reason?

You don’t. If your plant is properly designed, you’re absolutely immune to any extreme weather conditions.

Heck, we have nuclear-powered vehicles sent beyond our galaxy and they’re still working.

Nuclear power is literally the only form of energy we have that can work under virtually all environmental conditions.

Nuclear fission works even in vacuum.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#300

Post by mannerheim »

Nasrudith wrote: post #263
mannerheim wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many eagles are killed by housecats?

Vanishingly few - the housecats are the ones threatened - bald eagles eat them for one. Second two smaller ones seldom dawdle on the ground and are neither easy to ambush nor an easy fight even assuming a type small enough to be a threat. An eagle would need to be essentially already doomed in the wild or very young in a too obvious and accessible unguarded nest which could be threatened by say a squirrel nest raidin…

Precisely. Housecats kill more birds than wind turbines, but a pigeon is not an eagle, owl, hawk, or other large predatory birds. Might as well start talking about insects is we're lumping flying animals all together.
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